The advent of Xen and its like is exciting not least because it frees experimental OSes from a need to write and maintain infinitely many device drivers. Running Plan 9 under Linux seems to give us the best of all possible worlds. Hurd on Linux, anyone? Every part of Linux not needed for support of Xen might be trimmed away, leaving... IBM VM?

Folks, avriettea isn't a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is a recent innovation, evolutionarily. Technically, he's a toady. Toadyism, as a genetic trait, has been strongly selected-for as long as there have been bullies. The male inclination toward rape and the female soft spot for silver-tongued transients are similarly unfortunate inheritances we all share. All three are still selected for. (The latter two are in eclipse, for the moment; but let's see who replaces Sandra Day O'Connor!) Some of us consciously choose not to express those traits. Others run with them. It's just a matter of what you can stomach. I don't doubt there are some things even Alex wouldn't do (unless told to).

Thanks to mchirico for Linux Tips. Some of that turns out to be useful to have all in once place.

kjw: You say, "I've managed to create code that works great on FreeBSD/x86, but breaks on Linux/x86 and Mac OS X/PPC.", but you mean, "I have brokenness in my code that FreeBSD/x86 fails to reveal. Both Linux and Macosix detect the problem immediately."

Besides lending reliability to Galeon, Gnome 2.10, it turns out, took away more features. This time, weather forecasts, the Debian menu (got back by installing some new packages gnome-menus was not so forthcoming as to suggest), and the ability to keep the panel permanently at the bottom of the screen. (Every time gnome-panel crashes, it restarts back at the top.) Oh, and gnome-panel crashes more. I had to purge Evince to get anything even to offer to use Xpdf any more. Updating Xpdf and adding Evince back again, things seem OK now.

The Debian X.org packages are working well: mach64 XVideo support is welcome, whatever it is that it's good for. (Who has time to see movies?)

Linux kernel support for cpufreq, the variable-frequency CPU-clock driver and the virtual file system that controls it, on Intel P3 (Coppermine SMI) turns out to be much iffier than anybody says. Throttling via ACPI works fine, but not the ACPI cpufreq driver, and not the native Coppermine SMI cpufreq driver. I wonder if they ever will.

I had to add a USB sound gadget to get a quiet mike jack to use for VoIP. Its mixer stinks, the default volume is too low, and its volume-control buttons don't work on Linux, so I'm still plugging headphones into Compaq's noisy built-in audio output. Are most people forced to a software mixer because they have no usable hardware mixer? Maybe JWZ had a point. Of course I should just run Asterisk, and plug my trusty Western Electric phone into my Sipura 3000 PSTN/VoIP adapter. But would that really be easier?

I just built and installed the third-party equalizer module for XMMS, and now Oggs play equalized. (The built-in one only works with mp3s.) My hearing has the very common "4K dip", a narrow bandstop at -- in my case -- 3.8 KHz. With a big boost at 4 KHz, everything sounds much, much better.

Does anybody know how to persuade Mozilla/CUPS to print in a typeface bigger than 6 points? My mother-in-law's eyesight is not what it was, and the print keeps getting smaller for no reason I can find.