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If Novells means it serious they have to look into wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) for developing cross-platform binary applications and into Dojo toolkit (http://dojotoolkit.org/) for developing web applications. I'm quite sure these are the best way how to do cross-platform development. Besides this might lead to a new future where choosing any platform might not depend anymore on the availability of applications (see http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html.

For Linux fans read this LXer article (http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/54009/index. html).

O. Wyss

If Novells means it serious they have to look into wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) for developing cross-platform binary applications and into Dojo toolkit (http://dojotoolkit.org/) for developing web applications. I'm quite sure these are the best way how to do cross-platform development. Besides this might lead to a new future where choosing any platform might not depend anymore on the availability of applications (see http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html.

For Linux fans read this LXer article (http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/54009/index. html).

O. Wyss

How many times do I have to say that with true cross-platform development, the used system doesn't matter anymore these days. Sure enough if you stick in a Windows-Only environment or else, you have to care for all the little differences between the systems. But if you develop as I've outlined in wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) you can code on any platform as if it were the only existing platform while you code will most likely run unchanged on any platform. To say it once more:

"It doesn't matter which system you use for development".

O. Wyss

Well why bother with anything like Atlas when we have ZK
http://zk1.sf.net/

If you have to travel to Germany you may consider having a english-german dictionary on your mobile phone. You may try http://www.sf.net/projects/mobidict (disclaimer: I am the author of the software)

If you want some more ideas: http://www.getjar.com/

Some of the high level tools for SELinux:

SETools - http://tresys.com/selinux/selinux_policy_tools.sht ml
the SELinux IDE - http://selinux-ide.sf.net/
the reference policy - http://serefpolicy.sourceforge.net/
Polgen - http://polgen.sourceforge.net/

Don't forget this new competitor: eCryptfs, mostly written and supported by IBM, and fully GPL:

http://ecryptfs.sf.net/

It's all in the kernel, which means that shares memory mapping work (unlike userspace filesystems), and it keeps metadata on a per-file basis, which is *really* nice for things like incremental backup utilities.

should be more than enough to break Mircosoft's monopoly on the desktop which certainly will have a mighty impact on their ability to throw around with money. How?

Assume you have a 1000 developers who would one year fully concentrate on writing OpenSource applications according to the guidelines of wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/). This would easily achieve up to a few hundreds cross-platform applications which are better or at least equally good as any Windows-only application. This base stock will force any software vendor who wants to stay in business to change their applications as well to comply to wyoGuide. Any application soon will be converted to cross-platform that's no question. Together with the already cross-platform Mozilla and OpenOffice this will definitely break MS monopoly on the desktop.

Then nobody would ask again for none-Linux applications anymore as here (http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005 .pdf, http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread .php?t=105955 or http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/16798. html). The Ubuntu Bug #1 (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/1) would finally be solve and the future as outlined here (http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html ) would become true. All would win, well maybe not MS. So why doesn't IBM size up with Novell, Sun, Oracle, Google and others and throw in 10 million each? I think each of them are able to scrap together this 10 millions without much problems.

O. Wyss

should be more than enough to break Mircosoft's monopoly on the desktop which certainly will have a mighty impact on their ability to throw around with money. How?

Assume you have a 1000 developers who would one year fully concentrate on writing OpenSource applications according to the guidelines of wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/). This would easily achieve up to a few hundreds cross-platform applications which are better or at least equally good as any Windows-only application. This base stock will force any software vendor who wants to stay in business to change their applications as well to comply to wyoGuide. Any application soon will be converted to cross-platform that's no question. Together with the already cross-platform Mozilla and OpenOffice this will definitely break MS monopoly on the desktop.

Then nobody would ask again for none-Linux applications anymore as here (http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005 .pdf, http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread .php?t=105955 or http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/16798. html). The Ubuntu Bug #1 (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/1) would finally be solve and the future as outlined here (http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html ) would become true. All would win, well maybe not MS. So why doesn't IBM size up with Novell, Sun, Oracle, Google and others and throw in 10 million each? I think each of them are able to scrap together this 10 millions without much problems.

O. Wyss

nope, just going to leave a link quietly scratched in the dust http://fluxbox.sf.net/

I wonder what that Plan B could B.

Wicket

http://ita.sf.net/

There's sure enough already several other similar solutions out there which compete with you. So you should do something the others haven't done. Something which is obviously visible in the eyes of your users. So I propose first see that the GUI of your application fits the users and for that go to wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/).

Of course there are countless other things you could do but concentrate on the important things first and do the rest afterwards. Just think the best advertisment you get is your happy users talking about your application.

O. Wyss

Get out there and do interesting things ...

I did, see http://wyoguide.sf.net/. Unfortuately up to now not everybody thinks it's as interesting. Or haven't everybody heard of?

O. Wyss

It really doesn't make sense to flog others (Microsoft), instead we all should work on improving (Linux) as much as we can and in any possible way. That's the sole reason I designed wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/). So instead of loosing our effort and strength in silly flame wars, start improving Linux not only in the kernel, the desktop, the distributions but also in the free applications. Only then the whole picture of a free system will fit.

O. Wyss

Weasel Reader?? Have a look at PalmFiction (Russian website, but you can always use the fish if necessary).

It's also opensource, but it supports beautiful anti-aliased fonts (included, and also has Windows software to make your own) and, best of all, reads text, gzipped text, zip files containing text, whatever, directly from your SD card! No need to convert them into some crazy format, just throw the files on your card and away you go. It's fantastic ...

What I'd like to know is what AJAX library they use. Does Google build its own library and do they plan to release it to the public (OpenSource) or do they use another? I guess they don't use Yahoo's library and probably also not Zimbra's, so what else?

I'm starting to use the Dojo toolkit (http://dojotoolkit.org/) which might become the top free AJAX library. See my first easy samples "tree?.html" at (http://wyoguide.sf.net/test/.

O. Wyss

Agreed. Kevin - No hits. Scrabble - No hits. Python Scrabble - No hits. In other news, Play Scrabble

you need Coolplayer!
http://coolplayer.sf.net/

I'd personally like to suggest trying out Python. Not only is it more powerful than, and just as easy to code as – in fact, often considerably easier than – Visual Basic, it also has the advantage of running on many other operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X. It can take a little while to get the hang of, but once you know what you're doing it's effortless (take a look for yourself at a couple things I hacked together, for example).

And yes, despite being a Linux hacker now I once did use Visual Basic, and I have to say it took way longer to learn VB than it did Python.

I'd personally like to suggest trying out Python. Not only is it more powerful than, and just as easy to code as – in fact, often considerably easier than – Visual Basic, it also has the advantage of running on many other operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X. It can take a little while to get the hang of, but once you know what you're doing it's effortless (take a look for yourself at a couple things I hacked together, for example).

And yes, despite being a Linux hacker now I once did use Visual Basic, and I have to say it took way longer to learn VB than it did Python.

It enlightens me highly that the wxWidgets framework (http://wxwidgets.org/) also belongs to this group of the 30 top projects. It shows me that concentrating on wxWidgets in my application development guideline project wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) is the right step and gives me confidence that applications written this way will have a usable GUI and a superb code quality. It gives me pleasure that my way is correct and hope that the future of free choice of computer (http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html ) without application considerations is possible.

O. Wyss

It enlightens me highly that the wxWidgets framework (http://wxwidgets.org/) also belongs to this group of the 30 top projects. It shows me that concentrating on wxWidgets in my application development guideline project wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) is the right step and gives me confidence that applications written this way will have a usable GUI and a superb code quality. It gives me pleasure that my way is correct and hope that the future of free choice of computer (http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html ) without application considerations is possible.

O. Wyss

Lyx comes with good document types for theses and academic papers. However for most kinds of business writing tasks it's hopeless.

I think it's fair to say that LyX is only useful for academic writing; but for that form of writing, it's unbeatable. The bibliographic functions are just incredible these days, and combined with JabRef it's far superior to anything that MS Office + EndNote has ever come up with. I've written several papers and a book chapter with it, and am currently writing my thesis with it.

public boolean foo(int x) {
  if (x>2) {
    return true;
  } else {
    return false;
  }
}

Lots more on all that in my book - there's a downloadable free chapter there on using static analysis to improve JUnit tests if you want to get a feel for things.

Even if the web is a very democratic place only the biggest player get a top place. Just look how Yahoo declared itself as satisfied with second place or like Microsoft won't overtake Google anytime in searching. To overtake any leader of a certain kind of a web site you need huge amounts of resources, resources which only the leader can afford. So whenever there's this killer idea any big player simply takes it over and integrate it into their own side. Only when big players sleep like Microsoft did with IE, outsiders (Firefox) get a chance.

On the other side it's quite easy to destroy someone's business if you use the right leverage and are prepared to drop enough money out of the window to push such a leverage (see OpenOffice). Of course that means you neither can make a business yourself except after you are the undisputed leader. Yet another sample is the Xbox360, even if the PS3 will be a success, Microsoft will simply launch another XboxHDTV and will crush the PS just a year or 2 later since they have these resources.

What amazes me is that nobody understands these simple mechanics. The web is the ultimate amplifying factor which soon will influence even normal business like shopping or banking etc.

Besides just look how Microsoft has an OpenSource lab to know any emerging thread from the OpenSource community many times even before the OpenSource community knows it itself. All the big players, who can afford it, have such labs and also the ordinary business has soon to use this technique.

To summarize, it's quite unlikely to see any killer idea emerging from small sources since these don't have the necessary sources. Another sample my own idea (http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html ) needs a few millions to get started. But if I get this money it will completely change the desktop environment, finally fixing Ubuntu Bug #1.

O. Wyss

... but until we're all walking around with Star Trek-esque super computers the size of a notepad, I'm not sure I see any obvious reason for the desktop to disappear anytime soon.

Even then desktops will be around if only to start a web browser. So there will always be remote web applications as will be local binary applications. The only difference is which kind for what task.

But what will change is that applications either on the web or local will become cross-platform since sooner or later nobody can afford to develop for several distinct platforms anymore (http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html )

O. Wyss

Forming alliances seems to be the only way to force a standard these days. I hope there will also be an alliance forcing cross-platform development (http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html ) one day.

O. Wyss

The article says Oracle compares its US$15G/yr revenue to MySQL's US$30M/yr. But as Paul Graham says, it is OK to shrink a US$30G/yr industry to US$30M/yr, if your absolute share of the new US$30M is bigger than the one on US$30G was. Or in other words, MySQL will laugh to the bank on growing from US$30M, while Oracle will strive to keep their US$15G.

Also, IBM, Oracle and Intel did not make Linux. Richard Stallman created GNU, Linus used GNU and complemented it with Linux, and now IBM, Oracle and Intel help Linus with Linux and RMS with GNU.

I wonder how long will IBM and Oracle continue think they can sell proprietary servers on free platforms, without facing significant competition from free servers too. And how long Intel think they can sell proprietary machines to run free software without facing competition from free (think 'open') hardware? Now they are winning, IBM and Oracle using GNU/Linux to face competition from Microsoft, and Intel to crush proprietary RISC (think they ignoring OpenFirmware); but how long before we are running PostgreSQL (or better yet, Rel) on some OpenCores system booting with OpenFirmware or something the like? Not on the short term, for sure, but eventually maybe it is inevitable, unless DRM forces us into a police state.

It seems this study isn't fully accessable, is there a free link anywhere? I'm most interested in any information about the state of OpenSource und would like to get as many links to infos as possible.

See also http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html

O. Wyss

[I'm the author of Roundup]

I get good feedback from people using Roundup for this sort of thing (amongst others).

You can set it up to accept mail in, and for each new ticket (issue) created, it sets up a little mini-mailing list of the author and the people cc'ed on the incoming email.

Not to mention that we've taken some valuable widgets from our UI and released them under the MIT license at view.sf.net. And the drivers we've put in the xorg tree. And the numerous patches we've supplied to open source projects like gtk and gtkmm.

There are many developers at VMware that come straight from the open source community. Myself, a Galeon developer, Tomboy developer, VLC developer, xchat-gnome developer, etc. This contest benefits everybody, and we're not doing it to steal people's work. It's a shame people think that.

This is either unabashed ignorance, trolling, or just inexperience.

Windows cannot be installed, and up to date, WITH APPLICATIONS in anywhere near this time. You cannot slipstream a completely configured IIS install. You cannot slipstream a nontrivial user environment. You cannot slipstream anything but updates. Even with SMS remote rollout it takes more time. You cannot slipstream a configured Active Directory. This just isn't something that is tolerable on more than 100 machines.

You can get close with imaging, but it creates other problems and images must be updated. Bottom line is, there are things, as a Unix guru, that I can automate at unit install time that would require a team of programmers and cooperation from Microsoft to accomplish with Windows. Even more importantly, they are things that you WANT to be able to do.

Next, legal is big.

Finally, licensing is TECHNICAL. When Windows doesn't feel good about being licensed, IT REFUSES TO RUN! This was bad for people whose images tripped issues when going from SP1 to SP2 and it was bad for a similar group of people when Windows Genuine Licensing stuff hit the scene. Regardless of "philosophical" issues, the it helps your software to run and upgrade reliably when it doesn't have a paranoid mode designed into it whereby it refuses to correctly run. When thousands of desktops (or worse, embedded seats) require attention due to a completely unnecessary "feature", it is hardly philosophical. It turns into dollars and cents.

Ironically, for small and medium business, it's worse. An major IT shop may have millions in budget for a year. An additional $300,000 in upgrade labor and longer install times hardly shows up in the pretty charts for the CEO. For a small business, an extra $2,500 out of a $12,000 budget is huge.

If the licensing were only on paper it would be philosophical. The licensing is in the code. Soon enough it will be in the hardware. These are computer systems designed to NOT WORK in arbitrary cases. While you could argue that all computer security is designing software not to work, I think its easy to differentiate between security and rights restriction (aka technological licensing enforcement, aka not having control over your own equipment).

How anyone can recommend software with mandatory licensing for mission critical systems is beyond me. I've watched at least two people lose their jobs because a botched update caused a blue screen which corrupted the registry and put an important server in "activate me" mode.

For what its worth, with identical hardware I've got some homegrown deployment stuff that deploys images of Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux. I can do about 100 machines in 30 minutes. That said, the Windows machines require about ten minutes each to adjust the SID and replace the license key (to protect us from future problems with licensing). I have used Ghost in the past but it gets argumentative about some hardware and, when properly licensed, costs more money than I care to spend. It works better than most stuff I've tried. Face it, this is not a problem that Microsoft has solved yet.

I have to laugh at most of this thread. When you run your own business, and IT budget saved is your extra salary, suddenly it become painfully obvious how corporate culture prevents people from truly appreciating the cost of Windows. If the costs are always hidden in someone else's wasted time or just another line-item in the budget, its easy to accept the mess of costs, licensing, and strong-armed industry tactics that come with Microsoft. I, for one, do just fine without them.

With respect to the initial post, if you have to deploy hundreds or thousands of these, Linux has the potential to save you tons of time. The Motion Project at http://motion.sf.net/ might be useful for you. It doesn't necessarily have all of the PVR features, but it comes close. It also will feed back to a V4L loopback device, so it could still have MythTV strapped on the front for DVR support, although you may want to hack up the MythTV interface so that it behaves more appropriately. Good luck.

This is a very good point. If the apps are using Qt, then the GUI should be Qt also, when low-end hardware is a consideration.

Since Edubuntu seems to be just a set of packages and themes installed on Ubuntu, I was going to suggest installing a more lightweight desktop, also. Xfce or EDE will use fewer resources than either KDE or Gnome will. (I know there is a "xubuntu-desktop" package for Xfce, but I don't know about EDE support in Ubuntu.) But if those edutainment apps are the ones that will primarily be used, it may still make sense from the resource usage standpoint to go with KDE.

because you can't do that in Linux.

To advance OpenSource forward in the hope it will have an impact on enhancing the society I think it's most important to come to term and start developing TRUE cross-platform development. That means not only building cross-platform but also usable cross-platform by any ordinary user. See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html

O. Wyss

http://motion.sf.net/ (sourceforge, free software)

This, and some remote access should do what you want. With Liuux Mandrake and some others, it's easy to set up a firewall to only allow access to ports you need. You can easily set up a VPN (secure tunnel) or even use ssh to tunnel into your boxes when needed. You can also easily set up a rsync so that nightly your pictures (or mpg video of any motion) are transferred to one main machine.

The nice thing about using Linux is that you are not limited by some lame software company that thinks one software fits all.

Pro Open Source =/= Pro Linux. Come on, even -I- could figure that one out, hehe.

I hardly think that it's that hard to switch to Linux and be effective. I -DO- think that it's far too hard to get games to work on Linux however. While there are some older games and engines for older games that work on linux (such as Exult http://exult.sf.net/ ) it's currently far too hard to get most commercial games to run on Linux; developers rely far too much on DirectWhatachamadoers (TM) to do everything, instead of writing modular, portable code, they're writing code specifically for one system, without the required modularity to port to other systems.

Before someone mentions WINE, WINE is a great too to port SOURCE CODE to Linux, but trying to run BINARIES with it is a painfully hit and miss matter. And WINE doesn't work for everything - just look at Kylix (although I applaud Borland for being the only big commerical programming language developer I know of that tried to provide a viable programming environment for another platform.)

~ Wizardry Dragon

As I've begun writing applications for a living I've gradually been looking for a easy easy easy method of application development. Something that is truly RAD. For desktop applications I've settled on an old Amiga BASIC language and cross platform application framework called PureBASIC that's been ported for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. However for web toolkits I still haven't found that "magic bullet" that makes things truly and absolutely simple.

I've settled with wxWidgets/wyoGuide (see http://wyoguide.sf.net/ ) for binary applications development and now start delving into the Dojo-toolkit (see http://dojotoolkit.org/) plus PHP for web development. These are the best ways for me to do cross-platform development.

O. Wyss

It amazes me that anybody still can mention win32, etc these days. IMO it should now be obvious for everybody that to develop anything decent cross-platform is the way to go. In the web development there's AJAX/PHP/Java/... and in the binary application programming there is wxWidgets/QT/... .

See also http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html

O. Wyss

building content, content and again content. And for that you need users who provide content, editors who prove read content and a leader who assures the flow of content. There is no problem to find a leader, just choose yourself (or me if you like :-) ). There's no problem to find editors, in the beginning it could be yourself as well or later some of your best users. But it's impossible to find users who provide content, just forget it unless you have this exceptional idea, this outstanding vision and this absolute determination to success and work for it.

If you want to know what I'm talking about on a sample just have a look at my idea, my vision and my determination, have a look at http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html

O. Wyss

This is the way I'm going to do it. Why pay $600 for one of these "mobile hotspots" when you can build your own for around $200 in hardware. Not to mention that with a soekris computer you can use ip route tools to setup traffic shaping. I particular like this script: easyshaper.

I had a very good idea for an anonymous P2P network (anonymous for the uploader, not the downloader), that would be just a tiny bit slower than regular P2P (unlike every other anonymous P2P method). The idea was for the network to use UDP, have the upload software randomize source IP addresses, and have all the ACKs (as few as practical) broadcast back through the P2P network (likely, encrypted), thereby eliminating the only need for the downloader to know the real IP address of the uploader.

I later discovered that somebody else independently came up with the same idea, too, and actually started coding it. The project in question is http://udpp2p.sf.net/

Checking it out, and contribute to the project if you're able, to help get it to a usable state sooner, rather than later.

Yes, I agree watching movies in aaxine on the console is exactly equal to watching them in a GUI, and the drop shadows and live move and resize in Twin is easily a match for anything X can do!

Down with X!

• Previewing folders of graphics (thumbnails are useful things!)
  
• Browsing dir trees quickly (faster than tab completion when you don't know the exact folder you're looking for)
  
• Copying/moving/linking many individual, unrelated files to a new directory
  

• Batch operations on multiple files
  
• Quickly navigating to a particular known directory
  
• Copying/moving/linking related files of a single type to a new directory
  

Sorry, but I have to plug my own program. PyScrabble is an open source, multi-player game written in Python. Translated in English, French and German.

Come play. Spread the word. Have fun! :)

Otherwise I agree. Maybe the next MySQL kernel should be written in Java? Before people are shouting 'too slow' they should have a look at the performance numbers: http://polepos.sf.net/.

At least I think that Java is fast enough for a database engine, otherwise I wouldn't write my 3 engine in Java (1th was Hypersonic SQL, 2nd PointBase Micro, and 3th H2 (http://www.h2database.com/).

Thomas

Otherwise I agree. Maybe the next MySQL kernel should be written in Java? Before people are shouting 'too slow' they should have a look at the performance numbers: http://polepos.sf.net/.

At least I think that Java is fast enough for a database engine, otherwise I wouldn't write my 3 engine in Java (1th was Hypersonic SQL, 2nd PointBase Micro, and 3th H2 (http://www.h2database.com/).

Thomas

Ah, but I know lilo_booter from MLT :-)

IBM already started a project to emulate OS/2 at the API level, but not many people actually appear interested: http://os2linux.sf.net/