February 2004 - main

Reminder: Norwich evening meeting tomorrow 12th Feb AND venue change
by Syd Hancock 11 Feb '04

11 Feb '04

The monthly Norwich 'second thursday' evening social meet will take place tomorrow, 12th February from 8 pm. As previously discussed, we are going to try a different venue. The meeting will be in the 'City Gate' pub which is on Dereham road, just off the inner ring road at the junction of Grapes Hill and Barn Road. Dereham Road is the A1074 - take the Costessey junction on the A47 if coming from west of Norwich. Otherwise, when going clockwise around the inner ring road, Dereham road is the left turn at the traffic lights at the bottom of Grapes Hill (but see parking info below). There is a very large Cane Furniture shop on the corner and this is probably the best landmark from either direction. The pub, which has a large glass frontage (link to picture below), is next to the cane furniture shop. There is ample parking on the other side of the ring road off St Swithin's road. Coming down Grapes Hill turn right at the lights (St Benedict's Street), bear right into the entrance to the ca rpark. Pay-and-display, £1.40. Full address, photo, link to map etc here: http://www.norwichpubs.info/norwichpubs/pubpages/citygate.htm Anything I've left out? Are the directions clear? Constructive feedback always welcomed. As usual, I will probably not be there by 8pm, sorry, so whoever turns up first, don't get lost and wait for reinforcements to arrive :-) Regards Syd

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Groupware for the home
by Martin Collins 11 Feb '04

11 Feb '04

Hi everyone, My Wife and I both have seperate user accounts as she doesn't like me playing around with things and likes the fact that everytime she logs in it still looks the same!! Trouble is we only have one e-mail account and kmail is set-up the same for both log-ins. This has the annoying effect of received e-mails being split between the two log-ins. I was wondering if anyone could suggest a light-weight groupware package that would stop this? Or, we do have a partition "/shared" where we save common documents and I was wondering if I just copied the contents of the "mail" folders to a mail folder on this shared partition and then sym-linked to this from both home directories? Assuming read/write/group permissions were set up properly, would this work or would it thoroughly break my kmail set-up? Cheers. Martin

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how is linux doing in anglia ?
by Lucas Nussbaum 11 Feb '04

11 Feb '04

(Sorry couldn't find a better subject for this mail.) Hello, I'm french, 22, studying computer science in an engineering school in France. I might have to move to Norwich in a not too far future (ok, I'm not a real geek since I have a girlfriend in Norwich and we haven't even met on the internet). My problem is I can't really imagine life without a GNU/Linux box close to me, so I was wondering what the status of GNU/Linux is in East Anglia. So, some questions : Is it possible to find linux-related jobs in east anglia, or is it a london-specific thing ? :) Is linux used in the CS department of UEA, or are there windows boxes everywhere ? what are the other universities in anglia with CS departments providing courses in networking and operating systems ? Are there companies in Anglia who work specifically with Free Software, providing services or developing software for other companies ? Thank a lot for having read me until the end ! Lucas

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From: Wayne Stallwood <ALUGlist@digimatic.plus.com> To: main@lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] hard disc and laptop Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 00:00:48 +0000 On Monday 09 February 2004 21:36, Bryce Martin wrote: >> Hi,
by Edenyard 10 Feb '04

10 Feb '04

>> Does anybody know how to stop SuSE 9 from writing data to the hard disk of >> my laptop so very often. Basically, if you have done this already yourself, >> and are quite familiar with the set of things that need to be done and how >> to do them, please get in touch with me. I have changed a couple of >> settings that helped (I'm not usre if these changes were durable from one >> session to the next) that helped but I can't remember what I changed, so I >> probably need to re-visit this topic myself and post some more useful info >> to help with this query. I think I changed the percentage of a buffer that >> could be used up before it had to be written to disk, and another thing or >> two also, but I can't remember more now. Anyway, I thought someone might >> actually know everything off by heart, and could pass it on. One thing that always catches me out is the -- Mark -- that gets written to / var/log/messages every 20 mins by syslog. On SuSE I fix this by editing a line in /etc/sysconfig/syslog SYSLOGD_PARAMS="-m 0" Not sure if that is the "proper" place to change such a thing, but at the time working backwards from when syslog gets started by it's init script it seemed like the most logical place. I leave it in place for desktops and servers though, I have in the past known [ALUG] hard disc and laptop References: <20040210062529.19279.51982.Mailman(a)terry.blackcatnetworks.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <20040210062529.19279.51982.Mailman(a)terry.blackcatnetworks.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Wayne Stallwood wrote: > > One thing that always catches me out is the -- Mark -- that gets > written to /var/log/messages every 20 mins by syslog. On SuSE I > fix this by editing a line in /etc/sysconfig/syslog > > SYSLOGD_PARAMS="-m 0" > On Slackware 9.1, there's a line in /etc/rc.d/rc.syslog which reads '/usr/sbin/syslogd'; appending '-m 0' to it stops the '--MARK--' entries appearing, too. The value following the '-m' controls the interval at which --MARK-- gets written, so if you wanted to maintain the --MARK-- but have it occurring less frequently, presumably you could set this value appropriately. Gerald.

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hard disc and laptop
by Bryce Martin 10 Feb '04

10 Feb '04

Hi, Does anybody know how to stop SuSE 9 from writing data to the hard disk of my laptop so very often. Basically, if you have done this already yourself, and are quite familiar with the set of things that need to be done and how to do them, please get in touch with me. I have changed a couple of settings that helped (I'm not usre if these changes were durable from one session to the next) that helped but I can't remember what I changed, so I probably need to re-visit this topic myself and post some more useful info to help with this query. I think I changed the percentage of a buffer that could be used up before it had to be written to disk, and another thing or two also, but I can't remember more now. Anyway, I thought someone might actually know everything off by heart, and could pass it on. -- Bye, Bryce.

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realplayer 8.0.3.465-10 and bbc video files
by Bryce Martin 09 Feb '04

09 Feb '04

Just noticed - you are typing the first letter as 'i' (I) - that should be 'l' (L) Regards Syd Thanks Syd, I had no idea the command was ldconfig. I got the command to run, but it didn't solve my problem. I'm using realplayer 8.0.3.465-10 that came with the SuSE 9 discs. I have uninstalled and installed again using yast, but unfortunately, this didn't solve the problem either. I always use the bbc world http://news.bbc.co.uk/default.stm website to play audio and video links because in the past they have always worked properly. Now, the video links don't play. The message is that the AV console is not yet supported for my system. This is strange because only two weeks ago I was playing video files of Prof Collin Pillinger about Beagle 2 that lasted for an hour, and Tony Blair's interview with Frost (also an hour long). The audio links still work though. Could it be that the bbc site has upgraded and my player is no longer supported? Can you play the files? -- Regards, Bryce.

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 09 Feb '04

09 Feb '04

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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DreamW***er users
by MJ Ray 08 Feb '04

08 Feb '04

Hi, I'm looking for some former DreamW***er users to help test a visual web site editor. Please send me an email off-list if you're interested. I will, of course, summarise the test outcome to the list. (Sorry about the *s, but dealing with its output seems to have harmed me.) -- 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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Debian apt-get upgrade question
by Nick Heppleston 07 Feb '04

07 Feb '04

Morning all, Hope you can help. Started playing with Debian after deciding it was time I got upto speed with it. I've just gone for an 'apt-get update' and 'apt-get upgrade' and received the following warning (see below). Could anyone help decipher it for me. As far as I can see i'm running kernel 2.4.18-1-386 already, so how come the apt-get upgrade command wants to upgrade my kernel to the current version? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Nick <snip> You are attempting to install a kernel image (version 2.4.18-1-386) However, the directory /lib/modules/2.4.18-1-386 still exists. If this directory belongs to a previous kernel-image-2.4.18-1-386 package, and if you have deselected some modules, or installed standalone modules packages, this could be bad. However, if this directory exists because you are also installing some stand alone modules right now, and they got unpacked before I did, then this is pretty benign. Unfortunately, I can't tell the difference. If /lib/modules/2.4.18-1-386 belongs to a old install of kenel-image-2.4.18-1-386, this is your last chance to abort the installation of this kernel image (nothing has been changed yet). If this directory is because of stand alone modules being installed right now, or if it does belong to an older kernel-image-2.4.18-1-386 package but you know what you are doing, and if you feel that this image should be installed despite this anomaly, Please answer n to the question. Otherwise, I suggest you move /lib/modules/2.4.18-1-386 out of the way, perhaps to /lib/modules/2.4.18-1-386.old or something, and then try re-installing this image. </snip> -- Nick Heppleston 07989 581766 | nickheppleston(a)gmx.co.uk

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konqueror and plugins
by Bryce Martin 07 Feb '04

07 Feb '04

Content-Type=message/rfc822 Content-Description=embedded message From: Paul <bdi-emc(a)ntlworld.com> To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] plugins & KDE Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 17:53:04 +0000 >Hi Bryce >Having just experienced KDE hanging during one of the initial stages of >startup, you may want to try running ldconfig.. It solved the problem I was >having. >Regards, Paul. On Thursday 05 February 2004 12:32 am, Bryce Martin wrote: > konqueror and navigator have stopped playing video files on bbc websites that > they were playing without the slightest trouble last week. -- Thanks for the tip Paul but I need to know how to run idconfig. I mean, I tried typing idconfig as root and a user at the command line, but nothing happens of course. What do I need to do? The thing is that all the plugins (realplayer and the like) are already present and correct on my system. Last week konqueror and navigator used them properly and realplayer did it's job. Somehow, the system has got itself confused and thinks the plugins are not present (or something like that because it prompts me to download them). This is one aspect of linux that really annoys me. Everything is set up correctly and working one week, and the next things stop working for no apparent reason. Anyway, if you can give me as much detail about running or doing this idconfig thing, I would be very grateful. Regards, -- Bye, Bryce.

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