linux

Sun co-founder John Gage, who coined the phrase "The Network is the Computer" which later became a Sun slogan, is today entirely correct. Oh sure, he's not semantically correct, but he's basically correct in that the true power of the computer is not realized until it is connected to something. MP3 players are little computers that are networked to your computer long enough to load music on to them, for example. One useful and basic thing we can do to cause computers to participate with one another is to copy files between them. Sometimes it's most effective to just do this with a disk, but if they are connected to a network, it's usually easiest to copy the files that way, if not fastest.

On Windows there are a slew of file recovery tools which will peer intently at an optical disc, retrying until they recover every possible file. The leading tool is probably Isobuster, but there are dozens of candidates for the title. There are few automated (or even user-friendly) data recovery tools on Linux or UNIX(tm) platforms, but common tools which are often even included with the core system or which are installable through the official package system are often sufficient for performing this critical task.

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.