Slashdot Mirror

Try R300 opensource drivers. Work well enough on my Radeon 9600 XT at resolutions up to 1920x1440.
R300 is integrated in most current Linux distro. If not, you'll have to either upgrade your distro OR recompile the DRI modules.

But would it not be possible to use windows drivers for *nix? [...] A thin wrapper around the windows drivers could perhaps make it work and hold us over for the short term? Something like Wine for graphic drivers.

So it should be simpler to reverse engineer.

There are open-source R300 drivers that cover the 9500 up to x850 range of cards. I've used it for on old 9600XT AGP card (AGP chip) and HIS-overclocked X800 AGP card (PCIe chip with PCIe-to-GP bridge). The performance seem to be acceptable for my needs - which is surprising, knowing that R300 driver was completely developed from reverse engineering.

Recently the driver has been included in the official DRI tree. Most distro use it to provide open-source 3D acceleration. It is the default drivers for near every GPL-compatible Beryl/Compiz LiveCD (like Kooraa, for exemple) and function well enough with them (the same can't be said for official binary drivers).

As usual you should stop focusing on the hardware maker - who doesn't { have the possibility to / want to } throw resources at an OS that represents only a smaller fraction of their market share.
You should instead seek what has been produced by the OSS community - through large-scale collaboration they often manage to put out some marvels.

There no way one could except ATI to open-source drivers. They may have problems with code in their drivers that wasn't produced in house and that can't be opened cheaply.
BUT what AMD/ATI realy need to do is to help the DRI/FreeDesktop guys develop their own driver, and for that they need to document a little bit their chips. The best thing could do to the OSS community isn't trying to make their BLOB drivers less borked. The best thing would be to provide list of registers and samples so the community could write a R500 driver.

Why don't you try Wt? http://witty.sf.net/
Compiled code, clean interface, no cross-browser conflicts

I've had a pretty good run using Ardour, JACK, JAMIN and occasionally JACK Timemachine on an Athlon 2800+ with 256 MB of memory.

The most expensive piece of sound equipment seems to be the AD/DA converters (whether on or off board). I ended up with an RME Hamerfall 9652 (yes, the original one) and a Behringer Ultragain ADA-8000 (inexpensive at 230 USD). I also use a Behringer BCF-2000 for automation control, and a bunch of other rackmount processors. The sound is better than a studio I had recorded at a while back which used a Mackie D8B and a bunch of very expensive and fancy looking equipment.

I guess it depends what you want to get out of it. If you want to spend 30$ on a cheapie sound card, expect it to sound like that.... The audio *software* is available for Linux, so the only limitation is how much green you want to sink into your setup. (Hint, Behringer has a 30$ USB sound card available if you're looking to do recording "on the cheap" which would sound a bit better than an internal sound card, considering that you can move the AD/DA conversion process a bit further away from your machines' clock chips.)

I've had a pretty good run using Ardour, JACK, JAMIN and occasionally JACK Timemachine on an Athlon 2800+ with 256 MB of memory.

The most expensive piece of sound equipment seems to be the AD/DA converters (whether on or off board). I ended up with an RME Hamerfall 9652 (yes, the original one) and a Behringer Ultragain ADA-8000 (inexpensive at 230 USD). I also use a Behringer BCF-2000 for automation control, and a bunch of other rackmount processors. The sound is better than a studio I had recorded at a while back which used a Mackie D8B and a bunch of very expensive and fancy looking equipment.

I guess it depends what you want to get out of it. If you want to spend 30$ on a cheapie sound card, expect it to sound like that.... The audio *software* is available for Linux, so the only limitation is how much green you want to sink into your setup. (Hint, Behringer has a 30$ USB sound card available if you're looking to do recording "on the cheap" which would sound a bit better than an internal sound card, considering that you can move the AD/DA conversion process a bit further away from your machines' clock chips.)

A few other cool things: Ardour under the 3d window manager, beryl. Jamin - mastering software. Bristol - softsynth.

Might I also suggest a look at Restructured Text as another alternative. Comes from the Python community. Raw text is a little easier to read IMHO and can also output to HTML, PS, PDF and LaTeX. Either way you go, one of these formats is nice in that you will easily be able to convert to most any format you'll need to publish your documentation in.

A cornerstone of documentation in the Unix/Linux/*BSD world is the man page, a very concise and targetted form of documentation that programmers and sysadmins in particular find extremely convenient, especially for documenting library functions and commandline tools.

Unfortunately many FOSS projects don't provide man pages, not even a single one to document the commandline options of an application for example.

This is where newcomers to FOSS technical documentation could make a wonderful contribution. Just take any existing READMEs etc, or run an app with -h or --help or whatever it takes to find out how it's used (perhaps read the sourcefile headers, even if you're not a coder), and make a corresponding man page. That would be totally wonderful, and much appreciated by many.

What's more, there are many tools available to help you along the way. One good place to start is with perldoc/perlpod and the POD format (which are not tied to Perl at all even though they came from that community). These very handily allow you to generate both man pages and HTML equivalents extremely easily, as well as LaTeX format for high quality output and publishing.

As should be apparent, the best documentation system allow you to generate multiple different forms of output from a single input, and man pages + HTML should be the very least that is acceptable to you. (HTML-only documentation is pretty useless in many situations.) Be sure to check out the man2html suite too, which is very handy.

The Doxygen suite is very powerful as well, but automatically extracted man pages are no substitute for the real thing written by a competent technical author. That's where you come in.

It's great to hear of new people wishing to help with FOSS documentation, and man pages are a key element of the overall picture and an easy place to start as well. They really are the bedrock upon which much of FOSS is based, and deserve attention.

A cornerstone of documentation in the Unix/Linux/*BSD world is the man page, a very concise and targetted form of documentation that programmers and sysadmins in particular find extremely convenient, especially for documenting library functions and commandline tools.

Unfortunately many FOSS projects don't provide man pages, not even a single one to document the commandline options of an application for example.

This is where newcomers to FOSS technical documentation could make a wonderful contribution. Just take any existing READMEs etc, or run an app with -h or --help or whatever it takes to find out how it's used (perhaps read the sourcefile headers, even if you're not a coder), and make a corresponding man page. That would be totally wonderful, and much appreciated by many.

What's more, there are many tools available to help you along the way. One good place to start is with perldoc/perlpod and the POD format (which are not tied to Perl at all even though they came from that community). These very handily allow you to generate both man pages and HTML equivalents extremely easily, as well as LaTeX format for high quality output and publishing.

As should be apparent, the best documentation system allow you to generate multiple different forms of output from a single input, and man pages + HTML should be the very least that is acceptable to you. (HTML-only documentation is pretty useless in many situations.) Be sure to check out the man2html suite too, which is very handy.

The Doxygen suite is very powerful as well, but automatically extracted man pages are no substitute for the real thing written by a competent technical author. That's where you come in.

It's great to hear of new people wishing to help with FOSS documentation, and man pages are a key element of the overall picture and an easy place to start as well. They really are the bedrock upon which much of FOSS is based, and deserve attention.

I had this exact same need... I watched techbargains and a few other sites, and here's what I got (last August):

Dell Inspiron B130 with:
1GB RAM
1.8MHz Pentium M
i915 shared mem gfx chip
40GB HD
DVD/CDRW
14.1" wide-format 1280x800 display.
built in ethernet, wifi, modem, etc.
better than 2 hours battery life with default battery, "beefed up" battery provides about 4 hours.

Here's the hitches:

Wireless works out of the box *after* you install the firmware for the ipw2200 card. This involves either getting the package (which most distros have and some install by default) or getting it from http://ipw2200.sf.net/ and unpacking it to /lib/firmware.

Need to run 915resolution for most distros (only exception so far: openSUSE) to get 1280x800 instead of 1024x768. This is Intel's fault, 1280x800 isn't listed as a valid mode in the video BIOS.

The price: $450 shipped.

So, a nice laptop, with two hitches that are certainly show-stoppers for some people. BUT, in a few months you should be able to get a similar laptop (or better) for a similar price, with Ubuntu, working out of the box. That's just cool.

Side note: ipw2200 firmware is redistributable in unmodified form, and is now in Fedora extras, so its gaining acceptance by major players. Dunno if Ubuntu installs it by default.

Side note 2: here's hoping that Dell pressures Intel into helping/fixing the default X.org driver for the i915 and similar cards to negate the need for 855resolution or 915resolution. The "intel" X.org driver that comes with Fedora already negates this need, but not all distros ship this driver for some reason.

While you're checking out Mathematica, consider taking a look at the major open source computer algebra projects:

Axiom: http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/ (formerly known as Scratchpad) was developed at IBM as a commercial system, sold to NAG, and released a few years ago as an open source program.

and

Maxima: http://maxima.sf.net/ (descended from the pre-commercial Macsyma codebase) was maintained by William Schelter for many years and he obtained permission to release it as open source. Sadly, he passed away a few years later but the Maxima project has grown and now has many active contributors.

They won't have the glitzy graphics or army of specialized packages Mathematica boasts, but they also don't cost $1500 and (theoretically) can be audited for correctness all the way down to their foundations. I regard the latter as very important for people trying to do scientific research with computer algebra tools, and what's more no commercial company is required for their survival (the story of Macsyma is a very good object lesson.)

Maxima is the more "engineering" oriented of the two systems and will probably make more sense to Mathematica inclined users - it can use gnuplot, run on Windows and has a decent GUI called wxMaxima: http://wxmaxima.sf.net./ Axiom is more oriented towards being "strong" mathematically - it takes more getting used to and has very ambitious goals for long term mathematical research. It is attempting to become a literate program in the tradition of Knuth's TeX system. It doesn't currently have the interfaces to familiar tools the way Maxima does.

Both systems are already very powerful and while there are many bugs to work out progress is being made. If you're shopping around for a CAS and are interested in open source systems, I highly recommend checking them out.

(Bias disclosure - I have been a (minor) member of the Maxima project and am currently interested in/doing a little work on/with Axiom, in case the URL in my info doesn't give it away.)

While you're checking out Mathematica, consider taking a look at the major open source computer algebra projects:

Axiom: http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/ (formerly known as Scratchpad) was developed at IBM as a commercial system, sold to NAG, and released a few years ago as an open source program.

and

Maxima: http://maxima.sf.net/ (descended from the pre-commercial Macsyma codebase) was maintained by William Schelter for many years and he obtained permission to release it as open source. Sadly, he passed away a few years later but the Maxima project has grown and now has many active contributors.

They won't have the glitzy graphics or army of specialized packages Mathematica boasts, but they also don't cost $1500 and (theoretically) can be audited for correctness all the way down to their foundations. I regard the latter as very important for people trying to do scientific research with computer algebra tools, and what's more no commercial company is required for their survival (the story of Macsyma is a very good object lesson.)

Maxima is the more "engineering" oriented of the two systems and will probably make more sense to Mathematica inclined users - it can use gnuplot, run on Windows and has a decent GUI called wxMaxima: http://wxmaxima.sf.net./ Axiom is more oriented towards being "strong" mathematically - it takes more getting used to and has very ambitious goals for long term mathematical research. It is attempting to become a literate program in the tradition of Knuth's TeX system. It doesn't currently have the interfaces to familiar tools the way Maxima does.

Both systems are already very powerful and while there are many bugs to work out progress is being made. If you're shopping around for a CAS and are interested in open source systems, I highly recommend checking them out.

(Bias disclosure - I have been a (minor) member of the Maxima project and am currently interested in/doing a little work on/with Axiom, in case the URL in my info doesn't give it away.)

mp3splt's silence detection works great on all the We7 files I tested!*

mp3splt -s downloaded.mp3

* Grand total: one. But still. It appears the "Web 2.0 based, 'pat.pending' MediaGraft engine" is just prepending a ten-second mp3 with a polite period of silence before the music begins.

how can an open source project be acquired?

If the license was OSI before couldn't the project just continue?

From the wikipedia entry it looks like the project leader decided that the MS shared source license was going to be used.

WebCalendar is an open source, database driven, PHP web application that supports iCal and a rich feature set for multi-user calendaring.

http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php (home page of the SourceForge project)

Developing application in Windows can be as easy as VB. As far as I have seen there is nothing on this (OSS) side of the fence that comes close to it for ease of use, with (reasonably) good debugging.

Have you tried Gambas by any chance? I don't know about the debugging support, but the interface and language are very similar to VB.

Journaling filesystems like ext3, reiserfs or xfs bypass the kernel's delayed write mechanisms. This amounts to lousy spindown times when working off such a partition. There's no workaround for this.
http://noflushd.sf.net/

The 50% happy news requirement essentially reminds me of early morning news shows...
http://sphere.sf.net/flik/images/20070920.png

Unless someone knows of a PDF creator.

Have you looked into DRBL?

It has a program called Clonezilla that serves the images by multicast or unicast. I use that at work for installing the machines with multi-boot (WindowsXP+Ubuntu) and it works just fine and prety fast too :)

The only thing that you have to try is if it work with mac, but i think it will because of the way that the program does the image of the disc.

the 48GX is a good graphing calc, but the HP 32S II is still at the top of my list for engineering calculations. discontinued at about $60 new, used ones regularly sell for $125-150 on eBay. it has the sanest layout of any calculator I have ever touched, and all the operations I need to use are very fast to key in.

the ugly-ass 33S was designed as a replacement, but it offers negative improvement.

I love the 32S II so much, I wrote a /usr/bin/dc variant called dci that comes close.

Perhaps, you should reconsider but just use your C++ (desktop) experiences and tools to create web applications, using a library like Wt?

Then perhaps, you would like to create web applications using Python bindings for Wt (http://witty.sf.net/) ?

Just use TripleA. Setup will take a couple of seconds. The UI kinda sucks though.

That doesn't mean we can't compile the libraries separately and make them available to apps which make use of them. I have historically preferred window managers which remain as thin as possible. I'm not going to try and assert that E17 still qualifies as thin but it certainly doesn't try to integrate itself wholeheartedly into the overall system the way that KDE and Gnome do. When Enlightenment tries to pull a KDE/Gnome I'll still fall back to UDE.

Actually...

(1) the ROX Desktop uses drag-and-drop to install programs, and has done so almost as long as Mac OS X has (from another influence). ROX is a competitor to Gnome and KDE, not Debian or Red Hat, and so this works on all distributions. I don't understand any better than the next person why Mozilla won't distribute Firefox nightlies as AppDirs, nor why Nautilus and Konqueror won't execute them.

As for the rest, I'm surprised things aren't working just right for you anyway. They usually do. If they're not, you're right: But it's an excellent idea to try filing a bug with the relevant distribution; Free Software devs are almost entirely self-guided and working on their own desktop, so they're used to the faults and see through them. More practical than ranting on Slashdot, at least.

...which, in a 500K LOC program, there may be a bit of, try the copy/paste detector, CPD. There's a chapter on CPD in my PMD book, too...

Try Cream for Vim for clipboard smoothness:

• One clipboard
• Global clipboard (to the desktop environment)
• Ctrl+X/C/V (Cut/Copy/Paste) keyboard shortcuts
• GNOME or Windows, works the same in both

The Gallery Project hasn't yet seen a big interest in the 2007 Summer of Code. We'd like to encourage all interested students to apply before the deadline. Please don't wait until the last minute!

Students should feel free to submit their own project idea. In fact, we strongly suggest you submit your own project idea and have updated our ideas page to reflect this. You don't have to start from scratch - our "Create your own idea!" section has links to several areas with possible ideas. The Sample Ideas on our ideas page are just examples - they're not necessarily a higher priority than any other feature request.

We'd also like to encourage you to apply for multiple projects. We've seen several applications for the same project and we can only select one student for each project.

If you have any questions, feel free to talk to us on our Summer of Code mailing list or in #gallery on irc.freenode.net

Good luck!

--
Michael Schultheiss
Gallery Summer of Code Program Administration Team

SourceForge has this project that looks pretty promising. It has several others too, just search for "time and attendance".

TORCS is a more advanced racing simulation than Rars. Its held robot-programming contests for the last 3 years, with another about to start soon.

There have been several robots that use various learning techniques, though none to my knowledge have been full-blown AI/neural net solutions. To be honest, I query the advantages of doing it that way. A robot that has code to plan a smooth & optimal path around the track & calculates braking and steering accordingly will do much better (initially at least) than an AI robot that needs to learn this information. Perhaps bots that use a mix of the two (preplanning to begin with then learning to fine-tune any errors in the plan) would be the best solution.

So it seems like it ought to be possible to 'recontainerize' a Divx .divx or .avi into an .mp4 file without decompressing and recompressing it, thus avoiding loss.

Get mencoder for demuxing from avi, MP4Box for muxing into mp4 and optionally AtomicParsley for metadata. Windows binaries: [1] [2] [3]

On Linux install the packages MPlayer and gpac.

Sample code

mencoder -ovc copy -nosound -of rawvideo -o "temp.264" "the.avi"
mencoder -ovc frameno -oac copy -of rawaudio -o "temp.aac" "the.avi"
MP4Box -fps $fps -add "temp.264"#video -add "temp.aac"#audio -new "the.mp4"
atomicparsley "the.mp4" --stik "Music Video" -W

You can find out the framerate (frames per second) of the avi with ffmpeg [4].

ffmpeg -i "the.avi" nul 2>&1

Look for the line with fps in it.

RTFM of the parsley to see what sort of metadata you can add.

Now mod me up, bitches.

Hello:

The standard model has the symmetries U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3). The one in the middle, SU(2), is a unit quaternion, where a quaternion is like a real or complex number, but has four parts. I have developed the software to visualize quaternions at http://quaternions.sf.net/ using one number for time, three for space. SU(2) can be represented by the quaternion function exp(q-q*). Feed a thousand random quaternions into exp(q-q*), and get POVRay to make a nice animation. Do the same for q/|q| exp(q-q*), and you have a visual representation of the electroweak symmetry. Smash two of these together, and you get the symmetry of the standard model.

Visually, there is a clear message: if you want to smoothly represent all possible events in spacetime as quaternions, the group description must be U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3). You won't read that in a journal because it has to be done with animations.

http://www.theworld.com/~sweetser/quaternions/quan tum/standard_model/standard_model.html

doug

You can help. I have SL compiling on Linux to target an executable on Windows. http://oslcc.sf.net/

Why not build your own? Old PPCs, SPARCs, Alphas, and Intels are cheap on eBay. The software to create your own compile farm is readily available (and in the case of Buildbot, decentralized).

Having your own farm means you don't compete for resources, and you're not beholden to some assh^W other organization's business case for shutting it down.

I don't know what FLOSS stands for.

But there might be open source projects which would do what you need...

http://freshmeat.net/ and http://www.sf.net/ are good places to start.

The Manhattan Virtual Classroom at http://manhattan.sf.net is a GPL'd Course Management System that's been available since 2002. Probably one of the simplest interfaces out there, and very stable and well documented.

One, build-essentials installs all the packages for gcc, make, etc.

Two, I *use* Ubuntu - on a daily basis as my main distro.

Three, I've written Dapple, RMFCOM (a replacement for Command.com), and a few other, smaller programs (some of which are part of the BSDish-Linux project "FOX" I run, see my link). I think it's safe to say I'm a programmer.

Why did I pick Ubuntu? Because I liked Debian, and I wanted to get this computer set up quickly and didn't feel like going through the bullshit of installing a million packages to get a GUI.

-uso.

Can't get to TFA for some reason, but isn't this the point of Retroweaver?

If you have a Mac, you could try GDisk - http://gdisk.sf.net/
Turns your GMail account into online storage.

> aren't code reviews supposed to focus on the business logic implementation

I think that's exactly right - use tools like PMD to find nickle and dime things like certain null pointer exceptions, unused code, empty try blocks, etc. Let the code reviews be focused on things like "hey, we don't need all these accessors", "we should be using the business rule package here", "this is really more of a Map than a List" and that sort of thing.

The tools do the gruntwork and the people do the thinking... good times.

> aren't code reviews supposed to focus on the business logic implementation

I think that's exactly right - use tools like PMD to find nickle and dime things like certain null pointer exceptions, unused code, empty try blocks, etc. Let the code reviews be focused on things like "hey, we don't need all these accessors", "we should be using the business rule package here", "this is really more of a Map than a List" and that sort of thing.

The tools do the gruntwork and the people do the thinking... good times.

It's not even hard to install amarok! Go to http://fink.sf.net/, download and setup fink, enable 'unstable' in FinkCommander so that you can find amarok in the list, hit install and you're done!

I've had false positives from AV software before thanks to my use of NSIS as an installer. Apparently it's also a favorite of malware creators. I don't blame Nullsoft, but instead lazy AV makers who should know about NSIS by now and should test their signatures against it before publishing them.

Ditching Windows was a little hard as I used to play games, but I was reaching the point where gaming held little appeal for me anyway. Switching to a platform that ran for literally years on end without major crashes demonstrated the value of Linux, and obviously, the lack of worth to Windows.

Microsoft only holds its place because people are too timid to try something else. Apple's OS is slick. Linux has had windowmanagers that mimic the windows shell for many years. For people who don't play computer games it shouldn't be a big deal to switch.

I agree, that is basicaly the case with me, too. Most games I'm interested in nowadays run natively on Linux anyway (the UT series, id games, emulated stuff). For one thing, I don't really have the time to play anything that requires an extensive amount of time (ie rpgs, though I love them). But mostly I'm just not really interested in games that much anymore (with the exception of Gothic 3, if only because I loved the first two, and of course above examples).

Naturally this "I don't play games (anymore)" argument only counts in the event that games would be the only reason you're still using Windows, or have Windows on a seperate partition/computer. I have a WinXP x64 edition sitting around, but haven't used it in months, though admittedly I want to do some audio work on it. But thankfully my favourite sound tracker program (so to say one of a few "killer apps") is being ported to Linux in a cross-platform manner (http://psycle.sf.net/).

Using a tool such as (subtle plug) rtprof. It makes pretty call graph visualisations of programs as they're running. It's not very robust and probably doesn't even compile given that I haven't touched it for nearly 4 years, but there you go. Go open source! (And for the record I think making statements about security by comparing the call graphs of two competing products is, well, dumb).

Agreed, at one point my online strategy game was in the top 200 most active on sourceforge.net, well above many of the others listed in this thread. Activity ratings are the default way that searches are ordered, and they vary so much it's difficult to tell the truly active, popular projects from the others.

My own obviously make the "winner" pile. The rest I hear about through word of mouth.