Re: Back In The Saddle, Play, Want, Bin

On 2007-08-21 17:04:46 +0100, Resident Drunk <Notsure@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:

[ste parker] wrote:
John Dow wrote:
Shak the Monkey was never naughty:
Each time I convince myself to try Linux out seriously, a thread like this pops up and sends me crashing back down to Earth.

I've been working with linux since 1994 and every single year some
excitable chap discovers it and proclaims it "ready for the desktop".

In the past year or two (really since OpenOffice became useable) that's
been true for values of "desktop" approximating "surfing, reading mail,
doing word processing or being an out-and-out raging geek".
It's not there. It's unlikely to EVER be a desktop O/S suitable for your
granny for the simlpe reason that it's complete overkill. It's a thing
of beauty, to be sure - the server O/S to end them all - but it's just
not easy enough for joe public and I don't think it ever will be.


What's different between offering bloke-on-the-street a preconfigured Linux based machine running Firefox and Thunderbird or a preconfigured Windows machine running Firefox and Thunderbird though? Not much I'd say, I might even consider recommending such a thing to people if that's all they'd be using it for, depending on circumstances. Even OOo (which I don't like, myself) is surely enough for what most people would need?

Any of today's PCs are complete overkill for 99% of people, nor do they have any more clue about how to solve a problem with it than they would elsewhere. I agree with everything else, I don't think it's quite there, and I certainly don't think it will ever really break into the Windows monopoly, but I think the reasons for it that you give aren't right.

I have been using Linux a similar lenght of time to Choobs (with a few years off more recently for good behaviour).

I've got to say that having put Ubuntu 7.04 on my laptop when the XP disk died that I think it is much more ready for the man-in-the-street than Vista. I then wiped an old Knoppix off my Mame arcade machine and put it on there. Everything I have thrown at it works seamlessly and there are simple step-by-step tutorials for the things you don't know. Beryl can now be easily installed through Synaptic and configured through a Gnome Panel applet which gets installed automagically when you put Beryl on.

The only time I have piss about with anything that would scare people is removing VesaFB from the kernel and generating non-standard modelines for the arcade monitor, but these are things that 99.99999999% of people would never need to do and even then I found Wikis that explained everything.

Conversely I bought daughter #1 a laptop with Visa on for her birthday and it has been nothing but a pain in the arse. Despite being on a laptop several generations newer than mine, it is like walking through treacle trying to use it. I plugged in the Logitech Quickcam Messenger we had got her and it came up with various reasons as to why it wouldn't work on Vista (I know this is Logitech's fault), I plugged it into mine and it was just there - it didn't even need to tell me it was doing anything (only a check of dmesg calmed my assumption that it was too easy).

For Zo having problems with VNC - in Gnome click System->Preferences->Remote Desktop, enable it then make sure whatever firewall you are using lets either the program or ports 5800 & 5900 through (or whatever port you chose).

It was enabled, and all testing was on internal LAN so firewalling shouldn't have been an issue.

--
Zo

http://zomoniac.com/forsale.html

.

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