Jason Cook writes " I've been trying to install OpenLinux 1.2 on my secondary machine and have run into some problems. First of all, they only provide a boot image for booting off of either a CD or a 2.88 floppy. Neither of which this machine has. So I tried using a boot image for 1.1 and then do an NFS install. It appears to work, but it doesn't seem to install the kernel. So when the lilo configuration comes, it spits out error messages. I could go and download all of the 1.1, but I don't want to spend the time upgrading all of the packages. Any suggestions?"

Nate and I just had a cool idea- The Net (the terrible Sandra Bullock movie) is going to be Fox tonight at 8pm. I was thinking about trying to get a bunch of people in IRC tonight to lampoon the movie. Interested parties should join #thenet on irc.slashdot.org (check out SlashNET for more servers) tonight around 8 o'clock. It'll be fun ripping the crap out of what is just a painful movie for any self respecting computer geek to watch.

clarkcd wrote in with an easy question that I don't think has been addressed before: " Do you know of anyone with a list of Linux Powered/Linux-Friendly ISPs ? I'm moving soon, and since I'll be changing ISPs anyway, I thought it'd be nice to make an informed choice. I got lucky this last move and found an outfit running FreeBSD. It made my life much easier." It just strikes me that geeks should try to accumulate ratings for ISPs somehow so when you move to a new city (or visit another one :) you can find out easily where to get good access.

Dave Finton sent us this link where you can hop over to ZDNet/Yahoo's Internet Life Yippee/Yahoo thing. Then click on "Join the Propellerheads" If you post comments, you gotta read what they have to say about us. Although what is this 'propeller head' thing? This is like the 4th time I've read a review of Slashdot using that term. And they linked through The Cursed WWW^TM *grin*. (which shall hereafter be referred to as TCWWW^TM) I think this should be the official way to see if people really read Slashdot, or just skim.In anycase, cool to get recognition, Its pretty much how I like to look at Slashdot, although they did forget that 50% of our content is open source related. That's kinda important.

Our drive back proved much less eventful then the drive down, and now having had a nice nap, I'm ready to post a final batch of rants and rambles about the Expo and my experiences there. Hit the link below to read more. And now since I'm back, I should be reading email again, and of course posting articles more regularly.

weez writes "SlashNET has moved to a custom version ircd, dubbed "aurora" which is a hack maintained by novalogic. With the upbringing of our new ircd, has come network services, i.e: Chanserv (lets users register channels and maintain many settings for them) Nickserv (lets users register their nicknames and set settings for them) and Memoserv (lets users send "memos" to offline users who have their nick registered.) We hope the enjoys enjoy our new additions, keep chatting =) also, my e-mail has changed, you can no longer reach me at "weez@nectar.fsck.org" but instead at weez@shutdown.org. come join the fun at irc.slashdot.org! "

Ok so we hit the road at 10pm. At 2am, somewhere in the middle of Ohio, the transmission in the suburban core dumped. So we had a... layover in Ohio. It took several hours but we got a rental car early in the afternoon. We planned on arriving in Durham at 11am, but instead arrived 11pm. Ugh. But, we're here, we're alive, and hopefully fun stuff will happen today and tomorrow too *grin*.

As I'm sure most of you have guessed, I'm heading to LinuxExpo. In fact, the Suburban will be loaded with me and 4 friends in about an hour. MapQuest says 16 hours- Jeff says 12 *grin*. I'm looking forward to seeing those of you lucky enough to be joining us down there. And now the important part:I beg everyone to keep email to me to a bare minimum- I just can't handle the 400 emails/day I usually get while I'm down there! Use the Submissions Form for stories, and we'll try to keep the news flowing (plus updates from the front!). But if you email comments, questions etc, I'm not going to be very responsive for the next 72 hours, so wait a few days and make life easier for both of us *grin*.

Dana "SilverStr" Epp writes wrote in to tell us that in response to today's Ask Slashdot Quesiton, the folks at NetMaster Networking Solutions have created The Linux Modeline Database. A Quick and Easy web interface is available for searching and submitting modelines for monitors. Nice work...

This afternoon Dave and I managed to bring up a copy of SLASH (The Slashdot Like Automatic Storytelling Homepage *grin*) and squash a few zillion bugs in the process. The next step is to find a small band of daring souls willing to help beta test it. Each vict-errr, beta tester will get a tar ball, and subscribe to a mailing list. We want folks who can read/write perl and help fix bugs. Applicants need to a box that they can add a user to, run mod_perl/apache on, and mysql. Big Question we've been having massive problems with mod_perl database connections dying and any time the httpd process answers a request after that point, the queries return no data. If anyone has any helpful ideas, contact Me. Folks who want to beta test the code (we're looking for 5 or sites) should contact Dave. If all goes well, we should be ready to start distributing the code in the next week or 2.

Topher writes "I've got a Dell Latitude XP 4100C. I got RH5 on there no sweat, but I can't seem to get X running. It wants the horizontal refresh rate in the setup, and says it's VERY important. unfortunately Dell doesn't seem to think it's important enough to tell me. Any ideas on how I'd find out? When I try and run X just guessing the Hrefresh rate, it puts up a zillion tiny horizontal lines on the screen, and I have to telnet in and shutdown. "

Ok, this is gonna be funny: the short story is we have a new server running Slashdot, the longer story starts by saying that its not the machine that was shipped to us. Click the link below to read what happened if you're actually curious...

It's about that time again folks:Tomorrow we make the big upgrade. First we went from an Alpha/133 to a P133, and now we migrate to a P2/266. And we're going from 64 to 128 megs the RAM, so hopefully things will perform much more spiffily come monday afternoon. And now the blatant plug:The server was bought for us by Llamacom: they are swapping us a new MoBo/CPU/RAM/Case for a bunch of advertising. Check them out. Tell them thank you! Anyway, tomorrow Dave and I are making the switch, and so we will have downtime (insert spooky chords here). We're gonna start when we get up (which will fluctuate based on how much of this Jack Daniels we drink), and hopefully it'll only take an hour or so (HardDrive/Eth/Video swap, plus maybe a kernel recompile). Then again, things might blow up. So anyway, don't have to much withdrawl tomorrow morning *grin* we'll be back in a few hours. I hope. Really.

This question came from the one and only Jamie Zawinski. Simply put, jwz wants to know what would make a good Unix laptop these days- let's face it, its hard. It took me a long time to make mine behave nicely under Linux (and APM and Sound is still flaky). Anyway, I've posted his full message after the link.

Couple of comments recently have popped up about article contents lately, and I just want to address them. First is the suggestion that I reply with a prefabbed message to each submission a reason why it didn't get posted: If this takes 10 seconds per submission, this would add 50 minutes of work to my day. I'm already spending more time on Slashdot than my job. If Slashdot becomes my full time job, I'd consider it, but until then, no way! Second, people have complained about articles not getting posted, or being late. If you don't make the article look interesting to me, I won't read it. I have 50-75 submissions waiting each day when I get to work, and If your subject is 'Hey Look at This!' I'm probably just going to delete it, because the subject next to it actually might have some sort of description. Third please use the submit form folks- I'm already getting 350 emails a day. The form puts them into a database that I can search/sort/organize as well as post very quickly. Last:Postive Stuff I just wanted to just say that Slashdot is really going well these days. You've been sending in great articles, editorials, and posting excellent comments, as well as making constructive criticism that will eventually help make the site even cooler. And I want to thank everyone out there for helping make Slashdot as fun to maintain as it is. Oooh, and we broke our single day hits record yesterday:120,000! Way cool.

Brock Sides writes "Is it possible (and if so, how) to configure the stand alone Netscape Navigator (under Linux and/or FreeBSD, of course) to launch a third-party email client, e.g. "xterm -e pine", when clicking on a mailto link? "

Allright Dave and I have been getting to much email, so I want to post a few things: First, check out index_F.shtml which will default you to flat mode on articles. Second, you can view any of the slashdot article types seperately. Currently these are Features, Books, Articles, and Ask Slashdot (each of these subdirectories also has an index_F.shtml). Lastly, I put up a Hall of Fame to list the most active stories for the curious, it's still kinda bare, but I'll get around to improving it sooner or later. Lastly, just FWIW, we're going to start deleting comments that are older than a month or 2 (we have 32,000 of them in the database- too many for poor slow P133 server). Just a warning... don't try to convince us otherwise unless you want to buy us another server to handle the load *grin*.

Here's a challange for everyone out there: Rob Williams has a a Sparc Station without a CD ROM drive, and asks "How do I remote boot and install SunOS 4.1.4 on an OSless Sparc from a machine running Linux? The RARP and bootparm stuff sounds doable, but how do you layout the tftp directory and exports to allow a full install of SunOS on the Sun disk? Is the SunOS disk even fully readable by Linux? Are there other considerations for serving diskless client SunOS machines from a linux box?" (Note:If you have a question for Slashdot, send them to Cliff Wood. Don't be shy!)

Clarence Washington jr. writes "Is there a LDAP server available for Linux? What I am looking for is an LDAP server that would enable a network administrator to have a central database for user, resource, and server accounts. The server would also need to incorporate a robust directory replication mechanism. Combined with Samba, I could use Linux as a file server platform in a Windows environment and NOT have to maintain separate user and resource accounts on every server (difficult to manage in a multiple server or enterprise environment). I would imagine that this would need Windows client software as well to enable directory authentication versus direct server authentication

Benny Simon contributed a question that might be a bit more tangible then the last one. He writes " Macintosh 8.0 and 8.1 clients which mount volumes exported by netatalk from the Linux server exhibit strange and mysical behavior (not the dancing icons or incorrect free space reporting). What happens is that many programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, sometimes Netscape, others) crash or exit when opening or saving a file to the mounted volume. In addition, when using the open or save dialog boxes to navigate around folders on the mounted volume, response from the server is *really* slow. " His System is Linux 2.0.33 (redhat5) running on a VAResearch PentiumII/233 with 128MB ram unning netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.0a18.2 and he has no problems with MacOS 7.5.5 clients. So guys, whats the word?