Red Hat "Pinstripe" impressions: While the average user isn't going to notice much new (other than a few new apps to make desktop use more attractive), Red Hat has been very busy under the hood; the filesystem layout is much closer to it's other Linux brethren, package layouts have been standardized a bit, they've moved to xinetd instead of the traditional inetd, and XFree86 4.0.1 ships as the default. The new version of RPM is going to give people migranes, however (since packages created are no longer backwards-compatible with older releases; RPM 3.0.5, a "middle-ground" release, has never seen the light of day as part of an OS release yet, and it looks like Red Hat 7.0 will ship with RPM 4.0). I'm seeing semi-random X crashes during screensaver use, but that could be an artifact of the way I did the upgrade. The distribution is spread over two disks now, which is probably going to result in some moaning about how people have to lug around two whole CDs now to do a system install, but I'm fine with it. All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results. Nice work, Red Hat.
More fun with BSD/OS 4.1: I'd never have this much trouble with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or any Linux distribution. All I want is a working build of binutils 2.10 and gcc 2.95.2...it looks like I may finally have a reasonable build of binutils, but I'm still running into problems with GCC...of course, egcs 2.95.1 (which shipped with the OS) has a series of patches to it which BSDI apparently never folded back into the GCC mainline releases. Fuckers. I don't see any way to get at those patches without owning a copy of BSD/OS either, which might be a potential GPL violation, although I don't have the energy to call them on it just now (mind you, anyone can get a developer's copy of the BSD/OS 4.1 release for free from their website, so maybe it's not an issue?). Once I've got everything building, I'll have to see about cleaning up the patches for the binutils and GCC developers.
On handhelds: Daaaaamn, I gotta get me one of those iPAQ units that Jim Gettys is working on (see handhelds.org for details). I've been looking for a good PDA, and those look pretty reasonable for what I'd want to do with it. Although, Handspring still makes a damn cool little PalmPilot clone...
Today's slogan: "Go away, or I shall replace you with a very small shell script." (Thanks, ThinkGeek.)