Gowator

erm /bump anyone :D

basically how to block by referrer not IP?

Nice to hear and see people help each other :)

Yep, I got curious and tracked who it was :D

Here's the email reply from the guy I randomly corrected his English...

> Thanks. The text on the website was my first draft. I never got around

> correcting it. Too buisy, so I also didn't need it for my company. But you

> are of course true that it wasn't very professional.

>

> Thanks again. And if I can do something for you sometime, let me know.

>

You already are .... I use Joomla and rsgallery.... !!!

When you help someone else in the open source community I always like to

believe it always comes back... you will help someone else and they will help

someone else and eventually someone will help me who learned it from someone

you helped...

Beleive it or not this turned out to be completely true in 1 day....

The guy does use the component and has been helped by the guy I helped :D

You gotta love opensource :D

All audio CD's are NOT mountable- for the very simple reason there is no filesystem in there, only RAW data tracks!

You are obviously referring to mounting to a virtual filesystem (like KDE's "audiocd" vfs), which is a very different story- but an audio CD can NOT be mounted to a real mount point- period.

Ok, so obviously I'm confusing what Mandriva says vs. what the actual software is doing.

Yep I haven't done this for a while in mandriva but it (last time I checked) does some weird thing with audio CD's which basically rips the to ogg and then presents them like a filesystem and also as tracks.

It sounds like what you mean is when I put in an audio CD and right click on the drive icon and select "mount", and the icon changes to a mounted icon, it's not actually "mounted". I'm sure you can see why that would confuse me.

Absolutely... personally I don't like that sort of "white lie" but its a mandriva type thing meant to help n00bies .. when in reality it just confuses them (IMHO)

All semantics aside none of that changes the fact that a random selection of cd's won't "play" - and that is the issue I was trying to resolve. Does it matter what ripping software is being used if the disc is unreadable by the hardware or operating system? I don't think so, and that was my point regarding software selection.

YES! That is what they were saying from the begining...

There are different levels of UNREADABLE....

What mandriva does is some ripping on the fly... then it looks like it has files on the CD which it doesn't really have... but the more serious CD ripping software uses increasing levels of error correction AND more or less wants exclusive access to the CD... If the CD is "fake-mounted" (for want of a better word) it doesn't have exclusive access...

Also any automatic stuff that starts off interferes so if you have a CD payer auto start when a CD is put in it will interfere... GRIP et al have a lot of options for working with difficult and damaged disks...

Gowater:

Can you confirm, 100% of the unreadable CD's are audio CD's?

Yes, a couple are multimedia (a data track and audio tracks together on one disc). Of those few, most

of them will appear readable, but then be unable to rip some or all of the audio tracks. The data tracks are accessable no problem.

OK, this is a good diagnostic... we'll continue....

See the earlier paragraph - I certainly didn't know that the disc were treated differently this but it makes sense. That's why people like me need these forums - to get the info.

"The drive is three months old and hardly used (less than 30 discs prior to this project) - and I've never

in 25 years needed to clean a cdrom drive"

Whatever, I know people who never use a safety or who don't wear seat belts too. I also know of many people who shoot their balls off because they don't use a safety or need plastic sugery because they refuse to wear a seatbelt.

In a few occaisions Ive found taken the drive apart and reassembling it after a good clean works.

Interesting analogies, but I'm not sure how they apply. Regarding the "to clean or not to clean" issue, I was simply trying to point out why I didn't believe - within my experience - that the drive being dirty was likely, given the age and use level and environment of the drive. My opinion on that hasn't changed. I've also never found a vcr cleaning tape to make any difference either. When the vcr started to act up, and I used a cleaning tape, it has never made any difference. The vcr still needed service or replacement. My personal opinion - most so called "cleaning" products aimed at electronic devices are designed to make money for the seller by capitalizing on the fears of the consumer. Kind of like the home alarm companies and insurance industry (I hope all your ball-less friends didn't get robbed while recovering from their plastic surgery - ). The cost vs. benefit ALWAYS leans heavily toward supplier and 99% of the consumers see no real benefit. At least in a vcr the tape actually touches the head. I was under the belief that CD's used light and the only physical contact was the spindle on the disc, therefore I find it difficult to believe that anything other than airborne dust would effect the drives ability to read a disc, leading me to the conclusion that newer drives are less likely to need serious cleaning.

My experience is otherwise, Im not pushing cleaning products, Ive found the most effective to be opeining the thing up and giving it a good blast with compressed air ... and remove any accumulated fluff... at the same time when you put it together making sure its all aligned .. this can often get knocked out of kilter in shipping etc.

Regarding tape cleaning (which I know a LOT about from backup tapes and looking after huge robotic tape arrays) the time to clean the heads is not when they stop working... quite a few tape technologies actually have the cleaning on the lead-in and lead-out of the tapes... but usually the damage is done by abrasion well before that.... so you have to clean regulary... and pre-emptively to stop the damage...

CD's are somewhat different... but you can still damage them with small particualte matter ...they spin very quickly so small bits of dust are fired around ... however head-misalignment also occurs and can occur with a single bad disk which is unbalanced and hence rotates off centre causing shaking...

Anyway the point is that sticking a loaded pistol in your pants might not go off the first time or even the next 100... the chance doesn't change each time... according to how many times you do it, the chance depends on exterior things... if you have used a poor CD (heavily scratched, unbalanced etc) then that can misalign the drive... and it doesn't matter if its the first time you use it or the 1000th...

Whew... OK - Back to the thread...

Taking scarcrows advice and reading up on copy protection led me to the cdfreaks forums and I found a few comments on the drive model I am having trouble with - none good. A trip to the toshiba website found a firmware upgrade, but it claimed to be for speed not compatibilty.

My experience of CD writers is its not worth paying for quality unless its plextor... I have an old SCSI plextor 4x still works perfectly ... 90's vintage... but many manufacturers simply use cheaper components and hack the drive BIOS to the end of restricting what you can play... and in the end the drive doesn't last any longer than a "decent" cheaper one... and the drives are manufactuered to be semi-disposable nowadays anyway... the manufactuerers seem to figure you will change it for a new technology after a few months so don't seem to really put any effort into build quality. This seems to mean that many fail earlier even than expected... but largely its the poor mounting and alignment and can be fixed.

Of course, the upgrade is a windows executable (I swear I will never buy another product from a company that forces you to use that P.O.S. operating system). I booted to xp and updated the firmware and still - while running xp and after booting back to mandriva - no go on the discs. SO friends - here's where the thread ends.

Not necassarily, as has been said try the serious ripping SW... it has all sorts of add-ons for circumventing this.. Try lower speeds etc. etc. cdparanoia etc etc. (which itself has increasing levels of agressiveness and error correction)

Clearly , the drive is of inferior manufacture and will be donated to the local school. BTW since I have to take the frigging' thing out anyway -

I agree, but sometimes just reassembling it can fix this, often its the shipping that misalignes them..

just for the sake of the argument - I will disassemble, inspect, clean and try it one more time before drop kicking it. I will truthfully report my findings here and either eat crow - or serve it! Thanks to all of you for your time reading and posting on this and all my other threads.

Don't expect to see anything astounding.... Ive done this for others and they have said what exactly did you do... and in truth I just reassembled it ... then its worked... nothing obvious (obviously its always worth cleaning while your inside) but jusat carefully reassembling has in more than one case fixed it.

OK, this should have decent bandwidth

http://sfjlord.free.fr/ulteo/

anyone try let me know

thx

Have yo tried just changing repository? might just be one with borked hdlists?

Can you confirm, 100% of the unreadable CD's are audio CD's?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the fact that the disc's won't MOUNT has nothing to do with the type of ripping software I'm using or if the disc is a data or audio or whatever, right?

This is important because in theory you don't really mount an audio CD.... although as I remember Mandr* does some funny stuff with them to make it "appear" mounted...

This points to an incompatibility between your drive and the actual CD's... perhaps it is a driver issue but perhaps not but the drive shouldn't be mounted to rip it.

.The drive is three months old and hardly used (less than 30 discs prior to this project) - and I've never in 25 years needed to clean a cdrom drive

In a few occaisions Ive found taken the drive apart and reassembling it after a good clean works..

Well, I have not been able to get it to complete an install. It attempts to format the partition after installing the system! It uses gparted, but even if I prep the partition ahead of time, it wants to do a routine that is a little borked. Oh, well, it is an alpha.

If it works like the kanotix installer you can probably hack the install.

The kanotix one is basically a cp -Rp that then finishes and installs grub ...

Ive btorrented it and leaving it open seeding pretty much indefinately...

Like tyme I don't wanna completely loose all bandwidth but if anyone wants a download mirror I can host it no problem, just not with 10,000 connections.

A couple of days ago I checked out the home page of one of the core dev's for rsgallery a Joomla component.

The guy is starting his own web design business and he had a few grammatical errors etc. on his site so I emailed him and corrected them.

He was really great and said if I needed any help just ask... but I said no need, you are already helping me by helping others with rsgallery and in OpenSource what you give often comes back ...

I checked my charity website this monring and someone had posted two banners, made in Gimp anonymously, they didn't even have the disease... and much nicer than the quick one I knocked up...

Some days things happen that restore your faith in humanity and just generally helping people when you can.

Gowator: is there any distro you don't have a major complaint about?

Debian, Gentoo, Slackware and I can't find much wrong with FC... ;) and I'm holding out for Ulteo adding to that list! and mandriva isn't so far down the list... and *buntu is well up the list (surprising though you might find that)

Mandriva's failures are largely management issues IMHO... *buntu the lack of adressing the sudo stuff in public (not the sudo stuff itself but the discouragement from actually talking about it)... but these are not show stoppers.

I don't use slackware or FC ... and you know why I don't use Gentoo (its just a time sucker) but that doesn't mean I think they are not fine distro's...

Suse last time I ordered from them did the whole marketing thing 110% ... I mean nice box set, good customer service and feedback, DVD and CD editions for 32 and 64 bit... at less than the price of a powerpack... on one arch and one medium...

The hardware support really is excellent ... but the philosophy behind

It's a long standing issue with Suse and has nothing to do with Novell. When I tried 9.0 it didn't even play mp3 files out of the box. In fact since Novell bought them Suse become much more open even if it's still not able to play DVDs out of the box. IMHO it's a business decision and has nothing to do with respecting or not the spirit of GPL.

is a show stopper for me....

Its not the lack of MP3 support out of the box ... its the deliberate crippling of Xine

a ) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.

b ) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.

So it is a GPL issue.... strictly speaking the source should be available with precise instructions how to remove the hacks and recompile into a binary without limiting playback of DVD's... but that is the letter of the GPL... what is more disconserting to me is the spirit... because negative/limiting modifications for no reason but to prevent users choice to install libdvdcss is completely against the spirit.

p.s. Here is what OpenSounrce means to me....

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=37704

While despite boasting great hardware support, they deliberately break multimedia programs, it's not the fastest at booting (fedora, mandy, debian, gentoo, to name a few boot far quicker than suse), and the default gnome desktop is far from snappy.........same goes for their buggy/broken version of openoffice.

 

IMHO, there should be a mandatory x-kill button on every opensuse desktop, because you need it alot. I'm sorry, but the last time I sat with a suse 10.1 install on my PC, the last thing that passed my mind was "robust".

I didn't find Suse so buggy, though I had a older official non-free version, still have it somewhere... but that one aspect summed it up for me. Boot times I can live with, to some extent it goes with the great HW support which actually is very good I didn't know if the xine is crippled in Opensuse or not but if it is this is what I really mean about them distancing themselves from Novell.

Let's just judge OpenSuSe on its merits for now, not on emotional/ethical/... arguments.

I see your point but honestly I can't seperate the two... (if we group those together as philosophy) ...

The actual act of deliberately hacking Xine to prevent it using libdvdcss is an over riding factor ... its bad in a way I can't even begin to describe ... trying to keep to non OWT examples... but it would be like someone buying art for the sole purpose of using it to burn, its just wrong... or going to a party with the sole aim of drinking everone elses booze and then taking the unopened bottles home ... and then justifying it saying you could have drunk them at the party but you decided t save them for later. OK these are all sorta lame, but what Im trying to express is this shows zero respect for the programmers for xine.

They are taking the IP and the code of the programmers for Xine and then deliberatly breaking it...

... its somewhat a question of respecting the aims of the GPL.... not the letter.

The idea of the GPL is to add/extend/build etc. not deliberatly cripple so I can't see how to seperate the philosophy from the technical merits. Disabling a component for stability or something is one thing but doing it to make descisions for the users on using Xine to play DVD's or not is IMHO quite different...

I realise you can install other media players or get the Xine source from xine.hq etc. but I think you have to judge a distro as a whole not as a pure technical thing... there are a lot of distro's available and many of them are excellent so one has to apply other criteria to make a choice... one of the reasons I like Gentoo/Debian is the social contract and clearly expressed goals... technically I find the Gentoo one tiring...compiling everything soon turns into a hooby in my experience but this should be no surprise because its clearly written into the philosophy... and if you want to spend hours compiling and learning then that is a good philosophy... Open suse doesn't seem to have a clear philosophy, it doesn't say "our philosophy is to hack the product so it doesn't work as you want it"

As much as I would like to support some of the OpenSuse deves because they have nothing to do with Novell, it sucks. They have a lot of talent and there $$(managers)$$ are crap. They really should move on.

I agree.... they need to make a clean cut ... perhaps Novell will do it for them in changing all the distro names to SLED XXX ??? I am fully behind the "Open" part.... its the tenuous and not well defined link to Novell gives me a bad feeling...

I like me some bsd my self, but I don't think there are enough drivers to make it work.

 

If I had my choice Solaris :) cause its just cool, plus every buisness and there brother uses it and coding/programy is good on it too.

That's somewhat irrelevant with the OLPC.... since the drivers are all for a single model.... with very limited hardware and expandability (I don't see the kids going out and buying add-ons)

From what I read the screen/display is going to be a one off driver for the OLPC anyway... so the smaller resource footprint of BSD might be a better choice...

In the end... almost anything except Windows is a better choice so the kids learning to program be it linux/*BSD or Solaris are learning real skills...

Hello Gowater. The comment about the nvidia driver could maybe be a little unfair. That driver is intended to cover a lot of versions of nvivia video cards after all. I would quess a driver for a specific card would be very small. I do accept and take on your point though.

 

The $100 Project would likely have just a basic video card and a driver specially tailored for it so it would be quite small. On top of that I don't think the Project necessarily will have to be a heavily hacked down Linux OS. Just so long as the HD in it is around 4Gb or more it will be OK. It costs as much to make a small HD as to make a larger one so I don't think HD size wll be an issue. I believe that most of the cost was for the powering mechanism. I don't know if this correct but it would seem to make sense.

The kernel design of *BSD is IMHO unarguably technically better and more efficient ... but I use linux because memory and CPU cycles are cheap....

Technically better is not necassarily more practical or useful and the microkernel vs monolithic vs the present linux 2.6 mix is as old as linux ....

What it does mean is that linux has developed along with hardware and takes advantage of the new hardware often at an efficiency cost whereas *BSD maintains the efficiency even where its mostly not needed.... because HW costs are so low compared to the old arguament at the time in the famous post by linus....

In this particular case though the HW is very limited and resources limited.... so it is perhaps pertinent?

A very direct anaology on HW support is OS-X... because apple control the HW and the BIOS...

Here is the techy stuff

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_xnu.html

Ive noticed a huge amount of referrers lately to whom I have no access to the original link...

A large amount probably being for instance myspace ....

The problem is I can't see if this is positive or not...

I'm not so worried about myspace one way or another but I am getting referrals from afdiag.fr

This is somewhat worrying, they provide some service to members only... I don't know what because you have to pay to be a member... but essentially probably what I'm doing for FREE.... (see sig)...

I'm somewhat worried that the "charity" you have to pay to join ??? and more importantly from my POV you have to pay to see what they are offering... will be posting very negative things about my site... and perhaps encouraging its members to make trouble for me.

A while ago I was "investigated" by the French telecoms authority, a bit of detective work on my part showed a probable complaint I'm guessing because my site wasn't in French... the law is very vague over this... personal sites are explicitly OK in any language... but buisiness sites are required to prove they are explicitly not for French nationals...(at least in theory) in practice noone cares so long as noone complains! So you could offer a service for non-French people for instance for immigration or translation etc. but its all very vague...

My Joomla site has membership, the legal advice I have is this means its NOT a home page...

So far I have a disclaimer that the site is for non-French people....but I'm a bit worried that things are going to get hot?

I would like to block referrals from this domain ... or even all domains where the access is restricted. This is a philosophical view as well.... I don't beleive medical info should only be available to people who pay money...

Im fine them having a forum you need to join to post... but blocking people reading a forum for medical issues is IMHO immoral.

Any ideas?

For LinuxBIOS to ever become a mainstream option, it will have to work with Windows as well

Quote honestly I don't see why?

Phoenix exists in a niche, mainly OEM's like HP who want to customise a BIOS... or laptops etc.

It does depend what you call "mainstream" of course... Is the Mac BIOS mainstream? (for instance)

In many ways DRM stuff will provide an impetus all by itself IMHO... now what would provide an impetus is probably a HW LAMP server implementation with linux bios There are over 60 million apache servers on the internet, many runing linux or *BSD or even Solaris... http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/12/index.html

It matters not a bit to most hosters if they can run windows....they can choose from *BSD or linux and a slot in 19" rack server with linux bios (fully supported and designed to run on it) would be a real boost...

Sounds like a distro to me, not saying it wasn't good, I did like it the times I tried, but uh....

I dunno (honestly) ... I don't think its a simple answer or a definitive one because exactly what a distro is is somewhat a philosophical debate....

From my perspective a fundamental part of a distro is its package management. We equate Debian with apt, mandr* with urpmi (and we could split hairs on that one), Gentoo and portage, arch with pacman etc.

This indicates some fundamental split for any other YAD....

(I'm not saying its the only criteria)

*buntu still uses apt but has its own repo's... and its own deb's... thus it mostly fits that criteria.... like say Corel linux or Linspire... etc.

Suse is Suse, a slackware base with RH package management... ?? not sure how that fits into my criteria but Suse is synonymous with YaST ... it makes it a defining thing to associate Suse with (really trying hard here not to mention ....soft.)

Now many "distro's" have taken these bases (and others) and called themselves distro's. ... but does that make them distro's? For instance is Kubuntu a distro or a "flavor" of Ubuntu?

The existance of distro-watch et-al doesn't help clarify this... because packagers of flavor's of pre-existing distro's are somewhat pigeon-holed into calling it a distro... so kanotix is listed as a distro on distro-watch and others BUT I believe that's largely semantics.

Debian inparticular has many flavors.... netinstall, business-card image etc. all have different installers and add different things... kantotix IMHO fits into this slot... its a unstable/testing installer...

The forum/IRC etc. is mostly concentrated on fixing bugs in unstable... and kanotix adds fixes and scripts .. and

The other thing it adds is some user tools, like ndiswrapper config and stuff missing from Debian.

However, and this is really important IMHO... when those tools do reach debian kano withdraws his version....

This might seem minor but IMHO its not.... kanotix is just adding "missing" user tools to Debian and as soon as these are in Debian the Debian tools are used instead... (with the exception of one - the intaller)

Sorry, I realise I'm a fanboy but I honestly beleive its these seemingly small things which are important...

Judging by the forum (where somehow we have degenerated into Italian to discuss this???) a lot of people feel the same way, the major devs except kano seem to feel the same way and as of last night kano has not announced if he will use a *buntu base or a testing base.

Just an example but if you ask for help on stable on the kano forum then noone asks why are you using stable...

The devs all seem to feel part of Debian in the larger sense and not want to seperate themselves like *buntu... into a defined seperate distro. The patches etc. are all firmly 100% Debian and part of the same tree(s) so in many ways I think this is the important defining part, not how distro-watch pigeon holes it...

Come on, thats a little far fetched isn't it?

Its what I believe.... I think kano proposed this BUT the other devs were already having issues about release cycles etc. I could aks him directly, so could you.... but I don't want to and I suspect neither does anyone using the distro... because it is sorta forcing his arm.

I don't think I am saying anything out of order to say kano is not known for his interpersonal communications skills, then again neither are many gifted people... so my impression is he floated the idea and the co-dev's had other issues... I understand why he doesn't want to track testing timewise... and I think he's looking for a compromise but not decided.

The co-devs all leaving was IMHO a little precipitous....

In the end its what you want to make it yourself ....

Kanotix is a rock-solid Linux based on Debian-Sid

I take that literally and I take the fact it doesn't say

Kanotix is a rock-solid Linux distro based on Debian-Sid

I know many of the dev's reasonably well on IRC and my impression is based largely on this...

but in the end read my sig :D

It really is a matter of definition and opinion and that's very personal but I think if you had been active on #kanotix you might have drawn different conclusions than what has been written by 3rd parties in write-ups.

(I mean that if a mag does wa write up or sticks a cover disk then they call it a distro... but IMHO that in itself doesn't make it one)

One last thought, most of the official Deb maintainers don't consider it a "distro" apart either... least wise the ones I have had contact with ...

pick a really old post to quote why don't you :P that's June.

LOL, pick an old distro why don't Ya... :D

 

but seriously I just wanted to point out that Mandrake hardware support used to be really good...

back in 8.x days we had over 100+ graphics card vendors ... so I think its comparable and the HW support on Mandr*, at least compared to other mainstream distro's has gone downhill at some point since then... IMHO as Gael and the programmers were squeezed sideways by the business types so I really still have faith in Gael... he and the intial guys did an incredible job and I see no reason he can't do it again...

Sorry guy's just wanted to firm this up....

What I'm saying is most people here know I have lost respect for Mandr* over the last few years... however non of this affects Gael's ability to pull this together. In short when Gael was in charge of its direction (before the IPO) Mandriva was IMHO one of the best, if not the best distro. Hardware support was excellent for the time, issues were a bit different then ... we had over 100 graphics chipsets, probably over 1000 including subsets.. whereas today we have SATA issues etc. but Mandrake was as good if not the best at the time.

After the IPO and appointment of busness types its my opinion this went downhill but this is not the fault of Duval... (leastwise he probably learned a lesson about putting business types in charge of a distro)... and his ability is no different now (just more experience) than it was when he made Mandrake out of nothing or the left overs of RH depending how you look at it.

So all this nay-saying is IMHO unfounded... I personally have every confidence in Gael and his team and comparing it to editions of mandrake after the IPO is not fair, but mostly not giving it a chance.

How about a review now tyme or Ix ? In the release notes I don't see anything revolutionary.

Yep that is a fair point... I don't know if I might be interested because I don't see any clear indication of what it is. I haven't read every possible page on the site but is it Debian based or what?

I can see why people think its smoke and mirrors but that seems to be an information thing... IMHO it needs some bold statement by the team on the first page as to what exactly it is... for people who are not first time linux n00bs...?

Ulteo Alpha Sirius is out. However, I am asking for help. Ulteo needs more ftp servers for distribution. I am currently downloading at a rather pathetic pace, no doubt because all of us are using the same inadequet machine. If you can offer some space, please let us know at http://www.ulteo.com

Ix, I have space but its on a limited access server...

I could put it on my home machine but bandwidth would be limited like tyme... and I only have 1Mbit upload,

My ISP gives me 10GB free on the backbone, Ive never needed it ... since 1Mbit is OK for my own purposes but Ulteo are welcome to use it...

However overall Gael should contact my ISP ... they have a lot of linux mirrors and actively support linux and they are the 2nd largest in France (but growing fast) ... if your in the know then you can have anyone contact me and work out if they want to use the free space while they are sorting out a permanent hosting.

Meanwhile I hope they succeed I have every confidence !

Well sent gael an email to see if they want to use the 10GB...

Yeah and now the dudes off to make YAD (yet another distro)

Actually its not public yet... I don't know what he's going to do (and I could ask) and I honestly don't think he does.

Most of the other devs have jumped ship to make YAD on unstable/testing.... quite a few people (me included) are willing to stick with it so long as its not *buntu based.

But i don't really call the new unstable/testing CD a 'distro' ... kanotix was never a 'distro' at least to the insiders...IRC was mostly "debian this and Debian that..." (if you see what I mean) basically non of the devs regarded it as a seperate distro to debian... in Mandr* terms it was basically like running cooker with plf...

pick a really old post to quote why don't you :P that's June.

LOL, pick an old distro why don't Ya... :D

but seriously I just wanted to point out that Mandrake hardware support used to be really good...

back in 8.x days we had over 100+ graphics card vendors ... so I think its comparable and the HW support on Mandr*, at least compared to other mainstream distro's has gone downhill at some point since then... IMHO as Gael and the programmers were squeezed sideways by the business types so I really still have faith in Gael... he and the intial guys did an incredible job and I see no reason he can't do it again...

I truly think that this is one of those Microsoft desperation moves in attempt to stop something it knows is gathering speed and doesn't know how to stop it or respond to it.

With all their money they can try but in the end they will have NO worthwhile effect.

 

Windows has been truly and irreversably gazumped.

All the world that is considering this project knows that it is intended to stop lockin by proprietry companies so they will NOT even look at anything to do with Microsoft for starters. To financially compete, Microsoft would have to give it for free but it still would not have the reliability, security, stability and versatility of the "$100 Project". Remember the Project includes a range of usable and applicable learning packages and not just an OS, and I am sure the people who make programs to run on Windows will not necessarily agree to their stuff being used for free or be happy if Microsoft hijacks their work to achieve its own ends.

 

It is a last ditch but ultimately useless effort by Microsoft so don't bother wasting any of your valuable attention or time with it.

 

Cheers. John.

John, agree completely but even more so.... the reason MS is so helpless is because it only knows how to buy...

One might question WHO is going to be paying for this generous set of gold plated handcuffs ..? Oh, yep the people who buy windows!

I guess their next move will be opensourcing Windows 3.11.

In all honestly *BSD would probably be the best OS in terms of the spec?

Don't get me wrong I love linux but its sometimes a throw memory and CPU cycles at it affair...

e.g.

nvidia 4,703,540 (4MB for a graphics driver?)

However like I said before I'll bet those laptops hit the black market a week after they are released... and I'll bet most families would prefer running clean water...

BOOM!

 

I thought Kanotix was pretty nice when i installed it, but seriously, I'm tired of the 500+ distros.....

 

Kanotix deves, please move to Debian if your done, thx.... :unsure:

This is sorta the point and completely not the point at the same time really, Kanotix never stopped being Debian nor ever pretended to be anything else but a taming of unstable/testing with a idiot proof installer which also happened to be an excellent liveCD. So Kanotix was never really a distro as such just a Debian installer on one hand, a working and tirelessly patched Debian unstable... such that you could upgrade across XFree/Xorg or the HAL/Dbus stuff etc.

Vaporware!

 

im betting it'll be some silly web2.0 thingy that uses the internet for far too much. I'm also expecting hardware support to be mediocre, if Gael's work on mandrake/iva is anything to go by.

 

James

Being fair I don't think that was Gael... leastwise in recent years!

back then he was in charge mandrake hardware support was very good... probably the best back in 8.x days...

either way, I wish him all the luck...

p.s. forgot to mention, it might only really work in France as a web based distro...because of bandwidth restrictions in other countries etc. In France 22Mbit download is the norm...within Paris for almost nothing... or actually free..

I have a friend with no PC who bought their package simply for the free phone call and got internet and 100 channels essentially free. (The package is €30, a normal phone line is 15€ without making calls so if you spend more than €15 a mon on calls its actually cheaper even if you don't use the internet or tv channels - same way if you only want the cable channels... or just internet..)...

Thanks man ....

Your welcome to log in and poke about...

I can pm you a password etc. :D

I don't know what it is with mail servers, I just get a mental block ...?? I still haven't sucessfully got one working (well I did and broke it)... but I think it goes back to trying with qmail from source and basically getting lost.. now I just mental block!

OK now looks like

_________________

smtpd_banner = $myhostname ESMTP $mail_name (Debian/GNU)

biff = no

# appending .domain is the MUA's job.

append_dot_mydomain = no

# Uncomment the next line to generate "delayed mail" warnings

#delay_warning_time = 4h

alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases

myorigin = linuxmigrations.hd.free.fr

mydestination = linuxmigrations.hd.free.fr, localhost.hd.free.fr, localhost

myhostname = linuxmigrations.hd.free.fr

mydomain = linuxmigrations.hd.free.fr

mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8

mailbox_command = procmail -a $EXTENSION

mailbox_size_limit = 0

recipient_delimiter = +

luser_relay = nobody

_____________-

Have a /etc/aliases

and the /etc/mailname contained

linuxmigrations:/etc/postfix# more /etc/mailname

linuxmigrations.hd.free.fr

His wife and kids have been found alive. They were stranded in their car in the snow and he went off to find help. He is still missing.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/12/04/missing.f...y.ap/index.html

That's mostly good news....

Scary thing is you know you are meant to stop with the vehical but if your wife and kids were in it then it must be very hard to sit and do nothing... I mean at some point you have to realise that if you don't go then everyone might die ... lets hope he turns up alive though