The Sun X Server is also better, at least on some of the obscure Sun framebuffers that some of us wish we could use in 24 bit mode on OSes like NetBSD. Instead we have to settle for 8 bit emulation.
Actually, what it would do is reinforce the notion that 'Open Sourcing' is only a viable process when it involved opening the source of a software product that was developed in a proprietary environment.
There are examples of Open Source projects that were open source from the beginning, but there are also:
NetScape Star Office Quake DRDos
and various others.
It's probably not a good thing for companies to see 'Open Source' as a crew of pirates waiting to land on the deck and take control of their 'ship.'
Re:Don't laugh: symptom of big problem with Mac
on
Infected PCs for Rent
·
· Score: 1
The code word is 'grow up.'
The whole culture that emerged was:
"We have cruddy Macs at school until we get into Junior High. Then we get to use the PCs. And the lucky among us will have parents who buy a Family PC. And all the games we like are made only for the PC.'
. ..they unbundeled the built in C compiler and now sold same one as a seperate package for up to $2500. . . I've had similar experiences with SCO and Solaris "upgrades".
If you download the free Solaris from Sun and install it on your i386 or Sparc hardware, you'll find there is an additional ISO of Sun Freeware that you can download. Included on that CD is a full GNU toolchain including GCC. For free, obviously.
Pull your current video card. Plug in an S3/Trio64 card. Like an older STB card (STB was the only PC graphics board vendor who was a member of the X Consortium). You'll find you can't run it without a lot of tweaking and a recompile of XFree.
I'm running Slackware 9.1 with fvwm2 and my hand-tuned.fvwm2rc for my desktop machine. I experimented with KDE back in the kernel 1.2 days and didn't like it.
And I get NetBSD and Solaris to 'fly' on Sparc boxes with 40 MHz processors. I run NetBSD on my 486 laptop which is a 75 MHz processor. But I'm not willing to sacrifice power for bloatware, be it Windows XP or the stuff thats 'current' on the eye candy distros.
Okay, I will confess that I haven't tried KDE or Gnome.
Instead I run fvwm2 that I've 'tweaked the hell out of.' It runs really fast. I ran it on this box (a Dell Optiplex that I paid under a dollar for at auction- P3 500, 768M of RAM). It also works pretty good on the lesser Optiplexes I got at that auction for less than a buck, i.e. the boxes with PII 350 processors.
Whenever I've tried to run KDE or Gnome, it's a big hassle, probably because I am a dotfile enthusiast and ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc is so easy to edit with vi.
Office 2000, not Windows 2000. You know, the 'stuff' people run on a Windows system for productive purposes, not Minesweeper. The 486 laptop would likely be bogged down running Windows 98. The point was that the GUI and 'Office' functionality of Microsofts products is far faster, better tuned, and runs better on lesser hardware.
I 'spouted' about running Office on that hardware. A _modern_ version of Office. You're basically limited to running ApplixWare, or maybe an early, limited version of StarOffice, on a 486 laptop with Linux installed.
And 32 megs was NOT 'standard circia-95 RAM quantity.' That is the maximum that can be installed on my 486 laptop. Many people considered themselves lucky to have 16 megs back then, and many more made do with 8 megs.
'The path of history is known, the future is inevitable' prophesies from ardent advocates of a particular change have been coming un-true for centuries, now. Marx predicted that capitalism was obsolete and a new system was inevitable. It was supposed to happen over a hundred years ago now.
Microsoft, and other proprietary software/hardware vendors, can and will respond to the market 'in time.' Sun is already making the right moves in this regard and Microsoft can and will to the degree necessary.
Nothing Eric Raymond and his merry cross reference of halftrue metaphors can conjure up changes that.
Did you take out a second mortgage to buy VA Linux stock? Are you another accidental ex-millionaire?
Linux is killing proprietary Unix and people cheer it on. Just look at the Sun article from today.
It's also strong in webspace, at least the webspace that represents throwaway home pages on the Internet. Linux and Apache aren't making that much headway for corporate Intranets. And that's the space where money is spent, at least for web servers.
Linux is commodifying the Unix-like software market in ways that will drive it into becoming a captive semi-proprietary OS in the places where there is funding. So it'll the same as a Solaris or AIX box in a few years.
Except you'll be able to get the source code of the particular kernel fork you're running. Except the layers people interact with, similar to the situation with MacOS X.
To the degree that 'desktop Linux' can become a success, it will be to the degree that it can be made proprietary, highly designed, polished and sold by a single vendor. The traditional Unix vendors did the same thing a deacade ago. Nothing new here.
windows is truly a morons operating system which is what the vast majority of users in the workplace are.
No, the vast majority of users in the workplace are people whose focus is not the computer for the sake of itself. The computer, like the telephone, the photocopier, and the stapler on their desk, is a tool. And not being able to recite the wire guage of the staples in their stapler does not make them 'morons,' nor does their lack of interest in how to fiddle with the computer their company supplies them.
End users at home don't necessarily want to fiddle with their computers either, btw. Some of us do, but we're the exception, not the rule.
I could easily draw up a list of video cards that are abandoned in both 'current' Windows and in the binary-downloadable XFree86 releases that are current. I have numerous such cards. I'm not talking about 8-bit EGA cards, either. I'm talking about PCI video cards, even a few cards from the vendor who was the only PC-class video hardware vendor to be a member of the X Consortium. You mentioned S3 video cards. Quite a few are 'deprecated' now in XFree, ya know.
Actually, I would say that an 'IT industry expert' who had a lot of experience with command-line FTP would be one easily distracted by details and mechanics of legacy computing. You know how to do it, I know how to do it.
It is definitely NOT a good litmus test for wether someone qualifies as an IT expert. It just means they're probably not a 1989-era Unix head.
I cannot use Windows with a clear conscience because of IE's and Outlook's persistent security failures.
So use Mozilla and Eudora when you're stuck on a Windows platform. Why do you pose it like you're forced to use IE and Outlook if you run Windows. You're not. I wasn't, before I switched to NetBSD with Mozilla, and Sylpheed.
let them buy their 256MB-Intel-WinXP machines from Dell.
Not sure what you're implying there. I would be scared to run a 'Modern Linux Desktop' on an Intel machine with a mere 256MB of RAM.
I use FVWM on Slackware 9.1 instead, on my older hardware. But I know that the 'average user' will require much more.
In addition to this: I can and do run Office 2000, on Windows 95, on an aging Toshiba 486 laptop that only has 32 megs of RAM. It works pretty darn well for writing and spreadsheets. I know for a fact that I could NEVER get acceptable performance with that machine running Linux with OpenOffice.
It would run Linux fine with FVWM (it boots NetBSD-current with FVWM instead) but not with the 'desktop' power (I prefer command-line power thankyou, and XTerms are great for running shells out of) that most people expect today. But it's good enough to run Windows 95 and MS Office quite acceptably.
I want good drivers for my aging software, and as Linux has marched ahead as a platform for closed-source drivers for bleeding edge hardware, and as a server platform, it's partially abandoned most of the 'desktop' hardware I own.
Which is almost entirely 'legacy' hardware, I will concede. But Linux used to be a cool platform to run on older hardware. Now I find myself having to pare back on what I install, as I know modern KDE or Gnome would suck on my mere PIII-500 desktop machine with only 768M of RAM.
A bunch of us used to run Linux on 486s with 16 megs of RAM. Netscape, and all that. It worked pretty good.
My assertion, and I know it is true, is that kernels used to autoprobe ISA sound cards all the time. They don't any longer, and my error is in assuming that they do.
Your 'anything for Linux' attitude sounds remarkably like the traditonal old 'anything for the Party' banter that is thankfully only distant history now in most of the world.
Agreed. But most High School instuctors try to reduce Huxley's work into 'test tube babies' and in the process eviscerate all the other themes in that complex and marvelous novel.
Naw. That arranges the kernel source nicely for a make && make bzImage
I'm referring to the fact that a 'social construct' holds it all together and if the GPL is ever 'declared void' due to some form of legal hijinx, it will be the biggest, loudest 'gimmee fest' ever seen as the source tree fragments into a mass of conflicting 'rights.'
Thank you for the helpful suggestion. I indeed did compile my kernel with isapnp enabled, and it finds the sblaster card. I compiled in (non-modular) support for sound blasters which isn't 'taking' it seems. I have never used 'modules' in the past, have never needed to. Maybe I'm forced to finally deal with that mess instead of a monolithic kernel.
I didn't install a kernel from a 'distro' though. I built from a source tarball from ftp.kernel.org. It's a bit distressing that so much older hardware is being abandoned these days.
Now if I can get the Linux kernel to recognize my sound hardware.....
(no, really. I've run Linux since back in the days of the 1.2.13 kernel. I took a year or two off recently and when I came back, via. Slackware 9.1, I can't get a kernel built that finds my stock Sound Blaster 32. I haven't tried that hard, but back in the day I didn't try hard, either, and my Sound Blaster 16 (and before that my Sound Blaster Pro, as far back as 1994) worked great.
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The Sun X Server is also better, at least on some of the obscure Sun framebuffers that some of us wish we could use in 24 bit mode on OSes like NetBSD. Instead we have to settle for 8 bit emulation.
Actually, what it would do is reinforce the notion that 'Open Sourcing' is only a viable process when it involved opening the source of a software product that was developed in a proprietary environment.
There are examples of Open Source projects that were open source from the beginning, but there are also:
NetScape
Star Office
Quake
DRDos
and various others.
It's probably not a good thing for companies to see 'Open Source' as a crew of pirates waiting to land on the deck and take control of their 'ship.'
The code word is 'grow up.'
The whole culture that emerged was:
"We have cruddy Macs at school until we get into Junior High. Then we get to use the PCs. And the lucky among us will have parents who buy a Family PC. And all the games we like are made only for the PC.'
. . .they unbundeled the built in C compiler and now sold same one as a seperate package for up to $2500. . . I've had similar experiences with SCO and Solaris "upgrades".
If you download the free Solaris from Sun and install it on your i386 or Sparc hardware, you'll find there is an additional ISO of Sun Freeware that you can download. Included on that CD is a full GNU toolchain including GCC. For free, obviously.
Pull your current video card. Plug in an S3/Trio64 card. Like an older STB card (STB was the only PC graphics board vendor who was a member of the X Consortium). You'll find you can't run it without a lot of tweaking and a recompile of XFree.
It *is* possible. It's *not* easy.
I'm running Slackware 9.1 with fvwm2 and my hand-tuned .fvwm2rc for my desktop machine. I experimented with KDE back in the kernel 1.2 days and didn't like it.
And I get NetBSD and Solaris to 'fly' on Sparc boxes with 40 MHz processors. I run NetBSD on my 486 laptop which is a 75 MHz processor. But I'm not willing to sacrifice power for bloatware, be it Windows XP or the stuff thats 'current' on the eye candy distros.
That makes me moronic?
Okay, I will confess that I haven't tried KDE or Gnome.
Instead I run fvwm2 that I've 'tweaked the hell out of.' It runs really fast. I ran it on this box (a Dell Optiplex that I paid under a dollar for at auction- P3 500, 768M of RAM). It also works pretty good on the lesser Optiplexes I got at that auction for less than a buck, i.e. the boxes with PII 350 processors.
Whenever I've tried to run KDE or Gnome, it's a big hassle, probably because I am a dotfile enthusiast and ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc is so easy to edit with vi.
Office 2000, not Windows 2000. You know, the 'stuff' people run on a Windows system for productive purposes, not Minesweeper. The 486 laptop would likely be bogged down running Windows 98. The point was that the GUI and 'Office' functionality of Microsofts products is far faster, better tuned, and runs better on lesser hardware.
I 'spouted' about running Office on that hardware. A _modern_ version of Office. You're basically limited to running ApplixWare, or maybe an early, limited version of StarOffice, on a 486 laptop with Linux installed.
And 32 megs was NOT 'standard circia-95 RAM quantity.' That is the maximum that can be installed on my 486 laptop. Many people considered themselves lucky to have 16 megs back then, and many more made do with 8 megs.
'The path of history is known, the future is inevitable' prophesies from ardent advocates of a particular change have been coming un-true for centuries, now. Marx predicted that capitalism was obsolete and a new system was inevitable. It was supposed to happen over a hundred years ago now.
Microsoft, and other proprietary software/hardware vendors, can and will respond to the market 'in time.' Sun is already making the right moves in this regard and Microsoft can and will to the degree necessary.
Nothing Eric Raymond and his merry cross reference of halftrue metaphors can conjure up changes that.
Did you take out a second mortgage to buy VA Linux stock? Are you another accidental ex-millionaire?
Okay, I even add: Linux on the desktop? Haven't they used OS X yet? ;)
I'm still waiting for a distro of that to come out that runs on my hardware.
And I am not just talking about Intel boxes.
Linux is killing proprietary Unix and people cheer it on. Just look at the Sun article from today.
It's also strong in webspace, at least the webspace that represents throwaway home pages on the Internet. Linux and Apache aren't making that much headway for corporate Intranets. And that's the space where money is spent, at least for web servers.
Linux is commodifying the Unix-like software market in ways that will drive it into becoming a captive semi-proprietary OS in the places where there is funding. So it'll the same as a Solaris or AIX box in a few years.
Except you'll be able to get the source code of the particular kernel fork you're running. Except the layers people interact with, similar to the situation with MacOS X.
To the degree that 'desktop Linux' can become a success, it will be to the degree that it can be made proprietary, highly designed, polished and sold by a single vendor. The traditional Unix vendors did the same thing a deacade ago. Nothing new here.
windows is truly a morons operating system which is what the vast majority of users in the workplace are.
No, the vast majority of users in the workplace are people whose focus is not the computer for the sake of itself. The computer, like the telephone, the photocopier, and the stapler on their desk, is a tool. And not being able to recite the wire guage of the staples in their stapler does not make them 'morons,' nor does their lack of interest in how to fiddle with the computer their company supplies them.
End users at home don't necessarily want to fiddle with their computers either, btw. Some of us do, but we're the exception, not the rule.
I could easily draw up a list of video cards that are abandoned in both 'current' Windows and in the binary-downloadable XFree86 releases that are current. I have numerous such cards. I'm not talking about 8-bit EGA cards, either. I'm talking about PCI video cards, even a few cards from the vendor who was the only PC-class video hardware vendor to be a member of the X Consortium. You mentioned S3 video cards. Quite a few are 'deprecated' now in XFree, ya know.
Actually, I would say that an 'IT industry expert' who had a lot of experience with command-line FTP would be one easily distracted by details and mechanics of legacy computing. You know how to do it, I know how to do it.
It is definitely NOT a good litmus test for wether someone qualifies as an IT expert. It just means they're probably not a 1989-era Unix head.
No, everything about it makes it look like an item where you 'click to add to shopping cart.'
And the grandparent post talked about in-store demonstrations. At WalMart there's a row of sealed boxes.
I cannot use Windows with a clear conscience because of IE's and Outlook's persistent security failures.
So use Mozilla and Eudora when you're stuck on a Windows platform. Why do you pose it like you're forced to use IE and Outlook if you run Windows. You're not. I wasn't, before I switched to NetBSD with Mozilla, and Sylpheed.
let them buy their 256MB-Intel-WinXP machines from Dell.
Not sure what you're implying there. I would be scared to run a 'Modern Linux Desktop' on an Intel machine with a mere 256MB of RAM.
I use FVWM on Slackware 9.1 instead, on my older hardware. But I know that the 'average user' will require much more.
In addition to this: I can and do run Office 2000, on Windows 95, on an aging Toshiba 486 laptop that only has 32 megs of RAM. It works pretty darn well for writing and spreadsheets. I know for a fact that I could NEVER get acceptable performance with that machine running Linux with OpenOffice.
It would run Linux fine with FVWM (it boots NetBSD-current with FVWM instead) but not with the 'desktop' power (I prefer command-line power thankyou, and XTerms are great for running shells out of) that most people expect today. But it's good enough to run Windows 95 and MS Office quite acceptably.
I want good drivers for my aging software, and as Linux has marched ahead as a platform for closed-source drivers for bleeding edge hardware, and as a server platform, it's partially abandoned most of the 'desktop' hardware I own.
Which is almost entirely 'legacy' hardware, I will concede. But Linux used to be a cool platform to run on older hardware. Now I find myself having to pare back on what I install, as I know modern KDE or Gnome would suck on my mere PIII-500 desktop machine with only 768M of RAM.
A bunch of us used to run Linux on 486s with 16 megs of RAM. Netscape, and all that. It worked pretty good.
Sorry for seeming reactionary.
My assertion, and I know it is true, is that kernels used to autoprobe ISA sound cards all the time. They don't any longer, and my error is in assuming that they do.
Thanks for the pointers.
Many of them are large funds that made huge investments when these companies were on top of the world and had great growth potential.
I doubt that many current Apple investors have ridden that particular roller coaster ride anywhere near as long as you insinuate.
Your 'anything for Linux' attitude sounds remarkably like the traditonal old 'anything for the Party' banter that is thankfully only distant history now in most of the world.
Agreed. But most High School instuctors try to reduce Huxley's work into 'test tube babies' and in the process eviscerate all the other themes in that complex and marvelous novel.
It's almost like they know they're doing it.
Naw. That arranges the kernel source nicely for a make && make bzImage
I'm referring to the fact that a 'social construct' holds it all together and if the GPL is ever 'declared void' due to some form of legal hijinx, it will be the biggest, loudest 'gimmee fest' ever seen as the source tree fragments into a mass of conflicting 'rights.'
Thank you for the helpful suggestion. I indeed did compile my kernel with isapnp enabled, and it finds the sblaster card. I compiled in (non-modular) support for sound blasters which isn't 'taking' it seems. I have never used 'modules' in the past, have never needed to. Maybe I'm forced to finally deal with that mess instead of a monolithic kernel.
I didn't install a kernel from a 'distro' though. I built from a source tarball from ftp.kernel.org. It's a bit distressing that so much older hardware is being abandoned these days.
Now if I can get the Linux kernel to recognize my sound hardware.....
(no, really. I've run Linux since back in the days of the 1.2.13 kernel. I took a year or two off recently and when I came back, via. Slackware 9.1, I can't get a kernel built that finds my stock Sound Blaster 32. I haven't tried that hard, but back in the day I didn't try hard, either, and my Sound Blaster 16 (and before that my Sound Blaster Pro, as far back as 1994) worked great.