The Hyperlogos

For some time now I have been using ps3mediaserver to stream video to my Xbox 360. Since solutions for playing various video streams on various devices have become more convenient of late I've become less picky about what I transcode to, except that I like to achieve fairly high quality. ogmrip has become less useful of late, failing on most source video on which I try to use it, so I've gone back to Handbrake, the most competent and arrogant of DVD transcoders.

Via VT6656 USB WiFi has been out-of-tree because of non-GPLness. The new driver is a candidate for inclusion supposedly but for now you need to build your own driver in most cases. I want it for Debian 5 on my DT360.

A long-awaited project (awaited by me, that is) has finally come to pass with my successful installation of debian woody on my WebDT 360 (Geode LX800 model.) This machine has a low-power 500MHz x86 processor with a tightly integrated architecture, a penmount resistive touch panel, and mediocre I/O. Luckily it does have USB2 and good bluetooth, but the WiFi is in most cases a VIA vt6656 which until recently did not have a GPL-safe driver, meaning you have to build your own.

We have often heard from a broad variety of pundits about how Linux is not a mature, enterprise-class Unix. All discussion over how "Linux is a kernel" aside, today I have encountered the first piece of evidence that suggests to me that this is true. It seems that no Linux distribution has a simple "repair permissions" tool. This was a standard feature of package managers of UNIX systems before Linux was even dreamt of, for example in Solaris.

Debian-based Linux distributions, which use the .deb package format and the apt package management system, are relatively free from dependency hell and thus are generally a joy to use and maintain. However, in order to properly manage a local archive of packages you need to build a repository in which to keep them. This is the simplest recipe I know for putting together a HTTP repository.

Ubuntu is a high-quality Linux distribution based on Debian Linux. It provides various distributions customized to various purposes; Ubuntu, the "default" system, is based on GNOME. There are also Kubuntu (KDE), Xubuntu (XFCE), Edubuntu (educational, and provides LTSP) and possibly other official distributions; depending on whether this page is outdated, a DFSG1-style distribution in which all source media must be Open-licensed, as in GPL, BSD, Creative Commons, and/or Public Domain only. In addition, Ubuntu provides absolutely the highest level of driver support (at the expense of Free Software "purity") including nVidia, ATI, Intel, and other manufacturer's binary drivers.

• 1. Debian Free Social Guidelines (?)

The first and most important thing to know about OpenGroupware.org is that the documentation is absolute crap. It is clear that first and foremost, the goal is to sell the complete server distribution that works from install. The system has become much more work-at-first than it used to be, but the install is still pretty lumpy. This document will tell you how I managed to install the latest (as of 20060530) version of OpenGroupware.org (OGo) on a fairly plain Debian sarge (currently the stable release) installation.