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Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet)Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet)Posted Nov 13, 2004 21:53 UTC (Sat) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)Parent article: Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet)
I've been using Linux since 1993 and UNIX for much longer than that. My wife has always been involved with Windows, and now a bit of Mac. She's always used lookOut!, IE, etc. She feels that open source, while useful (she does use CVS on her Mac OS X for example, and we use a Linux firewall for our cable modem with the printer hanging off of it, shared with Samba), is always a big kludgy.
Last night she told me that the week before she was so fed up with cleaning her Windows laptop all the time that she downloaded and installed FireFox 1.0... and she said she absolutely loves it. It's fast, it doesn't install crap on her system all the time, and best of all (she says) even though it's open source it is extremely polished and professional looking and acting.
I don't agree with her that OSS is always a bit kludgy (although she does have a leg to stand on here of course), but I do agree with her about FireFox.
Kudos to the Mozilla team, and I hope to continue to see more great things from them. If you have relatives or friends who have been skeptical about free software, FireFox is a perfect way to induce them to get their feet wet!
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Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 13, 2004 22:57 UTC (Sat) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] > always a big kludgyUnfortunately most of the time it is. xterm/bash/vim/mutt is perfect. I use them 95% time. (with little assistence of icewm) other 5% percents are spent in Mozilla Mail & Browser. But most people will call that "kludgy." Both KDE/Gnome have long way before becoming anything useful & polished like e.g. MacOSX or Enlightenment. Well, they have already become useless & kludgy just like M$ Windoz GUI - so they are somewhere down half road. In opposite direction. FireFox brings good point: simplicity. It is simple - so it can be polished. It has limited but carefully chosen functionality. I doubt that with all that skinning support you can ever make Mozilla AppSuite that polished - polish must come from roots. And FireFox did it right - they have stripped all functionality - and then just added bare minimum. You do not need much to compete against IE, but just listen to screams of Opera fans ;-))) Opera - tries to be polished, but it has way too much functionality to be that cute as FireFox is. Simplicity is the key. P.S. La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever. (You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.) © Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 14, 2004 0:26 UTC (Sun) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] I would have agreed in the past however the new GNOME when used along with HAL/DBUS/udev/inotify is remarkably polished and well done. This is literally the first time with Linux that I've ever been able to plug a piece of hardware in and use it without fiddling around in an xterm. Spatial nautilus has taken over most of my routine file management activities (I was a CLI addict before). I don't use KDE but the KDE apps I've tried seem really well done (k3b, filelight). XFCE works really well for kiosks and public computer stations.
Yes we have a ways to go but let's give ourselves credit where credit is due.
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 14, 2004 10:14 UTC (Sun) by mepr (guest, #4819) [Link] The linux desktop, as presented by the major distributors, is still a mess when it comes to audio.. for example, having to manually add users to the audio group to be able to hear sound is not acceptable. And k3b is a nice program, but I've never yet seen it installed by default such that anyone but root can burn a cd.
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 14, 2004 13:05 UTC (Sun) by etwilson (guest, #8459) [Link] I don't know what distributions you have been using but both your examples are wrong on Fedora, at least. Asla sound works fine right out of the box, you don't need to set any permissions, I've never heard of that. And k3b works perfectly for me, no configuration necessary, in fact I burnt the Fedora Core 3 disks using Fedora Core 2 as myself, not root.
I only speak about Fedora as it is the only current distribution I know but I seriously doubt that Mandrake, SUSE or others are any more difficult. There are some issues with Linux on the desktop but those are not two of them. Try again.
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 14, 2004 18:06 UTC (Sun) by juanjux (guest, #11652) [Link] I can confirm than in Mandrake you don't need to do anything special to burn CDs or listen to music as normal user...
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 14, 2004 21:10 UTC (Sun) by tomsi (subscriber, #2306) [Link] There is one scenario where sound doesn't work on Fedora.
Try running fedora in text mode (init level 3) and use sound from a vnc session. Doesn't work - I don't get the right permissions. This is on Fedora 3, but I had problems on Fedora 2 too.
Why such a scenario ? I am testing out a Fedora based PC as a jukebox for my stereo. By using VNC, I don't need keyboard, mouse or screen, but can control the PC from my laptop.
audio group - what audio group? Posted Nov 14, 2004 14:22 UTC (Sun) by grantingram (subscriber, #18390) [Link] Well I'm using Mandrake 10.1, listening to music and writing this reply and I didn't know that the audio group even existed.
So in short etwilson is right, things work out of the box on at least one other modern GNU/Linux distribution.
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 14, 2004 16:21 UTC (Sun) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] > having to manually add users to the audio group to be able to hear sound is not acceptable.
You mean there's another distribution than Debian that actually does this ?
> And k3b is a nice program, but I've never yet seen it installed by default such that anyone but root can burn a cd.
Again, I'm not actually aware of any distributions that do this.
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 15, 2004 0:31 UTC (Mon) by mepr (guest, #4819) [Link] >> having to manually add users to the audio group to be able to hear sound is not acceptable.
>You mean there's another distribution than Debian that actually does this ?
It's security concerns. I also don't get it with audio, but I understand the motivation for the cd burning, since allowing users to write cds means giving write access to the disk group which means write access to hard drives. The two obvious solutions are adding the user to the disk group or running cdrecord setuid root. The first gives arbitrary bit-by-bit access to your hard drive. I can find no evidence of it now, but I read that cdrecord used to have an option which allowed the user to run an arbitrary program to do part of its job, which means "expliots" were not difficult. This old cod probably motivated the situation.
That's why I'm glad ubuntu came out. I haven't had the opportunity to burn a cdrom yet, but the audio problem seems to be fixed. And they are almost there with automounting thumb drives, etc. Provoked by the post above about DBUS, hal, etc., I rooted around a bit and found that pmount and pumount are in group plugdev. I added my user to that group, and now my usb drive pops up automatically and eog finds the .jpg folder and offers to import them.
>>And k3b is a nice program, but I've never yet seen it installed by default >>such that anyone but root can burn a cd.
>Again, I'm not actually aware of any distributions that do this.
No, You all have caught me being ignorant and unknowlegable, but I certainly wasn't trolling. I generally use Debian, which has the above problems with audio and cd burning. But I had actually read within the last couple of months that red hat was doing the same with cd burning. The article was wrong, then, or maybe referring to an old version.
Mark
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 15, 2004 1:13 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] It's security concerns. I also don't get it with audio, Think of a computer with a microphone (more and more prevalent due to VoIP), think of the implications if sound input were wide open.
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 15, 2004 6:58 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] > It's security concerns. I also don't get it with audio,
Forget microphones, or any other spy-vs-spy scenario. Just think about after you've gone to bed, some person who has remote access to your box cranking the volume all the way and playing heavy metal. Even if you trust your users implicitly, imagine one of your users remotely opening a program that uses auditory feedback, and having your computer randomly beep and boing at you for the next few hours. In a multi-user situation with remote users, permitting users to access the audio devices could certainly cause problems.
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 15, 2004 9:04 UTC (Mon) by ranger (guest, #6415) [Link] It's security concerns. I also don't get it with audio, but I understand the motivation for the cd burning, since allowing users to write cds means giving write access to the disk group which means write access to hard drives. The two obvious solutions are adding the user to the disk group or running cdrecord setuid root.Or, you do what Mandrake does, and use pam_console to give ownership to local devices to the locally logged-in user. Unfortunately, some things break when you have multiple locally logged-in users, which is when you would have to add the subsequent users to the audio group etc. (but this is a decision that needs to be taked while taking the associated risks into account, which is why users are not in these groups by default as they are in SuSE). That's why I'm glad ubuntu came out. Yeah, all the Debianites finally get a distro that works almost as well as other mainstream distros have for the past 2 years. Really, all the "new" features you describe have been available in Mandrake since about 8.2.
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 18, 2004 19:07 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link] Why couldn't it dynamically add you to an audio group?Multiple users might still have problems if they are actually using the device at the same time, but otherwise it would fix the problem. Maybe the sound mixing service should always be running and there should be a virtual device which can be opened by any local user... it could just mix the sound from the various sessions :)
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 15, 2004 9:36 UTC (Mon) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] allowing users to write cds means giving write access to the disk group which means write access to hard drives. The two obvious solutions are adding the user to the disk group or running cdrecord setuid root. The first gives arbitrary bit-by-bit access to your hard drive.Or you do the sensible thing, like Mandrake and use pam to change permissions on login. For example ls -l /dev/hd? on my machine at the moment says: brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 0 Nov 15 08:27 /dev/hda brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 64 Nov 15 08:27 /dev/hdb brw-rw---- 1 silvia cdrom 22, 0 Nov 15 08:27 /dev/hdc brw-rw---- 1 root disk 22, 64 Nov 15 08:27 /dev/hdd So, to have rw access to the cdrom (hdc at my machine) you need to either be the currently logged in user ("silvia") or be a member of group "cdrom", neither of which gives any access whatsoever to the other harddisks in the system. When "silvia" logs out the ownership reverts automatically to root.cdrom. That's the default, out-of-box behaviour. Users who wish so can easily change this default. In general it's good security to not give more permissions than needed. It's obvious that running as root, or having rw access to all disks in the system are both examples of too much permissions when all that you actually *need* is rw-access to one spesific device, namely the cdwriter.
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 15, 2004 15:42 UTC (Mon) by arafel (subscriber, #18557) [Link] I generally use Debian, which has the above problems with audio and cd burning.
Can't comment on audio - since I set it up once and haven't touched it since - but I'm afraid it's not the case with Debian and CD burning. apt-get install k3b worked out of the box, as far as I remember.
(Excluding a bug in k3b itself, which has now been fixed.)
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 14, 2004 18:31 UTC (Sun) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] having to manually add users to the audio group to be able to hear sound is not acceptable.No idea what you might mean there... In addition to servers, I've installed suse linux on my laptop and a number of desktops and in every case sound simply works in my normal user account. And k3b is a nice program, but I've never yet seen it installed by default such that anyone but root can burn a cd Again, no idea what you mean. I discovered k3b on my laptop recently and fired it up. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I have an 8x CD burner, and so I copied a CD on the spot, quick and easy, and a perfect copy, as a non-root user. I've since been using k3b on my other desktops as well. No hint of the supposed ownership/permissions problems. Sounds like FUD to me.
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 14, 2004 5:17 UTC (Sun) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link] "...and best of all (she says) even though it's open source it is extremely polished and professional looking and acting." I'd like to remind people that, despite its (almost) universally accepted status as a crappy and "BOFH" browser, IE does have an equally accepted status as an example of outstanding "look-and-feel" -- if nothing else, millions of potential Firefox users in the short-term are, now, comfortably familiar and functional with IE's GUI. Therefore, I'd like to also remind people that Chris Cook's "Luna Blue Theme for Firefox" gives a spot-on rendition of the Windows XP look-and-feel for IE, for the GNU/Linux version of Firefox. Make it even that much easier for your friends, family, and users to "do the right thing!"
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 15, 2004 4:37 UTC (Mon) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link] Be careful about trying to make a Linux desktop look identical to Windows. For example, Siemens did a study on Linux desktop usability that found that users had problems when presented something that looked like Windows but didn't act like Windows. When presented with something less Windows-like, they had different expectations and were able to adapt better. You might find the same is true for Firefox. By making the user interface look more like IE, are users going to find it easier to use, or will they be less likely to adapt when Firefox's behaviour differs from IE's?
Dear IE, I'm leaving you for good (ZDNet) Posted Nov 15, 2004 11:59 UTC (Mon) by mdekkers (guest, #85) [Link] I recently deployed a linux desktop that has a 100% Windows 2000 look and feel, and we did not find that at all -- the only problem we ran into was unexpected midlle mouse button behaviour (paste) and we xmod-mapped that away. However, this is a pretty much tightly locked down desktop.
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