I'm just happy someone else than Interplay is picking up Fallout, it's a truly great series. But Interplay really is something, they have (had) several strong franchises and golden opportunities that they've completely squandered time and time again.
Let's see, I can't even remember how many there's been... Descent and the excellent Descent: Freespace licenses come to mind. Ran those into the ground pretty spectacularly. Then there's Fallout of course. Interplay published the first Baldur's Gate, then botched that up completely, can't blame Bioware for not wanting to have anything to do with these guys anymore. Black Isle, now that was an innovative game house. Brought us Fallout and one of the greatest CRPG ever, Planescape: Torment. What does Interplay do? Shut the lot down. Well, at least we got Obsidian and Troika out of that wreckage. Didn't they have the Lord of the Rings license back in the day too? Now that's a license to print money, but somehow they managed to mess that up too.
At the moment they're just hogging licenses, they should sell the lot on Ebay and maybe we could get some respectable game companies like Obsidian or Bioware to give us some decent games.
Well, they've managed to hide it pretty good in this case as I could not locate any such thing. Mind pointing it out to me exactly where I could download ISOs of 9.1 Pro?
The closest thing I could find was the single-disc 9.1 Personal which contains about 1/4'th of the software in the Pro version. It's useless to me as it doesn't include any development tools, and I need something to build SuSE RPM packages of my programs with.
Why, they're just frontends to the RPM database? As is apt-get for Fedora. You install something with one and the other will know about it.
Bottom line is however that Fedora comes with only yum and it will continue to do so, and up2date also uses yum in the background. New users will just stick with it, if you're experienced enough to have a different preference you can go and download it youself, or use yum to do it for you in the case of for example apt-get from Fedora Extras.
I seriously couldn't move back to a Windows style "every program installs itself" with files going all over the system to god knows where. I've got something called "uwstart.ini" in my C:\ root. Who put it there? Nobody knows. With a properly packaged Linux distribution these days, every file outside your home directory and temporary files should be accounted for and belong to some package. Every, single, file. In a properly admined system you've got no business going outside your home directory in the first place, unlike Windows.
Here's some more RPM-fu: - rpm -qf somefile, reports what package any file belongs to (as in parent) - rpm -ql somepackage, reports where all the files of a installed package are
want to see where the dhclient configuration files are? rpm -ql dhclient |grep etc, presto (or use -qc) - rpm -qpl somepacakge.rpm, list where files in a package will be installed to before you install it. - rpm -qpi somepacakge.rpm, get all the information such as builder, package description etc. from an uninstalled package. - rpm -qa, list all installed packages. Combine with grep for lots and uses. - rpm -qp --changelog somepackage.rpm, get the full ChangeLog for a package. This is great for example for checking what's new in that kernel update package as Red Hat will list every patch they add and bugzilla number. - And of course plain ol' rpm -q package, report the version of the installed package. There's a ton of stuff you can query, pre and post install script contents, arch, etc.
And remember, RPM is completely network aware. rpm -Uvh ftp://someserver/somepackage works. Hell, you can use the above mentioned queries on packages without downloading them first. Grabbing the ChangeLog remotely is very useful.
Check out the W3Schools browser statistics. Mozilla based browsers have grown from just a few percents to over 12% in a little over year with steady increases every month. Now W3Schools is hardly your average Joe's website, but they are pretty representative of average Joe web developer I'd say.
I'm also seeing Firefox evanglism and enthusiasm in new places all the time, on gamer boards (Shacknews) and other unlikely places. It's because Firefox is the new cool thing, something regular Mozilla never achieved. The Firefox branding effort has paid of big time. Having the best browser doesn't bring in the users, having the best browser with a slick look does.
If you care what your browser is named you're probably technically apt enough to be able to figure it out from one of several possible sources or just by looking at it. The rest of the population can just keep using The Web Browser. Does my mother really care whether she's using Epiphany or Firefox? No, and neither should she have to.
Inicidentally, my cat is actually, honestly, i shit you not, named the equivalent of "cat" in my native language. It's a very common cat name over here. I have a feeling we're not going agree anytime soon;)
There's no such thing as an incorrect opinion. It's just that, an opinion.
You acting as assholes riling a member of the mainstream press for daring to interrupt your community circle jerk does far more damage to the perception of the state of Linux than any minor technical mistakes in the article ever could. We need these outside reviews of Linux because as Linux users we aren't objective. A reviewers can see a fault in Linux that we can not. Even if it's not really a fault, the fact that the reviewer percieved it as one should insipire us to try and see why that is is and fix the real fault which caused this misperception. Was the re-partitioning of the disk he failed to find hidden behind 5 menus? Fix it. Was up2date not visible enough? Fix it.
The Linux community's worst enemy is not Microsoft or any other company, it's the zealots among us. The worst part is, there's whole lot more zealots now than even a few years ago. They're not old Slackware users longing for the old days (I'm a Slackware user gone Fedora and quite happy thank you very much), they're newbies who like flies attracted to shit gravitate towards Linux looking for elitism and exclusivity and circle jerk communities like Gentoo (Gentoo's a fine distro for it's niche, it's the community I can't stand). It wasn't them who built the graphical boot screens and hardware detection systems over the years, it was us Slackware pioneers for the sake of not having to do it anymore in the year 2004. They don't get that the value of Linux is freedom and getting shit done, tweaking Linux day in and day out and doing things the hard way nets you absolutely nothing at the end of the day. Of course if it makes you happy, go ahead, but don't go around opening your head thinking you represent the Linux community in any way, I'm not even sure you'd even qualify as part of the Linux community.
i like to see the commands go by because if one is red then you know to go do something about it.
The Fedora graphical boot process will show you if any service fails during startup. In fact it's better than having tons of crap streaming down your screen as you boot, because it will only show you the important stuff and filter the redundant stuff you've seen a million times away. With RHGB, when something fails you notice because the whole screen changes, while a failed service otherwise will just be a single line with a red "failed".
When I'm writing an application for Linux, which happens to be my platform of choice, I couldn't care less if it doesn't work on your BSD running on an alpha. Open source is ultimately about scratching your own itches, it's certainly not my itch that my application doesn't work on your fringe platform. But, here's the great part, if you send me a patch for your platform I'll probably include it and maybe the next version will work out of the tarball.
And nobody is making the BSDs provide compatibility layers, go right ahead and run the native BSD and legacy Unix software if you want. Linux just happens to be where all the exciting application development happens these days. Don't worry about wether something is too mainstream or not, it takes valuable time away from coding. What, you're not a coder? You just like to use fringe platforms because it's "cool"? That makes you the valley girl of the Unix world.
3) the.NET framework is more elegantly designed. Thus in hacker jargon "The right thing".
I'd be quite suprised if it wasn't, since they have the benefit of hindsight compared to Java. The framework is really quite brilliant. I think a lot of Slashdotters dismiss Mono/.NET just because it has its origins with Microsoft but then turn around and use Samba:)
From a technical point of view the.NET CLR is cutting edge. Ultimately, for me it's all about technical superiority. It seems to me like Sun is faltering and not making the hard decisions that have to be made. The generics implementation they pushed is pure syntactic sugar where they could have made major improvments to their VM, now that's going to come back and haunt them down the line. Now Java 1.5 is suddenly 5.0? WTF, Sun, are you completely run by marketoids now? Java is bleeing dry and Sun is applying band-aids where major surgery is needed.
Multi-Language: Please, they're all the same language designed to look like other languages. Java has multi language support to (Jython). This is not a fundamental reason.
The big difference is that.NET/Mono is actively moving towards a general purpose VM whereas the JVM is not. Sun will officially support other languages when... well never. Today, you've got languages like Python/Ruby/Haskell being targeting at the.NET CLR, but look at the big picture. What about CLR version 2, 3, 4... ? The potential is huge. Parrot is the only thing even remotely like it the open source world, and that's only for dynamic scripting languages at the moment. Don't count out a Parrot to Mono CLR compiler yet either! The multilanguage feature has the potential to unify all the minor languages to a single CLR. Right now we're writing GTK bindings for C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, etc. With GTK# (despite the name, it's more like GTK-Mono IMO) every language targeting the CLR gets up to date bindings!
You have obviously no clue on what you are talking about.
Thanks. I simply tried to look at the issue from a normal users perspective, who doesn't care if Java is the greatest thing since sliced bread, just that it's behaving unlike everything else on my system. I use Java, Ant and friends, I'm just telling you why I think Mono will absolute pounce Java when it comes to the desktop. More than anything, both camps have a completely different way of looking at things. Java pushes their own solutions like webstart, jar, etc. while Mono integrates as much as possbile with your existing system.
Java if you go the self extracting binary route just expands itself wherever you want it to be and follows from one top level dir into its subdirs
Well that's even worse! Now you've got this huge glob of Java crap in your home directory! Look, is it really too much to ask that Java stops being such a fucking primadonna and installs itself just like everbody else into standard locations and doesn't pretend it's entitled to special hand holding from me.
nobody prevents you to use make it is just ant is so much better and therefore everybody uses it
I'll give you this, make can be pretty horrible at times and Ant is much better. But I'm not sure I'm ready to place the burden of tracking down and installing Ant on my users. Make is ubiquitous, yes, it's a pain in the ass for me as the developer, but it "just works" for my audience.
how much more alien is a zip file with the extension ant to linux compared to an exe file?
Well Mono only uses the exe extension because of convention, you can rename the thing to anything you want and it'll work. On the other hand, Mono has a wrapper ELF binary that bootstraps the loading of the binary "exe". What does this mean for the end user? "./monoprogram.exe" works and Mono is EXACTLY like a C program in that case. Let's see Java fit in on Linux like that. From day one Mono apps have been packaged with shell script or binary wrappers that hide all the VM stuff from the end users whereas Java rubs it in your face.
Check out the The Mono Handbook for tutorials and general getting started instructions. It's still a work in progress, so many sections are still quite empty. Another resource you should familiarize yourself with is the MSDN developer documentation for most of the core.NET API, it includes a lot of examples.
I also recommend you check out the standard GTK+ tutorial. A lot of it is still directly applicable to GTK# and it's more complete than most GTK# only tutorials. If you're already familiar with GTK+, Glade# for Rapid Development will help you get up to speed with Mono.
One huge benefit to Mono on the desktop is that it acts as, and for all intents and purposes is, just a normal language/platform for Linux. Exactly like C/Python etc. You install the RPM, or compile the source, or get the whole thing pulled down as a depdenency from yum/apt for some third party program you really wanted to run in the first place. It's there in the background as any other package on your system. When you run a Mono GTK# program from your GNOME menu or the shell, you can't really say just from looking at it that it's a Mono program and not standard C.
Java on the hand, goes out of its way to jump in your face at every opportunity. Java is completely unlike everything else on your system. Java spews its shit all around your system even when you install it from a package (what the hell entitles Java to a toplevel directory in/usr, it's just one of 12 languages and development kits I've got installed on my system). You're not going to get Java with your distribution. You can't pull down Java as a dependency for some other app. You don't get Java apps in RPM/whatever format in the first place. You've got to know what the heck a classpath is, etc.
Then you've got your Ant build systems, Jar packages, and tons of other stuff completely alien to Linux. The few Mono apps I've compiled have been the standard "./configure, make, make install". Long story short: Mono will will the desktop because end users don't have to know what Mono is in the first place.
First, Mono already supports a lot of the stuff coming in Whidbey (generics for example).
Second, even if Microsoft killed their.NET effort tomorrow it wouldn't change the fact that we now have a kick-ass development platform for Linux. Everybody needs to take a look at the two software stacks of Mono.
Wether Mono has feature parity with MS.NET is not the most important thing, neither is supporting Windows.Forms. Mono is good enough to stand on its own, as the next generation Linux development platform. Interoperability with Windows is just sugar on the top. Where do you see the Linux desktop being five years from now? I truly hope we're not still at the time writing our applications in C, as we do for the GNOME desktop now. Unless Sun steps up to the plate to release their JVM under a open soruce license, Mono is pretty much our only hope to modernize our development environment in any reasonable timeframe.
Of course, some will say we've already got Python, or Ruby or whatever. But I say I want to program Python in Mono.
Java, as it is now, is a complete non-contender in the area Mono is focusing on, which is Linux desktop apps. First, there's no complete open source Java implementation, no distribution ships Sun's JVM. Sure, you can download the JVM for free, but how can you expect us to build a desktop around the thing in that case?
If these are the best justification for.NET over Java, then they are pretty weak.
There's a lot of reasons to go with.NET over Java, and vice versa. This argument will likely never die. Ultimately the difference isn't that big. That said, I personally prefer the direction.NET/Mono is taking and I think Sun is foolish to be resting on its laurels. At this rate Mono will become a major force in the Linux landscape and Sun is doing nothing, five years from now they'll still be wondering what the hell happened.
Which brings us on to the second justification for.NET over Java, native GUIs, which is even weaker. Java-Gnome
Java-GNOME is completely dead. Java on the desktop, except for Eclipse and SWT (no thanks to Sun) is completely dead. GTK#/Mono has a lot of momentum and Ximian/Novell throwing their weight behind it which is not to be underestimated. Guess which is more likely to have support two years from now, Java-GNOME or GTK#?
Try this: Open the Firefox Options, look under Advanced and check the box for "Use smooth scrolling".
Incidentally, this is always the first feature I disable in IE since it makes the whole browser feel sluggish in my opinion. Different strokes for different folks, I guess...
I was really skeptical of the new winstripe theme in Firefox 0.9, the new changes introduced in 0.9.1 however makes it a LOT better in my opinion. I just wish Thunderbird would now work to unify its theme with Firefox.
It's the small things that makes the browser for me, the look and feel. It's hard to explain it in detail. Going back to IE after using Firefox for a long time just doesn't feel right. For example, there's all these little half-second pauses in IE when the controls and scrolling are unresponsive, times when the right-click context menu won't show up when it's still loading. Sometimes the window stops redrawing for a second or two (especially while running Windows Update, but otherwise too) etc. All these little glitches drive me crazy when I have to use IE.
Don't go down that road... Red Hat's contibutions to Linux absolutely dwarf SuSE's to date in no uncertain terms.
But let's just focus on the most recent efforts of both companies. Realistically no distro is going to include Yast, but it's still a very good move since it will allow SuSE ISO images to be distributed without the existing restricitions in the future and I'm thankful to Novell for it. On the other hand, Red Hat buying Sistina for $31 million and setting their arguably only asset GFS free and then working on including it in the Linux kernel proper directly also benefits Novell and other Linux distributors.
"lately has been locking down their Linux offerings"? How about giving some concrete examples. Last time I checked RHEL was 100% open source and available for download, and so is Fedora Core for the home user. SuSE has been cleaning up their act since they got purchased by Novell, but to play them against Red Hat, who has been completely 100% behind open source since day one, as somehow a more free alternative is laughable.
Red Hat's HA clustering software is also GPL but it doesn't run on other distros (and is not supported by Red Hat on other distros).
Of course Red Hat doesn't support other distros, but what makes you think the clustering software doesn't work on them? All the bits and pieces are available for download. If you find any "if (distro != RH) exit()" code in the fully GPL'd cluster toolchain, please feel free to remove them. There's no secret sauce to RHEL, it's all open source and everyone is free to copy and modify the code.
There's already one distro that includes the new GPL'ed GFS filesystem out as of today, Lineox. And Red Hat will be working to get GFS up to spec for inclusion in the official Linux kernel according to posts made to the kernel mailing list.
The code itself is open source, that is true, but "Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription [is] required"
This only refers to that point that Red Hat is not interested in selling to you unless you have a RHEL subscription. That $2,200 gets you GFS up and running on your RHEL cluster in a turnkey fashion, and it gives you the option to purchase further 24/7 one-hour response support contracts. You're free to assemble it all into a working system by yourself if you want.
This move by Red Hat gives new life (and resources) to GFS beyond the OpenGFS Project that has also been continuing to work on the code.
It's been pretty quiet regarding OpenGFS lately. Now it is of course possible that they join forces and work on the GPL GFS.
But Red Hat is hoping for inclusion of GFS into the Linux kernel. This would be the best solution, as it would give it a larger developer base, keep the filesystem evolving in sync with the kernel and preventing bitrot even in the unlikely situation that Red Hat drops support for it in the future. Technically, I'd say Red Hat has a pretty good chance of getting it in.
Re:That exists for years already!
on
Red Hat announces GFS
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· Score: 2, Informative
GFS is nothing like NFS, except they're both file systems. GFS is a filesystem specifically created for clusters. It means you have a lot of machines sharing a single logical file system. You can then add or remove machines from the cluster and the filesystem and all its contents remains accessible to all the nodes in the cluster. This is great for a lot of cluster tasks, such as having multiple load balanced web servers all serving the same content from a GFS system.
NFS on the other hand can be accessed from multiple machines but is ultimately hosted on one specific machine, giving you a single point of failure.
On my W2K box the Boinc 3.19 installer asked if it should make the Boinc screensaver the system default. Even if you choose no, you should see "Boinc" in the list of available screensavers. The screensaver runs fullscreen and looks exactly like the old Seti@Home screensaver except that it's in 3D. You can also get a per workunit visualization in a window by right-clicking on a workunit in the Boinc client and selecting "Show graphics". There's also a Boinc add-on that will draw a skymap for you and pinpoint the location of where your workunit is recorded from.
All in all I'm very happy with the new Boinc system. The new webstats system is a lot better, you can see exactly which machine submitted which unit, how long it took etc. The clients now also understand SMP without having to run multiple instances.
The screensaver is still there, and this time it's done in OpenGL. If you have a GPU the impact of running the screensaver is a lot less than with the old Seti@Home client.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just happy someone else than Interplay is picking up Fallout, it's a truly great series. But Interplay really is something, they have (had) several strong franchises and golden opportunities that they've completely squandered time and time again.
Let's see, I can't even remember how many there's been... Descent and the excellent Descent: Freespace licenses come to mind. Ran those into the ground pretty spectacularly. Then there's Fallout of course. Interplay published the first Baldur's Gate, then botched that up completely, can't blame Bioware for not wanting to have anything to do with these guys anymore. Black Isle, now that was an innovative game house. Brought us Fallout and one of the greatest CRPG ever, Planescape: Torment. What does Interplay do? Shut the lot down. Well, at least we got Obsidian and Troika out of that wreckage. Didn't they have the Lord of the Rings license back in the day too? Now that's a license to print money, but somehow they managed to mess that up too.
At the moment they're just hogging licenses, they should sell the lot on Ebay and maybe we could get some respectable game companies like Obsidian or Bioware to give us some decent games.
Well, they've managed to hide it pretty good in this case as I could not locate any such thing. Mind pointing it out to me exactly where I could download ISOs of 9.1 Pro?
The closest thing I could find was the single-disc 9.1 Personal which contains about 1/4'th of the software in the Pro version. It's useless to me as it doesn't include any development tools, and I need something to build SuSE RPM packages of my programs with.
Why, they're just frontends to the RPM database? As is apt-get for Fedora. You install something with one and the other will know about it.
Bottom line is however that Fedora comes with only yum and it will continue to do so, and up2date also uses yum in the background. New users will just stick with it, if you're experienced enough to have a different preference you can go and download it youself, or use yum to do it for you in the case of for example apt-get from Fedora Extras.
I seriously couldn't move back to a Windows style "every program installs itself" with files going all over the system to god knows where. I've got something called "uwstart.ini" in my C:\ root. Who put it there? Nobody knows. With a properly packaged Linux distribution these days, every file outside your home directory and temporary files should be accounted for and belong to some package. Every, single, file. In a properly admined system you've got no business going outside your home directory in the first place, unlike Windows.
Here's some more RPM-fu:
- rpm -qf somefile, reports what package any file belongs to (as in parent)
- rpm -ql somepackage, reports where all the files of a installed package are
want to see where the dhclient configuration files are? rpm -ql dhclient |grep etc, presto (or use -qc)
- rpm -qpl somepacakge.rpm, list where files in a package will be installed to before you install it.
- rpm -qpi somepacakge.rpm, get all the information such as builder, package description etc. from an uninstalled package.
- rpm -qa, list all installed packages. Combine with grep for lots and uses.
- rpm -qp --changelog somepackage.rpm, get the full ChangeLog for a package. This is great for example for checking what's new in that kernel update package as Red Hat will list every patch they add and bugzilla number.
- And of course plain ol' rpm -q package, report the version of the installed package. There's a ton of stuff you can query, pre and post install script contents, arch, etc.
And remember, RPM is completely network aware. rpm -Uvh ftp://someserver/somepackage works. Hell, you can use the above mentioned queries on packages without downloading them first. Grabbing the ChangeLog remotely is very useful.
Check out the W3Schools browser statistics. Mozilla based browsers have grown from just a few percents to over 12% in a little over year with steady increases every month. Now W3Schools is hardly your average Joe's website, but they are pretty representative of average Joe web developer I'd say.
I'm also seeing Firefox evanglism and enthusiasm in new places all the time, on gamer boards (Shacknews) and other unlikely places. It's because Firefox is the new cool thing, something regular Mozilla never achieved. The Firefox branding effort has paid of big time. Having the best browser doesn't bring in the users, having the best browser with a slick look does.
If you care what your browser is named you're probably technically apt enough to be able to figure it out from one of several possible sources or just by looking at it. The rest of the population can just keep using The Web Browser. Does my mother really care whether she's using Epiphany or Firefox? No, and neither should she have to.
;)
Inicidentally, my cat is actually, honestly, i shit you not, named the equivalent of "cat" in my native language. It's a very common cat name over here. I have a feeling we're not going agree anytime soon
I personally prefer Wikipedia over the old Britannica for two important reasons.
Firstly it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the word WIKIPEDIA inscribed in large friendly letters on the front.
There's no such thing as an incorrect opinion. It's just that, an opinion.
You acting as assholes riling a member of the mainstream press for daring to interrupt your community circle jerk does far more damage to the perception of the state of Linux than any minor technical mistakes in the article ever could. We need these outside reviews of Linux because as Linux users we aren't objective. A reviewers can see a fault in Linux that we can not. Even if it's not really a fault, the fact that the reviewer percieved it as one should insipire us to try and see why that is is and fix the real fault which caused this misperception. Was the re-partitioning of the disk he failed to find hidden behind 5 menus? Fix it. Was up2date not visible enough? Fix it.
The Linux community's worst enemy is not Microsoft or any other company, it's the zealots among us. The worst part is, there's whole lot more zealots now than even a few years ago. They're not old Slackware users longing for the old days (I'm a Slackware user gone Fedora and quite happy thank you very much), they're newbies who like flies attracted to shit gravitate towards Linux looking for elitism and exclusivity and circle jerk communities like Gentoo (Gentoo's a fine distro for it's niche, it's the community I can't stand). It wasn't them who built the graphical boot screens and hardware detection systems over the years, it was us Slackware pioneers for the sake of not having to do it anymore in the year 2004. They don't get that the value of Linux is freedom and getting shit done, tweaking Linux day in and day out and doing things the hard way nets you absolutely nothing at the end of the day. Of course if it makes you happy, go ahead, but don't go around opening your head thinking you represent the Linux community in any way, I'm not even sure you'd even qualify as part of the Linux community.
i like to see the commands go by because if one is red then you know to go do something about it.
The Fedora graphical boot process will show you if any service fails during startup. In fact it's better than having tons of crap streaming down your screen as you boot, because it will only show you the important stuff and filter the redundant stuff you've seen a million times away. With RHGB, when something fails you notice because the whole screen changes, while a failed service otherwise will just be a single line with a red "failed".
When I'm writing an application for Linux, which happens to be my platform of choice, I couldn't care less if it doesn't work on your BSD running on an alpha. Open source is ultimately about scratching your own itches, it's certainly not my itch that my application doesn't work on your fringe platform. But, here's the great part, if you send me a patch for your platform I'll probably include it and maybe the next version will work out of the tarball.
And nobody is making the BSDs provide compatibility layers, go right ahead and run the native BSD and legacy Unix software if you want. Linux just happens to be where all the exciting application development happens these days. Don't worry about wether something is too mainstream or not, it takes valuable time away from coding. What, you're not a coder? You just like to use fringe platforms because it's "cool"? That makes you the valley girl of the Unix world.
3) the .NET framework is more elegantly designed. Thus in hacker jargon "The right thing".
:)
.NET CLR is cutting edge. Ultimately, for me it's all about technical superiority. It seems to me like Sun is faltering and not making the hard decisions that have to be made. The generics implementation they pushed is pure syntactic sugar where they could have made major improvments to their VM, now that's going to come back and haunt them down the line. Now Java 1.5 is suddenly 5.0? WTF, Sun, are you completely run by marketoids now? Java is bleeing dry and Sun is applying band-aids where major surgery is needed.
I'd be quite suprised if it wasn't, since they have the benefit of hindsight compared to Java. The framework is really quite brilliant. I think a lot of Slashdotters dismiss Mono/.NET just because it has its origins with Microsoft but then turn around and use Samba
From a technical point of view the
Multi-Language: Please, they're all the same language designed to look like other languages. Java has multi language support to (Jython). This is not a fundamental reason.
.NET/Mono is actively moving towards a general purpose VM whereas the JVM is not. Sun will officially support other languages when... well never. Today, you've got languages like Python/Ruby/Haskell being targeting at the .NET CLR, but look at the big picture. What about CLR version 2, 3, 4... ? The potential is huge. Parrot is the only thing even remotely like it the open source world, and that's only for dynamic scripting languages at the moment. Don't count out a Parrot to Mono CLR compiler yet either! The multilanguage feature has the potential to unify all the minor languages to a single CLR. Right now we're writing GTK bindings for C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, etc. With GTK# (despite the name, it's more like GTK-Mono IMO) every language targeting the CLR gets up to date bindings!
The big difference is that
Where are the C# generics?
In Mono.
You have obviously no clue on what you are talking about.
Thanks. I simply tried to look at the issue from a normal users perspective, who doesn't care if Java is the greatest thing since sliced bread, just that it's behaving unlike everything else on my system. I use Java, Ant and friends, I'm just telling you why I think Mono will absolute pounce Java when it comes to the desktop. More than anything, both camps have a completely different way of looking at things. Java pushes their own solutions like webstart, jar, etc. while Mono integrates as much as possbile with your existing system.
Java if you go the self extracting binary route just expands itself wherever you want it to be and follows from one top level dir into its subdirs
Well that's even worse! Now you've got this huge glob of Java crap in your home directory! Look, is it really too much to ask that Java stops being such a fucking primadonna and installs itself just like everbody else into standard locations and doesn't pretend it's entitled to special hand holding from me.
nobody prevents you to use make it is just ant is so much better and therefore everybody uses it
I'll give you this, make can be pretty horrible at times and Ant is much better. But I'm not sure I'm ready to place the burden of tracking down and installing Ant on my users. Make is ubiquitous, yes, it's a pain in the ass for me as the developer, but it "just works" for my audience.
how much more alien is a zip file with the extension ant to linux compared to an exe file?
Well Mono only uses the exe extension because of convention, you can rename the thing to anything you want and it'll work. On the other hand, Mono has a wrapper ELF binary that bootstraps the loading of the binary "exe". What does this mean for the end user? "./monoprogram.exe" works and Mono is EXACTLY like a C program in that case. Let's see Java fit in on Linux like that. From day one Mono apps have been packaged with shell script or binary wrappers that hide all the VM stuff from the end users whereas Java rubs it in your face.
Check out the The Mono Handbook for tutorials and general getting started instructions. It's still a work in progress, so many sections are still quite empty. Another resource you should familiarize yourself with is the MSDN developer documentation for most of the core .NET API, it includes a lot of examples.
I also recommend you check out the standard GTK+ tutorial. A lot of it is still directly applicable to GTK# and it's more complete than most GTK# only tutorials. If you're already familiar with GTK+, Glade# for Rapid Development will help you get up to speed with Mono.
One huge benefit to Mono on the desktop is that it acts as, and for all intents and purposes is, just a normal language/platform for Linux. Exactly like C/Python etc. You install the RPM, or compile the source, or get the whole thing pulled down as a depdenency from yum/apt for some third party program you really wanted to run in the first place. It's there in the background as any other package on your system. When you run a Mono GTK# program from your GNOME menu or the shell, you can't really say just from looking at it that it's a Mono program and not standard C.
/usr, it's just one of 12 languages and development kits I've got installed on my system). You're not going to get Java with your distribution. You can't pull down Java as a dependency for some other app. You don't get Java apps in RPM/whatever format in the first place. You've got to know what the heck a classpath is, etc.
Java on the hand, goes out of its way to jump in your face at every opportunity. Java is completely unlike everything else on your system. Java spews its shit all around your system even when you install it from a package (what the hell entitles Java to a toplevel directory in
Then you've got your Ant build systems, Jar packages, and tons of other stuff completely alien to Linux. The few Mono apps I've compiled have been the standard "./configure, make, make install". Long story short: Mono will will the desktop because end users don't have to know what Mono is in the first place.
First, Mono already supports a lot of the stuff coming in Whidbey (generics for example).
.NET effort tomorrow it wouldn't change the fact that we now have a kick-ass development platform for Linux. Everybody needs to take a look at the two software stacks of Mono.
.NET is not the most important thing, neither is supporting Windows.Forms. Mono is good enough to stand on its own, as the next generation Linux development platform. Interoperability with Windows is just sugar on the top. Where do you see the Linux desktop being five years from now? I truly hope we're not still at the time writing our applications in C, as we do for the GNOME desktop now. Unless Sun steps up to the plate to release their JVM under a open soruce license, Mono is pretty much our only hope to modernize our development environment in any reasonable timeframe.
Second, even if Microsoft killed their
Wether Mono has feature parity with MS
Of course, some will say we've already got Python, or Ruby or whatever. But I say I want to program Python in Mono.
Java, as it is now, is a complete non-contender in the area Mono is focusing on, which is Linux desktop apps. First, there's no complete open source Java implementation, no distribution ships Sun's JVM. Sure, you can download the JVM for free, but how can you expect us to build a desktop around the thing in that case?
.NET over Java, then they are pretty weak.
.NET over Java, and vice versa. This argument will likely never die. Ultimately the difference isn't that big. That said, I personally prefer the direction .NET/Mono is taking and I think Sun is foolish to be resting on its laurels. At this rate Mono will become a major force in the Linux landscape and Sun is doing nothing, five years from now they'll still be wondering what the hell happened.
.NET over Java, native GUIs, which is even weaker. Java-Gnome
If these are the best justification for
There's a lot of reasons to go with
Which brings us on to the second justification
for
Java-GNOME is completely dead. Java on the desktop, except for Eclipse and SWT (no thanks to Sun) is completely dead. GTK#/Mono has a lot of momentum and Ximian/Novell throwing their weight behind it which is not to be underestimated. Guess which is more likely to have support two years from now, Java-GNOME or GTK#?
Try this: Open the Firefox Options, look under Advanced and check the box for "Use smooth scrolling".
Incidentally, this is always the first feature I disable in IE since it makes the whole browser feel sluggish in my opinion. Different strokes for different folks, I guess...
I was really skeptical of the new winstripe theme in Firefox 0.9, the new changes introduced in 0.9.1 however makes it a LOT better in my opinion. I just wish Thunderbird would now work to unify its theme with Firefox.
It's the small things that makes the browser for me, the look and feel. It's hard to explain it in detail. Going back to IE after using Firefox for a long time just doesn't feel right. For example, there's all these little half-second pauses in IE when the controls and scrolling are unresponsive, times when the right-click context menu won't show up when it's still loading. Sometimes the window stops redrawing for a second or two (especially while running Windows Update, but otherwise too) etc. All these little glitches drive me crazy when I have to use IE.
Don't go down that road... Red Hat's contibutions to Linux absolutely dwarf SuSE's to date in no uncertain terms.
But let's just focus on the most recent efforts of both companies. Realistically no distro is going to include Yast, but it's still a very good move since it will allow SuSE ISO images to be distributed without the existing restricitions in the future and I'm thankful to Novell for it. On the other hand, Red Hat buying Sistina for $31 million and setting their arguably only asset GFS free and then working on including it in the Linux kernel proper directly also benefits Novell and other Linux distributors.
"lately has been locking down their Linux offerings"? How about giving some concrete examples. Last time I checked RHEL was 100% open source and available for download, and so is Fedora Core for the home user. SuSE has been cleaning up their act since they got purchased by Novell, but to play them against Red Hat, who has been completely 100% behind open source since day one, as somehow a more free alternative is laughable.
Red Hat's HA clustering software is also GPL but it doesn't run on other distros (and is not supported by Red Hat on other distros).
Of course Red Hat doesn't support other distros, but what makes you think the clustering software doesn't work on them? All the bits and pieces are available for download. If you find any "if (distro != RH) exit()" code in the fully GPL'd cluster toolchain, please feel free to remove them. There's no secret sauce to RHEL, it's all open source and everyone is free to copy and modify the code.
There's already one distro that includes the new GPL'ed GFS filesystem out as of today, Lineox. And Red Hat will be working to get GFS up to spec for inclusion in the official Linux kernel according to posts made to the kernel mailing list.
The code itself is open source, that is true, but "Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription [is] required"
This only refers to that point that Red Hat is not interested in selling to you unless you have a RHEL subscription. That $2,200 gets you GFS up and running on your RHEL cluster in a turnkey fashion, and it gives you the option to purchase further 24/7 one-hour response support contracts. You're free to assemble it all into a working system by yourself if you want.
This move by Red Hat gives new life (and resources) to GFS beyond the OpenGFS Project that has also been continuing to work on the code.
It's been pretty quiet regarding OpenGFS lately. Now it is of course possible that they join forces and work on the GPL GFS.
But Red Hat is hoping for inclusion of GFS into the Linux kernel. This would be the best solution, as it would give it a larger developer base, keep the filesystem evolving in sync with the kernel and preventing bitrot even in the unlikely situation that Red Hat drops support for it in the future. Technically, I'd say Red Hat has a pretty good chance of getting it in.
GFS is nothing like NFS, except they're both file systems. GFS is a filesystem specifically created for clusters. It means you have a lot of machines sharing a single logical file system. You can then add or remove machines from the cluster and the filesystem and all its contents remains accessible to all the nodes in the cluster. This is great for a lot of cluster tasks, such as having multiple load balanced web servers all serving the same content from a GFS system.
NFS on the other hand can be accessed from multiple machines but is ultimately hosted on one specific machine, giving you a single point of failure.
On my W2K box the Boinc 3.19 installer asked if it should make the Boinc screensaver the system default. Even if you choose no, you should see "Boinc" in the list of available screensavers. The screensaver runs fullscreen and looks exactly like the old Seti@Home screensaver except that it's in 3D. You can also get a per workunit visualization in a window by right-clicking on a workunit in the Boinc client and selecting "Show graphics". There's also a Boinc add-on that will draw a skymap for you and pinpoint the location of where your workunit is recorded from.
All in all I'm very happy with the new Boinc system. The new webstats system is a lot better, you can see exactly which machine submitted which unit, how long it took etc. The clients now also understand SMP without having to run multiple instances.
The screensaver is still there, and this time it's done in OpenGL. If you have a GPU the impact of running the screensaver is a lot less than with the old Seti@Home client.