Slashdot Mirror

Sesse writes: "XMPS 0.1.1beta is out, with experimental DivX support for Linux (by thunking to the Windows DLL). It's still buggy, but it seems to work! Sounds like good news for bringing multimedia another step away from Windows-only systems :-)" XMPS driving force Damien Chavarria has placed a screenshot on this page about the DivX support. Can anyone comment on success with this, name files successfully viewed, etc?

webword writes: "The Duke of URL has posted a pretty good review of Mandrake 7.1. There is a useful list of pros and cons, along with performance and usaability ratings. There are some helpful screenshots too." BeOpen submitted a link to a 7.1 review on gnulinux.com, Sensei^ one on linuxnewbie.org, and Quick & Flupke serendipitously pointed out the new slash-like Mandrake Forum where users can (among other things) suggest features for upcoming Mandrake releases.

flupke asks: "In this article at ZDNet one can read about Linux consolidations. They provide several possible schemes such as: Caldera & SuSE, LinuxCare and O'Reilly, SCO and Turbo Linux, Compaq and MandrakeSoft. I don't think it's very accurate, but I'd like to have Slashdot readers on this subject because one day, it will happen ..."

Well, last Thursday evening we announced the Beanie award winners at the Slashdot/Andover/VA shindig at The China Club. For those of you not able to attend, I've written a synopsis below, otherwise you can watch the whole deal at TheSync. You can grab the awards in both streaming and downloadable format. And, if you'd like to see some pictures from the show, check out Brian Hawkins' online-pix as well as Kurt Gray's pix from the Andover booth.

The awards began predictably enough as Hemos narrowly took home the Hemos award. It amazes me how many people actually abstained rather than vote for Hemos, but alas, he still won. *grin* The award for Best Dressed went to Tux. Sadly, no one ever thought to nominate or vote for the fine women of FreeBSD, and Tux didn't even bother to show up for the award, leaving me with no one to hug. *pout* However, an Anonymous Coward was on hand to accept the Favorite Comment Poster award, as was CmdrTaco for the Favorite Author award. The Best Slashdot Story went to Quickies, and the Cluestick award for FUD went to Microsoft. Also, the pair of "Bully" awards for domain bullying and patent bullying went to Etoys and Amazon, repsectively.

The fun awards done with, it was time to get a little more serious (but not much) for the two grand awards. Best Unix Desktop Eyecandy went to Enlightenment, and Best Unix Earcandy went to XMMS. Best Desktop Theme went to BrushedMetal, which everyone uses at least a part of. The Best Perl Module award went to CGI, the best Apache Module award went to mod_perl, and the Best Open Source Text Editor went to vim. It's good to see things that I couldn't do my job without get some recognition, although I could probably have said the same about any of the nominees (except for Emacs, but that's a different matter entirely *grin*) The "Most Deserving of $2000" award went to Debian, while the Best Book award went to Programming Perl. Finally in this award category, the Non-graphical and Graphical Interface awards went to Pine and The GIMP, respectively.

The award for Most Improved Kernel Module went to USB, probably because it went from non-existent to usable in so short of a time. Alan Cox won the Unsung Hero award and immediately donated his winnings to the DVD defense fund, proving that he is indeed worthy of the name hero. Best Newbie Helper went to Tom Christiansen, famous for helping newbies find their way out of #perl (I'm kidding! Okay, only a little. Tom still rocks in my book.) and Most Deserving Open Source Charity went to the FSF. Best Open Source Advocate went to Linus Torvalds, surprisingly enough, but advocating by doing is one of the best ways to do it.

Finally, the Big Award for Most Improved Open Source Project went to the GNOME project. All of the nominees in this category were projects that at some point people shook their heads at, and now use on a daily basis, but GNOME just happened to beat out the rest.

Also, a new award for "Best Merger/Acquisition" was announced and awarded to VA Linux/Andover.Net to follow that day's news. All in all it was a good night, with lots of free beer and getting to know people who I'd only seen before on IRC or through e-mail. I imagine it was that way for a lot of people there.

Let's start this off with some Microsoft parodies: Polo pointed us to a version of office2000 that many Slashdotters might prefer to the Microsoft version. Lexie (ask out CowboyNeal!) sent us a Microsoft Monopoly that you probably won't see in stores. G. Crisp sent us a Lego Penguin: proof that someone has both too much spare time, and too many legos. An anonymous reader noted that you can get AccuWeather®5-Day Forecast for AREA 51. Forecast calls for black helecopters and Gillian Anderson. witten sent us a random Jon Katz story generator called (not surprisingly) Katzdot. While we're on the subject of Slashdot, it's worth nothing that ThinkGeek is now carrying new Slashdot T-Shirts. Of course personally I'd prefer the 'Kernel Panic' shot glasses, but then again, I've had a pretty long week. dayeight sent us something that is pretty indescribible. It involves video games, but presumably it also involved some sort of illegal substances too. I think its a metaphor for something. How about a few 'True Stories' to brighten up your day (no I'm not talking about zany Talking Heads movies). First zentropy sent us what seems to be a true story about why sports and Taco Bell just don't mix. An anonymous reader showed us a woman who is trying to get workers comp from her employer since she got carpal tunnel... her job involves phones, but it wasn't dialing them that caused the *ahem* injury.

Mart writes "Mahir Cagri, from Izmir, Turkey, was projected to instant fame when news about his homepage spread among internet users . Entitled Welcome to my homepage!!!!! I kiss you!!!! the page contains pictures of Mahir and describes his lifestyle in broken English: "I like to take foto-camera (amimals , towns , nice nude models andpeoples)....." Mahir's homepage has received over a million hits. It has been featured in Salon magazine, and is covered in this week's edition of The Onion under the headline "Turkish man Kiss You." Sadly the homepage wasn't real. Mahir claims that his home page had been pirated and that his worlwide fame, or infamy is undeserved. "

Mart writes "Mahir Cagri, from Izmir, Turkey, was projected to instant fame when news about his homepage spread among internet users . Entitled Welcome to my homepage!!!!! I kiss you!!!! the page contains pictures of Mahir and describes his lifestyle in broken English: "I like to take foto-camera (amimals , towns , nice nude models andpeoples)....." Mahir's homepage has received over a million hits. It has been featured in Salon magazine, and is covered in this week's edition of The Onion under the headline "Turkish man Kiss You." Sadly the homepage wasn't real. Mahir claims that his home page had been pirated and that his worlwide fame, or infamy is undeserved. "

We've had a lot of submissions lately about a proposal within the French Government to require use of Open Source software wherever possible, as well making the government more electronically accessible. Thus far however, either we've had material in French, or unsubstantiated - but thanks to one of our French-speaking readers who has translated the Senator's comments (above link) into English, you can click below to read the Senator's comments. This has to be one of the best ideas a national government has had in a long time - my hat (beret?) is off to the French.Update: 10/28 11:10 by H :Thanks to Julien Roussea who's sent over a translation of the legal proposal to require Open Source. As well, read his open letter regarding the issue.

Translation of comments by French Senator Pierre Laffitte to postings on the French Senat e-forum to his proposed law for making government services electronically accessible and mandating the use of open source software (I hope I did better than BabelFish).

Message from Senator Pierre Laffitte - email: p.laffitte@senat.fr Sent : 28 Oct 1999 09:37:59

Subject: Comments on the state of the forum on 27 Oct 1999

The success of the forum opened by the Senat shows the interest in the proposed law. More than 400 messages are awaiting me when I get back from Stockholm & Tunis in six days.

Some of them are very potent and enthusiastic; in particular, I'm thinking of those from Jeff Thompson and Xavier Giannapoulos on the 26th October. Of course we wish that the European Countries and others will follow. I add that the approach matches the strategies of a number of global information technology Companies. It's by way of services adapted to the customers rather than by selling proprietary software that money should be made. IBM and SUN are of this opinion and MICROSOFT seems to me ready to follow this path.

I thank you in the name of my colleagues and myself for the many positive responses.

I note that few of the comments touch on the use of electronic messaging in government departments. At the moment the legal control services of regional government oppose their use between local groups, which explains Article 1.

Few comments concerning the billions of savings that would result from public services and companies using email for calls for offers (Article 2). Nobody has brought up the very strong incentive for modernisation that this example by public services would provoke.

Most of the messages focus on open source, hence these remarks above. (Articles (4 & 5)

The objective of this forum is to collect suggestions, these will all be analyzed and weighed, in particular by the sponsor in charge of proposing the law. It will be no doubt examined as extension of the the proposed law presented by Ms. E GUIGOU giving legal status to digital signatures.

As is customary in the Senat, this will be completed by auditions and everything will be examined with a sense of responsibility, rigorousness and analysis of the various consequences. This conforms the tradition of the role to the Senat at the heart of the French Parliament.

Sénateur Pierre LAFFITTE

We've had a lot of submissions lately about a proposal within the French Government to require use of Open Source software wherever possible, as well making the government more electronically accessible. Thus far however, either we've had material in French, or unsubstantiated - but thanks to one of our French-speaking readers who has translated the Senator's comments (above link) into English, you can click below to read the Senator's comments. This has to be one of the best ideas a national government has had in a long time - my hat (beret?) is off to the French.Update: 10/28 11:10 by H :Thanks to Julien Roussea who's sent over a translation of the legal proposal to require Open Source. As well, read his open letter regarding the issue.

Translation of comments by French Senator Pierre Laffitte to postings on the French Senat e-forum to his proposed law for making government services electronically accessible and mandating the use of open source software (I hope I did better than BabelFish).

Message from Senator Pierre Laffitte - email: p.laffitte@senat.fr Sent : 28 Oct 1999 09:37:59

Subject: Comments on the state of the forum on 27 Oct 1999

The success of the forum opened by the Senat shows the interest in the proposed law. More than 400 messages are awaiting me when I get back from Stockholm & Tunis in six days.

Some of them are very potent and enthusiastic; in particular, I'm thinking of those from Jeff Thompson and Xavier Giannapoulos on the 26th October. Of course we wish that the European Countries and others will follow. I add that the approach matches the strategies of a number of global information technology Companies. It's by way of services adapted to the customers rather than by selling proprietary software that money should be made. IBM and SUN are of this opinion and MICROSOFT seems to me ready to follow this path.

I thank you in the name of my colleagues and myself for the many positive responses.

I note that few of the comments touch on the use of electronic messaging in government departments. At the moment the legal control services of regional government oppose their use between local groups, which explains Article 1.

Few comments concerning the billions of savings that would result from public services and companies using email for calls for offers (Article 2). Nobody has brought up the very strong incentive for modernisation that this example by public services would provoke.

Most of the messages focus on open source, hence these remarks above. (Articles (4 & 5)

The objective of this forum is to collect suggestions, these will all be analyzed and weighed, in particular by the sponsor in charge of proposing the law. It will be no doubt examined as extension of the the proposed law presented by Ms. E GUIGOU giving legal status to digital signatures.

As is customary in the Senat, this will be completed by auditions and everything will be examined with a sense of responsibility, rigorousness and analysis of the various consequences. This conforms the tradition of the role to the Senat at the heart of the French Parliament.

Sénateur Pierre LAFFITTE

Meshula writes "An interesting article suggesting that time is an illusion of perception has appeared at New Scientist. "...quantum mechanics supports it. In 1929, the British physicist Nevill Mott and Werner Heisenberg from Germany explained how alpha particles, emitted by radioactive nuclei, form straight tracks in cloud chambers. Mott pointed out that, quantum mechanically, the emitted alpha particle is a spherical wave which slowly leaks out of the nucleus. It is difficult to picture how it is that an outgoing spherical wave can produce a straight line," he argued. We think intuitively that it should ionise atoms at random throughout space. Mott noted that we think this way because we imagine that quantum processes take place in ordinary three-dimensional space. In fact, the possible configurations of the alpha particle and the particles in the detecting chamber must be regarded as the points of a hugely multidimensional configuration space, a miniature Platonia, with the position of the radioactive nucleus playing the role of Alpha. " It's worth a read. "

limited wrote in about the October issue of Scientific American, in which, he says, "there is a Special Report on High Speed Inet Access." Great in-depth tech stuff! In related (and IMO excellent) news, here's a News.com story Zyber sent in about a new ruling from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that requires cable TV operators to sell access to competing Internet service providers. Perhaps the US FCC will be smart enough to follow the Canadians' lead. One can only hope.

Christian Reiniger of the new Linux Game Development Project has written up a nice piece that you might want to read if you want to see more games on Linux, and how this new project will aid that. The way I see it, the apps are coming, and in many cases, already here. We just need the games. The following was written by Slashdot Reader Christian Reiniger The Linux Game Development Center Rationale

Linux is gaining much attention these days. People who were anti-Linux for a long time suddenly discover that it has changed much the past few years, ultraconservative magazines feature positive stories about Linux at prominent places and The Big Ones in the computer business are almost crowding to support the former "hacker OS".

Good press is always welcome - but can Linux live up to its new image? Can it avoid to dissapoint the people finally giving it a try?

Well, the "It doesn't have a nice, easy to use desktop" and "There are no applications for it" arguments are vanishing in a puff of colorful smoke and the "It's too hard to install" problem is quietly dissolving. But there's still that nasty "But I can't play my favourite games in Linux!" thing.

Linux has games. Linux has good games. But that other operating system has several orders of magnitude more good games than Linux. That's bad. And difficult to overcome, as it's not only because of technical reasons. But we, the free software community, have have a long history of solving But we, the free software community, have have a long history of solving problems and shipping around obstacles. There is no reason why we should not be able to solve this issue, too.

So what's the current situation, what needs to be done and what can be done? Here is a short overview of the major issues:

• Despite Linux's rapid growth - both in terms of user base and existing software - it still is not generally perceived as viable platform for high quality games. Some of the often cited problems are without doubt true, but most of these are already at the verge of being solved and the others mainly need more public discussion.
• While many game-related SDKs and applications exist or are in the make, there is no comprehensive overview of them available.
• As all of these SDKs have their strengths and weaknesses, much can be gained by making them as modular and interoperable as possible, so that game developers can combine them to an almost optimal solution.
• For both commercial game developers wanting to port games to Linux and yet-inexperienced Open Source® developers aspiring to write free games, easy to read documentation and online help via mailing lists and/or irc are very valuable.

Quick Summary

In essence we are suggesting that this new Linux Game Development Center be a kind of meta-project. It would be dedicated to advocating Linux as gaming platform, collecting knowledge about Linux game development and using it to help all interested people, providing facilities for discussion to Linux game developers and, last but not least, encouraging and helping existing free (Open Source®) game SDK projects coordinate with one another.

Please note that this is not an attempt to impose standards or rules on anyone. We just want to do what we can to help everybody coordinate their project with the others and to encourage all game SDK developers to develop compatible libraries.

This is also a call for developers, users and game SDK projects to join our efforts.

History

In the beginning ... there were many unrelated games SDK projects started by many different groups with little or no inter-group communication or coordination.

The initial initiative of starting the Linux Game Development site came from Ian Crawford (you can read his announcement of the site here).

It was first meant as a meeting and coordination point for people developing native and free Linux games, but its scope was soon widened to support Linux game development in general - the phrase "This site aspires to be the headquarters for all Linux game development" is from that time.

Cut - Switch to the PenguinPlay mailing list. Shortly after Ian's announcement of the site, Sam Lantiga suggested on the PenguinPlay mailing list that people could get together on IRC to discuss the future of Linux game development. His idea was considered as "really good" and after the first meeting the thing was extended to all people involved in pushing game development for Linux. Here are the archives of past meetings and the plans for future ones.

Well, the irc meetings became a regular event (each Saturday) and the possibility to have a real-time discussion through irc gave a big push to our work. We started discussing on how we could coordinate our efforts better, how to make Linux more appealing to professional game developers etc. After a few meetings we came to the conclusion that it would be best to merge the SDK projects (ClanLib, CrystalSpace, GAMES and PenguinPlay) to one, giving it the full support. It seemed to be the right thing, but we were a bit uneasy with it, as merging projects is a very, very difficult task.

Then Charles Durst threw in an proposal for a clearing house project, i.e. a project that would give developers from different game SDK projects a good way to communicate with each other, remind these developers to keep the different SDKs compatible to each other etc. He first proposed that PenguinPlay could become this "meta-project", but we found Ian Crawford's "Linux Game Development Center" much more fitting.

We started working on the homepage for this and Charles wrote an announcement text we wanted to post on Slashdot or Freshmeat and several newsgroups. However, as we assembled material for the homepage, discussed its structure etc it slowly mutated from the "Linux Game SDK Coordination Center" to a site for Linux game development in general - the "Linux Game Development Center" or LGDC for short. Ian's original site laid the foundation for this (as it was aimed at helping people to develop actual games) and the transformation was completed when the "Linux Game Breeding (LGB)" (aimed at creation of new projects around Linux GameDev) and "Linux Gaming Awareness (LGA)" (aimed at advocating Linux to commercial game developers) projects joined in.

So here we are. The Linux Game Development Center is a project from Open Source® game developers, maintained by them and dedicated to all people interested in the subject. Located at www.linuxgames.org, it serves as a sister site to www.linuxgames.com, the already well-established site targeted towards game players.

The Proposal

The new Linux Game Development Center would:

• Maintain a collection of links to various game SDK projects and a "news page" of the current status and functionality of each.
• Help coordinate efforts to increase compatibility and perhaps create "glue" software between the libraries produced by different game SDK projects.
• Help game SDK developers coordinate with one another (via mailing lists and perhaps IRC get-togethers), and share algorithms and code. This could even help SDK developers abstract out new layers of common or overlapping functionality between projects.
• Help to fill the functionality gaps that are currently preventing any combination of game SDK libraries from being comprehensive enough for many professional game developers to use.
• Help to direct game developers to the right tools for their particular tasks. Making it easy to find software for a particular purpose, within certain platform, language or license requirements. We are considering using existing web-based knowledge base tools such as WikiWikiWeb or faq-o-matic, as well as tables of the features and limitations of each available package.
• Collect the general feedback that game developers might want to give the Linux community about any porting problems they might have. And helping to start, extend or fix projects to meet those needs.
• If neccessary initiate and host "please port this to Linux" petitions and mane the commercial game developers aware of the demand.
• Find volunteers willing to port commercial games to Linux and act as mediator between them and commercial game houses.
• Provide facilities for discussion between commercial game developers and Linux users on how support for Linux can be increased in the future.
• Help rally game SDK development efforts to port existing game libraries to needed, unsupported platforms.
• It could help direct interested people to other projects as needed to help with bugfixing, porting, and documentation (especially with respect to interoperability between projects).
• It could even have a relationship to game SDK projects and Open Source® games somewhat similar to the relationship Debian has with the packages that it collects. It could collect easy-to-find and easy-to-install packages of game SDKs and try to make it easy for a new developer to choose the one(s) that best meets their needs. It could even help develop policies to ensure clean interaction between libraries wanting to be added to the collection.

While game development for Linux would be an important goal of the web site, the most important goal would be the development of quality cross-platform game libraries. For that reason, developers of games and game SDKs for platforms other than Linux would be more than welcome to join us. Especially if they are interested in porting software to or from Linux.

In the end, there would still be multiple, competing game SDK packages, but that should be OK as long as at least one comprehensive open-source solution can be cobbled together from the pieces. As we have seen with multiple distributions, and even the KDE/GNOME projects, competition can sometimes be a very good thing ... if you can see past the flame wars.

The biggest problem with having multiple, competing projects is the resultant (developer and user) confusion. What we are proposing is a Linux Game Development Center that is aimed simply at reducing that confusion by helping people to find, evaluate, combine and use the available tools, or to develop new, missing ones.

Request

At this point, we are mainly looking for:

• More people to work on the web-site (in particular people who have ideas for ways we should do it with existing or new web server and/or database technologies).
• Other game SDK related projects that should be added, or who want to help, or who should at least join the linuxgames mailing list(s).
• Other Game or Game SDK developers who want to be in on the discussions, prioritizing, development, or who just want to influence the direction of the Linux Games project in one way or another.

All interested people are invited to join the linuxgames mailing list and participate in the discussions (send a blank message to linuxgames-subscribe@sunsite.auc.dk)

Current Linux Game Development Projects

These are the current Linux Game Development projects we have been able to locate and invite to participate. If your favorite project is not included, let us know and please join us.

• 3dfx HowTo
• ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
• ClanLib
• CrystalSpace
• Daryll Strauss' Linux 3D page
• DUMB
• GAMES - GNU Animation Multimedia Entertain ment System
• GGI - General Graphics Interface
• GSI - General Sound Interface
• Linux game development webring
• Linux Game Programming HowTo
• Linux Game Programming Megasite
• Linux Game Tome
• LinuxGames.Com
• Mesa
• MGL
• PenguinPlay
• SDL - Simple DirectMedia Layer

Charles Durst, Christian Reiniger

BladeEnc is to be released under the LGPL. BladeEnc is an MP3 encoder which not only runs faster than the ISO code but is optimized to produce better sounding 256Kbit streams. Yes, files are larger, but they sound better. Within the category of free encoders, BladeEnc claims first place in The User Oriented MP3 encoding guide. This link was found on DemoNix

-=Colossal=- writes "What? You don't get PC Gamer and you can't wait till tomorrow to see the Quake Arena pictures, or your sick of seeing those blurry pictures taken by a digital camera. I couldn't let you wait any longer. You can view the scanned pictures here. " Totally worth the download time. Absolutely stunning.

Kodi writes "I found a link on OS News to a page that lets you have a faux MacOS right in your browser, complete with working menus, draggable windows, and draggable icons. Coolest thing I've seen done using only JavaScript. Also make sure you check the trash. (Note: If your browser doesn't get past the loading screen on the above link, try here to skip it.) " Not as cool as the Window Maker simulator, but I think I'll load it up and leave it up instead of a screensaver and see what my roommates think.

Kodi writes "I found a link on OS News to a page that lets you have a faux MacOS right in your browser, complete with working menus, draggable windows, and draggable icons. Coolest thing I've seen done using only JavaScript. Also make sure you check the trash. (Note: If your browser doesn't get past the loading screen on the above link, try here to skip it.) " Not as cool as the Window Maker simulator, but I think I'll load it up and leave it up instead of a screensaver and see what my roommates think.

Tsu writes "The much-referenced Netcraft web survey has turned three years old this month. It's interesting to look at how the fortunes of certain servers have changed, especially the declines in Netscape and NCSA servers and the gains made by Apache and Microsoft. This also marks the first month that plain-old Apache (not including derivatives) has had over 50% market share. "

Matthew Crosby wrote in to tell us that "there will be an informal little celebration thing on irc.gimp.org port 6666, channel #party. Paul Hart gave me a link to The Worm Farm. It's just weird. Robert Jones wrote in to send us a link to an excellent Linux Help site. Richard Brown sent us a link to a A weather site running Linux. Brian Moore wrote in to send us a link to a story about Communicator 5.0 And finally, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote in to announce that the PHP3 has hit the wire. For those in the dark, PHP is another excellent web page scripting language.

Nir Arbel writes " Some guy calling himself Phooky actually took the time to program a Tetris mod for Quake II. It's available at this site. I didn't quite know what to expect, but eventually it turned out to be a plain vanilla Tetris game, making minimal use of Quake II engine features , such as light-sourcing for the blocks and a few sound FX. Nevertheless, a fine example of how mad the world we live in is. "