Embedded NetBSD is great...

... but will it run on my toaster? Yes, it will.

It's worth noting that only root has access to the heating element. The CPU is an embedded ARM board. Slashdot had the expected number of jokes about the Slashdot Effect turning your server to toast.

A little about LinuxWorld

On the whole, LinuxWorld isn't as much fun as it used to be -- now it's mostly about selling to suits. Still, the swag was good, and it was cool to see the chaoswolf enjoying herself (even if she did get bored around 2:30; I would normally have made another round). The ".org pavillion" -- the ghettoarea where they put the free booths for non-profits -- was on a separate floor, and didn't seem to be getting as much traffic as in past years.

CDs for OpenSUSE and Ubuntu were very much in evidence. Digium/Asterisk had cute little asterisk-shaped install disks for the Asterisk PBX. No surprise there. Everyone seems to be using Polycom phones, which are a bit pricy but from all reports they're worth the extra $$. I'll put one on my wish list.

Best swag was Levanta's laser/pen. Seems like maybe twice the output of my old pointer, which was admittedly a cheap piece of junk. Best demos were the NetBSD-powered toaster, a bicycle-powered Asterisk rig for third-world villages, and the group -- don't even remember who it was, now -- showing off Linux on the Linksys NSLU2. The BlackDog Pocket Server would have been very cool, but I missed it somehow. It's a USB-powered Linux box that starts out looking like a CD-ROM long enough to trick a Windows box into auto-running the Cygwin X server. We wants it, preciousssss...

I got the opportunity to gripe at Dell (for lack of Linux on their desktop and laptop lines, and limited support in general) and Adobe (for Acroread's lousy UI and the lack of Framemaker on Linux). Skipped griping at HP; did that at a couple of previous shows this year.

No links; I'm being lazy.

Network oddities

rowanf came over to the Starport yesterday evening and had trouble getting DNS on her MacOS 9 laptop. Nobody else has reported a problem lately, but I seem to recall having some trouble with a Win98 laptop as well. My current best guess is that it has to do with DNS over UDP getting back through the various subnets and routers -- recent DNS implementations use TCP, but the old way involved UDP and the reply had to go back via UDP to port 53 on the requesting machine.