Slashdot Mirror

[ tons of tips and ideas what's possible with a Z follow ]

The 5500 and others are more like little Linux laptops then PDAs. While I am far from a typical PDA user, the absolutely INCREDIBLE stuff I can do with just a 5500 and a wireless card continues to astound me today. To be fair, I never bought a Zaurus with the intention of ever doing typical PDA like stuff, but just wanted an easy familiar environment to hack in.

Years ago I had a USR P1000 (The Palm 1000, before Palm bought it from US Robotics), and while it was a great PDA (for the day), it was underpowered for what I wanted and most importantly LACKED A KEYBOARD, which makes all the difference in the world. One day I worked an ENTIRE day with only my P1000, a ssh client and a (9600 baud) serial link to my cell phone to see just how doable it was. As a unix admin doing security work the P1000 did have SOME uses (serial console to Sun boxes, ssh client for accessing mail via Mutt, etc) but the end result was a less than productive day overall. Trying to edit files on unix boxes with vi using Graffiti was quite painful and I vowed I'd never buy another PDA until it had at least a minimal keyboard to work with.

Fast forward to my (now several years old) 5500. Shortly after getting it I wiped the original Sharp rom and replace it with the actively developed OpenZaurus distribution, and was very happy with the results.

I have a very portable linux box with wireless, nearly all the software I was using on Solaris and Linux, as well as the pretty Qtopia apps and a half-way decent environment. I've been able to get nice tools like nmap, p0f (Passive OS Fingerprinter), Kismet, and other excellent unix based tools working with minimal effort on the Z under OpenZaurus (and the a lesser extent the Sharp ROM). Under OZ I can compile and run MANY common exploit tools like the awesome Metasploit framework, which require perl, and to a less extent Python. Both are no big deal to get going on the Z, especially since the Z is binary compatible with the IPAQ based Familiar distribution, and usually just needs the odd library to get an app working. That's all fine for text based apps, but since OZ (using Opie, at least) is QT and not X based, a variety of GUI based apps don't easily run. There ARE solutions to getting X based apps to run with minimal fuss, including the original x11zaurus package, and more recently the excellent X/QT package, as well as simply running one of the versions of the vncserver for Zaurus which of course allows you to display X not only on your Z, but also on any other VNC compatible device (such such as you cell phone, Linux, Windows, etc).

More recently the GPE environment and projects has become available, and is offers an attractive alternative to Opie, but with X11 compatibility built in.

For me, I joined the Debian religion ~5-6 years ago after experimenting to see what all the fuss on /. was all about. It didn't take long before I was the typical Debian crack addict apt-getting any application I wanted to check out on a whim. After living in Ottawa for years I was very well aware of the Corel (and later Rebel.com (who themselves were called Hardware Canada previously, and were a unix reseller) Netwinder , which was a cool little ARM based PC, which unfortunately suffered under the idiocy of Corel's managem

Here's a blurb from linuxjournal on a ruling between Adobe and Softman that appears to grant Right of First Sale. Did this one get overturned?

I went googling for more about enforcement of Eulas and ran into the case of Softman vs Adobe that indicated that first sale rights trumped the attempted EULA. I've run across nothing saying that that was overturned, and it is referred to in First Sale at wikipedia.

Live and learn.

Here's a link to one of many stories on the net about this: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5628

The case was Softman v. Adobe. It is several years old, and it's been a while since I've looked into it. Basically, the court said, the customer bought the product, he owns it, he may redistribute it like any other product. You do NOT have the right to tell him what he can and cannot do with it via an EULA once he buys it.

You'll want to double check all this stuff to make sure I got it right, and that nothing has changed since. But there is legal precident on our side.

So, I guess my question is, do you guys just not follow the standards? What is it that you're doing to break your apps so much?


If I had mod points today, this post would get an insightful.

I often wondered the same thing. I'm no Java advocate -- I use it only when its the right tool for the job. I've never had a problem running a java app I've written on multiple platforms.

Now *other* java apps I've used, tend to break, are buggy/slow don't run on win32/Mac/linux/etc.

Blame the developer? There's lots of *really* bad VB code out in the world, but mostly because there are a lot or *really bad* developers out there writing code in VB. ( OT: Torvalds & VB)

There's a quote (I can't find online for some reason) from a fellow who says that he can program in fortran (or was it cobol?) no matter what language he was using. Perhaps the reason we has so many very poor java developers isn't because java is a poor language, or the developers are second rate, but because they refuse to change their style or methodology. Java isn't C. You shouldn't code as though it were.

I haven't used an applet in forever.

It's sad, Java was really ahead of its time on this one. Applets were a really good idea. "Wow , a way to safely run apps on the client machine!" It's too bad that the implementation was so poor early on.

Java still suffers from this bad rep, dispite the incredible advances its made.

OpenOffice, on the other hand, is a real standard being adhered to by an ever-increasing number of tools.

As a bonus, the suite also deals with the MS-Office non-standards pretty well (lots of people are using it today simply because it was able to recover corrupted MS-Office documents for them), and writes files in several other standard formats (PDF, HTML without the crap, PNG, yadda yadda).

Making the OASIS Open Office XML format also an ISO standard would surely be nice and make it look better on paper to corporate and institutional IT managers. But for the EU, the current standardization process through OASIS should be good enough, since the question is whether controlling the format by two standards bodies at the same time will be technically feasible at all.

...right here.

It's a bit out of date - it suggests you check out the code from CVS - but lots of good info there nonetheless.

eDonkey is definitely not about speed. Bittorrent usually end up with much faster downloads. I consider it as my "archive" ressource. It's way easier to find old and obscure files on that than on bittorrent sites.

One feature I particularly like about eMule is that it supports both server-based operation and decentralized Kademlia (a kind of distributed hash table) searching. The two systems work together nicely and usually end up with more sources than one one of them.

(can you tell me about a US computer mag, which actually features news?)

Linux Journal and Linux Maganize come to my mind. Even though their news lag several months behind, they're still a treat to read. I go online for my news, magazines for insight and articles.

But you do know, don't you, that Bill Gates gave $100 million to fight HIV and $421 million to fight Linux and Open Source when he visited India in 2002. You can read about it here too.

Philanthropist indeed.

I remember reading about an Antarctic Linux station and thought it was neet-o back then.

Your comment is a bit deceptive. When I first read it, having not read anything but the most brief description of SPF, I thought you meant that it broke forwarding from the client/MUA. In other words, I took what you said to mean that if my mail local servers implemented SPF, and I sent a message to someone, that person would not be able to forward my message to someone else via their client.

But the actual problem you're talking about exists when forwarding is done at the MTA level, which is utilized by a smaller set of users. See this article for more info ("The Price of SPF", about halfway down) for a better explanation.

Haven't actually tried it out (everything I write seems to be text or TeX), but I remembered reading this article a while back: "How to Index Anything", Linux J., July 1 2003.

I was going to mod you up, but I thought I'd help out the lazy instead: link to the article. :-)

Looks like an excellent application for Port Knocking.

Kudos to the Mono developers, what they have accomplished is no easy feat!

I just wonder when Microsoft will try to say, "See? We are the innovators. Look at mono! They followed our .NET framework in a desperate attempt to copy it!"

While it may be true that Mono was released after .NET, there is ample evidence that open source software is far more innovative than anything Microsoft has put out (with the possible exception of this useless piece of trash.

The point is that no matter what massive strides are made here (and they are great, and we are better off for having them), we must remain vigilant against people that would rather dominate the world than contribute to humanity.

Finally, you state that you do not wish to limit the ability of consumers to record over-the-air radio broadcasts. Instead, you apparently want to force them to buy what they have received for free since Fleming and Marconi first made it possible for consumers to hear news and music over the public airwaves.

As you know, we have long been concerned about content owners seeking to change the "play" button on our devices to a "pay" button. At least you have addressed the semantics by suggesting new devices come equipped with a "buy" button.*

*Excerpt of letter to Cary H. Sherman, President, RIAA, from Gary Shapiro, President & CEO, Consumer Electronics Association, 4/15/04, responding to a fax, by Cary H. Sherman to Gary Shapiro, at 14:30, 4/14/04, with this attempt at greasing the wheels:

We also point out that a lack of content protection will forever preclude a myriad of new business models that could [insert hush money offer here] benefit your members [end insert of hush money offer here] as well as other interested parties. For example, device manufacturers could provide "buy buttons" that would offer consumers the ability to quickly and easily purchase music that they hear on the radio. Indeed, iBiquity has said that it would like to offer to consumers, for a fee [as opposed to free], on demand weather and traffic reports. The same opportunity could and should exist for music, the bread and butter of radio broadcasts.

Sources

), they'll need control over the BIOS. That's why Microsoft is pushing so hard in this area, and why the Linux community must push back just as hard, and get the Linux BIOS.

5 second boot times were promised with a Linux BIOS. I'm still waiting. For the BIOS, and for my computer to boot up.

Another recen

Well, I guess I came to the party late. I didn't even realize that code used to be formatted to 80 columns!

I guess that's why most of my old code is impossible to maintain. In search of something better, I switched to Python because of ESR recommendation and I really, really like it. The forced syntax makes my code a lot more readable. Although I've been struggling to switch my LAMP coding from Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP to Linux/Apache/MySQL/Python, I'm hoping it will be easier to maintain.

I think I'll begin to adopt fixed-width as well and see if I can continue to make code maintenance improvements. To me, computing speed is no longer an issue. Development and maintenance speed is king now.

Bought out by Fujitsu? Interesting article on how IBM took on Amdahl.

Anyone know if there is a "Where are they now?" website for tech companies?

I expect this will be successful simply because of how enormously inconvenient it is for Linux users to buy a laptop bundled with WinXP and get a refund, or how expensive that OS is to just pay for and not use. However, if you don't like SuSE, there's always FreeDOS on a Dell and installing the Linux distribution of your choice later. I guess this rules in the convenience stakes - as convenient as buying a WinXP laptop - and that's its selling point.

(Note that this certainly isn't the first popular Linux laptop.)

It figures. This line of BS was played out two posts ago and /. doesn't have a mod rating of -5: Derivative.

No, Slashdot doesn't. But I'll bet SCO does.

Marcel Gagne writes an amusing and informative monthly Column for Linux Journal called Cooking with Linux.

Here.

Take a look at this.

It's amusing because O'Dowd makes a point of saying the FAA's standards of reliability and security should be what we aspire to, suggesing Linux isn't up to the task. The FAA obviously disagrees.

However, people have adapted Linux (meaning it is not "standard" Linux) to work with real time and embedded systems. Then again, even before Linux was being adapted to real time systems, DOS, and variants of DOS were being created for the same task, and still are.

A quick search provides a number of to links back me up on this, including this one:

Linux Journal Article - Using Linux in Embedded and Real-Time Systems

QUOTE: Although Linux is not a real-time operating system (the Linux kernel does not provide the required event prioritization and preemption functions), several add-on options are available that can bring real-time capabilities to Linux-based systems. END QUOTE

This link from the University of Zurich (Einstein's alma mater) lists a number of variants of DOS as types of real time systems. It also includes download links for threading libraries for DOS so that you can write 'real time' applications: Embedded and Real-Time Systems - DOS and Windows multitaskers / others

While DOS itself is really single threaded (or even "no threaded"), there is nothing that says you can't write multi-threaded code to provide a 'real-time' application.

Don't get me wrong, Linux is a good operating system, and when they can get most things right with it, including working sound drivers for my laptop (so that I don't have to screw around to make it work... I am more interested in using my laptop for it's intended purpose, not to screw around on it playing configuration games), then it will be ready for prime time. In the meantime, I will use Linux as a practice/R&D tool, since I program systems on Unix/Linux systems, and use WinXP, for my entertainment and Java programming O/S.

CVS homedir, by Joey Hess on LinuxJournal: http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5976

Thanks, that was the one.

CVS homedir, by Joey Hess on LinuxJournal: http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5976

Perhaps his column was trimmed by an editor, but Mr Adelstein knows about the U. S. Courts switch to Red Hat in the server room, because he wrote about it last month.

I would take Linspire over Turbolinux because Turbo is an RPM-based distro, and Linspire is Debian under the hood and can be updated to Debian Testing/Unstable with a few apt-get commands. Here's the how-to: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7165

Linux Journal had an article talking about the RedHat team's efforts to natively compile Eclipse with gcj.

In response to your earlier point, your editor looks nice but I don't see using it versus using Eclipse are mutually exclusive. I switch between vim and Eclipse all of the time. Sometimes I want a light-weight editor and sometimes I want a heavyweight IDE with package organization and javadoc look up and code completion. As they say, YMMV.

According to this article, the lifespan is about 10,000 writes.

They also suggest using the noatime mount option for flash ram, which is a good suggestion.

Josh

For what it's worth, the Republican National Committee is running Microsoft IIS on Windows 2000, while the Democratic National Committee is running Apache on Linux. As of this writing, November 5, 2003, the RNC has an uptime of 4.26 days (maximum of 39.04) and a 90-day moving average of 16.91. The DNC has an uptime of 445.02 days (also the maximum) and a 90-day moving average of 395.38 days.

Can you literally run something on a shoe-string budget?

I am becoming literally annoyed with references such as "really attractive for low-resource groups and countries". Typically low budget places don't have the knowledge to deal with any level of computer complexity. Set up a super fancy linux system in a quaint third world then leave. Who is going to do the maintanace? Think the person you trained is going to remember the general details, much less be able to trouble shoot? While clever cheap solutions sound really nice in theory, frequently the reality works quite differrently. Volunteers are not the most reliable source for sys admins. Chances are the work will be done by someone with little or no computer experince. See Algorithms in Africa for a slightly better overview by someone with real world experience. To quote:

"These questions all led to the same answer: the Brigades would be left in even worse shape than I found them. Rather than gaining empowerment, independence and enablement, they would more than likely be left powerless, dependent and possibly ruined. And all because of my own cultural myopia, despite my good intentions."

Rule of Modularity: the 'simple parts' are not so simple- take any linux distribution and type 'man ls' and see how long that is, it will work for anything substituted for ls, certainly not simple.

The unix philosophy is One tool does one task, and does it well. ls lists the contents of a directory. There are some options for sorting and selecting what information to show. But it's still just listing the contents of a directory. If ls also checked your email (jwz's rule) or something like that, you'd have a point. But you don't. You're just confusing options and complexity.

Rule of Composition: Most new linux apps are not desined to be connected (through a pipe) to anything else-- they are either programs written with curses or for X and that means that they are not connectable.

Don't confuse applications and tools. Apps are big monolithic programs like web browsers and media players. The little unix tools that populate /bin and /usr/bin are the things that are meant to be used with pipes and other shell constructs. It doesn't usually make sense to pipe the output of an app to much besides a log file.

And a pipe doesn't always have to be STDOUT or something. When working locally X11 goes through a pipe, a named pipe. DXPC, the Differential X Protocol Compressor, uses named pipes to send X11 messages to another host in an efficient compressed form. This program doesn't need to modify X or libx11 or anything else to do what it does. It's all through the magic of pipes!
(I originally thought SSH used the same method to forward+compress+encrypt X11 traffic, but it looks like it binds on local TCP ports instead)

Rule of Parsimony: use ls -l /path/to/program of ls -R /path/to/source and check the size column. Or check the man page. Or start the program and look. There are not many small linux programs- especially because of its open-source nature. Linux (kernel) itself is also pretty big,

Boy, you're not making much sense there. The linux kernel is actually pretty small. Most apps are quite a deal larger than the kernel. My 2.6.7 kernel here is 1.3M, compressed. My XFree86 4.3.0 X server is 1.7M. Mozilla is close to 20M. And ls, your previous "complex" example, is all of 71K. Apps are big, tools are small. On any OS. Simple.

YES! HAhahahahahaha! I want one too! I think the best message for one of those would be: "If you can read this...then it's too late."

Alright! A whole new way to piss people off behind the wheel! My fog horn idea is nothing compared to this! ;)

Actually I've been looking at putting one of these in my (bulletproof) back window to send a unique, personalized message to some people.

Linux Journal is a great magazine too. Their articles are incredibly rich in technical details - and the coverage isn't just linux kernel focused. They also have great articles about system administration tools, embedded systems, new hardware and general open source software development. They do accept advertising, but the ads are actually useful and relevant -- embedded h/w suppliers, cluster computing manufacturers, hosting providers, etc. I'm sure this is all preaching to the choir, though.

I'm most excited about getting a Linux Journal in the mail, and I read each Perl Journal cover to cover, but some other favorites:

DownBeat for the music

Fine Woodworking and its sibling Fine Homebuilding for one of the hobbies

Babybug for the kiddo

A open source RAD evironment sounds like it could have a huge impact on the number of apps that could be rolled out.

This month's Linux Journal had an article about a very nice RAD tool: GladeGen.py. You design your GUI with Glade, and then this script generates a python script to use your GUI. I've been using it for about a week now, and in that time I've written a couple dozen small GUI tools for my users.

There's a page of links from the article at linuxjournal.com.

Read about Softman v. Adobe (including the actual decision, before quadruple BS'ing each other.

"GFS is more like IBM's SAN Filesystem (a.k.a. Storage Tank)"

Red Hat sure has been busy this week, taking on Sun with thier open source java, and now IBM. Whatever the case Red Hat has become agressive and might be a "major" player if it's not already. BTW I'm surprised Slashdot didn't cover that story about Red Hat's eclipse being compiled without suns JVM, here is a snippet from this page
Instead of running on top of a virtual machine the way Java programs usually do--although that can still be done if the user prefers--Red Hat's version of Eclipse is compiled to binary and runs natively using the libgcj runtime libraries, similar to the way a C program runs using the GNU C libraries.
cool stuff.

I agree that retransmitting someone else's message to a new recipient will be seriously problematic in SPF land and will break ".forward" files all over the world.

Until a millisecond after the user replaces

user@domain.tld

...in his .forward file with...

|/usr/bin/srs user@domain.tld

...and the sysadmin inserts these two lines into /etc/aliases (after installing Mail::SRS from CPAN):

srs0: "|/usr/bin/srs -reverse"
srs1: "|/usr/bin/srs -reverse"

It's documented. And amply so, too.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Yes, they have been upheld in the past. They also have been been tossed as invalid in the past. Trying to enforce an EULA is at best a crap shoot.

For example, a full six years AFTER the ProCD case a judge says: Whether contracts such as Adobe's EULA, often referred to as "shrinkwrap" licenses, are valid is a much-disputed question. A number of courts that have addressed the validity of the shrinkwrap license have found them to be invalid . Softman-v-adobe.

One thing is pretty much indisputable - EULA's are not licences. It is in no way copyright infringment to install and run software you bought. EULA's are contract offers. You are always free to decline contract offers. The question is whether or not you can manage to buy and install that software while declining that contract offer.

If you ask me, if they want to make the sale conditional on a contract then they simply need to refuse to sell that software until you sign that contract.

-

One would think if Linux was so dodgy, ILM wouldn't have started a migration from SGI boxes to Linux boxes. Here are a few articles detailing how they love their new Linux setup. Not that that they don't have a few complaints (NFS performance.)

ILM Linux Switch

ILM Computers

More on ILM Linux switch

One would think if Linux was so dodgy, ILM wouldn't have started a migration from SGI boxes to Linux boxes. Here are a few articles detailing how they love their new Linux setup. Not that that they don't have a few complaints (NFS performance.)

ILM Linux Switch

ILM Computers

More on ILM Linux switch

One would think if Linux was so dodgy, ILM wouldn't have started a migration from SGI boxes to Linux boxes. Here are a few articles detailing how they love their new Linux setup. Not that that they don't have a few complaints (NFS performance.)

ILM Linux Switch

ILM Computers

More on ILM Linux switch

1) I haven't seen any Linux wristwatches. While I'm sure there may be some out there, I seriously doubt they're anything more than cheap toys.

Here is one and here's another. Both were built around 5 years ago, back when people were still actually surprised by such a feat.

While they aren't in production, they aren't exactly cheap toys either. The IBM Linux wristwatch aimed to have the same capabilities as a Palmpilot. The other is a videophone developed by a wearable-computer inventor.

But as for other small embedded devices, I have seen Free/NetBSD on consumer routers and bridges.

Yes, FreeBSD exists on routers and bridges and rightly so; it's got stellar networking performance and stability. But there are many more embedded Linux systems simply because it is a far more flexible code base with support for a LOT more architectures than FreeBSD. And you tend to see Linux in a wider variety of devices, such as the myriad of set top box devices and the like.

There is no reason why FreeBSD couldn't be put on a big-iron mainframe.

Yes there is: because it would be a lot more work porting Linux. There's no one (or at least not many) currently working on putting FreeBSD on big iron whereas every few months you hear about some company or university adding enterprise and mainframe features to Linux.

But as far as I can tell, only IBM ever bothered to put Linux on a mainframe anyway.

They're possibly the only ones to put it on a mainframe and sell it commercially, but this is IBM we're talking about. They're not exactly tiny in the mainframe market. And they aren't the only ones working on getting Linux to scale to the mainframe level by any means.

So it's a pointless argument.

No, it is a perfectly valid argument.

I like and appreciate FreeBSD as much as anyone else, but I'm not a very good system administrator if I don't evaluate and acknowledge a product's weaknesses as much as its strengths.

Hey! You forgot to mention where the "x" in "linux" came from! And what happened to your "linux worm"? And the rest of your GPL fud ?

Thanks...

One extrme method I read about on slashdot the other day was a guy using cvs to pack up everything in his home directory (the url escapes me)

That was a Linux Journal article.