Linux desktops have made so much progress this year, we should realize
that most of our past experience has become largely irrelevant. And
yes, Win2K does have a zsh shell, but the command-line language
capability of Windows is nowhere near that of our favorite OS. Also,
those features are not available in any of the consumer versions of Windows.
On the "good news" side, I finally got KM266 to work with Red Hat 9.
The solution is not ultimate--VIA's Savage driver still doesn't work for
the KM266 video chipset. But VIA's people promised to work on it--the
fact that they are willing to deploy an engineer and their worldwide
marketing manager to spend a weekend morning working on it should
underscore their long over due commitment. The demo system to be
installed at McKinley is definitely not for gamers, but for office uses,
it's more than adequate.
The 2.6 kernel should elevate the hardware compatibility of Linux to be
further in par with Windows (especially with regard to acpi--which has a
lot of bearing to Linux notebook PCs, USB, CD burning, etc.) But even
before the 2.6 kernel, we need an army of volunteers to play with
different projects, develop a database of user experiences, and
establish a source of helpers/trainers.
Of course, I am also anxiously awaiting Athlon64. This may finally move
Linux to computer games. As we all know, computing gaming is the mother
(literally speaking) of all computer hardware development.
Wayne
