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Overclockix 3.7 Released
prostoalex writes "Overclockix 3.7 is released, available via bittorrent. It's a live Linux CD with a bunch of utilities for 'torturing' the PC hardware, hence the name. The authors seem to take a reasonable approach on graphical desktop, cutting out what they consider unnecessary eye candy, but leaving in the tools essential for effective GUI. 'Some new package highlights such as knoppix firewall, vlc, superkaramba, KDE 3.3.1, newer 2.6.7 kernel, NX client, and many more', the site says."
Is Windows ME on there?
Why is this being posted just now? Not that this isn't really interesting, but the link says it was released on December 7th...
thisnukes4u.net
does anybody have a bootable CD with dnetc client :)
2.6.7 I hope you don't try an xfs filesystem or a nforce2 system on this kernel. woo superfase lameness
Why include KDE then? Why not something lighter like fluxbox, rox, etc?
I've been using Overclockix for a few months for Folding@Home. It is brilliant in that you can set up a Folding box that needs no HDD, and a keyboard/video/mouse only to configure the Folding client.
eclecti.cc
Do you remember the good old days? When software configuration had the power to wreak physical havoc on the machine components themselves?
:) slowly opened it's mechanical lid and began to shoot paper 10 feet out at amazing velocities.
ahhh, I recall a coworker telling me the other day about ancient IBM printers.
"Giant beasts!" they were described as. "Stacks of alternating row color feed paper as tall as a MAN!" he said. He was in school and was waiting in line to print out a program he held in his hands as several hundred punch cards. The woman at the front of the line inserted her cards and set the system running.
Apparently she sent some kind of malformatted instruction, because this printer (which was quite substantial in size itself - computers used to be so much more like washing machines and fridges didn't they
It took some time for an instructor to get called in to stop the madness, and apparently a good amount of paper had been blown through by that point ¦D
anyhow, the point of my story is a question. is it still possible to wreak havoc on modern PC's via non-bios software instructions? theoretically? without any physical hardware modification?
just curious =)
Superkaramba isn't unncessary eye-candy?
a beowulf cluster of Overclockix 3.7
Would the clockx go forward in time?
"anyhow, the point of my story is a question. is it still possible to wreak havoc on modern PC's via non-bios software instructions? theoretically? without any physical hardware modification?"
Hard Drives apparently need no help in that department.
I guess this is a fairly common story. We had high-speed line-printers at my college as well. Great fun was had when we wrote a program to send page feeds to the printer in an infinite loop. The paper actually arced through the air. The lab assistants were less than amused.
"is it still possible to wreak havoc on modern PC's via non-bios software instructions?"
Why don't you just blast the thing with a shotgun?
One of the biggest problems when overclocking is testing stability, and when you're running windows it's hard to tell just what is causing the instability. I think this will be very successful in the OC community because not only will it provide an environment to push the hardware, but it likely won't crash as randomly as windows does, won't require repartitioning to get into linux, and will probably generate more informative error messages if you push things too hard.
New to VoIP?
Making a Windows ME joke gets you modded as troll.
well, when I need to destroy the bad guy's PC it's likely he will have guards outside the door.
And it would have been a total waste of my time to buy this ninja outfit and grappling hook if I was just going to give away my position with a shotgun blast...of course, I suppose I could just carry a microwave gun, but have you priced those things lately?
I'm a ninja, man. Not bill gates!
Is this program useful to test system stability? I like to use cpuburn to see if my system can handle it like cooling.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Want to try making up a nice acronym expansion for Yggdrasil, which was one of the early distributions?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
You Gotta Get Da Really Awesome Super Intelligent Linux
"Burn-In", aka running new components at their max to get them to run faster, is complete hemp. There is no evidence to support this, and you are just decreasing your machine's life. However, burning-in can show a faulty components.
I will pass thanks :D
$7.95/mo hosting, 2.4GB disk, 120GB
Why don't you just blast the thing with a shotgun?
Compy 386 for sale!
Like used
Slightly Shotgunned
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Although I share your appreciation for the finer points of the 2.6.7 vintage, I feel that there are other vintages of similar quality that are underappreciated. For example, after a rough taste of 2.6.0 and its immediate successors---which apparently didn't much care for my USB bus---I settled on a lovely compile of 2.6.4 which I cherished for several months with nary a complaint.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
last time I tried overclockix, the distributed computing projects were pre set up to give some other guy 'arkayne' credit.
Skip that.
Nice troll, but no it doesn't need one standard distro. I use FC3 as my webserver because it is stable and is easy to set up even without GUI, I use Slackware for my firewall because the installer can run on a system with only 16 megs of RAM, I use LFS as my desktop system because I like to know how stuff works under the hood.
It wouldn't be possible to combine these, they each serve their own purpose. If you want something that is easy to use and tries to appeal to people who don't like diversity then use Linspire.
Damn 503's.
I feel ya my brother!
/me wonders what is considered unnecessary eye candy...
can u say "owned in 60-seconds" ? i yhowt ro. never run a live os booted from someone's cd.
For those of us who don't get the joke, this was the text of a fictional advertisement from HomestarRunner.com. It ran on Bubs' Concession Stand for Strong Bad's damaged computer after Bubs used his shotgun as an antivirus device.
Linky
I haven't thought about this in a while, and I know more about software and hardware. Maybe it's possible to constantly write data to a critical cluster of a hard drive so that the cluster goes bad prematurely and renders the drive useless? If the computer's fan is software-controlled then maybe you can shut it off and burn the system out? I remember somebody telling me a story about it being possible to blow out an old SoundBlaster card with proper instructions but that was a long time ago. And this is all assuming you want to actually kill the hardware. If you just mean wreaking havoc in general then I suppose you can just hook up another line printer and launch paper in the air still. And I am a person who feels the same about my hardware that people feel about their pets so this whole topic is somewhat disturbing to me.
In my high school robotics class, the robotic arms were controlled by big boxes which connected to ports on the back of the computers. You'd send data and receive status with functions like out(port, value) and in(port). If all else fails, you can hook one of these to the computer and program it to swing hard into the monitor. This is just sickening.
Why? Why whould having one distro be better? Would you like to run my cell-phone version of embedded Linux on your desktop? Would you like to run a mainframe version of Linux on your PDA? Would you prefer to run a Linksys SOHO firewall version on your Notebook? Do you really need to edit documents on your MP3 player?
Oh well, what the hell...
That is indeed something of a tortuous name.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The server's hardware is being tortured right now. It's totally slashdotted.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There I looked around and found this story about this utility called S2KCt used to supposedly cool some athlon processors by using the S2K bus disconnect instruction.
The guy writes how he simultaneously ran his utility that does a cpu burn-in and S2KCt and ended up with a burnt motherboard. He says his "converter" burnt. And he wasn't overclocking the machine at the time. He seems to know enough about heat management since he develops similar programs (see below on that). Then later, he says,using similar hardware he tried to test a later version of S2KCt and his motherboard died again.
So that is what I have recently heard about hardware being damaged by software. Also take note, since the author himself writes utilities that cool and stress the CPU he is not a totally unbiased source.Any computer engineers who can validate the story ?
Distro stands for "distribution". I would hardly call "Linksys SOHO firewall version" a distro (or even "version"). This is a customized OS designed for a specific purpose/device. However, there should only be one disro for desktops and one for servers. On desktops, lack of standardization is the main obstacle to Linux adoption.
I remember reading, years and years ago, about the possibility of damaging a floppy drive by sending it an instruction to access a non-existent sector, which would be beyond the reach of the drive's "arm" (?). I would think that the floppy controller would just return an error but, in any case, that's what the text said.
The same text also mentioned changing the display settings (frequency I guess would be the factor here) quickly and continuously.
I guess you could also wear out some things, like the hard drive or floppy drive, but that would require a long time (but who knows, maybe an attacker could do it over a weekend when the target computer isn't being supervised); I also assume you could damage the speakers, at the very least if its physical volume control is turned all the way up.
tmegapscm
I remember doing that (accidentally) a few times. Quite embarassing. But the really cool trick with some printers was to make themr actually "walk" across the room with a series of carefully timed carriage returns. Also you could get some printers to play music (of a sort).
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Meh.
You keep your single choice to yourself and let those who want and enjoy the freedom to create their own distributions do it. That's how innovations come about, you know.
Wait a sec... you're bill gates, aren't you? It was the no friends in the world that gave it away. Sorry, Bill, this ain't gonna be like Windows where it's your way or the hiway.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
haha yeah, use linspire you fucking monotone faggo
anyhow, the point of my story is a question. is it still possible to wreak havoc on modern PC's via non-bios software instructions? theoretically? without any physical hardware modification?
Sure! Just e-mail the (l)user of the computer that his computer has a nasty virus that can only be eradicated by doing <damaging action> to computer. You don't even need to write any machine code!
First, what's 'non-bios'? There seems to be nothing that only the 'bios' can do. If the BIOS can do something, the OS (or kernel drivers) can do it too, without any code from the BIOS. What's the difference?
What I remember is, years ago, there was a virus that re-flashed the BIOS with garbage, so it would fail to boot. (I think it's the CIH virus. Somewhere around 1999.) A lot of people had gone crazy, and had to call the customer support to replace the BIOS flash.
Well, if a 'user application' could wreck your (maybe modern) PC, then that's not a feature, that's a critical security threat. (A DOS attack, I guess.)
Well, some older CRT monitors could be damaged by giving them resolutions and refresh rates that they couldn't handle. There's a warning in one of the X man pages. The XF86Config one I suppose.
I had a KDS monitor that didn't come with instructions (that is I borrowed it from school) and one day I went to the library and when I came home it had stopped working. Anyway I took it apart and a little daughter board soldered on near where the horizontal refresh line came in (it had BNC connectors) had blackened itself. I would have fixed the board but the 8 pin chip that seemed to be the center of the board had been burned beyond recognition as had several small capacitors and the traces on the board. So I salvaged the flyback transformer, some power supply caps and left it for the trash men. I suppose that could have been caused by running it beyond spec, but I really don't know.
I am fed up of seeing this stupid comment on every other story posted in slashdot, and equally stupid replies by zealots who value "choice". There IS a standard distro. It is called Linux Standard Base. It is adhered to by Redhat and Novell and that means 99% of SUPPORTED workstations out there adhere to the standards. All the other distros, be it debian, gentoo, overclockix or whatever are either irrelevant (a distro to stress your hardware? Please...) or serve for a specific purpose (hobbyists, GPL freaks etc.). Just accept it and move on,
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah, ATiTool kills video cards. I know form first hand experience. ggrrmmble. 500% video card fried....
Slashdot 1|0 Productivity
Leaving out the unnecessary eye-candy? Wouldn't that be just about all of KDE? If they want to be truly thin, they can use twm. I don't get this contradiction though. KDE is anything but lightweight. Hell, even GNOME is lighter than KDE and it's still a beast.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
They're cutting out unnecessary eye-candy and throwing in superkaramba.
For the love of God, tell me what the unnecessary ones were.
Is what I'd consider including every GUI known to man! Drives me nuts.
Superkaramba is one of the most underutilized pieces of functional eye candy around (and so is the theme packaging format in 3.3! You can download single file *complete* themes now!).
Anyhow, I think more really is sometimes less.
Quack, quack.
That is the kind of mentality that prevents Linux from being adopted, especially on desktops. 99.9% users don't care about choice. They just want their computers to work and perform certain tasks.
Having many distributions creates these problems:
- Software that works on one distro might not work on another distro
- Task which is performed on one distro in one way is performed differently on anther distro. Therefore user can't accumulate Linux expertise.
- Different look and feel. Therefore user who has experience working with one distro feels uncomfortable with different distro.
Users dont care about choice? Are you for real?
I've used at least 10 different distros in the 8 years I've been running various linux boxes, be it server or desktop.
Would I still be using linux if I had been stuck with only 1 distro? No way.
Have you ever considered that sometimes parallel research and design can come up with better results? Sure, there is some duplicated effort, and some dev work gets overlooked and lost, but you get a stronger product in the end.
If everyone focused on one way of doing things, it doesn't mean that the end result is twice as good than if people focused on two ways of doing things.
Your Grandpa's Git Daughter Raised A Stupid Idiot Loser
Seriously though what you describe was called a 'paper throw' and probably ment the operators had set the thing up wrong ... basicly those old line printers had a control tape - a short length of paper tape with a bunch of holes in it, each time the page advanced a line the tape did too - the tape was the same length as a page (every time the printer had moved to a new page the tape had gone around once) - when the printer got a line to print it looked at the first character on the line (think fortran CC) and if it was a number N look at the Nth column in the tape and skip forward until it finds a hole in the tape in that column. So for example when you print labels you throw on a special tape with holes that match where the labels start etc etc and by convention '1' skips to the start of the next page because column 1 always has exactly one hole punched in it that lines up with the start of the page - you get the idea.
So what's a 'paper throw'? well if the operators ever put on a tape that has a column M that has no holes punched in it anywhere and someone prints a line that sais 'skip to column M' the tape spins forever without printing anything and paper streams (horizontally) out of the printer missing the basket that's supposed to catch it ....
Yes, most users don't care abut choice. Average shashdotter is not an average user.
Have you ever considered that sometimes parallel research and design can come up with better results?
Yes. There are advantages to having several approaches to the same problem and developing them in parallel. However, disadvantages far outweigh advantages. Having one single standard design is more important than having best design. Moreover, open source projects have very limited resources and it is better not to spread them among projects solving the same task. If projects working in parallel join, they are usually able to achieve more than each of them separately.
Given the fact that a pyramid scheme is guaranteed to leave the vast majority of the people who get sucked into it with absolutely nothing, do you actually expect you have a good chance to get your free stuff? What makes you luckier than the next guy?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
YOU GIBBED ME D00D!!
Corporate workstations, sure. Home workstations, hell no - no way in hell that RedHat and SuSE have 99% coverage.
;)
Hell, I doubt they even have 99% in the 'real world', I've known Slackware nuts who would leave bodies on the floor if anyone approached their sacred boxxen while wearing a goofy crimson hat.
At any rate, even RH and SuSE differ in where they're tossing stuff, what stuff they include, what they don't.
Like the spoon, there is no 'standard' distribution.
You fail to see is that some of the "non standard - unsupported" linux distro's are a lot better then commercial distro's and infact some have better support. Where is the Linux Standard Base to claim a standard btw?
A lot of attached devices have replaceble firmware. Modems, routers, graphics cards, DVD burners, cameras etc. Sometimes the firmware download functionality is built into the firmware, meaning that a failed firmware update may prevent a new update attempt. I know one such example were a camera went tits up after a failed firmware update. It had to be sent in for repair which turned out to be quite expensive. Also I have heard of graphics cards which was rendered useless by a firmware update. Another not so scary example is some SpeedStream routers which will have to be reset on a physical button after a failed firmware update.
knoppix with "readahead" and "bootchart" makes quick boot from CD and visualize the result.
e x-en.html
http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/readahead/ind
"readahead" is a tool to populate the page cache with data from files so that subsequent reads from these files will not block on disk I/O.
"bootchart" is a tool for performance analysis and visualization of the GNU/Linux boot process.
Face it, >99% of supported workstations run Windows or some proprietary Unix. The Linux Standard Base means zip. I use Debian, and think Debian should not necessarily follow LSB unless everyone truly thinks it is the best thing to do from a technical/engineering viewpoint.
Debian is the mothership. Within 20 years, almost all computers will run Debian or a derivative, because the "gravitational" gradient points toward Debian. Economic forces ultimately cannot be resisted, and the existence of Free software will make it impossible for similar proprietary software to generate revenue. The financial impetus to use Free software will become increasingly compelling in the next few years, and the obvious choice will be Debian.
The newer processors have thermal detection - if it gets too toasty, it'l overheat (although you might beable to change the critical point)
'Completely agree with your point---that is, as long as the "distro" (i.e. LFS) I use becomes the standard distro. Anyone who says otherwise is a dim-wit.
It's like trying to choose a standard language---it's not going to work, just as Esperanto didn't.
PS. Gosh, we can't even choose a standard unit system (one thing that might have the most benefit from having a uniform standard)! And I'm not talking about U.S. using "feet" and "miles"---even in scientific fields, SI isn't as standard as some would have the laypeople believe. However, in different specialized fields (spectroscopy, electrodynamics, etc.) there are "dominant" unit system (because that particular way of writing things out turns out to be convenient)---in the end, the best thing to do is let things be; and may the best distro/project win!
Well, no corporation would consider anything but Novell and Redhat, let's say, for the sake of being complete, Xandros and Sun JDS.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
1) Create interesting bootable linux distribution
2) Get posted on front page of /.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
### Why whould having one distro be better?
It would mean that one Linux would finally be compatible to another one, as it stands now you have a very hard time getting a binary build on distro X to run on distro Y.
### Would you like to run my cell-phone version of embedded Linux on your desktop?
Nope, but thats not the point. For different purposes, different Linux distros might make sense, however today we have multiple dozens of distros that serve *exactly* the same purpose.
If you plan to use it with several sensors it is a wonderful application.
I'm pretty sure it's the chernobyl virus, and a very nasty fellow it was. Whilst it technically doesn't "damage" anything, when the bios is soldered on it can cost more to reflash it than to get a new motherboard. It's still knocking around, and still works, but widespread antivirus and the lack of floppy-trading since the rise of the internet have made it pretty uncommon.
I am trolling
I had an old Centronix line printer that was like that. except much smaller but if you even touched the FF button it would shoot a stream of greenbar wide carrage paper 6 feet in the air before it arced back to the ground.
I wasted many a case of paper aiming that printer and cart at the doorway at work and holding down the FF button just as a co-worker walked through it.
I really miss the ability to print a 600 line bash script and not be fast enough to get to the printer that is behind you fast enough before it stopped printing.
Those were REAL printers. and yes, IBM still makes something like them... and they do look like washing machines.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Does anyone consider Mandrake main stream anymore? I thought it was cool and considered going back since I don't really want to reinstall Fedora ever 6 months... seeing how each new Fedora version takes a month to install and get used to...
Hah. I can beat that. Back in the 1970s, there was a high-speed printer at my college that had the characters on a chain that would run by the paper horizontally. A hammer in each column would hammer the paper against an ink ribbon that ran between the chain and the paper, thus leaving an imprint on the paper. The series of characters was repeated twice on the chain, so by studying a printout of all of the characters very carefully, I was able to determine their sequence on the chain. I wrote a program that would print out a line such that all the hammers would be activated at the same time. When the printer tried to print that line, it made a big "KA-THUNK!" noise, and jammed the paper in the printer, with the result being somewhat opposite the arcing effect that you have described i.e., the bottom feeder continued to feed paper into the printer, but nothing came out of the printer. When the printer was deactivated and the door openned, the paper resembled an abstract orgami sculpture. After a couple of such incidents, they modified the printer driver to specifically detect character sequences that would have this effect.
Yes, I was a bad boy in college.
"99.9% users don't care about choice."
Fine. Those 99.9% can use RedHat (or Beanie, or Derby, or whatever it's called these days). The rest of us can pick and choose.
Esperanto failed because it's loaded with biases. For example, it places too much emphasis on gender. Also, some of the consonants are difficult to pronounce for some people (e.g., rolling Rs for native English speakers, the R/L difficulties for native Japanese speakers, etc.). In addition, many of the words are derived from those in existing languages. For a language to be successful, it will have to be designed totally from scratch, have logical and consistant semantics, and be easy for people to pronounce, no matter what their native language is.
--
By modding this post down, you certify under penalty of perjury that you lick public urinals.
There was a fairly short period in computer history where we were foolish enough to have BIOS chips that were both soldered on and flashable. I can't think of a modern board that doesn't have a socketed BIOS.
Personally, I don't know why we don't go back to non-flash BIOS, or enable a locking mechanism on the chip. There's nothing in there I would want to be able to rewrite from the operating system on a regular basis.
Ya see, the best thing to do is get 40 gmail accounts and set them all to fowarding to your mums email address, then use them to get mailing listz
Wow....drunk much?
Anyways to answer a few things that have been mentioned... DC apps are preconfigured but the configs are in the ramdisk so its not all that hard to change them. I generally include scripts which reconfigure them and restart them using atyhe newly-generated config. I try stick some instructions about this stuff on KDE's desktop in a folder aptly named Info. Also, I've been putting the default configs outside the clooped filesystem so ppl can edit the iso before burning to change the default DC application configurations for their own use. P.S It's pretty clearly stated that the distro has these apps included and runs folding@home automatically. Its also as easy as "foldoff" to kill the process. WM's- Overclockix has fluxbox and icewm and xfce. The older 3.4 version even have Gnome. You enter a code when booting to use these instead of KDE. Also there's an app in the menu to switch even when running live from the CD. KDE was the logical default choice since its the most popular and most widely-used desktop environment, and my target users are tend to be new to linux. Eye-candy: Lately for eye-candy I use just a single added icon theme and the inclus (not running by default mind you). There are some added KDE service menus for ease of use, and transperancy-configured terminals, backgrounds set for icewm and fluxbox... but not much else. To counter-balance, I disable a lot of services I think most ppl won't be interested in on a live CD. When you come right down to it, Overclockix is Knoppix with a little face-lift, some extra tools for stress-testing and distributed computing nuts, and slighttly different package selection whuich includes some popular user-reqit's more up-to-date on the whole than Knoppix is, being upgraded to Debian unstable packages.
And yes, I'm a hobbyist. An inital release like 3.7 is almost guarunteed to have a coule of broken features. Which reminds me an update release for Overclockix 3.7 will probably hit the net in a few weeks.
I remember seeing tables full of really cheap high end motherboards (like $5-$10) at a computer hsow I went too back around '99. The catch was they all had stickers on them saying somthign to the effect of "this motherboard may be infected with the CIH virus"
Not on a regular basis, but I've been pretty glad I could reflash my bios when I've upgraded to a bigger hard drive and not had it all recognised. Maybe a bios protection jumper that you had to remove before being able to reflash would be a good idea though.
I am trolling
They removed unnecessary eye candy... ok, cool. But the package highlights list includes Superkaramba?
Hmm.. ok... from the Superkaramba website:
"SuperKaramba is, in simple terms, a tool that allows you to easily create interactive eye-candy on your KDE desktop."
I guess that makes it necessary eye-candy? These guys seem to have a pretty confused goal...
Ha! You sound like the BOFH who did this to a "user" at least once an episode.
Assuming YGGDRASIL ~= Overclockix... YGGDRASIL Gormly Groks Daunting Recursive Applications Stressing Integrated-circuit Logic
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Linux Standard Base is a standard, not a distro, as far as I can tell. There is a reference implementation, but that's all.
I had the same problem with a 15" KDS monitor which I too didn't have a manual for (similar to your appropriation of said device!)
It showed pretty patterns for a few seconds at higher resolutions in X, then promptly fizzled out to nothing.
i hate pansy republicans
Welll I did in 1989 threaten to reprogram a Alpha/Delta 3000 (what a P.O.S )
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Also you could get some printers to play music (of a sort).
I have a CD from the experimental surf group "Man or Astroman" called "A Spectrum of Infinite Scale."
There is a tune on it called "A Simple Text File" which is a dot matrix printer producing music.
More music, fewer hits