Can’t say I have ever used USPS Shipping Assistant software really. I use to use mail merge software in word but had too many issues when trying to get printer to print to sheet. After looking around the web we found a company in the midlands that could implement multiple databases into their thermal printing machine, ie take your database and create unique thermal labels based on your data. Saved us messing around really, and still allowed us to do one off labels for each customer for example.

of course - if you can get it and afford it nothing is better than Stanford.

Then I guess you’ll have to make sure someone seeds it 24/7.. If you have shell on wgs then it’s no problem I guess.. I can also seed whenever my machine is up.

What we should do is host a bunch of good-to-have images. Like some of the most common distros, plus a bunch of old ones to test binary compatibility on. We could pre-load them with svn checkouts of autopackage and various dev tools like gcc, emacs, auto* etc.

you finished it already?

“I’ve looked at Hula, but, you know, it’s just not like GMail…it looks a little bit like Zimbra. Zimbra is big, and slow, and bloated. *sigh*”

Well, as we all know by now, the Hula project collapsed (predictably; it was mostly vapor and abandonware to begin with). And as you correctly pointed out, Zimbra is incredibly bloated.

I suggest you check out Citadel — http://www.citadel.org

It’s got quite a lot of that “web 2.0 sizzle” and because it was built from scratch using clean, efficient C code, its footprint is quite small.

I just wanted to share my expirence with you. My site is http://www.viralpatel.net and http://geocities.com/taj_os

There is stable interfaces in Linux, in the form of portable APIs like Java, or API-independant protocols like X11 and DBus - these can be used from multiple programming languages, on many versions of many distros, right now. As an example, libhal’s API is unstable, but if you connect to hald straight from DBus, you can skip using libhal completely.

If you want a stable C API, either ditch ELF and make another object file format, or force his highness Ulrich Drepper to accept the -Bdirect patch and make gcc generate Bdirect ELF sections by default (ie. without the need for some special switch that nobody will know or use); I’m sure if Red Hat’s management got involved in the decision, the patch would be accepted very quickly.

Centralized repositories are evil and I hate them - but what else do you offer people? It is bitterly ironic that autopackage, which is a far superior solution, has less than 1% of the packages in Ubuntu’s repos. The way to win here, is to build autopackages of software which is almost never packaged or really difficult to install: MythTV (a mission to install, entire distro - MythKnoppix - just to get it working), asterisk (entire distros: Trixbox, AsteriskNow are built around it), mplayer (many people including me run the Windows version under wine, it’s easier than compiling the Linux version), and so on. Get this kind of software autopackaged and watch autopackage really take off.

Worth mentioning too for the uninitiated that to start the hplip set up application you type “hp-setup” from the command line (fedora 6 doesn’t have a Gnome icon for it).