finally

[gh0st]

so I've been trying to install linux on my computer for over a year, but i've been faced with a problem of wireless internet connectivity. apparently many people are faced with this problem of wireless cards being incompatible with linux because of driver and firmware problems. so, to me at least, getting my wireless card working was seen as a major milestone in my switch to linux, mostly because i'm a good 15 ugly feet away from the router. anyways i am overjoyed to announce that either through a stroke of luck or sheer miracles I was finally able to get my wireless card working!

this is one of the final steps to getting rid of Microsoft windows and now i can finally move on! i'm so happy i think my mind's going to break, anyways i highly suggest linux to anyone who wants to get away from windows. support the penguin!

[superluser]

Hey, congrats!

Which distro are you using?

[Tapewolf]

Cool.  Which kind of wireless card is it?
I'm mostly using RaLink ones.

[Sofox]

I've been using Fedora and have found it great for everything on my laptop, even recognises the volume dial. Plus it's blue, which is very important.

[Jer-oh-me]

I remember that day.

Also, a lot of the mainstream distributions actually will install a fairly decent driver if the wireless card is installed when you do the installation of the OS, which is my guess what happened.

[Vidar]

I managed to get a dual boot between Windows Vista and Ubuntu on my laptop. I never use windows on the damn thing anymore.
Ubuntu is just easy to use. No mucking about with drivers, no searching for options that exist only in an obscure corner of the registry, or seven menu-options deep in a convulted corner of the control panel. Everything just works.

[Jack McSlay]

Yeah I also recommend Linux over Windows, specially if the Windows in question is Windows Vista. Too many incompatibilities and too bloated.

I use Ubuntu. A lot of people say it's overbloated, but I think it's only overbloated if you never heard of "apt-get remove"

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

I've found "apt-get remove $(dpgk -l | grep '^ii' | awk '{print $2}')" works really well at clearing out those pesky excess packages.

Not to mention everything else. ;-]

[Jack McSlay]

That reminds me of one dude trying to make fun out of Linux by mentioning the message "unable to locate apt. use apt-get to install apt", which implies the user have been stupid enough to remove the apt package

or worst claim that "sudo rm -rf /" is a security disadvantage of Linux, despite Windows having an equivalent ("del /F /S /Q c:\*", works on XP, not sure about vista), differentiated that it doesn't require a root password. besides, who's daft enough to prefer erasing someone's data instead of stealing it?

edit: "rmdir /s /q c:\" has a more similar behavior to "rm -rf /" as it also removes directories

[superluser]

or worst claim that "sudo rm -rf /" is a security disadvantage of Linux, despite Windows

Time to post the UNIX-HATERS Handbook again, I suppose:

Date: Wed, 10 Jan 90
From: djones@megatest.uucp (Dave Jones)
Subject: rm *
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers2

Anybody else ever intend to type:
   % rm *.o
And type this by accident:
   % rm *>o
Now you've got one new empty file called "o", but plenty of room
for it!

Actually, you might not even get a file named "o" since the shell documentation doesn't specify if the output file "o" gets created before or after the wildcard expansion takes place. The shell may be a programming language, but it isn't a very precise one.

Date: Wed, 10 Jan 90 15:51 CST
From: ram@attcan.uucp
Subject: Re: rm *
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers

I too have had a similar disaster using rm. Once I was removing a file
system from my disk which was something like /usr/foo/bin. I was in /
usr/foo and had removed several parts of the system by:
    % rm -r ./etc
    % rm -r ./adm
...and so on. But when it came time to do ./bin, I missed the period.
System didn't like that too much.

Unix wasn't designed to live after the mortal blow of losing its /bin directory. An intelligent operating system would have given the user a chance to recover (or at least confirm whether he really wanted to render the operating system inoperable).

Date: Wed, 10 Jan 90 10:40 CST
From: kgg@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Kees Goossens)
Subject: Re: rm *
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers

Then there's the story of the poor student who happened to have a
file called "-r" in his home directory. As he wanted to remove all his
non directory files (I presume) he typed:
    % rm *
... And yes, it does remove everything except the beloved "-r" file...
Luckily our backup system was fairly good.

These are people who hate, hate HATE Windows and UNIX.  Preferred Operating Systems vary, but Twenex, ITS and MULTICS come up frequently

Now, I know a few of these people.  Some run Linux today.  But they'll tell you that that's simply because all of the other, better systems rae now obsolete.  On ine mailing list I'm on, the list owner still tells people that MULTICS was an improvement on its successors.

[Tapewolf]

Now, I know a few of these people.  Some run Linux today.  But they'll tell you that that's simply because all of the other, better systems rae now obsolete.  On ine mailing list I'm on, the list owner still tells people that MULTICS was an improvement on its successors.

Know any VMS people?

[Jack McSlay]

Time to post the UNIX-HATERS Handbook again, I suppose:

oh, the irony of an anti-unix book rhat starts with a guy who switched to mac 

[superluser]

Know any VMS people?

I know at least one guy who goes on about how great VMS is; he says his all-time favorite system is TOPS-20.

oh, the irony of an anti-unix book rhat starts with a guy who switched to mac 

Meh.  If you judge the book based on the fact that the introduction was written by a guy who was running a Mac (this was back in 1994, the days of Windows 3.11 and Linux kernel 1.0), all I can say is that the text speaks for itself.  UNIX-HATERS was based on a previous list called TWENEX-HATERS, a group of people who disliked having to move from ITS to TOPS-20.  The guy who started the UNIX-HATERS list (a Twenex fan) was booted off for not hating UNIX enough.

More reasons to hate UNIX:

We've known several people who have made a typo while renaming a file
that resulted in a filename that began with a dash:

Code Select Expand

   % mv file1 -file2
Now just try to name it back:

Code Select Expand

   % mv -file2 file1
   usage: mv [-if] f1 f2 or mv [-if] f1 ... fn d1
Here's a way to amuse and delight your friends (courtesy of Leigh Klotz).
First, in great secret, do the following:

Code Select Expand

   % mkdir foo
   % touch foo/foo~
Then show your victim the results of these incantations:

Code Select Expand

   % ls foo*
   foo~
   % rm foo~
   rm: foo~ nonexistent
   % rm foo*
   rm: foo directory
   % ls foo*
   foo~
   %
Last, for a really good time, try this:

Code Select Expand

   % cat - - -
(Hint: press ctrl-D three times to get your prompt back!)

(some of these have been fixed by now, but you can see why they would have been a problem)

[Tapewolf]

I know at least one guy who goes on about how great VMS is; he says his all-time favorite system is TOPS-20.

One of the more subtle in-jokes in my comic is that one of the characters has been using VMS for about 200 years... needless to say, he's not too happy when he has to use anything else.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

One of the more subtle in-jokes in my comic is that one of the characters has been using VMS for about 200 years... needless to say, he's not too happy when he has to use anything else.

Yeah, I'd be a little bit annoyed if I'd got that used to something and then had it taken away, myself.

Mind you, I might also be somewhat annoyed at how user-friendly the other systems were...

That reminds me of one dude trying to make fun out of Linux by mentioning the message "unable to or worst claim that "sudo rm -rf /" is a security disadvantage of Linux, despite Windows having an equivalent ("del /F /S /Q \*", works on XP, not sure about vista), differentiated that it doesn't require a root password. besides, who's daft enough to prefer erasing someone's data instead of stealing it?

That sounds more like the report Microsoft put out explaining why Windows NT was better than Solaris on, I think, an E10000.

Just to put that in perspective, an E10k is a piece of hardware that has a variable number of processors, up to 128, and costs upwards of a hundred thousand dollars empty. Usually comes in two entire, custom-built, rack enclosures.

No, not rack-mountable. Two, floor to six foot six high, 800mm wide, 1000mm deep cupboards.

And this was about ten years ago, now, so that was some serious hardware. Heck, you can still make the things work perfectly well - not like they're slow or anything. Massive equipment...


Anyway, the upshot of all this was that the list of objections to the Solaris Environment included one that there was a command the administrator had to run before you could physically remove, or replace, one of the processors from the server.

While it was still working.

Yes, folks. They objected to the fact that you had to tell the server that you were going to take one of the processors away from it. You still can't do that with Windows today.


The other one I can recall boiled down to: The administrator has a command to shut the machine down.

... Yeah, I'm just gonna leave it there.

[Colgatecrusader]

congradulations, windows is awful and is only getting worse. Sadly i think i'm stuck with it...

[Jack McSlay]

I know at least one guy who goes on about how great VMS is; he says his all-time favorite system is TOPS-20.

One of the more subtle in-jokes in my comic is that one of the characters has been using VMS for about 200 years... needless to say, he's not too happy when he has to use anything else.

I bet he programs in Fortran, or Cobol

[superluser]

I bet he programs in Fortran, or Cobol

My guy or his guy?  My guy seems to prefer Java, Perl and PHP, and the only time I've heard him mention COBOL was the following:

Once upon a time I worked for a small company that was taken over by a large company. The large company sent in all these white men in dark suits to watch over us. The few who knew anything about computers knew COBOL.

One time, my coworker Gene was patiently trying to explain his C code to one of the Suits:

    Suit: Why does this array start at 0?
    Gene: That's how C works. The first item in the array is offset 0 from the pointer.
    Suit: This goes from 0 to 9.
    Gene: A total of 10 values, yes.
    Suit: Can you make it go from 1 to 10?
    Gene: The language doesn't work that way.
    Suit: Can you make it go from 0 to 10, and not use 0?
    Gene: No, that wouldn't work ...

After a long and grueling debate on starting with 0 or 1, the Suit left. Gene came over to my cubicle, looked at me, and said, "but this one goes up to 11!"

[Vidar]

congradulations, windows is awful and is only getting worse. Sadly i think i'm stuck with it...

Only if you play games on a PC, or use photoshop a lot. For damn near everything else Linux has a viable alternative. You could also switch to a Mac.

[Sofox]

Only if you play games on a PC

That's the only reason my computer is running XP (thank goodness I was able to avoid Vista as the site allowed the PC to be customised before buying, it's getting scarily hard to get a non Vista laptop/PC these days). I've got Fedora running in VirtualBox so it's close by (came to love it on my laptop) though I haven't used it much there.

[Ryudo Lee]

Only if you play games on a PC

Also the only reason I'm still using XP as well.  My laptop came with Vista installed.  I quickly wiped it and installed XP.

I don't know if anyone is aware of it, but I've been watching ReactOS, which is slated to be a free Windows-compatible (meaning full out-of-the-box compatibility, no plugins or porting required) OS.  They're basing it off of Wine, apparently.  Thoughts on this?

[Tapewolf]

I don't know if anyone is aware of it, but I've been watching ReactOS, which is slated to be a free Windows-compatible (meaning full out-of-the-box compatibility, no plugins or porting required) OS.  They're basing it off of Wine, apparently.  Thoughts on this?

I'd almost forgotten about them.  Good to see they're thinking about x64 capability.  While I'm still not expecting miracles any time soon (and I was sure the roadmap said we'd have 0.4 or 0.5 by now), I would certainly kick W2K off in favour of it once it is able to run SONAR and Oblivion (Morrowind runs nice in Linux).

[Mao]

I've been looking in on it every now and again and have to admit some levels of curiosity.  Though I think given that it's based off of wine, with which my experiences haven't been stellar, I'll wait until I hear of a ground breaking version of it before I convert my gaming pc to it.  Until then I'll continue to manage with Vista on my desktop and XP on my (dead) laptop.

[Vidar]

Is there actually any reason, besides games (and in case of linux, photoshop), to not switch to Apple/Linux?
I suppose, if you use your computer for specialised work-related stuff, but other than that, the *nix operating systems have caught up with windows nicely in terms of usability and compatibility.

[Mao]

I suppose, if you use your computer for specialised work-related stuff

Reason two.  Most of the development I do is for windows systems.  Though some of the servers I work with are hosted on *nix machines, for which I *had* a dual boot set up to deal with for when I was home.  When they opened up the vpn a bit though this became no longer necessary for me.

Another reason many folks don't switch (and by my experience it's an invalid one) is the learning curve.  The operating systems are *not* the same and rather than try and figure out the new way to do exactly the same thing in a new system, they'd rather just stick to the way they're used to.

One that's also come up to me is accountability.  If something goes wrong with a commercial system it's pretty easy to hold someone accountable for it.  With an open source one, it's not as easy.  This is why I'm stuck with using oracles pathetic excuse of a web container (oc4j... a bastardized Apache Tomcat) for several of the projects I work on.  While I know it's not the exact question at hand, that was my personal experience for it.

Edit:  And one other reason that was mentioned by my coworkers as I was posting this:  The communities.  The fanatics and fanboys you get for either (while just as prevalent in windows I'm sure) are a huge turn off.  Some will stay away from a system simply to spite them or so that they won't be associated with them.

[Ryudo Lee]

Is there actually any reason, besides games (and in case of linux, photoshop), to not switch to Apple/Linux?
I suppose, if you use your computer for specialised work-related stuff, but other than that, the *nix operating systems have caught up with windows nicely in terms of usability and compatibility.

I work in a mostly pure Windows XP/2003 environment.  In fact, we recently switched from Novell to Exchange and we're on the tail end of phasing out Win2k.  And I've only ever used Windows systems in my life.  I cut my teeth on Win95 (the first edition, without USB support).  I have, however, put together a few Linux boxes to use as back up machines in case my primary home machine fails on me.  I used to do a little development for Windows systems too, using MSSQL as a database back-end, once I learned the severe limitations in Access.  (At the time I had full access to a MS SQL2000 Enterprise server, I didn't complain and I never looked back.)  From there my needs turned to gaming, and Mac and Linux just aren't good for that at all.  Even my laptop is a gaming device.

[Jack McSlay]

Only if you play games on a PC, or use photoshop a lot. For damn near everything else Linux has a viable alternative. You could also switch to a Mac.

Actually Photoshop has a good record of running on Linux through wine, I've actually came across a few artists who use Photoshop on Linux. Some other painting apps run fine two. Biggest problem is if you need 3d design softwares such as Autocad, or 3d modellers (if Wings3d and Blender don't suffice)

I forget the games because they suck for the most part.