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While you're waiting for Google to figure out how to port Earth to Linux, you should try the WW2D project (Java-based derivative of NASA's open-source .NET application WorldWind):

http://ww2d.berlios.de/

Does just about everything Google Earth does (although it's stuck in a Mercator projection instead of the cool spherical mapping), /plus/ you get more control over the data sets (satellite and aerial photos in different spectral bands, all sorts of layovers, etc.) than Google Earth offers. It's pretty fast, too, especially for a Java app.

Too bad World Wind is Windows only at the moment. WW2D should run on most Java capable systems, but it doesnt have the same coolnes factor.

I bought one about a week ago. I can't say I've noticed it's faster in real-world use, but it does benchmark slightly faster (in accordance with the CPU speed bump). Since its main purpose is to look gorgeous in the living room, run email and web-browsing, I have no complaints, but then I wouldn't have had, anyway :-) The faster drive is noticeable though (once you get past the spotlight indexing, anyway)

Having the extra VRAM seems to improve video performance a fair bit as well - subtly but noticeably smoother when doing the 'cube' switch using 'Desktop Manager', for example. (Which is the *very* first piece of s/w I ever install on a mac). Yes I use expose too, but with DM I can dedicate one screen per task. Much nicer :-)

Simon

To speed up startup, you could try ooo quickstarter, and/or prelink office, which is what windows does. On Ubuntu/Debian you do this:

apt-get install prelink
sudo /usr/sbin/oooprelink -f

Remote Desktop is very nice in all sorts of situations. It is far more forgiving on slow connections than X over ssh.

While that's true, I've found FreeNX better than RDP when it comes to high latency, low bandwidth networks. Hell, I forget to turn off amule when using it and it's still highly responsive.

There are a wide variety of these programs. I use NoteEdit. It was very hard for me to install it on my SuSE 9 machine, but it works well. Make sure you have TiMidity server, which is used for playback, installed and running or else NoteEdit will crash as soon as you start it, giving a cryptic error message. Sometimes running TiMidity will interfere with other sounds on my box, which is annoying, so I have to turn it on and off. If you want to print music you've inputed to NoteEdit, you need LaTeX installed. Remember, the commands to convert a LaTeX file to a musical score are:

$ latex filename.tex
$ musixflx filename.tex
$ latex filename.tex

I got this wrong for a while, even with the VERY noticable reminder from NoteEdit.

One of the other programs available is Rose Garden. Rose Garden is more mature but also less intuitive and oriented towards synthesis as opposed to performances.

If you get to be hard-core about editing scores on your Linux box, the best program around for professional score engraving will already be installed on your computer with the LaTeX distribution you aquired for printing the output from NoteEdit. See this Giant Musixtex Manual. I often typeset complex mathematics, but I have not yet been able to master musixtex, so good luck there.

Your theory about the speed differences of RDP and VNC is interesting, but wrong.

--> VNC sends the complete pixmap of the screen, pixel by pixel: the complete image, if you want.
--> RDP sends the screen drawing commands to the client: the instructions how to draw the sceen.

And because it is done in a clever way, RDP is faster.

The reason why X11 over the network so such a pain is because the X11 applications send too many roundtrips. An interesting article about this can be found at LinuxJournal.com.

BTW, NX and FreeNX do also send drawing commands instead of pixmaps -- and they are even faster than RDP. Plus, they do work cross plattform too:

I regularly use NX and FreeNX from Windows to KDE, from KDE to Windows, from Mac OS X to KDE, from KDE to Mac OS X, from KDE to KDE, from Windows to Windows, and from Mac OS X to Windows (oddly, it doesnt work from Windows to Max OS X) (yes, the bad part of my self tried to suppress the info "from KDE to Gnome, and from Gnome to KDE" -- which I do not use as often, but which is possible too).

You know what? I also can print across these sessions, to my local printer (whereever "local" might be in each case). And I can also copy and paste from local window to remote window and from remote window to local window. VNC would do none of these in any one of those scenarios.

It's your turn again, dear Gnome friend!

Hey, pass her ("hot, blonde") the contact data of the FreeNX developers too, will you? See here:

FreeNX Project Members

These guys have achieved brilliant things. They deserve some female distraction. Especially pipitas, I think.

The slowness of remote access has absolutely nothing to do with "outperforming the premier Linux desktop". Such things work on a much lower level. VNC does suck compared to RDP, but look at NX.

I read one of the links above, comparing Python and Lua, but it doesn't talk about sandboxes. Does Lua have one or does it just do multiple interpreters?

I have to say that Tcl is pretty good for this kind of thing too, although it is certainly bigger than Lua. It has sandboxes and multiple interpreters that you can control from both C and Tcl itself. You can also do threads, if you want. And the language is also pretty easy to learn for newcomers, like most scripting languages - especially considering the really friendly user community.

Of course, if you want really small, there are Tcl versions and related languages like Jim and Hecl .

are these statistics true i mean i dont use gnutella, edonkey, fastrack only bittorrent which tend to go slower and slower lately and the superior dc network which in my opinion is lightyears ahead of those gnutella edonkey fastrack i find everything on dc even the very rare things like dutch shows, swedish films, ... mame roms and i dld really fast if i put myself into the job of searching alternatives by the way i use this client http://dcgui.berlios.de/ Why doesnt someone even mention these p2p network it used to be much more elite 2-3 years ago and free of viruses back then which tends to change lately but still on the upside,now regulary there pops off a new hub over 8000 usrs and with more then 1 PiB share! or do i know exposed a network that everybody agreed on to never reveal????

I've used Rosegarden to enter a few pieces of music, and it's pretty good. I tend to focus more on tweaking the output to look exactly the way I want, and Rosegarden's output to Lilypond needed a fair bit of tweaking. Well, rewriting. :-)

There's probably a chance that Rosegarden's export to MUP or PMX or (various other options) works better. I've only recently started using Lilypond (after using MusixTeX for a while), so I'm probably not doing things in the most efficient way.

As mentioned by the AC, NoteEdit looks like a pretty good option too, though I haven't tried it myself. Hmmm... (reading features)... maybe I should. :)

Try NoteEdit. Works better for me than any free score editor I was able to find on Windows, and is fully featured as well!

http://noteedit.berlios.de/

gpsd? Or does code not qualify as code?
-russ

It's still being developed anyway under a different name. http://pvpgn.berlios.de/

Aah...I'm so glad that there are other countries.

It's still being developed anyway under a different name. http://pvpgn.berlios.de/

Some corrections...

---

Sound Juicer ( http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/sound-juic er )

---

MusicPD ( http://www.musicpd.org/ )

---

Something went wrong after freenx.berlios.de...

http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) - Well made remote desktop solution, but no server for Windows atm.

21. Both PPTP and LT2P/Ipsec ones exist. Poptop ( http://www.poptop.org/ ) ...

I just add a bit on that list from top of my head.
Although I think the listed app goes beyond what the so called 'average pc user' wants, but there goes...

1. Konqueror ( http://www.konqueror.org/ )

2. Email - Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ )

3. I think Evolution is more like in this place.

4. Lately "Sound Juicer" is taking more attention too

5. VideoLAN aka VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ) and Ogle ( http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ ) [and Goggles ( http://www.fifthplanet.net/goggles.html ) for Ogle GUI wrapper] for DVD watching.

6. There are plenty way to do this, but the typical ones could be 'Jinzora' ( http://www.jinzora.org/ ) and 'MusicPD' ( http://www.mpd.org/ ), even plain Apache does it fine too, in a way.

8. If you want easier to manage iptables wrapper, Shorewall ( http://www.shorewall.net/ ) and there are other wrappers too.

9. KOffice ( http://www.koffice.org/ ) and by individual components, Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ), Gnumeric ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ ), Gnucash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ )

10. Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) or Sodipodi ( http://www.sodipodi.com/ ) for vector graphics.

11. Miranda ( http://miranda-im.org/ ). Windows only.

13. Hmm , Samba? ( http://www.samba.org/ ), WedDAV (Look parent post), FTP (plenty ftp daemons, ex : http://www.proftpd.org/, http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ etc)

16. GPhoto ( http://www.gphoto.org/ ), EOG ( http://www.gnome.org/ ? ), GQView ( http://gqview.sourceforge.net/ ). The latters are for just viewing mainly.

20. FreeNX ( http://www.nomachine.com/ , http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) http://www.poptop.org/ ), L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpd ), RP-L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ )

24. Postfix ( http://www.postfix.org/ ), Sendmail ( http://www.sendmail.org/ ), Exim ( http://www.exim.org/ ), Cyrus ( http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ), Xmail ( http://www.xmailserver.org/ ), qmail ( http://www.qmail.org/ )

25. Spamassassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ )

26. Same as above.

27. XSane ( http://www.xsane.org/ ) for sane frontends.

30. Buzzmachines ( http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ) I could be wrong...

31. 'various GUI frontends' - X CD Roast ( http://www.xcdroast.org/ ), K3B ( http://k3b.sourceforge.net/ )

32. Don't know any opensource ones...

You might want to follow the NASA World Wind project. It does the same thing as Google Earth and is open source.

If I remember correctly there is a "2D" port to Linux, by which I mean you can only view directly towards the surface of the earth and can't tilt it to see land elevation.

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ - main site
http://www.worldwindcentral.com/ - "fan" site
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasa-exp/ - sf site
http://ww2d.berlios.de/ - 2D port

Cheers,

Roger

Now that he's on Mandrake (okay, Mandriva), using KDE 3.3 as his desktop, he hasn't twitched. I completely expected him to try out Linux for about a week, then go back to Windows 2000. It's not for lack of availability of the Windows install disks -- those have been sitting next to his computer where they always have been, still collecting dust.

The only app that he misses (or at least that he's told me about) is iTunes, which is one of those apps that I recommended that he download in the first place (I have a Mac in addition to my Linux desktop). And the additional benefit to him is that when I find a kickass application, like gaym-plugin, I install it on his machine, without ever having to sit down at his machine, like I had to do with Windows. Yes, I know about rdesktop for remote administration of Windows, but I'm not a Windows guy, and I don't pretend to be.

There is no surer conversion story than one from someone who is not CS-inclined.

Since Sun is the only vendor for "open" Solaris, finding another Solaris distribution or support will not be easy if Sun later changes its support terms, goes to closed-source Solaris, etc.

This perhaps explains why many people have little interest in Solaris at this time.

OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 are different. OpenSolaris is the source code to Solaris 10. Anyone can create an OpenSolaris distribution and support it! In fact blastwave.org is creating its own OpenSolaris distro as is Joerg Schilling (of linux cdrecord fame). Joerg's OpenSolaris distro, Schillix is available now.

http://schillix.berlios.de/

the best OO php framework out there: http://ydframework.berlios.de/

- MVC
- Action requests
- Active records
- Smarty builtin
- Form handling and validation
- Ajax integration
- Pdf on-the-fly
- XML
- DB abstraction supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Oracle
- Persistent store
- Integrated localization
- XML/RPC
- OO db query language
- Logging infrastructure
- Syndicated XML feeds

- Good documentation (pdf user-guide)
- Forums with quick responses

what do you want more?

http://pida.berlios.de/index.php/PIDA:Features
it early in development but already very useable. Its Python only, but that might change.

You could always help out with Windstille which is being created in the spirit of Metroid. It is a bit alpha at the moment but has 3d characters running around a 2d platform environment.

You'll probably bitch and moan (as a collective, I mean) that this is OSS and incomplete and yadda yadda, but sometimes if you want something specific then there's no better solution than to do it yourself.

You have INSTANT PORTING (& the fastest language short of straight C or ASM) to Linux via Kylix (Delphi for Linux)...

And also Kylix seems to be an abandoned product. Borland apparently wants to include it as an additional compile target in one of the future Delphi versions, but that's about all there is known about future Kylix plans.

Future 3D RTS, design your own units, developed as proprietary, now GPL (art and sound available, too; however, not the videos):
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/warzone/

Enjoy :)

Desktop Manager
http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/index.php

allows you to have multiple desktops (which is cool enough), but also includes a Command-R for running a new task.

There is a KDE program called Kompose which offers similar functionality on a KDE desktop.

It's a shame xorg didn't split from Xfree much earlier - we'd probably have XGL as standard, by now :(

Saw this one on freshmeat a few days ago:
http://mapgeneration.berlios.de/

Now all I need is a GPS receiver...

Happily I've been using my homegrown XML-RPC library for PHP - mainly because Edd Dumbills version was unreadable and had an ugly API - and how dumb it looks use eval() on unchecked data?!

http://xprofile.berlios.de/

I think the wave of the future isn't live DVDs, but GNU/Linux distros you can boot off the USB thumb (or pen) drive that hangs off your neck. The prices and capacities of such drives continue to fall such that 2GB versions are now within an employed geek's price range.

Having a bootable necklace is way cooler than a live DVD, almost like the stuff of a James Bond movie. For when was the last time you brought along a 12 cm data DVD to a rave party?

Here's one. It only tops off at 128MB though. So it's little more than a bootable business card.

I hope bnetd wins, but in the mean time: PvPGN works great

As for cdrecord ... come on. The fellow can be abrasive but I don't see how that's important here, and he can do what he wants with his code. He did license it under the GPL in the first place, which I for one appreciate, so we can use it and the extended DVD-supporting derivatives of it available in Linux distros. I don't see why him deciding *not* to give away *more* of his work draws such incredible indignation here. Sure, it'd be nice (FSF zealous would argue "morally required"), but really it's his work and his code.

What has irritated me are these things:

* The fact that he complained when people added their own DVD extensions into his software

* The fact that he advertises his DVD recording software as free for personal use, but distributes crippleware that requires a license key and doesn't provide any license keys (or at least, hasn't to me, despite the fact that I've followed the instructions at ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/ProDVD/README.ke y twice and requested assistance from him by e-mail once).

Maybe we could start, while we're busying downloading the bzip2'ed iso, a petition for the author of cdrecord to open the source to the DVD-capable version of CDRecord. Now that Sun has (or at least claims to have) released the source to what is its second most-valuable asset, Joerg has less reasons to hold on to his binary-only version of cdrecord. Not that there are no alternatives to cdrecord. But as far as optical media writing on *n*x is concerned, cdrecord is the gold standard.

AFAIK Shillin my resume is the same as OpenSolaris without any binary part.

Jörg Schilling will be so happy. He can finally release SchilliX, the Linux lookalike that runs cdrecord the way god intended it to.

OpenSolaris is coming out at the end of June. OpenSolaris is basically Solaris 10 in source code form. The license is the CDDL which is basically the Mozilla Public License with restrictions removed .

http://www.opensolaris.org/faq/licensing_faq.html

Anyone can create an OpenSolaris distro, in fact the guy who created cdrecord for linux (Joerg Schilling) is creating one called SchilliX.

http://schillix.berlios.de/

The great thing about OpenSolaris is that it is the opensourcing of Solaris 10 which means it has all the features and stability of that Operating system. It also has features that Fedora Core or linux don't have.

An example is DTrace. With DTrace, one can specify sensors in Solaris 10 and monitor everything. Even user programs.

You also have Zones in OpenSolaris which are like BSD jails, but are easier to maintain and create. Linux has user mode linux, but that is cumbersome compared to Zones.

SMF in OpenSolaris is questionable in benefit, but it allows services to be restarted automatically if they fail. Not something I'm interested in, but some people may like it.

But if you are unhappy with the bleeding edge of Fedora Core, give OpenSolaris a look when it comes out later this month.

- The dock. What a hideous piece of crap this is. My trash can is on the dock. So are my running applications. So are my non-running applications. But not all of my non-running applications. To get to those, I have to go into the applications folder, which has a nice alias on the desktop that Apple didn't create. Those useful programs that you only use once in a blue moon? Go dig for them... go dig.

Er. Okay. How is this different from any other OS? And you don't have to dig. Drag the Applications folder to your Dock. Right-click (or control-click, or just hold the mouse button down) on that folder, and you'll get a menu that pops up, listing its contents. Bam.

Also, any open Finder window should have the Applications folder listed on the left-hand side. Click on it, and scroll through the window.

- Driver support. I have a cheapo webcam that came with an Earthlink subscription years ago. I plug it into linux and it works. I plug it into my Mac and it does nothing. No drivers available.

So, cheapo webcam doesn't have drivers. There are Linux drivers. Maybe... I dunno... see if the code is available, and ask someone to port the drivers to OS X? I doubt the Linux drivers came with the cam in the first place. Someone else had to write them, right?

- Quicktime. It plays 8 seconds of video and stops. Every time. MPlayer for OSX handles the same files fine.

Let me guess: DivX files, right? Yeah. No one has written decent Quicktime codecs for DivX/XviD/3viX yet. This is Apple's fault?

- Sleep. It does it whether or not I want it to. Downloading a big file, it'll go to sleep. How the hell does one stop that? Other than that, sleep works great. Or not.

Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Energy Saver. Configure to your heart's desire.

- Virtual Desktops. Man, I never thought I'd miss them so much. And even the very good replacement I found, Desktop Manger, has flaws. If I leave the adium buddy list open on one desktop, go to another desktop, and mouse over the where the buddy list is on the non-visible desktop, I see tool tips. Among other bugs, that's the most annoying.

I can see how those could be useful, yes. In fact, there are a few different virtual desktop managers available for OS X. A quick Google search does wonders, but this appears to be the one most recently updated.

- Java apps. Either swallow the menubar for the active window or don't. Don't do it in some cases and not in others. Get your act together. I know I can code to specifically do that, but I shouldn't have to. Write once, run anywhere and all that.

Would be nice. However, from what I can tell, it's a problem with Swing. Could be wrong on that, but it seems that some Swing apps do it right, some don't, and that's where the discrepancy comes from.

Overall, most of your complaints could have been solved simply by asking a Mac forum (most of us are quite friendly ;) ), or some Google searches. The rest are just waiting on developers to actually develop solutions for stuff that's already third-party.

It's not much, but Virtual Desktops are pretty easily added with this doohickey. It's rather spiffy. I don't use my mac much, but it'd be a bigger pain in the ass without that and expose (yes, I'm too lazy to get the accented character)

or even Lincity-ng, they just had a release not to long ago, coming along great.
http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/

I talked to Uraeus about this a bit. The machine has combined ARM9/TI DSP cores. The idea is that you want the codecs running on the DSP, and apparently the free Xiph codecs we're included in the launch because there's no DSP port of the reference implementations. (There's no GCC back end for the dsp, although some folks are working on a related series.) This includes Ogg Theora, Speex and FLAC as well as Ogg Vorbis.

Whether the ARM is too slow (or battery consumptive) to run the decoders on its own, I'm not clear but with everything open source it will be easy to check.

I'll be a Guadec, where they are apparently also doing a demo, so hopefully will know more next week.

In the long term though we need help with the DSP gcc port and someone to do hand-optimized asm for the xiph codecs. If anyone's interested, please let us know.

Desktop manager:
http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/

There is a tool that mimic "Windows" alt-tab behavior, switching between all windows from all application with the keyboard but I can't remember its name.

For the wasted space, using Exposé and a rightly configured DragThing, I never use the dock anymore nor I minimize windows.

Not to mention availability... SF's current cvs availability record is embarrasing. I had to switch my project over to Berlios because the uptime was so pathetic (and I now get to use SVN rather than CVS as an added bonus).

You can use BerliOS, they support subversion.
http://developer.berlios.de

Check this for a detailed checklist of what each of the major version control systems support/doesn't support.

Plus, there is no official support for non-Windows platforms.

The eMule client itself is not official. If you want official, look at eDonkey Basic for Linux. Or just use mldonkey like everyone else does.

I have been following anatomic which seems to be a similar project, but uses gnutella as the supernode, and a modified BitTornado client. Looks like Azureus is much more mature though.

That's been a constant niggle to me for something like a year and a half. thanks!

wrt the parent:

The stuff that bugged me the most:

The dock is nice eye-candy and all, but a crappy application launcher. Between that and no right-click launch menu on the desktop, trying to run an application sucks. I found a couple different launchers that made this problem bearable:

One is X-10 launch studio, the other newer one is quicksilver. Now, launching an application (say, Transit) is "command-space transit enter". Much faster and easier.

Another one is the cluttery buildup of windows that comes without a decent pager. But I found desktop manager to be an excellent pager with nice eye-candy features, too.

There are other things I use alot, but those are the ones I can't live without.

p.s. If you are using one of the many carbon ports of emacs, might try a different one -- I use emacs hours a day on mine and have never have a crash. It may be as simple as that.