>Microsoft has pulled firewire support from their OS! No one knows if its permanent...
>Firewire is NOT gone
Shame, Firewire is fantastic, I was hoping that all the fab external firewire drives would become as cheap as cheaps for the rest of us who do not use Windows.
Hey, there is no reason why the kids have to stick with fedora, I'm sure Gentoo will build on it.
If you can get a decent Internet connection then there are western servers available for distcc, or one child could make a stage 4 file archive and share it with the rest. For many years, I had a laptop with half the specs of the OLPC (1996 laptop, swapped for a macbook in 2006), Gentoo worked great as it could make the binaries really small to save on RAM, if you have the power... so keep peddling granny.
> but it strikes me that they are implementing many unique (not "proprietary", but same difference) technologies
This is a "good thing", this will be the first ever laptop designed around the needs of education. This is also the first ever laptop designed just for Linux, loads of legacy hardware (BIOS, Serial cable) is not needed.
The hardware, software and bundled books and homework ('content' if you like) are all being specifically re-designed.
>The Sugar UI, networking, now security, and probably a bunch of things I don't know about.
I am sure there are many good things that some people do not know about;). Anyway these laptops are going to kids who have never owned a computer, so they do not have to be compatible with all the legacy crap that we own here in the rich west.
I think the Sugar UI is great. All the current desktop UI's, e.g. Windows Vista, OS X, Gnome, etc have the same metaphors as 'Lisa' in 1983. Now there is a UI designed for the Internet age, it has messenging and collobration as the core of the system.
>Where will they find apps for this platform?
It is still a Linux Distribution.I assume you are a Windows user (sorry if you are not), but most if not all the important sourceforge.net apps will work, because they are 'source', they will be recompiled for this Linux Distribution, not just by anyone, they have Red Hat behind them.
To get most apps working will just take:./configure && make && make install
>Is there an IDE for OPLC? Other tools?
I think the plan is for as much as possible to be in Python,so you would just use the normal Python IDEs and tools.
> * Will OLPC supply all apps themselves?
Redhat and chums will provide the inital batch. Python apps will probably 'just work', some other apps may need some tinkering if the laptops do not have all the most famous libraries, for example, I cannot imagine them having both GTK and QT.
>Perhaps this has been long ago addressed, or I over-estimate the problems or challenges, but I would be interested in the answers.
I think you are overestimating a bit. It is Fedora Linux tweaked a lot, but it is still Linux. I think the users will run out of space on the device long before they run out programs.
SCO argues that the Asset Purchase Agreement gave SCO the rights to Unix, and thus the rights to hold IBM for account for its 'allegedly' putting Unix source code into Linux (most of the so-called 'evidence' for this was thrown out by the court because of the lack of line and file information).
So if the Asset Purchase Agreement is held by the court to be valid then SCO owes Novell tens of millions. If the court says that the Asset Purchase Agreement is invalid then SCO does not have any property over the Unix code and Novell owns it all, Novell sacks SCO as their franchisee, and SCO do not have a business model or revenue income.
Either way, I cannot see a future business model for SCO, their licence revenue is drying up year-on-year as people port their apps to Linux or Solaris; and all the people that can make money from Unix (as opposed to SCO who just lose it), that is Sun, IBM and HP, do not need SCO at all. Sun's Solaris is based on BSD and they have already bought a get out of jail free card for any Unix V pollution, and IBM had a licence from AT&T for AIX and want to move to Linux anyway, as with HP.
Everyone else just uses Linux. If there is a market left for SCO, please tell me what it is?
Perhaps Novell figures that the need to be first in the queue of creditors when the liquidators arrive, having the money in a trust would mean they have a better chance at the money.
I suppose if worst comes to worst then they could always go after Microsoft et al who have Unix licences that Novell have not been paid for.
Well I now read a weekly magazine (Micromart, a UK computer magazine), mostly for buses and planes. Monthly magazines are just too old now, everything has been reported/reviewed elsewhere long before.
The problem is not low-quality students cheating, its low-quality teachers who need software to tell whether their students wrote their essays or not.
When I was at school, good teachers would know if a parent or sibling had helped because they obversed and tended the growth of knowledge themselves, they did not leave it to a web application or 'virtual learning environment' (virtually learning=almost learning=not learning?).
I use webmin/usermin (BSD licence) instead of Cpanel (proprietary).
It seems a bit odd to stick a proprietary web control panel to control a load of open-source software on an open-source web-server running on an open-source operating system.
I have to disagree, I am a long-time Emacs user, but I cannot stand the graphical interface, it is ugly, the ugliest thing on my system.
I use Emacs without X inside Gnome-Terminal, almost the same X functionality is provided by the Gnome-Terminal menu and without the hideous looking window.
Gedit is beautiful, light and responsive, Emacs should look more like that.
Cron-ning "shutdown -r now" is a bit too simple. Imagine that some user is doing important work and their machine silently reboots, that's not good. This also creates extra work for your helpdesk, "my machine reboots, come and fix it".
I would personally use some kind of pop-up dialog saying your computer is about to be reboot.
There are lots of different ways you can do this, the original bash programs were called dialog and xdialog, there are lots of equilivents these days, basically the idea is that they let you produce an OK/Cancel box within a bash script. You could also use something a little more powerful than bash such as Python or AppleScript or whatever.
I personally would recommend an Ipod over this DRM monster, but well-meaning relatives may inflict this on you in celebration of Christ's birth or whatever.
In this case, possibly the only way to survive this player may be a community produced firmware replacement. Its been done for the ipod and many other devices already.
If not then there are always the post-Christmas ebay auctions...
You can with a bit of fiddling. The GP2X has two ports, a client USB port (unpowered, so you can plug the GP2X in like an IPOD) and an ext port. There is a smalll third party adapter/lead to make the ext port into a powered USB (5V and 100mA).
You can have a USB wireless stick into this.
The problem is that some wireless USB sticks need more current than 100mA, so the most complete solution is this:
GP2X > USB lead > Battery powered USB Hub > USB wireless stick.
You also need to add a kernel module for the wireless card. Get something easy like Atheros.
Bit of a pain to set up. However when assembled, the last three are just like one strange looking lead.
The New York times seems to be trying to stir up "Fear, Anxiety and doubt". The government is not "Communist" but democratic socialist, like the UK's ruling party and much of the EU, Latin America and many other places.
In Kerala, they are replacing one western Operating System (illegal copies of Windows), with another western operating system (legal licences of Linux). After Microsoft went there and demanded lots of money for no source code and no local language support from their dialect, and Richard Stallman went there and offered full source code and a free system that had already been translated into their local dialect.
Why this should panic investors? Cola is after all very bad for you, why should Indians have to become clones of us fat, sugar-high westerners?
Kerala has done very well without help from the western elites and will carry on doing so. FUD or no FUD.
Yeah I agree, I personally have had very few problems with hardware support in my last five years of having a Linux only house (well an Apple Mac in the corner somewhere).
If you plan on buying something for Linux then you have very little problems. You just google for something that works on Linux then order it.
However, if you expect to be able to buy any strange peripheral (USB powered hamster washer) on a whim and then expect it to work at home, then you may be out of luck.
The only exception to this rule is wireless PCMCIA cards - it is a bit of a lucky dip. Regardless of whatever the model number on the box says, you never really know what chipset you got until you 'lspci'.
I have been trying to think of famous British open source people/projects. Here is what I have come up with so far:
Xen Mark Shuttleworth (sort of - has a British passport now and wanders around London sometimes). Tim Berners Lee, WWW Rob Hartill, Apache Simon Tatham, Putty Ian Jackson,ex-Debian Lead Alan Cox of Redhat and one-time kernel fame Alan Turing, father of computer science Jim McQuillan, Linux Terminal Server Project Dr John Pugh, MP and Linux activist
Slashdot Mirror
>Microsoft has pulled firewire support from their OS! No one knows if its permanent ...
>Firewire is NOT gone
Shame, Firewire is fantastic, I was hoping that all the fab external firewire drives would become as cheap as cheaps for the rest of us who do not use Windows.
Year, that's the one!!
Hopefully they will have yum or something.
Hey, there is no reason why the kids have to stick with fedora, I'm sure Gentoo will build on it.
If you can get a decent Internet connection then there are western servers available for distcc, or one child could make a stage 4 file archive and share it with the rest. For many years, I had a laptop with half the specs of the OLPC (1996 laptop, swapped for a macbook in 2006), Gentoo worked great as it could make the binaries really small to save on RAM, if you have the power... so keep peddling granny.
> but it strikes me that they are implementing many unique (not "proprietary", but same difference) technologies
;). Anyway these laptops are going to kids who have never owned a computer, so they do not have to be compatible with all the legacy crap that we own here in the rich west.
./configure && make && make install
This is a "good thing", this will be the first ever laptop designed around the needs of education. This is also the first ever laptop designed just for Linux, loads of legacy hardware (BIOS, Serial cable) is not needed.
The hardware, software and bundled books and homework ('content' if you like) are all being specifically re-designed.
>The Sugar UI, networking, now security, and probably a bunch of things I don't know about.
I am sure there are many good things that some people do not know about
I think the Sugar UI is great. All the current desktop UI's, e.g. Windows Vista, OS X, Gnome, etc have the same metaphors as 'Lisa' in 1983. Now there is a UI designed for the Internet age, it has messenging and collobration as the core of the system.
>Where will they find apps for this platform?
It is still a Linux Distribution.I assume you are a Windows user (sorry if you are not), but most if not all the important sourceforge.net apps will work, because they are 'source', they will be recompiled for this Linux Distribution, not just by anyone, they have Red Hat behind them.
To get most apps working will just take:
>Is there an IDE for OPLC? Other tools?
I think the plan is for as much as possible to be in Python,so you would just use the normal Python IDEs and tools.
> * Will OLPC supply all apps themselves?
Redhat and chums will provide the inital batch. Python apps will probably 'just work', some other apps may need some tinkering if the laptops do not have all the most famous libraries, for example, I cannot imagine them having both GTK and QT.
>Perhaps this has been long ago addressed, or I over-estimate the problems or challenges, but I would be interested in the answers.
I think you are overestimating a bit. It is Fedora Linux tweaked a lot, but it is still Linux. I think the users will run out of space on the device long before they run out programs.
We already know that the plan was to allow the children to modify as much as possible in Python. However, now Perl will be banished:
... freeing up much more space on the flash for user space. Source
We have broken the Perl dependency
Seems fair enough. All i can add is:
We are the Knights who say..... "Ni"! We are the keepers of the sacred words: Ni, Ping, and Nee-womm!
I think "Web Browser" would be the way forward. After all, everything gets renamed in Gnome menus anyway.
If I remember rightly, SCO has to trasfer 100% and then Novell hands back 5% as a fee.
>The question should be, why have they lasted so long?
;)
Because Windows Vista was not ready yet
>Novell isn't contesting that at all.
Indeed, it is SCO that wants to pick and choose which terms to accept. If the Judge does rule that they have to pay then it is game over for SCO.
SCO argues that the Asset Purchase Agreement gave SCO the rights to Unix, and thus the rights to hold IBM for account for its 'allegedly' putting Unix source code into Linux (most of the so-called 'evidence' for this was thrown out by the court because of the lack of line and file information). So if the Asset Purchase Agreement is held by the court to be valid then SCO owes Novell tens of millions. If the court says that the Asset Purchase Agreement is invalid then SCO does not have any property over the Unix code and Novell owns it all, Novell sacks SCO as their franchisee, and SCO do not have a business model or revenue income. Either way, I cannot see a future business model for SCO, their licence revenue is drying up year-on-year as people port their apps to Linux or Solaris; and all the people that can make money from Unix (as opposed to SCO who just lose it), that is Sun, IBM and HP, do not need SCO at all. Sun's Solaris is based on BSD and they have already bought a get out of jail free card for any Unix V pollution, and IBM had a licence from AT&T for AIX and want to move to Linux anyway, as with HP. Everyone else just uses Linux. If there is a market left for SCO, please tell me what it is?
Perhaps Novell figures that the need to be first in the queue of creditors when the liquidators arrive, having the money in a trust would mean they have a better chance at the money.
I suppose if worst comes to worst then they could always go after Microsoft et al who have Unix licences that Novell have not been paid for.
Also Micromart costs a quid or two, not seven quid. And of course it doesn't come with a CD full of crap shareware which you could download anyway.
Well I now read a weekly magazine (Micromart, a UK computer magazine), mostly for buses and planes. Monthly magazines are just too old now, everything has been reported/reviewed elsewhere long before.
The problem is not low-quality students cheating, its low-quality teachers who need software to tell whether their students wrote their essays or not.
When I was at school, good teachers would know if a parent or sibling had helped because they obversed and tended the growth of knowledge themselves, they did not leave it to a web application or 'virtual learning environment' (virtually learning=almost learning=not learning?).
I use webmin/usermin (BSD licence) instead of Cpanel (proprietary).
It seems a bit odd to stick a proprietary web control panel to control a load of open-source software on an open-source web-server running on an open-source operating system.
But thats just me....
I have to disagree, I am a long-time Emacs user, but I cannot stand the graphical interface, it is ugly, the ugliest thing on my system.
I use Emacs without X inside Gnome-Terminal, almost the same X functionality is provided by the Gnome-Terminal menu and without the hideous looking window.
Gedit is beautiful, light and responsive, Emacs should look more like that.
Cron-ning "shutdown -r now" is a bit too simple. Imagine that some user is doing important work and their machine silently reboots, that's not good. This also creates extra work for your helpdesk, "my machine reboots, come and fix it".
I would personally use some kind of pop-up dialog saying your computer is about to be reboot.
There are lots of different ways you can do this, the original bash programs were called dialog and xdialog, there are lots of equilivents these days, basically the idea is that they let you produce an OK/Cancel box within a bash script. You could also use something a little more powerful than bash such as Python or AppleScript or whatever.
I personally would recommend an Ipod over this DRM monster, but well-meaning relatives may inflict this on you in celebration of Christ's birth or whatever.
In this case, possibly the only way to survive this player may be a community produced firmware replacement. Its been done for the ipod and many other devices already.
If not then there are always the post-Christmas ebay auctions...
You can with a bit of fiddling. The GP2X has two ports, a client USB port (unpowered, so you can plug the GP2X in like an IPOD) and an ext port. There is a smalll third party adapter/lead to make the ext port into a powered USB (5V and 100mA).
You can have a USB wireless stick into this.
The problem is that some wireless USB sticks need more current than 100mA, so the most complete solution is this:
GP2X > USB lead > Battery powered USB Hub > USB wireless stick.
You also need to add a kernel module for the wireless card. Get something easy like Atheros.
Bit of a pain to set up. However when assembled, the last three are just like one strange looking lead.
>I have one person that will check it each morning and that is it.
Sounds like he is the one doing all the work!
I'm sure I remember once reading an article saying how no-one would ever buy Windows 2000 because of the all new Mac OS 9.
So yeah, I will carry on with Linux thanks.
"... will Force Linux Underground"
I thought we are underground to start with. I'm still waiting to go overground...
From TFA, "The news will further unsettle foreign investors in this state."
. php?content_id=138497
Interpretation, spin!
Here is a more balanced and fact-based treatment : http://www.financialexpress.com/latest_full_story
The New York times seems to be trying to stir up "Fear, Anxiety and doubt". The government is not "Communist" but democratic socialist, like the UK's ruling party and much of the EU, Latin America and many other places.
In Kerala, they are replacing one western Operating System (illegal copies of Windows), with another western operating system (legal licences of Linux). After Microsoft went there and demanded lots of money for no source code and no local language support from their dialect, and Richard Stallman went there and offered full source code and a free system that had already been translated into their local dialect.
Why this should panic investors? Cola is after all very bad for you, why should Indians have to become clones of us fat, sugar-high westerners?
Kerala has done very well without help from the western elites and will carry on doing so. FUD or no FUD.
Yeah I agree, I personally have had very few problems with hardware support in my last five years of having a Linux only house (well an Apple Mac in the corner somewhere).
If you plan on buying something for Linux then you have very little problems. You just google for something that works on Linux then order it.
However, if you expect to be able to buy any strange peripheral (USB powered hamster washer) on a whim and then expect it to work at home, then you may be out of luck.
The only exception to this rule is wireless PCMCIA cards - it is a bit of a lucky dip. Regardless of whatever the model number on the box says, you never really know what chipset you got until you 'lspci'.
Are the organohalogens the reason that Barney has not much going on down there too?
In Russia, Mars comes to you.
The UK has lots of open source developers and a large community but how is the UK doing for Open Source Adoption?
Not Very Well at all.
#!/usr/bin/python
foo='ck'
bar='it'
progress = "fu" + foo + "ing " + "sh" + bar
print progress
I have been trying to think of famous British open source people/projects. Here is what I have come up with so far:
Xen
Mark Shuttleworth (sort of - has a British passport now and wanders around London sometimes).
Tim Berners Lee, WWW
Rob Hartill, Apache
Simon Tatham, Putty
Ian Jackson,ex-Debian Lead
Alan Cox of Redhat and one-time kernel fame
Alan Turing, father of computer science
Jim McQuillan, Linux Terminal Server Project
Dr John Pugh, MP and Linux activist
Can anyone think of any more?