from:"Monique Y. Mudama"

On Tue, Apr 20 at  7:31, B. Alexander penned:
 
In my case, it appears the root of the problems are caused by
bitrot. I probably need to come up with some method of rebuilding
my sid boxes every so often. Prior to this, my rebuilds were done
in 2000 and 2007...Maybe if I am going to run sid, I need to plan
for an annual rebuild of the system...At least the
workstations...

I've been running sid on a headless box since 2002 or thereabouts,
with config files copied from an even older RedHat box.  No wipes /
rebuilds / etc.  There may have been a few panicked moments along the
way, but I think almost all of them were hardware related.  I may be
extraordinarily lucky, and I do think that the GUI packages add a lot
more complexity, or maybe simply a lot more packages and thus
opportunities for dependency problems.

If by bitrot you mean that files are corrupted, I'd take a look at
my storage devices and filesystem settings.

If by bitrot you mean that config files and such are becoming
increasingly dated ... I do fight that all the time, or rather I keep
telling aptitude to keep my modified files, promise myself that I'll
eventually take a look at the differences, and almost never do.

I don't know if it matters that I almost always use the curses
interface to aptitude; I usually get the updates, then let them sit
for a few days to give the bug reports a chance to roll in.  Anything
that shows up in apt-listbugs gets put on hold, or when time allows,
investigated and permitted.  Anything that seems like an unnecessary
removal or generally smells wrong gets put on hold as well.
Periodically I check out what's on hold to see if the dependencies
are fixed yet.

It's worked for me so far ... YMMV etc.

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Re: Increasing number of conflicts

On Tue, Apr 20 at 16:19, B. Alexander penned:
It's more of a packaging issue. For instance, there have been
several ABI changes, the most recent of which was the transition
from kde3 to kde4.  Packages getting left along the way.
 
Another thing is packages whcih seem to have gotten confused by
versions:
 
luatex: Conflicts: texlive-base-bin ( 2008) but 2007.dfsg.2-8 is
installed.  
python-kde4: Depends: python-sip4 (= none) but
4.10.2-1 is to be installed.

This might be a little painful for the KDE package, but I wonder what
would happen if you uninstalled them and then reinstalled them.

I'll admit, I've sometimes left packages on hold for months or even
a year before trying to figure it out.  Unless I specifically need a
feature available in the latest version of a package, I just let
things work themselves out.  This may not be an acceptable approach
for everyone ...  personally I find it better than the alternatives,
which are 

1) Run stable and have uniformly old packages (although I have a vague
notion that stable versions are being released more often now than
they used to be)

2) Run testing, which is really more an integration environment than a
distribution - although I've just checked the rules, and again they
seem to be much more friendly than I remember them.  I remembered
something like two weeks of clean living before a new version could
make it to testing, but either I remember wrong or things have
changed:

http://www.debian.org/devel/testing

Hrm.  Thanks for starting this discussion.  It seems that my
understanding of the distributions is (not|no longer) valid, and I need
to do some reading.

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Re: How to trick my Debian in thinking that a package is not installed

On Tue, Apr 20 at 23:10, T o n g penned:
 
 Yes, that's what I am doing now. Moreover, I've put it on hold in
 both dpkg and aptitude, but somehow it still get upgraded from time
 to time.

Pardon me for asking this, but what method are you using to hold the
package?  

This is from my aptitude's help:

=:  Hold a package in its current version to prevent upgrades.
::  Keep a package at its current version.  Unlike hold, this will 
  not prevent future upgrades.

 Where does Debian keep the installed package list? How does Debian
 know if a package is installed or not?

I think that's /var/lib/dpkg/status

Have you looked at the pinning solution suggested by others?  I think
pinning is the approach that's most consistent with the Debian
architecture.

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Re: How to trick my Debian in thinking that a package is not installed

On Tue, Apr 20 at 23:31, T o n g penned:
 On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:26:02 -0600, Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 
  On Tue, Apr 20 at 23:10, T o n g penned:
  
  Yes, that's what I am doing now. Moreover, I've put it on hold in
  both dpkg and aptitude, but somehow it still get upgraded from
  time to time.
  
  Pardon me for asking this, but what method are you using to hold
  the package?
  
  This is from my aptitude's help:
  
  =:  Hold a package in its current version to prevent
  upgrades.
 
 Yes, that's what I am using. 

For some reason, this just now triggered a memory for me.  I think
sometimes when aptitude is making suggestions to resolve conflicts, it
will un-hold packages.  I wonder if this is how your explicit hold gets
removed.

I'm not sure this helps you at all, but it might (maybe?) make
aptitude seem less cruel and capricious.

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Re: How to migrate my localhost php site to my ISP - Was: willing to learn php basics

2010-04-17 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On Sat, Apr 17 at 17:02, Joe penned:
 
 In order to achieve this, you need write access to that directory
 tree above apache's docroot, with the ability to set permissions
 correctly. From what you say, it does not seem that you have that
 with your current ISP. You would seem to need to spend some money,
 even before you are sure you will have the access you need.

There are a few different ways to deal with not exposing your password
to the world, but one thing I do want to note: in a hosted situation,
you should have a user home directory in addition to the directory for
your website.  If you need a file to be inaccessible from the web, you
can just put it in your home directory.  There's no need for root
level permissions.

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Re: How to migrate my localhost php site to my ISP - Was: willing to learn php basics

2010-04-17 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On Sat, Apr 17 at 11:15, Bernard penned:
 
 Thanks for your help Monique. I hadn't thought of that, but it makes
 sense that the ISP only allows one user to log into databases.
 Problem is that outside users will have to connect to my database
 through a php script that will contain my password !

Nope.  There are a few ways to deal with this; Joe mentioned a common
one, which is to have your password stored in a file that's outside of
your website directory.

Bear in mind, many, many people and businesses have successfully built
websites using both their own servers and host providers.  So for
almost any wait, that can't be right, because it causes this
problem! situation - there's almost certainly a readily available
solution.

 Could someone tell me where I could find relevant information and
 docs ? And maybe mention one or more ISP that would provide
 suitable mysql facilities ?
 
 As for hosting companies, I have been very happy with www.pair.com
 for years.  They provide I believe three database users -
 read-only, read-write, and full access.  You would only use the
 full access user to create the database structure - tables,
 indexes, etc.

Given that this is a Debian list, I should mention that Pair runs
FreeBSD systems, not Linux.

 Prior to subscribing to an expensive hosting, I wish to test the
 system on free ISP. I have two of them here. I tested them both, but
 testing did not go far as for now, since I am far from having
 understood how it is supposed to work. No doc is provided

*snip*

In my experience paying for web hosting - you do get what you pay for.
Pair is not the cheapest host in the business, but they have
had phenomenal uptimes, excellent support, and provide reasonable
access to the system.  I've been burned by cheap web hosts before -
including a company that cancelled a friend's account because he'd
typed ls /etc and they found it in his bash history file.  Wow.  I'm
not saying that you can't find a good host cheaper than Pair - for me
personally, Pair is cheap enough and good enough that I haven't looked
further since I started using them.  I should also note that I'm only
running a personal vanity site, not a business or service.  And if
you're not based in the US, I don't know how much sense it makes to
work with a US host provider.

I've never installed mysqladmin, so I can't speak to that.  I've
always just used command line tools for mySQL.

Anyway, I don't mean to sound like an advertisement for one particular
company.  I'm sure there are many reputable, reliable hosting
companies out there.  It does sound like you need a fair amount of
information to do this for the first time, so you might want to choose
a host provider that explicitly includes support as part of the deal.

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Re: How to migrate my localhost php site to my ISP - Was: willing to learn php basics

2010-04-15 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On Thu, Apr 15 at 23:43, Bernard penned:
 I have now got to a point that I have a working MySQL database
 system on my localhost machine. I thought that I would not have any
 problem migrating this to my ISP appropriate MySQL space, but so far
 I have failed to do so. Local doc is very scarce, and I did not find
 any relevant FAQ. I did find the relevant paths though, and
 succeeded installing a short php script which displays the current
 date, using strftime(), but there is no way I can access databases.
 From the online doc, I learnt that I can't create databases, and
 that I can just create tables under the database that already
 exists. If I import a table, only its structure gets imported, not
 its content, and then an error message says that I don't have
 privileges for this... so I am surely missing something as far as
 setting up is concerned, or initialization. In my efforts to fetch
 info, I got a few hints, but they were negative ones, for instance
 someone kind of said that most ISP did not allow their customers to
 more than one authenticated user. This would mean that I could not
 expect to install a database that would be available to the members
 of a club, each of them having a login and password.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but ... typically you would
have *one* login that the website uses to talk to the database.
Website users would not authenticate by logging into the database -
they would authenticate by having a username and (possibly encrypted)
password stored in the database, which you would somehow retrieve and
compare.

 Could someone tell me where I could find relevant information and
 docs ? And maybe mention one or more ISP that would provide suitable
 mysql facilities ?

As for hosting companies, I have been very happy with www.pair.com for
years.  They provide I believe three database users - read-only,
read-write, and full access.  You would only use the full access user
to create the database structure - tables, indexes, etc.  You would
use either a read-only or read-write user in your web code, depending
on what you were doing.

They also have a nice library of help documents, which are apparently
freely available without requiring a login: 

http://www.pair.com/support/knowledge_base/

And I think the command you want is mysqldump ... with the correct
parameters you should be able to tell it to create a file that
includes everything necessary to both create your table structures
*and* populate them with your data.  This of course assumes that
you're running the same version of mySQL on your local server as is
available on your host machine.

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Re: why does linux image try to use grub ?

2010-03-30 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On Mon, Mar 29 at 19:54, bri...@aracnet.com penned:
 
 you should know that I haven't done a full upgrade in a while, that
 may be part of the problem. used to be Debian unstable wasn't.  It
 is now :-(

In my experience, unstable goes through cycles - most stable just
before a new stable release, then going all crazy just after, rinse,
repeat.

(It's still better for real use than testing, IMO, because fixes can
enter unstable quickly, whereas they can be blocked from testing for
quite a while.)

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Re: internet connection tester script

2010-03-27 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On Sat, Mar 27 at 13:07, Jozsef Vadkan penned:
 Why doesn't my internet-connection script work?
 
 When I plug the ethcable out, it just waits...and waits...and
 waits...
 
 The script: http://pastebin.com/AE9U1qdL

I haven't looked at the script, but I wonder if you'd be interested in
the smokeping package?  You can set it up to ping various sites; it
has a web interface that will show you graphs of your packet loss for
various time periods.

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Re: nic issue on Debian Lenny

2010-03-26 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On Fri, Mar 26 at 10:55, Stephen Powell penned:
 
 First of all, when you say that you have two onboard nics, I
 interpret that to mean that there are two network adapters built-in
 to the motherboard, as opposed to separate network adapters
 installed in a bus-slot.  Is that what you mean?  That would be
 unusual.  It's quite common to see a motherboard with a built-in
 ethernet adapter, but I haven't seen any motherboards with *two*
 built-in ethernet adapters.  Usually, if a machine has two ethernet
 adapters, it either has two stand-alone NICs or else it has one NIC
 built-in to the motherboard and one stand-alone NIC.  But anyway ...

Just to chime in here, I have a  motherboard with two ethernet ports,
each with its own MAC address.  It's the Asus P7P55D EVO.  (And for
anyone searching for linux-compatible hardware - I haven't tried to
install linux on it, so I'm afraid I don't know if it is compatible.)

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Re: Debian is losing its users

2008-03-27 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2008-03-27, Wei Chen penned:

 Hi,

 I am somewhat disappointed that when you see that post, what most of
 you, if not all, reply to argue that the decrease of search volume
 does not indicate the loss of users, rather than thinking of ideas
 for something that can be done to help, which was the original
 motivation of the post.

I just assumed you were trolling with the first post.  I'm still not
sure you're not.

If your intention was to get people interested in generating ideas to
increase the popularity of debian, I don't think your first post did a
good job of communicating that intention.  And even if that had been
clearly communicated, another question is, does everyone agree that
increasing popularity is always a good thing?

 Even if the losing of users is not proportional to the decrease of
 search volume, there is a high probability that they are positively
 correlated. I hope some of you are willing to think of some
 constructive ideas for that. And in the meanwhile you may want to
 stop this meaningless dispute.

There is a high probability ...  That's a pretty bald statement.

An interesting question would be, how do you actually go about
establishing usage statistics?  The number of distinct IP addresses
that pull data from all the mirrors?  What's a stat one can actually
collect?

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Re: RAID suggestions?

2008-03-20 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2008-03-19, Michael S. Peek penned:

 This would be fine, I don't really care if it's a hardware or
 software RAID, although it seems like a waste of money to buy a
 hardware RAID card just to use as a dense SATA controller.  Is there
 such a thing as a SATA controller just for lots of drives?  One that
 supports, say, 8 or more drives and is supported by the linux kernel
 out of the box?  All I really want is to be able to have big-time
 data density in a single machine.

Commentary from my husband, who is a storage geek:

[quote]
Mine is relatively small... only a 4-port setup, 2 internal/2 external.

For native linux support, the LSI MegaRAID controllers are open source
and part of the kernel, there's no 3rd party driver to install.

Something like this has 8 internal SAS/SATA ports and is about $300.
It appears to be out of stock, not sure if it's been replaced by
something else or is just a big seller:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118092

You'll want at least one PCIe lane for every two drives as a minimum
for decent performance.  A 4-port PCI-e x1 controller card is cheap,
but can't get anywhere close to saturating 4 disks.

[/quote]

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Re: Question about Desktop Environments

2008-03-18 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2008-03-18, Ron Johnson penned:
 On 03/18/08 15:05, Paul Johnson wrote:
 What outcry?  Ron's got a point.  Seems like all the ladies went to
 debian-women or something.

 Serena Cantor  Michelle Konzack are the only two that I can think
 of on this list.  And debian-women doesn't seem very busy.

 If women are so weak that they can't stand up for themselves when
 guys start to get rude and obnoxious, there are bigger problems
 afoot.

Perhaps that should be

s/If women are so weak they can't/If women have better things to do
than/

But I don't really know, just having noticed this subthread right
abotu now, and not sufficiently motivated to go back and find the
origin.  Did a lot of women who used to post here recently stop doing
so?

I really have no business in this discussion, since I just a couple of
days ago thought, Hrm, I should resubscribe to debian-user and see
what's up.  Back in the day, I can't remember anyone doing anything
particularly offensive to women on this list.  Certainly nothing on
par with the slashdot and thedailywtf noise.

 - -- Ron Johnson, Jr.  Jefferson LA  USA

 Working with women is a pain in the a**. My wife

I read the quote, got moderately offended, read the attribution,
considered, decided she may have a point.

For values of women not including myself, of course.

I do wonder what the intent of including that in your sig is, especially
in a primarily-male environment.  The feel would be different in a
more evenly distributed crowd.

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Re: exim: too many connections?

2008-03-17 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2008-03-13, Paul Johnson penned:

 Are you already using greylisting?  If not, the easiest way to set
 this up is to install the greylistd package and follow the easy
 instructions in /usr/share/doc/greylistd.  The whole process
 should take download time+5

*dropping in after a long absence*

Please note, if you have a customized exim4.conf setup, you may have
to hand hack the rules to get them to work without complaint.

I did this recently, and I'm thrilled with the results.

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Re: greylistd / exim4 troubles -- how to troubleshoot?

2007-02-10 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2007-02-03, Tony Rowe penned:
 On 2007-02-02, Monique Y. Mudama [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 I'm wondering if this package just worked for anyone and if not,
 how they got it to work, especially with exim4 and a monolithic
 exim4.conf that was converted from an exim3 installation, on
 unstable.

 greylistd-setup-exim4 only seemed to apply to the split config
 files.

 Looks like there is indeed trouble migrating old greylistd configs
 to the unsplit exim4.conf.  Bug #398224 may be of interest (or
 not...), in particular near the bottom?

 Any luck?

Thank you for finding that.

It's definitely interesting, but it doesn't appear to be directly
related to my issue.  The bug has to do with the fact that the
remove action of greylistd-setup-exim4 doesn't work properly with
some installs, but since it only affects the split scripts, which I'm
not using, that doesn't apply for me.

My issue is probably more that in trying to paste in the relevant bits
of the greylistd config without having a good understanding of
exim4 config files, I've managed to screw something up.  The
exim4.conf file also has comments scattered about that make me wonder
if it's not using some special syntax reserved for systems upgraded
from exim3.

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Re: greylistd / exim4 troubles -- how to troubleshoot?

2007-02-02 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2007-02-02, Monique Y. Mudama penned:

 This is what I tried in my exim4 config, inside the check_recipient
 block.  The commented-out bits were causing complaints in exim4's
 mainlog, which I will readily admit isn't a great reason for
 commenting them out without understanding what they do.

To be more correct, I commented out the parts that were causing errors
in the paniclog:

2007-02-01 17:59:26 Exim configuration error in line 234 of 
/etc/exim4/exim4.conf:
  main option acl_check_rcpt unknown
2007-02-01 18:00:09 Exim configuration error in line 234 of 
/etc/exim4/exim4.conf:
  main option acl_check_rcpt unknown
2007-02-01 18:04:53 unknown named host list +relay_from_hosts
2007-02-01 18:05:05 unknown named host list +relay_from_hosts

Is the syntax for the monolithic config different from that of the
split config, or is there something else going on here?

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greylistd / exim4 troubles -- how to troubleshoot?

2007-02-01 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

I'm wondering if this package just worked for anyone and if not, how
they got it to work, especially with exim4 and a monolithic exim4.conf
that was converted from an exim3 installation, on unstable.

greylistd-setup-exim4 only seemed to apply to the split config files.

After fiddling with the example exim4 rule to get past errors in running
exim4 and in the mainlog, I ended up with a setup that seemed to keep
deferring long after it should have accepted a message (the triplet was
the same, unlike, say, gmail messages that can show up with a different
IP address pretty much every time).  I never saw the greylist rule let
anything through -- it just kept deferring, even with the time gap set
to 1 minute.

I haven't been able to find any troubleshooting guides for greylistd
via google -- the expectation seems to be that it will just work.

The example greylistd exim4 config starts with:

acl_check_rcpt:

But this doesn't seem right for my config file, which has:

begin acl

#!!# ACL that is used after the RCPT command
check_recipient:

This is what I tried in my exim4 config, inside the check_recipient
block.  The commented-out bits were causing complaints in exim4's
mainlog, which I will readily admit isn't a great reason for commenting
them out without understanding what they do.

  defer
message= $sender_host_address is not yet authorized to deliver \
 mail from $sender_address to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. \
 Please try later.
log_message= greylisted.
!senders   = :
   #!hosts = : +relay_from_hosts : \
   !hosts = : \
 ${if exists {/etc/greylistd/whitelist-hosts}\
 {/etc/greylistd/whitelist-hosts}{}} : \
 ${if exists {/var/lib/greylistd/whitelist-hosts}\
 {/var/lib/greylistd/whitelist-hosts}{}}
!authenticated = *
   #!acl   = acl_whitelist_local_deny
domains= +local_domains : +relay_to_domains
verify = recipient/callout=20s,use_sender,defer_ok
condition  = ${readsocket{/var/run/greylistd/socket}\
 {--grey \
  $sender_host_address \
  $sender_address \
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 {5s}{}{false}}

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Roberto C. Sanchez penned:
 Monique Y. Mudama wrote:

 I like your idea, except for point 4.  In fact, why does the
 government need to be involved in it at all?  Just to mess it up?


Well, *I* still hold to the idea that government/society is in some way
responsible for keeping its population from indigence.  I think.
Mostly.  Because of this, I'd rather do it by squirreling away their
income than by spending mine.

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Roberto C. Sanchez penned:
 Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 
 Anyway, I think your point here is a red herring.  If education is
 entirely privatized, schools will follow the money, and poor areas
 won't have the pull for really great education.  The military, by
 the way, doesn't pay its troops all that well.

 So, poor areas don't have things like restaurants and retail
 establishments?  The point is, that even poor will need education.

Sure, poor areas have McDonald's, WalMart, and Dollar Tree.  Not so many
organic food markets and Gucci stores, I think.  I guess I could be
wrong; I haven't extensively toured poor neighborhoods to check.

 Here is another concept: you value you what you have to pay for.  I
 know that I am more appreciative of the things which I have had to
 earn through hard work than of those which were freebies.

There's certainly a point to this.  My high school martial arts
instructor was adamant that he didn't give financial need based
discounts, because his experience was that people didn't value the
experience as much if they felt it was discounted.

But as you've pointed out (or was it someone else?  Too many people
... ), people *do* pay for education.  Or do you think the kids should
pay for it themselves?  Hrm, interesting thought ...

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Steve Lamb penned:
 Monique Y. Mudama wrote:

 I honestly don't believe this.  It might be different if good
 financial practices were required in the high school curriculum,
 but they're not.  (That's an idea I've read about in a couple of
 financial books now, and it makes a lot of sense.)  Very few people
 are all that good at investing.  Particularly, because there's a
 lack of understanding of the market, people panic when they lose
 money, pull their money out, and then never get the benefit of the
 upswing.

 But that's just it, they don't have to because Social Security
 is that bad.  It's not like they have to make out like a
 railroad bandit to beat Social Security.  All they have to do is
 the most basic savings to beat it.  Seriously!

Right, but if they don't understand the market, it's likely they'll
not just fail to succeed, they'll lose.  A lot.  I've mentioned this
before, but the idea of a required course in finance (not my idea,
just one I've read) appeals to me greatly and would make this a more
viable solution.

 Everything I've read suggests that financial experts, people who have
 a financial education and study the market as their job, are lucky to
 pick a winning stock 50% of the time.  What makes you think that
 someone with a full time job, child rearing responsibilities, etc is
 going to even do that well?  (And yes, you can invest in funds
 instead, but that still requires a fair amount of attention to earn
 enough interest to stay ahead of inflation.)

 Who said stocks?  I said invest as they saw fit.  And you're
 right, it takes a fair amount of attention to earn enough interest
 to stay ahead of inflation.  Now, for the $20,000 that you and
 others never ask.  Is Social Security staying ahead of inflation?

Hold up, hold up!  Let's not get confused.  I'm anti-social security,
I'm just not necessarily anti-safety net.  I strongly suspect (the
only reason I don't say I'm absolutely positive is because I haven't
looked into it) that SS doesn't keep up with inflation.

You're right, though, that stocks wasn't necessarily a reasonable
generalization, and it kind of occured to me when I was typing that,
but I posted it anyway (bad Mo'!).

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Re: [debian] Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Kent West penned:

 Being people, even Debianistas sometimes get off-topic and
 on-soapbox.  Yeah, the thread's off-topic and should have died long
 ago, but obviously these things are important to some of the group.
 This thread will naturally die (some year! ;-) ). In the meanwhile,
 the DEL key (or in your case, the 'unsubscribe' info at the bottom
 of each message) is your friend.

Erp.  I'm usually much better about not getting distracted on d-u ...

Anyway, the OP does have a point, and I'll stop posting to this
thread.  I spent too much time last night posting to it, anyway; can't
maintain it =P

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-29, Kent West penned:
 Mumia W wrote:
 Social Security is a government program. There's nothing wrong
 about using taxes to support a government program.

 So you're in favor of forcing Person A, at the point of a gun, to
 give his hard-earned dollars to Person B? Because at the basics,
 that's what it is.


But that happens all the time.  People who don't drive still pay taxes
for roads.  People who don't have children pay taxes for schools.
People who have no interest in nature pay taxes to preserve national
parks.

I agree that social security is all sorts of screwed up, but not
because it involves collecting money and spending it in ways that
might not directly benefit the person paying.  Not unless you're
against taxes of all forms, which is possibly an entirely different
argument.

(Just looked at my paycheck; wow, social security is about 1.5x what
I'm withholding for state income tax.  A little less than 1/3 of
federal.  It's definitely a large chunk of money, and I have zero
expectation of seeing a SS payout when I retire.  I don't even want
it.  I want to kill off this whole screwed up social security system,
and if that means I pay SS for my parents, then don't get any when I
retire, I'm honestly okay with that.  I don't want to see my nieces
and nephew burdened with paying this stuff.)



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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Christopher Nelson penned:
 On Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 09:43:35PM -0400, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:

 Besides, why is it my job to *guarantee* that you can send your
 children to school for free?  If you can't afford to raise them,
 then don't have them.  Really, why should I pay taxes for education
 my entire life when kids only go to school for 12-16 years?

 The same reason you should pay taxes for roads you don't drive
 on--because at all stages of life having an educated workforce
 benifits you, just as it benifits you for people (eg utility
 companies) to drive on roads you particularly don't use.  Or would
 you rather not pay your doctor to pass high school anatomy and
 biology?

It's a sad reality that not all adults are responsible.  Add to this the
fact that most teens aren't fully responsible, and that there is a huge
stigma to abortion, and that one half of the parental equation sometimes
skips out or is such a bad influence that they actually need to be
removed from the child's life, and people who have children without
being financially prepared are simply a reality, not something we can
wish away with ideas like, If you can't afford to raise them, don't
have them.

So it's a reality that there will be kids whose parents can't afford
to pay for education.  Now, here in the US, those kids will eventually
be able to vote.  I do feel that I benefit from a voting public that
has at least a high school education.  I also feel that, in an
environment where a good general education is strongly tied to income
(vocational schools don't seem nearly as popular here as in Europe,
and their students don't seem to be nearly as respected), I don't want
a large fraction of the population to be impoverished.  I have visions
of Let them eat cake! followed by guillotines.

As for me, I attended public schools throughout my education.  They
did d*mn well by me.  I'll grant that I went to a high school that
routinely ranks in the top of schools nationwide, and furthermore that
I was lucky in that I was in the accelerated track, which tends to
draw highly motivated teachers, but in any case, I don't feel I missed
out by getting a public school education.  I do wish everyone had
access to the kinds of teachers I had in high school.

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Roberto C. Sanchez penned:

 What about if you are in the military and get stationed in Arkansas?
 Then what?  Or somewhere with an insanely high cost of living?  The
 point is that if all education was private, you could live where you
 want send your kids to school where you want and it wouldn't matter
 that you weren't in the right district.

I find it interesting that you're all about freedom of choice and
personal responsibility, but the above quote doesn't seem to recognize
that joining the military is a choice, as is having children while in
the military.

Anyway, I think your point here is a red herring.  If education is
entirely privatized, schools will follow the money, and poor areas
won't have the pull for really great education.  The military, by the
way, doesn't pay its troops all that well.

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Roberto C. Sanchez penned:
 Christopher Nelson wrote:
 
 It could be, but a more salient question might be, would it be
 applied to private schooling?  There are people I know who despite
 the evidence they should, don't spend in retirement funds, etc.,
 and probably would buy an extra case of beer instead of paying
 their kid's tuition.
 
 So what?  Repeat after me, the government is not a babysitter.
 Now, repeat that until you believe it.  Seriously.  This is the same
 reason why I believe we should abolish social security.  Besides,
 there are people who now go out and buy lottery tickets or another
 case of beer, rather than food for their children.  IMHO, that is
 more reprehensible.  The point is, that people will be people, no
 matter what.


You're assuming there's no inherent benefit to having a well-educated
population.  This is not a point on which everyone agrees.  I agree
that people will be people, but I don't see why future generations
must suffer for it.  This is why I don't believe in seatbelt and
helmet laws for adults, but do believe in them for children.  Children
can't rescue themselves from these situations.

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-29, Steve Lamb penned:

 And public schools are doing such a fine job of educating, too!
 You are aware that there are people who believe public
 schooling was, and is, a bad idea and this would be best
 removed?

There are people who believe that amending the Constitution to prevent
gay marriage is somehow a worthwhile cause.  People believe all sorts
of crazy stuff.

I won't go so far as to say that the idea that public school is a bad
idea is crazy, but I would certainly say I'd want an awful lot of
evidence before I would want to act on it.

I'm a product of public education through high school, and a state
college, and my public school routinely outperforms vast swaths of
private schools.  Granted, that's not to say all public schools are
better than all private schools, but it suggests that public schools
aren't inherently awful.

 People who have no interest in nature pay taxes to preserve
 national parks.

 Same here.

Not sure what you're agreeing with.  I support national parks, and I
vote to spend money on local parks.  And I'm not sure wtf anyone is
doing in the Front Range of Colorado if they don't like nature, but
hey, I'm sure they exist, and maybe it bugs them that the rest of us
keep voting to protect our land.

 I agree that social security is all sorts of screwed up, but not
 because it involves collecting money and spending it in ways that
 might not directly benefit the person paying.

 It is a large part of it because it's pretty much a fact that the
 peo ple would have been better off with the money to invest and
 save on their own Yes, people can come up with specific cases of
 individuals who represent the exception.  But we're talking the
 by-and-large masses here, not the a friend of a friend's aunt's
 grandma...

I honestly don't believe this.  It might be different if good
financial practices were required in the high school curriculum, but
they're not.  (That's an idea I've read about in a couple of financial
books now, and it makes a lot of sense.)  Very few people are all that
good at investing.  Particularly, because there's a lack of
understanding of the market, people panic when they lose money, pull
their money out, and then never get the benefit of the upswing.

Everything I've read suggests that financial experts, people who have
a financial education and study the market as their job, are lucky to
pick a winning stock 50% of the time.  What makes you think that
someone with a full time job, child rearing responsibilities, etc is
going to even do that well?  (And yes, you can invest in funds
instead, but that still requires a fair amount of attention to earn
enough interest to stay ahead of inflation.)

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Steve Lamb penned:

 No, not might.  Most people.  Some might choose bad investments.
 But by and large it is extremely difficult to do worse than
 Social Security.  I think it's so bad that putting the money
 in a simple 3% interest savings account offered by any bank
 yields more in the end.

Even though I just ripped into you a few posts ago, you do have a
point here.  It would be interesting if social security could be
altered so that (this is just off the top of my head here, so I'm sure
it's not by any means perfect, but maybe the glimmering of an idea):

1) By default, everyone pays into SS

2) Instead of the current system, every person has an individual SS
account, from which their own retirement would later be drawn

3) That account would invest in CDs or some other extremely low-risk
setup.  Perhaps it could work like a bank instead, with an interest rate
based on balance (I'll admit I don't know enough about how banks work to
be sure that could work).

4) There would be a non-trivial, optional exam.  If one passed the exam,
one could choose what to do with the money that would typically be given
to SS: leave it there, invest it, spend it on wine, women and song.
Whatever.  But the exam would have to be good enough to ensure that the
taker is financially well-educated, and taking the exam would have to be
expensive enough to be a deterrent (shouldn't be a problem since it
would have to cover the costs of formulating the exam, etc).

The main trouble I see with such an approach is that someone could be
financially brilliant in a way not yet commonly accepted, and thereby
flunk the test.  But I imagine someone like that could fake it
through the exam anyway by knowing the right answers.

 The idea behind the Social Security system is that you shouldn't have
 to know anything about stocks, bond or any other securities to have
 your retirement protected.

 The idea of Social Security is to make people dependant on
 government and to buy votes.

Can't it be both?


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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-29, Roberto C. Sanchez penned:
 Mumia W wrote:
 
 Yes, they are. I was educated in a public school.
 
 As was I.  That is exactly the reason why none of my children will
 *ever* go to a public school.  I like to think that I am succeeding
 in life *in spite* of the fact that I went to public school.

Please note that just because *your* public school experience was
subpar doesn't mean everyone's was.

A lot of teenage troublemakers went to the local Catholic school
(whether or not they were Catholic) in my neighborhood.  All such kids
that I met learned much worse behavior by going to school there
(something like sending a first-time teen minor offender to jail, I
suppose).

 No they are not. A few, knowledgeable individuals *might* be better
 off, or they might screw up and choose the wrong investments and
 lose most of it.
 
 So, you believe that people are fundamentally stupid and need the
 government to babysit them?

To me, this is a qualified maybe.  Perhaps not stupid, but willfully
ignorant and willing to be led by emotion.  Maybe it would be better if
everyone were taught basic logic as well as how to identify basic
techniques of rhetoric (ethos, pathos, logos). 

Then again, at some point, you have to wonder what the parent could
have done differently.  Will a brilliant school matter if the parent
doesn't emphasize the wonder of learning from day one?  Would it have
been possible for the parent to choose a better school for their kids
to attend?  Perhaps the parent could have paid more attention to the
curriculum and supplemented it where it was lacking, or paid attention
to the PTO and encouraged change from within.

I learned a lot at school, but I was taught the love of learning at
home.  I still have fond memories of my dad taking me to the library
to choose my own books, well before first grade.

 And your retirement money shouldn't be entirely dependent upon the
 twists and turns of the business cycle.
 
 If you are smart they won't.  Even if you are not smart, if you have
 the wherewithal to hire someone who is, they won't.

I do have some problems with the meritocracy concept*.  Why should I
be rewarded for smarts, when I didn't really do anything to deserve
them?  Why should some other guy do poorly in life because he didn't
luck out in the brain dept?

* Not enough to give back the fun toys I've accumulated

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Roberto C. Sanchez penned:

 Mumia W wrote:
 
 A person doesn't have to be stupid to not want to have to learn
 about that stuff. And yes, even the stupid *deserve* retirement
 security.
 
 This is not the government's job.

I'm not sure if that's true.  Is it society's job?  If so, does
government enact the will of society?

If a mentally unstable (but not dangerous) person's family can't
afford to have them home cared or homed in a decent institution,
should that person be left on the street to beg?  I have a hard time
saying that anyone should be forced to spend money on things they
don't want to (as taxes do), but I have a harder time saying that
person should be on the street.

By the way, the reason I'm so interested in this discussion is because
it *is* a tough question for me.  I don't know the right answer.

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Mumia W penned:

 Social Security is not driven by a high profit motive; it's purpose
 is to provide stable retirement income to people, and it does a
 fantastic job of that.

It's not stable because it doesn't work when the population isn't
booming.

Even if it were stable, I would have to say so what?  You could
reliably give me $1 every month to live on, and do a fantastic job,
and it still wouldn't suffice.  That's social security in a nutshell.
If my parents had to survive on their social security checks, they
wouldn't be enjoying their retirement, they'd be regretting it.

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Curt Howland penned:

 On Saturday 29 April 2006 21:43, Christopher Nelson
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] was heard to say:
 That's your right, but unless you can *gaurantee* that I can, for
 no cost, send my children to a 100% secular school with decent
 teaching, there is no way I can support abolishing public schools.

 for no cost, send my children...?

 For no cost.

 This is the economics taught in public school? By teachers who must
 be paid, in buildings that must be maintained, on busses that must
 be fueled? NO COST???

 Let me guess, you vote too. Let's see, which one promises to give
 me something for nothing? Ah! He gets my vote!

People, even very smart people, make this mistake all the time.  I was
talking to someone recently who said that rather than paying for the
recycling of difficult to recycle materials (ie, computer equipment),
it should be paid for by the government or by the manufacturer.

*blinkblink*

You do realize that if the government pays for it, it will be covered
by taxes, and if the manufacturer pays for it, the prices will go up,
right?

That being said, it does seem to me that people are more likely to
recycle goods if it's free because of taxation/purchase price than if
they have to pay directly when they recycle.

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Roberto C. Sanchez penned:
 Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 By the way, the reason I'm so interested in this discussion is
 because it *is* a tough question for me.  I don't know the right
 answer.

 I think the problem is that we have moved away from familial
 responsibility.  There was a time when family and the local
 community took care of these things.  Once parents aged to where
 they could not care for themselves, the children cared for them.
 That sort of thing.  Of course, I don't know the right answer
 either.  If I did, I would be rich, or the president, or both :-)

Unless they didn't, I guess.  Family and local community can be
awfully cruel and/or negligent.

I keep thinking, yes, yes, this would make sense for most cases, but
what about the parent who molests their children?  What about the
parent who gives the son a computer and the daughter a dollie?  (Okay,
I guess we can't legislate against that kind of crap.)

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Roberto C. Sanchez penned:
 Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 
 You're assuming there's no inherent benefit to having a
 well-educated population.  This is not a point on which everyone
 agrees.  I agree that people will be people, but I don't see why
 future generations must suffer for it.  This is why I don't believe
 in seatbelt and helmet laws for adults, but do believe in them for
 children.  Children can't rescue themselves from these situations.

 You misunderstand.  There is a great inherent benefit in a
 well-educated population.  However, our current educational system
 is *not* producing a well-educated population.  Even if it could, it
 is not the province of government.

This is a point where I think we can agree to disagree.  I think it
could.  And I'm not at all sure it's not the province of government.

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Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On 2006-04-30, Roberto C. Sanchez penned:
 This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 2440 and 3156)
 --enig4A7950B5E5E647955FAA1AE5 Content-Type: text/plain;
 charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

 Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 On 2006-04-29, Roberto C. Sanchez penned:
 
Mumia W wrote:

Yes, they are. I was educated in a public school.


As was I.  That is exactly the reason why none of my children will
*ever* go to a public school.  I like to think that I am succeeding
in life *in spite* of the fact that I went to public school.
 
 
 Please note that just because *your* public school experience was
 subpar doesn't mean everyone's was.
 
 Umm, who said my experience was subpar?  I went to the top school in
 my county.  I had some of the best teachers in the state.  My
 teachers took a personal interest in me.  My parents were involved
 in my education (far more than most other parents).  That does not
 change the fact that the system as a whole is broken.

It's the implication when you say that the fact that you were educated
in a public school is exactly the reason why none of my children will
*ever* go to a public school.  I like to think that I am succeeding in
life *in spite* of the fact that I went to public school.

Now, maybe you meant that you succeeded in life because your public
school was exceptional, but that's not the simplest, most obvious
interpretation of your statement.

 A lot of teenage troublemakers went to the local Catholic school
 (whether or not they were Catholic) in my neighborhood.  All such
 kids that I met learned much worse behavior by going to school
 there (something like sending a first-time teen minor offender to
 jail, I suppose).
 
 I'm not sure what your point is here.

Just that private schools aren't inherently better than public
schools, either.  And yes, you're absolutely right that it's a closed
system right now and that the current private school system might have
little in common with what we'd have if the school system were
privatized.  (Does that word look weird to you?  It feels wrong with
an a.)

 I too learned a lot.  I too learned a love of learning.  In my case,
 neither of my parents went to college and they had to work hard.
 They didn't want to see me grow up to be in the same situation, so
 they emphasized the importance of education.

Yeah, I think a lot of people are in that boat.  I'm actually finding
I wish my parents had emphasized it less, or at least differently.
Every reward I ever got was in the context of school.  I think this
was slightly misguided.  At least my parents did encourage me to get
enough sleep, and worried if they thought I was studying too much.  I
had a friend, in a similar situation to what you describe, whose
parents would gripe at her if she didn't stay up till the wee hours of
the morning studying for tests.  It's a wonder she made it through
high school at all, as little sleep as she got.

 I do have some problems with the meritocracy concept*.  Why should
 I be rewarded for smarts, when I didn't really do anything to
 deserve them?  Why should some other guy do poorly in life because
 he didn't luck out in the brain dept?
 
 * Not enough to give back the fun toys I've accumulated
 

 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for
 he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth
 rain on the just and on the unjust. -- Matthew 5:45

He seems to send the dollars to those who got the good genes, though.

 If you are not good at something, you go and find someone who is and
 convince them (for pay or something else) to do it for you.  This is
 a basic life skill.

If it's a basic life skill, then there are many people who shouldn't
be breathing right now, because they seem to lack it.

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Re: Weired SPAMSCORE [63% SPAM SCAN] Re: Re: Install Debian 3.1 on a new Dell PowerEdge 2850

2006-04-26 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-22, Michelle Konzack penned:
 Hi Guys and specialy Jacob.

 How do you get this SPAM score?

 My spamassassin give me only:


 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.3 (2005-04-27) on samba3.private
 X-Spam-Level: 
 X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham 
   version=3.0.3

I have a X-Spam-Report header that gives me the breakdown of the score.

I've poked around, but I can't find anywhere in my config that I've
enabled it explicitly.  (Maybe I did and just can't find where at the
moment.)

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Re: ssh via inetd the Debian way

2006-04-26 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-26, Steve Lamb penned:

 Yeah, knew that but was doing 3 things at once.  Lemme just say
 never play MMORPG and admin at the same time.  :D

For several years, that would have effectively prevented me from
admin'ing =P

(But I'm feeling much better now ...)

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Re: Thanks! Re: good anti-virus software to use?

On 2006-04-22, Ron Johnson penned:
 On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 09:42 -0600, Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 On 2006-04-22, Ron Johnson penned:
 
  Unless you write with a secure language like COBOL.
 
 I'm sure it's possible to write an insecure program in COBOL.

 It would be darned hard.

 Strings are fixed length, the RTL chops off strings that are longer
 than the variable's PICTURE clause, and space-fills strings that are
 shorter than the PIC.  Also, the RTL does array bounds checking, so
 you can't smash the stack that way either.  And it doesn't have
 stupid \0-terminated strings.

 Face it: any language without malloc() is going to be much more
 secure that C/C++  Pascal.

Sure, but I could write a program in COBOL and still load passwords
from a plain text file stored with wide-open permissions, just for
example.

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Re: ssh via inetd the Debian way

On 2006-04-25, Steve Lamb penned:

 Is there some automated method of placing sshd into inetd?  I've atte=
 mpted
 to dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server to no avail.

I don't know about automated, but I found this warning in `man sshd`:

 -i  Specifies that sshd is being run from inetd(8).  sshd is normally
 not run from inetd because it needs to generate the server key
 before it can respond to the client, and this may take tens of
 seconds.  Clients would have to wait too long if the key was
 regenerated every time.  However, with small key sizes (e.g.,
 512) using sshd from inetd may be feasible.

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Re: Thanks! Re: good anti-virus software to use?

On 2006-04-25, Ron Johnson penned:
 On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 13:34 -0600, Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 
 Sure, but I could write a program in COBOL and still load passwords
 from a plain text file stored with wide-open permissions, just for
 example.

 That's willfully stupid programming.

People do stuff like that all the time.  As I said, you can write an
insecure program in any language.

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Re: Thanks! Re: good anti-virus software to use?

On 2006-04-25, Roberto C. Sanchez penned:

 I think you are twisting Ron's point.  His original point was that
 some languages (like C/C++) make it possible to have hard to detect
 subtle faults that become security problems.  Other languages (like
 COBOL) do away with those subtle issues.  Essentially, you have to
 try and be determined to write something insecure.  I think his
 discussion focused on strings, but it probably extends to other
 things as well.

I'm not trying to twist anything.  I do agree that language features
can help prevent all sorts of bugs and security issues.

I guess I'm just responding to an argument (maybe it only exists in my
head) that Oh, if we code in x language, we will never have to
worry about security again!  The language may reduce certain types of
security issues, but you still need to pay attention.

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Re: ssh via inetd the Debian way

On 2006-04-25, Steve Lamb penned:

 Uh, does this seem right?  I recall sshd generating the key when
 it is first installed and don't recall the key changing every
 reboot which is when sshd would shutdown/startup like it would
 from inetd.  :/

It seems like at some point in my life I remember seeing ssh in my
inetd file ... but I don't recall the circumstances.  It certainly
doesn't seem to me that I've ever had to wait tens of seconds after
the restart of sshd to log in.

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Re: OT: Comparison of filesystems

2006-04-24 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-24, Rick Friedman penned:

 I would like to hear from others their opinions about differing
 filesystems such as: ext3, Reiserfs, XFS, JFS, etc.20

I use ext3 primarily because it's broadly supported.  If the fecal
matter hits the rotary device and I want to be able to read the drive
on another machine, or boot with a different install or repair disk,
anything with ext2 support can read ext3, even though of course you
won't have the journalling support.

Granted, I made this decision a few years ago and maybe support for
reiser etc. is more common now.  Also, I tend to build my own kernels
and streamline them for only what I use, which affects this decision.

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Re: using apt-listbugs

2006-04-24 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-24, Rick Reynolds penned:
 Stephen R Laniel wrote:
It's probably just that your monitor's vertical positioning needs to
be changed.

 Hmm...  Maybe.  But this is the LCD laptop screen I'm referring to.
 I'm not aware of a way to adjust that (although there may be a way).

Does xvidtune work properly with LCDs?  I seem to recall I've used it
with an LCD to figure out the proper config before ...

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Re: slimp3 server behaving oddly

2006-04-24 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-16, Monique Y. Mudama penned:
 I run the slimp3 package.  Lately I've been using it a lot more than
 usual, because I finally put a client box next to my stereo so that
 I can listen to my music on decent speakers.

 Anyway.

 It just stopped working.

[snip]

With no leads, I gave up and installed slimserver, which seems to be
the same idea with a slicker interface and an active debian
maintainer.  Turns out slimp3 was orphaned. 

Anyone happen to know the exact relationship between the slimp3 and
the slimserver packages?  Is slimp3 an older form of slimserver?

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Re: distributions: UBUNTU vs DEBIAN

2006-04-23 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-23, Rogério Brito penned:

 He translated a helluva strings and, still, after talking with the
 responsible people on IRC (to get the work of this student
 integrated soon), I asked if they were willing to feed it back to
 Debian or upstream and the response I got wasn't that human or as
 kind as Ubuntu is promoted. :-(

 Still, having some core Debian developers working for Ubuntu is a
 good thing for Debian.

Wow, great of your student to take the initiative and do that!

Even if Ubuntu doesn't feed it back to debian, since it's open source,
how hard would it be for debian to leverage those files?

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Re: distributions: UBUNTU vs DEBIAN

2006-04-23 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-23, Hal Vaughan penned:

 Here's what I don't understand: If you like what other distributions
 do better, why are you so busy trying to convince debian to change?
 Why not just switch to one of the several distros you've mentioned?

 This may not be a logical fallacy.  If not, it should be: the idea
 that if you don't like something, find a substitute.  Those that
 criticize something (like Debian) often have a high regard for it,
 which is why they take the time and effort to provide constructive
 criticism.  If they didn't like it and didn't care, they would jump
 ship.  Then we'd have something with no disagreement and a project
 that would become more and more esoteric until it met only the needs
 of a few developers.

 If everyone had this attitude, nothing would ever improve.

In general, I agree.  A suggestion to change something to be more
useful shouldn't be met with derision.

In this case, however, it seems to me that several people, including a
debian dev, have tried to explain why the request is contrary to the
goals, in fact the very purpose, of debian.  It strikes me as kind of
like a consumer telling Ferrari their fuel efficiency sucks ...

Or maybe I'm missing Steve's whole point.  But that's how it seems to
me.

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Re: distributions: UBUNTU vs DEBIAN

2006-04-23 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-23, Kevin Mark penned:

[some snippage]

 In this context, free software user can never buy the software from
 a company because their is no company and their is no legal monetary
 contact between Debian and its developers and thus no one can make
 the free software developers do anything. The free software model
 does allow a free market whereby any other developer can be paid or
 convinced to do what you want.

 But it seems the free software developers are usually simply
 'scratching their itch' to their satisfaction and others may or may
 not like the result.  And the average users is more or less
 powerless to force the free software developer to listen to them
 sans forking over money and the developers accepting a contract to
 do what they want. 


When you say that the average user is powerless to force the free
software developer to listen to them, I'm wondering what you're
comparing this experience to.  Have you ever, as an average user, been
able to convince a commercial software company to do something for
you?  I'd love to hear about it, because that hasn't been my
experience.

I don't understand why the idea of spending money to get an open
source solution seems, apparently, unreasonable to you.  I'm grateful
for all of the free (as in beer) open source software I'm able to use.
But as a developer, I'd get mighty P.O.'ed if someone told me I had
to code something.  Offer me money, and I might accept.  (Note: I'm
not a debian developer.  I don't mean that anyone should offer me
money to write something for debian, although if enough money were
offered, I might consider it *grin*.)

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Re: Thanks! Re: good anti-virus software to use?

On 2006-04-22, Ron Johnson penned:

 Unless you write with a secure language like COBOL.

I'm sure it's possible to write an insecure program in COBOL.

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Re: distributions: UBUNTU vs DEBIAN

On 2006-04-21, Steve Lamb penned:

 Because Debian sucks just as much.  What wins people over?  It
 certai nly isn't Oh, well, that can work if you do this and
 this and this...  Know what most do Ok, fine, hi Bill, here's
 another $300 for the pro edition this  3 years.  See you in 3
 more.

Well, debian is pretty obvious about its purpose.  It's a link right
from the front page.  Maybe people should be choosing other distros if
they don't like bullet item number one of the social contract.  Debian
without the social contract would be just another distro.  In other
words, there would be no point to using debian without the contract.

 And if more people are won over and stay here and start
 demanding for the same from those developers stuff gets done.
 1% ain't gonna cut it.  And  a subset of 1% certainly ain't
 gonna cut it.

I don't even understand this paragraph.

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Re: distributions: UBUNTU vs DEBIAN

On 2006-04-23, Christopher Nelson penned:
 On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 07:31:56PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
 Christopher Nelson wrote:
  I have no idea what post you're talking about since you didn't
  quote it.
 
 I was referring to my only other post to this thread, namely
 [EMAIL PROTECTED].

 Okay, after some searching I found it (at:
 http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20060421.170836.4a9c52cc.en.html
 for the interested) and I'm afraid I cannot comment too much on it.
 I also don't know how much useful response you would get here, even
 if the post weren't buried in a thread such as this (I know the
 detail would be way over my head).  Maybe sending a similar message
 to the install team (of which, by you sig in that message, I assume
 you are a member?) would prompt more interest?

Er, Christopher, you might want to take a look at the email address
Joey uses and consider the context of his message.

Hint: http://people.debian.org/~joey/

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Re: distributions: UBUNTU vs DEBIAN

On 2006-04-22, Steve Lamb penned:

 Same drivers installed on Mepis, one mouseclick, not even 5
 minutes.  And Mepis is Debian based so there's nothing there
 that Debian couldn't do if it wanted to be more than a badge of
 pride and actually attempt to address t he userbase every once
 and a while.

Here's what I don't understand: If you like what other distributions
do better, why are you so busy trying to convince debian to change?
Why not just switch to one of the several distros you've mentioned?

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Re: distributions: UBUNTU vs DEBIAN

On 2006-04-22, Steve Lamb penned:

 Funny, the #1 point for most people is apt, not the social
 contract.  #1 for *you* maybe.

Who are these most people, and why should it matter to the developers
what most people want when they're not paying customers?

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Re: good anti-virus software to use?

2006-04-21 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-21, Michael Schurter penned:

 Think of it this way: if you were a virus/spyware/malware writer who
 would you target?  95% of the market or 5% of the market?

Well, if *I* were a virus writer, I'd want to target linux because
it's more of a challenge.  The only reason I can see for writing
viruses and whatnot is to improve one's knowledge of the systems.

Then again, I would never do that to people, so I guess I don't have
much insight into such a person's mentality.

 Also, Linux users tend to be more technically minded and able to
 correctly administer their own computers.

This is still true, but as linux becomes more user friendly, more
people are using linux with less technical knowledge or interest.

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Re: Thanks! Re: good anti-virus software to use?

2006-04-21 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-21, Christopher Nelson penned:

 Do keep in mind though, that you can still get infected via insecure
 things you add on, like PHP scripts you find online and put on your
 webpage.  Doesn't happen often, but something to think about.

Or even more often, PHP scripts that you write yourself!

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Re: Mail-Followup-To in muttng? [was Re: Thought on receiving two answers...]

2006-04-20 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-20, Matthias Julius penned:

 Another aspect is that there is no convenient way to send a private
 reply to the sender when he had set Reply-To to the list.  You then
 can only do this by manually copy/paste of the From address.

Well, yes, that's exactly why some of us want to do that =)

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Re: Mail-Followup-To in muttng? [was Re: Thought on receiving two answers...]

2006-04-19 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-19, Wayne Topa penned:
 

 folder-hook debian-user my_hdr Reply-To:
 'debian-user@lists.debian.org'

It must be considered harmful by somebody:

http://gmane.org/faq.php

[quote]
But I did use a valid email address.
Perhaps you did in your From, but your Reply-To address pointed to the
mailing list. Don't do that.
[/quote]

Other than that (and I'm not sure why they don't like it), it sounds
like a reasonable approach to me.

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slimp3 server behaving oddly

2006-04-16 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

I run the slimp3 package.  Lately I've been using it a lot more than
usual, because I finally put a client box next to my stereo so that I
can listen to my music on decent speakers.

Anyway.

It just stopped working.  Music was playing, and then it stopped.  I
killed xmms and restarted it, which gave me the remainder of the
buffered music, but then nothing more, and I can't connect to the
slimp3 web interface.  I have tried /etc/init.d/slimp3 restart, as
well as a stop and then start (checking to make sure the slimp3
process was really gone; it was).

When slimp3 is stopped, telnetting to port 9000 gets me the proper

telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

When slimp3 is started, I get the following:

Trying IP...
Connected to IP.
Escape character is '^]'.

That should bode well  except that it hangs forever when I do
this:

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1

Any thoughts?

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Re: lists.debian.org vs google groups

2006-04-06 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-06, Tudi LE BLEIS penned:
 On 4/4/06, Monique Y. Mudama ... wrote:

  Months later, I had filled half my quota, entirely with mailing
  list entries.  But there's no way to delete more than a page of
  messages at a time via their web interface (please, someone, prove
  me wrong!)

 Either I don't get your point, or you can cimply click on ALL,
 READ... well I have to admit that I never tried.

I'm pretty sure that ALL applies only to the current page.  If I'm
right, there's no way to do something to all messages, period.

If I am wrong, someone please tell me!

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Re: lists.debian.org vs google groups

2006-04-04 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-04-04, Pascal Hakim penned:
 I'm sorry, but I don't believe you can say something is another
 user's responsability. The last thing the listmaster team wants to
 have to do is to go through every message that has leaked the
 headers and deal with that. Someone's already mentioned that it
 looks like gmail does that by default. We have a lot of gmail
 subscribers, and that number is only going to grow.


It will always be N-1, where 1 is me.  I tried reading d-u via gmail
for a while, and was silly enough to believe gmail's so much space
you'll never run out! theory.  Months later, I had filled half my
quota, entirely with mailing list entries.  But there's no way to
delete more than a page of messages at a time via their web interface
(please, someone, prove me wrong!), so I ended up having to suck down
all of the messages via pop in order to delete them.  If I had had
messages I wanted to keep in gmail, that would have really sucked.

Web interfaces FTL.

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Re: lists.debian.org vs google groups

On 2006-04-03, kamaraju kusumanchi penned:


 The advantages I see are

 (1) A web interface to subscribe/unsubscribe and change mail/digest/no 
 email options. So we will not see those unsubscribe emails.

Disadvantage: It requires using a web interface to post.  Everyone who
enjoys using a browser form rather than their own customized text
editor, raise your hand.

 Is there anything that can be done with lists.debian.org that cannot be 
 done through google groups?

Sure.  Right now I use gmane to read d-u.  That means that I can
actually view it as a newsgroup.  I don't think that is possible using
google groups.  You also lose the power of all of the filtering that
can be done via procmail, maildrop, etc.  I bet a lot of long-time
posters here have developed all sorts of ways of processing these
emails.


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Re: lists.debian.org vs google groups

On 2006-04-03, Pascal Hakim penned:

 There have been a number of discussions about that. The main issue
 with that so far, is that the @ sign is used by a number of
 different programs to indicate things that aren't email address. We
 don't want to mangle arch/baz archive names, we don't want to mangle
 perl or PHP code that's posted to the list and so on.

I'm having trouble envisioning this as a huge problem.  At some point,
whatever converts the mailing list to HTML had access to the headers,
so it seems like it would be pretty easy to only affect, say, the From
header.

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Re: lists.debian.org vs google groups

On 2006-04-03, Pascal Hakim penned:
 On Mon, Apr 03, 2006 at 05:18:19PM -0600, Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 I'm having trouble envisioning this as a huge problem.  At some
 point, whatever converts the mailing list to HTML had access to the
 headers, so it seems like it would be pretty easy to only affect,
 say, the From header.

 Some people leak headers into the body of their email.

 For example, the first email in this month's archive:

 http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2006/04/msg0.html


Okay, that helps clarify the problem.  Thanks.

(I personally suspect that the email address I use confuses a lot of
spam apps.  Hrm, remove the word spam ... but wait, that's not a
legal address, toss that.  I do check this address, but it's pretty
easy to identify the fake amazon/chase/ebay/paypal/etc phishing
expeditions.)


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Re: lists.debian.org vs google groups

On 2006-04-04, Sumo Wrestler (or just ate too much) penned:
 My e-mail addy has the word spam in it; therefore, I get almost
 *no* spam. I got one a couple of weeks ago, and that's it.

I actually started using this email address several years ago, to
discourage people from emailing me directly.  The intent was to fool
humans; it seems to have done a poor job of that (lots of people CC 
habitually), but it does a fairly decent job of limiting spam.

I do still get a lot of spam, but usually from other sources.

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Re: lists.debian.org vs google groups

On 2006-04-03, kamaraju kusumanchi penned:

 The advantages I see are

 (1) A web interface to subscribe/unsubscribe and change
 mail/digest/no email options. So we will not see those unsubscribe
 emails.

I forgot to mention that this is hopelessly optimistic.  I belong to a
few yahoo groups.  They are also maintained via easy web interfaces.
And yet people regularly post unsubscribe requests to the group.

The only way to possibly prevent people from posting inappropriate
unsubscribe requests is to cut off their hands and ban them from using
voice recognition software.  I'm sure an enterprising few would still
find a way.

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Re: backing up a drive

2006-03-20 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2006-03-20, Micha Feigin penned:
 On Mon, 20 Mar 2006 15:46:15 -0600 Mark Petersen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:

 
 There's a few ways to do this, such as 'dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc' 

 Will this work if the drives are not of the same size? (I want to
 backup the drive so that I can restore it later if there is a
 problem)


I seem to recall that it doesn't.  I believe that dd will cause the
partition to think it's the size of the original partition.  So it
works, but you can only use as much space as the original hard drive
had.

There may be a way around this limitation or to fix it after
performing dd.

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Re: (G)Vim Oddity

2005-12-20 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-12-20, Heimdall Midgard penned:

 But surely in *n*x you can't assume what a file is on the basis of
 its extension?


Well, sometimes it's a good starting point.  For example, one of my
vim configuration files has:

au BufNewFile,BufRead *.java call JavaBuildEnv()

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Re: reply-to munging

2005-12-19 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-12-18, Felix Miata penned:

 That's only one admin's opinion. I find the opposite superior:
 http://marc.merlins.org/netrants/reply-to-useful.html

 This is a public discussion list, not a public questions/private
 answers list. You can't have a public discussion when people make
 their replies private.

I tend to agree, but I subscribe via the gmane news gateway, and I
found out the hard way that gmane won't post my messages if I specify
a mailing list as the Reply-To.

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Re: Monitor daemon for exim4 logs

2005-12-15 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-12-15, Paulo Marcel Coelho Aragao penned:

 Would anybody have recommendations of lightweight monitors for exim4
 logs, something appropriate to a standalone machine with a single
 user ?

 Thanks for your attention Paulo


Not a daemon, but I have this in my crontab:

@daily  /usr/sbin/exim4 -bp | /usr/bin/mail -e -s exim queue `date` user

You could do the same thing with greater frequency.

I didn't follow your description of your mail delivery closely enough
to know if this would get caught up in the delivery SNAFU.

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Re: apt-get install tries to REMOVE my kernel

2005-12-12 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-12-13, Mark Fletcher penned:

 How sure are we that this problem is related to xcdroast? Try
 installing something else, something harmless like an X-based game
 or something, to see if it tries to do the same thing. apt-get may
 just have got into a mess on your machine. I'm surprised any package
 would put a conflicts-dependency on a kernel image since there's no
 guarantee users are using a debian-packaged kernel (yes yes, heresy,
 I know, but there are plenty of heretics out there).


[delurk]

- heretic

(Actually, I use the debian source, but build it without benefit of
the debian packaging tools.  I could make up an explanation, but it
comes down to that's how I feel most comfortable doing it.)

[relurk]

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Re: unstable: udev and the elusive 2.6.12

2005-10-04 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-10-04, Jason Martens penned:
 Monique Y. Mudama wrote:


Hrm.  I guess I haven't been keeping up.  I assume this is to make
it easier to, say, have debian running with both linux and bsd, etc?

 That is correct.  See this bug:
 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=321167

Thanks!  That definitely clears it up.

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unstable: udev and the elusive 2.6.12

2005-10-03 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

I must be missing something here ...

I tried to install the latest udev, and it told me I needed kernel
2.6.12.

No big; I'm already running 2.6.10.

So ...

home:/etc/apt# aptitude search kernel-source-2.6
v   kernel-source-2.6
v   kernel-source-2.6.0-test2
v   kernel-source-2.6.0-test4
v   kernel-source-2.6.1
i   kernel-source-2.6.10
v   kernel-source-2.6.11
p   kernel-source-2.6.8


Where's the 2.6.12?

My sources.list has:

deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

I just updated via aptitude yesterday.

Is this part of the fun of unstable, or am I doing something wrong?

...

Er, I just noticed an earlier post referring to linux-source-2.6.12 
is this a new naming convention?

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Re: unstable: udev and the elusive 2.6.12

2005-10-03 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-10-03, Antony Gelberg penned:
 Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 I must be missing something here ...

 Yep.

 Er, I just noticed an earlier post referring to linux-source-2.6.12
   is this a new naming convention?

 Yep.


Hrm.  I guess I haven't been keeping up.  I assume this is to make it
easier to, say, have debian running with both linux and bsd, etc?

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Re: apache-ssl and php4

2005-09-26 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-09-26, Tim Jordan penned:
 I have a server configured with apache and php4 working great.  I
 just added the apache-ssl package and I created my own certificate.
 My problem is now when I try to access a .php page over SSL I get a
 prompt to download the file instead of it opening in my browser.

 Could someone please advise on what I'm missing?

 Thanks so much,

 Tim


home:/etc/apache-ssl# grep php httpd.conf
# distribution - see http://www.php.net) will typically use:
#AddType application/x-httpd-php3 .php3
#AddType application/x-httpd-php3-source .phps
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps


home:/etc/apache-ssl# grep php modules.conf
LoadModule php4_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/libphp4.so


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Re: Problem with the setup process

2005-08-31 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-08-31, Raj M penned:
 I am a newbee to the linux system. 

 In order to have debian as my OS, I downlaoded from
 the debain website, the stable 3.1 version. I
 completed the installation as per the debian setup.
 Now after rebooting and entering the login and pwd
 information, I get the following information. 

 Debian GNU/Linux comes with absolutely no warranty,
 to the extent permitted by applicable law. 
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]: ~$

 I am stuck after this message. What should I do next?
 I couldn't find any tips/direction in the Debian book
 that I have with me.


You're looking at a command prompt.  The ~ indicates that you're in
your own home directory.  Congratulations!  You have a working Debian
system.

What you should do next depends on what you want to do next.  What do
you want to do with this machine?


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Re: mutt + dovecot/squirrelmail + mbox ?

2005-06-05 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-06-05, Lee Braiden penned:
 On Sunday 05 Jun 2005 05:51, Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 So I finally bit the bullet and installed IMAP so that I could use
 one of the non-openwebmail webmails.  Squirrelmail's docs make a
 big point of how if you're running mbox and don't make sure the
 locking mechanisms are well-coordinated, you run a risk of turning
 your mailboxes into hamburger.

 I'm not entirely sure of what you're trying to do here.

Good point.  I wasn't exactly clear, was I?

For the last few years, I've been running mutt directly on my mail
server to access mbox-formatted mail.

I adore mutt, but there are a few situations when webmail is handy.
Sometimes I don't have the time to install and configure an ssh client
on the machine to which I have access, for example.  Sometimes I get an
email with a lot of links, and I'd like to just middle-click and open
them in new tabs.  Stuff like that.  So for a while now, I've been using
openwebmail, which is mildly annoying but did the job without requiring
IMAP or MailDir.

Now it seems that openwebmail isn't considered to be all that great,
has lots of security vulnerabilities and IIRC is no longer being
maintained as a Debian package.  So I had a look around.

Squirrelmail seems to be extremely popular as a webmail client, so I
went with that.  I chose Dovecot because it seemed pretty light-weight
and simple.

So, to summarize, I mostly want to use mutt to access my mail
directly on the server, but every now and then I also want to view my
mail using a web client.  I have screen running all the time, so mutt
will almost certainly be open to my inbox when I open up the webmail
client.

 But if you just need IMAP functionality for some web interface, and
 want it to be fast and lock-safe, then there's another option: dbmail.

 It'll store mails in a mysql database for you (postgresql too, but it
 seems to be optimised for mysql).  Shouldn't be any access issues,
 since dbmail's IMAP interface and its own client utilities do all the
 access.  Chances are, if you're running web stuff, you'll be using
 mysql anyway.

 The only downside is that you lose direct access to the files, so
 running spamassassin on your spam folder becomes a lot harder, *if*
 you want to keep your spam folder in IMAP too, that is.

Yeah, that's just not going to work for me.  IMAP is really just a
means to the end of webmail for me, but webmail is only a secondary
concern; I need to be able to run mutt, and being able to use grepmail
and similar utilities is also pretty important.

 Anyone have a script for processing remote IMAP folders with
 spamassassin, by the way? ;)

Good luck with that!

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Re: mutt + dovecot/squirrelmail + mbox ?

2005-06-05 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-06-06, Rogério Brito penned:
 On Jun 05 2005, Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 For the last few years, I've been running mutt directly on my mail
 server to access mbox-formatted mail.

 I have switched to mutt (from pine) since the pre-1.x days (it's ben
 more than 7 years, as far as I can remember) just for reading my
 mail in Maildir format and I haven't had any problems with that
 (well, besides when Debian's mutt got some header cache problems,
 but that was a problem with mutt and not with Maildir exactly).

Yup; I'm not worried about mutt's ability to handle Maildir.  I think
I've been using mbox because I'm familiar with it and because I know
that, push come to shove, more tools support mbox than support
Maildir.  I also have some logrotate stuff going on (I have procmail
save messages to a backup mailbox before it applies any rules, then
use logrotate to eventually phase out the really old stuff.  It saves
me from any malformed rules, and it also helps when I realize I've
just accidentally deleted a useful email).

[snip]

 Sometimes I get an email with a lot of links, and I'd like to just
 middle-click and open them in new tabs.

 This problem you can solve easily with urlview.

No, not really.  Well, sort of.  On machines where I have an xserver
installed, I can use that approach, but it's noticably laggier
(UI-wise) than running the browser locally.  And on machines where I
can't run an xserver, it's obviously not an option.  And I didn't know
that urlview could open things in new tabs of an existing session, but
I guess there's no reason it couldn't.

(It's just occured to me I could probably cobble together some Java
using RMI to address the issue of calling a browser on a different
machine ... sounds like a project!  I hope no one's done it already.)

[snip]

 Yeah, that's just not going to work for me.  IMAP is really just a
 means to the end of webmail for me, but webmail is only a secondary
 concern; I need to be able to run mutt, and being able to use
 grepmail and similar utilities is also pretty important.

 What's the problem with having mutt access your mail via IMAP on
 your local machine? I've been doing this for quite some time and it
 works quite well.  And it also opens the possibility of you using,
 say, horde as a webmail server which can contact courier-imap to do
 its job.

It's been a while since I've used IMAP with a regular client, but IIRC
it's slower and more cumbersome than direct access.  Specifically, it
takes a while to load mailboxes, and I have some very large mailboxes.
There's also the issue of having to deal with passwords or some sort
of authentication method.

 It may be that courier and horde aren't the best solutions to the
 problem, but the infra-structure that you'll use will mostly be like
 that, in terms of the problem you're trying to solve.

I've had some trouble installing horde, actually, and I just kind of
got annoyed and gave up.  Horde provides way, way more than I actually
need or want.

Dovecot and squirrelmail seem to be okay so far ...

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mutt + dovecot/squirrelmail + mbox ?

2005-06-04 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

So I finally bit the bullet and installed IMAP so that I could use one
of the non-openwebmail webmails.  Squirrelmail's docs make a big point
of how if you're running mbox and don't make sure the locking
mechanisms are well-coordinated, you run a risk of turning your
mailboxes into hamburger.

How do I find out if mutt and dovecot see eye-to-eye on locking
mechanisms?

I've heard lots about how dangerous mbox is and how I should probably
not even be using it, but I've been using mbox for an awfully long
time now, and I have a feeling that converting my system would be
non-trivial.  Or at least annoying.  While I understand that maildir
allows you to isolate corruption to single messages instead of the
entire mailbox, I guess corruption just seems so unlikely that I
haven't worried about it.  I'm sure it will bite me soon.

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Re: bash error handling help

2005-06-03 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-06-04, theal penned:
 I am have a script that uses a for loop to copy files to about 100
 servers.  I know how to get it to exit the entire script on an
 error, but I only want to stop what it is doing for the current $i
 and move to the next. here is the basics of the script. there may be
 some syntax errors in this script as I have edited it for public
 viewing.

Without looking in detail at the script, I think you're looking for
the continue keyword.  `man bash`, search for continue.

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Re: Openwebmail package removed ???

2005-05-17 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-05-17, Robert Vangel penned:

 I'm using squirrelmail, and found it really nice. Obviously it isn't
 quite the same (IMAP as opposed to local spool) but it means I can
 use it to connect to a remote server if I want to.

That's exactly the problem.  Openwebmail was the only webmail package
I could find that didn't require IMAP.  I really hope there's
something out there that fits the bill, but I'm not holding my breath.

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Re: Kernel advice/help

2005-05-17 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

[Followup-To: header set to gmane.linux.debian.user.] On 2005-05-16,
DesScorp penned:

[snip]

So here's the problem; the instructions ask for the location of the
kernel source code, which should be /usr/src. There's nothing there,
and if I'm correct, only the kernel image itself (/boot/vmlinuz) is
present. Should I be looking somewhere else, or does Debian not
install kernel source?

If that's normal, how should I proceed? When trying to apt-get the
same kernel version I already have, I get the already have this
version message. So can I simply go to kernel.org, pull down a
tarball of 2.4.27-1-386 and install the source in /usr/src for when I
need to compile something? That seems awfullyun-Debian like. And
I'd like to do it the Debian Way. Advice is appreciated.

Well, I build my kernels myself, but no one else seems to have
answered this, so I'll take a stab ...

The package you're trying to grab is the pre-compiled kernel. In
order to get the source, you want to get the kernel source package:

http://packages.debian.org/testing/devel/kernel-source-2.4.27

I think (not sure) you need a deb-src line in your
/etc/apt/sources.list, in addition to the deb line, to get that.

However, I'm not sure you need the actual source in order to do what
you're describing; I think you just need the header files, which you
can get with a headers package:

http://packages.debian.org/testing/base/kernel-headers-2.4-386

But first, are you absolutely sure that debian doesn't have a packaged
driver for this stuff? A search on 2.4.27 got me this list of
modules:

http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?version=testingsubword=1exact=arch=anyreleases=allcase=insensitivekeywords=2.4.27searchon=names

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Re: Openwebmail package removed ???

2005-05-17 Thread Monique Y. Mudama

On 2005-05-17, Jacob S penned:

 Sqwebmail doesn't require imap or pop. (Though it does require
 courier-authdaemon, which is what it uses for authentication and to
 find out where the maildir is located.)


Thanks; I'll look into it.

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Re: Resolution setting for XDM with and LCD

On 2005-05-15, N. Ross penned:
 Hi,

 I installed Woody and have a problem when I start X.  During the
 installation I specified that I use an LCD monitor with a native
 resolution of 1280x1024, but when I load twm or fvwm, the display is
 set to 1280x960.  In addition, the desktop image appears as a series
 of alternating grey/dark grey horizontal lines (is it supposed to be
 a solid color?).  I tried using CTRL+ALT+{+,-} with no effect.
 Anyhow, I just want to set the resolution to 1280x1024.

 Here is the Monitor and Screen section in my
 /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (I haven't changed it since the install):

[snip]

 Section Monitor
 Identifier  Generic Monitor
 HorizSync   30-60
 VertRefresh 50-75
 Option  DPMS
 EndSection

[more snip]

I believe X spits out a bunch of stuff to the screen when it loads.  It
should tell you whether or not it likes various resolutions, and why.
You can typically take a look at that screen by using ctrl+alt+F1 once
the GUI has loaded; then use alt+F7 (I think; maybe some other F-key) to
get back to the GUI.

What does your monitor's booklet say about horizontal sync and
vertical refresh?  Mine had very specific values for these.

I also had some trouble getting X to play nice with my LCD monitor.
The settings from the monitor's book weren't great.  I googled for my
monitor, found some modeline stuff, and then used xvidtune to tweak
it.  Here's what I ended up with (note that the specific values are
almost certainly WRONG for your monitor; this is just an idea of the
general form):

HorizSync   63.53
VertRefresh 59.59
ModeLine 1280x1024 108 1280 1344 1656 1700 1024 1029 1032 1066

Note that rather than having a range of values for HS and VR, I have a
single value.

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Re: partitioning help

On 2005-05-16, Adam Majer penned:
 Franklin Parlamis wrote:

 i tried to partition my hard drive for a debian woody install.  it
 is just south of 80 Gb and IDE (from a Compaq EVO D510 I am
 tranferring from Windows platform).  i wanted to go with 6
 partitions, which would require using an extended type physical
 drive to put the logical drives in.  using cfdisk, i made hda1
 bootable and type 83 (2 Gb), hda2 type 82 (10 Gb).  but when i
 tried to make hda3 an extended type (05, i believe) it would not
 let me.  any thoughts?  my bios is compaq 68602 v2.20.

 You don't make the extended partition. With cfdisk, you create
 either Primary or Logical partitions. This question is asked when
 you create a new partition. You can only have one block of logical
 partitions. If you try to mix them up too much you might end up with
 unusable disk space (until you repartition your drive)


To follow up on this,

If you have access to parted, you may find that it's a friendlier way
to partition and format a disk.  The help command actually is
helpful, and the error messages when it won't let you do something
are also pretty clear.

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Re: partitioning help

On 2005-05-16, Lee Braiden penned:
 On Monday 16 May 2005 19:23, Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
 If you have access to parted, you may find that it's a friendlier
 way to partition and format a disk.  The help command actually is
 helpful, and the error messages when it won't let you do something
 are also pretty clear.

 Helpful online help?  This parted of yours sounds like a minor open
 source revolution ;)

Hah!

Well, *I* find it helpful.  YMMV, of course.

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Re: partitioning help