Linux - For who and why

[Cuppatea]

GPSTI, if your even half right in what you just said Linux would only be a footnote in computing history. Fortunately for all it still exists, is installed in all corners of this planet and flies the flag for freedom.

It's really a shame this thread will turn into the same old debate. So tiring . I'll stick to reading Patrol stuff I think.

Edited July 12, 2012 by Cuppatea

[Ray!]

GPSTI, if you even half right in what you just said Linux would only be a footnote in computing history. Fortunately it still exists, is installed in all corners of this planet and flies the flag for freedom.

It's really a shame this thread will turn into the same old debates. So tiring . I'll stick to reading Patrol stuff I think.

I truly believe that Linux has a valuable place in computing, but it's best place is in enterprise situations, especially the server and web services environment. My point with this thread was to provide a reasonably unbiased view of what it means for anyone contemplating going to Linux as their sole operating system, if they just rely on oft made comments about how great and easy Linux is to use.

The thread has drawn some of the same old debate, but then that's partly to be expected; however, it's not become a rabid free for all.

Yes, America also flies the flag for freedom and look where that's got them.

Cheers

Ray

[GPSTI]

GPSTI, if your even half right in what you just said Linux would only be a footnote in computing history. Fortunately for all it still exists, is installed in all corners of this planet and flies the flag for freedom.

It's really a shame this thread will turn into the same old debate. So tiring . I'll stick to reading Patrol stuff I think.

I'm surprised that you expect a set of musings about where Linux fits in to bring a different conclusion.

When nothing changes, the conclusions have to be the same, don't they?

Linux for PC would have to solve a real problem that none of the alternatives can address before it can prosper.

Embedded Linux has the market completely to itself, because it does solve a problem in that "space". It's a multi billion dollar business solution that no-one collects money for. It's worth enough to end world hunger, but the open source community revels in it's freeness.

[Ray!]

This just reminded me of one other aspect, as I pointed out in my quotes earlier, the cost:

Free:

- OS

Not Free:

- PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse etc

- Power to run PC etc

- Internet connection

- Desk, chair etc

- Cost to run room, house etc

- and so on

Freedom!!!!

Cheers

Ray

[Glort]

Here is a typical windoze BS fkup for those that think it's such a straightforward compatible system that's Pi$$ing me right off.

I'm setting up a printer pool with 3 printers on one of the laptops I want to use for outside work.

Printer pooling works like a single line at the bank. 3 printers, first one available gets the next job And they all share the load till they are done.

If you send one job it goes to printer number one. If you send more, they go to 1 then 2 then 3.... in theroy and usually in practice.

Basically you connect the 3 printers, enable the ports, check the pooling box and assign them all a priority, 1,2, 3.

Now I have done this a load of times and sometimes its fine and other time it gives you endless grief like right now.

One of these printers has a bulk ink system on it I made myself and want to test some more by running off a quick 30 A4's for samples to give potential clients.

Even though I have prioritised that printer, checked it as the default and even gone to the trouble of makeing sure it is on port 1, This POS OS keeps sending the job to the number 3 printer.

The whole Farking idea of setting the priority and default printer is so you can assign the order of the printers the jobs go to.

Its Chit like this that windoze does of it's own accord even when you tell it not to that Pisses me right off and wastes endless time sorting out when you bloody shouldn't have to. While some people may think that mounting the printers and assigning them or whaterver you have to do in linux is a hassel, not having the control like you ought to in windoze is a hell of a lot more stuffing around in theh long run.

Now granted what I do is not what pleb does but the fact is the OS has the ability to do it but it dosen't often work as it should.

It seems I am always coming up against things in windoze that are features that never damwell work as they should and to get them too work requires far more mucking around than it should. Try getting an XP Machine to network BOTH ways with a win7. There is anotherr hear tearing windoze experience unless you can find the right snippet of info on the web for the work around on that!

It would have been far easier for me to set this up on a totally manual system that to have to deal with the Windoze knows best crap that frigs up what you ant to do!

/ rant.

[Ray!]

Are the printers identical and do they all share the same driver, name and output port? If not, pooling is not going to work or you will have problems.

Are you using a cross-over cable or hub/switch to direct connect? Also, have you correctly set up the Host/Guest protocols?

Cheers

Ray

[GPSTI]

Your problem is trying to assign a priority to a pooled printer.

Priority is designed for multiple printer drivers pointing to one physical printer. Priority means the spooler will send the highest priority jobs first - a low priority job may in theory not print for hours.

Pooling is designed for one printer driver pointing to 2 or more physical printers. Pooling means you let the OS define the priority depending on which physical printer is idle.

So if you try and use priority to direct jobs to a specific printer in a pool, you are using a sieve to gather water from the well - it's not going to work.

As an aside, if you have your pooled printers connected to the XP laptop via USB, you are guaranteed to have problems as USB sucks in XP, especially so pre SP3.

[Glort]

Ray I have set printer pools up literally dozens of times on different machines. I run 3 Pools of 3 printers each in the studio. There would be few people that would be more familiar with it or have done it more often than I have over the years.

All I am trying to do is set the same thing up on a laptop. Trust me, it's not operator error in this case. it SHOULD be a rather straightforward process. And that where windoze gets you every time... Turning the simple into the incredibly frustrating.

The moronic crap windows was actually switching which printer was the default and assigned the number one ( or any other priority ) last night when I gave it away in frustration.

If you really want an experience in the twilight zone, try setting up a wireless network connection with windoze to a wireless image transfer module on a camera. People the world over including networking experts are totally bamboozled by that one. Guys working for media outlets get new camera's and new laptops exactly the same and it works on some and defies all efforts and absurd amounts of time on others.

Mac has no such issues or complications.

The problem is nothing more than the "Uncle Bill knows what's best" mentality built into windoze that even when it has provision for you to tell it what it wants, it takes over when it feels the whim and fks chit up.

Usually with server editions they know they can't get away with such crappy programming and when you set this up on those OS's it works much better, IE, as it actually should. On the pleb editions it either works or it's a bloody nightmare.

Another thing that chits me to tears is the windoze updates. There were a couple last week I noticed. 1 Fked up the security system software at one of the buildings I was managing but luckily I fluked coming across what it had changed and was able to find and fix it quick and easy. If I hadn't have fluked seeing the problem, It would have taken a long time to figure it out because it was not something closely related to anything you'd look for.

My own computers had some minor issues from the updates and yesterday I got a call from a mates mother who is suddenly having trouble with the scanner I set up and was working fine... Right up till last week when she saw something about an update and gee wizz, now it's acting up.

As far as I'm concerned, Windoze does not have the credibility to be argued over any other OS.

[Glort]

As an aside, if you have your pooled printers connected to the XP laptop via USB, you are guaranteed to have problems as USB sucks in XP, especially so pre SP3.

I have my other printers pools assigned priority and do that as a matter of course because that works a lot better than not assigning them.

This is an XP machine I'm trying to work on however so you might have something there. I'm not sure what edition of "fix the dodgy errors that amount to a larger file than the original OS" the machine is running but I will have a look and update if needed.

Thanks for the heads up and can you elaborate on the USB problems and if there are any fixes for that or work arounds?

[Ray!]

I'm not suggesting that Windows is perfect by any means; but that it suits, and works for, the vast majority of people and their needs. When you start doing what you're doing, then you are upping the ante regarding complexity and potential issues. The fact that you've had things working fine before, indicates that the system is capable of doing what you want, you just need to narrow down what's different, or what you're doing differently this time.

Cheers

Ray

[GPSTI]

I'm working from memory re the USB problems, but I think XP may have preceded a working USB in the timeline of things. USB1.0 and 1.1 are not considered "working USB" in my view.

I can remember fixing a problem for a once only client who was running an ISA sever and using a USB modem as the device to access the internet - remember those days? Of course we scrapped that and put in a serial port modem which was as close to reliable as technology allowed without spending a motza. The client was a cheapskate, too - I fixed his problem and took ages to get paid, but that's another story

Back in those days having multiple USB devices would frequently cause trouble - one device would corrupt the other with its implementation of port drivers, so if you plugged in a new printer, your modem would stop working, and so on.

Sadly, if you are trying to use advanced features on USB in XP, you are asking for trouble. In the pooling scenario, you are asking for the USB "stack" to perform like the network stack, which it was never designed to do - it's a one device at a time thing with higher throughput than the old COM ports.

XPSP3 on USB 2.x was as good as XP got in terms of being able to plug in multiple devices without corruption, but you could still not use multiple devices concurrently - and that's exactly what you are doing with pooling.

I'm not surprised that you are exasperated with this setup.

[Glort]

I think You have it sussed GPSTI.

I haven't done this with an xp System for a while, the other machines I am running the pools on are XP and Server.

I have run pooling on XP before but it has generally been a big hassel like I'm having now and fixing the problem just seems to happen rather than happen because of something you did which you hadn't already tried before.

The last machine I did it on was a W7 and that went quite smoothly, as one would expect it should. Thinking about it, I have had more trouble with machines with stuff hanging off the usb's rather than when I have just sat machines in the corner to play print server. Pretty low end machines can do that surprisingly well which was why I thought this laptop would handle it. I might pick up some better used ones and try server or 7 on them and see how they go.

The thing that gets me though is Why the hell do they put the feature there if it's likley to cause problems which they must know about having designed the USB side and knowing it's limitations and weaknesses. Not including the feature at all would be far less frustrating than having it there and it doesn't work.

What is more of a pi$$ off still is when you go to the MS site, there is no mention on potential problems, you should follow the instructions and it would work. According to them, that's it. No mention of there are potential problems, why or how to fix them if it's possible.

Anyway, thanks for the info. It is at least some comfort to know that it is the system flawed beyond your control, not that you have somehow missed something which I knew I hadn't, but just the same.....

BTW, as you are obviously knowledgeable, what would you reccomend as a decent value for money new laptop?

I'd like a 17" screen, I7 and 8g min of ram hopefully for around $1500 as I'll need 2 of them.

[GPSTI]

That's a hard one to answer.

There seem to be fewer options than there were a while ago.

You have to decide what features you want - eg

High storage capacity with slow 5400rpm SATA2 drive, or fast performance with SSD and SATA3. Note that there are many SATA2 disks still being used in slow bus laptops and desktops.

Shared video memory or dedicated graphics card.

Blue-Ray or just DVD

ESATA, or ESATA/USB combined port (gives power over ESATA), or USB3 port. You need a special cable to run power over ESATA - I use it on my laptop to back up to a modded USB2 enclosure with a 7200 SATA2 drive in it. Backup speed thrashes the crappy USB2 480mbps.

Note that there are many USB3 external storage devices getting about, that promise to give up to 5Gbps data speed, BUT they have a 5400rpm SATA2 disk inside which cuts speed to 3.0GBps I haven't seen one yet that's SATA3 (6.0GBps) AND has a USB3 interface.

Warranty - 1 year or 3 years or upgradeable via package. I wouldn't buy a laptop that doesn't have or can't be upgraded to 3 year warranty.

Brand preference? - Lenovo, HP, maybe ASUS. Many don't have 17" any longer, eg Dell.

[Glort]

Well that certainly put a different spin on what I was looking for!

All very pertinent and valid questions though.

I was more thinking along the lines if there are any Brands you would reccomend or not? I don't have a prefrance other than best bang for the buck. To me there seems a load of units to choose from although that said I haven't tried to seriously narrow them down yet features wise. I know the 17" scree cuts things down but that is a prefrance rather than an absolute.

Speed in the hdd would be preferable as I can easily back up onto a portable drive or DVD every few jobs but speed while I am at the gig is important.

Dvd would be fine for practical purposes. I only need to burn one Disk on the computer then I load up an 11 drive Dupe tower and let it run the rest off to however many I need.

[Ray!]

Dell certainly provide 17" and bigger laptops. On one of the projects I was working on before I retired, the company working for us had bought two Dell Alienware laptops through the Dell refurb system and these units were about half price or less than new models and simply screamed. They were used to for some very serious graphics processing tasks, and were taken on board a warship for a week and performed flawlessly.

Cheers

Ray

[GPSTI]

Dell certainly provide 17" and bigger laptops. On one of the projects I was working on before I retired, the company working for us had bought two Dell Alienware laptops through the Dell refurb system and these units were about half price or less than new models and simply screamed. They were used to for some very serious graphics processing tasks, and were taken on board a warship for a week and performed flawlessly.

Cheers

Ray

Not for the desired price point - Glort said around $1500.

The cheapest 17" alienware with 256gb SSD, 6gb RAM is $3200ish.

[Ray!]

I wish I had the link to where these units can be bought, but they were around $1500 each, a bloody great buy. Apparently they crop up often enough, as it it wasn't just a one-off buy, the company bought one and then several weeks, or months, later bought another.

I think, this is where they got their units from: http://www1.ap.dell....?refid=df&s=dfo. They're out of Alienware, but the XPS don't look too bad.

Cheers

Ray

Edited July 18, 2012 by Ray!

[Tonka]

Urghh dell.. I used to work for them. What a train wreck of a company.

[Tonka]

If its the xps m1730 your talking about, dont bother. The video cards are faulty due to an nvidia chip. Ask me i own 1, cost me 4 grand when it came out.. I will never buy dell again.

[Ray!]

That's about a four year old model laptop.

Cheers

Ray

[Tonka]

Correct

[Rumcajs]

Talking about Dell.......................

Dell Gives Linux Laptops Another Chance

Today Dell announced its official re-entry into the Linux laptop market. Project Sputnik, ........

http://techcrunch.co...another-chance/

Edited July 19, 2012 by Rumcajs

[Ray!]

That's interesting, but why does a Linux laptop need 4GB of RAM and a Core i7 processor? Also, 'computational freedom'? I think the issue of copyright and an open internet has nothing to do with Linux. Cory Doctorow is a great SciFi author and his comments have clearly been taken out of context in the article, implying Linux represents some sort of computer freedom.

Cheers

Ray

[GPSTI]

Hmm, Sputnik1 burned up after 3 months when it came down to earth..........

Ya gotta love the way the geeks keep saying Linux will run on cheap, low powered hardware - if you really want to get a dose of head-banging frustration, install Linux on some cheap old hardware and see how it needs just as much power as Windows to be usable. But again, usable for what, exactly? Web browsing and E-mail.

I can do that on Windows, plus I can run all my accounting software, and I can run Office too, and easily do VPNs and RDP sessions to customer servers and desktops to solve problems (well, not any more sinece I sold the business haha). I can run navigation programs like OZI, Memorymap, Trackranger and easily run D/R programs like Todo backup.

Can anything else do all these things easily - no.

[Rumcajs]

That's interesting, but why does a Linux laptop need 4GB of RAM and a Core i7 processor? Also, 'computational freedom'? I think the issue of copyright and an open internet has nothing to do with Linux. Cory Doctorow is a great SciFi author and his comments have clearly been taken out of context in the article, implying Linux represents some sort of computer freedom.

Cheers

Ray

Hmm, doesn't compute (.....for someone who writes essays but can't read what other write ! .....)

"..... says the developer version will be the high end configuration of the XPS13, with 4GB of RAM, an Intel Core i7 processor and a 256GB solid state " .....

"...the demand from power users never really went away. Since the original announcement of Project Sputnik Dell has gathered extensive feedback ....."

" ......it will be more clear to buyers that this is a computer for power users........"

Read massive multi-taskers.

LOL, 4GB of RAM is too much for ya. My Linux i7 lappie has 8GB and I'm considering upgrading to 16.

Asking such questions suggest your total ignorance or lack of understanding of software writing (not really surprised ..... , )do you know who the software developers are, what they do?

People who run compilers, virtual environments software testing, code debugging whatnot, create web content software, forums/bulletins not MS office spreadsheets or watching Ucrap tube™ video snippets or searching for cooking recipes or playing Solitaire card games or use said navigational software ..........

Edited July 19, 2012 by Rumcajs