All things Linux

[Free]

BeOS had a couple of interesting ideas but in general was badly conceived and sucking too hard on the early broken C++ crack pipe. If it had gotten successful

I doubt it would have, even if it had a real chance at being the next MacOS.

They (would have) solved the networking problems by replacing the user-space stack they used with something far more BSD-like. I was able to play a bit with BONE, and it felt pretty damn stable in comparison to what they had.

The next set of problems was likely in the file system indexing. It really was a bear when you had to delete a lot of files. I don't think they had any fixes in store for that. Certainly they couldn't just turn it into a real relational db.

After that...I dunno. I was pretty happy with the rest of it, at the time.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

After that...I dunno. I was pretty happy with the rest of it, at the time.

Compared to contemporary Mac OS or Windows it was pretty good. I would have jumped on it if free UNIX hadn't taken off, though I'd rather have had the option of a memory protected AmigaOS or a consumer oriented QNX.

Speaking of the Amiga, it wasn't even as good as AmigaOS in a lot of ways. It had a much better file system, but the file system was like the one strong point in BeOS. The actual OS was pretty much traditional UNIX but in C++ instead of C, at a time when C++ was pretty awful (it didn't get decent until C++11), but without the API integrity of UNIX. The Amiga Exec on the other hand was way ahead of its time.

At least BeOS dodged the Mach bullet. Mach basically destroyed microkernels forever, by doing such a horrid job of pretending to be one.

The idea of a database as the file system is interesting. Like an enterprise quality PalmOS?

Edit: after a few minutes thought, no, my experience with DEC and other '70s era database-heavy file systems was not good. Flat files are better. Attributes and forks can be useful but they have to have superb end-user support and cross platform compatibility and nobody's even TRIED to make that work. And SQLite does a superb job of filling in the gaps.

 

[Free]

The idea of a database as the file system is interesting. Like an enterprise quality PalmOS?

Edit: after a few minutes thought, no, my experience with DEC and other '70s era database-heavy file systems was not good. Flat files are better.

Yeah, it's why the BeOS filesystem was "relational database-like." I mean, look what we almost got with Windows. Ugh.

 

[Essence Lumin]

The idea of a database as the file system is interesting. Like an enterprise quality PalmOS?

There was the original Pick operating system from the '80s. The entire OS was a database. Later versions of Pick ran on top of linux.

 

[Noodles]

Little Bobble Tables tries to use his laptop and obliterates it.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Microsoft uses SQLite for local databases now like everyone who is sane.

There was the original Pick operating system from the '80s. The entire OS was a database. Later versions of Pick ran on top of linux.

Thank you for refreshing my memory, I had literally lost track of those neurons and now they're going to wake up and chatter at me in the dead of night.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

That should be fine. That said, the thing with grub is when you mess around with partition tables there can be big problems if things don't go as expected.

Oh yeah, screw that partition wonkery. My Windows and Kubuntu each have their very own SSD, only sharing the big storage drive.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Noodles]

Oh yeah, screw that partition wonkery. My Windows and Kubuntu each have their very own SSD, only sharing the big storage drive.

This is actually very good.

I have on TWO occasional had Windows wipe out my Linux partition while dual booting when it did one of it's semi annual "big updates". I have found others having the same issue. It only seems to happen if you have it on the same drive in a partition.

It was not a simple case of having GRUB replaced by the Windows bootloader, when I tried to recover from a live CD the partition was just gone.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

This is actually very good.

I have on TWO occasional had Windows wipe out my Linux partition while dual booting when it did one of it's semi annual "big updates". I have found others having the same issue. It only seems to happen if you have it on the same drive in a partition.

Yep that's the whole reason. When I first started looking into trying out Linux, a lot of the videos I watched recommended against dual-booting with Windows and usually it was because of reports of that exact thing happening. It seemed to me that separate install drives would prevent that problem, so that's what I did. But I've already heard for years that messing around with already-established partitions is dangerous.

The way I did it, the only problem I've had with having them both installed is the thing where they argue over the system clock, but that was an easy thing to fix.

 

[Essence Lumin]

My memory is a little fuzzy from back then. I'm not sure we got into Debian quite that early. We used Redhat on some desktops and Debian for servers for a while. We didn't need to worry about configuring an X desktop on the servers because they just ran a command line. As I recall, it was mostly accepting defaults on installation but there were a few tricky points that had to be known and figured out. After the twentieth install or whatever it became more or less second hand. We didn't have to deal with things like slow dialup speeds with our T1 line. Still though, Debian is at the heart of many systems today including Ubuntu and Mint.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Heh - I have no knowledge of what things were really like at that point; I was a kid. I DO have memories of seeing boxes of Red Hat on the shelves at like Circuit City while I was looking at computer games, but I had no idea what it was. I remember guessing that it had to be something hacker-y in nature because I'd heard about "white hat" and "black hat" hackers by that point, but that was the limit of my understanding, lol.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

lol there is something in this video that from the moment I saw it I've been practically self-harming to keep from doing it on my own computer but I'm not saying what it is

 

[Free]

there is something in this video that from the moment I saw it I've been practically self-harming to keep from doing it on my own computer but I'm not saying what it is

Capturing video of yourself pretending to be Braveheart is up there.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

That WAS great, but that wasn't it.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Shoot I just discovered I can't actually save anything to the 2TB media drive. I guess that makes sense since it was formatted with NTFS (duh); but I got the impression that I could because the drive shows up and is fully browse-able in the file manager...for some reason? Like, Linux can obviously read and navigate the NTFS directory perfectly fine. But it was only now that I tried to actually create a file there and found out I couldn't, lol.

Well that leaves me with only the 500GB drive I have Linux installed on. That's....not really going to work, if I want to install a game library on Linux. I guess I need to buy a dedicated HDD for it too.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Linux has two NTFS drivers, one is in kernel, the other is FUSE based. Only the FUSE based one, NTFS-3G, can write to NTFS volumes in most Linux distributions.

 

[Free]

Linux has two NTFS drivers, one is in kernel, the other is FUSE based. Only the FUSE based one, NTFS-3G, can write to NTFS volumes in most Linux distributions.

You forgot Paragon's implementations. One is their commercial driver. And then there's their recent ntfs3, which is open source, read-write, and should be available in the kernel (since 5.15).

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Kernel 5.15 is way too new for most major distributions, meaning not in there yet.

 

[Free]

Kernel 5.15 is way too new for most major distributions, meaning not in there yet.

And this is the tolerated answer.