Reading NTFS is rather worthless on its own. As David points out, apparently the write support works now too. I'm the paranoid type though who would find it difficult to trust that it works properly without solid evidence to back the claim. Linux has had the ability to write for a long time but I've seen plenty of horror stories about it going terribly wrong and wiping out a lot of data. The FAT32 support is well tested. But then I wouldn't put it past M$ to have dumped it precisely because of this.

It's also not a matter of software problems with things where I work. None of my work has any reason to come home with me and they haven't seen fit to set me up with a remote IP phone yet. The disruption simply isn't worth the hassle to me right now.

Aww come on, for once maybe they dumped it because they realized that it really is not such a great file-system… :wink:

I have been using linux pretty much full time since Mandrake 8.x, continuing through to Mandriva 2005. Since then i have bounced about with various distros and currently have settled with SUSE 10.3. Linux almost does everything that i want natively and with WINE. Unfortunately there is 2 instances where i have need to boot into windows Xp, which fortunatly for me is very rare.

I would just like to point out, with a newer system, and 2g of ram + Vista isnt all that bad, if you can get/swing for ultimate it comes with its own KDE shell and compiling environment, along with an 'xwindows'.

Beyond that its memory management is far superior to XP, it actually uses ram, and frees it when you need it. Though anything below 2g isnt really going to benefit from this and just run slow as hell.

/Shrug, yeah everyone likes what they like, I still prefer much of XP, but there are some real nice gems in Vista, the memory management, and proper 2 core threading compared to XP is one of them. A built in dev environment is another.

-Syn

Whats this? and can you point me to a website. I googled based on your post but couldn't find anything relevant.

I have it on mine,

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsser...

Now it mentions Unix based apps, though it includes full GNU support and you can add libs and headers if you dig around. Ive had success compiling code natively with it(not a mud, havent had time to try that yet). It is not an eumlator, by the way, it is all native. It also, should you want it, lets you develop unix apps directly using windows DLLs. It includes 3 shells, and when you dig into the help files on Ultimate talks about getting into an xwindow session. It has a C shell, Korn Shell, and a specialized Korn shell. Also that article is from 06, the vista environment expanded the functionality :)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/detai...

thats the actual vista download for it.

-Syn (if that isnt KDE, my apologies someone had informed me it was :) )

Its probably far from perfect, and mainly tries to get to a Unix environment (which isnt Linux) but its something, if you happen to have Ultimate :)

-Syn

Nah, that's not KDE at all, KDE is a graphical environment like Gnome.

I found it very interesting that MS is putting all this Unix stuff in under the hood. I've heard speculation that they're planning on doing an Apple and shifting the whole kernel to Unix code…

ah, and Thatd be cool with me. I love nix, and I love my windows. Everything has bugs, everything has holes. /shrug. sorry about the KDE slip :)

Anywho, hope that helps anyone that didnt know about what kind of GNU environment vista had :)

-Syn

You know, I hate to have to admit it, but I'd be quite happy to see Windows 7 built atop a linux or BSD base with an XP style shell on top. Best of both worlds that way. It's just a shame M$ would probably release like 8 versions of it and charge you the "ultimate" price for the best one.

Why do you hate to have to admit it? Is it the Windows part or the Linux/BSD part that would bug you? :smile:

I too started with Linux, specifically Fedora 5, because of the mud. And Fedora 7, possibly Fedora Core 6, came with NTFS-3G, which does an excellent job of accessing NTFS volumes with full read/write capability. I'm using a program, GCstar, which is a database, of sorts for collections. I have my DVD collection on there and the 'database' files are written in xml, so when I switch to windows I can use the windows version with the very same files created in linux and stored on an NTFS volume.

I like XP, and still use windows for some things, but like the diversity of Linux, and setting up the dual boot was not too taxing. It's nice to have an option when you turn on your computer.

Neither. It's the Microsoft would be the one to have done it part. For all its faults, I happen to like XP for the most part. It gets along with my hardware, and I get along with it. That's not to say that I couldn't eventually get along with KDE or Gnome under linux, but the chances of that happening anytime soon are slim. I guess I'd just find it highly disappointing for M$ to be the one who finally makes linux truly useful to the masses on the desktop.

You know the types - the one click installer people who don't know what a command line is, and are perfectly happy for it. I have to admit that's been one of my peeves about linux in general is that not everything is a nice smooth "download, click, install" package. As much as I enjoy development in PHP and C/C++ I don't like having to resort to using the command line to manually compile anything I might need. Drivers, applications, whatever. I'm one of those people who despises the idea of compiling my own kernel. Things have improved vastly in this area recently but they haven't come far enough. I suspect only a company the size of Apple or Microsoft can really pull off what needs to be done, and that's what bugs me.

I don't get this whole compile-your-kernel thing. I've never had to compile my own kernel. The only time I had to get anywhere near the kernel was when I was installing file system modules to talk to my university networked file system over Kerberos authentication: hardly what you might call a common occurrence. (I didn't feel like using sftp: I wanted to talk to the FS directly.)

As for packages, I don't know about Fedora, but Ubuntu has very friendly package installers… Almost everything, if not everything, that a "simple user" would typically want is in the repositories.

Being in the repositories isn't necessarily the same as "surf to, download, click, install". For what things are in there, that's great, but users are a strange bunch of people. They find the darndest things out there to install. In Windows, I've yet to run into anything that wasn't a straightforward point and click install. Even for obscure things. I have however found that the obscure things in linux tend to be what need to be compiled by hand. Some of those don't even have configure scripts to make that less painless. The average person with an obscure program isn't going to want to spend that much time with it. And God forbid it should fail to compile. Or worse, that they're nice and cozy linux system didn't come with development tools installed by default. Explaining to these types of people that they need to go get compilers and libraries and other crap only frustrates them. It frustrates *ME* when that sort of thing happens, and I know how to deal with it. I'm sure I've made it fairly clear that I don't like being frustrated by my system :)

The average user isn't going to need an obscure program. If a user needs an obscure program, they're not an average user. Anything the average user needs, at least under Ubuntu, is easily found in the repositories and is as simple as the "Add/Remove Programs" in Windows.

I've never had any reason to compile my own kernel yet, and I don't really foresee any reason to ever do so with the way I use the system.

To say the average user will have no need for obscure programs is to have no understanding of average users. I've spent the last 5 years getting acquainted with the things they find and you'd be surprised at how off the wall a lot of it can be. All of it easily installed in Windows without batting an eye. The same wouldn't be true of the obscure material in linux.

It's kind of a definitional thing I suppose. Something that is obscure isn't meant to be used by the average person, I guess, definitionally…

Do you have an example program that the average user would want that they can't install from the repositories?

Well because something is obscure to you, maybe its not to a Dr or Engineer who otherwise has no computer experience or training what so ever. Ive come accross many of those people in my Tech support days, brilliant with a soldering iron and using the one program he was taught in college, ask him to install it or use an OS.. not likely, compounded on something which is much different in appearance to what might have been demonstrated in classes.

To people like us we may consider something obscure that would be rightfully so, to us, to a normal user that might get much much more murky a definition.

-Syn

Errrrr, yes, but I thought we were talking about average users, not research scientists.