Cymric wrote:
I am not going to turn this into a crash course on Linux, but... excuse me? The window manager thing is unlikely to be resolved, given the fact that X is designed to be fitted with different managers. I can use a very simple or a very elaborate one. Other OSes are as closed as a clam in that regard.
Well, it depends what is for anyone more important in an Os, a wide choice of incompatible managers, or a single one set as standard. In my point of view, a standardized one is more important, as it would be for many programmers who wouldn't have to worry which manager to choose before starting to code. Well, I could be wrong... do all the managers in Linux have a common set of basic functions for windows managing and the like?
However, what really made me go 'huh?' was that you somehow don't understand the reason for sync. Linux uses a buffered filesystem, so *everything* you write out to disk is cached. This allows for a great speedup of file I/O, since if the data written out is needed again, you just obtain it from RAM. There is no need at all to issue a sync manually---in fact, unmounting the floppy will do it for you. The design is to cache everything, and you can add auto-flushing capabilities later on if you so desire.
The problem is that AFAIK only Linux manages floppies and other devices this way: recent versions of Windows use caching, Beos requires mounting of devices, but they don't do delayed synching. It's nice that it's possible to do autoflushing, but I would prefer it to be set as default, I've spent half an afternoon to try to understand why files don't get copied to floppy even if the cp command was succesfull.
Also, caching can lead to unnecessarily problems: on a machine with Windows 2000, when I copy something to a floppy, to check it was copied correctly I usually copy it back to hard drive, but because of caching I have to take off the floppy, click on the drive's icon, reinsert the floppy and reclick to icon to be sure that the buffred has been flushed. Maybe there's some other way to avoid this, but I don't know of any other. Not that I use often floppies, but it's annoying neverthless.
Third thing: I am *really* curious as how you manage to lock up the system 'with everything you experiment'. You can crash Linux, but it takes an effort, and to be very honest, I don't think a newbie can do it. So please, to satisfy my curiosity, what kind of experiments do you conduct?
During an install of Slackware 9 I was trying to set a default window manager. I don't remember what have I done, but while trying to do so, at a reboot the system reported an error and it wouldn't boot. Later I've found out that the link of xinit has to be changed, in my case from xinit.kde to xinitrc. But when I wanted to try another wm, linking another file to xinitrc didn't work - startx loaded the same wm.
I had worse experiences with OpenBSD on Amiga. I was trying to add the support for the amiga's filesystem, to be able to read my Amiga partition under BSD. I have found very little information on internet, I've tried to add a line to fstab but I coudn't mount the partition. Later I found an example fstab which had an additional boolean flag on every line. Maybe this flag was working only on later versions of OpenBSD, because after adding it the system wouldn't boot again and I didn't find any other solution than reinstalling everything.
Of course it matters how much anyone is used to a system - I'm using AmigaOs 3.0 since 1996 and because of this I feel much more confortable when I use it.
Varthall
