[Preston] Hello

[Andrew King]

Matthew said:

 > If you don't mind me asking, which school do you work at?  I lived in
 > Penwortham/Preston all my life up until Oct 2001 (now at Lufbra uni).  I
 > went to Priory High (now a 'technical college' I believe).  I was a
 > temporary network admin there for a couple of months when they were 
waiting
 > for a new full-time one.  (I hadn't even heard of Linux or Open-Source in
 > those [~1997] days.)

I'm at Moor Park, the old grammar school just opposite PNE.

 > I am keen to delete Windows but there've been a few stumbling blocks:
 >
 > * My Intel HaM winmodem worked find on SuSE 8.0 but not on MDK9 and 
without
 > internet access at home (its 10Mbps LAN at uni :D) I can't use Linux 
solely
 > (need e-mail, OSNews.com, PlanetUnreal.com etc).

I had fun with them - decided I'd just go ahead and replace it (and that
was during college days when money was more scarce). I went to a
computer fair and explained my situation to the first random stall that
had modems. The guy showed me one and said that sure enough it was a
real hardware modem, so I bought it and got it back only to find that
red hat couldn't see it. Tried it on a windows machine with the driver
disc and sure enough it was a winmodem. The wording on the box didn't
explicitly state that it needed Windows though (else I wouldn't have
bought it). So I rung them up, and got this complete psycho insisting it
wasn't a winmodem and he wouldn't give me my money back. I told the guy
I'd go to trading standards, so he agreed he'd refund it then.

Ended up having to bike to south port (15-20 miles from Preston?), and
the guy really was a psycho. Wouldn't like to see him again without a
few years of martial arts training. His shop was well dodgyt hough -
tiny thing right behind a house, so that you'd have no idea it was there
if you walked past on the street. So that's possibly why he didn't want
trading standards to know.

Got an ISA 56k one in the end - it's been fine.

 > * Office Software seems not too great at the moment.  OOo is nice but 
looks
 > terrible and doesn't read my M$ Office documents too well (or 'convert'
 > them, at all).
 >
 > If you have any pointers, I'd be really pleased to hear from you.

I've made do with Abiword/OO/KWord/vi and a canon BJC-4200 and survived, 
but admittedly get away without having to use office software that often 
- mostly just for CV's and when management need something in writing. 
Hoping to get away with TeX when I get back to uni, but things might 
have changed by then anyway. I can see how it could be a hard time 
persuading someone who uses Office 2000 a lot to switch to any of the 
other open source alternatives - there's no way it's going to happen 
here in the next couple of years at least.

 > Also,
 > which distro of Linux do you use?

Started off on Red Hat, then switched to Debian last year. I think that 
Red Hat and Mandrake (and SuSe no doubt - haven't tried it) are great 
for helping people get into Linux, and if you really can't be bothered 
to spend hours setting everything up for a particular machine, and so 
still suggest to ppl getting started to go for one of them - but 
Debian's great for the apt-get system (especially with broadband). Just 
installed Debian on a nice scsi 1GB UK-Online rackmount system we've 
been given today.

 > Do you prefer GNOME or KDE?

Hard choice - have used KDE 1, 2, and 3 and GNOME 1 all for at least a 
few weeks each. The virtual screen thing that Gnome has, where you can 
move the mouse to the edge of the screen and it flips over to the next 
desktop, is definitely useful imo, and afaik KDE doesn't let us do this 
(would be grateful if someone could prove me wrong there).

 > I am also waiting to switch until Gnopernics is out (screen 
reader/magnifier
 > for GTK+2) but as soon as I have these things sorted out I'll be 100% on
 > Linux :).  There is nothing more annoying than buggy access software on a
 > buggy OS that you know you could fix (or try to :D) if you had the source
 > code....  I should thank M$ as they've given me a great motivation to
 > discover something much better and hopefully migrate to it :D.

That's a point - can you replace Access for at least fairly basic 
database stuff by using front ends to MySQL/PostgreSQL now, does anyone 
know?

At school, for one thing, I've been keeping tables of all our IT stuff 
(in HTML, stupidly). It's now at 268 workstations, printers, laptops, 
etc, and it'd be useful to be able to find out straight away what's in a 
certain department, what a particular staff member has signed out, etc 
etc. Reckon that's worth having a go at implementing as an SQL database?

 > LUG meetings are always good but I am currently only able to make
 > those here
 > at Lufbra.  Maybe at Easter there will be a PLUG meeting - I'd love 
to > come along.

Other random question, if anyone's reading this: we've got a rackmount 
cabinet - fairly tall one - probably something like 6ft, and it's full 
of switches and patch panels and so on. So we got given this rackmount 
server a few months ago, only to find that it doesn't fit. In terms of 
height, it's 1u, but it goes back further than the cabinet - it's about 
1.5x the cabinet in terms of how far it goes back. Is there any kind of 
standard measurement system for depth of rackmount devices, in the same 
way that they're 19 inches wide and so many 'u's high? Current plan is 
to just rest it on the top.

Andrew