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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!

WEP is weak. Use OpenVPN if you can.

WEP currently no support
Notice how WEP support is not yet done.

Until these drivers stabilize you can use NDISWRAPPER.

This tool allows you to run the Windows driver for some wireless cards that have little or no Linux support.

Daniel

As a professional, I can't imagine supporting anyone without a copy of SystemRescueCd on hand for just these kinds of problems. A single linux bootable CD image with GNU software such as GNUParted, QTParted, and Partimage, all of which are excellent and FREE replacements for PQMagic or Ghost.

If your '400 has nothing but twinax things get more difficult(since that only connects to dumb terminals or twinax client cards in PCs), so I assume you've got TCP/IP. I don't remember the commands any more, but GO MAJOR and page down until you find 'Telnet Server Commands'.

Get a linux box, put TN5250 on it from http://tn5250.sourceforge.net/, and just SSH in from remote. (So: remote machine --> SSH over internet --> Linux box on local network --> TN5250 over LAN --> AS/400) TN5250 can just telnet into the '400. You'll have to teach them the weird key sequences for PF1 through PF24 (escape then 1-9 for PF1 through PF9, escape then 0 for PF10, escape then - for PF11, escape then = for PF12, and escape then the same keys again SHIFTED for PF13 through PF24) and for sysrequest, help, etc.

If your '400 has nothing but twinax for terminal connections, get a twinax client card on a PC and some client software (IBM's Client Access for AS/400 works :) ) and use VNC. It's painful but better than nothing. It's also insecure by itself, so be sure to tunnel that VNC connection through SSH or something.

--Michael Spencer

It has a non-GPL compliant license though. Pity.

It has a non-GPL compliant license though. Pity.

... and right here: Firebird.

Maybe we should just redirect people to Sourceforge instead?

It's relatively simple to keep your parents surfing in safety. As many people have already mentioned, Firefox is a good start. But that's not where you need to stop. While Thunderbird is stil in alpha, it makes a nice email client, and has fewer glaring security holes than some of the more popular clients.

But where everything comes together is with the last two important pieces of software. I used to be a strong supporter of The Proxomitron, but it's very difficult to find now, and is no longer supported, so I've switched over to Privoxy which runs on most platforms, incidentally.

Privoxy is a local proxy that does filtering on all web content that you view, removing things like some ads, and all unrequested pop-ups. It filters virtually all malicious content I have seen.

A personal firewall is important to have now, and there are some reasonable free ones around. The ones I like take a bit of configuration, but they sure beat Zone Alarm. The two I use are Kerio Personal Firewall and Sygate Personal Firewall.

Sadly, both these products used to be completely free, but the same is no longer completely true.

Essentially, it is important to use a good browser, mail client, local proxy and firewall. With those in place a virus scanner is often somewhat redundant, though one of those might be a good idea too.

On the spam prevention front, I find Popfile to be an invaluable tool. It is, however, a wee bit advanced. I suspect that most parents wouldn't quite grok it. I've heard good things about SpamAssassin, though, and it might be worth the effort of teaching parents.

I released POPFile v0.21.0, perhaps I should have submitted a story?

And while we're it at, could we stop with the posturing "the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux".

John.

:)

Visual and audio effects mean processing time, and CPU time uses battery power. Also look into unloading modules that you aren't using, especially wireless network-related modules.

Alternatively, you could go the way of many /dotters and get a Mac. I'm a Unix geek who just got a used IBook and I love it.

Since you have a Thinkpad, you should download and install tpctl. It comes with a daemon called apmiser that controls power use according to CPU usage.

You're a good candidate to learn Vi. Vim kicks ass on Windows.

Won't be long until iPod is emulating whatever the hell it can, too ...

I've almost done this. DVDibbler (free, OS X) to take Toy Story from DVD to DivX'd AVI, then through Windows Media Encoder (free (except your soul) from MS) on Windows to make a ~150 MB AVI for PocketPC. But, the only PocketPC I have access to is a friend's 200 MHz iPaq that won't play it back--won't go full-screen (320x240, sideways) and won't play sound. (I encoded the movie twice, with both available PocketPC settings in WME.)

So, my two questions: 1) How much CPU do you need (speed & model) to play back a movie and 2) do any of these units have enough battery to play a whole (~90-min) movie? Has anyone really done this successfully--played back a movie, full-screen and sideways, and made it through the whole thing without a power cord? If so, what unit? What specs? How encoded?

Heres some simple Bash scripts to do almost exactly that They need a re-write to make them more robust and easier to maintain, but they work. I don't know how much work you'd need to do to adapt them to Linux or a more traditonal SysV style system though.

Maybe I, and others should make a concentrated effort for a couple of months, trying to get this project I found: http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/qt3-win32/ on its feet.

In the long term they plan to make a GPL port of QT for Windows (not only Cygwin, but MINGW as well). This would be EXACTLY what is needed to provide a real, working, viable alterbative to Visual Studio. Get on the bandwagon, they need help now! :D

Basically, they are taking the QT GPL sources for X11 and start to replace Xcalls with Win32 calls. Should be doable...

For a nice set of command line utilities for windows (no cygwin needed) check unxutils.sourceforge.net.

Wow, what a well-researched and interesting article. Will we be seeing 'newbie conversation' mode with the limited commandset (as used in the article) splashing across the desktop soon? Unlikely, I think, but this article puts the whole thing in a new dimension for me.

I notice the author is multitalented -- he's also the genius behind Desktop Manager, a virtual desktops manager for Mac. Wow. If only I was single...

If you like wxWindows (now wxWidgets), then try Boa Constructor. It's a free RAD tool for wxPython (which is cross platform).

[Rare is] about the only British developer rich enough to risk alienating a few Yanks

It's true. If you want to tap into the Nation of Consumers, you have to dumb down your game to their lowest-common-denominator tastes. Or you can create a cultural gem of a game and starve.

Perhaps what we need are a few loss leaders. Revolution are giving away Beneath A Steel Sky, with its undeniably British sense of humour.

I took a look at the Natural Language Toolkit for Python, which focuses primarily on statistical language processing. For example, given a tagged training copora, you can build conditional frequency distributions that say "natural language" is usually followed by "processing."

I've wondered if this is easier or harder in a more heavily inflected language like Latin or Russian. I would think a brute force approach would be complicated by the variety of endings, but that it would be easier to tag the parts of speech.

Try using ROX, the Filer comes up nearly instantly even on a low spec machine. It would be great if the user could configure which file selector the GTK toolkit uses, then you could configure globally for all applications.

Phillip.

Yes, Are You Talking To Me does this

Media Player Classic.
Winamp. (2; I don't recommend Winamp 3 and 5 as much, though many would probably disagree)

Probably a bunch of others, but these are the ones I use.

Disclamer: I might be somewhat of a Gentoo zealot.

"To start with the punchline: actually that should IMHO read "if you're a masochist and want the computer equivalent of a kick in the teeth, you should try the power of Gentoo." Yep, that's some real power in that kick."

Like you said, gentoo installation can be hard and tedious. But after that it's all downhill. Gentoo is the easiest Linux distro I have ever used(and yes, I have used Mandrake, Fedora, Debian etc.), while still letting you be in charge of your own system. Portage is by far the best package managment system I have ever come across and USE flags are the best part of it.

Of course Gentoo has it downsides, like the etc-hell and the fact that not all packages manage compile.(On these situatons you'll most likely find a fix form Gentoo Bugzilla, but it might not be that obvious at first and quite often these fixes require some hacking from the user part) Contrary to common belief, compiling packages from source doesn't really affect your systems usability after the installation (unless you play a lot of games). I'm quite able to play mp3, surf the net or do some coding(yes, with vim) while portage is doing it's work in the background.

Oh, and about that automation thing. People are already working on it. Take a look at GLIS.

The best file selector is no file selector at all. Since there is already a file browser such as Evolution (or its equivalent) that should be used, and made quick and easy enough for simple file selection tasks. To open a file, just view its directory and click on it; the application loads automatically and there is no real need for the two-step 'load application then use the Open menu', which dates from a time when computers didn't have a single GUI and there was no means to just open a file directly. To save a file, why not drag it from the application to the directory window. None of that clicking about with 'parent directory' and other nonsense.

Matthew Thomas pointed out better than I could that the separate file-picker is user interface cruft left over from an earlier age. Let's just have one file browser in the desktop and make it good enough to use for everything.

"burning audio CDs - poor"

Huh? Can't get any easer when using K3B

They go to all the trouble of creating a decent filer, Nautilus, and then ignore it for opening and saving documents by sticking with stupid file selectors. Again. Do any GUI developers bother challenging tired, illogical concepts? (Check out ROX for true drag and drop opening and saving: here)

Well, they are complaining about lack of progress bars, so I wonder if they ever heard about KPlayer.

Try Real Alternative (realalt121.exe somewhere down the list). It's just the Real codecs plus Media Player Classic, a GPL clone of the old Windows Media Player 6.4. You might also be interested in Quicktime Alternative on the same page. And from MS, you can get the WMV9 codecs for Media Player 6.4 by selecting "Codecs Installation Packages" on this page. Finally, for DIVX/XVID/3VID, you'll want ffdshow-alpha, ac3filter, and DIVX audio (link 6 on the page).

Try Real Alternative (realalt121.exe somewhere down the list). It's just the Real codecs plus Media Player Classic, a GPL clone of the old Windows Media Player 6.4. You might also be interested in Quicktime Alternative on the same page. And from MS, you can get the WMV9 codecs for Media Player 6.4 by selecting "Codecs Installation Packages" on this page. Finally, for DIVX/XVID/3VID, you'll want ffdshow-alpha, ac3filter, and DIVX audio (link 6 on the page).

Like all of the above, I too got fed up with anything Real has put out lately, for obvious reasons. That and it spontaneously reboots everyone's machines here in the lab.

Did some searching, found Media Player Classic (Article)- it's an open source clone of Windows Media Player before it got all colorful, space wasting, and less functional (WMP 8-9). Plus, with a bit more Google searching, I found Real codec packs for it as well. On the rare occasion I need to play Real content, I can.

the problem with winamp is its mp3 decoder SUCKS. try coolplayer for a higher quality player (uses madlib). You wont notice the difference if you have a normal multimedia setup, but I have a semi-pro audio setup connected to my pc and the difference is night and day.

And here are some URLs:
Real Alternative & Quicktime Alternative (middle of the page)
Media Player Classic (again, middle of the page)

Enjoy!

only an idiot would use such a setup over a standalone DVD player due to the loss of quality.

Matrox G200/G400 cards are pretty inexpensive and have really nice TV-Out. I have a Geforce4MX and a G200 in my system, both have TV-Out and it's night and day with the picture quality.

A cheap hardware DVD PCI card can get picture quality to rival most anything, although this will cost you a bunch of CPU time. I know a lot of FreeVO people use these cards.

Note thate [sic] compared to fvwm2 [which I have only used in cygwin] icewm supports multiple desktops, has a clock, start menu and tray. icewm also has nice window decorations..
Uh. . . have you ever tried configuring fvwm2? For some example config files you might want fvwm themes which has many themes with their own window decorations, "start" menues--taskbar like to button bar, a tray. Not to mention they all have virtual desktops (FvwmPager).
Total memory usage by fvwm: 4.7 MB

Score: 4, Funny only because it's true.

The Linux Test Project test suite

For those of us who use our desktops as a PVR instead of dedicating a machine to it, I highly recommend a TvTime and vcr combination under Linux. MythTV is a overkill for my needs. TvTime is hands down the best tv viewing program, IMO, and there are web frontends for vcr to make scheduling recordings as snap. There are some features lacking in this setup that a normal PVR system would have, such as live rewind and such, but I think there's alot of people going through way more trouble than they need to because they don't know there's any other way..

IS there a decent card for gnu/linux with:

* hardware acceleration
* decent performance
* support for multiple simultaneous X displays
* open source drivers


Check out the DRI page. Seems ATi has reelased the specs to their older Radeon cards; you can get hardware 3D with Radeons upto a 9200 series. Not to mention fixed Xvideo support.

You can get a 9200 with 128MB of RAM and DVI for 44 bucks on Pricewatch. Another bonus is that their fanless; that's if a 6000rpm fan bothers you.

Open source program for training mnemotechnic memory:
Mnemesis

Alexandre PUKALL published a free list of more than 10 thousand recipes about a decade ago. It's available in various forms on the Net. My take on it is an easy to search windows help file (.chm) (use xchm in Linux), but take it easy with my server as it's 7Mb (and it's all in French).

free WMV plugin?

What are you talking about? If you use Microsoft IE, I'd assume there already is a WMV plugin included... right?

Or if you're one of those Linux freaks, they can get Mplayer for Mozilla. (As long as you stick to Intel-style CPU of course)

But remember that non-IE browsers use mimetype (rather than file extension) to determine which plugin should view a download. Since your planning24h.jp server doesn't report a mimetype for WMV, the plugin might not be invoked.

Try a well written app like azureus and then come back and tell me that java is at fault rather than it's GUI toolkits.

IIRC, the plan was to switch to the Opal engine for GnomeMeeting 1.1 which gets you SIP support.

try imgseek.

real nice. real nice.

for family photos, of course.

real nice.

I agree, but consider that if you wrote technical documentation for a living, would you spend your time documenting How Things Work, or would you put that aside and compile a list of how to's and tips? I'd suggest that overlap aside, they're very different approaches intended for different audiences.

If you want everything in a "How do I?" format, then you'd be best served by narrowing web searches by using "FAQ" or "tutorial" keywords. You'll discover that that many are written separately and by different groups. Here's an example: one of the most extensive "How do I?" documents I've recently come across is the Vim FAQ. The first line reads "This Vim FAQ is created from the questions and answers posted to the vim@vim.org user mailing list and the comp.editors newsgroup". It's detailed enough that you could actually use it to learn from, but the point is that it's been authored by someone else and is being offered to a different audience.

If it helps, you may find that after reading enough tutorials, you'll find yourself re-reading man pages because you want more "complex stuff."

Since SPAM has propogated on to email, I am reminded of my favorite lines out of the Unix Haters Handbook.

The thing that gets me is that one of the arguments that landed Robert Morris, author of "the Internet Worm" in jail was all the sysadmins' time his prank cost. Yet the author of sendmail is still walking around free without even a U (for Unixery) branded on his forehead. -- An email from dm at hri dot com dated 12-Oct-93 in Garfinkle, Weise and Strassman; Unix Haters Handbook; May, 1994; IDG Books Worldwide

The interesting thing is that all this was published before the C&S Usenet spamming. How much time are admins spending on email management now?

SPAM has killed Usenet's usefullness for me. At least filters like Popfile and such are keeping SPAM over email bearable; even if they are not fixing the problem.