CNR for Mepis?

It is my understanding that CNR is intended for commercial applications (StarOffice and Win4Lin would be good examples) and proprietary drivers. The mentioned distro publishers (Fedora and Ubuntu) would provide some sort of initial access for their customers.

How long that access stays free (gratis) remains to be seen; however, my initial awareness of this "CNR-for all" discussion (around the end of last year) led me to believe that the CNR service was not intended to be long-term free (gratis).

At some point, this will be a subscription-only offering.

My occupation?
Well, computer geek-stuff, mostly. I could tell you all about it; but, then I would have to delete you.

I hope that the CNR feature will not be a feature of Mepis.
To me the whole idea of having to pay for freely (in both senses of the word) available apps, or through a CNR system if free, is going against the whole ethos of debian.
To me CNR is about RESTRICTING access to apps, not making them more accessible.
Why not just do
apt-get install app

anticapitalista

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

I think CNR should be available if its free. After all you don't have to use it & can just carry on using apt-get or synaptic. I installed freespire on my test PC last night and tested CNR & its very good, although I did get one dependency error trying to install the "totem" media player & had to report it to Linspire.

I played with FreeSpire and CNR a bit before coming back to Mepis. CNR was slower than molasses, and did not seem to be terribly user friendly to me. Maybe I'm just used to Synaptic and Portage (Gentoo), but CNR was just slow *and* confusing for me, and I would never want to use it.

Exactly my thinking.

Regards, Ko

Ko Bros

me had alook not so long ago, some of the stuff is free and some you have to pay for. I think it would be good though.

That's kinda what I was expecting .... but one can always hope .

I just seem to have a lot of trouble in Dependency "hell" with apt-get and Synaptic .... I thought that when I get something that won't install with apt-get, I could always turn to CNR, but the reason I didn't look at Lindows/Linspire/Freespire before this (since Lindows 4.5) was the old CNR that was $15 per month .

Us old fogeys want to learn this stuff too, gimme a break!

I have reviewed the CNR site and it seems like a really good idea. It is hard to predict its usability because it is still in ALPHA state. For now it has no effective search function. It appears to have server/bandwidth limitations and thus is slow. It is not clear about long term subscription cost. Current costs show free for free and charges for commercial (proprietary) apps. That seems fair if it persists. To its credit, it does address one of the most common complaints that the non-technical desktop users report. Windows users trying Linux frequently complain that they cannot find, download and install software in a CNR manner as they did in Windows. And secondly the multitude of distros in Linux is a good thing until it is time to install apps not included in the original distro. While the first two items mentioned above are the most important perceived problems, there is another which is often at the root of them. Commonality of APIs is the greatest shortfall Linux for the general public. Here CNR or something like it offers the greatest value to Linux/FOSS.

You're right. It's an issue of perception or, rather, finding fault with something they're unfamiliar with--because the claimed benefit with windoze never existed.

Perhaps windoze users could do something like pull their heads out of...the sand...and realize that, there are many ways of doing something; the windoze way is usually the worst; and truly intelligent people respect themselves enough to do something called learning.

Again, unfamiliarity with the rock-bottom basics. Every piece of introductory documentation that I've seen from a hundred or so distros, cover aspects of package installation and dependency resolution. Debian-based distros (with apt-get) or up2date-like services resolve these irritations in a way that is largely transparent to the user.

But, windoze users are, generally speaking, unforgivably lazy.

I was once paid $94.00 per hour to teach a woman in Indian Wells how to use WordPerfect 4.2. She had, until that time, been a WordStar user. I spent about 6 hours of frustrating time with this woman and her husband, per evening, for an entire week teaching them the differences between WordPerfect and WordStar, and was paid $3000.00, in cash, at the end of the week.

They had the WordPerfect manuals the entire time, and refused my repeated attempts to get them to perform the simple task of looking in the index for the answers to their questions. What I didn't know, I read to them directly from the manual...and they cheerfully paid me for the butler-like service rendered in reading it out-loud to them.

Sorry. In general terms, windoze users have been trained not to read documentation, or to help themselves in anyway; and I have sworn that I will never earn my money in nerve-grating ways like that again.

No offense intended, but,. please don't expect anyone to regard that objection with the same degree of credibility as the degree of seriousness in which one might offer it. Among other things, semi/pseudo/effectively-common APIs is one of windoze greatest weaknesses, in terms of security. A '.exe. and the current set of API calls work on nearly every remote windoze machine--the only trick is finding a way to get that program executed; and, unfortunately for us, it's just not that big a trick on a windoze system.

CNR *is* a good idea--probably only for new users, though--that simply hasn't arrived yet.

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