Open source needs open arms. the open arms to newbies is one of the reasons I am with Linspire and Freespire even though it is "too simple" for me.
Very well written and well-said. I've been using SuSE/SUSE for about two years now. I'm actually rather frustrated with the current version and the things I'm needing to do to keep it running. I wonder if it isn't time to actually try Lindows and see what it can do. My only major concern with it was the cost and the running as root. Seeing, however, that I pay roughly $50/year for SUSE upgrades and also purchase Crossover Office, my cost argument is mute. I've also read you can run as a normal user under Lindows. I remember them having codes which you can use to download the distro for free. I'll have to check into this.
My only concern now is the version of KDE. I've gotten very used to 3.5 and would hate to be forced back.
Just as an FYI, I reboot my laptops at least three or four times a day. I simply don't trust ACPI for suspending my machines. I'm currently running SUSE 10.1 on both and would appreciate a faster boot time.:)
I tend to agree. I know of only two people who actually own a modern Mac. (My 1980's vintage SE-30 doesn't count.) I know several people who use Linux on a regular or exclusive basis. I know I'm not representaive of the world as a whole, but I'd wager good money that *nix is far more popular than Macintosh in the world as a whole.
One has to place trust somewhere that the system will mostly work. Will it be 100% perfect? No - not unless you're voting in the USSR for Stalin around 1940. In that case, the voting came back 100% accurate.
There may be a very small minority of people who have the technical know-how, desire and access to get in, somehow access the motherboard of the machine, flip a switch, insert a boot card, run some other OS and in turn either invalidate or falsify votes.
I'm far more concerned with the seven out of ten people in my neighborhood were either too apathetic or discouraged to take the time to excercise their right to vote. None of them were forced to use a TEV, yet they still failed to vote.
Sigh......when will the voting advocates realize that hacking a touch screen machine is child's play when compared to the real threat against democracy, which is the extremely low (~ 30%) voter turnout in places like California for the June election.
Anybody who wants to fix the election, simply needs to funnel some extra money into a smear campaign to dissuade an extra one or two percent of the population from voting.
This crap about "hacking" TSV devices or the county tally systems needs to stop.
Oh, that's right - Bill-The-Gates invented the right click. Nevermind that Windowz 3.x never had a right click option, IIRC. I learned to right-click (and center click) on a SPARC 5 station and on OS/2, long before I started doing it in NT (a.k.a. OS/2 2++).
IIRC, the multi-button mouse was not used in the Mac 512 because it was seen as too complex.
Apparently they still think it is too complex.:P
When I fire up my SE/30, I occasionally will try to right-click to get a context menu.
I am neither trolling or clueless. I just point out that the whole mouse has to be moved to click. Instead of simply moving one finger, I now have to make the whole hand move - much more effort. Not at all user friendly.
Oh, and if there's a right-click option, it wasn't obvious.
Next, you're going to tell me that my SE-30 mouse has right-click functionality built-in.
That's almost as funny as Apples regression mouse - ie zero buttons. It was bad enough that apple can't produce a two button mouse, but c'mon how is this useful??
I was supporting my father-in-law the other day, who has an eMacintosh or iMacintosh or something like that. In any case, his mouse had this annoying feature where there's no button (or heaven forbid, a scroll wheel) and you push down to click.
I couldn't wait to get finished so I could get back to a real mouse on my SUSE laptop.:P
It will eventually be made into a movie starring Harrison Ford as "Shaggy" - an aging inventor who is being tortured by his robotic great dane. The great dane constantly comes up to him and goes, "ruh roh!"
Bingo! SuSE has always been a good distribution. I didn't use it way back when (I was a Mandrake guy.) but always heard of it.
SUSE 10.1 is a very clean distribution and a worthy successor to the line. Thanks to Andreas, it now includes Novell's ZenWorks updater which takes the pain out of updating software from non-official repositorys (apt, yum, yast, whatever) and is a beautiful feature. I haven't put the system on my notebook (running 10.0) yet, so I don't know if the wireless/wired bug has been fixed.
Yet, Novell has - in my mind - a history of shooting itself in the foot and underperforming in the marketing department. In fact, I cannot even find a marketing banner right now for SUSE 10.1 to display on my websites. I remember when Novell came out with Netware 4.0 as the "great upgrade" to 3.12, which I was installing on many clients' systems. No matter what the actual techical merits of Directory Tree over Bindry, it was destined to fail because Novell did a terrible job of marketing.
Same goes for SUSE - they simply don't know how to market it. Let's just hope they don't kill it off too soon! I might have to switch to FC or Ubuntu or another distro with which I'm unfamiliar.
Yeah, it has actually been awhile. (Of course I only use Windows at work and 80% Linux at home.) I still remember back in '98 or '99 when I get to work and the fax machine was spitting out "I Love You" from many of our contacts. I knew about the "I Love You Virus" before I got to work, and was ready to apply a patch to our Exchange server (we were using Innoculan I think), but the CEO had come in super early and - upon seeing an email from his buddy saying, "I Love You" - opened it.
...you say that like it is a bad thing. I've used the Outlook 97, 2K, XP and 2003 clients and find them all to be pretty much the same. Outlook 97 would do just fine for me and probably 98% of the world....of course, you're still stuck with those pesky viruses if you insist on running Outlook in Windows.
I demand a recount! I - in my executive power as me - hereby declare the above post to be +5 funny. Obviously the/. moderators need another Jolt Cola before they start modding these things down.
I haven't gotten my papers yet. I've been hiding under the radar of the UN for several decades now. Even the men in black haven't paid my employers a visit for awhile.
Well, I haven't downloaded Google Earth yet, but Picassa isn't a native Linux client. Though it works it is a WINE applicaiton embedded in a Crossover Office wrapper. I'm curious to see if Earth is native.
This has got to be the spot-on evidence we need for Global Warming. See it is all happening right there on Jupiter and is directly correlated with our warming oceans.
Of course, the majority of people around will tell you you MUST install the Enterprise Premium edition in order to play the latest and greatest World of Grand Theft Sims in 3D....meanwhile you'll just fire up your system and continue to get real work done.:)
>i am an open sourcer and while i would like to agree with you there, i have to say that the linux i run is crud compared to win xp.
Not in my opinion. In fact, WinXP was the final straw. I was very eager for "NT 5.0" and was excited when I first put the Beta into a spare system. Man what a disappointment! In fact, whenever I get XP on a system (I have it here at work) I am continually reminded how pathetic a "downgrade" it is compared to Win2K.
But that's another story.
>fedora core 4
I have very little experience with any Fedora product. The last RedHat product I used was RH 4.2 back in the '90s. I have Fedora 5 here but never used it. (I get free DVDs with one of my magazine subscriptions.)
> 1. probs with mounting usb disks
Okay, fair enough. Not sure what the problem is, but I bet the millions of other Fedora users would have been glad to help out. You might try www.linuxquestions.org or www.fedoraforum.org - both of those sites are very active.
> 2. no easy to use graphical search function like win xp
Heh. This one made me laugh. I am so amazed that people "like" the disabled (compared to Win2K) search function in XP. Just try searching for a text string inside a.java or a.php file. Can't do it. (There is a workaround and you can download WinGREP if you want.) On my system (SUSE 10.0 / 10.1 and KDE) I click on the geeko icon and type my search phrase at the top of the menu. Works like a charm. Let's not forget Beagle, which is supposed to be the best search/index utility out there on any OS. (I haven't tried it so cannot comment.)
> 3. i tried to copy from one usb disk to hdd and it corrupted the usb disk!!!!
Man that sux! I've never had this issue. (I have a growing collection of USB disks - currently in proud possesion of a 2GB deal I got last week.) Again, you would have gotten much help on the above-mentioned forums.
In addition if you're thinking of upgrading from Windows to a Linux Distribution, you should check out the following links:
Desktop Linux dot com - http://www.desktoplinux.com/ - this site has some good informaiton for beginners.
Tux Magazine - http://www.tuxmagazine.com/ - this was supposed to be a print magazine, but turned into a PDF download. Great stuff for people like me who haven't a clue what they're doing.
Linux Planet has some cool articles... http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/
Then there's the big red N - Novell's Cool Solutions: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/slp/
Then there are the forums, http://www.linuxquestions.org and http://www.linuxforums.org
This is a great comparison of the two, though it is getting old: http://www.michaelhorowitz.com/Linux.vs.Windows.ht ml
As for a comparison between Windows and Linux versions, you're in luck.
Okay, though books are a good source of information, I've had better luck with my friends/family upgrading from Windows/Mac to Linux by using the following list of periodicals.
Tux Magazine - A Free e-zine geared towards the Linux Newbie. http://www.tuxmagazine.com/ This comes out approximately once per month in PDF format and is VERY good. It is published by Nicholas Petreley, who is well-regarded in the *nix world. He apparently has a book of his own out now - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxdeskhks/ - I have not seen or read it so cannot comment.
Linux Magazine Pro - http://www.linux-magazine.com/ - Note for those in the US - this comes as a pricey ($100/year) subscription but is WELL worth it!
Linux Magazine - http://www.linux-mag.com/ - more technical in nature but still very interesting.
Seriously, I still have one machine which I haven't upgraded from Windows to Linux yet. It has been running AGV Free for several years now and has yet to be truly compromized - in spite of my wife's best efforts. AGV does a good job of realtime scanning and system wide scheduled scans. The virus definition is continually up to date and automatically downloads on a periodic basis.
I'd highly recommend AGV Free.
Of course, the best solution is to simply upgrade from Windows to a real OS like Linux.:)
<troll mode> By the way, SUSE 10.1 is now out and better than ever! </troll mode>
I think I've heard rumors that the device has built-in GPS satellite reconfiguration codes so your average counter terrorism unit field staff won't have to rely on somone at the home office to do their work and then download images to the unit.
I've also heard rumors that it has a very good mini speaker system, which then is utilized to randomly shout phrases like, "PUT THE GUN DOWN!"
Unfortunatly, user testing has been an issue, because pretty much anyone within range of the unit who can make a decision or has information about the unit has suddenly died a violent death either due to gunshots, nuclear leakage or nerve gas.
Slashdot Mirror
My only concern now is the version of KDE. I've gotten very used to 3.5 and would hate to be forced back.
Here's proof: http://www.perfectreign.com/?q=node/24
My only hope is that he tells all his first-grade friends how he kicks rear on Tux Racer and they'll want it too...
Why thank you! I'll check into them.
Just as an FYI, I reboot my laptops at least three or four times a day. I simply don't trust ACPI for suspending my machines. I'm currently running SUSE 10.1 on both and would appreciate a faster boot time. :)
I tend to agree. I know of only two people who actually own a modern Mac. (My 1980's vintage SE-30 doesn't count.) I know several people who use Linux on a regular or exclusive basis. I know I'm not representaive of the world as a whole, but I'd wager good money that *nix is far more popular than Macintosh in the world as a whole.
<troll mode>
It is way cooler, too!
</troll mode>
Maybe we could learn a bit more about JT Kirk. His horse, his live on the farm.
Maybe...
Uh huh.
And I see my point was completely missed by you.
One has to place trust somewhere that the system will mostly work. Will it be 100% perfect? No - not unless you're voting in the USSR for Stalin around 1940. In that case, the voting came back 100% accurate.
There may be a very small minority of people who have the technical know-how, desire and access to get in, somehow access the motherboard of the machine, flip a switch, insert a boot card, run some other OS and in turn either invalidate or falsify votes.
I'm far more concerned with the seven out of ten people in my neighborhood were either too apathetic or discouraged to take the time to excercise their right to vote. None of them were forced to use a TEV, yet they still failed to vote.
Did you?
Sigh... ...when will the voting advocates realize that hacking a touch screen machine is child's play when compared to the real threat against democracy, which is the extremely low (~ 30%) voter turnout in places like California for the June election.
Anybody who wants to fix the election, simply needs to funnel some extra money into a smear campaign to dissuade an extra one or two percent of the population from voting.
This crap about "hacking" TSV devices or the county tally systems needs to stop.
Oh, that's right - Bill-The-Gates invented the right click. Nevermind that Windowz 3.x never had a right click option, IIRC. I learned to right-click (and center click) on a SPARC 5 station and on OS/2, long before I started doing it in NT (a.k.a. OS/2 2++). IIRC, the multi-button mouse was not used in the Mac 512 because it was seen as too complex. Apparently they still think it is too complex. :P
When I fire up my SE/30, I occasionally will try to right-click to get a context menu.
Subscribe!
I am neither trolling or clueless. I just point out that the whole mouse has to be moved to click. Instead of simply moving one finger, I now have to make the whole hand move - much more effort. Not at all user friendly.
Oh, and if there's a right-click option, it wasn't obvious.
Next, you're going to tell me that my SE-30 mouse has right-click functionality built-in.
That's almost as funny as Apples regression mouse - ie zero buttons. It was bad enough that apple can't produce a two button mouse, but c'mon how is this useful??
:P
I was supporting my father-in-law the other day, who has an eMacintosh or iMacintosh or something like that. In any case, his mouse had this annoying feature where there's no button (or heaven forbid, a scroll wheel) and you push down to click.
I couldn't wait to get finished so I could get back to a real mouse on my SUSE laptop.
..."Do Robot Dogs Dream of Electric Cats."
It will eventually be made into a movie starring Harrison Ford as "Shaggy" - an aging inventor who is being tortured by his robotic great dane. The great dane constantly comes up to him and goes, "ruh roh!"
Bingo! SuSE has always been a good distribution. I didn't use it way back when (I was a Mandrake guy.) but always heard of it.
SUSE 10.1 is a very clean distribution and a worthy successor to the line. Thanks to Andreas, it now includes Novell's ZenWorks updater which takes the pain out of updating software from non-official repositorys (apt, yum, yast, whatever) and is a beautiful feature. I haven't put the system on my notebook (running 10.0) yet, so I don't know if the wireless/wired bug has been fixed.
Yet, Novell has - in my mind - a history of shooting itself in the foot and underperforming in the marketing department. In fact, I cannot even find a marketing banner right now for SUSE 10.1 to display on my websites. I remember when Novell came out with Netware 4.0 as the "great upgrade" to 3.12, which I was installing on many clients' systems. No matter what the actual techical merits of Directory Tree over Bindry, it was destined to fail because Novell did a terrible job of marketing.
Same goes for SUSE - they simply don't know how to market it. Let's just hope they don't kill it off too soon! I might have to switch to FC or Ubuntu or another distro with which I'm unfamiliar.
Yeah, it has actually been awhile. (Of course I only use Windows at work and 80% Linux at home.) I still remember back in '98 or '99 when I get to work and the fax machine was spitting out "I Love You" from many of our contacts. I knew about the "I Love You Virus" before I got to work, and was ready to apply a patch to our Exchange server (we were using Innoculan I think), but the CEO had come in super early and - upon seeing an email from his buddy saying, "I Love You" - opened it.
That was a fun day!
...you say that like it is a bad thing. I've used the Outlook 97, 2K, XP and 2003 clients and find them all to be pretty much the same. Outlook 97 would do just fine for me and probably 98% of the world....of course, you're still stuck with those pesky viruses if you insist on running Outlook in Windows.
Flamebait?
/. moderators need another Jolt Cola before they start modding these things down.
I demand a recount! I - in my executive power as me - hereby declare the above post to be +5 funny. Obviously the
Lisp...heh!
So you're naturalized?? Wow!!
I haven't gotten my papers yet. I've been hiding under the radar of the UN for several decades now. Even the men in black haven't paid my employers a visit for awhile.
I'll think about applying soon.
Well, I haven't downloaded Google Earth yet, but Picassa isn't a native Linux client. Though it works it is a WINE applicaiton embedded in a Crossover Office wrapper. I'm curious to see if Earth is native.
This has got to be the spot-on evidence we need for Global Warming. See it is all happening right there on Jupiter and is directly correlated with our warming oceans.
Okay, maybe not. But, hey, it sounds good!
What? You haven't gotten marked as a troll yet?
/. gestapo!
Shame on the
THIS POSTER IS OBVIOUSLY A TROLL!
(When you do get Linux on the MS handheld let me know. I'd love to try it myself.)
TROLL, I SAY!
LOL!
...meanwhile you'll just fire up your system and continue to get real work done. :)
Of course, the majority of people around will tell you you MUST install the Enterprise Premium edition in order to play the latest and greatest World of Grand Theft Sims in 3D.
>i am an open sourcer and while i would like to agree with you there, i have to say that the linux i run is crud compared to win xp.
.java or a .php file. Can't do it. (There is a workaround and you can download WinGREP if you want.) On my system (SUSE 10.0 / 10.1 and KDE) I click on the geeko icon and type my search phrase at the top of the menu. Works like a charm. Let's not forget Beagle, which is supposed to be the best search/index utility out there on any OS. (I haven't tried it so cannot comment.)
t ml
l
Not in my opinion. In fact, WinXP was the final straw. I was very eager for "NT 5.0" and was excited when I first put the Beta into a spare system. Man what a disappointment! In fact, whenever I get XP on a system (I have it here at work) I am continually reminded how pathetic a "downgrade" it is compared to Win2K.
But that's another story.
>fedora core 4
I have very little experience with any Fedora product. The last RedHat product I used was RH 4.2 back in the '90s. I have Fedora 5 here but never used it. (I get free DVDs with one of my magazine subscriptions.)
> 1. probs with mounting usb disks
Okay, fair enough. Not sure what the problem is, but I bet the millions of other Fedora users would have been glad to help out. You might try www.linuxquestions.org or www.fedoraforum.org - both of those sites are very active.
> 2. no easy to use graphical search function like win xp
Heh. This one made me laugh. I am so amazed that people "like" the disabled (compared to Win2K) search function in XP. Just try searching for a text string inside a
> 3. i tried to copy from one usb disk to hdd and it corrupted the usb disk!!!!
Man that sux! I've never had this issue. (I have a growing collection of USB disks - currently in proud possesion of a 2GB deal I got last week.) Again, you would have gotten much help on the above-mentioned forums.
In addition if you're thinking of upgrading from Windows to a Linux Distribution, you should check out the following links:
Desktop Linux dot com - http://www.desktoplinux.com/ - this site has some
good informaiton for beginners.
Tux Magazine - http://www.tuxmagazine.com/ - this was supposed to be a
print magazine, but turned into a PDF download. Great stuff for people
like me who haven't a clue what they're doing.
Linux Planet has some cool articles...
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/
Then there's the big red N - Novell's Cool Solutions:
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/slp/
Then there are the forums, http://www.linuxquestions.org and
http://www.linuxforums.org
This is a great comparison of the two, though it is getting old: http://www.michaelhorowitz.com/Linux.vs.Windows.h
As for a comparison between Windows and Linux versions, you're in luck.
http://www.linuxrsp.ru/win-lin-soft/table-eng.htm
Enjoy!
Flame bait...bah!
Okay, though books are a good source of information, I've had better luck with my friends/family upgrading from Windows/Mac to Linux by using the following list of periodicals.
Tux Magazine - A Free e-zine geared towards the Linux Newbie. http://www.tuxmagazine.com/ This comes out approximately once per month in PDF format and is VERY good. It is published by Nicholas Petreley, who is well-regarded in the *nix world. He apparently has a book of his own out now - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxdeskhks/ - I have not seen or read it so cannot comment.
Linux Magazine Pro - http://www.linux-magazine.com/ - Note for those in the US - this comes as a pricey ($100/year) subscription but is WELL worth it!
Linux Magazine - http://www.linux-mag.com/ - more technical in nature but still very interesting.
Seriously, I still have one machine which I haven't upgraded from Windows to Linux yet. It has been running AGV Free for several years now and has yet to be truly compromized - in spite of my wife's best efforts. AGV does a good job of realtime scanning and system wide scheduled scans. The virus definition is continually up to date and automatically downloads on a periodic basis.
:)
I'd highly recommend AGV Free.
Of course, the best solution is to simply upgrade from Windows to a real OS like Linux.
<troll mode>
By the way, SUSE 10.1 is now out and better than ever!
</troll mode>
I think I've heard rumors that the device has built-in GPS satellite reconfiguration codes so your average counter terrorism unit field staff won't have to rely on somone at the home office to do their work and then download images to the unit.
I've also heard rumors that it has a very good mini speaker system, which then is utilized to randomly shout phrases like, "PUT THE GUN DOWN!"
Unfortunatly, user testing has been an issue, because pretty much anyone within range of the unit who can make a decision or has information about the unit has suddenly died a violent death either due to gunshots, nuclear leakage or nerve gas.