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Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line"

Neal Stephenson, the author of "Snow Crash", and "Cryptonomicon", wrote the following long, but very interesting essay, discussing (amongst many incidentals) how he had been converted from MacOS to Linux, and why he believes that CLIs are the way ahead for the serious computer user.

I recommend you download it for reading offline- it's some 37000 words long.


VMware

A powerful virtual machine allowing you to run Windows NT, 9x or whatever under Linux (or even Linux under NT *boggle*). Seems very reliable and copes admirably with desktop applications- see the following page for some screenshots and a link to the home page.

SSH Clients

Win32


BeOS


XPilot

Xpilot: Launch

This is a simple menu which lists all the current games, the players on each, and ping times for the servers, then lets you pick a game to play and starts xpilot for you. Uses Matt Kern's metapilot script (included in the tarball).

Be warned, the current version hasn't been designed to install neatly- you may need to edit a few paths in the Perl scripts to get it work for you. You will also need a copy of fping to get the ping times.

Ship Shape Editor (editss) for xpilot

The following file contains the source and binary for editss (the binary is called edss, just run it to start the editor). Binary compiled for Linux 2.2.1 under Debian Slink (may work under Red Hat).

Xpilot Links


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Last modified: Sun Apr 23 03:37:47 BST 2000