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[Alug]Fwd: [Debian-uk] Software patents pubmeet in Cambridge
by markj＠cloaked.freeserve.co.uk 02 Jun '03

02 Jun '03

I think I'll be there... From: Wookey <wookey(a)aleph1.co.uk> Subject: [Debian-uk] Software patents pubmeet in Cambridge Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2003 17:16:21 +0100 (BST) A few of us in Cambridge are trying to increase public/geek/programmer awareness of EU software Patent legislation which is pending, and things are currently balanced between very bad, and quite reasonable, legislation. The issues are complicated. Any of you who are local and would like to be better informed, especially in order to make intelligent points to your representatives, would benefit from coming along. Here's the blurb: ----- Hi there, Join other software developers and Intellectual Property practioners at a pubmeet to in Cambridge discuss the proposals. As you may know, the EU is working on a directive covering software patenting. The next vote is scheduled for the 16th or 17th of June in the JURI subcommittee, which deals with legal affairs and the internal market. The final vote on the proposed directive by the European Parliament is currently scheduled for the end of June. The outcome of the process could affect individual software developers as well as small and larger companies but there isn't general awareness about the issues. Meet at the Free Press, Prospect Row, 8pm Thursday 5th June. The Free Press is a non-smoking pub. Look for a notice saying Patents or ask at the bar. Admission free. Let me, Jeff Veit, know that you are coming - email patents(a)tanasity.com because if the numbers are too large we will switch venue. Final notification by email on the afternoon of the 5th. Your email details won't be shared with anyone. Check http://www.tangledtime.com/patents.htm for latest news on the meeting. If you aren't interested or are interested but are unable to attend but a colleague or friend might be interested please let them know - this meeting has been organised quickly and hasn't been widely publicised and I am only sending one mail to each company/group that I think may be interested. Best wishes, Jeff Veit Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/ _______________________________________________ Debian-uk maillist - Debian-uk(a)chiark.greenend.org.uk http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/debian-uk

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[Alug]XP install
by Paul Tansom 02 Jun '03

02 Jun '03

OK, not a good title for a Linux list, but I couldn't resist commenting on my first attempt at installing Windows XP (Professional) given that people often say Linux is hard to install. First off, there seemed very few questions to answer - Windows assumed it knew best for just about everything, and boy was it wrong?! The end result goes something like this: A: - my 3.5" floppy B: - my 5.25" floppy C: - my ZIP drive D: - my DVD ROM E: - my CD RW F: - same CD RW as above G: - same CD RW as above H: - same CD RW as above I: - same CD RW as above J: - same CD RW as above K: - same CD RW as above L: - same CD RW as above M: - my hard disk with Windows XP installed on it Next comes the networking side of things: IE - fine, can browse the Internet and is pretty fast, can also browse my local Intranet Explorer - cannot see any other machines on the network, when it should be able to see two other Windows 2000 boxes

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[Alug]Moz Firebird
by Wayne Stallwood 02 Jun '03

02 Jun '03

Ok this is really buggin me now. Ever since I first tried Phoenix it has insisted on going to http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ whenever I start it up. If I then press the "home" button it takes me to my homepage of choice. If I watch the status bar at the bottom on startup I can see it going to Google (my preferred homepage) and then suddenly changing it's mind and going over to Barnes. I have recently re-installed Phoenix (to upgrade to Moz) by nuking the whole installation dir. I have grep'ed both my moz profile (in home) and the chrome dir. On at least a few occasions I have deleted my profile and created a new one. No-one else seems to be able to replicate this on their system. and I have only one machine (my main one) that does it. It is now really tainting my experience of what is a lovely, lovely browser. I am sure it is not a problem with Moz itself, otherwise others would be reporting it as a bug, but apart from the profile what could it be ?

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[Alug]RE: [Peterboro] GPL, freedom and bread
by John.Airey＠rnib.org.uk 02 Jun '03

02 Jun '03

You make some interesting points and I'd like to try and address some of them. Suppose your baker discovers that the flour he uses to make his bread comes from a genetically modified strain of wheat and only produces one harvest (this is actually the kind of "technology" that organisations like Monsanto are trying to sneak in). The cost of his bread has shot up as wheat has become more expensive, and because of patent restrictions he can only get his flour from one supplier. This is not unlike the situation with software. Ideally software should be "free" (free beer), but open source (free speech) is obviously a compromise. There is money to be made in both models from software support (and in the latter case from selling the packaged software). But there is an open market, just as there is in buying and selling wheat. Ultimately software is only a series of ones and zeroes (if only I'd patented it...) and these days is very very ubiquitous. You don't have to be in IT for very long to realise that the biggest software issue is support. I have the source code to some programs that I'm legally not allowed to change (it's written in Turbo Pascal, so I might not want to anyway). So the code has been abandoned, and this is happening all the time. I'd recommend writing the code for free (as is done with most Linux software) and making money from hardware or software support. Strangely enough, even Microsoft is leaning this way. - John Airey, BSc (Jt Hons), CNA, RHCE Internet systems support officer, ITCSD, Royal National Institute of the Blind, Bakewell Road, Peterborough PE2 6XU, Tel.: +44 (0) 1733 375299 Fax: +44 (0) 1733 370848 John.Airey(a)rnib.org.uk What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain... (Morpheus, The Matrix, 1999) - NOTICE: The information contained in this email and any attachments is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that you must not use, disclose, distribute, copy, print or rely on this email's content. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and then delete the email and any attachments from your system. RNIB has made strenuous efforts to ensure that emails and any attachments generated by its staff are free from viruses. However, it cannot accept any responsibility for any viruses which are transmitted. We therefore recommend you scan all attachments. Please note that the statements and views expressed in this email and any attachments are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RNIB. RNIB Registered Charity Number: 226227 Website: http://www.rnib.org.uk

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Fwd: Re: List-* headers, was [Alug]GNU/Linux Partition Utilities
by Ian Bell 02 Jun '03

02 Jun '03

On Thursday 29 May 2003 2:08 pm, MJ Ray wrote: > Andrew Savory <lists(a)andrewsavory.com> wrote: > > How about a little bit of politeness and respect? > > Sorry. The message I replied to was a little terse too, not the first time > that person had raised this, added nothing new to the topic, and is > definitely a FAQ. Is this a better summary for the FAQ maintainer: You want something new, here is something new. As an experiment I have subscribed at random to three mailing lists hosted by UK Linux User Groups. They host the mailing lists something in the region of 50 UK Linux User Groups. All three of the groups I subscribed to behaved the way I would expect. Messages appear as From: 'Author' To: mailgroup. Pressing reply sends a message to the group as expected. If I want to reply just to the author I just click on his/her email address. I strongly suspect that all the mail groups hosted by the UK Linux User Groups site behave this way, It is clearly good enough and problem free enough for many other LUGs to have it set up this way. It is clearly the way users expect it to be. I see no compelling reason why our mailing list should be different. Ian -------------------------------------------------------

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[Alug]Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 02 Jun '03

02 Jun '03

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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Re: [Alug]Wine
by jamie.french＠talk21.com 01 Jun '03

01 Jun '03

This is funny, I tried to get Wine working last night as I want to run KazaaLite. I dont have much time in the evenings and all I got to work was progman! Need to do some reading. Aside, does anyone know of any P2P clients like Kazaa which run under Linux? Take Care, Jamie Best Regards, Jamie French -------------------- talk21 your FREE portable and private address on the net at http://www.talk21.com

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[Alug]EU software patent threat
by Chris Lale 31 May '03

31 May '03

There is still time to lobby your MEPs. Please spare 5 minutes to send an email registering your concerns. The proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions comes before the European Parliament later this month. Patenting of software is a threat to all business models, but especially Open Source (including Free) software. It also penalises software developers and users of all types of software. Dan Bricklin (who invented the electronic spreadsheet in 1979 but did not patent it) explains why at http://www.bricklin.com/patentsandsoftware.htm You can find MEP's email and letter post addresses at http://www.europarl.org.uk/uk_meps/MembersMain.htm Other sources you may wish to draw on are Alex Hudson's useful site: http://www.softwarepatents.co.uk/ Analogy with music for non-techie people: http://www.coolscience.co.uk/free-software/software-patent-music.html Illustration of the infamous "technical effect" criterion: http://coolscience.co.uk/free-software/software-patent-techeffect.html European Parliament written question E3927/02 and answer. MEPs will be reassured but you might not be: http://www2.europarl.eu.int/omk/OM-Europarl?PROG=WQ&L=EN&PUBREF=-//EP//TEXT… If you are keen, the proposed directive COM (2002) 091:http://europa.eu.int/cgi-bin/eur-lex/udl.pl?REQUEST=Seek-Deliver&COLLEC… Paper on Open Source and software patents http://eu.conecta.it/paper/Open_source_software_patent.html Cheers, Chris -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | ___ Chris Lale <ctlale(a)netscape.net> | | / \ | | | <_/ My PC runs Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (http://www.debian.org). | | \ Robust, secure and free operating system + applications. | | `- | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+

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RE: [Alug]GNU/Linux Partition Utilities
by Keith Watson 30 May '03

30 May '03

> From: Paul Tansom > > ** Keith Watson <keith.watson(a)kewill.com> [2003-05-28 09:53]: > > > From: Paul Tansom > > > > > > Not actually booted my CD and tried it, but apparently yes parted is on > > > Knoppix apparently (can't find the link I found the quote on, but it was > > > from Knoppix 3.2 onwards). Some other useful links you may be interested > > > in: > > [snip] > > > > Thanks for the excellent links Paul, especially the one for PartImage. > > > ** end quote [Keith Watson] > > No problem. It happens to be something I'm looking into myself, partly > for speeding up the install process for machine (Windows 98 primarily > unfortunately), and partly to recover some data on a couple of drives > I'm having problems with. > > One seems to have a duff sector which is preventing access to a > partition (Fujitsu 20G, newest drive I had until I bought a replacement, > but not one of the notorious ones), and the other (again a Fujitsu, but > 13G this time) which seems to have lost partition information on the > transfer to another machine. > > I'm trying to work out whether Parted will recover things for me, or > whether I'm better off to go with one of two commercial solutions I've > found: > > Acronis RecoverExpert - looks good because it supports Linux Ext2, Ext3, > ReiserFS, and Linux Swap as well as the traditional Windows formats, but > the demo is only the Windows GUI version (not the boot disk). This has > a few issues booting with the drive 13G drive connected (so I can't get > any idea of whether it will recover it) and with the 20G it just shows > the partition as duff (it seems as though it simply recovers lost > partitions rather than fixing corrupt ones). > > Active Partition Recovery - only supports FAT and NTFS partitions, but > the boot disk can see and read all the partitions in question and show > me the data, so it has a distinct attraction in that respect! > > Both about 30usd - if anyone has used either of these, or Parted or > another utility to recover a partition problem I'd be interested to > hear. > > Oh, my tape backup is giving me hassle too - I'm not a happy penguin at > the moment. Having said that, my Linux machines are going strong and it > is only my Windows 2000 that is givin me hassle (duff hardware and the > tape backups which verified fine are not allowing me to access them now > that I've lost the boot drive that they were created from - classic > backup!). > > -- > Paul Tansom: - contact paul(a)aptanet.com for more information > Internet and Intranet Solutions -- http://www.aptanet.com/ > I think you meant this to go to the list Paul :o) I've always used PartitionMagic (I've got Version 6.0 but they're up to 8.0 at present) which has served me very well. but it's not GPL or GNU/Linux though credit where it's due. Amazon has the latest release of PM for 40UKP and also the back release 7.0 at 25UKP <http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/202-8112773-2091046> Never been unlucky enough to have to recover from the sort of problems you describe but I've no doubt someone on the list will have some war stories to tell :o) Regards, Keith ____________ The shortest answer is doing. George Herbert

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RE: [Alug]New Member Intro RE: [Alug]New Member Intro
by Dan Beimborn 30 May '03

30 May '03

Hmm, I sent it once and it was rejected due to my "From" not being subscribed, then I subscribed properly and resent it. I guess this first one also got approved. Sorry for the dupe DB Hmm, I sent it once and it was rejected due to my "From" not being subscribed, then I subscribed properly and resent it. I guess this first one also got approved. Sorry for the dupe DB ps- :) From: "Keith Watson" <Keith.Watson(a)Kewill.com> To: <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> Subject: RE: [Alug]New Member Intro Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 11:47:29 +0100 >> From: Dan Beimborn >> >> Hi Folks, ...snip... Anyone else get a strange feeling of deja vu? :o) Keith

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[Alug]New Member Intro
by Dan Beimborn 30 May '03

30 May '03

Hi Folks, I'm a recently-relocated Sysadmin/Network Guy/Web Guy/Bottle Washer from California (San Jose) where I worked for a software company that did firewall/HA & Linux appliances in the storage space. I have a lot of background in TCP/IP/network/security/exotic routing on Linux systems, and also had a great time getting linux running inside old arcade cabinets. I also used to beta test Linux games for id software, but sadly I discontinued that relationship before I could get any copies of Doom 3 for Linux! My wife is a Norfolk girl, and after years of thinking about it, we finally decided to move here (Holt) to take advantage of the sun & heat we missed out on living in cold, dark California. I'm in the hunt for work doing just about anything with Linux, though my specialties are perl/apache/mysql and firewall/security/networking. Looking forward to pelting the natives with penguin dolls whenever the chance arrives (you do that here, right? right?) DB

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[Alug]Wine
by Edenyard 30 May '03

30 May '03

Has anyone here ever had any experience of using Wine to run anything useful? I've tried installing it twice now on my Slackware 8.1 system. Sure enough, it runs solitaire (from an old Win3.11 disk I have) as claimed in teh documentation, but it chokes completely on anything and everything else that I've tried, specifically catalogue-CDs from the likes of Farnell, RS, Texas, etc., including one old one that I KNOW has been run on W3.1. I have wine-20030408 and kernel 2.4.18 on an Athlon 1000 with 256Mb RAM. I installed it using ./tools/wineinstall as instructed and running ./tools/winecheck gives a score of 85%+, so I think I've got at least most of the config right. Most of the error messages start 'fixme: ', which suggests to me that perhaps it isn't even intended to work. I don't have a Windoze partition on either of my PCs, but my understanding of the Wine documentation is that I don't need one. A 500+ Mb package just to run solitaire (and, to be fair, winmine....) seems pretty useless to me. Is it really intended for running 'real- world' applications or I being really dumb here? If it really is as bad as it seems, is there any alternative emulator (or whatever they're called) for running these catalogue-CDs? Any help appreciated, thanks! Gerald.

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Re: [Alug]Wine
by Edenyard 30 May '03

30 May '03

Dan Hatton wrote: > > If they're anything like the catalogue CDs I've used, they rely on the > presence of Internet Explorer. I've just checked, and although IE6 > will run under wine (in the sense of a window appearing, with menus > that will drop down,) it doesn't seem keen to do much. Also, as you > don't have a Windows partition, I guess you'd need to install it. I > have two nasty feelings about this. > I remember back in the dark old days when I existed on a mixture of DOS mainly with a little Doze 3.1, these exact same catalogue CDs ran then. That certainly didn't have this Explorer thing on it, so I suppose that I have to hunt for another reason for its failure. In any case, wouldn't Explorer be just for looking at .html pages? (Excuse ignorance on this - I've never used it!) Cheers, Gerald.

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Re: [Alug]Wine
by Edenyard 30 May '03

30 May '03

Adam Bower wrote: > > 500Mb?! that sounds a bit wrong to me. Unless you have all the source kicking > around and have built it from scratch. > I had source code and the .tar.gz was about 8Mb I think. Looking in the source directory after compiling, MC makes it 429Mb, of which the largest chunk seems to be the /dll subdirectory at around 305Mb. Also, there's around 107Mb in /usr/local/lib/wine and some other executables, etc., dotted around. Do you think I've done something silly? Why would it generate so much in the source directory that doesn't seemingly make it into /usr/something-or-the-other? > > There are packages that are around 35Mb > (compressed tgz for slackware so admittedly it will be bigger when installed) > maybe try one of them? > I don't relish the thought of downloading 35Mb on a modem that seems to connect at 44000 at fastest! I only had the source because Ian Douglas was kind enough to copy it onto a CD for me. Maybe when I get around to looking at Slackware 9.0 I may find the TGZ package on there. > > Anyhow I have used Wine to run Microsoft Office in Linux before, and I use it > to run Digiguide for windows also, I think a couple of years back I also made > Half-life work so it does indeed work with a fairly broad selection of > applications. > To be fair, I have now actually found 1 CD that runs on it and that's a car workshop manual CD. However, I'd already extracted the set of PDFs from this CD and copied them to my HDD so that I could read them with acroread, so it's a bit pointless using wine for that. What I really desperately need is for the RS and Farnell cats to run. No luck there, though.... Gerald.

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[Alug]SCO Unix IP Claim : Well that's the end of that then!
by Keith Watson 29 May '03

29 May '03

Press Release: Novell Challenges SCO Position, Reiterates Support for Linux <http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/05/pr03033.html> Keith ____________ AIR, n. A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor. Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary

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Re: [Alug]New Member Introduction
by Dan Beimborn 29 May '03

29 May '03

> Which part of california? I thought it was always sunny there ;) San Jose. Yes, actually it is sunny there all the time. Sunny enough to burn your skin in 15 minutes, year round. Hooray for that. I find myself not missing that (yet). > Pelting natives with penguins? How about the weather right now? ;) > And have some cold beer! Hmm, though culturally I should be a cold fizzy lager swiller, I tend to like nice pints of bitter served at about 55/60 degrees. My company ordered about 450 1u servers from a company called "Penguin Computing". Each one had a little 4" plush penguin doll in it. At one point, we put at least 400 of them in a large cardboard box and tipped them onto the head of a microsoft partisan in the office. Photos exist, but I can't find mine now! DB

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[Alug]Worth trying locally?
by tom potts 29 May '03

29 May '03

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9746 __________________________________________________ Yahoo! Plus - For a better Internet experience http://uk.promotions.yahoo.com/yplus/yoffer.html

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[Alug]New Member Introduction
by Dan Beimborn 29 May '03

29 May '03

Hi Folks, I'm a recently-relocated Sysadmin/Network Guy/Web Guy/Bottle Washer from California (San Jose) where I worked for a software company that did firewall/HA & Linux appliances in the storage space. I have a lot of background in TCP/IP/network/security/exotic routing on Linux systems, and also had a great time getting linux running inside old arcade cabinets (why not?). I also used to beta test Linux games for id software, but sadly I discontinued that relationship before I could get any copies of Doom 3 for Linux! My wife is a Norfolk girl, and after years of thinking about it, we finally decided to move here (Holt) to take advantage of the sun & heat we missed out on living in cold, dark California. I'm in the hunt for a permanent job (or the right contract position) doing just about anything with Linux, though my specialties are perl/apache/mysql and firewall/security/networking. Sexy CV available to anyone looking! Looking forward to pelting the natives with penguin dolls whenever the chance arrives (you do that here, right? right?) DB

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Re: [Alug]Wine
by jamie.french＠talk21.com 29 May '03

29 May '03

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[Alug]to hdparm or not to hdparm?
by Keith Watson 29 May '03

29 May '03

Has anyone experimented with this command? Did it speed up your system much? Anyone had any bad experiences? Anyone got any recommendations for parameter settings? Keith ____________ >From the first not a thing is. Hui-neng

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Re: [Alug]Wine
by jamie.french＠talk21.com 29 May '03

29 May '03

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Fw: Re: [Alug]to hdparm or not to hdparm?
by Steve Fosdick 29 May '03

29 May '03

On Thu, 29 May 2003 09:16:39 +0100 "Keith Watson" <keith.watson(a)kewill.com> wrote: > Had a play with hdparm last night and my experience was the same as > Ian. In fact the settings seemed to be at optimum by default, > everything I tried just slowed things down. I didn't find anything that speeded up the transfer rate as reported by hdparm -t - there was as much variation between any two tests with the same settings as between different settings.

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Re: [Alug]Serial port permissions?
by Edenyard 29 May '03

29 May '03

MJ Ray wrote: > > Did you start a new login after doing that? Changes to /etc/group only > take effect then. Running the id command shows what groups you are in > for any given login. > > Basically, adding yourself to the proper group is the right way to do it. > Thanks for that! I didn't realise that I needed to start a new login. I tried restarting Efax and also X, but obviously didn't go far enough back. Anyway, I've set the port group back as it was and have added myself to its group, as you recommend, and now it's all fine. Cheers, Gerald.

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Re: [Alug]The Mystery of the Stubborn Kernel
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 29 May '03

29 May '03

Dan Hatton wrote: >I wasn't in the IRC discussion, so apologies if I'm going over old ground. >Are you trying to mount your root filesystem from an IDE drive? If so, >please note that kernel-image-2.4.18-686 doesn't have IDE support compiled >in. I've decided to blame that for my inability to run this kernel, and >it could also be to blame for yours. > >kernel-image-2.4.18-bf does have IDE support compiled in, but I can't run >that either, because it's too big for Loadlin. If you're using a >boot-loader other than Loadlin, you might have more luck. Dan - thanks, this was the problem. LILO had no problem with this image. To think i've been building kernel after kernel without having a clue I would need IDE support; time to get a book on basic hardware out of the library perhaps. :-) Ta Jen

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[Alug]GNU/Linux Partition Utilities
by Keith Watson 28 May '03

28 May '03

I'm getting to the point where I seriously need to re-organise my disks in terms of the number, layout and size of the partitions (i.e. reducing the Windows ones [FAT32] and expanding the GNU/Linux ones [ext3]). In the past I've always used PartitionMagic for this but I'd like to stop using Windows based utilities entirely at some point. What's the general opinion on parted as a tool for this? Does anyone use a different GPL utility that they think is better? Keith ____________ There is nothing infinite apart from finite things D.T. Suzuki

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