Raw Matter

Freesoftwaremagazine has an interesting comparison (at the end of the article) between Vista and Debian (unfortunately, they use sarge numbers, but numbers for etch wouldn't be that different.)

The (not really surprising) conclusion: Kernel + libc + X + KDE + Mozilla compared to Vista (assuming that this is about comparable, functionality-wise), Vista is more than three times as big (LoC) and, consequently, expensive (COCOMO numbers.)

Zack's pam-hooks module got me thinking that the whole "start stuff at user login/logout" thing should be simplified a huge lot. Currently, there are just too many mechanisms depending on the user's shell, ?dm, distribution, session manager/desktop environment etc. Should this be a topic for the freedesktop.org people (or is it already - it might fit into Portland in some way)?

A standardized way to hook into session setup/teardown might also be good for security: if there's only few ways to get stuff started at login, that means fewer places to look where malware could be hiding. Of course, it also means that said malware can spread more easily, being more independent of the user's desktop environment.

iTaser: I never can remember: Were these the earplugs, and those the 50000V stunners, or was it the other way round?

Hit Alt+F2, type notepad, hit enter. An editor window pops up. Something is very strange, though ... until I realize that KDE has caught my Alt+F2, so that the “Run Command” box I was typing notepad into was not that of the Windows session on the terminal connection but the one of my local KDE. And since I've installed Wine some time ago, there actually is a text editor called notepad on my local computer which closely resembles the one from windows.

And the whole thing because apparently Copy and Paste doesn't work from my local desktop to a (Citrix based) terminal session. (Hmm. Is Alt+F2 even the correct key combination for Windozes? Update: Several people have pointed out that it's Start+R in Windows. Thanks, will have to try if that's put through to the terminal session correctly, then.)

Happy new year etc.

Dear Lazyweb, how do I set up java so that it either uses arts or properly uses software mixing so that I can have sound in parallel between Java and other applications? (At least, I assume that Java is the culprit, because I can have parallel sound between flash within firefox, which I assume not to use arts, and arts based stuff. I could be wrong on this, though, so the question might be how to set up arts to not lock sound exclusively...)

(Yes, the blog doesn't take comments. Drop me an email and I'll update this entry.)