Package management was being fixed before "the Oracle years". S11 was in progress when Oracle took over Your other comments don't make any sense, so I shall do you a favour and ignore them until you can state them more clearly.

To store encrypted stuff he has no access to, your neighbour has to really trust you, too!

http://releases.ubuntu.com/11.04/ubuntu-11.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/torrents/Fedora-15-x86_64-Live-KDE.torrent ... I could go on...

Is it likely that a German user would have got an email written in German, and that a French user would get an email written in French? Therefore, is it likely that a UK English (aka English!) speaking user would get an email written in English, not in American English?

Indeed. "sudo apt-get install vlc" is simple and predictable.

I hugely prefer to work in GNOME, but when forced to use MS Windows, PuTTY is the only thing that makes it bearable!

SunOS is the kernel of the old and current Sun operating system. The Solaris Operating Environment includes the SunOS kernel. Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.10 Generic January 2005

Don't keep us waiting - what's the interesting story? ;-)

Only if they redistribute the binaries. Google take and modify Free Software, but under GPLv2 have no obligation to share their changes

Oh, the irony

> Electronic Arts vinyl-sized game sleeves Since when was vinyl used as a measure of size?

You might want to change "cat > /etc/hosts" to "cat >> /etc/hosts" :-)

The cited use of i.e. seems perfectly reasonable. When i.e. and e.g. are so often used incorrectly, nobody recognises the correct usage any longer!

And corporate users, who have a WinXP desktop with IE6. I'm working on a customer site at the moment, where IE6 is the only permitted browser, the web proxy blocks sites which may install other browsers, so the only way to access many websites is to use my laptop with a 3G dongle to get direct access to the internet. Somehow, although PortableApps' Firefox worked once (loaded by USB stick, as the website was barred), it, too, is now somehow blocked. When browsing, I'm not too bothered about IE6's lack of compliance, but the lack of tabbed browsing means that it's impossible to organise a few sets of web pages together into a coherent set. (What *did* we do before tabbed browsing?!!)

Drepper, and glibc is also a big part of the G in GNU/Linux. The reason people fear upgrading glibc is that it is so central to the rest of the code they run on a GNU/Linux system. I don't know Drepper, or Schilling, or others, personally, but I respect the fact that they do far more than I do, and that they know far more than I do about libc level issues. I have been using GNU/Linux for 13 years or more, and in that time it has become perfectly clear to me how critical the work of people like Drepper are to the GNU/Linux ecosystem. Similarly, that is why the credit of GNU/Linux is so much more important that the "I heart Ubuntu" fanboy stuff. Sorry to be an old fart, but some of us care about design and engineering. Other people want pretty wallpaper. That's fine, Linux has plenty of room to accomodate both, and more besides.