Well, I'm a pretty happy Red Hat 5.2 user, but I've also installed and run Slackware (twice) and Debian (once) for at least a couple of months at a time. My impressions of Red Hat are as follows:
I got v4.2 from a book. At the time, I was a novice user. I'd been running Slackware 96 for a little while having recovered from a crashed Debian install (hardware, not software issue) and was getting frustrated with it. At the time, computers weren't a big issue to me. I just wanted a working, anything-but-Microsoft computer.
The installation was no easier to me than Slack or Debian had been, once I allowed for first-time jitters from that first Debian install and the fear I had of Slack's reputation. The advantage was a lack of compilation paranoia that had hounded me as a novice thanks to RPM's.
Not long after I installed 4.2, 5.0 hit the market. It had a working Gimp on CD, and I didn't have internet access at the time, so I got that. It was fine. It lasted me about a year.
When 5.1 came out, I bought it, because the net had come and gone in my home once again, and herein lies the tale:
Simply put, Red Hat 5.1 was a horrible thing to foist on customers. Take a quick peek at the errata page if you're curious. The worst part for me were the broken graphics libraries. There were also broken configuration tools, and a nonchalant warning to leave the graphical disk configurator alone because it was wrong. Cold comfort having had it scare me to death the first time I consulted it.
So, Red Hat 5.1 sucked.
About this time, Red Hat started supporting the GNOME push and announced they were against KDE in fairly definitive and ideological terms. They also stopped carrying CDE. To many users, I'm sure this seemed like a little midget Microsoft preparing for dominance of the Linux desktop, and, by extension, the corporate market for Linux.
So, so far we have:
Dominant successful commercial distro.
Shipping buggy product.
Using their bully pulpit as the top commercial distro to "dis" a desktop in favor of the one they were supporting.
Obvious interest in the business market.
In addition, and I am less qualified to speak to this because I've quite frankly forgotten Debian's setup and wouldn't remember Slackware well enough to have an opinion, I think Red Hat does some funky stuff with configuration files. I guess people go looking for things and don't find them where they're used to because Red Hat put 'em somewhere else. Like I said, I don't remember the others well enough to compare.
Last on my laundry list of things that seem to cause people to mistrust Red Hat would have to be their use of RPM as a package standard, and here I have to grit my teeth:
RPM isn't proprietary, despite claims to the contrary. It's true that RPM makes things easier on the novice, which is a "bad thing" to some among us. It's also true that there's an argument to be made for RPM allowing the person who compiles and packages an RPM to control the choices of the person installing the package later on down the road. I am assuming people who raise that last issue also complain about anything that doesn't involve compiling from source. I'd also point out that RPM supports source packages (SRPM's) that allow the end user as much control compiling a package as the original archive, because (as far as the one Red Hat produces) that's what they are in terms of the code they are carrying.
An additional complaint about RPM's, which I haven't seen for myself, is that some things are available only via RPM. I guess there are some commercial offerings where this would hold true, but I haven't seen them, and can't speak to that. Even if it is true, RPM is self-documenting. It's a simple matter to crack an RPM open for the files, figure out where they'd be placed, and put 'em there if it doesn't trample a pre-existing file. No need to even have an active RPM db on your system. Just RPM and cpio.
My own opinion on the matter is this:
They obviously learned from the disaster that was 5.1. They shipped a much better product with 5.2, and they "opened" the development process a lot more with Starbuck. I may even buy Red Hat 6.0, instead of going through Cheapbytes now that they've earned my trust back from the 5.1 fiasco.
They have also taken a conciliatory tack with the KDE project, based on maintaining that the root of their problem was ideological and acting accordingly by letting KDE back into their distro once the license issues with QT were resolved.
They aren't alone in wanting business to like them, either. Caldera is out there, and I think the Linux community at large is enjoying the slow and relentless process that is Linux overtaking and dominating in the "enterprise" world. That change has accelerated since last summer, when 5.1's crumminess and the spurning of KDE were such big issues.
I've also read the recent "Red Hat is the next Microsoft" press and have attributed that to bad journalism elsewhere. I will continue to maintain this:
We are all well aware that journalists don't confer "reality" in a sense that's meaningful to a rational person. Witness, for instance, Linux. Linux isn't "new," no matter who says it is. It existed and was in use long before the New York Times noticed it. Linux worked well before the people at ZDNet decided it did, once they had their noses rubbed in a few benchmarks.
In this case, once again, sayin' it don't make it so.
Conflict attracts attention, and reporting on conflict attracts readers. It also helps the nay-sayers get through another day of Linux bashing, because once you eliminate the mistruths told about performance, features, the presence of applications, ease of installation, and cost, you're left with tales about the underlying instability of the community that produces the product to begin with. And a good way to prove your point there is to highlight the flames and feuds (even though I don't think they're a sign of anything other than a community of people who care about something a lot) in hopes that you can prove Linux is doomed.
I also believe that the complaints about Red Hat's choices in terms of configuration file location and so on are pointless.
I am no expert. I can install several flavors of Linux, and I use it for everything I do with a computer (at home, because I'm not allowed to use it at work.) I'm not afraid of Linux, and I forebear when people talk about how "hard" it is. On the other hand, I doubt I'd be credited as a full-fledged geek by many here. Either way, Red Hat has bent to my will just fine. When I've disagreed with a choice in terms of a file's location or what have you, simple use of existing tools like 'ln' has allowed me to correct the issue to make myself more comfortable. In addition, when I couldn't find something where I thought it ought to be, it was just time to run 'find' and go get a glass of water or check my mail while I waited. At root, and speaking as a user who has written a tiny bit of Perl and had only five 'animal' books, six if you count the little Perl reference, Red Hat runs enough like the other two distros I've used as to make the differences meaningless.
Just as I finally decided I was tired of waiting for the RPM's to be released for the latest stuff...
I downloaded the sources not three nights ago.
On the other hand, the improvement is more than noticeable, and the less than instant gratification of compiling it all was worth it.
My box provides KDE for my housemate, because I didn't want her to deal with GNOME 1.0's less-than-stellar performance. I was using GNOME for myself. I won't put GNOME in front of her quite yet, but jeepers it's much better from what I can see over the last three days.
In particular the session management is less buggy, GNOME mc doesn't core every time I start a new X session, and the panel doesn't mysteriously "lose" applets every now and then.
Having finally gone out and compiled the thing for myself, I feel like I can also finally address the comments people made about how hard it is to install:
There are handy instructions on which order to build the source packages in. Even if you don't read them, a notepad (or vi in an open xterm, for that matter) is more than adequate to document what each./configure script throws up on. There's no rocket science involved here. With the RPM's out for the improved stuff GNOME's definitely a competitor again.
In terms of "ease of installation," though, I'd note that KDE ships RPM's in a giant tarball with accompanying scripts for installation. Maybe that will be GNOME's next step, though there comes a point where you're just pandering to the truly mule-headed and willfully obtuse.
All that aside, anyone who saw the promise but walked away from 1.0 disappointed ought to take a look at the newest releases. They've cleaned up a lot in very little time.
As for your experience in the 18th Corp or 82nd, you sound like a typical REMF.
Neither, thanks. And no, not a REMF. REMF's wouldn't run battle nets forward of lines. As for the rest of your post:
Oh BULLSHIT. The ability of the ground troops to execute a flanking manuver at high speed and then fight hard in meeting engagements along the front was a key component to winning the ground war.
I misspoke. The fact that armor and cav were crucial to the way the command chose to secure a win is indisputable. I would be an idiot to deny that. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who outranked me (and probably you, unless you're one of those three star anonymous cowards) who'd argue that there was no need to commit ground forces on that scale to deal with an enemy that had been dealt with from the air. You also have to be well aware that the Republican Guard was hardly a force to be reckoned with. Even the network "spinalysts" were willing to stop the histrionics long enough to admit that the RG was a shadow of itself after a decade of sapping conflict with Iran.
Desert Storm was an inflated victory. I understand why you wouldn't want to admit that, but on the other hand, I had plenty of comrades in arms (including some cav scouts, and a couple of chiefs who lost some of the soldiers we did lose) who regularly and openly admitted that by the time it came to the ground, the thing had already been decided.
I'd also say that it's disingenuous to argue that an armor battle says much about an infantry soldier's will to fight. My point lies more along the lines of where we are when it comes to fighting those wars where we can't soften them up with air power and pulverize them with arty and armor.
You can argue that the ROE they operated under hurt the Rangers in Somalia, and I'll grant that provisionally, too. I won't, however, grant that that had anything to do with the bumbling in Panama and the tripping in Grenada.
If the army has changed that much since 92, then we are in a world of hurt - because we no longer hav soldiers, just whiners like you apparently are.
I'm sorry you feel the need to resort to ad hominem attacks. I'm not whining. I'm questioning the readiness and capacity of US ground forces. That needs to be questioned, because yes, we are in a world of hurt. Several studies that came out while I was in showed that moral is pretty low, and readiness is very low.
As for your reaction to the anecdote I related about the soldier dropping his clip, all I can say is that you'd be buttstroking a whole lot of people. One study by SLA Marshall found that sometimes as few as 25% of soldiers engaged in a firefight discharge their weapons at all. Further, he found that sometimes only a quarter of them bother to aim.
Or did you think M16A2's fire burst to curb jamming? ---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net
As for your experience in the 18th Corp or 82nd, you sound like a typical REMF. Neither, thanks. And no, not a REMF. REMF's wouldn't run battle nets forward of lines. As for the rest of your post:Oh BULLSHIT. The ability of the ground troops to execute a flanking manuver at high speed and then fight hard in meeting engagements along the front was a key component to winning the ground war. I misspoke. The fact that armor and cav were crucial to the way the command chose to secure a win is indisputable. I would be an idiot to deny that. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who outranked me (and probably you, unless you're one of those three star anonymous cowards) who'd argue that there was no need to commit ground forces on that scale to deal with an enemy that had been dealt with from the air. You also have to be well aware that the Republican Guard was hardly a force to be reckoned with. Even the network "spinalysts" were willing to stop the histrionics long enough to admit that the RG was a shadow of itself after a decade of sapping conflict with Iran.Desert Storm was an inflated victory. I understand why you wouldn't want to admit that, but on the other hand, I had plenty of comrades in arms (including some cav scouts, and a couple of chiefs who lost some of the soldiers we did lose) who regularly and openly admitted that by the time it came to the ground, the thing had already been decided. I'd also say that it's disingenuous to argue that an armor battle says much about an infantry soldier's will to fight. My point lies more along the lines of where we are when it comes to fighting those wars where we can't soften them up with air power and pulverize them with arty and armor. You can argue that the ROE they operated under hurt the Rangers in Somalia, and I'll grant that provisionally, too. I won't, however, grant that that had anything to do with the bumbling in Panama and the tripping in Grenada. If the army has changed that much since 92, then we are in a world of hurt - because we no longer hav soldiers, just whiners like you apparently are.I'm sorry you feel the need to resort to ad hominem attacks. I'm not whining. I'm questioning the readiness and capacity of US ground forces. That needs to be questioned, because yes, we are in a world of hurt. Several studies that came out while I was in showed that moral is pretty low, and readiness is very low. As for your reaction to the anecdote I related about the soldier dropping his clip, all I can say is that you'd be buttstroking a whole lot of people. One study by SLA Marshall found that sometimes as few as 25% of soldiers engaged in a firefight discharge their weapons at all. Further, he found that sometimes only a quarter of them bother to aim.Or did you think M16A2's fire burst to curb jamming? ---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Saddam Hussein has survived several Techno-Wars, emerging even stronger and more enrenched than he was before. He was pushed out of Kuwait not by a Techno-war, but by a pretty conventional one, in which troops and tanks lined up in the desert to push him back to Iraq. Change that to "troops and tanks lined up to mop up what was left of his forces after the A-10's, Apaches, and other airborne assailants were done with them" and I'll buy it.
Unfortunately, "techno war" is something we're going to be needing more and more.
I've only recently left the U.S. Army (I was a paratrooper/signal geek). The impression I walk away with having spent my four years either in Korea or Fort Bragg, two assignments where a solider ought to feel most confident that he's surrounded by the best the conventional military can offer, is that the will and competence for a ground war fought between conventional forces simply aren't there.
People within the military will chase their tails about this forever, figuring out whether to blame what they consider less ability on the part of small unit leaders to discipline their troops, or too much civilian oversight, or a lower quality recruit pool.
Whatever the reason, the last twenty years have taught the military lessons that probably ought to be more traumatic than Vietnam was. For instance:
Grenada: Coordination was so poor that units were cut off from each other due to the lack of a consistent frequency scheme for communications. Rangers were attacked by gunships unable to identify them as "friendly."
Panama: Three way firefights between poorly coordinated ground elements representing Rangers, Marines, and regular army elements.
Somalia: Rangers, arguably the best the Army has to offer for stand-up fights, ground up and spat out by forces considered one step above "armed hooligans."
Desert Storm: A "victory," but hardly because of the competency of ground forces.
And to get merely anecdotal, numerous tales from fellow soldiers who were involved in several of the conflicts I mentioned above, including one story of a signal troop who, when faced with a possible overrun situation in Somalia, dropped the clip from his weapon and said "f*ck this, I can't."
I don't think we have the will to fight on the ground, and haven't for some time. In fact, we really don't have the will to fight at all.
It's absurd, while we're on this, to claim that these "techno wars" are "bloodless" anyhow. Everyone but the United States has been willing to admit that the "collateral damage" to the Iraqi infrastructure caused horrible devastation, privation, and loss of life among noncombatants. Unfortunately, the prevailing political climate in the United States has rendered discussion of such things nearly treasonous. Why? Because a thoughtful person realizes that discussion about this issue requires admission of some things:
We've probably been lied to by the people we're "supposed" to trust at some point along the way, and have most likely identified and asserted as "truth" some of the lies we've been told
We don't possess the means to figure that out for ourselves nearly as easily as we can merely aquiesce and go along with what we're being told, and...
We're well aware that regardless of our own ability to somehow tease the truth out of a "news" apparatus more concerned with profit and repsectability, there's little chance we can count on our neighbors to be the same way.
Knowledge, in this case, is a losing proposition. Asserting your perception of the truth invites the derision and abuse of anointed experts who have a stake in making sure we all remain content with our perception. Admitting that you've been systematically deceived requires character.
In a lot of ways, the other front in a techno war is the civilian population on whose behalf the war is being fought. The enemy has to be mastered on the plane of force, and the home front has to be bombed into submission epistemologically.
But we're still buying the product.
on
EDtv
·
· Score: 4
In "EDtv",the much-hyped movie about media hype, Director Ron Howard blinks. He gives us a mellow sit-com instead of a biting film about the dread and eerily relevant convergency of media, technology and voyeurism. "The Truman Show" never looked braver or better. "EDtv" is too creepy to be funny.
Just a metacomment here, because I haven't been to see EDtv and doubt I will.
I don't think there's much "brave" to be found in even The Truman Show. At first blush, entertainment of this sort might satisfy the person who wants to feel good about their entertainment choice for the evening, but there's something cynical to be read into productions that aim to "sock it to the entertainment industry" while playing at the local googleplex.
There is no risk being taken in making productions like this, or any production that takes advantage of our culture's ever-growing commodification of dissent, (to steal a phrase from A HREF="http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/reviews /commodify -your-dissent/"> The Baffler .
"Dissent" sells. Hell. How many of us have complained about all the idiots who walk around striking poses with their Linux books at the local Barnes & Noble because, as Boot magazine put it a couple of years back, when they included Debian on a CD, Linux was "a rebel OS" that would "impress your friends."
"Dissent" is marketable. "Dissent" makes about as much of a splash in the collective conscience as a minivan commercial. "Dissent" is used to market contra minivans, to convince you to pony up for an SUV so you can show you're not a "minivan driver," for whatever the problem with that is.
I don't think movies of this sort are anymore subversive than a Rambo flick, because in the end, no matter how subtle/strident, vitriolic/sweet the subversion, we're all still sitting in the same corporate-owned theater, with the same Twizzlers hanging from our slack jaws, and we'll be back at the same time next week for another installment. And we're the ones who pride ourselves on "getting it."
If you can show me that films like The Truman Show made people walk out and say "damn, we do live in an over-mediated world of objects and passive consumption, I'll happily shut up. I don't think you can though, because at least one poster on this topic to this point has identified how derivative of The Truman Show this movie seems to be. Someone in charge of making decisions decided more entertainment about how bad the entertainment industry is would make the entertainment industry some more money. Hmm.
My definition of FUD is just off from yours enough as to make us speak to the same issue on different, but not mutually exclusive, tracks.
You define FUD as FUD = Spreading Fear Uncertianty and Doubt, I tend to think of "FUD" as going a little further and having a motivational component. Since I'm still relatively new to Slashdot (one year) and Linux culture in general (two years), I did a quick Google search to see where I might have come up with that idea, since I know I didn't come up with it on my own, and came up with this page, which was featured here on Slashdot some time ago. It garnered a lot of comment, some negative. As much as I don't like the rash of attempts to write "scholarly sounding" documents that broke out after The Cathedral & The Bazaar got so much notice, I felt like FUD was pretty clearly summed up, especially since the author went so far as to attribute a source for the term.
Given that paper, I still maintain that this article is not FUD. It's ignorant, and it spreads the components of FUD by its mere publication, but it lacks a motivational element. Call it manslaughter instead of premeditated murder, I guess.
I will also continue to maintain that because in some ways Linux represents as much a cultural as technical phenomenon, and to the extent that the democratic, anarchic nature of the phenomenon's base will never settle on having a "ministry of truth" to issue press releases, reporters will tend to catch as catch can when it comes to reporting on this phenomenon.
You may also choose to note the headline of that item: Linux fans fear Red Hat takeover.
That's true. And again, I stand by my assertion based on cursory observation of virtually every story about Red Hat that runs here on Slashdot.
I don't think the openness of Slashdot is bad, either, by the way. But I've been around long enough to know that things that are "good" (free speech) don't always confer goodness in their use (libel, slander, FUD). This story by CNN is most likely an example. ---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net
They've figured out that Linux stories attract eyes, so they're going to write about Linux. Enter the other factor, which is what to write about once they've decided that they're going to write. Well, conflict sells. Heck, conflict has been the primary basis of Western (and I mean that in the classic sense) narrative for millenia. We've run through the cycle of "GNOME storms the MS desktop stronghold" and "Big Name Adopters Prove Microsoft is doomed," so the next best thing to do is troll (and I use that in the "gill net fishing" sense) for some other conflict.
I still maintain that as accurate.
That doesn't make this FUD. It just makes it sloppy, lazy, reporting from people who believe what they read from anyone who posts a suitably inflammatory comment on Slashdot.
Heck, just to get nasty about it, I'd submit that if reporters reading this site decided to set their filters up to "2," they'd probably report about this much less.
How can something be FUD when it's probably plucked in all of its repetitive, paranoid, strident glory straight from the pages of one of the standard bearers of the Linux revolution?
Don't by the way, try to claim agents of Bill are seeding this story. A quick look back at any story here that's ever reported on a new Red Hat, Debian, or other distro release will indicate that even Microsoft probably doesn't have the cash to pay that many agent provocateurs. Nope. it comes from in the fold, and now we get to wallow in the media-mediated tripe we created.
...I can confidently assert that this article is part and parcel of what you can expect now that Linux is "newsworthy."
They've figured out that Linux stories attract eyes, so they're going to write about Linux. Enter the other factor, which is what to write about once they've decided that they're going to write.
Well, conflict sells. Heck, conflict has been the primary basis of Western (and I mean that in the classic sense) narrative for millenia. We've run through the cycle of "GNOME storms the MS desktop stronghold" and "Big Name Adopters Prove Microsoft is doomed," so the next best thing to do is troll (and I use that in the "gill net fishing" sense) for some other conflict.
Red Hat is tailor-made for this sort of reportage, because anyone half-awake who reads Linux Journal (for instance) will come across a Red Hat hating letter every now and then. Anyone who frequents Slashdot will also come across the usual contingent of "Red$Hat" comments and the like.
This article is just a reporter being a reporter, writing about a general subject (Linux) that's been done to death by everyone and their mama's knitting circle newsletter, and trying to find an angle to make this story more interesting and more widely read than all the other Linux stories.
And, now that I think of it, we ought to realize that for every simpering convert, there's going to be a nay-sayer... you know... a water cooler sage... eager for the chance to say "I told you this whole loonis thing was going nowhere." ---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Yeah. I tried GNOME, too. It crashed after five minutes for me, as well, but I couldn't take that lying down. Once I realized there was a peculiarity in the way Red Hat 5.2 deals with your machine's hostname on a dialup PPP connection, and once I realized portmap was spiking pieces of GNOME when they requested service, all was copacetic. Well, until five days of steady use revealed another raft of bugs, which were presumably fixed, but unobtainable due to slow mirrors and a GNOME ftp site that is always full.
Back to KDE, though? Nope. Too slow for me. Someone said "Yeah... it really wants 64 meg or it thrashes a lot."
I decided I don't want a "desktop environment" for now. So I'm back to Window Maker and some well-configured menus for general use. It's sort of nice. I reclaimed a lot of HD space and my machine acts like the speedy thing it is.
I always thought it was because it made the letters look sort of like they'd been cut and pasted from various sources, like a ransom note in the movies or whatever.
I'm assuming you're arguing that hackers get to decide what "hacker" means, since they coined the phrase before popular usage altered it to mean "computer vandal." If not, forgive me.
If so, I have to argue that common usage means a heck of a lot. Everything, in fact, because language is generally about communicating meaning in a consistent and reliable fashion. "Languages" are also, as I understand this from my linguist friend, defined in part by their capacity to change. A language that doesn't change from time to time for whatever reason is, by that definition, dead.
In the 23rd century, maybe they will be calling cheese graters floppy drives for some crazy reason, and if saying "floppy drive" to a reasonably acculturated person chosen at random on the street makes them think of shredded cheese, well, guess what? "Floppy drive" will have come to mean a thing that you use to grate cheese.
In this case, I think we have to acknowledge that the word hacker is no longer owned by hackers because it has passed into common parlance.
With all that said, here are two reasonable representations of "common usage":
From Merriam-Webster Online: Main Entry: hacker Pronunciation: 'ha-k&r Function: noun Date: 14th century 1 : one that hacks 2 : a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity 3 : an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer 4 : a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system
I don't think there's an organization in the United States that could lay valid claim to canonical authority, considering the plethora of conflicting style-guides and so on. In this case, though, I think most would agree that Meriam-Webster is certainly respectable, and could lay claim to having their finger on the pulse of common usage. Unfortunately, the Oxford English Dictionary isn't available for online perusal, because they could lay claim to representing the parent dialect.
hacker SYL: hack-er PRO: hae kEr POS: noun DEF: (informal) 1. a computer programmer who is expert at correcting programs, and who is perceived as an obsessive or reclusive person devoted solely to computers. DEF: 2. a computer user who is able to penetrate carefully protected computer networks, such as those of a government.
In both definitions, we see both definitions living side by side, with an edge in precedence given to the more benign variety of "hacker."
I'm curious, by the way, what you call the American Civil War. Here in Virginia, some of the locals still call it something other than the Civil War, and they, since they're the descendents of the ones who rebelled and even started the armed hostilities, ought, following your logic, to be the ones who get to decide what it's called. That's a perogative most textbooks written to sell in California and Texas (which is to say "most textbooks") deny them.
I guess I'm just fine with everyone thinking "hacker" means vandal, anyhow. It doesn't change what I do one bit, which lately involves hacking on a nasty bit of proprietary software at work that made the mistake of using.dbf files even as the marketing droids try to sell us a multi-$1000 "conversion package." No coding is involved, just widespread spoofing of some indexes the designers must have thought others would be too dense to find. When I'm done, the taxpayers around here will have saved thousands of bucks, instructions on how to do what I did will be sent to other customers of the company that inflicted the horrible blob of code on us all, and I will remain a "non hacker" because there aren't any around here to confer the honor, which I understand is one of ESR's requirements for the title.
Guess I'll just have to wait for a local certification board to form.
I'll also wait to call what I'm doing "a hack," because that would upset the boss. I'll just call it "flurbing" and tell him it's a geek word for using something for other than its intended purpose.
...that strained my ordinarily charitable spirit on the front page of Salon|21st featuring Chris Roberts describing some of his influences (Tora! Tora! Tora!, Das Boot) and why the movie is better than Mortal Kombat.
I fell out of my chair when he talked about doing a "Saving Private Ryan kind of thing."
The "clean" theme that shipped with E certainly wouldn't give any suits any more pause than any other WM out there. Someone recently commented that the fvwm95 that shipped with Red Hat a release or two back was a terrible idea because the attempt to look Win95-ish was more jarring on a strange subliminal level than something 180 degrees off of the Explorer interface. My housemate... a luddite... likes E better than she liked fvwm95, but seemed happiest with Window Maker, which, courtesy of a bad theme and aterm, can be made to look pretty lurid.
That aside, having looked at my own work habits I agree that E probably ought not be the "banner bearing" wm.
Initially (the 0.13, 0.20 releases, anyhow) it looked like they'd go with FVWM2. I was cool with that. They even provided a nice theme to show what you could do with something I'd previously associated with a bad Win Explorer knock-off.
In the end it doesn't matter: GNOME dox are perfectly up front about being able to change wm's, state that GNOME is (conceptually) wm agnostic, and a menu is provided to change wm's once GNOME is brought up the first time.
I think the Linux-on-the-desktop issue is going to be resolved in part by the efforts of workplace advocates, not solely shrinkwrapped packages. We're just going to have to earn our advocacy spurs by ensuring that if Linux desktop machines are implemented in our workplaces, our coworkers get good guidance on all the choices they have. And we'll have to save the gargoyles and flaming wallpaper for lunch break.
Sorry. That was a real digression from the original point. I don't get near the GNOME/window manager discussions too often, so I've got a lot pent up.
so actually knowing whats inside your computer is a bad thing?
I don't think he came anywhere near making a statement like that. He was speaking to the relative difficulty of correctly installing Linux on a computer. From the sounds of it, he's done it on a machine he didn't put together himself. He's also stated he likes Linux and has fun with it.
I've had the luxury, now that I think about it, of having done my installs on a box that has nothing left of the original purchase but the power supply and the floppy drive. Popping the hood hasn't been necessary thanks to that. Of course, it wouldn't be necessary, anyhow, because I don't buy hardware on the bleeding edge. I buy stuff that was new technology over a year ago.
I can never figure out what anyone means by "more difficult," either.
Slack was my first distro. I didn't do anything "serious" with it, but it just required some reading to install, and it worked the first time.
Debates these days about the relative difficulty of each distro strike me as ludicrous. I've installed Debian, two releases of Slack, and 3 releases of Red Hat, and I'm a 98 pound weakling when it comes to this stuff. The worst trouble I ever had was forgetting to mark a bootable partition from Disk Druid under RH.
The IT people at work snicker at me behind my back because I never remember how to mount a network drive under Win95 and think I'm insane for insisting that installing the Novell Netware 32 bit client and then removing it but leaving the dll's it put there behind improves the Microsoft Netware client.
If I'm saying "it ain't that hard," it ain't that hard.
Of course, consider this about my IT people at work:
IT Guy: I need the quote marks stripped from that file. Could you fire up Word and do that before you send me the file?
Me: I'm sick of Word. I think I've got perl on this machine. I'll write something and have it to you.
IT Guy: Perl...? That's... a...?
Me: Oh, it's for stripping the quotation marks from text files.
It seems that if Microsoft can offer WordPerfect keybindings for transitional users, Corel could return the favor.
I tend to move people in my office toward WordPerfect when I can, just because it's the WP of choice among the administrators at the school I work at. Unfortunately, Linux-on-the-desktop here isn't too likely. Our primary app is a bloated, nasty thing that tries to "emulate" a Mac look-n-feel within windows. Consequently, my one-man war against Redmond is carried out on the applications side, with the exception of Access, which allows me a convenient back door to the school app's dbf files and spares me running 8 meg of app over a 10baseT net with 100 other clowns. Perl scripts are underway to cure that, too, but Access does what I need it to.
I don't think the author of that piece was too out there. I also concentrate on Windows 95 from time to time because it helps when I provide support to people. They don't want to hear me crying about better alternatives, and neither do the IT managers here. They just want me to help them.
In the mean time, I'm looking forward to seeing what Corel has to offer with the whole desktop Linux thing.
I start with the big green gnome-print, then it's something like:
settings/window manager
But when I get the window manager box up, nothing's there, and if I click it, it dies then restarts and there's still nothing.
Is there somewhere else I can go to pick a window manager other than Enlightenment?
I mean, it seems like a nice enough WM, but I've got time, energy and affection invested in Window Maker. I also depend on BlackBox for protracted GIMP sessions because of its small footprint. Enlightenment just isn't in the cards right now.
In general, there are chunks of this that are pretty nice. I'm speaking, by the way, as someone who's never coded anything more than some perl to catalog all the dirty words in the Starr Report. So, as a lowest-common-denominator, windows refugee kind of guy, I'm saying Gnome is pretty nice. It's purtier than KDE and wants less of my precious 32 mb. It doesn't thrash around as much, and feels more like I want it to feel.
There are bugs, but there's been worse than this out there in the past. If it kills the Gimp or Word Perfect out from under me, I'll hate its guts, but for now it seems ok. It'll only get better. It's one of the few projects where I'm tempted to break my usual silence and send bug reports, even if every other luser on the block is sending the same ones.
Anyhow... if someone can point me to where to get Window Maker back, I'll appreciate it.
---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net "Give me $20 worth of pudding, or kill me."
Now I'm going to lunch with my girlfriend, who's existence I can't prove with cut-n-paste (you just have to take it on faith, which I fault no one reading for not having) and forget this morning.
---------- mphall@cstone.nospam.net "Give me $20 worth of pudding, or kill me."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm a pretty happy Red Hat 5.2 user, but I've also installed and run Slackware (twice) and Debian (once) for at least a couple of months at a time. My impressions of Red Hat are as follows:
I got v4.2 from a book. At the time, I was a novice user. I'd been running Slackware 96 for a little while having recovered from a crashed Debian install (hardware, not software issue) and was getting frustrated with it. At the time, computers weren't a big issue to me. I just wanted a working, anything-but-Microsoft computer.
The installation was no easier to me than Slack or Debian had been, once I allowed for first-time jitters from that first Debian install and the fear I had of Slack's reputation. The advantage was a lack of compilation paranoia that had hounded me as a novice thanks to RPM's.
Not long after I installed 4.2, 5.0 hit the market. It had a working Gimp on CD, and I didn't have internet access at the time, so I got that. It was fine. It lasted me about a year.
When 5.1 came out, I bought it, because the net had come and gone in my home once again, and herein lies the tale:
Simply put, Red Hat 5.1 was a horrible thing to foist on customers. Take a quick peek at the errata page if you're curious. The worst part for me were the broken graphics libraries. There were also broken configuration tools, and a nonchalant warning to leave the graphical disk configurator alone because it was wrong. Cold comfort having had it scare me to death the first time I consulted it.
So, Red Hat 5.1 sucked.
About this time, Red Hat started supporting the GNOME push and announced they were against KDE in fairly definitive and ideological terms. They also stopped carrying CDE. To many users, I'm sure this seemed like a little midget Microsoft preparing for dominance of the Linux desktop, and, by extension, the corporate market for Linux.
So, so far we have:
In addition, and I am less qualified to speak to this because I've quite frankly forgotten Debian's setup and wouldn't remember Slackware well enough to have an opinion, I think Red Hat does some funky stuff with configuration files. I guess people go looking for things and don't find them where they're used to because Red Hat put 'em somewhere else. Like I said, I don't remember the others well enough to compare.
Last on my laundry list of things that seem to cause people to mistrust Red Hat would have to be their use of RPM as a package standard, and here I have to grit my teeth:
RPM isn't proprietary, despite claims to the contrary. It's true that RPM makes things easier on the novice, which is a "bad thing" to some among us. It's also true that there's an argument to be made for RPM allowing the person who compiles and packages an RPM to control the choices of the person installing the package later on down the road. I am assuming people who raise that last issue also complain about anything that doesn't involve compiling from source. I'd also point out that RPM supports source packages (SRPM's) that allow the end user as much control compiling a package as the original archive, because (as far as the one Red Hat produces) that's what they are in terms of the code they are carrying.
An additional complaint about RPM's, which I haven't seen for myself, is that some things are available only via RPM. I guess there are some commercial offerings where this would hold true, but I haven't seen them, and can't speak to that. Even if it is true, RPM is self-documenting. It's a simple matter to crack an RPM open for the files, figure out where they'd be placed, and put 'em there if it doesn't trample a pre-existing file. No need to even have an active RPM db on your system. Just RPM and cpio.
My own opinion on the matter is this:
They obviously learned from the disaster that was 5.1. They shipped a much better product with 5.2, and they "opened" the development process a lot more with Starbuck. I may even buy Red Hat 6.0, instead of going through Cheapbytes now that they've earned my trust back from the 5.1 fiasco.
They have also taken a conciliatory tack with the KDE project, based on maintaining that the root of their problem was ideological and acting accordingly by letting KDE back into their distro once the license issues with QT were resolved.
They aren't alone in wanting business to like them, either. Caldera is out there, and I think the Linux community at large is enjoying the slow and relentless process that is Linux overtaking and dominating in the "enterprise" world. That change has accelerated since last summer, when 5.1's crumminess and the spurning of KDE were such big issues.
I've also read the recent "Red Hat is the next Microsoft" press and have attributed that to bad journalism elsewhere. I will continue to maintain this:
We are all well aware that journalists don't confer "reality" in a sense that's meaningful to a rational person. Witness, for instance, Linux. Linux isn't "new," no matter who says it is. It existed and was in use long before the New York Times noticed it. Linux worked well before the people at ZDNet decided it did, once they had their noses rubbed in a few benchmarks.
In this case, once again, sayin' it don't make it so.
Conflict attracts attention, and reporting on conflict attracts readers. It also helps the nay-sayers get through another day of Linux bashing, because once you eliminate the mistruths told about performance, features, the presence of applications, ease of installation, and cost, you're left with tales about the underlying instability of the community that produces the product to begin with. And a good way to prove your point there is to highlight the flames and feuds (even though I don't think they're a sign of anything other than a community of people who care about something a lot) in hopes that you can prove Linux is doomed.
I also believe that the complaints about Red Hat's choices in terms of configuration file location and so on are pointless.
I am no expert. I can install several flavors of Linux, and I use it for everything I do with a computer (at home, because I'm not allowed to use it at work.) I'm not afraid of Linux, and I forebear when people talk about how "hard" it is. On the other hand, I doubt I'd be credited as a full-fledged geek by many here. Either way, Red Hat has bent to my will just fine. When I've disagreed with a choice in terms of a file's location or what have you, simple use of existing tools like 'ln' has allowed me to correct the issue to make myself more comfortable. In addition, when I couldn't find something where I thought it ought to be, it was just time to run 'find' and go get a glass of water or check my mail while I waited. At root, and speaking as a user who has written a tiny bit of Perl and had only five 'animal' books, six if you count the little Perl reference, Red Hat runs enough like the other two distros I've used as to make the differences meaningless.
Apologies for going on so long.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I downloaded the sources not three nights ago.
On the other hand, the improvement is more than noticeable, and the less than instant gratification of compiling it all was worth it.
My box provides KDE for my housemate, because I didn't want her to deal with GNOME 1.0's less-than-stellar performance. I was using GNOME for myself. I won't put GNOME in front of her quite yet, but jeepers it's much better from what I can see over the last three days.
In particular the session management is less buggy, GNOME mc doesn't core every time I start a new X session, and the panel doesn't mysteriously "lose" applets every now and then.
Having finally gone out and compiled the thing for myself, I feel like I can also finally address the comments people made about how hard it is to install:
There are handy instructions on which order to build the source packages in. Even if you don't read them, a notepad (or vi in an open xterm, for that matter) is more than adequate to document what each ./configure script throws up on. There's no rocket science involved here. With the RPM's out for the improved stuff GNOME's definitely a competitor again.
In terms of "ease of installation," though, I'd note that KDE ships RPM's in a giant tarball with accompanying scripts for installation. Maybe that will be GNOME's next step, though there comes a point where you're just pandering to the truly mule-headed and willfully obtuse.
All that aside, anyone who saw the promise but walked away from 1.0 disappointed ought to take a look at the newest releases. They've cleaned up a lot in very little time.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Neither, thanks. And no, not a REMF. REMF's wouldn't run battle nets forward of lines. As for the rest of your post:
Oh BULLSHIT. The ability of the ground troops to execute a flanking manuver at high speed and then fight hard in meeting engagements along the front was a key component to winning the ground war.
I misspoke. The fact that armor and cav were crucial to the way the command chose to secure a win is indisputable. I would be an idiot to deny that. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who outranked me (and probably you, unless you're one of those three star anonymous cowards) who'd argue that there was no need to commit ground forces on that scale to deal with an enemy that had been dealt with from the air. You also have to be well aware that the Republican Guard was hardly a force to be reckoned with. Even the network "spinalysts" were willing to stop the histrionics long enough to admit that the RG was a shadow of itself after a decade of sapping conflict with Iran.
Desert Storm was an inflated victory. I understand why you wouldn't want to admit that, but on the other hand, I had plenty of comrades in arms (including some cav scouts, and a couple of chiefs who lost some of the soldiers we did lose) who regularly and openly admitted that by the time it came to the ground, the thing had already been decided.
I'd also say that it's disingenuous to argue that an armor battle says much about an infantry soldier's will to fight. My point lies more along the lines of where we are when it comes to fighting those wars where we can't soften them up with air power and pulverize them with arty and armor.
You can argue that the ROE they operated under hurt the Rangers in Somalia, and I'll grant that provisionally, too. I won't, however, grant that that had anything to do with the bumbling in Panama and the tripping in Grenada.
If the army has changed that much since 92, then we are in a world of hurt - because we no longer hav soldiers, just whiners like you apparently are.
I'm sorry you feel the need to resort to ad hominem attacks. I'm not whining. I'm questioning the readiness and capacity of US ground forces. That needs to be questioned, because yes, we are in a world of hurt. Several studies that came out while I was in showed that moral is pretty low, and readiness is very low.
As for your reaction to the anecdote I related about the soldier dropping his clip, all I can say is that you'd be buttstroking a whole lot of people. One study by SLA Marshall found that sometimes as few as 25% of soldiers engaged in a firefight discharge their weapons at all. Further, he found that sometimes only a quarter of them bother to aim.
Or did you think M16A2's fire burst to curb jamming?
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
That was submitted all nicely formatted and previewed. Sorry, it's an unreadable mess now.
Guess I'll bug report it to Rob.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
As for your experience in the 18th Corp or 82nd, you sound like a typical REMF. Neither, thanks. And no, not a REMF. REMF's wouldn't run battle nets forward of lines. As for the rest of your post:Oh BULLSHIT. The ability of the ground troops to execute a flanking manuver at high speed and then fight hard in meeting engagements along the front was a key component to winning the ground war. I misspoke. The fact that armor and cav were crucial to the way the command chose to secure a win is indisputable. I would be an idiot to deny that. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who outranked me (and probably you, unless you're one of those three star anonymous cowards) who'd argue that there was no need to commit ground forces on that scale to deal with an enemy that had been dealt with from the air. You also have to be well aware that the Republican Guard was hardly a force to be reckoned with. Even the network "spinalysts" were willing to stop the histrionics long enough to admit that the RG was a shadow of itself after a decade of sapping conflict with Iran.Desert Storm was an inflated victory. I understand why you wouldn't want to admit that, but on the other hand, I had plenty of comrades in arms (including some cav scouts, and a couple of chiefs who lost some of the soldiers we did lose) who regularly and openly admitted that by the time it came to the ground, the thing had already been decided. I'd also say that it's disingenuous to argue that an armor battle says much about an infantry soldier's will to fight. My point lies more along the lines of where we are when it comes to fighting those wars where we can't soften them up with air power and pulverize them with arty and armor. You can argue that the ROE they operated under hurt the Rangers in Somalia, and I'll grant that provisionally, too. I won't, however, grant that that had anything to do with the bumbling in Panama and the tripping in Grenada. If the army has changed that much since 92, then we are in a world of hurt - because we no longer hav soldiers, just whiners like you apparently are.I'm sorry you feel the need to resort to ad hominem attacks. I'm not whining. I'm questioning the readiness and capacity of US ground forces. That needs to be questioned, because yes, we are in a world of hurt. Several studies that came out while I was in showed that moral is pretty low, and readiness is very low. As for your reaction to the anecdote I related about the soldier dropping his clip, all I can say is that you'd be buttstroking a whole lot of people. One study by SLA Marshall found that sometimes as few as 25% of soldiers engaged in a firefight discharge their weapons at all. Further, he found that sometimes only a quarter of them bother to aim.Or did you think M16A2's fire burst to curb jamming?
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Unfortunately, "techno war" is something we're going to be needing more and more.
I've only recently left the U.S. Army (I was a paratrooper/signal geek). The impression I walk away with having spent my four years either in Korea or Fort Bragg, two assignments where a solider ought to feel most confident that he's surrounded by the best the conventional military can offer, is that the will and competence for a ground war fought between conventional forces simply aren't there.
People within the military will chase their tails about this forever, figuring out whether to blame what they consider less ability on the part of small unit leaders to discipline their troops, or too much civilian oversight, or a lower quality recruit pool.
Whatever the reason, the last twenty years have taught the military lessons that probably ought to be more traumatic than Vietnam was. For instance:
And to get merely anecdotal, numerous tales from fellow soldiers who were involved in several of the conflicts I mentioned above, including one story of a signal troop who, when faced with a possible overrun situation in Somalia, dropped the clip from his weapon and said "f*ck this, I can't."
I don't think we have the will to fight on the ground, and haven't for some time. In fact, we really don't have the will to fight at all.
It's absurd, while we're on this, to claim that these "techno wars" are "bloodless" anyhow. Everyone but the United States has been willing to admit that the "collateral damage" to the Iraqi infrastructure caused horrible devastation, privation, and loss of life among noncombatants. Unfortunately, the prevailing political climate in the United States has rendered discussion of such things nearly treasonous. Why? Because a thoughtful person realizes that discussion about this issue requires admission of some things:
- We've probably been lied to by the people we're "supposed" to trust at some point along the way, and have most likely identified and asserted as "truth" some of the lies we've been told
- We don't possess the means to figure that out for ourselves nearly as easily as we can merely aquiesce and go along with what we're being told, and...
- We're well aware that regardless of our own ability to somehow tease the truth out of a "news" apparatus more concerned with profit and repsectability, there's little chance we can count on our neighbors to be the same way.
Knowledge, in this case, is a losing proposition. Asserting your perception of the truth invites the derision and abuse of anointed experts who have a stake in making sure we all remain content with our perception. Admitting that you've been systematically deceived requires character.In a lot of ways, the other front in a techno war is the civilian population on whose behalf the war is being fought. The enemy has to be mastered on the plane of force, and the home front has to be bombed into submission epistemologically.
Lots of luck to all of us.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
If anyone cares, it's:
The Baffler.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
In "EDtv",the much-hyped movie about media hype, Director Ron Howard blinks. He gives us a mellow sit-com instead of a biting film about the dread and eerily relevant convergency of media, technology and voyeurism. "The Truman Show" never looked braver or better. "EDtv" is too creepy to be funny.
Just a metacomment here, because I haven't been to see EDtv and doubt I will.
I don't think there's much "brave" to be found in even The Truman Show. At first blush, entertainment of this sort might satisfy the person who wants to feel good about their entertainment choice for the evening, but there's something cynical to be read into productions that aim to "sock it to the entertainment industry" while playing at the local googleplex.
There is no risk being taken in making productions like this, or any production that takes advantage of our culture's ever-growing commodification of dissent, (to steal a phrase from A HREF="http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/reviews /commodify -your-dissent/"> The Baffler .
"Dissent" sells. Hell. How many of us have complained about all the idiots who walk around striking poses with their Linux books at the local Barnes & Noble because, as Boot magazine put it a couple of years back, when they included Debian on a CD, Linux was "a rebel OS" that would "impress your friends."
"Dissent" is marketable. "Dissent" makes about as much of a splash in the collective conscience as a minivan commercial. "Dissent" is used to market contra minivans, to convince you to pony up for an SUV so you can show you're not a "minivan driver," for whatever the problem with that is.
I don't think movies of this sort are anymore subversive than a Rambo flick, because in the end, no matter how subtle/strident, vitriolic/sweet the subversion, we're all still sitting in the same corporate-owned theater, with the same Twizzlers hanging from our slack jaws, and we'll be back at the same time next week for another installment. And we're the ones who pride ourselves on "getting it."
If you can show me that films like The Truman Show made people walk out and say "damn, we do live in an over-mediated world of objects and passive consumption, I'll happily shut up. I don't think you can though, because at least one poster on this topic to this point has identified how derivative of The Truman Show this movie seems to be. Someone in charge of making decisions decided more entertainment about how bad the entertainment industry is would make the entertainment industry some more money. Hmm.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
You define FUD as FUD = Spreading Fear Uncertianty and Doubt, I tend to think of "FUD" as going a little further and having a motivational component. Since I'm still relatively new to Slashdot (one year) and Linux culture in general (two years), I did a quick Google search to see where I might have come up with that idea, since I know I didn't come up with it on my own, and came up with this page, which was featured here on Slashdot some time ago. It garnered a lot of comment, some negative. As much as I don't like the rash of attempts to write "scholarly sounding" documents that broke out after The Cathedral & The Bazaar got so much notice, I felt like FUD was pretty clearly summed up, especially since the author went so far as to attribute a source for the term.
Given that paper, I still maintain that this article is not FUD. It's ignorant, and it spreads the components of FUD by its mere publication, but it lacks a motivational element. Call it manslaughter instead of premeditated murder, I guess.
I will also continue to maintain that because in some ways Linux represents as much a cultural as technical phenomenon, and to the extent that the democratic, anarchic nature of the phenomenon's base will never settle on having a "ministry of truth" to issue press releases, reporters will tend to catch as catch can when it comes to reporting on this phenomenon.
You may also choose to note the headline of that item: Linux fans fear Red Hat takeover.
That's true. And again, I stand by my assertion based on cursory observation of virtually every story about Red Hat that runs here on Slashdot.
I don't think the openness of Slashdot is bad, either, by the way. But I've been around long enough to know that things that are "good" (free speech) don't always confer goodness in their use (libel, slander, FUD). This story by CNN is most likely an example.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
They've figured out that Linux stories attract eyes, so they're going to write about Linux. Enter the other factor, which is what to write about once they've decided that they're going to write. Well, conflict sells. Heck, conflict has been the primary basis of Western (and I mean that in the classic sense) narrative for millenia. We've run through the cycle of "GNOME storms the MS desktop stronghold" and "Big Name Adopters Prove Microsoft is doomed," so the next best thing to do is troll (and I use that in the "gill net fishing" sense) for some other conflict.
I still maintain that as accurate.
That doesn't make this FUD. It just makes it sloppy, lazy, reporting from people who believe what they read from anyone who posts a suitably inflammatory comment on Slashdot.
Heck, just to get nasty about it, I'd submit that if reporters reading this site decided to set their filters up to "2," they'd probably report about this much less.
How can something be FUD when it's probably plucked in all of its repetitive, paranoid, strident glory straight from the pages of one of the standard bearers of the Linux revolution?
Don't by the way, try to claim agents of Bill are seeding this story. A quick look back at any story here that's ever reported on a new Red Hat, Debian, or other distro release will indicate that even Microsoft probably doesn't have the cash to pay that many agent provocateurs. Nope. it comes from in the fold, and now we get to wallow in the media-mediated tripe we created.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Sure enough:
You can find it in this article by Wired that ran a little while back.
You'll just need to search for the word "scaffolding" once there. I'll leave interpretation to everyone else.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
They've figured out that Linux stories attract eyes, so they're going to write about Linux. Enter the other factor, which is what to write about once they've decided that they're going to write.
Well, conflict sells. Heck, conflict has been the primary basis of Western (and I mean that in the classic sense) narrative for millenia. We've run through the cycle of "GNOME storms the MS desktop stronghold" and "Big Name Adopters Prove Microsoft is doomed," so the next best thing to do is troll (and I use that in the "gill net fishing" sense) for some other conflict.
Red Hat is tailor-made for this sort of reportage, because anyone half-awake who reads Linux Journal (for instance) will come across a Red Hat hating letter every now and then. Anyone who frequents Slashdot will also come across the usual contingent of "Red$Hat" comments and the like.
This article is just a reporter being a reporter, writing about a general subject (Linux) that's been done to death by everyone and their mama's knitting circle newsletter, and trying to find an angle to make this story more interesting and more widely read than all the other Linux stories.
And, now that I think of it, we ought to realize that for every simpering convert, there's going to be a nay-sayer... you know... a water cooler sage... eager for the chance to say "I told you this whole loonis thing was going nowhere."
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Back to KDE, though? Nope. Too slow for me. Someone said "Yeah... it really wants 64 meg or it thrashes a lot."
I decided I don't want a "desktop environment" for now. So I'm back to Window Maker and some well-configured menus for general use. It's sort of nice. I reclaimed a lot of HD space and my machine acts like the speedy thing it is.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I know.
Go figure.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I'm guessing it's because the site is in support of a commercial offering: the book.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
If so, I have to argue that common usage means a heck of a lot. Everything, in fact, because language is generally about communicating meaning in a consistent and reliable fashion. "Languages" are also, as I understand this from my linguist friend, defined in part by their capacity to change. A language that doesn't change from time to time for whatever reason is, by that definition, dead.
In the 23rd century, maybe they will be calling cheese graters floppy drives for some crazy reason, and if saying "floppy drive" to a reasonably acculturated person chosen at random on the street makes them think of shredded cheese, well, guess what? "Floppy drive" will have come to mean a thing that you use to grate cheese.
In this case, I think we have to acknowledge that the word hacker is no longer owned by hackers because it has passed into common parlance.
With all that said, here are two reasonable representations of "common usage":
From Merriam-Webster Online:
Main Entry: hacker
Pronunciation: 'ha-k&r
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1 : one that hacks
2 : a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity
3 : an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer
4 : a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system
I don't think there's an organization in the United States that could lay valid claim to canonical authority, considering the plethora of conflicting style-guides and so on. In this case, though, I think most would agree that Meriam-Webster is certainly respectable, and could lay claim to having their finger on the pulse of common usage. Unfortunately, the Oxford English Dictionary isn't available for online perusal, because they could lay claim to representing the parent dialect.
But what the M/W definition represents is a marginal victory for hackers of the benign variety, as does this one, from the Wordsmyth English Dictionary and Thesaurus:
hacker
SYL: hack-er
PRO: hae kEr
POS: noun
DEF: (informal) 1. a computer programmer who is expert at correcting programs, and who is perceived as an obsessive or reclusive person devoted solely to computers.
DEF: 2. a computer user who is able to penetrate carefully protected computer networks, such as those of a government.
In both definitions, we see both definitions living side by side, with an edge in precedence given to the more benign variety of "hacker."
I'm curious, by the way, what you call the American Civil War. Here in Virginia, some of the locals still call it something other than the Civil War, and they, since they're the descendents of the ones who rebelled and even started the armed hostilities, ought, following your logic, to be the ones who get to decide what it's called. That's a perogative most textbooks written to sell in California and Texas (which is to say "most textbooks") deny them.
I guess I'm just fine with everyone thinking "hacker" means vandal, anyhow. It doesn't change what I do one bit, which lately involves hacking on a nasty bit of proprietary software at work that made the mistake of using .dbf files even as the marketing droids try to sell us a multi-$1000 "conversion package." No coding is involved, just widespread spoofing of some indexes the designers must have thought others would be too dense to find. When I'm done, the taxpayers around here will have saved thousands of bucks, instructions on how to do what I did will be sent to other customers of the company that inflicted the horrible blob of code on us all, and I will remain a "non hacker" because there aren't any around here to confer the honor, which I understand is one of ESR's requirements for the title.
Guess I'll just have to wait for a local certification board to form.
I'll also wait to call what I'm doing "a hack," because that would upset the boss. I'll just call it "flurbing" and tell him it's a geek word for using something for other than its intended purpose.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I fell out of my chair when he talked about doing a "Saving Private Ryan kind of thing."
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
That aside, having looked at my own work habits I agree that E probably ought not be the "banner bearing" wm.
Initially (the 0.13, 0.20 releases, anyhow) it looked like they'd go with FVWM2. I was cool with that. They even provided a nice theme to show what you could do with something I'd previously associated with a bad Win Explorer knock-off.
In the end it doesn't matter: GNOME dox are perfectly up front about being able to change wm's, state that GNOME is (conceptually) wm agnostic, and a menu is provided to change wm's once GNOME is brought up the first time.
I think the Linux-on-the-desktop issue is going to be resolved in part by the efforts of workplace advocates, not solely shrinkwrapped packages. We're just going to have to earn our advocacy spurs by ensuring that if Linux desktop machines are implemented in our workplaces, our coworkers get good guidance on all the choices they have. And we'll have to save the gargoyles and flaming wallpaper for lunch break.
Sorry. That was a real digression from the original point. I don't get near the GNOME/window manager discussions too often, so I've got a lot pent up.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I don't think he came anywhere near making a statement like that. He was speaking to the relative difficulty of correctly installing Linux on a computer. From the sounds of it, he's done it on a machine he didn't put together himself.
He's also stated he likes Linux and has fun with it.
I've had the luxury, now that I think about it, of having done my installs on a box that has nothing left of the original purchase but the power supply and the floppy drive. Popping the hood hasn't been necessary thanks to that. Of course, it wouldn't be necessary, anyhow, because I don't buy hardware on the bleeding edge. I buy stuff that was new technology over a year ago.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Slack was my first distro. I didn't do anything "serious" with it, but it just required some reading to install, and it worked the first time.
Debates these days about the relative difficulty of each distro strike me as ludicrous. I've installed Debian, two releases of Slack, and 3 releases of Red Hat, and I'm a 98 pound weakling when it comes to this stuff. The worst trouble I ever had was forgetting to mark a bootable partition from Disk Druid under RH.
The IT people at work snicker at me behind my back because I never remember how to mount a network drive under Win95 and think I'm insane for insisting that installing the Novell Netware 32 bit client and then removing it but leaving the dll's it put there behind improves the Microsoft Netware client.
If I'm saying "it ain't that hard," it ain't that hard.
Of course, consider this about my IT people at work:
IT Guy: I need the quote marks stripped from that file. Could you fire up Word and do that before you send me the file?
Me: I'm sick of Word. I think I've got perl on this machine. I'll write something and have it to you.
IT Guy: Perl...? That's... a...?
Me: Oh, it's for stripping the quotation marks from text files.
IT Guy: Oh. Cool.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I tend to move people in my office toward WordPerfect when I can, just because it's the WP of choice among the administrators at the school I work at. Unfortunately, Linux-on-the-desktop here isn't too likely. Our primary app is a bloated, nasty thing that tries to "emulate" a Mac look-n-feel within windows. Consequently, my one-man war against Redmond is carried out on the applications side, with the exception of Access, which allows me a convenient back door to the school app's dbf files and spares me running 8 meg of app over a 10baseT net with 100 other clowns. Perl scripts are underway to cure that, too, but Access does what I need it to.
I don't think the author of that piece was too out there. I also concentrate on Windows 95 from time to time because it helps when I provide support to people. They don't want to hear me crying about better alternatives, and neither do the IT managers here. They just want me to help them.
In the mean time, I'm looking forward to seeing what Corel has to offer with the whole desktop Linux thing.
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I start with the big green gnome-print, then it's something like :
settings/window manager
But when I get the window manager box up, nothing's there, and if I click it, it dies then restarts and there's still nothing.
Is there somewhere else I can go to pick a window manager other than Enlightenment?
I mean, it seems like a nice enough WM, but I've got time, energy and affection invested in Window Maker. I also depend on BlackBox for protracted GIMP sessions because of its small footprint. Enlightenment just isn't in the cards right now.
In general, there are chunks of this that are pretty nice. I'm speaking, by the way, as someone who's never coded anything more than some perl to catalog all the dirty words in the Starr Report. So, as a lowest-common-denominator, windows refugee kind of guy, I'm saying Gnome is pretty nice. It's purtier than KDE and wants less of my precious 32 mb. It doesn't thrash around as much, and feels more like I want it to feel.
There are bugs, but there's been worse than this out there in the past. If it kills the Gimp or Word Perfect out from under me, I'll hate its guts, but for now it seems ok. It'll only get better. It's one of the few projects where I'm tempted to break my usual silence and send bug reports, even if every other luser on the block is sending the same ones.
Anyhow... if someone can point me to where to get Window Maker back, I'll appreciate it.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"Give me $20 worth of pudding, or kill me."
util-linux-2.8-11
In turn, from the RH 5.2 distro disc:
310971 Oct 14 07:38 util-linux-2.8-11.i386.rpm
There.
Now I'm going to lunch with my girlfriend, who's existence I can't prove with cut-n-paste (you just have to take it on faith, which I fault no one reading for not having) and forget this morning.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"Give me $20 worth of pudding, or kill me."
Ok, cut-n pasted the wrong package...
However... to save some shred of my tattered reputation...
rpm -q -f
util-linux-2.8-11
I'll be shuffling off to shoot myself now.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"Give me $20 worth of pudding, or kill me."