Well, for one, if the code is open, then the project isn't really "dead".
Then how do you explain BSD?;)
Seriously though, if nobody works on a project for a long time, and doesn't intend to work on it, it's dead. Just because there's a *possibility* that someone else could just pick up and continue doesn't make it any less dead while there's still nobody working on it.
I would like to commend the Jefferson Center for being nonpartisan and including infringements on free speech by both the right and the left.
I still see righties whining here about the total bias of these awards, but I don't think they'll ever get their panties out of that knot. (Not referring to all right-wingers in general. Just the ones whining here.)
I've seen a few CDs that have the secret track after a period of silence, but they do it in an intelligent manner - the silence is in the form of an extra-long pregap before the secret track. This makes it less "secret" but also less annoying.
Frankly, even as a faithful Linux user, I still have to agree with him. Our missile defense systems should not be running the same software as my home PC whether it is a commercial or open-source product.
That's not even his claim. He's saying the dirty Commies are going to sneak backdoors into our security software.
Besides, it's only a testament to the flexibilty and power of Linux that it can be both highly secure and used by home users. Your point would hold water if this were a case of something like Windows 95, a primarily home user OS known to be less than secure, being adapted for use in high-security situations. Instead its a high-security OS that has been made accessible to home users.
I'm pretty sure Yellowdog uses yum as well now. The repository list has entries for it, and the SourceForge page for what appears to be the original updater hasn't seen an update in years.
A partial fix to that problem has recently been checked in, and they're continuing to work on it. The bug is here, though as I recall bugzilla.mozilla.org doesn't let you link directly from Slashdot, so you might have to copy & paste.
It really is one of the most annoying Mozilla bugs though, so I hope it gets fully fixed soon.
1. Use a Polaroid 2. One could theoretically tamper with anything. A photograph is relatively solid, especially since there are ways to tell if something was likely edited or not.
That's actually easy enough to check, and provide solid evidence of.
Simply get a cell phone, take a picture of it showing the time next to a clock showing the store time, once at the beginning and once at the end of the day. Cell phone clocks are set by the phone service and most of them don't even provide a way to manually change the time, so there's no possibility of tampering on your end.
Of course you'd have to do this over a period of several days just to show that it's not a one-time glitch in the store clock or the phone service.
Even up to K3b 0.10 I'd always have to toy around with configuration options to get it to even *try* to burn, but 0.11 seems to have gotten good at setting things up properly by default.
Well, sort of. I didn't really mean *all* US laws, just the important privacy and human rights ones. You're right, I should have clarified.
At any rate, I was also going under the assumption that the US would have reasonable laws, since I was already in fantasy land wishing the WTO would piss off.
That's exactly how I think foreign labor should be handled. Have your work done wherever you want, but if you want to do business in the US, you must comply by the same rules.
The WTO would have a shit fit though, as would anybody who believes that laissez-faire policies solve all the world's problems.
It's more than the installer. YaST is also the configuration tool for a multitude of system settings, and package manager.
Total newbies won't install *any* OS. However, modereate newbies and intermediate users can benefit from excellent installation and configuration tools.
Actually, SuSE/YaST has a pretty good way of dealing with this. Many of the auto-generated files, e.g. modprobe.conf, have comments explicitly telling you to edit [filename], but to make your own [filename].local, which is incorporated with an include statement at the end of the file, and tweak that to your heart's content. This way all your custom changes are preserved.
Yes, you can do that in other distros as well, but YaST sets it up for you by default.
Having said that, it would be awesome if they did include it, and ported the theme to KDE for complete integration.
Or at least use something other than that godawful Keramik/Geramik as default.
Which isn't very likely, since they would want something that looks pretty much the same in GTK and QT, and neither Plastig nor GTK-QT are good enough yet. Actually, I haven't tested Plastig myself, because I think QTPixmap is the devil, but GTK-QT is pretty nifty, if still buggy.
A port of Industrial would still be nice though. I do currently use it as my GTK theme.
Just a small correction to myself -- Mandrake Control Center 10 does have a module to configure the sound driver, but it's buried in the detailed Hardware section. Still, there should be a direct link to it in the main hardware section.
While I'm not going to suggest that your'e a TOTAL N00B and a failure for not getting the hang of Linux on the first try, I'll try to helpfully address a few of your points.
1. KDE Control Center -> Peripherals -> Mouse -> Advanced. Yes, it is a shortcoming of the component-ized nature of Linux that things have to be configured in several different places when they should really be in one. This wouldn't be a problem at all if there were just one desktop environment (KDE, of course) to deal with, but that's not going to happen any time soon. Still, I think improvements can be made.
(After reading other responses written while I was writing this) Ok, I'm not sure why it's still not behaving. What does the Mandrake mouse options say you're using for a mouse driver, and what mouse are you actually using?
2. The program locations concept was hard for me to get used to as well. The basic idea is that you don't *have* to worry about it, since the distro takes care of it for you, but it's hard to come from Windows where programs install themselves haphazardly wherever they want by default. Still, there are times when the RPM way just doesn't work.
As for your specific problem, the package name you were trying to install indicates that it's a package for ALTLinux, not Mandrake. The Mandrake package depends on a different library, so you won't find libpictl on Mandrake at all. Actually, it might just be a different name for the same library, but that makes all the difference as far as dependencies go.
There should be a Mandrake-specific rpm, pilot-link-0.11.8-4mdk.i586.rpm, (notice the "mdk" instead of "alt") listed in rpmdrake (the search feature is pretty useful, btw, if not as good as that of YaST or Synaptic).
As for uninstalling, the rpmdrake uninstall program (one of my biggest pet peeves with Mandrake is the separation of the install/uninstall parts of rpmdrake, btw) will take care of any installed RPMs easily and cleanly. Programs installed from source are trickier, but I'd stay away from those at first, unless there's something you really need that's not available from urpmi.
3. Yeah, Konqueror crashes a little too often for my tastes as well. It's gotten better in KDE 3.2, but most of the time it crashes (both in 3.1 and 3.2) is when I'm exiting after having a window open for a long time, at least in my experience. Your mileage may vary.
4. The Mandrake menus seem to be slow at updating themselves. I'm not exactly sure how long it takes them, but they'll be there. The categories seem pretty ok at directing which menu to look in. For the most part at least.
5. (going based on reply to other posts) If Mandrake supports it, you shouldn't have to isntall a driver yourself. Have you looked in the Mandrake Control Center sound card configuration? That is, if it's there. I remember 9.1 had a panel for it, but unless I'm stupid it's not there in 10. Well, that's crap.
6. Dunno about this one. You could have a bizarre video card/monitor combination, or Mandrake could have just goofed. This might be something to report to Mandrake QA. What card/monitor do you have, anyway?
I've also found that many of the answers to questions I look at are incomplete and cryptic. I hope what I wrote is understandable. I have a tendency to get incomprehensible when I get into geek talk.
Overall, I'd say you're likely to have a slightly better experience with Mandrake 10, though in your case I'd wait until the "official" edition is out. I've had a small share of problems with the Community release, and you don't seem like you need more complications. Good luck, and don't give up on Linux.
And as long as there is anything that requires a text file to be edited in linux, Windows will remain king.
Yeah, lucky Windows users. They never have to open Regedit, ever. To do anything. Why does MS even include it?
While your general point is correct, the hyperbole doesn't help.
I've been trying out Mandrake 10 for the past few days (it's normally SuSE for me) it's pretty good with its GUI configuration tools. Ideally, I'd like something that's a cross between SuSE's tools and Mandrake's, but that's not likely to happen.
Not so, at least in the case of The Silmarillion. It was complete in time for release at the same time as LotR. In fact, Tolkien campaigned relentlessly for this, but the publisher held it back. The second edition of the Silmarillion includes a letter from Tolkien explaining exactly this (letter #131 if you have the collection). Pretty much the only thing Christopher did was correct factual errors.
The countless volumes of the Histories of Middle Earth, as well as Unfinished Tales were, as you said, just collections of things J.R.R. wrote and Christopher found and commented on. But The Silmarillion is complete and canon.
You can speed up Acrobat significantly by getting rid of unneeded plugins, either by deleting them or moving them to another directory. There are only a small handful you'll ever actually use. It could still stand to be a lot faster, but it's better than it comes out of the box.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for one, if the code is open, then the project isn't really "dead".
;)
Then how do you explain BSD?
Seriously though, if nobody works on a project for a long time, and doesn't intend to work on it, it's dead. Just because there's a *possibility* that someone else could just pick up and continue doesn't make it any less dead while there's still nobody working on it.
I would like to commend the Jefferson Center for being nonpartisan and including infringements on free speech by both the right and the left.
I still see righties whining here about the total bias of these awards, but I don't think they'll ever get their panties out of that knot. (Not referring to all right-wingers in general. Just the ones whining here.)
I've seen a few CDs that have the secret track after a period of silence, but they do it in an intelligent manner - the silence is in the form of an extra-long pregap before the secret track. This makes it less "secret" but also less annoying.
Frankly, even as a faithful Linux user, I still have to agree with him. Our missile defense systems should not be running the same software as my home PC whether it is a commercial or open-source product.
That's not even his claim. He's saying the dirty Commies are going to sneak backdoors into our security software.
Besides, it's only a testament to the flexibilty and power of Linux that it can be both highly secure and used by home users. Your point would hold water if this were a case of something like Windows 95, a primarily home user OS known to be less than secure, being adapted for use in high-security situations. Instead its a high-security OS that has been made accessible to home users.
I'm pretty sure Yellowdog uses yum as well now. The repository list has entries for it, and the SourceForge page for what appears to be the original updater hasn't seen an update in years.
A partial fix to that problem has recently been checked in, and they're continuing to work on it. The bug is here, though as I recall bugzilla.mozilla.org doesn't let you link directly from Slashdot, so you might have to copy & paste.
It really is one of the most annoying Mozilla bugs though, so I hope it gets fully fixed soon.
1. Use a Polaroid
2. One could theoretically tamper with anything. A photograph is relatively solid, especially since there are ways to tell if something was likely edited or not.
Ok, then all the phones I've played around with suck. ;) They've been mostly the low-end ones anyway.
That's actually easy enough to check, and provide solid evidence of.
Simply get a cell phone, take a picture of it showing the time next to a clock showing the store time, once at the beginning and once at the end of the day. Cell phone clocks are set by the phone service and most of them don't even provide a way to manually change the time, so there's no possibility of tampering on your end.
Of course you'd have to do this over a period of several days just to show that it's not a one-time glitch in the store clock or the phone service.
Even up to K3b 0.10 I'd always have to toy around with configuration options to get it to even *try* to burn, but 0.11 seems to have gotten good at setting things up properly by default.
Well, sort of. I didn't really mean *all* US laws, just the important privacy and human rights ones. You're right, I should have clarified.
At any rate, I was also going under the assumption that the US would have reasonable laws, since I was already in fantasy land wishing the WTO would piss off.
That's exactly how I think foreign labor should be handled. Have your work done wherever you want, but if you want to do business in the US, you must comply by the same rules.
The WTO would have a shit fit though, as would anybody who believes that laissez-faire policies solve all the world's problems.
What's with the drive-by modding-down of comments alluding to New.Net's crapware and its tendency to cripple internet connections?
Whoa. I didn't know you could rip mp3/ogg like that. Frickin' awesome. I guess *that's* what the Audio CD item in Control Center was for.
I only wish I could pop a disc in either of my two drives and have it automatically determine which one has an audio CD in it.
There is a project to port Anaconda to Debian, but it's not the official installer.
Still, competition with Anaconda might be one of Novell's incentives.
Also, Yellow Dog Linux uses Anaconda.
It's more than the installer. YaST is also the configuration tool for a multitude of system settings, and package manager.
Total newbies won't install *any* OS. However, modereate newbies and intermediate users can benefit from excellent installation and configuration tools.
There's still the lack of official ISOs to download, though the way things are going, that might change as well.
Novell's handling of SuSE is looking better and better.
Actually, SuSE/YaST has a pretty good way of dealing with this. Many of the auto-generated files, e.g. modprobe.conf, have comments explicitly telling you to edit [filename], but to make your own [filename].local, which is incorporated with an include statement at the end of the file, and tweak that to your heart's content. This way all your custom changes are preserved.
Yes, you can do that in other distros as well, but YaST sets it up for you by default.
Having said that, it would be awesome if they did include it, and ported the theme to KDE for complete integration.
Or at least use something other than that godawful Keramik/Geramik as default.
Which isn't very likely, since they would want something that looks pretty much the same in GTK and QT, and neither Plastig nor GTK-QT are good enough yet. Actually, I haven't tested Plastig myself, because I think QTPixmap is the devil, but GTK-QT is pretty nifty, if still buggy.
A port of Industrial would still be nice though. I do currently use it as my GTK theme.
Convenience. It's just easier to have everything there on the CDs before you install.
Also, last time I tried the FTP install (8.2) it was a bit tricky to get started, but otherwise ok. Still, the FTP install is better than nothing.
Just a small correction to myself -- Mandrake Control Center 10 does have a module to configure the sound driver, but it's buried in the detailed Hardware section. Still, there should be a direct link to it in the main hardware section.
While I'm not going to suggest that your'e a TOTAL N00B and a failure for not getting the hang of Linux on the first try, I'll try to helpfully address a few of your points.
1. KDE Control Center -> Peripherals -> Mouse -> Advanced.
Yes, it is a shortcoming of the component-ized nature of Linux that things have to be configured in several different places when they should really be in one. This wouldn't be a problem at all if there were just one desktop environment (KDE, of course) to deal with, but that's not going to happen any time soon. Still, I think improvements can be made.
(After reading other responses written while I was writing this) Ok, I'm not sure why it's still not behaving. What does the Mandrake mouse options say you're using for a mouse driver, and what mouse are you actually using?
2. The program locations concept was hard for me to get used to as well. The basic idea is that you don't *have* to worry about it, since the distro takes care of it for you, but it's hard to come from Windows where programs install themselves haphazardly wherever they want by default. Still, there are times when the RPM way just doesn't work.
As for your specific problem, the package name you were trying to install indicates that it's a package for ALTLinux, not Mandrake. The Mandrake package depends on a different library, so you won't find libpictl on Mandrake at all. Actually, it might just be a different name for the same library, but that makes all the difference as far as dependencies go.
There should be a Mandrake-specific rpm, pilot-link-0.11.8-4mdk.i586.rpm, (notice the "mdk" instead of "alt") listed in rpmdrake (the search feature is pretty useful, btw, if not as good as that of YaST or Synaptic).
As for uninstalling, the rpmdrake uninstall program (one of my biggest pet peeves with Mandrake is the separation of the install/uninstall parts of rpmdrake, btw) will take care of any installed RPMs easily and cleanly. Programs installed from source are trickier, but I'd stay away from those at first, unless there's something you really need that's not available from urpmi.
3. Yeah, Konqueror crashes a little too often for my tastes as well. It's gotten better in KDE 3.2, but most of the time it crashes (both in 3.1 and 3.2) is when I'm exiting after having a window open for a long time, at least in my experience. Your mileage may vary.
4. The Mandrake menus seem to be slow at updating themselves. I'm not exactly sure how long it takes them, but they'll be there. The categories seem pretty ok at directing which menu to look in. For the most part at least.
5. (going based on reply to other posts) If Mandrake supports it, you shouldn't have to isntall a driver yourself. Have you looked in the Mandrake Control Center sound card configuration? That is, if it's there. I remember 9.1 had a panel for it, but unless I'm stupid it's not there in 10. Well, that's crap.
6. Dunno about this one. You could have a bizarre video card/monitor combination, or Mandrake could have just goofed. This might be something to report to Mandrake QA. What card/monitor do you have, anyway?
I've also found that many of the answers to questions I look at are incomplete and cryptic. I hope what I wrote is understandable. I have a tendency to get incomprehensible when I get into geek talk.
Overall, I'd say you're likely to have a slightly better experience with Mandrake 10, though in your case I'd wait until the "official" edition is out. I've had a small share of problems with the Community release, and you don't seem like you need more complications. Good luck, and don't give up on Linux.
And as long as there is anything that requires a text file to be edited in linux, Windows will remain king.
Yeah, lucky Windows users. They never have to open Regedit, ever. To do anything. Why does MS even include it?
While your general point is correct, the hyperbole doesn't help.
I've been trying out Mandrake 10 for the past few days (it's normally SuSE for me) it's pretty good with its GUI configuration tools. Ideally, I'd like something that's a cross between SuSE's tools and Mandrake's, but that's not likely to happen.
Not so, at least in the case of The Silmarillion. It was complete in time for release at the same time as LotR. In fact, Tolkien campaigned relentlessly for this, but the publisher held it back. The second edition of the Silmarillion includes a letter from Tolkien explaining exactly this (letter #131 if you have the collection). Pretty much the only thing Christopher did was correct factual errors.
The countless volumes of the Histories of Middle Earth, as well as Unfinished Tales were, as you said, just collections of things J.R.R. wrote and Christopher found and commented on. But The Silmarillion is complete and canon.
You can speed up Acrobat significantly by getting rid of unneeded plugins, either by deleting them or moving them to another directory. There are only a small handful you'll ever actually use. It could still stand to be a lot faster, but it's better than it comes out of the box.