Vista - Microsoft's new OS
 

Anyone know if there is a planned launch date for it?

Indeed, does anyone know how good it is? (Or bad!)


A little later I thought I would give Google a go. It seems there is quite a lot of good things coming with the new OS. Just type VISTA. Quite interesting.

PPP

Get your wallet ready for some serious spending by about November Pop. Longhorn is going to need an impressively specced machine to run well, so it might be advantageous on many ways to wait a few months more until the hype calms down a bit and prices stabilise.

If you buy the OS itself, look carefully at your own machine and work out whether it will be worth this no doubt expensive little package.

Conan

I've been told by a guy who should know that Vista is quite demanding on video resources, and so PCs with integrated video (most cheap ones) will struggle with it. Just a rumour, but then that's what Pprune's about :ok:

Most PCs that are less than 3 years old should be able to run it without problems, though less than 512MB memory will be noticeably slower - suggest at least that.

PCs with less able graphics WILL be able to run Vista, they'll just have to turn off most of the eye candy (so games written for Vista won't run).

WARNING: Vista looks like an interesting OS to me - MS have finally got around to fixing many of the previous security and many other issues, but there's a price (of course!). XP/2000 drivers won't work in Vista - so you'll need new drivers for all your devices. If your vendor isn't going to develop one then you're outta luck - and only MS certified drivers will be allowed, with NO option to allow installation of unsigned drivers (MS charges for certification and it takes quite a while).

DRM: Vista will have pretty aggressive Digital Rights Management, not just for music and video, but documents and images as well. If you don't mind not being able to do a lot of the things you once took for granted then be my guest.

Privacy: If you ever bothered to read the MS EULA (End User Licence Agreement) that comes with your MS OS/software you know that you effectively sign away pretty much ALL your rights by accepting it. The OS can watch what you are doing, phone home and use the info as MS sees fit - misbehave in MS eyes and your OS will be disabled - your habits WILL be know to MS.

I wouldn't be caught dead near Vista, not because it isn't a clever and pretty OS (and the indications are that it will be) but because I don't like MS's attitude and business methods, I think that they are far too powerful for their own good and ours, I don't trust them one bit and I don't like DRM and the feeling of the loss of my autonomy and privacy. And Vista will be expensive. But hey, whatever floats your boat....

MS are terrified of Linux and are using every means at their disposal to hinder the steady adoption of Linux - fair (a bit) and foul (a lot) - bribery, lies, innuendo, payoffs, threats to vendors, perversion of web and document standards and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers. Nasty.

Example: developers who plan Linux and MS versions will find that their MS certification will take a l-o-o-o-o-g time - probably enough to ruin them. If they promise not to develop for Linux they'll get a big discount on the certification fees. Don't laugh - it's happening right now, and MS has been employing these bully-boy tactics for years.

Example: MS is just ignoring the AntiTrust judgement against them in the States - they've bought off the supervisors of the judgement and with Vista will just sidestep the whole thing anyway.

Example: MS were ordered by the EU to release the full documentation of the XP program interfaces so that non-MS software writers could compete with MS. What MS then did was to offer to licence (for hefty fees) part of the source code (not the same as documentation and pretty much useless for writing apps.) for XP (which Vista will render obsolete anyway). And the huge fines? MS can afford it, even though they would bankrupt a medium sized country.

MS's army of lawyers and their bottomless pockets mean that legally only perhaps IBM could take them on in Court - with any other company or individual they just drag it on until your money runs out and you're bust.

GNU/Linux is roaring ahead with improvements in usability and user-friendliness, is rock-stable, already secure, unencumbered by DRM and I'm in control and can tinker as much as I like. No fees, no EULA, no phoning-home with my info. If I need to run Windows apps., WINE (the Windows Emulator) is getting better daily and can now run the majority of Windows programs (many of which are now cross-platform or are being ported to Linux anyway now). Linux apps are mostly GPL (so free) and those that aren't are at a fair price and compete fairly.

Finally, the Mac OS is now out for the x86 platform and it'll only be a matter of time before Apple releases it for non-Apple PCs (it'll be expensive though).

So no, I won't be going to Vista.

Another good reason to hang back/ignore is the extreme likelihood of the release of SP1, etc., etc., shortly after it becomes available.

Mac,

With you 100% on this!

I have made backup backups of all my Win2K and WinXP installation media, and I am learning Linux!

I will have to use Vista at work (I'm going to be on a RC version soon), but no way am I going to be dictated to (at home) by MS to the extent that Vista promises.

Long Live Linux! Go Gnu!

SD

BBC news on VISTA here ..... (27/02/06)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4754462.stm

Mac,

I agree with your philosophy 100%.

Out of interest, how easy is it for a reasonably intelligent but not particularly computer savvy individual to get to grips with Linux?

I have been seriously thinking about this for some time, but as a user of several expensive bits of Windows software (AutoCad, SolidWorks and a handful of odd computational fluid dynamics programs) I have always fought shy of making the jump.

My current XP machine is stuffed to the gunnels with odd bits of useful stuff, like umpteen Excel spreadsheets for doing odd bits of aircraft design and analysis, plus lots of Word reports, templates etc. Does all this sort of stuff port across to Open Office on Linux reasonably well?

I guess I could try it out by converting my spare PC to Linux, whilst keeping the XP machine going, but if Windows emulation is reasonably good then maybe I might be able to completely cut free from MS domination (that certainly appeals!).

VP

For a (l)user, exceedingly easy. Break them in with Thunderbird, Firefox and Open Office on Windows and there should be only a few contusions (theirs, naturally) as collateral damage when you switch. As the owner of the box, it is straightforward in the same way as these unfortunate people who learned to drive on automatic cars and had to make the jump to a proper transmission. You just need to put in some time and thought. Is the latter such a bad thing? What do you think of people who can only drive automatics?

As Mac has vociferously argued, why on Earth you'd pay for something which will make life harder, make you spend more money than you have already done to go about your business, and tie you in a relationship you will learn to abhor, is nuts.

Keep an XP kernel running - that's what I am writing from right now - but with partitions or spare drives you can have the best of both worlds.

BOFH

This is a good thing. However, there are various hairy arsed old users (yes, I count myself amongst them) who, having gained years of experience of either getting to live with MS, or (B) have had quite enough nervous trauma, will stick with them for a while yet. If and it is more of a question of when, I suppose - I get given another old base unit, I might even play with Linux myself. It is just that with a limited brain that is full of more shortcuts than a London cabbie, one does feel a bit maxed out, which in itself, is a pointer to consider moving, I suppose.

Time to lie down somewhere dark, methinks....

Conan

Linux - it may be the answer, but it's hard work!

I made my "old" PC into a Linux machine a year or so ago, to learn this new stuff. The good news is that Linux is (mostly) free. The software that goes with it is free, and very competent.

The bad news is that it's a lot geekier than Windows: you have to type the "admin" password every few minutes (or sometimes less) if you're trying to set anything up. Installing software is (mostly) a nightmare if you don't speak "job control language" - there's one example of how to install a simple graphics package here. In contrast, I use a similar package for Windows: to install that I had to run the setup.exe - and that was it.

When I got stuck (which happened often), I asked on various Linux forums. From those, I learned above all that a) Any idiot can do it; b) I'm stupider than any idiot, and c) What do you want to do that for anyway? When I got to the hard questions, the only responses I got were "I have the same problem - did you ever find the fix?" I still get those to this day.

Then I found one super guy who really knows this Linux stuff and is supremely capable and helpful, and no, I'm sorry but I'm not passing on his details.

There are many flavours of Linux to choose from; the aficionados call them "distros". I tried four distros before I got one that actually worked at all. The one I have (Debian) is pretty solid and stable, except that most of my peripherals don't work (ie printer, soundcard, scanner, webcam, and joystick). Some can be got to run by opening a command prompt and typing a load of JCL at it - but that only works till you reboot the machine, then it all has to be done again. I tried to write "startup" batch files to do that automatically, but it doesn't seem to work like that.

Connecting to a network is easy for the Internet access bit - it took me less than four hours to set up the Internet so that it could browse and send/receive e-mail. I doubt I had to type the supervisor password more than 50 times in the process.

But the network interface (called Samba) is something else. After about three months, I managed to cheat it enough to get it to talk to the other machines on the network and transfer files around.

There's a very clever package (called Kpackage) that will download the full list of all software available for Linux, and install it for you without any of the JCL stuff. The only slight snag is that 80% of the install processes end with an error message that it wasn't able to complete the job. Usually the reason was in Klingon, but often it told me I hadn't got the right version of something else. That meant load another item, which in turn needs another item which...

The killer for me was when I'd at last got enough stuff working to be able to use it "in anger". At that point came the time to upgrade to the new release that promised lots of fixes for the "doesn't work" items. Ah, no, you can't upgrade. You start again from scratch and install everything. Yes, right.

At that point I dug out the old Win2000 CD and loaded that onto the machine in "dual boot" mode. For playing, Linux is a challenge. For doing serious work, and for "server" duties, it's Windows.

I'm assured by those who can drive it that there are reasons why all those pitfalls and obstacles are there in Linux. I'm sure they're right. At my age, life's just too short...

...how easy is it for a reasonably intelligent but not particularly computer savvy individual to get to grips with Linux?

No harder than DOS.... Joking aside, a good distro like Ubuntu or SuSe makes it pretty easy

...as a user of several expensive bits of Windows software (AutoCad, SolidWorks and a handful of odd computational fluid dynamics programs.....

These don't port easily - stay with Windows for the moment

.....My current XP machine is stuffed to the gunnels with odd bits of useful stuff, like umpteen Excel spreadsheets for doing odd bits of aircraft design and analysis, plus lots of Word reports, templates etc. Does all this sort of stuff port across to Open Office on Linux reasonably well?.......

OO copes very well with simpler documents, but stumbles over complex documents with embedded stuff. No surprising, because MS keeps the formats secret and it all has to be reverse-engineered. Stay where you are for the moment.

......I guess I could try it out by converting my spare PC to Linux, whilst keeping the XP machine going, but if Windows emulation is reasonably good then maybe I might be able to completely cut free from MS domination (that certainly appeals!).

Thats the way to go. Learning Linux isn't difficult (people coped with Windows for Workgroups which was a lot worse) but it takes some minor effort - well worth it though!

"...you have to type the "admin" password every few minutes (or sometimes less) if you're trying to set anything up. Installing software is (mostly) a nightmare if you don't speak "job control language"".

Hmmm... Well I usually go to Computer Administration" and "Install new software" or their equivalents and choose "Install new software", point it at the RPM or deb file, give the admin password when asked for it and off it goes. I had to Google for Job Control Language"....!

Some of the people on Linux forums can be just as you say, but you'll get good help more often than not.

"The one I have (Debian) is pretty solid and stable, except that most of my peripherals don't work (ie printer, soundcard, scanner, webcam, and joystick). Some can be got to run by opening a command prompt and typing a load of JCL at it - but that only works till you reboot the machine, then it all has to be done again. I tried to write "startup" batch files to do that automatically, but it doesn't seem to work like that."

Odd. Ubuntu is Debian based and it picked up all my peripherals permanently on install and they all work. This JCL thing is starting to confuse me!

"But the network interface (called Samba) is something else. After about three months, I managed to cheat it enough to get it to talk to the other machines on the network and transfer files around."

I found SAMBA confusing when I started working in a mixed environment - it took me a day or two of tinkering to get everything tickety-boo. Most modern distros have a nice GUI for configuring SAMBA and you don't have to tinker with smb.conf

"....Kpackage..." I haven't used this particular package manager but most of my install packages work just fine. You can indeed have dependency conflicts that are a pain in the arse, but if you stick to stuff from the package depository designed for your own distro you should be OK. I presume you're not compiling from scratch!

"...At that point came the time to upgrade to the new release that promised lots of fixes for the "doesn't work" items."

Hmmm. SuSE at least upgrades pretty smoothly in place, as does Ubuntu, but you certainly CAN hose the system and need to reinstall though I haven't had to for quite a while.

"At my age, life's just too short..."

I sympathise. In exchange for getting an entire OS and software for everything under the sun for free you have to invest a bit of effort. Sometimes it's easier to pay the money, accept the chains and just do it. Your choice.

Linux is now a very long way from where it was 5 years ago when installing started with creating a bootdisk and a rootdisk and compiling lots of stuff yourself. In another 5 years it'll put Microsoft to shame.

Mac,

I think the JCL Keef refers to looks like this:
//EXAMPLE PROC
//EXAMPLE1 EXEC PGM=IEFBR14
//EXAMPLELIB DD DISP=(NEW, CATLG),DSN=&DSNAME
// STORCLAS=DASD,
// SPACE=(CYL,(16,4,4)),
// DCB=(RECFM=FB,LRECL=80,BLKSIZE=720,DSORG=PD)
//PEND
// SET DSNAME=MYLIB.EXAMPLE
//STEP001 EXEC EXAMPLE

I have just created a dataset called example (and brought back a few nightmares).

I think Keef is referring to what it's like introducing new programs to *nix. More advanced distros do, as you say, make things easier, but it is always more laborious - especially when you want root - compared to Windows' <click this shiny button to install spyware> feature.

If you're working in a systems environment, you have to go through the hoops of dev, UAT and then production. If you haven't had to do that, then the *nix way of doing things seems like too much effort (let alone the JCL above). It is probably, as you point out, because most users haven't had to grapple with expanded and extended memory, stacks, buffers and the like from the primordial slime which begat Windows. If a new app creates BSODs or kills partitions, just reinstall and lose some data.

Once that's happened a couple of times, people begin to ask about Linux....

BOFH

BOFH, I'm confused - I've been running various Linuxes for about 5 years and never encountered or had to use JCL when installing drivers or otherwise - usually there's a binary driver available but occasionally I've had to compile from source - never needed JCL.

AKAIK Job Control Language (JCL) is a means of communicating with the IBM 3090 MVS Operating System.

Google tells me that JCL consists of control statements that:

* introduce a computer job to the operating system
* request hardware devices
* direct the operating system on what is to be done in terms of running applications and scheduling resources

So sorta like a script (batch language for DOS old-timers) and JCL scripts can be converted to Korn or Bash scripts.

What has this got to do with installing device drivers in Linux?

If I've never needed to use JCL scripts in fiddling with Linux for quite a while, then what am I missing (and what if Keef doing that needs 'em)?

Ahhhh DOS!

PRINT [d:device][/B:buffsiz][/U:busytick][/M:maxtick]
[/S:timeslice][/Q:quesiz][/C][/T][/P][[d:][path][filename][.ext].....]

Thanks for the advice Mac, I'm going to take the plunge and play with my spare PC this weekend.

Ubuntu is the distro I now have, so I'll see how I get on with it.

I think I'll have to do some hardware tweaking first, mind, as I currently run the spare PC over the network, using the remote desktop. I guess a trip[ to the loft to dig out the old monitor, keyboard etc is in order first.......

VP

So which distro version of Linux would you all recommend for those of us looking to switch with the least amount of pain?

BD

There are quite a few good distros. I favour Debian based ones because I like Debian's package management system & it's dependency handling.

Of the Debian based ones there's:

Debian (of course), a very stable-but-slow-to-release-the-latest-&-greatest distribution. Has *HUGE* amounts of software available for it. Has been used as the based for lots of other distributions including:

Ubuntu: A simplified version of Debian with good hardware recognition released by Mark Shuttleworth's foundation. Has fewer from-the-box software options (but what's there is certainly good). They've decided to be more of a 'here's our choice of software to do xxxx tasks'. Committed to regular release dates, unlike Debian.

Kubuntu: Ubuntu but using the KDE desktop interface instead of Gnome. KDE has a lot more choices about how you set up your machine, Gnome -by design - is a lot simpler.

Knoppix: well known amongst the Linuxim for a very, very good 'live CD' distribution with excellent hardware discovery/driver loading routines during boot. Not as optimised for hard disk install but certainly workable. Knoppix has spawned lots of live CD distros.

Kanotix: Based on Knoppix but with excellent optimisation for HD installation. It's the one I use on my laptop. It's the I use now & is the only one I've used so far that could operate my laptop's Winmodem (yech!) out of the box. It has no troubles with the internal wifi card & I think it's even set up the integral bluetooth hardware.

I run SuSe 9.1, but can I get a wireless Wi-Fi card to run? Can I... Tried all the shells etc. Still stuck on a Cat 5 cable... @%$*&^%$$.

Why don't you download the .iso for Knoppix &/or Kanotix? Burn either/or/both to disks & try them? They both run from the CD without touching your HD file system. I'd be surprised if one of them can't drive your WiFi card. Unless your card some weirdo chip thing? What sort is it?