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"It would not surpise me if in the next year we'll start to see linux interfaces with window-in-window MDI, multi-row tabs, and talking paperclips. "

Wait - wait - we've already got at least one of them:

vigor

But hell, I'm sure someone could ionnovate them into the collective OSS codebase..

/mike

You can get Vigor, a vi clone with a talking (and evil) paper-clip assistant!

Besides, posting of clear text mailto: URLs on Slashdot should be considered unacceptable. That guy gets enough spam already, why not link to his homepage instead?

Of those 97% MSIE users 99% read at +1 and above, so you lose. Those who enjoy reading inane posts and looking at really nasty pictures are mostly Linux users.

The only other system in "widespread" use is GNU RCS. GNU RCS is different in that it's actually used by respectable organizations, not just amateurish Cheap Software projects. This is because it is similar to older, commercial systems which aren't available on modern systems. Unfortunately, development of RCS has fallen by the wayside too, and CVS is almost guaranteed to be the only Cheap Software system available in five years.

But, honestly, if you're have a Real Job at a Real Company, the cost of RCS is usually insigificant. And for personal projects and Cheap Software shit, CVS is more than adequate.

If you're like most Slashdot readers -- i.e. living in their parents basements and "hacking" Perl while living on food stamps -- and thus forced to use CVS, I recommend Fogel's book. It's actually available online, but I recommend buying it, because it is unique in two aspects: first, it's the only Coriolis book I've seen that isn't total BULLSHIT; second, it's some of the best-written Cheap Software documentation you'll ever read. If you're poor or stupid enough to use Cheap Software RCS, this book is essential. Fogel is really too good for Coriolis... I'd like to see this book reprinted by New Riders.

HTH, you delicious newbie fag!
-- The_Messenger

A.

I see you've listed 'vi'. Have you ever tried vigor? ;-)

(Read the "About" section.)

As an HCI student I can see the interest in writing your own window manager (I'd like to do this myself... although starting from scratch might not be the best way)

If this is actually what you want to do, make sure that you can't customise an existing one before you start all over again - the chances are you could take a simple system like FVWM ie. something minimal, and just put a few custom toolbars and such on it.

Try looking at the source code to other window managers. You can find several on freshmeat that are absolutely tiny ie. a couple of hundred k. The gzipped source for aewm, for example, is apparently under 50k - incredible :P

If you're after rewriting the windowing system itself and you're doing it for HCI related reasons, I think you may be nuts. There may be a good reason to do this but it doesn't spring to mind. Whereas there are - arguably - huge numbers of usability problems with window managers in general... low consistency, little feedback, that sort of thing.

Numerical Recipies - Numerical Recipes in C, 2nd edition is the numerical methods book.

Autobook - GNU Autoconf, Automake and Libtool.

GGAD - GTK+/Gnome Application Development by Havoc Pennington. I'm not sure which is better, the book or the authors name!

WGA - Writing GNOME Applications by John R. Sheets. Not complete, which is a pity. I'm sure that will change though.

Docbook - The definitive guide to SGML.

CVS book - Open Source Development with CVS by Karl Fogel. It is not quite the complete book, but it is the interesting bits.

FreeBSD Handbook - FreeBSD documentation.

Maximum RPM - Documentation for the RedHat package manager.

Based on that list, can anybody suggest further online books that I may be interested in? (Don't bother telling me about the old O'Reilly books, I know about those)

Have a nice retirement! :)

http://www.red-bean.com/~joelh/vigor/

You haven't seen Vigor yet, have you?

Ten times worse...

You've never heard of Vigor?

But hate Windows, per se? Like most folks, I need to use it from time to time, and other Microsoft products. Some of them work well enough, none of them are worth hating.

Karl Fogel, author of The CVS Book, points out that open-source software is designed differently than closed source software. He makes many rather insightful observations in the odd numbered chapters (in the printed book) about how open-source software is different. I spent a few minutes searching for a couple great quotes... but saddly his text is heavily designed towards a tutorial and not a reference.

One of the really important differences is that open-source software is designed to expose to the user a good conceptual model of how it works and what it's really doing internally. Perhaps this is because the author of the code also designs the user interface, but it's often times done this way so that users can understand the inner workings of the program, at least in a conceptual way, and perhaps become involved in the coding. (Karl's CVS book is well worth the money for the chapters that aren't downloadable if you're interested in the reasons for these sort of design issues)

Now some might argue that users are better off on a "need to know" basis, and the point of software is to bundle up all algorithms so the user doesn't need to worry about them. People who feel this way probably like closed source software quite a bit and it seems likely they would be uncomfortable using many open source programs.

Personally, I quite like having a deeper understanding of what software is really doing. Sometimes I don't bother to read the finer details, but it's nice to know that they are there and available should I want to know. It's empowering to have that sort of information readily available (as well as the source code itself) should I have questions or run into complex problems. It is more work than calling some tech support number, but investing the time to read about and learn what is really going on almost always leads to better solutions that some lame tech support help desk could provide, and (at least for me) I end up with a better long-term knowledge base.

After many years, particularly in the modern age of thriving open/free software, it's easy to get very used to this sort of openness, where the source is provided, and the design of the program and its documentation is such that you can really learn and understand what it's really doing. It's easy to get used to having command line switches or config files where you can really control things, and documentation that explains not just the "what", but also the "how" and "why" behind the configurable parameters.

It really does become easy to hate closed software, where the innards are some proprietary secret. It becomes easy to truely hate the overall design of "no servicable parts inside", where you get only a few simple dialog boxes to choose only a couple basic parameters, and even the "advanced" dialogs don't really provide access to really control much. It's easy to hate documentation which is a giant inventory of the radio buttions and check boxes, with simple brain-dead descriptions of each that would have been obvious, without any information about how the software really works.

That is the reason I hate Microsoft Windows "per se". Actually, Windows itself isn't so bad... you can actually learn quite a bit about how it works internally (I have a couple good books on the topic), and there are lots of good 3rd party tools that can give access to much of the internal workings. Still, it is the overall closed design that I personally hate about much of the world's closed source software.

What, you mean like this?

Vigor does that. Goddamn moron. Get a clue or shut up.

You forgot to mention a program called vigor.

Someone wrote a program called vigor that does have a paperclip. Screenshots here. Hillarious sutff, especially for an emacs user *grin*

Someone wrote a program called vigor that does have a paperclip. Screenshots here. Hillarious sutff, especially for an emacs user *grin*

Actually, it does. At this point it is obvious your wrong, lying and criminally insane!

Vigor does. You haven't been around here much, have you?

So did Vigor, the vi paperclip, make it into the 6.0 release?

Most if not all of your concerns are answered in "Open Source Development with CVS" (Coriolis, ISBN 1-57610-490-7), most of which can be downloaded from here.

Jeez.. that paperclip is only missing because it was already taken by another msoffice-like project! :)

...on the other hand, no open source development team would probably give you the 'paperclip'... ;-)

Well, you've obviously not seen Vigor, yet. As Evil as any M$ Paperclip.
--

but Vigor will be with us always.
Oh gawd I'm evil. Trust me do not install Vigor. But if you really want to there are debs. Just follow the link. It is bad trust me.

but Vigor will be with us always.
Oh gawd I'm evil. Trust me do not install Vigor. But if you really want to there are debs. Just follow the link. It is bad trust me.

Perhaps the authors will update it to insult^H^H^H^H^H^H er... emulate whatever new help system microsoft has come up with.

he probably uses vigor.
--

You can find a good part of the Open Source Development With CVS book by Karl Fogel online at http://www.red-bean.com/cvsbook/cvsbook.html
It's a very easy to read CVS book that begins with the basic steps of creating a repository and goes all the way to cover a lot of advanced aspects about using CVS on a daily basis.

here

You can find most of the book online here: http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/

I've never used Dxpc but my understanding of it is that it compresses all the X11 traffic on the fly. Used in combination with other tactics (e.g. using the lightweight apps/windowmanagers[1] like another poster recommended), should help your situation out.

I think there is some way to channel X11 over SSH, and further to finangle SSH into compressing the data stream, giving you compression as well as security. But I have absolutely no idea how to do that, so you're on your own in that regard. :-)

[1] if you want a lightweight windowmanager, definitely check out wm2, the rpm of which is 58Kb and at runtime (2x xterm, xdaliclock, xload, xsetroot -solid grey25, 1280x1024x16@100dpi) it looks to be taking up about 2.9 megs, of which a hair over a meg is actually shared. Note that wm2 is really minimal but then that's sorta the point. :-) Another low-usage window manager is aewm, also interesting as it's homepage includes links to several other ultra-lights. (<--becuase let's face it, twm is U*G*L*Y and should not be tolerated in polite society, hah)

--

It obviously won't help with the protocol restrictions but might be useful.

You can find out about CVS at Cyclic's home page. There's also a manual section and a section in the on-line CVS book about vendor branches.

"I have a mission!" he replied, with vigor.

Who else, when you saw this, immediately thought of this?

Here is an essay that gives some background for you. With Google you can easily track down any references that look interesting. For instance here is what Jefferson had to say on the topic. The original rationale is what he said, and by their definition it has definitely been corrupted.

For instance the record industry bullies musicians into signing, and then owns the copyrights for the rest of that musician's life. Read that description and tell me that the system has *not* been corrupted!

In short, please don't mistake your ignorance on the topic for his.

Intellectual property is an artificially granted monopoly for the purpose of encouraging people to create and give away useful ideas. Key to that concept was a limited term. Today the industry is doing everything to make that term "forever minus a day" (in Jack Valenti's words).

That is too much.

Regards,
Ben

You're too late:

Vigor

Apologies for the broken links at
cvsbook.red-bean.com, the problem is now fixed.

-Karl

It appears that pretty much all the links to the free chapters are currently bad. Since they're all dead, and there's no mention of it on the site, I'm guessing it's due to a mistake. Especially as they were all working a week or two ago.

However, it's still freely available via anonymous CVS. See http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/anoncvs.html for instructions on getting it. (I just tried it, and it does work)

The CVS version is the texinfo format, and includes a Makefile to build the alternate formats.

As the review says, half of the book (the technical chapters) are GPLed and downloadable from http://cvsbook.red-bean.com

It's still freely available via anonymous CVS. See http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/anoncvs.html for instructions on getting it.

The CVS version is the texinfo format, and includes a Makefile to build the alternate formats.

Try downloading Vigor! :-)

I particularly enjoyed the odd-numbered chapters of the paper copy of "Open Source Development with CVS," by Karl Fogel, from Coriolis OpenPress. These bonus chapters give an excellent feel for those devilish details that make an open-source project succeed or fail.

Is this what you're looking for?

;)

Anyone up for implementing this new feature/bug/security hole in Vigor for those of us who don't use office? andy j.

1)
Someone has taken a cue from a certain User Friendly strip and created VIGOR the vi[m] editor with an added paperclip assistant!
It features helpful advice, requiring you to click on a dialog box, such as:

"You have not entered insert mode before. While you're in insert mode, remember that you need to return to command mode before entering Vigor commands!"

and:

"Are you sure you want to move left?"

Screenshots

2)
I was once shopping on a Waldensoft store and found a boxed piece of software from Microsoft which would let you create your own Office Assistants. But the EULA specifically forbade creating any kind of office assistant that appealed to the prurient interests.

1)
Someone has taken a cue from a certain User Friendly strip and created VIGOR the vi[m] editor with an added paperclip assistant!
It features helpful advice, requiring you to click on a dialog box, such as:

"You have not entered insert mode before. While you're in insert mode, remember that you need to return to command mode before entering Vigor commands!"

and:

"Are you sure you want to move left?"

Screenshots

2)
I was once shopping on a Waldensoft store and found a boxed piece of software from Microsoft which would let you create your own Office Assistants. But the EULA specifically forbade creating any kind of office assistant that appealed to the prurient interests.

I agree with RG Ristroph's post -- the hard part is establishing version control -- the tool is not the most important part. That said, CVS is a pretty good tool. It works well over both LANs and WANs (unlike sourcesafe, for example), handles branching/merging about as well any as tool can, and bonus, is free. You *will* need someone who is dedicated to managing the system and answering questions. It may not (should not) be a full-time job, but until people are up-to-speed, they will make mistakes, and you need someone whose priority it is to fix those mistakes, and help the other developers learn how to accomplish what they need. (The above is true of any version control system, by the way, not just CVS.)

Before you install any VC system, you need to decide what you're trying to accomplish, and design the procedures to do that. CVS (or whatever) is a tool, not a methodology.

Finally, here are some hopefully useful links:

• Karl Fogel's CVS book (actually, portions of it, mostly dealing with using CVS), which I find more readable than the Cederquist manual.
• Some links about using CVS for websites:here, here, and here. Different view points, worth reading, and generally applicable even if you choose something besides CVS.

There actually is a linux vigor...er...virus. In case you haven't used this diabolical program, you can go to it here.

"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."

Get it here and cry.

Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected