Plan for the New LUAU

[Warren Togami]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin" <proforce65 at hawaii.rr.com>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at luau.hi.net>
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2001 6:45 PM
Subject: [luau] Re: Plan for the New LUAU


> I wish sometimes that there was only one linux version.  IMHO, this is
> what's holding linux back.

Yes, I also believe that there are many standardization problems in Linux.
While the hackers and power users may like the many options available for
their desktops (KDE, Gnome) and the myriad of window managers
(Enlightenment, twm, sawfish, cwm, icewm, and a hundred others), several
sound systems (esd, KDE sound, Gnome sound, etc.) and many Linux
distributions to choose from, this confuses the heck out of everyone else.
I believe that these many competing standards and the lack of a unified,
standard GUI configurator is scaring a lot of people, especially enterprise
people, from adopting Linux and open source.

Don't get me wrong though.  All of these technologies are becoming very
mature now, and they are increasingly interoperable, so eventually it wont
really matter what you use.  It'll just plain work.

>
> I see posts here everyday from people telling us to use freeBSD.  That it
is
> better then redhat.  I use redhat to long to learn another version.  Total
> confusion!  If you checkout freeBSD's homepage and start looking around
you
> will notice that it's command and file system is different from redhat.

Just because one person says FreeBSD is better does not necessarily mean
FreeBSD is better.  That only means that person likes FreeBSD better.
And they have good reason.  FreeBSD does a very good job at many things,
including their memory subsystem, TCP/IP stack and firewall routing stuff.
FreeBSD runs binaries from many other operating systems including Linux.
FreeBSD had stateful inspection in firewalling LONG BEFORE Linux had it.
Their filesystem is much safer and less prone to damage on crash.  However,
there is less hardware support and corporate backing (to create more
hardware support), and it doesn't scale well with SMP yet.

FreeBSD and Linux have own fortes, with a lot of overlap.  Your choice
really.

>
> I like using the console sometimes, but I prefer using gui.  But then
again,
> redhat's gnome doesn't work that great.  Netscape and the dialer crashes
all
> the time.  Java at http://www.funcom.com crashes.  But then again the
> ethernet networking/roadrunner runs great.  So maybe I should give freeBSD
a
> try or not?
>
>

Yeah.  Redhat never was very stable (in their client desktop and
applications).  They made the mistake a while back to include Gnome long
before it was ready and stable.  Things are a bit better in Redhat 7.0 (if
you don't mind the broken compiler or you're not a software developer).  But
now if you use Ximian (formerly Helix) Gnome you should have very little
problems.  Soon Gnome will come with Eazel's Nautilus instead of that crappy
GMC filemanager, and things will be a lot smoother and friendly.

For your web browser try Mozilla.  Check http://www.mozillazine.org to see
if the daily build has a thumbs up or down rating.  Be sure to get the
latest Netscape 6 plugins, toss them into your plugins directory and you
should be good to go.  For java applets I heard more people had success with
the Blackdown plugin, but I could never get that thing running in NS6 or
Mozilla.  If you're gonna try the Sun JVM be sure to get v1.3_01.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com