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http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000073

While compiling from source is will certainly give you optimisation for your given architecture, I often wonder at the situations where this should be imposed on you. I've seen people spend hours setting up gentoo users desktops and have to ask at the necessity for this. On a production environment expecting high load leves, 'yes, build from source,' however on a user desktop, I think it's waste of an organisations time and money.

Gentoo's portage system gives one the illusion of hackerish control, but having been one with hackerish control, I look at emerge and am not so satisfied. I was recently trying to build perl and wanted to fire off configure options, so I fired up emerge -vp (which shows you valid USE flags). It seems that in many places it completely curtails what you can do, depending on what the port maintainer has decided to expose in the ebuild - so I couldn't fire off half the configure options I wanted to. In my personal opinion, this leaves me wondering why I'd even want to use emerge package. Further, i was also unable to direct the build to another PREFIX directory, which is generally handy when you want to have multiple versions of components. Obviously this breaks the packaging system's world of dependencies.

Portage might be more attractive to me, if packages came as in both binary and source flavours and if there was more control over your interaction with build process. I don't like the fact that updating one emerge package seems to break your whole system and end up costing time. If I'm maintaining a desktop, I don't need this kind of hastle. I don't like emerging cpan modules, which are not consistency named. I don't need to see a large GUI application building for several hours.

SO, I ask myself, which is the best packaging system I've used. Strangely, I'm surprised, when I arrive at RPM. I've used RPM on production systems and have been surprisiingly happy with it. ebuilds are no harder than rpm spec's, however the real beauty is something which I think is essential for modern enterprise systems; transactionality. RPM v4 + allows you treat package updates as atomic transactions and in turn one can roll back from these to the previous itteration, of touched files, without having to manually manage these. SO, what happens if you break the build? You rollback.

I have a lot of friends who have used gentoo and loved it for a couple of months. I don't know anyone who hasn't shagged up his/her system and further I know a lot of these people have tired and gone back to some other distro. And we're not talking about people who didn't know what their way around a linux distro - it's typically frustration with portage. Anyway, I'm still going to give it a run for it's money and see if I end up with a different attitude.

"I think that desktop linux is not ready because it still plagued by a problem of text configuration files. I'm perfectly OK configuring my debian box from various files in /etc directory, however most of the users e.g. normal people aren't"

As a confirmed Debian user I find it strange that you don't know about Synaptic a GUI front-end to the debian package manager. Have you mentioned Xandros, Ubuntu or Linspire to the 'normal people', all three based on Debian and not a text config file in sight.

"as long as proper GUI configuration tools, like Control Panel in windows, are absent from KDE/GNOME desktop environments I don't think that majority of people would like to use it"

As a confirmed Linux user I find it strange that you are not aware of any GUI config tools. This Redhat Menu item (april 2003) looks to me, strangly like a GUI config utility. SuSE provides the YaST GUI install and config utility and not a config text file in sight. According to this Linuxconf has a GUI frontend that runs on Redhat or Mandrake.

Linux needs Control Panel (Score:5, Distro FUD)

I'm not too surprised by this decision. The FSF has been arguing strenously for a couple decades that linking consitutes derivation. It's a different kind of linking, to be sure, but the analogy is very apt. In both cases there is no copying, modification or distribution of copyrighted material, only a reference to copyrighted materials. See http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366 for an expert's take on the issue.

Perhaps the judge has read too much of Stallman?

I have to agree with the various posts that a technological solution is not going to fix all your problems. Even with a good alarm system and all kinds of fancy automation and webcams, there are some things that only a real person living in the place (or checking on it regularly) will be able to notice.

That having been said, here are some links to Linux Journal articles about doing various home-automation stuff. Perhaps if you implement these, along with a good alarm, and some relatives/friends help, you can have the peace of mind you need:

Home Automation using Python:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8513

Remote Temperature Monitoring:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8780

Automated Temperature Control:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9091

I have to agree with the various posts that a technological solution is not going to fix all your problems. Even with a good alarm system and all kinds of fancy automation and webcams, there are some things that only a real person living in the place (or checking on it regularly) will be able to notice.

That having been said, here are some links to Linux Journal articles about doing various home-automation stuff. Perhaps if you implement these, along with a good alarm, and some relatives/friends help, you can have the peace of mind you need:

Home Automation using Python:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8513

Remote Temperature Monitoring:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8780

Automated Temperature Control:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9091

I have to agree with the various posts that a technological solution is not going to fix all your problems. Even with a good alarm system and all kinds of fancy automation and webcams, there are some things that only a real person living in the place (or checking on it regularly) will be able to notice.

That having been said, here are some links to Linux Journal articles about doing various home-automation stuff. Perhaps if you implement these, along with a good alarm, and some relatives/friends help, you can have the peace of mind you need:

Home Automation using Python:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8513

Remote Temperature Monitoring:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8780

Automated Temperature Control:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9091

What I'd like is two-factor authentification using a USB stick. The best I've seen is pam_usb (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8338) , but haven't tried it yet. Anyone tried this or anything like it?

"no way the students will be able to do state-of-the-art desktop publishing and film editing using linux" http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8589 much of the editing for the movies "Lord of the Rings" and "Spiderman" as well as tons of other movies used linux.

And thus the advent of tripwire. At best the hacker could disable tripwire, but then the (savvy) admin would notice the lack of tripwire reports.

"the substance of the transaction at issue here is a sale and not a license" -- Judge Pregerson

Because Microsoft wants to turn Linux into a platform for its products

http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000119

Where are the human rights protests over Microsoft?

Here:

• http://marc.merlins.org/linux/refundday/
• http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6968

More links here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows+refun d+day&btnG=Google+Search

Though, it appears of late that the movement has lost steam. Apparently George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il are trying to distract the world from Microsoft's barbaric actions.

One recent thread about the book (which also comments on why things like functions and OOP appear later in the book than one would think):
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/br owse_thread/thread/b8366618c4547978

Also check the Amazon page for reviews and other feedback plus the author even posted a comment:
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0132269937

To reply to some previous comments:

- It's *much* faster than it used to be: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/python.php

- The indentation only bothers you for 1-4 months. (I didn't like it either at first.)

- It *is* interpreted but byte-compiled like Java to make successive runs faster

- Why ESR likes Python: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882

- Native look-n-feel GUI: http://wxwidgets.org/ and http://wxpython.org/

- Compare to other languages: http://wiki.python.org/moin/LanguageComparisons

- Shopping: http://www.bestbookdeal.com/book/compare/013226993 7 (it seems like Amazon, Buy.com, Bookpool, and Overstock rotate for having best overall price, i.e., no tax [depending on where you live] and free shipping)

- Bad code: Python is attractive to first-time programmers because of its ease, so that's what you may be seeing. Also, bad code is language-independent, regardless; Python does not go out of its way to make this happen. However, Python also attracts long-time programmers because they discover they are more efficient and productive in it.

FWIW, I switched to Python a few years ago (after lots of C/C++, Java, Perl, Tcl, etc.), and I don't want to program in anything else again. The naysayers can pound on me all they like, but from my point of view, I enjoy what I do, I get decent pay, and I can get home on time to feed my kids then hack some more for fun after putting them to bed.

-A.C.

Whoops ; Here are the examples I meant to include in my previous post.

Venezuela[1], Brazil[2], Extremadura and other regions of Spain[3], New Zealand[6], Bulgaria & Madeconia[4], and China[5], India. Development is often a worldwide effort, much like academic research.

For example, while I have only done a little FLOSS development, I've never met any of my collaborators in person.
    Thailand Cities: Vienna, Munich, Geneva, Bergen[7]. Peru, Paris:almost.

[1] http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-08 -30-011-26-NW-LL-PB
[2] http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=26006
[3] http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8485 - Good Read.
[4] http://www.foss.bg/news.php?id=2
[5] http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031117S0015
[6]
[7] http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/10/13/t13_2.php

Obviously it depends on your field. I'm more involved with modeling than multimedia. However, my understanding was that professionals were using a forked version of gimp for video editing on linux clusters. Is there a commercial version that scales this far? I really don't know. But in terms of professional use, I don't think amateurs have clusters for their video editing.

Likewise, way back when Alias/Wavefront's Maya was cock-of-the-walk, it was available for Linux. Maya used to be *the* app for pro work. Graphics people seemed to be absolutely snobbish about it. Autodesk bought them from SGI, but it looks like Autodesk Maya 8 is still available for (64-bit only) linux. The hard core mathematical physics geek in me finds myself asking: have you looked at Mathematica for visual transformations? Sorry, had to ask...

I had friends who were into Bluegrass, and looking at recording their jam sessions (we are talking a couple hundred people showing up for three day weekends at least once per month thru the spring, summer, and into the fall). I didn't track their progress, as I graduated and moved on to another university, but the impression I gathered was that tools existed. I think they were using Ardour / Jack with RME Hammerfall cards. Obviously this won't work with SoundBlaster toys. Postings on a recent real time kernel article here at slashdot had a number of people talking about what acceptance of real time patches into the kernel will mean in terms of multi-channel live recording. I don't know if Jack is enough for "real" work, or if other real time patches are needed. Again, it isn't really my field. I do remember wanting to buy this really cool synthesizer, but couldn't rationalize it in my budget. $8,000 for a linux sound system? Thats alot of $$$ even for a Korg...

What made you sound like a troll was suggesting that the tens of thousands of applications that are available for linux aren't. If anything, the abundance of software is more disconcerting than the lack of it. If you want to know, "is MS Word available", well only using Wine or Crossover, which to my thinking means "no." If you want to know, "are there word processors", there are many many many approaches. I'm sorry if I misunderstood, I certainly didn't mean to be offensive.

So these aren't my fields, but hopefully this will point you towards information. My understanding is that for professional (studio labs) work, linux is there for audio and video, using Free tools. In terms of graphics, I won't debate gimp & blender & such, because I just don't know. Maya is supposed to be top of the line, though. Hope this helps :-)

Here's just some of what Linus says about binary modules.

"I'm a complete non-believer in binary modules"

"Basically, I want people to know that when they use binary-only modules, it's THEIR problem. I want people to know that in their bones, and I want it shouted out from the rooftops. I want people to wake up in a cold sweat every once in a while if they use binary-only modules."

Even IBM does this to recover dead PC's.

Does this mean I can declare prior art? Get my lawyer on the bat-phone

As much as I hate meetings in general, one of the best jobs I ever had we had meetings EVERY DAY at 10am. They lasted anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour, with the average around 15 minutes, and it was essentially every member of the team (5 of us) talking about what needed to be done next, what they would accomplish today, and any problems encountered if what was to be done yesterday didn't get done. The long meetings were usually hashing out the more difficult (or at least less clear) tasks that needed doing.

When I started there and they told me we met every day at 10, I almost choked. But we had great engineers, we were focused, and we did amazing things, given the time and small size of our team. Unfortunately, we had the bad grace to do these great things in time for our software to be released in 2001. By the time our product won a Linux Journal Editor's Choice award, our company was no more.

Of course I've heard of Steve Mann's work, and his Gnu/Linux Wristwatch Video Phone, which used pie menus (but didn't talk as far as I know). He built his prototype pie menu watch in 1998, about 10 years after we (Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Ben Shneiderman, Mark Weiser) published a paper about pie menus at ACM CHI'88. But in 1988 (and 1998), not many people had hardware they could carry around that was suitible for implementing talking pie menus.

Speech synthesis requires a lot of memory to store a good voice, and speech enabled applications require a lot of task-specific scripting control (so they don't start talking and talking at length about something the user is no longer interested in). I'm using the Lua scripting language on the Pocket PC, to develop flexible speech enabled touch screen pie menu based interfaces, which will run on commonly available Pocket PC phones. (I've done a lot of Palm programming in the past, but that's a dead platform.)

Here's a video that Dave Winer took of me demonstrating an example application: a remote control for "Rock and Roll".

-Don

I think I don't need it. I would have to buy new computers to use it and I don't see any benefit to justify the expense. In past, I've upgraded when there was some benefit to be gained. For instance, I went to Windows (3.1) in the first place so I could run CorelDraw. I could do stuff that previously had been available only to Mac users. The choice was clear cut and I was delighted to switch.

Microsoft alienated me with the first commercial release of XP. You couldn't change anything about your computer without calling them for a new authorization number. There were also the rumors that XP was 'calling home' with information about what was on your hard drive. I vowed that XP would never enter my house and never sully my work computer. I switched to Linux. It does everything I need done. Why would I switch.

My wife's computer runs Win98. If it weren't for OpenOffice, she would have to switch to be able to read files that her customers send her. As it is, OpenOffice reads all those files just fine, so she doesn't have to switch either.

Microsoft is going to have trouble selling Vista. They are also having legal trouble in Europe. Their response is to say that the economy will be boosted if everyone switches to Vista. http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000097 They're nothing if not creative. But no thanks anyway Bill.

But honestly, this is not the kind of article were you can learn how-to do a linux-running: it simply says how they use it, but you are not going to find anything "usable" from there.

Try digging in HackADay or Make instead.

LinuxJournal ran an article on OpenOffice.org Extensions a couple of months ago. They link to the project wiki and summarize a few extensions, including a grammar checker, Wikipedia integration, and a blog posting tool.

Wow linux had to wait 6 months to get this driver, it only took XP x64 7 1/2 years!

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3819

I love my job.

ATHLETE is one of the coolest damn things I've seen in a long time, designed and built by a team of absolutely brilliant engineers. Think of a two-meter-tall six-legged metal spider on roller skates. Or, heck, just check the link above.

The current ATHLETE is a prototype (of course); the ones we send to the moon -- if we're selected -- will be twice that size. Yes, Slashdotters, welcome our four-meter-tall six-legged roller-skate-wearing metal spider overlords!

For additional coverage of K-10, ATHLETE, Centaur/Robonaut, and other vehicles participating in this test, check out the updates from JSC.

If they ever launch the darn thing (it is supposed to go up on the Falcon), this linux-run satellite has been ready to go for years.

Here's the article online. It was on Linux Journal of May, my mistake, sorry!..

The GPL covers explicitly *linking only*.

The GPL doesn't cover even that. It only covers derivative works. Linking is not sufficient to create a derivative work. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366

Most of the common maps, including the auto-mount maps have schema and attributes in LDAP. So its just a simple matter of using a migration tool (or doing it by hand) to build your LDAP version of the auto-mount map.

A quick google and here is a link you might like to look at:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6266
There are many other sources of information on this out there.

Anthony Whitehead
NordicEdge AB

>> Linking is derivation

You're just handwaving, and very badly. The exact opposite is true.

Here is the opinion of a respected lawyer on the subject. Summary: you're entirely wrong.

Lawrence Rosen is an attorney in private practice, with offices in Los Altos and Ukiah, California (www.rosenlaw.com). He is also corporate secretary and general counsel for the Open Source Initiative, which manages and promotes the Open Source Definition (www.opensource.org).

Anyone else disagree with ESR purely on timescales? He seems to think once we've all switched to 64-bit (and it's debateable whether that will actually happen by 2008), that platform will be locked in for 30 years. Seems unlikely. I doubt we'll move to 128-bit any time soon, but the next major platform shift, be it more parallelism, more collaborative and ubiquitous computing in the home, etc., will happen a lot sooner than 30 years from now. And FOSS (and Linux in particular) are well-positioned to be in on many of the things looking like coming down the pike.

Sadly, he may well be right about proprietary binary drivers being a necessary evil in the short term. But as J.P. Rangaswami points out chatting with Doc Searls in this month's Linux Journal, this probably is a short-term problem.

If you can't find a way to sync your iPod with your Linux machine you haven't really been looking!

When will we get to mod articles "-1, Troll"?

> "Well, I confess that only now I fully understand why Linux, Mozilla, TrueCrypt, and other open source projects register their names as trademarks"

In the case of Linux(tm), it's precisely because back in the mid-nineties, someone named William Della Croce, Jr. tried to hijack the mark and extort money from various vendors and publishers. It took a year, and a bunch of money, to get the matter resolved and the trademark reassigned to Linus.

It was an ugly and sordid affair, and I really wish there were better alternatives than either registering a mark or allowing it to be attacked by trolls. Prior use of a mark--even an unregistered mark--does (or should) count against trolls, at least in the US, but it can still be a hassle to fight them off if the mark's not registered. Personally, I would like to see the term "Linux" become a generic term (like "Aspirin"), but I can understand why Linus is reluctant to allow that to happen after the Dell Croce incident.

> "Well, I confess that only now I fully understand why Linux, Mozilla, TrueCrypt, and other open source projects register their names as trademarks"

In the case of Linux(tm), it's precisely because back in the mid-nineties, someone named William Della Croce, Jr. tried to hijack the mark and extort money from various vendors and publishers. It took a year, and a bunch of money, to get the matter resolved and the trademark reassigned to Linus.

It was an ugly and sordid affair, and I really wish there were better alternatives than either registering a mark or allowing it to be attacked by trolls. Prior use of a mark--even an unregistered mark--does (or should) count against trolls, at least in the US, but it can still be a hassle to fight them off if the mark's not registered. Personally, I would like to see the term "Linux" become a generic term (like "Aspirin"), but I can understand why Linus is reluctant to allow that to happen after the Dell Croce incident.

The latency issues have been more or less resolved by FreeNX, maybe read this nice NX intro.

Check out cosmopod.com - I think they still offer free testing NX desktops.

There are many good resources on the web. The standard resource is The Linux Documentation Project, or http://www.tldp.org/. Another site, which is much better than it used to be, is http://www.linux.com/. http://www.linuxjournal.com/ has many great articles to guide you through a wide variety of small projects. A great newer site with helpful articles is http://www.howtoforge.com/. For help on the desktop side, http://www.desktoplinux.com/ has many articles you may find of use. Documentation and information about KDE is, of course, available at http://www.kde.org/ and it's affiliated sites (linked from their homepage). IBM is always putting up new articles at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/ that can provide usefull information for development work under Linux. You may also find the articles on http://www.debian.org/, http://www.gentoo.org/, and http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ usefull even though the articles were written for other distros.

If you can't find what you're looking for there, you can always head over to irc.freenode.net. The #suse and #opensuse channels will be of particular interest to you. You may find #kde helpful for KDE applications. ##linux is basically a catch-all channel; we'll generally be able to field just about any question you throw at us there. If we can't, we will point you in the right direction.

Keeping up with the FOSS news can also teach you quite a bit. You already know about Slashdot. http://osnews.com/ is another very nice resource. http://www.kerneltrap.org/ is a less frequently updated site which can provide you with more advanced information. Keeping an eye on http://www.freshmeat.net/ can help you get a better feel for the various software available for Linux. And of course, with gmail you can setup alerts for Linux, KDE, etc.

If you really want to learn more about Linux, there's no better way than distro hopping. Go to http://www.vmware.com/ and download their free VMWare Server 1.0 to allow you to try out various distros without having to wipe your hard drive. This does, however, require you have a decent amount of RAM (I'd recommend at least 1 GB). Go to http://www.distrowatch.com/ for a fairly complete list of the available Linux distros, sorted by popularity.

If all these links really don't solve your problems, take yourself over to your best local bookstore and buy a book or two. The drawback of doing this, however, is that most of them will be pretty much out of date by the time they hit the shelves. On the other hand, they will give you a great foundation upon which you can build (update yourself) easily by utilizing the online resources.

Also, never forget about http://www.google.com/linux!

From what I could find, it's mostly a localized Debian with a few tweaks for ease-of-use and some educational apps and such. Review linked by distrowatch.

Placing your software in the public domain is not as easy as you might think. See this article by Larry Rosen in Linux Journal for instance: Why the Public Domain Isn't a License.

Contrary to what you see on TV, small claims court is based on common sense and reasonableness. Also small claims court is where the common man can plead his case against the big corporation.

i have experience in similar math-driven environments so can offer relevant thoughts.

a math-centric or faff-minimising prototyping environment is crucial whilst constructing the math models which you'll later be putting into Production. you want to absolutely minimise the Drag of the tool on the thought process. you can use MatLab or Excel or a piece of paper.

then take the result as being the Specification (Logical) which will feed into your development. your Production-ready code's particular Physical architecture will be influenced by that nasty thing called reality: performance, time/functionality tradeoffs, clients' hardware, legal requirements, that sort of thing.



you can use C++ if you want but i would advise against it unless you have strong historical/legacy lockins. for Maths work, Python's "NumPy" library actually runs faster than the standard C++ libraries (plus it can near-transparently use C/C++ libraries), and you avoid 99% of the time-wasting faff that C++ forces on the coders. so you develop several orders of magnitude faster. a lovely lovely language which slots straight into your mathematical environment.

e.g.: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882

January 1997
``In fact it's probably easier to write a virus for Linux because it's open source and the code is available. So we will be seeing more Linux viruses as the OS becomes more common and popular.''--Wishful thinking from McAfee

saw that here: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9065?

"Mac nerds? Are they the same sort of people as Windows hackers and Linux gamers?"

Did you know that you can play PS2 games in linux?

They did release it (altough using Wine).
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4589

Further, if it were not for Linux, BSD probably would not have developed to a state where it could have been used for such a purpose since Linux caused such a massive explosion in software development. The old pace of BSD development was kicked into gear by Linux. So, even the use of BSD would imply a dependence upon the existence of Linux.

Sounds like revisionist history to me. You might want to read up on BSD history and Linux history. Where was Linux in 1983 when 4.3BSD had implemented the first TCP/IP stack? It wouldn't be another 8 years until Linus made his first announcement about wanting people to send in a wishlist for his little OS project he's been dabbling with. Linux was made possible because it was transmitted on a network likely powered by a lot of BSD code. So Linux's existence is dependent on BSD, not the other way around.

The one point I agree with you on is that BSD development has stepped up in recent years. Whether that can be attributed to Linux directly, or in 1995 to Berkeley no longer directly developing it and thus spawning the major BSD projects, or a general surge in all open source operating systems alongside the popularity of the internet... is debatable.

I don't get it. Why do you think that people who chose the GPL are "control freaks"?

I still can't figure out how the claim that the GNU Public License encourages free speech is not utterly disingenuous. The GPL is the opposite of free speech; it's a highly detailed copyright agreement with the purpose of restricting the expression of derivative works. If I can't keep an expression to myself, I am restricted. All license agreements begin from the starting point of complete restriction, that is, total prohibition against use, and then work forward from that point. The summit of free speech is public domain expression--if you want to speak it again, go ahead, and for whatever purpose you care to seek. As much as I am an advocate of free speech and all other civil rights, my purpose with public software is not free speech--it's free beer.

I've seen Levanta's ads in Linux Journal before. Besides the silly name, it sounds like a pretty interesting premise--remote administration, deployment, and management of servers. I don't know how well it actually works, or how painful the integration with the managed servers is, but it certainly sounds cool.

The Evolution website says GroupWise (not free) works, and mentions a project for OpenGroupware.org compatability. This article also says people are implementing GroupDAV to make it work with servers including OpenGroupware.org and Citadel.

The "splice" system call seems to be an answer to one of Microsoft's bad ideas - serving web pages from the kernel.

I'm SO glad that httpd is just a figment of my imagination then. Funny, if it were to exist it would do exactly the same things as Microsoft's http.sys that you're crying about. Oh wait...