I'm not totally anti apple or anything, I just don't feel a need to pay an apple tax 🙂 For me, desktop Linux is more than good enough. I installed linux (FC3 to be exact) on my IBM T42, and other than a mild bit of hoop jumping for the wireless networking, requiring me to download a set of files and toss them into my kernel modules directory, everthing was auto configured, and just worked.

I own an iPod shuffle that my company gave to everyone, and it's a pretty decent little player, but I've never used iTunes, as they don't, as far as I know, support Linux. Plus I'm not paying someone else to encode mp3s for me, when I can pay less to buy the CD and burn it myself, and have it in both CD and mp3 format. Have you ever used Grip? it's very nice. Put in a CD, tell it to rip and encode, and 5 or 10 minutes later you've got mp3s ready to install on your mp3 player.

I guess if I was a graphic artist, I'd likely have a Mac, but I'm not, so the Gimp is good enough for me, I guess. 🙂

    No, never used (or heard of) Grip. I use CDEx - not sure if it's available for Linux (Sourceforge is currently down, so I can't check).

    I guess if I was a graphic artist, I'd likely have a Mac

    Yeah. The store had this HUGE Cinema display - guess it was the 24" - and it looked great. Pictures were slow to load (about 5-10 seconds) though. But, Dell has displays nearly identical to Cinemas, that can probably be had for far less. I think Apple's Cinemas use proprietary connections too 🙁.

      Actually, I think that's just the newest weird connector for such screens. We have flat screens with such strange connectors here at work (20 to 21" diags or so) and they have it.

      Main reason for the MAC for graphic artists is the software they have, and the stablity while running it. Nothing sucks as much as trying to edit video on a windows box, with the crashing and stalling and all that. Mac has always been better at graphics and video than windows in terms of stability, and it has way more software for it than linux, in that realm. I mean, I love the Gimp, but it's not in the same realm as photoshop.

      BCast 2000, or whatever it's called now is pretty good on linux, but again, the stuff for the mac provides both a wider range of software, and, generally, a better experience.

        Hey Sxooter - do you know of a good program (that can run in Windows, DOS, or via boot) that can checkout hard disks (and maybe other hardware like disk controllers) for bad blocks, errors, etc. and perhaps even fix them? All I know of is MS's chkdsk (I've run that several times - it appeared to find and fix errors, but I'm still getting 'hard disk error' messages and crashes). I think I might poke around Western Digital's site.

          Generally the manufacturer makes diagnostics available for their drives. A quick google search will turn most of them up. The interesting thing is that a lot of diagnostics will run on other manufacturer's drives. Most include the ability to do a true low level format on the drive and map out bad sectors. I used to use the old maxtor low level format utility on all my drives, not just maxtors (maxllf was the name of it) and it was quite nice. This was back in the day of 1.2 Gig hard drives...

            21 days later

            Do you have any RAID experience, Sxooter? One of these 1TB RAID NASs looks cool:
            http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833329005

            But at $1100 - not including drives - I figure I can build my own RAID box for cheaper, and have it much more expandable. I've read up some, and a lot of people seem to like Linux's software RAID - they split the drives up into 40GB partitions, and use tools like mdadm, smarttools, LVM, etc.

              I have a bit of experience. Mostly with HBA raid cards, not external solutions as much.

              I prefer the LSI or Arcea cards to adaptecs, which have cause me problems in the past.

              If you're gonna build a RAID for a database, look into RAID 10 with a large battery back cache.

              I think LVD SCSI is still the king, but SATA seems to be gaining speed as it gets deployed and tested more and more.

              Of course, if you're going for broken, then a SAN is the way to go. But they ain't cheap, and few people / applications really need that kind of performance.

              For home use and what not, look at the 8 port LSI DATA megaraid that's just coming out. Comes with 512 Meg of cache, and the battery packs are usually around $50.00 or so. Not an optional item, they are, for a database, required.

              What's cool about the LSI is that the cache / battery are a separate, self contained module that you can move to a new card should your old one blowout.

              I've used linux software RAID, and it is quite good. Note that for heavily written databases linux software raid can be fast, or safe, but generally not both, due to a lack of battery backed caching.

                I hadn't seen mention of LVI, Arcea, or LVD. I've seen a lot of positive remarks about 3Ware's cards (about $250-350), and a lot of negative about Promise and Highstep(?) - both of which apparently aren't true RAID hardware cards (the CPU still does the parity calculations). A lot of people seem to like software RAID better because it doesn't lock you into particular hardware - I guess you're stuck with the same RAID card, and can be SOL if it breaks and a replacement can't be found. And people didn't seem to have any performance problems with software RAID, which doesn't appear to require much processing power.

                And, yep, this is just for home use 😉. I had never heard of a SAN until the other day.

                  Hey, just curious, since you worked for Qwest, what do you think of Joe Nacchio?

                    I agree on the using software RAID keeping you independent of particular hardware. For serious production systems, you always have one spare machine with all the same kit checked out and ready to go so you always can get back to your data.

                    Same with tape drives. nothing like needing old data and finding out you don't own a tape drive that can read it anymore.

                    Never worked for qwest, but I was a customer once. In fact, I was the, they told me at the time, the very first DSL customer in the southside of Denver. I have fond memories of calling customer support every week or two for the first three months as they learned how to actually make it work. 🙂

                      12 days later

                      Have you ever used Samba, Sxooter? Check out NASLite+ - pretty cool. I guess there's a 4GB file size limit with Samba 🙁. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a Knoppix-like distro like NASLite+.

                        8 days later

                        I've used Samba quite a bit. I think the 4 gig file limit you speak of is / was in whatever OS that NASLite is built on.

                          find my.ini in your mysql directory
                          it looks smthing like this

                          #------------------------ IMPORTANT ! ----------------------

                          This file is GENERATED by EasyPHP when needed so edit the

                          file C:\PROGRA~1\EASYPH~1\conf_files\my.ini if you want to do

                          modifications in this file

                          #-----------------------------------------------------------

                          ; IMPORTANT
                          ; C:/PROGRA~1/EASYPH~1 is used to specify EasyPHP installation path

                          [mysqld]
                          datadir=C:/PROGRA~1/EASYPH~1/mysql/data
                          basedir=C:/PROGRA~1/EASYPH~1/mysql
                          bind-address=127.0.0.1
                          ; Uncomment for use on USB key
                          ; skip-innodb

                          change the locakhost bind address to the appropriate ip what apache listens for

                            a month later
                            Sxooter wrote:

                            RedHat 9 is pretty ancient. I've had no real problem with dependencies since switching to FC2 and FC3 on my home machines / laptop. Yum is so freaking cool. yum install packagename handles all the dependencies for you. All you gotta do is say yes or no.

                            Yo, Sxooter - do you use Yum to update software like PostgreSQL, PHP, httpd, etc.? I've compiled those from source for so long and have so many modifications and compiled-in things, so I don't know if Yum would do the same.

                              On my laptop and my homeworkstation, yes.

                              However, at work, my workstation has to talk to an oracle database, and at the time I set it up there were no rpms for it, and no simple way to get php to connect to it, so I had to compile php from source. Also, since I test the postgresql releases as soon as they come out to make sure there's no problem, I always build that from source for my machine so I don't have to wait. Everything else on that box is pretty much updated via yum.

                              The only software that's given me any real troubles lately is MySQL 5.0.x where x is 16 or greater.

                              Seems some OS doesn't have a new enough version of zlib, so rather than have that os update zlib, they sent along their own. When you try to ./configure php it fails because of this. MySQL has been sitting on this problem for a couple of months now. I think I've just about given up on them. We're busily changing over everything at work that works with both mysql and pgsql to pgsql because of it.

                                4 days later

                                Yeah, I think PostgreSQL is one of the easiest programs to compile. Compiling Apache and PHP always seems to get me lost way out in left field, especially with gd, freetype, etc. requirements.

                                You're right - yum is pretty nice. I never liked rpm because of its dependency hell. Check this out - yum can update from redhat 7.2 all the way up to Fedora Core 4. Don't know if I'm brave enough to try that 😉. Maybe I'll check out apt too - I hear it's more advanced (such as the ability to do rollbacks apparently). Yum reminds me of Ruby's gem, which makes dealing with packages really simple.

                                I wish there was an easy way to copy one server (all its programs, configs, mail, files, etc.) from one server to another and have it work right away. Would make upgrading so much easier. Perhaps one of those virtual programs can do that.

                                  22 days later

                                  I had the same problem as WarderBrad, and I couldn't find the answer through Google. So I had to struggle along and come up with something.

                                  The problem is that mysql is not in the system path, and Rails can't find the server. What you need to do is go to:

                                  Control Panel > System > Advanced > Environment Variables

                                  Edit the Path Variable by including the path to your Mysql bin folder. Mine was

                                  C:\apachefriends\xampp\mysql\bin

                                  Hope this helps!

                                    a month later

                                    Hey Sxooter - what do you use for email? On my old Redhat 9 server I used Postfix, DBMail, and Squirrelmail. Postfix works alright, but it inherits Sendmail's nightmarishly complex configuration. I figured I'd try DBMail as a way to get all my email in one place, in one format - I had, and still have, email in a bunch of mbox/Mbox/etc. files. But DBMail broke accessing email from the command line, and broke searches and other stuff in Squirrelmail. As for Squirrelmail, it became dead slow.

                                    Sure would be nice if there was a server-side program that did everything, similar to Gmail or something (not that I'm crazy about Gmail).

                                      At work I use evolution. It's got issues. Let's just say I'm now a creationist. hahaha. jk But seriously, that is one dodgy piece of software. But we've got an exchange server (here when me and the other unix admins showed up, sadly...)

                                      But for server side stuff I use sendmail to send email alerts and stuff.

                                      For personal Email, I use gmail, and I'm a big fan. Very easy to use, very fast (normally) and I can check my mail from anywhere with nothing but a web browser.

                                      I used to use sendmail, and have to admit, it's one of the few tools I ALWAYS used to gui tools from redhat to configure. That crazy M2 configuration dance you have to do otherwise is too much.

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