June 2005 - openSUSE Edu - openSUSE Mailing Lists

FLOSSIE Conference
by Phil Driscoll 29 Jun '05

29 Jun '05

ANNOUNCING The second annual FLOSSIE Conference being held on 14th and 15th July at Bolton Technical Innovation Centre. BECTA recently published their long-awaited Total Cost of Ownership report confirming that free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) enables schools to substantially increase their IT provision within their existing budgets, and avoid being locked in to a single software provider. This year's FLOSSIE Conference focuses on explaining and demonstrating the FLOSS technologies that achieve these results. The Conference now covers two days and keynote speakers are Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Technology Evangelist, and Dr Brian Iddon, MP for Bolton South-East and Member of the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee. Full details of the programme, how to reach Bolton TIC and obtain lodgings overnight, are given on the Schoolforge-UK website at: http://www.schoolforge.org.uk/flossie/conference200507.html Registration is £35 for individuals booking in advance, and £50 if paying via invoice. To register in advance, return the booking form available on the website with your cheque. Alternatively, call 01204 372204 or email julie.astbury(a)uktic.org to book your place and request an invoice made out to your organisation. The Conference is filling up quickly, so ACT NOW now to reserve your place! -- Phil Driscoll

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Denford
by Paul Taylor 27 Jun '05

27 Jun '05

Hi: Has anyone managed to get Linux to control a Denford router or know anything about this? Paul -- Sizofik a Ninila' Siyakhona?

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Migration Questions - MS Services for Unix and freenx
by Alan Loughlin 25 Jun '05

25 Jun '05

Hi, I was looking around for Linux active directory support and found an article on ms services for UNIX. Which apparently allows Linux clients to authenticate to ad as if it was a nis and nfs server. My questions, would this be a good direction to take for active directory migration? By that I mean the following... 1 Setup ms services for UNIX, use the server for nfs and to authenticate Linux boxes with ad user accounts as if it was a nis server 2 Deploy Linux desktops, set up nis and nfs on the clients. 3 Migrate ad user accounts to a real nis and nfs server, ensuring to implement a secure channel for nis and nfs to travel over. How to do this yet I don’t know. Main reason for this idea of migration is the xp pcs requirement of group policy, I couldn't move over to samba/nfs/nis until there were no xp pcs. >From this, I do think this method could allow me to move more slowly, due to proprietary software holding me back. Waiting for successmaker to come out with cross platform capabilities, which I've been told they are working on. >From step 2, how would be best to go about altering the users environment in KDE? Can kiosk allow you to alter an home directory of a test user that can be used as a default profile like how xp works? Sorry for the comparison, but I can only work with what I know. I would also like to make the menu locked for students, so would that be a case of read only-ing their menu folder. Also can you prevent someone from using sudo? Im still contemplating my distro for here and am seriously considering mepis because of how slick it is and that it using true debian repositories. Unlike some distros I know... Does freenx have to co-exist with ltsp in order for thin clients to benefit from freenx? As it seems it's not a thin client in itself. Sorry if I got the wrong end of the stick on this one, Im still learning. Many Thanks Alan Loughlin -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.6.9 - Release Date: 11/06/2005

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Karoshi 4.1.1
by linuxgirlie 22 Jun '05

22 Jun '05

Just a quick note to say that the latest version of Karoshi is now out. More information available at: www.karoshi.org.uk<http://www.karoshi.org.uk> Basically a Linux alternative of RM Connect Series, Ranger, et all. Cheers, Jo -- Spread FireFox: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=user/register&r=32751 Get FireFox: http://www.getfirefox.com OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org Mandrake: http://www.mandrakelinux.com Karoshi: http://www.karoshi.org.uk

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Network managers job
by Ian Lynch 14 Jun '05

14 Jun '05

I have a client with a network manager's job coming up in September. Commitment to Linux and uses Linux servers and thin clients. Based in North West. Anyone interested send me an E-mail for further details. -- Ian Lynch <ian.lynch(a)zmsl.com> ZMSL

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Forceing suse 9.1 to use icewm over KDE
by Rob Keeling 11 Jun '05

11 Jun '05

I am just rebuilding our LTSP server, (which had a hard disc fail). The last time I editied one of the config files to force execution of icewm, regardless of what the student clicked in kdm, but I cant remember what I did! Is there a) a cleaner way of doing this? something that didn`t require hacking of scripts is much easier to document. b) what am I likely to have editied? I thought it was //etc/X11/xdm/Xsession, but that didn`t "look" right. Thanks Rob Keeling

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ok starter for 10... CD -rewriters / mem sticks
by Russell Dyas 09 Jun '05

09 Jun '05

Ok Thanks to all that helped with login and screen res problem. Next question how to write to a CD-R. And the second question how to access usb memory sticks. As always this is in mandrake. Cheers Russ

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Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] sort ot: ok newbie question...
by Thomas Adam 08 Jun '05

08 Jun '05

--- Paul Sutton <zen14920(a)zen.co.uk> wrote: > so typing init 3 changes to level 3 by starting / stopping various > servies , typing init 5 does the same for runlevel 5. > If you are in level 3 you can no longer type ctrl-alt-f7 to switch > back > to X, however at the prompt you can type The only caveat with that is if any specific services are started in one runlevel and not another, then it won't be persistent -- which is not going to be a good thing if it is something important. Hence: /etc/init.d/xdm stop Remains in the same runlevel, and no harm done. > for the record, runlevels 3 and 5 are multi user and multi user with > X > respectivley. Under most distros this is true -- but not for Debian. > startx to start X, and therefore typing ctrl-alt-backspace will kill > the > xserver / window system and return you to a console. you can then > re-configure X to change and and try running startx again. There > should be a xf86config file that contains the settings and an X set > up > utility, however I am not sure what they are called anymore, since > they > moved to x.org, I assume not much has really changed. See my actual reply to this. Xorg hasn't changed the syntax. -- Thomas Adam -- A: No. Q: Can I top-post? ___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Yet another school database
by richard＠tortoise.demon.co.uk 07 Jun '05

07 Jun '05

On 6 Jun 2005 at 14:53, Thomas Adam wrote: > +--------------+ > | Class | > +--------------+ > | > | > / \ > +-------------------+ +----------------+ > | Classification | | Student | > +-------------------+ +----------------+ > | | > | | > / \ / \ > +----------------------------------------+ > | Belief | > +----------------------------------------+ > Yes, that's the design I was refering to in an earlier post. I've implemented it in the database, although I've used the name student_classification instead of Belief. I've also made a view v_student_ethnic2 that gets student ethnic data from student_classification instead of the previous 'look-up' table. This view, that will show a few records, illustrates my point. What is to prevent a student being given 2 ethnic groups. In the view, there is indeed a student with this unwanted duplication. With a design like this, the only ways I can see to prevent such a duplication are: a) A trigger on student_classification that would delete the previous ethnic group for a given student should a second get inserted. b) Only allow inserts to student_classification via a stored procedure that does the checking and adjustments for you. I've yet to write either a trigger or procedure in PostgreSQL but I assume such things are easy to do. However, triggers and procedures immediately make the design non- portable to other databases. Now I think that in the longer term, that's inevitable, but I was hoping for a design that could delay the requirement for such things for as long as possible. regards Richard-- richard(a)tortoise.demon.co.uk

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sort ot: ok newbie question...
by Russell Dyas 07 Jun '05

07 Jun '05

Right got mandrive or what ever it is called these days.. Anyway need cause got old screen plugged into it to need to set screens res etc to low size and res.. Anyway can't do this as once login screen comes up unreadable. Right so first question how do you boot into terminal. Second question how can later size from terminal I'm using kde if any help.. Russ

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Bit chilly out?
by Paul Graydon 07 Jun '05

07 Jun '05

Wonder of wonders, Debian v 3.1 has been released: http://www.debian.org/ On the very same day, Apple has announced that it is switching to using Intel processors, though little official word that I've seen so far about whether or not it will be strictly x86 architecture: http://www.theregister.com/2005/06/06/apple_intel_migration/----- Paul Graydon Network Technician Haywards Heath College http://www.hhc.ac.uk (01444) 456281 "Joy is not in things; it is in us." Richard Wagner

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Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Yet another school database
by Robert Jones 06 Jun '05

06 Jun '05

The standards set out for data exchanges in England should help you here - CBDS is pretty specific about things like ethnicity religion. Each student has exactly one ethnicity, from this list: http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/_doc/6845/ETHLIST.XLS so you make ethnicity a field in your student table, as you have done. As stated earlier, there are several ways you can use the list of possible values. Enumerating them in the table definition would work (you could still put something in your front end to allow editing of the list) or you could store them in your "ethnic" table if you preferred - this seems clearer to me. The whole class/classification thing is more flexible, but more complicated. You will need this level of complexity further down the line when you come to think about the connections between students, teachers, classes and courses, but at this early stage the things you are talking about are straightforward attributes of students, and so IMHO belong as fields in the student table. This may also help: http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/_doc/7995/CBDS%20Pupil%20V3.1.xls On Monday 06 June 2005 14:53, Thomas Adam wrote: > --- richard(a)tortoise.demon.co.uk wrote: > > I now want to say what ethnic group students belong to, and so on, so > > However, a student belongs falls into at most 1 ethnic group. > > Therefore I need a constraint on the table to prevent the entry of > > two records where the same student is assigned 2 classification_id's > > which actually belong to the same class (ie class_id=2 , Ethnic). > > > > A table constraint won't do, as two tables are involved. > > So you need to split it up a little. The problem you have is that each > classification category itself might have many things associated with > it. That's fine, but that calls for a re-think. > > One solution (ignoring any form of schema design) would be to make each > classification below each heading (i.e. 'ethnic group' for instance, > might have several elements attached to it) an enum of possibilities. > Whilst this is possible, there's several issues with it -- least of > which is the fact that you'd then have to use some form of trigger, > which is overkill in this case. > > So what I propose is we revist the schema overall. I don't have a lot > of time to spend on this as I'd like. However, I'll outline some of my > suggestions. As it stands, the relationship between 'class' and > 'classification' as entities is OK. What we need now is a means of > linking a student to this, in such a way as to meet the constraint [1] > that you're wanting. It seems to me that you want something like the > following (I apologise in advance for my poor ASCII diagrams): > > +--------------+ > > | Class | > > +--------------+ > > > / \ > +-------------------+ +----------------+ > > | Classification | | Student | > > +-------------------+ +----------------+ > > > / \ / \ > +----------------------------------------+ > > | Belief | > > +----------------------------------------+ > > > The nomenclature for table 'Belief' is questionable, and a more suited > name is advised. Essentially. 'Belief' is a link entity. The > assumption here is that there is a M-M (many to many) relationship now, > between Classification and Student. Due to the referential integrity > model, one cannot (directly) implement a M-M relationship between two > entities, so a third table is introduced. Essentially, 'Belief' would > hold foreign key references to both Classification and Student, so that > in this way, 'Belief' could then easily define whether a student could > be a member of a group or not, based on table constraints enforced > therein. > > Does that make sense? > > -- Thomas Adam > > [1] It's not really a constraint in the sense of a check, it's more > a design feature. > > > > ___________________________________________________________ > How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday > snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com -- Robert Jones ------------------------------------------------------- -- Robert Jones

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Yet another school database
by richard＠tortoise.demon.co.uk 06 Jun '05

06 Jun '05

Another attempt at an open source school database. www.schoolbase.net Anyone with ideas on how such a thing should be made? regards Richard

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NFS
by Miles Berry 05 Jun '05

05 Jun '05

I'm interested in setting up either a dual boot or Windows xserver suite, and want to provide access to the usual network shares which are on a Linux server running Samba. From what I've read NFS seems the way to go rather than using a Linux Samba client, but what I'm not clear about is the easy way to provide my users with access to just their shares, rather than whole sections of the directory tree. The smb.conf at present has shares set like this: [home] comment = Home Directories path = /export/user/%g/%u read only = No [hidden] comment = user's LINUX filespace path = /home/%g/%u read only = No [group] comment = Group's server file space path = /export/groups/%g read only = No [all] comment = Common files path = /export/all/ read only = No My question is really how do I get the %g and %u (groupid and userid) stuff and automounting in NFS, without having to write lots of separate scripts for each user. Any help would be much appreciated. BTW, Thank you to the many of you who got in touch about my 19 station LTSP idea, the governors have put this one on hold for at least 12 months, pending building work which will necessitate the use of the room I had in mind as a temporary music room. Ah well, maybe next year. -- Miles Berry Deputy Head St Ives School Haslemere www.stiveshaslemere.com

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php gurus about?
by Paul Taylor 05 Jun '05

05 Jun '05

Hi all: This is not strictly SuSE related but..I have a number of web sites running on a managed server (FC1) using Mambo. It has been working fine for a long time but a few weeks back I suddenly got plagued with upload errors relating to pclzip. The support of the site is less than forthcoming as it is a root server and they are not experts on individual packages. Having trawled through various forums I suspect that it relates to the version of Apache and PHP that are out of synch? It is running 2.0.50 and 4.3.8 respectively. I suspect that the provider updated one or other of these for me but I'm not sure. I installed Mambo on my home machine running 2.0.53 and 4.3.10 and have none of these upload problems. In order to move forward on these packages I assume I would probably need to upgrade the OS to FC2 or 3. This would entail yum as it is a remote device and I'm not sure this would work without bringing down the whole thing. They will do this for me but from scratch so I need good backups and to get all the sites back the way they were. probably easy but.. Any thoughts? -- De omnibus dubitandum

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