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My Compaq nw9440 laptop has a Conexant HSF soft modem. To make a long story short, the only way to get it to work on Linux (that I know of, anyway) is to use the commercial Linuxant drivers. Conexant paid them to sell drivers, and they're twenty bucks. It's not a bad deal compared to 3com, which does not and may never have Linux support for Winmodems (especially older ones.)

UPDATE 200802120955 PST: On my system (Ubuntu gutsy, wine-0.9.47) this seems to be working. I will leave this page up for posterity. --drink

Since about 0.9.13 or so Wine has been capable of running Steam and its attendant games, which includes items like Half-Life 2. However, steam backups don't seem to want to work properly.

Like many laptops, the Compaq nw9440 has a Synaptics touchpad. If you want to scroll like the big boys, which is to say with the right side of the touchpad, then you need to make some changes to your xorg.conf. I also use a USB pointer (Logitech TrackMan Wheel, the second generation Marble) and I wanted to be able to use both at once, either/or, et cetera. The touchpad can supposedly be used pressure-sensitively in The GIMP, which is another possible motivation.

If you play Freespace 2 Open with the Freespace 1 Port, and you have version 3.0.3 and want to convert to 3.0.4, you are supposed to run a batch file to run bspatch and make the new VP file. You can do this on Linux if you have Wine (I imagine more or less any version would work, but I don't know) installed, with the following shell script.

I have a Compaq nw9440 "Mobile Workstation" class system, P/N (or type or something) EZ901#AA. There are a number of different systems called the nw9440 which come in the same case, which are slightly different. I won't go into it here; this isn't an ad for HP. In fact, this laptop has presented (in my opinion) more than its fair share of obstacles in my pursuit of Linux. ACPI is slightly wonky, the modem is from Conexant, and video, of all things, has been a major PITA. This is highly unfortunate because this laptop has quite excellent graphics, in fact carrying the best of breed for its date of release - the NVIDIA Quadro FX1500. In particular, I am able to use the display panel only at its maximum resolution.

If you want to use the mapping functionality of ntop to give you [typically incorrect but better than nothing] geolocation maps on host-information pages (for IP hosts) then you need to install the mapper.pl script on a webhost someplace. Each lookup seems to take around 30-40kB but that's just a guess. I suppose I could use ntop to find out... Regardless, this is how I got mapper.pl to work.

Having fought with Crystal Reports Server XI for a while now, I've installed it no less than four times. One of those times it inexplicably failed to work. I then unpacked the very same virtual machine and installed it into the same VM on which it failed to work at all after installation, and it worked. So before I even get into this article my first tip is "if it appears that it should work after your install, and it doesn't, wipe the system and try again."

Some time ago I managed to pick up an IBM Thinkpad A21p for $200. I was motivated to make the purchase because it has a 1600x1200 15" display, which if you do the math is 133 ppi, an extremely high-resolution display. The display ended up having some lines down the side (display or flexible circuit problem) but all in all the system works quite well. I've since spent another $120 or so adding 256MB RAM (up to 384MB) and the 3Com MiniPCI combo ethernet/modem. The modem will likely never work in Linux, so I also have a Xircom two-slot-height cardbus ethernet/modem card which is supported.

This is a fairly sweet little system for its time, although it's nothing special now. It's got a Mobile Pentium 3 which runs at about 850 MHz and will step down to 700 or so, and really amazingly crap speakers. And the biggest problem? ATI Rage Mobility M3. The display does not properly report resolutions via DDC (Windows manages to figure it out, but that's not saying much since it's special-cased up the yin-yang) and so you get a horribly mangled display.

As discussed in a previous article, KVM is a kernel-accelerated virtualization package for Linux that utilizes AMD or Intel VT to reduce the cost of virtualization. It is based in part on qemu, a long-lived processor emulation package which also has a non-VT virtualizing engine, kqemu. One of the benefits of using qemu as a codebase is that qemu already has emulation for various pieces of hardware, including network cards. qemu can use a variety of methods for providing networking, including slirp, tunneling, and various others.

To me, the most interesting type of networking is VDE, or "virtual distributed ethernet". This is most similar to the type of networking performed by VMware. vde provides virtual switches (or hubs) and lets you connect them together at will. This document will not explain how to configure a complicated setup; it explains only how to set up a single TUN/TAP interface and utilize it. I will also briefly cover IP Masquerading, which is necessary for your system to access the outside world if it doesn't have a real, routable IP address.

KVM is a kernel-level virtualization technology/application that provides a complete PC virtual machine under Linux when you have a processor supporting VT. AMD and Intel both have processors which provide hardware support for virtualization to decrease the cost of translating all privileged instructions. In a recent study, vmware showed performance losses of 46% when functioning as a webserver. This is not out of line with expectations; the primary purpose of vmware is to consolidate little-used servers into a single machine.