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In that case please contact SLUG or turn up to one of their meetings. The next meeting is on Friday, May 27 from 6:00pm to 9:30pm at the University of Technology, Broadway, Sydney. Once you are there, have a word to whoever seems to be running the show and they will point you to the relevant person to talk to.

In that case please contact SLUG or turn up to one of their meetings. The next meeting is on Friday, May 27 from 6:00pm to 9:30pm at the University of Technology, Broadway, Sydney. Once you are there, have a word to whoever seems to be running the show and they will point you to the relevant person to talk to.

people might be interested in my poorly written howto on getting cifs and debian to talk: http://lists.slug.org.au/archives/slug/2003/11/msg 00386.html

Yes, the ICCCM is most excellent.

No offense, but the odds of you finding one thousand computer users willing to keep Linux on their desktop for everyday use is also next to ZERO.

Gee, it would probably take me so long to look up a few Linux Users Group pages and ask who uses Linux for a desktop. There can't be any of them out there ...

• LUV
• SLUG
• HUMBUG

*sob* It all started about a year and a half ago (I think? Is that right for my uid?) Now I've gotten that bad that I'm reading /. at work, and /. at home. It's gotten that bad that I don't evern recognise the word "slashdot" and more, prefering the gzip "/." more.

Anyway, back in the real world. I think the best place for a /. meeting in sydney .au would be at a monthly slug meeting. I haven't been to one yet, but judging by the mailing lists, the guys and gals read /. a fair bit.

And Melbourne, aparantly we're suffering from "post olympics depresion" so we need this! haha :)

I am completely convinced that by version 8 or so, Perl will

• make "$", "%", and "@" optional

• Status: Withdrawn

• will have a decent object-oriented system

• It already has a decent object-oriented system i.e. an optional one (and what it lacks in syntactic sugar can easily be procured from CPAN). Personally, I hardly ever write non OO Perl (and, yes, I'd like to see it graduate from 'decent' to best-of-breed), but there's a bunch of areas - quick'n'dirty CGI, sysadmin scripts, optimizations and general gluing and mucking about - where OO is overkill. Don't forget Perl is a great Unix tool amongst many other things. You can munge the hell out of text with little more than a commandline salvo.

• will have useful threading

• Try version 6.

• will have a secure sandbox ala Java

• Er, you mean like Safe, which is as old as Java, offers vastly more control than the Java sandbox (it operates at the opcode level), and which, to my knowledge, has never met a script kiddie yet it couldn't politely but firmly kick to the kerb.

Perl has many fine and dandy features because it promiscuously and 'diagonally' soaks up good ideas (Larry has even been spotted flirting with C# of late). You don't have to be a hypocritical hobgoblin to want to make it finer and dandier: just another perl hacker.

I have used this as the basis for setting up an X terminal booting off a server for both x86 Linux and sparc Linux. Took a bit of messing about, but fairly easy to do.

At the risk of drawing some heat, the whole diskless X client thing may be an interesting option to look into with StarOffice...

The power supply is on a shielded surface (well, kinda) and is behaving itself for the time being. My dad came over and *touched* the heatsinks to see if they were hot. This freaked me out until he explained that there was no current path, i.e. birds on a wire, but still, damn... anyway it's worth it. If it wasn't for that damn buzz it'd be completely quiet. If you really want a quiet system, go for an NCD X-term and sleep more easily too (oh did I mention, I'm not liable if your cat Fluffy likes to poke around power supplies and finds out just what curiousity did to the.. well, you know)

Thanks for the comments, it's good to know that not everyone thinks I'm a loony ;-) ("I want it quiet! REALLY quiet!" "oookay...")

You put the card in, it simulates a hard drive during boot, but can't be "altered". Usually, it'd go after a specially-configured Novell server to load apps.

Now that you mention it I remember a similar project in the Etherboot distribution - you can build a "FlashCard" which resides in an ISA slot, and contains an EEPROM that can be flashed with a BootROM. It's meant for testing Etherboot before you burn it onto 20 EPROM chips but it'll work for anything that wants to take control after the motherboard BIOS, in the same manner as IDE controllers and so on get called to do their thing. My knowledge of prioritization and contention is sketchy here, tho... whoever goes first wins the privelege of booting or what?

• Etherboot
• Netboot

The differences between the two projects include 1) size of the images, 2) number of supported NICs, and 3) available features. Nonetheless, they aim for compatibility between each other and it is often worthwhile trying both and finding out which one works better for your particular configuration. (As a co-author of Etherboot, I am somewhat biased).

Rather than asking your questions on Slashdot you probably stand a better changes getting answers to your technical questions, if you subscribed to the combined mailing list for the two projects. There also is an archive of all the messages ever posted on this list.

Both Etherboot and Netboot allow to load the Boot Prom image from floppy disk while you are still testing your environment. Once everything works, you can decide to burn an EPROM and eliminate the need for the floppy disk. Of course, with modern NIC cards things are easier, because some of them already include a FlashPROM.

Another very promising project is NILO. It has originally been started by one of the Etherboot authors and it is currently being written from scratch under commercial sponsorship (the entire project will is GPL'd). See the home page for all the details.

Eventually NILO will probably obsolete Etherboot and Netboot for everything but very special purposes. It currently is under active development and while we would appreciate more alpha testers it isn't really very useable for real-world applications. There will be announcements on Freshmeat about the progress of this project.

The differences between the two projects include 1) size of the images, 2) number of supported NICs, and 3) available features. Nonetheless, they aim for compatibility between each other and it is often worthwhile trying both and finding out which one works better for your particular configuration. (As a co-author of Etherboot, I am somewhat biased).

Rather than asking your questions on Slashdot you probably stand a better changes getting answers to your technical questions, if you subscribed to the combined mailing list for the two projects. There also is an archive of all the messages ever posted on this list.

Both Etherboot and Netboot allow to load the Boot Prom image from floppy disk while you are still testing your environment. Once everything works, you can decide to burn an EPROM and eliminate the need for the floppy disk. Of course, with modern NIC cards things are easier, because some of them already include a FlashPROM.

Another very promising project is NILO. It has originally been started by one of the Etherboot authors and it is currently being written from scratch under commercial sponsorship (the entire project will is GPL'd). See the home page for all the details.

Eventually NILO will probably obsolete Etherboot and Netboot for everything but very special purposes. It currently is under active development and while we would appreciate more alpha testers it isn't really very useable for real-world applications. There will be announcements on Freshmeat about the progress of this project.

Also have a look at Ken's presentation on this page for info on setting up a discless PC as a X terminal.

Also have a look at Ken's presentation on this page for info on setting up a discless PC as a X terminal.

Do not be ashamed as an old kernel is quite in style these days. I have been experimenting with some of these older, smaller gems. They were the ones that ran on less hardware and still do it well. Since I have a few 386's, some with 4MB laying around, may I share the following:

Superant - sells cheapo CDs catering to small computers
Xdenu Versions
Linux On A Floppy
Etherboot home page

My favorite:
toms router boot home page