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BOM Software
by Guy Eastwood 20 Mar '06

20 Mar '06

Does anyone know of any BOM (Bill Of Materials) management software? Either standalone on Windoze or web-based (LAMP, etc) ? My sister is after something to do this for her jewellery design biz but I don't wanna write it (and have the pain of maintaining it) but I thought there must be a free thingy to do this somewhere so she doesn't fork out for something nuts like SAGEware or similar when there's no need to. G

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 20 Mar '06

20 Mar '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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Linux Laptop from major supplier
by Ian bell 16 Mar '06

16 Mar '06

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X… Not the best but it's a start. Ian

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Ubuntu apt question
by Stuart Fox 16 Mar '06

16 Mar '06

Hi all Im new to the apt system, is ther a way to completely remove a virtual package and its dependencies? I've just put dapper on my laptop as an experiment and I want to replace gnome with kde (not starting a gnome/kde war, i just dont like gnome) I know I *could* just leave gnome in place but it urks me having all that *stuff* under the hood that I dont want there. Cheers Stuart -- The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

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MySQL Dynamic/index tables
by Richard Lewis 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

Hello ALUG, I hope you don't mind me asking a MySQL question here? I've got a very slow query on my database which uses a lot of LEFT JOINs in order to do a sort of keyword search across a number of tables. It seems to me that if I could create a sort of permanent temporary table which stores the result of this query, add a FULLTEXT index to it and then do my keyword searches on this table things would be a lot quicker. It would be like a sort of dynamic or index table because its contents would have to change as the other tables change - it would have to reflect the current state of the rest of the database. Does MySQL provide functionality to do this sort of thing? If not I suppose I could set up a cron job to perform the query and update the table every 10 minutes or so... I've searched for things like "temporary tables", "index tables" and "dynamic tables" but haven't really found anything particularly useful. Any thoughts? Cheers, Richard -- --------------------------- Richard Lewis Sonic Arts Research Archive http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ ---------------------------

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Kororaa Xgl Demo Live CD (Version 0.1) has been released
by Keith Watson 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

http://getkororaa.com/ Regards, Keith ____________ BAROMETER, n. - An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having. - Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary

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Anyone want some work?
by Joe Button 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

Hi. One of our ex-clients has asked us to do some (unspecified) reconfiguration to their Debian server. Apparently we don't want to do it, but I've been asked if I could find any other takers. If interested please complete the following sentence: "I am good at reconfiguring debian servers because .........." and we will pick a winner at random out of a hat. Cheers, Joe

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RE: [ALUG] USB DVD Reader/Writer
by Keith Watson 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

> From: Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk > Sent: 14 March 2006 22:51 > Any further comments welome -- I've never dabbled yet in the > DVD world. Neither had I until recently, I found this very useful <http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/coasterless_dvd.htm> Regards, Keith ____________ We don't see the world as IT is. We see it as WE are. - Anaïs Nin

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Free to a good (or bad) home
by Wayne Stallwood 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

I am having a bit of a clear out and just stumbled across the following bits...all free to anyone willing to come and get them...If not then I'll bring them to the next hardware meet. eMachines eTower 700ir Mini Tower PC Fitted with Celeron 700,Heatsink/Fan, Mainboard (Intel 810 chipset),CD-ROM,Modem and a floppy drive...Everything else has been robbed. Integrated Video and Audio, no AGP slot, 3 PCI's. Seems to run fine with a test PSU and some RAM (PC100 DIMM)...you'll probably have to junk the case because the PSU is one of the less common sizes. Plextor SCSI (SCA connection) SCSI CD ROM. 40x speed. DXR3/Hollywood hardware (DVD playback) Mpeg card, Drivers to make it work with Xine exist. Strange Compaq all in one PC (integrated monitor etc) with a Massive 8MB RAM and bohemouth 400MB Hard drive I believe it has a 486DX2/66 Processor. Works. Was going to be part of a long forgotten MiniITX project so now heading for the bin (unless anyone wants to save it)

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USB DVD Reader/Writer
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

Hi Folks, Can experienced persons recommend an external USB DVD reader and writer which works well with Linux? (I would be driving it from a Red Hat 9 laptop). Also: would there be any problems writing files to it from filesystems on other machines which are NFS-mouted on the laptop? (I would chiefly want to use this to make backups of large chunks of filespace, and there would not be space on the laptop to clone the files from the other machines, only one of which has a USB port which may or may not be OK for this -- SuSE 7.1 from around 2000). Thanks for any advice, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 14-Mar-06 Time: 16:58:34 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Windows Vista UI
by Wayne Stallwood 14 Mar '06

14 Mar '06

It's always worth looking at beta's of upcoming OS releases to see where they are heading...you never know there may be one or two good ideas that should be in Linux....But looking at these shots of Vista I am wondering if MS have sacked half their UI team (if they haven't they should do) http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1931914,00.asp Check out the media player shot non standard widgets, confusing boundaries between content tree and content files, media buttons that force you to mouse down to the bottom middle of the screen....madness or unfamiliarity clouding my opinion ? We stuck IE7 preview on a spare XP machine at work, same UI issues, looks pretty but is totally unusable for power users...The only good thing I would like to see implemented in firefox is the tab preview button that gives a screen of thumbnails of all current tabs.

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Wireless "N"etworking
by Martin John Collins 14 Mar '06

14 Mar '06

Evening all, Slowly but surely my Linux knowledge is growing but I have always avoided the big "N" as the alien terminology tends to make my head spin after about 5 mins of reading! But I'm going to give it a go. A full tutorial through the LUG is not what I'm after, but a few pointers of where to start would be appreciated. There's a desktop in the lounge (which will be the server) connected by cable to a Linksys wireless broadband router for ADSL internet access. My laptop connects to the internet wirelessly (ndiswrapper) through the router. Both machines connect to the router via DHCP and there are firewalls enabled on the desktop, the laptop and internally on the router. In the next couple of months I will be putting another desktop in my son's bedroom upstairs. All three machines will be running SUSE 10.0 All I really want is one shared folder on the server for moving files around all machines and for the laptop and upstairs desktop to be able to print to the printer connected to the desktop server. I don't know what route to go. I've read a little about internet printing protocol and configuring cups but that only covers the printing. Samba seems to address both but my first initial attempts have failed. I set up the workgroup COLLINS-NET through the SAMBA SERVER module in YAST which also opens up a firewall port on the server. I then configure the SAMBA CLIENT through YAST on the laptop and after entering the username and password it seems to connect (this is only after I shut down the laptop firewall manually - God knows what port the SAMBA CLIENT needs open!). However when I try to browse the network through konqueror "smb://collins-net/" I get the error "could not connect to host for smb://collins-net/". So I don't know - is SAMBA the way to go or is there a simpler solution? Your comments suggestions would be much appreciated. In the meantime I'm shutting down now and going for a sit down with a beer and a SuSE 9.2 Administration Guide!!! Cheers, Martin

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MySQL on Ubuntu 5.10
by David Noble 14 Mar '06

14 Mar '06

Hi!, After getting my bulletin board to work on my Debian system, I decided that as it wasn't using too many resources I might as well move it onto (another) old school computer (Celeron 600; 64m ram)... I performed a fresh installation of Ubuntu 5.10 (server), as I had a disc lying about. I installed the 'dev tools'(?) package, copied the MySQL source over to the machine, unpacked, ran configure (with relevant options). This worked, found gcc, g++, and all that, but came to a grinding halt, reporting "no curses/termcap library found". I checked that I had ncurses installed- I have ncurses-base. However, an "apt-get install ncurses-devel", or an "apt-get ncurses-dev" returns no results. What should I do- I don't seem to be able to find any relevant .deb packages on the 'net. I also have no internet access to this ubuntu machine as I am at <strike>prison</strike> school. Any suggestions appreciated, Dave.

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locale problem - what has changed to cause this?
by Chris Green 13 Mar '06

13 Mar '06

Until a couple of days ago I had my locales working OK, I just had all the LC_xxx environment variables set to their default value of "C" except for LC_TYPE set to "en_GB". This allowed accented characters to work correctly in mutt and tin. However something I have done over the weekend has broken this, now whenever I start tin for example I get the message:- Can't set the specified locale! If I set LC_CTYPE back to the default "C" then the message goes away so, for some reason, setlocale() cant find then "en_GB" locale. I've tried some other locales and I get the same message so I seem to have lost all of them. I haven't *really* lost all of them, the locale database is still in place at /usr/lib/locale. The most likely candidate for breaking this as far as I can see is that I upgraded the glibc library to get the latest Bluefish to work. What I don't know is how to get my locale database working again. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Thunderbird and Sent-Mail
by linux＠davebriggs.net 13 Mar '06

13 Mar '06

Hi chaps Does anyone know if it is possible to get Thunderbird to download messages in the sent-mail folder of an inbox as well as those that are in the inbox itself? I tend to use a webmail interface to check emails while I am at work, and it's annoying that any sent from there don't download onto my machine at home. Any help appreciated. Cheers Dave

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New Mail Notification Evolution
by Richard 13 Mar '06

13 Mar '06

Hello, Does anyone know how to make the New Mail Notification applet for Evolution display in the GNOME Notificiation Area? I've got evolution-plugins installed and the plugin is ticked in Evolution's plugins list. I've also found the option to make Evolution beep when new mail arrives but I'd like to be able to "close" Evolution and have a little icon in the Notification Area which lets me know when new mail arrives. (Plus, my machine has a bit of a problem with beeping...) Cheers, Richard --------------------------- Richard Lewis Sonic Arts Research Archive http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ ---------------------------

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 13 Mar '06

13 Mar '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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XGL on Ubuntu
by Wayne Stallwood 12 Mar '06

12 Mar '06

Anybody played with XGL yet....just upgraded my machine to Ubuntu dapper 6.04 ? Looks like getting XGL and Compiz working on a 64bit machine is "fun" at the moment but I am going to give it a try later. Slightly put of by all the warnings on the forums that it is highly unstable at the moment...but hey nothing ventured and all that. Apart from that the dapper upgrade went fairly well (considering Ubuntu are currently considering holding off the scheduled release for 6 weeks to tidy up the remaining bugs) I had a slight problem with Openoffice2 during the upgrade but removing the installation packages and then reinstalling after everything else was upgraded seems to fix it...at least all the important stuff seems to be working, but the default theme is still a bit of a mess.

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Best Linux Out There?
by Simon Royal 12 Mar '06

12 Mar '06

Hi I have posted a few posting for opinions on some distributions of Linux and have still not come to any conclusions. What is the best Linux out there in terms of user interface, compatibility with 3 party hardware and general range of software available. I know more and more software developers and producing linux versions of their software but I want to run Linux on a laptop with wireless internet, any suggestions please. Kind Regards Simon Royal ---- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac

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iso burning with cdrecord
by Ian bell 11 Mar '06

11 Mar '06

I've been wanting to try out syllable from this moths LXF cover disk which involves buring a (bootable) iso file to a CDR. This is casuing me some grief and only a small amount of success. I tried two different windows progs on the wife's (XP) laptop, Nero and Sonic - neither works. The I downloaded a free CD burner for windows, tried the 'burn iso' option, gave it the file name and bingo it worked. So at least I know the iso file is OK. The I dug out my old Iomega 4X USB 1.0 burner and plugged it into my Slackware laptop. As roo cdrecord -scanbus shows the drive OK. However, according to LXF all I need to do to burn the iso is: cdrecord -v dev=1,0,0 isofilename.iso cdrecord goes off and writes a file of the right size, I can see where it has been burned on the disk but it don't boot. What am I doing wrong? Ian

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Virtual K(V)M
by Peter Onion 11 Mar '06

11 Mar '06

Does anyone know of any existing tools/programs that allow a single keyboard and mouse to be switched between multiple machines ? For example, if I move the mouse off the left edge of host1's screen I would like it to appear at the right edge of host2's screen. I've already been looking at evdev and that seems like a good starting point. Sometimes 4 keyboards and mice get in the way ! And please don't reply with "buy a KVM" because that would be a kludge ! Peter

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CPU temperature monitoring
by Chris Green 11 Mar '06

11 Mar '06

My computer happily tells me how hot all the bits are and allows me to set alarms etc. but doesn't give me a clue as to what is 'too hot'. So, what sort of temeperatures are reasonable to see for 'CPU' and 'System'? Currently the CPU is 56 degrees celsius. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Re: Re: [ALUG] Best Linux Out There?
by Peter 10 Mar '06

10 Mar '06

There is a lot to be said for Mandriva. It has very comprehensive set of configuration guis - most ALUG people do not need them, but its nice for the rest of us. It will install all the desktop environments you will ever want with no strain. Its easier to install new stuff than Suse because you do not seem to get caught in the endless circle of dependencies as much. It is quite stable. There are lots of rpms for it. I prefer it to Suse, which I have installed with a couple of people, and have had some irritations with. The only real criticism is that moving from version to version is a bit problematic, and you have to agree with what most informed people say, that it is a bit ridiculous to have to do a clean install for every major upgrade. But this applies to everything except Debian or maybe also Gentoo. I think Suse is a bit better, it has a sort of cleanup tool, which seems to work. if you want Debian based, and you want simple and ordinary user friendly, its worth looking at PCLinux and Mepis. Both use apt for packaging. Both come on one CD. PCL has all the Mandriva admin stuff. Worth a serious look. Both are only KDE, but you can add Gnome easily enough. The one I really like is elive. That is a work of art. From the country that brought you the Trappist Triple, and the paintings of Breughel, and you know it as soon as it starts up.... If you want fairly stripped down and reasonably fast for an old machine, Vector and Vector Soho are not bad. If you want super stripped down and very fast for a very old machine, DSL. But if you want to laugh aloud, elive. Peter

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15" monitor for a poor student
by Paul 10 Mar '06

10 Mar '06

Hi Simon (Cyanide ?) Didn't note your email addy last night... Have a Compaq 15" monitor sitting here - Contact me off list and we can make arrangements for it's collection sometime next week. Regards, Paul.

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RE: [ALUG] Best Linux Out There?
by Keith Watson 09 Mar '06

09 Mar '06

> From: Simon Royal Sent: 09 March 2006 14:52 > > Hi > > I have posted a few posting for opinions on some > distributions of Linux and have still not come to any conclusions. > > What is the best Linux out there in terms of user interface, > compatibility with 3 party hardware and general range of > software available. > > I know more and more software developers and producing linux > versions of their software but I want to run Linux on a > laptop with wireless internet, any suggestions please. > My personal favourite is the latest release of Ubuntu (5.10 - Breezy Badger). I've found that it seems to support everything pretty much out of the box and seems to be good at recognising laptop h/w. See <http://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportMachinesLaptops?highlight=%28lapt op%29> for more info. Being based on Debian using Synaptic to keep the system up to date is a doddle. I haven't tried the next release (6.04 Dapper Drake) so can't say how much improvement there's been between it and 5.10, but I found 5.10 to be a lot better then the previous Warty Warthog release and, hopefully, Dapper will improve on 5.10 as much. Try going over to the Ubuntu wiki site <http://wiki.ubuntu.com> and searching for pages with Dapper, Laptop or Wireless in their titles. Lots of info. Regards, Keith ____________ The natural order of things includes us, and its laws are our laws. We are an endless moving stream in an endless moving stream. - Jisho Warner

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