2004: Year of the Penguin? 427
houseofmore writes "The Toronto star suggests that things are looking good for the Linux desktop this year as more heavy weight commercial vendors get behind it, including HP, Novell, IBM, Sun and... Walmart. It also mentions Red Hat's plan to offer a new corporate desktop edition of their enterprise desktop sometime this year. The article states that more and more companies are considering (and) switching to Linux for their desktop due to expensive Windows licensing fees and high-profile security vulnerabilities."
Yep - October 5th... (Score:3, Informative)
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From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) :-)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
Message-ID:
Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all- nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you
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The rest of the stories (Score:4, Informative)
Re:File names in Linux (Score:1, Informative)
ls -l You\ could\ always\ escape\ spaces\ like\ this.mp3
Or:
ls -l "Filenames can certainly be 64 characters long, even longer.mp3"
Yes, the "," is supported, too, and you can easily have more than one "." in a filename. Compare this to Windows:
Me: F2 -> Rename "htaccess" to ".htaccess" before uploading
Win: "Wah, wah, you must supply a file name (and not just an extension)!"
I mean, really...
Re:Just as soon as Linux works with my sound card. (Score:3, Informative)
Already happened (Score:5, Informative)
In India, where I live, 2003 was the year of linux on the desktop. Yup. Last year. Already happened.
Starting around last August, the avalanche started. Linux desktops crossed a threshold minimum level of usability, and the price of Windows became an unacceptable fraction of the price of the PC in this cost conscious market. I think it was IBM that ran the first ad for Linux PCs. Soon the taboo was broken. OEMs switched in droves. Today there is hardly anyone that only sells windows boxen. This year two companies have entered the market specializing in linux PCs.
I can feel the pulse at the grassroots level as well. While the percentage of linux users is surely nowhere near two figures, it has probably doubled since a year or two ago. Banks and other enterprises switching all employees to linux happens every day.
Billy Gates shot himself in the foot. Major anti-piracy ad campaigns and policing action by NASCOMM (BSA equivalent in India) contributed to awareness about alternatives and fueled linux growth. Today the ads directing the reader to microsoft.com/piracy/howtotell/ are conspicuous by their absence, but the damage has been done. What linux has won is mindshare. PC geek mags regularly carry linux distros and other linux software these days, and have as many articles about linux as windows. It looks like an exponential growth curve is assured.
If you're thinking of moving to Bangalore, there's at least one thing you can look forward to :-)
Re:Just as soon as Linux works with my sound card. (Score:3, Informative)
In my 9 years of running Linux, I've never had a sound card not work. Of course, I only ever use Creative Labs branded equipment, or onboard sound because I'm too cheap to go buy a separate sound card.
The only Audigy I have that you can't run Linux on is an "Audigy LS", that isn't based on the EMU10K chipset (it's the third Audigy I have running on my Windows Gaming machine), and thus isn't supported by the normal Audigy modules. Go out buy yourself a "SoundBlaster 16PCI", or a SoundBlaster 512. Local CompUSA, it's under 40 dollars. Put it into a machine. Boot. Disable the onboard sound in the BIOS. It'll work under RedHat. If for some reason that doesn't work, you've done something silly wrong. I had all three cards in various RedHat machines and swapped them, and they all worked flawlessly.
I believe counterstrike is supported by TransGaming, a commercial Wine fork (from when Wine was still under a BSD like license, instead of the LGPL it's under now).
Kirby
Re:Maybe when... (Score:4, Informative)
One way desktop Linux might get desktop seats (Score:4, Informative)
What I'm saying here is that part of the logical niche for a free OS is as an alternative upgrade path for folks that are finding that Windows simply doesn't give them an economically viable upgrade path. Microsoft is ceasing support of Win98. Now, to put this in perspective, even among folks outside of the district that hit our web page, over 20% are using older versions of Windows(ME,98,95) compared to less than 1% for Linux-and 4-5% for Macintosh.
Its always seemed to me that folks pushing desktop Linux generally assume that folks will ditch many of their windows applications(I know Wine works, but last I checked it was still a bit limited in what applications it would support) or at least substantially retrain themselves to use Linux.
I tend to think that just being the viable upgrade path for older hardware is the type of thing that will take Linux clearly past Macintosh in terms of numbers.
Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:2, Informative)
The Zero Install system [sourceforge.net] does this same make-the-directory-containing-the-program-look-lik e-the-program-itself thing, aiming to be a program repository and easy method of installation/uninstallation in one go. It's like OSX's folder-mounting plus apt-get plus a nice big cache of available programs all in one.
Re:I know how I feel about open source (Score:3, Informative)
>Highlight text and middle-click to copy
Middle clicking is an innovation? Didn't Sun/really old graphical Unix have this years ago?
Yes, Sun had this first but Windows does not have this feature, period
>Tabbed internet browsers (Comparing to IE) Is a browser part of Linux (OS)? If you claim innovation there, do you also take the blame for the crappy stuff too? Or is this one sided?
No, in Linux the browser is NOT part of the OS (which MS claims IE is)
What crappy stuff are you refering to? Lack of ActiveX??
>Live bootable CDs that don't require installation (If there are MS equivalents, please point them out)
Floppy disk formated with
We are talking full desktop environment here, a floppy with
>Truly separate user environments
Again, is this innovation or something that Unix had already?
Again, we are comparing Linux to Windows, not Unix
Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You're kidding, right? (Score:3, Informative)
I can pick it apart for days, but like you, I don't have that time
As you also mentioned, most of the points are ripped right from Apple. Apple are the ones that should get most of the desktop credit, for everything. Trashcan, taskbar, (do they have a start like button?), Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons (often in the same places to keep them standard.)
I agree KDE and GNOME are awful and do not innovate much at all and slow things down a lot.
I use Fluxbox [fluxbox.org] which only uses the taskbar by default (a very bare one might I add). There are no 'start like buttons', a menu is brought up with a right click anywhere. It is very lean and very fast. and highly configurable. The only real downside is that configuring is not user friendly at all, this is being improved on as it is a very young project still.
Windows can not take any credit at all for the desktop environment as that strongly belongs to Apple. The best anyone can do is improve on it.
Mono was create to keep interoperability between operating systems, not to copy and be a 'me too'.
The Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons have been around forever in any windowed desktop and are not always in the same order. In TWM default you have close on the top left, minimize on the far right with no maximize. This style was around before Windows 3.1, saying anyone copied this from Windows is wrong.
Looking around at other peoples desktop screenshots, I see that most people are imitating OSX on the desktop and keeping away from looking anything like Windows. Even the use of desktop icons are diminishing and becoming less common.
Re:Laptops (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Just as soon as Linux works with my sound card. (Score:3, Informative)
If your serious about getting it working, reply to this post. I know several people who use Knoppix, I'll get them to burn me a copy of the latest one they use, and get one of my machines to make the Audigy go under it. If you we're using RedHat 9, I could diagnose it relatively easily (given that RH9 is not EOL, I can't recommend installing it any more). A friend of mine just got a new Audigy he installed into a machine he runs Knoppix on, no more then 10 days ago. I'll ask him if there was anything special, and what version of knoppix he ran.
WhiteBox Linux is a free rebuild of RHEL, that's what I run at work/home. It's just like RedHat. I once had a Creative Labs SB16-PCI that gave me trouble. Mostly the problem was that it was really a repackaged ES1371 (I think that's the number). It was a chipset from a company they bought out years ago. My problem was that the PCI ID wasn't in old precompiled kernel image, so I had to hand load the modules.
There's a simple way to do that. By the way, Unless you are getting the highest end Audigy equipment, $150 is paying too much.
The one thing you really want to know is the PCI ID of the card. Run lspci -v,
find the number of the left it'll look like this: "00:08.0", that will have the name of the sound card somewhere on the line. Remember, that, now run "lspci -v -n", look for a line that has the same number as before, should look something like this:
That's the number of the PCI ID. That's the global number that should uniquely identify that specific PCI card. Linux Kernel drivers use that as the key for which modules to load during auto-detection. Go plug the number that looks like "1073:000d" into google, add other keywords as neccessary (linux, problem, detect, etc.). If there is an answer, that's the way I've found to be sure I'm going to find someone whose very knowledgable (most people don't report PCI ID's with their problems), and has exactly the same PCI card I have. I've been known to grep the source code looking for pieces of the PCI ID to see if cards are supported. If you have an Audigy that is supported by the 2.4.21 kernel I have installed (and I have access to the source), the PCI ID should be: "1102:0002", or "1102:0004" (I found that in: drivers/sound/audigy/main.c, search for PCI_VENDOR_ID) . If it's not one of those, that is probably why the auto-detection isn't working, and probably won't work under any circumstances.
In the end, you are looking for which modules need to be loaded. In your case, assuming you don't have an Audigy LS, the answer is probably as simple as:
orI know this is a lot more technical information then you probably really want. However, given that I can't show up where you are, it's the best I can do. Hate to see someone give up just over a minor issue like that (getting a sound card to work under Linux isn't terrible difficult assuming the hardware is supported by the version of Linux you have). You sound like you can understand all of this, it's just a lot more information then you are really interested in. Sorry, if this is way overkill. However, the stuff about lspci should give you clues to track down the information. If you run RedHat no recompilation should be needed.
Kirby
Re:Laptops (Score:2, Informative)
Business Week in on it too (Score:2, Informative)
OS updates require hardware upgrades (Score:2, Informative)
people love to bash Windows or the Mac by pointing out things that were true of them five years ago and are completely untrue now
Many people still haven't upgraded their OS, possibly because they still haven't upgraded their hardware, and unlike free operating systems, one cannot readily slim down either of the major proprietary desktop operating systems to run on 1999-era hardware. This is part of why people must still consider Windows 98/ME's 64 KB "System Resources" heaps.
Zeitgeist stats (Score:1, Informative)
Linux = 1%
Windows = 91%
Mac = 4%
'Nuff said