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Old habbits aren't always the best. There is a lot of clicking next in Windowsland that doesn't need to happen.

- they're forced to use a commandline interface for a package manager or compile something or some other nonsense they care not to learn.

BS.You can use great GUI tools to install, and use great internet tools to avoid installing.Both ways seem far better to me than "next, next,next,next,next,next,next,etc."

octave is not even nearly at the level Matlab is... nothing is. it is quite annoying that they have such a dominant product and noone has an alternative. its still pretty damn good though.

maths packages are something which OSS are just years behind unfortunately. matlab is the only real option for numerical stuff and mathematica the only real option for symbolic (maple is for classrooms, not the workplace).

on the numerics front, you are right there is octave. there are also some GPL C libraries such as matpack and GSL which are pretty good if you are writing a project to be released using the GPL and you take the time to learn the workings of the functions. but then, most problems you don't want to have to write a program to solve an ODE! matlab can do that in minutes whereas it could take a day in GSL. these OSS libraries have great documentation, an important thing for a numerics library.

on the symbolic front, OSS sucks. there is maxima and no documentation beyond introductions. no decent GUI exists and i found myself using the terminal mode. its about a decade behind maple or mathematica.

i have heard rumours that axiom will be good, but i seriously doubt it. and to be honest, i kinda like knowing that mathematica is used by so many people and is very well bug tested. the results may never be checked by a human, so you gotta trust your computer!

Funny, I can't remember the last time I heard about a homocidal maniac running around with a swimming pool killing people.

But this is beside the topic. My point was BitTorrent does have it's legit uses. And I would personally rather hear, "Motherfucka, I gonna bust a torrent in yo' ass," than "Motherfucka, I gonna bust a cap in yo' ass," while walking down an abandoned alleyway.

The MPAA and RIAA can take care of their own damn selves. They're large, hulking, entrenched plutocracies, I'm sure that they can make it on their own. But I, for one, don't want to go back to getting my Linux ISOs, or my video game remixes, or anything the slow FTP/HTTP way. It's retarded, when I could be using BitTorrent, but for the sake of the poor record companies who's afraid that suburban teenagers won't want to pay for the overpriced shit they call music nowadays, will instead sign up for spam and search unnavigable websites for hours on end to locate that one pitiful torrent that isn't even seeded anymore and spend 1 week trying to download it before giving up in disgust.

If you want to find music, there are better alternatives out there. Ones that don't require a webmaster to risk a subpeona by putting it on his website.

And I'll bet that the 3 people who modded me Flamebait are all NRA members. I love /. where even logical conclusions are inflammatory. If you disagree with me be decent enough to argue. If you find you can't, then maybe you are the one who's wrong.

Try Synaptic

This would be great for members of the general public who are looking for an alternative to Windows, don't want to pay for Mac, but are looking for a platform where installing and running software is as easy as on the platform they are used to.

IMO it's way easier to install software on e.g. Debian than it is on Windows - and when it comes to keeping a system up-to-date... Fuhgeddaboudit!

On windows you have to either find the software on some obscure website or have a cdrom with it - and then when you need to update the software, you need to go back to that obscure place again. Fortunately many programs are starting to ship with an "update self" feature - but still...

On my Debian box I simply search the apt repositories I've put in my configuration, when I find the software I want - install it and Debian takes care of the rest. And if I want to update my system... 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y'. And if I'm not comfortable with the command line I'll just use a tool such as Synaptic.

I know several non-techy people who has made the switch from Windows to Linux and all of them have been very impressed and delighted with Debian and it's package-system.

You'll have to explain to us again why anyone would want all that frilly eye-candy. Talk about a waste of CPU cycles and developer time. For a lean and mean window manager, I'd suggest Ratposion. Admiring your beautiful computer screen seems like a weird fetish to me. If you want somthing pretty to look at there are plenty of porn sites a mere click away.

Your link is broken. The correct link is: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/tiger.

I've been working with Tiger quite a bit over the last few months (even contributing some changes) and I'm pretty impressed with what it can do.
Also handy is the fact that it runs on most of the proprietary *NIX's.

[/Tiger Plug]

it is already under the GPL:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/debatepoint

-metric

hmm i see no mention of thier old name on that site. Do you have any evidence that its the same project?

Actually, the history of the renaming went like this: There was FreeCraft, which included the core engine, Warcraft II data ripper/support files, and Freecraft Media Project (which was supposed to produce free artwork - hilariously blasphemous stuff*).

After Blizzard C&D'd the whole lot, the original developers said bye-bye. New people started the work. Core engine was renamed to Stratagus, the Warcraft II ripper/data thing was called Wargus (which was originally just included in Stratagus, but quite soon split to another project), and FCMP became Aleona's Tales... uh, the web page now says "Wartorn", that project pretty much died because it was so... shall we say... not really going anywhere.

Nowadays, the Stratagus engine runs tons of RTS games - just check out the list in the web page!

Okay, the web sites still don't mention their original names, but you can search for news stories mentioning the Freecraft-to-Stratagus changeover. I believe Slashdot covered it. Yep! They did! (And I believe there was a dupe as well, can't seem to find it right now though =)

Try ArX.

>No AIM

There's Gaim. That will let them use AIM, but it will also mean that if their friends use MSN or ICQ instead, they can talk to all of them from within the same program.

>No Kazaa.

Heard of mldonkey? eDonkey, Kazaa, Gnutella, BitTorrent, Napster, and Direct Connect, all in the one app. Got more clients than you can shake a stick at, too.

It's funny you should say that. Have you taken a look at ArX? The author may be no Knuth, but ArX looks quite good. The name is also inspired by TeX.

You might want to check out ArX. It's basically a simpler, cleaner Arch, easier to use, with some extra improvements. I haven't used it personally, but it looks very nice.

Actually, tere are a lot of project in universities where the aim is to provide a fully autonomous (read autopilot, Flight Managment Systems....) UAV. Some of them are open including Paparadziy (http://www.nongnu.org/paparazzi/). Those (french) guys did some amasing work and all the code (both the remote control station and the embeded code) is GPL and you can also take a look at the schematics for thei on-boeard conrollers and other stuff. Their UAVs can folow a fliht plan, land automatically.... A lot of their ideas/issues come from the Air Traffic Control world.

As for the military applications as the article sugest, they are mostly talking about city surveillance, guerilla detection...

There are lots of such tools, including CVS, Subversion (SVN), GNU arch, Monotone, Aegis, CVSNT, Darcs, FastCST, OpenCM, Vesta, Superversion, Codeville, Bazaar, Arx, and Bazaar-NG.

linus didn't consider the nature of what he was using and got burned.

Well, let me point out Andrew Morton is the guy who does most of the heavy lifting on the kernel these days, and he uses his own scripts.

I thought you said you were using urllib2 earlier, not urllib? Anyway, it depends on which version your using. For older versions of python you can use http://www.nongnu.org/bothans/pydoc/common.timeout socket.html You've already figured out how to do it for newer versions :)

I believe ratpoison is even more minimalistic than ion.

For speed, nothing like ratpoison

What about Linux assembly language?

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/

Or, you can buy a printed version from here.

The next issue of Free Software Magazine will likely have a list of many of the good free books available.

Your Mr. Magoo method sounds much better.

Mach RPC is built on top of Mach ports, but an RPC call is not a single kernel-level operation. So you have the scheduling problem.

Interestingly, although it's very obscure, the kernel call level below mach_msg_send actually does support a combined send/block/receive operation. As the MIT document points out, this "enables certain internal optimizations".

But when you read the GNU HURD tutorial on Mach IPC, you see the suggestion that a program intended to send an integer to another program and wait for a reply should do two separate operations. Somebody doesn't get this.

Also, for no particularly good reason, Mach usually uses the same buffer for both send and receive, so if you use the combined send/receive form, whatever you send gets clobbered by the reply. So using this tends to involve an extra copy.

Mach IPC is incredibly complicated, You have to fill in many data structures just to send something. The implementation is complicated, too. QNX has a nice, simple primitive:

int MsgSend(int connectionid,
const void* sendmsg,
int sendbytes,
void* rcvmsg,
int rcvbytes);

You can probably figure out how to use that just from the definition. Even the reply value is what you think it should be: the receive count if it worked, -1 if it failed, with an error code in errno.

The name of the game here is getting the primitives right.

Sorry for the late reply. What about something like gwyple?

Yes, a panel gets kinda useless once you get a handle on the beauty of virtual desktops.

Linux' beauty is in that it is developed by users of the interface so you get some inavative and useful features (although virt desktops have been around for a while)

I personally am trying out ratpoison to see where the experimental ui's are going. It takes the ui into an interesting turn. It keeps windows in maximized frames. So that nothing is hidden in less you want it hidden. Take a look.

It's pretty cool. You write a loop like this:

#pragma omp parallel for private(sum) reduction(+: sum)
for(ii = 0; ii < n; ii++){
sum = sum + some_complex_long_fuction(a[ii]);
}

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It loads fine with GPDF, and with the Mozilla-Bonobo plugin it loads within Mozilla/Firefox/Epiphany/etc.

And for those of us who find mice inconvenient and prefer to use the terminal? What about our 'ease of use'?

I don't give a flying fuck about whether "Aunt Tillie" can use Linux or not. This focus some people have on Linux (or any other OS, frankly) becoming dominant is quixotic and pointless -- Linux cannot really compete with Windows without sacrificing what makes it worthwhile.

I've found window managers for Windows to be kind of cumbersome. Partially because the system isn't designed for that sort of thing, partially because they're not well done. And there's no ratpoison for Windows. As for X on OS X, that's kind of cumbersome, too. Again, not designed for it, and it doesn't manage the cocoa/aqua applications, which means either having two "window managers" or replacing the system applications.

apt-get update; apt-get install mozilla-firefox

apt-get update; apt-get upgrade

I will be quick. What OS are they deploying now? I guess it's the one from M$. Connectiva would be OK since it's from neighboring Brazil and has strong foundations in Spanish. If multimedia with the ability of sanely playing streamed radio from the internet is ever considered, do not forget Streamtuner http://www.nongnu.org/streamtuner/. There is no sane way of playing these kinds of streams.

I'm not terribly familiar with Conectiva. What does the Mandrake distribution gain with this merger? Just more experienced developers or did Conectiva have certain features that made it attractive?

Well Connectiva were one of the first distributions to embrace apt-rpm (they may even have done a lot of the development work, I can't recall) and provide some of the major development impetus behind Synpatic which is far and away the best GUI package manager around. As far as I am concerned what Mandrake could gain from Connectiva is a move to apt-rpm and Synaptic. I know URPMI has a lot of fans but I think apt and Aynaptic may be the way to go for pakcage management. It helps standardise things as well - all the Debian based distros use apt, and several use Synaptic by default as well, and despite yum being the default apt-rpm and Synaptic is very popular on Fedora, and even SuSE (instead of YaST).

At the very least I hope Connectiva stays with apt-rpm and Synaptic. I would hate to see them shift to URPMI at this stage.

Jedidiah.

Have a common to all distro's install tool that is very easy to use (perhaps a RPM front end).

Well Synaptic is a fairly universal install frontend for all distro based software - it runs on Debian (and all debian based distros), Fedora, SuSE, Connectiva. All you have to do is install the damn thing (it comes by default with several of those distro options). As for third party packages, try Autopackage. Yes they're still finishing things off, and yes, it's going to take developers bothering to package their software with it, but the promise it offers is, I think, enough that we can expect to see it become fairly standard over the next couple of years.

KDE vs Gnome wars: put an end to it.

Um, it is. Or are you going to say all the GNOME developers have to go and work on KDE (or vice versa)? So who says who "wins"? And who really cares if there are 2 seperate desktops if they integrate increasingly well via FD.o standards?

Jedidiah

Yes... and ratpoison's rudeness setting keeps you from having those popups steal window focus while you are trying to type.

http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison

Shouldn't the site be slightly updated, then? At least take the "this project is dead" part out. Go Hurd!

That is not where the problem lies. The additional problems in ascending order of size are --

1 -- (for the non-geek mum/dad user) getting used to the CLI

2 -- (for quite a lot of others too) figuring out what to do if
apt-get install programx
coughs over a dependency issue and shows up with screeds of error messages.

This is nowhere near as hard as you seem to think.

(1) Install Synaptic to do the package management (you know, like Ubuntu and Connectiva do by default), and they'll never have to look at a command line.

(2) They'll do the same thing they do when a Windows Setup.exe barfs with an error message. What's the problem? Neither happens very often at all (unless you go mixing your repositories... which will only happen if you know what you're doing... which will mean you can resolve the dependencies yourself).

For third party (non-distro provided) packages there's things like Autopackage, which while still in development will hopefully become the standard way for any non-distro packagers to package things up.

Jedidiah.

Synaptic on my Debian box provides a nice GUI for apt. Comes in useful when I want to check availability of various packages rather than just doing an apt-get upgrade/update.

Lots of GUIs to install packages exist. For example Porthole, Synaptic. (There are more than these, but I don't remember the names right now).

See also Autopackage for a nice attempt at easy installation across different distributions.

speak for yourself, 3-neuron wonder!

i would rather see one window!

yours truly, a 2-neuron programmer...

It should also be mentioned that one of the more popular eDonkey clients for *nix, mldonkey, also functions as a Bittorrent client. The latest CVS of mldonkey also supports multi-network downloading.

I'm pretty sure I once saw Win32 binaries of mldonkey out there, but I'm not sure if they are recent or have been updated at all.

The proper link:
mlDonkey

Repeat: Do not follow parent link!

Liferea
Straw
Blam

The rdiff-backup program is the tool I use.

It can backup a tree to another directory, saving previous revisions as you go. The backup looks like a copy of your tree, plus a meta-information directory for storing internal revision information. It's network aware, using ssh to copy things around. It does the same protocol as rsync, so bandwidth/traffic is minimized to just changes and checksums. You can set up a cron job to delete revisions older than X days.

The authors are working on a new project that does the same thing except the backup files are encrypted.

It's written in Python, so you know it's gotta be good! It's open source.

Drawbacks? No GUI. (That's not much of a drawback, is it?)

The rdiff-backup program is the tool I use.

It can backup a tree to another directory, saving previous revisions as you go. The backup looks like a copy of your tree, plus a meta-information directory for storing internal revision information. It's network aware, using ssh to copy things around. It does the same protocol as rsync, so bandwidth/traffic is minimized to just changes and checksums. You can set up a cron job to delete revisions older than X days.

The authors are working on a new project that does the same thing except the backup files are encrypted.

It's written in Python, so you know it's gotta be good! It's open source.

Drawbacks? No GUI. (That's not much of a drawback, is it?)

With rdiff-backup, backup dozens of gigabytes effortlessly and restore as effortlessly at any point in time. Add it in a nightly cron job and you are golden !

From the description : "rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership, and modification times. Also, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted. Finally, rdiff-backup is easy to use and settings have sensical defaults."

Read more !

I like rdiff-backup because it makes reverse diffs, meaning the files on the backup disks are always the most recent ones with older changes in diff files. It works over standard ssh and is fairly easy to setup (Some scripting required, or at least doesn't hurt). No gui though.

I think what's really made blogs (and now other outlets) take off is the use of RSS/ATOM feeds and RSS/ATOM readers. There's Straw for Linux, SharpReader for Windows, and even online aggregators like Bloglines for those who are always on the run.

It's easy to know when someone has updated without having to manually check every site. Reading content is also a breeze, by virtue of having a unified interface. Personally, a large number of my regular readers access my weblog through an RSS interface. And with big outlets like Yahoo News and BBC providing RSS feeds, it's not much more effort to simply add a personal blog to your daily reading list.

dselect sucks, so I never use it. I always use apt-get, apt-cache and apt-show-versions. For my non-geek friends I suggest Synaptic.

I guess it goes on my to-do list...along with a graphical front-end to portage

What about Porthole, KPortage, KEmerge, or portageMaster?

Unless, of course, you meant installing one of those. But with Gentoo, I hardly think that would warrant a place on a to-do list.