Slashdot Mirror

"things like double tap to fully justify a column of text in a webpage"
That's a very specific thing to be complaining about. I'm not even sure what you are getting at. Double tapping on the n900s browser zooms out the page (to the equivalent of being a 1280 width screen i believe). Double tapping again zooms in on that region. It's very intuitive and quick.
It's not what you're describing but it seems to achieve the same goal; Web pages are easily viewable on the n900. You can also install n900 versions of Firefox, Chromium or Opera if you don't like the default browser on the n900. So i don't see what you are getting at here.

As for the app store it's really just a repository, don't use the OVI store browser as that's redundant, use the App manager to browse for apps. You click app manager on the phone and you get a list of programs available from the repositories (including the commercial OVI store repository). Mame, SNES and Megadrive emulators, OpenSSH, ftpd, all the tux games, programs to turn you phone into a wireless access point, VOIP apps, all the major linux apps etc. are all downloadable from these official repositories. The n900's a full Linux system and the huge number of apps for the n900 reflects this.
I don't understand how you think there aren't many apps available. All i can think is that the official developer and extras repositories weren't added to the app manager and you browsed nothing more than the OVI store. Nokia open their phones so that there isn't one source of apps for the device, make sure you add the other well known sources. Note that's also why you never here about how Nokia killed app X for their phone. They aren't Apple. They couldn't stop a competing source of apps for their phones even if they wanted to and the OVI store is a small part of the ecosystem.

Here's some extra sources for n900 apps. Click these on your phone to add them to the App manager. The first link, the extras, is especially important as it's official and has a huge list of great apps with seemingly all the major linux apps represented. The rest i've linked here are a bit more specific and some are for beta version applications. But even if you just add the extras repository you should be giving the Android a run for it's money in the amount and quality of the applications available.
http://repository.maemo.org/extras/
http://repository.maemo.org/extras-testing/
http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/
http://my-maemo.com/repository/
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile
http://www.amsn-project.net/maemo
http://b-man.xceleo.org/repo/maemo-nintendo-emulators/
http://qole.org/repository

Menu at the top AND the bottom...?? Guaranteed to freak Windows users out.

Last time I did a "Linux for Windows users" installation I used SUSE. It was in a cybercafe (the most casual of users) and nobody seemed to have any problems.

Sorry, Ubuntu, but there it is...

Browser: FIrefox
Messenger: http://www.amsn-project.net/
Email: They're not using web-based email??

make webcams work (they don't in the majority of cases at the moment)

Who uses webcams? Text is much more efficient and doesn't hog bandwidth. aMSN kicks ass for those who still use MSN/Live Messenger.

stop regressions in graphics drivers

That's not entirely upto the Kernel dev's... Ati/nVidia/Intel all have their own driver packages that aren't included in the kernel. 9/10 times it's their problem, not the kernel dev's.

get other hardware working, e.g. iPods;

Definitely not a Linux developer issue. Apple changes the iPod connectivity system and obfuscates it so often it's not worth the hassle.
There are some solutions out there, though. Your mileage may vary though, depending on which model/revision/colour iPod you own.

make dual-screen work without spending 20 minutes fucking around

This depends on which set of drivers you are using. ati-config has an option to set it up nearly instantly. nvidia-config does, too. I haven't dealt with Intel video cards for a long time so I'm unsure of their options.

get GNOME on to QT and develop a decent HIG (sorry, the current GNOME HIG is an excuse to put off doing anything about bugs, see Apple's for how this should be done)

Not going to happen. There are alternatives to GNOME and KDE (and GTK/QT respectively). But you wouldn't want to use those because they aren't "pretty". Seeing as how you're a fan of Apple (and probably a douchebag-mac-fuck) that just won't do for you because fashion and beauty is everything to people like you.

finally pick one -- namely .deb -- package format and stick to it; so developers aren't put-off by the idea of spending days creating packages for different platforms.

Also probably never going to happen. .deb is not a good choice for some people (like me). Gentoo seems to have it right. Gentoo employs a ports-like system borrowed from BSD. Since you're such a fan of Apple, you could appreciate that. Seeing as Mac OSX is a fusion of MacOS and FreeBSD (_basically_ -- NOT getting into the technical aspect of this)

I'm sure some smug twat will pop-up and say how they don't care about Linux on the desktop, my answer is: why are you bothering to reply, if you don't care? There are obviously loads of people who do care, just look around at all the advocates. They told me Linux is ready for the desktop, and I tried it, only to find everything's slower, my iPod didn't work, then upgrading hosed my sound and video!

I guess I'm a twat... but who's holding the iPod?
Anyway. I'm replying because I want to maybe set you straight on a few things. You are obviously a Mac user because you are very imaginative. We all know only fruity apple guys are imaginative, right?
Perhaps your experience using Linux sucked, but my family uses it for _all_ tasks (from messaging, to e-mail, to programming, to book-keeping, to writing a letter, to watching Media on the TV, to the firmware in my networking equipment) and it works great.
I don't understand the speed comment you made. I've used Mac OS/X and every version of Windows. Speed certainly is not an issue here. Ubuntu may be your problem there (never used it past installing and wiping because I didn't like it)

If you're thinking of advocating Linux to someone: stop! Go and do some work on getting drivers working instead, your time won't be wasted and you won't lose any friends.

I'm guessing you are some hip-cool teen that doesn't seem to comprehend anything past "Ohhnoooes! My iPood Odesn't work! WTFBBQ :cry: /wrist"
That's fine. We don't want your business anyway. Maybe one day when you grow up and realize life is more important than your iPod will you understand.

Thank you, and have a good night.
Sincerely,
    Cory Christison

Or aMSN, oh how much sweeter it was, after the lunacy of the Microsoft client.... I'd be damned, if I understand why would anyone really _want_ to use that...

Taiwan is pretty geeky, though, much higher level of average computer knowledge, though I myself haven't really seen people using other things than Windows...

Nevertheless, I'm all for more Linux-using Taiwanese housewives ;) --- it's quite a few fantasy in a single package, totally sweet.... :))

http://www.amsn-project.net/ has worked decently for me.

aMSN http://www.amsn-project.net/ has supported video with msn for a long time now..

Not so.

Tcl's strongest redeeming features are its consistency and its sensibility. Tcl very strongly has a principle of least surprise, thanks to these. That alone makes programming in Tcl a joy compared with many, many other things. You'll spend a lot less time wondering how your code will work on a foreign platform, which flags a given widget expects, and so on.

Tcl of 2007 is also not Ousterhout's Tcl of 1987. A lot has happened in the last 20 years, including totally pervasive unicode support (the [msgcat] library makes internationalization such a breeze, there's absolutely no reason not to make all your programs localizable from the start), some very healthy namespace functionality, an excellent networking library, and of course the relatively recent Tile toolkit.

There are also new projects being developed with Tcl all the time.

Far from being an outdated or dying language, Tcl today is just a well-kept secret, sitting out in plain sight.

It might vary per server. I saw this story somewhere else and .info wasn't on the "full list" from someone who actually hacked a client to ask the server for the whole list

http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/18/ShowF orum.aspx

http://www.amsn-project.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t =157&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30

"image001.png" is blocked - because no-one ever uses a filename for something other than what someone else has used that filename for, no matter HOW generic it is, once someone's used a filename it's "taken" forever and always refers to that one evil exploit it was used for.

kakaroto from the amsn project somehow obtained the full censored regexp list. There are about 90 in total.

http://www.amsn-project.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t =157&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30

If all you require is a messenger client that accesses the .NET Messenger Service (Windows Live Messenger) then give aMSN Messenger a try. aMSN has most of the features of WLM (including web cam support), a vary active development team and isn't extremely bloated like lots of IM clients.