Travails with the Sony Clie TJ-37	September 9 2004, 03:29 pm
I just received in the mail a Sony TJ-37. It's a very nifty little Palm powered PDA. I purchased it to replace the a Handspring Visor that had fallen on the floor a few too many times. Getting it work with Linux was not difficult once I figured what the heck this meant: Sep 8 19:23:31 curare kernel: hub.c: new USB device 00:11.2-2.3, assigned address 6 Sep 8 19:23:32 curare kernel: usb.c: USB device 6 (vend/prod 0x54c/0x169) is not claimed b y any active driver. It turns out the stock SuSE 8.2 kernel (2.4.20), doesn't contain anything to recognize the newer Clie PDA's. I eventually looked in driver/usb/serial/visor.c and visor.h and realized this. I probably could have gotten away with adding a couple lines to visor.c and visor.h, but I figured as long as I was futzing with it, I might as well get a newer kernel as well. Once I downloaded a newer kernel (2.4.27) and did a cycle of make dep clean modules modules_install bzImage, most everything was ducky. Of course my sound stopped working, but by the time I figured that out it was 1:30am and time to go to sleep. Bah. I also realized this is the first time I've had to recompile a kernel in well over a year. So I guess that means Linux is getting there. Of course if I was using a newer distribution I suppose I wouldn't have this problem. C'est la vie. I also needed to recompile Weasel Reader to remove the warning about using a newer makeztxt than the reader software can handle. The warning screen is distorted on the Clie, so you can't tap the accept button. No skin off my nose, since the thing is wretchedly annoying anyway. Now I need to figure out how to pull the ROM off the verdamnt thing so I can do some POSE development.
Posted by: Zuvembi

Defcon report: 802.11b	July 14 2001, 01:26 am
Well we finally managed to get 802.11b working on the old unixbigots laptop. We're here at Defcon 9, drinking too much, smoking too much, and making our hotel room look like a lan party. Unfortunately most of the laptop HW of the various members sucks. It was about 105 degrees here in Las Vegas (the land of no taste). Only one lecture was attended today (about HSRP - [router stuff]), useless. We'll probably be attending haxor jeopardy later tonight. Mostly we're mucking about and destroying our bodies. More reports tomorrow.
Posted by: Zuvembi

Suse 7.2 Coming out June 15	May 30 2001, 03:15 pm
SuSE announced that they will release version 7.2 on June 15th. The press release is here. I've been enjoying SuSE 7.1 very much, it's a nice distribution. Heck it's easy enough my mom can use it. So we'll see if 7.2 has enough bells and whistles to justify an upgrade.
Posted by: zuvembi

Sky falling ect.	April 20 2001, 07:49 pm
Ars trechnica has an article about sunscreen: Ars Technica article It looks as if Slackware is in Trouble according various sources also. Not good.
Posted by: rbi

Nvidia 0.9.769 drivers officially don't suck	March 22 2001, 03:20 am
Well I hate to give anyone's closed source drivers praise. But now that I'm upgraded to SuSE 7.1 and downloaded and installed the latest drivers my system seems to be working fine. I was able to download some 3D Loki Games to play on my computer. All I can say is "Very nice indeed". It looks like I'll have to go pick up a couple copies of some 3D Linux games. SuSE 7.1 is nice, I'll see if I can't get a review of it up.
Posted by: zuvembi

Arstechnica forum link.	February 8 2001, 10:44 am
One of the forum articles on Ars Technica has the details from the story that disappeared from Linuxtoday.
Posted by: Zuvembi

Interesting.	February 8 2001, 10:40 am
The link on Linuxtoday talking about Microsoft Astroturfing has disappeared. I wonder where it went and why it had to go... Hmm. Curiouser & curiouser.
Posted by: Zuvembi

Hmm, Microsoft astroturfing again?	February 8 2001, 01:15 am
Linuxtoday has an interesting litte story. Evidently somebody sent Linuxtoday some news about SuSE laying off some people (which sucks, but isn't as big a deal as some people are making it out to be). Now they thought this was a little odd since most people who frequent Linuxtoday are fans, and this is mildly bad news. Well when they checked where it came from, they found the originating IP was tide83.microsoft.com (131.107.3.83). Some other things of questionable merit have also come from there before. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting...
Posted by: Zuvembi

Nice Article at ZDNet	February 6 2001, 05:33 pm
Evan Lebovitch has a very nice article running on Zdnet talking about the increase in FUD we see spewing from Microsoft these days. Now that GWB is in the White House it seems pretty obvious that they feel they can start taking the gloves off. I personally think they're doomed to failure, but maybe not. Anyway it's nice to see something other than the party line coming out of ZDNet. Evan has been doing fair and/or pro-linux articles for a while. P.S. Some of us actually like to get work done on our system. I can do that with SuSE. With slackware I would spend a lot of my time tinkering with slack just to get anything running. So what if my install has cartoons and progress bars and other nancy-boy stuff, it works doesn't it?
Posted by: Zuvembi

Unix? did you say Unix?	February 5 2001, 09:42 pm
Some of us like versions of linux that are similar to Unix, and not with some cute plug and play install. I do not boot linux into KDE either. I may run windows 2k a lot, but at least when I do unix, I do unix right. ps. It is logged in as root.
Posted by: rbi

Amusing blurb about Microsoft mail problems	February 4 2001, 11:09 pm
The Register has a cute blurb talking about some problems Microsoft has had with their mail servers. Evidently some of their mail has been in a holding loop for up to four days. On top of their DNS problems and what-not, this really strikes me as pretty convincing evidence that .NET is a horrible idea. Do you really trust Microsoft to keep their network up? If they don't you can't do jack if all your apps are .NET related. The story is fairly short. P.S. We're not dead yet, and hopefully we'll start posting more often now. I'm especially looking forward to the release of SuSE 7.1 Mmmm, XFree 4.02, KDE 2.01, and Kernel 2.4. Can you say creamy unix goodness. I thought you could. This is of course in contrast to some people [cough]heathens[/cough] that are running things like Slack in root mode so they can use sound.
Posted by: Zuvembi

Note to our readers....	November 16 2000, 12:00 am
As you've noticed, we haven't been updating very often. We haven't abandoned unixbigots, just have been busy on special projects. Zuvembi has been occupied with infiltrating the Pacific Northwest, while RBI and I have been working to make our move to spread unixbigotry to other parts of the midwest. Please pardon our absence. We will return to our sporadic updates as soon as the dust settles. Otto
Posted by: Otto

Interesting Beowulf article	September 22 2000, 04:18 pm
There is an interesting article on Beowulf style computing at the Government technology site. The article is mainly interesting because they talk about how it's becoming more common in government. Even though Beowulf computing started off in a semi-govermental setting (NASA), it is predominantly used in business and academic research settings. I'm always in favor of a wider usage of Unix-like technology.
Posted by: Zuvembi

SuSE 7.0 released	September 18 2000, 12:14 am
Well it appears that the eagerly awaited (by me anyway) next version of SuSE Linux has appeared. Version 7.0 has XFree86 4.0 standard and some other goodies. So it looks like I can finally start running some nifty 3D games in Linux without going out and recompiling my XServer. The 7.0 Version was actually out the 15th, but the weekend was busy and I forgot about it. One thing that is making me unhappy though is that when they split it into personal / professional, they removed a lot of the development tools from it. They still include gcc I believe, but not gdb, ddd, or a whole host of other things I expect. Bogus.
Posted by: Zuvembi

EFF needs food^H^H^Hunds badly!	September 15 2000, 11:56 am
There an informative article over Newsforge that talks about the EFF needing help. More specifically they need cash to continue their legal battles. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has gone through a lot of their budget doing defense work for things like the DeCSS case, among others. They've spent more already this year than their entire 1999 budget. So get out there and contribute! This is serious and important stuff.
Posted by: Zuvembi

Proposal for managing Linux Kernel Patches	September 13 2000, 04:24 pm
Linuxtoday has an interesting proposal by Sebastian Kuzminsky, Linus Torvalds, Theodore Ts'o, and Daniel Quinlan. This is to solve the problem's with having no archival system for patches and no way to track these things against the TODO and errata lists. Hopefully this will also help satisfy the people who have kvetched about Linus not using a CVS system.
Posted by: Zuvembi

OPEC site hacked...	September 13 2000, 01:56 pm
This is not really news - but interesting nonetheless. www.opec.org was hacked by someone named "fluxnyne". It was a reasonably harmless hack, just a page redirect to the crackers page and then a redirect back to OPEC's site. main page. I was curious what they were running... % telnet www.opec.org 80 Trying 212.27.106.6... Connected to www.opec.org. Escape character is '^]'. get asdf HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 17:44:13 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 87 The parameter is incorrect. Connection closed by foreign host. Wouldn't cha know it?
Posted by: Zuvembi

GPL violation in progress?	August 7 2000, 02:51 pm
It looks like Virgin Connect is doing a nono and violating the GPL for Linux and other unspecified programs. You can read some more details about it at this discussion board. I picked up this tidbit from the linux kernel mailing list.
Posted by: Zuvembi

Surfaw - Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Against the World wide web	August 1 2000, 10:49 am
Surfaw is an interesting method of wrapping internet search engines into the the CLI unix interface. I'm not sure exactly how it's useful, but dang it's purty.
Posted by: Zuvembi

Survey: Top Ten UNIX Commands	July 5 2000, 03:34 pm
At some time in the future, I will write an article on the top ten most important UNIX commands. I want your feedback! Thanks everyone.
Posted by: otto

Nvidia product manager interview	July 3 2000, 03:46 pm
NVNews has an interview with the product manager at Nvidia in this article. They talk about Linux support some in page 2 of the interview. There drivers may be flipping great, but I've been burned too many times to be comfortable with proprietary drivers. The one that hurt the most was my Diamond Fireport 40 Dual, a great scsi card, but it's discontinued, so no more driver updates for it. Errrr. Thank goodness the Linux driver for it is good.
Posted by: Zuvembi

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