main September 2001

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123 discussions

Syleham Meeting
by jh Atkinson 06 Sep '01

06 Sep '01

Greetings! Those of you who were at the last Syleham meeting may recognise me, if I describe myself as 'Ancient John' (whose wife made the biscuits), for I am well past my sell-by date, possibly past my display-until date, but I hope not past my use-by one. I do articles for a technical magazine. That magazine, like others, including Linux ones, uses Apple Macs for publishing. You could save the magazine's type setter from being murdered - and me from life imprisonment for that murder, if you can help me with (at Syleham) conversion of a postcript file to a pdf one. I had this demonstrated to me (but not on my Linux box), using the Linux command, ps2pdf, but I did not succeed in making it work when I got home. I am fed up to the back teeth with having symbols, such as degree signs, proper dashes and greek letters which I have carefully put in, being stripped out and not replaced or not replaced properly. My main reason for trying to use Linux is that I am working on communication for the deafblind. Many of the blind have not a hope of learning Braille. I understand that less than a quarter of the blind in the USA are literate in Braille. Computer technology that can work fast and efficiently is necessary for my project. If Linux is the operating system to go for, and I believe it is, I am hampered by a singular lack of expertise. Apart from configuration of zip drive and card for two additional serial ports I am stumped by configuration of the SCSI card, and so the scanner. It looks as if no appropriate module is being loaded. Scanning is an essential. The idea is for the deaf blind user to secure an opened book to the scanner. The scanner scans, feeds its output to the best OCR software to be had. The output from that is fed to a special shorthand system which I am developing. In turn, this is fed to a chord system reader. This latter (though not in its final form) is up and running, and I am learning to read on it. The time is rapidly approaching when I shall be really hampered by lack of a scanner that I can use. My Linux box's RAM figure is 128. Processor speed 500. Linux kernel 2.0 Linux flavour SuSE 7.0 Hard disk 20G I do hope there may be someone at Syleham who can come to my aid. I may bring the prototype chord reader as well as a couple of strange keyboards, if interest warrants. Ancient John (Atkinson)

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Bad, Bad news..
by Martyn Drake 06 Sep '01

06 Sep '01

Rackspace (who are my current hosting providers) have seriously mucked up in the billing stakes last month. I can no longer afford to run my server on such a (censored) way that's going to cost me more money than I ought to be spending each month. The long and short of it is that I'm terminating my dedicated server with Rackspace. Preferably ASAP (before the end of the month). Therefore, is there any kind people with a spare server out that that would be willing to handle hosting (either permanent or temporary - I'm attempting to see if my bosses would be willing to sponsor Alug by providing some space on their server) The term, "oh bugger!" springs to mind and I sincerely apologise to everybody about this. In particular to Mark Ray and David Freeman who are the current list moderators. I would like nothing better to scream and shout at Rackspace's accounts department for well and truly cocking things up. In July they took the best part of $1,156 dollars instead of $315 due to a muck up with their records. It's been fixed, but this latest incident does not impress me. I'm eyeing up a DSVR account as a potential new home for all my bits and bobs (I'm using Fasthosts for the time being for drake.org.uk - yeah, I know they're crap, but they're okay for a short period while I find something better), but nothing has been decided yet. Regards, Martyn "shafted by Rackspace, Webfusion and Pogolinux" Drake

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crash!
by Ricardo Campos 06 Sep '01

06 Sep '01

I was forced to use a hard reboot last night- grrrrrr! I installed Enlightenment, which went fine until I tried to load a certain theme. Then it came up with "config file missing lines" and asked me to restart or quit E (there was another choice-I don't remember). So I restarted E- it locked my computer up totally, no amount of key-bashing worked. After making a cup of tea, I decided to hard reboot. Unfortunately, now every time I start Gnome, it goes through this process, even though Sawfish is my WM for E!!! (This has locked the computer up too). I reinstalled E, but this didn't help. Has anyone had the same/similar problem? Incidentally, another thing that occurred just after that was that my computer CAN connect to the 'net, but for some reason cannot transfer any data at all, meaning I had to reboot into windoze to get online. grrrrrrrr.... >:| Ricardo _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

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Re: [Alug] Debian is my friend .... I think
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 06 Sep '01

06 Sep '01

David Casal wrote: >wehey! good to hear... there's hope for the linux musician yet! doesn't >Jenny Hopkins get up to this kind of stuff too? I'd love to hear more about >what stuff, and how... What's this I get up to? I deny it all! I'm only a linux musician in the sense that I run linux and make music, I don't use the linuxbox for music. Any music I do have on computer is in cubase, which I think is windows only. Let me know what you find for linux though. There was a discussion on various linux music programmes on the list last year. Want me to send them? I wrote >It's my life's ambition to get so i can do something faster in linux than > windows. Which caused Simon Jude to write: >Lots of things are quicker to do in Linux than Windoze. Just think of how >many times you have to reboot when making small system changes or >installing software. And just think of the free time from not having to >restart a crashed machine. Don't worry - it was only a joke. Takes me so long to get anything insttalled/configured/whatever I could usually have done it several times with a wooden wheel. Thanks to Jonathan for the PGDEBUG hints..I replaced the f*****d graphics card, tweaked my postmaster.init file and all is as good as new. Back to trying to get php working ;) Jenny.

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Bad, Bad news..
by Martyn Drake 05 Sep '01

05 Sep '01

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Re: [Alug] Debian is my friend .... I think
by David Casal 05 Sep '01

05 Sep '01

> > Anyone have any experience on win2k/Debian dual-booting? Just how hard > > would it be to get an almost-risk-free system running that? > > Yup, do it all the time. win2k/debian appears to be a far safer option > than win98 (I've lost my hard disk twice to 98 but never to 2k). As long > as things are backed up, it shouldn't be a problem. wehey! good to hear... there's hope for the linux musician yet! doesn't Jenny Hopkins get up to this kind of stuff too? I'd love to hear more about what stuff, and how... > > Sound config on it would be OSS, since I bought the drivers.Yummy. > > Also not a problem... I use OSS on my fileserver (well, with all those > disks it seemed silly not to use it as an mp3 jukebox too!) and that works > fine. How very, very nice. Planning to use an SQL object in PD to query FFT routines, hopefully for a bit of machine listening (Rowe, 2001) stuff. The idea would be to have small, well-defined samples stored in some kind of SQL place (PostgreS?), and have the routines from what I play (on shite keyboard) query them. A kind of AI sampler...Rowe wrote the neural network routines in C++ for MAC (yuk), but I reckon it could be ported to the PD environment (extremely well-commented .h), in C. Planning to learn that at the weekend...;~} Cheers, David

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Re: [Alug] Debian is my friend .... I think
by Ricardo Campos 05 Sep '01

05 Sep '01

I think it shouldn't really matter which distro you use. All you need to do is defrag then partition the HD, and make sure LILO/GRUB is installed on the 2nd partition (probably hda6) rather than the boot partition, with a very short wait before booting the default (unless you like waiting or typing). Then you need to install a bootloader (I use XOSL www.xosl.org) on the first partition (i.e. c:/), and that'll give you the choice. I'd have to say, I'd kill you if you touched one of MY companies laptops (even for Linux!!!) :P Ricardo _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

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Debian is my friend .... I think
by Earl Brannigan 05 Sep '01

05 Sep '01

Hi all, been a while since I posted something along these lines but here goes... Last night I finally ditched a DeadRat 6.2 installation (needed cleaning up anyway) and moved to a debian potato installation (bargain from Linux Expo..... free beer as well!). Install was nice and easy except : 1)loved the way apt can just plough through your CDs and catalogue all the packages (during the install), but how do you get it to do this in normal running (I thought I had the idea but ended up breaking apt!), ie I want it to now search through the rest of my catalogue of CDs. 2)Having broken apt by replacing the file:/file/binary/for/install/disk1 line with something that doesn't work is there a quick way to get it back. Or can I just tell apt to go search my CDs again (re: 1). 3)dselect is all very well but I would prefer a nice way to group say all X Packages together. Perhaps I'm missing something. 4)Where is XConfigurator ? I tried to be a bit clever last night but think I would have been better to play novice - quiet at the back!! ;o) and let debian do everything. Anyways, any thoughts, experiences or hints and tips to assist in making my transfer to the king of Distros as painless as possible much appreciated. Pllllllease no "RTFM"s, I am reading it but time is a pre-requisite, so if you just write and say "RTFM under apt section on blah" I'll still be grateful for the pointer. Cheers, Earl

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Re: [Alug] Introduction
by MJ Ray 05 Sep '01

05 Sep '01

"Ricardo Campos" <corez23(a)hotmail.com> writes: > My name is Ricardo, I work for local government as a Windoze NT Network > Admin (and a Lotus Notes Admin)(oh, and as a MS SQL Server admin), and I was > attracted to Linux once I saw the license costs for MS products! Heheh... pleased to welcome you to the group! > [...] Unfortunately our beloved government has decided exactly what > OS's and which products to use, and I cannot change that [...] Where is that policy set? I still don't understand why the government is apparently trying to get every company in the land to buy at least one operating system from an American company. > When is the next meet? Both my machines have network cards, and I might be > able to borrow a hub or two. On 16 September at Syleham, near Diss, Suffolk. See the web site (URL below)... I guess we should put more details on there. -- MJR This is my personal web site =-> http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ http://www.alug.org.uk/ <-- This is the LUG I go to I work for this clever internet developer ==> http://www.luminas.co.uk/

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Re: [Alug] Introduction
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 05 Sep '01

05 Sep '01

Hullo Ricardo. >(that means working on it after the pub till 3am just to do something that >would have taken me about 4 seconds to do in Windoze) It's my life's ambition to get so i can do something faster in linux than windows. >....we are not allowed to upgrade from Lotus 4.6 to R5 We call that a downgrade here at work. Next meeting is Sun 16 Sept, unless I am as wrong as i usually am. Where are you based? Jenny.

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