Paul Thompson wrote: 2. Cannot write to USB Memory Stick.

I agree with this observation as I've experienced this with two different flash drives on two different machines. I've also experienced similar problems with zip disks. Steve

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 10:18 pm, Saskman wrote:

...

I agree with this observation as I've experienced this with two different flash drives on two different machines. I've also experienced similar problems with zip disks.

Steve

I don't understand this but I've picked up a no-name brand USB memstick that locks up my wife's computer but my linux box it works fine... go figure...

I can get both of my flash drives and my zip disk to work with my SuSE machines, but when I attempt to transfer large quantities of files to, or from, the removable magnetic media the machines hang. Very annoying, but I've given up wasting anymore time trying to make them work. I just use CD-RW's while I wait for the patch. If I really need to get data onto a flash drive, well, one of my machines dual boots to XP, so that's OK. Redmond to the rescue :-) Steve

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 10:36 pm, Patrick Shanahan wrote:

What *patch* would that be?

9.2? Mandrake 10? XP? :-) Steve

On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 23:23, peter Nikolic wrote:

On Tuesday 08 Jun 2004 14:24, Steve Reynolds wrote:

...

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 10:36 pm, Patrick Shanahan wrote:

...

What *patch* would that be?

9.2?

Mandrake 10?

XP?

:-)

Steve

just what the hell is XP that crap from M$ Corp by any chance that virus infested full o holes crap ware ...:-)

XP is what MS wants all of use windows users to over pay for. Given the age of 98 I can't blame them for wanting to do an end of life on it, but I don't think many people are really ready for the jump from 98 to XP. I'm still getting used to it at work. Mike

On Wed, 2004-06-09 at 06:28, Fergus Wilde wrote:

On Wednesday 09 June 2004 10:55, Mike McMullin wrote:

...

On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 23:23, peter Nikolic wrote:

...

On Tuesday 08 Jun 2004 14:24, Steve Reynolds wrote:

...

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 10:36 pm, Patrick Shanahan wrote:

...

What *patch* would that be?

9.2?

Mandrake 10?

XP?

:-)

Steve

just what the hell is XP that crap from M$ Corp by any chance that virus infested full o holes crap ware ...:-)

XP is what MS wants all of use windows users to over pay for. Given the age of 98 I can't blame them for wanting to do an end of life on it, but I don't think many people are really ready for the jump from 98 to XP. I'm still getting used to it at work.

98's a shocking bag of sh**e though, isn't it? I hate it. It takes for ever to install and set up and then collapses if faced with any real work. I haven't installed anything later from MS, though, but trying to help non-computy friends with their installs of XP suggests to me that it's trying to be like *nix (they seem to have finally thought of things like different users and admin accounts, and they throw in a bit of mainly broken networking stuff), but as usual it is full of poisonous wizards and hand-holding toys that stop you doing what you want. It took hours of mucking about on the net to find out how to disable instant messenger, for example, and even then the damned thing keeps trying to come back like a ghastly and livid-faced zombie. Although it doesn't eat your flesh. Probably.

I haven't had much trouble with it (98) not working as long as you don't try and actually push your system to it's limits, or dl updates and burn CD's at the same time. I've had enough of XP at this point, the home edition is overpriced, and not as feature filled as 9.1 personal. The real power and security starts with the Pro edition, but I hate the GUI, I think NT was better in that respect. No popup menu's and when you search for a file on the hard drive you can actually point it to where in the directory structure it's located, not so it seems with XP. I have yet to work out some of the issues reguarding OOo and XP, twice XP has trashed passwords when the laptop was put into sleep mode with OOo not closed, this also resulted in a loss of files that were open as you couldn't write them to disk.

I know I've bitched a bit about some (I'm sure temporary and local) backward steps in 9.1, but it beats the crapola out of that nonsense. And have you noticed how much Windows costs by the time you've loaded it with some actual applications? Over 200 pounds for xp, 350 or more for office, 100 for a half-decent graphics prog, you have to buy antivirus - you're soon well over what the hardware to build a decent PC cost me. Here in the UK a 5 user windows server setup would cost me well over a thousand dollars US. Cheers

Yes I've noticed that Fergus. I want a clean system, no 'warez, and to do that in Windows is expensive. The cost of anti-virus can be likened to a yearly tax for running the OS, and you cannot really run XP without the updates, to keep you from being vulnerable, and you can't get the updates without going on line, in that vulnerable state. It's a foul catch-22 situation. One thing I'm not really impressed is that every new release of Windows outdates some hardware. Mike

On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 10:27, peter Nikolic wrote:

On Tuesday 08 Jun 2004 06:23, Paul Thompson wrote:

...

/rant on

I agree with some of the rants! It is a pain in the butt to set up SuSE 9.1 for a personal use. When you compare it to Ms desktops there is a big reliability and usability gap. Yes, reliability with peripherals, graphics, USB, etc. I have bought every SuSE Linux since 7.0 and I have to admit to anyone that asks that Linux is currently *well short* of what is a Reliable and Easily Usable desktop operating system "for anything other than a business office." I know the plusses of Linux. Set up in a basic config it is as strong as an oxe, but for a home desktop user...we have miles to go.

Some of the things you hit when setting up SuSE for Home use: 1. Cannot write to FDD -- duh, pretty basic user function. 2. Cannot write to USB Memory Stick. 3. Cannot mount CD-RWs reliably 4. Mounts optical discs as different drives depending on modes (/dev/guess-what-mode) 5. Doesn't recongnise DVD+/-R or +/-RW at times. 6. No MP3 encoding -- Yeah I know OGG and compiling LAME, but out of the box and legal is not there. 7. NO Video playing -- Yeah I know, compile the decoders, but out fo the box... 8. Networking is a pain to set up 9. Much heralded Samba 3 barely works in SuSE and is oooh sooo slooow, 10. Video drivers for ATI cards don't work in all modes 11. 3D acceleration on video guaranteed to crash 12. Cant write to NTFS drives. 13. Inconsistent interfaces to application. 14. Auto-mounting peripheral devices--what a confusing muddle. It was consistent when left manual. 15. USB peripheral storage devices on boot-up will mount sometimes but not others. 16. Laptop power management - only if coming back from suspension without USB peripherals is okay. 17. Wireless keyboards and mouse -- yeah, loose your usb and you're pulling the power to reboot. (ps. Laptops ain't servers, they do reboot two or three times a day.) 18. Wireless networking - augh what a pain.

To make claims like Linux doesn't crash is just ludicrous when configured for home use. Having the kernel still contemplating its navel while all the peripheral devices are crashing around it is not much solace. The Home User doesn't want to be Gyro Gearloose to get his PC going.

So there you have it -- flame that!

rant off/

Paul

Get yer flame proof suit on sunshine cus you is gonna get yer ass torched ..:-)... He HE He !!!!!.

1) Haven't tried yet ;) 2) 3) No pbm here 4) What do you mean by different modes? 5) No pbm. 6) 7) Only an apt-get away. maybe one day Novell will include it out of the box which will increase the retail price of the boxes I guess. 8) Yep agreed YAST seemed to act strangely. 9) Didn't measure speed but transfered back and forth 60GB of music from a firewire HD connected to my linux box to a WinXP box with no trouble. 10) Can't comment, I don't have an ATI graphics card. Always seemed to me that nVidia had better support (eventhough they're still proprietary drivers) 11) RTCW, NWN, America's Army, Enemy Territory, Quake3 all playing fine. I have a Sparkle GeForce 5900XT. Maybe a pbm with ATI 3D drivers(?) 12) Well, take a phone, call Steve or Bill in Redmond and ask them to help for better interoperability. Prepare to be crucified... 13) Different toolkits. 14) Well, it will get better but this is one of the weak points with linux on the desktop. 15) No pbm. 16) Can't comment. 17) My wireless mouse is working although I have the KVM pbm... 18) Cant' comment. The point is that if you're not ready to tinker with your setup then don't use linux. Period. I haven't seen one distro that doesn't require tinkering. Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora Core, Gentoo, Arch (the ones I've tried) requires tinkering (some more than others). In my experience once it's setup to my liking it usually stays up and running for a long time and I don't experience weird & random behaviour. Having said that, start installing 3rd party packages and you'll find all the QA that has gone in the distro doesn't apply anymore. Example, /me installing KDE 3.2.2 in SuSE 9.1 using apt and now ark is fucked up... until someone nice at SuSE decides to fix kdelibs (I've been told) and upload it. Yes I know it's unsupported and I should know better :) As linux becomes more complex in terms of applications being nicely integrated in Gnome/KDE it will get increasingly more dangerous to update core components without fucking up something. So install a distro, update it only for security/bug/kernel provided by distro maker and install only non-core 3rd party software like Azureus for P2P, LinCVS for CVS, Poseidon for UML, you get the picture. If you do that your system shouldn't become unstable and lose functionality or have some random behaviour (providing updates pushed to you by the distro maker are well QA'ed). -- Frederic Soulier

On Tuesday 08 June 2004 14:14, Örn Hansen wrote:

Have encountered it, sometimes I need to install the CD a few times or use the other CD-ROM. From this and earlier posts, it sounds more like you're CD-ROM is packing up.

-- Kind regards Hans du Plooy Newington Consulting Services hansdp at newingtoncs dot co dot za

On Tuesday 08 June 2004 15:14, jfweber@bellsouth.net wrote:

*** Reply to message from Örn Hansen on Tue, 8 Jun 2004 14:14:31 +0200***

...

...

2) 3) No pbm here

Ditto

okay, I am now officially and idiot and would put on me dunce cap if that damned Gnome would bring it back and wear something else on 'is travels... WTflock is pbm? To me it means Polarbar mailer, and that is obviously not what you are talking about.

PBM = portable bug module, man or info pbm should get you started. See also man pbmd for running it as a daemon so that other machines can connect and be supplied with bugs remotely (/usr/sbin/pbmd). It listens on port 10877, but is nearly deaf and machines attempting to connect need to 'shout' by sending SYN in the biggest possible font. HTH Fergus

Re: the home/personal version, it seems they might have drpped the ball w/ that one. My kid is on her 4th or 5th version of Suse... but so far at least hasn't been able to get her 9.1 home version up and running. OF course it hasn't helped they got their modem ( at least the modem) wacked by a lightning strike nearby... But before that happened we had one of those 4 hr phone calls, asking well, can you find/install find-locate, for instance, or other things that had been part of the home versions.

her reason for prefering to install that, it doesn't ask her so many questions on the install... I'm taking my pro cds when I go visiting soon.. attempting to show the pro install isn't all that scarey any more. But the real killer for her was that lack of Evolution, her prefered email program.... So I suspect I'll be suplimenting her cd's w/ at least some of the pro version ones.

It's surprising they seem to have dropped the ball there... But I installed a copy of teh home/personal version on a box here to see if I could figure out what the problems are... and mainly they are a lack of programs , expected... Maybe I can find a box of 9.0 personal? Someone must have one for sale... It seems much more a lack of expected elements than complete non function, well barring the dialup which will have to wait til a new modem appears. I had hoped the winmodem might have been a lucent... but it wasnt, so no help from that quarter.

OTH I have had almost no problems w/ the pro install, and will put it on my husbands box this week end. Which worries me only a little, his is an emachine.. but it seems happy w/ 9.0 pro. but since the new kernal really does help a lot of things we will jump him to 9.1 . He doesn't upgrade each time, about every three on average. But he has been a bit envious of this one...

Biggest PITA in all new installs/upgrades is backups... backup everything, even if you don't have any idea why you are backing it up... do it on rewritables if you are convinced you wont need the files for anything. At least if worst happens, you are back where you left off in an afternoon.. Always excepting any strange , weird or excentric hardware...

-- j -- nemo me impune lacessit

it's just an afterthought; okay ? : Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue...

-- Fergus Wilde Chetham's Library Long Millgate Manchester M3 1SB Tel: +44 161 834 7961 Fax: +44 161 839 5797 http://www.chethams.org.uk

On Wednesday 09 June 2004 14:56, Sid Boyce wrote:

Fergus Wilde wrote:

...

On Tuesday 08 June 2004 15:14, jfweber@bellsouth.net wrote:

...

*** Reply to message from Örn Hansen on Tue, 8 Jun 2004 14:14:31 +0200***

...

...

2) 3) No pbm here

Ditto

okay, I am now officially and idiot and would put on me dunce cap if that damned Gnome would bring it back and wear something else on 'is travels... WTflock is pbm? To me it means Polarbar mailer, and that is obviously not what you are talking about.

PBM = portable bug module, man or info pbm should get you started. See also man pbmd for running it as a daemon so that other machines can connect and be supplied with bugs remotely (/usr/sbin/pbmd). It listens on port 10877, but is nearly deaf and machines attempting to connect need to 'shout' by sending SYN in the biggest possible font. HTH Fergus

Unfortunate that, I've always had pbm (Portable BitMap) installed on Linux since the mid-90's at least, it is a collection of graphical format convertors, so says man pbm and info pbm this minute, they could have used a different name. It's like the confusion caused when you click on a .rpm download file and it opens realplay, RedHat were aware of that or should have been and done .rhpm, .rhp or .rhm instead. Sometimes you wonder why they try to occupy another bird's nest, like issuing mozilla firebird, though firebird was well established as a database package, thankfully they changed the name to firefox. They wouldn't have called evolution outlook as that would have incurred the wrath of Redmond, far more severely than when they stamped on KDE for using "Where do you want to go tomorrow". Regards Sid.

Hi Sid, sorry, I was just mucking about. I think jfweber was fooled as I was for a few minutes when Örn (I think) replied to the rant and kept putting 'no pbm here' in response to the original rant-points - I am guessing, but I think they were just trying to say 'no problem here' in fewer keystrokes - The Portable Bug Module Daemon is just the product of my feeble wit, I fear. I do agree about the irresponsible reuse of names, though. Best Fergus

-- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer ===== LINUX ONLY USED HERE =====

-- Fergus Wilde Chetham's Library Long Millgate Manchester M3 1SB Tel: +44 161 834 7961 Fax: +44 161 839 5797 http://www.chethams.org.uk

*** Reply to message from peter Nikolic on Tue, 8 Jun 2004 10:27:01 +0100***

...

When you compare it to Ms desktops there is a big reliability and usability gap. Yes, reliability with peripherals, graphics, USB, etc.

You sure that was from Peter? When I read the rest of your post, I

jfweber@bellsouth.net wrote: thought it was from him, surprised when he didn't appear in the reply addresses.

funny, no one I've given the thing to has noticed any differences in those items.. IF you are talking about the "latest greatest whatsit" well, that might be valid, but that is largely something that will take us a lot more work in the hardware community, something that seems to be alien to a lot of us. Especially when they look at you as if you are certifiabley mad to ask them to write you a nice whatsit driver , for free , please, and can you hurry, my kid has a birthday party and wants to play some silly thing on Thursday ( nevermind today is Wednesday)

However before the next version is out there will be one or more choices of drivers and probably some nice programs as well for the whatsit!

And plese don't say "well its not the hardware ;it works fine under windows version x" OF course it does.. MS pays folks to make certain it does work. It wasn't created for Linux, or even Mac... ( shudder) They have had the same problems w/ the latest greatest hardware for toys... since their hardware is so propietery. At least we have an advantage that once we get our stickly little paws on the item sseveral guys will go, oh it's just a foo here and a whatever else goes into drivers. and Soon... we have the whatsit as well. But if MS can't keep churning out new stuff, who is going to pay the OS UPGRADE price ???? I have one sister who upgraded her Windows95 os when she bought a new computer... because she wanted to use some new piece of hardware that wouldn't work under the old version... and that was just a few months ago... loyalty? Nah, she just never saw anything worth paying the UG price for til the new gadget showed up... I am giving her a copy of Xandros personal (courtesy of Linux-magazine.com) because it says it will resize her windows partition ( do all Linux distros? I've not heard of one that doesn't,but there must be one!) ;) It looks "cute and warm and fuzzy, and isn't as secure as I would like, but I'll be she wont get some nastly worm from using it...

And in this case , that is just fine! okay, now I'm ranting, as well... it must be contageous..

Some of us remember the early battles, Adobe refusing to port Photoshop to Linux despite many pleas and being told that it could be run under Linux using Executor (the Linux Mac emulator), it was the most clamoured for bit of software I can remember, instead the gimp got going, then a few years ago when they said they were considering it, the level of interest had waned considerably. Adaptec refused to provide drivers or information for Linux developers, but their stuff ran under Linux from very early on, until at last they relented and the SCSI developers discovered that they had made just 2 wrong assumptions that were of no consequence. Even in the latest kernels, the nvidia ethernet driver (forcedeth) is reverse engineered. I can see more companies jumping on board, like many others have done, with drivers to grab some share of the increasing Linux market, also pressure from HP, IBM, lessening fear of the wrath of Redmond, etc. The history of Linux is quite fascinating and all positive, at a London conference a few years ago Jon (Maddog) Hall said he saw a few young lads hanging around outside the hall at Atlanta, one approached him gingerly and said, "Mr. Hall, I don't know if you remember me?", he found out that the kid had written a key piece of Linux code and submitted it through him at the ripe old age of 7 - Jon's plea was for an end to the age limit for entry which is set at 18. I installed 9.0 on my daughter's machine and she has just one problem that I've not yet solved, the printer does not start up on boot, I have to http://hostname:631 and start it. Mind you, it's an unpatched 9.0, so I may have grab the patches and see if that cures it. The daughters just use it for MS Office under crossover office and especially the younger one for whom it's the games. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer ===== LINUX ONLY USED HERE =====