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Ian, you're good!! One day, you're going to have to explain what exact search terms you used... Anyway, thanks a lot! Also thanks to speedball2, I would have gone that route (wine and win software) if cdemu hadn't worked so nicely. How to install cdemu on Mandriva (2009.1 64 bit in my case) Ok, so indeed cdemu works fine, all that was needed was (as root): urpmi cdemu -a and then I had to make sure the dkms module of vhba got installed - the urpmi command did install one precompiled vhba module, but not for my current kernel. It actually installed a slightly older kernel too, which I later removed. So I did (still as root): urpmi dkms-vhba which installed and compiled the vhba kernel module for my kernel. How to use cdemu Then I loaded the module: modprobe vbha which created a device /dev/vhba_ctl and started the cdemud daemon: service cdemud start No config file editing necessary. At that point, the kernel message scrolled past (tail -f /var/log/messages): May 6 23:08:02 zurich cdemud[2862]: Starting daemon in daemon mode with following parameters: - num devices: 1 - ctl device: /dev/vhba_ctl - audio driver: null - bus type: system May 6 23:08:02 zurich klogd: scsi 9:0:0:0: CD-ROM CDEmu Virt. CD/DVD-ROM 1.10 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 May 6 23:08:02 zurich klogd: sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray May 6 23:08:02 zurich klogd: sr 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 5 and I checked to find: # ll /dev/sr1 brw-rw----+ 1 martina cdrom 11, 1 2010-05-02 21:19 /dev/sr1 The vbha module loading may be done automatically, didn't try to start clean yet. I also don't know yet if the cdemud will start automatically after rebooting, but I'll find out when that time has come. I would expect so. So then as regular user (since the device was owned by the regular user) I did: $ cdemu status Devices' status: DEV LOADED TYPE FILENAME 0 0 N/A N/A followed by: $ cdemu load 0 /mnt/neuchatel/giant/home/donkey/Globi_Seefahrer.nrg and checked to find: $ cdemu status Devices' status: DEV LOADED TYPE FILENAME 0 1 PARSER-NRG /mnt/neuchatel/giant/home/donkey/Globi_Seefahrer.nrg After that I started grip, and changed the cdrom device to /7dev/sr1, restarted it (it didn't want to see any contents, or perhaps I was not patient enough in my excitement), and it detected happily that there was a cd in the emulated drawer, got the track names from cddb and ripped it at high speed. After finishing, grip happily ejected the emulated disc, so I found: $ cdemu status Devices' status: DEV LOADED TYPE FILENAME 0 0 N/A N/A For gnome users there's the applet gcdemu, but I'm on kde, and perfectly happy with the CLI, so no problem for me. It would be nice for non-gnome GUI oriented users if there would be some other GUI. Or if anyone has an idea how to start a gnome applet from within kde (4), please post below.

Thanks Ian, but unfortunately that doesn't work... I forgot to mention I had also found that, but an audio cd cannot be mounted, it's not iso9660 but IIRC redbook. Also, yes, Nero can burn to an image,.. but that's an .nrg image.. which I have plenty of already. So I'd really like to find a solution which has some kind of simulated/virtual cd burner.

I'm trying to use nero .nrg audio cd images. Friends of mine have scanned their collection to .nrg files, but those are sadly not usable (also not on Win or OSX) other than to burn to cd, and they are non-compressed (or at least, they seem to be from the file sizes). So I've explained it's better to rip to flac, but it would be nice if they could convert their current rips to flac as well. I tried and managed using Nero for Linux, but I need to burn each .nrg to a cd (rw of course), then rip that one, then burn the next. So the speed and the quality both have me worried a bit. Plus, it wears out my burner. Is there any way to create a virtual cd burner under Linux? That way I can use nero to 'burn' the .nrg files to the virtual drive, then rip it as usual. Please note the following: I have not found any program that can use audio .nrg files under Linux. I have looked at nrg2iso, but that works for data discs only. There are some other similar things that I found which also didn't work, I forgot the names but can find those again, if necessary. I also looked at audiofs and cdfs, which seem to be unmaintained since a while, in any case, I couldn't find any way to employ those. [moved from Software by spinynorman]

I think I'm slowly starting to get the activies' purpose.. and why I didn't get it nor need it... I guess it's for people who are using plasmoids / widgets heavily. I only use gkrellm since I never found a good substitute, and otherwise the panel (clock / calendar). But people who need more space for widgets need these activity plains, I think if you use various programs (in windowed form), you need multiple desktops, or at least get benefit of that. If you use many many widgets, it is nice to have more space for them, and activities can do that. So: multiple desktops for multiple windowed apps, multiple activities for multiple widget collections. If anyone has another point for this, I'm all ears...

It's not very important when you sync, just do it before unmounting and wait for the disk light to stop burning. That's why I put the s double, I actually keep hitting s until the light doesn't come up anymore... You could do r s e s i s s u b or so. Whatever you do, make sure the sync is done.

I'm using KDE 3.5 on the main system (well, my wife uses it) - no way to move to KDE4 until each virtual desktop can have its own background. So I tried 2010.0 beta, and Lo and behold, individual images per virtual desktop. Lots of other interesting things, and: normally no icons. Contrary to most, I find this worthy of a "Hooray!" One thing has me puzzled though: the zoom out and multiple activities functionality. I've searched the web, read lots of things about it, such as this:http://temporaryland.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/my-kde-4-x-desktop-activities-tutorial/ and from kde: http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma... From the latter: Well, that's fine and dandy, but I did that with regular virtual desktops (workspaces, whatever you call it) back in 1992. Minus the widgets, because in those days on HP-VUE UNIX there were none. Anyway, with KDE 4.3 without using activities, just multiple desktops, I get exactly that. With KDE 3.5 I can also get exactly that. So is there anyone who can tell me what these activities are good for that I can't just do with a (extra) virtual desktop? Because I'm just not getting it...

I've had some problems on my laptop - it would not really start/boot the system. The fix? I hit alt-sysrq-e. Perhaps that needs to be preceded with a alt-sysrq-r, not sure. Something got unstuck due to that, and after that magic keystroke it booted fine. (I actually had to do that every time on 2009.1 on this laptop. Now I'm running 2010.0 beta's and this is now fixed.) I actually wanted to shut down the system since it wouldn't move anymore. (alt-sysrq-r,e,s,s,u,i,b is the thing to do to get the system to restart when only the kernel is alive, but for instance X is dead..) Obviously I don't know if this will help in your case, but it won't hurt. If the system really doesn't move, use the sequence I mentioned, instead of hard switching / power cycling or so.

Well, I disagree. Sorry to be late to the party guys - not enough time, too many things to do. But anyway... I disagree, since without bugreports, Mandriva won't get better, and with bugreports, at least it may. And I have used Mandriva without paying a cent for several years now (I did pay a few years although I got a free VIP account due to being a translator). If you don't pay the company Mandriva, don't comment on how the company treats their people. (If you do pay them, perhaps you should pay them more before you comment...?) If you use the distribution Mandriva Linux, please do contribute as much as you can. One way is to file bugs properly. Note: all bugs I filed have been handled in decent time, as far as I can remember. I've never felt like I was doing free work for a company when I was translating, I always felt like I was doing a little bit of work and getting back the whole OS in return. Small price to pay. BTW if you don't support Mandriva (linux, the distro), then how much better will Mandriva treat the remaining employees? You complain about Mandriva laying off AdamW, but none of what you do (FWICT) leads them to be in a position where they don't have to do that again the next time things get tough.

Quick question: is it now possible to have a different background image per desktop?

Late to the party as I usually am.... Adam, good luck with your next steps, and you and I know you deserved better. As for Mandriva, I'll continue to use it as long as it's usable. Creating a fork? That will be an option if things go that way - it is not that time yet, IMHO. I love Mandriva the OS as far as I love any computing platform, more than any other computing platform. I've never really loved the company though. The developers have done an amazing job on a shoestring budget, providing quite a few 'first-time' linux common user features: first freely available distro to do ntfs resizing during installation, great tools, etc. Ubuntu is only now coming closer (not there yet, though I haven't checked in a while). As I wrote, I'll continue to use it as long as it works for me.

I used to do this, and contrary to common opinion, this can work fine. I dual booted multiple linux installations, hibernating one and then going to another, etc. Just make sure you never ever write to a partition that was mounted on the hibernated system. Not actually mounting any of them helps, but if you must read data, mount them read-only. Otherwise, no problem as far as I can see. Make sure you have two hibernate swap partitions if you want to do this with two Linux installs. Hibernating Linux then booting to Windows should not have any similar conflict. The current grub has an option to immediately boot if in hibernation / suspend to disk. There is an option, forgot which file - can check if you want - to switch back to the default behaviour. If you have 2 different Linux installations, you can set up the regular grub in the mbr to boot: linux 1 windows chainloader to linux 2 partition boot sector and in the second linux installation boot sector, you can again have all kinds of entries. Now if you hibernate the second Linux, the grub in the boot sector of that root partition gets updated to autoresume, but the grub from the other Linux in the mbr doesn't, so from that one you can still boot windows. To be able to do it with only windows and one linux install, you need to find the config file. I'll post it if I find it... Edit: got it - I couldn't find it on the web, so I figured it should be something the code for the suspend stuff must include - so I opened mcc and went into the software installer, and checked which files get installed with pm-utils one of those is /usr/lib64/pm-utils/sleep.d/01bootloader where on a i586 system lib64 is likely just lib it refers to a file /usr/sbin/rebootin which is a perl script for a single one time system boot bypassing the menu. never mind that /usr/lib64/pm-utils/sleep.d/01bootloader gives error messages for Lilo, this is for grub too. all you have to do is remove 01bootloader from /usr/lib64/pm-utils/sleep.d/ and you should be set. Again: do not mount any partitions from a hibernated system in rw mode! They have not been cleanly unmounted, and the hibernated system will expect them not to have changed - Linux partitions keep track of mount-count and such!

Perhaps I'm more sensitive to tearing and other video artefacts than others, but in any case, I can hardly find any similar comments/problem reports on the usual forums nor on the web at large... Essentially, the problem is that I see some tearing even though I have overlay functional with Xv video. I figured out (from the intel manpage, man:intel) that the problem is likely that the hardware will accept any semi functional modeline as long as the lvds output is set up to use whatever config the lvds screen prescribes. But the video graphics will still use the modeline / xorg config as xorg likes; it looks like the graphics chip will tell xorg that some range of signals is fine, but then in the end pass the buffer data in the way the screen wants it. This leads to the +vsync not to have any positive effect on the tearing (it should go away), because it's not taken into account on the final signal going to the panel, but merely in between. The problem is, I tried turning off this driver feature, but then I get a 'no display found' error from X and only console. So it seems that the regular modeline that xorg.0.log tells me it uses (with -vsync no less..) is not at all what is needed. The panel is a 1280x800 one, and obviously I have no clue as to the real timings on the thing... Any hints as to what to try? Can anyone confirm what I postulate above?

The output of your free command shows no swap is used. In other words, you have enough ram, more wouldn't help. What you want is indeed to have the first line tell you that your ram is fully used, and the last line that no swap is used, in which case all is fine, ... output from my current machine: $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 4052292 3853548 198744 0 255472 2575444 -/+ buffers/cache: 1022632 3029660 Swap: 10233080 148 10232932 (Oh noes, the system ate all my ram!! ) Can you check if there is some disk activity? I noticed that kerry / beagle sometimes keep the disks busy, which is a major cause of slowness. I normally run with gkrellm on the side, just to keep track of high cpu and disk loads (and temps and stuff..). BTW flash can make a Athlon 2400+ stutter, from what I gather also on windows, so go complain to Adobe about that one.. ;) Did you get the new version of FF? Should be in the backports repos somewhere (I'm running 2008.1 x64 on all machines now, and did get FF3 on all of them, just forgot from where I got it).

For http access, there is an extra package you need: tightvnc-java I messed around a bit, so I'm not sure if there's anything else to do. Otherwise, only m repeats, but to get one 'm' character, you need to press it twice... See also: this bug Did some more hacking, and found that with this way to start, all is fine: vncserver :7 -dpi 80 -geometry 800x480 -httpd /usr/share/java -httpport 5807 +kb The java vnc package must be installed and +kb at the end is there to override the wrong default of -kb that gets used otherwise.. Hope this is useful to someone...

Hi Ian, thanks for the reply... Well, I just gave it up in the end. I did try to make a truecrypt file around the size of the partition, the first try realcrypt told me 'filesystem full'... after 4 hours of chugging... then the second time it didn't work either due to some other reason, forgot why, perhaps I forgot to format before trying to mount the realcrypt drive. In any case, I decided to forego realcrypt/truecrypt on the raid drive/partition. I did create two regular partitions where everything worked fine..

to set up a realcrypt / truecrypt partition, I have used this guide before: http://altoptions.wordpress.com/2008/01/16...t-howto-part-1/ but this time, I want to use it on a Linux RAID (mdX) setup - the raid setup works fine without realcrypt / truecrypt. If I follow the guide and create a realcrypt system out of the drive, then either it will stop when trying to make the device into a realcrypt volume, or it will manage to make the volume but then fail to mount it - realcrypt -l will list the device and mapper, but mount will show it's not mounted, and the prompt also doesn't come back after typing the realcrypt password... Is there something special about these /dev/dmX devices? Should I not try to use them in the same way as /dev/sdaX when making a realcrypt partition?

Quick comment, though I'm clearly late to the party.... Linux (as in the kernel) does a sync every 5 or 6 seconds. This is normal and smart, meaning in a power outage (including your kid pulling the plug or whatnot), you'll never lose more than 5 secs of data. On the other hand, my disks show 80-140MB/s continuous reads, which is what I'll open another topic about shortly...

I concur with most if not all points above. For me, it all started with first using Unix, then windows, then figuring out that I don't like the way the mswin window manager works, then figuring out that they (ms) don't care what I do or don't like. At the same time, I realised that I was spending effort on a weekly basis to keep mswin chugging along (98se in this case), and that I would spend as much time with Linux, but only in the beginning, since every step you take is one more on the path to computing bliss, whereas with mswin one regularly gets places several steps back.... Then I also realised the only way to be able to get a system that does what I like is to move to a Free Software system, and to be able to do that, enough people must do the same so that hardware of all kinds would be supported. So I started my website to get more people started. Today I can seriously say that Linux systems are the least annoying computing systems that I have experience with. It does take the proper hardware, but once that requirement is fulfilled, Linux does the job. I can't say I love it, I can just about say I like it, and often I'm on the verge of saying I dislike it the least... But at least, GNU/Linux allows me to take the driver's seat, unlike other, more popular, OSes.

Ashamed of Mandrake? Ehh, I mean, Mandriva? Heck no, why would I have named my website after it? :P Why would anyone be ashamed of what OS they use, if it's something they chose on purpose? Now, if you're ashamed of your past behaviour / choices or position, that I can imagine. But I don't even think most MSWin users who 'know better' are ashamed... Things that Mandriva (Mandrake) has in its favour (most already mentioned, but anyway) : - one of the first if not _the_ first distribution to aim for the desktop, instead of corporate servers - and make that work pretty well even back in the late nineties - first gratis available distribution to offer NTFS partition resizing - back in the day when XP started becoming popular and more and more machines were sold with NTFS, this was really important - committed to Free Software - still one of the easiest to use distributions, solid hardware detection and support - yes people claim it was flakey in the past, no I'm not one of those, I've always had good to very good experience with Mandrake/iva also on hardware that was 'too hard' for SuSE, Ubuntu and whatnot - DE/WM agnostic - though many keep FUDding that it's KDE centered - fact that one can mix and match in the use of the drakwizards and config file editing. - urpmi and the new automagical repo setup - first 'mostly open' distribution to offer fully legal DVD playback (I know, I know, Lindows had that too at some point) - community around Mandriva, though it's hardly as necessary (to me since I know how to use Linux / Mandriva, and to the users in general since Linux / Mandriva has become very very easy to use) Things that Mandriva has against it: - Ubuntu's astroturfing (see my Ubuntu review - I still rate it below Mandriva - didn't install latest yet I must admit - though it's catching up) - people comparing Mandriva of x months ago to complete fresh distro y - on very new hardware, where distro y has a newer kernel which just happens to support said newer hardware better - people thinking back at old and very old negative experiences with Mandriva/Mandrake I'm sure in the above lists I'm forgetting some points, but these are the main ones to come to my mind at this hour of the night.... Am I proud to be a Mandriva user? I don't know, don't think so. I'm proud to be in control of my systems, but I could do that with most other Linuxes as well, I'm sure. On the gdium: I saw it mentioned somewhere before, and realised one thing: if this thing becomes popular, that'd be a sure sign of the end of Microsoft as we know it. And another thing that I realised a long long time ago: the moment a fully Free Software system gets mainstream popularity (as in: over 15 - 25% marketshare) is the moment the hardware manufacturers can drop x86. As someone in the hardware / chip industry, I would really dig it if someone would just come up with a new CPU/dsp architecture and tilt Intel upside down...

Well, it seems that Gigabyte ship very suitable boards, which I'll probably go for. I still have some time before actually going ahead, but for now it looks like this: Desktop: Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H, since it has very nice on-board graphics (fastest integrated graphics around), which can eventually be complemented with an extra pci-x-16 card, and more importantly, AMD actually shipped this very board to reviewers to show off their new 780G + SB700 chipset... I'll have to go with a Phenom to make sure the graphics core gets good bandwidth - one thing I didn't aim at initially, but on this board that really makes a difference. Most likely I'll be going for a 9750. This board will only need the TVcard from the current desktop - and perhaps a second graphics card, in case the onboard card cannot play back without tearing on the second head (vga - the first head will be the regular monitor on dvi). I'll likely get a zerotherm BTF 80 hsf combo, transplant my dvdrw and the biggest ata harddrive, and not much else - the server will take care of the data backups, perhaps I'll even mount the home dir from the server. Server: most likely Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6, it's expensive, but leaves little for me to mess with. It sports onboard Sound, 2x GLAN (which I need both), 1394, SATAII RAID, 2x eSATA (always practical on a server that should be up 24/7 - no need to switch it off), serial external - instead of internal where you need to get your hands on a bracket or mess yourself with some wires or so. I'll only have to add a graphics card, and as I'll soon have a radeon 9250 pci left over from my current desktop, that's taken care of. I'll most likely go for WD caviar GP drives, dynamic rotational speed from 5400 to 7200, 1TB. I'll have 2 in linux software raid. These drives are slow, but raid will make sure that reading will be quite ok, and lots of RAM in the server will make sure that writing will not seem slow anyway... on the other hand, these drives are really really quiet and low power, if the reviews are to be believed. Furthermore I'll go for Zerotherm BTF 95 fanless heatsink, to minimize the noise. Lastly, I'm still thinking of getting a uSDHC card with thumbreader - costs around 70 US$ (72 CHF) and it would be nice to host the system - no moving parts, very low power , so I can always umount the TB raid and make sure the system is really really quiet - only PSU fans left over that move.... I intend to make these purchases in a week or 2, perhaps 3... Thanks again for your feedback. I'll let you know how things work out.

Thanks for the feedback guys! I'll check out that Gigabyte board John, thanks for the tip.

I'm in the market for a motherboard with AM2+ socket. Or actually, two boards. One will be the basis for a new server, the other for a new desktop. The server will be headless and keyboardless after installation, and function as a firewall/music server with LIRC / file and download/internet server. I will run vnc sessions on it, that I'll connect to remotely (from the internet or the internal network). It will be running webbrowsers with loads of tabs, perhaps an email app, some music player (currently I use xmms, but with a beefed up machine I might start using amarok) and mldonkey. In terms of hardware, I'll be very interested in a system with onboard graphics, since I'll never have use for more than svga for installation. Alternatively, I could use the pci radeon 9250 that sits in the current desktop - about which more later. Furthermore, I'll want to put in two 1TB drives in software raid (built-in backups), most likely sata drives. I have a dvdrom already, with ata connector. Naturally, at current prices, I could just get an SATA dvd burner. For LIRC / the music server, I'll need the com port - hard to come by, no longer exported to the outside bracket of any recent motherboard, but I can manage with the onboard serial port header, so that should be ok. It would be good to have a motherboard with decent/good audio. Currently I use a SBlive 5.1, just in stereo mode. Anything of similar of better quality is fine. The server will have to have two network interfaces, one to connect to the cable modem, the other to connect to the internal network/switch. This server system should be relatively quiet. I'm thinking: 4850e 45 W AMD64x2 CPU, with fanless heatsink. I already have an enermax 350W power supply, with atx 24(?) pin header plus 4pin extra header. It has a dual fan system: 80mm to the outside, 120mm at the bottom to suck air over the mobo+ cpu and out through the 80mm fan exhaust. The 120mm fan can be manually tuned. (Potmeter at outside next to power switch.) Any reason I could not use this PSU? I will want boards of which the bios can be updated without having Windows - luckily I noticed that for various Asus boards, one can update the bios just by using a usb flash drive (the built-in bios can read from usb thumbdrives). Gigabyte boards can do that trick from floppy - no problem putting a drive in, just finding a working floppy may be a bit hard... Now some more questions: do you have experience with an AM2+ board? Any things you particularly like, any things I didn't mention but you think I should take into account? Anyone with experience with Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP (can the wifi work as AP in Linux nowadays? I found older messages where it coulnd't yet, but just as regular wifi) - using it as AP will allow me to jump the Fon bandwagon..) Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI Asus M3N-HT Deluxe (splashtop - Express gate: before the bios one gets to choose to boot the built-in Linux in 5 seconds or so, or boot from harddrive - could be neat for the desktop, but I read somewhere that it doesn't work with usb keyboards/mice, and that it can only be updated from within windows...!) Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6 (dual gigabyte lan) I realise these motherboards are from a broad price range - cost is no big objective, but senseless spending is out of the question. In other words, taking the dual gigabyte lan board at twice the price of another one, where I could add an old pci ethernet card which I still have is not good enough. I was thinking about the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe for the desktop system, which is used for email, watching movies (mostly on the projector), writing documents and such. The most problematic thing is that it is a dual display system, currently with an nvidia gf4200ti to the monitor and an ati 9250 for the projector - which can't deal with 720p video - too slow... Also for TV time it cannot handle the highest quality settings, which the nvidia on the monitor has no problems with at all. I first had a single graphics card in the desktop system, but I learnt all kinds of nasty stuff about tearing, which I don't want to go through again. In any case, due to ATI/AMD's current stance towards the FLOSS community, I'll prefer to have an ATI card, so my question is: can that work fine on this board with Nvidia integrated graphics? I will want to play back HD content on the projector (at least 720p, but I may get a full hd projector before I exchange this hardware again). The only 3d stuff that will run for sure on this desktop system is Google earth and similar applications (marble for instance), and perhaps compiz (or the kde4 equivalent). The desktop system has a Bt848 tv-card which I need to keep if only for the remote control. Well, we just ditched the tv so we really want this to work... Otherwise, I have an Audigy sound card, but if the onboard sound is good, that's fine too. I have a 4 channel surround setup. And how about suspend to ram on current desktop systems, does that work on Linux nowadays? Any comments on power draw, also of DRR2 Ram? I was thinking of 4x2GB for both systems, the desktop since I'll be doing video editing on it (4x4GB would be better, but I don't see 4GB modules at affordable prices), and the server since once it's up and running I won't shut it down in a long while, and at 150US$ per 2x2GB ECC sticks I may as well fill all slots. (Uptime 460 days, but only because I moved - before that it was 650+ days IIRC.) Since they have heatsinks and on several of the aforementioned boards there are heatpipes to be connected to the modules, I'm guessing they may use a fair amount of power..? BTW I noticed most/all Asus boards are limited to 8GB, most Gigabyte boards can supposedly handle 16GB... Oh yeah, I may want to upgrade these systems to Phenom 4x cpu's once those are out in affordable and low(er) power versions. I'm open to all feedback, I'm mostly interested in your experience with AM2+ boards and in comments on things I may want to take into account for these Linux systems boards.

Ehm, not so IMHO, I learn CLI commands by reading the man page as well as from other people / scripts I come across and more. Of course for my job I have to, I work with Linux/Unix quite a bit (though less and less lately, jobs changing somewhat), and some colleagues are true aces when it comes to scripting (bash, ksh, perl, tcl, ...). I guess in some cases it makes no sense to try to do things with a cli (drawing an image in OOo impress, GIMPing a photo, etc), whereas some things are just awkward with a GUI, such as renaming a whole folder of files, where you want to strip some part of the name, or modify something... Example: Mdv installation screenshots start with 1.png and I tend to have around 40 or so, and sorting them you'll get 1.png 10.png .... 19.png 2.png 20.png etc - so a simple rename "" "0" ?.png sets that right. I can't for the life of me imagine having to do that with a GUI... Another example: copy a half full memory card from a photo camera to some place on your harddrive. Then take more pictures, without deleting the old ones from the card or formatting it. Then copy those again to your harddrive - the system will see that folders in the dcim/ directory already exist, and ask you to overwrite it or use a new name, etc. Whereas cp with the right options will just do what you want, or else you can use rsync. I'm tempted to take the position that novice users (of whatever program / functionality they're new to, so they may well be experts elsewhere) may well waste time by trying to use the CLI for something, whereas experienced / repeat users may well be wasting time using the GUI where automation through CLI and scripting is easily doable.

During my holidays in which I had very little contact with any kind of computers, I realised the following: You can do things with a computer with a graphical user interface (GUI), whereas a computer with a command line interface (CLI) can do things for you. A GUI system needs to be babysitted, told at every moment what to do. You can use it, sure, and in some cases it's the natural choice (certain image manipulations, drawing, etc). But a CLI system can be instructed to do things for you, automated, anything you do repeatedly. Today I discussed this with a friend, and during the discussion I likened the CLI to a butler that can do things for you, and the GUI is like being abroad where they speak a different language, nothing you know, and you're trying to get an icecream, so you just point at what you want. But it may well be that they don't have your favourite flavour on display, or they just don't get it that you really want only half a scoop of vanilla, and 1.5 of chocolate ... etcetc. Or, the GUI is going shopping at a supermarket, whereas the CLI is handing the list to the butler. So my friend commented: yeah, but I only know what I want by browsing through the isles and seeing what's on offer and so on... Or you may not know what kind of products are actually available. So in such cases, it's not possible to hand the butler a note with instructions or a shopping list, because it would be (mostly) empty. In other words, for less experienced users, the GUI saves the day, whereas for more experienced users (of perhaps very limited functionality, so let's say often-repeat users) the CLI can help avoid repetitiveness. Discuss if you feel like, ignore if you don't. ;)

Hi Neddie, good review! Of course all the Ubuntu fans (astroturfers?) will shout you should have compared to Ubuntu... Now to get your review linked at OSnews, distrowatch (just mail the guy, he'll link to it), linuxtoday, desktoplinux and the holy grail: slashdot... good luck!