Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014 (2014)
jeffcovey.net
jeffcovey.net
Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925135 - June 2014 (76 comments)
The immense buzz when Mozilla open sourced Navigator/Firefox. The crazy first day of the IPO of VA Software (+698% above initial price!!!)
Tweaking settings to get the best X11+Enlightenment speed possible, although I decided I preferred WindowMaker. Feeling like Open Source and Linux would take over the world (It did, really). Developers conferences at Apple to discuss this crazy upcoming Unix-based MacOS. (one of the presenters made a joke about how easy it would be to install apps, you'd just open a terminal and run "/bin/install --etc" and laughed at the horror on the faces of the assembled Mac evangelists)
I feel like an old hippie, trying to tell people what Woodstock was like and why it was special, only to see their confusion and lack of really getting it.
Not much of a point to this comment, just a big old nostalgia bomb early in my morning :)
You're so right that the internet seemed so full of possibilities.
It's evolved into more of a desktop now that plain window managers aren't something people usually think of. It's still got great eye candy, though I miss some of the old themes I used to use.
The Enlightenment libraries were used in Samsung's Tizen OS too - hopefully they got some consultancy money out of that (or similar).
https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened/243?lan...
It really does seem like the author of the article didn't read the docs, though. E.g., he states that Genlist "in essence is a list widget with some items." But according to the docs the "simple list" widget is the tool that fits that definition. Genlist is way more complex and apparently meant to handle situations with a large number of total items. Whether reallocation is an appropriate approach to get that complexity I don't know. But if it's the wrong tool for the job, who cares?
Ironically you are more likely to see such an approach in modern GUI toolkits than when EFL was written.
[0] https://docs.tizen.org/application/native/guides/ui/efl/grap...
The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era.
Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/
> The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era.
> Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/
Oh the times before it was xorg. And even before that, when for a proper modular accelerated X you had to pay or use X build for your graphic card. I remember buying new graphic card just to use a new modular XFree86(no drivers for my old one).
Now everything is so easy...
For a long, long time I was happy to even get XFree86 and later Xorg to work without 3D acceleration. By the time I started to care, helpful people from the Internet had taken care of most of the revolting details.
And when proper 3D acceleration became important (compiz was just gorgeous), vendors were reasonably happy to supply drivers for their GPUs.
In essence, though, I agree, Linux-on-the-desktop has gotten so much more easy over the past ~20 years.
I actually met my first wife through Everything2. At the risk of further exposing who I am, I even hosted the site at the University of Michigan Business School's little datacentre for a while. Good times!
I've just checked and felt a warm feeling in my heart seeing that the website is still up, and not only that, but I can even login into my account that hadn't been used since 2002 or so (didn't remember my username, but the account is tied to an email account that I've had since around 1997 (!) so it was easy to recover).
I might write again from time to time...
Thanks for mentioning it!
PS: How can one have such fond memories of something locked in the brain stored somewhere, and only remember them when someone mentions it? I wonder how many nice memories from that time are still lost somewhere in my head.
The ability to create amusing nodeshells, or posts that were just ASCII pictures of a fish swimming from a shark ("The birth of leadership"), or poems, or in-depth analysis of some interesting idea or thing.
Everything2 was where I first made real content on the web, and was proud of what I created. Like a precursor to answers on Stack Overflow (or other SE sites).
Wikipedia is great for factual stuff, but e2 was much more nurturing of creativity.
(used 'The Alchemist' as a username - probably because I was into reading about it at the time. Unfortunately most people probably thought I liked that book of the same name).
I went to a meetup in Melbourne. Met a girl in Chicago. Discovered that someone else lived literally on my street, a third of a mile away. I had several small world experiences on E2.
It was a unique time back in the late 90s, and those guys had their finger on the pulse of internet nerdom. It was pre-Facebook, pre-"Web 2.0" pre a lot of things. In a lot of ways Slashdot was the spiritual predecessor to Hacker News, so we owe that crew a debt.
IIRC they recorded sporadically around 1999 and 2000, just talking about whatever had been on the front page recently. I've thought about doing a sort of retrospective, listening to each one and writing a blog post about what they found interesting... it's a neat peek back at a different time and a different culture.
People still have interest in philosophy, free Internet and so forth.
Nothing is gone, it's just been made a bit less obvious.
They were never bad people to be around.
I would also include, along with Everything2, (I recall a guy named Tim Vroom—I think he attended Hope College with the Slashdot guys as well?) its sister site PerlMonks.org. Man, I spent a lot of time there learning Perl and reading up on CPAN modules. I'd hate to be maintaining any of the code we wrote then now though!
I would also include, along with Everything2, (I recall a guy named Tim Vroom?) its sister site PerlMonks.org. Man, I spent a lot of time there learning Perl and reading up on CPAN modules.
I later started building KDE weekly from cvs during their push toward 2.0, using their odd cvsup tool and somehow lived through their desktop during their CORBA phase. Again, I learned so much during this time which has been extremely useful for my occupation today.
It was a neat time to live in, for sure.
Long arguments about linux and micro$oft, the excitement when I got more karma. Ah, the glories of youth.
Feels old, man.
Oh, and it turns out the service doesn't work well on my VT420, but I understand why that's not exactly a priority.
In context, therefore, I think it's understandable.
Until you looked at old usenet / mailing list archives and realized you were already well into the eternal September by that stage!
(I'm being a bit facetious -- I think all eras have their pluses and minuses, comp.* etc heyday was before my time but it was quite amazing to see some of the in depth discussions and names involved. That's where the infamous Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate took place for example, and it was not uncommon to see CPU and operating system and other software designers from different organizations debating everything from kernels to TCP/IP enhancements to compiler theory to TLBs. Generally under their real names.)
"Have you ever kissed a girl?" https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sun.hardware/c/wCd7fHnz...
by Sun employee Bryan Cantrill (dtrace) :)
And yes I'm aware of that comment and it's a personal favorite of mine. Not the message by itself, but in the context the tantrum is the ultimate tacit surrender and humiliation of the big professional corporate clunky slow old proprietary OS to this open source upstart.
Miller's post was pretty strong out of the gate ("Solaris is a pig") but it had a lot of interesting technical content.
VA made F&F shares available to anyone who could document an open-source contribution to Linux. I think my addition of the "-e" switch to chpasswd was sufficient.
I recall that I purchased 140 shares at $30. I held on to those shares the first day all the way up to $300/share or whatever it was, and then kept holding the shares in the coming days and weeks all the way back down. I eventually sold a few years later for maybe $1/share. At least the loss was able to offset some LTGC.
I purchased some wisdom with that experience.
Edit: I left the same comment on this story in 2014:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925266
(I must be really boring at parties.)
That such an excellent way to phrase it, I may steal it ;-)
So much time lost :-) Thx rasterman !
Linuxcare is close to me... but I wont go into details. The first linux unicorn and crashed and burned, personally from my perspective, getting too hyper-valued-on-paper-too-fast
It's hard to believe, given how corporate and ad-heavy it is now, but there was a time when one of the first considerations in naming a new project was seeing whether foo.sf.net was available.
I knew once folks like the Thinkgeek founders and the last of the core SF team bolted that no hope was left. The fact that it survives, even in its current punchline without a setup configuration, might be a testament to how well and durable it started at.
kuro5hin was another site that I wish I had an accessible archive of.
That's where I first heard of bitcoin... long before it was worth even a penny.
I've since wondered who made that first article talking about bitcoin on that site.. but there's no way to check, since I only have my own memories to go on.
Those Bubble 1.0 adverts were the best.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
I was at VA then, and it was an utterly bonkers rollercoaster through the breach of pre "disruption-obsessed SV. I don't see that era ever returning, as we've now made "disruption" a programmatic end in and of itself.
i can’t tell you how much valinux changed my life.
the excitement. the possibilities. the dotcom money.
most of all the people - like rasterman, octobrx, rasmus of php fame.
insane coalescence of talent.
working there part time on linux.com was such a foundation experience for me as a freshman in college.
i feel like an old hippie now too.
but forever greatful to LNUX
thanks for the fun memories. :)
By which I mean I've noticed that a large percentage of sites are converging to a a very similar aesthetic and demographic. Let me call this the "Zoomer Influencer Aesthetic". Lots of buttons all over the place, popups to subscribe, garbage at the top, etc. You have to sign into many of these sites, of course, because all about harvesting those eyeballs, baby.
If you go back 10 years or so, it was a lot about content. You had something to say. Now it's a case that YOU are the content. It's all about you, how great your life is, how you're an "influencer", how you feel. When I first opened up TikTok, there was a category on unboxings, together with a bunch of beautiful boys and girls doing whatever vapid thing beautiful boys and girls do when they have nothing to teach or insights to impart.
We should probably blame YouTube. Ryan Higa, James Jackson and Felix Kjellberg possibly ignited a match. The young ladies have jumped on board, too. I dare say that most of them are doing 10X better than most man could do.
I do a bit of (mostly technical) blogging. I became fed up with Wordpress the other day, feeling it was too bloated. I had a hunt around for something that might be a suitable alternative. I had heard that Tumblr was picking up in popularity again, so I decided to give it a looksee to see if it was suitable. The answer was "no". Posts aren't dated (damn your teeth!), they seemed unsuitable for technical discussion, and they had that "Pinterest" feel to it. I quickly ruled it out. There were a few other sites I investigated, but figured they weren't all that great. Too much navigation and baloney. I'm looking for something simple.
Anyway, that's all for now. Now get off my lawn!
Static site generator (I like Hugo) + Github. Use Github Actions to build it, and Github Pages to serve it. Cloudflare on top if you want a custom domain (for the auto SSL).
Used to be, people could unpack shit by just removing it from its packaging without making a stupid fucking ceremony of it.
The whole concept of "unboxing" -- the mere fact that such a "concept" exists[1] -- is a horrific example of how vapid the Internet has become.
Yeah, hands off my Gran Torino, punks.
___
[1]: Or "is a thing", which used to be spelled "exists" back when a majority of people were literate.
This is partly why I did Freshermeat [1]. I am operating an instance dedicated to security projects [2] where you can submit projects.
[1] https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/freshermeat [2] https://open-source-security-software.net
I recall when it closed, I think RMS or ESR (kinda fuzzy now) asked for people to help build a replacement.
Personally, it is a real loss, not in a nostalgia sort of way, but in a discovery way. Search engines, searching github, heck just github, are no substitute for the cool software we found on Freshmeat. It was a way for projects to not only become visible, but for you to stumble upon them (as other comments have already noted). With some frequency, I wonder why no one has come up with a replacement. Sourceforge has had its ups and downs, but the front page of SourceForge compared to FreshMeat.net is like comparing a modern news conglomerate to Hacker News.
I have strong memories of writing my first piece of fairly decently-used software (Ticketsmith) around 1999, then carefully hand-packaging the tarballs and crafting the FM entries. At one point, once I had learned a bit more about web servers, I moved the downloads from my web host to my own Linux-based Apache box running on a cable modem out of my apartment and watched the download logs with FM referrers in realtime. It was exhilarating.
One thing I clearly remember about FM was a very nice color scheme and font choice. It had a certain polish to it in what was often a land of Apache auto-gen directory entries full of tarballs.
Tangentially related: I worked briefly for VA Linux, as part of the first paid staff of Linux.com. I learned a lot of large-structure PHP site architecting that summer. My boss was OctoberX of Themes.org fame.
Closet thing I can think of today is alternative to, but thats just related apps, not new inventions.
I started a Sourceforge and Freshmeat project and called it "XML for <SCRIPT>", out of amusement.
And that is when I learned how many open source listings/aggregator projects did not escape their output. It was difficult even to get the name changed.
I have a cringe-worthy XML story from ~1998.
I was IT manager for a software fulfillment and manufacturing company in redwood city, ca. Our biggest client was SUN Microsystems.
We manufactured the actual physical product for SUN OS Solaris, checkpoint FW, among things like games such as Everquest, TurboTax etc... If you bought any of these, we made the CDs, Boxes, Manuals, etc and handled drop-ship for orders done online via an EDI file that was FTP'd to our Linux FTP servers we built in house with the crew who would later found LinuxCare.
So, SUN wanted to have a big meeting on changing the EDI process from the FTP PUT of a flat text-file that we then needed to parse (which was a pain as our devs were constantly fiddling bits in order to make the EDI flatfile import into our manifest system on AS/400 went cleanly.
SUN wanted us to adopt this new EDI process based on their newly adopted plan for XML... I think this may have actually been the first meeting SUN had with any vendor to start XML adoption.
We didnt have any experience, clearly with XML, and SUN was doing a poor job in this meeting explaining why they wanted to use it.
I was ~22 years old or so, and I said the following cringe-worthy comment to the head of the relationship with SUN in front of the entire exec staff at my company:
SUN: So we want to eliminate the flat-file EDI format we have because of all our data issues (many late night hours each week fixing batch jobs on the AS/400 by many people on my team)
ME: "So, just so I understand, we are going to drop the crappy way your sending us data, and you want us to adopt this new thing, XML, which we haven't used yet - and you think this will resolve the data issues we have with the EDI process?"
ENTIRE C-SUITE AT MY COMPANY: *WAVING ARMS WILDLY* trying to get me to STFU mid sentence for calling SUN's EDI processes "CRAPPY"
I'll never forget that meeting. I Still cringe over that meeting to this day, however in a cmical way - as I realize I was 22 years old and that meeting was the first (many) had ever heard of XML.
---
Fun Fact; the folks that setup our FTP EDI process with linux, cronjobs for import and supporting our Linux boxes were Dave Sifry, Chris DiBonna and the others that founded LinuxCare.
Fun other fact ; After having these consultants for some time, I went to Dave Sifry, and I said to him "If I were you, I would start a company that specifically offers linux support contracts.
A ~month later Dave Sifry sat me down and said "Guess what I am doing!? We created a company called LinuxCare!"
We spoke briefly about me joining them, but I wasn't a good fit for helping them at this point... just a good catalyst that solidified what they were already thinking about.
I guess that's not too far from late Download.com energy, but I'd caution you about using it further.
By the end of my time using it, it already felt superfluous. I moved from RedHat to Debian and apt was clearly a better system for managing the software on my system than the random mix of installing RPMs and grabbing source tarballs.
Also, "tinder" - how the are you supposed to know what that is if you're learning the language in XXI century? It took me way too long to realize that "tinder", "match" and the fire logo are a clever wordplay.
Miles "Tails" Prower's name is a play on Miles Per Hour. Even a lot of native English speakers in mile-using countries miss it.
I try to take a Today's Lucky 10,000 approach to these situations.
Its absence is also one of the reasons I think the Linux desktop got so insular in the past decade. Freshmeat was a water cooler for people working on small components - here's a text editor, here's an ebook reader, here's 50 music players - go build your own environment. Where do you go today to "shop" for free software? Usually, just your distro's package repo.
The only comparable online experience I saw in the past decade was the high point of tumblr, albeit for a very different context.
These days, AlternativeTo is a pretty good… ehm, alternative.
But seeing this makes me sentimental, I spent a lot of time there in my younger (and Linux) years.
I'm a Mac user now.
I started off with windows 98, was linux for most of my life but in the mean time had to use enough windows 2000, 7 and 10 to be dangerous. Got sent an M1 Mac Laptop for a contract last year, and didn't really get it. Now happily using a weird minimalist linux distro with a window manager.
Anything bought by IBM or Embarcadero seems to end up being abandonware too.
Not sure that's happening so much these days, but that's what happened to the 90/00s web.
> Probably the best directory of Linux software right now is Freshmeat (http://www.freshmeat.net/). You can use the full-text search or the category-based browsing (labeled "appindex"). Note that the category scheme is kinda odd.
I also pointed people at `rpmfind.net`. I'd find those random packages scary today (like I do xda-developers), but it was a more innocent time.
Unfortunately the freecode.club replacement service adopted the tagging mechanism instead of the Trove system.
Some years later when I was learning rails, I remember to read a book written by the author of fm: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1985
The rewrite of fm in rails was really good. I always used it as a reference for benchmarking when I was starting to work with RoR.
Due to redirects, it seems like archive.org doesn't have it.
"Content may be stale" indeed (from the header)...
Now, with corporations controlling the kernel, Linux is rather boring.
I watch slashdot via http://alterslash.org, and occasionally (very occasionally) drop into the main site to add a comment. Are they still adding hot grits to Natalie Portman? Watching just the top comments on AlterSlash, I don't have to care.
What a nostalgia trigger. This was from back when Freshmeat was on unreal.org!