July 2004 - main - earth.li

Meeting report - City Gate, Thursday 8th July
by Kirsten Naylor 12 Jul '04

12 Jul '04

Another successful City Gate meeting! Not as many turned up as said they would, but still new and unseen-for-some-time faces there. Present were: Jonathan (Noodles) Martijn (mak) Adam (quinophex) Paul (paul_c) James (mChicago) Bryce Girlfriend of Bryce (sorry, didn't catch your name! Bryce, can you fill us in?) Kirsten (wildduck) We missed Elisabeth (sunflowerinrain) who was stuck in traffic and Brett (iDunno) who couldn't make it, also MJR (slef) and a couple of others who evidently were thwarted in the final hours. A convivial meeting as usual, made more interesting by the new people and the cool little phone/PDA gadget Martijn showed us. Lots of Linux talk, drinking of beer and munching of crisps and peanuts, frozen-bubble on Paul's laptop, and I am sure many things I missed while I was reading Linux User&Developer magazine or while I was just not paying attention :) Hope everyone will be there again at the next City Gate meeting (Thursday 12 August 8pm) Sadly Adam and I will be in France then, but back as usual in September. /Kirsten

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 12 Jul '04

12 Jul '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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Problems sending replies to ALUG list
by Ian Douglas 11 Jul '04

11 Jul '04

I am confused. Each time I have tried to send replies to posts on the ALUG list this morning an error box has appeared on my PC saying: ERROR: Sending failed: a SMTP error occurred. Command: DATA Response: 452 Filesystem error - message not accepted The message will stay in the 'outbox' folder until you either fix the problem (e.g. a broken address) or remove the message from the 'outbox' folder. Note other messages will also be blocked by this message as long as it in the 'outbox' folder. The following transport protocol was used: smtp://smtp.ntlworld.com:25 I have therefore resent my reply. However looking at my inbox it does seem though that this error message is wrong and my replies have indeed reached the ALUG list ok. Anyone any idea what is going on? I am creating the messages using kmail 1.3.2 (part of Debian 3.0) and seem to be able to send test messages to my other ISP account ok. Ian.

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Alug Library!
by Kirsten Naylor 10 Jul '04

10 Jul '04

The library has grown unwieldy now, and too big to haul to any meetings really except Sunday afternoon meetings such as at Syleham (short staggering distance from car boot to table top). (Thanks to everyone who has donated books lately!) So I draw everyone's attention to http://www.alug.org.uk/contrib/?LibraryBooklist which, now I look at it, ought to have ISBNs listed and a short description of each book, to aid people in making their selections. The idea is that those who would like books from the library place their requests with me or Adam (quinophex) and we will deliver to the next meeting, whenever that may be. If you live outside the Norwich area and can't attend Norwich meetings, we'd appreciate it if you'd cover the postage costs for us to post the book to you. Books can be returned, more or less at leisure (no time limit on the loan as such, in practice six months is about the limit) in the same fashion, or posted, or whatever as long as we get them back :) I will endeavour to get descriptions up as soon as possible. /Kirsten

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FF: dive and LinuxUser&Developer 36
by MJ Ray 10 Jul '04

10 Jul '04

I have a copy of the dive book+CD published by Liverpool-based FACT which I will pass on or post to any ALUGger who wants it. ISBN 0-9541604-9-5 contains essays about free software and copyleft culture. The CD contains a dyne:bolic bootable distribution. I'd be happy if you pass it on again when you're done. If unwanted, I offer this to the ALUG library. I also have LinuxUser&Developer issue 36. The unopened CD pack is the one with the Sun desktop and 500 packages. If unwanted, it will be recycled on Friday 23 July. Thanks, -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and not of any group I know http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing "Before we try to work out if he's competent, let's work out if he's conscious." (anon. exam marker)

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New CD drive not accessable
by Ian Douglas 10 Jul '04

10 Jul '04

Hi Folks, I installed Debian 3.0 on my PC ages ago and have been happily using it ever since. However, a few minutes ago, I upgraded my CD drive from a standard CD drive to a CDRW drive and I can now no longer access any CDs. If I try to mount a CD then I get an error message saying it is not a valid block device: giraffe:~# mount /dev/hdd /mnt2 mount: /dev/hdd is not a valid block device If however I scan through the output of dmesg I can see it listed: hdd: ATAPI CD-RW 16/12/40X, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive What do I need to tweak in order to be able to access CDs using this new CD drive? Thanks, Ian.

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RE: [ALUG] dpkg-dist error on installing postgresql
by Jenny Hopkins 10 Jul '04

10 Jul '04

> >Well, this is an interesting question that I have as a debian user: > >stable is still using postgresql 7.2. Current postgresql > version is up to 7.4, however. How can I keep my server > running stable but also keeping a bit more up to date with > versions of things? > >Jen > > > > In the case of PostgreSQL you can just compile it yourself as > it has tools to enable you to upgrade your data stores built in. > > Matt > I've been advised in the past that the trouble with compiling yourself in a debian system is that it breaks the integrity of the package system: do you mean here that you compile it and it kind of stays in sync with the apt system? Someone sent me a site offlist I didn't know existed: www.backports.org (thanks, Sue - tried to reply but it kept bouncing back). Jen ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________

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RE: [ALUG] dpkg-dist error on installing postgresql
by Jenny Hopkins 09 Jul '04

09 Jul '04

-----Original Message----- > From: Tim Green [mailto:tim@spodlife.org] > Sent: 30 June 2004 13:18 > > I shudder to think what would have happened if this was my live box > > and not the playpen. > > Thanks, > > Jen > > I shudder to think anyone would think to upgrade from stable > to testing on a live box at all! > > Well, this is an interesting question that I have as a debian user: stable is still using postgresql 7.2. Current postgresql version is up to 7.4, however. How can I keep my server running stable but also keeping a bit more up to date with versions of things? Jen ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________

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Thunderbird checking mail in all IMAP folders
by Martijn Koster 09 Jul '04

09 Jul '04

This came up last night... I'm using Thunderbird (0.6 on Linux, 0.7.2 on Windows) against a Courier IMAP server, and use mailfilter server-side to filter email into 70 different folders. By default Thunderbird doesn't check all folders for new messages when you hit "Get Messages". You can right-click a folder, select the Properties menu, and tick "Check this folder for new messages". But obviously that's rather tedious with that many folders. There is no UI to set "Check all folders for new messages" in Account Settings/Server Settings. After some Googling I found a hack: http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/tips.html#beh_downloadstartup http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/edit.html which works as advertised. -- Martijn

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KDE killed
by IanBell 08 Jul '04

08 Jul '04

I did a silly thing. I run Mandrake 9.2 and have a separate partition for home. On a spare partition I installed Slackware 9.1 and set its home to the above mentioned partition. Then under slack set up a new user with same name/password as the main user in home (hopefully) to access all the settings/data. Trouble is in doing this I seem to have knackered KDE. It stops with a message about the dcop server. Fortunately Gnome still works fine, and seems to pick up the entire KDE desktop icons and menus - that's how I am sending this email. So the question is how to get kde going again, and a corollary, how should I have set up Slackware to be able to access my existing home directory in the first place? Ian

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