A few have asked about getting these spiffy remotes working under Linux so I figured I'd finally have to run something, but the submissions have been piling up rather quickly. So if you have a remote mouse, this topic is for you!

Duncan McQueen would like to query you all on this issue "What is a good AGP video card for Linux? I have seen much about the new Savage 3D card by S3 and it is definitely in my price range, but I haven't seen anyone's success with running X on it. Any suggestions?" There have been quite a few submissions like this one, but they have been mostly requests for X servers which support the latest AGP cards. So I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone.

GooMBa asks"I've been looking high and low for a hardware supplier that specializes in older systems. Motherboards and cpu's that are Pentium 133's and older so I can experiment with SMP & Beowolfe type projects. Does anyone know a company (or internet site) like this? "

DrJolt writes "According to a ZDNet story the Palm IV has been pushed back to next year. " Get all our hopes up and then dash them. Ugh. *grin*.

J. Steinbrecher (fwromp) writes "Recently I was in the market for a new Laptop and decided I would look into leaving intel behind. I had read some stories about AMD opening up its K6 chip to the laptop market and decided to look into it. The links to laptop resellers that use the K6 chip on the AMD web page was very disheartening considering all the resellers using the PII chip. However I looked a bit deeper and found a lot of good companies (internet based and otherwise) are useing the K6 in the their computers and laptops. For anyone hunting for a bargin laptop with blazeing speed. Laptop 1, Laptop 2, Laptop 3 ."

Dave Cope asks "Since I have recently begun attending university, I have been moving my computer between my residense and my home a great deal. Today when I was defragging my HD, I found that I had some bad sectors. I have done surface scans of my HD before, so I am sure that this problem is only a few weeks old at most. The HD is an, almost new 3.5" 5.2GB drive. I am wondering if the car trips to and from university could have damaged the drive, or if it is more likely a manufacturing defect. I always thought that as long as a HD wasn't spinning it could absorb a fair amount of shock without damage. I would like some advice if possible. First, is the damage my fault, or just a defect in the drive? (I would like to know if my warranty covers me) Second, if I replace the drive will I have similar problems if I try moving the computer around a lot? Third, are there any ways I can safely transport my computer? Generally I am looking at ways to get around this problem. I would like to take my computer home on the weekend so I can do school work. If I can't take the computer home I will have to use my old 486 and move a lot of information between my two computers."&nbsp Now I've been throwing my boxes around for years and I've had a few drives go bad on me, but I think this is more an issue of the quality of a specific drive rather than a general concern. What say you?

Paul Moore wanted some help on TV Tuner cards. He writes: "I have a few questions that I was hoping you or the slashdot community would be able to answer. Basically I am looking into picking up a TV card for my machine, but I had a few questions about the capabilities of the bttv/video4linux stuff and didn't want to waste the developer(s)' time by mailing the video4linux list..." There's more! You know what to do...

David Sifry writes "According to PC World Online, it only takes a Palm Pilot, some software, and 10 seconds to copy certain types of car keys for infrared door locks. Those pilots sure have lots of uses! The full story is here. " I dig the software that lets you use your Palm IIIs irda port as a universal remote. 4" range sucks, but still. I wonder if I could get my laptop to do that.

needles writes "Afraid to leave home 'cause you'll be without your Linux box? Check out the CAJUN Car Audio Jukebox page where it describes how to use a linux box and a Matrix Orbital LCD display and keypad to add a mp3 Linux-based jukebox to your car audio system and fear no longer. The only problem I see in building this is the temperature and shock conditions for the components of the Linux box. Does anyone know what the most reliable components (especially the hard drive) for these conditions would be? " Something like this would work in your living room too. Somebody needs to sell these things. Anyone? Please?

latneM writes "On their latest Press Release 3Dfx unveils their latest video card. On top of "world's fastest 2D core" and twice the 3D power of Voodoo 2's in SLI, the PR says, "The Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 support both SGRAM and SDRAM memory, as well as the Windows 95/98/2000, MAC OS, Unix, and Linux operating systems." " Oh man that looks sweet. And they even mention Linux by name!

PianoMan8 writes "AMD has released thier K6-2's at 366, 380, and 400Mhz. The press release is here. Also, it appears that VIA and ALi will be making chipsets for the K7." Oh man that is cool. The 400MHz K6-2 has a faster core than other K6-2 chips. I can't wait for the K6-3 to come out so I can pop it in my K6-2 machine. Go AMD! Update: Diablo sent us a link to a Tom's Hardware Guide article which discusses these chips in a fair amount of depth.

J Widjaja writes "Infoworld carries an article which describe recent advances and challange on chip technology. This article gives nice overview of chip industry direction."

George wrote in wondering if you Slashdotters had answers to the following: "I would greatly appreciate any directions on how to make my Relisys infinity scorpio scanner work under Red Hat 5.1. I have searched in a lot of places in the net, but I can't find anything. SANE doesn't support it. Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I just keep a Windows95 partition just to scan."

Iomega will release a new ZIP drive, according to ZDNet. The new drive will costs 199$ and can store 250 MB on a disk. The new drive comes as a direct competitor to Sony's new drive which sotres only 200MB but can read 1.44 Floppies. Iomega says that they're going to sell a six-pack of the new ZIP disks for 100$.

Greg Gulrajani d writes "A trip down memory lane.. specs, photos and adds from the first personal computer wave that made us what we are!" I feel left out- my first was a TRS-80.

area wrote in to send us a link to a new wearable linux box. This one looks pretty good. It's called the Mobile Assistant IV and its from Xybernaut. It's the first one that doesn't look underpowered, and it has quite a few display options, as well as voice input. No price tag yet. I'd definately take one, but I probably say that about every piece of linux capable hardware ;)

Booker writes "So IBM announces a 25 gig hard drive... does the world need this yet? Unless this is in a RAID, would you really want to trust 25 gigs on a single drive? What would you use this for? 400+ hours of MP3s comes to mind... "

asmussen writes "Freshmeat has this today also, but I thought maybe seeing it on Slashdot also would help get out the vote. There is a petition going on for ATI to release specifications for their TV tuner cards so that we can support them under non MS operating systems. "

barspin writes "Got my December issue of PC Magazine today, and this is what JC Dvorak had to say about Transmeta in his "Inside Track" column: "There's been a buzz in the valley and elsewhere about Transmeta, a start-up that's going to join in the chip fray. It seems that with the help of some old Cyrix honchos, the company is going to make yet another x86 clone. But this one is going to be ultra-low power and designed for modern notebooks. Transmeta sees a huge gap in the market not being addressed by AMD or Intel. Now you know." This manages to shed a little light on what ddt (formerly of crack.com fame) and of course Linus are up to these days. I wonder, though, how verifiable this info is."

Eddie Rebel writes in with this interesting question: "At work, we have some Compaq 850s with 2Gb of RAM. Recently I was told that the extra RAM we thew into them might not do any good, if the machine's cache memory was not lage enough to handle it. As I understood it the RAM is cached in the L2, but if you have only 64k of L2 it wouldn't be able to store more than 64Mb of RAM, and so on. Is there any truth in this, could someone please tell me or point me to some information about this?"