Very Computer

Hi all, here is a post from another newsgroup by a poster who's new to
Linux and took the bull by the horns, and got his Winmodem running.

What a world of difference between a Windows user new to Linux, but
willing to learn and a anti-Linux poster who can't *ever* seem to
get Linux working.

Note that the distro is Suse, one that has been atacked repeatedly here
on Cola by the anti-Linux spammers.

Date: Thu, 09 May 2002 02:39:49 GMT
Lines: 14
User-Agent: KNode/0.7.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit

You are gonna really pop a cork with this one.  I went ahead and jumped
right in with both feet.  I installed SuSE 8.0 on the slave drive.  Kept XP
on C, and when SuSe installed I did a manual configuration on the
winmodem.  Danged if it didn't work. Of course you know that since the
headers will show this message is coming over via KNode instead of OE.  Now
to figure out how to set up the filters and to remove old messages. Kill
filters were easy to set up in OE  might take a while to figure out the
scoring in KNode.  And how to apply the values.
BTW thanks for the help.

--
              Kind Regards from Terry
My Desktop is powered by GNU/LinuX, Sorcerer kernel 2.4.17  
Free Micro burner: http://w3w.arafuraconnect.com.au/~tp/burn.html          
 ** Linux Registration Number: 103931,  http://counter.li.org **

Error Log for Thu, 09 May 2002 05:35:07 -0400: segfault in module "Terry

Quote:> Hi all, here is a post from another newsgroup by a poster who's new to
> Linux and took the bull by the horns, and got his Winmodem running.

> What a world of difference between a Windows user new to Linux, but
> willing to learn and a anti-Linux poster who can't *ever* seem to get
> Linux working.

What I found amazing when I first started using Linux is that even though
I had absolutely *no* idea what I was doing, just by following the
directions available everything Just Worked (tm).

Windows you follow the directions and it still doesn't work.  Then you
install a patch to fix that problem and something else stops working, and
so on, and so on.

I think I'd still have a full head of hair if it weren't for M$ products.
(:-)

--
rapskat  -  6:20am  up 14 days, 16:04,  5 users,  load average: 0.20, 0.21, 0.15
drop the hot to mail me

Fear is power -- Gowron

this is pretty cool!!! hey Terry, did ya tell
the poster how to do scoring and filtering ????

[snip]

--
+==================================
| M i c h a e l  J.  T o b l e r
| Authorship: "Inside Linux" ...
| "C++ Unleashed" ... "C++ How-To"
| Motocycling, Surfing, Skydiving
+==================================

 wrote
on Thu, 9 May 2002 19:35:07 +1000

Hmmm...does that mean we can't call 'em "Winmodems" anymore? :-)

Welcome to the club. :-)

--

EAC code #191       83d:00h:50m actually running Linux.
                    This is my other .sig.

Okay, I'll gleefully admit that this wasn't quite the case for me.
<donning matador costume, waving red flag at resident trolls...>

I set up my first linux box in late Dec. 1997.  (I'd been using unix for a
couple of years but had no admin experience whatsoever.)  I found that
the howtos, at least for nontrivial tasks, tended to proceed through
various "checking" stages; i.e., "try this; if that works, then go on to
the next section."

When I went to set up ppp in early 1998, the relevant howto said to
first try setting things up manually.  You fired up minicom, dialed into
the remote modem, issued the "ppp" command on the remote machine to get
things going (this is a campus modem I dial into, those details might be
different for different folks), then quit out of minicom (without
disconnecting the modem).  This was supposed to keep the ppp link active.

Didn't work.  Link kept dropping after I left minicom (maybe not right
away, but not long enough for me to do anything).  Drat, I thought.
For kicks I glanced through the rest of the howto (too see what I
would be missing?); basically the next seciton was trying the
automated scripts ("ppp-on" at the time) once you get things working
manually.  So I typed ppp-on (I'd gotten config scripts from a
coworker).

Whoosh.  ping?  yes.  telnet? yes.  lynx? yes.  All working spotless.

A little after that I finally got around to installing ghostscript
and diving into the printing howto.  cat to /dev/lp0 worked, no sweat.
The other checks in the howto were working ok as well.  Then came
the ghostscript-specific stuff.  "Fire up printtool, and setup this
config file (I believe /var/spool/lpd/(my printer)/general.cfg)."  Oops.
I had a dinky little compaq with 8M ram and <200M free hard drive, and
I lacked the chutzpah at the time to tackle installing X even without
those hardware issues.  Can't run printtool without X.  Time to give
up.

Well, lemme look at this general.cfg file first.  "THIS FILE IS
AUTOMATICALLLY GENERATED BY PRINTTOOL!  DO NOT EDIT MANUALLY!  THIS
MEANS YOU, DARRIN!"  Well, ok, not quite but pretty close.  But gee, I
thought, this looks like, well, a config file.  There are commented
lines (text obviously meant for humans, with a # on the left); and


volts to blow through the monitor and destroy him like on Star
Trek...)

GRIND GRIND GRIND (this was an Epson stylus color from 1995, they're
kinda loud ;)) There's my document.

So basically I'll go along with your assessment of things just
working.  You do occasionally have to be willing to _not_ follow the
directions though :)... I.e. not give up if one of a serious of
"tests" fails, and not to take dire warnings too seriously in (flat
text! could anything be better?)  config files.

Sadly, I'd like to be able to include the digital camera I just got my
wife in the success stories above.  <pausing... the crowd is
tense... doesn't he see the bull charging from behind... oh no, he
seems tangled in that stupid red cape... he'll be gored for sure...>
But no, I followed the (web, not vendor ;)) directions and everything
did "Just Worked (tm)".

Quote:> Windows you follow the directions and it still doesn't work.  Then
> you install a patch to fix that problem and something else stops
> working, and so on, and so on.
> I think I'd still have a full head of hair if it weren't for M$
> products.  (:-)

Well, last MS OS I used was 3.11, so probably noone's interested in
my comments on that subject.  But with linux, I have everything I need
to get my work done (and have a little fun as well).

Cheers,
Darrin

For it was written by rapskat:

Quote:> What I found amazing when I first started using Linux is that even
> though I had absolutely *no* idea what I was doing, just by following
> the directions available everything Just Worked (tm).

Indeed, to re emphasise what you've just said, the only occasions things
haven't worked for me is when I have been too obtuse to follow the
instructions.

--

Ian - looking through a glass onion

Hey dude, do you think we might have a class action
here?????

--
Regards, Joe
GNU/Linux user # 225822

Not yet but I sort of figured out some of the filtering.  Very similar to
old netscape mail reader way of doing things.  I also suspect that the
different e-mail newsreader programs all have similar methods.  OE was real
easy to block a specific poster.  Click on the message menu and then click
on block sender.  Poof all messages from that e-mailer gone.  But only if  
the poster used the same e-mail address.  Of course you could create a rule
and say filter all posts from Granny Grumblepants no matter what e-mail
address was used if Granny Grumblepants always used that as an identity. I
fully suspect that using KNode has similar but slightly different ways of
doing the same.

As for getting the winmodem going  I remembered which comm port was being
used and which IRQ from setting it up in winxp.  I told SuSE to use those
settings and it worked.  More than likely even though the modem is a
winmodem it also has some features of the older nonwin.  You can turn off
Plug and Play for instance with a jumper on the modem card.

I will probably get a bit of blasting from both sides for what follows.  I
like both SuSE and Winxp.  SuSE because I now have an alternative that
works, unlike some other publisher releases of Linux.  WinXP is worlds away
from Win 98 and the travesty called winME.  Winxp has done everything asked
of it by me so far.  Yeap I have gone online and downloaded the updates.  
Hmm just like I will have to do with Suse.  You see both operating systems
have an update button in the desktop.  Well sorry about the long winded
post.  But it's now 8:00pm eastern time and Star Wars is gonna be starting
in a few minutes.  See you tomorrow.  And if I ask really stupid questions
about linux, well I'm a newbie<G>

[snip great post by terry with a nice recap by rap]

Quote:> I think I'd still have a full head of hair if it weren't for M$ products.
> (:-)

lol .. thats why linux geeks are hippys ;-p we don't pull our hair
out as often {or ever} so we CAN grow it long ...

on Fri, 10 May 2002 at 00:03 GMT,

Welcome to the Linux community and to COLA.  Feel proud, you got your
hardware to work with Suse Linux, that is something that the various
anti-Linux propagandists plauge this newsgroup claim is impossible for a new
Linux user.

--
I run Linux, no *y RedHat, Debian, Slackware, or Corel, just Linux.
May all that you wish upon me and mine be visited upon you ten fold.

on Thu, 09 May 2002 at 10:26 GMT,

Now to come to think of it, I perhaps should have been amazed by that as
well, back with I first got started with Linux.  But I don't recall feeling
amazed, just relief that I in the early 1990's I had a OS that was as
reliable as what I used to use in the prior to 1980.

When I got started with computers, and OS crash was all but unheard of.
Routine crashes would never have been tolerated.  Reguardless of a timeshare
system, and punch card/printout system, or a teletype interface.  The
computers and the operating systems were expected to just work and keep
working.  When testing a new application software that you were writing,
crashes were possible, but the OS was supposed to and did handle the
application crash gracefully leaving the other tasks and other users working
away without a worry.

Then came the first microprocessors without memory protection or management.
Things were not so safe anymore, if you crashed the program with a bone head
error like this one:

xor a
ld b,a
ld c,a
ld h,a
ld l,a
ld d,a
ld e,a
inc e
ldir

You would have to expect the whole system to go down.  But other than
something like that or hardware failure, you could depend on even those
8-bit microcomputers to just keep running and running and running.

But Windows and Dos changed all that to the point that most people accept
frequent crashes of the OS as being a normal part of computing.

When I again had a stable, reliable, and dependable OS in the form of Linux,
I was not amazed, I just felt that it was about time that the computing
world get back on track and permit us to once agains have systems as
reliable as we had in the 1970's and 1960's.

Quote:

> Windows you follow the directions and it still doesn't work.  Then you
> install a patch to fix that problem and something else stops working, and
> so on, and so on.

Note to self: Oh!  I must write that article in the morning..

Quote:> I think I'd still have a full head of hair if it weren't for M$ products.
> (:-)

;-)  Is Windows the reason that Rogain sells so well?

--
I run Linux, no *y RedHat, Debian, Slackware, or Corel, just Linux.
May all that you wish upon me and mine be visited upon you ten fold.

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On Sat, 11 May 2002 00:27:57 GMT,

Quote:> In Dread Ink, the Grave hand of whytewolf Did Inscribe:

>> lol .. thats why linux geeks are hippys ;-p we don't pull our hair
>> out as often {or ever} so we CAN grow it long ...

> Damnit, now ya got me missing my hair... at one time it was 13+ inches
> long; took me a year and a half (stopped growing at 9 months). Ehh,
> it went to a good cause though; Locks of Love, they make wigs for children
> with cancer. You need at least 9" IIRC to qualify.

If I ever chop off the approx 2ft I have, I will give them a call, I
promise. Actually, come to think of it, I will be hacking it off before
we go offshore, in a couple of years.

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--
Jim Richardson
        Anarchist, pagan and proud of it
http://www.eskimo.com/~warlock
Linux, from watches to supercomputers, for grandmas and geeks.