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Man, I've been waiting for screen to get adapted to Solaris for years.

I got used to it during my shell-term AT&T Unix(tm) days. It made true multilple-session work possible. I was absolutely astounded as my PPP session was running under Windows 3.1.

It was amazing to have this true multitasking capability back in 1992 -- and you didn't have to use a mouse!

For those, like me, interested in the encoding/decoding technology used in the DSD (digital stream data) that the SACD is encoded with here is a short, useful paper on 1-bit Sigma-Delta Modulation . Those remotely familiar with digital signal processing shouldn't have any difficulty with it, but it isn't an introductory piece or tutorial either.

-Adam

Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.

AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.

Steps in roll-your-own:

Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME
KDE
ROX
foXdesktop
Perltop
Equinox
XFce
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.

If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager.
enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.

Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.

The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.

Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.

Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.

Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.

File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.

Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.

Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!

Window Maker runs pretty good... but then you lose 95% of your GUI environment.

Heh. I've been introducing folks to ion lately, and those who actually try it for a day end up loving it -- not one exception yet. ion gets rid of even more of the "GUI environment" stuff than Window Maker does -- but it's blazing fast, tremendously efficient (particularly for those who favor using the keyboard where possible) and uses a much more orderly paradigm than the usual moving potentially overlapping windows around over a desktop thing (that's right, in ion windows can't overlap; you'll need to try it to understand).

What I'm saying that having more of a traditional GUI environment doesn't necessarily translate directly into having a better end-user experience. ion is minimalist -- some might even call it "crippled" -- but it's also better than anything else I've ever used. Shiny does not necessarily mean good.

Btw, using the binary nVidia drivers made a huge 2D speed difference for me -- the choppy window resizes you discuss sound just plain Wrong (though, running ion, I haven't resized a window in... well, a long time now). Sure everything's working correctly (AGP support and such)?

I'm not sure that that is incorrect. There are only 4 timeslices, and a total of 12 slots, with repetition. The (unfortunate) bit is that, at least in the commercial world, the giant computer corporations of the past 50 years are and were US-based. It is these places who fund expensive research labs -- as someone pointed out, Microsoft is up there because they pump incredible budgets at results-free work. I believe Microsoft Research is the largest academic CS environment in the world.

And that the two universities listed are US-based says nothing of the international demographics of the programs. Generally CMU and MIT attract the best of the best in the world (certainly, CMU has more graduate students from IIT than MIT&CMU).

Can you think of who a competitor might be? Perhaps some of the Japanese megacorps... but I don't think Sony has a dedicated HCI research lab. And their HCI impact is still arguably less significant (good or bad) than PARC (windows), Apple or Microsoft.

That said, I prefer the direction ion is going: graphical usable interfaces and whatnot. Overlapping window jockeying sucks.

I thought this for some time, too, until I noticed that some pan&scan movies actually contain picture that's not present in the widescreen. This isn't always true, but some common films do it. I believe it is referred to as "soft matting" and the picture is filmed at 1.33:1 and cropped for the theatre, while the video version uses the whole image. Some examples: Spaceballs, Silence of the Lambs, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands.

Another combination that produces this is filming on Super-35. This film has a ratio of 1.6:1, rather than the 2.35:1 we're used to. So it is cropped vertically for theatre and horizontally for 1.33:1 video. Examples include: Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies, Apollo 13, Titanic.

Sometimes this results in you seeing things you weren't supposed to. In Terminator 2 at 1.33:1 (full-screen on a normal TV) you can see the pay phone is already broken, or John Cleese's shorts in the Fish Called Wanda 2 "nude" scene.

http://www.britannia.org/film/support/screenform at s.shtml

See this page for details:

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~leopold/Ld/FilmToVideo/

Now, you're probably saying to yourself "but we could still use one master stream and crop it differently for the two formats." And you're right, assuming the format supported that. But you still wouldn't want to-- since we're stuck at 720x480, we want the film->DVD transfer to use as much of the available space as possible. So we have an anamorphic widescreen that fills the data area, and we have a separate pan&scan that fills the data area. If we didn't do this, both formats would contain less image data-- something that is already in short supply at NTSC and PAL resolutions.

A cue track and the ability to switch aspect ratios on the fly would be brilliant additions to the next standard, though!!

I think you have right window manager, it's question have you configured it properly.

Take a look at here for example. Direction-command is something usefull you may not have noticed.

I think Ion is worth a try.

• Not have anything like DMCA or WIPO treaty (sorry, USA)
• Strong crypto is legal (sorry, France)
• Not have pro-censorship laws (sorry, Germany, Australia, USA)
• Not have weird libel laws (sorry, UK)
• Searches and siezures only done with a warrant (sorry, USA)
• Not take Scientologists and their kind seriously (sorry, USA)
• etc

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is based on my interpretation of Finnish law, based on published cases and sites like this.

• Finnish copyright law is kind of nice; it has lots of free use provisions (e.g. the right to copy and convert copyrighted material that you have bought the right to use as necessary to use it (irrespective of license agreements)).
• The EU in general seems not to recognise software patents, AFAIK.
• Strong crypto is completely legal in Finland; I regularly use military-grade PGP at school to send in assignments.
• Censorship in Finland is mostly limited to broadcast media (e.g. TV).

Finland is quite nicely connected, especially in urban areas (and university campuses). Consumer broadband is a bit on the expensive site but becoming widely available.

First off please get a better link on the Laserdisc. as it is misleading. The ANALOG signal is converted to DIGITAL for the disc and then back to ANALOG for playback..

Not getting into the audio differences. More information:
LD vs CD under microscope
Home Video Format Comparison

Jason Fisher
:P

Not getting into the audio differences. More information:
LD vs CD under microscope
Home Video Format Comparison

Jason Fisher
:P

Why you should not use a flag as a symbol of a language

If you're interested in this distro for running such apps, you might want to look into a lightweight window manager (if that's an applicable term) like ion. I personally use it on a number of my leaner boxen, and there's no reason you couldn't run konqueror/mozilla/koffice with it on a 32MB system. I'm not so certain about StarOffice - I haven't tried it on anything except my main (and much more modern) system.

About the only Widescreen TV show I can think of is B5. Are there many others?

Yes there are, though B5 was basically the first one, the other pioneer being Lois & Clark. Some other shows that I know of include ER (from season 6, I think), NYPD Blue (from season 8), Sopranos, Buffy (from season 4), Angel... Neither TNG, DS9 nor Voyager were widescreen, Enterprise is the first one in Star Trek franchise. Come to think of it, most of recent television shows with budget have been moving to widescreen, though television broadcast versions may still be pan&scan. Widescreen is the future way, and now there no point making shows that will have black bars on left and right in 5-10 years.

Actually, most of European TV productions, even low-budget ones, have been widescreen for years already.

And back to B5... It's a rather complicated example when it comes to widescreen. While live action was filmed widescreen with Super35 process, almost all CGI and composite shots were done in 4:3 (except for the last few episodes). Therefore all the CGI and composite shots must be cropped from top and/or bottom for widescreen version. Also there will be definite resolution loss when making anamorphic widescreen masters, because the original rendering was made for NTSC resolution. There is a long analysis of all the problems involved here.

Don't worry, both KDE and Gnome are busy copying the click-raises-the-window "feature" so you can be just as annoyed with Linux as with Windows! It is very frustrating to see this, I like Linux because it is different and innovative, not because it is "not MicroSoft".

Trust me, Linux is still very different and innovative -- if you want it to be. I've been using the ion window manager for the last several days, and love it. Go ahead, give it a try. If you're the sort of person who uses stuff out of the box... well, then you're the sort of person all the Windows-workalike code is written for.

To give a brief intro: ion doesn't have window raising, because it doesn't have windows -- not the usual paper-on-a-desktop metaphor, anyhow; it's more like the split-window metaphor from emacs or vim combined with multiple-desktop functionality and a highly keyboard-accessible interface (though the default keybindings might need some adjusting to be to your liking). It's sweet. Really. Try it.

2) Use either aide or tripwire to inspect changes to your file system (They keep snapshots of defined parts of the filesystem with various algorithms so any changes to binarys are noticed ie if /bin/ls was trojaned you would notice on next update of the aide database) see aide

3) use a chrooted environment for anything suspicious (not always very pratical though and inconvenient)

4) Reading through source and Makefiles might be considered but its not very realistic, though be suspicious of assembly code in source files (thankfully this virus is just a binary thing with the prominence of source)

I am sure the rest of the slashdot audience can think up many more methods but there's some I came up with.

In real-time: FileMon installs a driver that transparently tracks filesystem accesses. If you want to see what accesses the drive every five seconds, this is a good tool for it.

If you want to see what files were modified, use programs like AIDE (on Unix) or Tripwire (on Unix or Windows 2k/NT, apparently), or InstallWatch (Windows). If you just want to see where an install program left its files, this is good. If a given program is just reading (not writing) files, or leaving temp files in ignored directories, then this is not effective.

You can examine the source for AIDE & Tripwire, so this isn't a chicken-and-egg problem.

Sorry, forgot the link: The euro sign in HTML and in some other contexts

The page claims that if you are using LaTeX 2e, \usepackage{textcomp} gets the right character set, and \texteuro gets the symbol. I tried it, and it works.

Now, does anybody know how to get the American symbol for cents?

Ion looks a bit like Ratpoison. Also small and designed to be used without touching the mouse.

well, Ion and 3dwm might come pretty close.

/Erik

I currently use FVWM2 on my desktop and have tried WindowMaker and BlackBox. I haven't yet taken the time to venture into KDE- or Gnome-Land.

They are all fast to start up. However, FVWM2 is slow as hell at moving windows around opaquely. Okay, not slow, choppy... not smooth. BlackBox and WindowMaker are both pretty fast/smooth (they should be since BlackBox's window movement routines were derived from WM's). But neither BB or WM are as smooth as Windows boxes with high refresh rates set for the PS/2 mouse (for Win9x, use: http://www.students.tut.fi/~zibbo/other/ps2rate/ps 2rate.zip) .

This slow opaque window movement is the one thing I miss most when I go home and use my Linux box after using Windows 9x/2k machines.

as not a good idea
creasingly being interested
ot to be confused with the

i.e. noise. The only purpose it serves is to faster identify the window you're dealing with. This has become unnecessary with the invention of the taskbar. Further additions to this concept, like window summarization and application-specific taskbars, make it even easier to use. If you want to view a lot of information simultaneously instead of having everything in full-screen mode, a smart window-manager like ion will rearrange windows automatically in useful tiles. Additional usability can be gained with clever hotkeys for application-switching.

But while overlapping windows are stupid, transparent windows are really part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to stupidify the masses by making computers incapable of displaying information. The next step will be window-spectific screensavers, which turn on after a specific period of inactivity in a single window. Just you wait. Thanks to transparency:

• Information becomes unreadable, especially with unfortunate color combinations.
• Information you think is there is actually part of another window -- have fun editing that picture.
• When two windows overlap with the wrong alpha-blending setting, you can no longer be sure which one is on top without looking at the taskbar or focus (in this screenshot, thanks to additional braindead color gradients in the title bars, this is especially hard).
• Even your calculator will use more RAM than Mozilla ..

If you like eye-candy, you may "drool" over this one and get your brain fucked by the Illuminati. A frontal lobotomy may be a quicker solution though.

Army of Light needs ducks.

Standards-compliant HTML which works in all browsers is nice, but contradictory.

First off, there is no HTML Standard - only a WWW Consortium Recommendation. Secondly, there is more than one Recommendation, based on the DTD used to author the page. So making pages largely compatible involves using the relevant DTD for each User-Agent (note User-Agent, not browser). There's no point hacking an HTML4.01 Strict DocType to work in Netscape 3, since this browser implements a form of HTML3.2.

A lot of these myths and fallacies are covered by the document Publishing on the Web Is Different

Detecting browsers is often misused, but with older Javascript implementations the only way is sometimes to use a browser sniffer.

Never use a browser sniffer. MSN.com proved conclusively the idiocy involved in relying on User-Agent strings.

If only there was a standard function like browser.does("DOM_2") or something so you could switch by features rather than browser...

There is, and always have been. Javascript object-detection is a recommended way of determining a browser's functionality, so if(document.getElementById) {} identifies browsers that comply with W3C recommendations to DOM.

The one thing most web-designers are completely forgetting is that plain old HTML is supposed to be a document structure, not a layout format. Trying to force it to layout can only reduce the effectiveness of the structure, thus impair its future as a www-document.

With ideas like the Sematic Web approaching fruition, it is essential for webdesigners to concentrate on getting the document structure right first, then use CSS for layout.

Lets move beyond the fuzzy effects, and concentrate on the web's future. Its obvious msn have no clue about the web's potential as a global and open medium.

You first have to examine carfully the chracter set your current application can deal with. Is it ASCII? Or just the printable range? Or do most routines treat everything as sequences of 8-bit characters? Is the null character permitted in data? And so on.

This is a key point. Is the person sure that their data is all ASCII? Often people confuse "ASCII" with "8-bit text" and get burned. Most common is calling data "ASCII" when it's really "Latin-1" or "Windows CodePage 1252". Others thinking of similar problems should be careful about getting terms correct. Remember, if the data has any values outside of the 0 through 127 range (more than 7-bit, more than 128 values), then it's not "ASCII".

Also, if you can represent languages other than US English, Latin, Hawaiian and Swahili, then chances are good that you have something other than "ASCII" data.

You first have to examine carfully the chracter set your current application can deal with. Is it ASCII? Or just the printable range? Or do most routines treat everything as sequences of 8-bit characters? Is the null character permitted in data? And so on.

This is a key point. Is the person sure that their data is all ASCII? Often people confuse "ASCII" with "8-bit text" and get burned. Most common is calling data "ASCII" when it's really "Latin-1" or "Windows CodePage 1252". Others thinking of similar problems should be careful about getting terms correct. Remember, if the data has any values outside of the 0 through 127 range (more than 7-bit, more than 128 values), then it's not "ASCII".

Also, if you can represent languages other than US English, Latin, Hawaiian and Swahili, then chances are good that you have something other than "ASCII" data.

As a teenager (albeit a computer geek), I've been using linux for about a year now, and I've found I don't need a "desktop environment." I used GNOME for a while, and I use KDE now, but I don't use most of what it has to offer, and I don't really want it. It looks really nice, but when it comes down to it, I want something that works, is fast, and doesn't take up much RAM. KDE satisfies the first. I'm going to replace it with something else (I was thinking pwm) when I get a chance.

Don't despair. At least you got to know what everyone thinks about window managers... And there's some really insightful comments out there.

...and I found out about the Ion window manager, so I'm happy (until my other comment gets marked "Troll" or something).

(I don't know much about WM development, but...)

Honestly, the only two window managers that I ever felt comfortable with are fvwm (v2 if you like) and twm (didn't find a really good link, but it's standard on NetBSD systems, so you all know what I'm talking about right?). All other managers are just visual fluff that eats memory, occupies the palette, and slows the computer down.

There has been some other really great ideas during the last few years, like the pwm and wm2 (and its sibling, wmx) window managers. They simple, easy to configure, and does NOT rely on tons of extra libraries.

Someone else here was talking about environments, but I just can't see why you would want an extra "environment" on top of the perfectly usable standard Unix environment that's already there... Also, some of them comes packed with applications tailored especially for use within that particular window manager, which in reality turns each "environment" into its own, well, distribution. One can devote a separate CD for GNOME or KDE applications and support libraries, many of which just duplicates the function of already existing Unix commands. Sometimes I think someone ought start a KDE/Linux distribution just to spare everyone else from having to download that extra CD ISO.

Then again, we might be talking about different audiences here. The teenagers might need cool "environments" to get lured into using GNU/Linux, and that might have a positive effect in 5 to 10 years. But I wouldn't be very surprised if the adoption of GNU/Linux (or any other of the free Unices for that matter) by desktop users would be slowed down by offering a vast amount of conflicting graphical environments.

I think it would be a good idea to correct the bugs and stabilise the already existing window manages, maybe even to unify some of the more similar ones. You can make most of the more configurable managers look like each other anyway.

All that you need is some xterm windows.

I haven't seen anything in a window manager that interested me since 1993. All I pray for these days is that whatever window manager that gets installed on my systems by default have the decency to put the "close" box in the same place as the last location I got used to, and that it not make me jump through too many hoops to turn off all of the keyboard equivalents that get in the way of Emacs usage.

It has a very tiny memory footprint

You can configure it to do almost any thing you want

You can group many windows into one frame, which helps to manage lots of netscape, xterm, and other app windows.

It supports windomaker dock apps

A gui that isn't all gooey. I like that.

All I have to say is; next time you set up a Windows or Linux box, and you're a few days into it, know that you could have done this all in 15 minutes on a mac.

That may be, but if you put me and another guy on two different (or even the same) linux machine, setting it up for a few days, and come back and compare, you'll see two completely different environments.

On the Mac, 15 minutes later we'll both have made change that can be undone in less than 3.

which tells me that although the mac interface is intuitive and simple, and there is not much setting up that needs to happen... there also isn't much change that can happen. We'll both be conforming to someone else's vision (probably) and that is unacceptable to me. Vi and Emacs are both extremely powerful, speedy editors---but only for those who have taken the time to learn them. By the same token, whenever you watch someone edit their Autoexec.bat in Notepad, you see how slow and inefficient the "intuitive" means can be.

Use Ion, your efficiency will triple because you won't touch the mouse and won't screw with any windows. It's the pinnacle of the "steep curve = more better" debate for window managers.

Daniel

1. what's wrong with being a server closet geek toy? it's not like everything commercial, shrink-wrapped, shiny and expensive is worth something (regardless of pricetag).

2. what's the problem with making developers and users more aware of the system? educating the users should be priority one, not writing software to work around their ignorance.

3. people have been saying "Linux will forever be ______ if we don't _______" since 1992. I remember John Dvorak of PC Magazine saying something like, "Linux will never exist outside college dormitories" I can't remember his reasoning exactly. This is a man I considered (up until that point) to be an industry oracle, and I gather that he still has some of this reputation today.

The nice thing about Linux is that, like a virus ;), it will change into whatever you want. if you don't like having two APIs, spend a weekend tinkering with GNOME and KDE (or UDE or XFCE or whatever) and pick one you like. Then make your own distro (or use Linux From Scratch) and roll your own. Stand on the rooftop and shout, "KDE IS THE STANDARD FROM NOW ON!" Or whichever you pick.

And the cute thing is, the people who usually say, "We need standards here!" think that there is a Linux bureaucrat somewhere they could bribe into making this happen. No. The fact is, whichever desktop is default in the most Linux For Windows type deals will become the de-facto "standard" among newbies and the rest of us can jolly well use ION.

Hardware is a place where standards are important. Standard slots, sockets, plugs, cards, etc. Even there we don't have just one thing, we have all these crazy ISA and PCI and PCMCIA. Goll darn if only they'd pick one and stick with it! Software is not a hard science. User preference is key. But I must be lecturing the wrong person, because anyone who has a problem with the way Linux runs things and isn't writing code right now to solve the problem hasn't learned the essential truth behind the free software movement. Go use HP-UX.

Daniel

If you want to see what filehandles are open - as in, files & sockets - lsof is useful.

The checksummers take a couple of minutes to check timestamps, and at least a few minutes for checksumming; lsof could be scripted to run in a loop, I guess. These are tools for use at intervals. If you want to get a continual log, look at strace. If you want to be able to reverse the changes, you could try chroot, or back up your system, or use a test system.

If you want a window manager that's truly stripped down but still has plenty of functionality, try pwm or Ion which both make good use of the keyboard and run in about a meg of ram.

pwm somewhat resembles BlackBox without the bar at the bottom or iconify, adding the ability to attach windows together into frames for each navigation. You can move thru the frames with hotkeys, keeping the desktop more organized.

Ion takes it a bit further and forces all windows to maximize to fit a fix sized box (frame). You can have multiple programs in a given frame and can navigate thru them or move from frame to frame with mouse or keystrokes. It's truly odd and a big departure from traditional CDE or Windows knockoffs.

These are where real innovation and progress in window managing is. Making something that doesn't just look pretty or makes Windows users at home, but who would have guessed, actually help you manage windows better.

If you want a window manager that's truly stripped down but still has plenty of functionality, try pwm or Ion which both make good use of the keyboard and run in about a meg of ram.

pwm somewhat resembles BlackBox without the bar at the bottom or iconify, adding the ability to attach windows together into frames for each navigation. You can move thru the frames with hotkeys, keeping the desktop more organized.

Ion takes it a bit further and forces all windows to maximize to fit a fix sized box (frame). You can have multiple programs in a given frame and can navigate thru them or move from frame to frame with mouse or keystrokes. It's truly odd and a big departure from traditional CDE or Windows knockoffs.

These are where real innovation and progress in window managing is. Making something that doesn't just look pretty or makes Windows users at home, but who would have guessed, actually help you manage windows better.

Tripwire is now a pay for play product, so I suggest using something like this which is open source/free and just as good

IIRC Tripwire is GPL now. But in any case I prefer AIDE myself.

A question for the /. masses: I'm wondering if there's any hope for browsing the web mouseless under X?
I use Ion as a window manager, and live for the most part in Emacs, but I'm still at a loss when dealing with the web.
Navigator 4.mumble supports rudimentary keyboarding, but I can't select links in the body of a document. I built Mozilla out of an updated ports last night, and tabbing betwee links "sort of" works (their heuristic which chooses where to start is totally broken), but the browsing experience is so unpleasant that it's a move of last resort. Sadly, this is one more area where IE rules over the competition.
I've tried w3 mode, but it's not really good enough. Lynx is of course a possibility, but much of the web is visual and I don't want to give that up just because my hands hurt.
Any ideas?
TIA,
(jfb)

Seeing a boom mike in frame is not a "projectionist error." Think about it--if the man caught the boom mike in frame, it's going to be in the shot, and the film editors either catch it and fix it, or they don't. They're just like proofreaders.

It claims (without proof) to be a lot faster than Java: 1.5 - 3 times slower than C (according to this document, the source of much of the following information).

It's all tooled up with both the bad bways of Garbage Collection. Yes, let's hear it, folks, for Mark and Sweep and his old sparring partner Reference Counting. Still doesn't stop it churning perceptibly in the ticker applet. (They claim RT scheduling but that's no good when you're sitting inside IE with JavaScript turned on in a force 9 pr0n gale.) The polyhedra demo is fast and smoothe and reasonably svelte.

'array of array of vector of arse'. Gak! Neither I nor the compiler are amused that dcl is now compulsory.

It can run Limbo source or binaries, not just bytecode.

Dennis Ritchie encourages the development of a C compiler, and maybe the one bundled with Plan 9 has a few tricks up its sleeve. With a gcj-style Dis backend you could install signed X and Gnome/GTK/KDE/Qt (or the unbelievably cool Ion Window Manager) applets to replace the embarrassingly retro interface. How about writing DHTML in Perl or Python instead of JavaScript? Can you say .GNET?

The site's 3 years old and the guy may be talking out of his arse. I'll give him this, though: he sure knows how to diss up C++ with a zeal for hellfire and damnation truly worthy of his dear OS's name:

C++ objects and their complexities are happily left out. There is no polymorphism or tricky exception handling (the difficulty of understanding exception handling caused the explosion of the Ariane 5 rocket).

It's not every day you download and install an operating system in a couple of seconds (ADSL). Didn't even have to powercycle IE let alone reboot its other OS plugin, Windows. If they don't open the source I'm sure there's someone somewhere who's looking at his/her 1 floppy Linux distro and hatching a cunning plan. What a shame Theo de Raadt's so down on a pocket OpenBSD (reminds me of Guido's antipathy to a Python shared object, Linus's allergy to a kernel debugger). That fireproof sonofabitch would be a perfect fit for plug-in World Domination.

every minute a computer user realizes that eye-candy sugar coated user interfaces are a waste of time and computer resources and detract you form whatever it is you were trying to do before a shitty user interface got in your way.

check out this.
Note that this is not a lame link to goatse.cx or otherwise dried up joke.

In case some people weren't aware, AIDE has been available as a GPL'ed replacement for Tripwire for a while now...

Hate to reply to myself, but this is a better link for W -- can get the latest version from here. It'll run on fb, SVGAlib and libGGI - woohoo....

And he's not kidding. It really was the predecessor to the X Windows System. At least X wasn't named "W++". "W" was originally a black and white 1-bit display, although color was added later. Looks like the Yopy has color. There's also the Vinyl Window System, but it's not available for the Yopy.

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And he's not kidding. It really was the predecessor to the X Windows System. At least X wasn't named "W++". "W" was originally a black and white 1-bit display, although color was added later. Looks like the Yopy has color. There's also the Vinyl Window System, but it's not available for the Yopy.

---- ----

AIDE is a file checksum database thingy (similar to Tripwire [tm])
Portsentry is a portscan detection thingy...

And yes, both these things are good to have...


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• There are already free tools like aide that do the same job tripwire does. I don't have personal experience with any of them, so I cannot vouch for their quality, but I've heard good things about aide.
• Tripwire cannot be open source for linux alone. Either it is open source, in which case it follows the rules of the open source definition, including rule 8, "License Must Not Be Specific to a Product." or, it is not open source at all. Of course, they are welcome to release a version of tripwire that only works in linux, and license it under the GPL -- but then any hacker may go make it work on another OS without violating that copyright.