Meeting Notes and Questions

[JJ Neff]

Thanks to everyone who came to the NFLUG meeting Sunday.  The gibs were flying!
 (giblets for those who don't know).  We had a mini-Quake fest and many who
watched were threatening to bring PCs next month.

For those who were present they may recall that the Mandrake Server I brought
was locking up randomly and services were dying.  THose appear to have cleared
up mostly from the portmapper working correctly...and removing mismatched
DIMMs. The YP server starts as expected.  According to the documentation on
MandrakeUser.org the ypbind is only needed on the server if you plan on having
users use NIS on the server locally.  But apparently ypbind was a necessary
component.  Now I have to figure out how to use ypinit +m  to create a map of
users and home drives etc etc.  Hopefully someone can assist or send me docs
that are a little more straightforward than the NIS How-To.

HOWEVER: the server still locked up Monday, when I set it back up at home,
after only a few minutes.  I changed default init to 3 so I could get a console
to watch every time.  (Can anyone send a tip on changing Aurora to standard
text mode start up?) I noticed if the box sat a few minutes it got massive SCSI
time out errors and lost its mind.  I then had to "Raise Skinny Elephants".  I
turned off power saving in the BIOS and it seems to have fixed it.  Darn Power
saving.

Other stuff.  The install I attempted to do on the Tower gaming box I brought
did not go well at the meeting.  Here is what I learned.  The box has both IDE
and SCSI CDroms, the IDE is secondary/slave.  It is not detected in BIOS.  I
had to set the ide channel to "Auto Detect" In order to get the ATAPI CDROM
detected at boot- this then let me boot from Mandrake CDROM.  HOWEVER!  The
cdrom install failed 3X in a row. I finally booted and chose expert mode and
loaded the aicxxx scsi drivers and did the install from the SCSI CDrom.  THe
install went fine!  Weird.  I think that IDE drive may have issues...

(DEGE) I loaded the Mandrake- NVIDIA drivers for my GeForce2 MX 400 from the
MandrakeUser.org site and now when X starts I get an NVIDIA screen.  It is now
GL capable as I understand it.  What does this mean for playing Quake/QuakeII. 
 Can I play either of these with OpenGL.. WHere should I look for docs?  AM i
still forced to use squake (from your binaries)?

I almost bought RTCW (castle Wolfenstein) yesterday but then I realized I was
spending too much already on 5 port switches that were mislabeled at $29.99 at
CompUSA!  (hehe) I will get it and we will have to try that multiplayer also!
Anyone know the absolute cheapest place to purchase it online or local?

I wrote a lot of random thoughts to generate talk and get some answers to
questions.  If you respond please snip the part you are responding to and not
reply with the whole message thanks.

JJN

PS  CAN DOSEMU be used to play old DOS games like Tombraider 1 or D&D stuff?




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