August 2004 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Re: [wlug] Suse Live CD
by Craig Box 13 Sep '04

13 Sep '04

On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 22:02 +0000, Felix Hohener wrote: > Craig > > Just tried this, but I am not going anywhere. Is there any password involved > in the log on or just "user(a)jetstreamgames.co.nz" and nothing else? You need to specify a password I believe, but it can be anything. The username can also be anything as long as it ends with @jetstreamgames.co.nz You can then log in but only connect a range of selected IPs for games servers, including ftp.jetstreamgames.co.nz - make sure that whatever DNS server you're using is inside this list of IPs. You can use jetstreamgames's DNS server at 203.96.91.1 Craig

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Dual head vid card for FC2
by Jodi Thomson 07 Sep '04

07 Sep '04

I've just upgraded to Fedora Core 2 and my old dual head config of a RIVA TNT2 & S3 Trio64 no longer wants to work for some unknown reason. To that end I'm looking at buying a new dual head card to replace them with. I've tried a MGA G400 with limited success as the secondary display is blotchy. I've tried googling for xorg supported hardware with little to no results. Can anyone suggest a card that will work? Cheers Jodi ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------- Jodi W. Anderson, Mr (BA, A+, MCP) - Computer Systems Consultant Waikato University Library - Computing Operations Group Ph: +64 7 838 4323 email: jodi(a)waikato.ac.nz "Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before."

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ANNOUNCEMENT: Annual General Meeting, 13 Sep (2 weeks today)
by Craig Box 06 Sep '04

06 Sep '04

In accordance with Rule 6 of the charter, I would like to remind all members that the Waikato Linux Users Group (Incorporated) will be holding its Annual General Meeting on Monday, 13 September, 2004, at 7pm, at the Crawshaw School Hall (the same location as the Installfest.) All WLUG members are encouraged to make nominations for the WLUG committee for 2005. The charter specifies the committee as consisting of a President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, and five general committee members. We are accepting nominations via the web page http://www.wlug.org.nz/WlugElections. The conditions of nomination are: * You shouldn't nominate yourself. (If you want to stand, post a note on the bottom of the page asking for someone to nominate you.) * You can only nominate or second someone if you are currently a 2003-2004 paid up member. * You can only vote at the upcoming AGM if you were a 2003-2004 paid up member, and have signed a new membership form for 2004-2005 (remember, you have 90 days to pay.) If you're at all interested, please ask someone to nominate you! Regards, Craig

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SUSE Personal 9.1 review
by Craig Box 02 Sep '04

02 Sep '04

As pointed out on the SUSE page on the wiki, the German distribution SUSE has never had much of a following in New Zealand. With the purchase of Novell and the impending push in support that Novell will give for SUSE based products, and the new availability of a one-CD 'personal' edition, I thought I'd give SUSE a try. Installation The personal edition of SUSE comes on one CD, and it seems very positive from the start. Immediately upon boot you get a nice graphical splash screen, allowing you to either continue booting from the hard drive or install Linux, in normal or failsafe mode. It will attempt to automatically detect your screen resolution for the graphical installer, or you can pick one from a list. When YaST, the SUSE installer/setup tool loads, the good impressions continue. The installer is very much like the RedHat/FedoraProject installer, with help down the left side and the main options in a larger window on the right. It makes some judgements about your computer and offers a single click install. It detected a Windows partition and offered to shrink it and install into the newly created space, which would be an excellent option for new users. On my test machine, a P3-500 laptop with 192mb of RAM, I told it I wanted to manually override this and install to the whole hard drive. There are some niggles in the installer - you specify the time zone at this point, and there wasn't one for New Zealand at all! I had to select GMT+12 from an "Etc" list, but this won't account for daylight savings. At this point I should point out that the functionality available is limited by the fact this is a one CD distribution - you don't get GNOME, but SUSE has always been strongly aligned with KDE. The installer claimed it was going to install 1.4Gb of data - decent compression for a 700mb CD - and did so in a little over 45 minutes. The slide show was reasonably standard, offering screenshots and soundbites. KDE is referred to as "the comfortable desktop" - a comment on it's well known "resemblance" to MicrosoftWindows, I'm sure. The screenshots looked like they could do with being updated. They advertised Kopete and GAIM on the same screen - while it's nice to have options, it's also nice to have a 'best of breed'. (The personal edition doesn't actually have GAIM). Also, for a Windows user going through this setup, I think I'd like to see projects with less 'kooky' names. After a reboot, YaST continued with it's first boot routine, setting up user accounts and hardware. It complained about 'root' as a root password on two counts, being too short and containing the username. It also asked me to create a user account, and I notice it had auto-login on for that user. It also auto-detected the laptop's built in modem. After about an hour total, I had booted into SUSE. Desktop Experience Linux is Linux, and as a regular GNOME user, it's hard to judge a KDE desktop objectively. I'm not sure how much of the issues were SUSE and how much were KDE, but as SUSE are the major sponsor of KDE development I assume the two are interconnected somehow. The desktop is very reminiscent of Knoppix or Mandrake, but after an excellent looking setup routine, the default desktop was disappointing. The main fonts were too small and the OpenOffice fonts were too big. Changing the KDE fonts was simple; setting font size to 90% in OpenOffice made them look almost identical (more so than they do on Fedora), but it's not something that a normal user will be able to do. It's possibly not even something they'd notice. Desktop icons give you a nice tooltip, but they need to be single clicked, which isn't immediately clear. I had two of everything popping up straight away. For a personal edition desktop, it offers litlte more than three games - Enigma, Freeciv and Frozen Bubble. KDE on other distros ships with dozens of little games - I found it odd that they were all missing. Surely something like the LIRC client could be cleared to make way for Soko Ban. The SUSE help, built on the KDE help center, has a great manual built in, but it seems a little out of date, and it isn't customized for the personal edition. The desktop sharing stuff in KDE looked promising, if not a direct copy of the Remote Assistance feature in Windows. I'm glad to see the mail/contacts/calendar apps compiled into one application but it's hidden in the Office menu below "Document Viewer" and above "Office Suite", yet named "Kontact" and not "Groupware Client" or "Email/Contacts". Overall however the menu structure was far more contained than Fedora's mess, and more manageable than Knoppix by virtue of having less packages installed. As a personal edition I didn't check too far into the console - Aristotle suggests that it's crippled without a compiler, but I was trying to use locate and it didn't even have that! Surely it could have done away with something like the LIRC server in favour of a bit more power in the CLI. Hardware support YaST has some nice ideas - it has a "Load Vendor Driver CD" option for example, which would be great if vendors shipped driver CDs, but after the initial detection of the modem, I was let down by it saying that it needed the 'ltmodem' package, which wasn't on the CD. SUSE 9.1 Personal comes with Sun's Java, Acrobat Reader and RealPlayer, so they're obviously happy with licensing software. The lack of internet connectivity meant that, without a network card in the laptop, I couldn't go any further with internet access. Otherwise, YaST seems like a very clean interface for configuring a system, and isn't just a copy of Control Panel. Being built on the 2.6 kernel, I would have expected better laptop support as well. Closing the hood seemed to make no effect, either on AC power or on the battery. The ACPI options in YaST suggested that there was no ACPI support, and APM didn't do anything. Sound "just worked" - including software mixing in all the applications I tried, including the always tricky RealPlayer. I was very glad to see Noatun dropped in favour of xmms. Conclusion I have only seen little bits of Mandrake, but from what I have seen, as a KDE distribution it rivals SUSE on every strength, and now that YaST is open source, it could well have everything that SUSE Personal has to offer. If you're looking for something to give to your Mum, and you're a KDE fan, evaluate Mandrake along with SUSE. Personally, I hope the fact that SUSE is now under the same wing as Novell's Ximian team, means that we will see some of their great advances and ability to make simple tidy ups to a broken interface, applied to the SUSE desktop.

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Can some *please* explain this error
by Lindsay Druett 01 Sep '04

01 Sep '04

What's this error message all about when I'm trying todo the following apt-get install cyrus21-admin cyrus21-common cyrus21-clients cyrus21-doc cyrus21-imapd cyrus21-pop3d libcyrus-imap-perl21 sasl2-bin I get this error message... dpkg: syntax error: unknown group `Debian-exim' in statusoverride file E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

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Modern software on old hardware
by Craig Box 01 Sep '04

01 Sep '04

I recently had a Celeron 500 that I wanted to install for my flatmate to use as an internet/email machine. All evidence points to the 2.6 kernel being better on old hardware than 2.4, and in general support for hardware increases as you have newer software, so I thought I'd try installing Fedora Core 2 (then test3) on the machine. I've heard good things about the XFCE desktop environment, so I installed that. The machine started out with 64mb of RAM and took an ice age to install (I think it's about the RPM database needing to be in RAM at install time). It quickly got upgraded to 192mb RAM, which isn't exactly "new modern specs" but is a machine that was better specced than many machines we had at the recent installfest. I ran a quick, responsive, usable desktop environment on a 286 at 10Mhz. Linux was basically unusable on this machine. Software took an age to load, you could hardly run two things at the same time, and it was constantly in swap. The options seemed to be "run Windows 98" (the OS the machine was originally shipped with), or get some sort of Linux distribution that was around the same age. The Fedora Legacy project provides security updates for Red Hat as far back as 7.3, but I really don't want to run old software. In the end I found a surprising third option - I installed Windows XP and turned off most of the flash visual bits and pieces, and ended up with a usable machine running modern software. Not something that I wanted to have to do! There's a long standing belief that Linux can be used to revitalise old hardware. Short of using a terminal server of some description (which wasn't an option in this case), is this true? Craig

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RE: [wlug] VOIP
by Lindsay Druett 30 Aug '04

30 Aug '04

Argh... This sounds so sad, yet another person wants to use a Windows machine as a SIP phone... Around $ 250.00 will buy you a Cisco ATA-186 phone adaptor and give you two phone lines... Visit www.fwd.pulver.com and download their IP Phone and connect up with them, get a phone number and try some of these phone numbers... http://www.wlug.org.nz/SIPDirectory You could also try www.stanaphone.com Here's my set up http://www.lindsay.wired.net.nz/projects/sip/ > -----Original Message----- > From: jaytee(a)clear.net.nz [mailto:jaytee(a)clear.net.nz] > Sent: Monday, 30 August 2004 17:01 > To: Waikato Linux Users Group > Subject: [wlug] VOIP > > > Hi All, > Can anyone give me some simple instructions for a > windows 98 user to get internet telphone service here in NZ? > Regards John > > > info/wlug > > _______________________________________________ > wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug > >

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VOIP
by jaytee＠clear.net.nz 30 Aug '04

30 Aug '04

Hi All, Can anyone give me some simple instructions for a windows 98 user to get internet telphone service here in NZ? Regards John info/wlug

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Yoper
by s swami 29 Aug '04

29 Aug '04

I've just installed V2.0 (thinking it was 2.1). Yoper V2.0 comes with KDE 3.2.3 (V2.1 comes with KDE 3.3 and OpenOffice.org so I'll be visiting Copyleft soon). I have a small network and always use /etc/hosts rather than DHCP. I might have done something wrong (I know I didn't say "yes" to DHCP) so eth0 wasn't up. I fixed this by putting the appropriate ifconfigs in /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S20network (RedHat-like rc configurations are scary!) SiS SI7012 audio works out-of-the-box. My wheel mouse was detected. (Hey, it's a big deal for me ok ;-) I'll have to set up my brother HL-1430 printer manually. And one small thing: Yoper is as responsive as W2K on this machine -- in fact, it is probably faster. Barring something major, Yoper will now be my desktop OS (just like they said it would :-) _Kudos to Andreas and his development team_ Sid.

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Filesystem Top.
by Oliver Jones 28 Aug '04

28 Aug '04

Heya. Anyone know of a tool that is like "top" but for showing the number of files a process has open. I know all about lsof. But I want something along the lines of: PID NAME OPENFILES 1234 httpd 20 5321 bash 5 ... Etc... Something I can sort by number of files open like you can sort top by memory or cpu usage. Anyone know of anything like this or knows how to get lsof and some grep/perl/awk filters to do something similar. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com

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