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If you want to play your divx backups on a computer, and you don't want to boot into a full-size OS, why not try eMovix? Makes the CD bootable, with of mplayer to play the video. Nice.

Oh, and it does:

• AIM
• ICQ
• irc
• Jabber
• MSN
• Yahoo! Messenger

In using linux I've noticed that we have real problems with installing and uninstalling software (just image uninstalling mozilla on many platforms). This would have to be sorted before Linux could be used by the general public.
I hostly feel how ever that once this and other areas such as connecting devices have been delt with Microsoft have a big problem on there hands. Some projects that could sort the
installation/uninstalltion problem include autopackage zero-install and A-A-P

You think I don't know comp-sci? Oh dear, we seem to have a pickle here. I must have chosen the wrong profession, because I could have sworn I was leading teams of developers, doing my part to change the fact of Java gaming, helping design better database drivers, competing in competitions to pack the most into 4K, building better tools, and generally spending my time trying to knock some sense into these idiots who didn't pay attention when they were getting their degrees.

I didn't get a degree, but I did take the hard way of learning comp-sci. I spent years of my time studying the various texts and papers that students *should* be studying. Some people complain that, "well you can't be a *true* comp-sci professional because you didn't pay for this piece of paper." I just shake my head at their insecurity and offer to help them solve whatever their current problem is.

There are my credentials. Take them or leave them. My only recommendation is that you don't underestimate what I can do, or what I have done.

Opera's probably your best for that; I think it runs on OS X but I've Heard Bad Things. Galeon and Epiphany remember your webpages and take stabs at window postion, but tends to get them mixed up. Galeon and Epiphany will probly run on OS X with X.

That was just a normal plug, a truly shameless plug would have made sure to ask these people to step up and invest and sponsor some developer time on libwpd!

Windows
You can rip to Ogg using CDex and play using Winamp.

Linux
You can rip to Ogg using Grip and playing using XMMS

Another "killer app" is Rosegarden, which is rapidly becoming a suitable replacement for Steinberg Cubase. The Hydrogen sample based drum machine is also worth a mention. The exciting thing is that JACK allows easy multiplexing of things like Rosegarden and Hydrogen, and has kickstarted a whole load of audio and MIDI projects.

My only regret is that my preferred operating system lacks an ALSA compatability layer, so things like JACK and Rosegarden are Linux only at the moment.

Chris

Good summary.

I'd point people at CruiseControl for rebuilding and running the tests every time CVS changes get checked in. That app sends us hate mail every time somebody breaks something, and it is fantastic!

l-Zip - isn't it the archiver You've been looking for? :-D

Just be aware that the script have hard times dealing with special characters. If you've got MP3s originating from a Windows user the characters ` and ' are probably mixed up, so you'll have to fix that before converting.

I don't think you're alone there. I myself have tried FreeS/wan several times over the years and have always found it a frustrating experience. I think the documentation should take a lot of the blame for the problem. It was never too clear and gave only a few wildly different (and sometimes conflicting) examples. Left side? Right side? They would often switch the left/right-side convention for no apparent reason. And it I found it wasn't always clear what configuration settings were required and how they interacted. Because of this it was hard to condense a working configuration out of the few examples they did give.

Many years ago I was trying to connect my network with my familys' network (linux to linux) I eventually went with vtun. It worked fairly well. More recently I went with OpenVPN when I needed to connect my dads' Win2K laptop back to the family network over a dial-up line. In both these examples I originally tried using FreeS/wan on the linux side(s). I thought it would be easier (especially with W2K in the second case) because IPsec is a standard. Nope. Now I'll go look at this new Kame port in the 2.6 kernel and IPsec-tools. Hopefully it's fairly easy to setup.

I don't think you're alone there. I myself have tried FreeS/wan several times over the years and have always found it a frustrating experience. I think the documentation should take a lot of the blame for the problem. It was never too clear and gave only a few wildly different (and sometimes conflicting) examples. Left side? Right side? They would often switch the left/right-side convention for no apparent reason. And it I found it wasn't always clear what configuration settings were required and how they interacted. Because of this it was hard to condense a working configuration out of the few examples they did give.

Many years ago I was trying to connect my network with my familys' network (linux to linux) I eventually went with vtun. It worked fairly well. More recently I went with OpenVPN when I needed to connect my dads' Win2K laptop back to the family network over a dial-up line. In both these examples I originally tried using FreeS/wan on the linux side(s). I thought it would be easier (especially with W2K in the second case) because IPsec is a standard. Nope. Now I'll go look at this new Kame port in the 2.6 kernel and IPsec-tools. Hopefully it's fairly easy to setup.

My experience is that Thunderbird's spam filter is unfinished (as it is an alpha product). Spambayes catches 99% of all spam for me. It's proven better than even spamassassin. It will even work with Thunderbird.

Daniel

Show me *any* compression format that does a better job in this scenario.

Every non-lossy compression format. FLAC, Shorten, LPAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, etc.

I don't think you get it. I'm saying the quality is also relevent when converting to other formats, and when buying music, I absolutely demand non-lossy formats, as lossy formats are inherently low-quality when transcoding.

public void testShortNames() {
CommandLineOptions opt = new CommandLineOptions(new String[] {"file", "format", "ruleset", "-shortnames"});
assertTrue(opt.shortNamesEnabled());
}

public void testNullArgs() {
try {
new CommandLineOptions(null);
fail("Should have thrown an exception when null passed to constructor");
} catch (RuntimeException re) {
// cool
}
}

When will people realise that half the trouble with a lossy format is transcoding? Sure, AAC may sound high-quality when it's in its original format, but when you transcode it to MP3 for your MP3 player, the quality turns to shit. This is inevitably the case when dealing with lossy formats, and why I'd rather buy CDs and rip them to FLAC.

The goals of my project Tasogare (which will probably begin development sometime in the next year when higher-priority projects are complete) would for the most part allow the designers themselves to create the games since it would have most of the code all implemented in a way that isn't specific to any single game.

P.S. If any other game developers want to help out, let me know. This project is too large for just a few people.

G3D now has professional game developers, researchers, and students at several universities all developing 3D games and demos that run natively on all three platforms. The nice thing is that SDL was easier to use than the native Windows APIs.

For Linux to continue to be viable it needs to have a viable desktop. The desktop needs to have infrastructure that is easier to use than the Windows APIs and platform-independent in order to convince developers it is worth their while. As a developer, I don't want to use even more platform-specific APIs in order to support a (comparative) handful of users. I am willing to learn and use a new API if it makes Windows programming easier and gives me a free port to new platforms.

SDL, SDLmixer, OpenAL, and G3D are great for games. I'd like to see things like wxWindows for GUI development reach the same level of stability and native performance. Right now it is too hard to make a GUI application that runs on 2 or 3 platforms and looks as sharp as a native Windows app on Windows. It needs to be easier to write such a program using a platform independent API than the Win32 API in order to get more "real" programs on Linux.

-m

Except for games that use audio or graphics, Linux has pretty much spot-on compatibility with any IF game, as do most operating systems. IF games are extremely portable, written to one of a number of portable VMs (and all this years before Java...and with better compatibility than Java).

TADS (IMHO the most advanced engine, though Inform is very close) just plain runs on Linux. You want this to play .gam files.
There is Frotz to run Inform (.z5 files...I believe a couple other .zX formats, but I've only played .z5).
There is an ADRIFT implementation called SCARE for Linux. It has a less-than-perfect parser. To be honest, ADRIFT is a much simpler engine, and I generally fine TADS or Inform games to be much more fun and impressive.

Note that other classic adventure game VMs -- the ones for commercial graphical adventures -- like the Sierra (King's Quest, among others) and Lucasarts (Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, Secret of Monkey Island, among others) VMs have been ported to Linux in the form of Sarien, FreeSCI, and ScummVM. I don't believe there have been any new AGI/SCI/SCUMM adventures made -- the engines are static and no improved games will be made for them, but they're still neat projects to have fun playing the originals on.

Except for games that use audio or graphics, Linux has pretty much spot-on compatibility with any IF game, as do most operating systems. IF games are extremely portable, written to one of a number of portable VMs (and all this years before Java...and with better compatibility than Java).

TADS (IMHO the most advanced engine, though Inform is very close) just plain runs on Linux. You want this to play .gam files.
There is Frotz to run Inform (.z5 files...I believe a couple other .zX formats, but I've only played .z5).
There is an ADRIFT implementation called SCARE for Linux. It has a less-than-perfect parser. To be honest, ADRIFT is a much simpler engine, and I generally fine TADS or Inform games to be much more fun and impressive.

Note that other classic adventure game VMs -- the ones for commercial graphical adventures -- like the Sierra (King's Quest, among others) and Lucasarts (Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, Secret of Monkey Island, among others) VMs have been ported to Linux in the form of Sarien, FreeSCI, and ScummVM. I don't believe there have been any new AGI/SCI/SCUMM adventures made -- the engines are static and no improved games will be made for them, but they're still neat projects to have fun playing the originals on.

Test the waters with a live CD like Morphix or Knoppix. If your hardware gets detected well and things just work, install it to your hard drive.

My experience with SuSE was that hardware setup was a dream. I still miss YaST. Dependency hell drove me away. Apparently APT for RPM is quite good at resolving dependencies too. I just found that with Debian software installation is painless (using Synaptic or Aptitude as a frontend for APT) and things just work (once the hardware is configured - that's where Knoppix/Morphix come in).

Debian's "testing" distribution (currently Sarge) is really quite stable. The bugs get worked out in Sid (unstable), but the software is still quite recent (unlike Woody/stable). I found dealing with software installations on other systems painful compared with Debian. Everything I need is in the package repository, so apt-get/aptitude/synaptic does everything for me.

When I upgraded from kernel 2.4.22-xfs (that came with Knoppix) to 2.4.24 (standard debian kernel) it was that simple. Two commands and a reboot and it was running. There's a setting in some config file that will run update-grub for me, but I was too lazy to make the change.

Oh, I also had to recompile my nVidia video driver, but NV makes that so easy to do. Debian has some package for it. I should get around to trying it some day.

(Knoppix.net seems to be down right now - try the original site. It's not as easy to navigate, but the ISO is available there.

andy

Freevo might also be a good idea. If uses mplayer and xine to play virtually any (non-drm) media file you could think of.
I use it for all my media needs, but I haven't tried with DVD images (yet).

I'll try that later today, and post the result.

- Ost

Store the recovery information outside the archive. Par2 works really well. You can configure how much redundancy you want (2% should be fine for occasional bit errors, 30% if you burn it to a CD that might get mangled, etc.). It's a work in progress, but it's already really useful.

No one is turning up their noses, but it'd be nice if we could do more. As evidenced by Solitaire, Brick, and Parachute, the iPod is capable of decent graphical games (and other apps), and it'd be nice if Apple would release an SDK allowing their development. Maybe iPod Linux will get there at some point...

One old Ultima has been recreated with an open-source engine, and there are several other projects as well. What made these possible is that fans have published information about the data files involved.

Is Privateer I documented at all? I've been thinking that it would be a fun project, especially if we could create new plots and enhance the NPC interaction.

Sure can! ;-)

Time to buy my own UAV

Please check http://phpreports.sf.net.
Soon delivering PDFs and all the output formats you guys can imagine. ;-)

is kazaa one of the vendors? is there anything they can do about emule or edonkey users?

the latter seem to traffic especially in things like leaked source RARs, and since most of the central servers are overseas and operated independently (and 'overnet' seems truly peer to peer with no central servers), it would be tough to crack down on them, besides having a bunch of fake clients that harvest IPs. anyone know if they do this?

(i imagine the same concept would apply for bittorrent downloaders -- except BT relies on central tracking servers which would be comparatively easy to shut down.)

seems like a natural, uh, application, for the freenet project ;)

ah well. it's kinda scary that even the largest/richest software co in the world can't stop the spread of their IP, and that it takes only one person.

-fren

Your best bet to learn kernel hacking would not be to start working on a vast mass of code like Linux. Try hacking something smaller and easier to understand, like Minix or Syllable.

> a web dashboard portal showing the latest
> results in an easily-assimilated color
> coded HTML table

So true. I've set up one of these for a project I work on, and it's really helpful to be able to see at a glance the status of a bunch of projects.

Seems like some lintish tools could be incorporated into a kernel daily build, and maybe something like CPD as well...

Do you have any useful resources for NWN to help me get started?

What I would really love to do is build a mid-level game engine for Python using Pygame and PyOpenGL. Most of the workhorse code would be in C, but the rest would be scriptable in Python. Perhaps what I'm talking about has already been done, and I could help the developers? I know about Crystal Space, but it's more like a fully-formed 3D FPS engine with Python scripting added onto it.

The copy protection is the part Transgaming cannot release, but other than that they do give back to the community. After WINE changed to the LGPL, they're doing it thru ReWind but I'm sure the changes finally trickle back to the main wine tree if they're any good.

TransGaming is not such a bad company. I don't agree with what they're doing, I feel it may eventually or has already hurt GNU/Linux as a gaming platform. Still, it's nice to have games such as Warcraft 3 or Half-Life which enjoy a large following and would probably never be ported supported. It helps when someone considering switching just has to have that one game.

Just... listen...... to the screams......

can really change the look of a desktop. There are lots of unusual panel and taskbar replacements, clocks, etc.

Also check out KDE-Look's screenshots section which is filled with unusual desktops.

<plug>
Finally, there is kleardock a nice dock and kicker replacement for KDE.
</plug>

i am the lead developer of an open source game,Fmorg and somehow these arena unlimited people got my emailaddress, and sent me THIS....

First, let me apologize if the e-mail was unwanted. Your e-mail address is listed on the Fmorg project page and we thought you might be interested in what we're doing.

this sounds like a sort of scam to get us OO & indie game developers into some kinda contract on the off chance our game hits it big, and creates a demand for this crap

Second, we're not a contract-based service. We don't charge or require anything from developers. Period.

Personally, I'm an advocate of and contributor to the Open Source community. As long as I have any input, games released under any approved license will never be required to pay licensing or developer fees to use our system.

We are constructing and offering a set of tools to be used at will by any developer who might benefit from the inclusion of such features. For example, if a developer wants to sell, say, cars to augment a racing game to help support development, etc., then we would like to help facilitate that in a convenient and secure manner. We don't have or want any say in setting the price. We're looking to support ourselves by collecting a small percentage of the sale (the majority of the revenue goes straight to the developer).

my personal recommendation, JUST SAY NO TO SUITS!! -Ted

We're really not suits, we promise! (If you don't believe us, then check out our pictures.) :-) So far the project has been entirely self-funded (all our cars are beaters and paid for if you don't count the repair bills -- by the way does anyone have a spare alternator for '92 MX-3?). Our biggest hurdle to date (aside from trying to find Other People's Money) is tearing ourselves away from BZFlag and Armagetron long enough to get some work done.

But if you feel violated by our approach, I sincerely apologize. I hope you continue work on Fmorg with our without our help, as it looks very promising.

i am the lead developer of an open source game,Fmorg and somehow these arena unlimited people got my emailaddress, and sent me THIS:
To whom it may concern:
You are invited to check out Arena Unlimited's new, free online service
for Open Source and independent game developers.

Our technology aims to allow developers to convert their virtual game
items into real commodities that can be bought, sold, and traded. Also,
we intend to enable developers and publishers to create, sell, and
manage dynamic advertising space, objects, sponsorships, and other content
within their games.

On Friday the 13th, we made available a preview release of our project
showing off some of our basic features. We want to give developers a
chance to check out what we're doing and evaluate the approach we're
taking to ensure usability in the upcoming production release.
Please visit the Developer's Corner
(http://arenaunlimited.com/site/dev/) to see what we offer. Comments,
questions, and suggestions are welcome and wanted.
Sincerely,
Dan Chow
CTO, Arena Unlimited, Inc.
P.S. You are receiving this invitation because you are a developer for
Open Source or independent game content. We're sorry about the mass
mailing, however this is the first, last and only e-mail we'll send you on
the subject if you don't want to sign up for the mailing list. We
believe in opt-in, not opt-out.Your address "_my_sf_email!_@users.sourceforge.net" has been invited to join
the developers mailing list at mail.arenaunlimited.com by the developers mailing list owner. You may accept the invitation by simply
replying to this message, keeping the Subject: header intact.

You can also visit this web page:

http://lists.arenaunlimited.com/mailman/confirm/de velopers/5726ae9795213d5e2d10c8278e9d0c4ca0a62fa6

Or you should include the following line -- and only the following
line -- in a message to developers-request@mail.arenaunlimited.com:
confirm 5726ae9795213d5e2d10c8278e9d0c4ca0a62fa6

Note that simply sending a `reply' to this message should work from
most mail readers.

If you want to decline this invitation, please simply disregard this
message. If you have any questions, please send them to
developers-owner@mail.arenaunlimited.com.

as was reported on slashdot before, this virtual property thing is real big now, some kid sold his UO virtual property biz for like 10 million if i remember correctly. this sounds like a sort of scam to get us OO & indie game developers into some kinda contract on the off chance our game hits it big, and creates a demand for this crap. my personal recommendation, JUST SAY NO TO SUITS!! -Ted

This is exactly how the open source voting system being implemented by the Open Voting Consortium with the development going on Source Forge.

I couldn't agree more. A month ago I started serious kernel programming and my code wouldn't have been what it is if I hadn't found out about the free, online version of the second edition.

Some other useful sites :
the Linux kernel API reference

Linux cross reference, especially the `identifier search'.

the driver porting series over at LWN.net (which Rufus211 alreay pointed out).

the module init tools FAQ

this document, aptly titled `the linux kernel'

apart from these there are many more interesting links, but mostly those have to do with specialty domains, such as networking or memory management. I pasted my bookmarks.html to my personal website.

And lastly, if you want to do cross-version /dev (mknod and devfs), mmap, module or networking development, please take a look at our project's cvs server through our website (webcvs) at ffpf.sourceforge.net. The directory ffpf/srv/v1.1/generic contains some files I created that work on both 2.4.24 and 2.6.1 and which I'll test on a 2.3.99 system shortly.

I couldn't agree more. A month ago I started serious kernel programming and my code wouldn't have been what it is if I hadn't found out about the free, online version of the second edition.

Some other useful sites :
the Linux kernel API reference

Linux cross reference, especially the `identifier search'.

the driver porting series over at LWN.net (which Rufus211 alreay pointed out).

the module init tools FAQ

this document, aptly titled `the linux kernel'

apart from these there are many more interesting links, but mostly those have to do with specialty domains, such as networking or memory management. I pasted my bookmarks.html to my personal website.

And lastly, if you want to do cross-version /dev (mknod and devfs), mmap, module or networking development, please take a look at our project's cvs server through our website (webcvs) at ffpf.sourceforge.net. The directory ffpf/srv/v1.1/generic contains some files I created that work on both 2.4.24 and 2.6.1 and which I'll test on a 2.3.99 system shortly.

It's an iBook G4. I'm now a happy and proud owner of such a machine, and user of both MacOS X Panther an Linux on it.

The first thing I did when I got my hands on it was to re-partition it's hard drive and install Panther. Then I followed the instructions on setting up the mother of all Linux distributions on it from here.

I did the initial install of the Debian GNU/Linux base system (not without having to use a different kernel image for the ATA support, among other things to fiddle with), but then I started to take a serious look at OS X. It's an impressive operating system, with such a lovely and responsive GUI but the real power of UNIX I'm all used to underneath. I installed lots of open source software that I've get used to and couldn't live without. It all works so smoothly and nicely along other native applications, such as iTunes, Mail.app, Safari, Keynote, etc. - you get the best of both worlds. You have fink, you have darwinports, there's even OpenOffice.org. And if you're a developer, you also got Xcode from Apple. As I said, the both of worlds. And for some extra bucks you can get back some of your most beloved features from the Linux world: WindowShade X is a fine example of it.

Panther is also packed with some neat features not present anywhere else. Finder, for example, if one of the best file manager I've ever used. And Expose - I really miss it when working on Linux. One of the most useful enhancements a desktop environment could have get, it's not only eyecandy.

But then the necessity came and striked me hard. I have a small Linux consulting company. I was in a meeting with a customer the other day, and he wasn't so convinced that Linux could be a _viable_ alternative on the desktop. He thought it was just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such. And there I was, with my iBook with Debian loaded on it but with no desktop environment to show off. Just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such.

So I spent the whole night that day googling around and finally got my iBook to work nicely with Linux 2.6.2, supporting almost every single feature that's present on it except for Airport Extreme and the sleep functionality, which are not supported: sound, networking, USB 2.0, firewire, the combo drive, the ATI Radeon 9200 with DRI, the special function keys, the CPU frequency scaling. I even configured it to use an hfsplus partition for the /home directory, so now I have a single home for both Linux and OS X. Same desktop, same config for common programs.

There are still some things that Linux can do better than OS X. Like OpenOffice.org or GIMP. Certainly both programs do exist for OS X but their performance and overall integration with the rest of the system is not so good.

The conclusion of it is that, even if MacOS X is one hell of an operating system, Linux is fun. I love to use the same plataform on my x86 desktop I've grown used to for more than 6 years than on my PPC based laptop. And I still have the chance to reboot and use Panther for the amusement of it.

Regards,

It's an iBook G4. I'm now a happy and proud owner of such a machine, and user of both MacOS X Panther an Linux on it.

The first thing I did when I got my hands on it was to re-partition it's hard drive and install Panther. Then I followed the instructions on setting up the mother of all Linux distributions on it from here.

I did the initial install of the Debian GNU/Linux base system (not without having to use a different kernel image for the ATA support, among other things to fiddle with), but then I started to take a serious look at OS X. It's an impressive operating system, with such a lovely and responsive GUI but the real power of UNIX I'm all used to underneath. I installed lots of open source software that I've get used to and couldn't live without. It all works so smoothly and nicely along other native applications, such as iTunes, Mail.app, Safari, Keynote, etc. - you get the best of both worlds. You have fink, you have darwinports, there's even OpenOffice.org. And if you're a developer, you also got Xcode from Apple. As I said, the both of worlds. And for some extra bucks you can get back some of your most beloved features from the Linux world: WindowShade X is a fine example of it.

Panther is also packed with some neat features not present anywhere else. Finder, for example, if one of the best file manager I've ever used. And Expose - I really miss it when working on Linux. One of the most useful enhancements a desktop environment could have get, it's not only eyecandy.

But then the necessity came and striked me hard. I have a small Linux consulting company. I was in a meeting with a customer the other day, and he wasn't so convinced that Linux could be a _viable_ alternative on the desktop. He thought it was just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such. And there I was, with my iBook with Debian loaded on it but with no desktop environment to show off. Just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such.

So I spent the whole night that day googling around and finally got my iBook to work nicely with Linux 2.6.2, supporting almost every single feature that's present on it except for Airport Extreme and the sleep functionality, which are not supported: sound, networking, USB 2.0, firewire, the combo drive, the ATI Radeon 9200 with DRI, the special function keys, the CPU frequency scaling. I even configured it to use an hfsplus partition for the /home directory, so now I have a single home for both Linux and OS X. Same desktop, same config for common programs.

There are still some things that Linux can do better than OS X. Like OpenOffice.org or GIMP. Certainly both programs do exist for OS X but their performance and overall integration with the rest of the system is not so good.

The conclusion of it is that, even if MacOS X is one hell of an operating system, Linux is fun. I love to use the same plataform on my x86 desktop I've grown used to for more than 6 years than on my PPC based laptop. And I still have the chance to reboot and use Panther for the amusement of it.

Regards,

It's an iBook G4. I'm now a happy and proud owner of such a machine, and user of both MacOS X Panther an Linux on it.

The first thing I did when I got my hands on it was to re-partition it's hard drive and install Panther. Then I followed the instructions on setting up the mother of all Linux distributions on it from here.

I did the initial install of the Debian GNU/Linux base system (not without having to use a different kernel image for the ATA support, among other things to fiddle with), but then I started to take a serious look at OS X. It's an impressive operating system, with such a lovely and responsive GUI but the real power of UNIX I'm all used to underneath. I installed lots of open source software that I've get used to and couldn't live without. It all works so smoothly and nicely along other native applications, such as iTunes, Mail.app, Safari, Keynote, etc. - you get the best of both worlds. You have fink, you have darwinports, there's even OpenOffice.org. And if you're a developer, you also got Xcode from Apple. As I said, the both of worlds. And for some extra bucks you can get back some of your most beloved features from the Linux world: WindowShade X is a fine example of it.

Panther is also packed with some neat features not present anywhere else. Finder, for example, if one of the best file manager I've ever used. And Expose - I really miss it when working on Linux. One of the most useful enhancements a desktop environment could have get, it's not only eyecandy.

But then the necessity came and striked me hard. I have a small Linux consulting company. I was in a meeting with a customer the other day, and he wasn't so convinced that Linux could be a _viable_ alternative on the desktop. He thought it was just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such. And there I was, with my iBook with Debian loaded on it but with no desktop environment to show off. Just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such.

So I spent the whole night that day googling around and finally got my iBook to work nicely with Linux 2.6.2, supporting almost every single feature that's present on it except for Airport Extreme and the sleep functionality, which are not supported: sound, networking, USB 2.0, firewire, the combo drive, the ATI Radeon 9200 with DRI, the special function keys, the CPU frequency scaling. I even configured it to use an hfsplus partition for the /home directory, so now I have a single home for both Linux and OS X. Same desktop, same config for common programs.

There are still some things that Linux can do better than OS X. Like OpenOffice.org or GIMP. Certainly both programs do exist for OS X but their performance and overall integration with the rest of the system is not so good.

The conclusion of it is that, even if MacOS X is one hell of an operating system, Linux is fun. I love to use the same plataform on my x86 desktop I've grown used to for more than 6 years than on my PPC based laptop. And I still have the chance to reboot and use Panther for the amusement of it.

Regards,

It's an iBook G4. I'm now a happy and proud owner of such a machine, and user of both MacOS X Panther an Linux on it.

The first thing I did when I got my hands on it was to re-partition it's hard drive and install Panther. Then I followed the instructions on setting up the mother of all Linux distributions on it from here.

I did the initial install of the Debian GNU/Linux base system (not without having to use a different kernel image for the ATA support, among other things to fiddle with), but then I started to take a serious look at OS X. It's an impressive operating system, with such a lovely and responsive GUI but the real power of UNIX I'm all used to underneath. I installed lots of open source software that I've get used to and couldn't live without. It all works so smoothly and nicely along other native applications, such as iTunes, Mail.app, Safari, Keynote, etc. - you get the best of both worlds. You have fink, you have darwinports, there's even OpenOffice.org. And if you're a developer, you also got Xcode from Apple. As I said, the both of worlds. And for some extra bucks you can get back some of your most beloved features from the Linux world: WindowShade X is a fine example of it.

Panther is also packed with some neat features not present anywhere else. Finder, for example, if one of the best file manager I've ever used. And Expose - I really miss it when working on Linux. One of the most useful enhancements a desktop environment could have get, it's not only eyecandy.

But then the necessity came and striked me hard. I have a small Linux consulting company. I was in a meeting with a customer the other day, and he wasn't so convinced that Linux could be a _viable_ alternative on the desktop. He thought it was just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such. And there I was, with my iBook with Debian loaded on it but with no desktop environment to show off. Just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such.

So I spent the whole night that day googling around and finally got my iBook to work nicely with Linux 2.6.2, supporting almost every single feature that's present on it except for Airport Extreme and the sleep functionality, which are not supported: sound, networking, USB 2.0, firewire, the combo drive, the ATI Radeon 9200 with DRI, the special function keys, the CPU frequency scaling. I even configured it to use an hfsplus partition for the /home directory, so now I have a single home for both Linux and OS X. Same desktop, same config for common programs.

There are still some things that Linux can do better than OS X. Like OpenOffice.org or GIMP. Certainly both programs do exist for OS X but their performance and overall integration with the rest of the system is not so good.

The conclusion of it is that, even if MacOS X is one hell of an operating system, Linux is fun. I love to use the same plataform on my x86 desktop I've grown used to for more than 6 years than on my PPC based laptop. And I still have the chance to reboot and use Panther for the amusement of it.

Regards,

My reasons to do this would be to access the wealth of software out there. Does OS-X have the ability to support gnome and/or Kde apps? I figure it can be done, but how much hassle would it be?

I have mod points right now, but I'll respond to this instead.

KDE and Gnome have been ported to run on MacOS X. Apple provides a version of XFree86, which is bundled with Panther, or a free download for Jaguar. X11 runs rootless, which means all of your X11 windows are mixed in with your normal OS X windows. KDE and Gnome have both been ported. KDE is a little farther along than Gnome, but both are available through Fink. Check to see which packages are available.

Also, with KDE, the Qt library has been made available under the GPL for MacOS X, just like on Linux. So KDE software can be ported to MacOS X native with much less hassle than before.

Apple also supports Linux on their computers. TerraSoft makes the Yellow Dog Linux distro. They are also an Apple Value Added Reseller, and they sell Macs with YDL preloaded without voiding the Apple warranty.

Available here: vigor.sf.net

When I read the results, it really shocked me. Why, this means that 2004 is not going to be the year of Linux on the desktop -- this goes against everything I've heard on slashdot! All those hours I've spent reading articles by people in the open-source scene talking about how this year, was going to be it. But this makes more sense: Nobody has really heard about Linux outside of nerds.

You know about fink right?