We've got an easy one today. Jeremy Lepel writes " A friend and I have recently updated our kernels from 2.0.33 to 2.0.34. I had ppa support included in the kernel in 2.0.33 and he had it as a module. With the recent upgrade we've both included PPA v1.46 into the new kernel, but neither of us have been able to get the damn thing to work. I noticed during the boot process that it probes two of the parallel ports and then the scsi reports no paritions found. I've set my parallel port to match the 0x278 which is being probed on startup but this didn't change anything. I read in the README.ppa about a "lilo/loadlin command line" where you set "ppa=0x278,0" but I can't figure this out, either. Any help would be appreciated!"

Gregory Seidman wrote in to ask " I would like there to be a public (web) database of open source programs searchable by task/niche in particular." I can think of several, but I'm curious what people's opinions are of these. Some are fairly comprehensive, others are easy to use. Is there a clear winner? There are gold nugget applications out there, but so often they are things you stumble upon... it would be nice if they could be found simply.

With the X-Files movie opening up this friday, I just wanted to solicit links to articles related to Conspiracies. UFOs. Alien Abductions. Cattle Mutilation. Anything that is X-Filesish is probably worth a gander. Send submissions to Nate. By the end of this week, we'll post a collection of favorites and we can all enjoy the fun.

You know you've "Made It" when you get mocked on Ditherati. If you haven't seen the site before, you should check it out. They post stupid quotes from people each day. It's pretty cool- I'm glad I finally said something stupid enough to grace their pages *grin*.

Mike writes "Ok, here goes: Being a geek, I spend a lot of time on the computer. I'm a tall geek, around 6'4". That means the chairs I sit in while geeking are usually WAY too small, and I think it's starting to have adverse effects on my back. I'm not willing to give up computing, so...Who out there has advice on ways to reduce the pains associated with computing? I'm thinking perhaps a better-designed chair would help -- am I barking up the wrong tree here? "

Tim Doran was the first to warn me, but Salon Magazine has written a little diddy about Slashdot (linking through TCWWW^TM *grin*). For anyone who is arriving from Salon, Welcome. This sorta stuff kinda wierds me out, so I'm not really going to say much about it. (On the positive side, after the writing the article, the author of the article decided to get RH5.1 just to see what all the fuss is about :)

Nate wrote in to ask about something that I'm sure a lot of people around here have thought about- shopping online. He asks " For quite some time, I have been a big opponent of online shopping. I refused to put any kind of sensitive info across the Internet due to the insecurity of it. Well, they've had 'secure transactions' for quite some time now, yet I'm still paranoid. Is this paranoia justifiable, do I have a better chance winning the lottery than having someone sniff my credit card info, or is it quite safe?"

Recently I've had at least a dozen people comment about case design and modern computers. SGIs look cool, and the NetWinders, MicroServers, and even yesterday's Rock thing are interesting case design. Now I realize that a lot of people don't give two shakes what their case looks like (as long as it is big *grin*) but a lot of other folks seem to desire exotic and strange new case designs. Do people know where we could get cases? Is there a demand? Could the prices be reasonable? I realize that this is a really strange topic, but I've had an amazing amount of mail related to it lately so I figured I'd let you guys have at it.

Paul is finally ready to start selling the long awaited Slashdot T-Shirts. They are quite simple- the logo that you see next to this article, on a black or white shirt. They look absolutely awesome. They're gonna be $15 (shipping is included if you're in the US, foreign costs extra), and you can order them over at Bright Eye Productions. (Please address any questions about them to Paul)

Ok let's be careful with this one... this could erupt into a Distro Flame war, but I'd really like to see some helpful responses to this one, so everyone be careful, and see if you can't help Joe Bowman who asks "I've heard a bit of Stampede Linux and am just curious on whether any people currently running it would suggest a switch to it, and why? Currently I am using RedHat 5.0, and am a Linux newbie. I've been working on Linux servers for about a year, only learning what I needed to know, and just recently have put Linux on a machine at home. The idea of Stampede interests me, though would it be soon for a newbie like myself to give it a try?"

Allright we've got something of a doozy this time guys. Iuri Wickert has written in with a strange problem involving updating his RH system, and a mysterious problem that prevents his drives from being unmounted. When he reboots, it needs to fsck despite being, at least theoretically, properly shut down. Hit the link below for the full details of this whole conundrum.

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...