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arthur

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Posts posted by arthur

  1. Gnome 2.14, XGL and compiz, and rxvt-unicode with true transparency. :thumbs:
    I've absolutely no idea what XGL, compiz or rxvt-unicode are, but they sound good!

     

    I love the idea of screengrabs within screengrabs though, maybe you've started another infinite cat project!!

     

     

    All that transparent windows - how you do that? Is that XGL thing?

     

    XGL is the new *experimental* OpenGL-accelerated X server (actually, it still runs on conventional xorg). Compiz is the window manager to be used with XGL, and as you can see it has plugins like cube, rotate, zoom, water effects and so on.

     

    rxvt-unicode is the only xterm (like Konsole or gnome-terminal) which supports true transparency.

     

    I like the window organizer feature the best, i don't install eye candy for the sake of it (I've disabled water effects, couldn't imagine any possible use for it).

     

    here's a useful link

  2. well, i bought a TFT, DVD burner, 2 network cards, and a Microsoft Wireless Desktop keyboard and mouse - the first thing i did upon opening them was chuck the driver CDs into the far corner of my closet.

     

    All of them worked without me using ANY of the drivers. That's linux :thumbs:

     

    although some stuff like webcams are an absolute headache to get to work...

  3. reiserfs(v3) only journals meta-data and not actual data, so it might be less robust against failure as ext3. I love ext3, it's tried and tested and quite fast. i keep hearing these weird rumours that Reiser4 is horribly slow...any thoughts on this....?

  4. eh. a native port requires a complete rewrite of the engine since Half-life 2 uses the DirectX api, and not OpenGL. DirectX will probably never support linux, being from microsoft.

     

    and OpenGL might lack some features only DirectX may have. All in all it's a rather futile attempt as Valve will clearly not spend tons of money for what would basically be a completely new game engine for the small linux market.

     

    we'd have better luck hacking the Quake 3 Arena game engine source code and improving it...so get it from here and start your compilers! :beer:

  5. well you should go have a look at PHP in www.php.net, in the "downloads" section

     

    I'm coding PHP right now and I can't imagine how or why you would want a WYSIWYG app for it. It's a scripting language, kinda like Javascript, except it works server-side. I've never seen a WYSIWYG javascript app, much less a php one...

     

    If you want, learning CSS can help in pretty webpages (lots of websites use this now, even if just in-line CSS)...PHP just adds functionality that used to be the job of cgi-bin...like form handling, blogs, message boards, etc.

     

    i believe it can be also used as a general-purpose interpreted language, much like Perl is. There's even a PHP-GTK library if you want to write some GUI apps.

  6. people confuse me. they complain about a difficult one-time install /configuration process, but would put up with daily adware/virus/trojan scans that would take up to maybe 2 hours.

     

    i personally think the spyware/virus scans take much more effort. seriously, maintaining windows is too difficult for me. I get embarassed too many times when people approach me for windows maintenance advice, when i can only say, "I have absolutely no idea. I use linux, and I don't have to do that."

     

    Then they ask, "what do you do to maintain linux then? Virus scanners? disk defragmenting? registry optimization?" I answer, "er, nothing."

  7. You can pretty much make a Win shell seem like a Linux one with that lot in your PATH.  You actually need a couple of them to compile Apache on Windows using Visual Studio (wish those Apache buggers would just port it to GCC under Cygwin).

    I've managed to install Apache under Cygwin, and I don't have Visual Studio at all, so surely they have addressed the problem?

  8. try 'hdparm /dev/hda' and it should print a bunch of info to see if it's installed properly.

    'hdparm -y /dev/hda' will put your hd in standby and 'hdparm -Y /dev/hda' will put it to sleep.

     

    hdparm -S 241 /dev/hda should have printed something like "setting spindown timeout to 30 minutes"

     

    to make the changes permanent, you must go into MCC and configure hdparm to start every boot, and put "hda_args = "-S 241"" in /etc/conf.d/hdparm.

    at least, that's what i would do in gentoo, sorry, i don't have mandrake so about the MCC stuff... :unsure:

  9. install this program called hdparm, and issue the command as root:

     

    root@localhost # hdparm -S 241 /dev/hda

     

    that gives a spindown timeout of 30 minutes, if you want to learn about the timing, type "man hdparm". HTH

  10. even weak encryption, which wouldn't cause a very big slowdown, would make a point - "I don't want you to look at my metadata"

     

    But he sends it in plaintext. It's like walking naked through a street and expecting people not to look. At least put on a layer, however insecure, right?

  11. http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kern...otplug/udev-FAQ

     

    http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/udev-guide.xml

     

    if you type "ls /dev" on a devfs (old) machine, you'll get hundreds of files, even for devices you don't have. This is because in the old system device nodes couldn't be dynamically added.

     

    on a udev system, the /dev/ folder is empty, but populated upon bootup. when you add a device, a node/file is created in /dev/, and removed when you remove the device. That's about as far as my knowledge on it goes, but I run a pure udev system and found that it works flawlessly. If I plug in my DVD writer, /dev/dvd appears in the folder, and I simply mount it.

  12. well, if McVoy really cared about his metadata on the wire, he should have encrypted it, yes?

     

    McVoy has every right to pull the free client, but he has no right to get angry, nor does Linus. If he didn't hide his metadata through encryption, then Tridgell can't be blamed for looking.

  13. tridgell didn't touch the software itself...he just wanted to know what was on the wire. If you sniff surfer traffic, you'll learn all about HTTP GET requests, but you are not "reverse-engineering" Firefox, for example.

     

    This is ridiculous, like M$ saying, "you can't sniff IE traffic, we own those GET requests! stop reverse engineering!"

     

    If mcvoy is smart, and has good business sense, he would have already a backup business plan that is fully compatible with the OSS business model. Which I hope he is.

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