"By the time you read this, the 2004 holiday season will have dissolved into memory. I spent the last days of the year going through my list of "things I want to check out if I ever get the chance." As usual, I found some interesting tidbits." Read more here. Elsewhere, Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment.

Following my earlier article about creating a Bluetooth access point with your OS, here is my quick guide how to do just that with Arch Linux. You will need two Bluetooth-enabled devices to start with, and some patience as setting up Bluetooth is problematic on all OSes (each one with its own quirks).

Most recent PalmOne/Clie devices and some PocketPC ones come with Bluetooth instead of WiFi. Imagine yourself in a WiFi-enabled hotel room with your dual wireless *book on your lap and a BT-enabled PDA/phone device. How do you route networking to these devices *from* your Mac?

Thinking of changing an old laptop's OS from Windows to Linux? Don't do it until you read this. The benefits, the pains, the arguments, and the results. It's possible, but will everybody like it? Read on to find out. My take: For such an old laptop the article describes, either DamnSmallLinux or Windows98SE/ME or FreeBSD with IceWM or BeOS 5.03 are the best bets. Anything with modern UIs would crawl. I am using Gnome/XFce with ArchLinux on my Sony Vaio 333 Mhz PII-mobile with 128 MBs of RAM (almost twice as fast as the laptop in question) and it's already not as spiffy as Win98SE is on the same laptop. I also have to live with compromises (not loading most services etc).

Ubuntu is supposed to be a very user friendly distro. I guess the real test, as far as I was concerned, was to see how my wife (a computer neophyte) and my 6 year old son would do. My wife just sat down, opened FireFox and went to Ebay without noticing she wasn't in Windows. Read the full review at GUILinux.com.

"Mad Echidna" has posted an article about his migration from a Linux based PC to an old iMac in this article. My Take: My reply to his annoyances:

With the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Red Hat wants to give you the opportunity to try the latest release of Red Hat's market-leading Linux technology. For a limited time, you can download a free 30-day subscription to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 product of your choice (AS, ES, WS, or Desktop).

StanaPhone is the first free telephone with real US phone numbers, and a Skype competitor.

IBM is not only discontinuing support for Intel's Itanium processor in a new generation of server technology, it's going a step further, dropping Itanium servers from the product line altogether, sources familiar with the situation said.

Tuxmachines.org has a mini-Slackware 10.1 review, and some screenshots.

Kerrighed is a Single System Image operating system for clusters. Kerrighed offers the view of a unique SMP machine on top of a cluster of standard PCs. The goals of Kerrighed are high performance of applications, high availability of the cluster, efficient resources management, high customizability of the operating system and ease of use. Kerrighed is implemented as an extension to Linux 2.4.24 (a set of Linux modules and a small patch to the kernel). Port to kernel 2.6.x is planned for later this year.

Sun has recently released Solaris 10. It is currently free, as in beer, and most of it is promised to be released under an OSI approved license in the second quarter of 2005. Most everyone reading this probably knows all of that. The release and subsequent open sourcing of Solaris 10 has caused quite an uproar in the Open Source community and the IT industry as a whole. Read the review here.

In this article, LinuxTimes compares Xandros 3 Open Circulation Edition and SimplyMEPIS 2004.6.

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo has notified on the Lua mailing list that a paper in PDF format on the implementation of Lua 5.0 is now available for downloading: The Implementation of Lua 5.0 - Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, Waldemar Celes. Reccommended to anyone interested in the internals of Lua.