June 2004 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Re: [wlug] WLUG Meeting is tonight
by s swami 30 Jun '04

30 Jun '04

My replies to Daniel: > >You see what these f--ks did? Now I don't give a shit what reasons > >they had, they should have gotten over it like Netscape/Mozilla > > did. > > Which f--ks are that? Borland? I was using a lot of Borland > products at the time, so I remember the release of Interbase quite > clearly. It definitely had the feel of a company wishing to keep > dead code alive. Interbase was a good RDBMS, but it was losing > marketshare to SQL Server. IMO, the move to open source Interbase > was pushed by this, and not neccesarily out of any good will to the > world. These folks :-) referred to Firebird developers. Perhaps I was insufficiently clear: the context was the risks of "forking". Firebird forked Interbase and I don't care what their reasons were. They should have worked with Borland. > >It goes against the values I hold -- respect the company for the > >steps they took to open their sources and work with them for the > >benefit of all. If you have a problem, get some self-respect and > >write your own damn code from scratch. > > Now you seem to be talking about the Firebird developers (where did > the Netscape analogy go?) What's wrong with forking a codebase? > Especially if you think that the original codebase was released by > a company in trouble, as a way to wipe their hands of a dying > product. There we go, whats wrong with forking Java? And this is what concerns Sun and java developers like me. > > Don't get me wrong, I'm dead again the > zillion-opensource-products-to-do-the-one-thing sort of mentality > (yet another emacs with wordstar bindings and tetris.... what's the > point?), but in the case where you have taken a supposedly open > sourced product, and found that the group in charge of it is being > slow or tedious to get patches accepted, and in fact don't even > seem to *care* any more, what's the problem with forking it? It is > better to fork it than lose ongoing development entirely, surely? Java gets forked because MS feels that their patches aren't being accepted fast enough. > >As more companies open their sources, I hope that similar > > sentiments to mine will enter the hacker ethic. > > Your sentiment being "Always write your own code from scratch, > rather than take a useful codebase and work on it"? I hope not. > You're missing out on one of the most powerful aspects of open > source - you can take a project and modify it and release that, > legally. That is not my sentiment. But you highlight the risks of forking again. > Maybe I should point out where a fork has been beneficial: Samba > and Samba-TNG (The Next Generation). Samba TNG was forked at a time > where some of the developers thought the direction the main Samba > team was going was wrong. TNG was aimed at rewriting parts of the > core of Samba to do things much closer to the way windows does it. > Now, if Luke Leighton got "some self-respect and wrote [his] own > code from scratch", TNG would never have taken off. Far too much > work. This is not the same as my example. Interbase was originally close sourced, Samba was always open and developed by the community. If a large part of the community (read people who contributed code) feel the need for a change of direction, that is fine by me (similarly, I feel fine about X.org). You see these guys working on Samba-TNG and X.org contributed greatly to the original products. Now the f__ks who quickly set up their own Interbase repository and called it Firebird did not contribute a single line of code to what was a mature product (Interbase) -- they couldn't, it had been closed. They did not have the pedigree of the likes of Leighton or Packard and friends who also forked their originals. Forking in itself is not bad, it's who forks it and why. These ethical questions can be seen as relative. Hackers will vote with their fingers. If enough agree with my sentiments, these will enter the hacker ethic. (I hope I've made myself clearer). > >To (1): This is a problem with Debian and apt. It can't be the > >download (I do it on my 33K) it is the hoops that /Debian/ and > > /apt/ require us to jump through. > > If the license says you can't redistribute it, then any > distribution which prefers to maintain it's own repositories will > have this problem. I don't want to get into a discussion of what the different parties mean by "redistribute". Let's just look at it empirically: Java comes on every major Linix distribution disk apart from Debian. FreeBSD has negotiated a license with Sun that allows it to distribute Java from the FreeBSD site. NetBSD are doing something similar. Apple comes with Java. Clearly the problem is the Debian stance. Distributions can choose to be flexible. We all know of Linus's flexibility wrt to binary drivers "in" the kernel just as we know of RMS's opposite view. For Debian it is a religious question. That's fine. > Sure, you can always download it manually. And you can go and set > up your environment manually to path it correctly. And you can > setup binfmt so that you can just run a java app without having to > know it's java. What happens when you want to put a package that > depends on the jvm into your repository however? It is *really* > messy having a dependancy installed from source. Then your package sytem has a weakness with "having a dependancy installed from source". You could improve your packaging system or mandate (I'm being cheeky: substutute "ask") that all software conform with your broken packaging system. > >To (2): Yes. Let us hope that if it happens, we get a license > > similar in spirit to that of freedom, that Sun is given the > > respect it deserves and is able to profit fairly from it. > > > >And boy if I see the Firebird faction turning their evil green > > eyes thataway ... > > Get over it. If Borland stopped development of Interbase after > releasing it, it was because Borland didn't care enough about it. > Firebird did nothing wrong, other than force Mozilla to change the > name of it's browser a second time in short order. Interbase is still being developed by Borland. I will never use or support Firebird.

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Gotcha!
by Michael & Colleen McDonald 28 Jun '04

28 Jun '04

Not so long ago I decided to dabble my toes in the waters of Linux, to broaden my experience and see for myself if it can truly replace that "other" operating system. I purchased a new system with 2 disk drives and proceeded with some testing. Since I wasn't ready to break "the ties that bind", my plan was to install Linux on the slave drive and that other system on the master. Fedora Core 1 loaded nicely onto the slave drive. But ... on booting the system, "GRUB" would appear on the screen (no menu) and there it would stay. Fortunately I had created a boot floppy. Away I could go, having to boot from floppy. Just as well I had a floppy drive! That boot floppy was transferred to CD within a couple of days. The other operating system was loaded on to the master drive. No problems there, but it was interesting to note that many drivers had to loaded (with much rebooting of the system) before all the hardware was operational - whereas Linux coped "out of the box". Was surprised to find that my system drive was "G:" ... because of the Linux partitions set up earlier. Along comes Fedora Core 2. Great! The install went like a charm ... until the reboot. Of course, Grub still wouldn't load. The boot diskette (CD) for the 2.4 Kernel proved useless too! I've tried, without success to recreate the loader, even trying to put the loader on /hda. Even went to the extent of renaming some files in the boot partition on /hdb1 ... that caused the installer to think I needed a new loader (which is what I intended!), but when it came to the end of the installation it said the loader was up to date so it didn't need to replace it. "Help!" ... any suggestions please? Michael

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RE: [wlug] WLUG Meeting is tonight
by Lindsay Druett 28 Jun '04

28 Jun '04

And someone here can organise a bus for a trip to Taupo and back... :) > -----Original Message----- > From: Daniel Lawson [mailto:daniel(a)meta.net.nz] > Sent: Monday, 28 June 2004 14:33 > To: Waikato Linux Users Group > Subject: Re: [wlug] WLUG Meeting is tonight > > You really should try to make it up for a meeting sometime > Oliver. Taupo > isn't that far away. Perhaps you could even present a meeting > of your own? > > Daniel > > _______________________________________________ > wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug > >

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p200 server
by Gavin Denby 28 Jun '04

28 Jun '04

A while back I was offered a full server size p200 for a file server. I have lost the e-mail from the offer, and cant find who it was. Could that person please contact me off list. Thanks.

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OT - Need a CD copy - Visual C#.net standard Version 2002
by Gavin Denby 28 Jun '04

28 Jun '04

I have a fully licensed version of this software, but disk 1 has been damaged, and I cannot install it. Microsoft will sell me replacement Media at $50NZ but before I fork out more money on this, I thought I'd ask if anyone has a set of this with CD 1 that I can get a Backup of to allow me to work past the damaged bit of the media on disk 1, and install the software on my new laptop. otherwise its more dollars for Microsoft NZ that I would rather spend elsewhere. I need this for a course. so any help will be appreciated. After that I can migrate to mono. Please reply to me off list as this really has nothing to do with Linux, but since we have so many smart programmers here, someone may be able to help me hang on to a few dollars. Sorry if this traffic is a annoyance, I won't ask here again. honest.

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Wee problem with Samba
by Shane Taylor 24 Jun '04

24 Jun '04

Hi. I'm having a wee problem with Samba. It's configured to be the Netbios Master Browser for my home network. It's working perfectly ..... except that the browse list only contains a single machine - the Samba machine. I can get to any other machine using it's netbios name - \\megans - and everything works fine. The logs all show that it's working alright - it wins all the browser elections and no errors show up. The only weird thing I've noticed is that in the "log.<machine name>" lanman.c is mentioned after a client connection is made (shouldn't come into things at all but I don't think it's any problem??). Otherwise, things look just peachy. I've tried all the usual stuff (smbstatus/smbclient/nbtstat .... created shares and they show up etc), google, docs from all over the place blah yadda etc. Not a damn thing :( Any ideas?? I'm running Debian unstable with the 2.6.6 kernel and Samba 3.0.4. smb.conf [global] netbios name = debian workgroup = Workgroup wins support = yes security = share os level = 65 domain logons = no domain master = yes preferred master = yes local master = yes hosts allow = 192.168.1. 127. interfaces = eth0 lo bind interfaces only = Yes interfaces = 192.168.1.1/24 name resolve order = wins lmhosts host bcast browse list = yes dns proxy = yes printing = cups printcap name = /etc/printcap load printers = yes guest account = nobody log level = 3 log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m Netstat -a shows: tcp 0 0 debian:netbios-ssn *:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 debian:microsoft-ds *:* LISTEN udp 0 0 debian:netbios-ns *:* udp 0 0 *:netbios-ns *:* udp 0 0 debian:netbios-dgm *:* udp 0 0 *:netbios-dgm *:* debian:/usr/local/samba/var/locks# cat wins.dat VERSION 1 0 "__MSBROWSE__#01" 1088324891 255.255.255.255 e4R "DEBIAN#00" 1088283997 192.168.1.1 66R "DEBIAN#03" 1088283997 192.168.1.1 66R "DEBIAN#20" 1088283997 192.168.1.1 66R "MEGANS#00" 1088324846 192.168.1.41 64R "MEGANS#20" 1088324846 192.168.1.41 64R "MTROUSERS#00" 1088324803 192.168.1.10 64R "MTROUSERS#20" 1088324803 192.168.1.10 64R "RITWA#00" 1088311573 192.168.1.12 64R "RITWA#03" 1088311591 192.168.1.12 64R "RITWA#20" 1088311592 192.168.1.12 64R "WORKGROUP#00" 1088324846 255.255.255.255 e4R "WORKGROUP#1b" 1088283997 192.168.1.1 64R "WORKGROUP#1e" 1088324846 255.255.255.255 e4R debian:/usr/local/samba/var/locks# cat browse.dat "WORKGROUP" c0001000 "DEBIAN" "WORKGROUP" "DEBIAN" 400d9a03 "Samba 3.0.4" "WORKGROUP" ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.

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Traffic Monitoring
by Felix Hohener 24 Jun '04

24 Jun '04

We got a small network which connects to the internet via a switch and an ADSL router. We have no access or control over the router (corporate office only). I need to monitor the traffic between the individual work stations and the router in a as simple way as possible. Any suggestions? It can be Linux or Windows based, also commercial options are considered. Thanks --- Felix

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Debian update not working
by Glenn Ramsey 24 Jun '04

24 Jun '04

Hi, I'm running Debian/testing and I just tried to install a new package that had to update a lot of dependencies. Some of the downloads timed out, this is because they are outdated and no longer exist in the pool, so I need to do an apt-get update. This usually works out fine but right now apt-get update doesn't update the package files. I checked the packages it wants on the Debian website and they have been updated. Why would apt-get update have suddenly stopped working properly? (I'm also using apt-proxy but I don't think that should affect it) g -- Glenn Ramsey <glenn(a)componic.co.nz> 07 8627077 http://www.componic.co.nz

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Re: Committee meeting minutes
by David King 24 Jun '04

24 Jun '04

The reason they haven't supplied the IR254 booklet is "Clubs and societies (IR254) booklet has been withdrawn and is currently being reviewed to bring it up to date with current legislation." This quote can be found at http://www.ird.govt.nz/library/newsletters/aanswers/2004/2004mar.html >Craig B is trying to contact the IRD to become tax exempt but they >completely fail to produce the IR254 booklet that is required. --- David G King : d_king(a)xtra.co.nz http://dking.8m.net NZART, AREC

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Monday Meeting
by Greig McGill 23 Jun '04

23 Jun '04

>From the Wiki: Targeting Linux to Business. I will be covering: a.. What Linux is currently very good at. b.. What I think is required to improve this. c.. What Linux currently CAN'T do d.. What I think is required to help this e.. Some notes on advocating Linux to businesses. Please replace Linux with OSS/FreeBSD/Whatever as your needs dictate. :) Location - Crawshaw Primary School see http://www.wlug.org.nz/CrawshawSchool Greig.

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