Not so long ago I set up fedora (not my preffered linux distro) to test some things on. Due to some repositry related problems I inadvertantly ended up removing most of the desktop stuff.
I reinstalled X gnome and gdm. I could start X manually using startx but gdm just refused to work and gave no usefull indication that I could find as to why.
I have had similar problems with mail systems in the past.
Granted such problems are rarer on linux than on windows but they do still happen.
well more generally it seems like the real issue is that an OS can end up in loads of different configurations even on the same hardware depending on how it was deployed. This makes the pool of possible configurations (which even counting just hardware configurations is already far too big to thouroughly test) even bigger.
I would certainly consider a crash caused by loading an unnessacery driver to be a bug. Particularlly when having a previous version of that driver loaded was harmless.
IIRC there were similar issues with SP2, on clean systems it generally installed fine but if there were any issues with the system installing it was basically suicide.
In general I would not advise installing a windows service pack on a machine that you can't afford to reinstall/reimage if the install of the service pack goes wrong.
The problem is that a lot of places that claim to be "self sufficiant on power" are not really. They may generate more electrical power using renewables than they consume ON AVERATE but many of them treat the grid like a battery.
The trouble is of course that the grid is not a battery and if everyone treated it like one it would not work.
It also argues for having developers provide source rather than binaries to the people who build the final releases.
If mozilla insisted that contibuted extentions were submitted in source code form and then compiled by mozilla machines this kind of screwup would be much less likely.
I would think that they would still be able to tell which phone lines the modems were wired to which is all they really need to know to trace the calls through them.
While the internet existed in the 3.x/early 9x era it was nowhere near as popular as it is now and it was also nowhere near as malware infested.
And changing it now wouldn't solve much, users are used to running installers for screensavers and would continue to do so even if the screensavers themselves were forced to change to a bytecode format.
IMO the big thing that LVM offers is it makes reproportioning easier and safer.
With traditional partitioning you have to slide the data along the drive (which requires you to take the system offline, is time consuming and will probablly screw things up big time if power fails while doing it).
With LVM, I can add unallocated space to any volume I like quickly and easilly. If the filesystem supports online resizing I can even do it without unmounting it.
I agree though that while LVM does have JBOD and striping capabilities that are sometimes usefull the ramifications of using them should be carefully considered before going ahead.
I'm pretty sure gparted can nondistructively resize reiserfs partitions. So your method should be possible.
Unfortunately during each resize operation you will have to move the start of the ext3 partition. This is slow and relatively risky since afaict gparted moves the start of a partition by moving all the data on the partition, you can imagine what state that would leave the filesystem in if there was a power failure partway through.
Personally I don't think it is worth the hassle and risk.
all files user deleted within the KDE framework goes to the Trashcan instead Sounds very much like the windows recycle bin, files deleted through the shell or through common dialogs etc (and presumablly files deleted through some special API that hardly anyone uses) get sent to the recycle bin. Files deleted by any other means or files overwritten by saving a new version over the top do not.
From the GPs description it sounds like the norton protected recycle bin did a lot more than that.
it would have been impossible to............ allow the use memory that has been released.
given a conventional language and a page based VM architecture there isn't much you can do about this. You can't release the page back to the OS until everything in that page has been freed, while some stuff is still allocated within the page the application can still access all of the page.
Unfortunately the problem is not just undocumented functions (I agree anyone who uses those without a very good reason is an idiot, unfortunately the people who suffer when it breaks are probablly different people from the idiot who did it in the first place.
There are lots of subtulties in the windows API that just aren't well documented. (quick example, the behaviour of the windows messages system in a mixed ansi/unicode system).
Also problematic are functions that simply do not behave like the documentation says they shuold. So you end up having to reverse engineer how they actually behave before you can use them.
What's the use of legacy support anyway. If you have a windows 95 application, it will always have problems running under XP If an application ran fine under 95 and contemporary versions of NT it has a very good chance of running fine under XP.
OTOH if the application developer ignored NT (despite microsofts stated plans to migrate everyone to NT with 95 being a stepping stone release) and did naughty things like accessing hardware directly it probablly won't work.
Hell correctly written win16 apps run just fine under XP
I thought we were talking about a giant supercomputer, though -- I don't think we're talking about home directories. Well users of the supercomputer need somewhere to keep files that their jobs on the supercomputer will need to access. Sure you could use the users central campus home directories but that is likely to be bad for performance and may also cause other issues (for example some universities are pretty tight when it comes to quotas for central storage).
They are the suppliers of your "demand" and they are pretty much saying "no" Bullshit, they offer downgrade rights to XP with both volume licenses and with OEM copies of vista buisness or ultimate. Those buisnesses who require XP will have no trouble getting it.
The people who are getting screwed are non technical home users. If you make the mistake of buying a machine with a home edition of vista, you want to remain legal (or you don't have the skills to find and install a pirate copy or a techie friend prepared to do it for you) and you don't have access to volume licensing. You are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Retail and retail upgrade copies of windows do not come with downgrade rights!
Seriously, talk had advantages over IM. You actually could see what the other person typed as they typed it, including backspaces... ICQ actually offered a "chat session" feature that did that. but it required direct client-client connection which made many people (me included) abandon it. Also it apparently had fairly high network overhead.
I tend to think being able to compose your thoughts before letting the other end see them is probablly a good thing anyway.
what I don't understand is why people don't just shout this kind of thing to the jury in court, surely the penalties for whatever court offense this would be would be less than the penalties for murder.
Many people who use Debian for a personal system, tend to run Debian Testing. Indeed they do, however while I do use testing on my laptop I would not want to have to deal with the constant upgrade treadmill of testing on more than a couple of machines.
A somewhat smaller number run Debian Unstable. Which has an even heavier upgrade treadmill and higher chance of breakage than testing. Again I wouldn't want to deal with it on more than a couple of machines.
Ubuntu is a six monthly freeze snapshot of Debian Unstable. They freeze it, fix bugs in it, put the bugfixes upstream and then release it. Not entirely correct, while they do auto-import packages from unstable they only do that for packages that do not currently have any ubuntu specific changes.
Ubuntu does its own updates, which may or may not follow Debian Unstable updates, but in my experience, Debian Unstable updates faster than Ubuntu, even though both start from the same base.
probablly true if you look at the aggregate of all software that ubuntu distributes including stuff in universe. On the other hand there are a number of areas in which ubuntu is way ahead of debian (for example last I checked debian testing/unstable was still using a very old fassioned boot system by default).
But the big thing that ubuntu offers IMO is a middle ground. An (approx) 2 year release cycle is a bit slow for most desktop linux users but the constant upgrade treadmill of testing/unstable isn't exactly ideal either. It is also nice that you can start of on the every 6 months releases and after a few (1-3) upgrades you will be on an LTS release and can if you wish reduce your upgrade frequency.
Do remember though that this whole canonical/ubuntu/ubuntu foundation setup is privately owned by a very rich guy who fancied taking a pot shot at MS, so they can afford to take a slightly more relaxed financial approach to making money.
iirc there was a known issue with microchips eprom based pic microcontrollers. If the die was illuminated the ram would power up in a predictable state. If the die was in the dark it would power up in a random state. I wonder if this was the issue you ran into or if it was something else.
In any case think yourself lucky that you spotted it before moving to a device in a non windowed (hence not erasable) package.
note: you only get the downgrade rights with OEM copies, not retail copies. Yes I think this is crazy.
To perform the downgrade you use either a disk supplied by your OEM (probablly the preffered option), use your volume license media or use your media from an existing system (though this last option is likely to require a telphone activation)
note that system builder (whitebox OEM) packs for XP remain availible from MS until january and there is nothing preventing stockpiling of retail or whitebox OEM copies.
you will still be able to get system builder packs until next january and vista buisness and ultimate OEM come with downgrade rights (though in some cases they may be a pain to excercise)
and the bottom end of volume licensing (open license) is only 5 machines iirc.
Interesting is in this trial SCO is the defendant and Novell is the claimant. I thought it was SCO who is suing everyone. Afaict it is quite normal to countersue when you get sued. Especially when the organisation suing you is a company that likes to lie about you in public.
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Not so long ago I set up fedora (not my preffered linux distro) to test some things on. Due to some repositry related problems I inadvertantly ended up removing most of the desktop stuff.
I reinstalled X gnome and gdm. I could start X manually using startx but gdm just refused to work and gave no usefull indication that I could find as to why.
I have had similar problems with mail systems in the past.
Granted such problems are rarer on linux than on windows but they do still happen.
well more generally it seems like the real issue is that an OS can end up in loads of different configurations even on the same hardware depending on how it was deployed. This makes the pool of possible configurations (which even counting just hardware configurations is already far too big to thouroughly test) even bigger.
I would certainly consider a crash caused by loading an unnessacery driver to be a bug. Particularlly when having a previous version of that driver loaded was harmless.
IIRC there were similar issues with SP2, on clean systems it generally installed fine but if there were any issues with the system installing it was basically suicide.
In general I would not advise installing a windows service pack on a machine that you can't afford to reinstall/reimage if the install of the service pack goes wrong.
The problem is that a lot of places that claim to be "self sufficiant on power" are not really. They may generate more electrical power using renewables than they consume ON AVERATE but many of them treat the grid like a battery.
The trouble is of course that the grid is not a battery and if everyone treated it like one it would not work.
It also argues for having developers provide source rather than binaries to the people who build the final releases.
If mozilla insisted that contibuted extentions were submitted in source code form and then compiled by mozilla machines this kind of screwup would be much less likely.
I would think that they would still be able to tell which phone lines the modems were wired to which is all they really need to know to trace the calls through them.
While the internet existed in the 3.x/early 9x era it was nowhere near as popular as it is now and it was also nowhere near as malware infested.
And changing it now wouldn't solve much, users are used to running installers for screensavers and would continue to do so even if the screensavers themselves were forced to change to a bytecode format.
IMO the big thing that LVM offers is it makes reproportioning easier and safer.
With traditional partitioning you have to slide the data along the drive (which requires you to take the system offline, is time consuming and will probablly screw things up big time if power fails while doing it).
With LVM, I can add unallocated space to any volume I like quickly and easilly. If the filesystem supports online resizing I can even do it without unmounting it.
I agree though that while LVM does have JBOD and striping capabilities that are sometimes usefull the ramifications of using them should be carefully considered before going ahead.
I'm pretty sure gparted can nondistructively resize reiserfs partitions. So your method should be possible.
Unfortunately during each resize operation you will have to move the start of the ext3 partition. This is slow and relatively risky since afaict gparted moves the start of a partition by moving all the data on the partition, you can imagine what state that would leave the filesystem in if there was a power failure partway through.
Personally I don't think it is worth the hassle and risk.
all files user deleted within the KDE framework goes to the Trashcan instead
Sounds very much like the windows recycle bin, files deleted through the shell or through common dialogs etc (and presumablly files deleted through some special API that hardly anyone uses) get sent to the recycle bin. Files deleted by any other means or files overwritten by saving a new version over the top do not.
From the GPs description it sounds like the norton protected recycle bin did a lot more than that.
it would have been impossible to ............ allow the use memory that has been released.
given a conventional language and a page based VM architecture there isn't much you can do about this. You can't release the page back to the OS until everything in that page has been freed, while some stuff is still allocated within the page the application can still access all of the page.
Unfortunately the problem is not just undocumented functions (I agree anyone who uses those without a very good reason is an idiot, unfortunately the people who suffer when it breaks are probablly different people from the idiot who did it in the first place.
There are lots of subtulties in the windows API that just aren't well documented. (quick example, the behaviour of the windows messages system in a mixed ansi/unicode system).
Also problematic are functions that simply do not behave like the documentation says they shuold. So you end up having to reverse engineer how they actually behave before you can use them.
What's the use of legacy support anyway. If you have a windows 95 application, it will always have problems running under XP
If an application ran fine under 95 and contemporary versions of NT it has a very good chance of running fine under XP.
OTOH if the application developer ignored NT (despite microsofts stated plans to migrate everyone to NT with 95 being a stepping stone release) and did naughty things like accessing hardware directly it probablly won't work.
Hell correctly written win16 apps run just fine under XP
I thought we were talking about a giant supercomputer, though -- I don't think we're talking about home directories.
Well users of the supercomputer need somewhere to keep files that their jobs on the supercomputer will need to access. Sure you could use the users central campus home directories but that is likely to be bad for performance and may also cause other issues (for example some universities are pretty tight when it comes to quotas for central storage).
They are the suppliers of your "demand" and they are pretty much saying "no"
Bullshit, they offer downgrade rights to XP with both volume licenses and with OEM copies of vista buisness or ultimate. Those buisnesses who require XP will have no trouble getting it.
The people who are getting screwed are non technical home users. If you make the mistake of buying a machine with a home edition of vista, you want to remain legal (or you don't have the skills to find and install a pirate copy or a techie friend prepared to do it for you) and you don't have access to volume licensing. You are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Retail and retail upgrade copies of windows do not come with downgrade rights!
Seriously, talk had advantages over IM. You actually could see what the other person typed as they typed it, including backspaces...
ICQ actually offered a "chat session" feature that did that. but it required direct client-client connection which made many people (me included) abandon it. Also it apparently had fairly high network overhead.
I tend to think being able to compose your thoughts before letting the other end see them is probablly a good thing anyway.
what I don't understand is why people don't just shout this kind of thing to the jury in court, surely the penalties for whatever court offense this would be would be less than the penalties for murder.
didn't reiser sell namesys to pay for lawyers anyway.
The availibility and price of licenses to use reiserfs in a non gpl compatible way was in the hands of namesys's new owners from that point onwards.
Many people who use Debian for a personal system, tend to run Debian Testing.
Indeed they do, however while I do use testing on my laptop I would not want to have to deal with the constant upgrade treadmill of testing on more than a couple of machines.
A somewhat smaller number run Debian Unstable.
Which has an even heavier upgrade treadmill and higher chance of breakage than testing. Again I wouldn't want to deal with it on more than a couple of machines.
Ubuntu is a six monthly freeze snapshot of Debian Unstable. They freeze it, fix bugs in it, put the bugfixes upstream and then release it.
Not entirely correct, while they do auto-import packages from unstable they only do that for packages that do not currently have any ubuntu specific changes.
Ubuntu does its own updates, which may or may not follow Debian Unstable updates, but in my experience, Debian Unstable updates faster than Ubuntu, even though both start from the same base.
probablly true if you look at the aggregate of all software that ubuntu distributes including stuff in universe. On the other hand there are a number of areas in which ubuntu is way ahead of debian (for example last I checked debian testing/unstable was still using a very old fassioned boot system by default).
But the big thing that ubuntu offers IMO is a middle ground. An (approx) 2 year release cycle is a bit slow for most desktop linux users but the constant upgrade treadmill of testing/unstable isn't exactly ideal either. It is also nice that you can start of on the every 6 months releases and after a few (1-3) upgrades you will be on an LTS release and can if you wish reduce your upgrade frequency.
they make some money out of selling support.
Do remember though that this whole canonical/ubuntu/ubuntu foundation setup is privately owned by a very rich guy who fancied taking a pot shot at MS, so they can afford to take a slightly more relaxed financial approach to making money.
iirc there was a known issue with microchips eprom based pic microcontrollers. If the die was illuminated the ram would power up in a predictable state. If the die was in the dark it would power up in a random state. I wonder if this was the issue you ran into or if it was something else.
In any case think yourself lucky that you spotted it before moving to a device in a non windowed (hence not erasable) package.
note: you only get the downgrade rights with OEM copies, not retail copies. Yes I think this is crazy.
To perform the downgrade you use either a disk supplied by your OEM (probablly the preffered option), use your volume license media or use your media from an existing system (though this last option is likely to require a telphone activation)
note that system builder (whitebox OEM) packs for XP remain availible from MS until january and there is nothing preventing stockpiling of retail or whitebox OEM copies.
you will still be able to get system builder packs until next january and vista buisness and ultimate OEM come with downgrade rights (though in some cases they may be a pain to excercise)
and the bottom end of volume licensing (open license) is only 5 machines iirc.
Windows XP still has just under 6 years of support left (just under a year of mainstream support left, then another 5 years of extended support).
It seems you are confusing the end of support with the end of retail and big brand OEM availibility.
Interesting is in this trial SCO is the defendant and Novell is the claimant. I thought it was SCO who is suing everyone.
Afaict it is quite normal to countersue when you get sued. Especially when the organisation suing you is a company that likes to lie about you in public.