Linux-Advocacy Digest #538, Volume #25 Tue, 7 Mar 00 07:13:03 EST
Contents:
Re: Absolute failure of Linux dead ahead? (Wolfgang Weisselberg)
Re: Let's blow this Linux Scam Wide Open!! (Steve Mading)
Re: Salary? (Eric LEMAITRE)
Re: Copying linux to a larger drive ? (The Ghost In The Machine)
Re: I can't stand this X anymore! (Matthias Warkus)
Re: Criticism (The Ghost In The Machine)
Re: Salary? (Eric LEMAITRE)
Re: Drestin: time for you to buy UNIX for DumbAsses (The Ghost In The Machine)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Wolfgang Weisselberg)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.development.system
Subject: Re: Absolute failure of Linux dead ahead?
Date: 7 Mar 2000 10:48:22 GMT
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Mon, 06 Mar 2000 16:30:44 GMT,
Jon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sun, 05 Mar 2000 16:14:43 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jon) writes:
> > >> Jon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > >> > (Wolfgang Weisselberg) wrote:
> > >> > > How many machines do *you* know that are in active use today
> > >> > > *and* were so 15,20,30 years ago?
> > >One of the 2 machines is (yes, it's still in use) a 386DX40 with
> > >32MB RAM and an RLL drive on a 16MB cache card. I have 4
> > >machines in pieces at home that outpower that thing.
> <sigh> That 386 machine was not always a 386.
So it had a hardware upgrade. From no-MMU to MMU, for example.
New mainboard, new BIOS, too, I guess.
> It started out as
> an IBM PC-XT (hot stuff at the time). At what point did I claim
> it was 38 years old, eh? You apparently missed the entire point.
So, it was in use for how many years without a compile?
> The upgrade, when it was performed, caused so many problems that
> took so long to smooth out that future upgrades were considered
> out of the question.
I sure hope they have a couple of processors in reserve, a common
x86 CPU has a lifetime of 5-10 years ... if it's not overheated.
> The only remaining option was to transition
> completely to a new platform for MRP. If you've ever looked into
> MRP pricing, you'll understand why this isn't much of an option
> either. Hence, the pathetic 386 is still in use today complete
> with a (now corrected) date problem.
Do you expect to run your hardware for 25 years? If yes, then you
may run into some problems. And I am not even talking about 640k
should be enough for anyone.
-Wolfgang
------------------------------
From: Steve Mading <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Let's blow this Linux Scam Wide Open!!
Date: 7 Mar 2000 10:40:42 GMT
Drestin Black <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
: "Mike Kenzie" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
: news:89vjpa$ksj$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
:>
:> Although it was used to produce the special effects for Titanic
:>
: "Produce" gives it more credit than it deserves. It did bulk rendering work.
: Just slaving away drawing dots, not the creative process -- just the bulk
: repetive work. Creative work took place on... guess the OS... <grin>
The Human Brain? I certainly hope you aren't trying to imply somehow
that modelling software is more "creative" than rendering software.
Both types of software are deterministic programs that lack any sort
of creativity at all. The creativity is coming from the meat sitting
in the chair.
--
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven L. Mading at BioMagResBank (BMRB). UW-Madison
Programmer/Analyst/(acting SysAdmin) mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
B1108C, Biochem Addition / 433 Babcock Dr / Madison, WI 53706-1544
------------------------------
From: Eric LEMAITRE <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Salary?
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 12:13:57 +0100
Matt O'Toole a écrit :
> I wonder sometimes how Europeans can live at all. Everything seems so much
> more expensive over there, and apparantly, their salaries are lower, too.
Hi Matt !
You're right, in general living is expensive and salaries are lower, mainly
because of many taxes we have in Europe, especially in France. We have about 20%
taxes on salary, plus 20% on anything bought (TVA, we could say "taxes on bought
products"), and many more miscellanous taxes for about 15%, which in all means
that a french works nowadays at little more than 55% for taxes, the rest for
him. I believe we have now the higest taxation in whole Europe. Saddly our dumb
politicians (I should say "politicians" only, same meaning, in France at least),
have some other nice ideas for wasting more public money, the worse being the
"35 hours system", getting more pay for working less in every active branch,
which is a total silliness but only french government seems not to be aware of
it, so this will get worse whatever happens. Anyway, we lose 30,000 qualified
people a year, mainly computer engineers, who flee abroad.
But this is not especially better in rest of Europe, Germany and UK are very
expensive too, only few European countries are really worth living as
Netherlands and Ireland, to my opinion.
Bye !
--
Eric LEMAITRE
Ingénieur CNAM (CNAM Computer Engineer, MSD)
Ingénieur et Formateur certifié Linux Red-Hat (RHCE & RHCX Certified)
Responsable de formation pour les filières Internet et Linux (Head of
Internet/Linux Education Department)
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The Ghost In The Machine)
Subject: Re: Copying linux to a larger drive ?
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 11:36:42 GMT
In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Steve Budak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote on Tue, 7 Mar 2000 20:35:36 +1100 <8a2iha$jnh$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>Howdy, since this tends to be one of the most active Linux groups I thought
>I'd ask here.
>What's the best way to copy Linux from one hard drive (4GB) to another (8GB)
>?
>Thanks.
Assuming that /dev/hda1 is the root and only partition of
your one drive, and that's mounted on '/' (root), and the new drive
is empty, and mounted on '/newdrive', and one is logged in as 'root'
so that "Permission denied" messages don't give one major headaches,
one could do something like
cd /
tar clf - . | (cd /newdrive; tar xlf -)
to do a literal copy. 'man tar' for details on the 'l' option;
its intent is to restrict copying to the drive upon which '.' is
so that one doesn't get the /newdrive/newdrive/newdrive/... effect.
One can also use, according to 'man cp',
cp -p -x -R . /newdrive
which might be a little more intuitive, although I for one
haven't used it.
If you have multiple partitions on the first drive (I, for instance,
like to run systems with /, /usr, /var, and /home on separate
partitions), and want to keep that partitioning scheme, one can
create equivalent partitions on the new drive, then, after running
mke2fs appropriately, do the following. Substitute partitions
(/dev/hdb1 = first partition on second IDE drive) and
pathnames as required:
mount /dev/hdb1 /newdrive
mkdir /newdrive/usr
mkdir /newdrive/var
mkdir /newdrive/home
mount /dev/hdb3 /newdrive/usr
mount /dev/hdb5 /newdrive/var
mount /dev/hdb6 /newdrive/home
The above commands make an image of your new system, mountwise.
cd /
tar clf - . usr var home | (cd /newdrive; tar xlf -)
or
cp -p -x -R . usr var home /newdrive
Now, after either of these, you might want to boot your new Linux.
If using LILO (most people do), one has to edit the file
/etc/lilo.conf -- this is done on the OLD system, mostly because
it's the one running (the new one can't be booted just yet).
Assume, for the moment, that it has something like the following
(mine is from a RedHat system; yours may vary slightly):
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
image=/vmlinuz
label=linux
root=/dev/hda1
read-only
('man lilo' or 'man lilo.conf' for more details on the format)
You'll have to add in another, similar section, into this file:
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
image=/vmlinuz
label=linux
root=/dev/hda1
read-only
image=/newdrive/vmlinuz
label=linux.new
root=/dev/sdb1
read-only
Rerun lilo ('/sbin/lilo') and you're more or less done.
Don't forget to edit /newdrive/etc/fstab as well; otherwise you'll
probably get slightly strange behavior upon mounting; remember that
/etc/fstab, which probably contains /dev/hda1, will be copied
to /newdrive/etc/fstab, which is obviously incorrect.
You should now be able to reboot your machine, selecting
'linux.new' at the LILO prompt.
shutdown -r now
The only other issue is that you also have to edit
/newdrive/etc/lilo.conf (actually, it's /etc/lilo.conf after
the reboot), and you can do that either before, or
after you reboot, but one must edit it in the context of the NEW system:
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
image=/vmlinuz
label=linux
root=/dev/hdb1
read-only
to serve as a starting point. This is primarily so that you can
have a proper starting point, assuming you want to edit
/etc/lilo.conf (the old /newdrive/etc/lilo.conf) to add in
other operating systems such as Windows (any flavor), OS/2,
or FreeBSD later on.
* * *
A few editorial comments on all this.
* First, this is an .advocacy newsgroup; what you will probably want
in the future, if you continue to have questions (no doubt you
will!) you can post to comp.os.linux.setup, which tends to be
non-confrontational when it comes to helping people. We have
a number of "Windows only!" advocates here, and there is some
merit to the claim that it is far easier to copy Windows from one
drive to another, than it is to copy Linux (to which I say
"bull pucky", unless one is intent on shuffling drive hardware around;
copying Windows from the C: to the D: drive is rather easy,
but the registry editing that would have to be done would be
almost impossible without the text export option of REGEDT32
and something like Perl to do a search for 'C:' or 'c:' and
replace it with 'D:' or 'd:'; there might also be old .INI
files lying about that would also need to be edited, if one
has sufficiently old software).
You can also consult /usr/doc/HOWTO or various Webpages or
manpages for more info. While not perfect, Linux documentation
seems to be very comprehensive, and getting more so each day.
* Second, I have already mentioned the multiple partition setup of
my own machines; Linux allows one great flexibility here, and
one can mix and match. One advantage to the multiple partition
setup is that one can declare in /etc/fstab that a partition
such as /usr can be read-only -- nobody can read from or write
to it after it is mounted, not even the super-user; the
security implications are hopefully obvious. (Of course, the
super-user can remount it writable, if necessary; but a rogue program
invading the system is somewhat less likely to know how to do this.
Still, the rogues are getting more sophisticated, too...)
Another issue -- and this one hopefully has been fixed in newer
BIOS hardware, but in older hardware it's a bit of a pain -- is that
in LILO, one has to place the kernel (/vmlinuz, in the example above)
in the first 1,023 cylinders, because of the old 16-bit addressing
specification for cylinder, head, sector used in the INT13 BIOS call.
There's not all that much on /, really -- 100 megabytes is more
than enough, although it depends on how big you want /tmp to be.
Note that g++ uses /tmp for compiling (somewhat dumb, but usually
not a big issue unless one has huge source files).
* Third, there's probably a GUI way to accomplish some of this with
linuxconf, but I for one don't know it offhand; in the case of
Linux, it's probably easier to edit the text files (try that with
Windows!), although it may depend on the individual. Searching
for the right option, for me anyway, is a bit of a pain.
Of course, I was cutting my teeth on Unix in the early 80's
anyway, which means I'm used to text-based stuff. :-)
* Fourth, this is all untested, although it should work.
(Famous last words, I know!) However, there's little danger
of things malfunctioning so badly that you won't be able to
reboot at all, if only to the old drive.
* Fifth, good luck with Linux on your new drive, which is
undoubtedly faster!
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Mister Helpful :-)
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Matthias Warkus)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.x,comp.os.linux.development.apps
Subject: Re: I can't stand this X anymore!
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2000 12:25:06 +0100
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It was the 7 Mar 2000 09:01:56 GMT...
...and Steve Mading <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> : And I don't think any widgets or window manager can do anything to help that!
>
> True. I've heard rumors about how xfstt is supposed to support Truetype
> fonts in X, but I haven't gotten it to work due to crappy documentation.
> (The docs assume everything will work and don't cover the non-intuative
> error messages I'm getting.)
For me, xfstt works great, and I'd be glad to help you out to make it
work on your system, too.
> : if my speculation of the way it works is correct, otherwise, you will always
> : see broken bottons, truncated texts, and ... frustrating users.
>
> Well, IMO, it is a broken programming style to hardcode the locations of
> things like buttons by pixel.
Verily verily so.
> A lot of gui-building tools do it that
> way because it's the simplest way to make a gui-builder, but that doesn't
> mean it's a good idea. Even if you don't care for portability between
> OS'es, It's still good to make a flowing layout so you can change your
> mind on the font used without having to re-arrange everything.
Solution to this problem: Use a GUI builder that neatly enforces
flowing layout instead of pixel-based layout. I.e., use Glade.
mawa
--
I think it's interesting that the Athenians coined the term 'idiot'
to refer to someone who had _no_ interest in politics.
-- Wayne Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The Ghost In The Machine)
Subject: Re: Criticism
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 11:41:48 GMT
In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Robert Canup <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote on Mon, 06 Mar 2000 21:13:20 -0600 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>It is a common activity to criticize artistic works such as books and
>movies. There is a certain justification to this activity; after all, it
>is not as though the critic could change anything about the movie or
>book - only the author(s) of the art work can change the content of the
>work.
>
>What this has to do with Linux is this: unlike a book or movie, no one
>outside of the Free Software community has any moral right to criticize
>any free software; authorship of free software is open to anyone. If one
>perceives a fault or problem with a piece of free software one has a
>moral obligation to the rest of humanity to fix that fault or problem.
Not quite.
Of course, one does have that option, especially if one is knowledgeable
(and has the time!) to go in there and muck around with the source
code. I have been tempted, but simply haven't had the wetware
cycles to fix every bug in there (although with Linux, that's
not as much of an issue). In theory, at least, this makes
"free software" less buggy, since there are more eyes roving
over it -- and some of those eyes are darned good at picking nits.
>
>People who have the ability to write free software - but for one reason
>or another don't want to join the free software movement - forfeit their
>right to criticize work which they could change - but choose not to. On
>the other hand people who are incapable of producing good enough work to
>be included in a free software project have no moral right to criticize
>work which they are incapable of producing.
Well, there is that; there's a difference between being overloaded,
and downright incompetent. :-)
I am hopeful I fall into the former category...but I'm not one
that's all that knowledgeable about, say, TCP/IP stacks. :-)
>
>The people in this newsgroup who criticize Linux fall into two groups:
>those who could help fix the problems - but who refuse to do so, and the
>incompetents who couldn't do anything about those problems even if they
>wanted to. Neither group has a right to criticize Linux - although the
>case of the incompetent is slightly stronger: they might like to change
>something - but their lack of skill prevents them from doing what they
>want to do. Quite frankly though, the competent don't wish to listen to
>the the confused opinions of the incompetent.
>
>To those of you who are critical of Linux: Fix what is wrong - or keep
>your mouths shut.
Naaah, it's a free country; let 'em complain. Just realize that
some of the complaints may be valid -- and some are merely hot air. :-)
Killfiles are also useful, if one's newsreader supports 'em.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- insert random misquote here
------------------------------
From: Eric LEMAITRE <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Salary?
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 12:45:17 +0100
JCA a écrit :
> "José Luis Domingo" wrote:
>
> The problem is that in Europe technical people are at the bottom of the
> totem pole, no matter how good they are. The only place I know of where
> that doesn't necessarily happen is the US. The result: the US produces
> the best software in the world, and any good European software is developed
> by universities, not by private companies.
Hi !
You're both right and wrong, to my opinion.
You're right when you say that in Europe technical people are at the bottom of
the totem pole, no matter how good they are.
You're wrong whan you conclude immediatly that the consequence means an
immediate technical suppremacy of US produces, and that any good European
software is developed by universities, not by private companies. In france we
have many private companies which are famous worldwide such as Business
Objects, GemPlus, Cap-Gemini, ... and their programmers are very qualified too,
but the awful trouble for us Europeans is the lack of strategical efforts at
government level. Most of all have left France mainland for abroad where taxes
are much lower. There is a business war raging on using new technologies, and
in Europe we have no headquarters, every single company fights alone for
herself, while in USA whole country is involved in technical worldwide
standards domination. We have among finest worldwide scientifics at INRIA in
France on the pure technical field, perhaps better than at MIT itself although
MIT people are allready excellent too, but what use of any good technical
knowledge if we can't use it for making business ? Clearly none for us, this is
where we are clearly inferior. USA is often less (not much) advanced on
technological field, but it clearly smashes us in the business field.
USA are much better than others for they are much more efficient for using
their skills into making money, not for technical supremacy, but in overall you
are right, the result will be the same : more and more taxes will make our best
people flee to USA or elswhere for getting better life and salary, this can't
be avoided for us.
In California, first most important community in number are Chinese, second are
... French, allmost all involved in computing. Awfull waste, but politically
planified so whe could leave but not fight against it.
Bye !
--
Eric LEMAITRE
Ingénieur CNAM (CNAM Computer Engineer, MSD)
Ingénieur et Formateur certifié Linux Red-Hat (RHCE & RHCX Certified)
Responsable de formation pour les filières Internet et Linux (Head of
Internet/Linux Education Department)
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The Ghost In The Machine)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: Drestin: time for you to buy UNIX for DumbAsses
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 11:56:26 GMT
In comp.os.linux.advocacy, mr_rupert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote on Tue, 07 Mar 2000 00:38:22 GMT <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
>
>Eventually, Microsoft is going to get tired of re-inventing the
>UNIX wheel as if it were new and just come aboard the UNIX camp.
>
>This will be a sad day for us all.
>
>http://cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/03/06/ms.linux.idg/index.html
I'm not at all sure how "sad" this day will be, although it
probably will confuse the uninformed. Is it Linux with Office,
or Microsoft with Linux running underneath it? :-)
Linux purists may scoff at Microsoft Office (and it may have problems
because Linux seems to be having problems itself sorting out the
libc5/glibc2/glibc2.1 problem, as a binary-only release), but
it is a possibility. I myself am not sure what value-added
it would have on a Linux platform, although there is one big
advantage Exchange has over Linux mailservers; there's only one
copy of each and every mail message, no matter how many recipients
it has. (Of course, the fact that Microsoft makes it so easy to
send 200 megabyte files as attachments may have something to
do with this -- this is an innovation, if one can call it that, [*]
born out of necessity.)
And Office likes to sit on top of Exchange.
Of course, Microsoft is at it again, embracing and extending such
things as soft links and hard links in Win2K. Apparently their
newest innovations are soft links and some sort of duplication
strategy that only copies file metadata (this idea seems to have
been borrowed in part from Visual Sourcesafe, at least at the
conceptual level), which duplicates to some extent hard links.
Maybe. I don't know, since I don't have Win2K.
Again, this is apparently another innovation (?) born out of necessity.
While Linux and Microsoft operating systems are both getting
very large (there's an old saying: "data expands to fill the
disk available", and disks have been getting bigger :-) ),
Linux at least has the excuse of providing multiple solutions
for many problems (vi, emacs, joe, jed, pico for editors;
mutt and elm for mail readers; tar, cpio, ar, pax for archival
purposes; perl, sed, awk, grep for text processing of various
flavors) and just a lot of functionality. :-)
[.sigsnip
[*] Usenet spools have been doing this for years; each post,
especially when cross-posted to multiple newsgroups
(this one's going to two of them), is represented as a node
within a subdirectory; the nodes are hard-linked,
or in some cases, soft-linked, upon receipt by the innd daemon,
or one of its subsidiaries. Hard-linking increases
a reference count, but, except for another directory
entry, is very low cost, spacewise.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- insert random misquote here
------------------------------
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