I ran OS 9 (Classic) under Mac-on-Linux for some time. Anything that didn't require direct hardware access worked pretty much flawlessly; MOL emulates the essential hardware (video, hard drive, input devices, NIC) pretty well. But you wouldn't be able to for example use OpenGL apps. Photoshop ran great but it would never talk to your USB scanner. In this regard it's just a little bit more limited than Classic mode under OS X, though. I never ran OS X under MOL but I assume the limitations are similar. The vast majority of things that run under OS 9 just worked.
I think ACLs are only useful for a tiny minority, IMO.
One thing they are useful for is if you are replacing NT file servers with Samba servers. If you don't use ACLs (either XFS or the EA/ACL patch with ext2/3) then your Windows users who connect to your Samba shares don't get all the fine-grained permission control to which they are accustomed; Samba fakes it.
Combine this with winbind and you end up with almost a perfect drop-in replacement for your NT file servers, and you don't have to manage those users separately. Sah-weet.
Of course the real point to setting up your Mac as a fully functional server is that you get to do all your editing in BBEdit which not only does syntax checking and colour coding on the fly of HTML, Perl, JavaScript and more, but also can directly run Perl in an open document window, enabling you to all manner of extrancting and reporting on the fly.
That would be nice; we've never seen anything like that before in the Unix world...
Good to see another English major in this line of work.
I first started at this company as "Microcomputer Support," that is, Windows and some Mac OS. This shop has been all Windows and VMS since time immemorial, but one of their critical apps was switching from VMS to Unix so they had to do it too. I happened to hear at some event that they were going to have to start working with Unix, and since I had already logged a few years with Linux and BSD, I started to push through channels and ask if I could be involved - that's all I asked. Next thing I know, the Director of Technologies is calling me, asking for an interview, and in a few months, after taking a battery of tests and as soon as they were able to replace me, I moved to my new office as sysadmin. This must have been divine intervention; everything else here goes through lots of channels and gets tested with umpteen Gartner and PWC statements, blah blah blah, but for some reason (I'm sure it was a clerical error) they awarded me the job. Of course, they are paying me about half what an outside consultant would charge, so maybe that has something to do with it.
Having said that, you might be surprised at how boring and thankless this job can be sometimes. I know a lot of people who really have programmer tendencies, who get stuck with sysadminning and burn out on the whole industry.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I forgot one of the best ways to be introduced to Lisp: Emacs. It probably came with your OS or has been ported to your OS at some point, it is based on Lisp (albeit one not as powerful as Common Lisp), and you can get both an introduction to Emacs Lisp and a reference manual direct from GNU's web site.
There is a monolithic kernel for nubus Power Mac's being developed; I know that people have gotten Debian working with it, don't know about other distro's but it's worth a shot. Look here.
The original post you put up has become one of my random signatures (properly attributed to you, though), hope you don't mind. It really sums up my attitude as well.
> especially if you don't want to use the
> (admittedly slightly better) Xemacs (don't want
> the bloat, don't like X, want to be able to edit
> w/o X, etc.)
XEmacs does not require X11. In fact, it supports more features in a terminal than GNU Emacs does (font lock, etc.). Maybe you ought to try it again?
(Actually, XEmacs drives me nuts; I only use GNU Emacs. But I just thought you should know.)
> we still have BootX which works just fine to
> load Linux
Bad example: BootX quit working for many LinuxPPC machines sometime around Mac OS 9, which forced them into a special booter called yaBoot, a sub-OS requiring a special partition and everything. In other words, Mac OS changes (even before the oft-mentioned Mac OS X) have pushed us into similar territory, boot-wise.
Right now, I've got a working PL/I compiler going on my pentium. If you'rew interested, drop me a line.
Um, how does one go about contacting an AC?
Seriously, though, I think it would be very interesting to see about a free Multics clone for PC hardware. But do you honestly think that Linus knew what he was starting when he began coding the Linux kernel? Even if you don't like Unix in general, the value of his kernel, showing up at that point in time, is inestimable. He doesn't deserve a punch in the face. Do you think the guy who's maintaining FreeDOS should be punched? What if it becomes popular? Sheesh.
That's the great thing about Linux, if it's not broke, or you don't need the latest hardware support, you can keep running what you have.
True most of the time, perhaps. Every once in a great while you have to upgrade because of software, too.
Case in point: I have been running RH5.2 happily for about a year, but I really really wanted to try out Mozilla. Of course, none of the recent builds are recommended for glibc2.0 (RH5.x), because of bugs that get fixed in 2.1. And nobody would build binaries for us little glibc2.0'ers, because what was the point? It wasn't stable anyway. I tried, but somewhere in the middle of the build I realized that clearing out over 600MB of space wasn't going to be enough, and dumped it. *sighs*
So, I tried the upgrade to 6.1 yesterday. And somehow the FAT table on my poor DOS partition was destroyed. I swear, all I did was choose "upgrade." This being a work computer, it's important that I have a partition for Windows (even though I was able to run most of the apps via WINE).
Anyway, now I'm flailing around, trying to get work done without anyone knowing that I've lost every ounce of my Windows stuff. Point is, sometimes you get lost in the cracks (like I did), and have to deal with either upgrading or actually falling behind. (But I learned my lesson: next time, I'm either going to do the install completely manually, or dump the whole thing and try Debian.) *smiles*
I don't know anything particular about this situation, but since you posted on Slashdot...
It sounds like YOUR company could benefit from at least subsidizing GNQS, thus directing Stuart's future development towards feature enhancements/bug fixes that matter to you.
We wrote him asking about the possibility of support contracts. He wasn't interested, I guess (I didn't write him myself, since I don't have any purse-string-control, so I don't have the exact reply, but I guess he was too busy right then?).
We're a nonprofit organization, not a software company, and I suspect that the people in charge here wouldn't see much point to subsidizing him beyond the support contract we buy for all our other software. Since he turned that down (or put us off, I don't remember which)...
If I had my own successful software company, I'd subsidize him. But that and $1.09 will get you a cup of coffee, no more.
I would like to comment briefly on Stuart's project, Generic NQS. I'm sure that there are a million projects out there that "really need" some sort of funding, but I am surprised that nobody's taken on NQS yet.
For those who don't know, NQS is a load-balancing daemon for just about anything that can be queued, and it can be run on just one machine or a cluster of them. Very flexible, powerful stuff; useful for those of us who need more power than "at/batch" gives us.
I would think that a large application provider (ala SAP/R3, or Oracle or Informix) who is committed to Linux would be interested in funding your project. Our own in-house database product (Datatel Benefactor running on Ardent's Unidata database) is running on Tru64-Unix, but we have a very complicated hierarchy of users here and we needed the control and capabilities of something like GNQS to maintain order that could not easily be maintained using atq's and the like. This way, too, should we ever move up to another server in addition to the current one, we can balance across two nodes.
My point is, perhaps in your specific case you need to get noticed by a major applications vendor who has a use for the flexible scheduling and load-balancing capabilities of your product. The average guy doesn't have a need for it; I only found your product by sheer accident one day, and now it's my organization's first foray into GPL'd software. (Since its phenomenal success, we have added a few more.)
So, to all the people in the question article who complained about those of us who chose not to ask questions or participate in this fiasco...
Is anyone really surprised at this? He doesn't answer serious accusations from people who are qualified to comment on his reputation. Is he going to answer ours?
Instead, he continues to be validated in his own mind. I feel sorry for those of you who thought he might honestly respond.
I wasn't speaking to all Slashdot readers, only those who think he's a fraud, or define themselves as his detractors.
But as we can see from the comments on this article, a lot of people resent the free publicity he's getting from this, and the only reaction we as detractors can have in the face of it is silence - anything else serves his purpose.
People who want to know what he will say about something should ask questions. But I am merely pointing out that those who already have their minds made up against him are best served by not contributing to the discussion. He's going to get a very loud opportunity to answer them at the top of the column on Friday, and they will get a meek, moderatable opportunity to continue the discussion underneath...doesn't sound like a winning proposition to me. Not saying it's not fair, just saying that his opponents should consider this. If someone wants a chance to judge him by how he responds, not having done so already, then by all means ask away.
No, I think it's in Slashdot's best interest as a journalistic medium to do this.
However, I think it's in Slashdot's _readers'_ best interest to utterly ignore this article if they think he's a fraud. Look into his past yourself (and don't necessarily take either him or his biggest detractors at face value) and determine if you think he needs more free publicity or not.
The best thing those of us who _are_ detractors can do is: 1. Don't ask questions under this article 2. Don't moderate any questions in this article up
Perhaps there should be some bug-stomping party, some get-together (easy if funded by AOL, slightly more difficult if not) where competent hackers all converge and fix a lot of things over a weekend or something? Something like what Loki did.
I'm running Word and Excel 97 SR-2. Now, I do have a complete Win98 install on the old DOS partition, including IE4, so perhaps if IE is required, they're just relying on the one that's installed over there? (I might add, IE4 almost works; I can start to view simple web pages before it kicks me to the debugger.)
I'm not running entirely "Windowsless" on this laptop, I just never have to _boot_ Windows to get anything done. *smiles*
I am unsure of the answer to the "replacement DLL's" question. My guess is that eventually some of that will be taken care of, at least the bits that have somehow supposedly become part of the API, if it's really necessary. But I wasn't aware that Word and Excel 97 required IE (don't know about 2000). I'm sure they automatically install it given half the chance, though (like most other MS products).
First, Wine has made incredible strides in the last year. By incredible I mean "I can't believe how many more applications, including popular ones, work or work better now."
Second, it's the Wine people themselves who are also working on winelib; it's sort of a serendipitous project, I believe. That's not coming along quite as quickly last I checked, but if Corel really is getting involved then maybe that will change. Not sure how that has gone.
I have been upgrading at every release for the last six months and the only time things have ever "broken" as the result of an upgrade, it has been because they changed the options or the.conf file and I didn't pay attention. Usually five minutes later and everything's working again.
I should point out that I no longer use precompiled binaries; the code base is sort of large but it's worth it to compile it yourself. I fixed a lot of things by doing that. (Having to stick with glibc 2.0.7 for the time being sort of forced that as well.)
I don't think that what they're doing lends itself to nailing down the releases the way you suggest (1.0=Win31, 1.1=win32, etc.). It's hard to know what's what in the vast undocumented world of the Win32 API's. They're really doing a fantastic job these days, anyway - if you haven't tried it in a few months, try it.
These people are the ones who make it possible for people like me, in corporate NT-only settings, to survive with a dedicated Linux desktop.
In the last two upgrades, fonts have improved dramatically, and I can run Word and Excel (although printing is still a bit sticky).
My network at home is named after songs from the Jethro Tull album "Broadsword and the Beast."
This produces some interesting side effects:
beastie: firewall/print-server, mean little NetBSD/mac68k machine broadsword: My big LinuxPPC box, I love sitting at a "broadsword~$" prompt clasp: Linux/x86 laptop (you can clasp it) pussywillow: My wife's computer (I don't think she knows what to make of it, but I keep telling her it's a compliment) cheerio: Alpha file/MP3/squid server slowmarchingband: Windows machine (SMB, get it?) sealdriver: Old Quadra for Mac-only applications, stormy and self-absorbed
Speaking as a believer (and a geek, and a recovering DOOMaholic), I believe I can confidently say that God has no interest in winning the attention of gamers through crap like this.
I don't see anywhere in the Bible where we (as believers) are ordered to rip off the secular media, poorly, in the attempt to win back segments of society. How in the world does a game like this make my relationship with God any better? For that matter, how does 95 percent of Christian rock/rap/what-have-you? Or Christian romance novels (yes, they're out there)?
The fact is, most of the churchgoing Christian world thinks that they're supposed to be fighting "the world" on the world's turf, constantly playing catch-up. All most people (me included) have gotten out of this ridiculous one-sided conflict is the message, "Christian media sucks." And it does, for the most part.
I've got news for believers. The Lord wants us to work on our own relationships with Him, not stoop to playing this attention-game. We can't win at this, and do we even want to? Quake isn't the cause of society's ills. This effort was misguided from the beginning.
On behalf of intelligent believers everywhere, I would like to apologize to gamers, geeks, etc., for some of our wackoes. Every movement has them.
Slashdot Mirror
I ran OS 9 (Classic) under Mac-on-Linux for some time. Anything that didn't require direct hardware access worked pretty much flawlessly; MOL emulates the essential hardware (video, hard drive, input devices, NIC) pretty well. But you wouldn't be able to for example use OpenGL apps. Photoshop ran great but it would never talk to your USB scanner. In this regard it's just a little bit more limited than Classic mode under OS X, though. I never ran OS X under MOL but I assume the limitations are similar. The vast majority of things that run under OS 9 just worked.
One thing they are useful for is if you are replacing NT file servers with Samba servers. If you don't use ACLs (either XFS or the EA/ACL patch with ext2/3) then your Windows users who connect to your Samba shares don't get all the fine-grained permission control to which they are accustomed; Samba fakes it. Combine this with winbind and you end up with almost a perfect drop-in replacement for your NT file servers, and you don't have to manage those users separately. Sah-weet.
That would be nice; we've never seen anything like that before in the Unix world...
*smiles*
Do you have a link for this? I haven't heard about this. Emacs has supported X11 since at least, what, 17 or 18? Does your information predate this?
Good to see another English major in this line of work.
I first started at this company as "Microcomputer Support," that is, Windows and some Mac OS. This shop has been all Windows and VMS since time immemorial, but one of their critical apps was switching from VMS to Unix so they had to do it too. I happened to hear at some event that they were going to have to start working with Unix, and since I had already logged a few years with Linux and BSD, I started to push through channels and ask if I could be involved - that's all I asked. Next thing I know, the Director of Technologies is calling me, asking for an interview, and in a few months, after taking a battery of tests and as soon as they were able to replace me, I moved to my new office as sysadmin. This must have been divine intervention; everything else here goes through lots of channels and gets tested with umpteen Gartner and PWC statements, blah blah blah, but for some reason (I'm sure it was a clerical error) they awarded me the job. Of course, they are paying me about half what an outside consultant would charge, so maybe that has something to do with it.
Having said that, you might be surprised at how boring and thankless this job can be sometimes. I know a lot of people who really have programmer tendencies, who get stuck with sysadminning and burn out on the whole industry.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I forgot one of the best ways to be introduced to Lisp: Emacs. It probably came with your OS or has been ported to your OS at some point, it is based on Lisp (albeit one not as powerful as Common Lisp), and you can get both an introduction to Emacs Lisp and a reference manual direct from GNU's web site.
The Little Schemer is very good, and somebody can start with that without even having a background in programming.
There is a monolithic kernel for nubus Power Mac's being developed; I know that people have gotten Debian working with it, don't know about other distro's but it's worth a shot. Look here.
Amen, brother.
The original post you put up has become one of my random signatures (properly attributed to you, though), hope you don't mind. It really sums up my attitude as well.
> especially if you don't want to use the
> (admittedly slightly better) Xemacs (don't want
> the bloat, don't like X, want to be able to edit
> w/o X, etc.)
XEmacs does not require X11. In fact, it supports more features in a terminal than GNU Emacs does (font lock, etc.). Maybe you ought to try it again?
(Actually, XEmacs drives me nuts; I only use GNU Emacs. But I just thought you should know.)
> we still have BootX which works just fine to
> load Linux
Bad example: BootX quit working for many LinuxPPC machines sometime around Mac OS 9, which forced them into a special booter called yaBoot, a sub-OS requiring a special partition and everything. In other words, Mac OS changes (even before the oft-mentioned Mac OS X) have pushed us into similar territory, boot-wise.
Um, how does one go about contacting an AC?
Seriously, though, I think it would be very interesting to see about a free Multics clone for PC hardware. But do you honestly think that Linus knew what he was starting when he began coding the Linux kernel? Even if you don't like Unix in general, the value of his kernel, showing up at that point in time, is inestimable. He doesn't deserve a punch in the face. Do you think the guy who's maintaining FreeDOS should be punched? What if it becomes popular? Sheesh.
True most of the time, perhaps. Every once in a great while you have to upgrade because of software, too.
Case in point: I have been running RH5.2 happily for about a year, but I really really wanted to try out Mozilla. Of course, none of the recent builds are recommended for glibc2.0 (RH5.x), because of bugs that get fixed in 2.1. And nobody would build binaries for us little glibc2.0'ers, because what was the point? It wasn't stable anyway. I tried, but somewhere in the middle of the build I realized that clearing out over 600MB of space wasn't going to be enough, and dumped it. *sighs*
So, I tried the upgrade to 6.1 yesterday. And somehow the FAT table on my poor DOS partition was destroyed. I swear, all I did was choose "upgrade." This being a work computer, it's important that I have a partition for Windows (even though I was able to run most of the apps via WINE).
Anyway, now I'm flailing around, trying to get work done without anyone knowing that I've lost every ounce of my Windows stuff. Point is, sometimes you get lost in the cracks (like I did), and have to deal with either upgrading or actually falling behind. (But I learned my lesson: next time, I'm either going to do the install completely manually, or dump the whole thing and try Debian.) *smiles*
It sounds like YOUR company could benefit from at least subsidizing GNQS, thus directing Stuart's future development towards feature enhancements/bug fixes that matter to you.
We wrote him asking about the possibility of support contracts. He wasn't interested, I guess (I didn't write him myself, since I don't have any purse-string-control, so I don't have the exact reply, but I guess he was too busy right then?).
We're a nonprofit organization, not a software company, and I suspect that the people in charge here wouldn't see much point to subsidizing him beyond the support contract we buy for all our other software. Since he turned that down (or put us off, I don't remember which)...
If I had my own successful software company, I'd subsidize him. But that and $1.09 will get you a cup of coffee, no more.
I would like to comment briefly on Stuart's project, Generic NQS. I'm sure that there are a million projects out there that "really need" some sort of funding, but I am surprised that nobody's taken on NQS yet.
For those who don't know, NQS is a load-balancing daemon for just about anything that can be queued, and it can be run on just one machine or a cluster of them. Very flexible, powerful stuff; useful for those of us who need more power than "at/batch" gives us.
I would think that a large application provider (ala SAP/R3, or Oracle or Informix) who is committed to Linux would be interested in funding your project. Our own in-house database product (Datatel Benefactor running on Ardent's Unidata database) is running on Tru64-Unix, but we have a very complicated hierarchy of users here and we needed the control and capabilities of something like GNQS to maintain order that could not easily be maintained using atq's and the like. This way, too, should we ever move up to another server in addition to the current one, we can balance across two nodes.
My point is, perhaps in your specific case you need to get noticed by a major applications vendor who has a use for the flexible scheduling and load-balancing capabilities of your product. The average guy doesn't have a need for it; I only found your product by sheer accident one day, and now it's my organization's first foray into GPL'd software. (Since its phenomenal success, we have added a few more.)
If I remember correctly, XFree for the Alpha supports far fewer video card options, so you would probably want to stick with Intel.
So, to all the people in the question article who complained about those of us who chose not to ask questions or participate in this fiasco...
Is anyone really surprised at this? He doesn't answer serious accusations from people who are qualified to comment on his reputation. Is he going to answer ours?
Instead, he continues to be validated in his own mind. I feel sorry for those of you who thought he might honestly respond.
I wasn't speaking to all Slashdot readers, only those who think he's a fraud, or define themselves as his detractors.
But as we can see from the comments on this article, a lot of people resent the free publicity he's getting from this, and the only reaction we as detractors can have in the face of it is silence - anything else serves his purpose.
People who want to know what he will say about something should ask questions. But I am merely pointing out that those who already have their minds made up against him are best served by not contributing to the discussion. He's going to get a very loud opportunity to answer them at the top of the column on Friday, and they will get a meek, moderatable opportunity to continue the discussion underneath...doesn't sound like a winning proposition to me. Not saying it's not fair, just saying that his opponents should consider this. If someone wants a chance to judge him by how he responds, not having done so already, then by all means ask away.
No, I think it's in Slashdot's best interest as a journalistic medium to do this.
However, I think it's in Slashdot's _readers'_ best interest to utterly ignore this article if they think he's a fraud. Look into his past yourself (and don't necessarily take either him or his biggest detractors at face value) and determine if you think he needs more free publicity or not.
The best thing those of us who _are_ detractors can do is:
1. Don't ask questions under this article
2. Don't moderate any questions in this article up
Perhaps there should be some bug-stomping party, some get-together (easy if funded by AOL, slightly more difficult if not) where competent hackers all converge and fix a lot of things over a weekend or something? Something like what Loki did.
I'm running Word and Excel 97 SR-2. Now, I do have a complete Win98 install on the old DOS partition, including IE4, so perhaps if IE is required, they're just relying on the one that's installed over there? (I might add, IE4 almost works; I can start to view simple web pages before it kicks me to the debugger.)
I'm not running entirely "Windowsless" on this laptop, I just never have to _boot_ Windows to get anything done. *smiles*
I am unsure of the answer to the "replacement DLL's" question. My guess is that eventually some of that will be taken care of, at least the bits that have somehow supposedly become part of the API, if it's really necessary. But I wasn't aware that Word and Excel 97 required IE (don't know about 2000). I'm sure they automatically install it given half the chance, though (like most other MS products).
You might have better luck trying to run OSF/1 binaries. (Haven't tried it on mine, I use lynx if I need anything.)
First, Wine has made incredible strides in the last year. By incredible I mean "I can't believe how many more applications, including popular ones, work or work better now."
.conf file and I didn't pay attention. Usually five minutes later and everything's working again.
Second, it's the Wine people themselves who are also working on winelib; it's sort of a serendipitous project, I believe. That's not coming along quite as quickly last I checked, but if Corel really is getting involved then maybe that will change. Not sure how that has gone.
I have been upgrading at every release for the last six months and the only time things have ever "broken" as the result of an upgrade, it has been because they changed the options or the
I should point out that I no longer use precompiled binaries; the code base is sort of large but it's worth it to compile it yourself. I fixed a lot of things by doing that. (Having to stick with glibc 2.0.7 for the time being sort of forced that as well.)
I don't think that what they're doing lends itself to nailing down the releases the way you suggest (1.0=Win31, 1.1=win32, etc.). It's hard to know what's what in the vast undocumented world of the Win32 API's. They're really doing a fantastic job these days, anyway - if you haven't tried it in a few months, try it.
These people are the ones who make it possible for people like me, in corporate NT-only settings, to survive with a dedicated Linux desktop.
In the last two upgrades, fonts have improved dramatically, and I can run Word and Excel (although printing is still a bit sticky).
Hope this clears some things up.
My network at home is named after songs from the Jethro Tull album "Broadsword and the Beast."
This produces some interesting side effects:
beastie: firewall/print-server, mean little NetBSD/mac68k machine
broadsword: My big LinuxPPC box, I love sitting at a "broadsword~$" prompt
clasp: Linux/x86 laptop (you can clasp it)
pussywillow: My wife's computer (I don't think she knows what to make of it, but I keep telling her it's a compliment)
cheerio: Alpha file/MP3/squid server
slowmarchingband: Windows machine (SMB, get it?)
sealdriver: Old Quadra for Mac-only applications, stormy and self-absorbed
Speaking as a believer (and a geek, and a recovering DOOMaholic), I believe I can confidently say that God has no interest in winning the attention of gamers through crap like this.
I don't see anywhere in the Bible where we (as believers) are ordered to rip off the secular media, poorly, in the attempt to win back segments of society. How in the world does a game like this make my relationship with God any better? For that matter, how does 95 percent of Christian rock/rap/what-have-you? Or Christian romance novels (yes, they're out there)?
The fact is, most of the churchgoing Christian world thinks that they're supposed to be fighting "the world" on the world's turf, constantly playing catch-up. All most people (me included) have gotten out of this ridiculous one-sided conflict is the message, "Christian media sucks." And it does, for the most part.
I've got news for believers. The Lord wants us to work on our own relationships with Him, not stoop to playing this attention-game. We can't win at this, and do we even want to? Quake isn't the cause of society's ills. This effort was misguided from the beginning.
On behalf of intelligent believers everywhere, I would like to apologize to gamers, geeks, etc., for some of our wackoes. Every movement has them.