Time to get busy!

[Dwight Hughes]

| From: Tomas Arvidsson <md94-tar@nada.kth.se>
|
| > Now, which is it -- Linux or FreeBSD? If Linux, which Linux --
| > RedHat, Slackware, Debian, mkLinux?
| 
| Go with Linux and don't fuzz too much about which distribution we
| should use - they are basically the same. The major differencies
| between them are the vendor-specific tools you get and the support
| some vendors, i.e. Red Hat and S.u.S.E., will give you if you buy
| their distribution. Besides, S.u.S.E. have a Greman distribution with
| German docs, man-pages, and books which probably appeals more to the
| Germans who follow this list than any english distribution (I
| recommend it - it seems to be a really good distribution).

RedHat seems to be highly regarded for the quality of their product and
their support. 

| My suggestion of Linux is not really based on technical merits -
| something which will be irrelevant anyway if we are going to replace
| it with something more appropriate later on. I suggest Linux because
| it is more easily available (for buying - picking it of the net is
| probably the same pain in the but in both cases), there are more
| drivers and patches for strange hardware available and it is probably
| still available for more platforms than FreeBSD.

This seems to be true -- FreeBSD is at alpha level with their support
for ATAPI IDE drivers for CDROM drives, for example.

FreeBSD is touting "dynamically loadable kernel modules" at runtime (for
"new file system types" and "binary emulators") and "compatibility modules"
-- 
which they are using primarily for binary compatibility between FreeBSD 
and most of the rest of the Un*x clone universe -- would these be useful
to us in the beginning or for the LispVM effort? If so, are comparable 
capabilities available in the Linux OSs now?