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PDFCreator of course! I've been using it for years. Why on earth would you expect Word to have it built in? Rather an odd idea considering the pervasiveness of the UNIX philosohpy on this web site.

That is not true. Linux can have zones too. See UserMode Linux

If anybody reading this is interested in participating in the test procedure, check out the Linux Test Project.

I'm sure this is the last thing on anyone's mind, but for those of us who use ffdshow, this is nice news.

--grendel drago

Source code from tridge has been posted to FreshMeat. The SourcePuller project is hosted on SourceForge.

There is Gnome Java bindings too (beside Qt):
http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/bin/view

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcepuller/

And if you look at the release notes for the first version, you find Tridge's commentary:

As you probably know, there has been quite a fuss lately about this code and the fact that BitMover has now withdrawn the free version of bk. First off, I would like to say that this result was not the intention when I wrote this code. I had hoped that an alternative open client would be able to coexist happily with the proprietary BitKeeeper client, as has happened with so many other protocols. An open client combined with the ability to accurately import into other source code management tools would have been a big step forward, and should have allowed BitMover to flourish in the commercial environment while still being used by the free software community. I would also like to say that BitMover is well within its rights to license BitKeeper as it sees fit. I am of course disappointed at how BitMover has portrayed some of my actions, but please understand that they are under a lot of pressure. Under stress people sometimes say things that perhaps they shouldn't. As I have stated previously, my code was written without using bk. Some people expressed some skepticism over that, perhaps because they haven't noticed that bk servers have online protocol help (just type 'help' into a telnet session). I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that this help was intended for people like myself who wished to implement new clients. I would like to thank all the people who have supported me in the development of this tool by providing useful advice both before, during and after the development of the code. I tried to consult with a wide range of interested parties and the feedback I got was certainly appreciated. Finally, I would like to point out the obvious fact that Linus was perfectly within his rights to choose bk for the kernel. I personally would not have chosen it, but it was his choice to make, not anyone elses. Linus is now in the unenviable position of changing source code management systems, which is a painful task, particularly when moving away from a system that worked as well for him as bk did. If you want to help, then help with code not commentary. There have been enough flames over this issue already.

OpenBiblio might be a good fit. It's written in PHP and uses MySQL for its database engine. It was very easy to install, and I have it working on NetBSD, GNU/Linux, and several versions of Windows. Since we put it in, we've gotten a constant stream of good comments from our patrons and our library personnel -- mostly about how easy it is to use.

Now, I should point out that I'm a developer on the OpenBiblio project, so I'm probably biased. But I think it's surprisingly good. We don't quite have the feature set that Koha has, but the code is much more approachable, if you need to modify it.

I began using OpenBiblio because no open source library software did what the libraries I'm working for needed. It had the basic feature set, without a lot of extra fluff to get in my way. And the code was straightforward enough that I could modify it to fit my needs pretty easily. No other library system I looked at had quite the right mix. It's certainly not perfect, but we're working on it. I think it's a serious contender.

http://obiblio.sourceforge.net/

The "auxiliary documentation" that is mentioned at the article being kept up-to-date and reflecting code changes is now implemented as javadoc and its competing technologies like Doxygen or phpDocumentor.

Have a look at Relayfax. They have opensourced their engine on Sourceforge although it is a Windows only C++ solution.

I just recently installed Relayfax at a clients site and it is working well.

--
Evolution - Still a theory just dont tell its religious zealouts, the Evolutionians.

I am a developer involved with refbase. I say that not to plug the product (it is a bit minimalist for a real library, but there are many individuals, research groups and departments who use it to host papers), but so you know where I'm coming from. I have interacted with the open source bibliographic community & have tried many products & keep an ear to many others.

First, check out the oss4lib blog and openbib. These will point you to a lot of other good material.

Next, absolutely download , which is one of the most full-featured & comprehensive library solution that the F/OSS community currently has.

I personally thing cheshire deserves a shout out too. A clean, FAST python-backed online catalogue with cross-site searching & conforming to a lot of nice standards like MODS.

You should also keep an eye for developments from bibliophile. This is a collaboration between many players of F/OSS literature databases.

I am a developer involved with refbase. I say that not to plug the product (it is a bit minimalist for a real library, but there are many individuals, research groups and departments who use it to host papers), but so you know where I'm coming from. I have interacted with the open source bibliographic community & have tried many products & keep an ear to many others.

First, check out the oss4lib blog and openbib. These will point you to a lot of other good material.

Next, absolutely download , which is one of the most full-featured & comprehensive library solution that the F/OSS community currently has.

I personally thing cheshire deserves a shout out too. A clean, FAST python-backed online catalogue with cross-site searching & conforming to a lot of nice standards like MODS.

You should also keep an eye for developments from bibliophile. This is a collaboration between many players of F/OSS literature databases.

I am a developer involved with refbase. I say that not to plug the product (it is a bit minimalist for a real library, but there are many individuals, research groups and departments who use it to host papers), but so you know where I'm coming from. I have interacted with the open source bibliographic community & have tried many products & keep an ear to many others.

First, check out the oss4lib blog and openbib. These will point you to a lot of other good material.

Next, absolutely download , which is one of the most full-featured & comprehensive library solution that the F/OSS community currently has.

I personally thing cheshire deserves a shout out too. A clean, FAST python-backed online catalogue with cross-site searching & conforming to a lot of nice standards like MODS.

You should also keep an eye for developments from bibliophile. This is a collaboration between many players of F/OSS literature databases.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcepuller/

This will bring tears of joy to your eyes then!

>Anyway, this all seems like it's a problem that
>application developers simply don't use the tools
>provided for them to make their programs
>platform-independent. How would changing the
>platforms themselves fix the problem---at least,
>the one you were having?

The only solution I've seen for this problem that seems to work is FreeBSD's ports, or something like it...in the sense that more popular applications (Joerg Schilling's cdrtools, as a wonderful example) then have a "Makefile maintainer." It's the Makefile maintainer's job to find whatever patches are needed/available for the given application, and to write a Makefile which caters to the individual application's installation quirks. Thus, only one person has to endure the pain and suffering involved in figuring out how to get cdrtools to build. Everyone else thereafter can use the Makefile that was written by that original brave soul who figured it out. Also, even though individual Makefiles might themselves be very different, in order to cope with different non-standard install methods, the end user's installation experience is completely uniform...in most cases all they have to do is type "make install" to compile/install *anything.*

This is why I believe personally that if *any* package management/installation method was going to be included in the LSB, it should be something based on ports...simply because ports is the only solution I've yet come across which works in a complete sense. Virtually every other proposed system I've seen has problems. My own proposed solution is a combination of this, which is something I wrote myself a bit back, and rpm. The above linked project only has files in CVS right now though unfortunately, so you'll have to use that if you want them.

What I plan to do though is incorporate the use of bmake (NetBSD's make) and a partial clone of ports as a replacement for much of the body of rpm's .spec files, as well as doing away with rpm's dreaded subpackaging entirely. What this would mean is that I'd get rpm's packaging and dep tracking capabilities, which are in themselves quite good as long as you manually specify dependencies, but bmake/acbuild would also mean I'd finally have a sane specfile format. Of course, a fair amount of kludging would have to be done...the primary thing would be to convert rpm's custom vars into vars that bmake can make sense of. My system however would also at least partially do away with the need for programs like apt/urpmi as well, because of acbuild's fetch target. Yet another good thing about this though is that it wouldn't break existing compatibility with anything, in the sense that rpm will of course still be able to use specfiles which I won't have converted for this...I'd make my own specfiles available, but only people who wanted to use acbuild would need to know about them.

Everybody knows Adobe as the inventor of PDF, but unfortunately the company was nowhere on the servermarket. MacroMedia on the other hand has a more than interesting server product: Cold Fusion. The combination of both technologies looks very promising to me.
But wait a minute! Weren't you able to produce PDF documents with Cold Fusion? Of course you were: ColdFusion MX 7.0 is shipped with the iText.jar (iText, a free Java-PDF library, hosted on SourceForge, originally developped by yours truly).
And now comes the funny part: due to some regulations I don't fully understand, MM can't use any Adobe technology (or vice versa) till the end of the year. This means that the new company Adobe Systems will be shipping iText in their products for PDF generation.
The company that invented PDF, shipping my F/OS library hosted at SourceForge! What a weird way things work out some times.

The thing you're lookin' for is called WASTE and it's a beautfiful thing. Roll your own encrypted P2P network and only let in people you trust. Nullsoft released it under GPL, then didn't.

You can wait for Glitz and Cairo, but you don't need to. The svgl library does that today.

We were concerned that even with all of the advancements with online media in the past few years, it was still pretty difficult just to find new independent music that you liked.
It sounds like all the elements have finally come together for this kind of program. This kind of software could be used one day to share other independantly produced media - ie books, movies, and really fancy flash stuff :). Basically whatever we can produce for the medium can be shared and evaluated by others, ideally with cream floating to top.
The article also mentions this is based on iRate with a cleaner interface.

iRate is a similar piece of software that is available for Linux and OSX as well as Windows.

GnomoRadio
iRate

This sounds pretty similar to iRate which is a front end for downloading freely available songs from artist web pages and letting you rate them which in turns find more songs to download.

It seemed like a good idea but the interface was annoying enough that I gave up using it when I tried it out several months ago. Hopefully this project can take the idea and run with it and couple it with an interface that's more flexible.

Bad files have been around for a few years now. They are the main reason I stopped using KLite and searched out something better.

Use DC++. All hubs are policed by hub owners and hub operators. When you find somebody sharing a garbage file, you just have to tell an op. The op can then tell that person to remove that file and if they don't they are banned.

The fundamental problem with kazaa and similar p2p networks is the lack of ability to deal with "bad" users who share bogus files and such. There is an easy solution to this found at http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net/.

The Mentifex AI solution bypasses the famous Turing Test in favor of primitive AI Minds that must speciate and evolve.

The Association for Computing Machinery has reported twice (in 1998 and in 2004) on the Mentifex progress towards True AI.

AI has been solved but the claim of an AI solution *in* *theory* *only* arouses intense hostility on the 'Net.

Amazon Book Reviews are an example of vicious Mentifex-bashing where Slashdotters are invited to intervene with the well-known and widely admired Slashdot traditions of open-mindedness, fair play, and gentlemanly respect for the opinions of others.

Your name may shine forever in AI history if you read AI4U on line for free and write the definitive review of the solution to AI on Amazon.

The Mentifex AI solution bypasses the famous Turing Test in favor of primitive AI Minds that must speciate and evolve.

The Association for Computing Machinery has reported twice (in 1998 and in 2004) on the Mentifex progress towards True AI.

AI has been solved but the claim of an AI solution *in* *theory* *only* arouses intense hostility on the 'Net.

Amazon Book Reviews are an example of vicious Mentifex-bashing where Slashdotters are invited to intervene with the well-known and widely admired Slashdot traditions of open-mindedness, fair play, and gentlemanly respect for the opinions of others.

Your name may shine forever in AI history if you read AI4U on line for free and write the definitive review of the solution to AI on Amazon.

Re: Cleanup tools.

"windirstat" is great for finding large files. http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/

It was based on kdirstat. http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/

Someone made a Mac app based on that, called Disk Inventory X, here: http://www.derlien.com/

For OS X there's also OmniDiskSweeper, but it's $15 and not graphical. http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidiskswee per/

I have no problem finding a few gigs of old, forgotten files everytime I fire up one of those apps.

Re: Cleanup tools.

"windirstat" is great for finding large files. http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/

It was based on kdirstat. http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/

Someone made a Mac app based on that, called Disk Inventory X, here: http://www.derlien.com/

For OS X there's also OmniDiskSweeper, but it's $15 and not graphical. http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidiskswee per/

I have no problem finding a few gigs of old, forgotten files everytime I fire up one of those apps.

• Dashboard
• Piper for a while was trying to implement an entire new Unix desktop based on GUI-based command-line scripting, but never quite got off the ground, and eventually abandoned the idea.
• Knoppix and other liveCDs are innovative -- an entire operating system on a CD-ROM! -- though you might quibble with "prior art" in the form of boot disks that you'd use to play your DOS games. They didn't have entire filesystems on them, though, so I'd maintain that this was innovation. A Windows liveCD exists in a primitive form somewhere, I think, but I don't know anything about it.
• gaim and other pluggable communication programs -- Firefox and xchat spring to mind -- are very useful, and you can probably find a plugin on one of those programs that does what you want. To my knowledge, the furthest the proprietary world got in this direction was skinning, but I could be wrong.
• Also in this vein is KDE, specifically the use of DCOP to help automate GUI tasks. DCOP isn't very well known and you have to discover it, but it can be very useful.
• GNU Screen, to my knowledge, is one-of-a-kind software, though you might cite inspiration in terms of VNC programs, which I don't know much about.
• I believe the concept of numerous virtual terminals on the same physical terminal (ie. Alt-F1, Alt-F2) is not only unique to OSS, but unique to Linux.
• 
  Ethan

Over the last ten years, and especially the last three, I have become increasingly annoyed with online advertising and have done what I can to virtually eliminate it from showing its ugly face on my screen.

squid and adzapper which is currently replacing many ads with 1x1 transparent GIFs. This is especially handy because I tunnel all my web traffic at work over my 256k upstream DSL connection. Do I really want to be wasting bandwith with flashing or changing ads? /etc/hosts to eliminate things like ads.osdn.com, ads.doubleclick.net, and various others. Yeah, I could add them to adzapper but it's a lot more fun to just block them all together. It gives me a sense of accomplishment.

Any other ideas on how to surf ad free?

Another example of free software going where proprietary software cannot, or dares not, go.

I'm using AMP to manage everything. Everything I described in that post is fairly simple to do in the web GUI.

Opera state on their website that:

"We've cleaned up our front yard. The Opera 8 interface is designed to make the advanced functions easy and effective to use. Menus, toolbars and other elements have undergone our "slim and clean"-routine. The licensed version has the largest browsing area in the industry."

Admittedly I haven't had a chance to try Opera 8 yet (still waiting for the server to settle down), however if they can get the screen real estate you can achieve with the Firefox-based K-Meleon (in which you can have every single item, including menus, on the one line), then I'll be impressed, and probably switch back. I doubt that they'll be able to back the above claim up, however...

dnnrly, Take a look at the Truss Framework (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jdbgen/). This project started out because we had similar questions. The result is essentially design documentation for model driven architecture. Although the framework was originally intended for web-based database applications, we would like to hear other cases where it has been useful.

FreeDOS is nice (though about 20 years too late... isn't that always the way?). How about ELKS though? It's a 16-bit version of Linux, more or less. The project doesn't seem very active at the moment.

Of course, Minix is now free software...

Perhaps they were chosen to step on Matthew Grant's linux-based single-floppy distros "Eiger" and "Matterhorn".

Those were from the LRP, which is no more (LRP is dead, long live LEAF!)

Or maybe it's like Dilbert says, all the good code names have already been used (I myself am working on "project phlegm").

If you're a fan of the classic board game Battletech, try MegaMek. Its a net-play enabled clone of the board game, with an AI tacked on if you want to beat the heck out of defenseless silicon. Feature set and stability are good enough to keep a couple of thousand users, including a few persistent campaign servers, coming back for more. Disclosure: I code for it, so don't trust a word I say, try it for yourselves.

Warning: troll.

And a plagiarist.

(And that's a link to a Wiki. Call me paranoid, but I expect it to change.)

Can't you people use html? :-)

Firefox MSI
GPO support for Firefox

Positive example: OpenQuartz. They made a Free replacement for Quake I's content.

Take a look at Scuttle, a run your own style del.icio.us. You can try it out at http://scuttle.org/.

Seriously all of these tagged systems are much better than a flat hierarchy when it comes to reusing bookmarks. Plus having it in your own database or an RSS feed is quite useful. Select a tagged rss feed and add it to your site to display recently related bookmarks, I dig it. Just the ability to share alone makes the system worthwhile. No more digging through email to find a link someone sent you last year.

The public/private/shared scheme is nice too, but I haven't used it much yet. All in all, great project.

The only thing that Freeciv needs to come up to the standards of commercial Civ games is to port some of the nicer tile/unit graphics from some of the Civ 3 mods.

No, it also needs to implement the equivalent of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

Luckily, this seems to be under way, but it could use some help.

It's also Windows-only. I use both Linux and Mac OS, but not Windows.

On the bright side, however, I just discovered that FreeCraft apparently lives on as Stratagus. I'm gonna install that as soon as I can motivate myself to go find my Warcraft CD.

Is the on site documentation good enough or are there other resources you would recommend?

voip-info.org is like the bible of the VoIP/asterisk world. I definately recommend browsing around there before getting started, and keeping it bookmarked while you're installing and configuring asterisk.

I'm actually one of the developers for AMP, which is the web GUI that asterisk@home uses, and one of the biggest things I see is that there's a lot of people that want to just jump in thinking they don't need to know anything to get started. I'm not sure why this is, but you most definately need to understand basic concepts of a PBX, and some telephone technology, and how asterisk itself works in relation to those things. Most definately do not setup a mission-critical phone system (and I'd argue that any phone system used in a business instanly becomes mission-critical) without testing - a lot - first. Some people even setup test systems in their homes before hand.. and since the entry cost is so low, this is entirely possible. It's hard to recommend how much and what method to use for testing, since it varies depending on the size of your install. voip-info has some deployment tips though, that are probably very useful.

all hail the power of usenet ! :)

seriously, usenet is a far better place to download "stuff". with the development of better encoding schemes, the overhead of a binary attachment is only a few percent. see http://www.yenc.org/ (specs are public domain) and http://www.yenc32.com/ (gpl'd utilities). add miracle-like recovery schemes, such as http://parchive.sourceforge.net/ (listed as gpl'd on their project page) and usenet is far from being obsolete.... it's just most old-timers may have forgotten about it and newbies don't know it's there.

plenty of usenet providers tout a "no downloads logged" policy... so download to your heart's content, fill up that hard drive.. just remember to wait for what you want to be posted, don't post requests for anything that may be 'questionable' as to legality... ;)

plus, if there is something not kosher about a binary that's been posted (virus, trojan, not what it was claimed to be, corrupt, etc), replies to that fact follow pretty quickly after the original posting.

while the idea of usenet being nothing but smut and spam are partially true, there are a lot of useful groups out there. even a bunch that fall into the useful AND legal category. :) :)

The problem is when the prototype becomes the final product because TPTB don't want to waste money re-doing it.

That's indeed a huge problem. It's worth making the prototype look and act like a prototype. Fine ways to do that include Paper Prototyping, click-through mockups in plain HTML, and the Napkin Look-and-Feel. Also consider making the prototype obviously flawed in other ways. E.g., leaving stuff out, making graphics very low-res, adding long sleeps to make it slower, and so on.

Around 2002 (or 2001) I wrote a PHP and MySQL bookmark managing app that also uses tags to store information.

It's called BBPS and its GPLed.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bbps/

You can see a demo of it on my website:

http://edmz.org/bbps/

If you like it, consider donating some code to the project instead of starting your own. I've been on other projects and haven't had the time to update it. (But don't worry, it works as it is)

What we need is distributed trust: http://calvin.sourceforge.net/distributedtrust.htm l

Freeciv is an awesome game (thou the ai's too hard for me, but that's cause i suck).

There are plenty of other open source games that don't run on linux that have active game creating communities with some great artists that could use help. The rpg toolkit is an open source project that's written in vb. They have a sourceforge page. I've looked at the code and there's no reason this couldn't be ported to .net/mono using the sdl. This would make it run on linux. This would give hundreds of begining game developers and artists access to a community of people (oss people) who would play their games and give them feed back on how to make their games better.

I'm sure there are other programs that are floating around that could benifit from non-windows developers looking at their code. The whole more eye's thing doesn't work if eyes aren't looking.