Well : i'm finally getting round to some studying today and i've been digging trough the first two chapters of the book while trying out the info on my laptop and .. i can only conclude in this : Aaarg!!!!!!!!!!!!! I must say. this Linux thing is proving to be harder then i first expected. Ok , i know it was not going to be easy, but i never thought what a mouse-jockey i had become. Its all howdy dandy when you give me a nice gui and i can click my way into just about anything i want. But its harder when a silent prompt just stares at me from a dark screen. I read trough the manuals and think “when am i EVER gonna need this” and the next moment i find myself completely lost when trying to preform a simple task like copying or pasting a file using the console. Its starting over from scratch and its gonna take a lot of getting used to. But I don't have the luxury of falling behind. I have to learn this. Now that is just the thing. As you all know i hate toying around with things, just to toy around with them. I have to do something useful with them. I find myself BEFORE the point that i can use my acquired skills to actually 'do' anything, but I'm pretty frustrated to type commands down.. 'just to practice them' I hate moving meaningless files around just to get into the swing of it. Well no matter, it will be better in a few days. Meanwhile i have found a universal constant in Linux manuals. Whenever they give you ONE syntax, they give you 5 ! they all do the same .. but they give you the options just to confuse you. I mean , you don't give directions to someone saying. Drive this and that way / or that and that way / or this and this way / or this and so way. I mean : That person is gonna go bonkers on ya !. Well no matter. Back to chapter two. Oh yes ! just between the lines : I have found a way to work around my freezing keyboard problem ! until suse will give me an answer to my support query , I just retype the last two characters i typed, just before the keyboard freeze. And whaddajaknow ! It works . I read it somewhere on the Internet so i decided to try it out. am very curious as to what big-old-suse is gonna tell me. The error event that pops up into the event log is : "Linux kernel: input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard on isa0060/serio0 so .. i'm curious if posting this on usenet will help me to find a real solution." *** In other news i'm dug into this small pocket book about hacking, viruses and espionage. I read something about the CARNIVORE program the FBI apparently runs on the email traffic all over the globe. Its actually quite scary. I mean not to dive into conspiracy theory's and all that , but still. Its pretty scary when you think about some gov-clecrk reading trough your e-mail.. and the concequences. http://www.rhizome.org/carnivore/ is a link i found on line to some kind of carnivore like program that constructs images from the data stream it intercepts (?) Its something realy freaky and i'm gonna check it out a little more. "Carnivore is a surveillance tool for data networks. At the heart of the project is CarnivorePE, a software application that listens to all Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Next, CarnivorePE serves this data stream to interfaces called "clients." These clients are designed to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways. Use CarnivorePE to run Carnivore clients from your own desktop, or use it to make your own clients." is the official qoute on the site. Cool enough to check it out. Imagine a picture of your face made up out of all the binary data gathered from the porn sites you surfed. Kinda cool to give to your parents. 🙂