arthur

Apparently, even human life has a price...

hm, my first post was uninformed without reading the fine article, lol.

Ubuntu Server LTS also gives a good LAMP distro. No GUIs by default (it's really meant to be a server and not an easy-to-use desktop) so it's really minimal and the only updates are mostly security related. I've set up a few company websites with it and it's up and running in no time at all.

Sometimes I've felt this way too, but let's not be too condescending, and not insult anyone. I'm just thankful that I get good money because of my willingness to learn, as well as thousands of other people who work in IT :)

dadwhiskers, there does exist a fair bit of competition among linux distros, which is what we're probably seeing here. Competition is anathema to Microsoft, but it's actually quite a healthy thing to have. Also we linux users understand that not everybody has the time to mess with their system nor the mental effort involved which is why distros like ubuntu have come around - i'd say it's easier to do plenty of things in Ubuntu than XP, except maybe get viruses, the only reason XP is easier because of more industry support, which Linux is now starting to have. As a car analogy, many linux users are hobbyists who like to tinker with engines and stuff learning how things work, but most people would just like a car that they can drive with little maintenance and even have the hood welded shut (closed-source). Now that viable "non-hobbyist" distros like Ubuntu are coming around, the scene is starting to change a bit. Distros like Debian were never really meant for desktop use despite what people may say (having such a slow release cycle is certainly not for the desktop) and requires a fair bit of expertise. The good thing about linux is that there is a flavour for every situation, Debian, CentOS etc for servers, Gentoo, Slackware for hobbyists and developers, Ubuntu, Suse, Mandriva for the desktop and corporate desktop. Of course these are just generalisations and you can use distros being only limited by one's expertise - I've used Mandriva as a server for example. For one I'd never dream of using XP or Windows 2000 as a server (and the server editions are priced way out of reach) so there's only one flavour available as far as i'm concerned.

I've been trying to educate people that DRM is simply locking up content with a key, then giving the content AND the key to the consumer (in a obscured form). Maybe when the futility of DRM becomes commonly understood, then companies will *finally* adapt their business models to changing times.

Sorry about going into politics there - I won't go into that further. CES had a demo of the OLPC running Amiga OS, so I'd guess it's pretty capable of dual- or triple- booting any OS that can fit on the flash and use the AMD Geode. linky: http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/10/olpc-ha...o-run-amiga-os/

the laptop is not for the poorest kids, but rather the second poorest. For example, in my home country, the philippines, there is no mass starvation or civil war (although we do have guerrilla problems from time to time), but poverty is rife and the educational system is abysmal. Kids especially in faraway provinces are very poor, but NOT starving (well there are very few cases), so you vastly increase their opportunities with a better education. This laptop will provide both connectivity and education - I once participated in a project to deliver schoolbooks to a remote mountain community there, but I think an OLPC is the equivalent of hundreds of books. In that mountain village, there was no electricity, running water was from the streams - so the OLPC would fit there perfectly. I know in Africa the situation is much worse, but saying that the OLPC has no place in this world just angers me.

google is always my best learning resource when tinkering with linux. sometimes i even just cut and paste the error message into the google search bar, and i'll find something useful. Google is your friend on a funny note, there's a site called http://www.just****inggoogleit.com which you can send to friends as a joke edit: the **** is the f-word unfortunately not displayable here, hehe

RaLink released their wireless chipset drivers as open-source, and I use both a pcmcia (Edimax 7108PCG) on my laptop and pci card (sitecom wl-115) for my desktop. Works excellent under gentoo and ubuntu, haven't tested on mandriva. (both my cards use rt2500 chipset)

Ubuntu delivers Linux CDs to you for free. I've recieved 15 CDs myself, I've given them away to promote linux in my university. Also, Bittorrent is pretty fast for me. I switched on azureus last night to download CentOS DVD, it was going at 0kb/s when I went to sleep, now I wake up 7 hours later (yeah, I'd like more sleep than that, but well) and it's already complete. I just finished md5summing it 15 minutes ago and it's all good.

gentoo linux "purity" compiz theme (compiz-quinnstorm-0.0.13.12) glass icons (gnome-look.org) urxvt-unicode cairo-clock and goodweather gdesklet wallpaper is a photo taken by my friend

er..............what? :huh:

I'm 21 :) no, i'm not trying to make anyone feel bad, honest.

i remember having a not-so-fun time when I had to set up the urpmi mirrors, swapping them round if some weren't accessible, etc. New users can't really be expected to do that kind of thing, as basic as it may seem to us. So even a 3-CD install was quite useless for me as I couldn't install the software i needed without the mirror juggling trick. With ubuntu it's just a simple apt-get. And ubuntu makes the update easily visible - so buggy software is fixed more quickly and easily. But mandriva needs several clicks and dialog boxes before updating, do you think average users will go to that kind of trouble? They'll just notice the bugs, and that's not a good thing.