Libranet is a great distro for the non geek to get up and running with a debian box.
So is Xandros. And although the previous edition costed around $40, it was still less than half the price of the last edition of Libranet, which if I'm not mistaken, is $90. But now the Xandros OCE is free: OCE = Open Circulation Edition. The business edition is for exactly that, businesses, and just a lot of extra megs on the hard disk for a home user (unless you really, really prefer Sun's Star Office over OpenOffice. org).
Dont' get me wrong, I tried Libranet and it was damn good. But Xandros is just as good and also has excellent compatibility with debian software, without costing nearly a hundred dollars. And support on Libranet wasn't too great when I tried it; I just wound up referred to their forums. Big deal, Xandros has a forum too, and the people there are both nice and helpful. For that much money I'd expect it to have soemthing over a free edition of Linux, but it doesn't. Now I'm not a free software zealot saying all distroes should be free, but $90? Sorry to sound insulting (I actually am sorry) because Libranet was pretty good, but it wasn't better than Xandros and I can't see paying that much when there's an alternative that's just as good and free. If it weren't for ignorance about Xandros I don't think Libranet would have gotten as far as it did.
So you want to see the poor people become homeless then? Here's a real newsflash: lots of people are dependent on cars to get to work, and there's no changing that now. But you don't give a damn about them, do you? Never mind the people who would be reduced to utter poverty to fulfill your cause - or possibly even die of such problems as starvation brought on by poverty.
You're not the first person I've heard spout this crap, and unfortunately you probably won't be the last. I say we take the (incredibly short-sighted and selfish) people like you, reduce you guys to a low income and then make transportation to your job so expensive and difficult. Let's see if you keep preaching this hurtful spiel then. But we all know you won't; as long as it doesn't hurt you too much and everything goes according to your wishes, it's cool. And as to anyone else who gets hurt and suffers for that, to hell with them. Let them suffer or even die. You wouldn't lift a finger to help them, obviously, since you'd be the cause of so much misery in the first place. This stuff reminds me of that test about serial killers. If you want to see someone you met a relative's funeral again and don't know whow to contact them, just kill another relative and see if they show up for that funeral. That's how unbelievably selfish this crap is.
Yes, I know this is a flame. But what else to say to someone who's espousing that the poor be reduced even farther into abolsute poverty and misery? If you had to live like that you would know better. If I had a genie at this moment to grant me three wishes that would be one of them. Be thankful I don't.
I'm goign to meta-mod now, since apparently several mods are in desperate need of a good bitch-slapping to mod flamebait like this up to +4! interesting. The only thing interesting about it is from a sociological viewpoint, like the rebels in certain countries who are willing to kill over half the citizens of their homeland to gain their "freedom" (with them in control, of course). It's amazing where this mind-set comes from, but it seems to be more common than sane people think.
Oh, and btw, here's an idea: instead of causing a great deal of misery and suffering to reduce the pollution of the atmosphere by cars, how about reducing the dependence on cars that cause such problems? Y'know, make cars that don't do that? Electrical cars could very well be constructed like this. This is getting closer into the realm of possibility every year. Even with the oil companies fighting it, which they're doing tooth and nail. Perhaps if you actually wanted to do something other than espouse changes that cause misery maybe you could actually help instead of hurt. But you're too selfish to see that; you thought of something that would change thigns and you just don't care if it hurts other people as long as it doesn't hurt you.
I had Knoppix on my hd over a year ago and ran into serious problems when trying to install more software; the shortcuts to fit it onto the cd result in broken packages. Some stuff would install just fine, other stuff simply would not install at all and apt would just give me an error. AFAIK there is no fix for this and it hasn't changed. If you run into similar problems, you might want to try GenieOS; Genie is basically an easy install Debian. To get everything that Knoppix has on it (some of the software on Knoppix is fairly specialized) you may have to do a search to find a source to put on your list, but you can have a GenieOS set up in less than a day to have everything you want that's on Knoppix without broken package probems interfering with anything else you try to install.
If you dislike Mandriva for certain reasons, but actually like it otherwise, you might want to give PcLinux OS a spin. I can't vouch for it myself but I've read several people at distrowatch claim that it's what Mandriva should be. Even though PCLinux OS is still in beta, these folks say it beat Mandriva but was still very Mandriva-like. I dunno myself, but I thought others might want to know.
Agreed. I'm tired of hearing this "bloat" complaint. With *nix bloat is in the eye of the beholder. Some users might consider k3b to be needless bloat, I don't. Likewise many might think including any other window manager to be bloat, but I like my fluxbox, thank you very much. Why not just say "it includes a lot of software I don't want"? Calling that bloat is a bit insulting to the distro - just because you don't such-and-such doesn't mean other people don't.
Now, compare this to bloat on Windows where two suites of similar apps that do much the same thing as another are of widely varying sizes, say, 600 mb versus 75 mb. And the much smaller suite is far more stable.
Man, it's too bad I wasted all my mod points yesterday - this really deserves a + for informative since it's about a subject where alternatives of any sort are little-known.
Oh, I agree. In a way, I hate pdfs. But I write online pen & paper Rpg products (mostly for nothing) and they almost always have to be pusblished as pdfs to be accepted anywhere. At least I'm kind enough to not password-protect them like a lot of jerks so the only things you can do with them is view and print.
Because a lot of mods just won't get it and mod him as a troll. I meta-mod every day and I see that happening often. Just last night I had a case of someone being modded off-topic for a joke the mod apparently just didn't get.
If they were using Office XP and switched to OO.o 2 I know well from personal experience that the employees will see the benefits, especially in Word vs. Writer. Writer can export a document as a pdf without needing a 3rd-party macro or a program you use as a printer, plus it's FAR more stable. Writer's UI is better organized as well, IMO.
FF vs. IE? You gotta kidding me. More stable, more features, blocks pop-ups by default, etc.
One problem, though and I've mentioned this before; there's no open souce alternative to Acrobat Pro. Not even plans for one that I know of. That really sucks; we need Adobe-free computers, what with their exorbitant costs, product activation, and so on.
That's what all this about violent video games and movies amounts to. What did they have to blame for violence before they came along? Only themselves and society as a whole. If you think the kind of violence we hear about on the news now is a modern problem, you need to read a lot more history. As just an example, the Ripper murders in Whitechapel were sensationalized at the time, but a closer look reveals a great deal of violence happening on the streets before and after. One woman who is sometimes thought to be an early victim herself claimed to have been attacked by a gang - that is, a gang of young men, adolescents - before she died; there were quite a number of prostitutes murdered in Whitechapel months before the first true Ripper killing.
Humans are a violent species - that's where the problem really lies. Society, environment and well, life itself, aggravates violent tendencies. Deal with the cause rather than trying to blame something and get rid of it or the problem will just keep coming back. So what will happen if you do get rid of violent movies and games? Will the problem of violent teens magically go away? If it would, why were teens committing violent acts for several millenia before now? When censorship doesn't help, who or what will you blame then?
By this guy's logic I can make a post or journal entry here on/. and sue anybody who flames me! I ddin't know that. Hella cool! I'll be rich by this time next year!
There is a shitload of bands out their, but none of the big labels will see or hear them. Ilse de Lange might be the last you've heard from the Netherlands.
This is good news as far I'm concerned. These artists will basically have to ignore the record labels who are ignoring them and go into business without them. And, eventually, people will begin to hear how the good music is available online that you can't even get from the record companies. The more companies like Sony poison their business environment the better the alternatives look. The better the alternatives look the more word will spread. Thus, the money they lose by their own incompetence the less powerful they will become, paving the way for artists in busines for themselves to advertise (or online distrbution services selling their music to advertise).
Btw, anyone got any good links to palces to buy music from artists who aren't signed with the record companies? I'm defintiely interested in buying from the artists themselves.
I use it all the time and I'm constantly frustrated by clicking on an image or link and then getting a page that tells me I don't have permission to access it. Can they could fix the search engine so such images are excluded? That's one area in which all search engines seem to be lacking, so far as I know.
Boo frigging hoo. Helping people? There's achance that blood samples from this man just might save people's lives. Like my sisters. I think that's a bit more important than just "helping people" - that sounds like your every day charity work. If studying me and taking blood samples could possibly cure HIV I'd do it. But then I consider other people's live to be important.
This parasitism was never necessary to the point they took it from day one. Why should a recording label have any copyright to music at all? That's not the way the book publishing industry was built. The difference is that the book publishing industry came into being in a different time, when it was considered an extremely unethical business practice for a publisher to try to take the copyright from an author. The music industry made that same practice a matter of course. If that kind of greed had never been allowed in the first place, we wouldn't have many of the copyright problems we do today.
Do a search on George Harrison My Sweet Lord lawsuit and you will see that this is true. He lost a case that he copied the tune for his song from "he's So Fine", which was performed by the Chiffons - and that was back in the 70s.
Actually, that's really not such a bad idea, but you'd need software to deliver the message to anyone trying to do just that, not just something that blocks them from connecting with you.
And, agreed, this is bullshit. But this isn't the worst I've heard. I've also read that some spyware companies are leaning on the anti-spyware makers to exclude them from their detection lists. Unfortunately, I don't have any links to prove it now (it was about 5 weeks ago I read that, I think). I can't say it's true, but I'd actually be surprised if this hasn't been happening for a while. Think about it.
A few days ago when I was chatting with an Englishman he offered to trade me Tony Blair for President Bush. I was like, "well, he can't be any worse...." Now I wonder. Have I been suckered? Hmmmm.
This is clearly going to take away revenue from the channel and from Microsoft
I feel the same way about that statement that I would when a multi-millionaire complains about losing $10000. Yeah, yeah, this might affect others, but he needs to be more specific or the response is likely to be "pffft, why should I care? They're fantastically rich anyway!"
I'm an FF fan myself - using it right now - but I must admit, according to my system, Opera uses less memory, roughly half (depending on how many pages/tabs you have open and what you're doing). When my other comptuer gets a new motherboard next month, I'm going to use Opera on it because it has less memory. So, although I like FF better, I must say Opera is still pretty good. But if they ever get Firefox's memory use down to as low as Opera I'd only use Firefox.
But can you go directly to an FTP site without needing an FTP client in IE 7 like you can with Firefox? Dunno, but I do know you can't with IE 6; it just gives you a page not found message when you click an FTP link. And, although I can't speak for anyone else on this, in my experience IE was always far more crash-prone than FF since FF got out it's infancy stage.
Most of all (and I've probably said this before) with Firefox you can turn off software installation, although you have to turn it on long enough to install extensions. But when you're done with extensios, just go to Tools->Option->Web Features and uncheck Allow Websites to Install Software. That won't block all spyware and viruses but it will block quite a bit of it.
Slashdot Mirror
A pair of.... what? I've got several pairs of various things. I have a pair of breasts. In fact, I even have a pair of pears on my desk right now.
Note to self: don't try to be a smart ass until you've had enough coffee.
Libranet is a great distro for the non geek to get up and running with a debian box.
So is Xandros. And although the previous edition costed around $40, it was still less than half the price of the last edition of Libranet, which if I'm not mistaken, is $90. But now the Xandros OCE is free: OCE = Open Circulation Edition. The business edition is for exactly that, businesses, and just a lot of extra megs on the hard disk for a home user (unless you really, really prefer Sun's Star Office over OpenOffice. org).
Dont' get me wrong, I tried Libranet and it was damn good. But Xandros is just as good and also has excellent compatibility with debian software, without costing nearly a hundred dollars. And support on Libranet wasn't too great when I tried it; I just wound up referred to their forums. Big deal, Xandros has a forum too, and the people there are both nice and helpful. For that much money I'd expect it to have soemthing over a free edition of Linux, but it doesn't. Now I'm not a free software zealot saying all distroes should be free, but $90? Sorry to sound insulting (I actually am sorry) because Libranet was pretty good, but it wasn't better than Xandros and I can't see paying that much when there's an alternative that's just as good and free. If it weren't for ignorance about Xandros I don't think Libranet would have gotten as far as it did.
So you want to see the poor people become homeless then? Here's a real newsflash: lots of people are dependent on cars to get to work, and there's no changing that now. But you don't give a damn about them, do you? Never mind the people who would be reduced to utter poverty to fulfill your cause - or possibly even die of such problems as starvation brought on by poverty.
You're not the first person I've heard spout this crap, and unfortunately you probably won't be the last. I say we take the (incredibly short-sighted and selfish) people like you, reduce you guys to a low income and then make transportation to your job so expensive and difficult. Let's see if you keep preaching this hurtful spiel then. But we all know you won't; as long as it doesn't hurt you too much and everything goes according to your wishes, it's cool. And as to anyone else who gets hurt and suffers for that, to hell with them. Let them suffer or even die. You wouldn't lift a finger to help them, obviously, since you'd be the cause of so much misery in the first place. This stuff reminds me of that test about serial killers. If you want to see someone you met a relative's funeral again and don't know whow to contact them, just kill another relative and see if they show up for that funeral. That's how unbelievably selfish this crap is.
Yes, I know this is a flame. But what else to say to someone who's espousing that the poor be reduced even farther into abolsute poverty and misery? If you had to live like that you would know better. If I had a genie at this moment to grant me three wishes that would be one of them. Be thankful I don't.
I'm goign to meta-mod now, since apparently several mods are in desperate need of a good bitch-slapping to mod flamebait like this up to +4! interesting. The only thing interesting about it is from a sociological viewpoint, like the rebels in certain countries who are willing to kill over half the citizens of their homeland to gain their "freedom" (with them in control, of course). It's amazing where this mind-set comes from, but it seems to be more common than sane people think.
Oh, and btw, here's an idea: instead of causing a great deal of misery and suffering to reduce the pollution of the atmosphere by cars, how about reducing the dependence on cars that cause such problems? Y'know, make cars that don't do that? Electrical cars could very well be constructed like this. This is getting closer into the realm of possibility every year. Even with the oil companies fighting it, which they're doing tooth and nail. Perhaps if you actually wanted to do something other than espouse changes that cause misery maybe you could actually help instead of hurt. But you're too selfish to see that; you thought of something that would change thigns and you just don't care if it hurts other people as long as it doesn't hurt you.
I had Knoppix on my hd over a year ago and ran into serious problems when trying to install more software; the shortcuts to fit it onto the cd result in broken packages. Some stuff would install just fine, other stuff simply would not install at all and apt would just give me an error. AFAIK there is no fix for this and it hasn't changed. If you run into similar problems, you might want to try GenieOS; Genie is basically an easy install Debian. To get everything that Knoppix has on it (some of the software on Knoppix is fairly specialized) you may have to do a search to find a source to put on your list, but you can have a GenieOS set up in less than a day to have everything you want that's on Knoppix without broken package probems interfering with anything else you try to install.
If you dislike Mandriva for certain reasons, but actually like it otherwise, you might want to give PcLinux OS a spin. I can't vouch for it myself but I've read several people at distrowatch claim that it's what Mandriva should be. Even though PCLinux OS is still in beta, these folks say it beat Mandriva but was still very Mandriva-like. I dunno myself, but I thought others might want to know.
Agreed. I'm tired of hearing this "bloat" complaint. With *nix bloat is in the eye of the beholder. Some users might consider k3b to be needless bloat, I don't. Likewise many might think including any other window manager to be bloat, but I like my fluxbox, thank you very much. Why not just say "it includes a lot of software I don't want"? Calling that bloat is a bit insulting to the distro - just because you don't such-and-such doesn't mean other people don't.
Now, compare this to bloat on Windows where two suites of similar apps that do much the same thing as another are of widely varying sizes, say, 600 mb versus 75 mb. And the much smaller suite is far more stable.
Man, it's too bad I wasted all my mod points yesterday - this really deserves a + for informative since it's about a subject where alternatives of any sort are little-known.
Oh, I agree. In a way, I hate pdfs. But I write online pen & paper Rpg products (mostly for nothing) and they almost always have to be pusblished as pdfs to be accepted anywhere. At least I'm kind enough to not password-protect them like a lot of jerks so the only things you can do with them is view and print.
Because a lot of mods just won't get it and mod him as a troll. I meta-mod every day and I see that happening often. Just last night I had a case of someone being modded off-topic for a joke the mod apparently just didn't get.
If they were using Office XP and switched to OO.o 2 I know well from personal experience that the employees will see the benefits, especially in Word vs. Writer. Writer can export a document as a pdf without needing a 3rd-party macro or a program you use as a printer, plus it's FAR more stable. Writer's UI is better organized as well, IMO.
FF vs. IE? You gotta kidding me. More stable, more features, blocks pop-ups by default, etc.
One problem, though and I've mentioned this before; there's no open souce alternative to Acrobat Pro. Not even plans for one that I know of. That really sucks; we need Adobe-free computers, what with their exorbitant costs, product activation, and so on.
That's what all this about violent video games and movies amounts to. What did they have to blame for violence before they came along? Only themselves and society as a whole. If you think the kind of violence we hear about on the news now is a modern problem, you need to read a lot more history. As just an example, the Ripper murders in Whitechapel were sensationalized at the time, but a closer look reveals a great deal of violence happening on the streets before and after. One woman who is sometimes thought to be an early victim herself claimed to have been attacked by a gang - that is, a gang of young men, adolescents - before she died; there were quite a number of prostitutes murdered in Whitechapel months before the first true Ripper killing.
Humans are a violent species - that's where the problem really lies. Society, environment and well, life itself, aggravates violent tendencies. Deal with the cause rather than trying to blame something and get rid of it or the problem will just keep coming back. So what will happen if you do get rid of violent movies and games? Will the problem of violent teens magically go away? If it would, why were teens committing violent acts for several millenia before now? When censorship doesn't help, who or what will you blame then?
By this guy's logic I can make a post or journal entry here on /. and sue anybody who flames me! I ddin't know that. Hella cool! I'll be rich by this time next year!
There is a shitload of bands out their, but none of the big labels will see or hear them. Ilse de Lange might be the last you've heard from the Netherlands.
This is good news as far I'm concerned. These artists will basically have to ignore the record labels who are ignoring them and go into business without them. And, eventually, people will begin to hear how the good music is available online that you can't even get from the record companies. The more companies like Sony poison their business environment the better the alternatives look. The better the alternatives look the more word will spread. Thus, the money they lose by their own incompetence the less powerful they will become, paving the way for artists in busines for themselves to advertise (or online distrbution services selling their music to advertise).
Btw, anyone got any good links to palces to buy music from artists who aren't signed with the record companies? I'm defintiely interested in buying from the artists themselves.
I use it all the time and I'm constantly frustrated by clicking on an image or link and then getting a page that tells me I don't have permission to access it. Can they could fix the search engine so such images are excluded? That's one area in which all search engines seem to be lacking, so far as I know.
Boo frigging hoo. Helping people? There's achance that blood samples from this man just might save people's lives. Like my sisters. I think that's a bit more important than just "helping people" - that sounds like your every day charity work. If studying me and taking blood samples could possibly cure HIV I'd do it. But then I consider other people's live to be important.
This parasitism was never necessary to the point they took it from day one. Why should a recording label have any copyright to music at all? That's not the way the book publishing industry was built. The difference is that the book publishing industry came into being in a different time, when it was considered an extremely unethical business practice for a publisher to try to take the copyright from an author. The music industry made that same practice a matter of course. If that kind of greed had never been allowed in the first place, we wouldn't have many of the copyright problems we do today.
Do a search on George Harrison My Sweet Lord lawsuit and you will see that this is true. He lost a case that he copied the tune for his song from "he's So Fine", which was performed by the Chiffons - and that was back in the 70s.
Maybe because someone there found it personally inconvenient too? Y'know, the old use-your-authority-to-blast-those-who-piss-you-off technique.
Actually, that's really not such a bad idea, but you'd need software to deliver the message to anyone trying to do just that, not just something that blocks them from connecting with you.
And, agreed, this is bullshit. But this isn't the worst I've heard. I've also read that some spyware companies are leaning on the anti-spyware makers to exclude them from their detection lists. Unfortunately, I don't have any links to prove it now (it was about 5 weeks ago I read that, I think). I can't say it's true, but I'd actually be surprised if this hasn't been happening for a while. Think about it.
Hey! Even we aren't that cruel. Bondage is fun, this crap isn't. Leave us kinksters out of this, please.
CowboyNeal actually posting a story on /.? I thought he was just a myth.
A few days ago when I was chatting with an Englishman he offered to trade me Tony Blair for President Bush. I was like, "well, he can't be any worse...." Now I wonder. Have I been suckered? Hmmmm.
This is clearly going to take away revenue from the channel and from Microsoft
I feel the same way about that statement that I would when a multi-millionaire complains about losing $10000. Yeah, yeah, this might affect others, but he needs to be more specific or the response is likely to be "pffft, why should I care? They're fantastically rich anyway!"
I'm an FF fan myself - using it right now - but I must admit, according to my system, Opera uses less memory, roughly half (depending on how many pages/tabs you have open and what you're doing). When my other comptuer gets a new motherboard next month, I'm going to use Opera on it because it has less memory. So, although I like FF better, I must say Opera is still pretty good. But if they ever get Firefox's memory use down to as low as Opera I'd only use Firefox.
But can you go directly to an FTP site without needing an FTP client in IE 7 like you can with Firefox? Dunno, but I do know you can't with IE 6; it just gives you a page not found message when you click an FTP link. And, although I can't speak for anyone else on this, in my experience IE was always far more crash-prone than FF since FF got out it's infancy stage.
Most of all (and I've probably said this before) with Firefox you can turn off software installation, although you have to turn it on long enough to install extensions. But when you're done with extensios, just go to Tools->Option->Web Features and uncheck Allow Websites to Install Software. That won't block all spyware and viruses but it will block quite a bit of it.