- main - earth.li

Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 10 Sep '01

10 Sep '01

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.openprojects.net in the #alug channel, you can take a look at www.openprojects.net to get more info on the openprojects network. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server uk.openprojects.net" or "/server eu.openprojects.net" 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!)

1 0

FW: Help us fight the EUCD by leafletting about copy-protected CDs
by Martyn Drake 09 Sep '01

09 Sep '01

Just forwarding this announcement that came in for the group. BTW, potential good news about the list and web hosting, but I can't say anything as yet until early next week until everything has been agreed (if agreed!). To those that are currently offering hosting - my humble thanks to all, and hopefully we should know next week where things are heading. Regards, Martyn (aren't weddings a bugger to organise) Drake -----Original Message----- From: Jim Peters [mailto:cd@uk.eurorights.org] Sent: 09 September 2001 17:26 To: Martyn Drake Subject: Help us fight the EUCD by leafletting about copy-protected CDs CAMPAIGN FOR DIGITAL RIGHTS, UK ACTION DAY, SATURDAY 15th Please help us fight the EUCD and avoid more cases like that of Dmitry Sklyarov by distributing leaflets outside major record stores in your local town centre this Saturday. I'm writing to all the UK Linux user groups to invite them to join us in this action. We are planning a nationwide leafletting campaign to raise public awareness about the new copy-protected CDs that the major record labels have started to sneak into the UK, and to use this issue to raise awareness about the EUCD, the DMCA and the case of Dmitry Sklyarov. Check out our leaflet, which we hope will make the man in the street and his family say "Enough is enough!": http://uazu.net/cd/ Here is some background on all of this, in case any of these issues are unfamiliar to you: Dmitry Sklyarov: --------------- I hope you have already heard about the case of Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian cryptographer who was arrested in the USA after presenting a paper at DEFCON in which he exposed weaknesses in Adobe's eBook encryption. He faces up to 25 years in jail if found guilty. Check out the campaign in support of him: http://www.freesklyarov.org/ http://www.freedmitry.org/ He was arrested under America's new controversial DMCA laws. The Campaign for Digital Rights: ------------------------------- This is a UK group that formed to handle action in support of Dmitry here in the UK - it is linked off the freesklyarov site. Already two protests have taken place in London. Check out the web-site for details of these, and for mailing lists, flyers and other materials: http://uk.eurorights.org/ Soon after its formation, it became clear that the case of Dmitry Sklyarov was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the CDR could usefully campaign on much broader issues. For one thing, coming soon are the European equivalents of the DMCA laws, known as the EUCD, which have yet to be passed into law (they must be passed in each country individually). There is a chance that we may be able to make a difference here before it is too late. The new copy-protected CDs: -------------------------- These are the record manufacturer's latest ploy to put an end to MP3s and digital copying of CDs. They have developed a format which intentionally corrupts the error correction code on a CD, forcing a normal CD player to error-correct constantly, and even to interpolate and fabricate parts of the sound. They have been releasing these into the shops to see if anyone notices the difference, hoping that by claiming that there was no increase in the rate of return of these CDs, that they can justify putting all CDs into this format. They have released one million of these CDs into the UK alone. When ripping tracks from one of these CDs using a computer, naturally the CD drive complains about all these badly corrupted blocks, so it is impossible to rip the CD in the normal way. It might be possible to extract digital audio from CD drives that have SPDIF outputs, but in any case the audio quality of the CD can never be full CD-quality due to all the intentional corruption. Our campaign: ------------ We believe that the public will be outraged if they learn what the manufacturers are trying to do, and so we hope to give the public this information, and encourage them to act on it. That is the purpose of the leaflet. If there is enough public pressure on the record stores, this will be an extremely embarrassing situation for them, and they will be forced to choose between supporting the public (who keep them in business) or supporting the manufacturer. I'm sure you can see how this could be a potent force to help improve the situation. In addition, the media attention this would generate will allow campaigns against the EUCD to have much more credibility, giving us a chance to make a difference before it is too late. How you can help: ---------------- Even a single person handing out 500 leaflets in their local town centre this Saturday can make an enormous difference. If a group of you can get together, you could cover all the major record stores in your locality. If there are even more volunteers, you could make placards and get even more public attention. It's up to you. Apart from organising action in our own localities, we hope to help you by providing materials and a central point for coordination. We have the leaflet mentioned above ready for you to print out and take to a copy-shop, with another more general flyer coming soon to print on the reverse. On the CDR site there are also further EUCD and DMCA-related materials that might be useful for larger protests: http://uazu.net/cd/ http://uk.eurorights.org/ If you're thinking of leafletting in your area, check out the following page to see if anyone else is planning to do so as well. You could get in contact, and pool resources: http://uazu.net/cd/volunteers.html If there isn't someone already listed there for your locality, and you'd be willing to put up your contact details, please E-mail me this information at the address below. I need: the location you intend to cover, your name or the name of your group, plus some contact details (E-mail address and/or phone number): mailto:cd@uk.eurorights.org If you're not available on that day, but you know someone who might be, or some other group I might not have contacted, please forward this message to them. Particularly, user groups, if you have a mailing list, please let everyone know about this. The more people we can get involved, the better. If you want to keep in touch with further developments after this weekend, please join either the announce list or the discussion list at the CDR site: http://uk.eurorights.org/ Well, thankyou for reading all of this. I really hope that we can make a difference this Saturday and start to turn the tide against these extremely unpleasant plans from the media giants. Jim Peters -- Jim Peters (_)/=\~/_(_) Uazú (_) /=\ ~/_ (_) jim@ (_) /=\ ~/_ (_) www. uazu.net (_) ____ /=\ ____ ~/_ ____ (_) uazu.net

1 0

XSL Formatting Objects Question - Setting Document Defaults
by Steve Fosdick 09 Sep '01

09 Sep '01

After the responses to my question about publishing in both print and HTML format I decided to have a go with XML, XSL and FOP. I now have FOP installed though I am little disapointed that the only Java VM it seems to work with is a non-free one, but it now seems to be working. I now have a mostly complete stylesheet for print which just needs some tuning to make it look prettier but it also seems that I am forever having to repeat font attributes in various different bits of the stylesheet. What I would like to do if I can is to define some defaults for the font attributes to apply to the whole document and then the style template for the each of the various XML elements can just override the ones it needs to. Does anyone know how to do this? Steve Fosdick.

2 2

kernel version 2.4.9 problems
by Adam Bower 09 Sep '01

09 Sep '01

Hi all, maybe this is just me but kernel 2.4.9 seems to be almost as broken as a copy of windows ME!! last night I decided to get all my machines up to 2.4.9 (they were on a mix of 2.4.*) The first machine I have to downgrade was my NFS server, I can't remember the exact details but I was first having trouble getting the NFS to compile as a module but when I built it into the kernel it compiled. I then restart my box and the NFS clients start complaining that they can't get request slots etc. I put this down to some kind of 2.4.9 problems so restored the old 2.4.7 image and the NFS starts working again. The next machine that got 2.4.9 was my Vaio, this time 2.4.9 compiles nicely and there were no problems until I try and use my 3Com network card, the driver loads dmesg says everything is all nice and lovely, even the flashy light on the side of the card lights up! but does it work, the short answer is no. The final machine to get 2.4.9 (well I was compiling on all 3 at once) is my main workstation, and everything appeared to be ok until just now when I noticed lots of apps are segfaulting! Anyway rant over, I will check out the kernel mailing lists etc. to see if it is a problem at my end or Linus has decided to break the vm again. Has anyone else had any similar problems? I am looking at the FreeBSD cds in a very different light just now though, maybe I will be doing an install fest to BSD very soon ;-) Adam -- This message is Copyleft - all rights reversed Adam

2 1

Re: [Alug] kernel version 2.4.9 problems
by MJ Ray 09 Sep '01

09 Sep '01

xsprite(a)bigfoot.com writes: > hmm? > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/synching.html > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html "make world" is not a clean entire upgrade, nor does it claim to be. Last I checked, there was no nice way to install security patches to installed software either. The engineering of BSD lags some way behind Debian, sadly. -- MJR Thesis watch: 27% This is my personal web site =-> http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ http://www.alug.org.uk/ <-- This is the LUG I go to I work for this clever internet developer ==> http://www.luminas.co.uk/

1 0

Re: [Alug] kernel version 2.4.9 problems
by MJ Ray 08 Sep '01

08 Sep '01

Adam Bower <abower(a)thebowery.co.uk> writes: > Anyway rant over, I will check out the kernel mailing lists etc. to see if > it is a problem at my end or Linus has decided to break the vm again. Has > anyone else had any similar problems? I doubt it's a conscious decision, but I still can't quite bring myself to trust 2.4 kernels with machines I need until they get development on 2.5 underway. OK, cock-ups do happen in a stable series (2.2.17/18 OOM nuttiness, anyone?), but 2.4.x still hasn't been allowed to stabilise. > I am looking at the FreeBSD cds in a very different light just now though, > maybe I will be doing an install fest to BSD very soon ;-) Oh, any infatuation with FreeBSD will soon wear off when you try to upgrade between versions. No "apt-get dist-upgrade" there. Not even a clean upgrade option. -- MJR Thesis watch: 27% This is my personal web site =-> http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ http://www.alug.org.uk/ <-- This is the LUG I go to I work for this clever internet developer ==> http://www.luminas.co.uk/

2 1

FREE to a good home
by Paul 08 Sep '01

08 Sep '01

One dual Pentium (slot 1) motherboard with onboard graphics (looks like ATI Rage), 10/100 network, SCSI, floppy, along with the usual serial, printer keyboard etc.. But no IDE. This came out of a Dell server, beyond that I have no other details. There is no guarantees or manuals to go with it. Free to the first person that can collect in Norwich. Regards, Paul.

1 1

Dual head displays
by Paul 07 Sep '01

07 Sep '01

Hi Folks I'm back after some months of absence (been else where on other projects). I now have XFree86-4.10 and KDE2.2 installed on a spare 40Gig drive (I know, it's only a baby), and am trying to get a dual head display running. The graphics card has two GD5462 chips on board, but I'll be b***red if I can work out how to get both of them to work. Has anyone succeeded in running a dual display, and if so, do you have any pointers ? Regards, Paul.

1 1

Syleham Meeting
by jh Atkinson 06 Sep '01

06 Sep '01

Greetings! Those of you who were at the last Syleham meeting may recognise me, if I describe myself as 'Ancient John' (whose wife made the biscuits), for I am well past my sell-by date, possibly past my display-until date, but I hope not past my use-by one. I do articles for a technical magazine. That magazine, like others, including Linux ones, uses Apple Macs for publishing. You could save the magazine's type setter from being murdered - and me from life imprisonment for that murder, if you can help me with (at Syleham) conversion of a postcript file to a pdf one. I had this demonstrated to me (but not on my Linux box), using the Linux command, ps2pdf, but I did not succeed in making it work when I got home. I am fed up to the back teeth with having symbols, such as degree signs, proper dashes and greek letters which I have carefully put in, being stripped out and not replaced or not replaced properly. My main reason for trying to use Linux is that I am working on communication for the deafblind. Many of the blind have not a hope of learning Braille. I understand that less than a quarter of the blind in the USA are literate in Braille. Computer technology that can work fast and efficiently is necessary for my project. If Linux is the operating system to go for, and I believe it is, I am hampered by a singular lack of expertise. Apart from configuration of zip drive and card for two additional serial ports I am stumped by configuration of the SCSI card, and so the scanner. It looks as if no appropriate module is being loaded. Scanning is an essential. The idea is for the deaf blind user to secure an opened book to the scanner. The scanner scans, feeds its output to the best OCR software to be had. The output from that is fed to a special shorthand system which I am developing. In turn, this is fed to a chord system reader. This latter (though not in its final form) is up and running, and I am learning to read on it. The time is rapidly approaching when I shall be really hampered by lack of a scanner that I can use. My Linux box's RAM figure is 128. Processor speed 500. Linux kernel 2.0 Linux flavour SuSE 7.0 Hard disk 20G I do hope there may be someone at Syleham who can come to my aid. I may bring the prototype chord reader as well as a couple of strange keyboards, if interest warrants. Ancient John (Atkinson)

2 1

Bad, Bad news..
by Martyn Drake 06 Sep '01

06 Sep '01

Rackspace (who are my current hosting providers) have seriously mucked up in the billing stakes last month. I can no longer afford to run my server on such a (censored) way that's going to cost me more money than I ought to be spending each month. The long and short of it is that I'm terminating my dedicated server with Rackspace. Preferably ASAP (before the end of the month). Therefore, is there any kind people with a spare server out that that would be willing to handle hosting (either permanent or temporary - I'm attempting to see if my bosses would be willing to sponsor Alug by providing some space on their server) The term, "oh bugger!" springs to mind and I sincerely apologise to everybody about this. In particular to Mark Ray and David Freeman who are the current list moderators. I would like nothing better to scream and shout at Rackspace's accounts department for well and truly cocking things up. In July they took the best part of $1,156 dollars instead of $315 due to a muck up with their records. It's been fixed, but this latest incident does not impress me. I'm eyeing up a DSVR account as a potential new home for all my bits and bobs (I'm using Fasthosts for the time being for drake.org.uk - yeah, I know they're crap, but they're okay for a short period while I find something better), but nothing has been decided yet. Regards, Martyn "shafted by Rackspace, Webfusion and Pogolinux" Drake

3 3