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Backup internet access via dialup 'pay as you go' providers
by Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. 19 Apr '06

19 Apr '06

I want to be able to use a backup provider for my internet access via dialup when I have problems with my current ISP (NTL). Are there companies still around which do dialup internet access where you only pay for the phone call when you use it, and are member using such services? If so, please let me know who you use and why? I'm planning to use dialup as a backup instead of an ADSL line from someone else in order to keep the cost down. Thanks in advance for your help. -- Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. http://www.ashleyhowes.com/ "A martial art is like a mirror in which you look at yourself before you wash your face in the morning. You see yourself simply, the way that you are." - Bira Almeidai

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Thinkpad 755CX
by Simon Royal 18 Apr '06

18 Apr '06

Hi Does anyone know any information on the IBM Thinkpad 755CX or where I could get some. The IBM site is useless unless you already own a thinkpad and can provide a number of it. Regards Simon Royal -- >- Visit my website www.simonroyal.co.uk >- The box said Windows 2000 or better, so I bought a Mac

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 17 Apr '06

17 Apr '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! 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 xchat, irssi 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://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Meeting report: 2nd Thursday Norwich pub meet, 13th April
by Jonathan McDowell 15 Apr '06

15 Apr '06

To make up for forgetting to send a meeting reminder this week, here's a brief meeting report. Despite the lack of a reminder there was a good turn out. Richard Lewis, Steve Engledow, Dave Reynolds, Becca Sibley, Paul Corner, Rob[0] (no idea about surname), Neil (again, no idea about surname), Adam Bower, Brett Parker, Eli and myself where all there. We were happily ensconced in our usual corner to the left of the door. A game of Frustration (which appears to be renamed Ludo) was played, though I'm not sure if it was ever completed. Likewise Steve kept starting random games of Pontoon. More on topic discussions included Neil talking about his Zaurus (I no longer have mine), comparisons of recent AMD/Intel chips (in particular with respect to power consumption) and the difficulties of producing a document management system when all you've got is Word (with an interesting diversion into how UK deers got briefly blamed for BSE in Chile). I've no idea what went on at the other end of the table though. A good night I think with a good turnout. Hopefully we'll get an equally good result at the Syleham kit meet in a couple of weeks (Saturday 30th April). J. [0] Dave claims Rob looks like Noel Fielding of the Mighty Boosh, as seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8586532516895205430 -- Revd. Jonathan McDowell, ULC | umop 3pisdn w,I u3ym hx3s os w,I

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Slax and network?
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 13 Apr '06

13 Apr '06

Hi Folks, I thought I'd toy with Slaxkware in the shape of the "Slackware Live", or "Slax", CD for which an ISO can be downloaded from http://slax.linux-live.org/ It seems very nice! But there's a network problem which puzzles me. I tried it on a laptop, whose normal LAN address is 192.168.1.5, using as gateway another machine on that net is 192.168.1.3 and which also connects to an ADSL router which has address 192.168.1.1; and has a second NIC for local subnet 192.168.0.0 So, once I'm logged in to Slax (which defaults its network to 192.168.0.0), I ifconfig -a eth0 192.168.1.5 which seems to do that job OK; then route del default eth0 route add default gw 192.168.1.3 eth0 which also seems to do that job OK. When I now do ifconfig and route the results are identical to what that laptop has in normal use. However, while I can ping 192.168.1.3 [the gateway nachine] ping 192.168.1.1 [the router] any attempt to say ping 192.168.0.1 [a third machine on the other subnet] or any external IP address such as ping 130.88.200.20 fails. It's as though the gateway is not acting as a gateway. I can't make out why this should be so, since the laptop setup looks the same as it does in normal use, and nothing has been changed on any other machine. Any ideas, anyone? With thanks, and best wishes, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Apr-06 Time: 11:26:03 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Firefox foreign characters problem
by Chris Green 12 Apr '06

12 Apr '06

When I run Firefox on Solaris (and I think Slackware, so it is a Linux question, sort of) I get odd funnies in the character display when displaying Polish characters such as:- a with a cedilla l with a line through it etc. These are characters which don't have 'west' European equivalents. I have no problems with French accents or German umlauts. If I run my Windows copy of Firefox the characters display correctly. Under Solaris/Linux the characters are displayed as the right character but either too large, or too small or in a different font. It's not the View - Character Encoding setting, that is correct (and if you change it the characters in question change to funny symbols). So, what do I need to do to get these characters displayed correctly? -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Thinkpads
by Syd Hancock 11 Apr '06

11 Apr '06

Just a note to agree with the recommendation for the T23 Thinkpad. Got one from a seller in Ipswich via ebay a couple of years ago and it still serves me very well - very good value for money. Just about everything works in linux including sound and ethernet - out of the box on a stock mandriva 2006 install and no doubt just as easy on other distros. All those handy function keys for volume, screen brightness, switching to external monitor, suspend to ram etc all work although 'hibernate' to disk using acpi doesn't work for me yet. I use a wireless card in the card-bus slot and it switches cleanly and automatically from ethernet to wireless and back again. Using the GUI tools to setup ethernet and wireless networking was very simple - has to be as I'm no techie. Not a 'desktop-replacement' and no 3D graphics in the X driver but in general it does everything that you need from a laptop on a day-to-day basis. Handles KDE, OpenOffice.org, Firefox etc with no problems. I added a DVD-ROM/CD-writer and K3b works fine. I take it to school sometimes and connect to the overhead projector and sound system to play music DVDs to the kids as a special treat - helps me to enjoy work more too :-) Syd

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php-xml, mandriva etc - long
by Syd Hancock 11 Apr '06

11 Apr '06

Hi Dave Briggs Apologies for not threading - just read the posts on the archive. First - hopefully you are using MDV2006 and not an earlier version and especially not one of the magazine cover disks that appear from time to time. Because of the lead-in time before publication they are always outdated and in some cases have had various packages added and removed randomly. If you cannot d/l a recent version then email me. 1. Internet connectivity on your linux box - you really do need this for any distro in order to install updates as well as new packages. Can you use ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) on the windows computer and connect your mandriva box to it with ethernet? I've done this in the past with no problem - that was pre-XP though so things may have changed e.g. not sure if XP-home has ICS - it seems to lack most things that are useful. 2. easyurpmi - hopefully you have googled for this by now but if not, here is a brief intro. urpmi is the mandriva command-line utility for installing rpm packages. It has the major advantage of handling dependencies unlike classic 'rpm' as well as several others. The Software Installer in MCC (Mandriva Control Center) is a GUI front-end to this and other utilities - generally slower than command-line (of course) but has many useful sorting functions, information about all files and file-locations to be installed etc etc. easyurpmi is a website (group of mirrored websites) that make setting-up the sources for apps very easy. You just put in your system details (processor, distro version, repository types required etc) and then copy/paste the output into a root command line terminal. Try 'man urpmi' for more info. http://easyurpmi.zarb.org is the place to go. You need as a basic minimum update-source, main, contrib, plf-free and plf-nonfree. You can then disable the CD/DVD installation media (in MCC) if you wish as main contains more packages than fit onto the DVD/CDs. php-xml may be an example of this. I would suggest installins update-source first and installing all the updates. Even on dial-up it can be done overnight. plf will let you install stuff that enables encrypted-dvd reading and many other non-free multi-media formats that make the jolly old inter-web such a joy to use (heh...). plf are now hosting repositories for ubuntu as well. 3. php-xml is on the devel (aka 'community') mirrors in 'main' and may well be on the 'official' branch of the main tree. In fact many people, myself included, use the devel (aka 'community' in MDV2006 although not in earlier versions) repositories instead of the so-called 'official' sources (hopelessly confusing naming conventions BTW). Despite its name, devel contains the most recent and (generally) stable versions. If you do this then you do not need a seaparate 'update-source' and you will need rregularly to update all sources and install updates from the command line as root: urpmi.update -a; urpmi --auto-select 4. Then there is 'cooker' which is the stuff actually in the process of being developed - not for general use. It's the same structure that debian uses of course. 5. There are many other repositories of rpms built for mandriva although reports of how stable they are vary widely. 'Seer of Souls' (yeah, really) has a good reputation at present although I don't use it myself but does offer things like KDE3.5 etc that mandriva has not yet incorporated. google will find it for you if you want to give it a whirl - and selecting/deselecting repository sources in MCC is very quick and easy. 6. Look in the boot section of MCC - you should be able to set the options to login your user and start X from there if they were reset when you changed the graphics driver. Hope this helps. Feel free to email me off-list if you prefer. Syd

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Re: ThinkPad & Wireless
by Robert Grant (DEV) 11 Apr '06

11 Apr '06

>> from work... if only shockwave and some decent qualitative >> research software were available for linux things would be >> perfect. > >Not sure what you mean by "qualitative research software" >(let alone "decent") -- if you were more explicit we might >make some good suggestions! I've been doing quantitative >research with Linux for the last 23 years, and by now there's >a lot of good stuff about. But "qualitative" -- what do you >need for this? > 'Qualitative' analysis software is designed for research based on sources such as interviews, observational notes or transcribed media. The core functionality is to allow some kind of 'coding' of text files. For example, when reading through my interviews with Tanzanian businessmen I mark any section of text that deals with 'source of start-up capital'. Then whenever I want the software will show me on a single page all the passages relating to this concept. Obviously, there are lots of other such concepts like 'gaining a good reputation', 'doing business with kin' and so on. The software allows me to organise these in various ways, do boolean searches for passages relating to combinations of concepts, incorporate quantitative data on respondents and much else besides. People used to use boxes of index cards to do this kind of work. I use QSR's package Nvivo, which is not available for Linux. Neither, I believe are the other half-dozen widely used programs. I apologise however, that this remark was rather lazy in that I have not investigated this very thoroughly yet. I was carried away at both the fact that I've got a few things working well in Kubuntu recently (remember I am a strugluger) and that for once perhaps I could offer something relevant here (the 3Com Xjack card info). Best wishes, Rob

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php-xml
by Dave Briggs 11 Apr '06

11 Apr '06

Hi guys Managed to get Mandriva to work in the end - set the graphics driver to be a generic ATI one and it seems to work - though I have to log in and load KDE by hand now. I want to install MediaWiki to have a play with it, and have created the database, put everything in place but the installation php script is moaning that I don't have the php-xml package installed. A quick google has proved pretty inconclusive, and there is no sign of this on Rpmdrake. Any clues on where I can get this from? One complication is that I don't have internet access on this machine, so I have to download it on my Windows box and transfer it across. Cheers Dave

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