Linuces

Troodon · Post by **Troodon** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 6:46 am

Anyone know what happened to VALinux?

Post by **Dapper Dan** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 6:48 am

No, but it brings up an intersting question. Do you and Sky think having so many distros is a good or a bad thing? On the one hand, my capitalist blood tells me it is good as it brings more ideas to the marketplace. On the other hand, I wonder if it is not so good in that it causes so much confusion and incompatability between the distros. Just the other day, A friend of mine called to say a high scool student he knew was having problems logging in to his Linux disrto, I asked him which one he was using and he said Suse. He was not able to log in because, after typing his password, it threw him back out to the windows manager. My first thought was that X was not starting, and that he needed to run XFdrake to figure it out, but then I remember that Suse doesn't have XFdrake! How can I help this guy??
Here lately, all I've been hearing about is Gentoo Linux and Xandros Linux. Troodon, I believe you said you use Mandrake 8.2 and KDE, and Sky, I believe you said you use Slackware and Fluxbox. I use Mandrake 9.0 and IceWM. We seem to find common ground, though we are using different setups, so maybe it's a good thing to have variety. What are your thoughts?

Troodon · Post by **Troodon** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 2:24 pm

Well, I think variety is good and Linux has a future as a multi-distro platform. Personally, I have a Redhat 6.2 server and a Mandrake 8.2 w/ Gnome workstation (KDE was too slow). There are things I don't like about Linux though, but there is no perfect OS anyway.

I like its flexibility and stability and the fact that it's available free of charge, if you download it.

What I don't like is the way Linux is developed by people who are mainly motivated by their ego rather than by how useful a feature is, and commercialized by other people who are busy "keeping up with the latest release of the kernel" (to increase sales, obviously) rather than focusing on bringing one release to full throttle. It is seldom possible to copy a software package from a distro to another, or between different releases of the same distribution, unless you recompile it, and that's another story. When you decide to upgrade to the latest release of some software package things may get messy unless you really know what you're doing.

I prefer the look and feel of Windows 2000 (or MacOS X, if the Apple machines weren't so expensive) for a workstation, and the stability and flexibility of Linux/GNU for a server.

Post by **Dapper Dan** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 8:01 pm

Good points all. Speaking of things one doesn't like about Linux: If there is any one thing that, from the beginning, has driven me up the wall, it's the @#$%ing permissions! Sky will tell you I was pulling my hair out trying to compile staroffice from downloaded bin files! They came resricted and it took me almost a week to figure out that I had to change the permissions to make them work! LOL!
I know it is important to have them, and it is partly the securities issues that makes Linux more attractive than Windows, but in my mind, it seems like the whole permissions thing is the opposite from what it should be. To me, it would make more sense for the distos to provide everything in the beginning at 777, and then the Super User can add restrictions where he/she wants them.

Troodon · Post by **Troodon** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 8:41 pm

The problems you encountered with permissions when setting up the StarOffice Suite on Linux reflect yet another Linux headache that I failed to mention: it is largely undocumented. I too have wasted a lot of time figuring out how to install the server rather the workstation version of StarOffice.

I understand that writing documentation takes time but I think it's part of the paradigm: either your software is for the pros or it's for the masses ( and that's me

).

Let me give you another example. When I develop software I use Pascal, Perl, PHP, and PostgreSQL. Yup, no -BEEP!- C and such. There is this Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) available on most platforms. One day I decide I want to develop a graphical interface on Linux using the GTK library. Surprise -- Free Pascal comes with an interface to the GTK library but no documentation. So I contact the FPC developers asking for docs and they say "use the C documentation and examples". I ask them "if I knew C, would I use Pascal?!" and they say "sorry, we are too busy to write this kind of documentation".

Post by **Dapper Dan** » Sat Mar 15, 2003 10:14 pm

LOL! I'm running into a documentation problem as well. As you know, I've been fooling around with wine. Recently, I downloaded Dosemu, the dos emulator for Linux to see if I can get certain dos programs to run as well as Windows programs do with Win4Lin. I downloaded it, installed it, and tried to run it, but since there is no window that comes up to welcome me to Dosemu, I am uncertain as to whether it is working properly or not. I've not been able to locate any documentation that explains how it all works once you've installed it!