EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy, say so, I will respect that. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.

I know, I never made it back yesterday. Hmmm. A reasonably fruitful day, however. Tom and I thrashed out a seemingly workable schedule to pull us through to the end of the book. Then (with the exception of the summary), I finished Chapter 11. Clearly I have difficulty anticipating just how much effort it takes to install some of these programs. I can do software installs in my sleep (and have done, apparently). But to enumerate the steps makes what is (usually) a simple process appear long and arduous.

Good morning. The plan for today is to do the brief ETS website (front page only) update first off, then continue with the site redesign, and adding fresh content. I'll hare off back to home at about noon, pitch (4) loads of laundry into the machines, and start loading Caldera Linux Technology Preview in a VM. While that (and the laundry) are ongoing, I'll polish off the Chapter Summary for 11, about a page of repetitive redundancy. Then, with install and laundry done, I'll start walking through the latest and greatest from KDE and the Linux Kernel, documenting what users are likely to see in upcoming releases of OpenLinux. I figure 15 screenshots and no more than 25 pages. My estimating is getting better, but we'll see (OK, Tom and I'll see, you'll have to wait for the book to be published <g>).

I'd better get to it. Lots to do and not enough hours. I will be back -- I need to tell you about Holden's letters. In the meantime, take care. Later.

15:45 - I told you I'd be back. The laundry's done, Tom's been through 11, slashing & hacking (generally setting me straight), and now I've been through it again, and it is time to write that summary and be shut of the thing. However, there's a little mail to take care of...

> OK, Tom and I'll see, you'll have to wait for the book to be published <g>

No, old boy, there is no hiding, We WILL see.

--
Svenson.
Mail : [email protected]

??? Omnipotence? Again? Have they adjusted your medications recently?

<WAG> .b

From: "Holden Aust" <[email protected]>
Subject: Now you've got my attention....?
To: Brian Bilbrey <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 21:59:56 +0100

I was going to send you an email today, anyway, because I wanted to tell 
you that I was a bit surprised (and pleased) that you apparently hadn't run 
into the problem that I had when I installed Corel Word Perfect Office 2000 
for Linux.

I was cogitating about this and it occurred to me that:

A - Maybe the difference was due to my having installed the Word Perfect 
suite on Corel's Linux vs. Mandrake

                 OR

B - Maybe Corel updated the Word Perfect suite install CD with the newer 
font engine, and that I have the "older" version and you got the "newer" version

Not that it matters all that much to me, if it's working well for you, that's all 
that really matters.

I was going to suggest that you might want to take a look at Corel's PhotoPaint 
program anyway, even if you don't need it to "fix" the font-engine problem. 
It is a free download from Corel's site and looks like it will work with all the 
major distributions. It, too, is a pretty slick program and one in which someone 
coming to Linux from the Windows gulag would probably feel right at home 
(not at home in the gulag* part, but the User Interface, part!).

PhotoPaint is also included with the new retail version of Corel Draw for Linux, 
as well as with the "Deluxe" version of Corel's Linux. Corel Draw for Linux is 
also impressive, but it's $180 to $200, not a free download.

Oh, and just so you don't think I work for Corel, have you taken a look at 
IBM's Websphere Homepage Builder for Linux? For those looking for a 
Linux alternative to FrontPage, this might be a possibility. There is a free 
60-day trial download at:

http://www-4.ibm.com/software/webservers/hpbuilder/linux/download.html

Then, of course, I take a gander at today's page and you say, "I will be back 
-- I need to tell you about Holden's letters." So, of course, I'll check back, 
too, to see what in my recent letters you've decided deserves the wider 
attention of your of your audience....

                              Later,   Holden 


*Windows is like the gulag because you can never escape from it and, if you 
try to fight against it, you just get sent to camps closer and closer to the artic 
circle. Linux isn't like a gulag, it's more like being in a very dark basement 
and only having a few matches to use to find the flashlight which you know is 
somewhere around there and then using the flashlight to find the light switch 
and hoping that the batteries last long enough to read the man page to figure 
out what flags you use in the command line to turn on the light switch.

p.p.s. Amazingly enough, the new SuSE 7.0 manual has an entire 11-page 
chapter on how to record CDs using xcdroast and walks you through the steps 
necessary to use an IDE CD recorder, with numerous screenshots. Just for the 
fun of it, I'm going to try following their instructions, step by step, to see if a 
neophyte could do it. And did you know that SuSE has been supplying the 
Reiser file system from, at least, version 6.4?

Ya, but they couldn't possibly have left it so broken on *purpose*
that a separate package PhotoPaint is required to make the flagship
product, WPO2KfL, run. And besides, now we're talking about Caldera
OpenLinux 2.4 eDesktop as the basis of installation... However, they
certainly could have updated the fonttastic libs, or make the
install script for non-Corel linuxes work right...

PhotoPaint: How is it, compared to say... Gimp, which I am quite
happy with? 

Lastly, bright boy that I am, I knew that through the judicious
application of *just a few words*, I could get _somebody else_ to
write the rest of today's post for me... <g>

Thanks,

Brian.

Mornin', all. Progress is coming to town, and I don't mean a Soviet 5 year plan or a joint military exercise. Chapter 11 went back and forth a brace of times, and barring some minor last minute changes by Tom on my last minute changes late yesterday evening, two chapters, including 11, hit the email hopper at IDG today. We'd been holding Chapter 1 back to make at least mention of late breaking developments and products, but we're close to the end of the process, and if anything *really* exciting happens in the next few weeks, we can shoehorn the info in during Author Review.

Last evening, I got LTP (Caldera's Linux Technology Preview)installed in a VMware jail, but I must have left some crumbly mortar about the bases of those bars, because I let the sucker leak out and destroy my base eDesktop installation that I've been writing from and generating all my screen shots with. Ah, well. No data lost, as everthing is multiple redundantly backed up here and in Saskatoon.

Posted the latest update to the ETS home page yesterday. For you Johnny-come-latelies, ETS is the salt mine where I am a galley slave for wages (or have I mixed a metaphor there... "Shaken, not stirred"). At ETS, my official titles are MIS Manager and Webmaster. I also do some marcomm work (Catalog and Advertising art, text and production) PCB, Mechanical and Product design and whatever else drops within reach. My informal, but most used title is NPS, which stands for "No Particular Specialty". That one's my favorite. The website at ETS is in the throes of a major overhaul (which isn't published yet), but the newest information, the "Front Page" stuff written by Trudy (one of my bosses) needed to make it online, so I squidged it into the old format. Once I've got parts of the new design ready, I'll post them hereabouts for you to critique for me, if you would, perhaps next week-ish.

Once I get home today, it'll be time to snap some shots and talk nice about KDE 2.0, then upgrade the Kernel from 2.4pre-test1 to 2.4pre-test8, the latest and greatest, released last week. Apparently the kernel team has finally gotten some elusive memory corruption bugs under control. Then, if all goes really well, I'll be upgrading KDE to the latest as well (or trying to, anyway). I know how to be a good Roman Soldier - carrying my shield, or on it. Take care, and read the mail with me...

schizofrenia ? 

Sjon will see and Jan will see.  The others won't because we 
are going to hide the book afterwards. 

WAG ???? 
Acording to http://www.acronymfinder.com that is one of 

      Wild Ass Guess 
      Waste Area Grouping 
      Watershed Advisory Group 
      Women's Artistic Gymnastics 
      World Area Grid

But you could well mean : 

      Weird Anticipating Grin

--
Svenson.
Mail : [email protected]

Actually, Wide Ass Grin, but then, who's checking, Jan or Sjon?

Nice rejoinder. I can't afford to go there, or we won't finish the
book, and Tom will be unhappy...

.b

From: "Holden Aust" <[email protected]>
Subject: GIMP vs. PhotoPaint
To: Brian Bilbrey <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 00:55:54 +0100

I ain't no GIMP-Wizard (there's a scary sounding term, if ever there was 
one) but, again, for the average refugee from the land of WinDOS, 
PhotoPaint is going to look much friendlier than the GIMP does.

I'm certainly not saying that PhotoPaint is a direct competitor to GIMP, 
it's probably more like a Linux version of Adobe's PhotoDeluxe. Corel 
Draw will also manipulate photographs and perhaps it's more like 
PhotoShop in its capabilities than PhotoPaint is. Anyway, it's a free 
download and I would encourage you to take a look. It's also worth a 
look at PhotoPaint to be able to see the newer, distribution-aware, 
installer that Corel is using for Corel Draw and PhotoPaint. It seems to 
be much more "intelligent" than the installer that comes with Corel 
WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. It opens a dialogue box during the 
initial part of the installation and says: "You appear to be running 
Suse 6.4. Is that correct?" If you're not running what it thinks you're 
running, it gives you a drop-down list of distributions to choose from, 
which include, if I remember correctly, Corel, Red Hat, Caldera, 
SuSE, TurboLinux.

re: PhotoPaint...

Help me remember to check it out sometime in, say, November.
Anything that's not pretty closely related to book production is 
headed to the wayside for the time being. No room in the these crusty
old "little gray cells"...

.b

Good Morning. Svenson's email today greeted me with something like "since you do so much, they probably won't need to hire anyone else, just keep giving you more work..." ::sigh:: related to yesterday's job description, of course.

A productive, if low page count day, yesterday. I got Linux kernel 2.4.0-test8 down from kernel.org, placed, configured, built and booted it. Couple-a problems with drivers, but then I was installing in a VMware machine, and I've yet to rebuild the vmware tools to work with the new kernel, some of the VMware drivers wouldn't load (and of course I forgot that, yesterday! Why I remember at 6:30 am is literally beyond me). A couple more tests there, then I'm going to generate a batch of material for KDE2beta5, and put paid to this chapter... may stretch a day beyond where I thought, I was hoping to finish today, but too many things didn't go as smoothly as hoped. Today will be different.

If anyone knows about a library called libkssl.so.2 (or so.3) let me know - it's a dependency of KDE2beta5, and I haven't tracked it down yet. Now to work with me - maybe I'll return with good news this afternoon. TTFN.

Sometimes even speed-reading doesn't help...

Good morning. Yesterday was uneventful right up to the moments it became exciting. I wrote a $100K quote for product to a customer yesterday, since I had been dealing with the people telephonically. Be interesting to see if the order comes through...

Once I got home, I started things moving by stripping down the back 15G down to metal. Over the last couple of days, working with Linux Technology Preview and updating/upgrading bits here and there I had (a) entirely broken my install of 2.4, which lived in adjacent partitions to the more recent LTP install. (b) I had updated LTP to the point where it was too fragile to work with... <g> compare it to being the first kid on the block ot run a Microsoft Service Pack - effectively the same thing: you're the first kid to try to make a path across an abandoned lot, you've got to be the one to hold the grass down and who knows if there are King Cobras lurking in there

So, following the stripdown, I reinstalled eDesktop 2.4, and built it back up to my normal working setup, with SSH, Netscape 4.75 and so on. Then I went out to Sourceforge.Net (explicitly the COL 2.4 RPMS for KDE 2.0 Beta 5, a long URL), fetched down the whole kit and kaboodle, then installed KDE 2.0 the Final Beta onto eDeskop. I kept my fingers, toes and eyes crossed... it worked. Whooo-Hoooo.

That done, instead of trumpeting my unexpected victory here, I started grabbing screenshots and writing text for them, fillling in the holes I had left in the current Chapter on the future of OpenLinux on the desktop. Then I got ambitious... Helixcode Gnome... dare I try that again? It has worked OK for me on "real" machines, especially under Mandrake. But the experiences that Tom and I (more Tom, for some unfortunate reason) have had with the Helixcode installer indicate that I was treading on thin ice, trying to upgrade eDesktop, running in a VMware sandbox, with some other significant upgrades already in place...

Whooo-Hooooo, again! One weird thing, though. After doing a fresh install of Gnome Helixcode, which involved about 90 MB of downloads and 105 RPM packages installed, I thought for fun I would check back and see if there were any updates (aside from the Evolution preview that I knew I wanted)... 95 packages to be updated??? Wait, I just installed, how can there be 95 updates? Apparently, updates are to a baseline distribution. So know this: If you install Helixcode and get it running, login as root, run the Helixcode updater, and get-cher updates toot-sweet.

Ooops. I am out of time. Take care peoples, have a lovely time of day where ever you are, and I'll catch you again soon. TTFN.

Hi. Thought I'd drop in and post a couple of snaps of the farm. Mostly the tomatoes are done producing - there just isn't enough sun up here on the second floor porch under the overhang. The one plant that continues to produce is living in a 1 gallon pot - I never expected this one to live, much less thrive. The other plants will be coming out this weekend.

An addendum to running Gnome Helix: If your system doesn't already incorporate Gnome, then when you install the Gnome login manager (aka session manager), your other window managers go away, including KDE. Well, they're not gone, just not accessible from the login. To fix the problem, add an entry to /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/. Each script file in that directory is a session entry in the GDM login screen. Look at the existing entries for a pointer or two on creating your own.

Chapter 12, the future of OpenLinux (or something like that, the words are blurring right now), is as done as it's likely to be for the moment. Tomorrow (and for the next few days) I'll be working on Chapter 13, which is about the GUI administration tools, COAS and Webmin. Less prognostication, more facts. Should be lots easier for me to write, I hope. It's not a good thing when your eyes are pointing in different directions, is it???

On that note, I think I'll call it a night, quite early. I'll play Diablo II for a little while, then hang out with my lovely Marcia (website here, in case you didn't know) who has been supportive and remarkably restrained in her demands on my time during this writing, even though she knows it'll be worse before it gets better, as we round the last couple of turns and hit the straightaway towards the completion of the book.

TGIF!!!! And even though Fridays aren't really Fridays around here, there is still a difference - I can sleep in a bit for the next two days, and there's no commute traffic to cope with. Oh, sorry, forgot something from yesterday afternoon's update: To the driver of the white Lexus, doing 73 MPH in the slow lane with your eyes buried in the paperback book you have open on the steering wheel, "May you find your concrete abutment soon." The yutz!

Svenson wrote in to point out that it's a good thing that The Future of OpenLinux wasn't back one chapter. We wouldn't have wanted to imply that Caldera was headed for Chapter 11 (which it isn't, to the best of our knowledge). After poking in a few more bits, a couple of pages, into 12, I called it done, having run out of steam, and sent it to Tom. He'll be able to tell me what I am missing, 'cause it doesn't seem right, somehow.

An article at SecurityPortal crossed my eyeballs as a reference in an email recently, and I saved neither the email nor bookmarked the site. Fortunately, the title is distinctive: Stupid, Stupid Protocols: Telnet, FTP, rsh/rcp/rlogin. Informative despite its inflamatory title, I would regard the article as mandatory reading for anyone setting up a system that incorporates these protocols. BTW, it doesn't just diss the insecure, the article also explains and promotes SSH, a secure, encrypted session protocol. Recommended.

A parting shot from me to you, for the time being: Matt has a post up. Our buddy Mr. Beland, has been having a very interesting time of it (in the ancient Chinese curse meaning of the word), and it appears to be getting more painful and less intelligent <g> Poor guy. Well, anyway, I should be off to work. Have a great day, catch you later.

A busy morning already. Sorry. I've gotten a haircut, pruned back the patio farm (3 of the tomato plants are history), and had a nice long conversation with Tom. Both of us have found information that should help break our respective logjams. Of course, that means there's lots and lots of work to be done, and I'd better get to it.

I've brought down my development work on the new version of the ETS website locally, if you'd care to have a look and tell me what you think about the upgrade. Most of the content and links are dead yet, but a few pages are live, here they are: The Home Page, The Products Overview Page, and the Multimedia Products Page, also About ETS. By way of comparison, here's the live site as of today.

If you have a chance to look at those, I'd sure appreciate your opinion on the progress to date. Discerning browsers such as yourselves give me a good reality check. THANKS!!! Now to work with me. Later.

Good Morning. Lots to accomplish today, but got some feedback on the ETS pages (which I brought up on Saturday

On Sat, Sep 30, 2000 at 01:54:40AM -0600, John Doucette wrote:

HI Brian

I am using IE 5.5 and on the ETS products page, the first listing on the
left under products comes up as a smaller font, and is not
centered. Shows the same way on the multimedia page.

John D.

Hey, John,

Err, yea. that's on purpose becuase it's a submenu of the products
page. How can I make that clearer, please?

.b

On Sat, Sep 30, 2000 at 03:28:26AM -0600, John Doucette wrote:

How about using bullets or indents

Products:

-Multimedia
-Premise Wiring Ethernet
-IBM Connectivity
-Special Products

From: "J. H. RICKETSON" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 23:08:40 -0700
Subject: New ETS Design

Congratulations. All the difference between pro and amateur. Looks 
good, and is useful.

One small quibble: on the product overview page, the term "premise" 
is used. Perhaps it should be "premises"? It is my understanding that 
"premise" refers to something posited in an argument or theory, 
whereas "premises" refers to the boundaries of a building, as "on and 
off-premises sales", for instance.

JHR
-- 
J. H. RICKETSON
[[email protected]]
30/09/2000 11:01:36 PM
Linuxen do it in a hammock, standing up. By choice. 
Why? - " We've always done it that way!"

Thanks!  "Premise Wiring" is the industry term, gotta use it.

However, I think it's like this:

I am standing in a building and I talk about wiring the premises
(premises for the single building), right?

When I talk about standards for wiring a bunch of buildings, I am
talking "Premise Wiring".

I think it's one of those weird English language plural 
inversions.

Thanks for looking it over. Appreciate the feedback.

later, .bri

Now to get to work - I've got material to test and report on for Tom, then we're running down to Gilroy to pick up a few items at the Factory Stores down there. After that, I have a passel of input to do on the GUI System Admin chapter to get caught up to where I think I need to be. Oh, and a review from Tom on Chapter 12 to check out all the red on (I think - Late last night is a blur, although I did take a little break and watch the Matrix on DVD with my love).

TTFN, peoples. Back later.