March 2006 - main

Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 13 Mar '06

13 Mar '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!)

1 0

XGL on Ubuntu
by Wayne Stallwood 12 Mar '06

12 Mar '06

Anybody played with XGL yet....just upgraded my machine to Ubuntu dapper 6.04 ? Looks like getting XGL and Compiz working on a 64bit machine is "fun" at the moment but I am going to give it a try later. Slightly put of by all the warnings on the forums that it is highly unstable at the moment...but hey nothing ventured and all that. Apart from that the dapper upgrade went fairly well (considering Ubuntu are currently considering holding off the scheduled release for 6 weeks to tidy up the remaining bugs) I had a slight problem with Openoffice2 during the upgrade but removing the installation packages and then reinstalling after everything else was upgraded seems to fix it...at least all the important stuff seems to be working, but the default theme is still a bit of a mess.

2 5

Best Linux Out There?
by Simon Royal 12 Mar '06

12 Mar '06

Hi I have posted a few posting for opinions on some distributions of Linux and have still not come to any conclusions. What is the best Linux out there in terms of user interface, compatibility with 3 party hardware and general range of software available. I know more and more software developers and producing linux versions of their software but I want to run Linux on a laptop with wireless internet, any suggestions please. Kind Regards Simon Royal ---- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac

7 9

iso burning with cdrecord
by Ian bell 11 Mar '06

11 Mar '06

I've been wanting to try out syllable from this moths LXF cover disk which involves buring a (bootable) iso file to a CDR. This is casuing me some grief and only a small amount of success. I tried two different windows progs on the wife's (XP) laptop, Nero and Sonic - neither works. The I downloaded a free CD burner for windows, tried the 'burn iso' option, gave it the file name and bingo it worked. So at least I know the iso file is OK. The I dug out my old Iomega 4X USB 1.0 burner and plugged it into my Slackware laptop. As roo cdrecord -scanbus shows the drive OK. However, according to LXF all I need to do to burn the iso is: cdrecord -v dev=1,0,0 isofilename.iso cdrecord goes off and writes a file of the right size, I can see where it has been burned on the disk but it don't boot. What am I doing wrong? Ian

2 2

Virtual K(V)M
by Peter Onion 11 Mar '06

11 Mar '06

Does anyone know of any existing tools/programs that allow a single keyboard and mouse to be switched between multiple machines ? For example, if I move the mouse off the left edge of host1's screen I would like it to appear at the right edge of host2's screen. I've already been looking at evdev and that seems like a good starting point. Sometimes 4 keyboards and mice get in the way ! And please don't reply with "buy a KVM" because that would be a kludge ! Peter

7 11

CPU temperature monitoring
by Chris Green 11 Mar '06

11 Mar '06

My computer happily tells me how hot all the bits are and allows me to set alarms etc. but doesn't give me a clue as to what is 'too hot'. So, what sort of temeperatures are reasonable to see for 'CPU' and 'System'? Currently the CPU is 56 degrees celsius. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

6 12

Re: Re: [ALUG] Best Linux Out There?
by Peter 10 Mar '06

10 Mar '06

There is a lot to be said for Mandriva. It has very comprehensive set of configuration guis - most ALUG people do not need them, but its nice for the rest of us. It will install all the desktop environments you will ever want with no strain. Its easier to install new stuff than Suse because you do not seem to get caught in the endless circle of dependencies as much. It is quite stable. There are lots of rpms for it. I prefer it to Suse, which I have installed with a couple of people, and have had some irritations with. The only real criticism is that moving from version to version is a bit problematic, and you have to agree with what most informed people say, that it is a bit ridiculous to have to do a clean install for every major upgrade. But this applies to everything except Debian or maybe also Gentoo. I think Suse is a bit better, it has a sort of cleanup tool, which seems to work. if you want Debian based, and you want simple and ordinary user friendly, its worth looking at PCLinux and Mepis. Both use apt for packaging. Both come on one CD. PCL has all the Mandriva admin stuff. Worth a serious look. Both are only KDE, but you can add Gnome easily enough. The one I really like is elive. That is a work of art. From the country that brought you the Trappist Triple, and the paintings of Breughel, and you know it as soon as it starts up.... If you want fairly stripped down and reasonably fast for an old machine, Vector and Vector Soho are not bad. If you want super stripped down and very fast for a very old machine, DSL. But if you want to laugh aloud, elive. Peter

1 0

15" monitor for a poor student
by Paul 10 Mar '06

10 Mar '06

Hi Simon (Cyanide ?) Didn't note your email addy last night... Have a Compaq 15" monitor sitting here - Contact me off list and we can make arrangements for it's collection sometime next week. Regards, Paul.

1 0

RE: [ALUG] Best Linux Out There?
by Keith Watson 09 Mar '06

09 Mar '06

> From: Simon Royal Sent: 09 March 2006 14:52 > > Hi > > I have posted a few posting for opinions on some > distributions of Linux and have still not come to any conclusions. > > What is the best Linux out there in terms of user interface, > compatibility with 3 party hardware and general range of > software available. > > I know more and more software developers and producing linux > versions of their software but I want to run Linux on a > laptop with wireless internet, any suggestions please. > My personal favourite is the latest release of Ubuntu (5.10 - Breezy Badger). I've found that it seems to support everything pretty much out of the box and seems to be good at recognising laptop h/w. See <http://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportMachinesLaptops?highlight=%28lapt op%29> for more info. Being based on Debian using Synaptic to keep the system up to date is a doddle. I haven't tried the next release (6.04 Dapper Drake) so can't say how much improvement there's been between it and 5.10, but I found 5.10 to be a lot better then the previous Warty Warthog release and, hopefully, Dapper will improve on 5.10 as much. Try going over to the Ubuntu wiki site <http://wiki.ubuntu.com> and searching for pages with Dapper, Laptop or Wireless in their titles. Lots of info. Regards, Keith ____________ The natural order of things includes us, and its laws are our laws. We are an endless moving stream in an endless moving stream. - Jisho Warner

2 1

APT GPG error
by Richard Lewis 09 Mar '06

09 Mar '06

Does anyone know why I get the following warning message whenever I use apt-get update? W: GPG error: http://mirror.ox.ac.uk unstable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems Is it to do with the mirror.ox.ac.uk mirror? Or is it my set up? I also get a warning when I use apt-get install and upgrade that the packages can't be authenticated which I assume is another symptom of the same problem. Does anyone know what it is? Cheers, Richard --------------------------- Richard Lewis Sonic Arts Research Archive http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ ---------------------------

2 3