Many moons ago, August, I believe, "Good Morning America" was scheduled to carry a short article about the Personal Internet Appliance. The show was postphoned, and I am not sure that segment ever aired (I don't have television service, anyway.) It was revolutionary in two ways.... It promised internet connectivity with word processing, browsing, etc and a 333MHz processor with 32M RAM and a 2G or larger HDD. And the Price tag was an astounding $199. I ordered one, and the order was confirmed, and I was offered "customization" in a separate email where for only $29.95 the "codes" for my ISP of choice would be preloaded. I ignored the email and waited for the device,... and waited, and waited.... Well, tow months later, I called and they said they had no record of my order. OK snafus happen, particularly in startups, so I forgot about it. Later, someone approached me who has a son living 2400 miles away in Washington and who wanted to get him connected to email as cheaply as possible without trying the WEBTV type stuff. I remembered the PIA and said it should probably be stable, at least on the software side. I also presented several other alternatives without making any recommendation. He opted for the PIA from www.thelinuxstore.com. I recommended additional memory, so the PIA was purchased with 64M. Well, it was my opportunity to support the device. So, I dealt with it over the phone. Naturally, the high-schooler turned it off without shutting down. Then we discovered that the root password was nowhere in the documentation. (Everything was preinstalled, one ordinary user defined, named tux with pw tux). The Linux store folk I could find over the phone could not locate the one who knew the root password, so an email was sent and a response was received and, after e2fsck -c /dev/hda3 everything was working again. Debian was the distro, and KDE was the wm and level5 was how it booted (no LILO, no linux 1, no floppy drive for a rescue floppy, no CD drive to boot a CD to use it as a rescue). Everything worked like a charm. The modem was at /dev/modem, and Kppp was all set up except for the ISP specific stuff. Then we tried to go to eskimo.com No Carrier, nine times out of 10. Dropped lines, trashy performance. One login successful out of 74 attempts, and that one stayed up 3 whole minutes. Looked like Netscape loading knocked it down.... What is WORSE than a Rockwell HCF chipset? The PCTel HSP! That is what it had. A LINMODEM! And the Motherboard? PCChips M748R or something slightly newer which will run up to 500MHz P-IIIs and of course Celerons of all descriptions .... Most likely PPGA with perhaps a slot as well on board. Well, this is NOT one to try at home. This is NOT one to mention to friends. I found my friend a nice 56K external serial modem from Compaq for $54.50 plus $9.00 shipping. Now I just hope the PCChips board holds together for a while. As you know, PCChips boards are made by a company of geniuses who specialize in ECCR (elimination of cost-complicating redundancies) In 1996, it was discovered that motherboards produced by them had worthless pieces of plastic in the cache sockets (obviously, if there is no cache memory on board to fail, then the board will fail less frequently, and the cost complications are greatly reduced). I have seen Houston Tech, Hsin tech, Lucky Star, Matsonic, Eurome, Alton, and Amptron brands on PCChips made boards, and all seem to be basically the same. Never use two inductors when one will do. Never use a tantalum capacitor when an electrolytic can do the same task, and never, ever buy a chipset from a chipset manufacturer that the manufacturer is willing to put his own name on. Don't forget to use terms like AGP to mean "Advanced Graphics Processor" for your PCI/ISA boards without Accelerated Graphics Processor slots, either. After all, the Accelerated graphics Processor was at the time of MMX Socket 7 just another Cost Complication. Whew, long post, but you folk have been warned. Warn others. This is a BAD ONE. This is a Packard bell of the linux world. Also, there is a web site where the purchasers of these unhappy devices can update their software. It is called PlanetPIA, http://www.planetPIA.com, and it has been "Coming Soon" since September. This device will likely and deservedly fail. It is truly a shame that some will be blaming the operating system on it instead of the Ebiz Enterprises company handling it ... they seem predatory and into anything that is hot. But one note of light in all this darkness. EBiz did manage to make a nice installation of linux on very very marginal hardware. Sorry to have strayed from the Mandrake topic, but this one was too much to contain. Ebiz seems to have the linux store, CPU Micromart (which handles PCChips stuff and used to handle Multias), and a few other enterprises. None seem to have the resources to do much more than sell to you and produce product for sale. A number of items have appeared on their various web sites as things one would see and "gotta have" which have quickly disappeared. Whether it was "loss leader", "bait and switch vaporware", or something else, I cannot say, because they haven't yet learned how to ship to Alaska (fortunately for me, since my first impulse is to trust those involved with linux). Civileme
