Redhat is definitely not the distro for dummies. Try Mandrake or Xandros. Mandrake's gui installer tool isn't the nicest around but it does work, so if you click a link to a truly lsb-compliant rpm, you'll get an ugly but friendly program opening it, with one click to install it.
It means you have to mount things in the bloody stupid/media. OK so there are a few other things, but that's the one you'll notice. Did no-one at the LSB realise a) that's a bloody stupid name, it's not clear at all (is that where my multimedia goes? Does it make sense to mount network shares there?), and we were fine with/mnt anyway, you need more than one temp mount point these days so you're going to have subdirs under/mnt anyway, and b) that without this standardisation you could type any top level dir with one letter and a tab? (/boot doesn't have to be/boot, you can call it something else if it's easier)
Ahem. Rant over, we now return you to your scheduled browsing.
Knoppix-STD is only ~460 mb, which leaves 240 mb you can use to your advantage. Put some "normal" files in there - I use a set of mp3s and play them on my mp3 cd player, alternatively some "work"-type files or a set of ebooks. Then create the iso with mkisofs -r -J -hide-joliet KNOPPIX (and -hide-joliet index.html etc. if you leave those files in there)
Now you have a bootable cd full of security tools which, when viewed on a windows pc, looks completely innocuous.
No, but it's wrong to make a living doing something unethical, even if it's legal. Just like we despise telemarketers as evil even though they have to make a living, we can also despise "creative" people who won't let their creations be redistributed.
It's not slashcode, it's an incremental rendering problem in firefox - AIUI, the rendering engine is rounding the column width each time it renders the page again, which is every time it gets more data, and the errors add up to make it misaligned. That's why the bug only appears on lower bandwidth connections, and hence didn't get fixed by the mozilla devs for a while. It is fixed in mozilla trunk, which I think will become firefox 1.1 eventually.
You have to combine them. I use giFT to search for my audioscrobbler recommendations. Sure it would be nicer if the recommendations included a magnet link or something, but I can see why the audioscrobbler people don't want to do that.
Did you try running them through artsdsp? IMO arts shows one of the best sides of KDE. They chose a working if limited solution (unlike the new and horribly buggy gstreamer/esd) in order to produce a working, useable desktop environment today, and it allows those with very cheap onboard sound (me) to play multiple sounds at once, easily. Now that they're reaching the limits and other stable solutions exist, maybe they'll switch. But I will miss arts. Jack is still unstable on my system, and I can't even compile any 9x version. And alsa doesn't let me play two sounds at once on my via82c686b.
OK, that makes sense. But the Qt people seem a lot better at writing bindings than the gtk+ ones, so I'd put far more faith in some of their work. And I don't see them writing something to put their library out of use. Maybe they can just port everything to Qt - if mozilla can be ported in 4 days, there's hope yet.
I'd say keep an eye on Rosegarden and the integration efforts they're making with Audacity. Rosegarden is already the best free midi program anywhere, and is very nice to use if you have a real midi synth/keyboard. Since it relies on external softsynths that's not so good, but it's improving rapidly, and the UI is really very nice. Audacity is pretty basic, but supports LADsomethingorother and the plugins are being made to do some very good stuff. My school, about as anti-linux as it gets, has standardised on it. At the moment integration only goes as far as allowing you to open up audio in audacity, and then have rosegarden play it in sync with the midi file. But it's being worked on, and I think it will soon be good enough. The two together are already as good as I've seen for sub-£500, while they may not be "pro standard" they're good enough for anything I've ever wanted to do.
But, in an audio application, it would be good to have the backend be able to completely take over one of the processors, since latency is so critical. That way the important thread *will not stop*, whatever happens. Of course such a thing would probably require hard realtime patching and suid root, and quite possibly be impossible even then. But it would be a good idea.
I think he does have a good point though. You cannot say it's professional grade until it has been used in a professional environment under professional deadlines, so a project this new cannot possibly be professional grade. And, of course, no one is going to try it in a professional environment until it has been shown to be pro grade.
Gstreamer is good for modularising playback. For example, noatun, the kde multimedia player, is built on top of arts, the kde equivalent of gstreamer which is probably about to be switched. I've looked at the source, and there is no decoding code there at all. All the actual playback stuff is handled by arts, noatun basically just sticks a little bit of api on top of it (and it's such a nice api even I can write a plugin), and then the rest of it, even the basic user interface, is all done by plugins. How's that for modularity? It means that when the kde people added a xine bit to arts, the noatun maintainer didn't have to do anything, and I could suddenly play.wmas in noatun, without even upgrading it. However, this approach does not work for audio editing, and the reason is simple: there's far too much latency. A generic modular backend is never going to be as fast as a custom-written one, and when you're doing audio editing the backend matters. Gstreamer is designed to be network transparent for goodness sake, and there's no way you want an audio editor running with the latency you have sending things over the internet. Jack is a good backend for audio editors though. Jack plugins work exactly like you said, and crucially, the developers have been fanatically devoted to low latency, because it's been designed from the ground up for editing, not playback. It's possible gstreamer will be able to plugin to jack and use it as a playback backend; I know arts does. Modularity is good, but you're better off fabricating a screwdriver than trying to use a hammer:).
I'm not whining. Gentoo users can install it within a couple of days of release, and have no dependency problems. At all. By the time it's in the main Debian repository, I could have written a widget toolkit from scratch. As a gentoo user I probably have it installed by the time it's in the repositories of the most leading-edge binary package distros.
I think audio developers use custom widgets because the default knobs suck. It's probably because they're not used much, but look at QDial compared to any other qt widget, I think you'll agree it's the worst one available. And winamp is still far more popular than foobar2000.
You're right. I said a while back that what needs to happen is we need to implement the GTK+ api in Qt. Doing it the other way would be even better (WxWindows programs wouldn't be going through 2 layers of emulation, plus everything would be lgpl) but I don't think it's as feasible, as Qt does all sorts of fancy c++ which would be hell to implement under gtk. Just compare the kde C bindings with gtkmm.
There is one other thing that might work, though. The themes are getting closer and closer. I can see it getting to the stage where a gtk+ button and a Qt button look exactly the same, and a theme change changes the theme to both of them. Then it wouldn't matter which toolkit a program used - yes you need the libraries installed, but hard disk space is getting cheaper all the time. Perhaps what we could do is merge them into the same package, then gradually integrate the backend code more and more, until eventually there was no more code than for a single widget library.
I think the toolkits will converge, one way or the other, and the way it happens will be from FreeDesktop.org's efforts. KDE has done a lot to be gnome-compatiable - it can use the gnome icon theme, not just a single set of gnome icons but actually intelligently switch when you switch the gnome theme. It's also switching to DBUS for ipc as opposed to the good old DCOP, I for one will miss DCOP but hopefully it's for the best in the long run. Also a switch to gstreamer rather than arts for the multimedia backend is on the cards, as gstreamer's finally getting stable enough. Hopefully we'll see a reciprocal effort from the gnome people, maybe even to the extent of switching toolkits. As it stands Qt is better looking, more themeable, and nicer to use than gtk, all imo of course. Obviously a lot of people have put a lot of effort into gtk+ and I respect that, but ultimately I think it's down to the gnome devs to be the better man and concede on this front rather than dragging out a "war" which can only hurt linux. A switch from qt, which is c++ from the ground up, to gtk, just doesn't seem feasible to me.
Apologies for the long and rambling post.
Linux format did a good feature on these a bit back. Kino, cinelerra, and kdenlive seem pretty good. I can't speak for the others, but kdenlive will work "out of the box" if your distribution has the firewire modules and a correct modprobe.conf, which I'm pretty sure newer versions of mandrake do.
Erm, do you have a statistic to back that assertion up? In alt.os.linux, knode is usually pretty high in the stats - it was the most popular newsreader a few weeks back, although granted slrn is usally a bit ahead.
I would be very surprised if mutt was the most popular email client any more - maybe back in the days when only hackers used linux. It's possible the wm-agnosticish thunderbird would be top, but iirc that still depends on some gnome stuff. Hackers may use mutt, but for my money the majority of kde-distro users (SUSE, Mandrake...) will be using kmail, and gnome-distro users (Fedora) will be using evolution.
It's not right to distribute software without source. It's especially wrong if such software is usually distributed with source under an open source license. We support the millions of distros because they include source; if this company was distributing source with their offering, we'd have no problem with it.
The GPL is "serious copyright of any kind", and we are protecting it, at least as well as the security keys do.
We don't like copyright as it's currently abused, and we believe that all useful material should be shared. Thus we have no problem with someone copying a program, or copying a music file. That's what the GPL is all about, really, the right to copy. What we do have a problem with is falsely claiming ownership. If this company was selling Britney songs for lots of money claiming to have written them, we'd have the same objections as we do now. If the company was putting gpl programs on an ftp site and distributing them over p2p, we'd have no problem with it.
But he hasn't been caught for it, possibly because he hasn't tried to pass them off as his own work. Which makes him far smarter than these guys, which is all he claimed, not that he was morally better or anything.
No, he's claiming that successful cultures including American culture have always pinched ideas from other cultures, therefore "IP rights" are a bad thing.
well, its the same as people downloading music off the net. why cant people just respect the IP rights of artists?
No it isn't. Distributing someone's work is one thing. Claiming to have written it, and selling it, is another thing altogether. As a musician, if you recorded one of my concerts without permission I'd be annoyed. If you recorded it, claimed it was you, and started selling the recording for lots of money, I'd be livid. Don't you think?
Slashdot Mirror
Redhat is definitely not the distro for dummies. Try Mandrake or Xandros. Mandrake's gui installer tool isn't the nicest around but it does work, so if you click a link to a truly lsb-compliant rpm, you'll get an ugly but friendly program opening it, with one click to install it.
It means you have to mount things in the bloody stupid /media. OK so there are a few other things, but that's the one you'll notice. Did no-one at the LSB realise a) that's a bloody stupid name, it's not clear at all (is that where my multimedia goes? Does it make sense to mount network shares there?), and we were fine with /mnt anyway, you need more than one temp mount point these days so you're going to have subdirs under /mnt anyway, and b) that without this standardisation you could type any top level dir with one letter and a tab? (/boot doesn't have to be /boot, you can call it something else if it's easier)
Ahem. Rant over, we now return you to your scheduled browsing.
Knoppix-STD is only ~460 mb, which leaves 240 mb you can use to your advantage. Put some "normal" files in there - I use a set of mp3s and play them on my mp3 cd player, alternatively some "work"-type files or a set of ebooks. Then create the iso with mkisofs -r -J -hide-joliet KNOPPIX (and -hide-joliet index.html etc. if you leave those files in there) Now you have a bootable cd full of security tools which, when viewed on a windows pc, looks completely innocuous.
No, but it's wrong to make a living doing something unethical, even if it's legal. Just like we despise telemarketers as evil even though they have to make a living, we can also despise "creative" people who won't let their creations be redistributed.
It's not slashcode, it's an incremental rendering problem in firefox - AIUI, the rendering engine is rounding the column width each time it renders the page again, which is every time it gets more data, and the errors add up to make it misaligned. That's why the bug only appears on lower bandwidth connections, and hence didn't get fixed by the mozilla devs for a while. It is fixed in mozilla trunk, which I think will become firefox 1.1 eventually.
In a word: yes. Firefox is a little faster, looks slightly nicer by default, and takes up 1/4 of the disk space.
You have to combine them. I use giFT to search for my audioscrobbler recommendations. Sure it would be nicer if the recommendations included a magnet link or something, but I can see why the audioscrobbler people don't want to do that.
Did you try running them through artsdsp?
IMO arts shows one of the best sides of KDE. They chose a working if limited solution (unlike the new and horribly buggy gstreamer/esd) in order to produce a working, useable desktop environment today, and it allows those with very cheap onboard sound (me) to play multiple sounds at once, easily. Now that they're reaching the limits and other stable solutions exist, maybe they'll switch. But I will miss arts. Jack is still unstable on my system, and I can't even compile any 9x version. And alsa doesn't let me play two sounds at once on my via82c686b.
OK, that makes sense. But the Qt people seem a lot better at writing bindings than the gtk+ ones, so I'd put far more faith in some of their work. And I don't see them writing something to put their library out of use. Maybe they can just port everything to Qt - if mozilla can be ported in 4 days, there's hope yet.
I'd say keep an eye on Rosegarden and the integration efforts they're making with Audacity.
Rosegarden is already the best free midi program anywhere, and is very nice to use if you have a real midi synth/keyboard. Since it relies on external softsynths that's not so good, but it's improving rapidly, and the UI is really very nice.
Audacity is pretty basic, but supports LADsomethingorother and the plugins are being made to do some very good stuff. My school, about as anti-linux as it gets, has standardised on it.
At the moment integration only goes as far as allowing you to open up audio in audacity, and then have rosegarden play it in sync with the midi file. But it's being worked on, and I think it will soon be good enough. The two together are already as good as I've seen for sub-£500, while they may not be "pro standard" they're good enough for anything I've ever wanted to do.
But, in an audio application, it would be good to have the backend be able to completely take over one of the processors, since latency is so critical. That way the important thread *will not stop*, whatever happens. Of course such a thing would probably require hard realtime patching and suid root, and quite possibly be impossible even then. But it would be a good idea.
I think he does have a good point though. You cannot say it's professional grade until it has been used in a professional environment under professional deadlines, so a project this new cannot possibly be professional grade.
And, of course, no one is going to try it in a professional environment until it has been shown to be pro grade.
Gstreamer is good for modularising playback. For example, noatun, the kde multimedia player, is built on top of arts, the kde equivalent of gstreamer which is probably about to be switched. I've looked at the source, and there is no decoding code there at all. All the actual playback stuff is handled by arts, noatun basically just sticks a little bit of api on top of it (and it's such a nice api even I can write a plugin), and then the rest of it, even the basic user interface, is all done by plugins. How's that for modularity? It means that when the kde people added a xine bit to arts, the noatun maintainer didn't have to do anything, and I could suddenly play .wmas in noatun, without even upgrading it. :).
However, this approach does not work for audio editing, and the reason is simple: there's far too much latency. A generic modular backend is never going to be as fast as a custom-written one, and when you're doing audio editing the backend matters. Gstreamer is designed to be network transparent for goodness sake, and there's no way you want an audio editor running with the latency you have sending things over the internet.
Jack is a good backend for audio editors though. Jack plugins work exactly like you said, and crucially, the developers have been fanatically devoted to low latency, because it's been designed from the ground up for editing, not playback. It's possible gstreamer will be able to plugin to jack and use it as a playback backend; I know arts does.
Modularity is good, but you're better off fabricating a screwdriver than trying to use a hammer
I'm not whining. Gentoo users can install it within a couple of days of release, and have no dependency problems. At all. By the time it's in the main Debian repository, I could have written a widget toolkit from scratch. As a gentoo user I probably have it installed by the time it's in the repositories of the most leading-edge binary package distros.
I think audio developers use custom widgets because the default knobs suck. It's probably because they're not used much, but look at QDial compared to any other qt widget, I think you'll agree it's the worst one available. And winamp is still far more popular than foobar2000.
You're right. I said a while back that what needs to happen is we need to implement the GTK+ api in Qt. Doing it the other way would be even better (WxWindows programs wouldn't be going through 2 layers of emulation, plus everything would be lgpl) but I don't think it's as feasible, as Qt does all sorts of fancy c++ which would be hell to implement under gtk. Just compare the kde C bindings with gtkmm. There is one other thing that might work, though. The themes are getting closer and closer. I can see it getting to the stage where a gtk+ button and a Qt button look exactly the same, and a theme change changes the theme to both of them. Then it wouldn't matter which toolkit a program used - yes you need the libraries installed, but hard disk space is getting cheaper all the time. Perhaps what we could do is merge them into the same package, then gradually integrate the backend code more and more, until eventually there was no more code than for a single widget library. I think the toolkits will converge, one way or the other, and the way it happens will be from FreeDesktop.org's efforts. KDE has done a lot to be gnome-compatiable - it can use the gnome icon theme, not just a single set of gnome icons but actually intelligently switch when you switch the gnome theme. It's also switching to DBUS for ipc as opposed to the good old DCOP, I for one will miss DCOP but hopefully it's for the best in the long run. Also a switch to gstreamer rather than arts for the multimedia backend is on the cards, as gstreamer's finally getting stable enough. Hopefully we'll see a reciprocal effort from the gnome people, maybe even to the extent of switching toolkits. As it stands Qt is better looking, more themeable, and nicer to use than gtk, all imo of course. Obviously a lot of people have put a lot of effort into gtk+ and I respect that, but ultimately I think it's down to the gnome devs to be the better man and concede on this front rather than dragging out a "war" which can only hurt linux. A switch from qt, which is c++ from the ground up, to gtk, just doesn't seem feasible to me. Apologies for the long and rambling post.
Why do you dislike Qt so much? If it's just the general look and feel, have you tried using a gtk-like theme? If not, what's wrong with it?
Linux format did a good feature on these a bit back. Kino, cinelerra, and kdenlive seem pretty good. I can't speak for the others, but kdenlive will work "out of the box" if your distribution has the firewire modules and a correct modprobe.conf, which I'm pretty sure newer versions of mandrake do.
I would be very surprised if mutt was the most popular email client any more - maybe back in the days when only hackers used linux. It's possible the wm-agnosticish thunderbird would be top, but iirc that still depends on some gnome stuff. Hackers may use mutt, but for my money the majority of kde-distro users (SUSE, Mandrake...) will be using kmail, and gnome-distro users (Fedora) will be using evolution.
The GPL is "serious copyright of any kind", and we are protecting it, at least as well as the security keys do.
We don't like copyright as it's currently abused, and we believe that all useful material should be shared. Thus we have no problem with someone copying a program, or copying a music file. That's what the GPL is all about, really, the right to copy. What we do have a problem with is falsely claiming ownership. If this company was selling Britney songs for lots of money claiming to have written them, we'd have the same objections as we do now. If the company was putting gpl programs on an ftp site and distributing them over p2p, we'd have no problem with it.
But he hasn't been caught for it, possibly because he hasn't tried to pass them off as his own work. Which makes him far smarter than these guys, which is all he claimed, not that he was morally better or anything.
No, he's claiming that successful cultures including American culture have always pinched ideas from other cultures, therefore "IP rights" are a bad thing.
True, but that's because the GPL would be unnecessary in that circumstance. It's always been a kludge until we sort out copyright law.
No it isn't. Distributing someone's work is one thing. Claiming to have written it, and selling it, is another thing altogether. As a musician, if you recorded one of my concerts without permission I'd be annoyed. If you recorded it, claimed it was you, and started selling the recording for lots of money, I'd be livid. Don't you think?