I have one of these and it's just great. I have three of the extended life batteries and I can get nearly three hours use out of any one them without any low power modes and whilst installing software (with all the drive churning that involves). I imagine I'd get at least four hours with low power modes and all the other doobries switched on.
Getting it running Linux is easy, even the winmodem is supported (see the Linux laptops list for more info). Spec-wise it's fine (800x600 screen, the whole machine is about the size of an A4 sheet; P3-500, 128Mb ram, 12Gb hard disk). They're getting kinda scarce now, but I have seen them going in some discount stores for fire-sale prices, and there's always Ebay.
This whole licensing thing goes back to the arguments a few months back about software freedom==GPL or software freedom==free to choose licence. I heavily lean towards the latter.
Don't get me wrong, I love open source software, use it every day of my life, and I'm starting to dabble in development. And when I do, everything I do will be GPLd. I get really annoyed by companies ripping off GPLd software.
But... As an awful lot of commercial firms are showing, it's very, very hard to make money out of GPLd software. As long as this firm are within the legal limits of the GPL as regards to the modifications they're making to WINE, I say all power to them. Let the market judge whether they should succeed or not.
As to how useful this is... Several people have discussed doubt about the fact that DirectX is a moving target. Well, given the slowness inherent in even the best-written software emulation, I suspect that won't be a problem; ultra-new games are going to be a bit too slow to play, anyway. However, I have a massive library of DirectX games I'd love to unlock that would be very playable. In fact, I've been looking long and hard at DosEMU lately, and I suspect it's probably now easier to make really old DOS games work under Linux that under Win2k.
This article raised an issue that I'm getting increasingly interested in: water cooling. True, as esr hints, this used to be the domain of the lunatic fringe of overclockers, throwing together bits from Home Depot and old car radiators.
But! You can now buy off-the-shelf parts (here, for example) that all work together and can just be bolted together. You can build sealed systems, removing the risk of spills if you move the machine and meaning you don't have to top the system up to allow for evaporating levels. You can get dinky little 120mm radiators which can be fitted inside the case, meaning the entire system can be self-contained. And if the system is well-built enough, the risk of a joint bursting and soaking your motherboard is a lot less than your HSF falling off and frying your Athlon.
Balanced against that, you can get cooling performance superior to a fan-based system and a hell of a lot quieter. And the disadvantages of watercooling will only get less as they become more and more commoditized.
I totally agree; I've spent time working on a 21" monitor, and a couple of dualhead setups (writing this on a 17" and 15" combination because I'm a poor student) and the dualhead ones are much better. Apart from anything else, I seem to just prefer the 8:3 aspect ratio; it seems much more useful to have that much width. Even with a big 21", I have loads of overlapping windows, it's just that each app has a bigger window. With two monitors, each app still has a decent window, but I can easily run two side-by-side.
Re:The benefits of a custom compile
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 1
Well, just FYI, I have 256Mb of PC133 RAM and a 7200rpm IBM hard disk. Actual compile time was 48 minutes. You ought to be done by now:o)
The benefits of a custom compile
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 1
For some time now, I've been meaning to grab the Mozilla sources so I can try Galeon out again. So, as the new version is out, I thought I'd give it a go.
First off, what it cost me in resources: I grabbed about 150Mb of source off CVS, but it was compressed. Normal Mozilla source tarballs are 35Mb so it was probably about that amount that I actually downloaded. It took a little short of half a gig (!) of disk space for the compile, and it took about three quarters of an hour to compile on a 1Ghz Duron using this configure line:
./configure --enable-xinerama --disable-debug "--enable-optimizations=-O4 -finline -fno-omit-frame-pointer -march=pentiumpro -mcpu=pentiumpro" --disable-mainnews (most of which I snagged from some earlier/. poster, thanks!)
Secondly, what I gained over just using the normal build: Xinerama no longer makes my fonts go to comedy oversize on certain sites (reported here). But, more interestingly, Mozilla is definitely a lot snappier to use. Menus open quicker, I swear pages render faster, and it's all around more responsive.
Now to wait for a fresh Galeon to try out...
Re:Let's hope I can bid on ebay with 0.9.5
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 1
Seems to be working for me just fine. And the new tabs are pretty cool, too.
I have recently graduated as a joint honours physics and computer science person from the University of Cardiff, here in Wales. This means I (nominally) spent 50% of my time doing one subject and 50% the other, and the difference in the attitudes to teamwork was quite marked.
In physics, we were encouraged to work through problem sheets in a group whenever we wanted; it was just the Way Things Worked. We didn't have to acknowledge it or anything. I actually got the distinct impression that the tutors didn't think we did enough of it.
In compsci, for all of our work except one piece we had to sign a "this is all our own work" disclaimer, and cheats who got caught were treated pretty harshly. Although there was, of course, some informal discussion it was pretty frowned upon.
The exception was the specific group project which we did in the second year, which which nominally of eighty hours length; we were divided up into groups of six or so, given a fairly meaty project, and we had to organise ourselves and work through it.
Personally, I thought the group project was very worthwhile. It was designed to be a mirror of conditions in industry (right down to slackers in the group!) and it was a fair stab at that (I've also worked out in the Real World), although of course it wasn't perfect.
This group project system is pretty common in the UK, IBM run a nationwide inter-University competition around it. The best group from each University gets an all-expenses-paid trip on behalf of IBM to a two- or three- (I forget) day competition. The winners get to take brand new Thinkpads home, so it's pretty decent. My team didn't get in though:o(
Two months? Blimey. I've worked in the nuclear power industry (fuel modeller for British Energy here in the UK) and that's a hell of a long unplanned outage. Our managers would have been hopping mad over that. What went wrong, if you don't mind me asking?
Tell that to Kyle Bennet over at HardOCP... As detailed here, you can cook them all too easily. Quote from that page:- "AMD has told us in CERTAIN TERMS that the 1GHz TBird WILL BURN UP IN EIGHT SECONDS without proper cooling."
Gigihertz chips were expensive when that happened, too.
How long does your machine take to power down, and what CPU do you use? As indicated in that article and elsewhere, P3 and P4 chips are pretty much immune to overheating, but a 1Ghz Tbird Athlon will be dead inside 8 seconds and a 1.4Ghz chip *1 second*.
Motherboard monitor only scans the hardware for changes in values every 5 seconds or so. Even if that catches it right after the heatsink falls off, you still won't get much further than Win98's "Shutting down your PC" screen before the lightshow starts and your CPU goes China syndrome.
Oh, and Linux boxen can, indeed, be convinced to do the same thing with clever use of lm_sensors but as indicated above, if the heatsink falls off and the machine is powered off, it won't do diddly squat.
On a related note, I once ran my Celeron 433 with just a heatsink, no fan, to see if my enormous Globalwin heatsink was up to the task. It did about 5 minutes of Prime95's torture test before it hit 65degC and was still climbing; at that point I got nervous and switched it off. This would suggest to me that a stopped fan is much, much less catastrophic than a fallen-off heatsink. Let's just hope that more and more SocketA heatsinks are the screw-to-motherboard type.
Anyone wanting to get up to date with the SOTA in cooling should hit Anandtech.com's latest roundup, which is a pretty good summary of all those whacky overclocking HSFs.
Yeah, my mistake, I phrased that comment badly. I'm well aware that E is actually very old; I was running it before Gnome even existed, and possibly before KDE, although my memory is hazy.
The point I was clumisily driving at is that, at least from the tone of the/. story (I still can't get through to osnews.com), E seems to be shifting focus slightly, from windows-manager-with-knobs-on to full-fledged desktop. Admittedly, you could turn it into a full-fledged desktop before, but it took time and effort; however the amount of time and amount of effort drops all the time. And, with E's history of power and configurabilty, I have fairly high hopes that it will have all the features I want from Gnome, and all the features I want from KDE, and then I can stop having difficult choices to make about which desktop to use.
As for contributing... I'd love to, and hopefully, once I'm a few months into my PhD my C/C++ skills (which are currently pretty ropey) will have advanced to the point were I can. And I will, because I'd love to be involved in something like this.
first, its osnews.com, not osopinion.com Oopsie, well spotted, that'll teach me to rely on my memory.
second, E has been around as long as KDE/Gnome. I know, I was using it before Gnome existed... But I'll save my comments on this to the next reply I'm about to write, to someone who isn't a flame-happy troll.
Someone sent me this link, and I was surprised to find osopinion.com down. Then I thought to check/.s front page. Total lack of surprise when I saw the link;o)
On the subject of Yet Another Linux Desktop: well, I'm excited to try it out, but I'm starting to get annoyed by it too. I've spent the last year and a bit flip-flopping back and forth between Gnome and KDE because neither has all the fetures that I want; I feel like I'm being offered a compromise, not a choice. I'm not entirely sure a third option is going to help things unless it REALLY kicks ass. Time will tell.
An ex-collegue of mine left to go work in ST Micro's drivers department about a year ago. I looked him up not long after when the original Kyro was released; at the time, he was doing driver development for the KyroII. He mentioned then that ST Micro were working on a Kyro-with-T&L part, but didn't mention any ship dates.
I did get the impression that is wasn't going to be that far behind the KyroII though. So, we might have a T&L enabled card sooner rather than later, which will be pretty sweet. In the meantime, I think the KyroII will be the perfect stopgap between my Geforce 1 DDR, which is starting to look a little long in the tooth, and a Geforce 3, which will be an almighty card once DirectX 8 has some proper software support.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Welsh gods for my home LAN. Arawn, coincidentally, is my router :o)
So I discovered about 15 minutes of posting my original comment. I hate being stuck offline for a week at a time.
| Details censored in accordance with the US DMCA
Huh? What gives here? This sounds juicy.
A gaggle of cheerleaders in Tux costumes.
Getting it running Linux is easy, even the winmodem is supported (see the Linux laptops list for more info). Spec-wise it's fine (800x600 screen, the whole machine is about the size of an A4 sheet; P3-500, 128Mb ram, 12Gb hard disk). They're getting kinda scarce now, but I have seen them going in some discount stores for fire-sale prices, and there's always Ebay.
Don't get me wrong, I love open source software, use it every day of my life, and I'm starting to dabble in development. And when I do, everything I do will be GPLd. I get really annoyed by companies ripping off GPLd software.
But... As an awful lot of commercial firms are showing, it's very, very hard to make money out of GPLd software. As long as this firm are within the legal limits of the GPL as regards to the modifications they're making to WINE, I say all power to them. Let the market judge whether they should succeed or not.
As to how useful this is... Several people have discussed doubt about the fact that DirectX is a moving target. Well, given the slowness inherent in even the best-written software emulation, I suspect that won't be a problem; ultra-new games are going to be a bit too slow to play, anyway. However, I have a massive library of DirectX games I'd love to unlock that would be very playable. In fact, I've been looking long and hard at DosEMU lately, and I suspect it's probably now easier to make really old DOS games work under Linux that under Win2k.
But! You can now buy off-the-shelf parts (here, for example) that all work together and can just be bolted together. You can build sealed systems, removing the risk of spills if you move the machine and meaning you don't have to top the system up to allow for evaporating levels. You can get dinky little 120mm radiators which can be fitted inside the case, meaning the entire system can be self-contained. And if the system is well-built enough, the risk of a joint bursting and soaking your motherboard is a lot less than your HSF falling off and frying your Athlon.
Balanced against that, you can get cooling performance superior to a fan-based system and a hell of a lot quieter. And the disadvantages of watercooling will only get less as they become more and more commoditized.
I totally agree; I've spent time working on a 21" monitor, and a couple of dualhead setups (writing this on a 17" and 15" combination because I'm a poor student) and the dualhead ones are much better. Apart from anything else, I seem to just prefer the 8:3 aspect ratio; it seems much more useful to have that much width. Even with a big 21", I have loads of overlapping windows, it's just that each app has a bigger window. With two monitors, each app still has a decent window, but I can easily run two side-by-side.
Well, just FYI, I have 256Mb of PC133 RAM and a 7200rpm IBM hard disk. Actual compile time was 48 minutes. You ought to be done by now :o)
First off, what it cost me in resources: I grabbed about 150Mb of source off CVS, but it was compressed. Normal Mozilla source tarballs are 35Mb so it was probably about that amount that I actually downloaded. It took a little short of half a gig (!) of disk space for the compile, and it took about three quarters of an hour to compile on a 1Ghz Duron using this configure line:
./configure --enable-xinerama --disable-debug "--enable-optimizations=-O4 -finline -fno-omit-frame-pointer -march=pentiumpro -mcpu=pentiumpro" --disable-mainnews
/. poster, thanks!)
(most of which I snagged from some earlier
Secondly, what I gained over just using the normal build: Xinerama no longer makes my fonts go to comedy oversize on certain sites (reported here). But, more interestingly, Mozilla is definitely a lot snappier to use. Menus open quicker, I swear pages render faster, and it's all around more responsive.
Now to wait for a fresh Galeon to try out...
Seems to be working for me just fine. And the new tabs are pretty cool, too.
In physics, we were encouraged to work through problem sheets in a group whenever we wanted; it was just the Way Things Worked. We didn't have to acknowledge it or anything. I actually got the distinct impression that the tutors didn't think we did enough of it.
In compsci, for all of our work except one piece we had to sign a "this is all our own work" disclaimer, and cheats who got caught were treated pretty harshly. Although there was, of course, some informal discussion it was pretty frowned upon.
The exception was the specific group project which we did in the second year, which which nominally of eighty hours length; we were divided up into groups of six or so, given a fairly meaty project, and we had to organise ourselves and work through it.
Personally, I thought the group project was very worthwhile. It was designed to be a mirror of conditions in industry (right down to slackers in the group!) and it was a fair stab at that (I've also worked out in the Real World), although of course it wasn't perfect.
This group project system is pretty common in the UK, IBM run a nationwide inter-University competition around it. The best group from each University gets an all-expenses-paid trip on behalf of IBM to a two- or three- (I forget) day competition. The winners get to take brand new Thinkpads home, so it's pretty decent. My team didn't get in though
Ah, yeah, that'd do it. I presume this is on a PWR too, just to make the pain worse? Ouch.
Two months? Blimey. I've worked in the nuclear power industry (fuel modeller for British Energy here in the UK) and that's a hell of a long unplanned outage. Our managers would have been hopping mad over that. What went wrong, if you don't mind me asking?
Gigihertz chips were expensive when that happened, too.
Motherboard monitor only scans the hardware for changes in values every 5 seconds or so. Even if that catches it right after the heatsink falls off, you still won't get much further than Win98's "Shutting down your PC" screen before the lightshow starts and your CPU goes China syndrome.
Oh, and Linux boxen can, indeed, be convinced to do the same thing with clever use of lm_sensors but as indicated above, if the heatsink falls off and the machine is powered off, it won't do diddly squat.
On a related note, I once ran my Celeron 433 with just a heatsink, no fan, to see if my enormous Globalwin heatsink was up to the task. It did about 5 minutes of Prime95's torture test before it hit 65degC and was still climbing; at that point I got nervous and switched it off. This would suggest to me that a stopped fan is much, much less catastrophic than a fallen-off heatsink. Let's just hope that more and more SocketA heatsinks are the screw-to-motherboard type.
Anyone wanting to get up to date with the SOTA in cooling should hit Anandtech.com's latest roundup, which is a pretty good summary of all those whacky overclocking HSFs.
Yeah, my mistake, I phrased that comment badly. I'm well aware that E is actually very old; I was running it before Gnome even existed, and possibly before KDE, although my memory is hazy.
The point I was clumisily driving at is that, at least from the tone of the
As for contributing... I'd love to, and hopefully, once I'm a few months into my PhD my C/C++ skills (which are currently pretty ropey) will have advanced to the point were I can. And I will, because I'd love to be involved in something like this.
first, its osnews.com, not osopinion.com
Oopsie, well spotted, that'll teach me to rely on my memory.
second, E has been around as long as KDE/Gnome.
I know, I was using it before Gnome existed... But I'll save my comments on this to the next reply I'm about to write, to someone who isn't a flame-happy troll.
idiot.dumbass.
Both sound conclusions.
Someone sent me this link, and I was surprised to find osopinion.com down. Then I thought to check /.s front page. Total lack of surprise when I saw the link ;o)
On the subject of Yet Another Linux Desktop: well, I'm excited to try it out, but I'm starting to get annoyed by it too. I've spent the last year and a bit flip-flopping back and forth between Gnome and KDE because neither has all the fetures that I want; I feel like I'm being offered a compromise, not a choice. I'm not entirely sure a third option is going to help things unless it REALLY kicks ass. Time will tell.
/query NickServ /query ChanServ
Heehee :o)
An ex-collegue of mine left to go work in ST Micro's drivers department about a year ago. I looked him up not long after when the original Kyro was released; at the time, he was doing driver development for the KyroII. He mentioned then that ST Micro were working on a Kyro-with-T&L part, but didn't mention any ship dates. I did get the impression that is wasn't going to be that far behind the KyroII though. So, we might have a T&L enabled card sooner rather than later, which will be pretty sweet. In the meantime, I think the KyroII will be the perfect stopgap between my Geforce 1 DDR, which is starting to look a little long in the tooth, and a Geforce 3, which will be an almighty card once DirectX 8 has some proper software support.