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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 08 May '06

08 May '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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A Few DSL Questions
by Peter 07 May '06

07 May '06

How to stop Dillo loading at startup? Yes, this drives you crazy if you don't stop it. Go to /home/dsl/.xinitrc. You need to comment out the dillo line by putting a # sign in front of it. I think this was covered in the DSL FAQ. Don't know about radio. Someone said DSL is Debian, and yes it evidently is, but I found that some packages didn't seem to be installable with apt-get, when they were installable with Debian. I never did figure out why. It must be modified in some way so dependencies don't always work quite correctly? Are you using jwm or fluxbox? DSL-not (the slightly bigger one) is worth trying too, but the version I tried didn't have some features that are in the little one. But it did have better applications. Didn't try apt-get. Peter

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A Few DSL Questions
by Simon Royal 07 May '06

07 May '06

Hi Yet another few Damn Small Linux questions from a newbie. Fingers crossed everything is going fine including wireless surfing. 1. I have my wireless network set up via Prism 2, only I have to set it up each time I restart the machine. Is there anyway I can have it auto configured each time I switch it on? 2. Everytime I boot up I am faced with a Dillo 'intro to DSL' screen. How can I stop this appearing? 3. I also have downloaded and installed a small util to show the wireless strength, but that too doesn't load on start up - how do I do this? Regards Simon

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Ethernet conundrum, continued
by Peter 05 May '06

05 May '06

Well, the saga continues. It doesn't have much practical significance, but its an intellectual challenge, and its driving me crazy! I have these three Compaqs. They are just about identical. They are all PIIIs, though two have 128Mb and the other 192. That's the only difference. I installed mandriva 2006 on all three in the same way, using the same boot disk and installing over the net from the same site. Two of them are sitting next to each other on a table, connected to identical monitors. I have removed the battery on both to reset the bios (necessary to remove password to do the install). I've checked all the settings, and they are all set the same in bios. The only change I made to defaults was to set the time. I've checked that the ethernet chipset is the same, and it is. On one, the network goes off at keyboard power off, and comes back on at power up from the base unit power switch. On the other, everything reports fine at startup, but the little light on the built in ethernet port never comes on, and the network is first unavailable, then if you do ifdown eth0 followed by ifup eth0, it shows host unreachable. The light remains off. Then if you do a soft power down, disconnect the power, reconnect the power, the light comes on, boot then causes it to give you the identical messages at startup, but this time it works. Well, today, on the third one, which also does this, I put in a different pci ethernet card. It worked perfectly. Set it up as eth1, removed the other ethernet, eth0. Soft off, it goes off, restart, it comes back on. The only slight oddity was that it seemed very slow indeed in both printing and accessing the printer's web page. It took several minutes to spool a one page document with a couple of screenshots on, and displaying the printers web page was rather slower than I would have expected over a 100mbps LAN connection. But it worked on the problematic power aspect exactly as it should. I had the vain hope that maybe it could be something to do with manual addressing, so took in a router and set one of the ones that doesn't work to DCHP, but of course this didn't help. Its before that stage that the ethernet is failing to come up. Of course, I can just put in a second extra ethernet card in the one that doesn't work, and probably will have to, but its driving me nuts. This should not be possible. Or if it is, there should be some explanation of what is different about the one that works. I guess I can swap the hard drive of the one that works with one that doesn't and see if that makes a difference. I could try installing Debian on another hard drive, and see if that makes any difference. I just do not want to be intellectually defeated by this! Any other ideas? Any ideas about anything else one could do to narrow down the problem? Peter

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more free stuff
by Phil 05 May '06

05 May '06

Hi - I have some stuff to clear from the dining table before I get in anymore trouble, so; One generic beige tower, P2, MMX board, wouldn't guess how old but does have on board USB and an ethernet card, keyboard, Microshaft mouse and a Compaq 17" tube. All free. The tube is good, I just have no space, and need it all to go. The hard drive did have SuSe 9.0 on it last time it was booted, comes up with CMOS error now - I'm a PPC/Mac kinda guy and the wonders of BIOS leave me cold... Mail me if anyone wants it, as the address suggests, it's in Shelfanger

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Damn Small Alternative
by Simon Royal 04 May '06

04 May '06

Hi I know I have posted a lot lately regarding my Linux box, so sorry if this is irritating. I am looking for a possible alternative to Damn Small Linux. I have it running on my ThinkPad 380ED and it is ok. Currently with 48MB RAM it is fine, even have a wireless card running. I have an upgrade to 80MB coming to give it a little boost. Everything is working fine except Dillo keeps quitting and Firefox freezes the whole machine from time to time. As I will basically be using this machine as a wireless web/email machine I need a stable distro. Are there any other distros that are easy to configure, run on a P166 with 80MB RAM at a pleasant speed, can be booted by floppy as my 380ED wont boot from CD and have good wireless capabilities. A light window manager like fluxbox or icewm would be preffered over gnome or KDE. 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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Just testing if I'm back connected
by chrisisbd＠leary2.csoft.net 04 May '06

04 May '06

Sorry for the 'noise', I lost my main E-Mail machine a week or so ago (not my machine) and I've moved all my E-mail to Csoft in Canada and I'm just checking it out. -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

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Re: [ALUG] Damn Small Alternative
by Richard Lewis 04 May '06

04 May '06

On Thu, 4 May 2006 11:37:37 +0100, "Simon Royal" <s.royal(a)totalise.co.uk> said: > > Are there any other distros that are easy to configure, run on a P166 > with 80MB RAM at a pleasant speed, can be booted by floppy as my 380ED > wont boot from CD and have good wireless capabilities. A light window > manager like fluxbox or icewm would be preffered over gnome or KDE. > > I can't remember whether anyone mentioned this when you were working on this eariler, but have you tried Debian? You can boot the installation from floppies: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s03.html.en http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch05s01.html.en#floppy-boot and then pick only the packages you want to get your minimal system running. It includes Xfce and various other light-weight window managers and you get a choice of kernels. You can install over the network (from floppies) or from CDs (with floppies). Cheers, Richard -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis Sonic Arts Research Archive http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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Re: [ALUG] Keyboards
by John Seago 04 May '06

04 May '06

On Wednesday 03 May 2006, David Simon Cooper <david.cooper(a)uea.ac.uk> wrote: > > The only downside is that I could not get the software to work well > > with FC3 or FC4. I have had an answer from "Cherry" now who referred me to the downloads on this page: http://www.cherrycorp.com/english/cymotion-line/cymotion-line_master_linux.… scroll down to "Download Software" Click the download Software for Linux gives you Debian 3.1, Fedora 4, Mandrake 10.1, source code of KeyM@n Software, SUSE 10.0and SUSE 9.x. Nothing covers what I want, but it may be useful for you. -- John Seago GNU/Linux Registered User No. #219566 () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments

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DSL Alternatives
by Peter 04 May '06

04 May '06

> Are there any other distros that are easy to configure, run on a P166 > with 80MB RAM at a pleasant speed, can be booted by floppy as my 380ED > wont boot from CD and have good wireless capabilities. A light window > manager like fluxbox or icewm would be preffered over gnome or KDE. Yes, at least one comes to mind. Get the Debian boot floppies, and install Debian over the net. Use Windowmaker as the desktop. Install KOffice as the Office package and Firefox as the web browser. Use Sylpheed for email. Use xfe for a file manager. This was perfectly usable for me on a 200mhz MMX with 64MB memory. It didn't fly, but it ran just fine. The Debian boot floppies may even let you install from CD. Its likely that doing a similarly minimalist install from Slackware would work as well, but I did not try that. If you don't like Windowmaker, try Fluxbox in this scenario. I think WM is a lot better to use, and not much slower, if at all. Also consider fvwm. Peter

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