- wlug - University of Waikato Mail Lists

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@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@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@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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