[Techtalk] Random: MS problem, Linux solution and an experiment

[James]

I have a ghetto Compaq laptop.  It has one of those ridiculous touchpads
(I use a USB mouse), which I hate, as my hands always accidentally touch
it while typing and I delete half a page of work.  I tried disabling it
in XP and it refused to disable.  There was also no way to disable it
through BIOS.

I installed Mandrake on it (as an experiment, I'll mention that later)
and got an idea.

sudo cat /dev/psaux > /dev/null &

And it worked =)

College experiment:

A lot of people use my laptop to type papers, do work, etc.  Last
semester it had WinXP on it.  This semester I installed Mandrake 8.1 w/
KDE2.2.2 and w/StarOffice 6 Beta.  I want to see how many people don't
even notice the difference beyond mentioning that the interface is
slightly different.  Bets on that?  I seriously doubt I will win any
converts, but it would be interesting to see how a previously pure MS
Windows9x user fairs on Linux.

- James