Surrounded by felines

Yesterday my oldest daughter, chaoswolf, came home from a sleepover birthday at a friend's house and announced that she was changing her mundane nickname from "Katy" to "Kat". (She is, of course, keeping "Chaos" in fandom.)

Fine with me -- it's about time she picked her own nickname. But it does complicate things, because my wife, the flower_cat, tends to go by "Cat" for short. And the 11-year-old refers to herself as a "kitty-cat", though it doesn't have the status of a nickname (yet).

Well, I guess causing Chaos is what she's good at...

Scary software

OEOne can be described in a lot of ways -- it's a desktop environment, a Linux distribution (based on RedHat, as so many are), and the software for a home information appliance. What it really is, is an application written in XUL, Mozilla's XML User-interface Language.

This makes it the first example I've seen of Bill Gates' worst nightmare: a complete, web browser-based desktop environment. It hides the underlying operating system underneath something that looks like a web browser, not like a windows-and-icons desktop. Applications like the word processor show up in the same frame as web pages.

A review will be forthcoming after I've had a little time to play with it.

Note: I recommend installing it over a clean RH7.3 install on a partition you don't mind wiping afterwards. It really expects to be running on a dedicated machine, and seems to coexist uncomfortably with a working system. For example, the printer configuration page doesn't read your existing /etc/printcap file, but it does write to it.