Just out of interest, will internal legacy apps written in ActiveX work with Macs? I know there are versions of IE available for the Mac, but don't know whether ActiveX support was included. Sadly, whenever you hear the reasons why a company can't switch away from Windows, this reason is always near the top:(
But don't tar the entire MS line with the same brush. If MS Office is such shit, why is Open Office practically a feature by feature clone of it? (I'm sure I'll get roasted for that one but from what I've seen of it...)
1. OpenOffice developers may want to attract some users for the product it is developing.
2. Said users will almost definitely have been exposed to MS Office.
3. If said users view OpenOffice as having few of the features of MS Office, they are unlikely to switch - especially as changing from a familiar piece of software to an unfamiliar one is already a frightening prospect for many people.
The same thing happens with Linux and its Desktop environments; if I suggest that someone checks out Linux, I am instantly hit with a litany of "Will it open Word docs? Can I do this [feature that Windows has?] Can I do that [other feature that Windows has?]". The result tends to be that this this and that is eventually included into Linux, regardless of its merit as a feature. An alternative to any Microsoft product has a huge disadvantage - it has to be able to do everything the MS product can do, plus more. This is at least part of the reason why MS is so oft-copied, in my opinion. Plus, admittedly, MS often beats people to the punch of coming up with the best way of doing something.
Go to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/. Load up on software repositories. Then http://thebrix.org.uk/. I won't say that you'll never have to worry about this again, but you're supply of up-to-date packages will be enormously increased. PLF, for example, have a package for fairly bleeding-edge versions of mplayer with all required codecs (e.g. QuickTime,.wmv, Real, DVD etc). It's a shame that Mandrake don't link to these sites by default, but I guess there are legal reasons why they don't.
But I still need to get updates to her, and I cant see an easy way of doing it on a CD, as I dont have a list of what she has installed, nor is a way of downloading the full updates media apparrent
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding your problem (hopefully not, as this is going to take ages to type!), but here goes:
This may work - a trick I worked on when my housemate expressed a desire to install Mandrake 10.1 and I didn't want him to have to re-download 100's of MBs of software, repository info, etc.
Firstly - Mandrake can be configured so that it stores any downloaded packages for later use (as opposed to the default behaviour of wiping them once they're installed). These are stored in/var/cache/urpmi/rpms, and using urpmi --noclean (package name) will leave the downloaded package(s) in that folder. Annoyingly,/usr/bin/rpmdrake, the GUI installer, is hardwired to always delete them after installation, so I had to actually hack this file to prevent this. If you want to know what I did, e-mail me at my username minus the underscore at hotmail.com. Once done, any packages you install will be preserved in the aforementioned directory.
Next - repository syntheses. Update all repositories that you want to make available to your sister on your machine. The information will be stored in/etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg and the bulky parts in/var/libs/urpmi/ (this last one might be wrong; I'll check when I get back home).
Your sister will need to be provided with a mirror of the contents of the syntheses folder, urpmi.cfg , and the downloaded rpms cache, all in the proper places. I'd recommend burning the contents of these directories to CD along with a script that she can click on that copies everything to the proper places. Next, you will need to get her to update her software repositories; after the "copying all of the stuff over" part of the script, do something like:
urpmq --listmedia | xargs urpmi.update
If no further changes in the software repositories have occurred since you burned the CD, nothing will need to be downloaded, and the set of available software will be refreshed. Now, your sister has access to the same set of software/ updates that you have, so ask her to go to the Mandrake Update application, and tick all of the security updates and click Install. Since the required rpms are now in her cache, this will be very quick and require no downloading.
It's a bit convoluted on your end, but your sister should just have to click a few buttons to be fully up to date, even if she has a crappy net connection!
Hope this helps - of course, if you have SSH access you can do most of this with her only contribution being placing the CD in the drive!:)
Only vaguely on-topic, but I've never really found an answer to this question: are there any open-source Linux C++ IDE's that have good Intellisense/ Auto-completion and the ability to pause a program while it's running, edit the source, and resume with the new changes taking effect? Something like VC++ 6 would be cool.
SomethingAwful had a browser usage poll once, although it was in the section of the site specifically designed to appeal to techies and so no real conclusions should be drawn from it. The results, however, were very surprising: at one point, (claimed) Firefox users outnumbered IE users by ten to 1, although this eventually evened out to just seven to 1. Biznatchio's awesome SA-specific Firefox extension should probably get a lot of credit for this, though:)
and get a few (all?) repositories added. PLF is particularly good.
Installation of e.g. xmms or mplayer (the latter loaded with pretty much every codec you would ever need) is then a case of typing "urpmi xmms" "urpmi mplayer". Or you could do it through the System->Configuration->Packaging->Install Software GUI.
With good, up-tp-date software repositories added, installation of a lot of software under Linux becomes a complete no-brainer, and I personally have come to prefer it to Windows.
Good luck!
Re:Linux Desktop Thoughts...
on
Linux, Inc.
·
· Score: 1
As far as working on modern hardware -- I was under the impression that KDE4/QT4/Xorg were already working toward offloading a lot of tasks to the GPU?
Indeed so. There's a highly rough and experimental X server that (from what I understand) runs on top of OpenGL. Check out the xorg devel thread here:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2004-N ovember/004358.html
Natwest works perfectly with Firefox, even under Linux, with no User Agent switchery required. I think they only hot round to fixing it last year, though.
And finally, I'd like to have SessionSaver (which is no longer compatible with FF past 0.8)
I'm using SessionSaver right now with 1.0, and at home on my Linux machine with 1.0 - I suggest you give it another try;) Where are you getting it from? I *think* I got mine from texturizer.net....
Can you give an example? Adblock seems to be able to filter out arbitrary html, if that's what you mean.
A while back, dabs.com had an annoying pop-up that managed to get through Firefox's blocker, but a quick click on Adblock put paid to that forever by simply stripping out the offending part of the page from that point on. It was cool:)
Unless you're referring to Proxomitron, rather than IE, which I use cos it's a damn good piece of software even if it isn't open source. If you know of an OSS alternative, I'll be happy to try it out. However Proxo still isn't stolen, so I really can't work out where you got that part from.
Not tried it myself, but maybe you could check this baby out:
I know nothing of the printer and scanner aspect, but nowadays most camera manufacturers seem to be standardising on the USB Mass Storage drivers, making installation of drivers moot.
Hopefully, this "laziness" on the part of the manufacturers will spread into other areas of hardware; I guess it's much easier to license someone else's technology than write your own. Already, a large wadge of TV Cards all work with Linux, out of the box, as they share the same bt8x8 chipset whose drivers are part of most modern kernels. Obviously, extremely specialist items like graphics cards will never succumb, but hey - just stick with nVidia;)
It's pretty much pointless to attempt to generalise, I think. For my part, I will usually run only Open Source software insofar as this is possible, but will not hesitate to buy a decent game (like UT04) that has a native Linux version. I guess the reason for this is that Open Source FPS games (my preferred genre) are typically of pretty poor quality compared to their commercial counterparts, and I view games as a "luxury" item rather than something I depend on, so am usually content with closed, commercial offerings. But I'm equally sure there are a signifcant number of Linux users who simply will not even consider purchasing a game. It all de-generates into a pointless mess of anecdotal fluff from which it is impossible to draw any firm consensus.
I'm not a fan of piracy in any form, and have a couple of hundred grand's worth of original, legit DVDs, but if I were faced with a situation where I was required to jump through hoops to play something I had legitimately purchased, or forced to use a piece of hardware that "phoned-home" everytime I tried to play something, I would ditch my ethics and switch to piracy in a heartbeat. I'm not saying that piracy is justified; I'm simply stating what I would do.
Piracy will always (barring some incredibly devious, completely unhackable DRM that prevented even a relatively low-quality rip) happen, and it strikes me as utter insanity to inconvenience the legitimate user more than we inconvenience the pirate.
The same trend is happening in games, I gather (Half-Life 2 is a pain to play if you've purchased it; a breeze if you've obtained it illegally - although I haven't tried myself so feel free to set me straight on this:)) and so I'll never buy HL2 (although since it doesn't run properly on Linux yet, I doubt I'd even pirate it;)). On the other hand, I was so pleased to find a good Linux installer for UT04, which doesn't even require the CD to be present when you run it (!), that I almost bought another copy:)
Media Player Classic + Quicktime Alternative + Real Alternative codecs (or mplayer on Linux - I'm not sure how good the Windows port of mplayer is) > *
Bittorrent ensures that you get a file identical to that used to create the.torrent file, which is presumably created by mozilla themselves; basically, if you trust that you have downloaded the.torrent file correctly (e.g. from mozilla.org), and that mozilla.org created the.torrent file using the correct firefox-setup.exe, then you pretty much can't end up with a "false" file (unless someone has found a way to "trick" the hashing mechanism; I'm not sure whether this has been done/ is feasible), no matter how many "bad seeds" there are. Even the "tracker identitiy" is irrelevant. The checksum is contained within the.torrent file.
This is your second post I've seen equating Firefox Extensions and ActiveX, so I thought I'd chime in with a few thoughts.
I agree that Extensions certainly have the potential to be as deadly as ActiveX, but I doubt they will be as big a problem as ActiveX will be, for a few reasons. Firstly, drive-by installs (that is, installations without the user's knowledge or consent) are currently unheard of, and if a flaw is found that will enable this, it will be set upon pretty much immediately by the mozilla development community. Secondly, the Install dialog makes it very clear what is being done, and also prevents you from clicking "Yes" reflexively by enforcing a 3-second wait. Thirdly, the more recent versions of Firefox (prompted by a lyrics download site that attempted a Firefox extension install) come with a whitelist of just a few (one?) sites that are authorised to install plugins; an unrequested (or even a requested) install will simply show a small bar at the top of the screen. The user must then explicitly add this site to the set of allowed sites, go back and re-request the install, wait for three seconds with the standard, distinctive Install Extensions dialog.
Granted, all this does is make the consequences of their actions more clear to the user, and make them jump through a few hoops, but the procedure for installing an untrusted Extension is not too far from the complexity of downloading and executing some random application, and if a user is naive enough to do that, then there's not much that can be done from a technical point of view to stop them.
In a nutshell, the Firefox Extensions system makes it harder for people to casually (or unknowingly!) install plugins than ActiveX, but of course cannot guard against naivety. I'd say it is a strictly better solution, but of course, not a perfect one.
Slashdot Mirror
Just out of interest, will internal legacy apps written in ActiveX work with Macs? I know there are versions of IE available for the Mac, but don't know whether ActiveX support was included. Sadly, whenever you hear the reasons why a company can't switch away from Windows, this reason is always near the top :(
Tried www.cygwin.com?
2. Said users will almost definitely have been exposed to MS Office.
3. If said users view OpenOffice as having few of the features of MS Office, they are unlikely to switch - especially as changing from a familiar piece of software to an unfamiliar one is already a frightening prospect for many people.
The same thing happens with Linux and its Desktop environments; if I suggest that someone checks out Linux, I am instantly hit with a litany of "Will it open Word docs? Can I do this [feature that Windows has?] Can I do that [other feature that Windows has?]". The result tends to be that this this and that is eventually included into Linux, regardless of its merit as a feature. An alternative to any Microsoft product has a huge disadvantage - it has to be able to do everything the MS product can do, plus more. This is at least part of the reason why MS is so oft-copied, in my opinion. Plus, admittedly, MS often beats people to the punch of coming up with the best way of doing something.
Go to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/. Load up on software repositories. Then http://thebrix.org.uk/. I won't say that you'll never have to worry about this again, but you're supply of up-to-date packages will be enormously increased. PLF, for example, have a package for fairly bleeding-edge versions of mplayer with all required codecs (e.g. QuickTime, .wmv, Real, DVD etc). It's a shame that Mandrake don't link to these sites by default, but I guess there are legal reasons why they don't.
Hope this helps,
Simon
This may work - a trick I worked on when my housemate expressed a desire to install Mandrake 10.1 and I didn't want him to have to re-download 100's of MBs of software, repository info, etc. Firstly - Mandrake can be configured so that it stores any downloaded packages for later use (as opposed to the default behaviour of wiping them once they're installed). These are stored in
Next - repository syntheses. Update all repositories that you want to make available to your sister on your machine. The information will be stored in
Your sister will need to be provided with a mirror of the contents of the syntheses folder, urpmi.cfg , and the downloaded rpms cache, all in the proper places. I'd recommend burning the contents of these directories to CD along with a script that she can click on that copies everything to the proper places. Next, you will need to get her to update her software repositories; after the "copying all of the stuff over" part of the script, do something like:
urpmq --listmedia | xargs urpmi.update
If no further changes in the software repositories have occurred since you burned the CD, nothing will need to be downloaded, and the set of available software will be refreshed. Now, your sister has access to the same set of software/ updates that you have, so ask her to go to the Mandrake Update application, and tick all of the security updates and click Install. Since the required rpms are now in her cache, this will be very quick and require no downloading.
It's a bit convoluted on your end, but your sister should just have to click a few buttons to be fully up to date, even if she has a crappy net connection!
Hope this helps - of course, if you have SSH access you can do most of this with her only contribution being placing the CD in the drive!
--Simon
Only vaguely on-topic, but I've never really found an answer to this question: are there any open-source Linux C++ IDE's that have good Intellisense/ Auto-completion and the ability to pause a program while it's running, edit the source, and resume with the new changes taking effect? Something like VC++ 6 would be cool.
:)
Thanks in advance
As a Southampton Alumni I am very saddened to hear this :(
SomethingAwful had a browser usage poll once, although it was in the section of the site specifically designed to appeal to techies and so no real conclusions should be drawn from it. The results, however, were very surprising: at one point, (claimed) Firefox users outnumbered IE users by ten to 1, although this eventually evened out to just seven to 1. Biznatchio's awesome SA-specific Firefox extension should probably get a lot of credit for this, though :)
Here's a handy hint: head on over to
http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/
and get a few (all?) repositories added. PLF is particularly good. Installation of e.g. xmms or mplayer (the latter loaded with pretty much every codec you would ever need) is then a case of typing "urpmi xmms" "urpmi mplayer". Or you could do it through the System->Configuration->Packaging->Install Software GUI.
With good, up-tp-date software repositories added, installation of a lot of software under Linux becomes a complete no-brainer, and I personally have come to prefer it to Windows.
Good luck!
Natwest works perfectly with Firefox, even under Linux, with no User Agent switchery required. I think they only hot round to fixing it last year, though.
Can you give an example? Adblock seems to be able to filter out arbitrary html, if that's what you mean.
:)
A while back, dabs.com had an annoying pop-up that managed to get through Firefox's blocker, but a quick click on Adblock put paid to that forever by simply stripping out the offending part of the page from that point on. It was cool
If I were Mr Flibble, I'd be very cross right now :)
http://proximodo.sourceforge.net/
The developer of Proxomitron apparentl died last year, so I don't know whether we'll ever see the sourcee.
I know nothing of the printer and scanner aspect, but nowadays most camera manufacturers seem to be standardising on the USB Mass Storage drivers, making installation of drivers moot.
;)
Hopefully, this "laziness" on the part of the manufacturers will spread into other areas of hardware; I guess it's much easier to license someone else's technology than write your own. Already, a large wadge of TV Cards all work with Linux, out of the box, as they share the same bt8x8 chipset whose drivers are part of most modern kernels. Obviously, extremely specialist items like graphics cards will never succumb, but hey - just stick with nVidia
It's pretty much pointless to attempt to generalise, I think. For my part, I will usually run only Open Source software insofar as this is possible, but will not hesitate to buy a decent game (like UT04) that has a native Linux version. I guess the reason for this is that Open Source FPS games (my preferred genre) are typically of pretty poor quality compared to their commercial counterparts, and I view games as a "luxury" item rather than something I depend on, so am usually content with closed, commercial offerings. But I'm equally sure there are a signifcant number of Linux users who simply will not even consider purchasing a game. It all de-generates into a pointless mess of anecdotal fluff from which it is impossible to draw any firm consensus.
Ding ding ding.
:)) and so I'll never buy HL2 (although since it doesn't run properly on Linux yet, I doubt I'd even pirate it ;)). On the other hand, I was so pleased to find a good Linux installer for UT04, which doesn't even require the CD to be present when you run it (!), that I almost bought another copy :)
I'm not a fan of piracy in any form, and have a couple of hundred grand's worth of original, legit DVDs, but if I were faced with a situation where I was required to jump through hoops to play something I had legitimately purchased, or forced to use a piece of hardware that "phoned-home" everytime I tried to play something, I would ditch my ethics and switch to piracy in a heartbeat. I'm not saying that piracy is justified; I'm simply stating what I would do.
Piracy will always (barring some incredibly devious, completely unhackable DRM that prevented even a relatively low-quality rip) happen, and it strikes me as utter insanity to inconvenience the legitimate user more than we inconvenience the pirate.
The same trend is happening in games, I gather (Half-Life 2 is a pain to play if you've purchased it; a breeze if you've obtained it illegally - although I haven't tried myself so feel free to set me straight on this
Media Player Classic + Quicktime Alternative + Real Alternative codecs (or mplayer on Linux - I'm not sure how good the Windows port of mplayer is) > *
Not trying to make a Linus == Jesus comparison, but:
;)
You've never seen "The Life of Brian", have you?
Bittorrent ensures that you get a file identical to that used to create the .torrent file, which is presumably created by mozilla themselves; basically, if you trust that you have downloaded the .torrent file correctly (e.g. from mozilla.org), and that mozilla.org created the .torrent file using the correct firefox-setup.exe, then you pretty much can't end up with a "false" file (unless someone has found a way to "trick" the hashing mechanism; I'm not sure whether this has been done/ is feasible), no matter how many "bad seeds" there are. Even the "tracker identitiy" is irrelevant. The checksum is contained within the .torrent file.
:)
At least, that's my understanding of it
This is your second post I've seen equating Firefox Extensions and ActiveX, so I thought I'd chime in with a few thoughts.
I agree that Extensions certainly have the potential to be as deadly as ActiveX, but I doubt they will be as big a problem as ActiveX will be, for a few reasons. Firstly, drive-by installs (that is, installations without the user's knowledge or consent) are currently unheard of, and if a flaw is found that will enable this, it will be set upon pretty much immediately by the mozilla development community. Secondly, the Install dialog makes it very clear what is being done, and also prevents you from clicking "Yes" reflexively by enforcing a 3-second wait. Thirdly, the more recent versions of Firefox (prompted by a lyrics download site that attempted a Firefox extension install) come with a whitelist of just a few (one?) sites that are authorised to install plugins; an unrequested (or even a requested) install will simply show a small bar at the top of the screen. The user must then explicitly add this site to the set of allowed sites, go back and re-request the install, wait for three seconds with the standard, distinctive Install Extensions dialog.
Granted, all this does is make the consequences of their actions more clear to the user, and make them jump through a few hoops, but the procedure for installing an untrusted Extension is not too far from the complexity of downloading and executing some random application, and if a user is naive enough to do that, then there's not much that can be done from a technical point of view to stop them.
In a nutshell, the Firefox Extensions system makes it harder for people to casually (or unknowingly!) install plugins than ActiveX, but of course cannot guard against naivety. I'd say it is a strictly better solution, but of course, not a perfect one.