User:Crazyeddie

Intro
My screen name, crazyeddie, comes from a alien culture hero from the science fiction novel "Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. My real name is Dan Marshall. By day, I'm the owner and sole employee of Freelance Computer Repair, a small computer shop which has quite recently become profitable (woot!). By night I (still) work as a janitor at a local factory. Also, I'm an moderator here. (I prefer that term to sysop, since I'm not opping any sys.)

I've just set up a Live Journal account: http://www.livejournal.com/users/crazyeddie740/

Linux Experience
I'm not quite a linux noob, but I'm not far from it. I still use Windows about 90% of the time. I started Linux with Slackware (version 9.1 I think), but I found the lack of package management limiting. I then went to Mandrake 9.1, and now I'm going with Debian (started out with Woody, currently working with Sarge). I've also installed Mandrake 9.2, but didn't use it much. I've attempted to install Gentoo and LFS, but didn't make it all the way through. (I'm not sure, but I think LFS might actually have a more user-friendly install than Gentoo :-p) I have quite a bit of experience with Knoppix, but somehow, that doesn't seem to count.

Since my business serves Windows customers, I'm constantly on the look out for libre programs for Windows.

LQwiki Stuff
I'm currently working on incorporating the Jargon File into the wiki. It is a public domain source, consisting of hacker folklore going back to the elder days. However, a lot of it is off topic, so I'm about to take a break so the Jargon File material doesn't overwhelm the rest of the wiki.

I'm also about to begin a effort to incorporate material from the Linux Documentation Project into the wiki. Unlike the Jargon File, the LDP material is on topic. Unfortunately, unlike the Jargon File, the material, for the most part, isn't public domain. Instead, it is available underneath a variety of copyleft and/or libre licenses, most of which aren't Creative-Commons compatible. So we (meaning me, currently) have to ask each individual author for permission to release their material under the attribution share-alike variant of the Creative Commons.

Other than that, I bounce around the wiki at random, adding my two cents where it will help.

I'm also the one to blame for the Hardware Compatibility List. I'm thinking about scrapping it, provided nobody wants to keep it. It's just too difficult to maintain. Your distribution's web page should have that information anyway.

HCL Debris
Support from creative cards from (at least) the Live family onwards are usually prebuilt into kernels and use with Linux should not be a problem.

The exception is some Dell cards, which carry "SoundBlaster Live!" as a brand name, but are completely different from any of the Live family.

The Matrox G400 works great. I've got the 16 MB OEM and the 2D is very crisp on my analog LCD monitor.

Any digital camera which presents itself to the computer as a USB mass storage device can be used on GNU/Linux without special software. All modern digital cameras can connect in this way. Once connected files on the camera can be browsed in the same way as on your local hard drive.

Files on a digital camera are usually in jpeg or tif format and can be used as normal. Some professional cameras can save lossless, raw sensor data instead, in a format that differs from camera to camera. Camera manufacturers supply executables to use these formats, but they are normally Windows and Mac only. The Gimp loads the common raw formats directly, and free, open source tools exist to convert raw images to standard formats. dcraw is well regarded and often provides better quality images than the vendor-supplied programs. 

In 90% or more cases plugging the camera in and doing this:   Is enough to use the camera. A more perminant solution is to set up an automount. See mount and automount
 * 1) mkdir /mnt/camera
 * 2) mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera -t vfat

Gtkam comes with most distributions and can be used for older cameras that do not use the standard USB mass storage interface.

Etherlink III
This card is an ISA bus 10Mb ethernet card.

Debian
The current stable version of Debian, Woody, is compatible with this card, but I had to manually set the IRQ setting (which is 5)

SmoothWall
This card was compatible with SmoothWall. Keep in mind that if you are using another ISA card, you are almost certainly going to run into an IRQ conflict, unless you are lucky enough to be using a card with jumper-set IRQ.

Windows
Although Windows isn't actually a Linux distribution, it's worth noting this card works with Windows XP out of the box, no third party drivers needed. I also vaguely recall it working with Windows 98 without extra drivers, but I could be wrong.

Notes to Self
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_computer_club http://www.bambi.net/bob/homebrew.html