FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions. |
|
|
There are 12 entries in the FAQ.
Pages: 1
|
| What does VISTA mean |
 | Virus
Infection
Spyware
Trojans and
Adware |
Where is GarfNet based?
Author: Garfield Lucas |
| GarfNet is hosted by Noko and is based here in 'sunny' Southampton, on the south coast of England. Our host's website is http://www.noko.co.uk The head man is chap called Chris Attewell. He's a good guy & really knows his stuff. Noko is heavily into corporate web & intranet projects but somehow still manages to find room for little ol' us! Cheers Chris! |
What happened to the New Millennium ezine?
Author: Garfield Lucas |
| The 'Milly' as we affectionately called it was an experimental but slightly dysfunctional quarterly ezine that ran from 1995 December 27th through to 1999 December 25. It's quirky but honest view of the world attracted contributors & readers from all around the planet.
The New Millennium was a big project, undertaken on a shoestring budget. It resulted in a huge site, run by a team of enthusiastic writers receiving and trying to answer stacks of emails from all around the world. All of this became difficult to manage especially as the project failed to generate any revenue!
My father, David Lucas was major contributor & supporter. Unfortunately he died suddenly on the afternoon of 1999-11-18. My enthusiasm for the project waned as the magazine ran its last edition at 1999 Christmas. I concentrated on getting over the loss and on my commercial work. The site was allowed to rot for a while as the remaining members of the team started projects of their own.
It was written entirely by contributors who don't fit neatly into someone else's' boxes. But I think this gave it 'soul'. I met some amazing people and brought on board even more amazing people that I already knew. I learnt much.
The Milly' offers a record of some of people I've met - some via the net, some via the real world and quite a few more in the real world wanting to meet others in the virtual world! Many started their own sites as a result. Hard to say how many lives 'The Milly' really touched. There must be a thesis in it!
Millennium Archive can be found here http://www.garfnet.org.uk/new_mill |
Is the New Millennium available in an archive?
Author: Garfield Lucas |
| Yes. Fully searchable archive currently lives here http://www.garfnet.org.uk/new_mill |
What is the 'Millennium Team' doing now?
Author: Garfield Lucas |
| I am working on a new area of this site called 'Friends' where I plan to list most of the old team and their current projects. |
Why Linux?
Author: Garfield Lucas |
| Our old server ran since 1995 with only a handful of reboots. Needless to say, it was not an M$ Windows machine. It was a FreeBSD box and it served us well. When our ISP said we could build our own server, we had two choices;
1. Windows 2003 Server with IIS (Micro$oft Internet Information Server) or
2. Linux with Apache webserver.
M$ software would have cost an arm and a leg, whereas Linux & Apache is free. Thing is that I'm a tight-wad - the sort of guy who buys his shoes from Tescos! Therefore there was no contest here really. In fact ALL the software on our new server was Linux-based and totally free.
OK, setting up Linux can be a pain - although I must say Linux & Apache was a doddle for us for reasons detailed in elsewhere in this FAQ.
The tricky bit was installing the email server - frankly QMail still seems a black art to me. I wish you clever Linux people out there would invent an easy GUI installer! Anyway I digress. Once Linux is set up it is amazingly robust. And all that Unixy stuff may seem a bit scary at first but after you have worked with it for a while, you really do grow to love it. And there are some brilliant Unix resources on the web.
I know true Unix geeks would balk at this idea but I found a couple of articles on the Wikipedia especially helpful in getting my head round some basic Unix concepts...
1. Unix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
2. Unix Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard |
Which Linux 'flavour' did you choose and why did you choose it?
Author: Garfield Lucas |
| Debian 4.0 Debian is one of the most stable platforms upon which you can build a web server.
http://www.debian.org |
Didn't you use another Linux at one time
Author: Garfield Lucas |
| In 1995 our ISP set us up on a server running FreeBSD. Then in 2005 we built our own server, moved to Linux and chose a 'live CD' product based on Debian Linux called Simply Mepis. At the time, if you wanted a quick out-of-the-box solution with a minimum of messing about, I think Mepis was the best of the Linux distributions for the non-nerdy. It had everything you need for a basic user, including OpenOffice.org which will open & save most Micro$oft office documents. Mepis, like many of the newer Linuxes boasts loads of other nice features too, such as an adware-free weather station and network clock sync. You can download it for free from...
* http://www.mepis.org |
Why is Garfnet moving from a hand written site to a contact managed one?
Author: Garfield Lucas |
| Simple answer: time.
|
Would you use Debian on a desktop machine?
Author: Garfield Lucas |
| Yes and no!
Debian is great but there are other Linuxes that are easier for the end-user to configure. My current Favourite is Ubuntu.
In fact if you have an old PC lying around, say a Pentium c/w 256MB or more of RAM and a few GiB of hard disk space then you could do a lot worse than installing Ubuntu on it. I've done this for several friends, who have all found it perfectly adequate, 100% reliable - and totally Micro$oft free! The live CD is particularly nice because you can boot & run Ubuntu from the CD to see if you like it before you install it on your hard drive. Obviously it is rather slow running from CD. But at least you can see what it looks like. If you like it, then you can install it. Download it free from: http://www.ubuntu.com |
Which CMS has GarfNet chosen and why did you choose it?
Author: Garfield Lucas |
| Currently we are evaluating a number of quite different Content Management Systems. For the main part of the site it was a battle between Joomla & PHP-Nuke. Both are good systems. However Joomla's administration tools are a lot better, and much less idiosyncratic.
GarfNet Pictures is managed by an excellent CMS called Coppermine. We plan to integrate Joomla & Coppermine eventually.
Mr Goose chose another excellent product for his blog, called WordPress. And we are heavily experimenting with a dedicated educational product called Moodle for distance learning provision.
Our Moodle site can be found at http://www.deoss.org/moodle |
What is LAMPP?
Author: Garfield Lucas |
| LAMPP is an abbreviation for Linux | Apache | MySQL (database) | PHP ((Pretty) Hypertext Pre-processor) | Perl (programming language).
Today, many Linux distributions come with Apache anyway. But if you want the full LAMPP thing - and I'm just starting to discover what a fantastic thing PHP is - then a LAMMP package such as XAMPP is a good idea. This is available for free download from the Friends of Apache website. Note: if you use XAMPP be sure to read the security advice on the XAMPP site...
* http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html |
FAQ 
