Hello Relativity fans!

Many of you know, or perhaps none of you do, that Linux is gearing up for
going mainstream.  I'm on the bleeding edge (and have been for a while I
now realize) of this movement. Anyone who has used Linux during the past
few years knows that its "grown up" alot. Linux went from a pretty stable
and reliable 1.3.x series to the excellent stability and awesomeness that
I enjoy with the 2.0.x series of kernels. 

Netscape is getting ready to take Linux mainstream with better support
from its browsers, a new front-end for X, and improved product support.
Netscape may team with RedHat to produce a commercially viable mainstream
replacement for Windows.

So what does all this mean to the scene? Well, right now, not alotta. In
fact it may never effect the scene. If it does it'll be more along the
lines of seeing more and more of our FTP SiteOps switching to Linux and
even an emergence of WWW SiteOps because of Apache for Linux.

Like I said I've been on the bleeding edge for quite some time and I've
suffered my share of nicks and cuts. Right now I'm having a problem (not
necesarrily Linux specific) compiling a kernel because GNUs objdump
doesn't support --raw and --quiet quite right. So far I've never really
been hacked off because of it and people have tried to hack my box. I
haven't seen anyone get in and hope to never see anyone get in.

If you want some pointers for jumping onto the bleeding edge as well heres
a *short* list:

1)  Don't get discouraged!
2)  Go with a distro thats easy to install and easy to upgrade at least
    for your first time. RedHat and Debian are pretty nice, I prefer
    RedHat 4.2/5.0
3)  Seek help if you need to. #LinuxOS is a great place on EFNet. 
    http://www.linux.org/ if you like WWW stuff.
    http://www.ssc.com/linux/ has alot of neato stuff.
4)  To keep yourself on the bleeding edge (and your programs up-to-date)
    go to http://www.freshmeat.net/ -- Lots of people there keep tabs on
    darn near every software package there is for Linux including URLs for
    D/L, and HomePages.
5)  Shit happens. Things can, and sometimes do, go wrong. But just
    think, at least when Linux crashes if you're a competent programmer
    *YOU* can fix it!

Peace all, I'm outta here. I'd love to hear yer feedback so if ya have
any go ahead and fire it at my e-mail address!

ZOP12
zop12@mindless.com