"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 22:40:39 -0500
From: Tom Cannon tomc@usit.net
Subject: Cobal

Are there any Cobal compilers that will run under Linux, I have a serious need to move some code to the Linux platform if there is something available. Thanks.

(Check with Acucobol Inc., info@accubol.com, https://www.acucobol.com --Editor)

Date: Sat, 21 Jun 1997 16:02:04 -0400
From: Linda Brooks lbrooks@stc.net
Subject: Packard Bell SOUND16A Soundcard

I have a Packard Bell Pack-Mate 4990CD, which has a soundcard apparently called a "SOUND16A" (the documentation doesn't make it clear whether PB or Aztech made it, or if it was a joint production). It is a 16 bit sound card, which I can use under Windows 95 as such. However, in Linux, the best I can do is 8 bit sound (via Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 emulation). The card claims to support MSS, but nowhere in the documentation or setup program does it specify which IRQ this runs at, although it does tell what port. I have contacted Packard Bell's tech support, but they say they only support Windows software for free, and that if I wanted to talk about Linux or some such operating system, I would need to get "special support" which would cost a ridiculously high number.

As a struggling college student, I don't have much money to spend on the computer (it is actually my family's that I scratched up enough space to install Linux on), so I can't get a new sound card, and I am not even sure if the commercial sound drivers support this particular sound card.

I'm probably spoiled by Windows, but it's not asking too much for 16 bit sound so I can listen to 44KHz samples in stereo (I'm quite a MOD fan), listen to MP2's or MP3's, etc...

I'm not much of a coder, so I can't go about writing my own drivers. If anyone knows of how to set up this sound card for full 161 bit sound, please inform me. Or, if you know of any 8 bit .MP? players, that would work too =)

Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 12:03:00 -0400
From: Albert Race race@dgms.com
Subject: Linux HELP!

I would like to install Linux on a Sun 386i machine with 16 meg of ram, 2 350 meg scsii drives color video adapter and a tape drive, and Network support. When I try to install using a boot disk, I get the following message.

	Boot: Device fd(0,0,0): Invalid Boot Block

This occurs with any boot disk except for Sun. Is there a way I can get Linux to install to this system? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. If you can not help me, Please redirect this message to someone who could. I don't know where to get this type of information. I received these machines for free and would like to put them to use using Linux.

Thank you Albert F. Race

Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 11:44:43 +0200
From: Claudio cricci@cpiprogetti.it
Subject: Matrox

Is there a chance to correctly configure a Matrox Mystique with 4MB RAM under X or I must throw away it ?

Date: Mon, 2 Jun 1997 00:11:40 -0300 (EST)
From: Rildo Pragana rpragana@acm.org
Subject: Interfacing Genius Color Page-CS Scanner

Hello, Please help-me to interface my Color Page CS desktop scanner to Linux. Now, I can scan only from Windows (Argh!!) and it would be fine to have The Gimp accessing my scanned material. I can program in C and Tcl/tk, if I at least have the information on its SCSI card, and the scanner itself. Any information you may have is precious to me. When I have this job done, of course, I'll be happy to publish my adventures in the Gazette.

best regards,
Rildo Pragana
Greetings from Recife, the Brazilian's Venice

Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 14:36:09 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Bubar bubarda@sch.ge.com
Subject: Q: How do you un virtual a virtual screen?

My screen maybe 800x600 but my virtual screen is set at something like 1600x1200. How do I change this? Note:

1. This is not virtual Desktops, I like use of the PAGER
2. I wish you would put out a configuration guide for X that does NOT have to be a TOME but a small book(let) that helps users customize X to work the way they want.

Date: Mon Jun 16 13:46:14
From: Ade Bellini, AdeBellini@aol.com
Subject: *2+ Processing

Sir, I am a 35 from Sweden using at present *2 90 Pentium /NT4 and Slakeware 1.2.13 and Red Hat 3.0 (and DOS 6.22 !) all on the same machine. (paranoid !) I am interested in knowing how to take advantage of the *2 cpu's on a Linux based machine. Any thing regarding *2 + processing is of interest to me, as i use the NT4 as a server and would like to try using Linux instead. many thanks in advance

Ade.

Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 07:33:50 -0700 (PDT)
From: David Mandel dmandel@transport.com
Subject: CD Burners, Scanners, Digital Cammeras, etc.

I have a mess of family photographs and possibly 35mm slides that I want to preserve. One idea I'm considering is scanning these and putting them on CDs. So I have a few questions.

1. Will a Sony CDU926S burner work with xcdroast? The documentation says a Sony CDU920S will work, but I don't know the differences between the CDU920S and CDU926S. A bare bones (no docs, drivers, software) CDU926S is only $265. The MS ready version is $350, but who would want that?
2. What is a good, but cheap flatbed scanner to use? (Good means 24 bit color and >= 300dpi optical resolution.) What software (in Linux) supports the scanner?
3. I can't afford one, but... Are there any 35mm slide scanners on the market with Linux support?
4. And as long as I'm asking dumb questions... Does Linux have support for any digital cameras yet? Someday many of us will want to change to digital photography, and it would be awful to have to learn Windows to do this.

Thank you for your time and help,
Dave Mandel

(We'll have to depend on our readers for 1 and 3. As to 2, we use the HP5P flatbed scanner, which fits your qualifications for good. As to cheap it depends on your definition--it sells for around $400. The Linux software that supports all HP scanners is XVscan, and a very nice program it is. As to 4, the answer is yes; Hitach MP-EG1A, https://www.mpegcam.net/. --Editor)

Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 09:01:06 +0100 (BST)
From: Andrew Philip Crook shu96apc@reading.ac.uk
Subject: Ascii Problems with FTP

When I use a dos ftp(in ascii mode) program to download a Linux Script, because it is not running yet, the script fails to work when installed. This is because a ^M is appended to every line, take them out and it works.

What's happening?

How can I stop it?

Or how can a filter all the ^M's out?

Many Thanks
Andrew Crook.

(In a couple of last year's issues, there are several Tips & Tricks for getting rid of ^M. You can't stop them from happening. I personally get rid of them in vi using a global replace (e.g., :%s/^M//g); one command and they're gone forever. --Editor)

Date: Thu, 05 Jun 1997 23:08:08 -0400
From: Steve Malenfant, smalenfant@cablevision.qc.ca
Subject: Problems with XFree86

I'm a new user to Linux and the problem still XFree86! So then I tried to know want can I do to Linux community. In Issue #16, you said that the problem is not video card and is Monitor balancing. So why Windows 95 can have all these preset on monitor and Linux don't have? Why we can't use the stuff in the Microsoft Lib to transfer it into the database of XF86Setup or something like that. Cause that's real that the dotclock and all this is very scrambled! Why not just resolution and Virtual Refresh, that's all we need to know, the program could do the rest! We don't have to know what horizontal frequency and dotclock it is!

Steve Malenfant

Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 15:39:58 -0700
From: Kevin Hartman KevinH@hsaeug.com
Subject: Afterstep

Would anyone be interested in an Afterstep customization how-to/where to get?

Kevin

(Have you got one setup or just trying to find out if there's a need? --Editor)

Date: Sat, 07 Jun 1997 02:34:57 -0400
From: sinyz, sinyz@superlink.net
Subject: Need Help

Hi, If you happen to have time on your end please be so kind as to answer a few questions for a newbie!

Well , here is the situation and I need to get some serious advice from people like you. I have been reading the newsgroups and HOWTO's . They have been quite informative and ,increasingly so, as I continue . Now , thank GOD I got my Linux (RED HAT 4.1) box set up and running on my slave drive with Win95 on the Master. It detected my CDROM and I also configured my Xwindows (X11R6) .

But there are couple of questions

1. I have a video card of type diamond s3 virge 3D 2000 . The driver for S3 was a choice in the XF86Setup which I chose and everything seems to work fine. Also I chose the 800*600 resolution SVGA monitor . I have been hearing rumors from friends that the video card when being used by Xwindows may mess up the monitor . This has been troubling me quite a bit . What's up with this ??
2. I read using the dmesg command that Linux at boot time does not notice that there is a device on tty1 . The specific line reads this

   Serial driver version 4.13 with no serial options enabled
    tty00 at 0x03f8 (irq=4) is a 16550A
    tty03 at 0x02e8 (irq=3) is a 16550A

   There seems to be no mention of tty1 (com 2 irq 3) where my modem is installed at !How to fix this ?? By the way my modem happens to be a plug-n-play modem -SUpra 28.8bps. I have heard that pnp modems have problems with Linux and there are fixes for pnp types - please recommend any.(In effect how do I get my Modem to work)
3. Also I did not notice during the boot time messages any thing to do with PPP Protocol which I definitely need to dialup to an ISP . Does that mean recompiling the Kernel -- HOw ( if red hat distribution has specific or simpler way of doing things then let me know ) Thanks a lot in anticipation.

Date: Wed, 11 Jun 1997 11:06:57 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Martin Lersch lersch@athene.informatik.uni-bonn.de
Subject: User-Level Driver For HP ScanJet 5p?

Hello! Please can you point me to some direction were I can find a user-level driver for the HP ScanJet 5p? There exist the HPSCANPBM driver which works in part, but does not support the -width and -height options for the ScanJet 5p. I guess it was written for a ScanJet 4c or something like that. BTW: The homepage of HP does not give much support for Linux users. They do not publish the ESCAPE sequences of the scanners.

Regards, Martin Lersch

Date: Sun, 01 Jun 1997 00:56:52 -0500
From: Piotr Mitros pmitors@mit.edu
Subject: WordPerfect for Linux

Before more users spend many hours downloading the 50 megabyte (!) WordPerfect for Linux, you may want to note that the beta download lets you get a demo version that times out after just 15 days. They seem to have demo versions of WordPerfect 6 available, so it is not that big a deal.

However, I would like to see a comparison of WordPerfect for Linux, StarOffice's word processor and the what is planned for GNU WP.

Piotr

(I'd like to see that comparisom too. --Editor)

Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 06:42:47 -0400
From: Stephen L. Cito al256@detroit.freenet.org
Subject: Question about downloading the archive

Hello, I'd like to download the past issues of LG (having enjoyed LJ now since last fall), but I don't think I could even get an 11 meg file downloaded over my 14.4 modem within the 1 hour that I have before my local Internet connection (the Greater Detroit Free Net) times out on me. Is there any way to download the past issues in smaller "chunks"?

Thanks and have a real nice day...

SC, Novi, MI

(Hmmm, that is a problem. No, I don't save the individual tar files of previous issues separately. There is, of course, The Whole Damn Thing, option for each issue which gives you the issue as one great big file. Not as nice as the normal multi-file format but very popular so must work for some. --Editor)

Date: Wed, 04 Jun 1997 22:52:36 -0700
From: James Zubb jimz_@ecom.net
Subject: ActiveX for Linux

Hi, I read the ActiveX for Linux question in the Answer Guy's article, I did a little looking and came up with a web site: https://www.sagus.com/Prod-i~1/Net-comp/dcom/index.htm

I don't know if this is actually the ActiveX port for Linux or not, I didn't feel like trying to figure it out, but there is a Beta for Linux there. Beats me what it does or how it does it...

-- Jim Zubb

Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1997 19:01:40 +0100 (BST)
From: Adrian Bridgett apb25@cam.ac.uk
Subject: Re: X Color Depth (In response to the message by Roland Smith)

Normally 8-bit displays use 256 colours chosen from 2^24 (16,777,216), and 15/16/24/32 bits displays just use a fixed number of colours spread "evenly" throughout the colour spectrum.

16-bit displays use 5 bits for red, 5 bits for blue and 6 bits for green, however the 65536 colours cannot be changed and so the overall "resolution" of colour is lower than 256 bit displays. For instance you can only have 2^5 different shades of green, rather than 2^8.

Adrian

Date:Thu June 12 08:39:19 PDT 1997
Timothy Gray timgray@lambdanet.com
Subject: CNE Certification for Linux?

Oh, no not a certification suggestion......

Linux was developed as a better and free version of UNIX. Now someone wants to make a CNE for Linux? As a successful Linux Network Administrator (and Business owner that proudly states no Microsoft here!) I am appalled at charging ten's of thousands of dollars to get a piece of paper that states I can do my job. As an Internet service provider and an avid Linux, Freeware, and Free Software Foundation supporter I hire my network administrators and Engineers( We call them System Administrators ) based on their abilities and trainability. A CNE paper does not nor will ever impress me. Even suggesting such an idea toward Linux is appalling. Let's keep our last bastion of freedom from the clutches of cooperate greed! If we must have a Linux CNE make it 100% free and available to everyone on the planet.

Thank you, Timothy Gray

This page written and maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@linuxgazette.net
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