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Since SCO had a distribution of Linux at one time, I'm more concerned with who put the code in Linux as much as wondering how much is in it. Remember Open Linux 2.3? I still have a copy. This is pre lawsuit. I've been keeping the boxed copy as a buffer against legal challanges. I bought the infringing code from them before they became trolls.
http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=4448

Even better, ServerSpy reveals that the IIPA website is hosted by ConcentricHosts, who at least at one stage ran Linux servers. Maybe they still do, but unfortunately the only reference I could find is ancient and a lot could have changed in 11 years.

http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=12503

This is probably about the most incriminating one that immediately springs to mind.

For your reading pleasure:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041010180516/http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html
http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=10127
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/X_Window_System

BTW, I use Linux/X/GNU/Fluxbox

X is a disaster!

All the variouse WMs and DEs (I use Fluxbox personally) barely cover up the rough edges and sharp corners in the X brainfuck!

For your reading pleasure:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041010180516/http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html
http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=10127
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/X_Window_System

Please don't take this as an offense at all. from what it sounds like, you seem to be reasonably windows savy, not reasonably computer savy. an easy to understand article on making linux partitions for the windows user (first one i found from a quick google search) : http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id =11859 yes, deleting your ntfs/fat windows partition will destroy the data. you can resize it, using an advanced partition tool like partition magic, acronis partitionexpert, parted, im sure theres a few more out there. yes, you can share partitions between operating systems. you just need to have it supported by the linux kernel, built in or via module. anyway, i understand what you meant when you said that linux doesnt have a wide user base. it began in the early 90s, its main "commerical" focus is on servers, and its designed by open source developers in favor of open source developers/users. things seem to be changing though; i believe this is one of the targets that the ubuntu distribution is aiming towards. i think certain distributions of linux are getting closer and closer to the moment where it will "just work" for users. no troubleshooting needed, no driver hacking needed, no debugging needed. this is why i usually don't suggest the basic end user to try any other linux distribution than ubuntu. ok. rant done. its what, 2:30am where i am? i wont blame you if this whole message doesnt make any sense. for im tired. and out of coffee.

Er... No. "standard libraries... without resorting to Win32 calls"? It's not the Win32 part that's the issue, it's the DirectX part, a high-level, high-performance interface to 3D hardware. OpenGL is somewhat comparable, and in the mid-90s was the polished alternative to the weak hack that was DirectX. However, OpenGL evolves by committee, and has many conservative stakeholders such as CAD firms, while MS totally controls DirectX, and has been pushing hard for it to be used as widely as possible. Each iteration has made it much more powerful and better suited to games programming, as well as tracking the rapid advances in consumer 3D hardware. Further, if your PC game uses DirectX, it's much easier to port it to the Xbox360, and vice versa.

Both Parallels and VMWare are working on cloning the DirectX API so VM applications can have accelerated 3D, but it's a big task. The DirectX libraries are massive, and each version has major differences with the previous one. VMWare is working hard just to get DirectX 8.1 compatibility, i.e. two revisions ago.

Some of the big graphics engine makers continue to support OpenGL, but even so, how do they financially justify spending the time and money to port their games to a platform with a tiny desktop market share, and where a significant percentage of the users expect everything on their machine to be free and open source?

This is a passionate and well-argued plea for mainstream developers to develop for Linux, but I don't think he convinced too many game company CFOs.

I would refer you to the sad post from John Carmack, regarding the disappointing sales of the Linux version of Quake III back in 2000. So far, not too many companies have wanted to risk seeing if things have changed.

Instead, Microsoft has used this patent pledge to indicate that, in their view, the only good Free Software developer is an isolated, uncompensated, unimportant Free Software developer.

This from the man who believes that the GPL is the only FOSS license with the right to exist.

Mr. Kuhn, you are every bit as much a part of the problem as Microsoft are themselves. In fact, you are moreso. At least Microsoft do not try and pretend to be anything other than what they are. You are not one micron less a fascist...merely from a different direction.

You can take your warped, cultic distortion of the word "freedom," and cram it where you feel most appropriate. You and Richard Stallman are open source's answer to David Miscavige and L. Ron. Hubbard, respectively. You are the proverbial scorpion on Linux's back.

Some who use Linux with the total inability to think for themselves may delude themselves that they need to use your brain and Stallman's in leiu of their own. I am not among such people, and I defy, reject, and repudiate both you, Stallman, and the entirely *false* freedom which the FSF stands for. You would have us reject Microsoft as our masters, only to install yourselves in their place.

You do not speak for everyone who uses open source. You most certainly do not speak for me.

I'd be more interested in programming the displays to show something useful.

You want something more like one of these. (And, for that matter, so do I.)

The struggle between the so-called RMS-wing of OSS and the practical Linus-wing of OSS is eventually going to have to resolve these differences.

There are fundamental differences that most likely won't be resolved any time soon (as long as RMS is around).

Here's an excellent writeup about the different philosophies of the RMS-wing and the OSS-wing of FOSS

http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id =12503

I care not about politics, especially when it comes to bits and bytes. If the software I need costs money, I will just buy it. If it happens to be Free/free, even better! But I don't care about any "movements" and "religions" or "politics".

I think we take our freedom a lot more seriously than many around here if they get their panties in a bunch over bits and bytes.

The extremists over at the FSF are a miniscule minority compared to the overall open source crowd - and not even the same group.

http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id =12503/

If you do, you're one of the wankers that causes insecurity.

You mean 'one of the wankers' like RMS??

You should talk to a therapist about your feelings of insecurity.

You Decide:

The original article: http://qrxx.4t.com/barbieOS.htm along with http://g0re.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=6586, http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id =7885 and http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id =7885.

Be nice if my daughter was on the same OS as her old man.

myke

What other favorites from the past could be contributed to a UserLinux distribution, making it irresistable? How about Clipper, isn't that dead yet? Couldn't its corpse (implementation) be examined for clues in how to improve ReKall? I like the idea of integrating Coda into UserLinux, a product from 1987. I wonder, has IBM bothered contributed portions of OS/2's object-oriented GUI to either GNOME or KDE? Also, let's not forget the hundreds (thousands?) of games cast aside by their developers. I for one, would love to see an Open Sourced version of a game like Elite.

= 9J =

First, as stated before elsewhere, Linus is not the sole owner of the trademark. There are a couple of hundred of developers who co-own the mark.

Linus has outlined the general policy for the trademark use here a long time ago. Today I believe Linux International manges all Linux trademark related issues and mantain a trademark fund to help finnance Linux development.

I think every major distro has entered an agreement with Linus\Linux International about the use of the "Linux" trademark in conjunction with their "service" trademarks or "combination" trademarks.

Actually, you need to go back further than that to be 'original'. The Monorail was the first that I can recall that was built on that premise. It had a crappy dual-scan LCD and not much horsepower, but was still a neat looking device that got a lot of service as a POS terminal at a few stores I know of. I still use quite a few of the keyboards, as they showed up at an electronics wholesaler I live near for $5 bucks. They are simply Mitsumi keyboards with a neat dark grey color and light colored keys.

Here's a link to an article remembering the Monorail, as told by LINUX.com

Such machines can easily be found (with NIC & RAM) for under $25 on Ebay (although shipping's usually more than the PC). Try cruising the local garage sales or putting the word on the street you're looking for an old Garage Shelf Space Taker-Upper and you might just get it for free from someone who's just happy it's out of their garage and not in landfill. Heck, if you're the kind of person who would rather roll your own than buy, you've probably already got a few of these machines collecting dust and should already know all of this anyhow.

Another $15 for the ATA controller and $100 for a 120gb drive (some larger drives are often bundled with the controller, YMMV) and you're good to go for way under $275.

And if you really enjoy this kind of thing, pick up an HD44780 display (~$20 on EBay + $10 on wiring bits from RS or Frys) and run LCDProc so you can just look at the box to see if it's crashed before hauling out the spare KB and monitor.

Watch your system stats or that xmms playlist.

CrystalFontz has 2 line & 4 line displays that go into drive bays very nicely.

You can try any of the ones from the LCDProc hardware page. These include CrystalFontz, Matrix-Orbital, and CwLinux to name a few. The first two of these companies have a pretty good selection of LCDs in different colors and with different viewable areas.

I read the review and couldn't find out if it was easily programable

Can anyone think of any other cool uses for a fully programmable display like this?

So I wrote a little python script that checks /proc/mdstat every minute, and it displays a simple "Raid OK" or a scary message (and yes, I've tested that case, so it'll really happen ;-). Now if one of my drives goes out, I'll notice right away, because it's in plain sight.

I also poll /proc/net/dev and display some running average deltas, though I think that might be more eye candy than useful.

And of course, it displays a big clock too. It's the easiest-to-read clock in the room (20x4 VFD), but since it's not always being displayed (lcdproc switches around between all its different "screens") sometimes you have to wait a few seconds to see what time it is, so that's kind of lame. :-/

It uses a standard and well-documented serial protocol, which means you can quite easily write your own driver apps. Or alternatively there's LCDC for Windows (shareware, but worth it) or lcdproc for Unix.

these things are nothing new. linux central has had them for years now. also, check out lcdproc for software that writes to these things.

there was an acticle on slashdot about the lcd screens from matrix orbital using some cool linux software
http://lcdproc.omnipotent.net/

isn't really a brand new idea.
The LCDproc ( site currently down) and lcd4linux and
some other projects have been around for quite some time now.

I have created an USB Interface for LCD modules that has some advantages over the usual serial or parallel port hack. I hope to release it soon.

This could start a whole new line of pc monitoring tools.

(Ok, I just want to say, I think hooking up analog gauges is a neat idea, and I wholeheartedly approve of the "riceboy" mentality. With that out of the way...)

None of this stuff is really new. A shitload of monitoring tools like this, have already been thought up and implemented. People why are interested in these sort of things, should look into getting something like a Matrix Orbital LCD or VFD (or one of their competitors) hooked up to a serial port, and the lcdproc server software.

lcdproc clients have been written for all kinds of things, and idle monitors, temperature displays, etc are all old hat. Last year, I had a very embarrassing incident where my home fileserver's RAID5 was running in degraded mode for 6 months(!) before I noticed, because I never bothered to read logs (just goes to show what a shitty admin I am). So I thought, "never again" and darn near effortlessly wrote a little python program that displays my RAID status on the box's VFD. If my one of my RAID's partitions ever goes out again, then the usual "RAID Ok" that flashes on the front of my box every few seconds, will be replaced with something scary-looking, and I'll know.

LCD/VFD displays are a lot more versatile and general-purpose than analog stuff, the sky's the limit to what you can do with these things, and lcdproc makes them so easy to program. Every box should have one! :-)

Heh, last night I was writing a Python class to handle all my talking to lcdproc for me, so my mind was in a goofy mode when I read the summary. "Oooh, 21 inch LCDs! Is there an lcdproc driver for that yet?" Oh wait, these LCDs plug into the svga port instead of a serial port? It suddenly seems so boring. These LCDs are intended for GUIs and games and stuff, and here I was, thinking how nice they would be for displaying my system's uptime and CPU usage. ;-)

What you are looking for is LCDProc .

The LCDproc page has references to several of those serial/parallel characters LCD displays. LCDproc, which shows Linux system status on an LCD, also is an example of code to talk to them.

Since qmail has already had one exploit in its history, why should we believe that the rest of DJB's software is any more secure?

To answer your rhetorical question, I don't think anyone believes that djbdns is inherently more secure than qmail (although it is a lot easier to configure qmail in an insecure way, if for no other reason than that it's capable of running programs from .qmail files). I trust both of them a lot more than I'd ever trust BIND, though, even if that isn't saying much at this point.

Plus I'm lazy. The All-in wonder would really only be usefull to Windows boxen (especially with all the cool software.)

Oh... And the patent's pending ;)

You sound like you could use a nice LCD setup instead of second monitor like LCDproc. If you really want the monitor, then by all means get it.

I've been doing research on this for the last month or three, and the news isn't entirely good. First, you need to figure out exactly what you want your TiVo-esque set-top box to do. "Personal TV" features like live pause and live rewind? Digital, full-frame recording? MPEG1, MJPEG or MPEG2 compression? Channel guides and automatic VCR programming? CD playing? DVD playing? Lastly, what will you put it all in?

Let's start with personal TV features. You can currently record live, full-resolution video and audio onto your HD without dropping frames -- assuming you've got at least a 500mHz processor and a fast HD. That's just a live dump to a raw AVI, and you'll fill up your HD pretty fast that way, at roughly 1-2 meg a second. But if you can blow 4gb for an hour of programming to be able to do a live pause/rewind for a while, then that's not too big a deal. But what if you want to include digital VCR features, not just live pause/rewind?

Now, things get a little more expensive. The crux of the problem is to do live, full-frame MPEG2 video and audio encoding in software, you need at least ANOTHER 500mhz of horsepower, and a single 1gHz processor won't cut it. MPEG1 quality blows if you're recording off satellite or even decent cable TV (if you want the low-end, though, the Broadway MPEG1 encoder is cheap, around $800), leaving you with just MJPEG or MPEG2 video. MJPEG is much larger than MPEG2, because it doesn't have temporal compression, but you can get consumer-grade hardware MJPEG encoders on Matrox hardware, so for a build-your-own box, if you 2-3x your HD size, you should be okay. But to do it right, you want full-frame D1 MPEG2 encoding (half-D1 MPEG2 is MPEG1 resolution, but MPEG2 quality), like you have on DVDs. And to do that in hardware will cost you over a thousand dollars, and may not include an MPEG DEcoding solution!. Yuck. Darim's MPEGator2 can do full D1 encoding for (only) US$1800, VisionTech's MVcast is US$1995, DV Studio's Apollo Expert is US$1995 and includes both encoding and decoding, making it possibly the best buy. I have no idea if Linux drivers are available for any of them, but the price alone puts that sort of tech out of the realm of most people's hands.

With that sobering realization in mind, let's forge forward to channel guides and VCR programming. Channel guides are easy. Just have a Perl script rip and reformat any of the listings from the online providers, including Excite TV, Ultimate TV, GIST TV (which also provides the Yahoo TV listings), Ask TV (in the UK), Click TV (what TiVo uses), TV Quest, TV Grid or TV Guide Online. And once you have this set up, it's not much farther to program an IR transmitter to sit in front of your VCR's IR port to have it automatically record shows for you.

CD playing in a set-top box is a nice feature. Pop the CD in, and have it hit CDDB for the disc info, and give track options. Shouldn't be too hard.

DVD playing in a homebuild Linux-based set-top box is nearly possible now, too. As of this weekend, I believe that you can now put a DVD in the drive, and play it, entirely software decoded, no ripping VOBs or copying to a HD, full-screen, full-frame, with real-time AC3/48kHz audio downsampling to 44kHz, and audio/video sync is probably only a few hours of coding away. Now all we need is hardware MPEG acceleration in the ATI Rage chipsets, and maybe that attractive Apollo encoder/decoder.

Lastly, what are you going to put this monstrosity of open-source software engineering in? What we've just explained above is that for around $3000, you can build a combination cable box (we'll ignore the open source software cable descramblers for the moment), real-time MPEG2 digital VCR, timeshifting personal TV player, channel guide, CD player and region-code-less, restriction-less DVD player, that utterly blows the quality of anything else on the market out of the water. This is what TiVo WANTS to be. But what are you going to do? Stick a fat, ugly, beige desktop case on top of your TV? Bah. T-A-C-K-Y. Even the recently rediscovered BookPC (aka NLX) cases still look like PCs. But most people can't afford to mint custom cases, yet you want something that doesn't look like a PC. How about a 1U or 2U black rackmount case, sans locking front panel and rails? 19" wide makes it a bit wide for small TVs, but that's okay. You've got a bay for a floppy drive or small LCD panel, a DVD drive, and enough room inside for at least one HD, and in some 1U cases, both the TV card and the MPEG card! Otherwise, just go 2U, which isn't TOO much larger. Whee.

I think that's it. I don't know what the state of TV input on Linux is, but I assume it's pretty good, or you wouldn't even be able to consider this project, so that's not a big deal. And even through you can record in real-time, without compression, straight to AVI (bleagh!), I left out the possibility to post-process the AVI to MPEG, because really, that's so tacky. That's like having to play DVDs by copying them to a HD first. Do it realtime, and Do It Right(tm). Lists of MPEG hardware encoders I got from a Canadian distributor called BernClare Multimedia, Inc. Seems like a nice place. Other URLs I used for reference (no, my personal project doesn't have a site; I just posted most of my knowledge here!) include the still-conceptual LinuxVCR project, the LinuxToday article on How to Build Your Own 1U Rackmount, the Calibri 300R 1U rackmount Linux-based router, and LCDproc for that LCD display you know you'll need on the front to perpetually blink 12:00.

Matrix-Orbital, that is.

Check out the LCD Proc site, as it has lots of fun pictures and information.

I just bought one of these for my new dual Celeron box. I just finished the wood cage for the metal components last night - the hard drive comes tonight - and I full well intend to at least boot it into linux this weekend before I have to disassemble it to make the rest of the case!

LEDs are 'Light Emitting Diodes', the most common choice for any little blinking light on your computer (they tend to be just a little colored light.)

LCD is 'Liquid Crystal Display' which has this liquid crystal that's polarized and changes polarization when some electricity is run through it. This is what's used on digital watches, calculators, laptop displays and the little linux based MP3 player thingy that I've seen before.

If you're interested in the former, look on metalab (ex-sunsite) under Linux/system/status you'll find that there is a led-stat.txt describing a short program and cable with LEDs, etc. (there's also a ledstatus tarball and lsm) You can modify this LED status program in a number of ways, at one place I worked we had it set up with a colored "load meter" (gets higher when more load) combined with a heartbeat (goes back and forth to give you a 'feel' of how much CPU is available) and with two of the parallel port pins hooked up to a relay hooked up to the reset switch of the NT machine next to it, so we could send a specific signal to lcdmeter and reboot the NT machine when it froze.

If you're interested in an LCD display panel, as I suspect you really are, Matrix Orbital Corporation makes a series of LCD display panels (also VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) modules that appear to be completely compatible and brighter than the LCD panels) that are sold through a few different channels, including Linux Central. These appear to use RS-232, (or I2C, whatever that is) so you'll need a spare serial port.

The software to drive these is LCDproc which works on a fairly configurable client/server interface, so it should be possible to display anything you want with LCDproc as long as you can write a client that can speak the protocol.

LEDs are 'Light Emitting Diodes', the most common choice for any little blinking light on your computer (they tend to be just a little colored light.)

LCD is 'Liquid Crystal Display' which has this liquid crystal that's polarized and changes polarization when some electricity is run through it. This is what's used on digital watches, calculators, laptop displays and the little linux based MP3 player thingy that I've seen before.

If you're interested in the former, look on metalab (ex-sunsite) under Linux/system/status you'll find that there is a led-stat.txt describing a short program and cable with LEDs, etc. (there's also a ledstatus tarball and lsm) You can modify this LED status program in a number of ways, at one place I worked we had it set up with a colored "load meter" (gets higher when more load) combined with a heartbeat (goes back and forth to give you a 'feel' of how much CPU is available) and with two of the parallel port pins hooked up to a relay hooked up to the reset switch of the NT machine next to it, so we could send a specific signal to lcdmeter and reboot the NT machine when it froze.

If you're interested in an LCD display panel, as I suspect you really are, Matrix Orbital Corporation makes a series of LCD display panels (also VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) modules that appear to be completely compatible and brighter than the LCD panels) that are sold through a few different channels, including Linux Central. These appear to use RS-232, (or I2C, whatever that is) so you'll need a spare serial port.

The software to drive these is LCDproc which works on a fairly configurable client/server interface, so it should be possible to display anything you want with LCDproc as long as you can write a client that can speak the protocol.

Judging from their current line of servers, these machines might not have graphics boards in them at all.

The servers will have graphics (probably not accelerated 3D) since they will be designed to run both Linux and Micro$oft Windoze NT. A headless server would be a more reasonable option if NT wasn't part of the plan.

check out the press release

I hope the server is rackmountable, takes up 4U or less and has an LCDproc compatible display, especially if it's targeted at ISPs.