Perhaps mod_Torrent for Apache could be extended to allow this. While the goal right now is to only support individual file serving (automagically, without having to generate.torrent files manually), some more experimental delivery methods for traditional web site content could be a cool research project.
Re:My experiences with Gentoo
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
I have tried Gentoo, in fact I have a very powerful machine dedicated solely to playing with it. It's a neat system, but the optimizations ARE in my opinion completely negligable. The reason you are probably seeing an increase when going from Debian to Gentoo is that everything is compiled with GCC 3.2 in Gentoo while the base Debian system is still using GCC 2.X. That's your 20% speed increase right there for most C++ programs.
Trust me, or better yet, try it yourself, going from a modern distro like for example Red Hat 9 to Gentoo gives virtually no speed benefits.
Re:Ignorance is bliss.
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The Big Idea behind the SysV init style is that you use tools to administer it. Sure you could do it all manually, but why would you want to? All the symlinking of scripts to runlevels is done automatically for you, as a benefit it is easy to build very complex post install configuration scripts of server software installations.
A init script in Gentoo is little more than a wrapper to call some binary. Even the status checking seems to fail ever so often in my experience. Compare this with an Red Hat style init script, they can be hundreds of lines long and perform a dozen checks and dependency tracking before it'll start the service.
Which is better? It's a matter of taste I guess. If you like to tinker around the Gentoo scripts are ok, but these days I don't expect to have to think about init scripts. They are there, they work, other than that I don't want to care.
I'm one of those people who insists on compiling everything myself and not using packages. I do this because I like to have some control over what options are used when compiling and that everything is optimized to run on my machine.
Using a package manager and compiling everything yourself doesn't have to clash. Every package has a source package, just build those with whatever options you desire. You get all of the benefits of using an package manager, almost every file on the system can be accounted for and queried and you get to be a control freak too.
Check out CheckInstall, this little gem of a program replaces the "make install" part of a normal software installation process. It will create an package for your system (RPM, Deb, Slack tgz...) of the software in the active directory and add it to your package repository. Every file is still accounted for and you can remove the package without any problems later. It's invaluable for maintining a consistent system when most programs don't even include an "make uninstall" target anymore.
Re:My experiences with Gentoo
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When I want a new program all I have to do is 'emerge program', and it is installed, no having to deal with dependancies or lenghty configuration processes
And how is this different from Red Hat or Debian when using apt? With apt for rpm or deb you don't have to spend a day compiling OpenOffice or Mozilla. And don't get me started on customized compilations... the performance increase is usually neglible, but you will never recover the time you spent compiling the software.
You also end up with whatever crappy defaults the project maintainers have chosen, BigRedCursor theme in Xfree86 4.3 anyone? Gentoo also has no configuration tools of it's own, just because I've used and mastered samba and iptables for years doesn't mean I want to go editing files or writing complicated rules when my distro can (gasp) do it for me, meanwhile I can hopefully get some real work done.
SuSE (and other distros) sadly lack an easy way to share a directory under SAMBA.
Red Hat 9 comes with an new Samba configuration tool (GTK2 based, like all redhat-*-config" tools). It's very spartan, but it works quite well and setting up a share takes only a few clicks. It'll also create users, set passwords and manage the samba deamon itself. You can probably rebuild the SRPM for SuSE without any trouble.
A modern Linux distro doesn't need kernel recompilation for most things, not for drivers, not for CD-R(W) support (HOWTOS going on about SCSI emulation do more harm than good most of the time), only some very special purpose stuff.
BitTorrent is written in python so it's not compiled, a RPM won't do you much good.
A quick guide to installing BT on Linux:
1. Download the tarball, http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/BitTorrent-3.2.1 b.tar.gz
2. Untar it, "tar zxvf BitTorrent-3.2.1b.tar.gz"
3. Put the line "application/x-bittorrent;/home/user/BitTorrent/btdownloadgui.py %s; test=test -n "$DISPLAY" in the file "/etc/mailcap", adjust the path to point to where you untarred BT to.
4. That's it. Mozilla will now start BitTorrent when you click on a ".torrent" link.
Fact is, the record companies, regardless of how greedy you think they are, have a right to make money.
Nobody has a right to make money. The record companies can try to make money by offering a service that I am willing to pay for. Right now the alternatives are more convenient, so either the record companies adapt or they die (or are reduced to a sliver of their former selves). The problem is that the record companies don't understand what an incredible distribution channel they're missing out on. With broadband I can download a whole album in a few minutes, make it high quality in a format of my choice, throw in downloadable cover, lyrics, online communities (like Audiogalaxy tried) etc and I'd gladly pay a few bucks for it.
Design patterns themselves are just renaming something every skilled programmer already used, and now every unskilled programmer bandies about like so many Microssoft Certifications.
That's the whole point of design patterns, to formalize what skilled programmers already know and give us a framework of terms to discuss the things with. Instead of a lot of hand waving and whiteboard drawing we just say "delegation pattern" and everyone in the room knows what we're talking about and we then move on to getting some actual work done.
I mean, WTF? RedHat 8.0 is supposed to provide an easy-to-install, easy-to-use Linux installation to enable a smooth transition from Windows to Linux. Why the hell does it not come with the Windows filesystem then?
Red Hat does not include NTFS support because the legal status of the code is not completely clear.
I've been using Linux since 1996. I know how to compile kernels. Hell, I've been sending development kernel bug reports to the developers. Yet, I was appalled to learn that RedHat 8.0 comes with gcc 3.x which means that you can run into serious problems if you want to compile your own kernel.
You've been using too old stuff for too long. GCC 3 is hardly bleeding edge anymore, heck, does any distro except Debian include older gcc:s anymore? Furthermore, I've never had a trouble compiling a kernel using GCC 3.x.
And what the heck are you doing recompiling your kernel, it's the 21st century! You don't have to recompile the kernel for almost anything these days, certainly not for filesystems or cd writing. Use the packaging system in your distribution: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html. One minute of googling would have saved you all this trouble.
To my utter astonishment, W2K would not boot anymore. The initial W2K text screen would appear and even the boot splash screen would show up. But then a "STOP message" appeared on a blue background.
Are you using Lilo or something equally ancient to update your MBR? A "make install" instead of manually messing with the kernel images and Grub would probably have saved your ass, not mention it's a lot faster.
The config files Red Hat uses for the kernels are available in the SRPM's. You should use the SRPM's in any case since they're patched way beyond the vanilla kernel tree. Going from a Red Hat supplied kernel to stock images is a real downgrade.
Could you please do a favour to the community and pack the system into an RPM and make it available on the net? I just hate having to compile stuff and taking care of the depencies myself.
Xine RPMs are available from http://freshrpms.net/ with DVD menu support and all compiled in.
As for WMP for Linux, a year ago it would have been interesting. These days all relevant players do DivX 3-5, Quicktime (_including_ Sorenson codec), DVD playing etc. MPlayer is quite possibly the most advanced player ever, with more post processing and general purpose filters and features than you could possibly need. All WMP has is name recognition.
The NTFS thing is such a large thing to miss out - maybe they do it for licencing reasons, but if it's just out of bloody mindedness, well, they are shooting themselves in the foot.
Red Hat is not including it because the legal status of the driver is unclear. Same thing as with the MP3 decoders and royalty payments, personally I think they're being too cautious.
You don't however have to recompile your kernel just to get NTFS support! It's just one module you need, a single file. Grab it here in convinient RPM format.
Re:I was hoping they would wait.
on
New Red Hat Beta
·
· Score: 2
But it does include KDE 3.1, and GNOME 2.2 too (plus tons of new GNOME2 applications) which is also still in beta. And the XFree version is also a new beta with cool features (rotate and resize, yay). With all these new additions I'd say the final is still 2-4 months away.
For a start, the CVS command line client is non interactive, which is a pain in the ass if you are using SSH authentication and have to enter your passphrase every time you want to do something.
That's what's ssh-agent is for, you upload your public key to the machine running CVS and the agent running on your machine authenticates you without a password.
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.project.sourceforge.net:/ path/to/cvs/root checkout file Oh wow, yeah, now thats so obvious isn't it?
1. You can get rid of everything up to the "checkout" by putting it in your CVSROOT variable. 2. No subsequent updates/checkins ever need this information again as it's stored in the CVS data in the directory. So it's a one time deal.
Subversion replaces the cryptic CVSROOT with a "normal" url, so you'll be typing something like "svn co http://someserver/repository module".
To rename files in CVS, you remove the old file and add it as a new file.
But this new file does not have the history of the old file, you can not check out last weeks version of it and it is not included in diffs of changes that spanned multiple files. Deleting and adding, though it may be well-defined, is also a really ugly and non-intuitive way of doing it.
CVS has had its time, there's no reason to defend it any longer. CVS is being maintained, but it is not really in development anymore. I'm also pretty sure that I read somewhere that a significant portion of the CVS developers are in fact working on Subversion these days.
Subversion will replace CVS, no question about it, it's only a matter of time.
Re:RH8... the good, the bad, the ugly....
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
2.4.18... what's up with that. I guess it's been in testing too long. Actually, for a X.0 release things look pretty good.
The included kernel is by no means a stock 2.4.18. There's a ton of patches and tweaks applied (all available separeately in the kernel SRPMs'). For example the system clock ticks 5 times faster than the stock one, giving much better responsiveness in for example X (see the release notes on for more information). Large parts of Alan Cox's ac-kernel tree is part of the RH kernel (Alan is employed by RH you know). I know of no distribution that would ship a stock kernel.
Apache 2.0+PHP problem is a show stopper for me. Wiped the machine and installed Mandrake 9.0. Sad since 8 is very slick. Hats off (pun intended) to Redhat for a great release. I may come back to it if I can get the PHP stuff resolved.
All recent version of PHP have deprecated the REGISTER_GLOBALS option (and good riddance!). This is most likely what is causing your problems, poorly written scripts will no longer run on recent PHP's.
Re:Free version is non-distributable
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Unfortunately, Red Hat have moved the goal posts again. In a surprising move they've completely broken with their previous policy of 100% open source. The new distribution contains a few components which are (C) Red Hat and are *not* freely re-distributable.
Every piece of software in the distribution is of course copyrighted to someone. That has absolutely no implications for whether you can redistribute it or not. If you thought GPL'ing the software somehows means giving up your copyright I suggest you reread the license.
Now I admit I haven't checked all of the packages, but I did check the most obvious ones, redhat-artwork etc. They are all under the GPL.
If there are indeed packages that can not be redistributed I sure would like to know the names of them.
Re:And I had a 2 days head start too :(
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Note that CD 4 and 5 are source packages only and you probably don't need them. Also, CD 3 holds most of the server stuff (and I think KDE), so if you do a recommended Workstation setup you will only be asked for CD 1 and 2.
It is interesting to see the dramatic changes during boost, though even these seem to develop over a couple of days (I didn't realise the burns lasted that long)
Of course they don't, the burns are very short. They only need to supply apply a little more force than the atmospheric drag is excersing on the station. Maybe a quick review of your old physics text book would be in order;) There's this fairly well known phrase that says:
An object in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force
Re:I don't care as long as they fix the FONTS
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 2
The fonts in the new NULL beta are the best I've ever seen on a Linux desktop. I don't know what magic they're using, but my old RH 7.3 install with the Microsoft Web Fonts, XFT2 and GNOME2 anti-aliasing doesn't hold a candle against the NULL beta.
Now looking at the NULL beta XFT config file, I can see that there's a ton of setups listed, alias size tresholds, sub pixel aliasing etc. Also, there's a new Red Hat developed GNOME2 program for changing the between various aliasing modes.
It renders my old MS Word 2000 files correctly, even with some pretty advanced tables and stuff. I'd say the import filters are certainly good enough for 95% of all users out there.
Load time (measured with clock in hand): 5 seconds (without the program preload and that tray stuff), on my Thunderbird 800Mhz, 256MB machine. It still wants a lot of memory, but otherwise it's in a completely different class than the old Star Offices, performance wise.
It's free, it's good, it has a quality spell checker, what more could I possibly want?:) (Actually an Access replacement would be nice...)
GNOME 2.0, KDE 3.0, Mozilla 1.0, Open Office 1.0 (or SO 6.0), it's all coming together nicely IMO. And you can't beat the price.
Doesn't seem too promising: If you look at appendix L of the jpeg2000 draft, there are 22 companies who believe that implementing the spec may require use of their patents.
PNG still hasn't taken off despite being supported in all major browsers (now if only IE did proper alpha, any year now...), how much chance does an image format that requires third party plugins have?
I just tried the new version... Morpheus Preview Edition is basically an old version of the GPL'ed program Gnucleus. When you install it even displays the GPL as the click-through license.
They're however not providing the source, not yet at least. The Gnucleus developers claim that Morpheus didn't even bother contacting them before doing this.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps mod_Torrent for Apache could be extended to allow this. While the goal right now is to only support individual file serving (automagically, without having to generate .torrent files manually), some more experimental delivery methods for traditional web site content could be a cool research project.
I have tried Gentoo, in fact I have a very powerful machine dedicated solely to playing with it. It's a neat system, but the optimizations ARE in my opinion completely negligable. The reason you are probably seeing an increase when going from Debian to Gentoo is that everything is compiled with GCC 3.2 in Gentoo while the base Debian system is still using GCC 2.X. That's your 20% speed increase right there for most C++ programs.
Trust me, or better yet, try it yourself, going from a modern distro like for example Red Hat 9 to Gentoo gives virtually no speed benefits.
The Big Idea behind the SysV init style is that you use tools to administer it. Sure you could do it all manually, but why would you want to? All the symlinking of scripts to runlevels is done automatically for you, as a benefit it is easy to build very complex post install configuration scripts of server software installations.
A init script in Gentoo is little more than a wrapper to call some binary. Even the status checking seems to fail ever so often in my experience. Compare this with an Red Hat style init script, they can be hundreds of lines long and perform a dozen checks and dependency tracking before it'll start the service.
Which is better? It's a matter of taste I guess. If you like to tinker around the Gentoo scripts are ok, but these days I don't expect to have to think about init scripts. They are there, they work, other than that I don't want to care.
Using a package manager and compiling everything yourself doesn't have to clash. Every package has a source package, just build those with whatever options you desire. You get all of the benefits of using an package manager, almost every file on the system can be accounted for and queried and you get to be a control freak too.
Check out CheckInstall, this little gem of a program replaces the "make install" part of a normal software installation process. It will create an package for your system (RPM, Deb, Slack tgz...) of the software in the active directory and add it to your package repository. Every file is still accounted for and you can remove the package without any problems later. It's invaluable for maintining a consistent system when most programs don't even include an "make uninstall" target anymore.
And how is this different from Red Hat or Debian when using apt? With apt for rpm or deb you don't have to spend a day compiling OpenOffice or Mozilla. And don't get me started on customized compilations... the performance increase is usually neglible, but you will never recover the time you spent compiling the software.
You also end up with whatever crappy defaults the project maintainers have chosen, BigRedCursor theme in Xfree86 4.3 anyone? Gentoo also has no configuration tools of it's own, just because I've used and mastered samba and iptables for years doesn't mean I want to go editing files or writing complicated rules when my distro can (gasp) do it for me, meanwhile I can hopefully get some real work done.
Red Hat 9 comes with an new Samba configuration tool (GTK2 based, like all redhat-*-config" tools). It's very spartan, but it works quite well and setting up a share takes only a few clicks. It'll also create users, set passwords and manage the samba deamon itself. You can probably rebuild the SRPM for SuSE without any trouble.
Don't go recompiling the kernel because of something as trivial as NTFS support. Grab the NTFS module RPM for RH9 from here: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html .
A modern Linux distro doesn't need kernel recompilation for most things, not for drivers, not for CD-R(W) support (HOWTOS going on about SCSI emulation do more harm than good most of the time), only some very special purpose stuff.
BitTorrent is written in python so it's not compiled, a RPM won't do you much good.
1 b.tar.gz
/home/user/BitTorrent/btdownloadgui.py %s; test=test -n "$DISPLAY" in the file "/etc/mailcap", adjust the path to point to where you untarred BT to.
A quick guide to installing BT on Linux:
1. Download the tarball, http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/BitTorrent-3.2.
2. Untar it, "tar zxvf BitTorrent-3.2.1b.tar.gz"
3. Put the line "application/x-bittorrent;
4. That's it. Mozilla will now start BitTorrent when you click on a ".torrent" link.
Nobody has a right to make money. The record companies can try to make money by offering a service that I am willing to pay for. Right now the alternatives are more convenient, so either the record companies adapt or they die (or are reduced to a sliver of their former selves). The problem is that the record companies don't understand what an incredible distribution channel they're missing out on. With broadband I can download a whole album in a few minutes, make it high quality in a format of my choice, throw in downloadable cover, lyrics, online communities (like Audiogalaxy tried) etc and I'd gladly pay a few bucks for it.
That's the whole point of design patterns, to formalize what skilled programmers already know and give us a framework of terms to discuss the things with. Instead of a lot of hand waving and whiteboard drawing we just say "delegation pattern" and everyone in the room knows what we're talking about and we then move on to getting some actual work done.
I mean, WTF? RedHat 8.0 is supposed to provide an easy-to-install, easy-to-use Linux installation to enable a smooth transition from Windows to Linux. Why the hell does it not come with the Windows filesystem then?
l . One minute of googling would have saved you all this trouble.
Red Hat does not include NTFS support because the legal status of the code is not completely clear.
I've been using Linux since 1996. I know how to compile kernels. Hell, I've been sending development kernel bug reports to the developers. Yet, I was appalled to learn that RedHat 8.0 comes with gcc 3.x which means that you can run into serious problems if you want to compile your own kernel.
You've been using too old stuff for too long. GCC 3 is hardly bleeding edge anymore, heck, does any distro except Debian include older gcc:s anymore? Furthermore, I've never had a trouble compiling a kernel using GCC 3.x.
And what the heck are you doing recompiling your kernel, it's the 21st century! You don't have to recompile the kernel for almost anything these days, certainly not for filesystems or cd writing. Use the packaging system in your distribution: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.htm
To my utter astonishment, W2K would not boot anymore. The initial W2K text screen would appear and even the boot splash screen would show up. But then a "STOP message" appeared on a blue background.
Are you using Lilo or something equally ancient to update your MBR? A "make install" instead of manually messing with the kernel images and Grub would probably have saved your ass, not mention it's a lot faster.
The config files Red Hat uses for the kernels are available in the SRPM's. You should use the SRPM's in any case since they're patched way beyond the vanilla kernel tree. Going from a Red Hat supplied kernel to stock images is a real downgrade.
Could you please do a favour to the community and pack the system into an RPM and make it available on the net? I just hate having to compile stuff and taking care of the depencies myself.
Xine RPMs are available from http://freshrpms.net/ with DVD menu support and all compiled in.
As for WMP for Linux, a year ago it would have been interesting. These days all relevant players do DivX 3-5, Quicktime (_including_ Sorenson codec), DVD playing etc. MPlayer is quite possibly the most advanced player ever, with more post processing and general purpose filters and features than you could possibly need. All WMP has is name recognition.
The NTFS thing is such a large thing to miss out - maybe they do it for licencing reasons, but if it's just out of bloody mindedness, well, they are shooting themselves in the foot.
Red Hat is not including it because the legal status of the driver is unclear. Same thing as with the MP3 decoders and royalty payments, personally I think they're being too cautious.
You don't however have to recompile your kernel just to get NTFS support! It's just one module you need, a single file. Grab it here in convinient RPM format.
But it does include KDE 3.1, and GNOME 2.2 too (plus tons of new GNOME2 applications) which is also still in beta. And the XFree version is also a new beta with cool features (rotate and resize, yay). With all these new additions I'd say the final is still 2-4 months away.
For a start, the CVS command line client is non interactive, which is a pain in the ass if you are using SSH authentication and have to enter your passphrase every time you want to do something.
/ path/to/cvs/root checkout file
That's what's ssh-agent is for, you upload your public key to the machine running CVS and the agent running on your machine authenticates you without a password.
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.project.sourceforge.net:
Oh wow, yeah, now thats so obvious isn't it?
1. You can get rid of everything up to the "checkout" by putting it in your CVSROOT variable.
2. No subsequent updates/checkins ever need this information again as it's stored in the CVS data in the directory. So it's a one time deal.
Subversion replaces the cryptic CVSROOT with a "normal" url, so you'll be typing something like "svn co http://someserver/repository module".
To rename files in CVS, you remove the old file and add it as a new file.
But this new file does not have the history of the old file, you can not check out last weeks version of it and it is not included in diffs of changes that spanned multiple files. Deleting and adding, though it may be well-defined, is also a really ugly and non-intuitive way of doing it.
CVS has had its time, there's no reason to defend it any longer. CVS is being maintained, but it is not really in development anymore. I'm also pretty sure that I read somewhere that a significant portion of the CVS developers are in fact working on Subversion these days.
Subversion will replace CVS, no question about it, it's only a matter of time.
2.4.18... what's up with that. I guess it's been in testing too long. Actually, for a X.0 release things look pretty good.
The included kernel is by no means a stock 2.4.18. There's a ton of patches and tweaks applied (all available separeately in the kernel SRPMs'). For example the system clock ticks 5 times faster than the stock one, giving much better responsiveness in for example X (see the release notes on for more information). Large parts of Alan Cox's ac-kernel tree is part of the RH kernel (Alan is employed by RH you know). I know of no distribution that would ship a stock kernel.
Apache 2.0+PHP problem is a show stopper for me. Wiped the machine and installed Mandrake 9.0. Sad since 8 is very slick. Hats off (pun intended) to Redhat for a great release. I may come back to it if I can get the PHP stuff resolved.
All recent version of PHP have deprecated the REGISTER_GLOBALS option (and good riddance!). This is most likely what is causing your problems, poorly written scripts will no longer run on recent PHP's.
Unfortunately, Red Hat have moved the goal posts again. In a surprising
move they've completely broken with their previous policy of 100% open
source. The new distribution contains a few components which are (C)
Red Hat and are *not* freely re-distributable.
Every piece of software in the distribution is of course copyrighted to someone. That has absolutely no implications for whether you can redistribute it or not. If you thought GPL'ing the software somehows means giving up your copyright I suggest you reread the license.
Now I admit I haven't checked all of the packages, but I did check the most obvious ones, redhat-artwork etc. They are all under the GPL.
If there are indeed packages that can not be redistributed I sure would like to know the names of them.
Note that CD 4 and 5 are source packages only and you probably don't need them. Also, CD 3 holds most of the server stuff (and I think KDE), so if you do a recommended Workstation setup you will only be asked for CD 1 and 2.
It is interesting to see the dramatic changes during boost, though even these seem to develop over a couple of days (I didn't realise the burns lasted that long)
Of course they don't, the burns are very short. They only need to supply apply a little more force than the atmospheric drag is excersing on the station. Maybe a quick review of your old physics text book would be in order ;) There's this fairly well known phrase that says:
An object in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force
The fonts in the new NULL beta are the best I've ever seen on a Linux desktop. I don't know what magic they're using, but my old RH 7.3 install with the Microsoft Web Fonts, XFT2 and GNOME2 anti-aliasing doesn't hold a candle against the NULL beta.
Now looking at the NULL beta XFT config file, I can see that there's a ton of setups listed, alias size tresholds, sub pixel aliasing etc. Also, there's a new Red Hat developed GNOME2 program for changing the between various aliasing modes.
http://abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s603070.htm
This is my impressions of 1.0 so far:
:) (Actually an Access replacement would be nice...)
It renders my old MS Word 2000 files correctly, even with some pretty advanced tables and stuff. I'd say the import filters are certainly good enough for 95% of all users out there.
Load time (measured with clock in hand): 5 seconds (without the program preload and that tray stuff), on my Thunderbird 800Mhz, 256MB machine. It still wants a lot of memory, but otherwise it's in a completely different class than the old Star Offices, performance wise.
It's free, it's good, it has a quality spell checker, what more could I possibly want?
GNOME 2.0, KDE 3.0, Mozilla 1.0, Open Office 1.0 (or SO 6.0), it's all coming together nicely IMO. And you can't beat the price.
See this bugzilla entry for Mozilla's jpeg2000 progress.
Doesn't seem too promising:
If you look at appendix L of the jpeg2000 draft, there are 22 companies who believe that implementing the spec may require use of their patents.
PNG still hasn't taken off despite being supported in all major browsers (now if only IE did proper alpha, any year now...), how much chance does an image format that requires third party plugins have?
I just tried the new version... Morpheus Preview Edition is basically an old version of the GPL'ed program Gnucleus. When you install it even displays the GPL as the click-through license.
They're however not providing the source, not yet at least. The Gnucleus developers claim that Morpheus didn't even bother contacting them before doing this.