I second the 3ware recommendation. All of the servers in our facility use a 3ware controller and I've never had any problems with them. The Linux kernel has had a 3ware driver for quite a while now and it's very stable. This makes it very easy to perform installations, since you don't need to install a third party driver.

As mentioned by dmjedli, 3ware has a command line interface utility called tw_cli. I wrote a simple bash script to periodically check the status of the RAID and if there is an issue I get a message sent to me. It works extremely well and has been rock solid for our purposes. 3ware also provides a web interface called 3DM2 that allows you to monitor the status of the RAID and perform various tasks.

Not sure if this is just an error with copying and pasting what you have or not, but you shouldn't need to use the dollar sign before the commands you want inside of the script, so:

$ls /home/brian/*.vob > VOB.lst

should be:

ls /home/brian/*.vob > VOB.lst

Also, you may want to hard code the path to your .lst file, just in case you end up running the script from an odd location..that way you can always be sure of where the resultant file is going to end up.

Also, since Linux is case sensitive, you can use the excellent command that mfillpot mentioned, but make the search for the vob files case insensitive, like so: $(ls|grep -i .vob$)

The -i on the grep command tells it to ignore case and the $ on the end of the .vob will make sure that it matches only .vob as a file extension and not anywhere else in the file.

If you think it's a video issue, I think you can force it to use the generic vesa driver by passing the following boot line option: xdriver=vesa.

We're using a dual monitor setup for most of our programmers at work. I bought them some cheap Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 cards and installed the proprietary Nvidia driver. After that I just used the nvidia-settings utility to set the dual monitor configuration up. They are typically using GNOME and haven't had any issues at all. I would suggest spending the $30.00 or $40.00 on an Nvidia card and going that route.

Actually, now that I think about it I did end up having to install an older version of the Nvidia driver because the cards I used had such an old chipset. I think I put the version 173.14.18 driver on because of this...the latest driver didn't support them. Anyhow, just wanted to mention that. You shouldn't have any problem with any of the newer Nvidia cards, however.

I've never done this in Ubuntu, but the following page may prove helpful if you go the Nvidia route: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia

Here's my desk at work: It's an Atom powered thin-client connecting via NX to a Fedora 10 server running the IceWM window manager:

This is my primary work area at home: KVM over ethernet connecting to a Fedora 10 machine. This is what I use probably 95% of the time. The desktop shown is XFCE, but I also routinely use IceWM and sometimes OpenBox on it as well. This KVM also connects to a separate Vista box for playing games along with an XP box that runs a SageTV server.

I also have a media work area which runs a Windows XP box for using applications like Reaper and Premiere CS4

Oops, forgot to login, so that's my post above. One other thing I wanted to mention was that Motion may already be included in your distro's repository. I know Motion is included in the RPM Fusion repo, so I just used the yum install motion command to install it, instead of downloading the source and compiling that. You can install the RPM Fusion repository for Fedora 8, 9 or 10 with this command as root, if need be:
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Also, motion does allow you to create a mask to prevent areas with high motion from triggering motion events. There are instructions for this on the site here:
http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/MotionGuideOneLargeDocument#mask_file

I have a Nokia N95 and frequently use the Joikuspot application available for the S60 platform (http://www.joikushop.com/?action=products&mode=productDetails&product_id=33). It turns your phone into a standard wireless hotspot, so any laptop that has a wireless card should be able to connect to the phone to make use of it's 3G connection.

The only downside I've found with the software is that it rapidly drains my battery. Because of this, I try to make sure that I have my phone plugged in to an outlet while I'm using it.

I just made a Greasemonkey script a few minutes ago to alter the layout of the Linux.com website. The site layout actually prompted me to install Greasemonkey, as I'm using a 1680 resolution, and I wanted to make use of all of that screen real estate. Anyhow, the script I came up with is attached to this post and seems to work okay for me; it should stretch out everything to 100% of your monitor width. Hopefully I'm not doing anything stupid, as I never used Greasemonkey until about 10 minutes ago, so this is the first script I've ever attempted with it.

*Edit* Forum software won't let me attach a file with a .js extension, so I placed my script here: http://www.thelinuxpimp.com/files/linuxcom.user.js