Don wrote:
I have been disappointed in recent Ubuntu versions. Maybe it's Linux itself but it's moving too far away from it's roots in my opinion. A lean and mean operating system for experts is what it has been, but their vision seems to be to become the OS that even idiots can use. We already have Windows that even Grandma can check her email and browse the web and socially network.
Am I alone in feeling like this?
No.
Suggestions for a different distribution for me to try? I'm not looking to be a linux guru or make problems for myself, but I just want the OS to get out of the way and stop trying to be the killer application.
I switched to CentOS 6 for now. It still has Gnome 2 and I assume it will be supported
for a couple more years (as long as RedHat supports RHEL 6). Perhaps by then
the Gnome developers have regained some sanity (no panel?? extensions in javascript?????).
Don wrote:
Suggestions for a different distribution for me to try? I'm not looking to be a linux guru or make problems for myself, but I just want the OS to get out of the way and stop trying to be the killer application.
1. easy to use and maintaining a "traditional" desktop experience (and they started a couple of forks on their own to do this): Linux Mint - I used Debian Edition in particular.
2. not so easy to use - but with the best documentations pages I've found - and highly customisable: Arch Linux. I have it on my laptop and on a Seagate Dockstar, as someone already pointed out, there is Archlinuxarm, a port of Arch to the Arm platform.
On a side note, I've read some recent reviews on Ubuntu's next release, and it seems they've listened to several of the complains about Unity and really improved it.
Don wrote:
Suggestions for a different distribution for me to try? I'm not looking to be a linux guru or make problems for myself, but I just want the OS to get out of the way and stop trying to be the killer application.
1. easy to use and maintaining a "traditional" desktop experience (and they started a couple of forks on their own to do this): Linux Mint - I used Debian Edition in particular.
2. not so easy to use - but with the best documentations pages I've found - and highly customisable: Arch Linux. I have it on my laptop and on a Seagate Dockstar, as someone already pointed out, there is Archlinuxarm, a port of Arch to the Arm platform.
On a side note, I've read some recent reviews on Ubuntu's next release, and it seems they've listened to several of the complains about Unity and really improved it.
I tried Fedora and I'm using it now. I like their default window manager setup better than Ubuntu but it's still not really for power users. I really tried hard to like it, but I couldn't as it takes more mouse and keyboard work to do the things I mostly do.
Many people suggested that I go with XFCE which is what I'm doing and I'm happy with it.
I think the real problem is they are trying to make a User Interface designed for a tablet or phone work for a desktop - and it doesn't work.
I had a serious problem however with both Fedora and Ubuntu on my 6 core computer. If I run 1 instance of the chess program immediately after reboot and login it will run full speed, but within a few seconds it throttles down. It ends up doing about half the nodes per second it would do with older versions of Ubuntu. I tried turning off everything I could that involves CPU frequency scaling to no avail after scouring the web including trying to stop it in the bios setups. After wasting a day on this I gave up (for now) so at this point I'm running the latest Fedora on my Desktop where it doesn't matter and 2 or 3 versions OLD Ubuntu server on my workhorse machine which I always log into remotely anyway.
Has anyone else here had that problem and know how to fix it? I do want to run a modern linux distribution when btr-fs comes out in the next 5 or 10 years.
Upon delivery, the Raspberry PI will not be hindered by too few operating system distributions, but rather by too many. There is the eternal conflict: small plus simple vs big plus powerful.
The educators will mostly want the simple plus cheap as they would prefer to have all of their students running with the same distribution to make the teaching task simple and to free resources wherever possible.
Enthusiasts will tend to want as much power and flexibility as possible and wont mind spending US$50 or more on a fast 32 GB SD card and not care one whit if their distribution of choice won't run on a cheap 1 GB SD card used by a typical student.
For my cluster project, I need to keep the cost of each node relatively low and no more than twice the price of the board. I can do this by picking a very limited distribution which will fit on a 2 GB SD card with room to spare, even after loading a bunch of 2-5 man tablebase files.
sje wrote:For my cluster project, I need to keep the cost of each node relatively low and no more than twice the price of the board. I can do this by picking a very limited distribution which will fit on a 2 GB SD card with room to spare, even after loading a bunch of 2-5 man tablebase files.
How about a blade server? This one has 14 blades for around £400, giving a price of about £29 per blade.
Writing is the antidote to confusion.
It's not "how smart you are", it's "how are you smart".
Your brain doesn't work the way you want, so train it!
Yes. It would be hard not to, as the definition of a Beowulf cluster seems to include any group of two or more inter-networked machines running Linux working on the same problem.
Somehow it reminds me of the golden years of the Amiga and its RKRM (Rom Kernel Reference Manuals). Makes us want to learn ARM asm and "bang the metal" old style.
Although, for NDA agreement reasons, the graphic chip's registers aren't described.
A shipping date for the US$35 Model B has been announced: February 20, 13 days from now. The limit is one per customer for the initial run of 10,000 units.
