“In any large software project the end result comes up many features short of the wish list. If you’re lucky the product catches up to the wish list by the next version, and that is what seems to be the case with Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003.” Read the article at ZDNet.
How Windows Server 2003 Stacks Up
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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<quote>AD is both more powerful and more complicated in Windows Server 2003. There are almost 800 new group policies, which made it essential for Microsoft to improve the administrative tools</quote>
they should take a course of kiss philosophy from *nix vms …
more like 800 new ways to misconfigure your server…
Group policies in 2000 Active Directory don`t go far enough and as a network management tool its implemented very well granting the administrater unparalleled control over the network thats (and get this) easy to configure. Unfortunately 2003 server won`t be showing up in any office I control since it won`t be considered mature enough for at least a year after its out.
The day will come that M$ will rename windoze into Linux. lol
“The day will come that M$ will rename windoze into Linux.”
I don’t know what’s to be said for this comment. Microsoft has done a wonderful job creating software that “just works” (or just doesn’t work, but that’s a different story) Active Directory is a wonderful example of this. Contrast the configuration of an Active Directory setup to configuring a Solaris network to use LDAP. It will take a relatively knowlegable (and therefore expensive) administrator to configure Solaris LDAP, but a relatively ignorant NT admin can configure Active Directory.
After spending about 2 hours yesterday trying to get a USB mouse working on a decrepit Mandrake system (and for the record I *loathe* Mandrake, I’m so tired of looking at the Aurora Penguin confused over the Mandrake startup scripts horribly failing) I can definately say that I vouch for the ease of use and setup that comes from Windows environments.
“lol”
Glad you think your own jokes are so funny.
Are the 2003 GP extensions not automatically available to 2K servers using the XP templates?
apply as needed. *yawn*
The problem is that because configuration is administered via a GUI, you have to provide the options.
It’s better the linux way where you must know the options to put in, which means you must know what you are doing first.
This is my experience as an admin moving from administering Windows machines to Linux ones. Whereas I was often unsure of many of the options and implications of various check-boxes in the Windows environment – many of which were named poorly and served only to confuse – in linux I’m finding the default configurations come with the basics and you add what you want on top of that with a little bit of self-education.
Give a kid a knife and the kid will cut themself. The same thing holds true here. Every admin starts out somewhere, unknowledgeable and naive. Those are the admins that Windows appeals to due to the initially easy nature to get things running but it backfires… it’s just as easy to cause a severe problem.
“After spending about 2 hours yesterday trying to get a USB mouse working on a decrepit Mandrake system…”
just because you can’t figure out how to install a usb mouse in mandrake linux doesn’t mean it’s hard to use. it means you’re ignorant.
relatively ignorant NT admins are just what this world DOESN’T need and unfortuantely, microsoft’s software has done nothing but cater to idiots. i work in an environment where we have NT admins with all the certifications known to man, but they’re still morons. sure, autoconfiguration is great, but when it breaks… then what? the famous “ghost it” or “uninstall and reinstall”. that seems to be the answer on the tip of every NT admins tongue.
“oh, geez… you changed your desktop res to 1280 and forgot to change the refresh rate and now you can’t see your desktop? hmm… well shit… i dont know how to boot into safe mode… hmmm… let’s fire up norton ghost, that should fix it.”
don’t give us crap about how easy windows is to use. you pay a huge price for that “ease of use”. as for taking two hours to install a usb mouse… i dunno. after compiling the necessary options in my kernel, it takes a good 30 seconds to get it going. then again… i don’t use mandrake. for obvious reasons (read the reviews).
i’ve used windows since 3.1. a veteran of 3.11 and 95. used 98 for 4 years, then 2000 for 2. tried XP, didn’t like it. then went back to 2000. i boot 2k with gentoo, redhat and slack. i use win2k primarily for games. for the past 2 years i’ve used EVERY version of windows for games and nothing more.
and so on and so forth. it’s my lunch break, so i’ll catch you guys later.
Say whatever you will, but NDS blows ADS out of the water. While Windows is a snap to use (and a snap to screw up, admittedly), NDS gives you 100, no 1000 times the control.
We’re migrating from NetWare 5.1 to Windows 2000 and we admins want to cry every day.
I completely agree. NDS is what ADS wishes it could be, but never will. Novell has so many great products. It’s a shame they can’t seem to market or sell any of them.
“just because you can’t figure out how to install a usb mouse in mandrake linux doesn’t mean it’s hard to use. it means you’re ignorant.”
I’d say that’s a little pretentious… let’s get a quick breakdown of the procedure.
I want to install a USB mouse in Linux… okay
Was this gimpy ancient kernel built with USB HID support? No
Okay, so I need a different kernel… let’s build one from source
Let’s spend awhile cataloguing the system’s hardware so we know what kernel options we need.
Does the system’s compiler work? Nope… I’ll have to build the kernel elsewhere.
Okay, I’ve downloaded the kernel source.
Now I’m configuring the kernel.
Now I’m building the kernel.
Now I’m building the modules.
Now I’m tarring up the module tree and copying it to the new system.
Now I’m copying the kernel to the new system.
Now I’m reinstalling the bootloader.
Now I’m rebooting the system.
Now the new kernel is booting.
Well, everything looks good except I forgot IDE SCSI emulation because this system has a CD recorder.
Now I’m reconfiguring the kernel.
Now I’m rebuilding the kernel again.
Now I’m rebuilding the modules again.
Now I’m tarring up the module tree again.
Now I’m copying the module tree over again.
Now I’m copying the kernel image over again.
Now I’m reinstalling the bootloader.
Now I’m rebooting the system.
Now the system comes up, and everything’s working properly.
Now I have to reconfigure X.
Now X is up, and working with the new mouse.
Contrast this to:
FreeBSD – Plug it in, run /stand/sysinstall and reconfigure the mouse options. Reconfigure X. Done. This works on *any* FreeBSD system. Can you say the same for Linux? Go cathedral.
Windows – Plug it in, it works
OS X – Plug it in, it works
Don’t give me that “Linux isn’t time consuming, ur just ignorant” bullshit you little fucking child.
Linux has terrible deployment issues. There is no standardized platform, and each distribution has its own idiosyncrasies. Some distributions would have made this easier by, say, including USB HID support per default, in which case the job probably wouldn’t have taken nearly as long. However, for a device that’s supposedly “plug and play” I find the above ludicrous.
“just because you can’t figure out how to install a usb mouse in mandrake linux doesn’t mean it’s hard to use. it means you’re ignorant.” [snip]
“don’t give us crap about how easy windows is to use. you pay a huge price for that “ease of use”. as for taking two hours to install a usb mouse… i dunno. after compiling the necessary options in my kernel, it takes a good 30 seconds to get it going. then again… i don’t use mandrake. for obvious reasons (read the reviews).”
This is a bit of an iffy statement… After all, perhaps you can explain to me why Linux requires a kernel recompile just to support a USB mouse? With Windows, all I have to do is plug it in and go. Windows detects it and configures it automatically. So yes, one could argue that relatively speaking, a USB mouse is difficult to configure in Linux (and probably above the average computer user’s skill level.)
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Read articles with similar Topic How Windows Server 2003 Stacks Up
By Eugenia Loli-Queru – Posted on 2003-01-10 16:22:14
“In any large software project the end result comes up many features short of the wish list. If you’re lucky the product catches up to the wish list by the next version, and that is what seems to be the case with Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003.” Read the article at ZDNet.
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Direct Link for this comment wow this is what i really want …
By mariuz (IP: —.mures.rdsnet.ro) – Posted on 2003-01-10 16:54:28
<quote>AD is both more powerful and more complicated in Windows Server 2003. There are almost 800 new group policies, which made it essential for Microsoft to improve the administrative tools</quote>
they should take a course of kiss philosophy from *nix vms …
Direct Link for this comment 800 new group policies…?
By Elver Loho (IP: —.prn.estpak.ee) – Posted on 2003-01-10 17:04:05
more like 800 new ways to misconfigure your server…
Direct Link for this comment Can we leave the uninformed comments out?
By Mongrol (IP: —.your.on.peon.tv) – Posted on 2003-01-10 17:55:06
Group policies in 2000 Active Directory don`t go far enough and as a network management tool its implemented very well granting the administrater unparalleled control over the network thats (and get this) easy to configure. Unfortunately 2003 server won`t be showing up in any office I control since it won`t be considered mature enough for at least a year after its out.
Direct Link for this comment rename windoze
By hgm (IP: —.xs4all.nl) – Posted on 2003-01-10 19:08:13
The day will come that M$ will rename windoze into Linux. lol
Direct Link for this comment Re: hgm
By Bascule (IP: —.atmos.colostate.edu) – Posted on 2003-01-10 19:22:06
“The day will come that M$ will rename windoze into Linux.”
I don’t know what’s to be said for this comment. Microsoft has done a wonderful job creating software that “just works” (or just doesn’t work, but that’s a different story) Active Directory is a wonderful example of this. Contrast the configuration of an Active Directory setup to configuring a Solaris network to use LDAP. It will take a relatively knowlegable (and therefore expensive) administrator to configure Solaris LDAP, but a relatively ignorant NT admin can configure Active Directory.
After spending about 2 hours yesterday trying to get a USB mouse working on a decrepit Mandrake system (and for the record I *loathe* Mandrake, I’m so tired of looking at the Aurora Penguin confused over the Mandrake startup scripts horribly failing) I can definately say that I vouch for the ease of use and setup that comes from Windows environments.
“lol”
Glad you think your own jokes are so funny.
Direct Link for this comment Group Policy
By JCooper (IP: —.lut.ac.uk) – Posted on 2003-01-10 19:31:03
Are the 2003 GP extensions not automatically available to 2K servers using the XP templates?
Direct Link for this comment Your OS sux
By Christopher Kemp (IP: —.biz.mindspring.com) – Posted on 2003-01-10 19:42:24
apply as needed. *yawn*
Direct Link for this comment Re: 800 new group policies…?
By Charlie (IP: —.zen.co.uk) – Posted on 2003-01-10 20:14:25
The problem is that because configuration is administered via a GUI, you have to provide the options.
It’s better the linux way where you must know the options to put in, which means you must know what you are doing first.
This is my experience as an admin moving from administering Windows machines to Linux ones. Whereas I was often unsure of many of the options and implications of various check-boxes in the Windows environment – many of which were named poorly and served only to confuse – in linux I’m finding the default configurations come with the basics and you add what you want on top of that with a little bit of self-education.
Give a kid a knife and the kid will cut themself. The same thing holds true here. Every admin starts out somewhere, unknowledgeable and naive. Those are the admins that Windows appeals to due to the initially easy nature to get things running but it backfires… it’s just as easy to cause a severe problem.
Direct Link for this comment ahem…
By ryan (IP: 209.53.157.—) – Posted on 2003-01-10 21:47:44
“After spending about 2 hours yesterday trying to get a USB mouse working on a decrepit Mandrake system…”
just because you can’t figure out how to install a usb mouse in mandrake linux doesn’t mean it’s hard to use. it means you’re ignorant.
“relatively ignorant NT admins are just what this world DOESN’T need and unfortuantely, microsoft’s software has done nothing but cater to idiots.”
That’s really not an accurate statement. I’ve met plenty of NT admins that know their stuff a hell of a lot better than many Linux admins I have met. Why? Because unfortunately, the number of clueless UNIX administrators has also increased proportionally to the number of Linux installations. This isn’t a defect with Linux. Rather, it is just the fact that now that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can get their hands on a Unix system, they suddenly think they are a UNIX administrator because they once sucessfully installed Red Hat and got Apache to run on it. How many people claim “Unix administration experience”, only to find out the person can’t even explain sysV init, or write a shell script that uses conditionals? Creates a lot of unneccesary paperwork for employers looking for qualifed candidates for UNIX admin positions.
Oops. Let me try that again. A lot of unncessary crap in the lst one. Was only half paying attention. Sorry about that… I’m not even sure how it happened.
“just because you can’t figure out how to install a usb mouse in mandrake linux doesn’t mean it’s hard to use. it means you’re ignorant.” [snip]
“don’t give us crap about how easy windows is to use. you pay a huge price for that “ease of use”. as for taking two hours to install a usb mouse… i dunno. after compiling the necessary options in my kernel, it takes a good 30 seconds to get it going. then again… i don’t use mandrake. for obvious reasons (read the reviews).”
This is a bit of an iffy statement… After all, perhaps you can explain to me why Linux requires a kernel recompile just to support a USB mouse? With Windows, all I have to do is plug it in and go. Windows detects it and configures it automatically. So yes, one could argue that relatively speaking, a USB mouse is difficult to configure in Linux (and probably above the average computer user’s skill level.)
“relatively ignorant NT admins are just what this world DOESN’T need and unfortuantely, microsoft’s software has done nothing but cater to idiots.”
That’s really not an accurate statement. I’ve met plenty of NT admins that know their stuff a hell of a lot better than many Linux admins I have met. Why? Because unfortunately, the number of clueless UNIX administrators has also increased proportionally to the number of Linux installations. This isn’t a defect with Linux. Rather, it is just the fact that now that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can get their hands on a Unix system, they suddenly think they are a UNIX administrator because they once sucessfully installed Red Hat and got Apache to run on it. How many people claim “Unix administration experience”, only to find out the person can’t even explain sysV init, or write a shell script that uses conditionals? Creates a lot of unneccesary paperwork for employers looking for qualifed candidates for UNIX admin positions.
“That’s really not an accurate statement. I’ve met plenty of NT admins that know their stuff a hell of a lot better than many Linux admins I have met. Why? Because unfortunately, the number of clueless UNIX administrators has also increased proportionally to the number of Linux installations. This isn’t a defect with Linux. Rather, it is just the fact that now that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can get their hands on a Unix system, they suddenly think they are a UNIX administrator because they once sucessfully installed Red Hat and got Apache to run on it.”
Thank you, this is precisely my point. I’m suffering the aftermath of one such administrator… I’ve been left with a network of poorly installed Mandrake systems. Slowly I’ve been replacing these with (what I would consider) properly installed Debian/XFS systems, but many users simply refuse to have their systems reinstalled because it’s “setup exactly like I want it to be” (even if it can’t unmount its filesystems properly on shutdown)
I’d say in general a Windows network with a bad administrator will be in much better shape than a Linux network with a bad administrator.
Also, have a bad Windows administrator try setting up Active Directory and a bad Solaris administrator setup LDAP and see which one finishes first. Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.
“I’d say in general a Windows network with a bad administrator will be in much better shape than a Linux network with a bad administrator.”
That’s true. A reasonally intelligent person can bullshit their way through Windows administration. That’s not true with Linux. With Linux, you either know it or you don’t. And you don’t have any wizards or menu options to help you out if you don’t know it.
…in windows if you do something dumb, you can ask someone else for help and they’ll help you fix things. In linux, you might as well go swimming in the shark tank at sea world with T-Bones taped to your a$$.
Oreilly’s Book Covers: A Pictoral Guide to Operating Systems and Computer Technologies.
XML – Peacock – Attention grabbing, likes to implant itself around – hence why everyone and their mother is staring to use it as a standard.
Windows XP – Frog – If you kiss it, Luna will not get any better looking.
NT TC/IP Administration – Stingray – seems like such a small thing, but if you play with it – it will sting you.
Windows NT – Zebra – Trying to blend in a normal 9x like operating system.
Windows 98 – Toad – As ugly as Luna but with that added feature of crashing with random continous sound emitting errors.
Win2k Active Directory – Cat – Seems tame but unlike dogs, they never do what you tell them too.
Win 32 API Programming w/ VB – Spider Monkey – lots of acrobatics, little productivity.
Websphere 4.0 Workbook – Kangaroo – big kick.
VB Script in a nutshell – Pug? – Small, Compact, and Ugly.
Using Samba – Dodo? – M$ wants this extinct
System V in a Nutshell – Lemur – What you too will look like if you administer one of these.
Understanding the Linux Kernel – Hazey looking glass ball with a man inside – Too hard to make a picture of a bacterial colony.
SSH The definitive guide – Snail – Can’t crack the Shell
Solaris 8 – Salamander – I have nothing to say about salamanders…
Objective-C pocket reference – Fox – pretty clever language, no ones caught on to it though.
Network Security with OpenSSL – Walrus – Saw one of these masturbating at Sea World last year…
Mac OS X – Dog – Dog… one of the few animals that click its own member….
Linux in a nutshell – horse – Pretty fast, until something breaks, then you might as well shoot it and make dog food out of it.
which was Windows .NET Server 2003.
I had the oportunity to download it today and install it on a machine. Everything went like a charm until the machine was up and running and I tried to register the beta copy. The system froze with only one possibility: hard reset. It’s just a beta so I will reconfigure it tomorrow and play with it more, but at this point it looks pretty good, except the fact that the visual interface hasn’t changed too much from 2000, just few colors here and there and few changes in the accessing menus close to XP version…again, before anybody shouts any nasty words against each other, please remember that this thread is dealing with 2003 Server, not Microsoft, Mandrake, Red Hat or MAC.
Looking forward to seeing more comments.
The problem w/Windows is that things break by themselves far too often. I have had a Debian system running for over two years and have never had to reinstall anything.
With Windows, you have to Ghost the machines every quarter, sometimes sooner.
Management can never grasp this concept.
As far as USB mice are concerned, if you are expecting an old kernel to support HID, don’t be foolish. It’s like expecting Win 98 to support a USB printer. It won’t because the technology was invented after the OS was made.
I don’t use Mandrake but I’ve known many people that have had out-of-the-box support of their USB mice since ~8.1
Using Samba – Dodo? – M$ wants this extinct
I thought it was a kiwi
This certianly isn’t the case with my 9.0 install. On my install it detects everything that is USB compliant and which does not soley rely only a windows driver to get it working. I recently plugged in my new Archos mp3 player in a all I needed to do was to create a directory called /mnt/sda1 and then mount the drive. Hell I replaced plenty of USB mice on machines running MDK 8.2-9.0 and never encountered this problem. Of course if your using a ancient version of MDK I would understand.
I’d say they would both be worse off in both cases.
Why would you even want him/her to even finish the setup if they don’t know what in god’s name they are doing ? I much rather have them not be able to setup something like then to have a half-assed, half-working install that would only require more work to fix after you fire the idiot.
“The problem w/Windows is that things break by themselves far too often. I have had a Debian system running for over
two years and have never had to reinstall anything.”
Things don’t break by themselves. Things break because of DLL conflicts and such.It’s perhaps a tradeoff for ease of use. Windows trys to make things work when something is missing and sometimes it fails. Linux on the other hand, often just gives you a message that says something like:
error in loading shared library: libc.so.6 not found
Which of course, leaves the average end user clueless as to what is wrong and how they can fix it.
Hmmm.. if it’s not found, one would naturally tend to go looking for it. If you’ve spent ANY time reading any documentation you would first look in:
/usr/lib
/lib
Then user-defined paths such as /opt, /usr/local/lib, etc. etc. If you don’t find it, it’s not installed. If you find it, it means that the library path is set wrong. A quick search of Google or any Linux help chat room will tell you it’s your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable that needs to be set. There are for the most part two outcomes, both easily fixed — Why? Because the system is open and everything is at your fingertips, if you know where to look and how to use it.
There exists NO system where you can properly administer without any knowledge at all, Linux/UN*X doesn’t try to fulfill this — you have to know your stuff. NT _tries_ to make it dummy-proof, and ends up doing worse than a Unix would.
I’d say they would both be worse off in both cases.
I don’t want to criticize your conceptual understanding of reality, but it’s impossible for two things to simultaneously be worse than each other.
As far as USB mice are concerned, if you are expecting an old kernel to support HID, don’t be foolish. It’s like expecting Win 98 to support a USB printer.
But… Windows 98 does support USB printers (through vendor supplied drivers) and surprise surprise, Windows has the support of all vendors.
It won’t because the technology was invented after the OS was made.
No, USB mice existed long before this version of Mandrake was installed.
Then user-defined paths such as /opt, /usr/local/lib, etc. etc. If you don’t find it, it’s not installed. If you find it, it means that the library path is set wrong. A quick search of Google or any Linux help chat room will tell you it’s your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable that needs to be set.
If you’re using Linux, you should edit /etc/ld.so.conf. If you’re using Solaris, use crle.
There are for the most part two outcomes, both easily fixed — Why? Because the system is open and everything is at your fingertips, if you know where to look and how to use it.
The ‘system’ as you describe, especially on distributions like Mandrake, is highly un-automated. Packages don’t automatically configure themselves to work with each other dynamically. Certain distributions (such as Debian) have done a great deal of work to try to make this the case, but it’s far from seamless.
There exists NO system where you can properly administer without any knowledge at all, Linux/ UN*X doesn’t try to fulfill this — you have to know your stuff. NT _tries_ to make it dummy- proof, and ends up doing worse than a Unix would.
Of course, however there are systems where extensive knowledge is necessary versus systems where a mere conceptual understanding is all that is required. I think Windows is best described by the latter.
“Hmmm.. if it’s not found, one would naturally tend to go looking for it. If you’ve spent ANY time reading any documentation you would first look in:”
No shit…. You and I know this. But do you think the average end user has a clue what /usr/lib and /lib are for?
“A quick search of Google or any Linux help chat room will tell you it’s your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable that needs to be set.”
The prefered method (assuming you have root access) is to set it in ld.so.conf and then run ldconfig. But once again, the average end user isn’t goingto have a clue.
What happens if a library file really is missing? Then do you think the average end user is going to have:
#1: a clue as to what library the file is from?
#2: A clue as to how to install the missing library?
The end user isn’t going to have a clue. That’s the problem with this stuff in Linux on the average user’s desktop.
>>The prefered method (assuming you have root access) is to >>set it in ld.so.conf and then run ldconfig. But once again, >>the average end user isn’t goingto have a clue.
Your “average” users do not setup LDAP.
If you do not have root access to a srver (Windows or Unix)
then you are not allowed to use it!
I’m an avergage/below average linux user. I can compile a couple of programs and install them – icecast; I can edit a few config files to make things work – a la vsftpd; and I can surf the internet, email, add users, and collect pretty background pictures.
However, I still have no idea what exactly all these directories mean. Just to give you all a hint here is a newbie’s take:
/etc — all you config type scripts for different services are in here.
/opt — no clue, its just empty
/var — internet server stuff.
/home — where all the user home directories are by default.
/usr — where all the stuff needed for having a user account is.
/usr/local — where you install programs that run on this machine for users to share.
/boot — don’t mess with this, its what you boot off of.
/dev — no idea looks full.
/proc — looks like dev only with/out the 3letter/numbers filenames for everything.
/bin — binary shell commands are here.
/sbin — root only shell commands are here.
Thats about all i’ve yet to grasp. I probably wrong but so far it works for what I’ve had to setup. I takes a while to start figuring things out because everything is spread out and unless you can recognize some of the files in the directories there is no way to know what they do. Like I still have no idea what the difference between /dev and /proc are nor do I even know what /opt is for. I do like the way though that average users are supposed to know all of this. (Its really not all that important to know all these little details.)
As for the comment about well you should really know your computer to be able to use it. Do you really know your toaster oven? Or you do you only know it conceptually? There is a big difference between the coils get red hot and it toasts things and, oh well you simply go to /usr/lib and edit your library path.
What is Active Directory? Why is it good/bad?
Whats its purpose?
I’ll give you a rundown on the directories you weren’t entirely clear on.
/etc — System configuration scripts
/opt — A hold out from SysV UNIX. Short for “optional”. Third party apps may install here, but in reality it is rarely used on Linux.
/var — Log files, mail spool files, print spool directories.
/usr/local — Yes, it’s as you said. This is where most programs install themselves instead of in /opt. In SysV UNIX, they would install in /opt. But in Linux, /opt is rarely used and /usr/local is used instead.
/dev – This is a “pseudo filesystem”. It doesn’t really exist on your hard disk (assuming you are using devfs). Anyway, it’s where you access devices. Repeat the following mantra: “Everything in Linux is a file”. That makes your life with Linux a lot easier. Devices are represented as files here, and they can be accessed like files. (You can redirect output, for example, to the /dev/sound, which is a device for your sound card.)
/proc — Ignore it and you will be happy. It’s depricated, but it used to contain information about processes running on the system. Was used by various system utilities such as top and ps. The information is still there, but not much uses it anymore.
The Linux / UNIX directory tree is quite well laid out and makes a lot of sense once you understand it. It makes a lot more sense than the Windows directory treee. But the average end user these days in Windows never has to deal with the directory tree directly. It is hidden from them. All they have to know is that they click a certain desktop icon to start their program, that they save their files in “My Documents”, and that they can put a link on their desktop. Windows Exporer, and the Windows standard file dialog provide shortcuts to these which show up at the top level, which, of course, is not where they really are on the hard disk.
Apple also did this with Mac OS X. It’s directory structure is UNIX, but this is completely hidden from the average end user who never leaves the GUI. They will never even see most of the directory structure. That’s probably the way it should be for most end users.
Not only the control, but the speed of controlling, too! Things that require days in Microsoft AD, take only hours in NetWare/NDS! And the increadible scalability of NDS: it was tested with 40 billion objects in the NDS tree!!! – it’s a bonus you might want to consider.
Well, I hope network admins around the world do manage to stick with the better tools for the work.
Simba,
I’m sorry if this is already posted, but I’m reading through from the beginning and want to respond.
You don’t need to recompile the kernel, You just need to compile the modules for USB. It’s rather simple, go in and choose the usb stuff you need as modules and save.
type make depend; make modules; make modules_install
No need to reboot, no need to recompile and it takes all of 3-5 minutes. I’m really surprised Mandrake doesn’t have modules for USB, it fines my intellimouse explorer USB on install all the time.
Either way, it’s not important to me anymore because I run gentoo.
“You don’t need to recompile the kernel, You just need to compile the modules for USB. It’s rather simple, go in and choose the usb stuff you need as modules and save.”
Why should I even have to do this? In Windows all I do is plug it in and go. Windows automatically detects it and configures it.
In FreeBSD, it is almost as easy. I run sysintall, select the mouse setup option, and tell it I have a USB mouse and I’m done.
Why do I need to compile modules in Linux for something as elementary as USB mouse support?