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The single best feature?
Choosing the "best" is quite subjective. To me, it's definitely the ports system.
The closest thing you get in the Linux world is Gentoo's portage (which is modeled after *BSD ports). I've never tried it, but those who did found it quite different.
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

...is here.

Nice history lesson on EGCS. I wondered how that got sorted out...

Posted ... January 24, "yesterday published an Open Letter" and at OSnews http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9478/
Posted ... on 2005-01-22

Someone beat you to the punch and has written up a blurb about his machine.

But in all honesty, I agree with the hundreds of other posters who say that it will never measure up to the Mac Mini, especially in price. This is the reason why I've mentioned that Apple Mac Mini sales will cannibalize sales. At the same time Apple will see falling or stagnant sales on its own Airport Express and AirTunes devices since the Mac mini, presumably, can do all of that and more.

I am always recommending people to switch to Linux yet I never do. I installed Open Office and export my documents to word format yet at college they end up in a mess.

And, also - this bugs me... why on earth does Gnome have a Windows-style registry? The registry is one of the worst, most annoying, dumbest features of Windows and a big reason that I like working in Linux. So why on earth would you want to copy it?

I will not cover iptables in this paper. The reason is because most companies use hardware based firewalls to protect the servers in their production network. And this is usually being taken care of by another team and not by Linux systems administrators. If you are interested in a Linux Stateful Firewall using iptables, you might want to check out my instructions at Linux Stateful Firewall & IP Masquerading.

Werner made somewhat incorrect assumptions in that little paragraph.

iptables is an extra security measure I highly recommend - even on networks with hardware firewalls.

It is unwise to lock the security screen door but leave the front door unlocked when you are not home.

It's also intersting to note the following at the bottom of the page:

Copyright © Notice
This article may not be published, sold, reproduced or copied in whole or in part without obtaining permission first. But you are welcome to put links from your site to the article.

If Werner is going to claim copyright, he should state his sources - there is very little chance that he wrote every word. --Mike

And they'd be right.
Apple was working on non-folder groupings of data they called "piles" in the early 1990s.
"a pile is a loose grouping of documents. Its visual representation is an overlay of all the documents within the pile, one on top of the other, rotated to varying degrees. In other words, a pile on the desktop looked just like a pile on your real desktop."

The BeOS took this a step further (the ability to create/maintain piles automatically with a search).
more info

You can get it here. But be careful. Any spyware attempting to install itself on your machine will fail, and subsequently report you to the Department of Microsoft HomeLAN security as an unamerican, cancerous commie who stifles innovation.

Well we don't have any stories of sysadmins rescuing mainframes with knoppix.

Anyway osnews has a story on VMs and the OS

...and patched the same day.

The difference between free software and the proprietary stuff: if you've got no plausible deniability over faults, you tend to own up to them quickly. Not quibble over whether it's a bug or not, or how critical it is. And you fix it.

If you really want to kill a long, rainy afternoon, buy Jeremy Allison some beers and ask him about the undocumented bugs the Samba team knows about in CIFS, but, because they're nice guys, they're not holding MSFT's feet to the fire over.

IHBT, IHL, HAND.

It's an interesting point at the very least, and I'm curious if anybody has any actual hard figures comparing a 64 bit process to a 32 bit process on as similar hardware as can be obtained.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5768&page= 1

It says she and her daughter and son were in a house with a lot of old things, when her daughter (the older child) found a typewriter. She had never saw one. The girl uses the thing, and then starts explaining to the mother how wondefull it is, because it doesn't need wires or "expansive ink cartridges"... Then they got a piece of paper and started using it. The girl was marvelled "look!! You just type and the letters are already there in the paper!... The only problem is that you cant's change the fonts, , but it doesn't matter. There's no trouble with saving files, printing... You just type and it's already there!!"

I can even translate the story if anybody is interested. I love it, because I care so much for the subject (I almost cry when i read it :_) ). Imagine what is it to discover this "new" paradigm... We're so used to computers we forget how difficult they really are. Of course the girl will eventually find that computers have a lot of advantages, but we should never stop questioning the real usefullness of our tools. And children are great for that.

Now, my political agenda. I'm very pro-(command line interface). I found this article once (trough slashdot I believe) about someone who teached command line to people who never user computers before. This article says a lot about how command lines are more dialog-like, while the mouse interface require a lot of abstraction, and thus the command line is near to the normal relationship with another human, while graphical interfaces requires a lot of metaphors and parallels...

Anyway, I believe children should be exposed to things like LOGO. It's an important way to look at things.

Once I asked professor Vibeke Sörensen (I'm her fan :) ) wich approach she tought artists should have when dealing with programming: graphical interfaces (like with fluxograms) or text programming... she said it's the same thing, it just depends wether you like working with a painting or with a poem... I think this is a great insight on the thing. People learning to program should be at least exposed to all approaches before learning deeply. So, I think if you want your children to develop a good view on computing, you should look for some command-line driven programs, since this kind of environment is getting rare those days.

Back in my old school days (ouch, my back!), I was forced to do a lot of "dir"s and "cd"s, and to know what was "a:" before loading my games... And I believe this helped me to start to like dealing with computers.

I would like to add just one nore thing: I learned a lot of english (I am brazilian) just because of computer programs. I had to know what was "file", "save", "open"... I also learned a lot because of sierra's RPG adventures like King's Quest and Space Quest. What I mean is that I owe a lot of important knowledge to difficulties I had with informatics those days, and I simply don't know how to make my future sons learn all that without making them playing Prince of Persia in an old XT!... :)

I don't know, I believe my children will be writting perl scripts before 12!...

His SUSE 'review' His FreeBSD 'review'

Some gems (pun intended) from the latter:

FreeBSD 5.x enjoyed an excellent head start in the fully 64-bit AMD64 operating system arena, but now trails the pack, with only Windows XP 64-bit behind it in speed and completeness.

And don't even start me on his 'new feature list'. Forgets to mention important things like backports of many features of ULE to SCHED_4BSD, inclusion of pf and altq framwork in the base system (for sysadmins, this is perhaps one of the most important features), multithreaded network stack (although he mentions it elsewhere, but not under new features!), etc. He is even wrong in his pathetic attempt at humour (if it was that) about the naming of ULE:

The ULE (which is not an acronym; its full name is SCHED_ULE as opposed to the older SCHED_4BSD) scheduler continues to have stability and performance problems and was totally disabled instead of being made the default process scheduler in 5.3 as planned.

I would take this guy's comments with a grain of salt, except for his older work, which I think was excellent (I don't have problems with criticism, and his old amd64 review was quite critical. I have problems with FUD and unsubstantiated claims and badly written articles). What happened to this guy?

His SUSE 'review' His FreeBSD 'review'

Some gems (pun intended) from the latter:

FreeBSD 5.x enjoyed an excellent head start in the fully 64-bit AMD64 operating system arena, but now trails the pack, with only Windows XP 64-bit behind it in speed and completeness.

And don't even start me on his 'new feature list'. Forgets to mention important things like backports of many features of ULE to SCHED_4BSD, inclusion of pf and altq framwork in the base system (for sysadmins, this is perhaps one of the most important features), multithreaded network stack (although he mentions it elsewhere, but not under new features!), etc. He is even wrong in his pathetic attempt at humour (if it was that) about the naming of ULE:

The ULE (which is not an acronym; its full name is SCHED_ULE as opposed to the older SCHED_4BSD) scheduler continues to have stability and performance problems and was totally disabled instead of being made the default process scheduler in 5.3 as planned.

I would take this guy's comments with a grain of salt, except for his older work, which I think was excellent (I don't have problems with criticism, and his old amd64 review was quite critical. I have problems with FUD and unsubstantiated claims and badly written articles). What happened to this guy?

Yep FBSD 5.3 according to various sources is not production grade.

There are several bugs with hardware and i/o issues. It works beautifully or very badly unlike 4.x

You may want to read the flame war with some benchmarks stressing the new threading model int he link above?

Not to sound trollish of course but I have been pretty disapointed in the direction of 5.x. NetBSD might be a better option in my opinion for servers.

I wonder how the DragonFLY project is going? I am not a kernel expert or qualified to say wheterh 5.x is inferior or supperior. If I bet my job on it I would be very conservative about upgrading from what I hear from other people. Thats all.

It is not clear to me that your mom's computer needs cannot be met using Linux together with Win4Lin (also here), WineX (Cedega) (also here), wine, VMWare, etc.
I suspect that not all of these would be needed by your mom and some things still might not work. However, not all (windows) applications she might want will run on Apple machines. In fact, not all windows applications will run on windows machines.

It's really disheartening when Eugenia from OS News fame has to run a contest to make a friggin' file chooser work. In 2004. My gawd.

No idea why this "everyone must migrate to linux" thing is a stated goal of any CS professional. Linux is not the be-all-and-end-all of OS'es.

I don't think anyone said that, these statements are coming from open source/free software developers and advocates... it makes perfect sense for them to want people to stay away from closed systems and embrace open/free ones like Linux or BSD. Why should it be odd for the stated goal of a core open source software developer to convince people to migrate to an open system?

To me the underlying OS kernel should be irrelevant. I should be able to use KDE on an NT kernel

You already can: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9144

The kernel is just one small piece of software, with a whole bunch of artificial value attached. In the end all it does is send bytes back and forth to the hardware.

There's quite a bit more it needs to do, process scheduling, memory management, etc. It's a lot more complicated than just, "Oh process x wants to get at memory location y... I guess I'll just give it to him then."

Who really gives a shit about the OS? It's about as relevant as the brand of mouse you're using.

I look forward to the day that people dont list experience with "Linux, Windows, OS-X" on their resumes

First of all, you jump back and forth between what you wish a kernel was like and saying that this is how it is now. You use "kernel should be", then "the kernel is", then back with "I look forward to...". And then you jump around between 'kernel' and 'OS' using the terms interchangeably, and different parts of your argument alternatively hold up or fail depending on which definition you really mean.

Second... in order for us to attain this utopia you speak of with hot-swappable kernels, they would all have to have exactly the same API's. What happens when the BSD people want to innovate and implement some new exciting features and make them available to application developers? Are they just supposed to not do so because Microsoft hasn't implemented these features yet?

And if you're just talking about industry agreement to standards like POSIX, it will never work for several social, political, and practical reasons. It's hard to get people within one project to agree (hence this story) much less across organizations. But if they were to, is everyone just supposed to be stuck at that level? I'm guessing there will be different standards as time goes on, and probably various levels of compliance allowed as there already are with POSIX (which windows does conform to, and I don't think we're at the stage you would like to be at yet).

> What is the point?
The point is easy interoperability between *nix and Windows OSs. See my post at OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9163#313 438 of it's ease of use.

You can also find more info from from a paper published for the SIGUCCS of the ACM titled: Easy access to remote graphical UNIX applications for windows users Listed below is the publicly available abstract:
ABSTRACT
A barrier deters Windows users from evaluating graphical scientific software that runs only on remote UNIX systems. Graphical UNIX applications are based on X Windows. To make use of X applications, Windows users must install an X server, install communications software for connecting to remote UNIX systems, and configure their systems to display graphics from remote systems. This barrier can be removed by making use of an X server and communications software that run live from CD-ROM. This poster presents such a CD-ROM known as XLiveCD.

XLiveCD appears to users as an application that provides a command-prompt that allows them to log in to remote computers. Windows XP/NT/ 2000 users insert the CD into a drive and click twice in response to a wizard. A terminal window appears on the screen and provides a command prompt. From the command prompt users run the secure shell (ssh) to connect to a remote computer and launch applications. X graphics windows are forwarded automatically.

XLiveCD is based entirely on open source software and is available free for download. It is a Cygwin environment (from Red Hat, Inc.), including the X.org X server and openssh installed and modified to be run from CD-ROM. The home page is http://xlivecd.indiana.edu/.

Hmmmm...someone should give them a call.

In this message you say:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=107617&cid=915 8156

I liked fedora core 1, it works pretty well for me and runs my apps, but I was keeping my eye on the market and looking at alternatives as usual. This week I switched my work desktop from redhat/fedora core 1 to Suse 9.1 - I'm impressed by the fact that everything "just works" with suse, and that it comes with absolutely everything but the kitchen sink. I installed the nvidia drivers with one click in the yast menu, and will be installing ut2004 after finals...

OK, a couple of things, I was into Linux when I was in college and when I first got out. Today, I'm not impressed when "everything" "just works", up from "it works pretty well for me and runs my apps". Pretty well is not good enough, and "everything just works" is an expectation for me. I expect it of my car, my diswasher, and my computer. Trust me, getting excited about nvidia drivers when your in your 30s is kinda immature.

From this review of Suse 9.2, this review seems about as good as my experience with Linux ever got.

This reviewer was happy that this version of Linux came with a working battery level app. I ditched linux before such luxuries came around. I have 36 minutes before my PowerBook battery is at full charge. It also shows me the time to empty too when running on battery.

The reviewer says, "Using SuSE's powerful profile manager SCPM (System configuration profile management), I can swap almost effortlessly between network configurations".

Again, this is new to me for Linux. I like the "almost effortlessly" part. For me, when I go to a different network, I pick the location from the "Location" menu, and within 5 seconds or so I'm on the network. When I used Linux, I had symlinks to files for things like /etc/sysconfig/networks-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.locatio n1 ... locationN, and the same for /etc/resolv.conf, etc. My script relinked the proper links for the proper network, and away I went. I had to waste my time putting this together, whereas someone at Apple just did this for me.

This review seems candid and summarizes my experiences as well.

Not good enough. Sorry. Got better things to do with my time. I'm happy with Linux in my server rooms. No complaints once it is up and running, but for my day to day use, I prefer something a little more mature and polished.

[Anonymous Coward:]
Why not just switch to a BSD licenced compiler then?
If one doesn't exist, the BSD community could simply write it. It would certainly be faster, more stable and "cleaner" than any of the alternatives. I'm sure it wouldn't take the hordes of BSD developers more than a week to complete.
Of course the only evidence for this would be anecdotal and God help anyone who dared to publish a benchmark.
On a serious note, I used to wonder why the BSD community got trolled so much. Then I came across such wonderful examples of advocacy as those produced by our friend "setagllib". Your attitude attracts ASCII art Goatse trolls in much the same way as shit attracts flies.
To preempt your inevitable reply, no I am not a Linux user. I just find the majority of your posts arrogant and unhelpful.

I'm ready to bet that you are not only a Linux user, but a GNU zealot of the worst kind. Dear AC.

From time to time, it happens to say things in a way that offends some touchy people. Anyway, I still have to see a *single* BSD advocate deliberately spreading FUD over GNU/Linux. I see GNU/Linux advocates spreading FUD over *BSD everyday - and this has gone on for *years*. The "BSD is dying" campaign is just the most prominent example.

I remember a discussion some time ago (on OSnews if I recall correctly). It was a licensing issue - BSD vs GPL. Surprise, surprise.. :) - and I stepped out of line by making a slightly inaccurate statement. Guess what, another BSD user stepped in and corrected me, asking me to be more precise.
On the other hand, look at the FUD the GNU zealots are deliberately spreading on this board. This shouldn't be considered an acceptable behaviour among civilized people. And guess what, how many GNU/Linux advocates do you see stepping in (and, I'd say, defending *their own* reputation)? Easy answer: none, never.

There's a simple reason for this. GNU people think they're on a holy war: Stallman says that proprietary software is "immoral", and talks about "fundamental freedoms" that are violated when you get a software without the source included.
It happens too often that these statements aren't generating the sound laughter that such words are calling for. Nope, they're taken seriously. And the obvious logical consequence is that in this holy war, where "freedom" is at stake, any means are legitimate - spreading FUD, creating destructive viruses, anything. The objective is no longer to produce better software, or to maintain decency: is to sink BigEvilCorporations and proprietary software. BSD's in the way? Well, let's try to sink it as well. If the means (FUD) are dishonest and disgusting, well who cares, it's for a good cause. It's for morality, it's for "freedom".

A BSD advocate is mainly interested in technical excellence. A Linux advocate is mainly interested in winning the holy war against proprietary software. This alone is enough to explain the different levels of decency, and the different opinions on what can be considered an acceptable behaviour, that are characterizing the GNU and BSD communities.

The worst thing is, I see no easy way this issue in the GNU/Linux community can be resolved over time. Well, maybe if they finally manage to lock up their most "religious" leaders in a nuthouse. Cos that's where they belong.

I wrote an article about the solution to many logins and passwords...

They ran this same story on OS News.


http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=8945 [OSNews.com]

Will Eugenia Loli-Queru now start comparing all other browsers to Opera and find them lacking? :-)

Could the MS product Windows Services for Unix (3.5 OpenBSD based) and SCO Group be involved with Stone's alleged arrival at Redmond's door as well?

According to this eWeek article, they will be including Evolution, but Evolution 2 still needs some work to integrate it with GroupWise.

eWeek also has more information and you can look at Novell's Linux Desktop documentation and OSNews had some screen shots.

I personally saw the NLD running at a seminar last week and what I would call an Alpha release of Open Enterprise Server. I'm fairly optimistic about the product. I manage Novell and Linux servers at a north texas university and am greatly looking forward to consolidating the two into OES.

I was really interested to see that Novell has Linux kernel modules (a few of them that work together, actually) to manage their own NSS filesystem -- really an object database. This is very impressive since the NSS filesystem's access is granted to objects in eDirectory (LDAP server) and file permissions are quite different than posix file permissions. Yet, it mounted on Linux and showed posix permissions just as you'd expect. I've heard the open beta starts in December, with a final release in February.

LOL! Eugenia has been caught trolling the forums at OSNews.com, the very same forums that she moderates!

http://osnews.com/moderation.php?news_id=8649

LOL! Eugenia has been caught trolling the forums at OSNews.com!

http://osnews.com/moderation.php?news_id=8649

LOL! She trolls at the same site where she's a moderator! LOL!

For those that care, it was also reported on OSNews a bit ago too. OSNews

Sometimes he links to a message posted by DES on FreeBSD-advocacy in his signiture. If you take the time to see how that thread started, you'll see that the original "quesiont" was quite rude, and follow-up messages from the same person were written in a "I'm a famili member of the former Nigerian royal familiy and want to deposit large sums of money" style. Also if, you follow the thread further, you'll see this reply from a FreeBSD developer:

> BTW, I've spent a lot of time looking at the DragonFly approach, and I met
> with Matt for quite a while at USENIX to talk to him about the approach. I
> have a number of concerns about it -- I think the premise is very
> interesting, but that the results aren't yet there to prove the model. In
> particular, there's a huge volume of code in their system that has not
> been addressed, and a lot of complexity that will need to be handled
> before the SMP primitives they're using have proven that they offer the
> desired performance advantage. We have the opportunity of using a hybrid
> model, and have been exploring some of the ideas present in DFBSD (and,
> one should point out, many other SMP systems).
>
> A lot of other systems have opted to use elements similar to those
> primitives, but in a much more limited way due to the performance costs.
> For example, locking services into particular CPUs prevents the scheduler
> from balancing load between the CPUs in an service-transparent way. In
> the DFBSD model, load balancing must be implemented separately for each
> service, requiring extensive modifications to the services. I.e., the
> model may indeed offer benefits, but the cost of doing the work will be
> high, and the time to complete it long. We'll adopt elements of the
> design as they prove to make sense, as we do with all other open source
> operating systems (and they do with us!).

An interesting article has shown up on OSNews.com. Slackware is up to drop GNOME due to its bugs and bad maintainance. First companies are dropping GNOME (HP left) and now distros start dropping GNOME.

"Given the huge number of Linux drivers, those are the kind of changes that Apple can pull off but a near to impossible to do in the Linux world."
You trade the freedom to use lots of different hardware (Linux) for the convenience of using Apple hardware. Deciding which is better is personal.

"kernel are not that important anymore"
I have difficulty agreeing with this comment. Certainly there may be a great deal of interoperability between Linux and OSX (perhaps ignoring the GPL in some cases) but this is not the same as saying that the particular kernels are not important. If your comment were correct, would we need Free Darwin? (Also here and here.)

As the Linux kernel progresses (adding more improved journaled file systems, better smp support, better use of resources, etc.), I believe the same applications which run under Linux and OSX will run better under Linux. (A related example is Quake3; it runs much faster under Linux than under Windows. Sometime Windows (applications) run faster under wine than under Windows. I do not know how OSX and Linux compare in this regard. However, OSX has an extra layer which probably does not help speed things up.)

Mirror at http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/c8e667c8388471455 0446f30649107d6/index.html Mirrordot.

To be honest, I know that this is a great distro, but it doesn't need that much attention on slashdot. Seems like there have been 5 reviews already. If I wanted all of that info I would go to OS News.

No more PA-Risc.
No more Alpha.
No more Itanium Workstations
No more open source (except for lip service)
No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
No more HPUX.
No altavista when they bought CPQ.
No more Vision
No more Hewlett Packard name
No more Walter Hewlett or Packard involved.

Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.

Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.

I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&Co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest heros of silicon valley.

If you want to save the thing, people should really bring back Walter Hewlett to the board and make him Chairman. At least he understood what his father's company stood for.

No more PA-Risc.
No more Alpha.
No more Itanium Workstations
No more open source (except for lip service)
No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
No more HPUX.
No altavista when they bought CPQ.
No more Vision NO more Hewlett Packard name
No more Hewlett or Packard involved.

Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.

Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.

I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest hheros of silicon valley.

According to OSNews, another KDE developer has announced the Rubydium JIT.

I think the OSNews review posted today is better: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=8407

See the Debian Planet story back on the 16th. Which linked you to the announcement and also an interview.

OSNews

What a most bizarre feeling.
I feel both flattered and angry - v strange.

Good thing my short novels are not online.

Aww Israeli girls are so very pretty shame their personality is a bit .. (way too) strong for me ;)

There's a review of yoper 2 (not 2.1) on Osnews.

The article:

Yoper Linux v2.1 Review
Posted by qub333 at Mon Sep 13, 2004 8:32 pm

Yoper Linux v2.1
Website: www.yoper.com

Introduction
Ok, this is my first review and the kickoff to Linuxforums.org's Editorial Content Section, so lets get started. Yoper Linux is built around the idea of light, compact and wicked fast distro that is available to the average Linux user. Its 100% GPL compliant and the full ISO is free to anyone with an Internet connection. Yoper's popularity has absolutely skyrocketed with the release of v2.1 and is currently sitting at #18 on the distrowatch.com Page Hit Ranking.

Yoper's claim to fame is the speed at which it runs, out of the box. Yoper is a distro that targets the desktop Linux user from a brand new convert to the legendary guru. The latests release (2.1) improves upon the the installer, making it more user friendly and now includes non-destructive partitioning.

Speed applies to every aspect of the system. The install was completed, start to finish, in under 15 minutes. Once the system booted, the kernel took little time to load. It may seem little slow as compared to a custom kernel (like one created in a Gentoo install), but thats to be expected with a universal build. Once KDE started to load I noticed the speed kick. It was loaded in less than 10 seconds - which is good compared to my lovingly tweaked Gentoo system. Applications opened almost instantly and the overall feel of the system is similar to that of a fine Italian sports car, suave and fast.

The Yoper team accomplished this with the use of several methods that have always been available to those with enough experience, but generally beyond the average user, They include, but are by no means limited too:

Several performance enhancing patches to the kernel
All packages compiled specifically for the i686 against the latest and greatest of the gcc
All the binaries were 'stripped' (ie. all the debug symbols and other nonessential data are removed.) in order to create an even faster base system.
Prelinking

A short description of prelinking:

Due to Yoper's success, the process has been getting a lot of talk recently, and I was intrigued by the mechanics of this intriguing little utility. The results are readily evident: incredible startup times, even for massive applications. Basically whenever you start a program it has to find all the libraries that it will draw upon and link them to the correct location in the program. Prelinking does this when you run the Prelink, so when you start the program, 1/2 of all the startup work is already completed. Now should you be a developer, you will need to re-run the prelink code (a simple command available on their website) more frequently. They recommend it after major upgrades (such as KDE 3.2 to 3.3).

Installation
After downloading the single ISO and burning it, I booted into a BASH prompt. This might sound intimidating to those newer to Linux, but wherever a user is required to type something in there are directions included. In this instance it indicated 'type Yoper to begin setup'. A little fiddling reviled that the prompt had a few basic commands such as mount and access to Vim. Ready to begin the install, I typed Yoper, pressed enter and was greeted by the installer. Overall the feel of the install was similar to that of Slackware and comfortable enough for any user: even a Linux 'newbie'. While some may frown on the lack of a GUI installer, the Yoper team wanted to keep this all on one CD, resulting in a GUIless install. After a few simple steps (the installer holds your hand through the entire process) you arrive at qtparted, a graphical partition tool. The best part of this is that it not only makes the hardest part of the install possible through a simple GUI, but allows for non-destructive partitioning.

After that I hopped through t

On the other hand...

Fabian Franz: In fact, our FreeNX implementation is only the last piece of the mosaic. 99,9% comes from NoMachines's GPL/NX components, that we simply use unchanged in FreeNX.
[...}
Kurt Pfeifle: In the last 15 months, there have been servere misunderstandings concerning the whole NX software, which was considered to be "non-Free" by several Open Source developers, just because NoMachine also based its commercial products on top of it.
Without having a deeper look, rejecting NX as "practically unusable, if only the libraries are released under the GPL whereas the NoMachine NX Server remains proprietary". These biases simply overlooked, that a commandline tool was shipped by NoMachine almost from the beginning, including the source code which allowed everyone who was interested to build an completely working NX tunnel.
[...]
Fabian Franz: Our implemementation was intentionally kept simple. It's a simple Bash script...
You are surprised? Yeah, right: FreeNX Server is a Bash script, which glues together GPL library and executable components of NX to a working whole. All that stuff existed for 15 months untouched.
The fact that it is Bash means that every Linux developer can fix errors in our FreeNX server. ;-)
Kurt Pfeifle: I was merely a mentor for the FreeNX development and I do the documentation. But I can confirm: Fabian isn't lying... ;-)
FreeNX consists of less than 500 lines of Bash code (additionally to the NoMachine/NX source code parts, which are under the GPL).
Fabian did the implementation of the FreeNX server all by himself. First of all, Fabian is a true Bash wizard.
Secondly, this implementation should prove how "complete" the GPL components of the NX are already since 15 months.

So, i'd be guessing anyone from Gnome can code that up in a couple of days as well, there really isn't a whole lot of magic here.

there is no existing implementation to copy

Take a look at WinFS Vs GNOME Storage? Can you Say OS/400?. Here's a snippet to whet your appetite: ... it's worth bearing in mind that "Database Filesystems" are not a new idea - in fact, they've been in widespread use for many years. For a prime example, one need look no further than to IBM - their OS/400 operating system, which runs on the iSeries (previously known as the AS/400) minicomputers, features what can best be described as a "DB2 filesystem".

1. Elgato is over twice the price of the ATI solution
2. You can record in mpeg2, which means that you can't edit in any of the "big" Mac apps (iMovie, iDVD, etc) unless you convert the video to quicktime , DV, or some other compatible format (only to then have to convert back to mpeg for the actual DVD burning)
3. There's no way for me to use this on a PC with firewire apparently, so I need something else if I want to make this portable between machines

Multi-threaded coding is hard and don't any coding jocks tell you otherwise. It is significantly harder to do 100% correctly (and nothing less than 100% correct will do) than single-threaded coding.

Indeed, according to one of the ex-Be engineers one of the things that hurt BeOS was that writing software for it was quite tricky, it basically meant writing robust thread-safe code even for a simple text editor. There's a good discussion of it here.

Anyway it's sort of academic. One of the main uses of multithreading in BeOS according to be-fan was to do window rendering in a separate thread. Linux will get something very similar within a few months when X compositing lands. OK so it won't be a thread inside the same app, it'll be a separate process which is rendering the entire screen at once but the effect is the same - no matter how busy the app is, you won't be able to "rub out" the contents of the window.

BSD vs. Linux.

Yeah, especially when the main troll (Eugenia) comes into the discussion. Watch her pretend to have gaming industry experience.

As Chris Woods pointed out at OSNews comments, it is more like a remake of the Howie computer made by an UK company called Redten.