Re: Pre announce

[jfm2@club-internet.fr]

> 
> Hello world!
> 
> At 23-10-00 3:06:00, you wrote:
> >-Gimp's manual so you can really use all the power of Gimp.  It is in
> > PDF format because it gives better quality than HTML and this quality
> > is crucial in a program like GIMP.  For now you will have to use xpdf
> > for viewing it but I intend to add Acrobat reader in future releases
> 
> > I also added the whole cupsomatic database so you get far more
> > hardware support than in the original GPL version of CUPS.  I merged
> This doesn't give any copyright problems? I would suggest to make the
> system in such a way that copying is no problem.
> 

No there is no copyright problem.  I take great care about this.


> >yourself.  But now we have to think in people who are only computer
> >users and have to care for themselves since their first minute.  That
> >means that Linux people should not accept being bullied into using a
> >program just because it is in Unix tradition.
> I certainly agree with that.
> 
> >-Mandrake is easier and better than Indy.  Indy is faster but this is not
> >enough.
> Why not Mandrake as basis instead of Redhat? It's more up to date, and
> already (more than Redhat) focusing on the desktop user.
> 

Because Mandrake is superb but running it gives me the creeps.  First
time I installed it I noticed they were using hdparms.  This
accelerates the disk but it also has a fair probability of corrupting
your disk.  This had happenned two times a few months before this
installtion of Mandrake and had happenned to Fred Bastok (Mandrake's
number three) who had followed my advice.  For that install of
Mandrake their parms caused my fastest disk to miss an interrupt, put
itself in non-DMA mode and become three times slower than in normal
state.

A few months later I installed another version at work and the guy
using it got uninterruptible process with a ten lines program.  This
didn't happen on RedHat.  Aparentlye either a kernel patch or the fact
they were compiling kernel with pgcc had made the kernel go nuts.  And
I lost face in front of the Windows guru who didn't miss the
opportunity to torpedo that Linux experience.

Even today I see things in Mandrake that people believe they are
good things and I know they are neutral or have a negative effect.

I was really tempted to use an RH base and a Mandrake installer
however.  Perhaps it was those feuds I have with Mandrake who made me
refrain from doing this.  Or the fact I like and know Python better
than Perl.  Or the fact that the first thing I would do if using
Mandrake as base would be to recompile it entirely.

> >Speaking of speed.  I would need someone with a Celeron/PII/PIII
> >box accepting to recompile the glibc for 686 so we can put it at Indy
> >standards.  It is as simple as downloading an SRPM, then "rpm -U
> >glibc.srpm" then "rpm -bb --target=i686 /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/glibc.spec".
> >This would make Indy faster.  I cannot do it myself since the building
> >involves running a program generated by this compilation and that program
> >will use P6 instructions unavailable to my K6/2.  Contact me if you want
> >to help.
> I would like to help, but I cannot download large files, my connection doesn't
> permet me to. I have a PIII processor and currently Mandrake 7.1 installed,
> without any important updates.
> 

Thank you all the same.

-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez

Project Independence: Linux for the Masses
http://www.independence.seul.org