phunni

What is your sound setup? i.e. Sound card, are you using alsa or oss etc...?

Maybe, but aren't they offering technologies to companies for rapidly re-building Windows games/applications for a Linux environment. I thought that was what winelib was for, and I think Transgaming has a similar offer. Just like they did for this adventure game which ships for OSX: http://www.transgaming.com/news.php?newsid=110 As far as I can see, it doesn't require anyone to have a licensed version of WineX either. I think THAT is the real usefulness of these products. I rather see it as an accelleration process than as a threat to developing native Linux versions. If Linux as a gaming OS gets popular enough, then it will make sense to do a native Linux version. And even if they use Wine technology to port it, I don't really see the danger?? Besides, I would rather play my games today than tomorrow. The problem is that porting games using winelib is not not (as far as I can tell) the way gaming compnaies view the purpose of WineX In the sense that most gaming companies either just don;t care about linux as a gaming market or, if they do think about linux, they often just think - well it will probably run in Wine/WineX but very often not actually test that So companies are NOT being encouraged to port their games using winelib - they are simply being encourage (for the most part) to forget about Linux altogether since it's somebody else's problem if it works or not Obviously, this excludes all those fantastic companies who do native ports from scratch. Again WineX does not always help there either, since so many people still try and play games like Quake III or Return to Castle Wolfenstein in WineX even though there is a native port and the WineX version does not run as well! Also - it is not often true that a game will run just as well on wine as it will on windows - sometimes this happens but in most cases there will be problems - possibly minor, but still problems. A completely native port is always better IMHO

Did you do a checksum of the CDs you downloaded? The frst thing to check is that the packages you installed are not corrupted. This might have happened either during download or when you burnt the CD. The first thing to check is that the md5sums match the downloads. If that's ok, then it's worth trying to burn the CDs again. If you've done both those things and you still get the same problem - it's time to start looking at your system to see if we can figure this out - but those are definately the first steps. To do the md5sum check simply do md5sum <iso-filename> for each of the downloaded ISO files (replaceing <iso-filename> with the actual file name). This will give you a long list of characters. There should also be md5sums on the server where you downloaded the files - if they match the results of you md5sum then all is good there. If not then I'm afraid you have to download again...

Basically, the reason I'm asking the question is that a friend of mine has a small business where he sets up and admins servers for his clients. The kind of thing he offers is file nad print servers (I know how to do that with Linux) and terminal services where clients can log in remotely and have a desktop available over the internet. At present he's doing all of this with windows, but he wants to explore the possibility of doing it in Linux - primarily in the hope that he can save money. Obviously the very fact that his clients currently have a GUI system means that they will expect this as a minimum - so I'm really looking for a Linux alternative If I can find one, then we can both begin to systematically convert his clients to Linux :D

It seems to me that, in the short to medium term, WineX is good for Linux, bad for Linux gaming. Good for Linux in that it's easier to persuade people to switch OS if they know they can still play their favourite games Bad for Linux gaming in that gaming companies are far less likely to provide ports of their games as long as WineX is so popular The problem will arise in the longer term when Linux is more popular (hopefully that'll happen!) and WineX will simply be a liability. We won't need it to help switch users over - Linux will be more mainstream with a larger user base anyway, but it will still be getting in the way of Linux gaming Hopefully, at that, stage Gaming companies will simply recognise the popularity of Linux and port their games anyway and WineX will simply die by virtue of being redundant... hopefully...

that's true - I was simply responding to Darkelve saying that these compnaies can consider a Linux version because of WineX - although there is reason to believe that WineX discourages Linux ports...

Except that the fact that it runs in WineX means that they probably still aren't thinking of doing a linux version - nor are they likely to do so...

But - I reckon 90% of the problems in Linux are caused by either: 1) unsupported hardware 2) software functionaltity not properly implemented in Linux

yes - let's start a revolution! Behead all the european powers that want to drown us in software patents! Actually - some kind of drastic step needs to be taken in protest. Obviously I was joking about revolution, but we need to do something...

See - there's a problem right there. The fact that not being able to install by double clicking (although you can with an RPM can't you...?) is enough to make someone go back to Windows, just shows how lazy people have become - often because windows has done everything for them! Places where windows is not necessarily the first OS people use (I hear a rumour there are places like that...) shows that, actually Linux is no harder to use than windows - it just seems harder because it's different. I maintain that the main reason why Linux is sometimes harder than windows (or appears to be) is because of lack of third party support - which is nothing inherantly to do with the OS itself, just how much of the market it has broken into. As more software is ported and more hardware supported, I think Linux will takes even greater strides forward...

true enough - trouble is, most people think they can;t (even if they can) or simply don't care - or don't even know there is another option!

It's all sorted now - I have a firewall set up exactly how I'd like it now - using arno's firewall The slow email looked like it was a problem with the mail server trying to authorise me via port 113 and waiting till it timed out - however it ultimately turned out to be xinetd doing something odd everytime I tried to connect - it's been sorted out server side now, so my firewall is still rock solid and DENYing everything :D

the ntfs modules are fine for reading - dodgy for writing to ntfs. If you set up a mount point for an ntfs partition (you can do this in MCC or simply in /etc/fstab) then the module will be autoloaded (you might need hotplug installed - not sure) I reckon you picked an entirely reasonable place to post your query - but that's just me :D

nope - if you run menudrake it might well update the menu...

Thanks that looks good - I'll take a look at it

AAARRRGGHHH! This is sooo frustrating! I tried to use some of the script in that tutorial and just got loads of errors (too many to try and figure out what was going on) So I then reverted back to my original script - only this time it doesn't work, I don't know why though... So I am now right back to the script that anon recommended - which is ok, but it does return pings. I don't really get much of the iptables syntax at all, I'm getting more and more confused and less and less secure - all I want is a simple firewall which trusts my internale network and blocks anything I didn't ask for - but allows things like email etc.. through without having to wait an age for it It seems to me like, unless you can figure out iptables (which I can't - and now I feel stupid to cap it all off), it's just about impossible to get a simple, but effective firewall going in linux, unless you are happy to use a GUI - which I'm not as I don;t want X running on my server Edit: actually - despite a couple of unexplained errors - my firewall script does still seem to work, so I'm back to figuring out how to allow a host to be trusted so I can pick up my mail in reasonable time...

come on - just one line... How do I specify a trustd host that can connect to me so that I can pick up my mail with out having to wait for a minute for each account...?

OK, never mind - I tried it and it seems to work almost perfectly. I appear to now have a very secure system :D I had my system tested by using this and it gave me a perfect pass! The only problem now is that certain things are painfully slow - most notably picking up any email. How do I specify that certain hosts are trusted?

OK - that looks pretty good, can you explain some of the lines in the second bit of code so I can see exactly what I'm doing?

I can't install webmin - I tried but it doesn't like arch...

OK - I tried my script just to and it doesn't do what I want - eth1 is not trusted enough I couldn't log in via ssh anymore, I didn't check to see if I still had internet access, but not being able to log in is already to strict...

I think you might be right about the answer being inverse, but - MS TS provides graphical logins over the internet - I'm not aware of a linux equivalent. I know that many users can log in remotely to one box, but I don't believe they can all export different X displays at the same time - and even if they could it would be too slow... The difference is the graphical element...

I had a friend of mine ask me if Linux had a terminal services package anywhere. I answered that it probably does, but I wasn't sure exactly what it was. So - what is the answer? I know X can display over a network, but I don't think that's the same thing - especially as this guy wants to be able to do this over an internet connection and running X over the internet is painfully slow, even on broadband (I tried it one time running evolution over the internet...) Plus, I remember trying to watch the Rugby World Cup on Paul's machine running in NZ :D )

In the long run, I would agree with SoulSe that vanilla is best! But, unless you particularly want to learn about kernel configuration, I would stick with what you have for now...

no iptables gurus out there who can help me...?