You are correct, in a non-trivial environment that is the case. However, you brought up a Linux update issue relative to a Windows XP Pro update issue. I don't believe anything as mission critical as you are stating would be hosted on Windows XP Professional workstation, so I made a comparison to a similarly trivial Linux machine that hosted a backup to the actual live production machine. Truly, I should have actually made a comparison of a Linux workstation to make things fair but I don't have any highly out-dated versions of those laying around.

I did not assume "everything running on the old system will be supported under the newer release". This is why I read release notes for 5 different releases, and created a complete and full backup of the system which I could revert to in less than 2 minutes if shit hit the fan.

I apologize for the misunderstanding, I try to keep my posts kind of short, and end up not fully explaining myself.

From what I have been told, Military type defense practice "Defense in Depths". There are multiple layers of security. In other words, it is not enough to simply have encryption, or tight firewalls, or a secured facility with controlled access levels, or a private network. You can expect a good military controlled facility to have *all* of these things, and likely more.

Secured Facility, Private isolated network, secured switching, end-to-end IPSEC encryption, tightly controlled network resources based on Access Levels, unscrupulous automated monitoring.

Your best, and possibly only way into this sort of setup is through the users. However, I hear the military is researching a fix for this. I think they were calling it Skynet. It is supposed to remove the error prone human access from critical resources such as these with a more competent and logical artificial intelligence. Our salvation is nearly at hand! ;D

Migrating to a different distro is typically much easier, and cheaper. I worked on a machine in 2008 that was a version of RHEL from 1999. I made a full system backup to a separate partition on the same disk, migrated it to CentOS, cleaned up dependencies, rebooted into a new kernel, then ran yum to update CentOS. After that, it was just a matter of time taken to download updates for each release up.

It really involves a bit of research, I spent about 2 hours reading release notes before actually starting the operation. Then spent another 2 hours downloading and installing updates (carefully watching for conflicts). I am not a kernel hacker and was able to accomplish this. Now that this is done, the updates and upgrades are much easier!

Well, personally I'd mod this whole thread funny. However, the AC has a point. Your post appears to belittle an entire group of people. Whether or not that was your intended goal doesn't really matter. I shouldn't be surprised if you get a "fuck you" here and there for it though.

By saying that Swedish doesn't have a concept of Habeus Corpus--the liberty to not be detained unlawfully--is insulting, I would think.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis doesn't mean you can't think outside of your language, but the translation may be rough. For example, if someone literally translated Habeus Corpus to english without understanding its meaning, you get "You have the body". "Of course I have my body! Are you on crack?", someone who understands both languages and cultures would translate the concept, and not just the words.

You should also take into consideration that the parent mentioned they have to "send" the computer to HQ. Meaning there is a shipping delay for going back and forth. Even with overnight shipping, the earliest you could get a computer to them would be three days. At my office, we would send them another computer the same day loaded with the standard stable image, so they would have a working machine the next day or day after (depending on when the machine got shipped out).

Yeah, who in there right mind would ever do that?

In my experience with Windows Vista, transfering many small files, be it from disk to disk or to network, results in transfer speeds of less than 100KiB/s. For instance, anytime I have to transfer a users Quark profile (full of thousands of small font stubs for files), I generally get less then 10KiB/s transfer speeds until it can get past the font stubs, at which point it shoots up to MiB/s speeds. Haven't tried this in Windows 7 Beta, but I probably will at some point. It would be nice to see that go away.

Since when is making light of flamers an act of trolling?

You remind me of Mel Gibson when he was arrested for DUI. Another classic example of why drinking and posting is a bad idea.

Seriously, half of the code in the Linux source resides in the drivers directory.. haha.

I think a lot of people don't realize that windows doesn't really support their hardware, the manufacturers do (sometimes). Linux drivers come compiled into the kernel or as modules if you like.

Just yesterday I was having an idle conversation with a co-worker who was mentioning that her printer doesn't work in Vista because the manufacturer doesn't provide Vista drivers. Here at the office, we have an old Xerox printer (docucolor12) that has no Vista driver, yet we have tons of vista machines that depend on this printer. Our SysAdmin used a driver for a DocuColor40 instead, which causes tons of issues for everyone.

Drivers will always be a problem in both Linux and Windows. Not Mac so much since they severely limit the hardware the OS is allowed to run on, meaning less support is needed (but also severely limiting your selection as a consumer, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on who you are). The best thing you can do, is be a smart consumer. Do your research, make sure your OS supports your hardware *before* you buy it or before you upgrade your OS.

I have been running Ubuntu as a desktop for a couple of years now. At work and at home. I am a gamer, and I have to say that for my purposes wine has been working superbly.

--

At Home:
Last night, just for curiosity sake, I mounted my old windows partition (the one riddled with tons of game, ssshhh). I was able to run Spore, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, WoW (duh), Thief III: Deadly Shadows, Vampire: The masquerade, Kingdom O' Magic, NWN : Windows Client (I have the linux client as well).

I was able to run all of these games with no custom wine modifications (except for KOM, which has to run in dosbox on both Linux and Windows because of its age). Played each for a level, or stage, or what have you. Some of them were slower than if they had been running straight from Windows, but given the development rate of wine, I wouldn't be surprised to see this lessened by the end of the year. I can get over 30 fps in each game, some more than others obviously. For instance, if I were to boot into my Windows XP installation and run nwn I get less FPS than if I booted into linux and run nwn natively. I wish I could run more tests, but I don't have any other games that have a native windows *and* linux client.

Oh, did I mention I have desktop cube (among other things) enabled while I played all of these?

I am very, very, happy with my 3 year old desktop running Ubuntu. With the improvements in the 2.6.29 kernel, I think things will get even better once I have configured and compiled this (currently using stock ubuntu kernel).

--

At work:
I am using ubuntu on a full blown windows network. I'm talking exchange (no IMAP), SMB shares, etc (standard office environment). Evolution using OWA has a lot of problems, but it works. Changing your preferences a bit (Set Inline forwarding, Outlook style replies, etc) will make it emulate an Outlook install. It crashes pretty often, but thats probably because it has to interface with OWA rather than connecting directly with IMAP. Been running this setup for quite some time. I keep a file smb.credentials (rw-------)for easy rdesktop.

As always, Your Mileage May Vary.

There are two mainstream expansions for this acronym I know of. "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt" and "Fucked Up Disinformation". Substituting either of these into the GP's post produces a proper statement. Acronyms are often very ambiguous.

That said, don't be a dick.

Using ubufox on intrepid, amd64, never had this issue with right-clicking. Tried right clicking all over the place on the page, and on different objects, but it performed as expected! I feel so left out. :(

I agree, no one goes crying foul when teenagers go through puberty and the hormones change them into stupid little whipper snappers that won't STAY THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!

Yeah, I don't really know. My only point was that copyright protection isn't the only concern of all software vendors. Sometimes that does make sense. But like you said, that would belong in the TOS (completely forgot about that).

Except for online video games where the companies have to tell users upfront that if they hack the game and get banned, they aren't getting money back for lost time on gaming.

Your online (or lack thereof) experience may vary! :)