Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?
"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.
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.
it's useful because it's a live cd.
no possibility of fucking up the filesystems.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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
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 ?
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!
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.)
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.
Yeah, ATiTool kills video cards. I know form first hand experience. ggrrmmble. 500% video card fried....
Slashdot 1|0 Productivity
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 ....
1) Create interesting bootable linux distribution
2) Get posted on front page of /.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
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.