arthur

In fact, we'd probably be better off if we didn't put monetary value to everything

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.

It is just as ready as Windows and OSX for the desktop. What isn't perhaps ready for the desktop is some people that lack intelligence.

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

IMHO, you can learn everything about Linux on any distro. The difference between distros like Mandy, SUSE, Ubuntu,... and Arch, Slackware, Gentoo, ... is: Mandriva forces you to kick yourself in your butt in order to learn the expert stuff. other distros kick you in the butt for learning the expert-stuff. That's the whole difference imho.

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.

And that's why I agreed with you that Mandriva HAS done something that causes problems.

 

We'll probably never know where the problem resides, but it seems a number of things fail when you compile your own kernel. This is what leads me to believe that various things in Mandriva stop working, as soon as you compile your own kernel, versus using their kernels.

 

Like I said, if I use a Mandriva kernel, the problems don't exist. So either I'm missing something in the kernel, or the apps that fail are failing because they are looking for something in the kernel.

Same here, I've compiled kernels hundreds of times, but I've encountered problems compiling a vanilla kernel for my friend's computer running mandriva (i introduced her to linux). Network suddenly doesn't work, and other mysterious problems i had no time to solve. I'm migrating her to Ubuntu or Arch linux soon.

VBS? You mean VBScript? isn't that client-side?

IE plugins? you mean ActiveX? that's the one component of Windows that causes so much pain and suffering, and you want to include it in Linux? sorry, but that's

DirectX is good for games...but as it is owned by MS, it won't really become "free" as in freedom, Cedega implements it but has to license some proprietary libraries. Microsoft MIGHT opensource it...and pigs might also fly.

even when you call it a "silly web 2.0 thingy" hardly anyone would know what you are talking about.

heck, even the marketspeak people who made it up don't know what they're talking about :P

iph, only non-techies use the term "web 2.0" :P and if he bases it on debian, i think that has better hardware support than RH which Mandrake was based on.

true, binary would only be faster for code, not for configuration options. my gnome setup (2.14) is running rather slow, but that might be because of XGL and compiz eating up a good % of my CPU. The price of eye candy...

I just keep coming back to Mandriva because of urpmi. No need to fight for 2hrs with my comp to just install a single rpm. And that's what computers are all about. It's not very productive to use an OS (in a big company for example) that requires 1hr of configuration every time you start any application for the first time. That's why we have wizards to do this for us. To get our software to run.

my main complaint with mandrake is that urpmi often fails to find the software i want, and i have to google up and down to find the rpm, put it in my repository, then install it.

ubuntu, debian and arch have shown much better performance in this, although my current favourite is gentoo's portage system, which contains 100,000+ packages, even without overlays which i also use. Makes it much easier to experiment with new software.

but the point still is, to each his own :D

Gowator, why use a password at all? You can disable password logins in sshd, and just carry your RSA key in a USB stick, although you have to be careful with that as well.

Also, security by obscurity works against the automated tools that script kiddies use. Recompile SSH to remove the version banner, and make it listen on a non-standard port, since script kiddies always check port 22.

hth,

Arthur

I think Taiwan (I believe they represent the legitimate governmant of China but for simplicities sake I will refer to the mainland as China and the island as Taiwan) would be shooting itself in the foot if they did that, production would just move to China. Taiwan would loose, not MS.....

Coming from that region, and having a lot of chinese friends as well, the situation there might not be as simple as you think ;) if you wish to discuss this, let's take this into the "off the wall" forum shall we?

l alt-mouse wheel also makes windows true transparent in compiz...

yes, but that makes everything transparent. the menu bar, window titlebar, scroll bar etc. rxvt-unicode has true transparency in the inside only, meaning it's still easy to see.