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Posted on 03/12/2009 9:39:28 AM PDT by N3WBI3
Being an open source advocate apparently can be dangerous to your health -- or at least your hair. That's what Helios' Ken Starks found, anyway, when a field technician took issue with the threat of FOSS to his livelihood. Then there are the tips, lots of Linux tips.
It seems a fair statement to say that we here in the FOSS community are well-accustomed to ridicule. That, after all, is a cross one must often bear when walking a righteous path outside the mainstream -- as has been aptly demonstrated, we might add, in countless examples throughout the annals of time.
But for one of us to get assaulted simply because he is a Linux advocate? That is far beyond the bounds of what we can be expected to endure.
Sure enough, though, that's just what happened not long ago to none other than the Helios Project's own Ken Starks. Yes, Starks was apparently minding his own business at a gas station recently when a disgruntled Windows field technician for a local computer vendor verbally and physically accosted him for "costing us our jobs," Starks recounts.
Turns out an exchange of the usual pleasantries had revealed that Starks was a FOSS advocate, leading the Windows tech to take matters into his own hands. No one was seriously injured, thank goodness, but it's a warning for us all! Supporting free and open source More about open source software is not for the faint of heart, particularly during these tough economic times. 'You'd Have to Be a Complete Moron'
Bloggers on Digg and LXer picked right up on the news, you can be sure, as did countless others throughout the blogosphere.
"I have been saying it for 20 years: Windows is not an OS. It's an employment program," wrote TexMexRex among the more than 350 comments on Digg.
"And if somebody finds a cure for cancer, they'll be putting millions of cancer researchers out of a job," quipped Renton.
On the other hand: "You'd have to be a complete moron to believe this," 0x0000ff asserted. Tips Geeks Should Know
Yes well, living well is the best revenge, as they say; what better way to show where your loyalties lie than by digging even deeper into geekdom?
Several posts have been offered in recent weeks to help readers do just that, beginning with "Linux tips every geek should know" on TuxRadar.
The list of 57 tips -- beginning with "check processes not run by you" and ending with "Mac filtering Host AP" -- drew more than 2,000 Diggs and countless comments across the blogs. So enthusiastic was the response, in fact, that TuxRadar later added "More Linux tips every geek should know," with another 50 little gems.
That's exactly 107 priceless tips for penguin supporters to feast upon and enjoy! How to Become an 'Apt Guru'
Then, of course, there was also the recent post on MakeTechEasier entitled, "Things you need to know to become an apt guru" -- also filled with much sage advice.
When it rains, it pours!
Inspired by these sudden riches, we couldn't resist taking a small poll of bloggers' reactions.
"I don't really have much to add here -- there's some great tips," Kevin Dean, a blogger on Monochrome Mentality, told LinuxInsider.
One of them was particularly timely for Dean, in fact. "Having just moved, my wife and I are both coping with not having a home Internet 10th Annual Online Fraud Report. Online Payment Fraud Trends, Merchant Practices and Benchmarks. Get your copy today. connection," he explained. "We're trying to extend our range to mooch off of the neighbor's AP. As I skimmed this article I pulled out my laptop and tried forcing my wlan's connection speed, and it appears it's not yet supported. 2.6.28 seems to hold some promise in that area." Building Packages From Source
Also worth highlighting -- this time from the "apt guru" article, Dean added -- "is how amazingly simple it is to build packages from source with Debian's tools.
"Say I'm interested in pulling in the latest copy of screen that has just been introduced into Debian Experimental, and I'm running Ubuntu," he explained. "I'd add the Debian source directory (deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental main), run my update (apt-get update) and then begin," he went on.
"'apt-get source screen' would pull the source code; 'sudo apt-get build-dep screen' would install the needed build dependencies automatically; cd scree[tab] would change me into the source directory of screen (if your shell has tab completion); 'fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage' would configure, compile, build and package screen," he said. "In the directory above, I'd have a fresh .deb file ready for installation on my system." 'There's Beauty in This Example'
It may not be a paradigm of simplicity, "but there's beauty in this example," Dean asserted. "Notice I was actually mixing repositories, not from different releases, but different distributions! Building .debs from source makes this fairly simple and not so failure-prone. If there are dramatic inconsistencies, this process fails rather than breaking your system."
Others had different favorites to extol.
"My favorite tip is SSH," educator and blogger Robert Pogson told LinuxInsider.
"I have a couple of geeky students who are learning the ins and outs of the PC with GNU/Linux and hardware tricks," he began. "They had a defective CD drive and could not do the usual installation.
"I called them over to my desk and typed a few commands after netbooting the box using a floppy," he said. "I installed a netboot loader on the master boot record of the hard drive and rebooted the box to boot from the hard drive without leaving my chair -- the ultimate triumph of a geek."
The result? "The boys' mouths dropped open and they doubled over in exultation -- great fun!" he said. 'How Cool Is That?'
Another trick Pogson likes is forwarding X over the SSH connection. "With this I can run an application on a GNU/Linux machine where I have set up passwordless sessions," he explained. "'ssh -Y beast iceweasel --no-remote' starts my favorite browser on another machine so I can use its resources and browse the Web all at the same time remotely."
"How cool is that? We can all own a supercomputer More about supercomputer cluster incorporating our new machines with the old ones in a harmonious system using links on our menus and desktops," he added.
Some Linux fans -- such as Montreal consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack -- thought the lists of 107 tips were "a tad dated.
"The newer IDE code will optimize a lot of things for you," Mack told LinuxInsider. "You can tell if you're using the new drivers by the drive showing up as /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda." 'The Joys Are Great'
Others held up the tips as an illustration of why Linux has not yet won mainstream acceptance.
"If you have anything go wrong in Linux, your advice will ALWAYS be 'Launch Bash and type' -- which of course just killed any chance at all of having the average PC user keep your system," Slashdot blogger hairyfeet told LinuxInsider.
"In the 15 years I have been building, repairing, and servicing Windows, both home and business, I can count the number of times I HAD to use CLI on one hand and have fingers left over," he said. "There should not be a single task that you can do in Linux that requires a CLI. None."
Still, there's no doubt that there's much to love about Linux -- at least in the right hands.
"Whoohoo!" concluded Pogson. "The joys of being a computer geek are great with GNU/Linux.
OSS PING
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Ha what fun!
I will have to get gramma on ‘ubuntu’ so when her webserver for her mahjohn group fails she can bash— or can tell if you’re using the new drivers by the drive showing up as /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda
She wiull be so thrilled next time she wast to get email pictures from the grandchildren that she can pull in the latest copy of screen that has just been introduced into Debian Experimental
You Linux geeks are as bad as liberals
I bet the story of being assaulted by a windows tech is just as truthful as the last few liberal hoaxes about someone typing ‘nigger’ on the car door of a guest liberal speaker at a college event (turns out she wrote it herself to show how mean spiritted race debate has become)
Look, nobody is FORCING you to use windows. Use linux and create all the open source software you like- I love it I can get stuff free from you guys- and I am grateful.
Just don’t FORCE everyone to share your beliefs or feel you are somehow superior the way liberals feel everyone else HAS TO become socialists.
Oh, and ‘Ubuntu’ is a silly name for ANYTHING
I take it your part of the windows employment program..
I used windows/linux 50/50. I am a computer engineer and make systems using whatever tool gets the job done.
It just gives me great pleasure to tweek the Linux geeks
After 50 years Unix still is not the main stream PC operating system for EXACTLY the reasons stated in this article.
And they still cannot figure it out
Look, I KNOW it is a superior operating system, I use it and I have a degree in computer science AND physics.
But it bugs me when people act like liberals about government OR operating systems- and the linux zealots are like religios fanatics too sometimes.
oh- and I was around long enought to learn on unix in school.
I wateched these same geek types laugh at DOS, WINDOWS, OS/@ and (God help us) OS/2 WARP and every version on up...
Laugh and laugh... while they were losing ground to DOS(!!)
Even Apple had a better operating system, but the superior attitude has left it in 10% of the market.
>Look, I KNOW it is a superior operating system, I use it and I have a degree in computer science AND physics.
I disagree. While Windows “Would you like to continue?” Vista was definitely a [VERY LARGE] step in the wrong direction, XP and 98SE were superior, even to linux, in the sense that for simple and routine things you never felt like you were fighting against the OS... With linux, I’m constantly having to fight the OS. (The other day I was over my quota and couldn’t do any file-maintenance to get back to the allowed size, so I had to do some searching and finally found that the directory containing my trashcan was full and had to do a “rm .* -r -f” just to empty it.)
I meant LINUX is superior operating system
oops I misunderstood you
I agree it is vastly superior in terms of ease of use compared to Linux.
But in terms of security and stability Unix/Linux is still better (and more of a ‘real’ operating system)
You would think in 50 years they (linux geeks) could program it to look and run like windows or something USER FRIENDLY
Win2K professional (and winXP pro) were mighty fine, and Vista is stupid
It requires several assumptions--what purpose are you using it for? What task is being asked of it? What knowledge must the user have (or not have)? What's the background and habits of the person making the claim? What are the needs of the user?
One cannot make a blanket statement like "xxxx is the superior operating system" and leave it at that. That is way to general to make any sense.
...or something USER FRIENDLY
They have. KDE, Gnome, and Xfce are all very user friendly. They're just NOT Windows.
Frankly, I’m rather disappointed at the state of OS-es. (I have one that I’ve “back-burner”-ed...thinking on design issues and trying to finish my CS degree.)
I do think that the “everything is a file/bag-o-bits” mentality is a misdesign. Plus it makes the filesystem pug-ugly... and then there’s the encoding of device attributes into the FS, equally ugly.
I’m much more comfortable with the software-ish mindset of “everything is an object”... in regards to OS anyway. Because then you can have properties, functions, procedures, attributes, etc. And, from the “software mindset”, your file-objects could have read/write-to-stream methods where the stream is the interface to the physical media. A “monitor” object to map the capabilities of a monitor, etc.
Yeah but gramma can’t get a virus on Ubuntu.
Welcome to Windows.
Linux has some very good features but XP has it's points too. To compare them and say "this one is better" makes no sense.
I gave an example of one area wherein linux is not superior, routine file-maintenance. (I have had fewer troubles with file-maintenance on all my pre-vista combined than the last 4 years of dealing with the CS department’s linux machines.) That is the only issue I was addressing there; in other words I was refuting the blanket statement “Linux is the superior OS” by pointing out one area that it is not superior.
Currently showing sda, not hda.
No doubt, the stock market is in meltdown, both houses of Congress run by liberals, a communist just got elected president, and these guys come to FR to pimp Linux. At least it's entertaining watching them spin on their heads when you point out Obama is a big open source pimp himself.
You’ve got the right idea.
I was watching during the court cases where Gates tried to say that Internet Explorer was “part of the operating system” and it made me crazy.
I wish I could have testified that anythig above and beyond controlling the actual hardware is above the call of an operating systems and in the realm of user software. Because I knew the judges wouldn’t understand any of this.
>I wish I could have testified that anythig above and beyond controlling the actual hardware is above the call of an operating systems and in the realm of user software. Because I knew the judges wouldn’t understand any of this.
True, strictly speaking. However, UI _is_ used to control the hardware (in some sense), or in the limited cases of dedicated/embedded systems show the operator something (like the ‘check engine’ light in a car, etc.).
Another example, I’m thinking about making the OS’s memory manager (via subclass, interface or somesuch) available to user programs. While this may be “above and beyond” the call of an OS, it would be better, IMO, to provide memory-management and garbage-collection to the programmer rather than forcing them to use malloc and other-such minutia that are incidental to performing the procedure you are trying to finish.
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