Why software Sucks and What you Can Do About It Debate

[chuck]

The thing about users is that they want to use a system.

The thing about people like the group of us is we want to understand and enhance what we are doing.

The beauty of Linux distros is that they allow you to grow in whatever direction you want to.

As a general home end user <K|X>Ubuntu is a great starting point. And the neat thing is that as your needs grow, the packages are out there to allow you to expand your system as you see fit. If you decide that you need to get 'under the hood' you have the option to drop down to a shell and bang away and the command line.

You might find that you want to learn more than what's provided. You can explore to your heart's content. You can go get Gentoo and learn to compile. You can get Fedora and learn what the RPM stuff is all about. Want a Multimedia PC, there's a distro that drops that on a system and is designed for that purpose.

So if a user needs a starting point, there are simple entry points. If you want power after learning what is out there, there are places to step up too. You just have to realize that everyone starts somewhere and an Ubuntu box may be too simple for your needs at the advanced stages, but is perfect for your gf or mom to work on her web, email, chat, and other daily tasks.

[allix]

Eventually people will upgrade to Office 2007 and we'll get docx (OpenXML) files from family and friends, which is what Novell figured since they will be adding OpenXML support to OpenOffice.org.

Microsoft are wanting to make OpenXML a European ISO/IEC standard.
The specifications are around 6000 pages, its beginning to sound like the PDF specification which all linux pdf applications only implement some of the features.
Sad but true on linux the most feature full pdf client is by adobe.

Will only some of OpenXML be implemented in openoffice? time will only confirm that.

Dude, you really need to quit staring at that GCC Screen Saver all day long and try openSUSE, it already does this!

HAL and DBUS do that, its on many distributions

When I plug my USB key (Which essentially is the same as the majority of digital music players) into my box with openSUSE, a dialog box opens up and asks me if I want to browse it using Konqueror or do nothing. If I open it in Konqueror, stick in a CD I can just drag and drop the tracks I want ripped to my MP3 player, and it does it. Pretty great. The iPod, Zune and some Creative players are very very tricky because they use proprietary means of storing music on the device. Since the iPod is so popular even folks like Novell has people working on that as part of their job (Such as the folks writing Banshee), and there's that libgpod or whatever it is, that all apps can use to do iPod stuff. Eric Raymond's examples of we needing to give up our freedoms to allow people to use their iPods are flat out bullsh!t, I can use my iPod with Amarok and Banshee without any closed-source binary blob crap.

That works on other distros too , you love pimping openSUSE

We need a Microsoft Office clone, not an alternative, but an actual clone, because unless people who have the necessary cash are forced to, they don't want to take the time to learn anything new. A lot of my friends are students, and whenever pirating Office is way too complicated and cumbersome, OpenOffice looks pretty good to them, however to my aunt, it's just not feasible using Microsoft Office at work (Which she has done for years) and come home and use OpenOffice.org..

I suggested on irc for xfce to have its own office suite and was rightly told that office suits are complicated pieces of software and is not something that can be done in a day like a webserver. I personally think hacking on openoffice is the way to go, especially cleaning a lot of the code up so non-sun contributers can understand the code.
Its largely developed by sun developers , which does show .

Exchange support is gonna be really tough as that would require a lot of reverse engineering, which I think is better spent at reverse engineering graphics drivers. Samba, well, Novell is working on that. With WiFi we also need a sh!tload of reverse engineering.

I don't think its the reverse engineering thats the stumble block, its the patient infringement related issues. For example the nouveau project does not reverse engineer the closed source nvidia drivers because nvidia would come onto them. In fact ive heard there is no obfuscated code and the drivers are easy to decompile. They rely on users running REnouveau and sending the output to them.
I presume the project could be done in the same way samba was done by sending packets from *nix boxes to windows boxes and seeing what happens.
I am not sure that there is much demand for a Exchange support in linux, otherwise someone would of started the project by now. There is nothing to stop anyone starting it.


An interesting observation ive noticed through out this thread, everything suggested that linux should have is basically an implementation of an existing technology by windows or mac osx. If this is always going to be the case, linux on the desktop will never really get a mass audience because were always be waiting for windows or mac osx to create something and then we implement it. There are a few exceptions like virtual desktop windows that mac osx is releasing on there next release which has been in linux for over 10 years
Xgl/beryl and Co. seem to be another area, although vista does have some kind of 3d desktop going on with aero. And mac osx will possibly have something similar.

Implementing previous technology is not just tied to the desktop, a lot of secure enhanced features like selinux has been done on other systems before.
TrustedSolaris has had Mandatory access control for decades.

I was reading about the The FreeBSD Audit System that has been added to FreeBSD 6.2 which mentions the FreeBSD kernel implementation, extensible file format adopted from OpenSolaris BSM, mechanisms used for processing and maintaining the audit trail, and the OpenBSM audit library and tool set. The actual paper mentioned early on how portions of the design and implementation of audit on Freebsd are derived from audit implementation developed for mac os x.

The open source world has not, correct me if i am wrong, developed anything new them selfs, that closed source vendors have implemented there own way.
Except the virtual windows and xgl/beryl that i have mentioned above.
Ok, Upstart the event-based replacement for the init daemon tested on ubuntu is something new,


The actual FreeBSD paper can be found here :-
http://www.trustedbsd.org/20060303-ukuu ... -audit.pdf
[/quote]

[Tsuroerusu]

Eventually people will upgrade to Office 2007 and we'll get docx (OpenXML) files from family and friends, which is what Novell figured since they will be adding OpenXML support to OpenOffice.org.

Microsoft are wanting to make OpenXML a European ISO/IEC standard.
The specifications are around 6000 pages, its beginning to sound like the PDF specification which all linux pdf applications only implement some of the features.
Sad but true on linux the most feature full pdf client is by adobe.

Will only some of OpenXML be implemented in openoffice? time will only confirm that.

Well, Microsoft is pretty much the sole backer of OpenXML, OpenDocument has Sun, IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Corel, KDE and others behind it. The public sector various countries, seem to largely favor ODF.

However, OpenOffice.org not gonna replace Microsoft Office within the foreseeable future, Microsoft Office 2007 will eventually be pushed into schools, corporations and other entities that use it, as they purchase new systems and the old Office versions get taken out of the channel. Since Office 2007 has the Microsoft stamp on it, people will retrain their staff without thinking twice about it, and then we will start receiving docx files from family and friends using Word 2007 on a Windows Vista machine, if OpenOffice.org can't read that format, it's not interesting to people like students (The group of people whom I think is most likely use OpenOffice.org because of the hefty price of M$ Office) at all if the school uses Microsoft Office 2007.

Dude, you really need to quit staring at that GCC Screen Saver all day long and try openSUSE, it already does this!

HAL and DBUS do that, its on many distributions

Yep, HAL and DBUS are tremendous new achievements for the free software desktop!

When I plug my USB key (Which essentially is the same as the majority of digital music players) into my box with openSUSE, a dialog box opens up and asks me if I want to browse it using Konqueror or do nothing. If I open it in Konqueror, stick in a CD I can just drag and drop the tracks I want ripped to my MP3 player, and it does it. Pretty great. The iPod, Zune and some Creative players are very very tricky because they use proprietary means of storing music on the device. Since the iPod is so popular even folks like Novell has people working on that as part of their job (Such as the folks writing Banshee), and there's that libgpod or whatever it is, that all apps can use to do iPod stuff. Eric Raymond's examples of we needing to give up our freedoms to allow people to use their iPods are flat out bullsh!t, I can use my iPod with Amarok and Banshee without any closed-source binary blob crap.

That works on other distros too , you love pimping openSUSE

That and also just the fact that I don't know any other distro that supports KDE as well as openSUSE does. If you don't know what I am talking about, put a default openSUSE 10.2 (with KDE) desktop next to a Fedora Core 6 (with KDE) desktop, and tell me which one is the better, both in terms of polish, integration and overall feel.

We need a Microsoft Office clone, not an alternative, but an actual clone, because unless people who have the necessary cash are forced to, they don't want to take the time to learn anything new. A lot of my friends are students, and whenever pirating Office is way too complicated and cumbersome, OpenOffice looks pretty good to them, however to my aunt, it's just not feasible using Microsoft Office at work (Which she has done for years) and come home and use OpenOffice.org..

I suggested on irc for xfce to have its own office suite and was rightly told that office suits are complicated pieces of software and is not something that can be done in a day like a webserver. I personally think hacking on openoffice is the way to go, especially cleaning a lot of the code up so non-sun contributers can understand the code.
Its largely developed by sun developers , which does show .

Xfce doesn't need it's own office suite, there are already lightweight office programs like like AbiWord (word processor) and Gnumeric (spreadsheet).

Exchange support is gonna be really tough as that would require a lot of reverse engineering, which I think is better spent at reverse engineering graphics drivers. Samba, well, Novell is working on that. With WiFi we also need a sh!tload of reverse engineering.

I don't think its the reverse engineering thats the stumble block, its the patient infringement related issues. For example the nouveau project does not reverse engineer the closed source nvidia drivers because nvidia would come onto them. In fact ive heard there is no obfuscated code and the drivers are easy to decompile. They rely on users running REnouveau and sending the output to them.
I presume the project could be done in the same way samba was done by sending packets from *nix boxes to windows boxes and seeing what happens.

What Nouveau project is doing is basically collecting memory dumps from systems running the NVIDIA driver and then reverse engineering that, I am told that that qualifies as clean-room reverse engineering.

I am not sure that there is much demand for a Exchange support in linux, otherwise someone would of started the project by now. There is nothing to stop anyone starting it.

Actually, Exchange support is a big thing for big companies, it's very much in demand. Ximian (now Novell) wrote an Exchange plug-in for Evolution, which interfaces with Exchange through the web interface, not the real deal IMAPI connectivity.

An interesting observation ive noticed through out this thread, everything suggested that linux should have is basically an implementation of an existing technology by windows or mac osx. If this is always going to be the case, linux on the desktop will never really get a mass audience because were always be waiting for windows or mac osx to create something and then we implement it. There are a few exceptions like virtual desktop windows that mac osx is releasing on there next release which has been in linux for over 10 years
Xgl/beryl and Co. seem to be another area, although vista does have some kind of 3d desktop going on with aero. And mac osx will possibly have something similar.

Since we live in a Windows dominated world, we can't just isolate ourself on an island if we want to reach a wider audience, we gotta have interoperability as daunting as that may look. If Joe user is gonna try Linux on his kid's computer or on an old box, it has to work together in a Windows home network, and even more important, if a company is gonna try deploying Linux desktops, Linux HAS to be able to like integrate into an Active Directory domain etc. etc.

Implementing previous technology is not just tied to the desktop, a lot of secure enhanced features like selinux has been done on other systems before.
TrustedSolaris has had Mandatory access control for decades.

Well, MAC is stuff people have been needing. Remember, Solaris IS UNIX, Linux is a clone of UNIX. Solaris has been around of several decades, Linux has been around since 1991, aka a little over 15 years, so there's some stuff there's still left to be cloned I guess. Personally I'd really like something like FreeBSD jails or Solaris Containers for Linux that would use lightweight virtualization to isolate several instances of a system from each other, instead of running multiple instances of an entire OS at the same time.

I was reading about the The FreeBSD Audit System that has been added to FreeBSD 6.2 which mentions the FreeBSD kernel implementation, extensible file format adopted from OpenSolaris BSM, mechanisms used for processing and maintaining the audit trail, and the OpenBSM audit library and tool set. The actual paper mentioned early on how portions of the design and implementation of audit on Freebsd are derived from audit implementation developed for mac os x.

The open source world has not, correct me if i am wrong, developed anything new them selfs, that closed source vendors have implemented there own way.
Except the virtual windows and xgl/beryl that i have mentioned above.
Ok, Upstart the event-based replacement for the init daemon tested on ubuntu is something new,


The actual FreeBSD paper can be found here :-
http://www.trustedbsd.org/20060303-ukuu ... -audit.pdf

OK, I'm gonna have to call bullshit on this one, for several reasons.

Number one, the free software and open source community absolutely have innovated in tons of ways. At the time (1996), Apache was one of the only, if not the only, web servers that allowed ISPs to host multiple websites on a single box. Firefox, and it's community, has innovated in tons of ways with extensions and the overall feel of the browser, same thing with Thunderbird. BitTorrent is open source, and has been revolutionary in terms of distribution of media on the internet.
TCP/IP was first implemented on BSD UNIX back in the 80', however that was not free software in the beginning, it was out there on the internet before Linux really became solid.

The reason you havn't seen a desktop environment that's radically different (There may be something obscure somewhere) and builds on top of totally new, innovative ideas (In the same way that Nintendo's Wii controller does for video games) for desktop computing, is because only us geeks would bother to ever look at it. Inexperienced users are not gonna use anything that doesn't at least look a little bit familiar. Again, we live in a world where competition in the IT industry, in terms of operating systems and desktop computing, was stifled/eliminated many years ago, because of a certain company located in the northern parts of the United States of America. As long as this "occupation" exists, it's literally impossible not to use some already existing concepts, such as windows in a screen with a mouse cursor.

However, all is not lost in terms of innovation on the free software desktop, you really ought to take a look at what KDE will be doing with KDE 4.0. They are totally rewriting their desktop shell to do a lot of new and innovative stuff. This new desktop metaphor is what is known as Plasma, you can read a little about their intentions here:
http://plasma.kde.org/cms/1029
http://plasma.kde.org/cms/1069

Please notice that these pages are a little bit dated, as hackers prefer to spend all day in SVN or CVS instead of making pretty and updated websites.
If you want a oral explanation (No not that stuff!!) of Plasma, you can listen the second part of the interview with Aaron Seigo from KDE on The Linux Action Show: http://www.linuxactionshow.com/episodes ... wEP019.ogg

[allix]

Actually, Exchange support is a big thing for big companies, it's very much in demand. Ximian (now Novell) wrote an Exchange plug-in for Evolution, which interfaces with Exchange through the web interface, not the real deal IMAPI connectivity.

I had a look at the wikipedia article for novell evolution and it says how it works with advanced features of exchange, under it i saw versions for windows and mac osx available, that is something that almost always happens, and i am actually for cross-platform compatibility, whatever the Os it should work is my motto.
Of course with that, why would someone whose a long time windows user change if he can get the linux apps on windows? its a hard cookie to tackle..

Since we live in a Windows dominated world, we can't just isolate ourself on an island if we want to reach a wider audience, we gotta have interoperability as daunting as that may look. If Joe user is gonna try Linux on his kid's computer or on an old box, it has to work together in a Windows home network, and even more important, if a company is gonna try deploying Linux desktops, Linux HAS to be able to like integrate into an Active Directory domain etc. etc.

I never said once that we should isolate ourself s and write non-portable code or not embrace existing technology. I am just wondering when the day happens when the open source world makes something on the desktop that window,mac osx marvel over and use.

Well, MAC is stuff people have been needing. Remember, Solaris IS UNIX, Linux is a clone of UNIX. Solaris has been around of several decades, Linux has been around since 1991, aka a little over 15 years, so there's some stuff there's still left to be cloned I guess. Personally I'd really like something like FreeBSD jails or Solaris Containers for Linux that would use lightweight virtualization to isolate several instances of a system from each other, instead of running multiple instances of an entire OS at the same time.

I was also referring to FreeBSD which the kernel code base is a lot older than the linux kernel, and now FreeBSD has implemented that technology. I like either FreeBSD jails or Solaris Containers, technology for linux that does this is called Linux-VServer,OpenVZ and FreeVPS.

OK, I'm gonna have to call bullshit on this one, for several reasons.

Number one, the free software and open source community absolutely have innovated in tons of ways. At the time (1996), Apache was one of the only, if not the only, web servers that allowed ISPs to host multiple websites on a single box. Firefox, and it's community, has innovated in tons of ways with extensions and the overall feel of the browser, same thing with Thunderbird. BitTorrent is open source, and has been revolutionary in terms of distribution of media on the internet.
TCP/IP was first implemented on BSD UNIX back in the 80', however that was not free software in the beginning, it was out there on the internet before Linux really became solid.

Ok , you did catch me out there , how can i forget TCP/IP , Apache, Firefox and BitTorrent which are all very good technology that the free world have developed.

The reason you havn't seen a desktop environment that's radically different (There may be something obscure somewhere) and builds on top of totally new, innovative ideas (In the same way that Nintendo's Wii controller does for video games) for desktop computing, is because only us geeks would bother to ever look at it. Inexperienced users are not gonna use anything that doesn't at least look a little bit familiar. Again, we live in a world where competition in the IT industry, in terms of operating systems and desktop computing, was stifled/eliminated many years ago, because of a certain company located in the northern parts of the United States of America. As long as this "occupation" exists, it's literally impossible not to use some already existing concepts, such as windows in a screen with a mouse cursor.

Thats true, how do you think we can get more non-geeks on our boat? without paying them or if we do with a pledge, would it be successful, would us geeks pay ? A lot of us our extremely happy with gnome,kde,e17, fluxbox ,xfce etc as it is, and do not really think twice about something that less geeky users can use. There are exceptions to this geek rule, but its still a niche corner. You can repackage every desktop to look great out-the-box be it opensuse, fedora, ubuntu , deep down its still the same code, just hacked to look more polished, very few if any disros actually re-write programs that are included, a patch to fix some bug but never an accessibility problem because it would become a fork of some program and thats most of the time discouraged, plus it would take too long. The tradition of X making a program then a shiny distro including that program is going to continue not the shiny distro fixing the application.

Basically what i am saying is applications not included with the stock desktop environment also have to be easy to use if you want a wider audience.

[CptnObvious999]

It's still early-days but check this out: http://vivia-video.org/
I could imagine seeing something pop as we get into KDE 4.0, because by the developers will no longer have to struggle with basic multimedia things such as playing a sound, which with aRts took at least 30 lines of code, with Phonon, it's freaking 4. With the basic stuff dead simple, developers could focus on the more complicated stuff, however Phonon is not gonna be doing advanced stuff, it will eventually get a capture API, however I doubt that that's what is need for a GarageBand/Premiere type of thing.

Yeah things have gotten better and in the next year or 2 I think we will have at least one awesome one.

Hardware compatibility, when I plug in a printer it should popup a window asking me if I want to set it up,

Dude, you really need to quit staring at that GCC Screen Saver all day long and try openSUSE, it already does this!

Ok SuSE is probably the best at hardware detection but it still needs some work. My extra keys on my mouse and keyboard never work without some hacking around. Little things like that should be improved but we don't have too much work to do on this front.

Better office suite, sure openoffice and koffice are great but they could still use a lot of work.

We need a Microsoft Office clone, not an alternative, but an actual clone, because unless people who have the necessary cash are forced to, they don't want to take the time to learn anything new. A lot of my friends are students, and whenever pirating Office is way too complicated and cumbersome, OpenOffice looks pretty good to them, however to my aunt, it's just not feasible using Microsoft Office at work (Which she has done for years) and come home and use OpenOffice.org.

Call me crazy but it think Microsoft Office 2007 looks pretty nice, it looks less cluttered and more organized then OpenOffice right now. I hope the OOo crew works on it a bunch. As far as KOffice it looks slightly better but lacks some features and they made a few odd interface decisions, hopefully in KOffice 2 it will be much better.

Better networking support, exchange, samba, and configuring my wifi card should be a easier task then it is now.

Exchange support is gonna be really tough as that would require a lot of reverse engineering, which I think is better spent at reverse engineering graphics drivers. Samba, well, Novell is working on that. With WiFi we also need a sh!tload of reverse engineering.

Yeah but I think it is really necessary, its not like it can't be done. Exchange was the one thing that made me wonder if I even was going to try to run Linux on my work computer, luckily Evolution can use it (even though I hate it and would much rather use KMail).

Thats all I can think of right now, I might add more later.

GPLv3 my friend, GPLv3!!

riiight...

[dann]

Ok, here are some thoughts I have. Most of these should be at the distrobution level. I am coming from the perspective of a pre-installed system a user buys.

1) Wizards and tutorials would be a great thing. When the computer is first logged into it starts a little tutorial like Windows does. I hate that tutorial, but giving the user some guide at first would probably be beneficial.

2) The distro needs to decide on one web browser by default and set it as such for both Gnome and KDE. I think this should be firefox as right now firefox has the most features that the majority of users seem to want; and they work the best. Flash, multi-media, etc. all seem to work better in Firefox than Konqueror or Opera; with the least amount of difficulty. Plus, firefox will probably be what more users have exposure to and is the browser that most developers will support next to Internet Explorer. While I like Konqueror, it's just not ready like Firefox is for the average user. And the gnome browser, what is it? Epiphany, while it is based on Firefox is not firefox.

3) All the media codecs and dvd decryption must be included out of the box. The cost of these should be included in the cost of the system. Users should not be asked whether they want to install these as the general user really does not care. While it is important to our community that open codecs be given preference and education take place; let's face it: Joe computer user is not really that concerned.

4) The gimp's interface should probably be redesigned. I am certainly not qualified as to how; because I like the interface, but apparently the majority of users do not. So maybe there is a better design?

5) Plugging in a piece of hardware should have it work immediatley and bring up an application to use that hardware. Plug in a scanner, get Xsane, a camera get f-spot, a printer - it should automatically be set up.

6) Users should not be given a choice of desktop. The distro either has gnome or kde. Based on either choice the applications installed should be geared for that distro. F-spot on Gnome, Digikam on KDE for example.

7) The package manager should have categories, full descriptions with screen shots layed out in categories. Synaptic gets pretty close to this; maybe click and run is better at this. The user should see applications like OpenOffice, Xara, Inkscape, Audacity, etc. Not libraries and such. Dependencies should automatically be installed, not asked. Don't show the user a list of what is to be installed. If said user chooses OpenOffice and sees that 15 other pieces of software are going to be installed and questioned whether they want to continue, that is going to confuse them. Just do it.

KDE's interface needs some cleaning up. There are too many choices in there and the control center is a bit overwhelming. While I am not keen on the many levels of gnome configurability I must admit, I suspect aspects of the system most general users would want to configure are at their fingertips.

9) I'm looking at my System 76, Ubuntu places window that brings up nautilus. I see a cdrom drive and a cdrom drive. Hmmm.. I only have one drive in here so why am I seeing two devices. If I click on cdrom it tells me hda is not accessible. Bad bad bad. I should not see both. Speaking of that; my dad had such difficulty using a floppy disk in his dapper system. The devices listed should only be those detected, and detected smartly.

These are just some ideas. I'm no usability expert and I am the wrong person to be asking as I am not a general user. Maybe we need to get some general users' opinions.

[Tsuroerusu]

Actually, Exchange support is a big thing for big companies, it's very much in demand. Ximian (now Novell) wrote an Exchange plug-in for Evolution, which interfaces with Exchange through the web interface, not the real deal IMAPI connectivity.

I had a look at the wikipedia article for novell evolution and it says how it works with advanced features of exchange, under it i saw versions for windows and mac osx available, that is something that almost always happens, and i am actually for cross-platform compatibility, whatever the Os it should work is my motto.
Of course with that, why would someone whose a long time windows user change if he can get the linux apps on windows? its a hard cookie to tackle..

Evolution on Windows is far from something that is really usable, and it doesn't sound like something Novell is focusing on. Also, no where in the Wikipedia article does it say that Evolution works with advanced Exchange features.

With KDE 4, KDE's PIM suite, Kontact, will run natively on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. I think this is a good idea.

Since we live in a Windows dominated world, we can't just isolate ourself on an island if we want to reach a wider audience, we gotta have interoperability as daunting as that may look. If Joe user is gonna try Linux on his kid's computer or on an old box, it has to work together in a Windows home network, and even more important, if a company is gonna try deploying Linux desktops, Linux HAS to be able to like integrate into an Active Directory domain etc. etc.

I never said once that we should isolate ourself s and write non-portable code or not embrace existing technology. I am just wondering when the day happens when the open source world makes something on the desktop that window,mac osx marvel over and use.

Well, Microsoft ripped off Firefox and Konqueror for IE7, I'm sure they got inspired by Thunderbird for Windows Mail in Vista etc. etc.
The innovation you see from free and open source software is mostly new ways to use existing tools, the reason you're not seeing new tools, is because nobody besides geeks would use them because Joe User shits his pants about anything that's not familiar to him. That's not to say that you couldn't create something new and cool, but I think that energy is better spent on actually getting the free software desktop to a point where it's appealing to the general user, then we can start to do new stuff, which KDE 4 will already be doing with Plasma (Listen to the interview, and you'll *hear* what I mean).

Well, MAC is stuff people have been needing. Remember, Solaris IS UNIX, Linux is a clone of UNIX. Solaris has been around of several decades, Linux has been around since 1991, aka a little over 15 years, so there's some stuff there's still left to be cloned I guess. Personally I'd really like something like FreeBSD jails or Solaris Containers for Linux that would use lightweight virtualization to isolate several instances of a system from each other, instead of running multiple instances of an entire OS at the same time.

I was also referring to FreeBSD which the kernel code base is a lot older than the linux kernel, and now FreeBSD has implemented that technology. I like either FreeBSD jails or Solaris Containers, technology for linux that does this is called Linux-VServer,OpenVZ and FreeVPS.

Dude you really don't you your (UNIX)history very well do you? (Not meant to sound offensive).

FreeBSD jail was first introduced in FreeBSD 4.0, which came out in 2000, and back then, Linux didn't even work very well on laptops, it was very early days of desktop Linux for Joe User.

FreeBSD has been focusing as much on the server as Linux has been focusing on the desktop in recent years, which is quite a lot. So obviously they're gonna have some features for server usage that are cool. But think about this, neither NetBSD or OpenBSD has jails in the way FreeBSD does. OpenBSD puts Apache into a chroot jail, but that's clearly not the same as using a kernel-level virtual machine to lock down the system.

OK, I'm gonna have to call bullshit on this one, for several reasons.

Number one, the free software and open source community absolutely have innovated in tons of ways. At the time (1996), Apache was one of the only, if not the only, web servers that allowed ISPs to host multiple websites on a single box. Firefox, and it's community, has innovated in tons of ways with extensions and the overall feel of the browser, same thing with Thunderbird. BitTorrent is open source, and has been revolutionary in terms of distribution of media on the internet.
TCP/IP was first implemented on BSD UNIX back in the 80', however that was not free software in the beginning, it was out there on the internet before Linux really became solid.

Ok , you did catch me out there , how can i forget TCP/IP , Apache, Firefox and BitTorrent which are all very good technology that the free world have developed.

I could name numerous others, such as Asterisk, OpenSSH (Lots of cool stuff in there), Democracy Player .....
There's like a sea of free and open source innovation out there, I don't get why you can't see it!

And oh, did I mention that Sun's HotSpot virtual machine for Java is under the GPL today? It certainly didn't start as free software, but future development will be done in the open.

The reason you havn't seen a desktop environment that's radically different (There may be something obscure somewhere) and builds on top of totally new, innovative ideas (In the same way that Nintendo's Wii controller does for video games) for desktop computing, is because only us geeks would bother to ever look at it. Inexperienced users are not gonna use anything that doesn't at least look a little bit familiar. Again, we live in a world where competition in the IT industry, in terms of operating systems and desktop computing, was stifled/eliminated many years ago, because of a certain company located in the northern parts of the United States of America. As long as this "occupation" exists, it's literally impossible not to use some already existing concepts, such as windows in a screen with a mouse cursor.

Thats true, how do you think we can get more non-geeks on our boat? without paying them or if we do with a pledge, would it be successful, would us geeks pay ? A lot of us our extremely happy with gnome,kde,e17, fluxbox ,xfce etc as it is, and do not really think twice about something that less geeky users can use. There are exceptions to this geek rule, but its still a niche corner. You can repackage every desktop to look great out-the-box be it opensuse, fedora, ubuntu , deep down its still the same code, just hacked to look more polished, very few if any disros actually re-write programs that are included, a patch to fix some bug but never an accessibility problem because it would become a fork of some program and thats most of the time discouraged, plus it would take too long. The tradition of X making a program then a shiny distro including that program is going to continue not the shiny distro fixing the application.

Basically what i am saying is applications not included with the stock desktop environment also have to be easy to use if you want a wider audience.

Well, first of all, I think we need for the free desktop to gain more users, because more users will also bring in more developers, and more developers means even faster development. Look at KDE 4 for example, it's gonna go native on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, that will certainly bring in a few developers from those platforms to KDE.

Please allow me to quote Mr. Jeremy Allison from an article from ZDnet

"What should the Open Source/Free Software community do about Vista? In my opinion, we need to just keep doing what we're doing. Various pundits have predicted doom and gloom if we don't compromise on our principles and adopt proprietary drivers, or license proprietary media codecs to allow Apple iPods to work with Linux. I don't agree. You don't change a winning strategy just as you're starting to succeed. Linux has become completely dominant in some areas such as high performance computing and outshines Windows in areas like Web serving. It's just in the workgroup server space, which is tied into the Windows desktop, that the Microsoft monopoly still holds. We need to keep improving our products and, most importantly, keep offering the one feature that only we have, the one that Microsoft can't copy without completely changing their businesses model. We need to keep offering our users software Freedom. If Microsoft wants to copy that, then I'd welcome it and welcome them to our community. But I think they have to go through the tipping point with Windows Vista first."

Source: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9590_22-6151049-2.html

Just in case you don't know, I completely agree with what Jeremy says in this article, he makes an absolutely perfect point. I think the most fantastic, most innovative "feature" (It's not a bug, it's a feature! Damn it!!) that GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD has is freedom, you don't know how much you value something until the day you don't have it!

It's still early-days but check this out: http://vivia-video.org/
I could imagine seeing something pop as we get into KDE 4.0, because by the developers will no longer have to struggle with basic multimedia things such as playing a sound, which with aRts took at least 30 lines of code, with Phonon, it's freaking 4. With the basic stuff dead simple, developers could focus on the more complicated stuff, however Phonon is not gonna be doing advanced stuff, it will eventually get a capture API, however I doubt that that's what is need for a GarageBand/Premiere type of thing.

Yeah things have gotten better and in the next year or 2 I think we will have at least one awesome one.

Completely agree, if we make ourselves a time machine real quick and travel two years back in time, we were still largely struggling with laptop ACPI support etc. etc.
It may seem like we're so far off, but what we don't notice is how fast we're moving on a daily basis, you can see that by just taking a quick look at the KDE SVN and GNOME CVS repos.

Hardware compatibility, when I plug in a printer it should popup a window asking me if I want to set it up,

Dude, you really need to quit staring at that GCC Screen Saver all day long and try openSUSE, it already does this!

Ok SuSE is probably the best at hardware detection, however it would be nice if other distros were just as good. But my extra keys on my mouse and keyboard never work without some hacking around. Little things like that should be improved but we don't have too much work to do on this front.

Yeah, I agree. The problem I see for things like that is that Logitech is so damn closed, they don't support their keyboards or mice, and let alone be webcams, on anything but Windows and Crap OS X, we either need to reverse engineer their drivers, or somehow convince them to give us some specs.

Better office suite, sure openoffice and koffice are great but they could still use a lot of work.

We need a Microsoft Office clone, not an alternative, but an actual clone, because unless people who have the necessary cash are forced to, they don't want to take the time to learn anything new. A lot of my friends are students, and whenever pirating Office is way too complicated and cumbersome, OpenOffice looks pretty good to them, however to my aunt, it's just not feasible using Microsoft Office at work (Which she has done for years) and come home and use OpenOffice.org.

Call me crazy but it think Microsoft Office 2007 looks pretty nice, it looks less cluttered and more organized then OpenOffice right now. I hope the OOo crew works on it a bunch. As far as KOffice it looks slightly better but lacks some features and they made a few odd interface decisions, hopefully in KOffice 2 it will be much better.

I too am very much looking forward to KOffice 2, because with Phonon it might be very likely to see video and audio as a part of that, already very slick, office suite. Videos in presentations anyone?

Better networking support, exchange, samba, and configuring my wifi card should be a easier task then it is now.

Exchange support is gonna be really tough as that would require a lot of reverse engineering, which I think is better spent at reverse engineering graphics drivers. Samba, well, Novell is working on that. With WiFi we also need a sh!tload of reverse engineering.

Yeah but I think it is really necessary, its not like it can't be done. Exchange was the one thing that made me wonder if I even was going to try to run Linux on my work computer, luckily Evolution can use it (even though I hate it and would much rather use KMail).

Yeah, better Exchange support would help a lot in terms of getting companies to switch to Linux, because there aren't any good drop-in replacements for Exchange. Sure there's Zimbra and stuff, but if you have a network of hundreds of users, the gratis versions of those because unmanageable very very quickly and you need the "commercial" upgrades with good management tools etc.
I think one of the big strengths of GNU/Linux and FreeBSD is that they either come with, or make easily available, an ocean of immense amounts of great free software, I just think we really need like a high quality, very scalable and easy to manage Exchange replacement, and some sort of converter tool for that. And then of course also, better Exchange support in Evolution.

Thats all I can think of right now, I might add more later.

GPLv3 my friend, GPLv3!!

riiight...

What, you don't believe me? Well I can tell you right now, that both KDE and GNOME WILL be moving to GPLv3!

MUAHAHHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!
GPLv3 is coming to haunt you Devon Warren!
AHHH THE CHUPAGNUBRA!! IT'S BEHIND YOU!!!!!!

[allix]

Evolution on Windows is far from something that is really usable, and it doesn't sound like something Novell is focusing on. Also, no where in the Wikipedia article does it say that Evolution works with advanced Exchange features.

With KDE 4, KDE's PIM suite, Kontact, will run natively on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. I think this is a good idea.

Sorry it was a wikipedia article linked to that page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Exchange_Server

Microsoft Exchange Server uses a proprietary RPC protocol, of which only the API is documented (see MAPI). It was designed to be used by the Microsoft Outlook client. Email hosted on an Exchange server can be accessed using POP3 and IMAP4, with clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird and Lotus Notes. Both Microsoft Outlook and Novell Evolution are clients capable of using the advanced features of Exchange Server; Microsoft Entourage for Mac also has most of the advanced features implemented in the latest version. Exchange accounts can also be accessed through a web browser, known as Outlook Web Access (OWA). Exchange 2003 also features a WAP version of OWA, called Outlook Mobile Access (OMA).

Dude you really don't you your (UNIX)history very well do you? (Not meant to sound offensive).

FreeBSD jail was first introduced in FreeBSD 4.0, which came out in 2000, and back then, Linux didn't even work very well on laptops, it was very early days of desktop Linux for Joe User.

FreeBSD has been focusing as much on the server as Linux has been focusing on the desktop in recent years, which is quite a lot. So obviously they're gonna have some features for server usage that are cool. But think about this, neither NetBSD or OpenBSD has jails in the way FreeBSD does. OpenBSD puts Apache into a chroot jail, but that's clearly not the same as using a kernel-level virtual machine to lock down the system.

TrustedSolaris with MAC, audit and other security features have possibly been around since the mid-80s, it was designed for governments and other institutions with high security in mind, FreeBSD jails is very new in comparison.
This is largely because Freebsd being a BSD unix taken from the university did not need this type of security. Its been added to Freebsd largely by Robert Watson who has done a lot of trustedBSD work, for clients and research.
His webpage is http://www.watson.org/~robert/

Why did you bring up laptop support with unix history? perhaps showing something thats lacking? well with linuxbios , hopefully this compatibility issues will be a thing of the past..

I installed openbsd on qemu yesterday and i was quite surprised that sendmail was enabled by default, ive tried looking on the openbsd website faq and no explanation for that has been given, sendmail is notoriously known for having security hole, why not use postfix if any to be enabled by default.

Openbsd does not have mac, audit or very little of trustedBSD features, i believe its because the development team is very small, and more time is spend on auditing than adding new features.

I would like to see them in openbsd, but who i am to moan that to

I could name numerous others, such as Asterisk, OpenSSH (Lots of cool stuff in there), Democracy Player .....
There's like a sea of free and open source innovation out there, I don't get why you can't see it!

And oh, did I mention that Sun's HotSpot virtual machine for Java is under the GPL today? It certainly didn't start as free software, but future development will be done in the open.

Asterisk is a free software/open-source implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX) so its nothing that the open source designed.
I am not sure if your aware, but linux podcasts such as lugradio,tllts still use skype than Asterisk to interview guests, that sad but true.
I am sure Asterisk is very good for other things, but skype does seem to be a killer app in that respect.
OpenSSH is an implementation of SSH because the licensing of it changed and the openbsd development team created there own, you are right that there are features that are not in the original protocol.
The latest version Democracy Player just crashed after playing mp4 , ive tried on gentoo before my hardrive went, and now on debian it does the same thing. Its properly a bug with xine than Democracy Player. I do like that application thats also available on windows and mac

Well, first of all, I think we need for the free desktop to gain more users, because more users will also bring in more developers, and more developers means even faster development. Look at KDE 4 for example, it's gonna go native on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, that will certainly bring in a few developers from those platforms to KDE.

Please allow me to quote Mr. Jeremy Allison from an article from ZDnet

"What should the Open Source/Free Software community do about Vista? In my opinion, we need to just keep doing what we're doing. Various pundits have predicted doom and gloom if we don't compromise on our principles and adopt proprietary drivers, or license proprietary media codecs to allow Apple iPods to work with Linux. I don't agree. You don't change a winning strategy just as you're starting to succeed. Linux has become completely dominant in some areas such as high performance computing and outshines Windows in areas like Web serving. It's just in the workgroup server space, which is tied into the Windows desktop, that the Microsoft monopoly still holds. We need to keep improving our products and, most importantly, keep offering the one feature that only we have, the one that Microsoft can't copy without completely changing their businesses model. We need to keep offering our users software Freedom. If Microsoft wants to copy that, then I'd welcome it and welcome them to our community. But I think they have to go through the tipping point with Windows Vista first."

Source: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9590_22-6151049-2.html

Just in case you don't know, I completely agree with what Jeremy says in this article, he makes an absolutely perfect point. I think the most fantastic, most innovative "feature" (It's not a bug, it's a feature! Damn it!!) that GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD has is freedom, you don't know how much you value something until the day you don't have it!

The freedom also IMO means that we do not have to dominate the desktop world either, because we have lots to win but nothing to loose, apart from perhaps businesses putting in lots of money, but us geeks do not care about that, as long as we can use software for free we are happy, the average user is not , but lets be positive and think we can take the desktop market like a huge Hurricane Katrina.

What, you don't believe me? Well I can tell you right now, that both KDE and GNOME WILL be moving to GPLv3!

MUAHAHHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!
GPLv3 is coming to haunt you Devon Warren!
AHHH THE CHUPAGNUBRA!! IT'S BEHIND YOU!!!!!!

Thats interesting, it reminds me of the interview on tllts about how mplayer,xine cannot use fluendo codecs because there closed source.


To Dan :-

You have some very good points, you can apply for a job at canonical , you sound like the man they need

[Tsuroerusu]

Evolution on Windows is far from something that is really usable, and it doesn't sound like something Novell is focusing on. Also, no where in the Wikipedia article does it say that Evolution works with advanced Exchange features.

With KDE 4, KDE's PIM suite, Kontact, will run natively on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. I think this is a good idea.

Sorry it was a wikipedia article linked to that page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Exchange_Server

Microsoft Exchange Server uses a proprietary RPC protocol, of which only the API is documented (see MAPI). It was designed to be used by the Microsoft Outlook client. Email hosted on an Exchange server can be accessed using POP3 and IMAP4, with clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird and Lotus Notes. Both Microsoft Outlook and Novell Evolution are clients capable of using the advanced features of Exchange Server; Microsoft Entourage for Mac also has most of the advanced features implemented in the latest version. Exchange accounts can also be accessed through a web browser, known as Outlook Web Access (OWA). Exchange 2003 also features a WAP version of OWA, called Outlook Mobile Access (OMA).

Well that might be true, but the thing that people complain about when they talk about Evolution's Exchange connectivity is that it's really slow compared to Outlook.

Dude you really don't you your (UNIX)history very well do you? (Not meant to sound offensive).

FreeBSD jail was first introduced in FreeBSD 4.0, which came out in 2000, and back then, Linux didn't even work very well on laptops, it was very early days of desktop Linux for Joe User.

FreeBSD has been focusing as much on the server as Linux has been focusing on the desktop in recent years, which is quite a lot. So obviously they're gonna have some features for server usage that are cool. But think about this, neither NetBSD or OpenBSD has jails in the way FreeBSD does. OpenBSD puts Apache into a chroot jail, but that's clearly not the same as using a kernel-level virtual machine to lock down the system.

TrustedSolaris with MAC, audit and other security features have possibly been around since the mid-80s, it was designed for governments and other institutions with high security in mind, FreeBSD jails is very new in comparison.
This is largely because Freebsd being a BSD unix taken from the university did not need this type of security. Its been added to Freebsd largely by Robert Watson who has done a lot of trustedBSD work, for clients and research.
His webpage is http://www.watson.org/~robert/

OK, I guess I underestimated you, sorry about that.

Why did you bring up laptop support with unix history? perhaps showing something thats lacking? well with linuxbios , hopefully this compatibility issues will be a thing of the past..

To point out that that is some of the things that Linux development has been focusing on, it's only in very very recent years that FreeBSD started to focus just a bit on ACPI laptop support.

Your hopes for LinuxBIOS are WAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY too high, the only manufacturer that has truly been open with specifications is AMD, and here we're talking expensive server and workstation motherboards, not cheap and consumer-level desktop motherboards (Although I'm still waiting to see what they will do for the next generation of ATi CrossFire chipsets). The only laptop that can use LinuxBIOS is the OLPC, and that is so stripped down that most of us wouldn't use it.
Laptops are never using a standardized design, almost every damn vendor has their own small proprietary tweaks and hooks in it.

I installed openbsd on qemu yesterday and i was quite surprised that sendmail was enabled by default, ive tried looking on the openbsd website faq and no explanation for that has been given, sendmail is notoriously known for having security hole, why not use postfix if any to be enabled by default.

Yes, that is one thing I do not understand.

Openbsd does not have mac, audit or very little of trustedBSD features, i believe its because the development team is very small, and more time is spend on auditing than adding new features.

I would like to see them in openbsd, but who i am to moan that to

I would like to see a few features in OpenBSD, but I can actually tell you why a lot of those features are not in there, however the reason is gonna sound very zealotish. If you go read on openbsd.org you will find this: "Our efforts emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography."
The thing here you need to notice is "correctness". OpenBSD developers believes in writing correct code that doesn't need all those "overkill" methods to be secure. That is why they don't have a jailing feature the same way that FreeBSD does, because they think it's overkill.
At least this is my understanding. This is also the reason why WPA support is very poor in OpenBSD, they believe it's overly complicated and overkill.

I could name numerous others, such as Asterisk, OpenSSH (Lots of cool stuff in there), Democracy Player .....
There's like a sea of free and open source innovation out there, I don't get why you can't see it!

And oh, did I mention that Sun's HotSpot virtual machine for Java is under the GPL today? It certainly didn't start as free software, but future development will be done in the open.

Asterisk is a free software/open-source implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX) so its nothing that the open source designed.

Did I ever say that? Nope I didn't. I seriously doubt that you can use one of Cisco's PBX systems to give math lessons to your kids, there is a guy who is using Asterisk for that. Like I said before, most open source innovation you see in the form of using existing tools in a new way, not making new tools, because nobody would use them besides geeks so why spend the resources on that? Sure it may be boring for you to see like "start menus" in KDE and GNOME, but isn't our goal to reach out to the Windows crowd more than we do? Then we better spend our resources in the right places.

I am not sure if your aware, but linux podcasts such as lugradio,tllts still use skype than Asterisk to interview guests, that sad but true.
I am sure Asterisk is very good for other things, but skype does seem to be a killer app in that respect.

TLLTS uses Asterisk most of the time, I know this for a fact, as I myself has been one a few times!

Pat, Dann, Linc? Could I get some confirmation on this?

OpenSSH is an implementation of SSH because the licensing of it changed and the openbsd development team created there own, you are right that there are features that are not in the original protocol.

http://www.openbsd.org/crypto.html

OpenSSH

As of the 2.6 release, OpenBSD contains OpenSSH, an absolutely free and patent unencumbered version of ssh. OpenSSH interoperated with ssh version 1 and had many added features,

* all components of a restrictive nature (i.e., patents, see ssl(8)) had been directly removed from the source code; any licensed or patented components used external libraries.
* had been updated to support ssh protocol 1.5.
* contained added support for Kerberos authentication and ticket passing.
* supported one-time password authentication with skey(1).

Roughly said, we took a free license release of ssh, OpenBSD-ifyed it. About a year later, we extended OpenSSH to also do SSH 2 protocol, the result being support for all 3 major SSH protocols: 1.3, 1.5, 2.0.

That "OpenBSD-ifyed" sentence to me spells heavy auditing, careful thinking when actual programming are done etc. etc.
If that is not innovation in some way, shape or form, then I don't know what it is.

The latest version Democracy Player just crashed after playing mp4 , ive tried on gentoo before my hardrive went, and now on debian it does the same thing. Its properly a bug with xine than Democracy Player. I do like that application thats also available on windows and mac

That was not the point, yes the GNU/Linux version is not that stable, however this is a cool app. It's kind of like a TV-guide for podcasts and video shows on the internet, sure it is a little buggy, but everything that's not been tested for years will probably be, just look at Compiz and Beryl, freaking unstable even a year after the first version was out, even WITH corporate backing and full-time developers.

Well, first of all, I think we need for the free desktop to gain more users, because more users will also bring in more developers, and more developers means even faster development. Look at KDE 4 for example, it's gonna go native on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, that will certainly bring in a few developers from those platforms to KDE.

Please allow me to quote Mr. Jeremy Allison from an article from ZDnet

"What should the Open Source/Free Software community do about Vista? In my opinion, we need to just keep doing what we're doing. Various pundits have predicted doom and gloom if we don't compromise on our principles and adopt proprietary drivers, or license proprietary media codecs to allow Apple iPods to work with Linux. I don't agree. You don't change a winning strategy just as you're starting to succeed. Linux has become completely dominant in some areas such as high performance computing and outshines Windows in areas like Web serving. It's just in the workgroup server space, which is tied into the Windows desktop, that the Microsoft monopoly still holds. We need to keep improving our products and, most importantly, keep offering the one feature that only we have, the one that Microsoft can't copy without completely changing their businesses model. We need to keep offering our users software Freedom. If Microsoft wants to copy that, then I'd welcome it and welcome them to our community. But I think they have to go through the tipping point with Windows Vista first."

Source: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9590_22-6151049-2.html

Just in case you don't know, I completely agree with what Jeremy says in this article, he makes an absolutely perfect point. I think the most fantastic, most innovative "feature" (It's not a bug, it's a feature! Damn it!!) that GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD has is freedom, you don't know how much you value something until the day you don't have it!

The freedom also IMO means that we do not have to dominate the desktop world either, because we have lots to win but nothing to loose, apart from perhaps businesses putting in lots of money, but us geeks do not care about that, as long as we can use software for free we are happy, the average user is not , but lets be positive and think we can take the desktop market like a huge Hurricane Katrina.

When I say get larger market share I'm talking about the old-ass pipe-dream of "The Year of the Linux desktop" where in one year Linux takes like 90 percent of the market away from Windows in one year. That is a pipe-dream, period!
I am hoping that over say the next 8 years that Linux will garner like 10 or 20 percent of the global desktop market. I am hoping, not believing.

"as long as we can use software for free we are happy", that is not what Jeremy was referring to, neither is it what I am referring to when I say "free software".
Let's just get something straight, when I say "free software" I mean like "freedom software", not gratis software, aka no-need-to-pay-money.
If you want it in other languages, here you go:

German: Freie Software
French: Logiciel Libre
Spanish: Software Libre
Danish: Fri Software
Norwegian: Fri Programvare
Swedish: Fri Programvara

Are we clear? ... Good.

If I in some magic way had to pay to receive OpenBSD under the BSD license, or some GNU/Linux distro under the GPL, hell yeah I'd gladly pay. If I had the options of paying either 10 bucks for Microsoft Windows or 500 bucks for GNU/Linux, I'd gladly pay for GNU/Linux, for me it's "a matter of liberty", not price.
If you don't understand this concept, you should really go read the GNU manifesto, or even the GNU GPL itself, which is like an implementation of a philosophy.
If that still ain't enough, watch this speech by Richard Stallman: http://audio-video.gnu.org/video/richar ... _video.ogg

What, you don't believe me? Well I can tell you right now, that both KDE and GNOME WILL be moving to GPLv3!

MUAHAHHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!
GPLv3 is coming to haunt you Devon Warren!
AHHH THE CHUPAGNUBRA!! IT'S BEHIND YOU!!!!!!

Thats interesting, it reminds me of the interview on tllts about how mplayer,xine cannot use fluendo codecs because there closed source.[/url]
Apparently you don't know what Xine is. Xine is an entire multimedia framework, it's not just a player, sure there's a GUI player that uses the Xine framework, but that's not "Xine". MPlayer is a very monolithic style video player that both uses FFmpeg and a lot of it's own tricks from it's own spine of a codebase AFAIK. Same thing with VLC.

These other players can't use those Fluendo codecs, because those codecs are GStreamer codecs. In theory you probably could make Xine able to use GStreamer codecs, but damn that would take a shitload of work, work that is not worth the effort, especially since new GUI frontends for GStreamer would be easier by several multitudes to write (Mr. Washko, quit complaning and start hacking!! You lazy bump!!! )

To Dan :-

You have some very good points, you can apply for a job at canonical , you sound like the man they need

Extremely bad idea, because if Dann was "in charge" at Canonical or the Ubuntu project, everything would look like WindowMaker and have a shaving device included with every freaking CD shipped through Ship It! (If you don't get this joke, listen to episode 37 from about 20 mins. into the show, and be shocked!).

[allix]

Your hopes for LinuxBIOS are WAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY too high, the only manufacturer that has truly been open with specifications is AMD, and here we're talking expensive server and workstation motherboards, not cheap and consumer-level desktop motherboards (Although I'm still waiting to see what they will do for the next generation of ATi CrossFire chipsets). The only laptop that can use LinuxBIOS is the OLPC, and that is so stripped down that most of us wouldn't use it.
Laptops are never using a standardized design, almost every damn vendor has their own small proprietary tweaks and hooks in it.

I was under the impression that the linuxBios is just a matter of flashing the bios and then everything should work. I never knew it was something the motherboard manufacturers install, of course they can but i thought it was a *homebrew* bios that has a open standard.

At least this is my understanding. This is also the reason why WPA support is very poor in OpenBSD, they believe it's overly complicated and overkill.

so how do you secure a wireless network without using a vpn or is that the solution on openbsd?

Did I ever say that? Nope I didn't. I seriously doubt that you can use one of Cisco's PBX systems to give math lessons to your kids, there is a guy who is using Asterisk for that.

Do you have a link? i am interested.

TLLTS uses Asterisk most of the time, I know this for a fact, as I myself has been one a few times!

Which show is this where you are the guest?

That was not the point, yes the GNU/Linux version is not that stable, however this is a cool app. It's kind of like a TV-guide for podcasts and video shows on the internet, sure it is a little buggy, but everything that's not been tested for years will probably be, just look at Compiz and Beryl, freaking unstable even a year after the first version was out, even WITH corporate backing and full-time developers.

Comparing Compiz/beryl with Democracy player is a unfair.
Democracy player seems to me like a web based application but in its own integrated browser that only goes to a certain webpage thats stored locally or perhaps it reads a xml file. Either way its not as difficult as 3d cubes that xgl/beryl does.
I believe democracy is written in python too.
Democracy is still not a 1.X release so i should really keep quiet and send in bug reports , which i have.
Xgl/beryl IMO is still in experimental stage and is moving very fast because its something very new to desktops in general so lots of people are interested in hacking at it.
When it gets to a mature stage we will see it rock solid.

I really do not know sometimes why windows gets away with being unstable at times, i guess it because of support and continuous updates etc, plus 3rd part apps can fix those holes to some extent.

I cannot comment on mac osx but because its based on unix its stable underneath.

"as long as we can use software for free we are happy", that is not what Jeremy was referring to, neither is it what I am referring to when I say "free software".
Let's just get something straight, when I say "free software" I mean like "freedom software", not gratis software, aka no-need-to-pay-money.
If you want it in other languages, here you go:

German: Freie Software
French: Logiciel Libre
Spanish: Software Libre
Danish: Fri Software
Norwegian: Fri Programvare
Swedish: Fri Programvara

Are we clear? ... Good.

If I in some magic way had to pay to receive OpenBSD under the BSD license, or some GNU/Linux distro under the GPL, hell yeah I'd gladly pay. If I had the options of paying either 10 bucks for Microsoft Windows or 500 bucks for GNU/Linux, I'd gladly pay for GNU/Linux, for me it's "a matter of liberty", not price.

I mean freedom too, i don;t mean free as in warez free or opera browser free.
If i payed 500 bucks for linux i would also be free to give it to you for free.
Freedom means to do what you want with the code, with some restrictions.

That is one main reason why BSD license advocates choose BSD, because the only restriction is acknowledgment of the authors.

I like the gpl because it keeps code in the community.
BSD license is good for some things, especially when you have no choice but need to use closed source for whatever reason.

Apparently you don't know what Xine is. Xine is an entire multimedia framework, it's not just a player, sure there's a GUI player that uses the Xine framework, but that's not "Xine". MPlayer is a very monolithic style video player that both uses FFmpeg and a lot of it's own tricks from it's own spine of a codebase AFAIK. Same thing with VLC.

These other players can't use those Fluendo codecs, because those codecs are GStreamer codecs. In theory you probably could make Xine able to use GStreamer codecs, but damn that would take a shitload of work, work that is not worth the effort, especially since new GUI frontends for GStreamer would be easier by several multitudes to write (Mr. Washko, quit complaning and start hacking!! You lazy bump!!! )

Sorry my sentence was too vague, xine uses ffmpeg to do the actual encoding/decoding, where gstreamer has .so files. FFMPEG is under the LGPL so it use propritary codecs, my mistake from before, but ffmpeg would have to be rewritten to accept them, then xine would then integrate the ffmpeg changes.

Mplayer could not use them though, because its a gpl application, not sure about vlc.

[TankCatNinjaFish]

I see a lot of talk about what we need and want and how things should be done. Is all this talk accompanied by any action? The source code is open and the development tools are free for a reason. Go write something.

[Tsuroerusu]

Your hopes for LinuxBIOS are WAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY too high, the only manufacturer that has truly been open with specifications is AMD, and here we're talking expensive server and workstation motherboards, not cheap and consumer-level desktop motherboards (Although I'm still waiting to see what they will do for the next generation of ATi CrossFire chipsets). The only laptop that can use LinuxBIOS is the OLPC, and that is so stripped down that most of us wouldn't use it.
Laptops are never using a standardized design, almost every damn vendor has their own small proprietary tweaks and hooks in it.

I was under the impression that the linuxBios is just a matter of flashing the bios and then everything should work. I never knew it was something the motherboard manufacturers install, of course they can but i thought it was a *homebrew* bios that has a open standard.

All BIOSes today, are proprietary piece of shit 16-bit BIOSes that still does a lot of ground-work needed for DOS-based operating systems.
To write a BIOS you need the exact specs of the chipset and other devices because you're initializing the bare metal hardware for the OS to run on top of. The same way Linux or *BSD needs a device driver, LinuxBIOS needs hardware support. There is no "open standard" to code for, as this quote from Wikipedia will tell you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxBIOS
"Since LinuxBIOS must initialize the bare hardware, it must be ported to every chipset and motherboard that it supports."

You can see which chipsets are supported right here:
http://www.linuxbios.org/Supported_Chipsets_and_Devices

Here's the list of supported motherboards:
http://www.linuxbios.org/Supported_Motherboards

The ironic part is that most of those chipsets and boards are AMD chipsets and AMD-based motherboards.

Also, I think you will find this interesting:
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html

How You Can Help

Since requests for manufacturers' cooperation have not solved the problem, another approach is needed. Now we are asking you to help.

For instance, simply installing a new BIOS in the machine is a substantial challenge. Most manufacturers don't publish the information on how to do this. If you can figure this out for some recent model, especially a laptop, that would be a substantial contribution.

Cooperation from the manufacturers would make that work unnecessary. However, to gain cooperation we need to press for it.

The most uncooperative company is Intel, which has started a sham "open source" BIOS project. The software consists of all the unimportant parts of of a BIOS, without the hard parts. It won't run, and doesn't bring us any closer to a BIOS that does run. It is just a distraction. By contrast, AMD has been cooperating by releasing major chunks of their BIOS source code and making their technical experts available.

You can help our campaign by buying AMD CPU chips and not buying Intel, and by publishing statements about what you're doing. Likewise, buy motherboards that support free BIOS. See Supported Motherboards for information on which companies cooperate and which models and motherboards are supported.

When you do this, tell your friends and your coworkers. And please tell us, too--please write to bios@gnu.org to tell us that you have chosen what to buy because it supports a free BIOS.

You can also help our campaign by writing to manufacturers such as Intel, saying they ought to cooperate with a fully free BIOS. Calm but strong disapproval, coupled with stating an intention to take action accordingly, is more effective than venting rage. You can send them e-mail through the form on their Web site, and snail mail to:

Intel Corporation
2200 Mission College Blvd.
Santa Clara, CA 95052
USA

Please send a copy of your message to bios@gnu.org, so we can monitor the support for this campaign. The more mail they get, the more effect, so please do add your voice to ours.

We would like to offer positive inducements as well as pressure. Our idea is to endorse, for a period of time, the first manufacturer in a given category of machine (for instance, laptops) that cooperates fully with free BIOS. To make this offer effective, we would like to collect a long list of people who say they intend to make their choices according to our endorsements."

At least this is my understanding. This is also the reason why WPA support is very poor in OpenBSD, they believe it's overly complicated and overkill.

so how do you secure a wireless network without using a vpn or is that the solution on openbsd?

The last time I was looking through mailing list posts I saw something called AuthIP being mentioned.

Did I ever say that? Nope I didn't. I seriously doubt that you can use one of Cisco's PBX systems to give math lessons to your kids, there is a guy who is using Asterisk for that.

Do you have a link? i am interested.

I remember hearing about this ever being like a written howto, I heard it referred to on the video show called Systm, once, when they did an episode on Asterisk, which you can watch here: http://revision3.com/systm/asterisk
Be sure to download the Theora version.

TLLTS uses Asterisk most of the time, I know this for a fact, as I myself has been one a few times!

Which show is this where you are the guest?

Here ya go:
http://tllts.org/dl.php?episode=137
http://tllts.org/dl.php?episode=146
http://tllts.org/dl.php?episode=163
http://tllts.org/dl.php?episode=172

That was not the point, yes the GNU/Linux version is not that stable, however this is a cool app. It's kind of like a TV-guide for podcasts and video shows on the internet, sure it is a little buggy, but everything that's not been tested for years will probably be, just look at Compiz and Beryl, freaking unstable even a year after the first version was out, even WITH corporate backing and full-time developers.

Comparing Compiz/beryl with Democracy player is a unfair.
Democracy player seems to me like a web based application but in its own integrated browser that only goes to a certain webpage thats stored locally or perhaps it reads a xml file. Either way its not as difficult as 3d cubes that xgl/beryl does.
I believe democracy is written in python too.
Democracy is still not a 1.X release so i should really keep quiet and send in bug reports , which i have.
Xgl/beryl IMO is still in experimental stage and is moving very fast because its something very new to desktops in general so lots of people are interested in hacking at it.
When it gets to a mature stage we will see it rock solid.

You're right, I guess I'm just bombed not to have very stable desktop effects before Windows Vista shipped.

I really do not know sometimes why windows gets away with being unstable at times, i guess it because of support and continuous updates etc, plus 3rd part apps can fix those holes to some extent.

I can tell you why, people get used to the craptaculousness, it's that simple, when Windows crash, people are just like "Yeah, oh OK, fine, I'll reboot!". Sounds ridiculous to us as users of UNIX-style OSes, however the Windows world is THAT sad to look at.

I cannot comment on mac osx but because its based on unix its stable underneath.

I hate Mac OS X, can't stand that OS. But that's just me I guess, I guess I expect too much from a UNIX OS that doesn't provide me freedom.

"as long as we can use software for free we are happy", that is not what Jeremy was referring to, neither is it what I am referring to when I say "free software".
Let's just get something straight, when I say "free software" I mean like "freedom software", not gratis software, aka no-need-to-pay-money.
If you want it in other languages, here you go:

German: Freie Software
French: Logiciel Libre
Spanish: Software Libre
Danish: Fri Software
Norwegian: Fri Programvare
Swedish: Fri Programvara

Are we clear? ... Good.

If I in some magic way had to pay to receive OpenBSD under the BSD license, or some GNU/Linux distro under the GPL, hell yeah I'd gladly pay. If I had the options of paying either 10 bucks for Microsoft Windows or 500 bucks for GNU/Linux, I'd gladly pay for GNU/Linux, for me it's "a matter of liberty", not price.

I mean freedom too, i don;t mean free as in warez free or opera browser free.
If i payed 500 bucks for linux i would also be free to give it to you for free.
Freedom means to do what you want with the code, with some restrictions.

That is one main reason why BSD license advocates choose BSD, because the only restriction is acknowledgment of the authors.

I like the gpl because it keeps code in the community.
BSD license is good for some things, especially when you have no choice but need to use closed source for whatever reason.

OK, cool, just wanted to be sure that we were talking about the same thing.
I personally prefer the GPL overall, and the BSD license for specific things, such as OGG Vorbis and Apache.

Apparently you don't know what Xine is. Xine is an entire multimedia framework, it's not just a player, sure there's a GUI player that uses the Xine framework, but that's not "Xine". MPlayer is a very monolithic style video player that both uses FFmpeg and a lot of it's own tricks from it's own spine of a codebase AFAIK. Same thing with VLC.

These other players can't use those Fluendo codecs, because those codecs are GStreamer codecs. In theory you probably could make Xine able to use GStreamer codecs, but damn that would take a shitload of work, work that is not worth the effort, especially since new GUI frontends for GStreamer would be easier by several multitudes to write (Mr. Washko, quit complaning and start hacking!! You lazy bump!!! )

Sorry my sentence was too vague, xine uses ffmpeg to do the actual encoding/decoding, where gstreamer has .so files. FFMPEG is under the LGPL so it use propritary codecs, my mistake from before, but ffmpeg would have to be rewritten to accept them, then xine would then integrate the ffmpeg changes.

Mplayer could not use them though, because its a gpl application, not sure about vlc.

This is an interest page to read: http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/legal.html

I see a lot of talk about what we need and want and how things should be done. Is all this talk accompanied by any action? The source code is open and the development tools are free for a reason. Go write something.

Like I mentioned earlier, I can't even write a hello world program in C!

[hellonorman]

These are just some ideas. I'm no usability expert and I am the wrong person to be asking as I am not a general user. Maybe we need to get some general users' opinions.

When I think about all this stuff I keep getting stuck here. What are the things that a "geek" user wants to do that a general user has no use for? But let's limit this to ordinary desktop computing. Browsing, Email, Photos, Video, CD/DVD burning, Office Application, File Sharing, Backups, (are there more?).

Surely a general user wants those things to just work. But ANY user wants those things to just work. Don't they?

[TankCatNinjaFish]

I see a lot of talk about what we need and want and how things should be done. Is all this talk accompanied by any action? The source code is open and the development tools are free for a reason. Go write something.

Like I mentioned earlier, I can't even write a hello world program in C!

That's your problem. Open source is not a democracy, you only get to vote if you contribute code or money.

[Patrick]

TLLTS uses Asterisk most of the time, I know this for a fact, as I myself has been one a few times!

Pat, Dann, Linc? Could I get some confirmation on this?

We use Asterisk all the time for the phone interviews and shows where we can't get together. In the beginning we used Skype regularly but now we keep it around solely as a backup. I can't remember the last time we used it.