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I run mine in a screen session; it restarts every few hours by a cron job because of its tendency to crap out. any time I hear/think of something I want, I ssh in, type 'screen -r 2880', CTRL-A N to the next screen, and run fdb and am. By the time I get up in the morning, my new cds are waiting for me at MÆS. my only problem is needing a bigger hard drive or three:)

I run mine in a screen session; it restarts every few hours by a cron job because of its tendency to crap out. any time I hear/think of something I want, I ssh in, type 'screen -r 2880', CTRL-A N to the next screen, and run fdb and am. By the time I get up in the morning, my new cds are waiting for me at MÆS. my only problem is needing a bigger hard drive or three:)

I run mine in a screen session; it restarts every few hours by a cron job because of its tendency to crap out. any time I hear/think of something I want, I ssh in, type 'screen -r 2880', CTRL-A N to the next screen, and run fdb and am. By the time I get up in the morning, my new cds are waiting for me at MÆS. my only problem is needing a bigger hard drive or three:)

xserver is at zaurus.sourceforge.net I believe.

This is something I'm tired of hearing. IE is not built into the OS. It just happens to come with it. It also happens to use a bunch of DLLs that other pieces of Windows use, rather than writing its own (*cough* XPCOM *cough*) And just because something is "built into the OS" doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be faster. On my machine (P2 400, 640 MB of RAM, Win2K), K-Meleon loads a couple seconds *faster* than IE does. It also opens new windows faster than any web browser I can remember. Not all 3rd party software is slower than MS software.

I'm not aware of anything available for any browser that will shut those off...

Could someone explain the point of this exersise, except for the hack value.

Simple. Vexed.

as someone else stated, PAM does this. More specifically, it's the cracklib PAM module, here's an intro http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2001/10/05 / amModules.html.

NT has actually the same type of deal. The dll that does the password check is just a generic password filter provided my MS, you can replace with your own. I wrote an NT password filter that catches the username and password of a user whenever they change their password and sends it to a an external program registered in the registry. Use it to keep Win2K and OpenLDAP server passwords in sync, http://acctsync.sf.net but the external program could obviously be anything.

As usual, it's just that windows has a pretty GUI ( which should not be discounted btw. )

What about the openft protocol, they've been working on that for a while gift.sourceforge.net. They originally used the fasttrack protocol (KaZaa), but after kaZaa changed there specs, they decided to create their own protocol.

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

By the way, he got the URL wrong too - www.fs.net (SFS), not www.sf.net (sourceforge)

I've been using CBB for a while now. It's small, run on Linux and MacOS, and mature enough to suit my little needs. Check cbb.sf.net.

I've been using SFS for about four or five days, and so far I've been very impressed. Setting up an SFS client is easy, on Debian, just apt-get install sfs-client and you're done. On other distros and other Un*xes, grab the tarballs, compile and install. SFS uses a global namespace which is locally accessible via /sfs. In this directory, you'll initially see nothing. However, try changing directories into /sfs/sfs.fs.net:eu4cvv6wcnzscer98yn4qjpjnn9iv 6pi and be amazed. What you see in there is the SFS root of sfs.fs.net, the main distribution point of SFS. This is how you access any SFS server, by changing directories into its root. All that garbage after the colon is a cryptographic hash of the server's hostname, the server's public host key, and some other bits of data. The hash can be obtained by running 'sfskey hostid some.server.net'. Without using authentication, you'll have access to anything in any SFS root which has been publicly shared. Using authentication, you can have access to private shares on the SFS server just as if you were logged into that server and using the filesystem locally. For instance, I have /home privately shared on my main box. As a result, all of my users can have full access to their home directories from any SFS client in the world if they authenticate first.

I'm not aware of any Windows clients for SFS, but I've had access to SFS on Windows simply by sharing /sfs via Samba and mapping it to a Windows drive. Exactly the same semantics apply, just change directories in some.server.net:stuffstuffstuff and the contents of the share magically appear.

go check out gift and the open fast track features. They are not centralized like kazaa.

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

procedure Write(pid_t pid; others) is
// Write "(pid) 1FEDDE" on output
Write "(pid) ", HEX, pid as integer
// Write other arguments
Write others

procedure Write(uid_t uid; others) is
// Write "(uid) 1FEDDE" on output
Write "(uid) ", HEX, uid as integer
// Write other arguments
Write others

// Let's add a "WriteLn" capability
procedure WriteLn(others) is
Write others
Write NewLineCharacter

// And use it:
procedure Main() is
var pid_t pid := GetPID()
var uid_t uid := GetUID()
WriteLn "Hello, PID=", pid, " and UID=", uid

There are two reasons:

1/ The massive amount of FP state in IA-64 (128 FP registers). So the linux kernel is compiled in such a way that only some FP registers can be used by the compiler. This means that on kernel entry and exit, only those FP registers need to be saved/restored. Also, by software conventions, these FP registers are "scratch" (modified by a call), so the kernel needs not save/restore them on a system call (which is seen as a call by the user code)

2/ The "software assist" for some FP operations. For instance, the FP divide and square root are not completely implemented in hardware (it's actually dependent on the particular IA-64 implementation, so future chips may implement it). For corner cases such as overflow, underflow, infinites, etc, the processor traps ("floating-point software assist" or FPSWA trap). The IA-64 Linux kernel designers decided to not support FPSWA from the kernel itself, which means that you can't do a FP divide in the kernel. I suspect this is what is more problematic for the application in question (load balancer doing FP computations, probably has some divides in there...)

XL: Programming in the large

These are the three things to consider in your situation. College seems to be a good option, but you have to pick the right major. At my school [uiuc.edu], the CS program is purely software development. There is no instruction in shell scripting, Perl, or anything except Java (intro course) and C/C++. This does not provide a good background for a sysadmin by itself.

OTOH, we have the NCSA [ncsa.uiuc.edu] here, which provides many great opportunities. They don't offer a lot of jobs for students, but if you keep a close watch on the job listings, you can find one. I'm working on a project [oscar.sf.net] learning a lot about real sysadmin tasks, cluster admin, and software development. All this while learning how to really program in shell and Perl better than any CS class here ever taught me any other language.

Take my advice: go to college and work while you're there.

That one's already covered :)

From a (slightly outdated) whitepaper describing macs: "What's required is distributed responsibility for the information and uniform, centralized access to it." (macs is the Modular Access Control System, a project I'm working on to let different APIs interconnect, with an emphasis on access control.)

Don't get me wrong, I love LDAP -- but it's no panacea. There is no panacea. I may be biased but macs allows the different owners of different information to manage it their way, while making it available to others in another way. A sort of many-to-many cross-interfacing of APIs and storage mechanisms, which lets folks choose the best tool for the job, be it LDAP, /etc/passwd, SASL, or something else from the RFCs.

Cheers!

mds

From a (slightly outdated) whitepaper describing macs: "What's required is distributed responsibility for the information and uniform, centralized access to it." (macs is the Modular Access Control System, a project I'm working on to let different APIs interconnect, with an emphasis on access control.)

Don't get me wrong, I love LDAP -- but it's no panacea. There is no panacea. I may be biased but macs allows the different owners of different information to manage it their way, while making it available to others in another way. A sort of many-to-many cross-interfacing of APIs and storage mechanisms, which lets folks choose the best tool for the job, be it LDAP, /etc/passwd, SASL, or something else from the RFCs.

Cheers!

mds

I've been working on a project: macs, that provides (among other things) a protocol neutral authorization mechanism for hierarchical sets of resources. Featuring things like delegated administration mentioned in the article. We have been using this to control user access to things like web sites and file servers, but it would be trivial to adapt it to protect APIs instead.

Do people really leave their APIs dangling out there for all to call? Would this be a feature people would find useful?

Does Mozilla have similar gesture support? I thought I remember reading about that a while ago, but I haven't been able to find it.

I don't know about Mozilla, but Galeon sure has them in version 1.2.x. I thought it would be a useless feature at first, but now I can't live without it.

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

Gnutella is a nightmare

try mutella, u'll be surprised...

Try reading what I wrote. At that point it's too late: the core is written in nasty old sh and hardcoded C. No amount of installing packages later can fix that fact.

I did. I still disagree with you. Core scripts being written in sh does not impact system administration. It impacts people who need to maintain the core scripts only.

In the event that an administrator needs to modify any of these scripts, the important thing is that the widest possible array of system administrators are able to. That means using sh. If I found a script I needed to alter written in perl, I'd rather wrip it out and re-write it. There'd be plenty of other people who'd say the same for Python, Ruby, or whatever high level language you pick. sh is universal.

The FreeBSD solution is to move everything to depend on the /bin/sh executable: it's so vile and useless that nobody sane would **ever** use it for a significant application. Since no applications use it, there can be no conflict. This is self-evidently stupid.

No-one is asking you to write applications in it. All system administrators live and breath sh. It has existed, largely unchanged, on every UNIX platform since the dawn of time (epoch). If you can't hack it then I suggest you get out of the sysadmin game (and if you're not a system administrator, what the hell is this argument based on?)

If you wish to layer your own administration framework on top of the core system, then you are free to choose whatever language you like.

I recommend using Arusha which uses classless object-oriented XML source and supports methods written in Python, perl, or sh. [But I would recommend it as one of the developers. ;-)]

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As noted on the Smithsonian Institution's site, the first official American flag had thirteen stars and thirteen stripes, each representing one of the thirteen original states.
The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

LOL! I completed both MI1 and MI2 yesterday, using ScummVM.. :) Ahh, some nostalgica... =)

-You start out with a nose-equipped smiley :-). You can modify it slightly, to be a laughing smiley instead :-D. From there, maybe you want to add bulging eyes 8-D. Then you think to yourself, "Hey me, it would be funny to have a monkey emoticon!" so you add the wide nose common to monkeys 8=D. Still, you think it doesn't look right, because monkey faces are longer than humans, so you extend the nose. 8====D Congratulations, you now accidentally created an ascii phallus.

denoser

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

As noted on the Smithsonian Institution's site, the first official American flag had thirteen stars and thirteen stripes, each representing one of the thirteen original states.

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

As noted on the Smithsonian Institution's site, the first official American flag had thirteen stars and thirteen stripes, each representing one of the thirteen original states.

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?


This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.

AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.

Steps in roll-your-own:

Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME
KDE
ROX
foXdesktop
Perltop
Equinox
XFce
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.

If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager.
enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.

Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.

The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.

Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.

Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.

Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.

File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.

Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.

Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!

Or use a good whitelist. Anything sent to me by a stranger gets bounced with a message asking them to press reply to confirm their existence. After that, their original message gets through to me, and they're no longer a stranger.

I've only been using this for a month of so, but as far as I'm concerned, spam is no longer a problem. (Well, I did have a Nigerian bank scammer actually confirm the other day....)

If you don't mind playing with procmail, head over to http://sf.net/projects/whitelight and get a copy. Or get the python whitelist, I forget what it's called but it's on sourceforge. Or get the TMDA whitelist if you run your own mail server... or get some other whitelist, I'm sure there's many others.

And would that allow me to transparently make use of the hardware facilities provided by the likes of the H+ decoder card, or ATI graphics card?

Try Freevo. It does about what you're looking for, including controlling it using a regular remote.

I believe that distinction belongs to XawTV. Trust me. Thank goodness for zapping.

Since xine can play DVDs, so will your application and since xine can use the Dxr3 or H+ decoder cards, so will your apps. The xine homepage has a partially complete hackers' guide written by myself and others which may help you.

Or go to the DVDNAV page and get a plugin with full menu support.

First step : run Xine. Oh, except it sucks, because the version packaged with my distro is several months old. Watch out for this.

Second step: uninstall current Xine, go to the Xine homepage, and install the latest version. You may need either the tarball like I did, or there may be an RPM for you.

Third step: look in the links section at the bottom for CaptainCSS, download it, follow the instructions carefully, as they are non-standard, and you will have a fully working DVD player.

Final step: remember to click the D4D button rather than the DVD button.

Oh ... actual final step: curse the MPAA for making your life harder than it needs to be. Yes, DVD encryption sucks, but I won't go into why here, there are plenty of other /. stories that cover that. Anyway, that should get you going. If you get stuck, then try opening a ticket at protonic :)

Care to elaborate on your problem ? I assure you that we try to answer as many user queries as possible. Please join Anjuta-List and post your problem there. There is also a bug tracking mechanism available which is regularly monitored - you might file a bug there with full details.

You might also consider downloading the nightly CVS tarball available from the website and building it - to see if your problems have been addressed there. If you have the necessary libraries, it should be as simple as './configure && make && make install'.

So, while we're at it, how about a player that can handle the lossless compression format flac. I have all my CDs converted to flac, and am holding out for a portable player (preferably >15GB) that can play flac files and read ID3v2 tags. *That* would be nirvana.