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zero0w

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  5. 2 Screen Cards on Mandrake 9

    in Hardware

    Posted

    I agree GF4MX is rather weak, but the nVidia driver still makes it rock comparing to other display cards on Linux.

     

    Ok, back to the topic, I remember three articles talking about setting up multiple monitors with X-Windows:

     

    1. Using the Xinerama Extensions to MultiHead XFree86 V. 4.0+

     

    2. Multiple Monitors with X Mini Guide

     

    3. Multihead Systems under Linux and Windows

     

    I think you can check into them for further detail. I believe, however, the GF 3D acceleration won't be affected by 2nd display card. But you better set up a system yourself and test them out.

  7. The battle for the desktop

    in Everything Linux

    Posted

    So I gotta ask, do we really want to win the battle for the Desktop? Is Mandrake still targetting this market?

     

    I think we do. However, "we" doesn't mean the way "we" usually means - united.

     

    Linux, by its very nature of development, prefers diversity and flexibility rather than (one-stop) integration, which is the strength of MS. The open source developers WANTED to code, test and debug their applications until THEY feel it's ready to release - technical merits and professional (programming) judgment comes before market demand.

     

    Of course, the popularity of Linux means that might be changing. However, many proprietary and commercial software vendors (namely Adobe and Macromedia) still felt worried to support Linux, to compete with their open source counterparts - maybe the pressure from MS also counted as well.

     

    The basic GUI components of Linux will almost be complete (in terms of finish and general features) by 2003 or latest 2004. Of course power users can already tweak their desktop to be beautiful, to display great fonts and such, but normal users won't expect to do that. Hence other Linux distributions should learn from Red Hat and support Xft 2 + Fontconfig by default (or at least make it switchable between normal and anti-aliased fonts).

     

    KDE 3.1 will support object prelink, combining with glibc 2.3, we will once again experience faster GUI navigation. And hopefully the updated version Kylix (3.5 or 4) will support Qt 3.x by default (Kylix 3 supports Qt 2.3 currently). Hence GUI coding will once again become easier than ever.

     

    The other component remains to be settled down is the release of ALSA 0.9/1.0 final. Sound card support still remains an issue. It should be noted that kernel 2.6 should have ALSA support by default, hence the ALSA team should make it by the time kernel 2.6 is released.

     

    Now, I will suppose all these progresses will happen sometime in 2003, but are other application developers ready/willing to catch up? That's the issue.

     

    To be honest, I don't think people will go all over Linux and dumping Windows like Oracle did. At least for those who already had Windows installed and running. However, cross-platform development should become vital to Linux. If more vendors like Borland will release cross-platform development tool like Delphi/Kylix, that may make things easier. Recent survey by Gartner estimated Linux market share will rise up to 5% (remember Mac has only 3%), hence we can't be serious to expect the desktop war will be won within 3-5 years.

     

    However, back to the point of "we", one must remember the Linux world valued diversity over uniformity. It doesn't matter how many market share MS had got; the Linux development, as well as most other open source project development, WILL CONTINUE regardless of market share. If the Linux and open source community can fend off the intrusive Palladium and other DMCA nonsense, I think we will win the battle, and I think we want to, since the monopoly has over abused its power - especially when raising licensing cost in the middle of economic downturn.

  10. dosemu

    in Virtual Machines and Emulators

    Posted

    http://www.freedos.org/

     

    Wait for the FreeDOS team to improve the project. I think when 1.0 releases we will have more or less the same level of functionality of DOS 6.22 environment. Right now it is 0.8x and does not support FAT32 yet (check update, perhaps there maybe progress on this). Also there's a DOS-CD ISO to download so you can get a trial of this before going thru any installation.

  13. ML9 and RH8

    in Everything Linux

    Posted

    Correct me if I am wrong, I think Mandrake has better internationalization support; also I think it is better optimized in terms of i586 flags as default. I guess Red Hat has wide corporate support such as Oracle or Maya, and RH8 has great font support with Xft and Fontconfig; but I imagine changes will be coming now that others can learn from what Red Hat did. And KDE 3.1 will probably embed Xft in the official release.

     

    2003 will be the strong year for Linux on Desktop, that's for sure. I imagine KDE 3.x + glibc 2.3 + Kernel 2.6 + ALSA 0.9 + XFree86 4.3 will provide one of the smoothest desktop experience ever. And if fontconfig works really good, both KDE and Gnome will be benefited from this and might rival other OS as strong desktop contender.

  23. AbiWord for mdk9.0?

    in Software

    Posted

    From what I've heard, it's because AbiWord does not support i18n (multi-language & double byte character) standard properly. But I've seen others managed to get Chinese characters working on AbiWord, so I cannot say for sure the reason behind. Perhaps when Gnome Office is out sometime next year Mandrake may again change her mind.

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