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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • Oh for sure, but at least Alexa’s rankings were rather transparent and somewhat trusted built up on a reputation.

    I hadn’t even realized Amazon bought and discontinued the service, but that’s clearly exactly the type of instance that needs to be guarded against. I’m sure that a big part of why Amazon wanted that Alexa gone was because it would show rising competition, and Jeff can’t have that.


  • But that just tells you all the people that have visited the site and downloaded a script.

    I find it hard to believe that OpenMandriva is the most popular distro. I distrohop quite a bit and never even came across it (currently using Nobora on my PC, KDE Neon in the living room, tumbleweed on the kids laptops (though I may move them to silverblue or another immutable), and Pop on my laptop. It takes me a minute when I sit at any console to remember which package manager is the right one)

    If you want honest results of actual use on general-purpose PCs…I’d wish for something like Alexa Page Rankings that could get deep enough to know Distro, but that’s not possible (I don’t think, without every distro having its own User Agent signature in the browsers), and Amazon bought Alexa and discontinued those services



  • Anybody ever get Winmodems to work or did they all give up on it?

    Back in the day, it was hard enough getting dialup internet working on Linux (especially before you had internet in your pocket, so you had to print out HowTos or write down a bunch of notes before you tried to do it).

    But it was downright impossible with a class of modems that was designed essentially as a softmodem, heavily reliant on closed-source firmware and drivers, making them practically impossible to work on Linux.




  • I saw earlier you mentioned it’s an Optiplex, so I’m assuming this is an onboard NIC.

    I’ve never had an onboard NIC not work out-of-the-box in Linux. Wifi, sure, but usually just certain chipsets with proprietary/closed firmware. Dell usually uses Intel NICs and they’re usually pretty solid and well supported.

    Check to make sure that the NIC is enabled in BIOS.

    If you have/had Windows on this PC, did it work there?

    Does the NIC show in lspci or ip a ?

    Try an external USB NIC. Or an internal PCIe one if you’re comfortable with that.






  • It wasn’t too early, maybe 1997.

    I was like 12 or so and I had just installed Linux.

    I figured out, from the book I was working with, how to get my windows partition to automaticallyount at boot. Awesome!

    I had not been able to figure out how to start “x” though.

    So I rebooted into Windows, for on EFnet #linux, and asked around.

    Got a command, wrote it down on a slip of paper, and rebooted into Linux.

    I should mention, I also hadn’t figured out about privileges, or at least why you wouldn’t want to run around as root.

    Anyway, I started typing in the command that I wrote down: rm -rf /.

    I don’t have to tell you all, that is not the correct command. The correct command was startx.

    After I figured it was taking way too long, I decided to look up what the command does, and then immediately shut down the system.

    It was far too late.