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I completely agree with the tip about Source Navigator.

But beware that the original project (liked in parent) is stalled. So instead you should go with the well maintained fork - called Source Navigator NG. It's hostest at Berlios: http://developer.berlios.de/projects/sourcenav

I could newer understand the obsession with doxygen as it's a completely STATIC approach:
Alter your code -> do a complete reparse.
Further, it's just generating HTMLs so there is no real interaction with the actual code!.

I've found Source Navigator to be extremely useful which is some kind of "enriched editor" where you interact directly with the code and if you change something, it's directly visible.
It can navigator through the code by

1) find implementation or declarations of functions and variables or macros
2) display a cross-referencing tree of a symbol so you know where this symbol is used
3) do a grep (colorized!) over the source, with full regexp support
4) have a class browser to see the hierarchy or a certain class

That's why I tried to revive the development to "improve usability and performance" and made a fork called Source Navigator NG.
You will find at http://sourcenav.berlios.de./

We're just in the middle of getting our 3rd release ready which features the migration to Berkely db4 which will improve the lookup-performance in big projects (think: Linux kernel) dramatically and should be more stable on win32.

Actually, there is a very good successor to Source Navigator -- Source Navigator NG

http://sourcenav.berlios.de/

"... strives to improve usability and performance"

At least one poster mentioned Source Navigator. I second
this as a good choice for digging into the structure
of several programming languages. I've used it off and
on for several years (even bought a copy back when it was
a cygnus product). I think the original project
(sourceforge page) is unmaintained (last news posting
was in 2003), so it is a challange to build on
a modern linux distirbution (there is a windows
binary as well).

There is a fork working to update the package
SourceNavigator NG. I was able to build their
release with no problems.

http://developer.berlios.de/projects/sourcenav

I've used it for C, C++, Java, and some Python.

I highly suggest giving it a look.

Robert Wood
woodr[at]hiwaay.net

You have been able to make a Linux City for quite a while with Lincity, and in 3D with Lincity NG which is surprisingly addictive.

Luckily we already have much more advanced clones on Linux than the old original whose code has been opened.

Though their move is still good, and interesting just to dig into the code.

Did you consider BitBake? http://developer.berlios.de/projects/bitbake

It's not as ambitious as SCons.

It's part of the build framework for Open Embedded Linux - http://developer.berlios.de/projects/bitbake/

Its metadata repository takes care of keeping track of all the different ways to build things on different hardware.

Did you consider BitBake? http://developer.berlios.de/projects/bitbake

It's not as ambitious as SCons.

It's part of the build framework for Open Embedded Linux - http://developer.berlios.de/projects/bitbake/

Its metadata repository takes care of keeping track of all the different ways to build things on different hardware.

Far better than the BSD ports system, as found in MacPorts?

I stopped using Mac OS X at 10.2. Is MacPorts part of Leopard now?

If you're talking commercial software, then it's a click on the installer, and you drag the app bundle into Applications.

How did that installer get on your system such that the installation is only a click and a drag? Magic pixies?

I want to install Bip on a server running Ubuntu. The only thing I need to do is to type sudo aptitude install bip and hit enter to confirm. There's a nice point and click interface if you want that too.

Just for kicks, I decided to upgrade all of the software installed on that machine too. That's two commands.

All of these commands are present on every fresh Ubuntu installation, for example, and none of them require the presence of magic pixies to define away other parts of the software installation process to make it look more simple than it is. It really is this simple, as long as the software is in the repository.

Do rsync, GNU mv/cp/tar, or pax make sure that files are fully committed to disk (using fsync(), for example) before closing them?

If they don't, what happens in the scenario where the command finishes but the copied files' data is still in the system file cache when the destination disk or share goes away or fills up? Most of these programs can delete source files, so you could end up losing your data.

I like that the star version of "tar" does the safe thing by default (calling fsync() to catch any errors) but gives me the option of turning it off with the "-no-fsync" flag if I want speed.
"star" also has the ability to diff and merge directory trees.

For languages:

• Parley - Introduced in KDE 4
• KVerbos - in the Edutainment package of all KDE-based distros
• Rosetta Stone under Wine (gold rated as of 2006)
• Konjue - an add-on, but useful

For Physics:

• eduKator - an hypertext based book for physics instruction with working examples
• Step - a physics particle simulator

For Math:

• KAlgebra - a function plotter with advanced capabilities
• Kalcul - simple arithmetic trainer
• GeoGebra - similar to geometer's sketchpad
• At an upper level, Scilab, Octave, R, QtiPlot, RKWard

For geography:

• Marble - to be released with KDE 4
• KGeography - currently in the KDE Edutainment pack

For music:

• Score Reading Trainer
• KLearnNotes2 - a basic score tutor
• NoteEdit - reads midi files and converts them to scores - also great for composing
• A ton of other audio programs including Audacity, Rosegarden, etc. for composing, editing, multitracking...

For Mind-Mapping:

• Semantik

Webcams are quickly becoming a non-issue, just like ATA, SATA, mice, USB controllers, USB mass storage, etc. have in the past. In order for hardware to receive the Windows Vista-compatible logo, it must support the UVC standard, for which a quickly maturing Linux driver exists. Right now, it is more of a matter of applications switching from the deprecated V4L interface to V4L2. Bottom line is, new webcam hardware is supported natively by Linux and should very soon work out of the box with all current video applications.

The irony in all this is, of course, that we have Microsoft to thank for this.

Leopard will have "Spaces" but it sounds like all of a particular application's windows will be tied to a particular desktop. I like to have all the files associated with a particular project open in each desktop which may be in same application(s), so I'll probably stick with Desktop Manager

There's a lot that was done on the base level that will improve general usability. Finder is fixed (we hope). It's UNIX compliant now. Better use of 64-bit and multi-core processors.
Also, some of the "eye candy" will be very useful: easy backup and multiple desktops built in (I've been using a 3rd-party solution for this for a while now that works remarkably well, but has a number of glitches).
I'm not beating down the door for 10.5, but I am looking forward to some of its conveniences.

> What ever happened to minimal?

You would like to have a light Linux distribution? Something like this perhaps:

http://www.puppylinux.com/
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/about.htm
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

### OSS developers certainly have a whole bunch of good coders - and writers, in a pinch.

Writers, as in story, dialog, etc.? Since if so, I really would like to have a few of them, still strugling to find some of those for Windstille.

### But we'd definitely need folks creating those models for the display first! The tech is there, but the art lags a bit.

Going from a 3d engine that can render a bloomy 3d model to a fully fledged game is still a *long* way. It is a start for sure, but you need a little bit more then a few 3d models to make a game out of it, especially when it should be a good one.

Have you looked at the linux-uvc drivers found over at http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/ ?

To quickly install and test the driver, do the following:

1. Install subversion
2. Execute 'svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk' (without the ')
3. Execute 'make' in the source directory
4. Execute 'sudo su' to become root
5. Execute 'make install'
6. Plugin the camera and use either lucview or ekiga to test it out

For remote administration of windows the rdp protocol performs adequately on 28k8, there is an equivalent project for linux called freenx. Forget about VNC, it's to painful at these speeds (perhaps 640x480 in fuzzy mode will work).
Ofcourse you can install ssh with compression for terminal access.
For faster internet browsing you can install a proxy on a dedicated faster line someplace else that resizes images and gzips webpages on the fly such as webcleaner. You can also use mobile versions of internet pages for lower bandwidth, for example diggm8
Put all technical documentation on your local system for fast and easy access. For example wikipedia database dumps can be downloaded and used offline.
Use pop3/imap offline mail clients instead of webmail clients to check your e-mail, leave large attachments on the server.
Forget about VOIP, just use the phone or instant messaging.
Forget about YouTube, just program your digital video recorder one week ahead for all the interesting shows.

It probably uses a mini pci wireless card. Replace the one in there with an Intel one and it should work.

Some notebooks have BIOS locks. I tried replacing the Broadcom WiFi NIC in my HP with an Atheros NIC...it wouldn't even POST.

Fortunately, bcm43xx has advanced enough that I can get a reliable connection at home or on the road with the travel router I pack with my notebook, but it has some signal-strength problems that can make using public APs in unknown locations a bit dicey. (The travel router takes care of some of those problems, and for when it doesn't, there's data service from my Treo over Bluetooth.)

(ndiswrapper has never worked IME, so it's not really an option.)

When researching this I found 2 network types which required this, Infinibad and 1394 (Firewire). It looks to me like Microsoft picked the one which would (theoretically atleast) work on all network types, instead of only on a few.

Maybe they should do the right thing then - default it to off except when working on an interface that needs it? It's not hard to achieve, dhcpcd does this just fine.

I wouldn't really fault Visual Studio for Source Safe's failings, it isn't a required component. Personally, I wouldn't touch Source Safe with a very long pole in any voluntary manner (only if I was required to). Considering it is the only system marked as a system to avoid over at the Better SCM Initiative and even Forrester won't consider it anymore in ranking SCM products, I'm surprised it is being considered for any kind of current solution.

There are some decent tools for Visual Studio to work with CVS and Subversion, among other version control systems, and they work out fairly well. At work, we are using Subversion for our VCS, with AnkhSVN to handle the management inside Visual Studio. Except for some issues with using AnkhSVN back when it was first getting started (and was rather buggy), we have been very happy and productive with the solution.

Instead of plain ssh and X-forwarding, you might want to try NoMachine's (http://www.nomachine.com/) NXServer (there's a free-as-in-beer server limited to two login names) or the corresponding full GPL solution FreeNX (http://freenx.berlios.de/). It's basically to X-forwarding what Citrix MetaFrame is to Windows Terminal Services, in terms of compression and speed improvement.
Plus, all you need on the client side is their (free-as-in-beer) client, and not the entire Cygwin install.

As a user, Solaris TAR is crap to use compared to GnuTAR

It's my understanding (and with some limited experience) that remote X is not very fast, and is a security risk. From what I understand, that's why NX (FreeNX) is so useful... everything is tunneled transparently over an ssh connection, and a lot of the X stuff gets optimized. I guess there's a lot of back and forth communication between the X server and X clients which creates a lot of delay over a network, but somehow NX solves that. The big boast of the NX protocol is that it works great over low-bandwidth, high latency connections. I haven't ever tried it oever anything other than a local connection, so I don't know anything about that, really.

And NX has gotten much easier to install and setup, and will probably get easier. With the latest versions from NoMachine, you have the option of "shadowing" an existing session (à la Windows Remote Assistance) or starting a new session (which was previously the only way to do it).

Noooo!

Use kiwi to create VM images, ISO, live-CDs and etc.

http://en.opensuse.org/KIWI

http://developer.berlios.de/projects/kiwi/

OSI Certified:
http://opensource.berlios.de/docs/certification_ma rk.php

Unfortunately, I believe it doesn't work (SaX2).

However, when it comes to video cards, it has been my experience that there are very, very few video cards that don't work in VESA (SVGA) mode out of the box with Linux.

As the other poster said:
1. You should *always* get POST output. If not, card=dead
2. You should almost always get Linux console (vga=normal) output. If not, you've got a very crazy card or an esoteric configuration. Note; I'm talking about standard 80x25.
3. You should almost always get VESA output. This can be slightly more unlikely than #2, since there are a few cards out there with broken VESA implementations. These are generally crazy integrated Savages or SIS chipsets, particularly cut-down mobile version. Even then, some VESA modes should work (800x600 at low refresh rates has never failed me). Generally, if VESA output is messed up, you've got a card or a monitor that is misrepresenting its capabilities to the OS, and you should simply try a lower resolution.

Unfortunately, I know very little about Debian or Ubuntu. I can tell you that SaX2, which is the SuSE X configuration tool, is excellent at probing out weird configurations.

It seems that there maybe Ubuntu packages for SaX2 here: http://sax.berlios.de/ . It is a GPL package, so I don't know why it hasn't been ported around, as to me, it's rather brilliant. There are build instructions for Ubuntu on that link, and googling around it seems there are at least some of the SaX2 packages in Debian Universe (is that a correct name for the repository?).

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The problem with Producing OSS is that it is really biased, sometimes subtle, sometimes not so much.

For hosting sites, I'd like to add http://www.berlios.de/. Especially since they're outside the US and as such not subject to the US's insane laws (read: things like the DMCA).

As another recommendation, you have to have something before you ask people to join. And that does NOT mean just some code. You're going to have to have a good amount of documentation so developers will know: what you're doing, what direction you're taking, there ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to your code, etc.

Also, don't be too liberal with who you give commit access to. If you're too loose, then someone coming along could really screw you. Or not contribute at all and just lie about it b/c they have commit access. Or people could complain that Larry got commit access straight away, why do they have to work for it so hard. Among other problems.

I imagine that you have a couple buddies that might be interested in helping out. I'd recommend asking them first, design, document, get a hosting account somewhere and then develop. After something is produced, then start looking for extra help.

You're also going to have to consider how the project is run. Will it be a purely community based one, a benevolent dictatorship, or somewhere in-between? Stuff like that is going to have to be spelled out. Otherwise, you're going to run into problems with people thinking that they have "power" beyond what they actually have or not thinking that they have "power" that they actually do. Either way, that's never good for a project.

At any rate, that's my 2 cents.

Well, the LaTeX3 folks did take time out to finish documenting LaTeX2e (the 2nd edition of _The LaTeX Companion_ is _excellent_).

There aren't that many tools competing w/ TeX in the layout field:

ANT - ant is not text --- http://ant.berlios.de/ --- or at least that's where it was. Site's not responding now, hopefully temporary. Needs the ability to place a .pdf as a graphic, then I could start trying it out in some real-world cases

LOUT - http://lout.sourceforge.net/ --- I can never get past the really rough-looking example files

InDesign --- while it's getting better, it's still got a long way to go.

Quark --- the less said the better.

SoftMagic's MLayout --- www.softmagic.com - needs better H&J, but one of the more interesting efforts.

The big issue w/ the graphical tools is that they're limited by available labour, which can be an issue for jobs which can't be divided up for parallel work at multiple stations and their featuresets --- multiple-line run-in heads are _not_ easily automated in InDesign so have to be handled on an individual basis, parts of index entries or portions of section marks in a running head can't be tagged w/ character styles &c.

And of course there are TeX successors, and a continuing improvement in related tools --- LyX, http://www.lyx.org/ is one of the most innovative of these.

William

No, it's not a hardware limitation, it's a "software thing". Windows NT, 2000, XP, and Vista do NOT execute 16-bit code in the hardware!

Look at this page, there you have many mirrors of Wikipedia (they are meant to be used when Wikipedia is down, but it works equally well when Wikipedia is blocked).

You never got the Atmel drivers working because you were using drivers made from a dead project.
You want http://at76c503a.berlios.de/ (I have one of the cards.)

The VMware issue is just that. A VMware issue.
They simply havent updated their drivers. I know a pile of other drivers which need small tweaks to get working with newer kernels.

Of course it all depends on your distro how external drivers are handled.
I thought 'emerge nvidia-drivers' was pretty easy for installing the nVidia binary driver..

Michael Busch's whole argument that they GPL'ed the damn thing because they didn't want Broadcom to take advantage of their work is BS.

Of course it is. Of course, most people don't realise this, because the evil, inhuman Michael Busch used his time machine to travel back to 2005 and plant fake mailing list archives saying that the reason they chose the GPL over the BSD license was because they didn't want it taken proprietary especially by Broadcom, because of particular features of the open driver, when we all know it's just an evil, inhuman plot against Theo and OpenBSD. Thanks for alerting us to this deviousness, AC!

Michael Busch's whole argument that they GPL'ed the damn thing because they didn't want Broadcom to take advantage of their work is BS.

Of course it is. Of course, most people don't realise this, because the evil, inhuman Michael Busch used his time machine to travel back to 2005 and plant fake mailing list archives saying that the reason they chose the GPL over the BSD license was because they didn't want it taken proprietary especially by Broadcom, because of particular features of the open driver, when we all know it's just an evil, inhuman plot against Theo and OpenBSD. Thanks for alerting us to this deviousness, AC!

Michael Busch's whole argument that they GPL'ed the damn thing because they didn't want Broadcom to take advantage of their work is BS.

Of course it is. Of course, most people don't realise this, because the evil, inhuman Michael Busch used his time machine to travel back to 2005 and plant fake mailing list archives saying that the reason they chose the GPL over the BSD license was because they didn't want it taken proprietary especially by Broadcom, because of particular features of the open driver, when we all know it's just an evil, inhuman plot against Theo and OpenBSD. Thanks for alerting us to this deviousness, AC!

> How is someone going to learn assembly?

AppleWin

--
Somedays you wish the CP/M inventor would of used an Apple. (Stupid 8.3 compared to 32 chars)

... doesn't have a single decent image-browser ...

Gwenview, Picasa...

... dc++ client ...

Is in production. Check the CVS for latest builds.

... office suite ...

I really don't understand why you included this. OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord; all more than comparable to MS Word.

... Not to mention decent looking fonts ...

In Debian based distros, sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts. Rather simple. Other distros have packages of their own.

In short, I'm under the impression that you haven't really tried to use a modern Linux distro for more than the five minutes it took you to stereotype it, say, "This sucks because it's not what I'm used to!", and go back to Windows.

... doesn't have a single decent image-browser ...

Gwenview, Picasa...

... dc++ client ...

Is in production. Check the CVS for latest builds.

... office suite ...

I really don't understand why you included this. OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord; all more than comparable to MS Word.

... Not to mention decent looking fonts ...

In Debian based distros, sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts. Rather simple. Other distros have packages of their own.

In short, I'm under the impression that you haven't really tried to use a modern Linux distro for more than the five minutes it took you to stereotype it, say, "This sucks because it's not what I'm used to!", and go back to Windows.

Remote graphical apps with no huge b/w hit? http://freenx.berlios.de/ http://www.nomachine.com/

I run Desktop Manager in OS X on Intel (or well, not on Intel, but we don't have to go into that subject ;D)

Desktop Manager is a fantastic tool that's available now.

Battle of Wesnoth
* http://wesnoth.org/

SuperTux
* http://supertux.berlios.de/

Frozen Bubble
* http://www.frozen-bubble.org/

Why shut down your home system? Why not have it available as a server to make your life easier? I agree with other posters about using "offline" mode of Thunderbird and like clients.

In case you're thinking that you have a particularly repressive ISP...

My ISP blocks ports 80 and 25 - particularly irritating, if you ask me. My ISPs TOS, if read to the letter, would mean that multiple browser windows or tabbed browsing are inappropriate because it's more than one session over the broadband pipe.
 
I agree that it would be ideal if I could use every port I want, block the ones I want to firewall - but I'm too cheap to pay for that kind of access.
 
So I work around it. I use dyndns [dyndns.com] to create a pointer to my dynamic IP address. My ISP does not block https or ssh ports, so I leverage those to get what I want.
 
I use cron, fetchmail [berlios.de],
  procmail [procmail.org],
  spamassassin [apache.org], and
  postfix [postfix.org] to bring mail from my ISP to my local system.
 
I use uw-imapd [washington.edu] to share my mail with other computers on my home network
 
I use ssh and pine, or apache+php+MySQL+https (self-signed cert) with roundcube [roundcube.net] to get remote access to my IMAP server.
 
I use WinSCP [winscp.net] to get access to my files at home when I'm at work. My data is *MINE* and I easily back it up (nightly and offsite qurterly - snapshot backups coming soon thanks to rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org], perl and rsync)
 
Every tool that I use is free of charge and as free as the GPL and apache licenses are free (zealots can feel free to argue with someone else about the relative freedom of the GPL, thanks.)
 
I certainly could pay for more open TOS with an ISP - I could even host my applications at an ISP. I'm cheap, and this solution works well enough for me.
Hope you find a solution that works for you!
 
Respectfully,
Anomaly

My ISP blocks ports 80 and 25 - particularly irritating, if you ask me. My ISPs TOS, if read to the letter, would mean that multiple browser windows or tabbed browsing are inappropriate because it's more than one session over the broadband pipe.

I agree that it would be ideal if I could use every port I want, block the ones I want to firewall - but I'm too cheap to pay for that kind of access.

So I work around it. I use dyndns to create a pointer to my dynamic IP address. My ISP does not block https or ssh ports, so I leverage those to get what I want.

I use cron, fetchmail,
procmail,
spamassassin, and
postfix to bring mail from my ISP to my local system.

I use uw-imapd to share my mail with other computers on my home network

I use ssh and pine, or apache+php+MySQL+https (self-signed cert) with roundcube to get remote access to my IMAP server.

I use WinSCP to get access to my files at home when I'm at work. My data is *MINE* and I easily back it up (nightly and offsite qurterly - snapshot backups coming soon thanks to rsnapshot, perl and rsync)

Every tool that I use is free of charge and as free as the GPL and apache licenses are free (zealots can feel free to argue with someone else about the relative freedom of the GPL, thanks.)

I certainly could pay for more open TOS with an ISP - I could even host my applications at an ISP. I'm cheap, and this solution works well enough for me.

Respectfully,
Anomaly

I'm still waiting for Linksys to post an updated driver (without the buffer-overflow vulnerability) for a PC-card WiFi adapter I inherited (wouldn't have bought it myself, I'm pretty particular about Linux compatibility).

In the meantime I tried to use the open-source Linux driver from Berlios but it's not quite there yet, at least for the BCM4318. Can't complain, tho, wouldn't want to be in their shoes considering that Broadcom is totally uncooperative, from what I've heard.

The most *promising* project looks like BTG (http://btg.berlios.de/) based on Rasterbar's libtorrent
(http://www.rasterbar.com/products/libtorrent/inde x.html) (not to be confused with Rakshasa's libtorrent and rtorrent). It's a daemon that supports DHT (rtorrent doesn't) and has multiple front ends (e.g. web, ncurses, GTK gui) though XML-RPC. It seems to be the most flexible torrent client, ideal for the power user.

Unfortunately packages are not available in Debian repositories for either libtorrent or BTG (although Deluge, which uses libtorrent, is available?).

I moved to Linux in 1994 as my primary desktop and server OS. About three years ago I decided that I wanted to produce some video content. Video editing was theoretically possible in Linux - I hooked up my camcorder to my Linux box and did some editing, but the tools were primitive and cofiguration was unusually difficult.

Eventually I looked at OS X and iLife. I decided to jump to a Mac. What a great move!

I found that Linux made it possible to do some things, but OS X made it simple to do them.

Fast forward a few years. I now have a few macs at home - their licensing policy makes it affordable to have several machines and a five user license for the OS and tools. My family loves the power and usability of the Mac.

Recently my linux server at home began acting a bit flaky. I did some analysis and determined that hardware replacement was needed. After checking prices for CPU/motherboard/RAM (and potentially hard disk) I figured out that I'd need a few hundred bucks to replace the CentOS box with a new one. After thinking about whether to drop a few hundred bucks or not on this server, it occurred to me that I might be able to move all of the services hosted on linux to OS X.

I found that samba,
  hotwayd,
  dansguardian,
  uw-imapd,
  fetchmail,
  procmail,
  spamassassin,
    rsync,
  rsnapshot,
  apache2,
  MySQL4,
  PHP,
  perl,
  java, and
  squid were all available for OS X.

Most of these are "in the box" with OS X. The only ones that I need to compile from source are uw-imapd and squid! Of course I need the bundled developer tools to get a compiler, and the Apple/BSD startup mechanism and the netinfo wierdness require some tweaks - but since when did Linux *not* require any tweaking?

What this means to me is that after more than a decade of running Linux at home (and work) I am *this* close to shutting down Linux for good at home.

Hope your experience is similar.

Regards,
Anomaly

PS - I share your recent comments about the loss of a pet. :(