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These are good questions. These are the type of questions that a lot of experiences Linux advocates forget about or ignore.

Well, I'm not going to be able to give a lot of very specific answers to everything here, but this should help. I would first point you to your local Linux Users Group (LUG), if there is one. I've found that there's almost always someone in the group who can help me. It's one of the closest things to true tech support the Linux community has. Chech out http://linux.com/usergroups.pl to find one nearby. You should also do a google search since not every LUG is listed.

Many of the packages you see in gnorpm are libraries or applications that run only via the command line. Only a few of these are GUI applications you'll actually see under one of your menus. Now you may think that's a LOT of libraries and system utilities, but (from a Windows point of view) if you ever check out all that's in your C:\WINDOWS folder or C:\WINNT folder, you'll find all sorts of stuff you never seem to use (that doesn't make them unnecessary though!). I've been using Linux coming on two years now and it's only been in the last couple of months that I feel I really start to know what the different core packages are and what they do. And this is after doing many many installs of Linux. A good way to 'explore' what you've got is to check out the 'man' pages for the applications you find under /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and all those other 'bin' [binary] directories you have. I wouldn't suggest just sitting down and going through them all unless you have a LOT of time, but searching through the 'man' and 'info' pages are how you can learn a lot about your system.

You're 'boot' partition is where the libaries and programs that start up your computer reside. This partition in general does NOT have to be very large. Space is usually given on the boot partition if you what to do some configuration and cusomization. Try reading http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/partition -4.html#NUMBER .

As for the swap space, check out http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Swap-Space.html and also: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/partition -4.html#AEN347 . In general the Linux Documentation Project is a wonderful place to find answers.

Linux still has a horrid learning curve to it. While some love that (I for one), it's a rough climb for many. Learning about your system and about linux is a process of doing exactly what you did here--ask questions, participate in the community. And eventually, you'll get the hang of it.

As of Linux for Joe User, I would say we're getting close, very close, but there will always be more to do.

These are good questions. These are the type of questions that a lot of experiences Linux advocates forget about or ignore.

Well, I'm not going to be able to give a lot of very specific answers to everything here, but this should help. I would first point you to your local Linux Users Group (LUG), if there is one. I've found that there's almost always someone in the group who can help me. It's one of the closest things to true tech support the Linux community has. Chech out http://linux.com/usergroups.pl to find one nearby. You should also do a google search since not every LUG is listed.

Many of the packages you see in gnorpm are libraries or applications that run only via the command line. Only a few of these are GUI applications you'll actually see under one of your menus. Now you may think that's a LOT of libraries and system utilities, but (from a Windows point of view) if you ever check out all that's in your C:\WINDOWS folder or C:\WINNT folder, you'll find all sorts of stuff you never seem to use (that doesn't make them unnecessary though!). I've been using Linux coming on two years now and it's only been in the last couple of months that I feel I really start to know what the different core packages are and what they do. And this is after doing many many installs of Linux. A good way to 'explore' what you've got is to check out the 'man' pages for the applications you find under /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and all those other 'bin' [binary] directories you have. I wouldn't suggest just sitting down and going through them all unless you have a LOT of time, but searching through the 'man' and 'info' pages are how you can learn a lot about your system.

You're 'boot' partition is where the libaries and programs that start up your computer reside. This partition in general does NOT have to be very large. Space is usually given on the boot partition if you what to do some configuration and cusomization. Try reading http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/partition -4.html#NUMBER .

As for the swap space, check out http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Swap-Space.html and also: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/partition -4.html#AEN347 . In general the Linux Documentation Project is a wonderful place to find answers.

Linux still has a horrid learning curve to it. While some love that (I for one), it's a rough climb for many. Learning about your system and about linux is a process of doing exactly what you did here--ask questions, participate in the community. And eventually, you'll get the hang of it.

As of Linux for Joe User, I would say we're getting close, very close, but there will always be more to do.

These are good questions. These are the type of questions that a lot of experiences Linux advocates forget about or ignore.

Well, I'm not going to be able to give a lot of very specific answers to everything here, but this should help. I would first point you to your local Linux Users Group (LUG), if there is one. I've found that there's almost always someone in the group who can help me. It's one of the closest things to true tech support the Linux community has. Chech out http://linux.com/usergroups.pl to find one nearby. You should also do a google search since not every LUG is listed.

Many of the packages you see in gnorpm are libraries or applications that run only via the command line. Only a few of these are GUI applications you'll actually see under one of your menus. Now you may think that's a LOT of libraries and system utilities, but (from a Windows point of view) if you ever check out all that's in your C:\WINDOWS folder or C:\WINNT folder, you'll find all sorts of stuff you never seem to use (that doesn't make them unnecessary though!). I've been using Linux coming on two years now and it's only been in the last couple of months that I feel I really start to know what the different core packages are and what they do. And this is after doing many many installs of Linux. A good way to 'explore' what you've got is to check out the 'man' pages for the applications you find under /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and all those other 'bin' [binary] directories you have. I wouldn't suggest just sitting down and going through them all unless you have a LOT of time, but searching through the 'man' and 'info' pages are how you can learn a lot about your system.

You're 'boot' partition is where the libaries and programs that start up your computer reside. This partition in general does NOT have to be very large. Space is usually given on the boot partition if you what to do some configuration and cusomization. Try reading http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/partition -4.html#NUMBER .

As for the swap space, check out http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Swap-Space.html and also: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/partition -4.html#AEN347 . In general the Linux Documentation Project is a wonderful place to find answers.

Linux still has a horrid learning curve to it. While some love that (I for one), it's a rough climb for many. Learning about your system and about linux is a process of doing exactly what you did here--ask questions, participate in the community. And eventually, you'll get the hang of it.

As of Linux for Joe User, I would say we're getting close, very close, but there will always be more to do.

These are good questions. These are the type of questions that a lot of experiences Linux advocates forget about or ignore.

Well, I'm not going to be able to give a lot of very specific answers to everything here, but this should help. I would first point you to your local Linux Users Group (LUG), if there is one. I've found that there's almost always someone in the group who can help me. It's one of the closest things to true tech support the Linux community has. Chech out http://linux.com/usergroups.pl to find one nearby. You should also do a google search since not every LUG is listed.

Many of the packages you see in gnorpm are libraries or applications that run only via the command line. Only a few of these are GUI applications you'll actually see under one of your menus. Now you may think that's a LOT of libraries and system utilities, but (from a Windows point of view) if you ever check out all that's in your C:\WINDOWS folder or C:\WINNT folder, you'll find all sorts of stuff you never seem to use (that doesn't make them unnecessary though!). I've been using Linux coming on two years now and it's only been in the last couple of months that I feel I really start to know what the different core packages are and what they do. And this is after doing many many installs of Linux. A good way to 'explore' what you've got is to check out the 'man' pages for the applications you find under /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and all those other 'bin' [binary] directories you have. I wouldn't suggest just sitting down and going through them all unless you have a LOT of time, but searching through the 'man' and 'info' pages are how you can learn a lot about your system.

You're 'boot' partition is where the libaries and programs that start up your computer reside. This partition in general does NOT have to be very large. Space is usually given on the boot partition if you what to do some configuration and cusomization. Try reading http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/partition -4.html#NUMBER .

As for the swap space, check out http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Swap-Space.html and also: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/partition -4.html#AEN347 . In general the Linux Documentation Project is a wonderful place to find answers.

Linux still has a horrid learning curve to it. While some love that (I for one), it's a rough climb for many. Learning about your system and about linux is a process of doing exactly what you did here--ask questions, participate in the community. And eventually, you'll get the hang of it.

As of Linux for Joe User, I would say we're getting close, very close, but there will always be more to do.

That's why I just dumped the caps lock all together. You can remap the keyboard on most OSes.
Linux
Windows
On FreeBSD just use /stand/sysinstall , and go to the keyboard map section in the installer. There's actually a specific keymap that dumps the caps lock

There have been a number of posts complaining about how they have a new keyboard and it doesn't work in Linux. Well, though the Keyboard HOWTO doesn't mention it, these new keyboards work without modification to the standard X setup. That is to say, when you press an "internet" key, the X server recognizes this and recieves the scancode. All you have to do is map that scancode to a useful key, and presto, you have a functional internet keyboard.

1. Swap keyboards (no need to reboot here)
2. Run xev. Make note of the desired key's scancode
3. Edit your .Xmodmap file to map the key to something useful (X provides the symbolic names F13 and above for situations like this)
4. Run xmodmap .Xmodmap to tell your X server about your new keys.
5. Configure your applications to recognize these new keys. For example, in enlightenment you can edit keybindings.cfg so that F13 starts XMMS.

There is a Diskless Nodes HOWTO which basically covers your question. It seems there are lots of Live Linux distributions out there but I have personally only tried a version of SUSE Live Linux, which worked well.

The cheapest 4.7G dvd drive from pricewatch is $36 which is $7.66/gig. A 60 gig hard drive is only $69 which works out to be $1.15/gig. There just isn't any reason to use DVD for online storage when hard drive space is so cheap. The software raid driver in linux makes these large arrays easy with a trivial amount of hardware behind it.

vnc (or other RFB) server support, so I can view my desktop -- the one shown on the monitor -- from another computer.

I don't quite understand this last point - a friend of mine routinely logs into his Linux system from our department's Sun Ray terminals. He's not simply forwarding X11 through SSH, he interacts with his desktop the same way as he would had he been sitting at the computer. I believe that this is achieved using XDMCP (X Display Manager Control Protocol). This seems to work well for my friend.

I'm sure I am right with the majority of slashdot readers when I say that I was majorly psyched to read this. "Linux takes another company, victory is ours!" But I've since reconsidered, and though I'll probably get modded down for speaking my mind, here she goes.

Disney, as I'm sure you're all aware, has demonstrated time and again that it is against freedom. The very values that we in the Open Source community hold dear are trampled upon by the corporate suits at Disney and their pet politicians.

Disney is a company built on copyright law. Without copyright they would not exist. And one of their recent trademarks? That's right: Lilo. Linux afficionados such as myself don't need to be told that there is a much different Lilo that exists in the computer world.

If Disney decides to enforce their trademark rights here, we Linux users will be in serious trouble. Lilo is essential for booting into Linux, so there would be essentially no way to recover from such a thing.

I urge you all to petition Disney and get them to leave Linux to the hackers who care about its future.

Or insert a little time bombs into their computers, and when the office is on fire, appear with the water, save the day, become a hero, tell them that as a hero you know what's good for them — daily backups that is — and get a rise for saving not only the hard drives content, but also your coworkers.

But seriously, I don't have much time to read every +5 Insightful conspiration plan as well as the real solutions, so I'm risking being a little redundant.

Therefore, a lot of company property exists one place-- on individual hard drives.

You might of course try making them do daily backups, but they won't do it for sure, even if it means that every employee has to use 20 minutes every day. And they're right, like they're not changing the oil in the company's cars. They want to have computers which let them do their job.

The simplest solution would be to use Samba servers for users' files storage (I don't know if NFS work under Windows) &mdash which will act as a remote storage of everything your coworkers do, in a way totally transparent for them (just another directory on their computers to which they should save the important stuff) see Samba.org for details. If it's a small office, you just need a single file server for that so the hardware won't cost you much, the cost of software is $0 (or you may use Microsoft sollutions if you have lots of money for that — ask someone who uses NT file servers for more info about the MS way).

Now you have every important data on one machine. You can set up this machine to automatically sync the main directory with the redundant copy of everything in a second (or more) directory, so when someone deletes something important, it's still in the second copy, or third, etc.

But now you have a single critical point where everything important is located — that's to risky. You should have another machine, in another place, which will sync with the main file server every couple of hours, or every night using e.g. rsync. Now you have every data redundant in few places on two machines, and you can easily make manual backups on tapes, or CDRs, etc. from one of this machine.

You can use RAID 1 or 5 level arrays to be secured against hard disk failures, but it won't protect you if someone just deletes important files, so the periodical backups are still important with RAID arrays. Read the Software RAID HOWTO.

This is how I would do it, not counting on everyone making daily backups of their hard drives. I hope it will help you in securing your office data. The key ingredients: Samba and rsync.

You could also install rsync on the Windows machines (if there is rsync for Windows — I don't know) and set some Windows equivalent of cron job to update the backup version stored on the main server every hour and manually after clicking some "sync" icon, etc. Of course, There's More Than One Way To Do It.

I think the Linux Cofee How-To needs some updates!

packeteer asks

how DO you setup ipchains to do packet filteringt?

The information you need is in various Linux HOWTO documents. These should have come with your distribution. You can fetch updated versions of the documents from The Linux Documentation Project. You should study the following HOWTOs:

1. Security-Quickstart-Redhat-HOWTO (worth reading even if you don't have Redhat)
2. Security-Quickstart-HOWTO
3. Security-HOWTO
4. IPCHAINS-HOWTO

I asume you simply have a home box which you connect to the Internet using a ppp dial-up connection. If you have something more sophisticated, you will have to learn more. I'd say the most important thing to do is to block connections to the privileged ports via your ppp interfaces, for the following reasons.

• You shouldn't be providing any services to the Internet unless you really know what you are doing.
• If you have a dial-up ppp connection without a static IP adress and your own domain name, there is no legitimate reason for anyone to ever try and connect to those ports.
• Security exploits of privileged services will immediately given an intruder a root shell, and thus complete control of your computer.

packeteer asks

how DO you setup ipchains to do packet filteringt?

The information you need is in various Linux HOWTO documents. These should have come with your distribution. You can fetch updated versions of the documents from The Linux Documentation Project. You should study the following HOWTOs:

1. Security-Quickstart-Redhat-HOWTO (worth reading even if you don't have Redhat)
2. Security-Quickstart-HOWTO
3. Security-HOWTO
4. IPCHAINS-HOWTO

I asume you simply have a home box which you connect to the Internet using a ppp dial-up connection. If you have something more sophisticated, you will have to learn more. I'd say the most important thing to do is to block connections to the privileged ports via your ppp interfaces, for the following reasons.

• You shouldn't be providing any services to the Internet unless you really know what you are doing.
• If you have a dial-up ppp connection without a static IP adress and your own domain name, there is no legitimate reason for anyone to ever try and connect to those ports.
• Security exploits of privileged services will immediately given an intruder a root shell, and thus complete control of your computer.

packeteer asks

how DO you setup ipchains to do packet filteringt?

The information you need is in various Linux HOWTO documents. These should have come with your distribution. You can fetch updated versions of the documents from The Linux Documentation Project. You should study the following HOWTOs:

1. Security-Quickstart-Redhat-HOWTO (worth reading even if you don't have Redhat)
2. Security-Quickstart-HOWTO
3. Security-HOWTO
4. IPCHAINS-HOWTO

I asume you simply have a home box which you connect to the Internet using a ppp dial-up connection. If you have something more sophisticated, you will have to learn more. I'd say the most important thing to do is to block connections to the privileged ports via your ppp interfaces, for the following reasons.

• You shouldn't be providing any services to the Internet unless you really know what you are doing.
• If you have a dial-up ppp connection without a static IP adress and your own domain name, there is no legitimate reason for anyone to ever try and connect to those ports.
• Security exploits of privileged services will immediately given an intruder a root shell, and thus complete control of your computer.

packeteer asks

how DO you setup ipchains to do packet filteringt?

The information you need is in various Linux HOWTO documents. These should have come with your distribution. You can fetch updated versions of the documents from The Linux Documentation Project. You should study the following HOWTOs:

1. Security-Quickstart-Redhat-HOWTO (worth reading even if you don't have Redhat)
2. Security-Quickstart-HOWTO
3. Security-HOWTO
4. IPCHAINS-HOWTO

I asume you simply have a home box which you connect to the Internet using a ppp dial-up connection. If you have something more sophisticated, you will have to learn more. I'd say the most important thing to do is to block connections to the privileged ports via your ppp interfaces, for the following reasons.

• You shouldn't be providing any services to the Internet unless you really know what you are doing.
• If you have a dial-up ppp connection without a static IP adress and your own domain name, there is no legitimate reason for anyone to ever try and connect to those ports.
• Security exploits of privileged services will immediately given an intruder a root shell, and thus complete control of your computer.

packeteer asks

how DO you setup ipchains to do packet filteringt?

The information you need is in various Linux HOWTO documents. These should have come with your distribution. You can fetch updated versions of the documents from The Linux Documentation Project. You should study the following HOWTOs:

1. Security-Quickstart-Redhat-HOWTO (worth reading even if you don't have Redhat)
2. Security-Quickstart-HOWTO
3. Security-HOWTO
4. IPCHAINS-HOWTO

I asume you simply have a home box which you connect to the Internet using a ppp dial-up connection. If you have something more sophisticated, you will have to learn more. I'd say the most important thing to do is to block connections to the privileged ports via your ppp interfaces, for the following reasons.

• You shouldn't be providing any services to the Internet unless you really know what you are doing.
• If you have a dial-up ppp connection without a static IP adress and your own domain name, there is no legitimate reason for anyone to ever try and connect to those ports.
• Security exploits of privileged services will immediately given an intruder a root shell, and thus complete control of your computer.

ssh
gpg
https://
webdavs://
imaps://
...

Big Brother can watch all they want, but they'll only see my random bits.

One option used by many companies is to compartmentalize the data that needs to be secured. HP sells VirtualVault, or you could brew your own by running a chroot jail, or more completely by running a seperate virtual machine like User Mode Linux.

Erg, the link for Linux From Scratch is here.

Erg, the link for Linux From Scratch is here.

2>/dev/null redirects error messages from the command (and anything else written to stderr, which is file descriptor 2) to the null device. It keeps error messages from showing up. When > is used alone, it implicitly redirects standard output, which is file descriptor 1 (so it's the same as 1>something).

More interesting (and often obscure to new users) ways to redirect streams can be found here.

It's not that you can't build wearable displays. Many have been built. It's that wearing a display isn't fun. Wearable displays get tiring fast. Try one some time.

If you really want one of these things, MicroOptical sells a VGA-compatible eyeglass-mounted display for $2500. And here's an article about Linux on a wearable. This guy writes about using EMACS, "awk", and a wrist-mounted keyboard.

Oh bugger, I thought it was MB and not Mb. Thanks for pointing that out.

The Software RAID howto for Linux briefly mentions the problem, but does not delve into the cause...

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-2.ht ml#ss2.1

I'm searching for some numbers at the moment that might hopefully show how bad the problem is with a RAID0 setup. I guess the problem would be worse the smaller the chunk size.

As an academic myself, a few different issues spring to mind. I'll try to organize them in a somewhat coherent fashion.

First, I would ask if you really need textbooks? While most professors still use textbooks, a lot of people do fine without using any textbooks at all. Yes, it requires more effort on the part of the professor to research all of the sources themself; however, in my experience, the results are certainly worth it. Rather than teaching a politically-correct, watered-down course, you can tailor it to precisely what you feel is important. And shouldn't that be a professor's obligation anyhow?

For sources, I would start with the LDP, the FSF, O'Reilly, and Addison-Wesley. These guys easily make up over 95% of my tech bookshelf.

Addison-Wesley also does textbooks. I don't know how good they are but if they pay as much attention to their textbooks as they do to their IT texts, they'll be excellent.

On another matter, if you're going to consider rolling your own textbooks, don't reinvent the wheel. Much, if not most, of the documenation out there is under a free-as-in-speech license. Use it. Also, I don't think that you need to start your own website. I can't speak for the LDP but it seems to me that they would be delighted to assist you in developing the texts that you need.

Finally, if you go to the effort of developing all of this content, please do the right thing and share it with the community. Ideally, this would through a free-as-in-speech license.

• LPI (ORA) - more course-like coverage of basic Linux
  
• Rebel Code - fantastic history
  
• Free as in Freedom - RMS bio, a good read and also available under the GFDL
  
• Cathedral and the Bazaar
  
• In the Beginning was the Command Line - nostalgia
  
• Learning the Bash Shell
  
• Sed & Awk
  
• The Linux Documentation Project
  

There are lots of great textbooks on beginning UNIX, they don't have to be Linux specific. But when I taught a Linux class at a local trade school, I put together my own documentation. You can also visit The Linux Documentation Project where they have lots of guides and How-to's which most (if not all) are GPL'd and free to use.

This is a "link local" address. The most significant 10 bits of the address (binary 1111111010) are the network part, as indicated by the /10 notation. For more information read the Linux IPv6 HOWTO, 3.2 and 3.4.

This is a "link local" address. The most significant 10 bits of the address (binary 1111111010) are the network part, as indicated by the /10 notation. For more information read the Linux IPv6 HOWTO, 3.2 and 3.4.

This is a "link local" address. The most significant 10 bits of the address (binary 1111111010) are the network part, as indicated by the /10 notation. For more information read the Linux IPv6 HOWTO, 3.2 and 3.4.

You might want to look at NuppelVideo. I've used it to create mpegs froma tv-tuner card, which I subsequently burned to VCD. I've been very happy with the results. The tarball includes documentation and scripts to convert the recorded files to mpeg using lame, mpeg2enc, and mplex.

Also, the Linux VCR HOWTO may have some useful information for you.

The eCos kernel, the kernel that RedHat acquired when it bought Cygnus, does not have a POSIX compatible, or even unix like, kernel interface. It has a kernel interface, it just looks very different than Unix. They weren't creating an incompatible kernel just to be different, they were doing it to create a kernel with features ideally suited for the development of embedded devices.

As an example, a separate thread of execution is not started with fork() or pthread_create(), but rather a thread is created with cyg_thread_create() or sta_tsk() if the ITRON API is built into the kernel. If you look at the eCos API and something with a Unix or POSIX API you will notice that few if any of the same calls exist on the two platforms. Just to reiterate, so I'm not confusing you again. RedHat's eCos is a kernel designed for embedded systems and is not at all similar to the POSIX standard.

Now QNX as a developer of of software for the embedded market took an interesting strategy. Since there is so much software written for a POSIX style kernel, and it is an API that many people are familiar with, they created a kernel small enough for embedded devices, but gave it a POSIX API. This may make some tradeoffs in many directions, since what the program needs from the kernel and what the kernel needs to inform the code is very different for embedded devices than for a desktop or server OS.

Now to my comparison between eCos and QNX. When eCos is built with its optional EL/IX component, it starts to implement a subset of the POSIX API. So calls like read(), write(), and fcntl() are available. If you flip on the EL/IX switch, it starts getting a lot more familiar to Unix developers, which getting the product a little towards what QNX's product line does. Or at least having the same advantages.

Unfortunately, I can't quite understand how you read what I wrote originally and picked out the two sentence fragments you quoted as being a summary. If you could point out where my original post was unclear, I can try to avoid making the same mistake in the future.

Finally, to directly answer your points.

• No, you are right, a kernel isn't an API, but a kernel does implement an API. eCos does implment an API, but that API (without EL/IX) is very dissimilar to POSIX.
• Now for a company like QNX with a product like they have, I can perfectly well understand why they would participate in an effort like POSIX. As the committee is debating the pros and cons of particular features, they really want to be there to argue against features that could be construed as adding bloat.
• Being on a committee doesn't make a vendors product more or less compatible with the standard the vendor produces.

I have not tried it, but ifyou really want to play with Mindstorm and Linux, check out http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Lego/

For performance the short, short summary is that IDE wins in single threading IO due to small, low latency command overhead while SCSI wins out for multi threaded IO due to command queueing. Sure, it is in the IDE specs too these days but it is rarely implemented.

Check out the HOWTO and if you see a mistake do contact the autor, the LDT relies on feedback from you the readers and experts.

"A device has to be primarily designed for the purpose of circumvention, or marketed for circumvention."

So... if I happened to write, say, code to drive a coffee machine, but it also happened to have 'features' to crack e-book encryption and add the ability to embed fonts, it would be OK? :)

It's primary purpose would be, after all, to make me some java. =)

- Jester

Writing drivers is a helluva lot more easier in Linux than Windows. I think you'll find the Linux driver model is much less convoluted than VxDs and the new and overly complicated and thoroughly convoluted WDM. See here for details.

RedHat Hardware Channels
http://www.redhat.com/marketplace/channel_hardware . tml
(among others, there are Dell, Egenera ..)

Linux Hardware
http://www.linuxhardware.org/

Linux at IBM
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/

Linux at Compaq
http://www.compaq.com/products/software/linux/

It is a safe assumption that hardware from the 2 above manufacturer will be well supported, since they are supporting Linux heavilly.

Last but not least, make sure to read the Howto:
Linux Hardware compatibility HOWTO http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/

The trouble is, if 60 days isn't enough time to audit 25,000 machines it sure as hell isn't enough time to convert them to Linux.

60 days may be very little time, but its not an impossible feat to install linux. With tools like Norton Ghost (which also supports linux now) or redhat kickstart, all you need is 20 apprentices and 20 cds of cloned linux images, and you could accomplish 60 computers per hour, if each load only takes 20 minutes to map(assuming good cd-rom drives). HEck, you can send each apprentice to labs of say 30 computers and that lab can be finished in 20 minutes with 30 cds. Wow, that's 20 techies each finishing 30 computers per 20 minutes, which ends up being 1800 computers per hour! A lot better odds when compared to the required 17/hr just to make it in 60 days.

Do the math and you'll see that with enough CD-Rs, enough apprentices, and and a well planned image (or sets of images for specific labs) this is just an annoyance like MS. However, this may require extra DHCP,NFS,etc servers or special configurations specific to each subnet. But I'd say anyone managing 25,000 computers prolly has this covered. Plus, switching to linux might be better in the long run for better structure and user management than winblows2k, but that depends on the capabilities and organization of the admins. Some of us are pretty lazy! :)

The annoying part will come when you have to pry all those users off of MS Word and standardize Abiword or StarOffice into the structure. They won't like it.

Of course, they could make their lives a lot easier and just pay the money.

Anyhow, it's 9pm on the west coast so no real point in changing titles

Yes, it is not like anyone who reads Slashdot actual uses a TiVo or anything similar like ATI All-in-Wonder or Creative Labs Video Blaster DVR software. And do not let the existence of a VCR HowTo in the offical Linux HowTo's lead you to believe that there are still others who plan to watch the episode later that might hate you for the choice of article title.

But it is just TV, after all

Cute--apologize and then do a 180 degree with an excuse. Either apologize or try to save face with a lame excuse but do not try to do both. The fact is that content has certain values. For a large number of people the content of the X-Files has a great deal of value despite it's method of distribution being merely "TV." On the other hand, some content increases noise to signal. The maintainers of Slashcode are aware of this fact and put in an responce rating system which helps deal with "first post" and "me too" postings. Another issue is content which has a damaging value such as flamebait posts. This story including the *title* of the story would fall in the catigory of having damaging value. And since the title is part of the problem and gets replicated to several other pages through-out the web, you have probably also negatively effected the content of hundreds of pages through-out the internet. But Slashcode does not provide a rating system to reduce exposer of damaging Slashdot titles. And your responce to the issue is:

Excuse your actions as not being intentional

Excuse your actions based on the show's past content not having value to you (rating it as annoying)

Two word attempt at accepting responsablity with "my bad"--is that even a complette sentence?

Excuse taking corrective steps based on the time of day

Excuse taking corrective steps based on the fact you "loathe" doing so

Provide a "big" apology

Provide a "big overall" apology

Excuse your actions as only effecting "TV, after all"

Can you honestly not see how much of a meaningless "big" apology you provided?! If you want to try to save face with a bunch of pointless excuses then do not title it "I'm really very sorry" because it is clear your not. If you where sorry then you would *DO* something about it.

Maybe this would be useful during late night warthog jumping. practice.

For eeproms only a well presented one is here

For flash and eeproms Willem has the original hardware design with source available - dos is only a port away?

With that is the later version of the above Willem program with windows software available as freeware.
The board (double sided) for this is available fromWillem, contact him through his site or via the forum
There is a single sided version available, it's just rather cramped. The site is spread over several ISP's so you'll need to follow a few links to get a good grasp of whats there.

Finally a Linux one can be found through the Diskless HowTo. This won't do flash but has the linux software available as well as the design . It's the closest to open hardware that you'll find. While it may not have layout diagrams or photos, it's been around for a while so maybe someones enhanced it?

I'll admit two of those may be the simple ones you refer too , but the third - Willem or geocities will do flash, it has dos source available and does work. I've used it for flash as well as eeproms.
It'd be nice to see a linux port of it, save booting the dedicated 486 ;-)

And letting you have my /etc/passwd file does nothing harmful to me -- it's encrypted, right?!