I did have another thought about this; base it on damn small linux. It's a 50M bootable CD image which probably includes xscreensaver already.
That gives you a nice GUI and some basic toolkits for doing menus (I think it includes python, etc), leaves 600+M for images, and it designed to run from a read-only filesystem, so you don't need to worry about shutting down cleanly.
If you're serious about this hire a comp-sci student during the holidays, they can probably throw the thing together in a couple of days.
Yes, the sun is pretty stable here. Is rises in the east and sets in the west. In summer it travels almost directly overhead, in winter it arcs to the north.
If I had aimed my weathercam to the south, I would never have had a problem.
Take any one of the single floppy rescue bootdisks.
Add a copy of "zgv" (statically compiled, or you'll need to include vgalib and jpeglib)
Write a script that launches zgv with the appropriate parameters. Once you know it works, reinstall lilo so that your script gets run as init.
Total footprint will be perhaps two meg. Make an 'installer' for Linux or windows that dumps this at the start of a bootable CD and then lets the user fill the rest with pictures?
If you really have to have the fancy screen-merges and stuff, you can make up a system with JUST the linux kernel, XFree86, xscreensaver, and the very few libs that these depend on, basically the same way.
If you're ever setting up a webcam outside, position it so that the sun is always behind it, not shining directly into the camera for two or three hours every afternoon.
I learned this the hard way; my weathercam has exactly the same pattern of smokey lines across the sky now too..
And before all the Linux zealots jump in and say "Use Linux"
I use Linux as my main desktop, have for years..
I once made the misake of installing RealPlayer using Real's binary installer, which has to be run as root. And just like in Windows it messes file associations, so that *every* media type gets played by realplayer. It messes with mozilla's plugin and helper application settings so that every media and swf link gets opened in realplayer. It has the same 'cookies' and 'media partners' checkboxes (scroll down, they're below the deceptively uncheched first four options), asks for my email address during the install, I assume it phones home (via http) the same as in windows.In short, it's the same spyware-ridden crap no matter what you install it under.
There's nothing about Linux that inherently stops closed source apps from containing spyware. There IS something inherent about FOSS that stops it; a single pissed-off coder can fork the code and make a spyware-free version which is almost guaranteed to be more popular.
So the solution IMHO is to run FOSS apps wherever possible, even if Windows is still your OS-of-choice. I guess now we need an open-source equivalent of adaware or spybot:)
Well, almost. I can't seem to skip back and forth in my realmedia clips. But then I also have the same problem with some avi's, perhaps I just need to rtfm:)
Marginally offtopic; I tried installing realplayer under Redhat/Gnome a long time back. Somehow, it managed to steal file associations for just about every media type, even things that it was barely capable of playing (swf, etc)
AND it screwed up Mozilla's config too, so even after I sorted out Gnome's associations Mozilla was still trying to launch Real for all the media types Real thought it might like to have a go at.. the whole mess took me HOURS to sort out (and since realplayer has to be installed as root, it had fucked things up SYSTEMWIDE too!)
AAAAAAAAARGH!
NEVER AGAIN. It's shit like this that just pushes me further towards being totally open-source.
(Technically not 100% yet; I have a bunch of win32 codecs and an NVIDIA card still, but I'm getting there:)
I know how my meat was treated prior to becoming a steak; exceptionally well. Lots of good food, gentle handling, followed by a swift, painless, and totally unanticipated death.
And all for the most selfish of reasons. Stressed animals don't make good steak.
And we set up a redhat boot floppy that would install and configure our standard 'client firewall' server with NAT, apache, imap, etc. At the end of the install it would fetch ${MAC}.conf from our server, and set up whatever LAN and user accounts we told it, too. Insert floppy into factory-fresh PC, type "yes" (only because I insisted) and go make a coffee. Fully configured client firewall/server in about 15-20 minutes.
That's not my point; this is not the _standard_ install process that your Windows XP Home or Fedora Core 1 user ever sees.
TV tubes contain enough voltage to kill, so if you're fixing a TV anywhere that there are kids around take three or four bright yellow low-leakage capacitors, wrap the leads around the body in a spiral, and charge them to a couple of hundred volts.
It doesn't matter how many times you say no, some kids just HAVE to go touching things. It won't kill them to pick up one of these. It might well save their lives in the long run..
Under Linux, I would probably have done an absolutely minimal install (kernel, shell, libraries LFS-style) and have it run zgv on a console. No X, no window manager, no libraries or fonts, no kernel modules, no power-management. If you want to make things easy for yourself, start with a 1.44M floppy boot of Linux and add a custom-compiled static zgv. Total footprint of about 3M.
The thing that really amuses me though, is that if I were doing the same project in windows I would have done the same thing this guy suggested. Queue up a slideshow, then copy slideshow.scr into the startup folder.
Why did you automatically expect that this was going to be much harder to do in Linux?
It takes me about the same time to install Windows as Fedora Core 1.
Hoewver, at the end of installing FC1 I have a secure web browser and email, a working firewall, an office suite that's good enough for most small office or home users, powerful image editing software, and a whole bunch of other genuinely useful software.
At the end of installing Windows I have what? A minimal text editor, the same pain program tha was in Windows 3.11, some movie-making sotware, and the world's least secure email and web browser.
The very first thing I need to do is install all the drivers. From CD if I have them, but far too often I've had to sarch them out on the net. Then a critical service pack (100+ meg), a firewall, and a virus scanner. Finally I can start installing real software. Assuming that this is a legitimate install, I then have to call Microsoft and get both Windows and Office activated. Small businesses can't afford to run warez, the fines are huge and the chance of getting caught fairly high. Corporate edition Windows and Office (the one without product activation) is really only an option for corporates. Microsoft don't give it away to just anyone!
The ONLY reason most people think Windows is easy to install is because they have NEVER installed it. OEM prepacked 'ghost' recovery images don't count either!
I just spent the last 4 HOURS trying to find and isntall the correct 3d drivers for an SiS620 onboard chipset. It still doesn't work.
Err.. if it wasn't obvious from the rant, I was trying to install them under Win2k. I found the drivers for the exact motherboard from the manufacturers site in.tw but they just don't seem to work.
It's late. I'm tired and frustrated, but for fucks sake will you all get OFF this "Linux is too hard to install" shit. In my far-from-insignificant experience, Windows is much harder to install, expecially if you factor in the manditory service packs, firewall, virus checker, and the fact that a default Windows install comes with absolutely no useful software. It all has to be installed separately, and much of it has to be activated in the case of SOHO users or at the very least requires a lengthy CD code and a manditory reboot.
I just spent the last 4 HOURS trying to find and isntall the correct 3d drivers for an SiS620 onboard chipset. It still doesn't work.
Anyone who says Linux is "too hard to install" has probably NEVER installed any version of Windows.
I've installed or reinstalled every version of Windows from 3.11 to XP, Slackware, Mandrake, Redhat, Fedora, and Debian, on a wide variety of hardware - 486's, Dual CPU PII's, etc. There is no doubt in my mind that on WINDOWS is generally the harder operating system to install, and on average supports less hardware out of the box. Period.
Just remember that you need to ask for a "Terminating Number Search" - If you don't get this exactly right, the telephone company will have no idea how to help you even if you're a cop investigating bomb threats to a school.
I could swear there some article on slasdhdot very recently about how Microsoft got into the WiFi business in 'improve the technology' but recently dropped out.
I guess you could keep all your files (and drivers) on a different partition and reinstall windows without needing to backup first.
Anyhow, I just upgraded from RedHat8 to Debian Sarge. I have two 40G drives for/home and/media which I left unmounted while I did the install. Once I was done I set up/home and/media in fstab, nuked all the.config files (I was running gnome, I've decided I prefer kde) and set it up again how I like. Easy!
Bugger that. If you get a new machine, the very first thing you should do is.
NUKE and PAVE. Properly. Boot KNOPPIX for this one and run 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda' to completely wipe the drive. If you're really paranoid, do it several times.
This will get rid of whatever crap the last used had. Warez, kiddyporn, stolen government documents, whatever. You don't need it.
Once you have the base install sorted out, burn all the drivers your hardware requires onto a CD. Put zonealarm, adaware, spybot, java, flash, acrobat reader, etc on the same CD so you don't have to keep downloading them.. Keep a copy of TheOpenCD handy too, and you'll have most of the decent OSS software right there.
It only takes a few hours to completely reinstall Windows and a bunch of OSS apps, which is all most home users really need. And never mind windows updates; if you're behind a good firewall and not using MS's bundled swisscheeseware (IE/OE/WMP) then you probably don't need them.
If your computer is slowing down or acting weird, run spybot, norton, etc. If that doesn't fix it backup your data to a CD, and NUKE and PAVE.
If it's been a year since you last reinstalled; backup all your data and NUKE and PAVE again. You'll be surprised how much better things run on a fresh install.
Seriously. Why are people so afraid to format and reinstall their damned OS? It's not like it's difficult or anything!!
I'm not sure that sneaking into a small, neutral country at a time when none of the involved parties were at war with anyone, and blowing up the flagship of an organisation that exists to promote peace really counts as a 'military victory'.
In fact given that the ship was fairly old anyhow, Greenpeace got a lot of publicity (perhaps more than the ship was worth), and the agents in question were caught I'm not sure it was really any kind of victory.
Slashdot Mirror
What's most amusing about it; even if it gets to market, it will STILL be 'vaporware' :)
You want me to build this for you?
Am I getting paid?
I did have another thought about this; base it on damn small linux. It's a 50M bootable CD image which probably includes xscreensaver already.
That gives you a nice GUI and some basic toolkits for doing menus (I think it includes python, etc), leaves 600+M for images, and it designed to run from a read-only filesystem, so you don't need to worry about shutting down cleanly.
If you're serious about this hire a comp-sci student during the holidays, they can probably throw the thing together in a couple of days.
You live in a polar region?
Yes, the sun is pretty stable here. Is rises in the east and sets in the west. In summer it travels almost directly overhead, in winter it arcs to the north.
If I had aimed my weathercam to the south, I would never have had a problem.
Take any one of the single floppy rescue bootdisks.
Add a copy of "zgv" (statically compiled, or you'll need to include vgalib and jpeglib)
Write a script that launches zgv with the appropriate parameters. Once you know it works, reinstall lilo so that your script gets run as init.
Total footprint will be perhaps two meg. Make an 'installer' for Linux or windows that dumps this at the start of a bootable CD and then lets the user fill the rest with pictures?
If you really have to have the fancy screen-merges and stuff, you can make up a system with JUST the linux kernel, XFree86, xscreensaver, and the very few libs that these depend on, basically the same way.
If you're ever setting up a webcam outside, position it so that the sun is always behind it, not shining directly into the camera for two or three hours every afternoon.
I learned this the hard way; my weathercam has exactly the same pattern of smokey lines across the sky now too..
Would it be as much fun if slashdot accounts were not 'free as in beer?'
"If you're not part of the solution, your're part of the precipitate" .. the usual non-chemist version is s/precipitate/problem
And before all the Linux zealots jump in and say "Use Linux"
:)
I use Linux as my main desktop, have for years..
I once made the misake of installing RealPlayer using Real's binary installer, which has to be run as root. And just like in Windows it messes file associations, so that *every* media type gets played by realplayer. It messes with mozilla's plugin and helper application settings so that every media and swf link gets opened in realplayer. It has the same 'cookies' and 'media partners' checkboxes (scroll down, they're below the deceptively uncheched first four options), asks for my email address during the install, I assume it phones home (via http) the same as in windows.In short, it's the same spyware-ridden crap no matter what you install it under.
There's nothing about Linux that inherently stops closed source apps from containing spyware. There IS something inherent about FOSS that stops it; a single pissed-off coder can fork the code and make a spyware-free version which is almost guaranteed to be more popular.
So the solution IMHO is to run FOSS apps wherever possible, even if Windows is still your OS-of-choice. I guess now we need an open-source equivalent of adaware or spybot
Well, almost. I can't seem to skip back and forth in my realmedia clips. But then I also have the same problem with some avi's, perhaps I just need to rtfm :)
:)
Marginally offtopic;
I tried installing realplayer under Redhat/Gnome a long time back. Somehow, it managed to steal file associations for just about every media type, even things that it was barely capable of playing (swf, etc)
AND it screwed up Mozilla's config too, so even after I sorted out Gnome's associations Mozilla was still trying to launch Real for all the media types Real thought it might like to have a go at..
the whole mess took me HOURS to sort out (and since realplayer has to be installed as root, it had fucked things up SYSTEMWIDE too!)
AAAAAAAAARGH!
NEVER AGAIN. It's shit like this that just pushes me further towards being totally open-source.
(Technically not 100% yet; I have a bunch of win32 codecs and an NVIDIA card still, but I'm getting there
I know how my meat was treated prior to becoming a steak; exceptionally well. Lots of good food, gentle handling, followed by a swift, painless, and totally unanticipated death.
And all for the most selfish of reasons. Stressed animals don't make good steak.
Us Kiwi's know what fish and chips are..
Auzzies refer to them as "Feesh and Cheeps"
One thing I've always wanted to do, but never got around to doing, is to develop a fairly decent homebrew recipe and release it under the GPL.
Just to totally confuse RMS's "free as in beer" analogy.
And we set up a redhat boot floppy that would install and configure our standard 'client firewall' server with NAT, apache, imap, etc. At the end of the install it would fetch ${MAC}.conf from our server, and set up whatever LAN and user accounts we told it, too. Insert floppy into factory-fresh PC, type "yes" (only because I insisted) and go make a coffee. Fully configured client firewall/server in about 15-20 minutes.
That's not my point; this is not the _standard_ install process that your Windows XP Home or Fedora Core 1 user ever sees.
A handy tip for TV repair..
TV tubes contain enough voltage to kill, so if you're fixing a TV anywhere that there are kids around take three or four bright yellow low-leakage capacitors, wrap the leads around the body in a spiral, and charge them to a couple of hundred volts.
It doesn't matter how many times you say no, some kids just HAVE to go touching things. It won't kill them to pick up one of these. It might well save their lives in the long run..
Under Linux, I would probably have done an absolutely minimal install (kernel, shell, libraries LFS-style) and have it run zgv on a console. No X, no window manager, no libraries or fonts, no kernel modules, no power-management. If you want to make things easy for yourself, start with a 1.44M floppy boot of Linux and add a custom-compiled static zgv. Total footprint of about 3M.
The thing that really amuses me though, is that if I were doing the same project in windows I would have done the same thing this guy suggested. Queue up a slideshow, then copy slideshow.scr into the startup folder.
Why did you automatically expect that this was going to be much harder to do in Linux?
It takes me about the same time to install Windows as Fedora Core 1.
Hoewver, at the end of installing FC1 I have a secure web browser and email, a working firewall, an office suite that's good enough for most small office or home users, powerful image editing software, and a whole bunch of other genuinely useful software.
At the end of installing Windows I have what? A minimal text editor, the same pain program tha was in Windows 3.11, some movie-making sotware, and the world's least secure email and web browser.
The very first thing I need to do is install all the drivers. From CD if I have them, but far too often I've had to sarch them out on the net. Then a critical service pack (100+ meg), a firewall, and a virus scanner. Finally I can start installing real software. Assuming that this is a legitimate install, I then have to call Microsoft and get both Windows and Office activated. Small businesses can't afford to run warez, the fines are huge and the chance of getting caught fairly high. Corporate edition Windows and Office (the one without product activation) is really only an option for corporates. Microsoft don't give it away to just anyone!
The ONLY reason most people think Windows is easy to install is because they have NEVER installed it. OEM prepacked 'ghost' recovery images don't count either!
I just spent the last 4 HOURS trying to find and isntall the correct 3d drivers for an SiS620 onboard chipset. It still doesn't work.
.tw but they just don't seem to work.
Err.. if it wasn't obvious from the rant, I was trying to install them under Win2k. I found the drivers for the exact motherboard from the manufacturers site in
It's late. I'm tired and frustrated, but for fucks sake will you all get OFF this "Linux is too hard to install" shit. In my far-from-insignificant experience, Windows is much harder to install, expecially if you factor in the manditory service packs, firewall, virus checker, and the fact that a default Windows install comes with absolutely no useful software. It all has to be installed separately, and much of it has to be activated in the case of SOHO users or at the very least requires a lengthy CD code and a manditory reboot.
I just spent the last 4 HOURS trying to find and isntall the correct 3d drivers for an SiS620 onboard chipset. It still doesn't work.
Anyone who says Linux is "too hard to install" has probably NEVER installed any version of Windows.
I've installed or reinstalled every version of Windows from 3.11 to XP, Slackware, Mandrake, Redhat, Fedora, and Debian, on a wide variety of hardware - 486's, Dual CPU PII's, etc. There is no doubt in my mind that on WINDOWS is generally the harder operating system to install, and on average supports less hardware out of the box. Period.
Just remember that you need to ask for a "Terminating Number Search" - If you don't get this exactly right, the telephone company will have no idea how to help you even if you're a cop investigating bomb threats to a school.
And if you get caught stealing them, you could always claim it's because of a medical condition; RPM dependancy!
I could swear there some article on slasdhdot very recently about how Microsoft got into the WiFi business in 'improve the technology' but recently dropped out.
Yeah.. thanks for your contribution Microsoft!
I guess you could keep all your files (and drivers) on a different partition and reinstall windows without needing to backup first.
/home and /media which I left unmounted while I did the install. Once I was done I set up /home and /media in fstab, nuked all the .config files (I was running gnome, I've decided I prefer kde) and set it up again how I like. Easy!
Anyhow, I just upgraded from RedHat8 to Debian Sarge. I have two 40G drives for
Sarge kicks ass!
Bugger that. If you get a new machine, the very first thing you should do is.
NUKE and PAVE. Properly. Boot KNOPPIX for this one and run 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda' to completely wipe the drive. If you're really paranoid, do it several times.
This will get rid of whatever crap the last used had. Warez, kiddyporn, stolen government documents, whatever. You don't need it.
Once you have the base install sorted out, burn all the drivers your hardware requires onto a CD. Put zonealarm, adaware, spybot, java, flash, acrobat reader, etc on the same CD so you don't have to keep downloading them.. Keep a copy of TheOpenCD handy too, and you'll have most of the decent OSS software right there.
It only takes a few hours to completely reinstall Windows and a bunch of OSS apps, which is all most home users really need. And never mind windows updates; if you're behind a good firewall and not using MS's bundled swisscheeseware (IE/OE/WMP) then you probably don't need them.
If your computer is slowing down or acting weird, run spybot, norton, etc. If that doesn't fix it backup your data to a CD, and NUKE and PAVE.
If it's been a year since you last reinstalled; backup all your data and NUKE and PAVE again. You'll be surprised how much better things run on a fresh install.
Seriously. Why are people so afraid to format and reinstall their damned OS? It's not like it's difficult or anything!!
We know Heisenberg slept exactly HERE, but we have no idea how fast asleep he was!
I'm not sure that sneaking into a small, neutral country at a time when none of the involved parties were at war with anyone, and blowing up the flagship of an organisation that exists to promote peace really counts as a 'military victory'.
In fact given that the ship was fairly old anyhow, Greenpeace got a lot of publicity (perhaps more than the ship was worth), and the agents in question were caught I'm not sure it was really any kind of victory.