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Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 05 Apr '04

05 Apr '04

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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Norwich evening meeting: 11th March 2004
by Syd Hancock 05 Apr '04

05 Apr '04

(Notice sent out on saturday but not posted for some reason) --------------- The monthly Norwich 'second thursday' evening social meet will take place this week, 8th April from 8 pm at the City Gate, Dereham Road. Full address, photo, link to map etc here: http://www.norwichpubs.info/norwichpubs/pubpages/citygate.htm If you have not attended one of these meets before, they are informal and unstructured and general chat covers many topics as well as the obvious linux-related stuff. There may or may not be a penguin on the table :-) === directions etc === The City Gate pub is just off the inner ring road at the junction of Grapes Hill and Barn Road. Dereham Road is the A1074 - take the Costessey junction on the A47 if coming from west of Norwich. Otherwise, when going clockwise around the inner ring road, Dereham road is the left turn at the traffic lights at the bottom of Grapes Hill (but see parking info below). There is a very large Cane Furniture shop on the corner and this is probably the best landmark from either direction. The pub, which has a large glass frontage (see link to picture above), is next to the cane furniture shop. There is ample parking nearby, including possible free parking on the forecourt of a wine warehouse next to the pub or on side roads off Dereham Road. There is also Pay-and-Display parking ( £1.40 for the evening) on the other side of the ring road off St Swithin's road. Coming down Grapes Hill turn right at the lights (St Benedict's Street) and then left into the entrance to the car park which is behind Toys-R-Us. Syd

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testing to main - pleas ignore
by Syd Hancock 05 Apr '04

05 Apr '04

Annoying but necessary. Syd

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Re: [ALUG] The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story
by Stuart Hammond 05 Apr '04

05 Apr '04

I dont think it fair saying that linux has a long way to go for non technicle endusers, i am for all practicle purposes a newbie to linux, what i have found is that if i want to change any thing or customise any thing (well at least at my level) you can and its easyer than windows by far. The diffrences between them though is that the guys at microsoft seemed to make an OS which is aimed at being userfrendly and forgot about everything else (and its not like it all works as it should so even the most technicaly inept monkey could od it bits of it ae still damned annotying and difficult) where as in linux user frendlyness is a secondary option, having an OS which works and dosent fall kicking and screaming to the ground evrytime some script kiddie in kazakhistan gets bored and dcides to release his softwarre of doom into the world. _________________________________________________________________ Sign-up for a FREE BT Broadband connection today! http://www.msn.co.uk/specials/btbroadband

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The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story
by Graham Trott 04 Apr '04

04 Apr '04

A cautionary tale for anyone producing end-user software. Also an amusing and informative read. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html -- GT

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Re: [ALUG] DVD-R questions
by Steve Fosdick 04 Apr '04

04 Apr '04

On 2004.04.03 19:27, adam(a)thebowery.co.uk wrote: > The (very) unscientific results of this showed that whichever way I tried this > the job took the same amount of real time in seconds to complete (around 2m19s) > (this I presume is that even without using dma the dvdburner can shunt more > than enough data over the IDE bus), the difference was that when I wasn't using > dma the amount of cpu usage as system (according to top) was pegged at around > 60-70% of cpu with the idle time at about 40-30% and a load average of around > 0.89 and when using dma the system time dropped to under 5% with an idle time > of about 95% and a load average of 0.60ish. This is on an athlon 1700+ machine > and a via kt400 motherboard chipset with everything connected up nicely with > the best type of cables etc. etc. OK, so that's a data transfer rate of 3.27 MB/s and yes, at that speed PIO can keep up at the expense of more CPU time used. As the device gets faster the same is not true. Doing a similar test for a hard disk I remember getting rates of approx. 5 MB/s for PIO and approx. 25 MB/s for DMA. For a DVD burner running at 11 MB/s the difference would be important. Steve.

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NTP between local PCs
by Edenyard 04 Apr '04

04 Apr '04

I'm trying to get two networked Linux boxes to show the same time in X by using ntp. I'm running ntpd on the main one and I've added the IP address of the secondary one to /etc/ntp.conf. However, using ntpdate doesn't set the secondary PC's clock to agree with the main PC, because ntpdate complains that the main PC is too high a stratum. Does anyone know how to get over this. I suspect that the main problem is to do with the main PC not being connected to a kosher ntp server at the time (since there's no internet connection) but it seems that it ought to be possible to sync the two machines' clocks nonetheless. When there IS an internet connection, the main PC uses ntp quite happily to adjust its clock to whatever external server I select, but, even then, the secondary box won't sync to the main one. I've read through all the HTML documentation that comes with ntp in the Slackware 9.1 distribution, but no joy. Any clues, please, anyone? Gerald.

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DVD-R questions
by Wayne Stallwood 03 Apr '04

03 Apr '04

I was kindly given a Pioneer DVD A-04 today. Getting a bit old now, but it does (or should do) the job. I have two slight problems though. The drive is up and burning, but k3b on SuSE 9.0 moans that if I want to use Disk at Once mode I need to either find a copy of cdrdao that supports ATAPI writers or start using ide-scsi. I have never had to use ide-scsi before as I have always had SCSI writers, I tried the obvious adding hdc=ide-scsi bit to Lilo (as a guess) but it just resulted in the kernel complaining that it couldn't enable DMA for HDC. After a boot cdrecord --scanbus couldn't see it so I guess that didn't work out so well. How do I enable ide-scsi for this drive. Also, This drive has had a firmware update to enable it to write at 2x to the new style media , but k3b (or whatever tools it uses under the GUI) has firmly decided that this drive is a 1x drive. Any ideas how I change this or force the issue. Funilly enough it also missreports the maximum speed of my Yamaha SCSI drive as 6x when cdrecord is quite happy running it at it's full speed of 8x Side note, Anybody can make me a silly offer for my ageing (but still pretty good) external SCSI writer (complete with Ultra2 lead) even if the drive is a bit slow, the external case may be handy for a faster drive.

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Re: [alug social] Discrimination in action?
by Craig 03 Apr '04

03 Apr '04

On 2 Apr 2004, at 22:19, adam(a)thebowery.co.uk wrote: > Just to follow this up, I guess that most of you know but I am sure > there are a > few stragglers and people we have forgotten (sorry!) but Kirsty and I > are > expecting our first baby in November of this year :) Congratulations! Just done name it Joe V2.0 or something like someone in the US did..... C

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Freeserve Problems
by johnseago 03 Apr '04

03 Apr '04

Has anyone else had problems using freeserve as an ISP but using their own email address/domain name/ I ask because I have had considerable problems over the past week. It also transpires, after a fight to get them to admit it, that they are blocking emails with the following subject lines in the headers: Test Hi Hello Mail Delivery System Mail Transaction Failed Server Report Status Error URGENT ASSISTANCE INHERITANCE CLAIM LETTER FROM DR CHRIS CAN I TRUST YOU -- John Seago

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