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RE: Linux Political Party
by John Seago 01 Mar '05

01 Mar '05

Perhaps this subject might be better transfered to the Social list? -- John Seago GNU/Linux User #219566 (http://counter.li.org) AFFS (http://www.affs.org.uk/)

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Spare computer hardware
by Graham 01 Mar '05

01 Mar '05

I expect to be moving house before too long and have the usual pile of kit that doesn't deserve the attentions of the removal men. Any takers for any of the following to save them from the skip? Two Bull P166 pizza-box type computers, each with a small (1-2G-ish) hard drive and modest amounts of memory (64MB as I recall). They run Linux happily in text mode and can be used as low-duty web servers or the like. One has a 14" monitor sitting on top that I seem to remember will do 1024x768; it was running Windows 98 until recently. Keyboards but the mice are in poor shape. Assorted drives: Fujitsu M1636TAU - labelled as 1.2GB Seagate ST31722A - labelled as 1.6GB Seagate ST3491A - a 428MB drive CD-ROMs: 2 x 48-speed, 1 x 24-speed, 1 x unlabelled. 2 x Matrox Millennium PCI graphics cards - probably only 2MB at most but they'll run at 1024x768. 1 x Adaptec 2940 PCI SCSI card. 1 x USB Fax Modem - probably a WinModem. 2 x Intel Pentiums (Pentia?) with heatsinks/fans; probably about 100 or 200MHz but I can't decode the legends. And finally, a real treat: a Wyse 50 VDU in full working order. -- GT

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Political Action and/or Party's
by John Seago 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

Adam wrote: > I would prefer it if we had a better voting system, e.g. one where you > can vote more than once, i.e. once for each party you support. > So the presence of a vote for party A and party B on my ballot paper and > a lack of a vote for party C in effect means that I don't care if A or B > win, but I certainly don't want to support C. > In preparation for the next general election I don't know if I can bring > myself to vote for any of the parties because they all suck, just some > more than others. If in effect I could vote for all the parties who were > crap instead of the ones that were totally crap then it wouldn't be a > total disaster. > This has the nice side effect that I could vote for single issue > parties, and when they get lots of votes people think that maybe the > issues they are raising are a good idea and the mainstream will take > them up. Adam try sending the above, exactly as it is to the Party's of your choice. I would recommend including 10 Downing Street. I spend most of the day at home in the winter, listening to Radio 4. Analysts seem to be of the opinion that the one fact that is worrying all party's is exactly the point of view you exhibit above. It would be interesting to see what kind of response you get, especially as the EU has decided that democracy is inimical to Microsoft's interests. I might even have a go at a similar exercise myself. -- John Seago GNU/Linux User #219566 (http://counter.li.org) AFFS (http://www.affs.org.uk/)

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Re: main digest, Vol 3 #465 - 17 msgs
by John Seago 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

On Monday 28 Feb 2005 14:52, main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk wrote: > You missed my point then, the mainstream parties with the current system > don't care if you vote for a minority party (hell the liberal democrats > are a fairly mainstream party that suffers very often from the mentality > of the other voters "I would vote lib-dem but they won't get many votes, > so I won't vote for them". It makes no "real" difference with a single > vote if you spoil the ballot or vote for a minority party. Having re-installed since the Euro Election I'll have to dig through my archives to find what the Lib Dems said to me but I can assurue you it did make a difference to the Lib Dems. Still if you're not going to emigrate, I had the chance, but I'm now too old and broken, then the only recourse we, you and I, have is activism to change the system. A revolution of two, with one in a wheelchair, at least might get a slight sympathy vote. -- John Seago GNU/Linux User #219566 (http://counter.li.org) AFFS (http://www.affs.org.uk/)

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Invitation to FOSDEM 2005
by Fosdem Organization 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

Hi, The purpose of this e-mail is to invite you to attend the 5th edition of FOSDEM. This edition will take place on the 26th and 27th of February 2005 in Brussels (see http://www.fosdem.org for more info). The previous edition encountered a huge success with more than 2000 developers coming from all over the world to attend the talks of famous figures of the Free Software and Open Source community. This year, will be present (in alphabetical order): Alan Cox - Kernel Maintainer Alan Robertson - Linux High-Availability Project Founder Alasdair Kergon - Device Mapper and LVM Maintainer Alex Larsson - Nautilus and GNOME-VFS Maintainer Alexander Dymo - KDevelop Maintainer Andreas Zeller - Creator of ddd Benoit Minisini - Creator of Gambas Ethan Galstad - Creator of Nagios Gerald Combs - Creator of Ethereal Harald Fernengel - KDevelop Developer Harald Welte - Netfilter Core Team Member, GPL Enforcement Jeff Johnson - RPM Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales - Wikipedia Founder Ken Preslan - Developer of OpenGFS Marius Mauch - Gentoo Emerge Marty Roesch - Creator of Snort IDS Matthias Ettrich - Creator of KDE, and Lyx Olivier Fourdan - Creator of XFCE Olle Mulmo - GRID Specialist, Globus Toolkit Core Team Pat Mochel - Sysfs/Kernel Driver Core Maintainer Richard M. Stallman - Leader of the FSF Stuart Winter - Slackware & slacktrack Developer 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: Calibre room, GNU Classpath room, Clustering room, Debian room, Dokeos room, Drupal room, Embedded Software room, Gentoo room, GNOME room, GNUStep room, Jabber room, KDE room, Mozilla room, Opengroupware room, Perl room, PHP/Pear room, Tcl room. All those rooms have an internal schedule, including talks and presentations from lead developers. Moreover, the Free Software Award will be handed out during the FOSDEM 2005 by Richard Stallman and other members from the Free Software Foundation. Don't miss other FOSDEM initiatives like the Lightning Talks, the Key Signing Party, or the buffet. 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 Media inc., Linux Magazine, Freshmeat, Sourceforge, Argon7, Astaro, GNU/Linux Magazine France, Hakin9, Misc, PePLink, X-Tend, LinuxFR, Linux-Magazin, Best Of Publishing 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 2005 support operation at: http://www.fosdem.org/2005/index/support/ We hope to see you there. -- FOSDEM 2005 Damien Sandras Community Contact

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What is a Kit Meeting?
by Brett Parker 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Right, As this has come up a couple of times over the last few days... here goes the explaination of what a 'kit' meeting is... First off, kit is basically "old computers, new computers, anything that's interesting or you want to get rid of and think someone might be interested in, laptops, pdas, etc etc". A kit meeting is basically a meeting where by we have some desks, a reasonable sized room, and some power outlets. It's a good place to bring any thing that you'd like to demonstrate to the group (if you're feeling brave), or to get someone to help you with that niggly hardware problem, or help you to install one of the numerous distributions (we don't all know the same distribution, but you'll find a fair number of us that are Debian type people, some even Debian Developers, so expect the highest amount of support on Debian or Ubuntu based systems). All kit brought to the meeting is the owners responsibility, we have not yet, to my knowledge, had anything nicked from a meeting, but it's useful to label anything that you bring "Just In Case". (Also, when there's lots of 4 ways and network leads, etc, it can get a bit hectic at packing up time, in order to keep track of which bits are yours, it's useful to have them labelled). It is not neccessary to bring kit to the meeting, we're very open to talking about 'stuff', which can cover a whole array of subjects, and not even limited to just IT, sometimes we have interesting things to say (not me, personally, but sometimes there's interesting people about). It's a good opportunity for lots of us ALUGgers to get together, talk, demonstrate, help, get ideas, and generally have a good afternoon of playing with stuff, eating biscuits, and, quite usually, finding beer in the pub afterwards (UEA permitting, this time. Last time ISTR the bar being closed :( ). I hope to see many of you there. Thanks, - -- Brett Parker web: http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ email: iDunno(a)sommitrealweird.co.uk -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFCIzAxEh8oWxevnjQRAnhhAJ9b2OSREYtq1MR/o5xMoiZffUKu7gCfVdRr l5IiXEpjpQ+E7wOaqXNdl5I= =g9Lx -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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RE: [ALUG] New Member
by Elisabeth 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

hi Simon, Will we see you at the kitmeet on 20 March? eli/sunflowerinrain/elspeth

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RE: [ALUG] Kit Meet - 20th March @ UEA
by Keith Watson 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

> From: Brett Parker Sent: 25 February 2005 21:04 > Elisabeth <E.Fosbrooke-brown(a)uea.ac.uk> wrote: > > Sunday 20 March > > Constable Terrace Room A > > Start at 14:00 > > > > Bring software, laptops, pcs, monitors, pdas, peripherals, >> cables, bits and pieces... > > Share and enjoy. > > Or don't bring anything but yourselves, don't feel that you *have* to > bring kit to attend a kit meet. > > Biscuits are appreciated by all attendees though, as are hot > cross buns, jaffa cakes... (we like snack food ;) > > > If people could post back to the list to give us a feeling > what they're bringing, what they might want, and whether they are turning up. I shall try very hard to get there (seeing as it's just round the corner), I have some odd bits and pieces that may be off use to someone. I'll try and bring some sweet and sticky comestibles also :o) Keith

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Audio CD Writing
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

Hi Folks, I'm trying to get a ".wav" file (which I also have in a version ".cdr" converted by sox) onto a CD so that the CD can be played on a CD player. With 'xcdroast' I can get the file onto CD as a "data CD", but this doesn;t work for playing on a CD player. My 'xcdroast' tells me, when I'm about to master the file into an ISO image, that if I'm only mastering ".wav" files and want to create an aufio CD then I should use the "Write Tracks" menu and not the "Master Tracks" menu. That's all very well, but if I do that then the "Image Information" panel under "Write Tracks -> Layout Tracks, which seems to be the only way I can designate the filenames for tracks, shows me nothing (unless I have already mastered an image under "Master Tracks" which is then an ISO image which I don't want), and I can see no way of getting the filename into this window. This is xcdroast-0.98alpha13 on Red Hat 9.1. When I click on "Create CD" from the top menu, the first display which comes up is "CD.Image Info", and in this panel I can see the filenames. However, there's no provision there to select them for later use. The only other option which displays them is "Master Tracks" as described above. Can anyone take my hand and lead me out of the wood, please? Thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 26-Feb-05 Time: 20:09:26 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Re: [ALUG] Linux Political Party
by John Seago 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

On Monday 28 Feb 2005 06:26, adam(a)thebowery.co.uk wrote: > In preparation for the next general election I don't know if I can bring > myself to vote for any of the parties because they all suck, just some > more than others. If in effect I could vote for all the parties who were > crap instead of the ones that were totally crap then it wouldn't be a > total disaster. Which was precisely my point, don't vote for, vote against. (Or write on your ballot paper what you think of the Candidates, they all have to personally read 'spoilt papers. I think one of my best, years ago in a Borough Council Election was, "offered a choice between two crooks and an idiot, I choose not to vote for any of them"), With proportional voting we at least had the opportunity to take votes away from those we disapproved of. However, (for those who wonder why I start so many sentences with 'However', when I was at school, starting a sentence with 'But ' was a terrible sin), even with the first past the post method, voting for fringe party's sends a message, especially if like me you then send all the other party's an email telling them why you didn't vote for them, and that they can't make assumptions as to why their share of the vote was what it was, as there were lots of voters who did exactly the same as I/you, (just don't tell them which party you did vote for). -- John Seago GNU/Linux User #219566 (http://counter.li.org) AFFS (http://www.affs.org.uk/)

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