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Great question! aria2 is the only client (so far, others are in progress) to support segment hashes (aka chunk checksums/repair information) directly in the metalink. It just came out recently. For an example, check out the opensuse metalinks. I think this is one of the most important parts about metalink, files are verified during transfer (and corrupted files are fixed) over plain ftp/http with no server/tracker changes.

Well, the summary makes it sound divine - one link, one bit of software that accesses P2P, FTP etc interchangeably to maximize download speed.

That seems like a logical growth of Bittorrent.

Trying to figure out exactly what is needed though was another matter. After a half hour and three or four web sites I wound up with the wxDownload Fast Windows download manager and a Metamirrors Firefox plugin.

Is it all working as advertised? Well, stuff is downloading (OpenSUSE 10.2) but I have no idea of it's faster, or even if it's also uploading in P2P fashion.

For God's sake, is it too much to ask that the people behind stuff like this include a simple checklist?

To download using Metalinks you needs
a) A download client (here are links to a few),
b) This Firefox plugin and
c) then do THIS.

There is a port of Linux that will run on some microcontrollers, and ELKS, which is "sort-of Linux" aims to run on the 8086 and the 286.

As a GNOME desktop user, I gave Epiphany a try but found its bookmark system so odd I couldn't get used to it. Furthermore, it seems to be less brilliant in picking the right fonts from the system. I find Firefox on Linux to be so freakingly slow compared to the Windows version. I would love to use Konqueror from GNOME, but if I do "yum install konqueror" or whatever the package name is, it also installs the whole KDE thing and puts lots of bloat in my system menus with K-this, K-that, etc. Does anybody know of a statically linked version of Konqueror, so that one can just install that package? Or even a way to compile this yourself? If so, it would be interesting to package this as I'd switch overnight to a khtml-based browser. I know of a project called Gtk WebCore, which could be an alternative, but that Nokia spin-off project seems to be stalled unfortunately ...

You would be very interested in a SourceForge project that I am also interested in: TexPerfect. If only they had more developers!

TexPerfect on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/texperfect/
TexPerfect homepage: http://texperfect.sourceforge.net/

You would be very interested in a SourceForge project that I am also interested in: TexPerfect. If only they had more developers!

TexPerfect on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/texperfect/
TexPerfect homepage: http://texperfect.sourceforge.net/

I don't know if there's an automated way, especially because you run into the problem of differences in rendering. But, if you are on Linux, just install CUPS-pdf or on Windows, use PDFCreator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/). Both are print drivers so you can use the HTML/CSS rendering engine of your choice (pick a browser), then print.

I just finished setting up a Citrix server that addressed just that. Based on group membership, we can restrict what executable you launch with file security, i.e. you have to be a member of the Office Professional group in order to run Power Point or Publisher. With a simple login script, we add the desktop and start menu shortcuts to apps that they have permissions to run, and remove them if they don't have permissions. For the client side, we are using Thinstation to PXE boot the diskless clients and automatically launch a Citrix desktop session.

I've been on all sides of this. Sometimes it's good. Most of the time it isn't adequate.

Many applications don't work well in a Terminal server environment. So we need (you guessed it) Windows on the client.
Other applications' licenses don't allow use on a Terminal server. So we need (yet again) Windows on the client.
Today remote users (for some reason) have latency that is too high to be productive on the Terminal server. So we'd better have Windows on the client.
The secretary who only ever uses Word and Outlook is now required to watch a training video on her computer. So we need Windows on the client.

At the same time a P3 can usually (depending on your "security" software) run a terminal server client and those one or two other things that need to be local. However, then you have to manage all those clients. You would be amazed at how much less work it is to manage Windows when all you have on a computer is a terminal server client and a few other applications. Especially if you lock them down well. To ease the management of these thick clients (for literally this situation) my employer had me create Tiotha (http://tiotha.sourceforge.net/).

Warning: The 0.15st version of Tiotha on the website has a horrible memory leak. I hope to release the update very soon!

If the desktop computers have network adapters that support booting from the network, you can use PXE to turn the machine into a thin-client.

There is an excellent free utility for setting up the boot image to load from a TFTP server called ThinStation

We have a remote office where I work where everyone connects to a Win2K3 server with Terminal Services. I suggested PXE as a method of connecting rather than having a full-blown copy of Win2K installed just to run the TS client on boot. It worked great but as yet, has not been adopted.

I use links you insensitive clod! http://links.sourceforge.net/

MS's pricing on at least their "Dynamics" products is cheaper than the competition

Yes, it is exists and it's called CORBA http://www.omg.org/ . In particular, omniORB http://omniorb.sourceforge.net/ is VERY fast. The only thing is that it's not a "Web service" and doesn't use HTTP.

How hard did you look?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/timetrex/

lol - yes it is a bit like that.

Hang on - I seem to recall something about clippy for Vi .. http://vigor.sourceforge.net/screenshots/

Aha ! At least its available to install .. even if its not in portage at the moment.

Vigor Vigor Vigor

If there were an OPEN SOURCE type printer without all constricting licensing crap.

We could use cheap ink. It would be AMAZING. You could print out photographic posters for cents. You could redecorate your house with your own designs or photos like wallpaper.

There are one or two options. I've found Fink on Mac OS X to be OK (though annoying in some ways). On Windows there's win-get; I haven't tried it, but here's an app list. Some of them look a bit out of date though.

There are one or two options. I've found Fink on Mac OS X to be OK (though annoying in some ways). On Windows there's win-get; I haven't tried it, but here's an app list. Some of them look a bit out of date though.

I know you're not even bothering to disguise your trolling AC, but I use the KDE port on OS X, and am very glad it is available. My favourite LaTeX editor (Kile) is a KDE app, and the with the KDE port it's easy to use it under X, whether or not I bother loading the KDE desktop.

Funny how you never hear Windows or Mac users wishing for package managers and app repositories...Just like you never hear Windows or Mac users looking to make their desktop look and function like KDE or Gnome...

Actually there was demand for having a repository system on Mac, which is why fink exists. This allows Mac users to access a repository of open-source unix software.

Also, in fact, KDE has been ported to Mac OS X. I know of people who use it, because there are some KDE apps they really want to run on OS X. The next version of KDE will in fact run on Windows too. The reason these ports were developed is because of some number of people who wanted those features.

As for repositories, I personally love them. In fact I now find the "Windows way" of installing software to be painful and primitive. As another poster pointed out, Linux users still have the option of downloading a .deb or .rpm and installing that.

Open Source to the rescue!!!

http://jorillas.sourceforge.net/

Interested in Free Open Source High Quality Zero-Hassle Basic on Linux? Try Gambas. Honestly now, aside from a nice proof of concept I consider this VB to Mono thing somewhat pointless. There are better Tools for easy GUI RAD.

http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/

You can use it with the Gimp.

But last I checked it was not very good. And it's just a plain RAW converter, not a full-fledged RAW workflow tool.

I use my PSP for reading eBooks frequently. It's missing some of the features you desire, most notably screen size, but actually works remarkably well. It's a bit of a pain to get it going initially, though, as Sony never intended the PSP to be used this way. Essentially you need to use some kind of exploit to trick the PSP into running custom applications (homebrew). The PSP hacking community is active and thriving with many homebrew applications that are useful, and once you've loaded a custom firmware it's easy from there.

The eBook reader I use is called Bookr. Usually I rotate the screen 90 degrees and read "vertically". I admit I still like books better, but using the PSP allows me much greater mobility for books when traveling, and it's not so irritating to the wife if I want to read and she wants to sleep. It also lets you underclock the PSP, as the reader doesn't need a very fast CPU, so battery life is very long. I don't know exactly how long, but I believe that with the backlight at the lowest setting it would last eight hours or more.

For $250 I wouldn't buy it as an eBook reader. But as a video player, eBook reader, integrated 802.11 web browser (not to mention MP3 playback and games), etc. it's a pretty good deal. Gorgeous screen, too.

My AMD 64 3800+ has FreeDOS on the 2nd partition of my 1st hard drive. It is formatted as a FAT-16 partition. It is one of the choices on the GRUB boot menu. I only boot up DOS every once in a while, but it does run on my AMD 64 computer. About a year ago or so ago I had IBM PC DOS 2000 installed on the 1st partion which also ran well. I later reformatted that partition as NTFS and installed Windows 2000 on my first partition instead. I still have FreeDOS on the 2nd partition. I have Slackware Linux installed on my 3rd partition and in that case I have 32-bit version of Linux running on a 64-bit computer. On a logical partition I have the AMD-64 version of Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Linux which is what I like best and use most of the time.

An easier way to run an old DOS program under Linux or Windows would be to just use the free DOSBox program. In the past, I also used VMWare and had PC DOS 2000 installed on one the the virtual machines. With VMWare I was able to run Linux, Windows and DOS all at once.

Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any printer drivers. The rest of the stuff seems fairly straight-forward to get, but printer drivers I think have been the bane of everyone's upgrade experience since Windows 98 or earlier. Thank goodness for hplip. However, that won't help me much when I start getting friends and family asking me to upgrade their computers to Vista despite all my year-old warnings. That'll be my cue to sit back smugly and laugh at them.

In any event, I'm sure there are many that will find this aggregation useful.

am i the only one not assuming that we are intelligent life? have you tried to use windows me? or add a wireless card in linux?

Short answer: various things, compilation to bytecode before execution (I thought it was the case in the current interpreter, but might have been mistaken), etc.

Slightly less short answer: if I'm not mistaken, YARV includes a JIT compiler, similar to what Psyco does in the Python world. Psyco has been known to accelerate code execution up to 100x times, so I'd expect YARV to be even faster than this benchmark shows when it's stabilized.

check THIS out:

http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

and paired with audacity for chopping and converting samples you would have everything you need to make your own music:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

A nice drum machine:
http://www.hydrogen-music.org/

use ardour to mix it all!
http://ardour.org/

Now, if someone out there would like to create a GUI interface to emerge, that would be cool.

Kuroo for kdelibs
Porthole for gtk+

What makes violet Composer so special? There is already a lot of free or even open source software, that allows hobby musicians to have (nearly) as many possibilities as professional musicians.

Jeskola Buzz has been around for a while (it is free but unfortunately not open source... well, the developer lost the source anyway). There is a very vivid community around it (see for example http://www.buzzmusic.de/) and many people have already created a lot of nice music with it. Now there are even efforts make open alternatives to buzz (see http://trac.zeitherrschaft.org/aldrin/ or http://trac.zeitherrschaft.org/buzzrmx/ or http://www.buzztard.org/)
Check for example the music of http://www.paniq.org/. Most of this is made with buzz or aldrin.

Appart from the buzz scene, a lot of other virtual studio software and other audio tools have been created. Especially for Linux. See http://wired.epitech.net/, http://lmms.sourceforge.net/, http://beast.gtk.org/

So, as the Violet Composer surely is a nice project, there is already enough stuff out there for low-budget computer geeks to unleash their musical creativity!

Its great there are some good OSS music editors. I've not heard of VioLet Composer until now, but I'll check it out.

One great OSS music editor I've used is ModPlug.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/modplug/

The actual project:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/buzz-like

The screen shots looks kind of nice, but I don't know enough about making music to be able to evaluate it's worth.

The real bastard is that each distro has subtle differences in how the packages and the dependencies are organized. The only way that I can see to fix that is to design a universal package tree, and convince all the major distros to conform to it. Which is not impossible, but it aint easy, either. And it might cause other problems.

Which is why, as it currently stands, this year will not be Year Of The Linux Desktop. Consumers won't just accept that they can't install software X because it's an RPM and alien doesn't work (this is of course after looking online for half an hour to figure out that alien is the tool to use). Manually compiling from source is simply not an option for standard users. Sure it's a dandy idea, and if you get a "fullproof" GUI that handles the compilation and installation then maybe, but I can't count the number of times make/make install has failed for some obscure reason. The first time grandma needs to go download dependencies means Linux has failed on the consumer desktop.

This is one place that Microsoft and Apple have it right. By having a standardized method of installing and storing program information they make getting new software many times easier than on Linux (excluding the "normal" packages. I'm thinking more along the lines of tools and apps you download from the web). This is also one reason people are willing to pay for an operating system that has a standardized and dependable way of doing things.

Microsoft even released the WiX toolkit that allows anyone to create MSI installer packages. MSIs are one of the best ideas for Windows in a while: No more dealing with poorly-written homebrew installers or 10-year old, 16-bit InstallShield programs. Instead you have a fully scriptable installer that's transaction-based and has near 100% support coverage.

I like apt, but downloading a gzipped file of source or a deb that complains about dependencies still can't compare to an MSI package. Even if a solution was developed that worked as well as or better than MSI, as you say, it would take significant effort (and maybe not even then) to get it supported by all the major distributions. Some people seem to think that the fact that Debian does things differently from Mandriva that does it different than Fedora is what makes the distribution "special". Be that as it may, I think it's only hurting Linux users as a whole.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools

Not exactly point & click but it'll do.

ratpoison!

I'm as frustrated as Torvalds is with it, because it's not enough to just use KDE when given the chance. Look at the utter disregard the Ubuntu project has for Kubuntu; the system configuration dialogs last time I used it (Breezy Badger) were utterly broken and unusable -- and I've heard from some Edgy Eft users that it still sucks. There's a post right above here yapping about how awful slow Kubuntu is compared with Debian.

I've used KDE and Gnome for over a year each and a number of other "environments", but always fall back to my simple, custom FVWM2.
If you like fancy themes, get some here http://fvwm-themes.sourceforge.net/

Or just google them yourself http://www.google.com/search?q=fvwm2+themes&btnG=S earch

• Being zero cost in many instances.
  
  
• The (erroneous) perception on the part of Windows users that Linux can enable them to have a zero cost (or close) clone of Windows that will also allow them to no longer be affected by Microsoft's traditional corporate misbehaviour. The importance of this particular factor cannot be over-emphasised. Linux will eventually reach a point I believe where it will have very little individuality in its' own right; Windows refugees are still totally uncompromising in their insistence that Linux become a Windows clone that is simply removed from Microsoft, and they will do whatever they need to in order to ensure that ultimately, this desire is met. Ubuntu's resemblance to Windows is only the tip of the iceberg.
  
  
• Linux has consistently had wider hardware support than the BSDs. (Which is one reason why it's been more widely adopted than them)
  
  
• Being a free UNIX clone means that people who are already using commercial UNIX can get what they need done with Linux in many instances, while forgoing commercial UNIX's price.
  
  
• User friendliness is the paramount concern in lay end users' minds, but if that need is met, they will also favour a platform with greater security and stability as secondary concerns. Those two issues mean nothing however if a certain level of perceived user friendliness is not present first.
  
  
• In terms of corporate environments, the sysadmins of many companies are often members of Stallman's ideological cult. Although it can, it also often has nothing to do with Linux's technical superiority; using Linux can simply be a matter of doing what they're told by their fellow zealots.
  
  
• Software being open source and under liberal licenses is a factor which is of primary appeal to either programmers or the autistic. Neurotypical end users have no regard for it whatsoever.

You are absolutely correct.

I've done [Java] code reviews with and without static analysis tools.

If you don't have static analysis tools in place, the review tends to spend its time on finding and discussing little bugs. You'll still find the big ones, but the room is likely to be so worked up (or tuned out) by the discussion of "basics" to some and "nit-picking" to others that the discussion of important stuff is difficult to keep constructive.

If you do have static analysis tools in place, you can set the expectation that the reports of the static analysis tools are clean prior to the review. This allows the discussion to go straight to the important stuff. Maven's reporting features (plugins) are the number one reason I use it. My standard reports:

• Cobertura - Unit Test Coverage Analysis
• FindBugs - looks for bugs in Java code/li>
• PMD - scans Java source code and looks for potential problems/li>
• CPD - Copy Paste Detector tool by PMD/li>
• Changelog - retrieves list of recent changes from your cm system (CVS, Subversion, etc)/li>
• JXR (generates an HTML version of the source that other plugins can reference -- this is great if a report highlights a problem, you can browse straight to it)/li>

Static analysis tools are one of the great resources of the Java language.

Stephen

You are absolutely correct.

I've done [Java] code reviews with and without static analysis tools.

If you don't have static analysis tools in place, the review tends to spend its time on finding and discussing little bugs. You'll still find the big ones, but the room is likely to be so worked up (or tuned out) by the discussion of "basics" to some and "nit-picking" to others that the discussion of important stuff is difficult to keep constructive.

If you do have static analysis tools in place, you can set the expectation that the reports of the static analysis tools are clean prior to the review. This allows the discussion to go straight to the important stuff. Maven's reporting features (plugins) are the number one reason I use it. My standard reports:

• Cobertura - Unit Test Coverage Analysis
• FindBugs - looks for bugs in Java code/li>
• PMD - scans Java source code and looks for potential problems/li>
• CPD - Copy Paste Detector tool by PMD/li>
• Changelog - retrieves list of recent changes from your cm system (CVS, Subversion, etc)/li>
• JXR (generates an HTML version of the source that other plugins can reference -- this is great if a report highlights a problem, you can browse straight to it)/li>

Static analysis tools are one of the great resources of the Java language.

Stephen

You are absolutely correct.

I've done [Java] code reviews with and without static analysis tools.

If you don't have static analysis tools in place, the review tends to spend its time on finding and discussing little bugs. You'll still find the big ones, but the room is likely to be so worked up (or tuned out) by the discussion of "basics" to some and "nit-picking" to others that the discussion of important stuff is difficult to keep constructive.

If you do have static analysis tools in place, you can set the expectation that the reports of the static analysis tools are clean prior to the review. This allows the discussion to go straight to the important stuff. Maven's reporting features (plugins) are the number one reason I use it. My standard reports:

• Cobertura - Unit Test Coverage Analysis
• FindBugs - looks for bugs in Java code/li>
• PMD - scans Java source code and looks for potential problems/li>
• CPD - Copy Paste Detector tool by PMD/li>
• Changelog - retrieves list of recent changes from your cm system (CVS, Subversion, etc)/li>
• JXR (generates an HTML version of the source that other plugins can reference -- this is great if a report highlights a problem, you can browse straight to it)/li>

Static analysis tools are one of the great resources of the Java language.

Stephen

You are absolutely correct.

I've done [Java] code reviews with and without static analysis tools.

If you don't have static analysis tools in place, the review tends to spend its time on finding and discussing little bugs. You'll still find the big ones, but the room is likely to be so worked up (or tuned out) by the discussion of "basics" to some and "nit-picking" to others that the discussion of important stuff is difficult to keep constructive.

If you do have static analysis tools in place, you can set the expectation that the reports of the static analysis tools are clean prior to the review. This allows the discussion to go straight to the important stuff. Maven's reporting features (plugins) are the number one reason I use it. My standard reports:

• Cobertura - Unit Test Coverage Analysis
• FindBugs - looks for bugs in Java code/li>
• PMD - scans Java source code and looks for potential problems/li>
• CPD - Copy Paste Detector tool by PMD/li>
• Changelog - retrieves list of recent changes from your cm system (CVS, Subversion, etc)/li>
• JXR (generates an HTML version of the source that other plugins can reference -- this is great if a report highlights a problem, you can browse straight to it)/li>

Static analysis tools are one of the great resources of the Java language.

Stephen

Psion PDAs adequately filled this niche, and they had great keyboards. Sadly most were discontinued. There was however a project to port Linux to the various Psion machines.

I don't want to start a flame war here. I hope my tone comes across properly in this written medium, but in any case, my desire is to inform.

I don't want to start a flame war here. I hope my tone comes across properly in this written medium, but in any case, my desire is to inform.

I've used both PMD and findbugs and PMD is pretty good, but I find findbugs to be much easier to set up and use. (http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/)

Nice... yup, metrics are nice, but don't let them rule.

PMD has a bunch of metrics stuff, including NPathComplexity (thanks to Jason Bennett for writing that one) and CyclomaticComplexity. All the "codesize" PMD rules are here.

Nice... yup, metrics are nice, but don't let them rule.

PMD has a bunch of metrics stuff, including NPathComplexity (thanks to Jason Bennett for writing that one) and CyclomaticComplexity. All the "codesize" PMD rules are here.

Nice... yup, metrics are nice, but don't let them rule.

PMD has a bunch of metrics stuff, including NPathComplexity (thanks to Jason Bennett for writing that one) and CyclomaticComplexity. All the "codesize" PMD rules are here.