Linux Gazette 92: The Answer Gang
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...making Linux just a little more fun!
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The Answer Gang
By Jim Dennis, Ben Okopnik, Dan Wilder, Breen, Chris, and...
(meet the Gang) ...
the Editors of Linux Gazette...
and You!
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We have guidelines for asking and answering questions. Linux questions only, please.
We make no guarantees about answers, but you can be anonymous on request.
See also: The Answer Gang's
Knowledge Base
and the LG
Search Engine
Contents:
- ¶: Greetings From Heather Stern
Important: Apache install problem
- couple of questions regarding printing on Linux, pls
- New hard drive
- Redhat 7.2 upgrade to Redhat 9.1 without booting from a disk
Greetings from Heather Stern
Hello everyone and welcome once more to the world of The Answer Gang.
This is a time of holiday in the United States as it celebrates its
Independence Day holiady -- nowadays mostly an excuse to go picnicking,
and enjoy a lot of professional fireworks.
Let me see, in 1996 it was theoretically possible to declare your
indendence from Microsoft - but really, desktop Linux still had a long
way to go. Had PGP even been invented yet? We had spreadsheets all
over the place, some work on a nice little TeX based word processor --
interoperability still needed a lot of work. On the flip side, Linux
was invisibly serving a lot of systems out there, as was
FreeBSD, because sysadmins and
engineers stuck with a problem to solve and folks breathing down their
necks about it, could sneak in a small pentium and just apologize later,
knowing the bosses would be just plain unlikely to unplug it after it had
been running for a month, saving their bacon.
I'm sorry we're late with the current issue. Life's been a bit hectic
(is this any surprise?) and a few changes are going on under the hood.
Not only that but Murphy's Law seems to have it in for me...
I finally
had to upgrade that 386 I've been so proud of for years - I tried to
bribe it with a new power supply, and everything. Finally I brought it
out of the server closet on a link in my open lab. Some stray keyboard
call and boom, dead as a doornail. If the keyboard controller chip
goes, there's just nothing more your can do about the motherboard; take
its memory and cpu and math-coprocessor and sell them on eBay, and make
the empty motherboard a downrange missile target. Don't worry, I'm
still your well known curmudgeonette! It's now on a 486 overdrive chip
and sounding pretty good.
I had to move a client system during that window of sanity between "the
new drop has arrived" and "can we do this over a weekend so DNS can get
over it's confusion while we're not looking?" Guess when that put it -
you guessed it, deadline week. Luckily this doesn't happen too often.
Even more luckily their successful transition to new IP numbers is one
of the fastest I have ever seen. I need more clients like this one
I had mentioned that my Star Trek free software user group has been
doing internet lounges. At least that went well - we had a great time
at this last one, only toasted two monitors (sigh, this happens to old
spare monitors occasionally) and people are just in love with
Knoppix. I can tell you,
it's not the icons, because nobody reads tooltips, or reads icon labels.
It's the not having to login, and if anything goes wrong - or they are
worried about privacy, or basically ANYTHING - they can just
reboot it. Whee! I do have plans to play with
Sunil's customization tricks and
probably nail down some of the real FAQ generators. But overall, I say
live CD based distros are really nice. Mind you, we did have to have a
couple of machines that could play CDs to make everyone happy.
I'd score it as a big win for Linux though.
The spam that has been leaking through is particularly silly. Some bot
must think we're a "Gang" in the Hell's Angels sense, because now we're
getting offers to sell us motorcycle gear. Lemme see, most of us
already own leather jackets, and the ElfOS guy can't get a
finer bike to ride. So sorry, guys. Then we have the hits on
homework, offering us educational discounts... for a special you can
get this week, if you answer two weeks ago. Hope that class project was
a TARDiS. D'oh!
I've tried a bit of an experiment this month; the longer Tips that you
are seeing are the shorter kind of answers that used to fill pages and
pages of The Answer Guy column. We have some of the small ones stacked
up, but these looked pretty useful. Of course, TAG is filled with the
banter you're all used to, but perhaps these are shorter threads than
you're used to seeing -- things were late enough already
Have a lot of
fun this summer!
Copyright © 2003
Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.net/copying.html
Published in Issue 92 of Linux Gazette, July 2003
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