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After the tests, representatives of Fedora, Linspire and Novell told me that Sony Vaios are known to have compatibility problems with Linux.

The Linux systems could make sense for users who just want to send and receive email and surf the Web without the need for multimedia programs, or to perform home-office tasks without a lot of interaction with Microsoft systems.

Claims by some Linux publishers that anybody can easily switch to Linux from Windows seem totally oversold.

http://www.exploits.org/v4l/

scroll down, webcam stuff good luck!

Think there's any chance we'll ever see a ppc port of this distro? Once upon a time, there was an unofficial project, and slackware.org for a while had an announcement up that an official ppc distro was in the works, but that was long ago...

You can put together a home video security system on the cheap if you can hang a webcam somewhere usefull. I'm running Suse 9.1 on a Celeron 433 with a measley 128MB of ram and a software called motion that does motion detection and can save video or individual images to disk (or off-site) when it does.

When I travel I have the webcam pointed at the enterance and setup to ftp any captured frames to another server. When I'm home I put the software in streaming mode, point the webcam out the window and broadcast my view:

http://astroturtle.dyndns.org/

This won't prevent your mom's car getting broken into but I'll give you some ammo to hand over to the cops!

More linux video resorces here: http://www.exploits.org/v4l/

Good luck,
--
Luis Esteves
http://www.astroturtle.com

If anyone is interested in taking this project, I would love to help. I don't have the webspace, but I'm willing to do the porting, and get Slack 10 into PPC form. If you're interested email me: jlongs2@SLACKuic.edu minus distro.

I ran Slackware on my PC for years, but have recently switched to a Powerbook. I'd like to run Linux, and I've investigated dual-booting with either Debian or Gentoo.

I'm having trouble finding good resources, though these people seem to have made some progress... last November.

I've had a difficult time finding a current PPC port of Slackware. Has anyone experimented with building a Slackware base system on a G4 from some other distro, or had any luck with some other approach?

Have you tried a Linux webcam app? GnomeMeeting is very nice. There is also a list of others here under the "Video: Security / Webcams / Monitoring" section.

Do they still develop for PPC? It seems like all we get is gentoo these days.

And Yellow Dog, and Debian, and Slackware, and Mandrake, and SuSE, and...

Ahh, poor Gentoo fanboys, their minds are so narrow. Go back to your silly portage, little boy.

Stumbled across this one:
http://www.exploits.org/v4l/

Video for Linux (v4l) (much info here or the newer v4l2 are the places you want to check out as those above have men tioned. Also, check out this site for some code to used as a starting point. Attaching multiple cameras is no problem as the different USB cameras just map to /dev/video0, /dev/video1,...

Hmm,
Linux or BSD for PPC?

Why, that's crazy enough to work.

Noone mentioned Mplayer and Video-4-Linux
You should find great helpon both the mailing lists and Mplayer is portable to windows so if your school mates are alarmed at the diffrence in Linux you can make them feel more at home.

Or Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, or NetBSD, or plain old Darwin and roll your own distribution. There's even a very unofficial slackware project available. Or if you *really* like rolling your own, check out Linux from Scratch. If you have a really old Mac you can even run BeOS on it.

Me, I'll stick with OS X, but don't tell me you can't put another OS on your Mac.

drop your pants and go to http://slackintosh.exploits.org, yes you have to roll your own iso, BUT it's slackware for ppc! (i use it on my ibook 600) otherwise check out gentoo or yellow dog for out-of-the-box goodness. dont forget to install pmud for all your apple power management needs.

for me I use a APC Enviornmental card which is plugged into my smart UPS 1000, hooked up to my system via NUT, I then use a perl script to extract the data and send it to mrtg. the same script connects to weather.com and grabs the local weather as well, see the sample. this monitors just my living room, I don't have a job at the moment so I don't have an official server room, just a living room with about 20 systems.

She might be using Slackintosh. But I think there's about an ice cube's chance in hell that anyone's mom is using Slackware, let alone Slackintosh on a new G4 power Mac...

#rant_start
ive had an ibook for a year now and i love it! it comes with a *nix at "no" extra cost... BUT it runs linux great. ive got slackintosh running on mine with no problems. x windows, check. mozilla, check. power management, check. cd burner, check. dvd player, check. wireless, check. apple's kick-ass warranty, check. now, in your position id go with the new 12" powerbook. same size, but with a neato aluminum case AND a g4... heck its also got a 32meg geforce4, not bad for a laptop. but if your looking for price, you really cant beat an ibook.
#rant_end

I just bought a new BK500 on ebay, and it arrived yesterday. I spent a good part of today reorganizing my cables and installing and 'figging nut . Now I find out the damned thing has been recalled. I swear, if it weren't for bad luck, I wouldn't have any luck at all.

sox -t ossdsp -c 2 -w -s -r 44100 /dev/dsp -t wav - | lame -h -k - "radio-`date +%Y%m%d-%k%M`.mp3"

While the various larger distributions are geared towards multimedia functionality to different degrees, it obviously depends exactly what you want out of your box and how much you want to play with the guts (hardware and software). Many people would be happy with a DVD/VCD/mp3 player rather than a full-blown PVR, and I'm not sure how much freedom you'll get in this area with Media Center Pc's - I doubt this version of XP is designed around being able to rip, mix and burn ;) This is where some of the other Linux projects come in (some focussed on the embedded market only though). Maybe distribution in the classical sense was not the best of description for me to use, although projects like Flamethrower Linux are aiming for that - RedHat and Debian are working on multimedia based distributions, altho they are aimed more at the multimedia worker rather than player.

Projects like Dave/Dina, homeDVR, OpenPVR, MythTV and FreeVo aim at homebrew boxes somewhat akin to the Media Center idea and there are a myriad of sources for building boxes that do as much if not more than the Media Center. Flexibility is always good IMHO, and if you can start with a box that may just do DVD, DivX, CD's, mp3's and ogg, but expand it into a classic gaming machine running MAME et al as well as serving up content to the rest of your flat/house/hovel then that is "a good thing". More info at ding, eboxy.

Remember that Linux is used for commercial PVR's (and the Moxi Media Center) too and while there are companies that do these things commercially, that's normally a sign of open versions being around somewhere, especially if you like to get your hands dirty :) If you don't, then it won't be long before you new (or old) console will be able to fulfill many of these functions, again, they already can to a degree, if you don't mind hacking away a bit.

I've been wanting a radio capture card for a while (For Car Talk, Bob&Tom, etc...) and I've noticed most of them are part of TV tuner cards. Anyone know of one that works well under linux? Uder $50 would be nice ...

Video4Linux drivers support a number of FM tuners. I thought it would be cool to have a linux PVR for catching various radio talk shows that I miss (Car Talk is one of them... it's on way to early Saturdays in my area)

All the innovation is in the commercial sector?!

Are you on crack?!

Look at the Network UPS Tools. They are way more innovative than any commercial product performing a similar function.

What good is a homebrew UPS if it doesn't support decent management software such as NUT?

Having a UPS means nothing if you lose power and the server dies when the battery runs out. You want the system to gracefully shutdown when the battery level becomes critical.

well, two basic parts: hardware and software
first of the hardware is pretty independant of the os, just pick the highest quality capture card you can afford that is supported in linux, add a reasonable camera, sound card, and a nice modern machine of any kind. I use a bttv card, which works well for me, but of course it depends on your exact needs, and the camera that you hook up to it. As to software:
SDL, mostly used for game programming, but has some of the capabilites needed for capturing, sound recording, etc.
v4l the basic component of all video type stuff under linux-you can see the list of crap it supports there, but it doesn't really have facilities for actually capturing to something like mpeg.
avifile everything you want in a capture API, will let you output to all kinds of formats.
mplayer I have heard that they support capturing now, but haven't used them for that, but is what you will be using for playing back the files you capture.

My recommendation would be to use the VCR project, and one of these for audio. VCR uses avifile to record the video in your chosen format, and will record the audio also, but if you want seperate files for audio and video, it is simplest just to use the mic in with another program.

Let me know if you have problems--it's remarakably similar to what is already done to record television programming, with higher quality requirements, so you should be able to take advantage of all the PVR projects out there.
Or you can let me do it-send me the requirements, 1500$, and I'll send the box back a week later
;-}

If you haven't already, you probably want to check out NUT, as mentioned above. I've never used it with a non-APC UPS, but according to NUT's compatibility list, it has support for quite a variety of UPS hardware.

If NUT doesn't support your hardware, you may find others there interested in developing a driver. You also may find it easier to get your UPS manufacturer to contribute a copy of its protocol docs to the project than to you individually.

If you haven't already, you probably want to check out NUT, as mentioned above. I've never used it with a non-APC UPS, but according to NUT's compatibility list, it has support for quite a variety of UPS hardware.

If NUT doesn't support your hardware, you may find others there interested in developing a driver. You also may find it easier to get your UPS manufacturer to contribute a copy of its protocol docs to the project than to you individually.

NUT talkes with APC and friends. It's GPL'ed and works.

http://www.exploits.org/nut/

Actually, a much better alternative to both is NUT. NUT is both UPS brand agnostic and OS agnostic. It's really nice to be able to monitor 3 different brands of UPSs on four operating systems with the same software.

apcupsd is indeed nice, and I used it for awhile. A little while back, though, I switched to nut, the Network UPS Tools. nut supports multiple types of UPSes, from many different manufacturers, provides a consistent interface to the available data, and is nicely network-aware, for shutting down multiple computers on a single UPS. There's even a windows client, so the lone NT machine at work gets to shut down properly, too.

nut might be a little overkill for a single computer home setup on an APC UPS (as I believe apcupsd supports slightly more of APC's features), but nut is excellent for anything scaling beyond that.

As for the video capturing, here are a few places to start:

Video for Linux resources
Video for Linux mailing list - archives

I'm told the SlackWare folks have a port in progress, but it's not ready yet. If it were here, I'd say it's exactly what you want, but as it's not... why not give NetBSD a try?

If you are really adventurous, though, you could also try Slackintosh - it's an unofficial port from the slackware source tree. It has no installer - you will have to set up another linux/ppc distro to install it, but a very minimal install should work fine.

Just in case you are wondering, there are a few projects out there to port Slackware to the PowerPC.

LinuxPPC developer Ani Joshi has been playing around with Slackware for the PowerPC for some time, he has a bootable system, although I don't know if it's avalible yet on the net.

The offical Slackware project also now has 2 G3s and an iMac DV. So it looks like they may be also working on a port.

Finally Slackintosh is working on another PowerPC port. It appears it is the most complete right now. They started out a year ago with a 7200/120mhz machine, and now they are on a screaming G4 machine. See Slackintosh.Exploits.org for details.

It appears we will be seeing more of Slackware on the PowerPC -- more sooner then later. :)

Check this out: slackintosh.exploits.org. Slackintosh is (to be) Slackware for PowerMacs. As I understand it, installation can be done but Your Mileage May Vary. Unfortunately I only have one of these early PowerMacs with NuBus, which isn't supported by vanilla kernels, so I didn't yet have the chance to try it myself.

Being a Mac user and using Slackware at work on our PCs, I'm always on the lookout for Linux ports on the Mac. I really like the structure and tools that you package with Slackware and I'm frustrated with the Mac ports that I've tried. So I was surprised when I came across this little site talking about porting Slackware to a 7200 and G4 Mac (slackintosh.exploits.org). Are you aware of this project and what do you think about its possibilities?