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Ok, only FYI (as many of these topics were covered in other replies) and certainly not for karma (as this topic is dead at this point), here is the definitive guide for playing Lucasarts/Sierra games on modern PC's:

First, Linux PC's:
Lucasarts games: http://www.scummvm.org/
AGI Sierra games (Lsl1, Sq1, Sq2, Kq1-3, etc): http://sarien.sourceforge.net/
SCI0 Sierra games (Sq3, Lsl2-3, Kq4): http://freesci.linuxgames.com/
SCI1 Sierra games (Sq4-5, Lsl5-6, Kq5, etc) and oddballs like willy beamish and all those old games like tunnels of armageddon: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
Windows Sierra games (Sq6, Lsl7, etc): http://www.transgaming.com/ (or apt-get install wine)

Any platform, Sierra games: This guy has done the unpossible, writing timing fix patches for the games so you don't have to kludge them with slowdown utils: http://geocities.com/belzorash/

Windows PC's:
LucasArts games: http://www.scummvm.org/
AGI Sierra games: http://www.agidev.com/nagi.html
SCI Sierra games: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/
Windows games:
http://home.planet.nl/~harms646/larry7.html
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancement s/ResChange.shtml
Games that just don't work right:
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

And just for grins, because it's freaking awesome:
http://www.agdinteractive.com/
http://people.freenet.de/lucasfangames/maniac/game s_eng.htm
Good luck, let me know if you have any problems.

Ok, only FYI (as many of these topics were covered in other replies) and certainly not for karma (as this topic is dead at this point), here is the definitive guide for playing Lucasarts/Sierra games on modern PC's:

First, Linux PC's:
Lucasarts games: http://www.scummvm.org/
AGI Sierra games (Lsl1, Sq1, Sq2, Kq1-3, etc): http://sarien.sourceforge.net/
SCI0 Sierra games (Sq3, Lsl2-3, Kq4): http://freesci.linuxgames.com/
SCI1 Sierra games (Sq4-5, Lsl5-6, Kq5, etc) and oddballs like willy beamish and all those old games like tunnels of armageddon: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
Windows Sierra games (Sq6, Lsl7, etc): http://www.transgaming.com/ (or apt-get install wine)

Any platform, Sierra games: This guy has done the unpossible, writing timing fix patches for the games so you don't have to kludge them with slowdown utils: http://geocities.com/belzorash/

Windows PC's:
LucasArts games: http://www.scummvm.org/
AGI Sierra games: http://www.agidev.com/nagi.html
SCI Sierra games: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/
Windows games:
http://home.planet.nl/~harms646/larry7.html
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancement s/ResChange.shtml
Games that just don't work right:
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

And just for grins, because it's freaking awesome:
http://www.agdinteractive.com/
http://people.freenet.de/lucasfangames/maniac/game s_eng.htm
Good luck, let me know if you have any problems.

Then play Privateer again with a modern remake.

Same old game, but with modern 3d graphics, and available for linux, mac and windows ;)

http://wcuniverse.sourceforge.net/

Open Source Privateer Remake... Pretty good... Check it out.

like this http://black-legacy.com/index.php
orhttp://sourceforge.net/projects/planeshift/
Have a look on sourceforge for a few more

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1 - DOSbox is good for playing all those old-style games like Discworld!

http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/ - And scummVM for all your old lucasarts games too!

Both free software, and really good too...

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1 - DOSbox is good for playing all those old-style games like Discworld!

http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/ - And scummVM for all your old lucasarts games too!

Both free software, and really good too...

you need DOSBOX http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

We mentioned before that collision detection is able to be accelerated on the SPEs of Cell, despite being fairly branch heavy. The lack of a branch predictor in the SPEs apparently isn't that big of a deal, since most collision detection branches are basically random and can't be predicted even with the best branch predictor. So not having a branch predictor doesn't hurt, what does hurt however is the very small amount of local memory available to each SPE. In order to access main memory, the SPE places a DMA request on the bus (or the PPE can initiate the DMA request) and waits for it to be fulfilled. From those that have had experience with the PS3 development kits, this access takes far too long to be used in many real world scenarios. It is the small amount of local memory that each SPE has access to that limits the SPEs from being able to work on more than a handful of tasks. While physics acceleration is an important one, there are many more tasks that can't be accelerated by the SPEs because of the memory limitation.,

well .. at the risk of being a bit fan-boix, what about throwing Judy arrays at the problem .. ermm .. i mean, put Judy on Cell .. and use a combination of edge-detection and fast count by value ...

i mean, its not like vector can't function as simple hash. or am i missing out something important about this 'collision detection business' that can't be parallelized?

(i wouldn't know, incidentally, i don't do 3d/gaming .. so please point out my idiocy freely, at will, and as great a length as you can muster..)

We mentioned before that collision detection is able to be accelerated on the SPEs of Cell, despite being fairly branch heavy. The lack of a branch predictor in the SPEs apparently isn't that big of a deal, since most collision detection branches are basically random and can't be predicted even with the best branch predictor. So not having a branch predictor doesn't hurt, what does hurt however is the very small amount of local memory available to each SPE. In order to access main memory, the SPE places a DMA request on the bus (or the PPE can initiate the DMA request) and waits for it to be fulfilled. From those that have had experience with the PS3 development kits, this access takes far too long to be used in many real world scenarios. It is the small amount of local memory that each SPE has access to that limits the SPEs from being able to work on more than a handful of tasks. While physics acceleration is an important one, there are many more tasks that can't be accelerated by the SPEs because of the memory limitation.,

well .. at the risk of being a bit fan-boix, what about throwing Judy arrays at the problem .. ermm .. i mean, put Judy on Cell .. and use a combination of edge-detection and fast count by value ...

i mean, its not like vector can't function as simple hash. or am i missing out something important about this 'collision detection business' that can't be parallelized?

(i wouldn't know, incidentally, i don't do 3d/gaming .. so please point out my idiocy freely, at will, and as great a length as you can muster..)

We mentioned before that collision detection is able to be accelerated on the SPEs of Cell, despite being fairly branch heavy. The lack of a branch predictor in the SPEs apparently isn't that big of a deal, since most collision detection branches are basically random and can't be predicted even with the best branch predictor. So not having a branch predictor doesn't hurt, what does hurt however is the very small amount of local memory available to each SPE. In order to access main memory, the SPE places a DMA request on the bus (or the PPE can initiate the DMA request) and waits for it to be fulfilled. From those that have had experience with the PS3 development kits, this access takes far too long to be used in many real world scenarios. It is the small amount of local memory that each SPE has access to that limits the SPEs from being able to work on more than a handful of tasks. While physics acceleration is an important one, there are many more tasks that can't be accelerated by the SPEs because of the memory limitation.,

well .. at the risk of being a bit fan-boix, what about throwing Judy arrays at the problem .. ermm .. i mean, put Judy on Cell .. and use a combination of edge-detection and fast count by value ...

i mean, its not like vector can't function as simple hash. or am i missing out something important about this 'collision detection business' that can't be parallelized?

(i wouldn't know, incidentally, i don't do 3d/gaming .. so please point out my idiocy freely, at will, and as great a length as you can muster..)

Sorry 'bout that... the correct link is:
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/

Let me just add that TidyHTML reformats the code, strips out excessive tags, changes a few tags into CSS equivalents (if you allow it to do so), points out open tags and, what I like the most about it, it reindents the HTML to increase readibility.

mkLinux is pretty out of date. It hasn't been updated in forever. I suggest the more modern mainstream kernel.

mkLinux is a relic from the days when the mainstream kernel didn't support Mac hardware. Now it does. There's little to no need for mkLinux.

There is also a separately maintained kernel for NuBus-based Power Macs which I use on an old 5260. You can find it here. Installing Debian on a nubus pmac is pretty easy, and the 5260's screen is nice and large, with a 80x30 console mode, the machine makes a wonderful dumb terminal type device, which is what I use it for. It can run X, too. But there's one drawback: no sound.

start here....

http://dvarchive.sourceforge.net/

find the latest copy of dvarchive. it act's like a replay unit on the network, then search avsforums for the tools to edit out commercials and burn to dvd your shows easily (simple windows app+tool suite) the replay hacing is simply the drive upgrade, everything else is server side which makes things great.

Why are so many Slashdot users in love with Apple?

Do you think only Apple has Desktop Search? Google, Copernic and many others have Desktop Search also. And there were rumours not too long ago about Ask Jeeves open sourcing its Desktop Search.

And it's not as if lack of a desktop search technology is going to make Microsoft irrelevant. The fact is that Microsoft has code, right now today, to make desktop search happen on Longhorn. If desktop search becomes a killer app for Apple or others (and believe me, it hasn't yet...no one sees floods of people flocking to Apple or some other platform just to get desktop search), Microsoft has the resources to make it part of Longhorn or release it as a separate application...and if it becomes important enough, they will.

I'm no big fan of Microsoft, but you've seriously got to take off the Apple fanboi Aqua-colored glasses.

there are a lot of them...

Sarissa - http://sarissa.sourceforge.net/doc/
Prototype - http://prototype.conio.net/
Dojo - http://dojotoolkit.org/
SAJAX - http://absinth.modernmethod.com/sajax/
DWR - http://www.getahead.ltd.uk/dwr/
JSON-RPC-Java - http://oss.metaparadigm.com/jsonrpc/

• The interface can change from version to version without warning. Notable the python interface and the dc drawing code. Hopefully this won't happen again, but man was it a pain.
• You have to check every widget on every platform. The table widget in particular doesn't behave the same on all platforms. On the MAC, it is depressingly slow.
• Some issues won't be addressed. Using a virtual table, if you go over two million rows, you get drawing errors. While you might say two million rows is too many (and I agree), this is still a bug of which you might need to be aware. My bug report was actually listed as "not a bug" by the developers. At least change the docs to indicate this!

That being said, the development community is great and if you can live with testing every widget to make sure that they are really cross platform, I say go for it.

That being said, Qt is also a joy to work with, with great response from the developers (if you have purchased a license), a stable API, and truly excellent cross platform support. wx is almost there, but not quite (I had to ship with the cvs version for the macintosh in January)

Sarissa is a cross-platform XML and XSLT library (more like a wrapper actually) for Mozilla and IE.

I'm sure AJAX development can be simplified with sarissa. It won't work with other browsers, of course since not all of them support XSLT.

There are already several javascript libraries that make ajax development easier such as Sarissa. Sarissa makes it possible to use XMLhttpRequest in IE and makes avialable certain IE only parsing functions in other browsers.

I've tried working with some others with varried success.

No, what they do is relased it here. It's an XSL-T parser in JavaScript, really cool stuff.

I'd love to see Judy-style thinking applied to GPU problems..."

especially since i use Judy arrays for tons of things on two different architectures, and its just a darn efficient hash library for pretty much all of my needs ..

Return To Chaos - The Dungeon Master / Chaos Strikes Back Clone

DNA/Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom Adventure (online, java)

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (flash)

NetHack 3.4.3: Main Page

Jardinains! (fun breakout clone)

mono (excellent modern asteroids clone)

Ultimate++

It is BSD licensed, it comes with IDE on both Linux and Win32, and it kicks ass for productivity.

See comparison with Qt.

a) Java was DESIGNED for embedded systems, first and foremost. That's why it is hardware-agnostic; because it allows the hardware makers to throw in whatever chips are cheap in bulk at the time, change on a whim, and still push out the same upgrade to everyone. Being cross-platform in the MacOS/Linux/Windows way was just sort of a side-effect. Think about how much this will benefit set-top manufacturers!!

You can argue it was designed for embedded, but I won't. That was its original intention- I don't know about saying it was designed for embedded. Because Java is not open, "your slap Java on any chip" sounds great until you need a VM. Sure, there are nice free attempts, but you still have problems without your slow, memory hogging VM. Might as well screw deterministic memory- something more than necessary with realtime embedded systems. There are some nice attempts though- I've seen a theoretical maximum of 300 ms in some places for "sitting around" which isn't half bad. Show me a embedded device with a Java device driver. What about an unlaughable scheduler? Directly interfacing with interrupts? Anyhow, it's fun to go back and see how Sun at least had an embedded link compared to now. Where's it going?

b) Java isn't interpreted anymore... its just-in-time compiled and then executed as native code. A bit of a start-up pause while the classes compile, that's all.

Maybe JIT moved Java from being fully interpreted, but it's still interpreted and "compiled" at runtime making it theoretically (a.k.a Javaly) and realistically on average always slower and more of a memory hog than unnamed alternatives, that's all. But, sometimes that's ok right? Look at how Java has taken over the desktop application market where that least matters. How many Java desktop applications do you run? Can you tell it's Java? If programming will always be hard, one might wonder what skeletons in the closets Java fanatics have at the price of conformity to an interface. Java version incompatibilities, buggy VMs, oh my.

If you're after something that is a cross platform GUI toolkit, non commerical / commerical with LPGL license might i suggest Wxwidgets.

http://www.wxwidgets.org/

I have been using wx for a few months and love it.

Cross platform (Win32, MacOSX, Linux).

Very mature (12 years old) platform filled with lots of classes for most things you could think of.

And the seller point, no need to give away your source if you want to write something commercially at zero cost.

This doesnt mean QT isn't any good, but Wx has been around longer and really fills a need - try it out!

I'm using a Windows development platform Dev-C++ with all the hooks of wx: http://wxdsgn.sourceforge.net/

Why bother trying to configure an old box to boot DOS? Just run the games in Windows 2000/XP under DOSBox.

An OS for the blind should be command-driven. It might be argued that menus were designed precisely so users would not have to memorize cryptic commands. But for a blind user, it would be terribly inefficient (read, time-consuming) to be forced to listen to menu choices being read back. A command-driven OS would require an initially steeper learning curve in terms of memorizing keyboard short-cuts, but the effort is rewarded as soon as the user types "rf" for refresh, rather than wait for the text-to-speech (TTS) software to recite (1) Go to Site (2) Save Page (3) Reload Page, etc.

An OS for the blind should be linear rather than spatial. A blind user should not be forced to grope for icons or other clickable hotspots in an invisible desktop. Reducing the number of choices a blind user must make to get a task done makes the OS more rather than user-friendly.

Pasting a screen-reader atop a fancy desktop environment like Gnome or Mac OSX is not the solution. The solution is to get rid of the desktop manager and concentrate on making a better command language interpreter or shell.

Bash, or the B(ourne) A(gain) SH(ell) is already way friendlier to the blind user than Windows XP, Bash has file-name and command completion, which should make it easier to "remember" commands. Just remember the first few letters of a long command and press tab.

There are also a number of FOSS efforts to create the audio equivalent of a desktop. One is emacspeak, which is a lisp program that interfaces with the venerable emacs text editor and kitchen sink.

There are also GNU/Linux distributions geared toward blind users, such as Oralux.

imagine running JNode or JX on your DVD player! Then you could use the ethernet ports on these players to play streaming video on vlc on the java os on your java enabled dvd player! Yay convergence! I think I just threw up in mouth a little.

Anyone who writes in Groovy, Python, ObjectScript, JavaScript, NetRexx, and many others. There's a scripting JSR as well. I don't think the original poster had this specifically in mind though.

The Ur-Quan Masters

I've spent a lot of time with this one and I was just considering playing it again soon, actually.

Why bypass the trailers when you can use your blu-ray player to download movies off the net?

On the other hand, if you are looking to make a blind-friendly general OS, then look to the "3rd generation approach" to accessibility in GNOME, Mac OS X v10.4, and Longhorn. All of these are doing API-based accessibility, where every object on the screen implements a rich accessibility API which is taken together and then re-presented to the blind (or others with other disabilities). In GNOME this is with the open source Gnopernicus screen reader (see http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html). In Mac OS X v10.4 this is VoiceOver. Longhorn hasn't declared itself fully on this topic yet.

A final thing to look at is the work my co-worker Willie Walker and the University of Toronto Adaptive Technology Resource Centre did with the a speech Look and Feel for Swing.

... and are willing to do some hacking, I've always thought that the Roku Photobridge and Prismiq Media Player would make nice little MythTV front ends due to their hackability, wireless support, hardware decoders and digital outs.

Don't know much about the Roku (except that they're pretty open with developer support), but as administrator for a project that does open source for the Prismiq it should be doable to port mythfrontend to the box. Particularly since Prismiq released the source.

(plus, you can probably get one dirt cheap on eBay).

Has been for a while.

http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/

DOSBox for your retro DOS gaming needs. Sound should work fine, no need to get dusty.

Alternatively, there were Windows 95 compatible Direct3D accelerated versions of Tie Fighter and X-wing, which I'd recommend getting - the antialiasing really improves the graphics.

If you want an old game that has real depth, play Starflight. I recently started playing it for the first time, and it's like a good book but without being linear. I've been picking up clues to the story, while exploring planets and trying to stay alive.

The DOS version of Starflight is an 80808 era CGA game that has a lot of things that were way ahead of it's time. Inside of 700K there are hundreds of unique planets, several races and an involved storyline. The planetary details are generated by fractals but remember what you do on them. Almost everything is done in real time; if you stay silent on the comm channel too long, the aliens on the other side can get annoyed or take over the conversation. A lot of descriptions are done by text, so it requires a little imagination, but the atmosphere of trying to survive, alone in a cold unforgiving universe is very strong.

If you want to give Starflight a chance, I suggest using dosbox with the speed set to 1000 cycles. Anything higher will make battles and communication impossible. Be careful, though: saving or even playing the game modifies the main game files (stara.com, starb.com, starflt.com), so make archives of them if you want to save. You can't quit without saving.

Despite a slower pace than many modern games, this game is quite addictive once you get started. I'm going back to it right now... now if I can just find some promethium so I can repair the sheilds...

Freenet.

Oooooh, look everybody, /. has a link to Freenet (which has a link to some page (which has a link to some other page, which might possibly link to child porn)).

Not only that, OSTG actually *hosts* freenet.

Gotta be a special place in hell for doing that!

And just to be sure we don't forget about Google, you can use Google to find Freenet, so then, Google can be used to find child porn too!

What makes these links possible? THE INTERNET! THE INTERNET IS ENABLING CHILD PORN SOMEBODY MOD IT DOWN QUICK!!!

lol

Here is a good mythTV on FreeBSD howto:

http://mythtv.son.org/tiki-index.php

Personally, I use xdtv for watching/recording tv on my FreeBSD machine.

You tried using Eclipse for C++ development on Linux? You do realize Eclipse is a Java IDE, right? There are a lot more choices for doing C++ than the silly CDE plugin for Eclipse.

Download Stellarium at http://stellarium.sourceforge.net/ and you can pull up our night skies, only thing you need is your Lat/Long and a form of reference (conveniently provided by Earth) to get your bearings. Select an appropriate remote location in G-earth away from city lights and voila, instant geeky-but-still romantic date. Just add wine and an appreciation for the starry nights.

it's not like the windows users can run your .rpm packages either.

I think cygwin has an rpm2cpio compile. If not it should be straight forward.

Is msi a format or an executable? If it's a format, there ought to be an msi2cpio, or at least it should be possible. I mean, we have tnef tools on linux. Google shows no hits for it by that name though there might be code to borrow in here.

Another semi-interesting program your robots game is RoboCode http://robocode.sourceforge.net/. It's a web game where you code your robots in Java and set them loose on each other. It's more about teaching Java (and programming in general) then about AI though.

This is what i love about apple. They see the customers need and they execute simple as that.

When Microsoft does this (comes late to the game with a rip-off entrant that brutalizes a small-guy innovator) they tend not to be viewed as kindly.

I don't use Windows, so my recommendation is pretty much vapor when it comes to actual software experience, but Winsock Firewall is the only free software firewall I have been able to dig up.

Naturally, as free software, it isn't going to cost you anything. The people I have asked to try it out tell me it isn't quite as nice to use as some other non-free but no-cost (for personal use) solutions. But they tell me it is functional and would probably be suitable for a reasonably technical person.

I've got several links for you:

Kick Firefox to the curb
Kick Opera to the curb
Kick Maxthon to the curb

How could I not know of Firefox and have it installed when I post on Slashdot (Firefox usage up .03% vs IE!)? Really now... I was just using IE at the time, and found it hilarious that Slashdot would link to a site that would attempt to install malware on a user's computer.

(Besides, with SP2, Mouse gestures and program grouping on Windows XP, and privoxy for blocking in-line ads, IE is useable)

-Tezkah
(Posting A/C for O/T)

ability ... just download a file, double click it and install (for all distros, not just one)

That ability is _actually_ here: http://zero-install.sourceforge.net/

Though I really don't like this very much; but I am a terminal junkie familiar with both apt-get and ./configure && make.

As others told you, you should _only_ use the programs provided by your distro unless you can build from source yourself. Never install packages from another distro (unless you have to).

Finally there are GUI wrappers around "rpm" and "apt", probably even for portage; but you shouldn't even think about Gentoo until you are no longer afraid of a terminal/gcc/make/completely_broken_system.

Funny you should ask, I was just thinking of this as I read through the comments. I learned about this on slashdot a year or two ago:

DV Backup Open Source at SF.net

I just found this link also (mac only, $50 share- or cripple- ware)

Or you can download it here...

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

A lot of the other *nix tools are there too...

Or you can download it here...

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

A lot of the other *nix tools are there too...

Beyond that, there's nothing stopping people from developing using SWT if they don't like swing.
It's not as flexible, but it's MUCH faster.

Have a look at what it can do:

http://sancho-gui.sourceforge.net/images/ss-new-1. png

They even have natively compiled binaries for it!

And let's not forget the guys who invented swt:

http://www.eclipse.org/

Of course, that's not to say that swing sucks:

http://www.powerfolder.com/8603/39627.html

Mmm. nice isn't it? I certainly wouldn't spot this a mile away as being swing.
That is what we call an example of a programmer doing his job right.

I used to hate swing applications too, but that was when I ran a 500MHz machine. CPUs are cheap these days.