Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 17:57:01 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: home pc use Message-ID: <15354.60877.44081.17515@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <108388988@toto.iv>
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Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com> types: > Ceri writes: > > I refute your assumption that a system that > > doesn't run Windows applications is useless. > If you can get by without any Windows applications, your refutation is valid. > But most people need to run at least a few Windows applications, unless they > have Macs (which have a large enough choice of applications to avoid Windows > entirely and still get lots of things done). I run no MS-Windows applications. I have a test machine that runs windows so I can verify that hardware works with the vendor-provided driver, but it has no other uses. > > There you go again. > > Window Managers Do Not Run Applications. > > All you need is an X server to run Netscape. > Maybe I'm confused. How do you run an X server or an application within it > without a window manager? Try the following: $ cd $ mv .xinitrc save.xinitrc $ echo netscape > .xinitrc $ startx Poof. You're now running netscape without a window manager. X10's window managers sucked so badly that when forced to use it, I didn't bother with a window manager - I ran emacs as above. To the X server, a window manager is just another client. There can only be one such per screen, but there are other applications with similar constraints. The only part of an X workstation that has to run on the workstation proper is the server. You can run the window manager on a second computer somewhere (I just had a disturbing thought. plwm might run on a *MS-Windows* box and talk to the X server on your Unix workstation!) and let it manage windows on a workstation. In fact, that's the basic idea behind the "X-station". If you're not familiar with them, they were terminal-priced boxes that ran an X server in firmware. The only thing that ran on them was the X server. When you turned them on, they would use XDCMP to find a box running xdm to get a login window, which would then run your X environment on some other machine. 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. > > Generally, that is indeed true, but you don't > > seem to have much experience of Unix like systems, > > let alone FreeBSD. > It's true with all of them, rest assured. In fact, when you look at the source > code of multiple operating systems, it's surprising how often you see the same > algorithms over and over. Why restrict yourself to operating systems? When you look at the source code to most non-trivial programs, it's surprising how often you see the same algorithms over and over. That's why high level languages incorporate things like lists, dictionaries, tuples and so on. Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com> types: > Exactly. A production machine is _very_ different from a fun-and-games or hobby > machine. > > Just as the thought of replacing FreeBSD with NT to run my production Web site > chills the blood in my veins, so the thought of trying to get FreeBSD to replace > my Windows desktop seems fraught with peril, and it serves no useful purpose. Actually, the thought of moving *any* production environment from one OS to another is chilling. That's one of the things that IBM depended on for cash flow, and that MS depends on now. Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com> types: > It may be, if your needs are very limited. I have more than 100 applications > that I use on Windows, though, and there is just no way to get the equivalent on > FreeBSD--nor do I have any motivation to try to do so. Why would I want a clone > of Windows? I already _have_ Windows. Exactly. If I wanted to clone Windows, I wouldn't run FreeBSD on my desktop. Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com> types: > > Not everyone wants their systems to look like > > and feel like windows. > > Maybe, but you'd never know that from the fervor with which UNIX users (or > newbies, at least) rush to install GUI environments on their machines. You're confusing two different things. A GUI environment (hmm, I'm not sure I've got one now, as I'm running a window manager that doesn't use the mouse) doesn't have to look and feel like Windows. If they did, there'd be no point in running anything but Windows on the desktop. 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. I know Netscape was marketing one, and HP used to ship their own shell. 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. > Maybe I should take a poll: How many FreeBSD users here are satisfied with just > the standard command-line interface and interactions through terminal-style > remote programs like telnet or ssh? I'll raise my hand, but I daresay that I > won't see too many other hands going up. Why don't you try asking how many people want their desktop to look and feel like Windows? I bet you get about the same number of hands, either way. > > I for one would never have installed FreeBSD on > > my computers 5 or 6 years ago if it had looked > > like windows. > I installed FreeBSD specifically with the intent of leaving it in its native > state. It's a server, not a desktop. If I want to throw away vast amounts of > horsepower putting drop shadows and sparkly highlights on screen icons, I'll do > it on my Windows desktop system (heck, do I have a choice?). If you used a FreeBSD desktop, you would have a choice. I don't use window managers that provide drop shadows or icons. If I could find such a thing for Windows, I'd be much more likely to use it than FreeBSD on the desktop. > > Support is not difficult to get, but most FreeBSD > > users expect the user who is asking questions on > > this list to read the manpages and search the > > list archives before emailing the list. > I think we are desynchronized a bit. I was talking about production use of the > OS. Sorry, but you cannot sell an OS for use in production environments with > the advice to "read the man pages" or "e-mail this list" if support is required. Well, nobody sells FreeBSD, but it sees a lot of use in production environments with exactly that level of support. > Most production environments require hotline support for the products used. If > the system goes down with 1500 users connected, you cannot spend several hours > reading through man pages or waiting for e-mail to be answered to resolve the > problem; you need an engineer on the phone _right now_ who is competent to help > you bring the system back up _right now_. If you tell your manager that you're > waiting for some friends in cyberspace to give you a few educated guesses as to > what's wrong, both you and your manager will be flipping burgers before the week > is out. Doesn't sound like you've had much experience with commercially supported OS tech support. Telling managers "I'm waiting for an answer from vendor tech support" is a *very* common occurence with them. > No, it is a logical inevitability. What is Windows? It's the environment > provided by the Microsoft Windows operating system. So where are you likely to > find the most perfect implementation of a Windows environment? Under Microsoft > Windows, of course! That's never going to change. That's true. And the best MVS environment is sold by IBM. So what? > > Personally if the desktop system functions and I > > can get work done, I don't care if it looks like > > and acts like windows, and the less it looks like > > windows, the better. > The problem is that 99.9% of all applications out there in the world today will > not run except on a system that looks and acts exactly like Windows. So you are > stuck with the Windows environment whether you want it or not. No, you're not. The key is realizing that no matter what you do, 99.999% of all applications are useless. 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. I believe you said you were a web developer. You can build an almost complete web development environment on FreeBSD. The one thing that's missing is MSIE - 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. Since MSIE runs on Solaris/SPARC, you can put together a complete web development environment on that Unix platform. > Long ago, I saw a very simple windowed desktop on DEC UNIX systems, if I > remember correctly. Can anyone tell me what sort of environment that was? I > don't need something fancy, just something that will let me run programs that > require an X environment. I don't care if I hear lovely chimes when I > double-click on icons, and I don't need to have a menu of 3,245 desktop themes > to choose from. DEC workstations shipped with the mwm window manager as the default window manager. At the time, it was a pretty fancy window manager. It's still a lot heavier than anything I'd call "simple". As indicated above, the simplest window manager of them all is not bothering to run one. The closest thing to that is ratpoison, which is in the ports tree. No icons, now frames, no sounds; it's all driven from the keyboard. Beyond that there are a number of window managers that don't do any icons and only provide simple frames. I prefer lwm from that set, but it's certainly not the only choice. All of which is why I run FreeBSD on my desktop - because I believe that computers should adapt to users, and not vice versa. I get to run a window manager that suits my desires, instead of having to subjugate my desires to what Redmond provides me. > The problem of a mysterious reboot during the night is one of them: My system > rebooted abruptly sometime during the night, on one single occasion, which has > not been repeated. There seems to be no evidence of what happened; I asked here > if there was any place where I could look for clues, but didn't get much of an > answer. The system was running setiathome, and a cron job was executing (I know > this from the last screen output by top on a remote terminal before the system > went down). Nothing else. The system has been in the same state on many other > occasions, but no reboots have occurred. Since it's not repeating, I'd write it off as a hardware hiccup. 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. I've never run into a commercial support organization that would provide better results than what I just told you. If you can't repeat a problem, then there's no way it can be diagnosed and know that it's fixed. Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com> types: > Kris writes: > > I don't know what you mean by "functional and > > ergonomic equivalent of Microsoft Windows". > I mean something that does everything that Microsoft Windows does, with the same > ease of use. If that includes running Windows software, you're stuck. Of course, that also means you're stuck with the lousy GUI that Windows gives you. Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com> types: > Ceri writes: > > The X server runs on the workstation. > If all these people running X Servers like KDE are not running them on the UNIX > machine itself from the console, where _are_ they running them, exactly? 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. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Q: How do you make the gods laugh? A: Tell them your plans. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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