Way back when, I used to use a program in Windows called Gozilla to speed up my downloads. The problem with it was that Gozilla was invasive and contained a spyware payload. Competing programs emerged, but it seemed like the biggest added feature was always more spyware. So I gave up on HTTP download accelerators.
If you want to archive floppies--a good idea, since a floppy disk can sit for months unused and go bad between the time you made it and the time you really needed it, and since it's hard to shuffle through a collection of hundreds of disks and find the one you need--Linux is an ideal environment for it. To create a disk image, use the following command:
SCO is now threatening legal action against corporations that use Linux, since it supposedly infringes on their intellectual property but they haven't revealed the infringing code yet. I guess they need to start by suing themselves.
I found an interesting editorial called If I had my own Linux Distro. He's got some good ideas but I wish he'd known what he was talking about on some others.
There's been another milestone in getting Linux running on Microsoft's Xbox game console. It's now possible to get it going if you bridge a couple of solder points on the motherboard to enable flashing the unit's BIOS, then you use the James Bond 007 game and a save game that exploits a buffer overflow, and with a few more tricks, you can unlock the hard drive, put it in a Linux PC, install Linux, then move the drive back to the Xbox and turn it into a cheap Linux box.
Mail from Dave T.: I bumped into a place that is selling a used, functional Abit BP6 and a 400MHz Celeron to go with it. I already got another 400 MHz Celeron so it would be perfect. I always wanted to try out SMP but so far I haven't thought it was worth it. Now I can buy this combo and make my dream come true :-)
A question came up in the comments of one of my past entries that raised a good question: When you can't get a device to work, how do you determine which kernel module (Unix-speak that roughly translates to "device driver") to use to get the hardware working?
