My old Slackware box died on me a while ago and I decided to throw another box together out of spare parts I had lying around. The mobo, psu, and cpu are from a 2005 HP Pavilion. I got everything cleaned up and connected and set it to boot the optical drive first, but I dropped the Slackware disc in the drive and just got a black screen when I booted. Underscore cursor blinking in the top left corner for about 3 minutes and not a peep from the cdrom. Tried it with two other optical drives and still nothing. Is it not possible to install Linux with this OEM motherboard?

You've finally made the move to a Windows-free computer, you're enjoying your brand new Linux OS, no trojans/viruses, no slowdown, everything's perfect. Suddenly, you need to update the BIOS on your motherboard to support some new piece of hardware, but typically the motherboard vendor is offering only DOS based BIOS flash utilities. You panic! Fortunately, this problem is easy to solve...

Step 1: Download FreeDOS boot disk floppy image

FreeDOS, a free DOS-compatible operating system, is up to the challenge, no need for proprietary DOS versions. So, all you need is a bootable floppy disk image with FreeDOS kernel on it. We are fortunate that guys at FDOS site have prepared one suitable for us. Use the OEM Bootdisk version, the one with just kernel and command.com, because it leaves more free space on disk for the flash utility and new BIOS image. You can also find a local copy of this image attached at the end of this article. After you download the image, you need to decompress it. In other words:

With a little bit of torturing, and some fun on the way, find out how fast your hard disk drive really is.

Introduction

1-Terabyte hard disk drives are slowly coming to the market, so I suppose we can't complain that we don't have enough space to save (the ever increasing amount of) our precious data. But, it's also a known fact that although disk storage capacities are improving at an impressive rate, disk performance improvements are occurring at a rather slower rate. Unfortunately, larger disk doesn't always mean faster disk. What follows is an explanation of two techniques for measuring disk performance in Linux.

ASRock 775Dual-VSTABeing a happy owner of the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA motherboard for a week, I decided to share my opinions about it and also give an advice or two to other people thinking about running Linux on it.

In short, this board is an exceptional piece of engineering and Linux runs GREAT on it. I'm not going to list all the specifications of the motherboard, because they're readily available on its official page, but let me go through the interesting features:

• the board can use both DDR & DDRII memory (but not at the same time!)
• you can equip it with AGP or PCIe graphics card, your choice
• there's plenty of connectors for both older ATA or newer SATA drives
• you can run any LGA 775 processor you can get hands on, including latest Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe core)
• the board is very affordable (or should I say dirt cheap)