...and always have been. The specifications aren't always fully implemented and don't perform reliably even in consumer environments - i.e. every shipping copy of Win98SE is unable to recover once the machine goes into suspend unless a patch is applied. In terms of (SME) servers, the suport hasn't existed. Windows NT4 didn't support the full capabilties of either spec, and while Win2K does, it is still not in widespread use. As for Unix-likes, Linux has supported APM for some time now fairly reliably, but some applications (specfically poorly written FTP servers) still have some issues with it. Anyone know about ACPI?
Powering down hard disks does indeed cause wear and tear, but there are other components - ie, monitors (if you use monitors on servers), KVMs, and even switches which aren't in use during certain hours which won't be significantly harmed by powering down.
I think you are confused about your second point. Nautilus is a file manager. Evolution is a mail client.
No, he's not confused. The specific library theya re talking about is bonobo - to install the latest versions of evolution or nautilus, you inevitably need a newer version on bonobo, which breaks one or the other. I can't speak for this preview release, but to install evolution, I had to install a newer version of bonobo which broke nautilus.
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, root@localhost and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
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The biggest problem with KDE and GNOME is not that the file managers, java handling, etc aren't brilliant, nor the fact the Joe Average has no idea what a `gnorpm' is. Its that half an average users apps don't work with properly in both of them.
Er, actually, they're both bitchin, and the flamewar is over.
Damned straight. Now we know that neither KDE or GNOME are about to go anywhere soon,can we start creating desktop environments that actually match most desktop users, i.e., for people that choose aps based on quality rather than toolkit religion? I use KDE, Konqueror, and most of my other apps happen to GNOME based. This is because, to my own taste, Konqueror is the best fiel manager, and the (gnome based) rp3 is the best dial up tool.
* There's no (combined) style guide, so my kde apps shortcuts don't work in GNOME. And the common dialogues in both look completely different.
* There's no combined mime types, though I am told this is coming.
* The toolkits theme differently, so I configure the look and feel of one set of apps in a different place to another
* DND still doesn't work all the time. My respect goes out to whoever can prove me wrong by dragging a file out of a Konq FTP session onto a GNOME desktop. Yes, I've reported the bug. No, it hasn't been fixed.
* I can't have GNOME panel apps on my KDE panel, and vbice versa
* Package maintainers have to put apps in seperate directories for KDE and GNOME menus. Users have to update and manage them both.
* Eazel services tells me about nifty apps for any tollkit of desktop environment as long as its not QT or KDE. KDE calls GNOME `legacy' in their theme importer. And various other childish actions on both sides.
* Differing icon standards mean icons from apps designed around different desktop environments (not that this should ever be the case) look poor in another.
and the brave souls who are making the jump are running WINE as a matter of course. WINE makes it a lot easier for these people to make the jump, and increases the number of users that Liniux has.
No. They are not running WINE as a matter of course. WINE is highly beta, even the Transgaming and Codeweavers version 2 editions are still highly pront to crashing and run less than five percent of Windows applications, and that's a optimistic guess. Currently., managed mdoe is not the default on most versions, the WINE team themsleves don't usually produce binary crashes, and the `building font metrics' three minute wait to start an application still doesn't go away under the codeweavers version.
Yes, WINE will improve significantly over the next year as it actually starts providing more user feedback, testing guideliens and desktop integration. No, IMHO there's no way that within th4e next year newbies will be running WINE. Sorry. Its a a gargantuan task,,and the WINE folk are brave to attempt it, but my honest vide is I think they will fail, and this DirectX code will be more beneficial once it is merged into SDL.
I do a lot of WINE hacking, egnerally iupdate and run with everyt release, and have got Office 2000 and various opther apps working fine. But never a hundred percent, and always lacking some important functionality.
However, using Wine wrappers around Win32 DLLs is something WINE has definitely been sucessful at. The Open Source implementation of the Win32 avifile implementation has been a success and enabled formats like ASF1 and DivX;-) on Linux, and seems to be reasonably stable. I see this as being the future for the project.
I'll grant you they don't have the great big arrow pointing towards them that says "Click here stupid!", but I still fail to see what is so difficult about it.
That's precisely what makes it difficult. I could click on the kbutton, but I could slo click on the desktop button, the shortcut for XMMS, Konqueror, or many other things. Perhaps a tutorial started the first time a user logs in would be appropriate, identiftying the diferent pieces of the desktop. And turnable off, of course.
Seriously. I don't know how it works overseas, but I can magine it is similar to Australia. Current rates mean one Austarlian dollar equals sixty US cents.
The console, afew months past release, is still selling for around seven hundred dollars. Over time it will stick to bering around four or three hundred dollars. A clone PC with a decent 3D card is around $1100.
Games are between eighty and a hundred each and rarely get turned into bargain bin material. PC games are between thirty or forty [for something nine months old] and seventy dollars. We also have a large swap meet culture which makes purchase of OEM games fairly easy, for around $20 a pop. Yes, new games require newer PCs to get the most out of. Nothing says you have to play new games - many PC users I know still play half like and counterstrike years after their release. Worldwide statistics about games played online make this still the case. Furthermore, old PC game asre cheap.
The other factor is that modern consoles seem rather...er...crap in comparision to modern PCS. The original playstation released with games like Wipeout a couple of months down the track which made OC users jaw drop. The PS2 released with games like SSX [or something like that] snowboarding which made PC users laugh at the poorly accelerated graphics. Old PC games like Half Life still look better than anything I've seen on the PS2.
An even better solution is a length of 132 lbs (to the yard) rail.
And a largish electromagnetic coil, to make a neato rail gun. Add some optical recognition software to identify the Rednecks on your video camera feed and away you go:)
This might be referring to MicroUDF [also called UDF], the filesystem used on DVDs [as well as other devices] and integrated into stable kernels later than 2.2.16 and 2.4.0
Correction: Anyone else notice that RedHat is just following Microsoft[sic] footprints?
Yes. Why does it matter? Microsoft do lots of very clever things, like cultivate good relationships with admins and developers via Technet and MSDN, market their certifications and OSes well, have strong relationships with ISVs and developmewnt houses, UI design guides and standards, and have some really neat update tools.
Just because they have done some incredibly horrible things to comeptitors and allies doesn't instantly mean anything MS does is bad, that Red Hat shouldn't follow any path MS has r\tread before, or anything NT does shouldn't beimplemented in Linux.
I'd hate to think this is what's holding up ACLs from getting into the main kernel tree.
Remember, apt-get is cross platform too. The current release of Connectiva supports it (it was connective who created the RPM interface, and wrote an excellent set of packaging guidelines). The next major release of Linux Mandrake (still the best selling desktop Linux, and perhaps the most popular, depending on who you talk to) will also be APT based.
Um, pardon me, but how exactly does this mean Red Hat (or any Linux distro) has a consistent UI? Non technical users don't give a damn about toolkits of the religion behind tham, and happily use whjat they see as the best tool for the job - ie, a combination of apps with different toolkits. There's no reason why GTK and QT couldn't have a combined style guide and attempt to match their widget behavior, but they both are too busy being eahc others enemy they seem to have foprgot they're competiting with windows, not each other (if they are comepting with each other it is pointless - neither will go away anytime soon).
I'm yet to see a Linux distro with a consistent UI, and it saddens me I don't think I will see it for some time yet.
Actually, TurboLinux market share in Japan is tiny in comparison to Red Hat, the even has outsold Windows 98 [admittedly at the time when 98 and 98SE, classed as a seperate OS, were out simultaneously].
TurboLinux does dominate the rest of Asia, but Japan belongs to Red Hat.
I was discussing the Accenture name change with the others at my superbowl party today (I'm a Giants fan in Rochester, MN... it will be very lonely tomorrow) - we can't figure out why a company who only has mindshare through their name would change the only thing they have going for them...
The name change occured because Andersen Consulting is no longer associated with Aurthur Andersen or Andersen Corporation, who now have their own consulting arm, Arthur Andersen Consulting, as of around a year ago. In fact, I do believe there was some degree of legal action between the two former family members over the split.
hell redhat/ibm/compaq all employ kernel hackers, and i think linus listens to them when he makes decisions.
Indeed - I believe Linux accepted DevFS into the main tree due against his own personal judgement based on consensus from other well known Linux kernel authorities.
The day Linux turns out to be an OS for the corporations and not for the people
Why do you see those objectives as mutually exclusive? People that work in corporations have the same goals as those who work in small business, those who work for themselves, or those who don't work at all. Many of those kernel hackers work for said corporations.
They simply want a stable computing environment. If something like, for example, kernel debuggers or a fine-grained permission system [read: ACLs] will help is that goal, and a group of poeple need to fork Linux to do that, more power to them. We`ll all benefit from it. Why would a corproate forked Linux be bad, compared to a non-corporate forked Linux? The same people would still be working on it. The lciensing wouldn't change.
Id like to see if there's reasons here beyond `all corporations are inherintly evil'. Since you didn't qualify your initial post, I honestly doubt there is. But please post back and prove me wrong.
Have you ever actually installed any Linux distribution in the last year or so?
Yes, I have installed
* Red Hat 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 7.0
* Storm 2000
* Debian 2.2 [eventually]
* Caldera 2.4 technology preview
* Mandrake 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 [7.2 I run os my main machines]
* esmith 3.0, 4.0 4.1 [which was actually easy]
I have also installed
* OpenBSD 2.8
* Solaris 7.0 and 8.0 i386
And
* Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME
* Windows NT 4, 2000 Pro, Server
I word for a professional Linux systems administration company. They all suck. Unfortunately most machines already come with a flavour of Windows installed, so end users don't have to deal with Windows crappy installs. esmith is the only one I would consider remotely useable by non-technical people.
Basically, I thjought the ctiticisms in all of these OS were self evident. Man pages are generally notoriously badly written and occasiuonally don't exist. HOWTOs are generally extremnely out of date [even the maintained ones]. The debian install puts widgets off screen which you wont see unless you tab over them, and uses terms like `base system' which are vague.
It is hard when your app doesn't compile because a header file is missing. Or something doesn't compile with later [or broken] versions of GCC. It is hard when because someone told you *BSD runs Linux apps, and you realize that this blanket statement is a gross generalization.
It is sometimes perfectly good to assume that soemone knows what they are doing, and reads documentation. Most Linuxes, and many BSDs, do not however aim exclusively at this market - most Linuxes, in fact, don't. There's been so many times I've heard of a network beeing cracked and some BSD advocate says `just install OpenB and have your troubles go away. Firstly, network security isn't that simple. secondly, they probably can't install OpenBSD, because they find it dtoo difficult of because the documentation is porrly written, and their company can't hire external staff to perform this task for them.
Just be honest: `if you have a few years Unix experience under your belt, or have some cash avaliable for training, OpenBSD would be a good solution. With some tinkering and a bit of knowledge, it can also run many Linux applications'.
You sound like a person whose driven an automatic transmission all their life trying to learn to drive a manual. Jeesh.
This I think crystallizes the fact that you simply don't get what I'm trying to say. I shouldn't have to qualify myself: but I find the installs of OpenBSD and most Linux distributions quite comprehensible.
Of your analogy: its pathetic that you think just because I advocate giving people choice to drive their car how they want to I am personally incapable of driving manually.
Probably because Mac OS and Windows are designed around an assumption that newbies are very afraid of a command line.
Um, in case you haven't watched 99% of computer users rcently, I might remind you that that's a competely correct assumption to make. Any efficiancies gained from the command line batch processing are immediately lost when you consider the time taken to learnt to perform such functions. Rather than understand hwo to manipulate a series of around thirty of so widgets, the user must understand hundreds of commands, their relation to each otehr, and their various paramets, which are generally non-standardized across most Unixes.
Just making a small point to remind y`all that GUIs remain the best interface for the majority of computer users - just as common cars [rather than custom hotrods] remain trhe best type of vehicle for drivers. Because most drivers aren't mechanics.
Maybe that might prompt one the the GUI filemanagers to be capable of recursively changing permissions.
On the topic of Windows command line interfaces, while extremely limited compared to Unix, tab completion in W2K for directories with spaces in them works much better than most Unix shells. In Unix spaces can be escaped with backslashes or quotes. But the default tab expansion uses backslashes - which makes the directory much less readable and [if there are more than two spaces, quite common for many word processed documents] often expans the filename way off screen.
The windows cd can also do some nifty tricks. If you cd to a directory with a space in it and do not escape the name [Eg, `cd Program Files'] it will look at the unknown parameter `files' see if any directory called "Program Files" exist, and change into them accordingly. You can also use `cd...' to ascend 2 directories, `cd....' to go up three, etc.
It was a jab at Tucows for not knowing their audience
I think Tucows know tyheir audience perfectly - enwtwork administrators from the Windows world who heard about Linux and just want to run a stable OS. They find Linux difficult to use and confusing, with some people saying ti easy and other sinsisteing they need to manually recompile their kernel and all their applications too. The `help' section in their GUI only talks about a fairly small range of apps [at most, less than half of the GUI apps isntalled on their system], the GUI isn't consistent, they feel uncomfortable with this typing interface [which, for these users, is much slower than a GUI] and they can't find out how to make a shared directory for users to store common files in without permissions being a problem. Go on, sit your mother down in from of your Linux machineand let her figure out `chmod g+s./'. Good luck.
These people want to use Linux anyway, because they know and acknowledge Windows doesn't work properly. Most Linux distribution vendors still don't take ease of use seriously. Its nice that familiar faces like tucows and download.com can guide them into getting familiar feeling apps to helpm them administer their system.
Linux isn't more stable than Windows if you can't install it in the first place
I think this presents a good opportunity for many Linux users [myself included] to have a serious rethink about some of or Linux advocacy seeing [from the befit of a third poerson view] how blindly the BSD folk are about attacking those who don't understand their platform.
Yes, that means its not productive for you to yell at someone who think BSD is GPLed - Tucows were BSD newbies and newbies make poor assumptions. And many other comments [ie, about the installers being difficult] are simply true. They wanted tom provide you with a neat sorted mirror and guide to your apps, and you bit them. Linux users deal with people who don't understand the platform all the time - my employers once thought `hackers' were fourteen year old who broke into computers and defaced websites. When a stranger who doesn't know Linux calls colleagues criminals, I don't get offended. Its an easy mistake to make for someone what gets their news from any mainstream news source. Likewise, when I don't understand why my car doesn't work, and just want my mechanic to fix the damned thing, he's pretty pateint with me.
Thais is because most people are drivers and not mechanics. Deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
(Sorry, the spelling on that was atrocious).
...and always have been. The specifications aren't always fully implemented and don't perform reliably even in consumer environments - i.e. every shipping copy of Win98SE is unable to recover once the machine goes into suspend unless a patch is applied. In terms of (SME) servers, the suport hasn't existed. Windows NT4 didn't support the full capabilties of either spec, and while Win2K does, it is still not in widespread use. As for Unix-likes, Linux has supported APM for some time now fairly reliably, but some applications (specfically poorly written FTP servers) still have some issues with it. Anyone know about ACPI?
Powering down hard disks does indeed cause wear and tear, but there are other components - ie, monitors (if you use monitors on servers), KVMs, and even switches which aren't in use during certain hours which won't be significantly harmed by powering down.
I think you are confused about your second point. Nautilus is a file manager. Evolution is a mail client.
No, he's not confused. The specific library theya re talking about is bonobo - to install the latest versions of evolution or nautilus, you inevitably need a newer version on bonobo, which breaks one or the other. I can't speak for this preview release, but to install evolution, I had to install a newer version of bonobo which broke nautilus.
there is a nice demo mode which you can test
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Please contact the server administrator, root@localhost and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
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Sorry, another point I'd like to make:
The biggest problem with KDE and GNOME is not that the file managers, java handling, etc aren't brilliant, nor the fact the Joe Average has no idea what a `gnorpm' is. Its that half an average users apps don't work with properly in both of them.
Ahem. Thanks for listening.
Er, actually, they're both bitchin, and the flamewar is over.
,can we start creating desktop environments that actually match most desktop users, i.e., for people that choose aps based on quality rather than toolkit religion? I use KDE, Konqueror, and most of my other apps happen to GNOME based. This is because, to my own taste, Konqueror is the best fiel manager, and the (gnome based) rp3 is the best dial up tool.
Damned straight. Now we know that neither KDE or GNOME are about to go anywhere soon
* There's no (combined) style guide, so my kde apps shortcuts don't work in GNOME. And the common dialogues in both look completely different.
* There's no combined mime types, though I am told this is coming.
* The toolkits theme differently, so I configure the look and feel of one set of apps in a different place to another
* DND still doesn't work all the time. My respect goes out to whoever can prove me wrong by dragging a file out of a Konq FTP session onto a GNOME desktop. Yes, I've reported the bug. No, it hasn't been fixed.
* I can't have GNOME panel apps on my KDE panel, and vbice versa
* Package maintainers have to put apps in seperate directories for KDE and GNOME menus. Users have to update and manage them both.
* Eazel services tells me about nifty apps for any tollkit of desktop environment as long as its not QT or KDE. KDE calls GNOME `legacy' in their theme importer. And various other childish actions on both sides.
* Differing icon standards mean icons from apps designed around different desktop environments (not that this should ever be the case) look poor in another.
and the brave souls who are making the jump are running WINE as a matter of course. WINE makes it a lot easier for these people to make the jump, and increases the number of users that Liniux has.
;-) on Linux, and seems to be reasonably stable. I see this as being the future for the project.
No. They are not running WINE as a matter of course. WINE is highly beta, even the Transgaming and Codeweavers version 2 editions are still highly pront to crashing and run less than five percent of Windows applications, and that's a optimistic guess. Currently., managed mdoe is not the default on most versions, the WINE team themsleves don't usually produce binary crashes, and the `building font metrics' three minute wait to start an application still doesn't go away under the codeweavers version.
Yes, WINE will improve significantly over the next year as it actually starts providing more user feedback, testing guideliens and desktop integration. No, IMHO there's no way that within th4e next year newbies will be running WINE. Sorry. Its a a gargantuan task,,and the WINE folk are brave to attempt it, but my honest vide is I think they will fail, and this DirectX code will be more beneficial once it is merged into SDL.
I do a lot of WINE hacking, egnerally iupdate and run with everyt release, and have got Office 2000 and various opther apps working fine. But never a hundred percent, and always lacking some important functionality.
However, using Wine wrappers around Win32 DLLs is something WINE has definitely been sucessful at. The Open Source implementation of the Win32 avifile implementation has been a success and enabled formats like ASF1 and DivX
I'll grant you they don't have the great big arrow pointing towards them that says "Click here stupid!", but I still fail to see what is so difficult about it.
That's precisely what makes it difficult. I could click on the kbutton, but I could slo click on the desktop button, the shortcut for XMMS, Konqueror, or many other things. Perhaps a tutorial started the first time a user logs in would be appropriate, identiftying the diferent pieces of the desktop. And turnable off, of course.
Seriously. I don't know how it works overseas, but I can magine it is similar to Australia. Current rates mean one Austarlian dollar equals sixty US cents.
The console, afew months past release, is still selling for around seven hundred dollars. Over time it will stick to bering around four or three hundred dollars. A clone PC with a decent 3D card is around $1100.
Games are between eighty and a hundred each and rarely get turned into bargain bin material. PC games are between thirty or forty [for something nine months old] and seventy dollars. We also have a large swap meet culture which makes purchase of OEM games fairly easy, for around $20 a pop. Yes, new games require newer PCs to get the most out of. Nothing says you have to play new games - many PC users I know still play half like and counterstrike years after their release. Worldwide statistics about games played online make this still the case. Furthermore, old PC game asre cheap.
The other factor is that modern consoles seem rather...er...crap in comparision to modern PCS. The original playstation released with games like Wipeout a couple of months down the track which made OC users jaw drop. The PS2 released with games like SSX [or something like that] snowboarding which made PC users laugh at the poorly accelerated graphics. Old PC games like Half Life still look better than anything I've seen on the PS2.
An even better solution is a length of 132 lbs (to the yard) rail.
:)
And a largish electromagnetic coil, to make a neato rail gun. Add some optical recognition software to identify the Rednecks on your video camera feed and away you go
Fix UDF writepage() page locking
This might be referring to MicroUDF [also called UDF], the filesystem used on DVDs [as well as other devices] and integrated into stable kernels later than 2.2.16 and 2.4.0
Try using sndconfig next time you're on a Red Hat or Mandrake box, and listening to the sample wave:
"Hello, this is Linus (rhymes with `Guinness') Torvalds. And I pronounce Linux (rhymes with `cynics') Linux (still rhymes with `cynics')".
Correction: Anyone else notice that RedHat is just following Microsoft[sic] footprints?
Yes. Why does it matter? Microsoft do lots of very clever things, like cultivate good relationships with admins and developers via Technet and MSDN, market their certifications and OSes well, have strong relationships with ISVs and developmewnt houses, UI design guides and standards, and have some really neat update tools.
Just because they have done some incredibly horrible things to comeptitors and allies doesn't instantly mean anything MS does is bad, that Red Hat shouldn't follow any path MS has r\tread before, or anything NT does shouldn't beimplemented in Linux.
I'd hate to think this is what's holding up ACLs from getting into the main kernel tree.
Remember, apt-get is cross platform too. The current release of Connectiva supports it (it was connective who created the RPM interface, and wrote an excellent set of packaging guidelines). The next major release of Linux Mandrake (still the best selling desktop Linux, and perhaps the most popular, depending on who you talk to) will also be APT based.
consistants UI's (aka GNOME/GTK)
Um, pardon me, but how exactly does this mean Red Hat (or any Linux distro) has a consistent UI? Non technical users don't give a damn about toolkits of the religion behind tham, and happily use whjat they see as the best tool for the job - ie, a combination of apps with different toolkits. There's no reason why GTK and QT couldn't have a combined style guide and attempt to match their widget behavior, but they both are too busy being eahc others enemy they seem to have foprgot they're competiting with windows, not each other (if they are comepting with each other it is pointless - neither will go away anytime soon).
I'm yet to see a Linux distro with a consistent UI, and it saddens me I don't think I will see it for some time yet.
Actually, TurboLinux market share in Japan is tiny in comparison to Red Hat, the even has outsold Windows 98 [admittedly at the time when 98 and 98SE, classed as a seperate OS, were out simultaneously].
TurboLinux does dominate the rest of Asia, but Japan belongs to Red Hat.
Give a web browser the following checkable option;
[ ] Spellcheck text entry field larger than [XX] lines/characters/whatever.
You'd probably use a Hangul style red-underline spellchecker for speed. It seems dead obvious and I'm surprised it hasn't been implemented yet.
I was discussing the Accenture name change with the others at my superbowl party today (I'm a Giants fan in Rochester, MN... it will be very lonely tomorrow) - we can't figure out why a company who only has mindshare through their name would change the only thing they have going for them...
The name change occured because Andersen Consulting is no longer associated with Aurthur Andersen or Andersen Corporation, who now have their own consulting arm, Arthur Andersen Consulting, as of around a year ago. In fact, I do believe there was some degree of legal action between the two former family members over the split.
hell redhat/ibm/compaq all employ kernel hackers, and i think linus listens to them when he makes decisions.
Indeed - I believe Linux accepted DevFS into the main tree due against his own personal judgement based on consensus from other well known Linux kernel authorities.
The day Linux turns out to be an OS for the corporations and not for the people
Why do you see those objectives as mutually exclusive? People that work in corporations have the same goals as those who work in small business, those who work for themselves, or those who don't work at all. Many of those kernel hackers work for said corporations.
They simply want a stable computing environment. If something like, for example, kernel debuggers or a fine-grained permission system [read: ACLs] will help is that goal, and a group of poeple need to fork Linux to do that, more power to them. We`ll all benefit from it. Why would a corproate forked Linux be bad, compared to a non-corporate forked Linux? The same people would still be working on it. The lciensing wouldn't change.
Id like to see if there's reasons here beyond `all corporations are inherintly evil'. Since you didn't qualify your initial post, I honestly doubt there is. But please post back and prove me wrong.
Have you ever actually installed any Linux distribution in the last year or so?
Yes, I have installed
* Red Hat 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 7.0
* Storm 2000
* Debian 2.2 [eventually]
* Caldera 2.4 technology preview
* Mandrake 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 [7.2 I run os my main machines]
* esmith 3.0, 4.0 4.1 [which was actually easy]
I have also installed
* OpenBSD 2.8
* Solaris 7.0 and 8.0 i386
And
* Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME
* Windows NT 4, 2000 Pro, Server
I word for a professional Linux systems administration company. They all suck. Unfortunately most machines already come with a flavour of Windows installed, so end users don't have to deal with Windows crappy installs. esmith is the only one I would consider remotely useable by non-technical people.
Basically, I thjought the ctiticisms in all of these OS were self evident. Man pages are generally notoriously badly written and occasiuonally don't exist. HOWTOs are generally extremnely out of date [even the maintained ones]. The debian install puts widgets off screen which you wont see unless you tab over them, and uses terms like `base system' which are vague.
It is hard when your app doesn't compile because a header file is missing. Or something doesn't compile with later [or broken] versions of GCC. It is hard when because someone told you *BSD runs Linux apps, and you realize that this blanket statement is a gross generalization.
It is sometimes perfectly good to assume that soemone knows what they are doing, and reads documentation. Most Linuxes, and many BSDs, do not however aim exclusively at this market - most Linuxes, in fact, don't. There's been so many times I've heard of a network beeing cracked and some BSD advocate says `just install OpenB and have your troubles go away. Firstly, network security isn't that simple. secondly, they probably can't install OpenBSD, because they find it dtoo difficult of because the documentation is porrly written, and their company can't hire external staff to perform this task for them.
Just be honest: `if you have a few years Unix experience under your belt, or have some cash avaliable for training, OpenBSD would be a good solution. With some tinkering and a bit of knowledge, it can also run many Linux applications'.
You sound like a person whose driven an automatic transmission all their life trying to learn to drive a manual. Jeesh.
This I think crystallizes the fact that you simply don't get what I'm trying to say. I shouldn't have to qualify myself: but I find the installs of OpenBSD and most Linux distributions quite comprehensible.
Of your analogy: its pathetic that you think just because I advocate giving people choice to drive their car how they want to I am personally incapable of driving manually.
Probably because Mac OS and Windows are designed around an assumption that newbies are very afraid of a command line.
...' to ascend 2 directories, `cd ....' to go up three, etc.
Um, in case you haven't watched 99% of computer users rcently, I might remind you that that's a competely correct assumption to make. Any efficiancies gained from the command line batch processing are immediately lost when you consider the time taken to learnt to perform such functions. Rather than understand hwo to manipulate a series of around thirty of so widgets, the user must understand hundreds of commands, their relation to each otehr, and their various paramets, which are generally non-standardized across most Unixes.
Just making a small point to remind y`all that GUIs remain the best interface for the majority of computer users - just as common cars [rather than custom hotrods] remain trhe best type of vehicle for drivers. Because most drivers aren't mechanics.
Maybe that might prompt one the the GUI filemanagers to be capable of recursively changing permissions.
On the topic of Windows command line interfaces, while extremely limited compared to Unix, tab completion in W2K for directories with spaces in them works much better than most Unix shells. In Unix spaces can be escaped with backslashes or quotes. But the default tab expansion uses backslashes - which makes the directory much less readable and [if there are more than two spaces, quite common for many word processed documents] often expans the filename way off screen.
The windows cd can also do some nifty tricks. If you cd to a directory with a space in it and do not escape the name [Eg, `cd Program Files'] it will look at the unknown parameter `files' see if any directory called "Program Files" exist, and change into them accordingly. You can also use `cd
It was a jab at Tucows for not knowing their audience
./'. Good luck.
I think Tucows know tyheir audience perfectly - enwtwork administrators from the Windows world who heard about Linux and just want to run a stable OS. They find Linux difficult to use and confusing, with some people saying ti easy and other sinsisteing they need to manually recompile their kernel and all their applications too. The `help' section in their GUI only talks about a fairly small range of apps [at most, less than half of the GUI apps isntalled on their system], the GUI isn't consistent, they feel uncomfortable with this typing interface [which, for these users, is much slower than a GUI] and they can't find out how to make a shared directory for users to store common files in without permissions being a problem. Go on, sit your mother down in from of your Linux machineand let her figure out `chmod g+s
These people want to use Linux anyway, because they know and acknowledge Windows doesn't work properly. Most Linux distribution vendors still don't take ease of use seriously. Its nice that familiar faces like tucows and download.com can guide them into getting familiar feeling apps to helpm them administer their system.
Linux isn't more stable than Windows if you can't install it in the first place
I think this presents a good opportunity for many Linux users [myself included] to have a serious rethink about some of or Linux advocacy seeing [from the befit of a third poerson view] how blindly the BSD folk are about attacking those who don't understand their platform.
Yes, that means its not productive for you to yell at someone who think BSD is GPLed - Tucows were BSD newbies and newbies make poor assumptions. And many other comments [ie, about the installers being difficult] are simply true. They wanted tom provide you with a neat sorted mirror and guide to your apps, and you bit them. Linux users deal with people who don't understand the platform all the time - my employers once thought `hackers' were fourteen year old who broke into computers and defaced websites. When a stranger who doesn't know Linux calls colleagues criminals, I don't get offended. Its an easy mistake to make for someone what gets their news from any mainstream news source. Likewise, when I don't understand why my car doesn't work, and just want my mechanic to fix the damned thing, he's pretty pateint with me.
Thais is because most people are drivers and not mechanics. Deal with it.