Jim Henderson schrieb:

>> 	Did you try a pre 4.2 version?
>>
>> 	4.2 was supposed to be the first stable one (by their own 
> standards).
> 
> That's a good point, 11.2 ships with version 4.3 on it, so the suggestion 
> I made as to how to enable auto-hide may not have been in an earlier 
> release.

Speaking of KDE versions: I thought I might give KDE a try (after the 
Gnome version that comes with Debian 5.0.3 "Lenny" turned out incapable 
of providing proper XDMCP support, and looks nasty with XDM instead - 
not to mention that I'm a bit worried about running it in this hybrid 
mode), but the Debian KDE package version numbering puzzles me a bit:

- According to information on the Debian wiki, Lenny is supposed to use 
KDE 3.5.
- The "kde" main package and a few others have version number "5:48".
- Most other pagages named "kde*" bear version numbers "4:3.5.some".
- Yet others bear version numbers "4:4.1.some" (some of them are titled 
kdebase-runtime*".

Anyone have some idea how to interpret this?

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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> I think the observation of most Linux users that Linux "just works" is 
> clouded by them typically having at least some basic experience in 
> administering Unix machines.

  I think it depends a lot on the hardware setup you have. With the right
hardware you probably can just install OpenSUSE or a similar distro and
everything will just work, right out of the box.

  However, if you have even slightly more exotic hardware (and sometimes
even some quite common hardware) you might have to struggle for hours
before you will get the system fully working.

  For example, when I first installed Suse on my PC it had a HomePNA card
as its network card, and it just wouldn't work. It wouldn't work with
Ubuntu or Debian either.

  I had to struggle for hours with that problem, searching the net for info
and trying tons of things. In the end, it was enought to add *one* line in
one configuration file, and the network card started working like a charm.
I just can't understand why the installer couldn't to that itself, as it
was rather obvious in restrospect (but 100% non-obvious if you don't know
about it). I don't know if newer versions of OpenSUSE have fixed this.

  Likewise many ATI graphics cards work poorly, if at all, out of the box
when installing a Linux distro (any distro). For example both Ubuntu and
Debian were completely unable to even start X with my old ATI card. Suse
was able to start it, but without any kind of hardware acceleration and
with a lousy 60 Hz refresh rate. It wasn't until I ran ATI's proprietary
configuration tool (which has to be downloaded separately from AMD's
website) that I got hardware-accelerated windowing at 85 Hz. (There exists
a third-party driver for ATI cards which is able to use higher refresh
rates and hardware acceleration, but for some reason it was unable to
*configure* itself appropriately. I had to run ATI's configuration utility
before it started working.)

  Linux distros sometimes also have problems with sound cards and sound
chips, even popular ones (eg. I have had severe problems with a SoundBlaster
Live, even though one would think there would be full support for such a
classic sound card out-of-the-box in any distro in existence).

  And be careful if you try to install Linux on a *secondary* partition,
while keeping Windows on the primary one. While distro installers generally
won't cause any harm, they might get confused and configure Grub incorrectly
so that neither OS will load (I think I had that kind of problem with
Ubuntu). You'll have to manually fix the Grub settings so that they will
work properly.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> - According to information on the Debian wiki, Lenny is supposed to use 
> KDE 3.5.
> - The "kde" main package and a few others have version number "5:48".
> - Most other pagages named "kde*" bear version numbers "4:3.5.some".
> - Yet others bear version numbers "4:4.1.some" (some of them are titled 
> kdebase-runtime*".

> Anyone have some idea how to interpret this?

  KDE (and most windowing systems in general) are quite flexible with
regard to their own version and the software versions which come bundled
with the windowing system. This means that if you have, eg. both KDE3 and
KDE4 installed in your system, you can eg. run KDE4 programs from KDE3 and
vice-versa. IIRC this goes so far that you can even run Gnome programs from
KDE, and probably the other way around. (I don't know if some programs
might present some incompatibilities if run from a different windowing
system than they were designed for, but I haven't sumbled on any yet.
Not that I use cross-system programs all that much, though.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   However, if you have even slightly more exotic hardware (and sometimes
> even some quite common hardware) you might have to struggle for hours
> before you will get the system fully working.

Even with pretty simple hardware, I usually wind up installing a new Windows 
three or four times on the first day before I get everything working the way 
I want.  Of course, I notice when something's broken, so maybe that's part 
of the explanation.  Like on this machine, some audio-based process sucked 
up a constant 10% CPU time even when the machine was idle, until I avoided 
installing the manufacturer's custom driver for something unrelated (screen? 
Keyboard? Network? Some such nonsense that came with the machine) and used 
the one off Windows Update.  I'm sure many people wouldn't have even noticed 
that the distro that came with the machine was broken.

I check the Device Manager for "didn't install" devices and see if I can 
resolve it, too, which often takes a few tries to get right.

I've used only a few different Linux's, but I have to say that Warp's advice 
to use OpenSuSE was spot on the money if you don't know what you're doing 
already.

>   And be careful if you try to install Linux on a *secondary* partition,

Oh, that's the other thing that takes a while to figure out on each new 
Windows install. :)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Warp wrote:
>   For one, it's not possible to set the taskbar to autohide (I really
>   can't understand why).

It's three clicks away here (KDE 4.3).

> For another, it's not possible to configure virtual
> desktop switching to the mouse wheel (when used on the background).

It's doing it by default for me.

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clipka wrote:
> - According to information on the Debian wiki, Lenny is supposed to use
> KDE 3.5.
> - The "kde" main package and a few others have version number "5:48".
> - Most other pagages named "kde*" bear version numbers "4:3.5.some".
> - Yet others bear version numbers "4:4.1.some" (some of them are titled
> kdebase-runtime*".
> 
> Anyone have some idea how to interpret this?

Step 1: ignore the "4:" at the beginning of KDE package versions, it's a 
Debian thing.

The thing before the colon is an "epoch". It's there so that if someone 
messes up with version numbers, or if the numbering scheme changes 
completely, they can increase the epoch to make sure the "is version X newer 
or older than Y" works properly.

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Warp wrote:
> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> > For another, it's not possible to configure virtual
>> > desktop switching to the mouse wheel (when used on the background).
> 
>> Interesting, I never thought about this use of the mouse wheel before.
> 
>   It's addictive once you get used to it. Guess why I didn't like KDE4.

When my mouse wheel broke, and I bought a new mouse, I configured Compiz to 
switch desktops when I move the wheel *sideways* (interesting feature of new 
mouse :P). A global shortcut too, worked no matter where the cursor was.

I didn't find how to set that up in KDE yet.

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> Next, I installed Windows 7 Ultimate N on the system.  On the plus side -
> the installation was FAST.  Of the three full product installs, it was
> the fastest, actually.  I think it took about the same amount of time as
> Windows 3.1 did if you took out the diskette swapping.
>
> But it failed to detect my wireless card.  I had to actually plug into
> the wired network.  Then it downloaded updates automatically and
> installed a driver for the wireless card.  OK, it did eventually work;
> but with oS 11.2, it just worked - didn't have to download anything.

Lucky for you, when I installed Win7 (it was also a 32bit -> 64bit OS 
upgrade for me) it turned out the wireless card I had has a *really* crappy 
website, and of course no 64bit drivers at all.  Luckily I have another 
desktop PC with a wireless card from a more reputable manufacturer (which of 
course advertised Win7 and 64bit compatibility on their website) so I simply 
swapped them over.

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clipka wrote:

 
> When I got my AMD Phenom machine, I installed Debian "Etch" 4.0r5 on it
> out-of-the-box. Everything /seemed/ to be fine, until I discovered that
> something was wrong with the system time: The clock ran double speed!

Yup, on my previous motherboard, with Fedora 6, the clock SLOWED DOWN when I 
was rendering with Pov. As the load average went up, the clock ticked slower 
and slower. If you left the machine on for a week straight of rendering in 
Pov under Linux, you'd loose about 45 minutes.

-- 
Stefan Viljoen

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On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:15:43 +0100, scott wrote:

>> Next, I installed Windows 7 Ultimate N on the system.  On the plus side
>> - the installation was FAST.  Of the three full product installs, it
>> was the fastest, actually.  I think it took about the same amount of
>> time as Windows 3.1 did if you took out the diskette swapping.
>>
>> But it failed to detect my wireless card.  I had to actually plug into
>> the wired network.  Then it downloaded updates automatically and
>> installed a driver for the wireless card.  OK, it did eventually work;
>> but with oS 11.2, it just worked - didn't have to download anything.
> 
> Lucky for you, when I installed Win7 (it was also a 32bit -> 64bit OS
> upgrade for me) it turned out the wireless card I had has a *really*
> crappy website, and of course no 64bit drivers at all.  Luckily I have
> another desktop PC with a wireless card from a more reputable
> manufacturer (which of course advertised Win7 and 64bit compatibility on
> their website) so I simply swapped them over.

I actually had opportunity last night to install WinXP on the same 
hardware (the third of the three laptops) for a coworker who needed it 
for some software testing he's doing.  Using the recovery CD provided by 
Dell, I still had to download the drivers for the system.  I'm sure there 
probably was a driver DVD that I wasn't given to do the installation, but 
still....the D610 is older hardware and XP is an older OS; it seems that 
regardless of whether it's a new version of Windows or an older one, it 
took more work to get it to work than 11.2 did. :-)

Jim

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