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PC Magazine (online) on Linux & Linuxworld 55

Posted by HeUnique from the news dept.
PC Magazine Online has published some articles about Open Source, Linux world and reviews of Slackware, Caldera, Debian, Redhat, Gecko, and Apache. Worth a read. Those articles will be published on the next issue of PC Magazine in the March 23rd issue. (thanks to Eli Marmor for telling me about it).
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PC Magazine (online) on Linux & Linuxworld More

PC Magazine (online) on Linux & Linuxworld

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  • "Eric S. Raymond, the programmer behind many open source projects"... um, since when? Nothing personal against ESR (fetchmail is great), but this is just flat out WRONG. Wouldn't RMS, Linux, or Alan be a much better mention here?

    And since when has GNU fallen short of its goals?

    And when did RMS and the FSF promote open source? I could swear he dislikes that term. Would be nice if the press would learn the difference between free software and open source...

    --

  • Indeed,
    on the March 23rd issue - it will be on PC Magazine.

    Hetz

  • neet (Score:1)

    by drwiii ( 434 )
    I was reading thru it in print the other night.

    BTW, quick slashdot mention on page 168..

  • "Error Diagnostic Information

    " Server busy or unable to fulfill request. The server is unable to fulfill your request due to extremely high traffic or an unexpected internal error. Please attempt your request again (if you are repeatedly unsuccessful you should notify the site administrator).
    (Location Code: 25)"

    ... is that IIS gets slashdotted a lot easier than its alternatives.... But we knew that...

    Craig

  • I got a new NT PC at work last week -- the first thing I did was download VIM. :-)

    It was the first time I've used Windows NT, and I was suprised how primitive the NT UI is. The "DOS window" doesn't scroll back, it uses an ugly system font, and it doesn't even resize. MS has got some catching up to do if they're going to compete with KDE and GNOME!

    TedC

  • I was never able to get WinNT to install on top of Linux; it always choked (and destroyed my boot manager in the process, requiring me to break out a boot disk).

    To install Linux and NT on the same box you have to used the NT boot manager and keep lilo off the MBR. You also have to make a Linux boot image for NT. I've never actually tried it, so there may be more to it than that. I think I saw a mini HOWTO on the LDP that covers it pretty well.

    TedC

  • ...of hearing about how "Linux is harder to install than Windows".

    It's simply _not_ true.

    For one thing, they're always installing Linux on a system with an existing windows installation, which means that they have to repartition the hard drive and set up some sort of boot manager (lilo or otherwise).

    If they had to do that with windows they'd really have something to whine about.

    TedC

    I wonder what happened to SuSE and TurboLinux in their review?

  • until cave man grog can buy Linux preinstalled, or his half-clueful brother-in-law can mindlessly click on wizards, the Microserfs will have a credible claim that Linux is harder to install.

    Okay, it's _slightly_ harder to install, but my point is most of the difficulty arises from having to repartition the hard drive. People who have trouble with Linux fdisk would have trouble with Windows fdisk, it just happens that Windows is already on the drive when they get the computer so most people never have to deal with it.

    There's no easy way fix this either, since partitioning disks requires at least some knowledge of hard drives. I think Red Had Disk Druid does a good a job of this as anyone does. In fact, if someone were to install Red Hat on a raw drive (without Windows), all they have to do is select the canned workstation install and the drive is partitioned for them.

    X is another matter, but there is some progress being made there too. SuSE's SaX is pretty good.

    TedC

  • In case you're interested, vim is available for win32, also. Check out www.vim.org. The command to remove all quote marks in the file there is:

    :%s/\"//g

    which translates to:

    : enter ed mode
    % operate on all lines of the file
    / begin reglular expression
    \" quotation mark (escaped w/ a \, so it's taken literally)
    / end regex
    / end replacement text
    g do it for every occurence on a line

    Since there is no text in the replacement text area in this example, the "'s are removed.

  • In the early days of MS Bill wrote an essay on how Closed source and paying money for software was better than the current trend of Universities to give away their s/w. I can't recall a reference but I assure you it's true.
  • FWIW, I believe my OS is officially named Debian GNU/Linux. :-)

    Daniel
  • Good point. Actually, my UNIX install problem usually is a lot simpler and involves doing my math homework on the other side of the room while my computer installs stuff. (and don't even ask about upgrading. :-) ) I would've liked to have seen more research on what a package manager is..there's really nothing like them in Windows (well there is but it's completely useless. :-) )

    Daniel
  • I did. So...

    Daniel
  • Excellent article. But:

    GNU fell short of its goals, but...

    I have mixed feelings here. :-) On the one hand..they have a clue about GNU and its importance. On the other hand...GNU can't be said to have fallen short of its goals until it is complete. Oh well. In 5 years when the strange new kernel is the Hurd instead of Linux, maybe they'll correct this extremely minor point. :-)

    Daniel
  • And nevertheless, these are good articles. They understand well what open source is and what's the difference between it and freeware. I was quite delighted to see them after reading all this "linux freeware" bullshit that you see everywhere. They got a few points wrong but most the important stuff is set straight.
  • im very suprised on this article being published on the web. i received my issue of "PC Magazine" on Friday and immedially read the open source article. it is approx. 11 pages long, out of a 262 page magazine. but what suprised me even more was that they put the entire article online for everyone to see. most magazine websites you have to pay or be a subscriber. nice work pc mag!
    --
    scott miga
  • This is a wealth of articles from zdnet and is reading for a whole weekend. I must say I am impressed! Will they put this in the print mags for the masses?

  • I agree. IMHO RedHat install IS easier than
    Wiz9x. It was reported on slashdot, somebody
    installed RH 5.1(?) with his nose!
  • What about linux with a commercial x server and kde? That's not gnu/linux but that's the linux I'd like to see
  • so actually knowing whats inside your computer is a bad thing?


    I don't think he came anywhere near making a statement like that. He was speaking to the relative difficulty of correctly installing Linux on a computer. From the sounds of it, he's done it on a machine he didn't put together himself.
    He's also stated he likes Linux and has fun with it.


    I've had the luxury, now that I think about it, of having done my installs on a box that has nothing left of the original purchase but the power supply and the floppy drive. Popping the hood hasn't been necessary thanks to that. Of course, it wouldn't be necessary, anyhow, because I don't buy hardware on the bleeding edge. I buy stuff that was new technology over a year ago.



    ----------
    mphall@cstone.nospam.net

  • I can never figure out what anyone means by "more difficult," either.


    Slack was my first distro. I didn't do anything "serious" with it, but it just required some reading to install, and it worked the first time.


    Debates these days about the relative difficulty of each distro strike me as ludicrous. I've installed Debian, two releases of Slack, and 3 releases of Red Hat, and I'm a 98 pound weakling when it comes to this stuff. The worst trouble I ever had was forgetting to mark a bootable partition from Disk Druid under RH.


    The IT people at work snicker at me behind my back because I never remember how to mount a network drive under Win95 and think I'm insane for insisting that installing the Novell Netware 32 bit client and then removing it but leaving the dll's it put there behind improves the Microsoft Netware client.


    If I'm saying "it ain't that hard," it ain't that hard.


    Of course, consider this about my IT people at work:


    IT Guy: I need the quote marks stripped from that file. Could you fire up Word and do that before you send me the file?


    Me: I'm sick of Word. I think I've got perl on this machine. I'll write something and have it to you.


    IT Guy: Perl...? That's... a...?


    Me: Oh, it's for stripping the quotation marks from text files.


    IT Guy: Oh. Cool.



    ----------
    mphall@cstone.nospam.net

  • It's always good to see my favorite distro reviewed, as it seems to get left out of a lot of other reviews. SW is one of the very oldest, and in some way, hoariest of the Linux distros, but it does remain the favorite of Linux hackers. But there are some nits to pick about the review:

    1) The kernel in SW 3.6 is only at the 35th patchlevel, not the 36th. SW, however, has been the easiest to bring up to even the most recent kernels, even over RedHat.
    2) While you can buy it from Walnut Creek for $40, there is the subscription rate which is pretty reduced. However LinuxMall has it for $15.Great price: great mailorder firm... :-)
    3) SW -will- install with 4megs of memory and can be made to live in as little as 20megs of disk space. The posted minimums are just more sane.
    4) SW has always been panned for the bootdisk issue: gawd why are there so many?! For an important reason. As Linux people (and Unix people) you should -know- your computer, inside and out. You should know all about your cards, their IRQs, your video ram, everything. Then try to install and run Linux. I don't know how many times RedHat's one size fits all kernel has failed on older or "different" equipment. SW hails back to the day (during the early kernels) when you and your friends would compile specials kernels for each other based on knowing the insides of your computer. Get one box going and the rest would follow. Have fun and learn. Drink beer afterwards.

    As always, good job! to Pat V and the Walnut Creek group.
  • I was never able to get WinNT to install on top of Linux; it always choked (and destroyed my boot manager in the process, requiring me to break out a boot disk). In the end, I had to toast everything and then install Linux on top of NT. Admittedly, I know even less about how NT works than I do Linux (which isn't much), but...

    I agree; shouldn't someone be giving Linux some credit just for being willing to coexist with Microsoft products? I'd like to see a review sometime that says "Windows 2000 is great, but we're still waiting to see the ext2fs support." "The new Win95 user interface looks impressive, but I couldn't find out where the 'grep' command on the Start menu." "The new IIS4.0 interface is great, but I couldn't figure out how to administer it from my RedHat machine." Oh, and my favorite -- "SQL server 7.0 works well, but unfortunately it failed to ship with development tools for any of the Unix variants."

    One more quibble (while I have a captive audience) -- they kept calling KDE the "Kool Desktop Environment." From the KDE FAQ:

    2.2 What does the K in KDE stand for?

    Nothing -- it is simply the K Desktop Environment, just as the X in the X window system.

    Eh? Who's right here?
  • There will be more articles coming from Sm@rt Reseller (http://www.zdnet.com/sr) in the next few weeks with hard numbers on Linux performance.

    Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
    Senior Technology Editor, Sm@rt Reseller
  • Quite a bit of research was obviously done for this article - and not nearly enough. For ZD, this is a torrent of articles on Linux. They're actually starting to get a clue. Starting to. The mistakes in these articles are amusing. I won't even bother to give examples - I'm sure by the time this discussion comes to an end today, that will have been done more than adequately.

    One thing I hope they'll do is develop and publish more benchmarks for Linux, like they did with that Samba vs. NT article a while back. This is actually something ZD might be useful for; then we can look at the charts and numbers and how they were obtained, and ignore their judgements, expositions, and Editor's Choices.
  • Call me paranoid, or a conspiricy theorist, but up untill the MS trial, no one ever said a thing about linux (except on very rare instances or special events). Now suddenly every publication (including ones MS owns or has there hooks in) is praising linux as the next revolution (okay, so I'm exagerating, but you get the point).

    I'm telling you, this is all a ploy by MS to make them look like there is compotition.

  • Hey, i just installed Linux on two machines. the first one i did from scratch RedHat 5.2 over RedHat 4.2 and that install (over a year ago) was overtop of Win95 blowing it away completely. This second install of Linux i did was on a virgin hard drive. NONE are dual boot machines.

    I also did three installs of Win98 in December on virgin machines. all I did was feed a CD into the machine and click boxes. I learnt nothing in the process.

    I worked a *lot* harder on the Linux installs than the Winblows installs.

    Both Linux installs began with opening the cover and *carefully* identifying every hardware component. Knowing *exactly* which video card, sound card, network card and even some of the key chips thereon. Only after that did I do the RedHat 5.2 install. (i had painful memories of many 4.2 false starts.) Autoprobing really helped a lot. It took me a *lot* longer because i *had* to add my knowledge to the process. Knowledge i had to learn along the way. RedHat has the easiest install for the semi-clueless like me.

    Oh, but RedHat didn't support the Matrox G200 in 5.2 & I had to d/l updated rpms. The first time i got X working (on that other machine with a supported video card, and a noname monitor i had to guess about) I spent an all-nighter getting X working. Do you know *any* one who didn't scratch his head once getting X going?

    Now, during these two installs of Linux, I've made becoming a Linux guru my hobby. its more fun than using Windows. its also hard work. It was a lot more work than my Win98 game boxes going. Next time I install Win98 and Linux on separate machines, the Linux install will go faster *ONLY* BECAUSE NOW I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING.

    I couldn't install Linux without learning; with Windows, i could.

    if cave man grog go to Best Buy, point to the glowing thing & adjacent box, & buy, it come with Win98 preinstalled. perceived installation effort for cave man grog is zero.

    If cave man grog's brother in law who is "into computers" does a Win98 system upgrade it means feeding a CDROM and clicking buttons in a half-clueful way. This installation effort is epsilon.

    until cave man grog can buy Linux preinstalled, or his half-clueful brother-in-law can mindlessly click on wizards, the Microserfs will have a credible claim that Linux is harder to install.
  • Come on. They make it sound like Linux is going to scatter hundreds of unextractable and often increadable redundant pieces of code all over your machine by installing libc5 and glibc. Lets face it. UN*X got it right by centralizing interaction w/ the OS. My Lose95 box has so much useless code that has no chance of getting cleaned up that I had to buy another drive to store it. At least that money isn't going into BG's pocket. But then again...
  • RMS is an interesting personality. I don't think he wants the GNU in there for personal reasons. I think, really, he couldn't care less if noone knew who HE was. But he's right in wanting GNU in there, for the reasons he says. People _need_ to be exposed to what the Free Software Foundation stands for. People are really getting the wrong idea from people who advocate Open Source (TM), I think people need to see and understand free software. _freedom_ is what it's about really, not openness -- openness is just a part of freedom. While I love Linux and Linus as much as the next guy (probably more than most ;) and I see nothing wrong with commercialization, I'd like to see the GNU in there. For several reasons.
    Firstly, to give credit where credit is due! The free software movement is often enough about ego and contributions from the masses, and it's _very_ important to give credit to the people who provide a certain service. While there are definitely other parts to my system than GNU and Linux, they are by far the MAIN parts that we can all agree on.
    Secondly, to expose people to GNU. I know a lot of people who USE Linux-kerneled systems who haven't heard of GNU or if they have, don't really know what it is. The FSF is the most important free software organization.
    Thirdly, it provides an understanding of how what some people call 'Linux' really works. I run WindowMaker. Often enough non-geeks will ask me 'Is that Linux?' I don't know what to say to this question. If I say no, I have to go through a pretty long explanation they won't understand. If I say yes, I feel as if I'm lying to them. If we call the system GNU/Linux it'll make things a little more understandable.

    Just as a note, perhaps we should refer to our systems as 'Debian' or 'Red Hat'.. since that's really the name of an entire OS.

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