Slashdot Mirror

That's funny, according to this page :

http://freshmeat.net/stats/

fully 65.74% are under the GPL with an additional 6.53% under the LGPL. If anyone is cutting themselves off from the mainstream it would be BSD and other types of license, it seems :-).

Jeremy.

I'm sure it is widely know, but I thought it would be worth mentioning that if one can acquire the original data files to the Zork games (or other Infocom games), frotz will play them on modern systems and is OSS.

Also, the DOS/Windows incarnations may be found at the Underdogs site.

What about http://freshmeat.net/? Easier to track projects there IMHO... it's where I get some of my greatest tools. Sourceforge is good as well, just trying to spread the love

Cluster Live http://freshmeat.net/projects/thinux/ is an intuitive open source Live CD project for customizing and building Linux system on a bootable ISO image. It is equipped with pre-built Linux ISO image and shell scripting for customization.

5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?

Copyright (c) {year} {copyright holders}

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?

Copyright (c) {year} {copyright holders}

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?

Copyright (c) {year} {copyright holders}

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?

Copyright (c) {year} {copyright holders}

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

I got my numbers of 24436 and 3449 from another page on freshmeat.

So it seems Freshmeat is being ambiguous.

I got my numbers of 24436 and 3449 from another page on freshmeat.

So it seems Freshmeat is being ambiguous.

http://freshmeat.net/stats/

I'm not holding my breath for Mesa to be ported to an SPU but it would be interesting I must say.

You're confusing GPL'd software and GNU software. The GNU toolset (GCC, binutils, etc.) are in a constant state of flux as well, but yes, are pretty much "finished" as they stand now to most people. That said, they're a very small percentage of overall GPL software. Take a look at http://freshmeat.net/ and search by license for GPL or LGPL and you're realize how much software we're dealing with here. List out a full repo listing for Fedora or some such distribution to see how many separately licensed apps are included in a distribution too.

My iRiver H320 is seen by Linux distros as a MSC

And if you want to maintain that database of audio metadata in the root of the filesystem, I wrote a small utility for my H340.

Ask your computer using (non-techie) Mother/sister/brother what's important:
1) No hassle
2) Use **exactly** the same apps as everyone else, pre-installed
3) Cost - under $200 every 3 years
4) Quicken!!!! (the current version, not a 5 yro version)
5) Ms-Office (Open Office doesn't support all the XLS macros)
6) All the apps I want aren't pre-installed.

Seriously, users don't want to be bothered with loading apps and hunting for an app that is the same as what everyone else uses. I guess wine is a good step, but even I with 20+ years C/C++, networking, and architecture - find having Windows is just **easier**. My laptop is windows. My desktops are not.

Notice that security wasn't in the list? Virus, spyware, firewalls aren't mentioned. Picture their face - "why does it have to be so hard?" they ask.

My list of apps mandatory apps: Quicken http://quicken.intuit.com/, Visio http://office.microsoft.com/visio, XLS http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/FX10048762 1033.aspx, and Toolkit 5.x http://www.iclub.com/products/tk5.asp

Besides firefox, thunderbird, VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/, videoredo http://www.videoredo.com/, MovieManager http://freshmeat.net/projects/xmm/, Putty http://freshmeat.net/projects/putty/

Ask your computer using (non-techie) Mother/sister/brother what's important:
1) No hassle
2) Use **exactly** the same apps as everyone else, pre-installed
3) Cost - under $200 every 3 years
4) Quicken!!!! (the current version, not a 5 yro version)
5) Ms-Office (Open Office doesn't support all the XLS macros)
6) All the apps I want aren't pre-installed.

Seriously, users don't want to be bothered with loading apps and hunting for an app that is the same as what everyone else uses. I guess wine is a good step, but even I with 20+ years C/C++, networking, and architecture - find having Windows is just **easier**. My laptop is windows. My desktops are not.

Notice that security wasn't in the list? Virus, spyware, firewalls aren't mentioned. Picture their face - "why does it have to be so hard?" they ask.

My list of apps mandatory apps: Quicken http://quicken.intuit.com/, Visio http://office.microsoft.com/visio, XLS http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/FX10048762 1033.aspx, and Toolkit 5.x http://www.iclub.com/products/tk5.asp

Besides firefox, thunderbird, VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/, videoredo http://www.videoredo.com/, MovieManager http://freshmeat.net/projects/xmm/, Putty http://freshmeat.net/projects/putty/

Why's Photoshop not called Photo-change? You're not shopping for photos, you want to change them, right? And I've never heard of the expression "exploring the internet". I've heard of web surfing though, so why not call it "Internet Surfboard"? And why should I press the Start button if the computer is already started? Oh there's a menu under it then?

In my "K menu" (bottom left corner), tooltip "applications, tasks and desktop sessions", under the "graphics" menu, I have 23 applications one of which is "GIMP image editor". In the "internet" menu, one of the 20 programs is "iceweasel web browser", another "konqueror web browser", another "lynx" (ok that one doesn't say its a web browser). Hmm, maybe the KDE people should have called them "web surfer" instead of "web browser", as well.

My point is: if someone has a good idea (like you with those descriptive names), it tends to slowly percolate to the top, and a few years later most distributions of Linux have it, except for those that think it's a stupid idea :-). I can't keep up with the weekly progress on large distributions such as Debian, and they're only packaging the stuff (mostly). When I think of my perception of "Linux" I'm probably already behind the times and ignorant of what some people a few continents away are innovating right now :-). It's more like an ecosystem than like a single organism.

I think that if you're coming from the Windows world, it's difficult to see the tremendous growth and improvement that goes on in the Linux world. The stats page on freshmeat lists almost 43000 projects. Debian Etch has over 18000 packages (many programs span multiple packages). Can you imagine how much software that is? I haven't even read that many books in my life.

Conclusion: if you think Linux sux right now, try again in a few years. Who knows what it'll have evolved and expanded into by then. Maybe it will even be less out of touch with normal users ;-)

Nice. I was going to suggest RCS with rsync for centralization by hostname.
Combine this with http://freshmeat.net/projects/linuxsysteminfo/ System Info or something similar and life is good.

Config files aren't all you need. Those pesky customized startup scripts and custom kernel builds are also important.

A little clicking around in the GP's link renders the following: "If it's MPL *only*, you'll have to reject if it's targetted for main. If, like firefox and friends, it's multi-licensed, then it's fine." Also, this: "It is, in fact, not distributable as an executable by Debian."

I'm not involved in Debian, but that's a pretty resounding set of rejections. If you read the whole thread (here, find "MPL") you can see one or two dissenting opinions, but the "reject" option does seem to be the consensus view. And since BugZilla is MPL-only, it looks like distributing it as a binary will not be an option for Debian maintainers.

One thing I'm not sure about is whether Debian can go ahead and distribute the source. This would be a PITA for developers, but it's better than nothing.

I've been using Strip (Secure Tool for Remembering Important Passwords) for years on Palm. It keeps your passwords in an AES encrypted palm database with a master password. I like it over other PC-based password managers because I know that whether I sit down in front of a Windows, Linux, or Mac machine, I'll always be able to get at my passwords.

If so...

1) An open source WoW server emulator. I could do a number of things with that; tweak the AI and make bots for WSG/partying, migrate it to postgresql if that's never been done, (I don't think WoW does run on postgres) and maybe make some new material if I had 3d studio max. Someone else said the Diablo Battle Chest; I'd *maybe* go with D1, but WoW is everything D2 is and more.

2) UT 99 with level editor, and offline copies of this, this, and this site.

3) GTA: San Andreas.

4) Another interesting game-related project if I could learn enough would be a truly decent 3D front end for Nethack. This could possibly serve as a base, but I'd make a lot of graphical alterations.

FWIW, if you remove the "_thumb" from the url you end up with a legible version.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/brutalfm/

Done.

Did you look at FSVS http://freshmeat.net/projects/fsvs? Might do what you need - snapshots your system using a subversion repository. And allows for multiple users - like every subversion repository.

here is another screenshot.

> However, sudo eject does. What's funnier is that the Eject button works for DVDs, and I presume music CDs.
> Data CDs, however, are a pain. I would have figured that a DVD would mount like a normal data disc.

Only data CDs get mounted, Video DVDs are read directly without any kernel-level filesystem involved.
But, nowadays "Linux" (I actually think it was Ubuntu specifically, but might have been SuSE) should be able to detect via software that your pressed the eject button and just call eject.
I think there is even a dialog box to kill any applications that still use the CD.
If all of that does not work for you and really annoys you, you could also do "cat 0 > /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/lock", but that might have some not-so-nice side-effects ;-)
And maybe look here, too: http://freshmeat.net/projects/autoejectcdrom/

12 Gb of _relational_ database falls under "nothing to see, move along". But Essbase http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essbase is doing OLAP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLAP , which means that data is pre-aggregated across multiple _hierarchies_ . Those 150 users are likely the top management looking at the revenue, or reviewing the budget.
In Open Source land there are similar projects: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=olap&section=projec ts

You are asking the wrong question. What you should be asking is for tools that will tell you the disc is suffering from bitrot before it becomes unreadable.

These tools exist. I have run across them. Unfortunately, they only work on certain model drives that have the ability to report internal measurements.
Qpxtool supports about 45 drives from 8 manufacturers. Qpxtool measures recoverable and unrecoverable errors (PI/PIF), Jitter/Beta, FE/TE (Focus Error/Tracking Error).
http://qpxtool.sourceforge.net/

pxlinux was similar, however they got threatening letters and/or lawsuits from the company that makes plextools (parent company of plextor).
PXscan/PXview runs under windows (pxlinux is a port of PXscan/PDview), had the same problem.
Qpxtool doesn't seem to have the same problem.

Nero appears to have some sort of disk quality test.
Windows software for testing before your record (FE/TE): http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=192488

Here is another program that might work on any drive but may not report there is a problem as early. It times how long the drive takes to read each sector.
If the drive has to reread a sector, that takes longer. Some drives reportedly either read full speed or fail (probably means they don't have any retries).
http://freshmeat.net/projects/cdck/

dvdisaster records additional recovery information. The author was apparently able to recover data from a disk after carrying it around in a backpack
with no sleave. It records one ECC block per 223 sectors and can tolerate up to 32 read errors per block. The error correction files can be stored
on separate media (it looks like one disk could store ECC information for a couple hundred disks).
http://dvdisaster.sourceforge.net/en/

I have also noticed (on some damaged discs from a friend) that the dd program stops when there is a read error but the sdd program has the option to retry.

Record your data to multiple disks (preferably different brands) using the exact same ISO image (burn the same image multiple times or copy your disk) and store them in different locations. This gives you a form of software raid. If someone hasn't already written it, it would not be hard at all to write a program that will
read a disk to an ISO image on the hard drive, retrying bad sectors and recording a list of sectors it was unable to read. Then try to read those missing sectors from a different disc. A more sophisticated version might ask the drive to return the data even in the event of a CRC error and do majority rules for each byte
of the sector across three or more source disks. For added protection, use different brand drives to record the disks.

Deterioration reportedly tends to start on the outside of the disk, so if you only record half a disks worth of data it may last longer. Or use dvdisaster.

Levels of deterioration:
- Detectable only by reading internal parameters from the drive
- Drive can read the sector after multiple tries (detectable from timing)
- Drive gives up but you may be able to issue multiple read commands and get the data
- Permanent failure. May still be able to get data if you have recorded redundant info using a tool like dvdisaster
- so many read errors, or damaged lead in, such that full recovery is impossible

As far as the original problem of protecting films, I would consider the following:
- Use archival quality single layer DVD+/-R media.
One example: http://www.verbatim.com/optical/archival/ (about $1.50 each)
- Use a drive

If you want a "new" authentication method check out Enigform and mod_auth_openpgp which implements OpenPGP Signing of HTTP requests, which enables identity and data authentication, makes the whole user/password approach old age.

Not only that, in a world where banner ad companies can get infected with trojans the idea of people only getting infected if they're doing something "shady" on their machine is utterly absurd.

I've seen that too many times to count. In fairness, though, the times I've seen it has not been with major ad companies, but rather more "shady" advertising companies. However, that doesn't mean that the user was doing anything "shady," and yes, the assertion that they must have been doing that is absurd.

I suggest people check out Privoxy.

I used to check out http://freshmeat.net/ almost daily, but that was when I was only a few years into Linux and still on an endless search for software that did different things, and at the time it seemed simpler to just wait and see what came up on fm every day (you could easily tell how active things were that way, too). Speaking of fm---does anyone have a copy of that old butchered-meat logo fm used to have, waaaay back, before the beginning of the fm II theme?

About weekly, I'll check out http://amasci.com/ (amateur science and electricity stuff), http://en.wikipedia.org/ (duh), http://www.cray-cyber.org/ (free supercomputer access), http://www.hpcalc.org/ (HP48/49/etc calculator stuff), etc., to check for new stuff. I'll check my http://facebook.com/ and http://myspace.com/orangesquid (shuddup) messages about weekly. From time to time I might browse http://www.amazing1.com/ (catalog which has Tesla coils and stuff, though they're not actually the best place for parts/kits/devices) or search for scientific equipment or old unix systems on http://www.ebay.com/ (see the Used SGI Buying Guide FAQ, etc).

I also check up on some of my friends via http://os.livejournal.com/friends every few days.

Lately I've been choosing a new section on http://scitoys.com/ to read every few days. Every few weeks, I'll usually find a different information-type site to read through gradually, or pick a topic to research on wikipedia.

I hit the occasional online comic once in a while (too lazy to add URLs): Sinfest, Order of the Stick, & Penny Arcade.

Google is the launching point for 95% of my other online time, helping me find pages on stuff I'm researching.

There is already an experimental search module that does what you describe - though it searched images in your hard drive only. I remeber seeing it advertised in /. a couple of years ago. Its accuracy leave something to be desired but it worked as proof of concept. The program was open source, I'm sure it'll still be available at freshmeat. Look for image galleries software, you'll find it there (I think it was either KMRML or imgSeek). Now it even has a web version.

I have set up and supported remote sites and home based telecommuting. Listen to my advice, listen very carefully and save your sanity.

If your organization is large enough then it is likely that you will have a few older desktop PCs that have been or are due for replacement during an upgrade cycle. PCs that are inadequate for Microsoft XP and Office2003 are more than powerful enough for many current versions of Linux, especially for the role of server. Also second hand PCs with the required specifications are very cheaply acquired.

1) Find an older PC, at least a PII 300 with 256 MB memory, to set up as a headless ( no display or keyboard ) server and firewall. A simple web based interface ( or even an external hardware push button ) can be used by the local users to start/stop the server and internet connection. All other maintenance should be handled remotely via ssh, webmin and VNC.
2) Install a second NIC or connect the modem directly to the server. Connection to the Internet should be through the server and connection to the Office should be through a VPN on the server. Use a dynamic IP service for each site so you can remotely log on to the local server via ssh.
3) Install a new IDE hard drive in a 3.5" removable rack and tray. The drive should be than big enough for the operating system (Linux of course) and copies of some of the local desktop partitions. A telecommuter can shut down the server and bring in the drive during the day to resync and repair.
4) Install a DHCP demon on the local server to allocate local IP addresses, DNS and gateway settings. If the desktops are network boot capable then install TFTP to remotely boot and use Knoppix via PXE and the network. If the desktop OS is constantly crashing, or is infected by malware, the user can select PXE/network boot via the BIOS, and boot into Knoppix. The user can then be instructed over the phone to enable the ssh server to allow remote scan,repair and reimaging of the desktop partitions. The user can use the Knoppix desktop to continue working with full access to files while the the remote administrator fixes/reimages the drive in the background.( Consider hiring someone who knows how to customise Knoppix or another live Linux system for your setup )
5) Partition the desktops with as small as required C: partition ( or in the case of Linux the root partition ) for software. When software is install, use dd and netcat via live Knoppix to copy/clone a snapshot of the partition to the server. You can allocate the remaining free space as a persistent partition where documents are stored.
6) Install and enable remote VNC service on all the platforms, but only allow incoming connections from the local server ( which is redirected over a SSH tunnel ).
7) For local backup, create share directories on the desktop accessible by the server. On the local server create loopback encrypted file systems, unmount and copy the images to the desktops shares in chunks, using redundancy if enough space is available on the desktops. Checksum ( MD5 is enough ) each piece.
8) If the network load to the Office is taking up all the available internet bandwidth or the connection is just too slow then install proxy servers on the local server. You can also consider using a distributed filesystem ( OpenAFS is still the best ) wi

I suggested that if Linux wants to become more mainstream and convert average users that it might want to make that transition more seamless than what it currently is by making its initial interface with the user

How close to Windows do you mean? My point was actually not so much that user-friendliness is something that I have a problem with, but more that if we don't insist on the interface being identical to Windows, it might be possible to find an interface design that is actually even easier to use than Windows' has been. KDE has introduced a few interesting innovations in that regard, but they've only been able to do so by being unafraid to deviate from the Windows model somewhat.

the opposite occurs when you can't get Linux to set standards for what the desktop experience will be like, but it leaves it to distros and unregulated projects.

That is UNIX design philosophy. It has existed for a long time, and it exists for a valid reason. There's an explanation of that particular issue here if you're interested. The linked article is written by Jim Gettys, one of the principle designers of the X Window system, on which the Linux desktop is of course based.

Also, standards do exist, but nobody really adheres to that particular one anywayz because it incorporates a couple of fairly silly ideas. It also, now that I look at it, fairly egregiously violates the Single UNIX Specification.

the guerrilla war against the Borg known as Microsoft is and has been at a stalemate for a number of years.

Fear of Microsoft is used as a motivation for far too many things where Linux is concerned, IMHO. As Linus once said, fear and/or hatred are never motivations that produce good programming work.

Microsoft as a company are going to die purely due to their own missteps...it'll happen as naturally as the sun rising. That is not something which Linux users or developers need to continue to worry about, and we shouldn't.

Oggify was designed to handle flac to mp3 or ogg conversion in bulk, while preserving the tags. I've been happy with it (not that I'm biased or anything), and so have a number of other people. It's open source, free, and in Perl.
You should try it.

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

You could bookmark the debian package-of-the-day page, or you could bookmark this freshmeat page, which takes you to a random project. If you use other OSes in addition to Linux, the freshmeat one might be more useful. Freshmeat also has ratings, user comments, etc.

I don't know what FLOSS stands for.

But there might be open source projects which would do what you need...

http://freshmeat.net/ and http://www.sf.net/ are good places to start.

This question has come up once or twice before.

The usual suspects for answers to this question are as follows:

NorthStar, which is quite feature rich. "NorthStar is a system to help track and allocate blocks in an IP Network"

IPplan which is another open source product.

And PHPip

If you want to go commercial VitalQIP Enterprise could suit your needs quite well.

Berny

"Traditional" asteroid hunts are EXPENSIVE.

Why don't they make use of open source software? Sasteroids is free.

Basically you're talking about running tsclient on some Linux distro. Since you don't care about local capabilities, pick the lightest and fastest booting distro using the lightest window manager, or no window manager at all. Tsclient will run in full screen mode, so on a LAN it will feel pretty much like Windows.

Awkwardness will set in at the intersection of the remote world and local resources: while local storage (e.g. USB flash drives to take out/bring in data) may not be a big issue, printers sooner or later end up being a real PITA. Networked printers can work well enough (even though you tend to see all the company printers available, which in a larger installation can be A LOT), but local printers can be a pain and get you back into the customized client situation. It gets even worse with other peripherals like scanners, which can lead to a lot of compatibility issues with remote software trying to access a local scanner.

Indeed. It can be quite helpful in reviews of you actually provide a somewhat detailed definition, at the beginning, for what you're talking about, rather than assuming everyone has heard of it. Calling it a "static analyzer" only makes me think of balloons with hair stuck to them. And, "The first chapter is the mandatory introduction... Nothing unusual there," is simply ironic, given its absence here.

Freshmeat says, "PMD is a Java source code analyzer. It finds unused variables, empty catch blocks, unnecessary object creation, and more. It includes CPD, a tool to detect chunks of identical code."

Although I'm not sure if any of that is comparable to what's obtained by peer code review.

No, neither am I, but I do make the claim that I probably know and use more obscure-but-useful packages for Linux than anyone else alive. I also make the claim that that obscurity is often precisely because nobody has thought of listing the packages anywhere, and not because of the quality of the package. When I ran FOLK - which Debian carried - I virtually doubled the kernel's size for the purpose of showcasing what people were missing. I can't tell you if I made any impact on the kernel by doing so, but I can tell you that there were more people aware such patches existed afterwards than before.

The same goes with software packages. Google is OK, but it's hard to find some of these packages - I call them Open Secret Source - and Debian's information (when a package exists) is limited. Sure, there's a lot of crap on Freshmeat, but you soon learn how to filter it out. Sure, there are un-updated records on Freshmeat, though I've occasionally had brain convulsions serious enough to try to go through and clean those up. Really, what is needed (IMHO) is a professionally-maintained dictionary of quality products, which is always current (to within a week or two) and properly screened to ensure that the software is any good at what it does. Such indexes exist for Windows, but are usually pretty pathetic, but none that I know of exist for Linux. We've got the voluntary system only, which means quality will always be unknown and incompleteness will always be guaranteed.

Or you could just read the front page of Fresh Meat. They show many projects a day, some kind of obscure.

Depending on your hardware, try FreeBSD. VLC works a treat via ports, and installs a heap of codecs as well. Granted, the Open Sound System perhaps isn't quite as nice as ALSA, but it offers perfectly good stereo, and there are actually a number of sound filters available for XMMS at least which do various different things, so if you want something that boosts volume or cleans sound up in some way, you can probably get that from ports too.

I wouldn't bother with Samba, personally...use FTP. You can put an ftpd on the Windows box, make the directories you want accessible, and then do a batch wget from the Linux/FreeBSD box to transfer whatever files you need over. If you need to send files the other way, there are any number of GUI ftp clients for Linux or FreeBSD available; either search here for Linux or here for FreeBSD.

Until Linux frees itself from the horrible terminal/command line dependencies, eliminates text files for configuration (how the heck is the average joe supposed to know which one of hundreds of config files he needs to edit just to connect a network drive??)

What do you advocate as a replacement? The Registry? ;) The Registry uses text in places...the DWORD is actually an assembler variable...but it also uses a lot of non-text and is completely non-transparent in places. There are good reasons why UNIX (and hence Linux) uses text config files...you can read about those here if you want.

Your problem wasn't text config files...it was knowing which transfer protocol to use for what you want.

Also realise that Microsoft created the interoperability problems themselves...it's very convenient...first they make something completely closed and proprietary, and then they can use their obviously greater level of familiarity with their own system to make it marginally more workable with Linux.

Unfortunately, things like DRM which people talk about so much on here go hand in glove with people wanting Windows to do everything for them. If you willingly surrender self-responsibility to Microsoft, they're going to use that power to make some bad decisions...it's human nature. You can't reasonably expect them to give you something which works without you investing any effort at all on the one hand, and not have them include things with it which are actively harmful to you on the other. I realise that is going to sound self-righteous, condescending, and offensive...but unfortunately, it's also true.

If you want a system which does what you want, and only what you want, you're going to have to accept some responsibility, and do some work...that isn't Linux's fault. It's simply that you've got used to having most things done for you on the one hand, but also being abused on the other.

fusesmb mounts the "network neighborhood" in a folder and works in userspace, and of course Thunar can access it. And all other apps, too.

If you're willing to take the time to learn how to use it, a tracker can be amazingly flexible, and you can do quite a lot with one.

For Linux, there's (among plenty others, these are just the most prominent ones) MilkyTracker, ChibiTracker (which is the successor to Cheese Tracker), and -- don't mind if I spam my own program :) -- Schism Tracker.