I would say they are remarkably similar. The two biggest differences seem to be that Gentoo is source based and only seems to have one main subdistribution. Debian is binary based although any package can be recompiled from source pretty easily. Debian Unstable and Gentoo would give you the best apples-to-apples comparison. I'm not a Gentoo user so I can't advise you there. I will point out that the following source list for Debian's apt tool will get you easy access to fully compiled packages of mplayer and the w32codecs:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free #deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free #deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free
# Blackdown java port deb http://www.tux.org/pub/java/debian sid non-free
# Cinelerra/Media Players deb http://lpnotfr.free.fr/debian./ deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main deb http://www.kiberpipa.org/~minmax/cinelerra/builds/ sid./
Once your desktop is configured to taste, I think the following will do what you want with the preceding in your/etc/apt/sources.list:
If you want Shockwave as well, you'll have to pony up for a copy of Crossover Wine.
That gets the software to playback most anything and the ability to do it within a browser as well. Watching trailers on apple.com even works well.
Tuning:
mozplugger and the mplayer plugin are redundant in the video department. It won't hurt anything to skip this step but I do it anyway. Edit/etc/mozpluggerrc and comment out all the lines that handle video MIME types. The mplayer plugin does a better job. You want have all of this installed before running the Mozilla or Firefox for the first time for maximum painlessness.
Assuming you have a well supported video card (Nvidia and Matrox work well from personal experience), edit/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf and set vo=xv. This will enable hardware scaling for watching videos. Leave everything else in there alone.
1) It might be available on SACD, which I think sounds _much_ better than CD. 2) Even if it isn't, I get cover art, liner notes, and the ability to rip at any bit rate I want 3) no DRM
The SACD is absolutely encrusted with DRM. If it includes Red Book audio, you might be able to rip that.
I hate to be the smartass to point this out to you but the guts of your perfect OS are based "free second rate stuff" and are even compiled with "free second rate stuff".
Stop doing free tech support for them. No one knows how cars work either but most still know that if they drive like maniacs all the time then there will either be a wreck or damaged powertrain. Refuse to do that maintenance unless they are willing to meet you halfway and listen to easy to follow advice.
Tell them clicking the link for anything but Hotmail is like doing something really abusive to their car and expecting the mechanic in the family to fix it free. It certainly isn't the end of the world for you if they disregard and wind up paying somebody $75.00/hr to fix it for them. If that won't educate somebody then nothing will.
There is no malice here. It tough love and I starting practicing it when friends and family had me bail them out one time too many after ignoring that sort of advice. I get paid to fix same damn problems caused by the same damn people doing the same damn stupid things over and over again. I won't do it for free anymore. I'll give free help to family and friends but I expect my pitfall advice to be heeded or there won't be any more where that came from.
Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done The following NEW packages will be installed:
uselesslib0 uselesslib0-dev stupidlib stupidlib0-dev
And it's my right to undo any government mandated braindamage to my computers and media equipment. The assholes who paid for the DMCA know exactly where they can cram it.
I suppose you could but you'd wind up reinventing AGP. Your theoretical computer will need a fast interconnect with the host machine. Besides that, you have the slight task of designing an effective GPU.
Nvidia can't or won't open source their driver? Okay, we have to live with that. But riddle me this, what is so secret about the register level specs of the cards? As the ALSA guys say, "We don't want the Verilog or anything. We just want the information necessary to write a driver."
The result of this will likely be a driver that is not as fast and full featured as Nvidia's drivers. On the other hand, the driver will work across architectures and won't be plauged by silly problems like these 4k stacks. It will probably work correctly for more hardware cases. I have the Nvidia drivers and a SIS648 chipset on my machine. If I enable Hyperthreading, virtual terminals only work intermittently and my uptime will be something less than one day. I can see plenty of situations where I would like the choice between incomplete but throughly debugged 3D and all the bells and whistles.
I used to run a Matrox G400. Yeah, 3D was weak but those drivers were solid. I seriously doubt there is anything sooper-sekret about the hardware interfaces to these cards.
This gets a bit OT, though. The issue under discussion - controlling computing hardware as weapons
Computers are being considered weapons because you can simulate nuke tests with them. That said, these controls are silly. If a P-IV is consumer tech for me, I don't see the likes of Iran having a hard time getting their hands on some. Others have pointed out Fujitsu makes some nifty 64-bit Sparcs.
Building a nuke doesn't necessarily require extraordinary financing - you don't need a huge plutonium refinement factory to produce 1 bomb, you just need a source of refined plutonium.
That isn't something you can just run down to Wal-Mart and get. Absent a very big slip-up the Canadians aren't going let anybody use their fuel to nuke the US with. The fuel for "just one bomb" came from a refinement factory that required extraordinary financing.
There is one way the cult/small group scenario can hold ice. The former Soviet Union is doing a very piss poor job of securing and accounting for their nuclear materials. I don't think we would nuke Russia if it was just a slip-up (although we would insist on sanctions or something). The powers that be would still find someone "big" to blame and then deal out an asskicking especially if the scapegoat has something we would like to have. Iraq didn't have jack squat to do with 9/11 or anything else Al Queda did to us.
I didn't say I thought it was right. I'm only pointing out that the powers that be will want to vaporize somebody if we get nuked. "Turn the other cheek." won't cut it with those in charge if something like this happens.
1: Go out, buy a rifle and a handgun, a decent knife and some bodyarmor, and learn to use them. While you're doing this, get a good political education and know where you stand, and find people with similar views you can make good friends with.
What the hell good is anything I can get ahold of as a civilian going to do against military hardware? I can see myself with my Glock blazing away at the A10 Warthog that is about to kill me. The Warthog is only one of the toys they wouldn't hesitate to use against a rebellious populace. Come to think of it, even a rebellious populace is a bit much to ask. The government can do whatever the hell it wants as long as beer and TV are cheap.
Any armed rebellion against the government is going to look more like Ruby Ridge than the Civil War.
True. But as nuclear weapons go, they are extremely inefficient. You need A LOT of fuel to build one of these things. Getting enough fuel to build a small efficient bomb is a challenge in itself.
In other words, a dirty bomb and an actual fission device are very different things, and it isn't really possible to build something which is both at the same time.
I thought the US and Russia considered strontium laced bombs that would make anywhere they were detonated uninhabitable for long periods of time. As I understand it, we're talking about three broad classes of weapon:
1. Straight-up bomb. The primary purpose of the weapon is to wreak devastation.
2. The above + "dirtifier". The purpose of this bomb is to destroy an area and keep it unrebuilt.
3. Dirty bomb. This weapon causes very little destruction. It is meant to turn any area into a radioactive Superfund site.
There are all kinds of good reasons not build the 2nd class of weapon but its very possible.
I think Afghanistan would be glowing in the dark right now; and we probably wouldn't have stopped there. The US policy if a WMD is used on us is to answer with WMDs. Since we don't use chemical or biological weapons, what does that leave?
Any terrorist who gets ahold of a bomb had to have help from a patron Nation. Any such patron would get glassed.
Actually, I just looked at the Plugger page and they've just had a release after a long hiatus. The mozplugger devs say their next release will be based on it. Since mozplugger is just an apt-get away, I'll probably be staying with it.
I'll also point out that plugger does a better job of being the Acrobat plugin than the Acrobat plugin. The downside is each PDF viewed causes acroread to be started again. It's stable though and lets me use gv or xpdf in Acrobat's place on my Powerbook.
The GtkQT stuff is getting pretty good. I run KDE with the GTK2 apps set to use the GtkQT theme. The appearance of the GTK2 apps no longer clashes. I also use the Plastik theme for Mozilla which takes care of that. It so happens that Openoffice is more or less themed as Plastik and makes some use of GTK2. In all, the appearance of my desktop is as "unified" as other OS I've used.
Upcoming releases of KDE and GNOME will use DBUS so hopefully that will put object interchange problems to bed.
The hard drive in my Pismo Powerbook (400 Mhz 512 MB RAM) recently ate it. I was able to recover my $HOME with lots of time and cold packs...boy that sucked!
Anyway, I had to reinstall Debian from scratch on this thing. I did two things differently when I did so. I used reiserfs instead of ext3 and when I set up KDE for the first time I used minimum eyecandy and reenabled very few things. Those made things feel much snappier.
I also got some small improvements by putting/tmp and/var/tmp on tmpfs. tmpfs works like a ramdisk but it dynamically grows and shrinks depending on its contents. It's just the thing when swap isn't appropriate but little scratch files get made.
The system feels pretty good as it is right but I could prelink everything and get a bit better performance out of the gui apps. While you're at it, install hdparm and tweak your drives. Enabling DMA makes a big difference.
Or find an old P75 in the trash and use it to play those games...
Ah, but space is at a premium. When you have a wife and kid and don't live in a big place, there is only room for one machine. The emulator doesn't take up space and isn't old cranky hardware that will have to be maintained.
I've had better luck running games in newer versions of DOSemu. I'm running a 2.4 Ghz PIV and I couldn't get a decent framerate in anything I tried in DOSbox. DOSemu ran almost everything I threw at it acceptably. The biggie was Carmageddon.
I'll keep trying new releases. Either it will improve or I'll come into a machine fast enough to emulate a P75 with it. The following specs seem to cover all the ground needed to play games before the Win95 era began.
I'd estimate my current setup is closer to a P60 than a P75. The only fly in the ointment with DOSemu is that the OPL2/3 and wavetable stuff of the day may be spotty; you'll get sound effects but good luck with the music.
This is pretty nifty. It's more of an admin tool than a general use tool though. It only requires some scripts running on the server side. The client side needs a kernel module.
Re:IBM not OSS hero
on
Wired on McBride
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In the FOSS world, reputation counts for a quite a bit more. Code trees and user bases live or die based on reputation. Look at XFree86. A few months ago, they were the canonical implementation of X11. One bad licensing move later and they're blowing away like a fart in the wind.
If IBM truly intends to use FOSS as a vehicle to (legitimately) make money then they need the trust of the developers as well as their customers.
All that and SCO's accusations are not to be tolerated. IBM also has to maintain credibility in the business world. SCO's accusations are not to be tolerated and trying to interfere the AIX business is completely beyond the pale. They got between mother bear and her cubs there.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say they are remarkably similar. The two biggest differences seem to be that Gentoo is source based and only seems to have one main subdistribution. Debian is binary based although any package can be recompiled from source pretty easily. Debian Unstable and Gentoo would give you the best apples-to-apples comparison. I'm not a Gentoo user so I can't advise you there. I will point out that the following source list for Debian's apt tool will get you easy access to fully compiled packages of mplayer and the w32codecs:
.// sid ./
/etc/apt/sources.list:
/etc/mozpluggerrc and comment out all the lines that handle video MIME types. The mplayer plugin does a better job. You want have all of this installed before running the Mozilla or Firefox for the first time for maximum painlessness.
/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf and set vo=xv. This will enable hardware scaling for watching videos. Leave everything else in there alone.
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free
# Blackdown java port
deb http://www.tux.org/pub/java/debian sid non-free
# Cinelerra/Media Players
deb http://lpnotfr.free.fr/debian
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main
deb http://www.kiberpipa.org/~minmax/cinelerra/builds
Once your desktop is configured to taste, I think the following will do what you want with the preceding in your
apt-get install mplayer-586 mplayer-mozilla w32codecs mozplugger acroread timidity mikmod sox j2re1.4 flashplugin-nonfree
If you want Shockwave as well, you'll have to pony up for a copy of Crossover Wine.
That gets the software to playback most anything and the ability to do it within a browser as well. Watching trailers on apple.com even works well.
Tuning:
mozplugger and the mplayer plugin are redundant in the video department. It won't hurt anything to skip this step but I do it anyway. Edit
Assuming you have a well supported video card (Nvidia and Matrox work well from personal experience), edit
1) It might be available on SACD, which I think sounds _much_ better than CD.
2) Even if it isn't, I get cover art, liner notes, and the ability to rip at any bit rate I want
3) no DRM
The SACD is absolutely encrusted with DRM. If it includes Red Book audio, you might be able to rip that.
That was another band. And no we're not going to do fucking Stonehenge again!
I hate to be the smartass to point this out to you but the guts of your perfect OS are based "free second rate stuff" and are even compiled with "free second rate stuff".
Stop doing free tech support for them. No one knows how cars work either but most still know that if they drive like maniacs all the time then there will either be a wreck or damaged powertrain. Refuse to do that maintenance unless they are willing to meet you halfway and listen to easy to follow advice.
Tell them clicking the link for anything but Hotmail is like doing something really abusive to their car and expecting the mechanic in the family to fix it free. It certainly isn't the end of the world for you if they disregard and wind up paying somebody $75.00/hr to fix it for them. If that won't educate somebody then nothing will.
There is no malice here. It tough love and I starting practicing it when friends and family had me bail them out one time too many after ignoring that sort of advice. I get paid to fix same damn problems caused by the same damn people doing the same damn stupid things over and over again. I won't do it for free anymore. I'll give free help to family and friends but I expect my pitfall advice to be heeded or there won't be any more where that came from.
apt-cache search uselesslib
uselesslib0
uselesslib0-dev
apt-get install uselesslib0-dev
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
uselesslib0 uselesslib0-dev stupidlib stupidlib0-dev
And it's my right to undo any government mandated braindamage to my computers and media equipment. The assholes who paid for the DMCA know exactly where they can cram it.
I suppose you could but you'd wind up reinventing AGP. Your theoretical computer will need a fast interconnect with the host machine. Besides that, you have the slight task of designing an effective GPU.
Nvidia can't or won't open source their driver? Okay, we have to live with that. But riddle me this, what is so secret about the register level specs of the cards? As the ALSA guys say, "We don't want the Verilog or anything. We just want the information necessary to write a driver."
The result of this will likely be a driver that is not as fast and full featured as Nvidia's drivers. On the other hand, the driver will work across architectures and won't be plauged by silly problems like these 4k stacks. It will probably work correctly for more hardware cases. I have the Nvidia drivers and a SIS648 chipset on my machine. If I enable Hyperthreading, virtual terminals only work intermittently and my uptime will be something less than one day. I can see plenty of situations where I would like the choice between incomplete but throughly debugged 3D and all the bells and whistles.
I used to run a Matrox G400. Yeah, 3D was weak but those drivers were solid. I seriously doubt there is anything sooper-sekret about the hardware interfaces to these cards.
This gets a bit OT, though. The issue under discussion - controlling computing hardware as weapons
Computers are being considered weapons because you can simulate nuke tests with them. That said, these controls are silly. If a P-IV is consumer tech for me, I don't see the likes of Iran having a hard time getting their hands on some. Others have pointed out Fujitsu makes some nifty 64-bit Sparcs.
Building a nuke doesn't necessarily require extraordinary financing - you don't need a huge plutonium refinement factory to produce 1 bomb, you just need a source of refined plutonium.
That isn't something you can just run down to Wal-Mart and get. Absent a very big slip-up the Canadians aren't going let anybody use their fuel to nuke the US with. The fuel for "just one bomb" came from a refinement factory that required extraordinary financing.
There is one way the cult/small group scenario can hold ice. The former Soviet Union is doing a very piss poor job of securing and accounting for their nuclear materials. I don't think we would nuke Russia if it was just a slip-up (although we would insist on sanctions or something). The powers that be would still find someone "big" to blame and then deal out an asskicking especially if the scapegoat has something we would like to have. Iraq didn't have jack squat to do with 9/11 or anything else Al Queda did to us.
I didn't say I thought it was right. I'm only pointing out that the powers that be will want to vaporize somebody if we get nuked. "Turn the other cheek." won't cut it with those in charge if something like this happens.
1: Go out, buy a rifle and a handgun, a decent knife and some bodyarmor, and learn to use them. While you're doing this, get a good political education and know where you stand, and find people with similar views you can make good friends with.
What the hell good is anything I can get ahold of as a civilian going to do against military hardware? I can see myself with my Glock blazing away at the A10 Warthog that is about to kill me. The Warthog is only one of the toys they wouldn't hesitate to use against a rebellious populace. Come to think of it, even a rebellious populace is a bit much to ask. The government can do whatever the hell it wants as long as beer and TV are cheap.
Any armed rebellion against the government is going to look more like Ruby Ridge than the Civil War.
True. But as nuclear weapons go, they are extremely inefficient. You need A LOT of fuel to build one of these things. Getting enough fuel to build a small efficient bomb is a challenge in itself.
In other words, a dirty bomb and an actual fission device are very different things, and it isn't really possible to build something which is both at the same time.
I thought the US and Russia considered strontium laced bombs that would make anywhere they were detonated uninhabitable for long periods of time. As I understand it, we're talking about three broad classes of weapon:
1. Straight-up bomb. The primary purpose of the weapon is to wreak devastation.
2. The above + "dirtifier". The purpose of this bomb is to destroy an area and keep it unrebuilt.
3. Dirty bomb. This weapon causes very little destruction. It is meant to turn any area into a radioactive Superfund site.
There are all kinds of good reasons not build the 2nd class of weapon but its very possible.
I think Afghanistan would be glowing in the dark right now; and we probably wouldn't have stopped there. The US policy if a WMD is used on us is to answer with WMDs. Since we don't use chemical or biological weapons, what does that leave?
Any terrorist who gets ahold of a bomb had to have help from a patron Nation. Any such patron would get glassed.
Actually, I just looked at the Plugger page and they've just had a release after a long hiatus. The mozplugger devs say their next release will be based on it. Since mozplugger is just an apt-get away, I'll probably be staying with it.
I'll also point out that plugger does a better job of being the Acrobat plugin than the Acrobat plugin. The downside is each PDF viewed causes acroread to be started again. It's stable though and lets me use gv or xpdf in Acrobat's place on my Powerbook.
The GtkQT stuff is getting pretty good. I run KDE with the GTK2 apps set to use the GtkQT theme. The appearance of the GTK2 apps no longer clashes. I also use the Plastik theme for Mozilla which takes care of that. It so happens that Openoffice is more or less themed as Plastik and makes some use of GTK2. In all, the appearance of my desktop is as "unified" as other OS I've used.
Upcoming releases of KDE and GNOME will use DBUS so hopefully that will put object interchange problems to bed.
Plugger is mainly for NS4 and hasn't been actively developed for a couple of years. Mozplugger is an actively maintained fork for gecko browswers.
The hard drive in my Pismo Powerbook (400 Mhz 512 MB RAM) recently ate it. I was able to recover my $HOME with lots of time and cold packs...boy that sucked!
/tmp and /var/tmp on tmpfs. tmpfs works like a ramdisk but it dynamically grows and shrinks depending on its contents. It's just the thing when swap isn't appropriate but little scratch files get made.
Anyway, I had to reinstall Debian from scratch on this thing. I did two things differently when I did so. I used reiserfs instead of ext3 and when I set up KDE for the first time I used minimum eyecandy and reenabled very few things. Those made things feel much snappier.
I also got some small improvements by putting
The system feels pretty good as it is right but I could prelink everything and get a bit better performance out of the gui apps. While you're at it, install hdparm and tweak your drives. Enabling DMA makes a big difference.
Or find an old P75 in the trash and use it to play those games...
Ah, but space is at a premium. When you have a wife and kid and don't live in a big place, there is only room for one machine. The emulator doesn't take up space and isn't old cranky hardware that will have to be maintained.
I've had better luck running games in newer versions of DOSemu. I'm running a 2.4 Ghz PIV and I couldn't get a decent framerate in anything I tried in DOSbox. DOSemu ran almost everything I threw at it acceptably. The biggie was Carmageddon.
I'll keep trying new releases. Either it will improve or I'll come into a machine fast enough to emulate a P75 with it. The following specs seem to cover all the ground needed to play games before the Win95 era began.
Pentium 75
Soundblaster AWE32
32 MB RAM
Trio64/VESA/CGA/EGA graphics
I'd estimate my current setup is closer to a P60 than a P75. The only fly in the ointment with DOSemu is that the OPL2/3 and wavetable stuff of the day may be spotty; you'll get sound effects but good luck with the music.
why give the city free clean up labor? I'd just make a clean circle where my outline graffiti used to be.
Of course, using SSH is heavy on resources, so it would still be better to have the encryption optional.
No problem! From the FAQ:
Is it possible to use another command instead of ssh?
Yes. See --cmd shfsmount option.
You can tell ssh to not use encryption or use some other command entirely as the transport.
This is pretty nifty. It's more of an admin tool than a general use tool though. It only requires some scripts running on the server side. The client side needs a kernel module.
In the FOSS world, reputation counts for a quite a bit more. Code trees and user bases live or die based on reputation. Look at XFree86. A few months ago, they were the canonical implementation of X11. One bad licensing move later and they're blowing away like a fart in the wind.
If IBM truly intends to use FOSS as a vehicle to (legitimately) make money then they need the trust of the developers as well as their customers.
All that and SCO's accusations are not to be tolerated. IBM also has to maintain credibility in the business world. SCO's accusations are not to be tolerated and trying to interfere the AIX business is completely beyond the pale. They got between mother bear and her cubs there.