Very good to know. I always thought that Gentoo required my full password but, but as i no longer use it (or any linux distribution for that matter), I couldn't test it out.
You get into your account because the OS, like other BSD based OSes, only uses an eight character password
Nope. Both FreeBSD 5.3 and OpenBSD 3.5 require you enter your entire password, even if it's longer than 8 characters. I just tried it on a couple machines. I remember that both RedHat and SuSE 9.1 only required 8 characters of a long password back when I had access to machines that ran those...I never understood why. I just chalked it up to Linux's inherent insecurity.
the "make it open" mantra is also very popular in science, especially academia. I was at the American Geophysicist Union meeting in San Fracisco this december, and open data was the name of the game. Infact, open data is one of the main tenents of science. More and more data is becoming open and available. The USGS make data available. As does the professor i used to work for (i'd link you, but he's in the middle of an interstate move and the server doesn't have a new domain name yet). There was a whole undergraduate research project that i helped with making hydrologic data available to anyone who wants it. Many scientists post gathered data on their project sites. It's happening, simply for the good of the community. Details about equipment are usually either included, or corrected already in the data. All of the "real problems involved in actual implementation" are usually tackled by undergrads in a basement computer lab on campus, or as government interns, or as an algorithm with real time data. It's doable and it's being done.
I totally agree. I chose ES as a major because I'm completely and utterly facinated by natural systems. I love learning about connects and interconnects between the various spheres. Computers interest me, but only superficially, and thanks to the open source community I can teach myself a lot for free. UCR - the school I go to - does a similiar thing with it's breadth requirments. Humanities majors are supposed to take basic science classes and science majors are supposed to take basic humanities classes. There have been a few people who were just general business majors because they didn't know what thye wanted to do, who switched to ES because they really found the intro class interesting. To give the computer science department some credit, they're trying to make their intro classes harder and harder to really succeed well in (get an A or a B) to weed out the people who really don't care about it.
Don't know what you're talking about, really. Check the sciences, almost all OSS is academic. The OSS tools I use for research were all made my students or profs or multi-university collabortations.
Definitely. Modelling programs, algorithms, basically all scientific models are open source because they HAVE to be. You have to allow your collegues to look at your work simply because that's how science works. Where the open source disconnect occurs is in data analysis. Most sciences that aren't entirely unix-centric exist in a microsoft environment. Analysis happens in Excell. Posters are made in power point, as are research presentations. That final stage of research is (usually) done on windows because that's what most scientists and researchers know and are able to easily use. I did some research recently in the hydrologic field. I was able to do 90% of my project, if not more, on FreeBSD, however when it came to making up a poster to present, I had to use PowerPoint. Now that I know how the process works, I could probably have used The Gimp. However, I HAD to use ArcGIS becuase it was time prohibative to learn how the hell GRASS works. I think that's the main barrier from throwing off Windows in academia - all of these researchers have to keep researching, they have little or no time to learn how to use a new spreadsheet, a new graphics suite, a new GIS program (especially one as hard to use as GRASS, ugh).
I wouldn't say that all OSS is academic, but definitely all of scientific academia follows the tenents of OSS, because that's how science works.
It's been a while since you've met a lot of CS students, hasn't it? Most are in it thinking they'll make lots and lots of money after they graduate. They don't care about software wanting to be free. They don't even like coding. This represents about 80% of the CS student body, in my experience. They're not clever problem solvers, not at all. Most hate their major. They just want a nice cushy job in corporate america so they can buy whatever BMW they want.
The CS department at my school forces kids to use Linux in the labs. Regardless, there are seniors in CS that still use MS Visual C++ at home. I, being an environmental science major, have actually had to go help CS majors install linux on their machines, only to hear they reformatted and reinstalled windows because, "linux was too hard to learn." CS majors are not the clever little boy geniuses slashdot likes to paint them as. Those exist, but in the minority.
both LASER, RADAR, and SCUBA are pronounced the way they look. GNU is not. Guh-New? If you pronouce it the way it looks, you should just say "New," however that's not the perfered, "proper" way, right? That's the argument. I have no problem with acronyms that are pronounce the way they look. If you have to tell me the right way to pronounce and acronym, then it's not an acronym - it is, indeed, an initialisation. Acronyms are meant to make things easier, not to make engineers feel even more like they're God and can tell people how to do things.
haha you have no idea what you're talking about. I said 1.0-STABLE. No one on the dragonfly team would recommend using Dragonfly in a production environment, therefore it is not stable. Nice try, though.
Well - all releases - even 1.5, *WORK* on x86 FreeBSD. You just have to compile them yourself and download the source packages and patches yourself. The only thing special about 1.3.1 is that it's a Sun-licensed, *legal* binary distribution. Again...for x86. What I want is Java for amd64, as that's my primary platform.
I have a better question, as I don't care why you don't use FreeBSD: why do you feel obligated to tell us why you don't use it? If Linux works for you, great. Quite honestly all of your points are moot from my point for view for the following reasons:
1) This depends on your definition of a "desktop." To me, a Laptop is not a Desktop. If they were the same thing, why would they have different prefixes, Desk- and Lap-? I've used Fedora Core and I think it makes a Lousy Desktop. It has too many things I don't use installed in the default Desktop install. FreeBSD makes a much better desktop, with a much tighter install, while keeping all the bells and whistles *I* like. My opinion though. Since this is a subjective thing, I would say this point is moot and completely relative to the user.
2) Why would you need SMP for a standard desktop? And while I would Agree that FreeBSD doesn't do SMP Gracefully, it still does it basically the same way as Linux does from a theorhetical standpoint. I would argue the same thing that Matt Dillon argues - the basic underlying ideas behind both Linux and FreeBSD's SMP model are flawed and ungraceful. Check out the DFly site for more details. Technically, this is a moot point and is only a matter of time before FreeBSD is at the same level as Linux...i would argue they're so close right now the difference is insignificant.
3) While you might be correct with mindshare, there is not correlation between quantity of mindshare and quality of the final product. While the linux kernel is generally good, due to the decentalized nature of the linux community in general you end up with literally thousands of different distributions for different purposes, most of which are redundant and virtually useless. With BSD you have four to five different "distributions" with generalized goals - FreeBSD (server/workstation performance), OpenBSD (security), NetBSD (portability/stability), DragonFly BSD (cutting edge research/kernel-level innovations), and Darwin/OS X (general desktop optimization). While most interesting packages are indeed developed on linux, the majority run fine on all BSD's, with FreeBSD being compatible with the majority of the so-called cool linux-developed apps, including binary commercial linux games. FreeBSD also has binary 3D acceleration on x86 if you use an nVidia card, just like Linux. Moot point.
4) You mention the learning curve. Trust me, when i moved from linux to FreeBSD, there was virtually no learning curve. The RC system is much more sensical than the init.d system in my opinion./etc/rc.conf controls base-system-level startup scripts with a simple binary switch (i.e. sshd_enable="YES"). User-installed programs with startup scripts are controled by their own files in/usr/local/etc/rc.d. To activate these, generally you just move prog_name.sh.sample to prog_name.sh. The system will then start it up the next time you reboot. The scripts are also startable from the commandline by root, without need for a reboot. Package management is as easy as pkg_add -r [progname] for binary packages, or simply installing something from the ports directory. The program is then patched and compiled from source. Simple. It would take you, if you're an advanced linux user, probably a weekend to get up to speed on how to admin a FreeBSD machine, and maybe a week to master it.
5) As for patches, you'll probably notice by checking out the FreeBSD website there hasn't been a security advisory in the base system since December 1st, 2004...more than a month ago. When they tag a source tree as stable, you better fucking believe it's stable. Ports, however, may introduce security vulnerabilities as they're programs not directly controled by the freebsd project, perse. If there's a program that the ports team feels isn't secure, they won
In fact, I was not initially able to install Linux on my current home system, because at the time I built it (18 months ago) there were no Linux distros that supported SATA out of the box. But FreeBSD did. It wasn't until about six months ago that some Linux distros started shipping with SATA on by default. Many still don't.
Very good point. I have two 120 gig sata drives in a raid array. First I tried windows...it worked, but was a pain in the ass to set up (why the hell doesn't Windows XP x64 have sata support out of the box yet? Ugh). Then I tried Gentoo, because windows got boring. It detected by sata drives individually, but the array? Nope. In order for that to work I'd have to install it on a smaller ata drive, then build a kernel to recognize my particular hardware raid chip, then copy over the base system onto the array and boot from it. "Fuck that!" I said. Then I tried ubuntu...and same thing. So i finally gave up and decided to just say fuck it and install FreeBSD. It detected two identical drives and set them up as individual devices (ad0, ad1) and a raid 0 array device (ar0) - so i could pick if i wanted to use them as individual drives or as an array. Linux may have more hardware support than FreeBSD...but the hardware support FreeBSD has is done correctly and Just Works. Once again, FreeBSD won my heart over...even after I slammed it for not being as technically sound as DragonFly. Regardless, until DFly comes out with 1.0-STABLE, My box will be a FreeBSD box. Less headaches, hastle, and bullshit. It just works.
Communists believe in communal control over communal resources, where there is a planar social heirarchy - that is, everyone is on the same level. There are no consumers, producers, or managers - just people. The controls are all artifacts of human nature taking over human intellect. In communism there are no instant-gratification, tangible incentives (namely capital, be it money, land, or equipment) to perform at a higher level. Thus, in Soviet Russia the incentives to work became not being whacked by the secret police, not being thrown into siberia, etc. But, in pure communism, no one owns anything and government, money, capital in general are not needed. Everyone works for the common good.
Much of the centralized control and secrecy came out of Stalin and his...well...he was just fucked in the head. He brought the facism and violence to post-revolutionary Russia
Microsoft, on the other hand, would be an example of the evils of US capitalism - incentivising the destruction/consumption of competition in the name of worldly success, with very little thought to the long-term consquesnces to the consumer. This brings your walmarts, starbuckses, the destruction of small business and the uniform feel of department stores.
Please remove your slashdot accound. Your assumed clever comment has shown you to be, as esr would say, a "luser." But, then again, esr is a loser. So, go figure!
See, I totally agree with the grandparent poster. If you want everyone to pronounce GNU - GUH-NEW, you spell it accordingly. I have, and always will, say GNU - GEE-EN-EWE, why? BECAUSE IT'S A FUCKING ACRONYM! I pronounce it in the most sensical, straight forward way, because acronyms are meant (in theory) to simplify things. I don't give a fuck what RMS thinks. If he wants us to pronounce it Guh-new, maybe he should have named GNU something that, when acronym-ated, sounds more like Guh-New. GNU is three letters, G, N, and U. I pronounce it accordingly. RMS started a great thing, and seems to be an...eh...interesting guy...but i'm pretty fed up with Geeks, engineers, et al forcing their God complexes on us and dictating the RIGHT WAY to do things. Free software is about Freedom, right? Well i reserve the right to be free in my choice of acronym pronunciation. Thank you, and Goodnight.
Interestinly enough, while IBM might be officially backing SuSE and Redhat (which I'm not sure of, I haven't looked into that much) they unofficially have poured quite a bit of resources into the Gentoo project. You might want to check that out, kid.
His "stuff" (now reffering to DragonFly) also follows a model that is significantly different from any current UNIX system out there that I can think of - especially with respect to it's SMP system...which is why I question your statement about him not being able to think "outside the box"
I had a dual usb ibook which, for various reasons we won't go into, was crippled into only taking 128 mb of ram. It ran slow with 10.2. When i decided to figure out why, I fired up a terminal when the system was more or less idle, then fired up open-office (this was before X11 on OS X was using Quartz and whatnot). Almost immediately top showed 128 mb ram in full use, and the hard drive started cranking. So, I figure the slowdown was just caused by insufficient ram triggering swap to fire up on a nice, slow ATA 66 hard drive. All of the visual effects, however, stayed quite smooth the majority of the time.
Fifted. I buy everything through new egg. Since i'm in southern california i usually get what i want within 2 business days. Never had a problem with new egg. Ever.
When i ran Server 2k3 as my desktop, i had to ADD desktop fat. Turning on the Sound subsystem, install java, turn on graphics acceleration, loosen up security in IE, install firefox, enable direct X, install XP video card drivers (I had an ATi card back then, and they don't produce drivers for 2k3 like nVidia does), turn on image acquisition, turn on the CD burning subsystem, tweak memory usage to make it run more desktop-friendly. The only thing you actually turn off (and really don't have to) is that annoying shutdown tracker.
To me, and this is just me...you might have a totally different definition of "trim", that seems more like adding services that are unneeded for a server. Like i said before, Desktop "fat".
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Very good to know. I always thought that Gentoo required my full password but, but as i no longer use it (or any linux distribution for that matter), I couldn't test it out.
You get into your account because the OS, like other BSD based OSes, only uses an eight character password
Nope. Both FreeBSD 5.3 and OpenBSD 3.5 require you enter your entire password, even if it's longer than 8 characters. I just tried it on a couple machines. I remember that both RedHat and SuSE 9.1 only required 8 characters of a long password back when I had access to machines that ran those...I never understood why. I just chalked it up to Linux's inherent insecurity.
the "make it open" mantra is also very popular in science, especially academia. I was at the American Geophysicist Union meeting in San Fracisco this december, and open data was the name of the game. Infact, open data is one of the main tenents of science. More and more data is becoming open and available. The USGS make data available. As does the professor i used to work for (i'd link you, but he's in the middle of an interstate move and the server doesn't have a new domain name yet). There was a whole undergraduate research project that i helped with making hydrologic data available to anyone who wants it. Many scientists post gathered data on their project sites. It's happening, simply for the good of the community. Details about equipment are usually either included, or corrected already in the data. All of the "real problems involved in actual implementation" are usually tackled by undergrads in a basement computer lab on campus, or as government interns, or as an algorithm with real time data. It's doable and it's being done.
I totally agree. I chose ES as a major because I'm completely and utterly facinated by natural systems. I love learning about connects and interconnects between the various spheres. Computers interest me, but only superficially, and thanks to the open source community I can teach myself a lot for free. UCR - the school I go to - does a similiar thing with it's breadth requirments. Humanities majors are supposed to take basic science classes and science majors are supposed to take basic humanities classes. There have been a few people who were just general business majors because they didn't know what thye wanted to do, who switched to ES because they really found the intro class interesting. To give the computer science department some credit, they're trying to make their intro classes harder and harder to really succeed well in (get an A or a B) to weed out the people who really don't care about it.
Don't know what you're talking about, really. Check the sciences, almost all OSS is academic. The OSS tools I use for research were all made my students or profs or multi-university collabortations.
Definitely. Modelling programs, algorithms, basically all scientific models are open source because they HAVE to be. You have to allow your collegues to look at your work simply because that's how science works. Where the open source disconnect occurs is in data analysis. Most sciences that aren't entirely unix-centric exist in a microsoft environment. Analysis happens in Excell. Posters are made in power point, as are research presentations. That final stage of research is (usually) done on windows because that's what most scientists and researchers know and are able to easily use. I did some research recently in the hydrologic field. I was able to do 90% of my project, if not more, on FreeBSD, however when it came to making up a poster to present, I had to use PowerPoint. Now that I know how the process works, I could probably have used The Gimp. However, I HAD to use ArcGIS becuase it was time prohibative to learn how the hell GRASS works. I think that's the main barrier from throwing off Windows in academia - all of these researchers have to keep researching, they have little or no time to learn how to use a new spreadsheet, a new graphics suite, a new GIS program (especially one as hard to use as GRASS, ugh).
I wouldn't say that all OSS is academic, but definitely all of scientific academia follows the tenents of OSS, because that's how science works.
Because the funding isn't there. It's sad, but Professors need to eat just as bad as students do, and they eat by getting funding.
It's been a while since you've met a lot of CS students, hasn't it? Most are in it thinking they'll make lots and lots of money after they graduate. They don't care about software wanting to be free. They don't even like coding. This represents about 80% of the CS student body, in my experience. They're not clever problem solvers, not at all. Most hate their major. They just want a nice cushy job in corporate america so they can buy whatever BMW they want.
The CS department at my school forces kids to use Linux in the labs. Regardless, there are seniors in CS that still use MS Visual C++ at home. I, being an environmental science major, have actually had to go help CS majors install linux on their machines, only to hear they reformatted and reinstalled windows because, "linux was too hard to learn." CS majors are not the clever little boy geniuses slashdot likes to paint them as. Those exist, but in the minority.
both LASER, RADAR, and SCUBA are pronounced the way they look. GNU is not. Guh-New? If you pronouce it the way it looks, you should just say "New," however that's not the perfered, "proper" way, right? That's the argument. I have no problem with acronyms that are pronounce the way they look. If you have to tell me the right way to pronounce and acronym, then it's not an acronym - it is, indeed, an initialisation. Acronyms are meant to make things easier, not to make engineers feel even more like they're God and can tell people how to do things.
haha you have no idea what you're talking about. I said 1.0-STABLE. No one on the dragonfly team would recommend using Dragonfly in a production environment, therefore it is not stable. Nice try, though.
Well - all releases - even 1.5, *WORK* on x86 FreeBSD. You just have to compile them yourself and download the source packages and patches yourself. The only thing special about 1.3.1 is that it's a Sun-licensed, *legal* binary distribution. Again...for x86. What I want is Java for amd64, as that's my primary platform.
I'm a heavy Linux user. Why don't I use BSD?
/etc/rc.conf controls base-system-level startup scripts with a simple binary switch (i.e. sshd_enable="YES"). User-installed programs with startup scripts are controled by their own files in /usr/local/etc/rc.d. To activate these, generally you just move prog_name.sh.sample to prog_name.sh. The system will then start it up the next time you reboot. The scripts are also startable from the commandline by root, without need for a reboot. Package management is as easy as pkg_add -r [progname] for binary packages, or simply installing something from the ports directory. The program is then patched and compiled from source. Simple. It would take you, if you're an advanced linux user, probably a weekend to get up to speed on how to admin a FreeBSD machine, and maybe a week to master it.
I have a better question, as I don't care why you don't use FreeBSD: why do you feel obligated to tell us why you don't use it? If Linux works for you, great. Quite honestly all of your points are moot from my point for view for the following reasons:
1) This depends on your definition of a "desktop." To me, a Laptop is not a Desktop. If they were the same thing, why would they have different prefixes, Desk- and Lap-? I've used Fedora Core and I think it makes a Lousy Desktop. It has too many things I don't use installed in the default Desktop install. FreeBSD makes a much better desktop, with a much tighter install, while keeping all the bells and whistles *I* like. My opinion though. Since this is a subjective thing, I would say this point is moot and completely relative to the user.
2) Why would you need SMP for a standard desktop? And while I would Agree that FreeBSD doesn't do SMP Gracefully, it still does it basically the same way as Linux does from a theorhetical standpoint. I would argue the same thing that Matt Dillon argues - the basic underlying ideas behind both Linux and FreeBSD's SMP model are flawed and ungraceful. Check out the DFly site for more details. Technically, this is a moot point and is only a matter of time before FreeBSD is at the same level as Linux...i would argue they're so close right now the difference is insignificant.
3) While you might be correct with mindshare, there is not correlation between quantity of mindshare and quality of the final product. While the linux kernel is generally good, due to the decentalized nature of the linux community in general you end up with literally thousands of different distributions for different purposes, most of which are redundant and virtually useless. With BSD you have four to five different "distributions" with generalized goals - FreeBSD (server/workstation performance), OpenBSD (security), NetBSD (portability/stability), DragonFly BSD (cutting edge research/kernel-level innovations), and Darwin/OS X (general desktop optimization). While most interesting packages are indeed developed on linux, the majority run fine on all BSD's, with FreeBSD being compatible with the majority of the so-called cool linux-developed apps, including binary commercial linux games. FreeBSD also has binary 3D acceleration on x86 if you use an nVidia card, just like Linux. Moot point.
4) You mention the learning curve. Trust me, when i moved from linux to FreeBSD, there was virtually no learning curve. The RC system is much more sensical than the init.d system in my opinion.
5) As for patches, you'll probably notice by checking out the FreeBSD website there hasn't been a security advisory in the base system since December 1st, 2004...more than a month ago. When they tag a source tree as stable, you better fucking believe it's stable. Ports, however, may introduce security vulnerabilities as they're programs not directly controled by the freebsd project, perse. If there's a program that the ports team feels isn't secure, they won
In fact, I was not initially able to install Linux on my current home system, because at the time I built it (18 months ago) there were no Linux distros that supported SATA out of the box. But FreeBSD did. It wasn't until about six months ago that some Linux distros started shipping with SATA on by default. Many still don't.
Very good point. I have two 120 gig sata drives in a raid array. First I tried windows...it worked, but was a pain in the ass to set up (why the hell doesn't Windows XP x64 have sata support out of the box yet? Ugh). Then I tried Gentoo, because windows got boring. It detected by sata drives individually, but the array? Nope. In order for that to work I'd have to install it on a smaller ata drive, then build a kernel to recognize my particular hardware raid chip, then copy over the base system onto the array and boot from it. "Fuck that!" I said. Then I tried ubuntu...and same thing. So i finally gave up and decided to just say fuck it and install FreeBSD. It detected two identical drives and set them up as individual devices (ad0, ad1) and a raid 0 array device (ar0) - so i could pick if i wanted to use them as individual drives or as an array. Linux may have more hardware support than FreeBSD...but the hardware support FreeBSD has is done correctly and Just Works. Once again, FreeBSD won my heart over...even after I slammed it for not being as technically sound as DragonFly. Regardless, until DFly comes out with 1.0-STABLE, My box will be a FreeBSD box. Less headaches, hastle, and bullshit. It just works.
Communists believe in communal control over communal resources, where there is a planar social heirarchy - that is, everyone is on the same level. There are no consumers, producers, or managers - just people. The controls are all artifacts of human nature taking over human intellect. In communism there are no instant-gratification, tangible incentives (namely capital, be it money, land, or equipment) to perform at a higher level. Thus, in Soviet Russia the incentives to work became not being whacked by the secret police, not being thrown into siberia, etc. But, in pure communism, no one owns anything and government, money, capital in general are not needed. Everyone works for the common good.
Much of the centralized control and secrecy came out of Stalin and his...well...he was just fucked in the head. He brought the facism and violence to post-revolutionary Russia
Microsoft, on the other hand, would be an example of the evils of US capitalism - incentivising the destruction/consumption of competition in the name of worldly success, with very little thought to the long-term consquesnces to the consumer. This brings your walmarts, starbuckses, the destruction of small business and the uniform feel of department stores.
But, hey, I could just be talking out my ass.
NICE.
Please remove your slashdot accound. Your assumed clever comment has shown you to be, as esr would say, a "luser." But, then again, esr is a loser. So, go figure!
It's not blandness, it's usability!
...ok yeah, they're bland.
Right guys?!?! Right?!
I totally fucking agree. Good Show. And to all you mods - this guy is NOT a troll. He's bringing up a valid point.
See, I totally agree with the grandparent poster. If you want everyone to pronounce GNU - GUH-NEW, you spell it accordingly. I have, and always will, say GNU - GEE-EN-EWE, why? BECAUSE IT'S A FUCKING ACRONYM! I pronounce it in the most sensical, straight forward way, because acronyms are meant (in theory) to simplify things. I don't give a fuck what RMS thinks. If he wants us to pronounce it Guh-new, maybe he should have named GNU something that, when acronym-ated, sounds more like Guh-New. GNU is three letters, G, N, and U. I pronounce it accordingly. RMS started a great thing, and seems to be an...eh...interesting guy...but i'm pretty fed up with Geeks, engineers, et al forcing their God complexes on us and dictating the RIGHT WAY to do things. Free software is about Freedom, right? Well i reserve the right to be free in my choice of acronym pronunciation. Thank you, and Goodnight.
Interestinly enough, while IBM might be officially backing SuSE and Redhat (which I'm not sure of, I haven't looked into that much) they unofficially have poured quite a bit of resources into the Gentoo project. You might want to check that out, kid.
His "stuff" (now reffering to DragonFly) also follows a model that is significantly different from any current UNIX system out there that I can think of - especially with respect to it's SMP system...which is why I question your statement about him not being able to think "outside the box"
I had a dual usb ibook which, for various reasons we won't go into, was crippled into only taking 128 mb of ram. It ran slow with 10.2. When i decided to figure out why, I fired up a terminal when the system was more or less idle, then fired up open-office (this was before X11 on OS X was using Quartz and whatnot). Almost immediately top showed 128 mb ram in full use, and the hard drive started cranking. So, I figure the slowdown was just caused by insufficient ram triggering swap to fire up on a nice, slow ATA 66 hard drive. All of the visual effects, however, stayed quite smooth the majority of the time.
Yeah, I totally agree. I've never taken any microsoft operating systems seriously as server platforms...not even xenix.
bhahahahaha. Good delivery, too.
Fifted. I buy everything through new egg. Since i'm in southern california i usually get what i want within 2 business days. Never had a problem with new egg. Ever.
When i ran Server 2k3 as my desktop, i had to ADD desktop fat. Turning on the Sound subsystem, install java, turn on graphics acceleration, loosen up security in IE, install firefox, enable direct X, install XP video card drivers (I had an ATi card back then, and they don't produce drivers for 2k3 like nVidia does), turn on image acquisition, turn on the CD burning subsystem, tweak memory usage to make it run more desktop-friendly. The only thing you actually turn off (and really don't have to) is that annoying shutdown tracker.
To me, and this is just me...you might have a totally different definition of "trim", that seems more like adding services that are unneeded for a server. Like i said before, Desktop "fat".