Slashdot Mirror

Mono works great and has dozens of high quality applications. Why trust some unknown on Slashdot when you can see the results for yourself. Calling Miguel a "PR man for a competing product" just shows your ignorance. He's the guy who started GNOME, wrote GNUmeric and generally got people as excited about the desktop side of UNIX as Stallman and Torvalds did for the operating system.

Things you might consider:

Kubuntu Live CD (Info at Kubuntu.org)
Games Knoppix (Although the 0.2 release is accidentally missing a file manager. Also, the 0.2 version is not a "upgrade" of 0.1 - it has a different list of games, though they do overlap.)
Linux Live Game Project

All three of these are based on KDE, and so should be relatively familiar-looking for a Windows user. If you are comfortable enough with "Mac-like" theme, you can also try:

Ubuntu Live CD (Info at Ubuntulinux.org)

All of these are live CDs, which means that you can boot into them and try them out to your heart's content, without harming your existing windows installations. Those 5 CDs (Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Games-Knoppix 0.1 and 0.2 and LLGP) are what I give out to people to try out linux... Because there are games, they don't feel like it's so scary...

In order to get used to the command line (if that is one of your goals) the following may be useful:

The Command Line - The Best Newbie Interface? (an alternative perspective on the "scary" command line)
and
The CLI Series at Linux.com (Start at the last one on the last page "alias cat and pipe meet grep" and work your way up at your leisure.)

You may want to read and/or contibute to GrokDoc:
GrokDoc

I knew Slashdot borrowed news from OSNews but... usually they did it the same day....
This one is like 4 days old:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10512

I never said it was "my" proof. I am just repeating what Linus said and I thought I made that clear when I said "his proof". In defense of Linus though there was no good reason for him to change the error numbers when it caused some things to break.

As far as JFS goes, you need to read this: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=69. In it, Steve Best describes how the JFS team redesigned JFS and started with new source. In another published article, he describes key team members as being members of the original AIX JFS team. (See slide 8 here: http://www.perl.org/tpc/2002/sessions/best_steve.p df ) And in another part of one article, he states that JFS for AIX was around for 10 years before they started the new JFS. That's a very long time. This doesn't meet the standard definition of a "sterile" redevelopment environment.

Here you are missing a key point. The JFS that was created for OS/2 was completely different than the JFS for AIX. The fact that 10 years went by is also very telling, that is a long time in the world of computers and nearly all the technologies used in the original JFS were probably outdated or trivial by the time the second incarnation of JFS arrived. Just because it was called "JFS" doesn't mean it was even close to the same thing. The fact that IBM used some of the same developers for the new JFS means nothing because they never ported that JFS to Linux. They ported another filesystem by the same name that only got ported to AIX after it was ported to Linux.

http://cse.stanford.edu/class/sophomore-college/pr ojects-00/risc/risccisc/ this is probally what your refering to. also try http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3997

Well, really, again, my point was that POSIX standards included the interface to the o/s, but not really the .h files. And your "proof" that errno.h is original because the numbers are different is not proof at all. Anyone could copy it, then change the numbers. I'm only pointing out that your argument wasn't based on substantive evidence. But that's not important nor is it worth arguing about further. I'm an ardent Unix and Linux supporter, and I am not implying by any means that Linus did something untoward. I've replaced a lot of Microsoft and other systems with Linux and other *nixes over the years, and I even contributed some code to OSS. As far as JFS goes, you need to read this: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=69. In it, Steve Best describes how the JFS team redesigned JFS and started with new source. In another published article, he describes key team members as being members of the original AIX JFS team. (See slide 8 here: http://www.perl.org/tpc/2002/sessions/best_steve.p df ) And in another part of one article, he states that JFS for AIX was around for 10 years before they started the new JFS. That's a very long time. This doesn't meet the standard definition of a "sterile" redevelopment environment. He never explicitly states that _no_ code was reused. He only says they started with a new source base. Fact remains that they would have a difficult time proving that it wasn't a derived work of their own work. But the crux is that even if it was derived from the AIX system, which in all likelihood the design was, at the very least, the original work was IBM's and not SCO's. And I like IBM's work. I never much cared for SCO's, and I certainly don't care for SCO's attitude these days.

Here's my review of it from way back when if you need more info on it.

Enjoy!

I guess I'm not the only idiot still talking about this: http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10419 I just don't understand why if so many people, i.e. potential Mac customers (read above posts) complain about expensive hardware that Apple doesn't do something to reach that market. The Mac Mini has severe limitations in upgrading possibilities and the performance doesn't compare to what you can get for the same price using a different processor.

Sys V init scripts are just archaic and are showing their age and preventing more sophisticated forms of startup. Why doesn't RedHat investigate replacing Sys V init with a new, dependency-based, parallelizable startup system like Mac OS initialization system or Seth Nickell's proposed "SystemServices" init system:

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4711
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/2003/Sep

This could easily be backwards compatible such that there are services defined which are simply one-to-one mappings to scripts. Once it's dependency based, you don't have to worry about assigning hardcoded priorities manually and then writing dock gadgets that tell the user when the services are done "starting". As a user I couldn't care less that the services are done starting. Programmers have a futuristic technology called semaphores that can be used to block until a required dependency is fulfilled. If you want to print, and the print spooler hasn't started, instead of blowing chunks, you just implicitly start it. Magic! Ideally, ALL services would be lazy by default unless specifically told by the user to start up automatically (i.e. ssh server, web server, etc.)

I was going to post a comment about how amateur and untrustworthy the project looks, but somebody beat me to it:

If this is real at all, it clearly borrows heavily from some well known BSD licensed unixlike codebase (almost certainly Darwin, given their claims of Mach kernel services). Nobody, not even the Chinese government, is going to write an OS this feature-complete from scratch and spring it on us out of the blue. Even so, this would be a big step forward for Darwin: some of the features claimed (SSI clustering, NUMA support, SELinux-like MACs) have only been available in Linux and commercial Unices until now. So let me just say, if this is real, it's great.

Unfortunately, this seems unlikely to me. The website for this project is so unprofessional that I doubt it was produced by a team capable of creating this software. The following are strikes against them:

-The website is poorly translated, ridiculously unprofessional, makes very vague and grandiose claims, and shows only tiny screenshots that could well be KDE on Linux.

-They claim GRUB was "ported" to Kylin, yet their OS is quite obviously familiar enough that no port would be necessary: they're using Mach, and they certainly did not invent a new filesystem.

-They claim IA64 but not PPC support, Darwin is all about PPC but does not support IA64.

-They claim not only an astounding level of feature parity with Linux, but also extraordinary compatibility - they even claim to be LSB compliant!!

Are we to believe that the Chinese government poured enough money into this project for enough time for them to achieve such an amazing result, then had someone who couldn't do webdesign OR speak english spend 10 minutes on a website that is essentially one page of vague claims that reveal technical ignorance. A release announcment without even a download link? No way - it would be humiliating, and doesn't reflect the level of dedication that would be required to create such software.

This is most likely vaporware, and I'd even doubt it has anything to do with the government. If we do eventually see a download, I'd bet that it's an illegal and poorly put together Linux distribution with an OpenSSI kernel that hasn't got a trace of Mach or BSD anywhere.

synthespian, David Adams and Eugenia are all gullible, more so, it seems, than any Slashdot editors (this story remains conspicuously absent there).

check OSnews.com for the screens. apparently it's not user-friendly enough yet, and the fonts aren't spaced correctly. Expect eugenia's appraisal and some "how it should be done" mockups shortly.

For fucks sake, is this really so important to be on the front page of Slashdot? I will probably be modded down for this, but anyway...

While Slashdot thinks it is important to post news about Microsoft backing away from a gay bill with a source of from a random blog, there has been GCC 4 released, Apple has been paying tech editors to praise iPod, they managed to put 200 Gbits on a holographic disk and ton more of real news that matters.

For fucks sake, is this really so important to be on the front page of Slashdot? I will probably be modded down for this, but anyway...

While Slashdot thinks it is important to post news about Microsoft backing away from a gay bill with a source of from a random blog, there has been GCC 4 released, Apple has been paying tech editors to praise iPod, they managed to put 200 Gbits on a holographic disk and ton more of real news that matters.

1. Seth Nickell has posted a few videos showing the Luminocity window manager doing some super Open GL hardware acceleration tricks.

2. Interview: Rasterman Speaks of Enlightenment .17

3. XGL file format specs

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=10318&of fset=30&rows=37

"You can't patent ideas. You can patent methods. While one could argue that a method is an idea, in legal language (which is what matters in this case) the two are quite different. Reverse-engineering a protocol is quite legal, and any patent claims by Microsoft against Samba would be laughed out of court (especially since they didn't come up with the SMB protocol in the first place). It appears that the current dispute beween MS and Alacrity does involved patented technology, and thus Alacrity may have a case. "

On OSNews

Copied verbatim. Nice. What do we call dupes from other sites without credit? Oh, yeah, plagiarism

You can share your Bluetooth connection *to* wifi/eth0, but you can't share your wifi/modem/eth0 *to* Bluetooth devices. And all the third party hacks are just not reliable.

Apparently Linux can do it reliably.

You can share your Bluetooth connection *to* wifi/eth0, but you can't share your wifi/modem/eth0 *to* Bluetooth devices. And all the third party hacks are just not reliable.

Apparently Linux can do it reliably.

First check BeOS!
http://web.archive.org/web/20010521150816/www.bene ws.com/beos/
to learn the root of the OS.

BeOS was originally developed for BeBOX(custom ppc based smp box) and later started supporting 60x lines of PPC based Apple's Macintosh computers and power computing(Taiwan's mac licensed manufactural).
With version 3.0 x86 versions started shipping.
There were 3.0, 4.0, 4.5 then 5.0 Personal Edition and 5.0 Professional Edition.

I personally believe that BeOS doomed itself with expensive public relations fund spend heavily on BeOS Preview release 2(Remember those BeOS preview release shipped with Mac related magazines for free?) and decision to start selling x86 version. They started offering free version for 5.0 called 5.0 Personal edition, which were bit late(developers have migrated to linux world then...). So company were bought out by Palm.

However, right before they were bought out by Palm, there were two main project which disappeared all together.

BeIA with SONY eVilla project and Dano(BeOS 5.5 release). BeIA pretty much slipped away when Be had office equipment auction when they closed down the building along with some handheld devices(tablet computers loaded with BeIA).

I've heard rumors that after Sony seeing the utter failure of QNX based iOpner(which was immediately followed by another QNX based 3com'saudrey), axed eVilla and destroyed all produced units, so only surviving units are the ones that were auctioned off with BE office closing in CA(developer's machine?).

After BE was sold to Palm...however, BE source along with Dano was leaked over Beshare(beos centric p2p software).

So Dano(considered as unofficial release ver 5.1d0) .

OpenBeOS movement started around this time.
Now OpenBeOS has changed its name to Haiku-OS.
http://www.haiku-os.org/.

And soon people started BeOS Developer's Edition
at http://www.beosonline.com/.

And other people started BeOS http://freshmeat.net/projects/beos-max/
http://www.beos-max.org/.

Both BeOS Developer's Edition and BeOS Max revolves around Be's latest official release BeOS Personal Edition 5.0 + 5.0.3 upates and many new improvement which were contributed by a user community developed opensource softwares & drivers.

However, there versions which includes some unofficial released stuffs(stuffs from Dano and some controversial stuffs)
http://phosphuros.tk/
You can read the article by OSnews here.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6948

Here are some screen shots provided by Korean BeOS UserGroup.
http://www.bekrage.net/gallery/view_album.php?set_ albumName=screen
BeOS is nice because Localization stuffs were incorporated into GUI nicer than most other OS, making easier to support different language than English, especially where language isn't based on phonetic latin based alphabet languages such as Korean/Chinese/Japanese. Thier alphabet is 8bit(or even 16bit) character based.

Currently, Haiku-OS programmers are plugging away diligently where OS is almost ready, where most of the bread and butter applications were already worked out! This is a nicer situation where applications are already there when OS still hasn't shipped, due to special current circumstances of BeOS.

ZetaOS is heavily based on BeOS R5.0.3 + Bone network(Dano style) + lots of improvement borrowed from drivers found on BeBits(opensource community of BeOS) + Haiku-OS(OpenBeOS).

ZetaOS, there are RC1, RC2, RC3, Zeta Neo(considered as RC4) a

Argh!

AFAIK GNOME is 1st class citizen of Ubuntu. Will there be re-run of GNONE vs KDE

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5475

First, Theo and the other developers, although making good points, are being quite rude to employees. I think that its important for them to push this issue, but I think they are handling it immaturaly. Flaming Adaptec (ex-)employees is not a good move, even if Scott did make a post on OSNews

I think if you go back and check the archives you'll find that the great majority of the four-letter words are not coming from the OpenBSD group. Ref: that "post on OSNews".

I mean, how many open-source Unix servers are using their raid cards? How many of those users, admins, etc. realize the importance of an open source driver so it can be maintained by the community, since most companies have been slow (to say the least) to update their binary drivers?

And how many other kernel projects have rolled over for companies passing off binary-only drivers and management utilities? Seems the kids can't live without their hardware accelerated 3D shootem'-up games, eh?

How much applications in Gnome are actually coded using Mono? None, AFAICS

MUINE http://muine.gooeylinux.org/ is a Gnome app coded in Mono.

Here are a few more:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9780

Here's some fresh Debian:

http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10020

You read the wrong site. Try OSNews.com for the opposite experience ;)

I didn't see a picture of a kernel. It looks like Gnome...

Seriously, though, Java Desktop is just Sun's version of Gnome. They must of done something serious with it to justify charging $50 for it. Not clear what though.

Oh yeah, and it is available for linux.

In yesterday's news: "NeroLinux - Nero CD Burning App comes to Linux" I suggested this story a day or two ago, but as usual, it wasn't posted. I included that article & discussion in my submission as well, but of course none of that matters now. Thanks again, I love being rejected.

I wonder if Bilbo Baggins is using NeroLINUX since Nero has released this CD Burning app for Linux. If Bilbo is reading Slashdot, he probably doesn't know, but this story was submitted yesterday and still hasn't shown up yet here. But it has here:

"NeroLinux - Nero CD Burning App comes to Linux"

Maybe in a week this story will appear on /. after someone else submits the story because my submission here was probably rejected as usual. News for nerds indeed.

Sure: "NeroLinux - Nero CD Burning App comes to Linux"

I got the answer I expected from the Novell/Sun/Red-Hat people: "regarding market research, we care about it only when happens from our marketing department and to our customers". They don't care about the "generic" Gnome user. That's ok. Understandable. These guys have a business to run.

As seen on OSNews

While you are at it Eugenia, your readers/users want

1). A better comment system for OSnews.

2). Registration based commenting.

3). Support for all XHTML tags (it's freaking 2005!)

4). A better moderation scheme.

5). A user friendly editor with spell checking and automatic tagging.

6). Ability to reply directly to comments with ugly @ in the reply field.

7). Ability to place certain trolls on an ignore list.

8). Ability to edit comments that have already been posted.

Oh and your users have been clamoring for these features for years. Why haven't you implemented them?

Just look at her page at osnews:

http://www.osnews.com/editor.php?editors_id=1/

You can read, at the bottom of the page, she acting exactly like the people she is criticizing!

earlier I did post story on this subject and get rejected , then I submitted the same story at OSNews here , it's on front page there hours ago, wtf slashdot?
anyway, this is text of story:
In sad news for people who prefer Mozilla Suite over Firefox, seems will be there no Mozilla Suite 1.8 Final while developers already start talking about fork , others are just happy over the situation. More here.

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat [redhat.com], ximian [ximian.com] and sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf [gnome.org], an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated [osnews.com] because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more [gnome.org], more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this

In this article you'll find a pretty good answer to your question : seven economic models are detailed here, either based on selling services, advantages (think "club premium" or mandrakesque things like this), or novelty (one recent version of the software isn't for free-as-a-beer, but the older one is free-as-in-speech), etc..

have a good read!

Not here at slashdot according to this.

That's the problem with all solutions involving an external data collection program, just like locate, they never get in sync. Why on earth don't people use BFS ?
Since I have no use for google to search my own files, I'd rather mount google to search the web itself :D

Already gave my answer to this - right here. :)
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Win32 [is] "de facto standard" in the sense of being something well-defined.

Methinks you've obviously never coded for it. (See question number 3. :o)

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9762&off set=60&rows=75#337521

[ Rayiner Hashem (IP: ---.dc.dc.cox.net)]
"I think the "sad" part refers to the fact that this sort of technology has been ripe for the picking for years now, but only know are people getting around to looking at it, and only then because they are following Microsoft's lead. Interviews, and its successor, Fresco, have always belonged to the "free" camp, unlike competitors like Motif. Yet, the modern Open Source projects have catagorically refused to look at the technology until Microsoft pointed it out to them."

So once again, directly or indirectly, the OSS crowd is chasing tailights.

The OSNews story has a link to a FC2 yum repo in one of the coments, but I haven't found a source repo for those packages (I'm on PPC, so I need to rebuild the packages :().

It's all a matter of how you choose your metrics. Here's another one, desktop applications that don't suck horribly:

Java: Azureus, Eclipse.... I'm sure if I really searched I could find a third.
Mono: Beagle, Tomboy, F-Spot, Muine, MonoDevelop etc.

It's no sillier a metric than the amount of showelware on SourceForge for a given platform. For the Linux user it's certainly a more interesting one.

Even these so called crown jewels of the Java desktop can be spotted a mile away as Java programs. When you run Beagle or Tomboy you can not distinguish them from native GTK+ apps. For all intents and purposes they are native.

Java and Mono have chosen completely different paths at this point. It's futile to try to evangelize one language over the other at this point. Java has settled as a backend language for stuff like web services, while Mono/.NET competes with the incumbent C/C++, and Python to some extent, over the desktop. It's now a case of different tools for different jobs, and at this time it's already pretty clear that Mono is going to be a major force when it comes to the future of the Linux desktop.

I disagree. I'm no wizard and I have always had an easier time configuring apache than IIS.

The process is a little different of course, apache requires some reading, both of the config file and the docs. Where as IIS requires clicking through a multitude of dialog boxes and context sensitive menus. You could argue that the menu system is easier to learn, but I disagree. I also find the command line easier for a lot of tasks as do others. However, what really makes apache easier to use is when ever you have to debug some problem or have to do something a bit out of the ordinary.

This is all just from my personal experience of course.

Here's David's questions concerning MONO and the legal aspect.

• the disks have drive letters (e.g. D:)
• My Computer is identical to the Windows XP version
• ... PowerDVD? DVD Decrypter? AD-AWARE? This is WINDOWS!

This was posted on OSNews.com a while back. Not only did people find lots of typos, but also lots of semantic errors. It appears the author hasn't done much Windows programming and never tried to compile the code samples he displays.

It should be taken with a grain of salt

From OSNews.com:

Update: There is now a petition to keep Beastie, however FreeBSD's own Robert Watson emailed us to inform us that they are "seeking a new logo, but not a new mascot", so that petition is really reduntant.

Update 2: Rob Watson writes:

- The announcement text was an early draft, and the contest hasn't been announced yet.

- One of the immediate pieces of feedback we got was that we need to make it more clear: this is not about replacing the beastie!

- We're looking to create a new logo that can be used with the Beastie, or by itself. One of the specific concerns we have is that the daemon renders poorly in print using one-color, two-color, etc, and we need a vector logo, not just a mascot. Another was finding a logo that could be conveniently and easily printed by vendors on packaging for products that support FreeBSD. Not all vendors are willing to stick a Daemon on their packaging!

- We anticipate releasing the real announcement in the near future, at the logo-contest.freebsd.org URL. When it's ready, we'll send out e-mail to freebsd-announce, and we'll drop you a direct e-mail.

- Once again we've been reminded of an important lesson: don't put something on the web site if it's not ready to be seen. After at least three premature postings of FreeBSD releases on slashdot due to files starting to appear on the FTP mirrors even though the announcement hadn't been sent, you'd think we'd have learned.

Robert N M Watson

Jesus Christ.

Honestly, are you just totally daft? Your (relatively) low UID suggests that you've been around for a while, but it apparently isn't an indicator of resourcefulness. You do realize that we have the web and google, right?

Or was asking for a source just a half-assed way to indicate your belief that the OP's story was apocryphal?

I put "bill gates ten years two operating systems windows linux" into Google and got this link as the first hit.

That's fewer characters typed than it took you to write your completely moronic post.

Someone on here was saying a few days ago that people on the internet that ask for a cite couldn't give a rat's ass about the veracity of the information they're calling into question. At the time, I thought he was just being overly cynical, but now I'm really starting to wonder.

This has been ten minutes of my already too-short life wasted. I sure as hell hope you appreciate the link that you could have gotten in ten seconds if you hadn't been so god cursed lazy.

I think it's just your particular crowd. Because nearly all online polls I've seen have GNOME and KDE combined having the majority of the market, with WindowMaker having something like 10% or so. I've seen this both on a OSNews and a DebianPlanet poll.

I know of what I speak. I am not a novice.

Well, after her Vaio was so violently debilitated, and after being told by various experts that it would require nothing short of a complete (and very expensive) Windows system debugging and OS reinstall followed by a mandatory soak of the machine in a tub of bleach and then spraying it with a thick coat of road tar as she waved a burning effigy of Steve Ballmer over it while chanting the text of the Official Microsoft 'Screw You Sucker' Windows Troubleshooting Guide, she promptly dumped the useless hunk of sad landfill and bought herself a beautiful new iBook.

Well, we did. So let's download them, burn each of them to a CD-ROM, pick an appropriate pen to write the respective download URL and these words

Copy this and give it to your friends for free as well - it's Linux and it's legal!
And do bear in mind it will become even faster as soon as you install it to your hard drive...

Then, next time you get that desperate call from someone claiming their computer is broken, and asking you to fix their Wintel, in most cases you'll be able to help them simply by saying...

Remember that disk I gave you? There's probably nothing wrong with your hardware at all... just boot this!