Finally someone with some sense;) I've been using Windows 2000 for a few days now and I must say it's fantastic. I even installed the Unix services for NT without any trouble. Got a telnet server, some basic unix tools, perl, yadda yadda. The computer management console is great too, beats the socks off redhat's linuxconf imho.
Gee whiz, do you think it would be possible that someday stories on slashdot would be posted without inserting a comment dripping in sarcasm? Not everyone out there is an 37337 k-rad Linux usr. I for one have just installed Windows 2000 and I enjoy using it. Now if someone had posted a comment where they mentioned that "One of the dumbest things to do with Linux is install it" that would be quickly moderated to Troll, of course when it's NT being bashed then it's all good because Microsoft is "evil" yadda yadda
It's not a "wrong" thing, it is a "Buisness" thing. Why didn't Caldera, Redhat, Suse or whomever not purchase the company if they were so fond of it? I'm sure they had the money, at least Redhat did. A company must make as much money as possible by legal means, that is how buisness works. That money in turn goes to feed the families of Sun employees. It's great to label companies like MS and Sun as "evil" but fact of the matter is that because of them the economy rolls along. I'm sure if Redhat thought it could get away with it then it would happily purchase Caldera and Suse, thereby cornering the Linux commercial market. There are no good guys in buisness. C'est la vie
Sun _owns_ Star Office, they may do with it as they please. Remember also that Star office also does not run on Linux alone. Idealistic people? Yes. Talented? Yes, however whether they are more talented then the developers working on the closed source counterpart products is debatable. Generousity? I don't think so. Have Linux companies made any generous guestures to anyone besides themselves? Sun for example has on several occasions given out computers for use in schools. What has Redhat been doing with their newfound wealth? Have any of this money gone to non Linux/OSS related causes? Generous... I look at the KDE / Gnome issue and laugh. Here we have a bunch of guys who worked their asses off to create a usable interface for Linux, it is because of KDE that Linux has recieved so much attention from the media. Finally a usable interface. Trolltech was generous enough to allow use of their QT library. What happens next? A bunch of zealots scream in anger because QT is not GPL, because if they wish to use QT for commercial purposes then they must pay a fee. Is it me or does it seem strange for someone to make money off another person's product and not pay a licensing fee? And so Gnome was formed, a complete ripoff from KDE, yes some things are different, but as anyone can see it's essentually similar. If I had been one of the KDE developers and watched _my_ product on which I worked so hard for get copied..well.. I'd then cease coding for Linux. This is repeated all the time, look at how the gun was jumped when Corel released a beta of their distribution, how many people screamed "Screw Corel! We'll just warez their beta and put it up on ftp" What about the cries of "SGI is dead, but we sure hope they finish porting xfs for us before they're gone!" This is the generousity of Linux?
Yeah his "BeOS is doomed, it was a really nice try BeOS folks..really!" post sealed the coffin for me. Pushing Open Source software down people's throat is not a good way to lead people. The BeOS community has already been alienated. Maybe the traditional Unix crowd can be the next people he'll piss off. Oh wait.. Linus is already doing that with his "Hurry up and open source you wanabees!" to SUN. Oh how I wait for the day when Linux evangelists have offended everyone and the doors get shut on them.
Because Open Source is good! Or...something! Yeah! It's the hot new hip word around the software world. No, don't take into account that 99% of the users don't even bother looking at the code, much less understand it. It's simply a matter of using that spiffy two words "Open" and "Source"..."look ma! my source is open!" "That's nice dear" I'm wishing all these companies would grow some balls and say "screw you" to Linux and move on to working on porting stuff to operating systems where the userbase doesn't whine and complain all the time. Hint hint BeOS. We don't care if your code is open or closed, free or commercial. We just want it to work for us;)
Wouldn't preventing someone from disclosing such numbers be against the freedom of speech? That's weird... Hmm. IIS is alright though? The benchmarks I've seen were regular Apache vs IIS stuffs.
Anyway. The prices for total cost of ownership? Well.. while they recieved them from god knows where the fact is that Linux is not really "free of charge" Without a high bandwidth connection (which is what most people have) downloading a linux distribution is an impossibility, a luxury most can't afford at best. Well then you say "They can buy a full featured distribution and then make copies of it" Well...that's not quite the case. Any cd that contains a commercial product can't be legally reproduced. So in fact if you want all your 50 accountants at work to run Caldera Linux with so and so office suite, well you'll have to purchase 50 copies of Caldera Linux. Same goes for Redhat's secure server edition I believe. (although I haven't closely looked at it)
As for administration costs.... Well a Unix admin will cost you more. Unix _is_ more difficult to administer. With NT it's point and click. With Unix you need to learn various command line tools, as well as shell scripting for some tasks. Yes things like linuxconf are a step forward, but it's still only a step at the moment. Until Linux has something nice and integrated like the tools Irix has for instance NT will still be easier to administer and therefore require a less experienced (and costly) sysadmin. So yes the numbers are made up, but the end line is still there, Linux is only free if your time is free.
As a side trip;) Linux on the desktop... Now Microsoft doesn't see this happening. I'm somewhat in between on this. Yes KDE and Gnome are both good products, they are harder to configure then Windows, but they do offer more options (themes being my favorite) (Incidently why is the kde theme manager so much faster then E's?) However the problem is that X is a..and I'm sorry to say, a piece of slow crap. Yes it has lots of features. But it is _SLOWW_ You ask what I mean by slow? Install BeOS, try out the Gui, when I move a window across the screen - it's there. When I click on an app icon, it launches. There's never any slowdown when a window refreshes. That is what a Gui should be. Yes BeOS gui has no themes (sucks!):( But damn it's responsive.. to be fair Windows has a tendancy to lag much like X. So they're about equal in that area. However Windows is much much easier to configure.
Well.. what can I say, the Microsoft page has some inaccuracies, but Mandrake's page...heh. If you're going to do a rebuttal for a company please don't use phrazes like "Pulled ouf of ass" Mandrake's response was about as unproffessional as it gets. I would like to point some things out. This throwing around of the word "Fud" is getting quite old. Linux advocates are just as guilty of it as Microsoft. Don't believe me? "Linux is faster then NT" "Linux is more secure then NT" Does this sound familiar? And oh dear god what is this "We free software writers can admit our failings unlike you NT trash who don't allow benchmarks to be published against you" - What is that?? I've seen several benchmarks of Linux vs NT done by third parties with Linux winning in some areas. This is news to me. Admit failings? After the first mindcraft test Linux advocates screamed that the linux system was misconfigured, that if it was configured correctly then it would knock the socks off NT. After the system was configured by Linux engineers in the successive tests the results were..NT beats Linux..again..and not by a small margin either. Did those same Linux advocates admit to Linux failing the test miserably? Of course not, they simply pointed and said "Nobody would use such a over powered system for file serving" Admitting a failure is not in the Linux advocate's vocabulary, screaming "Fud" pointing fingers, creating conspiracy theories, and giving the "But it's being worked on now real soon (tm!)" responses as in the case of the journaling file system. Folks please stop screaming Fud and look in the mirror. Also I must say Mandrake's "You're just gui point and click using idiots" comment was really..really...well.. you can figure it out.
Once again I'm baffled at how Linux _must_ be tied into every technological tidbit that appears on Slashdot. Someone really needs to conduct a psychological study on this.
I've used the service since it began (what..almost 3 years ago or something of that sort?) Here in Fremont CA. It started out great, then the bottlenecks started to appear...week long outages...clueless tech support..blah blah. It's a love/hate relationship, you hate the outages, love the speed. I'd love to switch to something that's more reliable but isn't more expensive. DSL doesn't fall into this category yet. Oh well... as to the AOL @home bit..well the internal @home page offers quite a lot of info, it makes quite an excellent portal already, I really don't know what @aol could add to it.
How can you compete fairly? I've never seen such a thing;) In the buisness world your objective is to kill your opponents while making the stockholders happy. Do you really expect Intel to keep their prices higher then the Athlon for example? That would be like asking Redhat to stop letting people ftp their distribution and start selling it for the same prices as NT;)
I must say that I like Intel's offerings a lot, for the last few years they've been the leaders in the market, supplying the highest preforming cpu as well as highest quality. Yes the Athlon is a technicly superior cpu but don't count Intel out yet.
Yeah I don't see why the NT install takes so long. To install my Awe 64 I had to install some isapnp support option, then the drivers. And afterwards it kept giving me the windows "card detected! blah blah blah!" message for the next 5 reboots even though the drivers were already installed and I kept telling it to go away;) It was like a pesky street vendor. Finally it shut up;)Afterwards NT worked fine with the exception that booting takes a horribly long time. I'm not sure if this is due to Networking or SCSI Card..but it did take my windows nt workstation some 3-5 minutes to boot each time. Bummer. Ever notice that the KDE guys stole NT's task manager?;) That always cracks me up. Oh Partition magic...heh..well that seems to be the bane of all partitioners as it kills partitions as often as not. I think you need to defragment a fat partition before resizing for best effect. But yes you're right, partitioning _is_ the hardest task.
Well Windows detects it as a plug and play monitor, BeOS detects it as..well hell I don't know;) but it works. I thought it'd be nice if Caldera did the same..but at least it presented me with the entry for my monitor.
My system is: Celeron 300 Abit bh6 board 128MB ram Mylex UW Scsi adapter plextor 32X scsi cdrom, plextor 4x12 scsi cd-r IBM 8 GB ide hard drive awe 64 soundcard Riva TNT video card Linksys 10/100 Network card (the one the guy used) SGI 20.something inch monitor
Windows 98 The install is fairly simple, it des not recognize the video card (As TNT cards weren't around when 98 was made..duh) The NIC is either detected as a NE 2000 card, or nothing at all. Everything else works fine. After the install I pop in the driver cd for the video card and floppies for the network card. After a reboot everything works fine. I don't see what this guy's problem was for the Linksys card... go figure.
Windows NT (Workstation)
I installed NT a long time ago so I don't remember all the details. Video card worked fine after applying service pack 3 with AGP support. The sound card was a nightmare to install though, ISA PNP support in NT definately needs work. But after I finally managed to get it working everything was fine. I would like to mention that I used NT for a few months and not once did the system crash. Apps crash of course but that is present in every O/S. Never did I have to reboot a system due to a lockup. So when I hear these stories of systems locking up it makes me wonder if the user was playing Quake or something on the NT server;)
Mandrake 6.0
The TNT card does not get detected, this is okay as I can pick it from the list of cards supported. The SGI monitor does not get recognized _ this is a major pain in the ass as I don't have the manual for it. After playing "Guess the horizontal and vertical frequency" for 5 minutes I manage to get it right. Not a good way to pass time. Network card is detected fine. Mandrake 6.0 also does not have sound detection as part of the install, bummer. After running sndconfig everything works fine. All in all an okay install... the monitor bit is what annoys me the most.
Caldera 2.3
Wow..not bad, I'd say the best Linux installer I've tried so far. Detects everything sans... The monitor is not detected but they have an entry for it! Amazing. So I pick it and everything works fine, why doesn't Mandrake have the entry for my SGI monitor but Caldera does? Weird. After pondering that I also notice that Caldera detected my Awe 64 as a Soundblaster 16... makes me raise an eyebrow, but it works. My opinion? Not bad.
BeOS 4.5
Finally BeOS. I am lucky enough to have supported hardware, a lot of my friends have been unable to install it due to lack of drivers. I pop the cd in, run partition magic to make a BeOS partition. After a reboot the install kicks in, asks me if I want some 3rd party demos and japanese support. After that the install begins, after returning from a 5 minute trip to the kitchen I see that the install is done! BeOS boots in some 10 seconds and presto.. I blink in amazement as the install didn't ask me any hardware questions. But lo and behold everything was detected except for my network card (networking isn't part of the hardware detection I guess) I go into prefrences and put in my card type (no irqs or io settings to mess with) and my ip adress info. All done.
Moral of the story? Windows 98 install is easy, Windows NT is fine unless you have ISA PNP cards, Mandrake 6.0 install is livable, Caldera 2.3 install is about on par with Windows 98. BeOS install crushes them all. Not bad for an operating system made by a little company heavily in debt and smirked at by open source advocates screaming "Since you won't open source you will die! Mwahahaha!" Anyway that's my two cents. The biggest thing to watch out for is to make sure you have compatible hardware. Check first, install second. Not the other way around. Pardon any spelling errors;)
Yeah well what do you expect from "Linuxdot, news for Linux users, nobody else matters" Heaven forbid we get some hardware news where Linux isn't mentioned, where NT and Win 9x is not bashed, and where someone doesn't scream "GPL or Die!" Not every computer user has to be a part fiddling geek, or a Linux using know-it-all, an iMac is designed for people who are new to computers and want something that looks neat. If you're of the mentality where everything has to run Linux and have the latest in TNT video card 1 gig ram overclocked celeron covered with that ultra cool WWII plane heatsink well.. surprise, there are computer users out there who don't care about that stuff. Don't like it? Move on.
Wow nice, now if someone wants to invade France all they need to do is bring in a dozen or so G4s to knock out their airforce. Of course now Steve Jobs can show that not only is the G4 more powerful then the Pentium 3, but it's also a great weapon for world domination;)
First of all this tech support call should have never been released in the press. Second in defense of the microsoft employee that all this snickering is going on at... A while back SGI recieved several NT workstation in their lab, the folks decided to port some applications to NT, lo and behold they ran into a problem. They needed to make a soft link from one partition to another. After spending an hour on the matter, going even to the point of installing a bash shell...they gave up. Now imagine half a dozen Unix programmers and system administrators huffing and puffing over an NT box, (Having never even seen Windows in their life) unable to do anything. They ended up copying the whole directory structure, some 10 gigabytes. When the next day I showed them that all of this could've been accomplished by hitting the right mouse button and choosing "create a shortcut" they were totally baffled.
What's the moral of the story? Don't harp on someone new to the operating system. The pendulum swings both ways. So the guy didn't read the fine manual, big deal. Cut him some slack. Notice that in Windows the application installs in one step. A double click, not a mount cd, change cd, gunzip, followed by a tar followed by a make install. Heck just look at that and tell me which you would preffer. Some things in Unix are just a pain in the ass and people know it but refuse to admit so.
Okay I read the article.. I fail to see how this chip will blow Intel out of the water. K6-3s are still more expensive then celerons, and while they edge it out in non fpu related tasks they also loose in fpu related activities. Seems like a fairly balanced scale with the celeron costing a bit less. Hardly an innovative and amazing technology. As a side note... has anyone actually seen the K7 in stores? (Not web) I've been looking around Fry's electronics and see no sign of it. All this clapping of AMD on the back for defeating the "evil Intel giant" is great but all I see so far is no AMD cpus available, and Intel continues to smugly ship their cpus out while slashing prices. I think I'm beginning to see why Intel is not overly concerned about AMD, a few price cuts, AMD's inability to deliver mass quantaties of product, and presto. Any technological advantage of the K7 is nullified.
Re:Must be running IIS
on
WinLinux 2000
·
· Score: 1
Actually as we all know Linux boxes don't stack up to NT running IIS under heavy loads (See Mindcraft) And the Slashdot effect is a fairly heavy load... the site is down...well..It must be running Linux with Apache;)
Slashdot Mirror
Finally someone with some sense ;) I've been using Windows 2000 for a few days now and I must say it's fantastic. I even installed the Unix services for NT without any trouble. Got a telnet server, some basic unix tools, perl, yadda yadda. The computer management console is great too, beats the socks off redhat's linuxconf imho.
Gee whiz, do you think it would be possible that someday stories on slashdot would be posted without inserting a comment dripping in sarcasm? Not everyone out there is an 37337 k-rad Linux usr. I for one have just installed Windows 2000 and I enjoy using it. Now if someone had posted a comment where they mentioned that "One of the dumbest things to do with Linux is install it" that would be quickly moderated to Troll, of course when it's NT being bashed then it's all good because Microsoft is "evil" yadda yadda
It's not a "wrong" thing, it is a "Buisness" thing. Why didn't Caldera, Redhat, Suse or whomever not purchase the company if they were so fond of it? I'm sure they had the money, at least Redhat did. A company must make as much money as possible by legal means, that is how buisness works. That money in turn goes to feed the families of Sun employees. It's great to label companies like MS and Sun as "evil" but fact of the matter is that because of them the economy rolls along. I'm sure if Redhat thought it could get away with it then it would happily purchase Caldera and Suse, thereby cornering the Linux commercial market. There are no good guys in buisness. C'est la vie
Sun _owns_ Star Office, they may do with it as they please. Remember also that Star office also does not run on Linux alone. Idealistic people? Yes. Talented? Yes, however whether they are more talented then the developers working on the closed source counterpart products is debatable. Generousity? I don't think so. Have Linux companies made any generous guestures to anyone besides themselves? Sun for example has on several occasions given out computers for use in schools. What has Redhat been doing with their newfound wealth? Have any of this money gone to non Linux/OSS related causes? Generous... I look at the KDE / Gnome issue and laugh. Here we have a bunch of guys who worked their asses off to create a usable interface for Linux, it is because of KDE that Linux has recieved so much attention from the media. Finally a usable interface. Trolltech was generous enough to allow use of their QT library. What happens next? A bunch of zealots scream in anger because QT is not GPL, because if they wish to use QT for commercial purposes then they must pay a fee. Is it me or does it seem strange for someone to make money off another person's product and not pay a licensing fee? And so Gnome was formed, a complete ripoff from KDE, yes some things are different, but as anyone can see it's essentually similar. If I had been one of the KDE developers and watched _my_ product on which I worked so hard for get copied..well.. I'd then cease coding for Linux. This is repeated all the time, look at how the gun was jumped when Corel released a beta of their distribution, how many people screamed "Screw Corel! We'll just warez their beta and put it up on ftp" What about the cries of "SGI is dead, but we sure hope they finish porting xfs for us before they're gone!"
This is the generousity of Linux?
Yeah his "BeOS is doomed, it was a really nice try BeOS folks..really!" post sealed the coffin for me. Pushing Open Source software down people's throat is not a good way to lead people. The BeOS community has already been alienated. Maybe the traditional Unix crowd can be the next people he'll piss off. Oh wait.. Linus is already doing that with his "Hurry up and open source you wanabees!" to SUN. Oh how I wait for the day when Linux evangelists have offended everyone and the doors get shut on them.
Well..this is sad news. Guess I better start a petition asking Microsoft to make a BeOS port of IE as the mozilla port sucks like no tommorow
Because Open Source is good! Or...something! Yeah! It's the hot new hip word around the software world. No, don't take into account that 99% of the users don't even bother looking at the code, much less understand it. It's simply a matter of using that spiffy two words "Open" and "Source" ..."look ma! my source is open!" "That's nice dear" I'm wishing all these companies would grow some balls and say "screw you" to Linux and move on to working on porting stuff to operating systems where the userbase doesn't whine and complain all the time. Hint hint BeOS. We don't care if your code is open or closed, free or commercial. We just want it to work for us ;)
Wouldn't preventing someone from disclosing such numbers be against the freedom of speech? That's weird... Hmm. IIS is alright though? The benchmarks I've seen were regular Apache vs IIS stuffs.
;) Linux on the desktop... Now Microsoft doesn't see this happening. I'm somewhat in between on this. Yes KDE and Gnome are both good products, they are harder to configure then Windows, but they do offer more options (themes being my favorite) (Incidently why is the kde theme manager so much faster then E's?) However the problem is that X is a ..and I'm sorry to say, a piece of slow crap. Yes it has lots of features. But it is _SLOWW_ You ask what I mean by slow? Install BeOS, try out the Gui, when I move a window across the screen - it's there. When I click on an app icon, it launches. There's never any slowdown when a window refreshes. That is what a Gui should be. Yes BeOS gui has no themes (sucks!) :( But damn it's responsive.. to be fair Windows has a tendancy to lag much like X. So they're about equal in that area. However Windows is much much easier to configure.
Anyway. The prices for total cost of ownership? Well.. while they recieved them from god knows where the fact is that Linux is not really "free of charge" Without a high bandwidth connection (which is what most people have) downloading a linux distribution is an impossibility, a luxury most can't afford at best. Well then you say "They can buy a full featured distribution and then make copies of it" Well...that's not quite the case. Any cd that contains a commercial product can't be legally reproduced. So in fact if you want all your 50 accountants at work to run Caldera Linux with so and so office suite, well you'll have to purchase 50 copies of Caldera Linux. Same goes for Redhat's secure server edition I believe. (although I haven't closely looked at it)
As for administration costs.... Well a Unix admin will cost you more. Unix _is_ more difficult to administer. With NT it's point and click. With Unix you need to learn various command line tools, as well as shell scripting for some tasks. Yes things like linuxconf are a step forward, but it's still only a step at the moment. Until Linux has something nice and integrated like the tools Irix has for instance NT will still be easier to administer and therefore require a less experienced (and costly) sysadmin. So yes the numbers are made up, but the end line is still there, Linux is only free if your time is free.
As a side trip
Well.. what can I say, the Microsoft page has some inaccuracies, but Mandrake's page...heh. If you're going to do a rebuttal for a company please don't use phrazes like "Pulled ouf of ass" Mandrake's response was about as unproffessional as it gets. I would like to point some things out. This throwing around of the word "Fud" is getting quite old. Linux advocates are just as guilty of it as Microsoft. Don't believe me? "Linux is faster then NT" "Linux is more secure then NT" Does this sound familiar? And oh dear god what is this "We free software writers can admit our failings unlike you NT trash who don't allow benchmarks to be published against you" - What is that?? I've seen several benchmarks of Linux vs NT done by third parties with Linux winning in some areas. This is news to me. Admit failings? After the first mindcraft test Linux advocates screamed that the linux system was misconfigured, that if it was configured correctly then it would knock the socks off NT. After the system was configured by Linux engineers in the successive tests the results were..NT beats Linux..again..and not by a small margin either. Did those same Linux advocates admit to Linux failing the test miserably? Of course not, they simply pointed and said "Nobody would use such a over powered system for file serving" Admitting a failure is not in the Linux advocate's vocabulary, screaming "Fud" pointing fingers, creating conspiracy theories, and giving the "But it's being worked on now real soon (tm!)" responses as in the case of the journaling file system. Folks please stop screaming Fud and look in the mirror. Also I must say Mandrake's "You're just gui point and click using idiots" comment was really..really...well.. you can figure it out.
Actually I wasn't flaming the original poster, I agree with his statement that Linux users are for the most part hypocritical zealots ;)
Um I'm a BeOS user, I'm not a hacker. My operating system of choice is not open source ;) I guess my enemy is Linux then?
Um yeah..as well as Windows, BeOS, solaris, umm...what am I missing?
Once again I'm baffled at how Linux _must_ be tied into every technological tidbit that appears on Slashdot. Someone really needs to conduct a psychological study on this.
I've used the service since it began (what..almost 3 years ago or something of that sort?) Here in Fremont CA. It started out great, then the bottlenecks started to appear...week long outages...clueless tech support..blah blah. It's a love/hate relationship, you hate the outages, love the speed. I'd love to switch to something that's more reliable but isn't more expensive. DSL doesn't fall into this category yet. Oh well... as to the AOL @home bit..well the internal @home page offers quite a lot of info, it makes quite an excellent portal already, I really don't know what @aol could add to it.
How can you compete fairly? I've never seen such a thing ;) In the buisness world your objective is to kill your opponents while making the stockholders happy. Do you really expect Intel to keep their prices higher then the Athlon for example? That would be like asking Redhat to stop letting people ftp their distribution and start selling it for the same prices as NT ;)
I must say that I like Intel's offerings a lot, for the last few years they've been the leaders in the market, supplying the highest preforming cpu as well as highest quality. Yes the Athlon is a technicly superior cpu but don't count Intel out yet.
Yeah I don't see why the NT install takes so long. To install my Awe 64 I had to install some isapnp support option, then the drivers. And afterwards it kept giving me the windows "card detected! blah blah blah!" message for the next 5 reboots even though the drivers were already installed and I kept telling it to go away ;) It was like a pesky street vendor. Finally it shut up ;)Afterwards NT worked fine with the exception that booting takes a horribly long time. I'm not sure if this is due to Networking or SCSI Card..but it did take my windows nt workstation some 3-5 minutes to boot each time. Bummer. Ever notice that the KDE guys stole NT's task manager? ;) That always cracks me up. Oh Partition magic...heh..well that seems to be the bane of all partitioners as it kills partitions as often as not. I think you need to defragment a fat partition before resizing for best effect. But yes you're right, partitioning _is_ the hardest task.
Well you do need Service pack 3 for the card to be recognized correctly. That's what I meant ;)
Well Windows detects it as a plug and play monitor, BeOS detects it as..well hell I don't know ;) but it works. I thought it'd be nice if Caldera did the same..but at least it presented me with the entry for my monitor.
Well here are a few of mine.
;)
;)
My system is:
Celeron 300
Abit bh6 board
128MB ram
Mylex UW Scsi adapter
plextor 32X scsi cdrom, plextor 4x12 scsi cd-r
IBM 8 GB ide hard drive
awe 64 soundcard
Riva TNT video card
Linksys 10/100 Network card (the one the guy used)
SGI 20.something inch monitor
Windows 98
The install is fairly simple, it des not recognize the video card (As TNT cards weren't around when 98 was made..duh) The NIC is either detected as a NE 2000 card, or nothing at all. Everything else works fine. After the install I pop in the driver cd for the video card and floppies for the network card. After a reboot everything works fine. I don't see what this guy's problem was for the Linksys card... go figure.
Windows NT (Workstation)
I installed NT a long time ago so I don't remember all the details. Video card worked fine after applying service pack 3 with AGP support. The sound card was a nightmare to install though, ISA PNP support in NT definately needs work. But after I finally managed to get it working everything was fine. I would like to mention that I used NT for a few months and not once did the system crash. Apps crash of course but that is present in every O/S. Never did I have to reboot a system due to a lockup. So when I hear these stories of systems locking up it makes me wonder if the user was playing Quake or something on the NT server
Mandrake 6.0
The TNT card does not get detected, this is okay as I can pick it from the list of cards supported. The SGI monitor does not get recognized _ this is a major pain in the ass as I don't have the manual for it. After playing "Guess the horizontal and vertical frequency" for 5 minutes I manage to get it right. Not a good way to pass time. Network card is detected fine. Mandrake 6.0 also does not have sound detection as part of the install, bummer. After running sndconfig everything works fine. All in all an okay install... the monitor bit is what annoys me the most.
Caldera 2.3
Wow..not bad, I'd say the best Linux installer I've tried so far. Detects everything sans... The monitor is not detected but they have an entry for it! Amazing. So I pick it and everything works fine, why doesn't Mandrake have the entry for my SGI monitor but Caldera does? Weird. After pondering that I also notice that Caldera detected my Awe 64 as a Soundblaster 16... makes me raise an eyebrow, but it works. My opinion? Not bad.
BeOS 4.5
Finally BeOS. I am lucky enough to have supported hardware, a lot of my friends have been unable to install it due to lack of drivers. I pop the cd in, run partition magic to make a BeOS partition. After a reboot the install kicks in, asks me if I want some 3rd party demos and japanese support. After that the install begins, after returning from a 5 minute trip to the kitchen I see that the install is done! BeOS boots in some 10 seconds and presto.. I blink in amazement as the install didn't ask me any hardware questions. But lo and behold everything was detected except for my network card (networking isn't part of the hardware detection I guess) I go into prefrences and put in my card type (no irqs or io settings to mess with) and my ip adress info. All done.
Moral of the story? Windows 98 install is easy, Windows NT is fine unless you have ISA PNP cards, Mandrake 6.0 install is livable, Caldera 2.3 install is about on par with Windows 98. BeOS install crushes them all. Not bad for an operating system made by a little company heavily in debt and smirked at by open source advocates screaming "Since you won't open source you will die! Mwahahaha!" Anyway that's my two cents. The biggest thing to watch out for is to make sure you have compatible hardware. Check first, install second. Not the other way around. Pardon any spelling errors
Zagato-sama
Thank you for pointing that out, this must be that "Choice" that Linux advocates keep talking about.
Yeah well what do you expect from "Linuxdot, news for Linux users, nobody else matters" Heaven forbid we get some hardware news where Linux isn't mentioned, where NT and Win 9x is not bashed, and where someone doesn't scream "GPL or Die!" Not every computer user has to be a part fiddling geek, or a Linux using know-it-all, an iMac is designed for people who are new to computers and want something that looks neat. If you're of the mentality where everything has to run Linux and have the latest in TNT video card 1 gig ram overclocked celeron covered with that ultra cool WWII plane heatsink well.. surprise, there are computer users out there who don't care about that stuff. Don't like it? Move on.
Wow nice, now if someone wants to invade France all they need to do is bring in a dozen or so G4s to knock out their airforce. Of course now Steve Jobs can show that not only is the G4 more powerful then the Pentium 3, but it's also a great weapon for world domination ;)
First of all this tech support call should have never been released in the press. Second in defense of the microsoft employee that all this snickering is going on at... A while back SGI recieved several NT workstation in their lab, the folks decided to port some applications to NT, lo and behold they ran into a problem. They needed to make a soft link from one partition to another. After spending an hour on the matter, going even to the point of installing a bash shell...they gave up. Now imagine half a dozen Unix programmers and system administrators huffing and puffing over an NT box, (Having never even seen Windows in their life) unable to do anything. They ended up copying the whole directory structure, some 10 gigabytes. When the next day I showed them that all of this could've been accomplished by hitting the right mouse button and choosing "create a shortcut" they were totally baffled.
What's the moral of the story? Don't harp on someone new to the operating system. The pendulum swings both ways. So the guy didn't read the fine manual, big deal. Cut him some slack. Notice that in Windows the application installs in one step. A double click, not a mount cd, change cd, gunzip, followed by a tar followed by a make install. Heck just look at that and tell me which you would preffer. Some things in Unix are just a pain in the ass and people know it but refuse to admit so.
Hmm I see.. so Best Buy has them. How are they priced as compared to the P3?
Okay I read the article.. I fail to see how this chip will blow Intel out of the water. K6-3s are still more expensive then celerons, and while they edge it out in non fpu related tasks they also loose in fpu related activities. Seems like a fairly balanced scale with the celeron costing a bit less. Hardly an innovative and amazing technology. As a side note... has anyone actually seen the K7 in stores? (Not web) I've been looking around Fry's electronics and see no sign of it. All this clapping of AMD on the back for defeating the "evil Intel giant" is great but all I see so far is no AMD cpus available, and Intel continues to smugly ship their cpus out while slashing prices. I think I'm beginning to see why Intel is not overly concerned about AMD, a few price cuts, AMD's inability to deliver mass quantaties of product, and presto. Any technological advantage of the K7 is nullified.
Actually as we all know Linux boxes don't stack up to NT running IIS under heavy loads (See Mindcraft) And the Slashdot effect is a fairly heavy load... the site is down...well..It must be running Linux with Apache ;)