zero0w

Use alsamixergui package to enable the surround rear speakers if you are using ALSA as audio driver.

Blender 2.27 is released now!

Go grab it while it is hot.

Note: With the release of 2.27, GUI internationalization is now being supported. You can get the interface language translated to your native locale language, just like many other GTK+/KDE apps out there.

Actually, the open source Sphere RPG Engine 1.0 has been released for quite some time. The sourceforge site claimed it can compile on X11/Linux, but so far no news of getting it compiled/running under Linux yet.

Sphere 2D RPG Engine

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sphere

http://www.aegisknight.org/sphere

Sphere Suite IDE (Editor)

http://spheresuite.sourceforge.net/

Hopefully this open source RPG suite can rival RPGMaker or the sort in the future, and managed to be run on Linux.

Well, no reasonable people would be buying Linux products from a company who's sueing others for using Linux anyway, and perhaps the boycott really made some impact on SCO Linux product sales.

Anyhow, I think it is a desperate attempt to lure Microsoft to buy SCO, so that Microsoft can use more FUD to stop Linux, but not competing on merits. With kernel 2.6 coming, Linux has more staying power and more chances to prove itself than ever.

However, with Apple backing project such as GNU Darwin and KHTML (and recently Apple donated some computers for Perl 6 development), no one will be able to stop the spread of open source any more.

Just following the rules.:P

Funny this comes from someone who's calling 'Mods are evil' and hopelessly bound to his rebellious passion as much as he had. :wink:

Back to the topic (don't hijack it again ):

There are some problems with GTK 1.x plugin compatibility with GTK-2.0+ based PCSX v1.5, you can read the thread here:

http://www.ngemu.com/forums/showthread.php...&threadid=36310

Dragon Mage, your problem might be related to the issue on libpthread-0.9.so w/ Pete MesaGL plugin, you can check out the readme.txt from Pete MesaGL plugin for further detail, as someone else suggested similar problem in this thread:

http://www.ngemu.com/forums/showthread.php...&threadid=35158

Oops... maybe you're right. But PSX emulator is mostly for gaming anyway.  :P

nuff said.

:P

Oops... maybe you're right. But PSX emulator is mostly for gaming anyway. :P

The open source Playstation emulatior, PCSX, has released version 1.5.

http://www.ngemu.com/forums/showthread.php...?threadid=36210

PCSX now depends on GTK-2.0+ to run.

Also PCSX has internal BIOS emulation, which means you don't have to download or use the PSX BIOS (it's illegal if you don't have a PSX console, that is). Internal BIOS' compatibility has improved a lot since v1.4.

You will also need to download plugins and put them into the Plugin directory to run the PSX emulator.

For information on getting Linux plugins you can see the latest post from the linked page above.

I think 'txtplay' from the awemidi package compiled from source should work, but it is segfaulted right now. I need to look into it later.

Update:

#1. Rosegarden-4 0.9 is released! I think they will make 1.0 the first stable release.

http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/rosegarden/

Thac's Rosegarden-4 rpm in Sound section for Mandrake 9.1:

http://rpm.nyvalls.se/sound9.1.html

#2. The Fix Is In: Ardour Set For Summer Release!

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/05/2346223

It exists, AptGet+Synaptic, well almost. The problem here is more of accpetance. No one get fired for buying Microsoft. No get fired when you put in an MS patch and it messes things up (altough you should test any patch pefore deploying it). Testing could take a few days to a month.  

 

Now getting stuff from somewhere that has no accoutability to you. Me I know it works, the Linux community is made up of reponsible group of persons. The hard part is convincing a CEO that its safe.

That's the job of Linux advocacy group and community based organizations. While the business world trusted credibility, it is the reality that things changed and big company who could afford will afford, and while other non-profit organizations will have to organize around cost-effective community based solutions. You can't have all the goodies or otherwise people will deploy Linux a lot faster than they have already. There isn't really a 'free' (or very cheap) solution to critical task that people had to depend on a daily basis - but I wonder even for commercial software (namely Windows) how long can they be up and running and not subject to this maintenance schedule.

You will take several months of testing before deploying a new desktop OS. Lets say 2-6 months. By the time that you do, you got 6-10 months left of RH support and 10-16 months of Mandrake support. Than you go through the cycle again.

I am not sure about that, but then again it's about the task involved that requires the amount of testing time.

Hhhhmmm... who want to do that. If you deployed Windows 2000 back in 2000 (or even late in 1999), you would not have ot worry about replacing it till 2007 or 2008. After all, XP does not really work better.

 

Also Deploying it to the 150 or so machines at the University is time consuming.

Well, I think massive deployment of Linux is more difficult than small scale (< 50 seats) deployment. But Linux for now is more geared to custom jobs such as cluster computing and properly configured environment. For a general purpose desktop environment Windows certainly has its own merits. You are right if you recommend Windows for those who are less inclined to learn and adjust then. As for 2007/08, I think DRM solution and Palladium will force you upgrade already, don't bet on that long.

Its problematic when the OS your using is about to be EOL'ed and the hardware companies have not release drivers for the newer distro yet.

No argument on that. Make sure the hardware you purchase/use already has Linux support, if not, no one can tell when or how well it will be supported. However, keep in mind Linux driver support mostly would not have hardware obsolesence - even the hardware company is gone Linux and open source programmer can still make it work in the kernel driver.

Come on Promise, release some RH8 drivers (actually found a third party fix for this... but Raid 0/1 only), but its hard to convince even IT people that it works when you go to the official site and they say it does not. Besides, RAID 5 is what people want these days.

I need to study more about that. But RAID support seems crucial to commercial and critical task environment. However, I believe the increase of Linux programmers in the future will help a bit on that.

The great thing about Linux is that you probably never have to reinstall.... so you can deploy it once and have it running for 3-5 years till it EOL's, but if you EOL it in 12-18 months thats a problem... than it becomes a bit like Windows (which properly used should last more than a year... altough in a public environment, reisntall need ot be done more often).

The EOL for Linux will become longer in the future, I suppose, because many packages will become more mature and requires less maintenance. I could be wrong, perhaps someone will come along and make much more improvement to the kernel and user space apps and then more maintenance is needed. I think if you want commercial quality or stability of upgrade cycle, the only way to do that is to convince and request commercial software vendors to make Linux port using GUI widget such as Qt or wxWindows. Of course it won't be easy, but I think it's what most commercial shop will face in the future: cross-platform app support.

I think I read somewhere there is going to be mid tier security update solutions for EOL distros. The Register has an article on this one:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/29330.html

Maybe we will have some up2date clone in the making provided by 3rd party or community as low cost solutions. It's more crucial when you have to support server operations which needs constant maintenance, unlike on desktop where you simply downgrade or find another app when the one you are using is not working.

As some of you may have followed the discussion on TCPA or Palladium architecture and their implications, like this article in Linux Magazine, well now the call is made, by Linus Torvald, the chief hacker behind the Linux kernel, who has openly expressed his opinion of making DRM (Digital Rights Management) to work with Linux in the form of kernel certification, the GPL issue, and again of binary kernel modification.

Linus Torvalds:

''DRM is Perfectly OK with Linux''

Flame Linus to crisp

http://lkml.org/archive/2003/4/23/365/

According to Linus interpretation, he believes DRM signature or externally installed private key (eg. in the form of binary kernel module) would not violate the GPL license as 'derived work'. In one of his reply on the kernel mailing list, he has suggested the issue of the whole DRM thing is who can get to sign the DRM key and signature. Eg. Who signs a particular version of kernel to allow it to become runnable on a particularly DRM enabled hardware?

Again according to his interpretation, if the user (_not_ a system vendor) can decide to sign his own system, he can keep other people from hacking his system (or the kernel part, more appropriately) by disallowing, for eg., booting from a third-party Linux boot CD because the DRM-enabled system (eg. BIOS) won't allow uncertified kernel to boot at all. This, of course, is only true when the user can get to set what kind of signature key he can input into the BIOS _and_ modify his own kernel - but then to access certain media content or secured web site he will need to input another key and modify with another kernel module which contains that encryted key.

This may sound confusing, but literally, the embedded device like TiVO or many other Digital media set-top box which runs on Linux may want to use this signing feature first so that users would not be able to modify the system to intercept the video stream on those pay-per-view home video service, etc.

I do not know what to think about this. But I don't think Richard Stallman would in any way possible to keep quiet on this issue. This might not stop P2P traffic but would definitely helps to track down which machines are involved in the P2P activity since your system ID/kernel signature could be embedded in the packet sending out in the network if you would need to access authorized content in anyway.

Well, the future falls upon us, but for Linus to announce its coming it seems to be somewhat surprising. This should not prevent kernel hacking at all, but expect to lose your access to some secured websites or service if you want to do some kernel hacking. Literally, it will also be the hardware system vendors who will decide whether they will allow you to change your DRM keys and signature in the hardware level. We'll just need to see if the Congress will say 'go' on this one. :|

The author's site is back online, so I guess he does not need to mirror it as for now.

The list is very good. Thanks.

Also, DOlson has a new article on Linux games here:

Gaming and Linux in 2003

http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?si...03/04/18/169209

Thanks, this guide should be very useful. :D

Not necessarily, a one-year cycle could mean less support problem in release management. But again I think Red Hat's main revenue stream comes from corporate Advanced server edition, which is upgrade about once per year, or even less often.

Whats true for the server market is not true for the desktop market. Desktop stuff has to be more bleeding edge because users want the latest in GUI, multimedia, graphics, office-suite etc. Also, note that a server release is based on a desktop release that has been tested by a large user base for quite some-time. Hence the desktop cycle must be much less than the server release cycle, to allow for adequate testing by the user base.

The irony is the server revenue is subsidizing the desktop side of it. An average desktop Linux box cost much less than a server version of it. Not to mention the downloadable ISOs. However, it's only fair to say 'subsidizing' when the users don't work on ANY development or testing; in the case of Linux community, this is the opposite, the users are also the developers and also the beta testers and hence the distributors can benefit from them as kind of voluntary labor. In any case I see Linux is a different community altogether - not just different from Windows, from also very different from Mac user community altogether.

A one year cycle would mean less revenue.

Not necessarily, a one-year cycle could mean less support problem in release management. But again I think Red Hat's main revenue stream comes from corporate Advanced server edition, which is upgrade about once per year, or even less often.

The problem always is that open source package update & release is never meant to comply with business upgrade cycle. The year 2002-2003 has so many noticeable changes in desktop (Xft2, Fontconfig, Qt3.0+ & GTK2.0+ plus various apps upgrades) and kernel area (2.6 is coming summer, and glibc and gcc had numerous upgrades) and also the increasing user base that support problem becomes much a greater problem than before.

Once these changes become more stabilized, I think we will have less of a trouble; but I agree Mandrake's own tools are rushed, just that the rapid evolution is increasingly rapid and more update and patches would be expected, at least in the coming year or so (not to mention what the XFree86 fork project can contribute to the scene with more patches against the official tree by different Linux distributors out there...).

Bitstream Vera fonts finally released, grab it here:

http://www.gnome.org/fonts/

anon, I'll email the author and see what he thinks about it.

Stay tuned :) .

Wow... so fast :shock: ...

Ok, you can try again later, since geocities.com has bandwidth limit. :?

With permission from the author, I have setup a mirror host for this great (and long) article: Linux On Desktop, as his site has been offline for quite sometime...

Linux On Desktop - Mirror Page 21

http://www.geocities.com/zero0w/linux-desktop.html

Original link

http://www.ratedpc.com/review.asp?id=59

The author is currently seeking a new host, maybe Desktoplinux.com will become the official host of this interesting article later.

EDIT: The author's site is back online now, so you can reach the most update version of his article as the original link above.

But kernel-source is on CD3, so if you need to recompile the kernel or recompile nVidia kernel module you will need it.

Try install alsamixergui package from your Mandrake 9.x CD set. I think you can find the surround speaker volume somewhere in this alsamixergui (given you are using ALSA as sound driver - you can notice if ALSA is loaded when the system is booting).

Also others have been successful in doing so here:

http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=4084

Rosegarden works fine under ALSA when my sister connected her SB Audigy with an external keyboard, I don't know about if KDE supports ALSA natively or not. As for external MIDI box, I am not sure. But it's known that the OSS-compatible MIDI mode of ALSA still has some bug need to be fixed (not so in native ALSA MIDI mode). I think I read that somewhere before 0.9.1 stable version was released.