Over the years, several Be UserGroups, or BUGs, have popped up of which some are still alive and are perhaps even stronger than ever, some have disappeared, and a couple of others just more or less went into a coma, and in some cases are getting a wakeup call again. Curiously enough, most of the existing usergroups have no clue of what the other usergroups are up to. And that's a bugger. Time to do something about that and do a series of articles about some of the BUGs out there. Starting off with Italy (click on read more below) Italy

ITBug is a very active community with currently about 135 members. The "spinal system" of this usergroup is the mailing list, which is extremely active: it has a few thousand replies each month. ITBug is quite a new usergroup but has become so well-organised by now that it for example holds exhibitions. These exhibitions are also very focused on people not yet familiar with BeOS.

But ITBug reaches out to BeOS newbies not only by exhibitions. This month, for example, an introducing article has appeared in Hacker Journal, a renowned Italian hacker magazine. The article features the history of Be, from philosophy to demise, the takeover by Palm and the current state of BeOS and its predecessors. Additionally, they have already released the second edition of their freely available BEYOND magazine, the English translation of this edition appearing in the course of next week. (although there is a shout for more Italian-to-English translators).

Actually it's quite interesting reading through the magazine some time. The magazine doesn't focus on BeOS alone, but writes about a few other alternative operating systems as well. Topics vary from news and games to heavier subjects like a comparison of the BeOS and OSX file system and a series of articles about programming in the Rebol programming language. The second edition of this magazine also features an exclusive interview with Scot Hacker, acclaimed author of the BeOS Bible and founder of BeTips.

ITBug has even more in mind for the nearby future. IsComputerOn will keep you posted on this.