Hello, I wanted to bring to your attention some interesting operating system that is coming up. It is called Haiku, perhaps you have heard about it. It is based on (backward compatible with) the BeOS Release 6, another operating system that came up in the early nineties that was written from scratch in C++. What is more interesting about it is that it actually has a Microkernel design - more strictly it is a hybrid kernel - and has been known to have the most responsive GUI ever. It was designed to be primarily a "Multimedia platform" thus fully desktop-oriented. The makers of the system claim it is the "Linux of Desktop operating systems" ...... In fact Apple had keen interests on it (BeOS), they actually wanted to use it as a ground for the Macintosh (Version 8 onwards) but because of the pricing made for the system by Be Inc, they decided to acquire NeXT and base the Mac on its variant of B.S.D UNIX a.k.a Darwin (NB: Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the Web and run the first Web server on a NEXTStep Machine [info.cern.ch]). All the same Haiku is POSIX compliant, "pervasively multithreaded", has an advanced database-like (journaling) file-system among other things. I have been partly running the alpha-one version and it really feels snappy, quite usable. It can decompress mp3s and MPEG videos nicely, render images including SVGs beautifully and for those of you with strong geek appeals, it has PERL 5 and Python 2.6 for scripting, subversion 1.6 and C++ compilers + gdb to debug applications in case they crash in mid-execution. You can also dis/engage processors & processing cores on the fly by clicking on a button(s) and the kernel will distribute the loads to the available resources splendidly!! You can have a look at it from its site [ http://www.haiku-os.org/ ], the bootable image is about 389 Mb, 145 Mb compressed, and can also boot to the desktop. I thought I would let individuals in these groups know about it because I believe we have a number of strong developers hanging around. Haiku still needs some bug fixes for it to become fully stable. You can watch a video on the systems demo at google from here [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=236331448076587879#]. Have a nice time. I would really like to hear the opinions of those of you who get to use the thing. --- BeOS Part I [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggCODBIfWKY&feature=PlayList&p=17075EF3FA6554... ] BeOS Part II [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwqi9HnN17w&feature=PlayList&p=17075EF3FA6554...] Regards, Chiteri. P.S: For those of you who want copies of the C.D with Haiku, you can contact me off the list we meet. Am in the City of Nairobi, KENYA.