Seriously, Linpus Linux--is it any good?
in [Setup]
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From: felmon on 31 May 2010 02:15 On Mon, 31 May 2010 01:02:14 -0400, James Westwood wrote: > Openoffice makes claims of x number of downloads yet how many people > have actually seen Openoffice in the wild? I have not. I agree with your other points. Linux is not catching on in the US. (I am not so sure about other places in the world though.) anyway, I do see sightings of OO. I now see some (handful) students using OpenOffice. I assume they are using it via Windows but I haven't asked. Felmon
From: RayLopez99 on 31 May 2010 02:38 On May 31, 6:49 am, Aragorn <arag...(a)chatfactory.invalid> wrote: > as RayLopez99 wrote... > > So for this non-power user who only surfs the net to check email, I'm > > thinking that I might get her a $300 ACER Aspire R3610 M330 320G RAM > > 2G Mini Desktop LINUX--running Linpus Linux (what a stupid name; > > sounds like a disease). > > I will agree with you on the name. It does indeed sound like something > nasty. But then again, so does "Vista". Yes and no. Yes it sounds nasty. No on Vista. Vista is like "Visa" or "view". > > What's important here is that the distribution comes pre-installed on > the machine from the vendor and that it should thus be guaranteed to > work - covered by warranty! - with each and every component of the > machine itself. This is no different from when you buy an Apple > machine with OS X or any of the machines that come pre-installed with > Windows, or a smartphone with Symbian, Windows CE or whatever. If a > hardware manufacturer pre-installs an operating system, then that > hardware manufacturer is liable for the functioning of this > pre-installed system (but not for mis-use of it). Whatever. Let's answer the question shall we? > > > But my concern is that though the screenshots look good from what I've > > seen in Google, if it's already factory installed can she plug it into > > a DSL modem supplied by one of the Baby Bells, will the modem be > > recognized, and will she be good to go, so she can check her email at > > Yahoo email, or, do I have to do something to make the dang system > > work? > > DLS modems typically have an standard ethernet connection to the machine > and do not need to be "recognized" by the operating system, any more > than that your wall power socket needs to be. Whatever. Let's answer the question, shall we? > > What you probably /might/ have to set up is the typical ISP stuff - e.g. > username and password for the POP or IMAP e-mail accounts, if any - but > the internet connection itself should all be handled automatically by > the DHCP client at boot time. In some distributions, it might also be > necessary to manually enable NTP support, but that should be as trivial > as marking a checkbox. > AHA! Now we're talking. "Marking a checkbox". Does Linpus have this checkbox somewhere? Where would it be--on the main screen after you bootup, like Windows Settings | Control Panel? > > This is an ideal user--if ever there was one--for Linux, [... > > Nonsensical claim and trollbaiting. An ideal user for GNU/Linux would > rather be someone who values the merits of a genuine, powerful, > portable, flexible, versatile, stable and secure operating system over Whatever. I'm coding now a peer-to-peer program using Silverlight and web methods. Try that in PHP or whatever bogus language you Linux nuts use. > > ...] but unless Linux needs zero hand holding and installation help, > > [... > > Another nonsensical claim, as *no* operating system is ever without > flaws, and Windows - your little baby - certainly also requires > handholding, even for those who are experienced at it. What do you > think Microsoft has a help desk or a Knowledge Base on their website > for? OK, now we're talking. Are you saying Linpus has a help desk or Knowledge Base, if I cannot configure an internet connection? > > Most of my friends use Windows on their desktop machines and laptops, > and *all* of them are nagging or complaining about installation quirks > or other aspects of Windows when they are upgrading to a newer version > of Windows. So that's a newer version of the same system they had > already been using before, and in the use of which they should normally > be experienced. And these people *are* so-called power-users. OK, now we're talking. Are you saying that Linpus also will have these problems, for setting up an internet connection or email account? > > > A "first class OS like Windows"? Bwhahahahahaha! Did you just teleport > to the 21st century from the middle ages, where they still believed > that innocent old ladies with knowledge of herbs and plants were > witches in league with Lucifer, who had to be burned at the stake for > their sins, or what? [b.s. by a person who is a self-admitted schizophrenic or something deleted] > P.S.: Your question was not even on-topic for comp.os.linux.setup (but > perfectly suited for comp.os.linux.advocacy and what that group has > been about for at least the last half decade or so). Hence the > follow-up to C.O.L.A. > Aragorn, give it a rest. You did nothing but raise more questions than answers. Anybody else? About Linpus Linux, can somebody tell me if it's easy to set up an internet connection? Out of the box? Where can I ask this question? I would like to find this out before I spend $300 on the machine. RL
From: RayLopez99 on 31 May 2010 02:43 On May 31, 8:02 am, James Westwood <westwood.spamoja...(a)rocketmail.com> wrote: > Yet every single unbiased or even slightly biased source > shows Linux to be hovering around 1 percent. > That's pretty bad and why do all these numbers seem to > agree, within reason? > > > There is also no required registration or activation procedure to allow > > keeping track of the actual deployment and userbase. Ergo, invoking > > alleged market shares as an argument is in itself already an unreliable > > argument. > > Openoffice makes claims of x number of downloads yet how > many people have actually seen Openoffice in the wild? > I have not. > I suspect people download it, try it and remove it. > So does that mean it sucks? > Of course not. > In fact Openoffice is excellent IMHO. > To claim it's taking over Microsoft Office is another > thing however. > It's not, IMHO. > You sound reasonable. Consequently you'll not go far in COLA. Seriously, if you know whether it's easy to set up a DSL connection in Linpus Linux, please let me know, since I notice that the $300 machine does not even have a DVD/CD drive, so wiping out the Linux and installing XP, should it come to that, will be a problem. I need to have it work "out of the box". Remember, the target does not need anything but internet access, as she has email at Yahoo email and does not do anything but surf the net and send emails. No live chats, music downloads, etc. Should (I would imagine) be simple for Linux to do, but I'm not getting any positive reinforcement from these groups. RL
From: Aragorn on 31 May 2010 03:22 On Monday 31 May 2010 07:02 in comp.os.linux.setup, somebody identifying as James Westwood wrote... > On Mon, 31 May 2010 06:53:49 +0200, Aragorn wrote: > >> On Monday 31 May 2010 02:05 in comp.os.linux.setup, somebody >> identifying as RayLopez99 wrote... >> >>> On May 31, 2:33 am, Matt Giwer <jul...(a)tampabay.rr.com> wrote: >>> >>>> On 05/30/2010 06:25 PM, RayLopez99 wrote: >>>> >>>> > This is the fabled "Linux community"? >>>> >>>> Legendary perhaps but not fabled. >>> >>> Yes, these people are legends in their own mind. With their 1% >>> market share. >> >> Market shares are irrelevant with regard to the quality of an >> operating system. > > True, however one can not deny that Linux has for some > reason not caught on with the general public. > It just hasn't. Eventhough this is an advocacy debate, the tone of your post is serious - for which I salute you - and therefore I will indulge in the advocacy aspect for a brief while. ;-) It is true that GNU/Linux has not caught on with the general public, but the reasons for that have nothing to do with the qualities of the GNU/Linux operating system (or any presumed lack thereof). For starters, GNU/Linux in itself - meaning: I'm not talking about UNIX in general - only got a late start on the x86 architecture. Before the Linux kernel was developed - which began in 1991 - Microsoft had already built up a stronghold of the x86-based IT sector, and particularly so for the home and office enduser. In the server sector, it had to compete with Novell Netware, UNIX, VMS and similar technologies, and before Windows NT came along - which appeared later than GNU/Linux - they didn't really have any viable products. Now, this stronghold of the end-user x86 market in large part came to be because of the sales of home and small office computers that came pre-installed with a Microsoft operating system. This began with pure DOS in the early 1980s, and with both DOS and Windows in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Microsoft then also made it possible for computer vendors who would pre-install their computers with Microsoft software to obtain a more affordable bulk license for this software, on the condition that the computer be pre-installed *only* with Microsoft software. Certain computers - mainly laptops/notebooks, but I've also seen it on desktops - were then also supplied without an actual Windows installation CD but rather with a so-called "recovery CD", which, when the machine was booted up from it, would automatically repartition and reformat the hard disk, install Windows and all other additional vendor-supplied software in a preconfigured state, by which I mean: generally with either the Windows "C:" drive spanning the entire hard disk (if technically possible) or with a 4 GB "C:" drive and the rest of the disk organized as a single logical partition. So what you have here is a large number of brandname computers that came (and often still come) pre-installed with Windows, and sometimes even in such a way that the machine's warranty explicitly states that the warranty becomes void if the customer decides to install another operating system on it, either alongside of Windows or in its stead. Next to that, many shops who offer both brandname computers and whitebox computers will stick to Windows only, because just as the warranty of those brandname machines gets voided if the machine is used with another operating system than Windows, the deal Microsoft has with the vendors with regard to bulk licensing also becomes void if the vendor decides to even offer another operating system than Windows. In the event that this happens, the bulk licensing for Windows would suddenly become a lot more expensive for the computer vendor, and I'm not sure anymore on the exact percentage, but I do remember that it was quite significant. Now, GNU/Linux on the other hand is not a commercial product. It is a Free(/Libre) & Open Source Sofware operating system, which, unlike FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris and the likes, does not come as a single, installable operating system from a single source. (This is what Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral And The Bazaar" attempts to explain.) As such, multiple so-called "distributions" of the GNU/Linux operating system have arisen, with Slackware as one of the earliest distributions. Many of these distributions are commercial entities and have thus also begun offering commercial flavors of their branded GNU/Linux operating systems, but with the exception of a few are ones, most of these distributions also do still offer a freely downloadable version of the operating system, which is just as functional but lacks proprietary software - proprietary software which does come bundled with the commercial variants as an incentive for the prospective user to go ahead and buy the commercial variant, which typically also comes bundled with a limited yet official support offer from the distributor, e.g. Novell/SuSE, RedHat, TurboLinux, et al. Still, as GNU/Linux is primarily distributed per no-cost download over the internet - other than the expenses for the actual internet connection, of course - and as there are hundreds of very different distributions of GNU/Linux from organizations or companies who do not have the financial means to support large-scale advertising, and because of the fact that most of the software that makes up for a complete GNU/Linux system is indeed FOSS code, there also aren't any of the monopolizing tactics as the ones used by Microsoft. As the result of all of the above, GNU/Linux is not well-known by the mainstream, and as such, also it also cannot become /adopted/ by the mainstream. In addition to that, being a UNIX-style operating system, GNU/Linux has also always had a different philosophy, where the technical aspects were exposed to the user - especially so in the earliest distributions, but a little less so in the distributions of, say, the last six or seven years - and this tended to scare certain people away. And then there's the fact that this particular aspect was not remedied in the least by the aggressive FUD campaigns from Microsoft itself, both on the record and (especially so) off the record - the latter via deliberate infiltration in Usenet newsgroups by paid Microsoft shills. They have been caught with their pants down a couple of times - e.g. you might want to Google for "the Barkto incident" - but they have become much more careful since, and so it is not always obvious for the newbie that the friendly person giving them "advice" in a Usenet newsgroup about GNU/Linux and supplying them with information which is a mixture of both truths and outrageous lies - typically on the more technical aspects of which the "advising poster" knows that the newbie has insufficient knowledge to ascertain the veracity - is actually coming from a paid Microsoft disinformation agent. It's been a while so far since I've last seen one, but I have personally already encountered many of these paid shills, and when exposed, they rapidly seem to disappear without a trace. They won't even bother to try and refute the evidence against them anymore. They probably just shift to a different pseudonym or lay low for a while. But they're still around, trust me. ;-) Now, another factor which is also important (and especially so in the office/business market segment) is so-called vendor lock-in. Microsoft isn't the only software developer guilty of this, but they are notorious for the refusal to adhere to any standards other than the ones that they have submitted themselves, and with disregard whether the latter have been officially acknowledged as internationally standards or not. Vendor lock-in is not so much a matter of the operating system as it is of the application software that must run atop of this operating system, and this is a crucial factor in the corporate sector, and Microsoft is well aware of this. This is their leverage with official government-related administrations as well, and although this is effective at the international level, it is especially so the case within the United States, because there they also have external political leverage in the form of sponsorship of political candidates. Although elaboration on the following would take us too far off-topic, it also serves to be noted with regard to Microsoft's political power that Bill and Melinda Gates are both official members of the Bilderberg Group, a "secret society"-type of corporate (and aristocracy-imbued) lobby that seeks to influence governments all over the globe (and actually does influence them) in favor of corporate interests. (There's a Wikipedia article on them if you want to know more about this stuff. Their existence is officially documented, as are their member list, guest list and objectives, but it is a secret society in that whatever is discussed at a Bilderberg meeting is kept from the public and that no journalists are allowed to attend.) >> Alleged market shares represent commercially representative >> statistics. > > True, in terms of items sold. And statistics in themselves are of course highly debatable as an information source as well, because it's all about interpretation. And then there is the fact that every computer with Windows on it should (legally) have a separate Windows license. As we all know, there is a lot of piracy going on in the Windows world - and especially so in the Far East - but this whole thing is entirely moot in the GNU/Linux world, since Free Software does not require any licenses. That's what Free Software is all about. And as such, there are many people who own multiple computers which all run some GNU/Linux distribution but which are unaccounted for in the statistics, because, as it is common for residential internet connections, those machines would be connected to a LAN with only one public IP address, making it appear from the internet side of things as if it's all one and the same computer. And then we're not even touching upon virtual machines yet, where there really *is* only one physical computer, running multiple instances of GNU/Linux in parallel. >> GNU/Linux, although commercially available, is not a commercial >> product. It is still available as a freely downloadable >> system - and is primarily acquired as such - and does not have to >> rely on aggressive and monopolistic marketing tactics and deceitful >> advertising in order to actually get used. > > Yet every single unbiased or even slightly biased source > shows Linux to be hovering around 1 percent. > That's pretty bad and why do all these numbers seem to > agree, within reason? Presumably for the same reason as to why the three major religions of this planet have so much in common, i.e. they are multiple different interpretations of information coming from the same source. (All three of said major religions originate in the Middle-East, and both Christianity and Islam are built upon Judeaic lore.) If you're going to do statistical analysis and you maintain the same criteria for obtaining those statistics, then inevitably, you will end up with results that all gravitate towards the same percentage. I haven't exactly been monitoring the statistics with regard to GNU/Linux deployment, but I'd say that, strictly speaking of the home and office deployment and totally discarding the server, scientific workstation and non-x86 segments, 4 to 5% will probably be a more realistic figure. That's still pretty low, but again, I have to refer to what I wrote about more elaborately higher up in this reply. ;-) Note: Most userland software available for GNU/Linux will also run equally well on other UNIX-style systems. For instance (and to stay with the office suites), OpenOffice also comes in precompiled packages for (Open)Solaris and is equally well represented on desktop machines running FreeBSD or any of its siblings. So the percentages of deployment will be different depending on whether one looks at the deployment of the operating system or whether one only looks at the deployment of the application software. Microsoft on the other hand does not develop any software for UNIX, other than an occasional port of any of their application software to OS X, but OS X is also for most part proprietary, and most of its application software runs on top of its proprietary GUI, not on top of an X11 implementation. (And Microsoft products for OS X certainly won't.) >> There is also no required registration or activation procedure to >> allow keeping track of the actual deployment and userbase. Ergo, >> invoking alleged market shares as an argument is in itself already an >> unreliable argument. > > Openoffice makes claims of x number of downloads yet how > many people have actually seen Openoffice in the wild? Again, I haven't been keeping track of the statistics lately - and I do always tend to take them with a whole spoonful of salt anyway - but just about every GNU/Linux workstation I know of has OpenOffice installed on it, and likewise for FreeBSD and siblings. I must admit on the other hand that I have no clue as to how many Windows users would or wouldn't be using OpenOffice. I know some who do have it and who on occasion actually use it, but most Windows users would mainly use MS-Office, or at the very least, if they don't have a complete MS-Office suite, MS-Word and MS-Excell. And as far as I know, Microsoft offers freely downloadable viewers for PowerPoint presentations, so many people would be using those to open presentation documents. > I have not. I suspect people download it, try it and remove it. > So does that mean it sucks? > Of course not. > In fact Openoffice is excellent IMHO. > To claim it's taking over Microsoft Office is another > thing however. > It's not, IMHO. Well, I have never claimed that OpenOffice would be taking over Microsoft Office's market share. In fact, I don't see that happening anytime soon either, even if only because of the vendor lock-in. My point however - to the person identifying here as Ray Lopez - was that OpenOffice is a valid office productivity suite and that it is fully compliant with the internationally agreed-upon Open Document Format standard, and that, being a non-Microsoft product, it need not concern itself per se with MS-Office compatibility. In fact, one could posit that if any of these two office suites has a need to become more compatible, it would be Microsoft's Office, but Microsoft has always been quite reluctant to offer any kind of compatibility with anything which in any form is capable of running on GNU/Linux. And that's because although they unofficially do recognize the potential of the GNU/Linux operating system and even consider it a competitor - which it isn't[1] - their official stance has always been to ignore its existence from the simple vantage that it is not a commercial product and that it therefore cannot possibly be viable. It's a kind of denial phase thing, I guess, because they know all too well that it is viable enough. If they didn't, they wouldn't be going to such great lengths to infiltrate GNU/Linux-related newsgroups or web-based forums and spread anything from FUD to outright lies. [1] GNU/Linux is comprised of two main components which each have their own background and are not developed jointly. The first part is Linux, the kernel, which is developed by Linus Torvalds & friends, and the second part is the userland from the GNU operating system, which is developed by the Free Software Foundation. When Richard Stallman announced the start of the development of GNU back in 1983, his goal was to offer a free/libre alternative to proprietary UNIX, and GNU/Linux, being a UNIX-style operating system, does indeed serve that purpose[2]. Linus Torvalds himself on the other hand does not care about any political motives. He does of course like to see GNU/Linux be successful, but he's more interested in the technical aspects of the system. [2] GNU proper was to have its own native kernel design, which is a microkernel. The services offered to userspace by that microkernel come from a component known as the Hurd, which itself comprises a series of daemons (called "servers"), but which is still, after all this time, not production-ready. The underlying microkernel component is at present still the GNU implementation of the Mach microkernel, but Richard Stallman has already stated that his choice for Mach was the biggest mistake he ever made, and there is some research and experimentation going on in the GNU community with regard to alternative microkernels. Preliminary test distributions of native GNU - i.e. GNU with the Mach microkernel and the Hurd - have however already been available for a long time from Debian, but my personal guess is that the incentive for the further development of the Hurd has largely halted due to the motivations of the FSF being primarily political. They wanted to offer a fully functional, free - as in "freedom" - alternative to proprietary UNIX, and this objective has been met in the form of GNU/Linux - even though Linux itself is not part of the GNU project and isn't even a microkernel, it *is* licensed under the GPL(v2). -- *Aragorn* (registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
From: Aragorn on 31 May 2010 03:26
On Monday 31 May 2010 08:15 in comp.os.linux.setup, somebody identifying as felmon wrote... > On Mon, 31 May 2010 01:02:14 -0400, James Westwood wrote: > >> Openoffice makes claims of x number of downloads yet how many people >> have actually seen Openoffice in the wild? I have not. > > I agree with your other points. Linux is not catching on in the US. (I > am not so sure about other places in the world though.) GNU/Linux is quite popular in many European countries - especially in Germany and Scandinavia - and in the Russian Federation, in China, Japan, South Africa and many Latin-American countries. One of its strong points with that regard is that it has such an extensive language support. ;-) -- *Aragorn* (registered GNU/Linux user #223157) |