All I can say is these devices are not built to be radiation tolerant to say nothing of radiation hardened. Keep in mind the laptops (not used for safety critical things) on the ISS have to rebooted daily because of Single Event Upset (SEU)s that lock them up.

Interesting time to talk about Software Defined Radios.

NASA's SCaN Testbed with 3 Software Defined Radios is launching onboard the Japanese HTV-3 Unmanned cargo vehicle in 15 days. (July 21st)

It's an experimental payload that will be bolted to the exterior of the International Space Station and perform communications experiments with the 3 SDR's contained in the payload.

http://spaceflightsystems.grc.nasa.gov/SOPO/SCO/SCaNTestbed/Payload/

Yeah, I got scritchy-scratches but no music.

I don't hear any sound. :(

Yeh. Occasionally get same bs, too. WTF?

I've run into several sites that refuse any email address in that form (ie, foobar+somesite@gmail.com is rejected). Wish it worked all the time, though!

For labs/installations of many machines, or people who are dolts - um I mean newbies, I always recommend whatever the local flavour of Redhat/Suse/Mandrake/whatever.

However, for a few choice machines, machines that you spend more time with then should be legally allowed, I always recommend slackware (for a non high bandwidth connection) or gentoo (with high bandwidth). The flexibility of these last too is very rewarding for anyone who wants an uber customized Linux box.

And especially with slackware, you gain a lot of knowledge and familiarity with how things works, and how to fix things. This knowledge pays off it's debt quickly. For example, you might have a redhat buddy that has some problems with configuration GUI X, and you just go and fix it by hand.

LFS is interesting, but what's the big difference between it and gentoo? Just an extra step that's not very practical unless you're making your own distro.