On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Adrian Wells wrote:
Hi,
No news from Tiny I'm afraid! :-)
(Much to the wife's horror) I took the LINUX box home and got it working quite quickly with a little peace and quiet. Apart from a bit of messing around to get the graphics adapter to work with the GUI, all went well. After crashing several times and waiting an eternity for things to happen (even my 6 1/2 year old son was making disparaging remarks about the speed!), I robbed his machine of some SIMMs and managed a stately 24Meg. The machine runs at a speed that is just acceptable now, however, a couple of questions.
If I load either the gnome or enlightenment GUIs from the graphical logon, Enlightenment loads - what is happening here?
Enlightenment is a window manager, gnome is a user interface which can run with various window managers.
With lower memory (16Meg) I was experiencing two main problems. a) occasional glitches on the screen. b) if I clicked the left widget for sliding the desktop, the machine hung. This was most often (if not only) seen on KDE. Are these known problems, or do I not have my Graphics adapter set up correctly.
I think the latter.
All in all the GUIs are very sexy, but need looking at to get the best out of them. However, the on dit about being able to run LINUX on any old machine is just that. To be of any use - for any purpose - I think that we ought to be looking for (at least) an entry level machine of today. I already hear the cry of command line mode - Hey, I can start a fire with tinder, flint and steel, but give me matches every time.
Of course the bash shell command line is very powerful ...
It's an interesting point that one of the most (arguably) stable platforms around - the Apple - has one of the least evolved GUI's, The machines (interface) of today are virtually the same as my first apple, the classic two (one could argue that this is a powerful plus point), albeit faster and in colour. Do anything with them that apple say you can do and they are wonderful (to some people), try to stretch the envelope and they get very upset, this is hopefully where LINUX will triumph, but diversity could also be its stumbling block. Having said that, Windows tries to please all of the people all of the time - How many ways do you know for closing a program down?!
Taking my boy to see Toy Story now (since he can't use his computer! :-( ), but when I get back, I will be trying to get the networking working :-)
Have a lot of fun ... Roger -- Roger Whittaker SuSE Linux Ltd The Kinetic Centre Theobald Street Borehamwood Herts WD6 4PJ ---------------------- 020 8387 1482 ---------------------- roger@suse-linux.co.uk ----------------------