Slashdot Mirror

Well, you can order the FreeBSD CD direct from Walnut Creek CDROM (the people who sponsor ftp.cdrom.com, maybe you've heard of them). Check out their homepage at http://www.cdrom.com

I saw it here ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames/idstuff/quake3/win 32/q3test_1_05.exe

But, better to find a mirror. ftp.cdrom.com is crawling like a snail!

You can see what kind of machine it is at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/config.txt and see a picture of the actual machine at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/wcarc hive.jpg

You can see what kind of machine it is at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/config.txt and see a picture of the actual machine at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/wcarc hive.jpg

David Greenman, the Co-founder/Principal Architect of the FreeBSD Project just posted a new picture of the new wcarchive, it is now available here.

Updated hardware description is also available here.

It would be amazing if someone could pull some nice effects with The Gimp and make a cool looking "ftp.cdrom.com theme" for Windowmaker or something...

David Greenman, the Co-founder/Principal Architect of the FreeBSD Project just posted a new picture of the new wcarchive, it is now available here.

Updated hardware description is also available here.

It would be amazing if someone could pull some nice effects with The Gimp and make a cool looking "ftp.cdrom.com theme" for Windowmaker or something...

This link has more info on the hardware used by them and the throughput. I have installed FBSD3.1 in 15 min from them.

Slasdot should consider running on FreeBSD 3.1 now that it has reached a respectable readership.
It's called evoultion my simian brothers.

When I got mad, I loaded up the doom level I made of my highschool. Completely safe, and good for releaving stress. my level

Look on the bright side, they're probably saving up for when they lose the DOJ trial. :-)

That's too bad. Your arguments aren't valid either. Let's go through and figure out why:

1) It lacks real package manager (ok, do slackware packages ever get updated after the distribution has been released or can I find "slackware packages" from freshmeat.net somewehere),

Well, there's pkgtool, which works quite well. It removes all files associated with the package, even tells you what files were removed via /var/log/packages so you can see if something got deleted that shouldn't have been (Maybe a shared file). But really, tar xvzf package.tar.gz;cd package;./configure;make;make install is not that hard, and gives you the chance to tweak things if needed (Ever use qmail with qpopper?)

There's also the slackware contrib directory, included on the cd and via ftp at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/slac kware/contrib/.

And if you have no other option then to download a redhat or debian rpm, there's rpm2tgz, included with slackware 3.6, that converts an rpm package to a tgz package suitable for installation using installpkg or pkgtool.

2) 0% support (on Debian I am sure everything is up to date thanks to apt, on redhat there is at least an erratas webpage that lists fixes and updates)

Wrong again. Looking at http://www.slackware.com"> there is a lot of support there. They have a message board for technical questions, Install Help, a list of updated packages, etc. You can even email Volkerding and he'll reply.

Although by reading your message, it looks like you mean not support, but a way to see if everything's current. Well, you can just check the Changelog to see what he changed. You can find the changelog at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux /slackware/ChangeLog.txt. Not only does that notify you of security updates, but general updates as well.

3) It cannot be upgraded without trashing your system (when it is a 30 minute process on other distributions)

Really? I guess that my having upgraded from 3.4->3.5->3.6 without ever formatting must be a halucination. You have two choices. 1- Just install over the top. 2- Use pkgtool to remove your packages first, then run the install program. Takes me only 30-40mins to upgrade my system.

4) Never up to date (glibc2 ?)

Up to date is a relative term. If by up to date you mean the latest cutting edge beta libs and programs that haven't been tested thouroughly yet, well, I guess you're right. But OTOH, if you mean the latest stable libs and programs that have been tested, you're wrong. Remember, glibc2.0 won't be around long, and glibc2.1 is still beta, and still unstable. It hurts the linux community when a company puts out a distro that contains buggy software, as that pulls the general public's view of linux down to that of Microsoft. Just another company shipping products with bugs to get it on the marketplace rather then excercising a little patience and releasing a quality product.

5) It is a nightmare to maintain compared to other distributions.

I don't know how you maintain a box, but when I was working for a midsize ISP (Midsize for the area, about 1300 dialups) we used Slackware on all our machines. Rarely were upgrades needed, and when they were, we simply configured it on one machine, tar'd up the dir, and copied it to the others. We even got fancy and wrote a script to untar it, make it, then make install it. No need to worry about having dependancies, and no need to fuss with someone's precompiled binary.

Fact of the matter is, when you're running in most corporate environments, control of the box is an issue. With Slackware I just install and go. The times I've tried to use redhat, I ended up having to install several key components by hand because the rpm's didn't use the compile options we needed. Although as someone said earlier, FreeBSD is also a good option (Although I personally prefer OpenBSD as Theo is a security god).

That's too bad. Your arguments aren't valid either. Let's go through and figure out why:

1) It lacks real package manager (ok, do slackware packages ever get updated after the distribution has been released or can I find "slackware packages" from freshmeat.net somewehere),

Well, there's pkgtool, which works quite well. It removes all files associated with the package, even tells you what files were removed via /var/log/packages so you can see if something got deleted that shouldn't have been (Maybe a shared file). But really, tar xvzf package.tar.gz;cd package;./configure;make;make install is not that hard, and gives you the chance to tweak things if needed (Ever use qmail with qpopper?)

There's also the slackware contrib directory, included on the cd and via ftp at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/slac kware/contrib/.

And if you have no other option then to download a redhat or debian rpm, there's rpm2tgz, included with slackware 3.6, that converts an rpm package to a tgz package suitable for installation using installpkg or pkgtool.

2) 0% support (on Debian I am sure everything is up to date thanks to apt, on redhat there is at least an erratas webpage that lists fixes and updates)

Wrong again. Looking at http://www.slackware.com"> there is a lot of support there. They have a message board for technical questions, Install Help, a list of updated packages, etc. You can even email Volkerding and he'll reply.

Although by reading your message, it looks like you mean not support, but a way to see if everything's current. Well, you can just check the Changelog to see what he changed. You can find the changelog at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux /slackware/ChangeLog.txt. Not only does that notify you of security updates, but general updates as well.

3) It cannot be upgraded without trashing your system (when it is a 30 minute process on other distributions)

Really? I guess that my having upgraded from 3.4->3.5->3.6 without ever formatting must be a halucination. You have two choices. 1- Just install over the top. 2- Use pkgtool to remove your packages first, then run the install program. Takes me only 30-40mins to upgrade my system.

4) Never up to date (glibc2 ?)

Up to date is a relative term. If by up to date you mean the latest cutting edge beta libs and programs that haven't been tested thouroughly yet, well, I guess you're right. But OTOH, if you mean the latest stable libs and programs that have been tested, you're wrong. Remember, glibc2.0 won't be around long, and glibc2.1 is still beta, and still unstable. It hurts the linux community when a company puts out a distro that contains buggy software, as that pulls the general public's view of linux down to that of Microsoft. Just another company shipping products with bugs to get it on the marketplace rather then excercising a little patience and releasing a quality product.

5) It is a nightmare to maintain compared to other distributions.

I don't know how you maintain a box, but when I was working for a midsize ISP (Midsize for the area, about 1300 dialups) we used Slackware on all our machines. Rarely were upgrades needed, and when they were, we simply configured it on one machine, tar'd up the dir, and copied it to the others. We even got fancy and wrote a script to untar it, make it, then make install it. No need to worry about having dependancies, and no need to fuss with someone's precompiled binary.

Fact of the matter is, when you're running in most corporate environments, control of the box is an issue. With Slackware I just install and go. The times I've tried to use redhat, I ended up having to install several key components by hand because the rpm's didn't use the compile options we needed. Although as someone said earlier, FreeBSD is also a good option (Although I personally prefer OpenBSD as Theo is a security god).

DOWNLOAD Slackware 4.0 here
(LinuxToday appears to be slashdotted, at least from here)

Opera supports PNG natively since version 3.51 (just before Christmas). It has some problems with transparency, though; see the browsers page for details.

GIMP does support the PNG and the alpha channel...but it is sort of very difficult to use. I only succeeded doing it once some time back and I cannot for life of me remember how to do it so I can achieve the transparent feature under GIMP.

From the GIMP section of Chapter 4 (I mistakenly said Chapter 5 in another reply): open an RGB image, right click on it and select Layers -> Add alpha channel, and edit away. For example, select the Lasso tool, go to Dialogs -> Tool Options... -> Feather checkbox and set some feather radius (for the width of the variable-transparency part), then draw a loop around something, invert the selection (right button -> Select -> Invert) and erase (Edit -> Clear). Or you can do gradients or whatever tickles your pickle.

What you cannot do is any sort of transparency with palette images, as I recall. That may have changed in 1.1, but I haven't heard about it. The last time I checked, the PNG plug-in did not appear to have any transparency support at all, and the GIMP image model does not lend itself well to PNG's RGBA-palette mode.

Version 3 only supported PNG via third-party plug-ins. Adobe added native support to 4.0. It's not very good support (and in some ways it got worse in 5.0), but they're aware of it and are finally working on fixing it for 6.0.

I devoted 40% of chapter 5 to Photoshop 4 and 5. :-)

See either http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs.html or http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs-img.ht ml for some transparent PNG images (especially the bottom one), using either OBJECT or IMG, respectively. There will be at least three more as soon as I have time to add them to the web pages. Two are already available in the img_png subdirectory: IceAlpha-sml.png and RedbrushAlpha-sml.png, both by Pieter van der Meulen. (The third one is an excellent shot of an owl, and I may add a magnolia tree, too. All are 8-bit RGBA-palette images, btw.)

Oh, and http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngpic2.html has more PNG images, though not with transparency.

See either http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs.html or http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs-img.ht ml for some transparent PNG images (especially the bottom one), using either OBJECT or IMG, respectively. There will be at least three more as soon as I have time to add them to the web pages. Two are already available in the img_png subdirectory: IceAlpha-sml.png and RedbrushAlpha-sml.png, both by Pieter van der Meulen. (The third one is an excellent shot of an owl, and I may add a magnolia tree, too. All are 8-bit RGBA-palette images, btw.)

Oh, and http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngpic2.html has more PNG images, though not with transparency.

See either http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs.html or http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs-img.ht ml for some transparent PNG images (especially the bottom one), using either OBJECT or IMG, respectively. There will be at least three more as soon as I have time to add them to the web pages. Two are already available in the img_png subdirectory: IceAlpha-sml.png and RedbrushAlpha-sml.png, both by Pieter van der Meulen. (The third one is an excellent shot of an owl, and I may add a magnolia tree, too. All are 8-bit RGBA-palette images, btw.)

Oh, and http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngpic2.html has more PNG images, though not with transparency.

See either http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs.html or http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs-img.ht ml for some transparent PNG images (especially the bottom one), using either OBJECT or IMG, respectively. There will be at least three more as soon as I have time to add them to the web pages. Two are already available in the img_png subdirectory: IceAlpha-sml.png and RedbrushAlpha-sml.png, both by Pieter van der Meulen. (The third one is an excellent shot of an owl, and I may add a magnolia tree, too. All are 8-bit RGBA-palette images, btw.)

Oh, and http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngpic2.html has more PNG images, though not with transparency.

See either http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs.html or http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs-img.ht ml for some transparent PNG images (especially the bottom one), using either OBJECT or IMG, respectively. There will be at least three more as soon as I have time to add them to the web pages. Two are already available in the img_png subdirectory: IceAlpha-sml.png and RedbrushAlpha-sml.png, both by Pieter van der Meulen. (The third one is an excellent shot of an owl, and I may add a magnolia tree, too. All are 8-bit RGBA-palette images, btw.)

Oh, and http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngpic2.html has more PNG images, though not with transparency.

Folks, please check the toolkits page for a number of PNG-supporting Java options, including the Advanced Imaging API from Sun/Javasoft. JAIA EA1 and EA2 had read-only support, but write support is coming in the next release, I believe.

And I'll be sure to add a link to the godlike Justin's toolkit, too; I wasn't aware of that until now. (Bad Justin. I guess it was all that VRML hacking. :-) )

Possibly, in the bug parade at The Java Developers Connection support for PNG in Java has the second highest number of votes (only support for JDK 1.2 on Linux has more).

I know I have my vote in, I'd love to see PNG as a standard format for graphics in Java!

Some of the links given for other Java packages that provide support for PNG are:

http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/src/j ava-png-0.88.zip

http://www.visualtek.com/PNG/

http://www.sixlegs.com/png.html



as well as Activated Intelligence which makes JIMI and can write PNG images - not free though!

A couple of simple patches puts PNG support in XV. Check the PNG webpage for the patches and lots more info.

That's what the PNG home site is for! You can find PNG-supporting image editors at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngaped.html and image viewers at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngapvw.html (the supported OSes are indicated for each entry--look for "Windows 9x/NT" in your case). There are also other pages for converters, 3D apps, browsers, etc.

That's what the PNG home site is for! You can find PNG-supporting image editors at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngaped.html and image viewers at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngapvw.html (the supported OSes are indicated for each entry--look for "Windows 9x/NT" in your case). There are also other pages for converters, 3D apps, browsers, etc.

The source to the cddb server cddbd-1.3.1 is available and released under the GPL. If the current cddb server that Escient is using is derived from this source code they have the obligation to release their source code. I think it is pretty obvious that it is derived from the original GPL'ed server.

Here is an interesting quote from the cddb.howto : While we don't have anything against commercial software per se. we take a dim view toward having someone profitting from the use of the CDDB and servers.

The source to the cddb server cddbd-1.3.1 is available and released under the GPL. If the current cddb server that Escient is using is derived from this source code they have the obligation to release their source code. I think it is pretty obvious that it is derived from the original GPL'ed server.

Here is an interesting quote from the cddb.howto : While we don't have anything against commercial software per se. we take a dim view toward having someone profitting from the use of the CDDB and servers.

A friend of mine is working on such a system called OpenCart. I have no idea how far along he is, but you're free to email him if you like.

How do I use Netscape's native support? On my WinNT (ritual spit towards Redmond) box I installed Apple's Quicktime 3 plugin, which takes over the PNG format (and a boatload of others, as well). I'm running Netscape 4.5. How to I tell it to disable the QT plugin for PNGs and render them natively? This is somewhat important to me, as I'm doing some web development with PNGs and I want to see how Netscape handles them. My other recourse is to get another machine in here with a "clean" install.

I looked at the "Applications" entry in the Preferences dialog. "PNG" is listed as being supported by a plugin, but the "Edit" and "Removed" buttons are greyed out. I can't find a way to change it.

An oddity in the Linux (hail Linus!) version of Netscape 4.5: I have no plugins at all installed, and the "Applications" entry in Preferences tells me "PNG file -- Unknown: Prompt User". Netscape does render PNGs, though, even though it claims not to. But it seems that PNG is not its preferred format. On the PNG home page the PNG logo is given in an OBJECT tag, along with a GIF. Netscape renders the GIF instead of the PNG.

So shouldn't we be adding it to GIMP, Mozilla, Imlib and others? Can you provide a URL?

As others have noted, MNG is pretty much fully specified (and note that it includes a JPEG/PNG hybrid called JNG that provides transparency and gamma/color-correction to JPEG), but there is basically zero in the way of sample source code for it--and it is much more complex than PNG. On the plus side, Gerard Juyn has offered to make his MNGeye viewer code available as the starting point for a "libmng" implementation, but no one has had time to do anything with it yet. So those who are truly keen on sprite-based animation a la MNG can always get started and make life nicer for all of us.

In fairness, I should also note that Flash is in many respects competitive with MNG, and it includes some PNG-like support as well. So despite the fact that MNG includes some features not present in Flash, it may well turn out that Flash "wins" simply by virtue of being out there, being "open enough," and having several implementations (well, at least two, anyway).

Even if Flash becomes the de facto next-generation animation standard, I suspect that JNG will find favor, too. If you're already linking with libjpeg and libpng, adding support for JNG requires almost no additional code.

For real info goto:

http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/

-Alan