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How VMWare can be independent of host OS if it runs on top of it? I mean there is a single point of failure here: if host OS dies every VMWare instance dies with it.

And the question is not just performance -- indeed, with hardware band-aids like AMD Pacifica and Intel VT performance will be better. The question is density, scalability, and manageability (it is funny you even mentioned it -- see below).

Density: you can run hundreds of virtual environments in OpenVZ, you can run tens of guests in VMWare. Makes sense?

Scalability: can VMWare effectively utilize "big hardware" like 64-way SMP box with 64 GB of RAM? OpenVZ can -- absolutely no problem, there are no additional SMP hacks needed etc. More to say, a single virtual environment can use all those resources if needed.

Manageability: From a sysadmin point of view, VMWare guest is just like a physical server. If you want to apply software updates, you have to log in into each one and run an update procedure. One by one, the very same way you'd do it with separate physical boxes. In contrast, in OpenVZ you can actually see and access all the virtual environments from the host OS, making mass-management possible. You can apply updates en masse. You can do mass-management. Makes sense?

Indeed, VMWare (or other solutions of the kind, like Parallels or QEmu) makes sense if you want to run different operating systems, different kernels etc. It makes much sense in development labs, at home or when you have just one server. But if you have a rack of servers -- OpenVZ/Virtuozzo/other solutions of the kind makes much more sense, due to the reasons cited above -- scalability, density, manageability.

Everyone speaks about OpenVPN, which is a good piece of software, but software diverisity is desirable, especially in the field of security. It's better if all the Internet is not hacked through a single buffer overflow. IPsec-tools is an alternative to OpenVPN: different implementation, different protocol. A bunch of IPsec extensions have recently been added to cope with NAT, automatic configuration, and user authentication, so it is now really usable for remote user access, which was not the case in the past.

Check Emmanuel Dreyfus' paper on Remote user acces VPN with IPsec presented at EuroBSDCon 2005 for the background about it. There is also a how-to configure it for NetBSD (most of the document apply to Linux).

And you can also check IPsec-tools home page

Not much of a video-editing geek myself, so I have not tried this. But avidemux is said to be somewhat a clone of VirtualDub. Hope this helps.

honestly, i'm happy to see competion in the virtualization market...but those two open source products meet my own needs as well, and in some ways better, than vmware did

OTOH, on a day like this, Everything you know is wrong.

Is this you?

In France, the 'Free' ISP provides a freebox (modem) that can already do that, ie stream content from the computer to the TV. The feature is based on VLC and works with Windows, Linux or MacOS. More information here (in French, but with screenshots).

Of course, that's just one more feature of the free service, on top of TV (100 basic channels + channels you can subscribe to), phone (using VoIP, calls are free to a lot of countries), and internet (ADSL 1 mbit upstream, up to 20 mbits downstream), oh and video on demand too (no TV shows so far, only movies, costing from 2 to 5 euros). All that for 30 euros a month.

So why should I care about Viiv?

Hmm, I prefer to think the Linux era is just at the start right now and will still be flourishing in a thousand years... ;-)

aRTee

NVidia's crap. IMHO, fancy video and 3d is for wankers, but I need this driver because my messed-up BIOS gets the LCD resolution wrong. The NVidia driver ignores the BIOS, while the free driver obeys the bogus info.

Get an ATI card and use the free software drivers.

VMWare's crap. This is 2 drivers, neither of which I have working. In this case I want to use a Fedora Core 4 kernel which was compiled with gcc 4.0, but I upgraded my compiler to gcc 4.1 already. It seems that only Debian supports installing more than one compiler, so I'm screwed until I do something really non-standard.

Use kqemu

Digium's crap. Digium's drivers for Asterisk are actually GPL, but too defective to be accepted into the kernel. Of course, the claim is that "development happens too fast", which is total bullshit to anybody who knows anything about the Linux development process.

The code is there, send patches and stop whining.

qemu has been ported to the Mactels, as is WinTel from openosx.com.

Of course, there's always Darwine as well.

I recently came into possession of a free iPod Shuffle, and since I was away from home I put it on my laptop at work. I learned a day later that you can only install iTunes onto one computer otherwise it will try to delete the music you've put on the iPod from the other computer.

Thinking that was a pretty crappy way to operate something that should be as easy to add music to as copying files though My Computer to the iPod removable drive, I did a google search that would be illegal in the United States of America.

I came up with this:
software that operates the Shuffle without running iTunes *
which allows me to copy music to my iPod and generate a playlist without iTunes messing up my life.
*Offer void in the United States of America. Turnabout from the infamous [at least in the Rest of the World] "Offer void outside of the USA" is pretty sweet I do say so myself.

mmmm, Playboy-customized FreeBSD... lots of red latex... mmmm...

Indeed.

Back in the day, we didn't have your fancy-schmancy foryums and blahgs on everyone's webpage. We had ourselves the NEWSGROUPS.

And we liked it!

In order to discuss super-hero based RPGs on the rec.games.frp.* hierarchy, our posts would get lost. I decided to act upon this and had rec.games.frp.super-heroes created. There was much (ridiculous) debate ([sarcasm]on the internet? NO...[/sarcasm]) regarding the name.

We couldn't used "Superheroes" because of the joint trademark. We couldn't use "Supers" because someone (idiot) thought it meant the forum was only for discussion of GURPS: Supers . So a news admin suggested that we hyphenate. I mean, it's not like we were selling anything.

I maintained the FAQ for years, but then that C++ Hybrid guy kept spamming the Newsgroup and most of us left to go to various other gaming forums.

And Easy Kubuntu : http://olwin.free.fr/

It does the same job as Automatix. It's safer. But it offers less options (no Opera for instance). But for codecs and the like, it's perfect.

keyes
11-15-2005, 04:10 PM

If you use Kubuntu please use Easy Kubuntu (created by Olwin and Anbreizh from Ubuntu-fr in collaboration with me, they help me creating Easy Ubuntu and I help them to create Easy Kubuntu, source code is very similar). Automatix is a fork of Easy Ubuntu written by arnieboy (from ubuntuforums). Automatix is more complicated but have more features than Easy Ubuntu, it's the good choice for advanced users. Begginers must use Easy Ubuntu, it's a very easy way to set up correctly Multimedia, web and other needed things. Easy Ubuntu is very safe and don't change the default applications and behaviors of Ubuntu.

Although it's not a linux distribution, surely any live CD based on OpenBSD deserves a mention!

If you are interested in the technology behind their "antigravity" I highly recommend googling for "lifter project". I think their craft uses the same principles for propulsion as described in the web site. http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm

Here is something to consider for those that like to poke fun at UFOs.

http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm

If you don't live in a country where it is legal to use patented/whatever codecs without paying royalties, you can of course still do it at your own risk, which is exactly what you did by doing it in Gentoo, so I fail to see the problem.

FWIW, Debian does include mp3 decoder software (i.e., software that can decode mp3 files to listen to) by default. It takes ca. 5 seconds to know this by googling for debian AND mp3 AND patent AND policy, which brings up this thread as the first link.
This might be too much for a newbie, but you don't qualify because you installed Gentoo. OTOH, a newbie wouldn't even have to google for it, because it works out of the box.

If you mean mp3 encoders (software to produce mp3 files), you are right that they aren't included. It takes 0.29 secs (according to Google) to look for debian AND mp3 AND encoder, which will give you lots of info and debs to download.

I still don't see how you can add MP3 support to KDE when the support has to be compiled into the KDE apps that use it

The wonders of modern software engineering! Did you ever recompile Windows Media Player because you added codecs for ogg, DivX and the 1,000,000 other file formats it can't play out of the box? Thought so.
See, while support might have to be compiled in, to my knowledge all Debian packages do and will gracefully ignore it if the mp3 library is not present. This is true for all proprietary codecs that I am aware of.

If you google for Debian AND codecs or Debian AND "unofficial repository" or Debian AND decss, or whatever, you will see many hits to repositories that you can simply add to /etc/apt/sources list (you can also use, e.g., the newbie-friendly Synaptic). Usually the google hits will include the repository of Christian Marillat or, for Ubuntu, of the Penguin Liberation Front, who provide packages for users who do not live in legally challenged countries. Then just install what you need with Synaptic or apt-get.

If you live in such a country, you can still run a Debian-based distro, Linspire, which will give you mp3 and video codecs as well as a DVD player, all completely legal even in the US, for a small fee. (There is talk about providing Linspire's Click 'n' Run Warehouse for Ubuntu users too). (Don't believe the myth that Linspire runs everything as root, it is not true). Anyway, Xandros gives you nearly the same (sans CSS'ed DVD IIRC)

(offtopic) re: Remote Wonder and iTunes issues - I have found that this plugin http://remotew.free.fr/plugins.htm#itunes works just fine with both the Remote Wonder and the Remote Wonder II. re: topic - I have a feeling remotes such as the "Revolution" that Nintendo has shown prototypes may be the future of remotes. You can make them quite simple to use without too many buttons when rotation is accounted for. Just my $0.02.

I'll be downloading the full thing just for the sake of seeing how fast I can rotate it with GLiv.

I use this explorer extension. Works great.

If you've never installed Debian or Gentoo or Red Hat and don't want to waste a CD-R (or take the time to burn it, or whatever...) most of the distributions (including Knoppix) can be run "as if" from a CD but actually from the hard drive.

Marc Herbert's Windows Install Page details how to install a new distro using Windows without a CD. He also explains that the instructions are meant to be used for any OS, for example, trying Gentoo on a Fedora Core system. It's worth looking at!

Think of how much more you'll know after you've installed all the distros out there!

Check out the QEMU webpage here
A nice GUI interface for OSX is here
And another GUI interface is here

Considering that the majority of the time one will be able to run native OSX apps, the QEMU solution looks pretty good.

Willy

Wow - how is this 'insightful'? Conspiracy theories are sexy and aluring, but often based in pure fantasy:
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/pentagon.htm
http://libertyboy.free.fr/misc/attack/2001_09_11_p entagon_plane/index.php

Populous and Powermonger ~ atmospheric early Peter Molyneux games. Loved the rain, the birds, the boats... Powermonger was beautiful (although not terribly entertaining in the long run).

Starflight I/II and Star Control II (as The Ur-Quan Masters) ~ they're very, very similar - except Starflight is older and technically more primitive, as well as more serious in tone than the often quite frivolous SC2. 2D space exploration games; artifacts, mysteries, diplomacy, banter, upgrading, mining *sigh*, trading, fighting, and a wee bit of strategy. Epic and very much not "on rails" - you decide on your own what to do when or whether to do it at all. Played on DOS, Amiga, Linux, Windows.

Mercenary: Escape from Targ/The Second City, Damocles, Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis ~ a series of 3D vector graphics space games (although most of the game takes place on the surface and inside buildings). Some annoyingly absurd puzzles, by hindsight (pick up cheese to fly faster). However, the sense of freedom, vastness and complexity they evoked was quite unusual by 80s standards, and there weren't many better games for the Commodore Plus/4 anyway. Played on Plus/4 (Mercenary), Amiga (others). Windows remake of the whole series.

On the less adventurous end of the space game spectrum: Elite, Freespace I/II, Freelancer, Wing Commander...

Ultima IV ~ A real world map, not just dungeons! Towns with trees and ponds and hidden nooks and crannies! Conversations! Secret islands and shrines hidden away in the mountains! Monsters that didn't just pop up out of nowhere! I liked this so much better than the maze-based "puzzle" RPGs of the time. And I really loved the cover art, at the time :). What a change from all the muscle-bound Conan-alikes and horned demons. Played on DOS. Ultima V ~ The NPCs had houses! You could harvest their crops! They really went to bed at night (though never complained if they found you sleeping in it)! Played on C 64.

Archon ~ most conveniently described as a chess-inspired strategy game with one-on-one combat and unicorns, goblins, banshees and other such mythological critters. Terribly good game, almost managed to feel more ancient-in-a-good-way than chess itself. If I ever wanted a coffee table with a built in video game, this would be it. Played on Atari 600/800XL, C 64, Amiga. Dunno if the remakes are any good.

(Net-)Hack. Played on DOS, Amiga, Windows, Linux, Psion...

Moonsweeper and Beamrider ~ I never really understood why those weren't the most popular VCS games... 3D-looking 2D shooters, one smooth and pretty, the other confined to a grid not entirely unlike Tempest and with a growing number of enemies to predict, evade or shoot. Both quite atmospheric. Played on Atari 2600 and 7800.

Many "adventures", by which I used to mean "text adventures". In fact text adventures were among the first computer games I ever saw and I was fascinated by the freedom they seemed to grant the player: you could go where you want and issue any command you could think of. Neither was the case, but I had never used a computer before, was generally impress

Found these both on digg...
this one boasts making the dead pixels alive again....
http://udpix.free.fr/
this one is for ghosting....
http://www.beginnercode.com/index.php/2005/11/16/l cd-ghost-remedy/

For what it's worth, the Nintendo DS is cracked wide open and people are writing all sorts of fun homebrew for it. (And although this emulator is a favorite, games like this one are also a big hit.)

"Qemu may not run as fast as vmware does now but it's here, it's free and you can change whatever you want about it. The same is not true for vmware"

Well, to be entirely fair, that's because they do two different things. Qemu does CPU emulation, VMWare does virtualization. There is a module for QEMU that implements direct code execution (on x86 at least), but as per its webpage here, it is a "free to use, but it is a closed source proprietary product," so you can't exactly 'change whatever you want about it'.

-Frank

iCab 3 passes the test. See http://vric.free.fr/mac/iCab/iCab3b/ (includes other browser's screenshots as well).

Curent Trunk buids of Firefox (and other Gecko browsers) are getting real close. Here's a screenshot: http://www.flickr.com/photos/11294384@N00/93741157 /. This one was taken with Camino, but Firefox' rendering should look just like this.

Use qemu to run wine and emulate x86.
See http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-doc.html# SEC49 for more information on running the qemu userspace emulator with wine.

...WoW Cartographe. French-made tool with fabutastic feature set.

Six Months? How about right now. OpenOSX has released their "Wintel" package updated for MacOS X on Intel. It features the BOCHS 'emulator' that will run all manner of Windows, Linux, etc. MacNN has the scoop It's $25 to download.

Bochs? It's great if you want a full, perfect emulation of PC hardware done completely in software, but it's horribly slow. Oh, and it's both free and open source - that $25 is solely for some crappy third-party GUI. The 'native to Intel' thing just means you're doing a full PC emulation without going through Rosetta as well...

If you do want to emulate a PC in a slightly faster manner, try QEMU. I've no idea if it can be compiled on an Intel-powered Mac yet, but an emulated Windows 98 was just about usable for website testing on my 933MHz iBook G4.

There are several ways to do this, with varying levels of stability and performance.

QEMU will run Linux, BSDs, and Windows, from either Windows or Linux.
Colinux will run linux from Windows XP. I'm not sure what the latest Fedora Image for it is, but I run a 2.6 kernel based Gentoo build from XP frequently (for that nethack fix).

I'm not sure either is suitable, but i would recommend looking at them, as they are both interesting projects, if not immediately useful to you.

Go to this site and take a look. If you're a nerd for Linux, no problem. You grok this and get it done.

If not, well... imagine having to force Windows XP users who have never been without a GUI to compile XP programs and drivers and patches at the DOS command prompt. Nightmare. If you don't think so, you obviously never worked desktop support in a corporation or for home users. The majority may be whizzes at day trading, welding, cooking, whatever they do for a job, but they largely suck flat out at figuring this stuff out.

I have to reinstall my cam drivers every time I upgrade my kernel. I can do this. Worth it to experiment. But that is all it really is right now. Until the major vendors start porting webcam related features to their Linux releases, it is for nothing as far as adoption by less 7337 people is concerned. Yahoo IM would be a good start.

No, open source projects would not be better. Most of these have next to no adoption among those welders, cooks, day traders, etc. who are likely to be OUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. Do you not want to ever speak with them on webcam? Fine. Use Linux and Open Source while they use Windows and we'll remain two separate camps. The more day to day applications we have in common, the less the difference, the easier to adopt more and more *nix style things and the less tied they will be to Windows.

Upon installtion on my PC, it tried to disguise the addresses it connected to. Specifically : 192.168.112.207.net

See the full story at http://jc.coynel.free.fr/serendipity/

I use FC4. I *do* use four GNOME or GTK apps most of the time -- gkrellm, firefox, xmms, and sawfish.

But these are not really bad programs. There isn't really much by way of good competition for any of these. I don't run the "GNOME Desktop", and Fedora does not force you to do so. Just create a .xsession, and have it start your window manager. Use xbindkeys to launch programs. Hey, presto -- no icons on your desktop, no GNOME bar.

DAR sounds like a cool utility. Do you know of something similar for my Windows boxes?

--Lance

You might be interested in the perception of bounties in some bigger projects.

Once, Aaron Seigo writes about why he sees bounties with scepticism, also referring to a $30,000 Gimp Bounty gone awry.
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/11/mutiny-on-bount y.html

And the original article by Dave Neary detailing what went wrong.

http://dneary.free.fr/gimp_bounties.html

Obviously it's not that easy to support F/OSS, especially not by offering bounties.

I personally prefer gmusicbrowser, still a bit young, but a lot of nice ideas, and great for big collections.

I suggest This book and cd.

However this is only 1% of what you need. The other 99% is the actual drive to learn and study it EVERY DAY. When you take language classes in college (a good way to learn a foreign language in my opinion) you initially go 1 hour every day for a semester (about 18 weeks). That covers about 1/2 the language. The second semester covers the second half. That is approx 18 weeks X 5 days X 1 hour. This doesn't include time studying for tests and vocab quizes. I'd say I average about 3 hours studying a week in my current language class in addition to class time. That makes it 18 X 5 X 1 (90 hours) + 3hours X 18 weeks (54 hours studying outside class) or a total of 144 hours for 1 semester. If you want to get the grammar down and have a good knowledge doubling this is a good guess. 288 Hours.

Now you may need more than me because I already speak 4 languages. After you've learned a second the subsequent ones are easier. My grammar comprehension is better in all my foreign languages and my spelling is better too (too much cheating on spelling tests in middle school I guess).

Here's a bonus to Spanish. The grammar is very similar to French, Italian, Portuguese and of course it's base of Latin. Once you learn spanish these are easy to pick up.

What you should do (in my opinion) without taking formal classes:
1. Buy the CD/Book. (Online is WAY cheaper than in the store)
2. Plan to study 1 hour a day at least (M-F) hell you can do it while working out if you want to get really healthy too (that's when I do about half my vocab studying)
3. Once going through the book start translating an article a day from a foreign newspaper.
4. Then start recording your conversations and translating them real-time in your head to your new language.
5. Picture Salma Heyek as your prize. You'll learn for certain then!
6. Find some foreign friends to get beers with... Beers make you more confident in speaking (at least for most people that aren't extraverted freaks like me!).

bonne chance!

They're using Qemu.

Programmers type characters like { } $ ( ) = + more often than the general population. It would be an awesome geek-toy to have a keyboard which promoted these characters to their own keys and relegated those useless squiggles like vowels to Shift-Ctrl combinations ;-).

Your awesome geek-toy already exists! It is the French "azerty" keyboard! :-) Check the layout: azerty.png

{, (, $, etc are accessible by single key-presses, but to type numbers you have to use shift (who uses numbers anyway)

looking at those rules, I really doubt it would ever block something you wanted.

They block a great number of site that talk about ADSL. That's a very classic error French users do, who then go complain that they can't access http://adsl.free.fr/, the homepage of the broadband plan of a major ISP here (and clearly the best for techies who don't have huge wads of money).

Looks like Google is duplicating the efforts of Métro which ALREADY covers over 300 cities all over the world using your PDA (Palm, PocketPC, MS Smartphone, Symbian, others), and i-Métro for WEB, WAP, iMode.

Not only is Métro more mature, it's completely portable/finished/polished product with a large and stable support base.

I've personally used it to great effect plotting subway routes in my vacations to Tokyo, Japan and NYC, New York.

And in tomorrow news :
Jean-Michel Jarre is claiming prior art...

For a newer Mini-ITX that runs DamnSmallLinux, check out the DamnSmallMachine.

This comment by elconde has info on using the Windows key to run programs (short version: use xbindkeys).

First, while this is a personal preference, I use xfce4 for my desktop. It's fast, it's lightweight (relatively) and its infinitely configurable.

Then, download devilspie. This allows you to set up various programs like XMMS and gaim to not show up in your tasklist, pin windows to the screen regardless of desktop, etc, and makes ALT-TAB skip programs.

Then, download xbindkeys, and bind all those extraneous keys most new keyboards have to actual functions. If your system doesn't understand the keys (you're getting setkeycodes messages in /var/log/messages), then man setkeycodes, and map all those keys to something, and make xbindkeys use them to do various things. I have a Microsoft Multimedia keyboard here at work, and I've mapped every key to do something useful. Sleep enables my screensaver, log-off, calculator, messenger, web/home, mail all do what you'd expect, media runs xine, mute, play, stop, volume up and down, next song, and previous song all do what you'd think in xmms, my music runs xmms, my pictures runs gimp, and my documents runs xffm (xfce's file manager.)

Learn (or change so you know) the key combinations for switching desktops, swapping applications, etc.

Put SSH keys on all the servers you normally log into, and put ssh-askpass and ssh-agent into your xinitrc file.

Something I use that I find *INCREDIBLY* useful is:

xmodmap -e "remove lock = Caps_Lock"

Which makes X ignore the caps lock key, because in reality, I *never* use it, and the only time it's on, it's on by mistake, and learning that it's on by accident whilst running vim is *never* fun.

alias su to sudo su, so you only have to enter a password every once in a while.

Map one of your keys on your keyboard (if you don't have a multimedia keyboard, make it a ctrl-key combination of some sort) to xscreensaver-command -lock, and make it a habit to hit that button every time you walk away from your computer, so any logged in root shell is never a problem as far as physical security goes.

Also, if you do a lot of programming, and/or use vim a lot, I've found this function I threw together pretty useful in my .bashrc

if [ "x$DISPLAY" != "x" ];
then
function vim () { /usr/bin/vim.perl -g $@; }
fi

If I type in 'vim', it runs vim.perl (debian package) in X, since vim for x is generally more useful than console.

Also, I've set up my ssh to automatically forward X11 sessions (I only log into hosts I trust) so that if I run vim, and have my bash profile the same on the server I'm logging into, I get pretty graphical vim windows that make proper use of my :set mouse option.

That's all that immediately comes to mind, but it's also 9:25am on Monday.

http://hocwp.free.fr/xbindkeys/xbindkeys.html

Some good ones from my .xbindkeysrc:

"xmms --stop" Mod4 + Up

"xmms --play-pause" Mod4 + Down

"xmms --fwd" Mod4 + Right

"xmms --rew" Mod4 + Left

"emacs" Mod4 + e

"firefox" Mod4 + m

"oocalc ~/aspreadsheet.sxc" Mod4 + c