main September 2003

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[Alug]Apropos of absolutely nothing!
by Keith Watson 24 Sep '03

24 Sep '03

http://www.jotajota.org/ficheros/answer%5b1%5d.gif Regards, Keith ____________ 'If there is a better solution...find it.' - Thomas Edison --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.516 / Virus Database: 313 - Release Date: 01/09/2003

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[Alug]Announce digest, Vol 2 #16 - 2 msgs
by announce-request＠lists.alug.org.uk 24 Sep '03

24 Sep '03

Send Announce mailing list submissions to announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to announce-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk You can reach the person managing the list at announce-admin(a)lists.alug.org.uk When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Announce digest..." --------------.--------------------------------------------.------------ alug-announce | Newsletter of the Anglian Linux User Group | Weekly(ish) --------------'--------------------------------------------'------------ ** Please send articles for this letter to announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk ** *** Please send replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk, not announce... *** ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Today's Topics: 1. Call for Nominations for the 2004 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software (fwd) (MJ Ray) --__--__-- Message: 1 Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 23:27:25 +0100 From: MJ Ray <markj(a)cloaked.freeserve.co.uk> To: fsfe-uk(a)gnu.org, lugmaster(a)lug.org.uk, announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Organization: My own Subject: [Alug Announce]Call for Nominations for the 2004 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: 2003-09-21 23:34:20 +0100 From: Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org> Subject: Call for Nominations for the 2004 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software [Please redistribute widely where appropriate] The GNU project is asking for nominations for the 2003 Free Software Award. We want to give this award to a person who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software (free as in freedom; see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html for the definition), through activities that accord with the spirit of free software. Any kind of activity could be eligible--writing software, writing documentation, publishing CDs, even journalism--but whatever the activity, we want to recognize long-term central contributions to the development of the world of free software. "Accord with the spirit" means, for example, that software, manuals or collections of them (on tape or CD) must be entirely Free. (Once again, that's free as in freedom; see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html.) Work done commercially is eligible, but we want to give awards to individuals, not companies. People such as Miguel de Icaza, Donald Knuth, Larry Lessig, Brian Paul, Guido van Rossum, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Larry Wall who have already received this or other awards for their contributions, are not eligible for the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Please send your nominations to award-nominations(a)gnu.org on or before Friday 31 October 2003. Please submit nominations in the following format: * Put the name of the person you are nominating in the email message subject line. * Please include, in the body of your message, an explanation (40 lines or less) of the work the person has done and why you think it is especially important to software freedom. Please state, in the body of your message, where to find the materials (e.g., software, manuals, or writing) which your nomination is based on. Information about the previous awards can be found in http://www.gnu.org/award/. _______________________________________________ GNU Announcement mailing list <info-gnu(a)gnu.org> http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef(a)jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ --__--__-- _______________________________________________ Announce mailing list Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce End of Announce Digest

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[Alug]Confusing MSEC E-mails
by Matt Parker 23 Sep '03

23 Sep '03

Hi All, I'm running Mandrake 9.0 on my web server/e-mail server/firewall and MSEC is sending me reports every night telling me what's going on. The thing I find confusing is that I keep getting reports like this:- Security Warning: These files belonging to packages have changed of status on the system : - No longer modified : /usr/include/c++/3.2/bits/istream.tcc The thing is, this file has never been modified and it hasn't been modified back. What does it mean by "no longer modified"? It'll tell me one night that a file has been modified and then the next night it'll tell me that it is no longer modified. With all this "crying wolf" how do I, as a sysadmin, tell when something has really been modified? Matt

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[Alug]networking problems
by Ben Francis 23 Sep '03

23 Sep '03

I've got an unusual network problem with some Linux boxes at school. Mozilla Browser can view web pages fine via the proxy on port 80 and ftp works OK. I can ping the router but if I try pinging any web sites it just times out - it does seem to find the IP of the web site I'm pinging, but no data pongs back. So I can use google in a web browser, but ping google.co.uk just times out - I didn't know that was possible! I'm also having trouble allocating static IPs to the boxes. I've made "reservations" on the Windows NT DHCP server of the IP addresses I want in the range 10.25.20.101 - 10.25.20.108 but I'm having trouble getting /etc/network/interfaces set up correctly to connect to the network using them. This is the current contents of /etc/network/interfaces: =================================== auto lo iface lo inet loopback auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 10.25.20.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 10.25.16.1 #network 10.25.16.0 #broadcast 10.25.16.255 =================================== After I make changes I do ifdown eth0 and then ifup eth0, which usually results in a "network unreachable" message. Is there a way of being able to address a computer by its name as opposed to it's IP if a dynamic IP is being used, allocated by the DHCP server? I'd like to be able to do ssh user@hostname instead of ssh user(a)000.000.000.000 for example which is my reason for wanting static IPs in the first place. One other simple question, how can I find out the IP of the computer I'm working on? I thought it was hostname -i but this just returns 127.0.0.1 instead of the computer's IP on the network. One other unrelated problem. I've been having trouble changing the keyboard language setting for X from the default US to UK. I've changed the relevent values in /etc/X11/XF86Config and /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and restarted X, but for some reason it keeps reverting to US. The KDE keyboard setting is fine, but in fluxbox it uses a US layout. The funny thing is I've been able to change the language on my home PC using fluxbox, perhaps I'm missing something obvious. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I'm not very experienced with any of these problems! -- Ben "tola" Francis http://www.bourne-grammar.lincs.sch.uk/bgstux

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[Alug]Linux powered DVD player
by Jonathan McDowell 22 Sep '03

22 Sep '03

I mentioned this at the Forum on Thursday and people asked for more info. The new crop of EM8500 DVD players (the ones that are fairly cheap and support DivX) seem to be powered by Linux. You can get these for aruond £120, for example at: http://www.blankdiscshop.co.uk/acatalog/Hardware_Section__.html (the LiteOn LVD-2001 about half way down). LiteOn's page for the player: http://www.liteonit.com/DC/english/lvd_2001.htm Sigma's development kit is Linux based: http://www.sigmadesigns.com/products/em8500.htm Some info about other EM8500 players: http://www.duke.edu/~java32/bravo/bravohacking.html If I didn't have a DVD player already I think I'd be buying one of these to play with. J. -- I'm an a**h**e, I'm an a**h**e, | .''`. Debian GNU/Linux Developer I'm a real f**king a**h**e. | : :' : Happy to accept PGP signed | `. `' or encrypted mail - RSA + | `- DSA keys on the keyservers.

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[Alug]Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 22 Sep '03

22 Sep '03

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include tkirc, bitchx, xchat and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://freshmeat.net/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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[Alug]Kernels.
by Craig 19 Sep '03

19 Sep '03

Just thought of something to discuss on a friday ;) What kernels are you running at work/home? And what patches did you apply to it? At work, I'm running Con Kolivas patchset to 2.4 (http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/ ) as well on my mini itx at home. I was running 2.5/6 for a while with andrew morton's patchset and felt that I was being too far on the bleedin' edge ;) C

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[Alug]USB Hard Drives
by Richard Lewis (MUS) 19 Sep '03

19 Sep '03

Dear ALUG, I am looking to buying a USB hard drive and wondering if anyone knows anything about using them with Linux. Presumably I would have to set up a new block device connected to one of the USB ports. I could then mount it at somewhere like /mnt/usbhd. The ones I've looked at say that you have to write your own partition table and format the partitions yourself; how would I do this? (The details of the one I'm thinking of are here: http://www.dabs.com/products/prod-info3-info.asp?&m=y&quicklinx=2BDV.) Cheers in advance. Richard

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[Alug]A review: GoboLinux 007alpha
by MJ Ray 19 Sep '03

19 Sep '03

As some of you know, my desktop machine was running Gentoo for a while. It was an island in a see of Debian. However, a few things prompted me to move away: first, I found it a pain to write ebuilds; second, I hate having to jump through hoops to block "free for non-commercial use" software from being installed automatically; third, I found it was taking more and more time to update the system. There are things that Debian could learn, like firing up a merge tool when there's a new version of an edited config file, but apart from being source-compiled, it was similar to Debian but lacking the licence division. Gentoo's official line seems to be that their ebuilds are free software: they just happen to download things that aren't. Grrr. But this isn't a review of Gentoo. It's a review of GoboLinux. You can find their homepage at http://www.gobolinux.org/ but the big idea is to restructure the filesystem into /Depot (shared space), /Files (add-ons that don't belong to a particular program), /Programs (one subdir per program like the old /opt idea), /System (replacement for /etc, /usr and /var) and /Users (replacement for /home). Why do this? Well, they take the line that all package managers are doing it the hard way, throwing everything in together and trying to keep track of it. The depot or stow idea is basically right, but tries to accommodate throwing everything in together as well. Not everything in a package needs to be linked into a common area and there are some tricky question: do you tell a program it's going to run under /usr or /usr/stow/program? Gobo was first developed as a take on the stow idea for use in $HOME on a system that the developers didn't have root access to. Soon, an entire system was built up around the idea and has been put onto CD. Packages are basically a tarball of a subdirectory in /Programs and you install them with InstallPackage packagefile.tar.bz2, which will go off and try to satisfy declared dependencies. Building from source is normally quite easy too, using the sandboxing tool CompileProgram to build it all from a source tarball. Generally the developers have tried to avoid customising the sources too much, so if they didn't enable an option that you need, recompiling from plain sources with CompileProgram should work without trouble. Both these tools make the symlinks from /Programs/Whatever/Current/bin/* to /System/Links/Executables and so on, so the shell and other tools can find them. When you're sick of a program, you just rm -r /Programs/Whatever and run FixBrokenLinks. If you want to change the default version of a package, you change where the /Programs/Whatever/Current symlink points and rerun SymlinkProgram. It works surprisingly well. I installed from a CD image of 007alpha, which had some amusing bugs which should be squashed before 007 final ("Bond") is released. Although InstallPackage can download packages to fulfil dependencies, one that was missing from the base install was wget, which is used for the downloading. Development cycle is short enough at the moment that you can use a package from 006 ("Trevelyan") most of the time and sometimes even from 005 ("Thomas"). The developers are now getting to grips with things like that and supporting a variety of shells instead of just their favourite zsh. It's an interesting distribution and if they can solve the normal growing pains of a distribution, such as security, distributed development and trickier packages, it could be the base for a good multipurpose distribution in a year or so. Questions? Comments? -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef(a)jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/

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[Alug]Re: script help request
by Jenny Hopkins 18 Sep '03

18 Sep '03

On Thursday 18 September 2003 2:32 pm, MJ Ray wrote: > > I'm looping through a list of words in a file, passed in as > > variables, and > > performing an action on it, but first I need to strip the ".ipk" > > from the > > word. > > That's a different problem to the one you asked. If the word is > stored in the variable $word, then ${word/%.ipk/} will contain what > you need in bash. If you're using another shell, let me know. That's exactly what I was after - many thanks. I later realised the filename also had to have a version number stripped from it, but the above syntax took care of that as well, with a small amount of twiddling. Jen

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