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Well, you can use it to speed up swapping a little: http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Use_memory_on_video_card_as_swap

Why bother with a client when it seems to work under WINE.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Ventrilo_Via_Wine

Gentoo Wiki
Go there, then do a find for "MacOS" How hard is that?

After you've enabled insecure ports on your NFS server, all accounts on the Mac can connect to NFS without using reserverd ports. So now, you don't really need to go through any system files (such as the fstab you were looking for, and BTW, google 'lookupd') to use an NFS client . The easiest way to connect to a NFS share is from Finder, click the "Go" pulldown, then select "Connect to Server". Or from Finder, press ?K

I can understand what you went through though, I tried using XP's NFS client to connect to my Linux NFS shares first, and that's what made me get a Mac. :-)

I think that the best-regarded source of information about Linux hardware compatibility is the Gentoo Wiki: http://gentoo-wiki.com/. Without knowing anything about your hardware, my guess is you're being bitten by a bug in the nForce chipset drivers.

There is this thing called manpages, and the Gentoo wiki (a very exhaustive source of general Linux knowledge, not only Gentoo).

I know you are being funny. But their is just so much FUD from people who haven't tried Gentoo in years. Here is how you do it:

1) Download the latest LiveCD
2) Click on the GTK+ based Install button (if you mess it up, you will end up clicking CLI based. Good if you can go, if not, you WILL click on the other one: GTK+ based Install button)
3) Follow the instructions with sane defaults already setup (Yeah! CPUTYPE already setup)

If you are having trouble deciding if your CPU is x86 is or not, you ARE using x86. My dumbest friends know it if they have x86_64 that it is 64.

If you have problems, head off to Gentoo's documentation. I personally use opensuse these days at work, but when I have problem I head off to Gentoo forums, read Gentoo-wiki etc. They are the best out there!

So there you go. At the end, Gentoo is for those who are interested in it. It will not bring world peace, nor it will magically edit your configration files. It is for those who want to tweak. I got into it because I wanted to play Quake3A on linux, so that I can say good-bye to my Windows installation. For that I needed Unichrome drivers for my crappy video card, for that I needed to compile X... and I am more than happy that I chose Gentoo.

This seems to be a relatively recent invention. Last I looked, no one was using the Darwin tools but the old hfsplusutils which is the bad code I was referring to. For instance, see this Gentoo wiki page: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_hfsplus

Using the Apple-supplied tools is of course the best method. I did not realize they merely required a port to Linux.

This does make me wonder though, how hard would it be to rework the kernel hfsplus module to support journalling? I occasionally do kernel programming and tend to crash OS X hard on occasion so I like the FS journalling enabled so I can avoid long fsck times at startup. This, of course, makes the HFS+ volumes unavailable from Linux which is a real bummer.

IF one were to omit using X/startX & doing a GUI shell like KDE or GNOME, couldn't just about ANY Linux 'cut the mustard' for this task??

Oh certainly. It's just that it would be a lot of hard work cutting Ubuntu down to the 386/486 level, and what you'd have left, while it would certainly be Linux, it wouldn't be Ubuntu in any meaningful sense. Better to start from Debian, Slackware, or Linux From Scratch. TinyGentoo would be another contender.

If you want to get an idea of the minimum spec for a Linux system,have a look at tomsrtbt. It's a linux installation on a floppy disc - a "live floppy", if you will. It needs 8 meg of ram to boot, runs from a ramdisc, and doesn't have a minimum cpu requirement.

Aha, ok... something like SELinux gives you folks on Linux, that Windows has had on its filesystems via NTFS & the registry for years in ACL (access control lists): MAC (mandatory access control labels) - an analog of that which I note existed on NT-based OS' for years...

Well, to be fair, the Unix three level permission system is (as far as I can see) isomorphic to ACLs and MACs. That's been around since the seventies. It's just that the guy who wrote the security certification levels back in the 80s was a VMS head. So nothing got certified that didn't use VMS terminology. Windows NT got it because MS poached the chief architect of VMS, but Linux has has comparable features from the start.

That said, having a separate, orthogonal permission system can be useful; I believe the NSA have a Linux box online where they tell you what the root password is and give you a telnet prompt. You can't do anything once you're in, of course, but it makes a nice proof-of-concept.

Makes sense here: They "pre-harden" it for you, but how is THIS done? SELinux kernel hook addons (this is what I am assuming on this note)??

Pretty much. There are a whole pile of kernel compile time options to enable the subsystem, and to configure it. I can't remember too much beyond that - the last time I tried to set up SELinux by hand, I nearly locked myself out of my own box. So I can see the appeal of a distro where these things are set up for me.

OK. Hope that answers your questions. Let me know if I missed anything and I'll see if I can help :)

... my disks are encrypted

'dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda' FTW

Can anybody point me at a utility (Linux or Windows, I have both) that does this without me having to baby step it through 5 different utilities and a hundred command line options?

Anyone using ridiculous resolutions like the parent poster, take notice.

This has been mentioned before in many forums (including the Nvidia forums) and the solution is always the same. You have to tell X11/Xorg to use a different DPI for your desktop. The standard DPI does indeed make everything huge at these resolutions. Strangely enough, the Gentoo wiki has the most complete and concise info on this problem.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Set_DPI_(Dots_Per_Inc h)

I'm guessing that it's probably miscalculating a 72dpi mode when you'd probably prefer ~96dpi. Give that a shot.

Talking about customizations and package managers, I feel obliged to mention portage, gentoo's package manager. Its superb USE flags lets you retain control of the customization you get by compiling the source code while you also enjoy the benefits of having a package manager behind the curtains dealing with dependencies, version conflicts, etc.

Samba integrates just fine in an AD domain, got a Gentoo box doing file sharing and an internal wiki in an AD domain.

File share permissions from AD using this howto

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Adding_a_Samba_Server _into_an_existing_AD_Domain

Wiki login using this howto

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LDAP_Authe ntication

I'm slightly confused as to how this isn't "tightly integrated" into the existing AD setup, perhaps you would explain ?

afaict creating filesystems is never handled by the kernel and theres no real reason for it to be.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_hfsplus claims there are tools for creating hfs plus filesystems and an ebuild for installing them on gentoo.

i don't think there is a way to turn off the journal from linux though other than reformating which may be a problem if you are working with an existing hfs plus volume and can't easilly get it onto an OS-X box for journal removal first.

Device drivers must be compiled with the kernel sources nearby. That is to say, you'd have to download the kernel source package for your distro and install those. This will usually lead to some filling underneath /usr/src/linux. That is step 1. Go to the top of the linux kernel source tree in a shell (where you see a 'Makefile' listed) and type 'make menuconfig'. Browse to this page where you see 'Integrated Sound' listed and follow the instructions. Exit the menuconfig, and enter 'make' and 'make bzImage' or 'make modules' and 'make modules_install', depending on whether you built those extra modules into the kernel or as loadable kernel modules. Reboot.

example on gentoo > http://gentoo-wiki.com/Resize_LVM2_on_RAID5

http://www.void.gr/kargig/blog/2004/09/24/raid5-lv m2-recovery-resize-howto/ :)

It'll take some reading and combining from multiple sources. I've been doing it for a few years, combined with a handful of upgrades, plus setting it up as an iSCSI backend- all of that lent to the pool of greyness in my head.

I recommend Gentoo to do this with. Other distro's dont include the latest mdadmtools required to manage and migrate RAID5 md devices. Ubuntu is catching up, I believe.

Here are some places to start:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_Install_on_Sof tware_RAID
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86+raid+lvm2- quickinstall.xml
http://linas.org/linux/Software-RAID/Software-RAID .html
http://linas.org/linux/raid.html
http://evms.sourceforge.net/
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_iRiver

Enjoy,

Well, to save my honor, it seems that this info wasn't available when I tried to install.

Thats exactly the app I had in mind ;)

But then again, its really irritating to have to reboot for anything. And with tools like kexec, you will never need to do an actual hardware reboot.
Unless of course, you use windoze ^^

I used to have a really slick script that would record with mencoder and pipe it to mplayer, so I could see myself talk, and then just hit q when I was done. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted it.

Read this:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_a_webcam

You use v4l:// as your source, the video device is probable /dev/video0, and the audio device is probably /dev/dsp1. Notice the 1. That took me about 3 hours to figure out. Then you have to figure out how to encode to mpeg. Or if you want to take the easy way out, you use VLC and open your camera as a v4l source using the GUI. Of course, VLC is also a fat, fickle bitch, but that's another story.

I've never gotten any of the dedicated cam programs working. I think most of them are intended for firewire or something. Oh, and I wouldn't plan on doing much editing either. KDenLive is probably the best I've seen, even though its still a rather buggy beta.

I was impressed with Kopete, though. It worked right out of the box.

I've just recenetly been trying to multiseat X, the linuxtoys.org and http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Multiseat_X are good references on this, even though the gentoo one is a little outdated now. Anyway, I recommend either Ubuntu or gentoo for this and I used Xorg 7.1 with Gnome 2.16. I plugged an ATI Rage 128 with two matrox mga pci cards into the machine and started playing about, your core files that are going to allow you to do this is /etc/X11/xorg.conf & /etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf (or whatever flavour of xdm you are using) Firstly in xorg.conf you will need to define your devices & seats as in the tutorial, a *WARNING* at this point. There currently exists a bug with multiseating within xorg, that if you don't have an active monitor and keyboard for each seat (excluding your primary device) then it will crash the entire system. (This bug has been reported) Once you've done this it's the gdm configuration and I used the following: 0=Standard 1=Extra [server-Standard] name=Standard server command=/usr/X11R6/bin/X0 :0 -deferglyphs 16 -novtswitch -isolateDevice PCI:1:0:0 -layout seat0 flexible=false [server-Extra] name=Extra Server command=/usr/X11R6/bin/X1 :1 -sharevts -deferglyphs 16 -isolateDevice PCI:0:9:0 -novtswitch -isolateDevice PCI:0:9:0 -layout seat1 flexible=false This works for my system, the sharevts is a tricky option and it only served to give a display bug on my rage 128 (and wasn't required for the first video device). I would also suggest you turn off any vtcontrol in xorg.conf, this can be done with: Section "Serverflags" Option "DontVTSwitch" "yes" Option "DontZap" "yes" EndSection My conclusions? Multiseating can work very well, it's certainly on it's way to being more stable and certainly is viable for your situation.

Here are a couple other tutorials...

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Multiterminal_with_ev dev
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Multiseat_X
http://netpatia.blogspot.com/2006/09/multiseat-com puter-with-ubuntu.html

I did a multiseat setup using Ubuntu for Software Freedom Day last year and it worked quite well. The only way I was able to achieve hardware-accelerated 3D on _every_ head was to only use NVIDIA video adapters with the proprietary driver. (yes, I'm aware of the irony!) Unfortunately, none of the free (libre) drivers supported accelerated 3D on multiple heads at that time but perhaps things have changed with the latest release of Xorg.

Setups like this are quite fascinating to me as they reveal how much more efficiently a computer of moderate specs is capable of being used--desktop users don't even notice that they are sharing a machine. Some aspects are a little complicated (like mapping different sound cards to the correct seats) but IMO there is a _lot_ of potential in this area due to ease of administration, energy savings, and a decrease in noise (less computers means less fans whirling).

How come there is still no support for the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, as they call it? It's the best "broken" keyboard out there and one of the most comfortable ones I've ever used. Patches have been submitted multiple times, and seem to be maintained... No love for this hardware.

First couple of Google hits:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/8/3/80
and
http://lwn.net/Articles/194015/
or
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Microsoft_Natural_Erg onomic_Keyboard_4000
or
http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/Microsoft_Natural_Er gonomic_Keyboard_4000

And no, I don't want to recompile my kernel.

I have found that http://gentoo-wiki.com/ is a great resource for knowledge about the basesystem itself of Linux. I do love my Gentoo of course, but you'll find resources on said wiki for Linux in general - and quite a few of them - and I've seen people from both the Debian and Ubuntu community also look to this Wiki from time to time.

But not anymore. I frequently use it for historical documentation or if I want to know better about some topic. But when a device doesn't work, or I need a quick howto, I go over to Gentoo wiki or their official docs which are of a high quality. I don't have any doubts that the ubuntu/fedora/suse crowd check out their relevant documentation rather than head over to tldp. There are several reasons for it.

We have a lot of popular distros that do things in their own way. For example, the commands that work in Fedora will not work in Ubuntu without changing paths, package names etc... Its always favourable to have distro specific pages that allow everyone to copy-paste the commands without messing up on the fine details.

Secondly, I view whatever tldp has as a very good source to learn something. The information there is presented in a very generic way, and very well laid out - for example read the software raid howto over there and tell me whether you'll see that quality elsewhere.

But in this day of n00bs switching over, wiki pages are the way to go for popular information. Afterall, its the "in" thing now, has the web 2.0 touches and appeals to a very large crowd. The bottom line is that tldp isn't dead, just that its roles has changed a great deal in the last 5 years.

I'm using Gentoo Linux with iptables and ip route/tc/sfq. Unfortunately, Comcast seems to be doing something with my SSH traffic, or encrypted traffic in general, like the article says Rogers is doing. I know the QoS on my server is working correctly because web traffic goes through fine. I've also noticed periods where my upload (and sometimes download) traffic for bittorrent will drop to near 0. This happens at least a few times a day. Yet, when I go to websites while this is happening, it's blazing fast. I am supposed to have 768kbps up, but I usually keep it at 650kbps because speeds are averaging that on speed tests (speedtest.net, speakeasy.net, etc). The only downside to the QoS is that whenever I call Comcast, I have to turn off the QoS. Fortunately I just run two commands to turn it off (my basic firewall script which has commands to clear all mangle commands, and tc qdisc del dev eth1 root).

Damn am I getting offtopic. I used this tutorial for Gentoo to setup packet shaping, and modified it suit my needs. I also used ipp2p like the guide uses, rather than i7-filter.

Gentoo has some instructions if you can translate them to the corresponding Fedora commands.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_DRI_with_ATi_Open-Sou rce_Drivers

i don't know if there is a main, public online repository. I think that the feature is supposed to be more of a local thing where you have one system compile binaries which you can then pass along to all of your local boxes, instead of having each local box compile the same software. if you try it, make sure to edit your make.conf accordingly: http://gentoo-wiki.com/MAN_make.conf_5 PORTAGE_BINHOST = "ftp://login:pass@grp.mirror.site/pub/grp/i686/ath lon-xp" This is the host from which portage will grab prebuilt-binary packages. The list is a single entry specifying the full address of the directory serving the tbz2's for your system. This is only used when running with the get binary pkg options are given to emerge. Review emerge(1) for more information. Note that it should point to the 'All' directory on the host that creates the binary packages and not to the root of the PKGDIR.

you hang out with the wrong people: http://gentoo-wiki.com/MAN_emerge

specifically:

--buildpkg (-b)
        Tells emerge to build binary packages for all ebuilds processed in addition to actually merging the packages. Useful for maintainers or if you administrate multiple Gentoo Linux systems (build once, emerge tbz2s everywhere). The package will be created in the ${PKGDIR}/All directory. An alternative for already-merged packages is to use quickpkg which creates a tbz2 from the live filesystem.
--buildpkgonly (-B)
        Creates binary packages for all ebuilds processed without actually merging the packages. This comes with the caveat that all build-time dependencies must already be emerged on the system.

--getbinpkg (-g)
        Using the server and location defined in PORTAGE_BINHOST (see make.conf(5)), portage will download the information from each binary package found and it will use that information to help build the dependency list. This option implies -k. (Use -gK for binary-only merging.)
--getbinpkgonly (-G)
        This option is identical to -g, as above, except it will not use ANY information from the local machine. All binaries will be downloaded from the remote server without consulting packages existing in the local packages directory.

so it appears that Portage can not only install binary packages, but it can grab them remotely, too.

Using Wine, my girlfriends Gentoo-machine runs WoW like a dream. We followed this guide (http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_and_update_W orld_Of_Warcraft_with_wineguide) for Gentoo, but it can easily be used on Ubuntu or any other distro. One mighty trick is using the dedicated X-server, which gave a quite noticeable boost in FPS. Instead of booting right into KDE, she gets the console, where she can type startwow, or startx, depending on what she wants at the time. A little bit inconvenient to exit KDE to play, but doing so makes playing so much more enjoyable.

Software exists for OCR from camera sources such as cell phones.

Yeah, it exists but it fucking sucks. Have you ever used the software that does OCR from images? If you haven't try something like gocr for Linux and tell me how it worked out for you. Even if the OCR software available for cell phone images is 100x better, it will still be pointless.

The promise of Gentoo for me is being able to continually upgrade and never get outside of that window of support.
I agree. Every now and then a program's latest version doesn't agree with a config script somewhere, but that's what etc-update is for. If something borks, you can always ask the gentoo forums, which is an invaluable source of information for all things gentoo. That and the gentoo-wiki.

Also, no one is 'requiring' anyone to upgrade. I administer hundreds of gentoo servers and you don't always need to keep up to date to be secure. Part of the nice thing about gentoo is that you're only installing the packages you need, so if you know of a vulnerability in a script you use, you don't have to upgrade your whole portage tree just to plug a hole.

Interesting. What do you do about things like, Mastercook, Sunset Western Garden Interactive Computer Guide and Problem solver, Home Planning Software, Exercise and Diet Nutrition Software, Quicken and Monopoly?

I'd presume various combinations of WINE and QEMU would work. Once they're set up, they'll run pretty much forever with no real maintenance needs, and backup is much simpler, too. QEMU's how I got my wife's greeting card program running, though she made it through the holidays without it.

I tried to get my updated linux to install some old Loki disks I bought in the late 90s along with my WordPerfect 8.0 disks, and they won't install on the newer version.

A separate issue. I dunno about WP8, never used it. But I've got three Loki games running just fine on my Ubuntu system - Myth II, Heretic II, and Descent 3. You might try running the scripts and such as "bash [install].run" instead of "sh [install].run", or maybe you could Google a bit, just like you would with an old Windows game. I couldn't get Aliens versus Predator to run stably on my Windows XP system. Some sound issue, but it would hang or play the same sounds over and over. The AvP Linux port, on the other hand, runs a treat.

I've had decent luck with stock Wine for some games. Valve's Steam runs under Wine; HL2 not so much, but HL and its mods seem fine. American McGee's Alice runs utterly flawlessly. But - as I said - games can be an issue. Feel free to put points in your column or whatever on that score.

I'm not missing any point. However, people complaining about Vista and Aero while only looking at the requirements for a Vista Premium Ready PC are missing the point entirely. Since nobody really seems interested in Googling what you can get by with hardware-wise for a Vista + Aero experience, let me help you all.

Being honest, Windows Aero can be quite difficult to get. Firstly you need a compatible video card and then you need compatible WDDM drivers which work with that graphics card, and you need enough memory to be able to run it in the first place... remember that Windows Aero isn't just transparency within title bars of the active window... it's more like a technology in its own right.

The very minimum of requirements which need to be had on a system are:

• 128MB RAM
• DirectX 9 Support with Pixel Shader 2 support
• AGP 4x or better with compatible graphics card
• WDDM/LDDM drivers for compatible graphics card
• Screen resolution of 1024x768 at 32-bit colour

Let's compare that with the recommended settings for an XGL/AIGLX setup, courtesy of openSUSE:

The following graphics hardware is known to work well or recommended for use with XGL. Please add exceptions if there are any.

• Intel
  All intel graphics chips need the newest packages of Xgl and compiz for running flawlessly.
  • i915, i945
    Accelerated XVideo is broken on these cards. See Troubleshooting.
  • compiz --replace will most likely crash the Xserver due to a long standing DRI bug.
• NVidia
  All NVIDIA cards need the proprietary driver for running Xgl. Currently you will need to uninstall and reinstall the xgl rpm after installing the proprietary NVidia driver.
  • GeForce 4xxx series
    XVideo is not accelerated on these cards.
  • GeForce FX 5xxx series, Quadro FX series
    Accelerated XVideo is hitting a slow path on these cards, it is under investigation.
  • GeForce 6xxx series
  • GeForce 7xxx series (GeForce 7600 = not all effects are available but mostly working)
• ATI
  • Mobility Radeon 9700 SE: Xgl running with proprietary fglrx driver 8.23
  • Radeon X300: Xgl running with proprietary fglrx driver 8.23

If you are not sure what card you are using, you can run the following command (as root): hwinfo --gfxcard

If your card isn't listed then you can check out the Gentoo hardware list as well.

So basically, the hardware requirements are very similar, though Aero does require more because it simply does more, and if you don't believe me, take a real hard look at everything that it does. I'm not saying transparency and drop shadows are hard work, I'm saying Aero has much more functionality than you and a lot of people give it credit for. What does XGL/AIGLX bring to the table other than some slick animations and effects (Which I love, by the way) by rendering the screen and windows through OpenGL?

I'm not about to get sucked into a debate about why I said what I said about OS X, but I will say that it's pretty obvious you don't mind shelling out over a hundred dollars for an update to your OS every "1.5 years or so". Me, I'd rather they simply roll them up into a large update and charge the same price. You know, kind of like how Microsoft has been doing things. And if you think SP2 had no features, you really can't even notice something as obvious as the Security Center (Not that I'm saying it's the best example, but it's one of the most prominent ones). I'm not an apologist for bad software or anything because I feel they've

• Started with this HOWTO for gentoo
  
• Installed the stock FC5 (extras?) wine.
  
• Built the patched version in my homedir as described in the HOWTO, but did not install it.
  
• Installed Mozilla and the ActiveX extensions as described in the HOWTO.
  
• Installed WoW from CD under wine as described.
  
• Copied patch files from a Windows system, just to save download time.
  
• Ran WoW, and allowed it to patch.
  
• Tweaked sound settings as described.
  

• Sound pops from time to time when CPU is under load, especially if some other app competes for CPU against WoW. The suggested fixes on the HOWTO page failed to address this.
  
• Some graphics glitches, mostly involving flashes in water that extends to the edge of the clip plane. This is mentioned in the HOWTO, I think, but there's no known fix for it that I'm aware of. Not a biggie for me.
  
• Some key-combinations are not relinquished by the window manager even in non-windowed mode, and thus any WM-specific keys or mouse actions are not sent to the game. This is fixable, but I don't bother. I just avoid those keys, and I re-mapped the ones that I needed in the game.
  

• It's faster under Linux than it was under Windows, but not by much.
  
• Switching from WoW to a desktop app is amazingly fast and painless. Major difference from Windows.
  
• Applications that contend for memory and/or CPU while I'm playing don't appear to harm application performance nearly as much as under Windows, which given that this is both my game system and work-from-home-at-night system, is a major win.
  

Gentoo Linux already runs on the Intel Macs...

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-514346-highli ght-intel+mac.html

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Apple_MacBook

User 956 Why do we need wireless USB when we already have bluetooth? and vice versa? and beyond that, why do we need wireless HDMI?

Starting out with HDMI, why does a DVD player have to be close to the TV? Why is is stacked on top of a TiVo a Satellite reciever next to a playstation and an XBox, wouldn't it be nice to have all that clutter sitting in one corner of the room and have the TV hanging on a wall somewhere else.

How many bluetooth printers and scanners are there?

I'm working on putting a scanner in the kitchen with idea that if I find a nice recipie in a magazine, I can just lob it in the scanner push the one touch scanning button and it automagically dumps the image on my archive server runs a quick OCR on the image and dumps it in a database. If I want the recipie back (OCR willing) I should be able to find it via a simple text search

Wireless USB would be great I could put the scanner almost anywhere I wanted without having to worry about running 40 ft of USB cable through the house. Equally having a wireless USB backup drive tucked away in a draw somewhere makes a great backup if my laptop gets stolen... I'd certainally worry about the security of data stored on a wireless USB drive but its no worse than having a WiFi dirve.

Figure out a protocol and stick with it. That's why regular plug-in USB works so well.

True up to a point, when did you last use a floppy disk? a protocol that does not move with the times risks extinction..

Is this that?

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Imaging_with_a_LiveCD

Security is great, but trained and dependable users are better.

You might want to give Gentoo a shot. It all compiles from source and is currently using GCC 4.1. It's about as up to date as you'd like it to be. I have both 64-bit and 32-bit boxes and never had a problem with an install (can't say the same for updates, but probably better than most distros) Some would say it's too advanced for a noob, but I think there are so many clear wikis, installation guides and forum support, that it ends up being one of the easiest distros out there.

Try these sites to get you started:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml
http://gentoo-wiki.com/
http://forums.gentoo.org/

I use it for work, home development and even my HTPC, and it can easily support all kinds of devices. Just google "gentoo" and the device name you're interested in and you'll likely find a dedicated wiki.

Check out http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Providing_binary_packag es.

You can do alsorts of useful things; have a master repository for a network with the sites own USE flags, or even make a distributable binary package from the already installed app with quickpkg.

sure beats trying to archive up a windows app dir for backup.

Also its loosely related but i want to mention getdelta and the dtu format which makes source dls much lighter, good on a modem, or like me on an elcheapo 32/32 wimax.

Gentoo is evolving really fast! Having gone through lfs before gentoo existed I _love_ the foundation that portage has grown from bsd, and its still evolving.

Not to karma whore or anything, but the Gentoo wiki has a nice tip on dispatch-conf here.

And thanks for pointing this out... I've always used etc-update, and never known about a possible replacement for it.

The Gentoo Manual is very helpful, and so is the Gentoo Wiki.

And being a Gentoo user and fanboy, I find this kind of poster funny :)

If you want to use Linux to do everything you can do on Windows (gaming, multimedia, PVR, etc), it just sucks. The Hauppage drivers and MythTV are plain sucky and buggy. Most sound card drivers, and hell, the entire ALSA subsystem, suck as well.

Gaming sucks because there are only very few major release games ported to Linux (i.e. UT2k4, Doom3, etc...). Speaking of which I've loaded UT2k4 on my linux box once and it ran just fine. We need more of that. Unforunately, most of the games on Linux (and there are quite a few) are simple games like card games and mahjong and reversi. (Hey some people REALLY like Majong!:) Audio support is indeed lacking, however my audigy works pretty decently. ALSA is better than OSS (in my opinion), and I think it was a step in the right direction initially, but it seems to be falling short... As for MythTV and Videocapture, I've never been impressed with Hauppage hardware. I have a Hauppage card that's sub par even on Windows. I have had it working in Linux but again I wasn't impressed. However, Plextor seems to have a nice piece of equipment these days. And according to that HowTO, you don't need binary blob drivers, so it's GPL all the way, baby! :)

I'd prefer it in a heartbeat for server applications though. The trap that people fall in is trying to shoehorn FOSS into being all things to all people.

We have a Windows 2003 Small Business Server that fits the "slowly going down in flames" moniker. While it doesn't crash per se, it just does really weird things on a regular basis that I'm always having to get this or that service running again, taking care of weird errors.... Oh and it likes to kick out all our purchased licenses on a semi-regular basis. Called MS on that one. I was told to backup the licenses somewhere so I could just import them quickly instead of inputting all the 25-character codes each time. That is *not* a solution, that is a hack/workaround. Thanks MS! :( Apparently there's no fix...

Patch your GTK+ to open the save-dialog expanded. Patch that works with 2.8.6 and 2.8.19 at least:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Beautify_GNOME#Save_d ialogs_expanded_by_default

// ville

However, You have to take into account that all your internet traffic passes through IT-departments gateway. So you better check wich policy they got on non-workrelated internet traffic. Best thing you can do is set-up an encrypted tunnel to some server outside your network (use HTTP-encapsulation if you can only use HTTP).

I fail to see the benefit of using a supposedly secure browser. Any reasonably competent IT guy will see right trough it.

Not trying to detract from your statement, but if you are interested wiki's have been doing some new cool stuff:

For example http://gentoo-wiki.com

It has search as you type, and if you click the search button it does do a full text search