Linux - thumbs down

Older versions of VMware did either on top of an existing O/S or were built on a lightly modified Redhat Linux distro, now it's heavily modified and they're discouraging shell access altogether, I'm only up to speed with ESX5.1, they might have made it even less Linuxy with 5.5

Reply to
Andy Burns
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Exactly! The user/reader is supposed to be able to decide what it should look like with the 'sender' just setting some sensible defaults.

Reply to
cl

That's where the virtual machine approach works well, you save the file in a place shared by both the host and the (virtual) guest then pick it up in the guest by switching to another window. Once you're used to it a guest OS can feel just like another application running.

As I said you can also cut and paste between host and guest so if your customer sends you a URL in your E-Mail you can copy that and paste it into a program in the guest machine.

My habit is to run multiple desktops with, as I said, one dedicated to the XP guest. Then you can leave Thunderbird (or whatever) open in a 'Linux' window, copy the URL there, then just click on the 'Windows' workspace thumbnail in the panel and you're in the 'Windows' workspace where you can paste the URL into your favourite web-site builder.

Reply to
cl

We get locked down ones too. But mine isn't...

Reply to
Bob Eager

Quite sure. Hardware is twenty IBM x3850 x5 :

formatting link

The x3850s run RedHat Linux and VMWare. There are over 400 clients, most of which are Linux.

Reply to
Bob Martin

All very well using VM if you can stand the increased hardware overhead. Personally I'd sooner just swap a disk over or boot into a Windows partition.

Reply to
Cursitor Doom

the number of people who save £50 on a scanner and then find they have to spend £75 on Windows to use it....

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

That is indeed the sole justification I have for keeping mine.

That and testing against different browsers.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

well at least Geany understands php and html enough to highlight it, Even Pluma does that.

The problem is with HTML that what you see on one machine is seldom what you get on another browser. Or even on a resized browser.

So any attempts to wsysiwyg HTML are doomed from the start, although that doesn't stop many people selling things that claim to do it.

Dreamweaver. Ah yes, dreamwaver.

I spent two days turning dreamweaver output into valid HTML.

I then told my wife 'just do it as a PDF and let ME turn it into HTML, because dreamweaver doesn't.

Anyway every these days uses 'frameworks' like joomla, wordpress. nation builder etc.

That I do agree with.. inkscape is a joke and there ain't no 3D product there at all.

And there's nothing *remotely* as competent

No idea what lightbox is.. seems to be photoshop lite.

Well I have finally fund I am using more GIMP than photopaint these days. Now I FINALLY know the magic key sequences to bring up the stuff that took me YEARS to learn in corel photopaint.

well yes,

Basic good stuff continues to improve on Linux and every new release does more of what you actually want, because its written by people who want a tool, not a marketing gimmick.

The sort of man hours that go into the really heavyweight apps like creative suite, solidworks or corel suite are not yet avialable on a linux platform BUT things are getting close.

The linux typesetter Scribus is actually very nearly as good as Quark.

I rate gimp as being nearly as good as photoshop BUT it works in different ways. It takes a lot of learning.

But Inkscape compared with Illustrator or Corel Draw is a total joke.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I assuredly CAN but you may have to build a macro.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

That's an image viewer.

Lightbox lets you organise, tag, rate, edit (non destructively), export to Flickr (and lots of others) and more importantly, it's workflow oriented with lots of shortcut keys.

This is all good if you have 1000's of photos to sort out :)

Interesting. I use Cycas3D for a native very basic Linux CAD. It's OK for floorplans but it's not very good.

Reply to
Tim Watts

I think I mentioned 6GB RAM 3 years back when I bought it and several people said "WTF for???" Cannot remember if it was here or comp.misc.

My instinct was right :)

That too :)

Reply to
Tim Watts

The overhead is very small if the processor is modern and supports VX extensions.

Reply to
Tim Watts

It is as all things are, the buggering of a tool designed for one thing, into the shape that people wanted that is in fact completely different.

There is a tendency, and I am as guilty as anyone, to try and nail down container size, and fonts and image positions so it no longer flows at all.

And to use javascript to make a more pleasant user interface rather than what HTML decrees.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

that is a sentence straight out of broswer wars circa 1997.

Sadly times have moved on and te game now is to make it a page description langauge so that graphic fartists can exactly get everyone to look at their creations in t way they intended them to look.

The use of Flash for example as a way to generate pages of hi res images, not text, so that there is no possibility the browser or the OS and its limited and poorly rendered font collections can mess things up.

Also PDFS are blending with browsers too.

And HTML5 is trying to address the problems of what users and designers want, in ways that are nothing to do with hyper text markup at all.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Many universities seem to offer Workstation Admin on request to staff and PhDs (well 2 that I know off) - and a dire warning that buggering it up will result in a re-image. Which is a perfectly workable balance I feel.

Most users just need to install one or two pet programs on top of a standard build and it's way better for everyone if the core build and patches are automagically managed and everyone has the same version of core software.

Reply to
Tim Watts

Any server versions on top of an existing OS are really very old now - I've not worked with one at all.

ESX is dead, long live ESXi. Yes, they've been taking away the old full fat install for a while - 5.1 is ESXi too. The thin one is nicer to deal with IMO.

They're encouraging PowerCLI and of course full fat VCenter, but they are making shell access easier than it was.

Reply to
Clive George

Or save the data onto the linux desktop and pick it up via the 'share'

What you cant do is drop data into the windows VM directory, but the windows VM can see all the linux machine if you want it to. And you assuredly can use cut and paste, with a few caveats. .

Windows and its virtual machine are just another linux application, that's all. They can be resized minimised, shifted to another virtual screen and do anything that a normal application can.

Best of all you can snapshot the windows after you have installed it and added patches to iot and got it 'just so' and if anything goes wrong with it, you can go back in under a minute to 'where it used to work'

And provided you don't store any data inside windows VM, but on the linux machine, you wont lose anything at all. Except the malware :-)

If I had more RAM i'd leave windows running permanently but this machine cant be pushed beyond 4GB, and that's a bit tight for windows 'always on'.

But restoring a suspended windows takes about 10 seconds and is no slower than firing up firefox and with an SSD would be ..blindingly quick.

Its quite weird to do that and find that despite the whole machine having been powered down and rebooted, windows comes back to the exact job I was working on..

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

What you really need at that level is something that understands CSS and the "cascading" part, lets you diddle the settings and helps you decide which CSS file it would be most relevant in. Then helps you refactor when you've got into a mess of overrides!

Yes - I was very careful to say "like". I don't know of any competent site management suites but I'm sure there must be some. Dreamweaver tried to be that but as you say it spews s**te.

Yes. I need to redo the village website here and joomla is looking promising. I know WP well, but it needs securing (make all it's files unwriteable by the webserver except for media upload areas, then make those areas unexecutable (either PHP or CGI etc) - otherwise some joker just hacks the shit out of you with phpshell.

Then you need an unlock/relock script coupled with wp-cli so you can get cron to update the bloody thing as soon as patches come out.

And never let users install themes or plugins without vetting them.

I've only had 2 systems hacked in the last 3 years - guess what they were running! Hence I developed the hardening approach.

But by default Wordpress is pretty much a "come hack me please" system.

I find it quite good for small designs but it gets slow quickly (if that makes sense).

It's fundamentally different - it's not about editing, it's about

*managing* 1000s photos. It can do basic editing (crop/rotate/redeye) - but it's often used with photoshop for major corrective work. But you can pair it with Gimp just as easily.

With the slight exception of Gnome :) But there are plenty of alternatives!

Oooh must check that out (again, it was years ago I last looked).

Gimp's always been rock solid. It's not always had all the features nor the colourspace handling that Photoshop has, but what it did have was usually competant.

Except the macros. I never got on with its Lispy Script-Fu language.

Reply to
Tim Watts

Still sounds a bit confused.

VMware ESX/ESXi (ie the server version) is standalone - it doesn't run under RH.

RH can do virtualisation itself, ie it can be a virtual host, but in that case it's not VMware.

I'd expect the x3850s to run VMware ESX or ESXi (ESXi these days), then have RH clients underneath there. The exception might be for database servers, where you might want a physical RH install, especially if running Oracle due to really painful licensing issues on virtual clusters.

Reply to
Clive George

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