Why do you need a warranty for an IBM laptop. According to their commercials, they have an internal shock absorber that will brace for impact. You don't have anything to worry about.
In yet another sign that the apocolypse is upon us, Debian unstable actually had KDE 3.3 last week. I am glad they are finally pushing the edge with that repository rather than having unstable mean "not as stable as stable" and of couse stable meaning "running packages from 3 years ago". Those of us who choose to run unstable know what the word means and we are willing to chance it.
If you have a spare machine laying around and a TV capture card. Then you have to go through the nightmare of setting it up.
So if I can go out and get a Motherboard, Processor, Fan, RAM, hard drive, NIC, TV Capture card and anything else that makes this run and have it come in at least $30 less than a new Tivo (as low as $149 at times), then sign me up.
The reason I say $30 less, is that is what it would take for me to justify the headache of setting it up.
Otherwise, I will quit worrying about having 27 Linux boxes laying around to replace all my household appliances and just go spend a little money for something that works right out of the box.
In a perfect world, I agree that we (IT Pros) should not have to fork out our money for company time. In my personal case, I get my cell expensed, but I would be a liar to say that the majority of my home broadband usage is for the company VPN so that never crossed my mind to get that expensed.
But the sad fact of the matter is that it is an employer's market out there right now. So if you don't want to tow the company line, no matter how crooked it may be, there is some desperate unemployed soul out there who will work for less money than you and pay for his own cell phone ready to take your place.
Because of the way this industry is right now, the employers have the employees by the balls in many cases.
I feel your pain. The problem you will run into is that even if you get a D-Link, Linksys, or Netgear, some of them may use the same chipset. I tried the D-Link first because it was cheap. It used the Prism2 chipset. But after reading every bit of documentation, and trying it as both a module and in the kernel under about 10 configuations I gave up. It seems like getting these cards to work is hit or miss for a lot of people based on all the posts I read. And believe me I read a bunch.
Then I tried a Linksys that I use on my work XP laptop. No dice there. I forget the chipset on that one, but I had the Linksys WPC11 v4 which apparently has little or no support on Linux.
So finally I decided to just bite the bullet and get a Cisco Aironet 350. If you buy these new, they are over $100. But if you go to Ebay, you can get one for around $50. All you do is compile the support in the kernel and it works like a champ. I have set it up successfully on both Debian and Gentoo.
So Cisco is the easy way to go if you can get a good deal. I would avoid the Linksys card I tried, but apparently versions prior to v4 work better. You can give the D-Link or Netgear a shot with the Prism2 chipset, but you may have to work at it a while to get it working.
I happen to agree here. Having the choice to play flash games if you want is fine. The problem I have is that when I go to certain pages with Mozilla that use Flash, the browser locks up and I have to kill it.
If this new version fixes all that, that is cool. But as of right now, I just don't use it. And if I go to a page that uses it, I just do without that Flash content. My browser is much more stable that way.
Re:Nice, but about those 802.11a/b/g cards...
on
Open Source Hotspots
·
· Score: 1
I tried two Prism2 cards. I tried them as modules, built into the kernel both 2.4 and 2.6, and I could never get them to work. I went on Ebay and got a Cisco 350 series card, popped it in the machine, recompiled the kernel with the Cisco card options and it worked first try.
If anyone every wants to save some time, that is the way to go.
Re:Off thread but needing help figuring out distro
on
Fedora Core 2 Review
·
· Score: 1
The 3 easiest to learn are probably Mandrake, Fedora, and SUSE. But with that you lose some of the customization capabilities you mentioned.
My personal choice is Debian. You may get the comments about the installer being hard, but there are plenty of HOWTO's on the net to guide you through it. But if you can get it up and going, you can customize til your heart's content, and updating is a breeze with apt-get install && apt-get dist-upgrade. Plus, all it puts on there is what you tell it to put on there. So you can just apt-get install openoffice, xmms, and whatever PDF viewer you like and go to town.
Gentoo is a good distro as well, but I just think it is easier with a laptop to just use Debian since most everything you do is.deb binary packages and you don't have to put a lot of strain on a mobile CPU and battery compiling source code all the time. But if you don't mind that, Gentoo is a great distro as well.
You may just want to give FC2 a shot and see what happens.
If you really like Slackware, I would think you would rather look at Gentoo. Fedora is a pretty good distro, but I would not call it no frills and lean. It does a lot of stuff for you in the initial install, like putting the default Bluecurve desktop, loading extra packages you may not want, and the like.
You can always customize later, but I like Gentoo and Debian personally because you can customize from the start.
My 2 cents is Fedora is a good distro for laptops, and desktops you don't want to spend all day configuring. But if you want to get hardcore, you would probably want to look to Gentoo as a Slackware alternative.
I use Debian and Gentoo personally, but I have experimented with Fedora.
No flames please, just my personal opinion in response to a specific question.
Yes there is, didn't you see that episode of South Park where the FBI came storming through the window to bust the kids for downloading music.
Then they took them around to all the celebs houses and showed how Lars Ulrich could no longer put the marble tile around his pool at his mansion because of illegal music downloading.
Absolutely. I understand that you have to offer certain consumers a way to use their exising software on Linux. But I wish more time was spent distancing Linux from Windows and just write new stuff that is F/OSS from the get go.
People are always writing emulators and clones and so forth for Windows apps. If I wanted to run those apps so bad, I would just use Windows and make it a lot easier.
I want something new and fresh and native to my open source OS.
Yeah, Comcast is really on a roll today. I think they have another big announcement later where in order to better service their customers they would like to raise rates and reduce channels.
They will follow that up by telling young children that there is no Santa Clause.
I tried the Linksys and D-Link cards and both were a pain and I could not get them to work. All the modulating and rigging etc did not make them work. So as a helpful tip, go get yourself a Cisco Aironet 350 off Ebay. Support is built right into the kernel. It worked first try. Do that and leave your XP days behind.
I agree. People think they are bound to what the OS maker gives them on their ftp site. You can upgrade your kernel, run the latest packages, do whatever you want. All you have to do is know where to get it.
Slashdot users have always made it a point of not liking "the viral nature" of Windows.
So I guess we all have something in common there with Bill.
Re:Congratulations
on
Usenet Audio
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Usenet should not even be used as an April Fool's joke. You can take my P2P and my WWW, but leave my Usenet alone. This is the last bastion of the original "Internet" yet to be totally whored out to commerce and regulation. Please keep it on the dl.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a new one. We are talking about how evil Best Buy is and so the solution is to recommend Wal Mart??
Why do you need a warranty for an IBM laptop. According to their commercials, they have an internal shock absorber that will brace for impact. You don't have anything to worry about.
It is almost impossible to get mplayer on debian. I have not had much luck. When I did use it, I downloaded all the packages and built my own .deb.
http://www.princessleia.com/MPlayer.html
By chance have you tried VLC.
http://www.videolan.org/
That one is kept in the main Debian repositories.
In yet another sign that the apocolypse is upon us, Debian unstable actually had KDE 3.3 last week. I am glad they are finally pushing the edge with that repository rather than having unstable mean "not as stable as stable" and of couse stable meaning "running packages from 3 years ago". Those of us who choose to run unstable know what the word means and we are willing to chance it.
And yes, I am a Debian user.
If you have a spare machine laying around and a TV capture card. Then you have to go through the nightmare of setting it up.
.
So if I can go out and get a Motherboard, Processor, Fan, RAM, hard drive, NIC, TV Capture card and anything else that makes this run and have it come in at least $30 less than a new Tivo (as low as $149 at times), then sign me up.
The reason I say $30 less, is that is what it would take for me to justify the headache of setting it up
Otherwise, I will quit worrying about having 27 Linux boxes laying around to replace all my household appliances and just go spend a little money for something that works right out of the box.
I don't think you can freeze Linux. Penguins are used to freezing temperatures.
In a perfect world, I agree that we (IT Pros) should not have to fork out our money for company time. In my personal case, I get my cell expensed, but I would be a liar to say that the majority of my home broadband usage is for the company VPN so that never crossed my mind to get that expensed.
But the sad fact of the matter is that it is an employer's market out there right now. So if you don't want to tow the company line, no matter how crooked it may be, there is some desperate unemployed soul out there who will work for less money than you and pay for his own cell phone ready to take your place.
Because of the way this industry is right now, the employers have the employees by the balls in many cases.
Just hold it in India. What better representation of the Tech/IT industry could there be.
War'getting_a_life and leaving the electronics at home every now and then.
"Jim, this river is wonderful. Have you ever,..you know,....done it in a kayak. Not now Tracy the signal just went up to 79%."
I feel your pain. The problem you will run into is that even if you get a D-Link, Linksys, or Netgear, some of them may use the same chipset. I tried the D-Link first because it was cheap. It used the Prism2 chipset. But after reading every bit of documentation, and trying it as both a module and in the kernel under about 10 configuations I gave up. It seems like getting these cards to work is hit or miss for a lot of people based on all the posts I read. And believe me I read a bunch.
Then I tried a Linksys that I use on my work XP laptop. No dice there. I forget the chipset on that one, but I had the Linksys WPC11 v4 which apparently has little or no support on Linux.
So finally I decided to just bite the bullet and get a Cisco Aironet 350. If you buy these new, they are over $100. But if you go to Ebay, you can get one for around $50. All you do is compile the support in the kernel and it works like a champ. I have set it up successfully on both Debian and Gentoo.
So Cisco is the easy way to go if you can get a good deal. I would avoid the Linksys card I tried, but apparently versions prior to v4 work better. You can give the D-Link or Netgear a shot with the Prism2 chipset, but you may have to work at it a while to get it working.
Hope that helps.
Welcome to Slashdot. A nice friendly community where you can bash Microsoft and talk about the wonders of Linux and Open Source Software.
Just don't ask for help on because you will be called stupid and ridiculed for wasting everyone's time.
That is always my favorite troubleshooting answer.
"It works fine for me, I don't know what your problem is?"
I happen to agree here. Having the choice to play flash games if you want is fine. The problem I have is that when I go to certain pages with Mozilla that use Flash, the browser locks up and I have to kill it.
If this new version fixes all that, that is cool. But as of right now, I just don't use it. And if I go to a page that uses it, I just do without that Flash content. My browser is much more stable that way.
I tried two Prism2 cards. I tried them as modules, built into the kernel both 2.4 and 2.6, and I could never get them to work. I went on Ebay and got a Cisco 350 series card, popped it in the machine, recompiled the kernel with the Cisco card options and it worked first try.
If anyone every wants to save some time, that is the way to go.
The 3 easiest to learn are probably Mandrake, Fedora, and SUSE. But with that you lose some of the customization capabilities you mentioned.
.deb binary packages and you don't have to put a lot of strain on a mobile CPU and battery compiling source code all the time. But if you don't mind that, Gentoo is a great distro as well.
My personal choice is Debian. You may get the comments about the installer being hard, but there are plenty of HOWTO's on the net to guide you through it. But if you can get it up and going, you can customize til your heart's content, and updating is a breeze with apt-get install && apt-get dist-upgrade. Plus, all it puts on there is what you tell it to put on there. So you can just apt-get install openoffice, xmms, and whatever PDF viewer you like and go to town.
Gentoo is a good distro as well, but I just think it is easier with a laptop to just use Debian since most everything you do is
You may just want to give FC2 a shot and see what happens.
If you really like Slackware, I would think you would rather look at Gentoo. Fedora is a pretty good distro, but I would not call it no frills and lean. It does a lot of stuff for you in the initial install, like putting the default Bluecurve desktop, loading extra packages you may not want, and the like.
You can always customize later, but I like Gentoo and Debian personally because you can customize from the start.
My 2 cents is Fedora is a good distro for laptops, and desktops you don't want to spend all day configuring. But if you want to get hardcore, you would probably want to look to Gentoo as a Slackware alternative.
I use Debian and Gentoo personally, but I have experimented with Fedora.
No flames please, just my personal opinion in response to a specific question.
Yes there is, didn't you see that episode of South Park where the FBI came storming through the window to bust the kids for downloading music.
Then they took them around to all the celebs houses and showed how Lars Ulrich could no longer put the marble tile around his pool at his mansion because of illegal music downloading.
They are out there, just waiting.
Can't you see we are busy bashing M$ here.
Slashback is about WinXP SP2 not Gent.., oh wait, sorry about that.
You are correct. I use Mozilla on Linux. And certain flash pages lock it up. So my solution, I just don't run flash.
Now I don't have to kill my browser process because a flash page locked it up. It also runs much faster on said pages.
If I miss out on some content, so be it, but I will take the hit in the interest of my browser not crashing.
Absolutely. I understand that you have to offer certain consumers a way to use their exising software on Linux. But I wish more time was spent distancing Linux from Windows and just write new stuff that is F/OSS from the get go.
People are always writing emulators and clones and so forth for Windows apps. If I wanted to run those apps so bad, I would just use Windows and make it a lot easier.
I want something new and fresh and native to my open source OS.
Yeah, Comcast is really on a roll today. I think they have another big announcement later where in order to better service their customers they would like to raise rates and reduce channels.
They will follow that up by telling young children that there is no Santa Clause.
I tried the Linksys and D-Link cards and both were a pain and I could not get them to work. All the modulating and rigging etc did not make them work. So as a helpful tip, go get yourself a Cisco Aironet 350 off Ebay. Support is built right into the kernel. It worked first try. Do that and leave your XP days behind.
I agree. People think they are bound to what the OS maker gives them on their ftp site. You can upgrade your kernel, run the latest packages, do whatever you want. All you have to do is know where to get it.
You might be giving them too much credit. I think stable still runs 2.2. I use unstable which is still more stable than Windows.
Slashdot users have always made it a point of not liking "the viral nature" of Windows. So I guess we all have something in common there with Bill.
Usenet should not even be used as an April Fool's joke. You can take my P2P and my WWW, but leave my Usenet alone. This is the last bastion of the original "Internet" yet to be totally whored out to commerce and regulation. Please keep it on the dl.