Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Sudoku is a puzzle game consisting of a grid partially filled with numbers. The presence of a number in a particular square may tell you that in some other squares certain numbers cannot be placed, or that in some other squares certain numbers must be placed. You can then deduce how to fill all the squares on the grid.

The Debian package management system may tell you that if a particular software package is to be installed on your system, certain other software packages cannot be installed on the same system, or that other packages are required to be installed on your system.

Obvious next step - if you're insane - work out how to express a Sudoku puzzle as a set of Debian packages, and let the package management system solve the puzzle for you.

Jesse, whom some of us met on Software Freedom Day, made the trip up from Kempsey for the last meeting and has a nasty problem. The problem was with a proprietary operating system, but as the solutions to problems with proprietary software almost universally involve free software, I think it's appropriate to ask for help here.

The symptoms sound very much like a screwed up partition table. The suspicion is that the cause was some sort of trojan that was delievered as an alleged "patch" to some proprietary software for MS Windows. After installing this software, Windows spontaneously rebooted (nothing unusual in that), but on boot-up the computer could find no bootable partitions. On further examination, there was no evidence of any partitions at all. Here's my list of possible solutions; please add any others that come to mind below.

The copyright to CUPS, the printing system used by most free software operating systems (and a number of proprietary ones), has been purchased by Apple Inc., and the former copyright holder and creater of CUPS has been hired by Apple to continue working on it. He has stated that "CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms".

Reaction to this has been mixed, ranging from congratulating Apple on supporting such an important project, to concern about possible ulterior motives, based on Apple's mixed track record on working with the free software community.

Back when OS X was released, I personally thought Apple was seriously moving in the direction of freeing it's software completely. This would have made perfect business sense, as the distinguishing feature of Apple's products at the time was the awesomely cool hardware; giving users the freedom to share and improve the software that Apple provided to run on it would only serve to make the overall product more attractive. Ultimately, of course Apple evolved into as much an entertainment company as a technology company, with a strong motivation to release software that was deliberately defective in ways that prevented you from doing things with it that the entertainment industry didn't like, and which was therefore licensed to users in ways that prevented them from fixing these bugs.

In this light, one comment on cups.org strikes me as intriguing...

I love the occasional Top 25 Linux Commands articles that come along. For one thing, it gives me another opportunity to be tiresomely pedantic and say they are not "Linux commands", but bash "builtin" commands, or standalone programs. I also invariably find one thing I never knew about, or had forgotten. In this case it was "history", a bash builtin that is faster to type than "cat ~/.bash_history".

Well... hey, after that last meeting I got all fired up and upgraded from Dapper to Edgy and installed Beryl. So for the past week or so I've been whizzing round my 3d cuboid desktop thingy, writing my Uni assignments - I'm not sick on eye candy quite yet. It is kinda fun to laugh at all the 'early adopter's using Vista and seeing how they have to struggle to get similar affects with a brand new machine and graphics card whilst my crummy 3 1/2 year old lappy runs rings round them.

Stuff nerds to for fun hey...

I've always liked the idea of having multiple desktops but have never really gotten into them. When I'm in the Zone I tend to just do my thing until I run out of steam or can't find that 34th window I opened earlier. With the 3d cubey thing I just seem to keep going for longer and it feels much more tactile. Does that sound pervy?

Just wondering if anyone can help this relative newbie to Linux. I have installed suse 10.2 on two separate machines, one Intel based which works fine,the other  with an Nvidia chipset. Am having all sorts of dramas finding and loading the correct drivers for graphics and sound.Can anyone help?                      

Xkcd shows how you can apply simple command-line tools to make your life easier.

Not just a file manager, more a way of life, Nautilus has a few tricks you might not be aware of.

Following on from discussion at the last meeting, a visit to Wikipedia has clarified the relationship between the PictBridge and USB Mass Storage protocols.  Basically, there isn't one.  Or perhaps one could say they are complementary.

Check here before buying a printer!