Glitz

Which EPIA board have you got? I have an M10000 and just about everything works out of the box with LM9.1. VIA has linux drivers for the M10000 for graphics and the mpeg decoder hardware. I did make sure to configure the motherboard with their windows software before installing linux though. Glitz.

Try startx again and check if the video might be coming out of the other video card by default. It looks like the configuration may be set up for dual head display. I don't have any experience with that sort of configuration but X may default to only one or the other of the two displays. Glitz.

For starters, main() should come before the {. Fix that and compile again. That may get rid of most of your errors. Glitz.

I have a VIA M10000 with 1GHz C3 Nehemiah (I'm currently logged on from this machine). It will playback MPEGs well using the onboard hardware decoder. I don't know about other formats which can't use hardware decoding. It also has onboard 5.1 surround sound. I only have two speakers so I haven't tried that out either. The hardware 3D is not particularly powerful (forget 3D games) but the 2D acceleration is good. You have a choice of RGB, composite, or S-video out. Peripherals include 10/100Mbps ethernet, six USB2.0 ports, 2 firewire ports, two serial ports, parallel port, 2x ide UDMA 133, floppy, and one PCI slot, just to mention a few. Glitz.

My main machine: ABIT BP6 with dual Celeron 433MHz processors 384MB ram ASUS GeForce 3 4.5GB scsi UW, 7GB eide, 40GB UDMA 66(100) hard drives Adaptec 2940U2W scsi card Linksys Etherfast 10/100Mbps ethernet card SB AWE32 ISA sound card WACOM graphire graphics tablet UltraPlex 32x ultra scsi CDROM, PlexWriter 16/10/40A ide CDRW, Sony (something or another) DVD rom Viewsonic P775 17" monitor LM8.1, win98 (for those pesky windows only programs) Car PC (still under construction): VIA M10000 with C3 Nehemiah 1GHz processor 256MB ram 1GB ide hard drive Cute little 145W ATX power supply 12V to 120V, 75W inverter Tons of onboard peripherals LM9.1 for testing (I'm currently logged on from this machine) Server: Old Pentium 100MHz 48MB ram 1GB fast scsi hard drive Adaptec 2940 scsi card ATI Mach64 (for when it needs major servicing :wink: ) HP Laserjet 3 (for those really big printing jobs) 2x Linksys etherfast 10/100Mbps ethernet cards hardwired to use PCI interrupts B and C (motherboard has pre V2.0 PCI slots) Creative 52x CDROM LM8.1 Glitz.

That's why there are beta and release candidates. So that they get tested before the final release. Debian is stable because the software packages get tested over the course of years. This has the advantage of producing a stable system and the disadvantage of having older versions of programs. That is the tradeoff. Glitz.

A guy I knew developed just such a keyboard back in 1990. I believe it was originally an undergrad project. I tried it out back then and couldn't believe how easy it was to use. Within 5 minutes I was just typing away with one hand. Although I never tried it out for a long term period it could even be useful for those who aren't disabled. You can type away with the left hand and operate the mouse with your right hand. I don't do a lot of word processing so I really couldn't tell you if this is useful or not for that sort of thing but it might be. Glitz.

I can't wait to see that one on the tube... :D Glitz.

No, it's quite sound businesswise. Raise the hype, get the stocks to go up, maybe get a few foolish people to buy licenses and then sell, sell, sell... Make it look like you're innocent by loosing the court case and retire wealthy...or move on to the next company that is in financial difficulty and do it again. Glitz.

Okay, that's weird. Now we have an even bigger mystery on our hands... :o Glitz.

boot: is usually the prompt that lilo puts on the screen asking which boot setup you'd like. Try just hitting enter for the default. Glitz.

All I did was use what came with the LM8.1 powerpack edition. I configured a minimal system with icewm light (I think that's what it's called) and a few apps from the CDs. I basically have Bastille as a firewall. Going through the bastille-interactive setup program configured the firewall and internet sharing stuff. I also have SAMBA for windows print sharing and KUPS for linux print sharing. I use SWAT to set up SAMBA and the KUPS configuration program (I forget what it's called) to set up KUPS. That's it. Glitz. PS. Oh, and I also have the SSH server installed on it so I can administer the machine from my room (the server is in the basement).

Have a look around. There are (were) ruggedized cameras that are water resistant and pretty sturdy. I don't know if they are any good in terms of picture quality though. I know that Kodak made one. At any rate, if you can't find a ruggedized one, then go for something compact that you can put in your pocket. The smaller and smoother the case, the less likely it is to get damaged and the easier it is to keep it away from the elements. Glitz.

I use my old pentium 100MHz with 48MB ram and a 1GB hard drive as an internet gateway and print server as well. Three years of 24/7 operation and still running. I do have to take it down on occasion to reclaim the drive space from the log files and the reiser filesystem but not too often. Glitz.

Well, that may or may not happen and it certainly wont appear overnight. I'm sure you'll have plenty of warning and lots of time to get a new motherboard at that point in time (if it ever happens). It will be a gradual introduction at best and there will be losts of inventory to get rid of. Glitz.

3-4years not at all bad for a PC. Personnally the last new PC I had was a 200MMX, this has evolved in a series of small steps to what it is now (1.3GHz Athlon). Components being replaced whenever there was a really good special offer. :) It is bad considering I paid about $6000CDN for the system. I could probably have gotten a system that was almost as good for about $3000. Up until that point my systems have lasted for about 6-7 years at a time. Glitz.

Download the three CDs from the 20th. I don't know what the March 17th ones are about but they seem to be earlier versions of the last two CDs. Glitz. PS. Maybe you should try installing in expert mode. I had no problems installing 9.1rc1 that way. Okay, well there were some problems but not the one you mentioned.

Well, you know, I tried that once. I bought a brand spanking new 90MHz pentium back in '94 with top of the line scsi system and video card. It had a 520MB hard drive and it cost a fortune. I thought this should last a while. It started showing its age after three years and after the fourth year it was obsolete. I now believe that it is better to spend half the price and get 80% of the performance and upgrade more often (not a complete new system, just what needs upgrading). I think this is cheaper in the long run and you probably wont miss the missing 20% in performance. Halfway through the life of a top of the line model your performance will be only 60% of a newer top of the line model (or 20% less than the half price system) anyway. Glitz.

Just out of curiosity, if you use links because it is faster (since it doesn't display graphics) then why not just turn off the graphics in your gui based browser? Glitz.

Have you by any chance done something to change from 75dpi fonts to 100dpi fonts or vice versa? This always happens to me when I go from 75dpi to 100dpi fonts. I always have to pick new fonts since they don't have all fonts in common. At any rate, you should be able to find new good looking fonts. When selecting fonts, enlarge them to 64 points and make sure the edges are smooth. These are the scalable fonts that look good with antialiasing on. Glitz.

Check to make sure the user NUMBER and group NUMBER are the same on both systems. The system will take a user name and look up the number assigned to that name. The same for the group, although the groups are more standardized. Therefore, you may be james on both systems but on one system james may map to user 501 whereas james on the second system may map to user 1001. Good luck, Glitz.

Just out of curiosity, does it by any chance also lock up when you're running windows? Glitz.

Name brand burners may be better now but I had three HP burners die on me. The first an HP4040i went after 0.5 years. The second an HP6060i (futureshop replaced the HP4040i under warrantee) went after another year or so. And the third, an HP7200 (futureshop replaced the HP6060i under warrantee as well) went after about 2.5 years. I do not burn a lot of CDs. In that time I only burnt about 25 CDs total for all three. I then bought a Plextor PlexWriter 16/10/40A and haven't had any problems since (>3 years). And I've burnt many more CDs with the Plextor than the HPs combined. The funny thing is that the HPs all still write CDs perfectly. They only fail when reading CDs (any CDs). The CDRs I produced after they stopped reading properly work fine in other CDROMs and CDRWs. Glitz.

I had a power supply die on me. A capacitor inside blew itself to bits (with a rather loud bang). I think these guys are pushing the ratings of their components to the limit. Capacitors last longest if run at about 80% of rated voltage. Although in my case, either the cap was bad or they exceeded the ratings. Glitz.

No. Degaussing is the process of removing any existing magnetic field on the shadow mask of a monitor. It has nothing to do with static electricity, super high voltages, or even high currents. A coil around the shadow mask is energized with an AC current starting at a large voltage that is gradually reduced to zero over many cycles. This removes the magnetic field on the shadow mask and prevents any residual magnetic field from forming due to hysteresis of the shadow mask material. Besides, a thousand volts applied to your graphics card would not cause "wavy" lines. It would cause a complete failure of the graphics card and possibly your motherboard too. Make sure you don't have anything near the monitor that causes magnetic fields (speakers, dehumidifiers, computer power supplies, other monitors, etc...) A friend of mine tracked a similar problem down to a dehumidifier that was placed on the other side of the wall (in another room) right opposite the monitor. If no such sources are present then suspect the monitor itself. Good luck! Glitz. PS. Make sure the video timings are within the monitors specs as well. Timings that are slightly out of spec can cause weird things to happen to the display.