- WLUG - wlug.mailman3.com

SLIPS MA Open Source Bill
by Matt Higgins 04 Aug '03

04 Aug '03

New to the list, and wanted to know what you all thought. I'm looking to put together a bill that will require state gov to consider OSS when sending out RFP's. The bill would mirror those being proposed/stalled in other states such as Washington and Texas. I have been in contact with state Rep Robert Spellane who is positive about the subject. I believe he would be more responsive if the WLUG were also supporting this. Further more I think It would be interesting to get involved with public schools in Worcester to promote the use of Linux. I put up a small page on my web site to address this topic, which I have called SLIPS (Supporting Linux In Public Schools). (btw.. I think the next LUG topic should include LTSP! I have this working in a vmware window using just one comp) Tell me your thoughts ! Matt

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WLUG Meeting - Thurs. August 14th - 7PM
by Andy Stewart 03 Aug '03

03 Aug '03

HI Everybody, I'm going to announce this meeting "early" (at least relative to most of our meeting announcements) in the hope that it will whet your Linux appetite and entice you to attend this meeting. The meeting topic will be the Linux Terminal Server Project (http://www.ltsp.org) The speaker will be your fearless leader, Andy Stewart. With the use of this software, a person can create a network of computers which uses one powerful server and any number of less powerful diskless client computers. A user would log into the client computer, and would be doing all of their work on the more powerful server transparently. Some advantages to this technique are: - maintenance is largely localized to the server - reuse of old, otherwise obsolete, equipment - security concerns are localized to the server - control over what users can access One disadvantage: - if the sever dies, everybody is dead No doubt you're asking: - how can I boot Linux on a diskless computer? - how is it that I do my work on the server? - why is system management easier with this configuration? - in what practical situation is this configuration advantageous? The answers to those questions, and many more, will be forthcoming at the meeting. I will prepare slides for the meeting which I'll put on the WLUG website afterwards. I will also walk through the many files required to setup this configuration. A live demo will be part of the meeting. To make this a bit more interesting, I'd like to ask a few people to bring in some equipment to help me (please RSVP to me to insure that we have enough of the right things): - a multisync monitor with 1024x768@72Hz capability (my spare died) - a 10/100 network hub or switch - some Ethernet cables - one or two other client machines: - could be laptops with network capability and bootable floppy - at least a P90 with 32 MB of memory, bootable floppy, video, network, etc. My hope is that we could demo 2-3 working clients off of my laptop server. I'll bring one known working client plus the server. See ya later, Andy -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA USA http://www.wlug.org

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Re: [Wlug] Linksys Router
by Michael Long 02 Aug '03

02 Aug '03

Thanks for all the feedback. I used YaST (SuSE's configuration tool) to configured the interface with a static IP and entered in the ip addresses of the dns servers that the router is using. Hopefully the dns servers have static ip's. Cheers, Mike

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Linksys Router
by Michael Long 02 Aug '03

02 Aug '03

Hi All, I have a linksys router that is acting as a dhcp server. The last firmware upgrade has change the lease time options to allow a lease to expire between 1-99999 minutes. Occasionally one of my boxes gets assigned a different IP address which invalidates the port forwarding rules. I would prefer to use static IP's but I am depending on my isp (verizon dsl) provider for their dns servers and they serve me with a dynamic address which changes reqularly. My initial thought is to write a script that checks the IP of my box and if it has changed, use links to update the port forwarding rules on the router by sending the appropriate URL to the router. Any other solutions, workarounds, hints or feedback are welcome. thanks, Mike

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Next meeting - topics?
by Andy Stewart 01 Aug '03

01 Aug '03

HI everybody, I am wondering what we should discuss at our next meeting - any ideas? I have been playing with diskless clients lately. There are a couple of ways to do this: a) load and run a Knoppix CD with no hard drive b) LTSP - Linux Terminal Server Project If people are interested, I could give a talk / demo of some basic LTSP stuff. I've got it working between a lame P90 and my laptop server. Let me know if you have other ideas, or if this idea sounds like something interesting to you. Later, Andy -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA USA http://www.wlug.org

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audio application...
by Keller, Tim 30 Jul '03

30 Jul '03

Hey, At the BBQ, one of our members mentioned an application that he uses for voice chat that has a linux server component. Could someone (even possibly the person who mentioned it) remind me what the name of that application is? Thanks, Tim.

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RE: [Wlug] X is freezing
by Keller, Tim 29 Jul '03

29 Jul '03

Baris, Are you using the nvidia driver (nv) supplied with Xfree86 or the nvidia supplied driver? Thanks, Tim. -----Original Message----- From: Baris Hasdemir [mailto:penguen@hasdemir.com] Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2003 7:58 PM To: wlug(a)mail.wlug.org Subject: Re: [Wlug] X is freezing Gregory Avedissian wrote: > I get X lockups, too. But when it happens, nothing works. No mouse, no > keys, and I don't think I get increased cpu load. Only pressing the > reset button works. I'm pretty sure it's due to a flaky power supply > that puts out low voltages sometimes, and has on occasion rebooted > itself for no apparent reason. I'll know for sure in about a week, when > the new one arrives. > let me tell some more about the frozen state. when this strange thing happens I absolutely can move the mouse pointer. but nothing reacts when moved over, or clicked on. more, when connected from another machine thorugh ssh, even if I kill the application shown on the screen, although the application is killed. (even not in Z state) it is still shown on screen as if nothing has happened. it is more like a screenshot taken before the freeze. it seems like driver problem? would you think so? thanks, baris _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug(a)mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug

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kernel choices in Debian
by Gregory Avedissian 29 Jul '03

29 Jul '03

I'm planning on wiping out my SuSE 7.2 installation and trying Debian 3.0r0. The install manual says that kernel 2.2 is the default, and kernel 2.4 is an option. I can't find anywhere that says why I should choose one over the other. My SuSE is already using 2.4. Seems like it would be a step backward to install the default 2.2. Any ideas or suggestions? Thanks. Greg

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X is freezing
by Baris Hasdemir 28 Jul '03

28 Jul '03

Hi, When uptime reaches around three days, somehow a weird situation is happening. X usage suddenly jumps around 99% freezing the X environment. X seems to have frozen, but I can move the mouse pointer. Nothing else can be done. I log on to this machine from another one on the local area network using ssh, and reboot it for a temporary solution. If I restart only the X server, I believe it doesn't take that long to have the problem again. a total reboot gives me another 2-3 days. as soon as it freezes, connecting to this machine from the other one, I tried looking at the log files under /var/log several times. no entry has been added to xfree log in the last 10-15 minutes. and the files which have been modified in 15 minutes does not have any entries relating to the situaion, at least to my knowledge. suspecting the ram of this partially new system, I checked my rams with memtest-86-3.0. no problems are reported. suspecting the gdm, I tried without it as well. problem regenerates as usual. I don't know whether it is related but, another strange issue I am having is that: with or without gdm, sometime(not soon) after X login "alt" key starts not functioning. for example, alt+shift cannot change the keyboard layout or ctrl+alt+f{1-6} cannot take me to the consol and of course I cannot kill the X server using ctrl+alt+backspace. motherboard: Asus A7N8X cpu: AMD Athlon 2500+ video card: creative tnt2ultra 2X video driver: nvidia distro: slackware 9.0 ram: 512MB swap: 256MB Do you have any ideas? where would you think I should start from? thank you, baris

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SCO is getting greedy...
by Bill Smith 22 Jul '03

22 Jul '03

I got this as part of a mailing list for Information Week. I thought you would find it interesting. It's worth noting that SCO is working on THEIR SAY-SO. It is my personal opinion that any company that cowers and pays SCO just because they are using Linux is foolish. IANAL. It would be very much like some company deciding they wanted to bill you for services they didn't render. Would YOU pay that bill? If you haven't been following this story, SCO is the current owner of the Unix source code. They CLAIM that some of the System V source code made it into the Linux kernel, a claim that has not yet been substantiated. SCO has not (yet) publicly shown their "evidence". To date, the only way to see the source of their claims (no pun intended) is to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Many of the people that have agreed to SCO's requirements aren't technically savvy. Most of the people that WOULD know what they were looking at are either not interested in signing anything (like an NDA), or they just don't think that SCO has a leg to stand on. SCO themselves think that most of the Linux community will laugh in their (SCO's) face. I am proud to say that I am one of the people laughing. ;) ANYWAY, here's the teaser and the link to the article: SCO Group Wants Its Money With Unix System V copyrights in hand, the vendor introduced a plan to charge those who've used Linux as an alternative to Unix for UnixWare licenses. http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eMu10FEZ5Z0V20B4bt0AU -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- William Smith wsmith-at-chezsmith-dot-com Fall River, MA http://www.chezsmith.com "And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports on it, you know they are just evil lies." -- Linux Torvalds * TAG! v3.1 *

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