payasam

Will someone please tell me of an e-mail merge program for MDK 10.1? I have at least five of the things on my W 98 partition but haven't been able to find one for Madrake. [OOPS] Madrake = Mandrake

Thanks, LL, I'll look at them; though I've never worked in Clipper and only wanted something which would let me manage flat-file data bases.

I keep nearly all my data in dBASE III+ format (.DBF and .DBT files). In Windows/DOS, I use FoxPlus to manipulate these files. While I can and do view them in StarOffice and OpenOffice in both Windows and Linux, making forms and queries to suit my purposes, there are some things I cannot do. First, the files cannot be *physically* sorted: they can only be viewed in sorted form. Second, the .DBT (memo) files get bloated after a while and need to have empty or junk space removed. I haven't yet been able to find a Linux program that will do these things.

In Win 98 I have a program named PTB Sync which, at pre-set intervals, connects to selected time servers (if I am on line) and corrects system clock drift. Since I installed MDK 10.0 and later 10.1, the discrepancy has risen from under a second to several seconds or even more than a minute. I have NTP set up in MDK, but I believe it works only if the system is permanently on line. This could become a problem if I switch entirely to MDK, which is a long-term goal. Is there no Linux program which will connect to a time server when I am on line and compare its time with my system time?

Nothing, Anon, nothing, which does not thump and roar and leak engine oil and ruin your trouser leg with battery acid and bring you to a halt at midnight in the middle of nowhere can be called a bike. The objects of which you speak are good only for the quadriceps and the calves. [edit] ... and running shoes cost a great deal less, or used to.

Pop across to the nearest library and see how many works are listed as having been written by "Anon". I am proud to have been in communication with such a prolific author. A pity he isn't a bike man. Incidentally, SO and OOo do not need to be restarted for the changed settings to take effect.

Disappointed. While I've been on friendly terms with two of those, for more years than I care to count I've been a bike man. But Mutley makes up for that: I'm sure we could be friends. Another question. Are you the author references to whom outnumber all others by far in bibliographies?

Followed the route you charted, Anon. The trick turned out to be the Locale setting. If I turn it to UK, all is well except that I get the pound (or sterling or quid) symbol as currency. If I turn it to India (Hindi), all is well except that I get the rupee symbol in the Devanagari script. Since none of the money columns in my spreadsheets has cells formatted as currency -- that is, I don't ask for any symbol to be displayed -- this doesn't trouble me. Thanks. [edit] Sunbeam the motorbike or Sunbeam the motor car?

You're right, Devries. Individual applications do generally take settings from the operating system. I should think I had put in the right settings, but I'll check anyway.

Yes, Anon, that's about the first thing I do in any software, since I work in UK English.

We Indians write and read dates as DD-MM-YY. I've used SO and OOo in Win98 for a long while and never had trouble entering dates thus in those programs. In the same programs in Mandrake, though, while I can set dates to be displayed as I want them, I am obliged to enter them as MM-DD-YY. By force of habit, I enter them as I have always done - and am then obliged to correct them. While installing MDK 10.1, I selected India and UK English, so that should not be the problem.

I'd like to add my thanks to ANON. While I'm quite happy to work in the console, sometimes it becomes tedious to move whole directories or directory trees. In Konqueror that should be simple.

Following instructions posted somewhere on the Web by a person whose e-mail address begins with "ll...", I imported TTF, PFB and PFM faces from one of my Win 98 partitions. The procedure involved making sub-dirs under /usr/share/fonts, then running "ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale" and "mkfontdir" on each, then pointing to these sub-dirs in /etc/X11/fs/config, and finally doing "xset fp rehash" and "/etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart". Most faces now show up in most applications. However, Courier New and Cumberland look exactly the same when printed out. Monotype.com is OK. How do I undo what I have done and follow the advice of Anna and Iphitus?

The distinction makes sense for the reason that the two serve clearly different purposes. A more logical approach might be to rename MandrakeUpdate to MandrakeSources (or something else) and have two branches in that: one for updates, the other what you call general-purpose.

I see no reason why MandrakeUpdate should not accept sources other than those labelled "update". If such sources could be added manually - or, better, if MandrakeUpdate could be asked to look for them - then just the single tool would do all the work barring the installing, which I don't think should be a problem. This would go, of course, against the general rule that Progress always leads backwards.

I perceive a sputtering candle through dense fog, for which my thanks. As it happens, I too am comfortable at the command line: these window things confuse me. Now I must dash off and look into the easyurpmi business.

This confuses me, Arctic. I'm on 10.1, and the updater ran when I asked it to run, not before. Do you perhaps mean that the updater only has to be told to get started but not what to do after that, because that it knows or can figure out for itself? I realise this is the wrong place to ask, but why does my "avatar" (a Sanskrit word whose original meaning is something else entirely) not remain what I ask it to be?

Silly of me to imagine all kinds of complications when life is really so simple. But this brings up another question. Since MandrakeUpdate is installed by default, does not every user automatically have an updates source set up?

I don't have an updates source set up, Adamw, because I don't yet know how to set one up. I expect I'll get there in time. Advice such as yours is moving me on, since it helps me to understand commands and switches. I have a slowly growing collection of notes, which I hope will one day show me the light. Until then, the Update option in MDK is good enough. I don't know what rsync means, but the name suggests some sort of synchronisation. That's really not too bright of me, since you say clearly that it should mirror the updates directory of a server. Thanks for the tips. They'll probably come in handy one day.

I wish I'd known this earlier, Adamw. I've already brought in the updates that seemed to apply to the packages I use. But I'll scribble this down and hope to find it on a future installation. One difficulty I foresee, though, is figuring out which names to give to urpmi. MandrakeUpdate did that brain-work for me. I don't think MU accepts the --noclean option, though it did ask if I wanted to "update media", whatever that meant. I couldn't see how I might have "updated" four recorded CDs.

Thanks, Patrick. I know the level of security I chose when I installed 10.1. Arctic: I've done a spot of updating. Skipped things related to what I don't use, but if there's trouble I can always go back. I wish I knew of a way to save the downloaded updates as RPMs so that if I have to re-install the OS, or install it on another machine, the updating could be done off a CD.

Aru, your initial advice wouldn't have helped, since I wouldn't have been able to get to where I was to type the commands you listed. Good to see you again, Arctic, though I think your appearance has changed. You've told me how to get in, so perhaps after that I can do what Aru suggests. Also the updates, of course, which I really should have done earlier. One gets lazy with age. My security is set to normal or whatever Mandrake calls it. [EDIT] All well after I did as you said, Arctic. Acrobat Reader ran after making the file it wanted to make, and I copied a couple of files from D: to /home/user/xxx without problems. Now I must see to the update business. How does someone with such a chilly name bring so much warmth into desperate people's lives?

My fresh installation of Mandrake 10.1 ran for a couple of days but then suddenly began to give trouble. The last time I tried to boot, the system said sorry, it had "no write access to $home". Earlier I was unable to copy a file from a Win 98 partition to a sub-dir under /home/user/ without becoming root. There were references to "overriding mode 0755" and "I/O error 13". Acrobat reader refused to run because it could not create a sub-dir under /home/user/. I have done nothing which I did not do in Mandrake 10.0. I haven't even installed all the software I had in that. Will someone please help me out of this pit of abysmal ignorance? Do bear in mind that I do not know how to change permissions or even how to log in as root.

In MDK 10.0 I imported founts from my W98 partitions. It was tedious work but it got done. Now I have moved to 10.1 and it seems to have become impossible, at least if I go along the "add fonts" route. My fount files are zipped: TTF, PFB and PFM separately. Can I copy the ZIPs to MDK and unzip them? If yes, what should be their location and what is the procedure for telling MDK that they exist?

Here they are, Cage47: ld-linux.so.1, libc.so.5, libm.so.5 The problem, as I said, is that when I try to run xwp it says it cannot load libXt.so.6, though that library is on the system and the path to it is specified.