– By Thomas C. Greene of The Register –

What a weekend it’s been. I spent the better part of it installing Linux on what has
got to be the piss-poorest laptop computer ever built. The comical piece of junk to
which I refer is a Compaq 1200 series, which I bought quite deliberately for the
road. I’m confident it’s unlikely to get stolen, and if it does, I’ll be inclined to thank
the thief.
The Presario 1200 is an exceptionally poor candidate for Linux, having been
specifically designed to run Windows, and having every conceivable
money-saving dodge in place. It’s grotesquely underpowered, with 64MB of RAM.
It’s got a CMOS setup which forbids tinkering past setting the time and boot order.

It’s got a ‘system restore’ CD which Compaq is too cheap to put Windows on. This
is perhaps the single most unforgivable item in a vast catalog of offenses. No, the
Windows cabs are all taking up much-needed space on the thing’s puny 5GB hard
disk. So nuts to you if you fdisk the sucker and then fail to get Linux working
decently and have no choice but load Windows again. Compaq will sell you the
CD you’ll need for that, the damnable cheap bastards.

Of course it’s got a Winmodem in place of a real modem, and we all know it’s just
about impossible to make one of those toys work with Linux, thanks to the
trade-secret paranoia of their manufacturers. And we all know how badly broken
the 2.4.x kernel is for PCMCIA, which I insist on having.

But I did fdisk the little junker, and it did feel awfully good. And then I set about
forcing Linux down its ungrateful Windows-compatible little throat.

Since I’d reviewed several of the most recent distros in terms of their ease of
installation and found Mandrake by far the friendliest, I figured I’d take it easy on
myself and start there. I do run SuSE on my desktop and my wife’s, but considering
the number of quality deficiencies Compaq saddled me with, I felt I could rely on
Mandrake to ease the pain.

How wrong I was. First off, it was impossible to run X by selecting my actual video
adapter, a crap item by Trident called the “CyberBlade” (a bit like naming a toy
poodle “Ripper” — fine so long as the irony is intentended).

After various attempts at making it work I finally had to load a generic VGA adapter,
which compromised my lame machine’s performance even more than Compaq
intended. And once Mandrake was installed I had to wrestle with the Winmodem,
which turned out not so bad in the end.

The shitbox has a Conexant Winmodem, and this, it turns out, is the only bit of luck
I can report from the entire escapade. Conexant has got a Linux
driver, and it’s actually effective. The RPM didn’t work for me, but the tarball did, so
long as I deleted /dev/modem before running the shell script. Which I did, on my
fourth or fifth attempt….

All right, so I got my pathetic Winmodem working. A fat lot of good that does me at
home with my preposterously slow, dropped-every-ten-minutes connection to MSN.
(I told you, the box is primarily for the road. MSN is traveler-friendly, if not much
else.)

No, I’d have to get my ethernet card working with my little DSL home network. And
at this point Mandrake beat me down.

I am not a quitter. I ran the two-mile, wrestled, and boxed in high school; and these
are three competitive endeavors one wins solely by being more stubborn and
willing to eat pain than one’s opponents, who are themselves extremely stubborn
and willing to eat pain as well (otherwise they’d be on the volleyball team, now
wouldn’t they).

Mandrake’s idea of installing PCMCIA is to present you with a list of drivers.
You’ve got to install one of them, which it insists on testing. The installer won’t let
you go further until it’s satisfied with your choice. Of course if none of them
happens to work, well, you’ll just have to cancel.

I tried every driver that could possibly have worked, and Mandrake rejected them
all. I did research — I found out which other cards mine emulates. I was systematic.
I was patient, stubborn, and willing to eat pain.

I tried, and tried again. Nothing worked. So I jotted down a number of drivers
Mandrake had available for installation, and hiked up to my nearest CompUSA,
where I bought another bloody card, for which I knew Mandrake had the drivers.

And I inserted it, and I attempted to install it, and Mandrake made a sucker of me
again. Thirty bucks I burned on a spare ethernet card.

So I did some more research, and found a boot image for Mandrake tailored
specifically for PCMCIA installation.

Ah, pay dirt.

This boot image immediately caused the lights on the card’s connector to light up.
Surely I was minutes away from installing it. I booted from the floppy and ran the
Mandrake installation CD, and it crashed.

So i entered every safe-mode command I could think of — ide=nodma, lores, nofb,
noauto, expert, text….

No good, no good, no good. I even tried them all at once. No good.

At that point I fdisked the little junker again.

And then I busted out SuSE, which actually is my favorite, though YaST is
undeniably clunky and entirely too present in the background. Linux is Linux is
Linux, but different distros have their advantages and disadvantages. As distros go,
SuSE is the most flexible one I’ve tried.

So guess what? SuSE likes PCMCIA, even with the crap 2.4.x kernel. There was
no driver to choose; no bollocky ‘test’. I just named it eth0, gave it a generic
192.168.0.1 IP and 255.255.255.1 subnet mask
like any ethernet card, and that was that.

It understands the ‘CyberBlade’ as well, with no difficulties.

SuSE has no decent DSL support unless you’re in Germany, but that’s not a
problem if you’re willing to tweak it. I did give the distro a black mark for this in a
previous review, but that was from the POV of my foil Harry Homeowner, who’s
likely to be inconvenienced if not thwarted by such an omission.

As soon as I got SuSE installed, with eth0 painlessly configured, I simply ran two
nifty RPMs from Roaring Penguin, which make DSL in Linux ridiculously easy
whatever distro or homebrew setup you’ve got. I had the Compaq shitbox on
Verizon’s mighty broadband pipes in minutes.

So now we’re an all-SuSE household here at Chez Greene, and pretty well
delighted all around. We’ve got two desktops and one laptop, and room on our little
$100 router for another machine.

We’re expecting it in March.

All Content copyright 2001 The Register

Wired: “This company cast itself as a slayer of corporate behemoths — Indrema said it would produce an open-source game
console that could beat those from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. But the available evidence suggests that, in the company’s short
life, all it managed to get out the door were a few sorry press releases.”

Andrew Sazonov writes: “AMIS Software is proud to announce release of Productivity 1.1. with support of JBuilder 4, 5 and 6.
Productivity! is a genuine and rich set of tools intended to greatly simplify routine coding and navigation operations. As a result, it allows significantly greater development productivity. All Productivity! tools are carefully designed and tuned to minimize efforts to invoke and use them so you can enjoy the friendly environment Productivity! offers.

With Productivity! tools:

• Forget about typing your imports!
• Forget about annoying dialogs and Wizards while you are coding!
• Discover context and navigate through it!
• Use hyperlinks to surf and to get informed!
• Navigate freely through your classes, methods and fields!
• Obtain quick help on classes and methods exactly where and when you need!
• Add super interfaces, change super classes in several simple steps
• Override methods and constructors in a couple of clicks!
• Add access methods for your fields instantly!
• Use your own unique naming standards!
• And finally, forget that you are using Productivity! – just enjoy your favorite IDE, interesting work and your superior performance!

Try Productivity! to add unleashed power to your JBuilder environment!”

BÃ¥rd Farstad writes: “eZ xml version 1.0.4 is now officially released. eZ xml is a XML DOM parser written in pure PHP. It’s fully compatible with the libXml parser used in eZ publish, but does not require any external libraries. eZ xml is released under the GPL license.
Changes in this version
*Added function for printing string version of the XML DOM document.
* Fixed correct parsing of attributes containing =.

You can download this version of eZ xml from http://ez.no/filemanager/download/310/ezxml-1_0_4. tar.gz
You can read the latest changelog from this url: http://developer.ez.no/download/ezxml/changelog“

The Register: ”

Microsoft and IBM have been accused of patent violation in a lawsuit filed in Texas
last week by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a California software
firm.”

sloopy writes: “Cool little script/article from userlocal.com. ‘In this article I walk you through the process of making a simple Python script that uses a text file to pick a random .signature every 30 minutes (via cron).'”

Wired: “Computer worms and viruses were let loose online in record numbers in 2001, costing billions. But some coders say they are performing “community service” by finding product flaws and teaching the less savvy about security.”

Neal writes: “1. Mandrake Linux will once again amaze the Linux world with quality software and easier installation. (Editor’s note: we’re pretty sure some of this stuff happened already. Isn’t that cheating?)

2. Corel Linux will be just a memory.
3. Red Hat will finally get past the 1024 cylinder error.
4. Linux will hit 8 to 10% of the desktop market.
5. Ximian will lead the way in Gnome development.
6. Delphi Kylix will be the Linux development package of the decade.
7. SuSE will finally learn we don't want to run from the CD.
8. Sun will rock the world with StarOffice 6.0
9. OS X will change how we look at commercial OSes.
10. Linux will become a real alternative to Windows XP with better
 support and a wide range of software more than ever."

Advogato: “Would you like to write more portable code? Do you wonder how the developers of AbiWord , Mozilla and the GIMP got their programs to run on both Linux and Windows, and even other operating systems? Would you like to develop and run your application on Linux but infect Windows and Mac OS users with the love of Free Software?”

Grok writes: “In the Newspaper business, there is the National Enquirer. In the Internet News business, there is the Drudge Report. In Mozilla-related news, there is MozillaQuest. MozillaNews.org refutes the pack of lies that is MozillaQuest’s latest article. ( Editor’s note: This url seems to crash Netscape 4.78) Lies, Damned Lies, and MozillaQuest“