Fwd: Re: Linux for an association I work for.

[Shlomi Fish]

Forwarding, as this seems to be Moshe's intention.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Linux for an association I work for.
Date: Saturday 28 February 2009
From: Moshe Brace using Yahoo <mbrace700 at yahoo.co.uk>
To: Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il>

Shavuah Tov,
Too much Chollent on Shabbat affects spelling and grammar! 

I read an article in Readers Digest on Linus Torvald, as they say in Hebrew 
Kol HaKavod what ever his intentions were. Not many of us could do what he 
did: He took on the giant Microsoft. Is Linux winning over Windows, the Jury 
is still out on that one, and it will be for some time yet. Is Linux easy for 
the beginner not really as I have found out. The beginner has the fear of dual 
booting and wonders what will happen if the damn computer won't boot?

More than once I've had to use the Windows recovery repair console to Fixboot 
and Fixmbr, then because of dual booting to either Windows or Linux use a nice 
little disk I have downloaded called SuperGrub. This little floppy in the A:\ 
drive automatically repairs GRUB. It finds which Linux and Windows is where 
and does the necessary. If anyone wants it I will upload it.

With regards to Skype the picture showed up correctly once then didn't show up 
correctly in the preview next time around with the 
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l1/compat.so skype 

I thought maybe an alternative like Yachi would work the Webcam, no this 
programme doesn't either. 

Moshe



--- On Sat, 28/2/09, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:
From: Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il>
Subject: Re: Linux for an association I work for.
To: linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il, mbrace700 at yahoo.co.uk
Date: Saturday, 28 February, 2009, 8:04 PM

Hi!

On Saturday 28 February 2009 19:26:59 Moshe Brace using Yahoo wrote:
> Shavuah Tov,
> I'm a beginner what they call a Newbe. 

It's "newbie" - not "newbe".

> I too came to some of the
> conclusions below. However, I look at the problem from a different angle
as
> a newbe. I recently upgraded under the recommendation of Mandriva 2009.0
> from 2008.1 v Spring, I can't for love or money other that in Cheese
and
> Ekiga the Webcamera to work. 

Whoa! This sentence is written from the end to the beginning. It should read 
"I cannot get the Webcamera to work, except in Ekiga or Cheese".
Throughout 
your many posts to Linux-IL, you have complained that you cannot get the 
webcamera to work in *Skype*. Well, for your information, Skype is a highly 
proprietary, and highly obfuscated program that is hard to debug, has no 
official community support, and you should be thankful that it works at all.. 
If your camera works in Ekiga, then it works - period. The fact Skype does not 
interoperate with it indicates that it is a bug in Skype. We've been more
than 
patient in trying to help you with it, and I've given you a lead that I
think 
that your problem is that some of your device files have improper permissions, 
so you can only run Skype as root and use the video-4-linux compatibility 
layer.

Please try to find out which device files are being accessed (You can use 
"strace -e open" as root), and report your findings to us.

> With regards to other programmes yes they are
> not perfect and far from it. Something of the Linux uniqueness makes me
use
> it. I have Wine on my computer which plays games when trying to use it for
> certain Windows Programmes. 

Wine will take a lot of time to start working properly, because it is very 
hard to catch up with Microsoft's hairy Windows' semantics. Each
version of 
Windows tried to remain as backwards compatible to the previous ones (up to 
including many application specific workarounds) but also introduced many new 
bugs, and incompatiblities that application writers had relied on or worked 
around. So it's a hard problem, and it would be hard for a group of free 
software developers to implement a Windows-compatibility layer from scratch.. 
You'll need to accept this fact.

> But - I fight with myself not to add too many
> Windows programmes for the obvious reason - if I wanted to use Windows
> based programmes I don't need a dual boot machine. When do we reach
this
> line? If we cross it then you are 100% right.

What do you mean? I don't understand you.

> A young lad by the name Linus
> thought that programmes are too expensive for Mr average. He was right!
>

Actually, Linus Torvalds' original intentions in creating the Linux kernel 
were not to bring cheap software to the masses. However, Richard Stallman's

intentions in starting the GNU project were to a large extent to build an 
entire operating system built out of free-as-in-speech/open-source components 
(which would be made available for use in other operating systems and in other 
contexts). It should also be noted that the original Berkeley BSD effort, 
started even earlier, and so were even earlier efforts of writing Public 
Domain or otherwise open-source software.

> With regards to Mac: I have owned a Mac Classic and before that an Apple
> //C two wonderful easy to use computers. I have yet to see anything in
> Windows get to Mac standards; they are several years ahead of PC. I do not
> want to sound like an advert for Apple. As I found that several programmes
> on the Mac crashed. The Resume button appeared, presumeably the guy who
> wrote the programme that crashed had to send out his Resume when looking
> for a new job. Moshe
>

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Parody on "The Fountainhead" - http://xrl.us/bjria

<mauke>    I'm not interested in what you're doing; what are you
trying to 
           achieve?
<PerlJam>  mauke: I'm trying to achieve world peace and this regex is
           the last thing standing in my way! ;)




      
-------------------------------------------------------
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
First stop for Perl beginners - http://perl-begin.org/

<mauke>    I'm not interested in what you're doing; what are you trying to 
           achieve?
<PerlJam>  mauke: I'm trying to achieve world peace and this regex is
           the last thing standing in my way! ;)