Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Upgrade Ponderings -- 9:56 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ever since my scare with my box a month or so ago, I've been doing some preliminary research on a new box. It looks like I'd want to go with an nForce 570 SLI motherboard and an Athlon 64 X2 processor. That dual core stuff seems too slick for words. I read an interesting article over at Anandtech, discussing the value of dual core CPUs and Linux. It would be really slick to be able to compile something (for example) or burn a DVD and not have to treat my computer as if it were a precious vase. I figured an upgrade (including an SATA hard drive, PCI-E video card, memory, and a case) would set me back about $650 for one of the lower-end X2 processors. That'd be a pretty reasonable deal and would give me quite a speed-up over my Athlon XP 1800+. Maybe then I could replay Half-Life 2 without inducing vomiting.

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Firefox Vulnerability Hoax? -- 10:46 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

There was a lot of buzz recently about a report at a hackers' convention that Firefox's Javascript implementation was "a complete mess" and "impossible to patch." Well, now Ars Technica has word that the whole thing is most likely a hoax. Somebody obviously thinks they're very clever. Unfortunately the media really ran with this story. I was doubtful from the first moment because they didn't show any exploit code that actually worked. When someone says that something is either great or terrible without one shred of concrete evidence, something is amiss. I'm not saying that Firefox is perfect. What the Mozilla team has succeeded in doing is getting exploit concerns out there and forcing Microsoft to really go to work on IE again.

Slackware 11.0 Released! -- 8:48 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

At long last Patrick Volkerding has declared Slackware 11.0 to be complete! Right now the site is being Slashdotted so make sure to hit your favorite mirror site. Here's a snip from the announcement regarding kernels:

Slackware uses the 2.4.33.3 kernel bringing you advanced performance features such as the ReiserFS journaling filesystem, SCSI and ATA RAID volume support, SATA support, and kernel support for X DRI (the Direct Rendering Interface) that brings high-speed hardware accelerated 3D graphics to Linux. Additional kernels allow installing Slackware using any of the journaling filesystems available for Linux, including ext3, ReiserFS, IBM's JFS, and SGI's XFS. Slackware 11.0 also fully supports the 2.6 kernel series, with your choice of the well-tested 2.6.17.13 kernel in /extra (including a version of this kernel that supports multiple processors, multi-core CPUs, HyperThreading, and about every other optimization available), or the recently released 2.6.18 kernel in /testing. This kernel also spent a long time in development and in our own testing has proven to be fast, stable, and reliable.

I've been running a fully-patched Slackware 11.0 RC5 release for a little over a week now, using the 2.6.17.13 kernel. Everything seems to be working quite well.

Update! This is the mirror I used. I was able to max out my 2M cable connection.

Past Two Days' News

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