Documentary: GNU / Linux : The Codebreakers

I will get this. The work of Lawrence Lessig is also invaluable in understanding open source software and extreme copyright control which has developed over the years.

On the other hand, enthusiasts for Linux are not just a minority but they are also smug and exceptional toward users of the usual Windows environment. There's more to this story but the problem remains that learning a new OS is difficult and programs are created and dropped in development on a whim.

"smug and exceptional"

You find that kind of behavior here and there (especially among Germans if I you allow me a seitenhieb), but things have changed a lot for the better in recent years. Have you tried ubuntuforums.org? I always found the people there friendly, helpful, and non-condescending. Never heard anyone say "read the f*ing manual" there.

Oh sure RTFM. My net days go back to 1992 or thereabouts.

I spent 9 months trying to learn Linux with no real life assistance-- just net forums and so on. It was very slow, not fast to get responses unlike someone working in a computer lab with a teacher.

There are common tropes in Linux, my favorite of which is this story from Marcel Gagne. Gagne is a Canadian who writes Cooking With Linux for a national magazine. One day in his listserv he says something like "Even my father can use Linux and he's x-number of years old."

Well of course what Marvel is leaving out is that Marcel is the son-- a phone call or personal visit away-- and with the right answer the first time.

Then there's the "permission denied screen of death."
That's like the Blue Screen of Death in Windows except it's black.



cheers

BTW I still look at Marcel's listserv daily seeing if that big break in Linux usability.

"opportunities for industry and capacity development, software piracy reduction"

i haven't watched this yet, but i definitely will. i don't like the direction the phrase above suggests the film may go, though. i hate industry. i love piracy. this kinda reeks of that "new society within the shell of the old" bullshit. love FOSS though. other than drivers and codecs, necessary evils at this point, i'm free of proprietary software.

You guys may find this interesting: http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism

also, wanted to chime in with some agreement with Martin. you don't have to rely on help from CLI-junkies anymore. people on ubuntuforums and most other popular linux forums will give polite and helpful answers to even the simplest questions, and usually berate anyone who acts like an asshole.

I just finished the film/documentary. It gives a lot of hope for the future and admiration for what has been accomplished.

Not included in the film are the special versions of Linux for kids and the fact that many programs are pre-installed such as Firefox and Open Office Suite.

I have also seen some of the large tomes on Linux which, when you break them down, are nothing more than printouts of man pages (their phrase for manual page lookup.)

Several questions of mine never get answered.

The first is why have I never seen in even the largest of these Linux bibles an error index where errors are described by name? I know the reason but it's never talked about. The reason is that an error table or index would reveal the amount of error codes there are from kernel to desktop.

The second is that with all the 'choice' touted with FOSS, why in Linux can I not belay the supervisor and user roles and set a zero security level? This goes back to what I initially wrote:
the security levels and supervisor/user roles produce errors that are the product of the Tree House mentality-- that of the insiders in the know and everybody else.

1. Error index - Google is your error index these days. Just put your error message in quotes and run it through Google. I hardly run into an error message that hasn't already been encountered by somebody else already.

2. Separating user tasks from admin tasks is a crucial part of the security architecture. If you do away with that, you sacrifice a major advantage of Linux. And I don't think that this is what causes most of the errors either..

It IS possible (however foolish) to do so btw - just log in as root at all times.

I used to do that-- log in as root. No major damage but still too complicated.

And error index. Well what about when the permission denied screen of death takes out your operating system? Then google is useless.

There is one application I would like to see and that is the Linux used as hardware firewall. It would be epsecially good for what we do here.

A simple computing server is set up with NIC's and feeds data through but provides a hardware firewall to any intrusions or snoops. Linux has the program.

My fantasy is having a dedicated application on a cd rom with Linux that auto installs and runs the firewall until turned off. Everything would auto execute. But there are no single applications like that. I forget what they used to be called. Anyway it's a simple application of software but no one has done it. No copy protection as such is needed because it's all FOSS.