Re: Universal sound card?

bobbie sellers wrote:

Big snip of what appears to be Trollery and troll feeding but
maybe I am too harsh.

What constitutes "troll feeding" to one person may actually be "sane and
justified rebuttal" to another. There are plenty of newbies and lurkers
out there already who are being misled by the propaganda and Microsoft's
"Get the FUD" campaign.

Neither of you guys have tried Mandriva 2008.1, have you?

Not yet, no. However, I've always used Mandrake Linux - the predecessor to
Mandriva - on my own machines, and this very machine I'm typing this from
still has an old Mandrake 10.0 PowerPack on it.

My main machine however is still in the process of being set up, due to the
fact that it is a very complex set-up and the delay of the new release of
its chosen distribution, i.e. Gentoo. The complexity lies in the fact that
it's a machine intended to run virtual machines using the Xen hypervisor,
and that one of those unprivileged virtual machines will actually be an X11
workstation.

As soon as that machine is set up and fully functional, I intend to install
Mandriva 2008.1 on this one here. Up until then, I cannot afford the
downtime yet, so I'm stuck with this older release - which actually works
quite well, mind you.

It replaces Windows very well.

Sure it does, and so does everything else. However, that doesn't mean that
GNU/Linux as an operating system was meant as a Windows replacement. The
rivalry between Windows and GNU/Linux - not to use the word "war" - was
invoked by Microsoft, because of everything Microsoft stands for - i.e.
monopolists and megalomaniacs.

Sure, modern day desktop GNU/Linux distributors do intend to bring over some
Windows users to the GNU/Linux camp, but that's simply because most of
those distributors are now commercial entities and thus have to
obtain/maintain a market share to further their existence.

This does however not change anything to the premise of GNU/Linux as being a
UNIX-like operating system, with UNIX as the chosen system's architecture
because of the fact that UNIX was developed with logic, portability,
scalability, flexibility, security and robustness in mind, and totally void
of any commercial intentions.

Back in those days, and with UNIX actually originating as a hobby project by
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at AT&T Bell Labs, this was still possible,
and this approach was actually the best one. These days, technological
progress is totally dictated by economy and consumerism - just like almost
everything else in our civilization, unfortunately - instead of being
driven by a real strive for advancement.

GNU/Linux continues that tradition - and perhaps more so even for the Linux
kernel itself than for the GNU userland - and being a UNIX-style operating
system, it should not have to attempt to mimic Microsoft Windows. The fact
that most GNU/Linux distributors are attempting to compete with Microsoft
(and Apple) in the consumergrade OS market has nothing to do with the
operating system itself.

And it uses similar metaphors as did Zerox PARC, Mac, and Amiga before MS
Windows got to a usable state. *Yes, Even Before MS copyrighted Windows*
as a trademark.

AFAIK Mandriva is not the only distribution that is this
good and it is not assembled by boys working on college projects.

Indeed not, but other than some configuration, branding and putting the
pieces of the puzzle together, Mandriva doesn't do all that much. Let's
not forget that all the software in a Mandriva distribution was already
written by other people long before that.

It is not as cheap as pirated Windows either but you can get it
as simply FOSS which is free for the downloading. I used the free
version for several years.

Of all Mandrake distributions I have used so far, only one was actually
downloaded - that was the Mandrake 7.2 release. I've purchased all others,
simply because they contained all the proprietary plugins and drivers, and
because I wanted to financially contribute to the community.

See, with Windows, people want to use it but they don't want to pay for it,
so they will often go for pirated copies, cracked versions or whatever
other illegal thing. GNU/Linux on the other hand is given away for free,
and people actually *want* to pay for it. I guess that says enough about
how good it is. ;-)

The only problem I had with it was the WinModems that are so widespread
but I have plenty of external modems from Amiga days.

Some of those winmodems can be made to work, albeit that the number still is
few.

The good part about the paid versions is that they come with the codecs
need for entertainment media.

Indeed so, and this is why I personally recommend buying a shrinkwrapped
distro for the newbie rather than downloading one. In addition, you also
get the official support from the distributor in the event of difficulties,
as well as - in Mandriva's case, and only if you buy the version on CDs,
because the DVD comes "as is" - a printed installation manual.

Other than Mandriva there are Red Hat Enterprise, and SuSe
versions of fully supported GNU/Linux distributions. Xandros is
even allied with, "shock and horror" Microsoft?

SuSE is the property of Novell, and they too have signed a deal with
Microsoft. Their initial idea was not so bad, but they should have known
not to get between the sheets with the devil, because Microsoft has
conveniently re-interpreted their "cooperation" before the eyes of the
media as a "patent deal", feeding the FUD ("Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt")
machine even more and scaring away the newbies over (im)possible Microsoft
patent infringements by the Linux kernel.

By the way I have run GNU/Linux on 3 x86 machines, one 1.8 GHz Celeron
laptop which stopped working and a 2.4 GB Celeron obsolete Dell. On my
other obsolete Dell a 700 MHz Pentium 3 Coppermine, Inspiron 4000, I have
a Knoppix install as a dual boot. Will get a DVD Reader and put Mandriva
on it ASAP if some hardware repairs can be done.

I use GNU/Linux on all of my machines, and in our organization we also run
GNU/Linux on all of our servers; some of the workstations run Windows, but
that's the call of the owner of the machines, who has to work on them -
we're a not-for-profit and the computers we use are all our own property.

We've had Dell - we still have one - but now we're also using a Tyan-based
dual Opteron machine as a server, alongside an AMD Phenom server. My own
main machine is also a Tyan/Opteron machine (twin dualcore) with an Adaptec
SAS RAID controller and 32 GB of RAM. This one here is a simple AMD
AthlonXP 2800+ with only 512 MB and a single PATA hard disk.

As distributions, we've tried SuSE, we've actually used Mandrake 9.0
ProSuite for about two years, and now we're running CentOS on our servers.
And like I said, my main machine will have a Xen/Gentoo set-up.

I would not recommend any of the *buntus as a distribution for newbies
because of the "dedicated desktop support" concept. Ubuntu does not come
with KDE/Qt applications, and Kubuntu does not come with Gnome/GTK
applications.

This can be confusing for the newbie, so I would recommend a distribution
that supports both. Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, SuSE, Fedora Core - although I
personally don't like RH/FC/CentOS over their boycot of anything other
than /ext3/ for the filesystem - or Debian.

Slackware if you want to get your hands dirty. Gentoo if you want to get
them really, really, really dirty - I'm talking real Gentoo here, not
Sabayon - and LFS if you like crawling through the mud of the battlefield
first and then go basejumping next. :-)

--
*Aragorn*
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
.