Open-Source has a TV-Show

[geokker]

I think people confuse Linux, open source and open standards in addition to confusing the GUI with the OS. I don't have a problem with companies producing closed-code or proprietary products but it annoys me when they change or dodge open standards needlessly e.g. Microsoft changing XML and implementing a proprietary version of svg (Longhorn).

[nkt]

Originally Posted by geokker

I've tried many Linux flavours and am now very comfortable with Ubuntu.

I've heard some good things about it. However, at the moment, and prompted by this thread, I'm downloading Slackware 10.1 to go on the server.

C1ay, you are right. We should also mention, for those who don't know, things like bind, sendmail, and the many other free applications that keep the internet world running.

[alexander]

Originally Posted by geo

Why are you being so hostile? Let's discuss our differences of opinion without pettiness. Also, my comments were on the whole, positive. I feel like I would've been vaporized by a laser from space if I were anti-open source! Also, heavily biased comments like "..generally makes 1000 times more sense then Windows." are unhelpful.

I am not, i just overstated my point, no offense meant, if i did offend anyone, then I'm sorry, oh and lets discuss our differences of oppinion, thats what we are here for

I have used Linux/unix variants since before there were usable GUI's. Unlike all the Linux users I know, I exclusively use it - I do not have a crafty dual-booter in the backroom or a Mac lappy. When I speak of user friendliness, I am speaking from the point of view of an average Windows/Office user - so things like command line instructions are out of the question.

sorry, i just had to comment on this, you are a Linux user that has been using linux since before there was a usable gui (so i assume somewhere around 96 to 97) and you are speaking from a point of view of an average user, ok...
Oh and i dont have a crafty dual booter either, and i havent used windows unless i've had to fix something for almost a year, I run stage 1 Gentoo on my machines, as for GUI, I run my own custom breed of the Crystal FVWM theme, its a lot like Fluxbox that I used to run, but I've added some flashy, cool features (that i rarely use, but once in a while when i'm working and someone just happens to look at my screen and notice the absence of maximize button for example and instead see me click on my 4 in one button to maximize one window horizontally on one screen and close something on another, or the minimize thing that takes a snapshot of a window, and makes a little transparent icon at the bottom of the screen, and the one that gets the best response is when they see the background switch to another one), and its just as light as Fluxbox, so, as for the Mac which i got for free a month and a half ago, which runs OS X 10.4, to play around with it basically, I've built OpenBSD routers, I ran a FreeBSD server, but never had any experience with OS X, and ofcourse i could have set the mac up with a Gentoo install as well, but the only way I could put OS X on my resume is if i ran it for a while, so here i am.
Oh and those comments are really not as biased as you clame them to be, Linux does make more sense then windows does, for example why do you have to buy a copy of windows before you can read its lisence agreement when Open-Source lisence is openly available to read Online? Why are there hidden folders that you cant access unless you try to open them i through run or some files that you have to boot into like FreeDOS or Knoppix or something to even see? (for example you can not see the . directory in system32, yet by typing it in to run "Drive:\Windows\system32\.\" you see that it is there and there is a large amount of programs (which mirror system32 folder) that you can not see/access even if you have show hidden files/folders turned on? What is microsoft hiding? Why can you not uninstall any program you want to? why do you have to reserve to programs like XPLite to uninstall IE? Why does microsoft stride to make their OS incompattible with others?
As to the registry, why does an operating system solely depend on a database that is designed to secretly store secret application information, as well as core system information in a way that even advanced users have hard time figuring out and manipulating. Also there is a huge difference between the config files and registry, if you screw something up in the application config file, you app will tell you that there is an error in a heavily commented config file on line such and such, with registry, your application gives off a random error and you need to reinstall the application in order to try to fix it, and that may not help either. My biggest problem with the secretibe, information-hiding, dicombobulating registry is, and i have already stated it above, why in the world, and you state it yourself, that registry's primary function is to store application information, is the entire OS based on it, and why if there is a mistake in the registry, not all the mistakes do it but many do, does your operating system not start or crasy randomly? Now, and you know this, if there is a problem in a config file in Linux, the system will start, even though an application might not, even a serious system app like udev or something will not bring the system down, and even system config files may get screwed up if you run as root all the time, which noone should EVER do, the system is still fixable 99.9% of the time (infact in Gentoo, you can even accidently delete a system config file, you can go back a version in a matter of a pretty short command), because its easy to edit a well commented config file then it is to do anything with registry.

My point about retraining is fair - training is a considerable headache and it is necessary for the large jump from Windows GUI and apps to a Linux-based GUI and apps.

If you are talking about corporate environment, I agree 100%, but the investment is well-worth it, while in order to switch, the all and all cost migght even be a bit higher then switching to the next version of windows, the switch starts paying off really soon, on average saving about 2/3 of the total IT budget a year (since before the upgrade). If you are talking individual users, it takes a little commitment to, at least save a some money (lets see thats $200 for windows(Pro) plus $500 for Office(Pro), so about $700 bucks an upgrade (and using home is just not reasonable, even for "average" users, it's quite a downgrade), but wait there is more, $60 bucks fo the Norton Internet security package (I think it costs $40 to upgrade), you'll need some package for image manipulation, thats another $100, so its really looking like $800-$850 right there), but really, learn a better way.

The ones I've spoken to especially Excel and Access users simply cannot live with OpenOffice and equivalents.

There is an access equivalent in OpenOffice? wow, i didnt think there was, way to go OpenOffice. Oh and I agree that they are not as featureful as the Application package that they are modeled after, especially people that use access because they dont want to learn how to use any real database such as SQL (any flavor is fine, I use MySQL a lot, but been thinking of converting to Posgres, which allows you to store procedures as well as data, but MySQL is promising that their next version which is already at beta, making it just as good, well actually, better then MSSQL (its faster)...)

How many Microsoft developers do you think there are?

I'd say its pretty even there, although windows developers dont tend to write code unless they get paid for it, there are at least 2-4 million linux developers that spend their time on solely working on Linux application, but there are millions others who dont develop actively, but more write programs that suit some kind of a need that they have, they also write some patches to some already existant program, that tend to either add features or remove stupid things that the original programmers added in (such as release of the kernel information in naim), those would include myself and some of my friends.

Please point me in the direction of the MS Flight Simulator beater.

You thought I was bluffing? Flight Gear (www.flightgear.com), just check out the features, you can actually fly a shuttle out to space and then perform a reentry and land the thing, and since the model takes such a vast amount of factors in consideration, you can actually feel hitting the upper parts of the atmosphere as the shuttle bounces up. Oh and Flight Gear is FAA approved. P.S. if you are going to try it out, make sure you read the documentation as it is dfficult to just figure things out as you go along, since there are so many controls and things to deal with, oh and you will be better off with a joystick, playing with a mouse can be a pain.

Wifi cards on Linux - nightmare.

if you just need it to work and are not going to be using software like kismet, why dont you just use the NDIS wrapper and use the windows wifi driver for your card, simple, quick, easy, almost hassle free...

I think you are needlessly angry and offended

not angry but offended, perhaps by the wording, more then anything else

SATA controllers with Software RAID

i thought you were talking general users? where does the software RAID come in again? If you need to use software RAID you are well above the average user, and should know that howtos are available on the net (http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_..._Software_RAID , http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...AID-HOWTO.html)

Originally Posted by nkt

I was switched to Linux for a while, but now I use XP, as does my other half, who used Redhat/98 dualboot for about two years, before we bought a copy of XP for her.

Nobody, I repeat, nobody should never, ever use RedHat or any of its derivatives unless they are forced to, it is among the most horrible distros ever made, you are literally better off with XP then a general install of RedHat, I dont blame you both for switching...

Linux (aside from Knoppix) just doesn't detect the hardware nicely, doesn't help out much while installing, and, once installed, you are often just left to get on with it. Even something as simple as changing the screen resolution can be a nightmare - we had a weird issue with the root GUI being switched into a res that was too high for the monitor, but the other two accounts were fine. It took an age to solve.

<caugh> RedHat </caught>
Hey, other distros have no problem with hardware detection either, take Ubuntu, both the live CD and the installation or Gentoo Live disk for example (well, I guess i could argue the Gentoo installation as well, but since its a hands on thing with no installer, you tend to detect the hardware via lspci before compiling the your own kernel, but you could use genkernel, horrible thing that makes your kernel look like any Installer installed distro kernel, ugh what a thought...), Suse does pretty good job too.

Much tweaking later and we got it working, but nothing told us it wasn't perfect to start with! And on an nVidea card?

What about glxgears? the frame rate there is a perfect indicator of how well the 3D acceleration of your card is working or not working.

Which of the hundreds of Linux threads is the right one for them?

The most appropriate answer to this day is "The one that your neighbour or friend is running" ofcourse that might not be the case, so I split Linux distros in to 3 categories:
Ones I wouldnt use unless there is no way out: RedHat and all its derivatives (ex: Fedora), Debian, Mandrake and most of its derivatives
User-Friendly and I will recomend to beginner users: Ubuntu, Suse, Gentoo (stage 3)
Power User or ones i would and do use: Gentoo (stage 1), Slackware, SELinux

Oh and for most beginner users or users looking for hassle free distros, first choice: Ubuntu, second Suse, and if the user is looking to learn Linux by giving it a lot of time and figuring out how it works and everything, Gentoo stage 3

And what about BSD? OpenBSD or FreeBSD?

depends on what you are looking to do, OpenBSD is basically made for routing needs, very much security oriented it is not as fast as FreeBSD, but has numerous features that are not present in most other OSes, OpenBSD is working on a package that will allow you to have the ability to do crazy things that linksys routers can do, but for free, such as load ballancing with stateful packet filtering and nasty logging and alerting, so logically that takes up resources that are otherwise not taken by FreeBSD. But if you need a webserver or a BSD machine to run at home for your own leasure FreeBSD is faster a little more efficient and is more suited for those purposes.

but also by the Mac OSX, which is obviously more expensive

Mac OS X 10.4.2 $129 single user licese (apple's website) , Windows XP Home SP2 $190 ( http://www.google.com/froogle?q=Micr...Search+Froogle)
Windows seems obviously more expensive to me, but i may be wrong...

If Mac shifts to Intel, OSX may well be my next desktop.

I'd give Ubuntu a try before you do that, its quite cool and unique in its own ways, even just run the live cd for a while, or setup a dualboot, all the same, i think you'll enjoy it.

To be clear though open source does not mean a particular OS like Linux

No, open-source definately does not imply any operating system, however i felt like naming most of the open-source ones, so:
Linux, SunOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, NetBSD, GNU-Hurd, SSS-PC, ReactOS and FreeDOS.

Originally Posted by nkt

C1ay, you are right. We should also mention, for those who don't know, things like bind, sendmail, and the many other free applications that keep the internet world running.

yup, basically if you look at ther progression and development chart for Internet and Linux, you will find the curves extremely similar from the time that Apache was developed, they go hand in hand...
sendmail is the craziest program in the world in terms of configuration...

[alexander]

another super awesome simulator that has a little better graphics then flight grear is Xplane (check it out at www.x-plane.org)

[nkt]

Originally Posted by alexander

<lots snipped!>
Nobody, I repeat, nobody should never, ever use RedHat or any of its derivatives unless they are forced to, it is among the most horrible distros ever made, you are literally better off with XP then a general install of RedHat, I dont blame you both for switching...

:-)

<caugh> RedHat </caught>
Hey, other distros have no problem with hardware detection either, take Ubuntu, both the live CD and the installation or Gentoo Live disk for example (well, I guess i could argue the Gentoo installation as well, but since its a hands on thing with no installer, you tend to detect the hardware via lspci before compiling the your own kernel, but you could use genkernel, horrible thing that makes your kernel look like any Installer installed distro kernel, ugh what a thought...), Suse does pretty good job too.

Well, I'm downloding the DVD torrent right now, so it had better be worth it! ;-)

What about glxgears? the frame rate there is a perfect indicator of how well the 3D acceleration of your card is working or not working.

I was trying TuxRacer as the test, as it was the first 3D app I found. I got it in the end, but it was a struggle...

The most appropriate answer to this day is "The one that your neighbour or friend is running" ofcourse that might not be the case, so I split Linux distros in to 3 categories:
Ones I wouldnt use unless there is no way out: RedHat and all its derivatives (ex: Fedora), Debian, Mandrake and most of its derivatives
User-Friendly and I will recomend to beginner users: Ubuntu, Suse, Gentoo (stage 3)
Power User or ones i would and do use: Gentoo (stage 1), Slackware, SELinux

Oh and for most beginner users or users looking for hassle free distros, first choice: Ubuntu, second Suse, and if the user is looking to learn Linux by giving it a lot of time and figuring out how it works and everything, Gentoo stage 3

Like I say, Ubuntu is coming down now.

<snipped a useful desc. of other Free OSes>

Mac OS X 10.4.2 $129 single user licese (apple's website) , Windows XP Home SP2 $190 ( http://www.google.com/froogle?q=Micr...Search+Froogle)
Windows seems obviously more expensive to me, but i may be wrong...

And Ubuntu is £0, and seems obviously less expensive to me, but i may be wrong... I was meaning c.f. Linux, not Windows!

I'd give Ubuntu a try before you do that, its quite cool and unique in its own ways, even just run the live cd for a while, or setup a dualboot, all the same, i think you'll enjoy it.

I will, of course, let you all know how I get on.

sendmail is the craziest program in the world in terms of configuration...

But that flexibility and power means pretty much every server on the internet runs it, as well as a lot of home users. I know I want a local mailserver for my LAN.

[alexander]

Originally Posted by nkt

But that flexibility and power means pretty much every server on the internet runs it, as well as a lot of home users. I know I want a local mailserver for my LAN.

Not every server runs sendmail, but mail servers do. I think that Apache would be a better example.
I claim sendmail to be the craziest program ever made because of this:
Installing it is just as easy as any other program, however it is the configuration that make it so crazy. There are 2 config files in sendmail, one is a simple config file, its easy to use and gives you almost 0 control, so after the setup is done, your server is really insecure. But there is another config file that the first config file gets parsed into, and that is written by an nuclear physicist gone crazy and on drugs, that has control of everything in sendmail and can make it super secure, but even a 700 page book can not go through everything in there...

[nkt]

Originally Posted by alexander

Not every server runs sendmail, but mail servers do. I think that Apache would be a better example.

But most mail servers don't run Apache... :-Þ

Seriously, though, I couldn't remember off the top of my head if Apache was Open or not. (One of the "Big Three" - Apache, MySQL, PHP - is slightly less free, IIRC) Of course it is, and it has over 50% of the internet running on it.

PHP has been scanned as running 21,466,638 Domains on 1,293,874 IP Addresses!

[alexander]

Apache is one of the bigger and long running open-source projects. MySQL is also completely Open, and so is PHP... you might be confusing something with MSSQL or IIS maybe?

oh and as to mail servers, but most web servers dont run mail servers and web servers outnumber mail servers by miles

[nkt]

I know one requires payment for commercial use - MySQL? - and I didn't/don't have time to go check everything.

One thing I want to do is set up an HTTP/HTTPS proxy for myself, so I can bounce my surfing off my home connection (which I trust) while using an HTTPS connection from unsecured locations like wi-fi and untrusted networks. I also want to run sendmail on the same machine, so I can leave a copy there, but read remotely, via webmail over the https link.

Haven't got a clue where to start, though...

[alexander]

no, no, no, no, no, you do not pay for the product at all, the problem becomes when you run a multitude of mysql servers that you would like support when you get in trouble, and thats where money comes in. MySQL is a comlletely free and Open-Source database, but just like any company, they need money to survive, and since they would not dare sell their product, like hundreds of other companies like RedHat, Novelle, Suse, Sun Microsystems to name a few big ones, they provide a not so free support for their products, so when you need a patch or something does not work like you want it to, you have a person you can call, most of the time an actual developer, and you can say, well listen this isnt working, i need it fixed asap, what do you need me to do. (and this works many times better then microsoft support, where you need to get to like the 20'th level of people to talk to a tech who knows what the registry is, on and it is still not a fact that they will fix anything, they need a few thousand complaints before they consider it, oh and be prepared to spend hours on the phone with them)

Where to start? Well a good start will be running down to the nearest book store that sells decent computer books and look for a book on Apache web servers and another book on Sendmail, if I had a choice, I'd go with O'Reilley(sp?) their books like Running Linux are excellent and dont bore you with mumbo jumbo for the first 300 pages before briefly touching on a subject and the book is finished, unlike some other publishers... Also you need to read up on iptables (that should be your firewall, and you should know how to use it pretty well and you should use it) also take a look at port knocking, as that is another really cool thing that you might want to employ as one of the defense strategies, make sure you log well, and come up with some recommended log parser programs to alert you of any kind of attacks on your box, also since you are goint into the WWW, you'll need some rootkit sniffers and a strategy to make sure your box and packages arent infected, very popular way is md5 summs, but there are ways to make changes to the programs and backups, so make sure that you save all data to a cd or dvd and periodically check your system packages against your known base (or if you run a Debian-based distro, just write a small script to completely reinstall core system packages).

P.S. I know that I might have offended someone by my dislike of certain Linux distros, I would like to clarify that I dislike their general installs, straight from CDs, no modification, I know that some people go a long way to modify their system to work for them better, and you guys i encourage to do just that, i do not mean to offend any of you and respect anyone who is willing to join our discussions here (meaning computer science in general)!