I’m going to be short and sweet on this. The last time I checked, Sabayon made you run ~arch, upgrading would break your system, and it was all about bleeding edge gui’s. Sabayon is good for the last. But stay away from it if you want or need stability, or gentoo upgrades.

Today fsdaily posted an forum threadasking why they should use linux but not using certain reasons. However, some of the reasons they said can’t be used are part of the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of a computer.What is TCO? Here’s some of what Wikipediasays about it.A TCO assessment ideally offers a final statement reflecting not only the cost of purchase but all aspects in the further use and maintenance of the equipment, device, or system considered.

(note: this was originally intended as a reply to Why Is So Hard for Windows Users to Understand That Linux Is Not Windows, but it got so long I felt it should be it’s own post. I’m not sure the title is good, but it’s close enough)(note: I use the term users in this blog to mean people who use computers that do not, develop, administrate, repair, or are other wise considered power users, and professional computer users.

The Best guide for learning the basics of iptables is here Linux 2.4 Stateful firewall design for the most part it continues to apply to the 2.6 kernel. The only things that won’t apply to your linux system will be: emerge if you aren’t on gentoo, and the kernel options which have changed since 2.4 and even a couple of times during 2.6. I’m not going to cover those here. If you need help building your kernel or installing iptables I suggest that you consult with either the iptables home page or even better your distribution.

if you are using the cfq io scheduler in linux you can use ionice to nice your io. so to really nice something you would do nice -n 19 ionice -c 3 programname. This may not be the best idea on all programs but it works. If a program is beating your hd and cpu and you don’t want it to run this when starting it.

I’m starting a blog for my thoughts on forking Gentoo Linux here–This workby Caleb Cushingis licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

also see the selinux home/news page http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/news.cfm–This workby Caleb Cushingis licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Found this Unix Toolboxon Diggtoday. Most complete list of commands for Linux/BSD/UNIX that I’ve ever seen. I could only think of one missing off the top of my head. ionice.–This workby Caleb Cushingis licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I’m not going to mention things that are beyond the control of open source such as drivers and multimedia. These things are the fault of the corporations that control them.The first thing I think these systems need is a unified password manager. Instead both gnome and kde have there own password storage system and so do a million other apps. I think OpenBSD should lead the pack on this one given there reputation for security.