I'm currently using Evolution to access my company's Exchange addressbook via LDAP. Here's what you need to do:
Go to Contacts. Pick Tools -> Addressbook sources from the menu.
Hit the Add button.
Under the Basic tab: Account name can be whatever you want. Server name should be the IP address of the Exchange server. Check the "Requires Authentication" checkbox, and enter your e-mail address (the address of your mailbox on the Exchange Server).
Under the Advanced tab: Leave the port at 389, the default. Under search base, enter a string of text like this:
ou=My_Facility, o=My_Company, c=US
If you don't know what to enter for ou and o, you've got two options. If you have a nice Exchange admin who doesn't mind you using an unsupported e-mail client, you can ask them. Otherwise, you can use an LDAP browsing tool to check out the Exchange server.
Make sure you enter the country code! (that's the c=US in my sample above). Leaving this out made my addressbook not work.
I'm pretty comfortable with debian myself, but I was recently looking around for a more user friendly version that I could recommend to newbies. So I tried Storm Linux, and I have to say it's quite nice. It's basically Debian Potato with an easy graphical installer and some custom Storm packages, among which are helix gnome and a nice gtk-based front end to APT.
If you're looking for an easier-to-use debian, I'd recommend Storm.
Does anyone at Slashdot read the referred-to article before posting a story? I only read the first few paragraphs, and it seemed pretty apparent that the story is a hoax.
Take, for, example the "all@microsoft.com" e-mail address. Do you really think that Bill Gates would send such an e-mail to every purchasing clerk, secretary, and human resource person at microsoft?
I could go further, but I don't think it's necessary.
So why post this kind of story with a headline that makes it seem real? It seems kind of sensationalistic to me. If you want fake Microsoft vs. Linux stories, I'd be happy to write one for you. But if you want real news, check the story before post it!
Based on what I know about TMBG, I'm pretty sure their attack on NFS was not intended to be serious. They're just trying to make the point that Napster is only one of many, many, methods of transferring files over the internet, and if you ban Napster it's no big deal for everyone to switch to another protocol.
( Keep in mind that TMBG, unlike some other bands, has a sense of humor. )
In my experience, EFM (from CVS about a month ago) is very stable, as well as being exceptionally lovely. Try it. If you like the command line, you'll love it.
My favorite feature is that you can type commands, file names, and web sites right into the root window, and it does the appropriate thing. - for example you could just type "www.slashdot.org", and it brings up netscape with slashdot loading. You could type "/home/mp3", and it will bring up your mp3 directory. Or you could just type "killall mozilla-bin", and it would run the command.
And don't even get me started about the background image quality, antialiased truetype fonts, and font styles...
I see this as being a cross-platform problem, one that affects Linux as well as Windows. The root of the problem is this:
Even on a multiuser OS, users have full permissions on their own data. This means that if they can be tricked into running any kind of file that contains executable and/or script code, that file will be able to do all kinds of nasty things to their data, since it will run with their permissions.
It is important to note, as others have said here, that to a user their data is more important than system files. Which would you rather have deleted: your/etc directory (or registry for windows users) or all of your important documents? I think that all of us would rather still have our documents - after all, you can always just do a reinstall to recover system files. User-created documents are not always recoverable, and are therefore more valuable.
What's the solution to this? Banning certain file extentions from being transmitted via e-mail does not seem like a real solution. One solution would be "go back to the command line, since that forces users to think about what they are doing instead of just reflexively double-clicking everything". But that would require giving up years of interface design. Is there a way to keep a friendly user interface without making it all too easy for users to run destructive programs?
I believe that both Enlightenment 0.17 and Gnome 1.2 will support alpha-blending, and I believe that Enlightenment will support anti-aliased fonts. For some enlightenment screenshots, see http://www.enlightenment.org/efm.html. I couldn't find any good shots of the development version of gnome, but I've seen the anti-aliased icons in action and they look pretty good.
More importantly, I'd like to celebrate the fact that I got my first blue screen of death on Windows 2000 today at work! I went to open a.doc file in Word, and it said that to install the necessary converter I needed the CD. So I pressed the eject button on the CD-ROM drive, and BANG! BSOD. So much for stablility...
Shouldn't this story be filed under Linux?
on
Slackware Updates
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· Score: 1
Um, last time I checked, Slackware was a distribution of Linux, with no more of a direct relationship to the GNU organization than any of the other Linux disributions. So how come this story was filed under the category of "GNU", not "Linux"? Stories involving all the other distros get filed under "Linux"...
My theory is that Slashdot is doing this in an attempt to pacify Richard M. "GNU/Linux" Stallman. "Look Richard, we're so appreciative of the work GNU has put into free UNIX utilities that we did a story about Linux, and we filed it under GNU!"
I don't think that their aim is to make a one-size-fits-all desktop. Their aim is to create another desktop, one that will be simple to use for novice users. Yes, a UNIX without pipes would be much less powerful. But no, your Grandmother doesn't care. All she wants to do is to be able to surf the web, send email, find where she put her files, and MAYBE hook up a scanner, printer, or cable modem. So she uses this new, super-simple GUI to get around and configure her system.
When you are visiting and you want to write a new startup script for her, just escape to the command prompt, or switch over to Enlightenment or KDE or whatever your favorite desktop shell/environment is.
I think that one environment will never appeal to everybody. That's what Windows tried to do, and that's one of the reasons we all use Linux today. By providing muliple environments for users of different skill levels, Linux can become truly an OS for anybody.
It struck me as just as impressive that the desktop market share for Linux was up to 4%. As the article points out, that's only 1% behind Apple. Wow. Compare that to a year ago.
However, a little part of me has some doubts... It has been pointed out already, and I think quite correctly, that the number of retail copies sold don't really reflect the number of Linux users, since so many of us choose to download and/or burn our own CDs. My question is, how are server/desktop sales calculated? What about Joe "Windows Power User" Schmoe who buys Red Hat at Best Buy so he can play with it? Is that a desktop or a server sale? And if he only uses it once or twice, spending the vast majority of his time booting to his Windows 98 partition, does that really reflect an increase in Linux market share?
I think that Linux is a great desktop OS, and I have helped a few friends install it on their computers. But I guess I still have trouble believing a 4% market share. If I went down to the coffee shop and started asking people "What's your desktop OS?", I really doubt that 1 in 25 would say "I'm using Linux!".
So is it just me, or do these statistics not reflect the reality? Maybe you just can't compare the market share of free and comercial software...
Or, for that matter, flour. C'mon now, which would you rather have, a new CPU or a loaf of nice fresh baked bread?
on a less random (and offtopic) note, my boss just ordered me a laptop. It cost a lot of money. At the moment, the Pentium III is by far the chip of choice for high-end mobile systems, with no real competition from AMD yet. Do you all think that Transmeta is going to take the role of AMD in this area, or will we have to wait until the portable Athlon comes out to see a real price war?
1. I want a first post. 2. If I can't have a first post, I would just like to say that I'm glad AMD is around. Otherwise, chip prices would just be incredibly high, and then who would be able to afford to buy flowers?
Um, I think he was kidding there folks. Do you really thing that someone would say "the total pointlessness of coding standards" in seriousness? No need to get all offended. Next time, laugh.
I guess somebody found the first hole in the code.
on
Darwin on Crusoe?
·
· Score: 1
Well, I suppose it was only a matter of time, but congrats on being the first (as far as I've seen.)
I know that this probably doesn't make a big difference, but my humble programmer's opinion is that looking for accountability from a corporation for it's toolkit is just wishful thinking.
I have had enough experience fighting with buggy Visual Basic components (built by Microsoft) to know that a typical big corporation's idea of accountablity is to tell you "Yes, we know that's a bug, it will be fixed someday" or "Um, why don't you try doing it a different way?" -- this after your company shelled out a hundred bucks or so for tech support and you spent the whole day on the phone.
It's been said here before, and I'll say it again: the "You get better support from big corporations" story is a myth. At least with open source you can fix the bug yourself. Or, if you can't fix it yourself, you can contact the developer and ask them to fix it for you, instead of waiting for some corporate manager to decide if your bug is even worth looking at.
I think I understand where you're coming from. There have been a number of companies that have taken code released under more permissive, BSD style liscences and used it for commercial purposes, while still giving something back to the community in terms of code contributions.
I think that this is a nice thing for everyone involved. In fact, I think it is nicer and more generous to release your code under a BSD-ish liscence than the GPL. There's fewer strings attached, and I understand that.
The GPL says "Here's my code, but I'm going to restrict what you do with it because I don't trust you one bit!" That's not as nice as just giving your code away. Unfortunately, though, I fear that it is necessary, to keep Microsoft or another commercial establishment from closing, altering, and profiting from someone else's code without giving anything back.
If every person and business were generous and ethical and kept high moral standards, then we wouldn't need the GPL. But then, we wouldn't need policemen either. However, we live in an imperfect world, and so the GPL serves a useful purpose.
Tom, he was talking about the GPL as relevant to this story.
The article talks about how, whether or not the stock of the big Open Source corporations crashes, whether or not the massive popularity of free software cools, the current contribution of companies such as Red Hat will remain. Why? Because of the fact that their source code is released under the GPL.
Even if Red Hat goes bankrupt tomorrow, all their code will be around for anyone to use. And just as importantly, their code will not be used in a way that is harmful to the Open Source communitiy, such as in a closed source distro by Microsoft or another giant corporation. Why? Because of the GPL.
This kind of blatant FUD seems like sour grapes to me:
"Maybe my company hasn't proven itself to be a major force in the internet, but that's only because we didnt want to be anyway! The internet runs on BAD TECHNOLOGY! Sure, e-commerce has exploded in the past two years, but everyone buying things on line is a FOOL! How childish of all of you for thinking that you could implement key internet standards without Novell! All you web developers should have been patient enough to wait for us!"
"That's OK though, we forgive you. And what's more, we have lovingly designed a system that will eliminate those pesky security headaches forever. Just sign up for our new INSTA-SECURE service and we'll take care of all your problems! For just a small monthly fee, we'll store all your customer's secure data on OUR server! To sign up, visit our secure site NOW! Just make sure that you enable cookies first..."
Perhaps you think I'm kidding with that last "enable cookies" comment. But I'm not! The following was cut-and-pasted from the shop.novell.com website just moments ago:
Warning It has been determined that you have disabled cookies in your browser. ShopNovell requires cookies be enabled before you continue. For more information on this subject, please see Store Policies at shop.novell.com/shopnovell/help.html
In the midst of all these opinions, I would like to voice mine.
Mozilla is a very important project. Important for the future of Linux, important for the future of the web. The reason does not have to do so much with Microsoft or Netscape, but with different theories of web design and browser design.
Ever since Netscape 2.0, both Netscape and Microsoft have been attempting to increase the popularity of their browsers by adding "features" to the HTML standard that only they supported. Some of these "features" have made HTML better and more powerful. Some (like IE's MARQUEE tag) have been laughably bad. But in any case, they have tried, with each new browser release, to expand the HTML standard, and by doing so to draw people to their product.
I think that it is a mistake to look at Netscape as the good guy in this regard. Netscape has tried just as hard as Microsoft to add proprietary extentions to the HTML standard.
In recent years, the W3C (an independent, nonprofit organization) has developed a clear set of standards for HTML, and these standards include the abilities to use powerful features like Style Sheets and Dynamic HTML. Netscape's support for these standards has been downright awful. Not only have they failed to fully implement CSS1 and other standards, but they have once again tried to add their own extentions (namely the downright evil LAYER tag) to the HTML standard.
In fact, the reason that many developers (myself included) prefer to target IE for our intranet applications is that HTML has come a long way in the last 2 years, and Netscape has not kept up. IE is, in fact, much closer to the W3C standard then Netscape. When Netscape fails to render a page correctly, then, should the blame be put on the designer, who wrote proper HTML but didn't check it on Netscape, or the browser, which fails to render the code correctly? I'm not talking about Flash, Plug-ins, or VB here folks: I'm talking about javascript, CSS, and DHTML, all of which are based on open, independant standards.
However, Mozilla represents a paradigm shift for web browsers. Mozilla's cheif goal, as a pure web browser, is to be completely compliant with all the current standards. They are not trying to extend HTML, but conform to it. This is as it should be. HTML is a language. It has standards. Why is it acceptable for a web browser to not meet these standards? For example, (and I may be getting myself into trouble here because I'm not a C programmer) how would you feel about a C compiler that failed to compile common commands correctly? I don't think you'd tolerate it, even if the compiler included support for exiting new commands that were not part of the C language.
By making a completely standards based, cross platform browser, Mozilla is paving the way for the future of the internet, when it won't matter what O/S or browser anybody is using. Any page written according to the HTML standard will display correctly on anybody's machine, and we'll all be able to communicate.
So, to wrap up: Mozilla is important for Linux. Why? Because the future is coming where having a standards compliant browser will be the most important feature in defining a "real" desktop operating system. Yes, even more important than a good Office package. The web is only going to grow in importance, and with mozilla Linux users - as well as users of Mac, Windows, and other operating systems - will be able to enjoy its full potential.
Actually, the Mozilla project did start over. That's why this project has taken so long. They have created, from scratch, a very usable, standards compliant, cross-platform browser. In fact, they have brought cross-platform to a whole new level. Mozilla includes a customizable UI that uses it's own widgets, rather than those of the OS. That way a web page with text boxes, scroll bars, and buttons should look the same on Linux, Windows, and Mac.
And that's just one of the nice features Mozilla has to offer. Go check out the Mozilla advocacy site and be impressed.
Slashdot Mirror
Go to Contacts. Pick Tools -> Addressbook sources from the menu.
Hit the Add button.
Under the Basic tab: Account name can be whatever you want. Server name should be the IP address of the Exchange server. Check the "Requires Authentication" checkbox, and enter your e-mail address (the address of your mailbox on the Exchange Server).
Under the Advanced tab: Leave the port at 389, the default. Under search base, enter a string of text like this:
ou=My_Facility, o=My_Company, c=US
If you don't know what to enter for ou and o, you've got two options. If you have a nice Exchange admin who doesn't mind you using an unsupported e-mail client, you can ask them. Otherwise, you can use an LDAP browsing tool to check out the Exchange server.
Make sure you enter the country code! (that's the c=US in my sample above). Leaving this out made my addressbook not work.
For search scope, pick "Sub."
-Abe
Abe
If you're looking for an easier-to-use debian, I'd recommend Storm.
Take, for, example the "all@microsoft.com" e-mail address. Do you really think that Bill Gates would send such an e-mail to every purchasing clerk, secretary, and human resource person at microsoft?
I could go further, but I don't think it's necessary.
So why post this kind of story with a headline that makes it seem real? It seems kind of sensationalistic to me. If you want fake Microsoft vs. Linux stories, I'd be happy to write one for you. But if you want real news, check the story before post it!
Abe
( Keep in mind that TMBG, unlike some other bands, has a sense of humor. )
Abe
My favorite feature is that you can type commands, file names, and web sites right into the root window, and it does the appropriate thing. - for example you could just type "www.slashdot.org", and it brings up netscape with slashdot loading. You could type "/home/mp3", and it will bring up your mp3 directory. Or you could just type "killall mozilla-bin", and it would run the command.
And don't even get me started about the background image quality, antialiased truetype fonts, and font styles...
Abe
Even on a multiuser OS, users have full permissions on their own data. This means that if they can be tricked into running any kind of file that contains executable and/or script code, that file will be able to do all kinds of nasty things to their data, since it will run with their permissions.
It is important to note, as others have said here, that to a user their data is more important than system files. Which would you rather have deleted: your /etc directory (or registry for windows users) or all of your important documents? I think that all of us would rather still have our documents - after all, you can always just do a reinstall to recover system files. User-created documents are not always recoverable, and are therefore more valuable.
What's the solution to this? Banning certain file extentions from being transmitted via e-mail does not seem like a real solution. One solution would be "go back to the command line, since that forces users to think about what they are doing instead of just reflexively double-clicking everything". But that would require giving up years of interface design. Is there a way to keep a friendly user interface without making it all too easy for users to run destructive programs?
More importantly, I'd like to celebrate the fact that I got my first blue screen of death on Windows 2000 today at work! I went to open a .doc file in Word, and it said that to install the necessary converter I needed the CD. So I pressed the eject button on the CD-ROM drive, and BANG! BSOD. So much for stablility...
My theory is that Slashdot is doing this in an attempt to pacify Richard M. "GNU/Linux" Stallman. "Look Richard, we're so appreciative of the work GNU has put into free UNIX utilities that we did a story about Linux, and we filed it under GNU!"
Just my two cents.
Abe
When you are visiting and you want to write a new startup script for her, just escape to the command prompt, or switch over to Enlightenment or KDE or whatever your favorite desktop shell/environment is.
I think that one environment will never appeal to everybody. That's what Windows tried to do, and that's one of the reasons we all use Linux today. By providing muliple environments for users of different skill levels, Linux can become truly an OS for anybody.
However, a little part of me has some doubts... It has been pointed out already, and I think quite correctly, that the number of retail copies sold don't really reflect the number of Linux users, since so many of us choose to download and/or burn our own CDs. My question is, how are server/desktop sales calculated? What about Joe "Windows Power User" Schmoe who buys Red Hat at Best Buy so he can play with it? Is that a desktop or a server sale? And if he only uses it once or twice, spending the vast majority of his time booting to his Windows 98 partition, does that really reflect an increase in Linux market share?
I think that Linux is a great desktop OS, and I have helped a few friends install it on their computers. But I guess I still have trouble believing a 4% market share. If I went down to the coffee shop and started asking people "What's your desktop OS?", I really doubt that 1 in 25 would say "I'm using Linux!".
So is it just me, or do these statistics not reflect the reality? Maybe you just can't compare the market share of free and comercial software...
Abe
on a less random (and offtopic) note, my boss just ordered me a laptop. It cost a lot of money. At the moment, the Pentium III is by far the chip of choice for high-end mobile systems, with no real competition from AMD yet. Do you all think that Transmeta is going to take the role of AMD in this area, or will we have to wait until the portable Athlon comes out to see a real price war?
Sorry for my silliness... It's been a crazy day.
Abe
1. I want a first post. 2. If I can't have a first post, I would just like to say that I'm glad AMD is around. Otherwise, chip prices would just be incredibly high, and then who would be able to afford to buy flowers?
Um, I think he was kidding there folks. Do you really thing that someone would say "the total pointlessness of coding standards" in seriousness? No need to get all offended. Next time, laugh.
You the man.
I have had enough experience fighting with buggy Visual Basic components (built by Microsoft) to know that a typical big corporation's idea of accountablity is to tell you "Yes, we know that's a bug, it will be fixed someday" or "Um, why don't you try doing it a different way?" -- this after your company shelled out a hundred bucks or so for tech support and you spent the whole day on the phone.
It's been said here before, and I'll say it again: the "You get better support from big corporations" story is a myth. At least with open source you can fix the bug yourself. Or, if you can't fix it yourself, you can contact the developer and ask them to fix it for you, instead of waiting for some corporate manager to decide if your bug is even worth looking at.
I liked your story. Were I a moderator today I would give you a point.
Ok, I admit it, I was trying for a first post. So moderate me down to the very depths of the karma underground. I deserve it.
...because penguins are cuter that daemons?
I think that this is a nice thing for everyone involved. In fact, I think it is nicer and more generous to release your code under a BSD-ish liscence than the GPL. There's fewer strings attached, and I understand that.
The GPL says "Here's my code, but I'm going to restrict what you do with it because I don't trust you one bit!" That's not as nice as just giving your code away. Unfortunately, though, I fear that it is necessary, to keep Microsoft or another commercial establishment from closing, altering, and profiting from someone else's code without giving anything back.
If every person and business were generous and ethical and kept high moral standards, then we wouldn't need the GPL. But then, we wouldn't need policemen either. However, we live in an imperfect world, and so the GPL serves a useful purpose.
The article talks about how, whether or not the stock of the big Open Source corporations crashes, whether or not the massive popularity of free software cools, the current contribution of companies such as Red Hat will remain. Why? Because of the fact that their source code is released under the GPL.
Even if Red Hat goes bankrupt tomorrow, all their code will be around for anyone to use. And just as importantly, their code will not be used in a way that is harmful to the Open Source communitiy, such as in a closed source distro by Microsoft or another giant corporation. Why? Because of the GPL.
Myself, I think a little dissent is worth it.
Thank you for not swearing.
In the midst of all these opinions, I would like to voice mine.
Mozilla is a very important project. Important for the future of Linux, important for the future of the web. The reason does not have to do so much with Microsoft or Netscape, but with different theories of web design and browser design.
Ever since Netscape 2.0, both Netscape and Microsoft have been attempting to increase the popularity of their browsers by adding "features" to the HTML standard that only they supported. Some of these "features" have made HTML better and more powerful. Some (like IE's MARQUEE tag) have been laughably bad. But in any case, they have tried, with each new browser release, to expand the HTML standard, and by doing so to draw people to their product.
I think that it is a mistake to look at Netscape as the good guy in this regard. Netscape has tried just as hard as Microsoft to add proprietary extentions to the HTML standard.
In recent years, the W3C (an independent, nonprofit organization) has developed a clear set of standards for HTML, and these standards include the abilities to use powerful features like Style Sheets and Dynamic HTML. Netscape's support for these standards has been downright awful. Not only have they failed to fully implement CSS1 and other standards, but they have once again tried to add their own extentions (namely the downright evil LAYER tag) to the HTML standard.
In fact, the reason that many developers (myself included) prefer to target IE for our intranet applications is that HTML has come a long way in the last 2 years, and Netscape has not kept up. IE is, in fact, much closer to the W3C standard then Netscape. When Netscape fails to render a page correctly, then, should the blame be put on the designer, who wrote proper HTML but didn't check it on Netscape, or the browser, which fails to render the code correctly? I'm not talking about Flash, Plug-ins, or VB here folks: I'm talking about javascript, CSS, and DHTML, all of which are based on open, independant standards.
However, Mozilla represents a paradigm shift for web browsers. Mozilla's cheif goal, as a pure web browser, is to be completely compliant with all the current standards. They are not trying to extend HTML, but conform to it. This is as it should be. HTML is a language. It has standards. Why is it acceptable for a web browser to not meet these standards? For example, (and I may be getting myself into trouble here because I'm not a C programmer) how would you feel about a C compiler that failed to compile common commands correctly? I don't think you'd tolerate it, even if the compiler included support for exiting new commands that were not part of the C language.
By making a completely standards based, cross platform browser, Mozilla is paving the way for the future of the internet, when it won't matter what O/S or browser anybody is using. Any page written according to the HTML standard will display correctly on anybody's machine, and we'll all be able to communicate.
So, to wrap up:
Mozilla is important for Linux. Why? Because the future is coming where having a standards compliant browser will be the most important feature in defining a "real" desktop operating system. Yes, even more important than a good Office package. The web is only going to grow in importance, and with mozilla Linux users - as well as users of Mac, Windows, and other operating systems - will be able to enjoy its full potential.
Thanks for letting me put my two cents in.
-Abe
And that's just one of the nice features Mozilla has to offer. Go check out the Mozilla advocacy site and be impressed.