If you'd like to help improve KDE, you don't necessarily have to be a developer.
The best and easiest way is to find something you don't like and then file a "wishlist" bug report. It doesn't take very long, and provided you search for an existing report first, and make your request polite and concise, you're definitely contributing. You can also get involved in discussions via the mailing lists or the forums.
Of course this is not limited to KDE, either - most projects have some sort of bug reporting facility, and if all else fails you can email the developer.
I think it's important to note that the issue with the current Linux kernel's NTFS support is its capabilities, not its quality. It can only write to a file without increasing its size - and no creating or deleting files or directories. It's fine if you want to mount a loopback file on an NTFS partition (say if you want to install Linux onto a Windows machine without repartitioning - a few distributions support running Linux out of a file on the Windows partition in this way).
It's also fine if you just want to read files from an NTFS partition - I use it for this all the time.
There's often quite a difference between infringing on a trivial software patent, and taking someone else's code and basically trying to pass it off as your own.
There's nothing wrong with companies making money from GPL'd software. However, if a company takes GPL'd source, compiles it into their product and then doesn't provide a notice anywhere describing how the source including any modifications can be obtained, then they are in violation of the GPL.
The bottom line is, if someone has spent their effort on creating a piece of code and has (generously) decided to release that code under the GPL, and you want to reuse some or all of the code that they wrote, you have to comply with the GPL - otherwise, you don't get to use it. It's not a difficult concept to understand, nor is it unfair.
- The mouse is a little different, but you get used to it. Not sure about the extra buttons thing as I don't use mine. - You could try the new "forcedeth" driver for the nForce2 NIC. - CD burning works well for me. It doesn't use SCSI emulation anymore and reportedly is less likely to underrun. YMMV, though. - For a production web server that's running fine, there's no real point in upgrading to 2.6.
On the other hand, there are probably more users and developers testing the pre-release versions ahead of 2.6.0 than there were for 2.4.0, and we also now have OSDL doing serious enterprise-level testing of Linux as a core part of their operations.
Things are already looking very positive for 2.6.0, and I'd say if the benefits of moving to 2.6 are significant (and I think they are) then distro makers will switch to it pretty quickly.
Have you reported this to the ALSA developers as a bug? Considering ALSA is the way Linux is heading, this would be a problem worth solving and reporting it would be helpful.
2. It MUST have widespread hardware support. That means it supports the latest graphics cards, sound cards, network cards and I/O cards at full functionality of the device.
The only entity who really has control over this is the hardware manufacturer. If they release full specifications, or they develop drivers themselves, then it will probably be supported. Otherwise if you get support under Linux you should consider yourself lucky and praise the coder(s) who figured out how to do it on their own. I know the average user isn't going to understand this, but the people complaining here probably can.
The situation is really not all that bad right now - a huge amount of hardware already works very well with Linux. It will improve further as Linux increases in popularity and hardware companies start to realise the value in being open, or at the very least develop their own closed-source Linux drivers for their products.
Dramatic steps forward can occur when large deals (involving significant numbers of hardware units) are contingent on Linux support - eg. the recent addition of Promise SATA support to the Linux kernel. I suspect if more people emailed hardware companies who don't actively support Linux letting them know (politely!) that they chose some competing product instead of theirs because of Linux support, they might pay a little more attention.
While I have used Knoppix, where I needed to recover data I've used SystemRescueCD, and as my main drive has just died (the second one this month!) I'll be using it again shortly. It's based on the Gentoo LiveCD, is less than half the size of Knoppix, and contains all the utilities you need for rescuing and repartitioning (Partimage, parted/QtParted, fdisk, sfdisk, dd_rescue, plus all the usual stuff). Granted, it's not as friendly as Knoppix for the uninitiated as it just dumps you at a prompt after auto-detecting everything, but in any case you really have to know what you're doing to recover a system in this way so I don't think that's an issue.
I've written a small article in the Gentoo Docs forum about recovering my system using the CD.
It's a shame that report has been so heavy-handedly censored, though. You'd wonder why anyone would bother releasing it in such a state, where crucial pieces of evidence have been expunged and so little of substance remains.
I don't quite understand. You can afford the disk space *and* the bandwidth for a complete Knoppix CD image, but you can't for the source code of KDE alone?
If you had mentioned time to compile, that would be a different story.
I haven't fully investigated how factual the history in the Journeyman Project games (notably the second and third instalments) but they were a lot of fun. Not only did they have a rich visual world and a compelling storyline, but one of the best aspects for me was the witty AI companion you picked up called Arthur, who when prompted gave interesting comments on some object or the place you were in. I think games in this style would be great for opening kids' minds to learning about history as well as maybe teaching them a little problem-solving.
Not only does it look at the file extension to see if it's executable or not, in many circumstances it doesn't bother to check if the internal format of the file actually matches the extension!
For example, try renaming a.exe to a.pif and then running it. This should not work, but it does, and it's something viruses have actually taken advantage of.
Have Microsoft made any attempt other than in Outlook to close up silly holes like this? To the best of my knowledge, they have not. For all their proclamations about trustworthy computing, given this and the continual recurrence of buffer overrun-style bugs, you'd have to wonder whether they really care about making secure software.
That's true, but to get the equivalent functionality, just installing an SSH server on Windows isn't enough. Windows does not have the command line toolset that Unix does.
Just one example - how do you change permissions on a file from the command line? As I found at work, the only way to get absolute full control over file permissions (adding/deleting ACEs, changing owner, recurse through directories etc.) from the command line is to use a third party utility (FILEACL.EXE is the one I found, after much searching - there was one in the Resource Kit but it doesn't do everything).
There are plenty of other instances where you just can't do something in Windows without going to the GUI, unless you find/purchase a third-party tool. This is a nightmare if you just want to script things, let alone do remote administration over slow links.
You do have a valid point, however I don't think you could have too many complaints about this report in this regard. Having just skimmed over it myself, I think they've been brutally honest about the general flaws in Linux and what needs to be looked at.
What I meant was clients no longer automatically get a CAL just because they are running Windows 2000 Pro or Windows XP Pro. This policy is now gone, so you have to buy more CALs for the same number of clients if you upgrade to Windows Server 2003.
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If you'd like to help improve KDE, you don't necessarily have to be a developer.
The best and easiest way is to find something you don't like and then file a "wishlist" bug report. It doesn't take very long, and provided you search for an existing report first, and make your request polite and concise, you're definitely contributing. You can also get involved in discussions via the mailing lists or the forums.
Of course this is not limited to KDE, either - most projects have some sort of bug reporting facility, and if all else fails you can email the developer.
I think it's important to note that the issue with the current Linux kernel's NTFS support is its capabilities, not its quality. It can only write to a file without increasing its size - and no creating or deleting files or directories. It's fine if you want to mount a loopback file on an NTFS partition (say if you want to install Linux onto a Windows machine without repartitioning - a few distributions support running Linux out of a file on the Windows partition in this way).
It's also fine if you just want to read files from an NTFS partition - I use it for this all the time.
There's often quite a difference between infringing on a trivial software patent, and taking someone else's code and basically trying to pass it off as your own.
There's nothing wrong with companies making money from GPL'd software. However, if a company takes GPL'd source, compiles it into their product and then doesn't provide a notice anywhere describing how the source including any modifications can be obtained, then they are in violation of the GPL.
The bottom line is, if someone has spent their effort on creating a piece of code and has (generously) decided to release that code under the GPL, and you want to reuse some or all of the code that they wrote, you have to comply with the GPL - otherwise, you don't get to use it. It's not a difficult concept to understand, nor is it unfair.
- The mouse is a little different, but you get used to it. Not sure about the extra buttons thing as I don't use mine.
- You could try the new "forcedeth" driver for the nForce2 NIC.
- CD burning works well for me. It doesn't use SCSI emulation anymore and reportedly is less likely to underrun. YMMV, though.
- For a production web server that's running fine, there's no real point in upgrading to 2.6.
On the other hand, there are probably more users and developers testing the pre-release versions ahead of 2.6.0 than there were for 2.4.0, and we also now have OSDL doing serious enterprise-level testing of Linux as a core part of their operations.
Things are already looking very positive for 2.6.0, and I'd say if the benefits of moving to 2.6 are significant (and I think they are) then distro makers will switch to it pretty quickly.
Have you reported this to the ALSA developers as a bug? Considering ALSA is the way Linux is heading, this would be a problem worth solving and reporting it would be helpful.
The kernel doesn't control the boot process in the way you're thinking of - init takes over in fairly short order.
Some technical details here and here if you're interested.
2. It MUST have widespread hardware support. That means it supports the latest graphics cards, sound cards, network cards and I/O cards at full functionality of the device.
The only entity who really has control over this is the hardware manufacturer. If they release full specifications, or they develop drivers themselves, then it will probably be supported. Otherwise if you get support under Linux you should consider yourself lucky and praise the coder(s) who figured out how to do it on their own. I know the average user isn't going to understand this, but the people complaining here probably can.
The situation is really not all that bad right now - a huge amount of hardware already works very well with Linux. It will improve further as Linux increases in popularity and hardware companies start to realise the value in being open, or at the very least develop their own closed-source Linux drivers for their products.
Dramatic steps forward can occur when large deals (involving significant numbers of hardware units) are contingent on Linux support - eg. the recent addition of Promise SATA support to the Linux kernel. I suspect if more people emailed hardware companies who don't actively support Linux letting them know (politely!) that they chose some competing product instead of theirs because of Linux support, they might pay a little more attention.
You can run KDE apps in Gnome, and vice versa. For example, I regularly use GIMP from within KDE.
While I have used Knoppix, where I needed to recover data I've used SystemRescueCD, and as my main drive has just died (the second one this month!) I'll be using it again shortly. It's based on the Gentoo LiveCD, is less than half the size of Knoppix, and contains all the utilities you need for rescuing and repartitioning (Partimage, parted/QtParted, fdisk, sfdisk, dd_rescue, plus all the usual stuff). Granted, it's not as friendly as Knoppix for the uninitiated as it just dumps you at a prompt after auto-detecting everything, but in any case you really have to know what you're doing to recover a system in this way so I don't think that's an issue.
I've written a small article in the Gentoo Docs forum about recovering my system using the CD.
Of course, there's always Daikatana's "Superfly Johnson"...
What were they thinking, indeed...
It's a shame that report has been so heavy-handedly censored, though. You'd wonder why anyone would bother releasing it in such a state, where crucial pieces of evidence have been expunged and so little of substance remains.
I assume you've never been to bash.org...
(half-joking here)
Loki went out of business due to bad management, not lack of interest from gamers. Check out this article.
I don't quite understand. You can afford the disk space *and* the bandwidth for a complete Knoppix CD image, but you can't for the source code of KDE alone?
If you had mentioned time to compile, that would be a different story.
No, it does not. It doesn't do DVD navigation - for me, that is enough to stop me from using it.
I doubt a few hundred dollars is going to matter...
No, but save a few hundred dollars on each of a few thousand desktops and it adds up to quite a big saving.
I haven't fully investigated how factual the history in the Journeyman Project games (notably the second and third instalments) but they were a lot of fun. Not only did they have a rich visual world and a compelling storyline, but one of the best aspects for me was the witty AI companion you picked up called Arthur, who when prompted gave interesting comments on some object or the place you were in. I think games in this style would be great for opening kids' minds to learning about history as well as maybe teaching them a little problem-solving.
Not only does it look at the file extension to see if it's executable or not, in many circumstances it doesn't bother to check if the internal format of the file actually matches the extension!
.exe to a .pif and then running it. This should not work, but it does, and it's something viruses have actually taken advantage of.
For example, try renaming a
Have Microsoft made any attempt other than in Outlook to close up silly holes like this? To the best of my knowledge, they have not. For all their proclamations about trustworthy computing, given this and the continual recurrence of buffer overrun-style bugs, you'd have to wonder whether they really care about making secure software.
No, the long-haired hippie commie free software freaks just cut their hair and got jobs.
That's true, but to get the equivalent functionality, just installing an SSH server on Windows isn't enough. Windows does not have the command line toolset that Unix does.
Just one example - how do you change permissions on a file from the command line? As I found at work, the only way to get absolute full control over file permissions (adding/deleting ACEs, changing owner, recurse through directories etc.) from the command line is to use a third party utility (FILEACL.EXE is the one I found, after much searching - there was one in the Resource Kit but it doesn't do everything).
There are plenty of other instances where you just can't do something in Windows without going to the GUI, unless you find/purchase a third-party tool. This is a nightmare if you just want to script things, let alone do remote administration over slow links.
You do have a valid point, however I don't think you could have too many complaints about this report in this regard. Having just skimmed over it myself, I think they've been brutally honest about the general flaws in Linux and what needs to be looked at.
Cite your source. Here's mine (under "Removal of the Operating System Equivalency Provision"):
New Options for Microsoft Server Licensing - Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services
What I meant was clients no longer automatically get a CAL just because they are running Windows 2000 Pro or Windows XP Pro. This policy is now gone, so you have to buy more CALs for the same number of clients if you upgrade to Windows Server 2003.
a) This is not really complying with the licence, is it? You're not actually connecting from Win2K so you're not automatically entitled to a CAL.
b) I understand Windows 2003 Server doesn't give out CALs automatically to Win2K clients anymore, so you're out of luck if you upgrade to Win2K3.