On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, Nikhil Joshi wrote: [snip]
Ans: Use two ISP blocks in wvdial, one for you, another for your brother. You start *your* ISP with the right command-line argument to wvdial. There are also gui-apps that let you do theCan you please elucidate on this one. AFAIK wvdial requires wvdial.conf Now lets suppose I (the root) prepare wvdial.conf Obviously I must know my brother's pass to configure my brother's ISP
It is possible to make wvdial ask for passwd of the ppp account in use. See man page for wvdial.conf, look for an option called "Ask Password" As root you can setup wvdial.conf with two Dialer blocks, one for you, another for your brother with both set with this option. Then when either of you wish to connect, it will ask for your respective passwords.
I don't know whether rp3 from RedHat handles this password prompting. (rp3 uses wvdial as backend). KPPP seems to be nicely integrated gui option to do various of these things.
Forgetting about older windows release, if we consider Windows NT/2K/XP they all require administrative access to install/update softwares. As mentioned before, to the user, this is not visible. The
I guess theres a sort of pseudo administrative acc. in 2K whose user can install software w/o administrative previleges. pls correct me if I'm wrong
It is sort of like that, but much more sophisticated.
than common ext2/3 on Linux. But did anyone care for FAT32 on Win9x, without journaling support or anything. It still works.I have to agree on this one. I had a nightmarish experience with ext2. But FAT32 is quite resistant to power losses and stuff.
I would rate ext2/3 better than FAT32, but I may be wrong. What I ment by above was that you don't really need High performance, High availability file systems on desktops.
Windows GUI runs faster because much of its functioning is within the kernel, note that windows GUI is a "shell" to the underlying kernel. That
Correct me: I've read somewhere ---> IE is the shell of Windows 98
No, it is a component of the windows GUI, but inseparable. By "shell" I meant a layer / a set of tools through which you interact with system kernel. Under *nix system you have a command shell with a prompt. Under Windows you have menus, icons, buttons, and other gui elements. This "graphical shell" or the gui subsystem interacts with the base OS kernel and other devices. IE was integrated to provide seamless access to internet and file sharing. These 'features' are also the prime reason for presence of malicious softwares like viruses etc. since parts of these gui subsystems run with more privileges than the user.
[snip]
consumption. If MS hinders that by making it unrecognizable by common utilities like a browser, whose fault is it, the Linux loving users
but Microsoft is not the sole maker of Encylopedia (Encarta) , Britannica e.g.
What I would like is for these same companies to also come up with Linux versions of these softwares. This is more a chicken and egg kind of situation, there must be a beginning somewhere.
student will require. Windows not only sucks but it is pathetic in its default install to support any kind of coding.
VBscript ?
What kind of languages a typical course work in Engineering/Sciences require ? C, C++, FORTRAN, ? ODE solvers, Linear Algebra systems ? Where is support for all this? Note we are talking about a very large class of common people, who need a system that provides all a given family needs.
yours. In summary I will say use a system that gives you the best of all worlds, for me it happens to be Linux, it may not be the same for you.
I'm for Linux because I know I can handle it But I had common people and my own probs in mind while starting this thread
We right now have just too bad a statistic, too many windows users than Linux users. It is no wonder that most will not want to change, since their prime objective is to get the work done. Hence changes must occurs in schools, colleges and in homes. As far as problems are considered, I don't know another OS that has these many overwhelming number of support personel online 24x7x365. ;) It is right now a matter of awareness.
-Rajesh