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For a completely different, Free Software suggestion,
try unattended at http://unattended.sourceforge.net/ Haven't used this at work but uses a Linux or windows server, a boot disk and you write the Perl scripts. Seems like a neat project, installs programs and does all the rebooting for you.

The university I work at recieves them from Dell with images, apps included we just do the 3 or so non-critical fixes since the image was sent to Dell.

My current addiction(s) that were brought back from the dead have to be the re-incarnation of Sub Space (Continuum) and Star Control 2 (Urquon Masters).

I played both back when they were new, was a Sup Space fiend during the early beta testing days up until Virgin started charging for it (and locking guests to one or two type of ships), and completely quit once they killed it off for good. Star Control 2 I picked up from a friend a long time ago and played it for a while until I realized I had started off wrong and would have to start over to have any chance of completing it, and after a few attempts (and computer rebuilds, and College exams and work..) it got forgotten/lost.

A discussion on this very topic (addictive games of the past) had me looking for those two upon which I found they had both been re-built by the fans of the games. I play Sub Space Continuum far more than urquon masters simply because it takes less time, and is generally less involving. Being a Top-view MMPOG shooter, its easy to see why. Jump in, blow up a few ships and get blown up a few times, turn it off... The plot lines involved in Star Control/Urquon Masters makes it harder to leave, especially when you just figure out the next set of clues or get something that you know what to do with. Both are about as addictive as Civ is, to the point where I had to un-install urquon to get any work done.

Tm

ps: Sub Space (Continuum) is up and live at subspace.net
And Star Control 2 (Urqon Masters) is on Source Forge at SC2.sourceforge.net

If it doesn't require XMS/EMS try VDMSound. A P4 2.53 ghz, with a geforce 440 MX? can run tie fighter, XCom Ufo smoothly with dos box.

For Star Control II, I certainly hope you know about this open source version that runs on windows, linux, and mac. It's the complete game with sound and all the graphics, ship battles, and storyline that game sc2 great. I lost my old copy of the game, but this allows for some game nostalgia.

Try Basilisk. It's a GPL'd 68k Mac emulator, so should be able to run all of your classic Mac OS programs (up to a point), and should be able to work on the new intel macs. PearPC does PowerPC emulation but not sure how fast it will be for classic games. I'm not so sure how fast Basilisk will run as my last experience of a Classic Mac was a 68k performa which most systems should be able to emulate without any problems at all.

You can get a free version of SCII for 3DO that runs on PC -- voice and everything! Check out The Ur-Quan Masters

For those that don't know there is an open source version of Star Control 2 called The Ur-Quan Masters. I would advise against playing that game if you value your job/gpa.

For businesses that make a living from selling support (SugarCRM, RedHat etc.), the path is a different one.

First, you create the project. You keep updating it and improving it, until it forms a community. You keep mentioning that you also offer commercial support for the project, but until it has a community of early adopters, no one will pay you to support it.

If you manage to cross that sea, however, there is good money in FOSS. RedHat make all their money by selling support for the product after they managed to turn it into a standard. MySQL argueably do the same (they also try to sell licenses, which is something I'm not sure I agree with). SugarCRM are doing the same, though they did annoy the "community" enough to create a split. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that.

The thing to understand here is that you have a very long road ahead of you yet, before you can actually quit your day job for this.

Personally, I moved into the "sell services, base them on FOSS" business. Some of the FOSS involved was written by us, but we never sell the actual software, always the service behind it.

Shachar

"The primary issue with Per, Python, and Ruby is that they use interpreters, instead of native-code compilers"

Perl compiles to bytecode. Python also has Psyco which is a "specializing compiler". Ruby is slightly different.

The Pysco bunch appear to be working towards making "High-level languages are faster than low-level ones!" true. Which I thought may be of interest to you.

I (Sean) have been hired by Google, moved to Seattle, and have been working on the Google Talk team for about a month and a half. The goal of Google Talk is to make real-time communication as open as possible, and in that regard, I've been working to offer all of Google Talk's features into other clients. Currently, I'm working on making it as easy as possible for other clients to use Google Talk's voice features. You can expect Gaim and other clients to be interoperable with Google Talk's voice features in the near future.

Gaim 2.0.0 beta 2 does not include voice or video ("vv") support for any protocols. We've done some work toward vv compatibility for Google Talk, but it isn't ready for the general public yet. It is unlikely this will change for the final release of Gaim 2.0.0, but vv will be a primary focus for the next major release of Gaim after that.

I had problems with an iPod mini over USB - it seems that the iPod doesn't perform a connection handshake properly, leaving the host waiting for a response that never comes. This has been worked around, and NetBSD 3.0 works perfectly with my iPod mini (all praise to gtkpod). It certainly sounds like you hit the same issue, so I'd suggest giving NetBSD another try. As for live CD's, if you can't find a recent one on the mailing lists, then you could try making one with mklivecd.

you mean you havent seen vigor?

If you were a big fan of Secret of Mana, there's a MMORPG on sf.net that tries to capture the feel of SoM. The sf.net page The main website

Like most projects on sf.net, it's under development and isn't out of alpha, so be gentle with it... and if you like it and can contribute to it (pixel artists, anyone?,) please do!

As far as server-side *ML to *ML markup filtering is concerned, Betsie (the BBC's Perl accessibility parser) has been doing this since 1999. I've implemented it locally myself. It's a recursive regex toy no more sophisticated in principle than 1986's Encheferizer.

Considering how painfully orthodox Opera's developers are about W3C standards, microbrowsers that ignore CSS-based sites that accommodate media="handheld" perplex me.

In the case of the Linux desktops, you could probably hack something together that would work without those components. Arguably you could in Windows too, I guess, by having the Task Manager open (since it allows you to run programs by filename). But Windows is designed as a distribution to use IE as the main shell program. If you kill IE in Windows (go to Task Manager, find "explorer.exe", and kill it - or just crash it, there are plenty of ways to do it), you lose the desktop, the Start menu, and the taskbar. IE is the shell that most people interact with. (It's worth pointing out that "iexplore.exe" is a stub program that essentially just runs "explorer.exe".)

Ah, but Explorer is not the only shell for Windows, there's Litestep, Blackbox for Windows (and its offspring), and for the truly hardcore, progman.exe :-) (it still runs on W2K last I tried, although you do have to create all the groups yourself, and no system tray too)

Yes, actually.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dslinux/
http://www.dslinux.org/

MiltiValent might be a better suggestion than PDFBox.

So they are giving him an award for breaking the terms of a licence agreement? (...) a group that was paying Tridge had licenced the software

Tridgell never entered into a license agreement with BitMover, and whether license agreements entered by other ODSL employees extended automatically to Tridge is pretty questionable.

if you don't like the licence you use something else.

Right, sourcepuller.

There are many programs designed to be run on Windows. Developers usually only design for this operating system because it is on such a huge percentage of desktops. These programs cannot run on linux, so people have been working on emulators and/or compatability layors to get them to run on linux. Wine is a program that is used by people to run programs on linux, but is not perfect. With the Windows source code, they should be able to get programs to run much better.

There is also a problem with getting peripherals running under linux. You need drivers to get them working on your OS, but usually the company that made the device will only release drivers for it on windows. There are programs like NdisWrapper for getting certain devices to run on linux, that could also profit from having the windows source code.

These have been the main stinky points for Linux.

ReactOS is an operating designed to be fully compatable with windows drivers and programs. They are currently at version 0.2.9.

On the down side, the lack of crackers having the source code to windows means that it is difficult for them to find vulnerabilities. Even with the code secret, Windows has had a lot of problems with security. It has also developed in an enviroment were the only real security vulnerabilities would be ones that can be found without the source code. The type of people who would be interested in getting through windows's security won't mind downloading the source from some warez site. I hope that it isn't leaked to these kinds of people. Fortunatly, they probably won't release the source code of IE(wich is supposedly part of windows)

Another bad thing is you will most likely be hearing a lot of people making comments about how poorly windows is written.

Truth is Yellow Dog has always been a PowerPC distribution and that's where it is good at. On the x86 side of things there are plenty of distributions to choose from, including Suse and Redhat. Doing a search for "EFI Linux" with Google gives me the following links amongst others:

    - http://sourceforge.net/projects/elilo
    - http://docs.hp.com/en/5991-1247/ch05s21.html
    - Search for EFI at RedHat

From reading the above sites it would seem that if you are ready to diverge from a standard install, then it should already be possible to run Linux on EFI based Macs. Linux has the biggest advantage of having code which is easily modifiable by whoever has an itch to scratch, whereas MS-Windows depends on Microsoft having a business case for doing so.

Indeed, "hello world" began running with WINE on x86 MacOSX a few days ago.

What do you use to tag files in Linux? I usually use the powerful EasyTag, but it doesn't use other forms of info, like amazon.com data. The gentoo default version also is an older one, that doesn't have some nice features. Any suggestions?

Sounds like Bricolage or Krang would be pretty close to prefect for you.

Pfft. sshfs is even simpler and more reliable, not to mention far, far more secure.

ViaVoice Embedded, the product that they're releasing, works on limited-domain problems: for example, tasks related to control of your car's peripherals. When the vocabulary and grammars are constrained it's possible to acheive very decent accuracy.

Dictation, however, is a completely different problem. There are far fewer constraints on what can be said, and the system makes errors as it picks through the possible choices. As a result, most dictation software requires training: the system will use your voice to train its recognition models to improve its word selection. Dictation systems also ask for samples of your documents to train its language models on how you put words together; that also helps determine the probabiity of proper word choice. (Example of how you put words together: "Peanut butter sandwich" is a much more likely choice than "peanut butter sand," and will get a higher score.)

The IBM announcement is about embedded, task-oriented speech recognition. It's not "superhuman," according to the article's text and ignoring its headline. I'll have an opportunity to see it in action next week at SpeechTek West. Expect to see other product announcements about speech technology in the next few days as the conference approaches.

As for the TV translation software, it's still in the research stage according to the article. I've seen BBN's version of this software, and frankly it's amazing how good real-time translation can be.

Bell Canada deployed Emily a few years back, and the results to date have been excellent. A top-level question of "How can I help you?" replaces several layers of DTMF auto-attendant complexity.

If you're interested in trying speech recognition and text-to-speech out for yourself, you can use Voxeo's servers, program in VoiceXML, and my Voice Conference Manager app as a starting point (yeah, VCM needs a new release, and it's getting one soon).

I'm the developer of Scriptio, an open source solution that has some Flash features for animation and presentations. It is written in JavaScript and uses AJAX techniques, and also interfaces with Ogg Vorbis, QuickTime, and Flash audio tracks.

There are examples on the web site that show it in action, and the package can be downloaded at SourceForge.

Web site: http://www.scriptio.us/
Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/scriptio

The package was just released this month, and I'm not sure how to spread the word. Maybe the SlashDot editors will mod me up to get some exposure. :^)

Matthew Clark

You're probably thinking of RIPScrip from Telegrafix. They devised a protocol called RIP that transmitted vector graphics as plain ASCII. Sort of a 90's precursor to SVG. They even developed browser plugins to use their vecor format on the web, and had some interesting demos before even Flash was out. Way ahead of its time, but it never caught on because the company kept everything proprietary, and wanted you to use only their software, or license the protocol from them. I think they finally folded about 4 or 5 years ago.

Some of the old BBS software, like MajorBBS and Wildcat! incorporated support for RIP by default in their later versions, and if you run DOSBox with modem emulation enabled, you can install RIPTerm 1.54 and connect to some BBSes by telnet to see RIP in action.

Well, you learn something new every day. I didn't realize that NDIS was actually a multiplatform driver.

I think I was taking the "This project implements Windows kernel API ... within Linux kernel" too literally.

MP3Bookhelper (mp3bookhelper.sourceforge.net) is great for mass tagging files. It won't lookup information for you, but it makes batch tag editing a breeze.

CDex is another fantastic piece of software. It's an open source CD ripper that can automatically check the FreeDB.org database to add tags to your ripped music. http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos

Album Cover Art Downloader will, surprise!, download and insert album cover art from Amazon,Walmart, and Yahoo into your mp3s. Did you know you could insert a jpeg into the id3v2 tags? A little rough around the edges but still recommended. http://louhi.kempele.fi/~skyostil/projects/albumar t/

Is the author of http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=Cro ss-platform.html a genius if it really will change the way how computers can be bought somewhere in the future?

Also, there are no beta libraries in boost. A library is either in boost (and is production grade) or it isn't.

According to the developpers of the rt2x00 driver which is on http://sourceforge.net/projects/rt2400, master mode (or AP mode) cannot be enabled until it is implemented in the ieee80211 stack in the kernel. Indeed trying to enable it with iwconfig returns an error.

They acknowledge that ASUS provides a close source driver for some specific versions of the 2.4 kernel that supports master mode. I didn't try it.

It might be possible to use the windows drivers with a wrapper. I did that with a PCMCIA card on a PictureBook when it became apparent that I had revision C2 of the card (unsupported) instead of B1 (supported), or something like that. But I had lost enough time with this thing already.

The best ID3-Tag-Editor: - Can edit ID3 v1, v2 and Filenames - Table Layout: You see all your files at the same time - Open Source and written in Java, works on every operatin system http://mp3dings.sourceforge.net/

Broadcom is one of the only vendors that doesn't provide a mechanism for native Linux drivers.

Personally, I've never been happy with Broadcom's chips, and even less happy that they refuse to support the Open Source community even with a closed-source or partially closed-source driver. Even Atheros is supporting us with MADWifi and their closed-source HAL... Broadcom could do something similar.

Most of the projects either have support from chip vendors (Intel, Atheros, Agere) or there has been some reverse engineering done (TI).

TI ACX1xx chips: http://acx100.sourceforge.net
Intel Centrino chips: http://ipw2100.sf.net and http://ipw2200.sf.net
Atheros-based chips: http://madwifi.org

I think the wrapper stuff is interesting for the geek factor, but it makes me shudder when people (who don't really know what they are doing) try to use it as an end all be all solution for their wireless needs in Linux, but I'm happy for those who have actually been able to make this solution work for them. ;)

My advice is to shop around very careful, and choose a card that does what you need it to... don't just go with the cheapest thing you can find. A lot of OEM cards have the same chipsets... you can still find some decent stuff for cheap, but it's quite likely you'll run into something that doesn't have good Linux support.

TI Chipsets DO work using the ACX100 driver. They work quite well, actually. Right now, we are working on 2.6.16 inclusion and there is a recent code split to get generic 802.11 stack functioning. The code that is being pushed into the kernel uses a homebrew 802.11 stack. It builds with the generic stack, but is not quite functional yet. Information can be found at: http://acx100.sourceforge.net/

Minor correction:

"Before you throwing in the towel"

Should read:

"Before you throw in the towel"

Also, the project still has a page at Sourceforge. It's at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zd1211

Before you throwing in the towel, check out the following website:

http://zd1211.ath.cx/
(It used to be hosted at http://zd1211.sourceforge.net/ before moving to this new site.)

This project was started a while back to support the ZyDAS ZD1211 chipset in Linux. As it states on the site, the code was originally donated by ZyDAS. Sometime last year, I managed to contact their tech support and request another kind gesture to the open source community. A few emails later, they released an update to their original code. If I'm not mistaken, the version at the project's website has incorporated the improvements made in the company's updated code. The ZD1211 project also has a list of USB adapters that carry the ZD1211 chipset.

After checking out the project's website, check out the vendor's page as they have been keeping up with their pledge of helping out the open source community by releasing updated drivers. As a bonus, they have also released an updated **WPA Supplicant**. Enjoy fellow /.'ers!!

ZyDAS' ZD1211 download page:

http://www.zydas.com.tw/downloads/download-1211.as p

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with ZyDAS. I just believe it is commendable that a company responded to a request to support the open source community and is actively doing so by publishing updated drivers.

Good luck to us all!

I just got a new Gateway laptop with a wireless card made by Broadcom. After much trying and cursing, today I finally enabled the thing, thanks to ndiswrapper. It is interesting that the drivers from the CD are not working, but some strange driver for a similar card from Gateway's website is running well. I had some lockups in the process, so I am ready for nasty surprises down the road.

Anyway, this post is made from a Gateway 6023GP running Ubuntu Breezy, through a new and shiny wireless connection :) IMHO, wireless devices need a lot of help, but the situation is by no means hopeless. It looks like ACPI support is almost worse. Still cannot get the damn thing to hibernate...

Unless you want to do some snooping or personal intrusion detection with kismet.
Last I knew linuxant and ndiswrapper didn't support the hooks that were needed by kismet.

I was a happy Linuxant customer before needing this functionality.
Now I'm a happy customer of both madwifi on my laptop and prism54 on my desktop.

The prism_cs hostap_cs & orinoco_cs wireless chipsets are well supported by native linux drivers. My Openzaurus 3.5.3 runs a 802.11 CF card
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00008W9PW/qid=1 138067272/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl147/102-7968 491-5466514?n=507846&s=pc&v=glance)
just fine.

Also, the ACX chipset is well supported natively (http://acx100.sourceforge.net./ Typically, TI & DLink cards run on them.The drivers above are ones that I have personally compiled &/or used.
There are many cards that work well natively &/or using ndiswrapper. Just google for the info before you buy one. USB-WLAN adapters are a bit of a problem on linux because of proprietary technology.

For what it's worth, the TI ACX100/111 driver is included in Andrew Morton's patchset. If I remember correctly, many distributions have kernel packages available with this patchset already applied, so give that a go if you can find it.

The driver needs to be able to load a firmware image when the module is loaded. It sounds a bit complicated perhaps, but it should just be a matter of putting a file in the right directory and it will all be handled automatically from there onwards. Information about that and more can be found in this ACX100/111 Wiki.

The problem I had with this driver is finding a firmware image that will work. If the module inserts correctly, the device node (/dev/wlan0 or whatever) appears correctly, but the card just doesn't seem to work when you try to scan for networks and the signal and all other readings are at zero, then maybe it is a firmware problem. Try different combinations of firmware if you run into this problem and you can't figure out any solution.

For me, the driver seems to work very well now. I have a £5 Safecom card, cheapest crap on the market, it's not even listed in the supported devices on the Wiki, but it still works like a charm. Hopefully the driver will make it into the mainline kernel soon.

Yes, there is an 802.11 stack in the kernel. However, some argue that stack does not suit their driver or hardware.

First off, let me say I welcome the increased customization of the home page. But I think it could be done in a different way that would be easier to extend in the future, including doing things like you suggest.

Currently there are two separate systems that determine whether or not you see something. There's the new full/abbreviated/none system that uses the "home page" flag set by the editors in conjunction with the user's sectional preferences (which used to be a simpler yes/no by section), and there's yes/no by editor.

My idea uses a point-based scheme to decide whether or not a story appears on the home page. It incorporates all aspects of the story into one system. In the user prefs, you promote/demote stories by one point based on section, topic, editor posting it, and whatever other characteristics of the story exposed for this. NumPosts over X where you decide what X is, or Y% of comments at +4 or better where you decide what Y is, or submitter is a friend ... these are all possibilities. Then the editor posting it gives it a +1 if he marks it "home page" news. Tally up the points, and if it's positive it shows up full-text. If it's zero, it shows up minimized. If negative, it won't show up on your home page (but will in its section of course).

For example, a JonKatz story might have your personal -1, and the +1 for "front page" yields a 0 - you see only the minimized version. But say you really like stories in the BSD section (+1), and Jon happens to be writing about BSD. Then you would see the full story. Assuming no user customization, the default works just like it does today: stories at +1 (home page stories) show up full-text, all others are at 0 and show up abbreviated.

I've mailed this to Taco and posted it as a feature request for slashcode several years ago.

I'd also like to see support for regionalization added to slash. I'd bet there are lots of slash sites that would like to post news that's specific to a certain geographic locale, but don't want to make it front page news for everyone. With regionalization and a customization system like this, Slashdot could mention local conferences (which would be a useful service to those in that area) without getting flamed by the 99% that don't live there.

I've used ndiswrapper to great success for the Intel PC2100, the LinkSys WPC54G. However, ndiswrapper had problems (probably bad windows drivers, I'm not sure), with the DWL-G122. However, the status reports at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index .php/List#D pointed to native drivers at http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm. Kudos to Ralink for providing working Linux drivers.

The only wifi chip that I know doesn't have a Free driver is the broadcom. And now even that's not true with this which has recently become just about usable.

Off the top of my head the following chipsets have Free linux drivers available: Texas Instruments ACX100/ACX111, RaLink 2400/2500/2570, Intel ipw2100/ipw2200, Realtek rtl8180, Atmel at76c5xxx, and the ADMtek adm8211. There are one or two more, but I can't remember them right now.

There are also non-Free (despite the fact that the site says they're GPL) but otherwise decent drivers for the Atheros chipsets provided by the madwifi project.

I don't know where you got your information from, but you're very wrong. And the future of Linux wifi support is looking far stronger than any other OS with the new generic software 802.11 stack that's just gone into the kernel.

but it was rejected as all my submissions are,

http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/20051205 195525114

Take a look at the reverse engineering project here,

http://linux-bcom4301.sourceforge.net/

I'm running an Atheros miniPCI card with the MadWifi Driver under Linux and haven't had any problems. I've also used Orinoco and Prism2 cards with Linux out of the box.

I once had (long story short) several PCI cards that had Texas Instrument ACX100 chips and after a long time I stumbled upon the ACX100/ACX111 project on SourceForge (formerly the ACX100 project; they have grown since). They have a corresponding device list here and there.

Thib ;-)

I once had (long story short) several PCI cards that had Texas Instrument ACX100 chips and after a long time I stumbled upon the ACX100/ACX111 project on SourceForge (formerly the ACX100 project; they have grown since). They have a corresponding device list here and there.

Thib ;-)

Not sure what chipset your wireless card uses, but if it's Broadcom, there are 2 solutions now. 1) http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ lets you use Windows drivers on Linux. 2) http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ the native Broadcom driver is stabilizing now. It's experimental at this state, but people are using it on both x86 and ppc. I think you have to have a 2.6.15 or later kernel to use that though. I'm still using ndiswrapper for mine, it works okay until the native drivers are stabilized more.