At which point you can go back to using all your peripherals, not just a majority of them.
Knoppix cannot autodetect my USB WLAN adapter, and to this day I still don’t know how to get the damn thing to get online. I’ve managed, on my HD install of Knoppix, to install the drivers, configure the interface, and get the adapter up and getting a link signal, but nothing more. It also can’t detect my video card (ATI Radeon 9200), nor my monitor (ViewSonic E70). True, it’s not the absolute most recent build, but it was the most recent until a couple of weeks ago.
Live CD Knoppix is good if you want an emergency backup OS (I used it myself to rescue a screwy Windows registry a few weeks ago) and if you want an easy-to-use taster of Linux, but it’s nowhere near as perfect as Squiddy makes it out to be. The autodetection is better than most Linuxes, though, and the installation to harddrive is phenomenally easy, should you decide to go that way.
Maybe your friend is at fault for not installing a proper virus protection or not keeping the virus scanner and WinXP up-to-date.
Probably no OS is 100% secure, there are masses of security updates for Linux, too, but as pointed out it’s targetted less because there are less users.
I guess if the position of Linux and Windows would be reversed then people would be complaining about Linux and recommending Windows instead.
I have never been a friend of Windows (used 3.1, 3.11, 95 and 98) but I must say that XP is pretty good and very stable. Perhaps this is the version that should have been around years ago but at least now I don’t have much if any reason to complain.
At which point you can go back to using all your peripherals, not just a majority of them.
Knoppix cannot autodetect my USB WLAN adapter, and to this day I still don’t know how to get the damn thing to get online. I’ve managed, on my HD install of Knoppix, to install the drivers, configure the interface, and get the adapter up and getting a link signal, but nothing more. It also can’t detect my video card (ATI Radeon 9200), nor my monitor (ViewSonic E70). True, it’s not the absolute most recent build, but it was the most recent until a couple of weeks ago.
Live CD Knoppix is good if you want an emergency backup OS (I used it myself to rescue a screwy Windows registry a few weeks ago) and if you want an easy-to-use taster of Linux, but it’s nowhere near as perfect as Squiddy makes it out to be. The autodetection is better than most Linuxes, though, and the installation to harddrive is phenomenally easy, should you decide to go that way.[/quote]
Due to a firewall at work, I tend to save posts in chunks. There’s a whole paragraph that I couldn’t get Forumosa to accept when I wrote that, thanks to a bug in the forum software related to the firewall. It’s not perfect, but it’s not half bad. Here’s what I tried to append but couldn’t:
Morphix works with all of my machine’s peripherals. Generally, it’s the fault of the manufacturers – they write and test drivers for Windows, but often won’t take the trouble for Linux. Some drivers are written by guerilla reverse-engineerers, some drivers are written by volunteers from specs that a company kindly provides, and some drivers aren’t written at all because the company goes after anyone who tries.
There are WLAN adapters that work with Linux, but in such relatively new and unstable areas, you may have to select your hardware based on whether the manufacturer doesn’t have its head up its bum. :raspberry:
I found drivers - they were standard Atmel drivers. Work for massive numbers of WLAN adapters. And yet Knoppix still couldn’t handle it without outside assistance.
And that last comment in your post is exactly why Linux has a long way to go before it can be a true desktop competitor against Windows. Why should the consumer have to go out of their way to find specific peripherals that’ll work with Linux, when Windows supports any and every one? (I know why this is, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it is.)
[quote=“Tetsuo”]I found drivers - they were standard Atmel drivers. Work for massive numbers of WLAN adapters. And yet Knoppix still couldn’t handle it without outside assistance.
And that last comment in your post is exactly why Linux has a long way to go before it can be a true desktop competitor against Windows. Why should the consumer have to go out of their way to find specific peripherals that’ll work with Linux, when Windows supports any and every one? (I know why this is, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it is.)[/quote]
Well, the consumer doesn’t have to do that, unless the consumer wants to run Linux.
And the (unstated) reason why the peripherals work with Windoze is because the manufacturers want to sell into the largest market around, and so they do all the work to make sure that their gadgets will work for Windoze. As Linux becomes more popular for desktops and laptops (and it is gaining in popularity), they will eventually start supplying Linux drivers for such things as wireless LAN adapters. Until then, they’ll probably just keep doing drivers for peripherals that are server-oriented.
[quote=“Tetsuo”]I found drivers - they were standard Atmel drivers. Work for massive numbers of WLAN adapters. And yet Knoppix still couldn’t handle it without outside assistance.
And that last comment in your post is exactly why Linux has a long way to go before it can be a true desktop competitor against Windows. Why should the consumer have to go out of their way to find specific peripherals that’ll work with Linux, when Windows supports any and every one? (I know why this is, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it is.)[/quote]
Well, the consumer doesn’t have to do that, unless the consumer wants to run Linux.
And the (unstated) reason why the peripherals work with Windoze is because the manufacturers want to sell into the largest market around, and so they do all the work to make sure that their gadgets will work for Windoze. As Linux becomes more popular for desktops and laptops (and it is gaining in popularity), they will eventually start supplying Linux drivers for such things as wireless LAN adapters. Until then, they’ll probably just keep doing drivers for peripherals that are server-oriented.
I’d have to say that Linux is in a better position than the Mac on this.
I’d have to say that Linux is in a better position than the Mac on this.
How so?
Mac is basically BSD and Linux drivers should be portable with small effort.
Also, since Macs don’t get assembled by 100 companies like IA32 clones do, it’s likely to be easier for Apple to write 4-5 drivers for a new model that’s gonna sell in millioins than it is for each PC manufacturer to get drivers for peripherals that constantly change.
P.S. WTF is wrong with the quote code in this forum?
Actually, my experience with drivers is that Linux includes more of them out of the box. With Windows, what I’ve often encountered is that you buy some gizmo and it comes with a CD containing the Windows driver. Virtually no manufacturers supply drivers for Linux, but the Linux kernel has a driver for nearly everything. The only devices I haven’t been able to get working with Linux are winmodems (found in many laptops). Fortunately, these days you hard have to use a modem, as ethernet rules.
By the way, I have an Nvidia video card, and it works fine with Knoppix. I’m using it right now.
Dialing ADSL (PPPoE) with Knoppix is a pain - it’s the one complaint I’ve got with the system. I can dial from the command line only, and I need root privileges to do it. I just wrote to the Knoppix developers yesterday to suggest to them that they really ought to add an ADSL ON/OFF button.
Mine (integrated video in a Shuttle SFF SN41G2) comes up in a low-resolution mode (looks like 800x600) but triggers a reboot every few minutes, probably because Knoppix is overwriting the shared memory somewhere. If you have it as a separate card, you might be in a better position. Still, give Morphix a shot if you have some spare time, booting it with “morphix xmodule=nvidia” (no quotes) when it gives the boot prompt.
It’s a political bit of nonsense, actually – Klaus Knopper refuses to put NVidia’s supplied Linux drivers into the official Knoppix distribution, because NVidia didn’t GPL them. NVidia has a clause in its license saying “go ahead and share the drivers freely if you use Linux, just don’t rewrite them or decompile them”, but that’s not good enough for him.
This is the kind of stuff that non computer savy people do, and you can’t blame them (I guess, even though I’d like to). They download ramdom sh*t, install AOL a thousand times, use outlook express (the most hated on email client in the Windows world) with no virus software and don’t know how to fix stuff when it goes bad.
People still have problems sometimes doing basic stuff as well, but far less I think. I think Linux is going to be (and maybe is now) a really good solution for people that only do basic stuff (email, internet and word process with the casual game in there).
[quote=“roc”]“This is the kind of stuff that non computer savy people do.”
What an utterly ridiculous statement.[/quote]
I’d say it’s pretty accurate. I’m computer-savvy, and the only way you’d get me to install a “Hello Kitty” screensaver is at gunpoint.
[quote=“roc”]“This is the kind of stuff that non computer savy people do.”
What an utterly ridiculous statement.[/quote]
Have you worked a PC tech job or done tech support? From my experience your statement is “an utterly ridiculous statement.”
Rather interesting that this topic came up right now, since I’ve just spent the last couple of days reformatting, reinstalling and configuring operating systems on my two machines (desktop and notebook).
I’ve been an advocate of Knoppix, and I still am, but the reason for my reformat/reinstall activities was because Knoppix with the 2.6 kernel proved to be unstable. Using it with the 2.4 kernel (which is the default) has been fine. So for anyone about to take the plunge with Knoppix, keep that in mind. If you want the 2.6 kernel, you have to actively choose it (by typing “knoppix26” at the command line), so just don’t do that and you should be OK.
Anyway, since I decided to do a major OS overhaul, I divided my hard drive up into three partitions and installed OpenBSD, Slackware Linux and Knoppix. Right now I’m using OpenBSD. I like it because it’s very stable and secure, and certainly an educational experience for aspiring geeks, but I would definitely NOT recommend it to Unix newbies - cut your teeth on Knoppix or Mandrake first, and later maybe try Slackware (the most Unix-like Linux) before even considering OpenBSD.
If anyone here is getting ready to take the Knoppix plunge, I think you’ll find this forum to be very helpful:
