By convention, when a new version of a library breaks binary compatibility with the old version, its soname version number is incremented, so the old and new versions of the library will have different filenames and can be installed alongside each other. These often correspond (in Debian at least; dunno about other distros) to changes in the package name, again so that both versions can be installed at the same time.
For example, Debian has three versions of libgnutls: libgnutls5, libgnutls7, libgnutls10. Packages depend on whichever version provides the ABI they depend on. Periodic cleaning (using debfoster, for example) removes old versions that nothing depends on anymore.
Applications that many things depend on, such as GCC and Python, are handled similarly. There are (currently) packages named "gcc-2.95", "gcc-3.2", and "gcc-3.3", and a dummy package called "gcc" which doesn't contain any files but depends on (currently) "gcc-3.3". When GCC 3.4 is released, a "gcc-3.4" package will be created, and the "gcc" package will be updated to depend on that. This way, you can just "apt-get install gcc" and you'll always have the most current compiler, but other packages can depend on whatever version they want. The same goes for Python, with "python2.1", "python2.2", "python2.3", and a "python" dummy package.
My experience is with Debian, but I'm sure other distributions use similar conventions.
My understanding is that it wasn't so much about binary compatibility as about the GTK/GNOME split. The file selector is part of GTK, which sits below (and is independent of) GNOME, but everyone wanted it to be able to take advantage of GNOME features like icon themes.
The pluggable backend thing (use GnomeVFS if available, otherwise plain filesystem access, etc.) seems to be part of the solution that was devised for this problem. I don't know how it handles the icons and the bookmarks thing (that seems like it'd be part of GNOME, not GTK), but presumably there's some clever trick used there too. It's fairly tough to make a file selector that's extensible enough for GNOME but still independent of GNOME, and I think most of the delay was just figuring out the right way to do it.
Are you talking about running X apps on a Windows display, or running Windows apps on an X display? The former is taking advantage of the multiuser capability of Linux, not of Windows, but I've never heard of anyone doing the latter.
That's a feature that's unique to 2003, a combination of XP's Remote Desktop and 2000's Terminal Services Administration Mode, called "Remote Desktop for Administration". It's another step in the right direction; the next step would be to do away with the separate licensing for more than four users.
However, XP's Remote Desktop is mutually exclusive with the console. If someone connects via RD, the console user is asked for confirmation and then taken to the Welcome screen, as if they'd selected "switch user". If someone then logs in at the console, the RD user is immediately disconnected.
2003's Remote Desktop for Administration, on the other hand, does allow up to four (I think) simulataneous active sessions. To allow more than four people to use the server at a time, you have to buy a Terminal Services license.
What part of "So then my machine at home,
at which both myself and my girlfriend are logged in, both with completely different environments, both running programs at the same time, is NOT multi-user?" did you not understand?
The part where both people are using the computer at the same time. As opposed to having one person sitting at the computer, while the other person's programs keep running but are unable to interact with the human who started them. As I said, you can have multiple login sessions, but only one human can actually be using their session at a time.
A fully multi-user system would be one where both you and your girlfriend can be using the computer at the same time. Letting several users have sessions open is a step in the right direction, but it's not really multi-user if one of you has to stop what you're doing when the other wants to use the computer.
That's not to say the technology isn't there, though. Terminal Services (and 2003's "remote desktop for administration") is properly multi-user. However, that's a separate feature which you have to buy a separate license for, and then manually turn on. With Linux systems, it's there out-of-the-box.
If you like Angband, you should try ToME. It has an actual world map (all of Middle Earth, not just that one-screen town), a skill system a bit more like D&D, and some other niceties.
The scary thing is, the underlying concept there is actually plausible. Think about the similarity between human social connections and the connections between neurons in the brain. You're not aware of being part of a collective consciousness called humanity, but the individual cells in your head aren't aware of being part of a larger consciousness either.
You have to wonder how many things we consider "miracles" or extreme luck could really be actions of a larger entity which can influence groups of people as effortlessly as you can flex your fingers.
FWIW, the dubs are pretty good. I prefer to watch most anime in the original Japanese (notable exception being the Kenshin TV series -- I like his English voice better) but it's nice to know that if you want to watch a movie with people who aren't used to reading subtitles, you can set the dialogue to English and not worry that the quality will be lacking.
The US release of Spirited Away includes a second disc which contains, among other things, a look into Disney's work in adapting the movie. They were very careful about preserving the meaning of the dialogue in translation, only making small changes in places where the American audience might otherwise misunderstand. For example, when the injured Haku drops the stolen magic seal, the protective spell comes out of it in the form of a little slug-like thing. Some people in the translation team got confused at first because the slug-like thing looks a bit like a seal (the animal) so they changed "seal" to "wooden seal" in the dialogue to make it clear which object is meant. Especially after watching that, I don't think the Disney name detracts from the release at all.
Because the AutoZone suit isn't over AutoZone's use of Linux. It's over AutoZone's (alleged) use of proprietary SCO libraries on a platform other than UnixWare (presumably in violation of a license agreement)
The fact that the "platform other than UnixWare" happens to be Linux is irrelevant -- as someone else around here put it, AutoZone could be using Commodore 64s and SCO would still sue them for using UnixWare libraries there. SCO wants you to think the suit is over Linux, but it's nothing of the sort, and if AutoZone had never done business with SCO in the first place, and just used Linux from the start, this lawsuit wouldn't have occurred.
This matches, exactly, with a suggestion I posted to the debian-dpkg list awhile back. (Unfortunately, it didn't get any replies, but I still think it's a good idea, or at least a starting point for one.) I'd like to see Debian's package system enhanced with "feature flags" which work similarly to Gentoo's USE flags, to allow exactly the sort of customization you describe. Binary packages can be provided for the typical "minimal" and "everything" configurations, but you can ask for some other set of feature flags and it'll download the source package and build you a binary package incorporating just those features.
Actually, this feature offer one particular improvement over the current state of Gentoo: the installed package metadata would "remember" which feature flags were used for a particular package. As things are now in Gentoo, unless a change has been made very recently that I'm not aware of, if you build a bunch of packages with Perl support and then remove Perl from your USE flags and do a depclean, emerge will remove the Perl packages even though there's lots of software which depends on it. Similarly, if you override USE on the command line when merging a package, and later upgrade that package, the custom USE flags won't be remembered and used in the new build.
IMO, this is as much of a shortcoming as Debian's inflexibility in optional build-time features, so I hope to see it solved in future versions. More generally, though, my idea of the "ideal" distribution is about halfway between Debian and Gentoo, and I'd love to see the two approaches combined in a useful way.
Yes, Windows (XP and 2003, possibly 2000 as well) can be installed via PXE using Remote Installation Services. Microsoft even provides a PXE boot floppy for use with systems that don't provide it in the BIOS.
RIS requires a specially-configured NTFS partition (you can't put things other than installation images on it), and uses hard-linking to save space on duplicate files between similar installation images.
Of course, this doesn't address the question of why they don't image the Linux systems. It's certainly not very hard to do.
Yep, he's still here, and he's gotten his hair cut (gasp!) which means that black is white, one is zero, etc., or whatever that joke is.:-) I'm CompSci rather than CompE, so I've only taken two courses with him (ECE33 and an embedded-systems course). Two of my roommates are CompE, though, so I hear lots of stories.
I agree completely that IT and engineering are two completely different things, and it's definitely the engineering aspect that I'm interested in. I'm currently revising my resume (the file on my website will be replaced within a few days) and I've rearranged those points to emphasize that a bit. Unfortunately, IT is where I have connections to people who need work done, so that's the only "real-world" work experience I have; all my other experience is class or hobby stuff.
Thanks for the encouragement; I'm looking forward to getting a job somewhere that I can work on a worthwhile project and see it through to completion, rather than having to put it aside due to lack of time .:-)
Please don't joke about that. It's vitally important that we keep the Windows source code as far as possible from Linux, lest we one day find Microsoft making claims similar to the ones SCO is making now. I probably don't need to explain how Microsoft has a lot more potential to do serious damage in a situation like that than SCO does.
Keep in mind that while Knoppix is based on Debian, it isn't the same as Debian. I hang out in #debian on freenode and people occasionally come in with Knoppix questions. These people are always directed to #knoppix, because there are differences between the two systems that most of us don't have experience with.
Personally, I'm not too interested in the GUI part of it, but Knoppix in text mode makes a great rescue CD, for Debian systems and probably anything else. It supports lots of hardware, has SSH and netcat, understands XFS, has backup/restore tools, and so on.
Copyright infringement occurs not when you read the Windows code, but when you download it -- the person you downloaded it from didn't have the right to give it to you. So the person you download from commits copyright infringement directly, and you probably commit contributory copyright infringement or something by voluntarily participating in the transaction knowing that the other party is infringing.
The Windows source code could probably be considered a trade secret, too. (IANAL, of course.)
You're using Slackware, which is aimed at people who like to install things manually and exercise that level of control. If you want a nice installer, try Fedora. If you want a robust package system that handles dependencies automatically, try Debian, or to a lesser extent, Fedora with apt-rpm (a port of Debian's package-system frontend).
Installing Slackware and then complaining about having to install dependencies is like buying a car with a manual transmission and then complaining that you don't like having to switch gears all the time.
The way to win the battle against runaway popups is to rapidly and repeatedly press the Escape key. The pop-up window will appear, but since Escape is a shortcut for the Stop button, it won't have a chance to load its content (including the script which opens more windows), and you can close it safely.
You can install Woody with 2.4.18 by using the "bf24" kernel disk. From the CD, just type "bf24" at the isolinux prompt.
Unstable is actually quite usable though; most Debian developers run it on their desktops. I've been running it for 3.5 years without ever needing to reinstall.
No, it takes a single ISO download of 200MB or less, and an internet connection during the installation, to do a base-system install. You only need CDs if you're installing on a system that doesn't have an Internet connection. And when you do a network install, you only download the packages which are actually being installed.
Slashdot Mirror
By convention, when a new version of a library breaks binary compatibility with the old version, its soname version number is incremented, so the old and new versions of the library will have different filenames and can be installed alongside each other. These often correspond (in Debian at least; dunno about other distros) to changes in the package name, again so that both versions can be installed at the same time.
For example, Debian has three versions of libgnutls: libgnutls5, libgnutls7, libgnutls10. Packages depend on whichever version provides the ABI they depend on. Periodic cleaning (using debfoster, for example) removes old versions that nothing depends on anymore.
Applications that many things depend on, such as GCC and Python, are handled similarly. There are (currently) packages named "gcc-2.95", "gcc-3.2", and "gcc-3.3", and a dummy package called "gcc" which doesn't contain any files but depends on (currently) "gcc-3.3". When GCC 3.4 is released, a "gcc-3.4" package will be created, and the "gcc" package will be updated to depend on that. This way, you can just "apt-get install gcc" and you'll always have the most current compiler, but other packages can depend on whatever version they want. The same goes for Python, with "python2.1", "python2.2", "python2.3", and a "python" dummy package.
My experience is with Debian, but I'm sure other distributions use similar conventions.
My understanding is that it wasn't so much about binary compatibility as about the GTK/GNOME split. The file selector is part of GTK, which sits below (and is independent of) GNOME, but everyone wanted it to be able to take advantage of GNOME features like icon themes.
The pluggable backend thing (use GnomeVFS if available, otherwise plain filesystem access, etc.) seems to be part of the solution that was devised for this problem. I don't know how it handles the icons and the bookmarks thing (that seems like it'd be part of GNOME, not GTK), but presumably there's some clever trick used there too. It's fairly tough to make a file selector that's extensible enough for GNOME but still independent of GNOME, and I think most of the delay was just figuring out the right way to do it.
Are you talking about running X apps on a Windows display, or running Windows apps on an X display? The former is taking advantage of the multiuser capability of Linux, not of Windows, but I've never heard of anyone doing the latter.
That's a feature that's unique to 2003, a combination of XP's Remote Desktop and 2000's Terminal Services Administration Mode, called "Remote Desktop for Administration". It's another step in the right direction; the next step would be to do away with the separate licensing for more than four users.
However, XP's Remote Desktop is mutually exclusive with the console. If someone connects via RD, the console user is asked for confirmation and then taken to the Welcome screen, as if they'd selected "switch user". If someone then logs in at the console, the RD user is immediately disconnected.
2003's Remote Desktop for Administration, on the other hand, does allow up to four (I think) simulataneous active sessions. To allow more than four people to use the server at a time, you have to buy a Terminal Services license.
The part where both people are using the computer at the same time. As opposed to having one person sitting at the computer, while the other person's programs keep running but are unable to interact with the human who started them. As I said, you can have multiple login sessions, but only one human can actually be using their session at a time.
A fully multi-user system would be one where both you and your girlfriend can be using the computer at the same time. Letting several users have sessions open is a step in the right direction, but it's not really multi-user if one of you has to stop what you're doing when the other wants to use the computer.
That's not to say the technology isn't there, though. Terminal Services (and 2003's "remote desktop for administration") is properly multi-user. However, that's a separate feature which you have to buy a separate license for, and then manually turn on. With Linux systems, it's there out-of-the-box.
Hey! Tomatoes are good! :-P
If you like Angband, you should try ToME. It has an actual world map (all of Middle Earth, not just that one-screen town), a skill system a bit more like D&D, and some other niceties.
That one's at least understandable, because peanuts are legumes, not nuts.
The scary thing is, the underlying concept there is actually plausible. Think about the similarity between human social connections and the connections between neurons in the brain. You're not aware of being part of a collective consciousness called humanity, but the individual cells in your head aren't aware of being part of a larger consciousness either.
You have to wonder how many things we consider "miracles" or extreme luck could really be actions of a larger entity which can influence groups of people as effortlessly as you can flex your fingers.
FWIW, the dubs are pretty good. I prefer to watch most anime in the original Japanese (notable exception being the Kenshin TV series -- I like his English voice better) but it's nice to know that if you want to watch a movie with people who aren't used to reading subtitles, you can set the dialogue to English and not worry that the quality will be lacking.
The US release of Spirited Away includes a second disc which contains, among other things, a look into Disney's work in adapting the movie. They were very careful about preserving the meaning of the dialogue in translation, only making small changes in places where the American audience might otherwise misunderstand. For example, when the injured Haku drops the stolen magic seal, the protective spell comes out of it in the form of a little slug-like thing. Some people in the translation team got confused at first because the slug-like thing looks a bit like a seal (the animal) so they changed "seal" to "wooden seal" in the dialogue to make it clear which object is meant. Especially after watching that, I don't think the Disney name detracts from the release at all.
Because the AutoZone suit isn't over AutoZone's use of Linux. It's over AutoZone's (alleged) use of proprietary SCO libraries on a platform other than UnixWare (presumably in violation of a license agreement)
The fact that the "platform other than UnixWare" happens to be Linux is irrelevant -- as someone else around here put it, AutoZone could be using Commodore 64s and SCO would still sue them for using UnixWare libraries there. SCO wants you to think the suit is over Linux, but it's nothing of the sort, and if AutoZone had never done business with SCO in the first place, and just used Linux from the start, this lawsuit wouldn't have occurred.
See my suggestion earlier in this thread for one possible approach.
This matches, exactly, with a suggestion I posted to the debian-dpkg list awhile back. (Unfortunately, it didn't get any replies, but I still think it's a good idea, or at least a starting point for one.) I'd like to see Debian's package system enhanced with "feature flags" which work similarly to Gentoo's USE flags, to allow exactly the sort of customization you describe. Binary packages can be provided for the typical "minimal" and "everything" configurations, but you can ask for some other set of feature flags and it'll download the source package and build you a binary package incorporating just those features.
My original message to debian-dpkg is here.
Actually, this feature offer one particular improvement over the current state of Gentoo: the installed package metadata would "remember" which feature flags were used for a particular package. As things are now in Gentoo, unless a change has been made very recently that I'm not aware of, if you build a bunch of packages with Perl support and then remove Perl from your USE flags and do a depclean, emerge will remove the Perl packages even though there's lots of software which depends on it. Similarly, if you override USE on the command line when merging a package, and later upgrade that package, the custom USE flags won't be remembered and used in the new build.
IMO, this is as much of a shortcoming as Debian's inflexibility in optional build-time features, so I hope to see it solved in future versions. More generally, though, my idea of the "ideal" distribution is about halfway between Debian and Gentoo, and I'd love to see the two approaches combined in a useful way.
Yes, Windows (XP and 2003, possibly 2000 as well) can be installed via PXE using Remote Installation Services. Microsoft even provides a PXE boot floppy for use with systems that don't provide it in the BIOS.
RIS requires a specially-configured NTFS partition (you can't put things other than installation images on it), and uses hard-linking to save space on duplicate files between similar installation images.
Of course, this doesn't address the question of why they don't image the Linux systems. It's certainly not very hard to do.
Yep, he's still here, and he's gotten his hair cut (gasp!) which means that black is white, one is zero, etc., or whatever that joke is. :-) I'm CompSci rather than CompE, so I've only taken two courses with him (ECE33 and an embedded-systems course). Two of my roommates are CompE, though, so I hear lots of stories.
I agree completely that IT and engineering are two completely different things, and it's definitely the engineering aspect that I'm interested in. I'm currently revising my resume (the file on my website will be replaced within a few days) and I've rearranged those points to emphasize that a bit. Unfortunately, IT is where I have connections to people who need work done, so that's the only "real-world" work experience I have; all my other experience is class or hobby stuff.
Thanks for the encouragement; I'm looking forward to getting a job somewhere that I can work on a worthwhile project and see it through to completion, rather than having to put it aside due to lack of time . :-)
I'm guessing you're a Lehigh student/alum too, whoever you are. :-)
Please don't joke about that. It's vitally important that we keep the Windows source code as far as possible from Linux, lest we one day find Microsoft making claims similar to the ones SCO is making now. I probably don't need to explain how Microsoft has a lot more potential to do serious damage in a situation like that than SCO does.
Keep in mind that while Knoppix is based on Debian, it isn't the same as Debian. I hang out in #debian on freenode and people occasionally come in with Knoppix questions. These people are always directed to #knoppix, because there are differences between the two systems that most of us don't have experience with.
Personally, I'm not too interested in the GUI part of it, but Knoppix in text mode makes a great rescue CD, for Debian systems and probably anything else. It supports lots of hardware, has SSH and netcat, understands XFS, has backup/restore tools, and so on.
Copyright infringement occurs not when you read the Windows code, but when you download it -- the person you downloaded it from didn't have the right to give it to you. So the person you download from commits copyright infringement directly, and you probably commit contributory copyright infringement or something by voluntarily participating in the transaction knowing that the other party is infringing.
The Windows source code could probably be considered a trade secret, too. (IANAL, of course.)
You're using Slackware, which is aimed at people who like to install things manually and exercise that level of control. If you want a nice installer, try Fedora. If you want a robust package system that handles dependencies automatically, try Debian, or to a lesser extent, Fedora with apt-rpm (a port of Debian's package-system frontend).
Installing Slackware and then complaining about having to install dependencies is like buying a car with a manual transmission and then complaining that you don't like having to switch gears all the time.
The way to win the battle against runaway popups is to rapidly and repeatedly press the Escape key. The pop-up window will appear, but since Escape is a shortcut for the Stop button, it won't have a chance to load its content (including the script which opens more windows), and you can close it safely.
You can install Woody with 2.4.18 by using the "bf24" kernel disk. From the CD, just type "bf24" at the isolinux prompt.
Unstable is actually quite usable though; most Debian developers run it on their desktops. I've been running it for 3.5 years without ever needing to reinstall.
No, it takes a single ISO download of 200MB or less, and an internet connection during the installation, to do a base-system install. You only need CDs if you're installing on a system that doesn't have an Internet connection. And when you do a network install, you only download the packages which are actually being installed.
Netinst images