- main - earth.li

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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Linux Courses @ City College Norwich
by Craig 03 Apr '04

03 Apr '04

I finally got a reply through someone I know at college offering this course back then in January (Was it January?). The reply was this: "Sorry to take so long to reply, I have been off sick. I am afraid that we have had insufficient numbers to run the courses this summer term so the next start date is September." Hope that helps. C

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Shared Hard Drives for windows and Linux
by Stuart Hammond 02 Apr '04

02 Apr '04

Dear All I have a dual Hard drive systme which i am planning on booting both Linux and Windows XP one of the hard drives is givin over exclusivly to media (music movies ETC.) what i would apprecated advice on is: 1) Whats the best Format for the shared Hard Drive 2) What is the best loss less compression for music which can be used both in linux and windows (i was thinking FLAC but i havnt had any experince of it) And a bit off topic: 3) Any Good Free (as in beer) CD rippers for windows which compress to FLAC or simmiler Yours S Hammond _________________________________________________________________ It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today! http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger

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