jcl

Accessibility Options control panel.

Contents of my Start Menu: Adobe Reader Alice Axiom Azureus Capitalism II CCCP CDisplay Debugging Tool for Windows eMule Final Fantasy VII Frink Ghostview Google Earth ImageMagick Intel Processor ID Uility iPod gunk iTunes K-Meleon Microsoft Calculator Plus Microsoft Command Shell Microsoft .NET Framework SDK Microsoft Office 2003 Microsoft Platform SDK Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer Microsoft Reader MinGW Mozilla Firefox Nero Network Stumbler Opera Paint.NET PLT Scheme Powertoys for WinXP PuTTY QuickTime Real Alternative SharpDevelop SpeedFan SpeedSwitchXP SuperTux TightVNC VIM VMware Windows Re

-O2 slows the compile down a bit compared to -O. Maybe more than a bit. The others options shouldn't have a significant effect. The relative slowless of Gentoo builds compared to the BSDs is probably a side-effect of the more aggressive optimizations used by Gentoo users. GCC has never been particularly fast (g++ especially was terribly slow until recently) and it can get seriously bogged down if you flip the wrong switches and twist the knobs to far. And since everyone is doing it, if I remember correctly the last set of CFLAGS I used on Gentoo was CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -mar

You should be able to go even lower than that. The CPU lists only includes processors in production today and I think the DX9 video card requirement assumes you're using Aero.

CFLAGS! -mcpu=pentium4 is almost identical to -march=i386. -fforce-addr doesn't have any noticable affect IME. (It also seems like a bad idea given the register situation on IA-32 but it might work for the P4.) -funroll-loops. You're just asking for it -fprefetch-loop-arrays has always produced slower code for me. I don't think GCC is smart enough to be trusted here. -falign* should be unnecessary. -mmmx -msse -msse2 should be handled by the matching USE flags. (The inability of the Gentoo community to RTFM to determine what these flags do was one reason I gave up on it.) Compiler flags suc

Emerge KDE or GNOME. The differentness will start to sink in ten or twelve hours into the build. Especially if the build fails.

That's the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) driver for Access, dBase, Excel, Paradox, and text databases.

Oracle is at least 15 years older than MySQL. I doubt that Microsoft uses either of them for anything except compatibility testing and competitive analysis. He's full of it.

They're native. But the situation is similar to the dingo in that the coyotes are a species thriving in a non-native environment. The difference is that we introduced the environment instead of the animals.

The package that originally drove me back to Linux had dependencies on the kernel internals. Threading related, I think. This would have been back when FreeBSD and Linux both had non-comformant and flaky implementations of POSIX threads and people on the Linux side were doing evil things with clone(). Ironically I never did use the package after I switched. Not even sure what it was now. (I thought it was KRoC but I see that it supports FreeBSD.) Or even DRI. Someone did manage to get one of the NVIDIA drivers working on NetBSD years ago but nothing came of it. It might actually have been the

I dunno. Coyotes are pretty comfortable in human civilization. They arguably get along better in urban and suburban environments than in the wilderness. We had several families, maybe a dozen individuals, living happily in the city within about a mile of our old house. When I took my nightly walks I'd frequently run into pairs or groups (parents and pups) out hunting. None of them seemed particularly concerned about my presence. They'd back off to a safe distance and wait for me leave and then go about their business. Never heard any complaints about them. Not sure most people even knew they w

Yup. No need. There are bazillions of coyotes in the US. Indeed they've become a serious threat to other (sub)urban wildlife. They're even threating the newly-restored wolves in parts of the country. No one truly knows why some stories become international news. In this case it was probably because it happened in New York City. Media organizations tend to treat local story as national or international news and there are a lot of media orgs our there. If I had a nickle for every utterly unimportant NYC or Atlanta story that CNN has run over the years.... As for why it was news to begin with,

I pretty much demolished Gentoo. Portage will give you as much rope as you want and even help tie the noose when you decide to hang yourself. It didn't take me long to deadlock it. No upgrades possible because of version and dependency conflicts. Even hit some fun paradoxical dependencies: packages that had to be installed and uninstalled or upgraded and downgraded at the same time. In theory portage might be able handle situations like that -- it supports parallel installs of different versions of packages and has fairly useful dependency tracking -- but at the time there weren't many utiliti

FreeBSD's Linux compatibility wasn't quite compatible enough, NetBSD didn't have the NVIDIA drivers, Dragonfly was too much work, OpenBSD was OpenBSD.

Yeah. Arch was my first choice when I gave up on Gentoo. It is quite nice but the documentation policy drove me away. (Arch doesn't package any docs except for manpages. If you need the full documentation for a package you're supposed to get it yourself from the WWW.)

Did I ever mention that I switched to Ubuntu because my Gentoo install was so mired in dependency hell that it was impossible to update? All package managers hate me.

Heh. The first time I upgraded from Debian stable to testing the upgrade munged my package database. Took me a solid half day of work to rebuild the system. It did work well after it was fixed though.

That looks like a list of every package with a depend (upstream or in Ubuntu) on Firefox or a component of the Firefox project. Several are independent projects that (should) handle the depend upstream (e.g. epiphany, galeon, gecko-sharp, thunderbird, I think nvu). About 20 of them are Firefox components, plugins, or extensions. A few of them don't even seem to depend on Firefox (e.g. epydoc, dpkg-www) or only have depends on older versions (e.g. libsvg2, I think). The problem is that Firefox isn't integrated into Ubuntu the way IE is integrated in Windows. Half of the Ubuntu packages that dep

Compilers: Linux or BSD: GCC is the standard. TCC might be preferable if you don't like the compile/link/crash/debug cycle. ICC might be preferable if you like gratuitous optimization. Windows: Microsoft's C/C++ compiler. Everything else: Vendor compiler or GCC.

Really. C is probably the most popular language in the world. Ignoring Cobol.

There is a standalone PHP interpreter. Or at least there was a few years ago when I looked at it.

The standard Python distribution uses a bytecode interpreter. Programs can be provided in either source or bytecode format. (The bytecode files are generated automatically by the interpreter or manually with the py_compile module.) Performance can (frequently) be improved if necessary by using native-code modules. The Psyco module has a native-code JIT compiler. The PyPy implementation includes (incomplete) code translators targeting C and LLVM. IronPython and Jython use the CLR and Java JIT compilers respectively. The Parrot implementation will use Parrot's JIT compiler. Remember that the va

It works. Embed the Python interpreter in the game and expose a scripting interface through it.

AFAIK Ubuntu inherited Debian's kernel build and packaging system. You get the same kernel either way but it's nice to have it packaged.

Is your problem excess MIPS, RAM, and software compatibility?