A thread for boring computer questions.

okay,

I got a plotter, today, for free.

problem is, I think, the plotter's driver doesn't work with anything beyond windows 98 and I have XP.

is there a way of running a copy of 98 from inside XP?? or something??

what else could I do?

Have you tried the Win98 driver?

Oh and you can't run Win98 within WinXP, Microsoft isn't sophisticated enough for that

the 98 driver doesn't work, apparently.

I was told it wouldn't work, by the person I got the plotter from.

I looked online (a bit) and was told it wouldn't work.

I think I may have found a driver that will work.

how boring!!

I think you will have trouble with this. Best of luck, but everything has changed since then. 98 and XP share nothing other than the win32 API, which is not what a driver's going to use; XP is basically Windows NT and 98 is basically DOS. The term "windows" is about all there is in common, and if no-one's written an XP driver, you're stuffed.

If you can find a driver for say NT4, then there's a possibility, but even at that it's probably likely to fail.

Have fun anyway.

A "plotter" you say! Do they still exist! You'll be coming home with a drum printer and a wireless next.

haha, plotters are still v. important.

I think I have found an NT-based driver that, apparently, "works very well with XP".

since I dropped & broke my external hard drive, on sunday, I have no copy of autoCAD to give it a whirl with, though!!

ta!

You mean plotter as in massive-printer-that-takes-A0-size-sheets, yeah? Not them robot-pens-drawing-on-paper things?

Why not get a Turtle... Could be space saving.

can someone who has installed Nicotine 1.0.8 translate their install instructions to english for me? It seems to want me to do something totally different than I did last time I installed, but I can't figure out what. But the old version seems to have stopped working.

Either that or everyone on slsk has become a total asshole and stopped sharing, and no one is interested in my files either. The first option seems totally sensible to me, knowing people, but the second seems strange especially considering the new albums I just added.

I just switched clients again:

http://chris.schleifer.net/ssX/

so much better than nicotine, or the win client

-- fe zaffe (fezaff...) (webmail), March 28th, 2005 10:31 AM. (fezaffe) (link)

Seems like I'm getting better search results than ever. Maybe it's just time to get off Nicotine.

ssX is very good, it's come on leaps and bounds in it's last couple of builds, it was a complete resource hog and almost unusable relatively recently.

hrm that's not helping. Let me explain better?

Basically in either program (I dl'd ssX) I'm getting search results (slowly) but they're all greyed out and can't download. Now, I actually pay the $5 a month for slsk so this shouldn't be happening; I haven't used slsk in a while though, not heavily at least. But previously, like say 3 months ago when I last used it for several searches, virtually everything showed up as dl-able to me. Did they change the policy, like you don't skip the queue anymore? Am I doing something wrong, like should I be changing my settings, upping the speed limits or something?

OTOH like I said no one is dl'ing off of me either which is really unusual and is leading me to believe the problem is on my end.

The FAQ says something about ports needing to be opened--now I haven't changed anything with my hardware or software that I am aware of (which is why a port problem seems weird to me--it worked three months ago just fine) and have no idea how to check and see if these ports are open??

System Preferences -> Sharing is how you check which ports you have open and set ones to be open if they're not.

the Network Utility under Apps -> Utilities can also help you figure out which connections on what ports are working and what else is going on.

my firewall is off on my computer

also i don't see the ports they're talking about in apple's preset list of ports?

what about the ports on the router?

wait I found the ports in question but like I said my firewall is off so shouldn't they be open automatically?

the router should be wide open. The roadrunner modem may not be for some ports. you can add your own ports to the list they have there, if you start the firewall.

they should be open automatically but it was my impression the FW was on by default on OS X, most of the time. Dunno.

would anyone be willing to help me with this: (and forgive if i don't describe this quite right)

recently installed mandrake 10.1 and up til today it was playing nicely with my network. today, however (after re-booting into windows for a while) i seem to be having problems with host name resolution (?) - i can successfully ping the other comps IP addy's but cannot ping their names. and smb4k will not see the computers so that i can browse their shares. i don't so far know of any other way to browse the other computers.

any ideas?

ps i also have wanted to ask here for help on getting a ssk client and dc client running. where i'm stalled out there is: things wanted me to install glibmm.. ok so that would not go without libsigc++. I successfully installed this, but still when i try to configure the glibmm it says that it cannot find the libsigc++ and that i should try to 'add the directory containing `sigc++-2.0.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'sigc++-2.0' found'

so i don't know how to do that. currently the sicg++-2.0.pc file is in /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

also i don't really understand what's the best way to go about adding packages to the OS... what is the best procedure in terms of where to download the files to, where to unzip them, where to do the configure and install stuff, etc.

Can I re-assign IRQs in Windows XP? If so, how?

(My comp crashes frequently and I'm running out of ideas to explain why - and thinking conflicting IRQs might be at the bottom of it)

i believe that in order to manually control IRQ's, you must change your comp to 'Standard PC' , instead of ACPI-enabled PC. I once experimented with this and I wouldn't recommend it, though i can't remember exactly why. For one thing, I don't think you can switch back to ACPI. You can see what irq's are being shared in system configuration utility. maybe just switch some pci slots to try to get the irqs in line?

i think that the power & restart, etc. features didn't work properly after i switched to standard pc

man, weren't irq problems supposed to be over like 10 years ago?

Re: Linux problems. For the hostname resolution issue:

a) check that /etc/resolv.conf has your DNS server IP addresses in (NB: if you're still on dialup, then this file may well get temporarily replaced when your PPP connection is active)
b) if you've got static IPs for your computers, you can always just list them in /etc/hosts

The best way round the pkgconfig problems is to hunt the net for RPM files for your version of Mandrake for the packages you want to install. I *think* you install them with the command

rpm -ivh package-file.rpm

but you might want to check that, because I try to avoid RPM-based systems.

For the pkgconfig problems in general: to fix it for a single user, add the line:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH='/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig'

to that user's .bashrc file. (I assume you're using bash as the shell). To fix it for all users, there'll be a system-wide bash profile file somewhere under /etc (different Linuxes tend to be set up slightly differently)

An alternative way you might want to consider is to try to make sure manually-built things get installed to /usr rather than /usr/local. To do that, for most packages, when you *should* run

./configure

instead, run:

./configure --prefix=/usr

This will mean still that they might try to put files in /usr/etc, /usr/var and so on rather than the top-level directories. Whether you prefer this to /usr/local/etc, /usr/local/var and so on (which is what ./configure likes to use by default is up to you. I prefer to just use /usr/local for stuff I've built myself - but I use Gentoo, which makes many more packages available through the system installer than most Linuxes, so I've rarely had to do it anyway.

Oh, and, don't just add the export command to .bashrc - either run it at the command line too, or then log out and log in again.

thanks a lot caitlin, i'm going to have another go at this right now... i'm glad you are around on the weekend!

ronny, you might want to use a package manager that will automatically download and install any RPM packages that are needed to run the piece of software you want to install.

Mandrake's package manager is called urpmi. There's a tutorial here that might be useful:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/walter/geek/rpm-howto.html

I use a package manager (apt-get for Debian) to install any software I need. The only time I'll resort to installing something manually (e.g. configure && make && make install) is if the package repositories don't contain what I'm after.

i'm going to try that. i have been installing packages this morning, and was only mildly frustrated with recieving errors for 2 or 3 failed dependencies. but i just tried to install libz and got errors for like 20 other things! grr

well, i've got my network back but still up against a brick wall with dclib. thanks you guys :)

OK, here's a Windows question:

On my parents' computer (running Windows XP), whenever they start up Word, it tries to install Microsoft Office XP Standard for Students and Teachers. They have Word 2002 installed, it looks like, and they don't know what could have happened that would make it ask for the installation CD-ROM every time. If they hit cancel, it works fine, but it's still annoying and mysterious (like, you know, much of their computer). Any ideas what's going on and how to stop it?

I think that has to do with how office was installed. Like some of the clipart was left on the cdrom so the software prompts for it. moronic eh?

Yeah. But they didn't have that edition of Office (they thought) and it was working fine until a few days ago. Ah well.

Hey there y'all. I'd like to (once again) reveal my stupidity and ask if anyone knows a quick way to delete past searches from Google. I've got a trainee in work using my pc and having a jolly good laugh at all of mine.

I'm beyond mortified, he found 'minimise open pores' (after which he scrutinised said pores and agreed help was required) and 'Karen Carpenter' which he frowned at.

Internet Explorer:

Go to Tools -> Internet Options...
Click on "Content"
Click on the "Autocomplete..." button
Click on "Clear Forms"

Firefox:

Go to Tools -> Options...
Click on "Privacy"
Click on the "Clear" button next to "Saved Form Information"

Bless you my friend.

We've got an Airport Extreme at work, but want to extend the range; it's less a distance problem as a geography one; we need to get around a corner and through about 4 walls to the other part of our offices.

What's the deal with buying a wireless router to extend the range? Would an antenna do just as well? Can anyone recommend a good cheap solution that doesn't need uber-techieness to implement?

Right.

I've just got a new computer. It's the first time I've ever had a Proper New Computer, as opposed to a hand-me-down from someone else. As such, I want to treat her right so she'll look after me in return - chances are, I won't be able to afford another one for a very long time.

So, I'd like your collective recommendations. How can I make my new laptop last for 10 years? What's the first thing I should do? Should I uninstal IE and instal Firefox instead? (I've heard this said in the past) I want to keep her as uncluttered as possible.

What should I avoid? Will slsk cause me problems, of can it be among the first things I install (as well as musicmatch and msn messenger)?

I don't want to hurt my new baby! Best foot forward, and all that...

You can't uninstall IE and you'll need it for things, leave it.

Get Firefox, and MS Antispyware

Make sure you have XP Service Pack 2 and go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and make sure you have all the critical updates.

Get an Antivirus programme and keep it up to date

slsk is fine

musicmatch isn't that great, there are better programmes for ripping and playing mp3a, cdex, winamp, itunes etc.

No computer will last ten years.

I've got McAfee antivirus-antispyware software, so hopefully that'll do the necessary.

I only want musicmatch cos it's what I've used since 2001 so I'm used to its funtionality. What's better than it?

I know, I know, a decade is a daft aim, but you get my drift.

If you want a laptop to last a long time, it doesn't really matter what you install or not on it - if things get fucked up for software reasons you can always do a reinstall. If you want it to last, then just treat it like it's a fragile object - laptops die because of one two many knocks/drinks spilled on them.

like people, then!

thanks for your advice, folks. i shall bear it all in mind when downloading pr0n conducting research.

hmmm. that didn't work very well. what's the html for strikethrough? obviously not k!

strike and /strike

woo!

We used to use icalx.com for calendar sharing on Ical, but it appears to be down, and I'll bet it won't come back. OUr web hosts don't have webDAV servers, and as they're work related, we can't have them publicly available.

It needs to be simple, so getting people to use another app is out of the question. It needs to be cheap, so getting 7 people to get .mac is also out of the question. So...

Anyone know of any free / cheapish webDav server space we could use for hosting 6 calendars?

there's one built into OS X. Otherwise cheack out freshmeat.net.

You mean I can store files there and as it's webDAV enabled, we will be able to use them?

huh?

Freshmeat.net is a directory of software, mainly opensource and may be able to help you.

As for the Mac thing there was a useful article on macdevcenter.com on setting up a homemade .Mac server on your mac which included a WebDav calendar server. Set one of the office Macs to be the WebDAV server.