More 2 Cent Tips!

See also: The Answer Gang's Knowledge Base and the LG Search Engine

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• make fetchmail use procmail
• nfs lockups, fix your pagesize
• alien killer cheesecake eludes search, apropos apprehended
• Exporting a del.icio.us feed to a Netscape bookmark file
• Re: [LG 110] help wanted #1
• Linux mail and HTML
• Converting Mailman's text archives to mbox

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make fetchmail use procmail

Heather Stern (The Answer Gang's Editor Gal)
Question by billp_ in #hants ()

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nfs lockups, fix your pagesize

Heather Stern (The Answer Gang's Editor Gal)
Question by Rickeh in #hants ()

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alien killer cheesecake eludes search, apropos apprehended

Ben Okopnik (ben from linuxgazette.net)
Question by #tag-chat ()

Anyway - got a 2-cent tip for you. I sent this one in to Mike ages ago, but searching for it in LG doesn't show anything.

One of the things I'd found when experimenting with RedHat is that their "apropos" utility seems to be just an alias for "man -k", i.e., does not allow wildcard searches via "apropos -w". Since "apropos -w" was something I found very useful in my early days of learning Linux, I decided to write a script that would be an even friendler, more helpful version of "whatis" and "apropos -w" combined. I called it "howto"- and I still use it on occasion, simply because it's a fun way to find info (and get hooked into checking out other interesting things!). The syntax for it is very simple - just type

howto wipe out alien civilizations and make killer cheesecake

If there's anything that's available on the topic, or any of the keywords, you'll find it...

RedHat users note: your installation procedure does not automatically create the "whatis" database (or for that matter, even the "mandb" database) which is required by this script - and by "whatis". See the manpage for "man" and "whatis" for further info.

And here's the script:

See attached howto.sh.txt

Wiping out alien civilizations and making killer cheesecake are definitely knowledge that should be propagated. (are things? is knowledge? Damn this slippery language and its referents!)

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Exporting a del.icio.us feed to a Netscape bookmark file

Jimmy O'Regan (The LG Answer Gang)

This didn't fit in with my article (http://linuxgazette.net/110/oregan1.html), but it's still cool. It dumps your del.icio.us feed into a Netscape compatible bookmarks file.

See attached delicious2netscape.pl.txt

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Re: [LG 110] help wanted #1

Etienne Lorrain (etienne_lorrain from yahoo.fr)

Hi there,

When you have problems booting Linux from DOS, you also have to look in which mode you are using DOS: with or without HIMEM.SYS loaded, with or without EMM/QEMM/EMM386 loaded, with or without a swap file, with or without a disk cache or a memory disk (VDISK) loaded.

Have a look at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gujin

you have there a GPL bootloader which works from a lot of DOS configurations (probably all of them) - and if you have problems, its debug executable (dbgload.exe, dbgdisk.exe, dbgfs.exe...) create a file named DBG which explains what did wrong.

You have precompiled loader (interactive and command line version) at:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gujin/install-0.9.tgz?download

and precompiled debug at:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gujin/standard-0.9.tgz?download

Please read the doc at:

http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=3D15465

it answers most usual questions.

You may not want to install it as the master boot record (MBR) of your hard disk in its own managed partition (partition protected by setting the IDE max address of the hard disk) if you are using an older 2.4 Linux kernel because those kernel had a bug where, when the IDE max address is set, the Linux IDE system thinks the disk has 1 (i.e. one) sector (i.e. the total size of the hard disk is then believed to be 512 bytes - that is a bug).

Note that I have never seen a case where - if a problem appear following a hard disk install - the uninstall checkbox on the menu did not perfectly work and restore a perfect system, at least since v0.8. Version 0.9 is needed for newer 2.6 Linux kernels.

Etienne.

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Linux mail and HTML

Haim Kalderon (HaimK from sitqad.co.il)
Question by (ben-fuzzybear from yahoo.com)
Answered By Brian Bilbrey

Hello Ben,

I read your article at http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue92/okopnik.html, and was wandering if you can review the following:

I'm now moving major application from Windows to Linux server.

The application used blat mailing software.

Until here no problem, because I can work with Linux mail instead.

But the Windows blat had a flag to send mail in html format... maybe you know of an equivalent to send mails from Linux using the mail command?

Appreciate your help,

Haim

[Brian] Hello Haim,

Create a text file that contains your email. It should look like an email message, with headers on individual lines, etc:

    To: you@example.com
    From: me@example.com
    Reply-To: me-too@example.com
    Subject: Test HTML message

Make sure that one of headers is Content-Type, like this:

Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"

That tells the email client to render the text stream that it receives as HTML. Note that there are many options for charset - use the one that's appropriate for your target audience (common alternatives are the ISO-8859-n charsets). Also note that it doesn't help you when receivers of the email explicitly don't parse HTML mail, or have filters that preferentially mark HTML email as likely spam. But, ranting aside, we continue...

Then in the body of your email,

    <html>
         [your content]
    </html>

All of that is in a text file (or composed on the fly by your application), either way, redirected into the sendmail binary for mailing:

sendmail you@example.com < sample_message.htm

[Brian]

> To:
> <ben-fuzzybear@yahoo.com>

Ben FuzzyBear, eh? Is that your Animist Native American / Aleut moniker?

[Ben] Old nickname coined by an x-gf due to a number of my bear-like characteristics - mostly my hairy chest and my ability to substitute for a room heater or an electric blanket... but 'twas long ago, far away, and the account is essentially dead.

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Converting Mailman's text archives to mbox

Benjamin A. Okopnik (ben from linuxgazette.net)
Question by The Linux Gang , Heather , (star from starshine.org)

This was true of our mailman, which is a rather basic configuration at the time this tip was put together, so it should do just as well for anyone else who hasn't indulged in heavy modifications to mailman. Ah, python... -- Heather

Is the archive tarball not in mbox format? I'm writing this off-line so I can't check, but let me know if it's not - I've done header mangling before, specifically converting some weird format into mbox, so I'll happily fold, spindle, and mutilate those poor emails as necessary.

[Jimmy] The list archives are available as text (so close to mbox format that you really have to wonder why they bothered using anything else), or as HTML. Mailman does keep mboxes of its archives, but those are private - you should have no problem grabbing it though.

Got'em. Seems that the mods are pretty basic; passing it through a couple of simple regexes -

gzip -dc 2004-December.txt.gz|perl -0 -wpe's/^(From [^\s]+) at /\n$1\@/gsm;s/^\n//s' > mail.box

cures the disparity.

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This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette
HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

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