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The UI kinda sucks. But if you want one that doesn't a very similar project is Celestia.

I wrote myself a little SMS -> LiveJournal gateway. The script idles behind an email address on my box and knows that any messages from my cellphone email address to its address should be punted through JLJ which updates LiveJournal.

Kinda lame, but its neat to update my LJ from the center of DisneyLand from the cellphone.

I'll second the recommendation for "The Practice of System and Network Administration". It's the only book of its kind; independent of specfic platforms or technologies, and it stresses the six key principles of systems design and support practices: simplicity, clarity, generality, automation, communication, and the basics.

The slashdot review is here, and the freshmeat.net review is here

Where this book falls short in details (ie: exact policy wording, exact technical details of an issue, etc...), it gives you solid references to goto to get the details.

This book should really be required reading for anyone thinking of going into (or already in) systems administration. I've got 7 years in the field, and this book is still teaching me a thing-or-two.

And no, I dont get any kickbacks for this recommendation...

Which is why one should check with Freshmeat first.

Usually, when there's an article that clearly does not belong to Slashdot, you can easily spot the relationship between what was "marketed" and OSDN/VA software, so what's the connection in this case?? :) Oh, I found it, took just a bit longer: pyDDR.... you were just waiting for someone to link to OSDN, right? So there you are!

Debian has an approach to this that I appreciate and think is a good start - debconf. It's not as nice as having a unified file format layout, but it's also not as restrictive and allows people to choose the format that suits them best. For example, Python programs no doubt are more likely to use the format that is understood by its ConfigParser module instead of some other obscure format. If there were unified language support for a common parseable format (SGML/XML anyone? I think it is the closest), then I think it'd be easier to switch to as system described in this Freshmeat article from last February.

I've found that this works quite nicely for tracking memory usage. Doesn't check for over runs etc but is pretty flexible and makes spotting leaks/double free etc very easy (which is pretty much all i use boundschecker for in win32...) its GPL too and nice and simple to look at... cheers.

The Seattle Times link says he put his code into the public domain, but the freshmeat link says the code is subject to the MIT/X consortium license. So what's the issue here?

Don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but I use vcr.
Along with cron and a simple shell script, that's pretty much all you need.

MPlayer www.mplayerhq.hu can play pretty much anything if you run on x86 and the version about to be released even plays real media.

I use asfrecorder or asfr+ try this mirror for recording streaming programmes like from www.byutv.org

I believe mplayer will record from tv cards

But... you might want to join openmovie which aims to make a complete media system based on some of the above components

When you have questions like these never underestimate searching freshmeat.net

Try mp3mover (http://freshmeat.net/projects/mp3mover/?topic_id= 861%2C114).

You (and all those who come after you) would find it significantly easier if you simply did:

/sbin/chkconfig --del nfslock
/sbin/chkconfig --del portmap

Any Red Hat Linux since release 5.0 (1997, five years ago) has /sbin/chkconfig. And any Red-Hat-derived distribution has it as well. And if you have something else and prefer to use chkconfig, look for it on Freshmeat.

Geez, folks, it doesn't have to be that complex.

Yikes! Links make it a lot easier for people to figure out what's going on!

"A year ago, there seemed to be two promising Linux HA [high availability] frameworks--along with lots and lots of experimental things: SGI's FailSafe, and Kimberlite from Mission Critical Linux. The FailSafe software website now seems very out of date, although the mailing list remains active, and there seems to be forward momentum. On the other hand, Redhat seems to have forked the development of Kimberlite, calling the fork Redhat Cluster Manager. They don't seem to be making development source available, at least to the public. Are these two projects still relevant? What's the current status of Open Source HA?"

Try also linux-ha.org and open cluster

GNU Phantom.Security

Freshmeat Category Software Development :: Version Control.

How are they preventing you from saving it?

As you mentioned, they're doing streaming HTTP, which Real won't save, and they have some very good techs who have made it as difficult as possible to connect with a non-Real client.. (I'm sure it's possible, but I gave up on that route)

it wouldn't be that hard to record the stream on a network level. As I understand it, you can rig squid to cache realplayer

Yes, this would work, but it would be kind of like using a sledgehammer to swat a mosquito..

A better solution is epoxy, which I used on Movie88 with great success.

I have been able to dub DVDs flawlessly by piping them through an old VCR; no need for the illegal Macrovision bypasser things.

...that the competition was too tough for them? Harden up.

They say that the machine was running a version of Smoothwall linux with Apache running on a non-standard port and a minimum of other services.

Now their complaint is that this does not reflect a real-world situation. What is a real-world situation? A Windows machine running IIS? A default Red Hat install with all firewalling turned off and all services turned on?

I know I wouldn't run Telnet, SMB, Rlogin, Xdmcp and other "please hack me" services on my public webserver. I also would be inclined to put my webserver on a port where hackers wouldn't normally look. It's just common sense.

I thought the purpose of a hacking contest was to say "Here's a machine we think is unbreakable, now go break it". These jokers seem to be saying "hey, you've made it unbreakable, what gives?" I somehow get the feeling that kill9 and m0rla have missed the point.

(btw, anything related to Smoothwall should be avoided at all costs)

Could you offer documentation, please?

How do projects like gv, Multivalent and xpdf (among others) manage?

Could you offer documentation, please?

How do projects like gv, Multivalent and xpdf (among others) manage?

Could you offer documentation, please?

How do projects like gv, Multivalent and xpdf (among others) manage?

Hmm, from freshmeat, it looks like the new version even has graphics support now :/ . Oh well :P . Give it a shot!

dillo was the only graphical browser I could ever get running on a 486/33Mhz with 16MB RAM (mozilla 0.8 ran, but swapped too much to be usable). Actually, come to think of it, Opera (5.x?) didn't work too bad either.

Hmm, from freshmeat, it looks like the new version even has graphics support now :/ . Oh well :P . Give it a shot!

dillo was the only graphical browser I could ever get running on a 486/33Mhz with 16MB RAM (mozilla 0.8 ran, but swapped too much to be usable). Actually, come to think of it, Opera (5.x?) didn't work too bad either.

I'm sorry. I must have typed the wrong URL into my browser.

Wait, no. This is Slashdot, not Freshmeat. You know, News for Nerds? Stuff that matters?

If I wanted to know about the latest linux software updates, I'd go to a site about... well... linux software updates.

Slashdot is not Freshmeat. Please do not treat it as such.

We're not going to pop over to freshmeat and download the latest VB4Debian

Oh yes you are. GNOME Basic is an environment compatible with many applications written in the Visual Basic programming language.

On a related note, if you're looking for a sound editor, check out GNUsound. I wrote it myself so it must be good :)

• Berlin Consortium
• QTopia
• PicoGUI
• Relevant Freshmeat Trove
• Google's Linux specific engine results

I've started using Autopkg, but does anyone else have any more autoupgrade programs for Slackware? Also, what distros use BSD inits and which use System V inits?

Retail stores need an equivalent of K12 Linux for POS systems. If it is easy enough businesses will adopt it. Using something "like" LinuxPOS this could be done. In fact I am sure there has to be something like this already out there. There are all-in-one systems, like Beetle POS, but this is not open source.

You can chat on Ka[a]za[a]?

Yeah, at least that's what my roommate told me (he uses Kaazza) From what he said it doesn't sound too useful as you could only talk to someone who owns a specific file.

However, there are P2P systems that have IRC like chat channels and Usenet like messaging. The Circle is one.

The world needs one full-assed solution, not 400 half-assed solutions. That's the eternal problem with free software / open source development. Quit bickering about which one is better and which one to use; pick one, stick with it, and get it done.

I absolutely agree with you. I get so discouraged when I run into things like the 90 items listed under "Window Managers" on Freshmeat, and not a one of 'em especially useful.

That's the problem with the current state of open source development. Rather than putting 10,000 brains on one project, you put one brain each on 10,000 projects. Net result: almost zero result for a vast amount of work.

Maybe the only way to get programmers organized is to get a bunch of them in one place and wrap a company around them.

The real cost is more than the OS for each machine on a network. You want to have a print, intranet, or file server? You pay per-seat for a Client Access License (CAL) as well (about $350/20 depending on quantity for corporate, ~$180/20 for academic licenses). This adds up fast.... And while it is not half, it ends up being more than a couple hundred bucks once you get exchange, office, dev tools, a proxy server, and all of the other things they can bill you for on $600 worth of hardware.

From a development platform, the Java IDE's out there are quite good for young student level programmers. The thing that nearly killed me in college was vi/emacs before I could even start coding. Seems each TA had a differing opinion on which was better. Wimper... Tools like nedit go a long way to help newbies edit text rather than learn platforms. Sun's IDE, Eclipse, and a few others are pretty polished IDE's for the initial training.

The real cost is more than the OS for each machine on a network. You want to have a print, intranet, or file server? You pay per-seat for a Client Access License (CAL) as well (about $350/20 depending on quantity for corporate, ~$180/20 for academic licenses). This adds up fast.... And while it is not half, it ends up being more than a couple hundred bucks once you get exchange, office, dev tools, a proxy server, and all of the other things they can bill you for on $600 worth of hardware.

From a development platform, the Java IDE's out there are quite good for young student level programmers. The thing that nearly killed me in college was vi/emacs before I could even start coding. Seems each TA had a differing opinion on which was better. Wimper... Tools like nedit go a long way to help newbies edit text rather than learn platforms. Sun's IDE, Eclipse, and a few others are pretty polished IDE's for the initial training.

Hmm. Have you tried this on their _latest_ Unix client? It sure didn't work for me.

obligatory std::disclaimer: this is version 0.99.17 released just recently on Freshmeat on the 14th of May.

Isn't this what Freshmeat is for?

I asked myself the same question only a few weeks ago. I came to the conclusion that Kapital from theKompany was the best option. You'll probably need KDE and Linux or FreeBSD to run it.

Somewhat ironically, I'm using GnuCash until I can afford to buy it. :-/

Both Kapital and GnuCash claim to be able to import Quicken data files, which is a very handy feature.

Kapital is reviewed here.

Freshmeat also has a brief review that compares many Linux/Unix financial products.

If none of these seems sufficient, maybe Quicken runs under WINE. Has anybody tried doing so?

http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/269/

If you are looking for cheap, maintainable, stable software to replace your current Windows environment, then look into this :

Slackware Linux.
KDE.
OpenOffice (maybe StarOffice or Hancom Office or KOffice).
Mozilla (or maybe Netscape 6 or Opera).
The GIMP.
XMMS.
MPlayer.
GNUCash (or maybe Kapital).
Evolution.
NEdit.

Or if you need anything else, check out Freshmeat.

I have on old hotmail account that gets 100+ pieces of spam a day, and I no longer recieve any personal email to that account. What I've done, is I use Gotmail to download all the email, then pipe it to Razor. I do this every day from a cron job. If every slashdot user set up a hotmail account with a phony name, and ALLOWED the spam to come by not changing thier preferences, this would be a pretty good way to keep Razor, or whatever other spam reporting service you are using current.

I say bring em' on! I'm happy to waste MS's bandwith, and glad to help keep the spam databases current, so those of us running Spamassassin can keep our real email accounts clean.

quite interesting idea. submit it to the creator of the tool mentioned on that site, or to the creator of driftnet (the same thing but on i386):
you can find it here.

maybe a pipe could be set up so that this software will write the jpeg that finds on that pipe, and the screensaver will grab them :)

let me know if you want me to explain it to that guy [the idea is yours :) ]

cheers

Have a look at the GPLed GNU/Linux equal -- Driftnet

Run it on your LAN @ work for some scary results! (i shut it off after 10 minutes, after the pics of cross-dressing-victorian-era-constume-fan pics popped up *shudder*)

I run a online game development business (www.murpe.com) where most of my development and support team are found all around the world (England, India, Russia, Japan), so we had to look at a common place for having meetings and discussions. There are times my adminitrative staff cannot connect to our online games (due to firewall restricts on telnet), so using web interfaces was an option we considered.

Since we are primary an linux-run development business, we found that using phpBB's (www.phpBB.com) web board system we could keep things private and moderated, then we also utilized a few web based project management suites (you can find these through freshmeat.net easier) for delegating tasks and having a calender available to everyone for upcoming milestone meetings and what not. Overall, the web boards/suites allow us near real-time interaction for discussing issues and for working on other problems when they arise.

-- M

We ha d a go and tried the H.323 to ISDN gateway in our company. It worked like a breeze, right out of the box.

We were able to connect M$ Netmeeting directly to the server as well as the minimal phone application for windows (yes there is one avail. at Open H.323 Org).

I am sory to say that calling the communications prgramm under Linux froze my box completely -- it was probably the soundcard. But when I look an the Gnome or KDE application which are available I think Unix users have a good option to participate.

When it comes to Mac I must say I have no access to one, so I cannot verify the availability/functionality of any app for MacOS. I do beleive though that under MacOSX the above Unix versions should run very well ?

When it comes to SIP we do have linphone (Gnome) available as well as a whole rack ot libraries for different languages. All found on Freshmeat Net with the simple query "SIP" .

No idea about MacOS SIP apps, but the same though as above: MacOSX and Gnome ?

The Unix crowd might be interested to note that Yahoo has renewed interest in the Unix clients. An updated version was on freshmeat.net today, this is a 0.99.17 release that supports Linux (RPMs _and_ DEBs), Solaris and FreeBSD. While it doesn't have VoIP just yet (nearly all other features), it does seem fairly certain to do VoIP and Webcam.

Seems like the closest to a true cross platform VoIP app

I had an article on this awhile back ago (toasted like AlaskanUnderachiever's previous four AMD's), but with the site now gone, I can't seem to find it in either google or wayback.

Anyhow, I think it is important that even hardware move over to the open source world. There are three requirements for this to kick off:

An inexpensive system for creating them

Knowledge and understanding of the standards involved

A central repository for updating and dissemination

If a common public utility for creating wafers could come out at fair cost (say, atleast equal to a computer, estimate $800 or so) that would be a major step for the first part. If the group involved at the IEEE for processor standards could freely distribute some or all of the necessary information, similar to as PARC did with POSIX, that would assist in the second. Finally, we would need a FreshMeat equivelant for hardware designs.

Processors are only a beginning...solid state technology, drives and cards would come fast thereafter. Is it an emerging field or something that will remain in the hands of the elite few who actually know the difference between a PSU and an FPU? I can wait you people out...I've been waiting out for the creation of massively distributed Open Source Software before many of you were born!

Unfortunately, Basic (even Visual), is the only best known fortran-like easy language, that allow you quickly create formula-like stuff.
A good idea to promote PHP in schools for that purpose. It uses mostly fortran-like syntax.
BTW, there exists free implementation of substitute for visual basic for linux

These easiest way to get the most out of your 'educational' newsgroups is to get a reader like Pan, which lets you download all new articals+bodiess in all subscribed newsgroups with one command. You can then go and get a cup of tea, or whatever whilst it is busy....

Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.

AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.

Steps in roll-your-own:

Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME
KDE
ROX
foXdesktop
Perltop
Equinox
XFce
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.

If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager.
enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.

Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.

The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.

Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.

Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.

Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.

File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.

Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.

Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!

telnet sitename 80

There's an awful lot of overhead in that one for a protocol you're not even using when you connect it to an HTTP server! Here's a lighter-weight alternative:

nc sitename 80

(What's nc?)

There is, or at least is starting to be. It doesn't seem to have come very far yet.