thelinuxlink.net

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6170488551.html

I'm getting ready to move over from Ubuntu to Debian testing myself.

Great, so the next MEPIS release will be based off 9-month old Debian code. How exactly is using Debian stable a long term solution? Obviously he'll need to start building off of their testing or unstable branches, leaving him in the same boat as before...

So, um, he expected Dapper to continue to get all the latest updates or something? It was really pretty damn clear that Dapper was going to be frozen after Dapper +1 rolled around, but that it would continue to receive security updates and bugfixes. Is there some reason he doesn't just roll his own packages for updates?

As far as *buntu goes, I've actually been pretty happy with Feisty - they did away with a few "features" that bugged the hell out of me, and the upgrade from Edgy actually *worked*. That was a nice surprise.

i started testing before etch came out , when it arrived i stayed on it for a few months, then about a week ago updated to testing, because the first month or so can be a real mess after release, now that the dust has settled testing/lenny is actually good, pretty upto day as far as packages go. There is pidgin, latest iceweasel , amarok 1.4.6 , gnome 2.18, kde 3.5.7, 2.6.21 kernel amongst other stuff.

I've read posts from people who switched from Ubuntu to Lenny that they find Lenny to actually be more stable. I also just like the idea of switching to pure Debian goodness philosophically.

Well, Ubuntu is inherently more stable than Debian testing simply because it's tested and feature-frozen. Debian testing is a moving target, and you never know if something might blow up. It's unlikely with Debian, but there are no guarantees. My question is, why the hell are they waiting until September of next year to make another release? Why does Debian wait so long to freeze testing and release it as stable? Surely if Ubuntu can shoot for 6-month release cycles, Debian could try for 12-month releases.

Wally Balljacker wrote:Well, Ubuntu is inherently more stable than Debian testing simply because it's tested and feature-frozen. Debian testing is a moving target, and you never know if something might blow up. It's unlikely with Debian, but there are no guarantees. My question is, why the hell are they waiting until September of next year to make another release? Why does Debian wait so long to freeze testing and release it as stable? Surely if Ubuntu can shoot for 6-month release cycles, Debian could try for 12-month releases.

Really?!?

I find Debian Testing very stable, and also as up to date as I would want to be. I do believe that Debian Sid is a moving target, but my experience gives the nod to Debian Testing for stability over Ubuntu and other distros.

I will say that I'm using Fedora 7, and working through a few issues, but nothing major yet. (For example, /sbin was not included in the PATH for a regular user so using "ifconfig" brought back the error "command not found". This was an easy fix however, and Fedora 7 has been solid so far for me.)

mowestusa wrote:I will say that I'm using Fedora 7, and working through a few issues, but nothing major yet. (For example, /sbin was not included in the PATH for a regular user so using "ifconfig" brought back the error "command not found". This was an easy fix however, and Fedora 7 has been solid so far for me.)

I have found the reason for this. As a regular user, your PATH doesn't include /sbin, and if you use just "su" to become root in the terminal, your normal user's PATH is maintained, however if you use "su -" which is a full root login, then the root user's PATH will be used. This a feature, not a bug. I would guess it's done to keep dumb admins from screwing up a server or something. Remember, Red Hat do have to keep dumbfuck Windows admins in mind.

Tsuroerusu wrote:I have found the reason for this. As a regular user, your PATH doesn't include /sbin, and if you use just "su" to become root in the terminal, your normal user's PATH is maintained, however if you use "su -" which is a full root login, then the root user's PATH will be used. This a feature, not a bug. I would guess it's done to keep dumb admins from screwing up a server or something. Remember, Red Hat do have to keep dumbfuck Windows admins in mind.

I think your making a good point "T". On the Fedora forums "su -" was pointed out to me. This is the first time I have ever encountered this issue. You might be right about wanting to protect the system from Windows admins. I have gotten so used to using ifconfig to figure out what ip address the DHCP on the router gave to my system that I had no idea that my regular user would be handicapped in this way. I am impressed with this system so far.

I absolutely love the look of Fedora 7, the default graphics just blows away any thing that I have seen with other Distros. I am finding out that some of my familiar CLI tools are not included with the install and needed to be added from repos. I also could not live completely free. I needed to to install flash and mp3 encoding and playing, because of how I want to use the system. Right now I needed streaming mp3 for an internet broadcast that I'm listening to this week. I'm still using the "nv" free driver, but that is because I don't game. I'm wondering if I should install the non-free nvidia drivers though. I'm having a little lag with the icons appearing in the menus when I click on them. There is a second or two delay, which I did not expect with a Athlon 1ghz chip and 320megs of ram. I thinking of boosting the ram to 512 too, but don't want to spend the money on this old machine to go any higher.

mowestusa wrote:I am impressed with this system so far.

I got so hooked on respinning Fedora that I set up a local mirror on my FreeBSD box.

mowestusa wrote:I absolutely love the look of Fedora 7, the default graphics just blows away any thing that I have seen with other Distros. I am finding out that some of my familiar CLI tools are not included with the install and needed to be added from repos.

Just curious, are you using GNOME or KDE? I installed the KDE LiveCD, and it's been really great on both my desktop and laptop.

mowestusa wrote:I also could not live completely free. I needed to to install flash and mp3 encoding and playing, because of how I want to use the system. Right now I needed streaming mp3 for an internet broadcast that I'm listening to this week.

Well, if you use the libmad codec for playing MP3s, and LAME for encoding them, then MP3 is no less proprietary than say GNU/Linux itself is, since it's a free implementation of UNIX. Libmad and LAME are free implementations of MP3.
I use libmad to play MP3s that I might come across, that the historical ones that I already have.
I personally don't use Flash, primarily because it's not free software, and also because I hate it like the plague. I can not stand Flash ads, and I hate Flash sites in general. Also, when playing a video on YouTube, I hate the "buffering" thing, so I just download the video and then play it.

mowestusa wrote:I'm still using the "nv" free driver, but that is because I don't game. I'm wondering if I should install the non-free nvidia drivers though. I'm having a little lag with the icons appearing in the menus when I click on them. There is a second or two delay, which I did not expect with a Athlon 1ghz chip and 320megs of ram.

It's not a bug, it's a feature of GNOME!
It's like this on my laptop, which uses the free ATi drivers for full 3D, so no need for the NVIDIA blob.
I use KDE, and my menus are smoking fast!

Tsuroerusu wrote:Just curious, are you using GNOME or KDE? I installed the KDE LiveCD, and it's been really great on both my desktop and laptop.

I'm using GNOME installed off of the GNOME Live Fedora 7 CD. I'm doing this mostly because I have gotten used to GNOME. I loved KDE when I first tried Linux 3 years ago. However, I moved to Ubuntu about 1 1/2 years ago. At that time, there were a number of complaints with Kubuntu, but now it seems like those issues are fixed. However, I wanted a solid experience, so I went with a stock Ubuntu install with GNOME. I wanted this current desktop to be my "easy" Linux system to use. I have plenty of CLI machines, but I wanted to have some of the bells of a full desktop environment. So I installed the GNOME Live CD simply because I have been spending more time with GNOME lately. I should probably try KDE on this same hardware though.

Tsuroerusu wrote:I personally don't use Flash, primarily because it's not free software, and also because I hate it like the plague. I can not stand Flash ads, and I hate Flash sites in general. Also, when playing a video on YouTube, I hate the "buffering" thing, so I just download the video and then play it.

You make some good points. I love Sci-fi shows however. Unfortunately Sci-fi.com is all flash, and dog slow. I like getting show updates, release dates, and episode lists. As far as the downloading, what do you use to do this. I don't use You Tube much, but I do like Google Tech Talks on Google Video. Do you use a special downloader or how do you go about playing flash movies?

Tsuroerusu wrote:

mowestusa wrote:I'm still using the "nv" free driver, but that is because I don't game. I'm wondering if I should install the non-free nvidia drivers though. I'm having a little lag with the icons appearing in the menus when I click on them. There is a second or two delay, which I did not expect with a Athlon 1ghz chip and 320megs of ram.

It's not a bug, it's a feature of GNOME!
It's like this on my laptop, which uses the free ATi drivers for full 3D, so no need for the NVIDIA blob.
I use KDE, and my menus are smoking fast!

I just noticed that on my Pentium 500 system running Dapper the icons are not nearly as slow to appear, and it uses the free ati driver. Both have 320megs of ram, but the slower machine is the one that is faster as far as mhz. Of course, Fedora 7 is using a newer GNOME.

Is there an easy way to install KDE on Fedora 7? Is there one yum command that will do it like apt-get under Ubuntu?

I should give KDE a whirl?

Thanks T

@mowestusa

I use the UnPlug Firefox extension for downloading Flash videos on PPC. Works with YouTube, Google Video, and many other sites. You can use programs like MPlayer and VLC for watching the .flv files.

http://unplug.mozdev.org

mowestusa wrote:

Tsuroerusu wrote:Just curious, are you using GNOME or KDE? I installed the KDE LiveCD, and it's been really great on both my desktop and laptop.

I'm using GNOME installed off of the GNOME Live Fedora 7 CD. I'm doing this mostly because I have gotten used to GNOME. I loved KDE when I first tried Linux 3 years ago. However, I moved to Ubuntu about 1 1/2 years ago. At that time, there were a number of complaints with Kubuntu, but now it seems like those issues are fixed. However, I wanted a solid experience, so I went with a stock Ubuntu install with GNOME. I wanted this current desktop to be my "easy" Linux system to use. I have plenty of CLI machines, but I wanted to have some of the bells of a full desktop environment. So I installed the GNOME Live CD simply because I have been spending more time with GNOME lately. I should probably try KDE on this same hardware though.

Fair enough.

mowestusa wrote:

Tsuroerusu wrote:I personally don't use Flash, primarily because it's not free software, and also because I hate it like the plague. I can not stand Flash ads, and I hate Flash sites in general. Also, when playing a video on YouTube, I hate the "buffering" thing, so I just download the video and then play it.

You make some good points. I love Sci-fi shows however. Unfortunately Sci-fi.com is all flash, and dog slow. I like getting show updates, release dates, and episode lists. As far as the downloading, what do you use to do this. I don't use You Tube much, but I do like Google Tech Talks on Google Video. Do you use a special downloader or how do you go about playing flash movies?

I use two websites that gives you a link for the .flv files, videodownloader.net and keepvid.com.
There are several Firefox extensions that make these accessible right from the browser, I use VideoDownloader's own Firefox plugin, you can find it on the site.

mowestusa wrote:

Tsuroerusu wrote:

mowestusa wrote:I'm still using the "nv" free driver, but that is because I don't game. I'm wondering if I should install the non-free nvidia drivers though. I'm having a little lag with the icons appearing in the menus when I click on them. There is a second or two delay, which I did not expect with a Athlon 1ghz chip and 320megs of ram.

It's not a bug, it's a feature of GNOME!
It's like this on my laptop, which uses the free ATi drivers for full 3D, so no need for the NVIDIA blob.
I use KDE, and my menus are smoking fast!

I just noticed that on my Pentium 500 system running Dapper the icons are not nearly as slow to appear, and it uses the free ati driver. Both have 320megs of ram, but the slower machine is the one that is faster as far as mhz. Of course, Fedora 7 is using a newer GNOME.

mowestusa wrote:Is there an easy way to install KDE on Fedora 7? Is there one yum command that will do it like apt-get under Ubuntu?

You bet there is, just run: yum groupinstall "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"

(Don't forget the two quotes in the command, if you leave those out it won't work).

mowestusa wrote:I should give KDE a whirl?

Of course!

mowestusa wrote:Thanks T

No problem, it's what free software is all about.