Does anyone actually use OpenSUSE anymore? For an all purpose Linux distro, Ubuntu and Fedora seem to have the market cornered.
I used to use Mandriva but decided I wanted a distro with a more assured future (Mandriva's financial problems were worrying). Off the top of my head here's some reasons why I chose Opensuse:
* Proper KDE support - Kubuntu was just crap when I tired it, Fedora ok but not as good as Opensuse * Excellent package manager and large amount of packages available - Ubuntu is on par or better here, Fedora IMHO is still not up to scratch here - yum and it's GUIs aren't nearly as good as zypper/yast and the available packages not as numerous as Ubuntu or Opensuse * Active community and development - both Ubuntu and Fedora have these too but either way it was a pleasant change from Mandriva which is just too small * YAST - neither Fedora or Ubuntu have anything equalling it. I'm a sysadmin in my day job, I don't want to have to go home and edit config files too.
Yippee. Shouldn't a project funded by federal grants not be eligible to sell their findings but be required to provide them freely to the public? Seems a little wrong to me.
The 'federal' in the article refers to the Australian federal government not the US one. Just like the US undoubtedly charges us (Australia) for the information from its satellites (we don't have many of our own:() our government should charge you guys for the stuff we pick up with this.
For those like me who aren't so sure we want to vote Green there is at least one other viable alternative: The Australian Sex Party are contesting senate seats for the first time this coming election http://www.sexparty.org.au/
One of their policies is to oppose compulsory internet censorship.
You forgot the nearest competitor which is the ESA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esa) with an approx $4.5 billion budget.
But even including NASA's relatively large contribution, that's still a very small amount being spent overall by the world's governments. It makes sense to encourage more commercial involvement as well as commercial, rather than militaristic, competition between nations.
Holy shit! I just checked the Telstra site and you're right 2Mb/1Mb up for $50/month for 2GB download. I had to check my computer's clock to see if it's really the year 2010!
As an Australian living in Europe (20 Euros/month for 32Mb/1Mb up with truly unlimited - 100GBs is fine) I beg my fellow Aussies to dump these shitheads and go to a better, more competitive ISP - for my sake, I don't want to come back to broadband plans and prices from 1998.
As someone living in Germany I'll have to do the same thing. However when the DVDs come out I'll be buying them - DVD sales do more to support a show than watching it on some crappy free-to-air network.
Splitting telstra into retail / wholesale is a good idea.... but we just sold the thing for about $20b, and now we're buying back the wholesale half at the same time we're going to replace the infrastructure anyway?
It's true that the original Telstra sale was fucked (privatising a monopoly just turns it into a private monopoly). However this move makes economic sense - they're not so much buying Telstra's crappy old copper infrastructure, they're buying the pipes, cable conduits etc. that that infrastructure runs through.
The alternative - making a parallel pipe/conduit infrastructure for all the new NBN stuff - would be incredibly wasteful.
No, I was referring to the Ubuntu practice of ignoring perfectly good applications because they happen to use QT or some other toolkit. GTK and QT windows and widgets are only slightly different looking these days (with good theme settings), not any different looking than the various toolkits used on common Windows apps anyway.
As for digikam, I'm sure it could be improved but it's a working, pretty fully featured app and Shotwell is half-baked - Ubuntu is just re-inventing the wheel instead of encouraging development to improve existing apps like digikam.
Why try to re-invent the wheel at all with Shotwell, what's wrong with digikam? The disk space required for KDE libs is insignificant on modern computers (especially compared to the size of the average person's photo collection).
Is it the irrational fear that non-technical people will be confused by a GUI interface that looks slightly different? Because that's what they get in Windows all the time and they seem to cope.
Am I in some parallel universe where banning child porn is considered a good thing? I'm not talking cartoons and the like, but actual child porn featuring actual children?
No, child porn is illegal and always has been in Germany. The issue is that the previous government used the child porn bogeyman to try to scare people into accepting internet censorship based on a secretive blacklist (similar to what's being proposed by senator Conroy in Oz).
The new government threw out that law and adopted a new policy that translates roughly as 'deletion rather than blocking'. I.e. they'll use the police to go after people who setup child porn sites instead of trying to censor the net (a hopeless task anyway).
'To remove the perceived stigma, we would need to have more scientists talking openly about issues of religion, where such issues are particularly relevant to their discipline.'"
Why the hell should they do that? Sounds to me like these believer scientists have the right attitude to the whole thing - keep their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) in their private thoughts while at work and bring them out at home, at church or wherever else they belong.
Why would you want to disrupt the incredibly useful work of top scientists with bullshit and usually divisive debates and discussions about supernatural stuff that no person alive could possibly know anything about?
Amarok is seperate from the KDE releases, you can just run Amarok 1.4 in KDE4. Try banshee though, even though it's Mono/GTK it's actually quite a good app, and works fine in KDE.
In more recent times they directly sponsored the work on K3B needed to produce a native KDE4 version, meaning that everybody got a properly working K3B in KDE4 much faster than they would have without Mandriva.
No he's right, Mandrake was based off the old Red Hat Linux distros (before Redhat Enterprise). However they've been their own distro, independently doing the heavy work of creating their own packages and writing their own config tools for over 10 years now. Quite a few distros are now based off of Mandriva, and it'd be a shame to see them go.
Ubuntu is based on the superior Debian distribution and Mandriva is a Red Hat based distribution? And Debian is a lot more active than RHAT?
No Mandriva was last forked from Redhat over 10 years ago. Since then it's been its own distro - one of the few distros left that is an original source of its own packages, ie. not based on releases of any other distro. There are now distros (eg. PCLinuxOS) based on Mandriva.
As the comments on that link point out though software patents still aren't legally enforceable in the EU. The fact that the EPO is granting patents doesn't make them necessarily legally valid - such patents may very well be attempts to skirt the law by disguing software patents as process patents for example. Any claims would have to be tested in (expensive, time consuming) court cases.
I live in Germany and have made some minor contributions to Packman and I don't agree with the accusation that using patented software in this part of the world is not abiding by the law. On the contrary since software patents are not allowed in the EU any claim to patent protection on software would have to go through a court case to prove that it's not actually a software patent, but something deserving protection under some other part of patent law in the EU.
or demand them to add some Russian repositories in the apt-get config file so they can get unlicensed, pirated versions of those and break the law.
I mostly agree with the rest of your post but this part is just FUD. Firstly, the x264 project is not pirated software, it's an open source implementation of H264. Secondly, and most important, software patents are only really valid in one country with particularly skewed laws, the USA. Even there you'd need to spend minimum US$1 million on a patent lawsuit to see if the patent is even valid, let alone whether it applies to someone using it privately on a home computer.
I don't know about Ubuntu but for Opensuse the patented media codecs are hosted by the Packman project, a perfectly legitimate packaging project based in Germany that provides around 5000 extra packages that aren't in the main Opensuse repo.
You could always vote for the Australian Sex party. They're new for this election and actually have some pretty sensible policies revolving around civil liberties, freedom of speech and keeping religious fundamentalism out of Australian politics.
I don't recall the nautical shipping industry panicking like this over the fact that they can't reasonably send ships through a hurricane, and those happen much more frequently than volcanic eruptions of this magnitude. I get the impression that the rarity of this event that the airliners should be thankful for is also the very reason they are overreacting to it.
The difference is that you can see a hurricane. Weather radar, satellite images and such can tell you exactly where the dangerous winds are at any moment so you can simply re-route ships around it. This volcanic ash is not visible, either with conventional radar or visually with great accuracy. Expect this to change in future with more use of the specialised equipment needed to detect it by weather organisations and maybe even in aircraft themselves.
However for the moment the information needed to route planes around the patches of dangerously dense ash, in real-time for 25,000 flights per day in Europe just isn't there.
And virtually all this would've been unnecessary if Telstra had been privatised properly by previous governments - ie. split into an infrastructure company and a normal ISP and phone company, not a huge monopoly.
Australia might finally get a decent competitive broadband market in 2015-2020, if we're lucky.
Either that or go north of the cloud to Moscow and take the train back. Europeans generally brag about their ground transportation systems and deservedly so, I'm amazed at how much air travel there seems to be.
I live in Munich at the moment and a quick check of bahn.de shows that a train back from Moscow would take 34-35 hours. The high-speed trains in Europe are great but they're still confined to only certain routes, all in western Europe.
Upgrading railways to support high-speed trains takes years and huge amounts of money so if this volcano really does keep going for months Europe could be in serious trouble.
It's good to see this but it might be too late. Redhat is dropping Xen dom0 support in RHEL6 in favour of KVM. Probably because there is no Xen release based on the kernel versions (2.6.31 and 2.6.33) in the Fedora versions that it'll likely be based off.
Maintaining the 2.6.33 with bug and feature backports for 7 years from RHEl6's release is going to be work enough for them, let alone trying to keep up an old 2.6.18 Xen kernel.
For desktop distros it's even worse. While it's fine when running RHEL5 on a server, since the RHEL kernel is 2.6.18 but what to do if I want to run Xen on my desktop or laptop? I don't think some old, crappy and unsupported (by my desktop distro which is on 2.6.33 or something) 2.6.18 Xen kernel is going to support my wireless card for e.g. It just won't work well enough to be usable.
Unless Xen shows a major turnaround in getting their stuff fully and properly in the mainline kernel I say bring on KVM.
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Just to be clear the non-OSS software is available for free in the non-oss repository. When you buy the distro you're buying support, full stop.
I've found that those of us using OpenSuSE do so because it generally works and stable so we can be working on fixing other problems.
+1 to that if I had modpoints. That's been pretty much my experience.
Does anyone actually use OpenSUSE anymore? For an all purpose Linux distro, Ubuntu and Fedora seem to have the market cornered.
I used to use Mandriva but decided I wanted a distro with a more assured future (Mandriva's financial problems were worrying). Off the top of my head here's some reasons why I chose Opensuse:
* Proper KDE support - Kubuntu was just crap when I tired it, Fedora ok but not as good as Opensuse
* Excellent package manager and large amount of packages available - Ubuntu is on par or better here, Fedora IMHO is still not up to scratch here - yum and it's GUIs aren't nearly as good as zypper/yast and the available packages not as numerous as Ubuntu or Opensuse
* Active community and development - both Ubuntu and Fedora have these too but either way it was a pleasant change from Mandriva which is just too small
* YAST - neither Fedora or Ubuntu have anything equalling it. I'm a sysadmin in my day job, I don't want to have to go home and edit config files too.
Yippee. Shouldn't a project funded by federal grants not be eligible to sell their findings but be required to provide them freely to the public? Seems a little wrong to me.
The 'federal' in the article refers to the Australian federal government not the US one. Just like the US undoubtedly charges us (Australia) for the information from its satellites (we don't have many of our own :() our government should charge you guys for the stuff we pick up with this.
For those like me who aren't so sure we want to vote Green there is at least one other viable alternative:
The Australian Sex Party are contesting senate seats for the first time this coming election http://www.sexparty.org.au/
One of their policies is to oppose compulsory internet censorship.
You forgot the nearest competitor which is the ESA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esa) with an approx $4.5 billion budget.
But even including NASA's relatively large contribution, that's still a very small amount being spent overall by the world's governments. It makes sense to encourage more commercial involvement as well as commercial, rather than militaristic, competition between nations.
Holy shit! I just checked the Telstra site and you're right 2Mb/1Mb up for $50/month for 2GB download. I had to check my computer's clock to see if it's really the year 2010!
As an Australian living in Europe (20 Euros/month for 32Mb/1Mb up with truly unlimited - 100GBs is fine) I beg my fellow Aussies to dump these shitheads and go to a better, more competitive ISP - for my sake, I don't want to come back to broadband plans and prices from 1998.
As someone living in Germany I'll have to do the same thing. However when the DVDs come out I'll be buying them - DVD sales do more to support a show than watching it on some crappy free-to-air network.
Splitting telstra into retail / wholesale is a good idea.... but we just sold the thing for about $20b, and now we're buying back the wholesale half at the same time we're going to replace the infrastructure anyway?
It's true that the original Telstra sale was fucked (privatising a monopoly just turns it into a private monopoly). However this move makes economic sense - they're not so much buying Telstra's crappy old copper infrastructure, they're buying the pipes, cable conduits etc. that that infrastructure runs through.
The alternative - making a parallel pipe/conduit infrastructure for all the new NBN stuff - would be incredibly wasteful.
No, I was referring to the Ubuntu practice of ignoring perfectly good applications because they happen to use QT or some other toolkit. GTK and QT windows and widgets are only slightly different looking these days (with good theme settings), not any different looking than the various toolkits used on common Windows apps anyway.
As for digikam, I'm sure it could be improved but it's a working, pretty fully featured app and Shotwell is half-baked - Ubuntu is just re-inventing the wheel instead of encouraging development to improve existing apps like digikam.
Why try to re-invent the wheel at all with Shotwell, what's wrong with digikam? The disk space required for KDE libs is insignificant on modern computers (especially compared to the size of the average person's photo collection).
Is it the irrational fear that non-technical people will be confused by a GUI interface that looks slightly different? Because that's what they get in Windows all the time and they seem to cope.
Am I in some parallel universe where banning child porn is considered a good thing? I'm not talking cartoons and the like, but actual child porn featuring actual children?
No, child porn is illegal and always has been in Germany. The issue is that the previous government used the child porn bogeyman to try to scare people into accepting internet censorship based on a secretive blacklist (similar to what's being proposed by senator Conroy in Oz).
The new government threw out that law and adopted a new policy that translates roughly as 'deletion rather than blocking'. I.e. they'll use the police to go after people who setup child porn sites instead of trying to censor the net (a hopeless task anyway).
'To remove the perceived stigma, we would need to have more scientists talking openly about issues of religion, where such issues are particularly relevant to their discipline.'"
Why the hell should they do that? Sounds to me like these believer scientists have the right attitude to the whole thing - keep their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) in their private thoughts while at work and bring them out at home, at church or wherever else they belong.
Why would you want to disrupt the incredibly useful work of top scientists with bullshit and usually divisive debates and discussions about supernatural stuff that no person alive could possibly know anything about?
Amarok is seperate from the KDE releases, you can just run Amarok 1.4 in KDE4. Try banshee though, even though it's Mono/GTK it's actually quite a good app, and works fine in KDE.
In more recent times they directly sponsored the work on K3B needed to produce a native KDE4 version, meaning that everybody got a properly working K3B in KDE4 much faster than they would have without Mandriva.
No he's right, Mandrake was based off the old Red Hat Linux distros (before Redhat Enterprise). However they've been their own distro, independently doing the heavy work of creating their own packages and writing their own config tools for over 10 years now. Quite a few distros are now based off of Mandriva, and it'd be a shame to see them go.
Ubuntu is based on the superior Debian distribution and Mandriva is a Red Hat based distribution? And Debian is a lot more active than RHAT?
No Mandriva was last forked from Redhat over 10 years ago. Since then it's been its own distro - one of the few distros left that is an original source of its own packages, ie. not based on releases of any other distro. There are now distros (eg. PCLinuxOS) based on Mandriva.
As the comments on that link point out though software patents still aren't legally enforceable in the EU. The fact that the EPO is granting patents doesn't make them necessarily legally valid - such patents may very well be attempts to skirt the law by disguing software patents as process patents for example. Any claims would have to be tested in (expensive, time consuming) court cases.
I live in Germany and have made some minor contributions to Packman and I don't agree with the accusation that using patented software in this part of the world is not abiding by the law. On the contrary since software patents are not allowed in the EU any claim to patent protection on software would have to go through a court case to prove that it's not actually a software patent, but something deserving protection under some other part of patent law in the EU.
(Usual disclaimer IANAL etc.)
or demand them to add some Russian repositories in the apt-get config file so they can get unlicensed, pirated versions of those and break the law.
I mostly agree with the rest of your post but this part is just FUD. Firstly, the x264 project is not pirated software, it's an open source implementation of H264. Secondly, and most important, software patents are only really valid in one country with particularly skewed laws, the USA. Even there you'd need to spend minimum US$1 million on a patent lawsuit to see if the patent is even valid, let alone whether it applies to someone using it privately on a home computer.
I don't know about Ubuntu but for Opensuse the patented media codecs are hosted by the Packman project, a perfectly legitimate packaging project based in Germany that provides around 5000 extra packages that aren't in the main Opensuse repo.
You could always vote for the Australian Sex party. They're new for this election and actually have some pretty sensible policies revolving around civil liberties, freedom of speech and keeping religious fundamentalism out of Australian politics.
Following up my earlier post this BBC News article explains the situation in more detail: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8634276.stm
I don't recall the nautical shipping industry panicking like this over the fact that they can't reasonably send ships through a hurricane, and those happen much more frequently than volcanic eruptions of this magnitude. I get the impression that the rarity of this event that the airliners should be thankful for is also the very reason they are overreacting to it.
The difference is that you can see a hurricane. Weather radar, satellite images and such can tell you exactly where the dangerous winds are at any moment so you can simply re-route ships around it. This volcanic ash is not visible, either with conventional radar or visually with great accuracy. Expect this to change in future with more use of the specialised equipment needed to detect it by weather organisations and maybe even in aircraft themselves.
However for the moment the information needed to route planes around the patches of dangerously dense ash, in real-time for 25,000 flights per day in Europe just isn't there.
Try $43 billion over 10 years and even that's likely to be too high, the government is simply playing brinkmanship with Telstra so they don't try to block the plans: http://www.news.com.au/technology/billion-national-broadband-network-price-tag-a-bluff/story-e6frfro0-1225775686353
And virtually all this would've been unnecessary if Telstra had been privatised properly by previous governments - ie. split into an infrastructure company and a normal ISP and phone company, not a huge monopoly.
Australia might finally get a decent competitive broadband market in 2015-2020, if we're lucky.
Either that or go north of the cloud to Moscow and take the train back. Europeans generally brag about their ground transportation systems and deservedly so, I'm amazed at how much air travel there seems to be.
I live in Munich at the moment and a quick check of bahn.de shows that a train back from Moscow would take 34-35 hours. The high-speed trains in Europe are great but they're still confined to only certain routes, all in western Europe.
Upgrading railways to support high-speed trains takes years and huge amounts of money so if this volcano really does keep going for months Europe could be in serious trouble.
It's good to see this but it might be too late. Redhat is dropping Xen dom0 support in RHEL6 in favour of KVM. Probably because there is no Xen release based on the kernel versions (2.6.31 and 2.6.33) in the Fedora versions that it'll likely be based off.
Maintaining the 2.6.33 with bug and feature backports for 7 years from RHEl6's release is going to be work enough for them, let alone trying to keep up an old 2.6.18 Xen kernel.
For desktop distros it's even worse. While it's fine when running RHEL5 on a server, since the RHEL kernel is 2.6.18 but what to do if I want to run Xen on my desktop or laptop? I don't think some old, crappy and unsupported (by my desktop distro which is on 2.6.33 or something) 2.6.18 Xen kernel is going to support my wireless card for e.g. It just won't work well enough to be usable.
Unless Xen shows a major turnaround in getting their stuff fully and properly in the mainline kernel I say bring on KVM.