Slashdot Mirror

Don't forget about people using NDISWrapper, which is the only way to get such cards working on Linux at all unless someone has written a driver recently.

There is a native driver, but neither it nor ndiswrapper work worth a damn with my AMD64 Gentoo install. For the time being, I've given up on getting Linux WiFi working and just hang a Linksys WTR54GS off the network jack when I need to connect to someone's wireless network.

> Broadcom users on Linux should really be using the bcm43xx kernel module by now.

Out of the table of ten global "chip family id's" listed here, only 3 are currently listed as supported, the others are at best "unstable".

And personally, I didn't manage to get a BCM4318 "Air Force One"-based card (no, I didn't buy it, it was "inherited") working with the native module (Ubuntu Dapper). Sigh. Guess it's time to fish out the long cables until the Windows drivers get patched.

What I don't get is when do people have time to use WiFi at an airport?

If you're flying Southwest, you want to get there early enough that you're first in line to board the plane. If you do that, you're practically guaranteed an exit-row seat (extra legroom is good). That'll give you maybe an hour to kill, once you're past the security checkpoint and waiting to board.

That said, if I'm just reading mail, it's easier to bring it up on my phone (with its wireless data connection) than to break out the computer and see if Linux's Broadcom WiFi driver will behave itself today.

I've gotten so used to virtual desktops, it's really ideal. It's a feature I just can't believe is still not built into Windows or OS X. But under Windows I now always install VirtuaWin right away and use it constantly. I set it up to switch between desktops with Alt-Ctrl-Left and Alt-Ctrl-Right. Under OS X there is a program called Desktop Manager that does the same thing, but with pretty switching effects. :)

Seriously, I got hooked on using multiple desktops under Linux and I can't go back. It's one of the few GUI "features" I honestly feel has increased my productivity. Right up there with the mouse scroll wheel. I can't believe I lived without it for so long back in the Windows 2000/98 days. And to think that it's been on Unix/Linux for years without being "copied" yet! (By the first party vendor, that is.)

To answer the original question, I usually about 1 or 2 windows open per desktop, with 4 desktops configured. But it depends what I'm doing. I am one of those "close it when I'm done" kind of people, but memory caching does wonders... starting up FireFox after it's been closed is quite quick, no matter what operating system you're using.

In europe, Topfield's DVB PVR's and receivers have become very popular. They allow the user to install his own programs and therefore add to the functionality. Lots of stuff available around the net, googling for "Topfield tap" yields lots of results. The entire toolchain is there for anyone to start developing.

Anyway, as I don't really fancy a full-blown PC to my living room, I'm wondering if someone has either already made a TAP for this purpose, or if the MythTV stuff could be ported to Topfield?

Fetchmail is excellent at POPing mail and then delivering it to a SMTP daemon or local delivery agent. You'll still need to install an IMAP server locally, but fetchmail provides the necessary bridge.

WRONG! no-one should _ever_ run that pile of garbage. Use the reverse engineered bcm43xx driver included in 2.6.17+. It works quite nicely here on my zv5000 in 64-bit mode. http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/

given gentoo is GPL (no?), is it possible to bring create another distro with the current code base to make it more stable?

Indeed it is. Get someone good to lead it, and I'll gladly join up and start maintaining ebuilds again. ciaranm took a step in that direction with Paludis, but it's just a package manager. We need a whole new distro.

There's hope. Technically, at least.

Hmm.. doesn't seem like you can change the Mac's desktop on the fly.

Why do you feel the need to insert a random offtopic troll into an other wise perfectly good discussion?

(sigh) Nevertheless, I feel compelled to feed it anyway; hopefully this will be the end of it:

• It's not as if changing your virtual desktop changes your icons anyway (at least it hasn't on any system I've used), so it's irrelevant to this discussion.
• Macs have Exposé instead of virtual desktops.
• The next version of Mac OS will have virtual desktops (apparently, in addition to Exposé).
• If you really want virtual desktops on Mac OS, you can get them as a third-party add-on now.

• uTorrent (BitTorrent, Windows)
• Azureus (BitTorrent, Java)
• BitTornado (BitTorrent, Windows/Linux/BSD)
• KTorrent (BitTorrent, Linux/BSD/Mac)
• eMule (eDonkey, Windows)
• aMule (eDonkey, Linux/BSD/Mac/Windows)
• FrostWire (Gnutella, Java)
• Cabos (Gnutella, Java)
• Shareaza (Gnutella2/Gnutella1/eDonkey, Windows)
• Ares (Ares, Windows)
• DC++ (DirectConnect, Windows)
• RevConnect (DirectConnect, Windows)
• Valknut (DirectConnect, Linux/BSD/Mac)

However, I was pretty disappointed the day I got to his site and saw that I had to pay for cdrecord if I wished to burn... a DVD ?!

Obviously he has changed that in the meantime. In this README ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/ProDVD/README he says:

NOTE: the DVD-recording drivers have been added to the OpenSource
part on May 15th 2006 with cdrtools-2.01.01a09.

See ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/

There is no longer a need for a key.

However, I was pretty disappointed the day I got to his site and saw that I had to pay for cdrecord if I wished to burn... a DVD ?!

Obviously he has changed that in the meantime. In this README ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/ProDVD/README he says:

NOTE: the DVD-recording drivers have been added to the OpenSource
part on May 15th 2006 with cdrtools-2.01.01a09.

See ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/

There is no longer a need for a key.

Anyone who kept track of Joerg Schilling, and his prominent ego, was able to clearly see the inevitable fork from quite a distance away.

Warning: do not use Debian binaries as they include many Debian specific bugs and still do not run correctly on Linux-2.6

Both RedHat and SuSE publish bastardized and defective variants of cdrtools in their distributions....that illegally claims to be cdrecord.

The point is that there's nothing in the Debian Free Software Guidelines that prevents the use of the CDDL. Debian does *not* require GPL-compatibility. Usually.

Personally I suspect they're really doing this because Schilling is such a PITA to deal with, and because they know he hates it when people fork his code (see the rant on his site about how SuSE and RedHat are **eeeevill** for distributing "bastardized and defective variants of cdrtools" and how their software "illegally claims to be cdrecord").

Why didn't the author include Joerg's position on this? He didn't even provide a link to his hompage:
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/cdrecord.ht ml

He also seems to have problems with Suse and RedHat as far as his homepage goes (they also include older versions) and with the Linux kernel itself. There seems to be some stuff he dislikes about the SCSI subsystem. And he seems to prefer the way Solaris handles SCSI. Maybe someone with some insight (if there are any left on /.) could comment on that one, since I am not a kernel hacker.

Joerg Schilling is doing excellent work. But as some others have commented there seem to be personal issues. So it is a shame that they had to use such a lame excuse to boot him. I am pretty sure the fork will go nowhere or at best use patches from Joerg Schilling proving that there never were incompatible licences.

Note that I don't argue that he might be a difficult character. Comments on /. as well as his problems with other distros and the kernel suggest that he is. I simply don't know. But I also heard that Linux Torvalds can be a very harsh himself. Anybody want to fork the kernel because of that?

Cdrtools are now available unter a OSS license that gives more freedom than the GPL

Question : how can a licence with extra restrictions provide more freedom than the GPL ?

Here's one...

Denemo

and another... noteedit

"You lose 3D, sound, and most of them run a bit slower than native."

Not quite true. Yes, with the 3D. But the two main players (VMware and VPC) both support sound, and VMware even USB 1.1 passthrough.

With the thin-client option, Microsoft Terminal Services (if you're on a windows platform) has good scaling capabilities. Though it might not go into the hunderds or thousands, it should get you into the high dozens. Since most of the microsoft tool's dlls are loaded and shared between the clients, it has pretty good performance.

For linux, while SSH is always a favorite, look at NX-Servers (http://www.nomachine.com/ and http://freenx.berlios.de/) which is like X-forwarding with compression and caching.

It'll be difficult to have a fully virtualized solution. Going with thin clients, or a pxe-served image would be a more viable solution (no matter how beefy your servers and fast your network).

I've got a 4000 and it does 640x480 at about 30fps.

This is a lot of work but also a lot of fun! I did it for a real-time demo project with a few friend. We used Christmas fairy lights and 5 mini-VHS camcorders. You can see the result at the very end of our Childbone demo.

Nowadays, using webcams will save you a lot of troubles, and you can find lots of very useful codes on the Internet (such as Intel's OpenCV, however majors issues that you still have to solve would be calibrating camera positions and reliably tracking crossing markers in images. In my system I had to do an editor to manually reassign markers when incorrectly detected or labeled, which can be a very tedious task...

I would recommend Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000 webcams, as they are USB 2.0, can do 640x480 at 30 fps, and most importantly use the somewhat recent generic USB Video Class spec, for which a driver for linux is available. I have a few of those and the image quality is quite good :)

Good luck!

http://rsstool.berlios.de/ taught me everything I needed to know about taking advantage of RSS feeds.

Leopard's Spaces implementation looks like a quantum improvement on other virtual desktop managers I've used

Try Desktop Manager, it is perfectly integrated into Mac OS X.

I'll save him the trouble:
VirtueDesktops (free, built off Desktop Manager below)
CodeTek Virtual Desktop Pro ($40)
Desktop Manager (free, no longer in development?)

Though the virtual Desktops in Leopard look to be far more elegant.

I played with VirtualDesktop Pro for a bit. Does what it says. There is also a free beta program called Desktop manager that looks promising.

On OSX, the best one I've found is Desktop Manager.

The latency issues have been more or less resolved by FreeNX, maybe read this nice NX intro.

Check out cosmopod.com - I think they still offer free testing NX desktops.

I'm very very pleased with finally getting virtual desktops. I've been using Desktop Manager and will continue to until I get a computer with Leopard on it (probably a few more years), but it annoys me that I *need* a third-party app for that. (And window shading, for that matter.)

RSStool will filter such crap with the next release. http://rsstool.berlios.de/

Well considering Berlios can't keep mailing lists or subversion up for more than a few days at a time, that shouldn't be hard... This stupidity, for example, is holding up a project release. Now, I realise I'm not paying anything for the service, but this kind of thing is coming close to convincing me that I should be...

I don't see why these so called "online OS" projects don't just use existing X infrastructure to create an easy way to access standard X windows applications and run them remotely over SSH.

You can actually get such solutions.

These are running over FreeNX which is basically a compressed X connection where the local machine pre-guesses parts of the communication to cut down lag. I've tried them and they work quite nicely over a 512K DSL. In principle dial-up should work ok too, but I haven't tried.

Notice that a Dutch provincial agency has switched its 100 desktops to running over FreeNX. They're running their own server though.

That said, I tend to disagree with your point. Part of the idea behind YouOS et.al. is that being on the same machine as everyone else makes collaborative software easier. Just think if you could painlessly set up multiuser editing on any document you were working on. Flickr shows some of the way too.

The last thing is that you can't just pop into the average internet café and fire up an X/ssh connection. Something running in most browsers would work better here. Maybe something like VNC java viewer for NX is the way to go.

What would be really nice is some sort of common protocol for collaborative programs. That way we could both run some program locally (or NX'ed into our own snoop-proof private server) and have them connect to each other when needed. Pretty sure I'll get to see that in my lifetime, but if Open Source was a bit ahead of the curve here it would be so much better for freedom.

While that is true, FreeNX pretty well solves that problem.

Serious question : how can a X11 application look and feel like an OS/X app ? If this is not an X11 app, why do you need X11 installed ?

Other serious question, why not PHP-QT, which uses the native carbon bindings and doesn't require X11?

If you've gone to a lot of trouble to fake the OS/X behaviours, why not change the toolkits ?

Can some fellow /.'s recomend a webcam software that can stream to mutiple users (not just on a subnet or internal network) and has good authentication to prevent unauthorised viewing of the streams?

Unfortunately the BCM43XX driver causes a kernel panic with > 1GB of RAM:

https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/200 6-May/001840.html

I ran into this over the weekend when trying to switch my Dell Latitude D400 to Ubuntu Dapper, after a 10-year hiatus from using Linux as my desktop OS. As of today, looks like there isn't even a working patch available:

https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/200 6-June/001975.html

I had to go back to using an external wifi card. Yech.

Unfortunately the BCM43XX driver causes a kernel panic with > 1GB of RAM:

https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/200 6-May/001840.html

I ran into this over the weekend when trying to switch my Dell Latitude D400 to Ubuntu Dapper, after a 10-year hiatus from using Linux as my desktop OS. As of today, looks like there isn't even a working patch available:

https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/200 6-June/001975.html

I had to go back to using an external wifi card. Yech.

Haven't tried the release of 2.6.17 yet, but rcX versions required extracting the firmware for your Broadcom card from a binary such as bcmwl5.sys (Windows driver). The tool bcm43xx-fwcutter does this.

I'm not an Ubuntu guy, but this reference might be useful to anybody trying to make the new Broadcom Wifi driver work in Linux. Very easy steps, and most non-Ubuntu users should find it easy to adapt for their specific distros.

Choose one of the distros below - Schillix, BeleniX and Nexenta all have live CDs available in order to try
things out.

Solaris Express
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-expres s/get.jsp

Schillix
http://schillix.berlios.de/

BeleniX
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/ belenix_home.html

NexentaOS
http://www.gnusolaris.org/

marTux
http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~mbeinsx/marTux/

I had not heard of Openfiler before. It looks pretty interesting. Differences from FreeNAS that I noticed are:

o Linux based
o iSCSI target and initiator (SAN) support

I've been using the "Enterprise iSCSI Target" for Linux for a while now and it works pretty good. I serve up LVM slices to a Windows 2000 Server without trouble. The combination of EIT and LVM provide a lot of high end SAN features.

With redards to SAN features, I'm really looking forward to a unification of SCSI target drivers on Linux (http://stgt.berlios.de/) so that Linux can serve up LVM block devices over fibre channel. This would make Linux a very good platform for a SAN operating system.

I swithed over to Dapper around two months now and I initially had the same problems with the bcm43xx alpha drivers. My Broadcom 4306 chipset was working perfectly with ndiswrapper 1.0 and the Windows drivers that came with my HP laptop.

For some reason the firmware was not installed or not installed in the proper location.

After a couple hours of frustration, I looked around and found http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ (the drivers project page)

I downloaded the firmware, installed the tool (sudo apt-get install bcm43xx-fwcutter) and extracted to /lib/firmware and modprobed the driver again and everything works, now.

Also, everything else works with Dapper on my three year old laptop (hibernation, multimedia keys, lcd dimming, volume keys, processor scaling, printer [OfficeJet 6100 all-in-one])

There maybe other upgrades to NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher that I havent covered here, but I just wanted to confirm the driver works.

- Good Luck

Some Open Source Games

1. Lincity-NG
2. Globulations 2
3. Abuse-SDL
4. The Battle for Wesnoth
5. Solar Wolf
6. Boson
7. FreeCiv

Anyway, gmencoder, konverter, iriverter, movieconvert, and a load of other stuff.

And since you mentioned SVCD specifically, here is Tovid (screenshot)

a collection of video disc authoring tools; it can help you create your own DVDs, VCDs, and SVCDs for playback on your home DVD player.

Don't know if any of that stuff is right though... Good luck!

Certainly. The driver's SF page is here:

Broadcom bcm43xx

Note that the driver will be in 2.6.17 when it's released.

http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/

You can send me the mod points later. :-)

However, after using both for a period, I switched back to iTunes because it just works all-around better, and with the Multi-Plugin you can set it up with a foobar passthrough and through some mysterious setting drastically reduce the memory usage when it's minimized to the tray. If even this isn't enough for you, I'd say just man up and throw down a little under $70 to get another GB of memory. It's way more than iTunes will need and it will make your system snappier anyway.

I do know how to close down programs on the Mac, and others have used that particular machine at my work, and seem to be happy about it. I'm not saying anything about the stability of the OS (though I had three crashes during those six months), but programs (especially Code Warrior, Cyberduck and Opera) tend to crash.

With "circumvent" I mean: Installing TweakUI, AV, firewall etc, and altering a bunch of values in the register. Yes, it's tedious and shouldn't be needed, but at least the machine is working fine after that.

By the way, I would like to thank Rich for his desktop manager, without which working on the Powerbook would have been near impossible.

he moment you need to do X over a VPN to allow people in other sites to do the same work, you might as well shoot yourself in the head now and save your users doing it to you in 6 months time.

Use NX or FreeNX as your X.

the Xorg and other x server devs are aware of the problem, and they're working towards solving it.

I am 3d engine coder (http://telejano.berlios.de./ And making a 3d engine feels almost like painting (I also paint) and doing photography. This mean 3denginemaking =~ painting + photograpy + maths, so... 66.66% pure acepted art.

More on that... I use my 3d engine to explore artisting ideas. How to make snow that feel snow?,.. What look to get that feel?, and others.

As I work on other business, and my mind is free, I let my sould explore the in and outs of some 3d engine design ideas. And this feel exactly like pre-viewing on your brain something you can hand draw.

Some 3D engines even use the painter algorithm ;D

What about FreeNX? http://freenx.berlios.de/.

Open source, free, supports remote X, RDP * VNC and you can run authentication through PAM for 2-factor authentication support.