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I've been as critical of gOS as anybody, maybe even more so. The Ubuntu-derived OS that first ran the $199 Everex desktop offering that sold through Wal-Mart and a few others was a distribution that was far from ready for prime time, as they say.

Chief technology officer Earl Malmrose of the Berkeley, Calif.-based ZaReason and I didn't just talk about the Everex Cloudbook. Also on display were a $299 desktop machine and a few laptops (beginning at $899), all running Ubuntu 7.10, which ZaReason preinstalls and configures for its customers.

The highlight of SCALE 6x for me so far has been meeting Robert Shingledecker, whose Damn Small Linux is one of the best distributions out there for hardware that's seen better days. I won't go into all we talked about, but in the way of news, Robert told me that Damn Small Linux will soo go beyond the 2.4 Linux kernel and put out a release based on 2.6 at some point in the near future.

The "L" in SCALE may stand for Linux, but each of the three major BSD projects has a table at the Southern California Linux Expo. While the FreeBSD booth was giving away PC-BSD CDs (they still have about 500 left, so have at it, people), the OpenBSD booth was selling Version 4.2 CD sets for $45, and the NetBSD people were selling T-shirts for $15. I spent a lot of time talking to Kevin Lahey, a developer for NetBSD who is also a programmer for the Information Sciences Institute under the auspices of the University of Southern California.

I'm filing this from the SCALE 6x "E-Mail Room" in the Los Angeles Westin. They've got a little thin-client network going, with little client boxes from Solar Systems PC running Fluxbox. And since the browser is Iceweasel, I figure it's Debian based.

I got to SCALE 6x today just in time to hear Ubuntu's Jono Bacon deliver the keynote speech to a standing-room-only audience in the theater at the Los Angeles Airport Westin hotel. The room was packed, with people bunched up in the back and along the sides. His talk focused on the importance and purpose of community in the entire open-source world, not just the Ubuntu project. The point was that the community -- from developers all the way down to users -- will make some year (maybe not this year) "the year of the Linux desktop."

Every once in awhile, I write for a, shall we say, less specialized audience. Here's a story about this weekend's Southern California Linux Expo aimed at a more general audience. If all goes as planned, this will run in Saturday's print edition of the Los Angeles Daily News.

So I think I'm "discovering" the NetBSD live CD, but I learn that Distrowatch announced the damn thing in 2006. All I can say is that I'm very, very impressed. It's NetBSD, it boots on my temperamental test box, and not only does it have X, it has a full KDE desktop with tons of applications -- the full KOffice, Konqueror, Firefox, Abiword, K3b, Krita, the GIMP, Inkscape, JuK, XMMS, -- hell, just say it's got a full KDE 3.5.4 setup and then some, and NetBSD autoconfigured for my monitor (with the VESA option) and looks absolutely gorgeous.

Look under /pub/OpenBSD/doc/obsd-faq.pdf and /pub/OpenBSD/doc/obsd-faq.txt on your nearest FTP mirror. The thing's 227 pages long in PDF form. The 998-page FreeBSD Handbook, compressed in its various forms (including PDF, Postscript, text and RTF), can be found under /pub/FreeBSD/doc/handbook from your local FTP mirror. It's especially nice to be told to RTMF when the manual in question is as good as these two. And these are free books.

Why a desktop installation of OpenBSD? It's a legitimate question. According to Distrowatch, among the three main BSD projects (they don't like to be called "distros"), FreeBSD is way out in front -- and is the base for PC-BSD and DesktopBSD -- followed by OpenBSD and NetBSD.

If you gripe about a console-based installer, even those as relatively "easy" as Debian, the alternative disc for Ubuntu or even Slackware, then doing a BSD installation isn't for you. (Actually, it is, because DesktopBSD and PC-BSD, both of which I've also installed, make it much, much easier.)

I've tried OpenBSD before, and I always said I'd try it again. In the interim, I was able to try OpenBSD in a desktop configuration with the OliveBSD live CD, and that made me want to try a hard-drive installation of OpenBSD, which not coincidentally is the only one of the three major BSD projects (which include NetBSD and FreeBSD) to boot on my test machine. As was the case the last time I installed it, OpenBSD went on the box without a hitch. I created a user account, added it to the wheel group, which gave me sudo privileges, and I added the path to an FTP site for the precompiled packages to my .profile file. That enabled me to begin adding applications.

Even though I found very specific instructions for making the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB wireless adapter work with Linux using ndiswrapper, I've pretty much given up. In all cases, I can get the wireless adapter to light up, and I can find a wireless network. I just can't get a DHCP connection started. I don't have enough skill or patience to keep going with it. It's disappointing, but that's the breaks.

We all know that Linux is a kernel, an operating system, maybe even a socio-political movement (it depends on whom you ask), but in a sense, Linux is about people -- those who create, use and promote it. One of those people is Orv Beach, publicity chairman for SCALE 6X -- the Southern California Linux Expo -- being held Feb. 8-10 in Los Angeles.

When my Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card "just worked" with every single Linux distribution I tried, I was happy. When two el-cheapo cards from Airlink 101 didn't work with every single Linux distribution I tried, and still didn't work when I resorted to ndiswrapper and a console, I was unhappy.

The fact that Debian Etch -- a modern, up-to-date Linux distribution -- can run so well in 233 MHz of CPU and 64 MB of RAM is something truly to behold.

I've complained numerous times in the past about the Ted word processor being broken in Debian. On my many Debian installs, I could neither create a new file in Ted nor open an old one. But on my Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop), after doing my big Debian Lenny update yesterday -- which fixed an annoying Nautilus bug by updating to Nautilus 2.20 -- I decided to give Ted another try. It works.

The blogroll at Denny's blog -- Denny being committed to running OpenBSD as a full desktop operating system -- continues to point me toward interesting spins on the various flavors of BSD. Since OpenBSD is the only one of the three major BSD systems (which include NetBSD and FreeBSD) to run on my VIA C3 Samuel-based test box, I wanted to try one of the projects to which Denny linked right away. I've spent quite a bit of time trying to run the three main BSD projects and their various offshoots -- more trying than doing, actually, but I always want to try what's new.

I was pleased to learn that the Los Angeles Daily News' Rick Orlov -- L.A.'s most esteemed City Hall reporter -- recently bought an ASUS Eee-PC, and in his quest to make it run as well as it can, has begun reading this blog. Well, if hundreds of rambling posts about my Linux and BSD highs and lows helps, I'm glad to be of service.

In the past week, I've downloaded, burned and tried out a new version of DesktopBSD, and I also received a comment from Gerard van Essen, creator of the great FreeBSD -- The Unknown Giant blog to tell me about its new URL. Sources of news for the BSD distros are few and far between, and I'm grateful to Gerard for all his work in this area.