• Mood: irritated
• Music: Patty Loveless - Halfway Down

What news from the land of computer trask?

Here's the fortnightly from Fort Rongly:

Thanks to all who have helped with previous ones, which I posted on:

• March, 2005: Sat 05 Mar 2005, Sun 27 Mar 2005


• April, 2005: Sat 16 Apr 2005, Sat 29 Apr 2005


• May, 2005: Sun 15 May 2005, Sat 28 May 2005


• June, 2005: Sat 11 Jun 2005, Sat 25 Jun 2005


• July, 2005: Sat 09 Jul 2005


• August, 2005: Sat 13 Aug 2005, Sat 20 Aug 2005


• September, 2005: Sat 03 Sep 2005, Sat 17 Sep 2005


• October, 2005: Mon 03 Oct 2005, Sat 15 Oct 2005, Sat 29 Oct 2005


• November, 2005: Sat 12 Nov 2005, Sat 26 Nov 2005


• December, 2005: Sat 10 Dec 2005, Sat 24 Dec 2005


• January, 2006: Sat 07 Jan 2006, Sat 21 Jan 2006


• February, 2006: Sat 04 Feb 2006, Sat 18 Feb 2006


• March, 2006: Sat 04 Mar 2006, Sat 18 Mar 2006


• April, 2006: Sat 01 Apr 2006, Sat 15 Apr 2006, Sat 29 Apr 2006


• May, 2006: Sat 13 May 2006, Sat 27 May 2006


• June, 2006: Sat 10 Jun 2006, Sat 24 Jun 2006


• July, 2006: Sat 08 Jul 2006, Sat 22 Jul 2006

Thanks to nikolasco for replying last week.

Here's my fortnightly update:

• 1. Slow search in Mozilla Thunderbird: nikolasco reports that Thunderbird doesn't do any indexing, even of message headers. I have some 70000 messages to search through in my combined Inboxes - and that's just since the move! There are probably 200-250K if we go back all the way.


• 2. Failure to hibernate, redux: It's definitely BitLord, Firefox, or Mozilla (the original-flavor Navigator).


• 3. Software incompatibilities: I've turned off Talkback on Firefox to see if it crashes less. So far, so good, but it's only been half a day. Do I have to run a separate app to turn off Mozilla's Talkback?

Now for the new questions...

X-Windows clients

If you use X-Windows, what client do you recommend?

I have used:

• Hummingbird Exceed


• WRQ Reflection X


• Desqview X

and have now installed:

• XDeep 4.6.5


• X-Win32 7.1


• CygWin X 1.5.20-1

All of them seem a bit combersome and annoying to use from Windows.

If you use any of these, do you recommend it? If not, do you recommend something else?

Ubercomputer motherboard and processors

The time has come for me to start actually building Orome, and I find myself hesitant to go bleeding-edge and get a quad core Intel system. As I understand it, the 2+GHz (Conroe) and 3+GHz (Conroe XE) 64-bit Core 2 Duo systems are just coming out, so I will probably go for a mid-range, well-tested Conroe system.

Apropos of this: what specific processor and motherboard would you recommend? My goal is to put together or buy a system with high performance-price ratio, emphasizing integer processing and supporting high-end graphics cards (dual SLI, for example). It should have, in descending order of importance:

• Excellent performance with technical computing packages (integer, matrix, symbolic, and FP processing in R, SciLab, MATLAB, Statistica, Maple, Mathematica, roughly in descending order)


• Very good multimedia development, hypermedia authoring, and desktop publishing capabilities (Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0, Adobe Creative Suite 2)


• Good as an applications development platform (Java/Eclipse, C#/Visual Studio 2005)


• Good pipelines for real-time and batch-mode (CPU-intensive) rendering


• Good performance as a database server, though this is not its main function


• A total cost of under $4000


• A fast data bus, especially for doing intensive text and image processing


• Decent multitasking (distributed but still mostly single-user)


• The capability to handle occasional heavy-duty floating point processing


• A decent amount of RAM (4Gb) and the ability to use (but not overuse) it


• Fast GUI response time

Critical criteria are:

• Expandability - it should support 2-5 pairs of RAID drives, gigabit Ethernet when I upgrade my high-speed Internet service in few years


• Stability - it needs to be solid, first and foremost, bluescreening never or very rarely under fairly intensive application use


• Windows Vista readiness, when the times comes to install it next year)


• Long time to obsolescence - I'd like to use it as my primary system for 3 years

I plan to trick it out with dual SLI cards and an ATI All-in-Wonder 2006 edition.

PCI PCMCIA Wireless Card: Plug and Play in Linux?

Does anyone know how to get Ubuntu Linux to start eth0 on a PCMCIA 802.11b wireless card - a Cisco Aironet 340, to be precise?

I can get Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) to recognize the PCI PCMCIA adapter (the slot where the PCMCIA card is plugged in), but eth0 won't automatically start.

More generally, is there an Ubuntu Linux analog to "Plug and Play" yet?

--
Banazir