When Longhorn release, Linux got end. 17387

begin oeprotect.scr

Not so sure about Macs - read on:

My lad's OSX box has been all sorts of problems. I still haven't got to the bottom of how to mount the nfs shares on my n-w, nor how to authenticate against nis - there's nothing in the GUI front-end, andetcisn't properly used - the help has nothing of value. I've seen some stuff on the web, but it's been rather arcane, so far its not worked.

His Mac was over 6 weeks delivery from order, although 3 days had been promised. There wasn't even an apology, in spite of repeated enquiries!

He did some bluetooth upgrade, and ended up with a machine which wouldn't talk to either the keyboard or mouse - ended up *buying* another keyboard to fix it.

The built-in media player wouldn't play VCDs - he had to install the Mac port of linux mplayer - but was very pleased to find he had the standard mplayer interface at the end.

Usability against maintenance? The OSX Mac's been pooe so far, but it certainly looks nice when it works... although it cost probably four times what most of the other machines did. Display's nice, though.

Wait for reboot, slowdown, grind to halt, outlook dies halfway through email, restart - be careful not to use IE on the open network, try not to open any emails which you're not 100% sure about the safety of...

Well, it is an advocacy group, not a help group... a well worded question will generally result in some useful responses, but you need to focus on the reliable posters, and ignore the trolls. If you continue to pepper your questions with Mac advocacy, as you're doing here, you'll reduce the likelyhood of a useful response to a genuine question. There is a mac advocacy group you could use for that.

A good newsreader is a really useful thing for cola, but you need to make strong use of the killfilingscoring capabilities. I use slrn and leafnode, which means that I can filter on pretty much any header, many of which our trolls cannot affect, as well as score on differing combinations. Some people swear by knode, which has some capabilities to score depending on who's posted into a thread, which is a nice feature.

I find that slrn now kills rather more than 50% of postings when I look into cola, but it gets the s-n down to something reasonable.

Must admit, I hadn't considered liveCDs, but if you're using such, if you make your way to the tldp site, there are copies of man pages available, as well as the howtos and so on there. Also, on the debian irc servers, you'll find a channel called #knoppix which is good.

I would imagine a bootable DVD would have plenty of space for manpages, though.

hehe - perhaps. the #debian channel is good, but obviously is debian focussed.

No probs.

They do look rather nice. I've just suggested one of them to an inlaw who was determined to use Microsoft Office, but was sick of Microsoft Windows...

-- end Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk Shame is an improper emotion invented by pietists to oppress the human race. -- Robert Preston, Toddy, "Victor-Victoria"