I meant "Linux" as being the community and businesses involved in making or using it of course. This shorthand should be apparent to anyone reading.
proving the need for a coherent, non-imitating *nix desktop.
Yes, I'm all in favor of non-imitation myself - but you must admit that there's a certain class of user that this project would appeal to.
i'll stick to Windowmaker on my Linux, thank you.
WindowMaker is a NeXT clone, and Steve Jobs as much as anyone in the business has sued for look and feel; you're lucky that he ended up changing prototypes of OS X's look and feel to appeal to the existing Apple users.
That having been said, WindowMaker's a fine window manager, but it doesn't appeal to the sort of user this thing addresses. (Though I wonder if it's this sort of user, someone looking for a better Windows rather than a free Unix, that is good for the Linux community.)
Is there any legal issue with this? As I remember Apple always threatens those who reproduce the Mac OS user interface. Would Microsoft do the same?
My guess is that Microsoft would want to wait until this is some sort of threat. Wouldn't it generate a lot of bad publicity if they sued Linux for immitating them? A suit would be *good* publicity for Linux, after all, since any publicity is good publicity. (And Linux could always use more of that.)
If you don't have the package specification files available in the source tarball, you can use "checkinstall", which can create rpms, debs, and Slackware tgzs by simply substituting "checkinstall" for "make install".
Is this anything like a certain other organization stating that everyone "ought to have" universal health care
Not really, because out of all of the countries classified as "industrial" by the UN, only the United States and South Africa do not have universal health insurance.
Now if we can just get the Xwindows folks on board! When I say "12-point type", I mean a height of 6 lines per inch, not 12 pixels (enormous on the cellphone; invisible on the workstation).
You can use the DisplaySize option in XF86Config to specify the physical display size, and X will automatically adjust all point values to values appropriate for your screen size.
No, I'm not trolling. Don't most of those reasons also apply to the BSDs?
Only the ones that are open source. The article is about why open source will prevail, so closed source BSDs are going to fall by the wayside.
There is only one major closed-source BSD, BSD/OS (originally BSD/386) and it is no longer being made. (There are minor exceptions in the embedded world; but contrary to RMS's myth of the inevitable hording of BSD code, open-source *BSD has shown itself to be viable.
Honestly people, is this really/. front page news? This came out on the FreeBSD mailing list 36 hrs ago, and a fixed version of OpenSSL is already available.
Slackware Linux also has this fixed. Incidentally, like the parent's subject line says, this is a minor vulnerability that at the most makes openssl crash, not an exploit or a trojan like all the stuff we've been seeing about Windows on/. lately.
And not to pick on Linux, but if you look closely enough, there will be a FreeBSD and NetBSD, each with two different packagings from two different distributors, but containing the same software version.
No, NetBSD and FreeBSD are two different operating systems forked from the 386BSD source over a decade ago. They have a lot in common, and occasionally borrow code from each other, but unlike Linux they aren't different distros of the same OS (with the same kernel and lots of stuff thrown in) but rather are different kernels combined with a base system of Unix software as a unit with a large amount of software in pkgsrc or "ports" available only a "make install" away.
Slackware's packages are named.tgz, though to confuse things further most.tgzs are not slackware packages but rather generic.tar.gz source tarballs. (Which are the only distro-neutral format, source.)
5) ports (FreeBSD and OpenBSD's differs)
6) pkgsrc (NetBSD's offering)
Strictly speaking ports and pkgsrc are delivery and dependency fulfilling mechanisms for source code with special makefiles rather than a package format, and NetBSD's pkgsrc is platform-independant. It can run on Linux, Solaris, other *nix platforms, and there's even a Microsoft Unix Services for Windows version in the works.
The *BSD's also have binary package formats for use with pkg_add, named.tgz, but those are not as popularly used as ports or pkgsrc, which have advantages such as being able to track the latest versions of packages in the pkgsrc/ports tree using cvs.
...sure makes it seems like they think MS is an easy, endless source of money. Well, let's just wait and see what'll happen.
Also, ~$100 mil isn't chump change
If you have 50 billion, that's 50 thousand million, by the way, then 100 million, or 1/500th of that, is indeed chump change. That's how Microsoft can afford to make all of it's products except for Office and Windows "loss leaders" in order to extend it's operating system monopoly, and how it can become a major investor in SCO without breaking a sweat.
Checking some dates, that is about three years after the official publication of DES as a standardard.
Yes, for Version 7. Unix has existed going back to 1969, nearly a decade earlier. I'm not sure how old crypt(3) is, but I do recall they were describing what crypt was when it was first implemented. Like I said though, what I recall of what I heard (how's that for hear-say?) did not specify whether it was talking about crypt(1), which *is* Enigma-based, or crypt(3). I wish there was a grizzled veteren out there who knows what crypt(3) was during it's implementation, prior to DES if it's a very old library function, so we can establish if it was ever like crypt(1) in it's algorithm.
I recall reading that the original Unix crypt(3) algorithm was based on the Enigma machine.
Your wrongness is astounding. The fact that you were moderated up to 4 is proof that the moderation system has finally failed. I'll never read the comments on slashdot again. But I will fix this final error.
crypt(1), the file 'encryption' utility is based on a simplified Enigma. crypt(3), the password hash with an 8 character limit that can be run 100,000 times a second on a modern machine, always used DES.
My apologies for any mistakes I may have made. I seem to recall it was an interview concerning the implementation of very early (pre-V6, etc.) Unix; but maybe they were talking about crypt(1), unfortunately the interview did not really specify whether it was the library function or the command; hence my error. Incidentally the distro I use does not include crypt(1), so I had little way of knowing there was a crypt command via my machine's man pages, though considering how insecure it is compared to modern encryption tools such as gpg the crypt(1) you describe is not neccesasary making it's omission understandable. In any event, I hope you stick around anyway; we need more Unix gurus on Slashdot.:-)
I recall reading that the original Unix crypt(3) algorithm was based on the Enigma machine. It was picked specifically because it was already broken, so that the NSA wouldn't complain. Nowadays POSIX (and Linux) crypt(3) uses DES to encrypt, though there are known ways to break crypt's implementation of DES too. (Thus one should enable shadow password files.:-) )
If your running an i386 just run this baby and it will get rid of any packages that have been flagged as insecure ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/1.6.2/i38 6/All/audit-packages-1.27.tgz
Wrong. This tracks security problems of *packages*, as the name suggests. Problems with the base system, on the other hand, are handled by cvsing the proper source files and recompiling them; as per the advice in the security bulletins. (You *are* a subscriber to the NetBsd security announce list, aren't you? It's not high volume.:-) )
Your URL is incorrect, that should be slackware.com it's a.com, not a.org. Incidentally, Patrick Volkerding, the sole owner of Slackware, likes to point out that it's the only Linux distro that's always been in the black.:-)
1. Good DVD player & CD-RW that just work, without mesing around. If this software is not part of the distro, simple instructions on how to get/install it (one click?).
CD-RW burner software now comes with nearly all distributions. From the command line there's cdrecord and mkiso, for the GUI there's xcdroast and k3b. DVD playing of most DVDs, due to the encoding being illegal to distribute without royalties and NDAs, is difficult to get for Linux without knowing what to look for - but that's an effect of the American legal system rather than Linux's fault.
2. Friends who are familiar with the OS/Distro, for the network effects and piece of mind in case something goes drastically wrong. This is where having a "critical mass" (fuzzy value) comes in - this is already happening, but the more, the better.
Make friends at your local LUG (Linux User's group), and of course there's plenty of mailing lists, news groups, and IRC channels to go to.
5. Use easier "language" - eventually (in 1-2 years) e.g., non-cryptic commands, or a *standardized* set of aliases that work on all distros. [And continue to evolve the GUI so the user doesn't HAVE TO use the CLI.]
"ls" isn't much less cryptic than "dir", and is much more powerful. Togeather the Unix toolset is one of the most useful and powerful set of tools available, in spite of it's slightly greater crypticness than the DOS shell. Windows users are used to a shell environment that has very few features, so they tend to think that if Unix stresses the CLI it's stressing a less useful environment than the typical GUI. I reccomend you get a book, such as O'Reilly's "UNIX Power Tools", and learn the power of the force.;-)
6. Better Grub/Lilo/equivalent that is less intimidating for new users that want multi-boot. Preferably with a easy to use GUI that detects all HDDs & partitions and tells you what's on them (with as much relevant information as possible).
Red Hat has an easy to use GUI for configuring GRUB now. grub is really not hard to configure though, it's menu file is pretty clear and easier and less fragile than lilo. Check out the grub tutorial on IBM Developerworks
7. Some packaging system with less dependency problems. [Yes, there are a few that show very good promise, with only occasional issues surfacing.]
Kiddies with their emerge, their apt-get, and their urpmi... installpkg 0wnz j00.
(Sorry, I'm a Slackware user - and I find talk of dependency problems amusing; our solution to that problem is not to have brain-dead dependency checking in the first place. It actually works smoothly most of the time.)
8. The equivalent of a "tray" where one can see the status of the firewall, proxy server, network connection,..., similar to a few other OSs. The lack of such status is hard to get used to, for a new/non-expert user.
KDE has a network connection icon I think, kinternet, though I think it only works for dialup. For the firewall all you need is the command line and "iptables -L". For overall status you might want to check out gkrellm, it's a pretty-looking graphical display of CPU usage, memory, disk activity, network activity, and more if you get additional plugins for it. Maybe that would interest you...
9. Few, well chosen default applications on the distro (not "give them four of everything"). [Lot of progress has already happened in this area in a few distros.]
I find a full Slackware install to be a happy medium between bloat and bare-bones install. Of course, you probably wouldn't like Slackware because it has no additional GUI tools. Probably SuSE, Mandrake, or Red Hat/Fedora would be more your speed; or maybe Xandros or Lycoris if those are too hard. (I don't reccomend Lindows to anyone.)
So, if any Micro$oft employees have ever looked at Linux kernel source, they are no longer allowed to work on Windows 'cause now they are tainted?
Microsoft may do that. According to a footnote in an essay by Paul Graham:
"I've been told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source projects, even in their spare time. But so many of the best hackers work on open-source projects now that the main effect of this policy may be to ensure that they won't be able to hire any first-rate programmers."
The 7 nations of Caanan we were commanded to do battle with, after "the Assyrians mixed the nations" are no longer are existant according to the Talmud, so that is moot. We are still commanded to do battle with Amalek, but that is interpreted as being genocidal types like Hitler, ym"sh, rather than a particular nation.
But the jewish god, the christian god and the msulim god just happens to be the same god...
Not in this particular doctrine, one's religion determines eligability for eternel torture, which is the basis of the Pascal wager. Jews believe that the righteous of the gentiles have a portion in the World to Come, it is much less exclusive. Therefore my critique remains valid.
You all have heritage from your particular religion, the jewish, all of you share the old testament, and thus the same god, just different interpretations on what that god really is and wants from you.
They don't share however the Oral Torah, only the written one, which inevitably makes their understandings different than ours. (On top of that Islam, unlike Judaism or Xtianity, doesn't really have the "OT" it's scriptures are basically the Koran and the Hadith.)
I'd rather not believe in anything that can not in any way be disprooved by finding some type of not-yet-found counter-evidence. Not that such a theory can not be true, just that it is not in any way practical to base one's life on it...
Out of curiosity, do you ever date or marry a woman (or man if you are that rarity, a female on slashdot;-) )? People do plenty of things that are important to them and central to their lives that aren't based on a scientific theory and clearly are "illogical" in the Vulcan sense, and good religion is a very fulfilling and uplifting way of life even though it's not a scientific theory. Of course, according to Judaism, non-Jews are only bound to keep the seven Mitzvos of Bnai Noach; which are basically a foundation of civilized behavior rather than an all-encompassing way of life expressing "in all your ways know Him", as Orthodox Judaism is; so that dicotomy isn't one that you face if you do not choose to.
Xtianity is paradoxical, it claims that its god is just, but then the test as to whether god tortures you for eternity or not is completely arbitrary. I happen to be Jewish, and I'd rather not believe in a god that is torturing my late grandfather for being the wrong religion, thank you very much.
Ok, tell me what Bill Gates has been convicted of in criminal court. Now tell me what he has been convicted of in Civil court. Don't tell me suits brought against him. Tell me convictions
Microsoft has been convicted in court of being a monopoly. They were found guilty. The problem is that like most white collar criminals, Microsoft Corporation got a slap on the wrist rather than effective penalties.
Most Linux distros will work just fine with any TTF library - like the ones you would normally find in you C:\WINNT\Fonts
You should, however, make all of the *.TTF fonts lower cased (*.ttf) because otherwise X won't recognize them. Here's a one liner I adapted from O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools"
ls -d *.TTF | sed "s/\(.*\)\.TTF$/mv '&' '\1.ttf'/" | sh
Or you can find a number of Unix renaming programs on the net or in your distro. (I remember Red Hat came with one, and one is included on this book's CD-ROM as well, but I think the one-liner is more cool.:-) ) This has to be done because the shell interprets globs before they reach the program, unlike say MS-DOS. This is considered a feature rather than a bug most of the time.
This looks very similar to GNU Stow, which a derivative of CMU Depot.
They are well aware of that. From the article's link:
Package views is similar in spirit to the Encap Package Management
System, the GNU Stow Project, and the Carnegie Mellon University Depot
Configuration Management system:
However, these projects have a philosophy of "install anywhere, use in
one place", whereas package views departs from that model with a
philosophy that can roughly be summarized as "install in one place,
use anywhere".
Slashdot Mirror
That having been said, WindowMaker's a fine window manager, but it doesn't appeal to the sort of user this thing addresses. (Though I wonder if it's this sort of user, someone looking for a better Windows rather than a free Unix, that is good for the Linux community.)
If you don't have the package specification files available in the source tarball, you can use "checkinstall", which can create rpms, debs, and Slackware tgzs by simply substituting "checkinstall" for "make install".
Slackware Linux also has this fixed. Incidentally, like the parent's subject line says, this is a minor vulnerability that at the most makes openssl crash, not an exploit or a trojan like all the stuff we've been seeing about Windows on /. lately.
Slackware's packages are named .tgz, though to confuse things further most .tgzs are not slackware packages but rather generic .tar.gz source tarballs. (Which are the only distro-neutral format, source.)
Strictly speaking ports and pkgsrc are delivery and dependency fulfilling mechanisms for source code with special makefiles rather than a package format, and NetBSD's pkgsrc is platform-independant. It can run on Linux, Solaris, other *nix platforms, and there's even a Microsoft Unix Services for Windows version in the works.The *BSD's also have binary package formats for use with pkg_add, named .tgz, but those are not as popularly used as ports or pkgsrc, which have advantages such as being able to track the latest versions of packages in the pkgsrc/ports tree using cvs.
If you have 50 billion, that's 50 thousand million, by the way, then 100 million, or 1/500th of that, is indeed chump change. That's how Microsoft can afford to make all of it's products except for Office and Windows "loss leaders" in order to extend it's operating system monopoly, and how it can become a major investor in SCO without breaking a sweat.
I recall reading that the original Unix crypt(3) algorithm was based on the Enigma machine. It was picked specifically because it was already broken, so that the NSA wouldn't complain. Nowadays POSIX (and Linux) crypt(3) uses DES to encrypt, though there are known ways to break crypt's implementation of DES too. (Thus one should enable shadow password files. :-) )
Your URL is incorrect, that should be slackware.com it's a .com, not a .org. Incidentally, Patrick Volkerding, the sole owner of Slackware, likes to point out that it's the only Linux distro that's always been in the black. :-)
CD-RW burner software now comes with nearly all distributions. From the command line there's cdrecord and mkiso, for the GUI there's xcdroast and k3b. DVD playing of most DVDs, due to the encoding being illegal to distribute without royalties and NDAs, is difficult to get for Linux without knowing what to look for - but that's an effect of the American legal system rather than Linux's fault.
Make friends at your local LUG (Linux User's group), and of course there's plenty of mailing lists, news groups, and IRC channels to go to.
"ls" isn't much less cryptic than "dir", and is much more powerful. Togeather the Unix toolset is one of the most useful and powerful set of tools available, in spite of it's slightly greater crypticness than the DOS shell. Windows users are used to a shell environment that has very few features, so they tend to think that if Unix stresses the CLI it's stressing a less useful environment than the typical GUI. I reccomend you get a book, such as O'Reilly's "UNIX Power Tools", and learn the power of the force. ;-)
Red Hat has an easy to use GUI for configuring GRUB now. grub is really not hard to configure though, it's menu file is pretty clear and easier and less fragile than lilo. Check out the grub tutorial on IBM Developerworks
Kiddies with their emerge, their apt-get, and their urpmi... installpkg 0wnz j00.
(Sorry, I'm a Slackware user - and I find talk of dependency problems amusing; our solution to that problem is not to have brain-dead dependency checking in the first place. It actually works smoothly most of the time.)
KDE has a network connection icon I think, kinternet, though I think it only works for dialup. For the firewall all you need is the command line and "iptables -L". For overall status you might want to check out gkrellm, it's a pretty-looking graphical display of CPU usage, memory, disk activity, network activity, and more if you get additional plugins for it. Maybe that would interest you...
I find a full Slackware install to be a happy medium between bloat and bare-bones install. Of course, you probably wouldn't like Slackware because it has no additional GUI tools. Probably SuSE, Mandrake, or Red Hat/Fedora would be more your speed; or maybe Xandros or Lycoris if those are too hard. (I don't reccomend Lindows to anyone.)
Well, that's why it's called "Windows", a window is easy to break.
The 7 nations of Caanan we were commanded to do battle with, after "the Assyrians mixed the nations" are no longer are existant according to the Talmud, so that is moot. We are still commanded to do battle with Amalek, but that is interpreted as being genocidal types like Hitler, ym"sh, rather than a particular nation.
Xtianity is paradoxical, it claims that its god is just, but then the test as to whether god tortures you for eternity or not is completely arbitrary. I happen to be Jewish, and I'd rather not believe in a god that is torturing my late grandfather for being the wrong religion, thank you very much.
Package views is similar in spirit to the Encap Package Management System, the GNU Stow Project, and the Carnegie Mellon University Depot Configuration Management system:
However, these projects have a philosophy of "install anywhere, use in one place", whereas package views departs from that model with a philosophy that can roughly be summarized as "install in one place, use anywhere".