- main - earth.li

Two free tickets to the Linux User Expo conference (fwd)
by MJ Ray 26 Mar '04

26 Mar '04

Free tickets for the conference part on 20 and 21 April at London Olympia. http://www.linuxexpo.org.uk/ for more details. Entirely arbitrarily and without discussion: The first two people to email main-admin(a)lists.alug.org.uk get passed on as ALUG. You *MUST* be going to the expo. Special mentions in the results for including penguin ASCII-art. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: 2004-03-26 14:03:13 +0000 From: Jono Bacon <jonobacon(a)yahoo.com> Subject: Two free tickets to the Linux User Expo conference Hi all, Just on theblower to Maggie Meer from Linux User & Developer and they are offering two free tickets to the Linux User & Developer Expo conference. These tickets will let you sit in a session. You can claim two tickets for two members of each LUG. Oh,and I am speaking at the expo too. ;) Jono -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef(a)jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/

1 0

Wanted - analogue clock with date for X
by Chris Green 26 Mar '04

26 Mar '04

I have just migrated my work desktop from running natively on a Sun Spark workstation to running via an X server on a PC. After a week or so of using and tuning it I have most of the wrinkles out of it now but there's one remaining minor niggle. I run the (very) old Sun OpenWindows 'clock' on my desktop as it provides an analogue clock display *and* the date in a nice written format (e.g. it says "Fri Mar 26" at the moment). However it's somewhat imperfect when run on this PC X server, in particular the dots marking the hours are missing. Can anyone recommend an X clock utility that has an analogue clock face and the date? (The other niggle I haven't sorted yet is a total inability to 'compose' characters, I think I'm stuck on this one) -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk)

1 0

Alsa in 2.6.x
by James Green 26 Mar '04

26 Mar '04

This may be a wild stab in the dark, but I'm hoping someone out there has this one resolved already... Bought Unreal Tournament 2004. The demo worked nicely under kernel 2.6.4. Installed the retail version, and the following occurs: bash-2.05b$ /usr/local/ut2004/ut2004 open /dev/[sound/]dsp: No such device I've searched google without much luck. The Linux Games FAQ at icculus.org/lgfaq/ mentions some alternate drivers to be set as environment variables, which I see make no difference. I've compiled alsa in, with oss compatibility. The compatibility modules are indeed loaded. Other applications are giving sound fine, including the UT2004 demo. Most frustrating! Can anyone help? Thanks, James Green

2 2

[Alug Announce]Meeting on Sunday, meeting in late April and quietness
by MJ Ray 26 Mar '04

26 Mar '04

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- ALUG: ---- 1. Meeting in King's Lynn at 2pm on Sunday 28 March, Globe Hotel http://www.alug.org.uk/meetings/2004/03-28Sun.html 2. Opinions sought on late April Norwich meeting http://lists.alug.org.uk/main/2004-March/018217.html 3. Some list threads about ax25 and ALSA in 2.6, but a fairly quiet week on the list http://lists.alug.org.uk/main/2004-March/threads.html Other: ----- 1. Other UK lists reported on were quiet, so here's a reminder about free tickets for 20/21 April at London Olympia http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/expo/ -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef(a)jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

1 0

Mandrake / automake version
by Joe Button 25 Mar '04

25 Mar '04

Hi. I'm trying to build ardour from CVS on Mandrake 10 community. When I run autogen.sh I get a message telling me I need automake >=1.5 (Mandrake uses 1.4 as standard). I tried changing the symlinks for aclocal and automake in /etc/alternatives/ to the 1.7 versions and running aclocal but I got a message saying aclocal: configure.ac: 4: macro `AM_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT' not found in library Can anyone explain what I need to do to use a later version of automake? Thanks for any help.

2 1

Going ALSA-only with full mixing
by MJ Ray 25 Mar '04

25 Mar '04

On Monday's IRC, we discussed a little bit about how to get ALSA mixing sounds, but I'm not sure anyone got it working until after the meeting, so here's a summary and intro for those who missed it. Usually, only one thing opens the sound device at once and that's a pain. Different workarounds (esd, arts) exist, but it's surely better to do this in the sound driver. ALSA supports hardware mixing on some cards and is included in 2.6 kernels. Look at the Soundcard Martrix on http://www.alsa-project.org/ and see if your card has a (4) which means hardware mixing supported. If you have hardware mixing, using the right ALSA drivers is probably all you need to do. I think using ALSA-enabled programs is best, which usually just means installing the right package or compiling with the right options. For applications using the old /dev/dsp device, I think the module snd-pcm-oss should cope with it. I've not tested that and would like to hear what you find. If you don't have hardware mixing, then you need to enable the dmix plugin by editing a config file. Instructions are on http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc-php/asoundrc.php3#softmix but you probably want hw:0,0 instead of the 1,0 in the example. My main machine doesn't do hardware mixing, so I did this. In my experience, this *will* highlight any misconfigurations or weaknesses in your sound setups, which is why it's not done by default for cards that can't do hardware mixing. I found that sounds played out with horrible clicks, but I had a minor option for my card incorrect in modutils.conf. When I put that right, it worked fine. The XMMS sound player complained until I increased the two _size options in the config file. Also, XMMS needed to be told to use user-defined "default" output instead of the detected card and not use "mmap mode". I don't know exactly what all that does (although I could guess), but trial-and-error is wonderful, isn't it? Now, what about OSS-only programs? The OSS emulation doesn't cope for software mixing, as far as I can tell. While sound is playing via ALSA, I get "device busy" from things trying to use /dev/dsp. Running them through aoss (from the alsa-oss package) works. Anyway, I hope you enjoy mixing your Frozen Bubble music with http://muzik.agnula.org/ or similar ;-) Thanks to IRC #alug for help. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef(a)jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/

1 0

12 Noon today (Wed) - R4
by Anthony Anson 24 Mar '04

24 Mar '04

Alternatives to Windows OSs discussed. Sorry I've been conspicuous by my absence recently. Severe dose of RL. -- Tony http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hi-fi/ Lobby/bother/harrangue your MP about the rising tide of SPAM Suggest the laws relating to scanning e-mail contents be clarified. Point out that there would be votes in it. Contact opposition parties.

1 0

Survey: venue and date of next Norwich sunday meeting.
by Syd Hancock 24 Mar '04

24 Mar '04

Hi all. We need to have arrangements for the next Norwich sunday meeting finalised very soon. Would all the meeting regulars and anyone else interested reply to the questions below (preferably off-list) as soon as you can. Thanks. ----------------------------------- Current situation: Meeting is provisionally booked at the Billy Bluelight for the last sunday in April (25th). Possibility of booking a room at UEA on a saturday. Following w/e is ALUG's fifth anniversary but it is a holiday w/e so some people will be away. Questions: 1. Prefer: a) last w/e in April b) first w/e in May c) either 2. Prefer: a) saturday at UEA b) prefer sundays c) either Syd

1 0

AX25 Kernel
by Nick Daniels 22 Mar '04

22 Mar '04

Hi I wish to enable the AX25 protocol in Kernel 2.4.21-192-athlon on Suse 9.0 , is there anyway I can do this without rebuilding the Kernel ( something I have not done before) Regards Nick Daniels

2 1

Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 22 Mar '04

22 Mar '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!)

1 0

Advanced power management
by Charles Garcia-Tobin 19 Mar '04

19 Mar '04

Hi there I am trying to use APM on my home server so that its in standby all the time except when it has to perform its server duties. I think the machine is ACPI compliant, but the APM interface seemed simpler. Anyway when the machine has just booted, and I do an apm -S (in runlevel 5 full X) it goes into standby as you'd expect and everything is dandy. The I wake it up with some keyboard input say and again everything is cool, however after this first slumber if I try apm -S the machine will go to sleep and wake up instantly every time. Apmd shows the following: Mar 19 09:45:05 bongtime apmd[1607]: Event 0x0009: User System Standby Request Mar 19 09:45:06 bongtime apmd[1607]: User Standby Mar 19 09:45:09 bongtime apmd[1607]: Event 0x000b: System Standby Resume Mar 19 09:45:09 bongtime apmd_proxy[6395]: resume standby Mar 19 09:45:10 bongtime apmd[1607]: Standby Resume after 00:00:04 (-1% unknown) AC power As you can see it managed to sleep for 3 seconds before Event b woke it up. Does anybody now a way round this? Alternatively does anybody know how to put the network card and sound card to sleep, I can do hard drives with hdparm, the display with xset. Adding those two would more or less do decent standby mode. Cheers Charles

1 0

[Alug Announce]K.Lynn, 5th Birthday, 14 April events, political news
by MJ Ray 19 Mar '04

19 Mar '04

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Thanks for sending in a few more emails to announce@ this week -- it's appreciated. More always welcome. ALUG: ---- 1. Meeting in K.Lynn on 28 March http://lists.alug.org.uk/main/2004-March/018135.html 2. Opinions/help wanted on late April Norwich meeting http://lists.alug.org.uk/main/2004-March/018162.html 3. Reports of Norwich March meeting http://lists.alug.org.uk/main/2004-March/018153.html 4. Discussions of mouse setup, source code locations, USB floppy drives, Gentoo and kernel 2.6 http://lists.alug.org.uk/main/2004-March/thread.html 5. Meetings list on web site completed: did you know that we just had the 55th ALUG meeting? http://www.alug.org.uk/meetings/ Lugmaster: --------- 1. ACCU (Association of C and C++ Users) spring conference, Randolph Hotel, Oxford, 14-17 April 2004. http://www.accu.org/conference/opensource.html (GBP 595/495/295 whole conference, 160/135/90 day rate) Other: ----- 1. EuroLUGParty as part of event in Brussels on 14-15 April http://plone.ffii.org/events/2004/bxl04/ 2. Government consultations on "Open Source Software" policy and e-GIF (file formats etc) http://www.affs.org.uk/government/ 3. James Heald of FFII.org.uk writes about the proposed EU IPR Enforcement Directive: "Mme Fourtou got her package through, with no further amendments. The Directive is now likely to be signed off by the Council of Ministers on Thursday. Final vote was 330 to 151 with 39 abstentions." Most UK MEPs from the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties voted for the proposal. See http://www.ffii.org.uk/ for background. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef(a)jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

1 0

Norwich sunday meetings
by Syd Hancock 18 Mar '04

18 Mar '04

We have an afternoon meeting booked for the last sunday in April at the Billy Bluelight again. I don't like the room at the Billy very much - it is dreary and cold and unwelcoming. Does anyone know of a better alternative? Does anyone know of other pubs etc in Norwich with a room to hire at a reasonable price? The room at the Billy is £15 for example. Can anyone here book a room at UEA? Syd

4 5

Installing Gentoo 2004.0
by Richard Lewis 17 Mar '04

17 Mar '04

I've just downloaded the two ISOs for Gentoo 2004.0. Before I burn them to disc, does anyone know what they contain? Is it source packages or binary packages? And how long is it likely to take to install (from sources) a standard desktop system (X, KDE, OOo) on a Pentium III (512Mb RAM). Presumably I can do it a bit at a time (e.g. compile X first and then KDE in another session). What worries me slightly is that I'm running a laptop and they don't take kindly to be left switched on for long periods of time. Any thoughts would be very much appreciated. Cheers, Richard

4 6

Homemade notebooks anyone?
by Ricky Bruce 17 Mar '04

17 Mar '04

I am thinking about having a go at putting together a 'whitebook' as per instructions here http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/20031202/ and here http://www.techbuilder.org/article.htm?ArticleID=48122 The articles make it seem perhaps deceptively simple. Anyone done anything similar, any warnings, im not neccessarily doing it for cost savings, more for the experience. Or would small form factor be the way to go? Rick _________________________________________________________________ It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today! http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger

3 2

USB Floppy Drive
by Nick Heppleston | infotechnicale.com 16 Mar '04

16 Mar '04

I'm looking at purchasing an external USB floppy drive for my Toshiba notebook. Does anyone have any recommendations for a specific make/model that interacts well with Linux? Nick. -- Nick Heppleston t: 07989 581766 | e: nick.heppleston(a)infotechnicale.com

2 3

Small simple mail client
by mjr＠dsl.pipex.com 16 Mar '04

16 Mar '04

Are there programs like "mail" for reading over POP3, APOP or IMAP; or should I use mailsync or similar and use GNU mailutils? MJR

6 9

gentoo and portage
by Glen Tyler 15 Mar '04

15 Mar '04

Hi, a question to any gentoo users on the list. I have just installed gentoo 1.4 on my second machine (Cele 333, 256MB PC100) and I'm impressed - using the stage 1 tarball has compiled a pretty nifty OS and KDE desktop compared to the Mandrake/Fedora distros that I've had on there before. The main worry I have is that if I try to emerge-sync I'll be inundated with 1000's of updates and my poor ol' 28.8 connection will be tied up for a week. I've looked at the web site documentation, but there is no suggestion of using anything but portage for updates. I'm guessing that portage just adds a script to the sources (maybe a patch or two), but does anyone know if I can just download the script and patch then use the source that I already have? I'd like to use portage as it seems excellent, but would prefer to be more efficient with my online time.. best wishes Glen

3 2

ALUG is 5 years old
by John Woodard 15 Mar '04

15 Mar '04

ALUG is 5 on May 2nd this year! What are we going to do to celebrate? Any of you firestarters want to do something special? I like quite a few of you who are still here, was at Woodbridge on that Sunday in 1999. ALUG has given me so much over the past 5 years, many friends, much help and a real sense of being part of something that is very special, I feel we really should mark this event. Cheers, BJ

5 4

Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 15 Mar '04

15 Mar '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!)

1 0

Re: [ALUG] Anyone want Mandrake 10 ISOs?
by Richard Lewis 14 Mar '04

14 Mar '04

On Monday 08 Mar 2004 17:55, you wrote: > On Monday 08 Mar 2004 9:17 am, Richard Lewis wrote: > > >I downloaded the Mandrake 10 community edition ISOs today, so if > > > anyone's in Norwich and would like a copy let me know and I'll burn > > > some CDs for you. > > > > Um, I think only Mandrake club members can donwload the ISOs at the > > moment. If you are and have respectively then you probably shouldn't give > > them away to non-club members. Community edition will be available for > > general d'load soon. > > > > Cheers, > > Richard > > They are already available on eBay. I say this not as a justification but > merely for information. > > Ian Just to let you know: Mandrake 10.0 Community ISOs are now available for public download from the usual Mandrake mirrors! However, note the new release system for Mandrake: the Community Edition is more of a pre-release. Bug fixing and security updates will contain to be made to the main package tree and, in two months time, an Official Edition of the main tree will be released as ISOs. Its a bit like an extended testing period. The consequence that users would do well to have a good Internet connection and collect packages from the network rather than installation media so as to keep on top of updates or to wait until the Official Edition is released if they haven't time to be helping with the debugging process. Cheers, Richard

2 3

Re: [ALUG] Where do I put source files?
by IanBell 14 Mar '04

14 Mar '04

On Saturday 13 March 2004 13:51, Chris Walker wrote: > On Sat 13 Mar, MJ Ray wrote: > > On 2004-03-13 10:20:01 +0000 Chris Walker > > > > <linux(a)wymondham.demon.co.uk> wrote: > > > I've never compiled anything > > > before, I don't know where to put this stuff. > > > > Generally, whereever you want. > > OK. > > > Unpack it (tar xzf filename.tar.gz usually) and read the INSTALL file. > > (If it doesn't have one, report a bug.) Some people like to put it under > > /opt/src, some under /usr/local/src or /usr/src and some in a > > subdirectory of their home. I've even got one system with sources in > > /Depot/Compile/Sources... > > It does have an INSTALL file but it didn't give the location that I wanted. Apologies if this has already been said, but most source packages adhere to the following installation procedure. 1. cd to the directory where you have unpacked the source 2. type ./configure this runs the configure script which does a huge bunch of checks to try to make sure the compile will be successful. It should tell you for example if any libraries are missing. It is usually possible to pass arguments to configure to tell it where you want files to be put. configure creates (amongst other things) a makefile which tells the compiler how to build the programme from the source. 3. type ./make this compiles the programme and should result in an exectuable 4 type ./make install this installs the executable and any other necessary files in predetermined directories. HTH Ian

5 8

Re: [ALUG] Where do I put source files?
by MJ Ray 13 Mar '04

13 Mar '04

On 2004-03-13 10:20:01 +0000 Chris Walker <linux(a)wymondham.demon.co.uk> wrote: > I've never compiled anything > before, I don't know where to put this stuff. Generally, whereever you want. Unpack it (tar xzf filename.tar.gz usually) and read the INSTALL file. (If it doesn't have one, report a bug.) Some people like to put it under /opt/src, some under /usr/local/src or /usr/src and some in a subdirectory of their home. I've even got one system with sources in /Depot/Compile/Sources... -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef(a)jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/

2 1

Re: Mandrake 9.2 ADSL Network
by Bash McBash 13 Mar '04

13 Mar '04

Hi all. If anyone is intrested i have a BT router that i have flashed with the origanal manufactures firmware. (No as dumb as the BT version) if anyone wants it it £20. Adam.

1 0

Re: [ALUG] QX3 microscope
by Edenyard 13 Mar '04

13 Mar '04

Adam wrote: > I was just doing some digging looking for a few > bits about the QX3 and found http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtx3/ I think that that particular project just petered out a couple of years ago. I downloaded it a couple of days ago but couldn't get it to run. In addition to TVtime, I've tried Xawtv (which gave correctly-dimensioned pictures on screen but the image capture just gives a technicolour snowstorm effect when the file is viewed) and Mplayer (advertised as being able to view USB webcams or whatever but was far too complicated for me to be able to work out how). In contrast, getting the 'system' side of things in place seemed easy, even for me. Select the correct bits in the kernel .config, recompile & install kernel, plug QX3 into the USB port and off it all went. Amazing! > What was the price? Farnell seems to be having a clear-out at the moment and had it for £35 (and no delivery charges for account holders), whereas I'd previously seen it all over the place for quite a bit more than that. > although i recall that maybe intel > advertised it as doing 640x480 but in reality the sensor only could > capture 320x240 and the upsampling was done in software. Its resolution is 352x288 - I believe that might be quarter-CIF? The luminance resolution is double the chrominance. I wouldn't say that it was exactly broadcast-quality but it's good enough at the price to have a closer gander at some small items. Truly it's a bit cheap and plastic-y, but, at the price, what else could one expect? Cheers, Gerald.

1 0