DMA

A while ago our server seems to have a hard disk failure as the following error messages kept coming up: hda: dma timeout error: [...] hda: dma_timer_expiry: [...] We exchanged the 20 GB HD against my old Mac's 4.7 GB HD and reinstalled the system. A friend of mine tried the "broken" 20GB HD on a Windows system and said it works fine.

Although several linux video players (e.g. xine) do support playback of encrypted DVDs, Suse has crippled the libraries needed to do so. Thus none of the players/frontends included in Suse Linux 9.2 can play encrypted DVDs. What are encrypted DVDs? Essentially all commerical movies are released exclusively as encrypted DVDs. It is a pain in the ass, but actually can be cured. To play encrypted DVDs you need libdvdcss2. This is the famous hack, that was in the news and that obviously was not liked by the media industry.