Linux Gazette 76: The Answer Gang
By Jim Dennis, Ben Okopnik, Dan Wilder, Breen, Chris, and...
(meet the Gang) ...
the Editors of Linux Gazette...
and You!
Send questions (or interesting answers) to
The Answer Gang
for possible publication
(but read the guidelines first)
Contents:
- ¶: Greetings From Heather Stern
We send their spam to the Luxury Bitbucket
- Setup of ipchains when using ftp
- Can't get all my True Type fonts to get recognized
- USB mouse goes missing
- booting multiple linux distributions
- ext3 filesystemcheck?
- Soyo Shutdown
- How do I use a 250 zip with linux mandrake 7.2 --or--
- Reading Iomega 250Mb Zip Cartridges/Media
- socket doubt --or--
- How Do You Detect if a Server Closed a TCP Connection
- Hard Disk: BadCRC errors from dma_intr on bootup...
- FTP Server
- setting nameservers from the command line
Greetings from Heather Stern
Hey everybody and welcome once more to The Answer Gang. It's gotten a
little crowded in our little weekender pub here -- one querent offered
us some cake though, and I'm sure we'll enjoy it...
The statistics: We now have 60 members in The Gang. Less than 10
people received no answer whatsoever (and this can be attributed to things
like no subject, or no clear problem description). Spam is down immensely
since Dan went and made some of the dead trout into a Rube Goldberg machine,
reducing the mails that flew by me to somewhere around 500.
The dumb thing of the month: Some mailers not only turn stuff into HTML, but
they smush all the spaces out of it themselves, and then put the results in
quoted-printable. Glork. Much to my amazement that person got some answers
though I can't tell if they helped him. But it certainly didn't get pubbed;
I couldn't read it to tell if it was juicy...
But the real Rant Of The Month has to go to The
GNU Project for making it sexy to stop shipping man pages !?! Sadly this
isn't news. But definitely sadly, there are so many different places around
that helpful data might be ... and probably isn't, since many packages
pick one and don't have the others ... that we're gonna need a "wtfm"
command. An rtfm command that works would have to depend on it.
That stands for "Where's The Friendly Manual?"
Particularly egregious since distros now have to figure out their own way to
cook up replacesments, so when some cheerful soul pipes in "Oh just check the
man pages" ... the user can actually find one ... sigh ... Debian has a
standard undocumented.7 man page, which can be summarized:
Yes, we know there's no man page. It's already been filed as
a bug, thus you see this. If you'd like to write one for this
app and submit it we sure would appreciate it.
Don't even get me started about distros that tell you that you can't
get any help at all unless your webserver is working.
Phooey! I'm not going to let it ruin my weekend. I'm going to a filk
conference, as I do a couple of times a year. This particular one is
Consonance in the Silicon Valley
area. There will be bunches of computer songs there and I plan to be up
late singing a few of them. Regular readers already know about my
autobiographical filk song but I've written one about my
laptop, and a couple about Linux'ing, too. I'm not the really prolific
one though. My friend Steve Savitsky has enough to fill at least a couple
of CDs... and heck, that's just his computer songs
Have a great month everyone. I know I will!
This page edited and maintained by the Editors
of Linux Gazette
Copyright © 2002
Published in issue 76 of Linux Gazette March 2002
The Answer Gang
