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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 20 Feb '06

20 Feb '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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FW: UKUUG Spring Conference 2006 - Durham, 21-23 March
by Alasdair G Kergon 20 Feb '06

20 Feb '06

The UKUUG's annual Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) conference will take place in Durham from Tuesday 21st to Thursday 23rd March 2006: http://www.ukuug.org/events/spring2006/ This is the UK's only conference aimed specifically at systems and network administrators. It attracts a large number of professionals from sites of all shapes and sizes. As well as the technical talks, the conference provides a friendly environment for delegates to meet, learn, and enjoy lively debate on a host of subjects. The conference itself will be preceded by a full-day tutorial on "Managing Samba 3.0", with core Samba developer Gerald Carter joining us from the US. Delegates then have a choice of two workshops on the first morning of the main conference: "LDAP in depth", or "Firewalling with OpenBSD's PF packet filter". The main conference stream will focus on systems administration: the nuts and bolts of running large computer installations. The keynote will be given by James Youngman, now of Google Inc, who will be giving us the low down on how Google's systems are put together. This year, for the first time, we have almost an entire stream dedicated to a BSD MiniCon, and are pleased to welcome Dru Lavigne who will be joining us from Canada, as well as a number of speakers from the UK BSD community. We hope you will be able to join us in Durham for what is set to be one of our biggest and best conferences of recent years. -- Ray Miller, UKUUG - the UK's Unix and Open Systems User Group http://www.ukuug.org

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FOSDEM: Brussels, Sat 25 - Sun 26 Feb 2006
by Alasdair G Kergon 19 Feb '06

19 Feb '06

The purpose of this email is to invite you to attend the 6th FOSDEM on the weekend of 25th and 26th of February 2006 in Brussels. Previous events were hugely successful with more than 3000 developers coming from all over the world to attend talks given by famous figures of the Free Software and Open Source community. See http://www.fosdem.org/ for more information. This year's speakers include: Alex Russell, Project Leader of the Dojo Toolkit Axel Hecht, Member of Mozilla Europe's Board of Directors. Crispin Cowan, Architect of the AppArmor Project David Roundy, Lead Developer of the Darcs Project Geert Bevin, Lead Developer of RIFE Greg Stein, One of the Early Designers of the Subversion Project Ian Pratt, Leader and Chief Architect of the Xen Project Jan Janak, Core Team Member of SER (The SIP Express Router) Jason Huggins, Original Author and Core Team Member of Selenium Jean-Marc Valin, Main Author and Maintainer of Speex Jeff Waugh, The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop Jon Haslam, DTrace Project Jon Trowbridge, Maintainer of Beagle Julian Seward, valgrind Founder and Project Lead Mark Spencer, Founder of Asterisk Massimiliano Pala, OpenCA Project Manager and Chief Designer Michael Meeks, OpenOffice.org Richard M Stallman, Leader of the FSF Tomasz Kojm, Original Author and Project Leader of ClamAV Uriel M. Pereira, Plan 9 Hacker And many others who will be giving talks and tutorials... Several Free or Open Source Software projects have decided to hold a meeting during FOSDEM. It is a great occasion to meet core developers in the following developers' rooms: Ada, Calibre, GNU Classpath, Debian, Embedded softwares, Gentoo, GNOME, GNUStep, Jabber, KDE, Linux on Laptops, Mozilla, Opengroupware, openSUSE, Tcl/Tk, X.org. All those rooms have an internal schedule, including talks and presentations from lead developers. Don't miss other FOSDEM initiatives like the Key Signing Party, or the LPI exams. FOSDEM's goal is to provide Free Software and Open Source developers and communities the opportunity to learn and discuss the latest developments in the Free and Open Source arena and to promote the development and the benefits of Free and Open Source solutions. The speakers mainly talk about technologies and make technical speeches. The event is totally free. This is a non-commercial event organised by people from the community. So we would like to thank our sponsors who have understood this and helped us making FOSDEM possible to happen this year again in the same spirit. Those include: O'Reilly, Google, Argon7, Canonical, ESCAUX, GNU/Linux Magazine France, Linux Magazine, Misc, Nokia, Novell, SUN Microsystems, Think Wize, Freshmeat.net, Linux Magazin, Sourceforge.net and all of our donators without who organizing such an event wouldn't be possible. We encourage you to support FOSDEM if you appreciate the event and want it to continue in the same spirit. More information about the FOSDEM 2006 support operation at: http://www.fosdem.org/2006/index/support/ We hope to see you there. The FOSDEM team pr(a)fosdem.org

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Wirelessness and XP
by Peter 19 Feb '06

19 Feb '06

Has anyone encountered anything like the following? Start out with a netgear ADSL wireless router, new laptop, XP up to date, and coming into the admin interface of the router through a wired ethernet connection on another computer. Plug in, and the wireless network is recognised immediately. However there is no authentication or security, and it is recommended to change the SSID. I change it, and reboot the device. The old SSID is now shown in XP, along with the new name as a second network. In the admin interface for the router, at the top level, the new name is shown. Further down in the stack, the old name is shown - there are two menus, one where you change the SSID, the other where you allow or don't allow multiple SSIDs. It is in the second one that the old SSID shows up. Delete the old network in XP, and try to use the new one. Can't. Delete all of them in both machines, create a new one on the device. Now no network is visible, though the admin interface says its there, and the wlan light is on. Decide to try creating a new one, on the device. The old one, now supposedly deleted, now appears and can be connected to. What is going on, asks my friend? I spent a couple of hours on this in increasing embarassment, and not understanding at all what was happening. How could it be that networks which the router thought were there should not be visible from XP, and vice versa? Why did rebooting the device not seem to work as you'd expect? The devices by the way were on the same table top, so signal strength wasn't an issue. Was I missing something blindingly obvious? Thought wireless Linux was difficult, but its nothing compared to this! Peter

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DHTML date format - where can I find a description?
by Chris Green 18 Feb '06

18 Feb '06

I'm playing with tables in TWiki and one of the parameters for a date column is "DHTML date format" which specifies the format of the date (I assume). However I can't find anywhere that documents it, does anyone have any suggestions - either where to find doucmentation or a basic description? -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Could this happen on Linux?
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 18 Feb '06

18 Feb '06

Hi Folks, I've just been reading a shocking story on R-devel (the developers' mailing list for the R statistical programming language). Quote: "Over on R-help, the old problem of floating point precision has come up again (see my example below, where calling RSiteSearch can change the results of the var() function). The problem here is that on Windows many DLLs set the precision of the fpu to 53 bit mantissas, whereas R normally uses 64 bit mantissas. (Some Microsoft docs refer to these as 64 bit and 80 bit precision respectively, because they count the sign and exponent bits too). When R calls out to the system, if one of these DLLs gets control, it may change the precision and not change it back. This can happen for example in calls to display a file dialog or anything else where a DLL can set a hook; it's very hard to predict." In other words (if I understand aright), certain programs or processes can change the way the CPU functions when doing floating point arithmetic with the result that other programs will subsequently operate in a different FP environment and get different answers. I'd like to think that Linux was immune to this kind of thing, but can't see an a priori refutation of the possibility. What are the informed views on such a question? Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 18-Feb-06 Time: 16:12:56 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Anyone for Fat Cat tonight?
by David Noble 17 Feb '06

17 Feb '06

Anyone for Fat Cat tonight? --Daven

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Belkin PCI wireless card
by Ian bell 17 Feb '06

17 Feb '06

I am having some trouble configuring a newly acquired belkin wireless network card. I have it working but it is a kludge and I don't know why it works so I would like some advice. I have sorted the kernel module (rt2500.o) and I have added modprobe wlan0 to the end of rc.modules tp load it. It loads ok and I can ifconfig to my heart's content but it won't connect to my wireless router. I ran netconfig to set up dhcp but the client dhcpcd does not seem to get run. Running from the console does nothing but await the timeout. route shows just the local loopback. However, by accident I discovered that if I ran kwifi and configured the card to look for my router in infrastructure mode, then if I run dhcpcd wlan0 everything works. route shows that dhcp has made the necessary connections. OK I can do this manually every time but I don't understand what it is that kwifi is doing. Obviously there is a step I am missing somewhere. Can anyone help? I am running Slackare 10.1 Cheers Ian

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Colour lasers
by Barry Samuels 16 Feb '06

16 Feb '06

I want to get a colour laser printer but find the offerings rather confusing. Can anyone recommend one to work with Linux from experience? I want it to be capable of producing good prints from digital photographic images as well as general documents. I know that any Postscript printer should work with Linux but I remember seeing someone on ALUG say don't get one which uses Postscript as a layer over the printer's native language because it makes printing slow. A number of printers describe 'Postscript emulation' or 'Postscript simulation' - is there any difference? Are these the slow ones? Very often it is not clear whether a particular printer is true Postscript or not. What would I have to spend to get a true Postscript printer? Which ones should I avoid? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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How to become another user, without password, but keep environment?
by Chris Green 16 Feb '06

16 Feb '06

In my role at work at the moment I frequently have to become other users (mostly build management logins rather than specific user logins). To make this easier for myself I put myself in the user's .rhosts file so that I don't have to give the password every time I become the other user. This is inside a small[ish] development group so this doesn't raise any difficult security issues really. However if you 'rlogin -l newuser hostname' you get newuser's environment. This is OK sometimes but often is a bit of a pain because I need to reset DISPLAY to get X applications to work on my screen and I also lose my favourite editor, etc., etc. So is there any way to preserve the environment in the same way that would happen if I did an 'su newuser' but, on the other hand, allow me to login in without entering the password (as I can with rlogin)? I can thing of various nasty scripting ways of doing it but su is so close to what I want it seems a pity to re-invent an almost invented wheel. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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