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OK, er, you fail. Epically.

These are completely different types of work. What Arjan is doing is tailoring boot to a specific set of software running on a specific set of hardware, using an entirely legacy-free init system.

This is nothing at all like what Fred is doing, which is optimizing a legacy boot system for completely generic hardware and software - it has to run on any system, with any set of software available from the Mandriva repositories installed.

The two types of work are utterly and entirely different.

For the record, another of our engineers - Claudio Matsuoka - has been working on the *other* type of boot system for several months now. It began as a re-implementation of the 'fastinit' system found in the Xandros distribution on the Eee. This system is called 'finit', and you can find it at http://helllabs.org/finit/ . It is used in Mandriva Mini, our custom edition for netbook OEMs. It pre-dates Arjan's work substantially, or at least the public announcement of it.

Faster bootup? Like http://helllabs.org/finit/

the eeepc 's fast init that asus put in xandros makes it boot fast fast fast

here is a re implementation of it

http://helllabs.org/finit/

...but not Pokemon either. Could anyone identify the owner of these butts?

You can play your AGI games on your UNIX system right now. Check out http://agi.helllabs.org/ for an AGI interpreter. It's not perfect, but it can run a bunch of games quite well. There's also an SCI interpreter being worked on; check it out at http://sci.helllabs.org/.

You can play your AGI games on your UNIX system right now. Check out http://agi.helllabs.org/ for an AGI interpreter. It's not perfect, but it can run a bunch of games quite well. There's also an SCI interpreter being worked on; check it out at http://sci.helllabs.org/.

1. Are your projects well managed and well documented in appropriate formats?
   Approprate, huh, yes. When I forget what a chunk of code or command line option does, I can guess it in quite a few attempts.

2. Have you given attention to the user interface?
   Of course. I even used getopt_long(3) to manage long options, so clueless users can use a highly intuitive, self-explanatory interface!

3. Does your software have the polish that's needed to gain acceptance outside the hacker community?
   Of course it does. Dominik Mierzejewski built the RPM packages, and he's not Chinese!

4. Are your users being looked after and feeling as if they're a necessary and appreciated part of the Open Source development process?
   Except for the fact that all of them ask for an XMMS plugin (including here in /. -- thanks to all who sent me email, ugh), yes, why not? And I'll write the XMMS plugin for the next version! As I did in the previous five versions!

5. Is your Web site up to date, and does it contain all the information it needs, presented in a consistent, logical format that makes it easy to find information?
   Sure. And what is not there is mentioned in the package docs somewhere, or if it does not correspond to the actual implementation the implementation has the authoritative information, so it's all there, just check the implementation following the steps of question 1.

If the answer to any of these questions is "no", your software is falling short of its potential. If you've ever said that you wish there were more female geeks in the Open Source community, now may be your opportunity to welcome them into your team, not as mascots or hangers-on, but as an indispensable part of the project.

Of course the answer of all questions is "yes", but if you're a female geek and want to improve my project by adding BP Soundmon, TFMX and VectorDean support, integrating an m68k emulator to allow Deli compatibility, you're very very welcome!

Oh, ok. Maybe the project isn't as messy as I described... But I can't see why a female geek could make it less messy. I see female geeks as equals, i.e. as organized or disorganized as any male geek, no worse, no better as software developer. No need for Conjoined Twin Myslexia Day or whatever. Miod Vallat's MikMod, the competitor, has much better documentation -- and the last time I checked there was no girls in MikMod's credits.

And yes, I will write the damn XMMS plugin! :)

Some of the best games around are already (partially) working on UNIX systems! There are currently AGI and SCI interpreters in the works, that can play your favorite Sierra games, like the Space Quest series. If you want to help with these programs, head over to agi.helllabs.org and sci.helllabs.org, grab the interpreters, and hack away.

Some of the best games around are already (partially) working on UNIX systems! There are currently AGI and SCI interpreters in the works, that can play your favorite Sierra games, like the Space Quest series. If you want to help with these programs, head over to agi.helllabs.org and sci.helllabs.org, grab the interpreters, and hack away.

Eh, still no XMP plugin in the bundle... It's a great player, visit the site and bug the authors to write a plugin... I want my bunch of SQSHed exotic Amiga mods playing in XMMS ;)

No offense intended, of course :)

http://helllabs.org/~claudio/alsa/ rms-aureal.txt

make has been used to manage dependencies between project components for almost a quarter of a century. While it was a major advance over the hand-written shell scripts that preceded it, make's semi-declarative syntax is clumsy, and even short make scripts can be very difficult to debug. In addition, its functionality is not accessible from other programs without heroic effort, and it provides little support for common operations such as recursion.

How can one expect to actually call himself a developer if he can't even manage to understand Makefiles? IMHO the standard make does wonderfully what it was designed for, and the GNU make is half-way to creeping featurism. The consistency and interoperability of each of the system utilities adds elegance to Unix, and learning how to use them helps to keep the brain working! :) Stupidifying it is a mistake.

This isn't elitism, but I believe that replacing make(1) to make it more accessible to dumb people doesn't make sense, except if you dumbify the programming languages as well.

(I actually like autoconf, and I have been using it in some of my projects, but the Makefiles generated by automake are just too bloated. I use my own nice very nice recursive Makefiles to build and package the system, and it works quite well!)

make has been used to manage dependencies between project components for almost a quarter of a century. While it was a major advance over the hand-written shell scripts that preceded it, make's semi-declarative syntax is clumsy, and even short make scripts can be very difficult to debug. In addition, its functionality is not accessible from other programs without heroic effort, and it provides little support for common operations such as recursion.

How can one expect to actually call himself a developer if he can't even manage to understand Makefiles? IMHO the standard make does wonderfully what it was designed for, and the GNU make is half-way to creeping featurism. The consistency and interoperability of each of the system utilities adds elegance to Unix, and learning how to use them helps to keep the brain working! :) Stupidifying it is a mistake.

This isn't elitism, but I believe that replacing make(1) to make it more accessible to dumb people doesn't make sense, except if you dumbify the programming languages as well.

(I actually like autoconf, and I have been using it in some of my projects, but the Makefiles generated by automake are just too bloated. I use my own nice very nice recursive Makefiles to build and package the system, and it works quite well!)

Plugger seems to work well in Linux. Instead of being a monolithic multimedia player plugin, it uses xanim and mtv to play video, timidity for MIDI, xmp for mods and so on. It's worth a try.

And the /dev/sequencer support is good for slower machines.

XMP is a good mod player, and supports many mod formats.

Perl, vi, the zx81 and demos are really great hacks, but I nominate the Soundtracker and Protracker. They're simple, elegant and efficient hacks.

At http://agi.helllabs.org. I sent a story update to Rob but he has not posted it yet. A babelfish version is also available.

At http://agi.helllabs.org. I sent a story update to Rob but he has not posted it yet. A babelfish version is also available.