1. the pointer to void is a generic pointer, an invention by the ansi comitee to drop the usage of char * as the arbitrary object pointer;
2. a pointer to void may be converted to a pointer to any object of any type and vice-versa. even more, the result of the opposite operation compares equal do the original pointer.

a further reading of the text points the reader in the direction that the conversion is done by simple operations, assignment included, not explicit casts.

so, as many people has been preaching in the internet, casting a pointer to void only grants that the user is demanding the compiler to do something it would do anyway. more than that, casting makes you write more code and, when changing code, makes it easier to produce hard to find bugs (imagine you cast, then you change data types, but not the cast!). so, since i’m more or less an advocate of the suckless philosophy, i’m not casting!

para muitas pessoas o computador não passa de uma caixa negra, muitas vezes branca, crescentemente colorida; software então… isso aumenta ainda mais o meu interesse porque nunca gostei de pertencer à maioria (contemporânea). o meu futuro, como o de muitos outros, não se poderá limitar a trabalhos rotineiros, ou seremos desempregados em prol da índia e da china. espero assim, um dia, marcar a diferença thinking outside the box.

eu adoro o conceito, e sendo fã da asus tenho um certo orgulho que tenha sido o eee aquele que introduziu o vício (pelo menos é o que me pareceu), mas sinceramente, isto não são portáteis para uso normal! já os portáteis normais são uns verdadeiros epic fail em ergonomia, o que dizer dos mesmos em tamanho pequeno…

cada um sabe de si…

to launch with great style, i think a recursive acronym is something that shouldn’t even be discussed. recursive acronyms are extremely cool! not even my teachers [1][2] come up with those, and they pay real attention to project names, as they start with a small sentence that explains the whole project, match all the upper casing combination and choose the one that suits them best. at least that’s what it looks like.

so, at this point, “aingnbsdlalfs” stands for “aingnbsdlalfs is not …”

the second part of the name can be explained by the fact that it not actually that much recently came to many user’s attention that a lot of people are leaving gentoo to cope with archlinux as their default operating system. this graph shows you exactly how many:

now this is where you agree to everything i say because this was the first picture ever embedded in a page on this domain.

i have nothing against that! what i do have something against, though, is for someone to say that archlinux is a distro that is meant to be incredibly fast without having to set compiler flags, some other neat stuff some users don’t want to know about and, the worst of all, having to compile everything from source which, for some people, getting a usable system up and running means days.

gentoo stands for geeks et nerds, too. i have nothing against people who have the time and the machine to deal with software compilation but i, for one, like to need a package and have it running in the following minute, rather than postponing the affairs to the following day just for the sake of speed and whatever they also claim to obtain.

one thing is true: arch is optimized. i believe, though, that arch is optimized in a sense that it won’t run on rottening hardware. no specific actions are taken for arch to run faster than any other distro, and i say that because, as a simple example, peoplw claim having a more responsive less memory using debian i386 system as compared to the i686 arch with roughly the same software (search the forums for more discussions…).

this results in the second part of the name: “aingnbsdlalfs is not gentoo …”.

some other thing a few might have noticed is there have been made some comparisons between freebsd and archlinux. again: wrong. i believe freebsd is a much more solid project (just check the website, that is enough =)) when compared to arch or any other linux distribution out there. they follow much more restrict policies and patterns and, in the end, it’s not even linux, it’s bsd!! there is a similarity in the way the system boots up and in the package management though, once more, you are supposed to compile a lot more than you’d like. there’s just too much physical difference between both.

ends up explaining that “aingnbsdlalfs is not gentoo nor bsd …”.

back in the day when i think i was one of the first archlinux users here at my university, or even the whole country (really long shot =P), and this means halfway its existance (wombat), i had in my mind that i wasn’t a very knowledgeable linux user, and that i’d have to get both my hands and my brain dirty in order to use arch. arch gave me a somewhat solid comprehension of how a system might work, having never fiddled with much more that debian and ubuntu. arch is beautiful in this way because i see it as a finely tinkered lego construction. you have the master setup provided by the arch devs and then they give you small pieces that you can add to it. with the help of the best package manager they tell you which pieces can work together and which can’t, so that you can borrow them, stick them together, but then you have to tell some of them where they are and what they can and should do.

unfortunately, these days, due to a very kind and helpful community, archlinux is no longer about elitism, it’s becoming about popularity. sure that’s good, and sure that’s awfull. it’s good because more people get involved, and more people become aware of its existance. it’s awfull because with those come the people who bring nothing constructive and claim to want to learn more about linux. the thing is this isn’t the way to learn linux. arch is a mesh of “technologies” and ideas with one simple goal in mind: keeping it simple. not noob simple, structure simple, just like i previously explained.

it has been a long time since i heard anyone mention linux from scratch. the first answer to “why lfs” in their site is: “we teach people how linux works”. just like that, there you go, learn linux! and arch is now called “aingnbsdlalfs is not gentoo nor bsd, let alone linux from scratch”

now seriously, and i don’t believe anyone got here, i think that archlinux is great just the way it is, and it is really good that it comes to as much people’s attention as it comes. i would just like arch not to fall in a democracy, because with more naive users the system might start diverging from the kiss philosophy, which i support being the only and true reason to prefer archlinux over any other linux distribution.