8088s and Shuttles
klauss wrote:
So, fun stuff. You give your flash and HD and DRAM for granted, but when you go up all you have are 8088 and a few K of core RAM. That [NASA] must be a fun place to work at
It's like, so totally cosmic, Maan. <--Snigger--> Unreal. Think about it, the chips back then were huge heavy things. There was so much silicon an induced voltage didn't break the PNP & NPN barriers. Simple transistors were still the size of a pea, not a thousand on the head of a pin. Of course our new stuff won't hold up.
Then again, they were rather susceptible to static and teh new isn't. Then there's the technology for the HDDs. You can drop a SATA HDD and not sweat it. It's why they use them in laptops. Drop one of those old RLLS and you'll dent the deck plates.
klauss wrote:
Well, rejoice, mobile rekindled the love of leanness. Even when you have phones with 2G of RAM, using it costs a lot of power, and drains the battery. So people are re-learning how to code efficiently.
Assuming it manages to port over to the desktop. Sony is going to stop making televisions. MAC sold, or is selling off, most, if not all of their desktop and laptop factories. They're investing in portable and uber-portable. How much longer before the desktop goes the way of the Main-Frame? I give it five years before we're stuck buying from second and third-rate hardware makers exclusively. intel and AMD will continue on, yet you can bet they'll be making stuff for your telephone, iPod and the like, not a healty robust UPGRADEABLE desktop. Look at the all-in-ones they're selling now. It's all in the monitor and with them being touch screen, you don't even need I/O ports. Scary that.
GUI root login
klauss wrote:
Well... graphical root is quite a bad idea. Most distros have ksudo and gnome-sudo properly integrated into the desktop, so you don't really need a whole desktop running as root.
Nope. Not good at all. I've been known to disable my root account as well. HOWEVER...when you're configuring a brand new system, with nothing updated and all the fun things you want set up and running, how many times do
YOU want to type a 16 character password? I set it up, configure the system, then -- get this -- I needed to use the root account so infrequently I actually forgot my sudo password!
Grr.... Can you say, SINGLE USER MODE?
Wendy-J wrote:
but then, that's why we "Enjoy the Choice". Those are the exact reasons why I'm running the Debian/Boo-Boo derivative Mint...and as I said, I don't go with the bleeding edge releases, I stick with the Long Term Support releases. The OS I'm running is based on Boo-Boo 12.04. Mint 13 Maya -- GNOME 2 -- Desktop.
klauss wrote:
Well... they don't have LTS, but you still might want to try a live DVD with openSuse. I've always used it, it's friendly, it's current, and while it's not as stable as it used to be, it's got quite a healthy community. Worth a look.
To me, six months to a year is a VERY short time. Years get shorter as a function of age. I remember when a week was an eternity! Now a decade feels like a month did back then. I don't want to reconfigure my system every year. I like getting comfy. Every five years, your HDD needs to be replaced, need it or not, like it or not. They actually go bad sitting on the shelf. With how LTS systems are maintained for Five years, it makes a scary amount of sense. You're up for new hardware anyway, so give something new a whirl. I do use apps and programmes I port over from Open SUSE. I just can't see installing an OS, then three months later, since I was behind the times as usual, there's no more support. No updates, I can't watch videos because the needed codecs aren't available for the old systems and so on. I was perfectly happy with Firefox 3.68 Then suddenly I couldn't surf any more. YOU NEED A NEW VERSION OF JAVA and it's not written for the old, comfortable, very user friendly browser. You get the picture. I'm old and set in my ways.
Flashy screens....
klauss wrote:
While a memory hog, true, it's productive, insanely configurable, and in general user friendly. And the flashes they introduce aren't just for show, they're actually comfortable and useful (ie: animations prevent your eyes from loosing focus on windows, so you know what's going on the screen quite intuitively).
I railed against Adobe FLASH! I told AT&T they were making a mistake when they went with Adobe anything. I spent more time reinstalling doze 3.11 because of it than you'd believe. Flash only got worse as time went on. It STILL refuses to release resources, even with Firefox 20 whatever it is I'm running now. Everyonce in a while I'll hear my system fan start to scream and I'm actually not even doing anything with the browser. It's just open and there's a flash applet on the page that's sucked up all 2G of my system RAM.
HARD BOOT.
WHat do I need a desktop that will do that for -- read to -- me? Besides, I can't find squat in that side bar. Give me back my panels. I KNOW where everything is there and I have the mini-boxes showing what's going on on all four virtual desktops and I even have a notify applet to get my attention. It flashes the icon demanding attention and that's in good old fashioned GNOME 2.0.
I really don't want to learn a new way of doing the same old same old, when I'm already comfortable with what I have. I tried the desktop that came with Mint. It lasted two whole days. I spent more time on the Internet looking up where to find everyday apps than I did using the blasted things! Yeah, it's a failing on my part. I STILL don't own a smart phone. Why should I go BACK to billing by the minute for Internet connectivity at modem speeds and a minuscule screen? My screen is my old 32" HD TV. It's a monitor with a tuner. THe specs are the same for that as they are my Hanns-G 22". I gave tiny screens and charge by the minute up in 1995 when I managed to go with broadband!
It's comfy, well worn and I'm happy with it. It really is a failing. I've beome my grandmother!
YUCK!
klauss wrote:
Wendy-J wrote:
Gee, can you tell I used to code? USED TO.
It's been so long....
What a better excuse to start again than having sighed ?
I could give you my great-grandson's excuse when we tell him to eat his peas.
And I quote: "Don' wanna!"
I even have my lip stuck out!
klauss wrote:
The state of things is, nVidia works almost hassle-free (except when you have a bleeding edge kernel, where building the nVidia driver can take a bit of effort), but nVidia cards tend to be slower than same-priced AMD cards. AMD ones are blazing fast, but their drivers aren't nearly as mature.
Aaand... hardware-accelerated desktops are, while not new, relatively immature. Expect inconsistent performance, with OpenGL games that do crazy shit going at 200fps, and a stupid desktop lagging at 10fps.
I found KDE needs a bit of exploratory configuration until you find the setup that works best for your card, and it's not always the same. Sometimes, Xrandr works best, sometimes OpenGL, sometimes you've got to tweak them, sometimes defaults work. It's a chore, but once you've got it figured out, accelerated desktops can actually perform a lot better than classic ones, especially when multitasking.
Let's not talk about KDE. Want to talk about something that drags my current systems to their knees? Whisper KDE. Oh, it LOOKED great back when I got the P4 I'm using now. But that's it. It sat there and LOOKED at me, even with a discrete nVidia card. I coudn't do a bloody thing, yet it
looked great.
Calling it a 1-FPS Desktop was being generous. I'd click, get up, go downstairs, make a cup of coffee and some toast, root through the fridge, build a snack, then head back and see it still chugging away. That was all it took and I was back with GNOME.
Even with GNOME 2.0, I run into inconsistencies with OpenGL anything. Flaky now, dead later and working like a champ in the morning.
klauss wrote:
Debugging GPU stuff is a whole different game. You've got no debugger, you've got no printf. All you've got are the hints of what's wrong on your screen.
That loud bang you just heard -- and probably felt -- was my head hitting the desk. (It's an old military surplus SteelCase, so it's substantial -- like the rock that just hit it.) You mean, do like setting up codecs used to be in doze? Disable this one, enable that, tweak the other and pray?
klauss wrote:
Sometimes, you can use tried-and-true bisection. But when you have a bug that's been there forever, it's hard to figure out what's wrong. Sometimes, the GL state gets screwed up, but the game doesn't crash there, it starts misbehaving, first in subtle ways, then obviously, then crashing. By the time it crashes (or misbehaves noticeably), the problem spot is long in the past.
You DO mean that!
klauss wrote:
And you've got no debugging info for drivers. That's the thing. So you have to keep guessing. Debugging the kernel, while possible, is really hardcore.
So, in general, if it's shader-related, it's a matter of commenting out shader parts until it stops crashing, and then manually bisecting the offending bit.
Hit or miss, so long as you go about it in a logical and orderly fashion? OUCH! The easiest way is to cut it all and start enabling one by one, but with 512 or more shaders.... Remember the BOOKS we used to get when we got hardware? You got the full instruction set. Those really were the days.
klauss wrote:
But this Radeon bug I'm talking about, seems to happen on the fixed pipeline. That is, basic OpenGL stuff. So I have no idea how to start hunting for it, without looking at it personally. That's why having someone with the knowledge and wits to do the debugging really is so valuable: because you'll really have to guess where the problem is by applying all your knowledge.
And lotsa time. You've got to have lotsa time. If you don't... we all understand.
Let me see some of the issues, I'll read up on the OpenGL stuff and have a go in my spare time.
IF I get my teeth into it, I get like a Terrier. If I wind up screaming, I may well say, no, but at least I tried.
klauss wrote:
PS: still, you'll get the Radeon. They're good cards, and you'll get it, because you'll go for the highest bang for the buck, and they're it. And when you do, and VS crashes on you... can you resist the temptation of debugging?
We'll see...
Yeah, it's like, why CAN'T a Clyde handle like a Franklin. What do you need to do to it to make it work?
klauss wrote:
Still, really, it really takes lots of time. You might be wise to try something else when that happens. Like a cup of tea maybe.
Old programmer's trick. Note my cup of coffee, toast, cheese hunks etc.... Although, I don't usually take advantage of it until my eyes are bleeding and my brain is mush. Let me see some of the issues people are having and I'll dip my toe in. ONLY MY TOE, mind you.
Jeez, this was like a walk through memory lane.
C-ya,
w.