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sellis

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Everything posted by sellis

  1. Several people in this thread seem to be saying that one of the barriers for Linux is the Microsoft lock-in. However, what is interesting is that the people for whom license cost is a big problem (basically, those in "poorer" countries) are also those not already locked into the Microsoft monopoly. I think that *this* is where the Linux takeover will come from. Not the technophiles and open-source lovers in the US, Europe, Australia and the Far East, but from South America, Africa and Asia, particularly China. And when it's been proven there, over and over again, *then* people over here will start taking notice. I also believe that easier-to-use and easier-to-configure distros will also come out of this effort. This will happen gradually over a couple of years, but once this rising tide overtops the Microsoft lock-in dyke, then it will inundate most of the rest of the world pretty quickly. All in my poorly-informed opinion, of course.
  2. Here's an obvious hint: keep a separate copy of the files you have changed. I've been off the net for a couple of days trying to debug what happened after running Mandrake Update. It turns out (it seems) that it overwrote my copy of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0, as painstakingly set up according to the instructions in the first post of this thread. Of course, I'm now happily back in contact with the rest of the world. A minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
  3. I think that what has changed is the metadata about the document (in this case, the "last printed" date), rather than the document itself. I don't know of any way to avoid it, though.
  4. I found out about Childsplay through Linux Format this month and checked to see if it was in 10.0, and yeas, it was! (Although a little behind the curve as it is version 0.69) However, I got the same problem as the previous poster, or something very similar. So, I tracked down the link on the menu and started /usr/bin/childsplay from a console. Many error messages appeared, basically saying that it's looking for stuff in /usr/local/...etc when it's actually installed in /usr/... instead. Obviously, this fails! I had a quick look at the main python script, and it looks like it's getting this path from a variable called "LIBDIR" (if I remember correctly - I'm not at my linux box at the moment), but I can't see where it's getting set up. Having got all the dependencies installed, I tried upgrading to version 0.80, from the official website, but with no success either - same problem. Has anyone actually installed this correctly and had it work?
  5. For myself, I asked around and was recommended Mandrake as "an easy distro to get up and running with". So far, I'm still learning , and I'd rather do that on one, stable OS than on a number of them. So I'll stick to Mandrake for the time being.
  6. Indeed. However, SCO has previously claimed to be under DDOS attack from the FOSS community (which claim subsequently evaporated), and has not shied away from describing FOSS advocates in negative terms. A quick search gives us these links... SCO DDOS Attack - Was It or Wasn't It? Open SOurce Community Defends GPL Against SCO Attack SCO Plays Pathetic "Terrorist" Card Or did you mean the pig-wrestling thing? :P
  7. A friend of mine uses a similar thing at home, except he goes one further and disconnects the power from the backup drive when not in use. However, he did find the problem with this setup, which is: what happens if the primary drive fails half way through a backup? Answer: you lose everything. Better to have two backup drives, so that even if something does go hideously wrong during the transfer, you still have one copy intact. The USB option previously mentioned sounds like a good idea to me too, since you can keep the drives offsite and unpowered when not in use.
  8. ... once a company try to get into the politics, the government will stop them cold. And lo, it came to pass: China Moots Foreign Software Crackdown
  9. Amusing? Maybe. At least it wasn't out-and-out vandalism; it was simple, targetted and effective. A good idea? Certainly not. It just allows SCO to say "See, we told you those OSS types were nothing more than thinly-disguised cyberterrorists." Never wrestle with a pig. You get covered in dirt, and the pig enjoys it.
  10. ...and on another Microsoft-related note.... The Financial Times has this story: CCIA President Gets $10m from MS. Basically, shortly after the CCIA (the US regulatory body) settled its antitrust action against MS, the chairman of the CCIA shows up with $9.75m of Microsoft money in his pocket. The EU antitrust judge has called in the interested parties for a discussion. I suspect he won't be in a jolly mood.
  11. Oh, come now. 5 posts into a thread about Mr Ballmer and no-one has posted this link? Shame on us all! Developers developers developers developers, as long as they are our developers and they do as they're told. Well, they will if they know what's good for them. An earlier poster suggested that Mr Ballmet learn to "shut the f*ck up". I hope that he, like Mr McBride over at SCO, continue to attract light and attention. The more light and attention paid to this business, the better, IMO.
  12. Paradoxically, this may actually help the FOSS movement. Ballmer's statement, in my view, merely adds to the perception of Microsoft as a greedy and manipulative, an impression already well founded on the fact that they are a convicted monopolist. I am sure that others also agree, and this statement is unlikely to win them any friends. To be a successful evil overlord, you need to sneak about quietly, quietly building and building until the trap is complete and everyone is under your spell. However, Ballmer is acting like a b-movie baddie, strutting about threatening everyone openly, bragging about his plans and making thinly veiled threats at just about everyone. I bet he'll be about the only person surprised when just about everyone gangs up and gets rid of him. If you don't think it can happen, look back at where IBM was 20 years ago. High-profile statements like this are elevating the issue of IP rights and wrongs to a high level. Even the inertia of the enormous EU parliament is being overcome as they realise that this is a serious issue that could do enormous economic harm to virtually everyone except Microsoft.
  13. On a related note, I have noticed that when my wifi link goes down (as it does frequently - sigh), virtually any KDE app (including Konsole) can take 30-40 seconds to start. Presumably, this is a timeout on a failed attempt to get on the network. Why does KDE need to query the network every time it starts an app?
  14. Ahh, this is just due to the increased traffic of 10 million users all trying to download Firefox 1.0 today :P (It was a little congested at mozilla.org this morning, though.) I installed it at work today on Windows, and tonight on Linux, with no problems - settings migrated OK, and now Slashdot actually renders correctly on the first attempt so I'm happy.
  15. What really ticks me off (I'm in England and thus directly affected by this) is that this will end up being even more expensive than it already is, as I am sure the Microsoft have some "creative" licensing interpretations waiting to be deployed. This wasted money could have been used to improve patient care, and probabyl would have since it's in the NHS "pot" already. Time to give the Lib Dems a crack at government, I say. On the other hand, at least we have universal healthcare, unlike third world countries, so I guess we haven't got too much to complain about really.
  16. I second that vote. Mozilla Firefox + Adblock +gif animations OFF is what I use.
  17. Laura Didio is a MS (and SCO) cheerleader, often picked apart on sites like Groklaw. Few in the FOSS community now take her seriously, although she is inexplicably still plying her trade in Forbes and other mainstream magazines. There is a grain of truth in what the author is saying, though. For a MS-trained person, Linux is different and therefore scary and difficult at times. However, the same problems would occur if everyone used Linux and MS was trying to displace a large entrenched user base. I believe that we are near a tipping point, for two reasons. First, there are a large number of people in the developing world who are only just seeing their first computer. There is no migration cost for them, so Linux is very attractive. Many of these regimes (China, for example) are also politically motivated not be in thrall to the Beast of Redmond. Second, the balance is tipping for existing MS users too. Linux is getting easier and easier to use for the average user (case study: my wife uses Mandrake 10.0 to buy things on the web with no problems, worse luck). Also, sysadmins and users are getting fed up with MS licensing terms and security problems, and are beginning to seriously consider alternatives.
  18. Well, I thought that I'd contributed enough problems to these forums and it was time to redress the balance a little...
  19. Well, a lull in the DIY and mad work hours means I got the chance to try this, edited /etc/lilo.conf to set vga=788, ran lilo to recreate my boot info and lo and behold, it's fine. Marvellous! (Still don't know why it doesn't like 791, though.)
  20. Have you checked the firewall? It needs to know which networking device to use to connect to the internet, and if you've changed to wireless, it may still be trying to use an old wired connection.
  21. Here is a list of steps I went through in getting my elderley Mustek 1200CP scanner to work on 10.0 using SANE and GIMP. I hope that at least part of it is useful to others. 1. Connect scanner to parallel port, power on, and boot up PC. 2. As root, I ran sane-find-scanner, which helpfully informed me that it would not detect parallel port scanners. 3. After some hunting, I find that I need to edit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf to uncomment the line "mustek_pp", and also edit /etc/sane.d/mustek_pp.conf to uncomment the line "scanner Mustek-1200CP 0x378 cis1200". This is duly done. 4. Run sane-find-scanner again. No luck. Undeterred, I run scanimage -L just in case. No luck. 5. Find the very helpful site http://penguin-breeder.org/sane/mustek_pp and note that the RPM version for SANE listed here (1.0.14) is more recent than the one included in the Mandrake 10.0 distro (1.0.13). 6.Download and install new SANE RPM from http://packman.links2linux.org/?action=211. Aside - at this point I note that RPMDrake does not list sane as installed at all. (Anyone have any idea why? Kernel module, perhaps?) 7. Edited config files again. 8. Can now pass the "-p" option to sane-find-scanners but still no luck. 9. Checked operation with debug output, but with no real progress. I can at least see that the driver code is being loaded and executed, however, so the basic setup seems OK. 10. Reach dead end. Go to bed. 11. Next day, switch to Windows and go through similar tortuous process there. No luck. 12. Switch back to Mandrake and try the hardware manager. No luck - I get an "unsupported" message when I select the 1200CP from the list of available scanners. This rather begs the question of what it's doing in the list in the first place, of course... 13! The eureka moment! I realise that I have misread the port designations on the back of the scanner and have plugged the cable into the wrong port! Bang head on desk. Bang desk on head. Two year old son also learns a few more inappropriate words with which to embarrass his mother in Sainsbury's. 14. Woo-hoo. sane-find-scanners -p now finds the thing, and I can now acquire image in GIMP. 15. Image is stretched. Luckily, this is something I do know how to fix, as it is in all the Mustek FAQs - switch drivers to use 1200CP+ driver instead of plain old vanilla 1200CP, and everything is hunky-dory. Now, I am not sure whether the new SANE RPM was really necessary, but I am inclined to think that it is, as the previous version of sane-find-scanner had no -p option which appears essential for discovery. Anyway, I hope that the above helps someone in a similar situation.
  22. Thanks for that - I'll give it a try when I get a chance. I'm confused that 791 doesn't work, though, since 1024x768x16 is the resolution my desktop is running in. Weird.
  23. I'm having a similar problem. Be patient - the blank screen may only be temporary. As far as I can see, on my system, bootsplash (the graphical boot progress indicator) sets the video mode to a mode my monitor can't display. (It *says* it's VGA=791, i.e. 1024x768x16bpp, but the refresh rate is obviously out of kilter somehow.) After the usual boot process presumably happens, the login screen appears and everything is fine from that point on. But, of course, this can mean sitting watching a blank screen for a long time.
  24. Quick correction - CTRL+Z will stop top, but does not actually kill it. Pressing q (for quit) will kill it properly. The top command also only shows the most active processes. To list all the processes currently running, use ps -A
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