Posts by Jim D

it's obvious

The parents are obviously *nix users and fall on the "vi" side of the vi vs. emacs divide.

They couldn't name their daughter vi, or nvi, or vim, or vile, but chose elvis as the vi "flavor" to name their daughter after and indicate their preferred text editor..

Mine's the one with the colon print and the <esc> keys in the pocket.

Jim

desktop effects

Yeah, I run Fedora and have played with the desktop effects. I have more than enough poop (256 MB nVidia 7300 GS on my main desktop) on my systems to run them, but other than to occasionally show off to someone who's never seen them before, usually just leave them off.

Maybe I'm too old, or maybe just used Gnome and Linux too long to really care all that much for that kind of glitz. While the desktop switcher applet, and of course virtual terminals, may not look as cool as spinning cubes, they work just as well.

Nothing against the new stuff, but I usually just leave it turned off.

Jim

maybe it's about time...

I haven't downloaded any copyrighted materials, yet. I use bittorrent to get .isos of new Linux releases, and so far, that's about all.

But I can't play my legally purchased DVD's on my laptop, evidently because I don't use an "approved" operating system. I find this to be quite annoying.

Recently, my daughter, who has fewer personal inhibitions regarding downloading of copyrighted materials than I showed me how the same materials that I paid good money for and which did not play on my equipment and OS could be obtained at no cost and would work just fine.

I'm not certain how "fair use" would apply, but it would seem to me that if I can't use media I purchased on my equipment, I should be entitled to download functional versions at no cost and with no violation of any law.

Taken a step further, why the heck should I pay for defective, i.e., DRM crippled, media in the first place.

As I stated earlier, I haven't gone there yet, and so far all audio CD's I've purchased work fine on whatever equipment I choose to play it on, so that's not an issue for me. But I can certainly sympathize with and support anyone who downloads materials when he is unable to purchase functional versions of it legally.

Just bought a new laptop

Just bought a new laptop last week. It's a Centrino Dual Core with 2 GB RAM. The OS had been "downgraded" to XP with Vista Basic available for activation in a hidden partition.

I booted it with my Fedora 8 DVD and eliminated all existing partitions, formatted the HD to ext3 and 20 minutes later it was running beautifully. Never had a chance to see what XP or Vista would do.

The last version of MSWindows I tried to run was Win98, but it had issues with my hardware and kept blue screening and freezing. RedHat 6.2 fixed those problems and since then computing has been a breeze.

I'm one of the 130,000

But not, yet anyway, one of the 40,000 who have already purchased one of Dell's Linux computers. I am writing this (at work) from a Dell desktop running SLED 10 and at my other job, have Fedora installed on another Dell desktop. Both work great. At home I have two other computers, one a home built and the other an HP, both of which run Linux. I don't own, or even have ready access to a MSWindows computer. Not even sure if I would know how to do anything with one if I had to.

I am in the market for a Linux laptop and am giving serious consideration to the Dell offering, but am hesitating for two reasons. First, the hardware does seem to be a bit low end, and secondly, since Dell has not yet moved to Ubuntu 7.10, I'm not certain that they intend to continue supporting these units.

While Linux can be installed with relative confidence on almost any desktop unit, laptops can present challenges with wireless, hibernate and suspend modes, and possibly a few other areas not relevant to desktop installs. For those reasons, before I drop $1000 or so on a machine, I would like to know that everything will work. And to me knowing that it will work means that it will work with Linux.

I intend to make a decision soon since I get paid quarterly on one of my jobs and I will be getting a large check on January 1, a portion of which will be going towards the purchase of a laptop. Whether I buy a Dell Ubuntu machine or take my chances on getting one and blowing Windows away is yet to be decided. If Dell were to expand their offerings and provide me with a bit more confidence that they were really interested in supporting Linux offerings, they would be assured of at least one more sale.