- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Re: SUse v FC2
by Craig Box 05 Sep '04

05 Sep '04

(also CC'd to wlug-list for interest) Hi Gun, > I'm investigating a server for my NW of 6-8 workstations. Do you > think FC2 or SuSE as a server for file and printer sharing? Is SUse > free like FC2 is? SUSE is free in the same way that all Linuxes are; they're built on GPL components, but some distributions are not necessarily made available the same way as others. You can download SUSE as a Knoppix-like live CD, a single CD "personal" distribution (that isn't what you want for a server) or you can get the packages for other versions of SUSE from their FTP site, and install it manually. You could also find people who have a copy locally, I'm expect Gund or Michael Cree will be able to help. Of those two I would recommend Fedora Core here - this is my personal recommendation, as I know it and like it and I can't really say the same about SUSE. As for "the recommendation of the LUG as a whole", if you're prepared to do everything from the command line and do a lot of learning, you still can't go past Debian. There will be a new version called "Sarge" (3.1) released in a couple of months; you can get a recent ISO file of the installer and go from there, downloading more recent packages off the Internet, or you could install Woody (3.0) and wait till Sarge is released and release over the top, etc.. A large reason people that moved away from Red Hat to Debian on their servers is that Red Hat didn't have an automatic way of downloading and installing packages, and Debian did (apt-get). Now, Red Hat (in the form of the Fedora Project) has yum, apt-get and up2date to choose from, it's not really a problem any more. Also, there is more software packaged for Debian (11,000 packages or so) but for the ones that you regularly need, they're all available in 3rd parties repositories for Fedora. >From my estimates of your experience, I think you couldn't go past Fedora Core. FC3 is also coming out in a couple of months time. Craig

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RE: [wlug] SUSE Personal 9.1 review
by jaytee＠clear.net.nz 03 Sep '04

03 Sep '04

Yes it is, right under NZ. I don't think you got that far because of no dial up connection > > CHAT means Chatham Islands. Thanks Wayne I wondered what NZ chat time was when I saw it there (silly noob) > And it's moot because it wasn't listed at all. > > Craig I installed SuSE onto my laptop and desktop. Got a couple of problems with the monitors not reporting there X Y's When I manually configured them (with the gooey)The laptop remains unaffected and keeps reporting the problem, the desktopnow proudly announces there have been changes at every boot. We have a dial up with free net They have a peculiar habit of killing the connection every three hours which has meant that the update has crashed a couple of times and now yast is reporting that it " could not write server list to disk abort update?" If anyone knows how to deal with this it would be nice to hear from them.. Regards John..

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RE: [wlug] SUSE Personal 9.1 review
by Gund Wehsling 03 Sep '04

03 Sep '04

Hi Thank you for the great review, I would like to make a few points known that are not obvious to first time installers of SuSE: New Zealand timezone is listed under the 'Global' section in the continent selector as NZ or NZ-CHAT. ACPI is still regarded as experimental and a message to this effect is displayed when you try to alter any power settings. The message says to enable ACPI before the settings will become available. ACPI is located in the last tab on the power screen and can be enabled. Once enabled, the power control and ACPI functions become available. The idea to make it small and accessible will make it small and accessible, so there is little room for 'nice to haves'. The target market is definitely not the general LINUX community, so there will be no compile tools and little command line stuff. I think the idea is that my mother could install it and use it well on her P1. It autodetects _most_ commercially available hardware and is a great alternative to a couple of hundred dollars worth of competitive products. Other than that I liked your review and would like to see more like this on lists like this. Many thanks Gund -----Original Message----- From: Craig Box [mailto:craig(a)dubculture.co.nz] Sent: Wed 1/09/2004 21:13 To: Waikato Linux Users Group Cc: Subject: [wlug] SUSE Personal 9.1 review 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. _______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug

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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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RE: [wlug] SUSE Personal 9.1 review
by Lindsay Druett 02 Sep '04

02 Sep '04

But alas, on all the Cisco courses I've been on (a couple of them led by instructors with CCIE) had Windows machines and were using Hyperterm. I've also seen to many people out in the field using Hyperterm. It's *very* sad... > -----Original Message----- > From: Daniel Lawson [mailto:daniel(a)meta.net.nz] > Sent: Thursday, 2 September 2004 09:55 > To: Waikato Linux Users Group > Subject: Re: [wlug] SUSE Personal 9.1 review > > > Lindsay Druett wrote: > > >I guess minicom is a 'nice to have'. > > > >It certainly would have been nice for me to have when I wanted to > >connect my laptop/desktop into the console port of a Cisco device. > > > > > > > > Real Cisco engineers use cat. > > > > _______________________________________________ > wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug > >

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RE: [wlug] SUSE Personal 9.1 review
by Lindsay Druett 01 Sep '04

01 Sep '04

I guess minicom is a 'nice to have'. It certainly would have been nice for me to have when I wanted to connect my laptop/desktop into the console port of a Cisco device. Well, can't complain too much, at least joe (Joe's own editor) was part of the package. > The idea to make it small and accessible will make it small > and accessible, so there is little room for 'nice to haves'. > The target market is definitely not the general LINUX > community, so there will be no compile tools and little > command line stuff. I think the idea is that my mother could > install it and use it well on her P1. It autodetects _most_ > commercially available hardware and is a great alternative to > a couple of hundred dollars worth of competitive products. >

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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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Yoper CD wanted
by s swami 27 Aug '04

27 Aug '04

Hi folks I've been meaning to test-drive Yoper for a while (and now it has KDE 3.3 :-) But I haven't been able to find a spot on yoper.com where I can buy a CD copy of the latest version and my 33k dial-up connection is a little shy about the bittorrent that has kindly been made available. Does someone have a CD? Happy to pay student prices :-) Cheers, Sid.

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CD issues
by Jared Wigmore 26 Aug '04

26 Aug '04

Hi, I regularly get the message, "hda: lost interrupt" (that's my cd drive). Additionally, it takes a long time to mount, and to access each directory/file. I'm using kernel 2.4 on RedHat 9. Any advice. ===== -- JaredWigmore -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCM/CS/S d? s+++:-- a? C++++ UL++ P--- L++ E>+++ W++ N>+ o? K- w--- O? M-- V-- PS-- Y-- PGP- t+++ 5? X R* tv b++ DI D G e- h! !r z- ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ http://www.wlug.org.nz/JaredWigmore http://AnswersInGenisis.org/ http://www.againsttcpa.com/ ---------------------------------------- Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies. http://au.movies.yahoo.com

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Linux challenges for students from IBM
by Craig Box 25 Aug '04

25 Aug '04

"College and university students can make improvements to Linux, create usability tools or enhancements, or design Linux applications. The goals of the contest are to: 1. Promote student use of Linux worldwide 2. Solve real-world Linux issues-make Linux better! 3. Design or develop an application using Linux Prizes will be awarded to the top 20 entries, judged by IBM Linux personnel. These 20 students will receive an IBM ThinkPad with Linux and will also have the opportunity to qualify for one of three summer 2005 Internships at our Linux Technology Center. There will also be a University Award, one (1) Linux 16-node "start-up" cluster, given to the university who has the highest overall average from their students' entries." http://www.developer.ibm.com/university/students/contests/linux/ Craig

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Linux Laptops.
by Oliver Jones 25 Aug '04

25 Aug '04

Recently I've been thinking about buying a laptop. I've been thinking about an Apple 17" G4 Powerbook but I figure that's just a little to far from the flock... ie, I'd have to find replacements for too much software I currently use. For serious stuff I currently use Linux (Fedora Core 1) and it's associated apps. For "play" I use Windows XP. On XP I mainly use things like DVD Decrypter, PowerDVD, etc. Media playback and storage utils basically. Occasionally I play some Windows games but I'd be happy enough with just my consoles for that. There are some things about buying a laptop that concern me. One is unsupported hardware in Linux. The others are screen size (I use a 21" CRT at the moment) and speed (current PC's is a 2.6Ghz P4s). Anyone here have any suggestions regarding desktop replacement Laptops that have very good hardware support on Linux? 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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RE: [wlug] Linux Laptops.
by David Nicholls 25 Aug '04

25 Aug '04

mind you are you aware that mandrake do a PPC version of 9.1? for both sale and free download (i have all three ISOs if anyone wants them by the way). unsure just how good it is but it is one option also there is the opendarwin project (OS X backend for them as is iggerant ;]) - bsd based of course. once again i have an ISO i downloaded out of interest if anybody is. cheers... david -----Original Message----- From: Oliver Jones [mailto:oliver(a)deeper.co.nz] Sent: Wednesday, 25 August 2004 11:58 am Subject: [wlug] Linux Laptops. Recently I've been thinking about buying a laptop. I've been thinking about an Apple 17" G4 Powerbook but I figure that's just a little to far from the flock... ie, I'd have to find replacements for too much software I currently use. For serious stuff I currently use Linux (Fedora Core 1) and it's associated apps. For "play" I use Windows XP. On XP I mainly use things like DVD Decrypter, PowerDVD, etc. Media playback and storage utils basically. Occasionally I play some Windows games but I'd be happy enough with just my consoles for that. There are some things about buying a laptop that concern me. One is unsupported hardware in Linux. The others are screen size (I use a 21" CRT at the moment) and speed (current PC's is a 2.6Ghz P4s). Anyone here have any suggestions regarding desktop replacement Laptops that have very good hardware support on Linux? Regards Oliver Jones

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sendmail issue
by Gavin Denby 24 Aug '04

24 Aug '04

I am setting up a simple sendmail replacement for an old redhat machine with a dying hard drive. I decided to use a newer distro and went to slackware. I have copied the old data from the sendmail.cf files over and everything runs well until I send a local mail from console. Instead of getting mail from user(a)domainname.com the machine name is added, and i get user(a)machinename.domainname.com Of course if you reply this gets to be a real mess. Clients accessing via pop are ok , its just local automated messages that are causing issues. I have set Dj$w.domainname.com I have commented out all classes. I added DMdomainname.com I made the start with M4, is there something I can add there that will fix this ?? I hoped Masquerade_as(domainname.com)dnl would be enough, but still the machine name appears in the mail address ... ARGHHH !!!!! I planned to add an auto mail tool, but not until this is fixed. What have I missed ??? -- "Engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyse so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance." Dr A R Dykes.

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WLUG Meeting is tonight
by Meeting Reminder bot 22 Aug '04

22 Aug '04

The WLUG meeting is this evening ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Hacking your XBox - The Linux Way!. DrewBroadley (coming all the way from PalmerstonNorth) will cover Linux on an XBox, including using it as a media center. Don't miss this one! Location: CrawshawSchool Time: 7pm Doors will be open from ten to seven or so, presentation will start shortly after 7. __Topics__ How to Mod an XBOX: *Software Modifications *Hardware Modifications Xbox and Linux *Web/File/Media Server *Distros available Opensource Software and the XBOX *Xbox Media Center __Possible Extra Topics__ ''add your own suggestions''

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RE: [wlug] LINUX Servers in the SMB Workspace.
by Gund Wehsling 22 Aug '04

22 Aug '04

Hi Good points raised and not ones we are ignoring. To make sure we are not re-inventing the wheel, we have started a download of SuSE Standard Server 9 eval and once it is here, I will copy it and distribute it to all that are interested. In the meantime, a concensus needs to be reached as to what the server will support. I know that it would be nice to have a server that supplies all things to all people, but we feel that covering all bases may be too broad and it would be easier to sell a server solution that carries out basic although vital tasks, with ease, in such a way that the market comes to accept the solutions and products as stable and secure. For this reason and to keep things simple, we have a list of 'basics' that should be setup, standard and easy to use, troubleshoot and maintain, they are: DNS DHCP SAMBA / File and Print NETWORK SERVICES / Routing SECURITY / Firewall and authentication WEB / Proxy MAIL / IMAP and or Webmail The server design will be setup and tested as rigourisly as possible, fully documented, have a scripted install (or an aesy to follow install path that is well documented) that enables an easy setup / rebuild. The above services will become available within hours of arriving at a new site and with minimal 'tweaking / hacking'. The base idea that we don't want to lose here is that it must be easy to understand / support / install and must be reliable and stable enough that the end users start to change thier ideas about proprietry software and operating systems and the open source model is then promoted. Many of my customers are still 'fiddling' with LINUX and many of them are still concerned about what is a good desktop and what is a good word processor and I think that those discussions will go on forever until sombody realises that actual value of an installed and established system. So I am hoping we can spend time deciding on and testing and proving the best means of setting up and supplying the above services to sites that need them in a stable configuration at a fair cost in terms of resource (money or time). It has been my experience that most smaller companies will not really worry too much about what is running at the back-end and the mid to larger ones want clearly defined proceedures and best-practices before a solution can be considered, so as much as I hate paperwork, part of this project will be to supply those, as part of the bundle / solution. Now you can all start throwing chairs. Please address feedback direclty to the group unless it is trivial and please 'snip' this msg when replying. Many thanks Gund -----Original Message----- From: Oliver Jones [mailto:oliver(a)deeper.co.nz] Sent: Fri 20/08/2004 16:50 To: Waikato Linux Users Group Cc: Subject: Re: [wlug] LINUX Servers in the SMB Workspace. I personally think a turn key solution for SMB customers is a great idea. There are a few already out there already. The hardest thing I think you will find is defining exactly what features you solution should have. There is also a lot of work involved in making it self manageable. If you're going to offer management services as well that removes some of that integration work. Regards On Fri, 2004-08-20 at 15:10, Daniel Lawson wrote: >I will try to clarify what I asked yesterday and then we can start a chair fight. > > Excellent :) > >I am looking at starting a discussion / dialogue / knowledge transfer between all interested with the view to testing and building a single working solution that can be installed / sold to small to medium businesses. > >We (my colleagues and I) would like to build this on SuSE Server 9. At this moment, we think we have a viable product if we can all agree on what services this server will provide and how. Then, strip away the unnecessary packages and rpms till there is a 'standard' build that can easily be supported / installed. > > Ah, ok. Yes, this sounds like a good thing to work on. >I asked this becasue I wanted to get away from a discussions about desktop applications and processes and preferences and start focussing on an actual server product that can be sold or installed with the associated services. > > A wise move! >Anyhow, I hope this is not too vauge, nothing is actually written down yet, so we are starting fresh and anybody interested can join in or we can discuss it here if this forum will support that. > > As far as I'm concerned , it's fine to carry it on here, although it's trivial to move to another list if we find that it gets annoying. Daniel _______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug <http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug> -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver(a)deeperdesign.com <mailto:oliver.jones(a)deeperdesign.com> » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com <http://www.deeperdesign.com>

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RE: [wlug] SuSE 9.1 again
by Gund Wehsling 22 Aug '04

22 Aug '04

Hi Refresh my memory, what hardware are you using? Have you tried the 'safe mode' installations? Rgds Gund -----Original Message----- From: jaytee(a)clear.net.nz [mailto:jaytee(a)clear.net.nz] Sent: Sun 22/08/2004 13:24 To: wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Cc: Subject: [wlug] SuSE 9.1 again Hi All. After the SuSE failed to boot after a couple of install attempts I tried the Knoppix live C/D. It did not boot either and showed a page of I/O errors then locked on the Knoppix splash screen. <snip>

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(no subject)
by jaytee＠clear.net.nz 22 Aug '04

22 Aug '04

Hi All. After the SuSE failed to boot after a couple of install attempts I tried the Knoppix live C/D. It did not boot either and showed a page of I/O errors then locked on the Knoppix splash screen. I reinstalled SuSE again making sure that the Linux partions were formatted (yes) This time the programme did run with one error on screen. Resolution x and y not entered fonts may be affected. What do I need to do to solve that? Also the modem is not configured correctly. Stupid mode is not checked, should it be?? Regards John..

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SuSE 9.1 again
by jaytee＠clear.net.nz 22 Aug '04

22 Aug '04

Hi All. After the SuSE failed to boot after a couple of install attempts I tried the Knoppix live C/D. It did not boot either and showed a page of I/O errors then locked on the Knoppix splash screen. I reinstalled SuSE again making sure that the Linux partions were formatted (yes) This time the programme did run with one error on screen. Resolution x and y not entered fonts may be affected. What do I need to do to solve that? Also the modem is not configured correctly. Stupid mode is not checked, should it be?? Regards John..

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help at school
by Terry Cole 21 Aug '04

21 Aug '04

I have at school an existing web server/Intranet (RedHat 9). This controls access to the net using Squid and Dans Guardian. I have had a Uni student as part of her final paper set up a new server using Suse 9 has a replacement. She has now completed her degree and moved on to full time employment out of town. The new server also hosts one of our domains. I would like help on configuring Squid, etc and swapping over the servers with minimal down time. Can someone on the group help me with this process? It would mean someone from Rotorua or someone who is prepared to travel across to us. We will pay you for your time, etc. Please contact me off this list, if you can help. Thanks Terry Cole Rotorua, New Zealand mailto:terry(a)cole.gen.nz http://www.cole.gen.nz http://www.websnz.com

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Re: [wlug] Suse CD install
by jaytee＠clear.net.nz 20 Aug '04

20 Aug '04

Hi Group, I did get a SuSE 9.1 and tried to install onto Dell cpx 500 mhz laptop with ati rage video card. The install went pretty good except no 3D, I was not allowed to change the screen resolution, eth0 and modem were not configured. Set up ran right up to intial logon then blank blue screened at the end of the linux startup routine I wonder if I am obliged to get an online update before I get Linux up?? If any one can help (in lay terms) please go right ahead. Regards John..

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