After reading about certain events in the ongoing DVD scuffle over the past while, we now have something to be happy about.
But...
Etoy simply backed down, rather than have a court rule on it. I was kind of hoping (like many others) that this would set a precendent to avoid this kind of crap in the future.
I hope something like this doesn't happen again, or the accused would be back to square one. Another thing to note is that Etoy fought *hard* to retain their rights, much harder than most people would. I have incredible respect for those guys. I hope the victims of any future abuse follow their example.
They say the only way to configure Samba is through the "cryptic" configuration file.
Boy, don't these guys actually *read* the documentation? Swat is included in Samba in all of the distributions (I don't use Red Hat, but I imagine it has it too).
Swat rules, I use it all of the time. It is one the very few configuration tools that doesn't fsck up when you play with the file directly.
I work on a couple of projects involving both software and hardware:
OpenRemote - A remote control with many very neat features. Analog control, IR and RF communications (the site isn't nearly finished as I'm in the process of relocating to another province, yuck).
OpenBIOS - A BIOS that doesn't suck. I've designed development hardware here.
The GPL is software specific, so I'm not sure what happens to hardware designs in GPLed projects.
Is there a hardware specific GPL-like license for these designs? Both of these designs are somewhat commercially viable (OpenBIOS for embedded projects with low to mid production and OpenRemote for consumer applications).
I would prefer it if my work could not be "embraced-and-extended." If a company modified a design, they would be obligated to release the details of the designs (schematics, microcode, etc).
Like Woz, I wish schematics came with everything. There are schematics for my bass amp inside when it is opened. That's a good thing. Schematics are generally no longer available with computers (except many embedded computers).
There are a lot of features of Lynx that makes this a great idea. Users can upload/manage/edit files, and it can be set up to only run programs that are specifically set in Lynx. You can also disable the access to a shell in it (the keystroke is '!', I think).
Check out the well documented system-wide lynx.cfg file. You can use TRUSTED_EXEC to limit what local commands may be run and TRUSTED_LYNXCGI to limit what local CGIs the users can run. Set SYSTEM_EDITOR to force the user to only use the editor that specifies. Uploader definitions allow uploading using rzsz or kermit though ftp appears to be safe enough (as long as you make sure the version of the daemon you're running has no known holes). KEYMAP allows you to disable certain commands (shell, and possibly goto). The DIRED_MENU definitions allow you to set what users can do in their directories (copy, move, edit, compress, etc). Yes, you can tag multiple items for file operations.
I've seen systems with this setup and they work really well. Newbie users who are scared of CLIs will find it nice as well.
For extra-extra security, try removing the all-execute bit for all of your regular shells and set it so that only a trusted group may execute them, just to make it *that* much harder to screw with the system.
It is GPL, I have the driver but haven't tried it yet. I'll have to remove my GUS and put my Montego back in. Hopefully it won't send a nasty pop to my speakers like the GUS drivers.
The source code is included. The filename is vortex.c, which is a ~64KB file. A Makefile is also included (`make compile` will recompile your driver).
There are a lot of people here complaining that it's closed source, etc.
They are wrong, very wrong. Aureal have done exactly what we wanted. We now have completely GPLed drivers, which appear to be much better than the OSS I bought a while back (cannot record, no gameport support, much etc.).
The following files are distributed in this release:
README this file Makefile used to build and install the driver COPYING GPL information ChangeLog Version change information mod_conf script used by make install vortex.c driver source file asp30.o object file containing Au8830 core asp10.o object file containing Au8810 core asp20.o object file containing Au8820 core
(Emphasis mine).
Last I recalled, GPL happens to be open source.
Now I wonder how long it'll take to be distributed in the kernel releases.
Most, if not all, semiconductor manufacturers are really cool about this. The companies that were the coolest to me were: Analog Devices, Microchip Technologies, Maxim, National Semiconductor, TI, and Motorola among others.
All of those companies gave me precious device documentation and many of them gave samples as well. I used all of this in school and later in professional life ("we need a good low-power instrumentation amp." "I got a really cool one from AD which has great documentation, let's try it out and we can use them in volume (millions) later" "ok"). Semiconductor companies know the benefits of such behaviour and tend to act accordingly.
Embedded technologies are a very lucrative market that a lot of young people are jumping directly into (myself included). To deny the flow of information on your products would be like tying your own knot. I'm pretty sure Transmeta realises this.
I just checked out hotbot to see if any of my sites (which are constantly hammered by the Inktomi crawler, as I'm sure is the case with most sites) would come up.
It's getting more and more popular without major corporate funding. It's a terrific language, too. Especially for people like me who were raised on C (printf, yay).
If anybody deserves it (in the list anyway, but that's a whole other can of worms), it's them.
Matt Welsh - Wrote a couple of books. his homepage is here
Havoc Pennington - Works on GNOME for Red Hat. His page is here
Tom Christiansen - Did a lot of Perl documentation. More info here
I'm voting Sensei myself. He seems to cover a lot more ground at LinuxNewbie, a site I first visited today. That site seems to better cover the lone newbie wanting information on anything rather than just one thing. Welsh comes a close second.
I bought the Kensington Saddle Bag (from Software Online) and I am very happy with it. It's very configurable. It can hold a lot more stuff than most cases (gee, you gave me enough room for a few slices of paper, thanks) and is great for travelling.
I tried it. I have the deluxe version and it doesn't make me want to switch from SuSE.
Corel has modified both QT and KDE for their own purposes. That breaks a lot of dependencies for installing software that didn't come with it. I tried using dselect to grab software that I use that didn't come with it. When I finally got the dependencies satisfied, I let it install the new packages and it broke my installation. KDE didn't work at all. Maybe there's something I don't know about the Debian package format, but it's not apparent. I stuck SuSE back on.
The file manager itself was slow and unstable for me. I was unable to connect to either Samba or NFS shares. It simply stopped or crashed whenever I tried to get somewhere. It's butt-ugly, too. The icons on the toolbar are way too big and tasteless.
On the bright side, I have a little Tux on my desk, a second copy of Civ:CTP, a second copy of OSS, and a huge load of fonts which alien helped me install.
I paid for the OSS drivers too. Yesterday, I noticed this on the LinuxGames site:
Aureal Driver Update - Updated by Crusader
Matus Telgarsky wrote in to note that Dave Tabb forwarded an e-mail from Aureal to the ALSA development mailing list which states the open-source Linux Vortex drivers Aureal had previously promised will be available within two months:
Look for the release of Linux drivers in the next two months at our website for download.
As somebody else pointed out, Linux Mall has them in tons of sizes.
What I have is the little Corel Linux rubber Tux that came with Corel Linux Deluxe. It looks much better than the plush ones (the proportions seem all wrong, especially on the bill).
I squish him whilst thinking a lot. My friend's GF loves the little thing and asks him to buy her one every time she sees it. I found that funny since that was the original intention. She hasn't said, "he must be stuffed with herring," yet.:-)*
I wonder now if there's a way to get one of these rubber Tuxes without paying CAN$100 for Corel Linux Deluxe. Anybody know?
I'm the type that wants that specific video card (always Matrox), specific motherboard, NIC, *no modem*, and all the hardware must work in Linux.
That gets quite painful when buying packages. The packages always have cut corners. I've watched the quality of Dells sink to new lows lately. At my last job I had a 2-year-old Dell that had a Sony CDROM in it. I would have *never* bought a Sony CDROM ever. This one wouldn't read CDs most of the time. I had to use another one over the network. I have also noticed that the WD hard drives in them get lots of bad sectors at a very early age. Actually, they were the only hard drives I have personally seen with bad sectors ever.
If you want to go with boxed solutions, make sure that you know exactly what's in it, and get a guarantee that you can trade components if they don't work for your OS of choice (believe it or not, I was able to get these guarantees in the kernel 1.2 days).
Linux is, I'm sure, a very competent operating system. However, it is also elitist. The predominant ethic scorns newbies and laughs at ignorance. Linux is a step backward, in my view, from my personal goal of software that brings the power of technology to truly uninformed novices who could benefit from computers but who have been taught - by people like yourself - to fear it. Microsoft is the only company that seems to care about this crowd. That is why I choose to work for them.
No offense, but that is the single most misinformed paragraph I have read in a long time.
Check out the mailing lists and see how much newbies are scorned. There are a few pricks in them (and many hang out here), but for the most part, people get help right away.
Authors of OSS tend to actually listen to the users. They help them out, rather than recommending a "reinstall." Other users help out too, all of the time. Look at all the HOWTOs, lists, Ask Slashdot, and individual people who go out of their way to help someone out.
I even help out Windows users. I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about it as I am with Linux, but I help wherever I can.
It wouldn't make much sense for me to tell people to fsck off when they have questions about Linux. If people get scared off, that means less apps for me to choose from.
Actually, in my experience, it's the Windows people who are elitest. I have been laughed at by people who say, "sorry, but I like living in the present with a GUI. Not any of that command line crap." Now *that's* ignorance.
Isn't part of the Linux hype the fact that it is something that is not MS?
Ok, going back to when I first tried Linux...
I used DOS. Windows was something that ran Windows apps. I used it only for word processing. I spent the rest of my time in DOS, learning things about it (Thank you Peter Norton, for allowing me to see deeper into my computer). I learned assembly language, first used the internet (thank you Telemate).
Back then Internet for me was ftp and telnet. I spent most of my time downloading software and mucking about with it, hoping to learn something new. I kept noticing a directory called "linux" on many ftp sites and decided to enter one. I was amazed. A whole tree of apps I never heard of, and tons of text files. I downloaded some text files and read them, finding out that the easiest way to install Linux was by using a "distribution." In the "distributions" directory there were a couple of directories, SLS and Slackware (I think there was another one as well, but I'm kind of fuzzy). Completely randomly, I went into the "SLS" directory and downloaded the installation instructions. I then downloaded boot and root disks, as well as the "A" set.
Then suddenly, I backed up everything on floppy disks and parititioned and formatted my 100MB drive. 20 MB Linux, 5 MB swap, 75 MB DOS. I didn't go to sleep that night. I installed SLS, then DOS.
I read a vi tutorial, learned bash, read all the documentation I could get my hands on, learned how to compile programs in Linux, installed Slackware, and never looked back.
It wasn't MS problems that got me into Linux, simply boredom.
I was too young to have been able to get into Apples like I see many people here have, but I think Linux provided a similar enthrallment to someone who was born a little too late.
Slashdot Mirror
Here
:-)* ).
It's truly funny, yet disturbing (it's all *true*!
After reading about certain events in the ongoing DVD scuffle over the past while, we now have something to be happy about.
But...
Etoy simply backed down, rather than have a court rule on it. I was kind of hoping (like many others) that this would set a precendent to avoid this kind of crap in the future.
I hope something like this doesn't happen again, or the accused would be back to square one. Another thing to note is that Etoy fought *hard* to retain their rights, much harder than most people would. I have incredible respect for those guys. I hope the victims of any future abuse follow their example.
They say the only way to configure Samba is through the "cryptic" configuration file.
Boy, don't these guys actually *read* the documentation? Swat is included in Samba in all of the distributions (I don't use Red Hat, but I imagine it has it too).
Swat rules, I use it all of the time. It is one the very few configuration tools that doesn't fsck up when you play with the file directly.
I'll file this one under "misinformed."
Lemme guess, you did that to increase your hacker purity test score?
I did, as well. Actually, you get another point for attempting to increase the score.
Ah, those high school days...
I work on a couple of projects involving both software and hardware:
The GPL is software specific, so I'm not sure what happens to hardware designs in GPLed projects.
Is there a hardware specific GPL-like license for these designs? Both of these designs are somewhat commercially viable (OpenBIOS for embedded projects with low to mid production and OpenRemote for consumer applications).
I would prefer it if my work could not be "embraced-and-extended." If a company modified a design, they would be obligated to release the details of the designs (schematics, microcode, etc).
Like Woz, I wish schematics came with everything. There are schematics for my bass amp inside when it is opened. That's a good thing. Schematics are generally no longer available with computers (except many embedded computers).
You can set up Lynx as the user shell.
There are a lot of features of Lynx that makes this a great idea. Users can upload/manage/edit files, and it can be set up to only run programs that are specifically set in Lynx. You can also disable the access to a shell in it (the keystroke is '!', I think).
Check out the well documented system-wide lynx.cfg file. You can use TRUSTED_EXEC to limit what local commands may be run and TRUSTED_LYNXCGI to limit what local CGIs the users can run. Set SYSTEM_EDITOR to force the user to only use the editor that specifies. Uploader definitions allow uploading using rzsz or kermit though ftp appears to be safe enough (as long as you make sure the version of the daemon you're running has no known holes). KEYMAP allows you to disable certain commands (shell, and possibly goto). The DIRED_MENU definitions allow you to set what users can do in their directories (copy, move, edit, compress, etc). Yes, you can tag multiple items for file operations.
I've seen systems with this setup and they work really well. Newbie users who are scared of CLIs will find it nice as well.
For extra-extra security, try removing the all-execute bit for all of your regular shells and set it so that only a trusted group may execute them, just to make it *that* much harder to screw with the system.
I'm going to jump on the Matrox bandwagon (I would never buy anything else), but I do have something to add which hasn't been said yet.
My first Matrox card was a used Mystique 220. Out of warranty, etc.
Matrox gave me support for it, and responded to my email within 24 hours with a long descriptive answer.
That sold me.
As for software support, it's phenomenal, especially in Linux.
I just took a closer look, and the source for the .o files is not included.
I guess I jumped the gun. My apologies.
They are promising full source, though.
It is GPL, I have the driver but haven't tried it yet. I'll have to remove my GUS and put my Montego back in. Hopefully it won't send a nasty pop to my speakers like the GUS drivers.
The source code is included. The filename is vortex.c, which is a ~64KB file. A Makefile is also included (`make compile` will recompile your driver).
There are a lot of people here complaining that it's closed source, etc.
They are wrong, very wrong. Aureal have done exactly what we wanted. We now have completely GPLed drivers, which appear to be much better than the OSS I bought a while back (cannot record, no gameport support, much etc.).
Check out this link.
Here's a "quote":
(Emphasis mine).
Last I recalled, GPL happens to be open source.
Now I wonder how long it'll take to be distributed in the kernel releases.
Most, if not all, semiconductor manufacturers are really cool about this. The companies that were the coolest to me were: Analog Devices, Microchip Technologies, Maxim, National Semiconductor, TI, and Motorola among others.
All of those companies gave me precious device documentation and many of them gave samples as well. I used all of this in school and later in professional life ("we need a good low-power instrumentation amp." "I got a really cool one from AD which has great documentation, let's try it out and we can use them in volume (millions) later" "ok"). Semiconductor companies know the benefits of such behaviour and tend to act accordingly.
Embedded technologies are a very lucrative market that a lot of young people are jumping directly into (myself included). To deny the flow of information on your products would be like tying your own knot. I'm pretty sure Transmeta realises this.
Ask and ye shall receive.
I didn't know who Sensei was either, so I did a search and found out. That's why I posted the comment. So others could quickly find out.
Not my first choice. I nominated the guys that started nowonder.com. Sensei was the closest thing, though.
Hotbot uses Inktomi technology. They don't use Inktomi's database
Ahh, I see now. They are crawling my sites but not letting anybody search the results unless they pay big bucks.
Hmmm, looks like I'll be making a modification to my robots.txt files and possibly adding some new rules to my firewall.
I should be allowed to find out what info about my sites they are trying to sell. If I can't, they won't be getting access.
I just checked out hotbot to see if any of my sites (which are constantly hammered by the Inktomi crawler, as I'm sure is the case with most sites) would come up.
No hits.
Google finds them, though.
Something's definitely amiss regarding Inktomi.
That's why I voted for PHP.
It's getting more and more popular without major corporate funding. It's a terrific language, too. Especially for people like me who were raised on C (printf, yay).
If anybody deserves it (in the list anyway, but that's a whole other can of worms), it's them.
I'm voting Sensei myself. He seems to cover a lot more ground at LinuxNewbie, a site I first visited today. That site seems to better cover the lone newbie wanting information on anything rather than just one thing. Welsh comes a close second.
I bought the Kensington Saddle Bag (from Software Online) and I am very happy with it. It's very configurable. It can hold a lot more stuff than most cases (gee, you gave me enough room for a few slices of paper, thanks) and is great for travelling.
I use it a lot, I love the damn thing.
I tried it. I have the deluxe version and it doesn't make me want to switch from SuSE.
Corel has modified both QT and KDE for their own purposes. That breaks a lot of dependencies for installing software that didn't come with it. I tried using dselect to grab software that I use that didn't come with it. When I finally got the dependencies satisfied, I let it install the new packages and it broke my installation. KDE didn't work at all. Maybe there's something I don't know about the Debian package format, but it's not apparent. I stuck SuSE back on.
The file manager itself was slow and unstable for me. I was unable to connect to either Samba or NFS shares. It simply stopped or crashed whenever I tried to get somewhere. It's butt-ugly, too. The icons on the toolbar are way too big and tasteless.
On the bright side, I have a little Tux on my desk, a second copy of Civ:CTP, a second copy of OSS, and a huge load of fonts which alien helped me install.
This should be interesting.
As somebody else pointed out, Linux Mall has them in tons of sizes.
:-)*
What I have is the little Corel Linux rubber Tux that came with Corel Linux Deluxe. It looks much better than the plush ones (the proportions seem all wrong, especially on the bill).
I squish him whilst thinking a lot. My friend's GF loves the little thing and asks him to buy her one every time she sees it. I found that funny since that was the original intention. She hasn't said, "he must be stuffed with herring," yet.
I wonder now if there's a way to get one of these rubber Tuxes without paying CAN$100 for Corel Linux Deluxe. Anybody know?
I'm the type that wants that specific video card (always Matrox), specific motherboard, NIC, *no modem*, and all the hardware must work in Linux.
That gets quite painful when buying packages. The packages always have cut corners. I've watched the quality of Dells sink to new lows lately. At my last job I had a 2-year-old Dell that had a Sony CDROM in it. I would have *never* bought a Sony CDROM ever. This one wouldn't read CDs most of the time. I had to use another one over the network. I have also noticed that the WD hard drives in them get lots of bad sectors at a very early age. Actually, they were the only hard drives I have personally seen with bad sectors ever.
If you want to go with boxed solutions, make sure that you know exactly what's in it, and get a guarantee that you can trade components if they don't work for your OS of choice (believe it or not, I was able to get these guarantees in the kernel 1.2 days).
Unistroke. Get it?
Linux is, I'm sure, a very competent operating system. However, it is also elitist. The predominant ethic scorns newbies and laughs at ignorance. Linux is a step backward, in my view, from my personal goal of software that brings the power of technology to truly uninformed novices who could benefit from computers but who have been taught - by people like yourself - to fear it. Microsoft is the only company that seems to care about this crowd. That is why I choose to work for them.
No offense, but that is the single most misinformed paragraph I have read in a long time.
Check out the mailing lists and see how much newbies are scorned. There are a few pricks in them (and many hang out here), but for the most part, people get help right away.
Authors of OSS tend to actually listen to the users. They help them out, rather than recommending a "reinstall." Other users help out too, all of the time. Look at all the HOWTOs, lists, Ask Slashdot, and individual people who go out of their way to help someone out.
I even help out Windows users. I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about it as I am with Linux, but I help wherever I can.
It wouldn't make much sense for me to tell people to fsck off when they have questions about Linux. If people get scared off, that means less apps for me to choose from.
Actually, in my experience, it's the Windows people who are elitest. I have been laughed at by people who say, "sorry, but I like living in the present with a GUI. Not any of that command line crap." Now *that's* ignorance.
Isn't part of the Linux hype the fact that it is something that is not MS?
:-)*
Ok, going back to when I first tried Linux...
I used DOS. Windows was something that ran Windows apps. I used it only for word processing. I spent the rest of my time in DOS, learning things about it (Thank you Peter Norton, for allowing me to see deeper into my computer). I learned assembly language, first used the internet (thank you Telemate).
Back then Internet for me was ftp and telnet. I spent most of my time downloading software and mucking about with it, hoping to learn something new. I kept noticing a directory called "linux" on many ftp sites and decided to enter one. I was amazed. A whole tree of apps I never heard of, and tons of text files. I downloaded some text files and read them, finding out that the easiest way to install Linux was by using a "distribution." In the "distributions" directory there were a couple of directories, SLS and Slackware (I think there was another one as well, but I'm kind of fuzzy). Completely randomly, I went into the "SLS" directory and downloaded the installation instructions. I then downloaded boot and root disks, as well as the "A" set.
Then suddenly, I backed up everything on floppy disks and parititioned and formatted my 100MB drive. 20 MB Linux, 5 MB swap, 75 MB DOS. I didn't go to sleep that night. I installed SLS, then DOS.
I read a vi tutorial, learned bash, read all the documentation I could get my hands on, learned how to compile programs in Linux, installed Slackware, and never looked back.
It wasn't MS problems that got me into Linux, simply boredom.
I was too young to have been able to get into Apples like I see many people here have, but I think Linux provided a similar enthrallment to someone who was born a little too late.
I hope that answers your question
It's old, but it still rules.
Try it out. The interface is really good.