SoulSe

Page Hit Ranking 

Rank Distribution hpd 

1 Yoper 722 

2 Mandrake 555 

3 Red Hat 525 

4 Gentoo 429 

5 Debian 348 

6 Knoppix 332 

7 SuSE 272 

8 Slackware 246 

9 Lycoris 231 

10 Sorcerer

Yoper is getting a lot of attention (cus it's new). MDK still kicking ass though...

Commander Keen rocked! That and the original Duke Nukem games.

Anyway, this one looks good, I'll be downloading it tonight...

Moderators: Could we have this thread moved to 'Everything Linux' please?[/b]

I believe the answer to who will market is in the mirror; what we are missing is a good leader (should be Mandrake) with sound business principles.

I agree, but I think the "Leader" will have to be some sort of community of users.

Look at this forum, as example. In my opinion this website (mandrakeusers) is Mandrake's most important tool in deploying their distro - yet it is not supported by Mandrake and did not originate from the company.

Unfortunately, in the open source World, we as the users are forced to take the initiative for support and marketing in most cases. Not because Mandrake (or redhad, gentoo, whoever) are not interested, but because they cannot afford to do anything about it (especially in Mandrake's case).

Here is what I propose: A website driven community where volunteers can sign up for a program whereby they are provdided with merchandise and software and left to arrange for the deployment of all this material in their own capacity.

Some sort of award program could be supported by Mandrake (perhaps free club membership for volunteers?). Further support from MDK would include the printing and packaging of CDs (very cheap) and that's about it. The community would print stickers, posters, etc. themselves and rely on donation to do so (perhaps a small helping hand from MDK here). Of course, MDKs approval of all marketing material would be neccessary as well.

This is the way forward. Ixthusdan, you are right about one thing: no marketing equals no business - it is that simple.

We must, once again, move away from the whole "Linux is free" way of thinking. THE SOURCE IS FREELY AVAILABLE - BUT LINUX IS NOT FREE. It costs money to develop anything and this immediately prevents it from being "free."

import duties aside ... I've not had any problems buy from mandrakestore

 

even last time when people were complaining about service .. I ordered my boxed set, and it arrived 5 days later (in NZ !!! thats about as far away from france as you can get !!!)

Ok, I DO NOT have a ~/.fluxbox/startup file. So I created one based on yours, paul. It doesn't work! Weird.

I came right with Esetroot, now I just need the background to stay there when I log off. I could probably add the Esetroot -scale command to my startup file, once I get the startup file working, that is!

Buying box sets is all good and well if you live in a country where the shops sell them. Where I'm from, there are no shops stocking it.

I am contemplating purchasing 9.1 on the net when it is released, but import duties can sometimes be ridiculously high. In this situation, a club membership makes more sense.

Far less...

[simon@skratch simon]$ rpm -qa | grep gcc

gcc-3.2-1mdk

gcc-cpp-3.2-1mdk

libgcc1-3.2-1mdk

No .configure or anything remotely similar for idesk. Can't anyone make an rpm? I would if I knew how :D

Club membership also helps Mandrake with money on an on-going basis. Whereas purchasing a box is a once-off affair.

My recommendation: do both!

Decided to start a seperate thread for this one...

What is the best way to get dockapps to start up with fluxbox? I don't want to mess with .xinit and X in general too much. Is there a way of doing it in fluxbox's init file?

On that point, if I modify the .init file (I did it to automatically set wallpaper) it works fine until I log out, then all my changes to the init dissapear!

Here's what I want: Login and have my wallpaper and dockapps there with the start of fluxbox.

Also, do I need Enlightenment installed to have esetroot? Can it exist without enlightenment and, if so, how?

Ok, this is weird. Firstly:

[simon@skratch idesk-0.3.5]$ gcc --version

gcc (GCC) 3.2 (Mandrake Linux 9.0 3.2-1mdk)

Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO

warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

I also tried swapping g++ with c++ in my makefile and got the same errors:

[simon@skratch idesk-0.3.5]$ vim Makefile 

[simon@skratch idesk-0.3.5]$ make

c++ -g -O2 -c Desk.cc -o Desk.o

make: c++: Command not found

make: *** [Desk.o] Error 127

[simon@skratch idesk-0.3.5]$ make install

install idesk /usr/local/bin

install: cannot stat `idesk': No such file or directory

make: *** [install] Error 1

Now I'm stumped. Everything seems fine, but I cannot make or make install anything. ./configure does nothing for idesk...

In my own personal capacity, I have become very aware this week of how important marketing is to the success of any product or service.

I was on the highway the other day when I noticed a Windows XP billboard again - with that whole shlocky field thingy again and the words "Yes, you can..." Written under it. Powerfull marketing.

It got me to thinking about the one thing the Linux OS really could use - a powerfull marketing campaign. Of course, the statement "Linux needs marketing" is immediately meaningless because 'Linux' is a not a tangible product, it is given consistency by the various distros we aquire 'it' from. Like Redhat or Mandrake. Obviously, these distros who rely on support fees and corporate solutions for their money have very limited budgets for marketing. Also, the last thing we need is a war between two Linux distros - that would be counter-productive in the greater scheme of things.

Most of Linux's marketing comes from the press. Reviews, market figures and articles on the distro. But Linux is not new to the World anymore and will continue to receive less and less media attention until there is another big breakthrough.

So who is going to market our distro? Who is going to show the average computer user that Linux can be a powerfull and friendly replacement for their current OS? I wish there was some stinking rich dude who liked our OS and decided to throw sick amounts of cash at it. I would if I was stinking rich... Perhaps I should ask everyone to mail me $10 towards the cause...

Another approach to marketing is currently used extensively by the music industry - Street Teams. Extremely cheap and very effective marketing. People sign up for street teams on the 'net and get a box full of promotional material snail-mailed to them. They then hit the streets, hand out material, cds, stickers, put up posters all over the place and get the message out. In a way we are all members of a street team for Linux, telling friends about it, installing it on their computers and showing them how cool it looks. What we need though, is just that little extra edge gained from being able to hand out -for example- official MDK cds, stickers saying "windows will crash" or whatever and posters and stuff. Surely the major distros could afford that? Or perhaps this is the wrong approach all together...

Anyway - just something I was thinking about the last few days, would be interesting to get your views.

Yes I have installed Hancom, OpenOffice, and StarOffice, they all pale in comparison to M$ Office XP. Hey to say it but Microsoft really does a good job with their office suites.

I reckon by the next point release of Open Office, we will have a serious competitor.

On the whole rc2 thing - this is the last release before 9.1 final, so does that mean that we can expect the final release earlier then it was originally planned for?

I've been trying to get onto their page to find out what all the hoo ha is about - but it's been down all day.

Anyway, it would have to be pretty freakin' amazing to make me move away from Mandrake (we're rated second at distrowatch!).

I can't get idesk to compile..... actually, now that I think about, I can't get

ANYTHING to compile!

[simon@skratch idesk-0.3.5]$ make

g++ -g -O2 -c Desk.cc -o Desk.o

make: g++: Command not found

make: *** [Desk.o] Error 127

[simon@skratch idesk-0.3.5]$ make install

install idesk /usr/local/bin

install: cannot stat `idesk': No such file or directory

make: *** [install] Error 1

[simon@skratch idesk-0.3.5]$ su

Password: 

[root@skratch idesk-0.3.5]# make

g++ -g -O2 -c Desk.cc -o Desk.o

make: g++: Command not found

make: *** [Desk.o] Error 127

[root@skratch idesk-0.3.5]# make install

install idesk /usr/local/bin

install: cannot stat `idesk': No such file or directory

make: *** [install] Error 1

I get similar stuff with other programs, I have all the libraries, headers, etc. installed. I've never dealt with this problem cus I've always found RPMs for what I need and I've never fully learnt all the ins and outs.

I run fluxbox, which doesn't support icons - although I think there are some dockable apps which do similar things.

Fluxbox can do icons, http://www.fluxbox.org/fbdesk/ There is also a dockapp to do it.... the name escapes me, but it only does mounting of the CDROM (who uses floppys anymore? anyone?)

The problem with simply saying that we should all mount manually is that, if we ever want linux to succeed on the desktop, it has to be easier to use - this means automatic mounting of removable media.  Your average PC user will not want to mount drives as they need them

That and some marketing... God knows where that will come from...

# urpmi --noclean fluxbox

Call me lazy... I am.

I was trying to get idesk going when I stumbled over this: http://www.fluxbox.org/fbdesk/

Now why would I use idesk when the friendly people at fluxbox.org have written a program specifically for fluxbox that does the same job?

That said, I have not installed it yet, so this might be a tad premature...

Yip, I did. Put a link to Quake on it just to test it

But since it can't find the config, I'm guessing it stops there without even looking for links in the ~/.idesktop folder...

Unfortunately the kernel upgrade is not a reliable solution for supermount, in many cases though, it will make supermount run acceptably, but not perfectly.

I wouldn't despair though, I reckon that it should be fixed up once and for all by the time 9.1 final is released. Redhat seem to have the whole issue sorted out as I have not seen any problems with the supermounting system in RH 8.0

I prefer mounting things myself - that's the way we are intended to do things under Linux for several reasons. Why not just create a link on your desktop with, for example

$ mount /mnt/cdrom

and then you can just hit it whenever you want to mount your cdrom? Please don't tell me we have people too lazy to do that?

This is something that us Linux users have to deal with - spending months and sweat getting our system tweaked exactly the way we want it and then having to upgrade or whatever and losing it all!!

I have learnt a little trick though: Usually your system can be tweaked to perfection in a few hours, it's the figuring out how that takes the big time. So I keep a little log whenever I figure something out with exactly how I achieved something and what I did, etc.

This helps me write tutorials and gives me a todo list for whenever I do a clean install.

Anyway, I feel your pain, but I don't think it is 9.0 as such to blame for your problems - I agree with Ixthusdan that you probably need the newer libs.

I'm trying to get idesk running.

Whenever I try and start it I get: Can't find config file, or missing 'Config' table in the config file.

But I did create the .ideskrc file in my home directory, acording to idesk's site, and filled it with this:

table Config

 FontName: tahoma

 FontSize: 10

 FontColor: #ffffff

 PaddingX: 35

 PaddingY: 25

 Transparency: 100

 HighContrast: false

 Locked: false

 Shadow: false

 ShadowColor: #000000

 ShadowX: 1

 ShadowY: 1

 Bold: false

end

It's irritating

I have 5 different aterm entries in the menu with 4 #commented out for fast switching between favs.

I was reading somewhere that it is better to use bsetbg than Esetroot... something to do with transparency? I dunno....

One of us read it wrong or got 2 diff opinions. I read the opposite. Esetroot is better for translucency. Being part of the Enlightenment/Eterm combo, that's what it was made for. Is far better in many regards IMO. Load a low quality image with both and you'll see the diff.

Definately me who got them the wrong way around, sorry.

This is the first time I've used any other window manager besides Gnome for longer then 5 clicks. Loving this!

BTW: I don't suppose you an get tabs with aterm? I was using Powershell so I could have tabs but it's a silly term, I don't like it. I also saw another term based on aterm, but I couldn''t get it installed.

Everything DOlson said. :wink:

This has been discussed over and over and over again.

If you REALLY must use it, build it from the CVS tree - DOlson even has a tut. on his page! Don't pay for it.

I've become very hardcore about this - if they won't port to my OS then they can shove their game. I have a pile of old windoze games lying at home and if I really feel like playing them I will set up dual-booting again (wow! imagine playing the game on the platform it was intended for!) but I would not jeopardise the future of Linux gaming by using WineX.

It is funny to see Warcraft 3 running in a window every now and then though...