[goes buys a Mac] then writes to this thread http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=322203 and gets a reply "I don't think you can do this. There may be 3rd party applications avaliable though."
This is only the case if some idiot haven't reformated the whole file, haven't commited and then removed '^M' lines etc. (which happens all the time at least in this company;)
You are right about the fact that you have a reasonable network backup possibilities if you care enough. I managed to setup an automatic backup of all of my machines at work using http://www.amanda.org/.
But my home workstation is another story. I don't pay for any dedicated backup server so I end with making backups on DVDs. I can easily backup some stuff that is well organized but the rest is a bit problematic;). And what if your system died for some reason? Will you be able to recover it? What if it stopped booting?
Actually, there is a good system for it (at least from my perspective) -- http://www.mondorescue.org/ but I had problems to set it up correctly on Ubuntu. I'd really appreciate something with similar capabilities but tailored (and granted to work) for Ubuntu... possibly even with a graphical interface which would allow to easily define included and excluded regions to backup.
Besides that -- simple ubuntu-native backup would be clearly beneficial for less skilled users. I guess they now solve the problem by not doing any backups at all;). Maybe some of them use k3b to occasionaly burn some of their most important documents.
So I did. It felt more mature since I tried it last time (long ago, I must admit). However, there are still some annoyances which probably let me stuck with 'mc' for now.
Some notes after ten minutes of trying it (version 0.60):
I expect the filemanager to be rock stable (for writing/changin at least). I managed krusader crash in 5 minutes trying only some simple things. Ok, that may be a bad luck but I don't like the idea let the filemanager messing any of my files.
The whole thing is a bit flickering and unresponsive, sometimes (while doing some harder operation) it looks "dead" for a while but then redraws and finishes the task using "buffered events". That is certainly someting I don't like. It opens and closes dialogs fastly as hell and I don't know what it is doing at the time. Probably everything is okay (only buffered events I entered)... but what if?... considering it was not completely stable...
There are tasks which are uninterruptible and uncancellable. You have to completely kill the thing which is not good. Also the information about what it is doing during those action (packing for example) is rather brief.
There is no integrated viewer and no hexa viewer. Some of the things I really like since times when norton and then volkov commander rulled. Opening a separate window is annoying and unncessary. It should be done in the main window.
The shell is not enabled on typing by default and I am not avare how for example cut'n'paste selected files into it. Or how do I paste current directory to shell line. Also the output is displayed elsewhere. I like the way of old nc,nv,mc and such more.
You can not let the operation finish in background and do something else in between as you can for example in mc.
Browsing in archive files in the main windows did not work for some reason. Is it implemented? This is a stopper for me. One of the most usefull things in mc.
Well... enough for that bashing. Actually the thing looked quite promising, I'll certainly check it later when it reaches version 1.0 or at least some sort of beta...
Another thing to consider is named tuxcmd. But it is also incomplete and it seems to be developed by a single developer in open kylix3 (pascal thing). Well, well... this is not an easy project to do, a good filemanager;)
Yes, I know of/etc/alternatives. It's quite usefull for shell apps and cmdline.
But it is really not very useful when we are speaking of desktop environment. You're right that MIME system is mess. There is large number of MIME types which are essentially identical or at least always handled by the same application. And unfortunately not all core programs use it -- for instance firefox has it's own completely different mechanism. So not only you have to change a large portion of MIME associations (and the tree is huge) but you have to repeat this for all other core applications which don't use the very same system of MIME handling.
For start it would be nice if gnome2, gnome1 and core apps (like firefox) used _only one_ MIME type system. I guess to quickly change apps of your preference would be to replace all MIME types handled primarily by the app to be replaced by application you have chosen (if possible for given MIME type). Even that would be a huge leap forward.
I have to thank for extra nautilus tab for quick MIME reassociation, though. Originally it was hidden somewhere and very uncomfortable to change. Also it is quite impractial trying to handle more than one file in Nautilus (and this hold even if we speak about more files of the same MIME type) -- for instance you can't apply other than default action on them.
I think this is why many powerusers stick with cmdline. You are not repeatedly asked about doing something the way you don't want it to.
Managing files using Nautilus is also quite a task. I can't imaging reorganizing my files without 'mc' (which is quite outdated and doesn't work with UTF8 which is Ubuntu default). Unfortunately there is not anything like Total Commander in Windows. But this is a different story...
There are a few features which would be really nice [missing in comparison in other distros] -- but not planned:
A possibility of an offline installation. One can't setup Ubuntu well without Internet access. It would bevery useful for example if one could choose "extra" packages not found on official CD (at least some i18n stuff and reasonable multimedia). At least you would be able to pre-download packages (and all dependent packages! before installation). This would be also pretty nice for multiple installations (small bussines usage).
An automatical detection of BIOS RAID during installation process (a pretty common thing on modern computers and usually well supported in Linux). Now you have to do really nasty hacks to get it working (see ahref=https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FakeRaidHowto/rel=ur l2html-13444https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FakeRaidHowto/ > ).
A possiblity to switch all bindings from one app to another of your preference. You can now do it for WWW and email. It would be great to have it for text (gvim anyone?;), video (xine/mplayer), audio (xmms) instead of politically correct but unusable default applications.
Reasonably restrictively set firewall setup by default (maybe shorewall)
A good backup application (at least system recovery, etc settings snapshots, home dirs backup).
Some sort of graphical system messages reporter for desktop users (sniffing logs, reporting serious problems). Something like security update icon on the top bar). Smarttools should also really be installed by default.
Disabling completely disfunctional features like "hibernate" on standard desktops... I installed Ubuntu at least 20 times on different hw and I haven't found a PC on which this would not cause a complete hang up.
Anyway, Ubuntu is a really great distro. I've moved from Debian to Mandrake (now Mandriva) becouse of outdated packages needed for a workstation... now I'm back (even though to its desktop cousin). It's becouse it is much simpler and most of things just work out of the (unlike mdk, gentoo and others.) -- and still can be tweaked easily by a poweruser!
Well, I've seen also something a bit different. A manager asks an engineer for estimate on project deadline. An (experienced) engineer does his best and thinks something about 6 months. Becouse he knows something (bussines/political) related to this project, he rather says 4 months (and thinks about cutting docs and testing, tbd later). And manager ends with "What, it has to be finished in 2 months becouse we already signed the contract so."...
It is not the same thing. I bought a dictionary for Linux and I'd like some features in it. Features not really difficult to do or very demanding to do but (what a suprise!) the company does not care (well, they said they'd consider that and I never heard anything else from them). Read: I already gave them my money for the dictionary. It's a shame I bought not the data itself (compressed and obfuscated, btw.) but the program to interpret them. If it was OSS I could easily do it by myself. And -- this was rather a small company, not a mastodont like Oracle or AOL or whatever...
DESCRIPTION
The alloca function allocates size bytes of space in the stack frame of the caller.
This temporary space is automatically freed when the function that called alloca
returns to its caller.
RETURN VALUE
The alloca function returns a pointer to the beginning of the allocated space. If the
allocation causes stack overflow, program behaviour is undefined.
CONFORMING TO
There is evidence that the alloca function appeared in 32v, pwb, pwb.2, 3bsd, and 4bsd.
There is a man page for it in BSD 4.3. Linux uses the GNU version. This function is
not in POSIX or SUSv3.
It is not that overrated. Imagine a system dependent on JRE for some or most applications. Now you would be forced to download a huge package from Internet to get it working. Of course then you would have to setup the classpaths, ***_HOMEs and such. And what if you needed JRE for an app to setup an Internet connection or to download what you need...
On the other hand C/C++, shell, perl, python and all other apps run fine out of the box (and you don't even know what lang it was written in before you examine it in more detail). It is a serious stopper and it could be why mostly only enterprise level apps are written in java.
Actually most non-native speakers don't consider 'gimp' as a word to be something odd. They mostly know it as a name of a program and the meaning you mention is not known to them (becouse there is lots of more important words to learn first).
You also don't care about a foreign names of programs, you just get used to it;).
Actually I scan both film and positives. Though there is much more visible impact when working with film (film scanners have tougher job to cover the whole dynamic range) it also helps to do so for positives becouse the scanner hw is a) not that good to scan deep shadows or very light surfaces well b) the scan nearly always has shifted color -- to undo that effect you have to have greater than 8bpp depth or it is clearly visible that you manipulated the scan.
Yeah, fine, nice features but I wonder why there is nearly no interest in supporting more than 8bits per color. There is a lot of digital cameras out there, I scan my photos in 48bit mode. It's pretty annoying to to the basic color adjustments in (unstable and ugly) cinepaint which I have to restart after each load/save to avoid a crash and then to continue editing the image in gimp2. If more features are added it will be even harder to make everything properly work in a greater color depth.
Another thing that I miss for a long time is 'macro recording' similar to MS Office or Photoshop actions. Why do I have to write some weird script-fu skeletons and look up for functions and their parameters? It would be much easier if I could record my actions and then to parametrize them some way...
I asked about this at mailing list but the replies were a bit vague about those topics (or even angry)...
However, it should be masculine becouse it has origin in Czech language (a great writer, Karel Capek created it for RUR) despite in Czech many words are gender neutral.
hmm... i looked at it. There is no real documentation, for instance. They say that J2EE is supported but the link forwards you to PHP...hmmm. Okay, I know PHP so I looked at the basic concepts in the tutorial for the old PHP version of fusebox (membership required, doh!). I haven't see much new, sorry. To me it seems clearly inferior to, for example, Struts.
...a car radio is nice but unimportant gadget. But let's say someone would demand a radio made by Honda to let you on a highway. You know, 95% of people do have radio made by Honda we cannot support any other because of (put a dumb reason here)...
...and the radio is firmly in your car. It is problematic and expensive task to exchange it. So you end up rather buying Honda to avoid this. In fact you'd buy the whole car because of a stupid radio.
... and this is what many governments do -- sending and expecting only proprietary.doc files, requiring IE6, MS JVM... hey what's the problem everybody has it...
Well, this doesn't sound very new to me. Look at cameras for example. They evolved from complex machines for professionals to compacts which can be used by anybody. Profesional SLR's are expensive and generally they are not for amateurs.
Average Joe and his wife don't need to know anything to make their vacation pictures. They can't spoil much by point-and-shoot photography style.Of course, if you don't want this you need a more complicated camera (interface) thus you can do exactly what you want to do (and you can spoil a lot).
You simply can't have both. There is always a compromise between a powerful and a simple interface.
Have you followed the link in the article? I have no idea who would want to pay $5 for a set of tools capable generating a specified interval, summing up a sequence of numbers or taking random of those... Though, it may be useful to have those for shell scripting.
This was ask.slashdot.org. Who would expect a Spanish inqusition?
It's worth noting that the sound infrasturcture changed from OSS, to primerly ALSA. OSS is still in, but marked DEPRECATED, so at some point over 2.6, you aught to expect to shift to ALSA sound. It aught to be painless - ALSA supports OSS emulation, so you can phase apps through that.
Hmmm... It sounds like the the bad practices like cat wow.au >/dev/audio
won't disappear for another period. I was looking forward to default ALSA in 2.6.x but till the programs keep using the old API there is no chance for something better than OSS. Opening raw device, what the hell should it be good for?
Call for new API, better integrated with kernel new abilities. It is a shame that Linux really can't use nearly nothing that modern soundcards provide without many glitches....
Projects like OpenAL don't seem to be evolving and things like artsd, esd and whateverd don't do any good...
You need a special permission (which you have to pay, of course) by the original owner to make a translation. Once you have finished it you own copyrights to that translation. Anyone else can ask the original author for permission for translation again but he cannot just use the old translation as a skeleton since it is covered by a new copyright (owned by the original translator).
This is not exact (money sharing is mostly the most tricky part) but shows the concept.
The czech translation has been made by some impatient pubescents. They even didn't know that a translation was covered by a copyright law. But, as always, unawareness is not a justification.
BTW there have been some voices that such a delay before the translation hits the market increases a possibility of such an accident. The copyright owner hadn't given the permission (and the actual text) to begin the translation at the time the book was printed (although it is a routine to do so).
Slashdot Mirror
[goes buys a Mac] then writes to this thread http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=322203 and gets a reply "I don't think you can do this. There may be 3rd party applications avaliable though."
This is only the case if some idiot haven't reformated the whole file, haven't commited and then removed '^M' lines etc. (which happens all the time at least in this company ;)
You are right about the fact that you have a reasonable network backup possibilities if you care enough. I managed to setup an automatic backup of all of my machines at work using http://www.amanda.org/.
;).
;). Maybe some of them use k3b to occasionaly burn some of their most important documents.
But my home workstation is another story. I don't pay for any dedicated backup server so I end with making backups on DVDs. I can easily backup some stuff that is well organized but the rest is a bit problematic
And what if your system died for some reason? Will you be able to recover it? What if it stopped booting?
Actually, there is a good system for it (at least from my perspective) -- http://www.mondorescue.org/ but I had problems to set it up correctly on Ubuntu. I'd really appreciate something with similar capabilities but tailored (and granted to work) for Ubuntu... possibly even with a graphical interface which would allow to easily define included and excluded regions to backup.
Besides that -- simple ubuntu-native backup would be clearly beneficial for less skilled users. I guess they now solve the problem by not doing any backups at all
So I did. It felt more mature since I tried it last time (long ago, I must admit). However, there are still some annoyances which probably let me stuck with 'mc' for now.
... but what if? ... considering it was not completely stable...
;)
Some notes after ten minutes of trying it (version 0.60):
I expect the filemanager to be rock stable (for writing/changin at least). I managed krusader crash in 5 minutes trying only some simple things. Ok, that may be a bad luck but I don't like the idea let the filemanager messing any of my files.
The whole thing is a bit flickering and unresponsive, sometimes (while doing some harder operation) it looks "dead" for a while but then redraws and finishes the task using "buffered events". That is certainly someting I don't like. It opens and closes dialogs fastly as hell and I don't know what it is doing at the time. Probably everything is okay (only buffered events I entered)
There are tasks which are uninterruptible and uncancellable. You have to completely kill the thing which is not good. Also the information about what it is doing during those action (packing for example) is rather brief.
There is no integrated viewer and no hexa viewer. Some of the things I really like since times when norton and then volkov commander rulled. Opening a separate window is annoying and unncessary. It should be done in the main window.
The shell is not enabled on typing by default and I am not avare how for example cut'n'paste selected files into it. Or how do I paste current directory to shell line. Also the output is displayed elsewhere. I like the way of old nc,nv,mc and such more.
You can not let the operation finish in background and do something else in between as you can for example in mc.
Browsing in archive files in the main windows did not work for some reason. Is it implemented? This is a stopper for me. One of the most usefull things in mc.
Well... enough for that bashing. Actually the thing looked quite promising, I'll certainly check it later when it reaches version 1.0 or at least some sort of beta...
Another thing to consider is named tuxcmd. But it is also incomplete and it seems to be developed by a single developer in open kylix3 (pascal thing). Well, well... this is not an easy project to do, a good filemanager
Ok...and now tell us what was wrong...
Yes, I know of /etc/alternatives. It's quite usefull for shell apps and cmdline.
But it is really not very useful when we are speaking of desktop environment. You're right that MIME system is mess. There is large number of MIME types which are essentially identical or at least always handled by the same application. And unfortunately not all core programs use it -- for instance firefox has it's own completely different mechanism. So not only you have to change a large portion of MIME associations (and the tree is huge) but you have to repeat this for all other core applications which don't use the very same system of MIME handling.
For start it would be nice if gnome2, gnome1 and core apps (like firefox) used _only one_ MIME type system. I guess to quickly change apps of your preference would be to replace all MIME types handled primarily by the app to be replaced by application you have chosen (if possible for given MIME type). Even that would be a huge leap forward.
I have to thank for extra nautilus tab for quick MIME reassociation, though. Originally it was hidden somewhere and very uncomfortable to change. Also it is quite impractial trying to handle more than one file in Nautilus (and this hold even if we speak about more files of the same MIME type) -- for instance you can't apply other than default action on them.
I think this is why many powerusers stick with cmdline. You are not repeatedly asked about doing something the way you don't want it to.
Managing files using Nautilus is also quite a task. I can't imaging reorganizing my files without 'mc' (which is quite outdated and doesn't work with UTF8 which is Ubuntu default). Unfortunately there is not anything like Total Commander in Windows. But this is a different story...
Anyway, Ubuntu is a really great distro. I've moved from Debian to Mandrake (now Mandriva) becouse of outdated packages needed for a workstation
Well, I've seen also something a bit different. A manager asks an engineer for estimate on project deadline. An (experienced) engineer does his best and thinks something about 6 months. Becouse he knows something (bussines/political) related to this project, he rather says 4 months (and thinks about cutting docs and testing, tbd later). And manager ends with "What, it has to be finished in 2 months becouse we already signed the contract so."...
It is not the same thing. I bought a dictionary for Linux and I'd like some features in it. Features not really difficult to do or very demanding to do but (what a suprise!) the company does not care (well, they said they'd consider that and I never heard anything else from them). Read: I already gave them my money for the dictionary. It's a shame I bought not the data itself (compressed and obfuscated, btw.) but the program to interpret them. If it was OSS I could easily do it by myself. And -- this was rather a small company, not a mastodont like Oracle or AOL or whatever...
NAME
alloca - memory allocator
SYNOPSIS
#include
void *alloca(size_t size);
DESCRIPTION
The alloca function allocates size bytes of space in the stack frame of the caller.
This temporary space is automatically freed when the function that called alloca
returns to its caller.
RETURN VALUE
The alloca function returns a pointer to the beginning of the allocated space. If the
allocation causes stack overflow, program behaviour is undefined.
CONFORMING TO
There is evidence that the alloca function appeared in 32v, pwb, pwb.2, 3bsd, and 4bsd.
There is a man page for it in BSD 4.3. Linux uses the GNU version. This function is
not in POSIX or SUSv3.
(C) GNU
It is not that overrated. Imagine a system dependent on JRE for some or most applications. Now you would be forced to download a huge package from Internet to get it working. Of course then you would have to setup the classpaths, ***_HOMEs and such. And what if you needed JRE for an app to setup an Internet connection or to download what you need...
On the other hand C/C++, shell, perl, python and all other apps run fine out of the box (and you don't even know what lang it was written in before you examine it in more detail). It is a serious stopper and it could be why mostly only enterprise level apps are written in java.
Actually most non-native speakers don't consider 'gimp' as a word to be something odd. They mostly know it as a name of a program and the meaning you mention is not known to them (becouse there is lots of more important words to learn first).
;).
You also don't care about a foreign names of programs, you just get used to it
MS Office in crossover starts faster than native OpenOffice.org (1.1). What kind of MSO you refer to in case of AbiWord?
I guess it might be of overwhelming number of shared libraries OO loads...
Actually I scan both film and positives. Though there is much more visible impact when working with film (film scanners have tougher job to cover the whole dynamic range) it also helps to do so for positives becouse the scanner hw is a) not that good to scan deep shadows or very light surfaces well b) the scan nearly always has shifted color -- to undo that effect you have to have greater than 8bpp depth or it is clearly visible that you manipulated the scan.
Yeah, fine, nice features but I wonder why there is nearly no interest in supporting more than 8bits per color. There is a lot of digital cameras out there, I scan my photos in 48bit mode. It's pretty annoying to to the basic color adjustments in (unstable and ugly) cinepaint which I have to restart after each load/save to avoid a crash and then to continue editing the image in gimp2. If more features are added it will be even harder to make everything properly work in a greater color depth.
Another thing that I miss for a long time is 'macro recording' similar to MS Office or Photoshop actions. Why do I have to write some weird script-fu skeletons and look up for functions and their parameters? It would be much easier if I could record my actions and then to parametrize them some way...
I asked about this at mailing list but the replies were a bit vague about those topics (or even angry)...
However, it should be masculine becouse it has origin in Czech language (a great writer, Karel Capek created it for RUR) despite in Czech many words are gender neutral.
hmm... i looked at it. There is no real documentation, for instance. They say that J2EE is supported but the link forwards you to PHP...hmmm. Okay, I know PHP so I looked at the basic concepts in the tutorial for the old PHP version of fusebox (membership required, doh!). I haven't see much new, sorry. To me it seems clearly inferior to, for example, Struts.
I thought that only on MIT a developement of an arbitrary program ends when it is also capable reading email...
You simply can't have both. There is always a compromise between a powerful and a simple interface.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...oh wait!
Have you followed the link in the article? I have no idea who would want to pay $5 for a set of tools capable generating a specified interval, summing up a sequence of numbers or taking random of those...
Though, it may be useful to have those for shell scripting.
This was ask.slashdot.org. Who would expect a Spanish inqusition?
It's worth noting that the sound infrasturcture changed from OSS, to primerly ALSA. OSS is still in, but marked DEPRECATED, so at some point over 2.6, you aught to expect to shift to ALSA sound. It aught to be painless - ALSA supports OSS emulation, so you can phase apps through that.
Hmmm... It sounds like the the bad practices like /dev/audio
cat wow.au >
won't disappear for another period. I was looking forward to default ALSA in 2.6.x but till the programs keep using the old API there is no chance for something better than OSS. Opening raw device, what the hell should it be good for?
Call for new API, better integrated with kernel new abilities. It is a shame that Linux really can't use nearly nothing that modern soundcards provide without many glitches....
Projects like OpenAL don't seem to be evolving and things like artsd, esd and whateverd don't do any good...
You need a special permission (which you have to pay, of course) by the original owner to make a translation. Once you have finished it you own copyrights to that translation. Anyone else can ask the original author for permission for translation again but he cannot just use the old translation as a skeleton since it is covered by a new copyright (owned by the original translator).
This is not exact (money sharing is mostly the most tricky part) but shows the concept.
The czech translation has been made by some impatient pubescents. They even didn't know that a translation was covered by a copyright law. But, as always, unawareness is not a justification.
BTW there have been some voices that such a delay before the translation hits the market increases a possibility of such an accident. The copyright owner hadn't given the permission (and the actual text) to begin the translation at the time the book was printed (although it is a routine to do so).