What I can tell you, however, is that Debian's apt-get does an excellent job of creating menus for all applications that you install via apt-get. Sometimes the applications appear in the 'normal' Gnome menus but they seem to always appear under the Debian submenu (in KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, whatever).
So then, even in Debian, you have to do an "apt-get" via the command line? You can't just go to a web site, download software, and install it? You have to type in "apt-get", then whatever the code for the program you're trying to install?
Well, that problem is a combination of things. Firstly if you used the official Firefox installer, then this offers no integration into the host system at all. None. Not even menu items.
That seems like a pretty serious problem. I'm not a novice computer user, so I did a search for say, "Firefox", and couldn't even find an executable to click on! From a user standpoint, I don't really care whose fault it is, I just want it to work. I was hoping that a new version of Gnome would fix this...
If you install packages from your distro then you will *probably* get menu items.
I noticed that in one of the two (I don't remember), if I installed the app from the distribution's CD, then it would occasionally work. But then you're dealing with outdated software, which is obviously no good.
Whatever the problem is, it'd seem like "installing programs and running them" would be a fairly basic aspect of OS development in 2004, and I was surprised as hell to see that it didn't work. Nasty problem, definitely. Sounds like I'm just gonna have to wait a few more years before trying various flavors of Linux again. Bummer.
I'm not sure if Gnome handles this or not, but I was curious if the newest Gnome handles shortcuts properly. In the latest incarnations of Mandrake and SUSE, when you install a program, it simply disappears, with no shortcut anywhere to be found to the newly installed program, making both distributions that I tried completely useless in my opinion. Hell, even when I installed Firefox (what I thought was one of the better known, better made open source apps), I couldn't start the goddamned program after I installed it! But then again, this could be a distribution-level problem that Gnome doesn't have anything to do with... I have no idea.
Actually, Launch is probably the best streaming radio service on the Net. I've been using them since before Yahoo bought them, and Yahoo has only improved it. I only hope that they don't screw up Launch in favor of MusicMatch.
It was actually a very large co-location facility. They're not used to W2K (the vast majority of their boxes are FreeBSD), so they had not seen that before. They literally swapped out 3 different whole boxes before finally trying an Intel box. I lost about a week up uptime due to all of the switching and the problems. Oh yeah... identical hard drives.
I tried setting up our web server several times with AMD chips, and for some reason, we could never get any kind of stability with AMD and W2K. We had so many kinds of flaky problems with 3 completely different AMD machines, that we had to go straight Intel. Don't know why, but just to be safe, I'm not going to try AMD for a long time. I don't have time or money to experiment like that. I don't know what the problem was, only that AMD didn't work and Intel did.
Personally, I find this scary as shit. I think virii like this are going to be the reasons to compel a lot of middle-ability users to switch to Linux.
The only thing that Linux has got going for itself right now is security through obscurity. If Linux ever becomes popular as a desktop platform, I'm willing to bet my life that we'll start seeing worms targeting it, too.
As somebody who almost always votes Libertarian, I've done a lot of thinking, and I think that the real reason that 3rd party candidates will never have a chance in the US us due to the media. The media reports every 30 seconds what they think that the votign breakdown will be (ie: 45% Democrat, 51% Republican). The problem is that people always get into this "throwing away my vote" mentality. What needs to be done is polls need to be eliminated. All polls. They need to be made illegal. Voting in this country was designed to be a system in which each person votes for the person that they want to elect. Period. The media plays a very, very significant role in convincing people who they should vote for, and that just fucks everything up. As long as the media is reporting that the Democrats have this much vote, yada, yada, nobody is going to bother voting for a thrid party candidate because they believe that they will be "throwing away their vote". Ban public election polling.
I disagree. As a Linux newbie, I've tried Mandrake and SUSE in the past month, and there was plenty that I couldn't figure out. They're difficult enough without introducing more problems. I gave up on these two distributions after installing Firefox on both of them, then spending several hours trying to find the program to run after I installed it. No shortcuts anywhere. No idea what path it installed into. Couldn't even find an executable file on the drive! I think that a distribution even MORE user unfriendl than these would be so damn frustrating, that any nrmal person would throw the comptuer through a window.
I say if you want to start at home, start on an empty box, with the easiest one out there, to see if you can figure out the basics (I couldn't, but then again, my job isn't being an admin, so I wasn't willing to work for days and days on it). Once you get stuff figured out on something like Mandrake, THEN install a harder one.
But they are likely to produce a more limited version; either with a restrictive license -- or with less capabilities -- or a free download product with no source. But way or another, they must eventually respond.
I fact, I've been waiting for free-download Oracle/DB2 "personal database" or some limited opensource release of Oracle/DB2 for a while.
Someone please mod parent down. Free-downloads of all kinds of Oracle products (including their full RDBMS database, or the Lite version, or the personal version, or almost any of their products) have been available for about 20 years. Anyone who didn't know this would have to go through this very complicated procedure:
1. Go to Oracle.com
2. Click on the "download" link at the top of the page.
No. RDBMS & standard SQL are flexible enough to return data in any form you need, without having to invent a highly inflexible widget for various *kinds* of data. Using one tool is cheaper, more secure, more stable, and faster. RDBMS and SQL have been doing this and much, much more for years. Hierarchical data is just a tiny subset of ways that you can manage data with a traditional RDBMS and SQL. People who are not inclined to understand databases think that they're somehow antiquated because they don't have a "SELECT HIERARCHICAL" method or some such nonsense, so they think that you need another tool to do it with. It's already in place and functioning well. You just have to learn how to use it properly.
I agree. People are trying to re-invent the wheel without knowing that the wheel even exists yet. When I read articles about an XML query language, I just have to shake my head and laugh. If most developers understood RDBMS', we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
While this "article" is rambling, and realtively incoherent, I will agree with him on one thing: the average Slashdot user knows *nothing* about data. Any time a database discussion crops up, every PHP and PERL hack comes out of the woorkwork describing the wonderful spped at which MySQL handles a "select *" query. I personally feel that any database that is large enough or complex enough to have a DBA should limit access to it to only people who have had a basic "what is a database" class that explains what a relational database is, how it works, the basic history behind it, and specific basics such as stored procedures, triggers, views, foreign keys, etc. I can't begin to count the number of completely ignorant postings I've seen on/. regarding data. Hell, most people treat the database as an afterthought when designing an application, when, in reality, it should almost always be the *first* consideration.
I'm not sure what these developers are talking about. It CAN install as an extension to either Firefox or Thunderbird, OR you can install it stand-alone. I'd link to the page, but update.mozilla.org seems to be down right now. I absolutely installed it yesterday as an extension to both Thunderbird and Firefox, and stand-alone. Unfortunately, you can install it these 3 ways, and each one is a separate database. ie: Accessing the calendar from Firefox will not show you the same data as when you access it via Thunderbird.
I agree. I'm trying it now because I wanted a stand alone calendar app. I may not necessarily have Firefox or Thunderbird open at the time, so this is a nice way to cut down bloat. That being said, 0.2 has some serious resource allocation problems, making it run very, very slowly at times. I'm looking forward to future, more complete versions.
Well, I can do that too, and I tried. I thought of a good way to express myself, but every time I worked on it, I ultimately came up with that post. Pure coincidence.
Mr. vuvewux, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on/. is now dumber for having read to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Well, I spent 6 hours the other night trying to get some basic functionality out of Mandrake 10. $100-$200 for something that *works* is a great price. I'd pay $500/machine for W2K or XP, since the alternatives are not really alternatives.
It's not as bad as "Mozilla", which sounds like a kids' cartoon or breakfast cereal... especially when you consider "Mozilla" is the final name, and Longhorn is just a development code name.
Or Did you mean OSS as in open and Free with source, Professionally done sitting there on the Net just waiting for you?
That's what I was looking for. I can get Linux for free, a browser, email client, etc. Why not a POS system? As is all of the free, OSS ones are incomplete or just flat out suck.
Retail people need simple, easy-to-use interfaces and they do not want to deal with the problems associated with administering Microsoft OSes (worms, spyware, etc).
Our store would also run a Linux based POS system if there was a decent one available, although not because of any so called "problems associated with administering MS OSes)". A cash register is generally a single purpose machine running one or two apps, tops. Our W2K POS machines only rebott/get turned off when the power goes out. They're rock solid, but the software is expensive ($1200/workstation).
That sounds great. First, we need a list of all/.'ers already using OSS who are willing to take up the slack at each particpant's place of business while said participant dicks around with the software. I'll do it as long as somebody is willing to run my business for me that day (for free, of course). For me, they've got to be at my business at 8:00AM, and they'll probably get dome around 10:00PM. Any takers?
Slashdot Mirror
What I can tell you, however, is that Debian's apt-get does an excellent job of creating menus for all applications that you install via apt-get. Sometimes the applications appear in the 'normal' Gnome menus but they seem to always appear under the Debian submenu (in KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, whatever).
So then, even in Debian, you have to do an "apt-get" via the command line? You can't just go to a web site, download software, and install it? You have to type in "apt-get", then whatever the code for the program you're trying to install?
Well, that problem is a combination of things. Firstly if you used the official Firefox installer, then this offers no integration into the host system at all. None. Not even menu items.
That seems like a pretty serious problem. I'm not a novice computer user, so I did a search for say, "Firefox", and couldn't even find an executable to click on! From a user standpoint, I don't really care whose fault it is, I just want it to work. I was hoping that a new version of Gnome would fix this...
If you install packages from your distro then you will *probably* get menu items.
I noticed that in one of the two (I don't remember), if I installed the app from the distribution's CD, then it would occasionally work. But then you're dealing with outdated software, which is obviously no good.
Whatever the problem is, it'd seem like "installing programs and running them" would be a fairly basic aspect of OS development in 2004, and I was surprised as hell to see that it didn't work. Nasty problem, definitely. Sounds like I'm just gonna have to wait a few more years before trying various flavors of Linux again. Bummer.
I'm not sure if Gnome handles this or not, but I was curious if the newest Gnome handles shortcuts properly. In the latest incarnations of Mandrake and SUSE, when you install a program, it simply disappears, with no shortcut anywhere to be found to the newly installed program, making both distributions that I tried completely useless in my opinion. Hell, even when I installed Firefox (what I thought was one of the better known, better made open source apps), I couldn't start the goddamned program after I installed it! But then again, this could be a distribution-level problem that Gnome doesn't have anything to do with... I have no idea.
Actually, Launch is probably the best streaming radio service on the Net. I've been using them since before Yahoo bought them, and Yahoo has only improved it. I only hope that they don't screw up Launch in favor of MusicMatch.
Who put together the computers?
It was actually a very large co-location facility. They're not used to W2K (the vast majority of their boxes are FreeBSD), so they had not seen that before. They literally swapped out 3 different whole boxes before finally trying an Intel box. I lost about a week up uptime due to all of the switching and the problems. Oh yeah... identical hard drives.
I tried setting up our web server several times with AMD chips, and for some reason, we could never get any kind of stability with AMD and W2K. We had so many kinds of flaky problems with 3 completely different AMD machines, that we had to go straight Intel. Don't know why, but just to be safe, I'm not going to try AMD for a long time. I don't have time or money to experiment like that. I don't know what the problem was, only that AMD didn't work and Intel did.
Personally, I find this scary as shit. I think virii like this are going to be the reasons to compel a lot of middle-ability users to switch to Linux.
The only thing that Linux has got going for itself right now is security through obscurity. If Linux ever becomes popular as a desktop platform, I'm willing to bet my life that we'll start seeing worms targeting it, too.
As somebody who almost always votes Libertarian, I've done a lot of thinking, and I think that the real reason that 3rd party candidates will never have a chance in the US us due to the media. The media reports every 30 seconds what they think that the votign breakdown will be (ie: 45% Democrat, 51% Republican). The problem is that people always get into this "throwing away my vote" mentality. What needs to be done is polls need to be eliminated. All polls. They need to be made illegal. Voting in this country was designed to be a system in which each person votes for the person that they want to elect. Period. The media plays a very, very significant role in convincing people who they should vote for, and that just fucks everything up. As long as the media is reporting that the Democrats have this much vote, yada, yada, nobody is going to bother voting for a thrid party candidate because they believe that they will be "throwing away their vote". Ban public election polling.
Registered Libertarian.
I disagree. As a Linux newbie, I've tried Mandrake and SUSE in the past month, and there was plenty that I couldn't figure out. They're difficult enough without introducing more problems. I gave up on these two distributions after installing Firefox on both of them, then spending several hours trying to find the program to run after I installed it. No shortcuts anywhere. No idea what path it installed into. Couldn't even find an executable file on the drive! I think that a distribution even MORE user unfriendl than these would be so damn frustrating, that any nrmal person would throw the comptuer through a window.
I say if you want to start at home, start on an empty box, with the easiest one out there, to see if you can figure out the basics (I couldn't, but then again, my job isn't being an admin, so I wasn't willing to work for days and days on it). Once you get stuff figured out on something like Mandrake, THEN install a harder one.
But they are likely to produce a more limited version; either with a restrictive license -- or with less capabilities -- or a free download product with no source. But way or another, they must eventually respond.
Oracle Personal is free.
I fact, I've been waiting for free-download Oracle/DB2 "personal database" or some limited opensource release of Oracle/DB2 for a while.
Someone please mod parent down. Free-downloads of all kinds of Oracle products (including their full RDBMS database, or the Lite version, or the personal version, or almost any of their products) have been available for about 20 years. Anyone who didn't know this would have to go through this very complicated procedure:
1. Go to Oracle.com
2. Click on the "download" link at the top of the page.
No. RDBMS & standard SQL are flexible enough to return data in any form you need, without having to invent a highly inflexible widget for various *kinds* of data. Using one tool is cheaper, more secure, more stable, and faster. RDBMS and SQL have been doing this and much, much more for years. Hierarchical data is just a tiny subset of ways that you can manage data with a traditional RDBMS and SQL. People who are not inclined to understand databases think that they're somehow antiquated because they don't have a "SELECT HIERARCHICAL" method or some such nonsense, so they think that you need another tool to do it with. It's already in place and functioning well. You just have to learn how to use it properly.
I agree. People are trying to re-invent the wheel without knowing that the wheel even exists yet. When I read articles about an XML query language, I just have to shake my head and laugh. If most developers understood RDBMS', we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
While this "article" is rambling, and realtively incoherent, I will agree with him on one thing: the average Slashdot user knows *nothing* about data. Any time a database discussion crops up, every PHP and PERL hack comes out of the woorkwork describing the wonderful spped at which MySQL handles a "select *" query. I personally feel that any database that is large enough or complex enough to have a DBA should limit access to it to only people who have had a basic "what is a database" class that explains what a relational database is, how it works, the basic history behind it, and specific basics such as stored procedures, triggers, views, foreign keys, etc. I can't begin to count the number of completely ignorant postings I've seen on /. regarding data. Hell, most people treat the database as an afterthought when designing an application, when, in reality, it should almost always be the *first* consideration.
In other words, it sounds like you're saying that Mozilla needs an equivalent of Exchange Server?
I'm not sure what these developers are talking about. It CAN install as an extension to either Firefox or Thunderbird, OR you can install it stand-alone. I'd link to the page, but update.mozilla.org seems to be down right now. I absolutely installed it yesterday as an extension to both Thunderbird and Firefox, and stand-alone. Unfortunately, you can install it these 3 ways, and each one is a separate database. ie: Accessing the calendar from Firefox will not show you the same data as when you access it via Thunderbird.
I agree. I'm trying it now because I wanted a stand alone calendar app. I may not necessarily have Firefox or Thunderbird open at the time, so this is a nice way to cut down bloat. That being said, 0.2 has some serious resource allocation problems, making it run very, very slowly at times. I'm looking forward to future, more complete versions.
Well, I can do that too, and I tried. I thought of a good way to express myself, but every time I worked on it, I ultimately came up with that post. Pure coincidence.
Mr. vuvewux, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on /. is now dumber for having read to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Well, I spent 6 hours the other night trying to get some basic functionality out of Mandrake 10. $100-$200 for something that *works* is a great price. I'd pay $500/machine for W2K or XP, since the alternatives are not really alternatives.
It's not as bad as "Mozilla", which sounds like a kids' cartoon or breakfast cereal... especially when you consider "Mozilla" is the final name, and Longhorn is just a development code name.
Or Did you mean OSS as in open and Free with source, Professionally done sitting there on the Net just waiting for you?
That's what I was looking for. I can get Linux for free, a browser, email client, etc. Why not a POS system? As is all of the free, OSS ones are incomplete or just flat out suck.
If you have to hire an admin for a simple Windows based POS system, then you have more serious problems to address than the software itself.
Retail people need simple, easy-to-use interfaces and they do not want to deal with the problems associated with administering Microsoft OSes (worms, spyware, etc).
Our store would also run a Linux based POS system if there was a decent one available, although not because of any so called "problems associated with administering MS OSes)". A cash register is generally a single purpose machine running one or two apps, tops. Our W2K POS machines only rebott/get turned off when the power goes out. They're rock solid, but the software is expensive ($1200/workstation).
That sounds great. First, we need a list of all /.'ers already using OSS who are willing to take up the slack at each particpant's place of business while said participant dicks around with the software. I'll do it as long as somebody is willing to run my business for me that day (for free, of course). For me, they've got to be at my business at 8:00AM, and they'll probably get dome around 10:00PM. Any takers?