Mr. Marabou Man - Slashdot User

Homebrew Cray-1 140

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @01:00PM from the when-i-was-a-child dept.

egil writes "Chris Fenton built his own fully functional 1/10 scale Cray-1 supercomputer. True to the original, it includes the couch-seat, but is also binary compatible with the original. Instead of the power-hungry ECL technology, however, the scale model is built around a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. All software is available if you want to build one for your own living room. The largest obstacle in the project is to find original software."

Comment Re:Issues I've had. (Score 1) 410

by Mr. Marabou Man on Monday December 07, 2009 @06:11AM (#30350932) Attached to: Multiple-Display Power Tools For Linux?

What do you do with fvwm that you can't do with gnome? I used fvwm for quite a few years from about 15 years ago, and i can't say i miss it.

Well, I for one can run it on my hopelessly antiquated computer :) For me, the question is really: What can you do with Gnome that you can't do with FVWM ?

Comment Re:I know this is slashdot..... but XP (Score 1) 432

by Mr. Marabou Man on Tuesday March 31, 2009 @02:20AM (#27398561) Attached to: I typically stick with the same desktop environment

Maybe I don't have enough windows open at a time to really make it worthwhile, but the few times I played with them I always just ended up losing my windows and hunting through each desktop to find them. I think Alt+Tab / Win+Tab works fine (even better on Vista/Win7 with more detailed previews).

Remember where you start your apps. I have my virtual desktops arranged in two 3x2 grids, one labeled Personal, the other Work. Numpad 8 and 5 switching between the two. Numpad 7, 9, 4, 6, 1, 3 are bound to each screen within that section. Now on Personal, I will always run mutt on 7, Firefox on 9. On Work, I will always have Emacs in 9, xpdf in 7, figure editor in 6, spare terminal in 1, Matlab in 3, etc, and finding the right program is just a matter of hitting the corresponding Numpad key. This works extremely well for me.

Right-click any shortcut in the Start Menu or on the Desktop, go to Shortcut tab and type what you want in the Shortcut box. This works anywhere in Windows. In Vista and Win7 you have even more choices, for example, the Windows key + numbers opens the programs in your QuickLaunch in order (Win+1 opens the first shortcut, Win+2 the second, etc).

I'm guessing GP meant keyboard shortcuts used for other things, in addition to opening programs. Especially FVWM has huge possibilities here, and some people are quite into that. I obviously have quite a few myself (primarily window operations -- maximize, move windows between workspaces, etc -- The 'Windows' key actually comes in quite handy here).

My personal #1 annoyance with Windows, though, is that there is no easy way (at least that I know of) my modify the keyboard layout. I live in Denmark, but the Danish keyboard layout was really designed by someone with their head way up their ass (AltGr+7/0 to get curly braces? Bah). I personally find the UK layout rather good in many ways, but even using that as a base layout still leaves me with some serious xmodmap work to be done before I can use a system.

MoBo Manufacturer Foxconn Refuses To Support Linux 696

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 25, 2008 @08:19AM from the must-be-some-good-explanation dept.

Noodlenose notes a thread up on the Ubuntu forums, where a user is questioning the practices of hardware manufacturer Foxconn. The user describes how his new Foxconn motherboard caused his Linux install to freeze and fire off weird kernel errors. He disassembles the BIOS and concludes that a faulty DSDT table is responsible for the errors. Even though the user makes Foxconn aware of the problem, they refuse to correct it, as 'it doesn't support Linux' and is only 'Microsoft certified.' The user speculates darkly on Foxconn's motives. Read the forum, read the code, and come to your own conclusions. "I disassembled my BIOS to have a look around, and while I won't post the results here, I'll tell you what I did find. They have several different tables, a group for Windows XP and Vista, a group for 2000, a group for NT, Me, 95, 98, etc. that just errors out, and one for LINUX. The one for Linux points to a badly written table that does not correspond to the board's ACPI implementation.' The worst part is Foxconn's insistence that the product is ACPI compliant because their tables passed to Windows work, and that Microsoft gave the the magic WHQL certification."

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