Tidbits @ Kassemi

Hello everyone,

I've been working on my HP ze4420us for a while now. I've got several posts regarding it, but things may very well change. My father purchased a laptop from Walmart a little while ago, and decided that since I'm the one who uses my computer for big projects all the time, he'd let me keep the new one if I gave him my old one. Great, right?

The only problem is that I remember my experiences setting up linux on this laptop (HP), and don't want to go through that month-long process again. So far though, I've spent only a few hours, and already have wireless support (rt2500, which offers better support than any linksys wireless card :)), and all of my settings copied over... In addition, the new laptop sports the fancy USB2.0, which might come in handy if my christmas gift is that of an electronic music device (wink, wink), and four of them at that. The processor is an Intel, and not an AMD, which gets me kind of messed up inside, but it's got double the L2 cache, a higher FSB (400mhz), although 200mhz less clock speed. The HP's got a quiet keyboard, and a case that doesn't seem like it's going to break when I pick it up, and the touchpad is much larger and, in my opinion, easier to use. I'm still working on the proper kernel compilation for the new computer, but it doesn't seem like the SiS graphics card works as well as the ATI IGP card in the HP.

Since there's no guide for linux installation on the linux on laptops site for this model computer, I'll probably put one up when I'm done... I still have to make the decision though, and wish I could keep both... Next year I'm working for a powerbook.

'Till next time,
James

Hey everyone,

So I've got this linux box set up nicely. The cd-rom read is allowed by all users, but cd-rom write is allowed only by root. For the past 10 minutes I've been browsing the net trying to figure out a way to execute my cd-burning software as root. I knew about a few solutions, but here's why I decided not to use them:

sudo
We all do it. We have a very strong superuser password, but very weak (or at least somewhat weaker) user passwords. Allowing access to the program with sudo by my user would be a very bad idea, because if somebody was able to crack my weak user password (possible), they'd have unrestricted access to those programs which you didn't want them to in the first place.

Altered permissions
See above.

consolehelper
This is truly a nifty little application, and I've used it before. My issue is pam. I don't think that managing a system via simple UNIX permissions is a bad thing, and I don't believe that there is a need to use pam. Consolehelper does. If I were to use consolehelper, I'd have to install PAM, and that's just out of the question at the moment.

su via terminal
At first I didn't want to do this... It just seemed a little too close to what I've already been doing, and I thought it wouldn't work as well as I wanted. But guess what:



Works extremely well... Here's a screenshot:



Now, that's not really what I was worried about getting done right. What I didn't want to do was close two windows after gnomebaker was exited. Thankfully, (tested with fluxbox only), the aterm closes as well.

So for now, that's my solution. What I'll probably end up doing is writing a very simple GTK login form similar to what consolehleper does, but that's for another day. Right now this works just fine...

BTW: I'd just like to let all the other geeks that read this know what I think about Sony BMG... Ha. Nevermind. Let's just say that as I geek you already know what I think.

Till next time.

So... A quick post, something that obviously crosses the mind of most of us non-hispanic non-aryan-white white people... We're the minority in prisons, so what do we do?

Sample minority groups:

• English


• Australian


• Persian


• Arab


• Jewish

Anybody have any statistics and such?

Good day,
James