- main - earth.li

Quick intro from a new member
by Dave Briggs 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

Hello all I just thought I would send a quick email round, I only joined the list yesterday. I currently live in Ely, but as of this weekend will be moving to King's Lynn - well into the heart of ALUG territory! I work at the University in Cambridge, which is going to be a long haul every day but who cares when the rent is as cheap as it is in Lynn! I run Mandrake 9.1 on a dual boot with Windows at home. I am hardly technically proficient, but I just like the idea of open source software. My main interest lies in web site creation, and I run a book discussion website called Palimpsest - http://www.palimpsest.org.uk . I am still having some teething troubles with Linux, my soundcard seems to refuse to work and I haven't got round to buying a proper modem yet, so any internetting has to be done through Windows or at work :-( Anyhow, that's enough from me. Dave

2 1

Re: [ALUG] DOSemu - serial help needed
by Edenyard 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

Thanks for that, Owen! I've just sent a message to the DOSemu list as you recommend - will be interesting to see what comes back! Cheers, Gerald. On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 17:41:49 +0000, owen.churchcowley <owen.churchcowley(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: > Have you tried mailing the DosEmu list, its a good product and unlikely someone > who is on it has not hit this problem before, failing that they may know where > the bug is, have a patch or at the least know the location of thier bug track > location.

1 0

Re: [ALUG] Re: [Alug]OT: Standard of IT in schools across the country
by Ben Norcutt 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

>The d/l was blocked by the security s/w and I was told by the >network manager that it was blocked by the LEA provider not the >school. Glad to hear that it's not the case everywhere in Norfolk >though. Ah ok well we all go through the county proxy farm at bt which runs on symantec igear but they are always making changes and tweaking stuff. If it wasn't an igear ddr access denied page then it was blocked by county but they do block a lot of stupid stuff. Then again there's always around it :) Cheers, Ben

1 0

DOSemu - serial help needed
by Edenyard 30 Oct '03

30 Oct '03

Please could someone help me with this DOSemu problem: I've installed DOSemu V1.9.99 (a.k.a. 1.2.0) and have got it running quite nicely on Slackware 9.1 (2.4.22 kernel). It recognises the DOS partition on the HDD and will run programmes like Xtree and Wordstar without any problems. However, I have a programme written in Turbo Basic that accesses the serial port (COM1) and I'm having trouble getting it to talk to the port properly under DOSemu. This is the error message I get as DOSemu is coming up: ERROR: PORT: conflicting devices: COM1 & std port io The programme appears to be able to send out of the port but cannot get any data coming back in. I've set /etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf to deal with the COM1 port like this: $_com1 = "/dev/ttyS0 irq 4" $_ports = " device /dev/ttyS0 fast range 0x3f8,0x3ff" $_irqpassing = "4" but I can't stop the 'conflict' message or get any data from the port into my programme. The remainder of the programme appears to work properly, even printing to what it thinks is LPT1. I've an idea that I need to tell Linux to ignore COM1 (ttyS0) so that the DOS programme can have it, but I don't know how to do this. Is there a parameter to give to a module or the kernel at boot time, or something like that? I've tried DOSemu V1.0.2 and get the same problem, so I'm sure it's something I'm doing that's messing it up, rather than a DOSemu bug. Any ideas, please, anyone? Gerald.

2 1

Re: Welcome to the "main" mailing list
by Tim Green 30 Oct '03

30 Oct '03

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 09:01:01PM +0000, main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk wrote: > We welcome new members and we'd especially like you to send a short > description of why you're interested in Linux to the mailing list. Hello! I was invited to this evening's Ely social in The Fountain, but without enough warning! So here I am at home *clickerty-click* subscribing to the mailing lists. I have been using Linux since 1993 when I discovered I could re- partition my university's public PCs and dual boot between DOS and a unix. SLS Linux needed quite a few floppies! I now run Debian on half my PCs, and I gave up dual booting because I like to be able to run both Linux apps and Win32 apps at the same time. Maybe I'll try one of those emulator-y things like VMWare one day. I like using Linux because I feel I have much more control over my computers. I can choose to share files and other resources, and I can choose not to. And its free! If only I had a bit more free time to take advantage of the free speech aspect of Linux ... Tim.

2 1

Re: [Alug]OT: Standard of IT in schools across the country
by Ben Norcutt 30 Oct '03

30 Oct '03

>And, in Norfolk schools at least, can't d/l ISOs either which is a >disappointment. Syd, I don't know why you came up with that statement which is blatently untrue as I download lots of iso's from different sources all the time. We can send smtp mail using the country mail relay, ssl sites are fine, pinging web servers works, irc doesn't. As far as the best sites being filtered etc... well there are always ways Cheers, Ben

2 1

Re: [ALUG] Ely meeting report
by Simon.Turner＠LDS.spx.com 30 Oct '03

30 Oct '03

Kirsten Naylor wrote: >> A pleasant meeting in the Fountain, attended by Rob, Daniel, Simon, Ted, >> Kirsty and Adam. Daniel Silverstone wrote: > It was nice to meet Simon and Ted at last. The conversation was indeed > nice and geeky, I think adding the deck of cards to the mix helped to > fill any awkward silences a bunch of geeks often end up generating, > albeit not trying to do so ;-) Many thanks to you all for making me welcome! Interesting that three of us were from the same village. If you can persuade Tim to attend next time then there would be four! I enjoyed the cards - would be more than interested in bringing a laptop to a suitable venue in the future ... > I'm all for making this a more regular thing for the Ely/Nr-Ely crowd. > Perhaps every two or three weeks would be good. Admittedly it'd be nice > if we could get a venue to have a talk etc, but just making sure there's > face2face socialising within the LUG is a good thing. Agreed - I guess somewhere with some bandwidth would be good :-), although not always easy in the Fens. See you next time ... Simon -- Simon Turner

1 0

Ely meeting report
by Kirsten Naylor 30 Oct '03

30 Oct '03

A pleasant meeting in the Fountain, attended by Rob, Daniel, Simon, Ted, Kirsty and Adam. A penguin was present, as was lots of very interesting conversation about wireless internet, open source hardware etc etc (over a game of cards :). We met at 7pm (well, a bit after 7 for most of us - sorry Rob and Daniel!) and did not adjourn till after 10.30pm so it was a good night out! /Kirsten

4 3

Re: [Alug]Suse 8.1 Live Eval CD problem
by Syd Hancock 30 Oct '03

30 Oct '03

On Sunday 26 Oct 2003 8:54 pm, IanBell wrote: > On Sunday 26 Oct 2003 5:12 pm, Syd Hancock wrote: > > This is a question I've been meaning to ask for a while. When I > > first got my T23 Think[ad a couple of months ago I tried a Suse > > 8.1 Live Evaluation disk in it and what happened when it went > > past the opening screen was really scary. [...] > It doesn't, by any chance, have an LG CDRW drive does it?? I > have heard of problems with this drive and distros which have > packet writing enabled (like Suse 8.1 and Mandrake 9.2 but not > Mandrake 9.1). No I don't think it's the CDrom - it's an IBM drive (may be badged I suppose). The current problem with the LG drive and mdk9.2 is because the drive firmware uses a command which is intended to flush the buffers to flash the rom instead... hence dead CD drives while trying to instal mdk9.2 - nasty. LG's response is that their drives 'don't support linux'. Hmm. These LG drives are used in the Dell Optiplex BTW if anyone out there needs to know. I have a couple of them, they are a very nice machine, solidly made and an easy install (with mandrake 9.1 and knoppix at least) so I will not be using mdk 9.2 (which so far does not look as if it is going to be one of Mandrake's better distros unfortunately - many bugs have appeared within days of release. mdk9.1 is pretty solid though). Syd

5 9

[Alug]OT: Standard of IT in schools across the country
by Ashley 29 Oct '03

29 Oct '03

Sorry to be off-topic, but I was hoping someone may be able to point me in the right direction (if I remember correctly, some of the people on the list have experience with educational institutions). I have recently got involved in the creation of a CDROM presentation to be placed inside schools (high schools and sixth form). In order to do this, I need to get a grasp on the specs for the machines I am deploying on. I discussed this with Norfolk County Council and was told the following was recommended locally: * Windows 98 or XP * 1.7Ghz / 80Gb / 256 Ram * All students had Internet access on their desktops This only covers Norfolk of course and is only a recommendation I was wondering if a national minimum standard of computer technology exists, or whether each school sets their own standard? Please email me onlist, or directly if you can help. Ashley

7 9