Remember though that some things have changed between 2.4 and 2.6 that can't just be worked around by installing new packages. (USB module names, some mount points, that kind of thing.) If you want a clean boot you will have to change some of the init scripts, and this will break booting 2.4. So it's a bit all or nothing at the moment, and I recommend people who aren't convinced it will do everything they need it to do (I couldn't get my network card working under 2.6) stay on 2.4 until it's released proper.
The driver even handled an upgrade to Kernel 2.6 without flinching. NVidia AGPGART support doesn't have to be hacked in any more either, it would seem.
No more mucking around with the FireGL drivers from the German branch of ATI.
Other recent releases: Totem, GNOME 2 media player
on
MPlayer 1.0Pre1 Is Here
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You know the simultaneous best and worst thing about GNU/Linux/OSS etc is there is always another option...
There was a new beta of Totem released yesterday too - it's a GNOME 2 media player based on Xine (it doesn't attempt to reinvent the wheel). The author is also working on a Gstreamer back end for it.
Why do I like it? A quote on their webpage sums it up: "Totem is the only media player I've seen that doesn't attempt to have skins or look like a reject from a 1971 Kenwood catalog." For those of us who like Windows Media Player (pre 8) for its clean and consistent interface and were annoying that Linux doesn't have anything like it, Totem's your project.
Mplayer does some files better than Totem, but if you want to do more than "mplayer This.divx", check it out.
(standard "I have nothing to do with this project other than thinking it's really cool" disclaimer)
Throwaway Question that will Undoubtedly Get Dozens of Answers while the Rest of the Post Goes Unread: Why doesn't Mplayer disable XScreensaver while playing?)
All Your Base is post-Dot Com
on
Dotcom Era Fads
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
All Your Base is most definitely post dot.com.
It was early 2001 (sheesh, that long ago?) and it was picked up by the Google Zeitgeist at the time.
Kibology is probably pre-Dot Com as well. Maybe they meant to talk about lavish parties and venture capital being burnt?
At least we never really had a Dotcom era to speak of in New Zealand...
Picked up some of the momentum behind the failed? stalled? Open AntiVirus.
ClamAV is pretty much Linux command line only, designed for scanning e-mail. It also cannot remove viruses from executables, only detect them. However, it's Free, and that's a Good Thing.
It doesn't use the GTK "stock icons" like Galeon or Epiphany, so yes it still uses the "Modern" theme; but it sure renders everything nicer than GTK1 Mozilla.
So the only thing that is perhaps not unified is the appearance of the "forward"/"back" buttons, and what other application uses forward/back buttons? They're obvious to anyone who has ever used a web browser and I'm sure they'll be fine for new users.
Button widgets different (there has been some argument about this on the RHL list; they look like they're not expanded out to the corners, which is a violation of Fitt's Law, but might be changing further)
The corners are finally 'curvy', instead of having annoying squared corners with blue grabbers
If you want to see it first hand, set yourself up an apt-rpm repository for Rawhide and type 'apt-get install redhat-artwork'.
While the other comments to this post address the issue, it raises hope for the group of Linux sysadmins who don't need Red Hat for their technical support, but want to be able to run a version of Linux that's commercially supported by their application vendor.
The only 'non GPL' part of RHEL 2.1 was the JVM; if they're leaving it out of 3 entirely, then (pending trademark issues) there should be nothing stopping you copying an entire RHEL 3 CD. And while I'm not saying that you perhaps should, it sure makes the "Debian vs RHEL for servers" argument a bit more interesting.
If it's just omitted out due to the public redistributability of the beta, then I'm sure the project to rebuild RHEL from source will be able to provide what you want.
I've been trying to figure this out, and it would seem that there is nothing in the license that stops you being able to legally give me a copy of (say) RHES, and for me to run that copy, with no access to up2date and no support contract. (Like a lot of the other posts say, I am the support - my only concern is having a platform that commercial software supports!)
The license seems to refer to the services that come bundled with the software, not the software itself. I believe that the JVM cannot be copied from the standard distribution but removing is trivial.
Interesting notes: to summarise, it's probably perfectly legal for you to copy me RHEL ES, however you would probably also have to provide me all the updates if I wanted them (which may violate your license to receive them). The big dollars is with regard to the updates, and I believe they are made publically available by SRPM - and even then, its probably also technically allowable for you to mirror all the update RPMs somewhere.
I installed Lotus Domino recently on a Debian server because I didn't trust the machine with a consumer Red Hat and it wasn't cost effective enough to get RHEL. I'd be very interested to hear if you can or can't just copy/mirror RHEL.
Isn't it funny that over the course of the last 20 years, and the doubling of performance every 18 months in accordance with Moore's Prophecy, and even with the fact the average price of a new computer has fallen, they still average 2 minutes from power on to useful application running state?
When I had a Commodore 64 it was loading a game off disk. (Sure, BASIC was in the ROM, but we wanted an application. And I wont even talk about loading games for the VIC-20 off the Datasette!) Now, it's booting up Windows XP off ATA hard disks. Whatever the advances in hardware, software has risen to match it, where functionality really hasn't increased that much at all.
Thats the killer that people need to look at. Take older technology and do cool things with it, and tell people they no longer need to wait the 2 minutes to make their computer useful.
It'll make people healthier - no more just-turned-the-PC-on cup of coffee.
I don't disagree. I think that eventually we should move to a better email model - something like TMDA perhaps, where there is no guarantee that spammers can reach mailboxes. Or better legislation to make spamming punishable, controls on mail routers on million message mailouts, etc. Or djb's Internet Mail 2000, which moves the onus onto the senders network to store all 1m messages at a time, until people pick them up.
The other thing you can do is impose a microcost for mailing - at 1c/mail, spamming isn't economical any more. But then that is going to penalise the people who have legitimate reasons to send a million emails at a time - you'd have to have a very good micropayment system working on the Internet to do this.
However, those things need widespread change, and they need people in positions of power. Joe User at home can push for it, but they still get spam and they still want a short term solution. I suggest that even if they're filtering, the action of having to check their spam filter will make them irate enough. I see it as being like IPV6 - everyone would really have to change at once for the system to be most effective. (I use Freenet6, do you?)
Now that viruses are public, caught quickly, and Microsoft are being a lot less lax with security (I am in no way commending their effort, but they at least mostly fixed the Outlooks), you don't see people writing them nearly as often. I feel spam will get the same.
Realistically, I don't give a damn how much spam _you_ get, I care that _I_ don't get any.
You cannot automatically filter spam. Bayesian filtering works because it works on your own personal items only, and you have a method of manually removing false positives. There is nothing worse than the possibility that an ISP will filter out a real email in their spam system. That simple fact makes server side spam filtering impossible for most situations. You can filter spam into/dev/null (unacceptable), you can filter into a spam box (How many POP users would that rule out, who only have one POP box?), or you can keep it bundled in email with a flag, and expect people to update their clients, in which case you have the exact scenario you have now - the client has to do something themselves.
Until Hotmail et al starts offering bayesian filtering with a separate 'spam' mailbox, consider server side filtering worthless.
I am smart and don't get any spam. A lot of people I see in my line of work, aren't. These people are going to get something like Outclass (an Outlook plugin for POPfile), and then they are going to see the problem go away, and they're not going to lose any email in the process.
I'd rather use SpamBayes, but the Outlook plugin has an annoying bug that renders autocompleting addresses in Outlook useless.
Red Hat have been moving, as part of this big shakeup, to remove everything non-Free from their distribution - including contributing to an open source Java, I believe.
Pine has always had licensing issues, and it's widely accpeted that Pine fans can be appeased with Mutt and something like Pine2Mutt (which is simply an import script or two and the pine.rc that comes with Mutt.)
You may think this is a joke, but so far the best use for the Tablet PC I've found, and the one that keeps my Linux loving friends taking the laptop, putting it into tablet mode, and using it, is Microsoft's InkBall.
Super simple game - really addictive. How games should be made.
Don't knock a game as a killer feature for a platform.
Reply from OGo regarding Outlook functionality
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> I'm sure you've heard this a million times, but the biggest concern > people will have is how to make Outlook interoperate with > OpenGroupware.org.
Yes. I would like to point out that OGo is one of the very few solutions which provide a full MAPI storage provider (aka live access) instead of just a sync.
> Is the ZideLook plugin free?
No.
> If not, what are the > licensing costs
AFAIK about EUR 55, depending on the number of users. For exact information contact sales@skyrix.de.
> and would SKYRiX consider making the plugin free?
We would like to, but we don't own the plugin. It was developed by a partner of SKYRiX which needs to get back his investment.
I hear a lot, including in this article, about fonts that Agfa have developed and/or make available, that are pixel-for-pixel replacement for Windows fonts.
Can someone make this clearer for me? A brief look around Agfa's site suggests that they (as Monotype Corporation) developed all the Windows fonts, and may be able to license them out to other people.
More useful (no kernel recompilation required) is that a gentleman named Robbie Ward has applied NVidia's AGPGART patch to the Radeon kernel module builder, and the result can be found at here.
You can find a small HOWTO on getting the lot going at the Waikato Linux Users' Group wiki, at http://www.wlug.org.nz/RadeonOnNforce. Have a look around while you're there, its an excellent source of information and we'd really love you to add to it.
The article quotes RhymBox (I wouldn't have named a client that with another program called RhythmBox out there, which actually makes more sense as a name!), which seems like a bit of a MSN Messenger UI derived client. Upon first play it's very nice!
Free for non commercial use and apparently has source (according the the "You can modify software" clause in the license".)
Otherwise, I use JAJC, which is nice, but written in Delphi so not entire like the WIndows UI everywhere. But since when was any other IM entirely like the Windows UI?
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds very much like the Dead Man's Switch that was covered on Slashdot a while back...
If you don't tell it you're alive every now and then, it can encrypt your files, send email, and post messages on the web. Very paranoia.
NVIDIA drivers on Linux 2.6
Brought to you by Christian Zander, ex-NVIDIA intern.
I expect Arjan to have updated Red Hat packages soon at http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/2.5/
p age=kernel for the information for making these kernels work on RHL.
Remember though that some things have changed between 2.4 and 2.6 that can't just be worked around by installing new packages. (USB module names, some mount points, that kind of thing.) If you want a clean boot you will have to change some of the init scripts, and this will break booting 2.4. So it's a bit all or nothing at the moment, and I recommend people who aren't convinced it will do everything they need it to do (I couldn't get my network card working under 2.6) stay on 2.4 until it's released proper.
Check out http://thomer.com/linux/migrate-to-2.6.html and http://www.fearthecow.net/index.pl?section=guest&
ATI has just released official XFree86 4.3 drivers.
The driver even handled an upgrade to Kernel 2.6 without flinching. NVidia AGPGART support doesn't have to be hacked in any more either, it would seem.
No more mucking around with the FireGL drivers from the German branch of ATI.
You know the simultaneous best and worst thing about GNU/Linux/OSS etc is there is always another option...
There was a new beta of Totem released yesterday too - it's a GNOME 2 media player based on Xine (it doesn't attempt to reinvent the wheel). The author is also working on a Gstreamer back end for it.
Why do I like it? A quote on their webpage sums it up: "Totem is the only media player I've seen that doesn't attempt to have skins or look like a reject from a 1971 Kenwood catalog." For those of us who like Windows Media Player (pre 8) for its clean and consistent interface and were annoying that Linux doesn't have anything like it, Totem's your project.
Mplayer does some files better than Totem, but if you want to do more than "mplayer This.divx", check it out.
(standard "I have nothing to do with this project other than thinking it's really cool" disclaimer)
Throwaway Question that will Undoubtedly Get Dozens of Answers while the Rest of the Post Goes Unread: Why doesn't Mplayer disable XScreensaver while playing?)
All Your Base is most definitely post dot.com.
It was early 2001 (sheesh, that long ago?) and it was picked up by the Google Zeitgeist at the time.
Kibology is probably pre-Dot Com as well. Maybe they meant to talk about lavish parties and venture capital being burnt?
At least we never really had a Dotcom era to speak of in New Zealand...
ClamAV.
Picked up some of the momentum behind the failed? stalled? Open AntiVirus.
ClamAV is pretty much Linux command line only, designed for scanning e-mail. It also cannot remove viruses from executables, only detect them. However, it's Free, and that's a Good Thing.
I think that's Gnome Terminal being broken. It appears to me that it does it under any distribution when maximised..
It's the GTK2 version of Mozilla.
It doesn't use the GTK "stock icons" like Galeon or Epiphany, so yes it still uses the "Modern" theme; but it sure renders everything nicer than GTK1 Mozilla.
Look at the font along the title bar being the same as the Evolution screenshot
So the only thing that is perhaps not unified is the appearance of the "forward"/"back" buttons, and what other application uses forward/back buttons? They're obvious to anyone who has ever used a web browser and I'm sure they'll be fine for new users.
- New stock icons
- Default icon size now 32x32 instead of 24x24
- Different colour schemes
- Titles are now centered
- Button widgets different (there has been some argument about this on the RHL list; they look like they're not expanded out to the corners, which is a violation of Fitt's Law, but might be changing further)
- The corners are finally 'curvy', instead of having annoying squared corners with blue grabbers
If you want to see it first hand, set yourself up an apt-rpm repository for Rawhide and type 'apt-get install redhat-artwork'.While the other comments to this post address the issue, it raises hope for the group of Linux sysadmins who don't need Red Hat for their technical support, but want to be able to run a version of Linux that's commercially supported by their application vendor.
The only 'non GPL' part of RHEL 2.1 was the JVM; if they're leaving it out of 3 entirely, then (pending trademark issues) there should be nothing stopping you copying an entire RHEL 3 CD. And while I'm not saying that you perhaps should, it sure makes the "Debian vs RHEL for servers" argument a bit more interesting.
If it's just omitted out due to the public redistributability of the beta, then I'm sure the project to rebuild RHEL from source will be able to provide what you want.
There's also a RHEL rebuild HOWTO.
I've been trying to figure this out, and it would seem that there is nothing in the license that stops you being able to legally give me a copy of (say) RHES, and for me to run that copy, with no access to up2date and no support contract. (Like a lot of the other posts say, I am the support - my only concern is having a platform that commercial software supports!)
The license seems to refer to the services that come bundled with the software, not the software itself. I believe that the JVM cannot be copied from the standard distribution but removing is trivial.
Interesting notes: to summarise, it's probably perfectly legal for you to copy me RHEL ES, however you would probably also have to provide me all the updates if I wanted them (which may violate your license to receive them). The big dollars is with regard to the updates, and I believe they are made publically available by SRPM - and even then, its probably also technically allowable for you to mirror all the update RPMs somewhere.
I installed Lotus Domino recently on a Debian server because I didn't trust the machine with a consumer Red Hat and it wasn't cost effective enough to get RHEL. I'd be very interested to hear if you can or can't just copy/mirror RHEL.
50 Win2k desktops, you say?
HFNetChkLT should be exactly what you wanted.
Isn't it funny that over the course of the last 20 years, and the doubling of performance every 18 months in accordance with Moore's Prophecy, and even with the fact the average price of a new computer has fallen, they still average 2 minutes from power on to useful application running state?
When I had a Commodore 64 it was loading a game off disk. (Sure, BASIC was in the ROM, but we wanted an application. And I wont even talk about loading games for the VIC-20 off the Datasette!) Now, it's booting up Windows XP off ATA hard disks. Whatever the advances in hardware, software has risen to match it, where functionality really hasn't increased that much at all.
Thats the killer that people need to look at. Take older technology and do cool things with it, and tell people they no longer need to wait the 2 minutes to make their computer useful.
It'll make people healthier - no more just-turned-the-PC-on cup of coffee.
APT for RPM
All of a sudden Red Hat is a pleasure to administer, even with Rawhide packages.
You could use Red Hat's up2date, even with an arbitrary command line, but I like apt.
How many people you know that email you 12 gifs/jpegs in one message with LARGE red text. ????
Lots of them. They're called 'girls' and Slashdot should encourage communication with them wherever possible.
I don't disagree. I think that eventually we should move to a better email model - something like TMDA perhaps, where there is no guarantee that spammers can reach mailboxes. Or better legislation to make spamming punishable, controls on mail routers on million message mailouts, etc. Or djb's Internet Mail 2000, which moves the onus onto the senders network to store all 1m messages at a time, until people pick them up.
The other thing you can do is impose a microcost for mailing - at 1c/mail, spamming isn't economical any more. But then that is going to penalise the people who have legitimate reasons to send a million emails at a time - you'd have to have a very good micropayment system working on the Internet to do this.
However, those things need widespread change, and they need people in positions of power. Joe User at home can push for it, but they still get spam and they still want a short term solution. I suggest that even if they're filtering, the action of having to check their spam filter will make them irate enough. I see it as being like IPV6 - everyone would really have to change at once for the system to be most effective. (I use Freenet6, do you?)
Now that viruses are public, caught quickly, and Microsoft are being a lot less lax with security (I am in no way commending their effort, but they at least mostly fixed the Outlooks), you don't see people writing them nearly as often. I feel spam will get the same.
Realistically, I don't give a damn how much spam _you_ get, I care that _I_ don't get any.
/dev/null (unacceptable), you can filter into a spam box (How many POP users would that rule out, who only have one POP box?), or you can keep it bundled in email with a flag, and expect people to update their clients, in which case you have the exact scenario you have now - the client has to do something themselves.
You cannot automatically filter spam. Bayesian filtering works because it works on your own personal items only, and you have a method of manually removing false positives. There is nothing worse than the possibility that an ISP will filter out a real email in their spam system. That simple fact makes server side spam filtering impossible for most situations. You can filter spam into
Until Hotmail et al starts offering bayesian filtering with a separate 'spam' mailbox, consider server side filtering worthless.
I am smart and don't get any spam. A lot of people I see in my line of work, aren't. These people are going to get something like Outclass (an Outlook plugin for POPfile), and then they are going to see the problem go away, and they're not going to lose any email in the process.
I'd rather use SpamBayes, but the Outlook plugin has an annoying bug that renders autocompleting addresses in Outlook useless.
Red Hat have been moving, as part of this big shakeup, to remove everything non-Free from their distribution - including contributing to an open source Java, I believe.
Pine has always had licensing issues, and it's widely accpeted that Pine fans can be appeased with Mutt and something like Pine2Mutt (which is simply an import script or two and the pine.rc that comes with Mutt.)
You may think this is a joke, but so far the best use for the Tablet PC I've found, and the one that keeps my Linux loving friends taking the laptop, putting it into tablet mode, and using it, is Microsoft's InkBall.
Super simple game - really addictive. How games should be made.
Don't knock a game as a killer feature for a platform.
> I'm sure you've heard this a million times, but the biggest concern
> people will have is how to make Outlook interoperate with
> OpenGroupware.org.
Yes. I would like to point out that OGo is one of the very few
solutions which provide a full MAPI storage provider (aka live access)
instead of just a sync.
> Is the ZideLook plugin free?
No.
> If not, what are the
> licensing costs
AFAIK about EUR 55, depending on the number of users. For exact
information contact sales@skyrix.de.
> and would SKYRiX consider making the plugin free?
We would like to, but we don't own the plugin. It was developed by a
partner of SKYRiX which needs to get back his investment.
regards,
Helge
--
OpenGroupware.org - http://www.opengroupware.org/
I hear a lot, including in this article, about fonts that Agfa have developed and/or make available, that are pixel-for-pixel replacement for Windows fonts.
Can someone make this clearer for me? A brief look around Agfa's site suggests that they (as Monotype Corporation) developed all the Windows fonts, and may be able to license them out to other people.
Are the MS TT core fonts Not (Free?) Enough?
Oh. Sorry, wardy :(
/.'ing. I dont't think it should be too bad though..
Please pass on my appreciation for what he did, and my commiseration if he gets a
I'll mirror the file and he can put up a redirect if he wants.
More useful (no kernel recompilation required) is that a gentleman named Robbie Ward has applied NVidia's AGPGART patch to the Radeon kernel module builder, and the result can be found at here.
You can find a small HOWTO on getting the lot going at the Waikato Linux Users' Group wiki, at http://www.wlug.org.nz/RadeonOnNforce. Have a look around while you're there, its an excellent source of information and we'd really love you to add to it.
The article quotes RhymBox (I wouldn't have named a client that with another program called RhythmBox out there, which actually makes more sense as a name!), which seems like a bit of a MSN Messenger UI derived client. Upon first play it's very nice!
Free for non commercial use and apparently has source (according the the "You can modify software" clause in the license".)
Otherwise, I use JAJC, which is nice, but written in Delphi so not entire like the WIndows UI everywhere. But since when was any other IM entirely like the Windows UI?