I built an Ubuntu 6.06 system that happened to have an ATI card in it. I was so impressed with the system that I decided to build a new system. Happy with the ATI card, I ordered an identical, brand-new card...only I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my new system because the SATA drives required a driver that wasn't in 6.06. I fought with the ATI drivers for over a week and never could get it to work. And I'm not the only one that had the problem between 6.06 and 7.10. The forums were running over with complaints, but solutions were few and far between.
After a solid week of late nights with the ATI card, I ordered an NVIDIA card. 7.10 picked up the card and installed the proper driver on the first shot. Never again will I buy an ATI card for a Linux system. The two cards costs about the same, but one is a hell of a lot more work to get going.
For all the Linux sucks with games stuff you hear, I play OpenArena on my LAN in a totally Linux environment and my kids and their friends love it. My kids also love xmoto.
"Fortunately the problem is easy to fix: encrypt TPMS data the way keyless entry systems do."
Yeah, encryption would stop the little hacker down the street and keep them from setting up a road side explosive set just for you, but it wouldn't stop the government -- who would mandate a backdoor -- from doing it.
And personally, I'm not really worried about the hacker down the street...if cars start blowing up I would bet money it would be government doing it...and not a foreign government, but our government (but of course, it would be blamed on terrorist and the population at large would give up ever last bit of the tiny amount of "freedom" that we have left to get those darn terrorist).
Personally, I've never really been scared by any of the things our government keeps telling me I should be terrorized by, but what really scares me is the bleak future I see for my kids and their kids...caused by our own Orwellian, all-powerful government.
The problem with Canopy, as it is designed, is that the tower sites cost a fortune because the APs only have 60 degrees of coverage and, as designed, it would take 6 APs (900.00 to 1,500.00 each) to have 360 degree coverage. But it is possible to connectorize the APs and use far less APs by adding antennas with more coverage. If you can stomach that, you can get client units for less than 300.00. And add an aftermarket sync unit (200.00 - 300.00), and you can have multiple APs and clients not interfere with each other (just hope the other guy in town with Canopy syncs his equipment).
Let me tell you, two to three times, I have been involved in a 2.4 build-out. Each time it went like this. You spend a lot of time and money going around and swapping out that "expensive" Canopy equipment for the much cheaper 2.4 equipment. Everything works fine for about four days to a week. You run back and swap a few people back to that "expensive" Canopy equipment for various reasons...but within six months, when the crap hits the fan for some reason, and you have to have help scrambling to find enough Canopy equipment to put everyone back on...because its the only thing that "just works." It may not be perfect, but it does work.
After it saves your ass a few times, that Canopy equipment doesn't seem so expensive.
Didn't read TFA yet, but I know this will work fine with two units, you just set one to provide sync. But if you have four units in an area, they can interfere with each other. What you can do then is add a gps unit to the AP side, sync to that, and all four units Tx/Rx at the same time. So MIT really just created a Wi-Fi Canopy system...or what WiMax will be if it is ever released.
The biggest issue is that 2.4, with only 3 non-overlaping channels, is it almost unusable for long distance shots. I'm working in a WISP that has some 2.4 and it will make you pull your hair out. At one tower, in somewhat of a rural area, we could see 121 different SSIDs from an omni antenna a couple of hundred feet off the ground.
At 500.00 a unit, I doubt this will see high deployment, but if all of these things don't play nice with each other, it will be yet more interference.
And last, 2.4 could already do ten miles easy already, and much cheaper. You could build a Mikrotik AP for 600.00ish and have 20 clients at 10 miles for 200ish a client unit, if they are all line of sight. But note that you have stretched 2.4 well beyound what it was designed for, and in no time you will understand exactly why WISPs startup and fold like crazy...and the only people who made ANY money are the ones who sold you the equipment.
With a class of 900 people, it would be 3. The one in 300 number in my subject was correct, but twice I managed to write 1 in 3 in the body. I was trying not to be late for work and just flat out missed my mistake. My bad.
Still, someone figure out how many terrorist were at the Super Bowl.
Seriously, I said all along that they didn't care anything about catching terrorist...that it was just smoke and mirrors to monitor us. And low and behold, they will get to monitor us legally, as one out of three of us is a terrorist.
If this doesn't scare the hell out of you, I don't know what will.
Having a Wal-Mart as the ONLY place for electronics in my town, and having even worked there at one point in my life, I must say I think a lot of people on here must never have been to one. For starters, there is no "support" or training at Wal-Mart. Stuff comes in on a pallet, they set it in the floor in the middle of the night, and someone stocks the shelf. If you are lucky enough to find an employee in the day time, about the best you will get from them is where the product is located. That is how they keep prices low. There is no support or training. From time to time, you will find someone in electronics that knows a little something, as I even worked in electronics from time to time...but let me assure you, they don't go out of the way for that to happen.
Yeah, Microsoft keeps locking it down, and then backing off on the lock-down right at the last moment. What we need is a crack to turn the lock down back on in full force, not to totally bypass WPA.
Back in the day when there wasn't anything else, pirating copies of Windows was OK. Now that there are good choices, lock that bitch down hard and when you hear people PMS, tell them there is no WPA in Linux.
"PC World ran the final version of Windows Vista SP1 through a first set of tests last night. Here's the bottom line: 'File copying, one of the main performance-related complaints from Vista users, was significantly faster. But other tests showed little improvement and, in two tests, our experience was actually a little better without the service pack installed than with it.'"
1) IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sun...along with small businesses and individuals across the country (via the Ron Paul *Money Bomb* line of fund raising), do a flat-out hostile takeover of Intuit. 2) Quickbooks and TurboTax are ported to Unix/Linux under the GPL. 3) IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, etc., build a Linux application server tuned especially to offer up Quickbooks in a Remote Desktop style. 4) Offer said server on an easy to install LiveCD that lets everyone try it out and easily install it. 5) IBM, Sun, etc., make a huge amount of money selling enterprise ready QuickBooks servers. 6) Novell, Red Hat, etc., make a huge amount of money selling QuickBooks support. 7) All the small businesses save a ton of money not having to deal with QuickBooks forced upgrades and other shenanigans. 8) MS certainly isn't going to disappear, but they certainly feel a disturbance in the force -- as if a million people suddenly cried out Freedom!
If I go to register a domain host and see if a name is available, I should be the only one who can see that. Especially if you are checking on a domain register that has ssl. I could see checking on some odd web site, that was actually set up to farm domain names, but if you go to somewhere mainstream, it should be a given that nobody sees the lookup but you.
It is like self fulfilling prophecy. You use hidden cameras, key loggers, hook the employee up to heart monitors and watch their facial expressions, install GPS in their vehicles, tell them what they can't do when they aren't even at work, watch facebook and myspace in case someone slips up and has a little too much fun...and then they can't grasp why they can't find any good, happy employees.
I wonder what the employers will think when they find such a high percentage of their employees seem to be disgruntled? Or if they end up not using the software because they wouldn't be able to employee anybody if they did?
Dude, I should have made myself clear, but I expect some intelligence around Slashdot. I AM NOT A HARDCORE GAMER. I am not going to spend 273.00 for a video card, not because I'm high, but because I'm not high.
But it seems quite the contradiction I have run into, now. Linux runs great on older, slower computers, but a brand new 1.5 Ghz with a Gig of RAM is a completely worthless piece of shit, even with Linux on it???
It just so happens my kids are playing on an older computer right, with Linux loaded, and a video card that both supports 3D and has Linux drivers that actually work (And you can get these cards off of Ebay right now for 35.00, shipping included).
I guess my kids are high, or maybe smoking crack, but they have been having a blast playing X-moto, Billiard-GL, and a lot of other Linux games that require a card that can do 3D...and all of which should run just fine on my el-cheapo computer, if someone would just give me a driver for my video card that would support the 3D.
And if my el-cheapo computer, which seems to handle Vista fairly well, can't play some SIMPLE Linux games that happen to use 3D, then I think that would about sum up the state of Linux and why everyone hasn't switched to it.
It wasn't a 200.00 computer, if you actually read what I said, it was 273.00, and the video card on it does have 3D support. Do I expect it to be the world's greatest gaming system? Hell no. Would I expect 3D to work on it? Yes, I freaking do.
> If people were buying Linux systems, I don't think there would be a problem.
Actually, I purchased an Everex gc3502, which is basically identical to the 199.00 Linux computer they are selling at Wal-Mart, only mine had a gig of RAM and Windows Vista on it, instead of 512MB and gOS (Linux), otherwise it is identical. And I specifically purchased it because I wanted the extra RAM, to make a dual-boot system out of it (for the experience), and because I figured it shouldn't be too hard to find drivers for a system being sold with a Linux distro already on it. Ok, two out three ain't bad, I guess.
Read through Ubuntuforums.org and see all the people having trouble with cards that are supposed to do 3D but aren't for some reason. There are a large amount of posts.
My 1-month old new system has a VIA Chrome 9 HC IGP card. I've spent the last 2 days trying to get it to work on Ubuntu with something other than a generic VESA driver. I finally noticed VIA actually released a new driver on Dec 2007. I downloaded it and installed it. Still no 3D. After the second day of this, I said screw it and ordered an older card off of eBay that I know works because I have one in another system, but I still see people on the forums having trouble with even that card...so I'm thinking it is a crapshoot and hope I didn't waste more money.
There might be more interest in games if there was better support for video cards. Personally, I don't really mind spending two days to install a driver, because I usually learn a lot doing it. But how many people would rather spend those two days just playing the game they wanted to play?
I could do everything I need to do on a Win2K computer, and in fact, I still use it at work. I think there are tons of people like us. The other problem that gets people to upgrade is security, though. The world is a lot different than it was just 10 years ago. The problem is, those systems were very insecure to begin with, and the patches have either stopped coming or are very close to stopping. I occasionally still get people trying to use Windows 98 systems on the Net. That's fine, if you want to get owned in like five minutes (unless you have a good firewall, which most people don't). That's one reason MS quit issuing patches for stuff that old, because it was so fundamentally flawed to begin with, they couldn't even patch it without a complete rewrite.
I showed Ubuntu to a non-computer literate friend the other day. He wants me to install it for him, which scare me a little bit, but I will probably do it. How did I sell it to him? I showed him Firefox and then told him there was no spyware, no viruses, no virus scanners, no spyware scanners...and he was sold instantly, because he is sick to death of that on Windows.
I'm against stupid laws, but as long as some asshat is going to churn out a new one every five minutes, we need a couple of good ones:
1) Any DVD with multiple episodes on one disk should default to PLAY ALL, so when you can't find the damn remote, you can at least watch more than the first episode.
2) Any sound that plays after a DVD ends, should, by law, only be allowed to play for five minutes or less, and then it should go silent.
With just these two laws, people might want to start visiting the US again.
I did figure out the issue of the SATA drive not showing up.
The Everex GC3502 Chipset is:
Northbridge: VIA CN896 Southbridge: VIA VT8237A
There is no support for this in 6.06 LTS. It will work fine as long as you install 6.06 LTS to an IDE drive, but the SATA drive will not show up during the install or after you boot up into Ubuntu. Install 7.10 and the SATA drive shows right up.
I ended up getting the 273.00 Everex at Wal-Mart and building an Ubuntu System out of an older computer for my kids, and actually the older computer has a lot more get up and go to it...but the Everex is ok for the money.
My kids love all the games on Ubuntu, too. Yeah, you can download free games on Windows, but I was surprised at the depth of some of the games, and installing a ton of stuff was as easy as clicking some check boxes and downloading the games.
I wanted one of the 199.00 Everex computers, but I didn't want to order one. And I wanted a system with 1 Meg of RAM in it, and the 199.00 system only has 512. I ended up with the 273.00 Everex from Wal-Mart. It has a Gig of RAM, instead of 512, and a licensed copy of Vista. I added two 160 Gig IDE drives and made my first dual boot system (and hope to boot into Vista as little as possible), but my second Ubuntu box. For what I paid, I'm really happy, but I still think it is a little underpowered, making me really glad I paid extra for the extra RAM.
The thing is slightly quirky, too. I ended up changing the boot priority of the hard drives to make the IDE master boot first. A couple of days later, it just totally lost this setting and I had to go back into the BIOS and reconfigure it.
There are also issues with Ubuntu and the SATA drive it came with. Only my IDE drives showed up during the Ubuntu install, and they do not show up in Ubuntu either. The SATA drive will show up in Ubuntu, however, if I change the SATA controller type to RAID instead of IDE in the BIOS...but this setting makes the system reboot when you try to boot Vista from the SATA drive (yeah!).
Now the dual boot system works the way I want, but what trouble would I have run into if I had just wanted to wipe the SATA drive and install Ubuntu on it? One reason I went with Everex is that they are selling basically the same system with Linux on it, so I figure I'm not going to have many issues installing Ubuntu onto it. I think I might have to rethink that one.
And for the not newbie friendly thread running here: Of all the things I have issues with, the one place I really think Windows is way ahead of Linux in ease of use, is if you add a hard drive to Windows, 99% of the time, it just shows up and you can use it. For the love of all things holy, I never understood why this can't be done in Linux.
If it is a security issue, I wish it would just just do something like this, "a new drive has been detected, would you like the drive secure and locked down, or do you want to just use it? press Y for a usable drive, press N for a locked down drive."
You know, I can figure out a way to get something to work, but I don't think it is acceptable for someone to simply add a new hard drive and then have to spend 45 minutes to a couple of hours reading forums trying to figure out how to actually access it.
Slashdot Mirror
I built an Ubuntu 6.06 system that happened to have an ATI card in it. I was so impressed with the system that I decided to build a new system. Happy with the ATI card, I ordered an identical, brand-new card...only I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my new system because the SATA drives required a driver that wasn't in 6.06. I fought with the ATI drivers for over a week and never could get it to work. And I'm not the only one that had the problem between 6.06 and 7.10. The forums were running over with complaints, but solutions were few and far between.
After a solid week of late nights with the ATI card, I ordered an NVIDIA card. 7.10 picked up the card and installed the proper driver on the first shot. Never again will I buy an ATI card for a Linux system. The two cards costs about the same, but one is a hell of a lot more work to get going.
For all the Linux sucks with games stuff you hear, I play OpenArena on my LAN in a totally Linux environment and my kids and their friends love it. My kids also love xmoto.
transporter_ii
Laugh-a while you can, monkey boy!
"Fortunately the problem is easy to fix: encrypt TPMS data the way keyless entry systems do."
Yeah, encryption would stop the little hacker down the street and keep them from setting up a road side explosive set just for you, but it wouldn't stop the government -- who would mandate a backdoor -- from doing it.
And personally, I'm not really worried about the hacker down the street...if cars start blowing up I would bet money it would be government doing it...and not a foreign government, but our government (but of course, it would be blamed on terrorist and the population at large would give up ever last bit of the tiny amount of "freedom" that we have left to get those darn terrorist).
Personally, I've never really been scared by any of the things our government keeps telling me I should be terrorized by, but what really scares me is the bleak future I see for my kids and their kids...caused by our own Orwellian, all-powerful government.
transporter_ii
The problem with Canopy, as it is designed, is that the tower sites cost a fortune because the APs only have 60 degrees of coverage and, as designed, it would take 6 APs (900.00 to 1,500.00 each) to have 360 degree coverage. But it is possible to connectorize the APs and use far less APs by adding antennas with more coverage. If you can stomach that, you can get client units for less than 300.00. And add an aftermarket sync unit (200.00 - 300.00), and you can have multiple APs and clients not interfere with each other (just hope the other guy in town with Canopy syncs his equipment).
Let me tell you, two to three times, I have been involved in a 2.4 build-out. Each time it went like this. You spend a lot of time and money going around and swapping out that "expensive" Canopy equipment for the much cheaper 2.4 equipment. Everything works fine for about four days to a week. You run back and swap a few people back to that "expensive" Canopy equipment for various reasons...but within six months, when the crap hits the fan for some reason, and you have to have help scrambling to find enough Canopy equipment to put everyone back on...because its the only thing that "just works." It may not be perfect, but it does work.
After it saves your ass a few times, that Canopy equipment doesn't seem so expensive.
Transporter_ii
Didn't read TFA yet, but I know this will work fine with two units, you just set one to provide sync. But if you have four units in an area, they can interfere with each other. What you can do then is add a gps unit to the AP side, sync to that, and all four units Tx/Rx at the same time. So MIT really just created a Wi-Fi Canopy system...or what WiMax will be if it is ever released.
The biggest issue is that 2.4, with only 3 non-overlaping channels, is it almost unusable for long distance shots. I'm working in a WISP that has some 2.4 and it will make you pull your hair out. At one tower, in somewhat of a rural area, we could see 121 different SSIDs from an omni antenna a couple of hundred feet off the ground.
At 500.00 a unit, I doubt this will see high deployment, but if all of these things don't play nice with each other, it will be yet more interference.
And last, 2.4 could already do ten miles easy already, and much cheaper. You could build a Mikrotik AP for 600.00ish and have 20 clients at 10 miles for 200ish a client unit, if they are all line of sight. But note that you have stretched 2.4 well beyound what it was designed for, and in no time you will understand exactly why WISPs startup and fold like crazy...and the only people who made ANY money are the ones who sold you the equipment.
Transporter_ii
Where is badanalogyguy when you really need him?
Transporter_ii
With a class of 900 people, it would be 3. The one in 300 number in my subject was correct, but twice I managed to write 1 in 3 in the body. I was trying not to be late for work and just flat out missed my mistake. My bad.
Still, someone figure out how many terrorist were at the Super Bowl.
Transporter_ii
Needed with 1 in 300 being a terrorist
With one out of three people being a terrorist, I think we should all be gratefull that they are doing whatever it takes to get their jobs done:
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/spying/watchlistcounter.html?=main
Seriously, I said all along that they didn't care anything about catching terrorist...that it was just smoke and mirrors to monitor us. And low and behold, they will get to monitor us legally, as one out of three of us is a terrorist.
If this doesn't scare the hell out of you, I don't know what will.
Transporter_ii
Having a Wal-Mart as the ONLY place for electronics in my town, and having even worked there at one point in my life, I must say I think a lot of people on here must never have been to one. For starters, there is no "support" or training at Wal-Mart. Stuff comes in on a pallet, they set it in the floor in the middle of the night, and someone stocks the shelf. If you are lucky enough to find an employee in the day time, about the best you will get from them is where the product is located. That is how they keep prices low. There is no support or training. From time to time, you will find someone in electronics that knows a little something, as I even worked in electronics from time to time...but let me assure you, they don't go out of the way for that to happen.
Yeah, Microsoft keeps locking it down, and then backing off on the lock-down right at the last moment. What we need is a crack to turn the lock down back on in full force, not to totally bypass WPA.
Back in the day when there wasn't anything else, pirating copies of Windows was OK. Now that there are good choices, lock that bitch down hard and when you hear people PMS, tell them there is no WPA in Linux.
Transporter_ii
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/07/1911213
"PC World ran the final version of Windows Vista SP1 through a first set of tests last night. Here's the bottom line: 'File copying, one of the main performance-related complaints from Vista users, was significantly faster. But other tests showed little improvement and, in two tests, our experience was actually a little better without the service pack installed than with it.'"
1) IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sun...along with small businesses and individuals across the country (via the Ron Paul *Money Bomb* line of fund raising), do a flat-out hostile takeover of Intuit.
2) Quickbooks and TurboTax are ported to Unix/Linux under the GPL.
3) IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, etc., build a Linux application server tuned especially to offer up Quickbooks in a Remote Desktop style.
4) Offer said server on an easy to install LiveCD that lets everyone try it out and easily install it.
5) IBM, Sun, etc., make a huge amount of money selling enterprise ready QuickBooks servers.
6) Novell, Red Hat, etc., make a huge amount of money selling QuickBooks support.
7) All the small businesses save a ton of money not having to deal with QuickBooks forced upgrades and other shenanigans.
8) MS certainly isn't going to disappear, but they certainly feel a disturbance in the force -- as if a million people suddenly cried out Freedom!
If I go to register a domain host and see if a name is available, I should be the only one who can see that. Especially if you are checking on a domain register that has ssl. I could see checking on some odd web site, that was actually set up to farm domain names, but if you go to somewhere mainstream, it should be a given that nobody sees the lookup but you.
Transporter_ii
It is like self fulfilling prophecy. You use hidden cameras, key loggers, hook the employee up to heart monitors and watch their facial expressions, install GPS in their vehicles, tell them what they can't do when they aren't even at work, watch facebook and myspace in case someone slips up and has a little too much fun...and then they can't grasp why they can't find any good, happy employees.
I wonder what the employers will think when they find such a high percentage of their employees seem to be disgruntled? Or if they end up not using the software because they wouldn't be able to employee anybody if they did?
Transporter_ii
Dude, I should have made myself clear, but I expect some intelligence around Slashdot. I AM NOT A HARDCORE GAMER. I am not going to spend 273.00 for a video card, not because I'm high, but because I'm not high.
But it seems quite the contradiction I have run into, now. Linux runs great on older, slower computers, but a brand new 1.5 Ghz with a Gig of RAM is a completely worthless piece of shit, even with Linux on it???
It just so happens my kids are playing on an older computer right, with Linux loaded, and a video card that both supports 3D and has Linux drivers that actually work (And you can get these cards off of Ebay right now for 35.00, shipping included).
I guess my kids are high, or maybe smoking crack, but they have been having a blast playing X-moto, Billiard-GL, and a lot of other Linux games that require a card that can do 3D...and all of which should run just fine on my el-cheapo computer, if someone would just give me a driver for my video card that would support the 3D.
And if my el-cheapo computer, which seems to handle Vista fairly well, can't play some SIMPLE Linux games that happen to use 3D, then I think that would about sum up the state of Linux and why everyone hasn't switched to it.
Transporter_ii
It wasn't a 200.00 computer, if you actually read what I said, it was 273.00, and the video card on it does have 3D support. Do I expect it to be the world's greatest gaming system? Hell no. Would I expect 3D to work on it? Yes, I freaking do.
> If people were buying Linux systems, I don't think there would be a problem.
Actually, I purchased an Everex gc3502, which is basically identical to the 199.00 Linux computer they are selling at Wal-Mart, only mine had a gig of RAM and Windows Vista on it, instead of 512MB and gOS (Linux), otherwise it is identical. And I specifically purchased it because I wanted the extra RAM, to make a dual-boot system out of it (for the experience), and because I figured it shouldn't be too hard to find drivers for a system being sold with a Linux distro already on it. Ok, two out three ain't bad, I guess.
Transporter_ii
Read through Ubuntuforums.org and see all the people having trouble with cards that are supposed to do 3D but aren't for some reason. There are a large amount of posts.
My 1-month old new system has a VIA Chrome 9 HC IGP card. I've spent the last 2 days trying to get it to work on Ubuntu with something other than a generic VESA driver. I finally noticed VIA actually released a new driver on Dec 2007. I downloaded it and installed it. Still no 3D. After the second day of this, I said screw it and ordered an older card off of eBay that I know works because I have one in another system, but I still see people on the forums having trouble with even that card...so I'm thinking it is a crapshoot and hope I didn't waste more money.
There might be more interest in games if there was better support for video cards. Personally, I don't really mind spending two days to install a driver, because I usually learn a lot doing it. But how many people would rather spend those two days just playing the game they wanted to play?
Transporter_ii
I could do everything I need to do on a Win2K computer, and in fact, I still use it at work. I think there are tons of people like us. The other problem that gets people to upgrade is security, though. The world is a lot different than it was just 10 years ago. The problem is, those systems were very insecure to begin with, and the patches have either stopped coming or are very close to stopping. I occasionally still get people trying to use Windows 98 systems on the Net. That's fine, if you want to get owned in like five minutes (unless you have a good firewall, which most people don't). That's one reason MS quit issuing patches for stuff that old, because it was so fundamentally flawed to begin with, they couldn't even patch it without a complete rewrite.
I showed Ubuntu to a non-computer literate friend the other day. He wants me to install it for him, which scare me a little bit, but I will probably do it. How did I sell it to him? I showed him Firefox and then told him there was no spyware, no viruses, no virus scanners, no spyware scanners...and he was sold instantly, because he is sick to death of that on Windows.
Transporter_ii
I'm against stupid laws, but as long as some asshat is going to churn out a new one every five minutes, we need a couple of good ones:
1) Any DVD with multiple episodes on one disk should default to PLAY ALL, so when you can't find the damn remote, you can at least watch more than the first episode.
2) Any sound that plays after a DVD ends, should, by law, only be allowed to play for five minutes or less, and then it should go silent.
With just these two laws, people might want to start visiting the US again.
Transporter_ii
I did figure out the issue of the SATA drive not showing up.
The Everex GC3502 Chipset is:
Northbridge: VIA CN896
Southbridge: VIA VT8237A
There is no support for this in 6.06 LTS. It will work fine as long as you install 6.06 LTS to an IDE drive, but the SATA drive will not show up during the install or after you boot up into Ubuntu. Install 7.10 and the SATA drive shows right up.
Transporter_ii
I ended up getting the 273.00 Everex at Wal-Mart and building an Ubuntu System out of an older computer for my kids, and actually the older computer has a lot more get up and go to it...but the Everex is ok for the money.
My kids love all the games on Ubuntu, too. Yeah, you can download free games on Windows, but I was surprised at the depth of some of the games, and installing a ton of stuff was as easy as clicking some check boxes and downloading the games.
Transporter_ii
I wanted one of the 199.00 Everex computers, but I didn't want to order one. And I wanted a system with 1 Meg of RAM in it, and the 199.00 system only has 512. I ended up with the 273.00 Everex from Wal-Mart. It has a Gig of RAM, instead of 512, and a licensed copy of Vista. I added two 160 Gig IDE drives and made my first dual boot system (and hope to boot into Vista as little as possible), but my second Ubuntu box. For what I paid, I'm really happy, but I still think it is a little underpowered, making me really glad I paid extra for the extra RAM.
The thing is slightly quirky, too. I ended up changing the boot priority of the hard drives to make the IDE master boot first. A couple of days later, it just totally lost this setting and I had to go back into the BIOS and reconfigure it.
There are also issues with Ubuntu and the SATA drive it came with. Only my IDE drives showed up during the Ubuntu install, and they do not show up in Ubuntu either. The SATA drive will show up in Ubuntu, however, if I change the SATA controller type to RAID instead of IDE in the BIOS...but this setting makes the system reboot when you try to boot Vista from the SATA drive (yeah!).
Now the dual boot system works the way I want, but what trouble would I have run into if I had just wanted to wipe the SATA drive and install Ubuntu on it? One reason I went with Everex is that they are selling basically the same system with Linux on it, so I figure I'm not going to have many issues installing Ubuntu onto it. I think I might have to rethink that one.
And for the not newbie friendly thread running here: Of all the things I have issues with, the one place I really think Windows is way ahead of Linux in ease of use, is if you add a hard drive to Windows, 99% of the time, it just shows up and you can use it. For the love of all things holy, I never understood why this can't be done in Linux.
If it is a security issue, I wish it would just just do something like this, "a new drive has been detected, would you like the drive secure and locked down, or do you want to just use it? press Y for a usable drive, press N for a locked down drive."
You know, I can figure out a way to get something to work, but I don't think it is acceptable for someone to simply add a new hard drive and then have to spend 45 minutes to a couple of hours reading forums trying to figure out how to actually access it.
Transporter_ii
Slashdot | Caller ID Spoofing Becomes Easy
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/02/2311218
ID Spoofing for the masses:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/28/1450205
Slashdot | Caller ID Falsification Service
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/30/1620237
New Google Service Manipulates Caller-ID For Free
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/18/2112248&from=rss