This is a pretty simple issue that was easy to solve but took a bit of fumbling around...

I recently checked out the new Java SwingSet3 project from it's SVN repo, to play around with it. It's a NetBeans project so it was simple enough to fire up NetBeans 6.0 and use it's built-in Subversion support to check the project out from the repository directly...

My plan was very simple: check out the code with NetBeans, build it, run it (using JDK 1.6.0_10 beta for the new Nimbus look/feel too) and then hack at the code.

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Emacs long-awaited version 22.1 was released on 2007-07-02, and a package for Cygwin was available a few months later. The Cygwin package is still experimental, so Cygwin's setup program will select 21 by default.

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Well, my stint in *buntu is over, and it ends with an award to openSUSE: this is the first Linux distro I've returned to.

Kubuntu is nice, and I'm happy that I've tried it out, but it's not for me. It's nice enough if you want a simple desktop system, and APT rocks (especially with the aptitude front-end). But it's just not as good as openSUSE, sorry.

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Just sent the following letter to the Australian Standards rep for the proposal DIS29500 (Microsoft Office Open XML standard) which is being Fast Tracked through ISO, even with blatant interoperability, portability and cultural technical issues.  This is based on the instructions posted at Groklaw. Also, instead of just cut-and-pasting the comments from the No OOXML web site, I've reviewed them and altered for Australian concerns, so that they really are my own comments.

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Found this neat project in SourceForge, which is a fork (?) of OpenOffice that adds some nice features, but the really cool part is that it has free clip art and templates, many of which are actually decent!

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Okay, so I hate working in Windows, but on my employer's equipment at least, I must live with it. After having had this machine replaced twice (faulty Dell hardware) and rebuilt more times than I can remember (Windows BSODs), for a total of at least 3 system migrations this past year, I thought I'd better keep a list of what free software to install on top of Windows, and what adjustments to make, so that at least I don't feel like I'm wearing a straight jacket. Here goes:

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Quick note:- I use KDE nearly all the time. But sometimes I have occasion for a minimal desktop (e.g. when I plan to use just one, heavy program like FlightGear and need basically not much more than a window manager and X itself). So an alternate "light" desktop session type is nice to have.

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Yes, I've joined the ubuntu train, and I'm travelling in the Kubuntu car (the caboose?). This will be, what, my fifth (or sixth if you count Knoppix, but I never put that on my hard drive) Linux distro since trying out RedHat 5.2 back in 1999. Previous to this I was using openSUSE 10.2 which is not a bad distro either and I always had my eye on SuSE. So, why yet another distro change?

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MJL20080827 -- Update:  I Just realised that this is one of my top-visited pages and it's a totally disorganised and incongruent pile of... What's worse is, I've never updated it since the promised update back in March 2007!

Let me clear things up (and save you wading through the whole article): If you want remote access to your openSUSE desktop from a networked thin client, then forget about X11, XDMCP, VNC or tunneling X through SSH. Use the NX protocol. You'll need to do the following:

1. Install FreeNX on your openSUSE host. Some (slightly outdated, but usable) instructions are in Chapter 9 of the openSUSE 10.2 Reference manual. If you're using openSUSE 11.0 or newer, get the latest FreeNX package from the openSUSE Build Service (there are one-click install buttons)
2. Install an NX client on your remote terminal(s). Nomachine has free NX clients for Linux, Mac, Windows and Solaris (even some experimental ones for PlayStation 2 and Zaurus!). If your remote terminal is running openSUSE, you could alternatively get an open-source NX client from the build service (or ask yourself: I'm running X locally, so why don't I just use good ole SSH and X11?)
3. Configure your NX client to connect to the openSUSE host, then log in and enjoy!

The upshot: I've done this with a FreeNX server and Nomachine's NX client for Windows XP, and it all "just works", except maybe for some font issues with older X clients like emacs (install extra font packages from nomachine to fix that), and some transparency effect issues I noticed in kwin4, probably to do with X11 extensions missing in the NX client. Not a big deal.

Read the rest of this article for the boring background and laughable false-starts in my quest for remote desktops in X... <blush/>

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I don't know how many other people get this issue, but it comes up at my work a bit: Some co-worker asks me if I know of a tool to do such-and-such, and invariably I think “well, that's easy to do on Unix, but on Windows…”.

Then I remember Cygwin, and quickly find a Cygwin utility that does it, or can be scripted to do it with a small amount of work. So then co-worker asks if they can have a copy of this utility, and of course Cygwin is Free, so I say “sure, go download from www.cygwin.com.” Then they say, “yeah, but I don't want to install all of Cygwin, can't you just give me that one program?”

Well, the Cygwin command-line tools can be run from a Windows CMD.EXE shell, so this is quite possible to do. However, they all require the Cygwin POSIX layer, which at a minimum means I should also give them cygwin1.dll. But what other DLLs might the program use?

MJL2008-09-10T14:37+1000 Update: since this page gets a lot of hits, here's the quick answer: use cygcheck, i.e:

cygcheck grep

Find it under Happy hacker discovery #2. Keep reading if you're bored...

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