1) It's nowhere near as functional or customiseable as nautilus...yet 2) It's in quite early development and only ships with XFCE 4.4 beta at the moment, so isn't really the official current file manager:) 3) It's very promising.
I'm currently using Xfce 4.2.x (the current release xfce) after having a bad experience with the 4.4 beta but I have the Gnome suite installed and using Nautilus for my desktop and file manager.
Nautilus is quite heavy and uses a hefty volume of RAM, but no more so than Explorer does on Windows, as for response time it's certainly slower than other file managers but if you've got a spiffy CPU it's not an issue.
I agree, if their goals are fully compatible then they should merge.
I installed and used FreeBSD 5.3 for a while last year and the one thing I loved is that it easy (OK so not grandma friendly) to install and configure and *minimal*. It left it upto me decide what to install and when I did install something I didn't have to worry about distro this and distro that, or.deb this or.rpm that. The Linux world seems so fragmented and repetitive, it was nice to slip into the calming BSD world.
DesktopBSD/PC-BSD : BSD for everyone. FreeBSD : BSD for the guy who can cope with a command line. OpenBSD : BSD for those with severe paranoia. NetBSD : BSD for those with a spare toaster but don't like toast.
I think this is all the BSD world needs, I hope it stays focused. I love it.
Safer languages are great if you want to write something with pace, but they're really just hiding the underlying problem: that developers produce these buffer overflow problems when under pressure to deliver (either pressured by a deadline or by pure enthusiasm).
I personally do not feel that using bigger safety nets makes for a better circus act.
This is one of the things that worries me about GNU/Linux. I have not seen an equivalent of Window's Automatic Updates in any distro, and in my opinion such a feature is just essential.
In Windows I visit WU every second wednesday of the month and get my updates, but most Windows users don't know of the second tuesday cycle or would do this even if they did. They rely on AU.
When in a Linux environment i'm entirely oblivious to the any known vulnerabilities that may be currently in my OS (kernel, X, desktop environment). What is the solution? To check your distro's mailing list/forum/news feed? Not all distributions have such things, and many people will never do that.
Linux and open source generally has a win over MS in bugfix response but patch deployment sucks balls, you just cannot expect every newbie that comes along to follow their distro's development religiously and with interest.
For these reasons I currently hold the opinion that if OS share was reversed, the Linux world would, in it's current state, be failing more miserably than Microsoft.
As with most things there are a handful of practical barriers to overcome (primarily performance related), but another 5-10 years and those problems should be sorted out.
I would hardly call more powerful hardware being made available 'sorting out' the problem.
The crux of this article/interview is Linux 2.6 needs improving with old and/or less common hardware rigs. Your proposed extended solution is to radically refactor the entire kernel because, hey, modern hardware that the majority of us have can cope with it.
How the smeg did you pull that off, get modded insightful, and not get modded somewhat offtopic?
In any case moving to a new fundamental architecture is like turning grape juice into wine. There are some good wines and some bad wines, and while it's certainly possible to make a good wine from good juice, the problem is no matter how you produce your wine you're going to exclude those under legal drinking age, or rather, in this case, introduce alot of new barriers to those not in the mainstream.
It's not the mplayerplug-in's fault specifically. Alot of the issues are with 32bit only proprietary codecs and getting 32bit builds out there that actually work with firefox-bin, mozilla-bin or opera.
Atm plugins are being recognised fine according to "about:plugins" but simply do not load on websites, go into stop mode, and don't issue any errors in the terminal.
%MPlayer plays MPEG-1/2/4 videos at 720x480 on my 1.6GHz system using LESS THAN 1% CPU TIME.
I'm using an AMD64 3500 and mplayer chugs away 5-10% cpu (as measured by top) with a significant ~5% CPU usage increase in X, a total CPU usage of 5-11% at anyone moment throughout the movie in front of me. (I suppose a better way to benchmark it would be to play the whole 90 minute movie and then checkout the cpu time utilised by the end but i'm throwing ballparks here). I'm also playing PAL which doesn't require any funky inverse telecine or deinterlacing most of the time, so logically NTSC movies (720x480) would require more CPU time.
The CPU utilisation of mplayer is great but it's not 1% great.
Unfortunately any browser plugins for video on Linux AMD64 are spotty at best. Even using a 32-bit browser (firefox-bin) I find myself hacking my way through HTML to find the video file, download it manually and opening in mplayer.
the mplayer-plugin works to a degree, but is hopelessly unreliable.
Until December last year I was running Windows XP on a 233Mhz PII with 128MB's of 66Mhz SDRAM, a 30GB drive and an ATI 4MB AGP All in Wonder card (at 1280x1024 and 24 bit colour I might add). I bought that machine in 1997.
The usefulness of a machine is determined by the software you choose to run on it, I disabled Aero and used very lightweight software (Miranda not MSN Messenger, Opera not Firefox or IE etc).
I could never complain about that setup, with the exception of having a pretty dead multimedia experience (low resolution XviD/MPEG4 is about tops).
Of course I am pleased with my new setup, but considering it's about 15 times as powerful (and then some in some respects) I can't help asking myself, for my needs...is it really 15x as good?
The _real_ requirements for XP are lower than you think and i'm sure Vista will run fine on plenty of old hardware.
So basically, I can buy windows vista for $x00 and then turn it into windows XP? Why am I upgrading again?
If you feel the flashy eye candy is the only differentiating feature between XP and Vista and you run legacy hardware you wouldn't be upgrading anyway. So you tell us.
I am sorely disappointed there are no functional improvements to the window manager in Vista (I had Vista Glass running with a capable video card for a while and couldn't even figure out *how to do flip 3D).
Using XFWM (XFce window manager) on Linux has opened my eyes to some great windowing features, you'd think an OS called Windows would really shine in that area.
IMO, It would be nice if Firefox was just a basic browser with a secure and efficient XML, HTML, Javascript implementation and things like tabbed browsing, RSS feed support, the search box, and even bookmarks were just extensions shipped (and enabled) by default.
This would put alot of focus on massively improving the power and reliability of the extension API and have the advantage that you could update these components individually (yet with one click).
I still know people that refuse to use tabbed browsing and still goto Google manually when they want to search, instead of using the search box.
That said, this would only worsen the comparison with browsers like Opera that cram in some of the functionality of something more along the lines of the Mozilla Application Suite into something smaller than Firefox.
I'm not speaking negatively of standards. I'm just saying developing proprietary methods of doing the same things or entirely new features isn't always a bad thing, and MS shouldn't necessarily be slammed for it.
IE's support for certain standards (CSS2.1, XHTML), 5 years after initial release is pretty attrocious by todays standards, but at the time they were pretty much leading the game. At most that is neglect of their position in the high %'s of marketshare, not forcing others to avoid standards or proactively destroying the internet as some people insinuate.
Damn pressed submit. This site also break my middle click (new tab) behaviour and therefore poses an annoyance in my otherwise familiar my tabbed browsing experience. It use hyperlinks does it not, so why are the href's not filled in with valid URL's?
There is also another issue, the top of the window that comes up for article viewing can be moved so that the top bar is outside of the browser viewing area and therefore the window is essentially 'lost' and can no longer be moved back into any other position. The only way to fix this is refresh.
I've only tried to use this site for a few minutes and found issues that will stop be from ever using it in it's current state. The problems with AJAX and Web 2.0 techniques are well documented. Personally I feel it's more trouble than it's worth.
That said, Pageflakes looks like a rather attractive website so props to the designer.
At first using Opera and after 2 minutes it still said "Loading your start page...". I have to say it's a totally awesome implementation of whatecver buzzword you give to losing the visitors interest.
Turns out it's one of my ad filters (proxomitron) causing the issue (not Opera) but I have nothing amazingly aggressive blocked. To me this just demonstrates how fragile Web 2.0 websites are, I mean it didn't even have a failsafe so I could see something.
Personally i'd be more worried about data protection than hardware failure or human error. You'll have access to employees and colleagues PERSONAL data, which is different from business machines where what personal data anemployee puts on the machine is pretty much at their own risk.
I wouldn't be comfortable having access to that data. You might not be personally liable for damages but if a fellow employee makes the case to your employer that you have abused their trust you could soon lose your job.
Slashdot Mirror
noooooooooo keep it hidden :|
Other things to note about thunar:
:)
1) It's nowhere near as functional or customiseable as nautilus...yet
2) It's in quite early development and only ships with XFCE 4.4 beta at the moment, so isn't really the official current file manager
3) It's very promising.
I'm currently using Xfce 4.2.x (the current release xfce) after having a bad experience with the 4.4 beta but I have the Gnome suite installed and using Nautilus for my desktop and file manager.
Nautilus is quite heavy and uses a hefty volume of RAM, but no more so than Explorer does on Windows, as for response time it's certainly slower than other file managers but if you've got a spiffy CPU it's not an issue.
I just discovered the same feature in Nautilus today. I've been tunneling Samba over SSH and running mount like a dolt for ages.
Thats a feature of Archive Roller not Nautilus
I have heard a podcast from www.freebsd.org from one of the developers mentioning the problems with gnome becoming too Linux centric.
BSDTalk #32 - Interview with FreeBSD Developer Joe Marcus Clarke there is a transcription here.
That BSDTalk guy does some awesome interviews.
I agree, if their goals are fully compatible then they should merge.
.deb this or .rpm that. The Linux world seems so fragmented and repetitive, it was nice to slip into the calming BSD world.
I installed and used FreeBSD 5.3 for a while last year and the one thing I loved is that it easy (OK so not grandma friendly) to install and configure and *minimal*. It left it upto me decide what to install and when I did install something I didn't have to worry about distro this and distro that, or
DesktopBSD/PC-BSD : BSD for everyone.
FreeBSD : BSD for the guy who can cope with a command line.
OpenBSD : BSD for those with severe paranoia.
NetBSD : BSD for those with a spare toaster but don't like toast.
I think this is all the BSD world needs, I hope it stays focused. I love it.
Safer languages are great if you want to write something with pace, but they're really just hiding the underlying problem: that developers produce these buffer overflow problems when under pressure to deliver (either pressured by a deadline or by pure enthusiasm).
I personally do not feel that using bigger safety nets makes for a better circus act.
This is one of the things that worries me about GNU/Linux. I have not seen an equivalent of Window's Automatic Updates in any distro, and in my opinion such a feature is just essential.
In Windows I visit WU every second wednesday of the month and get my updates, but most Windows users don't know of the second tuesday cycle or would do this even if they did. They rely on AU.
When in a Linux environment i'm entirely oblivious to the any known vulnerabilities that may be currently in my OS (kernel, X, desktop environment). What is the solution? To check your distro's mailing list/forum/news feed? Not all distributions have such things, and many people will never do that.
Linux and open source generally has a win over MS in bugfix response but patch deployment sucks balls, you just cannot expect every newbie that comes along to follow their distro's development religiously and with interest.
For these reasons I currently hold the opinion that if OS share was reversed, the Linux world would, in it's current state, be failing more miserably than Microsoft.
As with most things there are a handful of practical barriers to overcome (primarily performance related), but another 5-10 years and those problems should be sorted out.
I would hardly call more powerful hardware being made available 'sorting out' the problem.
The crux of this article/interview is Linux 2.6 needs improving with old and/or less common hardware rigs. Your proposed extended solution is to radically refactor the entire kernel because, hey, modern hardware that the majority of us have can cope with it.
How the smeg did you pull that off, get modded insightful, and not get modded somewhat offtopic?
In any case moving to a new fundamental architecture is like turning grape juice into wine. There are some good wines and some bad wines, and while it's certainly possible to make a good wine from good juice, the problem is no matter how you produce your wine you're going to exclude those under legal drinking age, or rather, in this case, introduce alot of new barriers to those not in the mainstream.
It's not the mplayerplug-in's fault specifically. Alot of the issues are with 32bit only proprietary codecs and getting 32bit builds out there that actually work with firefox-bin, mozilla-bin or opera.
Atm plugins are being recognised fine according to "about:plugins" but simply do not load on websites, go into stop mode, and don't issue any errors in the terminal.
%MPlayer plays MPEG-1/2/4 videos at 720x480 on my 1.6GHz system using LESS THAN 1% CPU TIME.
I'm using an AMD64 3500 and mplayer chugs away 5-10% cpu (as measured by top) with a significant ~5% CPU usage increase in X, a total CPU usage of 5-11% at anyone moment throughout the movie in front of me. (I suppose a better way to benchmark it would be to play the whole 90 minute movie and then checkout the cpu time utilised by the end but i'm throwing ballparks here). I'm also playing PAL which doesn't require any funky inverse telecine or deinterlacing most of the time, so logically NTSC movies (720x480) would require more CPU time.
The CPU utilisation of mplayer is great but it's not 1% great.
Unfortunately any browser plugins for video on Linux AMD64 are spotty at best. Even using a 32-bit browser (firefox-bin) I find myself hacking my way through HTML to find the video file, download it manually and opening in mplayer.
the mplayer-plugin works to a degree, but is hopelessly unreliable.
Try compiling your player with XvMC (both MPlayer and xine-lib support it). I'm unsure to what extent it might be worth a shot.
Isn't MS replacing the stack in Vista? I wonder where they bought it from.
Until December last year I was running Windows XP on a 233Mhz PII with 128MB's of 66Mhz SDRAM, a 30GB drive and an ATI 4MB AGP All in Wonder card (at 1280x1024 and 24 bit colour I might add). I bought that machine in 1997.
The usefulness of a machine is determined by the software you choose to run on it, I disabled Aero and used very lightweight software (Miranda not MSN Messenger, Opera not Firefox or IE etc).
I could never complain about that setup, with the exception of having a pretty dead multimedia experience (low resolution XviD/MPEG4 is about tops).
Of course I am pleased with my new setup, but considering it's about 15 times as powerful (and then some in some respects) I can't help asking myself, for my needs...is it really 15x as good?
The _real_ requirements for XP are lower than you think and i'm sure Vista will run fine on plenty of old hardware.
So basically, I can buy windows vista for $x00 and then turn it into windows XP? Why am I upgrading again?
If you feel the flashy eye candy is the only differentiating feature between XP and Vista and you run legacy hardware you wouldn't be upgrading anyway. So you tell us.
I wish.
I am sorely disappointed there are no functional improvements to the window manager in Vista (I had Vista Glass running with a capable video card for a while and couldn't even figure out *how to do flip 3D).
Using XFWM (XFce window manager) on Linux has opened my eyes to some great windowing features, you'd think an OS called Windows would really shine in that area.
IMO, It would be nice if Firefox was just a basic browser with a secure and efficient XML, HTML, Javascript implementation and things like tabbed browsing, RSS feed support, the search box, and even bookmarks were just extensions shipped (and enabled) by default.
This would put alot of focus on massively improving the power and reliability of the extension API and have the advantage that you could update these components individually (yet with one click).
I still know people that refuse to use tabbed browsing and still goto Google manually when they want to search, instead of using the search box.
That said, this would only worsen the comparison with browsers like Opera that cram in some of the functionality of something more along the lines of the Mozilla Application Suite into something smaller than Firefox.
I'm not speaking negatively of standards. I'm just saying developing proprietary methods of doing the same things or entirely new features isn't always a bad thing, and MS shouldn't necessarily be slammed for it.
IE's support for certain standards (CSS2.1, XHTML), 5 years after initial release is pretty attrocious by todays standards, but at the time they were pretty much leading the game. At most that is neglect of their position in the high %'s of marketshare, not forcing others to avoid standards or proactively destroying the internet as some people insinuate.
Damn pressed submit. This site also break my middle click (new tab) behaviour and therefore poses an annoyance in my otherwise familiar my tabbed browsing experience. It use hyperlinks does it not, so why are the href's not filled in with valid URL's?
There is also another issue, the top of the window that comes up for article viewing can be moved so that the top bar is outside of the browser viewing area and therefore the window is essentially 'lost' and can no longer be moved back into any other position. The only way to fix this is refresh.
I've only tried to use this site for a few minutes and found issues that will stop be from ever using it in it's current state. The problems with AJAX and Web 2.0 techniques are well documented. Personally I feel it's more trouble than it's worth.
That said, Pageflakes looks like a rather attractive website so props to the designer.
At first using Opera and after 2 minutes it still said "Loading your start page...". I have to say it's a totally awesome implementation of whatecver buzzword you give to losing the visitors interest.
Turns out it's one of my ad filters (proxomitron) causing the issue (not Opera) but I have nothing amazingly aggressive blocked. To me this just demonstrates how fragile Web 2.0 websites are, I mean it didn't even have a failsafe so I could see something.
only if you install libmad and libcrazy
Personally i'd be more worried about data protection than hardware failure or human error. You'll have access to employees and colleagues PERSONAL data, which is different from business machines where what personal data anemployee puts on the machine is pretty much at their own risk.
I wouldn't be comfortable having access to that data. You might not be personally liable for damages but if a fellow employee makes the case to your employer that you have abused their trust you could soon lose your job.
...oh come on it even has blinky text.