*** 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 =====