Re: OT: Rant
On 24-Jan-02 Dan Griswold wrote:
dman [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
The LaTeX center environment follows that style too (FWIW). (I
don't believe it is possible to have only part of a line be in a
center environment. Nope, I just tried it. \begin{center} starts a
new paragraph (or at least a line))
The \tabular environment is what you would use for this.
This looks like over-kill! The \tabular envoronment
is heavy.
I don't know TeX well enough to know whether this is the
only option, but I would be surprised if it did not somewhere
have the equivalent of groff's .tl:
.tl 'lefthand string'centre string'righthand string'
which outputs a line with lefthand string left justified,
centre string centred, and righthand string right
justified.
The typical use for such a thing is three-part running
headers on successive pages, which is a very basic
need, and there must be some way in which TeX does this
layout for this purpose, which could be borrowed.
Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972
Date: 24-Jan-02 Time: 08:51:11
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RE: roff / tex comparison (was Re: OT: Rant)
On 17-Jan-02 dman wrote: On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 07:25:32PM +, Ted Harding wrote: | I'd like to suggest giving 'groff' a try. | I reckon it's well up with TeX, and better in some respects. Can you provide a list of the tradeoffs between [gnt]roff and (La)TeX? I've started with LaTeX; read lshort and now have Lamport's book. I've barely seen some snippets of roff source. A prof. I have now (Ken Reek) used a roff clone to typeset all of his handouts. They look nice too. I'm interested in knowing the differences and tradeoffs between the two systems, and how easy/quick is learning roff? The comparison could be very lengthy! Both systems involve a biggish learning phase to become really proficient, though both are fairly simple (and I reckon groff is simpler) for elementary use. Both use the markup principle, of course, i.e. in-line tags which specify formatting requests. In my view, this is terser and less distracting in troff than in TeX, and I reckon that working with troff is quicker and simpler that with TeX. The main difference in approach to formatting between TeX and groff is that TeX buffers more input before deciding precisely how to format it: for instance, TeX's line-breaks and hyphenations are computed in terms of a criterion calculated for a whole paragraph, and also there is a degree of vertical justification functionality for a whole page; all this is based on the glue concept. On the other hand, troff's lookahead is basically only one character, and it really only buffers one word. This can lead to TeX auto-generating a more pleasing layout than troff auto-generates; though this difference is rarely evident, in my experience, and in any case it is always possible to tweak the layout by hand in troff, once the content is in its final form. In my experience, you hardly ever regret using troff rather than TeX for such reasons. TeX also comes with a much bigger default repertoire of symbols and such than troff does, but again you can install TeX fonts in groff, so this difference can be eliminated. I don't have enough experience of using TeX to give a fair comparison in terms of capabilities and ease of use, but I can certainly do what I want in groff (and I sometimes want very extreme things); and whereas it may be possible to achieve the same in TeX it is my (limited) experience that it is much harder to do something non-standard. This is (at least in part) due to the fact that in troff you are working closer to the floor -- rather similar to the way Reveal Codes in WP gives you access to the base-level formatting. Sophisticated formatting (paragraphs, footnotes, ... ) in troff depends on macros. There is a variety of macro packs available, corresponding to different styles. However, the concept of style in groff is less central than in TeX. It is certainly quite easy, when you know what you are doing, to modify macros to achieve minor changes. For many purposes, it is not too hard -- when you _really_ know what you are doing -- to write your own macros according to the style you want to achieve. One comparison srikes everyone who has used both (and it is not a criticism of the capabilities of either, though very important to users): The wide adoption of TeX, initially by the academic community and later outside, led to the production of a vast amount of documentation, including many books, on using TeX and its variants (LaTeX etc.); and much of this documentation is excellent. Troff/groff, on the other hand, is very patchily documented, and simply for this reason can be harder to learn and to use effectively. Also, TeX is TeX (and LaTeX is LaTeX etc). On the other hand, during the period (1980s-1990s) when UNIX was being split into a variety of variously incompatible versions (usually by commercial developers), this increasing diversity also took troff with it so that, again, there are various incompatible versions of UNIX troff out there. GNU groff has attempted to re-unify the situation (while keeping a compatibility mode for those who want to use it in the same way as they use UNIX troff -- though what the latter precisely means is debatable). I think the above are the main strategic comparisons. Once one gets down to detail, the list would become enormous and in any case I don't know enough about TeX to go into the detail I could go into for groff. Until a few years ago, I would have said that groff table-formatting capabilities were better than TeX's; I believe that TeX has now caught up. Highly sophisticated line-drawing capabilities have long meant that groff's diagrammatic capabilities have been excellent, and they certainly used to be better than TeX's. I can't answer for an up-to-date comparison. Groff also has an equation editor (quite similar to WP's which I suspect was based on troff's). Here I think TeX does a marginally better job, not only because of having more symbols etc (but see above) but also in terms of readily-achievable layout
Re: OT: Rant
On 16-Jan-02 Kent West wrote: Go with LaTeX. It works great. It isn't too hard to start learning, as long as you let go with of trying to control the _exact_ appearance of each letter on the page. But that's just it; I need to be able to control the _exact_ appearance of each letter. WP could adjust leading and kerning and everything. It's just a solid workhorse that I just haven't found in the open source world. Hi Kent (et al), I've been following this thread with interest. WP-5.1 used to be a trusted workhorse of mine, for very much the reasons Kent (and a few others) have given. I reckon that the Windowised version (from 6 on, but especially 8) have lost the ease of use which 5.1 on DOS had; and they have also lost some of the functionality (you can no longer edit a printer driver file as comprehensively as you could). And the GUI is much clumsier than the old function-key method. I taught a number of people how to use WP-5.1 by a very simple method. 1. Have it configured to show the menu bar. 2. Tell people: Alt-F10 (or whatever it was) for the menu; F3 (Help) then the initial letter of what you want for anything else (and so on down the tree). 3. Apart from that, just type at it. Within a short time, people taught themselves to be very slick and clever at using it. Doing it all with keystrokes led to very fast working. (As my friend Charles Curran once put it: I can touch-type, but I can't touch-mouse) I think it's a great shame that this very competent word-processing program is now sidelined. But, since that sadly is the case, one must think of alternatives. Kent mentions needing to control the details of appearance and layout precisely, but hasn't found the solution in the Open Source world. I'd like to suggest giving 'groff' a try. UNIX old-timers will know what I mean, since 'troff' was what you use[d] in UNIX for formatting documents to typesetting quality. Too many Linux users believe that 'groff' is _only_ used for formatting man pages. While it is used for that (so every time you enter man whatever you will see groff output), it has enormous capabilities. A surprising amount of professional typesetting is done with groff (or troff in UNIX houses). For instance, most of the O'Reilly books have been typeset with 'groff'. You may also come across it in unexpected places: though it's not obvious, the HarperCollins Robert French Dictionary was typeset with troff. Have a look at that if you want to see what sort of control this can give you over appearance and layout. Basically, groff is a fully-functional document preparation and typesetting package. As well as designing layout and appearance, (including tables, equations, diagrams and graphical content) you can also prepare tables of contents, indexes and bibliographies. I reckon it's well up with TeX, and better in some respects. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 16-Jan-02 Time: 19:25:32 -- XFMail --
Re: OT: Rant
On 16-Jan-02 Kent West wrote:
On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 04:55:05PM -0600, Kent West wrote:
And being able to have Left Justified, Center Justified, and Right
Justified text all on the same line, so you don't have to throw in a
bunch of spaces to get everything to (maybe) line up.
For those who don't grok this, look at the top of any man page:
man(1) Manual pager utils man(1)
That can be done with a center tab and a right-aligned tab.
Ross
Yes, but then you have to go tweaking the tab settings, and then
setting them back to normal afterward. This method works, but WP's
was simpler.
Following up on this specific point, and linking to groff as well,
you do this in {g|t}roff with
.tl 'man(1)'Manual pager utils'man(1)'
(.tl is a title line tag; .tl 'X'Y'Z' sets X left-aligned
(see, I learned!), Y centred, and Z right-aligned. As its name
suggests, its main usage is for running headers, but you can
use it anywhere on the page. X, Y or Z could be empty.
e.g.
.tl ''Header'page_number'
(This is as easy as any way of doing it in WP).
Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972
Date: 16-Jan-02 Time: 20:08:12
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Re: Where do you RTFM ?
On 26-Dec-01 Karsten M. Self wrote: The problem isn't just vi, though. _Most_ Unix commands are based on mnemonic, consonant-heavy, abbreviations: ls, cd, rm, mv, ll, who, vi, ps, mutt, df Most of these are balanced between left and right hands, leading to good natural rhythems, many are based on home-row keys, etc. Two of the most annoying Dvorak keytrokes are 'ls' (both right pinky) and 'cd' (right middle top row, right index home left reach). It sounds trivial, but you end up typing these repeatedly, and the motor memory is hard to break. While that last sentence is very true, it's not an argument for or against any particular keystroke combinations. If you change keyboard layout, you have to re-learn. And if you change back, you have to re-adapt. For what it's worth, if I have a long session at the computer keyboard (e.g. writing a report), then it takes a short while before I can play the piano properly again. And vice versa. It's Karsten's motor memory thing. I have to flush the motor buffers, so to speak. But this doesn't mean that I should re-write the music, nor that I need a piano locale on my computer ... Best wishes to all, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 26-Dec-01 Time: 09:41:17 -- XFMail --
RE: man v. info
On 25-Dec-01 Imre Vida wrote:
[snip]
The major sources of help/information for me are
the apropos, the -h/--help options and the man pages.
These are fast and efficient means to find what i want
most of the time.
As far as info is concerned, i fully agree with Karsten.
It doesn't work intuitively for me either; i just get
lost in the maze of links and 3 sentence pages
I hate it for this.
The lack of manpages, and outdated manpages are frustrating.
And what Karsten brought up is also a nice idea:
to have examples in man pages. There are some manpages with examples
but most of them are without although they are really helpful.
[snip]
I really agree with this. I find 'info' very frustrating;
the most useful way I have found to use it is simply to
scroll through as if it was one continous document, and
at that stage it might as well be in 'man' format anyway.
If you reall want to search through a 'man' page,
a simple way is
man whatever | col -b | less
('col -b' strips out any highlighting/underlining,
e.g. 'b^Hbo^Hol^Hld^Hd' and allows the keywords
to be searched for like all the others).
As to what to do about it, I can only suggest
reinstate the man pages in full. I know it's
not 'kosher' to disagreee with the GNU info
policy, but I think that those who do disagree
should say so. After all, it'a a Free and Open
World, isn't it?
Happy Christmas and New Year, and best wishes to all,
Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972
Date: 25-Dec-01 Time: 17:00:36
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RE: Man pages to PDF or RTF?
On 17-Nov-01 Rafe B. wrote: Is there a windoze util that will convert Linux man pages to RTF or PDF or Postscript? Specifically, what is the format of man pages? TeX/roff /troff/other ??? Is there a HOWTO for man-page format (There must also be a nifty indexing scheme, right?) I really want printable files. I know I can find the man pages in HTML format at many different websites -- that's not the point. Don't bother with Windows. Use the -Tdevice option to 'man' (this passes the option to 'groff'). The primary (source) format of man pages is that of 'troff' source text, to be formatted using the -man option to include the tmac.an macros (don't worry, 'man' looks after all that). So, if you want PostScript output, try (for example) man -Tps ls man_ls.ps and you will have the man page for 'ls' in PostScript (view it with say 'gv' or print it as a PS file). You can then convert it to PDF with ps2pdf (part of 'ghostscript'). Also, if you want DVI output, you could use -Tdvi instead. Hope this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 17-Nov-01 Time: 17:08:14 -- XFMail --
RE: acroread,xpdf hassle
On 15-Nov-01 Glen Snyder wrote: I've only seen this problem on one computer I use at work, which is running potato. If I try to open a pdf with acroread, the text repeats itself and then wraps over onto itself, making the document unreadable (this is with any pdf file). If I try to advance to another page, it locks up, crashes, or I get a segmentation fault. I've tried to purge acroread and reinstall.I've also tried deleting .acrorc , but the problem still reoccurs. I have a vodoo3 card and a viewsonic A75f monitor if that matters...and I do not have any other problems with display on other programs. Another issue...I can pull up the pdf files with xpdf. Although the files print ok on a ps printer, the letters all display with a dashed outline that is nearly illegible. I would imagine that this is a font server problem. Anyway...any ideas, suggestions...or anecdotes of similar experiences would be appreciated. The following may or may not work in your case, but it solved a very similar-sounding problem I had with recent Acrobat Reader: When you have opened acroread, click on the File button, then Preferences then General; then uncheck (disable) Smooth Text and Images. I don't know what the underlying explanation is, but there is an interaction between acroread's antialiasing algorithm and certain X displays (not all). Good luck. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 15-Nov-01 Time: 20:12:07 -- XFMail --
RE: OT -- Microsoft's Smart Tags
Well written, Will! On 15-Aug-01 will trillich wrote: Real Life Internet Evil: Microsoft's Smart Tags Content (the tags) are added dynamically to web pages by the browser without the permission of the person who created the pages (the webmaster or author). While strictly speaking this might not violate copyright laws (but it might be considered vandalism), it sure is rude. In fact, most people would consider it highly unethical. One question which occurred to me when Smart Tags first hit the news (though, as people are pointing out, it seems to be on hold for the time being): Suppose you create a web page, and you make a word or phrase highlighted because it's a tag for one of your own URLs (i.e. _you_ want the reader to be able to follow a link at that point). And suppose the word or phrase is one of the things that MS Smart Tags wants to hijack. The question is: Who trumps whom? If MS Smart Tags overrides your own intentions, then I would think that you might have a case in law -- at least if you could prove financial damage as a result (as many commerical sites certainly could if that happened to their own advertising content). Hmmm. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 15-Aug-01 Time: 10:07:59 -- XFMail --
RE: Long route delay after PPP connection
On 01-Aug-01 James Preston wrote: This is almost certainly not a specific Debian problem, but my potato installation always exhibits a strange pause in updating routing information after dial-up. After successful handshake and allocation of an IP and and nameserver entries (from the log), there is 10 - 20 second delay before route(1) will show *any* entries: it just shows the Destination Gateway ... header hangs/block. Very strange. I've had the same problem with ppp, though in my case it's been taking longer, so I was waiting to see possible replies to your message (none that I've noticed so far). And, by the way, there's repeated little bursts of disk activity during this delay (every 3-4 seconds). Anyway, I've just solved it, and the same may work for you. For other reasons, I had occasion to look in /var/log/messages and, in the messages generated during dialup, noticed a whole slew of entries along the lines of Aug 5 13:26:40 tedistan pppd[24408]: rcvd [IPXCP ConfRej id=0x1 node d77d107b router proto 2] Aug 5 13:26:40 tedistan pppd[24408]: rcvd [IPXCP ConfReq id=0x2 network c24216c8 router proto 2 router name ADMsnmp complete] Aug 5 13:26:40 tedistan pppd[24408]: sent [IPXCP ConfAck id=0x2 network c24216c8 router proto 2 router name ADMsnmp complete] Aug 5 13:26:43 tedistan pppd[24408]: sent [IPXCP ConfReq id=0x1 network 0 node d77d107b router proto 2 complete] repeated many times during this delay period. Clearly something associated with IPXCP wasn't right. So I looked at 'man pppd' and searched for IPXCP. There's an option -ipx-protocol which turns off IPXCP. So I changed the contents of /etc/ppp/options from defaultroute to defaultroute -ipx-protocol and now, lo and behold, no delay! (and all those entries in /var/log/messages are not appearing any more). Good luck, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 05-Aug-01 Time: 17:29:27 -- XFMail --
RE: fixed frequency monitors
On 29-Jul-01 Sam Varghese wrote: i managed to get two 20 monitors today - but both are fixed frequency. does anyone have any experience in getting a monitor of this kind to work with linux? I've done this with Hewlett Packard A1079C monitors. These have a 3-line input with separate cables for Red, Green and Blue, the synchronisation signal goes on the Green channel, and the resolution is fixed at 1280x1024. In this case the main issue is coping with the sync-on-green. The only way I found was to install a Matrox Millennium board (though maybe there are others that support sync-on-green, but I haven't found them). Then you have to edit your XF86Config file so as to a) Get the monitor frequency, etc., right; b) Ensure that the device section has the sync-on-green option set. In the case of the HP A1079C and the Millennium (4MB) board, the relevant sections of XF86Config are: Section Monitor Identifier HP 1280x1024-72Hz VendorName Hewlett-Packard ModelName A1097A BandWidth 135 HorizSync 78.125 VertRefresh 72.008 Mode 1280x1024 DotClock 135.00 HTimings 1280 1344 1536 1728 VTimings 1024 1027 1030 1085 EndMode EndSection Section Device Identifier Matrox Millennium VendorName Matrox BoardName MGA Option sync_on_green EndSection Section Screen Driver svga Device Matrox Millennium Monitor HP 1280x1024-72Hz Subsection Display Depth 24 Modes 1280x1024 ViewPort0 0 EndSubsection EndSection That's all that's needed, and I find it works fine in X (those ancient monitors have a great display: sharp, undistorted, steady, good colours, and lots of pixels). If your monitor is not the same, you will have to find the right settings for the Section Monitor -- these are fairly critical. And if the resolution is different, you will have to also change Section Screen. You may well be able to locate the appropriate parameters by doing a Web search on monitor make/model plus linux. For instance, I got a lot of useful stuff with a Google search on HP-A1079C AND linux You may even find suitable settings tucked away in the monitors database in XFree86, which in my case was in the file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/Monitors where you find #Date: Fri, 16 Sep 1994 23:16:32 -0700 #From: Leonard N. Zubkoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Section Monitor Identifier HP 1280x1024-72Hz VendorName Hewlett-Packard ModelName A1097A BandWidth 135 HorizSync 78.125 VertRefresh 72.008 Mode 1280x1024 DotClock 135.00 HTimings 1280 1344 1536 1728 VTimings 1024 1027 1030 1085 EndMode EndSection NOTE: As I say, it works fine in X. However, it won't work in text mode since it's not getting the sync-on-green (which isn't started up until X starts). All I get in text mode is shimmering horizontal lines, and I suspect one is stuck with that in Linux (though I believe there are drivers, but not for Linux, which can set the sync-on-green for all modes). So in that case I either boot up with the monitor switched off, start X blind, and then switch it on; or I can telnet in from another machine. Possibly some other card may allow sync-on-green to be set by jumpers. The other thing to bear in mind is that the Apple Mac monitor works exactly the same (sync-on-green), but you can buy PC-Mac adapters (plug the adapter into the PC video port, and then the monitor cable into the adapter) which route the PC sync output onto the Mac green line, and then it should work in all modes. Could be worth a try for your monitor. Hoping this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 29-Jul-01 Time: 11:02:48 -- XFMail --
Re: fixed frequency monitors
On 29-Jul-01 Sam Varghese wrote: On Sun, Jul 29, 2001 at 11:02:48AM +0100, Ted Harding wrote: On 29-Jul-01 Sam Varghese wrote: Red, Green and Blue, the synchronisation signal goes on the Green channel, and the resolution is fixed at 1280x1024. In this case the main issue is coping with the sync-on-green. Thanks very much for taking the trouble to reply in so much detail. I probably will look for the adaptor which you mentioned as these monitors are both Mac monitors - Supermac STD9782-E. I've managed to find the vertical and horizontal sync rates. Does the sync on green mean that you can't use a terminal while in X? No -- it's rather the other way round: in XF86Config you can set 'Option sync_on_green' so that you get it when X is running (the X driver sends some magic signals to the card so that it generates a sync signal on the green channel), whereas when you're in text mode that hasn't happened (or has been reset) so the monitor doesn't get the sync signal. Since these really are Mac monitors, I'd guess that the ideal solution would be the adaptors: then you should get the sync signal in every case because it's physically wired across in the adaptor, and these adaptors are supposed to be made precisely for the job of connecting a Mac monitor to a PC. However, I'm no expert on Mac monitors (once I briefly used one, of old vintage, with such an adaptor), so rather than trust me in every detail do enquire carefully about the combination of adaptor and model of monitor. The situation is subtly different from a sync-on-green generated from the card itself, since that has somewhat different voltage and timing characteristics from the sync signal which comes down the sync lines on a PC (actually there are two, vertical sync and horizontal sync, and the adaptor uses electronics to drop one of them onto the green line). Once again, good luck! Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 29-Jul-01 Time: 16:27:14 -- XFMail --
RE: CD-RW Question...
On 25-Jul-01 Aaron Traas wrote: I have a question... Could someone please recommend a reliable IDE/ATAPI CD-RW that works out-of-the-box with Debian? Like, something I could just plug in and start burning. Also, I'd like one that isn't too picky about different brands of media. The Ricoh in my Win98 box isn't that reliable, and doesn't like Memorex and other common brands of CD-R blanks. I installed a RICOH first time round, and wasn't too happy with it (principally because it was quite unreliable about detecting the CD for reading -- about 2 failures in 5 -- but it also didn't properly locate the start of the CD when writing). As a result, the shop changed it for an LG CED-8989B which seems to work perfectly well in both directions. Hope this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 25-Jul-01 Time: 23:48:36 -- XFMail --
Re: Anyone got acroread working on potato?
On 23-Jul-01 Touloumtzis, Michael wrote: On Mon, Jul 23, 2001 at 01:16:15PM +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Everytime I try to open a .pdf file with acroread it gives me the following error: Exited with error code: 0x400e0009. I am running potato and xpdf works OK - but it doesn't display the fonts in the .pdf file properly. Is there something wrong with acroread or my system? I have had the same problem with the acroread distributed with SuSE-7.2 Try starting acroread, then in File - Preferences - General uncheck Smooth text and images. I don't know why this happens -- it seems to depend on the X display you are using (it doesn't seem to like 24bbp -- OK in 8 or 16 -- on some graphics cards). Hope this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 23-Jul-01 Time: 13:56:24 -- XFMail --
Acrobat Reader Linux distributions
Hi Folks, I'm having problems with Acrobat Reader (version 4.0) segfaulting repeatedly on a SuSE-7.2. (This is with Smooth text and images turned on -- turning this off seems to cure it). What are people's experiences with this version of Acrobat Reader on other recent Linux distributions? With thanks, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 08-Jul-01 Time: 14:18:46 -- XFMail --
RE: Createing a Crontab for the last day of the month
On 25-Jun-01 Miller, Jim wrote:
Hello guys,
Is there an easy way to run a script the last day of each month
using cron. IE it would handle the 30,31,29/28 issue?
You can't use cron syntax to catch the last day of the month.
What you can do is to run, every day, a script which checks
whether it's the last day today and then runs what you want.
So your crontab entry could be like
0 0 * * * last_dom
and now the fun starts.
First, the command
date '+%m %Y %d'
generates the current date as numerical month, year, day.
Just now, it gives
06 2001 25
Now take the first two of these, and do cal with these arguments:
cal 06 2001
getting
June 2001
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
The last number of the last non-blank line is the number of the last day
of the current month (allowing for 28, 29, 30 and 31). If this matches the
third element in the output of date '+%m %Y%d' then today is the last day
of the month. Otherwise it isn't. If it is, the run whatever.
You can conveniently use awk to do these little jobs ...
You could also write the script so that whatever was an argument to
last_dom, so that you could have crontab entries like
0 0 * * * last_dom check_bank
0 0 * * * last_dom pay_electricity
0 0 * * * last_dom run_payroll
...
which should be intuitive enough for anyone.
A script last_dom which somewhat crudely does the above is
#! /bin/bash
echo -n if [ lastday.tmp
echo -n `cal \`date '+%m %Y'\` | \
awk '{if(NF) last=$(NF)}END{print last -eq }'` lastday.tmp
echo -n `date '+%d'` lastday.tmp
echo ] ; then $1 ; fi lastday.tmp
chmod 755 lastday.tmp
lastday.tmp
which, when run today as last_dom ls, generates (and executes)
the file lastday.tmp which contains
if [ 30 -eq 25 ] ; then ls ; fi
(and, by changing -eq to -ne, you can get it to actually do
something today).
Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972
Date: 25-Jun-01 Time: 23:10:12
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Re: Createing a Crontab for the last day of the month
On 25-Jun-01 Rick Pasotto wrote: In the script that the cron job runs every 28-31 put the line: if [ `date +%m` == `date +%m --date=tomorrow` ]; then exit; fi About as neat as you can get!! Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 25-Jun-01 Time: 23:19:56 -- XFMail --
Re: pdf editor ?
On 19-Mar-01 Hall Stevenson wrote:
Ultimately, if you want to edit anything, you need the original. I
don't think you can even create a PDF from scratch or from nothing.
You have to start with another file.
Well, in fact you can, if you understand the PDF format (which is
far from easy), since a valid PDF file can be written as ASCII text
-- even one which includes graphics and fancy fonts.
A PDF document in ASCII looks a bit like XML, only with different
words. An example is attached (base64-encoded to avois line breaks).
Admittedly I created it by converting the PostScript source for an
example in the Blue Book, for which the source is:
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
/inch {72 mul} def
/wedge { newpath
%% rgbR rgbG rgbB setrgbcolor
0 0 moveto 1 0 translate 15 rotate 0 15 sin translate
0 0 15 sin -90 90 arc closepath} def
gsave
%%0 inch 0 inch translate 3 inch 4 inch translate
0.5 inch 0.5 inch scale 0.02 setlinewidth
1 1 12 { 12 div setgray
gsave wedge gsave fill grestore 0 setgray stroke grestore
30 rotate } for
grestore
showpage
but, as you can see from the PDF file, I could in principle
have simply typed it once I had worked out what to type.
Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 284 7749
Date: 20-Mar-01 Time: 00:04:11
-- XFMail --
rose.pdf
Description: Binary data
RE: Drawing diagrams of servers
On 26-Feb-01 Russell Coker wrote: I want to draw some diagrams of a network showing things such as user uploads files to an FTP server, FTP server uses rsync to push data to web server, users download data from web server. I want to do this will little boxes representing each machine etc. Years ago I used visio to do this on Windows. I tried Kivio (KDE visio-like program) but it doesn't allow me to specify types of lines between objects (I want arrows to show direction the data flows), it doesn't seem to allow labels on lines, and is generally klunky. Is there a good program in Debian that allows this? Assuming you want a static diagram (e.g. which simply shows the layout and sequence of events, etc) and not one which is updated dynamically from a database of user activity, then I suggest that a good way is to learn to use groff with the pic preprocessor. Pic was tailor-made for exactly this sort of thing, and is quite easy to use once you have got the hang of it. Best wishes. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 284 7749 Date: 26-Feb-01 Time: 12:56:28 -- XFMail --
Re: PS to HTML?
On 24-Jan-01 Dave Sherohman wrote: BTW, anyone know what's up with pstotext? I ran a PS doc through it last night and there were a lot of extra spa ces in the outpu t, including many in mid-word. Is this preventable? [Gurus: please read the speculative bit at the end] No. And there's nothing going wrong with pstotext in this respect either. A typical reason would be that the software which created the PostScript file did some kerning, i.e. moving letters of a word (usually) closer together (e.g. in Wombat the ombat would be moved slightly left so that the o was slightly over-hung by the W). When this happens, the sequence of characters in a word is broken at that point, and a PostScript motion command is interpolated, so that in the PS code it is no longer a contiguous sequence of characters. Unless your PStoWhatever is clever enough to reconstruct the intended word from the fragments, it will do the dumb default thing of treating separate sequences as separate words. And it would have to be pretty clever, since the spacing between words (in filled text) may be done by exactly the same mechanism as kerning. The following, for instance, is from a PS file containing the sentence The Wombat is a small animal.: .318(The W)12.318 F .318 (ombat is a)-1.92 F 3.802 (small animal.)72 244.8 R Since the break-up is present in the PS file to start with, it is not due to pstotext in the first place. Only if pstotext was supposed to be capable of realising that Wombat was the intended result of W followed by ombat, while a sollowed by small should be left alone, should you suspect a flaw in pstotext. As you apparently realise, you cannot expect to do better than a very crude extraction of textual content from a PS file; a PS file is a computer program for placing marks on a page, and the fact that some of these marks are represented by characters is pretty incidental. [For gurus] Nevertheless, I suspect that a relatively straightforward algorithm could be created for this job, assuming (for present purposes) that only the standard printable ASCII characters are needed. When a construct like (The W) is encountered, this is interpreted as an instruction to render the string The W on the display device. Each character (including the space) in the string is in fact a pointer to a position in the font definition which causes the PS interpreter to look up the primitive PS drawing commands which will creat the shape of the printed character. It strikes me as eminently possible to construct a program which would act like a PS interpreter in all respects _except_ that the drawing commands evoked by (e.g) the character W would be replaced by simple emission of the ASCII code for W to the standard output. Questions of motion between characters could be handled by the following kind of thing (where Motion means the displacement between where the PS file asks for a character to be printed, and where it would have been printed if it had immediately followed the previously printed character): 1. If the Motion is a small Motion (kerning) ignore it. 2. If the Motion is (approximately) a positive space, emit a space. Similarly for (approximately) 2 or more spaces. 3. If the Motion is (approximately) a negative space (overprinting) emit a backspace. 4. If a Motion is (approximately) a positive or negative line-space, (superscript, subscript) emit the corresponding positive or negative line feed. 5. If a Motion is a combination of backspace upwards (accent above) emit the appropriate thing. Etc. Now: does anyone know a program which works like that? (The advantage would be that the sort of thing that Dave Sherohman wants to do would be strsightforward and should come out right, while many of the computer-program-like things which PostScript can do -- like loops and conditional branching -- would also be done as they should be; also definitions within the file (which can be macros that print out as blocks of text) would work too.) Best wishes to all, Ted. Topical Thought: It is better to arrive, than to travel hopefuilly. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 284 7749 Date: 24-Jan-01 Time: 17:44:01 -- XFMail --
Re: howto tell cron run last day of month
On 03-Jan-01 Nate Duehr wrote:
Would midnight on the 1st work? Just a thought.
There's no situations I can think of where the first of the month
doesn't exist in most locales, since daylight savings changes
officially
at 2 AM in places that do that.
(like here... grrr)
On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 06:12:21PM +0200, Jaume Teixi wrote:
I run a cron script 27-31
then inside the script i need to check if it this last day of month
how to check this ?
thanks,
jaume.
Try this for size:
# `cal 1 2001 | grep -v '[A-Z]' | grep '[0-9]$' \
| awk '{print export LAST=$(NF)}'`
# echo $LAST
31
# `cal 2 2001 | grep -v '[A-Z]' | grep '[0-9]$' \
| awk '{print export LAST=$(NF)}'`
# echo $LAST
28
You can get the current day DD, the current month MM
and the current year from the date command:
# DD=`date +%d` ; echo $DD
04
# MM=`date +%m` ; echo $MM
01
# =`date +%Y` ; echo $
2001
# `cal $MM $ | grep -v '[A-Z]' | grep '[0-9]$' \
| awk '{print export LAST=$(NF)}'`
# echo $LAST
31
Then you can carry out whatever comparison you want between
$DD and $LAST (e.g. if there's something which has to be
done 4 days before the end of the month ... ).
I once used to get paid on the Friday preceding the last
Saturday of the month -- now that's the _next_ exercise
for the reader!
Ted.
A Topical Thought: It is better to arrive, than to travel hopefully
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 284 7749
Date: 04-Jan-01 Time: 10:25:57
-- XFMail --
Re: Postscript printers
On 14-Nov-00 Michael P. Soulier wrote: Is this a true postscript printer ? Isn't it enough for it to just speak PCL? Then with ghostscript you can handle postscript just fine, no? No. Ghostscripts emulation of standard Adobe PostScript is good, but imperfect. In particular, the fonts are different from Adobe's (unless you install Adobe's separately, with payment), and it can show. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 284 7749 Date: 14-Nov-00 Time: 23:56:29 -- XFMail --
Re: ps2pdf and LaTeX's seminar style
On 07-Oct-00 Thomas Halahan wrote: Rafael Nice summary. The only thing is there must be an easier way that editing the PS file. I will investigate. Tom I've had the same problem of converting Landscape PS files to PDF so that they can be viewed right way up in Acrobat Reader. The only way I've found is to use the 'pstill' program with the '-R' option: pstill -R90 .. generates a PDF which is rotated clockwise by 90 degrees. For the 'pstill' program, if you don't know it already, see http://www.this.net/~frank/pstill.html It is not totally straightforward to get this program set up, but once you have it running it does a good job. I don't know of any way to get ps2pdf to rotate the output. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 284 7749 Date: 07-Oct-00 Time: 17:02:10 -- XFMail --
Re: Console based Word Processor
On 01-Sep-00 Joseph C. Tuttle wrote: On 27, aug, 2000 at 10:00:48 +0518, USM Bish wrote: I've just this last weekend heard about WordPerfect for UNIX in version 5.something being on the CD you could buy of WordPerfect 8! I've heard this before, but I haven't been able to find WP 5.x on either of the two WP 8 CDs I have. I'd be happy to find it, though, because I believe the DOS version of WP 5.1 was one of the best software products ever created. So, if any of y'all know where it can be found exactly, please let me know. Seconded! When WP was windowised to WP6 it lost a lot which has never come back. In particular, proper printer handling of international characters is one: WP6/7/8 has only one font for all these, different from the fonts for ASCII/iso-Latin1, and it looks awful (if it works at all). A candy GUI is no substitute for doing a proper job (though I have to admit that the WordPerfect GUI is better than the Word Imperfect one). If I could get WP5 for UNIX up on Linux I'd run for it! Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 284 7749 Date: 01-Sep-00 Time: 17:06:02 -- XFMail --
Re: Console based Word Processor
On 01-Sep-00 Paul Seelig wrote: On Fri, Sep 01, 2000 at 11:38:19AM -0400, Joseph C. Tuttle wrote: I've heard this before, but I haven't been able to find WP 5.x on either of the two WP 8 CDs I have. It is only included in the retail server edition. Check for yourself at http://linux.corel.com/products/wp8/features.htm;. At that site it says: Corel WordPerfect 8 for Linux Character Terminal Binary for non-GUI terminal users Note WordPerfect 8, not WordPerfect 5 Maybe this is indeed the good old WP5, but maybe it is simply WP8 with all its disadvantages and none of its advantages ... Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 284 7749 Date: 01-Sep-00 Time: 18:29:07 -- XFMail --
RE: Login with user name in CAPS
On 23-Aug-00 Viktor Rosenfeld wrote: I just logged in with my user name accidentelly in CAPS and the system let me log in. More suprisingly, everything that is printed on the terminal is in CAPS, too, including everything I type in lower case. Is this a bug or a feature? Or is it a feature that used to be a bug? Well, it's a feature, and it was never a bug (though these days you might plead that it's a bug which used to be a feature). The point goes back to the very early days of UNIX, when the user was quite likely to be logging in from a very primitive teletype that could only do capitals (5- or 6-bit serial line). UNIX was set up to recognise login with capital letters and use capitals for the rest of the session, precisely to handle this. That's the explanation. I suppose even now there may be some rare cases where it is still useful. And I suppose that one could envisage an option for the login entry in /etc/inittab which could suppress the behaviour. But it's hardly worth it: if it happens, just press ^D and log in again. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 284 7749 Date: 24-Aug-00 Time: 20:54:43 -- XFMail --
RE: [Q] virus susceptibility data
Hi Olaf,
On 18-Jul-00 Olaf Meeuwissen wrote:
Dear Debians,
I'm looking for any kind of info on vulnerability to viruses on Debian
and/or Linux. Pointers to anti-virus programs are also very welcome.
If I can't convince some people here at work, I'm about to be told to
disconnect from the net or use (heaven forbid!) Windows for any kind
of internet activity beyond our firewall. And that seems to include
sending email like this to the list. Gack!
As other have pointed out, there are almost no known viruses for
UNIX/Linux as such, and the two or three ever heard of are (as far as I
know) almost never encountered. For some reason, hackers don't bother
to attack UNIX systems that way (probably there's more mileage in other
types of attack).
A line of virus which might well be possible, and platform-independent,
is the planting of Java in HTML. This could hit UNIX/Linux and Windows
equally, though I haven't heard of it on Linux. A lot of Linux MUAs
can open HTML attachments in Netscape, though usually not automatically
(the user has to choose).
DOS/Windows viruses are another matter, in these days when people
routinely mail each other Word/Excel etc attachments in the name of
communication. Even Linux folk have to deal with these things, which
usually means running Windows on another machine, or in WABI or WINE or
VMWare, and opening the file (though most Word docs can be handled in
Linux-native WordPerfect which should not be vulnerable to a Word macro
virus, for instance).
Once you have done that, your Windows installation may be messed up
(though the Linux part of your installation should survive). In any case,
if you subsequently forward the attachment to a colleague you will be
sending the virus on, whether your Linux system is immune to it or not.
These add up to arguments for virus-checking incoming mail, even on
a UNIX/Linux system.
Clearly, plain-text and similar emails don't need checking, and usually
attachments are not opened automatically either, so there should be
no need to virus-check every mail (which, if it's done on delivery,
really slows things down).
I simply take the precaution of running a virus check only on a mail
containing a possibly suspicious attachment and leaving the rest alone
(having been caught once by a macro virus in a Word/Win-3.1 document
which caused my WABI/Win-3.1 Word to send it on whenever I subsequently
used this Word).
The program I use is VirusScan ('uvscan') from Network Associates:
see in the first place http://www.nai.com and, in particular,
http://software.mcafee.com/centers/download/
along with the MacAfee virus database (though you can use others). It
seems to work quite well. You can configure it to be run standalone
rather than as a filter for incoming mail: then, if you see a mail
attachment that you think might need a check, you just feen that
attachment to the virus checker (My MUA, XFMail, has a flexible MIME menu
which allows you to View As any attachment; and you can set one of the
As options to be a pipe to the checker).
Phil Brutsche in this thread said that there is one very
important differece between Linux and Windows in this regard: unlike
Windows email programs, Linux email programs *do not* execute programs
recieved as attachments automatically - you need to 1) save the program to
disk and 2) manually execute it before any damage can be done.
This is not quite true, either in principle or in fact.
First, nothing stops someone from developing an email program (MUA)
which _could_ automatically (without user selection) open an attachment
it thought it knew how to handle (though I don't know of one; but
a naive user could set this up in the rules for filtering incoming mail,
I dare say).
Secondly, when you receive an email consisting (in effect) solely of
an attachment with no other significant information, all you can usefully
do is open the attachment. In many MUAs this is simply a matter of
clicking on the attachment bar and the rest is then automatic;
the scope for user discrimination is almost nil (with the exception
of running a virus check on it).
Now, although I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, in XFMail at least
you could have one of your MIME entries of the form
type/subtype extn command
application/prog exe exec
which would have the effect of executing the attachment as a program.
I hope this helps. Olaf's situation is not as straightforward as he
might wish!
Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 284 7749
Date: 18-Jul-00 Time: 10:55:45
-- XFMail --
Re: mutt and Turkish
On 24-Mar-00 Patrick wrote: I've been searching about in www.mutt,org and can't find any reference to what I should ser charset to. Does anyome know where I can find out what the Turkish character set is and do I need to make any other changes to my system for it to work in mutt? On Fri, Mar 24, 2000 at 11:48:03AM +0900, ChangMin Oh wrote: Maybe you need to open your .muttrc, and edit set charset=~~. I don't know about mutt, but the Turkish ISO charset is iso-8859-9 I found good sets of Turkish fonts for X at ftp://ftp.linux.org.tr and ftp://compclup.ceng.metu.edu.tr/pub/linux/turkce and, if you poke around there, you may also find fonts for character consoles (VCs). Good hunting! Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 25-Mar-00 Time: 13:30:53 -- XFMail --
RE: Schedule-like app for Linux
On 04-Feb-00 Ted Harding wrote: On 03-Feb-00 Kent West wrote: What this boils down to is: Is there a program for Linux that will do essentially the same thing as Schedule+? I don't know if it will meet your needs, but have a look at plan: http://www.IN-Berlin.DE/User/bitrot/plan.html This has a lot of useful calendar/scheduler functions, and is easy to use once you get the hang of it. It can be run on a local machine, but it is also networkable: you can store the schedule files on a central server running a program 'netplan' and the other machines, each running 'plan', get their data from that. I think that controlling access to the files is probably a matter of setting up groups: there doesn't seem to be an access control function which is configurable within plan, but I'm not sure. Correction: I just had a look at man netplan: You can set up an access control file which controls which users can do what (read/write/delete) to each schedule file. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 04-Feb-00 Time: 01:15:19 -- XFMail --
Re: Digital cameras and Linux
On 12-Dec-99 Matthew Bloch wrote: On Sun, 12 Dec 1999, Neil Booth wrote: I'm considering buying a digital camera or videocam, but am concerned about being able to download the JPEG images to Linux. Of course, the cameras come with a serial cable and software for downloading the images to Windows. It is worth considering a camera that can record the JPEG file directly to a floppy disk -- either natively (the Sony Mavica was probably the earliest to do it this way) or using a bit of clip-on kit which you buy separately (an increasing number of makes offer this option). Then you don't have to worry about using software, cables or any other nonsense: you just put the floppy into the computer (anybody's computer ... ) and copy the files. Also, provided you have enough battery resources, you can go out for a long day with a pocket-full of floppies and come home with hundreds of photos: you don't have to buy several expensive memory modules to achieve the same effect. (The floppies used are in all cases -- as far as I know -- standard DOS-formatted floppies straight out of the box). Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 12-Dec-99 Time: 15:13:37 1673182 seconds left -- XFMail --
Re: Why
On 05-Dec-99 Bart Szyszka wrote: My guess is that the windows install probably uses the same lowest-common-denominator graphics mode (it looks like it to me) ... If this is the case then the x-based setup routines should be written for a standard 640x480x16 mode, regardless of which video hardware is detected during setup, no?... This is exactly what I was thinking. The windows installer uses a generic 16-color, 640x480 mode (Standard SVGA or just Standard VGA?) and I've never heard of anyone having graphic-card related problems with it. Why can't someone do something similar with Linux? Is that what Corel did? This is in fact exactly what happens in any Linux installation where the X-configuration stage offers you the choice between a graphical and a text-based approach. If you choose the graphical one, then the XF86_VGA16 driver is started in 640x480 resolution and you have a working X display. This almost always starts up successfuly, whatever your hardware. Now, here's the secret. This server, being a XF86 server like any other, needs an X Config file to look up before it starts. So this file must be somewhere, mustn't it? So you can find it, can't you? OK. Almost always, this file is somewhere under /tmp (exactly where, depends on which distribution you are installing and on which graphical X configuration program you are running). By this stage, you can usually switch to a VT (e.g. Ctrl-Alt-F2 / F3 ...) which is running a shell. Now cd /tmp and poke around below this (ls -a) until you find it (it will be easily recognisable). Having found it, copy it to root's home directory. (Do this during the X configuration process, since it gets deleted after that closes down). If you wait until you have specified your mouse and keyboard before making the copy, you then have available a perfectly well working, though very basic, X configuration file. If you copy this to where X expects to find its configuration file by default (e.g. /etc/XF86Config) then you will be able to run a basic X. If you kow what you are doing, you can then edit this file experimentally to enhance the X functionality. You can then try it with the X driver you really want to use (e.g. XF86_SVGA). This trick has got me past the X config stage on more than one laptop, in those cases where the config program refuses to come to terms with the hardware itself, and drops you back without having set X up (and, of course, having by then deleted its temporary Config file ... ). Hope this helps. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 06-Dec-99 Time: 10:07:20 2209960 seconds left -- XFMail --
RE: presentation graphics
On 24-Nov-99 joost witteveen wrote:
I want to produce some simple bar charts showing the difference
between different products. Gnuplot doesn't seem to be able to do
what I want (just nice clean bars with numbers at the tops and
descriptions at the bottom).
Is there a good program to do this easily? Preferrably something I
can run from a makefile...
Well, I'm not claiming the stuff below is good:). But is is
easy, and you can generate it from a makefile (just make the
makefile insert your own table where I now got that postscript
array).
%!PS
/width 10 def
/r{(bar.ps) run} def
[
[10 (foo)]
[20 (bar)]
[30 (foobar)]
[29 (fooba)]
[50 (fbfb)]
[20 (bar)]
]
/bar {
aload pop
/title exch def
/y exch def
gsave
0.5 setgray
width 0 rlineto
0 y rlineto
width -1 mul 0 rlineto
closepath
fill
grestore
gsave
width 2 div y width 2 div add rmoveto 90 rotate title show
grestore
} def
/Times-Roman findfont 10 scalefont setfont
100 100 moveto
{
width 0 rmoveto
bar
} forall
showpage
Nice PS, Joost!
Folks, don't forget the power of PIC. It's sitting there as part
of groff.
Example: make a file called barchart with the following contents:
8--- cut here -
.LP
.PS
vscale = 4
define bar {
x = $1
y1 = $2/vscale
ylabel = $2
line from x,0 to (x+0.25),0 to (x+0.25),y1
line from (x+0.25),y1 to (x-0.25),y1 sprintf(%0.2f,ylabel) above
line from (x-0.25),y1 to (x-0.25),0 to x,0
line from (x-0.2,-0.2) to (x,0) invis $3 rjust aligned
}
define barchart {
i=i+1
y = $2
bar(i,y,$1)
}
i=0
copy bar.dat thru barchart
.PE
8--- cut here -
and a data file called bar.dat with contents:
8--- cut here -
widget 15.0
bidget 13.5
squidget 18.0
midget 5
didget 10.2
8--- cut here -
Then run
groff -Tps -p -ms barchart barchart.ps
and see what you get. (One advantage of doing it this kind of way
is that it's much easier to add complications to the figure using
PIC than it is by modifying PostScript such as Joost's).
Best wishes,
Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 24-Nov-99 Time: 13:34:47
-- XFMail --
Re: Botting a Mylex DAC960 RAID controller
On 22-Nov-99 aphro wrote: From what i read the root partition cannnot be part of a raid array without some crafty configuration. nate The crafty configuration is precisely what I would like to learn about, if anyone could point me in the right direction. With thanks, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 23-Nov-99 Time: 10:19:46 -- XFMail --
RE: OT - How to save real audio files?
On 12-Oct-99 Cyrus Patel wrote: Hi Guys, This is slightly offtopic, but I just downloaded Real Player and I was wondering if there was a way to save real audio file locally so I don't have to fire up my ppp connection just to listen to .ram files. It depends (aspects of this are covered in the RealPlayer documentation). First of all, if the supplier of the RA file doesn't want it saved or copied, you will not be able to do that. Such files carry some sort of signature which RealPlayer recognises and honours. For files which are not protected in this way, you may or may not be able to save them or download them directly. Some versions of RealPlayer have a save button which appears when a file, which is being played, is not protected. You can use this to save the file. Again, this is covered in the documentation. When you get the .ram file from the supplying site, this usually has a URL to the location of the .ra file (the actual audio file) itself, similar to the following: pnm://broadcast9.activate.net/radiofree/channel1.rm pnm://ras.radio.cz/zpravy.ra You will find, in the case of the first of these, that you cannot access the site with a browser and therefore, as far as I know, you will not be able to download the file directly using this URL. However, if you go to http://www.rferl.org and poke about, you may be able to find the equivalent (and, in this case, it takes a good deal of poking); in that case, you can download it by ftp. In the second case (if I remember right) you will be able to download the file directly by ftp. In summary: your mileage may vary. And in unpredictable ways. Also, is there a way to convert .rm files to wav? I don't know the answer to that (and I wish I did). Hope this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 12-Oct-99 Time: 14:00:09 -- XFMail --
Re: OT - How to save real audio files?
On 12-Oct-99 Kristopher Johnson wrote: (Ted Harding) wrote: When you get the .ram file from the supplying site, this usually has a URL to the location of the .ra file (the actual audio file) itself, similar to the following: pnm://broadcast9.activate.net/radiofree/channel1.rm pnm://ras.radio.cz/zpravy.ra You will find, in the case of the first of these, that you cannot access the site with a browser and therefore, as far as I know, you will not be able to download the file directly using this URL. You can't open these URLs with a browser, but you can open them with RealPlayer's Open Location... menu item. - Kris Sure -- but this doesn't of itself enable you to save the file locally, I think. Am I wrong? Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 12-Oct-99 Time: 16:37:00 -- XFMail --
RE: OT - How to save real audio files?
On 12-Oct-99 Ted Harding wrote: On 12-Oct-99 Cyrus Patel wrote: Also, is there a way to convert .rm files to wav? I don't know the answer to that (and I wish I did). Hope this helps, Ted. Which reminds me -- I have a related query of my own. If you want to try the files I'm talking about, get http://216.231.54.128/tmvl/ra/vv/sergen01.ra, /sergen02.ra, ... /sergen21.ra (Netscape will automatically download these to your local drive, if you get them as above). These are a series of readings, each of one Turkish poem with background music. When you listen to them in sequence, you realise that they are a dissection of what must originally have been a continuous performance lasting about 45 minutes (the clue is in the music). What I would like to be able to do is to join them back together again, so as to have one big file which would recreate (possible with audible joins) the original continuous performance. So my question is: does anyone know how to glue two or more RealAudio files together into one big file? Simply concatenating them does not work: RealPlayer plays the first section, then whereas its clock shows it working through the remainder you hear no sound. With thanks, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 12-Oct-99 Time: 17:20:49 -- XFMail --
RE: Fax format TIFF files (www.efax.com)
On 03-Oct-99 Carl Fink wrote: I'm using the free (advertising-supported) Internet fax service at www.efax.com. They assign you an arbitrary phone number, and faxes to that address are received by faxmodem and mailed to you. The file comes as a TIFF. I have several viewers that can read TIFFs (xv, xloadimage) and a fine bitmap editor (the GIMP), but apparently efax.com encapsulates multiple-page faxes into a single TIFF, and all of those programs display only the first page. Can anyone recommend a program (preferably, of course, Debianized) that will display all the pages of a fax-format TIFF? ImageMagick will do the job nicely. With IM installed, enter display file.tif Using as a test a file which Carl sent me, this command takes a few moments to load. Then (on my screen at least) you get a screenful which is a partial view of the first page with a little pan icon. You can pan round this page using the arrow keys, or by holding down the left mouse button on the frame in the pan icon and dragging it around. For the next page, right-button on the image and select Next from the menu which pops up. Again after a few moments, you get the next page. And so on. To go back to previous pages, right-button and select Former. An alternative is like: display -geometry 600x800 file.tif With this, the program calculates a resized image before displaying it, and this takes rather longer: it took 25 seconds for the first page to come up, and about 20 seconds (after selecting Next) for the next page. Admittedly I'm not using a fast machine (pentium 150). Or (but this seems to give poorer quality) you can click on View with the first command and then select Half Size etc. You can also use the ImageMagick convert command in the form convert +adjoin file.tif file.gif (or select another format instead of GIF), which will then produce a separate file for each page: file.gif.0 file.gif.1 ... which can each be viewed stand-alone by any standard viewer. According to Carl, apt-get install imagemagick is all you need to know ... Best wishes to all, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 04-Oct-99 Time: 14:47:12 -- XFMail --
RE: txt 2 ps?
On 28-Sep-99 erasmo perez wrote: hello everybody which package can i use in order to convert a text file (as created by emacs) to a postscript file, but in a way i ould have control over factors like: type and size of the font, spacing, identation, justification, etc. thanks a lot Try enscript (also variously known as nenscript, genscript). Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 29-Sep-99 Time: 00:00:27 -- XFMail --
RE: 8N2 communication?
On 21-Sep-99 Gerhard Kroder wrote: recently i had to configure a cisco isdn router, wich requieres 2 stopbits (at eight data and null parity bits) as communication parameters. the only communication programm avaliable on my 80mb deb2.1 was minicom, which didn't have 8N2 to set up. do you know others that support 8N2, or how else can i set these parameters? i do not want to switch to an windows evironment, where hyperterm supports 8N2 Are you finding that the comms fail if you set it at 8N1? Usually, serial comms are robust about the number of stop bits. In voltage terms, the line alternates between a high (MARK, M) level and a low (SPACE, S) level. Theoretically, the transition from one to the other is instantaneous. In practice, it takes a little time so there is a gradient followed by a roughly constant M or S voltage. The ground (quiescent) state is MARK. The start of a signal packet is signalled by a drop to SPACE level for the duration of a bit cycle. When this transition is detected, the receiver starts its clock to measure out bit-cycle intervals, confirming by measuring the level (should be SPACE) after half a bit-cycle. This is the Start bit, whose basic function is to synchronise the receiver's bit clock. Head to tail thereafter (no theoretical time gap between them) follow 7 or 8 data bits and an optional parity bit, each at either MARK or SPACE level, and one or more Stop bits at the MARK level. Levels are measured at around the timed midpoints of the bit intervals, so as to keep clear of the gradients. Numbers of data and parity bits are determined by the comms settings, and the receiving device simply counts bit-cycles until it has received what it expects. Once the data and any parity bits have been received and the first Stop bit has been verified at MARK level, the next interesting event will be the transition from MARK to SPACE for the Start bit of the next packet. Therefore a second Stop bit is redundant, and as a general rule serial comms devices will ignore it. This is the explanation why serial comms are usually robust about the number of stop bits. And also why I suggest (unless you have already tried it and it doesn't work) that you try 8N1 anyway. It is possible, however, that if a device has been set up to insist on 2 Stop bits, then it won't start looking for a Start bit until it has clocked at least 2 bit-cycles after the expected time of the beginning of the first Stop bit cycle. Hope this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 21-Sep-99 Time: 13:17:39 -- XFMail --
RE: Virus protection by unix (was Re: To the Debian Project... )
On 21-Sep-99 David Wright wrote: Quoting Keith G. Murphy ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): Art Lemasters wrote: BTW, I recently worked a contract for a corporation that uses nothing but NT servers and workstations. The machines were rebooted every two or three days, and complete images were installed to them once a week or more. Granted, though, the employees there were actually allowed to send and receive e-mail to their workstations via the Internet with no UNIX server to protect them! Semi-serious question: How does a UNIX server protect them against viruses (I assume that's what you mean)? Do they die in the arid environment of the server? ;-) I think unix servers are generally virus-neutral. Most of the products that claim to scan emails, for example, at gateways seem to be built for NT and Netware. Perhaps this is one reason why so much anti-virus scanning is left to the end-user, which makes it much more expensive as well as hit-and-miss. (I for one have no idea how to scan a floppy/ email/downloaded file with a virus scanner.) I suggest having a look at AMaViS - A Mail Virus Scanner See: http://satan.oih.rwth-aachen.de/AMaViS/amavis.html This is a (quite complex) script which allows you to apply your favourite ported-to-Linux virus scanner to email (it includes code for extracting attachments which may be uuencoded, base64-encoded, gzipped, tarred, etc, and subjecting each attachment to the scanner). You will also need to download a good virus scanner from a suitable source. I use the McAfee uvscan; the docs to AMaViS suggest other choices as well. You can also use this software to scan directories containing Word documents etc, if you keep such stuff. I also set up my mailer (XFMail) so that I can pipe an email to the scanner if it has an attachment which contains MS files (in fact I don't otherwise bother with routine virus scanning of email). Hope this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 21-Sep-99 Time: 16:02:03 -- XFMail --
RE: reformatting a postscript file from letter to a4 paper size
On 04-Sep-99 shaul wrote: I am getting a very narrow, practically none, right margin for the ps files of ftp://athos.rutgers.edu/runet/tcp-ip-intro.ps and ftp://athos.rutgers.edu/runet/tcp-ip-admin.ps. (those files are recommended by the NET3-HOWTO as an introductory text.) The very narrow margin are created both by gv and when printing the files. Can it be that this is due to a letter vs a4 paper size ? Can I change the postscript files (and not the source file) so that it will have a reasonable setting on a a4 paper ? The short answer is No -- unless you have an advanced knowledge of the technicalities of PostScript. I have had a look at the first file, and it seems to have been formatted with a 1-inch left margin, and ragged-right lines up to 7 inches long, so you can get a line going to 8 inches across the page. Hence your margins. However, with luck you can use the program 'psresize' to do the job, since it was written with knowledge of the technicalities. You may have to try various options until you find a combination that does what you want. I have it from a SuSE Linux installation; I believe it is part of the 'pstools' or 'psutils' package, but I'm not sure where these can be found. Try searching a Linux ftp site, if you haven't already got it. Best of luck, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 04-Sep-99 Time: 21:00:28 -- XFMail --
RE: Console Word Processing
On 12-Aug-99 Cheshire wrote: Hey all, I've been unsuccessful in finding a console alternative to wordperfect/star office. Basically I've set up a linux box for someone and can't get X to work with the 16 color VGA monitor (I haven't looked through much documention on it tho so I don't even know if I can--but nonetheless, the 640x480 res wouldn't be great for much) and one of the primary functions of the box will be word processing. I was hoping for a little more than the countless basic editors. Can someone point me in the right direction? I really don't want to put windows back on it. Sorry for the non-debian-specific question. |cheshire| There's a lot to be said for good old WordPerfect-5.1 running in dosemu. It works a treat, especially from the console: if you start dosemu by 'dos -C -k' (where '-C' refers to the DOS boot drive and might be different in your setup, and '-k' starts it in raw keyboard mode), then you get just about all of WP's weird keystroke combinations and you also get its graphics modes (for 'View Document', equation editing, WP graphics). In some respects WP lost functionality when 5.1 was windowised for WP-6, and this has persisted into WP-7 and WP-8, in both Windows and UNIX versions. However, this will do only for word processing. It has no pretensions to be an office suite. Hope this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 12-Aug-99 Time: 02:34:55 -- XFMail --
Partitioning and symlinks
Hi Folks,
(Some of you may have seen this query on the SuSE list a couple of
days ago, where I got but one though not useless reply; I had
also sent it, I thought, to the debian-user list but do not seem
to have received it from that list. Apologies if this makes you see it
twice, or even thrice!).
A query/discussion-point for those of you who know their way around
these things --
When you first set up partitions (for /, /usr, /home etc) you won't be
sure how the takeup of space on these will turn out in the long run,
so you make an intelligent guess. Sometimes the partitions you create
will be on the same physical hard drive, sometimes on different HDs.
The usual (and recommended) approach is that a particular partition
on a particular drive will be home to a particular sub-tree: for
instance you may have created /dev/hdb2 to contain /home and then,
when the system boots, /dev/hdb2 gets mounted onto /home.
However, this approach has the disadvantage that the association
between logical sub-tree and physical disk-space is, as it were,
carved in stone. If it turns out, for instance, that you under-estimated
the space required for /home, then you have some restructuring to do.
Or, you may find that you encounter a need for an additional sub-tree
for which you don't have space on the partition housing its parent;
nor can you now create a new partition anywhere else which you
could mount. An example of this would be a big package which installs
itself into (say) /opt, and you haven't got a /opt, have you? There's
no room left in the disk partition which mounts onto /, and you can't
make any more partitions on your existing disks. Or, you have got /opt
but there's not enough room.
An alternative approach (which I first adopted in an emergency arising
for such reasons as in the previous paragraphs) uses symbolic links.
Say there happens to be a lot of space left in the disk partition which
mounts onto /usr/local.
Then you can
mkdir /usr/local/link_opt
***[see below]
ln -s /usr/local/link_opt /opt
or, if you already had a /opt but you have simply run out of space to
put anything else on it, you insert, at ***, above the lines
cd /opt
cp -a * /usr/local/link_opt
rm -rf *
cd ..
rmdir /opt
Taken to its limits, this approach could imply that all you need is
a mount-point under /, within the primary partition that mounts
onto /, for each of the other physical partitions on your hard drives.
Then _every_ other sub-tree of / which you might need can be
_physically_ placed where you like in any of these physical partitions,
given therein it own peculiar name -- like link_opt above -- and
_logically_ placed where it should be by means of a symbolic link.
This would (if it worked without problems) be a very flexible solution
to problems arising from ill-judged initial partitioning.
Now, the reason I'm raising it as a query/discussion-point is that
sym-links are not treated entirely in the same way as either sub-tree
which are physically on the same partition or physical partitions
which are mounted onto mount-points.
A simple example of this is the 'ls' command, for which the special
option '-L' is required to follow sym-links: for instance, compare
the outputs from the two commands
ls -l /var/X*/lib
and
ls -lL /var/X*/lib
Such a difference could, for instance, break some scripts. The big
new package you just installed into /opt (which is really a sym-link
to /usr/local/link_opt) might not work, or not work properly.
'tar' is another command needing a special option ('d') in order to
act as though the sym-link was a real one.
Not being expert in all the details of how sym-links are handled
compared with ordinary links, I'd like to hear from people who've
been down this road before, or who know what to watch out for if
you do go down it. It strikes me that the method can be useful, but
needs using with great care. Are there, for instance, directories
for which it should never be used?
So, over to you!
Best wishes,
Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 11-Aug-99 Time: 21:45:20
-- XFMail --
--End of forwarded message-
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 12-Aug-99 Time: 02:47:10
-- XFMail --
Partitioning and symlinks
(I already posted this to the SuSE list, so apologies if you see it twice)
A query/discussion-point for those of you who know their way around
these things --
When you first set up partitions (for /, /usr, /home etc) you won't be
sure how the takeup of space on these will turn out in the long run,
so you make an intelligent guess. Sometimes the partitions you create
will be on the same physical hard drive, sometimes on different HDs.
The usual (and recommended) approach is that a particular partition
on a particular drive will be home to a particular sub-tree: for
instance you may have created /dev/hdb2 to contain /home and then,
when the system boots, /dev/hdb2 gets mounted onto /home.
However, this aproach has the disadvantage that the association
between logical sub-tree and phyical disk-space is, as it were,
carved in stone. If it turns out, for instance, that you under-estimated
the space required for /home, then you have some retructuring to do.
Or, you may find that you encounter a need for an additional sub-tree
for which you don't have space on the partition housing its parent;
nor can you now create a new partition anywhere else which you
could mount. An example of this would be a big package which installs
itelf into (say) /opt, and you haven't got a /opt, have you? There's
no room left in the disk partition which mounts onto /, and you can't
make any more partitions on your existing disks.
An alternative approach (which I first adopted in an emergency arising
for such reasons as in the previous paragraphs) uses symbolic links.
Say there happens to be a lot of space left in the disk partition which
mounts onto /usr/local.
Then you can
mkdir /usr/local/link_opt
***[see below]
ln -s /usr/local/link_opt /opt
or, if you already had a /opt but you have simply run out of space to
put anything else on it, you insert, at ***, above the lines
cd /opt
cp -a * /usr/local/link_opt
rm -rf *
cd ..
rmdir /opt
Taken to its limits, this approach could imply that all you need is
a mount-point under /, within the primary partition that mounts
onto /, for each of the other physical partitions on your hard drives.
Then _every_ other sub-tree of / which you might need can be
_physically_ placed where you like in any of these physical partitions,
given therein it own peculiar name -- like link_opt above -- and
_logically_ placed where it should be by means of a symbolic link.
This would (if it worked without problems) be a very flexible solution
to problems arising from ill-judged initial partitioning.
Now, the reason I'm raising it as a query/discussion-point is that
sym-links are not treated entirely in the same way as either sub-tree
which are physically on the same partition or physical partitions
which are mounted onto mount-points.
A simple example of this is the 'ls' command, for which the special
option '-L' is required to follow sym-links: for instance, compare
the outputs from the two commands
ls -l /var/X*/lib
and
ls -lL /var/X*/lib
Such a difference could, for instance, break some scripts. The big
new package you just installed into /opt (which is really a sym-link
to /usr/local/link_opt) might not work, or not work properly.
'tar' is another command needing a special option ('d') in order to
act as though the sym-link was a real one.
Not being expert in all the details of how sym-links are handled
compared with ordinary links, I'd like to hear from people who've
been down this road before, or who know what to watch out for if
you do go down it. It strikes me that the method can be useful, but
needs using with great care. Are there, for instance, directories
for which it hould never be used?
So, over to you!
Best wishes,
Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 10-Aug-99 Time: 14:49:51
-- XFMail --
RE: no fixed disk
On 07-Aug-99 tf wrote: Hey guys, I dual boot, and suspect I picked up a virus that ate somthing important. I can't get either to windows or my debian partition. What I wonder is, how can I restore my mbr, (or do anything,) If I can not boot? the slink rescue disk does not boot. windows system disk wont either. hopefully this will be the shove I need to lose windows (its a crutch). Any ideas? If you can't even boot off a system floppy, then your hardware's up the creek. It may be the CMOS BIOS that's got corrupted (If I remember aright, the CIS/Chernobyl virus does just that if it gets the chance). So as a first try, I suggest you switch on the machine and catch it early enough to switch into BIOS setup, which any intact machine will allow even if there are no bootable media available. Then have a look at the BIOS, especially the boot settings. If the BIOS looks normal, then start looking at hardware. Motherboard? paper-clip fallen in there? ... Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 07-Aug-99 Time: 02:37:12 -- XFMail --
RE: Microphone input in X.
On 22-Jul-99 Person, Roderick wrote: Does anyone know, is there a /dev/mic or a module that needs to be loaded to get a mic input to work. I have a Sound Blaster 16 PCI it works in everyother way but not mic input. Come to thing of it I haven't tried the line so I don't know if that works. I use the OSS driver ( http://www.opensound.com/linux-x86.html ) with xmix, xmcd and xplay, and along with everything else microphone input also works fine (the recording to a .wav file is done via xplay). Setup of OSS was amazingly straightforward. Mine's an SB-16 too. Hope this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 22-Jul-99 Time: 16:50:49 -- XFMail --
Re: email acknowledging/confirmation
On 07-Jul-99 Pere Camps wrote: Jonathan, That is not a standard e-mail feature. There are a VERY FEW Microsoft-ish e-mail clients that have a Request return receipt feature, but that ONLY works when the receiving mail client supports that feature as well, and has it enabled. That's why I was asking. Too bad. :( In other words, it'll happen maybe once in a blue moon. I'll resort to the usual method: first line of the message - I want an ack!!! ;) Best way -- person-to-person! But, if you think you'll ever need the automated version, XFMail can do this (both request and give acknowledgement of receipt or of opening or of both), automatically or after user confirmation (according to how you configure it). Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 07-Jul-99 Time: 10:33:35 -- XFMail --
Re: E-mail for dummies.
On 04-Jul-99 Pollywog wrote: Mahogany is new, and still has some bugs, but I like it. I am still using xfmail but want to move to Mahogany as soon as some of the little bugs are fixed. Thanks for the reference. I just tried mahogany. Nice GUI, and clearly going somewhere. I didn't stumble over any of the alleged bugs (though I got a segfault the first few times I started it up); but I think it has a good way to go before it has the very useful functionality of XFMail. Worth watching, though. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 05-Jul-99 Time: 10:59:48 -- XFMail --
Re: Auto Shut-off
On 18-Jun-99 Damon Muller wrote: On Fri, 11 Jun 1999 13:33:40 +0100 (WET DST) Pedro Quaresma de Almeida [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now, whenever I want to shut-off the computer, I do a shutdown at Linux, them I must!!! (the switch-off button does not work, it is only a switch-on button) go to ms-windows to do a shutdown there (with the corresponding shut-off action). Even without kernel APM support, you shouldn't have to reboot into windoze just to shut down. I know with my ATX board/case, I actually have to hold down the stop/start button on the case for about 5 seconds before it shuts down. That is the case with a lot of ATX systems, I believe. This seems to be the case with many new kits. The power supply button is no longer a mechanical link to a mechanical switch which disconnects the mains from the power-supply box, but connects to pins on the motherboard which in turn connect to some circuitry which causes a signal to be sent to some circuitry in the power-suppy. Furthermore, the way in which this works is in many cases configurable by setting jumpers on the motherboard (have a look at the M/B manual). All a damn nuisance: why the hell can't they leave well alone? If all else fails, once you have run shutdown -h now to take the system down to halt state, you could then simply unplug the power cable (or switch off at the wall socket). That should stop it dead ... Hope this helps, Ted. (Fondly remembering my first car and its trusty crank-handle) E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 18-Jun-99 Time: 11:38:42 -- XFMail --
RE: Upgrading My Encarta Encyclopedia 99
On 14-Jun-99 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To Who this my concern, I have tried my hardest to up grade my Encarta Encyclopedia. But, I never could find a way to do it,even though, I followed all of the instructions. Would you please, try to help me out. Does this mean you have got Encarta to run under Linux??? If so, many of us would be grateful to learn how to do it! With best wishes, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 14-Jun-99 Time: 10:48:04 -- XFMail --
RE: I am not impressed with Debian so far.
On 08-Jun-99 Steve Lamb wrote: Multi-CD needs to be streamlined. No, it doesn't. Why use a CD at all when you van get the latest and greatest direct from the net? Better documentation, maybe, so people can get a base install working, but beyond that, nothing but net. I'll tell you why. Like millions of others who have to go on line by modem, with costs here in Europe at about $1.00 per hour at cheapest, at max 10MB/hour its going to take you ages, and cost you much more than a good packaged CD set, to download 1 CD's worth of stuff. Comparatively, CDs are cheap, very fast, and easy to go back to many times. That's why we use them! Best wishes, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 08-Jun-99 Time: 13:09:50 -- XFMail --
RE: A dumb, somewhat off-topic question...
On 08-Jun-99 Mark Wright wrote: I've checked the FAQs, and I can't seem to find a good answer to this: why is Linux not refered to as a flavor of Unix? On Linux.Org, it's referred to as Unix-like, and this hedging seems pretty universal. Is there some Unix standard that Linux does not adhere to. Is there some licensing organization that expects someone to pony up some dough before they can say, Unix(TM) (but if that's it, who paid for FreeBSD?) In my experience, Linux is no more different from any particular flavor of Unix than Solaris is from AIX, or whatever - is there some important difference I'm missing? UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group -- see http://www.unix-systems.org/trademark.html However, you are completely right in that Linux is UNIX in exactly the same sense as a vaccuum cleaner is a Hoover or a ball-point pen is a Biro (or, in France, a Bic). Likewise Solaris, AIX etc are UNIX. While you can get away with using UNIX as a generic term like this in casual speech, you have to be careful elsewhere. In the above URL it is stated: It must not be used as a generic term. To register a product (e.g. Linux) as UNIX with The Open Group you would have to register it under UNIX95 or UNIX98: see http://www.opengroup.org/public/prods/xum4.htm and http://www.unix-systems.org/unix98.html respectively. Sorry about that! Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 08-Jun-99 Time: 19:26:41 -- XFMail --
Re: HELLO
On 04-Jun-99 Bob Brown wrote:
Hey, this is a good one {grin} . Why can't I think up a scam like
this?
- Original Message -
From: some one [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Sent: Friday, June 04, 1999 9:43 AM
Subject: HELLO
What scam? I didn't see anything devious there.
Seriously, there are people in such a situation as described and in their
case it's not funny. People do get tracked down and killed.
If (as is probably the case) it's a genuine cry from the wilderness,
there's probably not much anyone can do except maybe (and discreetly)
offer some comfort. Even email messages can be risky though, in such
cases, since there is a possibility of tracing them to the recipient.
In any case, even if it's possible that it's a scam, it should not be
laughed at thoughtlessly; the other possibilities are too serious and too
sad.
Best wishes to all,
Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 05-Jun-99 Time: 00:04:53
-- XFMail --
RE: Temporaly disable program
On 16-May-99 Urban Gabor wrote: Hi, I've installed a program (gpm to more precise) and I want to disable/enable it for the next booting. Remove/install every time I want to experiment would be weird. Any ideas are wellcome Generically, the way to prevent a program from executing is to change its permissions so that it is not executable (i.e. does not have x permission). My gpm has (ls -l `which gpm`): -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root36515 Dec 1 1997 /usr/bin/gpm i.e. 755 permissions. If you do chmod 644 /usr/bin/gpm then the result would be -rw-r--r-- 1 root root36515 Dec 1 1997 /usr/bin/gpm i.e. the x permissions would have gone and the program would not execute. When you want it back, you restore them with chmod 755 /usr/bin/gpm I'm not running a Debian system at the moment, so I can't answer for precisely how Debian starts up gpm when it boots, but in my SuSE system the file /etc/rc.d/init.d/gpm has the lines test $START_GPM = yes || exit 0 case $1 in start) if test -x /usr/bin/gpm ; then echo Starting console mouse support. (gpm) /usr/bin/gpm $GPM_PARAM fi ;; The if test ... checks whether /usr/bin/gpm exists and is executable. If not (which would be the case if you changes the permissions) then nothing is done. For what you want to do, achieving it simply by changing permissions is going to be simpler than fiddling deep inside the boot-up initialisation scripts. Hope this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 16-May-99 Time: 10:34:17 -- XFMail --
RE: 150K=?iso-8859-1?Q?_=B6W=B0=AA=B3t=A9=F3=BA=F4=A4W=B9=A3=B8u=ACO=A6=F3=B5=A5=A7=D6=B7P??=
On 14-May-99 Eric wrote: [a lot of Japanese accomanied by a 150K advertising GIF] This bomb from Eric was out of order. I hope steps have been taken. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 14-May-99 Time: 12:31:24 -- XFMail --
Compaq Elite 4/75
Hi all, Anyone out there using Linux on a Compaq Elite 4/75 model laptop especially with Graphics: WD 24A who would be willing to get in touch with a friend of mine about X problems? With thanks, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 06-May-99 Time: 19:08:04 -- XFMail --
RE: XiG Accelerated-X v.5
On 19-Apr-99 George Bonser wrote: This is just a note that I wanted to get filed away in the list archive in case anyone else has any problems with getting this software installed: You will need the termcap-compat package installed before installation. Detection of your graphics card is pretty good but it may not properly detect your monitor. Change your monitor settings to the best value you find in the list ( the one that is at or just below the maximum your monitor supports ) and you should find the the higher resolution modes become available to you. In other words, it will not allow higer resolutions that it thinks your monitor supports even if your graphics card can support higher and it is very conservative in setting the monitor modes. I would add to this, however (AND AT THE READER'S OWN RESPONSIBILITY) that the monitor definition files are ASCII files, well annotated, which you can edit if you think that you need to and that it is safe to do so, and if you believe that you know what you are doing. They are files: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/AcceleratedX/monitors/BRAND/MODEL.vda Similarly for the video cards: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/AcceleratedX/boards/BRAND/BOARD.xqa (For instance, when using an S3 375-4 card I found that the XiG max pixel clock was too low, so upped it from 56.6 to 65.0 in the file s3/375-4.xqa with satisactory results). AT YOUR OWN RISK. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 19-Apr-99 Time: 03:15:44 -- XFMail --
Re: How to bring a file from Windows to Debian?
On 19-Apr-99 Keith G. Murphy wrote: That makes me curious. He used quoted-printable. (He also used a multipart message with HTML as one of the parts, but that's irrelevant here). Can PINE not handle that? How do other list users feel about using quoted-printable? The idea is that the readers will wrap the lines to their liking. (Along with some different handling of 8-bit characters). If your reader does not handle it, or you don't have it set properly, the message will indeed look like a big long line. Quoted-printable is an abomination, and the least satisfactory of all the solutions to non-ASCII/non-RFC mail. As well as planting =20 at the end of long-line breaks (and granted there is a need for a solution to the long-line problem), any true = goes into =3D, as well of course as all characters with codes 128 going into =XX. So far so bad. The fun steps up when someone forwards such a message to via another Q-P channel, whereupon we get =-=3D-=3D3D, and so on. Strictly speaking MUAs are supposed to be able to unwrap all that from whatever depth it has reached, but I never met one that could take further than one level. In any case, what if the original message contained an intentional =3D (like this one -- if any of you are viewing this and you mailer unwraps the pseuso-QP you won't see what I wrote). As far as long lines are concerned, if you need to send them then send them as base64- or uuencoded attachments. That way everything is preserved. Otherwise, God be merciful to your PostScript files, for instance. (Some hyper-RFC-compliant mail handlers introduce their own line breaks ... ). As for foreign languages: since the Internet, and nowadays most mail servers, are 8-bit clean, most people should meet with no trouble if they are simply sent in clear with the appropriate charset header. But otherwise the same solution (encoded attachments) is good. These days, any competent MUA should be able to cope with these basic MIME issues, and quote-printable should be abandoned. Since you ask, that's how I feel! Cheers, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 19-Apr-99 Time: 18:32:26 -- XFMail --
Re: www.debian.org
On 18-Apr-99 Bill Bell wrote: It looks like this is the default I am seeing when I go to debian.org. I can't tell for sure though. This gives it away (view Doc Source): !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN HTML lang=zh Ted. In German oder English I know how to count down, Und I'm learning Chinese, says Werner von Braun. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 18-Apr-99 Time: 19:46:32 -- XFMail --
YARD users list??
Does anyone know of a mailing list for users of the YARD RDBMS? ( http://www.yard.de in case anyone's wondering what it is). With thanks, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 17-Apr-99 Time: 10:06:54 -- XFMail --
RE: Continuing saga...
On 16-Apr-99 Small, Bradley wrote: Problem #1, I have a modem on Com1. I know I do because Bill Gates tells me I do when I run His OS. Try as I might I can't seem to convince Linux that it is there. I assume that I should be using wvdial and when it ran the configuration utility it said that it didn't detect any modem. So I read the man page and setup the wvdial.conf file. I pointed it to each /dev/ttySn 0,1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 with no real difference except that 0 threw a different kind of error. You may well have the modem on /dev/ttyS0 = COM1, but you probably also have your mouse there as well. In that case you are likely to hit interrupt conflicts, and Linux will only see one of the devices. Suggestion: either move your mouse to /dev/ttyS1 -- plug into the COM2 port, then rm /dev/mouse ln -s /dev/ttyS1 /dev/mouse or move your modem to COM2 (may involve changing jumper settings; I don't know what to do if the modem is PnP), then rm /dev/modem ln -s /dev/ttyS1 /dev/modem or (perhaps better -- comments from others advisable here): ln -s /dev/cua1 /dev/modem (the ttyS* and cua* devices are hardware-equivalent, but if I'm not mistaken using the /dev/cua* device is better for dialin, which you might want for a modem). Hope this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 16-Apr-99 Time: 14:55:31 -- XFMail --
RE: Continuing saga...
On 16-Apr-99 Small, Bradley wrote: You may well have the modem on /dev/ttyS0 = COM1, but you probably also have your mouse there as well. In that case you are likely to hit interrupt conflicts, and Linux will only see one of the devices. I don't think so, since my mouse is a ps/2 mouse rather than a serial mouse. It could possibly be, but how would I tell. In that case you should have /dev/mouse - /dev/psaux and no conflict should arise; so probably Andrei Ivanov's diagnosis is correct; and you should try his suggestions. Best of luck! Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 16-Apr-99 Time: 15:48:40 -- XFMail --
RE: Should I be worried about this?
On 16-Apr-99 Matt wrote: I sent an email to this list a while ago, and then I got the following. Was there a problem with my original message? Matt No. The problem is explained with limpid clarity in the message which was returned to you: - megtelt a cimzett levelesladaja. In other words, the addressee [EMAIL PROTECTED] cannot receive new mail because his mailbox is full, and [EMAIL PROTECTED] thinks you might wish to know that. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-UIDL: 924287048.21427.draughts.freeuk.net ~ Uzenetet nem tudtuk tovabbitani! Az On altal a(z) [EMAIL PROTECTED] cimre kuldott uzenetet nem tudtuk tovabbitani. A hiba oka a kovetkezo lehet: - megtelt a cimzett levelesladaja. ~ We couldn't deliver your message! The message sent to the address [EMAIL PROTECTED] couldn't be delivered. The reason for the error: - The mailbox of the user is full. ~ Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 16-Apr-99 Time: 23:51:46 -- XFMail --
Re: What DO you lose with Linux ???
On 12-Apr-99 John Galt wrote: The thread was declared dead last week. Was it? If so, if it died, then that was a result of being force-fed with alien material (long emails, security in email, and the like). Whereas, my original posting that started the thread -- which continues to receive the occasional useful response -- concerned the fact that people who switch from Windows to Linux may find themselves losing access to software they like or need to use. Despite the plea I posted a week ago for people to change the subject line if they wanted to discuss these other issues, it sems that they kept on regardless. If that had the effect that what was intended to be a useful thread was declared dead as a result, then as a final comment on that situation I wish to say that I feel very disappointed by these consequences of how some people handled it. Best wishes to all, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 12-Apr-99 Time: 10:02:00 -- XFMail --
Re: Good notation program for linux
On 05-Apr-99 David B.Teague wrote: On Mon, 5 Apr 1999, Marcus Claren wrote: Subject: Good notation program for linux Does anybody know of a good music writing program for linux, preferrably deb - packaged? Hi Marcus: I too need a program that will notate music as well as something that will take files from that notation and create MIDI files, and play them. I looked in the the Packages.gz files from the Debian Potato distribution. There many programs that refer to music. Some of these in .../dists/potato/contrib/... are musiclyr pmx In .../dists/potato/main/... some are lillypond abc2ps abcmidi rosegarden In .../dists/potato/non-free/... some are abc2mtex musixtex opustex I hope this helps, and if you decide to use one of these I'd like to know which one, and how well it does the job. Musixtex is a pure printing program and is capable of doing a fine job, just as raw TeX is capable of fine text printing. However, creating the input by hand would be for the masochistic. Better would be to use a front-end which can do musixtex output. Rosegarden has a nice GUI and can produce musixtex, opustex and (if I'm not mistaken) pmx output. However, Rosegarden's musical repertoire is not complete nor always correct; there is a new version under development but progress is currently VERY slow (since the developers have other things on their plates). Rosegarden can also produce MIDI output, within its limitations. At present, my preferred program for scoresheet printing is MUP (see http://www.arkkra.com ). It has no GUI, so you type in text codes for the music, but this is compact and fairly intuitive, and easily editable. The printed output (PostScript) is superb (or can be made so); its good scoresheet formatting is transparent and involves no detailed input from the user unless some non-standard layout is required. I have encountered almost no serious limitation to what it can print (except possibly piano reductions of polyphonic music: it is limited to two voices per stave which may frustrate you in this context. Although each voice can consist of chords, it is not the same). However, since the source code is equally available, you could try making changes to implement more than 2 voices per stave; but I have to confess that my few attempts to do this have shown that the exercise is more complicated than it looks ... It can also generate MIDI output. Its default MIDI does not sound very exciting; it has MIDI directives which, I guess, a MIDI-knowledgeable user could use to improve that, but I'm not so can't comment. MUP is shareware: to register a copy (and get a key to enable removal of the Unregistered Copy of MUP watermark from everything it prints) you should (and I have been happy to) send the authors $25. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 05-Apr-99 Time: 21:42:06 -- XFMail --
Re: What DO you lose with Linux ???
Folks, Once, there was a purpose to the thread given in the subject line, and I am most grateful to the many people who made relevant comments on my original query about the availability of user-desirable software for Linux. I shall collate these and pass them on; also, it would be seemly to summarise to the list in due course. Meanwhile, it seems to have branched out into other topics, such as the details of IRC and what to do about long email attachments, etc. I have no objection to that either, but would be obliged if such discussion could continue under different subject lines. Best wishes to all, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 03-Apr-99 Time: 16:04:38 -- XFMail --
RE: Epson Stylus Color 640/slink+potato
On 02-Apr-99 Jim Gould wrote: I'm using the following: lprng 3.5.3-0.1 magicfilter 1.2-28 cdlabelgen 1.1.3-1 gv 3.5.8-11 Running cdlabelgen with the proper arguments gets me a PS file which shows up quite nicely in gv. No problem there. The problem appears when I print the label out -- the very last couple of lines of the printout aren't there. Not continued on another sheet, just... not there. Similar problems occurred while printing in XV, but with different files. Anyone have any ideas at all what I could do to fix the problem? This could be a paper-size problem: If the software thinks it's formatting for A4 size but you're printing to US Letter size paper, than exactly that will happen. Check the settings! Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 02-Apr-99 Time: 13:42:44 -- XFMail --
RE: -HUP question
On 31-Mar-99 Pollywog wrote: I changed my /etc/inetd.conf and then ran 'killall -HUP inetd' but my logs don't show that inetd restarted. Will I have to reboot instead, or maybe go to single user mode and exit? If, as root, you simply type inetd that should restart it. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 31-Mar-99 Time: 22:56:47 -- XFMail --
RE: 386/4MB RAM?
On 29-Mar-99 Vincent Murphy wrote: i want to install linux (debian if possible) on a 386SX with 4MB RAM and a 51MB HD. it will have an ISDN terminal adapter and a 3c509 network transciever. can i use debian? if i can't, how do i go about it? i'm open to suggestions about other (*BSD?) kernels. Linux is installable and usable on such a machine, including networking. (I actually started off with 386DX/25, 4MB RAM, 40MB HDD and got useful work done: 5MB swap, 25MB occupied by Linux and applications, and 10MB left over for user files). However, you will have to limit yourself to installing only the minimum components you need, and of course no X. I don't know whether Debian's installer will work in only 4MB RAM. I don't think Red Hat's will. I did once, owing to a memory failure on a laptop which normally has 20MB RAM but was only seeing 4MB, install SuSE-5.2 to the full extent I wanted (including X, but it did have 500MB HDD!), but it had to work at it all night once the packages were slected (it was using the swap heavily). So your mileage may vary. Probably, in such a tight space, you may find it more straightforward to install from a distribution like SlackWare, where it is easier to copy the distribution components you need onto floppies and carry on from there (with 50MB HDD you're only going to be able to install some 15-20 floppies' worth of stuff), and the installation manager is very compact. Sláinte, and the best of luck! Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 29-Mar-99 Time: 11:33:20 -- XFMail --
RE: what is flex ?
On 27-Mar-99 Àùåóëîâ Àëåêñåé wrote:
What is flex ?
Pathfinder
Flex performs essentially the same functions as classic UNIX lex: it
produces C code which serves as a parser that can be used to analyse
structured input for patterns and tokens, and, for each token, generate
corresponding output according to rules which you define. This is
typically followed by analysing its output by C code generated by yacc
(yet another compiler compiler) which refers the sequence of outputs
from lex to a yacc grammar which you also define. The grammar is the
generative grammar for the language in which you write your structured
input.
Programs which accept structured program-like input from the user
(including anything from a simple calculator which can recognise and
respond to input like 1.2 + 3.14 = ?, to a full compiler for a language
like C) can be composed using lex and yacc. A classic is the eqn
component of the troff package, which generates text-formatting commands
for mathematical printing when given input like
{x sup 2} over {a sup 2} + {y sup 2} over {b sup 2} = 1.
The interpretation of this input is defined in the first instance by
lex rules, and there is a yacc grammar for it which generates the
troff code which generates the formatting when processed by troff.
See the man page man flex (or man lex which gives the same), and also
man yacc.
Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 28-Mar-99 Time: 02:06:43
-- XFMail --
What DO you lose with Linux ???
Apologies for duplicate postings, but I'd like to make sure I sound a diverse population. Today' London Sunday Times feature Innovation (pp 10-11 of News Review, http://www.sunday-times.co.uk ) has an article by David Hewson (of Linux, the Program from Hell fame) entitled Linux wins backing of computing giants. His attitude to Linux is much more moderate than it was: the article is basically balanced and fair, including some sound negative comment. However, he states: Behind the hype there is precious little sign of Linux becoming a serious, versatile desktop OS. If all you need is a browser to get through the day, it's fine. But if I boot the PC I am using right now into any kind of Unix the list of stuff I lose -- music composition, accounting and personal finance to name but a few -- is endless because the applications just aren't there. On top of that, Linux is difficult to set up, fails to understand the difference between a desktop PC and a notebook, and lacks any kind of plug and play facility. I'm sure the last sentence is simply wrong in point of fact. If, in the previous sentence, he'd given a longer list of stuff I lose one might be in a better position to respond constructively. However, can I ask people what they would use for music composition, accounting and personal finance? I'm aware of good programs for creating musical scores which can also generate MIDI output, but I'd hardly call them top-flight composition tools; and it does seem that the accounting/finance area is thinly served. He didn't mention OCR (optical character rcognition) either. Where is the OCR program for Linux that works? Now that vmware is out ( http://www.vmware.com ) people who want to can run Windows applications on top of Linux without, it seems, losing much or indeed anything, so this could be the basis of another line of reply to Hewson's article: he can start up Linux and the list of stuff I lose would be empty because it would all still be there! Comments, info, contributions, anyone? Best wishes to all, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 28-Mar-99 Time: 12:49:27 -- XFMail --
Re: RedHat = MS-Linux???
On 28-Mar-99 Guido A.J. Stevens wrote: George Bonser [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I wish I could find that Heinz Ketchup article again. It was Red Hat's president saying that their #1 mission is to make Linux=Red Hat. If you send someone out to get Linux, he wants to be 99% sure they are going to come back with a Red Hat box. http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-03/young.html A fascinating article. Somewhat mischievously, I extract the following from it: Heinz has 80% of the ketchup market because they have been able to define the taste of ketchup in the mind of ketchup consumers. Now the Heinz Ketchup brand is so effective that as consumers we think that ketchup that will not come out of the bottle is somehow better than ketchup that pours easily! This was Red Hat's opportunity ... to help define, in the minds of our customers, what an operating system can be. One feels that the parallel with Heinz should not be taken too literally. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 28-Mar-99 Time: 15:45:30 -- XFMail --
Re: What DO you lose with Linux ???
On 28-Mar-99 Tom Pfeifer wrote: (Ted Harding) wrote: and it does seem that the accounting/finance area is thinly served. This is the primary missing piece for me, at least in terms of a home, desktop system. While there are some personal finance programs available such as Gnucash etc, there is nothing remotely as good as Quicken. And I'm certainly not interested in running an older version of Quicken with Wine. I have gotten used to such things as paying bills on line, downloading my credit card statement, and being able to tie all my finances (investments, mortgage, credit, checking etc) together seemlessly in one software package. I suppose one has to consider that (at any rate here in the UK) on-line banks assume you're using Quicken and interact accordingly, so you could miss out on a lot of facilities unless you use it. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 28-Mar-99 Time: 17:03:12 -- XFMail --
Re: interesting
On 16-Mar-99 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: George Bonser dixit: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,33762,00.html Looks like Caldera is building a nice linux install wizard ... called lizard. They say they might open-source it. They might? I thought everything developed under Linux has to be GPL'ed, and thus open source! Not so. You may develop any application or tool you wish on/under Linux on a commercial basis and impose whatever licence conditions you like, so long as this does not depend on GPL'ed code, and market it as you please. A lot of people have been doing just this for quite some time. What you may not do is treat anything of GPL origin in this way: for that you have to make the source available and you have to include the GPL itself (or state clearly how it may be obtained). Best wishes, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 16-Mar-99 Time: 11:59:39 -- XFMail --
Re: Statistics/graphing programs for scientists?
On 12-Mar-99 Richard Lyon wrote: No free unix program is going to provide the sort of on-line help, user interface or range of analysis methods that comes with statistica. Unix applications like octave are not going to provide any better statistical analysis than a spreadsheet. You may be right about statistica (for all I know). However, your last sentence is so seriously misleading that it must be corrected. First, octave is no spreadsheet but close to being a clone of the MatLab core executable. Therefore it is a highly programmable matrix- and array-oriented general-purpose numerical analysis package and it is exremely powerful. What it lacks relative to MatLab is the range of toolboxes which add specialised pre-programmed functionality. Though it does have its own Statistics toolbox this is less complete than MatLab's. However, nothing whatever prevents a knowledgeable user from programming their own very sophisticated statistical analysis, far beyond what any spreadsheet known to me could achieve. Scilab is another free unix program with similar general capabilities to octave and more powerful in certain respects, with excellent graphical resources. In addition there are some powerful free unix programs which specialise in Statistics. R and XLispStat are important examples. An important though more specialised (based on Monte Carlo approaches to Bayesian statistics) package is BUGS, also available for Linux. And, lest your last sentence should give the impression that only programs with spreadsheet-like capability are available for UNIX generally, don't forget that almost all the major programs exist in UNIX versions (MatLab, S-plus, SPSS, Mathematica, SAS, maybe also Statistica, and so on) and many of them have been ported to Linux as well (MatLab being early on the Linux scene). Regards, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 13-Mar-99 Time: 15:36:55 -- XFMail --
Re: what is SGML? [long]
On 11-Mar-99 Henry Kingman wrote: J.H.M. Dassen wrote: This might be a little off, as it was a couple of years since my SGML class, but here goes: SGML was created in the 70s by an IBM lawyer, Charles Goldfarb, ... Thank you for that story ... enjoyed it with great interest. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 11-Mar-99 Time: 22:48:10 -- XFMail --
RE: Decode mail attachements from Eudora via a filter
On 26-Feb-99 Conrado Badenas wrote: I recently begun to receive messages with information like this: Dear Conrado: Here you have the file requested. I'm sorry but I wrote it with MSWord. Your mom --=_920025339==_ Content-Type: application/msword; name=File.doc; x-mac-type=42494E41; x-mac-creator=4D535744 Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=File.doc How can I restore the file File.doc from the attachement made with Eudora?. I have tried with uudecode but it doesn't work (it seems it is not uuencoded). This is your clue: Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 base64-encoding is not the same as uuencoding. Eudora, as such, has nothing to do with it. Lots of mailers use base64. A base64-encoded file can be decoded with the command cat codedfile | mmencode -u decodedfile However, note one important difference: An encapsulated uuencoded block begins with a line like begin 664 filename and ends with a line like end and so you can submit a text file which includes a uuencoded block to uudecode, and it will decode the block into filename. This is a very convenient way to handle it when encapsulated in email, since it ignores everything except what's between the two encapsulating lines. base64 encoding knows nothing about that sort of thing, so you have to separate out the encoded block on its own, with nothing else at all. If the encoded block is a separate (and clean) email attachment, then you should be able to save the attachment and run mmencode -u on it. However, if the base64-encoded block is within the text of the body of the message (as sometimes happens), then you have to save the message and edit out by hand everything except the encoded block. Hope this helps. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 26-Feb-99 Time: 17:40:14 -- XFMail --
YARD DBMS
Anyone out there bee using YARD DBMS trouble-free on Linux? I'm getting more or less nowhere. Version 1: 4.02.00 of 08 March 1996 (installed off SuSE-5.1 CD pre-packed). This one is simply obstinate about doing the right thing or completing operations, especially in yardxsql. On the whole I'm going round in circles with this one. Version 2: 4.05.1 installed strictly following instructions from the cpio archive from the YARD ftp site priv_4.05.1_PCPentium_Linux2.0.33.cpio.gz With this one I cannot even initialise it (other users are still active even though no user has even started to use it). If anyone has been here before me and found a way round it, or can assure me that it's not worth trying, I'd be pleased to hear. I'm using a 5.1 SuSE system, kernel 2.0.34 With thanks, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 23-Feb-99 Time: 02:33:41 -- XFMail --
Re: not a plain file - apt install with dselect
I'm not sure that [EMAIL PROTECTED] is best for you to bother about this. I've forwarded this correspondence to the person who probably is best. Ted. On 20-Feb-99 John Stevenson wrote: I guess we are better off using Imperial college in london that manchester. I now use src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/Linux/debian and have had no problems. David Wright wrote: Quoting John Stevenson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): [...] I am installing the frozen distribution from ftp.mcc.ac.uk using the apt method of dselect. I installed apt via the instructions in the updatepackages/Readme file on the ftp site. I have 95% of the packages installed, however it seems that apt wont install the files its fetched untill it has all of them. I can understand this. However apt is having problems getting a few of the files. See the error message below. Is there a problem with apt, the ftp site or my installation? Any clues ?? This is what I sent to mcc.ac.uk back in August last year. I got no reply. --8 Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 15:26:13 +0100 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: ftp.mcc.ac.uk oddities I've emailed this address because the file ftp://ftp.mcc.ac.uk/.message says that if I have problems, I should email %E [sic]. I use the ftp.mcc.ac.uk server to download from the /pub/linux/distributions/Debian tree. Over recent weeks, I seem to have problems with parts of the tree suddenly disappearing. My client freezes up, and if I kill it and reconnect, chunks of the tree are missing, but they usually return after a few minutes if I keep re-listing the directory. Am I alone here? For example, just a few minutes ago, I could only see the READMEs and /hamm in /pub/linux/distributions/Debian, but everything is back now. --8 Cheers, -- Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +44 1908 653 739 Fax: +44 1908 655 151 Snail: David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA Disclaimer: These addresses are only for reaching me, and do not signify official stationery. Views expressed here are either my own or plagiarised. -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 20-Feb-99 Time: 19:50:43 -- XFMail --
RE: Which mail system?
On 19-Feb-99 Robert-Jan Kuijvenhoven wrote: I have installed Linux and now I would like to start sending and receiving mail. I would like to send and receive mail to the smtp server and from the pop server from my ISP. My computer is a stand-alone machine, so there is no local mail. What is, in my case, the best package for mailing? The book 'Running Linux' (O'Reilly) suggests using smail and elm, but I have the feeling smail is for setting up a mailserver. Which I don't need because I connect to my ISP's mailserver. I can use netscape for this, but I would appreciate a mail system a mail system that receives mail in the background, without me having to start X and netscape every time. Be careful not to get confused here. I think, when you are using Netscape to connect to your ISP's mailserver then you are in effect using it as a browser which happens to be reading your mailbox on the ISP's mailserver, much as it would read another URL or a newsgroup. If you want to have mail handling facilities on your own machine, then there are two aspects to deal with. You need a Mail User Agent (MUA) like elm, pine, mutt, ... (which don't need X) or my favourite (see below) XFMail (which only works in X). This is the friendly interface you interact with when you compose, read or administer mail messages. Netscape can also function as an MUA (and of course needs X). You also need a Mail Transport Agent (MTA) like smail, sendmail, exim ... This is the software which sits in the background and handles the transmission of mail. For instance, when you finish composing a mail in your MUA and send it, this really invokes MTA activity; the MTA sorts out what headers to attach to the mail and stacks these, and the message text, in the outgoing queue directory. Depending on your connectivity, it may then immediately pick it up and open up a Mail transport dialogue with your ISP's mail-router, thereby transmitting it, or will leave it hanging until you have a connection open and then (perhaps under an explicit command such as mailq which for both smail and sendmail starts the queue run to send off all the batched mail to the ISP) send it out. Netscape does not function as an MTA. For receiving mail, if your ISP's mailhost knows about your IP address at the time it receives a mail for you, it may try to transmit it to your machine immediately (depending on configuration). More likely, it will stack your incoming mail in your mailbox on the ISP's mailhost and wait for an explicit mail-pulling exercise using popclient or fetchmail which will invoke its popserver facility; your own machine is responsible for starting up popclient or fetchmail. Mail thus received by your machine is stored in the first instance in your local mailbox file (/var/spool/mail/userid). Some MUAs handle this mailbox directly (elm, pine, ... ); others (XFMail, ... ) copy it down and split it into several files, one for each message, in your personal Mail directory (/home/userid/Mail/... or -- for Netscape -- /home/userid/nsmail/...) and only after this can you see the mail in the MUA. It is not a good idea to use different MUAs promiscuously, because of these different mail-handling methods. Again, depending on your connectivity, you may decide to program popclient or fetchmail activity to happen at set intervals (as a cron job) or when you deliberately decide to open up a connection. As to choice between smail and sendmail: in terms of what they do and how they are invoked, they are very similar (smail is deliberately designed to be a plugin replacement for sendmail). However, there are some differences of interface. The major difference between them is in the organisation of their configuration files, sendmail's being much more obscure. However, a modern Linux system should incorporate straightforward s[end]mail configuration for standard purposes as part of its system administration utilities. Once you have you MUA and MTA set up on your own machine, then you can read and write mail in the background whether or not you are connected to your ISP. As I am doing at this moment. Hope this helps, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 19-Feb-99 Time: 14:45:06 -- XFMail --
Re: Tex
On 17-Feb-99 M.C. Vernon wrote: Hate to sound stupid but just what is TeTex? What is it used for? It is latex, tex, and a bunch of add-ons. They are _the_ way to typeset documents. Combine this with a decent editor[1] and you'll produce better documents than MSWord Matthew [1]I could name one, but that might be flame-bait ;) As elsewhere in the message (and I'm not talking about the reference to MSWord) ... :-) Best wishes, Ted (aka groffer) Motto of the Day: Markup Languages Are GO!! E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 17-Feb-99 Time: 14:23:51 -- XFMail --
Re: Network Not Working!
On 10-Feb-99 Carey Evans wrote: Trying to use 192.168.0.xxx is asking for trouble, in my opinion. Why? I've been using this series for years on a home Linux LAN with no problems at all that I'm aware of. Try setting Linux and Windows to 192.168.1.something. What difference does it make to change from 192.168.0.xxx to 192.168.1.xxx? Or is it a Windows thing? Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 10-Feb-99 Time: 11:54:30 -- XFMail --
RE: MAILER-DAEMON@telmer DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE
On 10-Feb-99 Colin Telmer wrote: I keep getting this message placed into my various mailboxes and can't figure out what is doing it. Pine 4.05 can't see them but when I log in I always have mail and it bugs me:) I partially understand what the message is for (something to do with pop or imap) but I can't figure out what keeps creating them after I delete them. I do not have any pop or imap software installed. I do however infrequently use netscape mail and have it pointed at the same folders as pine is. Could netscape be creating these messages? Cheers, Colin. Did you read the message? The one which is planted locally here states: == Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 14:38:57 + (GMT) Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA X-IMAP: 0897750745 110670 This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software. If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created with the data reset to initial values. == so it looks like a really bad idea to delete it (unless you have no other mail in your folder). And it's not created by netscape, but by the mail software itself. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 10-Feb-99 Time: 15:02:38 -- XFMail --
RE: Redirecting display output to multiple monitors
On 08-Feb-99 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have three computers on a LAN. I want to run an application in one of them and have the display output showing on the other two at the same time. I guess what I'm trying to do is something like MS netmeeting. Is this possible? Try XMX (X multiplexer). Recent versions are straightforward and work beautifully. (You can elect whether or not the other displays are entitled to provide input). This is an X application though: I don't know of a way to copy a plain console. http://www.cs.brown.edu/software/xmx/ Good luck, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 08-Feb-99 Time: 23:44:38 -- XFMail --
RE:
On 05-Feb-99 Pawel Zawisza wrote: is there a way to run debian (ie. v 1.3) on a 386sx system with ONLY 2megz of ram? If no then what other linux version would you recommend for this system? thanx, Pawel It is probably impossible to run any Linux with only 2MB RAM -- maybe just possible to get a flicker of basic activity, but since the kernel, once in memory, will take up at least most of that you won't have much room for anything else. 4MB RAM can support a reasonable amount of activity if X is not used. If you want to use X, you should have at least 8MB (it will just about run in 4MB but will be impossibly slow). Hope this helps, Ted. PS the above does not apply to ultra-compact Linuxes which can fit on a 1.44MB floppy, but these are so limited you probably won't want to use them. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 07-Feb-99 Time: 20:23:24 -- XFMail --
Test -- please ignore
Please excuse this -- I need to test what our local mail-router is up to (or not, as the case may be!). Best wishes, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 31-Jan-99 Time: 12:17:10 -- XFMail --
RE: CR key broken ?
On 17-Jan-99 Nidge Jones wrote: I have asked this before, but I still can't get to the bottom of it ? When I telnet into Debian 2.0 from a Terminal on the Ethernet, the CR key becomes broken in a few things and doesn't fucntion right. [snip] At the Linux prompt all is well, nothing appears to be wrong. However start something like JOE (editor) up and the CR doesn't insert when you hit it, it just wraps to the next line. For example, if you are half way through a line of text, and you hit CR, the second half of the line will drop to a new line , and all other lines drop down to make room, yes ! But not here, if I do such an action, the text will just drop ontop of the line below, making editing impossible. [snip] I'm not finding it easy to understand what's going on from your description, but if I understand aright then: In case A: you press return in the middle of a line, the line breaks, the second half and all below drop a line, and the second half begins at the left of the screen. In case B: you press return in the middle of a line, the line breaks, the second half and all below drop a line, and the second half begins vertically below where it was before. If that's the case, then in case A your screen display is executing a CR-LF combination, while in the second case it is executing a LF only. Quite where this arises is anyone's guess, since the relationships between keyboard input, file contents, and screen display depend on a variety of translations carried out internally. Normally, for keyboard input to a text file in any editor, the CR key inserts a LF into the file (the standard UNIX end-of-line delimiter). Normally, when a text file with LF EOL delimiters is output to screen, the LF is translated into a CR-LF pair. So case A looks normal, and case B looks like a failure to translate LF-CR-LF on output. This is possibly an stty problem: try giving the command stty -a in the relevant terminal, and compare the output with what man stty says. God luck, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 17-Jan-99 Time: 12:04:44 -- XFMail --
Re: _very_ reproducable WP8 X client lib error.
On 28-Dec-98 Havoc Pennington wrote: On Mon, 28 Dec 1998, Stan Brown wrote: This bug is 100% reproducable. Sugestions? Email Corel. It's almost certainly a WordPerfect bug, and since WordPerfect is not free software there's nothing anyone else can do about it. For what it's worth, when I read Stan Brown's posting about the _very_ reproducible bug I tried to reproduce it. And failed. WP-8 labels worked fine for me. I installed out of the full tar file onto a 1-year-old SuSE-5.1 Linux system (with of course libc5 libraries). Maybe some interaction between WP-8 and the Linux distribution you use; in which case it's not necessarily a WordPerfect bug at all. Cheers, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 28-Dec-98 Time: 19:08:59
RE: Why?!
of the software? And would it work equally as well? As to why I use Linux myself: as an old UNIX user I was waiting for an affordable UNIX for the PC. Linux came on the scene and I thought it would do the job. I (we) have been using it for 5-6 years now. Linux has always done the UNIX job very well. The difficulty in the early days was finding the variety of applications software we needed, and it was an act of faith that one day it would all become available and Linux would come of age as an OS For The User. I think that day is dawning now. Meanwhile, between putting the UNIX tools together to accomplish tasks, and running the DOS software under Dosemu then later running Win-3.1 software under WABI, we have managed pretty well. (I'd like to add that when I first tried Windows I was so revolted by the tacky interface and the bland kiss it better but don't solve the problem MS-Help, that I stuck to DOS as much as possible; even then I made up my mind to find something different, without quite knowing what I was looking for). Anyway, that's my story: one family's Home Use of Linux. I reckon it works pretty well and I'd need a lot of persuading that it would be worth shelling out the many hundreds of pounds it would cost to do it the other way. Or try to do it ... Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that there is one other desktop in the house. It runs Windows-98, and it is heavily (almost exclusively) used ... ... for games. I hope this throws some light. Best wishes, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 21-Dec-98 Time: 00:08:14
Re: WP 8 problem
On 20-Dec-98 Riccardo Tommasini wrote: Charles, indeed I think all this satisfactory reports about WP8 and the fact that one should not have complains about limitations of free a software are an example of the poor's man happiness. The points are: - the cost it takes to dowload 23 MBytes of software, i.e. the phone bill. - the fact that corel never pointed out any limitation. - the fact that at no cost there are a lot of products much better than the free version of WP8. Hence congratulations to all the guys happy with such a bunch of useless code. ric Let me try to balance this argument. I'm basically in agreement with Riccardo, without wishing to be so dismissive. The free download version is in fact _very_ useful for anything which is plain text/tables/etc so long as you don't need equations or drawing capbilities. However, it would have been fair dealing for Corel to make the true limitations clear beforehand. I think that in ALL European countries people pay by the minute for phone connections, and getting WP8 cost me at least $5 (equivalent). I'm keen to get WP8 anyway, if only for the MS file format import/export facilities (otherwise, what DO I do if I get a Word7 file by email? I can run Word-6 under WABI, but no Win-95 software). I've used WP since 5.1, including WP6 on Linux and the demo WP7 (indeed fully functional but reminds you every minute or so that you haven't paid for it). In order to legitimately use WP8 outside the home, anf for the sake of the manual a nd the extras, I would happily have paid up the reasonable price for the commercial version when it came out, subject to being satisfied that it worked properly for me. The interest of the download version is that it lets you check it out for misbehaviour, and for whether it does enough for you. With equations and graphics missing, I can't do this properly, and I do feel somewhat cheated of my $5. I don't think Corel were straightforward about this. Their Web page said the download was a Fully functional word processor (which it isn't, even compared with WP-5.1 -- i.e. equations, though you can still import grahics e.g. jpeg); and that the commercial version would include in addition Advanced drawing and charting applicationsd with online Help -- no mention of equations, and Advanced suggests that Basic drawing and charting applications would be available. Among the few recent benefits to modern civilisation which we in the UK can claim is the concept of being economical with the truth; it seems we have managed to convey it to others ... Best wishes to all, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 20-Dec-98 Time: 17:51:59
Re: Why does 16 bpp look the same as 24 bpp?
On 20-Dec-98 Ben Collins wrote: On Sun, Dec 20, 1998 at 10:54:52AM -0700, Rick Macdonald wrote: Can anybody explain this? I would have thought that 65K colours would _not_ look as good as 16M! Logic would tell you this, but in fact 16bit and 24bit isn't very discernible from a human standpoint especially for simple photos. True enough, for 24bit vs 16bit. However, don't forget that some apps will refuse to run in 16bpp (e.g. WABI will run only in 8bpp or -- using wabiprog-2.2D -- also in 24bpp; but WABI will NEVER run in 16bpp). So if you use these apps and want more than 8bpp (and there is a hell of a difference between 8bpp and 16bpp) then you have to use 24bpp. Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 20-Dec-98 Time: 19:21:29
8-bit X cutpaste problem
Folks, I have a curious problem with cuttingpasting 8-bit characters between xterms, i.e. characters with the 8th bit set (such as ¾ which has code 0xBE = 190 decimal). It arises when pasting into a window in which a remote machine is logged on, in which case the 8th bit is stripped (i.e. the above gets pasted in as with code 0x3E = 62). Pasting into a window in which the local machine is logged on is OK -- the 8th bit is not stripped. In detail: On machine A: xterm windows: AA1 (machine A logged in) AA2 (machine A logged in) AB1 (machine B logged in) AB2 (machine B logged in) pasting AA1-AA2 : OK (8th bit not stripped) pasting AB1-AA2 : OK (8th bit not stripped) pasting AA1-AB1 : FU (8th bit stripped) pasting AB1-AB2 : FU (8th bit stripped) And it is exactly symmetrical by machine: going to machine B, On machine B: xterm windows: BB1 (machine B logged in) BB2 (machine B logged in) BA1 (machine A logged in) BA2 (machine A logged in) pasting BB1-BB2 : OK (8th bit not stripped) pasting BA1-BB2 : OK (8th bit not stripped) pasting BB1-BA1 : FU (8th bit stripped) pasting BA1-BA2 : FU (8th bit stripped) Can anyone (a) explain why this happens? (b) suggest a cure? With thanks, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 03-Dec-98 Time: 18:00:01
RE: Can I start X while other stuff going on?
On 11-Nov-98 Kent West wrote: This will probably be one of those questions that EVERYBODY knows the answer to, so why are you asking such dumb questions, Kent? However, being entrenched in the Windows world where you didn't do such things, I wanted to ask before I hosed something. That's OK, Kent! You're in the position of some kid who's never had a good meal, led up to a table covered in goodies, who asks Can I really eat all that at once?. Just get stuck in. Otherwise put: assume you can do everything at once unless you find different in particular cases. Can I switch to another virtual terminal and start X Windows while I've got something else going on in the first vterm, such as a download or a dselect session, etc? Yes. And if I can, once I'm in X, how do I then get back to where I can see how the download is progressing? Do I just Ctrl-Alt-F[key] back to the original vterm, or can I bring up the process in an Xterm or something similar? Pretty well. Normally X (whichever VT you start it from) is running in VT6 (or maybe VT7). To get from X back to ANY VT (Vt1, Vt2, ... ) just press Ctrl+Alt+F1, Ctrl+Alt+F2, etc. However, you can't transfer a process from a VT to X, nor from X to a VT, nor between VTs, nor between different xterms in X. To get from any VT back to X, just press Alt+F6 (or maybe Alt+F7). To switch between VTs (even though X is running) press Alt+VT1, Alt+Vt2, etc. You'll find that everything that's running on any/all of the VTs, and also in X, just keeps running even though you're not looking at it. Welcome to the world where things happen. Cheers, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 11-Nov-98 Time: 02:34:37
RE: [SuSE Linux] bitmap to outline postscript
On 19-Oct-98 I wrote: Does anyone know of a package that can take a bitmapped black-and-white image and produce PostScript outline code which would draw the equivalent? I am most obliged to everyone who responded to the above request. Several people suggested Corel Draw or other commercial software (which does not as yet, it seems, run under LInux). However, I donot propose to go down such roads as yet. Special thanks to Karl Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED], joint creator of GNU fontutils, for drawing my attention to this (which seems made for the job). In its original (1992) form, however, this does not compile easily (i.e. for me not at all) under Linux. I am therefore also grateful to Oliver Corff, [EMAIL PROTECTED], for his work in changing it so that it does compile more easily. However, this is for RedHat-5.1, and it still did not compile on my SuSE-5.1. This may have been a glibc problem. Anyway, with a few changes I was able to get Oliver's version to compile. Details are as follows: Get Oliver's version (gnu fontutils-0.6 for Linux) from http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~corff/fontutils/* Untar. If necessary, change GNUmakefile.in to reflect your basic X directories (you will probably find that the default /usr/X11R6/lib/X11, /usr/X11R6/include and /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults need no change). Also (and you probably will need to make this change) in two places in GNUmakefile.in replace /usr/local/tex.local by wherever your TeX texmf tree is. Namely, at line 30 I changed texmf_prefix = /usr/local/tex.local to texmf_prefix = /usr/lib/teTeX/texmf and at line 59 I changed default_tfm_path = /usr/local/tex.local/fonts//:. to default_tfm_path = /usr/lib/teTeX/texmf/fonts//:. Finally (and this is where the possible glibc issue arises), in the file lib/fmod.c at and around line 53, I removed everything to do with the line extern int isnan(),finite(); The reason is that math.h, already included, defines these as macros and the compiler treats the above occurrences as cpp macro calls, with unwanted results. After these changes were made, I got a clean compilation. Now I only need to find out how to really use the fontutils! Best wishes to all, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 28-Oct-98 Time: 12:37:22
Re: WP 8 Suite
On 18-Oct-98 Bob Nielsen wrote: On Sun, 18 Oct 1998, D'jinnie wrote: A while ago, there was a buzz about Corel releasing a WP Suite 8 for Linux. It was slated to come out mid-summer...I can't find any mention of it anywhere on Corel's site. Did they give up on the idea, or what? All they have released so far is the WP 7 word processor. There was a beta of version 8, but it was for the word processor only and it doesn't appear to be available at present. Look at www.sdcorp.com for further information. I'd like to see Quattro Pro added, at least. Bob If you go to one of the sites listed on www.sdcorp.com for WP7, you can find the pre-release of WP8, dated August 1998 ftp ftp.turbolinux.com /pub/linux/corelwp/wp8prelease/ (and read the README in that directory: you can either get a 38MB tar.gz file, or several files less than 5MB each. Also note what it says about unpacking the file[s]). The directory /pub/linux/corelwp/ itself contains the files for WP7. Hope this helpes someone! Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 19-Oct-98 Time: 01:30:38
Re: WP 8 Suite
On 19-Oct-98 Ted Harding wrote: On 18-Oct-98 Bob Nielsen wrote: On Sun, 18 Oct 1998, D'jinnie wrote: A while ago, there was a buzz about Corel releasing a WP Suite 8 for Linux. It was slated to come out mid-summer...I can't find any mention of it anywhere on Corel's site. Did they give up on the idea, or what? All they have released so far is the WP 7 word processor. There was a beta of version 8, but it was for the word processor only and it doesn't appear to be available at present. Look at www.sdcorp.com for further information. I'd like to see Quattro Pro added, at least. Bob If you go to one of the sites listed on www.sdcorp.com for WP7, you can find the pre-release of WP8, dated August 1998 ftp ftp.turbolinux.com /pub/linux/corelwp/wp8prelease/ (and read the README in that directory: you can either get a 38MB tar.gz file, or several files less than 5MB each. Also note what it says about unpacking the file[s]). The directory /pub/linux/corelwp/ itself contains the files for WP7. Hope this helpes someone! Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 19-Oct-98 Time: 01:30:38 E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 19-Oct-98 Time: 01:31:44
bitmap to outline postscript
Hi Folks, Does anyone know of a package that can take a bitmapped black-and-white image and produce PostScript outline code which would draw the equivalent? Reason: I have an assortment of hieroglyhpic, cuneiform etc characters in ancient scripts which I want to be able to use as scalable characters in groff text. I can make images of these, for instance by scanning, as bitmaps or similar. Given a PostScript graphic, I know how to use this in groff as a character scaleable by the surrent point size. However, the direct PostScript equivalent of a bitmap has a lot of bytes in it, since it draws it dot by dot. If I took the time and trouble, I could make individual PS equivalents by PS line or curve commands (which in any case would scale snoothly) in far fewer bytes; but I would like to do this in software. Basically: given, e.g., the bit pattern 000 0 0 00 00 00 00 0 0 000 is there a program which would take this pattern and produce an economical PostScript code which would operate by drawing two ellipses as smooth curves and filling the space between them? With thanks, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 19-Oct-98 Time: 17:52:38
Re: Debian KDE philosophy
Independently of the KDE issue, there's a question I've wondered about for some time. Has the GPL ever been tested in court (i.e. has there ever been a case that turned on it)? Best wishes, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 09-Oct-98 Time: 15:04:58
Re: being dropped from the list
On 17-Sep-98 Hanno Wagner \(Debian-Listmaster-Mails\) wrote: On Wed, Sep 16, 1998 at 09:37:04PM -, Darren Benham wrote On 16-Sep-98 Ralph Winslow wrote: It seems that everytime my ISP has the slightest interrruption of e-mail service, I get unsubscribed to this list. Might it be you should define slightest :-) Our listserver count the bounces someone is having at (actually) at the count of 10 he unsubscribes him from the particular list. debian-user is a high-traffic list and the count of 10 is reached easily. I've been watching this thread. Now that you've replied, Hanno, I wish to add my voice to support the original complaint. A while ago, your list server wrote to me: ***Your mail address [EMAIL PROTECTED] has been removed ***from the debian-user@lists.debian.org mailinglist. ***It generated an excessive amount of bounced mails. ***From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***Subject: failure notice *** ***Hi. This is the qmail-send program at murphy.debian.org. ***I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following ***addresses. ***This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out. *** ***[EMAIL PROTECTED]: ***130.88.200.93 does not like recipient. ***Remote host said: 550 relaying to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***prohibited by administrator ***Giving up. On the other hand, nothing seemed to be wrong when I myself looked into our local mail system (and specifically 130.88.200.93, which DID like me). Why so?? I asked my local admin friend. To which the reply was: ***This was a temporary problem between 0700 and about 0930 yesterday ***morning. I had a real tantrum about it... but it won't've done any ***good... So, as a contribution to you should define slightest :-) I offer the above snippet of empirical evidence -- namely a temporary local misconfiguration lasting a mere 2-1/2 hours can cause people to be dropped from the mailing list, and have to re-subscribe. Now I know you have a big mailing list there, which inevitably generates many bounces because of the amount of traffic. However, the important parameter in determining whether a user is really unmailable is not the _number_ of bounces but the length of time, combined with the reason, for which the remote address generates bounces. So, therefore, a retry bounce generated say every 5 hours usually indicates that some host on the route is temporarily down, and re-try for at least 24 hours (and most mailers keep trying for up to 5 days) is in order. On the other hand, an unknown-user bounce is more indicative of genuine unmailability. Even so, on one of the lists I run (which has several subscribers in the FSU, Central Asia and Turkey) it is not uncommon for an address to become unknown user for a few days at a time, and then to rise again from the ashes when someone out there puts the system right again. So (admittedly on a list with under 1000 members) my own policy is to check that it remains unknown user for at least 5 days. Similarly (but for a longer period) for mailbox full bounces. Admittedly such an approach is far more feasible using bare hands when there are few users. But nowadays list-server software can be prgrammed to handle these things more automatically, and the above-mentioned mailing list (which now runs under L-Soft LISTSERV) automatically probes suspect addresses for a while, repeatedly, without involving the list itself, and automatically removes persistently recalcitrant adresses, where persistently is of course configurable and could be anything from a few hours to a few weeks. What is finally needed for a smooth integration with the list itself is for the list server to set suspect addresses to no-mail or equivalent on the list itself, so that the list does not generate bounces; meanwhile the list server probes in the background. If the address comes back to life, then the address is restored to mail on the list and all is well. Otherwise, in due course the list server removes the address (or sends a message to the list-owner requesting approval for removal). Either way, however, junking users who become unmailable for very short periods (such as the above) is definitely unreasonable, in my opinion. I hope this is a helpful contribution to the discussion. Best wishes, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 17-Sep-98 Time: 12:06:23
Linux for Disabled -- Contact sought
Hi Folks, A few years back there was a guy (in the US) active on some of the Linux lists who was developing linux applications for the disabled. He set up his own list, as I recall, and disappeared from general view. It's some time since I lost track of him and no longer have any pointers. I would now like to get in touch with him, and would welcome any information which would lead me to him (private reply or to the list, as you please). With thanks, Ted. E-Mail: (Ted Harding) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 15-Sep-98 Time: 23:40:40
