Brother printers typically work ok with Linux. I just finally retired my HL-630 and replaced it with a HP LaserJet 4M+. The Brother printer served me faithfully for about 5 years. Not bad considering I originally bought it for $15 at a Salvation Army Thrift Shop. I replaced the drum and it worked perfectly. Just this winter the drum failed again and rather than replacing it I upgraded to PostScript with the industrial quality HP printer.
For the first type, any pretty reasonably recent distro will work. The two main package formats are RPM and DEB. RPM used to be it for the most part, but these days you can usually find a DEB if there is an RPM to be had.
RPM's do somewhat of a "dirty" install in that they often put files in non-standard locations and they have dependency issues. DEB packages don't really have any major flaws except perhaps that they are considerably more difficult to create properly than RPM's. Debian based distros also have the "alien" tool which can install an RPM, but their native package is the DEB. So my thought is that Debian based distros give you the best of both worlds here.
Source based packages are another matter. You need a system with a very strong compiler toolchain if you want to build beta versions of games with reasonable ease. Obviously source based distros like Gentoo and Slackware hold the high cards here, but Debian runs a close second because its toolchain is also very high quality. Gentoo is pretty nice for a lot of source based games, because chances are there is a Gentoo ebuild prepared and all you have to do is emerge the package. For Debian systems, its a bit more complicated because you have to install whatever development packages are required, but often the ones provided by Debian are not recent enough to compile the software. This is where things get ugly for Debian based systems. For Gentoo, often you can "unmask" a package and install a beta version of a developer library without much hassle.
Overall, I still would probably say that Debian unstable and its derivatives are the best choice for most gamers. You can quickly and easily install a humongous number of precompiled games, and getting the odd source based game to build isn't really a big deal unless its bleeding edge new. Debian's new installer is much improved over older variants making it not too hard for a novice to get a Debian system up and running.
Gentoo, however, is probably preferable for game developers and advanced users. It too has a considerable number of game ebuilds making installation of the more common Linux games quite painless. If you are the type who likes to play around a lot with Sourceforge CVS versions of games, then Gentoo (and similar) is probably more what you want.
In summary,
Debian: loaded with good games that are fast and easy to install. Source builds are slightly more difficult but not overly so. In a couple hours you can have a fresh install with literally hundreds of games. A great choice for anybody.
Gentoo: perfect for the game developer or advanced Linuxer's who want to play around with source code. Most popular games are available as ebuilds for painless compilation/emerging. More geared towards experienced people who will accept a leaner system and those who are trying to wring every last cycle out of their processor, or for those more interested in the nuts and bolts.
Personally, I run Gentoo on my own system, but for the wife's or kid's computers, Debian is a faster install with more games and more bells and whistles. I'd recommend starting with Debian (and derivatives) if you are pretty new to Linux. Gentoo is pretty cool but you should probably cut your Linux teeth on something with a flatter learning curve. The idea is to have fun and play some games.
Like everything else with the Hurd, it'll come in time. I'd do something with it, but I don't have a clue as how I'd write a device driver, much less an interface for one.
Likewise. I'm in kind of a strange position as I am keenly interested in stuff like this, yet this really isn't my personal genre.
The L4/Hurd guys are talking about "Deva" which is their vaporous specification for a driver interface. Since Hurd's drivers are all userland, this specification which nobody is working on is probably one of the most important things in the development of computer science right now. Hell, I should go back to university and take some classes so I could work on it. Talk about making history.
Slashdotters constantly bitch and moan about how slow Hurd's progress has been, but all they have to do is send in a patch or write a doc or something. I personally ported GNU Pth to Hurd some years back making me (in my mind) one of the first people to ever compile and run a pthread app on Hurd (slooooowww). Hehe, but I did make pseudo-history in the world of computer science because of that stupid couple days I spend fiddling around with autoconf.
L4/Hurd development is total anarchy. Work on whatever you feel like and send in patches. You don't have to "join GNU" or any such nonsense. In fact I have never ever seen RMS post to any Hurd developer list ever. He's more likely to post here.
Slashdotters seem to think that Hurd is RMS's little empire, but in fact he has about nothing to to with it. Marcus Brinkman right now is probably the unofficial leader of Hurd just because he has personally written most of the really hardcore stuff.
This arch is still a baby and this would be a great time for L4/Hurd to latch onto this processor. There is already a L4 PowerPC/64 port in some kind of development stage, and the very first platform is likely to be a PS/3 with somewhat fixed hardware specs. Marcus et. al. were discussing today something and they mentioned that there is nobody working on the driver interface for L4/Hurd yet.
Hurd might be an interesting candidate for running on Cell because of the highly threaded design. Hurd servers might be able to swap in and out of cells as they require cycles. It seems a good match; i.e. L4 runs in the main core, and various translators and other processes run on the cells. If a cell could be programmed to run the filesystem, for instance, it would totally free up the core for other business.
Because the PS/3 will have a highly fixed hardware set, implementing a minimal driver set might be feasible given enough reverse-engineering effort.
I'm not saying that L4/Hurd will kick the nuts off of Linux on an Opteron, I'm just noting that it might be pretty cool to experiment with Hurd on Cell technology. The L4/Hurd team is real close to getting the last peices in place to compile Mach based Hurd under L4, and if you ever tried Debian GNU/Hurd, you know its pretty near feature-complete and a pretty neat system to run. The next task for L4/Hurd is a driver infrastructure, and it might be wise to look at what Cell is bringing to the table before it gets too far along. Know what I mean.
I just installed Debian Sarge with the full-blown Gnome desktop and Nautilus on a Pentium-100 with 98M and an old Voodoo3. Good computer for the kids. It's pretty slow but still usable. I'll probably ditch Nautilus and put something more lightweight on it eventually, but it does work reasonably well considering what its running on.
The new Debian installer is pretty amazing, by the way. I made 3 floppies and booted it up. It didn't detect the 3c509B, but as soon as I picked it from the list the installer took off like a rocket sled. It immediately connected to its server and started slurping up the base files. It was the easiest Debian install I ever did.
You're right on the name. The FSF should have gone for alix, just for the coolness factor. Just compare "Hey, I run linux, you? Alix myself" with "Hey, I run linux, you? Hurd myself". Just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Well, if you want to be trendy, then you just call it "NewOS" or "New" as a play on GNU's "guh-nu". Compare:
This computer runs the "guh-nu" hurd.
This computer runs the "New" operating system.
Obviously, one uses "New" to impress the layman, while reserving "guh-nu hurd" for the elite inner circle of fellow computer nerds, where speaking it out aloud is sure to provide much amusement.
Wow, something I wrote actually trickled back into/. Amazing. I was just joking about Python, of course.
L4-Hurd is pretty nifty, I think. Of course I run Gentoo and whatnot personally for the usability aspects, but I've been following the L4-Hurd port for a while now and this is an amazing little bit of news.
I can't wait to start experimenting with the new features. This is really cool.
Here's a coral cache link to the HurdOnL4 Wiki page which I set up last summer. It's slightly out of date, but provides a lot of background behind whats going on and some basic information about the build and boot process.
When you retrieve the CVS sources, read the README and all the docs because they contain the most up-to-date information available about building the system.
I was jamming away when my sound suddenly fizzled and a terrible smelling cloud of smoke wafted up out of the back of it. I flipped it off and looked inside. Large, very fried cockroach on top of the main circuit board.
I de-bugged the amp, but it refused to work anymore. I took it to the local shop and they worked on it. When it came back, it worked for a while then died again, this time for good. Now all that is left are two Black Widow speakers and six 6L6 Groove Tubes in matched pairs.
Those tubes cost $50 each and that was over ten years ago. Last I heard they really haven't made many new tubes lately. I'd recommend selling them off a couple at a time on Ebay over a period of time.
I'm an unemployed mechanical engineer and my entire family has been completely without health care for almost a year now. This includes two kids and my wife as well as myself. Even when I was working I could only afford the cheapest package. I'm now in the process of applying for welfare health care so that the kids can go to the doctor. In fact for most of my adult life, I have been without basic health care. To me the Canadian system sounds pretty nice.
AFAIK, this is my original (and probably patentable) idea inspired by this posting. Since I lack the cash to pursue the patent, I'll donate my great idea for the greater benefit of all mankind. If anybody thinks this is worthwhile, and knows how to patent it in the public interest, so that open source types can use it, then be my guest.
Replace the mousewheel with a small trackball. This then would provide universal scrolling along 2 axes. You could use this for all kinds of gaming stuff also, and it would be great for something like this 3D environment. And best of all, backwards compatible with wheel mice.
Well, in classic Trek, they just talked to the computer for mundane commands. Spock had this tablet looking thing with a stylus occasionally. Large banks of blinking lights seemed ubiquitous and perhaps they could interpret them As Seen in the Matrix(tm).
The old Trikorder's seemed pretty cool, some kind of PDA on steriods and apparently kitted out with a variety of sensors such that it could record vast amounts of scientific data, audio, video, and who knows what else it did.
Later Trek's seemed to show you more of a touchscreen type display using something akin to LCARS. It's probably just Debian or Gentoo, however many years down the road.
Alien computers always seem to be either panels covered with glowing glyphs which one presses, or else large clusters of crystals which one waves one's hand over. Alien glyphs don't sound very user-friendly, but the crystal thing doesn't sound too bad. The crystal type devices usually involve holograph projectors also, which is definately a desirable feature.
The Borg's are presumably "jacked in" all the time, and you can see what happened to them, so make what you will of it.
There has been a lot of heresay about Solaris being technically superior to Linux, and in some cases this is warranted, but for the most part I would tend to disagree.
Especially if one compares the Solaris system to the GNU system, technically superior might not be as good as flexible and usefull. I admit that I am a command line commando and I like lots of command line switches and options. In my experience, the GNU operating system utilities are the best to be had. Perhaps they don't run fully optimized, but doing exactly what you need at any speed is better than not doing what you need at high performance levels.
Sun's obvious plan here is to use the Solaris Unix kernel and bolster Solaris with more feature-rich GNU-derived utilities. Their open source initiative is their "right" to justly use and incorporate the bulk of GNU into the arms of their Solaris operating system.
It's a good idea for them, and they are acting on it while the iron is hot. Solaris can benefit from all the great GNU software as first-class packages rather than/usr/local slipshod type upgrades.
I would presume that the Solaris UNIX kernel is indeed technically superior to the Linux kernel when running on Sun hardware, but I think that I will continue to run the Linux kernel on my non-Sun machines. I know that if the license is compatible enough, Debian will soon make a Debian GNU/Solaris which boots the Solaris kernel into a Debian userland (on Sun hardware). That seems to be the way of it.
The dynamic duo is pretty tough to beat. Considering the vast amount of available standard modules for Python, and the linkage to OpenGL and SDL provided by PyGame, you can quickly hack out some serious gaming goodness.
Also, Python is arguably a good language to learn programming basics with, and it is also a highly effective tool for advanced programming users also.
Even though Python is not characteristically known for its raw speed performance, this is dramatically offset by the processing power of modern CPU's. Most 2GHz and better processors will run Python well enough that performance simply is not an issue.
PyGame gives you quite a lot of functionality. It effectively provides your main() loop, handles keyboard and mouse events, blits graphics to your canvas, plays music, and a lot more. If you also use the Numeric package then you can do vector processing with pretty decent performance.
I'm using Python and PyGame for my project Space Commander and I'm pretty happy with it so far.
Extra buttons and wheels are undoubtably useful things for shortcuts, but the design principle that everything should be available in a consistent manner without HAVING to use them is great for those of us that don't use them very often.
That is simply preposterous! Everybody knows that its better to have buttons and wheels festooned all over one's gadgets inasmuch as is possible. Luckily with USB gizmos, gamepads, controllers, and multimedia keyboards, you can now far surpass the classic Space Cadet Keyboard in input potential. It is obvious that you are sadly not one of the computer gaming set.
Perhaps all those 1-button Mac mice could be gutted out and converted to computer microphones or something useful?
Take ten pounds of cane sugar, one bottle of blackstrap molasses, and 10-20 pine cones (to taste). Boil them up for a while, then strain out the pine cones as you pour it into a 5 gallon plastic garbage can (unused). Add water to make 5 gallons, and dump in a couple packs of yeast. Cover it up best you can.
After its done working (about 2 weeks), siphon the beer off and put it into bottles. Add about 1/4 teaspoon of sugar per bottle. Cap them up and wait a couple more weeks. Chill and serve.
By using different ingredients, you can make different kinds of beer.
Am I the only one who thinks their master plan involves ppc based desktops & laptops running linux. So they can stick it to both Microsoft and Intel.
I doubt they want to "stick it" to Intel, but Microsoft may be a different story. Few of you probably remember the pre Windows 3.0 days when IBM and Microsoft were collaborating on OS/2. When Microsoft had stolen enough IBM tech to make Windows 3.0 viable, they basically double-crossed IBM and stabbed them in the back. Windows 3.0 and OS/2 Warp were essentially both forks from the original collaborative project. MS slapped together a buggy package and shipped it out the door while quality-conscious IBM waited until OS/2 was ready.
Nothing the matter with PowerPC (or Cell) processors. In fact they would probably run Linux a lot better than the X86 architecture if somebody with IBM's resources put a bit of work into improving LinuxPPC support. The PowerPC architecture is pretty "unixy" to begin with while X86 is a just a ancient architecture with about a million band-aids slapped on over the years.
Since Itanium is sinking rapidly, PowerPC and X86-64 are probably the only real contenders for 64-bit supremacy.
I have no idea what these upcoming Cell processors are going to be like, but IBM has been doing some unusual things since announcing them. I think they are getting ready to drop a Cell processor based Linux bomb on the unsuspecting PC world.
500 patents must be like 0.1% of IBM's patent holdings. This sounds like a PR move more than anything.
Personally, I figure they must want to use stuff covered by these patents for patches to make Linux work better with their hardware. They probably want to add support for AS/400 DASD arrays or who knows what and in order to be able to do so in an open-source manner they have to free up relevent patents or else Linus will reject the patches.
A lot of people here seem to not like IBM, but I have always loved their hardware. Their products are almost invariably very high quality, if somewhat expensive new, but used IBM gear is great stuff. The fact that they are using Linux on their big iron machines just goes to show that they are smart, they are progressive, and that they lead the pack rather than follow it.
QCad is pretty simplistic, but its just a 2D cad program, and its the best open source one that I am aware of. There are a ton of other OS cad systems in development but right now QCad is the only one that is complete enough to be usable for professional purposes.
I would much rather have BRL-CAD, it is a magnitude of order superior to anything else out there, but it is not made for civilian engineers. It is a package whereby you can painstakingly draft in a sophisticated model by brute force entry of coordiates and then run advanced tests using plugins which are probably still classified.
There could be a lot of good from this, however. For instance, several years ago I was trying to design a safety tank for pressure testing of piping networks. The submerged weldments were pressureized, however if the plugs would happen to fail, there was a significant ballistic force involved. How many inches of steel reinforced with concrete would be necessary to stop the plug? Honestly, I never was able to solve the problem, but BRL-CAD can handily solve this type of simulation.
QCad is probably the closest thing to AutoCAD LT that you will find for Linux. It has a nice easy-to-use interface, seems mathematically correct, and is still under active development. Most Linux distros offer it as a binary package; i.e. apt-get install qcad or emerge qcad.
Other currently usable engineering type tools which you may or may not be aware of are:
What needs to happen is these tools should all be made to interact now. Draft your model in BRL-CAD (or Blender), run FEA on it using FElt, and then import views into QCad to dimension and plot out hardcopies. Some nice tight integration between these packages would be great.
I'd just graduated from college and was surfing around trying the various CAD programs for Linux. It compiled easily enough on my old Debian Potato system.
I never really used it for anything though. I ran through the tutorial, drafted the 3-d mug, and that was about it. About that time I picked up a copy of TurboCAD Solid Modeler (for Windows) and TurboCAD has been my home drafting package since.
BRL-CAD probably needs a lot of work on the UI. Functionally, the program is quite sophisticated, but a more mouse-oriented interface would help a lot. That and I don't seem to recall any ability to dimension objects.
Add some button bars, osnaps, dimensioning, and some printing/plotting options and BRL-CAD could be a really nice drafting package for Open Source operating systems. I'd be suprised if the KDE and Gnome people didn't jump all over this.
I have it installed on my system also, although I don't recall booting it anytime recently. It does boot though. It has X, you can compile programs, I think it runs Emacs, it definately runs vi, there might even be a couple games ported to it now. It's a turtle, but definately not vaporware.
I've had 5 OpenGL cards so far in Linux. I was playing Quake2 in GL mode back in 1998 on my Voodoo2 in Debian!
1998 Voodoo2: man was that ever cool, but that was pretty hard to install. You had to compile Mesa from source with the Voodoo2 patch.
1999 Voodoo Banshee: Another painfull install, this was right at the birth of DRI and XFree 4.0. I eventually got it working right nicely.
2000 GeForce2MX: This was a serious upgrade but a pretty easy install. Preformance was awesome.
2002 GeForce4MX: Just an incremental upgrade. All I did was swap the card in and it worked.
2004 GeForce FX5900: A serious upgrade which runs anything I throw at it. Switched to Gentoo with no major issues.
I've truly experienced the entire development of OpenGL acceleration in Linux. I went from cute software rendered Mesa in a window the size of a matchbook, to something that probably gives SGI workstations a run for the money. You should have seen my big shit-eating grin the first time I got glQuake running on that Voodoo2 in Linux:-P
Slashdot Mirror
Brother printers typically work ok with Linux. I just finally retired my HL-630 and replaced it with a HP LaserJet 4M+. The Brother printer served me faithfully for about 5 years. Not bad considering I originally bought it for $15 at a Salvation Army Thrift Shop. I replaced the drum and it worked perfectly. Just this winter the drum failed again and rather than replacing it I upgraded to PostScript with the industrial quality HP printer.
- Binary Packaged Games
- Source Packaged Games
For the first type, any pretty reasonably recent distro will work. The two main package formats are RPM and DEB. RPM used to be it for the most part, but these days you can usually find a DEB if there is an RPM to be had.RPM's do somewhat of a "dirty" install in that they often put files in non-standard locations and they have dependency issues. DEB packages don't really have any major flaws except perhaps that they are considerably more difficult to create properly than RPM's. Debian based distros also have the "alien" tool which can install an RPM, but their native package is the DEB. So my thought is that Debian based distros give you the best of both worlds here.
Source based packages are another matter. You need a system with a very strong compiler toolchain if you want to build beta versions of games with reasonable ease. Obviously source based distros like Gentoo and Slackware hold the high cards here, but Debian runs a close second because its toolchain is also very high quality. Gentoo is pretty nice for a lot of source based games, because chances are there is a Gentoo ebuild prepared and all you have to do is emerge the package. For Debian systems, its a bit more complicated because you have to install whatever development packages are required, but often the ones provided by Debian are not recent enough to compile the software. This is where things get ugly for Debian based systems. For Gentoo, often you can "unmask" a package and install a beta version of a developer library without much hassle.
Overall, I still would probably say that Debian unstable and its derivatives are the best choice for most gamers. You can quickly and easily install a humongous number of precompiled games, and getting the odd source based game to build isn't really a big deal unless its bleeding edge new. Debian's new installer is much improved over older variants making it not too hard for a novice to get a Debian system up and running.
Gentoo, however, is probably preferable for game developers and advanced users. It too has a considerable number of game ebuilds making installation of the more common Linux games quite painless. If you are the type who likes to play around a lot with Sourceforge CVS versions of games, then Gentoo (and similar) is probably more what you want.
In summary,
Personally, I run Gentoo on my own system, but for the wife's or kid's computers, Debian is a faster install with more games and more bells and whistles. I'd recommend starting with Debian (and derivatives) if you are pretty new to Linux. Gentoo is pretty cool but you should probably cut your Linux teeth on something with a flatter learning curve. The idea is to have fun and play some games.
The L4/Hurd guys are talking about "Deva" which is their vaporous specification for a driver interface. Since Hurd's drivers are all userland, this specification which nobody is working on is probably one of the most important things in the development of computer science right now. Hell, I should go back to university and take some classes so I could work on it. Talk about making history.
Slashdotters constantly bitch and moan about how slow Hurd's progress has been, but all they have to do is send in a patch or write a doc or something. I personally ported GNU Pth to Hurd some years back making me (in my mind) one of the first people to ever compile and run a pthread app on Hurd (slooooowww). Hehe, but I did make pseudo-history in the world of computer science because of that stupid couple days I spend fiddling around with autoconf.
L4/Hurd development is total anarchy. Work on whatever you feel like and send in patches. You don't have to "join GNU" or any such nonsense. In fact I have never ever seen RMS post to any Hurd developer list ever. He's more likely to post here.
Slashdotters seem to think that Hurd is RMS's little empire, but in fact he has about nothing to to with it. Marcus Brinkman right now is probably the unofficial leader of Hurd just because he has personally written most of the really hardcore stuff.
Hurd might be an interesting candidate for running on Cell because of the highly threaded design. Hurd servers might be able to swap in and out of cells as they require cycles. It seems a good match; i.e. L4 runs in the main core, and various translators and other processes run on the cells. If a cell could be programmed to run the filesystem, for instance, it would totally free up the core for other business.
Because the PS/3 will have a highly fixed hardware set, implementing a minimal driver set might be feasible given enough reverse-engineering effort.
I'm not saying that L4/Hurd will kick the nuts off of Linux on an Opteron, I'm just noting that it might be pretty cool to experiment with Hurd on Cell technology. The L4/Hurd team is real close to getting the last peices in place to compile Mach based Hurd under L4, and if you ever tried Debian GNU/Hurd, you know its pretty near feature-complete and a pretty neat system to run. The next task for L4/Hurd is a driver infrastructure, and it might be wise to look at what Cell is bringing to the table before it gets too far along. Know what I mean.
The new Debian installer is pretty amazing, by the way. I made 3 floppies and booted it up. It didn't detect the 3c509B, but as soon as I picked it from the list the installer took off like a rocket sled. It immediately connected to its server and started slurping up the base files. It was the easiest Debian install I ever did.
- This computer runs the "guh-nu" hurd.
- This computer runs the "New" operating system.
Obviously, one uses "New" to impress the layman, while reserving "guh-nu hurd" for the elite inner circle of fellow computer nerds, where speaking it out aloud is sure to provide much amusement.L4-Hurd is pretty nifty, I think. Of course I run Gentoo and whatnot personally for the usability aspects, but I've been following the L4-Hurd port for a while now and this is an amazing little bit of news.
I can't wait to start experimenting with the new features. This is really cool.
Here's a coral cache link to the HurdOnL4 Wiki page which I set up last summer. It's slightly out of date, but provides a lot of background behind whats going on and some basic information about the build and boot process.
When you retrieve the CVS sources, read the README and all the docs because they contain the most up-to-date information available about building the system.
I de-bugged the amp, but it refused to work anymore. I took it to the local shop and they worked on it. When it came back, it worked for a while then died again, this time for good. Now all that is left are two Black Widow speakers and six 6L6 Groove Tubes in matched pairs.
Those tubes cost $50 each and that was over ten years ago. Last I heard they really haven't made many new tubes lately. I'd recommend selling them off a couple at a time on Ebay over a period of time.
I'm an unemployed mechanical engineer and my entire family has been completely without health care for almost a year now. This includes two kids and my wife as well as myself. Even when I was working I could only afford the cheapest package. I'm now in the process of applying for welfare health care so that the kids can go to the doctor. In fact for most of my adult life, I have been without basic health care. To me the Canadian system sounds pretty nice.
Replace the mousewheel with a small trackball. This then would provide universal scrolling along 2 axes. You could use this for all kinds of gaming stuff also, and it would be great for something like this 3D environment. And best of all, backwards compatible with wheel mice.
The old Trikorder's seemed pretty cool, some kind of PDA on steriods and apparently kitted out with a variety of sensors such that it could record vast amounts of scientific data, audio, video, and who knows what else it did.
Later Trek's seemed to show you more of a touchscreen type display using something akin to LCARS. It's probably just Debian or Gentoo, however many years down the road.
Alien computers always seem to be either panels covered with glowing glyphs which one presses, or else large clusters of crystals which one waves one's hand over. Alien glyphs don't sound very user-friendly, but the crystal thing doesn't sound too bad. The crystal type devices usually involve holograph projectors also, which is definately a desirable feature.
The Borg's are presumably "jacked in" all the time, and you can see what happened to them, so make what you will of it.
Especially if one compares the Solaris system to the GNU system, technically superior might not be as good as flexible and usefull. I admit that I am a command line commando and I like lots of command line switches and options. In my experience, the GNU operating system utilities are the best to be had. Perhaps they don't run fully optimized, but doing exactly what you need at any speed is better than not doing what you need at high performance levels.
Sun's obvious plan here is to use the Solaris Unix kernel and bolster Solaris with more feature-rich GNU-derived utilities. Their open source initiative is their "right" to justly use and incorporate the bulk of GNU into the arms of their Solaris operating system.
It's a good idea for them, and they are acting on it while the iron is hot. Solaris can benefit from all the great GNU software as first-class packages rather than /usr/local slipshod type upgrades.
I would presume that the Solaris UNIX kernel is indeed technically superior to the Linux kernel when running on Sun hardware, but I think that I will continue to run the Linux kernel on my non-Sun machines. I know that if the license is compatible enough, Debian will soon make a Debian GNU/Solaris which boots the Solaris kernel into a Debian userland (on Sun hardware). That seems to be the way of it.
Also, Python is arguably a good language to learn programming basics with, and it is also a highly effective tool for advanced programming users also.
Even though Python is not characteristically known for its raw speed performance, this is dramatically offset by the processing power of modern CPU's. Most 2GHz and better processors will run Python well enough that performance simply is not an issue.
PyGame gives you quite a lot of functionality. It effectively provides your main() loop, handles keyboard and mouse events, blits graphics to your canvas, plays music, and a lot more. If you also use the Numeric package then you can do vector processing with pretty decent performance.
I'm using Python and PyGame for my project Space Commander and I'm pretty happy with it so far.
Perhaps all those 1-button Mac mice could be gutted out and converted to computer microphones or something useful?
After its done working (about 2 weeks), siphon the beer off and put it into bottles. Add about 1/4 teaspoon of sugar per bottle. Cap them up and wait a couple more weeks. Chill and serve.
By using different ingredients, you can make different kinds of beer.
What are these alternatives then?
Nothing the matter with PowerPC (or Cell) processors. In fact they would probably run Linux a lot better than the X86 architecture if somebody with IBM's resources put a bit of work into improving LinuxPPC support. The PowerPC architecture is pretty "unixy" to begin with while X86 is a just a ancient architecture with about a million band-aids slapped on over the years.
Since Itanium is sinking rapidly, PowerPC and X86-64 are probably the only real contenders for 64-bit supremacy.
I have no idea what these upcoming Cell processors are going to be like, but IBM has been doing some unusual things since announcing them. I think they are getting ready to drop a Cell processor based Linux bomb on the unsuspecting PC world.
A lot of people here seem to not like IBM, but I have always loved their hardware. Their products are almost invariably very high quality, if somewhat expensive new, but used IBM gear is great stuff. The fact that they are using Linux on their big iron machines just goes to show that they are smart, they are progressive, and that they lead the pack rather than follow it.
I would much rather have BRL-CAD, it is a magnitude of order superior to anything else out there, but it is not made for civilian engineers. It is a package whereby you can painstakingly draft in a sophisticated model by brute force entry of coordiates and then run advanced tests using plugins which are probably still classified.
There could be a lot of good from this, however. For instance, several years ago I was trying to design a safety tank for pressure testing of piping networks. The submerged weldments were pressureized, however if the plugs would happen to fail, there was a significant ballistic force involved. How many inches of steel reinforced with concrete would be necessary to stop the plug? Honestly, I never was able to solve the problem, but BRL-CAD can handily solve this type of simulation.
QCad
QCad is probably the closest thing to AutoCAD LT that you will find for Linux. It has a nice easy-to-use interface, seems mathematically correct, and is still under active development. Most Linux distros offer it as a binary package; i.e. apt-get install qcad or emerge qcad.
Other currently usable engineering type tools which you may or may not be aware of are:
What needs to happen is these tools should all be made to interact now. Draft your model in BRL-CAD (or Blender), run FEA on it using FElt, and then import views into QCad to dimension and plot out hardcopies. Some nice tight integration between these packages would be great.
I'd just graduated from college and was surfing around trying the various CAD programs for Linux. It compiled easily enough on my old Debian Potato system.
I never really used it for anything though. I ran through the tutorial, drafted the 3-d mug, and that was about it. About that time I picked up a copy of TurboCAD Solid Modeler (for Windows) and TurboCAD has been my home drafting package since.
BRL-CAD probably needs a lot of work on the UI. Functionally, the program is quite sophisticated, but a more mouse-oriented interface would help a lot. That and I don't seem to recall any ability to dimension objects.
Add some button bars, osnaps, dimensioning, and some printing/plotting options and BRL-CAD could be a really nice drafting package for Open Source operating systems. I'd be suprised if the KDE and Gnome people didn't jump all over this.
I have it installed on my system also, although I don't recall booting it anytime recently. It does boot though. It has X, you can compile programs, I think it runs Emacs, it definately runs vi, there might even be a couple games ported to it now. It's a turtle, but definately not vaporware.
What is it about the unlucky version 4? Duke Nukem 4ever -- Elite 4(ever)? Maybe version 4 should be skipped entirely by software developers.
- 1998 Voodoo2: man was that ever cool, but that was pretty hard to install. You had to compile Mesa from source with the Voodoo2 patch.
- 1999 Voodoo Banshee: Another painfull install, this was right at the birth of DRI and XFree 4.0. I eventually got it working right nicely.
- 2000 GeForce2MX: This was a serious upgrade but a pretty easy install. Preformance was awesome.
- 2002 GeForce4MX: Just an incremental upgrade. All I did was swap the card in and it worked.
- 2004 GeForce FX5900: A serious upgrade which runs anything I throw at it. Switched to Gentoo with no major issues.
I've truly experienced the entire development of OpenGL acceleration in Linux. I went from cute software rendered Mesa in a window the size of a matchbook, to something that probably gives SGI workstations a run for the money. You should have seen my big shit-eating grin the first time I got glQuake running on that Voodoo2 in LinuxI'm getting 6475 fps with a NVidia FX5900 in Gentoo using the Gentoo nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx ebuilds. Man those little wheels are just flying.