- main - earth.li

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.

5 6

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

4 5

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.

5 5

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."

2 3

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

4 3

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/ ---------------------------

1 0

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!)

1 0

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.

2 5

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

7 9

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

2 2