Occasional Thoughts

Why is Linux not a replacement for Windows? Why does Linux not want to be a replacement? What is the difference between Linux and Windows? Why are Linux programs sometimes not as easy to use as other programs in Windows and why do they not want to be easy to use? Read the answers to these question in this excellent article: Linux is Not Windows

Wow! I never thought that the Embassy theme would become so popular. But it got voted to #10 on the Linspire Warehouse Voting Booth.

I already mentioned the woes with configuring postfix on my dads computer. But there was another problem with the linux box: While the computer was able to reboot, it hung at shutdown so that the only possibility left was to switch off the machine resulting in file system checks at the next start up. After some googling I was convinced in my guesswork that the root cause was a broken ACPI implementation. However disabling ACPI didn't help. What helped was to set the kernel option noapic in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

At home I have a simple setup running: Fetchmail fetches emails from my POP3 accounts hosted at my ISP, forwards them to a localuser using the local transport of postfix, which in turn delivers them to a mail dir in my home directory that is served via IMAP using courier. A simple setup that was configured within 30 minutes. But then I intended to do the same for the server in my dads home. Easy, I thought, since I already did that before and expected to perform this in less than 30 minutes. At first it looked like I had no problems, but then fetchmail fetched the mails, but it didn't forward them to the local mailbox. In addition I wasn't able to send emails using the local transport to my dads mailbox and in /var/log/mail I saw errors like"421 dns lookup failed for sender domain indicating that postfix contacts the SMTP Gateway of my ISP for delivering local mails. Do you have any clue what could have been the problem here?

Well, the title should really say "Spammers - f*** off", but I don't want to sound rude. In the last days more and more comments were posted that obviously were originated by spam bots. Therefore I had to install a wordpress plugin that displays an image containing text, which has to be entered before a comment is published. Sorry readers for that annoyance, but it is still better than requiring everyone to register, before he is able to post a comment and I still like to read your opinions.