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Next Social Meeting: The Reindeer, Dereham Road, Norwich: Thurs 14th April from 8pm
by Brett Parker 14 Apr '05

14 Apr '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi all, We're nearly at that time of the month again, yes, that's right, the time for the second thursday, norwich, alug social evening meeting. This time round we'll be in The Reindeer, which is (basically) opposite the City Gate. Attendees to these meetings usually include (but are most certainly not limited to, we like new people!): Me (iDunno) Jonathan (Noodles) Adam Bower (quinophex) Kirsten Naylor (wildduck) Eli (sunflowerinrain) Paul (paul_c) Martijn (mak) Last month we had a very nice turnout, it was good to see you all, I hope you can make it again this month. For those that don't know where The Reindeer is, the directions can be found at: http://www.alug.org.uk/venues/reindeer.html Now, someone kick me and remind me that I need to write the other patch to the website to fix the rest of the references to the venue change ;) Thanks, - -- Brett Parker web: http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ email: iDunno(a)sommitrealweird.co.uk -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFCVqQtEh8oWxevnjQRAqzJAKCTDwpV4N0rYXY+ap6T51rfb8xKmQCfZFKT 9/UgsTps4d8m/E6JRgG+2dc= =fgDb -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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another new member
by David Studholme 13 Apr '05

13 Apr '05

Evening, all. I've been lurking on the list for a while, and thought it's about time I introduced myself. I've been playing with various flavours of Unix/Linux for several years now both at home and at work. My main Linux activity is using PERL to do various analysis of biological data. See http://www.sainsbury-laboratory.ac.uk/bioinformatics.html for more info. I've still got a lot to learn, as I found out this weekend when trying (and failing) to get Debian up and running on my laptop :-( Cheers, Dave

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Re: [ALUG] LISP questions and other manuals
by tom potts 13 Apr '05

13 Apr '05

http://compubooks.eigenstart.nl/ has lots of lisp books/tutorials and lots of other languages and os's etc Downloadem while you can! Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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Blocking Posts to the List
by John Seago 12 Apr '05

12 Apr '05

To the best of my recollection some of the lists to which I am subscribed refer posts to moderation where the subject list is, "Re: Contents of main digest...", thus, in the main, catching posts to which one may have replied in haste, by simply hitting the 'reply' button. such a policy would have caught the post by Bob Dove. Aside to Bob Dove, top-posting is placing you reply above the quoted material, the usual practice is to cut the quoted material and then reply underneath the quoted material, or to interleave them into the quoted material. see: http://www.catb.org/~esr//jargon/html/T/top-post.html http://home.online.no/~shughes/a57998/quote.html which may be of some help. -- John Seago GNU/Linux User #219566 http://counter.li.org AFFS http://www.affs.org.uk/

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Looking for calender/timeline/chronology application
by Chris Green 12 Apr '05

12 Apr '05

I'm looking for an application which will allow me to write a sort of history. It's a bit difficult to describe but I'll do my best. What I want is an application which will provide a timeline with divisions of days, months and years as required with the ability to write quite large chunks of text by the timeline. Then, if possible, I'd like to be able to have hyperlinks in the text that would lead out to other descriptions etc. or even to other parts of the timeline. I want the timeline to be flexible so that in one place a day might take up as much space as a year does elsewhere on the line, I don't want a calendar type fixed layout. Basically it's a set of interactive web pages with the addition of the timeline 'in the middle'. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions for what I could use? It doesn't have to be web based by the way but I suspect that a web application is most likely. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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RE: [ALUG] Linux Political Party
by David Briggs 12 Apr '05

12 Apr '05

> Below is a letter I got after asking the library > spends on proprietary software, I did not use the > phrase "Open Source" A pretty disappointing response that you got. Looking at the relevant page of the 2004/5 budget yields little (http://www.norfolk.gov.uk/council/departments/finance/Budget%20Book%202004_ 2005.pdf - page 20 of the pdf). You could always try asking the Education and Cultural Services Scrutiny Review Panel (http://www.norfolk.gov.uk/council/committees/papers/schedules/education_cul tural.htm) to have a look into this for you. It might make a difference if it came from ALUG as an organisation. Both MJ and I know a bit about Scrutiny, though from rather different perspectives ;-). Dave

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New member
by Bob Dove 11 Apr '05

11 Apr '05

Hi, I'm an ungruntled Win user. I'd like to try Linux but it seems I have to go back to the dreaded command line. I did conquer this in CP/M and DOS but having used Win since v.3.0 I have forgotten a lot about command lines! The Linux 'language' is akin to Terry Pratchett and you 'lug' members seem to have a bit of a sense of humour. I must say that installing Win is much MUCH easier than installing Linux!!! Something I haven't managed so far. Then there is the problem that I absolutely need to be able to run QuarkXPress and Photoshop (PS). I understand that 'WINE' can be used to a degree with older versions. GIMP is not in anyway equal to PS as any PS user will confirm, in fact there is no other program equal to PS! I already use OOo v 1.3 (in Win) in preference to MS Office. I like it and looking forward to using v 2.0. I need to know what program to choose as a starter, how to partition my C drive to install Linux into &c. Cheers, BD. -- Internal Virus Database is out-of-date. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.9.1 - Release Date: 01/04/2005

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Seeing as the list has been a little quiet of late
by Wayne Stallwood 11 Apr '05

11 Apr '05

I posted this to a newsgroup yesterday, the more I think about it the more I think someone *could* make a go of selling a Apple like solution. Anyone care to comment ? > > When are those people over there ever going to wake up? Jobs could put > Gates on > welfare if he'd port the Mac OS to the PC. I'd buy it in a heartbeat, > even with Apple's usurious profit margins .. Every time I hear this I wince, Do you know what OSX would become if it was ever ported over to the X86 platform... OSX is nice, clean, relatively stable and deserved of the "Just works" title simply because the developer of the OS is in 100% control of the platform. The only machines that (in a legitimate manner) can run OSX are designed and manufactured under licence from Apple themselves. Because of this I would expect random crashes and installation difficulties from an Apple no more than what I'd expect from say an Xbox. Port it over to a platform like x86 where there are a thousand manufacturers competing with their own little tweaks, variations and buggy third party drivers combined with the massive task of support for legacy hardware and applications and you'd either have the unstable mess that is Windows XP or limited manufacturer hardware support as towards Linux. Think about this- (and if anybody forms a business model based on this I thought of it first :-) ) For the sake of argument (and because we are on a SuSE newsgroup here) Lets say Novell came up with their own hardware platform, base it on X86 architecture if you like. Now imagine that they only supported SuSE linux when it was running on that platform, and the only third party hardware and software they supported was that which they had agreed (by arrangement with the manufacturer) was compatible with SuSE linux. Imagine how stable and easy to use that system could be, everything could just plug in and work, there would be almost zero hardware compatability issues because they would have been resolved by Novell/The Hardware manufacturer before you bought the kit....it would be just like an Apple (or a Sun box) Of course some people would shun it, they would say that they can buy a computer cheaper from Dell cheaper than the Novell one and then download a free Linux distribution to go on it, or they'd say that Novell don't sell a computer that meets their particular needs, or they dislike the fact they they are tied into one vendor. But some people want more of an appliance than a computer and that's how I see Mac's, you take them home and plug them in and they just work.

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 11 Apr '05

11 Apr '05

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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Asus A8V networking problem
by Dennis Dryden 11 Apr '05

11 Apr '05

Hello, I decided to upgrade my PC a few month's ago and ended up purchasing an Asus A8V motherboard and a AMD 3200 Athlon64 CPU. It's been working just fine after some initial problems(just needed a bios upgrade) but yesterday decided to stop the built in network card from working. I cant think of anything i had changed to messup configurations or make it act any differently so im quite confused as to what the problem is. The onboard NIC uses the sk98lin kernel module and when i try to modprobe it i get the message that the card was not found. In WindowsXP(the 64bit beta) the card shows up but tells me the network cable is unpluged(its not and the cable works fine). So i decided to just get another NIC and got a cheap Realtech pci card, when i try to modprobe its driver i see a similar message telling me that it can't talk to the card, and in windows i get the message again that the network cable is unpluged. Anyone have any ideas what my problem might be? Thanks, Dennis Dryden

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