[KLUG Members] Ahh Cyrix, I remember him well...

[Adam Williams]

>Yeah, I remember when wild-eyed Glenn Henry (former Big Blue upper level 
>developer) went to IDT with the idea to create the winchip (centaur).  If I 
>remember right, they licensed the MMX instructions out so they would be 
>compatible with Intel and AMD's MMX.  Cyrix made up their own MMX instructions 
>(I got bit by that when I put a winmodem-junk into a commodity Cyrix M2-200 
>box-junk that required MMX).  They also used that MediaGX processor in a 
>couple of notebooks and desktop mobos.  Terrible performance with MS OSs.

Ah yes, another often overlooked reason not to use WinModems.  Excessive 
dependencies.
 
>I also remember when IBM concurrently manufactured processors for AMD, Cyrix 
>and WinChip (pretty much everyone non-intel) and yet IBM always prefers the 
>Intel way.  Kind of like why AOL uses a hacked up Internet Explorer when they 
>purchased Netscape a technological century ago.  

I'd imagine AOL uses IE because 99.44% of their users are on Win32.
 
>On another note, I am still chuggin' away on resolving these problems I 
>inherited.  Adam, since you are so fond of the RS6000s, I might have to give 
>you a holler on them.  This is my first exposure to them.  

These guys are almost identical to UNIX except for a couple of system 
confiugation techniques.

>On a lighter note, things are much nicer, now that I just got a new Inspiron 
>4100. (PIII 1.13, ATI Radeon, DVD/CDRW, 320MB RAM, 30gig, Accupoint (eraser 
>head) and touchpad).  I just dumped and reloaded it with WinXP, W2k Server and 
>just downloaded Debian Potato ISOs to load.  Things almost feel normal again.  

Is this a laptop?  If so how well does the Linux installation like it?