KCLUG July 2007

kclug@kclug.org

39 participants
30 discussions

Re: Free Cellphone Service- New York Times
by Luke -Jr 06 Jul '07

06 Jul '07

On Thursday 05 July 2007 22:22, you wrote: > Just call up your asterisk box while at home, using the wifi so the call is > free. Sure, and waste 3x the bandwidth at a major drop in quality (digital to analog to digital, even before final termination!) > Have the asterisk give you a dialtone to dial out with, and just never hang > up. Asterisk doesn't give dialtones on its own except on actual analog lines.

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None
by James Sissel 05 Jul '07

05 Jul '07

And what happens when you are walking by (but not in) the coffee shop with the free WiFi and get arrested just like the poor man checking his email in his car? http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060622-7111.html Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins(a)tarcanfel.org> wrote: July 5, 2007 STATE OF THE ART IPhone-Free Cellphone News By DAVID POGUE Man, oh man. How'd you like to have been a PR person making a cellphone announcement last week, just as the iPhone storm struck? You'd have had all the impact of a gnat in a hurricane. But hard to believe though it may be, T-Mobile did make an announcement last week. And even harder to believe, its new product may be as game-changing as Apple's. It's called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, and it's absolutely ingenious. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, and yet enrich T-Mobile at the same time. In the cellphone world, win-win plays like that are extremely rare. Here's the basic idea. If you're willing to pay $10 a month on top of a regular T-Mobile voice plan, you get a special cellphone. When you're out and about, it works like any other phone; calls eat up your monthly minutes as usual. But when it's in a Wi-Fi wireless Internet hot spot, this phone offers a huge bargain: all your calls are free. You use it and dial it the same as always - you still get call hold, caller ID, three-way calling and all the other features - but now your voice is carried by the Internet rather than the cellular airwaves.

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Web services "in" the KC area.
by Arthur Pemberton 05 Jul '07

05 Jul '07

Just though you gentlemen may be intereted to know that The Metro's "Trip Planner" at kcata.org has been updated: it nolonger has the artificial restriction which limited to Windows+IE, and (seems) to work in Firefox cross OS, and also seems to work. It also seems to work in Konqueror, so I guess it should work in Safari. It seems to be written with ASP.NET, so it is cookie laiden, and it uses AJAX in a way which I personally consider to make it less useful that its previous version. Contrastingly, Time Warner Cable's online chat claims to support Netscape and IE only, so far I've tried it in IE. So unless it really works in Netscape, no cross OS, or even Firefox support. The support-analyst I spoke with, they will be focusing on IE because "Firefox does not come bundled with Windows, so we know that everyone will have Internet Explorer" , which of course presumes that only Windows exists - but the chat service is at least better than their telephone answering service. Peace -- Fedora Core 6 and proud

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Update: Using memory key as boot directory
by Leo Mauler 05 Jul '07

05 Jul '07

I just wanted to let everyone know that the Compaq PC I was going to boot using a USB memory key, turns out not to support USB booting. I was a couple of numbers off on the Compaq serial number. Fortunately, I've discovered an alternative: Compact Flash cards. Seems you can buy a Compact Flash interface card which attaches like a regular expansion card to your computer. On one end you plug in a Compact Flash card, and on the other end you plug in a regular IDE cable. The expansion card doesn't use a PCI slot. The card has jumpers to select Master/Slave (no Cable Select I'm afraid) and you power it using a regular floppy power connector. Since /boot can fit into 50MB or less, I'm going to make a 64MB Compact Flash card into the boot directory. This will let me use an 80GB hard drive in a computer which has a 64GB hard drive limit BIOS. This did get me to thinking about the whole concept of putting huge hard drives into very old computers, as Compact Flash completely masquerades as IDE. Even if the system doesn't boot USB, it will almost certainly boot CF on an adapter. This makes it a lot easier to bring old hardware back into circulation with larger new hard drives: instead of a 10 year old 1GB hard drive for a /boot directory, you can use a 1 year old CF Card. I'm going to try booting from a CF Card on my old laptop one of these days: it has an 8.4GB limit and I have this nice 10GB laptop hard drive lying around, as well as a PCMCIA CF Card adapter. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Got a little couch potato? Check out fun summer activities for kids. http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=oni_on_mail&p=summer+activities+for+kids&…

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Challenger
by Earle Beason 04 Jul '07

04 Jul '07

Eerily enough..... Your correct, it does share memory, and a good portion of it. As for upgrading it, I got it this thing in the scarp pile, did enough cleaning and basic troubleshooting to get it operating. I only have plans to use it to teach myself the basic of various Linux systems. My goal is to create an Office document, watch a DVD, play an MP3, get wireless accesss to the Internet on each distro and the scratch it and go to the next distro. It more of a learning toy then a functional computer for whatever it is I do. I have Fedora 7 on my tower that I becoming more and more inclined to use as I escape the clutches from Microsoft. My old tower is starting to look more like Linux bait ever day, I have some programs I haven't figured out how to run on the Linux box. I probably wait until Microsoft hamstrings the XP program in order to force me to go to Vista. The Dell Laptop I have will keep the Microsoft program on until my warranty expires then, It going Linux the next day Good book to read, should be the lug mantra http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg246380.html I suspect that the Thinkpad laptop is using shared video memory with system RAM. You might be able to reduce the amount of shared video RAM in the BIOS to allow the install to complete. Additionally, adding system RAM would be a good idea to enhance system performance especially for Fedora Core 6 or Fedora Core 7. A smaller footprint distro might also be a workable solution as described below in the prevoius post. I hope this helps. Thanks, Jeffrey A. McCright, A+ 816-210-3107

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Question-Challenger
by Earle Beason 04 Jul '07

04 Jul '07

I got my hands an a Pentium 3. 256Megs of memory, Ibm think pad, I can't upload Fedora 6 or 7 due to lack of resource. I would like to use this for four things, 1 listing to MP3, 2, watching DVDs, 3 office work with the standard Open Office. and 4 Internet accesss using a wireless. It has a fair sized hard drive considering it's age, Like 20G. I am clueless on what to do with this project, at this moment and I am open to options so for anyone with some spare time who can offer ideas and thoughts.

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Re: Kclug Digest, Vol 36, Issue 3
by Earle Beason 03 Jul '07

03 Jul '07

The Laptop itself is on the skits, and I suspect has a very short life ahead of it, the previous owners were not nice with it.(bad spots on the LCD, the soda that was dumped on it, missing hard drive/memory, cracked case) It was one of those "Neat! a laptop in the scrap pile, wonder what can I do with it" type of situations. Fedora 5 will load, Fedora 6 runs in to a memory error, Fedora 7 just requires to much memory, Suse 10.2 loaded nicely, and worked well on the laptop, but it didn't work well with me. Slackware was horrible, don't know what I did wrong yet, Ubuntu was bloody slow. Knoppix worked, I honestly could have staid with that. I picked up Xandross and was going to give that a wack and the Puppy sounds like fun. I ran out of ideas to try with this laptop and needed fresh inputs Yup, this Laptop going to be the whored out to the distro and pay for my Linux Education and good old Hard Knocks University > >

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meeting on indep. day?
by David Nicol 03 Jul '07

03 Jul '07

Is the regularly schedld kclug meeting on or off, what with the holiday? -- You can be a coffee achiever You can sit around the house and watch Leave It To Beaver The future's up to you So what you gonna do

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Why wouldn't Fedora work again?
by cragos＠gmail.com 03 Jul '07

03 Jul '07

I'm not a Red Hat-guy, but I'm hard pressed to see a reason why Fedora wouldn't work on this machine. A recent build of Debian worked just fine on my ~300mhz G3 with similar specs until its recent demise. Try installing FC7 or a recent build of Ubuntu and try it out - It'd probably work just fine with a light weight WM like XFCE, Icebox, or Blackbox. That said, if you'd be happy enough with a minimal distro, DSL-N or Puppy Linux would probably get the job done. DeLi doesn't meet your requirements out of the box as it lacks native OpenOffice support. -Sean

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Using USB memory key as boot directory for older computer?
by Leo Mauler 01 Jul '07

01 Jul '07

I have found a lot of articles on installing an entire Linux distribution onto a USB memory key. What I want to do is install Linux on an older computer, with an 80GB hard drive, but the BIOS doesn't like hard drives bigger than 64GB. The computer is one of those systems built to fit inside a compact case, so there is only room for one hard drive inside the case. As you know, Linux ignores the BIOS, so once it boots any size hard drive is okay. In ye olden days I'd use a floppy to boot the computer, but I'd much rather use a 64MB memory key for /boot so that I can use modern kernels. The computer itself will boot from a USB device. I have all of the parts I've mentioned and not enough money to buy anything else. Can anyone direct me to some assistance in getting a distribution installer (CD distribution) to recognize the USB memory key at boot time, so that it can be used as /boot? Also, does the USB key need to be initialized as bootable before beginning the Linux installation? I'm still deciding whether to use Ubuntu or Debian, though I am leaning towards Ubuntu. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Need a vacation? Get great deals to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel. http://travel.yahoo.com/

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KCLUG July 2007