Subject: Linux-Misc Digest #839
From: Digestifier <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 94 19:13:16 EDT

Linux-Misc Digest #839, Volume #2                Wed, 28 Sep 94 19:13:16 EDT

Contents:
  Re: New Linux Distribution (Dan Newcombe)
  Re: [ppp] (Al Longyear)
  Re: New User HOWTO proposal (Matt Welsh)
  Re: Word Processor Project: What happened? (Ulrich Cyrus)
  Re: New Linux Distribution (Charles Blair)
  Re: Maple V for linux! (Shannon Hendrix)
  Re: Hmmm (Bjorn Kihlberg)
  Re: Contrib. $s for Linux Dev (Drew Eckhardt)
  Re: pkzip for dos? (Peter Suetterlin)
  Re: which is better: Mitsumi or Panasonic CDROM? (Beeblebrox)
  News readers for SL/ip (Ian Colquhoun)
  Re: P5-90 MHz beats SGI R4000-100MHz. (Valery Petrov)
  Re: P5-90 MHz beats SGI R4000-100MHz. (Valery Petrov)
  Re: 256 colors on laptop X (Charlie Krasic)
  Re: P5-90 MHz beats SGI R4000-100MHz. (Valery Petrov)
  Re: Linux on a 386 (Jim Sun)
  Re: P5-90 MHz beats SGI R4000-100MHz. (Orc)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Dan Newcombe)
Subject: Re: New Linux Distribution
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 15:21:01 UNDEFINED

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Juana Moreno) writes:
>        - Defaults to SINGLE USER mode. No need to show the complications
>                of multiuser accounts to newbies who will likely use it
>                personally.

Hell...why not make it single process mode.

>        - Only one shell: bash, with lots of aliases that match as closely
>                as possible the COMMAND.COM commands and the utilities in
>                the DOS directory. Maybe it won't be very difficult to 
>                include a .BAT->.sh translator.

Also, rename vmlinuz to COMMAND.COM

>        - Only enough utilities to match the functionality of the DOS
>                standard utilities plus the major unix winners like 
>                grep, awk and sed. (But not vi or emacs!!!).

But you should put something like JED there to replace dos EDIT.

>        - NO NETWORKING, except for maybe a terminal program (minicom) and
>                a mostly configured SLIP (client side only). In that case,
>                maybe Mosaic should be also included.

Most definatly, as everyone knows that you use windows to connect to the 
information superhighway.

>        -NO SCSI. Most home dos-win users don't even know what SCSI is.

Not completly true.  The higher end systems sometimes come with SCSI.

>        -XFree 3.1 configured to use the VGA16 server (mono or color) with
>                a generic (low resolution) Xconfig.

And don't foget to use a large font size.  

>        - Utilities to match the standard Windows applets:
>                Winfile -> Xfm-1.3
>                Progman -> Xfm-1.3
>                Notepad -> Axe (?)
>                Write   -> Ez
>                Terminal -> Minicom (Seyon?)
>                Mediaplay -> ?????
>                Dos windows -> Xterm,rxvt (of course !!!)
>                Whatelse??? 

Of course, you'll have to include xpm so you can have all sorts of colorful 
pixmaps.  Also a dynamic utility to convert .ico's to .xpm's would help.
        Soundrec should be easy to find a replacement for.
        Mediaplay could be replaced by xanim
        Paintbrush by xpaint
        calender by some x prog (xcal?)
        Include some stupid incomprehensiable and unused program to replace Object 
                Packer  
        Tons of bitmaps for the background.
        A graphical interface to xkeysym to replace key mapper.
        Through in xsc and they'll think they're getting Lotus for free.
        
>        - Only one window manager: FVWM

Don't know....maybe you would need to disable the popup menus and set it up so 
that ctrl-esc will bring up the window list, and alt-esc will cycle through.

>        - The binaries should fit (gzipped) in 10 1.44 floppies.

Don't forget to add this to the login scripts for that genuine dos look:
PS1=C:`pwd|sed s/'\/'/'\\'/g`\>

--
Dan Newcombe                    [email-masked]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"And the man in the mirror has sad eyes."       -Marillion

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Al Longyear)
Subject: Re: [ppp]
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 11:46:24 GMT

[email-masked] writes:

>  As the moment, I am connected to nntp.interramp.com via PPP.

>  I am thinking about moving my PPP account to another server that I will
>call `snarf.com'.

>  As far as I can tell, the only thing different about the way I now
>interface with interramp.com via PPP and the way I am supposed to
>interface with snarf.com is that interramp.com assigns me a "dynamic"
>IP address each time I dial in, whereas snarf.com has "loaned" me a
>fixed IP address.

They both work the same way. If snarf.com is configured properly then you
could use the identical options.

>  So, since the various scripts that I am using with interramp.com work 
>nicely, I simply copied them all into another directory and modified them to 
>suit snarf.com.

>  However, when I try to connect to snarf.com, the negotiations get
>bogged down and (I think) my end of the negotiations eventually loses
>patience and quits.

>  Here is the tail-end of the log:
> ...
>Sep 27 01:44:36 bedlam pppd[651]: fsm_sdata(LCP): Sent code 1, id 1.
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Sep 27 01:44:36 bedlam pppd[651]: Timeout 2194:10910 in 3 seconds.
>Sep 27 01:44:36 bedlam pppd[651]: Setting itimer for 3 seconds in
>timeout.
>Sep 27 01:44:36 bedlam pppd[651]: LCP: sending Configure-Request, id 1
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Sep 27 01:44:39 bedlam pppd[651]: Alarm
>Sep 27 01:44:39 bedlam pppd[651]: sent [LCP ConfReq id=0x1 <mru 1500>
><magic 0x8e417aab> <pcomp> <accomp>]

There is no one listening at the other end. Notice that the id number
does not increment. It keeps sending the "hello, I want to talk to
you. Is anyone there?" (LCP-request) frame. This is sent every three
seconds. Unfortnately, there is no one home at the other end.

Your remote end is not running ppp. In fact, it is not doing much of
anything. You need to talk to the snarf.com admin people and get the
proper login script or something.

>Sep 27 01:44:39 bedlam pppd[651]: LCP: sending Configure-Request, id 1
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Sep 27 01:44:42 bedlam pppd[651]: Alarm
>Sep 27 01:44:42 bedlam pppd[651]: LCP: timeout sending Config-Requests
>Sep 27 01:44:42 bedlam pppd[651]: Connection terminated.
>Sep 27 01:44:42 bedlam pppd[651]: Exit.

"Oh well. Since there is no one listening then I think that I'll quit
now. I have tried 10 times without a howdy in reply."

>  Here is what is in the two directories I mentioned:

This is not important for this problem.

PAP and CHAP protocols are not exhchanged until the LCP protocol is processed.
The remote is not even doing that. Check out the remote.

-- 
Al Longyear           [email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Matt Welsh)
Subject: Re: New User HOWTO proposal
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 15:11:09 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (David K. Merriman) writes:
>In light of the experiences I've had getting Linux installed and configured, 
>I'd like to offer to write a Linux New Users HOWTO.

Your idea is a good one, but I fear that such a HOWTO would be
extremely long. You want to cover everything from shells to 
man pages to editors to kernel compliations. This is essentially
what has been done in the I&GS, which covers these things and more.
You can't condense this information considerably, and if you try
to do so you'll lose the content. What's wrong with the I&GS?

Miscellaneous tips, tricks, and so forth are already covered in the 
Tips-HOWTO, by Vince reed ([email-masked]). Please send that information
to him. I'd rather see people updating the current HOWTOs instead
of trying to preempt what we already have.

Thanks,
mdw

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Ulrich Cyrus)
Crossposted-To: alt.flame
Subject: Re: Word Processor Project: What happened?
Date: 25 Sep 1994 12:02:42 +0100

Lars Hofhansl ([email-masked]) wrote:

: In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Mark A. Davis) writes:
: >
: [...]
: >
: >You can run Unix WordPerfect right now using the Linux IBCS emulation code...
: >It supports both text and X (GUI WYSIWUG) out of the box.  Cost is about
: >$299
: >

: Go and get "andrew" from sunsite. It's wysiwyg, it's good, it's fast, and it's
: for free.

: sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/X11/andrew/...

and it does not support umlauts in a reasonable way (no way to input with
german Xmodmap directly - only by pressing strange key-kombinations :(

regards, Ulrich
-- 
=============================================================================
Ulrich Cyrus      Voice+FAX: ++49-203-735154             [email-masked]
Fliederstr. 169,  47055 Duisburg, Germany      [email-masked]
/earth is 98% full - please delete any unused to free up space!

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Charles Blair)
Subject: Re: New Linux Distribution
Date: 28 Sep 1994 15:24:43 GMT

   I suspect a lot of novice users never use sed and awk, and that many
more use vi.

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Shannon Hendrix)
Subject: Re: Maple V for linux!
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 00:35:55 GMT

[email-masked] (Scott Weinstein) writes:

>I havn't seen anything on the newsgroups about this... Maple V is
>available for Linux. It looks and runs just like the Solaris version. 
>The binaries are not staticly linked and the entire installation takes
>up 24 MB. I'm impressed.

Where do you get it?  How much?
-- 
csh
===========================================================================
[email-masked]      | Linux... that's it for the moment
===================================+ 

------------------------------

Crossposted-To: alt.fan.linus-torvalds
From: [email-masked] (Bjorn Kihlberg)
Subject: Re: Hmmm
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 14:17:14 GMT

Chris ([email-masked]) wrote:
: Jeez - I hadn't realized that Linus had such a loyal following ;)

: Chris

But of course! Not anyone would get the idea to start a new .NIX (*NUX?) and
manage to make it better than all the others combined! :)

--
====================================================================
 Bjorn Kihlberg                 |    email:  [email-masked]
 (C) All Copyrighted            |            [email-masked]

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Drew Eckhardt)
Subject: Re: Contrib. $s for Linux Dev
Date: 26 Sep 1994 18:41:44 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Steven Buytaert <[email-masked]> wrote:
>J.J. Paijmans ([email-masked]) wrote:
>: As for the Great Linus himself: we have to decide yet what to do and how,
>: but I think dutch or belgian beer will be involved somewhere.
>
> Go for the Belgian beer. I can give you a few tips there. But beware,
> 3 pints of 'Duvel' and the next kernel release will take 3 days extra :-)%

Duvel's is pretty yummy, although a bit pricey.  Lindeman's Kriek is 
nice too, although I don't think Lambics should be considered beer.
Otherwise, we don't get too much Belgian beer arround here.

If you can settle for beers from other nationalities, I'd have to 
recommend Sam Smith's Oatmeal Stout and Taddy Porter, McEwan's 
Scotch Ale, New Castle Brown Ale, and Sam Adams Cream Stout.

There are also plenty of local microbreweries in the states which
have very tasty beers, with personal favorites being cask conditioned like 
the Walnut Brewery's Cask Conditioned James and Wilderness Pub's Cask 
Conditioned Stout. Other local favorites are Colorado Kind Ale from 
the Mountain Sun Pub and Brewery (very hoppy), Extra Special Bitter,
etc.

For light beers, I'd have to go with Sierra Nevada Pale,
the Walnut Brewery's Buffalo Gold Ale, or Breckenridge Brewery's
India Pale Ale.

-- 
Since our leaders won't respect The Constitution, the highest law of our 
country, you can't expect them to obey lesser laws of any country. 
Boycott the United States until this changes.

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Peter Suetterlin)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.help
Subject: Re: pkzip for dos?
Date: 28 Sep 1994 13:46:42 GMT

Rob Janssen ([email-masked]) wrote:
: In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] writes:
: >Hi All, 
: >Does Linux have a utility to pkunzip DOS .zip files?  If yes, would
: >you tell what site it is on?  
: Yes it does.  It is called "unzip" and you should find it on all the
: usual Linux sites.
: Rob

What's about unzipping multi-volume pkZIP-files? Until now the only way
to unzip them was using dosemu. Or am I missing something?

==================   Peter 'PIT' Suetterlin   =================
|   Kiepenheuer Institut     |   Sternfreunde Breisgau e.V    |
|   fuer Sonnenphysik        |                                |
|   0761/3198-210            |   0761/71571                   |
-<[email-masked]>-<[email-masked]>--

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Beeblebrox)
Subject: Re: which is better: Mitsumi or Panasonic CDROM?
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 19:30:04 GMT

[email-masked] (Eberhard Moenkeberg) writes:

>The specs are lying. The Panasonic is faster than the Mitsumi.

What evidence do you have for that ?
---
   [email-masked]              [email-masked]
             "I follow your steps in snow, the traces disappear.
     We know what we've lost when it's gone, I'm wishing you were here."

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Ian Colquhoun)
Subject: News readers for SL/ip
Date: 27 Sep 1994 02:33:19 GMT

Thanks for the help guys... I tried using rtin -n but it didn't seem to make a 
substantial enough difference for me.  For now I'll just log in to my shell 
server and read news from there!

Ian
([email-masked])

------------------------------

Subject: Re: P5-90 MHz beats SGI R4000-100MHz.
From: [email-masked] (Valery Petrov)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 17:50:23 GMT

In article <ianm.780340433@miles>, [email-masked] (Ian McCloghrie) writes:
|> [email-masked] (Valery Petrov) writes:
|> 
|> >the price difference (similarly equipped SGI is ~3 times more expensive)
|> >I wonder who whould like to buy those Indigos nowdays. 
|> 
|> (in the future, please try to use lines < 70 characters long)
|> 
|> The reason people buy Indigos (and SGIs in general) is not to have
|> general CPU compute servers.  The reason, quite simply, is graphics.
|> (Yup, that's what the 'G' in SGI stands for).  The amount of graphics
|> rendering hardware one can get in an SGI is more than just about any
|> other off-the-shelf workstation, certainly more than in a PC.
|> Combine this with their GL 3-d graphics libraries, and you've got a
|> system for doing really really nice graphics programming.

You are right about graphics rendering hardware. It costs also certainly 
more then any PC video card. Unfortunately it is highly specific to the
3-D polygon manipulations and has very moderate speedup for X applications.
I measured 85 KXstones on my Indigo R-4000 with XZ videocard ($3000 option).
You can get comparable X performance with ~$100 worth S3 videocard under
XFree.
        3-D GL libraries is also freely available for Linux and they are
almost compatible with Silicon Graphics GL format.

Valery Petrov
Nonlinear Dynamics Research Group
Department of Chemistry
West Virginia University

------------------------------

Subject: Re: P5-90 MHz beats SGI R4000-100MHz.
From: [email-masked] (Valery Petrov)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 17:58:29 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Chree Haas) writes:
|> Bill Broadley ([email-masked]) wrote:
|> 
|> : :    You should note the the Indy has a MIPS R4600 processor, which is
|> : :    much faster than Pentium.  Also, the SCSI Drive is faster and more
|> : :    expandable than the Dell IDE.  Overall, the Indy will have much
|> : :    higher throughput and lower price/performance.
|> BTW, when you ran the benchmark, did you add the -mips2 to the command
|> line for the SGI?  That can easily make a 5-10% speedup in the code over
|> the default -mips1 option.  BUT I don't know what using a pentium optimized
|> compilers effects would be...
|> 
|> Chree
Of course I set -mips2 option while compiling. I don't have SGI with R4600
available to test it, but according to the specs it is slower then P5-90. R4400 is
faster but it costs much more then P5-90.

Valery. 

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Charlie Krasic)
Subject: Re: 256 colors on laptop X
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 14:50:06 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] () writes:

> VGA16 seems to be the only mode detected by X when I start up on an NEC
> UltraLite. I looked at the sample Xconfigs and found that the toshiba
> laptop only listed VGA16 as well. Is there some inherent limitation here
> or can I get 256 colors on my laptop? I know it can handle it since
> windows runs with 256 colors.

The original Ultralite Versa uses a Chips and Technologies chipset.
XFree86 doesn't support that chipset, so the only server that works is
the generic VGA16 server.  It is extremely slow and you run out of
colours real fast.

The Versa E's have a Western Digital chipset which is supported and
works _very_ nicely in 256 colour mode.  It can also drive an external
monitor at 1024x768 in 256 colours which is nice too.  :)

Don't know about the Versa 'S' models.

-- Buck

------------------------------

Subject: Re: P5-90 MHz beats SGI R4000-100MHz.
From: [email-masked] (Valery Petrov)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 18:19:03 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Andres Kruse) writes:
|> In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Valery Petrov) writes:
|> >Some benchmarks comparison:
|> >
|> >                    DELL XPS-90      SGI with R4000 cpu (100MHz):
|> >Integer:            19.2 sec.               23.3 sec.
|> >Floating point:             200 sec.                199 sec.
|> >
| 
|> 
|> Oh yeah? What about SGIs superb graphics ?

I've tested it with Xbench and got 85 KXstones - compare it to 250 KX of #9 GXE 
card on DELL XPS-90.
 
|> can put 256MB RAM in them (and it works! (have you ever seen a PC 
|> with > 64MB?))
Personaly I don't have that much money but I've seen 128 MB is a standart for P5 
motherboards. 

|> What if you want to develop code which runs then in parallel on SGI Challenges ?

Power C costs you $5000. Are you gonna spend that much to have a possibility to
run this code on Challenges ?

|> Remember that the Indigo is the low end of a rather big line of workstations. 
|> R4000SC is actually a processor which is already 2 years old and obsolete. 
|> The processor you should be comparing to is R4400@150Mhz which can be up 
|> to two times as fast depending on your code.

I think it would be atmost 1.5 times faster, since bus still runs at 50 MHz.

|> And if you were using R8000
|> your floating point speed would be almost four times as fast (looking
|> at the SPEC FP92 numbers (Intel 815/100: ~80, PowerChallenge R8000: ~310).

And how much machine with R8000 costs? It was ~$50,000 last year.
I can buy 10 Peniums for that money and organize Parallel Virtual
Machine that would be faster then R8000.

Valery Petrov.
Nonlinear Dynamics Research Group.
Department of Chemistry.
West Virginia University.

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Jim Sun)
Subject: Re: Linux on a 386
Date: 28 Sep 1994 22:52:16 GMT

[email-masked] (Jeff Kesselman) wrote:

>Note however that NOT all 486's are equal.  The IBM 
>blue-lightening 486 for instance, is really a 386 with improved caching.  
>it does NOt have the improved micrcode and runs somewhere btw a 386 and 486
>in performance....

The first sentence is correct; the remainder are misinformation at best.
IBM's SLC and DLC processors are indeed merely improved 386s; however, the
BlueLightenings are true 486-class processors; they use the 486 architecture
provided by Intel itself (such as BL75) or Cyrix (such as BLDX2-66).  

Jim

------------------------------

From: [email-masked] (Orc)
Subject: Re: P5-90 MHz beats SGI R4000-100MHz.
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 18:04:08 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Larry Pyeatt <[email-masked]> wrote:

>Your belief is not based in reality.  Apparently you did not call Dell
>as I suggested.  Did you not even read my post?  I read the add in
>Computer shopper and then called Dell to get a price quote.

  Well, even workstation owners occasionally go and get bids from
other suppliers when the workstation vendor charges too much for
add-in components.  Buying an ethernet card from Dell for $450 is
like buying extra winchesters from SGI without bothering to look
at the third-party vendors.

                ____
  david parsons \bi/ If I wanted to be locked into proprietary standards
                 \/                           I'd buy a 4341 or Atari ST.

------------------------------

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End of Linux-Misc Digest
******************************