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Your DOS apps will be asking "What USB?" when you run them safely isolated from reality. Now I have to find a working 5.25" floppy drive so I can have a go at getting my old DOS games back. You can print to file, take screenshots of games with no native screenshot capability, use devices like USB optical mice or graphics tablets that the game authors never even dreamed about.

The market is currently quite rough, especially to break into. After being laid off when a product tanked on the market, I've gone a few months without having a single resume responded to - and I have almost a decade of professional programming experience that was applicable to the jobs I've applied for (and my resume used to keep the phones ringing daily for months when I posted it - the market has changed a bit).

I've been spending the extra time continuing development on my personal code library and projects, writing open source code, and working on a few products that I expect there to be a market for when they're done. That's how I'd suggest breaking into the field as well.

You have a very special situation though - you know, or can find out if you think about it and ask your colleagues, exactly what one fairly wealthy niche market needs. What software would help you - as a doctor - work more efficiently? What software have you and your colleagues found lacking? There's your first project :)

It won't be easy, and you won't make money fast. My recommendation would be to start learning about computers and computer programming now while thinking about products. As soon as you feel like you can design a useful program and have one in mind - take a shot at it.

Use CVS ( or for Windows, WinCVS ) or some other revision control so you can keep track of all the code you write (I wish I had when I started!). Estimate for yourself how long tasks should take - track those estimates, and figure out why they were right or wrong. Document everything, especially the code.

Once you have a product you think is worthy for your target audience - use it yourself in your work. Then let some colleagues try it out. Fix anything you find wrong with it, and ask your colleagues for suggestions.

Then, set up a website, advertise it, and try to sell it - or set up a project on SourceForge and make it open source - whichever you feel more comfortable with. On SourceForge, you'll be able to enlist the help of other more experienced programmers and together tailor the product towards excellence. If you sell it and it's successful, you'll be able to afford to switch careers to full-time programmer/entreprenuer and just work on your business.

That brings me to another point - if you aren't currently running your own doctor's office, start learning business skills too. They're just as hard to pick up as programming skills - possibly harder for some. Figure out what you'll need to do to start running your own software company. Even if you decide to write your own software as open source and become an employee for someone else professionally, this will help you at the negotiating table.

What I would NOT recommend is dropping out of medicine, getting a BS in computer science, and expect doors to be immediately open when you g

Besides GNOME Storage that another poster mentioned, segusoLand looks rather interesting as well. I was actually thinking about inventing the same wheel once; I'm glad I didn't bother.

No, but you can easily install most of your favorite GNU and Open Source tools. Just use Fink. It's a very easy-to-use package management system based on Debian's apt-get.
That way you don't have to "Forget using "ldd" to figure out how to resolve the situation.".

Unfortunately, this write-up is totally screwed up. The intended emulator is QEMU, which can already be used on PPC/Linux to run Wine at speeds aproaching native speeds. I posted a link to the forum where this is discussed elsewhere, but here it is again.

QEMU is a dynamic translator that decompiles x86 executables and recompiles them into PPC, caching the results. You can find the qemu project here.

Not only will this work, but it will work FAST. In fact, it will probably even be possible to drop windows DLLs onto your mac in the same way that you drop them onto Linux in order to get Wine to work better (using native windows DLLs instead of Wine clean-room versions). Remember, QEMU is a dynamic translator.

Take a look at their forums where this question was asked: qemu, not bochs

The point is, there needs to be some software that will allow one to move to a mac, but provides some sort of transitional workaround until something native is available.


try this* or this

if your still stuck in Mac OS 9, you can try this or even try to find this

you have a lot of options, open your eyes!

*yes it's owned by Microsoft, but only recently. VirtualPC is still the product i would recomend if you need to run windows Software on the mac. G5 support is still an issue, but version 7 (shipping soon) should fix that.

?agpgart?

Then why can't Nvidia open large majority of the driver that doesn't use "NVIDIA's internal AGP support"? The drivers already have agpgart support, why couldn't they make an OS driver based off of that alone?

It just might work... but veeeeeeery slowly, if Bochs is underneath it.

According to the site, WINE itself compiles rather well, and they'll be using Bochs for the actual x86 emulation.

The second phase is to then integrate in WINE the QEMU binary translator.

Additional supporting tools for launching Windows applications from the desktop and an integrated installer are desireable items for the package (like OpenOffice is doing).

This is distinguished from simply using QEMU to run Windows because there is no Windows here. Just WINE and QEMU to run Windows applications directly under X. That will enable vastly better performance, better integration, and easier administration.

For Mac OS X, the ideal would be to eventually use the native GUI.

Further enhancements could include integrated support for things like FAT32/NTFS volumes with Windows under via QEMU (or other PC emulator) so that the same Windows applications could be run in either mode (Windows or WINE).

When I want to play an old DOS game on my XP system, I don't mess with a compatibility layer (complicated and unreliable) or reboot to DOS (damned inconvenient). I run DOSBox, which emulates not just the CPU, but the sound card and video adapter as well! The overhead is horrendous (Sword of the Samurai takes more than half the cycles on my 1 Ghz Pentium III), but well within the capacity of my system. And that's a real-time application! I imagine the DOSBox would barely notice the overhead for something less CPU-intensive, like a word processor. One of these days, I'm going to have to try Windows 3.0...

I think most Windows desktop applications (database clients, productivity software) would have even less overhead than my old DOS games. But even if they had a lot more, consider the specs of a low-end Macintosh. Its CPU cycles as fast as my Dell's, and the raw crunching power of a G4 is possibly twice that of my PIII. Never mind a dual-processor G5!

Which isn't all that expensive. If performance and usability were the only criteria for buying a computer, I'd be a Mac fanatic. As it is, I hardly ever touch one. Oh well.

you don't need a mod-chip anymore unless you want to replace the ide drives. there are more options besides the 007 flash rom + soldering trick. http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/faq.html#9

Some of the files had special names. !Boot and !Run, for example; !Boot was executed when the application was first seen by the filer (and did things like load the application's icon, register file types, etc) and !Run was executed when the application was double-clicked on.

Unfortunately, Acorn weren't thinking about security when they designed this. (Hey, state of the art in those days was MS-DOS 3 and System 6.) !Boot in particular was a virus-writer's heaven. Stick your floppy disc in the drive, bring up a browser window and your virus automagically loads...

Incidentally, you can still buy Risc OS if you have an Acorn micro or a clone thereof. At one stage someone had even done a port to the Psion Netbook, but that seems to have evaporated. In terms of usability, it still knocks the Windows and MacOS desktops into a cocked hat --- despite being designed about two decades ago. If you want something more modern, and free, the ROX Desktop incorporates a lot of Risc OS' design elements into a desktop system that runs on Linux and X. Damn well, too.

"...try and get Linux on them..."

they already did... just look.

P3 733

GF graphics card somewhere between GF3 and GF4 power.

64mb DDR ram.

A mod Chip is required to bypass the normal startup routine and allows you to install a custom version of Linux
on your Xbox, most of them will play XBox games, along with allowing you to place and play most types of media on your Xbox. Often even including the ability to ftp files up to your Xbox via ethernet connection.
The bad part is you can't play XBox live with a mod chip running. (unless you enjoy being banned from MS severs...)

xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/

xbox linux project

There are others too. Just do a search on google. But thats a good start. Not sure about NetBSD.

- Mail.app isn't the only MUA in the world that uses baynesian filtering. Mozilla, Thunderbird do too. They both run on Windows and Linux

- Panther has Expose, Linux has virtual desktops.

- Consistent GUI like Aqua vs. Metal vs. Classic vs. 3rd party UI like KPT or Lightwave? I'm interested in your definition of "consistent". Also, Gnome has descriptive buttons too ("discard" and "save").

- Gnome has also sensible defaults. But you can change things, if you want. But you don't have to.

- self containing applications - some are, some are not. See also iTunes. Or any application that uses external frameworks.

- iPhoto is slow. Dog slow. And you can't order digital prints if you don't live in USA or Canada.

- Linux has no product activation.

- Linux just works too (For me. YMMV.)

- You can have encrypted fs too. But yes, it is not one click.

You forgot OSX downsides:

- to play media files, you need to download MPlayer or VLC. Linux applications, right?

- MS Office sucks. Not just like Windows version, Mac version sucks even more. No Unicode support on Unicode OS? Scrambled characters, if they are not in US-ASCII charset? There goes grandaparent's comment about flawless .doc opening. OpenOffice.org does better than that.

Space Cadet keyboard

The bigger issue to me is language choice. GTK has bindings for almost every commonly used language. Qt doesn't support much besides C++. I prefer the extra flexibility of GTK for that reason.

Qt has bindings for several languages, including Java, Perl, Python, C, Ruby and C#.

I once heard the C binding is not very useful for using it from C, but it is intended to be used as a foundation for bindings to other languages. Does somebody know if this is true? Has somebody tried to use Qt C binding?

I once read an example Java program that used Qt/Java and it looked good.

here are bindings for C, Perl and Python.
here are bindings for Java.
here are bindings for C#
here are bindings for Ruby.

I'm confused.. could you clarify what you mean by:

"One biggie is that text windows work much better on linux"

I have actually found the opposite.... there is lots of great ways the GUI integrates directly with the CLI (ie pbpaste, pbcopy, and the infamous open command)... the keyboard shortcuts tend to be fairly uniform throughout the system, and with things like Perl Pad, you can take advantage of perl scripts operating on things selected with the mouse from global keyboard shortcuts (the services menu)... this kind of system-wide integration you just don't find with the current multitude of GUI toolkits for Linux.

You also might want to take a look at these scripts for Finder/Terminal interaction... I've found them very useful.

This is in addition to perl, awk, sed, grep, and all the other unix CLI tools we know and love.

In my opinion, the great advantage of Mac OS X over linux is the access to commercial software... I can run Macromedia Freehand right next to my gnuplot. I didn't "resist the temptation" to install OSS tools... in fact, it was precisely this synergy between great open source and commercial software which drew me to Mac OS X from Linux.

That and the USB hardware support... :)

Not that I believe in operating system religious wars, but peek around some more on that Mac OS X system... I think you'll find that with practice and maybe some third party tweaking (remember when you learned linux...) you'll be just as productive if not maybe a tad more on the mac. (Though I guess this depends on *exactly* what you're doing.. mileage may vary)

While this comment is pretty well written, it's so naive it almost smacks of trolling. No examples, no proof... very little substance beyond your own opinion.

Have you done any research into command line administration on OS X? If you had, you probably would've run into the Apple Server documentation, which covers in extensive detail how OS X Server can be administrated from the command line. Much of the info is relevant to OS X Client as well but, since Client is targeted towards Mom & Pop computer users, it doesn't have **everything** available from the command line. If that's what you wanted, then you just bought the wrong version of the OS.

Even so, have you installed Fink to automatically download, "configure; make; make test; make install" almost any OSS software you can think of for OS X? It works wonderfully, and thankfully has removed me from the process tweaking header files & hand-applying patches to get stuff to build & install.

Honestly, I use OS X, Linux & Solaris boxes daily, and I can't say that one OS's CLI support is any better than the other. Terminal emulation isn't rocket science any more. And, while the default Terminal.app is decent, I've been using iTerm as my emulator for a while & am very happy with it.

You might have had the wrong expectations on Mac OS X Client if you truly do want to do everything via the command line & a terminal window. You also might have not spent enough time with the OS to get used to the BSD-ism's of the CLI. But you may want to provide some more substance.

While this comment is pretty well written, it's so naive it almost smacks of trolling. No examples, no proof... very little substance beyond your own opinion.

Have you done any research into command line administration on OS X? If you had, you probably would've run into the Apple Server documentation, which covers in extensive detail how OS X Server can be administrated from the command line. Much of the info is relevant to OS X Client as well but, since Client is targeted towards Mom & Pop computer users, it doesn't have **everything** available from the command line. If that's what you wanted, then you just bought the wrong version of the OS.

Even so, have you installed Fink to automatically download, "configure; make; make test; make install" almost any OSS software you can think of for OS X? It works wonderfully, and thankfully has removed me from the process tweaking header files & hand-applying patches to get stuff to build & install.

Honestly, I use OS X, Linux & Solaris boxes daily, and I can't say that one OS's CLI support is any better than the other. Terminal emulation isn't rocket science any more. And, while the default Terminal.app is decent, I've been using iTerm as my emulator for a while & am very happy with it.

You might have had the wrong expectations on Mac OS X Client if you truly do want to do everything via the command line & a terminal window. You also might have not spent enough time with the OS to get used to the BSD-ism's of the CLI. But you may want to provide some more substance.

> If Qt was free, you'd see all that free Qt-based
> software running on Windows. Since it's not, all
> it is is a convenient free GUI library for X
> programmers...forget the cross-platform idea.

There actually is a GPL'd
native Qt for Win32. Trolltech didn't release one, but the community eventually got around to it. They're still working on it, but the feature set is mostly complete, although it does need performance improvements.

By the way, don't confuse this with the version of Qt made for Cygwin. This Qt does not need to be on Cygwin's X implementation.

--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main

I'm running it with 6 virtual desktops on an iBook 500Mhz w/ Panther, and it's both fast at switching desktops and has a nice low profile - just a couple icons in the top bar.

• Grab a copy of the worm from your mailbox. I don't know what to do if you think there's a conspiracy about how that copy got to your mailbox, but if you have hundreds sitting there, I believe at least the first version released all had the same MD5sum, so check with your neighbors or whatever. At some point conclude you have an "in the wild" version of the virus.
• Get the zip from the email and uncompress it. Sometimes it's called text.exe, sometimes others, but let's just call it text.exe.
• Download UPX. Run "upx -d text.exe" (the worm was upx-compressed to save some additional space, as you can tell by running strings on the original version and seeing "upx" show up at the front)
• In unix, run "strings text.exe | perl -ple 'y/A-Za-z/N-ZA-Mn-za-m/' | less"
• What do you see? This:
  • 
    GET / HTTP/1.1
    Host: www.sco.com
    www.sco.com

I think it's clear that there's SOME funny business targetting sco there. Look at the disassembly so far, there's code attached to it to that does SOMETHING. Who knows, the code might never be called or whatever (which would be pretty odd for a 32k worm that's been compressed multiple times), but even at this point, it's still reasonable to conclude that SCO is threatened, regardless of what the PR department says.

Thankfully, POPfile has caught all of these and my inbox has been spared of this garbage.

If more people ran POPfile, these kinds of outbreaks wouldn't happen.

Do yourself a favor and install the octopus
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

Definitions are available currently

According to the official site (at 5:00 EST) there are still no ClamAV defs available for the .b variant of this worm (affectionately known as Worm.SCO.*).

Does anyone know where I can grab (and submit) a signature...or a copy of it (without waiting for it to trickle into a user's mailbox)?

• wxPerl
• wxPython
• wxBasic
• wxLua
• wxJavaScript
• wxJava
• wx4j (alternative Java binding)
• wxRuby
• wxEiffel
• wxHaskell
• wx.NET (C#)

• wxPerl
• wxPython
• wxBasic
• wxLua
• wxJavaScript
• wxJava
• wx4j (alternative Java binding)
• wxRuby
• wxEiffel
• wxHaskell
• wx.NET (C#)

• wxPerl
• wxPython
• wxBasic
• wxLua
• wxJavaScript
• wxJava
• wx4j (alternative Java binding)
• wxRuby
• wxEiffel
• wxHaskell
• wx.NET (C#)

• wxPerl
• wxPython
• wxBasic
• wxLua
• wxJavaScript
• wxJava
• wx4j (alternative Java binding)
• wxRuby
• wxEiffel
• wxHaskell
• wx.NET (C#)

• wxPerl
• wxPython
• wxBasic
• wxLua
• wxJavaScript
• wxJava
• wx4j (alternative Java binding)
• wxRuby
• wxEiffel
• wxHaskell
• wx.NET (C#)

• wxPerl
• wxPython
• wxBasic
• wxLua
• wxJavaScript
• wxJava
• wx4j (alternative Java binding)
• wxRuby
• wxEiffel
• wxHaskell
• wx.NET (C#)

Let's be clear here. The issue isn't whether you are using Linux or not; nobody else with any sense cares. What you should feel guilty (or not) about is whether you are making the world a better place.

Contributing to Linux might be one way to do that, but again if you're only a passive user then you aren't helping. Alternatively, many (most?) open-source projects are platform-agostic, so you can still help out if you're using OS X, Windows, or whatever. In my case I primarily use OS X but have written a free piece of software that animates juggling patterns. It's not much, but it's cross-platform and has quite a few users across all OSes.

And who says Linux is making the world a better place? I haven't seen an argument for who wins by having all the value sucked out of the OS market. Linux could make computing slightly more accessible in poor countries, but most of them steal Windows or get it at dramatically reduced prices anyway.

...but perhaps in a future VM version [Java] will allow primitive generics (obviously forcing a bytecode regeneration)

Allowing primitive type arguments in generics would not necessarily require any changes to the VM or bytecode.

The Java 1.5 implementation of generics is substantially based on the Pizza compiler, which allowed primitive type arguments without requiring boxing (links: the pizza compiler, the GJ compiler it evolved into, some academic papers about the compilers).

If I remember correctly, the pizza compiler generates separate classes for the different primitive types. It needs a different class loader, but generates classes for an ordinary VM.

Take a look at wxGlade. It's a GUI GUI builder for wxWindows written in Python. It can write out Python, C++ or XRC (XML-like resource code) code.

to just learning and mastering level design? While level design is an art form in and of itself, you will be much more marketable if you have skills in other areas of game development. Get one of the cheap engines, like Torque - $100(http://www.garagegames.com) or even a free one like Crystal Space 3D (http://crystal.sourceforge.net) and learn as much as you can about the overall process of making games. There's TONS of them available (3D Engine List) and you'll be one step up on everyone else. Soon you'll be on your way to making the real money in the game industry... which is being a producer. Just my 2 cents...

Qt has been released under a twin QPL/GPL license since 2.3. The people at TT made a version of Qt3 that's GPL'd for linux, and a QPL'd version for windows.

Just because the TT people didn't release GPL'd windows version doesn't mean you can't port the linux one over, and in fact, it's being done right now.

Jeez, they give us a great free library and everybody bitches. If you don't like TT's QPL'd Win32 Qt3, help port the GPL'd one over then.

TT's QPL version of Qt for windows will always be better/faster. Thats why you pay money. There will always be a GPL'd version though, and they can't take that back from us.

Now they can make a Qt4 that's not GPL'd at all, but then we'll have two standards. Which standard do you think will survive, the open one or the closed one?

Do you have the model 1038Z or the 1200x series Oribiting Brain Lasers? I found a sourceforge project that as a partially working kernel patch for the 1038Z, but you will need to be running a 2.4.20 kernel, and make sure to include all of the last USB patches for the 2.4.x series, or you won't have support for the solar panel controls.
Oh, and make sure to check your number dependancies, at least once.

Damn it's good to be a Supervillain.

You can get a very rough idea of the performance gain here (scroll down to "Trove Primitive Collections"). It's a significant difference.

Of course, for most apps that people are writing for Java (i.e. webapps for business), an optimization of this magnitude won't be noticable--all the time is spent in the DB or network. On the other hand, IIUC, MS intends to write large sections of Longhorn in C#.

Take a look at linux console project. They're on the way.

We *just* added captcha functionality at spamgourmet but we're using a random number at the end of each quizword, and we use a random filename for each image. The code just went up on sourceforge if you want to take a look.

Editorialists have decried these losses of privacy, as if it were the most sacred of human rights. But just what is the value of privacy? Do we really need it? And, indeed, can we afford it? After all, everything from your son's shoplifting to the destruction of the towers at the World Trade Center could have been prevented if we had less of an ability to do things in secret.

There are thousands of years of history that show, without exception, that power breeds corruption and abuse. The right to privacy should be considered a counterbalance to power. If those in power obliterate privacy, they do not have to fear the repercussions of their abuse of that power, because they will know where and who may resist them and how they will go about it.

"... God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

-- Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William S. Smith in 1787

What would Thomas Jefferson say to your comment? We actually have a problem in America today; Many Americans have lately fallen victim to the idea that they should sacrifice their privacy and other essential human rights (primarily those that Jefferson was so proud of) so that the Government can more effectively protect them from terrorists and other such nonsense. The only real effect is that the Government constructs much stronger defenses against it's own people than it had previously.

History has shown that it is significantly more difficult to acquire basic human rights than it is to give them up. History also shows that regardless of the reason for sacrificing them, once sacrificed, they will be exploited for other reasons. These reasons may seem rational at the time, and each new exploitation may be just a small step from the last one. But over time, the civil liberties of a people are chipped away into oblivion with this mindset.

Not only do I disagree with your post, but I believe that because of the growth of information technology combined with our current privacy crisis, America is closing in on an inevitable, new type of rebellion; Today, corporations that manage data and services that are very private to individuals are regulated and controlled with many consequences. One of those consequences is that the Government may tap into the private information flow of it's citizens, be them voice communications, auto-theft gps services, financial records or whatnot. Eventually, ad-hoc, encrypted networks that contain no Government accessible back-doors will spring up. It is even likely that communities such as Slashdot will be where such movements start, and therfore may one day be considered an enemy of the State.. Interesting thought, huh?

Projects such as freenet represent a blow across the bow of this fight for basic privacy rights. I expect that it will eventually become messy, as frustration at not being able to penetrate these networks sweeps through agencies such as the FBI, NSA, IRS, etc.. The Government will probably even try to make such networks illegal at some point and it could take years or decades before the basic rights to privacy return to our lives. But equilibrium will eventually be restored and we will have the ability to be untrackabl

Do a test with ATI Radeon 9200 and XFree 4.4 (You can use a farily new distro with back patches for XFree 4.3). The XFree 4.4 drivers for ATI Radeon 9200 is not made by ATI. They are native OpenSource XFree drivers made with documentation provided by ATI. Most if not all Radeons up to 9200 has good native support with full 3d accelration. The tv-out is not as good as it should, but it's been worked on.

"Gatos - Enhanced XFree86 drivers for ATI videocards, with emphasis on TV-input and Output"

Radeon XFree4.3 manual page

atitvout 0.4 - This program is mostly a student hack, but it shows how the Radeon techicaly works regarding tv-out.

Do a test with ATI Radeon 9200 and XFree 4.4 (You can use a farily new distro with back patches for XFree 4.3). The XFree 4.4 drivers for ATI Radeon 9200 is not made by ATI. They are native OpenSource XFree drivers made with documentation provided by ATI. Most if not all Radeons up to 9200 has good native support with full 3d accelration. The tv-out is not as good as it should, but it's been worked on.

"Gatos - Enhanced XFree86 drivers for ATI videocards, with emphasis on TV-input and Output"

Radeon XFree4.3 manual page

atitvout 0.4 - This program is mostly a student hack, but it shows how the Radeon techicaly works regarding tv-out.

Introduce a desktop with a small learning curve designed for laymen and market it well, and then we can start blaming the monopoly, but not before.

Hi

You can't compare drivers hacked together by someone who has no idea how the device works against a professionally written driver written by the people that built the device.

I use the NVidia drivers, amongst many others. I even wrote the DirecPC linux driver - so I know how difficult it is to make a piece of unknown hardware work at all, let alone properly without any help from the manufacturer.

If they just gave us the documentation we'd be happy - actually giving us code is a bonus.

I moved my scanner to my linux server and installed "sane". I installed "sane-twain" (free/OSS software) on my XP box, and it then accessed the scanner on the linux box quite happily. Some of the icons weren't as pretty as the windows driver, but all the same stuff was there.

Later I installed a dual-boot setup on my workstation. I used XP less and less because it was so SLOW and getting slower - I don't install much new software once i get set up either - and yes, I ran AdAware and anti-virus software.

Eventually, I only ever fired up windows to run Quickbooks. Now that I have Crossover Office installed, I don't even do that (crossover runs the native windows quickbooks just fine).

A few weeks ago I used Partition Magic to downsize my XP partition (which I had done once before) to make more room for linux. My XP partition was 15GB with about 3GB spare, while Linux was 8GB with no spare.

(un)fortunately, Partition magic trashed my XP partition..... so what did I do? stress? no... I just said "well, I don't use it, so why recover/re-install it? Partition Magic then proceeded to do a wonderful job deleting the XP partition and moving/resizing the Linux Ext3 partition. I now have a lovely 23GB linux partition with loads of free space. GNU parted provides similar capabilities on linux, though I have yet to check it out in person.

The best thing, is that I have a WinRadio card. Winradio stopped developing their linux drivers shortly after releasing a working open-source driver a few years back. Someone started a sourceforge page and updated the original driver. They haven't done any work on it for almost a year, but i was still able to download it and with about a day's work yesterday, I have my winradio card working on kernel 2.6. (yes, I have contacted the sourceforge page owner about sending the updates so everyone can use it).

Someone is going to say "but i can't write software so what good does that do me". My answer is that I don't write 99% of the software on my linux box. I just contribute where i can because i want to - it doesn't matter if I draw a few graphics, write code, make a web page, or do nothing at all, I can still use the work of people like myself.

The best part is that I don't have to start from scratch - I don't have to start writing the driver all over again just because Winradio don't want to update the drivers for my old card, and won't give me the source code. (although to their credit winradio do provide a windows driver for XP, even for this, their oldest card) Another example is the NVidia drivers - the official ones don't support Kernel 2.6 yet, but due to the open source component (the core of the driver and GL code is closed source), I can get a 2.6 driver from a third party, who, just like myself, did it for himself and released the result to the public.

Right now I have ALL my hardware working quickly and well, even though some of it is 5 or 6 years old, and ALL of it is 3+ years old, and I'm running the latest version of the OS.

I just can't get that anywhere else.

You're about to say "but I can't get drivers for the latest gadget". Well if the vendors followed the Winradio and NVidia examples, by releasing a linux driver, you wouldn't have that problem.

What about Palm Python? Okay, limited, no QT, I know.

For my programming needs, the H330 is plenty. There's OnboardC, LispMe, and Dragon Forth. This lets me do the kind of programming I like to do. I recognize that this doesn't fit everyone's needs, but I don't think I'll outgrow my H330 for quite a while. :->

Use OpenVPN instead - a breeze to install, secure, interoperable, etc.