February 2006 - main

Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 13 Feb '06

13 Feb '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! 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 xchat, irssi 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://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Ignore last mailing
by robert 12 Feb '06

12 Feb '06

Hi i write this to inform you that since i sent out HELP WITH TARBALLS i have now got my snes9x up and running on Linux.Thanks Robert

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HPLIP and PSC 500
by Dan Hatton 12 Feb '06

12 Feb '06

Dear All, Is anyone having any luck using the HP PSC 500 all-in-one printer and scanner (or any other HP all-in-one on a parallel port) under Linux? If so, please can you tell me how? The story so far: Once upon I time, I was printing and scanning happily, using the hpijs back-end to CUPS and the hpoj back-end to SANE. Then scanning stopped working, apparently due to the bug described at <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=339584>. About three weeks ago, I decided to deal with this by migrating to hplip's hpaio back-end to SANE, but have had no joy. Functionality seems to have steadily deteriorated since then, perhaps with successive upgrades to the SANE version in Debian Testing; at first, the scanner would freeze part-way through scans above a (low) critical resolution, then the scanner would freeze part-way through all scans, whatever the resolution, now SANE front-ends can't see the scanner at all. I note in passing that the list of available devices in CUPS contains the line "hp no_device_found," and I'm having to get printing to work using "Parallel port #1" from this list, which I suspect means I'm, in some sense, bypassing hplip, even though I'm using "HP(HPLIP)" as the model/driver option. I think this may have something to do with the following messages in syslog; maybe the first two lines represent two things happening in the wrong order? The first one seems to occur during loading of kernel modules, and the second on running of /etc/init.d/hplip start. Feb 11 19:21:36 (none) hp: unable to open /var/run/hplip/hpiod.port: No such file or directory: prnt/hpijs/hplip_api.c 84 Feb 11 19:22:04 (none) hpiod: 0.9.7 accepting connections at 32770... Feb 11 19:27:02 (none) tcpspy[4527]: disconnect: user hplip, local 127.0.0.1:52646, remote 127.0.0.1:32770 Feb 11 19:27:02 (none) tcpspy[4527]: disconnect: user hplip, local 127.0.0.1:32770, remote 127.0.0.1:52646 Any ideas are welcome. -- Thanks very much, Dan Hatton

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New Laptop Success
by Peter Onion 12 Feb '06

12 Feb '06

If anyone is thinking about a laptop for linuxhere is asuccess story....... There was a time (not so long ago) when installing Linux on a laptop was a bit of a lottery with respect to getting drivers for all the hardware. I decided my trusty old Dell Latitude was up for replacement, and having just built a desktop with a AMD64 mobo I decided to go for a similarly powered laptop. For several reasons I decided on one of these http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/nbrange.html?CSF After a bit of a delay ( and some trouble with UPS (that's the courier firm! )) it finally arrived yesterday. I've installed SuSE 10.0 from DVD and EVERYTHING WORKS, even the built in wifi that uses a chip set I'de never heard of before! As with my other boxes I've added the ATI proprietry X server to get openGL support (1280x800 is nice!). Peter

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Help with tarballs
by robert 11 Feb '06

11 Feb '06

Hi i would just like to ask anyone if they know about installing snes9x emulator tarball as it seems a little different to the tarball i install on Gentoo. Thanks Robert

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Re: main Digest, Vol 8, Issue 15
by David Noble 11 Feb '06

11 Feb '06

re: the laptop- did it come with wireless drivers for Linux; or do you still need to use ndiswrapper?

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Where to find script
by Paul 10 Feb '06

10 Feb '06

A little titbit for JT arising from a conversation at the meeting earlier... The script utility can be found in bsdutils in Debian's packaging system. Regards, Paul. -- From the Klingon book of C: Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' - they have 'arguments' - and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.

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i686 kernel on P4M
by Wayne Stallwood 09 Feb '06

09 Feb '06

P4M's should be i686 compatible shouldn't they ? I noticed the other week that the Ubuntu installer had selected the i386 kernel build on my Thinkpad...thinking that this was a mistake on the part of the installer I changed this to the i686 one (moving restricted modules over to i686 as well after my wireless broke) Since doing that I have experienced a couple of hard lockups...two when running Mozilla Firefox and one when using VMware Player (The VMware kernel modules taint the kernel but they don't usually give me any bother) Similarly I have never heard of Firefox crashes killing a whole machine. Moving back to the i386 kernel I cannot repeat these problems. My understanding is that i686 was everything from a Pentium Pro upwards..the P4M being based on the PIII core I thought this would be fine, but maybe there are some instructions not implemented on the P4M...Any thoughts ? My Music server (A real PIII) is running the i686 kernel and is rock solid.

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Re: main Digest, Vol 8, Issue 12
by John Seago 09 Feb '06

09 Feb '06

On Thursday 09 Feb 2006 12:00, Colin Rothwell <colin.rothwell(a)frambroadband.com> wrote: > Why do I like Linux? I think it mainly comes down to the fact that > it's free. I don't see why I should pay through the teeth for an > expensive micro$oft product when I can have one that is just as good > for free (i.e. Open Office org and Linux). There is however a slight problem with this consumer side outlook, those that build and make available the distribution/s your are downloading, are depending on other consumers, such as I, (I have a subscription to Slackware), to fund the development, their hardware, web sites and mirrors. The principle is, after all, ``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ``free'' as in ``free speech,'' not as in ``free beer.'' See: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html If you want to take something, you have a responsibility to give something back. -- John Seago GNU/Linux Registered User No. #219566 http://www.affs.org.uk/ HTML Mail Rejected

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Why I like Linux
by Colin Rothwell 08 Feb '06

08 Feb '06

Hello Everybody, Why do I like Linux? I think it mainly comes down to the fact that it's free. I don't see why I should pay through the teeth for an expensive micro$oft product when I can have one that is just as good for free (i.e. Open Office org and Linux). I also like having package management programs (portage, mainly) which allows me to do a search for a certain program and just have it installed. I also like not having to worry about viruses and spyware. Colin

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