linux_learner

i wasnt gonna go into security. if you'd like, i can oblidge. windows installs where it wants. apps install where they want. windows uses the registry as a pointer as to where and how things work. to "fix" windows there are extremely limited options. i used to fix windows. in fact i was doing it so much, i had to build a site to take the load off of me. (80+ contacts asking me to fix their windows). linux, i am still learning. now whats interesting is, my wife is no techie. doesnt know much except how to surf the web, check email, listen to music, and compose letters. my wife got sick of windows. she demanded linux. she wanted something that "just works". when we did run a dual boot, she would on occasion boot into windows, only to find out that she "misses" kde. she loves the gui of linux over windows. lets be clear on this. we had been running XP for like 2 years (i beta tested XP). i had tried various themes, skins, windowblinds, object desktop, and so on. i became so proficient at fixing windows, i can still in some cases, walk a person through editing the registry. (not having looked at windows in over a year has taken its toll). to be even more clear, i did BUY XP after it was released to the market at full retail rate. i no longer own/posess any windows software. in linux, i have rarely had to edit scripts, or such. the post install "just worked". thats in suse and mandrake. for me, linux "just works". i leave linux up and running for weeks, or months at a time. the last time i had a reboot was due to a power outage. i struggle with apps in linux, but then i struggled with apps in windows to. in windows it was run time errors and editing the registry, and pray it works. the other day i downloaded and installed "dansguardian". i thought i had to configure this and that. i was wrong. all i had to do was activate proxy settings in my browsers. i've had similar problems in windows. (helps to read the directions).

bvc while i thank you for the screen shot, i have already seen screen shots. my point was "so what". mac has aqua, linux has kde, gnome, and on and on. with the "looking glass" project, that could put linux ahead of other desktops in some ways. as far as the reasons why, i've simplified it down to 2 essential reasons. 1) not satisfied with current OS. 2) currious/tinkerer. while you are suffering from burnout, i dont like scripting any more than you, however i dont like OS's that do it all for you and take all the control from you. i endured that long enough with windows. i enjoy my freedoms, although sometimes the same freedoms can be annoying. which do we choose, freedoms? or lack of freedoms? btw, why would you use "windowblinds"? in linux i dont need "windowblinds". i can customise it all i want, if i want. the last time i saw "windowblinds" was on windows, in which case it cause the system to become....shall we say, more unstable.

bvc i'll admit that i am a bit biased. i never said i wasnt. the last time i saw apple/mac was before there was a mac (back in the 80's). i have grown up in the M$ world. from M$ DOS, WIN3.1 to XP. that being said, if i ever BUY another computer, it WILL be a Mac. i like the linux OS, but the Mac OS is bsd 4.4 so to me theres little difference in the kernels. i can compile either one. i can run shell on either one. just Mac has Aqua........yeah and.......... i always wondered why a Mac person would switch to linux. if Mac is all that, then why? i'm not saying it isnt all that, but it makes me wonder.

thats the sort of thing that irritates me. either answer the question or drop it. you have provided no hard imperical data to dispute what cybrjackle said. obviously you dont intend to. my personal conclusion is, your biased. nothing wrong with that. what does irritate me is that you present it like its obvious when its not. you come accross like your better than....and maybe you are, just do the curtesy to back it up. prove it. otherwise, i must conclude your full of it, and cybrjackle's arguement is more convincing since he has provided "proof".

i am not a developer. i do know however....IT IS possible. period. end of story. do you mean like M$ office? where they keep making current versions incompatible with past versions? lets reflect on history. arpanet (OSS) developed tcp/ip. MIT developed kerebos (also OSS). M$ tries to buy out the standard, then add their own code, then patent it so nobody else can touch it. gimp is an OSS version of what? photoshop (kinda). abiword/kword, etc, etc...are OSS clones of MS Word. this isnt inovation. standardization is important to. dont get me wrong. but if we just stay with standards, then we never come to anything new and we become complacent.

speaking of games.....in my previous post i forgot to mention that ps3 is supposed to run embedded linux. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/developer...,2132851,00.htm this is just speculation on my part, but that could mean great things as far as gaming for linux. watch out yall!! here comes linux, like a freight train.

reading this thread has brought some things to my mind, so i thought i'd share them. the general impression on desktop linux is, it needs killer apps. that linux needs to port more over and so forth. while there is some truth to this, i think its a misnomer. what got linux and OSS to where it is today is inovation, not porting. i think OSS needs to push the envelope and do some inovation, not so much porting. the project "looking glass" might be an example of inovation. i think that alot of projects right now are started by someone who thinks it'd be cool if they port their favorite M$ app over. like i said, this does have its place, but not at the expence of inovation. dont get me wrong, i am not saying OSS doesnt inovate, it does. just i think we're seeing more of an emphasis on porting lately than inovation. on the subject of mac vs linux; last i looked, mac had 5% of the desktop market share and linux had 5%. this is neck and neck. linux is booming over in asain countries. by the way, the 5% is refering to "licenced" or purchases. since we know linux is available for free, how many more have non-licenced copies of linux? when comparing apps, there are always die hard fans. some say photoshop is the king, some gimp. while others say mac apps rule. M$ office and IE have been ported over to mac. it all has to do with someones oppinion. as i once heard; "oppinions are like buttholes, everyone has one, and they all stink". linux can do what mac can do. the question is, why hasnt linux done it? is it because some companies dont want to make their products available for linux? i hardly think so. OSS can do anything. OSS invented kerebos and perhaps gui ( tracing the gui time line is really hard). i do know that X was started by MIT in the 80's. roughly about the same time Xerox, and IBM made thier gui's. M$ wasnt even in the picture as far as gui's are concerned. i saw the other day, an open source project of mac/darwin for x86 architecture. http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/ we also know that people make linux available to ppc. since this is true, there must be a demand for it.

gui's are a nice way to break in newbies. i would not consider myself exactly a newbie, yet my skills in linux are not as mature as they could be. gui's can also be crippling. i rely on gui's quite heavily, but can navigate reasonably ok with out a gui. in the linux world, you can and do have it both ways. this is one thing i'm relatively sure will never change. its what gives linux its strength. you have the ease of a gui for newbies, and the power of the shell for those who want it. i think yast going GPL is great news for several reasons. one it would mean other people can contribute to improve upon yast. two is, it could help unify the distro's a bit, while maintaining their uniqueness. one of the things i have heard newbies say over and over about linux, is that they wish they could install things as easily as they did on windows. while i disagree with the windows permission structure, the simplicity (to a point) would be a nice way to help newbies get into linux. imagine being able to click on a *.bin, or a *.tar.gz, or a *.rpm, or a *.deb, or whatever and a gui installer checks the package for proper installation and deps, then resolves any deps and installs it. while maintaining the option of going to a shell and running the usuall commands. gui tools should never be excluded, but rather be there to enhance the product. when gui tools get to be as powerfull as the shell, then we have something. remember with linux, we always have choice. this or that. we the user, have absolute control. i dont see that philosophy changing. its what makes linux great. gui tools are just enhancements, and should never be discouraged. just my 2 cents

this article http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php?...040309192233678 contains the story. the info is here http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF...f50-401819.html in direct competition with M$ :D oh yeah!

i think the title says it all. go read the review and lets see what you think. http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6327

i read a while ago that play station 3 is supposed to run embeded linux. :D imagine the possibilities :D

http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,...4,61412,00.html

just to be clear on this. this problem doesnt occur through out the entire site (at least not that i have noticed). it only occurs http://www.ebaycareers.com/jobsearch/index.html i went to irc.mozilla.org #mozillazine to ask why some view the site correctly and some dont. they said its a poor browser detection script and probably fails sometimes. they said it has to do with the "user agent". <Wolf> well, it looks like cheap browser detection.. so it probably fails. <Wolf> when it shouldn';t <Wolf> it doesn't seem to be using the UA <linux_learner> UA? <Wolf> User Agent. <linux_learner> is there a fix for that <Wolf> complain to the website owner? <Wolf> heh.. and most likely Mozilla is broken because of site detection, not incompatibility these are just excerpts from the conversation. if i posted all of it, it'd be really long.

i dont see this as ignorance. i see this as a deliberate attempt to be IE exclusive. if it was ignorance, why would they add the code to block browsers identifying themselves as Netscape? objStr = MM_swapImage.arguments[(navigator.appName == 'Netscape')?i:i+1];

on desktoplinux.com someone reported that mozilla didnt work with ebay http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/board/...Page=0&Session= we debated it for a bit, contimplating if it could be a misconfigured browser or what not. http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/board/...Page=0&Session= while the ebay home page displays properly, other pages may not. i decided to look at the source code and see why. i found this function MM_swapImage() { //v2.0 var i,j=0,objStr,obj,swapArray=new Array,oldArray=document.MM_swapImgData; for (i=0; i < (MM_swapImage.arguments.length-2); i+=3) { objStr = MM_swapImage.arguments[(navigator.appName == 'Netscape')?i:i+1]; if ((objStr.indexOf('document.layers[')==0 && document.layers==null) || (objStr.indexOf('document.all[') ==0 && document.all ==null)) objStr = 'document'+objStr.substring(objStr.lastIndexOf('.'),objStr.length); obj = eval(objStr); if (obj != null) { swapArray[j++] = obj; swapArray[j++] = (oldArray==null || oldArray[j-1]!=obj)?obj.src:oldArray[j]; obj.src = MM_swapImage.arguments[i+2]; notice on line 4 it has "objStr = MM_swapImage.arguments[(navigator.appName == 'Netscape')?i:i+1];". obviously their looking for sites that identify themselves as Netscape or Netscape compatible. look at the source yourself http://www.ebaycareers.com/jobsearch/index.html now i point this out not to whine, but to act upon this. we need to act here. we need the linux community to email ebay and tell them what we think about this.

OT how does rieserfs4 compare to XFS?

i am in the U.S. and i despise M$ for alot of the reasons already mentioned. M$ deprives one of choice. M$ likes ignorant customers, and will do anything to keep customers ignorant. other than their ethics (which recently consists of alot of my reasons), i have other reasons for disliking M$ products. mainly, stability and security (or lack there of). when i beta tested XP, i was impressed with it. perhaps i was impressed because i had just come from ME (it cant possibly get worse than ME). when sp1 hit, and i found that M$ had squelched the nessesary info for people to at least temporarily secure their systems, and the extent and how many flaws their were, i became enraged. i wrote M$ an email right then, and informed them i'd never buy another M$ product again. i have since broken my contract with MSN, and i no longer use M$ windows or windows products. i also actively promote linux (even at work :D ) and "inform" people about the security vulnerabilities of windows. (since i work for comcast, and occasionally set up, or have questions regarding high speed internet, i do get to tell customers all kinds of things ) muhahahaha. sometimes i love my job. i have even talked about why i dislike windows to a guy in washington state, who works directly for M$ as a supervisor in the tech department. (oh yeah) i, as a U.S. citizen, whole heartedly support the unbundeling of windows. i think the U.S. courts whimped out. i can only hope the E.U courts dont. but then, i find it sad that the U.S. cant regulate a company with in its own borders and has to rely on other governments to regulate what goes on in our borders. i guess it goes to show how weak we have become.

i use linux, nothing but linux, so help me linus!! seriously i use straight linux now, no windows. my wife gave away all of our windows software. what caused this? our first computer had windows 98. i crashed that over 20 times. most my fault. then we baught our first computer (the windows 98 one had been given to us by my folks). our new computer came with ME . oy!! was that a nightmare!! ME litterally crashed 5 times in one day on my wife. i was beta testing XP and had stopped supporting ME for my wife. XP at first seemed an improvement, but then compared to ME....anything is an improvement. i discovered XP has another screen of death, a red screen of death. i found alot of hardware doesnt work with XP, and alot of software doesnt work. basically forcing me to "upgrade". but even the software designed for XP rarely worked. XP was just a big headache. we stay in linux cause "it just works", and its true. linux does "just work". it does everything i need. i rarely see a crash, and rarely need to reboot.

windependant, i cant answer your specific questions as i have never used MNF. i did however find the howto's, enjoy. hope this helps. http://doc.mandrakelinux.com/MandrakeLinux.../MNF-User.html/ http://doc.mandrakelinux.com/MandrakeLinux...F-Booklet.html/

boring can be a wonderfull state to be in. when i was in windows, i was tense, anxious, and always wrestling with the system. it helped me learn alot about windows, and troubleshooting. i also learned that theres only so much that can be done in windows. that was my biggest frustration right there. i really hate being limited. when i installed mandrake, i cant say everything worked perfectly, but certainly better than windows. i had a mysterious problem where all of a sudden X would restart, seemingly for no apparent reason. 9.2 fixed that. i started doin cooker in 9.2, and hosed mandrake. while i am new to suse, i have had 0 problems as far as system stability. the main thing i fight with is various apps. gaim doesnt seem to want to sign on. somethin about SSL. yes its the current version. yes i tried compiling it. but really, since there is kopete, and linux offers alternatives to its alternatives, this doesnt slow me down at all. it is nice to know that i can boot my system with no worries. or even leave it running with no worries. i'll take being bored any day.

with M$ pushin a negative campain against linux, its free publicity. i dont see this as "bad" publicity per se'. i see this as just exposure. since M$ is bashing a little known OS, those who dont know about it will start asking questions. what is linux? why is M$ saying its bad? whats so bad about linux? and so on. ofcourse the only way to resolve these questions, is to simply try linux. this is where M$ will get hurt. and it will be done out of their campain, with their money. thank you M$.

there is a readme file that has all the instructions. always read the readme's. always! ftp://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distribut...rake/iso/README

i did see a "generic" computer in best buy. the salesman said it was their own. he also said it was available online. i just looked, couldnt find it. as far as red hat and mandrake not being in stores, i knew that. i search news.google.com daily. my point is not whether red hat pulled their distro from shelves or mandrake being in finacial trouble, but rather that best buy can and should carry more distros. debian, knoppix, lindows, conectiva, lycoris, the list gets really long. does best buy need to carry all of the distro's? no. that would be prohibative and pointless. i do also realise that the distro's need to do some marketing, but lets look at an interesting fact. IBM advertises some for linux, and thats linux in general. IBM doesnt specify a distro in their adds. we have seen over the past year, linux has exploded. not just in the server market, but also in the desktop market. linux is in such high demand in thialand that HP had to pull in dell to meet the demand. telling manufacturers was the next suggestion i had. i just wanted to see how this played out first. the more we consumers, let people know what we want, then the chances go up of getting what we want. for to long we have sat back and accepted what has been provided to us. its like we the consumer has forgoten that these people are in place to meet our demands. like they have been dictating to us. now its our turn.

perhaps from the title you have some idea, perhaps not. i was in best buy the other day, as it is one of my most common stomping grounds. a littttle more than a year ago they used to stock red hat, suse, and mandrake. yesterday i walked in and found only 3 boxed sets of suse 9.0 pro. i have repeatedly asked them to stock linux. of which they tell me, its not up to them, but corperate. i told them, it'd be nice to have some choice, not just windows. when i go into to buy a computer, i have a choice. hp with windows, compaq with windows, or sony with windows . this is not what i call choice! i told them i wanted to see computers with linux preinstalled on display. the only way to accomplish this, is not with a lone voice, but if we all collaborate and hound them to death about it. let them know that we want linux. let them know there is a demand. if we do this, and have a friends do this and so on, we can get best buy to change. how do we do this? they said bestbuy.com has a suggestion box, and we should use that. (i didnt tell them i'd do this. they we're speaking only to me, but can all drop a few "suggestions"). lets start advoating and letting dealers, stores, manufacturers know that we want linux.

a proxy is a good idea. arno's firewall is a good choice. linux can do NAT, 256 NAT addresses at that. dynamic NAT can be accomplished, and technically, you can do dynamic NAT and dynamic PAT (port address translation). its all up to you, what you want to use it for and so on. the way you described it, it sounds like you want linux to be a firewall. a server is something that gives information. ie. google. what you described sounds like you want linux to filter the incomming packets from the net. proxy's do just that. a proxy is one type of firewall. routers are another, and software firewalls are yet another. all three can be employed. the http://tldp.org has a great (but lengthy) howto on all this. look up 'ip masquerading'.