Sven Groot said:

ZippyV said:

*snip*

Probably, but it'll work better in VMWare (because it has additions for Linux).

 

Word of warning though: don't use VMWare Player's easy install. I did this and got stuck at the logon screen with a keyboard that didn't work no matter how often I rebooted the VM. After I installed Ubuntu manually it worked fine.

I think the best option for a *nix environment back home is Virtual Box from Sun/Oracle. The Guest Additions work better than the Integration Components in HyperV or VirtualPC (since those are optimized for Windows), and yet is not as resource hungry as VMware. I wouldn't use VBox in production though - it's not as stable as HyperV or VMware.

Shining Arcanine said:

IDWMaster said:

*snip*

Perhaps some chairs are flying at Redmond.

Perhaps the chairs are flying in the imagination of some Linux freaks out there.  Microsoft has had an OpenSource Lab for quite some time now, running all kinds of Linux distros and Unices, for interoperability and benchmarking purposes etc.

Linux is a competitor in a way (web servers), and a partner in another (data centers). In both cases, you need to know who/what you're dealing with. 

Ignorance is the enemy...

spivonious said:

daniel.forga said:

*snip*

If that's the case, then I see Chrome OS being hugely popular if they can get it preinstalled by OEMs.

 

I haven't run into dependency issues so far, but I'm not installing a lot of programs so I may be avoiding it. This problem definitely does exist on Windows though. If I install Crystal Reports 9, then install Visual Studio 2008 (which contains Crystal 2008 Basic Edition or something like that), Crystal Reports 9 breaks because VS overwrites a shared library file. I have to then run a repair on Crystal 9 to get things working again. The problem is effectively solved with .NET and their strong naming system, but there are very few commercial desktop apps written with .NET.

Well, I think Chrome OS is a waste of time. I like the Chrome browser - it's fast, secure, got a whole bunch of neat features in it, that other browsers will eventually have to implement as well. Due to its sand-boxing model, it's the hardest to break into nowadays. But Google as a company does not evolve around an alternative OS. What they are good at is search apps and search engines. That's pretty much it. Microsoft's strength is not the browser, but the OS - and the whole line of products that evolve around it. Among which IE. Which is anyway more secure than Safari, for instance. With ASLR and ACL in Windows and IE, it's a lot harder to crack in comparison to Safari on the Mac. Mac OS X offers security by obscurity, since almost nobody uses it. They're in no way better. Anyway, I digress. So obviously, there are dependency problems on any system under the sun (e.g.,DLLs on Windows). But broadly speaking, this dependency issue is a lot bigger on Linux. Don't jump to conclusions just because of some exceptions. If you install Debian 5 right now, and then want to update the system, the first thing it'll do is break some packages. Try it. And Debian is considered one of the most robust Linux Distros. Hell, Ubuntu is based upon it. (Not to mention the nightmare Linux is for developers, since there are no standards whatsoever, and libraries keep changing from one version or distro to another.) It's a moving target, and it's suicidal. It'll probably never get beyond the stage of project/lab, unless some organization tries to standardize it, the way the Open Group did with UNIX, because of the so called "UNIX wars" back in the 80s. History repeats itself in a way...

spivonious said:

daniel.forga said:

*snip*

It works for me as a web browser/email machine, and I'd be willing to bet that describes 95% of home users.

 

Yes, it's made up of a bunch of smaller pieces, but these are all effectively managed and patched through the Software Update application. I don't think the overall quality suffers at all.

 

If I didn't like Media Center on my HTPC and I didn't use my desktop mainly for games, I would seriously consider installing Ubuntu on those machines as well.

"It works for me as a web browser/email machine, and I'd be willing to bet that describes 95% of home users."

If that's all you need, you might as well try out Chrome OS. It's nothing BUT a browser, really.

P.S. The dependency issue is a BIG problem on Linux systems. I only know of three exceptions: Windows, Mac OS X and PC-BSD, that install every app in its own container, so that such issues don't appear. 

The Linux distros are famous for crashing packages and apps due to dependencies (this app needs this version of glibc, but the other an older one, so what do you do - keep this app or remove it for the sake of the other one? To break the packages or not to break them, that is the question...)

spivonious said:

daniel.forga said:

*snip*

I used to think like you, but then I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my laptop (now upgraded to 10.4) and I have to admit that it would be perfectly fine for the majority of home users. But hardware support is definitely a sticky issue. The main reason for my dislike of Linux was that my wireless card and sound card never worked out of the box on my desktop. The home user is not going to search around the web and put up with the holier-than-thou Linux crowd to get help on running install scripts.

 

I don't think Win7 gives me any advantages over Ubuntu for web browsing/email/word processing/light gaming, which is what the majority of home users do.

Dude, as I said - to me Ubuntu is not a real system, it's the clone or the prototype of what an OS could be. I like playing around with it, but it's nowhere near Windows Seven or Snow Leopard. Let me repeat - nowhere near. Sure, you can check your email, browse the net or watch some movie - but the general quality is very poor, mostly because so many things come from so many different places - patchwork, to be precise. You have this huge duplication of effort, with developers working on Gnome, KDE or Xfce - yet non of those offers a real desktop experience like Aqua or Aero. None of them. I like to play with Linux in different scenarios - client, server, gateway - but to me it's more of a computer virtual lab and learning ground, than a real system to be deployed in production. If you go into production, you will use AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, OpenVMS, NonStop, Windows Server and a bit of RedHat and SuSE Linux Enterprise. That's about it. 

Shining Arcanine said:

Sven Groot said:

*snip*

In that case, you might want to consider a different Linux distribution. Gentoo Linux sounds like it would be a better fit for you. It is an excellent server OS and it can compete feature-wise with RedHat Enterprise Linux should you configure it that way. It also is really easy to "muck about" with it. If you do not want that much of a hands on experience, I suggest that you look at CentOS, which is basically RedHat Enterprise Linux, although I doubt it will give you the same opportunity to "muck about".

If you just want to play around with a system and learn something, then yeah - Gentoo is a good place to start. They also have fantastic online documentation. That being said, I don't like the fact that Gentoo tends - as a distro - to install everything from source (FreeBSD style), and that it tends to keep things always up to date - which often breaks packages. If you mention the fact that the project itself is in a poor state, since Daniel Robbins made the mistake of leaving it (he may have been forced to, due to financial and personal reasons), one more reason to stay away from it. But there's other pretty geeky versions of Linux that one can play around with (Linux from Scratch, Arch Linux etc.)

Shining Arcanine said:

contextfree said:

*snip*

That sounds like Windows Vista.

 

vista was a transitional stage to the so called se7en (actually, winnt 6.1 >> vista on steroids)

seven is what vista was supposed to be from the outset; it kicks *

it's amazing how many improvements have been done over XP; and when you think about it, most of the users out there are still using good ol' XP (the 64 bit version was pretty good though - cutler himself apparently worked on that port)

Sven Groot said:

Bass said:

*snip*

Speaking of hardware support, I'm still debating with myself whether to upgrade my Ubuntu servers. Half of them are still running 9.04 because they wouldn't boot with 9.10 (I did the upgrade, then was greeted by a kernel panic; when I tried to clean install instead, I found even the installation CD couldn't boot on those systems). Maybe 10.04 works again, but since you can't upgrade directly from 9.04 to 10.04 (as far as I can tell) it'd mean clean installing those four servers.

when it comes to ubuntu, i wouldnt use anything but LTS-s on a production server (right now, i think 8.04 is the best option - 6.06 kind of old, 10.4 too fresh); the releases in between are more or less of a testing field for the major releases

besides, you could always run debian on your servers; do a minimal install, then add the server components you need and that's that. debian is reliable, the ubuntu team comes up with kernel tweaks that may lead to kernel panics and affect your environment negatively

personally, i prefer slackware it's the cleanest and most reliable linux distro i've worked with (and i've worked with most of them)

Shining Arcanine said:

RoyalSchrubber said:

*snip*

There is a difference between something being free of charge and something being worth your time. Comparing Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux, of the two, I can say only Ubuntu Linux is free of charge, but on the other hand, I cannot say that either is necessarily worth your time. People might use them, but the fact that people use them is likely more because the users have learned ways around the quirks of each to get thigns done rather than one actually being worthwhile to use over the other.

 

The quirks are part of both operating systems' learning curves; no one is born with the ability to sit down at a computer for the first time, write a composition to a friend in a word processor, make a presentation for an office meeting, write computer programs, read the latest news from the internet and send emails to friends and family. It takes time to learn how to do those things with any operating system.

 

With that in mind, I do not see why any first time computer user would want to use either Windows 7, Ubuntu 10.04 or <insert OS here> over the other. They will learn to do things in roughly the same time and the differences in the learning curves will have little effect on how easy it will be to do things once they learn how to do them.

 

Actually, I am wrong; I do see one reason. That is the lack of the search box in the menu bar. That means that a first time user should look at Kubuntu, which uses KDE, instead of what I will call Gubuntu, which uses Gnome.

you cannot compare se7en with ubu104; windows seven is a real operating system; ubuntu lynx is just a joke; might as well be a good joke but nonetheless

linux only shines as a system if used as a web or file server; but that's not a lot; in fact, it's very little, compared to all the products developed around windows server/client (AD, SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, MS Office etc.)  

i agree to the other guys, most of your comments are pointless; is canonical paying you to troll around here? or did they send you a free CD with ubuntu?  

Shining Arcanine said:

daniel.forga said:

*snip*

Ubuntu Linux is free of charge. Windows is not.

precisely the quality is a reflection of the price

turrican said:

CannotResolveSymbol said:

*snip*

wow, so u'll be able to use this for 6 months now?

this is a long term support release. 3 years on the desktop, 5 on the server. no match to microsoft, but hey - the wikipedia servers are running it