response 228 of 290:

Mar 10 07:04 UTC 2006

 re #227:  there's nothing particularly awful about ndiswrapper 
 and it's very, very useful in cases where the manufacturer (I'm
 looking at *YOU*, Broadcom..) won't release details necessary
 to implement a native driver.

 The Dell laptop I use for work has a built-in broadcom wireless
 chip that isn't supported by Linux except through ndiswrapper.
 However with the hardware emulation mode that ndiswrapper provides
 it works very well (better, seemingly, than it does in Windows,
 as odd as that may be..)

response 230 of 290:

Mar 10 16:02 UTC 2006

Somebody with ndiswrapper please let us know its memory usage before I bother
with it.  DSL (50MB of Debian on live CD) may support it if you download an
extra package of applications.  Ubuntu Live might support it too, but we don't
have 128MB of RAM on our laptops to run that huge GUI in (it won't run at all
with less, not sure if DSL will accept 32MB).  I will try the card once in
Win98 at the public library.

My 2.4.31 kernel won't work at all with USB - crashes with uhci.  I modelled
it on something that works and just added usb-uhci (as module) and removed
a bunch of things that did not look essential (various USB scanners, cameras,
serial adaptors, ISDN modems).  My kernel config is at
http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/2.4.31/configsy.431 - all help appreciated.
And when I tried using this setup to compile rtl8180 it would not compile
anyway and INSTALL says I need to hack Makefile for 2.4, and 2.6 is easier.
2.6 takes too much RAM and is ridiculous for a 100MHz laptop computer.

response 238 of 290:

Mar 11 22:04 UTC 2006

Having more than one machine spare!

And sorry, but they got the Plan 9 windowing system VERY wrong, unless they
now believe in dictating policy as well as implementation. In which case, both
the windowing system and they are wrong.

response 240 of 290:

Mar 12 03:00 UTC 2006

 ?[3~[3~

response 242 of 290:

Mar 12 15:41 UTC 2006

> they get it in their heads that the way Linus et al do it is the One 
> True Way

This is probably because Linux is the first unix-like operating system
these people have ever used. It was pretty much that way with me.

response 244 of 290:

Mar 12 18:34 UTC 2006

Re #241: I'm not so sure about Linux, but I like X.  I like
  the ability to run a client program on whatever machine
  happens to be most appropriate and have its output display
  to (and keyboard/pointing device input from) whatever
  machine happens to be in front of me. I also like the fact
  X makes no attempt to dictate my choice of window manager.
  I imagine X predates Linux and it's developed by different
  people.

response 246 of 290:

Mar 12 23:16 UTC 2006

X works for me.  It's nice that it's cross-platform too.  Is
Plan 9's windowing system confined just to Plan 9?

response 248 of 290:

Mar 13 01:54 UTC 2006

I think there's also an X11 wm that's meant to look like rio.

You're right, Dan. X11 DOES suck. And so does UNIX, whatever flavour. The
trouble is, they're SO much better than That Other System in SO many ways,
and Plan 9 is SO little known, that its suckiness is (almost) irrelevant. Now,
if I'm wrong about the window manager thing, then fine. But don't assume I'm
just some ignorant Linux fanboy. I also use (and happen to prefer) FreeBSD
on one machine. I can also see lots of areas where linux went wrong, like
kernel module support. But I suspect that unless you're a kernel programmer
(which I'm not), and/or you have a few machines kicking around that you can
power constantly just to have a distributed OS (which I don't), then Plan 9
really wouldn't look much more attractive to you than Linux/BSD. (As an aside,
imho Plan 9 still doesn't do device management correctly: /dev/dev/ and
/dev/devctrl is certainly an improvement over /dev/dev/ and ioctrl, but the
OS should include facilities for decoding whether what's written to /dev/dev
is a command or data, instead.

As for the bad old days; point taken. But I know that lots of people prefer,
and always have preferred, developing for UNIX rather than Windows, and
developing for Mac OS Classic (especially early versions) sounds like a
nightmare. Let's face it, aside from some shining lights (now sadly mostly
dimmed), programming graphical applications on just about ANY platform in the
eighties must have been the GUI equivalent of batch-mode-only OSES. Did I
mention it sounds painful?

response 250 of 290:

Mar 13 03:46 UTC 2006

Is Plan 9 free software?