Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 01:32:24 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com> To: "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org> Cc: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: home pc use Message-ID: <019701c17224$013e6520$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <15354.60877.44081.17515@guru.mired.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Mike writes: > Try the following: > > $ cd > $ mv .xinitrc save.xinitrc > $ echo netscape > .xinitrc > $ startx > > Poof. You're now running netscape without a > window manager. Fascinating. I don't care for Netscape, but I presume I could do the same with the Linux version of Opera. > If you're not familiar with them, they were > terminal-priced boxes that ran an X server in > firmware. I've heard of them, but the rumor was that they were terribly overpriced. > From the sysadmins point of view, this was great. > You only had to manage one system, as the boxes > you put on desks didn't require management beyond > the power switch. It also provided the kind of user > mobility in the late 80s and early 90s that > Windows didn't get until the last few years. So are X Terminals still in common use? If not, why not? They sound like an excellent solution to a recurring problem with Windows (namely, the fact that users tend to screw up machines that they can fiddle with themselves). > Why restrict yourself to operating systems? Only because of the context of the conversation. > Actually, the thought of moving *any* production > environment from one OS to another is chilling. I learned the hard way that just going from one release to the next--or even just applying the latest set of patches--can be pretty chilling, too. > That's one of the things that IBM depended > on for cash flow, and that MS depends on now. Yes, all PC software companies depend on it. Unfortunately, that situation cannot endure. I'm a bit confused myself because, on the one hand, I know that Microsoft has little choice but to go to the XP model of "pay forever," but on the other hand, I'm absolutely opposed to paying for anything of the kind myself. Indeed, the day I got my FreeBSD system was the day after Windows XP went on sale. I worry about open-source products like FreeBSD, too. It's great to have such nice software for free, but where is the money going to come from to keep such p roducts alive? (Although I understand that FreeBSD is getting some cash from development of a secure version, TrustedBSD--will that become open source too, I wonder?) > Exactly. If I wanted to clone Windows, I wouldn't > run FreeBSD on my desktop. Agreed. That's why FreeBSD has just a plain text console on my desktop right now. > I've been told that you can change the window > manager on Windows (I believe they call it a > "shell"), but I've as yet to find a place to > download an alternative. On NT, at least, you can theoretically unplug the Win32 subsystem and put another one in its place. I've never heard of anyone doing it. In theory, you could have any GUI you wanted, just as with UNIX. However, with recent kludges made to NT to support DirectX and other aberrations, I don't know if this is still possible. It was never possible with the consumer-grade versions of Windows, which were just one big blob. > MS changed their license to kill Netscape's > product, which forced HP to replace their > shell with the one MS provides, creating a > measurable increase in support calls. That's a more superficial shell, though. In theory, you can chuck the entire Win32 subsystem, which goes down to the kernel. > I don't use window managers that provide > drop shadows or icons. Which window manager provides the cleanest desktop under UNIX? Also, if the window manager is just another X client, how does it manage to influence the appearance of windows created by other clients? > Well, nobody sells FreeBSD, but it sees a lot > of use in production environments with exactly > that level of support. I meant selling in the sense of successful advocacy. > Doesn't sound like you've had much experience > with commercially supported OS tech support. On the contrary, I've had a ton of experience, on _both_ sides of that fence. But if you have a hotline, you can tell your management that the vendor is working on something, and then the pressure is off. Making no progress when the ball is in the vendor's court is _much_ different from making no progress when the ball is in your court. > Telling managers "I'm waiting for an answer > from vendor tech support" is a *very* common > occurence with them. Yes, and it works well. But it only works if there _is_ a vendor tech support. Many vendors have an implicit or even an explicit obligation of performance in their support contracts, so managers know that it can't ride forever, and even if it does, they can get a lot of mileage out of saying the vendor is looking into it. > That's true. And the best MVS environment is sold > by IBM. So what? Well, an important consequence of that is that you should never try to compete on your competitor's turf. The best windowing environment around, for most purposes, is Windows. Trying to compete against Windows with a UNIX windowing environment is self-defeating. If you want to advocate UNIX (as in FreeBSD), do it by emphasizing what UNIX does best, not by continually showing what it does worst. > If you can find the .001% of applications that > aren't useless in the .1% that don't run on Windows, > you'll do fine. The chances of finding such an application would be the product of these two probabilities--or one in one hundred million. > I believe you said you were a web developer. It is one of the things I do, yes. Apache under FreeBSD. I try to avoid IIS these days. > You can build an almost complete web development > environment on FreeBSD. Probably. What would be the nearest equivalent of Visual InterDev on FreeBSD? I wouldn't need any of the fancy features, just something to manage the files in a Web-friendly way, and a nice source editor like Visual InterDev has. > ... because MSIE is your typical buggy MS trash, so > you have to QA against it to find out where they > aren't following the standards. In the most recent independent tests I've seen, MSIE adheres to Web standards better than any other browser. Only Opera makes a comparably good showing. Netscape is significantly behind, even in version 6.x; the old version 4.x had thousands of bugs and isn't even in the running (never was, actually). > Since MSIE runs on Solaris/SPARC, you can put > together a complete web development environment > on that Unix platform. But that wouldn't be free. Being in the clutches of Sun is at least as bad as being in the clutches of MS. > Since it's not repeating, I'd write it off as a > hardware hiccup. That is almost my conclusion, but I tend to write it off as a software bug that occurs only under some weird set of hardware conditions. As long as it is not occurring again and again, I'm not too worried about it. Already I am running a card with no support (some sort of GeForce card--it came with the hardware, but I run it in plain text mode), so perhaps it hit something there. The processor gets pretty warm with setiathome (49 degrees), but that still seems to be within limits, and in any case, as far as I know neither chipset/MB nor the AMD processor has any provision to boot the system if the temperature gets too high. > If that doesn't satisfy you, make sure you're > set up to capture core dumps, be prepared to debug > them, and wait for it to happen again. Dumps are not produced by default? And if it was a hard reboot (branching to the initialization address in the BIOS, or something), how would FreeBSD get a dump? > KDE is not an X server. KDE is a desktop environment. > It can be run on any machine with IP connectivity > to the X server. Including a Windows machine? Or would I still have to spend hundreds of dollars on an X server for Windows to do that? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?019701c17224$013e6520$0a00000a>