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Tenebrae is a great example of a free open-source game engine with linux support. It even supports pixel shaders and 3d audio.

Also, the MS page linked above is for their optional "Plus" pack, not for the base XP system (which comes with, what? Solitaire, hearts, minesweeper? Do we now have a more advanced MCSEHS qualification? - Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert and Hearts Shark). I do notice an ominous counter to one FOSS advantage, though, a "365 tips from users like you" section.

In the mean time, you can try Morphix Gamer bootable CD... I think it's a good start...

From the Game module Page:
listing of games:

Enemy Territory (in seperate minimodule, but in the default iso)
BZflag
Frozen Bubble
Freeciv
Freecraft
pysol: solitaire
xmame (non-free): arcade games.
ZSNES: SNES games.
and heaps, heaps more. help me out and add to this list (ideas & suggestions are welcome too!)

Other games available as minimodules:

q3a demo
ut2k3 demo

Iso Download

Some examples of when they've done this ? Certainly not with media players or web browsers.

The only "hard" thing about installing Realplayer or Quicktime player is trying to uninstall them again once you realise how incomprehensibly *bad* they are at actually playing media.

I, personally, am a fan of Media Player Classic. However, if given a choice between Realplayer, Quicktime Player and WMP, WMP is so clearly superior in pretty much every way the decision makes itself.

Get the ISO
The morphix site

See The New Adventure Shell. :)

But it isn't getting your pimply teenagers buying into Linux. They want big shiny games with graphics and extra blood, not games with plots and purpose and entertaining and replayable (damn, I sound like an old man...)

There's always NetHack - Falcon's Eye if you want shiny graphics.

software mixing is JACK's job.

Running legacy DOS games natively is a pain when it's not impossible, but the DosBox emulator does a really good job at it, and there are builds available for all major operating systems.

Yes.

...DOOM .

The source is there for multiple platforms, lots of WADs are out there, lots of utilities are around... good times.

Crush seems to have an awful lot of overhead for an OS language.

Oh, I see that it has unsafe pointers for when you want to avoid garbage collection, right? But wait, doesn't that make it an unsafe language?

And it's nice that you can switch between dynamic and static typing, because I sure as hell wouldn't want type inference in my kernel, but can the safety checks be done statically? I guess not, that'd be undecidable, right?

If Crush has "no primitive types or constructs", what's this "raw core" the Introduction talks about?

Do these guys actually have any idea what they're doing? Designing a modern programming language and designing an operating system are both monumental tasks. I hope they're at least having fun...

If and when zero install catches on, you won't have to. Depending on your definition of installation, it makes installing software either non-existant or completely transparent.

You could complain about C all day, the problem is, it's the best thing we have right now.
Hardly.

One of the problem with modern languages is, you can't write an operating system in them.
Sure you can, with little more ASM code than is required for a C-based operating system. Heck, lots of OSs have been written in things like Lisp. Actually, C is a terrible language for writing operating systems. Because its not safe, you have to have an MMU to protect programs from each other. This sucks for performance. Not only do you have the hit of memory protection, but you have to have bounderies between userspace and kernelspace, and between programs. That's why it takes 600(!) clock cycles on my P4 to do something trivially simple like gettimeofday()! If you use a safe language, you don't need memory protection, or even a kernel/userspace boundry for that matter. You get completely fine-grained protection for all objects. See this SF project for an OS written in a safe language.

One of the problems is half the new languages are scripting perl/python like langauges and the rest compile to byte code.
I don't know what's the current fetish with VMs, but most of the really advanced languages (Lisp, ML) compile to well-optimized native code. Look at the recent comp.lang.lisp thread where they ported Almabench to CMUCL, and got within a few percent the performance of C.

Maybe C would go away if there was a compiled langauge that wasn't largely controlled by one company that produced fast code and was portable.
Common Lisp
Another Common Lisp
Ocaml
Scheme
Dylan
Another Dylan

We have lots of languages that are much more powerful than C (hell, they're much more powerful than Java/C#), safer than C, and very close in performance. It is merely a failure of programmers and the software industry that we have not been able to utilize them.

You could complain about C all day, the problem is, it's the best thing we have right now.
Hardly.

One of the problem with modern languages is, you can't write an operating system in them.
Sure you can, with little more ASM code than is required for a C-based operating system. Heck, lots of OSs have been written in things like Lisp. Actually, C is a terrible language for writing operating systems. Because its not safe, you have to have an MMU to protect programs from each other. This sucks for performance. Not only do you have the hit of memory protection, but you have to have bounderies between userspace and kernelspace, and between programs. That's why it takes 600(!) clock cycles on my P4 to do something trivially simple like gettimeofday()! If you use a safe language, you don't need memory protection, or even a kernel/userspace boundry for that matter. You get completely fine-grained protection for all objects. See this SF project for an OS written in a safe language.

One of the problems is half the new languages are scripting perl/python like langauges and the rest compile to byte code.
I don't know what's the current fetish with VMs, but most of the really advanced languages (Lisp, ML) compile to well-optimized native code. Look at the recent comp.lang.lisp thread where they ported Almabench to CMUCL, and got within a few percent the performance of C.

Maybe C would go away if there was a compiled langauge that wasn't largely controlled by one company that produced fast code and was portable.
Common Lisp
Another Common Lisp
Ocaml
Scheme
Dylan
Another Dylan

We have lots of languages that are much more powerful than C (hell, they're much more powerful than Java/C#), safer than C, and very close in performance. It is merely a failure of programmers and the software industry that we have not been able to utilize them.

Firebird
Postgresql
Maxdb

They all beat MS-SQL consistantly, and postgresql is coming close to toppling oracle!

Mysql isn't the only open source database in the world. It is popular because 90% of users DON'T need all the flashy features.

You can download Python plugins to work together with the excellent Eclipse.

• import rlcompleter, readline and
• here

Linux is written in C, SDL is written in C, X (I think) is written in C. The gimp is written in C (along with GTK). Gaim is written in C. There are almost 13000 projects on sourceforge that are registered as being written in C.

C is neither bad nor dead (not that it doesn't have its problems). Whoever wrote this article and the previous one about it on slashdot is a moron.

Since I am stooping to these references, lets add that running as root in linux will probably not mean more I-D-ten-T errors, since you will still have to mark a download as executable before it can bite you in the butt.

We're not judges. It's up to the courts to peruse the intricacies of leagality on the matter. And then make a judgement based on their findings. But what's significant IMHO is that this man is just another file sharer fighting the antiquated ways of the past. And for every one like him arrested, they'll be a hundred others to take his place.

File shares of the world unite, we have nothing to lose but our lives. And if my life is to be sacrificed in a Federal Prison for having the audacity to share share my hard drive, then such a life can hardly be worth living. Let us stand up for ourselves.

John Ashcroft told me about this, but told me to keep it secret. Clients for the Gnutella P2P network



He also said Linux users can go straight to Gnutella



Now they'll have a file on me.

All you have to do is pick up an Audrey from Ebay and point it to a Gallery installation and set the page to slideshow for the album. Simple and done quickly from very off the shelf parts. For bonus points, have the gallery hosted so that you don't have a server gobbling electricity 24/7; plus others can easily access the gallery the same way and emulate a Cieva service.

For those of you interested in finding out what it is all about, see here.

While I know that this is more of a compositing program--at least from what I read so far...as I have shamefully not RTFA

Obviously. If you had, you'd know that it's not intended to be used for composition.

I'm going to take this opportunity to bitch about the one thing that has been keeping me from making the switch to Linux for all these years: Audio Apps

I have no idea what your requirements are. I don't know when you last looked at the Linux music scene. To me, it seems like the pro audio applications available are progressing at a fantastic rate. But without knowing your needs, I don't know whether it's good enough for you.

I'm no industry elitist that demands ProTools. in fact, I hate protools. The interface leaves much to be desires...granted, i'll buffer that (admittedly harsh) opinion: I'm a huge fan of CoolEditPro.....("eww, PC audio"...I can hear it already),

The hot app for professional multitrack audio recording and editing in Linux is Ardour. But if you don't like ProTools, you may not like Ardour, since its interface is very derivative of ProTools.

The underlying audio subsystems are a far cry from what windows offers. And what I experienced with in my limiting dealings with aRTS leaves much to be desired. (Think: latency) And I'm sure that has a lot to do with it....(why hasn't ASIO or an equiv been implemented yet?)

I don't know any Linux audio folks using aRts for their pro-audio work. Instead, the fundamental infrastructure for pro-audio on Linux these days is JACK. JACK is good stuff, designed from the ground up for professional audio work.

Other people have given you info to look at about specific pro-audio applications: Ardour, JAMin, Hydrogen, Rosegarden, etc. -- all of which can interface through JACK. Regarding plugins, there are tons; take a look at the LADSPA website. These plugins can be manipulated in a rack-like GUI interface, if that's what you want.

Regarding latency, I routinely get sub-ms kernel/software latencies; I'm limited by the soundcard's capabilities at this point. Of course, to get good latency performance in Linux, you have to be willing to do things like patch your 2.4 kernel (see e.g. Robert Love's preemptable kernel patch and Andrew Morton's low-latency patch. The 2.6 kernels are supposed to provide low latency from the start; it's not yet clear whether they do.

Many of the apps above are still in development/pre-release stages. In other words, while they're completely useable (and many people are using them to make good music), you should expect bugs. For the most part, the big ones are gone; but still, saving your work frequently is a good idea.

To me, the biggest problem in Linux pro-audio right now isn't applications. They're not done yet, but they're there, and they're advancing at an amazing rate. To me, the biggest problem is the same one that afflicts a lot of open source projects: lack of good documentation. For one example, the Ardour manual is skeletal; many (most?) people figure out how to use it either from their previous experience with ProTools, or from actually looking at the ProTools manual instead. The situation is the same for other projects. Fortunately, there are lots of mailing lists that

While I know that this is more of a compositing program--at least from what I read so far...as I have shamefully not RTFA

Obviously. If you had, you'd know that it's not intended to be used for composition.

I'm going to take this opportunity to bitch about the one thing that has been keeping me from making the switch to Linux for all these years: Audio Apps

I have no idea what your requirements are. I don't know when you last looked at the Linux music scene. To me, it seems like the pro audio applications available are progressing at a fantastic rate. But without knowing your needs, I don't know whether it's good enough for you.

I'm no industry elitist that demands ProTools. in fact, I hate protools. The interface leaves much to be desires...granted, i'll buffer that (admittedly harsh) opinion: I'm a huge fan of CoolEditPro.....("eww, PC audio"...I can hear it already),

The hot app for professional multitrack audio recording and editing in Linux is Ardour. But if you don't like ProTools, you may not like Ardour, since its interface is very derivative of ProTools.

The underlying audio subsystems are a far cry from what windows offers. And what I experienced with in my limiting dealings with aRTS leaves much to be desired. (Think: latency) And I'm sure that has a lot to do with it....(why hasn't ASIO or an equiv been implemented yet?)

I don't know any Linux audio folks using aRts for their pro-audio work. Instead, the fundamental infrastructure for pro-audio on Linux these days is JACK. JACK is good stuff, designed from the ground up for professional audio work.

Other people have given you info to look at about specific pro-audio applications: Ardour, JAMin, Hydrogen, Rosegarden, etc. -- all of which can interface through JACK. Regarding plugins, there are tons; take a look at the LADSPA website. These plugins can be manipulated in a rack-like GUI interface, if that's what you want.

Regarding latency, I routinely get sub-ms kernel/software latencies; I'm limited by the soundcard's capabilities at this point. Of course, to get good latency performance in Linux, you have to be willing to do things like patch your 2.4 kernel (see e.g. Robert Love's preemptable kernel patch and Andrew Morton's low-latency patch. The 2.6 kernels are supposed to provide low latency from the start; it's not yet clear whether they do.

Many of the apps above are still in development/pre-release stages. In other words, while they're completely useable (and many people are using them to make good music), you should expect bugs. For the most part, the big ones are gone; but still, saving your work frequently is a good idea.

To me, the biggest problem in Linux pro-audio right now isn't applications. They're not done yet, but they're there, and they're advancing at an amazing rate. To me, the biggest problem is the same one that afflicts a lot of open source projects: lack of good documentation. For one example, the Ardour manual is skeletal; many (most?) people figure out how to use it either from their previous experience with ProTools, or from actually looking at the ProTools manual instead. The situation is the same for other projects. Fortunately, there are lots of mailing lists that

While I know that this is more of a compositing program--at least from what I read so far...as I have shamefully not RTFA

Obviously. If you had, you'd know that it's not intended to be used for composition.

I'm going to take this opportunity to bitch about the one thing that has been keeping me from making the switch to Linux for all these years: Audio Apps

I have no idea what your requirements are. I don't know when you last looked at the Linux music scene. To me, it seems like the pro audio applications available are progressing at a fantastic rate. But without knowing your needs, I don't know whether it's good enough for you.

I'm no industry elitist that demands ProTools. in fact, I hate protools. The interface leaves much to be desires...granted, i'll buffer that (admittedly harsh) opinion: I'm a huge fan of CoolEditPro.....("eww, PC audio"...I can hear it already),

The hot app for professional multitrack audio recording and editing in Linux is Ardour. But if you don't like ProTools, you may not like Ardour, since its interface is very derivative of ProTools.

The underlying audio subsystems are a far cry from what windows offers. And what I experienced with in my limiting dealings with aRTS leaves much to be desired. (Think: latency) And I'm sure that has a lot to do with it....(why hasn't ASIO or an equiv been implemented yet?)

I don't know any Linux audio folks using aRts for their pro-audio work. Instead, the fundamental infrastructure for pro-audio on Linux these days is JACK. JACK is good stuff, designed from the ground up for professional audio work.

Other people have given you info to look at about specific pro-audio applications: Ardour, JAMin, Hydrogen, Rosegarden, etc. -- all of which can interface through JACK. Regarding plugins, there are tons; take a look at the LADSPA website. These plugins can be manipulated in a rack-like GUI interface, if that's what you want.

Regarding latency, I routinely get sub-ms kernel/software latencies; I'm limited by the soundcard's capabilities at this point. Of course, to get good latency performance in Linux, you have to be willing to do things like patch your 2.4 kernel (see e.g. Robert Love's preemptable kernel patch and Andrew Morton's low-latency patch. The 2.6 kernels are supposed to provide low latency from the start; it's not yet clear whether they do.

Many of the apps above are still in development/pre-release stages. In other words, while they're completely useable (and many people are using them to make good music), you should expect bugs. For the most part, the big ones are gone; but still, saving your work frequently is a good idea.

To me, the biggest problem in Linux pro-audio right now isn't applications. They're not done yet, but they're there, and they're advancing at an amazing rate. To me, the biggest problem is the same one that afflicts a lot of open source projects: lack of good documentation. For one example, the Ardour manual is skeletal; many (most?) people figure out how to use it either from their previous experience with ProTools, or from actually looking at the ProTools manual instead. The situation is the same for other projects. Fortunately, there are lots of mailing lists that

lilypond test.ly
GNU LilyPond 1.8.0
Now processing: `/home/fred/ly/test.ly'
Parsing...
Interpreting music...[1]

PDF output to `test.pdf'...
DVI output to `test.dvi'...

The equivalent to ASIO in linux is Jack, but comparing Jack to ASIO is to downplay it's functionality. Jack offers much more and is rapidly becoming the wheel around which all Linux-Audio apps revolve.

There are a number of audio production suites in development in Linux-land.
Some notable ones:
- Ardour, audio only, but pretty much feature complete in that arena.
- MusE a pretty advanced all in one (midi and audio) music production environment.
- Rosegarden-4 which has roughly the same feature set and goal as MusE.

The equivalent to ASIO in linux is Jack, but comparing Jack to ASIO is to downplay it's functionality. Jack offers much more and is rapidly becoming the wheel around which all Linux-Audio apps revolve.

There are a number of audio production suites in development in Linux-land.
Some notable ones:
- Ardour, audio only, but pretty much feature complete in that arena.
- MusE a pretty advanced all in one (midi and audio) music production environment.
- Rosegarden-4 which has roughly the same feature set and goal as MusE.

Lilypond is to Finale or Sibelius, as LaTex is to Microsoft Word. Do you also think LaTex lacks intuitivity, just because you can't easily change the typography?

The WHOLE point with Lilypond and LaTex is that there are some people out there who can just do much a better job on typography than YOU. And some of those people has put that knowledge and skill into a program.

And, yes: there is a GUI front-end

• NoteEdit
• Gscore
• Roudoudou
• Denemo

• NoteEdit
• Gscore
• Roudoudou
• Denemo

Denemo is a GUI frontend to Lilypond.

Most people, I'd imagine, would want to typeset music graphically

Remember that many major books are still created using LaTeX, which, although unwieldy to some, is so ridiculously powerful that it just can't be gotten rid of.

Denemo

Not to underestimate the effort, but with extensions this has got to be easier than I think it is. Ruven Gottlieb's Purity-of-Email project is out there to integrate Mozilla mail with CRM114.

Not to underestimate the effort, but with extensions this has got to be easier than I think it is. Ruven Gottlieb's Purity-of-Email project is out there to integrate Mozilla mail with CRM114.

A good example of seperating content from presentation is to use an XML-type file (at least have a structured document model) where the music data is defined. Then, have somthing like an XLS sound stylesheet to define how the data will sound like. As a developer, this would create greater posibilities what I could do with the sound that my application processes.

On a side noce GNoise is a good sound editor that I recommend to anyone doing edeting or large sounds like game-music (that is uncompressed in raw format.)

It is a little thing that sits in your system tray. That said, it's just perl modules (I think) so it runs on other OSes too. That said, best thing I've found on Windows.

Funny, the Slashdot blurb accuses him of saying that no other system today does SSI, while according to the article he simply said their (future, potential) SSI plans will beat Linux's (present, working) SSI clustering.

Anybody have thoughts comparing the DragonFly SSI(warning, PDF) and the Linux one?
(Open)Mosix has had craploads of work done on it, and by the time DragonFly's is done, it will be even further ahead. I somehow doubt DragonFly's will end up being better.

PK

Well, the problem is a bit more difficult than that. IPSec can be used with VoIP, but it isn't particularly efficient. There are special IPSec for VoIP specifications, so the problem isn't encryption, but the lack of certificates. Public key encryption is always vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, be it SSH or SSL web traffic.

I'm guessing this might hold VoIP back for a little while, but when VoIP will be deployed large-scale, we will for sure see people having personal certificates. Right now, a real non-test certificate from verisign for a company web server costs 895 $ but I could see the prices going down for personal certificates, when markets for those would start to appear.

Or then there's the Finnish model, where you can get an electronic ID just like you can get a regular ID from the government. The electronic ID is the regular plastic ID card with a smart card chip. You get two certificates from the government-operated CA. All this for the measley price of 40 euros. This would be a viable choice for private persons too.

There is also a SIM card version (a WIM card) designed that will come out in the future.

Not sure what Mythtv you used, but Mythtv has video preview in the Channel Guide. link

The file names are only used by Mythtv internally. If you have need to use them outside there are several scripts to rename them based on the database. mythname.pl for example. There is also nuvexport. MythTV's conflict resolution is also quite smart, though perhaps somewhat complex.

But yes, MythTV is still in development, so if you're considering commercial software it probably isn't for you.

Check out SaberNet DCS. It is an Open Source timekeeping package designed to be as efficient as possible. There is nothing worse than spending more time tracking something than you actually spent working on it.

Disclaimer: I am a developer on this project.

... but it was more interesting, and he wrote it over a year ago.

You can see it here

Lots of interesting insight.

There's just one thing I'm missing: the ability (possibly a seperate program) to dump the contents of an existing DVD to a DVDAuthor-compatible structure

3) Make sure and put conduit (empty is fine) in ceiling locations as well. You never know when you might want to install a multi-room audio system.

For my simple home firewall/nat i use Shorewall (use IPfilter on Solaris at work), but damn, i love a good read on other firewalls and their setups.

i must say that i really like the idea of phoneboy.com being TWiki....just allows for such a broader range of information from people.

Since i can't read the Ma Bell site from the previous article, i'll go check this out for the afternoon.

No, it's not like MATLAB -- Python is a general-purpose language. If you want MATLAB, then you're looking for a more specialized environment, like SciPy (maybe using iPython to provide a nice interactive environment). As a MATLAB replacement, Python is probably a work in progress.

If you want homogeneous collections with fast transformations, you must do it with somewhat opaque containers like Numeric, where anything that runs inside the inner loops of transformations is written in a very fast language. (Oh, I just remembered Weave) This is true in Lisp as well, though Lisp has also had compiled forms which are pretty quick.

Anyway, lots of options. Stop complaining and enjoy what you got!

So, is Java really better? I honestly don't know the scientific or image processing domain, so I don't know where Java's at there.

No, it's not like MATLAB -- Python is a general-purpose language. If you want MATLAB, then you're looking for a more specialized environment, like SciPy (maybe using iPython to provide a nice interactive environment). As a MATLAB replacement, Python is probably a work in progress.

If you want homogeneous collections with fast transformations, you must do it with somewhat opaque containers like Numeric, where anything that runs inside the inner loops of transformations is written in a very fast language. (Oh, I just remembered Weave) This is true in Lisp as well, though Lisp has also had compiled forms which are pretty quick.

Anyway, lots of options. Stop complaining and enjoy what you got!

So, is Java really better? I honestly don't know the scientific or image processing domain, so I don't know where Java's at there.

Gah, missed that bit about iBooks in the original. Oops.
Oh well, I'm sure that more than a few of those I found are compiled for OSX.

Speaking of Celestia, I just found Mostly Harmless, which looks pretty neat. Best of all, it's got a Ringworld.

Gah, missed that bit about iBooks in the original. Oops.
Oh well, I'm sure that more than a few of those I found are compiled for OSX.

Speaking of Celestia, I just found Mostly Harmless, which looks pretty neat. Best of all, it's got a Ringworld.