After I posted this I had to run an errand and while driving (where all real thinking is done) I had an idea. Maybe it's redundant or overreaching, but I'll try and relate it in words anyway.
A set of standards called "Desktop Linux". From a PHB and marketting viewpoint, it makes sense. Nothing to do with servers or emebeded systems or that old 486 dhcp server sitting in someone's basement. It's just a concept that represents the computer that sits in people's homes and cubicals.
So the idea I'm kicking around is a set of standards. As far as the end user is concerned, the heart of this is a GUI interface similar to what distros include in their base install. The Mandrake control center comes to mind, but I hear YaST and Yum (I may be wrong on that one) are similar to this. I'm proposing a common "control center" where all the hardware that the user is concerned with such as scanners, cameras, mice, printers, graphics card, monitor, USB drives, Firewire drives, etc can be controlled and configured from. Hardware other than that like IDE controllers, USB controllers, internal hard drives, and other devices people generally don't have to worry about that are either hidden or not existant in this at all. This control center is independent of window mangers so gnome, kde, and icewm for example would not have to worry about it directly, just interfacing with it.
The goal is to be able to walk into a store like best buy, see a little sticker on the box of a printer that says "Desktop Linux Compliant" and to purchase it knowing it's promised to work with their computer. So they take it home, out of the box, plug it in and something in the background like hotplug detects it first. It passes that information along to the control center. The control center informs the user of it's detection and either downloads the driver or asks for the CD the manufacture included.
I know that sounds too good to be true, but let's pretend it's still possible.
The manufacturer doesn't have to worry about supporting all linux distros and platforms, just the "Desktop Linux" standard. Their drivers are just modules in this control center. Printer modules can then connect up to something like cups to do the rest of the work.
What makes this special is that as long as distros and manufacturers are compliant with these standards, everything should work properly. Drivers can be compiled for i386 or some other low common denominator or just delivered as source for simplicity.
Same idea for a usb flash drive. It's inserted and the control center mounts it and opens up a konqueror window and displays it's contents. It's up to KDE to provide that part. The control center just gets the information from hotplug, mounts it, and tells the window manager to open a window.
This whole concept is where open source should try to be. Central and enforced standards. The control center is probably just a bunch of interfaces for the distro, hardware maker, kernel, and window manager. But the goal is to bring them all together in one central location that's easy to use.
I'm not suggesting to rewrite hotplug, cups, samba, or sane, but just to agree on a simple yet powerful interface for the user to trust. Hardware makers could develop modules for the control center that would be standard across all platforms and window managers.
This still preserves one of the initial goals of linux to be customizable and compact. If someone doesn't want "Desktop Linux" then they don't have to install it. But distros would like this idea so they don't have to repeat the work SuSE and Mandrake did to get a scanner working. It also allows people to use lighter window managers because the hardware controlling ability in KDE is a reason I use it.
So that's the idea I'm kicking around. Comment as you wish. I'll admit I don't know the techinical difficulties this might entail, but distributing it across hardware, distros, and window managers could make it feasable.
Good point. As much as I like linux and use it daily, Microsoft is a huge multibillion corporation. I don't see how linux is going to knock it off it's mountain any time soon. At most, it's marketshare will increase to that of Apple. That would still be a huge accomplishment, but it's unrealistic to hope it's going to topple microsoft. And even if it did, Microsoft could just focus all of it's efforts on Office to compete with open office and still make money. I've read that Office is microsoft's bread and butter anyway so it wouldn't make much of a difference.
If some day the operating system becomes completely transparent and people can run any software on any machine, then the money will be made in the applications.
Linux still needs it's desktop standards "enforced" better I think. The handful of distros are still competing against each other too much. RPMs should be killed. We need standards like connecting a printer will automatically set it up. Sharing over home networks works out of the box. When you plug a USB drive in, it's contents pops up on the screen. Same thing with digital cameras and mp3 players. Mass broadband adoption helps things because manufacturers can centralize their driver databases, or even just the distros can do this.
The devil is in the details and linux still requires too much knowledge that geeks take for granted. I like how KDE is starting to take over on some of this and in a sense making operations standard across distros, but this needs to happen more often.
It's been my experience that distros differ little for the end user. Window managers differ in their features between basic WMs to desktop environments like KDE and GNOME.
Flame and bitch me out all you want and call me stupid for thinking operating linux requires knowledge and experience, but I bet someone can setup and share a printer and a directory faster on windows than linux if they had no background experience to begin with. We don't need to dumb everything down to a wizard, but making initial configuration easier is where standards have to be initiated.
Oh, and before anyone thinks they should list a dozen apps that will do what I said above, if they're not turned on by default or at least given the obvious option when I install linux, then they're too difficult for the average user. And I'm sure I've either heard or currently use any package you want to inform me about, but that meant I already had to search them out, something most people aren't going to do.
You're talking about porting a file system assuming the operating system is unaware of it. We can look at the source code and linux and find that answer out, but with windows it's more difficult to tell. Since Microsoft seems to only support FAT, FAT32, and NTFS, I'm sure that's built into the kernel for speed. So unless you're going to make something that emulates NTFS on top of reiser, I doubt it would ever work. And if you're going to do that, what's the point at the end of the day?
For windows and linux compatibility, I always use FAT32. Linux isn't perfectly stable with NTFS and Microsoft only touches microsoft formats (hey, why not?).
...to use it for a while. I'm sure it's been tested very extensively, but there are always bugs initially in any major release like this. I'm sure nobody running a server will touch this for a while even with the benchmarks.
I'm not trying to spread FUD on reiser at all, I run reiser 3 and I've never had any problems. I'm just raising the question of how long does it take until people will put it in production servers and their main desktops?
Anyone who maintains servers care to shed some light on this?
I always have. Whether it's a new version released (like firefox) or even just a patch (like IE) I'm always happy to see development on software. The only thing I can poke fun at is that IE updates are usually big security vulnerabilities and firefox updates are usually feature updates.
I know this sounds like a huge cheapshot and I don't in anyway mean it to be...but I'm running firefox on linux and I've never recieved a popup. I've seen people's computers with spyware that displays popups without a browser window opening. I think the people commenting on this one are sincerely curious as to what website is causing these popups and what spyware program is on your computer.
I agree that it's a bad idea to say firefox is immune to spyware installing easily, but on the other hand I'd like to see when this has actually happened.
Ah come on. This guy's not trolling at all. My friend who uses windows installed SP2 and said IE6SP2 (is that what they call it?) is great. This guy even said all this in his humble opinion.
Anyone with mod points should mod this guy up for being informative.
(Just don't use it to mod me down because I defended this crazy IE loving windows using n00b:) )
I wish to call on the slashdot people to change the icon for microsoft. I find that portraying one of it's founders and current top executives as a Borg insulting to the maturity of people here. Simply use the actual microsoft logo or something that just says "microsoft" if there are legal problems with their trademark.
I'm not trying to make this a serious conservative website about tech news and opinions, but a lot of us are open source advocates and the community is represented somewhat on this website. This site has a responsibility to the OSS community and while this Borg icon may have seemed funny years ago, I think the joke is on us now.
And while people may say how microsoft bashes linux and opensource openly, that doesn't mean we should in turn bash them with an icon. All this anti-microsoft does is give credibility to their argument that open source projects are managed and supported by a bunch of geeks in their basements, and not hardworking, intelligent companies.
I'm concerned their efforts are for nothing
on
Linux Desktop Guide
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
While I commend them on their efforts, I don't think very many people are going to find this useful.
I would have chosen Mandrake over Fedora because Fedora is meant to be Red Hat's bleeding edge test bed. Mandrake is easy to set up and as long as don't care to tweak around with it much, it'll do you fine.
Computer use is getting so complex and most of us here don't even realize it. To explain the simplest tasks to someone who knows nothing about computers is not easy and I think it needs to be taught rather than dictated to in a book. And a book at that, a pdf is only useful if someone is going to print it out in lieu of teaching someone.
Nobody learns to drive a car by reading a manual, and no one should be expected to learn a computer by manual either.
This is similar to the argument that.9999 (repeating) equals 1. No matter what "mathematical genius" says, I don't agree. "Really really really small" does not equal nonexistant.
Many people have tried to explain this to me in their "correct" way, but I don't believe them. I've seen decent and poor attempts to prove this and they're all based on an assumption somewhere in the proof.
Yeah but the people in office better have a good excuse to the companies that put them in office. When they tell them they won't be making all that money after their products are advertised, they'd be pretty pissed off.
I'm not trolling, look at the money both parties get from corporations. And if it's off the books, they just imagine a very big number.
What exactly a modern reactor? I forget where I heard this, it was probably on the history channel, but I was under the impression that a reactor hasn't been built in the USA in decades. So are you referring to modern US reactors or modern reactors in countries such as Japan?
I don't think fission is the best solution to our energy problems in america, but I do think it's better than coal if done PROPERLY and SAFELY. If you take an example like chernobyl then you make a poor argument because that was a disaster waiting to happen from day 1. I trust our regulations in this country to prevent that from happening here.
But if microsoft does pull this off and it's sucessful, the OSS community will copy it. I like linux and all, but few of the programs I use have any innovation and are clones of commercial software. And innovation doesn't mean better icon and menu placement so don't even bother with that argument. They do seem less bloated though and usually are more responsive. An example is how nero is hundreds of mb and k3b isn't. JuK is smaller than windows media player, but it only plays music files. Konqueror has some "gui enhancements" but it's still the same idea. Gaim is nice in that it doesn't have all the crap and bloat of AOL's IM client. KDE as a desktop environment has more features and looks a lot nicer, but nothing revolutionary. The gimp still isn't as good as photoshop, sorry folks. Openoffice still has a long way to go, but it's pretty good.
Mozilla and firefox are the exception, they're just fscking awesome.
This is of course just my opinion. I used some KDE apps as an example because KDE is popular. Let's not make this into another damn Linux vs Windows fight, I'm just saying that apps for Linux aren't necessarily more innovative than apps for windows. And that has nothing to do directly with linux vs windows so, again, let's not start that again.
Exactly. Groups like Greenpeace are so informed and ignorant they are hindering clean cheap energy. The amount of radioactive waste put into the atmosphere by coal is much greater than nuclear fission. Fission is clean and a lot more abundant than coal or oil. It will take some time but we should be gearing up for a hydrogen economy where hydrogen gas is used in everything from cars to cell phones. The hydrogen can come from nuclear power plants.
Call me crazy, but I think this is a good solution.
"The key to saving money is keep the government out of it completely at all costs."
I mean it's important to keep the government out of the system---at all costs. It's an expression in America. Other than that, I don't understand the confusion.
Insurance companies are private. Imposing a tax on gasoline would require the government to get involved and fsck everything up. The key to saving money is keep the government out of it completely at all costs.
I'm against this idea of having a GPS device in the car because it just adds more cost and more overhead. Look at the EZ Pass system on the east coast. It's great for consumers, but the state governments were losing a lot of money on it.
I'm all for the simplest idea possible. I think this just adds another layer of complication and thus wasted money on top of an already expensive industry.
When the you go from a half dozen news channels and a few dozen large newspapers to thousands of news websites. The content is spread thinly across many sources and readers. Companies who advertise must spend more time than they did 10 years ago to figure out who to buy advertising space and how much. I think this is a great improvement over how things in the past because every news site can be a niche and have a focused audience.
As long as the advertisements themselves don't interfere with the content, I don't care. If I'm reading an article about an Audi S8 and there is an advertisement on the right of the screen for Audis, I'll take notice and possibly look somewhere else for my car reviews. But if I'm reading an article summary on Slashdot about kernel 2.6.8 being released and there is an ad for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 I won't care so much. Actually I'll laugh knowing Microsoft is funding these hours a day wasted on Slashdot. It all depends on the website and advertisement.
He's just giving respect people deserve. Maybe he secretly hates them and bashes them anonymously on slashdot, but I doubt that. Being respectful doesn't mean ass kissing and I don't even think he was trying to imply honor.
Slashdot Mirror
After I posted this I had to run an errand and while driving (where all real thinking is done) I had an idea. Maybe it's redundant or overreaching, but I'll try and relate it in words anyway.
A set of standards called "Desktop Linux". From a PHB and marketting viewpoint, it makes sense. Nothing to do with servers or emebeded systems or that old 486 dhcp server sitting in someone's basement. It's just a concept that represents the computer that sits in people's homes and cubicals.
So the idea I'm kicking around is a set of standards. As far as the end user is concerned, the heart of this is a GUI interface similar to what distros include in their base install. The Mandrake control center comes to mind, but I hear YaST and Yum (I may be wrong on that one) are similar to this. I'm proposing a common "control center" where all the hardware that the user is concerned with such as scanners, cameras, mice, printers, graphics card, monitor, USB drives, Firewire drives, etc can be controlled and configured from. Hardware other than that like IDE controllers, USB controllers, internal hard drives, and other devices people generally don't have to worry about that are either hidden or not existant in this at all. This control center is independent of window mangers so gnome, kde, and icewm for example would not have to worry about it directly, just interfacing with it.
The goal is to be able to walk into a store like best buy, see a little sticker on the box of a printer that says "Desktop Linux Compliant" and to purchase it knowing it's promised to work with their computer. So they take it home, out of the box, plug it in and something in the background like hotplug detects it first. It passes that information along to the control center. The control center informs the user of it's detection and either downloads the driver or asks for the CD the manufacture included.
I know that sounds too good to be true, but let's pretend it's still possible.
The manufacturer doesn't have to worry about supporting all linux distros and platforms, just the "Desktop Linux" standard. Their drivers are just modules in this control center. Printer modules can then connect up to something like cups to do the rest of the work.
What makes this special is that as long as distros and manufacturers are compliant with these standards, everything should work properly. Drivers can be compiled for i386 or some other low common denominator or just delivered as source for simplicity.
Same idea for a usb flash drive. It's inserted and the control center mounts it and opens up a konqueror window and displays it's contents. It's up to KDE to provide that part. The control center just gets the information from hotplug, mounts it, and tells the window manager to open a window.
This whole concept is where open source should try to be. Central and enforced standards. The control center is probably just a bunch of interfaces for the distro, hardware maker, kernel, and window manager. But the goal is to bring them all together in one central location that's easy to use.
I'm not suggesting to rewrite hotplug, cups, samba, or sane, but just to agree on a simple yet powerful interface for the user to trust. Hardware makers could develop modules for the control center that would be standard across all platforms and window managers.
This still preserves one of the initial goals of linux to be customizable and compact. If someone doesn't want "Desktop Linux" then they don't have to install it. But distros would like this idea so they don't have to repeat the work SuSE and Mandrake did to get a scanner working. It also allows people to use lighter window managers because the hardware controlling ability in KDE is a reason I use it.
So that's the idea I'm kicking around. Comment as you wish. I'll admit I don't know the techinical difficulties this might entail, but distributing it across hardware, distros, and window managers could make it feasable.
Good point. As much as I like linux and use it daily, Microsoft is a huge multibillion corporation. I don't see how linux is going to knock it off it's mountain any time soon. At most, it's marketshare will increase to that of Apple. That would still be a huge accomplishment, but it's unrealistic to hope it's going to topple microsoft. And even if it did, Microsoft could just focus all of it's efforts on Office to compete with open office and still make money. I've read that Office is microsoft's bread and butter anyway so it wouldn't make much of a difference.
If some day the operating system becomes completely transparent and people can run any software on any machine, then the money will be made in the applications.
Linux still needs it's desktop standards "enforced" better I think. The handful of distros are still competing against each other too much. RPMs should be killed. We need standards like connecting a printer will automatically set it up. Sharing over home networks works out of the box. When you plug a USB drive in, it's contents pops up on the screen. Same thing with digital cameras and mp3 players. Mass broadband adoption helps things because manufacturers can centralize their driver databases, or even just the distros can do this.
The devil is in the details and linux still requires too much knowledge that geeks take for granted. I like how KDE is starting to take over on some of this and in a sense making operations standard across distros, but this needs to happen more often.
It's been my experience that distros differ little for the end user. Window managers differ in their features between basic WMs to desktop environments like KDE and GNOME.
Flame and bitch me out all you want and call me stupid for thinking operating linux requires knowledge and experience, but I bet someone can setup and share a printer and a directory faster on windows than linux if they had no background experience to begin with. We don't need to dumb everything down to a wizard, but making initial configuration easier is where standards have to be initiated.
Oh, and before anyone thinks they should list a dozen apps that will do what I said above, if they're not turned on by default or at least given the obvious option when I install linux, then they're too difficult for the average user. And I'm sure I've either heard or currently use any package you want to inform me about, but that meant I already had to search them out, something most people aren't going to do.
You're talking about porting a file system assuming the operating system is unaware of it. We can look at the source code and linux and find that answer out, but with windows it's more difficult to tell. Since Microsoft seems to only support FAT, FAT32, and NTFS, I'm sure that's built into the kernel for speed. So unless you're going to make something that emulates NTFS on top of reiser, I doubt it would ever work. And if you're going to do that, what's the point at the end of the day?
For windows and linux compatibility, I always use FAT32. Linux isn't perfectly stable with NTFS and Microsoft only touches microsoft formats (hey, why not?).
...to use it for a while. I'm sure it's been tested very extensively, but there are always bugs initially in any major release like this. I'm sure nobody running a server will touch this for a while even with the benchmarks.
I'm not trying to spread FUD on reiser at all, I run reiser 3 and I've never had any problems. I'm just raising the question of how long does it take until people will put it in production servers and their main desktops?
Anyone who maintains servers care to shed some light on this?
I always have. Whether it's a new version released (like firefox) or even just a patch (like IE) I'm always happy to see development on software. The only thing I can poke fun at is that IE updates are usually big security vulnerabilities and firefox updates are usually feature updates.
I know this sounds like a huge cheapshot and I don't in anyway mean it to be...but I'm running firefox on linux and I've never recieved a popup. I've seen people's computers with spyware that displays popups without a browser window opening. I think the people commenting on this one are sincerely curious as to what website is causing these popups and what spyware program is on your computer.
I agree that it's a bad idea to say firefox is immune to spyware installing easily, but on the other hand I'd like to see when this has actually happened.
Ah come on. This guy's not trolling at all. My friend who uses windows installed SP2 and said IE6SP2 (is that what they call it?) is great. This guy even said all this in his humble opinion.
:) )
Anyone with mod points should mod this guy up for being informative.
(Just don't use it to mod me down because I defended this crazy IE loving windows using n00b
Actually that was a south park reference. I keep all the imature stuff for my website, not on slashdot.
I wish to call on the slashdot people to change the icon for microsoft. I find that portraying one of it's founders and current top executives as a Borg insulting to the maturity of people here. Simply use the actual microsoft logo or something that just says "microsoft" if there are legal problems with their trademark.
I'm not trying to make this a serious conservative website about tech news and opinions, but a lot of us are open source advocates and the community is represented somewhat on this website. This site has a responsibility to the OSS community and while this Borg icon may have seemed funny years ago, I think the joke is on us now.
And while people may say how microsoft bashes linux and opensource openly, that doesn't mean we should in turn bash them with an icon. All this anti-microsoft does is give credibility to their argument that open source projects are managed and supported by a bunch of geeks in their basements, and not hardworking, intelligent companies.
While I commend them on their efforts, I don't think very many people are going to find this useful.
I would have chosen Mandrake over Fedora because Fedora is meant to be Red Hat's bleeding edge test bed. Mandrake is easy to set up and as long as don't care to tweak around with it much, it'll do you fine.
Computer use is getting so complex and most of us here don't even realize it. To explain the simplest tasks to someone who knows nothing about computers is not easy and I think it needs to be taught rather than dictated to in a book. And a book at that, a pdf is only useful if someone is going to print it out in lieu of teaching someone.
Nobody learns to drive a car by reading a manual, and no one should be expected to learn a computer by manual either.
This is similar to the argument that .9999 (repeating) equals 1. No matter what "mathematical genius" says, I don't agree. "Really really really small" does not equal nonexistant.
Many people have tried to explain this to me in their "correct" way, but I don't believe them. I've seen decent and poor attempts to prove this and they're all based on an assumption somewhere in the proof.
Yeah but the people in office better have a good excuse to the companies that put them in office. When they tell them they won't be making all that money after their products are advertised, they'd be pretty pissed off.
I'm not trolling, look at the money both parties get from corporations. And if it's off the books, they just imagine a very big number.
Why do people say slashdot is just a bunch of angry geeks who love to rant?
Too bad you couldn't spell "Iraq" properly.
What exactly a modern reactor? I forget where I heard this, it was probably on the history channel, but I was under the impression that a reactor hasn't been built in the USA in decades. So are you referring to modern US reactors or modern reactors in countries such as Japan?
I don't think fission is the best solution to our energy problems in america, but I do think it's better than coal if done PROPERLY and SAFELY. If you take an example like chernobyl then you make a poor argument because that was a disaster waiting to happen from day 1. I trust our regulations in this country to prevent that from happening here.
But if microsoft does pull this off and it's sucessful, the OSS community will copy it. I like linux and all, but few of the programs I use have any innovation and are clones of commercial software. And innovation doesn't mean better icon and menu placement so don't even bother with that argument. They do seem less bloated though and usually are more responsive. An example is how nero is hundreds of mb and k3b isn't. JuK is smaller than windows media player, but it only plays music files. Konqueror has some "gui enhancements" but it's still the same idea. Gaim is nice in that it doesn't have all the crap and bloat of AOL's IM client. KDE as a desktop environment has more features and looks a lot nicer, but nothing revolutionary. The gimp still isn't as good as photoshop, sorry folks. Openoffice still has a long way to go, but it's pretty good.
Mozilla and firefox are the exception, they're just fscking awesome.
This is of course just my opinion. I used some KDE apps as an example because KDE is popular. Let's not make this into another damn Linux vs Windows fight, I'm just saying that apps for Linux aren't necessarily more innovative than apps for windows. And that has nothing to do directly with linux vs windows so, again, let's not start that again.
Thank you for seeing that. Uranium is in the coal and it goes into the atmosphere when it's burned. I didn't know this was such a "secret".
Exactly. Groups like Greenpeace are so informed and ignorant they are hindering clean cheap energy. The amount of radioactive waste put into the atmosphere by coal is much greater than nuclear fission. Fission is clean and a lot more abundant than coal or oil. It will take some time but we should be gearing up for a hydrogen economy where hydrogen gas is used in everything from cars to cell phones. The hydrogen can come from nuclear power plants.
Call me crazy, but I think this is a good solution.
"The key to saving money is keep the government out of it completely at all costs."
I mean it's important to keep the government out of the system---at all costs. It's an expression in America. Other than that, I don't understand the confusion.
Insurance companies are private. Imposing a tax on gasoline would require the government to get involved and fsck everything up. The key to saving money is keep the government out of it completely at all costs.
I'm against this idea of having a GPS device in the car because it just adds more cost and more overhead. Look at the EZ Pass system on the east coast. It's great for consumers, but the state governments were losing a lot of money on it.
I'm all for the simplest idea possible. I think this just adds another layer of complication and thus wasted money on top of an already expensive industry.
When the you go from a half dozen news channels and a few dozen large newspapers to thousands of news websites. The content is spread thinly across many sources and readers. Companies who advertise must spend more time than they did 10 years ago to figure out who to buy advertising space and how much. I think this is a great improvement over how things in the past because every news site can be a niche and have a focused audience.
As long as the advertisements themselves don't interfere with the content, I don't care. If I'm reading an article about an Audi S8 and there is an advertisement on the right of the screen for Audis, I'll take notice and possibly look somewhere else for my car reviews. But if I'm reading an article summary on Slashdot about kernel 2.6.8 being released and there is an ad for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 I won't care so much. Actually I'll laugh knowing Microsoft is funding these hours a day wasted on Slashdot. It all depends on the website and advertisement.
*Mandrake users can...wait until Mandrake 10.1 Powerpack Edition
Alright so these people who can't handle the smell of new computers can do this:
Have them shipped to my house.
I'll use them for a few years.
I'll ship them to your house.
problem solved!
He's just giving respect people deserve. Maybe he secretly hates them and bashes them anonymously on slashdot, but I doubt that. Being respectful doesn't mean ass kissing and I don't even think he was trying to imply honor.
Does this mean somebody is trying to explain to him the benfits of open source?