Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Announcements Software Linux

SlashNET Forum with Marcel Gagne 149

Posted by CowboyNeal from the getting-to-know dept.
weebl writes "SlashNET is pleased to announce an upcoming forum with Marcel Gagne. He writes the 'Cooking with Linux' column every month for Linux Journal magazine. His first book was the acclaimed Linux System Administration: A User's Guide. Recently he wrote a book called Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!, which is intended for consumer desktop users who are curious about Linux and want to give it a test run. The forum will be held on Monday February 23, 2004 at 8PM US Eastern Standard Time (-0500). As usual, the forum will be held in #forum. You will be able to submit questions both before and during the forum which will be used to guide the discussion."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

SlashNET Forum with Marcel Gagne More

SlashNET Forum with Marcel Gagne

Comments Filter:

  • Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goobye... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jetkust ( 596906 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @01:48PM (#8364439)
    ...Say Hello to the Installation Screen of Torture.

  • oui oui! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    you bring the bottle of wine, I'll bring the bag of...

  • BSOD isn't *that* unfriendly... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @01:50PM (#8364470) Homepage
    I can imagine the shit in the pants of a neophyte who sees "kernel panic" on their screen.

  • Distributions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @01:53PM (#8364497) Homepage Journal
    I'm fairly new to regular Linux use, and as such am probably one of those readers for whom his work is intended.

    Lately, I've been trying to get moved over to Linux (from WinXP). But damn near every distribution I've tried to install gives me problems. From SuSE to Knoppix (installed, not live) I cannot get it working. One of the attractions is that it doesn't cost me anything to try out.

    How do you handle the recurring debates over distributions? What would you recommend to someone who wants to try moving to Linux but can't afford to spend countless hours getting it to install - installing Windows XP only takes me 30 minutes and everything works.

    Perhaps some other ./ers could offer their suggestions as well. Sorry if this isn't quite on topic.

    • Have you tried Mandrake? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Mandrake is absolutely THE easiest to install, and works on almost all platforms (Laptop compatibility rocks!). Give it a roll!
    • What? You must be doing something wrong. Just see an example of how good Linux installs are here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=97912&cid=8364 504

      Plus that comment is modded +5 Informative so it must be true!

      • Re:Distributions (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Vancorps ( 746090 )
        Sorry, but its damned near impossible to have both ease of installation and flexibility. That said Linux has come a long way. Just to get linux to boot I have to add mmap=640k mmap = 512m mmap = 1023 mmap = 2047

        That just gets me booted, then I have to add more kernel load options to get the network cards to use tcp/ip properly

        Granted my situation is unique, the machine is a quad processor proliant but the situations are real and the person isn't necessarily doing anything wrong. One of the strengths of t

    • Re:Distributions (Score:5, Informative)

      by mumkin ( 28230 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @02:03PM (#8364637) Journal
      How do you handle the recurring debates over distributions? What would you recommend to someone who wants to try moving to Linux but can't afford to spend countless hours getting it to install - installing Windows XP only takes me 30 minutes and everything works.

      I would recommend that you drop into the #forum channel of irc.slashnet.org around 8pm EST this evening and ask Marcel Gagne. :)

    • Re:Distributions (Score:2, Interesting)

      by chazwurth ( 664949 )
      Without knowing what kind of problems you're experiencing, the best advice I can offer is that you should find someone in your area who knows what they're doing. If you're even somewhat close to a medium-sized city, there is probably a local Linux user group; try googling for them, they may have a web page. If you have any friends who use Linux, ask them for help I've found that many Linux users are happy to help someone else who's just starting out.

      If that doesn't work out for you, try the IRC channel for

    • Re:Distributions (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If everything works with XP, why are you switching?
      • If everything works with XP, why are you switching?

        An innate preference for the Open Source philosophy and/or a geekly curiosity?

        KFG
        • KFG: A little of both. Plus, XP isn't working perfectly (on any machine I've tried). I've switched to OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird and have tried GIMP. I like the philosophy, the price and the fact that sometimes I can screw around with the code myself to get it to do stuff I want (without having to wait for MS to do it for me).

          This weekend I tried SuSE - installing using a "newbie install guide" I found posted on Slashdot. Plenty of instructions for installing via FTP network install. Wait! It doesn't reco
          • Well, I'd be among those that claim that XP doesn't work as designed, i.e. when it's working perfectly it isn't working by my definition of "working."

            That doesn't mean I don't use Windows, just that I have declined to upgrade and don't intend to do so except under some form of compulsion, which I feel free to resent.

            As per my other post I'd recommend Mandrake, and I'm sure you'll find that dozens of other like recommendations appear under this article.

            My experience is that it installs fast, clean and wit
          • I'm intrigued, because in my experience, network card support is pretty good. (It's harder to sell network cards without Linux support than it is to sell, say, Winmodems.) Please reply, or email if you prefer, everything you know about your network card. Maybe I can make sense of it.
            • Thanks for the offer, but I'm downloading Mandrake ISOs. I'm sure I would have had no problem with SuSE once it was installed, but I couldn't get my network card running and thus the network install was not possible.

              I hate being a newbie again.

          • Did you check to see if this network card is on SuSE's supported hardware list? Most major distros publish a list of hardware they support out of the box.

    • Re:Distributions (Score:2, Interesting)

      by rsklnkv ( 532866 )
      "...installing Windows XP only takes me 30 minutes and everything works..."
      EVERYTHING? You mean all of notepad and sound recorder and the other three apps that come packaged with XP?

      On a serious note, I haven't had a linux install take me countless hours in years. That's not to say there is no post-install tweaking to be performed, but even windows needs that after an install (new latest-and-greatest drivers, codecs, etc).
      I just installed the latest Suse and had no serious problems. In fact, I was quite su

    • Slackware (Score:3, Interesting)

      by turgid ( 580780 )
      Contrary to popular belief slackware [slackware.com] is quite simple to install and get working as long as you don't mind using text-mode menus to install. However, with Linux, you only install once. If yo know what a disk partition is, then that's about as technical as you need to get these days to install Slackware. It's also comprehensive without being bloated, very unfussy about hardware, very up-to-date and un-"dumbed down" unlike Fedora (previously Red Hat).

      I am biased. I've been using Slackware since 1995. I've trie

    • - installing Windows XP only takes me 30 minutes and everything works.

      You must be a very lucky guy. Wait and see what happens when you upgrade your PC with a bran'-spankin-new devices for which XP doesn't have driver available. If you don't have a driver disk and are not connected to the web, you are out of luck.

      Quite honestly, I don't find Windows (any version) installation any easier than popular Linux distro installation. This is already a redundant topic on /. To me it takes more than 30 minutes an

      • If you try to install some new hardware and XP doesnt have the driver, you are in the same position as you are with Linux. Except with XP you are pretty much garunteed the driver actually exists. Furthermore I reinstalled XP about a week ago, and it took a total of two reboots. Once to install the OS, once after I ran windows update. Here's a hint, just because an installer tells you to reboot doesnt generally mean you have to. I had a fully functional, secure, updated system in under 2 hours. Includin
    • Most debates about distributions don't amount to much anyway, so they are handled quite nicely. You're doing the right thing by trying out a few different ones, but you can save some time by avoiding any of the ones that sound too "exotic".

      Using one distribution versus another won't have a day or night impact on your use of Linux until you get into the portions where the various flavors differ. On excellent example of this is in administration. The average user usually does very little administration, b

    • Re:Distributions (Score:3, Interesting)

      by NtroP ( 649992 )
      Although I use RedHat/Fedora almost exclusively my primary desktop OS at work (as a Systems Administrator of a large Windows/Linux/Mac network), I'd recommend ARK Linux [arklinux.org] for drop-dead simple installation and good beginner experience. I have to admit, the one-click install is pretty impressive. As you get more familiar with Linux you will probably look forward to "tweaking" the install and compiling your own kernels, etc. and may want to look at some of the "better known"/"mature" distros, but the pollished

      • I gather that, given enough time, most /.ers could write working binaries with nothing but a pencil, some paper, and a case of Jolt cola, but I guess this is the place for my first post: an old thread where my almost-complete ignorance works in my favor. Mod me redundant, but if there are any other newbies reading this, let me second NtroP's recommendation of Arklinux. [arklinux.org]

        Other than Knoppix, ARKlinux is the only distro I've ever tried*. It has installed smoothly on both of my machines (a Compaq laptop and

    • I am a Windows user myself but I recently installed Debian and have been doing alright with it. I have tried Mandrake it worked alright. And I tried older versions fo Redhat so far I have to say that Debain is by far my favorite.
    • Try Fedora - lots of thrid part supprt in english. Better yet grab Mepis - run it as a CD based live distro or install to HDD in minutes. Both good choices. Before going Linux check your Hardware compatibility. (It is still the case that hardware vendors lazily only support Monopol$oft in the majority of cases but is steadily improving)
    • Well, Marcel has his favourite distros, but "KTBSODG" uses a variant of Knoppix. For the most part, the book stays away from distro-specific requirements, and concentrates on a specific GUI (KDE).

  • installation screen of torture? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by freerecords ( 750663 ) <slashdot.freerecords@org> on Monday February 23, 2004 @01:53PM (#8364504) Homepage Journal
    no... you obviously haven't had a go at installing any of the "user friendly" distros anytime in the last oooo ummm 4 years? Redhat/Fedora has a great installer which is so easy to use.. but by far the winner has to be Mandrake whose isntallation makes Windows look like Slackware 4.0.. Linux is ready for the desktop - the desktop just isn't ready for linux.
    • While I agree that installing linux has gotten a lot easier with Mandrake (or even Redhat), it's still far from being as simple as a Windows install. Non linux users don't know what window manager they should pick, what packages they really do need (nothing has a simple name... it's like reading a novel when doing an install), or what sizes their partitions need to be. Granted they have default settings, but I think someone needs to come out with a distro that takes it all down to the basics: 1 window man
    • Linux is ready for the desktop - the desktop just isn't ready for linux.

      I've got 2 Linux boxes at home (no Windows partitions). I'd have to disagree though. Until Windows users know what emacs is or why some application binaries go under /usr/bin versus some /usr/local/bin or that documentation will be found under /usr/share/doc (or /usr/local/share/doc) and how to correct symbolic links pointing to outdate lib files I don't think its ready.

      The way I'm seeing it now is Linux is two distict operating sy
      • This is a fine point about Linux. Since its inception its been trying to be both a desktop and a server and ironically this is a big complaint the Linux community has with Windows!

        I agree there needs to be seperation. An administrator is quite capable of running man woman while the average user needs to be able to just click an icon and get exactly what he or she wants. I've seen this done with BeOS, Windows, and Lycoris. All three are great desktop OS's in my opinion. Cut out the stuff you don't need and

    • Perhaps you haven't installed Windows in the last ooooo ummmm 4 years? Its been almost six years now since I've had to stick a Windows cd in and actually type anything to get an install. Granted if I want to customize it even further then I would not do an unattended install but these are options that pretty much every OS has in the last ten years.

      Plus, does it really matter about the installer? I mean if you are installing an OS should you not know how to configured and operate the OS already? If that's t

  • His wine choices at the beginning if his articles!

  • The Blue Screen of Death (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FreakOfTheWeek ( 415378 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @01:54PM (#8364510)
    I honestly don't remember the last time that I or anyone I know had a blue screen of death with windows 2000 or windows XP. It's time to stop complaining about the stability of windows.

    There are plenty of other things to focus on (for example: security, closed standards, cost, etc.)

    I am not saying that the current windows operating systems are the pinnacle of stability, but for most purposes, they are definitely good enough.
    • I honestly don't remember the last time that I or anyone I know had a blue screen of death with windows 2000 or windows XP. It's time to stop complaining about the stability of windows.

      I can remember, though i must say it does happen much less often than in Windows 98. Windows 98 was terrible, you couldn't use it for more than a day without it blue screening on you. XP and 2000 it happens more like once a month, if that often. But it does happen.

    • Re:The Blue Screen of Death (Score:4, Funny)

      by curtisk ( 191737 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @02:04PM (#8364649) Homepage Journal
      I have seen some recently on winXP pro and they actually were due to hardware issues, so yeah they still exist, but nothing like their glory days of the win9x series. Beating the "BSOD" joke to death is old hat and really not current for a current book.

      OTOH, my new book "Saying goodbye to Exception Errors and emm386 by moving to Linux" should be on bookshelves soon.

    • Re:The Blue Screen of Death (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      the blue screen has been replaced with a much friendlier technology. spontanius reboot. no blue screen, no newbie wondering which keys to press, no hassle, just a machine doing a reboot and will be finished booting in a few minutes to let you get back to work.
    • I honestly don't remember the last time that I or anyone I know had a blue screen of death with windows 2000 or windows XP.

      It's been a year for me.
      Microsoft's crash analysis diagnosing the problem quickly and correctly as a USB driver, in language you didn't need to be a techno geek to understand.

    • We see Blue Screens on Win2K daily, related to the Netware client. You can blame Novell, but a poorly written app shouldn't be able to hose your system.
    • Windows no longer gives BSOD. It will reboot if it encounters a critical error. While I haven't seen a BSOD in forever, I have "clicked my way into the bios" a few times. Albeit, mostly when playing a game.

  • Book is good... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by neiffer ( 698776 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @01:54PM (#8364515) Homepage
    "Linux System Administration: A User's Guide" was one of my first Linux books. It was fairly informative and very easy to read. Now, mind you, I'm still addicted to Windows, but I thought that he had a very realistic slant on the strengths and weaknesses of various Linux options.

  • Linux Users (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23, 2004 @01:56PM (#8364545)
    His first book was the acclaimed Linux System Administration: A User's Guide.
    "Linux Users: A System Administrator's Guide" would be more acclaimed.

  • Please! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by msimm ( 580077 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @01:59PM (#8364582) Homepage
    Make him stop using the CORNY FRENCH shtick. It make interesting articles unbearable. French is a beautiful language, but Marcel's French waiter doesn't belong in my firewall configuration article.
    • Somebody had to say it - thank you. That shit's NOT FUNNY! It's annoying as hell! And it's pissing off the French! Just tell me about compiling the kernel module for my toaster, or whataver the article is supposed to be about that week. If I want uninspired ethnic humor I'll go down to the bar.

    • Re:Please! (Score:4, Informative)

      by dbc ( 135354 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @05:18PM (#8366999)
      Indeed!! That stuff drives me nuts. At first, I tried to slog through his crap to find out what he was trying to say, but that French chef schtick just got in the way. Pretty quickly, I just started completely ignoring his columns. Then I dropped the magazine. It was an easy decision... which of two Linux magazines do I want to continue paying for? Easy: shit-can the FRENCH CHEF magazine.

      Hrumph.
      • Its too bad too, LJ is a really good journal and his articles are informative. But I can't read more then two lines myself before I become angry and lose patience. If I where reading comedy, maybe...but I like to keep my technical reading clear and comprehensible.

        Good to know I'm not alone on this (my wife thought I was nuts grumbling under my breath..lol)!
    • I have to agree with parent on this - I've gotten some pretty damn usefull information from his articles, but crap, throwing french phrases in the article willy-nilly is just annoying. You don't know how many times I wish I could do a search-and-replace on paper just so I could place all the french sillyness with " "!
    • What had the potential to be the most interesting column (for me) actually had the reverse effect because the irritating French comments just made me fume.

      It made me stop subscribing to the Linux Journal.

    • You might not have noticed, but Marcel Gagne is a Canadian of French descent (i.e. French Canadian). The brand of franglais that Marcel writes in his articles is both humourous and representative of the sort of English language you might find in English-speaking Quebec, French-speaking New Brunswick, and French-speaking northern Ontario.

      I, for one, appreciate Marcel's humour and language. I told him so when I reviewed his first book for Addison-Wesley Longman.

      • If this was a humor column I would have just written it off as not my style and moved on. The trouble is this is a technical column. *shrug*

        I guess he would have his admirers but I'd appreciate his articles a whole lot more without the cutesy. For me it shoots straight past painful into new, uncharted territory.
        • That's also his style.

          It may not be very compatible with everyone but it's pretty easy to disregard the comments and focus on the point of the article...

          Also, you make it sound in your previous comment as if everyone should unsubscribe from LJ because of those articles, though it had been voted the best column by LJ subscribers over 2 years in a row IIRC...

          That aside, the comments don't bother me at all but I can see how someone could get annoyed with them.
          • Also, you make it sound in your previous comment as if everyone should unsubscribe from LJ because of those articles

            Your probably refering to one of the other comments attached to mine. I read LJ myself, I also have a lot of respect for the editor Don Marti and although I do find it dissapointing because I can not 'disregard the comments and focus on the point of the article' I would not let that stop me from enjoying the rest of the magazine.
    • I find tres dificile the technical stuff, so I get real joy de vivre every time I read Monsieur Gagne's articles in le magazin.

      But there are some people around here that take life tres seriouse and would jump to the Seine from the Eiffel Tower beacuse a fly flies close by.

      Ces't la vie I suppose.

  • Not just for the desktop anymore... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ArmenTanzarian ( 210418 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @02:01PM (#8364620) Homepage Journal
    I recently upgraded some servers to Win Server 2003 and it's very quick, but I'm pretty sure it flashes the BSoD every other time I reboot. I'm going to hook it up to a VCR to check it out, because it's too short to notice anything but the color of the screen and writing. It's just eery...
    • You know, you can change that behavior. I can't tell you where, but there's an option to disable the reboot that occurs on a BSOD. It also logs that text somewhere. Sorry I can't offer more precise instructions; I use Linux.
    • a VCR?!?! YIKES! That's not a typical piece of troubleshooting instrumentation.

      What you want to do is prevent Windows from rebooting immediately after your bluescreen. Do this: Go into the control panel, and click System Properties. Click the ADVANCED tab, then click the SETTINGS button for STARTUP AND RECOVERY. There you will see a checkbox that is probably checked that says "Automatically Restart". Uncheck it.

      Not that we all wouldn't like to see a video of your server crashing...

  • What people should say to interested users... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23, 2004 @02:03PM (#8364639)
    Of windows is that with linux, you actually can figure out what went wrong, when something goes wrong. You have extensive logs, all the configs are right there in front of you.

    I hate windows now, after using linux. Windows is like the stereotypical woman. You never know what's really wrong with it, and you have to keep on trying different fiddling games. Then suddenly, it will start working fine again.

    I do NOT want something that is as mystical and mysterious as windows when I need to get something done. Thank god I've got linux, which just works (And if it doesn't, I can figure out why it doesn't...)

    All metaphors aside, I still think the registry and drivers system of windows (especially XP) is one of the most mysterious and confusing arrangements I've ever seen.

    • How do you figure that?

      Whoopty damn doo, the source is available to me.

      However, any documentation I'm lucky enough to find is years out of date. The CUPS manual is basically a longwinded treatise about reading the manual, for instance. Absolutely no information in there to help you get your printer working.

      Do I really want to pore through millions of lines of source code to figure out why I can't get a particular machine to join a SAMBA controlled domain? Or start debugging ghostscript to figure out w
    • My guess is that you really have a hard time understanding women then since there are always signs that say what is wrong.

      Surprise surprise this is just like Windows except you never learned to get such information. You have logs that are just as extensive in Windows if you choose both to activate them and read them. In Windows I can dump all tcp/ip traffic to a text file or database just like I can with Linux, Netware, or BeOS. Its all about knowing what tools are available to you rather than just assumin

  • The logs will be at slashnet.org (Score:5, Informative)

    by chmod_localhost ( 718125 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @02:07PM (#8364671) Journal
    For some reason, nobody ever bothers to mention where the logs of the Slashdot IRC forums get posted. After the IRC interview with CmdrTaco and Hemos a few months ago, it took me some digging to figure out where the log wound up.

    For those who can't make the chat, the log will eventually be at http://www.slashnet.org/forums/ [slashnet.org]

    Editors: After the chat is over, any chance of having the log URL linked to the story text as an update?

  • Mon ennemi (Score:5, Insightful)

    by g1zmo ( 315166 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @02:17PM (#8364801) Homepage
    Is he going to keep up the annoying French persona, having his stuffed penguin fetch obscure bottles of wine for the readers? It's a failed bit, in my opinion.
    • They might be obscure to Jolt Cola swigging weenies, but to those of us who appreciate the finer things in life Marcel keeps a very good cellar. I just wish he would serve some cheese with it some time. You know real stuff like Reblochon, Ponte l'Avec or my favourite Coeur de Neufchatel :-)

      BTW I think that being french-canadian he's sort of stuck with his "french persona"

      • Ah, the spirit of Slashdot. I'm glad you judged me to be a "Jolt-swigging weenie" who has no idea of the "finer things" of life, with absolutely no basis for such a characterization. But you're absolutely right. I've no idea what the difference is between the wines (I assume those are wines) that you listed. That's just not my bag. I'm sure I have knowledge of things that you know nothing about, and don't really care about, but I wouldn't ever try to imply that you're second-class because you don't app

  • Will the new book INCLUDE a distribution? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by VernonNemitz ( 581327 ) on Monday February 23, 2004 @02:33PM (#8364989) Journal
    I see some commentary about the difficulty of installing Linux. If this book is for the average Windows user, then it needs to include some Linux distro that is practically guaranteed to install with no hassle (or at least no hassles not described in the book!).
    If THAT can be accomplished, then Microsoft can start kissing itself goodbye.
    • It includes a slightly modified version of knoppix on cd.
    • then it needs to include some Linux distro that is practically guaranteed to install with no hassle (or at least no hassles not described in the book!). If THAT can be accomplished, then Microsoft can start kissing itself goodbye.

      There is a hell of a lot more to a good distro then the install process. Linux has excelled well beyond Windows in this regard already. Take my personal favorite: Mandrake. Not only does it look good installing, but it will configure and install most of your drivers in less the
  • I thought they already had toasters that run linux. Or is he talking about high-end machines, like ovens?
  • Quick! What words rhymes with Gagne!?!?!?

  • Linux needs more Marcels (Score:5, Informative)

    by embill ( 551301 ) * <btraynor@gHORSEmail.com minus herbivore> on Monday February 23, 2004 @03:21PM (#8365632)
    In my opinion, Marcel provides an intelligent, readable, and most importantly FUN introduction to Linux. A first line of support for many Linux newbie's is their local LUG mailing list where more often than not (but not always) they're berated by the local alphageeks for asking a question that's been answered 100 times previously on the list or in scads of documentation. Unfortunately, newbies just want things to work, they don't want to know how it works. These types of responses usually result in their retreat back to the safety of Windows. Whether we like it or not, the latter situation is only going to increase, as more and more users migrate to Linux. Marcel's book stands as an excellent resource for anyone newbie's who don't mind doing a little reading. And for those who don't, Marcel offers both a mailing list [marcelgagne.com] and an IRC channel (#wftl on server: www.marcelgagne.com) for painless, alphageek free help.
  • Je m'appelle Marcel. Stop zee Weendows from eenvading your computer, just like we (oui?) wanted zee Americans to not eenvade Iraq. Bah, we (oui?) French no notheeng of, how do you say..."warfare." I weel help you zees time. But if you eenvade another countree (Mon Dieux, not France AGAIN), I weel veeto your Leenux installation, just like we (oui?) veetoed your UN rezolution.

    Puns intended!
  • ...but I want to know when we get a forum with anime fanfic writer Stephen Gagne. :)

Slashdot Top Deals

Almost anything derogatory you could say about today's software design would be accurate. -- K.E. Iverson

Close