Are you on old school Amiga user who gave up that most brilliant of operating systems for no other reason than it seemed during the middle to late 1990's as the platform was dead in the water and going nowhere fast after company after company bought, collapsed then sold the Amiga brand on? Have you longed for those days when innovation truly was innovation and the Amiga range of personal computers rose high above the competition in both sales and usability? If your answer to any and all of the above is yes then you have no doubt tried AROS.

The Amiga was one of the most powerful PC's of it's time, easily trumping the emerging IBM PC's in the 80's. You can relive this classic PC on your Linux desktop thanks to a number of emulators that are available.

During my article on Amiga emulation on the Linux platform I had deliberately neglected to mention AmiKit as there appeared to be only MS Windows based executable installers and zip archives on the AmiKit web site.

After the article went live, Mike kindly informed us there was indeed a Linux friendly archive of AmiKit.

Spotted at Amiga's Pepcom booth, the GP2X handheld, from Korea's Gamepark holdings, made for a whiplash double-take: the best computer of the 1980s emulated on a portable? Alas, no, but it was nice to see this thing in the flesh, after it being out for ages but all-too-rare on these shores.

Mark Shuttleworth made headlines not too long ago when he called for the Linux desktop to surpass Mac OS X in both beauty and functionality. While a lot of folks thought that was breathtaking and audacious, I think he's aiming too low. I think Linux should aspire to equal or better the AmigaOS.

If you yearn for the operating systems or arcade games of the past, and are willing to make the effort to bring them back to life, free and open source software is definitely the way to go. Green screens and might-have beens, operating systems and games, BeOS, Amiga OS or DOS can be relived and replayed through a host of emulators, simulators or rewrites in varying stages of completion.

Nokia researcher Jamey Hicks recently proposed a Open Source Hardware License (OSHL) for approval by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Is there a need for a hardware-specific license? If so, what makes hardware different from software?

Remember Amiga? Well, if you're old enough to remember that platform, then you might remember the Pagestream desktop publishing system. Pagestream began in 1986 as Publishing Partner for the Atari Computers.

Who's left standing at the altar?