ScottBob asks: "Seeing the recent post about the vintage computer festival got me thinking about old hardware I'm still using in my 'modern' computer. I have a 1 ghz Celeryonion machine, but when I bought the mobo I specifically looked for one with an ISA slot so I could still use my old Zoltrix modem I bought in '97 when V.90 was adopted (when it probably would have been cheaper to buy an ISA-less mobo and a PCI modem). I've also moved a '93 model floppy drive from machine to machine, and it still works. Usually, monitors and power supplies survive the ravage Moore's law has on hardware, but what other things does everybody else save when they cruft together a new machine? Anybody ever do things like disguise a 4 GHz P4 in an ancient 8086 machine box? While on the subject, is anybody still running old DOS programs in a DOS box on a Windows machine (e.g. a database) because your company is too poor/cheap to upgrade or doesn't want to bother with any free alternatives?"

darth_silliarse writes "ExtremeTech have thankfully confirmed that I am not completely deaf - onboard m/b sound is not as bad as it sounds. Is onboard sound for the poor, needy or completely bone idle? What are other peoples opinions of m/b sound? If nothing else, it frees up a PCI or ISA slot... ;o)"

This set of interview responses from Linux hacker Alan Cox is overtly political, in line with the questions we asked him on May 6th. Alan doesn't just talk about problems here but proposes sensible solutions for them. Very nice. Thanks, Alan.

eschasi asks: "Recently we've been seeing some trend towards smaller footprint machines like the new iMac or the tiny PC system shown in this recent article. All these tiny systems have scalability or quality problems for me, and I don't think it has to be that way. But all the solutions I see require discarding much of what we think is standard to desktop/deskside mechanical design for PCs. Apple has been able to do with much more freedom becuase they own the whole process. PC makers, however, don't. The last major improvement to PC motherboard/case design was the ATX design, and that was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. I think that major improvement can still be made in an evolutionary way. I want both worlds: I want a small footprint; I want it in a premium system; I want it to have enough room for a pair of hard drives, a 5.25" external slot, and a 3.5" external slot; and I want it using largely off-the-shelf components, and I don't want to have to re-invent ATX and PCI and ya-da-day to get it!" Do you feel the same way? How would you improve the current crop of PC form factors?

Snowfox asks: "Between having multiple network cards, video cards, SCSI controllers, audio, etc, I'm always hurting for expansion slots. Five or six just aren't enough for an everything box. Several companies offer PCI expansion chassis. I see these vendors on the show floor at Game Developers Conference and Siggraph every year, but the prices are high and none of the vendors can tell me whether these support Linux. Has anyone had any dealings with one of these units?"

Anonymous Coward writes: "People at the at Chinese University of Hong Kong have developed a reconfigurable computing card which uses the SDRAM memory slot instead of the PCI bus. Measurements in the paper show greatly improved bandwidth and latency - why aren't more people using this idea?"

Over the last few months, I've had a number of AskSlashdot questions about quiet computers, what hardware to get, and other items for assembling a mega-machine that won't knock the roof off. I've put the finishing touches on my own mega machine -- if you're looking at doing the same thing, or are just curious about the hardware involved, you can find out about what I built.

The Fat Guy asks: "I'm having trouble trying to find a device that may not Is there any 'in-line' device out there that can transparently mirror IDE drives? I have a need for a device that will connect to an IDE bus (ATA 100) and will then connect to 2 separate (identical if need be, but ideally allowing different geometries) hard drives and transparently mirror them (RAID 1). I can not install an IDE RAID controller (no PCI slot in the embedded box), and I can't do software RAID (it needs to be OS independent). Ideally, I'd like something that would even work with an external USB or Firewire drive controller. CRU once made something similar to this for older IDE drives, but it appears that they dropped the product and did not update it for the modern drives. Any suggestions? Am I wasting my (and your) time asking this?" It's an interesting idea. Does anyone know of a technical reason why such a device can't be made if it doesn't already exist?

il_seba asks: "We are looking for x86 hardware which could be used to build a stilish/compact WAN router for our LUG. The main requirements, in no precise order, are: small size, fanless operation (low power/low heat CPU + compact flash boot medium), on-board fast ethernet and a single PCI slot. The actual candidates are IGEL thin-clients and ALLWELL STB1030N, although if you have more, we'd appreciate knowing about them. We just need the barebone system, as we'll provide software by ourselves."

Joane Lispton asks: "I would like to ask the Slashdot crowd if they can help me do the following: I want to fit a x86 motherboard, two drives (Maxtor HD and CD-RW unit) and _two_ PCI cards into a 1U case (plus fan & power supply). Is this feasible? I was wondering whether there is some sort of "L-shaped" adapter that allows you to place PCI cards PARALLEL to the motherboard... Any tips are greatly appreciated!" I distinctly remember something like this existing for ISA cards, (it plugged into the normal ISA slot and had ISA slots that mounted parallel to the motherboard). Has a PCI equivalent been introduced?

cheros writes: "I would be interested if anyone knows of motherboards which have more than the usual 4/5 PCI slots on them (and maybe with one or two ISA slots as well). Extenders would be interesting too, but I can imagine bus timings getting in the way of anything with leads leaving the case. I'm about to build another system (with a 1.3GHz AMD as main processor), and when I start listing the toys I want in it I end up being short of slots. Just add up: sound, SCSI, NIC, TV, FireWire, serial card for extra serial ports (Linux and VT100 - it rocks ;-). And I have this old ISA card I built a while ago with 8 relays - that's no longer usable so I might need another slot for a digital I/O card. Anyone? Pleeze?"

Michael Buffington asks: "I frequently go to LAN gaming parties, and because I'm not all that interested in toting my higher power mid tower machine around, I bring my lower powered notebook. I want to build a full powered machine complete with a fast, 3.5" HD, CD-ROM, Pentium III or similar in speed CPU, at least 1 AGP slot, and at least 2 PCI slots (or integrated sound, or network, or both), as small as possible. I've considered going the PC 104 route, but don't know of any vendors who sell complete systems (which I'd be more comfortable with, on the PC 104 route), and honestly don't know the pricing on PC 104. I've also considered finding the smallest motherboard I can, and hand building a machine as small as possible with normal equipment (duct tape being part of the 'normal' equipment). Does anyone have any ideas, examples, or stories to help with my new obsession?"

Knobby was one of the several people to point out a really neat piece of hardware. He writes: "Total Impact just announced (a few days ago) their 'briQ'. It's a PPC G3 or G4 machine measuring 5.74 X 1.625 X 8.9 inches with a single 64bit 66MHz PCI slot, integrated 10/100Mbit networking, a 40GB HDD, and ships with LinuxPPC.. The press release on the page doesn't mention it, but the announcement I received mentioned a starting price of ~$2500.. Note: These are the same folks making the quad G3 and G4 processor PCI cards mentioned in an earlier article." I've long wanted a computer in which the processor / motherboard / memory were as easily removed and replaced as a hard drive, this sounds quite close to that ideal.

In Take 1 of this two-part series, I described some of the current technology in wearable computing as seen at ISWC 2000, this year's just-finished iteration of the International Symposium on Wearable Computers, from head-mounted displays to intelligent jackets. In this round, a little more speculation about where the future of wearability lies, with a peek in the door at some of the things being done in top university labs. What forces will shape the future of wearable computing? Hint: GeForce 2's are still hard to carry, and there's never enough power.

vbrtrmn writes: "A company called Mobility, has recently introduced a cross between a docking station and a desktop PC. It's called the EasiDock 5000. It looks like a normal Desktop PC, though the EasiDock plugs into a laptop's PCMCIA card slot, using it as a highbandwidth bus (1,250Mbps). The EasiDock comes with: 5 drive bays, 3 PCI slots, 2 IDE controllers, a 2-port USB hub; get the PDF datasheet. Unfortunatly, it currently only supports Windows 98/98SE and Windows NT 4.0, though they boast, 'Coming soon... Win 2000 & Millennium, Apple, Linux.'"

giminy writes: "These boards from TotalImpact look pretty nifty. Each one can take 4 g3's or 4 g4's and go in a regular PCI slot -- and get this, they can run in Intel machines. They work by having a program dumped to them like a second computer. Still kinda pricey for the cards, but you can put as many of these cards in your server as you want for something super-scalable. Linux support is there, and datasheets are available." We mentioned these back in '98 but a lot has changed since then. I'm sure there are clever uses for a couple of spare CPUs in a box ;)

alexhmit01 asks: "So my friend's father bought a new set of machines for his office from Gateway, and they included with it this little cube called a Micro Server, which he gave to his son. Naturally, the first thing that we did was crack it open, and saw that it includes a PCI slot (some expandability, currently has a modem that we'll yank), and 10 GB hard drive. We're flipping through the manual, assuming that it is an NT machine when I notice they talk about SMB shares, so I'm assuming SAMBA. I get to the back and see two documents, the BSD license and the GPL. We check out the specs, it runs a 64-bit RISC processor (I'm assuming Arm), and Linux 2.0! So how many IT people have gotten one of these and decided to actually put it to use? Any suggestions? "

Shawn wrote in asking for suggestions on high-end Linux Workstation configurations for the US Army. Aparently, they are looking at replacing some SGIs with cheaper PCs, and this being Slashdot, I'm sure some of you might be able to make some improvements to their suggested configuration. I can't tell you how glad I am to see the US Army giving Linux a chance. The US Navy could probably learn a thing or two from this. Click below for the full text.

gjt writes "Finally. The death of of the ISA slot is near. Red Herring is running a story on the Legacy Free PC. Plug all of your mice, keyboards, joysticks, modems, etc. into the Universal Serial Bus. Compaq is releasing a computer called the Vista which will do just that. Yes, Apple did that over a year ago with the iMac and PCI based G3 and G4. Of course, if you're like me, you'd want to build your own box. Asus makes legacy free "PC 99" compliant motherboards. I wonder if this means more IRQ numbers. And what's the state of USB and Firewire support in Linux?" Suddenly USB is everywhere. Will it take hold? A lot of PC manufacturers sure seem to think so.

Kevin Way is having trouble getting his Diamond Monster 3D to work properly under Linux. It's kind of a strange situation. Hit the link below to read his description and see if you can't help.