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Focusing on the embedded market (and seemingly well-liked by users of both Linux and the various BSDs) are the boards from the Zurich, Switzerland-based PC Engines. The company has some extremely compelling and relatively inexpensive offerings ... if you're willing or able to run your application(s) in 256 MB of RAM.

From ZDNet's GreenTech Pastures blog comes news of Linux-based computers from SiCortex that offer between 72 and 5,832 processors per box, with each CPU drawing less than a watt of power. In other words, it's a green supercomputer. Prices go from $25,000 to $1 million, and according to the ZDNet post, the company has moved 54 boxes to entities that include big research universities and the Department of Defense.

I had no expectation that it would work, but I decided to shove my trusty Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA 802.11b wireless networking card into the meant-for-Airport-only slot in my Power Macintosh G4/466 running Debian Etch. I connected the antenna wire. I booted Debian. I opened the Desktop -- Administration -- Networking tool. There it was, eth2, my wireless card. One problem: Since the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver card is quite a bit longer than the Airport card this slot was meant for, there's no way I can even close the case of the G4 while using the Wi-Fi card.

I haven't tried ZenWalk in a very long time, but I'm thinking about it. When I first started using Linux in early 2007, ZenWalk was one of the systems I played around with. I had a nice install at one point, and that particular machine would boot and install the old version of ZenWalk at the time but not the new version. As a last-ditch effort/experiment, I tried to upgrade the old system, but since ZenWalk had stopped supporting my old system but kept everything in the same repository, the upgrade bricked the install. Morale of that story: Always put /home on its own partition so you can do a reinstall. Be that as it may, ZenWalk is a super-fast system with excellent hardware detection and less geeky pain than in Slackware, upon which Zenwalk is based.

I was pleased as the proverbial punch to receive a link in the latest Distrowatch Weekly, and I didn't even have to stoop to my usual begging. (Thanks Caitlyn!) What I also saw in the column was the announcement of a new distribution, CentServer, which is based on CentOS. For those who might not know, CentOS is itself a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

What role does the Internet Explorer Web browser play in your life? In recent days, new vulnerabilities in the flagship Windows browser have come to light. Alas, the fix is in, but pundits continue to suggest that running IE is just asking for trouble. I'm not ready to say IE is such a security risk that instead browsing the Web with Firefox, Google's new Chrome, the super-quick Opera or even Apple's cross-platform Safari is enough to save your digital bacon. Nope, it's all about what you do, where you go and what computing platform you choose to do it with. The fast is that i386-based Windows PCs continue to be the most vulnerable platforms out there because of both their ubiquity and relative lack of built-in security when compared to Macintosh OS X and the vast number of Unix-like OSes out there (including Linux, the BSDs and Sun's offerings). If you make a habit of downloading executable files (they're easy to spot in Windows because they end in .exe) without being absolutely sure they're totally legitimate and then double-clicking on them, bad things may very well happen.

The OpenBSD, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (oBAMP) platform provides a powerful point of departure for the creation of dynamic web content. Learn the procedures for running OpenBSD 4.4 with Apache SSL, MySQL 5, and PHP 5.

[I haven't tried this yet, but explanations on how to deal with dynamic Web content in OpenBSD's chrooted Apache environment are few and far between. - Steven]

I haven't booted the Power Mac G4/466 running Debian Etch in a while, but I did so today because I'm about to move the box and its massive LaCie electron22blue monitor. So I wanted to power it up, do a software update and get it on the cart. This is a nice box on which to run Debian. I've complained at length at how poorly Fedora 9 installed and autoconfigured on this box and how startlingly better Debian Etch did with that same task. Sorry to repeat that, but it bears repeating.

Hey teeming masses, don't say Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates (and the Professor and Mary-Ann) never did nothing for you. In a totally roundabout way, I learned that Microsoft is giving away — I say giving away — Microsoft Word. OK ... Microsoft Word for DOS. Remember that? I do. I actually used to run Word for DOS a bit back in the day. The Unix-like OS world is awash in console-based text editors. There are literally hundreds, from vi and nano to joe and emacs. But is there an actual word processor for the Unix/Linux console? Nope. "Ubuntu Kung Fu" author Keir Thomas suggests running the freely downloadable Microsoft Word for DOS and using the DOSBox MS-DOS emulator to run Word as a command-line word processor.

If you use both Windows and Linux/Unix boxes and are not familiar with PuTTY and Xming, you're really missing out. In case it's not totally clear above, PuTTY enables you to run an SSH console session from your networked Unix-like box, and Xming allows you to run X apps over that same connection. It's all good, clean geeky fun.

While I've experimented with FreeBSD (and offshoots DesktopBSD and PC-BSD), NetBSD and OpenBSD (the latter of which I run the most; including right now), I never really paid much attention to DragonFlyBSD. A quick perusal of the DragonFlyBSD Web site offers a lot of information on things like its new HAMMER filesystem as well as the operating system's goal of bringing "native clustering support" into the kernel. It's all a bit over my desktop-using head.

We've pretty much reached the point at which it's probably cheaper to buy a laptop computer than it is to purchase a comparable desktop PC with the keyboard, mouse and monitor needed to make it all work. But laptops break. And they're hard to fix. Often really hard. And instructions on how to fix them are either really detailed (like those for Macs from ifixit.com) or, shall we say, "nonexistent."

You theoretically can use the Windows bootloader to dual-boot with OpenBSD 4.4, but since I had already killed it out on my most recent installation and didn't have a Windows XP disc to restore it, I turned to GRUB, the bootloader I always use with Linux. GRUB is one of many applications we associate with GNU/Linux but which is also available as a precompiled package that's quite usable with OpenBSD, though not without its quirks. If I can make it work, you can too.

I'm getting ready to give the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) to our daughter to run her educational games (Childsplay, Gcompris, TuxPaint) on Ubuntu Hardy with the non-crashing Xfce window manager instead of the crashy version of GNOME in this Ubuntu build. To replace that machine for me, I pulled a Toshiba Satellite 1101-S101 laptop from the boneyard.

It would be a strange thing indeed if Xubuntu ended up running better on my Gateway Solo 1450 than the flagship Ubuntu distro. While I've had luck with Xubuntu in the past (I think my favorite version was 7.04), regular Ubuntu always seemed to be more polished and stable than Xubuntu or Kubuntu. Until now.

In case you were wondering, yes it does occur to me that all the time I'm spending trying to figure out why Ubuntu is crashing (or why my Debian Lenny screen slowly degrades during each computing session) is time better spent finding a system that does work and presents none of these problems. That's why I'm running the currently trouble-free CentOS 5.2 as my secondary distro on the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

I feel like I'm booting children off a train. Sure I've had my times when I installed a GNU/Linux distribution, used it for a couple of hours and then pulled it. But for the past year or so, I've stuck with Debian, first with Etch and then Lenny since Etch went stable in April 2007. And when Ubuntu rolled out its new LTS distro in April of this year, I installed it and have been using it since. My older Compaq laptop has been running OpenBSD 4.2 for over a year, and I've done two very satisfactory Etch installs in the past month or so. But on my main machine, a 2002-era Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, there's been trouble in GNU/Linux paradise.

This wasn't the first time I tried Fedora — or Fedora 9 for that matter — via live CD. I must have burned my first CD of the distro soon after it was released. Now that I was resolved to replace Debian Lenny on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) with ... something that didn't have Lenny's seemingly unsolvable screen-refresh issues, I decided to give Fedora 9 a try. I knew that it was a little less than three weeks until the release of Fedora 10, but since I was ready now, Fedora 9 it was.

Here's the deal: I've been fighting with Debian Lenny for months on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where I have everything running great except for my persistent problem with screen refresh in X. I've replaced the Intel i810 driver with the plain Intel driver, I've tweaked everything that can be tweaked in xorg.conf. I can't really get work done while my display is slowly disintegrating during the course of a computing session.

Every time I write about Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which I've been running on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop since its release in April, I mention that it's the only GNU/Linux distribution I've used that successfully suspends and resume the computer. And I've made that feature — suspend and resume — the bar over which other distros must jump to "beat" 8.04 on this platform. Make no mistake, I've "enjoyed" a working suspend/resume capability. But I haven't enjoyed returning to the laptop after a while to find the screen looking normal but the keyboard and mouse completely dead. CTRL-ALT-backspace won't kill X. CTRL-ALT-delete won't reboot the machine. I need to do a hard boot with the power button to get things working again.