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...i nearly always install on new systems:
CoreWar: simulation game where a number of warriors try to crash each other while they are running in a virtual computer.
Battle for Wesnoth: fantasy turn-based strategy game.
BZFlag: multiplayer 3D tank battle game.
Crimson Fields: tactical war game in the tradition of Battle Isle.
Crossfire: cooperative multiplayer graphical RPG and adventure game.
Enigma: inspired by Oxyd on the Atari ST and Rock'n'Roll on the Amiga.
FlightGear: Flight simulator.
FreeDroid: clone of the classic game "Paradroid" on Commodore 64.
Frozen Bubble: puzzle-bobble clone.
Globulation 2: Real-Time Strategy.
LinCity: city/country simulation game.
LBreakout 2: breakout-style arcade game in the manner of Arkanoid.
NetHack - Falcon's Eye: mouse-driven interface for NetHack that enhances the visuals, audio and accessibility of the game, yet retains all the original gameplay and game features.
netPanzer: online multiplayer tactical warfare game designed for FAST ACTION combat.
Pathological: enriched clone of the game "Logical" by Rainbow Arts.
Project StarFighter: xy-axis star fighting game.
SuperTux: classic 2D jump'n run sidescroller game.
XKobo: astpaced multiway scrolling shoot-em-up.
XRick: clone of Rick Dangerous.
XScorch: Scorched Earth clone.

Have fun!

• Mepis
• Fedora
• Debian use the new installer, Testing rocks.
• Feather Linux for those of you still running your favoite 486.

I doubt they will block Slashdotters.

It's less effort, really it is. We now return you, of your own volition, to Windoze hell.

Another similar distro is Feather Linux. And for the google-challenged, here are the links to damn small linux and dynebolic: DSL, dynebolic.

I have a ton of computers, like alot of others here, I suppose. Now, my newest Athlon XP system is really noisy, but an old pentiumIII I have is really silent. So I boot Feather Linux on it from my 128meg twinmos pendrive. It can't boot from USB though, but there's a bootdisk on the Feather Linux website that enables this. It's nice for that size(60 MB I think), and has 2 word processors(!)(why), a web browser, pdf support, nmap, and lots more. And it's real easy to add modules to too. Give it a try.

Google is your friend. Check out The Linux Bootable USB Key HOWTO . Particularly the piece about the Flonix Knoppix variant.

I have an older 400mhz Dell notebook. I am currently using a CF to IDE adapter in it.

http://store.ituner.com/ituner/emstcfl.html

It works great, i am using a 256 meg sandisk compact flash card and feather linux.

http://featherlinux.berlios.de/

Overall the performance is not too bad. Battery life is MUCH better without the hard drive. Write speed is not too great, but since I usually ssh into my server and leech from there, i dont need to worry about that much... :)

Please back this up by pointing us to instructions that show how to boot a PC from a USB drive into DOS and run a simple task such as repartitioning the hard drive.

Which drive in particular would allow this? Please tell us.

gift is a pretty decent console P2P app (currently has plugins for OpenFT, Gnutella, and FastTrack).

Here is a openflash movie about a penguin flyiing:

http://telejano.berlios.de/option/colinux1.swf

Ok?...

Unfortunately, your WG121 is not among those, but the Linux Prism GT driver project at least mentions it (although with a pretty disturbing "unknown status" and a "success rate" close to 90%, which seems kinda oxymoronous), so maybe it's worth a try. Atheros chipsets are supported by the MadWifi project, too...

I started with RH 5.2, which means that graphical file management on Linux for me is a non-starter. Thus I turned to XFce 4.0.5 at www.xfce.org, and haven't looked back.

For all you moderate to advanced folks out there who want the simplicity of managers like FVWM combined with modern features and GTK2, you ought to take a look at XFce 4.0.5. And the best part is that there are a wealth of plugins available for XFce's panel, appropriately referred to as goodies.

Here's a "mini-HOWTO" that I found via google. I didn't read the whole thing, but it looks informative. Wikipedia's Ramdisk entry had links to two stripped down knoppix distros that could be loaded into a ramdisk - Damn Small Linux (50 mb), and Feather Linux (64 mb). I've never done anything with ramdisks (I'm a linux newbie, too) but they do sound pretty neat.

Don't use the phrase Aunt Tillie. You'll only encourage ESR.

As opposed to encouraging Mr. Stallman? Who (outside the FSF board) wants that?

He wasn't saying everyone has to use it. He was saying Slashdotters should use it. Software doesn't have to be good for everyone in order to be good.

Not everybody who reads Slashdot has access to a computer containing suitable hardware for a Free operating system. (For instance, I don't. I tried Mandrake 9.2, and X wouldn't find my ATI Radeon card in accelerated mode. In addition, Microtek Scanmaker 4800 series scanners are listed as completely unsupported in SANE.) Not everybody who reads Slashdot can program in a commonly compiled language.

It's not very hard at all for Some Guy to write a better UI for MLDonkey.

But it is rather hard for Some User to find an existing GUI for his platform. Go to mldonkey.org, click English, click downloads, click GUIs, and apart from the official G2GUI (version 0.1), none of the seven listed clients advertises itself as being "for Windows." And still, where is the official or semi-official Win32 binary of the core? Go to mldonkey.org, click English, click downloads, click Core Binaries, and they're all for GNU/Linux, MorphOS, or FreeBSD.

Don't use the phrase Aunt Tillie. You'll only encourage ESR.

As opposed to encouraging Mr. Stallman? Who (outside the FSF board) wants that?

He wasn't saying everyone has to use it. He was saying Slashdotters should use it. Software doesn't have to be good for everyone in order to be good.

Not everybody who reads Slashdot has access to a computer containing suitable hardware for a Free operating system. (For instance, I don't. I tried Mandrake 9.2, and X wouldn't find my ATI Radeon card in accelerated mode. In addition, Microtek Scanmaker 4800 series scanners are listed as completely unsupported in SANE.) Not everybody who reads Slashdot can program in a commonly compiled language.

It's not very hard at all for Some Guy to write a better UI for MLDonkey.

But it is rather hard for Some User to find an existing GUI for his platform. Go to mldonkey.org, click English, click downloads, click GUIs, and apart from the official G2GUI (version 0.1), none of the seven listed clients advertises itself as being "for Windows." And still, where is the official or semi-official Win32 binary of the core? Go to mldonkey.org, click English, click downloads, click Core Binaries, and they're all for GNU/Linux, MorphOS, or FreeBSD.

Shareaza is, for now, the only application that support multiple network swarming downloads.
Wrong!
A new MLdonkey unstable core has also been released last night, bumping it up to version 2-5-devel-6, featuring full multinet swarming support and lots of other improvements.
source

I've been using MLDonkey for about 9mo now, and I couldn't be happier. It runs as a daemon in the background, so I don't have a fancy GUI repainting constantly while I'm doing other things. There's also a boatload frontends to it, from telnet and web-based (built-in) to Windows-native to GTK+ to KDE. Here is a better summary of the interfaces.

Since the core is separate from the interface, you can administer your core from other hosts. Just run the interface and specify a hostname. For example, multiple people in a household can all share one MLDonkey server and order downloads from their workstations.

And yes, it does support more networks than Shareaza.

I haven't booted it yet, but I think knx-hdinstall is gone know from knoppix, and knoppix-installer is the installation tool. Of course you can also just use a persistent home directory to keep some things around, and if you visit klik.berlios.de you can even install (some) more applications into that persistent home.

KCEasy is simply a front-end. KCEasy makes use of giFT

KCEasy may be just a front-end, but it is a front-end developed by one of the guys heavily involved in reverse-engineering the KaZaA encryption algorithms (eg, /src/crypt/enc_type_*.c) for the giFT-fasttrack plug-in: mkern.

See:

Maybe the KaZaA people are miffed at his reverse-engineering ways and chose to attack here rather than at the gift-fasttrack plug-in level?

Sharman Networks, has sent a Cease and Desist Letter to the maker of KCEasy because it interoperates with their FastTrack network.

I'm a bit suprised that the KCEasy authors have complied with the cease-and-desist this easily, since the above statement is not really true.

KCEasy is simply a front-end. KCEasy makes use of giFT, which is an interface program, connecting one or more front-ends to one or more protocol plug-ins. giFT then in turn makes use of the giFT-FastTrack plugin which actually communicates on the FastTrack network.

Anway, those of you using KCEasy might want to look into some of the other giFT front-ends, I don't know of any others for windows offhand but I'm guessing they are out there.

Googling for giFTcurs, appolon, giftui will bring up some for *NIX.

I'm all for Mono, software should be cross platform, and and it would be nice to see this succeed where Java unfortunately didn't.

Its always interesting to see people dismiss java as a failure out of hand with no real arguments for it. Did it fail? Depends on your point of view. Is java cross-platform? Most certainly is! And will continue to be so to a bigger extent than .Net/Mono, C et al will be for the overseeable future. (Dont give me the "C is portable too" crap, just today I found differences in the behaviour of strtok between platforms, not to speak of "compile everywhere").
Is java a failure on the client? Well, as far as circulation goes, probably, but that has three main reasons:
1. Higher learning curve, VB will always be easier to learn.
2. Old myths die hard: yes, Java was slow and java interfaces where ugly and clunky. 5 years ago! Newsflash, Java has moved forward in great leaps since the days of Java 1.1
3. Applets are mostly useless. But: Java != Applets!

Java is a great success just about everywhere else BUT on the desktop computer though, there are millions of java-enabled handsets, there are tens of thousands of java server deployments etc etc.

But.. Hopefully in the future I wont have to choose "java or .Net", hopefully they will interoperate more or less seamlessly, something that there is already work in progress on in more than one place.

How about Darcs?

I was just recently looking to move away from CVS for my personal projects. I'm not always home, and I wanted to have copies of my repositories on at least my laptop and desktop.

At first, I was leaning towards trying out GNU Arch. But I really wanted something that had a working win32 client. So I took a look at Darcs.

I'm very happy with it so far. It is extremely easy to set up and use (but I haven't seen any gui frontends if that's the kind of thing you want). It is also very easy to keep multiple repositries in sync.

I've read that it can be slow for large projects. I don't remember reading the definition of large, but none of my repositories qualify :).

You might also want to check out this comparison or this comparison of revision control systems.

I was just researching this very question for myself today. Found a nifty comparison between several source control systems. Perforce and BitKeeper seem like the most complete systems, with Monotone and Subversion close on their heels. The trial version of Perforce works for up to 2 people with all features enabled. It gets kind of expensive if you need more than that ($750/seat). Couldn't find actual pricing for BitKeeper, although they were prompt in replying to an email to their sales address and I'm discussing it with them.

Now it's time to catch up with distros that are way easier to use than XP and have interfaces that also do much more:

• Knoppix boots just about anything.
• Mepis does the same and gives you an install GUI. The new version gives you KDE 3.2, which kicks any proprietary interface's ass, and was used to make this post.
• Feather Linux nice for older computers and dead easy to use.

The Free and Open source comments quoted were true when they were written, but are not anymore. People really have gotten into the works enough to make many usable and easy interfaces. Like other "Free software will never do X" arguments, this one was false.

The gentle reader may remember these famous predictions. Free Software will never:

• make a kernel
• be useful in the Enterprise
• make anyone any money
• be able to work devices

As free software generated billions of dollars for big and small companies alike, runs on all manner of hardware for all kinds of companies that demand scalability and stability, we could be sure easy to use, polished interfaces were right around the conner. They are here and available to anyone with a good network connection.

Michelle, download and run Mepis today.

"The goal of BerliOS is to provide support for different interest groups in the area of Open Source Software (OSS). Our aim is to fulfil a neutral mediator function. The target groups of BerliOS are on one hand the developers and users of Open Source Software and on the other hand commercial manufacturers of OSS operating systems and applications as well as support companies."

It's not that pine is not GPL, it's that pine is altogether Not Free Software. Specifically, the University of Washington will not allow anyone to distribute modified versions, they've even threatened to sue people who do this with older versions of Pine. This makes it hard to work the software into a distribution like Red Hat, and even harder to want to.

Personally, I use Mutt, and I love it. Other people seem equally pleased with elm. With both of these clients, "all you need is an xterm".

If you really prefer Pine, there are two projects to create an Free replacement for it: Hydrant and OSERP. I don't know how far along and usable either project is. If you just miss Pico, there's an excellent Free clone called Nano, which is very usable and included in most Linux distros already.

Linux already has something like this (minus the cache on demand) in the form of Knoppix + Klik
All the files are stored in a single directory under your home directory which can be on a USB drive or anything. It also works with a hard-drive install of Knoppix.

nr.1. DVD-R
DVD-R is 100% compatible with the DVD-ROM standard. The DVD-ROM standard is actually closely analoge to the CD-ROM standard upon which the very popular CD-R recordable is based.
burningtools :

• cdrtools-2.0x : cdrecord-prodvd, oss dvd, dvdrecord
• dvd+rw-tools : growisofs

• dvd+rw-tools : growisofs + mkisofs

no.3. DVD-RW
DVD-RW is mostly an analog standard to CD-RW. I use it when designing/creating and debugging new iso's.
burningtools :

• cdrtools-2.0x : cdrecord-prodvd, oss dvd, dvdrecord

no.4. DVD+RW
DVD+RW is where i touch in the dark. Basicly i would assume that DVD+RW is just a DVD+R which can be 100% erased, and thus be used again as Multi-track/Multi-volume archive disc.
burning tools:

• dvd+rw-tools : growisofs + mkisofs

Urls :
dvd+rw-tools: http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/
cdrecord-prodvd: ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/ProDVD/
cdrtools: http://www.fokus.fhg.de/research/cc/glone/employee s/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html
oss dvd: http://crashrecovery.org/oss-dvd.html

Robert

if they are giving office away for free, I dont feel so bad for downloading it from mldonkey.

Hmm. The Germany government has been supporting OpenFacts for some time. I guess I've tried to get people interested in that site, but it hasn't gotten very far (in the English version, at least -- the Germans seem to be doing well in the Deutsch version)

The good news for the new project is that all OpenFacts material is public domain, so it's fair to cut-n-paste off that site (well, if there's anything very useful).

Um, and how is this site run by LinuxQuestions independent, exactly? I guess I don't quite understand how that can be the case. Whatever, I guess.

Since it's about to get Slashdotted, here is the mirror list section from the xfree86.org site:

Web Mirrors

Our web site is very busy and often causes timed out connections. The following sites have been verified as being both accurate and reliable in their mirroring process, and so we recommend these for the best access:

Costa Rica
Copenhagen, Denmark
Paris, France
St. Denis, France
Berlin, Germany
Dortmund, Germany
Athens, Greece
Seoul, Korea
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Bucharest, Romania
London, United Kingdom

Not posting as AC 'cause the troll potential would be too high...

Don't install debian and then shrink it down. Start with Bonzai Linux and then add what you need:

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

I ran into this recently in Debian too. It seems that the open source software just doesn't quite cut it for my TDK drive. I could write cds fine with cdrecord, but it would fail with an "unrecognized media" or some such error when I tried to burn a dvd. I was using dvdrecord (based on cdrecord), but it doesn't work with a lot of drives. The really frustrating thing is that cdrecord supports writing dvds with my drive, just not in the opensource version. You can get the "pro" version here it is free for non-commercial use and it works well (there is a readme file with more info).

Linus wants a distributed system, which Bitkeeper is.

Did Linus evaluate GNU Arch? If so, what did he find wrong with it? One of the goals of Arch is to replace Bitkeeper. Yes, there exists one known feature that Arch lacks compared to BK, namely copying files within a repository while forking its change history, but why did Linus find this a showstopper? Or has Arch progressed rapidly since the BK decision?

Here's a comparison with 10 popular replacements

http://better-scm.berlios.de/comparison/comparison .html

try this.

Note: written by a subversion dev :)

EduKnoppix
Gnoppix
NordisKnoppix
KnoppMyth
Augustux
Condorux
BitDefender
FeatherLinux
Flonix
Overckockix
Knoppix STD
Sulix

> [-] point and click install of software. (general feeling that that doesn't really work)

klik.berlios.de works great. It's extremely easy and works instantly if you use the Knoppix version specified on the site. You can even install software while running entirely from Live-CD.

Try out Klik

1)pclinuxos is Mandrake 9.2 + updates + some PLF packages, + some updates from contrib + some custom packages by Texstar, generated using mklivecd, which is in Mandrake 9.2 contribs (and easy enough to use that there are already about 5 other Mandrake 9.2-based live CDs made with it).

2)Quicktime playback is only possible with the win32 codec, which:
-is not open source (thus can not go in the Mandrake download version which must only consist of open-source software)
-probably not commercially distributeable without a license
-has other potential legal problems
-trivially installable from PLF.

I am running Mandrake 9.2 with some packages from PLF, and I just double click on the Quicktime movies on my digital camera, and they play, no mess, no fuss.

3)The slowness of your machine is likely due to a miscofigured hostname, to test, try:
$ time getent hosts `hostname`

If that takes more than about 2 seconds, that's your problem, you can probably fix it by running:
# echo -e "127.0.0.1\t`hostname`" >> /etc/hosts

4)Never had printing problems with 9.2, quite a few printers, and a live CD I made based on 9.2 worked out-the-box with all printers I tested with. Your CUPS problem could be related to your problem above if it is indeed name resolution issues.

I wonder if you think about all the other people who contribute the thousands of packages available in Mandrake ...

Not sure if the kza is able to connect - IIRC they changed the protocol.

Not sure how well giFT-FastTrack works...

I don't know if it is the "best" but try mldonkey (which Morpheus uses too). mldonkey has a telnet interface & IMHO excellent web interface. This is a good starting place for mldonkey info: MLDonkey World

So, basically, Morpheus has a re-implementation of FastTrack from scratch.

Seeing how morpheus is basicly gnucleus (a GPL gnutella client) with spyware, I would not be surprised if there was code in the from the mldonkey of gift team who do fasttrack in GPL code for their project.

Ofcourse they could licence the protocol from sharman (or the orginal authors who are making peercache). I wouldn`t put it past them to get information from the orginal russian coders who were hired to make the first kazaa. I really don`t think these people would do their own reverse engineering.

The old kza will not work because it does not have the new encryption layers. Instead you can use giFT, giFT-FastTrack and giFTcurs.
It looks alot better than kza and it's guaranteed to be free of spyware (it's free software). It's all in Debian, except for gift-fasttrack which you can get here:
deb ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/gift-fasttrack unstable main

Have you looked into Kazaa lately??? It's ABSOLUTELY the same stuff that was there 12 months ago, and networks like kazaa are the ones monitored by the RIAA (still ~ 4 Million users online)

Quality has even improved during the last months with IP-Block-Lists getting more updates and Apollon+gIFT (TRY THIS FOLKS, GREAT CLIENT) having matured...

See...

Apollon@SF.net
gift-fasttrack (got updates lately...)

http://livecd.berlios.de/

Nautlius is VoIP that uses Blowfish as the cipher.

Here's the home page. Get the software here. It hasn't been updated in awhile, but maybe now there's more of an incentive to do so.

Nautlius is VoIP that uses Blowfish as the cipher.

Here's the home page. Get the software here. It hasn't been updated in awhile, but maybe now there's more of an incentive to do so.

The thing is, though, that he seems to be proven correct every single time this comes up. Remember when BitKeeper restricted their license, effectively prohibiting anyone from contributing to the Linux kernel and, say, Subversion? Or when Darren Reed re-interpreted the license to IPF, forcing the OpenBSD team to remove it from their system? Or any of the other stories on Slashdot where a closed-source company lures users and developers with gratis copies of their new, shiny product - and then changes licensing terms once everyone's hooked?

The fact is that if you use non-Free software, then you are beholden to the whims of someone else. I always recommend Free software solutions to my employer when remotely possible, not to save a few pennies, but to ensure that we have the right to use our systems as we see fit, not as someone outside our business allows us to.

RMS is loud, obnoxious, and irritating to a lot of people. He's also right almost every time when he warns of the dangers of non-Free systems. Although you might not like the delivery, the message seems to be dead accurate.

berlios

Thanks for the Musik link. I was looking for something that would work under Linux since Apple is being idiots over supporting Linux. Yes I know that sounds trollish, though Apple is lucky to have 2%-3% of the desktop market, so they are not making any huge profits from their Apple users. Second, it wouldn't be that hard to port the services of iTMS to Linux from their BSD based system. Linux users are not choosy, give us a simple GTK+ GUI to the services and we would be happy. Heck, just realease the services/daemons as a closed binary with the specs on how to use them and the Linux community would make their own front end GUI in no time. You would have GiTMS, KiTMS, QiTMS in a few weeks.