Ouch:) In addition to Damn Small Linux, you might also want to try Vector Linux, Feather Linux and Puppy Linux. Any or all should do but hey, at a 50-100MB download, why try just the one?:)
Then for God's sake let them know why. Make the reasoning behind your decision as public as possible. We need to raise awareness of this, and if "Joe Public" is too apathetic to care, Intel's shareholders may not be.
Perhaps, but nowhere near the degree to which Windows is. Go out and buy Windows XP today, and you'll have something almost identical to what you'd have 3.5 years ago when it first came out; that is, nearly and XP installations are very similar, and at the core OS level, likely vulnerable to the same exploits.
Now lets take a peep at Linux. There are 200+ distros. The majority of distros apply custom patch-sets to their kernels. Heck, people are always whining about the fact that software packaged for one distro won't work on the others! And then there are the dozens of Desktop Enviroments and common library versions that people will have. In short, Linux installs tend to be greatly more heterogenous than the bland armies of XP clones, and as such, an exploit targetted at one is less likely to work on another. Of course, if there is ever a "one true distro" (if this occurs, by bets would be on Ubuntu or SUSE), then Linux will be much closer to a monoculture - except that the very rapid development and release rate of Linux means that somewhere who joins up late in the game will have a very different system to that of someone who downloaded and installed siz months ago.
In short - I doubt Linux will ever be the "monoculture" than Windows is.
Less drastically, there are compiler options that employ techniques to greatly reduce the possibilty of buffer overflows. Why people don't compile with these (and accept the small performance hit) is beyond me.
It confirms no such thing, you muppet - it's just some statements that happen to accord with your prejudices, and which you therefore have chosen to accept uncritically. Oh, and if you think hackers are not seeking ways to exploit Linux, which runs countless servers, has millions of home-users, and has a large presence in Fortune 500 companies, then you need your head read.
There are pop-ups that exploit plugins like Flash players etc, but these can be disabled by setting privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins to 2 in about:config.
Well, it's not that clear-cut - I don't see why people always have to think "Windows is a target solely because it is popular" or "No, Windows is a target purely because it is poorly designed". The truth, as is almost invariably the case, is somewhere in between. For instance, I browsed (under Linux) to a site demonstrating a Firefox 1.0.3 vulnerability. Two Konsoles instantly popped-up and did a ls -R, with no action taken by myself. I'd imagine under Windows, where people tend to be running as administrator, that the results could be very severe (the exploit was OS-agnostic). And yet, there were no exploits for this vulnerability out in the wild (and yes, I know it was patched extremely rapidly, but whole hoards of people always fails to upgrade).
Why was this? Here is a demo site that gives sample code for exploiting a Firefox vulnerbility to execute arbitrary code, and no malware purveyors are biting. I mean, come on, it's right there in front of them, practically handed to them on a silver platter! I can't think of any other explanations except that malware writers simply considered Firefox's relatively small installed base, and decided not to bother. If it had been IE, there would have been an epidemic!
There is light at the end of the tunnel, however; even though perfectly secure software is impossible (and even degrees of security are not much of an issue, as you only need one exploitable vulnerability in your software to be pwned), if developers can patch and deploy fixes faster than exploiters can...exploit, then eventually the would-be exploiters will give up and target lower-hanging fruit. There's already some evidence of this occurring - I think an article was posted a few months ago that stated that even though the Linux installed base is growing rapidly, exploit attempts were actually decreasing; like the script-kiddies etc were giving up and moving on to something else.
I don't know any other Linux users personally, but I like to help out new users on the forums occasionally. So here's an anecdotal example of the progression of a newbie from the Windows-Way to the Linux-Way that I was personally involved in:
It's a great feeling when the clouds suddenly part and someone sees the light!;) And I agree that the Windows-Way is only intuitive because it is what we are used to it - a completely new user, faced with the task of installing a piece of software they'd heard about, would probably pick up the mouse, hold it to their lips and say "Computer: install Firefox!". Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the point - they would expect to be able to click on something that says "Install Software" and let the computer do the work, rather than gallavanting around the net ("Go-ogle? What's that?!") manually downloading shit ("I just downloaded a file, but where did it go? What to I do now?"). Quite why distros don't have such a button on their default desktops is beyond me.
I wonder how much more difficult this makes it to update your kernel? Ubuntu recently issued a new kernel update and while it worked effortlessly for me (as all of my drivers are part of the kernel, through sheer good fortune!), would those using a pre-installed version of Linux with all the OEM-specific drivers and patches be able to update just as easily?
The major news is the HP initiative that can spark similar behaviour in IBM, Dell (who do SuSE), etc.
Indeed. IBM's Thinkpad line are typically very Linux-friendly, but there are still problems (the T22's WinModem has no GPL'd drivers so can't be placed in the kernel; suspend/ resume are a little flaky; the X40's built-in card-reader does not work, etc). I'm not sure how much power IBM have now over the future of Thinkpads, but a 100% Linux compatible Thinkpad (with GPL'd drivers from Kernel to accelerated 3D to modem) is something I would fall over myself to pay for.
Is Linux still suffering from incompatible hardware in computers these days? I haven't purchased a laptop since 1996 but it ran Linux (I did have to use AcceleratedX because at the time XFree didn't support the video card chipset) just fine.
On the whole, most things work, but accelerated 3d, Winmodems, and ACPI-type stuff (suspend, resume etc) are still bugbears - often even after a lot of commnad-line tweaking.
Don't know why you were modded Troll. Sure, the guy was a little heated, but I sense his frustration: this whole discussion is going to become just the definition of AI. You know what the definition of AI is? It varies, but it usually goes like this: AI is anything that computers can't do yet. In other words, as soon as a computer is capable of accomplishing something once thought hard (e.g. beating a Grandmaster at chess), the goalposts move. This is what is going to happen here, on either side of the fence: someone with viewpoint A (where A == open source is innovative, B the converse) offers an example of innovative open-source app X, and someone with viewpoint B says "No way man, GCC is just, like, a rip-off of commercial compilers!". And vice-versa. The whole discussion will proceed back and forth in this manner until everyone on either side's head explodes. Mod whole article -1, Flamebait.
The point of larry is that decent software can't be created by a student in a couple of weekends
The point of Larry is that innovative software doesn't get created in this manner. Personally, I would suspect that 90% of innovation lies not in the polish that goes into taking your idea and making it into a slick package, but in the very first prototype where you have a brainwave and say - "hey, I've just thought of a new algorithm that could be a (good way of accomplishing task that noone has tackled yet|more efficient solution to an old problem)". If a bunch of open-source writers pull this off, and I bet there are countless examples of this occurring, then this gives lie to Larry's claims. I don't care whether they then take their novel algorithm and wrap it up in mom-and-pop friendly packaging - they have Innovated, and the rest is just adding lacquer.
Note again that I am not saying that quality software can be or is accomplished by a student in a couple of weekends, but I'll bet that Innovative software often is.
To begin with, software these days is quite complex and it really is impossible to have a full-blown operating system with all the applications people expect and not have some sort of issues. Secondly, the vast majority of people out there are not computer savvy and are going to need help regardless of how well built their OS/applications are. Red Hat isn't dead yet so I wouldn't be so quick to proclaim them as such, although their demise wouldn't entirely surprise me.
Indeed. Non-trivial software will require support (either to install, or to tailor to your companies specific requirements) until we invent Strong AI, not before.
That's one of the great things about open source software; it doesn't have to. Companies like Red Hat are packagers, not necessarily creators. What they provide is a nice, neat package of what others are already creating.
Even then, Redhat to a *huge* amount of development, especially on GCC. If I recall, Luminocity was also funded by Redhat. This is not even close to an exhaustive list.
Weird - I open up Synaptic, search for Firefox, mark it for installation (and do the same for any other software) and click Apply. Once its done, all apps are neatly categorised in the "K"-menu (Firefox is under Internet), rather than just being neatly splurged onto the end of the menu list. If for whatever reason I was a desktop or quicklaunch entry, I simply drag it off the menu to where I want it. Also, I can quickly run any app I want just by typing the name in the "Run command" box in the kicker, due to the fact that all programs go in the same place, rather than being placed haphazardly in random locations outside of your path.
Simpler directory structure? Set up Konqueror to show only the Home folder, and then make subdirectories for Pictures, Films, Music, whatever.
Your comment about OO.o is so trivial and petty that I won't even bother to address it, suffice to say that there are doubtless dozens of little things that OO.o can do that Word cannot. If it's that urgent, file a bug report - it has a damn sight better chance of getting incorporating into OO.o than into Word.
Also, thus whole "tweak and tune" to get things like an Office Environment, Web Browser, e-mail, calendar etc - most Linux installs have these set-up by default.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I've only seen Windows XP crash (including spontaneous reboots) a few times. All but one were due to an overheating graphics card (and yes, this also crashed Linux, and much more quickly, I might add); the other was a housemates PC, when I was copying some stuff from my Linux machine onto his via Samba. He swore that it was due to Linux being shit, even after pointing out that it was his PC that hard-locked, not mine. Maybe we should enter him for this contest?;)
But anyway, for all its faults, there are three criticisms of Windows/ Microsoft that I don't believe hold water:
1) Stability;
2) Development tools. Say what you will, I've never seen an F/OSS C++ IDE that's even close to the usability of Visual C++ (even VC++, from '98) - excellent intellisense and Edit & Continue make coding a dream; and
3) Speed/ bloat - the best F/OSS DE's (GNOME and KDE) are every bit as processor and RAM hungry in my experience - possibly even more so. Of course, you could use a lighter WM/DE like XFCE (which I really admire), but then you are trading up convenience and functionality.
On the plus side, both GNOME and KDE are cognizant of this problem and have the philosophy that people should not have to upgrade their machines and are working hard on the problem, but even so, it's hypocritical to accuse Windows of bloat.
Every other criticism is pretty much fair game, though:)
I agree with you, there are a lot of FOSS zealots quite vocal in Slashdot and other community forums, but you have to keep in mind that Linux didn't get where it is because of them but because of a tech-savvy silent majority, which is way more helpful and way more involved in the real issues than those guys. The zealots have more time and more energy to waste in sterile discussions, but what can we do? Should we spend hours modding down those morons or typing coherent arguments that get ignored or mod down by them anyways?
This needs to be modded through the roof. The vocal minority should not properly be lumped-in with the Linux Community at all, since they contribute nothing but noise and a bad image. 90% of these obnoxious idiots have probably never written a line of code in their lives, and are using Linux purely because it makes them feel either 1337 or part of an elite clique. I'm sure that the true Linux community would rather see these hangers-on go away, in much the same way, I suppose, as advocates of peaceful religions would like to see the "smite the unbelievers!" contingent disappear.
I'm a little unclear on this also; I think what happened at Palm is that PalmOS became the Palm API built upon a Linux core, or somesuch. Anyone more knowledgeable than me care to chime in?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Ouch :) In addition to Damn Small Linux, you might also want to try Vector Linux, Feather Linux and Puppy Linux. Any or all should do but hey, at a 50-100MB download, why try just the one? :)
Then for God's sake let them know why. Make the reasoning behind your decision as public as possible. We need to raise awareness of this, and if "Joe Public" is too apathetic to care, Intel's shareholders may not be.
Now lets take a peep at Linux. There are 200+ distros. The majority of distros apply custom patch-sets to their kernels. Heck, people are always whining about the fact that software packaged for one distro won't work on the others! And then there are the dozens of Desktop Enviroments and common library versions that people will have. In short, Linux installs tend to be greatly more heterogenous than the bland armies of XP clones, and as such, an exploit targetted at one is less likely to work on another. Of course, if there is ever a "one true distro" (if this occurs, by bets would be on Ubuntu or SUSE), then Linux will be much closer to a monoculture - except that the very rapid development and release rate of Linux means that somewhere who joins up late in the game will have a very different system to that of someone who downloaded and installed siz months ago.
In short - I doubt Linux will ever be the "monoculture" than Windows is.
Less drastically, there are compiler options that employ techniques to greatly reduce the possibilty of buffer overflows. Why people don't compile with these (and accept the small performance hit) is beyond me.
It confirms no such thing, you muppet - it's just some statements that happen to accord with your prejudices, and which you therefore have chosen to accept uncritically. Oh, and if you think hackers are not seeking ways to exploit Linux, which runs countless servers, has millions of home-users, and has a large presence in Fortune 500 companies, then you need your head read.
There are pop-ups that exploit plugins like Flash players etc, but these can be disabled by setting privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins to 2 in about:config.
I think the link to the demo page was in this thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=34099
It might even be the link in the first post, but I can't tell as I've upgraded to 1.0.4 and also do not speak German :)
Why was this? Here is a demo site that gives sample code for exploiting a Firefox vulnerbility to execute arbitrary code, and no malware purveyors are biting. I mean, come on, it's right there in front of them, practically handed to them on a silver platter! I can't think of any other explanations except that malware writers simply considered Firefox's relatively small installed base, and decided not to bother. If it had been IE, there would have been an epidemic!
There is light at the end of the tunnel, however; even though perfectly secure software is impossible (and even degrees of security are not much of an issue, as you only need one exploitable vulnerability in your software to be pwned), if developers can patch and deploy fixes faster than exploiters can...exploit, then eventually the would-be exploiters will give up and target lower-hanging fruit. There's already some evidence of this occurring - I think an article was posted a few months ago that stated that even though the Linux installed base is growing rapidly, exploit attempts were actually decreasing; like the script-kiddies etc were giving up and moving on to something else.
Have you tried using hdparm to see if your DVD drive has DMA enabled? If not, it can lead to really weird problems with DVD playback.
That's a fairly neat idea, but I think most people would be put off my the necessity of rebooting just to play a game :(
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=34155
It's a great feeling when the clouds suddenly part and someone sees the light! ;) And I agree that the Windows-Way is only intuitive because it is what we are used to it - a completely new user, faced with the task of installing a piece of software they'd heard about, would probably pick up the mouse, hold it to their lips and say "Computer: install Firefox!". Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the point - they would expect to be able to click on something that says "Install Software" and let the computer do the work, rather than gallavanting around the net ("Go-ogle? What's that?!") manually downloading shit ("I just downloaded a file, but where did it go? What to I do now?"). Quite why distros don't have such a button on their default desktops is beyond me.
I wonder how much more difficult this makes it to update your kernel? Ubuntu recently issued a new kernel update and while it worked effortlessly for me (as all of my drivers are part of the kernel, through sheer good fortune!), would those using a pre-installed version of Linux with all the OEM-specific drivers and patches be able to update just as easily?
Don't know why you were modded Troll. Sure, the guy was a little heated, but I sense his frustration: this whole discussion is going to become just the definition of AI. You know what the definition of AI is? It varies, but it usually goes like this: AI is anything that computers can't do yet. In other words, as soon as a computer is capable of accomplishing something once thought hard (e.g. beating a Grandmaster at chess), the goalposts move. This is what is going to happen here, on either side of the fence: someone with viewpoint A (where A == open source is innovative, B the converse) offers an example of innovative open-source app X, and someone with viewpoint B says "No way man, GCC is just, like, a rip-off of commercial compilers!". And vice-versa. The whole discussion will proceed back and forth in this manner until everyone on either side's head explodes. Mod whole article -1, Flamebait.
Note again that I am not saying that quality software can be or is accomplished by a student in a couple of weekends, but I'll bet that Innovative software often is.
Simpler directory structure? Set up Konqueror to show only the Home folder, and then make subdirectories for Pictures, Films, Music, whatever.
Your comment about OO.o is so trivial and petty that I won't even bother to address it, suffice to say that there are doubtless dozens of little things that OO.o can do that Word cannot. If it's that urgent, file a bug report - it has a damn sight better chance of getting incorporating into OO.o than into Word.
Also, thus whole "tweak and tune" to get things like an Office Environment, Web Browser, e-mail, calendar etc - most Linux installs have these set-up by default.
Yeah, I've heard some very good things about kdevelop - I'll definitely give it a try at some point. Especially as I'm itching to hack on KDE :)
But anyway, for all its faults, there are three criticisms of Windows/ Microsoft that I don't believe hold water:
1) Stability;
2) Development tools. Say what you will, I've never seen an F/OSS C++ IDE that's even close to the usability of Visual C++ (even VC++, from '98) - excellent intellisense and Edit & Continue make coding a dream; and
3) Speed/ bloat - the best F/OSS DE's (GNOME and KDE) are every bit as processor and RAM hungry in my experience - possibly even more so. Of course, you could use a lighter WM/DE like XFCE (which I really admire), but then you are trading up convenience and functionality.
On the plus side, both GNOME and KDE are cognizant of this problem and have the philosophy that people should not have to upgrade their machines and are working hard on the problem, but even so, it's hypocritical to accuse Windows of bloat.
Every other criticism is pretty much fair game, though :)
Did you have an onion tied to your belt? I hear it was the style at the time :)
I'm a little unclear on this also; I think what happened at Palm is that PalmOS became the Palm API built upon a Linux core, or somesuch. Anyone more knowledgeable than me care to chime in? :)