Re: [wlug] Suse Live CD
by Craig Box
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
15 years, 8 months
Dual head vid card for FC2
by Jodi Thomson
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."
15 years, 8 months
ANNOUNCEMENT: Annual General Meeting, 13 Sep (2 weeks today)
by Craig Box
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
15 years, 9 months
SUSE Personal 9.1 review
by Craig Box
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.
15 years, 9 months
Can some *please* explain this error
by Lindsay Druett
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)
15 years, 9 months
Modern software on old hardware
by Craig Box
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
15 years, 9 months
RE: [wlug] VOIP
by Lindsay Druett
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
>
>
15 years, 9 months
VOIP
by jaytee＠clear.net.nz
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
15 years, 9 months
Yoper
by s swami
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.
15 years, 9 months
Filesystem Top.
by Oliver Jones
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
15 years, 9 months
