How do you feel about X [windows] ? Would it be feasable to mimick some of the better attributes of the OS X GUI with GNUStep or perhaps a BSD liscensed implementation?
Well, I certainly have been using the X window system for a long time and have written a fair amount of software for it; For what it does, it rocks but for what it doesn't do, it really sucks. Don't even talk to me about font handling or printing. I think that before you're going to see X really get some decent applications, you're going to have to finish the missing 5% of X -- the part that was scheduled to take 90% of the time and so nobody got around to it. Plus, the whole UI war thing needs to end -- Adobe is never going to port photoshop while nobody can answer "Which GUI environment is dominant and therefore recommended for use?". I think X will probably remain the DOS of window systems.
When will sendmail be replaced by a more reliable MTA such as postfix?
I don't think it will ever be _replaced_ but I fully expect the MTA to be an option in future FreeBSD releases. We've talked about it for quite a long time, so you can consider sendmail, postfix or even possibly (gak) qmail to soon be selectable options.
Recently, a Brazilian FreeBSD user group had posted a set of tools to make "live versions of freebsd" - FreeBSD ready to run on CDs - very easy to customize, etc. The tool set really works, and it seems as a good alternative to PicoBSD. Anyone considering it on the FreeBSD source tree like PicoBSD is today?
Well, first off, it's not really an alternative to PicoBSD. PicoBSD can be embedded in very small (deliberately small) configurations, like flash cards or 1.44MB floppy disks. This Brazilian effort uses some of the same technology but is more of a "demo CD" feature. Other OSes, like Yggdrasil Linux, have had that going for years, so it's not exactly a new thing, but I still think it's cool.
There seems to be a lot of new I/O implementations at all levels on the way (3gio, hypertransport, serial ATA), are any of them definitive and close enough to start work on within FreeBSD? Is FreeBSD ever consulted about these types of proposals for standards?
I would say that of those, only serial ATA is really close. We have people already looking into it, although we don't exactly get consulted about this kind of thing in advance.
When will we get Blowfish, AES, or whatever for user password encryption? Are export restrictions the problem?
I believe that's already supported now. I see AES and blowfish support in libcrypto, although I'm not sure how one sets ones default password format to use them.
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