so much for linux

[Ruel Smith]

Hmmm ... did you ever get a Linux running on your Soyo board?

I'm writing from that very computer, running Mandrake Linux 10.1. My only
problem is with hardware accelerated 3D. Distros don't matter, as the
problem is present in Fedora, SuSE, and Mandrake. I think the Via KT600
chipset's AGP bus isn't directly supported by either nVidia or ATi, and
therefore hardware accelerated 3D doesn't properly work. I can get my
nVidia card to work with open source drivers in 2D, and the ATi card works
in 2D only with ATi's drivers. I think I'll change to an nForce board to
remedy the situation.

 

[Ruel Smith]

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.

For $80, you got an OS and quality office suite software, Quark Xpress
quality desktop publishing software, MS Visual Studio quality develoment
environments, Photoshop quality photo manipulating software, LiteWave
quality 3D rendering software, antivirus software, spam filtering, project
management software, personal information managment software, and more?
Wow... Where can I get such a good deal? Oh...yeah...Linux!

 

[Ruel Smith]

_________________________________________________________

Tried that, Knoppix wouldn't recognize my modem or sound card no matter
how much tweaking I did.

And I bet neither did Windows without using a 3rd party driver disk...

 

[Ruel Smith]

Absolutely, and not only that, whenever I changed hardware, XP
recognized it, loaded the drivers automatically and I was off and
running.

Wow... So did Mandrake Linux! I swapped out my eVGA nVidia FX5200 card and
put in an ATi Radeon 9600 card, rebooted and was off and running!
Amazing...

 

[Lordy]

LOL..............Linux easier than a XP install...............RIGHT!
What printers and scanners OLD, parallel printer/scanner?

Scanner : Epson Perfection 1650 Photo (via USB)
Printer: Canon S600 (although the defalut drivers for this range of canon
drivers arent the greatest it terms of photo quality.

Come ON,
right away some people can't wait to exaggerate.

No need to exaggerate mate. I happily use both OS's so its no big deal to
me. If things dont work I say so. Whats the point in lying about it??

 

[Lordy]

If a fraction of
that effort was spent in writing drivers for hardware,

This is largely down to the hardware manufacturers, who have specs readily
available.

 

[Lordy]

At Microsoft, there is one
hand guiding development.

Not quite. Again its the manufacturers who put in their own effort to make
sure their product is supported under Windows. Right now, for many, the
business decision was definitely not to support Linux. For others it is.
Over time the balance is changing. For exanple most HP and Epson printers
have Linux drivers from the manufacturer (not some open source reverse
engineering effort). Canon still do not AFAIK.

Remember When XP first came out? For a time many bits of hardware would not
work until drivers were made available. I had to get rid of an old Artec
USB Scanner because they didnt release any XP drivers. In PC World many
peripheral retail boxes had stickers saying that "XP drivers were not
packaged, get them from the website" etc. Of course since XP was "the way
to go" in terms of marketshare, the manufacturers had to get their act
together developing XP drivers in a hurry. With Linux, having a minority
share, there is not such a great financial incentive.

Hardware support is firstly down to the manufacturers desire to support
linux. Its only if they dont bother that you need open-source reverse
engineering projects (as most manufacturers dont release detailed hardware
specs to the public)

 

[Lordy]

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.

You just revealed a certain level of ignorance BTW.

 

[David Maynard]

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.

For historical perspective, UNIX, the Linux source of those ideas, was
developed in 1969, the year that Linus Torvalds was born, by Bells Labs: a
'guiding hand' kind of institution.

 

[JAD]

lying? see there ya go again exaggerating

why exaggerate? cause that's what you guys do all the time...what good
are drivers that only work fairly good? I have an s540, what distro
are you using that needs no third party disk? From XP this printer
puts out above average quality photos.

the sales pitch for Linux is going in the wrong direction. its not
ease or looks...its about having something that will let you listen to
or watch whatever you want without special licenses and phoning home
to big brother. But then that went out the window when they started
charging as much as a windows release. When I started with gnu/linux,
we were sending a donation to a BBS sysop and we could download via
zmodem protocols. forever and a day. It's much easier today but
networking and USB 2.0 and firewire are needed as part of the OS. You
can't beat the ease of windows, that's why its popular.

 

[Mac Cool]

Ruel Smith:

Linux IS easier to install than Windows

I agree with you, it is, and I understand why Linux advocates push this
one aspect of Linux so strongly because for many years Linux was so
difficult to install and developed such a bad reputation. The real
issues with Linux have nothing to do with installation, they are all
post installation.

It has been a couple of years since I stopped messing with Linux (except
for Knoppix). I tried Debian, Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, Thin Linux and
several other distros just for the hell of it. I wanted to like it, I
tried hard to like Linux. As recently as a few years ago, Linux still
would not work properly with a USB mouse (don't start); Linux still
didn't support Firewire, it didn't support most games, basically if you
didn't own an Nvidia video card you were screwed. Open Office is not a
replacement for MS Office; it is not 100% compatible with MS files which
99% of the business world uses. The biggest complaint is the lack of
support. Yes, there are hundreds of forums, websites, newsgroups and the
manpages; but it's next to impossible to get a straight answer to even
the simplest question and for every useful reply you receive about five
RTFM replies regardless of whether the manpages answer the question.

OTOH, Knoppix seems to be very full proof. So far I have not had any
issues with USB and it even supports my external Firewire drive. I own
an Nvidia card now so I can only say it works with Nvidia and Intel's
onboard video. Unfortunately I have no use for it except as an
occasional troubleshooting device and demo for folks who are Linux-
curious.

 

[Matt]

For historical perspective, UNIX, the Linux source of those ideas, was
developed in 1969, the year that Linus Torvalds was born, by Bells Labs: a
'guiding hand' kind of institution.

It isn't uncommon for that kind of hand to do the right thing,
especially when the main intention is to build something useful. But
besides that, the creative individuals that built Unix had to do
considerable sneaking around in order to get the ball rolling.

 

[Matt]

Matt wrote:




I'm writing from that very computer, running Mandrake Linux 10.1. My only
problem is with hardware accelerated 3D. Distros don't matter, as the
problem is present in Fedora, SuSE, and Mandrake. I think the Via KT600
chipset's AGP bus isn't directly supported by either nVidia or ATi, and
therefore hardware accelerated 3D doesn't properly work. I can get my
nVidia card to work with open source drivers in 2D, and the ATi card works
in 2D only with ATi's drivers. I think I'll change to an nForce board to
remedy the situation.

I'm writing this on a KT600 Dragon Ultra Platinum Edition with an MSI
FX5200 card and Fedora Core 3. Tuxracer works---no problem. I've also
run this with FC2 and if IIRC FC1. My mobo seems to be the successor to
yours, but seemingly has the same chipset. I could be wrong, but really
I think you can get the 3D to work. When you try, at what point do you
think it goes wrong? Are you able to install the nvidia driver?

 

[Bill Turner]

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.

_________________________________________________________

I don't understand? Well, I was using Unix to do email back in 1989
(remember PINE?) before Microsoft even thought about it. Like I said,
I'm not a programmer but I am a well-experienced user and for me,
Windows beats Unix and it's quasi-clones hands down. I've installed so
many Linux variants I've lost count. Mandrake, Debian, SUSE, Knoppix,
even Xandros which set me back $50 and is just an elegant piece of crap.
None of them - not one - ever worked half as well as Windows. Most of
them had something that wouldn't work at all, usually hardware related.

Microsoft has focused since day one on making its products
user-friendly, especially for the non-geek. Of course, true geeks are
appalled at the results, but users ultimately vote with their wallets.
Guess who won? The look and feel of Windows, especially XP, is smooth
as silk and people like it.

Need to update or patch? Connect to Windows Update website and it's
practically automatic. By comparison the acronym "RPM" sends people
screaming in frustration. Does the word "dependencies" make you blanch?

Been there, done all that. Mr. Gates, though having the black heart of
a monopolist, focuses on his customers. The average Linux programmer
focuses on his pet projects. If the masses like his work, fine, if not,
that's fine too.

I'll pass.

 

[Bill Turner]

And I bet neither did Windows without using a 3rd party driver disk...

_________________________________________________________

You would lose that bet. WinXP has a ton of built-in drivers that
handle everything I've thrown at it, with one exception, below. The
only purpose for the disk is to add bells and whistles if you want them.

Here's the exception. When XP first came out, I had a PCI card which
added two serial ports. At first, I had to install drivers from the CD
that came with it. A couple of years later, I gave that computer to my
mom and built another one for myself, moving that card to the new one.
To my surprise, XP now recognized the card and installed the drivers
without using the CD. That's the only exception. Everything else XP
handled all by itself.

True geeks will be unimpressed by this, but Joe User loves it.

 

[Bill Turner]

And computers!

_________________________________________________________

No, no, no.

I don't mean getting a bunch of parts and plugging them together. I
mean making your own castings, milling out parts, fabricating from
scratch. Anybody can plug a computer together. I'm on my sixth
homebuilt one now.

 

[Bill Turner]

For $80, you got an OS and quality office suite software,

Wow... Where can I get such a good deal? Oh...yeah...Linux!

_________________________________________________________

Yep, if you don't count the endless hours of frustration making it work,
it's a reeeeeeal bargain, alrighty!

 

[Conor]

And computers!

_________________________________________________________

No, no, no.

I don't mean getting a bunch of parts and plugging them together. I
mean making your own castings, milling out parts, fabricating from
scratch. Anybody can plug a computer together. I'm on my sixth
homebuilt one now.
[/QUOTE]
If anyone wants to figure out what Bill is on about, he means something
like this:

http://www.bit-tech.net/article/114/

 

[Conor]

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.

[/QUOTE]

The top ones are P2P and ripping apps...

 

[Ian Harding]

The one head behind that one hand decided that Windows would never run
on anything but x86 processors.

I remember NT supporting PPC, MIPS, and Alpha processors out of the box
and at no extra cost. Market forces spoke and by the time Win 2K was
released MS had decided it was not worth their while (Alpha support made
it to Win2K beta but was dropped before final release IIRC). Virtually
all systems running NT were using x86 compatibles because of
price/performance benefits and third-party software support.

Ian