There are still issues involved with mixing Qt and GPL/LGPL software, even when the new Qt license takes effect.
I'm sure there is some politics mixed in with Red Hat's reasoning. Even if they shipped Qt, I could understand them not wanting to install it by default if only because you still can't develop commercial software using Qt (even with the new license) without paying royalties to Troll Tech. Note that even Motif does not have this restriction on it (AFAIK, and I might be wrong about that).
In the meantime (before the license change), Red Hat probably can't even ship the Qt libraries without paying royalties to Troll Tech. So they decided to go with GNOME and I'd be disapointed to see them waffle back and forth between KDE and GNOME and end up supporting both in a half-assed manner, even if all the sudden Qt became LGPL'd. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
As long as it's linked dynamically, they could ship KDE sans Qt and make you have to go get Qt yourself (or a variant such as Harmony). -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I love fvwm2! Don't base your experiences on fvwm95/AnotherLevel. Hell, you can even find themes for fvwm2. In terms of functionality what is it really missing? The ability to put side buttons on your window borders? I mean, in terms of necessary functionality it's all there, and it's highly configurable as well (in fact, next to E it's one of the most configurable wm's). It's also been there longer, and is more stable and robust than E (haven't used WM so can't speak for it).
If you're interested in fvwm2 themes, check out fvwm.themes.org. They don't have very much there, but it's a nice proof of concept.
What I'd like to know is, do either GNOME, or KDE define hints to set a mini-icon image, just as ICCM has hints for full-size icon images (e.g. Netscape uses this). That's one of the few things I'd like to see in fvwm2, if such a standard existed (that and full GNOME-compliance). -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Just because fvwm95 sucks doesn't mean that fvwm2 itself sucks. All it needs is GNOME-compliance and it's still the best (IMHO) [hell, even without GNOME-compliance it's the best:-) ]. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
It also defeats the purpose of login security. For instance, when you try to login on the console as a user who does not exist it still asks for a password and will tell you "Login incorrect", the same as if the user did exist but the password was wrong. This is just a means of keeping such information on a need-to-know basis. Providing names and pictures of users kind of defeats that purpose. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Kind of. You'll still need to upgrade a number of utilities. Noticeably absent is glibc 2.1, which is understandable: I installed it (2.0.95) by hand last week (by rolling my own rpm) and had lots of problems with it, so I reinstalled glibc 2.0.7. There are probably some newer 2.1 versions I'll have to try when I get the time. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Once all the distros move up to glibc, you'll be correct. Until then, good luck getting alot of glibc RPMs (which most of them are) to work in Slackware. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I've only had experience with Slackware 3.4 and Red Hat 5.1, and I know some others (SuSE, maybe) are supposed to be a little easier but this is what I've gathered is needed to add to the installation (in order of my preference):
1. Easier package installation Slackware was just beast, making me sit there and wait for each package to be installed for it to ask if I wanted to install the next one. I think there was an option to automatically answer those, but I didn't want an all-or-nothing type installation. Red Hat is a little easier, but again I like to choose my own packages individually, which is still a chore in Red Hat. I'd like some sort of hierarchy where I can disable/enable an entire category, *or* I can go and choose the packages therein individually. Currently Red Hat is either/or.
2. Mouse support. Other distros may have this, but Red Hat doesn't. The first thing it should do is try to determine the mouse type (it asks later on) and then run gpm so that you can actually use the mouse during the installation. Keyboard navigation can become a task in newt (I'm assuming that's what Red Hat used for their installation program).
3. Better GUI. Red Hat (as I said) uses newt for the installation program. Functionally that's fine, but for a little more ease of use, if they could use a simple VGA X server (will work on just about any card) instead (maybe having newt as a backup for those few cards that won't work or for non-CD installs) that'd be pretty nice.
4. Better usage profiles for default installations. Red Hat, for example, has only a couple usage profiles, you either want everything or the bare minimum. It'd be nice to have profiles for say, developers, end users (non-developers), mail server, etc etc. with default packages selected to fit that profile (and then let you further customize which packages are actually installed).
5. Better X-window configuration. I've never gotten an XFree86 server to work from the Red Hat installation; I've always had to tinker with video card/monitor settings after the install. Some of this is unavoidable without a more robust device information database, but someone without the experience will never get X-window to work by themselves if it doesn't work out of the box, and by the time they get help, they will be deeply discouraged. It goes without saying that Red Hat needs to dump fvwm95 in favor of (at least) a more smooth interface (obviously they are trying to do this by using GNOME and possibly E [although I wouldn't make E the default if I were them because it is by and large unfinished; maybe WindowMaker, Blackbox or a better fvwm2 setup]).
6. A post-installation tutorial. Of course not many people will just jump right into Linux without at least a book or someone there to show them what to do (esp. if they've never used UNIX). An interactive tutorial for the newbies would be nice, that goes through basic discussions of the CLI, X, root v. user, and where to get more help, etc. This could probably ship as a seperate CD, so that the first time root or a new user logs into xdm or something, they get a prompt to enter in the CD and the tutorial program is launched when they do (or they can choose not to launch it of course). -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Do we get to vote if there's a God, or if cold fusion is possible or if there is an aether or if tachyons exist or how about anti-gravity? Can we vote on that too?
Come on now, for centuries science has challenged popular beliefs in ordre to prove conventional wisdom wrong; now we're going to make science dependant on popular beliefs and who has the fastest internet connection? Blech.
The only sure thing here is that Pluto is most definately not Greek... -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I thought it was interesting to hear from "the other side." I don't mean MS, I mean the group of people who depend on tools like VB for their applications. Here in Unixland, we have the Perl et al hackers, but it's not the same. Even in Perl, Ptyhon, etc. you have to know a fair amount to get something done. You don't just start up a GUI and form a complete, threaded, GUI-based application in a day with Perl, or even Tcl/Tk (which, BTW, is not compiled, as VB can be).
This guy isn't jumping ship from VB to GNU C++ or anything. It seems he's heading for Delphi, which touts the same idea as VB.
All real coders may hold these folks in contempt, but if you think about the idea, it makes sense. Programming VB is not real programming as we all think of it. As an analogy, making a phone call is not really operating the phone system. While UNIX may have some tools that begin to try to accomplish what VB and Delphi are accomplishing, such as Tcl/Tk, Java BDK, etc, none really compare.
Like it or not, VB is used alot, partly because of its appeal to all the non-programmers who need to draw up a little helper-app quickly. The idea behind VB is good; VB itself is just silly. But I think the Unix world would gain alot of non-programming types (especially in the corporate scene) if we had such tools, but which were better implemented. I think CORBA could be used as a foundation of this; choosing a single language like Perl or Tcl/Tk will rob you of the interoperability VB and Delphi can produce using COM.
-- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Until it mutates and the gene sequence it destroys is a human one. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Who cares what the case looks like?
on
Cooler Cases
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· Score: 1
I don't care if my case is beige. I look at the monitor. If what's on the screen is pretty then who cares what's in the corner covering the computer components putting the pretty stuff on the screen? What I'm interested in are things like side-panel doors and stuff that actually helps me maintain the computer. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Actually, if she didn't patent it, it work would be pre-existing technology and no one else could patent it.
The primary danger in patents is in those patents which are made intentionally broad in order to gain control of other future technologies which the original inventor did not in fact invent (or discover, whatever). Other than that, patents can be a nuisance (such as MP3-encoding), but little more. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Companies who help OSS products by hiring OSS developers or assigning current employees to aid in an OSS project aren't really doing so out of charity. For instance, Corel is not supporting WINE because they love WINE, they are supporting it because they intend to use it in their own products. Likewise, Red Hat doesn't aid in kernel & software development for the fun of it; they do it because their business directly depends on the quality of these things. So I question whether it's a valid argument to call such activities charity rather than business expenses.
As for the private programmer, that may be a different case. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I had 0.99.0 and I had to install with --nodeps because of a few old library dependancies (apparently rpm can install packages in the proper order, but won't uninstall correctly if any of the old packages depend on old packages you're trying to replace) -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
My point was that there's no way for me to tell the difference between the two ACs. I think this is the most irritating side-effect of ACs on/. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
on
Star Wars Crawl
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· Score: 1
Hey, the Inquisition killed it's share of men too. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Since no one in this thread said "MPEG I or II layer 4" why did you go off on them and CNN about it? -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Possible futility of a consumers Linux site.
on
Linuxberg opens
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· Score: 1
I don't know about Apple, but for Microsoft this isn't really true. It's just that vendors have gotten so used to shipping their products along with the required DLLs, e.g. MFC40.DLL. This, of course, bloats the download.
In Linux the philosophy is "don't touch my core libraries unless I tell you to", rather than "replace my core libraries unless I tell you not to." Most software for Linux, even commercial software, adheres to this philosophy, in fact I don't know one that doesn't.
Alot of this stuff is source, so it doesn't matter anyways. As for dependancies, if they had the rpms, debs, etc. available too, those problems could be avoided. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Slashdot Mirror
There are still issues involved with mixing Qt and GPL/LGPL software, even when the new Qt license takes effect.
I'm sure there is some politics mixed in with Red Hat's reasoning. Even if they shipped Qt, I could understand them not wanting to install it by default if only because you still can't develop commercial software using Qt (even with the new license) without paying royalties to Troll Tech. Note that even Motif does not have this restriction on it (AFAIK, and I might be wrong about that).
In the meantime (before the license change), Red Hat probably can't even ship the Qt libraries without paying royalties to Troll Tech. So they decided to go with GNOME and I'd be disapointed to see them waffle back and forth between KDE and GNOME and end up supporting both in a half-assed manner, even if all the sudden Qt became LGPL'd.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
As long as it's linked dynamically, they could ship KDE sans Qt and make you have to go get Qt yourself (or a variant such as Harmony).
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I love fvwm2! Don't base your experiences on fvwm95/AnotherLevel. Hell, you can even find themes for fvwm2. In terms of functionality what is it really missing? The ability to put side buttons on your window borders? I mean, in terms of necessary functionality it's all there, and it's highly configurable as well (in fact, next to E it's one of the most configurable wm's). It's also been there longer, and is more stable and robust than E (haven't used WM so can't speak for it).
If you're interested in fvwm2 themes, check out fvwm.themes.org. They don't have very much there, but it's a nice proof of concept.
What I'd like to know is, do either GNOME, or KDE define hints to set a mini-icon image, just as ICCM has hints for full-size icon images (e.g. Netscape uses this). That's one of the few things I'd like to see in fvwm2, if such a standard existed (that and full GNOME-compliance).
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Just because fvwm95 sucks doesn't mean that fvwm2 itself sucks. All it needs is GNOME-compliance and it's still the best (IMHO) [hell, even without GNOME-compliance it's the best :-) ].
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
It also defeats the purpose of login security. For instance, when you try to login on the console as a user who does not exist it still asks for a password and will tell you "Login incorrect", the same as if the user did exist but the password was wrong. This is just a means of keeping such information on a need-to-know basis. Providing names and pictures of users kind of defeats that purpose.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Kind of. You'll still need to upgrade a number of utilities. Noticeably absent is glibc 2.1, which is understandable: I installed it (2.0.95) by hand last week (by rolling my own rpm) and had lots of problems with it, so I reinstalled glibc 2.0.7. There are probably some newer 2.1 versions I'll have to try when I get the time.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Subject speaks for itself.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Once all the distros move up to glibc, you'll be correct. Until then, good luck getting alot of glibc RPMs (which most of them are) to work in Slackware.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I've only had experience with Slackware 3.4 and Red Hat 5.1, and I know some others (SuSE, maybe) are supposed to be a little easier but this is what I've gathered is needed to add to the installation (in order of my preference):
1. Easier package installation
Slackware was just beast, making me sit there and wait for each package to be installed for it to ask if I wanted to install the next one. I think there was an option to automatically answer those, but I didn't want an all-or-nothing type installation. Red Hat is a little easier, but again I like to choose my own packages individually, which is still a chore in Red Hat. I'd like some sort of hierarchy where I can disable/enable an entire category, *or* I can go and choose the packages therein individually. Currently Red Hat is either/or.
2. Mouse support.
Other distros may have this, but Red Hat doesn't. The first thing it should do is try to determine the mouse type (it asks later on) and then run gpm so that you can actually use the mouse during the installation. Keyboard navigation can become a task in newt (I'm assuming that's what Red Hat used for their installation program).
3. Better GUI.
Red Hat (as I said) uses newt for the installation program. Functionally that's fine, but for a little more ease of use, if they could use a simple VGA X server (will work on just about any card) instead (maybe having newt as a backup for those few cards that won't work or for non-CD installs) that'd be pretty nice.
4. Better usage profiles for default installations.
Red Hat, for example, has only a couple usage profiles, you either want everything or the bare minimum. It'd be nice to have profiles for say, developers, end users (non-developers), mail server, etc etc. with default packages selected to fit that profile (and then let you further customize which packages are actually installed).
5. Better X-window configuration.
I've never gotten an XFree86 server to work from the Red Hat installation; I've always had to tinker with video card/monitor settings after the install. Some of this is unavoidable without a more robust device information database, but someone without the experience will never get X-window to work by themselves if it doesn't work out of the box, and by the time they get help, they will be deeply discouraged. It goes without saying that Red Hat needs to dump fvwm95 in favor of (at least) a more smooth interface (obviously they are trying to do this by using GNOME and possibly E [although I wouldn't make E the default if I were them because it is by and large unfinished; maybe WindowMaker, Blackbox or a better fvwm2 setup]).
6. A post-installation tutorial.
Of course not many people will just jump right into Linux without at least a book or someone there to show them what to do (esp. if they've never used UNIX). An interactive tutorial for the newbies would be nice, that goes through basic discussions of the CLI, X, root v. user, and where to get more help, etc. This could probably ship as a seperate CD, so that the first time root or a new user logs into xdm or something, they get a prompt to enter in the CD and the tutorial program is launched when they do (or they can choose not to launch it of course).
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
What happens when Pluto and Neptune exchange places in orbit, as they do every so often?
"My very energetic mother just sent us practically nothing" ?
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Do we get to vote if there's a God, or if cold fusion is possible or if there is an aether or if tachyons exist or how about anti-gravity? Can we vote on that too?
Come on now, for centuries science has challenged popular beliefs in ordre to prove conventional wisdom wrong; now we're going to make science dependant on popular beliefs and who has the fastest internet connection? Blech.
The only sure thing here is that Pluto is most definately not Greek...
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
SCO? I thought the Unix trademark was owned by The Open Group.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I thought it was interesting to hear from "the other side." I don't mean MS, I mean the group of people who depend on tools like VB for their applications. Here in Unixland, we have the Perl et al hackers, but it's not the same. Even in Perl, Ptyhon, etc. you have to know a fair amount to get something done. You don't just start up a GUI and form a complete, threaded, GUI-based application in a day with Perl, or even Tcl/Tk (which, BTW, is not compiled, as VB can be).
This guy isn't jumping ship from VB to GNU C++ or anything. It seems he's heading for Delphi, which touts the same idea as VB.
All real coders may hold these folks in contempt, but if you think about the idea, it makes sense. Programming VB is not real programming as we all think of it. As an analogy, making a phone call is not really operating the phone system. While UNIX may have some tools that begin to try to accomplish what VB and Delphi are accomplishing, such as Tcl/Tk, Java BDK, etc, none really compare.
Like it or not, VB is used alot, partly because of its appeal to all the non-programmers who need to draw up a little helper-app quickly. The idea behind VB is good; VB itself is just silly. But I think the Unix world would gain alot of non-programming types (especially in the corporate scene) if we had such tools, but which were better implemented. I think CORBA could be used as a foundation of this; choosing a single language like Perl or Tcl/Tk will rob you of the interoperability VB and Delphi can produce using COM.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Real nice....until you want to install an additional drive or the newest 3dfx card.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Until it mutates and the gene sequence it destroys is a human one.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I don't care if my case is beige. I look at the monitor. If what's on the screen is pretty then who cares what's in the corner covering the computer components putting the pretty stuff on the screen? What I'm interested in are things like side-panel doors and stuff that actually helps me maintain the computer.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Would you want billions of 10-15 pound dust mites infesting your house?
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Actually, if she didn't patent it, it work would be pre-existing technology and no one else could patent it.
The primary danger in patents is in those patents which are made intentionally broad in order to gain control of other future technologies which the original inventor did not in fact invent (or discover, whatever). Other than that, patents can be a nuisance (such as MP3-encoding), but little more.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Companies who help OSS products by hiring OSS developers or assigning current employees to aid in an OSS project aren't really doing so out of charity. For instance, Corel is not supporting WINE because they love WINE, they are supporting it because they intend to use it in their own products. Likewise, Red Hat doesn't aid in kernel & software development for the fun of it; they do it because their business directly depends on the quality of these things. So I question whether it's a valid argument to call such activities charity rather than business expenses.
As for the private programmer, that may be a different case.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I had 0.99.0 and I had to install with --nodeps because of a few old library dependancies (apparently rpm can install packages in the proper order, but won't uninstall correctly if any of the old packages depend on old packages you're trying to replace)
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Then every dollar of tax revenue would count as a surplus.
Yeah and the more they tax us, the bigger their surplus, the better everyone thinks of the gov't. Silly, ain't it?
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
My point was that there's no way for me to tell the difference between the two ACs. I think this is the most irritating side-effect of ACs on /.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Hey, the Inquisition killed it's share of men too.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Since no one in this thread said "MPEG I or II layer 4" why did you go off on them and CNN about it?
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I don't know about Apple, but for Microsoft this isn't really true. It's just that vendors have gotten so used to shipping their products along with the required DLLs, e.g. MFC40.DLL. This, of course, bloats the download.
In Linux the philosophy is "don't touch my core libraries unless I tell you to", rather than "replace my core libraries unless I tell you not to." Most software for Linux, even commercial software, adheres to this philosophy, in fact I don't know one that doesn't.
Alot of this stuff is source, so it doesn't matter anyways. As for dependancies, if they had the rpms, debs, etc. available too, those problems could be avoided.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.