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Over the course of the last month or so, I've been collecting Laptop questions and have been holding onto them trying to figure out the best way to post them. I've now decided that the way to do this that would be the most effective would be to ask a real generic question and then post the individual problems separately in the article proper. The topic this time is: "Linux on Laptop's" If you've had problems installing Linux on Laptops, or weird Linux problems on laptops, then this one's for you! Click below. ...continued...

Alright! There are some specific questions below but any questions and answers on laptops are welcome here!

Kyri Sarantakos asks "I'm looking to buy a laptop and I want to know if any fellow ./'s have any suggestions as what brands work well with linux out of the box. Is there anyting I should know? or avoid?"

s.blood wants similar information, but also wished to know this: "I'm in need of a laptop to run Linux and I was wondering what kind of experience other users have had. Is it best to put more money into CPU performance, RAM, or the display?"


and this one from David Wagle with a NEC 330T problem: "I got a brand new NEC 330T on the basis that previous Versa laptops have worked great with Linux cardservices. Unfortunately, that isn't the case here. Upon inserting the card - I get the approporiate "loading eth0" message and the card initializes. Then, however, the card simply drops. This happens intermittently, and I can not correlate it to anything in particular. The ethernet pcmcia card is a 3com 3CXE589DT, and this SAME card works fine in a toshiba in the cube down the hall. I am using RH5.1, with the 3.0 pcmcia package. The controller chipset is a 02 Micro 02 6832/6833 controller."

So we've played Civilization. We've played Sim City. We've played WarCraft, WarCraft II, StarCraft, Command & Conquer, Rebellion, Xcom, Diablo, and Grand Theft Auto. And finally now I realize what we need: SimHood. It fakes an inner city neighborhood. With an interface somewhere around WarCraft II meets Grand Theft Auto, you can choose to play the Cops, The Gangstas or the Mafia. You can train the boyz in your hood to deal drugs (more points for selling to children!) as the Mafia you can extort "Protection" in your neighborhood while controlling lucrative monopolies in various industries. And as the cops you can embezzle from the state, while raising a corrupt army of boys in blue, specially trained to do your will. It's all about creating environments populated with cheezy stereotypes anyway. Just imagine head to head gameplay! After watching several room mates lose their lives to playing Grand Theft Auto, I figure its either going to be SimHood, or else they'll wait until when GTA2 comes out, supporting exciting new features like 'Rape' and 'Dismember'. What ever happened to tetris?

Several folks asked for it, so I figured I'd quick whip up a review of the first full length CGI film from PDI. Hit the link below to read my take on it. Ok I'm a computer geek. And a film geek. And an animation geek. So if a company is going to release a full length CGI film, I'll probably go see it. And if you get Woody Allen and Christopher Walken to do voices, I'll probably enjoy it. Even if Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone and Gene Hackman to provide most of the rest of the voices.

So here's the deal:the story is something anyone could write. I can imagine the day they got Woody Allen to play to role of the lead Ant. "Ok, guys? We've got Woody. Go watch a few of his movies, and then write a script tomorrow. We go into production next thursday". Don't get me wrong. The movie is funny. Definately a notch above typical children's animation. But the Woody Allen dialog is just rehashed from other places. If you enjoy that, you'll love the movie. After an hour and a half, the novelty of a CGI Woody might wear off. But don't worry, various dirty jokes and references have been scattered about to balance the Allen bits.

Anyway, the plot. 'Z' is Allen's charachter. He is a worker ant. He meets Princess Bala at a bar (in a scene basically identical to every other 'princess rebels from her role in the royal household and secretely runs off to be rebellious with the commoners' scene that you've ever seen). Z falls in love (of course) and to get a chance to see her again, he switches places with his Solider ant buddy (Sly's charachter- possibly the best mouth CGI I've ever seen) and gets accidentally sent to war.

So there's a corrupt general trying to overthrow the queen. There's a special placed called 'Insectopia' located far away. There's an amazing adventure on the surface. There's lots of cheezy sequences where ants try to rebel from the role they've been cast into (Worker ants vs. Soldier ants). Zillions of shots designed to hammer into the audience that this movie is talking about Community vs. Individuality. The good of the one vs. the needs of the many. The Team vs The Star. Yada yada yada. It gets somewhat tiring at points as the theme his hammered on the viewer over and over aqain, but the good bits outnumber then bad.

The cinamatography is great. Working on a film of this scale must be great fun for a director. He can do anything he wants. Amazing pans and impossible camera angles. Gigantic shots. War sequences that look a lot like Starship Troopers, except with Ants & Termites instead of beautiful Fox TV show stars and gigantic metal bugs.

The animation is excellent. Not necessarily better than Toy Story, but excellent. The backgrounds, rendering, shading and lighting are all a notch above TS. Visually the movie is a treat, some absolutely amazing special effects, including some excellent CGI water shots that will really make ya feel wet.

The voice actors are all fine. Allen does his neurotic New Yorker bit the whole way through (the film starts with him talking to his therapist). The rest of the Stars are just doing their normal schtick just like Woody. It's fun, but except for Stallone, none of the voices are really standout. It's just that the charachters aren't all that interesting.

Anyway, its worth the price of admission if you enjoy Woody Allen, CGI, or Disneyesque cheezy fluffy movies (especially without the cheezy fluffy Disneyesqye songs). I happen to be a fanatic of all 3, so I loved it. But I'm terribly biased- if Full House had been produced as CGI, I probably would have liked that too.

It has been a grey, rainy day over here, and I needed a little sci-tech to brighten my day up. So, in a bow to people working in the other cool technology, I figured this would be an interesting subject. A group of scientists have breed hybrid poplar trees that essentially suck heavy metals and other such goodies out of the earth, using phytoremediation. The poplar stores the pollutants in the cellular strucute, metabolizes it to something less toxic, and releases it into the air. The gene to handle all of this was originally taken from a strain of bacteria. Mmm...gene splicing.

Richard Harmon writes in with this bit of networking trouble: "I'm trying to set up a linux firewall at my office, but I can't get the forwarding to work. I've tried ipportfw, but it acts like the packets don't match the masq' rules or something. I can't figure out a way to have the smtp, pop3, imap, x.400 and so on forwarded /through/ the firewall with NAT (network address translation).. I basically want my firewall to sit on the mail sever's old (outside) IP, and then when it recieves network traffic on that IP to forward it to our internal network (192.x.x.x). HELP!!!

Michael Wood writes in with a problem I myself have experienced from time to time. Here's it is: I've recently installed RedHat 5.1 on a pentium ii w/ 64 MB ram, S3 Virge/GX AGP video card, and SB AWE 64. X (or Linux or something) seems to be very unstable. If I start X, open an xterm and type "ls -lR /" (or various other commands) as a normal user the machine hangs solid after a small amount of output. I've done this a few times while trying to figure out what's going on, while running "while sync; do sleep 1; done" from a virtual console. While the while loop is running, the hard drive makes a noise every second as expected. When the machine hangs the hard drive is completely quiet, so it's not just X that's hung. Ctrl-Alt-Del does nothing. Keyboard leds do nothing. Can you help him out? Hit the link for more... ...Continued...
I've had no problems with the machine in text mode, although I haven't run any resource hungry, text mode programs.

The Xwrapper is suid root, but the X server isn't, right? So if the Xwrapper drops privs (which is it's whole purpose) the X server gets run with access to the console, but no other privs, right? So if the X server only has access to the console, can it cause the machine to hang? And if it can, SHOULD it be able to? This sounds like a kernel bug to me, but I don't know enough about such things :)

I've tried out Linux-2.1.121. It died after a few lines of output from 'ls -lR /' in an xterm.

I got hold of Metro-X from RedHat 4.1. This seems to be more stable. I managed to go all the way through an 'ls -lR /' It did hang once, though. Also, it doesn't support my video card, so I could only get 640x480x4bpp working. I was going to try the frame buffer thing and the frame buffer X server, but the only frame buffer X server I have found so far is one for 680x0. I'll probably give GGI and XGGI a try next, unless I can find an x86 frame buffer X server.

This is getting kind of long, but Michael and I have been back and forth on this one for a while, and I can't seem to figure it out. As an aside, I've had X crash badly on me 6 times in the past 2 years under suspicious (unexpected) circumstances, and it would be interesting to know if other people have experienced something similar.

Philipp Koehn wrote in with a piece addressing something that always seems to come up any time you start talking about free software. His piece is called Who is the Software Communist. It's a pretty interesting read, although I suspect that most readers will disagree with it. I figure we'll hear some opinions on this one. The following essay was written by Slashdot Reader Philipp Koehn Who is the Software Communist?

In the debate about open source software the term 'communism' comes up quite freuently. The funny thing is that both sides accuse each other of being the red danger. So what is going on?

Communism is this nice idea that a human society should not be ruled by greed and egoismus, but rather by everybody contributing an equal amount of work and sharing the results. Famous society hacker Karl Marx made the blue print, and we tried it. Now, after millions of people masacred, demoralized, and empoverished, it doesn't seem such a good idea after all.

One problem is: to insure equal and distribution everything has to be centrally planned by someone. Descisions are handed down just like by Bill Gates' Kremlin in Redmond: The proclamation of standards and software to be used from the Microsoft politburo. Leaving the trade press busy guessing the next steps of the big brother, but not questioning them.

So here we are the software freedom fighters, bringing back the right to speak up and tearing down the Berlin Wall of non disclosure agreements and closed source code. Winning back the power to the marketplace of ideas (or bazaar of ideas, if you want). Fighting the evil empire that is set to enslave us.

But there is also the other side of communism: the original idea of sharing, the distribution of goods to whoever needs them. And here the history lesson turns sour: The failure of communism indicates that this does not work. Most people don't want their equal share, and give without profiting. They want to have more. They want better cars, better houses and more shiny desktops than their neighbors. In this light the open source community is suddenly the ideal communist society that never worked on a large scale. It is too easily ripped apart by the capitalist world with its cheesy marketing appeal and cell phone envy.

So this will haunt the future of open source. The current idealism will not sustain. Historically, every spiritual movements is consequently taking over by people who take it for granted and use it for their advantage. Or, as put in "Trainspotting" more generally: everything ultimately turns to shit.

Right now we are still in the spiritual phase of the movement, with the main motivation being to build up the wave. Every big company domino that falls to Linux is greeted by cheer and excitement. Soon it will be everywhere. And then?

Cold realism will kick in. The most likely exploit of Linux will be in the field of distributions. Red Hat? Caldera? Suse? Debian? Well, nobody got ever got fired for choosing IBM Linux - of course with added value and glitzy marketing. Linux might shift away the power from Microsoft, but only into other - only argueable better - hands. Will the world be a better place? Maybe slightly, but this revolution, too, will eat its children.

Slashdot reader Brice Ruth has this question:

Since installing RedHat 5.1, I've been trying to find any kind of help in running iBCS. I realize that a package for iBCS is preinstalled with RedHat 5.1 (kernel-ibcs...), however, all attempts at running SCO binaries have failed. I HAVE been able to figure out that the reason it is failing is because I don't have libraries for the binaries. Let me rephrase -- I DO have the libraries, since I have access to a perfectly legal copy of SCO OpenServer, however, I have no idea where to place them and what directory structure is necessary so that they are found, etc. Two things would be quite helpful in my quest:

1. a good page that tells me all these things that I need to do
   
2. someone who has successfully used iBCS and is relatively familiar with the process in both SCO and Solaris.

If you have a question you would like posted to Ask Slashdot, then please send them to me. I would like to start posting more questions on a regular basis since Ask Slashdot is now its own section.

Robert Hale writes "This guy has rigged the old (non A) Celeron to work in SMP mode. He is currently trying to figure out how to do the same with the new A version. He is in Japan."

deathcat writes "This is an article on the eating habits of geeks and prop-heads. I got the link from this really cool newsletter Netsurfer Digest ." Add me to the list of unhealthy nerds. My groceries consist of 4 2 liters of mtn dew, a few microwavable pizzas, crackers, juice, a few cases of beer, M&Ms, chips, macaroni and cheese, and hamburger helper. I figure I've got at least a week to live.

YuppieScum sent us a link to a story on Yahoo about TI and their new .07 micron process for making even smaller microchips. I figure at this rate, we'll be able to implant whole P2s into professors soon.

Online communities seem to be the hot thing these days. Right now this article does a good job of looking over this not-so-new phenomena. I dunno-I guess I just figure we worked a lot of this out in the BBS days, and wonder what the big fuss is. Sure, graphics and such are neat, but how necessary are they to actual community? Being able to exchange ideas without rancor or reproach is what really matters I suppose.

The NSCA has done some not-very-novel research: build a cluster of computers and solve a parallelisable problem on it. The novelty? Well it runs on NT, so now Microsoft is crowing that NT is wonderfully scalable. As contributor Mark Harrison points out: "I figure if this NT cluster is using NT Server, which it must if it it is using more than 10 TCP/IP connections per node (I know nothing about these parallel systems, but with 124 two-processor nodes, each node must communicate with more than ten other nodes). NT server costs a bunch (about $1,000 per licence, I believe), so the cost is $124,000 for the OS. So much for their tagline, "High-Performance Supercomputing at Mail-Order Prices." How about "Save $123,975 on your supercomputer -- Use Extreme Linux." " Well... it might be time to help Ben Elliston who presented his encapsulation of IP in SCSI in August's Linux Journal which has a higher throughput than ethernet.

SunWorld reviews the results of its poll on the importance of Open Source to developers Not surprisingly 96% of Linux users considered it important, but so did 77% of NT users, with an average of 69% of developers finding OpenSource very important to their work. Even managers like OpenSource, with 70% calling it very important versus 75% for sysadmins. GNU utilities took the king's place with 85% of cross-platform respondents using them. One interesting figure is that Linux is more prevalent in smaller companies while Solaris rules the roost of larger companies... so SunWorld named us a competitor to Sun. Thanks, Andrew Crump and Jim Kinney, for this one.

Mike Miller wrote in to tell us about Forbes Magazine running a poll to decide on your Internet Hero. For those who have paid attention, I have stopped posting polls because the Slashdot Effect was wrecking them for people, but this poll is a textual one. They ask you to write instead of just checking a box, so I figure we all can post good answers and not just skew things HtAD style. Questions include what 'net company will die first and who is your 'net hero.

Brian King writes "a thirteen year old jamaican has become the youngest government advisor ever, keeping the government up to date on technology. We should try to get his email address and send him the full scoop on linux, which would be the perfect network basis for a country with little money. what do you guys think?? Here is the story. "

Jon Squire writes "I figured I'd ask the well informed slashdot readers if anybody has heard of or is developing Voice recognition software for linux? I'm also interested in developing TV Tuner Support for the ATI All in Wonder if no-one else is doing it. "

JEDIDIAH writes " Does anyone want Westwood games on Linux? I dunno about the rest of you but, I sure do. I happen to rather like our games; that's why I work here. I just don't want to have to run 'that other operating system' to do it. So, as the resident Linux Zealot, I'm always trying to figure out just how I can get the rest of them (Westwood) to come around to my point of view... '-) Ideally, I would like to be able to walk over to Brett's office (Brett's our CEO) with a sufficiently large & verifiable list Linux users that are ready willing and able to buy his games such that he would have cause to pay some serious attention to us as a market. To that end I have posted a short, unofficial Westwood Games marketing survey This system is on a cable modem so please be patient if it falls under the slashdot effect. I only have a 64K outbound connection. Also, please do not indulge in forms of 'ballot box stuffing'. I need this information to be as accurate as possible. "

As many people can tell you, I love games. Stuff like this will get even more people involved, so go and register. Besides, Dune 2 is still one of the best games ever made.

Our network of informants let us in on this: Linus was recently interviewed by Boot Magazine, but the interview was only available in the print edition until now. Check out the interview. It's one of the best I've read in a long time. Also, Christopher Blizzard (a truly cool man) wrote in to remind us about the (free) conference between Linus and other prominent figures in the Linux community tomorrow. It will be held in Santa Clara, California, and will be hosted by The Sillicon Valley Linux User's Group.

Well, after yesterday's lifting of the injunction against MS much of the media is trying to figure out what's going on. And in related news, the DOJ's Joel Klein still thinks that the Department of Justice has a strong case against Microsoft in the anti-trust area. I dunno-how do you all think this will play out?