Just wanted to say thanks to the dev team for this project. Though the systems I roll out to our end users are running GNOME, Windowmaker is still my weapon of choice for the machines that I have to use.
Never fails to confuse the hell out of my students when I hook the laptop up to a projector, either. Heh.
So as soon as this hits Unstable (what's that, 2007 or so?) I'll be happily upgrading.
--saint
Re:$100 PC... and some great old ideas
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Funny, I've got a machine that was designed just that way, right down to the blinking email LED. It's called an Audrey, it was made by 3com, and it failed miserably in the market.
People want a "real" computer for the same reason that they want "upgradable" computers; futureproofing, whether they need it or not.
--saint
Re:For those who don't know ... what is this?
on
Netatalk 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So if I understand the functionality correctly: Netatalk:OSX:: Samba:windows
Sorta. It's more like
Netatalk:Classic Mac OS:: Samba : Windows or OS X
I have a file server at home that runs Samba, Netatalk, and NFS, so I can get to it from anything, but I use Samba to connect to OS X.
Way to miss the point! Also a nice way to avoid discussing the points made in my statement.
As far as I could tell, your "point" was that you have every right to download software and other material that you have no license to, and that people who don't think you do have never been hungry or otherwise materially impoverished.
How exactly you managed to go from an appeal based on hunger for food to one based on the desire to play some silly video game was left as an exercise for the reader. Myself, as the reader, assumed that this was just another childish and pathetic justification for stealing software and so I called you an asshat.
If you do have some sort of actual argument, please, feel free to put it forth.
People who HAVE gone to bed hungry don't see your noble "Do Without" sentiment in the same light. When "Do Without" and "Take It Without Depriving Anyone Else of Anything" are your only options, we'll all be impressed when you chose to impose unnecessary restrictions on yourself.
Yeah, that's why I keep downloading macaroni and cheese off of gnutella.
I've had good luck with Windowmaker -- but then again, maybe that's because I use it for all of my machines running X. The only tool is a hammer, and all that.
Personally, I run three monitors on my work computer (an OS X machine). There's a CRT on the left that has my iTunes list, Stickies, iCal, and other "need to keep an eye on it" sort of stuff. There's a fullscreen iTerm session on the rightmost CRT that has tabs for half a dozen or so SSH sessions. And the middle display is an Apple Studio Display (the retired 15" model) where I do most of my serious, interactive work.
Changing from one monitor to two takes some getting used to, but going from two to three was (aside from some geometrical issues trying to fit everything onto my desk) pretty painless.
I use an Audrey as a front end for my own setup (check out www.audreyhacking.com if you like). All of my CDs come into the house, get ripped on the Mac using iTunes, the mp3s are copied over onto the NFS server by a daily crontab, and they show up in the Audrey playlist.
If your parents are bright enough to put a CD in the drive and click on a "rip" button, something similar might work. And the Audrey is a simple, simple, simple touchscreen interface that even my parents were able to figure out.
We had a couple of IBM salesmen at work last week, and this was one of the cool upcoming features that they were crowing about. Another one was an embedded chip that stores a whole bunch of passwords and other "sensitive" data, sort of like a hardware version of the Keychain that Apple has built into their OSes for years.
For software protection, I run OpenBSD on the only machine accessible through my router.
For physical protection, that OpenBSD box is an elderly PPro that's wedged behind a desk in my attic. On the off chance that someone breaks into my house, I doubt they'll bother moving furniture to steal an old beater machine; since I keep all of my important data on there, I could easily replace everything that's more obvious without too much trouble.
Still no love for the Linux/PPC people, I see. Damn. I would really like to be able to use Sun's JVM on all of my machines, but I'm stuck with IBM's on my old Powerbook.
It seems like most of the married people I know went through almost exactly this sequence during their first year of marriage. All the married guys I know are broke most of the time. The houses they bought (not ONE still lives in an apartment) are all enormous (read "six bedroom colonial on an acre" here) and their mortgages are preposterous (like, 2000/month).
I know anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much, but this is not necessarily what _has_ to happen.
I got married last year, and my wife and I decided that we want to have kids in a few years. More importantly, we decided that one of us will stop working in a few years to raise them. Nothing depresses me more than the idea of some teenager in a daycare center raising my kids.
So when we went to look for a house, we bought one that we could easily afford on just my salary. And it's not like I'm living large or anything; hell, I'm an IT guy at a medium size college. A _Catholic_ college at that, and you know they aren't throwing money around.
Bills can be managed. Easily. It's just that most people want to have the fruits of a lifetime's labor by their 25th birthday.
Ideally maybe something like a downloadable floppy image I can get to my FC2 machine, then use that via sneakernet to boot the toshiba and get online with, then finish an install with something linuxy-ish and useful beyond a firewall.
Try NetBSD or OpenBSD. Either one can do a network install from a floppy boot, if you've got an Ethernet card in that old Satellite, and they rock on low-spec machines.
Woz, some might say, was the conscience of Apple. He shared his idea and knowledge openly. He is the antithesis of Jobs, who is reserved and secretive.
Woz was one of the keynote speakers at HOPE 5 this year, and I drove to New York City just to see him speak. I think the best line he dropped in his keynote was "Everything cool I made, eventually Steve [Jobs] would say `let's sell it!'".,
This is on a Powerbook running Debian... I don't know if the swf-player has been packaged up for YDL, but it works okay here. It doesn't do anything real fancy (like homestarrunner, for example) but it can handle older, basic Flash pages with no real problem.
--saint
(Junk characters? What the fuck. Nice code, Taco, way to keep the trolls at bay. Typing to get around the goddamned poorly written lameness filter.)
(Hmm. Still won't let me past. You know, this place is turning to a cesspool of GNAA posts and taco-snotting references, and I can't copy and paste a command line into a message without the rickety backend of this overhyped site having a seizure. How horrid. Let's see if I can post this yet.)
(Still not working. Let's take some of the junk characters out of the command line that I pasted in and see if that helps.)
(Yeah, that did it. Of course, I had to delete half my actual post, but at least I'm past the Royal Filter. Go fuck yourself, Taco.)
If you can still install Fedora on a circa-1994 Pentium, you should be able to put YDL on a G3 from 1998.
I think the biggest concern is that the Old and New World Powermacs use different boot loaders, and Terrasoft doesn't want to get involved with that.
Not that I can say I blame them. On the Old World machines, you have to either use BootX (which boots Linux from inside of Mac OS, once the latter has fully loaded into memory... what a pain) or Quik (which, from some of the threads I see on debian-powerpc, seems to be a little problematic.)
I doubt it's a matter of functionality, just a matter of support. Although I do find it funny that Debian supports Old and New World Powermacs, and even 680x0 based Macs, and doesn't seem to get any props for it. Oh, well.
These laptops run 8.6 to 9.2.2 and X VERY WELL - they also run Linux PPC and YellowDog well.
If by "Linux PPC" you mean the old distro that hasn't been updated since the end of 2000, I dispute that claim. NOTHING runs that distro well. What a piece of shit that was.
(I don't normally bash distros -- hell, use whatever you want -- but that was the shadiest piece of software I've ever experienced. I started on NetBSD, and tried to move to Linux running LinuxPPC Q42000 on a Motorola Starmax. I don't know if it was because it was a clone, or because it was an OldWorld Mac, or what, but LinuxPPC was so bad it scared me away from using Linux at all until late last year.)
I use a Powerbook G3 "Pismo" running Debian as my main computer these days, and I couldn't be happier with it. Not only is everything supported, including sleep mode and wireless networking, but it has two battery bays for a total of eight or nine hours of life under normal usage.
Earlier this year, when I flew to San Fran for WWDC, I was able to use the laptop all the way from Buffalo to Cincinnati to San Francisco for writing code, reading docs, and listening to mp3s, and still landed with 50% left on one of the batteries.
The downside, of course, is that an older laptop doesn't have nearly as much processing power as a new one; but for me, it's worth the sacrifice.
Another model I saw that looked interesting was a VIA Nehemiah based model with JDS that was being demoed at JavaOne -- I don't remember who made it, it might have actually been Tadpole, but I would imagine that the battery life on those would be pretty good. The keyboard was too small for my Ogrish Hands (tm), but it seemed like it would be okay for someone more human-sized.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wanted to say thanks to the dev team for this project. Though the systems I roll out to our end users are running GNOME, Windowmaker is still my weapon of choice for the machines that I have to use.
Never fails to confuse the hell out of my students when I hook the laptop up to a projector, either. Heh.
So as soon as this hits Unstable (what's that, 2007 or so?) I'll be happily upgrading.
--saint
Funny, I've got a machine that was designed just that way, right down to the blinking email LED. It's called an Audrey, it was made by 3com, and it failed miserably in the market.
People want a "real" computer for the same reason that they want "upgradable" computers; futureproofing, whether they need it or not.
--saint
So if I understand the functionality correctly: Netatalk:OSX :: Samba:windows
:: Samba : Windows or OS X
Sorta. It's more like
Netatalk:Classic Mac OS
I have a file server at home that runs Samba, Netatalk, and NFS, so I can get to it from anything, but I use Samba to connect to OS X.
--saint
Way to miss the point! Also a nice way to avoid discussing the points made in my statement.
As far as I could tell, your "point" was that you have every right to download software and other material that you have no license to, and that people who don't think you do have never been hungry or otherwise materially impoverished.
How exactly you managed to go from an appeal based on hunger for food to one based on the desire to play some silly video game was left as an exercise for the reader. Myself, as the reader, assumed that this was just another childish and pathetic justification for stealing software and so I called you an asshat.
If you do have some sort of actual argument, please, feel free to put it forth.
--saint
People who HAVE gone to bed hungry don't see your noble "Do Without" sentiment in the same light. When "Do Without" and "Take It Without Depriving Anyone Else of Anything" are your only options, we'll all be impressed when you chose to impose unnecessary restrictions on yourself.
Yeah, that's why I keep downloading macaroni and cheese off of gnutella.
Asshat.
--saint
Those who don't like the whiteness
I doubt that. Most of the U2 fans I know are incredibly white. Hell, you practically need special glasses to see them.
--saint
I've had good luck with Windowmaker -- but then again, maybe that's because I use it for all of my machines running X. The only tool is a hammer, and all that.
--saint
Personally, I run three monitors on my work computer (an OS X machine). There's a CRT on the left that has my iTunes list, Stickies, iCal, and other "need to keep an eye on it" sort of stuff. There's a fullscreen iTerm session on the rightmost CRT that has tabs for half a dozen or so SSH sessions. And the middle display is an Apple Studio Display (the retired 15" model) where I do most of my serious, interactive work.
Changing from one monitor to two takes some getting used to, but going from two to three was (aside from some geometrical issues trying to fit everything onto my desk) pretty painless.
Just another data point.
--saint
I use an Audrey as a front end for my own setup (check out www.audreyhacking.com if you like). All of my CDs come into the house, get ripped on the Mac using iTunes, the mp3s are copied over onto the NFS server by a daily crontab, and they show up in the Audrey playlist.
If your parents are bright enough to put a CD in the drive and click on a "rip" button, something similar might work. And the Audrey is a simple, simple, simple touchscreen interface that even my parents were able to figure out.
--saint
Probably not.
We had a couple of IBM salesmen at work last week, and this was one of the cool upcoming features that they were crowing about. Another one was an embedded chip that stores a whole bunch of passwords and other "sensitive" data, sort of like a hardware version of the Keychain that Apple has built into their OSes for years.
Also Windows only.
Dammit.
--saint
For software protection, I run OpenBSD on the only machine accessible through my router.
For physical protection, that OpenBSD box is an elderly PPro that's wedged behind a desk in my attic. On the off chance that someone breaks into my house, I doubt they'll bother moving furniture to steal an old beater machine; since I keep all of my important data on there, I could easily replace everything that's more obvious without too much trouble.
--saint
Still no love for the Linux/PPC people, I see. Damn. I would really like to be able to use Sun's JVM on all of my machines, but I'm stuck with IBM's on my old Powerbook.
--saint
It seems like most of the married people I know went through almost exactly this sequence during their first year of marriage. All the married guys I know are broke most of the time. The houses they bought (not ONE still lives in an apartment) are all enormous (read "six bedroom colonial on an acre" here) and their mortgages are preposterous (like, 2000/month).
I know anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much, but this is not necessarily what _has_ to happen.
I got married last year, and my wife and I decided that we want to have kids in a few years. More importantly, we decided that one of us will stop working in a few years to raise them. Nothing depresses me more than the idea of some teenager in a daycare center raising my kids.
So when we went to look for a house, we bought one that we could easily afford on just my salary. And it's not like I'm living large or anything; hell, I'm an IT guy at a medium size college. A _Catholic_ college at that, and you know they aren't throwing money around.
Bills can be managed. Easily. It's just that most people want to have the fruits of a lifetime's labor by their 25th birthday.
--saint
We'd end up with a vast population of illiterate, intellectually stunted morons.
Well, that would certainly be a change.
I'd write more, but Ricki Lake is on.
--saint
Ideally maybe something like a downloadable floppy image I can get to my FC2 machine, then use that via sneakernet to boot the toshiba and get online with, then finish an install with something linuxy-ish and useful beyond a firewall.
Try NetBSD or OpenBSD. Either one can do a network install from a floppy boot, if you've got an Ethernet card in that old Satellite, and they rock on low-spec machines.
--saint
Someone needs to just decide already on an "offical" GUI for unix.
Okay. From now on, everyone else has to use Windowmaker, just like me.
--saint
Nonetheless I can obviously carry on a good paper since I scored 5.5/6 on the essay portion of the GRE.
You might have scored even better if you could avoid using phrases like "carry on a good paper."
[/pedantic assclown]
--saint
Woz, some might say, was the conscience of Apple. He shared his idea and knowledge openly. He is the antithesis of Jobs, who is reserved and secretive.
Woz was one of the keynote speakers at HOPE 5 this year, and I drove to New York City just to see him speak. I think the best line he dropped in his keynote was "Everything cool I made, eventually Steve [Jobs] would say `let's sell it!'".,
--saint
I wish every person that ever complained about the "Start" button used to turn off the machine had to teach a 5-year-old with a mac how to eject a cd.
Hit the eject key on the keyboard?
Drag the CD icon to the big eject icon on the Dock?
Oh, sorry -- I thought I was allowed to debunk old, no longer applicable UI complaints as well. Hey, have fun.
--saint
We're having a problem with theft right now. Many things aren't locked down
This may be because you drilled out all the locks and cut all the cables.
Heh.
--saint
My biggest complaint about linux on PPC is there is absolutely no flash plugin available.
dpkg --get-selections | grep -i swf
libswfdec0
swf-player
This is on a Powerbook running Debian... I don't know if the swf-player has been packaged up for YDL, but it works okay here. It doesn't do anything real fancy (like homestarrunner, for example) but it can handle older, basic Flash pages with no real problem.
--saint
(Junk characters? What the fuck. Nice code, Taco, way to keep the trolls at bay. Typing to get around the goddamned poorly written lameness filter.)
(Hmm. Still won't let me past. You know, this place is turning to a cesspool of GNAA posts and taco-snotting references, and I can't copy and paste a command line into a message without the rickety backend of this overhyped site having a seizure. How horrid. Let's see if I can post this yet.)
(Still not working. Let's take some of the junk characters out of the command line that I pasted in and see if that helps.)
(Yeah, that did it. Of course, I had to delete half my actual post, but at least I'm past the Royal Filter. Go fuck yourself, Taco.)
If you can still install Fedora on a circa-1994 Pentium, you should be able to put YDL on a G3 from 1998.
I think the biggest concern is that the Old and New World Powermacs use different boot loaders, and Terrasoft doesn't want to get involved with that.
Not that I can say I blame them. On the Old World machines, you have to either use BootX (which boots Linux from inside of Mac OS, once the latter has fully loaded into memory... what a pain) or Quik (which, from some of the threads I see on debian-powerpc, seems to be a little problematic.)
I doubt it's a matter of functionality, just a matter of support. Although I do find it funny that Debian supports Old and New World Powermacs, and even 680x0 based Macs, and doesn't seem to get any props for it. Oh, well.
--saint
These laptops run 8.6 to 9.2.2 and X VERY WELL - they also run Linux PPC and YellowDog well.
If by "Linux PPC" you mean the old distro that hasn't been updated since the end of 2000, I dispute that claim. NOTHING runs that distro well. What a piece of shit that was.
(I don't normally bash distros -- hell, use whatever you want -- but that was the shadiest piece of software I've ever experienced. I started on NetBSD, and tried to move to Linux running LinuxPPC Q42000 on a Motorola Starmax. I don't know if it was because it was a clone, or because it was an OldWorld Mac, or what, but LinuxPPC was so bad it scared me away from using Linux at all until late last year.)
--saint
I use a Powerbook G3 "Pismo" running Debian as my main computer these days, and I couldn't be happier with it. Not only is everything supported, including sleep mode and wireless networking, but it has two battery bays for a total of eight or nine hours of life under normal usage.
Earlier this year, when I flew to San Fran for WWDC, I was able to use the laptop all the way from Buffalo to Cincinnati to San Francisco for writing code, reading docs, and listening to mp3s, and still landed with 50% left on one of the batteries.
The downside, of course, is that an older laptop doesn't have nearly as much processing power as a new one; but for me, it's worth the sacrifice.
Another model I saw that looked interesting was a VIA Nehemiah based model with JDS that was being demoed at JavaOne -- I don't remember who made it, it might have actually been Tadpole, but I would imagine that the battery life on those would be pretty good. The keyboard was too small for my Ogrish Hands (tm), but it seemed like it would be okay for someone more human-sized.
--saint
Out of all the iapps apple has put out, I really find iphoto to be the worst program apple has came out with
I'd have to say that iCal takes that throne. What a godawful interface that thing has.
--saint