I would be very surprised if the optical drive needs a PCMCIA card. This laptop has 1394 (Fire Wire) so the external drive should just plug in to that.
it's not suitable for servier virtualization in the data centre, at least not yet. The problem is that the host Linux kernel lacks resource allocation and accounting capabilities
Check out the recent announcements by Kevin Lawton of the plex86 project (Slashdot covered it here). He said he would be ripping out most of the complicated stuff from plex86, and making it work with "well-behaved" guest operating systems (specifically, Linux). From what I understand, it will be suitable for running multiple VMs that are isolated from each other and the host OS, and it should be possible to control their resources better.
The entire point of the GPL was that it does matter how a goal was achieved.
So far, I'm with you.
This is just one more step down the path of reducing Linux to just another corporate OS.
No, you lose me here.
GPL is a great license and I'm glad the Linux kernel is under it. But it is not the only acceptable license in the world. Even RMS agrees that there are times when it is okay to license things under another license. This is one of those times.
It is impossible to take GPL code and just suddenly say "I'm putting this under a new license now." Thus it is impossible to take the GPL out of Linux. Your statement that Linux will be reduced to "just another corporate OS" is only flamebait.
This annoying DRM junk does not involve the boot sector. According to the actual article (which I actually read), they found it writing to track 0, sector 33.
Track 0, sector 0 is the boot sector. The partition table is stored in this sector. The rest of track 0 (sectors 1 through 63) is not officially used, so some DRM systems like to stash data there.
What makes this annoying is when you try to install another DRM-enabled product that also wants to write in the same place; after you install the second program, the first one will accuse you of being a pirate, and it will refuse to run anymore. Since there is no standard for using this space, its easy for two DRM systems to conflict with each other.
If there were a standard for using that space, presumably the DRM authors wouldn't want to use it! After all, someone would write a utility that showed you what programs were using that space, and for what... and then it wouldn't be obscure, and so it wouldn't be "secure" anymore. Feh.
I won't ever buy programs that pull stunts like this.
I think they raised the prices, but I can't find the email they sent me about it, so my best recollection will have to stand.
Rather than let your recollection stand, why not just take a look at the web site? You can see that prices start at $300 and go up from there. The server version is $3000, or $6000, depending on configuration.
I had trouble following the patent text; it's pretty dry. It's not clear to me whether the patent covers just the.NET API, or if it would cover any similar system.
If it covers any similar system, and the patent is granted as-is, that would be bad for the Mono project. But if it just covers the.NET API, the Mono guys won't care much.
It would be nice if Mono projects could talk to.NET servers and vice versa. But it isn't strictly necessary. Mono is potentially a useful system, all by itself, without it ever talking to a Microsoft server.
This action by Microsoft really reminds me of IBM's Microchannel. Before Microchannel, anyone could make hardware cards compatible with IBM computers (ISA bus). The Microchannel PCs (the PS/2 series) were different: you had to license patents from IBM to make cards for Microchannel. IBM probably thought they would be able to lock customers in, but what actually happened was that people voted with their wallets for non-Microchannel solutions. Microchannel drove customers away from IBM and towards IBM's competition.
Does anyone really need.NET? How many even really understand what it is? Now, Microsoft not only needs to explain why you should abandon your current system to use.NET, they need to explain why.NET is worth locking yourself in.
Linux/KDE or Linux/Gnome doesn't even make a good e-mail drone. The spellchecker is so 1995. I want an underlining spell checker.
I really don't know where you get this. Evolution has an underlining spell checker, and has for a long time! You need gnome-spell installed on your system, and if you are using Evolution 1.2 you need to go into the settings and enable the spell checker. (On my computer I have a choice of American, British, or Canadian English checking.)
P.S. GNOME is still playing catch-up to become as nice as Windows. But the 2.2 release goes a long way. It's really nice! The desktop is almost there; we just need applications and a good default setup, and even naive users will be happy to use it.
if you've come up with a codec that doesn't infringe anyone's patents, why/how should they care? The problem is that to date, nobody in the OSS world has done so.
Ogg Theora is free software that you can use without needing to pay royalties. It's based on VP3, and the VP3 patent owners have given up their patent rights so Theora can be fully free. (And I hope good things will happen to them as a reward.)
Theora hasn't hit 1.0 yet; the current, alpha-quality release is the first milestone release. Plans are to release a beta in March 2003 and the final 1.0 in June 2003.
I'm sure MS has patents and copyrights up the wazoo on Windows NT, and is not afraid to take advantage of them.
Microsoft isn't the nicest company on Earth, but they don't really have a history of using lawsuits to try to squash competition. I doubt the ReactOS guys need to fear this.
Remember how they arrogantly sued the company they bought MS-DOS from out of existence because they were worried they would add multitasking to it?
Actually, no, I don't remember this at all. Could you point me to a newspaper article or something?
I did a web search, and all I could find was that Seattle Computer Products sued Microsoft (in 1986), not the other way around!
Years ago, in a discussion of space shuttle safety, Henry Spencer said that he thinks the Space Shuttle is only about two nines safe.
In other words, there is a 0.99 or 99% chance that a shuttle mission will not end in disaster, and a 1% chance it will. Those are not good odds; if your car was that dangerous, you would never drive it.
Before the Challenger disaster, there were some NASA documents that estimated the shuttle at five nines reliability (0.99999), according to the book What Do You Care What Other People Think by Richard Feynmann (who served on a panel investigating the Challenger incident).
I have seen several posts saying that now we should realize how dangerous space flight is; we should never send radioactive stuff aloft; etc. Actually, we should realize how dangerous the space shuttle is, and get started on building something safer now. With a better design, it should be possible to fly to orbit with four or five nines of safety, instead of the two we get with the shuttle.
The best thing the government could do: announce a valuable prize of some sort (tax-free money, or a guaranteed promise of X number of launches that will be purchases for $Y million each, or whatever). NASA is no longer capable, as an organization, of the can-do engineering that got us to the Moon. NASA cannot be entrusted with designing a shuttle replacement.
I have good news for you: the version of GNOME in Debian unstable is GNOME 2.2.
I was using GNOME 2.0 back when it was in Debian experimental, and I cheered when it got promoted into GNOME unstable. Using Debian experimental is sort of a pain.
As I said, Debian unstable has been living up to its name recently. The transition from GNOME 2.0 to GNOME 2.2 was not without pitfalls. But it's pretty much done and GNOME 2.2 works well now.
I don't use Ximian GNOME. I use Debian, and I just go ahead and use the Debian packages for GNOME.
Which has been an adventure, lately. Usually the "unstable" branch of Debian is very stable, but lately it's been living up to its name. For a while, Nautilus was dead in the water!
But on the other hand, it works now and I love it. GNOME 2.2 is really adding some nice little bits of polish. I showed my wife the "hide/show desktop" button, and she started using it right away. (Note: it doesn't seem to work with Sawfish right now, but it works great with Metacity.) I can never get my wife to use more than one desktop workspace, but she did like hiding and showing all the windows.
For the most part, I've been enjoying the adventure. It's interesting to see new things appearing in the Debian packages, and to keep track of the major threads on the debian-gtk-gnome developers mailing list.
If you just want a GNOME desktop that works, grab Ximian when they offer it. (Or install Debian unstable right now, and only update your packages when someone tells you it is safe!)
Will Ximian give me back my view-ports and edge-flipping?
As others have noted, you can get it back by playing with Sawfish's config.
I have to say, though, that I'm content with the defaults. Edge-flipping is sort of cool, but it annoys me when I do it by mistake. So I always had the delay set at a few hundred milliseconds, so I would drag a window, wait for it, keep dragging. With GNOME and Metacity now, you can just send the app to another workspace. It works for me.
You can also click on the little representation of the window up in the workspace switcher, and drag it from one workspace to another! That's pretty cool. Windows are represented with little proportional rectangles within the workspace switcher, and you can click on the active one and drag it around, either within the current workspace or to another one.
It's a pain to drag a small window, since the representation is very very small. They ought to be forgiving about where you click, since you can only drag the active window anyway and there is only one window active at a time.
And finally, correct me if I am wrong, but it is assumed that Linux gets it's name because it is the brainchild of Linus Torvalds
That's true. Linus didn't really call it anything at first, but when he wanted to upload it to a BBS to share it out, he needed a name. He came up with "Freax" ("Free UNIX", sorta). The BBS sysop didn't like that name, and changed the name to "Linux" ("Linus's UNIX", sorta). Linux was the one that stuck... nobody really liked Freax (not even Linus).
I did this the first time I played the GNOME Mines game. The grid was something like 100x100, with one mine. My score was "NaN"! I laughed out loud.
"NaN" is, I presume, short for "Not a Number", which is the result you get in floating-point math when you do something bad like dividing by zero. I think your score in GNOME Mines is divided by your time, so that if you take a long time to solve it, you are penalized. Since I had effectively solved the game in zero time, my score had a divide by zero error. Then GNOME Mines printed the result, and the library came up with the string "NaN" to represent the error.
I just tried it again with the current GNOME Mines. Instead of NaN, my score was 0.0. Bummer.
Debian's "stable" branch is good for servers. It is, in fact, stable. The Debian guys back-port bug fixes from new packages to the stable packages, and security patches get out there quickly. You can upgrade with just a command line (ssh) and you don't need to reboot a system to upgrade it.
Historically, it has taken two years or more for Debian to release, so there are at least two years where any particular version is the official stable version. I think Debian doesn't keep officially supporting old releases very long after a new "stable" release happens... but again, Debian systems are very easy to upgrade.
If you want to try Debian, I say go for it. Of course you should start out small and make sure it works for you, with just one or two servers. I suggest you start out with that 486. See how it likes Debian.
I'm not really a sysadmin, and I'm wondering just how serious this EOL thing is.
I understand that "if it ain't broke, don't touch it" is a good rule for IT. But Red Hat won't be forcing you to upgrade all your machines, it just will be refusing to support old installs. If it ain't broke, you don't need support, right?
The other thing is that Microsoft upgrades often come with serious changes: you can't just install the new version, you have to change your whole setup. Isn't it true that Linux server software is generally backwards-compatible, and you can upgrade your packages to the latest stuff without changing the way the servers are set up?
Finally, I run Debian, and it's easy for me to upgrade a system with just an ssh connection. Can Red Hat admins remotely upgrade packages over ssh, without having to install APT for Red Hat? (And if not, how do real sysadmins feel about APT for Red Hat?)
Arrgh. Wrong link. The above link points to the Baen page on Bujold; here is the correct link to the Baen Free Library page for Bujold, with "The Mountains of Mourning".
Yes. This series starts out good, then it gets better, and recent books have been awesome. She has several Hugo and Nebula awards.
You can get a taste of her work for free from the Baen Free Library. Her novella "The Mountains of Mourning", which won both a Hugo and a Nebula, is available there. It is an early Miles Vorkosigan story.
Slashdot Mirror
I would be very surprised if the optical drive needs a PCMCIA card. This laptop has 1394 (Fire Wire) so the external drive should just plug in to that.
steveha
it's not suitable for servier virtualization in the data centre, at least not yet. The problem is that the host Linux kernel lacks resource allocation and accounting capabilities
Check out the recent announcements by Kevin Lawton of the plex86 project (Slashdot covered it here). He said he would be ripping out most of the complicated stuff from plex86, and making it work with "well-behaved" guest operating systems (specifically, Linux). From what I understand, it will be suitable for running multiple VMs that are isolated from each other and the host OS, and it should be possible to control their resources better.
steveha
No, please do nitpick. I got it wrong and I'm glad you corrected me.
Partition table != boot sector.
steveha
The entire point of the GPL was that it does matter how a goal was achieved.
So far, I'm with you.
This is just one more step down the path of reducing Linux to just another corporate OS.
No, you lose me here.
GPL is a great license and I'm glad the Linux kernel is under it. But it is not the only acceptable license in the world. Even RMS agrees that there are times when it is okay to license things under another license. This is one of those times.
It is impossible to take GPL code and just suddenly say "I'm putting this under a new license now." Thus it is impossible to take the GPL out of Linux. Your statement that Linux will be reduced to "just another corporate OS" is only flamebait.
steveha
This annoying DRM junk does not involve the boot sector. According to the actual article (which I actually read), they found it writing to track 0, sector 33.
Track 0, sector 0 is the boot sector. The partition table is stored in this sector. The rest of track 0 (sectors 1 through 63) is not officially used, so some DRM systems like to stash data there.
What makes this annoying is when you try to install another DRM-enabled product that also wants to write in the same place; after you install the second program, the first one will accuse you of being a pirate, and it will refuse to run anymore. Since there is no standard for using this space, its easy for two DRM systems to conflict with each other.
If there were a standard for using that space, presumably the DRM authors wouldn't want to use it! After all, someone would write a utility that showed you what programs were using that space, and for what... and then it wouldn't be obscure, and so it wouldn't be "secure" anymore. Feh.
I won't ever buy programs that pull stunts like this.
steveha
I think they raised the prices, but I can't find the email they sent me about it, so my best recollection will have to stand.
. jsp
Rather than let your recollection stand, why not just take a look at the web site? You can see that prices start at $300 and go up from there. The server version is $3000, or $6000, depending on configuration.
https://www.vmware.com/vmwarestore/newstore/index
They used to have a limited version that would only run Windows 98 as a guest, and they got rid of that.
steveha
if VMware can't produce a better product than the OSS community can in their spare time, they don't deserve my $130.
Which version of VMware costs $130? Some academic version?
I'd love to play with VMware, but it looks like it would cost me $300 per computer.
steveha
There are two things I would like to do with plex86:
0) multiple virtual Linux servers, each in its own chroot jail.
1) run Win98 under Linux, to be able to run Win32 apps for testing purposes or backwards compatability.
Sounds like it will do multiple Linux servers very well, soon. But do they still have any hopes for plex86 running non-Linux OSes as guests?
P.S. According to reviews I have read, Win4Lin does a decent job of letting you run Win98 under Linux. It's not free software, of course.
steveha
I had trouble following the patent text; it's pretty dry. It's not clear to me whether the patent covers just the .NET API, or if it would cover any similar system.
.NET API, the Mono guys won't care much.
.NET servers and vice versa. But it isn't strictly necessary. Mono is potentially a useful system, all by itself, without it ever talking to a Microsoft server.
.NET? How many even really understand what it is? Now, Microsoft not only needs to explain why you should abandon your current system to use .NET, they need to explain why .NET is worth locking yourself in.
If it covers any similar system, and the patent is granted as-is, that would be bad for the Mono project. But if it just covers the
It would be nice if Mono projects could talk to
This action by Microsoft really reminds me of IBM's Microchannel. Before Microchannel, anyone could make hardware cards compatible with IBM computers (ISA bus). The Microchannel PCs (the PS/2 series) were different: you had to license patents from IBM to make cards for Microchannel. IBM probably thought they would be able to lock customers in, but what actually happened was that people voted with their wallets for non-Microchannel solutions. Microchannel drove customers away from IBM and towards IBM's competition.
Does anyone really need
steveha
Linux/KDE or Linux/Gnome doesn't even make a good e-mail drone. The spellchecker is so 1995. I want an underlining spell checker.
I really don't know where you get this. Evolution has an underlining spell checker, and has for a long time! You need gnome-spell installed on your system, and if you are using Evolution 1.2 you need to go into the settings and enable the spell checker. (On my computer I have a choice of American, British, or Canadian English checking.)
P.S. GNOME is still playing catch-up to become as nice as Windows. But the 2.2 release goes a long way. It's really nice! The desktop is almost there; we just need applications and a good default setup, and even naive users will be happy to use it.
steveha
if you've come up with a codec that doesn't infringe anyone's patents, why/how should they care? The problem is that to date, nobody in the OSS world has done so.
Ogg Theora is free software that you can use without needing to pay royalties. It's based on VP3, and the VP3 patent owners have given up their patent rights so Theora can be fully free. (And I hope good things will happen to them as a reward.)
Theora hasn't hit 1.0 yet; the current, alpha-quality release is the first milestone release. Plans are to release a beta in March 2003 and the final 1.0 in June 2003.
http://www.theora.org/
steveha
There is a driver for NT4 that supports reading and writing NTFS.
I did of course mean "reading and writing FAT32" here.
steveha
Windows NT didnt support FAT32, only FAT16. Or did they add FAT32 support in a service pack?
s html
Nope. If you wanted Windows NT with FAT32, you had to buy an upgrade to Windows 2000.
There is a driver for NT4 that supports reading and writing NTFS.
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/fat32.
But you can't boot from a FAT32 volume using this, and of course this isn't a Microsoft product.
steveha
I'm sure MS has patents and copyrights up the wazoo on Windows NT, and is not afraid to take advantage of them.
Microsoft isn't the nicest company on Earth, but they don't really have a history of using lawsuits to try to squash competition. I doubt the ReactOS guys need to fear this.
Remember how they arrogantly sued the company they bought MS-DOS from out of existence because they were worried they would add multitasking to it?
Actually, no, I don't remember this at all. Could you point me to a newspaper article or something?
I did a web search, and all I could find was that Seattle Computer Products sued Microsoft (in 1986), not the other way around!
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-502830.html
If Microsoft ever arrogantly sued Seattle Computer Products, I'd like to know more about it.
steveha
Years ago, in a discussion of space shuttle safety, Henry Spencer said that he thinks the Space Shuttle is only about two nines safe.
In other words, there is a 0.99 or 99% chance that a shuttle mission will not end in disaster, and a 1% chance it will. Those are not good odds; if your car was that dangerous, you would never drive it.
Before the Challenger disaster, there were some NASA documents that estimated the shuttle at five nines reliability (0.99999), according to the book What Do You Care What Other People Think by Richard Feynmann (who served on a panel investigating the Challenger incident).
I have seen several posts saying that now we should realize how dangerous space flight is; we should never send radioactive stuff aloft; etc. Actually, we should realize how dangerous the space shuttle is, and get started on building something safer now. With a better design, it should be possible to fly to orbit with four or five nines of safety, instead of the two we get with the shuttle.
The best thing the government could do: announce a valuable prize of some sort (tax-free money, or a guaranteed promise of X number of launches that will be purchases for $Y million each, or whatever). NASA is no longer capable, as an organization, of the can-do engineering that got us to the Moon. NASA cannot be entrusted with designing a shuttle replacement.
steveha
I have good news for you: the version of GNOME in Debian unstable is GNOME 2.2.
I was using GNOME 2.0 back when it was in Debian experimental, and I cheered when it got promoted into GNOME unstable. Using Debian experimental is sort of a pain.
As I said, Debian unstable has been living up to its name recently. The transition from GNOME 2.0 to GNOME 2.2 was not without pitfalls. But it's pretty much done and GNOME 2.2 works well now.
steveha
I don't use Ximian GNOME. I use Debian, and I just go ahead and use the Debian packages for GNOME.
Which has been an adventure, lately. Usually the "unstable" branch of Debian is very stable, but lately it's been living up to its name. For a while, Nautilus was dead in the water!
But on the other hand, it works now and I love it. GNOME 2.2 is really adding some nice little bits of polish. I showed my wife the "hide/show desktop" button, and she started using it right away. (Note: it doesn't seem to work with Sawfish right now, but it works great with Metacity.) I can never get my wife to use more than one desktop workspace, but she did like hiding and showing all the windows.
For the most part, I've been enjoying the adventure. It's interesting to see new things appearing in the Debian packages, and to keep track of the major threads on the debian-gtk-gnome developers mailing list.
If you just want a GNOME desktop that works, grab Ximian when they offer it. (Or install Debian unstable right now, and only update your packages when someone tells you it is safe!)
steveha
Will Ximian give me back my view-ports and edge-flipping?
As others have noted, you can get it back by playing with Sawfish's config.
I have to say, though, that I'm content with the defaults. Edge-flipping is sort of cool, but it annoys me when I do it by mistake. So I always had the delay set at a few hundred milliseconds, so I would drag a window, wait for it, keep dragging. With GNOME and Metacity now, you can just send the app to another workspace. It works for me.
You can also click on the little representation of the window up in the workspace switcher, and drag it from one workspace to another! That's pretty cool. Windows are represented with little proportional rectangles within the workspace switcher, and you can click on the active one and drag it around, either within the current workspace or to another one.
It's a pain to drag a small window, since the representation is very very small. They ought to be forgiving about where you click, since you can only drag the active window anyway and there is only one window active at a time.
steveha
And finally, correct me if I am wrong, but it is assumed that Linux gets it's name because it is the brainchild of Linus Torvalds
That's true. Linus didn't really call it anything at first, but when he wanted to upload it to a BBS to share it out, he needed a name. He came up with "Freax" ("Free UNIX", sorta). The BBS sysop didn't like that name, and changed the name to "Linux" ("Linus's UNIX", sorta). Linux was the one that stuck... nobody really liked Freax (not even Linus).
steveha
I did this the first time I played the GNOME Mines game. The grid was something like 100x100, with one mine. My score was "NaN"! I laughed out loud.
"NaN" is, I presume, short for "Not a Number", which is the result you get in floating-point math when you do something bad like dividing by zero. I think your score in GNOME Mines is divided by your time, so that if you take a long time to solve it, you are penalized. Since I had effectively solved the game in zero time, my score had a divide by zero error. Then GNOME Mines printed the result, and the library came up with the string "NaN" to represent the error.
I just tried it again with the current GNOME Mines. Instead of NaN, my score was 0.0. Bummer.
steveha
Debian's "stable" branch is good for servers. It is, in fact, stable. The Debian guys back-port bug fixes from new packages to the stable packages, and security patches get out there quickly. You can upgrade with just a command line (ssh) and you don't need to reboot a system to upgrade it.
Historically, it has taken two years or more for Debian to release, so there are at least two years where any particular version is the official stable version. I think Debian doesn't keep officially supporting old releases very long after a new "stable" release happens... but again, Debian systems are very easy to upgrade.
If you want to try Debian, I say go for it. Of course you should start out small and make sure it works for you, with just one or two servers. I suggest you start out with that 486. See how it likes Debian.
steveha
I'm not really a sysadmin, and I'm wondering just how serious this EOL thing is.
I understand that "if it ain't broke, don't touch it" is a good rule for IT. But Red Hat won't be forcing you to upgrade all your machines, it just will be refusing to support old installs. If it ain't broke, you don't need support, right?
The other thing is that Microsoft upgrades often come with serious changes: you can't just install the new version, you have to change your whole setup. Isn't it true that Linux server software is generally backwards-compatible, and you can upgrade your packages to the latest stuff without changing the way the servers are set up?
Finally, I run Debian, and it's easy for me to upgrade a system with just an ssh connection. Can Red Hat admins remotely upgrade packages over ssh, without having to install APT for Red Hat? (And if not, how do real sysadmins feel about APT for Red Hat?)
steveha
you need the media and the reader together to constitute a drive
Yeah, but you can carry 5 of these, plus the PC card media reader, in a lot less space than 5 PC cards.
And if the media is $15, 5 GB, and flexible without data losss... I will buy at least 5 of them. To start with.
And they will no doubt make a smaller version, say the size of CompactFlash, for cameras and such.
steveha
Arrgh. Wrong link. The above link points to the Baen page on Bujold; here is the correct link to the Baen Free Library page for Bujold, with "The Mountains of Mourning".
http://www.baen.com/library/lmbujold.htm
steveha
Yes. This series starts out good, then it gets better, and recent books have been awesome. She has several Hugo and Nebula awards.
u jold
You can get a taste of her work for free from the Baen Free Library. Her novella "The Mountains of Mourning", which won both a Hugo and a Nebula, is available there. It is an early Miles Vorkosigan story.
http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=lmb
steveha