Windsor UNIX Users Group - Software

Open Office spotted in local school. (no replies)

Sherriw — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:55:20 -0500

Just for fun I thought I'd mention that I got a kick out of discovering that the local highschool LaJeunesse (near Dougall and ECRow) (French Catholic board) is using Open Office. I asked one of the teachers about it since all the schools I've gone to were married to MS Office. He said they are actually given Word Perfect from the board, but the school downloaded Open Office b/c it's compatible with more formats (including MS .doc files) compared to Word Perfect. Heh. I just like the the students are learning and getting familiar with it.

Free Book: Virtualization for Dummies (no replies)

ezod — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:32:59 -0400

Free Virtualization for Dummies book download, courtesy of Sun:

[www.sun.com]

mail through a provider-blocked mail port (1 reply)

bradbobak — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 09:38:46 -0400

Can I do this? Can I somehow get my mail forwarded to my domain on some arbritary port? Seems like cogeco is intercepting my port 25 transmissions.

Google Summer of Code (no replies)

ezod — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:50:34 -0400

Anyone planning on participating in Google's Summer of Code this year?

It's a great way for students to get involved in contributing to free software projects. If you'll be a student as of mid-April, and you have a bit of coding know-how, check it out! The mentoring organizations will be announced March 17, and student applications are due by March 31.

I'm planning to submit a few Gentoo Linux proposals, along with possibly some for GNU, GIMP, Python, LyX, and any other interesting ones. Students can submit up to 20 proposals.

Standalone WM, anyone? (3 replies)

ezod — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:10:05 -0400

In recent years, I frequently see people commenting that the standalone window manager paradigm is dead and that integrated desktop environments like Gnome, KDE, XFCE, et al are where it's at.

I'm just curious if anyone else out there still prefers a more basic approach. I originally got familiar with Open Look on Sun machines, and I haven't felt the need for much more. I've been using Blackbox standalone for years, doing most stuff in terminal windows (vanilla xterm). Recently, I installed ROX to use as a standalone filer as well. I find this setup very productive, particularly since it doesn't hide my system behind abstraction layers and wizards, and to boot, it's incredibly fast and resource-efficient.

I've tried Gnome, KDE, and XFCE, along with CDE on Solaris, and nothing really stood out other than (a) somewhat tighter integration between applications, although nothing that can't be done with a little grease in a standalone WM, and (b) the ease of setting up otherwise complicated things, like CUPS printers. I should mention that none of my pet applications are married to Gnome or KDE libraries.

For those who do find desktop environments indispensable, what features make it worth the bloat and restriction?

lol, anyone ever had to deal with bcm43xx-fwcutter before? (1 reply)

Gh0st_Pirate — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:26:28 -0500

lol, anyone ever had to deal with bcm43xx-fwcutter before? what a pain in the ass! just curious if anyone else had any experience using this.

IMAP clients suggestions? (1 reply)

Matt Draisey — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:40:29 -0500

I'm looking for a good imap client on linux that will let me get a hang of how imap works. I have just tried using imap in evolution and wasn't impressed.

Google has just added imap support to gmail and google/apps mail accounts. I like the idea of being to synchronize my local hierarchy of mail with the online version. Evolution is my current email client and has 6 years of mail stashed away in a complex hierarchy. My google/apps account is only a year old (when I finally got fed up of running spam filters on my own server) and all my recent mail is duplicated there but with only superficial tagging. I don't yet know enough about imap to synchronize my mail properly and evolution's documentation is terrible

I have been considering abandoning evolution for years now --- I really don't like the way it splits mail up to Inbox, Outbox, Sent, Drafts, Trash, etc. --- it really messes up mail threading.

Everything I know about imap I have gained in the last two hours, the last hour of which was spent in fruitless googling. I would welcome any help I could get.

Phorum Info & News Module (no replies)

ezod — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:54:39 -0400

Back in April when we launched the new site, I created an Info & News module for Phorum (you see it in action on the main page). It's been working satisfactorily for a while now, so I'm going to go ahead and post it for download.

Description: This module adds side-by-side panels at the top of the index page for site information and news. The settings allow selection of the forum to source news from and modification of the info box.

To Do: I'd really like to be able to limit news articles to the first post in a thread (the parent topic), so that people can reply in the news forum. I'd also like to have the info section read BBcode instead of HTML. Both should be fairly easy to implement, but I don't actually know PHP...

WUUG Pamphlet: Contributing to Free Software Projects (1 reply)

ezod — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:59:19 -0500

Here's the pamphlet I whipped up for tonight's meeting, about different ways of contributing to the free and open-source software community. Being in a hurry, I paraphrased material from two sites without permission. Hopefully the authors, in the spirit of F/OSS, won't mind. :)

FUSE + Gentoo + Kernel 2.4 (no replies)

ezod — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:11:31 -0400

I just tried to compile FUSE on my Gentoo sparc64 server, and portage spits out the following error:

!!! kernel 2.4 is not supported by this ebuild. Get an
                        older version from viewcvs

which, naturally, occurs because I'm running kernel 2.4.34 on that box (and for various reasons I want to keep it that way). It fails to mention here or in the changelog what the last version of the ebuild to support kernel 2.4 was. Google doesn't help much because apparently this is just a Gentoo thing, since FUSE's site proclaims "Runs on Linux kernels 2.4.X and 2.6.X".

Anyone know what version of the Gentoo ebuild I should be looking for?

PGP/GPG (no replies)

ezod — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:34:15 -0400

Anyone else use PGP/GPG? I fell out of using it for a while when I started using Gmail exclusively, but now with FireGPG it's easy to use again.

We should be having a meeting soon (September hopefully, if the U of W gets back to me in time) and I was thinking we could do a keysigning party.

Either way, you can get my public key here or on the MIT PGP Public Key Server.

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys DEBEF479

MS and Patent garbage.. (2 replies)

Zer0 — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 09:10:09 -0400

Ok first of let me say that I'm not some crazy Micro$oft hater. I think there is a time and a place for MS products and they work great for some people. Just because I love open source doesn't mean I need to hate Windows I just choose not to use it much like how a gearhead prefers cars he/she can mess with over a family sedan.

But I digress, when MS pulls BS stunts like their recent patent attacks and shifty deals with Linux I want to hate MS. I read desktoplinux.com daily and with all the recent articles about MS deals with various distro's to let them use propritary codecs etc have been getting me worried.

I know MS has something tricky up their sleeve, the devil's in the details here.. Actually I think we are signing a contract with the devil. Among the distro's who are seeking agreements with MS are.. Red Hat and Linspire (I'm sure there's more).

Now today I read that MS is complaining about 235 patents being violated by Linux and OSS. Take a freakin hike MS and get out of my OS!

eerrrr I'm so mad right now!

Anyone else following this? How do you feel?

local dns server setup (3 replies)

bradbobak — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:59:39 -0400

Hi, I'm running clarkconnect with a dns server so I can point my internal machines to 10.0.0.1 and have dns.. What I want to do now is to allow any box on my lan to specify something like 'ping my_internal_box' and have my dns server provide the corresponding internal ip address for my_internal_box.. I'd like it so that boxes on my internal network don't have to supply the trailing domain name.. Any ideas?

Xnest (2 replies)

bradbobak — Thu, 03 May 2007 14:56:45 -0400

Hi guys.. if I use 'Xnest' on one system to access xdm (or somesuch) on another is the system running Xnest acting as the server? if so, (using openbsd) how would I set things up on the openbsd box to watch for an Xnest login attempt and run xdm?