May 2003 - main - earth.li

[Alug]Virgin Radio
by Wayne Stallwood 21 Aug '03

21 Aug '03

Wow, I have just surfed over to http://www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/listen/index.html To pick up a music stream to listen to and I was greeted with this message "Hello, Linux user! Virgin Radio is available in your favourite MP3 player (and Real) - the other stations are just in Real format. You can download a Linux version of Real Player from Real.com. You can also listen to our Windows streams with Crossover." I think that is the first time I've seen browser/os detection on a website and it hasn't displayed a "Your not using IE6 on Windows XP, GO AWAY" message. What a nice change.

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RE: [Alug] Evening Meetings
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

Syd wrote: >How about an informal evening meeting in Norwich on Monday's from about 8pm Syd - I live too far away, but enjoy. Should we change the IRC meeting evening, though? Jen

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[Alug]GPL, freedom and bread
by Ben Francis 04 Jun '03

04 Jun '03

I've just been reading several documents at gnu.org explaining the benefits of free software over proprietary software (indexed here http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html) After reading these articles/essays I very much feel that following the guidelines of the GNU Public License is the single best way to develop software in most if not all cases and holds benefits both for developers, end users and society as a whole. However, I still feel that if I were asked to justify this view to someone I would have trouble doing so, because my understanding of the underlying concepts is still a little sketchy. In particular, I can quite readily accept that writing software under the GPL is the best way and I'm the kind of person that would still program even if I was not being paid to do it. However, the harsh reality is that programmers need money to put bread on the table and apparently some geeks even have families to support! Just say someone were to program full time and released all of their code under the GPL, where does their bread actually come from? Short of selling their body on the streets (which may be frowned upon by aforementioned family) or starting up a farm and becoming self sufficient, where does the doe come in? I believe that job satisfaction comes over money every time, but there are still sources of money in free (as in speech not beer) software and the documents make it quite clear that you can quite legitimately sell such software for whatever price the market will pay, providing you follow the guidelines so that the freedom of the software is maintained. If a baker buys his own flour, he owns the bread he bakes and can sell it. If I write software but I don't own it, I can still sell it, but people can get it for free from elsewhere and can get it from a friend, which as an alternative to paying 9.9 times out of 10 they will. At the moment this may not be such a problem as people may prefer to buy the software in a package with an instruction manual and bundled support for the program. However, I would argue that the ideal program would be intuitive to the point where it required no documentation or training and support is mainly for when things go wrong, which an ideal program wouldn't. In instances where a form of support or source of information IS required, which will always happen, the online community can often offer support that is equal to that of paid support for free, and this is actively encouraged within online forums and instant messaging. With the spread of broadband internet connections swapping information or programs between people is becoming even easier and cheaper than copying a CD to the point where the cost per byte is negligible, which is the way it should be. The only source of income that therefore remains is writing bespoke solutions for a particular customer where that customer would pay you to port your program to fit their own business practises rather than work on the features you would normally put as a high priority. However, if this is also released under the GPL will the number of cases not be very small and no basis for a decent sized income? I don't like the fact that my only concerns stem from the need for cash, but it is, unfortunately, a necessity. I'm posting this rather long message here because I know there are veterans on the subject lurking in the corner (or not) who may be able to enlighten me. I believe the answer to my questions lie on well trodden ground and hopefully those answers will help me in my active support for free software. If there is an easy answer, then forgive my ignorance but I make no apologies for asking silly questions, someone has to ask them :) Thanks for your time, Ben "tola" Francis --- there is no spoon... damn, now I have to eat my yoghurt with a fork.

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Re: [Alug]Wine
by jamie.french＠talk21.com 03 Jun '03

03 Jun '03

This is funny, I tried to get Wine working last night as I want to run KazaaLite. I dont have much time in the evenings and all I got to work was progman! Need to do some reading. Aside, does anyone know of any P2P clients like Kazaa which run under Linux? Take Care, Jamie Best Regards, Jamie French -------------------- talk21 your FREE portable and private address on the net at http://www.talk21.com

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[Alug]XP install
by Paul Tansom 02 Jun '03

02 Jun '03

OK, not a good title for a Linux list, but I couldn't resist commenting on my first attempt at installing Windows XP (Professional) given that people often say Linux is hard to install. First off, there seemed very few questions to answer - Windows assumed it knew best for just about everything, and boy was it wrong?! The end result goes something like this: A: - my 3.5" floppy B: - my 5.25" floppy C: - my ZIP drive D: - my DVD ROM E: - my CD RW F: - same CD RW as above G: - same CD RW as above H: - same CD RW as above I: - same CD RW as above J: - same CD RW as above K: - same CD RW as above L: - same CD RW as above M: - my hard disk with Windows XP installed on it Next comes the networking side of things: IE - fine, can browse the Internet and is pretty fast, can also browse my local Intranet Explorer - cannot see any other machines on the network, when it should be able to see two other Windows 2000 boxes

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[Alug]Moz Firebird
by Wayne Stallwood 02 Jun '03

02 Jun '03

Ok this is really buggin me now. Ever since I first tried Phoenix it has insisted on going to http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ whenever I start it up. If I then press the "home" button it takes me to my homepage of choice. If I watch the status bar at the bottom on startup I can see it going to Google (my preferred homepage) and then suddenly changing it's mind and going over to Barnes. I have recently re-installed Phoenix (to upgrade to Moz) by nuking the whole installation dir. I have grep'ed both my moz profile (in home) and the chrome dir. On at least a few occasions I have deleted my profile and created a new one. No-one else seems to be able to replicate this on their system. and I have only one machine (my main one) that does it. It is now really tainting my experience of what is a lovely, lovely browser. I am sure it is not a problem with Moz itself, otherwise others would be reporting it as a bug, but apart from the profile what could it be ?

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Fwd: Re: List-* headers, was [Alug]GNU/Linux Partition Utilities
by Ian Bell 02 Jun '03

02 Jun '03

On Thursday 29 May 2003 2:08 pm, MJ Ray wrote: > Andrew Savory <lists(a)andrewsavory.com> wrote: > > How about a little bit of politeness and respect? > > Sorry. The message I replied to was a little terse too, not the first time > that person had raised this, added nothing new to the topic, and is > definitely a FAQ. Is this a better summary for the FAQ maintainer: You want something new, here is something new. As an experiment I have subscribed at random to three mailing lists hosted by UK Linux User Groups. They host the mailing lists something in the region of 50 UK Linux User Groups. All three of the groups I subscribed to behaved the way I would expect. Messages appear as From: 'Author' To: mailgroup. Pressing reply sends a message to the group as expected. If I want to reply just to the author I just click on his/her email address. I strongly suspect that all the mail groups hosted by the UK Linux User Groups site behave this way, It is clearly good enough and problem free enough for many other LUGs to have it set up this way. It is clearly the way users expect it to be. I see no compelling reason why our mailing list should be different. Ian -------------------------------------------------------

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Re: [Alug]Wine
by jamie.french＠talk21.com 01 Jun '03

01 Jun '03

This is funny, I tried to get Wine working last night as I want to run KazaaLite. I dont have much time in the evenings and all I got to work was progman! Need to do some reading. Aside, does anyone know of any P2P clients like Kazaa which run under Linux? Take Care, Jamie Best Regards, Jamie French -------------------- talk21 your FREE portable and private address on the net at http://www.talk21.com

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[Alug]EU software patent threat
by Chris Lale 31 May '03

31 May '03

There is still time to lobby your MEPs. Please spare 5 minutes to send an email registering your concerns. The proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions comes before the European Parliament later this month. Patenting of software is a threat to all business models, but especially Open Source (including Free) software. It also penalises software developers and users of all types of software. Dan Bricklin (who invented the electronic spreadsheet in 1979 but did not patent it) explains why at http://www.bricklin.com/patentsandsoftware.htm You can find MEP's email and letter post addresses at http://www.europarl.org.uk/uk_meps/MembersMain.htm Other sources you may wish to draw on are Alex Hudson's useful site: http://www.softwarepatents.co.uk/ Analogy with music for non-techie people: http://www.coolscience.co.uk/free-software/software-patent-music.html Illustration of the infamous "technical effect" criterion: http://coolscience.co.uk/free-software/software-patent-techeffect.html European Parliament written question E3927/02 and answer. MEPs will be reassured but you might not be: http://www2.europarl.eu.int/omk/OM-Europarl?PROG=WQ&L=EN&PUBREF=-//EP//TEXT… If you are keen, the proposed directive COM (2002) 091:http://europa.eu.int/cgi-bin/eur-lex/udl.pl?REQUEST=Seek-Deliver&COLLEC… Paper on Open Source and software patents http://eu.conecta.it/paper/Open_source_software_patent.html Cheers, Chris -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | ___ Chris Lale <ctlale(a)netscape.net> | | / \ | | | <_/ My PC runs Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (http://www.debian.org) | | \ Robust, secure and free operating system + applications. | | `- | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+

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RE: [Alug]GNU/Linux Partition Utilities
by Keith Watson 30 May '03

30 May '03

> From: Paul Tansom > > ** Keith Watson <keith.watson(a)kewill.com> [2003-05-28 09:53]: > > > From: Paul Tansom > > > > > > Not actually booted my CD and tried it, but apparently yes parted is on > > > Knoppix apparently (can't find the link I found the quote on, but it was > > > from Knoppix 3.2 onwards). Some other useful links you may be interested > > > in: > > [snip] > > > > Thanks for the excellent links Paul, especially the one for PartImage. > > > ** end quote [Keith Watson] > > No problem. It happens to be something I'm looking into myself, partly > for speeding up the install process for machine (Windows 98 primarily > unfortunately), and partly to recover some data on a couple of drives > I'm having problems with. > > One seems to have a duff sector which is preventing access to a > partition (Fujitsu 20G, newest drive I had until I bought a replacement, > but not one of the notorious ones), and the other (again a Fujitsu, but > 13G this time) which seems to have lost partition information on the > transfer to another machine. > > I'm trying to work out whether Parted will recover things for me, or > whether I'm better off to go with one of two commercial solutions I've > found: > > Acronis RecoverExpert - looks good because it supports Linux Ext2, Ext3, > ReiserFS, and Linux Swap as well as the traditional Windows formats, but > the demo is only the Windows GUI version (not the boot disk). This has > a few issues booting with the drive 13G drive connected (so I can't get > any idea of whether it will recover it) and with the 20G it just shows > the partition as duff (it seems as though it simply recovers lost > partitions rather than fixing corrupt ones). > > Active Partition Recovery - only supports FAT and NTFS partitions, but > the boot disk can see and read all the partitions in question and show > me the data, so it has a distinct attraction in that respect! > > Both about 30usd - if anyone has used either of these, or Parted or > another utility to recover a partition problem I'd be interested to > hear. > > Oh, my tape backup is giving me hassle too - I'm not a happy penguin at > the moment. Having said that, my Linux machines are going strong and it > is only my Windows 2000 that is givin me hassle (duff hardware and the > tape backups which verified fine are not allowing me to access them now > that I've lost the boot drive that they were created from - classic > backup!). > > -- > Paul Tansom: - contact paul(a)aptanet.com for more information > Internet and Intranet Solutions -- http://www.aptanet.com/ > I think you meant this to go to the list Paul :o) I've always used PartitionMagic (I've got Version 6.0 but they're up to 8.0 at present) which has served me very well. but it's not GPL or GNU/Linux though credit where it's due. Amazon has the latest release of PM for 40UKP and also the back release 7.0 at 25UKP <http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/202-8112773-2091046> Never been unlucky enough to have to recover from the sort of problems you describe but I've no doubt someone on the list will have some war stories to tell :o) Regards, Keith ____________ The shortest answer is doing. George Herbert

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