Re: [SLUG] Re: [Linux-aus] Australian distributor product page for Raspberry Pi (Model B)
On Thu, 2012-03-01 at 21:40 +1030, Glen Turner wrote: > Do you know if there is actual stocked product behind that page? People in TLUG are complaining that North America sold out in 2.5 hours. They're waiting until end April now. AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Alternatives to Gnome3
On Sat, 2011-11-12 at 21:21 +1100, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: > Hi all, > > I just upgraded my debian testing laptop and found myself running > Gnome3. I was quite happy with Gnome2 (with a few minor tweaks) > but Gnome3 is completely abysmal. > What I find annoying about these conversations is that if you had gone and bought an Apple with Mac OS X you would be perfectly reasonably working through learning how to use a new Desktop and not complaining about it at all. But here we are admonishing the GNOME hackers had the temerity to do something new and different. ++ I've been using GNOME 3 full time for over 9 months, and I find it quite usable. Sure, it's different than GNOME 2. It's vastly different. But it *is* a new UI paradigm. The GNOME 2 experience was 9 years old, and the gnome hackers have been working hard (since about 2007) to do something about interaction that the old Windows 95 paradigm simply couldn't address. Sure, I had to learn some new usage patterns, but I don't see that as a negative. It's a new piece of software, so I'm doing my best to use it the way it's designed to be used. Incidentally, I'm not sure how up to date it is, but you might have a read of http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design to see some of the things they had in mind. And of course there's lots of things linked off of http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/ . Distros like Ubuntu have been shipping GNOME 2.32 for ages; but it has been well over 2 years since anyone actually worked on that code. It's wonderful that nothing has changed for you in all that time, [a true Debian Stable experience!] but I think it's a bit odd not to expect that something that was widely advertised as being such a different user experience is ... different. ++ I went to some trouble to run GNOME 3 during the Natty cycle; that was a bit of work but I needed to be current; now with Oneiric things are mostly up to date. GNOME 3.0 was indeed a bit of a mess, but then so was GNOME 2.0. The recently released 3.2 is a big improvement. And it looks like the list of things that seem targeted to 3.4 will further improve things. I'm now running GNOME 3 on a freshly built Ubuntu Oneiric system; I just did a "command line" install of Ubuntu and then installed `gdm`, `gnome-shell`, `xserver-xorg` and friends. Working great, and not having installed `gnome-desktop` saved me a huge amount of baggage. Of course a normal Oneiric desktop install and then similarly installing and switching to gnome-shell would work fine too. You probably want to enable the ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 PPA. ++ One thing I do recommend is mapping (say) CapsLock as an additional Hyper and then CapsLock + F1 .. CapsLock + F12 as launchers. I have epiphany browser on F1, evolution on F2, IRC on F3 and so on. Setting up CapsLock + A as to do `gnome-terminal --window` means you can pop a term easily from anywhere. You do all that as "custom shortcuts" in the "Keyboard" section of system settings. That means I only use the whole "Win key + T R A C ..." thing (in this case looking for the Project Hamster time tracker) for outlying applications. Of course you can also set up the things you use the most on the "Dash" (I think that's what they call it) as favourites. I've actually stopped doing that [the original design didn't have favourites at all]; I prefer to have it as an alternative view of things that are actually running. AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] resolv.conf reset each reboot - static config - ubuntu server 10.04
On Fri, 2011-07-01 at 02:00 +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote: > Static ip, resolvconf installed, I even went so far ... Why not just uninstall resolvconf and configure /etc/resolv.conf manually? It's not like you have to configure it more than once. AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] kvm network bridging etc
On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 14:18 +1100, david wrote: > I can't help but think I'm missing something simple. > Host is Ubuntu 9.10 - guest is 10.04 server. If you're using libvirt to manage KVM (as Dean asked), then you _really_ want to be running something newer than that on the host. I'd recommend (at least) Lucid. Also, depending on what you're doing, you may want to run libvirt from a PPA (Lucid's will work, but upstream has fixed all kinds of shit that hasn't made it into Ubuntu yet; libvirt is moving fast [which is good]). AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie #java-gnome on irc.gimp.net signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] pdf nup that preserves hyperlinks?
On Thu, 2010-12-23 at 15:02 +1100, pe...@chubb.wattle.id.au wrote: >and produces PDFs. So, is >there a reasonable way to munge the PDF file into two-up, and keep >hyperlinks? Did you try pdftk? It's a pretty good swiss army knife. And meanwhile, package pdfjam [scripts] apparently has a `pdfnum` so that might do the trick and seems to depend on a toolchain along the lines of what you're happy with. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems review, and effective procedures for change management: enabling successful deployment of mission critical information technology in enterprises, worldwide. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] detecting hard drive failure ?
On Thu, 2010-11-11 at 08:21 +1100, Voytek Eymont wrote: > I can ssh to the NAS: > > - what sort of tests or whatever can I run before I pull the unit down ? Does `mdadm` work? # mdadm --detail /dev/md0 although the way QNap lays out their filesystems is slightly over the top, so you have to be careful interpreting the results [one of the reasons we switched to running a full Linux distro on them rather than QNap's] AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems review, and effective procedures for change management: enabling successful deployment of mission critical information technology in enterprises, worldwide. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] On buying a laptop.
On Thu, 2010-10-14 at 17:42 +1100, Tony "H.G" Candito wrote: > OK, so now that we've learn't what isn't safe. What is? I've had ASUS laptops the last few goes. They've been surprisingly tolerable. The one I've got now is a "UL20A". I'm rather pleased with it. Low voltage chip and Intel graphics. Yeay. http://www.liliputing.com/2009/11/asus-ul20a-review.html http://www.asus.com.au/product.aspx?P_ID=pS8jNzTab4WZZGjY The bigger learning was discovering that some bright sparks have set up mailing lists for laptop families running (in this case) Canonical's Ubuntu Linux. Mine is: https://launchpad.net/~asus-ul30 There appear to be similar "teams" for other laptop families, so in aggregate, these might be a good source of information as to current laptop support across the spectrum. AfC Barcelona -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems review, and effective procedures for change management: enabling successful deployment of mission critical information technology in enterprises, worldwide. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Mailing list web archives..... Is this leagal ?
On Wed, 2010-02-17 at 09:12 +1100, Troy Rollo wrote: > Implying consent for a person to quote a message in reply > (such as in the quote above, for example), or for the list owner to keep an > archive, is likely to be easier than implying consent for third party > archiving. gmane archives on request of the list owner, which, while not explicit consent on the part of the originator, is at least a relationship with the mailing list and that list owner can indicate who (if anyone) is archiving the list with their consent. Given how long public mailing lists have been around, and given how long public web archives of them have been available, it'd be rather hard to construct an argument that someone _posting_ to a public list should have an expectation that no one would be able to see their content. But publishing a recooked archive of someone else's list (as opposed to archiving your own list or asking gmane to do it on your behalf) without their consent is pushing it. If nothing else, it is redistribution, and in open source land we tend to care about getting the semantics of that right. AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] 64 bit.
On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 21:59 +1100, david wrote: > Just (this week) moved from 32 (old machine that dies) to 64 Ubuntu. Not > one single glitch due to 64bit. That may have been pure luck, but I've > got quite a lot of stuff installed. Well, not to be underestimated is that people have worked hard over the last 5 years to make Linux and their applications run well on 64 bit. Sure, there were many glitches early on. That's porting for you. But lots of hackers and early adopters (as they then were) put the hard work in, and now, many years on things work great. That's our luck. Yeay open source, etc. [my recent experience along these lines was taking the 5 month old (amd64) LiveUSB stick with the Ubuntu Karmic release on it to a store and being able to boot Linux on a laptop I was considering - zero problems, brand spanking new hardware. I was impressed. Very impressed. We've all come a long way] Anyway, this comes up on the SLUG list fairly frequently. I think the consensus is clearly established that 32 vs 64 bit is well and truly past the point of being something we need to worry about. AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] /proc and /sys
On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 13:05 +1000, david wrote: > To what extent are /proc and /sys recreated by the system as required, They are entirely dynamic. /proc and /sys (and, for the last several years, /dev) are virtual filesystems; the mount command that gets them there in the first place is something like # mount -t proc none /proc # mount -t sysfs none /sysfs (contrast to) # mount -t ext3 /dev/sda6 /home > and to what extent do they need to be backed-up? > Not at all. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems review, and effective procedures for change management: enabling successful deployment of mission critical information technology in enterprises, worldwide. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Proprietary colour names (was GIMP was...)
On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 15:53 +0100, Richard Ibbotson wrote: > ... much better than it was but some sort of Pantone colour > integration would be good (eventually). An open source version of > that would need to be implemented. Which is what the hold up is, at least as I understand it. The Pantone colour palate (specifically their name-to-ink-colour mappings) is Pantone's proprietary intellectual property and they have chosen not to let them be used in libre ways. [they make tons of money printing swatch books of the mappings and licencing the names. This is not dissimilar to the business model used by most font foundries, which is why there are so few libre fonts. The difference is that anyone can create a font, whereas an industry standard that is not an open standard with libre data is a bottleneck] As long as the graphics arts industry continue to use those names to identify, and the printing industry uses such names to distinguish the pile of coloured bottles on the shelf, then apparently there's nothing we can do. ie, we are free to come up with our own names for inks, release them freely, and manufacture said inks to our hearts content. But this doesn't do us the least bit of good until such time as such inks were widely available at printing houses as an alternative to the Pantone copyright ones. And that ain't about to happen. It's exasperating, but the names & mapping are their property. I think most people who need to would be happy to pay for access, but a) such a datapack would be non-redistributable, and in any case b) since people are used to getting it for "free" (in products whose vendors have already paid Pantone for a licence), people don't really get the idea that there's a cost to it. So maybe we need to go on a crusade to convince ink manufacturers to _also_ label their products with [some hypothetical set of redistributable] names, as well as Pantone ones. AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Laptops with Linux pre-installed?
On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 07:40 +1000, Martin Visser wrote: > And yes, I do find it a little frustrating that [HP] aren't more > comprehensive in the Linux support across the range. Chatting with Bdale about this a few months ago, he articulated that there was a vast difference in HP's laptop line between systems targeted at the consumer audience, and systems targeted at the corporate market. Notably, the consumer-targeted systems rapidly change chipsets based on whatever was forklifted into a large bin in the corner this morning, whereas the corporate systems were deliberately manufactured with a defined load-out that would stay the same throughout the support lifespan of the system. [Which is impressive if true. There's nothing worse than taking a machine in for servicing and getting a new motherboard back with _completely_ different hardware in it] He also seemed to be saying that their focus with Linux support (ie, drivers and availability installed at time-of-sale) was [would be?] in the corporate product set. In any case, the idea was navigate to the corporate audience side of their web site, rather than the generic home consumer side. I haven't yet put this to the test yet, I'm afraid, but he was [as ever] extremely helpful, and I'm going to go with HP for my next system, I suspect. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems review, and effective procedures for change management: enabling successful deployment of mission critical information technology in enterprises, worldwide. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] network manager files
On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 13:57 +1000, david wrote: > I'm trying to debug a networkmanager problem. What version of NetworkManager are you running, on what distro, etc? And, in all consciousness, the connection editor GUI is fairly comprehensive; what is its UI presenting for this connection? What does the CLI `nm-tool` tell you about the connection? [Trying to infer things from an application's stored internal representation is almost never the right idea. Admittedly your negative number does indeed seem peculiar, but really it is meaningless until it has been loaded and interpreted by nm to mean whatever it means to nm] Or, just read the source code to find out how what it is serializing from in writing this field. AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] remote mail system
On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 21:19 +1100, Kyle wrote: > Alternatively set your clients up to use your mail server for SMTP, then > have your mail server relay through your ISP's SMTP server. Nothing wrong with doing it this way. Hey, email once was a store and forward protocol. :) AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] any java FOSS project needing help?
On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 20:59 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: > depends on their interests. For me it was an interest in ... That really is critical. If you don't have some intrinsic motivation driving you to want to do something, it's very hard to be involved. Of course, many of us work on are things that are prerequisites for something that we are passionate about; but wanting that dependency to work so we can get on with the thing we are really interested in does lead to a great deal of the activity that happens. [and then something that dependency uses needs fixing, and then you pause that to enhance on a tool that makes working on that lower project better, and the next thing you know you're writing kernel device drivers. Don't laugh; I know one guy who didn't stop at the kernel; last I heard he was doing Open Hardware VLSI design. This is being "Deeply recursed" :) Not sure if he ever got that bug he filed fixed. Seems like he's still "interested", though, and that's ultimately all that matters] That all said, there are any number of projects that might be of interest. If your daughter's husband still wants to work on Open Source × Java, I am active in that space so I'd be more than happy to make some suggestions. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems review, and effective procedures for change management. We actively carry out research and development in these areas on behalf of our clients, and enable successful use of open source in their mission critical enterprises, worldwide. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] wireless broadband?
On Thu, 2008-07-10 at 16:01 +1000, Del wrote: > So, who uses wireless broadband here? Not telco, but I can put in a brief mention of Unwired. One of the cafes in town just got an access point (yeay) provisioned by Unwired (oh). It's only been installed for a couple weeks, but I am rather underwhelmed. It's ok for email, but I was trying to to get some remote systems administration done this morning, and it was a most unpleasant experience - poor latency and worse, dropping connections. > The limitation is that I need it working on a boat It may seem overkill, but depending how far offshore you're heading don't screw around, just get an Inmarsat terminal. [I've got an old Nera Worldphone Mini-M terminal for sale, if anyone wants it :) I used it quite successfully in remote locations in Europe. You'd need your own service provider account, of course] AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems review, and effective procedures for change management. We actively carry out research and development in these areas on behalf of our clients, and enable successful use of open source in their mission critical enterprises, worldwide. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] uptime and multicore/multithreaded cpu's
On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 23:33 +1000, Sonia Hamilton wrote: > A question about uptime. My understanding of the load average figures is > that a figure less than 2.0 on a 2 CPU machine means the CPUs don't have > more work than they can keep up with (on average). As an aside, It is interesting to note that "maxing out" (1.0 on one CPU, 2.0 on two, etc) the load average does not necessarily imply the best use of a machine. I know the gent who runs the image farm at Amazon. Unsurprisingly, Amazon's high level IT people wanted all the systems to be fully utilized - but the point of the image servers is *not* to be running without any CPU idling, but to be serving images with extremely low latency. So in this case, they needed a very beefy set of machines that were running at as close to idle as they could so that any new request coming in could be acted on immediately. He had such a bad time of trying to explain latency to senior IT that finally he gave up and hacked the kernel so that it reported artificially high load averages to trick out the external monitoring agents so the IT managers wouldn't feel that they could lump more services onto the box, thereby increasing their "utilization" at the cost of completely destroying responsiveness. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems review, and effective procedures for change management. We actively carry out research and development in these areas on behalf of our clients, and enable successful use of open source in their mission critical enterprises, worldwide. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: Sending mail from within a highly locked down network
On Mon, 2008-04-21 at 14:37 +1000, Mary Gardiner wrote: > I wasn't clear in my original mail: I'm more interested in how people > get their laptop to switch mail settings between "inside horrible > network" and "normal operation" Gentoo Linux has an RC system that has the concept of "named runlevels"... so we tend to have laptops that are setup something like: /etc/runlevels/ default/ network/ wireless/ office/ and then have different /etc/init.d/ RC scripts added to these softlevels as appropriate - for example, in the "office", bring up cupsd; in "wireless" we're want the NetworkManager daemon running, etc. As root, it's just # rc office etc to switch. Rather nice. Anyway, that's our gateway to running custom scripts depending on environment. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems review, and effective procedures for change management. We actively carry out research and development in these areas on behalf of our clients, and enable successful use of open source in their mission critical enterprises, worldwide. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: Women's pre-SLUG meetup, Lindt Cafe, Darling Harbour, Fri Feb 29, 5:30pm
On Sat, 2008-02-23 at 12:34 +1100, Mary Gardiner wrote: > On Thu, Feb 21, 2008, Mary Gardiner wrote: > > Date: Friday 29th February 2007 > > 2008 of course! Don't feel bad, Mary. After three release candidates and staring at the NEWS file entry I'd been working away at for almost a month, two minutes after I did the release for our project, I discovered that it was headlined "12 Feb 2007". Oh well :) AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems review, and effective procedures for change management. We actively carry out research and development in these areas on behalf of our clients, and enable successful use of open source in their mission critical enterprises, worldwide. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] tool for displaying time in different timezones?
On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 11:24 -0600, Sonia Hamilton wrote: > Anyone know of a tool for displaying the tool in different timezones? slashtime: just a little Perl script I wrote up a few years back, but I still find it rather handy. It's thing is showing the offset from where you are, rather than from GMT (which is bloody useless) http://research.operationaldynamics.com/projects/scripts/#slashtime As it happens, I've also written a GTK version, which runs rather nicely, but it needs a bit of work on the UI to select places of interest before I can release it as a standalone program http://research.operationaldynamics.com/projects/slashtime/files/ZonesWindow_Screenshot.png AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Gentoo anyone?
On Thu, 2008-01-03 at 23:30 +1100, Blindraven wrote: > come around and not only > install Gentoo, but take me through what you are doing etc? you know, teach > me the ropes? If you are still going to go in this direction, and no one else has already taken care of this, I can work with you for this. We've been running Gentoo ~5 years now, and have a fairly pragmatic approach to it. In some areas it shines, and in others you grind up a bit against the fact that it is a community (not commercial) distribution. There are *certainly* a who large number of gotchas and that-wasn't-obvious-until-someone-explains-it, and that makes your seeking assistance from someone already up the learning curve rather astute. > It would have to be while my other half is at work ie business hours. No problem. Contact me off list and we can sort something out. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Managing Director Operational Dynamics Consulting, Pty Ltd Australia: Office 02 9977 6866, Mobile 04 1079 6725 We are an operations engineering consultancy focusing on strategy, organizational architecture, systems review, and change management procedures: enabling successful use of open source in mission critical enterprises, worldwide. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Novell and Microsoft
On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 10:29 +1100, James Dumay wrote: > Novell are not handing the keys out to anyones castles, as GPL'd and > similarly licensed software will stay open and free Yes, but as you point out, > You can be sued now and you could be sued before the deal if you > infringe on someones intellectual property Just because the copyright owner grants you licence to use something of theirs via GPL does not mean that you have right to use any patented technologies belonging to some third party that said software happens to use (willingly or not). As Brendan Scott pointed out in this week's OSWALD email, if the royalty payments indeed covered any (for instance) .Net technologies, then in effect Novell has acquiesced to the legitimacy of those patents. [ie, to be effective, a patent holder has to demonstrate that they are enforcing it. Gaining royalties from someone over it is such evidence]... ...which in turn makes explicit the fact that the rest of the world (ie, anyone not a Novell customer) has NOT been granted a right to use. Incidentally, this has ever been my concern with Mono in GNOME. Nothing against the language, or the project, or any apps written with it. But while _C#_ has been submitted for ECMA standardization, the _framework libraries_ (ie, ".Net", which Mono clones) appears to be heavily patented*, which would seem to put it in the same category as the GIF patent in terms of its free/non-free status, GPL or not. ++ Naturally all concerned will continue to muddy the waters - for example, I and many others are inferring what the "royalty payment" is for (danegeld, perhaps?) and much discussion is based on such speculation. Certainly we can't expect any clarity from the two companies in the subject line... after all, they're out of the line of fire. I rather expect that the entire topic is already far beyond the possibility for dispassionate debate, although SLUG's discussion of it has been quite measured. You should see TLUG in Toronto. Jeesh. AfC Sydney * I'm not an IP lawyer, of course. But I did some cursory searches on CAMBIA's Patent Lens a while back and oh my goodness there are a lot of patents covering .Net. That's fine (ie FOSS fine) if we're all given a worldwide royalty-free grant to use them. That has not been the case. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Installing fonts on Linux
On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 09:04 +1000, Peter Miller wrote: > Can anyone tell me how to install a TrueType font on Linux I once (2+ years ago) had to jump through some hoops to teach my system to make MS Corefonts available. The trick was having a local.conf in /etc/fonts with something like this (dug out of an old backup): /opt/Ximian-OpenOffice/share/fonts/truetype /usr/share/fonts/corefonts Where those two directories were things I added. Since then, my distro's packaging + policy along with the general renaissance of co-operation between the GNOME, KDE + freedeskop + X crowds has led to all of this "just working". I have no idea whether firefox uses fontconfig, but much else in a modern Desktop Environment does, and at the time it made a big difference. So maybe try adding the information to /etc/fonts/local.conf? AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Technology strategy, managing change, establishing procedures, and executing successful upgrades to mission critical business infrastructure. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: September SLUG Monthly Meeting
On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 10:10 +1000, Lindsay Holmwood wrote: > General Talk: Conrad Parker ... It will be > Conrads last SLUG meeting for at least 3 years as he's leaving to > study in Japan a few days after the meeting. Sayonara! So be sure to wear something plaid tomorrow night... http://research.operationaldynamics.com/blogs/andrew/#slug-plaid-for-kfish :) AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Technology strategy, managing change, establishing procedures, and executing successful upgrades to mission critical business infrastructure. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Running squid on a laptop. Silly?
On Sat, 2006-07-22 at 16:01 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: > I'm thinking of running squid on my laptop. Is there [another] way of > solving this problem? You might look at woffled: http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/ I used it for a while and was happy enough with it. It's feature complete, to be sure, but occasionally it can annoy you. Once in a while (especially in hotels that are faking website responses to force you to log in) you have to turn it off completely (ie change proxy setting in `gnome-network-preferences`). What it lacked, by in large, was co-ordination with the web browser. While not anywhere as functional, just telling my browser to be in offline mode is generally enough - even though it's cache is tiny. AfC Vancouver -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Greylisting (was: Re: [SLUG] mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] slow)
On Wed, 2006-06-14 at 11:48 +1000, Paul Dwerryhouse wrote: > Greylisting relies on most spamming software being pretty dumb; some > only try to send a message once, and don't respect a "mailbox temporarily > unavailable" response from the SMTP server. A compliant SMTP client > would try to resend a message after a certain delay, when faced with > such a response. Which is why it's so important for SMTP servers to guard against the possibility of being open relays. Certainly, greylisting can be circumvented by the evil doers simply injecting their messages to a legit nearby SMTP server, say, their ISPs which *will* properly retry. That, however, is easy for an organized ISP to track, hence those in the axis of evil writing SMTP clients that go direct to the server the target domain's MX record points at, which is why greylisting is a nice touch. AfC Sydney -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Is there a truly upgradable Linux distro?
On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 13:45 +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > in which numerous respondents say that Debian and Gentoo Those are the two that I have experience with upgrading over long time periods. Relevant to this discussion, I had one Debian upgrade continuously from 1998-2003 and a Gentoo system live and upgrading from time to time from 2002-present. Excellent success with both. To me, there is an important consideration: stable or unstable. In Debian's case, if all you ever do is run their stable releases, then you will find their upgrades smooth indeed. They are very focused on this. On the other hand, if you're needing more up to date code, I'd give Gentoo the nod. Because it is building locally as it goes, you are more likely to have everything just fit together. An instantaneous moment of bliss, to be sure, but it does seem to work out well over the long term that each such brief rebuild occasion results in a nice stable ticking-along system. [Frankly, I give credit to the free software universe as a whole, not to any particular distro. The combination of some distros pumping the leading edge and shaking out initial problems, others pulling bugfixes in from the enterprise installations, and things like GNOME and KDE working together (sic) through freedesktop and utoptia and other projects, practices, release cycles, and interaction have coalescing into a whole where everyone quickly benefits from the experiences of the others] Of course, Gentoo doesn't have releases, per se (they cut a bunch of install CDs with lots of precompiled packages to get you bootstrapped a few times a year), but in a continuous "upgrade something when I need it and rely on minimum version requirements expressed in the packages to cause deeper upgrades to happen when necessary" mode, it's been very reliable. What it means is that my attention is focused on the thing I'm upgrading, and the base system (whatever that might happen to be) is largely left alone to tick along. I wrote an article in Linux Journal last year about it, see: http://www.operationaldynamics.com/reference/articles/GentooUnusual/ if interested. > Perfectly smoothly? No. The only way you're going to get that is a blank system fresh install of something like RHEL, SUSE, or maybe someday Ubuntu where stuff has been extensively tested. And even then, it's "out of date" and frozen in time, so you don't gain a whole lot that way if, for whatever reason, you need a newer version that what your OS is currently providing. Really, the issue boils down to skill set - if you have the skills to watch for, detect, analyze, and resolve issues, then you're going to be fine on the continously upgrading testing/unstable distro versions (Fedora rawhide, Ubuntu whatever, Debian unstable, Gentoo unstable, etc). If you just don't have time for that sort of thing, then, to be perfectly honest, the strategy you have adopted of getting a system installed, configured and then leaving it alone for a long time is a fine one indeed. Nothing like actually getting on with using your computer to be productive as opposed to using all your productivity just to keep a damn computer running. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Website: http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Blog: http://research.operationaldynamics.com/blogs/andrew/ GPG key: 0945 9282 449C 0058 1FF5 2852 2D51 130C 57F6 E7BD Sydney: 02 9977 6866 Mobile: 04 1079 6725 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: SLUG on gmane.org
On Wed, 2006-05-31 at 12:09 +1000, Terry Collins wrote: > [ more blather ] Trolldom must be like a disease. Perfectly reasonable rational people suddenly get infected and then loose their minds and go on tilt ranting about something. As Jamie and Mary pointed out, SLUG has been a publicly archived community since the mid 90s. Get over it. I for one am glad that the communities I participate in are well distributed and broadly archived. One of the defining characteristics of the open source movement has been its global nature and the ability of contributors to collaborate across borders. Anything that further fosters the sharing of knowledge is to be encouraged not only for the immediate benefit in the admittedly narrow domain that is information technology, but in the far more important area of extending understanding between peoples. That's how we prevent war. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Managing Director Operational Dynamics Consulting Management Consultants specializing in strategy, organizational architecture, procedures to survive change, and performance hardening for the people and systems behind the mission critical enterprise. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: [SLUG-ANNOUNCE] DebSIG Meeting: Wednesday April 12, 2006
On Sun, 2006-04-09 at 22:04 +1000, Lindsay Holmwood wrote:
> Guest speaker Christof Wittig will be talking about db4o
For those of you who have no idea what this is or why it might be
interesting, Christof is the CEO of db4objects, Inc, the company around
what I find to be a remarkable native (Java or .Net) object oriented
database that is available under the GPL. I met him when he was in
Sydney in January. I got word that he's going to be back in town this
week, and a few weeks back asked Lindsay if he was looking for a topic
for DebSIG this month. Not every day a businessman decides to GPL his
product.
OODBMSes came and went as a technology in the late 80s/early 90s, so you
might be saying WTF? Those efforts largely face planted because they
tried to create a generic object syntax and a complicated meta query
structure rather than working in the native syntax of {insert your OO
language here}. db4o is really rather different. It is trivially easy to
use and surprisingly robust. For me, working in Java on Linux as I do,
it has given me a reliable persistence store for my applications without
any of the usual object-relational mapping nightmare that would crop up
if I were to try and use a more traditional RDBMS.
While their primary market is embedded devices, this is not limited to
phones and what not like you might think. I gather that one of their
earliest clients uses db4o as the live datastore underneath the
signalling system for an entire metropolitan railway, which I gather
involves insane numbers of objects per second. Pretty cool - and if it
does that then I'm quite certain it can handle the stuff I throw at it.
Anyway, Christof is a lovely fellow and presents well. You should enjoy
his chat so I encourage you to stop by the new debsig location. And
thanks to openskills for gatecrashing their party.
AfC
Sydney
--
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Managing Director
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd
Australia: Office 02 9977 6866, Mobile 04 1079 6725
Management consultants specializing in crisis management:
strategy, organizational architecture, procedures to
survive change, and performance hardening for the people
and systems behind the mission critical enterprise.
http://www.operationaldynamics.com/
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Infrastructure archictecure
Tonight at SLUG I mentioned the broader issues of the disciplines and practices involved in running a production platform. One of the fundamental pieces of background knowledge that's an important and canonical reference is a paper called "Bootstrapping an Infrastructure", which more or less established the notion of "gold server". Available as an living online document at http://www.infrastructures.org/ ++ For what it's worth, if you're interested in Gentoo packaging, I wrote an article on the topic that appeared in Linux Journal. See http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7438 It's written somewhat deliberately to give non-Gentoo users who have some idea of the experience of packages and administering their own Linux distro an idea of the interesting ways that Gentoo has approached the problem space. There's a PDF of the article in it's original form on my site - IMHO it's typeset a little better :) Enjoy. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/reference/articles/GentooUnusual/GentooForAllTheUnusualResaons_Article.pdf AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Technology strategy, managing change, establishing procedures, and executing successful upgrades to mission critical business infrastructure. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: [SLUG-ANNOUNCE] Monthly Meeting: Friday, May 27 2005
On Mon, 2005-23-05 at 16:24 +1000, Chris Deigan wrote: > When: > Friday, May 27, 6:30pm - 9:30pm Regrets - I'm going to be in Calgary. Cheers, AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Technology strategy, managing change, establishing procedures, and executing successful upgrades to mission critical business infrastructure. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] updating Perl modules, how ?
On Tue, 2005-10-05 at 08:49 +1000, Voytek wrote: > what's the simplest way to keep my various Perl modules up to date ...? Not disrespecting the replies about how to update via CPAN, I thought I should mention that several Linux distros provide packages around perl modules For example, modules Perl::DBI and Perl::DBD::MySQL are packaged as follows: Fedora Debian Gentoo perl-DBI libdbi-perl dev-perl/DBI perl-DBD-MySQL libdbd-mysql-perl dev-perl/DBD-mysql If, perchance, your requirement included only those modules that were under package control by your distro vendor, (and assuming of course that sufficiently new versions of said modules are packaged), then you could rely on your OS's package tools to upgrade your perl modules. Incidentally, whether you upgrade by hand, or whether you upgrade via package tools doesn't change the fact that you remain responsible for QA testing your application on any new environment. That goes with the territory. There's nothing holy about manually building things. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Technology strategy, managing change, and process improvement. Enterprise architecture, large installation systems administration, and performance improvement for both systems and the people who run them. In Australia: Office 02 9977 6866, Mobile 04 1079 6725 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] gpg getting slower and slower - maintenance?
On Sun, 2005-24-04 at 19:31 +1000, Sonia Hamilton wrote: > I've noticed that as I get more signatures on my key, gpg is getting > slower and slower decrypting or authenticating emails. A partial improvement can be had by periodically running gpg --rebuild-keydb-caches The first time I did that I chopped the time check-trustdb time from > 30 seconds down to 8s or so. A bigger performance boost is to set no-auto-check-trustdb in ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf (especially seeing as how you're doing it periodically via a cron job). Not suffering that 30 second wait every time Evolution fetched a new key on me was nice. AfC Sydney (yeay!!!) -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Management Consultant Technology strategy, managing change, establishing procedures, and executing successful upgrades to mission critical business infrastructure. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] gpg getting slower and slower - maintenance?
On Sun, 2005-24-04 at 19:31 +1000, Sonia Hamilton wrote: > I've noticed that as I get more signatures on my key, gpg is getting > slower and slower decrypting or authenticating emails. A partial improvement can be had by periodically running gpg --rebuild-keydb-caches The first time I did that I chopped the time check-trustdb time from > 30 seconds down to 8s or so. A bigger performance boost is to set no-auto-check-trustdb in ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf (especially seeing as how you're doing it periodically via a cron job). Not suffering that 30 second wait every time Evolution fetched a new key on me was nice. AfC Sydney (yeay!!!) -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Management Consultant Technology strategy, managing change, establishing procedures, and executing successful upgrades to mission critical business infrastructure. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Tonight in Woolomoolloo
The [new] Linux Australia committee is in Sydney this weekend for its first meeting. We're going out for drinks tonight at the bar in the W Hotel at Woolomoolloo wharf; you're all welcome to join... we're planning to be there around 9pm. [who's in town? Jon Oxer, Anthony Towns, Stewart Smith joining Pia Smith and me, Andrew Cowie. I gather a few slug regulars are planning to stop by and say hello] AfC -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Visual Basic port
On Fri, 2005-14-01 at 16:33 +1100, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: > Java/AWT (compile to native binaries with gcj) There's a pretty vibrant Java/GTK bindings project out there, http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/ We've been using it quite successfully (and in combination with GCJ to generate native binaries) for some time now. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers specializing in large installation systems administration, enterprise architecture, and performance improvement for both the systems and the people who run them In Australia: Office 02 9977 6866, Mobile 04 1079 6725 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Nominations open for Linux Australia's annual election
[Slug tends to be a pretty well connected bunch of people, so many of you will already be aware of this. For those that have not:] Linux Australia has opened nominations for their executive committee for 2005. So if you are interested in working to represent the interests of Linux and Open-Source users in Australia, first make sure you're a member, secondly nominate yourself or others for any of the positions. See http://linux.org.au/membership/ Nominations are open now, and close 8 Jan. That's when voting beings. Pia Smith wrote an email to linux-aus mentioning the dates and whatnot in greater detail, see http://lists.linux.org.au/archives/announce/2004-December/msg7.html It's a little difficult to articulate what the exact demands of the positions will be, given that it depends so much on whatever the make up of the newly elected board is. If you have questions, though, feel free to contact me and I'll offer biased opinions. :) Cheers, AfC Sydney [shamelessly borrowed from an email sent by Michael Davies to LinuxSA] -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney: +61 2 9977 6866 New York: +1 646 472 5054 Toronto: +1 416 848 6072 London: +44 207 1019201 signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Acroread in Linux "VERY UGLY" - can the 'face' be changed?
On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 22:51 +1100, Elliott-Brennan wrote: > The acroreader in Linux is so ugly. The grey interface acroread as supplied by Adobe is indeed pretty horrid. However, in my experience it's got the most reliable rendering engine. gpdf has been making great progress - if you're on a GNOME 2.8 system you can consider that an alternative for many purposes - but you will still, once in a while, need to go back to acroread. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney: +61 2 9977 6866 New York: +1 646 472 5054 Toronto: +1 416 848 6072 London: +44 207 1019201 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Most valuable free/OSS software that doesn't exist?
On Mon, 2004-15-11 at 14:44 +1100, Gavin Carr wrote: > cfengine is sendmail in this space - does everything, but is a dog to learn. > I want a postfix. Hear hear. I take that one further - cfengine is good at convergence, but that is only half the problem space (generating configs is the other half) and then there are problems which neither are suitable for. (Alva Couch's behavioral agent closures show promise here) I'm at LISA [ http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa04/ ] this week largely for the purpose of participating in the ongoing development of this area of research. Last year was pretty exciting in this regard - radmind, isconf, psgconf, agent closures, LCFG+SmartFrog - so we'll see what this year brings. AfC Atlanta -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney: +61 2 9977 6866 New York: +1 646 472 5054 Toronto: +1 416 848 6072 London: +44 207 1019201 signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Autofs Woes
On Tue, 2004-02-11 at 12:26 +1100, Craige McWhirter wrote: > I'm playing with autofs and friends and the problem that I'm > encountering is that while it always mounts the object I'm after it > always mounts it as root, even though I specified the "user" option and > the user has made the access that caused the object to mount. That's odd. FWIW, here's a few fstab entries: /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro,users 0 0 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,rw,users 0 0 /dev/sdc1/mnt/usbkey auto noauto,rw,users,sync0 0 Only difference I can see from yours is "users" instead of "user" which shouldn't matter. As an aside, I had to put the following in /etc/filesystems: vfat * Otherwise msdos was getting set as the filesystem type for floppies and usbkeys instead of vfat (meaning mangled long filenames) [because /proc/filesystems shows msdos before vfat - see `man mount`] I didn't have to do this on another system, so its possible that I have unnecessary drivers built. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] adding mail and Maildir for new user?
On Tue, 2004-19-10 at 19:15 +0800, Glen Lewis wrote: > man maildirmake > Which is just a fancy way of doing mkdir d mkdir d/new mkdir d/cur mkdir d/tmp where d is your target directory name, perhaps "Maildir" AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Qmail smtproutes
Qmail can be tricky, largely because things are only documented on one particular man page, there are forward references between the man pages, and often what things mean, and what you think they mean, can be at odds. On Fri, 2004-01-10 at 12:13 +1000, Peter Rundle wrote: > that if I created the user locally on the linux box with a ~/.qmail file > that the mail would be delivered there but apparently not. In addition to the suggestion Stuart made about locals and virtualhosts, you may also want to check out the documentation about the alias user. ie, in /var/qmail/alias can be a bunch of .qmail files (typically root, mail-daemon, postmaster, ie .qmail-root .qmail-postmaster .qmail-mailer-daemon This assumes that Qmail is installed "properly" (ie DJB's way) has its alias user set up, etc. I seem to recall that the Debian maintainer attempted to "fix" the setup, so god knows where it expects things to be. See qmail-send(8) for details on virtualdomains, and perhaps http://www.lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html#aliases AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: LCA - Hack Train?
On Thu, 2004-30-09 at 12:32 +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote: > On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 11:56:17AM +1000, Craige McWhirter wrote: > > good to have a "Hack Train" where we book in bulk a carriage I usually take the train to Canberra from Sydney in preference to flying. Although it's a bit of a milk run, one gets there in 4 hours and all things considered it means that I can get 3-4 hours of work done. Flying, on the other hand, one shuffles from one lineup to another, and Qantas are so anal that they don't actually allow you to turn a laptop on during the "short" flight. Net result, 2-3 wasted hours. And the view out the window is nice. > Would it have sufficient power, internet access, and beer? And you have these things when driving in your car? Someone should call the police! To answer your questions: no power (but that's what laptop_mode & software suspend are for, yo), no net access maybe (there's a cafe on board, not sure if they serve booze). With more than a 14 day advance booking, you can usually get a 50% discount from CountryLink. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Lightweight message passing infrastructure?
On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 17:26 +1000, Robert Collins wrote: > On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 16:09 +1000, Andrew Cowie wrote: > > Quick survey: I'm building something that requires a lot of two-way > > (message/event) traffic between clients and servers, and could use some > > help picking a technology. > > Well, in my consulting days, when a client asked me an open ended, > unqualified question like that... Yeah, yeah. Ok, so I should have provided more context. I've chatted about this project with a few of the SLUG people that I see on regular basis, but for the rest of the mailing list: One part of my work focuses on managing massive changes & upgrades to mission critical systems.[1] I'm writing a tool to help me with that. Specifically: Right now, many of my clients do their procedures in clunky manually generated [paper] documents, but when a group is working through a procedure around a specific point event (say, replacing all the networking gear in your datacenter) there is an intense need for the people involved to collaborate and coordinate their activities. In essence, the problem is one of merging structure (the procedure to be run) and sequence (enforcing the fact that although a hierarchical document, it actually involves a carefully specified sequence of events, and that order must be enforced). See [2] > Are there other constraints, like the use of a specific programming > language on the client or the server, or a specific client or server > platform? No, not really (well, ok, it's not mobile devices - it's a client/server application), Trying to work my way through the various option spaces so as to make these choices has been quite the nightmare (er, "learning experience). I've made good progress, though. I actually gave a presentation about this last weekend... anyone who is interested and still reading is invited to have a look at: http://www.operationaldynamics.com/reference/talks/WelcomeToMyNightmare/ [Summary: I'm working on and for Linux, in Java + gcj, writing a GTK/Gnome app, and Berkeley DB is the back end data store. Wondering what the heck is up with all that? Follow the link, doh! And yes, It'll be open source] That presentation concludes with the specific technical problem that led me to start this thread in the first place: I am trying to decide on an appropriate middleware technology for a problem with these aspects: * Relatively small groups (5-15 people, typically) so low message volume. * Participants are distributed in space (some in the data center, some in the office, vendor reps, contractors, and specialists may be external) [so a solution that works reasonably well across complex network boundaries would be useful] * Events leading to messages, however, are extremely close in time (I check that I've done a step, you check you've done the step right next to it, we both need updates, happens in the blink of an eye, can't loose time from polling cycles ). * Very high consequence if things get out of whack (team is updating a mission critical system, yo!) so don't want to loose messages or history of progress through the sequence. Updates are idempotent, though, so receiving a message twice isn't a problem, which seems like it should help. Last weekend, Ben Ellis suggested to me that I consider XML-RPC. I don't think that's the solution to my problem, but man, what a clean API [3] Julio's suggestion of leveraging Jabber is really intriguing. Stewart Smith made a similar recommendation to me a few months ago, which I'd forgotten about. So, thanks Julio! There were a lot of typically murky complex Java APIs out there, but I found one which seems really straight forward, [4]. If I go down this road, could either build the server as an independent Jabber client, or hook it into a Jabber daemon as a Jabber component. Not sure the pros/cons of that yet... > Funny thing jumped out at me here... I was taught about oop in terms of > message passing: there is no conceptual difference between passing a > message and a 'remote object invocation'. Yeah. Indeed, I don't need the remote object part - I have the data model well under control. I just need to pass events. [yes, of course, a Remote Entity model DOES do what I need - just seems overly complicated is all] Given the relatively small size of the groups involved here, polling doesn't create a resource constraint issue, but it is inelegant at best, and certainly doesn't scale. No, the only real trouble that I can see is that in the wider public network context, the firewall problem gets in the way - clients can connect outbound to some server on the net, but (especially in an HTTP paradigm) the other direction doesn't fly. (oh, sure you can pass messages in response to a poll, but you can't initiate). I don't think I want to writ
[SLUG] Lightweight message passing infrastructure?
Quick survey: I'm building something that requires a lot of two-way (message/event) traffic between clients and servers, and could use some help picking a technology. The server->client direction is tricky in conventional web (and web- derived) models because it's always client request server response on the clients schedule (no good for passing messages from server to client, at least, not without client polling type behaviour, yuk). XML- RPC would have been perfect except for that. Given how absurdly simple and clean the Java APIs are, I may use it anyway. Someone at SAGE-AU suggested I consider ICE (an next gen CORBA, see http://www.zeroc.com/ ). It's pretty impressive, but seems like an awful lot of framework for what I would have hoped would have been a simple implementation, especially considering that I view the problem in message passing terms, not remote procedure calls or remote object invocation terms. That said, the scalability, availability, and just- works factor (once implemented) is alluring. In the Java world, there are obviously lots of frameworks, (ranging from J2EE EJB containers down to small things like picocontainer) but I don't really want a container at all - managing lots of objects, and persistence, isn't the problem I'm trying to fight. Further, I'd like the server to be a relatively stand alone thing, and containers introduce pretty massive installation headaches. OpenJMS would be good in theory, but it's very heavily J2EE based, and brings all that baggage. Any suggestions welcome. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Top and hyperthreading.
On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 21:50 +1000, Jeff Ai wrote: > 1. cat /proc/cupinfo shows there are 2 CPUs, which is what i expected. > 2. top shows only CPU. Did you try pressing the '1' key when top was running? It should toggle between showing a single aggregate line for all CPUs, and a summary line for each CPU. [I'm on a dual CPU system, not HT, but...] AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Richard Stallman - bed
On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 21:53 +1000, Lester Cheung wrote: > What about a talk on a COMPSOC event at UNSW? > I don't think Stallman would speak there unless UNSW changed its name to GNU/UNSW. AfC -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: favicon ? Re: [SLUG] Slides from Debian SIG
On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 17:37 +1000, Voytek wrote: > > It's as Dave said - it's purely for eye-candy. While Mozilla [variants] and Opera usually look at what has to say, and fetch that as a little tab icon, some versions of IE just directly go and ask for "/favicon.ico" regardless of whether or not there was even a link to it in the page. That's probably why > I regularly see it in my error log, There is certainly no *requirement* for a page to have one. > Historical tidbit: This showed up as an undocumented feature in IE circa 2000. Instead of the IE "e" beside the address bar, it would render the icon that came from that site but only if you had a site bookmarked in IE's "favourites" list - hence "favourites icon". That requirement always struck me as strange, as well as the fixed name. [and that's why, if you're going to do one of these for a web page, don't change the name from /favicon.ico - silly, sad, I know - but that's the way it was. I don't know if IE actually respects the href now, but certainly there are masses of older browsers out there which just automatically grab for that file, specifically. I suppose it's no worse than robots.txt's fixed name, but then at least robots.txt alludes to the purpose...] Anyway, shortly thereafter Opera started sticking these cute little icons into tabs, and it caught on. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Slides from Debian SIG
Hey, Someone just asked me if they could see the slides I used last Wednesday in my "things Debian might learn from the successes of Gentoo" presentation. Certainly: http://www.operationaldynamics.com/reference/talks/DebianGentoo/ [or just "operationaldynamics.com/talks" will jump you there] Those who were at DebSIG know I talked pretty broadly and more or less just used these slides as signposts along the way, so I'm not sure how much interest they would be to someone who wasn't there. That said, I did update them a touch before posting them based on comments people were kind enough to make afterwards. Thanks in particular to Anand, Matt, Matt and Dave :) Cheers, AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Wine & MYOB
On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 23:05 +1000, Stuart Guthrie wrote: > > > 1607: Unable to install Installshield Scripting Runtime MYOB Premier's installer is Flash based - so you need flash installed. I run the commercial version of wine, "CrossOver Office" from ( www.codeweavers.com ). I found that I could install MYOB only after I installed flash from [wherever] via "CrossOver Plugin". Once I did, though, it installed fine. However, when I ran it, it generated like 40 error dialog boxes about file i/o. One time I actually clicked through through them, and found MYOB running, which was cool, but the i/o errors had freaked me out a bit. I haven't gotten around to upgrading to their version 3.0 yet, so this may have improved. As for SQL-Ledger or GnuCash, if you are trying to get MYOB running for business requirements, be a little hesitant with both. SL's multi currency treatment is a bit whacked, and GnuCash openly acknowledge they lack a number of features to be suitable for small business. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Patches from non-carbon based life forms
So on PLUG's mailing list shows up a posting about some Linux distro that is in use at NASA for flight hardware. Came this reply: http://mail.plug.linux.org.au/pipermail/plug/2004-July/054960.html AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Disaster Recovery in Lower Manhattan presentation tonight
Hey SLUG, [I realize this is rather short notice, but I just got word back that it was ok for non-members to attend] Last year at AUUG's conference I presented a paper on my [then] company's experiences and lessons learned from in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. I've been invited to present that paper again to a join meeting of IT students from UTS and the Software Quality Associaton (NSW). http://members.ozemail.com.au/~sqain/ It's tonight (Monday) starting 6pm or so, at UTS: Room 10.04.470 (Building 10, Level 4, Room 4.470), Jones St, Sydney. (Just off Broadway, near Central Station (the old Fairfax offices)) If you're interested in disaster recovery, especially in the context of what a small technology business needs to do to stay afloat, then I welcome you to come. Best, AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
About LPI exams (was Re: [SLUG] Semester 2 Linux Courses)
On Sat, 2004-06-26 at 12:58, Ben de Luca wrote: > Is the course centred towards one distro? By design, the LPI exam developers keep the certification vendor neutral. As "ABD Computer Installations" mentioned somewhat colourfully, they do have a mix of practices, although I would characterize it more broadly - for instance, SuSE and Novell (both) have been major sponsors of LPI for a long time. This is a fantastic thing, as there is an enormous difference between "knowing how to do something on Linux[Unix] flavour X" and "knowing that a certain aspect of the system exists, and where to set out about finding it on whatever distribution you happen to be faced with. LPI puts a lot of effort into their website; http://www.lpi.org is always a good place to start trying to get information. AfC Karslruhe -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 North America +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Developing FOSS while employed developing proprietary software
I'd just like to say that this has been one of the most interesting, informative, rational and useful discussions I have yet seen on this topic anywhere. My compliments to Michael for asking such an insightfully prepared question, and to Ken, Simon, Jeff, Del, Stuart, Paul, Dave, Mike, Mary, Roger, and Martin for their views. Go SLUG! AfC Toronto -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Toshiba Portege
On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 11:40, James Gregory wrote: > So I stumbled upon the Toshiba Portege M100 which looks like a cool box. On the road I use a Toshiba Portege 4010, which I believe is the previous years' model. [The picture looks the same] The thing about Toshiba is they are renowned for *radically* changing the chip sets from one model year/number to the next. So it's entirely possible the one you are considering has different internals. BUY A PLANE TICKET AND FLY TO NORTH AMERICA TO BUY THIS. LAPTOPS ARE STUPIDLY EXPENSIVE IN AUSTRALIA. SAME LAPTOP IN CANADA IS $2,899.00 CAD == AUD! Ok, so maybe just get FedEx to ship it ;) My specs listed here, with comments: Toshiba Portege 4010 933 MHz Pentium III Like all Toshibas, it tends to run hot. toshutils from Buzzard mostly work (ie fan works). Better yet, recent 2.6 kernels ACPI are working. There's a Toshiba extension to ACPI available - you end up with some things in /proc/acpi/toshiba that largely negate necessity to use userspace toshutils. Software suspend swsusp2 2.0.0.80 + kernel 2.6.6 works. 2 PCMCIA slots (which I never use :)). A *third* PCMCIA slot (actually slot zero) is where the 802.11b card is plugged in. Its orinoco-cs, works. Since yours is Pentium "M" that probably means you'll have to jump through Centrino hoops. 2 USB slots - usb-ohci. 10/100 Ethernet - works great. I use e100 kernel module. Winmodem - doesn't work. Maybe it will someday, but I doubt it. Fireware - never tested, sorry. SD slot - does NOT work. Chip to talk to is it totally proprietary - no one I've seen has any idea how to talk to it. 1024x768 screen. trident XF86Config module. X is fine, but not 3D accelerated. Sound is good. Nice speakers. CD-ROM/DVD-ROM is slim select bay. DVD *works* (used Totem to play a DVD movie for the first time yesterday. Woot!) Suggest you also buy: Slim select bay Secondary battery Slim select bay Secondary Hard Drive (I just use it for backups, but backups are a good thing when you're on the road for a months or two at a time ). DMA doesn't seem to work to secondary drive, which is weird, as it does seem to work (?) to CD/DVD. I've got 1024MB (which is max) memory in mine. Probably overkill, though I do a lot of compiling. 512 MB would be fine. ONE LAST THING: MAJOR PISS OFF - THE CORNERS BOTTOM RIGHT AND BOTTOM LEFT WHERE YOUR HANDS REST ARE VERY SHARP. GET THE THING ON YOUR LAP AND DO SOME EXTENSIVE TYPING. IT'S FINE. GET THE THING ON A DESK, AND YOU START STABBING YOUR PALMS. So make sure that this isn't an issue for you. Guess I should make a web page out of this and put it somewhere. :) AfC Toronto -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Fixing your technology by focusing on your people and the processes around them. We improve usabilty, scalabilty, and maintainability - the keys to making technology work - through team building, implementing effective procedures, and enhancing systems performance. Contact us! http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney, New York, Toronto, London -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Debian RAID-1 installation (was: Re: [SLUG] Enterprise Platform)
> >>OK, so how do I install ... with RAID and LVM? While not in quite as much specific detail as jaq's post, a recent issue of Sys Admin Magazine had pretty much an entire issue devoted to the topic of storage and included a couple articles about RAID and VM on Linux. It could well be a good resource if you're looking for further perspectives. http://www.sysadminmag.com/articles/2004/0404/ Regards, AfC Toronto -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] mail processing in perl
On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 21:53, Ken Foskey wrote: > Is there a module that will process a mail file used in Evolution > (single flat file containing mail and attachments). Assuming you are using Evolution's internal folders (which are in plain mbox format), you might check out "grepmail", http://grepmail.sourceforge.net - that should give you the tools to pick and choose and do what you want. AfC Calgary -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd New York: +1 646 472 5054 Toronto: +1 416 848 6072 Sydney: +61 2 9977 6866 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/contact/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] random backgrounds under gnome2.6
On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 18:59, Kevin Saenz wrote:
> Can anyone help me out? I am trying to get my background on gnome2.6
> change randomly after a specified time.
Attached is a little shell script which will cycle the next image from a
list onto Gnome's desktop background.
It's fun to use in from a cron job, or, say, from .bash_profile [if
DISPLAY is set] to change the desktop background every time you pop a
term...
Randomizing a list of images is left as an exercise for the student :)
[I note that you asked about Gnome 2.6; I'm running 2.4 on this system,
but I imagine it still works the same way]
AfC
Calgary
--
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd
Where is he and what time is it there? Use slashtime!
http://www.operationaldynamics.com/time
#!/bin/sh
# 2003, AfC
# Select the next image from a list and make it the Gnome desktop background
# (or, just specify a filename and it'll use that)
#
# LIST is a file with a list of images, one per line, relative to LIBDIR,
# that you'd like take the next image from. It's not random, rather, it cylces
# through the list one at a time under the assumption that you don't want to
# see a picture you've recently seen again.
#
# The script makes a symlink in LIBDIR called "current.jpg" so you can figure
# out where the background image actually came from if you like it
LIBDIR="/home/andrew/lib/backgrounds"
CURRENT="$LIBDIR/current.jpg"
LIST="$LIBDIR/randomimages.list"
if [ $# -eq 1 ] ; then
if [ ! -f "$1" ] ; then
echo "need to specify a file, or, use without args to get a new random image"
exit 1
fi
IMAGE=`pwd`/$1
else
cat $LIST | perl -e '
$first = <>;
while (<>) {
print "$_";
}
print "$first";
' >$LIST.tmp
mv $LIST.tmp $LIST
IMAGE=`head -1 $LIST`
IMAGE=$LIBDIR/$IMAGE
fi
rm -f $CURRENT
ln -s $IMAGE $CURRENT
gconftool-2 --set "/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename" \
--type string $IMAGE
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] revisiting a hot topic (accounting systems)
On Tue, 2004-05-11 at 01:50, Dave wrote: > I use sql-ledger as well. http://www.sql-ledger.com/ > > It does GST and PST for Canada eh! But probably can be used for > Australian GST without too much trouble. There are people here in Aus who do use it, so "yes" it can be adapted. As many have pointed out on SL's mailing list, it's "just" a matter of knowing how to configure tax accounts (GST paid, GST collected, and then reducing them when you submit quarterly BAS tax owing or receive BAS derived GST refunds). FWIW, if you have access to someone running (or are yourself running) MYOB, they do a good job of dealing with the GST transparently, and a bit of brief study will teach you all you need to know about how to post to these accounts. We're considering a switchover at the end of this FY as well, although I'm not convinced yet - MYOB is clicky as hell, but SL doesn't seem to be too helpful around things like date entry and repetitive tasks [Canadian GST PST and HST are all applied on top of the sticker price, whereas Australian GST is (usually) incorporated in the sticker price, UK VAT style. SL does have support for included taxation] AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] spam filters not working
On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 10:08, Angus Lees wrote: > From what I can see any spam filter that needs training is missing the > point If you use a model where you train your filter with every single filter, then yes, your viewpoint that "needs training is missing the point" makes sense. But most people I work with only train their spam filters when something is mis-classified. This has the effect of keeping the database size down a touch, and also means that the mechanics of "remove this message from the database of spam words and add it to the database of white words" is unnecessary. > - but I've never actually run any of the Bayesian filters so its > purely ignorant prejudice ;) My scheme is this: I run bogofilter on the server where my mail is aggregated as the final step before it gets sorted into folders. Positives are is sent to a "ProbableSpam" folder. I have two other relevant folders: Spam and NotSpam. I have a cron job that periodically (say, every 6 hours) takes any messages from those folders and feeds them into filter with the appropriate marking, then empties the [Not]Spam folder. If something is misclassified, [ie a spam message shows up in my InBox] all I do is move (or copy) it to the Spam or NotSpam folder, and forget about it. [It's IMAP, so it goes to the server] A few hours later, the script will come along and train accordingly. This may or may not meet your definition of "acceptable usage model" but works for us. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] OO PDF Export
On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 11:57, Glen Turner wrote: > Yeah, I particularly like the way in 1.1.0 that the entire PDF file is > contained in one page. The simple workaround is to turn off "online mode", and then generate the PDF. It will do what you were expecting it to do. It would seem good advice to always verify the layout of your document before printing (be that to paper or PDF). There was also a bug where if you had auto spell check on the little red squiggles would show up in the PDF. That's fixed as of 1.1.1 (as least, it's fixed as of 1.1.53 of the Ximian version of OpenOffice which is what we use). The simple work around, though was to turn off auto spell check before generating a PDF. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] RHEL installations
Hey, I'm doing a bit of research and need to speak with someone who has a large installation of machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux v3. If anyone would be willing to share some experiences, please contact me off list. Thanks, AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers t 02 9977 6866 m 04 1079 6725 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Independant IT consultant?
On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 16:27, Mike MacCana wrote: > > Although we all will agree Linux for a headless server will > > always outperform its windows counterpart :) > > Why? You know, that's a good question to ask. I used to think that running a Windows server in a production environment was ridiculous. But there are lots of people who do so. Of course the reason for that is that XYZ application they need works there. Oracle, for example, doesn't really care whether it's running on Windows, Unix, or Linux [quite impressive, really]. Certainly, there is a lot of software in the ERP and business analysis space that [has to] run on Windows Server. People with Unix/Linux backgrounds are accustomed to administering machines remotely and likewise used to doing things via command line interfaces. But in a large in house corporate data centre, people sometimes (for legacy reasons if nothing else) have the infrastructure they need to KVM large numbers of machines. To the actual performance question: I imagine that the assumption is that running an X server on a machine that "doesn't need it" is wasteful of resources. Certainly if you're *using* that X server for a graphical user environment, you'll be generating a lot of load that will detract from the horsepower available for real services. The assumption would seem to be that since a Windows server needs to run it's graphical environment, whereas a headless (presumably implying X -less) Linux box does not, a Windows server must under-perform a Linux one. I'm not so sure how much the GUI matters in reality. I think the real key is "using the graphical interface". While X is a large beastie, to be sure, if it's just sitting there not doing anything then a lot of it can get swapped out - and will be as more active server processes consume resources. Which all makes me think that a Windows server's GUI may not be as much as a penalty performance wise as we might think. It would be interesting to find some unbiased statistics about all that. Another domain, Java VM performance, shows Windows servers doing just fine. From a year ago: http://www.volano.com/report/ Doesn't mean I would recommend Windows by any stretch. I'm an operations guy - the ability to remote administer farms of Linux systems and the ability to finely control system layout, activity, and performance is the critical differentiator. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie t 02 9977 6866 m 04 1079 6725 OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] memory utilization q
>From top: > Mem: 1023128K av, 990212K used, 32916K free, ... >From free: > Mem: 1023128 993100 30028 Same numbers, right? Apparently showing only 30 MB free. Next line from free: > -/+ buffers/cache: 197728 825400 Shows that you actually have 825 MB available. The OS is just using the rest of it to help speed things up by caching things (disk reads, for example) in memory. The moment a real program needs more memory, then it'll get it - up to 825 MB of it.* AfC * more or less :) -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] memory utilization q
On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 00:24, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > [ ... output from `top` ... ] It may be simplistic to say so, but the one thing that top doesn't do is what `free` does - do the math: sirius:~ $ free total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem:515168 495068 20100 0 37104 196644 -/+ buffers/cache: 261320 253848 Swap: 996020 34824 961196 sirius:~ $ While this output really is a tad cryptic, the -/+ line shows what you actually are interested in. All it does reduce the used number (increase the free number) by the amount of memory being used by buffers and cache, but as you can see on the example output from a small server shown above, what at first glance appears to be a system starving for memory is really only about 1/2 used - with Linux being awesome and quietly caching things for us to improve performance. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Blackberry and Linux
On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 16:38, James Gray wrote:
> Anyone ever used a Blackberry with Linux?
Certainly the conduit and initialization software is all Windows based.
RIM's website doesn't mention Linux anywhere.
Note that the software ("redirector") needs to be running in order for
your (Windows) mail client to notice that you've received a message and
to forward it onwards to RIM's network. You can avoid this if the
Redirector is plugged into a corporate Exchange server if you've got the
enterprise version (which most firms do).
There were a few third party webmail type providers who do the webmail
box + redirector thing. If something like that is available here in Aus
you might have the best luck there. You'll still probably need a Windows
machine somewhere to sync + configure the RIM.
>Looks like I might be
> getting one so work can more efficient sabotage my weekends and days off
> (lol - days off? wtf was I thinking?!).
Is it too late to change your mind and give it back?
I lived with one for 3 years. Our subjective opinion was that for our
firm it led to a drop in productivity - largely because of the fact that
it is very difficult to compose substantive replies - not to mention the
fact that it severely impinges your ability to get any separation
between work and the rest of your life. I believe some quantitative
studies by NY based investment banks showed similar results.
It *was* very useful for sales types and senior executives who were
never in the office, but even so, getting one liner replies from people
who didn't bother to read a whole email gets a bit thin after a while.
Also, senior execs have executive assistants who read their email - so
that when the exec actually has a moment to call in their assistant can
focus them on the matter at hand, rather than them having to wade
through an inbox fighting signal-to-noise problems.
Blackberries are very nifty toys, to be sure, but they have a
significant impact on work habits.
> Just curious as to if there is any Linux support (Evolution, Mozilla,
> KDE PIM?).
There doesn't appear to be; certainly RIM's development platform is very
Microsoft Visual centric (although the newer models are Java based, not
C++ based, they still list Windows 2000 as a requirement - presumably
for the conduit / sync software needed to actually talk to it).
AfC
Sydney
--
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Re: [SLUG] arch "rm foo; cvs up foo" equiv
On Thu, 2004-03-18 at 13:32, Benno wrote: > In cvs I do: > > rm foo; cvs up foo Not the arch answer you're looking for, but for general interest, in subversion that functionality is "revert" svn revert foo.c AfC -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] powering down hdx
On Sat, 2004-03-06 at 15:08, Simon Males wrote: > I have a faulty (noisy) 20g drive which I wish to use for backup on my > desktop. Basically if I umount it, does it stop the drive spinning? If it's an IDE drive, then hdparm -y /dev/hdb (or whatever the appropriate device is) will spin it down. Use it at the end of your backup script! Noisy is one thing. Faulty another, as you point out, but *increased* noise (especially grinding noises, lol) are a bad sign. You sure you want to be using this thing as a backup disk? Question: is there an equivalent to hdparm for SCSI disks? AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: DSPAM vs SpamAssassin FYI
On Sun, 2004-02-22 at 17:29, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> Most people really care about "spam" vs
> "non-spam" but it sounds from your mail like a "spam"/"virus"/"non-spam"
> categorisation might work.
I stumbled across something called POPfile a while back.
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/
It didn't quite fit my usage mode at the time I was setting filtering
up, but what did catch my eye was the way it supports multiple
"buckets".
If you want to classify as "Spam" and "NotSpam", fine, but if you also
want to classify into buckets like "Family" "ImportantLists" and
"HighVolumeListsWithDrivel" you could do that as well.
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?HowTos/Training
It strikes me that this could be easier than constantly tweaking {
procmail | maildrop } rulesets...
Come to think of it, maybe I'll revisit it... :)
AfC
--
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Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054
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Re: [SLUG] Re: DSPAM vs SpamAssassin FYI
On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 10:33, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> As unfortunate as it is, I think the only way to combat
> spam is to make it expensive to send by default.
As it happens, Microsoft, Yahoo, and {some major ISPs} are trying to
figure a way to implement "Internet Postage".
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/32760.html
They say they are advocating this because of the anti-spam effect it
would have.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader what possible ulterior
commercial motives might be present.
AfC
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Re: [SLUG] Re: DSPAM vs SpamAssassin FYI
On Sun, 2004-02-22 at 15:39, Jeff Waugh wrote: > Well, that was certainly an interesting post. Although he didn't provide it, his web site is remarkably informative: http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/dspam/ > So, who's been having fun with their anti-spam tools recently? I'm still > using spamassassin and bogofilter [1] these days, but finding more and more > crap in my real inbox, thanks to all this random-text crap. Gar. I use bogofilter [only]. When the heap-of-random-dictionary-words technique cropped up, I was really worried - it seemed a good workaround. For a while I started getting 15-20% false negatives. I thought I'd have to ditch and go to a full blown SpamAssassin or whatever setup, but I faithfully kept training for a week or two, and suddenly, my false negatives are right back down to 1-2 per 1000. My guess [this is entirely unscientific] is that it backfired on them. The dictionary is relatively big, but the set of words commonly used is *really* small in comparison. Because they use words that I and my correspondents *never* use, the score on uncommon words (take "lanthanide" and "dispensary". Who are they kidding?) goes up, and they become clear markers for spam. [I wonder how many people are spam blocking this thread? :)] AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Compiere
On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 15:14, Hal Ashburner wrote: > Project of the month at Sourceforge. > http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2004-02.php > http://www.compiere.org/ I just had a flip through their site. It seems comprehensive enough, but it's difficult to get a sense of what is actually *there*. I finally found their product tour. looks hard to use. I'm currently looking for something solid in this space, so I'll probably build this at some point to have a look, but first impression of this didn't leave me a warm fuzzy. > Any thoughts on Sourceforge in general? Slow, too much promotion and advertisement clutter, difficult to use, stupid forums that don't map to mailing lists. Get me drunk sometime and I'll tell you how I *really* feel. :) AfC Canberra -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 North America +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] So Linux is American.....read on!
On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 06:43, Bret Comstock Waldow wrote: > Linux, as an expression of individual choice and creativity, is > definitely an expression of American values (I was born there). It is > also an expression of New Zealand values (I migrated there). I don't > see anything in what this fellow wrote (he's speaking to an American > audience, he thinks he's trying to get them to wake up) that suggests he > thinks it's exclusive to America only. Hear, hear. Well written Bret. Sluggers, [Personal aside: I fall into this trap myself, occasionally. It's generally called stereotyping: Australians are like "this", the French are "that" (well, I'm half British, so what would you expect me to say on that one). With that disclaimer:] In my experience, myopia is somewhat a national trait in the United States. They are very well meaning, very sincere, and absolutely convinced that they're not doing wrong. They don't, however, "get out much" and their newspapers and television reinforce this. So, quite often, things written by Americans for Americans come out sounding like the US is the only thing going. I'm from Toronto. Toronto tends to think of itself as "The center of the known universe" (certainly that's what the rest of Canada thinks Toronto people believe). Sounds a bit like a certain port city in Australia I now live in. So, we all do it. It's ok - they don't mean it personally. AfC -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] key management for pgp keys
On Fri, 2004-02-13 at 22:15, Ken Foskey wrote: > If we have their public key installed You meant "private" here, right? > Any other thoughts on how to protect the keys? Keychain sized USB flash drive which the secret keychain is carried on? Also - if you used symmetric encryption throughout (PGP supports, gpg option -c) then it would just be a conventional matter of remembering the encryption passphrase as opposed to public/private key management issues. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] OT Voice of IP via ADSL
I left it this late in the discussion, because it's almost OT and likewise very difficult[1] to get to Australia. I'm using something called Vonage http://www.vonage.com/ They got profiled in The Economist a few months back, and I subsequently saw some guy at a conference plugged in using it, so I learned it wasn't vapourware. Their VoIP system is very locked in, their servers, their hardware, etc etc, but they do one thing which is awesome - they are fully plugged into the Public Switched Telephone Network, and have [American] FCC approval to operate. What's awesome is that they have divorced the ide of area-code and location. So, in North American terms, I can have a 646 [New York] phone number, but be sitting in Colorado. Or Montreal. Or Sydney. They recently got a bank of Toronto numbers [so have an access tandem there at least], so have almost crossed the how-do-we-operate-internationally barrier. Are they coming to Oz? Doubt it anytime soon, but if they pulled off one international, then more international can't be far behind. [1] Unfortunately, at time of writing they only deliver to US mailing addresses. So, I had to use a friends US domestic address to receive the thing, then have them post it onwards. Real pain. Vonage know people do this, and while they dont [technical,billing] support it, they do realize lots of their customers are doing it and seem to be steadily moving the direction of this working. AfC Who is 646-472-5054 in New York [USA], and 416-848-6072 in Toronto [Canada] which all rings on line 2 of his phone in his office in Sydney, which is connected to Vonage's little [Motorola] VoIP box sitting on the floor, which is just one node on my SOHO network, uplink is ADSL. -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Trouble finding Linux
On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 14:19, Greg Brennan wrote: > I figure I can't run into too much trouble if it boots from the cd > (can I???) so I'll give it a try first. No, except for one thing. Live CDs like Knoppix and Morphix often probe for- and put icons on the desktop for- existing hard drive partitions. It won't deliberately touch them, but if you open those "partitions" and muck with them, then yes, you can make a mess. So, leave the hard drive alone and you'll be fine :) AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Running my cronjobs in a different timezone
On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 17:45, Jeff Waugh wrote: > I don't mind affecting every single process > I run on the machine - that would be a reasonably pleasant side-effect. Given that degree of latitude, why not just change the timezone of the whole box? Just because the machine is sitting in [NA]EST doesn't mean it has to be told it's in New York or whatever. Just tell it that it's in Australia/Sydney. [ie change /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Sydney and echo "Australia/Sydney" >/etc/timezone] Wouldn't that do the trick? [Or is it not your machine, just your account?] AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
RE: [SLUG] OT: Computer hardware stores in Syd CBD
On Mon, 2004-02-09 at 15:00, ksaenz wrote: > But who with non internet exploder browser can visit that site? I have > boycotted them because I can't view their site. :) As others have pointed out it does "work" in Mozilla (the problem being that their site is just plain bad)... ... but you could always *telephone* them to order. [I recommend it, in fact. They're pretty fast, BTW] AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
RE: [SLUG] Trouble finding Linux
> I'm interested in installing Linux on my home pc. There are a considerable number of ways to bootstrap and install Linux that don't require a CD-ROM ISO. Debian's installer pages go into this in great detail; any other distro that is fundamentally download-it-from-the-internet based will be similar. > I would prefer not to order > online Not sure what underlies that concern, but a fantastic place to get ISOs from in Australia (especially Sydney region) is www.everythinglinux.com.au They're prompt, and with it. AfC -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] jdk1.4.1
On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 22:30, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > If you're using java 1.4.x then there is no reason not > to go to the latest .. which I think is 1.4.2_03 or something. I have to second that notion. Unless you have a large production platform (in which case you have to do migration and regression testing before deploying something as fundamental and core as a new JVM), you'd do well to quickly move to whatever the latest release from Sun is [assuming you're using their JVM]. Note that, especially on Solaris, JVM stability is typically achieved in the x.y.[1-3]_0[1-4] range. They have a lot of enterprise users, and people flush out the significant bugs pretty thoroughly. Not quickly, mind you, but eventually. The x.y.0 releases are notorious for being flaky as hell. Going with a x.y.2_03 (as was suggested above) is likely a good move. [That pattern applies to all of Sun's release engineering - you'd be foolish to adopt Solaris 12 when it comes out, but Solaris 12/4 will be rock solid. Come to think of it, that pattern applies to Linux Kernels too :)] AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] LCD recommendations
I'm considering replacing my CRTs with LCDs. I've been googling around a bit, but I was wondering if anyone has specific recommendations about LCD monitors? My only requirement is that the screen res be greater than 1024x768 (ie, the 1280x1024 that seems to be standard at 17" is more than ok) and have a good old analogue 15 pin VGA plug. Any suggestions? Specific manufacturers/products, or review sites would certainly be welcome. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Who has spoken to Commonwealth bank Tech support?
On Sat, 2004-01-24 at 11:13, Grant Parnell wrote: > I also use ANZ, javascript/http/https, works real nice. Yeah, they're not bad. Pretty clean. One of the better (in terms of the requirements of this thread) online banking interfaces I've seen globally. Also for completeness, despite the above endorsement, ANZ *still* can't link their corporate credit cards to their online banking. Absolutely ridiculous - I have to pay my ANZ Visa card via BPay. AfC -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Xinerama and fonts - nvidia TwinView setup
On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 19:27, Mary Gardiner wrote: > On Wed, Jan 21, 2004, Jeff Waugh wrote: > > Matrox in both cases? > > Yeah, same card in fact. Help me out here ... if Matrox uses an nvidia chipset, right? If that's not correct, then please consider this for general interest... -- The voodoo you have to go through to get dual monitors to work is somewhat extreme, though (amazingly) really well documented[*]. Jeff's comment about them and Xinerama reminded me that ***they implemented their own Xinerama, IN the driver*** which means, against all logic, you DON'T call `X +xinerama`. Makes it barf. They advise against it... The keyword for the driver option you're searching on is "TwinView" In my case, I *didn't* configure two monitors nor two X servers. I ended up with one screen 2048x768 (or whatever) big, but the Xinerama magic (usually) works - notably GNOME 2.4 does everything right. Xscreensaver needs to be bumped to 4.14, but it also does everything right. Check this out - there's stuff in here which you never would have expected in a Device section. It's unclear how much the rest of the xf86config file influences the config. I have two Monitor sections, but the two Screen sections seem to be overridden (and ignored) by this... perhaps only one Monitor gets read, and then... it works this week, don't touch. Section "Device" Identifier "GForceFX5200" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "PNY Technologies" BoardName "FX5200PCI" BusID "PCI:1:6:0" Option "TwinView" "True" Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync""31.47-85.03" Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "60-85" Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf" Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024,1280x1024 ; 1172x864,1172x864 ; 1024x768,1024x768 ; 800x600,800x600" EndSection I told you it was voodoo. AfC * As you know, I'm running Gentoo. Half the reason I do is so that the OS doesn't give me hassle when I have the temerity to want to use a vendor supplied driver even if it happens to be binary non-free. In portage there are two packages, "nvidia-kernel" and "nvidia-glx" (both using the same download file from Nvidia). One of them contains this HUGE documentation file from nvidia with All The Answers (tm). I can email it to you if you think it would help and can't find it. I gather there are Debian friendly ways to get the vendor driver from Nvidia. As I understand it the free reverse-engineer one is terrible - it certainly makes a hash of the dual head thing. -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] gpilotd issues
On Mon, 2003-12-22 at 00:45, David Kempe wrote: > I can't get my Palm to sync with Evolution cos gpilotd is refusing to > connect - any tips? Not specifically, but there are endless threads on the evolution mailing list about this sort of thing. Check out http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution Best, AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Andrew: "Brr it's cold" Native: "Hey! You're Canadian! I thought you liked the cold!" Andrew: "Why on earth do you think I left?" -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] iptables (debian)
On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 22:26, Daniel Bush wrote: > am wondering if the LOG facility of iptables and syslogd are the > problem. Have also disabled any '(x)console/tty' items from /etc/syslog.conf ) It's always possible you missed something... In any case, I always found on my Debian systems that to be sane and happy I would do the following: rm /dev/console ln -s /dev/tty2 /dev/console [where 2 was a vt I removed the getty from and had it just for logging] That, in turn, is a trick I learned from years and years ago on Xenix systems when the default resulting in the same effect you're describing - caused because /dev/console was pointing at /dev/tty0 - which results in any and all console [virtual] ttys being sprayed. I never actually saw anything like /dev/tty0 being linked to /dev/console, but it sure seemed that way on my Debian boxes. This all assumes that replacing /dev/console as I suggest is a sane and ok idea - Lord knows I could have been committing some horrible faux pas. I'm sure the Debian people out there in our lovely community will have a more authoritative answer for you; it hasn't ever seemed to be a problem on my lovely shiny Gentoo machines... :) AfC Toronto -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 North America +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] djbdns opinions?
On Sun, 2003-12-07 at 20:33, Sonia Hamilton wrote: > I've been looking at DJ Bernstein's djbdns server at > http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html. > > I'm thinking of using it instead of bind9; just wondering if anyone has > any experiences with using it, and opinions (positive or negative). You said you've used qmail. That probably means you've used daemontools as well. If you're comfortable with (and using) svscan/svc/multilog/etc and the whole /service symlink thing, then plugging djbdns in is a snap. We used it for a while - in fact, our use of it predated qmail; I think that was part of our problem - we didn't quite know what were doing with daemontools at that point, and that meant that we screwed up a few things (like forgetting to regenerate .cdb files, etc) which meant that our satisfaction wasn't as good as it might have been. That said, I'm really impressed with djbdns (and dnscachx which goes with it). It's a bit of a learning curve as is usual with DJB's stuff (what is it with that guy compulsively making hard to use software?) but the fact that it automatically generates the PTR records, for example, is terrific. I seem to recall that it either a) has issues with, or b) doesn't do, zone transfers. I'm probably wrong, but you might want to check. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] keys for digital signature
On Sun, 2003-11-30 at 09:02, Mary Gardiner wrote: > which is why you shouldn't be trusting of many of the keys in your key > ring. Of course, this is the whole reason for key signing events. If you show me a copy of your key [fingerprint], and a copy of some photo identification, and assert that they key and ID are yours, then I have a reasonable grounds to go back to my keyring and say "yes, I trust that this key really is the digital public key of that person". Doesn't mean you trust the person's *character*, just that you have been reasonably convinced that the key matching that fingerprint really does belong to that person, and so can trust that a digital signature made with that key came from that person. -- The process can stop there, but there is one more step. It can get a touch complicated from here, but this is how a "web of trust" grows: If we want, we can sign the other person's key indicating that we trust it, and then send a copy to the other person. Each person can, if they care to, submit these signatures to the public key servers; future downloads of that public key will result in a key which carries along with it these signatures from other people. So, ultimately, even if I don't know *you*, but your key is signed by someone I *do* trust, then I have a reasonable assurance that you are who you say you are. -- I've always wondered at what point this algorithm would break down under it's own weight - assuming mass adoption of the OpenPGP key system world wide, when would either keyring file size, complexity in the trustdb, or length of time needed to validate signatures, cause the whole thing to grind to a halt? AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] getting root's bin paths after su ?
A little email about .bashrc vs .bash_profile: On Tue, 2003-11-18 at 15:28, Andrew Bennetts wrote: > The dash makes it a "login shell", which means it executes the bashrcs and > whatnot specific to the root user, thus you'll get the environment you expect. Without wanting to be pedantic, I got this wrong enough times to offer a minor clarification: A great way to figure out what your system is doing is to put echo "In ~andrew/.bashrc" 1>&2 As a line in your .bashrc, and similar lines in places like .bash_profile, .profile, and if you're really stumped, /etc/profile, .gnomerc and /etc/X11/gdm/gnomerc (but see warning [1] below!) Sometimes you'll be surprised. For example, I was once dealing with Solaris boxes whose default shell wasn't bash. I wanted to use bash, and so would do ssh [EMAIL PROTECTED] bash [assuming bash was even on default path, ] The thing that surprised me was that, *I* thought I was "logging in", but in this case, .bash_profile wasn't run, only .bashrc . This because running bash as the command via ssh is the same as if you just type `bash` on a command line - .bashrc gets sourced, but not .bash_profile. . As you may have noticed, one of bash's options is --login (this is what relates to the `su -` conversation). It turned out that if I wanted .bash_profile to run, I needed a "login environment" and so needed to amend the above command to ssh [EMAIL PROTECTED] 'bash --login' which was a bit of a pain. [So I wrote a wrapper, but that's another story ;)] So this is all to say that, especially with bash as a shell (but I suspect many others), it pays to a) put environment setting/creating things, like setting PATH, in .bashrc b) put login only things, like checking new mail or changing directory to ~ or running a clock or ... in .bash_profile; c) go to the effort to actually *get* a login shell when you want one. Note: Interesting how the default skeleton .bash_profile always sources .bashrc for you! That's because if bash IS in login mode, and decides to source .bash_profile, it DOESN'T source .bashrc automatically as well - so if you're environment settings are there, then you need to act to get them. -- [1] WARNING! Don't forget that since .bashrc gets sourced any time a shell runs, it REALLY must not output anything on stdout - in other words, that little debuggy statement I suggested above will wreck your world if it *doesn't* go to stderr and you try to do `scp`. So don't forget 1>&2 on any debug lines Ah, the things we learn by trial and error. Given that this is all open source and subject to modification without notice, your mileage may vary. Certain forward looking statements (like "it may work") are not to be taken as authoritative. And if this message wasn't intended for you, then destroy it without reading it :) AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] evolution
On Sat, 2003-11-15 at 13:35, Jeff Allison wrote: > I've got a problem with evolution my IMAP folders... Jeff's got you on the right track, of course, but I would suggest also that you have a look at the evolution mailing list archives. This sort of question comes up (sadly) quite regularly. http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution/ The "sadly" comment is there because the IMAP code in evolution is *REALLY* weak. This isn't just a matter of my opinion - it's a loud and constant complaint from evolution users. And Ximian knows this. I've had long talks with Ettore (and even Nat Friedman) about it, they know it needs fixing, but for some reason it never quite makes it onto the radar to get fixed in a given milestone release - the UI work they've been focused on continues to take priority. Nat told me they're serious about finally addressing this problem either in 2.0 or shortly thereafter. We'll see. In the mean time, if you get really frustrated I would recommend using something like offlineimap which groks IMAP really well and mirrors your server's mailstore to a local tree of maildirs. I written a few emails to the evolution list about this if you're interested: http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution/2003-March/028106.html http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution/2003-November/033842.html [I did a google on 'IMAP Andrew Cowie site:lists.ximian.com' to find these; similar searches but with your problem might work for you] Best of luck, AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] virus puzzle
On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 17:29, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > No, I have not uncommented the local master = yes line in the smb.conf file. > I think the default is not to become a master, right? > NO! [I'm no expert, but that declared assumption made me want to check - I get myself into trouble all the time that way :)] >From http://au1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/smb.conf.5.html : "This option allows nmbd(8) to try and become a local master browser on a subnet. If set to no then nmbd will not attempt to become a local master browser on a subnet and will also lose in all browsing elections. By default this value is set to yes. Setting this value to yes doesn't mean that Samba will become the local master browser on a subnet, just that nmbd will participate in elections for local master browser. Setting this value to no will cause nmbd never to become a local master browser. Default: local master = yes" AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Gentoo
On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 12:27, Declan Ingram wrote: > Has anyone out there had much experience with Gentoo ? I was running > debian and thought i would give it a go. I switched to using Gentoo about 9 months ago, partly for technical reasons (not the ones you'd think, see below) and partly because I thought that *someone* on the Linux Australia committee should be using something other than Debian [Ok, Leon uses Mandrake :)] There are, it turns out, quite a number of Gentoo people in Australia. I'm working on encouraging the ones I come across to join in with groups like SLUG, LUV, HUMBUG, PLUG, etc and to attend events like LCA. If you want to "try" it, expect a learning curve; the same that you would have switching to any other distro. One tends to do a lot manually on a Gentoo installation (for example, if you want to change timezones, you probably are going to be changing the /etc/localtime symlink yourself). It's not exactly hard - and great fun for anyone who likes doing a lot themselves. It *does* have it's own ways of doing things, notably around rc scripts and building packages. Both are excellent. The technical reason I'm still using Gentoo is not for the performance optimizations that may or may not accrue from compiling things with specific optimization flags, but rather that I find the packaging system (specifically the files used to describe how to build packages) to be deliriously easy to use. I work in a number of environments where I need to rebuild specific packages to my requirements, or quickly package local software to be rolled out across a number of machines in a production environment. I find it really easy to integrate my own work into the machine's existing package management system. That counts for a lot for me. As a side note, I expected Gentoo to be a nightmare to maintain. We've all lived through the occasional nightmare episodes when tracking Debian unstable (like breaking lilo, things like that) and given that Gentoo is a similarly moving target, I expected it to break all the time. Much to my surprise, it doesn't. I *don't* just madly and blindly update my system automatically each night or anything like that, but I do find that when I upgrade specific packages the dependency graph stays on top of things... between that, proper library slotting, and ./configure working it's magic, It mostly Just Works (tm). :) One last little tidbit. Using Gentoo, one maintains (in a /etc config file) a list of the various "kinds" of things I'm going with my system. For example, I've told it things like "gnome -kde java -ldap". The build files take account of these settings, and adjusts ./configure settings accordingly. So, when using Gentoo, you're not locked into the decisions about settings and capabilities made by, say, a Debian package maintainer. All adds up to a lot of flexibility and a lot of power under the hood. But of course, that's also the case because it's Linux. All good. I've prepared a presentation called "About Gentoo for people who think its a crazy idea". It's on offer as a SLUG talk if anyone is interested. > If you dont mind having it download and compile for a day or two it is > fast and tastee! Gentoo has a [mostly] working binary package system which integrates tightly with the normal filesystem management done by the packaging system. I recently built a server and for comparison tried downloading Gentoo's CD images (1 x CD-ROM to get you going up to and including X windows, and a second one with a pile of [optional] binaries (Gnome, KDE, etc)). Downloading the ISOs and then updating my build description tree resulted in some wasted downloads in the more fast-moving software, but many things are pretty static over medium time spans and so the binaries made a few weeks/months ago are pretty good. Not having to build gcc, glibc, xfree, etc right off the bat meant I was up and running really quickly, downloading and compiling specific ebuilds as needed as I moved forward. After about a month of running the system, I'd say that I've needed/wanted to upgrade (ie downloaded source + compile + merge into system) about only 30% of the packages. That's a slow and quiet background trickle, really and as for system impact? There isn't any. That's what nice(1) is for. AfC P.S. I don't care if the original poster was trolling, as some suspected. It's a worthy enough question. -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Server 'up'; but 'down' from external viewers...
On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 02:53, Jared Pritchard wrote: > I think it's something like 'apachelt restart Another post replied saying how you might go about testing and finding `apachectl` For what it is worth, I have seen some installations where apachectl doesn't actually do the right thing. This can happen if the configuration file for apache (httpd.conf, apache.conf, apache2.conf, etc) isn't named or located where the webserver is compiled to expect it ... and the commands in /etc/init.d/apache (or /etc/init.d/httpd or whatever) explicitly reference a different configuration file. This is all to say that you might try using /etc/init.d/apache [re]start (or whatever) if apachectl doesn't do it for you. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] multi function printer
On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 09:31, Ken Foskey wrote: > I was thinking of getting a laser / fax combo. The boss lady wants a > simple fax and I can use this to get my laser printer. On the lower > price point. It must run under cups and toner must be in the reasonable > range. Any suggestions. HP 3330MFP has been good to me the last 6 months. I use it exclusively as a fax and copier, so I can't tell you whether it's any good under CUPS, I'm afraid, but it does seem relatively robust. I am using CUPS to talk to an HP 2100TN laserjet over the network and that's rocking... For what it's worth, MFP's have traditionally used non standard protocols on the [parallel] wire, and so typically earn "paperweight" status from linuxprinting.org . The one I'm suggesting, however, eared a "mostly" which is pretty damn good. http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-LaserJet_3330_MFP -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 North America +1 646 270 5376 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] httpd.conf performance options suggestions
On Wed, 2003-07-30 at 12:56, Andrew McNaughton wrote: > If bandwidth is your bottleneck (or is expensive), look at using mod_gzip. Even if you're not using PHP, have a look at http://www.jpcache.com/ It seems this guy has put a great deal of effort into both a caching engine for PHP, and making use of the gzip encoding that HTTP allows. I might help reinforce what the docs on mod_gzip have to say. (Which, incidentally, are at: http://www.schroepl.net/projekte/mod_gzip/ ) AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 North America +1 646 270 5376 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
RE: [SLUG] VNC
On Sun, 2003-07-20 at 20:57, Adam W wrote: > Simon, > > > HI all, > > I am experimenting with using VNC to access the desktop on my > > LTSP server from my Windows laptop. I can connect OK but all > > I get is a plain grey screen and the mouse curosr, there was > > an app running when I clicked and dragged, I thnk it was > > iconmanager or something similar, however since I closed it, > > I don't even get that anymore. Sounds to me like xdm [or kdm or gdm or whatever] isn't running, or if it is, it's not connected to [or a child of] the X server you have running there. But, see below... > I cant help you exactly with your problem - if there is one... BUT... I > can tell you that VNC on linux is much different to that on windows. On > linux it is much like a TERMINAL and on windows, you control the local > mouse and keyboard. If you want to control the local mouse and keyboard, > so the mouse moves on the local screen when the VNC mouse moves - > mandrake made some sort of remote desktop app that uses VNC to control > the local K&M. You can achieve the remote-control aspect you're looking for under VNC, but you need to run a program which exports your X display as a VNC stream. There was such a program, called x0rfbserver , available from http://forum.hexenet.de/ . That site, is however, off the air, and the freshmeat entry is gone (WTF?!) I corresponded with [EMAIL PROTECTED], who reported that he was aware it was [temporarily, he hoped] gone upstream, had taken action to keep it in the Gentoo mirrors. It's a package called "rfb". So you should be able to find it by looking for /distfiles/rfb* in the Gentoo section of any major mirror. [Here in .au, I've been using http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/gentoo which is a mirror of http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo . I'm not sure what Debian or Red Hat call the package, if anything] If you're not looking for remote control, but just want to access an X desktop, you can do that. I think you're on the right track, but you need to additionally run an X server (which will in turn need to have an xdm/kdm/gdm on it) and have a VNC program attach itself to it. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 North America +1 646 270 5376 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Writing GUI apps for "Linux" (FOSS platforms)
On Thu, 2003-07-17 at 23:23, Jeff Waugh wrote: > Only if people use/rewrite non-ECMA bits, which may be encumbered. .NET is > actually a really kickarse devel platform, and the MS guys have been very > helpful with alternative implementations of it. Even if you dodge all of the > MS-only, non-standardised stuff, it is still a great platform (as shown by > the speed of the Mono project and unencumbered software based on it). It will be interesting to see if this continues. Andrew Tridgell remarked to me a few months back that it used to be that the Samba team could get answers from Microsoft Engineering - in fact, the two groups had a decent relationship and the Microsoft techies appreciated that the Samba group were finding bugs in SMB implementations under Windows. Apparently, in the last 18 months, this activity has cooled off dramatically - as Microsoft has come to realize that Samba is a key component enabling heterogeneous networks - and therefore a "direct" threat to them, the word has gone out inside Microsoft that supporting Samba is not cool. It will be a shame when Microsoft corporate comes to realize that Mono et al are a direct threat as well; I can't imagine them acting any differently in that situation. Oh well. It'll be fun while it lasts ;) AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 North America +1 646 270 5376 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
