lol you must be ignorant. mandrake uses rpm, in fact mandrake is entirly based on redhat fyi.

Haha...In fact I think almost all flavors of Linux use RPM for packages

I was saying the rpm format was bad I was saying red hat is. And since when is mandrake based off of redhat? Mandrake is just another distributor of Linux. Redhat is a bloated piece of poop.

p.s. Dibrom... Has your changes in 3.90.2 made it into the official lame source code yet? like in this guys "ftp://cedric.vabo.cz/pub/linux/apps/lame/".

mandrake was originally based on redhat believe or not. and mandrake does still use rpm.

thats not really that hard to believe figuring how redhat was one of the first big distrubutes out there.

redhat still sucks, though. mandrake may have been based off it, but it definetly didn't go down that bloat road redhat did.

Actually the last install of Mandrake I seen was 3 CD's and RH is using 2 CD's for the install. Stop while your ahead SNYder :-)

I like Mandrake more than RH also but it's more bloated than RH ever though about being. Sorry, don't mean to add fuel to the fire guys.

<Off Topic>

Bah.. Debian or Gentoo That's where it's at.. Gentoo especially really looks to be turning out nicely.

</Off Topic>

Linux as a whole sucks. It's only used by elite fascist and communist GPL supporters, aka OpenSource dorks who have no clue, no life, and serve no useful purpose. I could get more into it than name calling, but I don't want to take the time to ramble here, and instead, I'll debate anyone on a point-for-point basis.

BSD is where it's at... OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Darwin, BSDI, RTMX, or any other BSD I might have missed.

Pick one and become enlightened. =)

i have a question. why do you say its communist? the gpl says you have the freedom to do whatever you want to do, as long as you make the source available somehow. oh and i tried freebsd. not as much hardware support, no 3d support.

I've been reading a lot about linux lately and was thinking of giving it a go. Which is better? Mandrake or Suse?

They both seem pretty good to me especially Mandrake.

no no no. only the first mandrake cd is the actual installer. the rest is extra stuff which you don't half to install.

and since when is there 3 cd's? last time I downloaded it, it was two? :confused:

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[img]75c9c7b0cb[/img][img]75c9c7b0cb[/img][img]75c9c7b0cb[/img][img]75c9c7b0cb[/img]
[img]75c9c7b0cb[/img]

WOOOOOO!!!!!

Well, you'll need the second CD if you ever want to compile anything yourself...

And yes, there are three CDs in the latest Mandrake 8.1, the least stable and most buggy version of Mandrake yet. RedHat 7.2 is what I'm currently using. Both have excellent install systems, although both use RPM, which isn't the ideal package format.



Idiot.

This is really why I prefer Gentoo myself, aside from the less "bloated" feeling it also offers. In addition, I just prefer the more "hands on" approach as in starting from a minimalistic setup and then building from there instead of having everything dumped onto the system all at once during install. Of course, you can slim down the installs of Redhat/Mandrake, but still. I don't really like having a bunch of stuff installed on my system that I don't specifically use and IMO it's more of a pain in the ass to go through an installer and uncheck everything than to just start from scratch and build upwards.

The downside to Gentoo though is basically the opposite of Redhat and Mandrake. The install isn't extremely user friendly, but the package management system is significantly better than RPM IMO.



RPM is popular, but there certainly are other (better) package management systems out there. Debian's apt (there's an apt tool for RPM also, yes, but I've never used it) is really nice, Gentoo's Portage system is great (similar to the BSD Ports), and there are some others like Stampede's SLP and then there's the basic Slackware tarballs. There's probably more out there also.

People who respond to criticism with one word comments that mean nothing only weaken their position and show the true nature of the so-called "Linux community".

No thanks.

I think it's a bit unfair to make such a statement when the comment it was in response to was equally devoid of meaning, other than a bit of name calling.

I respect both BSD and Linux. OpenBSD is one of my favorite OS's as a matter of fact, but it certainly doesn't replace Linux for what I use it for. They serve different purposes in my eyes. At any rate, I don't buy into the whole license wars crap myself (or the KDE vs Gnome stuff, or this or that, or... etc, etc). I say, use what's available to you and what makes you happy, and let everyone else do the same. Arguing one way or the other in an offensive manner is kind of pointless because neither side is going to change their mind in the end anyway.

To expand on my one word reply:
1) Fascism and communism are from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Something cannot be 'fascist and communist'. By saying that, you show that you have no idea what either word means.
2) Neither fascism nor communism are applicable to Linux.
3) Neither fascism nor communism are necessarily an insult, despite you obviously intending them both as one.

I see you are from America, which would explain your misunderstanding of the term communism. I'm unsure how you attached the label fascist to Linux, however.

Altogether, I believe I summed up this much more concisely in my previous reply.

I was under the impression that I knew my definitions and that I actually know better than most people what these words mean, considering I did a thesis on related subjects, however, I referenced my dictionary (Cnd. 3rd Ed. AHD) and would it defines fascism as the following:



It also defines communism as the following:



I see my memory has not failed me, and these terms (in definition, possibly not in governmental practice) are obviously are not mutually exclusive. In the case of Linux, I can easily argue that it can fall under both definitions, and I'm not saying it's necessarily bad, but in this case [Linux], it doesn't work, and it's painfully obvious. Anyway, enough about language skills.

Also, I was born and do currently live in the United States, but I have not lived here for the majority of my life. I've spent more combined time in the many other countries in which I've lived(Western Samoa near Telefaga, American Samoa near Sinalele, Paupa New-Guinea in Port Morsby, New Zealand outside of Auckland, Fiji, Tonga, and some various islands of micronesia) but I've lived in the USA the longest time of any one country, and thats because I do prefer it here. I am still fluent in Somoan and can understand and communicate rather well in most other Polynesian languages in case I decide to leave the country for some political reason. Being an "American" (which in reality means nothing) doesn't cause me to understand or misunderstand governments in any way, and to even suggest such borders on the absurd.

I'm actually rather informed about communism in particular, because my best friend and former rommate is a long time member of the CPUSA and I commonly read their website and publications. If anyone is confused about government, it's the people in Washington DC, USA. =)

In regards to Linux, I'm not going to get into all the reasons why I think it sucks more than a 500 horsepower shop-vac in reverse, because this would turn into a book rather than a post, and because I can support my claims with literally hundreds of pages of background information on the fragmented and disorganized development of Linux in general; not to mention how the GPL makes slaves out of it's users. I'm somewhat intoxicated and don't feel like writing that much at once. =) However, I will debate intelligently on a point to point basis, as I said earlier.

I'm not Linux newbie either. I began using Linux 0.96 or something and then moved to 0.99pl12 as I migrated from a stable Minix system (and because Minix development after implementing X11R5 and page swapping stalled, but did become Minix-vmd later on, maybe in 1995, anyway, off topic again).

I think I was originally using MCC and moved to SLS, or maybe it was the other way around. Later, I manaully moved to Slackware after version 1.0.1 was released, and then again later manually converted my system from a.out to ELF. I did quite a bit of development work on the Linux kernel, including custom networking patches for distributed computing, low-level hardware drivers for the HP EtherTwist and SMC Elite ethernet NICs, a driver for a custom external DAC, some crude ARCnet and DECnet drivers, and later created a parallel distributed and highly optimized version of POVRay to take advantage of these new kernel features.

To cut this very long story short, I because completely fed up with the so called "Linux community" and the hapzardness of Linux development, and abandonded all Linux work around the time of kernel release 1.3.57. I had never released my source code (except some of the Ethernet stuff), because at the time it was all being used experimentally by myself only, but, out of spite, and to be "in conformance" with the GPL, I destroyed all my source code and development work, and I've never once looked back.

Also, I've done some development work for a few large corporations, and, when it comes to the protection of trade secrets, it makes much more business sense to pay developers salaries for hundreds of hours of work to write something from scratch than it does to use GPL software and submit to the opressiveness of the GPL license. I've seen this decision made over and over again. What the GPL really does is create a deadpool of worthless code and software that otherwise might have been able to serve a purpose.

IMHO, the best answer yet is BSD, but it's imperfect. I've tossed aside my career of software development and management of software development after I was laid off after the NASDAQ crash, and I've been much happier; even though I'm much, much poorer than I was.

So, I now have two choices.

1) get into a long drawn out, virulent flamewar.
2) walk away.

I choose (2). I thought you were just being a clueless idiot. Now I see that you're not an idiot, and have a clue, but for some reason didn't feel like using it. If you get your kicks out of trolling, then good for you. I'm sorry your experience with Linux has been so disappointing. Perhaps it's something for me to look forward to once I've been around as long as you have.

Just to update, I've talked to Jon I on the IRC channel and I don't think there is need to continue this discussion here, at least not with him, as interesting as it may be.



Update: I'll confess - I do sometimes get a kick out of making a blanket statement like "Linux sucks" and then totally going off on someone at random about it. It's not deliberate though, it's subconscious, I swear! It's not just related to Linux. It happens whenever someone discusses Linux, religion, government, drugs, and science fiction. Those are my touchy subjects. =)

couple replies:

1. Mandrake has always been based off of Red Hat...it rehashed Red Hat and added a more Newbie friendly face to it...it came with all features of Red Hat in the first 5.x versions...
2. BSD? LINUX? WINDOWS? they are all for different people with different specialties...[those with intelligence use Debian/Slackware Linux and those that don't use Windows and in the middle are other Linux distros and "BSD" which by the way is lame...] he he he
3. no linux doesn't suck...what sucks is paying hundreds of dollars for software which could be free and continuosly updated for free. and the ability to choose from hundreds of linux distros to match your needs and expertise? how is that communist? fascist?...you are retarded...
4. most distros come with one installation cd and all additional cd's are packages/programs
5. trnsz...why such a hate for linux?
6. if linux is less superior...than why is it more stable?

i hope this refuels the flaming....

Point 6:

I didn't want to get back into this, but I'll say that I've never seen uptimes on Linux that come close to approaching BSD uptimes. I have actually worked on BSD machines which last booted before Linux was even written. Please don't say some ridiculous blanket statement about Linux stability. I have a BSD machine up and running in my parents garage that has over 2500 days of uptime on it. I set it up back in high-school and it's been running since I moved out without a problem, with very heavy loads. It only has 8MB of RAM and runs about 200MB into swap constantly.

One of the most stable operating systems that I've seen in production has to be NetWare. I might be biased being a CNE, but there is a machine in my fathers law office running some old version, I don't know the version exactly, maybe 2.11, but it is approaching 3,000 days of uptime, and serves database applications, mail, and, gasp, lockfiles, to about 250 workstations.

My preferred OS to work with is VMS, now OpenVMS, but thats a completely different story. I think VMS holds the worlds computer uptime record, with uptimes of more than a decade -- I think it was a VMS2 VAX that ran from late 1980 until early 1991 until the machine hardware was upgraded and software updated to VAX/VMS 5.5. I think the machine was either a government installation or used at DEC, my memory fails me.

Point 5:

I'm not going to get into this right now completely. It's 5:19am, I want to sleep. But in a nutshell, it has to do with the development philosophy and the attitudes of the user community.

Point 4:

Can't really argue here, but if I was going to use Linux, I wouldn't be using RedHat or Debian; CRUX really seems the best choice ( http://crux.nu/ ). Not suprisingly, they use BSD derived initscripts, a BSD derived package system, and a BSD derived installation and distribution system.

Point 3:

If you must choose from hundreds of Linux distributions to suit your needs, something has gone drasticaly wrong somewhere along the software development chain, and a whole community should take in some reading about software management. There are too many BSD systems as it is, and I only know of six of them, and two of them are VERY special purpose (Darwin and RTMX).

Point 2:

Nice to see how you can say BSD is lame, but I bet you couldn't even tell me five features that BSD doesn't have that Linux does, and I'm also pretty sure that you couldn't tell me five features BSD has that Linux doesn't. I consider myself a person of intelligence, and I'm using Windows (and VMS) for quite a few projects that I would never in the life of the solar system consider converting to Linux or BSD, however, on the other hand, I've not found a situation where Linux was ever the best solution, all aspects considered -- including code management and license. The right answer isn't always BSD or VMS or NetWare or anything else either. I did one project, in 1997 mind you, using Microsoft Xenix.

Point 1:

At this point, I'd rather run Mandrake than RedHat if I was forced between the two, but I think it is a well known fact that Mandrake was originally a RedHat based distribution.

It's all about the Amiga and OS/2.

And BeOS.

OS/2 wasn't a bad OS. I remember waiting in line for midnight to roll around so I could purchase OS/2 Warp 3, and I used it on my 486 to run a BBS for quite a long time. I was using a cool serial to TCP/IP interface driver too, so the BBS would answer lines as well as Telnet sessions. The best thing I remember about OS/2 was Rexx, actually.

Amiga's were cool computers, but I never got into them enough to really appreciate the operating system. I do believe that the latest version of AmigaOS (5?) has some native PowerPC support now.

trnsz, sorry for not replying sooner...i kinda forget i left that little flame fuel post...

ok...fessing up, i have never even seen a bsd system and those "he he he" chuckles were just there to get somebody talking...i have little knowledge of computers outside of Micro$oft, but would really like to learn...

when i said "more stable" i was referring to windows...

in the workstation environment, what would you use [or do use]?

can you say something more about the linux issue, sometime not at 5:19am? i would appreciate it...if you don't want to post it you could email me at xmixahlx at yahoo.com

long live communism!

In a workstation environment, it really depends on two things; the type of enterprise and required applications. In all honesty, the best workstation situations that I've experienced were either Windows NT/2K/XP or MacOS.

Also, at my last job, averaged out over the period of about 400 days, the NT servers had better availability than the Linux servers, but not by much. So much for Linux stability. =)

What else do you want to know about the Linux issue? Let me know and when I'm up to it I'll post it.

-- 8:28am and I'm finally going to bed.

Suprised that nobody has bitched yet...

cmon I'm drinkin' tonite.

Lets get it on.

I use windows now, but i planned to get into linux. I think I use mandrake distro, tried BEOS once, crashed alot - dont like the interface too. I'm just a homeuser, no server crap, so I think linux will do, I hope, a better job than Win98, which crashes some 5 times a day. (maybe I start too much progs, mostly some 8-10, but it should be multi-tasking, isn't it?)

But: Is mandrake good enough, now, or should i wait until 8.2 (i heard 8.1 is quite buggy) and how long whould that take?

'bout communism/facism: I dont think the dictonary gives also the feeling of both of them. Communism is 'good' - it is meant to equalize all people. of course, this doesnt work in practise, but the idealistic idea of communism whould create a perfect world.
Facism, on the contrary, is based on a dictatorialistic system. the people for the government. communism should have in its final stage no goverment, and in 'the beginning' the government should be there for the people. like in a democracy. Facism just means a totalitarian regime, surpressing all individualistic freedom. (in fact, it is what communism became in the USSR, cuba and korea). and sorry for my english.

I'm a happy mandrake user. Although my system has been heavily modifed since I installed it.

I found mandrake gave me a working system very quickly when I needed to get work done. Since then I've just played around with it, checked out the various software that comes on the CDs. It's good. It can install down to like 65Mb or something if you want, but really if you plan to use the system for much you need more space.....

My personal experience with stability in regards to NT vs linux is definitely in favour of linux. The NT boxes at uni have all sorts of problems generally. I've had KDE crash on me a few times in the last few months, but the system has remained solid. Serving up internet for my home LAN perfectly.


I can't comment on BSD, my experience is basically nil. But it's so much less acessible as far as I can tell. I have some worries about hardware support and software compatibility, even though I'm sure most software works. I guess the only way I'll find it is to try it. But I really need a second machine, as this one needs to be available for people to use internet.

TrNSZ

and the attitudes of the user community.
Well, Master, please tell me what my attitude is.

What do you think of Linux today?
Or didn't you try some newer version of it?
Does, from your opinion, only Linux (Kernel) suck or even the other software that's usually delivered with it?

I'm using Debian with Linux 2.4.20 for some months now and I'm very satisfied with it. Before that I had Windows 98 SE and then Windows XP. When seeing it only from the point of use and leave the ideology aside, than I can say that I'm way more satisfied with Linux than I were with Windows systems. I tested FreeBSD a little bit but at that time my soundcard wasn't supported, so it wasn't an option for me. I installed FreeBSD 4.8 some weeks ago but deleted it very soon, because it would have been a waste of time making my way through the system, as I already know Linux and it does what I need. Well, I'm a home user and don't have any servers running, so I can't tell something about server usage of both Linux and FreeBSD or Windows.

Your rants about the GPL are somewhat weird, you'd better cling to reality: It's a license for distribution of software and not a regime/political ideology. But I addmit that there are a lot of folks who seem to be thinking every piece of software must be GPL'd or LGPL'd and everything else would immediately be wrong. Yes, this sucks. At the other side, there's nothing wrong with the GPL, it doesn't enslave it's users. But you have to be sure that it's the license you want to use.

There's nothing wrong with sharing knowledge and software as long it's yours and not "stolen". The GPL and LGPL are simply a possibility for sharing your software while avoiding that someone simply takes your work, makes it closed source and sells it. And for endusers it's a cool license because they don't have to care about it .

I'll stop here.

* A linux/*bsd system is not better than the person(s) who installed it.

* A linux/*bsd system is not or more secure/stable than the person(s) maintaining it.

* Even the greatest nerds makes simple stupid mistakes.

* A system that takes 5 minuts to update has a much higher chance of getting updated than a system which takes 2 hours. Especially if the company owns multiple systems that needs update.


I have been working together with many brilliant nerds over the past five linux years. All but one felt the need to recompile everything for security and performance reasons. When these nerds left the company, their systems needed maintenance BADLY. The company suffered from exploited security holes, as the there were no time to update the many servers.

Debian and Gentoo might be excellent distributions if you have a REAL need to manually compile and configure everything. It is my opinion that the vast majority claiming so does not have a REAL need. They just do it because they can or because it is fun. This is okay for a home computer, but very bad for a company.

On the other hand, Red Hat is an excellent choice for a small company with only one or two systems administrators. If the systems only include standard RPMs, the entire server park can be updated in a matter of minutes. It is also reasonable to assume, that the combined knowledge of the team at RedHat exceeds the combined knowledge of any one or two system administrators working for that small company.

I don't know gentoo but what do you mean with 'configure everything' when speaking of Debian? There wasn't too much I had to configure to have it running. And (security)updates are really the easiest thing with apt-get. But AFAIK you won't get security updates for the testing tree very soon as they usually first go into unstable tree. Before Debian I had Mandrake 9 and Red Hat 8 for a short time, (for me) the easiest setup/configuration was that of Debian Woody, although the 'knowledge' from using Mandrake and Red Hat weren't of too much help. Well, I think it all depends on what you like or what you can learn better. I addmit that Debian would be impossible to properly install and configure for a computer newbie but in the end that goes for every system - some OS just make you think you'd know what you are doing.

Ok, here's my two cents. First off, you fools, communism is an economic system, not a political system. In the original true marxist sense it described a system in which people contributed everything they could and took only what they needed. In that system there wouldn't be things like starvation and war, but alas, its just a pipe dream and human nature smashes it to peices before it can even lift off. Pitted against capitalism, i think i would prefer communism my self. The traditional "communism" that spawned mcarthyism was not about communism at all, rather it was just a witch hunt for assholes representing dictatorial or oligarchical governments who stole resources from their own people. I question any source that ties communism with facism.

Ive been hopping around the Operating System carousel quite a bit myself lately and as a fairly well educated yet impatient end-user/tech/administrator i have come to several conclusions. My original os was windows 98 which made me want to pull my hair out. This spawned my interest in linux as i desperately sought an alternative. My first stab at linux was quite awkward and i backed off very quickly because it was "way" too hands on and hardware support was very poor. I next went to win2k/xp and was very happy with these platforms since they offered wonderful ease of use, with modest power-user capability, and for once m$ put out a product that didnt crash every time the wind blew. I then was captivated by the innovation of gentoo linux and ive been using that for well over a year. It did everything i needed, i had full hardware support, but godammit i got tired of editing text files every time i wanted to make a change. Installing a new printer took me 2 days and by the time i was done my sound stopped working. Everytime i fixed something, something else broke. Now make no mistake, i do not blame this on linux, it had more to do with my inexperience as an administrator, but it was still frustrating. At work, i have a workstation running mandrake 9.1 which is a really cool linux distro, as close to windows as you can get with linux. Does everything i need it to and its the only pc in the shop that doesnt crash. Anyways, i know im ranting on and on so bear with me, i decided in the last week to migrate back to winXP simply for the sake of saving time. Ive gotten together a full production ready pc in less than a day, however i delegated my server needs off to a makeshift pentium2 server running redhat 9. The reason i chose redhat 9 was because of the candy like gui configuration tools for the heavy duty server tools like apache and the likes. All of these systems do their job, i dont really prefer one over all versus the other so shut up with your this is better than that.

Here is the cliffhanger ending though. Recently im starting to feel like my favorite operating system has to be Mac OS X (Darwin + Aqua). This is the best of all worlds like you wouldnt believe and i think its potential is far undercut. Here we have a BSD powered unix monster with the most user friendly interface ive ever seen. For the regular joe, he doesnt ever have to know whats under the hood because it "just works". But for freaks like me, i can go in and enable the root account, and wreck havoc with the terminal and all my GNU toys. Its stable as hell, POSIX compliant, server grade/scalable, idiot-proof, and not to mention it comes on very stylish hardware (save for the ugly ass toilet seat laptops and those stupid tv looking imacs). Who wants to deal with linux or raw bsd when apple has done all the work for you. In reality though, i would ideally be running all of the mentioned operating systems, windows for my desktop #1, macosx for desktop#2/laptop, and linux for my server.

So i conclude: personal experience is one thing however people do have to make their own mistakes sometimes (although it doesnt hurt to warn them), however zealots are just downright aggravating and not worth debating with. Keep your opinions to your self unless you are going to follow through with some sound explanation or logical dialogue.

Who is that directed at?

It won't be the monster for everybody until they have a 64 bit version out, and can't scale
that much until it is.

Show me the gigabytes!

Using Debian Woody and Sid along with Windows 2000 and XP on one system. Win 2k partition might get replaced with FreeBSD soon (testing purposes).

I think Linux still has much potential. The thing I'm not satisfied with is multimedia.

There is no player I'm aware of that can read APE2 tags or my replaygained MP3s. LAMIP sees dead, too and foobar is closed, that leads to this:

userXYZ, I think everything would be much better without commercial products. OSS is still superior to ALSA in terms of usability. With the OSS/"commercial" being GPLed and built into every kernel, no one would complain about sound that doesn't work. With WineX being GPLed and packed with every distribution, no gamer would complain about bad emulation. Same goes for the NVIDIA drivers, but I have to admit they grew better and better. Don't know if Newbies know what to do to kill X.

Your replaygained MP3s can be read by any player/decoder, it's not an special issue. ciber-fred is still working on LAMIP, so luckily it's not dead


You mean installation or what? ALSA will be in Linux 2.6 so at least from then on there will be no hassles with installation. If there's nothing special about one's soundcard then it shouldn't be too much of a problem to compile ALSA from sources, a little error and try and you'll have it.


I would always prefer native apps and games.


GNU/Linux isn't perfect but if one's willing to invest some time then it's a good choice. At least in my opinion.

This was directed at zealots of course.

TrNSZ, I couldn't agree more! I'm quite pissed with Linus too, so pompous and all. His microkernel discussion with Tanenbaum and his opinions on Itanium kind of sums up how much of a computer scientist he is.

But OS X? It is ludicrous Apple is trying to play in the high-end server arena. Darwin might be a UNIX, but I don't think OS maturity wise comes anywhere close to Solaris, BSDs, etc...

Instead of senseless name throwing and instead of taking the whole 'this OS is better than that'-thingie on a personal level you'd better make your choice and respect the choices of others. If Linux and/or any other OS sucks in your opinion than that's absolutely right, but please don't play the missionar.

removed useless offense

Yes god forbid someone has oppinions. Especially if they differ from what you preffer.



After reading on this I found good and bad from both in the discussion. Honestly then and now Minix had/has major problems. There is a reason it is not heard of much any more IIRC. So what if Linux is a so called monolithic system? That discussion is so old that many versions of the then fabled Windows NT have come and gone. And in many instances Linux and related software have kept up and even outpaced NT. Not half bad for a monolithic system. I would take a decent monolithic system over a poor microkernel system any day. In regards to the blurb about being better off waiting for the GNU Micro Kernel by Tanenbaum. Were still waiting. IIRC it is what is now known as the HURD and even after well over a decade has not reached a usable wide spread beta state. Where is the wisdom in that.



Yes he is a rather decent one. Does anyone remember the bruhaha that went on after the release of the Itanic er um I mean Itanium? It was one of the most overhyped underperforming processor launches perhaps with acception to the last couple of motorolla procs. The things on price point and actual performance were real stinkers and for all their advanced design had a hard time keeping up with their archaeic ancestors. You want to talk about a seriously underhyped and underutilised processor? Have you looked at Transmeta's Carusoe? For mobile applications the thing is magnificent. Rather efficient in both power consumption and CPU cycles. A verry innovative design IMO.



Ummmm. Isn't Darwin off the shelf BSD with Apple extentions? I might agree that the extentions might be immature. But for christs sake. The OS "IS" BSD!!!

I know what crawled up TrNSZ's and others shorts and died. BSD is a great system. And has been around longer than Linux. Yet then and now it has never recieved the same attention as Linux. They mumble to themselves "what kinda thankless world is this?". I got news for you. The story of BSD is not quite as inspiring as the one behind Linux. Strange but true. And from a joe user standpoint alot more work has been put into Linux than BSD. Arguably if someone understood how it was done for Linux it would be insanely easy to do for BSD. Though to my knowledge, no one ever has. Why? I know enough programming to get me in trouble. And I am more savvy at the CLI than most. But I really like the ease of setup of a Mandrake or SuSE. BSD's lack of that is another thing that keeps it from the hands of the masses. Funny how BSDers an Linuxites can find the time to argue over things like kernel minutia and can't find it in themselves to gome together over their considderably larger similarities to make headway against those like Microsoft. If Linux were as bad as some here have made it out to be would companies like IBM and Dell have invested in it as much as they have? Considdering that BSD and the BSD license could quite possibly be more flexible for them. As with everything there are pro's and cons. It just seems like some are hell bent to make much ado over nothing.

Well, I dont know much about BSD, but I guess - you can say its 'too free'. If you write code for it, someone can steal it, ask mony for it etc etc - its not true free. cuz it wont stay free. thats why I prefer GPL - thats true freedom!

about usabillity, I guess OS-X rulez. and it is stable, too! But I prefer linux, because it is free, and open for improvement. Dont know any reason to go for winblow$, thats slow, buggy, expensive, and makes you dumb by trying to think for you.

ow, and I went for Debian (yep, long ago I posted in this thread the question what distro I should use - I tried suse, mandrake, and 5 other less known distro's - I even forgot.)

'bout communism, you MIGHT say its an political system too - in a way. It says there should be no-one in charge.... quite stupid, imho ;-)