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KernelTrap Interviews Andrea Arcangeli 145

Posted by timothy from the not-your-ordinary-attic-dweller dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Andrea Arcangeli completely rewrote the 2.4 Linux kernel virtual memory subsystem several years ago, a surprising event during the evolution of a stable kernel series. A very intelligent 27-year-old from Italy, Andrea spoke with KernelTrap in great detail about the past, present and future of his Linux kernel efforts. An interesting interview ."
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KernelTrap Interviews Andrea Arcangeli More

KernelTrap Interviews Andrea Arcangeli

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  • Excellent (Score:1, Informative)

    by nathanhart ( 754532 )
    Andrea is a 27 year old Linux kernel hacker living in Italy and working for SUSE. Looks like yet another reason to play with it when it comes out

  • Surprise (Score:5, Funny)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:20AM (#9194559) Homepage Journal
    Linux hacker : Age 27 : lives with in parents house.

    Who'd've thunk it, eh?

    • Re:Surprise (Score:5, Funny)

      by nathanhart ( 754532 ) <virusfarm@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:22AM (#9194580) Homepage
      Hey the rents cheap, the foods free and only once or twice a day you have to answer one of their computer questions

      • Re:Surprise (Score:3, Informative)

        by Zerbey ( 15536 ) *
        I think my parents gave up trying to understand what I was doing on the computer within a couple of weeks of me owning one.

        I just got the occasional "Isn't it just amazing what they can do nowadays?" after that...

        Most non-Geek parents are the same, I think.
        • Its never the watching what your doing, its more like asking you to help them figure out what a message means on their computer, and then getting upset when you tell them if you leave your mini-server farm (or as they like to call it, your room) you might forget that all important function your are codeing and most of it is still in your head. Then they have to lay the guilt trip on and your forced to go help them, and wow that was a simple error message, crap now what was I doing again?
        • It could be worse, I have a parent who THINKS he knows alot about computers because he used to program them with punch-cards in College! He tries to understand (and be able to do) everything I do with computers. One thing I don't miss about living with the 'rents is trying to un-do the horible things he did to PCs.
      • If he sues every linux user for using his code he would not have to live with his parents.

      • Re:Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cluckshot ( 658931 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @01:55PM (#9197413)

        It just isn't the same in the USA as the rest of the world. Generally the rest of the world expects kids to stay at home until they marry. The compressed locations of Europe and Asia tend to make this most practical. They also have a real good social order that tends to respect the idea that family is very important.

        The USA grew up with people who had really moved out (to another country) and also with lots of space. As such we tend to view it as a requirement to move out. I think in many ways the Non US way is superior in human terms. It does have its price. The US way has its own advantages.

        • Re:Surprise (Score:3, Interesting)

          by TyrranzzX ( 617713 )
          It's kinda wierd, the old countries like the middle east, it's custom for an entire family to live in the same house generation after generation. I had a teacher who's family lived in a house for 800 years. The boon to that system is that the grandparents and great grandparents get to see their kids and educate them about their childhood every day. Tradition stays and sticks.

          Then in Europe, there's different expectations. Either you move out when you marry or you move out when you have to financially
    • Parents house or parents basement?

    • Re:Surprise (Score:5, Informative)

      by KarmaPolice ( 212543 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:29AM (#9194638) Homepage
      Linux hacker : Age 27 : lives with in parents house.

      Who'd've thunk it, eh?
      Actually, most italian men live with their parents until they get married.

      • Re:Surprise (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I'm Italian and today this is just a "prejudice" :)

      • Re:Surprise (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Actually, most italian men live with their parents until they get married.
        Considering the fact that he spends his life re-writing kernels then I think he's going to be living at home until he's finished re-writing 2.8 as well.

      • Most American men live with their girlfriends until they get married. =)

      • Yeah, same thing in Spain according to most of the spanish people I ever met.

      • Re:Surprise (Score:2, Funny)

        by mpecatam ( 779531 )
        "Actually, most italian men live with their parents until they get married."

        Or even after they get married. The idea is to live in your parents house until you can live in your childrens house.

    • Re:Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CharAznable ( 702598 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:30AM (#9194648)
      In many countries, it's customary to live with your parents until you get married and move away. That's how it is in Costa Rica, where I'm from. I wouldn't be surprised that Italy is the same way, them being so family oriented.

      • Re:Surprise (Score:2, Informative)

        by hackrobat ( 467625 )

        Well, in India, it is customary to live with your parents even after you get married. It has to do with family values, esp. in rural India. In the big cities, it has more to do with the fact that the cost of living by yourself is prohibitively high for most people. Software engineers are an exception. ;)

        • Re:Surprise (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Judging from the code coming out of India, I'm guessing it's customary to marry your parents.

    • >Age 27 : lives with in parents house.

      This is very, very common in Italy. 60 Minutes (I think) did a piece on it a few years ago. Profiled a 40ish executive, single, who lived with the parents. Goes home for lunch, mom does his laundry, etc. This in a guy making serious bucks (well, Lira, anyway). The article pointed out that this is a common way of life until they get married.
  • Very nice to see some recognition for the kernel developers and other Free Software developers.

    To me, they really are some sort of modern day heroes.

    • "Dear linux developers: you won't get any of our money, and you will still live in your parents' basement, but to us, and we say this from our hearts, you are true heroes. For you and your naivete are what turns Gulfstream IVs into Gulfstream Vs, Mercedes into Maybachs, and 'beach view' into 'beach front.'"

      The CEOs of IBM, RedHat, Sony, and every other company on the bandwagon that you are working for for free.


      just because you mark this 'troll' doesn't make it any less true

      • The subject of this interview works for, and is paid by, SUSE - which belongs to Novell: When I started working for SUSE I was still attending University but over time I got more interested about the work I was doing on linux, plus I could make a living thanks to linux while I didn't get any money by studying more years at University ;).

        Your pov is a pretty common misconception: big business profiting from the work of hundreds of thousands of idealistic but naive developpers. The truth of the matter is that big business wants - needs - enterprise features in open source software, and you're going to get there a heck of a lot faster by paying somebody to develop them than you are waiting for some guy to decide that he personally *really needs* to support 32 parallel processors.

        • Bullshit.

          There is SOME inevitable blowback from the commercial world to OSS, but most large companies very carefully isolate the OSS parts to give back as ltitle as possible or make meaningless OSS contributions. Look! Sony's OSS'd some kernel hardware interface that enables communication with an embedded sony controller! if you just build your own chip foundry and reverse engineer sony's chips you can save on software costs!

          Oh lookie! Red Hat open sources everything except the proprietary bits th

          • So. They're within their right too, if it bothers the developers then what are they doing writing under the GPL anyway.

            However, i would say that a large portion of the major developers in the Linux kernel, and by major I mean those contributing large amounts of code, are employed by the 'large companies' either to work on the kernel.

            Haven't you wondered why Linux has picked up so much steam recently? Why not in '95, Linux was almost 5 then? Its the difference between actual volunteers, then those voluntee

  • Amazing considering no education above high school (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drizst 'n drat ( 725458 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:28AM (#9194637)
    Andrea Arcangeli: I've no degree yet, the only piece of paper I have is the high school diploma. I wasn't that bad at school, for instance I surprisingly got 60/60 votation in the diploma and maximal votes at University too for all the software related exams, and I loved studying physics and electronics too (not only computers). It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much. I've seen a lot of this with folks to receive their backgrounds from non-traditional sources such as Computer Learning Center and the like.
    • It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much

      THis amazes you. Lets think about it. Bill Gates doesn't have a formal education. No college diploma and he is the richest man in the world. Look at the show the apprentice. The final two. Formal education vs experience of doing it yourself. THe doing it yourself won with Trump. It's all over the place.
      • Bill Gates already was rich when he was born. He has a "the third" in his name for crying out loud. And considering he dropped out of Harward that's even more of a sign that he had more money than he could spend.

        Once you have a lot of money making more seems to be a lot easier than when you start from scratch.

        But hey, look at the GWB. Even if you are a C student you can become president. Well at least if your daddy is the president.

    • Re:Amazing considering no education above high sch (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much.

      It always amazes me how stupidly ignorant white-boy can seem to be about his fantastic education system and how it seems you can't do 'anything' in the world without a certificate from some organized education front ...

      Please. "Higher Education" is fine and dandy, but it is a luxury that many people, striving hard to survive and live another day, just simply cannot afford.

      Many times, striving hard to educate oneself is si
      • Many times, striving hard to educate oneself is simply far, far superior than "working hard to get educated by someone else"...

        I agree! Unfortunately, the years of hard work and study I put into memorizing every piece of Star Trek minutiae just isn't getting me a job or a chick. Damn!

    • It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much.

      Yeah, mostly high achievers [cnn.com] graduate from Yale and Harvard first and then distinguish themselves by serving their country selflessly before going on to make the world a better, safer place.
    • Yes, and it always amazes me when people with formal education accomplish so little. I've seen a lot of this with folks to receive their backgrounds from traditional sources such as Universities and the like.

    • Higher education yes, degree no (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:47AM (#9194770)
      He has higher education, he just doesn't have the degree. The article indicates that he learned a great deal from his college courses.

      A degree gets you an interview. What you learned gets you the job. AA skipped the interview step ;-)
    • It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much.

      Someone, I forget who, had a great quote on the topic:

      "A degree will get you into an interview, but won't get you through interview. Intellegence may get you through a job, but may not get you a job."
    • "It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much." I'm not as amazed because I've always held the opinion that passion and determination are two of the primary ingredients of success and/or accomplishment.
    • > It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much

      It always amazes me when people who have spent so much time in our horrible education system (and it is pretty bad in all countries) are able to create good software or to think at all. In my experience, good minds stay good in spite of education rather then because of it.
      • Have you even gone to college?

        Part of that process is learning a bunch of stuff that you probably would never learn otherwise because it just didn't seem interesting. Sure, 1% of my class mates may still have learned that because they are just really bright. But the rest of us wouldn't. And while all may not be the best developers in the world they are still very useful and can at the very least earn enough to pay back what it cost to educate them.

        Now if we relied on auto-didacts then only 1% of those peo
    • If you had extended your quote a little bit longer you might have noticed the part were he said that he specifically went to University to learn as much as he could from all of the computer and science classes. So he has a decent amount of formal education. He just didn't feel like jumping through the hoops to get the paper that goes with it.

  • EEK! (Score:5, Funny)

    by NicolaiBSD ( 460297 ) <spam@vand[ ]magt.nl ['ers' in gap]> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:02AM (#9194850) Homepage
    The parallel port was the device I knew best in the PC hardware because for the final exam at high school we developed an autorange (from a few millivolt to thousand of volts) digital oscilloscope (designing both hardware and software) and I was acquiring the data from the 8 bits output of the ADC using the parallel port in nibble mode with a multiplexer with x86 inline assembler in a C++ program.

    If you understand this sentence you know you're a geek.

    • Re:EEK! (Score:5, Informative)

      by KJE ( 640748 ) <ken@kje.ca> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:57AM (#9195297) Homepage
      When I read this all I could think of was that I wish I had gone to his highschool.

      • Mod Parent Up (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sonpal ( 527593 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:22AM (#9195540) Homepage
        Andrea did some cool stuff. How come our high schools don't teach us how to:

        Live off the land

        Modify our cars

        Hack computers

        Understand personal finance

        Write contracts

        Defend ourselves in court

        Defend ourselves physically

        Handle a gun safely

        Think critically

        Change our government for the better

        It seems to me that too much focus is given to understanding the past and not enough to understanding the present. Don't get me wrong, knowing the past is valuable, but I think that if we teach people about the present, people are naturally going to be interested in the past.

        In general, people don't need to know how to calculate the area under a curve. But everyone needs to know how to think critically and not be manipulated.

        • Re:Mod Parent Up (Score:3, Insightful)

          by dylan_- ( 1661 )
          Andrea did some cool stuff. How come our high schools don't teach us how to:
          I suspect the problem is that people expect schools to teach them everything. Most of the useful things I've learned in life weren't learnt in school...
        • Well, if you're talking about American high schools, certain major political forces want you to not have a gun at all, and take whatever propaganda they shove down your throat (DARE comes to mind) at face value.

          I think its also funny that American high schools (at least the ones I've seen) can push all this b.s. on students, requiring them to do this or that, but they don't provide a way for you to register to vote as soon as you're of age. That just doesn't make any sense to me, it seems like EVERYONE sh
        • Personally, I would hope the (American, at least) schools work on teaching math, english, and science properly first.

        • Canadian schools cover all this (Score:4, Interesting)

          by IncohereD ( 513627 ) <mmacleod&ieee,org> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @02:06PM (#9197505) Homepage
          Andrea did some cool stuff. How come our high schools don't teach us how to:
          # Live off the land

          If your high school is in a (sub/)urban area, how useful is this? Or possible?

          # Modify our cars

          My high school had auto courses (my school was in Southern Ontario, Canada)

          # Hack computers

          I took 4 or 5 computer courses in high school. Basic application use, programming in Turing and C++, graphics in 3D Studio, large projects.

          # Understand personal finance

          I believe there were business courses along these lines, I didn't take any, though. I think this was also covered in the general stream of math.

          # Write contracts
          # Defend ourselves in court

          We had grade 12 and 13 law. I'm not sure how much time was given to contracts (I only took half of the grade 12 course), but we even went on a visit to court in both mandatory grade 10 history and optional grade 12 law.

          # Defend ourselves physically

          In grade 9 gym we covered wrestling. The upper gym courses covered more defense.

          # Handle a gun safely

          Not really a big deal in Canada. I know a lot of people who learned this in cadets or the reserves, though.

          # Change our government for the better

          History (Canadian, Ancient, American, 20th Century), Politics, Law...all covered this. Your comment about understanding the past rather than the present is missing the point entirely. But we did always talk about current elections in classes, even in elementary school.

          # Think critically
          In general, people don't need to know how to calculate the area under a curve. But everyone needs to know how to think critically and not be manipulated.

          Doesn't calculating the area under a curve require critical thinking?? Regardless, Calculus wasn't taught till grade 13, and anything past grade 10 math was optional. If you're school taught you anything at all you probably learned to think critically. Didn't you have to write essays? Solve problems? Every single one of our grade 13 classes had an "independent study unit" which we had to do something on our own, requiring critical thinking.

          We even covered media bias in our english classes (I didn't take the full english media class, but we did cover it in the required grade 13 english class). We took stories and advertisements from different newspapers and looked at their political bias. Then we watched some Chomsky videos.

          As far as I can tell most Americans seem to need to move to Canada to actually get their American values.

        • Re:Mod Parent Up (Score:3, Insightful)

          by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )
          Too much about the past, are you kidding me?

          The high school my siblings graduated from only offered one history class, and it was an optional class only available to seniors.

          How is that too much history?

          If anything, schools are not teaching enough anything. They're simply going through the motions of 'education'. You're absolutely right in what schools should be teaching, though.
        • "Handle a gun safely"

          Im assuming you mean *safe for YOU* here..

          "/Dread"
    • At least he was not using the Parallel port in stroke mode.

    • Re:EEK! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lemmeoutada Collecti ( 588075 ) <obereonNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:32AM (#9195622) Homepage Journal
      Using the Paralell port with an ADC is actually fairly easy. You just connect the input to a neutral grounded source to prevent circuit noise, feed the input from the analog waveform source (a calibrated RF generator works nicely) and adjust the capacitance to normalize the digital output. Use the multiplexer to allow more than one input to be sampled, and code the assembly to sample nibbles in a round robin based on the matched timing of the data strobe from the ADC. Using the paralell port results in stepping of the data, as the maximum resolution of the scope is limited by the 8 bits of the port. However, with multiplexing, some of the multiplexed channels can be used to widen the bit count to 16, 24, or 32. I never tried it above 32, as the 8086 I was using was unable to sample fast enough beyond that, even in assembly. Process the port input as a large integer and convert that to a pixel position (and numeric readout if desired) in simple integer to fixed point math.

      The hardest part is eliminating the circuit noise for millivolt readings. In larger waveforms (5v and higher) the noise is mostly drowned, but at the millivolt range, any circuit noise, or any unmatched grounding, causes jitters in the waveform being read. Calibration to the range is essential for any serious reading.

      And for fun, hook an unamplified output from a portable CD player to the scope, and viola, instant waveform display of the sound signal. Great way to relax on a lazy sunday, listen to and watch the music. Of course, this was in the pre winamp days, so it was a Walkman.

      [/Meandering off]
    • > digital oscilloscope (designing both hardware and software)

      Nah, he's a pampered geek. Most of us still use analog. No fancy menus, just turn a knob if you want to change anything.

    • Re:EEK! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Etyenne ( 4915 )
      If you understand this sentence you know you're a geek.

      Perfectly clear. Which part don't you understand ?

      j/k

    • Re:EEK! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by lpontiac ( 173839 )
      If you understand this sentence you know you're a geek.

      If you live in the US. If you live in Italy, it could just mean that you graduated from high school.

  • I think he likes "free as in beer" more then... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "free as in rights" That whole Bitkeeper talk got me thinking that maybe this guy is a little on the cheap side. Doesn't both him its binary, or closed source and would use it if it was freeware. Buddy why don't you take all that money your saviing from living with your parents and buy the damn thing.

    Although, the license to use bitkeeper is really anti-competitive and agree when he said, "if no open source project could ever beat bitkeeper in the long run, Larry wouldn't need this weird licence in the f

  • That Sheila's a he! (Score:5, Funny)

    by RoloDMonkey ( 605266 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:07AM (#9194893) Homepage Journal
    Poor Andrea, now he is going to get slashdotted by a bunch of lonely geeks that didn't RTFA, and think that he is a she.

  • Maybe Andrea would fix PCIPCI DMA for us? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:08AM (#9194902)
    On modern CompactPCI hardware I should be able to DMA between (for instance) SCSI and a DSP array on the PCI bus.

    Currently this isn't possible. For our application we had to make a very nasty hack to our SCSI driver.

    What we would have liked to do would have been something like:

    Get physical address from libpci

    mmap region to user process

    open a rawio device

    read()/write() the rawio device to-from the mmap()'d buffers to effect DMA transfers directly to the PCI device.

    In our case (a streaming media server) we have no need whatsoever to bring the disk buffers into main memory.

    Programmed transfers from main memory to PCI memory are expensive.

  • hm (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:36AM (#9195130)
    after reading that article i feel as though my programming skills are on par with a primate.

    • Re:hm (Score:1)

      by Tukla ( 5899 )
      Umm...is Andrea not a primate?

      I'd better let the furries know about this. We...er, they will all be wanting to yiff him.

  • Why does he want to get trusted computing and DRM hardware running in Linux? I thought that was the kind of thing we were trying to avoid in Linux. Why should we trust M$ and the Trusted Computing Group [trustedcom...ggroup.org]
    • We need to be very, VERY careful with regard to enabling or endorsing any method that involves anoyone other than the primary parties in any transaction - monetary, knowledge, reputation, etc. Look at what an incredible scam Verisign and its co-conspirators made of SSL transactions: SSL has ONE real value: It encrypts an information transaction, making that transacftion private to the parties invovled. Users of SSL want (and need) to know that the information being transferred cannot be read by a third p
  • Is anyone else concerned about the apparent contention over BitKeeper mentioned in the article?
    • Is anyone else concerned about the apparent contention over BitKeeper mentioned in the article?

      Yup. But then, that's a (heated) discussion which has already taken place / is already taking place in plenty of other forums. No need to bring it in here too.

      (As an aside, I use Arch [gnuarch.org]).

  • Andrea likes TCPA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swillden ( 191260 ) * <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:34AM (#9195628) Journal

    I found this bit really interesting (and insightful, actually, more on that below):

    Actually in my spare time I had an idea of one revolutionary and ambitious project I can build on top of the trusted computing capable hardware (that project has nothing to do with linux by the way, but for it to run on linux too, linux would need to provide some basic trusted computing support), that's something I wanted to build for a long time but it has never been feasible until they added the trusted computing to the hardware and they filled the gap to make my idea possible, so I'm quite happy about these new hardware features (despite clearly they can be misused for some annoying things too).

    I bring it up because this is so contrary to the common opinion on /., which is that TCPA is unabashedly evil and has no utility. Andrea is obviously one very smart guy, and a person who feels the need to have complete control over his machine, but who likes TCPA in spite of the risk of misuse. Contradiction?

    The fact is that TCPA *is* an extremely useful and valuable technology for systems that require a high degree of security. It's not clear to me that the average home PC benefits from it, but it's very valuable for cheap, high-performance key management systems and cryptographic accelerators, systems that contain valuable data (like many businessmen's laptops), and systems at critical points in network infrastructure. I'm sure there are other valuable, and non rights-eroding, applications as well.

    In my work as a designer and developer of high-security systems, I'm extremely excited about the fact that we can now buy low-end computing equipment that has TCP hardware. It enables so much. The next step is TCP hardware that is tamper-resistant, or even tamper-reactive, but still cheap. For now, really high-security systems still require something better [ibm.com], but TCPA can fill the niche between systems that require serious security and those that can get by with purely software-based security (or no security, which is fine for the majority of desktops and laptops).

    To be clear, DRM is a bad idea, in general. The business applications (self-destructing documents, confidential documents that cannot be printed) do have potential utility, but I doubt they're worth the complexity they'll create. And Palladium aka NGSCB aka whatever-it's-called-today is an unquestionably evil notion, focused on removing the ability of people to control their own hardware, in an effort to allow a couple of declining business models to prop one another up.

    IMO, what geek activists need to focus on is not killing the development of tools [againsttcpa.com] like TCPA, but rather on legal and social means of ensuring our rights [digitalconsumer.org].

    Tools are not evil. Only users are evil.

    • That is great that you are a fan of TCPA. But its existence could lead to other things down the line.

      Once it is widespread some evil corporation might try to influence the government to mandate that it be present in all computer hardware sold in the USA. While this in itself wouldn't be bad, it is just a hop, skip and a jump from mandating something such as Palladium and full DRM on all computers, since the trusted hardware will already be there!

      If you don't think it could happen just look at recent b

  • My how he has come along in 8 years... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ZombieEngineer ( 738752 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @04:48PM (#9199279)
    A bit of background history for the parport driver. This original started by two guys (Philip Blundell and Tim Waugh) blabbering about treating the parallel port as bus. There was something like ten e-mails for a couple of days while most of the regulars were scratching their heads.

    The parallel port ZIP drive maintainer asked them to provide a function prototype of this thing that they were talking about, of them (Phil/Tim) quickly whipped up a rough 50 line C header file which was turned into a working parport driver + parport enabled ZIP and printer driver (removing the infamous "printer-on-fire" message in the process). There were bugs in the parport driver (it was the first pass but you could print and use the ZIP drive together which was something that previously could not be done) but Phil/Tim/Andrea quickly pounced on the driver and straighten it out. Some of the routines for supporting NatSemi and SMC chipsets are there due to the ZIP drive maintainer not being able to use EPP mode on his Dell desktop.

    When Andrea first appeared on the parallel port scene he was lacking a little confidence (appologising for his poor english which was far better than my italian :-) but once he got his feet wet with kernel hacking there was nothing stopping him.

    Unfortunately I dropped out of the parallel port group around 2000 due to work commitments (linux hacking was one of those phases that I went through).

    I congratulate Andrea on where his life has taken him.

    ZombieEngineer

    Formerly-the-hacker-who-maintained-linux-zip-drive rs.

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