Sun and Apple both ship a proprietary OS based around an "open source" core. Sun's core is OpenSolaris, and Apple's is Darwin. Sun has done a far better job open sourcing their operating system. I do a 3rd party hardware device driver for both MacOSX and OpenSolaris. To compare Apple's to Solaris' "open source" OS is quite interesting:
- Source code: Darwin: Must sign up for an Apple account to view source, source code for Intel kernel not even available. Solaris: Source code browseable on web, and available to anybody. - Installable OS: Darwin was never updated from 8.0.1, which was released over a year ago. Solaris: Solaris Express is released at least monthly. - Project direction: Darwin code appears after a MacOSX release. There is no way to see the source code of an upcoming MacOSX version, there is no way to even know what features will be present aside for signing up for a $500/yr ADC account. You are not allowed to talk about this in public. This is in stark contrast to OpenSolaris, where Sun engineers publically debate virtues of different features, and future directions on their forums/mailing lists, and anybody is welcome to contribute.
In short, OpenSolaris is a real open source project. Darwin is a sham, and would not survive without Apple.
After years of begging for an Apple ][, Atari 800, or Vic 20, my parents finally gave in and bought me a Franklin Ace 1000. I still remember hearing "Men at Work" on the radio on the way to the computer store. For those that don't remember, a Franklin Ace 1000 was an Apple ][+ clone with a 6502 and 64KB of RAM, and an (illegal) copy of Apple BASIC in ROM. Franklin was sued out of business by Apple for this.
My parents even sprang for a color monitor (Amdek), and a 5.25" floppy disk drive (Rana), and an Okidata printer. I played around with Logo, Basic, and 6502 assembler on that machine. That machine also served as my word processor through high school. I played all sorts of great games, many of them shareware, some of them cracked, and only a few purchased with my meager income from lawn-mowing. Roughly a quarter century later, the Franklin still works. I just packed it up and moved it into my attic after cleaning out my Dad's house when he died in December. He was still using the computer for simple word processing and numerical calculations 25 years later.
I've been a sysadmin, and OS researcher, and now I do network device drivers and firmware for a living. I wonder what I'd be doing right now if my parents had bought the other item I was begging for -- a moto-cross style off-road motorcycle.
I used kmail as an imap mail client because it allows the use of an external editor to compose messages. After more than a decade of using emacs, I just cannot get used to the key bindings that builtin editors in gui mail clients use. The "emacs" like key bindings that some mailers offer just do not cut it. Kmail mostly worked for me. It was fast and efficient. However, it seemed to get horribly confused when I would wake my desktop up in the morning after suspending it the previous evening. About 3/4 of the time, I'd need to kill and restart kmail. Somehow, some obscure setting became corrupt, and the language it used for outgoing mail switched to some arabic font. My outgoing mail appeared blank to people using Outlook, and like gibberish to people using mail clients with the correct font installed.
I finally settled on thunderbird after a co-worker told me it has an extenstion which allows me to use emacs to edit my messages. It works reliably after resuming my desktop in the morning. Basically, it just works. The fonts/colors were ugly as hell out of the box and took a lot of work to make even barely tolerable. But for "just works", I can live with that.
Mythtv already has this feature. It is called time stretch and has been around since 0.17, nearly 1 year. I can generally watch a "1 hour" show in a little over 30 minutes with Timestretch set to 1.1, and using commercial skipping.
From the 0.17 release notes at http://www.mythtv.org/: # "Timestretch". Though, it's really 'time-compression'. This allows the user to adjust the playback speed slightly, but keeps the audio at the same pitch. If you're recording a lot of shows, timestretch lets you get through them faster. =)
Check the "Local HDTV Info and Reception" forum for your area at http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f= 45. It may be possible for you to get the HD channels without paying for the digital package if you have your own tuner. Many companies do not scramble the HD locals.
I currently pay for nothing but "basic" cable from Time Warner, and I get PBS, ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, TNT-HD, Discovery-HD, and a digital mirror of the basic channels from my local provider. I'm using the built-in tuner in my HDTV, and also a Dvico Fusion HDTV5-Gold card in my MythTv DVR.
Also, if all you want is the locals, consider putting up an antenna. I have 2 tuner cards in my MythTV box, and the other one goes to an attic antenna which gets the major networks that I can get on cable, plus UPN and WB which my cable company does not carry. If you don't feel you can handle putting up an antenna, hire an installer. If you drop your cable, the antenna, tuner, and installation will pay for themselves after a few months.
It all depends on how you use your DVR. The problem that I have with space comes when I try to get an entire season, so I can watch it in-order all at once.
For example, I heard really good things about Numb3rs a few weeks after it started. I hate coming into the middle of a show, so I set my MythTV box to record it in HD and decided to wait until I had all the episodes before I started watching. Each episode consumes 6.5GB at the bitrate our local CBS station uses. Even with only 13 episodes, this is taking up roughly 84.5GB of space on my 160GB drive.
It would be much more cost effective for me to add a few more drives to my existing $850 setup than to by a $2000 DVR.
3) I'm running with DVI-I as confirmed by the the Xorg.0.log:
(II) RADEON(0): Primary:
Monitor -- TMDS
Connector -- DVI-I
4) I'm running at 1600x1200 as confirmed by xdpyinfo and xrandr.
But I'm not really sure if my complaint is about the fonts, or just how they are rendered. I could care less what the font is called, or where it came from if it is rendered sharply (like on OSX). I've also tried Windows ttf fonts, and they don't seem to be any better. So I guess my complaint is with the font rendering of modern, proportional fonts like those found on most web pages, and used in GNOME or KDE apps. Fixed fonts (like I used for xterms and xemacs) are fine.
Back in the bad-old-days, my CRT was never this blurry.
Eycandy.. bleh. Concentrate on decent font support
on
Xorg and Desktop Eyecandy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'd much rather see fonts that don't suck on LCD monitors than eye candy. I can do without shadows and showy effects, but not without clean, clear fonts.
I'm writing this from a machine with a 1600x1200 Dell 2001FP monitor, and an ATI Radeon 9200SE, connected with DVI running X.Org version 6.8.2. I have never, ever been able to get decent fonts with XFree86 or X.org. The fonts are either too jagged without antialiasing, or too blurry with it.
I have wasted hour after hour following various FAQs, playing with antialiasing, autohinting, and subpixel rendering in my ~/.fonts.conf. I have installed the Bitstream Vera fonts. I have sacrificed a goat and done a rain dance. And still, all those fonts look so blurry that I feel like I'm going blind.
Thinking that it was something about the Radeon, I tried an NVidia 5200 with the commercial NVidia drivers. No joy. I've also tried the ATI fglrx drivers for the Radeon. No joy.
Yet when I plug in my Apple Powerbook, OSX makes the fonts clear and legible, so it must be possible to drive the LCD monitor correctly.
I've been putting my desktop to S3 sleep every night for the last year or so. Overall, it works really well.
My machine is an Intel 845BEG desktop board running FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE. The ACPI support in FreeBSD is quite good. I bought the motherboard specifically to be able to suspend it. I reasoned that because Intel pushes ACPI, they would have a good implementation in their BIOS.
The one application I have problems with is kmail. After a resume, it will think it lost connectivity to the pop server and sometimes hang. I just kill and restart it. That's much faster than having to re-open all my various emacs buffers. And of course my ssh sessions are dropped. Overall, I'd say its just the same as suspending a laptop.
I have one add-in PCI card that doesn't understand sleep mode (a Comtrol Rocketport serial card). I have a script to unload the driver before I put the machine to sleep. The I re-load the driver when the machine wakes up.
At least as important as the codec is easy access to the multimedia file without needing a plugin.
Getting various multimedia plugins working on non-Windows OSes is painful. When you can't get the plugin to work, digging through 17 layers of javascript to find the link to the multi-media file is a royal PITA. I *love* it when sites provide a direct URL to the media file. Even if its WMV.
I have owned a Zenith z32v37 for roughly one year. At the time, it was the cheapest HDTV I could with a built-in HDTV tuner. It displays full 1080i and 720p. The dvi port also works just fine as a display from my powerbook.
Having installed the latest beta of solaris 10 just last week, I can say that Solaris/x86 is still a joke.
I wanted a quiet machine at home for Solaris driver development. Rather than bringing a Sun box home, I decied to put it on a spare partition on my current crashbox. Since its a home-office machine, its shared between Solaris, Linux and *BSD. It took me roughly 2 days and 3 attempts to get it installed on a PC here. An install of FreeBSD takes or Linux 20-30 minutes on this same machine.
- Booting from a non-primary drive results in their bootloader crashing with a complaint about kmem_malloc. So I had to shuffle things and make space on the first drive.
- Their installation over-estimates the size required for an install by roughly 5GB. After wasting time with a minimal install, I finally figured out that I could just make space on the second drive and remove it after the install completed.
- They don't support ATA DMA on modern, pentium4 Serverworks chipsets, making an install take hours, rather than 10s of minutes like linux or FreeBSD. (When was the last time you saw a SCSI CDROM?)
Don't get me wrong, Dtrace is really amazing. But only if you can put up with the rest of the package, which most people can't.
I have misfortune to own the wrv54g. It crashes regularly, and is the most unstable access point I've ever seen. If you really are interested in this solution, make sure to check out the wrv54g group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wrv54g *before* you buy.
Yes, I have the exact same monitor (I'm typing this from it), so I can confirm that 1600x1200 works.
The only "gotcha" I see is that once every 10 times I startx, I see crazy red interference. I've found that by switching to a text vty and back, I can make it go away.
I just need to find fonts that don't make me go blind (AA fonts look terrible, even with all kinds of sub-pixel rendering tricks..).
I have nearlly the exact same setup, and the XFree86 4.3.99.15 driver has been working for me since last winter. I needed to move to 4.3.99 because the 4.3 drivers did not work for DVI. It took quite a bit of fiddling to get 4.3.99 to work
Here is my Device section from my XF86Config file. I think the TMDS setting was key to getting it to use DVI.
There may be a 64-bit userland available, but from what I hear, the kernel won't be going 64-bit anytime soon because they don't want to force 3rd party developers to rebuild their kernel extensions.
This means that we'll have to live with a small (4GB) kernel address space for a long time. This makes entry into the kernel very expensive for syscalls, ioctls, etc. Its pretty much the same thing as the linux 4GB+4GB patches.
In some sense its nice that they are still fighting about technology. Time Warner has no idea that my new Zenith C32V37 with built-in HD tuners can decode Time Warner's digital cable signal, including the neighbors' on-demand HBO and Showtime. All for the price of basic cable.
I'm sure they'll have all this sorted out by the time you get your set. Meanwhile, I'll enjoy the free ride while it lasts.
I'm just guessing here, but I imagine that it would affect you by the HD tunder refusing to output a broadcast-flag encumbered signal to a non-copy protected output. In practice, this means DVI with HDCP (High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection).
So you not only can't record it, I think you might not even be able to watch it unless your set has DVI HDCP inputs.
Small correction: I know for a fact that SAS is available for linux. There are even announcements on their site that "JMP", the user-friendly gui-based STATS-101 app which started out on Macintosh is now available for linux.
For what its worth, S-Plus (from Insightful) and its open-source clone called R have been available for linux for years.
The biggest problem for me is that uControl apparently doesn't work, so I won't be able to swap control and caps-lock if I upgrade. Since my hands are hard-wired to find the control key to the left of the 'a' key, this is a showstopper for me.
Does anybody know of any other way to swap control and capslock on an Apple Powerbook (ti, 866MHz)? Xmodmap apparently doesn't work either. This copy of panther is burning a hole in my pocket..
Slashdot Mirror
Ditch their firmware, and use OpenWRT, or DD-WRT if you prefer GUIs.
Sun and Apple both ship a proprietary OS based around an "open source" core. Sun's core is OpenSolaris, and Apple's is Darwin. Sun has done a far better job open sourcing their operating system. I do a 3rd party hardware device driver for both MacOSX and OpenSolaris. To compare Apple's to Solaris' "open source" OS
is quite interesting:
- Source code: Darwin: Must sign up for an Apple account to view source, source code for Intel kernel not even available. Solaris: Source code browseable on web, and available to anybody.
- Installable OS: Darwin was never updated from 8.0.1, which was released over a year ago. Solaris: Solaris Express is released at least monthly.
- Project direction: Darwin code appears after a MacOSX release. There is no way to see the source code of an upcoming MacOSX version, there is no way to even know what features will be present aside for signing up for a $500/yr ADC account. You are not allowed to talk about this in public. This is in stark contrast to OpenSolaris, where Sun engineers publically debate virtues of different features, and future directions on their forums/mailing lists, and anybody is welcome to contribute.
In short, OpenSolaris is a real open source project. Darwin is a sham, and would not survive without Apple.
$ dmesg
sharks-with-lasers: module license 'mad scientist' taints kernel.
After years of begging for an Apple ][, Atari 800, or Vic 20, my parents finally gave in and bought me a Franklin Ace 1000. I still remember hearing "Men at Work" on the radio on the way to the computer store. For those that don't remember, a Franklin Ace 1000 was an Apple ][+ clone with a 6502 and 64KB of RAM, and an (illegal) copy of Apple BASIC in ROM. Franklin was sued out of business by Apple for this.
My parents even sprang for a color monitor (Amdek), and a 5.25" floppy disk drive (Rana), and an Okidata printer. I played around with Logo, Basic, and 6502 assembler on that machine. That machine also served as my word processor through high school. I played all sorts of great games, many of them shareware, some of them cracked, and only a few purchased with my meager income from lawn-mowing. Roughly a quarter century later, the Franklin still works. I just packed it up and moved it into my attic after cleaning out my Dad's house when he died in December. He was still using the computer for simple word processing and numerical calculations 25 years later.
I've been a sysadmin, and OS researcher, and now I do network device drivers and firmware for a living. I wonder what I'd be doing right now if my parents had bought the other item I was begging for -- a moto-cross style off-road motorcycle.
I used kmail as an imap mail client because it allows the use of an external editor to compose messages. After more than a decade of using emacs, I just cannot get used to the key bindings that builtin editors in gui mail clients use. The "emacs" like key bindings that some mailers offer just do not cut it. Kmail mostly worked for me. It was fast and efficient. However, it seemed to get horribly confused when I would wake my desktop up in the morning after suspending it the previous evening. About 3/4 of the time, I'd need to kill and restart kmail. Somehow, some obscure setting became corrupt, and the language it used for outgoing mail switched to some arabic font. My outgoing mail appeared blank to people using Outlook, and like gibberish to people using mail clients with the correct font installed.
I finally settled on thunderbird after a co-worker told me it has an extenstion which allows me to use emacs to edit my messages. It works reliably after resuming my desktop in the morning. Basically, it just works. The fonts/colors were ugly as hell out of the box and took a lot of work to make even barely tolerable. But for "just works", I can live with that.
Mythtv already has this feature. It is called time stretch and has been around since 0.17, nearly 1 year. I can generally watch a "1 hour" show in a little over 30 minutes with Timestretch set to 1.1, and using commercial skipping.
From the 0.17 release notes at http://www.mythtv.org/:
# "Timestretch". Though, it's really 'time-compression'. This allows the user to adjust the playback speed slightly, but keeps the audio at the same pitch. If you're recording a lot of shows, timestretch lets you get through them faster. =)
Check the "Local HDTV Info and Reception" forum for your area at http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f= 45. It may be possible for you to get the HD channels without paying for the digital package if you have your own tuner. Many companies do not scramble the HD locals.
I currently pay for nothing but "basic" cable from Time Warner, and I get PBS, ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, TNT-HD, Discovery-HD, and a digital mirror of the basic channels from my local provider. I'm using the built-in tuner in my HDTV, and also a Dvico Fusion HDTV5-Gold card in my MythTv DVR.
Also, if all you want is the locals, consider putting up an antenna. I have 2 tuner cards in my MythTV box, and the other one goes to an attic antenna which gets the major networks that I can get on cable, plus UPN and WB which my cable company does not carry. If you don't feel you can handle putting up an antenna, hire an installer. If you drop your cable, the antenna, tuner, and installation will pay for themselves after a few months.
It all depends on how you use your DVR. The problem that I have with space comes when I try to get an entire season, so I can watch it in-order all at once.
For example, I heard really good things about Numb3rs a few weeks after it started. I hate coming into the middle of a show, so I set my MythTV box to record it in HD and decided to wait until I had all the episodes before I started watching. Each episode consumes 6.5GB at the bitrate our local CBS station uses. Even with only 13 episodes, this is taking up roughly 84.5GB of space on my 160GB drive.
It would be much more cost effective for me to add a few more drives to my existing $850 setup than to by a $2000 DVR.
Just to confirm
1) I'm using DVI, not analog
2) Again, DVI
3) I'm running with DVI-I as confirmed by the the Xorg.0.log:
(II) RADEON(0): Primary:
Monitor -- TMDS
Connector -- DVI-I
4) I'm running at 1600x1200 as confirmed by xdpyinfo and xrandr.
But I'm not really sure if my complaint is about the fonts, or just how they are rendered. I could care less what the font is called, or where it came from if it is rendered sharply (like on OSX). I've also tried Windows ttf fonts, and they don't seem to be any better. So I guess my complaint is with the font rendering of modern, proportional fonts like those found on most web pages, and used in GNOME or KDE apps. Fixed fonts (like I used for xterms and xemacs) are fine.
Back in the bad-old-days, my CRT was never this blurry.
I'd much rather see fonts that don't suck on LCD monitors than eye candy. I can do without shadows and showy effects, but not without clean, clear fonts.
I'm writing this from a machine with a 1600x1200 Dell 2001FP monitor, and an ATI Radeon 9200SE, connected with DVI running X.Org version 6.8.2. I have never, ever been able to get decent fonts with XFree86 or X.org. The fonts are either too jagged without antialiasing, or too blurry with it.
I have wasted hour after hour following various FAQs, playing with antialiasing, autohinting, and subpixel rendering in my ~/.fonts.conf. I have installed the Bitstream Vera fonts. I have sacrificed a goat and done a rain dance. And still, all those fonts look so blurry that I feel like I'm going blind.
Thinking that it was something about the Radeon, I tried an NVidia 5200 with the commercial NVidia drivers. No joy. I've also tried the ATI fglrx drivers for the Radeon. No joy.
Yet when I plug in my Apple Powerbook, OSX makes the fonts clear and legible, so it must be possible to drive the LCD monitor correctly.
I've been putting my desktop to S3 sleep every night for the last year or so. Overall, it works really well.
My machine is an Intel 845BEG desktop board running FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE. The ACPI support in FreeBSD is quite good. I bought the motherboard specifically to be able to suspend it. I reasoned that because Intel pushes ACPI, they would have a good implementation in their BIOS.
The one application I have problems with is kmail. After a resume, it will think it lost connectivity to the pop server and sometimes hang. I just kill and restart it. That's much faster than having to re-open all my various emacs buffers. And of course my ssh sessions are dropped. Overall, I'd say its just the same as suspending a laptop.
I have one add-in PCI card that doesn't understand sleep mode (a Comtrol Rocketport serial card). I have a script to unload the driver before I put the machine to sleep. The I re-load the driver when the machine wakes up.
At least as important as the codec is easy access to the multimedia file without needing a plugin.
Getting various multimedia plugins working on non-Windows OSes is painful. When you can't get the plugin to work, digging through 17 layers of javascript to find the link to the multi-media file is a royal PITA. I *love* it when sites provide a direct URL to the media file. Even if its WMV.
I have owned a Zenith z32v37 for roughly one year. At the time, it was the cheapest HDTV I could with a built-in HDTV tuner. It displays full 1080i and 720p. The dvi port also works just fine as a display from my powerbook.
Having installed the latest beta of solaris 10 just last week, I can say that Solaris/x86 is still a joke.
I wanted a quiet machine at home for Solaris driver development. Rather than bringing a Sun box home, I decied to put it on a spare partition on my current crashbox. Since its a home-office machine, its shared between Solaris, Linux and *BSD. It took me roughly 2 days and 3 attempts to get it installed on a PC here. An install of FreeBSD takes or Linux 20-30 minutes on this same machine.
- Booting from a non-primary drive results in their bootloader crashing with a complaint about kmem_malloc. So I had to shuffle things and make space on the first drive.
- Their installation over-estimates the size required for an install by roughly 5GB. After wasting time with a minimal install, I finally
figured out that I could just make space on the second drive and remove it after the install completed.
- They don't support ATA DMA on modern, pentium4 Serverworks chipsets, making an install take
hours, rather than 10s of minutes like linux or FreeBSD. (When was the last time you saw a SCSI CDROM?)
Don't get me wrong, Dtrace is really amazing. But only if you can put up with the rest of the package, which most people can't.
I have misfortune to own the wrv54g. It crashes regularly, and is the most unstable access point I've ever seen. If you really are interested in this solution, make sure to check out the wrv54g group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wrv54g *before* you buy.
Yes, I have the exact same monitor (I'm typing this from it), so I can confirm that 1600x1200 works.
The only "gotcha" I see is that once every 10 times I startx, I see crazy red interference. I've found that by switching to a text vty and back, I can make it go away.
I just need to find fonts that don't make me go blind (AA fonts look terrible, even with all kinds of sub-pixel rendering tricks..).
I have nearlly the exact same setup, and the XFree86 4.3.99.15 driver has been working for me since last winter. I needed to move to 4.3.99 because the 4.3 drivers did not work for DVI. It took quite a bit of fiddling to get 4.3.99 to work
Here is my Device section from my XF86Config file. I think the TMDS setting was key to getting it to use DVI.
Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Driver "radeon"
Option "DDCMode" "on"
Option "MonitorLayout" "TMDS"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "on"
Option "DisplayPriority" "HIGH"
EndSection
Good luck!
(BTW, I live in fear of upgrading to X.org and having this break..)
There may be a 64-bit userland available, but from what I hear, the kernel won't be going 64-bit anytime soon because they don't want to force 3rd party developers to rebuild their kernel extensions.
This means that we'll have to live with a small (4GB) kernel address space for a long time. This makes entry into the kernel very expensive for syscalls, ioctls, etc. Its pretty much the same thing as the linux 4GB+4GB patches.
Possibly.. Their salescritters sure don't. They deny you can get HD without one of their set-top boxes.
Another interesting channel I get is a grainy b&w (x10?) picture of a rack of servers with a thermometer. Some nights, that's the best show on TV.
In some sense its nice that they are still fighting about technology. Time Warner has no idea that my new Zenith C32V37 with built-in HD tuners can decode Time Warner's digital cable signal, including the neighbors' on-demand HBO and Showtime. All for the price of basic cable.
I'm sure they'll have all this sorted out by the time you get your set. Meanwhile, I'll enjoy the free ride while it lasts.
I'm just guessing here, but I imagine that it would affect you by the HD tunder refusing to output a broadcast-flag encumbered signal to a non-copy protected output. In practice, this means DVI with HDCP (High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection).
So you not only can't record it, I think you might not even be able to watch it unless your
set has DVI HDCP inputs.
Small correction: I know for a fact that SAS is available for linux. There are even announcements on their site that "JMP", the user-friendly gui-based STATS-101 app which started out on Macintosh is now available for linux.
For what its worth, S-Plus (from Insightful) and its open-source clone called R have been available for linux for years.
The biggest problem for me is that uControl apparently doesn't work, so I won't be able to swap control and caps-lock if I upgrade. Since my hands are hard-wired to find the control key to the left of the 'a' key, this is a showstopper for me.
Does anybody know of any other way to swap control and capslock on an Apple Powerbook (ti, 866MHz)? Xmodmap apparently doesn't work either. This copy of panther is burning a hole in my pocket..
Good thing I always use scp..
No need to change your shell. Just create a file .profile in your home directory with this
/bin/tcsh ]; then /bin/tcsh
called
in it:
if [ -f
exec
fi
That will start tcsh each time you ssh in, or start a Terminal window.