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From what I understand, dosbox emulates the CPU as well. DOSemu should run it at your CPU's speed, but I haven't used it since Linux kernel 2.0.x days. Lately I have thought about getting some of my old DOS games going, but haven't put much effort into it. Though DOSemu seems broken on 2.6--I get "LOWRAM mmap: Invalid argument / Segmentation fault" It could be a permissions problem though...(haven't tried it as root yet) The page says it was last updated in 2007, so maybe it was updated to 2.6?

This post from the Arch Linux forums may help: kernel 2.6.30 upgrade causes dosemu to segfault. It seems dosemu doesn't work with .30 but .31 version from git does work? Looks like they have a configuration suggestion too...

Then again, you may have problems with speed. Quite a while back, I tried Syndicate Wars, and it ran at about 10x speed. Way too fast. I think DOSbox solved that by emulating the CPU, so everything the game sees works like it did on an old computer. Though since it is emulating, it takes many processing cycles to do on emulated processing cycle, which means your 2.0 GHz computer may only be able to run it at say (just a wild guess), the same speed as a 100 MHz machine. Probably not even that. So I don't see a 1996 game working too well.

I would guess the easiest way would be to use an older computer and install FreeDOS or something on it. You know, that 900 MHz one collecting dust in your closet. Then you don't have to worry about emulating crap. ;-) But then you may still run into the super speed issue. This is partly why old computers had a "turbo" switch--some programs assumed the processor was at a specific speed. Some programs assumed the MIPS / clock speed was constant. 486 was below 1 MIPS/MHz, Pentium was about 2 MIPS/MHz, todays CPUs are probably much higher before you even get to the multiple cores. I think some just detect if it is a 486 or pentium and do their calculations. They don't know anything about newer CPUs, so it doesn't work...

I nearly lost my whole filesystem. It's a good thing I had a backup core system on reiserfs to boot from and run fsck. from what I understand, it's a problem with the ext4 journaling system and metadata. this link has info on the journal problem...which may have already been patched in the current kernels. http://lwn.net/Articles/284037/ wiki page for ext4 - bottom has a fix for the problem: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ext4 essentially, mounting and ext4 filesystem with option "data=ordered" helped my system out. since I have enabled this mount option, my filesystem is now stable even after hard reboots or power failures. Hope this helps out people as it did me! -Kamphor

Obviously you don't know jack about Java. It is a compiled language, you know, so the comparison to {shell|Python|Perl|PHP|anything text based and interpreted} is plain wrong.
You have two possibilities: binfmt_misc or wrap a JAR in a shell script

But it is great when you have servers up to your ears.

Slackware is a beautiful server distro, but I used to use it as my primary desktop distro until comparatively recently. The only reason why I stopped was because of a long hiatus in the maintenance of the Dropline Gnome distribution. I just don't have time to build all that stuff myself, and it used to be so good. (And no, Gentoo just does not fill that gap.) Now I am mostly using Arch Linux which is similar in the important ways to Slackware (sweet!) but with the advantage of more current package builds.

I would guess the authors of TFA are trying to get Slashdot to heat their apartments.

Putting Ubuntu on that list was pretty much equivalent to holding their asses to the flames.

Though I have to say, I sort of agree. I have made several attempts at keeping that distro installed on my machines (ditto with Gentoo, but that's a different story), but every time I did so I ended up chucking it out and going back to Slackware, or more recently Arch, which is enough like Slack to be nice to use, but with a really effective and useful package system.

You should both consider using Privoxy. It's web filter proxy that can be as agressive/forgiving as you like.

I got rid of AdBlock a few months ago, I find Privoxy to be a lot more configurable, and since it's a proxy, it works with all my browsers. It might not be for everyone, but I find it very convenient, and firefox loads pages noticably faster now too.

For linux users, there's a quick guide on the Arch Forums on how to set it up for Midori (and actually any browser). It's a little Arch-centric, since Arch uses the BSD init system, and config file arrangement, but it's pretty straight forward, and there are plenty of guides on the official privoxy site too.

Arch has had it since yesterday: http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/openoffice-base/

Don't use Ubuntu if you want to configure things yourself... Try LFS (Linux From Scratch)
Holy shit I hope your not a doctor:
    "That cut is too deep for a band-aid, the only other option is to amputate the limb"
Dude, there are a bunch of other distros out there that allow for far more configuration than Ubuntu while also having nice amenities like an actual package management system. I personally have been using Arch Linux for about a month and I have been able to do a lot of customization that Ubuntu makes difficult without having to search the web for every single library dependency in existence. It's a little irresponsible to dump LFS directly on somebody who is just getting proficient with Ubuntu... in fact, LFS is cute if you want to get the basis for beginning your own distro, but frankly it's a waste of time for most end users since you really don't learn anything more about Linux by fighting incompatible package versions, despite what the ricers say.

Version 9 or 10 or so. I don't remember exactly why I thought, as someone new to Linux, that going with Slackware instead of something else would be a good idea, but the first thing I did was try to get it set up. And the second, and the third, and so on. Eventually I managed to get a nice little GNOME desktop running, and learned a fair bit along the way. Including that managing software under Linux without a proper package management system can be kind of annoying, and having up-to-date software is nice on a desktop, so I went on to other distros for various periods of time, including Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian again, and even a brief stint with FreeBSD somewhere along the way. Currently using Arch, and have been for the past couple of years.

I'm not sure what that's got to do with Linux. I'm quite certain that the majority of Linux users pick something other than that unspeakably vile baby-poo brown Gnome theme Ubuntu is so fond of. I know I do. So yes, Ubuntu is fugly by default, but Linux has far too many user environments for any comparison to be meaningful.

Incidentally, my own machines are a MacBook laptop and an Arch Linux desktop machine. The latter has by far the more attractive desktop and UI appearance.

For Wine on x86_64 you could get it pre-compiled from an unofficial repository (browse them manually to find one you like the best). They also have useful things like Flash and the closed VirtualBox.

There is not much you can do about the lack of polish though (not that it's missing much anyway), other than hacking it yourself or putting up with it. But the advantages of rolling updates and PKGBUILDs and the BSD style init thing make it worth it.

I was close to dumping Ubuntu personally.

Then you're probably luckier than me.

I've been using Linux since the mid '90s, mostly on Slackware (with occasional forays into LFS, Mandrake, Redhat and Gentoo) and occasionally install Ubuntu just to see where it's heading.

Slackware's falling behind a bit as far as the desktop experience is concerned (sorry Pat, I know it's not your fault), but fortunately Arch Linux is similar enough and current enough to fill the void.

But I digress. Ubuntu is probably (in fact certainly) great for newbies, but for those of us with some experience with Linux, some of the developers' more capricious antics can be a bit frustrating. Case in point: why should we have to hunt around to find whatever file has replaced /etc/inittab ?

Until quite recently, I've been setting up Slackware on workplace machines, not because I have any ideological bias against any other distro, but because it is very quick and easy to get a productive and useful platform with Dropline Gnome. I have never had any complaints that it is too hard for non-techies to use, though I don't expect any of these users to do any command-line activity to maintain these systems.

Since it now appears that maintenance of the Dropline Gnome distribution is being happening very slowly, I now use Arch Linux, which has all of Slackware's advantages but with a less conservative focus. This works perfectly for me, but it'll be a couple of months yet before I start rolling out disk images for the users.

I did eventually get my Linux to connect to the ISP, but the compression engine/accelerator refuses to run, which makes everything extremely slow (50k versus ~500k).

Toonel.net seems to be a cross-platform web accelerator. May be worth a try.

Another problem happened when I changed my resolution to 1024x800 - when I tried to change it back to 1280x1024 the dialog box was too big, and I couldn't access the OK button since it was offscreen. I'm still stuck at the wrong resolution.

This is different in different window managers, but there is usually a key you can hold down to move windows more easily. Try holding down alt, grabbing the window near the bottom and dragging it until the button is visible.

Or just change it from the terminal, by typing: xrandr --mode 1024x800

(With Windows pressing the enter button auto-selects OK, but not with Linux.)

This derives from IBM's Common User Access standard. GNOME's interface guidelines (which should apply to the Ubuntu program you're running) also mention this, but don't explicitly stress always setting the OK button as default. So it's probably a bug.

So I think I'm going to use the WinXP Restore CD to wipe Linux off my laptop. From what I can see, XP and Mac OS are both more user-friendly than Ubuntu.

Yes, this is the problem with trying to build a copy of the Windows GUI: the small differences put people off. But if you want to assemble a more customized environment out of different components, Linux can be much nicer environment.

I just switched from a Mac to a system running Arch Linux with Window Maker as the window manager (no GNOME or KDE). It's a bit fiddlier to set up than the Mac, but much cleaner and lighter.

Don't know if this helps, but I use qemu-kvm under fedora. With qemu you can install XP or whatever base system you want to an image, then I generate an overaly file associated to the disk image. This means that all future changes to the disk image are stored in an external file. So if I think I have a virus or want to reset the system all I do is delete the changes disk image and I am back to a clean install of xp. This page details how to do it. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Qemu Also, I would use kvm part of qemu if you chip can do it (new pentiums can), it means that you are not doing emulation but running the OS as a native OS.

One of the main reasons the idea of a netbook has been ruined for me is the boot time.

I really don't get this mentality. My first gen Asus 701 took all of 30 seconds to fully boot. I've since put UbuntuEee on it an it now takes about 40 seconds. IS your life that full that you just can't wait less than a minute?

Netbooks aren't meant to be whipped out for quick searches. They're meant to be an ultra portable that surfs, does email, word processing and other work. Pretty much what you would use a back breaking laptop for.

I agree with you, most gnu/linux netbooks boot pretty fast (fast enough for quick searches for me anyway). My Samsung NC10 boots in 17 seconds with Arch, and that's with the stock kernel (grub to X using bootchart, ~22 including bios).

After ditching the stock xandros that came on my eeepc 700 2G, i tried ubuntu-eee netbook remix (now easy peasy) but performance was not great. I tried eeebuntu-base which was a lot better and includes one-click scripts for you to run at anytime to get the configuration and performance just right for your model. but for what i use my little laptop for (local or remote development) i realized that a command-line was really all i needed so now have arch linux installed with toofishes' custom kernel for the eee and no GUI (for now). It boots fast, only has what i need and pretty easy to update with pacman (rolling distro). Its pretty awesome. The Arch Linux wiki entry for installing on an eee has some great general purpose advice http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installing_Arch_Linux_on_the_Asus_EEE_PC#Avoiding_Pitfalls

http://www.archlinux.org/

Download the the latest ISO/USB image (USB image would be preferable unless you have an external optical drive)

Links to mirrors / the torrent (pick i686)
http://www.archlinux.org/download/

I use it with my Acer Aspire One, and all the drivers are working nicely

http://www.archlinux.org/

Download the the latest ISO/USB image (USB image would be preferable unless you have an external optical drive)

Links to mirrors / the torrent (pick i686)
http://www.archlinux.org/download/

I use it with my Acer Aspire One, and all the drivers are working nicely

It doesn't make sense for Mozilla to profile their linux binaries when most users install from packages. The fact that most linux distros aren't shipping optimized builds is no big secret either. The original tests would only make sense if they were comparing like with like.

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=22919

Gentoo is actually a distro I recommend sometimes to people who are interested in installing Linux on their computer for the first time, and it's not because I'm some MS shrill who is trying to scare people away from Linux. ;-)

But if you have someone who has used Linux on someone else's computer or a school computer or something so that they are not scared of the command line and are have become pretty sure this is something that they'll actually be using rather than just installing because they want to try it and think they might like it, and they are willing to put in a little bit of effort, Gentoo is a really good choice. (That's a lot of 'if's, but Gentoo isn't exactly your typical newbie distro.)

I'm a big Gentoo fan (well, to the extent I'm a fan of any OS, which is not very much), because I think it is a solid distribution, but the main selling point for someone who can and is willing to deal with it is that in my experience, the documentation has just been outstanding. It's been a bit since I have really done any adminning of my own Linux box so this may be out of date, but I would do searches for Linux problems without specifying I was running Gentoo, and it seemed that half the time I would hit something on the Gentoo site anyway.

I won't diss Gentoo, but I prefer Arch. Don't flame me, I know what I am going to say is wrong, but I think of Arch as a binary Gentoo. It's fast, lean, bleeding edge, and on a rolling release like Gentoo, but without all time waiting for it to compile. I tried Gentoo for a while, but I got tired of the compile time, and I find Arch more user friendly since so much can be controlled with a few config files in etc, and they have a really nice source repo (AUR) with compile/installer scripts.

Gentoo is actually a distro I recommend sometimes to people who are interested in installing Linux on their computer for the first time, and it's not because I'm some MS shrill who is trying to scare people away from Linux. ;-)

But if you have someone who has used Linux on someone else's computer or a school computer or something so that they are not scared of the command line and are have become pretty sure this is something that they'll actually be using rather than just installing because they want to try it and think they might like it, and they are willing to put in a little bit of effort, Gentoo is a really good choice. (That's a lot of 'if's, but Gentoo isn't exactly your typical newbie distro.)

I'm a big Gentoo fan (well, to the extent I'm a fan of any OS, which is not very much), because I think it is a solid distribution, but the main selling point for someone who can and is willing to deal with it is that in my experience, the documentation has just been outstanding. It's been a bit since I have really done any adminning of my own Linux box so this may be out of date, but I would do searches for Linux problems without specifying I was running Gentoo, and it seemed that half the time I would hit something on the Gentoo site anyway.

I won't diss Gentoo, but I prefer Arch. Don't flame me, I know what I am going to say is wrong, but I think of Arch as a binary Gentoo. It's fast, lean, bleeding edge, and on a rolling release like Gentoo, but without all time waiting for it to compile. I tried Gentoo for a while, but I got tired of the compile time, and I find Arch more user friendly since so much can be controlled with a few config files in etc, and they have a really nice source repo (AUR) with compile/installer scripts.

Or Arch Linux... Its Pacman package manager is pretty damn good (and handles both binary and source packages)...

I was in the same position as you, only recently found about VirtualBox, and have converted all my VMware images using the instructions here (which are distro-agnostic): http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VirtualBox#Converting_from_VMware_images .

Good luck! :)

That's always the problem, isn't it? Slow adopters, I mean.

You're right about that. But let's not forget ALSA has OSS compatibility which is pretty dang good, but not 100%. Pulse also has ESD and ALSA compatibility. The combination will cover the vast majority of your audio needs.

Over the next year or so, compatibility should further improve as pulse becomes even more entrenched.

I forget, did the Flash plugin ever move on to ALSA? I assume they haven't even thought about moving to Pulseaudio yet..

Check it out, Adobe made the change when they pushed for version 10 parity on linux of the flash plugin. It already supports pulseaudio. They now support 64-bit Linux with Pulseaudio, so they're way ahead of ya.

If you want (in my opinion), the best, certainly one of the most configurable, KDE 4.x experience out there, try KDEmod. Currently it's at version 4.1.3, and includes some backports from the 4.2 branch as well (finally, panel auto-hiding for example). Even better, it runs on a very flexible and fast distribution, that's either i686 or x86-64 optimized, has a really fast package manager, uses precompiled packages by default but makes compiling packages with custom options very trivial and is as light (or heavy) as you want it to be. Granted, it doesn't offer as much hand holding for newcomers as Ubuntu or Fedora, but the community documentation is generally very good. Check out the wiki - if the installation instructions don't seem too intimidating I suggest you give it a go. Once you have a base Arch system up and running, installing KDEmod very easy.

Want a sleek and fast linux ? Slackware's the answer.

You sound like a recent convert. :-D

I've been a huge fan of Slackware ever since it was Soft Landing Systems, but since my preferred GUI is Gnome rather than KDE, I fairly recently got tired of waiting for updates to the excellent Dropline Gnome distribution for Slackware while it looked as if it was going nowhere, and tried out Arch Linux, and I haven't looked back.

It's optimised for 686 architectures, the package manager, like Slackware's, is nice and simple, but with much more powerful features for retrieving packages plus dependencies online and on-the-fly. And best of all, it has nice BSD-like init scripts with which any Slackware user will feel comfortable. It's less intuitive for the newbie to install than Slack, since there's a certain amount of manual editing of config scripts required, but neither is really designed for the newbie in any case...

The chipset in question is a bitch. You need to patch madwifi for it to work or use the new HAL branch (which hopefully will be merged to trunk soon), instructions here. You also have to make sure (with recent kernels) that the ath5k module is blacklisted. The process is much easier if you use a distribution that makes building custom packages easy. Although little blame lays on the distributions (the desktop oriented ones, at least) for not including the driver out of the box - the patch has been available for quite some time, although it is x86 only. But once you get past the hurdles, the chipset works fine, at least with WPA-PSK.

The average consumer shouldn't have to go through those steps; luckily with many wireless chipsets the drivers work out of the box, so IMHO hardware support in Linux is almost, but not entirely, there. Pleasant surprises exist though. For example, I've yet to meet a DVB (digital TV for us Europeans) tuner that would need external drivers apart from downloading a firmware file - most that I've tried haven't even required the firmware. The drivers in Windows for said tuners seem to be really flakey with much worse signal quality, some cannot record multiple channels simultaneously (although the hardware would allow this), not to mention the awful bundled software. Kaffeine is really good for simple viewing, and MythTV (once you get it installed, which can be a chore) is nothing short of amazing.

Ubuntu isn't really suited for low end machines anymore, IMO. Has to be at least 2ghz, with at least 512mb RAM.. Anything lower and it's going to be pretty slow.

I'm sure some people here are going to be comparing Ubuntu to Vista in regards of getting slower with release, but because it's Linux we have a few more choices.

They make distros that are meant to be lightweight- Anyone with a machine that's a little old, I urge you to try one of them. You'll be pleasantly surprised and maybe find a new favorite window manager/desktop environment in the process. Before you start talking about how joe sixpack doesn't want to try another distro or learn anything about Linux- I'm not talking to Joe sixpack here, I'm talking to you, a slashdot lurker.

Try one of these distros and be amazed at how fast everything is:

Crunchbang Linux

KMandla's GTK 1.5 Remix

Or, if you want to be more adventurous, get Arch Linux and grab a window manager like Openbox or PekWM. If you go that route, take a look at this Openbox guide that'll show you a nice panel to use, file navigator, and generally hold your hand through the process, here. But if you want your hand held even more, someone packaged a panel and file navigator and theme chooser and stuff like that together with Openbox already- Called LXDE. You can just grab that too, should be in any repository.

I do think it's unfortunate for joe sixpack that it's getting a little slower- But for them it's still faster than Vista and XP, right?

You know what they should make? They compile pretty much everything in the kernel as a module, and then they probe hardware and load the right modules each time you boot... It would be cool to be able to do a "Speed up my computer" boot where it loads the modules, and then compiles a kernel with the modules for the hardware it finds compiled into it. Disable things that it hasn't seen their computer use, etc., and then just still probe the hardware to fall back on another kernel if things have changed.

OR, how about loading modules when you actually need them..? And this goes for daemons, too. When you go to listen to something, and it returns that there's no module loaded for sound, how about loading the module then, and then starting the alsa daemon. Have you ever looked at the daemon list for Ubuntu? It's huge. I know I don't need all of those- I know because on the distro I'm on now I only run 3 daemons on boot, and everything works fine.

I don't know. Maybe that's not the solution. But those guys are clever, I'm sure they can come up with something to get rid of the extra daemons and modules running without sacrificing usability. Anyone here have any good ideas..?

Most Linux users prefer to upgrade software using the channels for their distrobution.[sic]

That's one of the advantages of "rolling-release" distributions.

My currently preferred distro, Arch Linux has kept up with the OOo3 betas, and had the final version up and ready to load as soon as it was released.

CMYK support for the GIMP - Why you might not need CMYK support in the GIMP.

If someone knows enough to know that they need CMYK support, chances are they need CMYK support.

What disease is this that has people writing dirty great long articles about how a feature is unnecessary, not particularly useful and indeed sometimes dangerous when really what they mean is "My pet product doesn't support it and I'm ashamed to admit that - so instead of admitting it I'll try and tell anyone who will listen that the feature is a bad idea in the first place!"?

The people who write these articles invariably try and sound entirely authoritative, almost always talk down to their audience and are completely unaware of how damn stupid they sound when it is widely known that a rival product supports it without significant issue.

CMYK support for the GIMP - Why you might not need CMYK support in the GIMP.

Separate+ CMYK separations plugin for GIMP -- And if you really need it, get this. Very nice. Supports ICC color profiles.

I don't see it anywhere in the release notes, though the potential for CMYK support was one of the reasons for the move to GEGL.

There is a plugin called seperate+, though I'm not sure if that still works properly with the new version.

There's also a potentially useful article on this on the Arch Linux wiki.

I am a good citizen, I submitted the patch in the Arch Linux bug database, you can find it at:

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10483

Odd place to ask but look at Arch or Vector those distros are pretty, lightweight, and modern. http://www.archlinux.org/ http://vectorlinux.com/ And in my experience a fresh carefully done fresh XP install will feel pretty quick. But once I have used it for a bit it always slows down.

Just as an FYI, Mepis is now debian driven. In fact, it uses the Debian stable repositories except for a repository that has backported packages and other custom stuff. The only reason I have moved away from it, is the oldness of stable.

If you're looking for something more bleeding age I would suggest checking out arch. You'll have to do a little work to get it up to the usability that OpenSUSE is because it makes you build your own system. On the plus side though, it's a rolling release (so you don't have to reinstall it again) and it's comparatively fast since you choose what daemons to run.

This problem has been a huge annoyance, but there is a way around in Arch Linux, there should be similar solutions for other distro's.

For the Arch Linux workaround, nspluginwrapper is used to get around the limitation with a whole bunch of 32bit libs. The full details are on the Arch Linux Wiki.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_Flash_on_Arch64

cheers,

You ought to take a look at Arch Linux which have released their binary packages for KDE4 (They've been in testing previously).

screen is possibly the most underrated GNU tool ever. I could never do without it, but I'm amazed by how many "seasoned" sys admins don't use it. You can learn to use screen in a day -- Ctrl-A and ? will help. I change this keyboard binding with the "escape" command, since I'm a bash user.

Start your screen sessions from the console when you boot the box, then attach to it under X and remotely over Ssh.

Unfortunately screen does not solve the problem of persisting X-windows applications, and if you use an server over Wifi, this can be a real problem. Try xmove, though it doesn't cope well with loss of connectivity. There's a little tutorial here.

There is a commercial app called Recon-X, which I haven't had a chance to try and would like to know of any FOSS alternatives. Check the product page here.

findutils is part of the base even in Arch: http://www.archlinux.org/packages/13285/

I"m planning on putting FC9 on a machine, FC9 has Pulse Audio http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview, I'm not certain about it on a 64bit machine. I've gotten Adobe Flash to work on my Arch Linux machine using Nspluginwrapper. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_Flash_on_Arch64 The Arch Linux Wiki says there might be trouble with Pulse Audio and Flash. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio Anybody try Adobe Flash+Nspluginwrapper+x86_64+PulseAudio? How'd it go?

I"m planning on putting FC9 on a machine, FC9 has Pulse Audio http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview, I'm not certain about it on a 64bit machine. I've gotten Adobe Flash to work on my Arch Linux machine using Nspluginwrapper. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_Flash_on_Arch64 The Arch Linux Wiki says there might be trouble with Pulse Audio and Flash. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio Anybody try Adobe Flash+Nspluginwrapper+x86_64+PulseAudio? How'd it go?

I've been reading up a lot on flash drive technology recently, and it's seems that Xandros on the eee has been tuned somewhat to run well on flash (unionfs, run mostly in RAM, etc) to ensure that not to many writes are made to the flash drive. Generally most flash today is NAND based and has 100K write/erase cycles - some embedded-quality industrial flash drives have better ECC, wear levelling and bad block management to go somewhat higher (but you then pay more for the CF or SD card) - so it's important to do this to extend flash drive's lifetime. However the trend is for low-end flash to use MLCs (>1 bit per cell, vs SLCs which have 1 bit per cell) - drives using MLCs typically have even lower flash lifetime (10K write cycles), and the flash drive manufacturers are usually vague on this, particularly the cheaper ones.

The write cycles are across each individual erase block (something like 32 to 128 Kbyte), not per sector/page. Bad block management is critical to 'wear levelling' - as one erase block gets worn out (flagged by ECC) the data is moved across to a new erase block. As long as there are enough good erase blocks and you aren't doing a lot of writes to every part of the drive, there should be enough good blocks around to substitute for bad blocks. There's also work to ensure that if power is lost while multiple pages are written to an erase block, the drive can detect which were written OK - it then reads these and writes them to a new erase block, marking the old erase block as bad. The flash drive has a software Flash Translation Layer (FTL) that hides all this complexity, and the better vendors put more effort into good FTLs.

So... Some care is needed to install another Linux distro, or standard XP, onto the eee - not to get it installed, but to avoid wearing out the eee's flash drives too quickly. There are various flash-optimised Linux distros including Damn Small Linux (DSL, http://damnsmalllinux.org/ Puppy, SLAX, Debian Live (http://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/), etc, which manage to write infrequently to flash by running from a RAM disk (with no swap on flash, or at least reduced 'swappiness' parameter) and using unionfs or aufs to map a RAM drive 'over' the flash drive, allowing writes to be delayed until much later, and thereby minimising number of flash writes. DSL writes only when you shut down, or on demand, and Puppy writes every 30 minutes or so. Generally, Live CD distros are quite easily adapted to run well with flash, whereas hard disk distros do not run well on flash.

Ubuntu for eee looks very nice if you like Ubuntu, but doesn't do any flash optimisation that I could see from its wiki (apart from recommending use of noatime in fstab which is quite basic) - perhaps someone has done this as an add-on though. XP embedded apparently has some tweaks to do the same thing as Linux, but you need to be quite a techie to find and apply the flash optimisations, compared to simply installing Damn Small Linux which is already flash optimised.

There seems to be a lot of confusion on this - a good summary of this from eee perspective is http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=297632. However, some people actually advocate removing unionfs from the eee Xandros setup in order to gain some flexibility, without even mentioning the issue of increased flash wear - see http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:removeunionfs which also suggests use of ext3 which will further increase flash writes (default is to write to log every 5 seconds typically). This is a really bad idea... I would really suggest reading up on this before changing the default setup, which uses unionfs in a similar way to DSL and Puppy Linux to minimise flash writes.

Does anyone know a major distro that runs on the eee and is already flash optimised to minimise writes?

i use flash and youtube on my 64bit install of archlinux. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_Flash_on_Arch64

Skype seems to work for me OK, at least in echo test I'm using KDE on Arch linux basicly all I did was
install per Skype's instructions,
install one missing library,
make an echo call - didn't work
adjust mic levels in kmixer - didn't work
adjust input levels in kmixers - didn't work
un-mute microphone and input lines- woooohh that worked;
muted un-necessary mics and line and adjusted to sane levels.

Yet another reason I prefer to use a distro that doesn't use a scheduled release cycle, and doesn't need to. Or this for those of you with more free time on your hands than is strictly healthy :P

You're supposed to configure the ALSA plugin for PulseAudio so that ALSA apps get PulseAudio automagically:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio

PulseAudio is designed to fit into your audio stack all over the place. Since they'd never get any adoption if everything had to be recoded, they took the smart route and added input/output plugins and emulation systems for every system that exists already.

It's a smart move. Once developers realize that PulsaAudio is on *every* modern system, apps will start being coded against the PulseAudio stack instead of using /dev/dsp, ALSA, ESD or some other option.