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shiv:~# packit -m inject -d <target_ip> -F S -s <target_ip> -S 135 -D 135 -c 20

> Here is a hint, all those apps that Fedora installs is not part of Linux, they are 3rd party

Sheer brilliance here. Going to a dozen different websites, crawling through ads and hoping to find the few "trusted" mirrors
that won't dump a purple monkey spyware onto my system, or getting GPG-signed packages straight from the vendor of my
distribution? If that sounds the same to you, then I postulate that you are a monkey.

> you do realize those codecs Mplayer are using aren't put there by the bit fairies right?

No, they're put there by Fabrice Bellard, and God bless him for the good work he does.

> To play an avi file in a web browser on Windows I install a codec.

You do realize those codecs don't appear on your hard drive thanks to http client socket faeries, don't you? You have
to pick through virus-laden pr0n sites to get them, and then fire up one of the 3 or 4 adware players to use them.
And, if you succeed in throwing together all the codecs that are supported by the combination of ffmpeg (linked above
for your convenience, monkey) and the one big tarball from the mplayer site, then maybe you're smarter than your posting
habits make you sound.

> You don't need to defrag every day, you don't need to purge temporary internet files, don't run any software from
> places you don't trust(you know, like you do in linux) and you wont get a virus, and actually pay attention when
> you surf instead of hitting the enter button blindly and you wont get spyware

Please explain your rules to the man who's concerned about being able to "just drive" his computer without
maintainence. My apt-get dist-upgrade keeps me secure and has all the software that I'll probably ever want to
install.

> Linux does not cure stupidity, but I guess it lets you hide it better

And all's well that ends well, ok? So I'll end this shit with a "FUCK you, but have a nice day!"

"pdf output;"

You can get this with a couple free programs for windows. I have PDFCreator
and it works fine. Slightly harder to use than choosing export to PDF from the menu, but not much harder.

I'm also going to add a subjective disadvantage to OOo: it's butt ugly. It looks like 2.0 fixed this, but I use Word when I'm in Windows mostly because I can't stand the interface of OOo.

Also, I'm going to add another esoteric benefit to Word: the revision markers (track changes) are much better in Word, especially the deleted text. Word puts the deleted text off to the side with an arrow pointing into the body to where it was removed from; OOo crosses out the deleted text in-place. That means that if you're reading a document that is tracking revisions, the deleted text interrupts your flow and makes it harder to read.

• Visual Studio .Net Professional 2003 - $528.66
• Office 2003 Standard UPGRADE - $228.59
• Windows XP Professional w/ SP2 - $308.77
• Switching to Linux/OpenOffice/Something from SourceForge - priceless

Best of all, it doesn't cost 350, or even 150 dollars! Seriously though, all you need is a 30 dollar Microsoft trackball (one of their few good products) and a 10 dollar memorex keyboard, and you're good to go. If you're having ergonomic issues with those, then you're doing something wrong.

Ugh, going in reverse chronological order, I am now a little sick to the stomach of the idea of making yet another layer of abstraction on top of all the various GUI/Sound toolkits out there. While this is a neat idea (and perhaps even marketable), I could easily see it ending up in the same exact "problem" we have now (ie, too many toolkits). I say "problem" because many who think that having all these choices are a bad thing are short sighted. Consistency is one thing, but mandating that everyone use the same tools is just stupid. Choice isn't the problem; incompatibility, inconsistency and bad design are.

Anyway, back to my original subject, I found one project (Generalized Interface Toolkit) which looks to kinda-sorta do what I described in my previous post (which, yes, I am responding to). Looking at this project, it became apparent that this wasn't exactly what I wanted, and my goals don't align up perfectly with theirs, so I would probably have to start a project of my own if I wanted to see my ends met. This got me thinking about Doing-It-Yourselfness, as well as choice, and one synapse lead to another, and I started to get queasy thinking about how GITK is (and my project would become) just another layer of abstraction competing for the same mindshare. Don't get me wrong, abstraction can be good and useful, but when taken too far, or used unecessarily, it confuses people and slows things down.

Anyway, I guess my point is that while it might be useful to some ("write once for ALL Linux GUI's!"), the idea also sort of disgusts me. As with many ideas that disgust me, however, it would probably make a lot of money. Look for your copy of GUI Uber Alles(tm) at a computer store near you soon!

Wow! A ship with a PC, 2 cash registers and a mixing desk in the cockpit! :P It's a wonder he can see where he's going with all that stuff piled on the dash.

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/gallery/vegastri ke_mod/pirate_ejection

Yes, Windows most likely can support that. I mean, it does support ext3, ReiserFS, and even ext2 with write support. So I think there's nothing technically in the way. The problem is probably being lack of driver developers. ;-)

Microsoft needs to keep everything locked up. NTFS was good enough for a while but now the linux driver is maturing to the point where it is no longer a weapon. Remember, with Microsoft, everything is security through obscurity. And that goes for their financial security as well.

You are buying too much into MS concept that operating system includes one standard UI. I am sure Gnome and KDE have all kind of configuration files not covered in POSIX. On the other hand, most Linux apps, including Gnome and KDE, compile and run on OSX without any drastic code changes. Why would you say OSX is less "UNIX" than Redhat then?

Whoops. Apparently, Crusader used a modified Ultima 8 engine, so it's a Pentagram issue, but I found an interesting screenshot on the Pentagram sourceforge site.
http://pentagram.sourceforge.net/images/screenshot s/noremorse.png

which one?

Check out UFO2000, a multiplayer xcom game that will run on linux! As well, you could always play the original using dosbox.

Check out UFO2000, a multiplayer xcom game that will run on linux! As well, you could always play the original using dosbox.

if you want the thing.. grab it here
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wcuniverse/priv ateer1.0.exe?download

They link to a Source Forge Gallery of screenshots. They also warn that there are spoilers in the gallery.

Here is one of the Ultima remakes of which they speak. One of the best games ever made.

It is a lack of humans willing to produce content for these games.

Have you looked at Vega Strike?
Homepage

Photo caption: "Four people who are perfectly happy with 64 KB of memory, a 1 MHz processor, and 16-color graphics"

Says it all right there! Now how do I run catakig on my i686?

With GTK, you are tied to X, [...]

And, for GTK on Linux without X, you can run SDL... as there has been some work on getting the two working together.

With GTK, you are tied to X, [...]

And, for GTK on Linux without X, you can run SDL... as there has been some work on getting the two working together.

With GTK, you are tied to X

Tied to X? Sure doesn't look that way to me...

Even if you're not a developper, you can contribute! Good documentation is hard to write. Graphics are hard to draw. Wether you're a designer or just a "plain old folk", you can write for OpenSource projects. Heck, even if you can't contribute of your time, how about a small donation to keep those people running?

You can help having an even better database backend by helping the fantastic folks working on this behind the scene. They really deserve it!

That's so true, especially that Firefox isn't even the best browser choice on anything but Windows. There's a plethora of Gecko-based browsers available for Linux: such as Galeon or Epiphany for Gnome, or actually Konqueror for KDE, which I hear can use Gecko as a rendering engine. All these use native toolkits for displaying their user interfaces, thusly they're much faster and more look-and-feel-comformant than Firefox can ever hope to be.

(As a personal opinion: honestly, I can't see why one would want to use Firefox under Linux at all.)

People have lots and lots of data in formats that are only supported by proprietary Windows software. For example, my elderly neighbor has megabytes worth of genealogical material (digitized wills, etc.) on her Windows box in a format that she can only use with the proprietary genealogy software she bought.

well, now you know why we keep saying that proprietary formats are bad... and as for genealogical formats... GRAMPS handles gedcom format with no problems (as long as the program that created followed the standard correctly that is)... so you've lost that cop-out excuse. ;)

Linux PBX based ISO, Asterisk@Home
You still need some hardware though!

HSQLDB, which is a full SQL DB, is certainly capable of using foreign keys, as can be seen in the feature list. If this feature is not in Open Office 2.0, maybe we might see this being used in a later version. On the other hand for the average person a flat database is usually a good start, since anything beyond basic roledex style records is probably handed off to the 'IT guys'.

HSQLDB, which is a full SQL DB, is certainly capable of using foreign keys, as can be seen in the feature list. If this feature is not in Open Office 2.0, maybe we might see this being used in a later version. On the other hand for the average person a flat database is usually a good start, since anything beyond basic roledex style records is probably handed off to the 'IT guys'.

There isn't a file manager I'm personally satisfied with.

Have you had a look at ROX? It's small, fast, and has some nice shell integration (eg. you can navigate directories/files as you would in bash, with tab completion, etc; you can run shell commands in a minibuffer; a command to open a terminal at the directory you're browsing ...) - it even provides a desktop and will automatically mount and unmount devices, if that floats your boat (you don't need to have it enabled)

Personally, I use IceWM for windowmanagement (it's fast, more themeable than *box variants and provides a nice taskbar) coupled with ROX. I noticed the other day that this combo is what VectorLinux provides as an alternative to KDE, so obviously I'm not the only one using the two.

There isn't a file manager I'm personally satisfied with.

Have you had a look at ROX? It's small, fast, and has some nice shell integration (eg. you can navigate directories/files as you would in bash, with tab completion, etc; you can run shell commands in a minibuffer; a command to open a terminal at the directory you're browsing ...) - it even provides a desktop and will automatically mount and unmount devices, if that floats your boat (you don't need to have it enabled)

Personally, I use IceWM for windowmanagement (it's fast, more themeable than *box variants and provides a nice taskbar) coupled with ROX. I noticed the other day that this combo is what VectorLinux provides as an alternative to KDE, so obviously I'm not the only one using the two.

Check out KILE too.

XP Home Edition lacks the ability to turn off "simple file sharing" which also means no access to the NTFS Security GUI when running in normal mode.

There are workarounds, however, and I ran a Home Edition workstation with fine-grained ACLs for a while before eventually upgrading to Professional for other reasons.

1) Booting into Safe Mode will give access to the Security tab in Home Edition. This is obviously not convenient for day-to-day changes but is useful for major changes and setting up the system initially.
2) The command line tool CACLS ("Change ACLs") is available in Home Edition just as in Professional. CACLS does not provide full access to all NTFS permission settings, but handles most that would be used for general use.

Combining these two is enough to get anything done, but for more convenient full access to NTFS permissions settings from the command line without having to boot into Safe Mode in Home Edition, I recommend checking SetACL and SubInACL

WiMAX has a theoretical bandwidth (warning: pdf, see pg 5) of about 4.5Mbps per 3.5Mhz channel (outdoors, range 15km)

Thanks a million. I'm hoping it's suburban outdoor so I can download important stuff faster there. You know, like Vega Strike or something. <offtopic>I wouldn't put "warning: pdf" though--at least for those who have broadband and version 7. I have it on now and I was able to get to that page without waiting for no stinkin' badges. I mean, plugins. They know how important that is--just look at the first list item. (Version 6 users know what to do.)</offtopic>

DOSEMU stands for DOS Emulation, and allows you to run DOS and many DOS programs, including many DPMI applications such as DOOM and Windows 3.1, under Linux.

DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that uses the SDL-library which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. DOSBox has already been ported to many different platforms, such as Windows, BeOS, Linux, MacOS X...

Ouch, ouch, ouch. May I suggest installing SpellBound for Firefox to clear up your little... ahem.. problem?

No, probably links. Yes, we fully understand that a web browser exists named lynx. Good show.

Is FreeType 2 affected by the patents ?

The answer is no for any recent build of FreeType 2, since it comes with a "auto-hinting" module that was specifically designed to completely ignore the TrueType bytecodes.

Myth 2: Apple is suing (or sued) FreeType

This complete myth apparently started with this article on the SlashDot news site. Too bad the editors didn't care to check the submitted link nor even tried to contact us, we could have helped them !!

I don't really believe that. As I mention on the web page, ALAC is very similar to FLAC - however it is slightly more complicated, not less. It requires more CPU power to decode ALAC than it does to decode FLAC. That said, it should generally have a better rate of compression.

http://members.home.nl/w.speek/comparison.htm
http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html

NOOOOOOOOO. I hate iTunes! I think it is as ugly as sin!

I use Gtkpd. It looks a lot better, automatically handles the mounting of my iPod, and my favorite distro has a package for the newest version in the developtment branch (Ubuntu). I will never use such an ugly program like iTunes to connect to such a pretty device (plus my friends that use it say that it wipes off any new music that they added elsewhere when they use iTunes!)

From the page you linked:

Is FreeType 2 affected by the patents ?

The answer is no for any recent build of FreeType 2, since it comes with a "auto-hinting" module that was specifically designed to completely ignore the TrueType bytecodes. -- FreeType and Patents

FLAC is significantly smaller, but it takes significantly longer to encode

Font hinting is needed (as opposed to just being nice to have) in the following two situations:

• International text. Now, this problem has sort of been hidden for a while because most Chinese/Japanese users were using bitmapped fonts, because there aren't many fonts which cover all the glyphs these languages use and they are mostly pretty old-skool, especially on Linux. But these days more TrueType fonts for non-Latin scripts are coming out and for these character sets real hinting (by which I mean, interpreting the TrueType VM opcodes) is essential. The auto-hinter mangles them. Or at least, this is what I have been told by somebody who knows.

• Windows compatibility. There are two aspects to this. The first is being able to correctly import MS Office documents, which have a tendency to change size or lay out incorrectly if you are using the wrong fonts - or crucially, using the right fonts but without the same hinting engines. That's because the resulting rendered glyphs are not metrically compatible, which is just a fancy way of saying the letters are different sizes. Metric compatibility is a rather tough challenge, and the auto-hinter does not attempt to be compatible with real hinting metrically (indeed, I am not even sure it could be).

  The other aspect is Win32 programs on Wine. Wine uses FreeType to render text, like nearly all Linux programs do, and because the Win32 widget toolkit is positional incorrect metrics can cause labels to be wrapped or clipped, causing GUI corruption. Therefore correct hinting is essential.

Hopefully you see now why it would be a useful ability to have, even though the work of David Turner on the auto-hinting algorithms is truly great.

For more information on the (complex) issues behind font rendering and hinting you can read about it here.

Or you can use a GPLed version for the computer: Robo Rally in Java (minus option cards)
If you know how to use CVS (and have Apache Ant or Eclipse installed) I recommend the CVS version though.
(Project page on Sourcforge)
<shameless plug>

Or you can use a GPLed version for the computer: Robo Rally in Java (minus option cards)
If you know how to use CVS (and have Apache Ant or Eclipse installed) I recommend the CVS version though.
(Project page on Sourcforge)
<shameless plug>

That piece of software is great, it uses a lot of interesting tricks to work in such small memory footprint. Adam itself helped me to implement it on mi own pet OS Picix , for te PIC18 microcontrollers, and works very well. It almost fills a 10Base-T card, and the processor is only 8 bit and 40 mhz!

OK, so hinting and anti-aliasing are different things. You can use both, or none, or one of either, it doesn't matter.

Hinting is about correctly grid fitting the pixels. It can (and should) be used at any size, but is most noticable at small sizes (which is most text on a computer screen). If you want to see text that isn't hinted, look at this.

So to say "hinting is ugly" is not correct: hinting by itself modifies glyph shapes, for the better (that's why people want it). As you can see from the picture, unhinted text is very ugly indeed - unpleasant to read in fact. What you probably mean is that some people don't like anti-aliasing. On Windows it's off by default,on Linux it's on but you can disable it globally very easily, and on MacOS X you cannot disable it without special purpose hacks that often break when you upgrade.

FreeType is capable of anti-aliasing and also using TrueType hinting, which it can do in one of two modes: automatic and by using the data embedded in the fonts. In automatic mode it tries to guess based on the shapes of the glyphs. The algorithms used are fascinating and developed specifically for FreeType, to work around the patent. However the autohinter doesn't always get it right so FreeType can also use the real hinting engine it is supposed to use, if you have a license.

"Font smoothing" is just another way of saying anti-aliasing, except in that thread you linked to where they appear to be using it to refer to what is normally known as sub-pixel anti-aliasing which exploits properties of how pixels are laid out on LCDs to make it look better. Microsoft calls this "ClearType". FreeType can do this too.

In short: hinting and anti-aliasing/smoothing are different things, which have different purposes. It's possible to have one without the other.

You find it in the contiki CVS.

Have a look at http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html/...