R.I.P. Commander Armstrong
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Former Student Gets 30 Months in Prison for DDoSing Conservative Figures and Using Botnets [Link]
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A panic set in the other day when our 10 year-old HP Deskjet 895Cse printer stopped working. It would power up but the lights would flicker and then nothing - just the blinking orange light indicating a problem. I saw no paper jam and the printer was clear of toys and small objects that the kids sometimes stick in there. Convinced it was something simple, I unhooked it and proceeded to take it apart. I took the back panel off and there was my problem: a small piece of paper jammed under one of the rollers. I took it out and hooked the printer up and the printer worked.
We bought that printer ten years ago this week when we bought our Gateway 600Mhz PC (running FreeBSD today) and I think the printer was around $200.
They don't make them like that anymore. Something tells me that if I were to buy a comparable HP today, it would be junk within three years.
I refuse to replace it; best printer I've ever owned. Someone gave me a newer one last year and it was about two years old but I never hooked it up. I gave it away.
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That's a good summary of this what this bill would do:
Senate Proposal Gives President Authority Over Internet
I wish that Orwell would have written a prequel to 1984. I have a feeling it would look much like our society today.
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Ever since Firefox 3.x.x came out I have wanted to use it on my main PC which is running Slackware 12. (FF 3.whatever runs fine on my wife's Vaio XP laptop) When I first tried FF 3.x.x on my machine, it was dog slow so I went back to 2.0.0.x. So, I tried again last night to install Firefox 3.0.10 on my main PC and, once again, the install goes fine but 1) is it still painfully slow and 2) this time, I noticed I didn't have <- and -> buttons on the upper left. So, once again, I reverted back to 2.dinosaur because it is significantly quicker and works. I am considering upgrading to Slackware 12.2 but I haven't decided yet and really don't know if it's worth the effort just to use FF3. I have also toyed with the idea of going with Fedora (which now up to 6 discs unless you do the DVD or net install; I do have a DVD burner so that's what I would do) or even Ubloatu with the hopes that maybe I'll have better luck with some of the ham radio software out there that is supposed to work with Linux. Decisions. Decisions. I don't want to drift away from Slack but I what I might do is just set up another PC for ham radio and see how that goes because I really don't want to part with Slackware as my main PC's OS.
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Today is Firefox 3 Download Day. So, go ahead and download. I will download it at least three times myself. I haven't even tried the RC's for 3 yet but I will download it for my main desktop (Slackware, of course), the XP side of my wife's laptop, and a copy to keep on my flash drive so I can install it as needed.* I'll likely update the Slackware side of the laptop, too, once I give it a go on my main desktop. Jumping from 2.0.0.14 to 3 is a major version leap and apparently worthy of a full version number increment; going from Gecko rendering engineversion 1.8 to 1.9. From what I've heard, FF3 is less of a memory hog than FF2, even though I never really noticed a problem myself. Memory hog or not, it's still better (as was the case with Netscape, Mozilla, and is with Sea Monkey) than that piece of crap, bane of the Web, Internet Exploiter. And if you're using Internet Exploiter, why? Why? Why? Why?
*Not counting the download (FF3RC3 is a 7.1 MB download for Windows), install on a Windows machine takes less than 45 seconds and doesn't require a reboot. I have sat through an IE6 to IE7 update. It takes several minutes, I seem to recall around five which is after the 70MB download (that's right, almost 10x FF3RC3), and requires a reboot. What a joke.
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I have a secondary machine that I've been running FreeBSD on for a few years. In fact, if it weren't for me shutting everything down when I went on vacation last summer and one time hooking up a UPS, it would have probably been up that long too; well, a year at least. Alas, I bade farewell to 4.11 and prepared for 7.0.
# >uptime
> 8:11 PM up 258 days, 1:11, 1 user, load averages: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
That dates back to July and it was up well over 100 days at that time, which was the time elapsed since I turned it off in order to plug it into a UPS.
And then...
# >halt
I also pulled out the 8.4GB hard drive and put in a 40GB drive. Other than that, it's still the same PII 400MHz, 128MB RAM machine.
The install went as easily as any FreeBSD install does. The only problem I had was that Mr. Butterfingers hit the wrong menu choice at the end of the install and instead of exiting and rebooting, it started the install again. I got an error and was stuck in a loop - a "...try again?" type message; I selected 'no' but it still wanted to install again. So, I unplugged the power cord and it rebooted fine with the install I just did intact.
I don't bother installing X or a plugging a mouse in because I use it as a server. Although, one doesn't need X or a mouse to chat on IRC, IM, or even browse the web. All told, I spent maybe an hour installing and configuring it. From an end-user's perspective, I haven't noticed too many changes, so far, except that the Apache default DocumentRoot is under /usr/local/www/data now instead of /usr/local/apache/htdocs and the boot screen is slightly different. The Daemon screensaver, of course, is unchanged. As usual, I'll tinker with it here and there as time permits.
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I have a Sony Vaio laptop that used to just run Kubuntu but now I have set it up as a dual-boot with WinXP on one side and Slackware 12 on the other. I have had a few problems and the biggest is getting LILO to work properly. When LILO is set properly, the WinXP side gives me a BSOD shortly after it's turned on and just hangs there with a system is shut down type message. However, when I use Bootmagic to select the Windows partition, the machine boots directly to Windows with no LILO screen. I can still boot to Slackware by inserting the Slackware CD and typing this at the prompt:
hugesmp.s root=/dev/hda2 rdinit= ro
which works but it's a pain to do. The second problem was the wireless connection. The module loaded on boot (ipw2200) but I could not start eth0; with the standard "eth0: error fetching interface connection: device not found" error. I did a "dmesg | grep ipw" showed these errors:
# dmesg | grep ipw
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.2.0kmprq
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: ipw2200-bss.fw request_firmware failed: Reason -2
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: -2
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: probe of 0000:06:04.0 failed with error -5
I found a fix on a Suse forum and that suggested updating the firmware would work; the firmware can be found here:
http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php
and I downloaded and installed version 3. I unpacked the tarball, changed to the directly and typed as root:
cp ipw2200-* /lib/firmware
and reloaded the ipw2200 module and restarted the network and wireless now works. Now, if I can only fix that LILO problem...
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