I'd love to run Linux on the desktop but every time I try I find an excuse or a reason why not to. These aren't very big excuses, but each and every one drives me back to Windows. And I feel really bad advocating Linux-on-the-desktop (and I'd feel even worse trying to sell it to people) if I can't even run it myself.
I'd like nothing more than to run Linux, if not for my conscience than to shut up the more rabid of my friends. You can build a list a mile long of applications that would have to work seamlessly under Linux before people would change (and yes Photoshop is at the top of that list) - but all that is doing is saying "I'm really not ready to make that committment yet, and here is what I am going to blame today."
Gnome 2 is a big step as well. But now it's another excuse to blame another application. "Evolution isn't GTK2 yet." "Mozilla isn't GTK2 yet." (You try making a new Galeon2 build work. And then you can blame sub-pixel anti-aliasing for not working in all your programs, if you like that kind of thing.
Red Hat 8.0 has blown me away with a desktop that finally looks nice and doesn't require the Microsoft fonts to do so. Even though I prefer Debian, I might install RH8 and try again. But still, I'll install it dual-boot for starters, and then I'll find myself needing to boot back into Windows for something, and not going back into Linux...
The reason I am not changing is that I am used to everything being nice in Windows, and I am not prepared to accept even small drops in 'niceness' for the incredibly large gain in karma that you get for being completely open-source.
Remember, running Windows isn't an evil thing. I'm writing this from Mozilla. I run (some) open source Windows apps. But when it's as easy to get warez as it is in the world today...
If we were in a totalitarian copy-protective state etc, you'd see GNU/Mozilla/Desktop/XConsortium/whoever Linux (as a whole) improve 100 times quicker than it is now.
It bothers some people, but that's how IMAP works and that's how Outlook (especially Express) handles IMAP. And like it or not, Evolution is 'based on' Outlook (in the loosest sense.)
You mark a message as deleted, and then you purge each folder as you finish. I personally prefer this behaivour to moving all my messages from dozens of folders into a single trash that I'll never check through or find anything in.
Doesn't it have an "auto expunge on leaving folder" option anyway?
From a usability standpoint perhaps it should offer the option either way. It's open source remember. Go hack it in.
Isn't it nice when you're having a discussion on IRC about Evolution needing to be ported to GTK2, you Google for the time line and get a post from July saying it'll be worked on after Evolution 1.2.
Then, I thought "well, I'll read the latest months news on the Evolution mailing list" and see this announcement.
Lo and behold, a trip to Slashdot, and what has just been posted.
This all happened between my morning and lunchtime Slashdot reading! Woo, the universe is on fire today. Perhaps if I think about Duke Nukem Forever it'll be out by next Tuesday.
Applause to Ximian for their new release and to the GTK2 developers everywhere. Gnome 2 is turning KDE users' heads.
They can't match Google on bandwidth
on
Altavista Renewed
·
· Score: 2
All I can say is from where I sit (quite far ahead of a Slashdotting normally; it's morning in the first timezone in the world, GMT+13), Alta Vista seems to be down.
A search engine that can't take a/.'ing. We normally point people to search engines when other sites are/.'d. More bandwidth please AV!
Reason #1 for installing Mozilla and/or Phoenix
on
Phoenix 0.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Debian's installer isn't designed to be hard, nor is it Debian policy to screen out idiots using the installer. More the point, Debian is designed by people who know Linux, and swayed in general by people with a clue. They have never had a problem with their current installer. PGI was designed by Progeny, a company founded by Ian Murdock to sell Debian as a (desktop?) solution to the sort of people that would want to see a graphical installer on it. (It has now become a solutions provider - "The Linux Platforms Company".)
The new Debian desktop distribution will mark a change to all of this, I'm sure. It will provide a place for documentation writers and usability experts to become Debian developers. This is the distribution that will see work done on an installer, which will probably either replace or modify Debian's current installer. But I don't want to see it removed entirely.
As has been said a hundred times before (I'd link specific comments, but check back to any other thread about Debian), Debian isn't a distro for new Linux users. It can be, but that is not it's main purpose in life. If I were asked to summarize Debian's main purpose in life, I would say "to provide Linux on some more obscure hardware platforms and to put the F back into Free."
People say Debian's installer sucks for people who don't know what they doing. I had trouble the first time I installed Debian. I can whisk through the installer with no problems now.
I installed Gentoo some months ago for a LUG demo. The installation process ate my Windows partition (because I was an idiot and typed mke2fs/dev/hda2 instead of/dev/hdb2), but otherwise, I followed my 13 page printout to the letter and not only did I have an installed system at the end of it, I knew how the installation worked. I knew all about partitioning and filesystems and swapfiles and hopefully someone who has never seen these things before will know what they all are at the end, as opposed to someone who hits "Enter" (or worse, clicks "OK") multiple times.
Putting the installer into X or gtkfb will sure make it seem a bit more friendly for new users, but unless it's backed up by a great set of administration tools for package management etc such as Red Hat provide, you're just fooling people into thinking that they can get by without knowing anything.
I think something like what has been produced here is what Debian needed more than a graphical installer - this page will instill the sense that "if you read the instructions, complex tasks become simple" into people, and that's what really counts.
If you're going to change something about Debian, change dselect. It's horrible. It needs to be changed. I haven't used dselect since I learnt how apt worked, but sometimes it would come in useful if it wasn't so god awful!
RTFM is a damned sight easier to say to someone if they have a decent manual available. Lets hope this guide can fill that void.
Chronic Logic, the people who brought you the cool Pontifex bridge builder game, have a game called Triptych, which can loosely be defined as 'Tetris meets Columns with physics'.
When you drop blocks, gravity affects them, and you can move blocks around with other blocks. (If your blocks aren't placed square, they don't land square! V shaped blocks tend to sit upside down etc) You get rid of blocks not by making lines, but by getting 3 of the same colour in a row, which then 'energize' and let you eat other blocks of the same colour.
And the best part - it's written in the Simple DirectMedia Layer, so it runs on Windows, Mac or Linux. Check it out. (The main site is in Flash; this site takes you straight to it.
(Disclaimer - I am nothing to do with Chronic Logic - I just like the game.)
Server Error in '/' Application. Runtime Error Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
[etc]
Wow! Microsoft have two great advertisements for their superiority over other technologies in oen day.
An interface. And corporate support. (Some might say a lack of RMS is a good selling point in itself.)
There are some wrappers for GPG, which is solely a command line utility. The Windows Privacy Tray is quite good.
However, one of the terms of sale of PGP IIRC was that there would always be a 'freeware' edition available, and that is definitely the case with PGP 8.0. This will be the first release that correctly supports Windows XP.
PGP support in Windows mail clients
on
PGP 8.0 Beta Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm on some mailing lists where people like to GPG (GNU's PGP clone) sign email, and our LUG have had a couple of GPG keysignings.
So, being a OSS supporting Windows user, I thought I'd try this out.
My normal mail client is Outlook Express (don't complain, when used by someone with a clue there's no more security risk than with any other mailer), and the method that PGP plugs into Outlook Express is digusting. There's a GPGOutlook Express plugin that suffers from the same problem. Basically, when a message windows is loaded, the decoder automatically copies all the text from the window into a buffer, runs the text through PGP, and then pastes the results back into the window. In the case of the version of PGP I tried, in 8pt font.
This also doesn't help when you have a Windows mailer that doesn't support MIME types correctly (Evolution especially likes to send mail with the PGP block as an 'attachment', which basically means your message appears blank in OE with two attachments). No PGP verification there.
I hear Outlook isn't much better; Outlook's IMAP support isn't as polished as OE's, and I guess they don't really want to make it better at the expense of Exchange licenses.
What's the answer? Enigmail. You have to use Mozilla Mail, of course, but that's something that can be adjusted to (and if it's too hard to adjust, it can be customized in XUL of course.) But it seems to be the only way to get correct behaivour for PGP email verification in Windows. And it's all OSS, too.
That said, it didn't handle decryption at all. But I was running a beta on a nightly with a 2 day old GPG build, etc. You get what you pay for.
What would I like to see happen? Outlook Express to become a bit more modular, with actual support for PGP (even the free PGP Home edition would be better than nothing). Or Mozilla Mail evolve a little bit more so I can tolerate using it as my mail client;)
It was a ~4gb volume; I found 1.5gb in the/var/dpkg/cache directory. About 9 versions of most packages. Every time you download a new version, Debian keeps the old ones.
Remember Debian users, apt-get autoclean is your friend.
Red Hat 8.0's new consistency is provided using Xft2/Freetype with 'heavy modifications' and the Bluecurve theme. Underneath remember, it's still Gnome 2 and/or KDE.
The world is a big free and happy place. Which means you too can have the Red Hat desktop goodness on your distribution of choice and not have to complain about Taiwanese flags, RPM, additional packages for MP3 playback etc.
I haven't got a hard disc spare to install Red Hat 8.0 on (I'd really like to see it based on all the screenshots), but I do have a couple of Debian systems. Someone could make me a very happy man (and earn some serious karma) by taking the bits that are good about Red Hat 8.0 and making them available in other distributions.
That's how Linux works. Take the bits you like, ignore the bits you don't. Is Bluecurve on Freshmeat's themes section yet?
Your Mozilla directory (Which is either {\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Mozilla,.mozilla}/profiles/default/*.slt) is different to your Phoenix installation, which keeps everythying in the one directory.
unix.js doesn't exist. There are two files. prefs.js is generated by Mozilla when you edit your preferences. Don't edit this. The file even warns you.
To make changes, edit user.js. This overrides prefs and lets you set things you want to keep set. A couple I recommend.
In 1.2 alphas, turns on support for pages that tell you that a domain couldn't resolve, instead of the annoying modal dialog that you have to get rid of.
If you're dealing with a free Unix (Linux, BSD etc), the most 'standard' way for mounting network partitions is using NFS (the Network Filesystem.)
Several companies will sell you NFS utilities for Windows. nfsAxe is by the people who make WinaXe, a Win32 X server. A quick search doesn't turn up a standard Windows open-source solution for this.
SMB has been rebranded by Microsoft as CIFS, the Common Internet File System. Microsoft have all the official docs, but of course samba.org have more information about it than they do.
Samba is supported by all Windows machines. It doesn't even work too badly for sharing filesystems between unices (I have a public SMB share on a FreeBSD file server machine mounted on my Linux gateway: you wouldn't know it wasn't a local FS.) The permissions model isn't perfect, of course, but for a shared FS, it works good.
Your question asked "is there a better way." Well, without getting into what's wrong with Samba, it's hard to answer. If you want Windows interoperability (and it's hard to find a situation where it's not a plus), you can't go wrong with Samba. It's a very mature, stable, complete solution.
Most Windows users start out with MS Paint{,brush}. Compare this to the GIMP. Then compare it to Photoshop.
Paint has the right idea in my Book of UI Design for Image Editors - a 'full screen' workspace for your image, tools that are kept outside the image, and menus that are accessed from the top of the screen.
Photoshop take that one step further with tabbed palletes (as this comment says, perhaps that can't be replicated exactly without infringing copyright laws) - however, I expect with a few hours of work, someone familar with the GIMP could write a more usable (in this case, yes I mean more Windows-friendly) UI for it, moving all the menus to a MDI style application. Take THAT app and package it on your Windows OSS CD.
GIMP has all the hard work done - the image tools are great, and wingimp claim to have 90% of PS's functionality. And you can't complain about 0% of the price.
Windows people would only get confused by The GIMP. It looks like crap so normal users don't bother figuring out how to use it. Sure, some learning is always a good thing, but the interface is not only (IMO) counter-intuitive, it goes against the established norm, in a way that could be very easily fixed.
Even if it doesn't use tabbed UI, then you have the basic little-dialogs on top of a big dialog interface. And make the buttons in the toolbox smaller so we can actually fit the _picture_ on the screen somewhere!
I would think the interface is common enough that you could get away with it. Perhaps not in the guise of an image editor - this would be done to imitate Photoshop, so it _would_ be copyright infringement - but it would be interesting to see what could be done to fix up the interface from what it is now.
As someone who uses Photoshop now and then, I can't get the GIMP. It all just feels wrong. I'm sure it contains almost all the functionality ('the hard part') of Photoshop, but the UI is so completely different.
Photoshop's UI is very standard - a single MDI window. How hard would it be to create a GIMP addon/port that replicated Photoshop's interface principles (without going so far that Adobe can sue) - things like having floating toolbars over a background window. Some people might like the GIMP's multiple-parent-window architecture, I'm sure, but most I know are repulsed about it. (It reminds me of Visual Basic 2.0.)
If you give Windows people GIMP, they will either be used to MS Paint get confused, or be used to Photoshop and get confused. Some people will say "Well, they should be willing to learn something new", but I think that the Windows graphics program paradigm is better, and it's GIMP that needs the change.
Well, is the X-Box going to get significantly cheaper before the next run comes out?
Is this just Microsoft's way of getting Linux lovers to buy their X-Boxen for Christmas, instead of waiting and getting one that might not run Tux Racer?
The X-Box isn't even out here (New Zealand) yet. Two weeks away. Maybe they have a great worry that if they release them here, we'll make some great break-through in modding and influence the rest of the world..
Something important to note: on Windows XP, Phoenix renders web pages using Luna (Windows XP) native widgets, as opposed to drawing it's own. Check resource:///res/samples/test5.html in both Mozilla 1.2 and Phoenix to see the difference.
This instantly makes it more appealing to Internet Explorer users. Lets hope there is more coming. If Mozilla wasn't the IE killer we hoped, keep the features up (and the download size down). Oh, and if you're using the Luna UI now, please consider using the same techniques for native Windows widgets in the rest of the browser as well!
Take an analogy, and call me in the morning. If TV signals leak (Videocrypt Pay-TV goes out unencrypted, for example), they don't call the people who turn on their TV and see "Oooh, unencrypted Sky" and watch it, theives - they fix the problem. A leak is a bug, something to be fixed.
Why don't Nokia put more time and effort into convincing people to secure their wireless networks? It's my airspace too! As a citizen of {insert friendly first-world nation) I would like to think that I have some right to the cancer-causing radiation that is travelling through my head. If I choose to pick it, that's up to me. If it can go through walls, it's going through my head, goddammit!
It's my airspace. These people are sending signals through our bodies. Even assuming it's 100% healthy (no trolls with stories about studies into cancer causes required), I don't have the right to attempt to listen to this signal?
Perhaps the issue is transmitting back onto these networks should be illegal, but snooping shouldn't be. Turn on the encryption, smarten up and stop bitching at (white-hat) hackers for using technology in ways it wasn't originally intended to be used. That's how development works.
I've read the Konzept whitepaper for the Kolab server, and -- it doesn't get any closer to the solution that most of the OSS world are hanging out for.
What's the big problem? The server side. Getting Outlook to work with anything but Exchange. Linux and OSS have made much more headway on the corporate server than on the corporate desktop, so what someone needs to do is write an OSS backend. With Cyrus/LDAP/Samba/etc, it's almost there -- everything but calendaring can be done. Work on that!
Things I'd like to see done:
Port Evolution to Windows
Open-source a connector plugin like Bynari
Settle on a calendaring standard (might I recommend iCal) and write a server for it
Doing any of these three things would be a better start for OSS groupware than the Koalition project, at this point in time.
A friend has suggested to me that Mozilla, with the calendaring system finished (and a server written), provides 9/10 of the functionality of Outlook and IE combined (plus of course tabbed browsing and popup blocking...) Perhaps that's the road we need to take. Mozilla certainly have the name behind them now, and with some hacking on their mail client, could be the groupware answer we want.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to run Linux on the desktop but every time I try I find an excuse or a reason why not to. These aren't very big excuses, but each and every one drives me back to Windows. And I feel really bad advocating Linux-on-the-desktop (and I'd feel even worse trying to sell it to people) if I can't even run it myself.
I'd like nothing more than to run Linux, if not for my conscience than to shut up the more rabid of my friends. You can build a list a mile long of applications that would have to work seamlessly under Linux before people would change (and yes Photoshop is at the top of that list) - but all that is doing is saying "I'm really not ready to make that committment yet, and here is what I am going to blame today."
Gnome 2 is a big step as well. But now it's another excuse to blame another application. "Evolution isn't GTK2 yet." "Mozilla isn't GTK2 yet." (You try making a new Galeon2 build work. And then you can blame sub-pixel anti-aliasing for not working in all your programs, if you like that kind of thing.
Red Hat 8.0 has blown me away with a desktop that finally looks nice and doesn't require the Microsoft fonts to do so. Even though I prefer Debian, I might install RH8 and try again. But still, I'll install it dual-boot for starters, and then I'll find myself needing to boot back into Windows for something, and not going back into Linux...
The reason I am not changing is that I am used to everything being nice in Windows, and I am not prepared to accept even small drops in 'niceness' for the incredibly large gain in karma that you get for being completely open-source.
Remember, running Windows isn't an evil thing. I'm writing this from Mozilla. I run (some) open source Windows apps. But when it's as easy to get warez as it is in the world today...
If we were in a totalitarian copy-protective state etc, you'd see GNU/Mozilla/Desktop/XConsortium/whoever Linux (as a whole) improve 100 times quicker than it is now.
It bothers some people, but that's how IMAP works and that's how Outlook (especially Express) handles IMAP. And like it or not, Evolution is 'based on' Outlook (in the loosest sense.)
You mark a message as deleted, and then you purge each folder as you finish. I personally prefer this behaivour to moving all my messages from dozens of folders into a single trash that I'll never check through or find anything in.
Doesn't it have an "auto expunge on leaving folder" option anyway?
From a usability standpoint perhaps it should offer the option either way. It's open source remember. Go hack it in.
Isn't it nice when you're having a discussion on IRC about Evolution needing to be ported to GTK2, you Google for the time line and get a post from July saying it'll be worked on after Evolution 1.2.
Then, I thought "well, I'll read the latest months news on the Evolution mailing list" and see this announcement.
Lo and behold, a trip to Slashdot, and what has just been posted.
This all happened between my morning and lunchtime Slashdot reading! Woo, the universe is on fire today. Perhaps if I think about Duke Nukem Forever it'll be out by next Tuesday.
Applause to Ximian for their new release and to the GTK2 developers everywhere. Gnome 2 is turning KDE users' heads.
All I can say is from where I sit (quite far ahead of a Slashdotting normally; it's morning in the first timezone in the world, GMT+13), Alta Vista seems to be down.
/.'ing. We normally point people to search engines when other sites are /.'d. More bandwidth please AV!
A search engine that can't take a
The Realistic Internet Simulator (Macromedia Flash required)
Yes there is. vim. ;)
Debian's installer isn't designed to be hard, nor is it Debian policy to screen out idiots using the installer. More the point, Debian is designed by people who know Linux, and swayed in general by people with a clue. They have never had a problem with their current installer. PGI was designed by Progeny, a company founded by Ian Murdock to sell Debian as a (desktop?) solution to the sort of people that would want to see a graphical installer on it. (It has now become a solutions provider - "The Linux Platforms Company".)
The new Debian desktop distribution will mark a change to all of this, I'm sure. It will provide a place for documentation writers and usability experts to become Debian developers. This is the distribution that will see work done on an installer, which will probably either replace or modify Debian's current installer. But I don't want to see it removed entirely.
As has been said a hundred times before (I'd link specific comments, but check back to any other thread about Debian), Debian isn't a distro for new Linux users. It can be, but that is not it's main purpose in life. If I were asked to summarize Debian's main purpose in life, I would say "to provide Linux on some more obscure hardware platforms and to put the F back into Free."
/dev/hda2 instead of /dev/hdb2), but otherwise, I followed my 13 page printout to the letter and not only did I have an installed system at the end of it, I knew how the installation worked. I knew all about partitioning and filesystems and swapfiles and hopefully someone who has never seen these things before will know what they all are at the end, as opposed to someone who hits "Enter" (or worse, clicks "OK") multiple times.
People say Debian's installer sucks for people who don't know what they doing. I had trouble the first time I installed Debian. I can whisk through the installer with no problems now.
I installed Gentoo some months ago for a LUG demo. The installation process ate my Windows partition (because I was an idiot and typed mke2fs
Putting the installer into X or gtkfb will sure make it seem a bit more friendly for new users, but unless it's backed up by a great set of administration tools for package management etc such as Red Hat provide, you're just fooling people into thinking that they can get by without knowing anything.
I think something like what has been produced here is what Debian needed more than a graphical installer - this page will instill the sense that "if you read the instructions, complex tasks become simple" into people, and that's what really counts.
If you're going to change something about Debian, change dselect. It's horrible. It needs to be changed. I haven't used dselect since I learnt how apt worked, but sometimes it would come in useful if it wasn't so god awful!
RTFM is a damned sight easier to say to someone if they have a decent manual available. Lets hope this guide can fill that void.
Chronic Logic, the people who brought you the cool Pontifex bridge builder game, have a game called Triptych, which can loosely be defined as 'Tetris meets Columns with physics'.
When you drop blocks, gravity affects them, and you can move blocks around with other blocks. (If your blocks aren't placed square, they don't land square! V shaped blocks tend to sit upside down etc) You get rid of blocks not by making lines, but by getting 3 of the same colour in a row, which then 'energize' and let you eat other blocks of the same colour.
And the best part - it's written in the Simple DirectMedia Layer, so it runs on Windows, Mac or Linux. Check it out. (The main site is in Flash; this site takes you straight to it.
(Disclaimer - I am nothing to do with Chronic Logic - I just like the game.)
For more information on how they're going about ripping Mozilla apart to build Phoenix, check
0 82
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171
(Usual Slashdot cannot link to Bugzilla rules apply, copy and paste into your browser)
http://www.gotdotnet.com/error.aspx?aspxerrorpath= /team/workspaces/faq/Default.aspx
Server Error in '/' Application.
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
[etc]
Wow! Microsoft have two great advertisements for their superiority over other technologies in oen day.
An interface. And corporate support. (Some might say a lack of RMS is a good selling point in itself.)
There are some wrappers for GPG, which is solely a command line utility. The Windows Privacy Tray is quite good.
However, one of the terms of sale of PGP IIRC was that there would always be a 'freeware' edition available, and that is definitely the case with PGP 8.0. This will be the first release that correctly supports Windows XP.
I'm on some mailing lists where people like to GPG (GNU's PGP clone) sign email, and our LUG have had a couple of GPG keysignings.
;)
So, being a OSS supporting Windows user, I thought I'd try this out.
My normal mail client is Outlook Express (don't complain, when used by someone with a clue there's no more security risk than with any other mailer), and the method that PGP plugs into Outlook Express is digusting. There's a GPG Outlook Express plugin that suffers from the same problem. Basically, when a message windows is loaded, the decoder automatically copies all the text from the window into a buffer, runs the text through PGP, and then pastes the results back into the window. In the case of the version of PGP I tried, in 8pt font.
This also doesn't help when you have a Windows mailer that doesn't support MIME types correctly (Evolution especially likes to send mail with the PGP block as an 'attachment', which basically means your message appears blank in OE with two attachments). No PGP verification there.
I hear Outlook isn't much better; Outlook's IMAP support isn't as polished as OE's, and I guess they don't really want to make it better at the expense of Exchange licenses.
What's the answer? Enigmail. You have to use Mozilla Mail, of course, but that's something that can be adjusted to (and if it's too hard to adjust, it can be customized in XUL of course.) But it seems to be the only way to get correct behaivour for PGP email verification in Windows. And it's all OSS, too.
That said, it didn't handle decryption at all. But I was running a beta on a nightly with a 2 day old GPG build, etc. You get what you pay for.
What would I like to see happen? Outlook Express to become a bit more modular, with actual support for PGP (even the free PGP Home edition would be better than nothing). Or Mozilla Mail evolve a little bit more so I can tolerate using it as my mail client
My system disk filled up a few weeks ago.
/var/dpkg/cache directory. About 9 versions of most packages. Every time you download a new version, Debian keeps the old ones.
It was a ~4gb volume; I found 1.5gb in the
Remember Debian users, apt-get autoclean is your friend.
Texstar has some "Freecurve" RPMs for Mandrake 9.0 up as well, for Mandrake users who want a taste of Red Hat's new theme.
I'd just like to add that, as reported on the Dot, it seems Gentoo users can issue
# emerge redhat-artwork
and be in Bluecurve bliss.
Red Hat 8.0's new consistency is provided using Xft2/Freetype with 'heavy modifications' and the Bluecurve theme. Underneath remember, it's still Gnome 2 and/or KDE.
The world is a big free and happy place. Which means you too can have the Red Hat desktop goodness on your distribution of choice and not have to complain about Taiwanese flags, RPM, additional packages for MP3 playback etc.
I haven't got a hard disc spare to install Red Hat 8.0 on (I'd really like to see it based on all the screenshots), but I do have a couple of Debian systems. Someone could make me a very happy man (and earn some serious karma) by taking the bits that are good about Red Hat 8.0 and making them available in other distributions.
That's how Linux works. Take the bits you like, ignore the bits you don't. Is Bluecurve on Freshmeat's themes section yet?
The parent doesn't have it quite right...
.mozilla}/profiles/default/*.slt) is different to your Phoenix installation, which keeps everythying in the one directory.
t o", true);
Your Mozilla directory (Which is either {\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Mozilla,
unix.js doesn't exist. There are two files. prefs.js is generated by Mozilla when you edit your preferences. Don't edit this. The file even warns you.
To make changes, edit user.js. This overrides prefs and lets you set things you want to keep set. A couple I recommend.
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.mail
Tells Mozilla to use the system wide installed mail program instead of Mozilla Mail for mailto: links
user_pref("browser.xul.error_pages.enabled", true)
In 1.2 alphas, turns on support for pages that tell you that a domain couldn't resolve, instead of the annoying modal dialog that you have to get rid of.
I'll treat this message as if it's not a troll.
If you're dealing with a free Unix (Linux, BSD etc), the most 'standard' way for mounting network partitions is using NFS (the Network Filesystem.)
Several companies will sell you NFS utilities for Windows. nfsAxe is by the people who make WinaXe, a Win32 X server. A quick search doesn't turn up a standard Windows open-source solution for this.
SMB has been rebranded by Microsoft as CIFS, the Common Internet File System. Microsoft have all the official docs, but of course samba.org have more information about it than they do.
Samba is supported by all Windows machines. It doesn't even work too badly for sharing filesystems between unices (I have a public SMB share on a FreeBSD file server machine mounted on my Linux gateway: you wouldn't know it wasn't a local FS.) The permissions model isn't perfect, of course, but for a shared FS, it works good.
Your question asked "is there a better way." Well, without getting into what's wrong with Samba, it's hard to answer. If you want Windows interoperability (and it's hard to find a situation where it's not a plus), you can't go wrong with Samba. It's a very mature, stable, complete solution.
Most Windows users start out with MS Paint{,brush}. Compare this to the GIMP. Then compare it to Photoshop.
Paint has the right idea in my Book of UI Design for Image Editors - a 'full screen' workspace for your image, tools that are kept outside the image, and menus that are accessed from the top of the screen.
Photoshop take that one step further with tabbed palletes (as this comment says, perhaps that can't be replicated exactly without infringing copyright laws) - however, I expect with a few hours of work, someone familar with the GIMP could write a more usable (in this case, yes I mean more Windows-friendly) UI for it, moving all the menus to a MDI style application. Take THAT app and package it on your Windows OSS CD.
GIMP has all the hard work done - the image tools are great, and wingimp claim to have 90% of PS's functionality. And you can't complain about 0% of the price.
Windows people would only get confused by The GIMP. It looks like crap so normal users don't bother figuring out how to use it. Sure, some learning is always a good thing, but the interface is not only (IMO) counter-intuitive, it goes against the established norm, in a way that could be very easily fixed.
Even if it doesn't use tabbed UI, then you have the basic little-dialogs on top of a big dialog interface. And make the buttons in the toolbox smaller so we can actually fit the _picture_ on the screen somewhere!
I would think the interface is common enough that you could get away with it. Perhaps not in the guise of an image editor - this would be done to imitate Photoshop, so it _would_ be copyright infringement - but it would be interesting to see what could be done to fix up the interface from what it is now.
As someone who uses Photoshop now and then, I can't get the GIMP. It all just feels wrong. I'm sure it contains almost all the functionality ('the hard part') of Photoshop, but the UI is so completely different.
Photoshop's UI is very standard - a single MDI window. How hard would it be to create a GIMP addon/port that replicated Photoshop's interface principles (without going so far that Adobe can sue) - things like having floating toolbars over a background window. Some people might like the GIMP's multiple-parent-window architecture, I'm sure, but most I know are repulsed about it. (It reminds me of Visual Basic 2.0.)
If you give Windows people GIMP, they will either be used to MS Paint get confused, or be used to Photoshop and get confused. Some people will say "Well, they should be willing to learn something new", but I think that the Windows graphics program paradigm is better, and it's GIMP that needs the change.
Well, is the X-Box going to get significantly cheaper before the next run comes out?
Is this just Microsoft's way of getting Linux lovers to buy their X-Boxen for Christmas, instead of waiting and getting one that might not run Tux Racer?
The X-Box isn't even out here (New Zealand) yet. Two weeks away. Maybe they have a great worry that if they release them here, we'll make some great break-through in modding and influence the rest of the world..
Something important to note: on Windows XP, Phoenix renders web pages using Luna (Windows XP) native widgets, as opposed to drawing it's own. Check resource:///res/samples/test5.html in both Mozilla 1.2 and Phoenix to see the difference.
This instantly makes it more appealing to Internet Explorer users. Lets hope there is more coming. If Mozilla wasn't the IE killer we hoped, keep the features up (and the download size down). Oh, and if you're using the Luna UI now, please consider using the same techniques for native Windows widgets in the rest of the browser as well!
Take an analogy, and call me in the morning. If TV signals leak (Videocrypt Pay-TV goes out unencrypted, for example), they don't call the people who turn on their TV and see "Oooh, unencrypted Sky" and watch it, theives - they fix the problem. A leak is a bug, something to be fixed.
Why don't Nokia put more time and effort into convincing people to secure their wireless networks? It's my airspace too! As a citizen of {insert friendly first-world nation) I would like to think that I have some right to the cancer-causing radiation that is travelling through my head. If I choose to pick it, that's up to me. If it can go through walls, it's going through my head, goddammit!
It's my airspace. These people are sending signals through our bodies. Even assuming it's 100% healthy (no trolls with stories about studies into cancer causes required), I don't have the right to attempt to listen to this signal?
Perhaps the issue is transmitting back onto these networks should be illegal, but snooping shouldn't be. Turn on the encryption, smarten up and stop bitching at (white-hat) hackers for using technology in ways it wasn't originally intended to be used. That's how development works.
What's the big problem? The server side. Getting Outlook to work with anything but Exchange. Linux and OSS have made much more headway on the corporate server than on the corporate desktop, so what someone needs to do is write an OSS backend. With Cyrus/LDAP/Samba/etc, it's almost there -- everything but calendaring can be done. Work on that!
Things I'd like to see done:
Doing any of these three things would be a better start for OSS groupware than the Koalition project, at this point in time.
A friend has suggested to me that Mozilla, with the calendaring system finished (and a server written), provides 9/10 of the functionality of Outlook and IE combined (plus of course tabbed browsing and popup blocking...) Perhaps that's the road we need to take. Mozilla certainly have the name behind them now, and with some hacking on their mail client, could be the groupware answer we want.