Slashdot Mirror

> In my opinion everbody should use Firebird or Konqueror... =)

I'm sorry, but Firebird isn't a browser. Perhaps you meant FireFox?

Konqueror is part of KDE, which isn't available for Windows. Windows still has about 90%+ of the internet users, and nobody will switch OS simply to use another browser (especially when you consider most won't even download another browser)

And last, you forgot Opera in your wish-list. They may be commercial (oh no, run, it's not free!) but their browser sure kicks serious ass. Firefox is nice, but Opera is still superior (IMHO).

Autodetect of PCI devices has been working for ages, USB works fairly well as does Firewire. The best robust printing solution I have ever seen (Cisco Enterprise Print System) is based on Linux and open source projects. Linux also supports ACL's so if you really need em go ahead and use em. Any other questions?

Oops, missed a couple of good ones: Polygon Worlds lets you drive around on Mars. Planet's Orbits and Partiview are great for general Astronomy education.

...and some more general linkage, because I'm bored:
Educational -
Tuxtype and Droid Battles.
Board/puzzle games -
MahJong (the real four player thing, not the solitaire version), Settlers of Catan - versions here or here, JTEG, a Risk-alike, and Tetrinet (networked T*tris).
General Fun -
Armagetron (definitely have a look at this - I can imagine it being popular with kids), Search and Rescue, Astrobattle, Tower Toppler, MyLink (UpLink clone), Airstrike, XRick, Vegastrike, Stoned (curling simulation), CarWorld, Cannon Smash (virtual Table tennis), Sentry, Noiz2sa, rRootage, PowerManga, Spheres of Chaos, Warblade, Epiar...

More possibilities.

You might also give Nethack or one of its many derivatives a shot.

That enough to keep you busy? (=

Oops, missed a couple of good ones: Polygon Worlds lets you drive around on Mars. Planet's Orbits and Partiview are great for general Astronomy education.

...and some more general linkage, because I'm bored:
Educational -
Tuxtype and Droid Battles.
Board/puzzle games -
MahJong (the real four player thing, not the solitaire version), Settlers of Catan - versions here or here, JTEG, a Risk-alike, and Tetrinet (networked T*tris).
General Fun -
Armagetron (definitely have a look at this - I can imagine it being popular with kids), Search and Rescue, Astrobattle, Tower Toppler, MyLink (UpLink clone), Airstrike, XRick, Vegastrike, Stoned (curling simulation), CarWorld, Cannon Smash (virtual Table tennis), Sentry, Noiz2sa, rRootage, PowerManga, Spheres of Chaos, Warblade, Epiar...

More possibilities.

You might also give Nethack or one of its many derivatives a shot.

That enough to keep you busy? (=

Oops, missed a couple of good ones: Polygon Worlds lets you drive around on Mars. Planet's Orbits and Partiview are great for general Astronomy education.

...and some more general linkage, because I'm bored:
Educational -
Tuxtype and Droid Battles.
Board/puzzle games -
MahJong (the real four player thing, not the solitaire version), Settlers of Catan - versions here or here, JTEG, a Risk-alike, and Tetrinet (networked T*tris).
General Fun -
Armagetron (definitely have a look at this - I can imagine it being popular with kids), Search and Rescue, Astrobattle, Tower Toppler, MyLink (UpLink clone), Airstrike, XRick, Vegastrike, Stoned (curling simulation), CarWorld, Cannon Smash (virtual Table tennis), Sentry, Noiz2sa, rRootage, PowerManga, Spheres of Chaos, Warblade, Epiar...

More possibilities.

You might also give Nethack or one of its many derivatives a shot.

That enough to keep you busy? (=

Oops, missed a couple of good ones: Polygon Worlds lets you drive around on Mars. Planet's Orbits and Partiview are great for general Astronomy education.

...and some more general linkage, because I'm bored:
Educational -
Tuxtype and Droid Battles.
Board/puzzle games -
MahJong (the real four player thing, not the solitaire version), Settlers of Catan - versions here or here, JTEG, a Risk-alike, and Tetrinet (networked T*tris).
General Fun -
Armagetron (definitely have a look at this - I can imagine it being popular with kids), Search and Rescue, Astrobattle, Tower Toppler, MyLink (UpLink clone), Airstrike, XRick, Vegastrike, Stoned (curling simulation), CarWorld, Cannon Smash (virtual Table tennis), Sentry, Noiz2sa, rRootage, PowerManga, Spheres of Chaos, Warblade, Epiar...

More possibilities.

You might also give Nethack or one of its many derivatives a shot.

That enough to keep you busy? (=

Oops, missed a couple of good ones: Polygon Worlds lets you drive around on Mars. Planet's Orbits and Partiview are great for general Astronomy education.

...and some more general linkage, because I'm bored:
Educational -
Tuxtype and Droid Battles.
Board/puzzle games -
MahJong (the real four player thing, not the solitaire version), Settlers of Catan - versions here or here, JTEG, a Risk-alike, and Tetrinet (networked T*tris).
General Fun -
Armagetron (definitely have a look at this - I can imagine it being popular with kids), Search and Rescue, Astrobattle, Tower Toppler, MyLink (UpLink clone), Airstrike, XRick, Vegastrike, Stoned (curling simulation), CarWorld, Cannon Smash (virtual Table tennis), Sentry, Noiz2sa, rRootage, PowerManga, Spheres of Chaos, Warblade, Epiar...

More possibilities.

You might also give Nethack or one of its many derivatives a shot.

That enough to keep you busy? (=

Oops, missed a couple of good ones: Polygon Worlds lets you drive around on Mars. Planet's Orbits and Partiview are great for general Astronomy education.

...and some more general linkage, because I'm bored:
Educational -
Tuxtype and Droid Battles.
Board/puzzle games -
MahJong (the real four player thing, not the solitaire version), Settlers of Catan - versions here or here, JTEG, a Risk-alike, and Tetrinet (networked T*tris).
General Fun -
Armagetron (definitely have a look at this - I can imagine it being popular with kids), Search and Rescue, Astrobattle, Tower Toppler, MyLink (UpLink clone), Airstrike, XRick, Vegastrike, Stoned (curling simulation), CarWorld, Cannon Smash (virtual Table tennis), Sentry, Noiz2sa, rRootage, PowerManga, Spheres of Chaos, Warblade, Epiar...

More possibilities.

You might also give Nethack or one of its many derivatives a shot.

That enough to keep you busy? (=

Oops, missed a couple of good ones: Polygon Worlds lets you drive around on Mars. Planet's Orbits and Partiview are great for general Astronomy education.

...and some more general linkage, because I'm bored:
Educational -
Tuxtype and Droid Battles.
Board/puzzle games -
MahJong (the real four player thing, not the solitaire version), Settlers of Catan - versions here or here, JTEG, a Risk-alike, and Tetrinet (networked T*tris).
General Fun -
Armagetron (definitely have a look at this - I can imagine it being popular with kids), Search and Rescue, Astrobattle, Tower Toppler, MyLink (UpLink clone), Airstrike, XRick, Vegastrike, Stoned (curling simulation), CarWorld, Cannon Smash (virtual Table tennis), Sentry, Noiz2sa, rRootage, PowerManga, Spheres of Chaos, Warblade, Epiar...

More possibilities.

You might also give Nethack or one of its many derivatives a shot.

That enough to keep you busy? (=

Oops, missed a couple of good ones: Polygon Worlds lets you drive around on Mars. Planet's Orbits and Partiview are great for general Astronomy education.

...and some more general linkage, because I'm bored:
Educational -
Tuxtype and Droid Battles.
Board/puzzle games -
MahJong (the real four player thing, not the solitaire version), Settlers of Catan - versions here or here, JTEG, a Risk-alike, and Tetrinet (networked T*tris).
General Fun -
Armagetron (definitely have a look at this - I can imagine it being popular with kids), Search and Rescue, Astrobattle, Tower Toppler, MyLink (UpLink clone), Airstrike, XRick, Vegastrike, Stoned (curling simulation), CarWorld, Cannon Smash (virtual Table tennis), Sentry, Noiz2sa, rRootage, PowerManga, Spheres of Chaos, Warblade, Epiar...

More possibilities.

You might also give Nethack or one of its many derivatives a shot.

That enough to keep you busy? (=

I found this article interesting and educational, until I went to look at the recommended dvdauthor site. What your article says dvdauthor supports and will support bears little relation to what I found. Was that the package that you were talking about or is there another dvdauthor package?

This isn't a problem with FFox not being standards compliant, but a problem with the slashcode not being standard html. See the faq. Bugs have been filed already.

This isn't a problem with FFox not being standards compliant, but a problem with the slashcode not being standard html. See the faq. Bugs have been filed already.

This isn't a problem with FFox not being standards compliant, but a problem with the slashcode not being standard html. See the faq. Bugs have been filed already.

I bought an ATA DVD burner largely for data backups and had it direct-attached to my Linux machine. I used it this way for months. I also have a Powerbook G4. At some point, I borrowed an ieee1394 (Firewire) camcorder, and I got iLife so I could make home-movie DVDs. Transferring my home video to the powerbook was a breeze. iMovie was very easy to use for editing the video. I anticipated that I would use iMovie/iDVD to master an ISO that I could scp to the Linux box for burning.

Alas, iDVD claimed it wouldn't even start without the "correct hardware present". I assumed that meant a DVD burner. So I bought a firewire enclosure for the drive, and a ieee1394 card for the linux machine, and I was all set up to share the DVD drive. Except that really, iDVD won't run without an Apple Superdrive present. (The error message didn't tell me that; I had to google for that.")

In the end, I used Kino, dvdauthor, and growisofs to make my first home-DVD. The fact that I bought the ieee1394 enclosure was a waste of money caused by Apple's insistence on iron-fist control.

Sure, iMovie and iDVD are easier and quicker to learn than the open-source tools. But the open source tools wouldn't have caused me to waste time and money buying hardware, and hours editing video with a tool that ultimately I had to abandon (iMovie). It took some doing to learn how to use kino and dvdauthor to do what I wanted. But less time than it took to ship the DVD enclosure and reconfigure all my hardware.

Ogg WHAT?
Are you talking about using Ogg Vorbis as the audio codec? Yes, it is very good. I wouldn't use anything else for either my CD rips or DVD rips.
Or are you talking about the bastardisation of the Ogg container format that is the OGM container format? Do some googling. From the mailing list postings I saw, the Ogg guys aren't too happy about this effort by one windows programmer to hack the Avi/VfW information into the Ogg container format. If that's what you're referring to, and using, I recommend you instead look at the Matroska container format. It's much more flexible and is slightly more efficient space-wise than OGM. Mplayer supports it, don't know about Xine. There's a Matroska splitter/demuxer thingy for windows, don't know about Mac OS/X support.

I found this link by Ross Bernheim when I acquired my DVD-RW:
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/AV/consumer-video-t o-dvd.html
Also, I was also looking into LVE as an editor. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising.
http://lvempeg.sourceforge.net

When I took a look at the first of these two articles which examines end-user anti-spam solutions I had to wonder if the writer had actually tried any of the technology or was relying purely on hearsay. For example:

Spam senders and their bulk-mailing applications are not static -- they rapidly adapt around filters. For example, to counter word lists, spam senders randomize the spelling of words ("viagra", "V1agra", "\/iaagra"). Hash-busters (sequences of random characters that differ in each email) were created for bypassing hash filters. And the currently popular Bayesian filters are being bypassed by the inclusion of random words and sentences. Most spam filters are only effective for a few weeks at best

This is the view of someone who clearly has no experience at all with a high-quality Bayesian classifier like POPFile. I've been using this program for almost a year and it most certainly has not been defeated by random words or spelling. Many of the tokens that trip email as being spam are actually unusual items in the headers or sales terminology. After a very brief training period POPFile has continued to provide me with excellent protection from spam and malicious email, with only a few false negatives to retrain on.

If that's not a good end-user anti-spam solution then I don't know what is.

They are lagging behind Sony, though only on the home console front, not portable. The GameCube is leading the XBox worldwide; in fact it was never in third. Furthermore, Microsoft has lost money on its games division every quarter, wheras Nintendo has primarily gained money. To say Nintendo is lagging Microsoft just sounds ridiculous.

In terms of using dirty legal tactics, they're no worse than anybody else. Micosoft is the one who's done the most ridiculous thing I've seen so far in trying to stop XBox Linux (even though it's a legitimate use for the product). As far as I know, neither Sony nor Nintendo has voiced similar complaints about Linux on their respective systems. As for piracy, all three use any edge they can to crack down on it.

So how, exactly is the parent Insightful? Am I missing something in this post?

Oh crap. Did not read the man page for spumux at http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/doc/spumux.html. Didn't notice that right away, anyway. It seems you can do subtitles, this is nice.

Do you have a ROM dumper lying around?

Yes, in fact, I do. I also have a copy of GCC targeted for the Game Boy Advance.

You can do this today in Quanta. (see http://quanta.sourceforge.net)

Authoring video DVDs on linux is more than a little difficult, these days. That said, with a little command line knowledge and some good old-fashioned ingenuity, you can accomplish much.

I found this article to be a good starting point. The beginning of the article assumes that you'll be working with a framegrabber and generating MJPEG video with appropriate resolution/framerate, etc. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world, so you'll actually need to transcode your videos into the MJPEG format before you do the MPEG2 encoding. I find that mencoder is usually the best way to accomplish this:

mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -oac copy -vf scale=720:480 -sws 9 your_file.avi -o mjpeg_stream.avi

Note that the above command assumes you are making a DVD for NTSC (US/Canada/Japan) format. If you use PAL, you'll want 720:576 as your resolution and 25 fps as your framerate instead. If you're encoding from a film (24 fps) source, try applying the telecine filter, as well (add ",telecine" after the scale command, and set "-ofps 29.97). This method of framerate conversion is the standard for cinematic DVDs.

Now, I know you're asking, why not use mencoder to encode the MPEG2 stream directly and skip the middleman? Well, I've tried this, and it isn't possible for a couple of reasons. The first is bandwidth control. Although mencoder will accept a bitrate option for MPEG2 encoding, it is not conscious of the buffering assumptions of the DVD standard, and will produce streams that will encounter buffer underruns in hardware DVD players. The second problem is that an MPEG2 program stream for a DVD must contain empty navigation packets (these get filled in when you create the actual vobs), which mencoder won't create. C'est la vie.

It's worth noting that you can get at more advanced bitrate control options for libavcodec's MPEG2 encoder by using lavc's native transcoding application, ffmpeg. At least, theoretically you can. My version of ffmpeg 0.4.7 doesn't seem to include mpeg2 as a possible output format, even though it's accessible through mencoder. Go figure.

OK, let's move on to our friend mpeg2enc. The first thing you'll notice is that it's slow. Really slow. Especially compared to mencoder. You'll live, though. Take a nap or something. The instructions in the article will give you a stream that's perfectly fine for DVD encoding, but it's definitely worth looking at the manpage as well. One of the most important things you'll learn there is that mpeg2enc takes arguments for both aspect ratio and framerate of incoming movies. Add the option "-a n" to the command given in the article, substituting 2 for n if your video is in the 4:3 aspect ratio (regular TV), 3 if it is 16:9 (letterbox widescreen format, most movies), or 4 for 2.21:1 (cinemascope widescreen, movies shot in panoramic view). The "-F n" command specifies the framerate. IF you are using PAL or SECAM, always use 3. If you are using NTSC, always use 4. Anything else will make you cry. Finally, you can add the "-p" option if you have 24 fps input video that you intend for NTSC viewing, and you didn't already have mencoder apply telecine. I actually prefer to have mpeg2enc do telecine, as that way you are certain to avoid A/V sync problems.

Moving right along, the article tells you how to use the dvd authoring tools to eventually get an iso file ready to burn. It should be noted that the image you have ready won't have menus or other niceties. For sooth! Lucky for you, you actually can include these things, but it won't exactly be easy. Now that you know the basics of encoding for the DVD format, this guide can instruct you on how to add things like menus and whatnot. Anyway, once you get the iso file ready to go, I highly recommend you burn it with KDE's excellent K3B, unless you have an attachment to the command line too

What happens when someone on your whitelist opens an attachment that automatically sends email from their account, signing it? Now you have a spam that has been legitamately sent from your friend's account.

I created a C/R anti-spam system myself, but gave up on it and turned to Spambayes for two main reasons:

1.) I was losing challenges in others' spam filters
2.) I would still get emails from whitelisted folks when they were infected with an email worm.

If you're interested, I blogged about my switch from C/R to Bayesian filtering here.

I've been able to build and burn DVDs of my captured TV shows (from satellite)

Plus share them: Gnutella

John Ashcrsoft told me this but said not to tell anyone.

1. Use kino to do the video editing, and output/export (i.e. save as) an MPEG-2 (DVD format). To get this to work you will most likely need Mplayer installed because you'll need the mplex commandline tool to "multiplex" your audio and video files. Some like to use transcode, but I like Mplayer much better. Split the MPEG into multiple MPEGs if you want to have different chapters -- the best way to do this is to use a commandline tool called mpgtx. Or just save different MPEGs from kino. BTW, if you need to get video footage to edit in the first place then use dvgrab to get video from your DV camcorder -- it should be a part of the kino suite of tools, but if it's not, get it from one of the pages in kino.
2. Once you've gotten your MPEGs all created, now you can author. I use dvdauthor. What you have to first do is create a XML text file to list the MPEGs you want to burn into the DVD. And example of such a file is found here. The easiest method is to create a new chapter for each MPEG file. Then you run dvdauthor like so:

   dvdauthor -o DVDdir -x xml-filename

   DVDdir is the name of the output you want -- name doesn't really matter; xml-filename is the name of the text file you created.
3. DVDdir will be a directory from which you then need to create a video ISO. You need the commandline tool mkisofs. Example is:

   mkisofs -dvd-video -o fileoutput.img DVDdir

4. Now you just need to burn fileoutput.img with your DVD recorder. I use dvdrecord (yes, it's a commandline tool):

   dvdrecord -v -eject speed=4 dev=0,0,0 -dao fileoutput.img

1. Use kino to do the video editing, and output/export (i.e. save as) an MPEG-2 (DVD format). To get this to work you will most likely need Mplayer installed because you'll need the mplex commandline tool to "multiplex" your audio and video files. Some like to use transcode, but I like Mplayer much better. Split the MPEG into multiple MPEGs if you want to have different chapters -- the best way to do this is to use a commandline tool called mpgtx. Or just save different MPEGs from kino. BTW, if you need to get video footage to edit in the first place then use dvgrab to get video from your DV camcorder -- it should be a part of the kino suite of tools, but if it's not, get it from one of the pages in kino.
2. Once you've gotten your MPEGs all created, now you can author. I use dvdauthor. What you have to first do is create a XML text file to list the MPEGs you want to burn into the DVD. And example of such a file is found here. The easiest method is to create a new chapter for each MPEG file. Then you run dvdauthor like so:

   dvdauthor -o DVDdir -x xml-filename

   DVDdir is the name of the output you want -- name doesn't really matter; xml-filename is the name of the text file you created.
3. DVDdir will be a directory from which you then need to create a video ISO. You need the commandline tool mkisofs. Example is:

   mkisofs -dvd-video -o fileoutput.img DVDdir

4. Now you just need to burn fileoutput.img with your DVD recorder. I use dvdrecord (yes, it's a commandline tool):

   dvdrecord -v -eject speed=4 dev=0,0,0 -dao fileoutput.img

1. Use kino to do the video editing, and output/export (i.e. save as) an MPEG-2 (DVD format). To get this to work you will most likely need Mplayer installed because you'll need the mplex commandline tool to "multiplex" your audio and video files. Some like to use transcode, but I like Mplayer much better. Split the MPEG into multiple MPEGs if you want to have different chapters -- the best way to do this is to use a commandline tool called mpgtx. Or just save different MPEGs from kino. BTW, if you need to get video footage to edit in the first place then use dvgrab to get video from your DV camcorder -- it should be a part of the kino suite of tools, but if it's not, get it from one of the pages in kino.
2. Once you've gotten your MPEGs all created, now you can author. I use dvdauthor. What you have to first do is create a XML text file to list the MPEGs you want to burn into the DVD. And example of such a file is found here. The easiest method is to create a new chapter for each MPEG file. Then you run dvdauthor like so:

   dvdauthor -o DVDdir -x xml-filename

   DVDdir is the name of the output you want -- name doesn't really matter; xml-filename is the name of the text file you created.
3. DVDdir will be a directory from which you then need to create a video ISO. You need the commandline tool mkisofs. Example is:

   mkisofs -dvd-video -o fileoutput.img DVDdir

4. Now you just need to burn fileoutput.img with your DVD recorder. I use dvdrecord (yes, it's a commandline tool):

   dvdrecord -v -eject speed=4 dev=0,0,0 -dao fileoutput.img

The more modern definition of "sim" that you seem to be using typically doesn't include anything of any redeming educational value. Most of the rules of the world are so simplified that behaviour within the sim is borderline random or very easy to effect by doing something seriously unrealistic. You'd get about as much educational value out of Monopoly as you would out of Railroad Tycoon. You could try looking at word and puzzle games. There's a "Wheel of Fortune game for the Mac, but I would imagine that a room full of kids would go through the library of puzzles pretty quickly.

My final suggestion might be a little out of your scope: Robocode or Corewars -- Kids develop their own little programs that battle it out in a virtual arena. The second is a little more abstract than the first. At the very least it will teach them how to program.

I have found myself very suprised that there exist no programs for linux that will author. I have a mac (yes, i know, hes looking for linux/win stuff) and I use Sizzle as iDVD cannot burn to DVD+R's, many of which I got for free. It doesn't work perfectly, but it can author and build menus.

As I understand it (you chould check out the site and email the author), this is built off of OSS such as somthing called dvdauthor - I have to believe that this has a front end for it in linux, or that it would not be hard to make...

non-dangerous NTFS support (including writing, which is huge when migrating from Windows)

All the info I could find indicates that you can only overwrite existing files, and only then with files the same length -- any other writes would mess up the filesystem.

Have you tested this?

You know...That is where using a linux tool can help windows. If one of the bootable linux rescue CDs has a copy of AIDE you could do your fresh setup, then keep a copy of all file hashes and later verify them when you have any suspicions that any file on the entire windows partition was modified from the way you set it up and therefore prove or disprove your theory that one of the DLLs were overwritten. In fact, doing such a thing may be the best way to detect new and unknown malware that your virus scanner, trojan scanner, or spyware scanner can't yet detect.

We therefore took the uncompressed clips and created new "master clips" by encoding them to very high bitrate (around 8 megabit) files using Indeo 5.1 compression, as all our test applications could easily read this format.

STUPID! YOU'RE SO STUPID!!!

...like Fluxbox

... we're innovators, using new technology to break up the old "closed" system of information control. If people can get religious degrees on scholarships then surely there must be some philanthropy available for the Fellinies and the Woody Allens of this world. Our current profit motives for funding the arts cause an unnecessary waste of society's resources.

You've thrown your television out the window, now throw Hollywood out with it.

Senator Fritz Hollins 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

But can you run usermode Linux on usermode Linux?

More to the point, can you run usermode Linux on top of Line on top of Windows?

If you don't want the whole of Cygwin in there, you could always go for the standalone Win32 ports of various n*x command line tools in GnuWin32.

Having 'tail' and 'sed' available at work is a godsend.

- Juk - great playlist based music player

Or better still, build a Timex/Spectrum in an FPGA and clock it as fast as you like...

well, if you're trying to run an old DOS game you can do that with DOSBox, which comes in handy a lot of the time.

iRATE

If the mainstream music organizations want to make their music difficult to listen to, why take the extra effort?

Didn't see it mentioned, which surprises me. This may not be a solution to find all the legal commercial MP3s you want, but it is a great way to find all the legal indie music you might like.

From the introduction:

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

i thought to myself, what about BMRT as a renderman compliant renderer, if there is a Mac version, for those not wanting to wait for Pixar or Apple. But now www.bmrt.org doesn't seem to be resolving, and any results Google gives back seem to be a bit dated.

Take a look at aqsis.

Try GNU utilities for Win32

Forward as well as backward slashes in file paths are accepted.

If you can run python, you can ipcheck.

Quote from the first page at http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/:

This project was created by Intel to enable support for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 (IPW2100) mini PCI adapter. This project is intended to be a community effort as much as is possible given some working constraints (mainly, no HW documentation is available) (Emphasis mine)

So in Intel's own words, they did not release the specs, and I can't find anything on the site that says different...

Er, its also mentioned on the project homepage:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

to answer my own question (partly):
"As the firmware is licensed under a restricted use license, it can not be included within the kernel sources. To enable the IPW2100 you will need a firmware image to load into the wireless NIC's processors." From http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/README.ipw2100.
And look at the firmware license!