jeffRASH

by Ben Crowell, lightandmatter.com

It was time to buy my daughter a cheap Linux system to be used for schoolwork and playing flash games — well, mostly for playing flash games. In the past, I’ve bought the $200 Great Quality boxes at Fry’s, and they’ve proved very reliable, but the salesman at Fry’s told me that they were no longer carrying them, so in search of my cheap Linux fix, I decided to buy the new Everex TC2502 Green gPC being sold at WalMart. Er, supposedly being sold at WalMart. WalMart has sold Linux PCs in the past, but what was supposed to be different about this one was that it was going to be available on the shelf in stores, not just by mail order. However, a bit of searching in the WalMart web site showed that the machine wasn’t really in stock at any of the stores that were listed as having it. What was in stock was the GC3500, a $300 model that comes with Windows Vista preinstalled. (Since then, Everex has lined up a bunch of other distributors; since I’m not a big fan of WalMart, I’d probably use one of them if I was doing this over.) I ended up ordering the $200 machine I wanted via WalMart’s “Site to Store” service, where they ship it to the local store (at no extra charge), and send you an email when it’s arrived so you can come and pick it up. The price was $199, plus tax. A monitor and wifi card basically doubled the price.

The default gOS desktop.

Click here, to view the complete review.

Ubuntu Home Page | Ubuntu

Slashdot - Firehose
Debian win32-loader goes official
Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13, @03:39AM

An anonymous reader writes “After a long process of review and polishing, the win32 loader from http://goodbye-microsoft.com has finally made its way to official Debian CDs. Latest daily builds of lenny (the development version) are including it, making the start of Debian Installer as simple as just a few clicks. The win32-loader version, now based on GRUB 2, includes new features such as detection and preseeding of Windows settings, and is translated to 20 languages.”
http://goodbye-microsoft.com

Last week I bought a copy of PdaNet and installed it on my laptop and Motorola Q. It works great!

PdaNet allows your Windows computer to connect to the Internet through your Windows Mobile Phone with your ActiveSync cable/dock, Bluetooth or InfraRed. If you own a Motorola Q or any other Windows Mobile phone with a data plan, PdaNet will make it your high speed wireless Internet Service for your laptop/desktop computer instantly - no extra hardware or setup necessary, no need to kill ActiveSync or perform any tricky hacking to your device whatsoever.

Click the image above to checkout their website. There you can download the 7 day demo and/or purchase the full version.

I searched high and low for a Windows Media Player Mobile skin that looks like the new Windows Media Player 11. Yesterday I finally found a really good one.

I had to tweak the time and volume locations on the landscape version down two pixels to make it look right for the “Motorola Q”. I also had to move the volume icon down and left a few pixels to make it line up better.

1. Just click on the image to download it.
2. Unzip the files and copy them to “Program Files\Windows Media Player” on your mobile phone.
3. Now you can select that skin in the options menu in Windows Media Player Mobile.