main September 2003

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[Alug]Alug evening meet last thursday
by Syd Hancock 16 Sep '03

16 Sep '03

Six people met at the Forum - Graham, Mark, Jonathan, Tarquin, Syd and a new comer Robert who heard about the meet via the website. We talked a lot about wi-fi, mini-itx, driveless servers based on compact flash - and various pssible combinations of these technologies - and probably lots of other things that I've now forgotten. An enjoyable evening. Next evening meet will be on the second thursday in October - i.e. the 9th Syd

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Re: [Alug]EDP..
by Craig 15 Sep '03

15 Sep '03

On Monday, Sep 15, 2003, at 18:25 Europe/London, Ian Bell wrote: > On Monday 15 Sep 2003 9:45 am, Craig wrote: >> Anyone checked out the EDP front page news this morning? >> >> How.. er.. amusing. >> > Two bits particularly caught my attention. First that despite their > best > efforts they could not get rid of it, and second that their broadband > connections seemd unaffected (why??). Why they failed to get rid of it is a mystery. Seems that they don't employ active directory? I don't like it when they say 'computer expert'... just really annoying... C

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[Alug]EDP..
by Craig 15 Sep '03

15 Sep '03

Anyone checked out the EDP front page news this morning? How.. er.. amusing. C

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[Alug]Norfolk County Council response (fwd)
by Tarquin Mills 15 Sep '03

15 Sep '03

---------- Begin forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2003 17:56:38 +0100 Subject: Norfolk County Council response Briefing note in response to questions raised by Mr. Tarquin Mills on NCC use of free operating system software. How much do we spend on Microsoft Software? As NCC has over 6,000 PC's and a wide range of servers we would need to undertake some further research into the number of MSOffice, Project, Publisher, Visio and Windows Server licences we currently have in order to give a comprehensive answer. As there has not been any significant growth in the number of PC's and servers then the number of new licences would not be great but there would be the costs of upgrades to existing licences as well as the annual maintenance costs to consider. All our new PCs come with Windows installed and therefore it is difficult to identify the actual cost for the operating system software element. Initial discussions with PC suppliers indicate there is unlikely to be any discount in buying PCs without the Windows operating system. Quantifying these costs will therefore be difficult. NCC in conjunction with other local authorities has negotiated various commercial arrangements with suppliers in order to ensure that its procurement of software achieves value for money. Some of these arrangements may be confidential and therefore it may be difficult to provide more than summary information. Is the Authority trailing free Operating Systems? Whilst 'Linux' is an excellent operating system and would be a cost-effective choice for many organisations, there are significant reasons why Norfolk County Council is not considering its use at the moment: We have a huge range of applications, many of which are specifically designed to run on Windows desktops or servers. Many of our applications will simply not run on Linux so it's not just a question of replacing the operating system. We would have to evaluate all of our systems to identify which are and aren't compatible with Linux. Those that aren't will have to be rewritten or replaced. This will be a very time consuming and costly process and it would probably take many years to get a return on our investment. It will also divert resources away from other projects and impact on the day-to-day running of services as both users and support staff are trained and have to become familiar with the new systems. The risks associated with such a migration will be very high. Many of our applications help meet statutory obligations or support critical services. Since the change of operating system will impact on a large number of applications, it follows that many of the Authority's key services could also be affected. Although the Linux user-base is growing, there are a limited number of companies doing application development for the operating system. Moving to Linux now will reduce the number of software suppliers available when procuring new system. This would be particularly acute in the already specialised Local Government area. Gartner (an independent ICT research company) have recently (June 2003) conducted some research into the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the Windows v Linux desktop. These vary from a saving of £400 per user/year to an increase of £100 per user/year depending on the version of windows and the application software. These calculations did not include any of the migration costs which for a enterprise like NCC would be considerable nor the cost of dealing with document compatibility issues when trying to share documents with other users running Microsoft Office. Supported versions of Linux are not free and it would not be feasible for NCC to rely on the open-source community for support in the delivery of its business critical systems. NCC is continually looking at ways of reducing its costs and believes that bigger gains can be had from deploying desktop management tools more effectively and implementing new processes rather than migrating to a new operating system. NCC has recently worked with Gartner on developing its Technical Architecture Strategy and this included a review of its operating system and software standards. The outcome of this review was a recommendation that our strategic direction should be Microsoft. Ann Carey e-service directorate =============================== One of the reasons give above points to illegal activities by M$. -- Tarquin Mills RUNG (RISC OS Users, Norfolk Group)

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[Alug]Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 15 Sep '03

15 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]Re-partitioning a Win laptop
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 14 Sep '03

14 Sep '03

Hi Folks, I've just acquired a 2nd-hand laptop which has Win98 installed in a single 6GB partition (the entire HDD). Since this software is not entirely useless (rumours to the contrary notwithstanding) I intend to keep this on say 2GB, making the remaining 4GB over to something really useful (Linux of course). So I shall be fips-ing the partition down to 2GB and then setting up Linux partitions on the remainder. This, as far as it goes, I know how to do. However, a couple of issues concern me and I'd welcome informed advice from people who've been there before. 1. At present, it seems that the Win98 is set up to look after Virtual Memory (aka swap space) in its own way ("Dear user, please don't get involved in anything as difficult as this ... just leave it to us"). I seem to recall that Windows uses some sort of "hidden file" for swapping out. Qs: Will I be treading on any toes on this front by cutting back the disk space to the first 2GB in this way? Or will Win98, next time it starts up, simply do its usual swap thing in the space it then finds available? If there would be problems, what should be done to avoid them? 2. I want to keep the power-management ("go to sleep" on inactivity timeout or on pressing the "snooze" button on the machine) available in both Win98 and Linux. Q: I believe that one of the options is "hibernate to disk", where the system state is saved somewhere on the HDD. This is a similar issue to number 1: what toes would I be treading on? Q: There is also a converse issue: If I fail to set up the Linux partitions properly, and the laptop writes its system state out to disk when it wants to sleep, could this overwrite something that shouldn't be overwritten? Again, if there could be problems, what should be done to avoid them? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 13-Sep-03 Time: 10:16:59 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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[Alug]RE: Broken CD drive
by Richard Lewis 13 Sep '03

13 Sep '03

One other thing: it now restarts itself whenever I open and close the drive and sometimes while I'm typing. And it won't shut down properly: once power down is reached the system restarts instead. Richard

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[Alug]2 debian questions...
by BenEBoy 13 Sep '03

13 Sep '03

OK, in the past 2 weeks I've gotten rid of Morphix because I wanted the speed increase of LFS and whilst trying to compile KDE for lfs realised that life is too short to mess around getting stuff to compile (kdelib is a nightmare. I managed to fix one of the errors I got with my half remembered C skills (I used to be a quite good C coder until I got a job with COBOL) then I got another one about ambiguous function calls and gave up), so I gave debian another go (couldn't get X11 working last time I tried). Anyway, could someone give me an example of their sources.list file please? I assume using the UK mirrors would be good enough but thought I'd check just in case not... Secondly, can someone tell me how to just get the security updates when I do an apt-get upgrade? I'm pretty sure there is an ftp server or two which just has the security updates but I haven't been able to find it with my googling powers. I assume specifying the source when doing the upgrade will do what I want it to, but without a server to connect to I'm stuffed aren't I ;) Sorry for the debian newbie questions... BenE

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[Alug]BootDisk
by Michael Sage 13 Sep '03

13 Sep '03

To All, I have given up on the idea of having IDE RAID the costs are just too high to have a proper hardware RAID (like Adaptec cards etc). I have setup a mandrake system, as it supports RAID as an install option, which is nice! My BIOS unfortunately does not let me boot off the second drive (which is bad), which means should the first drive in the array fail I would be, well, up the paddle without a creek! What I intend to do is use a boot disk to boot the system into its RAID state, so it doesn't matter which drive is down, so my boot order will go Prim IDE, Floppy, CD. There are two things I could do with help with! 1. Why can't I boot off the secondary IDE? It comes up with L 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 etc 01DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER. I am sure this is a BIOS problem. 2. How \ What do I need to create the boot disk simply to kick off the boot process off any drive? My RAID config works like this: Md0 mounted on /boot is a boot array MD1 mounted on / is the rest. Any help would be great, TIA. Michael

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RE: [Alug]-lvgagl
by Jonathan Dye 12 Sep '03

12 Sep '03

Nick Daniels wrote: > Hi > I am trying to install a progarmme called linrad (DSP), > it needs > svgalib which I have installed. > When I make linrad I get " cannot find - lvgagl" I > think it is part of > svgalib, > If I type whereis lvgagl I get :- > linux:/home/nick/linrad-01.06 # whereis -lvgagl > whereis [ -sbmu ] [ -SBM dir ... -f ] name... > I have been windows free for two years , please dont let me > reinstall it Nick Daniels Try: whereis lvgagl (without the -) JD _____________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked for all known viruses by the MessageLabs Virus Scanning Service

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