I do this because I don't want to be playing around with CDs when I'm installing or the machine doesn't have a CDROM drive.
You can install Mandrake over the network. I download the CD images to my server and then mount them loopback (and then bind-mount the parts together and make the result available over FTP).
In the./images directory is a network install floppy image for using on the clients and because this uses SYSLINUX to run the kernel, I like to extract it and use PXELINUX instead, so that the network install can be booted over the network.
I'm currently running Mandrake 9.0 as the server for my LTSP thin clients, and a peeve I have at the moment is that KDE's "artsd" sound server wasn't compiled to enable output to the "nas" sound server running on my thin clients. NAS running on the clients should play sounds from the remote applications that are running on the server.
You have to be briefly open minded before you just dismiss things as technically impossible (and then do it).
In this case, I haven't read the article, so I'm wildly speculating, but if you consistently go through the executable replacing groups of instructions with functionally equivalent groups that are the same length then you effectively have an encoded stream of 1's and 0's (or other numbers for more equivalent types). This wouldn't work for self-modifying code, and each instruction has to be the right length also, but you can see how not blindly dismissing it is interesting.
Why the hell does OpenGL, something you're never going to use remotely, require XFree86?
Why not use OpenGL remotely? - it's something I've wondered before: Remote OpenGL apps
On the other point, I think it's good that all the other things that X does over DirectFB are easily just not used on a machine that you don't want displaying graphics any more (init 3, no need to recompile the kernel).
Why do people keep suggesting X is replaced? I'm not sure what sort of problems they have had, but it seems evident that they don't understand the nature of those problems and just blame X.
X abstracts out all of the messy hardware specific stuff that goes into rendering the desktop, providing optimized drivers for the cards and network transparency.
Also I'm guessing that Qtopia is either only accelerated for very specific embedded hardware, or just uses the framebuffer. This used on our desktop PC's would give awful performance, as anyone who has used the framebuffer X server on an unsupported chipset knows (I have a Sun Javastation Krups).
If I have a Cobol shop, a Perl shop, a Smalltalk shop, I can either port my existing code to the.NET implementations of these languages somewhat painlessly OR I can scrap all my existing code
I don't believe it would be that painless to reimplement on the.NET language themes. In just the same way these languages can be used on The Java Platform, i.e. for COBOL, Perl, Smalltalk and lots of other languages.
I might try VS.NET if I can run it on an open platform, but I usually just use Emacs, and I believe that for server-side applications, hardware and software vendor independence are the most important long term considerations.
whereas in Java, there is no reuse at all. You have to _rewrite_ everything.
I've always wanted to say this: Are you on crack?
I won't be yet another poster who points you to the webpage that lists all the different languages that can target the JVM, but I will mention that the standard API contains about 24000 methods and properties.
Also please look at the level of reuse that happens at places like http://jakarta.apache.org. Java seems to lend itself to this, enhancing the increased reuse affect that open source provides.
Well your comment suggests that the community will be expending a large amount of effort to be running Windows applications in the future as they have to at the moment - with Wine, and chasing MS's proprietary (hidden) functionality.
Your earlier comment: we need a.NET implementation for running Windows apps in future - makes it sound like when Mono is ready things will be easier.
Whenever Mono is discussed people claim that the.NET platform is standardized and so the problems that MS currently causes won't exist. I don't think that they've proved themselves as "trustworthy" by any measure.
Actually goatskin would be pretty good as well. I read recently that in the UK parliament, The Queen's Speach which outlines the plans of the government in the next session, is written on a roll of goatskin that should last 7000 years. There is a company here in Britain that is kept in business producing goatskins for just this purpose.
I'm not sure how the goats would feel about you wanting to back up 220GB though...
I've been assuming that the hard part of this is not a simple BBC micro emulation, but effectively emulating the video disc player as well. The BBC micro took input from the user and must have communicated to the video disc machine what image or video content it wanted displayed (overlayed onto the signal from the computer) on the screen.
So to make this usable now you have to read in the content of the video discs and implement the protocol used to communicate between the BBC micro and the video disc drive.
I played with this kit for ages when my mother brought one home from the school she worked at. I was just a small kid at the time but was a budding programmer, so was fascinated when I saw the BBC micro (6502 based with 64 or 128Kb of RAM) do things that I hadn't imagined for it. This was because of the video disc player (which was enormous) must have overlayed its output onto the video signal of the computer.
There were a few relevant video clips, e.g. of the Falklands war, but the most interesting content for me was where they had walked round Brecon (in Wales) and taken photos at various intervals and in about eight directions (and then with zooms of interesting features), so the effect was that the user could explore the place. Interaction was via a mouse as I remember and the display quality was far in advance of what the BBC micro was capable of.
All the sections of the content were navigated around in some sort of virtual art gallery (a bit like someone might make with VRML).
Another useful feature was the extensive maps of the whole of the UK that were easily manipulated/zoomed.
Most of the posts here are assuming that the content was protected in some DRM style way, but I don't think that is true. It seems likely to me that the navigation system for the data was encapsulated in the program, and so emulation or rewriting are the only options.
What do you mean?
The BBC micro was a 6502 based machine that lots of people in the UK bought because the BBC ran a series on how to use one, and it is pictured at the top of the article.
There were a few types, but I have used the BBC's Doomesday Project and it came with a 'Master 128' IIRC.
Currently most Linux graphic card drivers (X servers) do not support hardware-accelerated GLX/OpenGL for remote applications. They do support hardware acceleration for local applications. The effect is that remotely started OpenGL applications are hardly starting at all and are really slow. An exception are the closed source NVidia drivers. They have a direct rendering interface which supports indirect rendering for remote applications.
I use a central server to run my applications and then use X to display them remotely. Is the above excerpt out of date or do any other board manufacturers plan to incorporate the ability to run OpenGL apps from a server?
Let me just see if I understand Slashdot's position on all of this:
You don't. For one more time, XML is *not* a standard format of data. It is just a standard for how the data is laid out, in tags.
The standards are called XML Applications, and so in OpenOffice's case it is good, whereas Microsoft using a closed XML Application (that they don't tell you the definition of) is bad.
While GIFs are bad because they use software patented technology, no such thing exists in PDF.
Unfortunately this just isn't the case. From Adobe's website: Adobe has a number of patents and patents pending, covering technology that is disclosed in the Portable Document Format (PDF) Specification, version 1.3 and later, as documented in PDF Reference and associated technical notes.
For details, see the Patent Clarification Notice.
Adobe automatically license PDF to people who want to create programs that implement the specification. They do this so that they can go after you if you do not implement it "properly".
IBM.
Their JRE is better than Sun's (I'm using Linux). They are an OEM, and happen not to be big fans of Microsoft.
And they love Java, writing utilities in it like VisualAge FJ, and little stuff like their ServeRAID config tool.
Plus they give away what I regard as the best compiler - Jikes.
Disclaimer: Maybe they already bundle their JRE, I've never bought an IBM system.
Alterations to FM556_linux/bin/linuxm.glibc2.i386/maker5X.exe
In khexedit:
002C:04E9 ---> 002C:04ED substitute E8820B0000 with 9090909090
000A:CCEA ---> 000A:CCEE substitute E8513B2100 with E90E000000
Alterations to ~/fminit/licenses
use fmaddlicense with the following command:
add 20-0-44-01-5-01234-13F0D9 (username)
Slashdot Mirror
Why? NAS is a network resource hog.
Well let's see shall we:
for 44.1Khz stereo 16-bit sound the bandwidth usage is 44.1*2*16 = 1411.2 Kbps.
So even if the network packet overhead increases this by 40%, nas will require 2Mbps.
I don't think this will bother the 100Mbps connection much.
I do this because I don't want to be playing around with CDs when I'm installing or the machine doesn't have a CDROM drive.
./images directory is a network install floppy image for using on the clients and because this uses SYSLINUX to run the kernel, I like to extract it and use PXELINUX instead, so that the network install can be booted over the network.
You can install Mandrake over the network. I download the CD images to my server and then mount them loopback (and then bind-mount the parts together and make the result available over FTP).
In the
- Brian
I'm currently running Mandrake 9.0 as the server for my LTSP thin clients, and a peeve I have at the moment is that KDE's "artsd" sound server wasn't compiled to enable output to the "nas" sound server running on my thin clients.
NAS running on the clients should play sounds from the remote applications that are running on the server.
Does anyone know if this has changed in 9.1?
- Brian.
You have to be briefly open minded before you just dismiss things as technically impossible (and then do it).
In this case, I haven't read the article, so I'm wildly speculating, but if you consistently go through the executable replacing groups of instructions with functionally equivalent groups that are the same length then you effectively have an encoded stream of 1's and 0's (or other numbers for more equivalent types).
This wouldn't work for self-modifying code, and each instruction has to be the right length also, but you can see how not blindly dismissing it is interesting.
- Brian.
In England football (soccer) pitches are a common unit of measurement, but heights are either measured in double decker buses or Nelson's columns.
For larger areas than football pitches, Waleses are used.
- Brian.
"Libraries of Congress" are units of data storage.
Why the hell does OpenGL, something you're never going to use remotely, require XFree86?
Why not use OpenGL remotely? - it's something I've wondered before: Remote OpenGL apps
On the other point, I think it's good that all the other things that X does over DirectFB are easily just not used on a machine that you don't want displaying graphics any more (init 3, no need to recompile the kernel).
- Brian.
Why do people keep suggesting X is replaced? I'm not sure what sort of problems they have had, but it seems evident that they don't understand the nature of those problems and just blame X.
X abstracts out all of the messy hardware specific stuff that goes into rendering the desktop, providing optimized drivers for the cards and network transparency.
Also I'm guessing that Qtopia is either only accelerated for very specific embedded hardware, or just uses the framebuffer. This used on our desktop PC's would give awful performance, as anyone who has used the framebuffer X server on an unsupported chipset knows (I have a Sun Javastation Krups).
- Brian.
If I have a Cobol shop, a Perl shop, a Smalltalk shop, I can either port my existing code to the .NET implementations of these languages somewhat painlessly OR I can scrap all my existing code
.NET language themes. In just the same way these languages can be used on The Java Platform, i.e. for COBOL, Perl, Smalltalk and lots of other languages.
I don't believe it would be that painless to reimplement on the
I might try VS.NET if I can run it on an open platform, but I usually just use Emacs, and I believe that for server-side applications, hardware and software vendor independence are the most important long term considerations.
- Brian.
whereas in Java, there is no reuse at all. You have to _rewrite_ everything.
I've always wanted to say this: Are you on crack?
I won't be yet another poster who points you to the webpage that lists all the different languages that can target the JVM, but I will mention that the standard API contains about 24000 methods and properties.
Also please look at the level of reuse that happens at places like http://jakarta.apache.org. Java seems to lend itself to this, enhancing the increased reuse affect that open source provides.
- Brian.
Well your comment suggests that the community will be expending a large amount of effort to be running Windows applications in the future as they have to at the moment - with Wine, and chasing MS's proprietary (hidden) functionality.
.NET implementation for running Windows apps in future
.NET platform is standardized and so the problems that MS currently causes won't exist.
Your earlier comment:
we need a
- makes it sound like when Mono is ready things will be easier.
Whenever Mono is discussed people claim that the
I don't think that they've proved themselves as "trustworthy" by any measure.
Brian.
I think I prefer:
static int well_is_it = -1;
well_is_it = (well_is_it+1) ? well_is_it : (strcmp((char*)glGetString(GL_VENDOR), "NVIDIA Corporation")==0);
return well_is_it;
-Brian.
Actually goatskin would be pretty good as well.
I read recently that in the UK parliament, The Queen's Speach which outlines the plans of the government in the next session, is written on a roll of goatskin that should last 7000 years.
There is a company here in Britain that is kept in business producing goatskins for just this purpose.
I'm not sure how the goats would feel about you wanting to back up 220GB though...
Brian.
I've been assuming that the hard part of this is not a simple BBC micro emulation, but effectively emulating the video disc player as well. The BBC micro took input from the user and must have communicated to the video disc machine what image or video content it wanted displayed (overlayed onto the signal from the computer) on the screen.
So to make this usable now you have to read in the content of the video discs and implement the protocol used to communicate between the BBC micro and the video disc drive.
Brian.
I played with this kit for ages when my mother brought one home from the school she worked at. I was just a small kid at the time but was a budding programmer, so was fascinated when I saw the BBC micro (6502 based with 64 or 128Kb of RAM) do things that I hadn't imagined for it. This was because of the video disc player (which was enormous) must have overlayed its output onto the video signal of the computer.
There were a few relevant video clips, e.g. of the Falklands war, but the most interesting content for me was where they had walked round Brecon (in Wales) and taken photos at various intervals and in about eight directions (and then with zooms of interesting features), so the effect was that the user could explore the place. Interaction was via a mouse as I remember and the display quality was far in advance of what the BBC micro was capable of.
All the sections of the content were navigated around in some sort of virtual art gallery (a bit like someone might make with VRML).
Another useful feature was the extensive maps of the whole of the UK that were easily manipulated/zoomed.
Most of the posts here are assuming that the content was protected in some DRM style way, but I don't think that is true. It seems likely to me that the navigation system for the data was encapsulated in the program, and so emulation or rewriting are the only options.
Brian.
What do you mean?
The BBC micro was a 6502 based machine that lots of people in the UK bought because the BBC ran a series on how to use one, and it is pictured at the top of the article.
There were a few types, but I have used the BBC's Doomesday Project and it came with a 'Master 128' IIRC.
Brian.
From: http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/January2002/arti cle222.shtml#222lfindex3
Currently most Linux graphic card drivers (X servers) do not support hardware-accelerated GLX/OpenGL for remote applications. They do support hardware acceleration for local applications. The effect is that remotely started OpenGL applications are hardly starting at all and are really slow. An exception are the closed source NVidia drivers. They have a direct rendering interface which supports indirect rendering for remote applications.
I use a central server to run my applications and then use X to display them remotely. Is the above excerpt out of date or do any other board manufacturers plan to incorporate the ability to run OpenGL apps from a server?
Brian.
Paul: Why don't you just download me?
Bill: I have no answer for that
Let me just see if I understand Slashdot's position on all of this:
You don't. For one more time, XML is *not* a standard format of data. It is just a standard for how the data is laid out, in tags.
The standards are called XML Applications, and so in OpenOffice's case it is good, whereas Microsoft using a closed XML Application (that they don't tell you the definition of) is bad.
Do you get it now?
Brian.
Version 2.0 of each application added XML-based web services, and distributed database access with rollback
So the demo also shows how to make your applications scalable, making performance even less relevant.
-Brian.
While GIFs are bad because they use software patented technology, no such thing exists in PDF.
Unfortunately this just isn't the case. From Adobe's website:
Adobe has a number of patents and patents pending, covering technology that is disclosed in the Portable Document Format (PDF) Specification, version 1.3 and later, as documented in PDF Reference and associated technical notes. For details, see the Patent Clarification Notice.
Adobe automatically license PDF to people who want to create programs that implement the specification. They do this so that they can go after you if you do not implement it "properly".
Brian.IBM.
Their JRE is better than Sun's (I'm using Linux). They are an OEM, and happen not to be big fans of Microsoft.
And they love Java, writing utilities in it like VisualAge FJ, and little stuff like their ServeRAID config tool.
Plus they give away what I regard as the best compiler - Jikes.
Disclaimer: Maybe they already bundle their JRE, I've never bought an IBM system.
Brian.
Alterations to FM556_linux/bin/linuxm.glibc2.i386/maker5X.exe
In khexedit:
002C:04E9 ---> 002C:04ED substitute E8820B0000 with 9090909090
000A:CCEA ---> 000A:CCEE substitute E8513B2100 with E90E000000
Alterations to ~/fminit/licenses
use fmaddlicense with the following command:
add 20-0-44-01-5-01234-13F0D9 (username)