We bought a bunch of security kits, "standard" Kensington types, which work nicely with the Compaq laptops we bought for our Postgrad students. But one of our lecturers got a nice shiny Acer laptop. He was leaving it in an unlocked office, so we thought it was time to apply both a) clue and b) a security lock.
But could we get the lock to engage with his security hole on the laptop? Could we heck. We prodded and poked and twisted and fiddled but *nothing* could get the thing to stick. It looked like the security hole wasn't quite deep enough for the lock to engage.
We dont know if its the lock or the laptop, but we'll try and find some other ones that work. I dont want his 17" screen Acer walking...
I can well believe it. What I really want is an Xt wrapper round the gecko rendering engine:) I don't want skins, I dont want sidebars. I just want something that looks a bit like xedit, but with web pages beautifully rendered, and a big smiling face on the central admin.
Its not file size, its memory footprint. Firebird has about twice the memory footprint as NS4 on this Solaris box. But the admins say thats too much.
Yes I could get a new box for them, but heck, our support services are supposed to support undergraduate teaching systems, and I'm busy supporting our postgrads. They have access to an 18-CPU Mosix cluster, and there's probably fewer of them than there are undergrads.
We're working on compiling Ishzilla for solaris, which claims to be lightweight (and looks it), but we have to hammer our way through the prereqs first. You ever tried to compile something complex on a non-Linux box? Not nice!
Not light enough for our admins to be happy about me sticking it on the Sun E450 that we use for undergraduate teaching. Stuck in an X-terminal lab with only login access to the E450? You're stuck with Netscape 4. They fear 25 firebirds will bring the system to a crawl.
Anybody know of an even _lighter_ browser, preferably gecko-based, that will work on Solaris? Binaries would be nice:)
Oh no, we can't trust the BBC these days don't you know? I can imagine that Bill Gates will now be launching a swingeing attack on the BBC, leading to a month-long enquiry chaired by, oooh, an unbiased Paul Allen, and then resignation of several senior BBC executives....
[if you dont know what I'm talking about, google for 'Hutton Report' or see BBC news main page:)]
I've noticed linux laptop installs do pretty well at supporting sound, ethernet, USB, and graphics on notebooks these days, but have trouble with a lot of the power-management and suspend/hibernate functions.
We just spent ages trying to configure a new Acer Aspire laptop (17" screen) - and most worked with RH Fedora out of the box, except hibernation (which worked sometimes, but not with the Nvidia drivers in), and we couldn't get it to query the battery power state (relevant file in/proc wouldn't tell us).
Did you get all these things working with the laptop you got all the devices working on?
Yeah, and this idiot gets a 'Windows Recovery' disk with his laptop. Any idiot can get Windows back to the initial state with it, including the magic blue buttons.
If hardware suppliers supplied Linux Recovery disks, or if there was a standard way of doing these things, then that would be marvellous. The situation is much like the early days when you needed drivers for things that are now generic, or use a de-facto standard.
I suspect laptop manufacturers are too busy trying to have their own gee-whizz whistles and bells to beat the opposition.
Just as desktops are in decline, so I'm told. "Desktop PC popularity 'to plummet' by 2007" according to ZDNet.
What Linux needs is _laptop_ support. When you get a laptop with Windows on, it all works. All those funny blue-coloured function buttons? Click and up and down goes the volume, the machine sleeps, hibernates, wakes up. The CD transport buttons on the edge work when you have the unit switched off, and it can even play MP3s from C:\MyMP3s when (apparently) switched off.
Well, thats what the Acer Aspire we got the other day did. And then we put Linux on it, and my techie has spent the last three days trying to get half those things working again. Tried assorted kernels to get hibernation working - but there was a conflict with the Nvidia drivers and we lost accelerated X. DVD recording isn't working for some reason, although CDs are. I think we can get the function buttons working - we did this for another batch of laptops previously.
As laptops get more and more popular, Linux is going to have to sort these things out sharpish. Lots of our staff now have desktop linux boxes (and some have had them for years) but more and more want laptops, and they expect the same feature set as with Windows - but at the moment we cant give that to them.
Looking at the pics, it seems the motherboard occupies the blank space between keyboard and screen, which means they can make the keyboard thin and not have to worry about cables etc under the keyboard.
Suggest you stick strips of velcro underneath the unit and on your lap-covering garments:)
I'm pretty sure I've seen a short version of the 'cog' ad, probably a 30 second version. Not sure if its just the tail end of the full ad or another smart edit. This removes the 'cant afford 120s ad slot' excuse.
Remember the 'Open Source' IE patch that came out recently? That had a few bugs in - buffer overflows, that sort of thing. Luckily, being Open Source, they got spotted quickly.
Now apply the 'Rule of 6 times' to Microsoft's closed source IE patches...
Reminds me of my ZX Spectrum programming days. We were working on a program that really had to use as little memory as possible, so chunks of the code were copied into bitmap screen RAM. The Speccie had attribute screen RAM as well, so we set that to black ink on black paper so the code was invisible, and designed the rest of our screen graphics around it.
Of course if the screen ever scrolled we were in trouble:)
If I was running openwares.org I'd sell the company to Microsoft for a few million and then I'd shut up about IE security.... I'm sure that's legal, and not really extortion. Plus MS would have access to openwares' amazing security software...
You can tell its Friday and that there's a carpenter sawing the ceiling off just outside my office. I misread that as "Space Shuttle to be Outfitted with New Stereo".
The file/var/lib/nfs/rmtab on the server keeps a list of what systems have mounted NFS drives. What you then do is this:
1. When shutting down, first go through rmtab and send an rwall message to those machines, saying 'get the heck off because the server is going down shortly'
2. Two minutes later try again and send a more forceful message.
3. Two minutes later tell them they are about to get it in the neck. And shutdown.
If you really dont want to shut the machine down with NFS mounted stuff still there, then modify to taste - dont shutdown unless rmtab doesn't have any shares from machines you dont want to annoy.
This is untested of course.... Until you try it! Read the warnings about rmtab in man mountd. It may not be trustworthy.
Do they say how we're going to power all this new technology when the oil and gas runs out in fifty years or so? Or how we're going to feed the billions and billions of people on this planet?
I'm hoping for cheap, clean fusion as a solution to the power problem, and soylent green as a solution to the food problem. Ah no. Not genetic engineering either. Population control? Maybe.
Server slashdotted so no, I haven't read the article..
TWMs icon manager. Xerox 'Rooms'. Virtual Desktops. Expocity. Ratpoison. All designed to help you get around your X window clutter. Great.
But how many of them deserve slashdot headlines? Did Expocity get in just because its a clone of a Mac UI feature?
And its a patch to a window manager? Looking at the code I think the reason for this is because it is continuously updating its thumbnails as the window manager gets events, so I guess it can display them rapidly when the user asks. Will this slow everything down?
Could this be re-implemented as a standalone X program? Or would getting thumbnails of obscured windows be a problem?
I have 8 virtual desktops. I know whats on each of them. Alt-1 gets me to my email and general web browser. Alt-2 has my IRC client. Alt-3 has a gnome-console with a tab to the servers I want to keep an eye on. Alt-4 has some statistical analysis I'm working on. Alt-5 is my web development screen. And so on. Xmms is set to stick on all screens, and is shrunk to mini-view up at the top.
Within each virtual screen its easy to find the application I want - in the web dev screen I might have a Mozilla window, and Opera window, an emacs windows, and a Gimp window, but its easy to find the one I want.
I neither understand why you'd need a screen of thumbnails to all your open apps, nor understand why this is on slashdot. Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
We bought a bunch of security kits, "standard" Kensington types, which work nicely with the Compaq laptops we bought for our Postgrad students. But one of our lecturers got a nice shiny Acer laptop. He was leaving it in an unlocked office, so we thought it was time to apply both a) clue and b) a security lock.
But could we get the lock to engage with his security hole on the laptop? Could we heck. We prodded and poked and twisted and fiddled but *nothing* could get the thing to stick. It looked like the security hole wasn't quite deep enough for the lock to engage.
We dont know if its the lock or the laptop, but we'll try and find some other ones that work. I dont want his 17" screen Acer walking...
I can well believe it. What I really want is an Xt wrapper round the gecko rendering engine :) I don't want skins, I dont want sidebars. I just want something that looks a bit like xedit, but with web pages beautifully rendered, and a big smiling face on the central admin.
Here's some comparison memory usages for opera, firebird , and NS4, on our solaris box, looking at www.plone.org:
SIZE,RSS, name
33M, 29M, opera
38M, 31M, firebird
17M, 15M, netscape 4
opera isn't much lighter than firebird in this metric.
See the small footprint of netscape 4? Shame it can't render the plone page properly because it really doesn't do CSS properly. Gah.
Baz
Its not file size, its memory footprint. Firebird has about twice the memory footprint as NS4 on this Solaris box. But the admins say thats too much.
Yes I could get a new box for them, but heck, our support services are supposed to support undergraduate teaching systems, and I'm busy supporting our postgrads. They have access to an 18-CPU Mosix cluster, and there's probably fewer of them than there are undergrads.
We're working on compiling Ishzilla for solaris, which claims to be lightweight (and looks it), but we have to hammer our way through the prereqs first. You ever tried to compile something complex on a non-Linux box? Not nice!
Baz
Not light enough for our admins to be happy about me sticking it on the Sun E450 that we use for undergraduate teaching. Stuck in an X-terminal lab with only login access to the E450? You're stuck with Netscape 4. They fear 25 firebirds will bring the system to a crawl.
:)
Anybody know of an even _lighter_ browser, preferably gecko-based, that will work on Solaris? Binaries would be nice
Baz
You want a phone that has an address book and can make calls - but you dont mention you want it to receive calls. Smart :)
Oh no, we can't trust the BBC these days don't you know? I can imagine that Bill Gates will now be launching a swingeing attack on the BBC, leading to a month-long enquiry chaired by, oooh, an unbiased Paul Allen, and then resignation of several senior BBC executives....
:)]
[if you dont know what I'm talking about, google for 'Hutton Report' or see BBC news main page
Baz
Can someone show me a real example of this being used? Please. Pretty please....
I've noticed linux laptop installs do pretty well at supporting sound, ethernet, USB, and graphics on notebooks these days, but have trouble with a lot of the power-management and suspend/hibernate functions.
/proc wouldn't tell us).
We just spent ages trying to configure a new Acer Aspire laptop (17" screen) - and most worked with RH Fedora out of the box, except hibernation (which worked sometimes, but not with the Nvidia drivers in), and we couldn't get it to query the battery power state (relevant file in
Did you get all these things working with the laptop you got all the devices working on?
Baz
Yeah, and this idiot gets a 'Windows Recovery' disk with his laptop. Any idiot can get Windows back to the initial state with it, including the magic blue buttons.
If hardware suppliers supplied Linux Recovery disks, or if there was a standard way of doing these things, then that would be marvellous. The situation is much like the early days when you needed drivers for things that are now generic, or use a de-facto standard.
I suspect laptop manufacturers are too busy trying to have their own gee-whizz whistles and bells to beat the opposition.
Just as desktops are in decline, so I'm told. "Desktop PC popularity 'to plummet' by 2007" according to ZDNet.
What Linux needs is _laptop_ support. When you get a laptop with Windows on, it all works. All those funny blue-coloured function buttons? Click and up and down goes the volume, the machine sleeps, hibernates, wakes up. The CD transport buttons on the edge work when you have the unit switched off, and it can even play MP3s from C:\MyMP3s when (apparently) switched off.
Well, thats what the Acer Aspire we got the other day did. And then we put Linux on it, and my techie has spent the last three days trying to get half those things working again. Tried assorted kernels to get hibernation working - but there was a conflict with the Nvidia drivers and we lost accelerated X. DVD recording isn't working for some reason, although CDs are. I think we can get the function buttons working - we did this for another batch of laptops previously.
As laptops get more and more popular, Linux is going to have to sort these things out sharpish. Lots of our staff now have desktop linux boxes (and some have had them for years) but more and more want laptops, and they expect the same feature set as with Windows - but at the moment we cant give that to them.
www.tuxmobile.org is your friend...
Baz
Looking at the pics, it seems the motherboard occupies the blank space between keyboard and screen, which means they can make the keyboard thin and not have to worry about cables etc under the keyboard.
:)
Suggest you stick strips of velcro underneath the unit and on your lap-covering garments
Baz
The article says:
"Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself."
In soviet russia, perhaps.
Baz
I'm pretty sure I've seen a short version of the 'cog' ad, probably a 30 second version. Not sure if its just the tail end of the full ad or another smart edit. This removes the 'cant afford 120s ad slot' excuse.
Of course, maybe its not a US model car....
Remember the 'Open Source' IE patch that came out recently? That had a few bugs in - buffer overflows, that sort of thing. Luckily, being Open Source, they got spotted quickly.
Now apply the 'Rule of 6 times' to Microsoft's closed source IE patches...
Reminds me of my ZX Spectrum programming days. We were working on a program that really had to use as little memory as possible, so chunks of the code were copied into bitmap screen RAM. The Speccie had attribute screen RAM as well, so we set that to black ink on black paper so the code was invisible, and designed the rest of our screen graphics around it.
:)
Of course if the screen ever scrolled we were in trouble
If I was running openwares.org I'd sell the company to Microsoft for a few million and then I'd shut up about IE security.... I'm sure that's legal, and not really extortion. Plus MS would have access to openwares' amazing security software...
Baz
I was expecting this anonymous coward to be saying "In pre-soviet russia...."
You can tell its Friday and that there's a carpenter sawing the ceiling off just outside my office. I misread that as "Space Shuttle to be Outfitted with New Stereo".
The file /var/lib/nfs/rmtab on the server keeps a list of what systems have mounted NFS drives. What you then do is this:
1. When shutting down, first go through rmtab and send an rwall message to those machines, saying 'get the heck off because the server is going down shortly'
2. Two minutes later try again and send a more forceful message.
3. Two minutes later tell them they are about to get it in the neck. And shutdown.
If you really dont want to shut the machine down with NFS mounted stuff still there, then modify to taste - dont shutdown unless rmtab doesn't have any shares from machines you dont want to annoy.
This is untested of course.... Until you try it! Read the warnings about rmtab in man mountd. It may not be trustworthy.
Baz
Do they say how we're going to power all this new technology when the oil and gas runs out in fifty years or so? Or how we're going to feed the billions and billions of people on this planet?
I'm hoping for cheap, clean fusion as a solution to the power problem, and soylent green as a solution to the food problem. Ah no. Not genetic engineering either. Population control? Maybe.
Server slashdotted so no, I haven't read the article..
TWMs icon manager. Xerox 'Rooms'. Virtual Desktops. Expocity. Ratpoison. All designed to help you get around your X window clutter. Great.
But how many of them deserve slashdot headlines? Did Expocity get in just because its a clone of a Mac UI feature?
And its a patch to a window manager? Looking at the code I think the reason for this is because it is continuously updating its thumbnails as the window manager gets events, so I guess it can display them rapidly when the user asks. Will this slow everything down?
Could this be re-implemented as a standalone X program? Or would getting thumbnails of obscured windows be a problem?
I have 8 virtual desktops. I know whats on each of them. Alt-1 gets me to my email and general web browser. Alt-2 has my IRC client. Alt-3 has a gnome-console with a tab to the servers I want to keep an eye on. Alt-4 has some statistical analysis I'm working on. Alt-5 is my web development screen. And so on. Xmms is set to stick on all screens, and is shrunk to mini-view up at the top.
Within each virtual screen its easy to find the application I want - in the web dev screen I might have a Mozilla window, and Opera window, an emacs windows, and a Gimp window, but its easy to find the one I want.
I neither understand why you'd need a screen of thumbnails to all your open apps, nor understand why this is on slashdot. Oh well.
Baz
Since all the geeks round here refer to 'Head Rat Linux' anyway, they should rename it Deaf Aura just to keep one step ahead...
Just go here.