using vi, emacs, then pico and subsequently confusing them all...
I don't expect end users to know the syntax and command to make the changes take effect for every app on their system. neither should Linux. Windows doesn't make every user learn regedit to use their OS. The solution tothis problem is to ignore those who say you need vi or emacs and demand a system with a comprehensive range of GUI tools. Mandrake provide this, and Red Hat 8 beta does too (but not their current release, which is missing quite a few important items). Everything is a layer of abstraction. Some people are comfortable at diffferent layers of abstraction. Saying that GUI tools are a copout is akin to saying not writing your own OS is a copout.
how the file tree is laid out. What the conventions are, where do I find things, and where do I put new things?
The OS should have a tool that performs find in an obvious place. KDE and GNOME, IIRC, already have this. Its not necessary to know the filesystem layout when installing osftware, as most software packages will install their files into their correct place as determined by the File Heirarchy System. However, I agree a brief, three paracgaraph guide to the FHS for those ofus who want to know wouldn't go astray.
(I know there are the man pages, but the man pages can be very criptic sometimes, even for me a seasoned programmer).
Damn straight. One cannot RTFS if TFM is a POS and you simply want to use the system.
Even a built-in tutorial, taking you through the basic stuff on your first install would be fantastic. And the only thing that would happen is that people would use linux more.
Last time I used Mandrake, it has this feature. (If I sound like I'm boosting Mandrake, I'm not - I don't actually use the distro - I use Red Hat which is aimed more at businesses and servers, but I can appreciate where Mandrake can be very useful).
The RedHat and Mandrake crews are starting to make this less the case, but if we have a long way to go. If we are serious about putting linux on the desktop as a serious contender to the M$ offers we will need to shed the geek reputation of linux, by making it easy for everyone to use it.
I'm not sure if you were joking or not, but to respond:
Access became much cheaper and more ubiquitous. Checking your mail at a net cafe wouldn't have been possible without a popular net. neither would purchasing broadband at current rates.
Suddenly there was a vast quantity of information and application avaliable through other media that was now avaliable through the net. Your Lord of the Rings trailer wouldn't be visible on the net so easily nobody was watching.
Monetary incentive meant new and better sites / apps. Google wouldn't exist without their adwards, which in turn wouldn't exist without an audience
It became possible to meet people outside the geek world on line, and share your mutual interests (cars, ham radio, dessert recipes, whatever)
Imagine an engineer who worked for a motor company in the early days complaining that horseless carriages were ubiquitous and that the roadways were filled with idiots who didn't know how to rebuild an engine.
Open Outlook on each PC, and use the Outlook export wizard to export your mail from the Exchange message store (what you're looking at on your Exchange system) to a pDo whatever conversion is necessary to view such items in Evo if that's what you're usingersonal store (also known as a.PST file)
Import this into Unix mbox format, for use with Evolution (or Kmail, but I'd use Evo, with Out 2 Unix.
Export your contacts to a Personal Address book (.PAB file)
Use LookOut to import the.PAB file ( to KAB or Gnomecard format). You might need additional conversion depending on your mail client.
Think about paying a local software development house with QT or GTK programmers to make a little GUI wizard application to automate this process. It'll save you and your users time. Since the app isn't giving you any competitive advantage, Open Source it.
If you don't want to ride the cutting edge on your work desktop, I'd suggest those of you running Red Hat should install apt and add the following to your sources.list:
This guy has packaged KDE 3.02 for Red Hat 7.3, but more to the point, also a bunch of useful apps from apps.kde.com, including KRFB (the desktop sharing app) and, IIRC, the samba / nfs right-click file sharing Konqueror plugins.
As far as I can tell, there's nothing Red Hat specific about the project. Linux clients not already using up2date can, as far as I see it, still install up2date and use Current servers to provide their packages rather than Red hat network.
Linux clients who can't install RPM packages (there aren't many) aren't compliant with the Linux Standard Base.
The internet was built using Free Software, by free software developers, back when it was still called Free Software, and the term "open source" had not yet been coined. NOTE that 'Free Software' isn't the same as GNU.
I don't think which term was coined first matters. AFAIK most of these tools were not labelled as Free Software by their authors in terms of the FSF's definition (the FSF list of freedoms). They were applications created by people who wanted to share their code with the internet, but not under a specific definition of Free Software (the FSFs) or Open Source. However all these applications are both Open Source and Free Software (in the FSF sense) because they comply with the Open Source Definition and the FSF's list of freedoms.
Because it did. All major server side software on the internet (major meaning leads its market), an Open Source application (as, of course, defined by the Open Source Definition) leads.
Web Servers - Apache
Proxy Servers - Squid
Email Servers - Sendmail
DNS - BIND9
FTP - WuFTPd
Even OpenSSH is more prominent than the proprietary alternatives (though from an end user point of view that's not really much of an argument).
Most people have absolutely no idea this is the case. They don't realize that every time they connect to the internet they're relying on the root nameservers, all of which use Open Source software on Unix, to do their jobs. And those Open Source systems are rising to the challenge. There are people out there - including many journalist (Adam Turner from The Age is a good example if you live in Australia) who literally think proprietary Microsoft software is fundamenttal to the operation of the internet - even more so than OSS applications.
Before I (and I imagine a fair few others) decide whether to lend a hand, I'd like to know why people are emailing you in a manner you seem abusive. Respond and put your side of the case forward, and show us the web site so we can make up our own mind.
Generally because Linuxconf wasn't stable. It would often eat hand edited configuration files (though that improved with time), and had a nasty tendency of asking you to perform actions that weren't necessary to make your changes take effect (eg, wanting to postfix when you made a change to samba) with no logical explanation. The system also seemed to want to perform actions necessary for changes to take effect two or more times before it would let you quit.
RPM, the standard packaging system according to the Linux Standards base, had support for PGP (IIRC) around three years ago. This was replaced / upgraded to GPG a couple of years ago. Every package in Red Hat Linux (and most other popular distros) is signed (unless someone screws up - there was a case where 2 packages weren't properly signed, but signed replacements were made avaliable soon after). RPM will print a strong warning if the signature isn't correct (and maybe fail the operation - dunno, my signature's have always been correct).
Dpkg also recently added GPG support, buy you have to trust individuals rather than a specific company - no packager is going to lose their job if they're working in Albania on Debian trojaning packages.
Using commercial as a synonym for proprietary isn't logical. There's plenty of Open Source applications which have been produced for the primary aim of making money (RPM, Zope) and there's plenty of closed soruce apps which are produced for non-commercial reasons (eg, PowerArchiver back when it was called easyzip). The word proprietary is a much more accurate description of the software.
The response I received stated that they don't like to use freeware, but only consider industry proven and supported software
I agree with the poster above. Since when are these mutually exclusive? That people refer to proprietary software as `commercial' is a fault of their logic. Chances are they are already relying in soem way or another on one of the following Open Source applications that are either produced for commercial reasons and have some kind of backing. Oh, did I mention that each of these apps is the markt leader in their field?
the Bind DNS Server
Sendmail
Apache
Squid
WU FTPd (yes, I know it sucks, but its still the world most popular FTP)
Reebok. An ad shows clothing that changes color as runners exert themselves more vigorously. Consumers can program their clothing with the latest fashions by downloading directly from Nike.
did you manually upgrade all the desktop and widget libraries when you updated from windows 2000 to XP? No? You just inserted the cd and let the whole OS updater do it for you?
Indeed. But Windows 2000 or XP weren't labelled as finished products until those installation mechanisms were finished and avaliable.
The one thing loud and clear through all the development process is INSTALL GNOME2 IN A SEPARATE PREFIX!!
And? The development process for Gnome 2 is over. The environment is supposed to be ready.
The One Reason I Use KDE and not anything else
on
GNOME 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
A Scenario:
You install your desktop environment with the default settings
Your hard disk begins overheating
Unix operating systems will start sending all the error messages from yoru disk to/dev/console. Because all users on a Unix system are supposed to see/dev/console. If you're running KDE, you'll see/dev/console. If you're running the default setup of any other desktop, you won't. Your hard disk will melt. Have a nice day.
Sure, you can add some third party app to your non-KDE desktop yourself if you know you need to, but secure defaults (security == protecting data) are why I use Unix.
The acid test of any license is whether it's DFSG [debian.org] free and can thus be included in Debian, Mandrake and other Free Software distributions.
Er, no. The Open Source Definition and the Free Software List of Freedoms are used a lot more commonly than the DFSG, which the OSD to a certain extend replaced. I think you just saw this as an excuse to advocate Debian ignoring well known yardstick of the Open Source / Free Software community. Mandrake use the OSD themselves to define what should and shouldn't be in their distro, as do Red Hat (both of which do include proprietary apps, eg Netscape 4, when there are no stable OSS alternatives).
Groups like Apple and the DivX team have been known to release purportedly "open source" software under look-but-don't-touch style licenses.
They are lying. As there's as little to stop them saying a proprietary application is Open Source under the DFSG as there is the Open Source Definition.
GeForce doesn't resize the screen when it tries to go fullscreen.
Er, I meant Geiss.
Something else: here's a.spec you can use if with transgaming CVS.
Edit this file to change the version to todays date
Change the release to `1joeblogs' and edit the changelgo accordingly, because I didn't create this package, you did.
Place it in/usr/src/redhat/SPECS
Download CVS from Transgaming as per the web site
mv wine winex-20020624
tar -jcvf winex-20020624 winex-20020624.tar.bz2
Move this file to/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
As root, rpmbuild -ba/usr/src/redhat/SPECS
You don't really need to be root, but setting up RPM for regular users is left up to the reader.
Summary: Runs Windows programs (especially multimedia ones) under Linux Name: winex Version: 20020616 Release: 1mm Source0: %{name}-%{version}.tar.bz2 License: APSL Group: Applications/Emulators BuildRoot: %{_builddir}/%{name}-%{version} Requires: kernel >= 2.4, XFree86-devel, gcc >= 2.7.2, flex >= 2.5 Requires: bison, glibc >= 2 Conflicts: wine %description TransGaming WineX is a derivative of the Wine project. Wine is an implementation of the Microsoft® Win32® APIs on top of UNIX and X-Windows - in essence, it is a Windows® compatibility layer. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows to be installed, as it provides an alternative implementation of Windows written from scratch with no Microsoft code whatever. TransGaming WineX includes a new implementation of the Microsoft DirectX multimedia APIs, including Direct3D - the core graphics system most Windows games use for hardware accelerated 3D.
%changelog * Sun Apr 7 2002 Mike MacCana 1mm - Created packages
This is junk to allow me to post this.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.
Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi.
First, someone below seems to think this was created by Winamp. It wasn't, it just another Open Source tool created by OSS developers/hackers.
Install the plugin. Then if you're using WineX (as you should), you'll need to link.wine to.transgaming. Start XMMS, and enter the plugin configuration dialog. You'll have WinAMP meta plugin pop up in the list.
Now download Geiss or G-Force from Winamp.com and run `winex (whatever).exe'. Install as normal, the defaults will be fine.
Now start XMMS again. When you try and configure the WinAMP meta plugin, you should now be able to select the Plugin DLL you just installed.
Using Transgaming WineX 2.0 stable release, GeForce works fine, except the window doesn't move and is always on top. GeForce doesn't resize the screen when it tries to go fullscreen. I'm not sure if these are WineX problems, WinAMP meta plugins or otherwise, suffice to say that WineX handles this well already for most games it supports.
So yeah: G-Force and Geis are great. Various `dancer' type plugins failed miserably. But its a promising start, especially for an app that's only existed for a few weeks.
MPlayer will happily play WMA version 7 or 8 (and I think Xine might too - not sure). Now MPlayer is fully open source, the only think that remains for it to become a quality media player is a playlist - expect it there pretty soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post was excellent.
using vi, emacs, then pico and subsequently confusing them all...
I don't expect end users to know the syntax and command to make the changes take effect for every app on their system. neither should Linux. Windows doesn't make every user learn regedit to use their OS. The solution tothis problem is to ignore those who say you need vi or emacs and demand a system with a comprehensive range of GUI tools. Mandrake provide this, and Red Hat 8 beta does too (but not their current release, which is missing quite a few important items). Everything is a layer of abstraction. Some people are comfortable at diffferent layers of abstraction. Saying that GUI tools are a copout is akin to saying not writing your own OS is a copout.
how the file tree is laid out. What the conventions are, where do I find things, and where do I put new things?
The OS should have a tool that performs find in an obvious place. KDE and GNOME, IIRC, already have this. Its not necessary to know the filesystem layout when installing osftware, as most software packages will install their files into their correct place as determined by the File Heirarchy System. However, I agree a brief, three paracgaraph guide to the FHS for those ofus who want to know wouldn't go astray.
(I know there are the man pages, but the man pages can be very criptic sometimes, even for me a seasoned programmer).
Damn straight. One cannot RTFS if TFM is a POS and you simply want to use the system.
Even a built-in tutorial, taking you through the basic stuff on your first install would be fantastic. And the only thing that would happen is that people would use linux more.
Last time I used Mandrake, it has this feature. (If I sound like I'm boosting Mandrake, I'm not - I don't actually use the distro - I use Red Hat which is aimed more at businesses and servers, but I can appreciate where Mandrake can be very useful).
The RedHat and Mandrake crews are starting to make this less the case, but if we have a long way to go. If we are serious about putting linux on the desktop as a serious contender to the M$ offers we will need to shed the geek reputation of linux, by making it easy for everyone to use it.
Agreed. You rock.
- Access became much cheaper and more ubiquitous. Checking your mail at a net cafe wouldn't have been possible without a popular net. neither would purchasing broadband at current rates.
- Suddenly there was a vast quantity of information and application avaliable through other media that was now avaliable through the net. Your Lord of the Rings trailer wouldn't be visible on the net so easily nobody was watching.
- Monetary incentive meant new and better sites / apps. Google wouldn't exist without their adwards, which in turn wouldn't exist without an audience
- It became possible to meet people outside the geek world on line, and share your mutual interests (cars, ham radio, dessert recipes, whatever)
Imagine an engineer who worked for a motor company in the early days complaining that horseless carriages were ubiquitous and that the roadways were filled with idiots who didn't know how to rebuild an engine.You do know how to rebuild an engine, don't you?
If you don't want to ride the cutting edge on your work desktop, I'd suggest those of you running Red Hat should install apt and add the following to your sources.list:
rpm http://www.math.unl.edu/linux/redhat/apt 7.2/i386 kde3
This guy has packaged KDE 3.02 for Red Hat 7.3, but more to the point, also a bunch of useful apps from apps.kde.com, including KRFB (the desktop sharing app) and, IIRC, the samba / nfs right-click file sharing Konqueror plugins.
Exactly which nation would that be?
As far as I can tell, there's nothing Red Hat specific about the project. Linux clients not already using up2date can, as far as I see it, still install up2date and use Current servers to provide their packages rather than Red hat network.
Linux clients who can't install RPM packages (there aren't many) aren't compliant with the Linux Standard Base.
The internet was built using Free Software, by free software developers, back when it was still called Free Software, and the term "open source" had not yet been coined. NOTE that 'Free Software' isn't the same as GNU.
I don't think which term was coined first matters. AFAIK most of these tools were not labelled as Free Software by their authors in terms of the FSF's definition (the FSF list of freedoms). They were applications created by people who wanted to share their code with the internet, but not under a specific definition of Free Software (the FSFs) or Open Source. However all these applications are both Open Source and Free Software (in the FSF sense) because they comply with the Open Source Definition and the FSF's list of freedoms.
Open Source built the Internet
Because it did. All major server side software on the internet (major meaning leads its market), an Open Source application (as, of course, defined by the Open Source Definition) leads.
- Web Servers - Apache
- Proxy Servers - Squid
- Email Servers - Sendmail
- DNS - BIND9
- FTP - WuFTPd
- Even OpenSSH is more prominent than the proprietary alternatives (though from an end user point of view that's not really much of an argument).
Most people have absolutely no idea this is the case. They don't realize that every time they connect to the internet they're relying on the root nameservers, all of which use Open Source software on Unix, to do their jobs. And those Open Source systems are rising to the challenge. There are people out there - including many journalist (Adam Turner from The Age is a good example if you live in Australia) who literally think proprietary Microsoft software is fundamenttal to the operation of the internet - even more so than OSS applications.Before I (and I imagine a fair few others) decide whether to lend a hand, I'd like to know why people are emailing you in a manner you seem abusive. Respond and put your side of the case forward, and show us the web site so we can make up our own mind.
Generally because Linuxconf wasn't stable. It would often eat hand edited configuration files (though that improved with time), and had a nasty tendency of asking you to perform actions that weren't necessary to make your changes take effect (eg, wanting to postfix when you made a change to samba) with no logical explanation. The system also seemed to want to perform actions necessary for changes to take effect two or more times before it would let you quit.
RPM, the standard packaging system according to the Linux Standards base, had support for PGP (IIRC) around three years ago. This was replaced / upgraded to GPG a couple of years ago. Every package in Red Hat Linux (and most other popular distros) is signed (unless someone screws up - there was a case where 2 packages weren't properly signed, but signed replacements were made avaliable soon after). RPM will print a strong warning if the signature isn't correct (and maybe fail the operation - dunno, my signature's have always been correct).
Dpkg also recently added GPG support, buy you have to trust individuals rather than a specific company - no packager is going to lose their job if they're working in Albania on Debian trojaning packages.
Thanks for the URL. As I was voting, I notice sf.net isn't blocked. OSS Developers can use sf.net in place of sourceforge while we all vote.
Using commercial as a synonym for proprietary isn't logical. There's plenty of Open Source applications which have been produced for the primary aim of making money (RPM, Zope) and there's plenty of closed soruce apps which are produced for non-commercial reasons (eg, PowerArchiver back when it was called easyzip). The word proprietary is a much more accurate description of the software.
I agree with the poster above. Since when are these mutually exclusive? That people refer to proprietary software as `commercial' is a fault of their logic. Chances are they are already relying in soem way or another on one of the following Open Source applications that are either produced for commercial reasons and have some kind of backing. Oh, did I mention that each of these apps is the markt leader in their field?
Reebok. An ad shows clothing that changes color as runners exert themselves more vigorously. Consumers can program their clothing with the latest fashions by downloading directly from Nike.
That's an issue with packaging, not Gnome2 itself. The same goes for many of the other grips that the author has.
That packaging is considered not a part of Gnome 2 is an issue.
did you manually upgrade all the desktop and widget libraries when you updated from windows 2000 to XP? No? You just inserted the cd and let the whole OS updater do it for you?
Indeed. But Windows 2000 or XP weren't labelled as finished products until those installation mechanisms were finished and avaliable.
The one thing loud and clear through all the development process is INSTALL GNOME2 IN A SEPARATE PREFIX!!
And? The development process for Gnome 2 is over. The environment is supposed to be ready.
Unix operating systems will start sending all the error messages from yoru disk to
Sure, you can add some third party app to your non-KDE desktop yourself if you know you need to, but secure defaults (security == protecting data) are why I use Unix.
To get something for free in a quality-controlled environment is useless if you aren't 100% certain that it will all function as-promised.
MD5, or Red Hat's `check' option in the installer, works for me.
The acid test of any license is whether it's DFSG [debian.org] free and can thus be included in Debian, Mandrake and other Free Software distributions.
Er, no. The Open Source Definition and the Free Software List of Freedoms are used a lot more commonly than the DFSG, which the OSD to a certain extend replaced. I think you just saw this as an excuse to advocate Debian ignoring well known yardstick of the Open Source / Free Software community. Mandrake use the OSD themselves to define what should and shouldn't be in their distro, as do Red Hat (both of which do include proprietary apps, eg Netscape 4, when there are no stable OSS alternatives).
Groups like Apple and the DivX team have been known to release purportedly "open source" software under look-but-don't-touch style licenses.
They are lying. As there's as little to stop them saying a proprietary application is Open Source under the DFSG as there is the Open Source Definition.
Er, I meant Geiss.
Something else: here's a
You don't really need to be root, but setting up RPM for regular users is left up to the reader.
Summary: Runs Windows programs (especially multimedia ones) under Linux
Name: winex
Version: 20020616
Release: 1mm
Source0: %{name}-%{version}.tar.bz2
License: APSL
Group: Applications/Emulators
BuildRoot: %{_builddir}/%{name}-%{version}
Requires: kernel >= 2.4, XFree86-devel, gcc >= 2.7.2, flex >= 2.5
Requires: bison, glibc >= 2
Conflicts: wine
%description
TransGaming WineX is a derivative of the Wine project. Wine is an implementation of the Microsoft® Win32® APIs on top of UNIX and X-Windows - in essence, it is a Windows® compatibility layer. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows to be installed, as it provides an alternative implementation of Windows written from scratch with no Microsoft code whatever.
TransGaming WineX includes a new implementation of the Microsoft DirectX multimedia APIs, including Direct3D - the core graphics system most Windows games use for hardware accelerated 3D.
%prep
%setup -q -n wine
%build
%configure
make depend
make
%install
%makeinstall
%post -p
%postun -p
%clean
rm -rf %{buildroot}
%files
%defattr(-,root,root)
%{_bindir}/*
%{
%doc README ANNOUNCE BUGS DEVELOPERS-HINTS LICENSE LICENSE.winehq
%changelog
* Sun Apr 7 2002 Mike MacCana 1mm
- Created packages
This is junk to allow me to post this.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.
Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi.
First, someone below seems to think this was created by Winamp. It wasn't, it just another Open Source tool created by OSS developers/hackers.
.wine to .transgaming. Start XMMS, and enter the plugin configuration dialog. You'll have WinAMP meta plugin pop up in the list.
Install the plugin. Then if you're using WineX (as you should), you'll need to link
Now download Geiss or G-Force from Winamp.com and run `winex (whatever).exe'. Install as normal, the defaults will be fine.
Now start XMMS again. When you try and configure the WinAMP meta plugin, you should now be able to select the Plugin DLL you just installed.
Using Transgaming WineX 2.0 stable release, GeForce works fine, except the window doesn't move and is always on top. GeForce doesn't resize the screen when it tries to go fullscreen. I'm not sure if these are WineX problems, WinAMP meta plugins or otherwise, suffice to say that WineX handles this well already for most games it supports.
So yeah: G-Force and Geis are great. Various `dancer' type plugins failed miserably. But its a promising start, especially for an app that's only existed for a few weeks.
MPlayer will happily play WMA version 7 or 8 (and I think Xine might too - not sure). Now MPlayer is fully open source, the only think that remains for it to become a quality media player is a playlist - expect it there pretty soon.