snutz411

I first tried Linux a few years ago, not because I was completely against Windows or anything like that, but just because I had some free time on my hands. I started off with Mandrake 9.0 which was very user friendly and Windows-like. After reading through a bunch of message boards and learning which distros are good for what, I soon realized my current distro was great for Linux noobs. So then I decided to try something a little more advanced like Slackware which I knew had a steep learning curve.Since then I've been using Slackware as my main OS and couldn't be happier. Of course somethings are a pain in the *bottom* to configure, but that;s Slack for you. If it ain't hard, then you won't learn anything from it.That's my story, I basically started to learn Linux because I was bored.

Haha, I was about to post the same thing.

I run Slackware 10.2 on my Dell 600m with no problems at all. Granted, I had to go through the trouble of making sure everything was configured correctly, but nonetheless everything works. After the install there were a few things that didn't work "out of the box". Such as my...soundwifimonitor settingsI had to install ndiswrapper to get my wifi working, but that was cake. Just a few commands and scripts, and everything was peachy keen. I had to install ATI's proprietary drivers to get my LCD resolution to 1400x1050 (the way I like it). The default resolution was 1280x1024 or whatever it is, which would be fine, but I like higher res. My sound works after playing around with alsamixer.Since this is a laptop, I had to make sure to build the kernel with the ACPI option. This make lets Linux know that this system is a laptop, so it'll have battery support, stand by, and things like that.If you don't want to go through the trouble of configuring pieces of hardware on your laptop, I highly recommend Ubuntu as a distro. Pretty much everything will work right after install and it has a lot more graphical interfaces for things such as updates and all.

Usually Symantec.com has free online security tools. You can use their program to run security checks on your system.If you are worried about your security, just make sure you have a firewall, even having Windows Firewall enabled will probably help you out. And disable File and Printer Sharing, then you should be fine.

If you are familiar with Linux, you may want to use a Live-CD called PHLAK. It is short for Professional Hackers Linux Assault Kit. It has all the network security tools that any script kiddie would need or want. I won't tell you have to use any of it since that would probably be for the best, but all the tools are pretty much command line.If you want to use this distro of Linux, then learn command line. It is seriously worth it if you want to just be knowledgable of another OS.

This would all depend on what you need to use the computer for. People who want to game or need high end specifications will definitely want a desktop. However for people that are mobile, they will want a laptop.I personally like to use my laptop. I am a college student, so it is very useful to bring around to classes. I bought it 2 years ago and definitely paid the high price to make sure it will still be in good shape down the road. I like being able to unplug and just take my laptop anywhere with me, and have all the resources I need from a computer to get through the day.If you are going to invest in a latop, don't be cheap. You'll regret it down the road since the only thing you can really upgrade in a laptop is memory and a hard drive, which will be expensive nonetheless. I paid aroudn $3000 for my Dell 600m and its still good today.1.6 gHz Pentium M Processor512mb ram60gig hd64mb video card14.1" LCD screenI also have an external 19" LCD monitor to hook my laptop to when I need it, but I don't recommend using a laptop as a desktop replacement. You'll end up lugging around a 15lb weight that will most likely just sit on your desk because you don't want to bring it anywhere.Although in the near future, I may be investing in a new desktop system from theses makers...http://sys.us.shuttle.com/ They make Small Form Factor computers that look really nice. I'll end up paying around $2600 for a high end gaming computer from them. It'll have dual-core AMD 64-bit processor, dual 256mb Nvidia video card, 2gig ram, 250gig SATA HD. And it'll all be in the case that is a little longer than a Gamecube.

Do any of you guys use a content manager to create and edit your website?I find that Mambo is very simple and nice to use. I know there are a lot of them out there, so what else do people use?

So I ended up buying a Nintendo DS a month ago for the hell of it, and I'm really glad with the purchase. Then I heard the news of a new Mario Brothers coming out, and now I'm REALLY glad with my purchase.This game has the same game style of Mario 3 on the NES, but with superior graphics and fun, fun gameplay. If you happen to find a super mushroom, Mario grows to full up the screen and you get points for everything you run into and destroy. Like all Mario games, there are secret levels to find, and shortcuts and all kinds of goodies. Everyone that knows how to play Mario games for the secrets will love to play this one.I give this a 9/10 only because the game is kinda short. Lots of things to go back to collect, but the game itself is short.

Did anyone catch the match of Barcalona vs Arsenal for the league final? It was a crazy game. Within the first 10 minutes, Arsenal's keeper got Red Carded so they were short one man the entire match. And Barca scored 2 goals within 8 minutes of each other, I think. They won 2-1.BAR-CA-LONA, da da da da da, BAR-CA-LONA!!!

I got this device a 9/10. Here is the official Palm website for the TX http://mynewpalm.com/ I really like the big screen and the ability to switch the landscape vertical to horizontal. The Wifi works extremely well when you are near a hotspot. I use it constantly on my university campus. It has a built in web browser and email client (which is extemely easy to set up). It is best to view PDA-enabled websites but it can still view normal websites pretty decent. I don't have any bluetooth enabled devices like a cell phone or laptop, but as soon as I get one I'll test out the bluetooth capabilities. Although from what I can see you can bluetooth to your mobile phone and send out TXT messages via your palm and even dial phone numbers from it. I also downloaded an opensource SSH client to allow me to wirelessly connect to my numerous shell accounts. It literally gives me a lot of power in the palm of my hand since I have a whole slew of command line applications I can run . It also has the ability to read and open up Microsoft Office Documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. This device is a bit expensive. Retail is around $299.99 and some deals out on the web will cut it to $269.99. Palm really doesn't offer many discounts or sales. Also any peripherals you want to use with it will also be very expensive. I am debating whether or not I want to get a bluetooth enabled fold up keyboard through Palm.com which costs $149.99. I like to do homework while on campus, but for that I usually just bring my laptop. The only problem about that is I have to carry it around with me all the time. If I had the TX and a Keyboard, I would be set even though I would look extremely lame, haha. That's my review, I hope it is useful for anyone considering to buy a PDA.

GMail is pretty good. You get a ton of space, so you'll probably never run out of room. You can easily search your e-mail and you can use the GMail chat thingy. You'll get AdSense Ads geared towards the content of your e-mail.I tend to steer away from using Web Mail all the time and use E-mail Clients such as Thunderbird on Linux and Outlook 2003 on Windows. I just find that easier than keeping track of all my e-mail accounts.

Check out this site for examples on how to set up the ODBC/JDBC connection. It's pretty simple to do with the help of examples. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

I honestly thought I was the first person to think of this for the 911 emergency service, but after I googled the term "911 text messaging", I learned that I was wrong.Apparently there are some places that already have this, and that completely stole my thunder. But it is a good concept for those situations when you can't talk on the phone in emergency situations.

In the "xorg.conf" it has pretty much all of your peripheral settings such as monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. It has the resolution settings as well as the refresh rates. You really don't need to know exactly the refresh rates for each resolution. It kinda just gives you a range of rates to use, at least my setup did. But if you edit that file without first installing the drivers, it won't do anything. So find your drivers and install them.

If you have an unsecured wireless network, it basically opens up your internet access to anyone who lives close to you. This is especially true if you live in the city or in a development in the suburbs. Some people may even accidently be connected to your network just due to the default settings on that persons wireless card. For the most part, I don't think anyone will be using your internet access to due illegal things, but those people are out there. Some people wardrive which means that they just get in their car and drive around until they find wireless "hotspots". People don't even need laptops anymore, I have a PDA that has wireless on it. If people hijack your internet and do bad, bad things, it will be reported under your IP address that you get from your ISP.

You'll need to install the drivers for your video card. If it is ATI, then just go to ATI's website and download them. They should come in a RPM file. But somewhere on the web, you should be able to find them. Then you'll need to rewrite the "xorg.conf" file if you are using X11 as load the windows manager. Its fun stuff.

Well the MAC Address is used to relate the IP Address to a physical computer. Each ethernet device has a unique MAC address, but any computer can have any random IP address. But when you map a IP Address with the MAC Address, you know exactly what computer is using that IP Address. Also think in terms of network security. If there wasn't a MAC Address, there couldn't be any physical evidence to prove you used a IP address for questionable actions.

Yes, I use SSH all the time for my daily stuff. Some classes at my university require the use of SSH with their file servers to do homework and submit it. I have a dedicated server at my house with port 22 open, so whenever I'm on the road and I need a shell account, I can login to my IP Address. That is actually pretty handy when you really really need a Unix System.I even have a SSH program on my Palm TX called TuSSH. So I can have Unix wherever I go as long as I have a wireless internet connection...think of the possbilities.Yay for SSH

I retract my previous statement about going back to Slackware 10.0. I did switch back to 10.2 for updateability. I had everything pretty much setup and configured for 10.0, then I decided to run slapt-get to update the software on the computer and little did I realize that it was pulling files down from the 10.2 FTP site instead of the 10.0. After it was all done, I couldnt start up X11 anymore.Slackware gave me a little kick in the crotch, but I forgave it. I put back on 10.2, found new ATI drivers (which I got working) and resources for this version are readily available.O the pains of working with Slackware, but I still believe that it will make me stronger in the end, haha.

One of my friends recently purchased EA's Fight NIght Round 3 (boxing game) for his XBOX 360. After having only played Mike Tyson's Punch-Out on NES and some other boxing game on PS2, I don't have much experience criticing boxing games.But this one stands out in my mind, it just looked and played wonderfully. It has an innovative fighting control system that heavily relys on the rythm of your fighter. You control the punches by moving the R2 stick around in distinct patterns. I found that while you are in the middle of completely wailing on someone, the R2 stick is great because it keeps the rythm of the fighter going...if you are lucky enough you will accidently hit one of the huge hit patterns and go into a first person "I'm going to knock your a$$ out" mode where your opponent can only see you and your giant gloves hitting his head repeatedly until you fall down.The game doesn't have a lot of in-game characters, and only a few more are unlocked (some big fat guy and that guy from the Under Armor commericals...we must protect this house guy). Although I have been doing some searching and you can use Create-a-Champ to build models of boxers such as Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, and others even Vin Diesel, haha.One really cool feature is the ESPN Classic mode where you can replay historic fights using the current characters in the game. I really like this game and me and my friends play it all the time, but if you don't have the friends to play, maybe this is just a rental. But if you got friends to like to fight vicariously through this game, then definately pick it up. It somehow became our new party game.

I've been using Slackware 10.0 on my Dell 600m for the past couple years and I can say that it is a great learning tool for anyone who wants to get into Linux. There is a big learning curve for anyone who wants to use Slackware, but once you start to catch up, you REALLY catch up.A couple days ago I got the bright idea to wipe 10.0 off my laptop and install 10.2 instead of doing it the sensible way (without having to fdisk and repartition, but I was bored anyway). Then today, I decided to go back to good old 10.0. I had a hard time trying to find downloads for the install discs because I lost my other ones since it was such a long time since I needed them. One of the main reason was that for some reason I couldn't get my ATI on board Video card to work correctly with 10.2, I could have been due to the kernel, but both versions stayed pretty similar using the 2.4 kernel (instead of the 2.6 which can cause lots of a hardware compatibility issues). Another reason was because I didn't like the way KDE looked. The newer version of the KDE got rid fo the bigger icon mouse overs in favor for a giant tooltip type deal (yuk).This was probably something that I was just looking to find something bad with so I can go back to what I know and love.But there are some GOOD things I noticed too about the upgrade.1. Any user and shutdown and restart the computer now. Previously only root could have such priviledges.2. You don't have to mess around with the /etc/iniitab to get KDE as your default Window Manager3. Obviously, its the most recently version of Slackware, so its good to stay current.However, I don't believe I'm the only one that feels this way. In the Slackware Community, the 2 most used version of it seem to be 9.1 and 10.0.

This is pretty easy, you'll just need to add a function to the add button on your form. I hope you are familar with basic Visual Basic syntax. I'll help you with the sudo code for this, but this is just a generalized idea of what you need to do. And also, are you familiar with storing SQL results in result sets? if not google that. String sql_checkUser = "SELECT password FROM user_table WHERE username = username"//store this result in a result set//check to see if the result set has ANY valueif (result set != null)//then we have a valid user name and password//process the add user functionelse //result set is null, so the user name and password didn't match//pop up window, to prompt userend if Again this is just a general idea of what you want to do, I haven't coded in VB in a long time so I don't remember the syntax of things exactly, but if you find the code you want to use and put them where I commented lines for them, you should be good to go.

I type around 65 wpm with pretty good accuracy. When I was in elementary school my 5th grade class had a touch typing course. Then in High School in order to take higher level computer classes, you had to pass out of touch typing (take a test and if you did any higher than 35 wpm you passed).I usually don't type 65 wpm all the time because I don't think I can think of things to write that fast. So I'll write something down pretty fast, then there will be a long pause, then I'll continue. This happens to me a lot when I'm writing essays and such...even this thread.

If you are a Linux user and play around with the configuration files on your computer to get your setup working just the way you like, do yourself a HUGE favor and get a Knoppix LiveCD.I screwed up the conf file for my X11 setup under my Slackware 10.0 laptop and the startup sequence went just fine, but before the login screen would show, the system would crash. I couldn't get to a command line to fix what I wanted.I didn't have a rescue disk and I REALLY didn't want to reformat and start over from scratch since this computer is working so close to the way I wanted (I got wireless working, my ATI video card to work, most of my USB mouse, and my LAN browsing)After a couple failed attempts to trick it into going into a command line, I popped in my Knoppix cd and from there I can view all the partitions on my harddrive (Windows and Linux). I set the option to make whichever partition I want to be writable, by default the partitions are read-only. Now I can edit my xorg.conf file and fix my screw up.Lesson to be learned is, even if you think you have a good understanding of Linux, crap will hit the fan one of these days and just consider a LiveCD to be the paper towl to clean it all up.

Well I found myself debating whether or not I want to spend some money on a LCD Monitor...and then I did.I went to my local BestBuy, straight to the monitor section and picked out the biggest, prettiest looking monitor I could find.I ended up walking out with a 19" LG 1932TX LCD Monitor on sale for $329.99.The contrast ratio is 1400:1.Response Time 4msSupports DVI and D-SUBResolution is 1280x1024 (I really like this setting, so anything higher doesn't mean anything to me)Super ThinGreat design since it was made by LGThis is how I like to spend my money although right now I currently don't have a computer that will use DVI. But this is the first of a two part purchase. Whenever I get around $2000, I'm going to buy myself a Shuttle XPC (tiny Gamecube like computers that are just as fast as any normal desktop) and hook it up to this monitor. Then I will be a happy, happy man.