I'm not sure I agree with this, unless I'm thinking about it differently. We could write an efficient, fast, dependency resolver that only has a package repository of 1,000 packages. As long as all dependancies are included in that repository. Making the repository bigger by adding 10,000 packages to it doesn't necessarily make the resolver any better. It just makes the repository better. The resolver still works the same way. Just like an employee information system that links all information for each of 100 employees versus 10,000 employees. The second one isn't necessarily better than the first. Or am I missing something here?
I've installed RH RPMs on Mandrake through both the rpm commandline and through urpmi and they always seemed to work fine. I'll have to try emerging RPM on my gentoo box to see how it works. I never thought to do that before.
If you want package management to Just Work(TM), use Debian. It comes with apt-get, which automatically downloads and installs your package _and_ its dependencies
Well urpmi on Mandrake will download the package _and_ its dependancies as well. I can set up my system to point to one or more mirrors, as well as the installation CD's. Then when I 'urpmi ' it will search through the FTP mirrors I have configured to find the package and each dependancy (if any). Urmpi will return the list to me asking if it is ok to install these, and the original package. I think it handles this pretty well. I've never used Debian, so I can't say anything about apt, but apt isn't the only thing that does dependancy checking/downloading/installing.
I think in that case, both the consumer and Ford are responsible. The consumer is responsible for his or her flawed decision to purchase a low-quality vehicle. However, Ford would be responsible for designing the vehicle in the first place. Ford should also be responsible for what happens to the user because of defects in the product (car).
If there is a Ford dealership close to my house and all I ever do is buy Fords, should Ford be held liable when all my cars fall apart?
Well that depends on how the Ford vehicles are designed. If the car is designed so you can pop a tape into the tape player and your gas tank explodes, Ford should be responsible. If a consumer's engine seises because he or she has't changed the oil in 10 years, the consumer should be blamed.
I still prefer vi, just because it's different. As far as your questions with nano, the arrows and pageup/pagedown seem to work well for me from what I recal (I'm not at my gentoo box right now:-( ). I haven't used nano too much yet though. The keyboard shortcuts in the screenshot are there, but the arrows should work just fine. And unlike vi, you don't have to be in a special mode to edit the file.:-)
Gentoo comes with nano. Not sure about other distributions. I think nano may be closer to what you expect of a text editor.
But I do agree with the grandparent poster. Boot the install CD for a modern Linux distro, like Mandrake for example, and you get the OS with word processing, multimedia applications, games, Internet apps (IM, browser, mail, etc), and other apps already installed. Install Windows and you get some of this, but for everything else, you either have to buy it separately, or download it. Either way, you have additional installation time and effort to get the system up to speed.
As far as the issue with linux not working correctly on certain hardware, most modern distros, again mandrake for example, do a pretty good job of auto-detecting and configuring hardware by default. This assumes that your hardware is supported under the OS, but the same is true for Windows. Windows just supports more hardware because more vendors write drivers for it because more people use it, etc, etc.
he's and she's is perfectly valid if, say, you are writing a sentance like "Your essay has too many he's and she's in it." The plural form of a word uses an apostrophe+s if you are referring to the word itself. Just like you can say "Jack should mind his p's and q's."
One thing I never figured out is the plural form of acronyms. Would you have 5 employees with CISSP's, or 5 employees with CISSPs?
At least Apple (and even M$ to a lesser extent) uses prosaic names
As far as Microsoft software goes, what about their "flagship" office suite? I can understand "Word" but how does "Excel" say "spreadsheet"? How does the user know that "Access" is a database? (I use the term "database" lightly.) I don't think PowerPoint or Outlook are that descriptive either. We just know what these app names are for because we've used them for so long (for the Windows users out there.)
As far as software installation goes, I don't think it's fair to generalize and say it's a nightmare in linux. Some distros of linux don't have dependency checking, so you have to find them yourself. Actually, I believe this is true (correct me if I'm wrong) of any distro if you do the './configure;make;make install' way.
But some distros have good package management tools like urpmi (mandrake) emerge (gentoo). Seeme pretty easy to me to do 'urpmi --update --auto-select' (or use the graphical MandrakeUpdate) or 'emerge -U world'. You just have to know the tools to use.
I've had directory names under linux with spaces. I can do 'cd/mnt/windows/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Office....' It even works with tab completion for me. Wouldn't other linux apps use this type of path to get to directories with spaces in them?
With that Mandrake installation, it was as if the installation was seeing my / partition and it alone (/ was mounted under/dev/hdb3, 1.4 gigs approx.) The package selection screen only allotted me about 1.4 gigs to install. I don't remember what I allotted for/var,/usr, et cetera, but each of those was around the 300 - 500 meg range. It just seemed like the install was only seeing/dev/hdb3 (/ partition). That's not very friendly to the newbie user.
I do agree with the parent's original post. Linux (mandrake, redhat, what have you) does have many issues to clear up. But then again, so does Windows IMHO. Mandrake didn't seem to play well with my partitioning scheme, but then in Windows, (to my knowledge) you can't even split the OS across partitions.
and at the very least they are going to have to contend with multiple disk partitions
I've tried to set up a Mandrake 10.0 system recently by partitioning the hard drive. I used different partitions for certain directory trees like/var,/tmp,/home,/usr, and/boot. Once I got to the package selection screen, I was informed that I had approximately 1.4 gigs of space to install, so I couldn't pick all the packages I wanted. The / partition itself was 1.4 gigs, but the other mount points took up the rest of the 6 gig drive. It seemed I could not continue with the installation unless I did a bare minimal install.
My point is, even if a newbie does understand how to partition the drive, it is not really explained what mount points are good to separate, and what ones are not. I don't quite consider myself a newbie, but I didn't see anything anywhere that said why I could not select approximately 1.7 gigs of data/apps to install on my 6 gig drive.
My Gentoo install appears to work rather well with multiple partitions, but I haven't gotten Mandrake to work right with them. Mandrake is supposed to be geared to the newbie. But then again, I guess a newbie wouldn't partition his drive.:-P/p?
I have a sound blaster 16 PCI card. Mandrake hasn't auto-detected it at all since after 9.0. With 9.1 and beyond, the installer does not detect the card. However, I can go to a command line and 'urpmi sndconfig' (or whatever the red hat commandline sound utility is) and it detects the card fine. Despite this, I still can't get the sound to work... and sb16 is a pretty standard, and somewhat old, card.
Doesn't matter to me anymore anyway since I've switched to Gentoo.:-)
I'm not exactly sure what's funny about this. I've never used Lindows before, so I can't really complain about it. From what I understand, Lindows is set up by default to run everything as root. (correct me if I'm wrong.) Of course, this is very bad from a security standpoint. However, Windows does the same thing.
The average home user will probably not even know that they can (and should) have unprivileged user accounts for every day use. They are used to just using their computer (admin by default.) So using Lindows with root as default won't make a difference to them. At least the user will get a peak at what linux is all about.
Whether or not so many Windows boxes out there being hijacked and having tons of adware/spyware/trojans/viruses/etc is Microsoft's fault or not is besides the point. It doesn't really matter if it is their fault or not. The fact remains that there are still a lot of infected boxes out there. That's reason enough to stay away from Windows for me. (although I sometimes have to take work home at the end of the day so I have to have an XP box at home... for only that purpose.)
Of course it wouldn't make sense to blame Ford if a friend borrowed your Ford vehicle and crashed it. However, if 90% of the Ford vehicles out there on the market always ended up having their brake lines cut, windows smashed, tires slashed, or some other problem caused by someone messing with the car, that may be good enough reason to avoid buying a Ford vehicle from the fear that someone may do the same to your new car.
Just my $0.02
I just installed Gentoo recently on my home system. I was overwhelmed at first with the 100+ page installation handbook. I agree that Mandrake's near-automated installation is MUCH easier, but I don't think we'll be seeing an automated install for Gentoo anytime soon.
As far as using Portage, how is that much better than urpmi? I haven't really used Portage much yet, being new to Gentoo, but from what I've read about it, it seems similar to urpmi, at least on the surface. In mandrake, you want to update everything? "urpmi --update --auto-select". In Gentoo, update everything? "emerge -up world". The latter is a little shorter to type, but that's not really an issue. Or "urpmi "
I used to work at a help desk at a local university. One day a student came in saying that she couldn't get her disk out of the computer. I went down to the lab downstairs and looked at her computer. There was no disk in the drive at all.
Me: There's no disk in the drive.
Her: are you sure?
Me: I'm sure.
She wouldn't take that answer because she "never took it out." So I pushed the door open and looked in with a pen flashlight to show her that there was no disk.
Her: could it have fallen out and into the computer?
I explained to her that that's not possible. She must have misplaced it, or someone else took it when she wasn't looking.
Seems like another case of "my computer ate my disk.":-)
Well actually, if we put a mirror 13 billion light-years away from Earth, wouldn't that just enable people, who exist 26 billion years in our future, to see our present?
I think we'd have to get the mirror up there at faster-than-light travel in order for us to see anywhere into the past.
I just wish something just like apt-get existed for the rpm world that made it just as easy to update. However, I've read of projects in the works just for that so I'm sure "rpm hell" will be over a lot sooner than "dll hell" lasted.
I'm not sure about other RPM-based distros, but Mandrake uses urpmi. Urpmi does a nice job of handling dependencies. I have it running on my server. All I need to do is "urpmi packagename" and it will search through a list of FTP sites to download any and all dependancies needed for the package in question. Then it will install everything for you. You can configure what FTP mirrors you would like to use, or have it use the installation CDs. "urpmi --update --auto-select" updates all of the installed packages to the latest version.
Is there anything like this for other RPM-based distros?
The Gentoo installation handbook also ends by saying "We'll shut up now and let you enjoy your installation:)" I never did get through the installation due to I/O errors on the portage and stage3 tarballs though...
I don't know what you mean by "develop" but you don't even have to invent the plant to get a patent, you can simply discover it and patent it, as long as you know what it is. From the link you provided:
A plant patent is granted by the Government to an inventor (or the inventor's hiers or assigns) who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced a distinct and new variety of plant, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state. (emphasis mine)
The text above requires that you invent (or discover) AND asexually reproduce a distinct and NEW variety of plant in order to get a patent on said plant. You can't just find a new plant in a forest and say "I know what that is, no one else does, so give me a patent." The way I see it, you have to discover a way to create a new variety of plant, and actually create it through asexual reproduction in order to get a patent. Then you wouldn't get a patent on the apple tree, but one on the apple tree with thorns.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I agree with this, unless I'm thinking about it differently. We could write an efficient, fast, dependency resolver that only has a package repository of 1,000 packages. As long as all dependancies are included in that repository. Making the repository bigger by adding 10,000 packages to it doesn't necessarily make the resolver any better. It just makes the repository better. The resolver still works the same way. Just like an employee information system that links all information for each of 100 employees versus 10,000 employees. The second one isn't necessarily better than the first. Or am I missing something here?
I've installed RH RPMs on Mandrake through both the rpm commandline and through urpmi and they always seemed to work fine. I'll have to try emerging RPM on my gentoo box to see how it works. I never thought to do that before.
Well urpmi on Mandrake will download the package _and_ its dependancies as well. I can set up my system to point to one or more mirrors, as well as the installation CD's. Then when I 'urpmi ' it will search through the FTP mirrors I have configured to find the package and each dependancy (if any). Urmpi will return the list to me asking if it is ok to install these, and the original package. I think it handles this pretty well. I've never used Debian, so I can't say anything about apt, but apt isn't the only thing that does dependancy checking/downloading/installing.
I think in that case, both the consumer and Ford are responsible. The consumer is responsible for his or her flawed decision to purchase a low-quality vehicle. However, Ford would be responsible for designing the vehicle in the first place. Ford should also be responsible for what happens to the user because of defects in the product (car).
Well that depends on how the Ford vehicles are designed. If the car is designed so you can pop a tape into the tape player and your gas tank explodes, Ford should be responsible. If a consumer's engine seises because he or she has't changed the oil in 10 years, the consumer should be blamed.
I still prefer vi, just because it's different. As far as your questions with nano, the arrows and pageup/pagedown seem to work well for me from what I recal (I'm not at my gentoo box right now :-( ). I haven't used nano too much yet though. The keyboard shortcuts in the screenshot are there, but the arrows should work just fine. And unlike vi, you don't have to be in a special mode to edit the file. :-)
Gentoo comes with nano. Not sure about other distributions. I think nano may be closer to what you expect of a text editor. But I do agree with the grandparent poster. Boot the install CD for a modern Linux distro, like Mandrake for example, and you get the OS with word processing, multimedia applications, games, Internet apps (IM, browser, mail, etc), and other apps already installed. Install Windows and you get some of this, but for everything else, you either have to buy it separately, or download it. Either way, you have additional installation time and effort to get the system up to speed. As far as the issue with linux not working correctly on certain hardware, most modern distros, again mandrake for example, do a pretty good job of auto-detecting and configuring hardware by default. This assumes that your hardware is supported under the OS, but the same is true for Windows. Windows just supports more hardware because more vendors write drivers for it because more people use it, etc, etc.
he's and she's is perfectly valid if, say, you are writing a sentance like "Your essay has too many he's and she's in it." The plural form of a word uses an apostrophe+s if you are referring to the word itself. Just like you can say "Jack should mind his p's and q's."
One thing I never figured out is the plural form of acronyms. Would you have 5 employees with CISSP's, or 5 employees with CISSPs?
As far as software installation goes, I don't think it's fair to generalize and say it's a nightmare in linux. Some distros of linux don't have dependency checking, so you have to find them yourself. Actually, I believe this is true (correct me if I'm wrong) of any distro if you do the './configure;make;make install' way. But some distros have good package management tools like urpmi (mandrake) emerge (gentoo). Seeme pretty easy to me to do 'urpmi --update --auto-select' (or use the graphical MandrakeUpdate) or 'emerge -U world'. You just have to know the tools to use.
I've had directory names under linux with spaces. I can do 'cd /mnt/windows/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Office....' It even works with tab completion for me. Wouldn't other linux apps use this type of path to get to directories with spaces in them?
With that Mandrake installation, it was as if the installation was seeing my / partition and it alone (/ was mounted under /dev/hdb3, 1.4 gigs approx.) The package selection screen only allotted me about 1.4 gigs to install. I don't remember what I allotted for /var, /usr, et cetera, but each of those was around the 300 - 500 meg range. It just seemed like the install was only seeing /dev/hdb3 (/ partition). That's not very friendly to the newbie user.
I do agree with the parent's original post. Linux (mandrake, redhat, what have you) does have many issues to clear up. But then again, so does Windows IMHO. Mandrake didn't seem to play well with my partitioning scheme, but then in Windows, (to my knowledge) you can't even split the OS across partitions.
I've tried to set up a Mandrake 10.0 system recently by partitioning the hard drive. I used different partitions for certain directory trees like /var, /tmp, /home, /usr, and /boot. Once I got to the package selection screen, I was informed that I had approximately 1.4 gigs of space to install, so I couldn't pick all the packages I wanted. The / partition itself was 1.4 gigs, but the other mount points took up the rest of the 6 gig drive. It seemed I could not continue with the installation unless I did a bare minimal install.
My point is, even if a newbie does understand how to partition the drive, it is not really explained what mount points are good to separate, and what ones are not. I don't quite consider myself a newbie, but I didn't see anything anywhere that said why I could not select approximately 1.7 gigs of data/apps to install on my 6 gig drive.
My Gentoo install appears to work rather well with multiple partitions, but I haven't gotten Mandrake to work right with them. Mandrake is supposed to be geared to the newbie. But then again, I guess a newbie wouldn't partition his drive. :-P/p?
I have a sound blaster 16 PCI card. Mandrake hasn't auto-detected it at all since after 9.0. With 9.1 and beyond, the installer does not detect the card. However, I can go to a command line and 'urpmi sndconfig' (or whatever the red hat commandline sound utility is) and it detects the card fine. Despite this, I still can't get the sound to work... and sb16 is a pretty standard, and somewhat old, card. Doesn't matter to me anymore anyway since I've switched to Gentoo. :-)
I'm not exactly sure what's funny about this. I've never used Lindows before, so I can't really complain about it. From what I understand, Lindows is set up by default to run everything as root. (correct me if I'm wrong.) Of course, this is very bad from a security standpoint. However, Windows does the same thing. The average home user will probably not even know that they can (and should) have unprivileged user accounts for every day use. They are used to just using their computer (admin by default.) So using Lindows with root as default won't make a difference to them. At least the user will get a peak at what linux is all about.
Whether or not so many Windows boxes out there being hijacked and having tons of adware/spyware/trojans/viruses/etc is Microsoft's fault or not is besides the point. It doesn't really matter if it is their fault or not. The fact remains that there are still a lot of infected boxes out there. That's reason enough to stay away from Windows for me. (although I sometimes have to take work home at the end of the day so I have to have an XP box at home... for only that purpose.) Of course it wouldn't make sense to blame Ford if a friend borrowed your Ford vehicle and crashed it. However, if 90% of the Ford vehicles out there on the market always ended up having their brake lines cut, windows smashed, tires slashed, or some other problem caused by someone messing with the car, that may be good enough reason to avoid buying a Ford vehicle from the fear that someone may do the same to your new car. Just my $0.02
interesting... my password always shows as Password: ********
I just installed Gentoo recently on my home system. I was overwhelmed at first with the 100+ page installation handbook. I agree that Mandrake's near-automated installation is MUCH easier, but I don't think we'll be seeing an automated install for Gentoo anytime soon. As far as using Portage, how is that much better than urpmi? I haven't really used Portage much yet, being new to Gentoo, but from what I've read about it, it seems similar to urpmi, at least on the surface. In mandrake, you want to update everything? "urpmi --update --auto-select". In Gentoo, update everything? "emerge -up world". The latter is a little shorter to type, but that's not really an issue. Or "urpmi "
I used to work at a help desk at a local university. One day a student came in saying that she couldn't get her disk out of the computer. I went down to the lab downstairs and looked at her computer. There was no disk in the drive at all. Me: There's no disk in the drive. Her: are you sure? Me: I'm sure. She wouldn't take that answer because she "never took it out." So I pushed the door open and looked in with a pen flashlight to show her that there was no disk. Her: could it have fallen out and into the computer? I explained to her that that's not possible. She must have misplaced it, or someone else took it when she wasn't looking. Seems like another case of "my computer ate my disk." :-)
What about those of us who have never seen any of the Star Wars movies? ::goes back to hide under my rock::
Well actually, if we put a mirror 13 billion light-years away from Earth, wouldn't that just enable people, who exist 26 billion years in our future, to see our present? I think we'd have to get the mirror up there at faster-than-light travel in order for us to see anywhere into the past.
The Gentoo installation handbook also ends by saying "We'll shut up now and let you enjoy your installation :)" I never did get through the installation due to I/O errors on the portage and stage3 tarballs though...
What about Trillian? I've been using it for a while now without any problems.