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Offline Hammer

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #44 from previous page: October 01, 2003, 01:50:41 AM »
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It cannot even play svcds in right aspect ratio, it also pretty slow.

In regards to speed, it's dependent on hardware and driver interactions (I have no speed problems running Mpeg 1 on following hardware;
1. Celeron 433Mhz, Intel 440ZX, NVidia TNT2, PC100 192MB RAM.
2. Athlon XP 3200+, nForce II 400 Ultra, NVidia Geforce 4 TI 4600 VIVO, PC3200 1GB RAM (also tested with 512Mb).
3. Athlon XP 1800+/2000+, VIAKT133A, NVidia Geforce 2 MX/400, PC133 640 MB  RAM.

I haven’t tested Mpeg 1 on following HW recently (but I know they work fine with Mpeg 1/VCDs).
1. Intel Pentium 4, i850, 1 GB PC800 RDRAM (main development server).
2. Intel Celeron 300A, SIS BX Pro, SIS6236, 128Mb RAM (unused box).

Usually, Video cards (boxed retail) includes PowerDVD OEM e.g. as in Leadtek products.

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However i like Windows Media Player 6.4, the gui is small and plays nearly every format correctly as long as you have the codec.

One could type  "Mplayer2" on Start->Run mini-command-line (includes in XP)...
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Offline fx

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #45 on: October 01, 2003, 02:24:44 AM »
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Why Windows Media Player 8 (or Media Player 9 for that matter) defined as crap in your view?


I say Windows Media Player 8 and 9 sucks because they're totally bloated, on a slow computer (p2 333, 128MB) it takes a long time to start and plays lot's of video files choppy (except MPEG1 and low quality DivX). The older versions of Media Player is a bit better since they won't take ages to start but they video playback doesn't seem to differ. Anyway on this very same computer running Linux and MPlayer almost any media file I have tried playing runs perfectly fine.

I must point out I heard MPlayer for Windows is as good as the Linux version which furthermore points out that M$ Media Player suckss.

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Is there a superior all-in-one media player for Linux or a collection shovel-ware?


MPlayer is all in one, and I haven't stumbled across one single video-file it can't handle.

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one crappy Web Browser

IF that was the case, 90 percent of world’s desktop users should select another browser.


Yes they should (Mozilla Firebird or Opera) and another OS for that matter. Not necessarily Linux though, it's far from perfect and you should have time to configure it and learn what's going on. But if you have alot of time to spend it's nice.

But I shouldn't really say anything, I'm using XP myself atm, all because of those damn games.
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Offline levelLORD

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #46 on: October 01, 2003, 02:46:01 AM »
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@Hammer
Why Windows Media Player 8 (or Media Player 9 for that matter) defined as crap in your view?


Please... On p4 it takes 3 hours to open a media player, and 3 more to open a movie. MP9 (or 8) is super-bloated. All that different GUIs and shaped windows... Who need that? What about the thing that Media Player is sending data to Microsoft (autoupdating... right) with the list of recently opened files? :) To just create a playlist you need ages. I know that if you are familiar with it, you will not have a problem, but after a first try, I was dissapointed, and after a second, while I was waiting to open a movie, I know that I need MP6.4 back. It's still there, but having problems with wmv files. There is a replacement for MP, called Media Player Classic, latest version 6.4.6.5, and it rocks. I'm sure that you have your opinion about MP, but it's not always like it seems. ;)

Take care,

levelLORD
 

Offline Tomas

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #47 on: October 01, 2003, 02:53:34 AM »
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In regards to speed, it's dependent on hardware and driver interactions (I have no speed problems running Mpeg 1 on following hardware

Forgot to state that it was the startup time i meant. I think it is very slow to startup, compared to other mediaplayers.
 

Offline whabangTopic starter

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #48 on: October 01, 2003, 07:18:21 AM »
Media player 6.4 is, without doubt, the best version. The new ones are slow. Personally, I prefer Winamp 2.91...

About Linux being bloated:
I chose Easy-to-install versions as I don't have much experience with Linux.  Nex time I'll try with one of the more advanced distros and "Linux for dummies" in my hand... :-D
Beating the dead horse since 2002.
 

Offline Hammer

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #49 on: October 01, 2003, 07:52:03 AM »
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Tomas wrote:
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In regards to speed, it's dependent on hardware and driver interactions (I have no speed problems running Mpeg 1 on following hardware

Forgot to state that it was the startup time i meant. I think it is very slow to startup, compared to other mediaplayers.

It loads about 1 second(s) when using my PC (2) (click from XP's quick launch icon bar)....

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Offline Hammer

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #50 on: October 01, 2003, 08:08:19 AM »
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another OS for that matter.

Note that software investment protection may be the overriding factor in the selection of MS Windows.

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it's far from perfect and you should have time to configure it and learn what's going on

That’s a presumptuous POV.  I have already configured Mandrake Linux 9.0 for my liking (use as a secondary development server).
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Offline csirac_

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #51 on: October 01, 2003, 10:09:40 AM »
I've used Debian/GNU Linux as my only full time OS for over 2 years on 3 PCs. Like others, my switch came "out of the blue" when I desperately had to print an assignment, and Win98SE with all the latest patches gave up the ghost - simply because I changed IP address (or at least, that was the last thing I did before it stopped booting).

I was dual booting debian at the time; it took me about an hour to work out how to get programs to print in linux (I had never attempted printing in linux); apt-get install cupsys; apt-get install xpp. Configure. It worked. Luckily I was using OpenOffice on the windows side.

About package dependancies: that is the nature of Linux and probably OSS in general. Reuseable code. Shared libraries. Massive amounts of Infrastructure are there for developers, allowing endless possiblities with little effort. This is important, since most OSS apps only have 1 to 3 active developers.

Many applications are simply a perl or python script - they might call wxWindows or GTK wrappers to get a GUI, use the cdrecord/readcd CLI programs to read/write to CD-Rs, use mkisofs to build an image from a user selected path and voila - you could have a CD burning program in probably less than 50KiB.

The cdrecord developers will support new CDRW drives, so you could write to DVD drives in the future. The mkisofs people will build in DVD fs support. The wxWindows/GTK people will keep refining their GUI toolkits to support different environments (for example, there's a text mode version of GTK, and wxWindows people are working on a self hosted embedded version that doesn't need X or a window manager). The Perl/Python interpreter/compiler will get new architecture support (Athlon64, for ex.?) and performance enhancments.

So in this little example our hypothetical cd burning app will recieve many new enhancments with little or no effort on our own part. Plus, in contrast to for ex. the Nero people in Win32 land, all we did is a GUI and some glue to some already very mature CD software, whereas the Nero guys would have written .vxds, drudged through the MS Windows DDK (not for the faint of heart!), poured over ISO specs on file systems, SCSI emulation over IDE, dozens of hours of testing.... then Adaptec EasyCD Creator would have done this themselves, then B's recorder people would have done it as well, all re-inventing the wheel over and over!

I could go on but I've ranted enough for now... essentially, package dependancies should in theory REDUCE bloat, for ex. there should be only one libpng.so library that ALL apps use to open PNGs, there should be no duplication of functionality. Of course, that doesn't happen, there are competing libs for similar functions, eg. SDL/Allegro etc., GTK/wxWindows/QT etc., xdm/gdm/kdm etc. the list goes on.

Anyway. I bet I could set up a decent Debian install with Moz/OpenOffice/printing/networking/Gnome 2/xine/mplayer/balsa and friends in 200MiB just using apt-get remove to cut the crap...

- Paul
 

Offline csirac_

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #52 on: October 01, 2003, 10:19:52 AM »
@Waccoon:

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slow and didn't detect my hardware correctly, and xFree86 is a joke when it comes to stability. Still, all


X is unstable? I use my computer *very* heavily (I have no life) and leave my Gnome 2.2 session logged in for over a week until I decide to try a new kernel compile or something. I've only ever had to restart X when some stupid libsvga game steals keyboard/mouse input, or once when VMWare did the same.

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Well, I wouldn't go THAT far, unless you're talking about the PnP capabilities of Linux, and all the chipset bugfixes compiled right into the kernel (I don't need a patch for an Intel chipset in my kernel if I'm using nForce, dammit!)


Yeah, PnP sucks, so does being your own UNIX admin when all you want to do is get some work done/watch some movies (which is the biggest reason most people don't stick with linux, IMHO). But I'm curious - what distro do you use that compiles-in some obscure intel patch; and if it is really so obscure as to be impossible to removed at compile time (ie. not loadable module), how do you expect that particular distro's kernel to boot on anything other than your computer, since this is obviously a work-around that must be enabled very early in the boot sequence? Wouldn't Windows have similar unnecessary hw-workarounds in it's kernel? There is an alternative of course - compile your OWN kernel without that support, but I would imagine you wouldn't possibly miss a few KiB, surely... :-P

- Paul
 

Offline Hammer

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #53 on: October 01, 2003, 10:39:39 AM »
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So in this little example our hypothetical cd burning app will recieve many new enhancments with little or no effort on our own part. Plus, in contrast to for ex. the Nero people in Win32 land, all we did is a GUI and some glue to some already very mature CD software, whereas the Nero guys would have written .vxds,

Please recall ASPI driver access for NT 5.x. Note that .VXD class drivers can't be applied for the current MS Windows 2K/XP/2K3....
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Offline csirac_

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #54 on: October 01, 2003, 11:05:39 AM »
@crumb:
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Of course if your time has no value you can spend your life customizing and recompiling linux to make it run more or less decently.

Sadly linux apps and the OS itself sucks and openoffice crawls...


Yes OpenOffice 1.0.x crawls, but OOo 1.1rc5 is the fastest I've seen yet. 1.0.x took *years* to save a big document, 1.1 drastically improves start time (but not enough) and doc load/save time (also not enough, but at least now it's quite usable).

OpenOffice uses bugger-all of the Linux API infrastructure that is there. It's a bit like Mozilla. It uses its own entirely self-contained architecutre for everything from the GUI down to the String handling.

It is its own operating system.

It is not a good example of a lean, mean Linux app. that uses all the nifty shared libraries that I was talking about. Abiword and GNUmeric might be the next best thing.

As for the Linux kernel sucking, it's about using the right tool for the job. Embedded applications? Definately. Free, open source, rock solid, flexible, small footprint. Server/storage farms? Routers? File server? Web server? Application Server? Yes. The Linux kernel scales up fairly well from what I've read. Engineering workstation? Probably, if you have a dedicated admin or a support contract. Business desktop? There's nothing intrinsically limiting about the Linux kernel here, except that it is a Unix clone so you need in-house or contracted Linux expertise.

As for the GNU fluff around the kernel, it's great for non-desktop things. Engineering workstations? Yes, Linux is solid, has good SMP and support for lots of memory and huge files, but it might not be the best for the user (I think it is though, over the Sun CDE anyway, I've only ever used an IBM AIX app over SSH/X so can't really comment there, haven't used anything IRIX).

Business desktop? Probably no, unless you are a _very_ large corporation  who can afford good responsive knowledgable admins prepared to do probably more testing/tweaking work than what would be necessary with a Sun setup.

Then we get to home users. Home users generally don't want to be Unix sysadmins. They want to play games and watch movies.

On the kernel side, that means prompt, direct, serious investment from hardware vendors into writing decent drivers, quickly, that properly utilise the hardware. Just like the Windows efforts. This isn't happening now, it isn't going to happen soon, if ever.

@alx:
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Finally, i hate the way that the heavyweight desktop environments (Gnome and KDE) claim to be really innovative - but all they do is copy windows


On the GNU fluff side (Gnome and friends), the GUI design is acceptable. When the Gnome people say they are being innovative, they don't necessarily mean the GUI design. They are also talking about the technical side. The API, the internel design. For me, if there is any innovaiton in the GNOME project, that is where it is happening. It frustrates me that people write off something because they can't see beyond the surface. If they don't want to see beyond the surface, they aren't really qualified to write it off, now are they?

And finally, on the home user's desktop experience side, there will ALWAYS be problems. GNU/Linux distros are a clone of the Unix environment. This environment assumes a certain amount of technical knowledge. Assumptions like basic understanding of permissions, groups, file system layout, networking protocols, file system types, mount points, scripting, user account administration, package managment, how the kernel works (loading drivers), bootloaders (setting up a new kernel with LILO).

You could say MacOS X has solved these things. But the money in Linux is not on the home users's desktop, so these issues aren't going to be addressed for quite some time, if ever. The best that I am hoping for is Linux being adopted on the corporate desktop, and POS.
 

Offline csirac_

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #55 on: October 01, 2003, 11:45:00 AM »
@waccoon
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gadgets.  They even put "START" on the Start Menu!  I mean, COME ON.  The only thing that was different was the organization of Start Menu items, or rather, the lack of organization.  I actually got rid of RedHat 5 faster than any other distro because it left such a bad impression on me.


(sigh).  Redhat is not a good example of what can be done with Linux. Redhat bastardises most of the GNU software they package. They put their logo in the buttons, they even hack up their own dist. of gcc. Of all the distros I've seen, I hate Redhat the most. I hate it. I hate it.

I HATE REDHAT. For some reason whatever they have done to Gnome 2 in Redhat 9 simply brings a P4 2GHz to it's knees. It has an outrageous "typical" install. It's RPM based. God I hate RPMs with vengence. Perhaps I should change my nick to redrumtahder :-). Any RPM based distro leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because of the dependancy nightmares. I've been meaning to try gentoo some time, but haven't got around to it...

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They do only what interests them, and not "customers", which is why I'm not a big fan of free software, anyway.


I'm sorry, but I think you are seriously mistaken. Why do you think that Redhat did that EXACT COPY of Win95? Have you even been on any of the OSS mailing lists? Their entire focus is on users. There are heavy flamewars on project decisions, one side arguing a technical point of view, the other a user's point of view. Do you know why Gnome and KDE desktop environments are so popular? It's what the users are choosing!!! It's what YOU  the USER is CHOOSING. Users do not like change. They want to press F5 and have a window refresh. They want to press F2 and have a file be renamed. When they press alt-tab, they want to switch apps. Most are too scared to use multiple desktops, and there are only so many ways to launch an app that doesn't involve a start menu/dock/desktop icon!

In the case of the Gnome/KDE projects, it is the USER's fault for how closely they resemble windows. These projects exist entirely for the users. I am totally bamboozled as to how you can possibly think otherwise. Without a userbase, there is no point to Gnome/KDE. These projects struggle against (or "with", if you would prefer) each other for wider user acceptance. The result is what YOU the USERS have created for yourselves, from all the feedback project members get, feature requests, comments, etc.

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They do only what interests them, and not "customers", which is why I'm not a big fan of free software, anyway.


I should shutup, but I'm still shocked. With OSS, "They" and "Them" are also the users. If a user-developer finds existing apps are insufficient, they add the features they want or start from scratch. I'll admit, far too many times I have seen non-developers request a feature or made a request only to be met with a "do it yourself" response. The problem, of course, is that most developers don't have time, are already overcommitted and working by themselves. Luckily though, the maintainer still has their enthusiasm they had when they started/took over a project and if something is interesting/important enough it will get done.

To contrast to the Win32 world, I'd like to know what makes you think commercial Win32 developers listen more to user feature requests than OSS developers.

As far as innovation goes, windows bores the hell out of me. There are many fascinating Linux projects that I don't think have windows equivilents. Distributed High Performance Computing: http://www.openmosix.org; a professional low latency audio server that can run dozens of audio channels at once (JACK): http://jackit.sourceforge.net/; a Finite Element Method program that can solve Partial Differential Equations for 2D/3D problems (freefem): http://www.freefem.org/; a 3D space simulation with over 100000 objects complete with orbit patterns etc. (celestia):http://www.shatters.net/celestia/.

- Paul
 

Offline csirac_

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #56 on: October 01, 2003, 11:55:23 AM »
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Please recall ASPI driver access for NT 5.x. Note that .VXD class drivers can't be applied for the current MS Windows 2K/XP/2K3....


Okay, so they are called VDDs or something else these days, but Nero/Adaptect still provide their own ASPI drivers.

I'm sure you understand my point though :-P

- Paul
 

Offline r_o_o_s

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #57 on: October 01, 2003, 01:12:39 PM »
In fact, you are right, most Linux distributions are bloated, so are the BSDs. But linux users have completly different motivs for using their OSs than amigans. They look for freedom of the code, for usability and for cheap software that works.

Im sure lot's of them would change for a light weight, quick response system with the feel that you are in control if they could without having to back down from their favourite motivs of above. But now you have to pay for an amiga system and you don't get all that functionality you do with a bloated Unix system, and once something doesn't work you can't fix it but have to hope for someone else to do it so that you can buy the new version.

That leaves only us that really really love the amigas advantages and are willing to suffer the consequences of our choise to stick around.

/Roos
 

Offline csirac_

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #58 on: October 01, 2003, 01:29:22 PM »
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r_o_o_s wrote:
That leaves only us that really really love the amigas advantages and are willing to suffer the consequences of our choise to stick around.

/Roos


What about the Linux users who buy an A1/AmigaOS4 anyway (like me!)? I'm sure many A1/AOS4 buyers won't be entirely ditching Windows, just like the Linux using A1/AOS4 buyers won't be ditching Linux :-) Except, of course, the A1 users who were forced into using Linux... perhaps *they* will ditch Linux :-P

- Paul
 

Offline Tomas

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Re: No more linux for me...
« Reply #59 on: October 01, 2003, 03:04:49 PM »
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It loads about 1 second(s) when using my PC (2) (click from XP's quick launch icon bar)....

over 3 seconds on my old XP2100+, 512mb sdram, asus a7v133 kt133a. The hd it runs from is not the very fastest, but damn . even wmp6.4 starts up much quicker on the same system.

Mine also does it in a sec, if i load it first, so that it is stored in memory.

But anyway  7.x, 8.x and 9.x all sucks since they cant handle svcds correctly. I also miss the keyboard keys for functions, like volume control, pause and so on.