Guys on FOSS

The Future

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:11:00 -0600

Wow, it's happened again. There has been no posts for a great deal of time. Sorry.

This month marks the 2 year anniversary of the creation of GuysOnFOSS. We've done quite a bit in the two years including reviews, podcasts, rants, etc. I, for one, have enjoyed the process immensely.

I'd like to take a moment to talk about the future. The next year I expect will be hectic, as the majority of the writers are moving onward and upward. In September, most of us will be entering university. There may be little time for blogging in the upcoming months. In university, the whole team will be studying subjects related to the topics relevant to this blog. I can see this transition going two ways. Either the blog slowly falls into oblivion, only to be spoken of at Christmas and Summer breaks; or it keeps going, hopefully with a new perspective that will be born from the new found knowledge that we'll [hopefully] obtain through our next level of education and beyond. I'm rooting for option 2, but the best we can do is take this one week at a time.

Thanks,

-The Thoth-

An Introduction to Threading and Multi-core Processors

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Fri, 13 May 2011 22:21:00 -0600

An Introduction to Threading and Multi-core Processors

With the increasing popularity of multi-core processors, most people imagine that all their programs will run much faster. While this is true, it is not always the case. Sure, the operating system boots up faster, but what about Firefox, or Blender? Some people have noticed they just stay the same speed. So why do these programs run so slowly on such a “fast” processor?

The answer to this question lies in threads. So what is a thread? One can think of a thread as a lightweight process, where it can execute in a process and access the process’s resources, along with sharing information with other of its kin. Seems a bit bizarre? Do not fear, threads are quite simple to understand when you put them in an analogy. Imagine a room. In this room, there is only a filing cabinet will all the documents employees of Department A need to process. Joe, our hard-working employee works in this office, which all people of Department A share. Now, Joe’s office has a small problem - it is missing an essential piece of furniture: a desk. Without it, Joe has nowhere to place any of his work. Not to worry, the company did ensure that Joe the employee can work. So they ordered a desk. Unfortunately, they were a bit low on budget and could only afford one desk, so all the employees must share this one table. Problem is, the desk is so small that only one person can work on it. This means while Joe is filling out paperwork, Alice, an employee from a different department, must wait until Joe is finished. This may seem like it is very unproductive (and it is), but it gets worse. By a company policy, employees can only work on 10 documents during one session at the desk so other employees can use the desk too. This makes their work time slower as more people line up to use the desk if they have more than 10 documents, as they need to make trips back to the . Joe often needs to work on hundreds of documents. To increase the efficiency of his department The obvious solution is to hire another employee, and put him in the same department as Joe. So the company hires Steve and places him in Department A. Joe can then give half his work to Steve and he can wait behind Joe and as soon as Joe is finished working on 10 documents, Steve can jump to the table while Joe returns the end of the line. By employing another worker, the Department is performing faster. This technique is called multi-threading in programming.

In this analogy, Joe and Steve are threads (employees) of the same process (Department A). They can both access the documents (instructions) in their room and also work at the same pace. Now Alice who works in Department B is a thread in a different process and she can only get documents from her department. This is how processes work. Threads of one process can only access instructions and data from the process in which they were created.

Now back at the office, the Board of Directors thought it would be a good idea to increase productivity. The next day, all the employees walked into the workplace for a surprise: the company is now the proud owner of two desks. Now any of the employees can work at 2 times the efficiency. Now, to the board of directors, they had expected all the work to be done in half the time. Why was it that Alice’s department, Department B still worked at the same speed as it did before the second desk. The answer is that there is still only one employee in Department B and regardless of how many free desks, Alice can only work so fast. So single threaded applications such as Firefox are like Alice, where there is only one employee who needs to share the desk without sharing the work. This fact makes them unable to use the additional core as efficient as other programs such as Apophysis (a Fractal Renderer) that have multi-threading capabilities.

In this scenario, adding another desk is equivalent to adding an additional core to the processor. This is where you get dual core processors from Intel and AMD. This covers the basic theory of threads. This is also where I am going to finish of this article. Of course, being a introduction, it does not cover some of the more advanced topics such as:

Hyper-Threading - Where the workers literally share the desk by drawing a line down the middle and have two people work on it at the same time
Process Isolation - If there is a murder in Department A, Alice from Department B does not need to know about it.
Deadlocks - Steve is waiting for Joe to give him some data so he can finish his work but Joe is waiting on Steve to give himself data so he can give Steve the data he needs.

So if you want to know more about them, Wikipedia is a great resource. Cheers!

Beginning to code

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Wed, 4 May 2011 17:56:00 -0600

Are all your friends are programming making you feel left out? Do you think that all those things that you use online can be made better? Have you ever complained that a game could be so much better if they just changed that level? Fear not! The power of programming will solve all those problems! Or will they?

Many of the representations of coding scare or fool many non-programmers. Being a programmer myself, it is easy for me to say that scenes of sitting in front of a terminal with flowing text (See hackertyper for reference). This is by far the most common view I have heard of whilst mingling with normal folk. To know the true experience of programming, one must sit down and start learning. Yet, the beginning programmer faces another hurdle. The world of programming has many languages to choose from, each with its strengths and weaknesses. The most common languages is C and C++, with the majority of all programs and operating systems written using them. While it is the most common, don’t get fooled into thinking that you must learn them first, or even at all. Of course, there must be a reason for the advocacy of C and C++, otherwise, why do so many use it. The first step to programming is picking the right language for the job. An in depth article on picking a programming language will be covered in a future post, as I intend this article as a primer to programming.

Before you start on programming, you should think about how you will see programming and what to expect. You may be programming as a hobby, or you may be stepping into the world of the computer industry. These two different views will affect how you program. A professional programmer will spend much more time, and will usually have more resources than a hobbyist. This leads into the next topic: Your Environment. All programmers have usually have a specific environment they like to work in. The most common environment is the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which is a pre-made set of software where all the development can be done within a window. Others may like a text editor only, or even just cat and append. Consideration of these elements of programming is very important to the beginning programmer, as it will help with learning the language and make the development smooth.

So, what next? There are many paths that one can take when programming. The main branch is software vs web programming, and each of those split into smaller sub-branches. It is up to you to pick where to go next. It can be developing a website or making a game. As a final not, I encourage you not to stick to only one type of programming, play around with different styles and methods. Learning and programming in narrow views is limiting the amount of work you do. Read what others say, try new concepts. All of it will be helpful to you, and last but not least, enjoy yourself. Remember: more than once a programmer’s problem is resolved by an epiphany overnight.

Vim vi vim

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 21:48:00 -0600

Text editing is a common task many Linux users do day to day. Gedit, Kate, Kwrite - they are all programs which assist us in changing configuration files, or just taking notes. While today’s systems orient around newfangled graphical interfaces with mouse support, fancy sounds, and (not so) nice assistants, some have forgotten about the good old editors which were one of the foundations of the Linux OS. Before the GUI, text editors existed on the command line. Now, newer Linux users who have seldom used the terminal interface are dwarfed by the mighty command line interface and step back from using anything which has a black background with green text. While on first glance it may be scary, users of CLI based editors will tell you that it is not, and while there may be new material to learn, the result could mean efficiency and time saved for other work.

This article investigates one of the most popular editors for the CLI: Vim. This editor is distubited with most Linux distros. Created by Bram Moolnaar in 1991 for the Amiga (Yup, its that old), it was an improved version of an earlier editor, vi, hence the name Vi IMproved (which is shortened to vim). Vi, created by Bill Joy was an improvement on ex, an even older editor. Now over the generations, these tools were created to increase efficiency for text editing. Vim is no exception to this philosophy and encourages it as one of its goals.

Vim and Vi are based on a mode system. Depending on how you write and code, you may be in either insert or normal mode for the majority of your session. These modes are what throws some people off, simply because the keys they hammer away don’t appear on screen. One of the first things a vi user learns is the insert mode. In this mode, you are able to type into the document itself (which is what a text editor is supposed to do, right?) The other mode is normal mode. Now at this point, you may be thinking “Why do I need another mode when you just told me that insert mode does what I want it to do?”. This second mode is quite important for efficiency in coding, and also allows you to save the text to the drive. The rationale behind the different modes is for faster processing of the work. A user is able to get into insert mode a number of ways. To name a few, by pressing o,O, a, A, i and I, the user is placed into insert mode. The different keys and their uppercase counterpart have different functions though. While all of them put you into insert mode, they place the cursor in different locations. O and o opens a new line above and below the current position respectively. I inserts places the cursor at the beginning of the line, while i has the cursor insert before the character. A appends the line, placing the cursor at the end of the line while a puts it after the current character.

There are many commands to learn before a user is able to code faster than the average non-vi user, but don’t let new knowledge push you back. All the commands do something slightly different and can mean moving to another location in the document or perform macros. The keys which are mapped to commands are also smartly located. The more often the command is used, the closer the key is to the home row (on QWERTY keyboards). This reduces the time needed to move and insert text. Don’t believe me? Go onto Youtube and search Vi or Vim, many of the videos shown are not in time lapse, the users are merely using the full power of Vim.
With all this said, I encourage you to go out and try Vim. Much of my coding is done within this spectacular program and I have noticed an increase in the speed of my coding. Have fun with it too, forcing yourself to learn the complete dictionary of commands extremely hard in one day. If you don’t know where to start, vimtutor (just type that in) is a interactive tutorial which will bring the user up to the basics of Vim. Now, as a final note to the reader: Watch out for those sneaky EMACS users, they will try to convert you to the dark side...

LaTeX Part 1 - History

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 10:27:00 -0700

Throughout history there have been people who identify a problem, and instead of idly accepting the situation, they produce a solution. These are people like Henry Ford who noticed the inefficiency of automobile production and invented the assembly line, a standard in modern manufacturing. Or perhaps we consider Bette Nesmith Graham, painter and more importantly white out inventor. She saw a common problem and instead of just chucking out entire sheets of typing she set out to fix the problem. Often these innovators do not realize the full potential of their solution to one problem. Who doesn't have a can or two of WD-40 in their house? This was originally a product to solve a specific space related problem, but it is now used on everything from zippers to distributer caps.
There is another case in which a project was designed due to solve a daily irritation which took off quite dramatically. Of course I am talking about the subject of this article: TeX and more specifically LaTeX.

To understand where LaTeX came from we must first examine it's foundation, TeX (pronounced tɛk). TeX was invented by a man by the name of Donald E. Knuth. Donald was growing frustrated with the current typesetting practices in the 70's. In fact his own book, The Art of Computer Programming, was re-pu

blished in the 70's he found the typesetting to be hideous. A few months later Knuth decided that he would not accept the situation idly and set out to produce TeX. The project was started in 1977 and Knuth

predicted that he'd be able to finish it in one year. His estimate was off by about 10 years.

However, Knuth's system did not really take off until the invention of a macro package called LaTeX. LaTeX was invented by a man named Lamport as a way for the user to concentrate on the writing instead of the formatting. Think C instead of Assembly. Today if you were to start writing a book in TeX, you'd most likely use LaTeX. It does a bunch of automatic formatting by section, chapter, etc. in order to make the document as readable as possible. This system really lets the author focus on the content, and then make stylistic changes later.

Next article: Plain TeX vs LaTeX

Very Useful Links:

Big Online LaTeX Beginner's guide

Nice PDF for LaTeX Beginners

Nice PDF for Plain TeX Beginners

WikiBook on LaTeX

History

Wiki pages: LaTeX TeX

-The Thoth-

A Minecraft diary thing

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:05:00 -0700

So i've been gone awhile and the Thoth has been bugging me to do some posting so ill be doing a day by day type thing of Minecraft. Similar to what PC gamer is but im doing this on my server which about half of the blog team plays. Those who do play are me Inerg, Crazy2be and Mekapedia and then the odd friend that does join. Any who here goes for day 1.

So the first thing I would like to state is that I started this in a world were me and

Crazy2be

created a house like thing already. I'll do a walk through it sometime later maybe day 3 any

ways. Lastly the reason why I have glow stone is due to a mod that lets us set spawn rates so we set stone to have a .05% chance of dropping glow stone since you cant get it in multiplayer.

So I started off my day deciding ill go and look in Crazy2be's collecting hole thing to come across this.

Due to issues with the image's im merely making them links for now.

Luckily for me the 2 creepers got caught on each other and couldn't walk up the stairs so I was able to easily dispatch them with my bow. Also to any readers who play on server I highly suggest using a bow as a weapon as the combat system is pretty rough if you try and stab your enemies.

Any ways later in my day I decided to go and look in a cave that I had found earlier that was huge. So as I was exploring this cave I found this.

Due to issues with the images I'm making them links for now.

Thats right a single yellow flower cooking by some lava. This is the first time I've found a flower underground or even so close to lava so I decided to include it in my daily log. Lastly in my adventures in the cave I came across this.

Due to issues with the images I'm making them links for now.

Its not the easiest to see sadly and I wasn't able to disable my HUD do to being in combat but it was a worthy shot :). Its a picture were I had three skeletons and a zombie after luckily for me a Skeleton shot one of the zombies so I got to have a bit of a easier time killing them :). Actually that was the last I forgot to add I was working on a cart system as well.

Due to issues with the images I'm making them links for now.

And heres what I ended my day with creating a cart system to transport goods up and down from our mine. It didn't work great but I improved it on day 2 after Crazy2be broke it.

As a final not I would like to suggest that you at least try this game in single or multiplayer although I got really hooked once I started on multiplayer. Also Blogger get a better damn way to handle images while I can edit the HTML for placing them make it so that I don't I like being lazy :(. Also OH GOD THE PICTURES THEY RUIN EVERYTHING! I'll try and figure a way to make them small clickable links. Well for now I'm going to make them links later on ill make them better.

LibreOffice History

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 22:39:00 -0700

Wow Ladies and Gentlemen, it has been far too long. I doesn't seem like a month ago since I last posted. Anyways, the show must go on.

What have the GuysOnFOSS been up to lately? Not too much actually. Individual projects rumble onwards, and the new semester has brought more schoolwork... For most of us.

Recently I switched my office suite from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. Our readers will probably be familiar with the course of events which prompted the creation of LibreOffice, but if you missed it I will reiterate it here:

Sun Microsystems was the company which owned OpenOffice and it's closed source sibling StarOffice. When the data base giant Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems, they also acquired StarOffice and OpenOffice, as well as OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris was killed and many feared that OpenOffice was going the same way. Fans of Sun were horrified. Oracle published this to the Sun Facebook page:

Hi, everyone! Just a quick heads-up: Now that the acquisition has gone through, we will be phasing out the Sun Facebook page over the coming weeks. Please join the official Oracle Facebook page to stay on top of Oracle/Sun-related news, connect with peers etc. Thanks!

Not surprisingly the comments went mostly like this:

"Do not want." -Jeff Dudley

"Im not joining Oracle anything... Sun Rulez. Oracle Sucks." -Anthony ' Alby' Williams

"PLEASE dont kill that name an Logo!! PLEASE!!!!! Im devasteted, its actually a part of my life just disappearing.Please!!!For have many years havent I stared at the beatiful blues and greys of SUN? Many! It allways felt so comforting, and now? BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! -Magnus Nystrom

The feeling of impending doom was so strong that several devs started "The Document Foundation" built from the code of OpenOffice. Origonally the plan was to include Oracle in the new buisness by contributing code back; however, Oracle wanted nothing to do with it and threatened to fire the devs. 33 devs left Oracle and in September 2010, LibreOffice was born.

Thats the story, it's a relevantly old story, but hey, we haven't posted in a couple months so just pretend we posted this in January and you missed it. Next time I'll go into what I've found so far with LibreOffice.

Until then,

-The Thoth-

Special Holiday Episode and a Poem

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 23:59:00 -0700

Hello Readers!
This is a special holiday episode of the podcast. It is a discussion about software distribution and the pros/cons of having an app-store type method of distribution. I have also written a short poem for the holidays, which can be found below.

Twas the night before Christmas, some people say,

When old Steve Jobs took the holidays away.

You opened your gift; A laptop, alright!

But as you read the manual you shuddered in fright.

Although you had payed for the best laptop there is,

You found that your new macbook was actually his.

No freedom here, as in beer or in speech,

Step out of line, and a contract you'll breach.

But then out of nowhere you see a large sleigh,

With a penguin at the reins, here to save Christmas Day.

You say to the penguin, "This macbook, it sucks",

The penguin looks up and replies, "Hi, I'm Tux".

He hopped from his sled, with a "HeHeHe"
and whipped out a Linux live CD.

Your eyes light up, could it be true?
So many choices, like Arch or Gentoo

There's Red hat, and Suse, and quite a few more
Such as CentOS, Mandriva and Tiny Core

With a tip of his Fedora and a quick wave goodbye,
Tux jumped into his sledge and flew into the sky

So try a new distro, there is nothing to fear
And from GuysOnFOSS have a fantastic New Year!

Music credit: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Humble indie

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:43:00 -0700

Well a couple of exciting things has happened with the Humble indie bundle. First of all, all of the people who purchased it now have a code which they can use on steam to get another way to download them. Secondly there running it for the second time. I would personally say that its a great thing to purchase the games from as you can choose what you wish to pay and can dedicate how ever much you want to different thins like the developers or to the charity they have selected. The games are also released for all major os's meaning Windows, Linux and Mac.

Heres the link and if I don't post again have a great Christmas.

An Update

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 13:11:00 -0700

Hello,

Sorry about the long gap between posts. It seems like things pile up all at once.

So whats new with the GuysOnFOSS? We've all been involved at some level with a website design project, which has taken up much of our time. In addition, it is that time of year when things really get busy in the tangible world with exams and the holidays. I will make a greater attempt to update my Twitter feed more often when I come across things that I find interesting, and perhaps just to let you know what we're working on. If you haven't followed me on twitter yet, you can do so by following this link: http://twitter.com/the_thoth.

As for the podcasts, those seem to have been put on hold as well. We'd like to start them up again, but don't hold your breath, at least until the new year. We still have one episode that was recorded several weeks ago, but the news is outdated by now. The reason I bring it up is that it contains an excellent debate between Mekapaedia and Crazy2be. Perhaps I will release that as a bonus.

Stay tuned!

-The Thoth-

Why webcomics hate Woofy

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:51:00 -0700

Awhile ago we had some one who came across the blog through a search for why Web comics hate Woofy so I figured I would give a fairly basic explanation why. The most basic reason for the upkeep of the server. If you had every one just download the web comics through Woofy or some other script you would have a serious drain on a server but method to pay for the bandwidth. The only way most web comics are able to continue there hosting of the comics they need ads to earn them revenue so that they can afford the server hosting. While this issue does arise most people still often complain that people are leeching the bandwidth from the people who read the comic through the site and not through a separate download method. I personally have to disagree with people who complain about web comic downloaders because I use it purely for the purpose of having a backlog of comics so if I go some were with out wi-fi I can simply enjoy a whole bunch of comics and even make up for ones I might not have read. Any ways the next reason why people do not like Woofy is copyright concerns. Some artist's I assume believe that when people download there web comic through something like Woofy there work is being pirated like people pirate games. These claims I find less legitimate as they can just as easily add were to find the site and who the author is under the strip with an extra 10 pixels to the border. Any ways I hope you guys enjoyed my tired rant that should have been written like 3 weeks ago. Also I'm sorry if my writing wanders a lot if you have any questions leave a comment and I'll reply to the best of my ability.

No Podcast This Week

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 19:39:00 -0600

Hello readers,

Just thought I'd do a quick post to let you all know that there will not be an episode this week due to all of us having commitments. You can stop staring eagerly at your computer monitor waiting for the podcast. We will be back (I hope) next week with episode 9.

Happy Halloween from all of us at GuysOnFOSS!

A Quick Primer to SSH

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:18:00 -0600

A quick guide to SSH:

Have you been at work and think "Hey I can do this so much faster with x on my computer at home!" Well, SSH will solve your problem. SSH - Secure SHell - is a protocol for calling a remote system and controlling it via the shell. Designed in 1995, it has been put through the tests of time and now in version 2 it is one of the best ways of remote shell access.

"Wait. I want to use Firefox (or any other graphical program). This only gives me shell"

SSH offers x forwarding, enabling you to use programs with GUI.

"The Internet says that remote control is insecure"

SSH is secured by a public key system with a choice of another symmetric cipher (invoked by -c)

"Ok, it seems cool, how do I use it?"

Setting up the client is easy. For Linux and Mac users this is already built in. For Windows users, there are many clients available such as PuTTY, KiTTY, etc.

Linux/Mac:

0. Make sure that you have an account on a remote system with SSHd running.
1. Open a shell session.
2. Type: ssh user@ip
(replace user with your username on the remote system and ip with remote ip)
3. It will prompt for a password, type it in
4. Use normally, but remember, you are in the remote system.

Windows:

0. Get PuTTY
1. Type in your credentials
2. Login!

For more info, use man ssh

The Eighth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 08:35:00 -0600

Inerg and The Thoth fly solo... For about 8 minutes. The show is shorter this week due to audio problems, hopefully these will be fixed by next week. Enjoy the 8th episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast!

News:

Gene Simmons gets ddos'd

Pirate Bay Going to Space?

Google Chrome 7

Radon 6800 series

Officer Bubbles

Officer Bubbles Original Video

Laptop Thief Returns Data

WD 3 Terabyte hardrive

Restraining Order Served Over Facebook

NASA 100 Year Spaceship Program

Topics:

Learn how to use man

MenuetOS

Program For The TI-8x Series Calculators

Novell For Sale

Troll Physics - Just for fun

Try it For A Week: Peppermint

Due to audio problems, Inerg will be publishing his 'Try it for a week' on a separate occasion.

Music credit: 'Killing Time' and 'Enter The Party' by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

The Seventh Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 23:17:00 -0600

Join The Thoth, Inerg and Mekapaedia on a roller coaster ride of a show. This week learn about what Mekapaedia knows about China, what The Thoth knows about AROS, what Inerg knows about geography and what the pope knows about technology. All this and more on the seventh episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast.

News

Google tests driver-less car

Pope warns about illusions vs reality

Polynomial - Space of The Music

Skydive from space canceled

People are not choosing effective passwords

London stock exchange runs Linux

USA is most bot infected country... In The World

Topics

Make your own dropbox-like backup service

Free Public Wifi?

Try it for a week: AROS

-Part 1

-Part 2

-Part 3

Music credit: 'Killing Time' and 'Enter The Party' by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Try It For A Week: AROS Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:41:00 -0600

Alright, so here is the third part I promised.

AROS was originally called the Amiga Research Operating System. This was later changed to the recursive name AROS Research Operating System. It is based around AmigaOS, which was originally developed by Commodore in the mid 80's for the Amiga computer. However, the Amiga was not doing well, and rather than lose it entirely a open project began. This is where AROS came in with the goals:

Is as compatible as possible with AmigaOS 3.1.
Can be ported to different kinds of hardware architectures and processors, such as x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA and other.
Should be binary compatible on Amiga and source compatible on any other hardware.
Can run as a standalone version which boots directly from hard disk and as an emulation which opens a window on an existing OS to develop software and run Amiga and native applications at the same time.MorphOS
Improves upon the functionality of AmigaOS.
-From aros.sourceforge.net

In fact, software that is designed for AmigaOS usually compiles and runs fine on AROS. This was important as AROS was supposed a parallel to AmigaOS. Even though AmigaOS is still around, and on version 4, many people prefer AROS due to the convenience of having it run on any system you want.

AROS is not the only company cloning AmigaOS, there is another. It is called MorphOS, and it contains several key differences between AROS. For example, it only runs on Powerpc architecture and contains proprietary software as well as some open software. Some of the open code in MorphOS actually came from AROS.

This image represents the development of AmigaOS

Final Thoughts

Well, I tried it for a week and I must say I am impressed. Although I had problems at the beginning of the week, the important thing is that I was able to resolve them. AROS would function as a desktop OS if it weren't for the same problems that all 'alternative' OS's have and that is compatibility with standards like windows. I can't wait to see how far AROS will progress in a few years.

Remember to check out the website at aros.sourceforge.net, and give AROS a try.

Try It For A Week: AROS Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 17:46:00 -0600

I spoke too soon:

As you can see Icaros is working just fine. For some reason, even after I got it to boot properly by disabling DMA, I was still having problems. Every time I tried to start my browser (OWB) it hung while it was "generating font cache"

I tried re-installing it with the full image instead of the Lite image and I got it going. It looks good. I will do a couple more tests and try some of the included apps so I can do at least one more post on this interesting OS. Stay tuned.

Try It For A Week: AROS Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 20:48:00 -0600

Hello Readers!
I hope you have been enjoying our podcasts as much as we have enjoyed creating them. If you have been listening to them you will know that we recently kicked off our new segment 'Try It For A Week'. If you haven't been listening, I am not talking to you.

For my 'Try It For A Week' I chose AROS. Things have not gone well thus far. I though I'd have no trouble with this, but I am. The distribution I have been trying out is called Icaros and can be found here. Booting the live cd was no problem on both Virtualbox and later Qemu. The problem came after installation when I tried to boot into AROS for the first time. I got GRUB but no OS.

That is all I can really do for you for the time being. I will continue working on getting it to boot correctly as time allows. Until then, stay tuned for an AROS history lesson.

Interesting find in google maps

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Sat, 9 Oct 2010 14:13:00 -0600

As I was wasting time going through Google street view I found a tank. While this is a a tech blog I thought I would share this interesting find since its related to Google's street view. Here's a direct link if you prefer.

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The Sixth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Sat, 9 Oct 2010 08:30:00 -0600

On this week's show Inerg and Mekapaedia join me, The Thoth, for our sixth excursion into the land of podcasting. Remember, you have one more week to enter our contest to win a free beta key for Starcraft 2 or Plain Sight. We introduce our new segment - 'Try it for a week' - listen for more details. Join us for this and so much more on The GuysOnFOSS Podcast.

Errors: I don't know who was pronouncing Maemo correctly, but there seems to be a bit of confusion about it on the Maemo forums. If you know how it is pronounced, let us know. Also, The Thoth said that Moblin turned into Maemo. This is false, Moblin and Maemo merged, making MeeGo (Try saying that 5 times fast!)

News:
IE Browser Share Drops Below 50%
Toshiba 3D TV
US Army Testing PIPBoys
Firefox 4 Beta Released for Maemo and Android
Nixie Pixel Wins Logitech 'Host with the most'

Topics
AROS
Toybox
Microsoft Expression Encoder

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

The Fifth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Sat, 2 Oct 2010 08:35:00 -0600

On this episode of the podcast... The Thoth, Inerg, Mekapaedia and Crazy2be discuss their favorite distros and why they like them. Also, a new segment is introduced called 'Try it for a week'. Remember to enter our contest to win a Starcraft 2 Beta key, or Plain Sight. All you have to do is send an email to Guysonfoss@gmail.com telling us you want to be entered. Keep in mind, if you want your voice to heard on the show, send us an audio clip of you saying what you want to say and we'll probably play it on the show. Another note, we are now on itunes so if you have one of those newfangled ipods, you can download our lovely voices directly onto your device. Show Errors: Meakapaedia accidentally said Fujita instead of Fujitsu; XGA instead of XFX and Pacman -Syu instead of Pacman -Sy.

News
Netflix comes to Canada
Sidux is Sidux no more
Google Turns 12
They're rooting everybody out here
Mandriva forks
LibreOffice
Go-OO

Topics
Peppermint
Moblin
Chromium-OS
Mint
OpenBSD
Arch Linux
Gentoo
Plan 9
Mandriva
Windicators

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

House cleaning

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Fri, 1 Oct 2010 19:50:00 -0600

If you've been following our twitter account, or our facebook page (@guysonfoss and Guys on FOSS respectively) you might have noticed the massive torrent of updates suddenly appearing.

Do not panic.

We're merely updating our tagging system, which was lacking. It varied from none (inerg) to excessive (Thoth) to irrelevant (Me). It's been overhauled, and rules are now in place. Hopefully, searching for posts in the future should be greatly optimized.

Podcast tomorrow! It's been hailed our best one yet.

Why I hate Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 20:00:00 -0600

This isn't a rehash of the same things I've been saying for quite a while, it seems, it is a clarification of why I am saying them.

Certain people might say "You're saying them because you like to be controversial, annoying and contrary!", and they would be right. But that's not the entirety of my reasons.

The original hatred stems from use. I used Ubuntu for quite a while, under the guise of Linux Mint, and it worked fairly well. The packages were about as recent as the Pre-Cambrian era, but at that point it really wasn't an issue. I then moved to Arch, because largely, I was bored and wanted to try something new. My skills with Linux grew exponentially during my use of Arch, and I went from nearly no knowledge of the internals to what I would call a fair knowledge of the internals. I can't hack the kernel yet, unfortunately. Lack of C experience.

What did happen though, is when I went back to Ubuntu, the experience was frustration. While Arch made you work all the time, and Ubuntu didn't, when you did want to work Ubuntu got in the way. It is nowhere near as compliant as Arch, and gnome doesn't help. XFCE helps a bit, but my the package manager is the same. And oh, how I hate apt. Why? Because it doesn't have a "force" option. In pacman, I could delete the kernel for all it cared. Why is this important? Let me refer you to a more experienced man:

"UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things." - Doug Gwyn

The reason the "force" option is important in a package manager is because sometimes there are package conflicts that the package manager cannot sort out, so you need to yank out one dependency and install a replacement, or install the conflicting package first and then the dependency, etc... The inability to do so is infuriating. The obsolescence of packages wasn't great, either.

And then came the time I tried to run Xubuntu off a USB stick. It was slow as all hell. Arch Linux? As fast as normal.

After the noncompliance and the slowness of Ubuntu made me leave it for Arch, and occasionally along the road, Gentoo, I started to grow in a more philosophical way in all aspects. Then I looked at computing.

What did I realize?

Ubuntu, OS X, Windows and all those kind of purported "user-friendly" operating systems actually make computer user harder for the average person. "What?", you might say, akin to my mate Crazy2be, "That doesn't make any sense.". It does, actually. It does because it makes it so the average user requires no skills, and thus develops no skills, in using an operating system. I understand using a stable, supported and easy to use system in a business environment, but in that case you're probably using AS/400 and Windows XP, so the point is moot.

I suppose there is an argument that people should be able to choose. Sure, you annoying libertarian, but then you can choose with Arch Linux. The choice comes down to "pacman -Sy kde" or "pacman -Sy gnome". If you're not sane, that is. The real answer is "hg http://hg.suckless.org/dwm"

So what I'm saying is basically I hate ubuntu because I hate using it, and it is a symbol of what I consider the unskilled corruption of a hobby OS. I'm also telling the average computer user "Go and install Arch Linux so you can learn some skill. For your sake as much as mine."

With your help, we can eliminate things such as this from being needed to be hung up:

The Fourth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 06:00:00 -0600

This week on the podcast: Waffle Monster makes his return and we talk about stuff! Remember to enter our contest by emailing us at Guysonfoss@gmail.com! Also, if you don't already have Dropbox and you have been considering it, help us out by signing up with our link by clicking here!

News:
Mint Debian
Sidux
Uberstudent
Schools Spy on Students Through Webcam
Engineer Terrorists
Dell's New 7" Tablet
FCC Opening TV Airwaves
Facebook Down
IBM Single Atom DRAM
GOG down then up again
Garry's Mod For Mac

Topics:
Diaspora
Microsoft Security Book
OpenBSD
Installing Gnome on OpenBSD

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

The Third Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (GuysOnFOSS) — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 06:00:00 -0600

This week... On The GuysOnFOSS Podcast.

News Topics
Data Deduplication Comparative Review on Slashdot
Baremetal OS
The ACTA
Google Bounty
Torvalds becomes an American

Topics
Firefox Beta/Nightly builds
Portable apps
Acid3 test
Sunspider test
Peacekeeper Test
Google Phone
Google Spies on Teens
Commodore Phoenix
Apophysis Fractal Flame Editor
Helpful Youtube Video for Apophysis
Another Apophysis Video

Helpful contact info
GuysOnFOSS Twitter - GuysOnFOSS Email - Facebook Page
Mekapaedia's Twitter - Mekapaedia's Email
The Thoth's Twitter - The Thoth's Email
Inerg's Email

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)