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I have a similar story with a small dockapp called wmfuzzy that displays a time string.

When I switched to OpenBSD on a laptop, it didn't work. I informed the author, and he rewrote some code so it would. I tested it, found a few bugs, and told them of it. Although I couldn't code C at the time, I could read the asset reports and change the system clock so that the bugs would trigger.

Its a great feeling to submit a bug report in the morning and by the next day have a patched version of the code to test.

Its also nice to get a point release and credit in the changelog. :)

Another time, I was playing slash'em and I found that I could get some rather strange error messages with One-Eyed Sam in a certain scenerio. I talked to one of the developers on IRC, narrowed down the problem, and filed a bug report. Last I heard, it was fixed in the next release. (The bug wasn't a game-crashing bug, just slash'em realizing that the shop didn't have a shop keeper.)

For example, how many commercial software development jobs come with benefits like this ?

• Alexei Vladishev
• Francesco
• Gerbier Eric
• Jerome Couderc

"Media Player Classic" is a great alternative to quicktime, realplayer, and WMP. It's GNU, and works on about 90% of the media I've tried:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/

Full sets of codecs for it are at:
http://www.k-litecodecpack.com/

Based on my experience in the software industry, you don't have to go as far as to pick one of these pre-packaged development ideologies. You really need just three things, and in my experience, nobody bothers to even go this far.

1. Design documentation (i.e. what we're supposed to do)
2. Source-code comments (i.e. what we did)
3. Commit e-mails (i.e. how it changed over time)

(You can see how well I live up to my own standards here.)

To get a team of programmers to work together, one must actually implement the physical communication they need to mesh together and produce something that's greater than the sum of the parts. That means you need a method for bringing new programmers up to speed, and for allowing existing programmers to change projects or to contribute to projects, in a way that doesn't rely on other programmers (especially if those other programmers no longer work there). The three items listed above are all you really need.

The key is to actually do these things...in my 12 years in the software industry, I've seen these things done properly exactly zero times, and was even fired once after the company president told me they were never going to do anything like this, and that it wasn't needed anyway. Eeek.

mplayer -dumpstream <.rm file>

mplayer -dumpstream <.rm file>

If you're on windows, Real Alternative and MPC Media Player Classic will do the job without having to install evil realplayer.

The Airtunes device also supports 5.1 DTS sound.

Speaking of 5.1, does anyone know what decent 5.1 soundcard works well in Linux? I'm not an audiophile, so I'm speaking about a typical consumer product.

On a side note, I've just setup a small office (all Fedora 3 workstations). The fileserver is connected to the stereo and I found this project called Tunez. (with a 5.1 capable receiver, which is why the need for a linux supported 5.1 soundcard).
If anyone has one stereo system in the office that everyone shares, I highly recommend using Tunez as it allows your co-workers to choose and vote on songs in the playlist.

Here's one way.... Get a small computer, big harddrive.

Get an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 (~$100) and maybe a right-angle PCI adapter to fit it into your little BTX box or whatever. Load your OS of choice. You've already got plans for the rest - that way should be just fine. Rip your stuff onto the drive (encode with FLAC), hook it up to an amplifier, and you're all set.

The 2496 has already got RCA IN/OUT and Digital connectors (read the specifics on compatibility and what you can and cannot use at the same time) making hookup easy. It will also record at impressive rates and resolutions (playback too if you've got fancy hi-res sources). You can find drivers for most of the following at OSS (these are commercial drivers that run ~$50 for the most common OSs that include free tech support and upgrades for 2 years).

* Linux (x86, Alpha, PowerPC)
* VxWorks (Tornado)
* LynxOS (x86, PowerPC)
* SCO Open Server
* SCO UnixWare
* Solaris (x86, Sparc)
* IBM AIX
* FreeBSD
* BSD/OS
* OpenBSD
* NetBSD
* HP-UX

You could buy a mixer and some mics to do some high quality recordings too. (I've picked up a 10 channel Yamaha mixer [MG10/2] w/ 4 mic inputs (phantom capable) for $99 and a Samson CO2 matched pair of small condensers for ~$120 at Sam Ash to do recordings with a setup very similar to that above and it worked quite well.) No experience with the OSS drivers but they seem to be responsive to email inquirys about specifics and have a free trial available.

I dream of a portable custom BSD based solution that has easy controls (serial keypad and LCD - "real" buttons and switches), could be setup for automated recordings, has a builtin mixer, microphone inputs (phantom powered for my dream large condenser pair), and speaker/headphone driver, AND is powerful enough to run baudline for use in the field. Background processes could compress material as I was recording (incremental, selectively, to be sure you could grab the entire recording - even if your quality had to suffer - but you'd get the highest possible of any given event). The network interface could stream audio at selectable bitrates (.ogg peeling) OR amplify a stream like an internet radio station. AND it could do my laundry for me and fit in a backpack. If anybody else would be interesed in something like this please contact me and I'd love to collaborate. [ bricoleur !AT! 80d !DOT! org ]

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=44 9291 The projects listed on SourceForge

• Your ASUS V7100 video input is fully supported by the rivatv driver.
• Although the SF page lists this as alpha, I have had no problem making the video output work on my own very similar graphics card.
• Here's a link to one of the many promise raid howtos for linux. I have personally made the promise raid on my own motherboard work.

• Your ASUS V7100 video input is fully supported by the rivatv driver.
• Although the SF page lists this as alpha, I have had no problem making the video output work on my own very similar graphics card.
• Here's a link to one of the many promise raid howtos for linux. I have personally made the promise raid on my own motherboard work.

They have it, why not create a sourceforge like site for their own projects

or do they plan to donate some money to it to help it all as a whole??

You really should consider some type of lossless compression. The "headache" is minimal, and although it isn't the 10x compression of its lossy brethern, 2x is nothing to completely ignore. http://flac.sourceforge.net/

I'm at IBM Watson, down the hall from one of the Performance Explorer (PE) guys, and I just went up to ask about it. PE did indeed go over, and it's licensed under the IBM CPL, which is very similar to the Apache Public License (APL). The CPL isn't just "generally an open-source license," it's been certified as one by the OSDI. One of the authors of PE is a graduate student, and he's been pretty busy with his own life right now. It probably won't make it out at the end of this month. We're nudging the authors, anyway. They just want to get the code into better shape for release. PE is a sub-project of Jikes RVM, a free VM for Java project I develop on, and it's at http://jikesrvm.sourceforge.net . I'm sorry to say that, right now, the PE directory in our CVS repository is just a placeholder.

• How often are functions called (and branches taken)
  
• Which functions take most of the time
  
• See the assembler code for each line with a mouse click (no need to guess anymore)

Although WINE might not actually be an emulator, I wouldn't count on the name to prove that.

Take for example LAME which stands for "LAME ain't an MP3 encoder", and on their site the first line says: "LAME is an LGPL MP3 encoder".

You may want to look into Dosbox http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1 so you can get rid of 98 and not have to reboot. It may do what you need.

An emulator emulates a CPU or platform. VMWare is an emulator, because it emulates an x86 host system.

Except that it doesn't, which is why VMWare is NOT an emulator - VMWare cannot be run on non-X86 hardware. It actually uses 386 Enhanced mode to "split" the CPU into multiple logical CPUs, minimizing performance costs in so doing.

An actual X86 emulator is BOCHS.

The idea is actually already used in the ndiswrapper project. This is a project that allows Windows network drivers to operate under Linux. The main purpose of this project is to support writeless adapters for which there are no Linux drivers.
Marcel

Unfortunately all of their projects will show zero files committed until they get this Nov. 2003 issue fixed.

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

Some vendors do not release specifications of the hardware or provide a linux driver for their wireless network cards. This project provides a linux kernel module that loads and runs Ndis (Windows network driver API) drivers supplied by the vendors.

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

Project implements the first full read/write free access to NTFS disk drives. You can mount your Microsoft Windows NT, 200x or XP partition as a transparently accessible volume for your GNU/Linux.

This compatibility was achieved in the Wine way by using the original Microsoft Windows ntfs.sys driver. It emulates the required subsystems of the Microsoft Windows kernel by reusing one of the original ntoskrnl.exe, ReactOS parts, or this project's own reimplementations, on a case by case basis. Project includes the first open source MS-Windows kernel API for Free operating systems. Involvement of the original driver files was chosen to achieve the best and unprecedented filesystem compatibility and safety.

(you can use the FUSE LUFS wrapper to run this, as LUFS is now unmaintained).

see also PNG files with some studies of the network http://larytet.sourceforge.net/images/tests/

client is only 250B size and was created with performance in mind. You can run multiple clients on the same PC (this is what you see in PNG files) and evaluate the network performance

see also PNG files with some studies of the network http://larytet.sourceforge.net/images/tests/

client is only 250B size and was created with performance in mind. You can run multiple clients on the same PC (this is what you see in PNG files) and evaluate the network performance

See Proximodo. Still in alpha.

W.I.N.E.
Wine Is Not an Emulator.

[blockquote]Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows binaries to run on x86-based Unixes.[/blockquote]

Wine

colinux,NdisWrapper If MS were to do as he has described, it would more likely serve as a migration mechanism and would ultimatly harm Windows dominance in profound ways.

I submit to you all that Dvorak doesnt even try anymore. Industry prognosticator he is not.

So I ask, why not create code that would allow you to use Windows drivers on Linux?

There is. Its called ndiswrapper. From what I understand, it will 'translate' the MS API into Linux, allowing you to use MS drivers in Linux.

I don't know all the details, but I know that it worked for me in getting a Netgear 802.11g card to work under Mandrake. I ended up finding a native Linux driver a week later, but in the meantime the card worked, and wasn't very difficult to get running.

It seems to me that if you take Dvorak's comments to their logical conclusion that:

* MS can kill Linux because Linux doesn't have full driver support;

* Therefore, Linux can kill MS by implementing driver support.

Somehow, I believe that it is far more likely that the community, and the hardware vendors, will make Linux drivers available long before Redmond can figure out how to release Linux without a GPL.

M.

How About Kenosis and Rodi both open source and a distributed bittorent idea .Exceem uses libtorrent a open source libary and a proprieatarty supernode system and the code base is encrypted but no encryption is used to protect the end user it also logs into a central server to retrive supernodes not safe at all and maybe suspicious.

http://kenosis.sourceforge.net/
http://larytet.sourceforge.net/btRat.shtml

How About Kenosis and Rodi both open source and a distributed bittorent idea .Exceem uses libtorrent a open source libary and a proprieatarty supernode system and the code base is encrypted but no encryption is used to protect the end user it also logs into a central server to retrive supernodes not safe at all and maybe suspicious.

http://kenosis.sourceforge.net/
http://larytet.sourceforge.net/btRat.shtml

What you need to use is something like regdump, I've started to use it to convert windows settings into Linux settings transparently, but you can use it to make sure nothing modified the registry.

If only Microsoft open sourced their registry code so that everyone could compile a fresh, untouched version.


Fresh from the sourceforge.net project BeeHive...

regdump-0.0.1

This is very, very alpha. But hey, it's a start right?

GENERAL NOTES:
The code provided shows a general implementation which can read Microsoft
Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 hive files. (Note: Win2K has a very
different appearance internally (data) but the hive files are same in
their structure.) I decided to make the output marginally useful so the
contents of the hive file are dumped to stdout in REGEDIT4 format so you
can do something like: ./regdump NTUSER.DAT > backup_profile.reg

1) A dv movie editor - no idea on linux

kino edits DV natively. There are a bunch of Linux audio/video editing programs listed here.

You'll probably also want mjpegtools to turn DV into VideoCDs and DVDs.

I use phpicalendar and Apple's iCal to do this. You have to have a separate calendar for each subset of information, but they all appear at the same time (in different transparent colors) and it works really well. You can even password protect different calendars (although I don't bother). It requires some admin work to get setup, but once it is running it is rock solid.

But fortunately, I've got 1GB of RAM, and there's barely any spyware, so I'm ok with it now. I just wish I didn't have to put either Dillo for Linux or IE6 on Win98 for those old late Pentium Is / early Pentium IIs I fix up for people in my spare time, since Firefox is a nice browser despite its flaws. Too bad it won't run decently on anything less than a Pentium III with 256MB of RAM.

Wine Is Not an Emulator. It just reimplements the Windows API under different OSs, so you still need an x86 compatible CPU for it to work. Bochs OTOH is an emulator, and apparently supports MacOS (as well as other machines). No guarantees upon performence though!

Divx sucks, nobody has used that crap in a long time. If you use compressed content then xvid is current

If you use compressed content then xvid is current. Since DVD burners have gone sub $100 and 3mbit connections are common, actual dvd-r images are becoming vogue.

Fortunately, the algorithms used are good enough that it's not usually noticable. (Note that I said `not usually' -- there are certainly cases where you can notice the compression artifacts.)

If you want video that's not compressed, get a Video Disc player. They're analog, though some do have a CD quality digital soundtrack. Or a VHS tape deck.

Did we already try this? http://web.archive.org/web/20010223211530/http://w ww.ogsproject.org/ in 2001! It even made it onto /. http://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/13/1854219.shtm l. Did it go anywhere? no!

Why not look at something that is useful outside of groupware like building on top of syncML or using xmlrpc/soap or something that is designed for real time data exhange. Then you can hook other applications into your groupware too, not simply share between a handful of groupware platforms. DAV+[i|v]Ca[l|rd] looks nice and suggests supporting existing open standards, but it isn't a real solution.

I don't have all the answers but, here goes for a list of the problems I see with with GroupDAV:

* DAV is designed for file storage
* [i|v]Ca[l|rd] is designed for import/export not sharing
* What else uses this "standard"
* Why go for something which is lowest common domininator?
* Shouldn't efficiency of the protocol, not the speed of a few apps implementing it be the major considration?

Side question - has any other groupware suites been invited to participate? Like "FOSS Champion" Novell's Groupwise or Open Souce Crusader IBM's subsiduary Lotus with Notes? What about any of these http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft &forum_id=0&group_id=0&atid=0&words=groupware&Sear ch=Search?

Come on we can do better than a half baked concept that has taken 4 years to go anywhere - technology moves on - and we should too!

Just set them up with a K12LTSP Lab

Then send the students home with one of these disks.

Under no circumstances should it ever be a requirement to teach kids brand loyalty.
Learning computers in school should be about concepts. Not the latest features of some proprietary Office suite.

Tux4Kids

Kinda surprised Bill Kendrick hasn't allready been promoting this.

Linux Leters and Numbers

Kstars and other regular software like OOo or Abiword or Koffice.

Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab (the big 3 for commercial mathematics software) are probably a little on the high powered side for high school. That's not to say high school students couldn't learn a lot from using them, merely that the price tag for such software just isn't going to be justified by the usage.

You can get similar stuff for free in Octave and Maxima. Neither are as complete as the 3 mentioned, but then I doubt many high school students will be using Maple's ability to generate the Galois group of a polynomial. Octave and Maxima (and R for Statistics) should be enough for most high school level work.

As an off topic note, Maple for Linux really hasn't been as well maintained as the Windows version in the last few releases, and has tended to be slower/buggier (at least in the GUI interface department). I'd suggest Mathematica would be a better bet under the circumstances.

Jedidiah.

What educational software packages are available for Linux?

I'm not sure what you're looking for exactly, but off the top of my head (and a little freshmeat help):

Primary school level: Gcompris is great, has a large bundle of games targetting everything from spelling to geography to math, and is easily extensible.

Astronomy: Both Celestia and Stellarium provide great tools for teaching kids of all levels about our universe.

Mathematics: You can use basic spreadsheets if you like, but there's also Octave for vector and matrix mathematics and Maxima (and several others that I can't recall right now) for symbolic algebra.

Chemistry: There's stuff like Ghemical and Gperiodic which aren't half bad for exploring various chemistry concepts. Then there's stuff like GenChemLab which is pretty neat.

Physics: There's physics simulation software like Physics3D , and there are others around if you care to look.

Computing: Well, you've got all the programming tools you want, but also things like DrPython to make it easier/fun for students (even at lower school levels).

General knowledge: Wikipedia is accessible from anywhere.

Okay, there's a science bias there, but it's not a bad start for what I can think of, or find in 2 minutes of freshmeat.

Jedidiah.

What educational software packages are available for Linux?

I'm not sure what you're looking for exactly, but off the top of my head (and a little freshmeat help):

Primary school level: Gcompris is great, has a large bundle of games targetting everything from spelling to geography to math, and is easily extensible.

Astronomy: Both Celestia and Stellarium provide great tools for teaching kids of all levels about our universe.

Mathematics: You can use basic spreadsheets if you like, but there's also Octave for vector and matrix mathematics and Maxima (and several others that I can't recall right now) for symbolic algebra.

Chemistry: There's stuff like Ghemical and Gperiodic which aren't half bad for exploring various chemistry concepts. Then there's stuff like GenChemLab which is pretty neat.

Physics: There's physics simulation software like Physics3D , and there are others around if you care to look.

Computing: Well, you've got all the programming tools you want, but also things like DrPython to make it easier/fun for students (even at lower school levels).

General knowledge: Wikipedia is accessible from anywhere.

Okay, there's a science bias there, but it's not a bad start for what I can think of, or find in 2 minutes of freshmeat.

Jedidiah.

Well Maple IS nice and all, but Maxima is free (speech and beer), it's quite nice too, it uses a similar interface (Maple copied Maxima/Macsyma, in a look-and-feely kind of way) and is nicely apt-gettable from a net-connected Debian box.

Yes Maxima has been ported to Windows too, but then again, a lot of good open source software has - that's the nature of the beast. Showing the IT blokes/blokesses at the school a computer that doesn't get raped by spyware after 2 minutes of internet use is probably a bigger selling point.

All my foes are spelling or grammar Nazis.

Maybe this will help you to get rid of them.

DOSBox

You have the classic battle between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office.
After just Linux and OpenOffice installed, it will be evident the advantages are much greater than using Microsoft products, namely because of the price. If these guys are donating thousands of computers to schools, reducing software price from $200-300 per unit to $0 is going to enable them to construct out quite a bit more labs.

There are quite a few Gnome applications which would help in everyday usability. Of course, Gnome or KDE would probably be your desktop of choice, especially if the organization is coming off of Microsoft Explorer; keep it familiar to effectively show advantages.

You didn't specify what type of educational environment the labs target, but for programming Anjuta is a great alternative to Microsoft Visual C++.

A few other mentionable applications would include Mozilla Firefox (over Microsoft Internet Explorer), and The Gimp (over Photoshop).

For networking with existing Windows labs, Samba is an effective alternative.

As far as programs, Debian has several, but don't forget to check out Sourceforge and Freshmeat for software.