55 new of 203 responses total.
Jeff was just about to ask Sindi why she favours referring to herself in the third person when you switched to using first. Why does Sindi hate GUIs? Jeff agrees with Cross; for the kinds of things one can do with Win98 these days, a GUI linux distro would be better for most people than Win98. There are several distros Jeff or Sindi could use which are low-powered and have GUIs. Jeff agrees that Sindi has a right not to use GUI's if she chooses not to, but surely Sindi realises that she is not at all in the majority in this? Cross was right to use the word "pathological" in the sense he used it, but Jeff agrees with whomever pointed out that Cross should have explained his use of the word.
Dan wonders why people insist on calling him Cross and not just, you know, Dan. Or even dan.
Jeff calls Dan {C,c}ross because that's his login name.
And surname.
Dan understands that. But Dan would sort of prefer Dan.
keesan to cross and twenex: Someone specifically wanted Win98 to play Win9X educational games on with her daycare kids. Someone else specifically wants to learn MS WORD so she can get a job in an MS OFFICE. Other people (who I have never met) wanted something their friends in Ypsi could help them with. Linux is going onto computers for friends, and they seem able to manage without help once I set it up with Opera and give them a quick lesson. No Windows worms or viruses, and it runs much much faster. It also takes only a few minutes to copy over from a USB memory stick and uncompress (once I partition and format the drive), and put on their phone number, login and password. I don't need to download 8MB of video driver because I have some older video cards that work with a standard driver and configuration. Since ALL they want to do is browse the internet, and don't need anything fancy such as Shockwave Flash or even sound, this is a small tool that does the job much faster than a big one. keesan does not like GUIs because: they take longer to set up and load (though linux X and icewm are only a couple of seconds), they waste memory, they are designed around a mouse and it is quicker for me to use the keyboard, they waste hard drive space (a bigger hard drive boots slower because linux checks it out first). But sets them up for friends so they can use Opera. Opera is now usable as 'user' - su user first. I dial as root so that user won't have access to the file containing login and password. Three of our friends for whom I set up both Win98 and linux with opera have not used the Win98 version, they prefer linux. Faster, more stable. I had it booting into X (vt1 - the other vts were still console) until I added the password package and now I lost that. SOmeone suggested putting startx in profile but then I would not have three consoles in addition to X. Any other ideas? I had edited inittab to only make vt1 go to X. memory leak, forcing core dump, segmentation fault (I exited lynx on vt3)....
The problem with Windows 98 and web browsing is that Windows 98 is horribly insecure. A Windows 98 machine dialing into the net is likely to get compromised almost immediately, even one coming over a slow dialup line! Hence the danger. I would check and see if Windows programs run under WINE or something similar before going with Windows 98. It's not just about simplicity and space, it's also about security.
Dan, sorry about referring to you by your login name. I'll try to remember to refer to you by your given name instead. No insult intended.
P.S: Dan or dan ?
That's all right; I prefer Dan, but will respond to either. I'm just curious why people choose one over the other, and of course, I realize that no insult was intended.
If you read closely, you will see that I put Win98 on for wordprocessing and linux/opera (run as user from now on, not root) for internet. I ran a chkrootkit program which did not detect any linux viruses after 4 years of my running as root. I have no daemons running (no open ports) except Xvesa. I am offering Abiword for wordprocessing but people want Windows. Some people also insist on Windows for browsing and that is what I gave them. I told them to get a virus checking program and not do anything high security. They do email. They do not have the money to purchase a new computer with new Windows.
...and what we're saying is that those people would be better off with Linux, even if they want to run Windows software, it would be better to run it under emulation than on native Windows. Where do you get all these Windows licenses, anyway?
We get Win98 on lots of used hard drives and remove junk from it. I am not going to spend time learning to run Windows emulated under linux just for people who don't want to use linux. I tried dosemu and it works badly with the programs I wanted it for. Does okay with a CAD program in xdosemu. Would you like to put some minimal linux with Windows emulation on 500MB drives for me to give away?
How much space would linux with WINE require? wineHQ has a Slackware 10.2 binary that should run on a 386 that is 10MB tgz - maybe it would fit but I don't have Slackware 10.2 or want it. Upgrading the glibc to use this binary would require also changing the kernel and modules. Not impossible and this certainly takes less space than 150MB of Windows 98 itself. I have 150MB free space in the linux partition for the friend who wants WORD and linux/opera. And only 50MB free in the Windows partition. Thanks for the idea.
I can't find a binary for anything older than Slackware 10.2. Source is 11MB bz2. A list of supported applications includes WORD97 and 2000.
Regarding #161; Err, that's kind of illegal.
Can you give me a bit more information about the boxes besides the max drive size? Are the PCI-based? What brand of NIC do they use? I may be able to throw together a nice image that you can toast onto a bunch of CF cards or small drives, and be done. I will probably base it off of a standard version of Slack 11 or something else "normal" and well-known/well-supported.
Now Jeff understands that Sindi needs to install Windows for some users, but agrees at least provisionally with Dan that the way Sindi is "procuring" Win98 at least MAY be illegal. Jeff hopes Dan notices that Jeff has now started calling Dan "Dan," and is pleased. I am going to stop the irritating parodic third-person nonsense now.
Dan notices and Dan appreciates. And now I will also knock off all the 3rd Party nonsense.
Sindi might not think she is doing any harm pirating Windows for people but the fact is Microsoft regularly goes after people who do so. How they do it is offer free copies of properly licensed Windows in exchange for the names and addresses of the people who install the pirated software.
re 167 Brooke would like it better if Dan started referring to himself as "The Dan".
Sort of like, ``The Donald''? ``Rosie's a slob!''
Exactly!! Please Jesus let your hair be better.....
Oh yes; don't worry, my hair is better than The Donald's comb-over.
Re 165 (?) from maus Are you offering to put together some small linux that I can transfer via some external drive (I have a USB external drive and a 1GB USB flash drive) that will run Opera and also WORD under WINE? That fits in 500MB? This particular computer has 2 PCI slots and I put a video card into one of them (rather than dealing with an odd driver that I might have to compile). No network card. Eventually an external modem. I was told not to put any more work into it right now. It was supposed to be for the to-be-ex-wife of a friend and we will see if she even wants to use the linux part of it for the internet. He says she is rarely satisfied with anything he gives her. He is delighted with the linux/opera I put on his computer. By great good fortune he already has a Lucent modem in there which worked with ltmodem.o driver. My two lucent modems did not. If she does not like linux, I will let him put Win98 and WORD on the drive after removing linux and enlarging the Win98 partition. I installed Slackware 10.1 or 10.2 on one computer and it immediately filled up at least 1GB in a minimal installation, and wasted 64MB of RAM on running unneeded daemons. It had several pages of config file for X. I am using a generic Xvesa driver with no config file.
(Her not being satisfied with things he gives her might have more to do with the fact that she is a soon-to-be-ex-wife than that she is not satisfied with those things. And perhaps, vice versa.)
Vice versa. Today someone brought us 9 64MB and 4 128MB SIMMs so we could actually put together computers with 128MB RAM and Ubuntu (if we had lots of large hard disks - it demands 2GB) but Ubuntu is slower. He also brought four SIMMS (two labelled 64MB) that have two little slots very close to each other just off of center, with no chips on two (just greenboard) and some metal cased thing on the other two. ??? And a no-name motherboard with onboard i810 video sound and only three slots to replace them with. No ISA and we are out of extra external modems. Anyone have 28.8K or 33.6K they don't want?
I will look into creating an image for this. In my past experience, the basic load of Slackware was pretty small and light. If it has grown over the years, you would be better off using a decently sized drive to accomodate a reasonable distribution of Linux.
I am putting linux on the hardware that we have and do not want a distribution of linux, just enough files to dial and run Opera. The standard Slackware puts on all sorts of unwanted things. Wait on this project to see if the person getting the latest computer really wants linux. Why an image file rather than a .tgz? What kernel does the Slackware 11 glibc require? The glibc from Slackware 9.1 insisted on a kernel 2.4, which I have compiled. A lot of the reason why the later kernels are larger is they support newer hardware, and I am using Slackware 4 or earlier age hardware.
The Linux pundits will tell you until they are blue in the face that the kernel is actually very small and that all the support for newer hardware is done via kernel modules; so supporting older systems in a small amount of space is trivial: just delete the modules you don't need. The reason you may want to do this is because giving someone Windows 98 and Office 98 is illegal.
Dan: I refer to people by loginid because it is unique. There are other people here called "Dan" but no others called "cross".
That's fine, I guess.
The kernel that comes with my linux is about 400K. The standard Slackware 2.2.16 kernel is about 1GB. How big is 2.6? The person getting the latest computer has their own OEM copies of 98 and OFFICE. The later libraries are a lot bigger.
re #181: surely you mean 1MB, and not 1GB. on my Ubuntu laptop, my untrimmed kernel is about 1.2MB. mcnally@skookum:~$ ls -l /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1207281 2007-02-06 20:04 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386
1MB, of course. Is 2.6 less buggy than 2.4? My custom kernel, with modular support for sound, framebuffer, usb, and scsi, is 700K (2.4.31). The generic kernel that came with my linux is 430K.
> Is 2.6 less buggy than 2.4? I have no idea how to answer that. Which version of 2.4? Which version of 2.6? Which bugs?
2.4.31, latest 2.6. 2.4.31 has a few problems. Can't load usb_serial as a module (has to be built-in). Have to load gameport.o for some sound cards to work even though it is not listed in modules.dep. Why are you using 2.6?
2.6 is what most distributions ship with. Besides working better with desktop-type hardware, it allows device-name persistence for hot-pluggable devices, hot-plug capabilities for PCI boards (PCI, PCI-X and Compact PCI) which allows live repairs and newer ones offer kdump/kexec functionality. Aside from that, it is actively developed and *supported* by Linux distributors. There are a few problems, to be sure; namely, the OOM-killer behaves badly and can cut off access to the box entirely (bigger problem on overloaded servers) and the memory oversubscription is a little flaky, leading to the OOM-Killer being called. Both of these are tunable parameters, though, and oversubscription can be turned off and OOM-killer can be made more sane or shut off entirely. Additionally, the t3 driver (Tigon gigabit ethernet driver) is fucking nuts and can cause stability problems in kernel-space (I have seen one box freak out multiple times in a day when under heavy network load using a NIC that is run by the t3 driver -- customer was very *NOT HAPPY* and we wound up disabling the t3 NIC and adding an Intel PRO/1000 NIC board and all was happy).
Wow, I probably should have broken that into a couple of paragraphs.
I don't even know what OOM is and have no need for hotplugging. Had to use kernel 2.4 for USB-storage (but DOS also supports that except for my SM card reader). I probably would not take advantage of any features of 2.6 on my 1998-2001 hardware. Am giving people 2.2.26 and also optionally 2.4.31 on computers with USB ports (two so far). 2.4 correctly identifies the amount of memory even in computers with i810 video, where I have to subtract 1MB from onboard memory with mem= to make 2.2 kernels boot. If I knew a whole lot more I could try to write my own kernel without things I don't use. Some of our computers have 12MB RAM so a smaller kernel is better. I still can't get ssh working as 'user'.
Hot-plugging is useful for external devices, such as USB, Serial and Firewire devices. OOM means out-of-memory. The Linux kernel oversubscribes memory, and if it runs out of total virtual memory (RAM + swap), it runs a daemon in kernel space that forcibly kills processes and forcibly free()s their memory so that the kernel will not panic. In some cases, it can behave pathologically, but in many cases can keep the system up through a transient memory shortages. On memory-constrained systems, a well-behaved way of coping with OOM conditions is critical, and if the kernel requests more memory and can't get it, it can panic or worse.
I don't run out of memory. We are giving everyone at least 64MB which is plenty for running one browser. But I have had the problem on computers with 8MB or less RAM and no swap space - it just crashes. USB storage works fine if you just load the drivers manually. Same for serial devices. Thanks for the explanations. I have never managed to use even 128MB RAM at one time, as a single user.
Keesan, I regularly see boxes with 2 GBytes of RAM and 4 GBytes of swap start shooting processes to free memory (and I usually get a ticket when the OOM-killer shoots sshd or httpd). Real systems with real loads and thousands of users accessing simultaneously a web application that talks to a database require more RAM. Manually loading drivers is an unacceptable inconvenience for many users, and imposes a barrier to use. For most people, the operating environment is simply a vehicle to use the commands that they need; most people do not get off on faffing around with their operating environment to achieve things that have been solved elegantly and reasonably. P.S: My partner, who is sick and on medications responds "wake up and come into the 1990s".
The computers we put together are for single users and don't run out of memory. The one person who requested USB was really interested in learning linux and had no objection to typing usb-on and mount /dev/sda1 /mnt. And he was delighted with the 15 second boot. So while 2.6 may be much better for your situation, 2.2 (2.4 if you need USB storage) works fine for mine. Most of our computers and libc5 are from the late 90s already. A 1999 linux runs faster on a 1998 computer than the latest and greatest. To use the internet on the latest computer I set up, boot the computer, type lin to boot from DOS to linux (or win for Windows instead), root and Enter to login as root, dial to dial as root, login user and Enter to login as user and automatically load X, then you can select programs from the START menu with a mouse (or type their names in an rxvt). Type reboot to reboot before shutting off the computer. I put little menus with instructions along the way (in autoexec.bat and issue). How is this not elegant?
this just gave me the idea of removing the gear stick from my car, after all in town I hardly get to use anything other than the second gear, which with a little getting used to you can also start moving with. that way the car will be lighter and I'll have more space to move! less consumption and more comfort! ;P
While you're at it, remove all of the seats and only install the ones you need, adding and removing them as needed. And a car from 1982 drives the same as one from 2004, so there is no point to buying anything newer than 15 years old. Oh, and fuel injection annoys me, so anything I get has to be carburated. If you ever need an oil change, Jim might be able to help. He'll jack up the car, remove the drain plug, refill it with oil, and let you drive off forgetting to reinstall the drain plug. When your car dies, you can just pick up another junker from us for $50.
Good idea. Better yet, use a bike in town. Takes up much less space, makes almost no noise or pollution, and is better for everyone's health.
And if you get hungry, eat some dried leaves and twigs and drink water from the curb.
Or some chocolate you find in a garbage can.
People cannot digest cellulose.
nope, we sure cant. It is part of what is in poop. I learned in my biology class what else is in poop and I think I will be grossed out for the rest of my life.
It tends to be yellow or brown in color, too.
The color is I think from broken down heme (from blood).
this conversation started on nonsense and is turning to shit
Re resp:141: Well, it's a bit like saying that driving a modern car is more pleasant than driving a Model T. It's obviously true, to most people, but there are still people who really enjoy restoring and driving an antique. Re resp:179: For what it's worth, I find 'gull' perfectly acceptable. 'David' is awfully generic. ;) Re resp:195: It also greatly increases your chances of getting killed by being run over by a car, thus reducing the overpopulation problem. ;)
You have several choices: