[Glastonbury] The Glastonbury Linux Users Group

[Martin WHEELER]

On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, Kelvin McNulty wrote:

> Do let me know when there is a meeting at the school...

Should be one this month, Kelvin -- Steve's i/c timetable, so presumably
he'll let us know when the first meeting is to take place.

> I have SuSE Linux 8.0 on one machine - with a completely smashed up Konqueror,
 ...
> and 8.1 on another machine which will not access the Web reliably...
 ...
> and 8.1 on a third machine

Hmmm -- sounds like you're a good candidate for a small local network.

Here I have a firewall running Mandrake, which hasn't been touched for
two years.  It just sits there doing its stuff, dialling out, accepting
calls, filtering out spam, and has never given me any problems.  (It's
the Mandrake dedicated firewall CD -- I can let you have a copy if you
want.)  It's the only box that talks directly to the outside world.
And it was simple to set up.  We have an indentured slave who lives out
Somerton way who can do it in his sleep.  [Just make a noise like a
couple of pints of beer, and he'll come running.]

All my other machines on the network are running Debian 3.0 (sarge),
with a 2.4 kernel, and they all access the internet via the firewall.
(Even Elisabeth's machine, which is a dual-boot Win98/Linux box, and
which she uses under Win98 all the time.)  Various laptops come and go,
and are also plugged into the 'net via the firewall (stuff a CAT 5 cable
in the back of the box, and away you go), so I don't have problems with
inbuilt dodgy winmodems.

Is that part of your problem do you think?
What modem(s) are you trying to run?

And certainly the behaviour of Konqueror you describe is something I've
never encountered.  (Sounds a bit like a severe memory leak.)  In your
case I'd just blow it away, and use YAST to re-install it on the
particular machine affected.  And if it's definitely a Konqueror/KDE
incompatibility problem, try installing Mozilla instead.  Or use a less
resource-intensive window manager.  (I use icewm when I get fed up with
the demands of Gnome and KDE.)

> Linux - great system, I love it, but it is not very user friendly...

That's why we have the Luser group!
(Actually, it *is* user-friendly -- it just doesn't make friends easily
with Win-bound mentalities, is all!)

> if anyone
> out there understands the dial-up networking on Linux, do get in touch.

Fire away.
When using RH-based systems, I usually find kppp is sufficient (as
Nirwin says: should be no probs there); before I installed the network,
I used to use xisp on indivdual machines, and was very happy with it.
I installed it out the box, and it just worked, once I gave it all the
good numbers.  (I have to admit I never had any problems with SuSE.)

Andy -- would you care to comment here?

>  Just what
> has Redmond got on dialup that the open source community has not?

An iron bloody grip on your computer; what it may contain; who it may
talk to; and what it's going to allow you to do with it -- that's what.

Beware operating systems (apparently) bearing gifts!
-- 
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
mwheeler@startext.co.uk                http://www.startext.co.uk/mwheeler/
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