Novell Desktop Linux 10: getting closer to a toss up between Linux & Windows?

On a sunny day (Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:09:48 -0500) it happened Tony Hill
wrote in
:

On Mon, 06 Feb 2006 12:46:27 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

On a sunny day (Sun, 05 Feb 2006 17:17:09 -0500) it happened George Macdonald
wrote in
:

On Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:39:33 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 04 Feb 2006 11:42:04 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :

As Tony
has pointerd out, parts are too expensive.
Depends, floppy drive is 10$, DVD drive 50$ or so here....., monitor 250$,
keyboard 10$, mouse free with a box of chocolates.... ;-)

Is this an act with you -- having to have it spelled out in excruciating
detail -- or are you really that thick? It's not the "part" in itself
that's expensive - it's the IT infrastructure you need to keep on hand to
do diagnostics, replacement, reinstalls, etc. etc.

Save me your petty insults and incompetence.
It MUST be incompetence if you think you need an 'IT infrastructure' to replace
a mouse.
Get a life, if not you will have to carry on like that.
What a pain it must be :-)

In a company of more than ~10 people, yes you DO need some form of 'IT
infrastructure' to replace a mouse. Or do you want your employees to
spend their working hours driving to the store to buy the mouse
themselves? Many employees could easily be costing the company $100
to go to the store just to pick up a mouse because theirs went bad.
And that's your best-case scenario. What happens when a power supply
or motherboard goes bad on your out-of-warranty computer?

You might not need a BIG IT department, it could well be just one
person that does this as only part of their job, but in anything other
then the smallest of small companies you need SOME kind of IT group.

Yes and no.
When you buy a monitor here you get 3 years guarantee and they come
to your place to fix it.
When you are a BIG IT company you have a a few mice in store (maybe even real ones),
but also a box full of these (even I have a bag full of used mice).
My bos (in BIG IT company many years ago) argued with IBM like this:
When will now no longer buy original IBM, because for the price we can get 2 clones,
and put one in storage for spare.
He did.
The fact is tha t 'the one in storage' was immediatly used too.
So that gives you redundancy :-)

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:21:12 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

My bos (in BIG IT company many years ago) argued with IBM like this:
When will now no longer buy original IBM, because for the price we can get 2 clones,
and put one in storage for spare.
He did.
The fact is tha t 'the one in storage' was immediatly used too.
So that gives you redundancy :-)

Redundancy is not a replacement for a system. Say the spare stayed in
storage, and someone's box dies. You plop it on their desk.

What about their apps? Where's the data? How long will it take a
typical user to load all the updates, patches, service packs,
whatever?

If you don't care about data continuity, sure, leave it to the users
to replace their own stuff out of a storage cabinet full of components
and work out the software issues. Otherwise, you need a system, and
someone to plan and manage it.


--
Neil Maxwell - I don't speak for my employer

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:15:40 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:09:48 -0500) it happened Tony Hill
wrote in
:

If that's what you like then fine, but you have to realize that you're
ALWAYS going to be a VERY small minority. For the VAST majority
(read: 99%) of the world, this is going to be MUCH less efficient then
going through a GUI to find what they want most of the time. Only a
few crazy masochists are going to even try to learn even a fraction of
what all those applications are going to do, so spending the time
searching through the man pages to figure out what they need is not an
efficient use of time.

I pointed out SEVERAL times that I use fvwm a nine page pager, and that
gives one screen with icons and 8 with xterms.
So I have the good of both worlds.
And fvwm does not re-arange icons either like my win98 did.

As for the 'newer PC is better' or 'newer OS is better' it total nonsense.

I am testing Linux 2.6.15.2 , the 2.6 kernels have no longer OSS for the sound,

For my Linux box ALSA works a lot better than OSS did, and I can still
use all the old OSS-only applications through emulation.

and yesterday it locked on audio DMA and I had to power down.
The kernel performance sucks relative to 2.45 kernel, the dvb driver sucks
and NOTHING new that is of ANY use I have come acrosss.

Aside from all the new drivers (which you apparently don't need since
you're computer is 5 years old), it also has numerous improvements in
terms of pre-emptive kernel, memory management (particularly for large
quantities of memory, ie big workstations and servers) and thread
handling.. just to name a few things. Whether you need these or not
is another question altogether.

You do not read man pages?
What do you use a PC for then?

I tend to like using my PC to get work done rather than searching for
the right command to use! :

To click on mediaplayer to watch porn only?

This issue is that ONLY A MASOCHIST SEARCHES IN MS MENUS just to find it is
not in the sub-sub-sub-subs0ub menu(ater it flipepd back several times, so retry nnn),
while yiou KNWO the program is called 'mplayer' and you CAN type.
So mplayer mymovie.avi is SOOOOOO much faster.
And if you want bells and whiteless you type man mplayer.

If I used Media Player often enough to require it I would have a icon
on my desktop or some shortcut bar. As it is though I just use file
association (both in Windows and Linux) to get Media Player/Mplayer to
play the video files. It's a whole lot easier to double-click on the
file I *JUST* downloaded then to type anything at all.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:15:40 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

This issue is that ONLY A MASOCHIST SEARCHES IN MS MENUS just to find it is
not in the sub-sub-sub-subs0ub menu(ater it flipepd back several times, so retry nnn),
while yiou KNWO the program is called 'mplayer' and you CAN type.
So mplayer mymovie.avi is SOOOOOO much faster.

Hmm, you store everything in the same directory?

Personally, I find it faster to find a file by browsing through a
hierachal directory/folder system then launching the app by
doubleclick.

As compared to typing something like \apps\media\mplayer
\home\downloads\movies\funny\spoofs\themovie.avi

especially if sometimes you decided some time ago themovie.avi would
be more suitable in \home\downloads\movies\funny\mtv

Then again, was that \downloads\ or \download\ ?

Sure you have perfect memory, power to you, but most of us don't and
prefer to spend our time doing something else more enjoyable than
memorizing file organisations on several drives, reading man pages and
remembering all those myriad switches options and such.

There are some things better done in GUI and some better done in CLI,
why restrict yourself?

--
A Lost Angel, fallen from heaven
Lost in dreams, Lost in aspirations,
Lost to the world, Lost to myself

On a sunny day (Sat, 11 Feb 2006 03:33:53 GMT) it happened
(The little lost angel) wrote in
:

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:15:40 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

This issue is that ONLY A MASOCHIST SEARCHES IN MS MENUS just to find it is
not in the sub-sub-sub-subs0ub menu(ater it flipepd back several times, so retry nnn),
while yiou KNWO the program is called 'mplayer' and you CAN type.
So mplayer mymovie.avi is SOOOOOO much faster.

Hmm, you store everything in the same directory?

Personally, I find it faster to find a file by browsing through a
hierachal directory/folder system then launching the app by
doubleclick.

As compared to typing something like \apps\media\mplayer
\home\downloads\movies\funny\spoofs\themovie.av i

especially if sometimes you decided some time ago themovie.avi would
be more suitable in \home\downloads\movies\funny\mtv

Then again, was that \downloads\ or \download\ ?

Sure you have perfect memory, power to you, but most of us don't and
prefer to spend our time doing something else more enjoyable than
memorizing file organisations on several drives, reading man pages and
remembering all those myriad switches options and such.

There are some things better done in GUI and some better done in CLI,
why restrict yourself?

Yes OK, this 'path' to the file is important.
Sure, if you use text a lot, like right now, yes, I have a directory structure
and it is even different on 8 or so mounted partitions.
On the other hand Linux (Unix) has a well known (and sort of (almost) standardized
directory structure, you will not likely find the movies in /usr/bin for example ;-)
(OK MS people would put self-extracting there... LOL)
In 'VDR' as is sort of a standard, and most apps that I write there is a directory
/video
in my case it is split up in
/video/ts
/video/mpeg/
etc..
On the win partition it is called movies
But /video has become a sort of standard I think.
Sometimes you change to that dir, but indeed I usually type
xine /video/my_movie.ts
Not very difficult because I put it there.
But really good memory? No way should you assume that.
the issure with Unix (unlike MS products) is this, once a day 'updatedb' runs.
So now if you want to know where blues_brothers.ts is (for example, an this assumes
you have no clue about upper and lower case, where it is or how it is written on;y know it is a .ts format),
you could do
locate -i blues | grep -i ts
that would give you some hits.
I use 'locate' and 'grep' many times a day.
There is indeed no way to remember where exactly a file is, for example working with postgres,
instelling a new version, setting up databases and links, locate will find all stuff.
The most important tools:
updatedb
locate
grep
ls -rtla (just 'l' on my system, shows the last entry is a directory)
apropos
man

And locate is very fast, not like 'find'.

As you have discovered finding something across many disk and partitions with so many giga bytes
requires tools.
then just double click middle mouse on the relevant result, no typing involved:
Example:
grml: ~ # locate -i morning | grep mp3
/video/sound/other/bob_dylan/new_morning/01-if_not_for_you_192_lame_cbr.mp3
/video/sound/other/bob_dylan/new_morning/02-day_of_the_locusts_192_lame_cbr.mp3
/video/sound/other/bob_dylan/new_morning/07-new_morning_192_lame_cbr.mp3
/video/sound/other/bob_dylan/new_morning/08-mr_tambourine_man_192_lame_cbr.mp3
/video/sound/other/bob_dylan/new_morning/12-father_of_night_192_lame_cbr.mp3
/video/sound/other/dean_martin/21-carolina_in_the_morning_192_lame_cbr.mp3

so I double click middle mouse on the line with tambourine then type these 6 characters only
mpg123 once click of the middle mosue button to insert the full pathfilenameENTER
and it plays

As it is still on my screen, iIcan already click a next one i want to hear.
Of cause normally it plays aiutomatically from my playlists in xmpl (that I wrote).

I think I can do this faster then dilly dally with little windows and icons.

On a sunny day (Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:31:35 -0500) it happened Tony Hill
wrote in
:

I am testing Linux 2.6.15.2 , the 2.6 kernels have no longer OSS for the sound,

For my Linux box ALSA works a lot better than OSS did, and I can still
use all the old OSS-only applications through emulation.
It seems here, that as I had 4 dsp devices (with 2 soundcards) in OSS, the
ALSA emulator (?) now only shows 2.
Also the mixer devices no longer correspond to the dsp devices.
So any programs that would change mixer /dev/mixer1 for audio /dev/dsp1
now do it for /dev/dsp0, bit of a disaster when a radio transmission is
running and you listen to some other sound in preview and mute it.


Aside from all the new drivers (which you apparently don't need since
you're computer is 5 years old), it also has numerous improvements in
terms of pre-emptive kernel, memory management (particularly for large
quantities of memory, ie big workstations and servers) and thread
handling.. just to name a few things. Whether you need these or not
is another question altogether.
Yes, 'improvements':
'lost interrupt' (on various hd devices and audio),
4 x longer time to access my postgres database (why? need to sort this out)
no longer 'update' the 'update' program allowed you to control
how often the buffers flush, you could set it short to for example get fast
transfer of pictures from the security cams (via LAN).
Absense of 'update' is a big minus.
Actually Linus severely ****ed me of.
First I disagreed when he did not want GPL3 for the kernel license (denounce
DRM), but I do agree that DRM should be possible,
Then he claimed that he wanted 'vendor pull' for reiserfs4 to go in the kernel,
OK so Linus is 100% the commercial tour, fine for him.
For me the OS is the accumulated work of thousands of programmers who contributed
free time and ideas.
F*ck the vendor pull, there was no vendor pull when he wrote that kernel either.
So time for a new kernel.

You do not read man pages?
What do you use a PC for then?

I tend to like using my PC to get work done rather than searching for
the right command to use! :
locate

If I used Media Player often enough to require it I would have a icon
on my desktop or some shortcut bar. As it is though I just use file
association (both in Windows and Linux) to get Media Player/Mplayer to
play the video files. It's a whole lot easier to double-click on the
file I *JUST* downloaded then to type anything at all.
When one has only one file, I have several thousand, and several hundered
DVDS (I made), lots of pieces of movies all over the place.
To organize these in a 'project like setup' (per movie) the idea
implemented in the subtitle editor 'xste' (you can download from my site)
makes things a bit easier.

On a sunny day (Fri, 10 Feb 2006 09:07:33 -0800) it happened Neil Maxwell
wrote in
:

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:21:12 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

My bos (in BIG IT company many years ago) argued with IBM like this:
When will now no longer buy original IBM, because for the price we can get 2 clones,
and put one in storage for spare.
He did.
The fact is tha t 'the one in storage' was immediatly used too.
So that gives you redundancy :-)

Redundancy is not a replacement for a system. Say the spare stayed in
storage, and someone's box dies. You plop it on their desk.

What about their apps? Where's the data? How long will it take a
typical user to load all the updates, patches, service packs,
whatever?

If you don't care about data continuity, sure, leave it to the users
to replace their own stuff out of a storage cabinet full of components
and work out the software issues. Otherwise, you need a system, and
someone to plan and manage it.
Maybe 'big IT company' is different to you then it is to me.
In a 'big IT company there would always be somebody to ask for help
with that (I have done this myself, however busy you may be, you help
a collega to get up and going if they walk into your office and ask).
And that can happen to the best ones...
On the other hand, the guys that worled in the big IT company *I* was
in, were very capable programmers, who had the backups in the cabinet
behind them, backups made every day, and the big stuff (licensed app
software) in the company safe.
But if your definition of 'big IT company' is just the local travel agency with
5 PCs and 6 non technical travel advisors, then yes..... in that case there
SHOULD be a fully configured spare 'terminal' as that is all it is - a terminal-.

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 13:33:26 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 10 Feb 2006 09:07:33 -0800) it happened Neil Maxwell
wrote in
:

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:21:12 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

My bos (in BIG IT company many years ago) argued with IBM like this:
When will now no longer buy original IBM, because for the price we can get 2 clones,
and put one in storage for spare.
He did.
The fact is tha t 'the one in storage' was immediatly used too.
So that gives you redundancy :-)

Redundancy is not a replacement for a system. Say the spare stayed in
storage, and someone's box dies. You plop it on their desk.

What about their apps? Where's the data? How long will it take a
typical user to load all the updates, patches, service packs,
whatever?

If you don't care about data continuity, sure, leave it to the users
to replace their own stuff out of a storage cabinet full of components
and work out the software issues. Otherwise, you need a system, and
someone to plan and manage it.
Maybe 'big IT company' is different to you then it is to me.

Evidently.

In a 'big IT company there would always be somebody to ask for help
with that (I have done this myself, however busy you may be, you help
a collega to get up and going if they walk into your office and ask).

Ah, and this ad-hoc "support" is somehow free? Time == money, and all
that.

And that can happen to the best ones...
On the other hand, the guys that worled in the big IT company *I* was
in, were very capable programmers, who had the backups in the cabinet
behind them, backups made every day, and the big stuff (licensed app
software) in the company safe.

And you think that is "backup"? What about a fire in the building?

But if your definition of 'big IT company' is just the local travel agency with
5 PCs and 6 non technical travel advisors, then yes..... in that case there
SHOULD be a fully configured spare 'terminal' as that is all it is - a terminal-.

No, it sounds like that's the sort of company *you* work for.

--
Keith

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 13:09:31 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

On the other hand Linux (Unix) has a well known (and sort of (almost) standardized
directory structure, you will not likely find the movies in /usr/bin for example ;-)
(OK MS people would put self-extracting there... LOL)

Not to me honestly, the default Linux/Unix structure just don't make
sense. Instead of a USRobotics folder, why didn't they call it user
and instead of bin, making the whole thing sounds like the user's
trashbin, why didn't they call it /user/programs ?

Futhermore, I find it a mess to have everything installed into
programs or Program Files for that matter. It isn't intuitive to me so
standardized or not, it's a learning curve and memory work compared to
a graphical tree representation.

In 'VDR' as is sort of a standard, and most apps that I write there is a directory
/video
in my case it is split up in
/video/ts
/video/mpeg/
etc..
On the win partition it is called movies
But /video has become a sort of standard I think.
Sometimes you change to that dir, but indeed I usually type
xine /video/my_movie.ts

This sounds exactly like erm a guy geek's way of doing things. Why
would anybody want to arrange my movies or music based on whether they
are .ts or .mpeg??? I prefer them as things like "tv serials" "movies"
"funny clips" "anime" nevermind if they are .ogg .ts .avi or .wat

Not very difficult because I put it there.
But really good memory? No way should you assume that.
the issure with Unix (unlike MS products) is this, once a day 'updatedb' runs.
So now if you want to know where blues_brothers.ts is (for example, an this assumes
you have no clue about upper and lower case, where it is or how it is written on;y know it is a .ts format),
you could do
locate -i blues | grep -i ts
that would give you some hits.
I use 'locate' and 'grep' many times a day.
There is indeed no way to remember where exactly a file is, for example working with postgres,
instelling a new version, setting up databases and links, locate will find all stuff.

I think I can click Explorer Download Drive Movies Sad Movies
and find Blues_Brothers.ts faster :P

The most important tools:
updatedb
locate
grep
ls -rtla (just 'l' on my system, shows the last entry is a directory)
apropos
man

And locate is very fast, not like 'find'.

As you have discovered finding something across many disk and partitions with so many giga bytes
requires tools.

Hence rather than forcing users or yourself to suffer the need to type
so many things and wait for processing, it's faster to use a GUI on a
file organisation that's personally intuitive and meaningful.

then just double click middle mouse on the relevant result, no typing involved:
Example:
grml: ~ # locate -i morning | grep mp3
/video/sound/other/bob_dylan/new_morning/01-if_not_for_you_192_lame_cbr.mp3
/video/sound/other/bob_dylan/new_morning/02-day_of_the_locusts_192_lame_cbr.mp3
/video/sound/other/bob_dylan/new_morning/07-new_morning_192_lame_cbr.mp3
/video/sound/other/bob_dylan/new_morning/08-mr_tambourine_man_192_lame_cbr.mp3
/video/sound/other/bob_dylan/new_morning/12-father_of_night_192_lame_cbr.mp3
/video/sound/other/dean_martin/21-carolina_in_the_morning_192_lame_cbr.mp3

so I double click middle mouse on the line with tambourine then type these 6 characters only
mpg123 once click of the middle mosue button to insert the full pathfilenameENTER
and it plays

As it is still on my screen, iIcan already click a next one i want to hear.
Of cause normally it plays aiutomatically from my playlists in xmpl (that I wrote).

I think I can do this faster then dilly dally with little windows and icons.

Ah, but in this case you ARE using a WIMP graphical interface, albeit
with very primitive graphics. You have a full screen Window, textual
Icons, a Mouse and Pointer! See, it does make sense ultimately to have
some form of GUI for various kind of work.



--
A Lost Angel, fallen from heaven
Lost in dreams, Lost in aspirations,
Lost to the world, Lost to myself

The little lost angel wrote in part:
Not to me honestly,

Fair enough. There's no disputing taste. Much of Unix and
other Linux-like systems is very old (1970) and knowing the history
helps understanding why things are

the default Linux/Unix structure just don't make sense.
Instead of a USRobotics folder, why didn't they call it user

USRobotics did not exist at the time. /usr was to save typing,
and many Unix commands show similar bizzarre abbreviations.

and instead of bin, making the whole thing sounds like the
user's trashbin, why didn't they call it /user/programs ?

/bin is for "binaries". 'bin' is a NOT synonym for garbage
in American english.

Futhermore, I find it a mess to have everything installed
into programs or Program Files for that matter. It isn't
intuitive to me so standardized or not, it's a learning curve
and memory work compared to a graphical tree representation.

Everything is memory work to some extent. Unix is supposed
to split packages, and store things in functional directories:
/bin for binaries, /lib for libs, /etc for config, / directory
for system essentials, /usr for optional components, /usr/local/
for custom "just this box" software. /usr/man for manual pages.
There a lot more around Filesystem Standards.

MS-DOS/Windows has typically does things very differently: packages
are stored in their own directory, all together, like C:\LOTUS123 .
This is great for installs & removes, but is hard for the system
to share libs and even to find all pgm components sometimes.


This sounds exactly like erm a guy geek's way of doing
things. Why would anybody want to arrange my movies or
music based on whether they are .ts or .mpeg??? I prefer
them as things like "tv serials" "movies" "funny clips"
"anime" nevermind if they are .ogg .ts .avi or .wat

Certainly. You are well entitled to organize your data
however you wish.

locate -i blues | grep -i ts

I think I can click Explorer Download Drive Movies
Sad Movies and find Blues_Brothers.ts faster :P

Only if you are reasonably certain where it is. And even then,
mousing is more ergonomically taxing than it appears. The `locate`
will find it wherever you might have stashed it.

Hence rather than forcing users or yourself to suffer the
need to type so many things and wait for processing, it's
faster to use a GUI on a file organisation that's personally
intuitive and meaningful.

Personally, I find `locate` so useful that I even build and
maintain the database on my MS-Win2k box at work (along with
the rest of the commands). I have trouble remembering in what
sub-sub directory I stashed a file, and `grep target database`
is both fast and intuitive for me. Of course, I did invest some
time years ago learning `grep` and friends. I think it has paid
off well for me, but might not for more casual users.

Ah, but in this case you ARE using a WIMP graphical
interface, albeit with very primitive graphics. You have a
full screen Window, textual Icons, a Mouse and Pointer! See,
it does make sense ultimately to have some form of GUI for
various kind of work.

I would not say a GUI is useless. Au contraire -- how better to
do graphical things like drawing layout? The mouse cut'n'paste
is also useful (available for CLI via selection/gpm).

The real problem with a GUI is that it is a menuing system. Very
limited choice, and forced visual memory. Made more confusing by
"Personalized Menus". The cryptic icons are explained by Tooltips.
A more subtle problem is the GUI cannot do pipelines which is
were the real strength of the CLI comes from.

-- Robert