On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 09:43, Rob Wood wrote: > Hello CLUG, > Rob Wood (Woodsey) here. I attended the meeting on 04December (introduced > myself as marine engineer), it was great to meet everyone for the first > time. I was amazed how helpful and welcoming everyone was, thanks for that. > Sorry I had to leave early, but found both presentations very interesting. > Rik's site "infohelp" is a fantastic utility. > > I probably won't be able to attend again as I have to move to Auckland due > to my girlfriends job, but before I go, would you guys mind if I ask a few > questions? > > Well I'll ask them anyway. > > I have tried several Linux distributions in the past couple of years and > got to various stages of success. My most successful was with Mandrake 9 > with which I actually got online and managed to print something. That was > just before coming to New Zealand from the UK. I still consider myself a > raw beginner so I am going back to basics. > > I presently have Smoothwall 2 as a firewall which connects to an ADSL > router. Since receiving e-mails from the group, I have heard talk of IPCop. > Is this a similar thing? Yes, IPCop is, perhaps 'was', a fork of Smoothwall. The IPCop people have put a lot of effort into removing the Smoothwall code from their offering.
> Is it better or worse? Much of a muchness, IPCop has a 'community' focus, while Smoothwall is much more of a commercial exercise. > On Smoothwall, I can't get > the DMZ pinhole to work with my server so the server has to connect > straight to the router. It's probably my fault but would IPCop do this > better? Probably. > I have Ubuntu on my laptop (kindly given out at the meeting), dual booting > with WinXP but it doesn't like my laptop pnp BIOS and only boots every > other time with lots of fatal error messages. I can't find a way to disable > the pnp BIOS. Is there any other workaroud? Laptops can be rather trying to get going. There are many WWW site devoted to the exercise. http://tuxmobil.org/ is the Grand-daddy of them all. > Can anyone reccomend a distro well suited for use on a home run web server > to run Apache2. My hardware is primitive so I envisage a small distribution > without any "whistles and bells" I'm running on Win2000 at present but I'm > not happy with it. Any Linux will be fine hosting Apache. Choose the one with which you are most familiar, and load as few apps as possible. Mandrake would do the job well. It used to be possible to create a command-line only installation. I expect that that is still the case. It's sensible not to load the X-11 windowing server on a machine which is open to the Internet. > I downloaded Xfree window package for my experimental/learning linux box > (486 with TINY Linux) and have a file that looks like a zip file under > windows but has the name XTinyBin.tar What do I do with this now? (polite > answers only please) tar tvf XTinyBin.tar to see the contents of the archive. tar xvf XTinyBin.tar to extract contents of the archive. > Any help with these questions would be welcome. np -- Sincerely etc., Christopher Sawtell
