...making Linux just a little more fun!
By Jim Dennis, Jason Creighton, Chris G, Karl-Heinz, and... (meet the Gang) ... the Editors of Linux Gazette... and You!
From Rick Moen
Answered By: (folks on the ILUG mailing list) Kevin Lyda, Rick Moen, Braun Brelin, David Golden
[Mailing list participant Braun Brelin inadvertently triggered a noisy 100-post distribution-advocacy flamewar by asking what's the "best 64-bit Linux distro". These meta-comments followed:] -- Heather
[Kevin]
So, after that long thread, I'm wondering what Braun thinks of his
choice.
No, no, not the distro choice; his choice of ILUG as a place to email a question about Linux distros...
[Rick] Are you suggesting that there's at least one on-line Linux forum on the globe where soliciting "Suggestions for best 64-bit [sic] Linux distro" would not constitute the hapless posting of flamebait?[Rick] Are you suggesting that there's at least one on-line Linux forum on the globe where soliciting "Suggestions for best 64-bit [sic] Linux distro" would not constitute the hapless posting of flamebait?
Someone with a bit more common sense might have posted "Here's the Linux distros I'm aware of, so far, with active x86_64 ports: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, SuSE, RHEL, CentOS, Tao Linux, Scientific Linux, CRUX, Lineox, cAos-2, RockLinux, Knoppix64, Slamd64 (Slackware), StartCom, SourceMage, Rocks, rpath Linux, Kanotix, White Box. Any others worth mentioning?"
Someone might even have chased down a long batch of URLs for publication. -- Heather
[Kevin]
What can I say, I'm a Pisces; I dream a lot. Dreaming or not, I do
think a nearly 100-message thread on it borders on farce.
Any others worth mentioning?"
It would be nice to get some ideas of what people are using. If you
want to use a distro that will have local support, I think the question
has some merit.
[Rick] We Tauruses, by comparison, are too stubborn to believe in astrology.[Rick] We Tauruses, by comparison, are too stubborn to believe in astrology.
Just as a reminder, though, the question posed was "What's the best...?"
You're a Taurus? I've always wondered, how do you acquire flatware?
Just as a reminder, though: The question posed was "What's the
best...?"
Yes, OK, that wasn't the wisest choice of words. But still, no matter
how distro questions are asked, these threads always seem to careen out
of control.
[Braun] I was rather amused, actually. I was thinking of asking another question on the list about GNOME vs. KDE, to see if I could spark another long flamewar.[Braun] I was rather amused, actually. I was thinking of asking another question on the list about GNOME vs. KDE, to see if I could spark another long flamewar.
[David Golden] Bah. Neither approach the professionalism of classic X desktops.[David Golden] Bah. Neither approach the professionalism of classic X desktops.
Okay, in most respects they do, but one thing really annoys me about both KDE and GNOME is the way they still don't handle applications running from different machines and home directories properly at all. They make the assumption, time and again, that all the apps on the screen are running on the one display with prefs in the one home directory. If I wanted that, I could get a fucking Macincrap.
Older X applications used the xrdb, so that UI configuration was a property of the display. All your resource db-supporting apps could look just how you wanted them, no matter which host they were running from.
Then 10000 Windows-developer-weenies apparently jumped ship to Linux, bringing an incoherent mess of files stuck in the home directory and slagged off xrdb while completely missing the point of it, so we have things like the unadulterated horror of GConf. A few did eventually grasp what xrdb brought, and I acknowledge that xrdb would need heavy tweaking bordering on rearchitecting for "modern" preference datatypes, but they really threw the baby out with the bathwater by forsaking its core ideal of dynamic, server-brokered preferences.
P.S. See "man Xaw" for an interesting hack: you can now specify the vector-drawing commands used to draw a widget in the "displayList" xrdb resource of an Athena widget...
[Braun Brelin].
[Rick Moen] It's a reasonable concern.[Rick Moen] namespace collision with Itanium.
.
Imagine my surprise when, upon trying to run it, the shell script complains that the architecture is incompatible with the drivers....