As a lot of other posters have said, there's not very much software for it other than what they themselves provide, but there's another side of it, too – hardware. If I remember right, last time I saw anything about SkyOS (I will admit it was a while ago) there was very little hardware or software support. Couple that with the high price tag – i.e., any price tag – and lack of publically-available source code, and I honestly just don't see any reason other than the hell of it.
Personally, if there's any "alternative" OS I hope takes off, it would have to be either Linux [insert obligatory reference to Ultima here], or one of my favorite "pet" projects, ReactOS. The nice thing about the latter is that it (will eventually) support the same software running on Windows, so if not the most ideal system – obviously, if it runs the same software, a lot of vendors may not see any reason for an open-source, Linux-compatible, etc. version of their product – at least it (will be) a somewhat practical one than a Linux system. And OpenBSD is totally kick-ass, although honestly I'd say it's probably in exactly the right place right now; those who can understand it can use it, and everyone else can stick with something better suited for them.
DISCLAIMER: I will admit I'm a Linux dev / distro maintainer and there may be some bias here...
Exactly! (Right now, I've got the source available for free, but I've also got the written offer online – you get the source in exchange for a "reasonable fee"... as far as I'm concerned, I'd say that somewhere between $ARM or $LEG is reasonable, considering the amount of effort that went into this – patching every single one of over 300 packages, by hand, to build for more than one processor architecture isn't exactly easy work!)
I happen to be a distro maintainer myself – yes, I know, I say that every single post, but at least now it actually is relevant – and I'll admit, up until recently I didn't distribute any of the source code either. But starting with the latest release, I've done no less than three whole discs of nothing but source – it's really not that hard to do, honestly.
(If you're wondering, it had nothing to do with the FSF or GPL zealots; I've been working on doing an AMD64 port of my system, and that meant I had to move away from simply pulling pre-existing x86 binaries and actually start building the source myself. Honestly, it actually seems to be working a lot better this way.)
Just in case any other would-be distribution maintainers are reading this, I may as well offer some advice – I've just put together a set of three ISO images containing the complete source code, as well as build scripts, etc. to automate the compile process. You really just have to know how to distribute it. As far as my distro's concerned, I don't actually distribute the ISO images or CD's myself – all the downloads, etc. go through MadTux.org, who not only host everything at no cost to me, but they also donate some of the money from monthly CD sales to me to continue development, pay for Web hosting, etc. So get someone like them to help with the hard part (actually distributing everything) and once that's out of the way, you should be fine.
Bit off-topic, but if you need those kinds of features (compilers, custom Perl modules, etc.) maybe check out one of the user-mode Linux Web hosts like Linode.com – they've been running my site for a few months, and I'd say it's probably the best thing since Al Gore invented the Interwebs:-) You get your own distribution, your own choice of server configurations... it's like a dedicated server without the dedicated server. [Not trying to sound like an advertisement or anything like that, just a very happy user recommending a useful service.]
I tend to use ImageMagick a lot via PHP scripts, but not with any sort of polyglot of code or anything – I just use exec("convert... ");. It's probably not the most cross-platform way, but since I tend to do exclusively Linux/UNIX-based stuff, and most of the code is only used by me for my own sites anyway, it's not a problem at least as far as I'm concerned.
Personally I just have an overclocked P4 chip connected to the heating grills in my toaster – I've programmed the handle to activate a shell script which builds gcc, glibc, the kernel, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, etc. (all at once) and makes the thing pop the toast out really fast. Although I tend to use Slackware-based systems on my own toaster.
Crosstool – haven't used it too extensively myself, but it did a great job when I had to cross-compile a Linux kernel to run on my AMD64 system. And if you're using ARM or similar architectures, QEMU might be helpful. I may be entirely missing the point here, but may as well offer my own limited knowledge anyway:-)
(1) Bugfixes are a part of development. (2) If bugfixes are being made, the program is still under active development, at least in a very loose sense of the term. (3) Therefore, anything actively maintained is a development branch.
Obviously this is in the absolute loosest sense of the term, but the point I'm trying to make here is that until the thing has ceased to have any work done on it at all, not even bugfixes, only then can you say that it's not a development branch. Besides, the Caldera people are so busy suing everyone – and then trying to get them back so they can sue them some more – so how would they know what a dev branch is anyway?
I just submitted the exact same story last night, and it was rejected – oh well, at least someone else managed to get this posted:-) Either way, this is definitely a good thing; I've been watching the project for months, and I've been wondering forever when the 0.3.0 release will be. (I'm downloading it now, I have to see this thing in action!)
Personally, I'd say my favorite Pilot pens are the Precise ones – you know, the nice solid tube-shaped ones that you can get in a four-pack at Wal-Mart for just a couple bucks. Although my absolute favorite pen is probably one which my dad and I turned on his lathe – it's a bit chipped, because it was the first pen either of us tried turning using a "fancy" pen blank and not regular wood, but it's really neat looking, and I'm right now using it to write a novel (I've been writing the entire thing by hand, one section at a time, just randomly ordering things around – after I've got enough sections together I'll write some stuff to connect them all and then type everything up at once. A lot easier to edit that way; I once did write a complete novel, but it's horrible and I'm probably never going to publish it...)
Personally, I tend to like just a regular old wiki for documentation – for example, most of the documentation for Ultima Linux is on a MediaWiki site. Although this might not be the best way if you need printed documentation, because of the fundamental differences between a Web site and a wiki. Of course, if the primary method of providing documentation is going to be printed, I'd say learn LaTeX – it's really not very hard at all, and it tends to be very good for technical documentation because it (1) handles all the formatting for you so you just have to do the actual content, (2) has some very, very powerful typesetting capabilities if you need advanced features like tables, mathemetical symbols, etc., and (3) is almost trivially easy to learn, at least as far as I'm concerned.
You can put in whatever value you want for the releasedetail.cfm id field, but either way it shows the same thing. I don't think any real company would have a Web site which worked like that – if it were real there would be some sort of error message or another press release.
And as I said earlier, I don't think it's that hard to set up an Apache virtual server and provide false information when registering a domain... depending on the registrar it may be quite a while before they realize that the domain doesn't belong to who it says it belongs to.
Besides, notice that there are (1) a lot of typos, and (2) no references on the main SCO site...
Although honestly, it would probably be trivially easy – hell, I'm only sixteen and I already know how to set up an Apache virtual server (I use the things all the time), so is it really all that hard to imagine someone at the university or wherever registering a domain name under a false identity, and using a virtual server or a similar technique to create a fake site? I wouldn't be surprised at all, honestly, considering the circumstances.
Re:Starting to understand that book title now
on
New Caldera Promised
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· Score: 1
One of the older editions – the one that came with Red Hat 8.0 – mentioned Caldera briefly, although that's as far as it went. Yes, I actually did read through the entire thing cover to cover...
If you ask me, anything that's actively maintained is a "development branch" – 2.6 is just considered to be a more stable, ready-to-go development branch than 2.5. And honestly, since 5 and 6 are right next to each other on the keyboard, isn't there a possibility that it was just a typo? After all, it only says once that it's based on 2.5, for all we know they may have just let their fingers slip or something.
Either way, I'm not buying it – any way you interpret the phrase – I'd rather just keep developing my own distribution, violating their bullshit patents or not:-)
Let me clarify a bit for idiots like you and everyone in Hollywood: The type of thing the MPAA/RIAA wants to ban that the EFF is objecting to in this particular video. Creative misinterpretation is not your friend.
I'd have to agree – that was one of the most well thought-out animations I've ever seen, even compared to the ones that weren't propaganda against digital rights management. Definitely great attention to detail, too (at least with all the parody titles) – hopefully this will make people realize that this actually will affect them, and isn't just something that super-techies and/or Slashdot readers don't like because it doesn't work on Linux. Disclaimer, I'm a super-techie and a Slashdot reader who does the kind of thing they want to ban all the time on Linux...
Already done – Microsoft's had programs named stuff like COMMAND.COM for years. And now, of course, it's come back and bit them in the ass because of those e-mail viruses that send.COM programs to trick people into thinking it's a.com Web site... got to love Microsoft, eh?
For a second there I thought it meant "source" as in source code, until I saw the part about Half Life. Talk about confusing – who'd have thought a proprietary game would be called Source? And even the name Half Life kind of gets confusing if you try hard enough (I remember in geometry class, our teacher was showing how to work our TI-83's, and everyone was so disappointed when she explained her "HALFLIFE" program was to determine the half-life of a radioactive atom... I think I'm the only one in the class who even knew what she was talking about). Who knows, maybe it's just me...
Definitely a valid point, and quite honestly I think that the media is overblowing everything at least a little bit – but either way, I tend to be both (a) extremely paranoid and (b) heavily biased against those sites, so I definitely wouldn't want to have a good search engine on there, and I definitely wouldn't want to have them indexed in the "regular" part of the search engine, either. Hell, I never even visit my friends' MySpace/Xanga/LiveJournal sites – I just can't stand the damn things.
Slashdot Mirror
As a lot of other posters have said, there's not very much software for it other than what they themselves provide, but there's another side of it, too – hardware. If I remember right, last time I saw anything about SkyOS (I will admit it was a while ago) there was very little hardware or software support. Couple that with the high price tag – i.e., any price tag – and lack of publically-available source code, and I honestly just don't see any reason other than the hell of it.
Personally, if there's any "alternative" OS I hope takes off, it would have to be either Linux [insert obligatory reference to Ultima here], or one of my favorite "pet" projects, ReactOS. The nice thing about the latter is that it (will eventually) support the same software running on Windows, so if not the most ideal system – obviously, if it runs the same software, a lot of vendors may not see any reason for an open-source, Linux-compatible, etc. version of their product – at least it (will be) a somewhat practical one than a Linux system. And OpenBSD is totally kick-ass, although honestly I'd say it's probably in exactly the right place right now; those who can understand it can use it, and everyone else can stick with something better suited for them.
DISCLAIMER: I will admit I'm a Linux dev / distro maintainer and there may be some bias here...
Exactly! (Right now, I've got the source available for free, but I've also got the written offer online – you get the source in exchange for a "reasonable fee"... as far as I'm concerned, I'd say that somewhere between $ARM or $LEG is reasonable, considering the amount of effort that went into this – patching every single one of over 300 packages, by hand, to build for more than one processor architecture isn't exactly easy work!)
I happen to be a distro maintainer myself – yes, I know, I say that every single post, but at least now it actually is relevant – and I'll admit, up until recently I didn't distribute any of the source code either. But starting with the latest release, I've done no less than three whole discs of nothing but source – it's really not that hard to do, honestly.
(If you're wondering, it had nothing to do with the FSF or GPL zealots; I've been working on doing an AMD64 port of my system, and that meant I had to move away from simply pulling pre-existing x86 binaries and actually start building the source myself. Honestly, it actually seems to be working a lot better this way.)
Just in case any other would-be distribution maintainers are reading this, I may as well offer some advice – I've just put together a set of three ISO images containing the complete source code, as well as build scripts, etc. to automate the compile process. You really just have to know how to distribute it. As far as my distro's concerned, I don't actually distribute the ISO images or CD's myself – all the downloads, etc. go through MadTux.org, who not only host everything at no cost to me, but they also donate some of the money from monthly CD sales to me to continue development, pay for Web hosting, etc. So get someone like them to help with the hard part (actually distributing everything) and once that's out of the way, you should be fine.
Bit off-topic, but if you need those kinds of features (compilers, custom Perl modules, etc.) maybe check out one of the user-mode Linux Web hosts like Linode.com – they've been running my site for a few months, and I'd say it's probably the best thing since Al Gore invented the Interwebs :-) You get your own distribution, your own choice of server configurations... it's like a dedicated server without the dedicated server. [Not trying to sound like an advertisement or anything like that, just a very happy user recommending a useful service.]
I tend to use ImageMagick a lot via PHP scripts, but not with any sort of polyglot of code or anything – I just use exec("convert ... ");. It's probably not the most cross-platform way, but since I tend to do exclusively Linux/UNIX-based stuff, and most of the code is only used by me for my own sites anyway, it's not a problem at least as far as I'm concerned.
In about a week.
Personally I just have an overclocked P4 chip connected to the heating grills in my toaster – I've programmed the handle to activate a shell script which builds gcc, glibc, the kernel, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, etc. (all at once) and makes the thing pop the toast out really fast. Although I tend to use Slackware-based systems on my own toaster.
Crosstool – haven't used it too extensively myself, but it did a great job when I had to cross-compile a Linux kernel to run on my AMD64 system. And if you're using ARM or similar architectures, QEMU might be helpful. I may be entirely missing the point here, but may as well offer my own limited knowledge anyway :-)
Hey, I know :-) I just like ReactOS.
(1) Bugfixes are a part of development. (2) If bugfixes are being made, the program is still under active development, at least in a very loose sense of the term. (3) Therefore, anything actively maintained is a development branch.
Obviously this is in the absolute loosest sense of the term, but the point I'm trying to make here is that until the thing has ceased to have any work done on it at all, not even bugfixes, only then can you say that it's not a development branch. Besides, the Caldera people are so busy suing everyone – and then trying to get them back so they can sue them some more – so how would they know what a dev branch is anyway?
I just submitted the exact same story last night, and it was rejected – oh well, at least someone else managed to get this posted :-) Either way, this is definitely a good thing; I've been watching the project for months, and I've been wondering forever when the 0.3.0 release will be. (I'm downloading it now, I have to see this thing in action!)
Personally, I'd say my favorite Pilot pens are the Precise ones – you know, the nice solid tube-shaped ones that you can get in a four-pack at Wal-Mart for just a couple bucks. Although my absolute favorite pen is probably one which my dad and I turned on his lathe – it's a bit chipped, because it was the first pen either of us tried turning using a "fancy" pen blank and not regular wood, but it's really neat looking, and I'm right now using it to write a novel (I've been writing the entire thing by hand, one section at a time, just randomly ordering things around – after I've got enough sections together I'll write some stuff to connect them all and then type everything up at once. A lot easier to edit that way; I once did write a complete novel, but it's horrible and I'm probably never going to publish it...)
Well, so much for staying on topic!
Personally, I tend to like just a regular old wiki for documentation – for example, most of the documentation for Ultima Linux is on a MediaWiki site. Although this might not be the best way if you need printed documentation, because of the fundamental differences between a Web site and a wiki. Of course, if the primary method of providing documentation is going to be printed, I'd say learn LaTeX – it's really not very hard at all, and it tends to be very good for technical documentation because it (1) handles all the formatting for you so you just have to do the actual content, (2) has some very, very powerful typesetting capabilities if you need advanced features like tables, mathemetical symbols, etc., and (3) is almost trivially easy to learn, at least as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, but the Vogons probably took it so he couldn't cover his ears during a poetry recitation ;-)
What the HELL are you high on?? If you want simplicity, I say we need Aero for Windows 3.1! Or even better... Aero DOS! Now that's simplicity for you!
Just try any one of these out:
5 634632 561
http://www.openlinux.org/releasedetail.cfm?id=
http://www.openlinux.org/releasedetail.cfm?id=543
http://www.openlinux.org/releasedetail.cfm?id=235
You can put in whatever value you want for the releasedetail.cfm id field, but either way it shows the same thing. I don't think any real company would have a Web site which worked like that – if it were real there would be some sort of error message or another press release.
And as I said earlier, I don't think it's that hard to set up an Apache virtual server and provide false information when registering a domain... depending on the registrar it may be quite a while before they realize that the domain doesn't belong to who it says it belongs to.
Besides, notice that there are (1) a lot of typos, and (2) no references on the main SCO site...
Although honestly, it would probably be trivially easy – hell, I'm only sixteen and I already know how to set up an Apache virtual server (I use the things all the time), so is it really all that hard to imagine someone at the university or wherever registering a domain name under a false identity, and using a virtual server or a similar technique to create a fake site? I wouldn't be surprised at all, honestly, considering the circumstances.
One of the older editions – the one that came with Red Hat 8.0 – mentioned Caldera briefly, although that's as far as it went. Yes, I actually did read through the entire thing cover to cover...
If you ask me, anything that's actively maintained is a "development branch" – 2.6 is just considered to be a more stable, ready-to-go development branch than 2.5. And honestly, since 5 and 6 are right next to each other on the keyboard, isn't there a possibility that it was just a typo? After all, it only says once that it's based on 2.5, for all we know they may have just let their fingers slip or something.
:-)
Either way, I'm not buying it – any way you interpret the phrase – I'd rather just keep developing my own distribution, violating their bullshit patents or not
Shh... no correcting my intentionally misleading history, this is Slashdot and everyone's supposed to hate M$!
Let me clarify a bit for idiots like you and everyone in Hollywood: The type of thing the MPAA/RIAA wants to ban that the EFF is objecting to in this particular video. Creative misinterpretation is not your friend.
I'd have to agree – that was one of the most well thought-out animations I've ever seen, even compared to the ones that weren't propaganda against digital rights management. Definitely great attention to detail, too (at least with all the parody titles) – hopefully this will make people realize that this actually will affect them, and isn't just something that super-techies and/or Slashdot readers don't like because it doesn't work on Linux. Disclaimer, I'm a super-techie and a Slashdot reader who does the kind of thing they want to ban all the time on Linux...
Already done – Microsoft's had programs named stuff like COMMAND.COM for years. And now, of course, it's come back and bit them in the ass because of those e-mail viruses that send .COM programs to trick people into thinking it's a .com Web site... got to love Microsoft, eh?
For a second there I thought it meant "source" as in source code, until I saw the part about Half Life. Talk about confusing – who'd have thought a proprietary game would be called Source? And even the name Half Life kind of gets confusing if you try hard enough (I remember in geometry class, our teacher was showing how to work our TI-83's, and everyone was so disappointed when she explained her "HALFLIFE" program was to determine the half-life of a radioactive atom... I think I'm the only one in the class who even knew what she was talking about). Who knows, maybe it's just me...
Definitely a valid point, and quite honestly I think that the media is overblowing everything at least a little bit – but either way, I tend to be both (a) extremely paranoid and (b) heavily biased against those sites, so I definitely wouldn't want to have a good search engine on there, and I definitely wouldn't want to have them indexed in the "regular" part of the search engine, either. Hell, I never even visit my friends' MySpace/Xanga/LiveJournal sites – I just can't stand the damn things.