Darkelve

There is some discord from the anti-patent lobby about this move, they are afraid. Basically they are afraid IBM, with this move, wants to divert attention away from the real issue of wheter software should be patentable. I do not think software patents are a solution to either, but still consider this to be a very positive move.

Yeah... back then I didn't even know what ISO files were... Imagine that! :D

So I was searching the web and suddenly I encountered a post of mine, my very first 'cry for help' on how to install Linux. Up to now I installed and tried at least a dozen of distro's and bought 3 distro versions (Mandrake, SuSe, Linspire). That was -I think- about 2 to 3 years ago (date posted: 20 October 2002) Ah, the memories B)

Personally I don't hate Google. It's just that I'm always happy to try out new things.

I think last time I went (last Saturday) it was €15 for the DVD edition and €13 for the CD edition.

It runs under Wine, but it'll probably run a little better under Crossover Office. At least with version 6.0, I know from experience. Vanilla wine still has some issues, which Crossover has (mostly) solved.

"no cookies | no search-term records | access log deleted after 7 days" and: no advertising.

Yeah, I think this is the case, since the program exits silently. Still, they could have shown a message saying "sorry, but you have 0 days left, ...", so you would actually know what was going on. But password wasn't for Cedega, because running the installer as root did work and did not ask for a passwd.

dude, where did you find it? (plz let it be Leuven... ;) ) although my search probably wasn't very thorough, I've never been able to find a linux-mag in a paper/magazine-shop over here <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Actually, in a shop in the town I live in (Lommel). I'm sure if they can ship over there, that there will be other shops that have it. If you take a subscription, they'll send it to your doorstep, but as for me I probably will not buy every issue (december edition was nice, included Ubuntu and Fedora Core 3 B) )

I'm using it. It's just a tiny bit slower. And the comics are funny.

I'm trying to install the Cedega Time limited demo in Fedora Core 3, but it keeps bugging me with something called 'sudo' When uncompressing it ask for a passw, if I give root passwd. it's not ok and if I give my user I get: 'user' is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported. Any ideas?

Getting Fedora installed and getting all the updates took some time and patience... to make matters worse something in yum update manager seemed broken. If I would install more as 1 update simultaneously, it would appear to halt. There was an update for Yum, however, let us hope that fixed it. (Edit: I can confirm now this is the case) Anyway, I like how the hardware detection is. Much better than Red Hat 9, which was a disaster for me: no network connection, no sound, my mouse went crazy, ... but now all seems to work! I've got a nice 1024*768 resolution with a 85Mzh Refresh rate (87 also an option, but I left it at the defaults). At first I had no MP3 playback, but installing things with Yum from command line is really easy, once it is set up. The FAQ's at http://www.fedorafaq.org/ are really excellent. It took no time at all to download xmms, xmms-plugins-mp3 and xmms-skins B) nvidia card is finally recognized and gives me a WHOPPING amount of FPS (well, compared with the previous performance)! Glxgears indicates an average of 1849.400 FPS. Gnome, I guess I have to get used to it although it is not bad. The only thing I would like improved are the fonts. Mandrake's and SuSe's are nicer, IMO. Oh yeah, and it boots up slower then both. I guess I still have some tweaking to do (e.g. runlevels, ...). The boot screen could also be improved. And the dialog boxes and the GUI are not always as responsive as I would like. Well, you can guess if I complain about these details how nice all the rest is :) Gonna try Cedega with Morrowind in an instant! This Fedora thing is not so bad, provided you know a little about CLI (e.g. I did the Xmms and nvidia driver install from an xterm and mounted my windows partition with my music collection manually in this terminal.) I'm glad I tried out this distro. Not sure if I will go using it full-time, but we'll see. In the meantime, I'm pleasantly surprised. This is not a review and I know it is not coherent, but well, I had to say SOMETHING, no? Screenshot: Firefox showing a Beyond Good&Evil website, with Flash plugin (banner above) and mplayer plug-in installed (you can't see it, but yes, it works! so it plays wmv's too, not too mention my Dabatteyo Naruto movies) Setup time: less than 1 minute :)

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020381,39183538,00.htm http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050110103552944 Good news!

If you drag the icon from its entry in the "K menu" to your desktop (or panel), does this new shortcut behave the same?

You forgot aRTee's SuSe review.

You're making me curious, aRTee! :lol: And I hope without a Windows tax !

And, if I was the only one using my PC (and not my wife as well) I would still be a windows user. But the time it (sometimes) took for me to get things working was more of an inconvinience for her than just me. When I finally had the problem with X locking it was too big a thing and too important a thing for her to be without a PC for the time it would take me to fix it. Therefore I don;t use Linux on my home PC anymore - but I'll never use anything else on my server... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That X lockup has to have a solution though. Find a solution an off you go. Is it really so difficult to trouble-shoot this? Seems to me that, for the rest, you like it fine. I've had a time like you (random lock-ups) too. But in the end I found a solution (even though not optimal since I don't use 3D intensively it's fine).

Yes, that is my impression. Side note: this is at least the 3rd 'major' distro I know of based on Debian.

Thanks! ... more like an exercise in fun, really :) Of course these statements and predictions are all IMhO.

Linux & Open Source Software : 2005 in preview The year is still young and all the events that happened around Linux last year warrant a pre-view of Linux in 2005. But first, a short wrap-up of 2004. 2004 wrap-up First of all, I became a moderator for the Hardware and Workbench forum. I must say, in the short period I was able to observe this forum, it is pleasing to see how many problems from the many problems posted, are actually solved. It always gives me pleasure to mark a post with a rather complicated problem as 'Solved' (that is, if Spinynorman does not beat me to it :P ), thanks to the tireless contributions or our members. The FAQ and Tutorial section is top quality, making it easy and interesting to visit the board and solve your problem or get a response to your question. If there is interesting Linux news to share, these boards are often the first place it is posted. In short, the Mandrakeusers Community is bustling with life. 2004 saw a number of high-profile wins. Especially in the Government area. Governments are truly warming up to Open Source, the most important reasons being governments that have to balance their budget and cut costs and cutting back on license fees for software products is a tempting option. On the other hand, there are is the more ideological reason of freedom and open standards. Especially for less rich countries this is a driving force, combined with the wish to create a local software industry. For the first time since long, Microsoft products have to really compete, which can only be a good thing. Highlights: - Munich switching to Linux (LiMux); probably the project with the highest visibility - Governments in Singapore, France, Netherlands (Haarlem) switch to OpenOffice http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0...39171012,00.htm - Linux in Europe: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/06/16/linux_in_europe/ On the Linux/OSS front, there were a number of interesting events: - Novell's acquisition of SuSe and Ximian - IBM's continuing commitment to Linux, including a couple of really nice TV ads - The SCO lawsuit; while some organisations may have slowed down or even abandonned their plans to switch to Linux, the lawsuit has had the positive effect of bringing more visibility to the OS, especially in the media. - Xorg's fork of XFree, several popular distro's already adopted the new X.org, apparently without too much of a hassle. - One of the most important events of this year is, without doubt, the rise of Mozilla Firefox. Now that web access is becoming so important, Firefox makes sure websites play nice and use standards, lest they do not intend to loose 5-10% of their visitors (10% is the goal Mozilla wants to reach at the end of 2005). The initiative "Spread Firefox" has had unprecedented success, with the 2-page New York Time advertisment the icing on the cake. Firefox is replacing Internet Explorer on the Windows platform at an incredible rate. Of course it has been a long time favorite on Linux, from back when it was called Firebird (and before, Phoenix). As a side-effect, it's brother Thunderbird gets quite popular as well. - The launch of kernel 2.6, a tremendous improvement over the previous kernel. - And, of course, we have had the regular hodge-podge of distro's, functionality-wise up to par with Windows XP, with a couple surpassing its value-for-money. - A lot of much improved and new software, the process of natural selection continues. - A couple of blockbuster games ported to Linux, e.g. DoomIII and Unreal Tournament for Linux. - Attempts to create cross-distro (or distro-agnostic) installers. - A select, but important, number of software with Linux support. E.g. Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 (beta), Skype, PcAnywhere, RealPlayer, Helix Player, ... - Mandrake is back in the black! :-) - Red Hat 'splits' its distro into the Red Hat and Fedora project, which provokes mixed feelings in the community. - the birth of the Ubuntu distro - Shy attempts to pre-load Linux on retail PC's from e.g. Mandrake, Linspire, HP. - Some hardware manufacturers make an effort to provide Linux drivers. The crown, IMO, goes to nVidia, who are able to provide drivers for Linux with comparable performance to the Windows drivers and offer a not too difficult installer. Honorable notion is for HP. ATI gets the thumbs-down. The only way I see ATI catch up in the Linux space at all is if they Open Source some of their drivers. This would be a smart move, IMO. But my guess is ATI just do not care. As you can see, 2004 has been an eventful, transitional year. My prediction is that 2005 will be such a transitional year as well, but with several important keystones for the steamroller I predict Linux to be in 2006. 2005 in preview - SCO's lawsuit will die. Either because SCO is dealt a blow in one of the court cases or because they die when their finances are drained. Most probably, there will be something to celebrate this year (the wait was long enough!). - At least 1 other high-profile Linux switch in the government - Adoption of the Oasis file format by some governments, greatly boosting Open Standards and Openoffice.org in particular. - Linux server wins will continue headstrong. There is really no stopping this. - Samba will reach version 4, which will reportedly enable it to become an Active Directory Domain Controller: http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn...012-26-NW-CY-DV If it works just as reliably as the rest of the samba code, this will prove to be a major competitive challenge for Microsoft. - Further improvements in X.org - Some freedesktop.org work will come into fruitition - Some distro consolidation in 2005 or otherwise 2006. Some distro's just will not make it and either go out of business/stop their business, other distro's might be acquired by a company or another distro ('oh, the horror!', you may think, but these things seem kind of inevitable). Mandrake acquired by HP? I think not, although this is a popular speculation. - Software: * Beagle (killer app) * OpenOffice.org 2.0/Staroffice X; this version will challenge MS Office domination by offering a complete, free/cheap alternative to MS Office. Furthermore, this version looks so promising that governments and individuals who held out on switching to OpenOffice.org last year, might well change their minds this time. And, with OpenOffice Base (replacement for MS Acess), the suite is now offers the complete spectrum MS Office offers. * Mono will go full-steam ahead, with full .net 1.0 (and maybe 1.1) support - As Microsoft is faces heavy competition, I predict at least 1 lawsuit targeting the following organisations: * Samba Team (Samba) * Novell (Mono) * OpenOffice.org organization (OpenOffice.org 2.0) - A couple of distro's will surpass Windows XP in functionality, ease-of-use and value for money and make Linux even more a viable choice for the home desktop. In particular, Linspire 5.0 may surprise some people. It has very modern components (kernel, filesystem, ...), has been under development for a long time and there'll be a surprise, something to do with mp3 (and, I am guessing, Lsongs). Be sure to watch for Desktop Linux Summit reports in the middle of February! - Game developers will slowly start to discover Linux. Expect to see some more ports of games to Linux this year. Not that I know anything concrete. However, Transgaming, in one of their newsletters, mysteriously hinted they were working on porting a couple of titles. Watch them. - Wine is slowly crawling towards a 1.0 release. Following the Wine Weekly news, this year should be the year where most applications 'just work'. CrossOver your fingers! Which reminds me that Crossover now sports near-full iTunes support. And Cedega will profit from this too, I guess. Oh yeah, and Crossover Office will provide MS Office 2003 support. - The great filesystem Reiser4 will be officially adopted by a couple of distro's - systems pre-loaded with Linux will become a little more main-stream and easier to actually buy, although these will still be shy efforts. So in my view, 2005 will be a transitional, but highly important year with lots of interesting events, if you only know where to look. It will finally start to be taken seriously as a desktop and home OS, which can only be good for competition. And for us already using Linux. (Oh yeah, and phunni will discover the error of his ways and return to using Linux ;) ) 2005 here we come!

Why don't you start a new post for your problem? Perhaps Laptops&Portable devices would be an appropriate forum.

Maybe because the source is available to everyone? Open Source does not mean you can't charge anything. Free as in speach, not free as in beer, is the motto that applies here, I suppose.

you mean "the distro's installer blows with my hardware" <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Possibly... still I can't understand why the LiveCD would detect just about everything and the installer going berserk on me when installing packages (error installing packages, maybe not enough space, bla bla, even though the partition I gave it has 43Gigabyte!). Then I'm thrown into an obscure package management tool with incomprehensible menus and options. In any case, the reason did not make any difference in deciding to install another distro.

Maybe, but some of us have to find out the hard way. Me included... Running this from a Fedora box now although I swore never to go near a Red Hat distro again after the disaster I had with RH9. Ubuntu LiveCD is great (see my review), but the distro's installer blows... it's like it's from the stone age or something. So I installed something that would not take long to install and give that a try. Choice... ah yeah this feels good.

Well, being bored in the weekend I decided to try out Ubuntu. So I downloaded the LiveCD, "Warty" release. Here are, in short, my findings: (See also: aRTee's SuSe 9.2 review: http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showtopic=10630 ) Gnome 2.8 really IS very user-friendly. The minimalist approach makes it very easy to find things. There is a smart selection of included applications, giving you about everything you need for most home users, but nothing more. Still, the applications including are probably best-of-breed: Gaim for IM, Evolution for mail, Firefox for web browsing, Totem for movies, Rythmbox for sound. Further Gthumb, File Roller, Gimp, GnomeMeeting, ... These applications all share the same feeling of a simple user interface and being able to tackle a limited number of tasks, but tackle them as good as possible. I did notice Rythmbox did not play my mp3 files, although when I tried Ogg files there was no problem. Probably you'll have to configure this yourself later? Of course, I am guessing this point will be moot because of apt-get/synaptic. The desktop is very nice, although if I compare with Mandrake and SuSe, it could use a bit more polish; e.g. the fonts are a bit worse and in a couple of other locations a bit more attention to detail and polish should be given as well. The default theme, however, is very calm, very warm. Hardware detection is excellent. Up to now, the only distro that recognized all my HW correctly was SuSe... until I put in this Ubuntu CD. Including my nVidia Geforce MX440 card... strangely lsmod shows loaded: Glxgears gave a satisfying (at least, I think) 424.200 FPS; Ubuntu/Debian apparently detected it had to set nVagp to 1, while in SuSe I had to do this manually before the random crashing stopped. At 1024*768, I get a 101Mhz refresh rate in Ubuntu. In SuSe only 81Mhz, although in SuSe I might have a slightly higher resolution. This Ubuntu thing is FAST. I'm talking about a machine with specs: AMD AthlonXp 1600+ 256MB DDR Ram While some other LiveCD's slugged away with these specs *cough* SuSe 9.2Live *cough* , the Ubuntu LiveCD is about the fastest I have seen. Just makes you wonder how it would speed along on a fresh install. I tried connecting to a Shared folder on our Local network as well, and this was no problem. Nice! File management was convenient, although I did not like a new window popping up for each folder I opened. I 'solved' it by specifying to open each window in a 'browser', but I'm not sure if this is the correct solution. It's definitely not straightforward. What I thoroughly enjoyed, however, was the "breadcrumb trail" the file manager offers you in the dialog boxes. This makes it trivial to switch back and forward to folders you've been already. All available partitions were detected and mounting them is as easy as clicking them. after which they show up on the desktop. My first impression: Ubuntu is a distro that, after installing and some small configuration, will be usable even for people with little knowledge of computers, let alone Operating Systems. The default desktop gives little choice, but it also gives little room to make mistakes. But I suspect this can easily be overcome with the included Synaptic program. Ubuntu's excellent hardware recognition and speed are yet more reasons to try it. In some places, it might lack the polish of some distro's that have a longer history, but I expect this situation will not exist for much longer. I am guessing that Ubuntu will be a boon especially for 'older' systems, but even if you have newer hardware, give it a try! Two thumbs up! Edit: obligatory screenshot attached