Posts by Chika 1774 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Oct 2007
Have a number of different KDE environments at my disposal, from KDE 3.5.10 under openSUSE 11.4 right up to KDE 4.10 under openSUSE 12.3. Currently have a VNC session open to a server running oS11.4 and KDE 4.6 release 6.
Never noticed this problem on any of them.
PFE. Used it in the 90s, still have it to hand now, albeit on a rather creaky XP box. When I first started editing, it was all group edits on teletypes, then I switched to EDT on PDP-11s, then vi on Unix. Then I was introduced to PFE, and it became a mainstay because you could use it in so many different situations where many editors back then were either over-engineered or just couldn't cope.
OK, as I came into Linux from Unix anyway, I already had a number of fave commands which worked well going over, including find (especially find . -exec which is damn useful for things like large scale permission fixes), grep and such.
One tool I was introduced to, however, was webmin (www.webmin.com) which is a web based front end which I've used on various flavours of Linux including openSUSE and RedHat/Fedora. It cuts a lot of time and effort out of the everyday configuration tasks on a system. Certainly with SuSE, I can combine procedures using Webmin and YaST, but Webmin takes a lot of the need for tools like YaST and its equivalents on other systems out of the equation.
I'm also something of a fan these days of Nagios (www.nagios.org), amonitoring tool which can be used to monitor quite a large range of devices, from switches up to servers, Linux, Unix or Windows. I tend to use Nagios Core and build my system from there.
Sounds very similar to the Aspire One I bought some years ago. I still have the recovery CD for what was shipped with it but with OpenSUSE 11.4 and KDE 3 (if you know me well enough, you'll know my opinion about KDE 4) now nicely fettled in there after a couple of false starts with its various predecessors, it's a fine beast and is never likely to see Linpus or whatever it was. Not bad for a sub-£200 machine, though the SSD in it is one of those early ones that runs a bit slow.
It seemed to me (yet again) that whoever designed the package was attempting to dumb down the front end because they had no idea of the skill sets of the eventual users. This is a bit stupid given that the KDE front end isn't really that different that a user can't find their way around, and GNOME 2, MATE, Cinnamon or whatever aren't unfriendly either and would probably work well on a netbook (I don't have one to hand but I wouldn't be surprised if somebody else here could vouch for them).
Too many companies are too eager to reinvent the wheel, and underestimate the user base too, whether from the GUI design side or the cost side.
I drove my Pug for nearly 16 years, so I can safely comment on how good French cars were. I'm not keen on the latest models, but my 1995 Peugeot 306, owned from new, rarely let me down. With 15 years past and well over 180000 miles on the clock, yes, I had problems, but I defy anyone to have a car that old and that travelled that hasn't had problems.
Mind you, the successors to the 306 look pretty poor, IMHO!
Over the last couple of years, YouTube have redeveloped their front end to work more like a TV service, and they are trying to bully users into dropping their nicknames. They insist on plastering adverts around the site and inserting them into the stream as well. They are losing the point of why YouTube existed in the first place. The idea of charging for viewing content, therefore, is pretty obvious.
It's a bit like when Sky decided to encrypt all their already commercial satellite stations. Then they introduced "pay per view" to certain channels. YouTube are trying the exact same model, and the only way this differs is the way in which they actually obtain their material.
It's time we found an alternative, methinks. The best way to scare a US corporate is to threaten their income, and Google are as corporate as they come.
RISC OS - obscurity for its own sake?
To be honest, I wasn't that interested in a Pi for Wheezy as I'm already a Linux user with plenty of kit around. But RISC OS, given the age and condition of my existing Risc PCs, was too good to pass up! Sling Sunfish on there to share prior backups from Miyuki and Madoka and we are there!
And RISC OS at 1080p... wow!
Nice article, VS, but...
Maybe so.
My own view is that while antivirus packages can stop some fo what attacks you, there are those packages that make your system slow and, in some cases, unusable because of all the extra crapware they bundle in with it. Added nag screens and popups that try to get you to "upgrade", pointless extra bits in the background that rarely do anything other than chew up resources, things that essentially duplicate what your software or OS do on their own...
While I like to have an A/V handy on my Windows system, I prefer to make sure that A/V is all it does.
To blame netbooks for associating Windows with the cheap and nasty is a bit strong as not all netbooks were cheap and nasty. Mine is quite a nice one, though it is getting a bit tatty these days given its age now, though I can honestly report that it has never seen any Windows software beyond the occasional use of Wine or the occasional connection to a Citrix session.
The biggest problem was that Microsoft, true to their track record since the 1990s, decided to bloat every successive release they did, relying on advances in hardware support to prop up its code. They were, therefore, caught out when the netbook popped up with a feasible working OS (whichever Linux distro it was) because they only had XP that could possibly run on it and they wanted to kill that. Microsoft effectively misread the market then, thinking that they could impose Vista on us, and they misread the market since, both with regard to Windows 7 Starter and to Windows 8.
Point fingers at whoever you like in Microsoft that could be blamed for it (Ballmer gets my vote) but the insistance that we must have a new OS every three years or so and it must be a complete paradigm change each time which requires more bloat or whatever without checking with the consumers is never going to be a reliable way to go. That's regardless of what the hardware is.
Very true. One problem that always crops up is that when you leave a door open to help somebody, it is only a matter of time before somebody else uses it to steal the crap that lies inside.
I've never been a fan of total automation myself because of situations like this one. If anything, it's one reason why I have avoided Chrome up until now, though I'm not completely happy with Firefox's setup either. But the feature was there with the best of intentions. Coding is often a thankless task.
I might not like Google a whole lot right now, but I can see why they are doing this. If anything, it saves them from a bigger problem later on.
I got out of programming years ago because I recognised the things in this article. I knew I wasn't a brilliant programmer but I knew enough to make various modules that could do most of what was needed and then write simple code using these library modules so as to give myself some breathing space when my various bosses wanted it NOW.
I had to do this because the people behind the original code that I was working on had such a weird idea of what makes a program that in many cases it was easier just to pull apart what it was supposed to do then write it all over again, especially as this was code that needed amending due to the millennium bug that infected every stinking line of that mess of a system! I managed it, and I'm proud of what I did, but I really wish I never had to do it!
Trouble was that I increasingly felt like I was fighting the system, both metaphorically and physically, just to get the work done. It took redundancy to actually make me realise what a wreck it was making of me! I went back as a contractor a couple of months later and did some of my best coding, if I do say so myself. These days, I rarely ever touch code though it's a hard habit to break, especially when you see some of the crud out there.
Now there's a couple of possibilities here.
The first, of course, is that you are actually happy with W8. Fair enough. If it does what you want it to do when you want to do it, then that's fine and dandy. Chalk one up to Microsoft and all is fine with the world. (Just don't expect me to join you any time soon).
The second possibility, however, came to mind because of the throwaway line at the end. "Sad that Reg writers and a lot of you bloggers can't appreciate something good and lol @ anyone still using windows XP on a home computer...what r u doing here!!!!" The thought that came to mind doesn't bear repeating, but I really hope that I'm wrong on that count. Let's just go with the "fanboi" label.
As for defining a "power user", you have a weird idea of what constitutes a power user if you gauge them by how often they switch their computer off. Generally, a power user is defined by what they do when the computer is switched on, not just by the use or otherwise of the shutdown command.
@Pat4
In that case, KDE? XFCE? Plenty of other alternatives too.
To be honest, I share your pain as I just killed my attempt on openSUSE 12.2 to regress to 11.4 because of the screwup I perceived in the GUIs there. I really can't fault Torvalds on that one.
My next attempt might be to try 12.2 with TDE (a branch of the older KDE3 GUI) as the native KDE3 is severely cacked IMHO. In a virtual system, of course!
Haven't we beaten this subject into the ground yet? Or is it just that somebody wants to keep it rolling until enough people scream "Enough already, I'll buy it if it will keep you quiet!"
Whatever the Microsoft apologists might say, the battle lines were drawn on this subject a long time ago and there's little sense in dragging it out now. We know that there are people out there, possibly a large number of them, that don't like the unholy wedding of TIFKAM and the more traditional interface minus its "start" button because it doesn't work the way they want it to in the desktop environment. Likewise there are folk out there that like W8, especially in the touch environment which is pretty much where it was targetted anyway, so it's likely that most desktop/laptop users will go to W7 instead (or Linux).
We also know that the tablet and the smartphone are being taken on by more and more folk in the home, in quite a few instances as a replacement of a PC rather than as an addition as they don't use a PC for anything over and above what they can do with a tablet, and W8 is a latecomer here in comparison with Apple and Android.
And before we bring up the thorny subject of Windows 3, consider how long ago that was, what we had to run it on and all the effort that has gone into improving the front end, including Windows in its various guises since W3, Apple's various revisions since System 7 and all the various GUIs on Linux. (Yes, and RISC OS too!) W3 was pretty much a menu system, the equivalent of the Start menu on its successors, and nothing more, so it's a bit pointless to compare it to any of these.
W8 has its benefits when it comes to a touch screen environment, but it will struggle to beat the systems that are already dominant in that area. It may be years before Microsoft makes a dent in the fondleslab market and will only do it with an intuitive front end, something that W8 fails at in some areas. As far as the PC market goes, however, W7 and WXP are tough acts to follow and W8 just doesn't cut it.
There. I said it again!
Yes, yes, yes. SO many people are posting here saying that they have machines that are easily good enough to support what they need. I can say the same. I upgraded to a Phenom II x6 a while back and, while this is easily powerful enough for W7 and anything I'm likely to need to run, it does raise one point.
Windows 8 is, at least in the traditional PC world, an "upgrade" to W7. It consumes no more than W7 did, and therefore needs no hardware change for those of us that have W7, if we actually decide that we really want to go in that direction. The only realistic target there is for remaining Windows XP users (I doubt that any Vista users will have any more problems than do W7 users) who will likely be using older hardware.
However the problem there is that WXP users won't necessarily switch to W7/8. With the expiry of WXP coverage getting closer, the people still using WXP will increasingly be either hard core users who do not like the idea of shifting, people who can ill afford the shift for whatever reason, and corporate users who are likely to go to W7 only when the existing machines are getting near to their end of life.
I'm not convinced that the tablet is going to replace the PC everywhere, but it does have an advantage in the home market at least, not least because a cheap tablet running a reasonably recent version of Android can undercut anything in the Windows market, and W8 has yet to really catch on with the great unwashed. If it every does.
And yes, I now have a RasPi, including a RISC OS 6 image. I'm using the HDMI side of things as far as display is concerned and it's pretty impressive! As my last RISC OS experiences were with my old Risc PCs (Miyuki and Madoka), it was quite a step up, even if I did get a few probs with 26-bit modules and such. I have no trouble with boot speeds so you could be right about board issues.
Actually, my belief in all this has been documented in the past here but, in short, this machine is a great idea for the teaching of the upcoming youth, not because it adheres to a specific OS but because it makes the whole idea of computing accessible. Even if you add on all the cost of buying the bits you need to get it to work, you still undercut the vast majority of the sort of kit that traditionally gets installed, and setting up and knocking down is so simple, even a woodwork teacher could do it! It is a good machine to muck around with and that is precisely why it should work well in a classroom.
Should, not will. The application is down to the users, of course.
Sorry, but that horse has long since bolted, as stated in the article. Actually, the XScale (or StrongARM II as it was called during its development) wasn't a bad processor - ask anyone that has ever seen an Iyonix.
It would take much for them to re-adopt ARM, especially as their involvement was mostly as a result of their buying of DEC Semi.
Haven't tried KDE 4.9 yet, so I'll hang fire there. Kate, however, is pretty good, though I still prefer KWrite or vi when I'm working on scripts. Not sure why.
And yes, I still use KDE 3.5.10. Like I said, I haven't tried KDE 4.9 as yet but I detested 4.8 (and openSUSE 12, for that matter).
Have tried Windows 8: Yes I have
Found it counter intuitive to use in a desktop/laptop environment: Yes I did
Considered that it might be better to split between touch environments and traditional environments: Yes I did
Already have a perfectly good PC so don't need to buy new: Yes I do and no I don't.
Windows 7 was already a bit of a leap because of the number of legacy systems I use that needed fettling to get to work (or just a complete replacement). With all the work done now, why would I spend my time moving again?
My second ever computer (the first was a ZX81 which lasted for six months before I lost patience and sold it) was a BBC Micro that kept crashing after about half an hour of use. In the end, I lifted the front of the computer and let it drop back onto the desk.
It worked perfectly from then on.
Go fig!
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