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Ely meeting report
by Daniel Silverstone 12 Nov '03

12 Nov '03

Hi, Well, the hard-core ALUGers from the region descended once again on Ely to have a good chat and a pint or two. Myself, Rob, Kirsten and Adam turned up in the Fountain and had a good natter. The smoke rose to record levels so we decided to find a new pub. The new venue for Ely meets is the 'Prince Albert' pub which is just up the side-road from the Fountain, and is opposite one of the pedestrian exits from the council carpark. The Prince Albert was nice, happen to have a cheap book sale to raise money for the Haddenham Wildlife Sanctuary, and happen to sell a good ale or two. Much geekery was perpetrated, and a jolly good natter. Thanks to Kirsten and Adam for turning up, and hopefully we'll see a few more of you at what is turning into a nice regular pub going evening for a bunch of geeks. Regards, Daniel -- Daniel Silverstone <dsilvers(a)digital-scurf.org> Digital-Scurf

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Wednesday Ely Meet
by Daniel Silverstone 12 Nov '03

12 Nov '03

Hi, As we seemed to enjoy it last time, we're proposing another Ely Wednesday evening meeting in the Fountain pub. If anyone needs directions, please ask. We shall aim to be there at 19:00. Last time involved discussions ranging from what beer was good, through when might Debian release Sarge, onto "Is the GFDL free then?" so we have high hopes of a repeat of the beer discussion this time. See you there, Daniel. -- Daniel Silverstone http://www.digital-scurf.org/ Hostmaster, Webmaster, and Chief Code Wibbler: Digital-Scurf Unlimited GPG Public key available from keyring.debian.org KeyId: 20687895

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Re: [ALUG] Telling Linux to ignore hardware
by Edenyard 11 Nov '03

11 Nov '03

Chris Walker wrote: > > How about putting a loopback tool (a paper clip or two if you're feeling > brave) on the port to make it think something is connected? Would that > improve anything? > I was thinking about something along those lines so that I'd know when the stream had actually been transmitted from the hole at the back. The RS232 to RS485 adapter has a facility for echoing the data on the TX line back to the RX line and that would have done the 'paperclip' trick nicely. Unfortunately, it still doesn't get me clear of the problem, because I'd have no way of knowing how much delay had been introduced by the emulation between the echo coming back to the port and the emulator actually passing it back to my DOS programme. If there were an appreciable delay, I'd miss the real received response from the far end of the RS485 link. Ted.Harding wrote: > > mv /dev/ttyS0 /dev/ttyS0.bak > > There may be a problem arising from the initial hardware probe > at the start of boot: if Linux _at that point_ lays claim to the > hardware device then there may still be conflicts. I haven't tried > the above, so it's only a (possibly uninspired) guess. > It does seem to claim the port very early on, judging from teh dmesg output. MJ Ray wrote: > > Feed the serial driver the io address and irq of com2 as com1 or > something equally odd, then call it ttyS0. I forget how, sorry, but > I'm sure I've done similar things in the past to get an internal ISA > modem working. > Oh - that sounds intriguing! Does that mean that Linux would be trying to get at /dev/ttyS0 and /dev/ttyS1 both at the same actual hardware address? I suppose that would be alright, so long as it didn't want to write to both 'ports' at the same time. I'll try that as soon as time allows. Thanks for all the suggestions, as always! Cheers, Gerald.

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Re: [ALUG] Shutting down by non-root
by Edenyard 11 Nov '03

11 Nov '03

Richard Kettlewell wrote: > > CTRL-ALT-DEL seems perfectly sensible to me. > I can't see how that can be made to work via an IceWM menu, though. > > I'd suggest doing that to shutdown instead of halt - it appears (from > Debian's source) to be actually designed for setuid running, which > halt is not, and making programs setuid when they are not designed for > it can lead to unintended consequences. > Brett Parker wrote: > > SetUID evil! I'd definately go for a sudo job, and probably alias halt > to sudo halt, reboot to sudo reboot and shutdown to sudo shutdown. Also > makes it easy to add any other programs in to the list, *AND*, means you > can limit which users have access to which groups of commands. > Well - now I've learnt something else new! I've often wondered, whilst watching the packages scroll up the screen during a Slackware installation, what sudu was all about. Thanks to mention of it here, now I've been and gone and found out! Until I get it working properly, though, I've managed to set 'shutdown' to suid and that now seems to work properly with IceWM's menu item. Thanks again to everyone who'se contributed to my progress! Cheers, Gerald.

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King's Lynn meeting
by MJ Ray 10 Nov '03

10 Nov '03

OK, a few emails have been thrown around off-list and I'm thinking of calling an informal ALUG meeting in KL on Wednesday 19 November. In the town centre, probably 7 or 8pm, with exact time and venue to be confirmed later. Who will be there? -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef(a)jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 10 Nov '03

10 Nov '03

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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Shutting down by non-root
by Edenyard 09 Nov '03

09 Nov '03

For once, a non-hardware question from me! What is the correct way of making 'ordinary' users (i.e., not root) able to shut the PC off at the end of the session? I find that (at least, on Slackware) an ordinary user can't use '/sbin/halt' or '/sbin/shutdown' because an error message is returned, saying something along the lines of "You must be root do do that". I've checked the permissions of /sbin/halt and /sbin/shutdown and they're both rwxr-xr-x, so I don't think that's the problem. I know that ordinary users can use Ctrl+Alt+Del and that works well here, turning off the power at the end of the shutdown procedure, but it would be nice to be able to make the 'shutdown' command in the IceWM menu work for ordinary users, too. Thanks for any clues on this one! Cheers, Gerald.

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Re: [ALUG] Telling Linux to ignore hardware
by Edenyard 08 Nov '03

08 Nov '03

MJR wrote: > > 1. don't compile the serial driver into the kernel and don't load it. > Adam wrote: > > Just out of interest, why do you want to not have a ttyS0 ? What are you trying: > to achieve? if we know that perhaps we can come up with another plan :) > Ted wrote: > > Anyway, as Adam says, it would help to know why you want Linux not > to know about /dev/ttys0 > I still need /dev/ttyS1 to work, since that's where my modem is connected, so disabling serial support altogether isn't really an option. > > has it got a dark secret? Crossed the > floor of the House to Windows, has it? > Crumbs, NO! If it had strayed to that extent, I would have personally drilled it out of the chassis and incinerated it by now.... The real problem is something of a convoluted story: I started off wanting to run a particular DOS programme using DOSemu. This DOS thing uses a serial port but has to be able to wiggle the RTS line properly. The reason for that is that it gets connected to an RS485 half-duplex system that uses RTS to switch between send and receive. The programme (which was written in Turbo/Power BASIC), when running on a proper DOS PC, writes to, and reads from, the UART's control registers to achieve the correct timing of RTS with respect to the transmitted data. That has all been working nicely for about 8 years on a variety of boxes fitted up with various flavours of DOS. In trying to make this work on a Linux box, I discovered that the emulation of the serial port by DOSemu is less than perfect. It doesn't faithfully report back the state of the UART's registers, so that, when looking for the transmit shifter to empty in order to know when to switch RTS off, the programme gets the wrong information. Also, there's a problem with the timing relationship between when the transmitted data emanates from the hole on the back of the PC and when the RTS line toggles; I imagine that this is due to latency in Linux's emulation of the port to DOS programmes. All in all, DOSemu hasn't come up with the goods for this DOS programme of mine, which I HAVE to get working for a client. The DOSemu list has, so far, seen fit not to afford me any help either: when I posted a query there, the response I got was, "What's RTS?", which doesn't exactly fill one with lots of confidence... This brings me to the query I posted to the ALUG list. I thought that, maybe if I could persuade Linux that what my DOS programme looks on as COM1 (/dev/ttyS0) didn't actually exist, then it wouldn't emulate it; I could then set the relevant things in the DOSemu config file to allow my programme to have direct unhindered access to the UART. Until I can persuade Linux that the port isn't there, I can't do that. If I do, I get an error when DOSemu starts, reporting a conflict between COM1 and standard i/o port. Hence the question: how do I get Linux to ignore a serial port? I hope that goes some way towards explaining the origin of my question. Sorry it's gone on a bit! Thanks for your input, chaps! Cheers, Gerald.

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Announce digest, Vol 2 #23 - 2 msgs
by announce-request＠lists.alug.org.uk 08 Nov '03

08 Nov '03

Send Announce mailing list submissions to announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to announce-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk You can reach the person managing the list at announce-admin(a)lists.alug.org.uk When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Announce digest..." --------------.--------------------------------------------.------------ alug-announce | Newsletter of the Anglian Linux User Group | Weekly(ish) --------------'--------------------------------------------'------------ ** Please send articles for this letter to announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk ** *** Please send replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk, not announce... *** ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Today's Topics: 1. Web site updates (MJ Ray) 2. LOCAL: GNU/Linux/ALUG/Norwich Thu 13 Nov (MJ Ray) --__--__-- Message: 1 Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2003 01:06:34 +0000 From: MJ Ray <mjr(a)dsl.pipex.com> To: announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Organization: Very poor Subject: [Alug Announce]Web site updates Some changes have been made to the ALUG web site. Most importantly, http://www.alug.org.uk/meetings/2003/ now contains Norwich meeting details until January 2004, thanks to Syd. I have also gone back through the list archives and added links to missing meeting announcements or reports. If you can find one I've missed, please email me. If you'd like to add a page to the web site, please email me about that too. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef(a)jabber.at Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ --__--__-- Message: 2 From: MJ Ray <mjr(a)dsl.pipex.com> To: announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2003 17:14:14 +0000 Subject: [Alug Announce]LOCAL: GNU/Linux/ALUG/Norwich Thu 13 Nov [1]ALUG [2]Map Meeting 2003.16: Norwich: The Forum bar Thursday 13 November 2003 Plan for the meeting Roughly, as follows: We will meet up from 8pm onwards for an informal evening get-together for anyone interested in GNU/Linux. How to get there For directions, please see [3]the venue information page. Use [4]the meeting transport page if you want to share your journey. People at the meeting If you will be coming to this meeting, please try to say so on the mailing list, so we can be prepared for the numbers! Equipment Equipment is brought at your own risk. NB: This venue is not suitable for anything more than portable equipment (laptops, palmtops, etc). As always, we strongly suggest that you tag or label your kit. No known thefts have occurred at our meetings, but there is ample scope for going home with the wrong cables, etc. Discussion If you want to discuss this meeting, please [5]use the mailing list. [6]Back to the meetings index * Destinations 1. [7]Join ALUG 2. [8]FAQ 3. [9]Meetings * Local LUGs 1. [10]Peterborough 2. [11]Cambridge * Recent Donors 1. [12]PHP4Hosting 2. [13]Black Cat Networks 3. [14]Martyn Drake 4. [15]Turo Technology LLP 5. [16]O'Reilly UK You may think I'm a dreamer... but I'm not the only one [17]UK LUGs References 1. http://www.alug.org.uk/ 2. http://www.alug.org.uk/ 3. http://www.alug.org.uk/venues/forum.html 4. http://www.alug.org.uk/contrib/?MeetingTransport 5. http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main 6. http://www.alug.org.uk/meetings/ 7. http://www.alug.org.uk/background/contacts.html 8. http://www.alug.org.uk/contrib/?AlugFaq 9. http://www.alug.org.uk/meetings/2003/ 10. http://www.peterboro.lug.org.uk/ 11. http://www.cambridge-lug.org/ 12. http://www.php4hosting.co.uk/ 13. http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/ 14. http://www.drake.org.uk/ 15. http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ 16. http://www.oreilly.co.uk/ 17. http://www.lug.org.uk/ --__--__-- _______________________________________________ Announce mailing list Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce End of Announce Digest

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rpm to apt
by BenEBoy 07 Nov '03

07 Nov '03

Evening all, Can I ask you knowlegable lot whether alien is still the preferred way of getting RPM's onto debian or is there a better way and I should be shot for even mentioning alien here? thanks BenE

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