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A great use for wiki technology is to maintain Man Pages updated. Most of us know that some man pages are spartan at best, and few get updated regularly.
The Waikato Linux Group have published most of the linux man pages on their wiki site. This way anyone can edit/modufy/update these manpages.
Great idea.

There is this guy hacking his ADSL modem. He played a game of backgammon on it and could watch the console output as Linux booted up: http://www.linux.net.nz/pipermail/aucklug/2005-Nov ember/000567.html (came across this when I was trying to set up my D-Link 302g ADSL modem with a usb connection) Cheers

As one of the helpers for the installfest, I can say that this is pretty much only going to help our cause. We couldn't ask for better advertising (both the NZ Herald, and Slashdot).

We will be ready, Saturday, with plenty of CDs (we hope).

Well, I can assure you that Chris Barton is a real person -- a journalist for the New Zealand Herald technical and business pages, (not a "technical writer" as written here) i.e. He is a real person who needs to get real work done irrespective of what operating system he's running. He's a journo, not a techo by trade. That's what's news. More and more, musicians, artists, novelists and soccer moms are flocking to Linux in NZ because of what Chris Barton writes in the newspaper. Particularly his promoting our INSTALLFEST which is what the original article was about.

Now Chris has also written numerous good articles about WETA DIGITAL , the people who brought the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the big screen, running linux clusters (at least two generations of them), as well as numerous other commerical linux deployments throughout New Zealand and the rest of Australasia. I was actually quite surprised that he wasn't running Linux on his desktop already, but, then, a lot of us are literally forced to use Windows at work by brain-dead MSCE-infected ITdiots who advise Upper Management. The more of a groundswell towards Linux adoption they see, the better.

Sorry, but as long as there are no separate shelves with Linux software in shops like CompUSA or Virgin Megastore, Linux will not be for "ordinary people".

Well, the computer store I go to -- Dr Floppy -- has Linux games stocked on shelves separate from the Windows games...and about the same number of each. It's a retail store in the heart of downtown Auckland.

If the US and UK retailers haven't figured out how to stock and market Linux games yet, well, that's their loss.

People can transfer the skills they already have from Windows to Linux -- which is what the INSTALLFEST is all about, really: helping "ordinary people" leverage a very transferrable skillset.

The important thing to remember is that while they may feel at first that they're "having to learn everything all over again," with just a little encouragement, they soon realize that all the things they learned how to do in Windows and/or Mac gave them a lot more general knowledge than what they had when they truly knew nothing about computers. The truly awesome thing is when they realize that they actually know a lot more about computers in general than they're giving themselves credit for--because it's their second or third operating system, they find themselves picking it up far more quickly than the others, and they see more similarities than differences. Your "ordinary people" are not so ordinary any more! Well, not in NZ anyway.

Back to your point about games. Most of your linux games are open-source anyway, which means that not only can you get them for free (as in beer) over the internet, but also so can all of your friends. Far more social than forcing everyone into the false dilemma of "Purchase or Pirate." On Windows, you have to either crack the game to play it multiplayer, or convince your friends to buy it. On Linux all that intellectual energy can go into adding new features, or even just making new skins -- because you don't have to crack it!

Please check out our Installfest site. This is intended to install linux, yes, and get people started, yes. But most of all it will put the people getting started in touch with local people who can and will provide them with additional information in the future. It's about promoting linux in the community, and forming a community around it.

I have to say that "ordinary people" are getting more and more sophisticated. People are learning about their own computers at a much deeper level than ever before -- configuring a machine to, say, share a printer over a network is common knowledge these days, part of what is considered basic computer literacy , and guess what? This knowledge and these skills are transferrable.

Going from one pointy-clicky interface on a Windows PC and setting it up for email, file and print sharing, to another pointy-clicky interface on, say, SuSE, to do the same things is a lot easier than when way back when, when we had to explain to people what a network could do for them in the first place. Windows helped crack open the window to learning to use a computer, and Linux turns it into a door--a great big double door to a very large house, with a tiled and heated indoor pool, a marble sunken jacuzzi and a conservatory. They just don't want to go back to their overpriced little council flat of a Windows operating system after seeing what they can do with Linux running on the same machine.

There was a time when MS "wasn't for ordinary peoples' desktops", either. That was the domain of Apple, remember?

LINUX. Because in a world without fences, who needs Gates?

Well actually ... no. Having the correct IP does little good.

A lot of ISPs use a transparent proxy for outgoing requests. If they find a packet heading for port 80, they grab it and route it via their own proxy servers. The proxy server does its own lookup via its own dns cache, and makes the request on your behalf. No matter what result you may be getting for DNS lookups, if their cache snaffles your packet, then it is all a waste of time.

Have a read of this post to NZLUG.

I went to the launch in Auckland, New Zealand. Because of our location we were probably the first in the world to have it launched here (we did have it released here first, see earlier articles).

Here's a link to my post on a mailing list explaining what I saw, as well as the application crash at the end of the demonstration. Worth checking out.

If that link doesn't work ... um, well I can't find any other archives of it sorry.

On Monday a gentleman on the IBM public relations team talk to the local LUG.

In his presentation he spoke about how Samba is so widely implemented MS would be silly to break compatibility with it, for fear of the backlash of all the irate customers.

Maybe he underestimated MS's stupidity, or perhaps he underestimated the power of their marketing team.

In the past they have slipped various other incompatibilities in that you wouldn't believe, but the lemmings upgraded.

Aw man, and in other news it rips me to hear that a major government department wanted to move to Linux but had to continue with NT because there weren't enough people with Linux experience available. :-(

Code Red will only slurp down 12868 bytes.

Don't do it - the 'net has enough stress on it with 5.9 million IIS running hosts trying to infect everything in site without you transmitting a bunch of zeroes.

Yes, so I had similiar thoughts, but Daniel Lawson taught me better. (Thanks Daniel BTW.)