alexpank

This should be fairly easy to do, depending on how your users are logging in. For example, if you only have one user per computer (i.e. each library user doesn't have to log in before they use the machine), you could just set up your permissions so that that user only has access to the /mnt directory, and all other directories are accessable only by root or by an admin. On the other hand, if you have multiple users (unlikely in a public library, now that I think about it...), you could whack them all into a group which has access to /mnt and nothing else, with admin/root being able to access everything else. You can set this up through the CLI - I would tell you how, but I suck at it, especially adding users - or through MCC. I'm at uni now so I can't tell you exactly how to do it, but I think it's in System > Users Hope this helps a little (and that someone can furnish the details of adding uses through the CLI!) Alex BTW, it might be an idea to restrict their write permissions to just /mnt/floppy or something like that, rather than giving them the whole of /mnt to muck around with.

Mmm, thought that might have been the case. Thanks for the confirmation, tyme. Anyway, urpmi is the better option to start off with, and then go to the web if there's nothing in the repositories.

There are also sites around like pbone, rpmfind and rpmseek, which have RPMs for various flavours of Linux, including a number of versions of Mandrake/Mandriva, but your best option is urpmi, because it'll install all your dependencies (Deo volente), whereas the websites above only install that RPM. I believe you can use urpmi to install downloaded RPMs, but I don't know if it will automagically grab the dependencies too. HTH

Hi nate, I'm not a web-savvy soul in the slightest, but this might depend on how the school (or the tech-heads behind the site) want you to access the D2L site. I know the version that my uni uses requires you to log in every time, which is a right pain in the proverbial, so I sympathise. I'd suggest asking your IT guy at school and seeing what they say - I'd imagine that you aren't the only one frustrated at this problem! FWIW, I personally wouldn't be too happy about sending a URL that had my username and password in it, but then there might not be much in the way of sensitive documents in the D2L system (unless the Geography curriculum has changed a whole lot since I went through school ) HTHAL Alex

I don't think this will help you at all, but the .deb packages are for Debian and Debian-based distros, like .rpm files for Mandrake, RH and so on. As far as the flashing thing goes, the only solution I can think of is to use KDE with Kopete - I use that for MSN and it works fine :) Sorry this doesn't really solve your problem, but it might give you a temporary solution.

Depends a bit on which desktop manager you're using, but the easiest solution is to press Alt+F2 (or go to the KdeMenu, Gnome Menu, etc. and click Run...), type in 'gaim' (no quotes) and click OK. It may be included in your KDE Menu, etc. too, under Internet > Instant Messaging. I'm not 100% sure about the menu location, but it's something like that. Alex Edit: corrected typo (damn capitalisation...)

Cannon >> As someone who has never written much more than a couple of batch files going to no more than about half a dozen lines, the thought of that terrifies me! I'll see what I can find - this might be a good opportunity :) Devries >> That program works with the Edict and Kanjidic files, which are in their own native format (see Edict documentation and Kanjidic documentation for more details). The XML files (JMdict and Kanjidic2) are developed from those files with more detail. I can get the native-format files working, but I just wanted to use the more detailed XML files if I could. There are a couple of links on this page to projects that use the XMLs, but one is a dead link and the other appears to be able to handle only JMdict and not Kanjidic2. Thanks for your help, guys Alex

OK, this sounds like a really dumb question (and I'm the one asking it!), but this is a completely new area for me, so please be patient I've got a few XML files with their respective DTDs that I downloaded from my alma mater. Problem is, I have no idea what to do with them now. They're dictionary files, but I don't know of any way of using them other than opening them up in an editor and searching or grepping through them. Is there some kind of program or utility for searching through XMLs like these? TIA :) Alex

This might be an obvious thing to suggest, but do you shut down kopete before you turn off your computer? I use Kopete on KDE3.2 (er, I think) under Mandrake 10.1, and if I quit Kopete before I turn off the computer or log out, it doesn't come back up the next time unless I ask it to. Same thing with Kscd and emacs and stuff, too. HTH (and apologies if you've tried this already) alex

OK, just did a quick google and here's a link for intlfonts - the good ol' Free Software Foundation and also GNU. Seems they've got either the whole lot in one big (23.2 MB) file, or split into the various regions. HTHSE2 (hope this helps someone else too) Alex

Hi Ian, I thought that might have been the case - I wasn't too worried about it being moved, although I would still be concerned if it ended up in MSA! I just thought it was funny that it went from one forum to another and back again :) Sorry it's taken me a while to get back to this. I tried your solution with some slight modifications. Firstly, I installed the intlfonts package (I'm not sure where I got it from, I just had it as a tar.gz in my home directory from way back) and then added the directory where those fonts went to FontPath, as per your solution. They included fonts for the JIS X 0212 character set, meaning that the missing characters were now not missing. FYI, JIS X 0212 contains all the characters that weren't considered important enough to go into the main set (JIS X 0208) but were too good to throw out. I'm working on some stuff that uses these characters, so not being able to see them is rather a pain. Actually, your solution helped me with another issue, which was the fact that I had to go and add those fonts to the font path every time I wanted to use them in Emacs, which was a right pain. A readme in intlfonts said to add an 'xset +fp' line to ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsessions, but that didn't work (since I didn't have them...) However, adding them to XF86Config worked a treat! In short, cute psycho monkey 1, recalcitrant computer 0. ;) BTW, there are also intlfonts packges for other languages as well (including Chinese, Korean, a number of Asian languages like Hindi, Devanagari, Tibetan, Lao, etc., and some African languages), so this should work for them too. I'll hunt down a link for the packages, cos it seems they're not on urpmi. FWIW, I've included a couple of screenshots for before and after comparison. Can you tell the difference? Many thanks! Alex <-- note blank spaces in Japanese text! <-- and voila :)

Thanks for that, neddie. I've been reading a little bit about gawk, and I might see if that can do it too. I have a feeling that the filename (or something liek that) might be one of the fields, so I could get around it that way. Thanks for your help! Alex

Just dropping in quickly to see what's happening. I've got a bit busy with an exam (tomorrow!), so I haven't had a chance to try Ian's solution yet, but i'll give it a go tomorrow after I've finished my exams and let ya know what happens. BTW, what's with the posting ping-pong? If this ends up in Security Advisories I'll be a little concerned (^_-)

Ta for splitting that off, Yves. I know, I know, I should've done it myself *flinches in preparation for beating* To give a bit more detail, I've got a bunch of CSVs from MS (yes, I have sold my soul to the devil), which are basically the text strings from most of their programs, with the English and Japanese versions in separate fields. What I want to do is convert those CSVs into something like [I]Japanese text[/I] /English text/ (file that it came from) -- the formatting's to do with a dictionary program I use. There are a number of other fields in the CSV, but i was just going to throw them out. So, given that info, is python still a good option? TIA (and apologies for the OT post...) Alex PS (more OT) MS puts out these files so that they can 'ensure consistency in translation' for third-party programs, but I've found countless situations where, for no apparent reason, their own files are inconsistent! Not that this suprises me - MS making dodgy software? :o

Thanks, Ian, I'll give it a go and post back! Edit: FWIW, I'm not getting any error messages or little boxes, just blank spaces where the characters should be. I'll post a screen cap tonight after I get home, if I remember.

Yup, that's one seriously strange guy... Still, I guess you'd have to be to call yourself 'why the lucky stiff'. Oh well, to each their own, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, it takes all kinds to make a world and all that. BTW (kinda OT) I've got a whole stack of CSV's that I'm looking to convert into another format. Should I use python or ruby or something like that, or is there a better alternative?

Tell me about it... I find the CLI easier too, especially with the magic of the middle button copy-and-paste Man, why didn't I discover that earlier.... Thing I hate, though, is that I try to do it in windows too...

Hi folks, I've been having a bit of trouble with Japanese language display in a terminal since upgrading from 9.0 to 10.1 - certain characters show up as a blank space, which is kinda hard to read... I've checked out the font in KCharSelect, and it seems that the characters in question are in the font, but for whatever reason they won't turn up on screen. I'm using kterm 6.2 (for Japanese support in EUC encoding - all the other terminals only seem to support Unicode) and it worked fine under Mdk 9.0, but for some reason it's no good under 10.0. One thing I thought it could be is the fact that the characters that don't show up are all fairly obscure, but then I figured that if they show up in KCharSelect (and gucharmap, for that matter), then they should show up on screen. Does anyone know why these glyphs go mysteriously missing? TIA [moved from Software by spinynorman]

Sorry, I should have been clearer about which checkbox I meant. That is the one, though. Like ianw said, it'll still work fine, as I can attest! What I've done with mine is get the full hdlist for the smaller sources, and just the synthesis file for bigger ones (main, contrib, etc.). Dunno about other options than MCC and the CLI, but I wish there was a way of select mirrors straight from MCC, rather than having to go to Easy-URPMI - cutting out the middleman, so to speak. Ianw > Man, how did you reply so quickly? Are you like Superman or something??

I could be wrong, but I think what remarque is referring to here is the hdlist files needed to set up the urpmi sources in the first place. This isn't to say that ERD's reply is wrong, but it can be troublesome, particularly if you need to sort out dependency problems. Did you try using the synthesis.hdlist files? If you're using EasyURPMI (like, say, from Mandrivausers.org), you can check a box to use the synth files, which are much smaller, but don't include information like changelogs and so on. I use them for main, contrib... and a couple of other sources I can't remember now, simply because it takes too long for the ordinary hdlist to download on my connection. Hope this helps

Man, this guy has got one weird sense of humour, but he sure knows how to use it! If only everything was this fun... Alex @learning Ruby while I should be writing an essay (sigh)

Just a comment on both of these, relating to my experience trying to get Japanese working in Mdk10.1. This was the first time I had to really hack mandrake to get something to work, and I'm still trying to iron out a couple of problems (in between exams, so the poor old linux box isn't getting a lot of love at the moment), but it's basically working. That is, I can get Japanese input in most programs, every time I boot up, and with a comparatively small download (something like 10MB, I can't remember exactly). Compare this to trying to get it going in Win95/98/2K - haven't tried in XP, but I hear it's all supposed to be done at installation. To retro-install a Japanese input method editor, there's a huge download (58MB or so - try doing that on 33.6kbps dialup!) and then it only works on MS Office programs! I mean, this is an official MS program, so is it too much to ask that it at least work with other Windows-based programs? I mean, I'd love it if it even worked with, say, MSN Messenger or Write. Install a proper Windows J-IME, like is in J-Windows? Sorry, you need to get J-Windows for that. Er no, I think I'll stick with Linux. BTW, if there's anyone who might know why Kterm has decided to hide JIS-0212 characters from me, I'd love some enlightenment! I mean, there aren't that many naughty ones... Alex P.S. Oh, and about not being able to find information about this or that distribution, I was amazed at the amount of info out there for most of the main distributions (Mdk/Mdv, RH, Suse, Slackware...). Anyway, I thought there wasn't really that much difference between the various distributions in terms of where files are put, although my experience outside Mdk is very little... :woops:

Forgive me if this is out of place, stupid, obvious or whatever, but were you installing from source or from an RPM? If you were using the source file (I thought this might be the case from the talk of unzipping, configuring and building), then it's not going to show up when you do 'rpm -qa |grep gcc', or when you try urpmi/urpmf/urpmq. Assuming the config and everything is kosher, gcc should still work, though. FWIW, I'm using 10.1OE (Discovery), and I'm pretty sure the RPMs for gcc are on one of the 3 CD's (not sure which one). In any case, it appears to be sorted now, so feel free to ignore this if you want :) Alex (still trying to make sure that there's not something blatantly obvious that I've missed, and also waiting for someone to point out glaring errors... :unsure: )

Hmm... I'm not sure if being from Sydney makes you better or worse :S I suppose I have to give ya credit for having the sense to get out of there! For those of you playing at home, neither renaming nor deleting the .OpenOffice.org directory changed a thing, so i did a complete reinstall and presto! Now X won't load... Argh... Alex @ hurrying to the Mandrake/Mandriva archives to search for a dusty file on unsticking X that I'm sure I've seen around somewhere...

Thanks for your advice, John. Gee, I might have to take back all the nasty things I said about Queenslanders :P I deleted the .oo directory and the world hasn't ended, so I'm going to try firstly renaming the .OpenOffice.org_1.1.0 to .OO.o_1.1.3, to see if that's what it's problem is (I've got 1.1.3 installed, but for some reason I've got a 1.1.0 directory... go figure?), and if that fails, delete the whole thing, and if that fails - and maybe even if it doesn't - I'll just do a fresh install for the experience. Yes, it is 10.1OE (AFAIK), so I'm hoping that a re-install will clear out some of the deadwood and so on. BTW, I hope doesn't mean that you have to reinstall often... Thanks again :) Alex