On Sat, Mar 31, 2001 at 10:47:11AM -0800, David Freeman wrote:

1) Is it possible to configure linux to turn an ATX pc off when you run halt?

Yes. As other people have said the way this actually happens is that Linux requests that the APM BIOS (Advanced Power Management) shut down the power supply. In order to to that the Linux Kernel needs to be configured to use APM - some are and some aren't. As an example the kernel images from Debian don't use APM by default. If you build the kernel yourself it's one of the options you can pick - if you turn on APM support you can leave all the other APM related options at their default values and the power off will start working. Of course the "power off" isn't completely off and you may find the BIOS has the capability to start the machine back up at a specific time, so you can use that to get the PC to start up at the beginning of surtime, say, do some work with the net and shutdown again afterwards.

2) Who was the person on mondays IRC who had started a open tshirts project?

I don't know, sorry.

3) Does anyone know if and what is happening on 29/04/01 with regard National linux day? We only have 29 days left to plan!

The impression I have is that there will be some demo Linux systems running, demonstrations of the Linux install process and some people installing Linux for Punter after they (the punters) have signed a suitable disclaimer. I guess there will also be questions from the punter which we will do our best to answer. If anyone else knows more perhaps they could let us all know.

4) And finally, I currently refuse to buy a DVD player(as in Hi-fi seprate) for a number of reasons, most notably I feel that region coding is an infringment on my rights. But I do feel alot happier with the idea of playing DVD's from linux with the DeCSS(or similiar) code. Can anyone advise on what I would need to play DVD's full screen(or even better 16:9 on a normal screen) with normal stereo sound out the sound card.

I have never really looked into this, but a quick web search turned up a few references which may be woth checking out: http://gape.ist.utl.pt/ment00/linuxdvd.html http://home.germany.net/100-5083/ http://lurch.ucd.ie/~conormc/linux/dvd.html http://xine.sourceforge.net/ http://www.linuxvideo.org/

4-b) What would I then require to output the sound to a AC-3 decoder?

AFAIK DVDs are recorded using MPEG (which version I can't remember) in which case I would expect that was is recorded on the disk is an encrypted MPEG system stream. In the that case the playback sequence is that the data stream is decrypted returning it to an MPEG system stream, the system stream is de-multiplexed into separate audio and video components each of which is fed to an approriate decoder. Whethe ryou would have to get the various bits separately or whether there is a player that does everything end to end I don't know. It should certainly be possible to construct a player from bits as MPEG video and Audio decoders are freely available. Steve.