Seriously...this looks like it could be a very interesting development. For a long time, the Newton was a very popular item, but its time had not yet come. The Palm Pilot later showed what a handheld could be. Put them together, and we might just have something interesting.
Other folks have already said, but I might as well put my two cents in, too.
I've never adminned any Linux box except for my personal one; I've run RH5.0 and 5.2 on it, and plan to upgrade to 5.9 in a week or so once Cheapbytes gets it on CD.
There are, essentially, three ways to upgrade any package with a Red Hat system.
1) Compile from scratch. You can tar -zxvf and make just like with any other Linux distro. I do it from time to time myself if what I want isn't around in RPM form yet. The only thing about doing this is that it doesn't tell your RPM database that it's installed.
2) Install from RPM. This is what most people in a hurry or who don't know how to patch or deal with odd compile errors will do. When you do this, it installs the binaries, the documentation, and puts a note in your RPM database that the package is there.
The one problem with this is that if you use compile to install some packages and RPM to install others, RPM won't realize the compiled packages are installed. But there are RPM options to override dependancy failures, so if you know that you've got that package installed, you can tell it to install anyway.
3) Build from SRPM. The SRPM, or source RPM, contains the.tar.gz'd source, plus a.spec file that contains the instructions for compiling and installing it. You can do an rpm --rebuild (or is it --recompile?).SRPM and just watch it go. This has the double benefit of both compiling it on your machine (and thus customizing it to your specific installation) and adding it to the RPM database.
This also suggests
3a) "Roll your own" RPMs. You can do it; it's as easy as putting a script together that tells how to compile, and what files go where. I've tried it myself, for a simple program. This has the same benefits as 3) above...
The thing to know about companies is, they are NOT human. After a certain critical mass, they retain NO human qualities. RPM was released when RH was still run by humans, and humans who cared somewhat for the linux community. Furthermore, Linux itself was a very small platform back then, and all developments had to be shared if it had any chance of hitting the big time. Now it has.
In other words...almost anyone who makes a distro and sells it will eventually become all Big and Evil and Bad when they make enough money? So...um...who's going to make a distribution then? People who aren't in it to make money? Then where does the support come from? People who are in it to make money? Then don't they become all Big and Evil and Bad?
Growth is inevitable. Commercial interest of one form or another is inevitable. When those commercial interests grow bigger, people start getting scared--with or without good reason--by the towering monoliths they see. I guess we need corporate whipping boys to take out our fears on... Yesterday it was Mikey$oft, today it's Red Hat. Who will it be tomorrow?
Get real, people. And take some economics classes.
...but as I've seen in IMDB's "user comments" area, and now here, no matter how crap a movie is, there will be some (sometimes a lot) of "I liked it" and "it wasn't that bad" reviews...and no matter how awesome a movie is, there will always be somebody yelling SUCK!!!
Someone should come up with a formula relating the number of each type of review to the other to figure out just how good movies really are...:)
From what I've read and been told, you apparently didn't really miss very much by not getting to play WC4. Even Mark Hamil couldn't save it (or so I'm told).
WC3 rocked very very much, though. Wish they'd based the movie on that, using the same actors...
I'd like to again suggest the double-gatewaying of Slashdot articles to a NNTP-style discussion area. Someone brought up the notion that this would mean losing HTML posting or reading capability, but to be honest, I wouldn't mind; I'd probably be using Netscape to read it anyway and Netscape interprets HTML just fine...and if not, I'd put up with it.
Also, I've noticed what might be a possible bug. I have my threshhold set at 1 in my user-defaults page, so I miss out on a lot of the flamewars and such...but I find that when I click on the "Down One" link, due to wanting to read a thresh 0 post, it stays right at threshhold 1 even after reloading the page. Could you do something about this, Rob?
Kudos for all the other great stuff you've done, though!
Well, just make it so you'd have to go to the/. discussion area itself to find out what the name of the newsgroup was, then you'd click a link (or copy and paste to your newsreader) to go to it. You'd still see the advert when you stopped in to get the link, but you could read and post to the discussion in newsgroup style. Best of both worlds.
How about coming mirroring your message boards on a NNTP-style news server (and vice versa)? It would be nice to be able to read the comments in a threaded newsreader and not have to mess around with the somewhat clunky message-board interface.
Well, on the one hand, it's nice to see Opera getting released for Linux, just because it seems to be a fairly popular browser (for a non-Big-Two offering), and the more popular software gets ported over to Linux, the better off Linux will be in general. When I used Opera on my old 486 DX2/66 running Win95, it was a good deal peppier than Netscape or IE; there were a few annoying things about it, most notably the 30-day expire time.
OTOH, I've never really liked the Opera peoples' attitude ("Free web browsers are worth exactly what you pay for them; pay for ours and use it, it costs money, therefore it doesn't suck"). I've heard good things about Mozilla's progress, and look forward to trying out a stable version of it when it comes out.
Some friends and I were talking about this, and we came to the conclusion that if Joe Average's ISP fees go up at all because of this, they may go up by $5 or so per month across the board, but it's doubtful we'll see by-the-minute rates. Why? Because it's painfully clear...the customers don't want that. ISPs would be shooting themselves in the foot to go to hourly pricing--even AOL finally gave up on it. They'll charge everyone a bit more before they do that.
People see "long distance" and immediately start to panic, sheesh. If this is going to affect any of us at all, it'll do so indirectly, by our ISPs getting charged a bit more.
DynDNS was terrific, that's what it was. I'm dialing in on a school account, and it used to be that I could have my Linux box set up as terrania.dyn.ml.org so that I could telnet into it from the computer lab or wherever and check my mail, or run webpages or chatservers on it. But then it went away, sigh...now I have a script kludge that emails the current IP address to another account that I can check and use to telnete in, but it's just not the same.
Of course, ML's DYNDNS service was never the most reliable thing in the world to begin with...if DHS can do better, I'll be very, very happy about things.
A couple of notes...Linux Gazette had an article about using DynDNS services, complete with scripts, in one of their back issues--I think it was the January one. There is a commercial DynDNS service, DynDNS.Com, that charges $25 a year for DynDNS service, too.
Also, for the DHS folks...did you know that there is a Dynamic IP hosting system for Linux out there? It's called GnuDIP--check Freshmeat for it. I haven't looked at it myself, but maybe it'll have some stuff you can use in it.
Good luck, and I have to say I can't wait 'til I can have terrania.(dyn.)dhs.org!:)
What I was hoping to find here would be RPMs of the kernel itself. I installed all the RPMs from the tango project, then tried make menuconfig and so forth with 2.2.1, and when I rebooted, my system wouldn't even boot...and when I tried to go back to the old kernel, I found it had munged my modules directory somehow to the point where I had to do a full reinstall before I could get back into 2.0.36!
I really would like to upgrade, so I can maybe get my sound card working (it's a SB Live), but I've never had any success with a kernel upgrade any time I've tried...if anyone can help me, please let me know?
Hey, I never said whether I agreed or not that Yahoo was or wasn't a good investment. I haven't taken the time to apply those criteria; I don't know whether it is or not. Sure, lots of people have made money on it...but what goes up must come down, sooner or later.
People need to make informed decisions about where to invest and how--not just guess based on past performance. Look at the numbers--all the numbers--and read analysts' reports, and make sure you know what you're doing. Otherwise, you might as well go to a casino and put the whole thing on the roulette wheel--you're doing the same thing by playing in the stock market, and the stock market usually doesn't give you free booze while you're doing it.
Decide for yourself. Follow the criteria given for evaluating investments, in the Motley Fool's 13 Steps to Investing Foolishly. Apply them to Yahoo and see how well it stands for yourself.
If all you want is to read email and post stories, do you really need direct floor access? I would think that a dialin with a 33.6 modem would be sufficient for that.
Is having three IPs for a couple of days really worth $1600? The big businesses who will be attending can afford to eat that cost...you can't. Heck, if you're so dead set on spending $1600, get a new laptop (and join the Windows Refund Day people:) with a cellular modem--at least you'll still have it after the convention is over.
Look up in the upper left hand corner Jon... "News for Nerds." News. Please Jon explain to me how your articles are news. Do you understand what news is?
Look up in the upper left hand corner, Juuri. "Stuff that Matters." Matters. Please, Juuri, explain to me how a newbie coming to Linux, sharing his experiences that those of us who want to convert other newbies to Linux can use to avoid similar pitfalls along the way, doesn't matter. Do you understand what stuff that matters is?
You weren't born with a keyboard in your hand. Neither was I. At some point in your life, you had no idea at all about how a computer worked or what to do with it. Perhaps you were one of the early hackers who got into computers by playing around with one of the pre-PC home boxes.
But at some point, you learned to go beyond being a user to being a tinkerer, an advanced user. For some people, this comes early in life. For other people, like Jon, it comes later...and they say that learning new things gets harder as you get older.
I have a lot of respect for Jon...he's not afraid to make stupid mistakes, and when he makes them, he reports them--he doesn't keep them to himself to make himself look better. Sure, it might be easy to have contempt for someone who makes the stupid mistakes in the first place--but I bet you've made some pretty serious boners yourself along the way.
And Jon, at least, doesn't go around insulting other people--even the ones who flame him.
Or, to put it more succinctly, get a life, get a clue, and get off Slashdot and raise its collective IQ by a couple of points.
Don't fear commercial appz/gamez
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Everything in this world costs something. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
I honestly don't care about the ideology. If OSS is so superior, as everyone believes it is, then it will win out naturally--look at the strides Linux has taken. In the mean time, I'm going to buy whatever I want to buy.
I hate the "cheapskate Linux-user" image...
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Has anyone ever noticed this? Whenever another proprietary program gets ported over to Linux, everyone starts bitching and moaning about, "Oh, no, it's notfree, we'll have to pay for it! They should be giving it away, waaaaah!"
While part of the crowd making these complaints might have semi-legitimate ideological reasons for it, sometimes I get the feeling that a lot of Linux users are just so used to getting stuff for free that they think all software for free systems, whether "free software" or not, should be "free as in beer" as well as (or instead of) "free as in speech." I wouldn't be surprised if one of the major reasons that Linux had a dearth of software is due to that very notion, the perception that Linux-users wouldn't pay for the software they used.
If you want more games to come to Linux, email the game companies and tell them you would buy the games. Help Linux shed the cheapskate image.
If someone gets a Starcraft petition up, I'd sign!
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"send a lot louder and a much more effective message by developing a petition campaign for the good games."
Hey, if someone got up a petition for Linux Starcraft, you can bet I'd sign it!:)
I don't suppose anyone's written up a howto for upgrading out-of-the-box (or, rather, off-of-the-Cheapbytes-disk) Red Hat 5.2 to use kernel 2.2.X? I've heard some word that not all of RH5.2's components were recent enough, and I'd like to know what I'd need to change out.
I'll admit, I only skimmed the thing, and IANAL, but it looked to me like it was a patent only on the specific programs and methods of Internet networking that they used. I could be wrong, but it would probably be best not to get all excited and angry until someone who is a lawyer can take a look and see what they think.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously...this looks like it could be a very interesting development. For a long time, the Newton was a very popular item, but its time had not yet come. The Palm Pilot later showed what a handheld could be. Put them together, and we might just have something interesting.
Other folks have already said, but I might as well put my two cents in, too.
.tar.gz'd source, plus a .spec file that contains the instructions for compiling and installing it. You can do an rpm --rebuild (or is it --recompile?) .SRPM and just watch it go. This has the double benefit of both compiling it on your machine (and thus customizing it to your specific installation) and adding it to the RPM database.
I've never adminned any Linux box except for my personal one; I've run RH5.0 and 5.2 on it, and plan to upgrade to 5.9 in a week or so once Cheapbytes gets it on CD.
There are, essentially, three ways to upgrade any package with a Red Hat system.
1) Compile from scratch. You can tar -zxvf and make just like with any other Linux distro. I do it from time to time myself if what I want isn't around in RPM form yet. The only thing about doing this is that it doesn't tell your RPM database that it's installed.
2) Install from RPM. This is what most people in a hurry or who don't know how to patch or deal with odd compile errors will do. When you do this, it installs the binaries, the documentation, and puts a note in your RPM database that the package is there.
The one problem with this is that if you use compile to install some packages and RPM to install others, RPM won't realize the compiled packages are installed. But there are RPM options to override dependancy failures, so if you know that you've got that package installed, you can tell it to install anyway.
3) Build from SRPM. The SRPM, or source RPM, contains the
This also suggests
3a) "Roll your own" RPMs. You can do it; it's as easy as putting a script together that tells how to compile, and what files go where. I've tried it myself, for a simple program. This has the same benefits as 3) above...
Anyway...good luck with it!
The thing to know about companies is, they are NOT human. After a certain critical mass, they retain NO human qualities. RPM was released when RH was still run by humans, and humans who cared somewhat for the linux community. Furthermore, Linux itself was a very small platform back then, and all developments had to be shared if it had any chance of hitting the big time. Now it has.
In other words...almost anyone who makes a distro and sells it will eventually become all Big and Evil and Bad when they make enough money? So...um...who's going to make a distribution then? People who aren't in it to make money? Then where does the support come from? People who are in it to make money? Then don't they become all Big and Evil and Bad?
Growth is inevitable. Commercial interest of one form or another is inevitable. When those commercial interests grow bigger, people start getting scared--with or without good reason--by the towering monoliths they see. I guess we need corporate whipping boys to take out our fears on... Yesterday it was Mikey$oft, today it's Red Hat. Who will it be tomorrow?
Get real, people. And take some economics classes.
...but as I've seen in IMDB's "user comments" area, and now here, no matter how crap a movie is, there will be some (sometimes a lot) of "I liked it" and "it wasn't that bad" reviews...and no matter how awesome a movie is, there will always be somebody yelling SUCK!!!
:)
Someone should come up with a formula relating the number of each type of review to the other to figure out just how good movies really are...
From what I've read and been told, you apparently didn't really miss very much by not getting to play WC4. Even Mark Hamil couldn't save it (or so I'm told).
WC3 rocked very very much, though. Wish they'd based the movie on that, using the same actors...
...not original source articles (though that would be kinda neat too... :)
I'd like to again suggest the double-gatewaying of Slashdot articles to a NNTP-style discussion area. Someone brought up the notion that this would mean losing HTML posting or reading capability, but to be honest, I wouldn't mind; I'd probably be using Netscape to read it anyway and Netscape interprets HTML just fine...and if not, I'd put up with it.
Also, I've noticed what might be a possible bug. I have my threshhold set at 1 in my user-defaults page, so I miss out on a lot of the flamewars and such...but I find that when I click on the "Down One" link, due to wanting to read a thresh 0 post, it stays right at threshhold 1 even after reloading the page. Could you do something about this, Rob?
Kudos for all the other great stuff you've done, though!
I take it that Quicktime for Windows doesn't work yet with WINE?
Well, just make it so you'd have to go to the /. discussion area itself to find out what the name of the newsgroup was, then you'd click a link (or copy and paste to your newsreader) to go to it. You'd still see the advert when you stopped in to get the link, but you could read and post to the discussion in newsgroup style. Best of both worlds.
How about coming mirroring your message boards on a NNTP-style news server (and vice versa)? It would be nice to be able to read the comments in a threaded newsreader and not have to mess around with the somewhat clunky message-board interface.
Well, on the one hand, it's nice to see Opera getting released for Linux, just because it seems to be a fairly popular browser (for a non-Big-Two offering), and the more popular software gets ported over to Linux, the better off Linux will be in general. When I used Opera on my old 486 DX2/66 running Win95, it was a good deal peppier than Netscape or IE; there were a few annoying things about it, most notably the 30-day expire time.
OTOH, I've never really liked the Opera peoples' attitude ("Free web browsers are worth exactly what you pay for them; pay for ours and use it, it costs money, therefore it doesn't suck"). I've heard good things about Mozilla's progress, and look forward to trying out a stable version of it when it comes out.
Some friends and I were talking about this, and we came to the conclusion that if Joe Average's ISP fees go up at all because of this, they may go up by $5 or so per month across the board, but it's doubtful we'll see by-the-minute rates. Why? Because it's painfully clear...the customers don't want that. ISPs would be shooting themselves in the foot to go to hourly pricing--even AOL finally gave up on it. They'll charge everyone a bit more before they do that.
People see "long distance" and immediately start to panic, sheesh. If this is going to affect any of us at all, it'll do so indirectly, by our ISPs getting charged a bit more.
DynDNS was terrific, that's what it was. I'm dialing in on a school account, and it used to be that I could have my Linux box set up as terrania.dyn.ml.org so that I could telnet into it from the computer lab or wherever and check my mail, or run webpages or chatservers on it. But then it went away, sigh...now I have a script kludge that emails the current IP address to another account that I can check and use to telnete in, but it's just not the same.
:)
Of course, ML's DYNDNS service was never the most reliable thing in the world to begin with...if DHS can do better, I'll be very, very happy about things.
A couple of notes...Linux Gazette had an article about using DynDNS services, complete with scripts, in one of their back issues--I think it was the January one. There is a commercial DynDNS service, DynDNS.Com, that charges $25 a year for DynDNS service, too.
Also, for the DHS folks...did you know that there is a Dynamic IP hosting system for Linux out there? It's called GnuDIP--check Freshmeat for it. I haven't looked at it myself, but maybe it'll have some stuff you can use in it.
Good luck, and I have to say I can't wait 'til I can have terrania.(dyn.)dhs.org!
What I was hoping to find here would be RPMs of the kernel itself. I installed all the RPMs from the tango project, then tried make menuconfig and so forth with 2.2.1, and when I rebooted, my system wouldn't even boot...and when I tried to go back to the old kernel, I found it had munged my modules directory somehow to the point where I had to do a full reinstall before I could get back into 2.0.36!
I really would like to upgrade, so I can maybe get my sound card working (it's a SB Live), but I've never had any success with a kernel upgrade any time I've tried...if anyone can help me, please let me know?
No, it's up--I just got to it...you must have had a netburp or something.
Hey, I never said whether I agreed or not that Yahoo was or wasn't a good investment. I haven't taken the time to apply those criteria; I don't know whether it is or not. Sure, lots of people have made money on it...but what goes up must come down, sooner or later.
People need to make informed decisions about where to invest and how--not just guess based on past performance. Look at the numbers--all the numbers--and read analysts' reports, and make sure you know what you're doing. Otherwise, you might as well go to a casino and put the whole thing on the roulette wheel--you're doing the same thing by playing in the stock market, and the stock market usually doesn't give you free booze while you're doing it.
Decide for yourself. Follow the criteria given for evaluating investments, in the Motley Fool's 13 Steps to Investing Foolishly. Apply them to Yahoo and see how well it stands for yourself.
If all you want is to read email and post stories, do you really need direct floor access? I would think that a dialin with a 33.6 modem would be sufficient for that.
:) with a cellular modem--at least you'll still have it after the convention is over.
Is having three IPs for a couple of days really worth $1600? The big businesses who will be attending can afford to eat that cost...you can't. Heck, if you're so dead set on spending $1600, get a new laptop (and join the Windows Refund Day people
Look up in the upper left hand corner, Juuri. "Stuff that Matters." Matters. Please, Juuri, explain to me how a newbie coming to Linux, sharing his experiences that those of us who want to convert other newbies to Linux can use to avoid similar pitfalls along the way, doesn't matter. Do you understand what stuff that matters is?
You weren't born with a keyboard in your hand. Neither was I. At some point in your life, you had no idea at all about how a computer worked or what to do with it. Perhaps you were one of the early hackers who got into computers by playing around with one of the pre-PC home boxes.
But at some point, you learned to go beyond being a user to being a tinkerer, an advanced user. For some people, this comes early in life. For other people, like Jon, it comes later...and they say that learning new things gets harder as you get older.
I have a lot of respect for Jon...he's not afraid to make stupid mistakes, and when he makes them, he reports them--he doesn't keep them to himself to make himself look better. Sure, it might be easy to have contempt for someone who makes the stupid mistakes in the first place--but I bet you've made some pretty serious boners yourself along the way.
And Jon, at least, doesn't go around insulting other people--even the ones who flame him.
Or, to put it more succinctly, get a life, get a clue, and get off Slashdot and raise its collective IQ by a couple of points.
Everything in this world costs something. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
I honestly don't care about the ideology. If OSS is so superior, as everyone believes it is, then it will win out naturally--look at the strides Linux has taken. In the mean time, I'm going to buy whatever I want to buy.
Has anyone ever noticed this? Whenever another proprietary program gets ported over to Linux, everyone starts bitching and moaning about, "Oh, no, it's not free, we'll have to pay for it! They should be giving it away, waaaaah!"
While part of the crowd making these complaints might have semi-legitimate ideological reasons for it, sometimes I get the feeling that a lot of Linux users are just so used to getting stuff for free that they think all software for free systems, whether "free software" or not, should be "free as in beer" as well as (or instead of) "free as in speech." I wouldn't be surprised if one of the major reasons that Linux had a dearth of software is due to that very notion, the perception that Linux-users wouldn't pay for the software they used.
If you want more games to come to Linux, email the game companies and tell them you would buy the games. Help Linux shed the cheapskate image.
"send a lot louder and a much more effective message by developing a petition campaign for the good games."
:)
Hey, if someone got up a petition for Linux Starcraft, you can bet I'd sign it!
I don't suppose anyone's written up a howto for upgrading out-of-the-box (or, rather, off-of-the-Cheapbytes-disk) Red Hat 5.2 to use kernel 2.2.X? I've heard some word that not all of RH5.2's components were recent enough, and I'd like to know what I'd need to change out.
Thanks...
Robotech_Master
I'll admit, I only skimmed the thing, and IANAL, but it looked to me like it was a patent only on the specific programs and methods of Internet networking that they used. I could be wrong, but it would probably be best not to get all excited and angry until someone who is a lawyer can take a look and see what they think.