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Contents:

¶: Greetings From Heather Stern

Language choice --or--

Generic installer locations

Mail forwarding

Process lifecycle --or--

Parent and Child
The birth and death of linux processes

Upgrading KDE

Greetings from Heather Stern

Greetings, everyone, and welcome once more to the world of The Answer Gang. It's sunny September where I'm sittign but for some places the storms are rolling in. (See our Mailbag for soggy details.)

Meanwhile, it's getting toward Autumn. The blustering winds are starting to tug at the leaves, the blustering television sings of back to school and fall fashions. What have these to do with the world of techies? Not much...

Well, hold on a second there. Actually, the start of new academic seasons give the open source world a new batch of bored students and busy computer science departments with fat links to work on new projects. Techie bits have come up in the fashion world - depending on just how far away from the techie world you are, fashion might have been what dragged Linux into your view, as the Burlington Coat Factory sometime ago (about 5 years now) held a certain large hardware vendor over a barrel by taking them up on their system preload offer, but wanting the "ordinary consumer" class of systems en masse rather than a few rackmount servers. Since then, Burlington expanded their Linux use company wide and appear to be pretty darn happy with it.

Let me take a woman's intuition on a little shopping trip, then, and see where else Linux has come into fashion... I'm not talking T-shirts, mind you. I can get those at trade shows. I can buy them at ThinkGeek. I'm not talking about silly tidbits like a tie with 47 pictures of Tux on it. The ability to wear bumper sticker and /usr/share/games/fortunes sorts of wit is not fashion. I'm talking about the world where some crazy designers feel compelled to reinvent crayola colors every 6 months or so and force beautiful slinky babes (of both genders) to walk up and down a long stage wearing... err, well, sometimes it doesn't look silly, but often it does.

What doesn't help is how hard this can be to shop for. Search engines are with "in this fashion..." and "accessories" will get you peripherals. I really had to pull out the stops for this. You won't find it on freshmeat either (though I did find yet another lightweight wm called WMI).

You want jewelry, you have to look for jewelry - amd apparently it helps if you spell this the long way. Linux Jewellery has quite the debian collection, and some BSD stuff too.

You ladies who want to show off your fondness for Red Hat instead, consider these. Sorry it's not a fedora: http://www.thesilvermonkey.com/redhatsocietythemefashionjewelry.html

OTOH, sometimes a hat is just a hat. As early as 3 years ago some people were seeking geek chic that didn't include looking like "the techie" from several hundred feet away. THis article from that time relates, and I'm pleased to say many of its links are ever still good. Dress shirts wired for techie bits? My goodness:
http://www.geek.com/pdageek/features/chic/index.htm

That was 2001. In 2002, CNN wondered if wearable computing would hit the fall fashion highlights with an MP3 jacket. "We're just demonstrating the technology." they cried, it's not like we want money for this. Working with partners, etc. Get the giggles yourself while reding this:
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-941578.html

Will wonders not cease. It was shown off, among other curious inncations of the fashion world, at a fashion conference earlier this year. Infineon really has partnered with Rosner for a MP3 denim jacket (well it looks denim; I could be wrong) and O'Neill for a MP3 enabled snowboarding jacket -- now you "Extreme Linux" fans have something to wear.

No idea what OS the players use, sorry - fashion doesn't care about that. Is the open source concept affecting fashion more directly? Maybe not. But someone's thinking about it.

Amazing. Maybe we're getting somewhere. Until next month, folks. I and my red straw hat are off shopping.