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[Alug]USB Hard Drives
by Richard Lewis (MUS) 19 Sep '03

19 Sep '03

Dear ALUG, I am looking to buying a USB hard drive and wondering if anyone knows anything about using them with Linux. Presumably I would have to set up a new block device connected to one of the USB ports. I could then mount it at somewhere like /mnt/usbhd. The ones I've looked at say that you have to write your own partition table and format the partitions yourself; how would I do this? (The details of the one I'm thinking of are here: http://www.dabs.com/products/prod-info3-info.asp?&m=y&quicklinx=2BDV.) Cheers in advance. Richard

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[Alug]A review: GoboLinux 007alpha
by MJ Ray 19 Sep '03

19 Sep '03

As some of you know, my desktop machine was running Gentoo for a while. It was an island in a see of Debian. However, a few things prompted me to move away: first, I found it a pain to write ebuilds; second, I hate having to jump through hoops to block "free for non-commercial use" software from being installed automatically; third, I found it was taking more and more time to update the system. There are things that Debian could learn, like firing up a merge tool when there's a new version of an edited config file, but apart from being source-compiled, it was similar to Debian but lacking the licence division. Gentoo's official line seems to be that their ebuilds are free software: they just happen to download things that aren't. Grrr. But this isn't a review of Gentoo. It's a review of GoboLinux. You can find their homepage at http://www.gobolinux.org/ but the big idea is to restructure the filesystem into /Depot (shared space), /Files (add-ons that don't belong to a particular program), /Programs (one subdir per program like the old /opt idea), /System (replacement for /etc, /usr and /var) and /Users (replacement for /home). Why do this? Well, they take the line that all package managers are doing it the hard way, throwing everything in together and trying to keep track of it. The depot or stow idea is basically right, but tries to accommodate throwing everything in together as well. Not everything in a package needs to be linked into a common area and there are some tricky question: do you tell a program it's going to run under /usr or /usr/stow/program? Gobo was first developed as a take on the stow idea for use in $HOME on a system that the developers didn't have root access to. Soon, an entire system was built up around the idea and has been put onto CD. Packages are basically a tarball of a subdirectory in /Programs and you install them with InstallPackage packagefile.tar.bz2, which will go off and try to satisfy declared dependencies. Building from source is normally quite easy too, using the sandboxing tool CompileProgram to build it all from a source tarball. Generally the developers have tried to avoid customising the sources too much, so if they didn't enable an option that you need, recompiling from plain sources with CompileProgram should work without trouble. Both these tools make the symlinks from /Programs/Whatever/Current/bin/* to /System/Links/Executables and so on, so the shell and other tools can find them. When you're sick of a program, you just rm -r /Programs/Whatever and run FixBrokenLinks. If you want to change the default version of a package, you change where the /Programs/Whatever/Current symlink points and rerun SymlinkProgram. It works surprisingly well. I installed from a CD image of 007alpha, which had some amusing bugs which should be squashed before 007 final ("Bond") is released. Although InstallPackage can download packages to fulfil dependencies, one that was missing from the base install was wget, which is used for the downloading. Development cycle is short enough at the moment that you can use a package from 006 ("Trevelyan") most of the time and sometimes even from 005 ("Thomas"). The developers are now getting to grips with things like that and supporting a variety of shells instead of just their favourite zsh. It's an interesting distribution and if they can solve the normal growing pains of a distribution, such as security, distributed development and trickier packages, it could be the base for a good multipurpose distribution in a year or so. Questions? Comments? -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. 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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[Alug]Re: script help request
by Jenny Hopkins 18 Sep '03

18 Sep '03

On Thursday 18 September 2003 2:32 pm, MJ Ray wrote: > > I'm looping through a list of words in a file, passed in as > > variables, and > > performing an action on it, but first I need to strip the ".ipk" > > from the > > word. > > That's a different problem to the one you asked. If the word is > stored in the variable $word, then ${word/%.ipk/} will contain what > you need in bash. If you're using another shell, let me know. That's exactly what I was after - many thanks. I later realised the filename also had to have a version number stripped from it, but the above syntax took care of that as well, with a small amount of twiddling. Jen

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[Alug]Adrian Kiddle rejoining ALUG
by Dan Beimborn 18 Sep '03

18 Sep '03

Adrian, check out rdesktop: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rdesktop/ DB

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[Alug]Trouble with foreign character input
by MJ Ray 17 Sep '03

17 Sep '03

I want to type characters like c-cedilla (French) and c-circumflex (Slavic) easily. I cannot get the compose key or the dead_circumflex character in xmodmap to work for anything other than combining a circumflex with a space to produce ^. Redefining keys with xmodmap, eg: keycode 54 = c C ccircumflex Ccircumflex doesn't work either (output of xmodmap -pm gives: shift Shift_L (0x32), Shift_R (0x3e) lock Caps_Lock (0x42) control Control_L (0x25), Control_R (0x6d) mod1 Alt_L (0x40) mod2 Num_Lock (0x4d) mod3 mod4 Super_L (0x73), Super_R (0x74) mod5 ISO_Level3_Shift (0x71) in case I've got a modifier wrong.) That used to work with XFree86 3.3.1, using AltGr-c to give c-circumflex. Indeed, it's the same xmodmap file and the same pc105 gb keyboard settings in the config file (but a different place), but I am now using XFree86 version 4.3.0. If someone knows what is wrong, please tell me. If I can give more helpful info, please tell me what you want. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. 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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RE: [Alug]Adrian Kiddle rejoining ALUG
by Adrian Kiddle 17 Sep '03

17 Sep '03

Thanks Dan, I tried it out yesterday with some kind assistance from Simon Jude and it works very well. -----Original Message----- From: Dan Beimborn [mailto:Dan@celticmusic.com] Sent: 17 September 2003 11:15 To: Adrian Kiddle Cc: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: [Alug]Adrian Kiddle rejoining ALUG Adrian, check out rdesktop: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rdesktop/ DB

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RE: [Alug]Fax Server?
by Jonathan Dye 17 Sep '03

17 Sep '03

nickheppleston(a)gmx.co.uk wrote: > I'm looking for suggestions for a fax server. At my last compay, we > used RightFax - a Win NT4 application - that allowed users to 'print' > to a fax spooler which would then be sent via a dial-up modem. Is > there anything similar out there in the open-source world? > > Any help would be greatly appreciated. have a look at hylafax. You can set it up so you can print to it or send files to it with various (unix) command line tools. There are also some windows drivers/plugins according to the homepage. JD _____________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked for all known viruses by the MessageLabs Virus Scanning Service

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[Alug]Norwich meeting schedule.
by Syd Hancock 16 Sep '03

16 Sep '03

I would like to have regular sunday meetings in Norwich every two months, held regularly on the last weekend of the month (i.e. roughly mid-way between the mid-monthly evening meetings). 1. Syleham is planned for every third month so every six months there would be a possible overlap. But, provided we don't choose the same date, I suggest that it is worth trying out since the extra mileage means that for some people Syleham is just that bit too far south of Norwich and for others Norwich is a little too far north compared to Syleham. 2. Use of UEA facilities with bandwidth would be great if it could be arranged regularly and reliably. If not then a reasonable venue that happens is better than a great venue that doesn't. **If there is anyone on the list who is able to book a room at UEA please contact me.** Can people who work at UEA book rooms? As has been said before, you don't need to do anything except make the booking. No organising, no responsibility to take, nothing... unless you want to do more of course :-) Any comments on these suggestions? Syd

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[Alug]isdn card
by Syd Hancock 16 Sep '03

16 Sep '03

I've bought an ISDN pcmcia card (may be cardbus, not sure) to use with a Thinkpad T23 running mandrake 9.1. It is made by IBM and has the name "International ISDN PC card" printed on it. P/N is 09N3606 I (perhaps naively) assumed that it would be recognised as a serial port just like my pc-card analogue modem but it isn't. If I'm logged in to a console as root when I insert it then I get a message to the effect that it is an unsupported card, product info "ISDN", "CARD" followed by function: 6 (network) I've spent some time with google but am still not sure whether it is possible to use it with linux. Any and all help, advice or explanations suitable for a puzzled novice will be very welcome. TIA Syd

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[Alug]Bourne Grammar Open Day
by Ben Francis 16 Sep '03

16 Sep '03

Bourne Grammar School in Lincolnshire will be holding a general 'Open Day' on 2nd October after school finishes for the day (I *really* hope that date is right ). I'm in the sixth form there and hopefully will be showing off my 'GNU/Linux Lab' on the day. Any luggers are more than welcome to attend to have a peep and make suggestions for future improvements. Please don't expect anything special as I'm new to Linux myself, it's basically 6 workstations running a hard disk install of Knoppix (main reason being ease of re-installing if someone breaks something) and a Debian web server, all low spec machines that are surpless to requirements elsewhere in the school. They're wired into the school's windows NT/2000 network and the 2 meg ADSL line. The workstations currently don't *do* much either as they've only been there since the beginning of term! It's nothing like the established system I've heard about at Skegness and *still* haven't been to see ;) I'd really appreciate the support, and if you do come up to the IT rooms and I start to try and explain Linux to you *please* stop me before I embarrass myself completely! I could do with some help convincing the Director of ICT that Linux in school is a good idea if I'm going to have a lasting effect before I leave :) Confirmation of date and a more specific time to follow. Many Thanks -- Ben "tola" Francis

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