April 2004 - main

ISDN
by Stuart Hammond 07 Apr '04

07 Apr '04

Can any one recomend a good 128K linux compatible PCI ISDN adapter? i know there is issuses with normal modems, is this the same with ISDN or are they all the same and just work? _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself with cool new emoticons http://www.msn.co.uk/specials/myemo

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Next Norwich week-end meeting - new proposal
by Syd Hancock 05 Apr '04

05 Apr '04

Short version: Not a lot of interest expressed even from the regulars, although that does not necessarily mean that no-one is interested :-0 BUT... is it worth spending money on hiring a room if few people are likely to be there? If we cannot get a free room at UEA for an ALUG 5th Birthday Bash, how about meeting up at the City Gate instead, maybe for meal during or afterwards, first w/e in May? ---------------------------------- Long Version: Recently I asked for feedback on when the next Norwich w/e meeting should be held because the planned meeting is a week before ALUG's fifth anniversary and a few people had suggested that this should be marked. I have had three responses. Two preferred the first w/e in May (the 'birthday' w/e but also a bank holiday w/e) and one had no preference. So call it three for May. Two preferred the idea of a saturday meeting at UEA if it could be arranged and one preferred a sunday meeting. In retrospect my 'survey' should have distinguished between 'saturday' preference and 'UEA' preference. I suspect people were choosing UEA rather than 'saturday'. I have no way of knowing if the other people who often come to w/e meetings but did not respond have no preference or are simply uninterested :-) ------- Anyway, the preference from the tiny and possibly-unrepresentative sample is for a saturday meeting at the UEA on the first w/e in May i.e. May 1st. If a free room can be booked at UEA then this can go ahead. Otherwise... well, it may be a bit of a problem. I will not be in Norwich that w/e but I can change the Billy Bluelight booking. I don't have time to search for an alternative. I'm concerned that very few people will turn up again and it is an expensive place if very few people attend. Maybe an alternative, if a booking at UEA does not happen, would be to have a saturday or sunday birthday meet at the City Gate instead on May 1st or 2nd? Maybe meet up for a meal? OK, so it's not a place to take kit but is that so important this time? That actually sounds like more fun to me than the Billy Bluelight or even UEA. I'll be sorry to miss it. If it works we can do it more often and keep a room-booked meeting for when there really is some activity worth booking a room for, such as a talk, demo etc. And there is always Syleham which is a great place for kit-bringing meetings: tables, chairs, beer, tea and coffee plus it's warm, inviting and (dah-dah!) free as well. So - what do you say??? City Gate on the Bank Holiday w/e in May? ------------- The other thing is that I will be away for the next couple of weeks and really want to get this settled asap. I will (fingers crossed and keep the string pulled tight) have email though. Finally, I think we have to question if the old-style unplanned bring-kit meetings are really fulfilling a need, at least in Norwich now there are regular monthly evening meets for face-to-face contacts. Most people seem to get the general tech support they need via the list. Just a thought Syd

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Re: [ALUG] NTP between local PCs
by Edenyard 05 Apr '04

05 Apr '04

Steve Fosdick wrote: > Do you have something like this in the ntp.conf on each machine? > > # ... and use the local system clock as a reference if all else fails > server 127.127.1.0 > fudge 127.127.1.0 stratum 10 > > If so I am guessing that the secondary PC is refusing to sync to a > server that appears to be in the same stratum as itself, i.e. 10. > You could change the PC you want to use as the master to stratum 9 > and see if that solves it. Thanks for your clues, Steve. I do have those lines in /etc/ntp.conf. I tried using ntpq to look at the debugging info (as per the HTML docs) and it seemed to be saying that the the reason for failure was due to the main PC being too high a stratum at stratum=15, despite those lines in the config file. Also the 'flash' variable was reading 20, which, when decoded using another of the docs, merely said "wind the clock up"....!! Is this going to be another CUPS horror-story? Cheers, Gerald.

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 05 Apr '04

05 Apr '04

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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Norwich evening meeting: 11th March 2004
by Syd Hancock 05 Apr '04

05 Apr '04

(Notice sent out on saturday but not posted for some reason) --------------- The monthly Norwich 'second thursday' evening social meet will take place this week, 8th April from 8 pm at the City Gate, Dereham Road. Full address, photo, link to map etc here: http://www.norwichpubs.info/norwichpubs/pubpages/citygate.htm If you have not attended one of these meets before, they are informal and unstructured and general chat covers many topics as well as the obvious linux-related stuff. There may or may not be a penguin on the table :-) === directions etc === The City Gate pub is just off the inner ring road at the junction of Grapes Hill and Barn Road. Dereham Road is the A1074 - take the Costessey junction on the A47 if coming from west of Norwich. Otherwise, when going clockwise around the inner ring road, Dereham road is the left turn at the traffic lights at the bottom of Grapes Hill (but see parking info below). There is a very large Cane Furniture shop on the corner and this is probably the best landmark from either direction. The pub, which has a large glass frontage (see link to picture above), is next to the cane furniture shop. There is ample parking nearby, including possible free parking on the forecourt of a wine warehouse next to the pub or on side roads off Dereham Road. There is also Pay-and-Display parking ( £1.40 for the evening) on the other side of the ring road off St Swithin's road. Coming down Grapes Hill turn right at the lights (St Benedict's Street) and then left into the entrance to the car park which is behind Toys-R-Us. Syd

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testing to main - pleas ignore
by Syd Hancock 05 Apr '04

05 Apr '04

Annoying but necessary. Syd

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Re: [ALUG] The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story
by Stuart Hammond 05 Apr '04

05 Apr '04

I dont think it fair saying that linux has a long way to go for non technicle endusers, i am for all practicle purposes a newbie to linux, what i have found is that if i want to change any thing or customise any thing (well at least at my level) you can and its easyer than windows by far. The diffrences between them though is that the guys at microsoft seemed to make an OS which is aimed at being userfrendly and forgot about everything else (and its not like it all works as it should so even the most technicaly inept monkey could od it bits of it ae still damned annotying and difficult) where as in linux user frendlyness is a secondary option, having an OS which works and dosent fall kicking and screaming to the ground evrytime some script kiddie in kazakhistan gets bored and dcides to release his softwarre of doom into the world. _________________________________________________________________ Sign-up for a FREE BT Broadband connection today! http://www.msn.co.uk/specials/btbroadband

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The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story
by Graham Trott 04 Apr '04

04 Apr '04

A cautionary tale for anyone producing end-user software. Also an amusing and informative read. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html -- GT

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Re: [ALUG] DVD-R questions
by Steve Fosdick 04 Apr '04

04 Apr '04

On 2004.04.03 19:27, adam(a)thebowery.co.uk wrote: > The (very) unscientific results of this showed that whichever way I tried this > the job took the same amount of real time in seconds to complete (around 2m19s) > (this I presume is that even without using dma the dvdburner can shunt more > than enough data over the IDE bus), the difference was that when I wasn't using > dma the amount of cpu usage as system (according to top) was pegged at around > 60-70% of cpu with the idle time at about 40-30% and a load average of around > 0.89 and when using dma the system time dropped to under 5% with an idle time > of about 95% and a load average of 0.60ish. This is on an athlon 1700+ machine > and a via kt400 motherboard chipset with everything connected up nicely with > the best type of cables etc. etc. OK, so that's a data transfer rate of 3.27 MB/s and yes, at that speed PIO can keep up at the expense of more CPU time used. As the device gets faster the same is not true. Doing a similar test for a hard disk I remember getting rates of approx. 5 MB/s for PIO and approx. 25 MB/s for DMA. For a DVD burner running at 11 MB/s the difference would be important. Steve.

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NTP between local PCs
by Edenyard 04 Apr '04

04 Apr '04

I'm trying to get two networked Linux boxes to show the same time in X by using ntp. I'm running ntpd on the main one and I've added the IP address of the secondary one to /etc/ntp.conf. However, using ntpdate doesn't set the secondary PC's clock to agree with the main PC, because ntpdate complains that the main PC is too high a stratum. Does anyone know how to get over this. I suspect that the main problem is to do with the main PC not being connected to a kosher ntp server at the time (since there's no internet connection) but it seems that it ought to be possible to sync the two machines' clocks nonetheless. When there IS an internet connection, the main PC uses ntp quite happily to adjust its clock to whatever external server I select, but, even then, the secondary box won't sync to the main one. I've read through all the HTML documentation that comes with ntp in the Slackware 9.1 distribution, but no joy. Any clues, please, anyone? Gerald.

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