[Techtalk] What I did over the Christmas Holidays!

[Raven, corporate courtesan]

Heya --

	Only answering the ones I think I can be helpful on...

Quoth Jennifer Davis (Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 03:32:33AM -0500):
> 1.	I think that there is a conflict with the sound card and another
> device.  How do I check?  In windows, I would use the device manager
> control panel.

	I had this same problem recently with my sound card.  You can
troll through the boot messages with dmseg and attempt to find
conflicts, but I didn't actually find any for my system.  You should see
something like:

<Sound Blaster 16> at 0x330 irq 5 dma 0

in the dmesg output; that will give you the IRQs, and you can compare it
against the other IRQs in use.  For me, though, it was a permissions
problem on the sound devices, and a missing /dev/sndstat at first.  When
I redid the module for my sound card and changed the permissions on
/dev/dsp, that fixed it for me.

	Are you sure that you're using the right module for your sound
card?

> 3.	What is the Slackware way of installing a printer?

	You can set up lpd, the printing demon, or its more secure
equivalent LPRngi (http://www.astart.com/lprng/LPRng.html), or CUPS.  I
don't know of any particularly Slackware way of doing it, but then again
I'm not really experienced with Slack.  

	You may also want to check out
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5329 for a quick rundown on
your alternatives.  Someone more Slack-savvy may be able to help you
choose something distro-specific if that's what you want.

> 5.	Are there any tools/tricks for converting MS Outlook Express email
> boxes, files or whatever into standard linux mailboxes?  Sorry, jargon
> escapes me here.

	There are.  You can find alternatives at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ol2mbox/  and
http://www.icewalk.com/softlib/app/app_01205.html

	The former is still is beta.  The latter is KDE based, but will
convert yoour Outlook Express files to mbox format.  (Just be careful
not to overwrite her existing mbox; that would be bad as it would
replace all the new mail she's gotten.)  You should be able to use it
for any mbox conversion from OE; just use Balsa rather than kmail to
open the new mboxes.
 
> 6.	What is the secret for having the PC shut itself off?  I know it?s
> in the kernel configuration, but I just have never mastered the API
> thingee.

	Like a power saving thing, or on command?  shutdown -h now,
halt, etc. will do it from the command line (as root, or you can change
the priviliges to let a user do it, use sudo, alias it, what have you).
 
Cheers,
Raven 
 
"Nobody 'manages' IT.  It simply entropies."
  -- Rafe, on the number of "Come As You Aren't" attendees who came as
     some form of IT management.