Author Archives: Donncha

Grab install-sendmail and finally get email working on your machine! This script will install a mail server suitable for use on a stand alone machine as well as a network mail server. Be warned though, it won’t work with the latest Sendmail(version 8.9.2), that’ll come later.
Of course, Kernel 2.2.0 came out today! 🙂

Linux Power has a few interesting articles right now, especially the introduction to a series on writing games in Linux.
There are some really cool demos linked from The PC Demo Fan Club. Incoming Future is absolutely amazing, but win32 and 3dfx only. 🙁
Heretic has been ported to Linux! I downloaded and compiled the source without a problem. Couldn’t run it because I didn’t have the Heretic graphics or data with me in work..
A script to install Sendmail is coming RSN! I learnt a LOT during the last two days installing mail on our local network. My script should make any budding sysadmins jobs easier!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, I and my family suffered a great tragedy this Christmas which has changed all of our lives. My mother passed away on Christmas Eve after a short and sudden illness.
“Mom, we miss you.”

Seems that lowrent.org is down at the moment. Thankfully, my Xoom site is being watched!
Lots of cool things happening but due to unfortunate occurances in real life I just don’t have the time to report anything.
Happy Christmas!

Here’s a page supporting Cross-ELF, a library that runs graphical applications in Dos/Windows and of course Linux. The page is part of Cotting Software Productions, and you can find Cross-ELF examples as well as other programs there.
TDGraphics is another cross platform games development library which I found on Freshmeat.
It “allows programmers to write computer games which transparently run on Unix (X, DGA, GGI) or Windows (DirectX)”. I’ll be downloading a copy soon!

I found TinyGL, a Small, Free and Fast Subset of OpenGL at Freshmeat. I’ll give it a go in a few days. Could be interesting for demo coders who approach coding in a minimilist fashion.
Numerous corrections have been made to my Intersocs report below.
On Dec 1st, TechTV interviewed Owen Kelly about Linux. Here’s a short RealVideo movie (860K) of the interview. Unfortunetly, I haven’t been able to play it in Linux, but it does work in Windows players. MPEG version to come later maybe.

I’ve written a report about the Intersocs conference in Galway which happened over the weekend. Check it out below. If you were there and want to add anything, tell me and I’ll append it.

On Saturday 28th of November I made my way up to Galway in the west of Ireland for the Intersocs Ireland Conference ’98 that was taking place there.

I travelled from Cork with Owen “BLG” Kelly early on Saturday morning and just made it to National University of Ireland, Galway for the first lecture by Kenn Humborg which was delayed by almost an hour for some reason.

The lectures were in a theatre on-campus. The theatre holds a large screen (2×2 metres perhaps) which was used to present the lectures. It was really cool seeing an X display on such a huge screen! Especially seeing someone typing in an xterm, typing “ls”, “cd”, or typing “make” even!

Kenn went to a lot of work for his presentation. He created a set of slides using Magicpoint explaining some aspects of Linux networking, how IP masquerading works, how sendmail can be configured and he touched on related topics.

After a short break, the presentations continued with a talk by Joe Desbonnet about setting up Apache as a web server. Unfortunately Joe had been out the previous night so his talk was a small bit unprepared. He went over the configuration files Apache uses (httpd.conf, access.conf and srm.conf) and continued about using Perl and mod_perl. He spoke a little about the dangers of using mod_perl (memory leaks), how to combat those dangers (no sloppy coding, and the server kills threads every 150 hits), and the speed advantages of mod_perl.
He talked a little about the two HTTP protocols, 1.0 and 1.1, and telneted to port 80 of his own machine to demonstrate how a human could send commands to a web server.

A talk on HTML by Ken Guest followed this. It was presented in a browser of course, and links to related documents were included. Ken talked about different aspects of writing web pages by hand, and stressed the need for using compatible tags, hence, probably, his plain presentation which could have been viewed by any browser from Lynx upwards.
Ken shared some of the tricks he’s learned in creating web pages, such as putting a <BR> tag after text in a table in case the browser doesn’t understand tables or doesn’t interpret them well.

A public demonstration installing Linux was to take place soon afterwards but many of us went into Galway city center in search of refreshment. After burgers and drinks we walked around for a while before making our way back to the university for the aforementioned demonstration.
There were two machines, one had RedHat 5.2 on it and was at the stage where X was displayed on it, although the video card in the machine was unsupported by X and they had to resort to VGA.
The other machine was running Suse 5.3 which wasn’t as far advanced in the install, because XF86Setup defaulted to a refresh rate too low for the monitor.
The demonstration seemed to lose momentum before people in the audience started asking about applications for Linux. Several business men asked about desktop suites, to which many pointed out the excellent Star Office and Applixware as well as pointing out that Corel would be releasing it’s office suite very soon.
Alan Cox pointed out that Star Office was free for non-commercial use describing that concept as, “great!”, for trying out applications.
After that the discussion turned towards applications and became more informal as Kenn Humborg fetched his computer in and set it up with KDE and showed off the smart looking GUI on his machine. Ken showed off Klyx, and some of the configuration dialogues in KDE. I took over for a few minutes to show how simple it is to set up a printer on a RedHat system (using printtool) and went on to explain some of the benefits of using Linux.
At the same time people were walking around, talking in groups, or just sitting quietly. Alan Cox had quite a crowd around him within a few minutes. Unfortunately we were kicked out half an hour later at 7:30pm.

The “Great Nerd Table Quiz” took place later in the college bar where most people had drifted to by 8pm. I didn’t stay. I went for dinner with Owen and his brother at Pasta Paradiso which serves the most beautiful pizzas! If you’re in Galway make sure you try them!
In the end, the table with Ray Kelly, Sean McGrath, Joe Kilcullen and Kenn Humborg won the table quiz.

An ironic event occured when I tried to register at the hostel Ken Guest had booked.
They use cards with a magnetic strip to gain access to rooms in the hostel and they have to be swiped before you can use them. Unfortunately, mine didn’t work twice and I had to be registered again. I noticed they were using an MS Access database on their machine to register people and just when my details were to be entered the database crashed and had to be restarted..

Alan Cox

This was the guy a lot of guys came to see I think, at least judging by the crowds gathered around him most of the time! He took it all very well, chatting away and listening, “just like one of the lads”.

After the first 2 presentations he was introduced to us formally and a brief questions and answers session followed.
Topics discussed ranged from:

• The development kernel (linux.org ran 2.1.129 for a day and a half before crashing, porn sites are the best sites to use to test the abilities of any new kernel.
• GGI
• speech recognition (emacspeak, Festival)
• The structure of RedHat was asked about. RH has a marketing and sales department like most large companies! RHLabs was created because Mark wanted to get into real work again. In RHLabs they have lots of PCs and even a Nintendo!
• Alan wasn’t going to be goaded into the whole QT/KDE vs Gnome battle. He believes the two desktops won’t merge as both groups want to work on their respective projects.
• He’s payed to do kernel things 🙂
• Kernel in CVS? Linus doesn’t want it to happen. A small number of people have to know what’s going on everywhere. They have to have a view of the whole kernel development. In CVS this would be too hard to do.
• They might persuade Linus to use Jitterbug though.
• Alan tries more patches than Linus does. That’s why you get the AC versions of some of the patches. Linus isn’t payed to do what he does. Alan is, so he can afford to work longer on the kernel and fix any bugs that might occur.
• Mac floppies are _very_ difficult to support. Supposedly, Apple did everything they could in software, and anything else, well, they did that too.
• When asked about the Corel Netwinder, Alan said the video, “wasn’t quite that fast”, and it had the performance of a Pentium. He talked about joining 15 of them together to make a very powerful computer, but nobody wanted to turn it on for fear of breaking anything!
• Alan said that IBM are interested in PowerPC Linux.
• Linux on the Xeon can address 2 gigs of memory. He knows things about Merced development he can’t tell anyone!

Related Links

• There are photos of the event at http://www.linux.ie/intersocs98/photos/
  I’m not there, which you should be rather glad of!
• Irish Linux Users Group
• Intersocs98 is an information page hosted by The ILUG.
• Using Linux as a gateway is Kenn Hummborg’s Intersocs talk.
• Websites with Pico is Ken Guest’s talk on web development.

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Corrections:
(3-Dec-98) John Allen pointed out that it was Joe Desbonnet, and not Joe Desmond, who presented the talk on Apache. He also informed me that the Suse machine mentioned above was an old machine, and the refresh rate was too low for the monitor they selected in the setup.
(7-Dec-98) Kenn Humborg pointed out that I spelt his name wrong, and told me who won the table quiz.
(16-Dec-98) Ken Guest was the guy who demonstrated KLyx, not Kenn Humborg. He also emailed me links to the talks presented on the day.

4 Things:
I’ll post a report about last weekend later on today. Good weekend. It’s something we’ll have to do again!
Deregulation of the telecom industry in Ireland occured today!! Telecom Eireann now have competition in the home/consumer market! Here’s hoping we get flat rate or free local calls!
If you live in Ireland, watch Techtv tonight on Network 2. It’s on just after 10pm (I think) and will have a short Linux report interviewing Owen (BLG) Kelly. I saw adverts for it on tv last night and they showed a logo I did in the GIMP for his web page!
Finally, I’m 23 today! Yep, getting older. I remember the days when we all coded in assembly and…

I’m off to Galway for the weekend. There’s going to be a gathering of Linux people at Galway University on Saturday morning, as well as a night out that night. Alan Cox should be going as well as most of the Linux guys in Ireland. Look for a report next week!
I got an interesting email during the week concerning real-time processes, and another subject upon which I’ll base a quizlet soon.27

I received an email from Tim Newsome yesterday. He talked about giving a demo real time priority so it could execute smoothly. I would have agreed with him a few months back but I believe Linux is capable enough to handle the strain of a demo without resorting to giving it (the demo) complete access to the CPU. Hardware prices are dropping every day, and entry level machines are now much faster than the machine I work on at home(or at work..)
I want to see demos running on an X desktop. Maybe, with a slightly higher priority than other apps and it is possible.
Hey Tim! Wanna code a demo?

Something completely different now.
Recently I was on the receiving end of the evangelism of a highly sophisticated organisation wanting me to support it. I did too. I completely believed what I was told for 2 weeks. The organisation is Amway.
This is a company that will deliver products your door, at a cheaper price and promising a full money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with any product. There’s more to it than that, if you tell people about Amway and they buy goods, you get a small percentage bonus if they buy over a certain value of goods.
The problem is, the system is brain washing.

You’re encouraged to go check out Amway, but after hearing how good it is from the Amway representative and the fact that it is probably a friend who introduced you to Amway, many people will likely not check out Amway. I didn’t.
It was only after telling a friend, Dave, about the business that I checked up on it. He asked me questions about taxes and things I couldn’t answer. He brought up ideas that frightened me at the time. Do a search for the word Amway on Yahoo now and see some of the sites dedicated against Amway. They’re what I found.
I confronted my Amway “upline” with questions from Dave. He answered some of the questions well enough, and he did say that a company called “Donnagh & Bradstreet” would say that Amway are ok. I accepted this at the time.
The same evening I searched Yahoo for “Amway” and found out that “Donnagh & Bradstreet” are an acreditation firm. They’re guys who know if a company is a good bet to lend money to. Obviously I didn’t want to loan Amway money so their information would have been useless.
There’s also a list of steps to take to guarantee success in Amway. One is the system of motivational books and tapes. This isn’t an Amway thing, but organised by others. Later I remembered that on Will Smiths’ latest album there’s a guy who wants to do a business deal with Will, and promises him some of the proceeds of the motivational tapes and books..
They’re smart. I talked to a person I was told introduced Amway to Ireland, and the guy was a brilliant salesman. No, more than that. He had an answer for everything. One slip up though. He used Bill Gates as an example of a successful business man. To a non-computer person this might be encouraging but not to me. He described his business more eloguently in that sentance than at any other time.
I complained to him that a friend had tried a washing powder and wasn’t happy with it.
He asked me if I thought she was an expert in washing powders.
I replied, “No, but I’m sure her mother is.”
To which he replied, “Ah! But there’s plenty of mothers will buy it!” and smiled with a terrible grin.
As a learning experience, Amway can’t be beat. I learned more about myself and about human behaviour and motivation than I have in a long time.
Why is this relevant to Linux? Have you asked yourself why the GPL is the way to go when coding software? Have you looked at the Artistic Licence Perl is distributed under? Do you know the complete facts about something you’re advocating?