September 2001 - WLUG - wlug.mailman3.com

Install fest with WPILA on Thursday!

by Andy Stewart

Hi everybody, We will be having an install fest at WPI on Thursday, October 4th from 6 - 10 PM. I have several folks who have volunteered to make CDs and be installers - thanks gang! The main target of this install fest is the WPI community, but I won't turn away folks in need as long as there is room. I am, however, lacking in RSVPs from prospective installees. If you wish to have Linux installed on your machine, please send me an e-mail so that I can handle the logistics. Let's get the word out and hope for a great turnout! Later, Andy -- Andy Stewart Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA, USA http://www.wlug.org

Sept. 30, 2001

RE: [Wlug] Lancaster Project update

by Track

Good to see things went well at latest project. Hopefully I'll make the next one. It's also great to see some fellow Crusaders hacking it up. =) --Track (HC '99) -----Original Message----- From: wlug-admin(a)mail.wlug.org [mailto:wlug-admin@mail.wlug.org]On Behalf Of Andy Stewart Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2001 5:30 PM To: wlug(a)mail.wlug.org Cc: nsmith(a)holycross.edu; wrlinx(a)yahoo.com Subject: [Wlug] Lancaster Project update HI everybody, Here is an update on the Lancaster, MA project which started yesterday. I showed up around 10:30 AM and two other fellows from Holy Cross came to join me. They left around 5 PM and I stayed until about 7 PM. We installed additional hard drive in two machines onto which we installed SuSE Linux. The installation went smoothly, as did the X windows configuration. The problems started with the networking. Mixing ISA and PCI cards in a system is problematic. I have discovered the hard way that the motherboard picks the PCI card interrupts, and if they interfere with the ISA card, too bad! Some motherboards allow you to exclude interrupts from being used by the PCI cards - some don't. At least the really old ISA cards had jumpers so you *knew* which interrupt it wanted...the "new" ISA cards don't even have this, so you're doubly screwed. The systems both had ISA NICs. We eventually got one of them working (perhaps by accident). I finally swapped out the other one for a PCI NIC which worked almost immediately. I played with Coyote Linux on the old 486SX with 16 MB of memory after we had performed a memory upgrade and a proper CDROM drive installation. Coyote Linux appears to be a continuation of the work started by the Linux Router project. Its benefits are that it fits on a single floppy, appears to be more up to date than LRP, and is definitely easier to configure. After playing with the modem jumpers and after shutting off the motherboard COM ports, I was able to get Coyote Linux running, pinging the local network, and dialing the ISP on demand. In short, it was acting properly as a router for the other two Linux machines - yipee! Our host had quite a spread for us at lunchtime consisting of broccoli quiche, chips and hot sauce, soda, and more! My thanks to Neel and Ryan (from Holy Cross) for coming to help out, and to Warren (our host) for a great lunch and for asking for our help. I expect that we'll be taking another trip to Lancaster in about a month to install CUPS, perhaps SAMBA, configure two printers and a scanner, enable full access from all machines to those printers, to enable a packet filtering firewall on the 486, and to insure that everything else is in proper working order. Later, Andy -- Andy Stewart Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA, USA http://www.wlug.org _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug(a)mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug

Sept. 30, 2001

Lancaster Project update

by Andy Stewart

HI everybody, Here is an update on the Lancaster, MA project which started yesterday. I showed up around 10:30 AM and two other fellows from Holy Cross came to join me. They left around 5 PM and I stayed until about 7 PM. We installed additional hard drive in two machines onto which we installed SuSE Linux. The installation went smoothly, as did the X windows configuration. The problems started with the networking. Mixing ISA and PCI cards in a system is problematic. I have discovered the hard way that the motherboard picks the PCI card interrupts, and if they interfere with the ISA card, too bad! Some motherboards allow you to exclude interrupts from being used by the PCI cards - some don't. At least the really old ISA cards had jumpers so you *knew* which interrupt it wanted...the "new" ISA cards don't even have this, so you're doubly screwed. The systems both had ISA NICs. We eventually got one of them working (perhaps by accident). I finally swapped out the other one for a PCI NIC which worked almost immediately. I played with Coyote Linux on the old 486SX with 16 MB of memory after we had performed a memory upgrade and a proper CDROM drive installation. Coyote Linux appears to be a continuation of the work started by the Linux Router project. Its benefits are that it fits on a single floppy, appears to be more up to date than LRP, and is definitely easier to configure. After playing with the modem jumpers and after shutting off the motherboard COM ports, I was able to get Coyote Linux running, pinging the local network, and dialing the ISP on demand. In short, it was acting properly as a router for the other two Linux machines - yipee! Our host had quite a spread for us at lunchtime consisting of broccoli quiche, chips and hot sauce, soda, and more! My thanks to Neel and Ryan (from Holy Cross) for coming to help out, and to Warren (our host) for a great lunch and for asking for our help. I expect that we'll be taking another trip to Lancaster in about a month to install CUPS, perhaps SAMBA, configure two printers and a scanner, enable full access from all machines to those printers, to enable a packet filtering firewall on the 486, and to insure that everything else is in proper working order. Later, Andy -- Andy Stewart Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA, USA http://www.wlug.org

Sept. 30, 2001

Re: [Wlug] next week's installfest

by Andy Stewart

On Saturday 29 September 2001 01:05 am, you wrote: > On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, Keller, Tim wrote: > > What you might want todo is just grab everything; debs, rpms and > > tarballs. > > > > That way, not matter what distribution we load, we'd be able to > > install. > > I was planning on grabbing as much as I can, however each > version of each distribution has a different set of Ximian Gnome > packages that run around 225MB a piece. > > What CDs do people plan on bringing? I'll be bringing my SuSE CDs. I have a slightly older SuSE 7.1 Pro which I could give to somebody if they want it. -- Andy Stewart Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA, USA http://www.wlug.org

Sept. 29, 2001

Re: [Wlug] next week's installfest

by Brian J. Conway

> I was planning on grabbing as much as I can, however each > version of each distribution has a different set of Ximian Gnome packages > that run around 225MB a piece. > > What CDs do people plan on bringing? As mentioned, I'm bringing five 3-CD sets of Mandrake 8.1. Since Ximian for 8.0 was released a few weeks ago and Ximian isn't too fond of Mandrake, being a KDE-centric distribution, I really think it's a non-issue (but I figured I'd throw it out anyways). 8.1 includes Gnome 1.4.1, so at least it's up-to-date, if not as pretty. Brian J. Conway dogbert(a)clue4all.net "LINUX is obsolete" - Andrew S. Tanenbaum, creator of Minix - Jan 29, 1992

Sept. 29, 2001

RE: [Wlug] next week's installfest

by David Lee Ludwig

On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, Keller, Tim wrote: > What you might want todo is just grab everything; debs, rpms and tarballs. > > That way, not matter what distribution we load, we'd be able to install. I was planning on grabbing as much as I can, however each version of each distribution has a different set of Ximian Gnome packages that run around 225MB a piece. What CDs do people plan on bringing? -- David Ludwig | "The Linux philosophy is laugh in the face of davidl<at>wpi.edu | danger. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself.' http://www.wpi.edu/~davidl | That's it." - Linus Torvalds

Sept. 29, 2001

RE: [Wlug] next week's installfest

by Keller, Tim

What you might want todo is just grab everything; debs, rpms and tarballs. That way, not matter what distribution we load, we'd be able to install. Tim. -----Original Message----- From: David Lee Ludwig [mailto:davidl@WPI.EDU] Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2001 6:40 PM To: wlug(a)mail.wlug.org Subject: [Wlug] next week's installfest For next week's installfest, is anyone going to be burning multiple copies of some particular distribution? If so, what? I was thinking of making some CDs with Ximian Gnome on it. -- David Ludwig | "The Linux philosophy is laugh in the face of davidl<at>wpi.edu | danger. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself.' http://www.wpi.edu/~davidl | That's it." - Linus Torvalds _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug(a)mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug

Sept. 28, 2001

next week's installfest

by David Lee Ludwig

For next week's installfest, is anyone going to be burning multiple copies of some particular distribution? If so, what? I was thinking of making some CDs with Ximian Gnome on it. -- David Ludwig | "The Linux philosophy is laugh in the face of davidl<at>wpi.edu | danger. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself.' http://www.wpi.edu/~davidl | That's it." - Linus Torvalds

Sept. 27, 2001

Re: [Wlug] Firewall on 486 w/8 MB of memory

by John Stoffel

doug> OK that means no kissing! :-) And I'm still fighting it. I might not be making it saturday. We'll see... doug> The box is up in Lancaster. It is a Unisys EVC-142. There are no doug> manuals available --- it was a second hand purchase. I can find doug> nothing about it on the web. :-( Ugh. Not good. doug> It has a 540 meg hard drive, the 8 meg you know about, and we doug> jury-rigged a CDrom drive on it (by jury-rigged I mean there was doug> only one IDE cable and it would not reach both the hard drive doug> and the CDrom if both were in the available bays so we simply doug> left the case open with the CD drive lying on a book on top.) That could do the trick for now. If we setup the system with a CDROM drive and a floppy drive, we can use the Oxygen LRP distribution, which has all the packages and stuff on CDROM, and the config on a write protected floppy. Or the standard LRP with a single floppy should work as well. doug> Bad news and good news here :-). The modem is internal. However doug> it is Listed as OK on the Linux Modem Compatibility list. It is doug> a US Robotics Model 0584 56K ISA. That should be ok. doug> Incidentally, the NIC cards they have are all 3COM model 3C509B doug> and there is a 3c509 module which seems to work ok with them. This is good too, since I think LRP supports these out of the box pretty much. These are PCI, right? Or are they ISA? Do you have the PPP dialout number, username and password yet as well? It might make sense to try and pre-configure an LRP diskette with all the info needed and see if it would just boot right from the start. I can take my existing images at home which are known to work and try to update them or this setup. Please realize that this box would be dedicated to LRP only, no real user logins allowed/needed? John

Sept. 27, 2001

Re: [Wlug] WPI Install Fest

by Brian J. Conway

> Red Hat 7.2 should be ready by then... On that note, Mandrake 8.1 ISOs hit the primary mirror around 4 PM today (sshhhh) which I grabbed, so assuming all goes well with testing it this weekend, I'll be bringing 5 3-packs of CDs to the installfest of that. Now no need for an updates CD (I hope). =) Brian J. Conway dogbert(a)clue4all.net "LINUX is obsolete" - Andrew S. Tanenbaum, creator of Minix - Jan 29, 1992

Sept. 27, 2001