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If your thinking something like QuickBooks, then you're in luck because these programs already exist. Check out these projects:

Quasar:

http://www.linuxcanada.com/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/quasar/

Compiere:

http://www.compiere.org/

and of course there is GNU Cash:

http://www.gnucash.org/

Tux Paint is sooo much cooler.

Get it? Tux... Penguin... cooler?

sorry...

But I'm going to post it anyway.
What's with all these software announcements lately? So now /. is compeating with Freshmeat?

Why not try out something between Notepad and Vim, see http://freshmeat.net/projects/wyoeditor/. BTW wyoEditor is cross-platform and can be used on Windows, Linux and MacOSX.

easy. go get ratpoison. my work machine runs ratpoison exclusively when I'm doing development. at home when I'm kicked back surfing the web, KDE or OS X are great, but when I want to get some stuff done, ratpoison can't be beat.

centericq + screen FTW

If you have a ISP that allows perl-cgi:s you could easily install OTP, and build a system where you have the files ready to go.

You're right, sorta. The djvu format is better than PDF for scanned books in most respects. Looks better, compresses better (and compresses by default), decompresses + renders faster while using less memory, more easily transformed to/from other formats due to availability of high-quality open source and free tools, etc. The Internet Archive's books collection has several books archived in djvu format.

The downside is that most users do not have a djvu reader installed on their computers, and even though it's trivial to download and install djview for free, most people will not bother. The Internet Archive more or less solves this problem with a java applet which turns users' web browsers into djvu readers. This should work for other content providers as well, except nobody knows about it, so everyone stops at "oh no, nobody has a viewer installed". The end.

On a slightly different note, though, PDF isn't that bad. It's an open format, and even though most people seem to think Acrobat is the only viewer, there are others like xpdf, which is faster, more stable, and easier to use than Acrobat (though not as fully-featured).

-- TTK

OK this "sound" promising
http://freshmeat.net/projects/tuxshop/

But search those links - there seem to be many others.

I am sure you tried all avenues,
but in case you haven't -
Here are two links that may help with your search.

http://www.linux-software.cz/en/
http://www.freshmeat.net/

Too lazy to make a clicky.

Google agrees that Klingon is a real language, but Elvish is pushing it.

(setq exec-path
(nconc exec-path
'(
"/usr/local/bin"
)))
(load-librar y "mailcrypt")
(setq crypt-encryption-type 'gpg)
(require 'crypt++)

Sure, there's LyX, and probably other semi-WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX, but it's not the same.

Have you ever tried texmacs? It is rough but 100% WYSIWYG.

Yeah thats fairly insightful... In for these cases you could use Mindmapping tools.

Since Kdissert http://freshmeat.net/projects/kdissert/ became mature I have not needed to touch a word processor. It is a lot easier to play with the structure of a piece of information in a mind mapping tool than when using a wordprocessor.

I can output everything to Latex, OOo or HTML. The only place I can see myself using a word processor is to pretty up a document for hard copy and thanks to the fact that Kdissert generates styles this job becomes very easy.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/xclip/

Anyways, let us examine the different components and see how far OSS can take us. Maybe it can't go the whole journey, but if it can do some, then a hybrid solution will work.

Open Groupware, SuSE's Open Exchange and OSER will handle the Exchange part, including support for all those MS Exchange clients, such as Outlook.

That just leaves the Active Directories part. ISC's DHCP supports Dynamic DNS. However, you may want to add in DHCP2LDAP to get a good link between DHCP and BIND. OpenLDAP provides the LDAP implementation part. Kerberos and DNS are easy (although some may quibble with my choice of Kerberos version!)

Provided you're not planning on having both MS Active Directory and the above amalgam running, you should then be set to go with a comprehensive Active Directory lookalike which will interact with client systems in the same way Microsoft's software will.

The problem I found is that there's almost no way of getting from a Linux solution -to- Active Directory. If AD is present, it must be a root server, which Linux CAN pull from.

Do I recommend this kind of a setup? Probably not. The Exchange and Groupware stuff should be fine, but the Active Directory stuff isn't as coherent as it could be and I've heard of nobody who has completely replace AD with an Open Source solution, even though from a purely technical perspective it should be possible.

This is a useful list. I've done some EDI too and written an EDI parser (http://freshmeat.net/projects/medici/). It may be that you'll be needing much higher level packages, but a Perl API wrapper works for me.

http://freshmeat.net/project-stats/import-download -stats/53427/

/\Watch the slashdot effect!/\ From 40 hits a day to 280 and rising :)

Checkinstall is your friend. You'll never have to type "make install" again. Instead, run checkinstall at the "make install" stage, and it builds a package for your distro (it handles .rpm, .deb, and .tgz based distros) and installs it. You can then just use your distro's package management tool, in Slack's case pkgtool, to remove it at a later time.

I think it's in the extras directory on the second Slack CD, if memory serves correctly.

I've just finished creating the worlds first working fusion reactor, but hey, whats the fuzz - others have thought of it before me.

So you think an app that maintains a photo gallery is something that hasn't been done a few times? Possibly on every known platform, in every known language, for every known format, both offline and online?

But I see how one might confuse it with a technological breakthrough on the order of a new energy source.

Hey, someone else has had this problem too. Fortunately, free software to the rescue. and this plugin works nicely.

This is where the true support for these formats will remain - open source. If you want support, you have the freedom to write it yourself.

Of course, if memory serves me right non-free Paint Shop Pro still has IFF support as well. Hmmm. This page seems to say so. I seem to remember Photoshop having IFF support, but that was 3.0 or 4.0ish many moons ago onna MacOS classic box.

CheckGMail for X11 (GNU/Linux) http://rss.freshmeat.net/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releas es-global?m=2037 Just an RSS aggregator as another /.er stated.

No.

Try SuSE 9.3

Everything you listed but encrypted DVD's works out of box.

1. Palm sync. Check. (Tested myself, on this system)
2. SD cards. Check. (Tested myself, on this system)
3. Camera. Check. (Tested myself, on this system).

For that, you need a licensed DVD player. Just like on Windows!

You think DVD's play out of box on Windows???

Intervideo makes LinDVD. Cyberlink makes PowerDVD for Linux. Or you can install Ogle, from RPM, from http://unix.freshmeat.net/projects/ogle/.

Either way, you need DVD playback software licensed by the CCA.

Everything, and I mean *everything*, works the same way on Windows.

• HELIX and slashdot article on same
• INSERT
• Knoppix STD
• Local Area Security Knoppix and slashdot article on same
• Security LiveCDs article from IBM Developerworks

For pop3, suggest take a look at http://freshmeat.net/projects/popular/ .
It's open source, scales very well. Easily handles a million pop accounts.

However, an email system takes more than just software. It also requires hardware and good systems people.

A reasonable protection and possible mechanism for GPL propogation that would achieve the end goal of the license. If the biggest patent holders were to agree with it, the only logical course for anyone else not to violate those patents would be to 1) Pay a licensing fee to the holder. Or, 2) Use the same software under GPL thereby gaining protection.

Good chess, I hope something like it is adopted.

The GPL is the most often used open source license by a very large percentage with 10 times the number of projects than the second closest competitor, and that happens to be the LGPL. It will be difficult for corporations to avoid using it as the current patent craze takes hold and goes beyond reason. They'll be taking the medicine even as they're making themselves sick.

= 9J =

|most
http://freshmeat.net/projects/most

I have been using Freshmeat.net for seven or eight years. It is a great place to get open source material. It includes not only sourceforge projects, but other OSS and non-OSS projects as well. The search function seems to work well enough for me to find good solutions to my needs.

Get an account on Freshmeat, so you can sort the results of a query by rating, popularity and vitality.

Stay informed and up-to-date all the time and not only if you've been delegated to a project.

Now, we move onto the portable I/O. The vast majority of scientific software (which is, in turn, the bulk of MPI-based software) uses the Heirarchical Data Format. There are two versions worthy of mention - HDF5 and Parallel HDF. Both support MPI in operations. Compile HDF5 with MPI support, and you have something that will support platform-independent atomic and compound data types.

Of all the options, HDF5 (from the NCSA) is the most widely used. I would say that the majority of scientific and distributed software out there that uses platform-independent typing uses HDF. So does the grid computing system Globus. The other platform-independent complex data typing libraries, CDF (from NASA) and NetCDF (from UniData), are rarely used. Indeed, the next generation of NetCDF - version 4 - will be built on top of HDF5. There's a link to the development site and the source code on Freshmeat.

Less-widely used, but still very significant, is the Transparent Parallel I/O Environment. I am not 100% sure if this supports MPI, it's been a while since I've used it and I never put in the dependencies on Freshmeat for it.

Depending on what is being done, PETSc may also be worth checking out. This supports MPI-based differential equations.

Globus can use MPI for communication and then handle the I/O directly. This means you only have to write your interface for one API, not one API per type of operation. Main problem is that Globus has a fairly large footprint, so you might not want to do that unless the project is large enough to warrant that kind of sophistication.

Now, we move onto the portable I/O. The vast majority of scientific software (which is, in turn, the bulk of MPI-based software) uses the Heirarchical Data Format. There are two versions worthy of mention - HDF5 and Parallel HDF. Both support MPI in operations. Compile HDF5 with MPI support, and you have something that will support platform-independent atomic and compound data types.

Of all the options, HDF5 (from the NCSA) is the most widely used. I would say that the majority of scientific and distributed software out there that uses platform-independent typing uses HDF. So does the grid computing system Globus. The other platform-independent complex data typing libraries, CDF (from NASA) and NetCDF (from UniData), are rarely used. Indeed, the next generation of NetCDF - version 4 - will be built on top of HDF5. There's a link to the development site and the source code on Freshmeat.

Less-widely used, but still very significant, is the Transparent Parallel I/O Environment. I am not 100% sure if this supports MPI, it's been a while since I've used it and I never put in the dependencies on Freshmeat for it.

Depending on what is being done, PETSc may also be worth checking out. This supports MPI-based differential equations.

Globus can use MPI for communication and then handle the I/O directly. This means you only have to write your interface for one API, not one API per type of operation. Main problem is that Globus has a fairly large footprint, so you might not want to do that unless the project is large enough to warrant that kind of sophistication.

Now, we move onto the portable I/O. The vast majority of scientific software (which is, in turn, the bulk of MPI-based software) uses the Heirarchical Data Format. There are two versions worthy of mention - HDF5 and Parallel HDF. Both support MPI in operations. Compile HDF5 with MPI support, and you have something that will support platform-independent atomic and compound data types.

Of all the options, HDF5 (from the NCSA) is the most widely used. I would say that the majority of scientific and distributed software out there that uses platform-independent typing uses HDF. So does the grid computing system Globus. The other platform-independent complex data typing libraries, CDF (from NASA) and NetCDF (from UniData), are rarely used. Indeed, the next generation of NetCDF - version 4 - will be built on top of HDF5. There's a link to the development site and the source code on Freshmeat.

Less-widely used, but still very significant, is the Transparent Parallel I/O Environment. I am not 100% sure if this supports MPI, it's been a while since I've used it and I never put in the dependencies on Freshmeat for it.

Depending on what is being done, PETSc may also be worth checking out. This supports MPI-based differential equations.

Globus can use MPI for communication and then handle the I/O directly. This means you only have to write your interface for one API, not one API per type of operation. Main problem is that Globus has a fairly large footprint, so you might not want to do that unless the project is large enough to warrant that kind of sophistication.

Now, we move onto the portable I/O. The vast majority of scientific software (which is, in turn, the bulk of MPI-based software) uses the Heirarchical Data Format. There are two versions worthy of mention - HDF5 and Parallel HDF. Both support MPI in operations. Compile HDF5 with MPI support, and you have something that will support platform-independent atomic and compound data types.

Of all the options, HDF5 (from the NCSA) is the most widely used. I would say that the majority of scientific and distributed software out there that uses platform-independent typing uses HDF. So does the grid computing system Globus. The other platform-independent complex data typing libraries, CDF (from NASA) and NetCDF (from UniData), are rarely used. Indeed, the next generation of NetCDF - version 4 - will be built on top of HDF5. There's a link to the development site and the source code on Freshmeat.

Less-widely used, but still very significant, is the Transparent Parallel I/O Environment. I am not 100% sure if this supports MPI, it's been a while since I've used it and I never put in the dependencies on Freshmeat for it.

Depending on what is being done, PETSc may also be worth checking out. This supports MPI-based differential equations.

Globus can use MPI for communication and then handle the I/O directly. This means you only have to write your interface for one API, not one API per type of operation. Main problem is that Globus has a fairly large footprint, so you might not want to do that unless the project is large enough to warrant that kind of sophistication.

Where's the CAD/CAM software?

Well, aside from the 43 CAD packages (some free, some open source, some commercial) trivially accessible through freshmeat.net, there is also BRL-CAD, the recently open-sourced CAD software used by the Army Research Laboratory to model and upgrade the Abrams battletank, and other systems.

There is also CAM software available, CNCsr being one example, used for control of CNC (Computer Numeric Control) devices (lathes, mills, routers, plasma cutters, etc).

There are other, highly valid criticisms of this author's thesis, but the lack of engineering tools isn't one of them. The main source of Linux's strength, IMO, is that it is used by professionals (mainly engineers) to get real work done, and this use drives the direction of its development, and the development of the software running on the platform. In many cases, it is the same engineers using the software that develop the software. This naturally results in software which is highly suited to practical everyday (albeit specialized) use.

-- TTK

Where's the CAD/CAM software?

Well, aside from the 43 CAD packages (some free, some open source, some commercial) trivially accessible through freshmeat.net, there is also BRL-CAD, the recently open-sourced CAD software used by the Army Research Laboratory to model and upgrade the Abrams battletank, and other systems.

There is also CAM software available, CNCsr being one example, used for control of CNC (Computer Numeric Control) devices (lathes, mills, routers, plasma cutters, etc).

There are other, highly valid criticisms of this author's thesis, but the lack of engineering tools isn't one of them. The main source of Linux's strength, IMO, is that it is used by professionals (mainly engineers) to get real work done, and this use drives the direction of its development, and the development of the software running on the platform. In many cases, it is the same engineers using the software that develop the software. This naturally results in software which is highly suited to practical everyday (albeit specialized) use.

-- TTK

So graphical tools are good for this problem-space, depending upon your needs.

Here're two projects inspired by Microsoft Journal:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/jarnal/

http://www.adebenham.com/gournal/

Depending on your needs, you might find a drawing program of use --- I use Futurewave SmartSketch (old PenPoint program ported to Mac OS and Windows which morphed into Flash) on my Stylistic 2300

So look at

http://www.cenon.info/

or use GIMP for bitmaps

If you do a lot of math, you may find the Freehand Formula Entry System (FFES) of use:

http://www.cs.queensu.ca/drl/ffes/

William

Aye, but will it be any good on my laptop with ATI Radeon graphics?

I have a feeling I'll be sticking with Gnome+DR16 for as long as I can. Not least because my preferred theme, Arctic, works well for me (http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/arctic_/)

And what do you think pixbuf uses internally?

Imlib Description

Notice that the imlib project source is stored on gnome's servers?

They might have integrated the functionality by now (I'm not super up to date with the gnome libs), but the fast graphics code they have came from the E team.

Not toeing the line?
Because you are harshing on one of the highest Holy Grail joke-butts in Slashdot history?

You could try to be a little more appreciative, but that's not troll-material on its own, A/C..

E17 is not E16, E15, or even E14.

Do yourself a favor, get it in front of you, and see the Easter Bunny do a jig with the Tooth Fairy under a fleet of Flying Pig musicians. There's more to it than "Oooh, shiny"

Are you trying to get us to convince you? Take a look - not at screenshots. See it in action, then look at some screenshots circa 1998.

Look at Avalon & Aqua, and consider the programming forces behind them.

Now, take a look at Rasterman.

And I'm no fan-boy of any spelling. It's just good stuff!

Also, ICQ has been in beta for about that long. Google was in beta for what, a year & a half?

Beta, shmeta. Is there code? Does it run?

Hey, freezing a broken hard disk works, really

If you use *nix you can watch "protected" DVDs using any number of players such as Mplayer or Ogle, and libdvdcss for authentication.

Not really, the best stego packages use error correcting codes to help mitigate this kind of attack. Some stego packages don't work by using the LSB but by swapping adjacent pixels. The cleaning of the LSB would have no real impact on this type of stego.

Sounds right to me. I wrote a stego app that just modifies bitmaps in a very obvious way, and it would certainly be defeated/corrupted by changing some of the bits (in fact, that's why I didn't feel qualms about posting it), but some of the the best open source apps have just what you describe.

Furthermore, a simplistic counter-method of just modifying the LSB could be defeated without error correction: if they knew the LSB wasn't safe, they could simply choose to modify other bits instead. -- Paul

Maybe you can split the difference between Computer and Paper... I haven't used this product, but I had come across it a while back.

http://www.acecad.com.tw/digimemo/dm-a501.htm

It allows you to write on regular paper. The problem with this: I think the software is Windows based. I did however find a freshmeat project

http://freshmeat.net/projects/digimemoa501converte r/

to convert the files to UNIX, so maybe that will work.

This would allow you to have both a paper copy, ease of 'data' entry, and a computer based backup to print/review.

And GIZMO is still delayed.

If I get round to installing Voip on my Linux Yahoo Chat.
I will be ready to tell both companies to f*** off.

One word for Bad Companies Porting: DON'T Fucking BOTHER!!

And GIZMO is still delayed.

If I get round to installing Voip on my Linux Yahoo Chat.
I will be ready to tell both companies to f*** off.

One word for Bad Companies Porting: DON'T Fucking BOTHER!!

What's always left out in these discussions is the differentiation between good cookies and tracking cookies (especially long-lasting session ids). See also cookies(5). Lack of user education and bayesian cookie filters in browsers IMO.

Well this is off-topic, but I see many responses referring to Ultima Online, but Ultima was around LONG before that. These are some great games to get into if your're bored. Wikipedia has some history on the series. Here are some FOSS versions (although in most cases you still have to buy/own the original):

Ultima IV (freeware) with the XU4 engine.
Ultima VI with the Nuvie engine.
Ultima VII with the Exult engine.
Ultima VIII with the Pentagram engine.
Ultima Underworld with the UWADV engine.
Ultima Underworld II with the LOW engine.

Most of these, and the ones I didn't mention can be played with DOSBox. My favorites are Ultima V and Ultima VII. And for good measure here is a free game that doesn't have anything to do with any of this, but it still kicks ass, Star Control 2.

Apparently, most people realize that following the Golden Rule is a good thing.

= 9J =

I think you will be able to attract students to your course by focusing on what you can do in the course and not on what language you get to use. A course on "Building a Blog", "Programming a Robot", or "Building an Online Store" is much more enticing than PHP or Ruby on Rails. When you watch a home remodeling show, they don't advertise it as the show with the coolest miter saws and wrenches. The show isn't about the tools, it is about the end product, a new deck, or new cabinets in your kitchen.

Since you are teaching new programmers, I will suggest languages and frameworks based on how easy they are to start using as opposed to how good they are in the long run.

PHP has excellent documentation. Although its function names can be inconsistent or duplicated (e.g. sizeof, strlen, count), it is fairly easy to follow the code. This would probably be the easiest well development platform to get started on without evaluating different components, since you really don't need to bother with libraries to do MVC for a beginners course. You definitely will want to set up PHP with "xdebug" so that PHP will provide you with a stack trace for your errors. Otherwise, you will only see the line number where the error occured, which is not very useful if the line number is inside a function that gets called in a hundred different places.

Ruby on Rails is a very large frameworks, and you are just throwing names around to suggest this for an intro course. Ruby, the language, and a basic html templating system might be easy to teach, but Rails involves the MVC pattern, object-relational mapping for database access, and an architecture for unit/functional testing. This is NOT good for beginners. The Rails tutorials will also give you a false impression of how easy it is by having you build a bunch of database driven web pages with very little code. After you finish the tutorial, you will still have a lot to learn.

Although I think Ruby is a more powerful language for an experienced developer than PHP is, it has a lot of syntax rules to learn. For example, curly braces {} could contain a block of code or an associative array, and "joe!" means run the joe! function, and "!joe!" is a boolean NOT operator acting on the return value of joe!

My personal favorite programming language is Python. It has a cleaner syntax than PHP or Ruby, although an amazing amount of new Python programmers are burnt by mismatched indentation between tabs and spaces. Python will treat a tab as the same indentation level as 8 spaces, but your text editor may be using a different value. Even though python tells you the line where the syntax error is, the error may be invisible in your editor. If you are interested in Python for web development, Zope involves learning too much infrastructure for beginners. You would be better off with Spyce.

Instead of making your students build things from scratch, they may feel likethey are accomplishing more by customizing an opensource program that alreadyexists. You can find a bazillion PHP web portal projects at http://freshmeat.net./