main June 2003

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60 participants
86 discussions

[Alug]Knoppix
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 07 Jun '03

07 Jun '03

Hi, I know we did knoppix onlist a few weeks back, but a pal of mine discovered knoppix the other day and was very impressed. He did ask me: >I want to know what you can't do with Knoppix that I could by doing a >full install. I presume a proper install would give better performance. And of course, I don't know. I'm going to be grilled on this as he'll presume I'm some sort of linux expert, and I need to have some answers ready so I don't tumble from my pedestal :-) Thanks, Jen

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[Alug]POP3 Mail and Spam Questions
by Keith Watson 06 Jun '03

06 Jun '03

I was having a tidy-up of my Debian install last night and trying to sort out some sort of spam filtering. To access mail I simply use Sylpheed as a straight dial-up POP3 client. I don't use procmail, sendmail or any sort of MTA (or at least I don't think I do :o) ). So I did a apropos search on 'mail' and came up with a long list of things that had been installed as part of the base install. Given they way I access my email can I uninstall things like procmail, sendmail, and various MTAs? or is this likely to break something else? I'm thinking of using 'mailfilter' (mainly because it can act as a POP3 client) to scan the mail headers on the ISP server and delete any spam before I download it. Given my setup, are there any alternatives I should also look at? As part of setting up mailfilter I need to set up a set of regex entries to identify possible spam. I'm reasonably happy with regex itself but if anyone has some anti-spam regexs I can crib I would be most grateful :o) What would be nice would be to use some of the DNS blacklist servers e.g. spamcop, ordb, etc., in some way, can I do this with this sort of configuration without actually downloading the headers 1st? Keith

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[Alug]Gentoo/MacOSX Announced
by Craig 06 Jun '03

06 Jun '03

Check out gentoo.org small news on this. Looks like fink may have some competition? ;) -- (o_ - Craig Butcher //\ - IT Technician / Unix Support MTH/ENV @ UEA V_/_ - http://www.wizball.co.uk

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[Alug]MSNBC Article
by Wayne Stallwood 05 Jun '03

05 Jun '03

http://www.msnbc.com/news/922215.asp?cp1=1 Just been reading this, short version is that MS are facing a bit of a Technology gap in the event that .NET, XBOX and Smartphone don't take off in the near future (and lets face it based on current adoption that is a reality) Some interesting gems from Balmer here in a supposed memo to the staff (mind you this is msnbc so who knows ? ) "Some way off in the future lies a generation of technology that Microsoft promises will change the lives of every computer user. Codenamed Longhorn, it involves a complete revamp of the company's two core product lines - the Windows operating system and Office productivity suite " Ahhh So now I see what Longhorn might be about. Office is the driving force behind the sales of Windows Desktop (and arguably server if you think about it) A lot of people don't buy Office because they bought Windows, They bought Windows because you need it to run Office So what if they did an "IE" with Office, What if Office plugged into Windows in such a way that the interoperability could not be easily rivalled by a third party Office suite application (like the link ups with the fancy new database filesystem) What if you bought the two as one package ? What if then MS claim in the following anti-trust suit that the two are so intertwined that they cannot be separated ? "Add in the weak economy, and "there is less passion and enthusiasm for technology, and greater focus on doing more for less." " The focus always was on doing more for less, you could argue that was the driving force behind computing in the first place. Why would you want to do less with more ? The only time that culture existed was during the DotCom boom when skills were at a shortage and everyone was in a high adrelanin race. Then you went for the solution that required the shortest time and the least skill to get up and running. It's funny how quickly we have forgotten the DotCom days and state that the IT trade is in some sort of depression. It's not, it has just turned back to normality after a massive peak. Was anybody really riding up that peak expecting it to just carry on forever or even to flatten out at the top ? "In that environment, companies have turned to Linux and other open-source software programs, seeing them as cheap but adequate alternatives." So MS do view Open-Source as a cheap but truly inferior product STILL. Do they feel that the only reason Open-Source projects like say Apache are anywhere in the marketplace is because they are free ? If so what happened to all of the TCO fud they were spouting last year. Answer me this ? If I approached a say large hosting provider, running lets say 100 machines serving websites for third party customers. I go to them with an Apache replacement that can do the same job and handle the same traffic on half the machines, and it is somehow more secure and requires less constant administration, yet at the same time is more scaleable. If I took them this product and said but the bad news is that unlike Apache which is free this is going to cost you £1000 per machine. Do you not think they would do the sums and go for it ? "Around half of the 1 million corporate computers in the United States that run the Unix operating system are candidates for migration to Linux, according to Ballmer - a significant challenge to Microsoft" and it always will be. Linux is a Unix work alike, Windows is a Proprietary Operating system adhering to non uniform standards. Which one is going to be the easiest for all of those migrating Unix companies to move to ? Notwithstanding the fact that one of the things MS is always claiming in the "Linux is more expensive than MS" FUD is that it's a major cost to retrain your MS staff. Well the same is true for Unix staff to be trained for MS (actually they will just probably leave) "the company's overhaul of its software licensing terms antagonized many of its customers. " Exactly. How about also looking at upgrades, if I install Microsoft Small Business Server and then my company grows beyond the limit of clients on that product (I can't remember the limit but there is one) I have no easy upgrade path, no single upgrade I can buy and I will have to throw my investment of SBS CAL's and Server software away. and start again with several different products. "It must also get better at segmenting the markets its serves and turning out the products that different customers want." How about segmenting Servers and Workstations. Servers do not need Web Browsers, Media Players, Mail Clients or Games yet these are installed by default by every MS server platform I can think of. There are even Server platforms that have DirectX (stand up Windows 2000 Advanced Server). Wayne

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[Alug]Tim O'Reilly talks and O'Reilly books
by Adam Bower 05 Jun '03

05 Jun '03

Hi all, I was just speaking with Josette from O'Reilly (she is the O'Reilly UK PR manager who arranges review copies for lugs etc.) and she asked if I could forward the info on Tim O'Reilly giving talks in the UK on to the list. The other news is that she is arranging for the Alug Library to get some new/more books. I will let you know what we have when it arrives. I also am going to look at setting up some kind of review section on the website so that if you borrow books you others know what you think of them, and of course let Josette know also. Anyhow details of Tim O'Reillys talks are: Tim O'Reilly will visit the UK in June. He will be giving several talks - ****London Date: June 23rd Time: 6.30 pm for 7.00 pm Where: City University Pre-registration is mandatory see - http://www.ukuug.org/events/TimOReilly/ ****Birmingham, NEC Date: June 25th Key Note Speaker - LinuxUser & Developer Expo 2003 see - http://www.linuxuserexpo.com/ Thanks Adam -- jabberid = quinophex(a)jabber.earth.li AFFS || http://www.affs.org.uk/ || Not a filesystem

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[Alug]Automount problem with Nautilus
by Keith Watson 05 Jun '03

05 Jun '03

I'm running a Debian Woody (r3 stable) based system with Gnome 1.4 + Sawfish window manager + Nautilus. I use Nautilus to manage the desktop. Have just implemented autofs/automount which works great. Small problem is that when automount unmounts a cdrom (i.e. after then timeout period when I'm not accessing any files on the drive) Nautilus traps this and issues an eject command for the drive. Which is not always what I want. Anyone else come across this behaviour? Any ideas on how I could fix this or good places to look for a fix? Keith ____________ Mistakes are the portals of discovery. James Joyce

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RE: Laptops, was RE: [Alug]animation software and C++ training
by Adam Bower 04 Jun '03

04 Jun '03

> The downside is that the batteries are now dead, after only 2 years > usage. According to Dell that is good going, about 500 recharges I > estimate, but Dell reckon 300 is average. I was expecting > closer to 1000 > based on ordinary rechargeable batteries! That doesn't work out cheap > at 77ukp +P&P +VAT. Did you have the batteries plugged in while you ran the laptop on mains power? that tends to kill them fairly quickly. Of course that is not as bad as the original sony laptop battery on my Vaio I had, which died after about 35 charge cycles. Adam

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[Alug]animation software and C++ training
by Simon Jude 04 Jun '03

04 Jun '03

Hi, Does anybody know of any good animation software for linux which can take a sequence of images and create animations from them? I have used Quicktime in the past but as I'm hoping to get my hands on an old PC in our lab to run linux on in the near future I was wondering whether there was an alternative! Also, slightly off topic, we are about to buy a number of software packages that come with APIs and SDKs so that we can customise them if we wish (and require a training course in Arizona!). Can anybody suggest any good books or training courses for learning C/C++? Thanks Simon

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[Alug]how to mount a removable SCSI disk?
by Keith Watson 04 Jun '03

04 Jun '03

Yes, OK, I know the answer is "very carefully" :o) By a fortuitous chain of events I have become the owner of a Castlewood ORB2 2.2Gb removable SCSI drive (plus a couple of removable disks to go with it). Which is nice because now I've got something to hang of that old SCSI adapter card I had lying around (Diamond Multimedia Fireport40). I've tried it out with Windows 2K and it works a treat (media is currently formatted as FAT2). GNU/Linux (Debian) picks up the SCSI card and the device OK (i.e. everything shows up in /proc/scsi as it should) with the adapter being scsi0 and the drive is on LUN 5. I've installed the scsitools package <http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/scsitools.html> and run scsidev. And now I'm stuck, I presume I need to mount the drive with something like; mount -t vfat /dev/??? /mnt/orb2 but what device name should use (or how do I find out)? Regards, Keith ____________ Say nothing and saw wood. Vermont Saying

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[Alug]Re: Redhat, Mandrake, and Gentoo Disks
by Dan Beimborn 04 Jun '03

04 Jun '03

Thanks so much for the huge response to my query. I've been well looked after by Graham, but thanks to everyone who responded. Very nice group of people you have here! The hitch I seem to run into is that Gentoo is a small kick-off disk followed by downloading source off the net. Does anyone have a trick to do that with a local mirror to make it bearable for a modem guy to set it up? I've got a couple machines, some crossover cables, and plan to install it to a VMWare image on a windows box to start with (the missus gets the faster CPU for her photoshop!). DB

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