[BLUG] Sweden's Pirate Party has won a seat in the European Parliament (fwd)

> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8089102.stm
>
> "The group - which campaigned on reformation of copyright and patent law
> - secured 7.1% of the Swedish vote.
>
> The result puts the Pirate Party in fifth place, behind the Social
> Democrats, Greens, Liberals and the Moderate Party.
>
> Rickard Falkvinge, the party leader, told the BBC the win was "gigantic"
> and that they were now negotiating with four different EU Parliamentary
> groups.
>
> "Last night, we gained political credibility," said Mr Falkvinge.
>
> "People were not taken in by the establishment and we got political
> trust from the citizens."
>
> The profile of the Pirate Party and issues surrounding copyright law
> have dominated headlines in Sweden over the past few months.
>
> In April, a court in Sweden sentenced the four men behind The Pirate
> Bay, the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, to a year in
> jail and ordered them to pay $4.5m (?ffff?ffff3m) in damages."

--
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Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.

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Re: [BLUG] Debian PowerPC dicsc

I really thought you could also jigdo from any Debian-derived Linux
for any platform. The trick is that normally it defaults to your local
source mirror (from /etc/apt/sources.list), and you need it to do things
slightly differently when using another architecture.

This is what I would have offered to do, had you not found a solution.

The jigdo-lite stuff is amazingly simple for being so delightfully
useful. I think it'll basically work on any platform that has the
dependancies met.

Cheers,
Steven

On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 01:17:44PM -0400, Kirk Gleason wrote:
> Actually I found the OS X jidgo stuff (google works better when
> things are spelled correctly -- when is someone going to develop
> an intent-based search engine anyhow? ;-), and the jigdo stuff is
> processing happily. Still no idea how long it will really take,
> but ...
>
> I was just figuring I would grab the small CD and get rolling today,
> and get my week started out with some debian PPC awesomeness.
>
> Thanks for the offer though!
>
> On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 1:11 PM, Barry Schatz <sorbetninja@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't mind leaving a download for 3 hours. I also live a block from
> the dsl central office. If you want, I can download it and then send it
> to you.
>
> -Barry
>
> Kirk Gleason wrote:
> > All,
> > Couple of questions:
> >
> > 1. Does anyone have a any debian PowerPC isos about? Something recent
> > would be awesome but by no means necessary.
> > 2. Does anyone know of a way to make jigdo work in OS X?
> >
> > It would appear that the debian PPC isos are not hosted on most of the
> > mirrors (or at least the ones that I have tried). I have found a
> > couple (from sweden I think), but it is gonna take me over 3 hours to
> > download the "business card" CD -- 67MB large it is. I tried a torrent
> > for a couple of of the isos as well, and no seeds for the PPC stuff.
> >
> > --
> > Kirk Gleason

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Re: [BLUG] Apt-get vs Aptitude

On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 10:43:42AM -0400, Mark Warner wrote:
> It appears that with Lenny, Synaptic is being deprecated in favor of
> Aptitude. However, my distro of choice (the Lenny based MEPIS 8) still
> defaults to Synaptic. I also understand that mixing the two can
> conceivably cause problems. So for now I'm gonna stick with ol'
> reliable. Old dog != new tricks

If Synaptic is being depricated, expect some other GUI-based tool to be
in the pipeline. The GUI tools seem to have a shorter life-span than the
ncurses tools.

I wouldn't expect the niche (GNOME-based Package Management) to remain
unfilled. It may be a matter of abandonment by the developer. In such
cases, depending on the source of the original, folks sometimes find it
easier to write a new tool than to try to maintain the old one.

(Though in GNOME it seems fairly common for a product to remain at 0.9
until they do a complete rewrite and have a *different* product that
gets no further than version 0.9... I saw someone ranting about it the
other day, but I forget the apps in question. New apps are always sexier
than maintaining old apps.)

--
Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
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Re: [BLUG] Beware Copyright Law (was Transform Ubuntu to OS-X)

On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 01:23:58PM GMT, David Ernst [david.ernst@davidernst.net] said the following:
>
> In music school, we often ran across works that were believed to be by
> Franz Joseph Haydn, but whose authorship was eventually called into
> question by music historians. At some point, one of my profs told a
> story that Haydn's publisher would sometimes take pieces written by
> other composers and publish them under Haydn's name. Haydn was quite
> well known and well liked, so naturally his publisher thought that the
> pieces would sell better if marketed as pieces by him. I suspect he
> was correct about that.

And of course this still happens today. I went into a record store
about 12 years ago and came across a rather amaturishly packaged CD with
the name Jamrollypolly from Warp records with a label on it that said
"don't let the pseudoym or subgrade packaging fool you! This is the
Aphex Twin!" I asked the store owner about it and they insisted that it
was Aphex Twin, which was believable because Richard James (Aphex Twin)
used several pseudonyms. I bought it (being the sucker I am) and upon
listening to it, it sounded somewhat like Aphex Twin, but it turned out
that it wasn't. Some people on the net looked into it more and found
that it was a group from New Jersey or something like that. It could be
that Warp records encouraged record stores to file them under Aphex Twin
so that it would sell better.

--
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Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
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Re: [BLUG] Apt-get vs Aptitude

On Fri, Jun 05, 2009 at 06:50:13PM -0400, Barry Schatz wrote:
> I never liked dselect. I switched to aptitude shortly after I started
> using Linux (around 2004, Debian Sarge was about to release). dselect
> kept doing unintuitive things like making changes after I quit and
> restarted the program that I thought I had cancelled the first time.
> aptitude's interface was so much nicer. Of course, once I learned
> apt-get I really didn't see why I needed a ncurses interface (I
> didn't realize until later that I could use aptitude like apt-get).

I've met people who didn't know there *was* an ncurses interface. They
saw so many examples of people using apt-get, that they thought that was
all they had. It resulted in them not easily knowing what packages were
available, and due to apt-get's lack of full dependancy supprt, some
package installation frustration.

--
Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
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Re: [BLUG] Editable image repository? (was Transform Ubuntu to OS-X)

On Sat, Jun 06, 2009 at 05:07:49PM -0400, Gillis, Chad wrote:
>
> Quoting Barry Schatz <sorbetninja@gmail.com>:
>> Other sites worth checking out are gnome-look.org and kde-look.org.
>
> Those are some neat sites. Along slightly similar lines, has anyone
> ever come across a central repository like that of explicitly
> openly-shared images in an editable format, for example in GIMP's .xcf
> format or in .svg? It could be useful if someone wanted to use a
> picture for a project but modify it somewhat. For example if you knew
> you wanted to draw something with a "global community" theme you could
> start with someone else's drawing of the Earth, remove the parts you
> don't like, and build on top of it.

I wanted to state that with KDE 4, KDE's SVG support is now as good as
GNOME's SVG support.

This means that *both* KDE and GNOME should now support SVG and SVGZ
(gzip-compressed SVG) background images. While these may be few and
far between on the *look.org sites right now, with any luck we'll see
more of them. While most background images are based on photo-like
images, not all of them are, and if they're distributed as SVG, you get
all resolutions (within an aspect ratio, at least) in a single file.
(It also makes it easy for J. Random User to tweak the file for their
particular aspect ratio by simply by changing the size of the background
component.)

--
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Re: [BLUG] Debian PowerPC dicsc

Actually I found the OS X jidgo stuff (google works better when things are spelled correctly -- when is someone going to develop an intent-based search engine anyhow? ;-), and the jigdo stuff is processing happily. Still no idea how long it will really take, but ...

I was just figuring I would grab the small CD and get rolling today, and get my week started out with some debian PPC awesomeness.

Thanks for the offer though!

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 1:11 PM, Barry Schatz <sorbetninja@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't mind leaving a download for 3 hours. I also live a block from
the dsl central office. If you want, I can download it and then send it
to you.

-Barry

Kirk Gleason wrote:
> All,
>   Couple of questions:
>
> 1. Does anyone have a any debian PowerPC isos about? Something recent
> would be awesome but by no means necessary.
> 2. Does anyone know of a way to make jigdo work in OS X?
>
> It would appear that the debian PPC isos are not hosted on most of the
> mirrors (or at least the ones that I have tried). I have found a
> couple (from sweden I think), but it is gonna take me over 3 hours to
> download the "business card" CD -- 67MB large it is. I tried a torrent
> for a couple of of the isos as well, and no seeds for the PPC stuff.
>
> --
> Kirk Gleason

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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>

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Re: [BLUG] Debian PowerPC dicsc

I don't mind leaving a download for 3 hours. I also live a block from
the dsl central office. If you want, I can download it and then send it
to you.

-Barry

Kirk Gleason wrote:
> All,
> Couple of questions:
>
> 1. Does anyone have a any debian PowerPC isos about? Something recent
> would be awesome but by no means necessary.
> 2. Does anyone know of a way to make jigdo work in OS X?
>
> It would appear that the debian PPC isos are not hosted on most of the
> mirrors (or at least the ones that I have tried). I have found a
> couple (from sweden I think), but it is gonna take me over 3 hours to
> download the "business card" CD -- 67MB large it is. I tried a torrent
> for a couple of of the isos as well, and no seeds for the PPC stuff.
>
> --
> Kirk Gleason
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

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[BLUG] Debian PowerPC dicsc

All,

  Couple of questions:

1. Does anyone have a any debian PowerPC isos about? Something recent would be awesome but by no means necessary.

2. Does anyone know of a way to make jigdo work in OS X?

It would appear that the debian PPC isos are not hosted on most of the mirrors (or at least the ones that I have tried). I have found a couple (from sweden I think), but it is gonna take me over 3 hours to download the "business card" CD -- 67MB large it is. I tried a torrent for a couple of of the isos as well, and no seeds for the PPC stuff.

--
Kirk Gleason

Re: [BLUG] Apt-get vs Aptitude

On Mon, 8 Jun 2009, Mark Warner wrote:

> My first successful installs of Linux were Breezy and MEPIS
> 3.3-1, both Debian based, and both using apt/Synaptic. To this
> day, I still can't get comfortable with any desktop distro that
> isn't Debian based. The only exception is PCLinuxOS, but that's
> because it uses apt-for-rpm.

Anybody know whether the Debian family of distros is
taking any interest in PackageKit? Fedora clearly has great hopes
for it, and iirc it's meant to be OS-agnostic.

http://www.packagekit.org/

--
Beartooth Implacable, Curmudgeonly Codger Learning Linux
On the Internet, you can never tell who is a dog --
supposing you care -- but you can tell who has a mind.
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Re: [BLUG] Apt-get vs Aptitude

David Ernst wrote:
>
> I've probably underestimated just how important package management
> is to me. Honestly, I hate dealing with it, so the faster I get it
> done probably correlates strongly with how happy I am with a distro.

My first successful installs of Linux were Breezy and MEPIS 3.3-1, both
Debian based, and both using apt/Synaptic. To this day, I still can't
get comfortable with any desktop distro that isn't Debian based. The
only exception is PCLinuxOS, but that's because it uses apt-for-rpm.

It appears that with Lenny, Synaptic is being deprecated in favor of
Aptitude. However, my distro of choice (the Lenny based MEPIS 8) still
defaults to Synaptic. I also understand that mixing the two can
conceivably cause problems. So for now I'm gonna stick with ol'
reliable. Old dog != new tricks

Prolly need to set up a test install of Squeeze and start pokin' around.

--
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Re: [BLUG] Beware Copyright Law (was Transform Ubuntu to OS-X)

On Fri, Jun 05, 2009 at 04:36:09PM -0400, Simón Ruiz wrote:
>I hear this "We have a crappy implementation of it, but copyright is
>good in principle" idea often, but I'm not sure I know which principle
>is being talked about.
>
>What is this principle? Can we name it?

I'm definitely in the camp of "we have a crappy implementation of it",
I think the current "life plus 70 years" law is not only ridiculous
but blatantly driven by Disney, and extremely detrimental. But, I
absolutely think that there's some sense of copyright that we all
want, and this is the story I always tell to illustrate that.

In music school, we often ran across works that were believed to be by
Franz Joseph Haydn, but whose authorship was eventually called into
question by music historians. At some point, one of my profs told a
story that Haydn's publisher would sometimes take pieces written by
other composers and publish them under Haydn's name. Haydn was quite
well known and well liked, so naturally his publisher thought that the
pieces would sell better if marketed as pieces by him. I suspect he
was correct about that.

I can't assure you that this story is true, but it kind of doesn't
matter in this sense: If it's true, it's repulsive. I've told a lot
of people this story in casual settings and I can't remember anyone
expressing sympathy with the publisher's position. We have an
intuitive sense, then, of intellectual property. It just clearly
doesn't even come close to matching our nation's intellectual property
laws.

david
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Re: [BLUG] Apt-get vs Aptitude

>Steven Black wrote:
>> I'm old enough to remember the days when all we had was 'dselect'.
>> I think I'm one of the few, though.

I was working in a RedHat shop, and had become very comfortable with
RPM. Something prompted me to try a debian installation, and as soon
as I had it installed, I said "ok, how to I run updates? How do I
install new software?" All the reference materials I could find
pointed me to dselect (I can't swear that apt-get wasn't available
yet, but it certainly wasn't the standard. This was somewhere around
1998, I'd guess). I spent an hour or two of extreme frustration
trying to get dselect to do what I wanted to do. And, in the end I
said "forget debian". That remained my attitude until I tried Ubuntu
Breezy Badger, which was indeed breezy to install, update packages,
and install additional software. At which point I basically said
"forget redhat".

I've probably underestimated just how important package management
is to me. Honestly, I hate dealing with it, so the faster I get it
done probably correlates strongly with how happy I am with a distro.

David
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