Windows XP and the Microsoft agenda - can it get worse?

[Ted Striker]

*cough* *cough*

Linux zealots.

Microsoft bashing is sooooo 1999 and also high schoolish...

[Asher]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
*cough* *cough*

Linux zealots.

Microsoft bashing is sooooo 1999 and also high schoolish...

Doncha know that it's hip and cool to be anti-status quo?
Power to the people!
Viva la revolution!
etc.

[Ted Striker]

Oh be quiet Asher.

I just installed the 2.023 Suse kernel on my TI calculator.

Top that one, tough guy!

[Yog-Sothoth]

Originally posted by Asher
XWindows crashes far more often than Windows 2000 does. And, when it comes down to it, having the GUI crash is just as bad as the whole OS crashing for the vast majority of users.

Hmm, not my experience at all. I have had very few X crashes in the 7 months I have used linux. If it happenes very often, it's probable you have misconfigured it somehow. Or you might be using alpha or beta software that just don't play along very well with X.

If you see some regular patterns in the way it crashes, you can just search on the net about it, and you will most likely find out what's the cause.

Originally posted by Ted Striker

Oh be quiet Asher.



I just installed the 2.023 Suse kernel on my TI calculator.



Top that one, tough guy!

Hehe

Just for the record, you are Derek right?

/me gets a headache of all this nameswitching

Btw, what exactly is a win xx OEM version in comparison to the "regular" version?

Is it just that it has don't have all the extra's like a fancy box and a manual etc while the cd's are the same, or are there other differences?

[Ted Striker]

Yep that's me Yog.

Caught in the act again.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Yog-Sothoth
Hmm, not my experience at all. I have had very few X crashes in the 7 months I have used linux.

Even there, that's far more often than Win2K crashes on me. But my Xwindows crashes about once per week, if I'm lucky.

If it happenes very often, it's probable you have misconfigured it somehow. Or you might be using alpha or beta software that just don't play along very well with X.

If you see some regular patterns in the way it crashes, you can just search on the net about it, and you will most likely find out what's the cause.

I'm using XFree 4 with Nvidia cards on both computers. They appear to be configured fine (I let the automatic thingie do it for me, then when it kept crashing so often I peaked at the config and it appears to be all correct).
My 'crash' in XWindows occurs seemingly randomly, where the screen is flooded with red and blue horiztonal lines that keep jiggling around the screen. Occasionally, I can't even go to another vterm to kill Xwin. It appears to have frozen all of Linux's IO when it does that.
Very frustrating.

[Yog-Sothoth]

Originally posted by Asher



Even there, that's far more often than Win2K crashes on me. But my Xwindows crashes about once per week, if I'm lucky.

It has only happened when trying to run windows software through wine

I'm using XFree 4 with Nvidia cards on both computers. They appear to be configured fine (I let the automatic thingie do it for me, then when it kept crashing so often I peaked at the config and it appears to be all correct).

My 'crash' in XWindows occurs seemingly randomly, where the screen is flooded with red and blue horiztonal lines that keep jiggling around the screen. Occasionally, I can't even go to another vterm to kill Xwin. It appears to have frozen all of Linux's IO when it does that.

Very frustrating.

What kind of nvidia card do you have , and which driver are you using?

You should use either the "nv" or "nvidia" driver, where "nv" is an open source driver (without 3d support) and "nvidia" is the one Nvidia distribute.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Yog-Sothoth
What kind of nvidia card do you have , and which driver are you using?

You should use either the "nv" or "nvidia" driver, where "nv" is an open source driver (without 3d support) and "nvidia" is the one Nvidia distribute.

It happens on my GeForce 2 MX and GeForce 3 machines.
I'm using XFree 4.0.3, and I was under the impression only 3.3.6 had 3D support?
I can't recall the specific driver, it was labeled "GeForce" on the config screen.

[Yog-Sothoth]

Originally posted by Asher



It happens on my GeForce 2 MX and GeForce 3 machines.

I'm using XFree 4.0.3, and I was under the impression only 3.3.6 had 3D support?

I can't recall the specific driver, it was labeled "GeForce" on the config screen.

As far as I know Xfree86 didn't support GeForce 3 before version 4.1.x, so it's quite surprising you got it to work at all

I strongly suggest you upgrade Xfree86 to > 4.1.0. Nvidia have 3d support under 4.x.x series with the "nvidia" drivers which you can find on Nvidia's web site. It's best if you use the tarball. Just uncompress it and run make install (they are precompiled).

You can find out which driver you use by looking in this file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. I pressed tab twice when I wrote that

I'm not sure about 3d support in 3.3.6. Since nvidia haven't released the specs, the only drivers with decent 3d performance are the one's that Nvidia themselves distribute, and I don't think they work with 3.3.6

[Asher]

Oh, the curses of running Linux with a modern system.

Whenever I can be bothered I'll start the arduous task of upgrading XFree.

[Yog-Sothoth]

Originally posted by Asher

Oh, the curses of running Linux with a modern system.



Whenever I can be bothered I'll start the arduous task of upgrading XFree.

In the wonderful world of the debian distro, this would be a simple apt-get

[Ecthy]

Originally posted by blackice
Good post Korpo Thanks

just German quality, even though he's only Bavarian

[Korpo]

Ecthelion, Vorsicht! Du bewegst Dich auf einem schmalen Grat! Bayernbashing prohibited!

Well, Asher thinks BSD to be a better OS than Linux. Well, all BSD versions, especially FreeBSD are lagging behing technically behind any Linux kernel.

The only acceptable BSD is OpenBSD for its security features, and FreeBSD would be dead, because nobody uses it, if not Apple exploited the weak BSD license and made propietary code out of it. Nothing against Mac OS X, it is a fine OS, and the first Mac OS with a fine command line alternative, but it is an open-source license disaster!


Why all the MS bashing?

Well, let´s ask what Open Source is about?

It´s about security and control of your information flow. An adept user/programmer can check a Linux program indepently of the manufacturer´s/developer´s decision, whether it contains back doors, or Trojan code, or does spy on your personal data.
The classic counter-example was Realplayer, which was spying on user data, till that came out (after that already was happening over a very long period) and they had to change that, because it conflicted with data protection laws in several European states.

And Windows XP is more efficiently than any Linux ? Laughable. You cannot install a new Windows on an old machine. You can scale even a modern Linux system down to every machine you can imagine, that´s why a lot of people use their old 486 Windows boxes as small web servers, or firewalls, and all of this under Linux.

I repeat: A correctly set up X is much more stable than a Windows box. Nvidia was my problem, too. But the Nvidia drivers included with Xfree 4 are ok now. You cannot deem the whole Xfree project responsible for a poor graphics driver. Especially since a lot of the graphics drivers on Windows dists work suboptimal or not by default when they come out. Even on Win98SE they had faulty drivers that were incompatible with DirectDraw (Rage II+ PCI for example), though this were basically Win95 drivers..... I have a perfectly running X conf now, even with Nvidia.


But, what did I make up the thread for? For the discussion of MS business practices. I guess we have a bit of evidence there with the browser lockout, the poor Outlook and MS IIS security allowing worms to spread, the new licenses (which were extended to Win2000 after massive consumer protest), or the hacker board "scheme"... I may have not mentioned it, but here it comes: MS took lead of a board about security issues. MS agenda: "Publishing the way you can harm a system is enabling hackers to copy successful attacks". So they changed that. And not only that. It came out, that they did hide several security alerts concerning their products entirely.

My point is: You simply cannot trust those guys. You can only anti-trust them!

[Asher]

Originally posted by Korpo
Well, Asher thinks BSD to be a better OS than Linux. Well, all BSD versions, especially FreeBSD are lagging behing technically behind any Linux kernel.

Yes, Linux has many more root exploits being patched in kernel revisions than the BSD alternatives.

And Windows XP is more efficiently than any Linux ? Laughable. You cannot install a new Windows on an old machine. You can scale even a modern Linux system down to every machine you can imagine, that´s why a lot of people use their old 486 Windows boxes as small web servers, or firewalls, and all of this under Linux.

Efficiently does not equal low system requirements.
No one will argue that you can put Linux on obsolete computers and make a better computer out of it.
However, Windows does a LOT of things more efficiently. Multimedia is the big one. Especially with the mods in the XP kernel.
The other major thing Windows does better is threading. Sure, there is a clash of design ideology here, but Window's threading performance is MUCH faster than Linux's. That's why Mozilla for Windows seems to be much faster than Mozilla for Linux (Mozilla relies heavily on threading). There was a big discussion on this on Slashdot.org the other day.

I repeat: A correctly set up X is much more stable than a Windows box. Nvidia was my problem, too. But the Nvidia drivers included with Xfree 4 are ok now. You cannot deem the whole Xfree project responsible for a poor graphics driver.

Stop right there.
Do you know what causes the VAST majority of Windows NT crashes? Bad drivers.
So now I'm going to use your excuse to get out of all of the Windows NT crashes I've ever had (2 total, 1 on 2K and one on XP Beta 1 -- both due to drivers).

MS took lead of a board about security issues. MS agenda: "Publishing the way you can harm a system is enabling hackers to copy successful attacks". So they changed that. And not only that. It came out, that they did hide several security alerts concerning their products entirely.

This is a MAJOR pet peve of mine.
Linux has been doing this for as long as I can remember.
Did you hear about the 4 major root exploits fixed in the 2.4.13 kernel? Chances are you haven't.
They don't release that stuff publically.
So about a week after this, MS announces they're not going to tell hackers how to exploit patched bugs. This makes perfect sense to me. Prior to this, they explained in detail what the bug was and what was fixed. Weeks later, Worms/Virii come out exploiting it (Code Red, anyone?). So MS announces they're just going to announce that a bugfix/sec fix is available, so people can patch, without detailing all of the specifics. The zealot community is up in arms: "How dare they?! Anti-trust the bastards!" when they're doing the EXACT same thing. It only makes sense, security wise.

My point is: You simply cannot trust those guys. You can only anti-trust them!

Hey, they tried that.
Didn't go as planned.

[Korpo]

Well, about the driver problem: A lot of Windows driver work not and a lot of Linux drivers work shipping with the dist.

And you don´t value scalability, but a multimedia solution?

Throw away Windows or Linux and get BeOS! It is the only available OS written especially to effieciently handle multimedia.

Why didn´t make it to the mass market?

MS OEM (comp manufacturer) license forbids to preinstall another OS on a box shipping with Windows (and if I remember right, to modify the boot loader as well).

So you are forced to ship Windows-only machines...

You can read that in a lot of convincing articles, but you cannot read the OEM license the manufacturer gets: it´s the non-disclosure /trade secret type. If you talk about, the license is void.

And partly the anti-trust action mentioned OEM issues, too.