<br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>Art Hampton writes:<br><br>> Criminy. I installed Slackware and attempted to access my cdrom. I'm told
<br>> that only root can open the cdrom. OK, so I log on as root and attempt to<br>> change the permissions to allow the lowly user (me) to open the cdrom, and I<br>> can't figure out how to do it.<br><br>Did you try chmod(1) and chgrp(1)? A good thing to do is to create a
<br>"console" group, and make console devices owned, readable and writable<br>by that group, and then add your account to that group.<br><br>If you don't want to use the command line, log into your graphical<br>
environment as root, get properties on the cdrom file (/dev/cdrom or<br>whatever), and change the permissions/ownership that way.<br><br>If you are having trouble figuring out what the name of the CDROM device<br>file is, use dmesg(1). It will list your CDROM drive along with all the
<br>other hardware you found. This is probably quickest:<br><br> $ dmesg | grep -i cdrom<br><br>Some desktop environment or other (GNOME, KDE) probably has some<br>graphical hardware browser that is easier to grok than dmesg. I don't
<br>know.<br><br>I realize I am only proving your point, but:<br><br>> just too much effort to be able to open the GD cdrom. Give me<br>> strength, or better yet, W2K.<br><br>Are you running Windows as Administrator, or is your user account a
<br>member of a privileged group? Almost certainly.<br><br>And turn off Autorun. ;)<br><br><a href="http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/Sony-BMG/">http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/Sony-BMG/</a><br><br>> I suppose I'd best put on my flame retardant outfit...
<br><br>Not at all. Your claims are perfectly legitimate. The thing is, the<br>tradeoffs are different, and the Linux/Unix way is better in certain<br>circumstances. A safely-configured Windows system is likely to be at<br>
least as cumbersome as Linux.<br></blockquote><div><br><br>Excellent point. I'd completely forgotten that I'm logged in as administrator in W2K!<br><br>My wife is looking to upgrade (from an HP laptop about three years old) and I'm recommending an iMac G5. My hope is that she'll be able to do what she wants to do without shooting herself in the foot or blowing away the OS.
<br></div><br>We're behind a fairly secure firewall in the router that we use to share web access. Wish me luck...<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>> This discussion of Aptitude is just about a perfect example of why I'm<br>> typing this from W2K.<br><br><br>You know, Ubuntu is the first distro I've tried where I really felt like I<br>could do *everything* without touching a command line (real command-line
<br>apps like gcc and perl excepted).<br><br>I'm using Slackware because for my taste Ubuntu has turned into too much of<br>> a resource hog.<br><br><br>Is Ubuntu really more of a resource hog than Win2K? It's certainly not worse
<br>than WinXP. :-P<br><br>William<br></blockquote></div><br><br>Absolutely. Ubuntu Badger cripples my dual P3 450 mhz. machine. I'm now sporting 512 meg of ram and that didn't seem to help much (it was 256 meg when I started whining). And it's not just OO2. Just trying to type a message using the Evolution mail thingy I wind up typing blind into the buffer waiting for Ubuntu to wake up and service the keyboard buffer. Not good. I kind of prefer DSL, but the intial learning curve seems a tad steep.
<br><br>I detest Microsoft. My heart yearns to be able to chuck Windows and just use an open source OS, but Adobe is a huge stumbling block. Premiere and Photoshop are the main reasons I use a computer, and the Gimp isn't a suitable replacement. When Premiere and Photoshop will run native in Linux I'll bite the bullet and learn what I need to know to get around the OS. For now I have one 3 ghz. WXP box dedicated to Premiere and Photoshop. I don't use it for surfing or anything else, no word processing etc. Just those two apps. For other stuff I use the 'old' computer with 'only' 512 meg of ram. Good lord. I never thought I'd say that. It's amazing how much we were able to get done in 64 k. of ram with a Commodore 64.
<br><br>I wrote Conway's Life to run on the Commodore and it was painfully slow. I wrote it in Forth. Years later I did it in C on a '286 and nearly needed to put in delay loops to be able to see the generations go by. I was using a more efficient algorithm but even so - the point I'm trying to make is that the OS has crippled these incredibly powerful machines we're running. At least Ubuntu has brought this particular box to its knees.
<br><br>What's the point? How fast can we process words? Why do we need to download these huge programs to make our computers run less quickly? We need to keep them running efficiently so we can attend to important stuff, like viewing smut.
<br><br>Art<br><br>