November 2004 - main

Re: Linux
by Jeremy Dales 05 Nov '04

05 Nov '04

Many thanks for the welcome. I'm afraid I'm still trying to work out the format here, so I hope I've replied to the right place. I should have mentioned I'm using Fedora Core 2. As you can probably tell from my post yesterday, I'd spent a very frustrating day trying to work out how to install applications - anyway, my first success was late last night when I managed to install Firefox by untarring it, cd to the download directory and typing rpm. -i firefox.rpm (or thereabouts). Things are starting to make a bit more sense.

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Alternatives to lynx
by Chris Green 05 Nov '04

05 Nov '04

I'm looking for an alternative text browser to use instead of lynx. The one major facility I want is to be able to interpret javascript. I've tried links (the Twibright labs links(2)) and although it looks good and builds very easily I can't get it to run javascript either. When I get to a javascript link it just says "javascript::" and won't actually do anything. Are there any other possibilities? -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Linux Laptop
by tom potts 05 Nov '04

05 Nov '04

Anyone know where I might be able to purchase a new laptop/notebook with Linux installed so M$ get none of my money? Preferably from this little backwater of a country but EU would do at a push Tom ___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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Re:Linux Laptops
by tom potts 05 Nov '04

05 Nov '04

The FreeDos Dell option is probably a last resort - I'm not sure I want to buy from a company that refuses to supply AMD based machines - though I have sent them an e-mail asking if they could! And at my last company their so called service was dire! ___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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Kit Swap meet?
by Jonathan McDowell 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

Another meeting suggestion: How about a kit swap meet? Everyone brings their old junk they want to get rid of for free and we bring some install CDs too perhaps and either we just swap junk or we combine it up to build full machines that we can then give to charity or people can take away? Possibly January, after Christmas when people have got shiny new kit and have old stuff cluttering up the place? J. -- ] http://www.earth.li/~noodles/ [] God is REAL. (unless declared [ ] PGP/GPG Key @ the.earth.li [] integer) [ ] via keyserver, web or email. [] [ ] RSA: 4DC4E7FD / DSA: 5B430367 [] [

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LiveJournal breaks Planet ALUG
by Ben Francis 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

Thanks slef for the page on Syndication Tools in the ALUG Wiki.¹ I was just wondering, why is it that certain HTML produced by LiveJournal² (especially images) breaks Planet ALUG/Mabloss³? I'm assuming it's because LiveJournal produces bad code in the RSS feed. Is this the case? What's the best approach to fix this? 1) Syndication Tools - http://www.alug.org.uk/contrib/?SyndicationTools 2) LiveJournal - http://www.livejournal.com 3) MaBloss - http://mjr.towers.org.uk/mabloss.html -- Ben "tola" Francis http://hippygeek.co.uk ---------------------------------------------------- COMPUTER SUPPORT for small businesses and home users http://tolatech.co.uk ----------------------------------------------------

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Problem with /dev/tty with kernel 2.6.9
by Alan Williams 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

Hiya folks I just upgraded to kernel 2.6.9 on my home machine. I tend to keep the latest, partly to test things out and partly as a learning exercise. I have had occasional problems in the past, but several important programs die under this kernel, in particular less and rxvt which I use all the time. Using strace, I can see the problem happens on trying to open '/dev/tty', which used to be a device pointing at the current terminal and is now a directory containing devices 's','s0',..,'s9'. The application dies with 'EISDIR'. The documentation on this change is obscure (nothing new), though presumably this is soumething to do with the setup of udev. So any info you have on these points would be useful. 1. Why has this particular change happened? 2. What is the alias of the current terminal supposed to be now? 3. Is there any workround you can think of that will enable these programs to work properly without changing the source and recompiling? I suppose I could revert back to 2.4.x but I would rather use the latest stable kernel if I can. Any suggestions gratefully received. The distribution is Slackware 10.0. Alan -- Alan Williams phone 01603 460800 15 Albury Walk NORWICH NR4 6JE alan(a)bearsden.demon.co.uk

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unicode, sqlite and C
by MJ Ray 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

This is a typical slippery slope... I start off from a general issue that affects most users, through a specific application, to a specific programming question. Are you holding tight? Is there a C doctor in the house? Some of you may have "enjoyed" the change of character set from ISO-8859-1 (an 8-bit character code, so 256 possible characters)) to utf-8 (a large character set which is converted into 8-bit codes, pairs of 8-bit codes and so on). Basically, 8859-1 only lets you display western European text, while utf-8 lets you have southern or eastern European languages, or greek or cyrillic or whatever, all at once without doing anything unusual with character sets. FAQ at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html The SQLite database seems to use UTF-16 as a basic datatype. I was having a browse after it was suggested that I try writing a Scheme interface to it. When reading http://www.sqlite.org/capi3.html, the following caught my eye: "There is no agreement on what the C datatype for a UTF-16 string should be." Is there really such disagreement on this basic datatype? The FAQ makes it look clearcut on wchar_t. What types do C programmers really use? For my part, Scheme's character and string datatypes seem to cope with unicode in theory, but the implementation details (such as what character set) are still being thrashed out. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and not of any group I know Creative copyleft computing - http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ Unsolicited attachments to the pipex address deleted Will HLF fund tree-killings? http://www.thewalks.co.uk/

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Apache2 processes
by Jenny Hopkins 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

Hi, I've recently installed apache2. I notice that it spawns processes like fury but doesn't kill them when the corresponding web page is closed? Is this due to me misconfiguring a config file, perhaps? Thanks, Jen

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What does this do
by Wayne Stallwood 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

When typed into a bash prompt :(){ :|:&};: I have been told it does bad things so don't try it, is it folklore or does it really do something nasty ?

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