Re: Back to Windows??
> Bud,
>
> In your answer you are drifting away from what it is really about. Jan's
> Microsoft has a dominant position,
An illegally dominant position, according to the judge, but is being allowed
to get away with it for an unknown further block of time, while the appeal
process tilts favors in the other direction. Sort of the reverse of throwing
the book at 'em and throwing away the key... leaving the key lying around in
the hall in case the prisoner needs it for something.
> other installation techniques
which when they work, are really sweet, and when they don't work, cause a
tenth or less of the computing population to reach for ANY linux rather than
face another attempt at such an install. At least the penguins might *answer*
me in a newsgroup.
> and a clear
> commercial goal is another subject
Yeah, try Libranet or Storm or Corel if you want a commercial debian. Just
bear in mind that Storm doesn't give a hoot about laptoppers (and appears to
be going broke -- too many ads, not enough something else?), Corel does other
things than OS' for a living, and Libranet is young yet, so if doesn't work,
just *tell* them, okay?
> i.m.o. , maybe also worthwhile to discuss but not in this thread.
maybe. Probably not worth much more than the above. We on this list are
here to "pay it forward" or learn a bit more about Debian, not usually to
rant about the beast of Redmond.
> I have the same bitter experience as Jan has: a printer that does not work,
what kind of printer? what kind of work?
> a tape streamer that does not work,
what kind of tape drive? (did you try amanda? Maximum Linux magazine has
a big article about backup software this month; we can help translate
to debian terms if you think it would help... once you have a better question
than "doesn't work")
> no way to get an ADSL modem running a.s.o.
You have an ADSL codec on your laptop???
> Many of the responses to posters of the sort of messages like Jan's
> mention issues like "recompile this or that", "check the order of this and
> that", "be sure that xxx is loaded before yyy" and other "advice" like that,
> which in practice screws up the machine even further. That's the way it goes
> with Linux, just be objective and read the mail archives .....
> In my case I got frustated beause I had a relatively simple goal when I
> tried to install my machine:
Java's core design goal can be described in one sentence, but "write once
run everywhere" is not a simple concept, and the uses of Java have often
tried to drag it away from that dream.
Simplicity itself is a complicated subject. Any one person's idea of "man
this is so hard. why didn't they just W instead of XYZ anyway?" is someone
else's idea of a good reason to sell 2000 dollars worth of equipment on ebay
for whatever they can get, just to get it out of their face... and yet some
other fellow's idea of "obvious".
Some people do think that
cd (whatever directory you unpacked my tarball in)
./configure
make install
...is pretty darn simple. or even
apt-get -b source foopackage
dpkg -i (the resulting .deb file)
And if it *works* ... welcome to plug and play... then it was!
With more than 4000 debian packages I certainly wouldn't expect someone
to know that W would do for him the same thing as Xyz, with a different
style entirely, nor that its original author is working on project N,
which also has an utterly different interface. What I do know is that
in Debian, unlike many other distros, if "that old abandoned package W"
does something and still works, the package will tend to still be around.
Anyways I have no idea why you want your laptop to be a Visto clone (Visto
is a website which promises to be your office desk on the web) so I really
don't know what direction to point you next. In the general case, we
have a bunch of webservers (but were you only thinking Apache?) more than
one java (you like IBM or Sun's flavor?) and too many little databases
to count (if I consider database-like PIMs and address books in addition to
"the big boys" mSQL, mysql, postgres, Oracle, Sybase, LDAP... shall I shut
up yet?)
So, you may think "it's simple, or at least, it ought to be", but we're
still working on figuring out which "it" you had in mind.
* Heather Stern * star@ many places...
Reply to: