Slashdot Mirror

There was/is a Open source flash player. Its legalities are a bit questinable as it was based upon a flash 3.0 parsing document that Macrodmedai released. I was working on it for my company, but we ended the project when it became obvious that we couldn't leagly include it in our prodcut with out releasing the other soruce code. Its a shame. I found and fixed a few bugs, but no one was really interested in it at the time. Once the linux player became available even the original author just let it sit. still hasn't been modified.

UPDATE! Before posting I found the reincarnation of the project. Looks like some people care after all. Go here to the GPL FLash Web page I know I will do what I can.

I have the Asus V6V (read more at: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2 311) Firewire - Have not used it, but it looks to be supported and configured External video output - Yes, I use this to give presentations at our LUG Power Modes - I do not have much use for the various power modes so I would not be able to answer specifically if everything in that area is working, however there is this project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/acpi4asus/ Battery Monitor works Track pad including tap works Sound works - best yet even my special volume keys work Internal wireless and Ethernet both worked without any extra configuration There is no docking station connection. So yeah, from my experience, the Asus V6V (running any of the latest 3 releases of ubuntu) has everything working. However, there are things I have not tested. There may be some issues in the power management, but maybe not. I also have not tested the card reader (it doesn't have a CF slot which is what my Rebel XT uses). I also have not tested the dial up modem. I would not be surprised if this untested hardware also worked flawlessly (with the exception of the modem--I remember the hell I used to go through with modems and linux way back in the day, but that may have changed too). If you really want me to test some of that other stuff, I'll find time to do so.

I've had two versions of QuickBooks Pro. Presently, version 2004. I've tried on several occations to get Quickbooks to work under Wine. Along the way, I've heard of people having various levels of success, particularly if they first install it on Windows and then move the files over to the fake windows drive under WINE. However upon reviewing this thread on Slashdot, it dawned on me that there is another huge name in the accounting business. Peach Tree. So I went on over to the AppDB at winehq.com and looked up PeachTree. I was stunned to see only one person had filed a report about it. It looks like version 2005 works fairly well under WINE as reported here:http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId =3817

Now I know it isn't Open Source, but could we sway Peach Tree to make a Linux version using winelib. We can point to the recent port of GoogleEarth as a recent success story. Or maybe we could ask PeachTree to open up their code in exchange for publicity and a huge jump in market share.

There is GNUCash,

KMyMoney
http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/index-home.html

Ahh, I understand the issue you're having now and I definitely agree that the conversions both ways are really ugly and a pain. If you're able to use a third party API you might want to check out Joda; that is of course, if you haven't already. Cheers.

http://perllinux.sourceforge.net/

Download the core web fonts here. Thanks go to MS for their liberal license.

If I was in your situation I'd put KeePass on a USB stick and carry that around with me.

It is able to enter your username and password in such a way that key loggers can't pick it up.

Have a look and tell me what you think.

http://keepass.sourceforge.net/

As far as password management goes try KeePass. Free as in speech and beer, flashdrive friendly, and darn nifty.




Debt is Hell. Get out now.

While we're talking about media players, can somebody recommend a lightweight, open source media player for me? I'd really like to find one that has nice visualizations, FLAC support, support for streaming radio, and a decent id3 tag editor.

I'm still using winamp 2.72 because I've never found anything that compares (although Snackamp is pretty slick for dealing with my 20,000 song mp3 collection).

This is a good indication that Ruby's implementation is flawed.
Not perfect, certainly. I'd go for 'immature' over 'flawed', though.

In fact, there was an effort to get Ruby on the JavaVM, which got scrapped
No it didn't. Here it is.

But when there are alternatives that give you a single, fast language base up front (e.g. Java, IronPython), it seems pointless to go in a direction that would require writing C when that's not desired.
It depends on which you value more: developer time or processor time.

I commend these efforts, but wonder why on earth Matz is spending time writing yet another VM (Rite)?
One word: continuations. I'm no expert by any means, but the impression I have is that continuations are mindbogglingly difficult to get right on a VM that's not designed with them in mind. The question in *my* mind is why Ruby hasn't been implemented on top of a Common Lisp runtime yet.

What about Star Control 2 ? Did you miss it ?

http://oolite.aegidian.org/
http://retrospec.sgn.net/users/tomcat/miodrag/xEli te.zip?
http://www.rebelstar.cd2.com/cgi-bin/dc.cgi?file=r emakes/elite_-_the_new_kind_v1_0.zip

May I also recommend:

Privateer...
http://priv.solsector.net/
http://wcuniverse.sourceforge.net/

It's the only way to get a good deal! http://sourceforge.net/projects/jbidwatcher You'll have my ebay sniping tool when you pry it from my DMCA'ed, dead hands! ~ criminally insane robot

Users much prefer the simpicity of an X.509 solution.

There are a ton of sniping services out there. eSnipe is just one of the more popular ones (don't ask me why).

There's even at least one completely free and no-registration-required sniping service: http://www.cniper.com/

But why give a third party your ebay account information and let them track your bidding habits, when you can run a sniping tool on your own machine?

Here're some sniping tools that'll run on Linux, courtesy of freshmeat:

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=snipe&section=proje cts&Go.x=0&Go.y=0

And here's esniper, a tool that I personally prefer:

http://esniper.sourceforge.net/

It's very no frills and is text-only, but is absolutely reliable, easy to use, and functional enough to get the job done. I set aside a screen session for it, let it run in the background, and go do something else while it snipes for me.

Take a look at Python and PyObjC. http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net/

Just like RMS refusing opportunities to 'spread his message' because the people offering him the opportunity don't talk about GNU/Linux and Free Software, very few people will actually hear this interview because they chose not to provide an mp3-encoded version.

Perhaps Richard has come up with some great new ideas or a really compelling argument. Unfortunately, nobody is listening because he's only available in Ogg this time.

Oh, and if you needed any further proof that the people running Groklaw don't live on planet earth, here is what they link to as a Free Ogg player:

Audacity
The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor
Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds.

You should take a look at Starter Toolkit for DB2 on Rails. It is a complete package of everything that you will need including a copy of DB2 Express - C that is absolutely free to distribute as part of your finished application and it does not limit the size of your data like the other database servers do. It is a complete one-click installer for everything. The integrated installer is for Windows at this point but the one for Linux is in the works. Bookmark http://db2onrails.com/ if you are interested in watching this very fast evolving space. As for the IDEs, there are quite a few really good ones out there RadRails that just got an award as the best Open Source Eclipse-based Tool. Matt Kent, Marc Baumbach, and Kyle Shank have done an amazing job on the tool and a nice presentation at the RailsConf 2006 in Chicago. There is also RDT. There is even a set of add-ins called Saphhire in Steel for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. I can just see all the sladhdotters rushing to get this one :-) and flame to death in the process.

I don't understand why there would be any greater implications from this event than any other. All kinds of organizations have been compromised; this is far from news, and just another example of why most security experts recommend a "multi-tiered" password scheme for users. A set of passwords, of varying importance...for the most critical things, a longer and stronger password, another middle-level password to use at other sites of lesser importance (like webmail) and a throwaway password for things that don't matter to you so much. Best of all, use unique passwords for the high-importance site, if you use something like Password Safe for Windows, KeePass for Linux, or Keyring for PalmOS to keep track of them securely.

I don't understand why there would be any greater implications from this event than any other. All kinds of organizations have been compromised; this is far from news, and just another example of why most security experts recommend a "multi-tiered" password scheme for users. A set of passwords, of varying importance...for the most critical things, a longer and stronger password, another middle-level password to use at other sites of lesser importance (like webmail) and a throwaway password for things that don't matter to you so much. Best of all, use unique passwords for the high-importance site, if you use something like Password Safe for Windows, KeePass for Linux, or Keyring for PalmOS to keep track of them securely.

Try using eclipse with the plugin ... http://sourceforge.net/projects/rubyeclipse @least eclispe does more than thing rather than dozen crappy ides someone has cobbled together

I've already started to give them the message by uninstalling Adobe reader and installing the FoxIt PDF Reader. It's a small download, doesn't come bundled with anything, doesn't ask you to update EVERY time you open it, and has no splash screen. It just opens a PDF and displays it - really, really fast. I'm surprised no one else has linked to it in these comments yet.

So now, with Foxit, PDF Creator, and GIMP, I'm now pretty much Adobe free, so I don't have to worry about these stupid bundled apps and constant updates. Any OS alternatives to Shockwave?

http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

Besides, my local Guitar Center (same store, different name) requires me to give my address and phone if I want to use my debit card (for "security reasons"... yeah, right).

I also don't know how Linux compatible it is. It ships with a free copy of Audacity... A bit redundant, since Audacity's free software anyway.

Ah, well... I guess I'll have to borrow a friend's turntable and go direct to my audio card.

Not really, complicated things start to appear whenever the gravitational field is strong enough. The relativistic perturbation of the orbit of Mercury was one of the effects that were observed before the special theory of relativity existed. Today we even have open source software that calculates those effects.

Or SudoWin

Well, if you really want to donate, you can do that using Sourceforge's donation page. We don't advertise the donations page because we haven't really had a need to solicit donations. :)

Give Mandrake, Gentoo, Kubuntu a try.

Or you could stick with Fedora and just go to http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/, download and install the Yum repo information and upgrade to a proper version of KDE that way...

We use inkscape for drawing backgrounds for our adventuregame. We postprocess the resulting pictures with the Gimp, since its easier to add details with a raster editor. If you wan't to render SVG's directly there is libsvg, but a more game related library would be libsugar which is capable of rendering SVG's using OpenGL.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/libsugar.

Btw. I want to thank slashdot for telling us about Moho, it rocks our 2d animated world ;)

1. All software violates patents

There are so many software patents nowadays, I'm sure it's impossible to write all but the simplest software without treading on somebody's patent. But to suggest that distro owners should knowingly violate patents is kind of negligent.

The patents are only valid in the US and Japan

I know they're slightly biased, but on the MP3 Licensing web site, there's an extensive list of patents which have been granted in an equally extensive list of countries.

The point is moot in 3 years anyway when the patent expires. So, there's no time to popularize ogg if that's what they're attempting.

Again, I'd refer you to the MP3 Licensing web page. If you assume a patent duration of 20 years from filing, the first patents may have begun to expire but there's still quite a number of years to go until all the ones necessary to implement a full-featured decoder will have expired.

I'm all for keeping things 100% FLOSS, but as long as a piece of software has source code and is freely licenced then personally I don't care if it violates patents. Its one thing being forced by law not to use MP3 playback, but voluntarily removing it preemptively...isn't that a little like jumping off a cliff to avoid getting pushed off?

Apparently quite a number of the big free distros have legal teams who would disagree with you. From what I've used, neither Fedora nor Ubuntu include MP3 playback support and it's precisely for this reason. It's OK you advocating violating patents but these distros are made by non-profit organisations who have a lot to lose if they come on the wrong end of a patent lawsuit. At least they make the effort to make MP3 support available. If you want MP3 support, either pay for a commercial distro or quit whining and take the 2 minutes to install support for your distro. As you say, one day all these patents will have expired and even the free distros will be able to ship with MP3 support out of the box.

Of course, most Linux distros ship with support for 2 excellent audio formats out of the box: Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, both of which are better than MP3. Ogg Vorbis is a lossy CODEC which provides better quality than MP3 at a lower bitrate. FLAC is the lossless CODEC and provides CD quality with 30-60% compression. Neither contain any patents that we know of (that in itself is important) and both work great on Windows too.

Could Inkscape be used to generate art for a videogame?

Yes. Depends on what and how you're planning to do things. The GNOME games migrated to SVG artwork quite a while back.

Another approach is to create your artwork in SVG and then render to bitmap at different sizes. This mirrors a lot of the workflow used for creating icons.

Are there any libraries to render this stuff?

As far as libraries go, there are librsvg and KSVG for a start. For other gaming needs, one can do some interesting things with SVG and XHTML in a browser with a little JavaScript sprinkled in.

So look at the URL for the tarball and get creative: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/inkscape/

I have heard that this is the open source replacement for Adobe Acrobat. How good is the PDF support with this latest version? Can we edit PDF documents reliably now? Export is fine, but import, edit, and export is what I am looking for.

Why use an old PC. The quake engine has been in the public domain for quite a while, you can get Win32 and Linux executables that will run on any modern machine.

I cannot remember all of the projects that use the Q1 engine, however a quick search on Sourceforge.net is sure to return some results.

Happy birthday Quake!

And thanks to Id for releasing its source code under GPL, because of this, the game is still being played and mod'ed after 10 years of its initial release, check Tenebrae for example, which adds modern rendering techniques like per-pixel lighting and stencil shadows to the original game.

Even though Bitstream Vera is free and kicks mscorefont's ass?

No, they don't kick MS Corefont's ass, because the Bitstream Fonts contain little more than the characters from the old ISO-8859 characters, while the MS fonts at least cover other Unicode blocks such as Latin Extended-A and Cyrillic. If you're doing web design where conceivably content can show up in non-Latin scripts (even if its just a single word in a sea of English text), then Bitstream Vera doesn't cut it.

One should avoid Bitstream Vera, but the answer isn't going back to MS Corefonts, it's using the DejaVu fonts. These are extensions of Vera that already support many international scripts, with all the goodness of Bitstream-designed typography in the Basic Latin and Latin Supplement blocks. It looks as if the DejaVu project might even succeed in making a free alternative to Arial Unicode MS (with mono and serif versions too).

The DejaVu fonts packages have superseeded Bitstream providing a much larger character set than the Gnome developed counterpart.

HTH

Check out the Gumstix.org Project. The project has a very nice distribution of sorts with lots of stuff for embedded processors. They have built a configuration utility for setting up your embedded system. Also it does not just support the gumstix hardware, they have support for most of your standard linux architectures. Just get the svn copy of the build root, this page has their svn access instructions. It is also fairly easy to figure out how it works and add extra packages. Just remember if you want to use C++ that is at beta level. Also check out the mailing list and the wiki.

While FTP is nice for file storage, it has no security. Someone else has already recommended SCP. I like to use SSH-FS when I need security and want the remote server to appear like it is local.

Uh, yeah. Are you talking about the UI? A lot of UI stuff in OS X do not require any coding at all, you just use interface builder. There are a plethora of applications and utilities out there for OS X which interface command line OSS with an Aqua UI.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/itheater
http://www.videolan.org/
http://freshmeat.net/browse/839/
Do a search for OS X on sourceforge, you will find some mac specific applications but also a lot of cross platform projects and projects which merely provide a graphical UI for command line tools Mpegtools.

BTW, that's FS/OS. Not everyone agrees with gun-toting racists and the OSI does not represent those with morals.
What the hell are you talking about? Who are you accusing of being a gun-toting racists? How are you representing the open source movement when you go off on such an insane tangent?

i'm too paranoid to use stuff like this for backups.. sure 25 gigs is nice but whats the use if i just burn everything in 35 copies on the disc incase one part becomes unreadable?

as media starts to hold more, i just start creating more copies of the same backup on the disc. bluray/hdvd scares me because if it gets scratched you lose so much more than if a cd gets scratched

For those that don't know, PAR2 files are parity files that can efficiently reconstruct missing or damaged blocks in your archive. If you have more PAR2 recovery blocks than damaged blocks, then you can completely reconstruct all of the damaged files in your archive. The best newbie explanation I've seen is the "PAR & PAR2 files" section from Slyck's Guide To The Newsgroups.

If I'm backing up to a data DVD-R (capacity 4,706,074,624 bytes), I'll leave around 4GB of space for the actual data and fill the rest (to the brim) with the PAR2 files that I created for that data. I name the PAR2 files starting with the letter 'z' so that they get burned on the outer edge of the DVD. When creating the PAR2 files, I choose a block size that is a multiple of 2048 bytes because that is the block size of a DVD sector.

Some easy-to-use tools to create PAR2 files:

• Windows: QuickPar (freeware)
• OS X: MacPar deLuxe (shareware, $15)
• Linux/OS Independent (GTK): GPar2

Some DVD data recovery software (to get every readable block off a damaged disc):

• Windows: IsoBuster (recovery functions are free)
• Linux/OS X (command line): dd_rescue

Thanks, WuphonsReach.

you should give other gecko-based browsers like K-Meleon a try on lower-end windows PCs. I think K-Meleon is snappier than Firefox because it leaves out the whole XUL layer, and uses native windows widgets, or something like that. I even deployed it on Pentium II machines.

I always used to use Mozilla quite and later firefox on old 450Mhz 128MB boxes running win98, though it worked better under linux on the same hardware, without any trouble, the idea of using a seriously deficient rendering engine, with all the lack of standards support and exploitation which that entails, purely because it allows you to browse 30 websites simultaneously seems odd to me. Have you tried newer versions of Firefox with the browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers key set to a lower value? Or even a different Geko based browser such as http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

how does the now free Opera cope, i hear that it's excellent in low memory situations and it's got one of the best rendering engines around.

If these developers want to help the people of china why don't they do it with an opensource browser engine, or even as an extension to the most popular opensource browser?

Actually it is difficult to find good alternatives to CORBA for high performance and/or mission critical distributed applications.
ICE, the middleware created by the company where the author of the article works, is very good.
The downsides:
- It is proprietary
- It is not free for commercial applications (this is not bad per se)

Most of the shortcomings of CORBA depicted by Michi Henning are true.
But some of them are avoidable.

These are some pros for CORBA:
- Many freeware implementations (TAO, OmniOrb, JacOrb, etc)
- Very good performances
- Good support (both from public forums and private companies - three or four companies, for instances, offer support for TAO)
- Interoperability with everything. Java is compatible out of the box (even if the JDK ORB is acceptable only on the client side). The excellent IIOP.NET (http://iiop-net.sourceforge.net/) offers .net interoperability. OminOrbPy (http://omniorb.sourceforge.net/) offers Python bindings. Et cetera.

If only CORBA had a C++ binding like ICE...

Sted

P.S.
Like many developers working with CORBA, I am grateful to Michi for his precious help within comp.object.corba in the early days.

Actually it is difficult to find good alternatives to CORBA for high performance and/or mission critical distributed applications.
ICE, the middleware created by the company where the author of the article works, is very good.
The downsides:
- It is proprietary
- It is not free for commercial applications (this is not bad per se)

Most of the shortcomings of CORBA depicted by Michi Henning are true.
But some of them are avoidable.

These are some pros for CORBA:
- Many freeware implementations (TAO, OmniOrb, JacOrb, etc)
- Very good performances
- Good support (both from public forums and private companies - three or four companies, for instances, offer support for TAO)
- Interoperability with everything. Java is compatible out of the box (even if the JDK ORB is acceptable only on the client side). The excellent IIOP.NET (http://iiop-net.sourceforge.net/) offers .net interoperability. OminOrbPy (http://omniorb.sourceforge.net/) offers Python bindings. Et cetera.

If only CORBA had a C++ binding like ICE...

Sted

P.S.
Like many developers working with CORBA, I am grateful to Michi for his precious help within comp.object.corba in the early days.

CLI programs are REALLY useful to look at "hidden" content.

'pdftotext' comes with xpdf & is even available natively on windows.

Similarly, for MS Word documents, you may use 'antiword', 'catdoc', and 'wv'.

These programs are quite nice in that they can easily batch-process a lot of documents & then you can go grepping through them for interesting tidbits.

(On the GUI front, evince deserves a plug. It uses the same poppler backend as xpdf and kpdf. I used to use tiny & fast xpdf for most of my pdf viewing, but evince has a few nice features which xpdf lacks & has become my personal favorite pdf viewer.)

Try the Connelly Case (with pictures!)... I've been making them for all my CDs and DVDs since I came across that site in '04 and have been very satisified with the results.

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/howto/rst-dir ectives.html The directives aren't doing it for you?

I dunno...but, if you want to make their tracking data useless for you...start trying to encrypt ALL your internet traffic.

Grant it....it will slow you up a bit, but, will make you far less traceable. Set up anon. browsing, set up nym accounts for email...that will help your mail at least be encrypted, even from those who don't know how to use pgp.

• Tor - For anonymous browsing
• Freenet
• Anonymous Email (look for Nym section)
• Free Proxy servers (some https and anon listed)
• Set up and use Mixmaster anon remailers