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[ Home ] [ Archive ] [ ] [ Previous ] [ Next ] +---[ Issue 18
| 20th September 99 ]----+
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The Linux Bits: The Weekly Linux E-zine
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http://www.thebits.co.uk
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----[ EDITORIAL You'll notice that I've taken the trouble to format The Linux Bits in both a text version and an HTML version. I hope this means everyone will be able to read this issue properly, but if not then please let me know (including details of your e-mail client) and I'll see what I can do to solve the problem. If all goes well, I'll send The Linux Bits like this from now on. ----[ OP-ED PIECE Last week I said some things I shouldn't have. I apologize for the use of bad language in this forum. It was unprofessional and won't happen again. For anyone who was offended I apologize. Also, last week I slammed Microsoft pretty good about their "privacy" issues, which seems to be a topic that comes up again and again where they are concerned, unfortunately. This week, it's the turn of Linux. Quite specifically the issue of missing "shared libraries" that seem to dog every install you try to do. Shared libraries, in and of themselves, make a great deal of sense. You save on disk space by not having them linked statically into every program, you save on RAM when you run them, as only one copy of the library gets loaded into memory no matter how many programs need it. That is good. What is not good however, is that when a program absolutely needs to have a particular "shared library", then it should be included as part of the install. Or at a minimum, it should be clearly shown where you can find these libraries that are crucial to the operation of the program. I will speak about KDE because that is what has been dogging me the past couple days. In a nutshell I tried to do an upgrade to KDE 1.1.2 and ended up not being able to use KMail anymore because of a "missing library" which I'm having the devil's own time trying to locate. I went to the KDE website expecting to find at least some reference to this library - either having it available for download, or a link to it - and found nothing. This is not good. Not at all. There are parts of the GUI now that I can't use. KMail for instance. Probably others as well, but I've not had time to investigate fully yet. KDE is just one example of this issue. One that I know about personally, but I've received emails in the past from people complaining about the very same type of problem. How can Linux hope to be "taken seriously" when something that should be a simple exercise - a minor upgrade to an existing application on your system - can turn into a nightmare of lost time, lost patience, and lost productivity? And all because of a "missing library" that no one thought to include as part of the install, mention in accompanying documentation, or provide a link on their site to find it elsewhere. This is, to my mind, not an acceptable situation. People that package an application for install (or upgrade) should not make the assumption that every library needed, will already be on the system in question. Maybe it is, in my case it most assuredly was not. How hard can it be to provide a link to a set of shared libraries that you could download and install if needed? How hard can it be to at least include a README that tells you what libraries are required, and tells you where to find the ones you might be missing? Not hard at all.
----[ LINUX NEWS & ARTICLES FROM "THE REST OF THE WORLD" Killing Off Linux: It's All Academic What can I say? You simply have to read this article. Definitely the best article I've read all week. Linux-2.3.18... and a freeze Without a doubt, thee big story of the week. I'm sure you've all read about it by now, but just in case... 2.4 kernel for Christmas anyone? Happy 8th Birthday Linux! On the 17th September 1991, Linus e-mailed his 0.01 kernel to just four people. Doesn't sound like much does it? Well believe it or not this was to be the first public release of Linux. Here's a site that celebrates its birth. Happy 8th birthday Linux! K Desktop Environment 1.1.2 Ships As Bill's already pointed out, KDE 1.1.2 was released this week (Sep. 13th). This press release from KDE will tell you all it. Introduction to CORBA, Part 1 Many of you will have heard of CORBA being mentioned every now and again, but very few will know what it is. This lengthy and necessarily detailed article will explain the ins and outs of CORBA. You don't have to read it all, or even understand it, but you should take a quick read of the first few paragraphs so you know what it is... for the next time it gets mentioned. Cockpit Has Supercomputer 'Brain' Absolutely nothing to do with Linux, but I thought this article too cool to leave out. One for the nerds amongst us to drool over... ----[ KERNEL NEWS As of the 20th September '99: Current development kernel: 2.3.18 (Released: September 10th '99) Current stable kernel : 2.2.12 (Released: August 25th '99)KernelNotes.org The place to go for the latest stable and development kernel! ----[ OPEN SOURCES UPDATE Last week Dusty Yee had a review of the book, "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution". Unfortunately I only noticed a few days after the release of issue 17 that the entire book is available to read online! So what are you waiting for, get clicking! Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution ----[ QUOTE OF THE WEEK My selection for this week's "Quote of the Week" might seem to be a strange pick, but for me, it's the quote that really got me thinking. The quote isn't so much the following line from this week's Linux Weekly News, but the two words I've indicated in bold: "Alan's stated intent is to try to make a "rock solid" 2.2.13 - something which would certainly be much welcome in the user community." This for me, quintessentially sums up the attitude towards development of the Linux kernel - the pièce de résistance of Open Source (IMHO). That even though 2.3.18 has just been released and 2.4.x will hopefully be out for Christmas, Alan Cox - the kernel guru - is still concerned with attaining perfection in the 2.2.13 kernel (instead of releasing "quick-fixes" years down the line). It just goes to show how perfect the ideology of Open Source and kernel development is. Mr Linus and his army of penguins have every reason to be proud of our operating system. ----[ LINKS TO INTERESTING PLACES LinuxChix.org A highly commendable site. Created by Deb Richardson, LinuxChix attempts to bring together penguins of the female-persuasion from all four corners of our planet. Eventually, LinuxChix hopes to launch a speaker series, community outreach programs to introduce young girls to Linux, and install fests aimed at women who want to install Linux on their machines. As Deb has stated though, it's not gender biased with 20% of their members being male. A nice looking site that's definitely worth a look. LinuxLinks.com The trouble with sites that primarily focus on links to other sites, is that they tend to be thrown together with no real thought and organisation put into them. Fortunately LinuxLinks.com is not one of those sites. A great place to track down information on specific subjects concerning Linux. ----[ THIS WEEK WITH ATHENA This past week has been a nightmare, with things not going as planned for one reason or other. I spoke about the KDE install disaster in my Op-Ed piece. I will admit to bearing some responsibility for how things turned out, but that does not excuse KDE - or anyone else for that matter - for not including or pointing out the location of files crucial to the operation of their program. Hardware? Who knows. My CDROM won't mount. Not at all. I've not had time to open the case to check for loose connections yet but will most assuredly be doing that sometime today (Saturday). Here are the symptoms - if you know what the problem is, then please send an email so I can keep what remains of my hair intact: Last Friday I got Michael Kofler's book delivered from Fatbrain.com, so over the weekend I tried to use the CDROM to check the CDs that came with the book (there are 2 of them, one of which has Red Hat 6.0 on it) but when I went to mount the CDROM... yes you've guessed it... it wouldn't work. Under X I got a "medium not found" message (how informative is that?). So I first thought that I'd gotten my permissions messed-up. I logged out of X and did a su to root and tried to mount the CD again. Still didn't work. I keep getting a message about "hdc: lost interrupt 15" and then "mount failed: medium not found". I checked my /etc/fstab file and have it set to allow user access. I checked the CDs on a machine at work - they're fine. I've even checked CDs I know are fine and still no mount. :( I checked the /var/log/dmesg file and it seems that the CD is being recognized just fine on boot-up. It's listed as /hdc (this is correct as it's the first IDE device on the second controller) and it would appear that the proper drivers are being loaded for it as well. So why won't it mount? I've left a rather detailed message in the comp.os.linux.hardware newsgroup but haven't had enough time to get a reply yet. On the positive side this week: With or without X and KMail I still have a working system. No CD access at the moment that's true - and it is a huge problem to me, believe me - but the system doesn't come to a halt because of that. Luckily for me Linux works quite well without a GUI, and I'm accustomed to working in text mode anyway, so it's no huge issue. Except that my email is all held prisoner now by KMail until I find the time to track down the library that will let it be free once more. Then I have to find the time to figure out how to correctly configure Fetchmail and Procmail so that I can use Pine (or maybe even Mutt!) and be "free" from X, unless I so choose. Sendmail works. Fetchmail appears to work. Procmail I'm still working on. Talk about incentive... maybe KDE did me a favour. The following is a few console programs I snagged this week that have been a lot of help to me. BTW, I picked up both of these at Linuxberg.com in the Console Software section.
WVDIAL 1.40 I picked this up on the recommendation of Howard Arons (author of the excellent Mutt review, back in issue 16) and it's made life much simpler for getting a connection to my ISP without the Usernet program (that runs under X of course). Thanks for the recommendation Howard, it works just fine... and very simple to setup too. Free yourself from the tyranny of X! :)
PURP (PUGO RPM) 0.9.2 Purp 0.9.2 - here's a short bit from the README... I went looking for something like this because I needed to have a way to install RPM's for the GNOME and KDE GUI - and since I was doing an upgrade of the GUI, I couldn't very well use a GUI tool to do that now could I? :) A ncurses-based RPM-handler Copyright (C) 1998-1999 -- Anders Karlsson Purp is a ncurses-based RPM-handler. The goal has been to provide an interactive and efficient way to handle RPM-packages on ordinary text-terminals. More information about Purp, and new versions are available at the Purp-homepage: http://www.lysator.liu.se/purp/. BTW, it works pretty well given that it's not at 1.0.0 yet. A little rough around the edges yet but the program is worth having around if you need to - or want to - install some RPMs from a text terminal.
BACKUP ISSUES You may recall that I'd decided to get a CD-RW for use as a backup medium. I still may. The issue is now however, not as "clear-cut" as it was last week. I went looking on the Net for some specs and discovered that more than a few of them had the following minimum spec for their use: Pentium 166, 32Mb. This is a problem. I only have a Pentium 100 with 32Mb, and haven't as yet been able to determine if my system has the "horsepower", to be able to do a successful "burn" of a CD-R or CD-RW disk. I would think that it should, since the OS in the specs was Windows 9x/NT, and since Linux is much easier on the system resources than Windows, I would think that my system would be fine. I would like to hear from someone who has used a CD-R or CD-RW under Linux though. Let me know what your setup is, any problems you've had, and so forth, as the research has just gotten started in earnest again. Given the size of the hard drive I have on the way (17Gb), my only feasible alternatives for backups are either the CD-RW or a tape drive of some sort. Nothing else would give me enough capacity to do any good and also refrain from "breaking the bank" for the cost of media to do the backup on. Zip drives are obviously out, as that would be like using floppies on a drive that size. So, if someone has stories about tape drives - good or ill - let me know! I'd prefer an IDE interface, since I don't have a SCSI card. But if a SCSI tape drive is the best one for the job I suppose I could use that. I'll be sure to let you know how my CDROM problem turned out. I just know I'll get it working again. :) ----[ REVIEW OF STAROFFICE 5.1: PART 2 Here's part 2 of Joe's 3 part review of StarOffice 5.1. Since the buy over of Star Division (SO's creators) by Sun Microsystems, and Sun's move to make SO "as good as" Open Source, Star Office received 250,000 downloads from Sun's site in it's first 7 days! Just goes to show how popular this "Office-beater" is. (Although personally I'm looking forward to seeing how KOffice, and offerings from/for GNOME (e.g. Gnumeric) progress.) --Laurence
STARWRITER: IT'S LIKE MS WORD, ONLY FREE AND BETTER The first thing that struck me about the word processor (StarWriter) is its striking resemblance to the HTML editor. The only noticeable changes being the appearance of margins to indicate the printable area and the application-sensitive toolbar changing to feature the addition of word processor-specific formatting icons. I have to say, I was impressed. Typing-up letters in StarOffice is almost too easy, and in my opinion, is friendlier than Microsoft Word. Word has an annoying tendency of automatically changing the formatting of parts of your document, and throws up far too many "Are you sure?", "Are you sure you're sure?" confirmation boxes to continually distract your train of thought. StarOffice, fortunately (for the most part), does away with these productivity-killing features. If you've worked with other word processors before then you'll notice that StarWriter has all the features expected of a modern word processor. Every feature is where you expect it to be and the whole thing is highly configurable. The menu-structure is more logical than in MS Word, so the configuration is no problem, even for beginners. A welcome feature to StarWriter for those accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of MS Word is that when you highlight say one word, or five, StarWriter actually does as you say. How many times have I had Word decide it knows better and highlight the entire line? Too many. Also because the positions of words in a sentence differ in the German language, I find myself having constantly drag words into their correct position. Ever tried to do this in Word? Try it in StarOffice and you'll notice that it actually works the way it's supposed to, with a welcoming space juxtaposed on either side of the word's new position!
THE HELP SYSTEM The Help system is well-structured, and answered the few questions I had, with ease. More than one type of Help system exists in StarOffice (shown below), all of which can be accessed from the Help menu.
TASK SCHEDULER The Task Scheduler as it's title implies, allows you to manage your appointments. You can define and view Private, Official and Confidential dates. Official dates can be managed at a central source - where the Task Scheduler is always running - so that anyone on a LAN can view them. The Private dates can only be seen by you, and a definable assistant person, and Confidential dates can only be viewed by you. The tasks can have a definition, details and participators (which can be imported from the StarOffice Address book - also used by the SO Email client), a start and finish date (with status defined in percent), and an owner. So what do I think of it? It's an easy to use, powerful tool, that's great for handling big projects. I've gotten too used to the great scheduling application on my Psion Series3 handheld, but apart from the loss of portability, the SO Task Scheduler is no less powerful.
STARBASIC AND THE STARONE TECHNOLOGY StarBasic is used to build macros for all application parts, and StarOne is the API (Application Programming Interface), allowing programmers to access the functions of StarOffice. In short: StarBasic code is reusable, can be inserted as JavaBeans in your Java code when running on a StarOffice Server, makes the seamless integration of third-party components in the SO Desktop possible, sub-components are exchangeable, provides access to StarOne (the API) from almost all programming languages, is scalable from simple to very complex tasks, distributable, and maintains compatibility with future versions. If you're a programmer, you'll understand this, if not don't fret.
STARCALC StarCalc is the spreadsheet program in StarOffice. It has all the features users have come to expect from a spreadsheet, like being able to generate charts and graphs from your spreadsheets, and supports a plethora of financial, mathematical, statistical, and scientific functions. It's also good for making forms, and can deal with many database formats. On that last point you should note that StarOffice's file type support is excellent. This is a feature that has come to be expected from all real office suites. (Editor: A feature which grudgingly, MS Office excels at, especially Office 2000 Premium Edition, which nears perfection. Linux users don't have too much to worry about though. It costs US$500 (and probably the same in ús), comes on 4 CDs, and will eat up a sizeable portion of even the biggest hard drive. That being said though, IMHO Linux office suites are still years away from coming feature parallel with Redmond's flagship app. Office 95 yes. Office 2000 no.)
STARCHART Can be used as a separate program, or as a marked area in a StarCalc table. Many types of diagrams are supported, also a new 3D-engine of StarDraw/StarImage can be used. All in all, an impressive little program. StarChart Screenshot
STARDRAW StarDraw is the application for drawing vector-graphics. Anyone who has used a vector-graphics package before e.g. Corel Draw, will find StarDraw easy to get to grips with. Although it's able to import many graphic formats (.wmf, .eps, etc.) it unfortunately doesn't deal with Corel Draw's .cdr file type. Mac format .eps files aren't supported either - because of licensing problems... sigh. Using StarDraw I found that some pretty precise drawings could be created, perhaps making it useful for quick CAD drawings. A worthy addition to StarOffice, with some simple and powerful tools at your disposal. A quick graphic I created.
STARIMAGE StarImage is StarOffice's application for creating bitmap graphics. It's the only application in StarOffice to feature a single undo function. One great thing about StarImage is that you can create some excellent animated GIFs, and in my opinion is more powerful than Microsoft's GIF Animator. Also multi-frame TIF Format is supported. The frames can be moved and resized, allowing accurate placement. Not every part of the animation has to be redrawn, so you could have a house for example in the first frame, and only animate a window within it in giving the exact position in relation to the upper left corner, and the frame size of the window, for the next frame... and so on. Spraying and drawing in transparency mode, zooming up to 3200% for fine details, grids, some effects like poster or Cole drawing, and a colour-picker are available. All the tools you would expect from a good bitmap graphics application are here, and if the power of The Gimp isn't required then StarImage comes recommended to get the job done quickly. I'm sure this is going to be a future favourite of mine for creating animations!
STARIMPRESS StarImpress is a vector-based presentation program. It can handle almost infinite slides in a Diashow, supports overblending etc and has a Live-mode, where objects can be manipulated during the running presentation. I haven't played around with it too much, but it seems like it has all the features expected, and that some pretty impressive presentations could be created with it. StarImpress Screenshot
STARMATH As you can guess, this is a tool to create mathematical formulas, which you can then import into a document. Everything you would expect is here. Since mathematics is not my forte, I won't delve into the subject. Instead I've provided a screenshot to show you what it's all about: StarMath Screenshot----[ WHAT'S NEW AT THE BITS THIS WEEK? This week has seen the introduction of a new section called, Diary of an Open Source Newbie. Written by yours truly, I plan for this section to help motivate me learn C and GTK+ so that I can begin work on a GNOME application. Hopefully this diary will motivate others and maybe even help them on their uphill struggle to becoming a competent Open Source Linux programmer.
I've also added a search engine to the homepage, allowing visitors to search both the site and the web, and I've added a reformatted issue 12 to The Linux Bits Archive. Hopefully by the time you read this, I'll also have added a reformatted issue 11, which is nearly completed. ----[ THE BITS GOES PC Thanks to an e-mail from Dusty, Bill and I have decided that for The Linux Bits and the site as a whole to be taken more seriously we'd lay of needless "name-calling" and the occasional use of bad language from now on (but not caffeine). I'm in the process of removing all unnecessary bad language and changing all mentions of M$, Windoze, and Mickey$oft to their PC equivalent. That does not mean we will stop speaking our mind on a "certain" company and a "certain" inferior OS (allegedly), it's just that from now on we'll try to be a little more professional about it. ----[ WRAP-UP
Last week it was Microsoft. This week it was KDE. Next week? Who knows. I don't play favourites when it comes to talking about truly idiotic things that companies do. They call it "Plain talk" where I come from. With everybody and their cousin Joe talking up KDE lately, I was unpleasantly surprised by the troubles I had. Shocked might be a better word. I'll tell you this. So long as this "shared libraries" issue continues, Microsoft has nothing to fear on the desktop. Not from KDE. Not from GNOME. Not from Linux. No "ordinary user" would have tolerated the trouble I had with upgrading to 1.1.2. Nor should they have to. Nor should we, just because we've decided to run Linux. So then, what can we do? Plenty. If you go to get an upgrade of a program and have the horrors that happened to me happening to you, then make sure you tell the people that wrote the program about it. Talk about it in the newsgroups and anywhere else you can find a place to post it, so people know just how unacceptable it is. But please, don't just suffer in silence, saying nothing. The problems will only continue. Believe it or not your opinion does matter, especially on issues like program installs. If the problems don't stop and you're ignored, then by all means find yourself another program to use with similar functionality, that works as it should. This is Linux after all, and choice is what it's all about.
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