Linuxers December 2004

linuxers@mm.ilug-bom.org.in

103 participants
144 discussions

Re: [ILUG-BOM] Cheapest Laptop
by sherlock＠vsnl.com 12 Dec '04

12 Dec '04

On Saturday 11 December 2004 10:09, Trevor Warren wrote: > Anandtech.com has some good reviews of the > processors. These processors have the following > > specs: > > 90 nm die > > 4-8 cores on each cpu > > Each core having 4Ghz + crunching power > > Intercore B/w of 4.5Ghz + ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ actually that is what makes the power pc really great. Easy scalability by simply putting more processors on the same die. Even the low end devices have bus speeds of 200mhz. Debain and Yellowdog both work with powerpc. There are several embedded boards which run uclinux. And ofcourse some of the Apple Power Macs (with pci bus) can run linux. But as of now u cant beat the x86 arch on price. Considering the fact that i would require support from a laptop mfg cause his mobo/peripheral combo is some closed design, I might be better off buying off the shelf lowpower mobo, battery + charger and laptop lcd and throw them into a small briefcase. I would easily save 40% on the cost and have better performance and (self) service. Also most of the warranties are carry in (onsite costs about 5% more). It is easier to find a component vendor than a service center in most places. Regarding Taiwanese mfg as Saswata points out all mobo roads lead to China a few to south east asia (IBM and Dell included). But Dlink (Goa Ponda), and Kobian (Daman) have plants in India.

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Re: [ILUG-BOM] Cheapest Laptop
by Saswata Banerjee 12 Dec '04

12 Dec '04

Trevor Warren <trevorwarren(a)yahoo.com> wrote: __________ > > >Saswata, > > Toshiba-IBM-Acer could be good options to look at. I >can vouch for the in-capability and unprofessionalism >at Zenith to be able to cater to customer problems. Actually the after sales support for zenith depends on whom you buy from since dealers / resellers mostly do the service for you. I have a very good supplier. His response time to compaints at my father and 2 friends was about half day. Zenith depends on its dealers to provide first line of support and get it to zenith for serious problems. Similar to assembled pcs. Moral : don't bargain unnesessarily on pricing, let him make that 1500 margin unmolested and you are likely to get good service. > > As for Zenith, he just gets the whole laptop in a >CKD form from Taiwan to his plant in goa, gets out the >screw drivers and assembles the same. These laptops >are most probably from the same stables as your >Gateway/HIS/Low end Taiwanese manufacturers stables. The entire world buys from taiwanese, so that per se is not bad. Anyway, no components are manufactured in india, all come from abroad. Apart from the ibm assembly plant at pondiocheri, there are no other manufacturing units in the country. >Stay away from these taiwanese look a likes since its >less on the quality that worries me.......but largely >its Zeniths approach to after sales service. > > Also, support for Gnu-Linux on these laptops would >surely be and added benefit. > >Trevor > > >===== >|------|____________________________________|------| >( >- / Scaling FreeSoftware & OpenSource \ -< ) >/~\ / In the Enterprise \ /~\ >| \) \ | www.fsf.org | www.opensource.org | / (/ | >|_|_ \____________________________________/ _|_| > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Dress up your holiday email, Hollywood style. Learn more. >http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com > >-- >http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers

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Re: [ILUG-BOM] Cheapest Laptop
by Trevor Warren 12 Dec '04

12 Dec '04

Saswata, Toshiba-IBM-Acer could be good options to look at. I can vouch for the in-capability and unprofessionalism at Zenith to be able to cater to customer problems. As for Zenith, he just gets the whole laptop in a CKD form from Taiwan to his plant in goa, gets out the screw drivers and assembles the same. These laptops are most probably from the same stables as your Gateway/HIS/Low end Taiwanese manufacturers stables. Stay away from these taiwanese look a likes since its less on the quality that worries me.......but largely its Zeniths approach to after sales service. Also, support for Gnu-Linux on these laptops would surely be and added benefit. Trevor ===== |------|____________________________________|------| ( >- / Scaling FreeSoftware & OpenSource \ -< ) /~\ / In the Enterprise \ /~\ | \) \ | www.fsf.org | www.opensource.org | / (/ | |_|_ \____________________________________/ _|_| __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Dress up your holiday email, Hollywood style. Learn more. http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com

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Re: RHCE
by Subhamoy Mukherjee 11 Dec '04

11 Dec '04

Hi All, Something to mention about RHCE. As someone mentioned earlier 'it's nice to prepare for RHCE' but after getting certified I think the market is still not prepared for a RHCE. For eg. I completed RHCE on August 2004 but still waiting for a good option. There is no adv. in the newspaper Appointments asking for RHCE. So what's the good in going for so much effort. -- Subhamoy

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Cheapest Laptop
by sherlock＠vsnl.com 11 Dec '04

11 Dec '04

Which is the cheapest laptop available? Should run linux ofcourse. I need to purchase one for general field use.

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Re: [ILUG-BOM] Cheapest Laptop
by Saswata Banerjee 11 Dec '04

11 Dec '04

Trevor Warren <trevorwarren(a)yahoo.com> wrote: __________ > >Hello JTD, > > With IBM jettisioning it's PC division things don't >look too good for other manufacturers too but luckily >as i hear laptops are a different story. Let me >forewarn you that i am not in anyway an advocate for >classy brands but in this case it pays to safe than be >sorry. > > IBM and Dell in india is the best that money can get. I thought laptops were a part of the pc division of ibm sold to the chineese. Don't use dell. You are dpendent on dell to service you. Unless you are a large corporate, you will need to go down on knees and beg for service. Dell does not support linux on laptops. Hp and ibm you can get service from multiple support centers and they officially sell laptops with linux preloaded. The linux loaded laptops are cheaper by at least 7k. Acer is also good, cheap and supports linux. So does toshiba - yesterday's advt 50k or so. Have a look at zenith laptops. Their quality is suprisingly good. I speak from experiance of friends. >And as for Gnu-Linux - BSD, you should be able get any >freaking GPL'ed application running on them without a >hitch. Make sure you get wifi support since thats the >norm if you will be travelling to europe/us. Most laptops here are sold with wifi 11b standards which are slow and outdated. Only toshiba and zenith have wifi 11g. That is almost 6 times faster and is now the standard in all laptops in western markets. Saswata

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help req for networking
by Pankaj Dekate 11 Dec '04

11 Dec '04

Hi linuxers, I am a newbie to networking and am keen to learn networking in linux. The only resource i have is a single computer.Is it possible to setup and test firewalls and mail servers and other servers only using a single comp using the loopback address.Or can i try using two network cards on a single comp? Can I assign two ip address to a single ethernet interface.Please let me know if i can learn using a single comp as i cannot afford to join any course or purchase another comp to learn it. TIA, Pankaj

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[Commercial] PERL Trainers urgently required
by OSPOnline 11 Dec '04

11 Dec '04

We need to immediately conduct a 30 hrs PERL Training for one of our clients. Those interested may kindly get in touch with the undersigned and mail their profiles to admin(a)ospians.com. -- Regards, Aishwarya (Mobile: 98208 79303)

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Re: [ILUG-BOM] Cheapest Laptop
by sherlock＠vsnl.com 11 Dec '04

11 Dec '04

On Saturday 11 December 2004 08:24, Trevor Warren wrote: > Hello JTD, > > With IBM jettisioning it's PC division things don't > look too good for other manufacturers too but luckily That should free their PCs from M$tax. And according to some pundits allow IBM to push non intel architectures (Power PC). The power pc cpus provide a range of watts/mips combinations which beat intel cpus hands down on both counts and can be used in small embedded stuff all the way upto large clusters - running GNU/Linux. So they have a complete software environment at zero cost. All they need is a system cost comparable to the i386 arch. Bet the chinese will deliver. So get ready to see a whole new range of innovative products. Thanks for the feedback on laptops. rgds jtd

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Re: [ILUG-BOM] Mono Session on 19th Dec
by Miguel de Icaza 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

Hello, Now here a lot of people may ask why there are two projects with the same goal ... the thing is that the DotGNU people earlier have tried to merge the two projects together but all they got were verbal volleys from our very favourite Miguel de Icaza. The main problem at the moment is that the Mono guys (read Novell) doesn't want to have Mono under a Free Software license and they also recently changed their library licensing from LGPL to MIT's X11 license to make it more unrestrictive. The reality is much more complicated than that. Both teams have invested heavily in their own stacks, and neither group is willing to throw away they work that they have produced. To that mix, you can add the licensing piece, which has two elements: * Novell licenses the Mono source code for proprietary applications, very much in the same way that Qt, MySQL and Berkeley DB are relicensed, because they allow us to fund the work of Mono while still contributing it to the free software world. It would be ideal if all software wrote itself and we had many more contributors working for free, but today thanks to this licensing model we are able to fund 25 developers to work full time on Mono. * The .NET technologies are a source of great debate in the open source world, and adding to the mix the fears that people have over the GPL and the LGPL makes things worse. The particular problem is that there is room for "interpretation" in the case of the GNU LGPL about what a "derivative works" is in the presence of an OO library. If you make a subclass of a Mono library and override a method, is it a "derivative work"? Lets say: class MyApp : Window { ... } Reasonable people will have different opinions. Now, the matter is more complex since it is not about a given lawyer opinion. The problem is that every contributor has the right to interpret what "derivative works" means. Each one is entitled to his opinion, and it means that proprietary developers would risk having their source violate the license. The choices were to invent a new license, or pick something trusted, so we decided to go with the license that gives you the most freedom to maximize adoption and minimize fear. Mono is about brining new software to the Linux world, and bringing ISVs to Linux is something we consider very important. They also plan to sell Mono to companies under proprietary licenses if they want to. Talking about technical issues, DotGNU is faster than Mono as Mono is self hsoting (written in C# itself) and Mono also has a very weird approach towards implementing the Windows.Forms thingy ... The speed issue is incorrect. The MONO VM is among the fastest VMs out there, we are now close to matching the Microsoft.NET one as we have been working on very advanced optimizations based on SSA: SSAPRE, Arrays Bound Check elimination and in general our JIT has been tuned during two and a half years. DotGNU today has a tuned interpreter, but a tuned native code generator is better. You might be referring to the speed of the C# compiler, but here you are comparing apples versus oranges, let me explain why: * The PNet compiler is not a complete C# 1.0 compiler. One day, it will get there, but it is not there today. Speed wise, they do not implement definite assignment, which is a very computationally expensive operation, so it is easy to be fast if you do not flag every error or every warning. * Mono's C# compiler is not only C# 1.0 compliant, but implements about 70% of the C# 2.0 stuff today, including generics which on its own took a year to develop and tune. * Mono's C# compiler *can* be made faster, and even match the speed of cscc if you precompile all your assemblies with all optimizations like this: for i in $prefix/lib/mono/gac/*/*dll; do mono --aot -O=all $a done Do the same for mcs.exe they have done it using Wine whereas DotGNU only needs X to run Windows.Forms What Mono seems to me at the moment is that it's just a C# development environment for GNU/Linux and doesn't intend to be 100% compatible with MS .Net ... they are trying to push GTk# instead of Windows.Forms ... who'll use GTk# if Windows.Forms works perfectly ? As DotGNU's implementation of Windows.Forms is incomplete, and so is Mono's new implementation. You can not run any existing commercial application with either of them. Both will mature, but you wont be able to show me any commercial app running on either today. We are working on a new implementation of Windows.Forms, that follows the same approach the DotGNU people took. There are four full-time developers working on it so we will soon have something ready for production use. Now, I do believe that Windows.Forms has many flaws, specially for open source software as it does not work well with translation to different languages nor do the applications "just-work" in different languages like Gtk# applications do. This is important to support open source programs that work in many languages. We consider Windows.Forms to be important to bring Windows developers to Linux, but our path to independence is really using a toolkit that came out of the open source world and works well with other open source efforts. Witness the effort of Gnome India and how well it supports every script available, or how it supports Hebrew and Arabic without changing a line in the software. Windows.Forms just can not cope with this. far as DotGNU is concerned, GTk# or any free software libs can be easily made to work with DotGNU's Portable .Net. The fact that Gopal V, one of the major contributors to the DotGNU project ported the Portable .Net to the Encore Simputer in 3 hours flat on Linux Bangalore/2004 this time bears testimony of the portability issue. DotGNU support for Gtk# will definitely mature in the future, and I wish them good luck, but they are nowhere the stability or completeness of Mono. They can screenshot applications, but they wont be able to run the more complex apps like F-Spot, Beagle, MonoDevelop or even Monodoc. As for portability, porting an interpreter is very easy. Barely anything more than "configure; make; make install". In fact, you should be able to run Mono on the Encore Simputer as well, since we support the ARM processor in our interpreter. We are now working on a JIT engine for the StrongARM, so that will give you also a nice performance boost. While I don't intend to demean Mono in any way, I dislike their attitude towards the Freedom aspect in general and the DotGNU project in particular. (Rhys Weatherley and others have relicensed DotGNU code to Mono under their MIT's X11 license but the reverse has not happened till date). The DotGNU project needs our help and it's time we got our facts right and decided whom we should support. I would not have replied, but "its time we got our facts right" annoys me, because your post is miss-informed and far from having the facts right. What you have heard is a bunch of half-facts. You are wrong about that. DotGNU has taken large chunks of Mono code under the MIT X11 and distributes it as part of their runtime (RegularExpressions, XmlSerialization) both which are very complex pieces of code. They also ship our class libraries for any high-level features, so they tend to be behind Mono. Good luck, Miguel.

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Linuxers December 2004