> the only difference is its RPMs and Redhat instead of.deb and Debian.
Now, I haven't installed from "freshrpms" so take my statements with a grain of salt, but... Past experience says that Debian has at least three big advantages over RedHat: - Almost every significant (and many not-so-significant) free software program is part of the official distribution, integrated with the menu system, mailcap system, configuration database, etc. - The installation of most packages tries to help you get a working configuration (by asking you questions) out of the box. People often find this confusing, but many find it preferable to having something like "sendmail" installed but broken. - Upgrading anything but the kernel itself does not involve rebooting, and your configuration is generally either left alone, or migrated with some help from you. (And most packages that can't do one of those tell you "I'm broken, please read [whatever help file]" so you have a chance of doing something about it.)
Until you've lived in Debian (and perhaps another OS) and maintained a machine for some period it's hard to appreciate these things. I've got a machine that has been migrated to the latest and greatest since around 1996, and not had a fresh install in this time. It's had uptimes of hundreds of days, and just chugs along, secure and doing it's job.
If running RedHat with "freshrpms" is like that, more power to you, and I'm glad RH has caught up. Otherwise you might want to give Debian a try. If you find the install confusing, as others have suggest, Knoppix makes a fine installer for Debian.
When you figure out how to force Win32 users to move Linux, let me know. MS used illegal business practices to force Win32 on the world by making you buy it with the hardware. Apples/oranges?
Check out transgaming - was "No 3D?"
on
Win4Lin 5.0 Reviewed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Check out Transgaming. They support a variety of DirectX games, including some 3d games iirc. They do this through extending wine to support DirectX. What I don't know is if they feed changes back into the mainline Wine. I do know that CodeWeavers do, but they don't support DirectX...
On the other hand, the age old question is that if Windows emulation works SO well on Linux, then will there ever be a commercial market for native Linux apps? I'd rather see native ports of these various apps/games, and I hope emulation is simply a stopgap...
Ummm, KDE 3.1 just came into Debian in it's entirety, finally, and now packages that depend on KDE are coming into unstable. (Cool stuff like K3B.) If you run unstable, you can build a NICE desktop system already. (KDE took forever to come in for a variety of reasons, but I'd say that the biggest holdup was the ever-changing g++ ABI, which is outside of Debian's control. Wanting to "do the right thing" and work out the technical problems of live updates within Debian took some time given the shifting ABI - it's a complex problem.)
Also, the debian-installer people are making big progress as we speak. Debian is improving daily. Desktop Debian is a reality for some, and will be a reality for more people soon.
I'd say the more informed and educated your populace is, the better chance you have of having a stable and productive society. The more stable and productive a society, the less chance of extreme groups gaining popularity and sponsoring terrorism.
One way that people become informed and educated is through the Internet. To access the Internet, it takes hardware, software and bandwith. One of these things can be gotten for free; the others become cheaper on a regular basis.
Check out Geek Corps for an example of a group that is taking this theory and running with it. They are trying to bring the Internet to the citizens of the world. I think it's a noble cause. People often argue "give them food, water, etc", and of course they are right. But in the long term you need an educated populace that can be informed about the world about them to have a stable society and to make informed decisions when participating in their country's political processes. In the long run I think "free software" == "real freedom" for places that have oppressive governments.
I have done this, even across windows machines. Of course, I'm not a typical windows user in that I tend to live in Cygwin when I use windows. Anyways, I have in my.bashrc if [ -n "$LINUX" ]; then... fi and if [ -n "$WINDOWS" ]; then... fi
Plus a bunch of stuff that is common between machines. I also have some tests for "what domain am I on?" to set a couple of options. It works reasonably well. I have been toying with the idea of using replicated HOME dirs via Unison (as I mentioned in another thread) but have not bitten the bullet just yet. Part of the issue is whether or not I really want my entire home directory to be replicated, or just parts... I guess I haven't figured out my requirements yet so I haven't constructed a solution just yet.
An alternative to a true distributed filesystem is Unison , a user-space daemon that keeps filesystems automagically synced using rsync. I have not used it myself, but I saw reference to it nested somewhere in here and thought it looked interesting.
So has anyone had good or bad online banking experience with any of these? I think all of them but gnucash are supposed to support it. I'd like to see a comparative review...
> With IDE drives down to around $1/G, just go out and buy yourself a bunch of IDE drives for backup--they are a lot more reliable and a lot faster.
What about when your house burns down, your power supply drops 120VAC on the +5 line of all of the drives, etc? Am I supposed to drop an IDE disk in my safety deposit box occasionally? As far as DVD-R goes, so far the media cost seems kind of high to be running full backups very often. (E.g. nightly, which is easy to do with tape.)
Note, I'm not endorsing the idea of using video tapes for backup, but using a real tape backup still seems like the best option to me for data you really want to be able to restore.
> also the new (cyrix derived?) via c3's&etc would have been much much much much more intresting than 65 intel/amd cpu's..
FWIW, I just put together a linux machine based on the VIA C3M266 motherboard and 1 GHz Via (Cyrix) C3. This machine serves as a firewall, file server, web server, and mail server for a small network. It's on all of the time so I thought that a low power solution would be nice. The machine it was replacing was a dual PPro 150, and it is definitely much faster than that, and runs quieter and cooler.
Since it was replacing an existing machine, the process I went through was to: 1) Build a C3 compatible kernel. (The C3 has no "cmov" instruction, a ppro optimized kernel won't work!) 2) Build the appropriate drivers for the the devices on board. (Of biggest concern, VIA IDE drivers and the VIA-Rhine ethernet driver.) 3) Replace motherboard, hook everything up. 4) Profit. (OK, just kidding.)
Anyways, it ended up being a completely smooth transition. I could not find any info about running Linux on the VIA C3M266 before hand, so I thought I'd share my experience.
> Software companies are not going to go away > overnight (or even in the forseeable future, > if you value useable software), but in a world of > "GPL, and nothing but GPL" those companies cannot > exist.
This is something I've always wondered about. If the GPL was the only license in the universe, would there be no software at all? It's kind of what you're asserting, and I don't think it's true. It's not like there would suddenly be no need for software, right? What it would do is make software so it wasn't sold as a product, and it would turn programmers into "true" service people. Programmers would be like plumbers, coming to your house to help you (or your company) fix software problems. Like plumbers, they would compete on rate and on skills.
What's wrong with the old ones?
on
A Sound Server For X
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There are already a bunch of remote sound servers. I happen to like rplay, but there is also artsd, nas, esd, etc... Was the problem simply NIH syndrome?
Yes, I've got a 600e and it's eaten two batteries (and the third is starting on the downward curve.) It's a couple of years old, so I guess it's not that bad.
However, a couple things to consider. There are at least three ways to get replacements from IBM. One is full retail - it's very expensive and not a good idea. Another is to call about the warranty, even if it's out of warranty. They offered to give me a battery for half price if I shipped them the old one. Lastly, if it's under warranty they'll send you a new one and a prepaid box to send the old one back.
Another thing to consider when discussing rechargeable batteries is that you need to look and see what technology the battery in question is. Lots of people are spouting off stuff about full discharge, topping off, etc, but that's all a load if they don't know what kind of batteries you've got. NiMh != Nicads != Lithium Ion. Proper care of each is fairly different - Li Ion being the strangest. Do some googling and you can find articles about proper care for each type of battery.
My 600E has/had Li Ion batteries and I was surprised to read one day that it damages them to discharge them below 40% capacity. Couple that with a fixed number of recharge cycles (where going from 95% to 100% counts as a cycle) and you see that any time you run on batteries, you should go down to 40% and then recharge.
Also note that the latest BIOS for the 600E won't start a recharge cycle unless the battery is below 95%, which is a good thing. IBM also recommends that you upgrade the configuration utility when you call about the battery warranty - they claim somehow the newer version is better for the batteries as well. Given that I run Linux I have my doubts that it matters to me, but I did update it in case it tweaked some setting in the hardware.
All in all I've been looking at a battery every 18 months as part of the cost of ownership. If that bothered me a whole lot, I'd take the batteries out unless I really needed them and store them however is appropriate for the technology.
There is a peer to peer network (in beta) for only bands like Phish and the Dead that allow taping. It's called furthurnet.org. There is a java client that works fairly well in Linux, too. I've grabbed tons of cool stuff from there - Hendrix, Neil Young, Built to Spill, Phish - there's a huge list of bands. And they have.shn and.mp3s currently, eventually there will be video too.
The drivers that the Weather Channel was paying for - did anything ever come of that? This announcment from Nvidia is definitely great, and I have no doubt it's the most they can do right now, but...
It would be much better to have open source drivers available. You'd get more people looking at things like security and performance issues, and then we could have support for architectures other than x86. (Which is probably something Nvidia themselves isn't going to bother with.)
Latency vs. Bandwidth
on
DSL Rising
·
· Score: 4, Informative
One thing that I like about DSL over cable (having used both in my area) is that the latency of the DSL is better. I think most people are probably more latency sensitive than bandwidth sensitive. When you are clicking links, you want that instant feedback.
FWIW, you could run IE in Linux if that was really the only issue you had. If you want it to be really, really easy and support Wine development, purchase Crossover Office from Codeweavers for a measly $55. (Try getting a Windows license for that!)
I'm simply a happy customer of theirs, no affiliation.
Factoid could remember every place that you went, every person you saw, where you put your car keys... This could hit hard storage for you. Never again would your recall of "what was a I doing on that day?" or "have I ever met this person before?" be an issue.
> Check out apt-build. It does exactly what you think it does.
Ummm, there is no such package. If you mean "apt-get --build source " as another poster mentions, it's not the same - not by a long shot.
- It's not sticky - i.e. it won't compile from source on the next upgrade.
- There is no system-wide configuration of compiler flags to use - stuff like --arch=athlon-xp
(My understanding is that Gentoo can do that stuff, but I've not tried it.) I love Debian as much as the next guy, but I'd like to see these capabilities in Debian too.
You'll notice the subject was asking for people to help out these projects - I didn't suggest that they are close to competing with them yet. Only with man-hours of work is there any way for these projects to progress, hence the need for help
Slashdot Mirror
> the only difference is its RPMs and Redhat instead of .deb and Debian.
Now, I haven't installed from "freshrpms" so take my statements with a grain of salt, but... Past experience says that Debian has at least three big advantages over RedHat:
- Almost every significant (and many not-so-significant) free software program is part of the official distribution, integrated with the menu system, mailcap system, configuration database, etc.
- The installation of most packages tries to help you get a working configuration (by asking you questions) out of the box. People often find this confusing, but many find it preferable to having something like "sendmail" installed but broken.
- Upgrading anything but the kernel itself does not involve rebooting, and your configuration is generally either left alone, or migrated with some help from you. (And most packages that can't do one of those tell you "I'm broken, please read [whatever help file]" so you have a chance of doing something about it.)
Until you've lived in Debian (and perhaps another OS) and maintained a machine for some period it's hard to appreciate these things. I've got a machine that has been migrated to the latest and greatest since around 1996, and not had a fresh install in this time. It's had uptimes of hundreds of days, and just chugs along, secure and doing it's job.
If running RedHat with "freshrpms" is like that, more power to you, and I'm glad RH has caught up. Otherwise you might want to give Debian a try. If you find the install confusing, as others have suggest, Knoppix makes a fine installer for Debian.
When you figure out how to force Win32 users to move Linux, let me know. MS used illegal business practices to force Win32 on the world by making you buy it with the hardware. Apples/oranges?
Check out Transgaming. They support a variety of DirectX games, including some 3d games iirc. They do this through extending wine to support DirectX. What I don't know is if they feed changes back into the mainline Wine. I do know that CodeWeavers do, but they don't support DirectX...
On the other hand, the age old question is that if Windows emulation works SO well on Linux, then will there ever be a commercial market for native Linux apps? I'd rather see native ports of these various apps/games, and I hope emulation is simply a stopgap...
Ummm, KDE 3.1 just came into Debian in it's entirety, finally, and now packages that depend on KDE are coming into unstable. (Cool stuff like K3B.) If you run unstable, you can build a NICE desktop system already. (KDE took forever to come in for a variety of reasons, but I'd say that the biggest holdup was the ever-changing g++ ABI, which is outside of Debian's control. Wanting to "do the right thing" and work out the technical problems of live updates within Debian took some time given the shifting ABI - it's a complex problem.)
Also, the debian-installer people are making big progress as we speak. Debian is improving daily. Desktop Debian is a reality for some, and will be a reality for more people soon.
I'd say the more informed and educated your populace is, the better chance you have of having a stable and productive society. The more stable and productive a society, the less chance of extreme groups gaining popularity and sponsoring terrorism.
One way that people become informed and educated is through the Internet. To access the Internet, it takes hardware, software and bandwith. One of these things can be gotten for free; the others become cheaper on a regular basis.
Check out Geek Corps for an example of a group that is taking this theory and running with it. They are trying to bring the Internet to the citizens of the world. I think it's a noble cause. People often argue "give them food, water, etc", and of course they are right. But in the long term you need an educated populace that can be informed about the world about them to have a stable society and to make informed decisions when participating in their country's political processes. In the long run I think "free software" == "real freedom" for places that have oppressive governments.
(I speak only for myself, as always.)
I have done this, even across windows machines. Of course, I'm not a typical windows user in that I tend to live in Cygwin when I use windows. Anyways, I have in my .bashrc ... ...
if [ -n "$LINUX" ]; then
fi
and
if [ -n "$WINDOWS" ]; then
fi
Plus a bunch of stuff that is common between machines. I also have some tests for "what domain am I on?" to set a couple of options. It works reasonably well. I have been toying with the idea of using replicated HOME dirs via Unison (as I mentioned in another thread) but have not bitten the bullet just yet. Part of the issue is whether or not I really want my entire home directory to be replicated, or just parts... I guess I haven't figured out my requirements yet so I haven't constructed a solution just yet.
An alternative to a true distributed filesystem is Unison , a user-space daemon that keeps filesystems automagically synced using rsync. I have not used it myself, but I saw reference to it nested somewhere in here and thought it looked interesting.
There is also Kapital from The Kompany. And gnucash, which is linked in other replies. And CrossOver Office, which supports Quicken.
So has anyone had good or bad online banking experience with any of these? I think all of them but gnucash are supposed to support it. I'd like to see a comparative review...
> With IDE drives down to around $1/G, just go out and buy yourself a bunch of IDE drives for backup--they are a lot more reliable and a lot faster.
What about when your house burns down, your power supply drops 120VAC on the +5 line of all of the drives, etc? Am I supposed to drop an IDE disk in my safety deposit box occasionally? As far as DVD-R goes, so far the media cost seems kind of high to be running full backups very often. (E.g. nightly, which is easy to do with tape.)
Note, I'm not endorsing the idea of using video tapes for backup, but using a real tape backup still seems like the best option to me for data you really want to be able to restore.
> also the new (cyrix derived?) via c3's&etc would have been much much much much more intresting than 65 intel/amd cpu's..
FWIW, I just put together a linux machine based on the VIA C3M266 motherboard and 1 GHz Via (Cyrix) C3. This machine serves as a firewall, file server, web server, and mail server for a small network. It's on all of the time so I thought that a low power solution would be nice. The machine it was replacing was a dual PPro 150, and it is definitely much faster than that, and runs quieter and cooler.
Since it was replacing an existing machine, the process I went through was to:
1) Build a C3 compatible kernel. (The C3 has no "cmov" instruction, a ppro optimized kernel won't work!)
2) Build the appropriate drivers for the the devices on board. (Of biggest concern, VIA IDE drivers and the VIA-Rhine ethernet driver.)
3) Replace motherboard, hook everything up.
4) Profit. (OK, just kidding.)
Anyways, it ended up being a completely smooth transition. I could not find any info about running Linux on the VIA C3M266 before hand, so I thought I'd share my experience.
> Software companies are not going to go away
> overnight (or even in the forseeable future,
> if you value useable software), but in a world of
> "GPL, and nothing but GPL" those companies cannot
> exist.
This is something I've always wondered about. If the GPL was the only license in the universe, would there be no software at all? It's kind of what you're asserting, and I don't think it's true. It's not like there would suddenly be no need for software, right? What it would do is make software so it wasn't sold as a product, and it would turn programmers into "true" service people. Programmers would be like plumbers, coming to your house to help you (or your company) fix software problems. Like plumbers, they would compete on rate and on skills.
There are already a bunch of remote sound servers. I happen to like rplay, but there is also artsd, nas, esd, etc... Was the problem simply NIH syndrome?
Yes, I've got a 600e and it's eaten two batteries (and the third is starting on the downward curve.) It's a couple of years old, so I guess it's not that bad.
;-))
However, a couple things to consider. There are at least three ways to get replacements from IBM. One is full retail - it's very expensive and not a good idea. Another is to call about the warranty, even if it's out of warranty. They offered to give me a battery for half price if I shipped them the old one. Lastly, if it's under warranty they'll send you a new one and a prepaid box to send the old one back.
Another thing to consider when discussing rechargeable batteries is that you need to look and see what technology the battery in question is. Lots of people are spouting off stuff about full discharge, topping off, etc, but that's all a load if they don't know what kind of batteries you've got. NiMh != Nicads != Lithium Ion. Proper care of each is fairly different - Li Ion being the strangest. Do some googling and you can find articles about proper care for each type of battery.
My 600E has/had Li Ion batteries and I was surprised to read one day that it damages them to discharge them below 40% capacity. Couple that with a fixed number of recharge cycles (where going from 95% to 100% counts as a cycle) and you see that any time you run on batteries, you should go down to 40% and then recharge.
Also note that the latest BIOS for the 600E won't start a recharge cycle unless the battery is below 95%, which is a good thing. IBM also recommends that you upgrade the configuration utility when you call about the battery warranty - they claim somehow the newer version is better for the batteries as well.
Given that I run Linux I have my doubts that it matters to me, but I did update it in case it tweaked some setting in the hardware.
All in all I've been looking at a battery every 18 months as part of the cost of ownership. If that bothered me a whole lot, I'd take the batteries out unless I really needed them and store them however is appropriate for the technology.
(Enough rambling for now
Could you please link to where I can get a VGA compatible full color lcd panel for $140? Thanks!
There is a peer to peer network (in beta) for only bands like Phish and the Dead that allow taping. It's called furthurnet.org. There is a java client that works fairly well in Linux, too. I've grabbed tons of cool stuff from there - Hendrix, Neil Young, Built to Spill, Phish - there's a huge list of bands. And they have .shn and .mp3s currently, eventually there will be video too.
The drivers that the Weather Channel was paying for - did anything ever come of that? This announcment from Nvidia is definitely great, and I have no doubt it's the most they can do right now, but...
It would be much better to have open source drivers available. You'd get more people looking at things like security and performance issues, and then we could have support for architectures other than x86. (Which is probably something Nvidia themselves isn't going to bother with.)
One thing that I like about DSL over cable (having used both in my area) is that the latency of the DSL is better. I think most people are probably more latency sensitive than bandwidth sensitive. When you are clicking links, you want that instant feedback.
> OS/2 included things like REXX and a couple useful editors, when Windows included solitaire.
;-)
> (Yeah, OS/2 had a solitaire game, too.)
And don't forget, in the OS/2 Solitaire it would let you CHEAT!
(So does MS Office and Quicken.)
FWIW, you could run IE in Linux if that was really the only issue you had. If you want it to be really, really easy and support Wine development, purchase Crossover Office from Codeweavers for a measly $55. (Try getting a Windows license for that!)
I'm simply a happy customer of theirs, no affiliation.
Factoid could remember every place that you went, every person you saw, where you put your car keys... This could hit hard storage for you. Never again would your recall of "what was a I doing on that day?" or "have I ever met this person before?" be an issue.
> There is, but it's only in unstable right now.
Doh! That's what I get for checking these things out at 4AM - I didn't select "unstable" at http://packages.debian.org, sorry 'bout that.
> Check out apt-build. It does exactly what you think it does.
Ummm, there is no such package. If you mean "apt-get --build source " as another poster mentions, it's not the same - not by a long shot.
- It's not sticky - i.e. it won't compile from source on the next upgrade.
- There is no system-wide configuration of compiler flags to use - stuff like --arch=athlon-xp
(My understanding is that Gentoo can do that stuff, but I've not tried it.) I love Debian as much as the next guy, but I'd like to see these capabilities in Debian too.
I noticed these at Pep Boys (an auto parts store) the other day. Strange impulse item, methinks. Anyways, should take care of the drops for you.
You'll notice the subject was asking for people to help out these projects - I didn't suggest that they are close to competing with them yet. Only with man-hours of work is there any way for these projects to progress, hence the need for help
Some of them are:
gEDA - schematic capture, board layout
Icarus Verilog - verilog simulation, synthesis
Savant - VHDL analysis, simulation (sequential and parallel)
GnuCAP - a mostly Spice compatible circuit simulator
The Open Collector has references to these projects and many more! (Full disclosure; I'm an upstream author on the SAVANT project.)