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

The Answer Guy

By James T. Dennis, answerguy@ssc.com
Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

Problems with SCSI-CDROM and Audio CDs --or--: Sinister 'xmcd' Permanently Disables Right Speaker Channel
Email Alpha-Paging software
xdm in 16bpp Mode
Bad cluster in HDD
Complex network and NetBIOS
Lets vote for Linus --or--: Some Thoughts on "The Man of the Century"
How do I setup gateway server? --or--: Linux as a General Purpose SOHO to Internet Gateway
Linux.bat -or--: LOADLIN.EXE, Plug & "Pray" and "Win(Lose)Modems"
'sendmail' Masquerading: What and Why
Tools for converting X output to java
Fwd: Please Be Careful --or--: "Good Times" Are Here Again? NOT!
LinuxGazette Mar 1998: xdm Login doesn't!

Linux Gazette: The Answer Guy for May, 1998

Well, plenty has happened in the world of Linux this month:

The kernel team is getting much closer to the next stable version,
Linux has been discussed favorably on NPR (National Public Radio)...twice.
- Once on All Things Considered (transcript available with a link a RealAudio file of the whole thing and
- again on "Science Fridays"
Linus is the proud father of another baby girl.
I've completely changed the look of this column.
I'm signing a book contract to do a book on "Advanced Linux Systems Administration"

My wife has decided to take responsibility for marking up the mail that I do as "The Answer Guy" (I didn't pick the name, honest!). Traditionally I've just answered the e-mail that was forwarded to me by the Linux Gazette editors and copied them on it. Marjorie has normally done the rest.

This has been O.K. since we've focused on content rather than form. However, I've wanted to improve it a little bit ever since I first found out that the answers I was giving were being included in LG. (Mainly I want the URL references I make to other various web sites to be rendered as links so you don't have to cut and paste those into your "Go" or "Open Location" prompt).

Obviously I've procrastinated on that for over a year. Yes, I fiddle with Hypermail and MHOnArc. Finally, Heather took matters into her own hands and modified a copy of 'babymail' (a Perl script) to do most of the work. Unfortunately it appears that this still requires quite a bit of hand tweaking. Oh well. [24-Aug-2000: Hyperlink removed because file is gone. -Ed.]

So, I hope everyone likes the new look. [Me too! -- Heather] To any of you that have written to me and been ignored or never received your responses I'd like to apologize. Sometimes I procrastinate on more than just the cosmetics and I certainly hope you eventually got your answers from other venues like comp.os.linux.* or the L.U.S.T. (Linux Users Support Team) mailing list, or even (horrors!) from one of the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) mirrors.

Another, budding new source of support info for Linux users will hopefully be the "self-service" Linux Search Engine which hopefully will eventually be a complete replacement for Yahoo! (the source for most of the answers I've ever given here).

Well, enough of my rambling and onto my usual collection of questions and answers. As usual I've also included a couple of items which are my responses to posts in newsgroups or mailing lists --- items that I personally think are important enough to be restated here.

Jim Dennis