M
Matt
Mr said:
Use Fedora.
Use Fedora.
R
Ruel Smith
Mr said:
Don't ditch SuSE for Red Hat or Fedora. The latest Fedora has gotten mixed
reviews. I've used Fedora, Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE at different times.
I like SuSE and Mandrake best.
R
Ruel Smith
David said:
Huh? SuSE definitely DOES NOT expect more than a passing expertise. In fact,
it's the only distro I've used to this date that didn't require me to hack
the X86Config file manually for my video. SaX2 set it all up for me,
beautifully, including letting me adjust to a higher refresh rate. YaST is
about as simple as it gets to taking care of administration duties and the
setup was almost as painless as Mandrake's. Mandrake has even copied YaST
to a great deal in creating their Mandrake Control Center. In fact, SuSE
and Mandrake are touted as 2 of the best distros for beginners.
SuSE's only pitfall is package dependencies, but you can cure that by
installing Apt and setting it up. This is something optional, and not
provided by SuSE. I believe SuSE will go to Red Carpet Express, if they
haven't already with 9.2 to fix the dependency hell. Directions on how to
install and setup Apt are easy to follow and can be found here:
http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/home.html
Mandrake gives you URPMI, but it's less than fun setting up the sources and
one problem with a single package and it aborts the entire installation
From an article on madpenguin.org:
"With the exception of the missing Novell Connector for Evolution and the
lack of proper multimedia support, SUSE Linux Professional 9.2 is hands
down one of the best distributions I've seen this year, and considering
it's December there's not much hope that another distro can top it at this
point. Fedora Core 3 is pretty impressive as far as desktop distros are
concerned, and I hear Ubuntu is pretty slick, but SUSE is reigning king for
the rest of the year. Thanks for the most excellent ride SUSE, and two
thumbs up to Novell for a job well done! "
Read the whole review here:
http://madpenguin.org/cms/html/47/3038.html
I agree with your comments about Gentoo and Debian. Hell, you can throw in
Slackware in that list too.
B
Bill Turner
_________________________________________________________
I can't believe the time and energy you guys put into making Linux work.
for $80 you can get WinXP Home and have an OS that does everything right
out of the box.
You guys probably build your own toasters, vacuum cleaners and lawn
mowers don't you?
L
Lordy
comp.linux/windows.advocacy is not here!
But since were here , XP does not do everyting out of the box.
For me, a single Linux install will have my TV card, printer and scanner
configured, unlike a fresh XP install (ie out-of-the-box). On the
otherhand, manufacturers will always provide nice one click driver
installations for various peripherals and Linux support is an afterthought
at best. Getting Dual Sreen running with Nvidia requires a bit of reading,
and last time I checked Broadcom had not made drivers available for 54g
wireless. and I havent played with my bluetooth USB stick yet.
Admittedly There is an aspect of Linux that requires tinkering that can be
rewarding in itself. Obviously this is not for everyone! Much in the same
way people like doing self builds and invalidating warrantees, modifying
some bit of new hardware
L
Lordy
Quick challenge.. burn a Knoppix CD, put it in PC and boot. Even my
MCSE/MCSA mates were amazed..
B
Bill Turner
_________________________________________________________
Tried that, Knoppix wouldn't recognize my modem or sound card no matter
how much tweaking I did.
Pretty, though.
C
Conor
Suse personal edition is free.
L
Lordy
Curious. Did windows XP out of the box??
J
JAD
LOL..............Linux easier than a XP install...............RIGHT!
What printers and scanners OLD, parallel printer/scanner? Come ON,
right away some people can't wait to exaggerate.
What printers and scanners OLD, parallel printer/scanner? Come ON,
right away some people can't wait to exaggerate.
M
Matt
Ruel said:
Hmmm ... did you ever get a Linux running on your Soyo board?
F
Frank
Bill Turner said:_________________________________________________________
Tried that, Knoppix wouldn't recognize my modem or sound card no matter
how much tweaking I did.
Pretty, though.
If you looked further there would have been a lot more that was
misconfigured.
I think it would work well on pre 2000 hardware.
M
Matt
JAD said:
All Epson scanners, at least. Lots of good cheap laser printers by HP,
Samsung, Brother, etc., new and old. But yes, you do have to pay
attention as to what you buy. See www.linuxprinting.org and
www.sane-project.org
Time is on Linux's side.
B
Bill Turner
_________________________________________________________
Well, maybe. Let me ask you a question: Why is so much Linux
programming effort spent on things which, IMHO, are a waste of time? Go
to sourceforge.net and look over the projects going on. As of today,
there are 92,465 projects underway. Most of them I don't even have a
clue what they are about, never mind their usefulness. If a fraction of
that effort was spent in writing drivers for hardware, Linux would be
far, far ahead of where it is now. But writing drivers is not
glamorous, is it?
I admit I'm not a programmer so maybe I'm not seeing the big picture,
but I suspect many Linux programmers have their own little pet project
which no one else cares about and will never use, but it gives them
great pleasure so that's what they do.
This is Linux's Achilles heel, I believe. At Microsoft, there is one
hand guiding development. At Linux, no one is in charge, and it shows.
The only way Linux will ever beat out Microsoft is to become (shudder)
like Microsoft. And maybe the Netscape people will indeed do this...
I'm watching.
Am I wrong?
B
Bill Turner
_________________________________________________________
Absolutely, and not only that, whenever I changed hardware, XP
recognized it, loaded the drivers automatically and I was off and
running.
I've always felt Windows is for people who need to get things done and
Linux is for people whose hobby is computers. I don't mean that as a
put down for either side, it's just how it is.
M
Matt
Bill said:
The dynamic there is that as the installed Linux base increases, the
hardware makers will not be able to neglect Linux drivers and will write
their own. No big hardware maker is going to discard 5% or 10% of the
market for the cost of writing a driver. But you are right that drivers
are often a barrier to Linux. It is a chicken/egg problem.
The problem has more often been that the hardware makers wouldn't
release the information needed to write drivers, so some guesswork and
reverse engineering and backdoor research have often been required.
M
Matt
Bill said:
And computers!
M
Matt
Bill said:
The one head behind that one hand decided that Windows would never run
on anything but x86 processors. The one head denied the classic Unix
concepts of users and file ownership, but was eventually forced to come
up with a shabby imitation. The decision to integrate the features of
the system instead of building it in layers led to a morass of
unmanagable code so that it takes them 5-6 years to bring out the next
version.
R
Ruel Smith
JAD said:
It's not an exaggeration, when you consider that your OS, drivers, and
software get installed in one single operation. With retail distros,
there's no need to install 3rd party drivers or software, for the most
part. Sure, there's bound to be some open source application that didn't
come with your distro and you can hunt it down and install it after the
fact, but generally it holds true. With Windows, you need to install the
OS, then the drivers, then all of your 3rd party software - all seperately.
It can take a lot of time if you have lots of software, and heaven forbid
you lost product key...
Hardware setup problems exist in both OS's. I had a horrible problem with
one system I built for a friend based on an MSI 925X Neo2 Platinum board.
His USB just quit working out of nowhere. Removing SP2 and reinstalling it
fixed it, but after installing SP2 it would work for only for awhile. Then,
out of nowhere, again, it quit working - rendering his card reader and
printer useless. I've also had problems with 3rd party drivers in Windows
that have given me fits, particularly Creative's software. I've even gotten
nasty exclamation marks in Device Manager saying something was wrong with a
particular piece of hardware and racked my brain for days, only for it to
suddenly start working correctly, but I did nothing different the other 15
attempts at installing the driver. So don't give me the crap that Windows
is a breeze to install hardware.
Linux can be a headache too. I currently have problems with this system,
which is built upon a Soyo SY-KT600 Dragon Plus 1.0 motherboard, where it
says that the AGP bus is not supported under the nVidia drivers or ATi
drivers. I've swapped a 5200FX card for a Radeon 9600 and still cannot get
hardware accelerated 3D. I'm planning to upgrade to a nVidia nForce chipset
board, soon, to remedy the situation.
Overall, though, due to the fact that you pretty much install your entire
system with one operation, Linux IS easier to install than Windows.
R
Ruel Smith
Bill said:
Writing drivers is the job of the OEM. Many OEM's do not release information
to make life easy to write drivers. So, I boycott those companies that do
not write drivers, as best as I can, on both my Windows and my Linux
system. Nowadays, Intel, nVidia, and ATi are very involved in Linux, and
getting an Intel or nForce board to work in Linux is pretty easy. Now, some
of the onboard stuff like LAN chips may not, but that's because they are
3rd party and don't develop drivers for Linux. Also, you can use just about
any currently available ATi or nVidia based graphics card in Linux without
much hassle.
As far as the open source projects on sourceforge, it's no different than
the totally useless shareware software out there @ www.download.com and
other portals. Anyone can start a project. It doesn't matter how stupid it
is.
No different than the hordes of shareware programmers out there on the
Windows side.
Yep. Those projects you refer to have nothing to do with the Linux OS. They
are software that works in Windows. Again, those projects you refer to are
the equivelent of shareware programmers giving people free downloadable
software from the many portals they exist on. Some stuff is good, others
are crap. The distros filter the stuff out for most people. Someone writing
an application to allow someone to make CD labels and putting that app on
Sourceforge has absolutely nothing to do with the Linux OS.
You don't seem to understand that most of the stuff that makes up the Linux
OS is part of Unix and was around before Linux was ever conceived. Linux is
only the operating system kernel that uses all of this GNU software
(originally) that together make up what the public understands as Linux.
However, FreeBSD and OpenBSD use the very same stuff, but are actually a
Unix, and are published by the very people who own the rights to the Unix
operating system originally developed by Bell Labs. The Linux kernel has
only one person controlling everything - Linus Torvalds himself. There is a
large cast involved - some volunteers and others that work for companies
like Red Hat, Novell, etc. that actually get paid to develop the software.
It gets developed in a cohesive manner.
Microsoft's development of Windows is actually very inefficient. Patches and
updates happen at a very slow pace. Recently, MS released a patch for IE
that has been a known vulnerability for over 2 years! Longhorn is pushed
back until 2006, and it'll be cut down at that. Linux patches happen very
quickly. Software is continually updated on a regular basis. The Mandrake
Linux 10.1 I'm using is light years ahead of the Mandrake Linux 9.1 that
was released about 2 years ago. SuSE released a 64 bit Linux almost as fast
as AMD released Athlon 64 chips to the market, and their current version
already supports Intel's x86-64 architechture, while 64 bit Windows has yet
to be released and few, if any, drivers will immediately be available for
it.