I saw an article in the Toronto Star in which Steve Ballmer was, um, well, talking gleefully about the city of Munich's highly publicized and controversial migration to Linux, server to desktop, costing more money than expected.

So I suppose Mr. Ballmer is prepared to reimburse one of my clients for its unexpected expenses in migrating from VMS to Windows then, eh?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

I can't say I discovered this--I saw a reference to it in User Friendly this past week--but there's now an XP-lookalike window manager for Linux called XPDE.

A quick look at the screenshots shows it's a pretty convincing clone. But is it legal?

Fresh on the heels of the Linux Kernel 2.6.1 release, Kernel 2.6.0 made it into Debian Sid (unstable). I haven't tried it yet, as I messed things up on my main Linux box when I tried to upgrade to a pre-release version of 2.6.

In case you haven't read about it elsewhere, a new branch of the Linux kernel called -tiny was quietly released last month. Its main intent is for embedded systems, but I can see all sorts of uses for it. The smaller the kernel, the faster it loads off a floppy, so it'd be great for boot disks. Likewise for diskless machines that boot off the network.

Sometimes you need to transfer files between Linux boxes, or between a Linux box and some other box, and setting up Samba or some other form of network file system may not be practical (maybe you only need to transfer a couple of files, or maybe it's just a one-time thing) or possible (maybe there's a firewall involved).

I don't remember what I was looking for, but I don't remember finding it, and what I do remember finding is what looks like another decent text-mode text editor (is that redundant?) for Linux and Unix.

I'm posting this from a computer running Knoppix. Charlie brought a copy in to work the other day and handed it to me. I actually downloaded Knoppix several months ago but never burned myself a copy because I didn't have any 80-minute CD-Rs--I've still got about 20 74-minute jobs I haven't used yet.

Well, I've been playing a little bit with Erik Anderson's uClibc-based development environment mentioned in the previous two posts.

I think I found just what I needed. Somehow I overlooked it before. Right there on Erik Anderson's uClibc page, near the bottom, there's his uClibc development environment. What is it? A Linux distribution based on his uClibc, busybox and tinylogin userspace in addition to enough GNU tools to compile other stuff. If you don't want all 150 megs' worth, download his makefile and uncomment just the stuff you want.

OK, so we've been talking about NAS boxes at work. NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a simple server appliance. Plug this thing into the network and you've got an instant file server.