(OT) Which flavour of Linux?

[Clive George]

A comment indicating an almost dennis-like level of cluelessness.

[The Natural Philosopher]

A comment indication a large and unsatisfactory exposure to PERL programmers who said it was better, and failed to achieve speed, CPU or RAM efficiency or largely to make the programs work at all.

Maybe I've been unlucky, but PERL programmers in my experience are almost always bad programmers

[The Natural Philosopher]

That's slightly non trivial.

I've got a Happauge in mine, and it does work, but only with totem-xine .. but the latest kernels did include drivers that understood it.

Its a bit better with Linux. Sometimes a limited functionality is achievable.

It never will be if you want latest hardware plug and play. However that card SHOULD work.

if you want to try, switch the problem to comp.os.linux.misc, and lets see what may be done.

Or have a look here

Cheers, T i m

[Clive George]

I'm not a perl programmer, but I will program in perl when appropriate. Speed, CPU and ram efficiency have never been a problem with my perl programs, unlike in certain other compiled languages - the perl stuff has always been surprisingly fast and never made a dent on memory.

Depressingly though, in real life CPU and ram efficiency aren't nearly as important as they once were. You can get away with a hell of a lot when your limiting factors are database and network - my app servers mostly sit there doing bugger all, and the database server does the real work. And we pay database vendors to get the CPU and ram efficiency they need - they're not my problem.

[Adrian C]

Not a problem. Use one of these connected between that PC and the KVM switch.

USB TO PS/2 PS2 CABLE MOUSE KEYBOARD CONVERTER ADAPTER

£1.39 inc. post

Mine (not the above but similar) works faultlessly with a Dell Dimension

3100 & Belkin Omni 4-port PS/2 KVM.

[Tim Watts]

The Natural Philosopher wibbled on Friday 07 May 2010 14:06

Rubbish. 23,000 lines of perl at Imperial (DoC) looking after both the installation and day to day maintenance (anything from user accounts, files updates, package management and server management) says you're wrong.

17,000 lines are common modules reused several dozen times typically.

That's not some ugly monolith either - it is a well structured set of modular "applets" that each do one small job and do it well. The installation system (completely replaces the native distribution installer) and the maint stuff have survived a transition from managing 2 versions of Mandriva to various versions of Ubuntu (excepting the package management module, which was rewritten to handle debs rather than rpms).

No it isn't. But writing in C is if the task might be done with 1/4 of the code in a higher level language.

Which bit of 1% did you miss?

That's because the code architecture was sane. Anyone can write crap code in any language.

[Tim Watts]

The Natural Philosopher wibbled on Friday 07 May 2010 14:07

Back in the real world of sysadmin and web applications....

[Huge]

TNP confirms that there is indeed no area of "expertise" in which he isn't prepared to demonstrate that he's a drooling retard and that his killfile entry is well deserved.

Quite.

[The Natural Philosopher]

WEll I made more money out of IT than you ever did, so whether or not I am a drooling retard, at least I am a rich drooling retard thanks to my understanding of computer and networking hardware and software.

[David WE Roberts]

I have always considered csh the work of the devil ;-)

[Huge]

I used it for years, despite it being "flakier than a snowstorm" but switched to bash a couple of years ago and am perfectly happy with it.

For writing scripts I use perl.

[David WE Roberts]

Are you a Perl Monk?

[Huge]

No. Although I've been drinking with some of the London Perl Mongers before now.

Sadly, these days I'm way too exalted to actually write much code. :o(

[Bob Eager]

I couldn't do without the programmed command completion (copied, but not equalled, now by bash).

[dennis]

Its a waste of time for 99.999% of users, but not when you have system availability requirements that allow a few seconds a year downtime.

[dennis]

It sounds like it is your problem. I had to have Informix changed to get reasonable performance from it. It was fairly obvious why it was very slow but they didn't appear to know why? I don't know what happened after IBM acquired it.

[dennis]

ITYM other people lack of understanding.

[Steve Walker]

Ubuntu will be fine - get a corporate surplus desktop for £50 and let him play.

[T i m]

It is.

I think this (Ubuntu) sees the dongle as the LED only went on after it had downloaded the restricted drivers and a channel scan does bring up a batch of progs. It's just when I start Kaffeine > Digital TV it gives me a:

Cannot find demux plugin for MRL "fifo:/home/tim/.kde/share/apps/kaffeine/dvbpipe.m2t"

whatever that means.

This Mac Mini is mainly running XP and all my (sometimes old / bizarre) hardware works. The same machine booted into OSX and I have to miss out on some hardware and software (like my Voda Mobile BB dongle 'works' under OSX but because I don't think there is an app for that I can't just click on a 'Check Credit' button. Same with Linux of course.

I'm sure it's partly my lack of Linux experience but it *is* frustrating when I can boot my Tosh A300 Lappy in XP or (even!) Vista and everything works. All starts well with (say) Ubuntu, it sees all the built in hardware (better than Windows in fact) then fails by not (easily) working this tuner or seeing a 'digital camera' (of all things). Then I can get my WHS to run backups, can't print to my Samba print server, etc etc. I can't even use XP under VirtualBox because I can't get it to see the USB devices. ;-(

Now I dare say that is this was 100% OSX or Linux then I wouldn't have many of those inter connectivity issues but there is a good reason I've been running Windows for the last 20 years (even if it is as the LCD).

Ok, thanks, I may well do.

enough) I'm always a bit worried when stuff doesn't explicitly mention my OS version and hardware (the hardware looks right on the link though). I say that because it's quite possible a later release of the OS already caters for my hardware but something else is wrong (it could be simple / trivial) and my blind stumbled attempts to 'fix' a problem stand a good chance of making things worse. Luckily, when this happens (and it often does) I have no data on the Linux installs so I'm happy to use a sledge-hammer to crack the nut and re-install from scratch.

He trouble with many 'linux people' is they have forgotten what it's like to be a total noob and even the most simple and basic instruction can fail at the first attempt. A classic example of that being told to exit a particular file and I've actually found, opened and edited the file but can't save it because I don't have the right 'permissions'.

And not all of us want to 'learn_all_about' this sort of thing. We just want to try something else and at a level we are used to (ie, via a GUI and with most stuff working / being supported directly). The fun being 'a change is as good as a rest'. Most of us don't mind getting the jack out now and again but don't expect to have to re-weld it just to make it work! ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

Kind of paraphrases the old statement about a real programmer can write fortran in any language ;-)