Some shameless self-promotion: http://bhepple.freeshell.org/o... The scripts are here: http://bhepple.freeshell.org/o...

fluxbox with my own scripts

it's not about our freedom to drive - it's about our freedom to be able to travel without yahoos trying to kill us on the roads. I would make driverless cars compulsory for under 25's, over 75's and anyone who's ever had a drink driving or dangerous driving conviction.

Read Mr Poettering's own account of systemd at http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html Features are listed in legions but only one tangible, significant benefit: it's supposed to be faster. Only one real benefit and then only to laptop owners. What would a server admin care if it takes 2 minutes to boot or 15 seconds or 10 minutes? Who cares? Now, if you google the first major distro to go systemd ie fedora-15, you'll see that it's not faster at all in practice. So all that change, all the obfuscation of hiding in compiled code what used to be clear (in bash-scripts), all the complexity, confusion, breakages, fear, uncertainty and doubt amounts to - no advantage at all. I'm not sure if it's enough to have me bail out of the fedora world - but surely this won't find its way into RHEL?!?!? Please tell me not!!!

You young schmucks should listen up! When you hit 40-50 years old your eyes will seize up and you'll be able to focus at exactly one distance. You get glasses, then you have a choice of distance (TV or driving) and reading (books or monitors) as well as whatever your eyes can do by themselves. One thing you'll notice is that at the closer distances, the focal depth is very small - it makes a big difference if the monitor is 40cm away or 50cm - at one you can focus. At the other you can't. Brutal as that. Now sit down at a 75cm (30") widescreen monitor and WTF - if you can focus at the centre, you can't focus at the edge. Unless, of course you sit 2m away or more. That's why I'm sitting exactly 45cm from my good old 43cm (17") diagonal 1920x1440 Philips 107P4 CRT monitor. It beats the crap out of the Dell 2001FP 51cm (20") 1600x1200 monitor at work both in the quality of the image, the number of vertical lines of code in emacs and my ability to focus on it. When they offered me an upgrade to a rootin tootin 27" wide-screen, I tried it and sent it back - just couldn't focus all the way to the edges. If any monitor manufacturers are listening here, WE WANT VERTICAL PIXELS _AND_ A NICE COMPACT FORMFACTOR - around 43cm, thank you very much!! I'm not talking a small demographic here - it's the baby boomers!!

As said previously, scripts are scripts and don't often need a GUI. But for grep's sake, make them consistent!!! The only spicing up _really_ needed are some standards:

o output errors to STDERR; normal output to STDOUT
o include (-h, --help) processing - and send it to STDOUT so the help can be piped to 'less'
o use getopt(1) or process-getopt(1) so that options on the CLI parse in a predictable and standard way
o keep it terse except for errors so that the user can easily see if it worked or not without scanning vast output
o provide a --verbose option to help with tracking down those errors

... and the most annoying thing of all - make sure --help _always_ works, even if the script body itself can't - at least the user can then be told about what the prerequisites are.
Head over to http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ for much wisdom on how to write better bash scripts.

gjots2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gjots2/ (full disclosure: written by me under GPL)

ccrypt: http://ccrypt.sourceforge.net/

Reason I ask is there is a similar thing called rPath which I used on a project a couple of years ago. It spun off from RedHat (Eric Troan, Michael Johnson et al). Mr Johnson was kind enough to explain (http://lwn.net/Articles/283070/) that although it used usernames/passwords to control access to the software this was not "DRM", and that it contained proprietary code - I was never quite clear if that meant the source code was available or available only to paying customers.

So is the SuSE offering completely FOSS?

Bob

If a crim wants to pinch my old fashioned paper id, they just take it or fake it. If a crim wants my biometric, they take my finger, eye whatever. Not nice. Bottom line - there are some things I'd lose an eye or a finger for, but not many. To hell with biometrics.