The Curious Incident of Sun in the Night-Time ~~ Stallman's comments on Sun Micro & JAVA release

Slax is installable via the Slax Installer.

They're up to 5.16 (I still have a customized 5.07) :|

Mine has XFCE and KDE as desktop environments (though someone recently put up a Gnome module...)

There's about 700 modules--ranging from wallpapers to drivers to games, even entire desktop environments.

With Websave and configsave, it's possible to save your configuration and restore it on the next boot.

Base isos are around 200MB...

IIRC, Zenwalk was either Minislack or Zipslack (don't remember exactly)
It's what got me comfortable enough to actually try and run Slackware 10.

The other live CD I sometimes run is FreeSBIE--which is based on FreeBSD 5.3

Apple's O/S is far from completely open, in fact they aren't releasing the kernel code for Intel processors nor are they using Stallman's license that would force them to.

Once again repeating Apple's statement that posted to you earlier - Although the source for the new Intel kernel has not been published yet, Apple has not announced a change in their open source policy on the kernel. Apple is expected to say more about the Intel kernel source situation at the next developer's conference. I'll speculate it will be fully published a few weeks before Leopard is released, consistent with their past practices.

Regarding Stallman and FSF software, much of it IS INCLUDED with Mac OS X, including emacs and the gcc compiler. Apple IS REQUIRED to comply with the GPL on those items. You can open the Terminal application and enter the commands "man gcc" and "man emacs" to confirm that fact. Other notable GPL software packages on Mac OS X include gdb, perl, samba and grep.

Several other open source software packages using licenses other than GPL are also included with Mac OS X, and Apple complies with their respective terms and conditions. A comprehensive list of Mac OS X software components and licenses is stored at /Library/Documentation/Acknowledgements.rtf.

Nobody here likes Stallman's personal politics. He's not on the list of people I admire in the industry. But he is a good programmer and a lot of people have made a lot of money from his work.

Irish,

Apples are great boxes but don't let the propaganda machine fool you. Many of the Linux tools licensed to stallman are also present on other operating systems like Solaris / AIX / and OSX.

I like OSX more than any other desktop I have used but *if* you want to make a comparison might I recommend getting a live CD Linux distro *and* test driving a mac.

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

I hear good things about MEPIS and/or Ubuntu. Just burn and boot off of them. Even with my OSX desktop I do all online transactions off of a live CD.

Nobody here likes Stallman's personal politics.

Well there sure are quite a few that rush to his defense whenever I remind them what a moonbat he is. I think we have quite a few "techno whores" that pledge their allegiance to the "god of technology" above all else, and would support the devil himself if he wowed them with new capabilities, especially if they were "given away" "for free". Nobody wants to hear this though, as the truth is often painful.

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