Village Voice on Gnome GUI/Linux 173
Jen Matson writes "Village Voice writer Austin Bunn examines the Gnome GUI, Linux, and (in a sidebar) his own experience trying to install Linux on his IBM laptop computer.
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Village Voice on Gnome GUI/Linux
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We warn the reader in advance that the proof presented here depends on a clever but highly unmotivated trick. -- Howard Anton, "Elementary Linear Algebra"
Laptop install (Score:1)
Can't help feeling (as I'm sure others must) that "...if *I* was there, that sucker'd be up and running!"
Laptop install (Score:1)
Why? (Score:1)
anyone's act of generosity or voluntary
cooperation as a validation of
socialist thought?
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
This mirrors my experience on a dell desktop (Score:1)
The first issue was partitioning the hard drive. I used partition magic and made linux partitions. However, RHL 5.2 did not want to recognize these partitions, so I deleted them. I could then repartition using disk druid.
Next, I could not get X windows to work. The Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro that came with my computer was not supported by XFree86. Attempting to run in VGA mode caused the install to hang. I purchased the Xi Graphics driver, but I then had problems with mixing both XFree86 stuff and XiGraphics stuff (due in part to my own maladroitness). Not knowing how to correct this situation fully, I simply reinstalled everything. That worked. I could run X-windows. Other headaches followed with X-windows but having gotten the hang of rpm and configuration files, I never had to do a complete reinstall to fix them.
Next came ppp. That by itself was a one week trial by fire. I was trying to do it over a 3Com external isdn modem that uses synchronous ppp. The computer is worthless to me without net access. I discovered the rather simple solution was to get the modem to do synchronous/asynchronous translation. One week to discover this 30 second solution.
With some perspective on all of this, I realize that one of the issues is the heterogenous and complex nature of the intel platform. Microsoft has done a reasonably good job of forcing manufacturers to produce drivers, but even they have problems. The other thing is the OEM install. They face these problems with windows but solve them before you see them.
re: Happy now? (Score:1)
That article should please the Linux + Gnome zealots. I'm all for Linux, KDE and Gnome, but the wording of the article was too strong for my pathetic constitution. I had to stop reading halfway down... Saboteur? Bomb? Detonation? Tyranny? Yes tyranny is probably the right word to use, but don't make the Linux world out to be full of religious type nuts....
"Are you the Linux Users Group?
Fuck off, we're a group of Linux users..."
No/undetected CDROM? - install via NFS or PLIP (Score:1)
PLIP also works well if you don't have a pcmcia card.
Granted, tho', no new user could be expected to figure this stuff out on the fly.
The parallel port is your friend! (Score:1)
Laptops - not ordinary Intel systems. (Score:1)
The sad fact is that laptops are actually semi-custom Intel boxes. Many have hardware that is so different than standards that the OEMs must provide semi-custom versions of Win95 to install on them. Anyone trying to install an off-the-shelf copy of Win95 on these laptops will have a similar experiance to the author of this story did with Linux.
The real problem is one of expectation. People think that the laptops are "just another intel system" when they are not. The only solution I can see in pre-installed Linux.
Even though Linux has a reputation of being hard to install, most of the people writing these articles probably could not install Windows either, so they buy systems pre-installed and hopw the hard disk does not crash.
This mirrors my experience on a dell desktop (Score:1)
I have this problem whenever I upgrade on a box that uses/used PartitionMagic 3.x; some (and sometimes all) of my ext2 partitions get labeled as "Amoeba" (IIRC), and if I'm not wary (like when I upgraded to RH5.2), Bad Things® will happen. If you use the fdisk (it that it?) program from the boot disk - mine was a CheapBytes CD, but I guess the real RH5.2 has it too - you can manually tell the install program that your ext2 partitions really are ext2.
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Laptop install (Score:1)
Why? (Score:1)
Why else? I can find fault with both the left and the right since they are both extremes.
Left : Look! Gnome is great! it throws it back at the da man's face! It's socialist.
Right : Look! Gnome is great! I can package this into my own distribution and ship it all over for money!
Left : You Fascist Whore! You can't control our movement!
Right : Well, there's this loophole in the GPL...
Me, well i'm discordian and I just take the best of both worlds. Vegetarianism + Hatred of gov't comes from both sides, ya know.
This is why (Score:1)
--Webster
Perhaps your question should be worded as "why do leftists always view anyone's act of generosity. . .
Terrible blow to opensource.... (Score:1)
Agreed (Score:1)
"That's because the long-term future for private companies that have amassed their millions on proprietary code is one of diminishing returns."
Christ . . . this is just cant; exciting promise makes sentimental 'facts'. GNU is just as inevitable as Richard Stallman (one in a few million). My luck was his labor.
Your sig made my day alright.
Be afraid, capital boy. (Score:1)
Kropotkin beats Marx! Kropotkin beats Rand! Go Kropotkin! Go go go! Wooo-hooo!
http://www.anarchy.org [anarchy.org]
giggle (Score:1)
http://www.anarchy.org
I thought the definition of anarchy was the absence of an organization.
I understand that the purest form of the definition may diverge from mine, but then it wouldn't have made be giggle.
Whatever happened... (Score:1)
What distribution? (Score:1)
Thanks!
sandeen@io.com
He posted to DejaNews (Score:1)
Whatever happened... (Score:1)
Fallwell on Linux (Score:1)
Then Pat Robertson would lead a prayer to burn the evil Linux spawn.
Personally, I'd rather have some commie pinko from the Village Voice on our side. Anyone know if Rage Against the Machine use it?
Zagmar
Gnome is a disgrace (Score:1)
Comments directly proportional to quality? Gnome's release got well over 1000 comments here (mostly flames):
This is why... really? (Score:1)
Actually, the textbook definitions I've seen basically have socialism as a society where the state owns and/or controls the means of production.
Frankly, I'm unconvinced that this is the case with open source software, or that it's a desireable way of doing things. And it's the way most socialist experiments turned out so far.
Perhaps a more complicated way of putting it would be thusly: what did they call generosity before the late 18th/early 19th century, when socialist philosophers first sprang up?
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
For me, it wouldn't be worth the trouble. (Score:1)
About the most I would have gone to would be copying it (the CD) onto a FAT16 partition, then installing from there.
That is reasonable. NFS or PLIP (when there is no network) is not. Not for someone who's just playing around for an article, and doesn't necessarily have a passion for Linux.
Nowadays, if I couldn't get it to install, I might go to such measures. But when I was installing Linux for the first time, I sure as hell wouldn't have.
--
- Sean
Fear the impossible? (Score:1)
Unless it's a corporation saying "work for 50 an hour, work for somebody else for the same wage... or starve". Non-coercion? In the absence of labor laws (and other such regulations), the corporations become The Law, and coercion remains part of the equation.
Since there are no businesses in a socialist world, everyone is forced deal directly with the government for their needs, a violation of that principle.
From what I gather, the idea of "workers owning the means of production" does not preclude business, and doesn't necessarily have to involve government, other than, say, as a regulatory body, for example.
Dos centavos. Spend it wisely.
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Interesting assertions... (Score:1)
I'll agree that it wasn't as nice a release as I'd hoped for, but saying that only 5% of people who tried to install it were successful... that's ludicrous.
PM (Score:1)
That's odd I've used PM to create/resize ext2 partitions before and after installs of RH 5.2. Works beautifully. I use it to slowly claim space for Linux on my Win98 drive. Just yesterday I used it to repartition an existing Linux disk to keep a data partition and reformat the rest for a clean install of RH5.2.
-tak
So we're a bunch of "techno-libertarian" commies? (Score:1)
It's the Village Voice, what did you expect? The fact that linux is in there at all is rather astonoshing.
You're right - Laptops != ordinary Intel systems. (Score:1)
Poor bugger. (Score:1)
*grin* now that I've stirred up the hornet's nest.... *grin* *grin* Seriously. LINUX IS NOT THAT HARD. PCs are just so incompatible, klugey, and deeply proprietary that most people have problems installing Linux on them, and need extensive resources to cope. Give the reporters NetWinders if you don't want them to be touching Macintoshes, but at all costs liberate Linux from the treacherous clutches of the PC! Linux is, and needs to be, a lot more than that pile of archaic kluge.
We keep seeing articles on wizzy cases- somebody or lots of people ought to start putting together wild handcrafted linux boxen with unusual designs, quick, while the hype is big. It'd be a great way to separate Linux from the PC, and now is the time to strike. What's out there as far as circuit designers? Is it possible to buy many known-standards-compliant peripherals like keyboards and drives (not necessarily the cheapest ones!) and design a special mobo with a StrongARM chip on it or something, or several PPCs for a high-powered machine, or an Alpha or quad alpha or something? I keep returning to the NetWinder- what a great form factor, what a great energy consumption, can we have more Linux computers with a design like that?
Jerry, Pat, and RATM not on Linux (Score:1)
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Moral of the story? (Score:1)
If Microsoft, Apple, or IBM includes a driver with their operating systems, it probably will work out of the box.
If Linux includes a driver in the kernal or in a distribution, it might work, it might not.
Fortunately, there are many workarounds, but in my experience (with RedHat), if the driver craps out, you're not going to get very far.
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Angle Brackets. (Score:1)
Use < and > to produce < and >.
--
- Sean
Gnome is (*not*) a disgrace (Score:1)
I really like the fact that it and Enlightenment are *highly* configurable; this allows me to create an environment that's highly tuned to my preferences. In comparison, I always found KDE to be a bit rigid and limited in terms of configurability.
Anyway, I was right on the edge of abandoning GNOME forever, but I gave it that one last attempt and now I wouldn't use anything else for a Linux desktop.
But they really do have to get their act together wrt bundling it in a saner installation package/script, that's for sure!!
This mirrors my experience on a dell desktop (Score:1)
In my case I suspect that an OEM installed utility had a role in changing the formatting type. [Or do you have S.M.A.R.T. utility on your desktop.]
By the way, I believe it's PM version 4 that can format ext2 partitions.
I really have had no problems with my partitions being recognized. However, I may do things to screwup the whole system, e.g. by unknowingly substituting a user's password for root when I was learning to add users. Nonetheless, these were my errors! Moreover, I have installed both RH 5.0 and 5.2 - and it's getting better, but new problems arise as the last set are solved.
Well, I dunno. (Score:1)
Installed RedHat 5.2 on it -- no problem.
Got PPP working -- no problem.
Upgraded kernel to 2.2.2 -- no problem.
DL'ed GNOME rpms.
rpm -Uvh GN<tab><enter> -- oops. Missing a lib.
DL the lib from wherever.
rpm -Uvh lib<tab><enter>
rpm -Uvh GN<tab><enter> -- no problem.
Reconfigured the default WM to WindowMaker -- no problem.
And this from someone whose prior experience with Linux amounted to a couple of hours at max.
Now I do have to admit that when I tried to upgrade WMaker from 0.20.1 (the default with RH5.2) to 0.50, I ran into all sorts of problems. It wanted libungif4, whereas GNOME (and WMaker 0.20) was using libungif3, and so a whole buncha things conflicted, and I ended up going back to WMaker 0.20.
But seriously... that was the only problem I had that was related to GNOME at all. And you could definitely call me a new Linux user. And yes, I was doing this entirely on my own. It hasn't crashed since (except for that power outage a week or so ago.)
Stable and straightforward to set up.
*shrug*
Mebbe I'm just lucky...
--
- Sean
Libertarianism has many meanings (Score:1)
Actually someone right here on
~"The right thinks the Libertarians are too leftwing,
The left thinks the Libertarians are too right wing"~
well that's approximate..
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law...
Why? (Score:1)
Certain radio blowhards like to point out every example of something liberal as an attempt to control others. Ignore the stated purpose
But then, he just does it because it generates his favorite kind of caller: the *sputtering* liberal.
I don't sputter, sorry.
Fear the impossible? (Score:1)
You're forgetting the "invisible hand" of the market economy. People are used to 5.50 or whatever an hour minumum. I minimum wage were to go away today, most employees would be paid the same contractually, and the others would fight for their wages or quit and go somewhere that they could make more.
Now I don't know what you mean by "labor laws" -- If you are talking about kids in factories, all get paid less because there are more workers in general. But keep in mind that minimum wage is just a price floor by which the government people "happy"
He posted to DejaNews (Score:1)
-tak
You're right - Laptops != ordinary Intel systems. (Score:1)
How Occidentalocentric! (Score:1)
I know it all too well. It's a myth.
People are used to 5.50 or whatever an hour minumum.
Not in the Dominican Republic. Or [fill in the blank with any one of 150+ nations].
[If] minimum wage were to go away today, most employees would be paid the same contractually, and the others would fight for their wages or quit and go somewhere that they could make more.
Fight? Flight? This is not an option for most people. Phillips-Van Heusen closed down a plant in Central America (El Salvador?) rather than deal with a workforce that managed to win collective-bargaining rights (through an impossibly protracted process); they wanted a raise from 50 to 90 an hour. if they find work elsewhere, it'll probably be for 50 an hour.
There's six billion folks in the world, and the "invisible hand" uses that to force the terms of people's wages. While the DJIA has risen hundreds of percent (adjusted for inflation) in the last 20 years, average hourly wage in the nation that houses the Dow has gone down, IIRC, or flatlined. An example of the global effect of the "invisible hand". If people around the world were happy with The Hand, they wouldn't be heading for The West.
I both lament and benefit from this. This makes me a hypocrite. Or just brutally honest.
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You're right - Laptops != ordinary Intel systems. (Score:1)
You may need to get a whole mess of drivers to get the video/audio/modem working right, but for the basic stuff, Windows at least finds your drive controller.
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Never install Linux alone? (Score:1)
Interesting assertions... (Score:1)
What the hell. (Score:1)
A) Easy to install if you follow the instructions provided on gnome.org, I follwed the instructions to the letter for RH5.2 and have a stable system, and I did not have to do any --force or --nodeps
B) Pretty stable for x.0.0 release. Most of my headaches came from Enlightenment, I simple switched to WindowMaker and poof, problems gone.
So kids, whats the moral of the story?
RTFM
Libertarianism has many meanings (Score:1)
he? (Score:1)
Gnome is a disgrace (Score:1)
Did you pay for gnome?
Did you contribute to their budget?
Did you buy a cd or some other form of donation?
Did you submit "detailed" bug reports?
Did you create a suggestions list and emailed it to them?
Did you contribute code snippets?
Do you belong to "any" linux based organization to where you are actively involved with "any" of the above?
Written any docs perhaps?
Personally, I have had little problem installing gnome via RPM or compiling it. (I prefer RPM's , I'm lazy)
rpm -Uvh --nodeps --force filename.rpm
(The quick way, does all rpm's in the directory based on installed packages)
rpm -Uvh --freshen --nodeps --force *.rpm
Any of these has worked without failure for me and anyone I know.
granted, there are quite a few bugs with gnome its self and the applications, but considering its age, the amount of coding necessary, and what it does for the cost, I'm impressed. They also have the burden of being current and utilizing the latest GTK widjets set.
PS: Don't just complain, its allright to point out bugs and shortcommings, but just to sit there and rant with little to contribute in exchange for an organization of people gearing their efforts to provide "you" a potentially microsoft free , open sourced windowing environment for not a single dime out of your pocket, only demonstrates your absolute shortsightedness and lack of ambition.
I surely hope the linux community is not mostly comprised of this sort of attitude. Linux needs doers... The complaints are not in shortage.
PM (Score:1)
This mirrors my experience on a dell desktop (Score:1)
In my case I suspect that an OEM installed utility had a role in changing the formatting type. [Or do you have S.M.A.R.T. utility on your desktop.]
In mine, it's a self-assembled box (DOS or Win9* originally), so there's no weird OEM utility AFAIK.
By the way, I believe it's PM version 4 that can format ext2 partitions.
I know, but his 4.0 and my 3.x versions seem to have a hard time convincing RH's install program that some ext2 partitions are really there - the unifying factor is that the original formatting and subsequent partition changes were done by PM (of course, I didn't have the benefit of being able to tweak ext2 partitions directly). Bug or Feature? RH's fault or PQ's? I've never found out.
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Whatever happened... (Score:1)
What distribution? (Score:1)
Gnome is a disgrace??? (Score:1)
What part of gnome in particular?
I still have a libc 5 RH 4.x system and it seems to work ok for me. I just downloaded all the source and compiled it in the order that was given on the web page.
I must odd. I always get the tarballs and compile. Other than extracting stuff from a redhat source rpm, I haven't used rpm since the first time I installed linux on the machine.
Frog legs for dinner. (Score:1)
The funny thing is: nobody's wages have been cut. Some high-paying jobs have left the country; some low-paying (by US standards) have left the country as well, since there's always some third-world economy that features lower labor costs. The long-term effect is an overall lowering of wages, but that Hand is invisible, remember? The resultant increase in job/wage insecurity (which Comrade Greenspan often finds to be a Good Thing®) prevents (or subverts) the traditional upward wage pressures that "full employment" would bring. Again, no-one's getting their wages cut. Corps bring in scab labor in order to get some extra leverage against striking workers - that works to keep wage increases down or nonexistant, and often gives the corp carte blanche to move X number of jobs overseas. Again, not a cut, but it has helped keep down overall growth in wages. There will not be masses of people going postal - just as a frog won't jump out of the pot if you slowly raise the water temperature to boiling point.
Mmmmmm. Frog legs!
Disclaimer: IANAE.
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Gnome is hardly a disgrace (Score:1)
What the hell. (Score:1)
Gnome is a disgrace (Score:1)
Why would I pay for something of THAT quality?
Did you contribute to their budget?
Did you buy a cd or some other form of donation?
Again, why would I spend my money on something that's really not ready for prime time. Did I mention that I really disagree with the religious , political, whatever, frevor Gnome is attracting? I'd rather sit back and watch the extremists self destruct thank you.
Did you contribute code snippets?
Yeah, give me decent C++ bindings and I'd love to. Not.
What the hell. (Score:1)
Daniel
Depressing Thought (Score:1)
it was a bit involved, but it did work), I found GNOME to be rather disappointing.
It was very unstable, almost embarassingly so.
What bothers me is that one of the dominant distributions has made
such an unstable desktop their default.
As Linux is gaining more attention, and as people begin to learn that there's an
alternative to Windows, they're more than likely to try RedHat and discover, "Hey!
This is worse than Windows! It crashes all the time! Whatever." and go back to 98/NT.
Why? (Score:1)
Fear the impossible? (Score:1)
Of course in the absence of the laws that allow corporations to absolve actual human beings of responsibility, (limited liability being the sole reason for the existence of corporate charters) corporations would not exist either!
Since there are no businesses in a socialist world, everyone is forced deal directly with the government for their needs, a violation of that principle.
Actually...there are businesses in a socialist world. Just not corporations.
I have found this thread rather interesting, as I got into Linux mostly because I found a lot of resonances between the way the Free Software/Open Source movement actually worked, and the theoretical works of Kropotkin like Mutual Aid [pitzer.edu]
Gnome is a disgrace (Score:1)
gnome-session
in my
Has a few odd bugs and infelicities. I'd say it should have been a
Dave Cook
This is why... really? (Score:1)
-lx
Why? (Score:1)
-lx
Revolution mounted where? (Score:1)
-lx
rage against the machine (Score:1)
Sheesh, and here I was thinking that amplifiers, mixers, and electric guitars were electronic.
-lx
anarchy.org (Score:1)
Like christian.com back in the old days...(*sniff*)
-lx
invisible hand my ass. (Score:1)
I think it was an article on
-lx
that's not crowley! (Score:1)
Besides, you don't think that crowley might have been being sarcastic when/if he made that comment about education?
-lx
Then don't use E. (Score:1)
E isn't part of GNOME, or vice-versa.
--
- Sean
eh? (Score:1)
:-)
--
- Sean
Gnome is a disgrace (yes, yest is ) (Score:1)
Window XX can be hard to install also. (Score:1)
Laptop install - RH5.2 on my TP600 - no problem (Score:1)
And it doesn't matter... but it does (Score:1)
But they might, unless they want to lug their computer back to the store (and probably pay) to have it "fixed" when they blow their registry, or they corrupt their hard drive, or a virus wipes out their drive or any one of the thousands of ways a Windows installation can get hosed up enough it needs to be reinstalled.
So, saying, "Well, Windows is hard to install too" is silly.
It isn't silly, although it still isn't completely an excuse.
Laptop install (Score:1)
and all available during the install process.
I'm with you, had I been there, that sucker'd be up and running, even if I had to resort to installing from the hard drive and sort out the PCMCIA details later.
The Linux Laptop home page [utexas.edu]
has no less than 6 different pages about installing on an IBM 560*.
One point I make to people over and over is that installing an operating system from scratch on a PC, ANY operating system, is difficult. It requires knowledge of the hardware that very few ordinary users have.
I have done over 100 Linux installs from scratch on various hardware, and have done several dozen installs of Win 95/98. I run into puzzeling stuff at least as often during windows installs as during Linux installs.
Those of us with experience installing *operating systems* (which probably includes a majority of those reading this) know that Plug-n-Play is a bad joke, "auto detection" often doesn't, etc.
While most users can install an *application* the majority of people when faced with the proposition of breaking open the shrink wrap on that OEM Windows 95/98 CD that came with their computer because their hard drive got hosed and they are facing installing windows from scratch are totally in over their heads.
These same people couldn't install Linux either.
This means that the writer has a very good point that the availability of computers with Linux pre-installed is essential for it to ever become a major player. Fortunately, this is happeining.
My ThinkPad 390 and X difficulties (Score:1)
But my difficulty was getting X setup. SuSE X setup tool, sax, wouldn't let me select the neomagic driver (I have the latest XFree86). It kept saying I needed to install it (the file that was requested wasn't on the CD). Some research on the 'net and I found out the driver is part of XF86_SVGA driver. So I tried to do it manually in XF86Config, but X would crash saying no 'neomagic' driver exists. Ugh. So I reran sax again and by some magic, I could select the neomagic driver. I had to guess at the screen frequencies and card memory to get the 1024x768 resolution.
But now, I'm stuck getting the sound card to work. The SuSE tutorial didn't help at all. I've never done this before, so I'll be excited when I get it to work.
And I can complain about the "crummy internal modem chip which IBM NEEDS TO WRITE A LINUX DRIVER FOR!!!"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
"We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"
Hmmmm.... (Score:1)
I was a newbie too, but using RH 5.2 I had my machine up and running in under 30 minutes....hmmmm.....
What shortcomings does KDE have?? Name them! (Score:1)
From all reports I've heard, that is the case, so I won't argue with that.
But on the other hand, when I did try it on a 486/50 with 32MB of RAM it crawled. Gnome ran without a problem on the same machine, as far back as 0.13 and as recently as 1.0.1.
> It's also based on CORBA, and has applications
> like StarOffice that use it.
Is there an ORB as part of the KDE downloads? Is there a document object model or applet framework as part of the KDE downloads? No.
MICO is only installed currently as a support app for Koffice, a alpha/beta suite of applications.
I'm not saying that this isn't going to be expanded in the future, but considering that the current desktop runs independant of CORBA, I would not say that KDE is "based on CORBA".
The StarOffice announcement includes some minor concessions (a link on the panel and a handful of icons), some features that will work with Gnome as well (dnd interoperability), some features that should not be a consideration (SO tries not to cover kpanel - this is a WINDOW MANAGER issue), and one real integration (the KDE control center being available in the SO settings menu.)
> The UI toolkit - Qt - is rock solid and
> documented up the wazoo (there's even an
> O'Reilly Qt book already released in Germany).
GTK documentation has been an issue in the past, since it's been a moving target during the 1.1 series.
But things are becoming a lot better. Eric Harlow's book has been released by NewRiders, Redhat is gearing up for it's own reference manuals, and the online documentation project has been accelerating ever since the code freeze of both GTK and Gnome.
> It's got themes:
> GNOME seems sexy when you see all the themed
> screenshots, but when you realize you can
> customize KDE the same amount, then start
> looking below the surface...
Themability in Gnome includes the ability to have replacement rendering engines for the Widgets, this is far more configurable than KDE is currently.
> Right now GNOME is a sham. I've already seen
> press reviews of GNOME comparing it's crashes to
> Window's blue-screen-of-death... It'll be a real
> shame if Linux gets written off as being as
> buggy as Windows because of the politically
> motivated "1.0" release
Gnome is far from a sham. I'll agree that the 1.0 release had a handful of bugs, but a large portion of the "bugs" people report are in fact configuration problems.
Initial installation is still a bit too difficult, I'll agree, but Gnome is more ambitious than KDE - the base installation includes an ORB, a CORBA naming service, an implementation of IIOP, a set of C convienence functions (memory allocation, data structures, cross-platform compatibility functions), a generic plug-in interface, a thin wrapper for X, a graphics library, an image manipulation library that can handle almost any format, audio support libraries, a network aware audio server, high level graphics libraries, an xml parsing library, a cross-platform system monitoring library, a vt emulation library, http access functions, truetype font libraries, etc, etc, etc...
And that is just support libraries, not applications.
Not to mention that the acid test for Gnome will be the release of Redhat 6.0, when the majority of users are exposed to it, not the 1.0 release.
On the whole, the 1.0 release has gotten the name out, gotten a lot of people to try it finally and submit bug reports, etc, etc. Even the Linux kernel goes through such "brown paper bag"
Linux install on a laptop (Score:1)
You cant be a newbie and install an OS that didnt have the hardware designed for it. Microsoft is an easy install because *ALL* PC hardware vendors support them. Linux you have to know what hardware is supported and only purchase that hardware. It bothers me that these "tech writers" attempt installations of linux, they dont know anything about the OS, there hardware, or hardware in general then do a bad write up about it. There is also an IBM laptop -> linux faq out there also that shows you how to get the sound working/cdrom (atleast for the 380). IBM's pcmcia nics are supported as well. Its not that hard people. Just make sure you have supported hardware, or complain to your hardware vendors if they dont support it.
preinstalled Linux (Score:1)
Laptop install (Score:1)
All DOS 6.x needs is the boot floppy. It helps with the fdisk and format. But we could argue that DOS is just a slightly better interface than the BIOS itself.
I run into puzzeling stuff at least as often during windows installs as during Linux installs.
Windows can be way beyond puzzling. What the hell does "A fatal exception error occurred in module (Unknown) at memory address (Unknown)." mean? If Windows can't tell me what memory address it happened at, how on earth am I supposed to know which device did it?
Those of us with experience installing *operating systems* (which probably includes a majority of those reading this) know that Plug-n-Play is a bad joke, "auto detection" often doesn't, etc.
Plug-n-Pray is more like it. Windows has on more than one occasion lowered me to "ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease...yes!" or more often "no!!!!". I liked DOS devices: Jumper the IRQ, DMA, and memory addresses on the card and put the corresponding values on the command line. The problem with Windows is that I cannot see the command being issued to do whatever it is that's it's doing when it's trying to load the driver, so I can't see what's going wrong. And AutoDetect usually only works with things like "101/102-key or Microsoft Natural Keyboard" and "Generic IDE drive type 47".
At least back in the day computer use required some technical competency. Now that you don't have to think to do anything, people who can't think are using them.
Mike
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Ethernet at Home (Score:1)
If you have more than one computer, I think is is useful to network them, even at home. Do you want to sneaker-net print files to your printer when every OS you buy these days can share printers? Why wait for 'net access when there are ways to let every client on a LAN use a dialup link simultaneously?
Of course, Jane and Joe Sixpack may not have ethernet at home, but they are probably not
What distribution? (Score:1)
For a limited memory install you might want to try Slackware. I have successfully installed Slackware 3.x on a 386SX-25 with only 4M of RAM. I have also installed it on a Toshiba 3300SL laptop (386SL-25) with 8M of RAM (from floppies no less).
I know that it is possible to install Red Hat 5.2 on an 8M machine (I did it on a 486DLC-40 with 8M), but I have heard that prior versions had a bug that caused
Ethernet at Home, I have a card to connect to ... (Score:1)
To what if any extent is USB supported under Linux? I have the impression it is not supported even under kernel 2.2. However, researching some problems with sound configurations I found it USB listed in a configuration file.
Anyone know for sure?
Veggie Conspiracy (Score:1)
If the people in the US would eat 10% less meat there would be enough excess crop to end the third world famine.
hehe.
/adam
Veggie Conspiracy (Score:1)
And it wouldn't matter, because they'd just produce enough less grain to make up the difference. Seriously, famine in the third world isn't caused by excess consumerism in the first world. Its caused by political problems in the third world that wouldn't go away even if there were plenty of excess surplus grain. There is already tons of surplus grain and the western governments pay farmers not to grow as much and there are still surpluses. And it doesn't get sent to the third world, and even when we try to send it, it doesn't get distributed because of political reasons.
Veggie Conspiracy (Score:1)
Sad, but true.