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Qchem

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Posts posted by Qchem

  1. Then become a tester. Developers honestly *love* testers, and you'll learn a helluva lot working through problems and trying to fix them collaboratively. More than just installing another distro.

     

    How would we go about doing that? I've got some spare time and there are machines sat around my office not even plugged in. Feel free to PM me about it.

  2. My guess is that after all the Xorg changes, it might be a little painful to get this to work with 2007.
    Yup. I'm guessing Qchem is trying to run some legacy app that probably won't see an update anytime soon!

     

    Yeah, it's also proprietary so I can't get at the code and when a new version is released I have no idea if it will work.

     

    To save pain on my part it might be best that I try a different distro, one with Xorg 6.something

  3. Well, he has some valid points and a load of junk:

     

    1) Gaming

     

    If you're seriously in to gaming on a PC rather then console then you're probably better off with Windows and that is likely to remain the case for a long time. Cedega seems to work well for some people, but the people I know that are fanatical gamers would dismiss this as too much effort (read in to that what you will ;) ).

     

    2) Software Support

     

    Umm, this is where he misses the point, and where the average Joe he's talking about probably misses the point of Linux and software freedom too. Being pragmatic about it I can see why some people will want to buy photoshop, but how much non-gaming software that you see for sale in your local store is worth paying money for?

     

    3) Stop assuming people are Linux experts

     

    Face it, Linux is written by geeks and adding user-friendly features is pretty much bottom of their TODO lists. But, there are places for people to look for help - if they can't be bothered searching and reading (hardly need to be a Linux expert to do either of those - waddle over to google and type Mandriva help) then how on earth is anyone meant to help them.

     

    4) Hardware support

     

    Not the fault of Linux developers, perhaps instead of writing FUD he could try to lobby manufacturers to either produce binary blob drivers (will do at a push) or produce true FLOSS drivers. He probably would have more wieght with them than an army of Linux heads.

     

    5) Too many flavours

     

    Someone give this guy a copy of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, he just doesn't get it at the moment.

     

    6) OS zealots

     

    He has a point here, but without people preaching how good Linux and other OS's are how would the masses actually learn of their existance in this MS dominated world.

  4. I'm a big SGI fan too, there's a couple of octanes and a origin 2000 hanging around the office. Whilst they're pretty much useless for research these days I can't bring myself to throw them away!

     

    In my professional life I'm a computational chemist and there's a UK wide working party that have just bought a new computer as a central resource. It's an SGI altix with 224 Itanium 2 cores, 896 GB of RAM and some silly number of TB of storage. Perhaps that's what's helped bring SGI back to life ;)

     

    I really hope they survive.

  5. This is with a 2007 install and gnuplot-4.0.0-10 rpm just installed from urpmi.

    And what should I do?

     

    You should probably check if anyone has reported the bug to mandriva and if they haven't, report one.

     

    If you're desperate to use gnuplot now, perhaps you could uninstall the rpm and install from source.

  6. The basic answer is security. You're not supposed to be able to write (or more importantly overwrite) files that are of a general importance to the OS - those that are found in the root partition.

     

    Also, it's good security practice not to log in as root (same in any OS) so this option is disabled by default. The way to edit files as root is to either use the su command to change to the root command from a terminal, or to use the kdesu package or similar (e.g. press ALT-F2 and type kdesu konqueror).

  7. You will be able to do this as a shell script, basically you can just create a file which contains the commands you wish to run. It is good practice to start the script with

     

    #!/bin/bash

     

    and end it with

     

    exit 0

     

    so that a new session is started and exited cleanly. To make the file executable, either right click on it and change the permissions or via the command line:

     

    chmod +x nameofscript

     

     

    Hope this helps you get started.

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