I've gone through this little dance hundreds of times. I'm sure others have, too.
RPM hell has had me stymied for years. Example: This morning I tried to install mrproject (Microsoft Project-ish program) on my Ximianized RH7.3 box from the RPM Here's my experience.
Download the RPM and double-click it. I'm given "Nautilus has no installed viewer capable of displaying...". So basically it has never occurred to either the Nautilus developers, Redhat or Ximian that a default viewer for an RPM should be assigned (I know - you use apt-get, but I'm not as smart as you so I deserve what I get - or don't get - if you get me).
So I start GnoRPM and drop the package on it - it places it in packages/applications/project management. That's a good start. Try to install it and I get a Dependancy Problem. "mrproject-0.5.1-for.ximian.1 requires libgal.so.18" It asks me if I want to ignore these problems and possibly make my system unstable - why would anybody want that?
So off I go looking to see what sort of libgal... I have using GnoRPM again - i hit the find button. I'm given the following choices:
FIND PACKAGES THAT:
Contain File
Are In The Group
Provide
Require
Conflict With
Match Label
Uh...how about "match label". I type in "libgal" and hit find - I get NO FEEDBACK. No hourglass-ish thing telling me it's trying, no rapidly changing display of which directory it currently looking in, nothing - after I press the button it returns to it's unpressed state and I'm sitting at my desk wondering how long I should wonder wether it's still working. As far as I can tell it never even tried to search.
So I manually look for libgal - it's easy enough to find, it's right in 'libraries'. It turns out I've got libgal.so.19 or something like that - well I need libgal.so.18 so now I have a dilemna - I can install it anyway, but that's never worked for me, or I can return to an older version of libgal - yeah right.
So I give up on the RPM methond and decide to wade a little deeper in the pool and install from source. Download the tar.gz. Just for fun I double-click it. Of course, same problem as with the RPM. "Nautilus has no installed viewer..." Apparently they've never run across a.tar.gz file before. Well, what the hell did I expect?
So drop to a console, "tar -xzf mrproject...." - I've done that before. Now try "./configure" I remember that much, but then what - is it "make" or "make install"? I can't remember. Read the README - it doesn't say. Try "make install" Error - try "make" and Miraculously it's doing something - and GIVING ME FEEDBACK - oh JOY!
Not beeing a C programmer - I foolishly try to run the run-mrproject script - no dice - error. Oh yeah - "make install" first? Ok, FINALLY I got the program running. But was all that really necessary?
I'm desperately trying to ditch windows, but after two years of toying with linux I'm STILL unable to do so completely.
Someone in my area (Orange County, CA) has been plastering big, orange bumper stickers that say SCAM on top of these signs. I love the idea - I'll bet it's more effective than tearing them down since it forms a connection in the minds of people that read them.
If people see WORK FROM HOME associated with the word SCAM enough times, the message would stick - especially in the minds of the type of person that would fall for the scam in the first place.
So this question has bugged me ever since I was old enough to grasp the problem.
The current life cycle of nuclear fuel goes something like; dig up a huge pile of rock and dirt with uranium deposits, refine it down to a small, highly radioactive fuel rod and put all the dirt back. Use the fuel rod for a year or so, then seal the slightly less radioactive rod in a barrel and store it somewhere - forever.
The question is this: Couldn't that spent fuel then be pulverized and diluted back into the same pile of dirt? Certainly it couldn't be more dangerous after it's used than before - it just spent a year fissioning itself off at near critical-mass so it's lost some of it's radioactivity. Granted - it would probably cost about as much as it did to mine it in the first place, but it would leave the environment no worse for the wear (well, except that it was strip-mined - but that's another issue).
Or, better still, why can't spent fuel rods be transferred to low-efficiency power plants. They may not be profitable, but it could be less costly than finding and buying land that's geologically rated for a million years of stability. The half life of a spent fuel rod may be 500,000 years, but if it continues to burn in a power plant, that time can be cut pretty drastically.
Can't it? This is really a question - not an invitation to flame me for my admitted lack of knowledge.
Over the last 6 months, every time I download a nightly or milestone, I've been recording the results of the following test.
Download the installer and run it. Moz will launch automatically after install. Kill Mozilla and restart it. Bring up the task manager to see how much memory is used.
That's a decrease of almost 5 megs in memory usage over six months - all the while they've been adding features. Significantly, they've added venkman, tabbed browsing, the dom inspector and favicon support.
Also significant - I don't know why I bother to get the talkback builds anymore - I haven't submitted a crash in 3 months. And I run it all day, every day.
Microsoft is using its HUGE profits in the Office arena to fund their drive into the enterprise OS market - which is scaring the bajeezus out of Sun's strategic planners. Sun must do something to level the playing field.
To win this battle, Sun doesn't need to capture much market share, all they need to do is give consumers a credible alternative. The bumper-sticker version of this strategy: If you can't beat your competitor, screw up his margin.
I've heard that Office makes up about half of MS's revenue - about 4 billion in the last quarter of '01, that would be about 16 million copies if they're going for $250 on average (I don't know this, I'm just speculating).
If Sun succeeds in forcing them to drop their price by even $10, they've scored a major victory - to the tune of $160 million per quarter. That's not chump change, not even to the beast of Redmond. Remember, Microsoft's profits are somewhat tied to their stock price (they pay their employees largely with stock options) and their stock price is sustained by GROWING REVENUES - which they won't have if they have to drop the price of MS Office.
If you read the preceeding and substitue IBM for Sun, you'll understand IBM's committment to Linux.
I believe it's genuine. but it's not terribly incriminating. I expect nearly every large company gathers intelligence on their competitors. And if they can find willing insiders - that's their competitor's problem.
That said, I'm frankly getting pretty tired of all the posts insisting that Slashdot has degenerated to nothing but MS bashing.
People SHOULD be MS bashing. MS is actively working to take away our freedom (digitally speaking) and it makes me mad as hell. Did anyone read the finding of facts? Does it mean nothing to you that they use their monopoly to stifle competition, starve out competitors and break standards?
It should be telling that the only real competition that MS sees on the horizon is free software. It's the only model that can withstand the onslaught of FUD, standards-breaking, product tie-in's and out-spending that characterizes an MS reaction to competition.
If you think they're just tough competitors, you're naive and I would be happy to compete against you any day.
Before you beat up on mozilla for feature creep, you should note that mouse gestures are NOT a feature IN mozilla, but an outside project of mozdev.org. If you want to use it, you have to install it. It's not in the trunk.
Granted, the extra features have been POURING in lately (venkman, tabs, link toolbar - all within the last week), so there is a great deal of feature creep but that's a symptom of the unqualified success of mozilla. They set out to develop a platform to be used for all kinds of projects, starting with a browser - and people are using it for all kinds of projects. The way things are going, it looks like the deluge is just starting.
I for one, couldn't be happier. It's got annoyances, but it's nightlies are stable (it hasn't crashed in so long I don't know why I bother with talkback anymore) and they've got features that I would miss dearly if I had to go back to I.E.
I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. Stephen King may not turn the publishing world upside-down, but the potential here is bigger than you might think. For about 2 years I've been dreaming of an effort to publish electronic versions of textbooks (specifically math books) for free distribution to students. All I needed was an appropriate article on/. to start a discussion:) My vision is a collaberative effort to develop textbooks by authors who submit new chapters/books/fixes/updates to the administrators, who review those changes and consider them for acceptance into the published versions. Students could then either use the books online or print a postscript or pdf (or whatever) version of them. A printer could even print, bind and sell the books, in case anyone really needs a bound version. A teacher could download and change it to his/her liking and use it as the required text for a class. I got this idea when I tried to return a Trig book to the school's bookstore - they refused to accept it because they had changed versions. I had paid something like $50 for the book and could get $0 for in 6 weeks later (it was a summer class). I'm wondering what had changed in trigonometry over those 6 weeks - in fact, what significant changes have been made in algebra, geometry, trig or calculus over the last 100 years? Do students need to have $75, newly minted math books to learn math in a community college? So, my question is, what are your thoughts on a gnu textbook license? I've reserved freetextbooks.org, but haven't done anything with it, yet. joelgrimes@mad.scientist.com
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that picture of the building must be a joke.
If it's not then WHERE THE HELL DO THEY GET THAT KIND OF MONEY?
RPM hell has had me stymied for years. Example: This morning I tried to install mrproject (Microsoft Project-ish program) on my Ximianized RH7.3 box from the RPM Here's my experience.
Download the RPM and double-click it. I'm given "Nautilus has no installed viewer capable of displaying...". So basically it has never occurred to either the Nautilus developers, Redhat or Ximian that a default viewer for an RPM should be assigned (I know - you use apt-get, but I'm not as smart as you so I deserve what I get - or don't get - if you get me).
So I start GnoRPM and drop the package on it - it places it in packages/applications/project management. That's a good start. Try to install it and I get a Dependancy Problem. "mrproject-0.5.1-for.ximian.1 requires libgal.so.18" It asks me if I want to ignore these problems and possibly make my system unstable - why would anybody want that?
So off I go looking to see what sort of libgal... I have using GnoRPM again - i hit the find button. I'm given the following choices:
FIND PACKAGES THAT:
- Contain File
- Are In The Group
- Provide
- Require
- Conflict With
- Match Label
Uh...how about "match label". I type in "libgal" and hit find - I get NO FEEDBACK. No hourglass-ish thing telling me it's trying, no rapidly changing display of which directory it currently looking in, nothing - after I press the button it returns to it's unpressed state and I'm sitting at my desk wondering how long I should wonder wether it's still working. As far as I can tell it never even tried to search.So I manually look for libgal - it's easy enough to find, it's right in 'libraries'. It turns out I've got libgal.so.19 or something like that - well I need libgal.so.18 so now I have a dilemna - I can install it anyway, but that's never worked for me, or I can return to an older version of libgal - yeah right.
So I give up on the RPM methond and decide to wade a little deeper in the pool and install from source. Download the tar.gz. Just for fun I double-click it. Of course, same problem as with the RPM. "Nautilus has no installed viewer..." Apparently they've never run across a
So drop to a console, "tar -xzf mrproject...." - I've done that before. Now try "./configure" I remember that much, but then what - is it "make" or "make install"? I can't remember. Read the README - it doesn't say. Try "make install" Error - try "make" and Miraculously it's doing something - and GIVING ME FEEDBACK - oh JOY!
Not beeing a C programmer - I foolishly try to run the run-mrproject script - no dice - error. Oh yeah - "make install" first? Ok, FINALLY I got the program running. But was all that really necessary?
I'm desperately trying to ditch windows, but after two years of toying with linux I'm STILL unable to do so completely.
here's a good demo of it.
Someone in my area (Orange County, CA) has been plastering big, orange bumper stickers that say SCAM on top of these signs. I love the idea - I'll bet it's more effective than tearing them down since it forms a connection in the minds of people that read them.
If people see WORK FROM HOME associated with the word SCAM enough times, the message would stick - especially in the minds of the type of person that would fall for the scam in the first place.
So this question has bugged me ever since I was old enough to grasp the problem.
The current life cycle of nuclear fuel goes something like; dig up a huge pile of rock and dirt with uranium deposits, refine it down to a small, highly radioactive fuel rod and put all the dirt back. Use the fuel rod for a year or so, then seal the slightly less radioactive rod in a barrel and store it somewhere - forever.
The question is this: Couldn't that spent fuel then be pulverized and diluted back into the same pile of dirt? Certainly it couldn't be more dangerous after it's used than before - it just spent a year fissioning itself off at near critical-mass so it's lost some of it's radioactivity. Granted - it would probably cost about as much as it did to mine it in the first place, but it would leave the environment no worse for the wear (well, except that it was strip-mined - but that's another issue).
Or, better still, why can't spent fuel rods be transferred to low-efficiency power plants. They may not be profitable, but it could be less costly than finding and buying land that's geologically rated for a million years of stability. The half life of a spent fuel rod may be 500,000 years, but if it continues to burn in a power plant, that time can be cut pretty drastically.
Can't it? This is really a question - not an invitation to flame me for my admitted lack of knowledge.
Over the last 6 months, every time I download a nightly or milestone, I've been recording the results of the following test.
Download the installer and run it. Moz will launch automatically after install. Kill Mozilla and restart it. Bring up the task manager to see how much memory is used.
Here's the results I've had on my W2k box:
2001 10/01 build 03 22,540k
2001 10/15 build 06 21,876k
2001 10/18 build 03 21,692k
2001 10/23 build 09 21,984k
2001 11/16 build 03 21,952k
2001 11/29 build 03 21,656k
2001 12/06 build 03 19,868k
2001 12/10 build 03 19,812k
2002 01/07 build 03 18,124k
2002 01/14 build 03 19,064k
2002 01/17 build 04 19,244k
2002 02/26 build 03 18,608k
2002 03/06 build 04 18,220k
2002 03/11 build 04 17,704k (build 0.9.9)
That's a decrease of almost 5 megs in memory usage over six months - all the while they've been adding features.
Significantly, they've added venkman, tabbed browsing, the dom inspector and favicon support.
Also significant - I don't know why I bother to get the talkback builds anymore - I haven't submitted a crash in 3 months. And I run it all day, every day.
It's not an Office killer and Sun knows it.
What it is is a margin-killer.
Microsoft is using its HUGE profits in the Office arena to fund their drive into the enterprise OS market - which is scaring the bajeezus out of Sun's strategic planners. Sun must do something to level the playing field.
To win this battle, Sun doesn't need to capture much market share, all they need to do is give consumers a credible alternative. The bumper-sticker version of this strategy: If you can't beat your competitor, screw up his margin.
I've heard that Office makes up about half of MS's revenue - about 4 billion in the last quarter of '01, that would be about 16 million copies if they're going for $250 on average (I don't know this, I'm just speculating).
If Sun succeeds in forcing them to drop their price by even $10, they've scored a major victory - to the tune of $160 million per quarter. That's not chump change, not even to the beast of Redmond. Remember, Microsoft's profits are somewhat tied to their stock price (they pay their employees largely with stock options) and their stock price is sustained by GROWING REVENUES - which they won't have if they have to drop the price of MS Office.
If you read the preceeding and substitue IBM for Sun, you'll understand IBM's committment to Linux.
I believe it's genuine. but it's not terribly incriminating. I expect nearly every large company gathers intelligence on their competitors. And if they can find willing insiders - that's their competitor's problem.
That said, I'm frankly getting pretty tired of all the posts insisting that Slashdot has degenerated to nothing but MS bashing.
People SHOULD be MS bashing. MS is actively working to take away our freedom (digitally speaking) and it makes me mad as hell. Did anyone read the finding of facts? Does it mean nothing to you that they use their monopoly to stifle competition, starve out competitors and break standards?
It should be telling that the only real competition that MS sees on the horizon is free software. It's the only model that can withstand the onslaught of FUD, standards-breaking, product tie-in's and out-spending that characterizes an MS reaction to competition.
If you think they're just tough competitors, you're naive and I would be happy to compete against you any day.
Before you beat up on mozilla for feature creep, you should note that mouse gestures are NOT a feature IN mozilla, but an outside project of mozdev.org. If you want to use it, you have to install it. It's not in the trunk.
Granted, the extra features have been POURING in lately (venkman, tabs, link toolbar - all within the last week), so there is a great deal of feature creep but that's a symptom of the unqualified success of mozilla. They set out to develop a platform to be used for all kinds of projects, starting with a browser - and people are using it for all kinds of projects. The way things are going, it looks like the deluge is just starting.
I for one, couldn't be happier. It's got annoyances, but it's nightlies are stable (it hasn't crashed in so long I don't know why I bother with talkback anymore) and they've got features that I would miss dearly if I had to go back to I.E.
I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. Stephen King may not turn the publishing world upside-down, but the potential here is bigger than you might think. For about 2 years I've been dreaming of an effort to publish electronic versions of textbooks (specifically math books) for free distribution to students. All I needed was an appropriate article on /. to start a discussion:) My vision is a collaberative effort to develop textbooks by authors who submit new chapters/books/fixes/updates to the administrators, who review those changes and consider them for acceptance into the published versions. Students could then either use the books online or print a postscript or pdf (or whatever) version of them. A printer could even print, bind and sell the books, in case anyone really needs a bound version. A teacher could download and change it to his/her liking and use it as the required text for a class. I got this idea when I tried to return a Trig book to the school's bookstore - they refused to accept it because they had changed versions. I had paid something like $50 for the book and could get $0 for in 6 weeks later (it was a summer class). I'm wondering what had changed in trigonometry over those 6 weeks - in fact, what significant changes have been made in algebra, geometry, trig or calculus over the last 100 years? Do students need to have $75, newly minted math books to learn math in a community college? So, my question is, what are your thoughts on a gnu textbook license? I've reserved freetextbooks.org, but haven't done anything with it, yet. joelgrimes@mad.scientist.com