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I know you are a troll but ill bite,
check you facts about language-speeds
instead of trying to keeping old myth about "java's slow" alive.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

I don't think anyone's actually using GNU/NetBSD.

You better compare python to other dynamic scriptlanguages instead of C or Java. One should probably take the languageshootout on alioth.debian.org with a grain of salt (as i didn't look into the implementation of the benchmarks), but supposed that the benchmarks are equally well written, you'll see that python compares very well against php or perl. Java is a lot faster, but eats a lot more memory. Then again, Java is a lot different to Python. Let alone C.

You better compare python to other dynamic scriptlanguages instead of C or Java. One should probably take the languageshootout on alioth.debian.org with a grain of salt (as i didn't look into the implementation of the benchmarks), but supposed that the benchmarks are equally well written, you'll see that python compares very well against php or perl. Java is a lot faster, but eats a lot more memory. Then again, Java is a lot different to Python. Let alone C.

You better compare python to other dynamic scriptlanguages instead of C or Java. One should probably take the languageshootout on alioth.debian.org with a grain of salt (as i didn't look into the implementation of the benchmarks), but supposed that the benchmarks are equally well written, you'll see that python compares very well against php or perl. Java is a lot faster, but eats a lot more memory. Then again, Java is a lot different to Python. Let alone C.

There was a Debian project to put the GNU userland (such as glibc) on top of the NetBSD kernel - http://www.debian.org/ports/netbsd/. While it seems as though the whole project is dormant, it does suggest that Linux could be replaced as the kernel of the Debian operating system. It would be amusing to see the licensing issues that brings up, and whether RMS could justify calling it GNU/BSD, given that a lot of the code in what he currently calls GNU/Linux was not written for the GNU project or released under a GPL license.

FWIW, the win32-loader is interesting in that it gets compiled using entirely free software that's all available in Debian. Getting this to be true of every bit of it was one of the trickier things in developing it. http://packages.debian.org/win32-loader

It's also possible to run it in wine, it won't do anything,
but you can see the dialogs --good enough for the (very little bit of) testing/development that I've done on it.

The win32-loader is mostly the work of Robert Millan, who I'm sure like most of us has several licensed copies of Windows, even if he doesn't want them.

... and many others. You can start here, but the list goes on and on because free software is like that. If you count the Debian derivative users, you find that it's the most popular and widely used gnu/linux. That's because it's free and easy to modify. Ultimately, freedom meets user need better than anything else.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=441379

I didn't try it on 32, so I don't know, but I suspect it has the same issue. The installer attempts to write to c:\boot.ini and/or do something with bcdedit.exe. I made a shortcut to debian.exe and set it to admin+xpsp2 compatibility and copied a boot.ini from an xp machine. The install ran and asked me to reboot, and it did modify the boot.ini I copied over, but of course the real startup files were not modified.

Here's what it did, in case anyone knows how to replicate this by hand using bcdedit.exe (it added the last line):

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
C:\g2ldr.mbr="Debian Installer"

I'd monkey with it, but not on this machine.

Also, it says during install that once you reboot it will ask you if you want to format your hdd or resize it, but I thought from reading the thread here that it would create a few gig file on the c: and use it as a virtual drive. I just ran it again to make sure I got my verbiage right, and there is no indication that it will run directly off of the ntfs. Am I reading it wrong?

By all means, show me this wondrous swappable kernel project in action.

I don't have any Windows machines to test it out on.

Will this work in Wine? :)

win32-loader is a Windows program that installs debian. That has already been said. One might also wonder why a windows program that installs debian would actually be installed in debian.

For 1, it is not included in Lenny like the summary says:
http://packages.debian.org/win32-loader
It is only included in sid, for now.

Debian regularly includes debian installer packages in debian. Developers who create release CDs do so by creating a custom debian installation, with these debian installer packages (on CD). These packages are usually not useful on a regular user's primary system.

Since none of the links in the story explain what the win32-loader is, can anyone explain what it does?

Swappable on the fly maybe not, but you can in any case run a GNU/NetBSD (http://www.debian.org/ports/netbsd/) system for example.

Linux is just a kernel, sure it can be used with software stacks that are not GNU, but there are not many distributions of GNU/Linux that don't use at least a few of their packages. A quick look at the GNU packages listed on http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/ comes up with a fairly large number of core packages (bash, coreutils, glib, grub, fileutils, gcc, libc, shellutils, etc) without which your system isn't really very useful.

The title of the press release is "QNX Publishes Neutrino Source Code and Opens Development Process". Arista, on the other hand, didn't seem to mind mangling this in order to get this article posted to Slashdot.

I imagine this kind of thing might be why Bruce Perens said way back in 1999 that it's time to talk about "free software" again.

Here: Debian

And from the main page,

Debian is one of the most popular and widely used distributions. They use the name GNU/Linux.

What I believe he meant was that the BSD camps do not simple /include/ software, but will actively maintain it.

Funny, that sounds a lot like Debian (and Ubuntu) to me. Just look at the changelog file of any debian package.

Just a heads-up to those looking to install it easily: This program is already in Debian, thanks to the work of Adam Cécile (Le_Vert). You can see it on the packages page at http://packages.debian.org/lenny/ophcrack .

Well I guess it depends what you are building. Ruby on Rails is certainly a fun framework to work with. The trouble is Ruby itself is painfully slow (see http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ for data on this) and doesn't get Unicode. So if you're site is going to do anything large or international it would be a poor choice. If not then RoR is a lot of fun - go for it.

PHP. People do build large apps in PHP. Having used it quite a bit it remains a mystery to me a)how and b)why. Its ugly and handles state poorly - a disaster for a web language in my view.

Alternatives. Both Java and ASP.NET make sense for large scale applications. Beyond that it depends a lot what you're doing. I would tend to plump for Java since I like being able to pick the right framework for the job I'm doing - so for instance if I'm building a high traffic web app I'd probably go for Struts, if I was building something that needed to be more desktop like I'd probably go for JSF with Seam, and if I was after lots of Ajax bells and whistles I'd probably add GWT into the mix. I also like the richness of the Java toolbox (being able to use JMS to talk to MQ for instance, applets on the client side for certain specific duties), and the Java tools (notably IDEA) are world beating.

Yep, there is a patch that will remove the worm so that you will never get it again: here.

It's worth looking at

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.ph p?test=all&lang=hipe&lang2=hipe

for the general performance of erlang. It compares unfavorably in those tests to lisp and clean, two other functional programming languages.

There are two free (GPL) 3d electromagnetics FDTD solvers, RadarFDTD and Tessa.

This post brought to you by reading comprehension, and the letter K.

$ locate GPL | xargs zgrep -i version.2..june.1991 | wc -l
80

This post brought to you by reading comprehension, and the letter K.

$ locate GPL | xargs zgrep -i version.2..june.1991 | wc -l
80

Get Debian for that:

http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages .pl?keywords=porn&searchon=names&subword=1&version =all&release=all

On the Debian bugs system page it says the first version was realeased in 94. I'm not sure how much was implemented, but in it's current form it's really very much alike the patent (what is said in the abstract anyways.

Listserv might also apply, if they had advanced mailinglist management in the beginning.

Simply instally unison or rsync or whatever and have the job kick off with whereami for linux (you'll have to find the main page yourself) or marco polo for macs.

Debian refused to make a non-pure 64-bit port of their distro. Therefore Ubuntu has as well. But I run Skype on Gentoo AMD64 without an issue. I hate Ubuntu users now. They are ruining it for all of us, whining all day "I can't get this to work and this is supposed to be easy and I'm so stupid but I hate Windows because I just figured out everyone else does and how Microsoft is so evil so let me jump on this bandwagon." Go back to Windows or Mac OS X, idiots. Actually just go back to Windows. Let us not have idiots using OS X either.

Speaking of Wine, I don't use it a lot. I have some Windows foreign-language-study programs that run just fine under it. Some Windows games run all right under it; the occasional crash is part of the fun :). The one application I'd like to see working better is Personal Ancestral File, but the Linux alternatives are competitive. I use OpenOffice or Koffice or emacs for office stuff, and write new software in perl or Java or C#, all of which are cross-platform.

Better yet:

apt-get install putty

Second: ignore the ass above who said dump Java. Modern hotspots have made Java as fast or faster than C/C++. The guy is not up to date.

Really?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.ph p?test=all&lang=gpp&lang2=java
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.ph p?test=all&lang=gcc&lang2=java

Java has certainly made performance gains over the years but it is most certainly not a replacement for C/C++ if you care about raw performance at all.

Second: ignore the ass above who said dump Java. Modern hotspots have made Java as fast or faster than C/C++. The guy is not up to date.

Really?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.ph p?test=all&lang=gpp&lang2=java
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.ph p?test=all&lang=gcc&lang2=java

Java has certainly made performance gains over the years but it is most certainly not a replacement for C/C++ if you care about raw performance at all.

>So you're the kind of person that would hate http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/fbsd/ Gentoo/FreeBSD then?

Actually I was reading a little (nothing in great detail) about the alternate platforms for gentoo the other day, so you're not presenting something new to me.

BSD -Unix- is a system, developed and planned as a whole unit. Linux -and 'meta' operating systems such as Debian and Gentoo all suffer from a lack of co-ordination. Microsoft gets many things wrong, but their ad in '99 with the illustration of Linux as being an animal made out of the parts of different animals is actually pretty spot-on. The file utilities come from one developer, your archiving programs come from several different projects and your bootstrap utility is made by someone else entirely -and none of these people are on the same page.

In other words, most Linux distributions are comprised of random, seperately developed programs as opposed to whole systems where the person developing a new kernel api communicates back and forth with the people who are working on the corresponding userland code (whatever that may be in that instance, file utilities, disk utilities, whatever).

Then you have Gentoo -which, along with Linux from scratch- adds even more randomness to the mix with its' update mechanism. Update when the latest diskutilities fuck up X (or whatever) and your system is hosed.

The strength of Unix (BSD, Solaris) is that it is _designed_ -and by replacing the userland designed to work with the kernel with the usual disparate array of GNU/utilities you detract from the strenth of using a designed system, and are probably better off sticking to Linux.

Unless you're simply talking about splicing gentoo in the place of the usual third party delivery mechanism (gentoo instead of ports, gentoo instead of pkgsrc). That would actually be interesting, but I don't think that's what you're talking about.

>Suck it down my friend - Gentoo is the meta distro.

First, a correction is in order - Debian is "the" meta distro, and has been since 2000, if not before (they have had ports to the Freebsd, Netbsd and Hurd kernels in development since then -hell I've heard unconfirmed rumors of a cygwin port of Debian).

That said, this statement is why I think that you're not talking about replacing package delivery mechanisms but are instead talking about ripping apart stable, designed systems and replacing them with randomly bits and pieces of cobbled-together pieces from GNU.

Lastly, the claim that Gentoo is a development platform "for developers by developers" is rather amusing considering that no one touts it as a superior programming enviroment (at least, not outside of the gentoo forums, I wouldn't know about there -that's not someplace I have any reason to hang out at).

Instead you hear two claims from most Gentoobies:

1)"I feel like I understand my system so much better by compiling it myself"
2)"It takes a long time to compile a system, but it runs sooo much faster once you do".

You never hear people talk about how great the documented gentoo is (they say that, instead, about BSD), you never hear about what a great environment Gentoo is to develop in -whereas people frequently comment about how much cleaner, elegant and easier to understand the code from -say- Net or OpenBSD is.

Now, as far as things to suck down -you might consider swallowing the fact that pkgsrc has existed longer -and does better- as a cross-OS packaging system and that Debian pretty much invented the concept of the Meta OS.

While Joe User may end up a developer after using Gentoo (though I've seen no evidence of that happening) I think that's much more likely to happen if Joe User either uses and follows the Linux From Scratch book or downloads one of the BSDs and gets his hands dirty experimenting with and seeing what breaks in /usr/src. :)

Here's knetworkmanager: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/network-ma nager-kde
It's been in the official repos for quite a long time (can't remember exactly but I've been using it for probably more than 6 months).

The SSH file transfer protocol supports retrieving byte ranges, so it is possible to implement reget. I made a patch to add it to OpenSSH some time ago, though it has not been merged.

Please give an example of "spyware" distributed by Debian.

I admit that you have to opt in, and it is for a good cause, but it is spyware.

Please give an example of "spyware" distributed by Debian.

I admit that you have to opt in, and it is for a good cause, but it is spyware.

Java is not slow. It's not blazingly fast either, but it sure isn't slow. What financial institutions do is to throw twice the hardware at the problem, instead of 5 times the manpower. And funnily enough, I love C++, and love to hate Java, but not for its speed.

No - like Debian Edu, or K12LTSP. Schools save money, but more important, sysadmin teachers can go back to teaching and stop running around ghosting the PCs at least once a week. Besides, at the 11-12 level many of the kids are already familiar with Linux.

No matter what step Novell takes, till the deal with Microsoft is alive, I'll never touch or recommend this distro. Why AMD, IBM/Lenovo or others push openSUSE they doesn't like Debian's "Social Contract" or The Ubuntu Promise ?

WHAT is Debian?
The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system that we have created is called Debian GNU/Linux, or simply Debian for short.

What is Debian ?

Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer.

It goes on after this, but for me, the definition is complete in the first sentence. After all, there is also a GNU/Hurd flavor to Debian. But the operating system is referred to well enough by the simple term "Debian".

The dependency on restricted non-modifiable fonts for web and print needs to be reduced....
Every script should have a free as in freedom working implementation.

Thankfully there are efforts underway to create a common open font set for the free desktop:
Check out the growing collection of open fonts released on the Unifont fontguide and the OFL font catalog". The freedesktop wiki lists the beginnings of a common open font set . The page needs updating though as some fonts have been released/freed since the last change.

We now have the community-approved license for fonts: the Open Font License , a growing community of open font designers a community of distribution packagers and a growing toolkit to do font design collaboratively.

Let's see what happens.

Thanks, I was going to say something similar. The Hurd doesn't have developers coming out of its ears like Linux does, but if you want to run it on your x86 machine, Debian have a distribution of it that works today.