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culture.gov.uk discussion forum
by MJ Ray 16 Jun '05

16 Jun '05

Since about a year ago, the UK government's approach to software development has been part of a "Creative Industries" topic. This effort is shared between the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS). Today (Thursday 16 June), a discussion forum was announced by the minister for creative industries. You can read Rufus Pollock's event report and follow links from http://www.okfn.org/drn/node/58 It is important that free software supporters and developers get involved in the discussion. The "Creative Industries IP Forum" - which is being invited to advise the government - is almost entirely protectionist. Several members campaign for increased copyright and Digital Restriction Management (DRM). Civil society seems only represented by the Consumer Association, which itself makes a lot of money from publishing copyrighted magazines (the "Which?" series), if I remember correctly. The panel at today's event was mainly protectionist (rather than the more permissive approach of free software) but Rufus wrote to the creative-friends list: > The main item is good news: [copyright] term extensions were *not* > mentioned at all and don't seem to be on the agenda for /the present/. Please pass this report on and encourage people to tell the government about the importance of a permissive approach to the UK's culture, whether by encouraging native companies (instead of UK arms of internationals), helping to preserve our native languages, or any of the other benefits. Register for the discussion on the DCMS site as detailed on http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative_industries/discussionforum.htm -- MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/

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Webmail that can read local mbox files?
by Chris Green 16 Jun '05

16 Jun '05

Does anyone know of a reasonably up to date (i.e. still maintained) webmail application that can use local mbox files? I have been trying a couple of webmail applications with IMAP servers (both UW Imap and dovecot) but the IMAP implementations are so awful that they make them very awkward to use IMHO. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Exciting London Tech event
by Karamoon 16 Jun '05

16 Jun '05

Anyone going to this? It's essentially "NotCon II", run by NTK, UKUUG and Backstage At The BBC. I went to NotCon last year, as did about 300 other people and we all had a wizard time. http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2005/ -Matthew __________________________________ Discover Yahoo! Stay in touch with email, IM, photo sharing and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/stayintouch.html

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Second contact for Norfolk CC listing
by MJ Ray 14 Jun '05

14 Jun '05

I've finally got the forms to update ALUG's listing on the Norfolk County Council register of interest groups and clubs to correct the small errors. There's a space on the form for a second set of contact details. Who wants to be listed? Please send me your name, address, telephone, fax (if available) and email address, whether you want to be contacted by Norfolk libraries and whether you want to be contacted by NCC about their other services and activities. Then I'll get your sig when I next see you and send the form in (so in the event of many volunteers, it'll be whoever's going to LUGradio.org live or I can get to see soonest, I guess). Thanks! -- MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/

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Blackberrying, Calendaring
by MJ Ray 14 Jun '05

14 Jun '05

Does any ALUGger have a Blackberry? What applications do you use with it? Can it be made to work with Mozilla, Thunderbird, Sunbird or other things? Looking around mozilla.org, it doesn't look promising and this may be a "killer lack of feature" for someone I know who's being messed up by Outlook. :-/ What do we do with these calendars? (I still tend to use whiteboards, diaries and agendas myself.) URLs or magazines to hunt down and read for more info would be great. I've been away from this for years: I find the Palm a great ebook reader with plkr and cspotrun, but lousy for my scheduling. Thanks in advance for any help. -- MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/

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Weird NFS problem
by Stuart Bailey 13 Jun '05

13 Jun '05

I'm having trouble with NFS on a Fedora 3 server. The client machines are a mixture of HP Unix and Solaris (also samba is used for Windows clients). Most of the time the NFS export point runs perfectly fine, a client have it mounted all the time, and files and directories can be listed as expected. All users have write access. However, occasionally (about once a day) the files in various directories disappear from the client machines. If I go to the server and cd to the troublesome directories, they immediately become available to the clients again. The only error I get in the logs is: Jun 13 07:39:58 kelvin rpc.statd[2248]: Received erroneous SM_UNMON request from kelvin.test for 172.16.44.23 but this indicates a write access problem with /var/lib/nfs/statd/sm and sm.d. But I have checked that the rpc users has r/w access to these. I tried a tcpdump and got the following: 13:27:36.751186 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 52539, offset 0, flags [DF], proto 6, length: 148) tescat2.680050 > kelvin.test.nfs:108 lookup [|nfs] 13:27:36.751223 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 14271, offset 0, flags [DF], proto 6, length: 160) kelvin.test.nfs > tescat2.680050:reply ok 120 lookup ERROR: No such file or directory post dattr: 13:27:36.751646 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 52540, offset 0, flags [DF], proto 6, length: 132) tescat2.680051 > kelvin.test.nfs:92 getattr [|nfs] Based on this I have tried turning off client side attribute caching, to no effect. I have exported the directories as such: /data 172.16.44.0/24 (rw,async,insecure,insecure_locks,no_subtree_check) I have also tried sync instead of async, and removing the no_subtree_check flag, also to no effect. Other things I have tried: reducing the MTU on the network to 1000 from 1500 Any ideas would be appreciated. Many thanks, Stuart. -- --------------------------------------- Stuart Bailey BSc (hons) CEng CITP MBCS LinuSoft (Proprietor) Linux Specialist (01953) 601294 (07778) 383739 http://www.linusoft.co.uk ---------------------------------------- ********************************************************************** This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please email postmaster(a)linusoft.co.uk immediately. You should not copy or use this email or attachments for any purpose nor disclose their contents to any other person. NO BINDING CONTRACT WILL RESULT FROM THIS E-MAIL UNTIL SUCH TIME AS A WRITTEN DOCUMENT IS SIGNED ON BEHALF OF LinuSoft. LinuSoft cannot accept any responsibility for the completeness or accuracy of this message as it has been transmitted over public networks. *************************************************************************

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 13 Jun '05

13 Jun '05

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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OpenOffice Printing
by Wayne Stallwood 12 Jun '05

12 Jun '05

If there is one thing I hate about OpenOffice it's the silly printer spadmin thing. I am running OpenOffice 1.1.3, I am not running OpenOffice2 yet because Ubuntu haven't released the AMD64 OOo2 packages yet. On my SuSE install I had it set up (or SuSE had it set up) to print to kprinter so that rather than having to set up my printers with spadmin I could just print through the KDE printer dialogue. Is there a way to achieve the same sort of thing with Gnome...i.e. print in such a way that it launches the Gnome print dialogue ?

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Who will benefit from this, I wonder???
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 11 Jun '05

11 Jun '05

A brief casually-overheard news item in tonight's Radio 4 News Bulletin at 8pm got me looking for more detail. The best I've found is on the "East Kent Mercury" website (linked from BBC News/Kent): ======================================================= http://www.eastkentmercury.co.uk/news/default.asp?article_id=20841 Controversy over heads' term-time trip to States by Political Editor Paul Francis COUNTY education chiefs have defended a decision to take nearly 100 secondary headteachers to America for a study tour and conference that will cost tens of thousands of pounds of public money. More than 90 of Kent's 106 secondary heads have accepted Kent County Council's invitation to travel to four different States in October for a week-long visit. The trip is costing every school that has agreed to go around £1,500 and will take place in term time. The headteachers will be accompanied by a 20-strong group of senior education officials and county councillors and will visit Seattle, New York, Boston and San Francisco. The county council insists the costs of its party will be financed from money made by the education directorate. The study tour will primarily involve headteachers visiting schools and end with a conference in Seattle hosted by Microsoft. KCC says the trip will enable Kent heads to learn from the experience of schools that have developed advanced methods of "personalised learning" to boost classroom standards, often using state-of-the-art computer technology. Teachers will visit so-called "charter schools" in the four different states. These are smaller secondary schools usually run by non-profit making sponsors who have much greater freedom over the curriculum. In a statement, KCC said: "Personalised learning is key to our strategy for secondary education and so it will be invaluable for our headteachers to discuss the way Charter schools have responded to their situation and identify which elements could be modified and implemented in Kent schools." Asked why the trip was taking place during term-time when parents were being urged not to take their children out of school, KCC said it was important headteachers visited schools to "experience the different ways of motivating students to ensure they maximise their potential and thereby create a step change in the provision for Kent students." The education authority stressed schools had "structures in place to allow headteachers to be attend conferences and meetings." However, not all headteachers believe it is necessary. One, who asked not to be identified, said: "I do not feel it is right to be out of school for a week on a trip that will cost the school more than £1,000. It has not properly been explained to me why it is regarded as so important to go." Earlier this year, the Kent Messenger Group revealed how foreign travel trips by education officials and headteachers had cost the taxpayer thousands of pounds. Among them was a visit by 20 headteachers and education officials to Seattle that cost £30,000. ======================================================= There's also a link at the end of the article to "on-line debate", which might be interesting to follow. Bloody hell. 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: 11-Jun-05 Time: 22:16:09 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Goods on offer
by Peter Hunter 11 Jun '05

11 Jun '05

Hi everyone, I have a couple of computers I am parting with if anyone is interested. I have decided to convert my main PC to Linux only and concentrate on using nothing but linux. Equipment offered is as follows: Apple eMac 1.25GHz G4, 512Mb RAM, 80Gb hard drive, 8 speed DVD RW (superdrive). It has 3 x USB 2, 2 x USB 1.1 (on the keyboard), 2 x Firewire, 10/100 ethernet, built in 56k modem, etc. Includes Apple keyboard and mouse. OS X 10.3.9 installed. All discs and books etc. All in original box and just 6 months old. Also included is an Apple iSight camera (boxed) with stands and Firewire cables. Plus (not so new) Lexmark X 85 all-in-one printer (low on ink) with software etc (no box). All together cost over £900, will accept £450. Also. Fujitsu Scenic eD P 3 800MHz desktop. 10 Gb hard drive, 160Mb RAM, floppy, MSI 4 x DVD RW, 17" CRT monitor (nearly new), keyboard and mouse. Has SuSE 9.2 installed from magazine DVD. Open to offers around £100. Buyer(s) must inspect and collect. You can email me direct at: peterslinuxbox(a)ntlworld.com, or telephone me on: Norwich 464999 Regards all, Peter

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