This item is for system announcements (new computer equipment on Grex, system
upgrades, Grex meetings, etc.).  Personal announcements should go in agora
item 2.

205 responses total.

Are old Agoras being kept online now that there is more disk space, or
did Fall Agora '95 get taken off when this was started?

It's still here.  You can reach it by typing "join agora15" at an "Ok" prompt.
Conferences are on a different disk from home directories; there's plenty of
space on the disk with the conferences.  Right now Agoras 1, 2, 4-6, 8, and
13-19 are on-line.  I plan to upload Agoras 9-12 at some point in the future.
I also hope to locate Agoras 3 and 7 on old backups, but that's a major
project.

This item has been linked from Agora 4 to Helpers 49.

I've installed a new "wrapper" script around the "chsh" command.  The chsh
command is used to change your shell.  It used to let you change to a shell
that you didn't have the startup files for.  Then, the next time you logged
in, none of your commands would work.  Cleaning up after that was a mess.
And "help, none of my commands work anymore" was one of the most popular
questions people would e-mail to staff.  My new chsh wrapper checks to see
if you have startup files for the shell you are switching to.  If you don't,
it offers to create them for you.

If you use the "!change" program, that runs the new chsh wrapper too.

Ah!...fond memories. I did exactly that (changed my shell without startup
files), and I e-mailed srw, who got me through it, in about the first
month I was on grex. 

Grex signed a rental agreement today for a space on West Huron street.
We will be moving some time in the next week or two.

YEAH!

 Sounds good to me.

Re: #6
Yippie! Grex has a home! 

Great!!!
Except for the downtime to come ...

congrats!  now have to think up a new name.  its not underground
\so it cant be the dungeon II. , Anyone whose seen it have
any suggestions?

   When I first dsaw the room, I thought:  "Pumpkin".

   It's a slightly bizarre shade of orange.

Definitely pumpkin.

Grex is going to live in "The Great Pumpkin patch"?

cool! I mean who doesntbelieve in the Great Pumpkin after all!

Now I know what  to say when people ask me where Grex is headed:

   "...from the dungeon to the pumpkin patch."

re: chsh:  When I logged on, I got copies of both sets of dot files. <shrug>

Please explain?  Are you saying that newuser set up all the dot files for you,
or that you ran chsh and it created the files, or something else entirely?
I'm confused.  To my knowledge, newuser has never created both sets of dot
files.

dang, do you mean you changed from bbs to chsh and then had both .login
and .profile? If so - the change program doesn't erase the old login file
(.profile) so you'd still have that. It just isn't called from chsh.

I'm not sure where they came from, but I logged in with bbs as my shell, and
when I went to change to a unix shell, I first changed to sh, then csh, then
tcsh.  When I changed, I just ran chsh, which at the time had no wrappers,
I think, and I already had the dot files.  I had a .login, and a .profile,
as well as a .cshrc (which was empty).  Comments and whatnot indicated that
they were standard dot files for grex.  I still don't know where they came
from.  I assumed newuser made them, but if you say it didn't, I'll take your
word for it.  Was there some script I could run that would have created them?
I don't remember running such a script, but I may have.

does anyone know the words to the copacabana?

IWLTA that I am tired of clueless jerks on Grex.  <sigh>

Russ, what makes that newbie a "jerk"?  Was it an obscure insult to ask for
song lyrics, or what?  I agree with the "clueless" part, but where are you
getting "jerk" from?

We spent a few hours today cleaning the trash out of Grex' new room, and
cleaning the place up.  I looks pretty good.

  I find people who are intolerant of new users to be much more disturbing
than the normal new user gaffs.  What makes it worse is that new users are
likely to change, while rude oldtimers are likely continue being rude.  I
do have hope that Russ will prove to be an exception...tone down, please! :)
 
  Margs, you've probably figured out by now that each of the numbered
"items" in a conference pertains to a particular topic.  To ask a random
question like lyrics to the Copacabana, you should try asking in item 7,
the "short question item."

dang, the usual way to have gotten a .login and .cshrc was to copy them from
someone. There's a standard pair somewhere, but I can't remember where, but
I keep a pair in my directory so I can tell a helpee to copy them from there.
Now, with the new wrapper - all that fuss has been bypassed. Yea! Somewhere
in the cycle of shells you went through, you picked up a .cshrc - but it
should not have been empty, so maybe you made it (inadvertently?).

/etc/skel  ?

Re #20: http://europa.cs.mun.ca/~dsquires/lyrics/copa.html
(Its amazing what one can do with Grex and Netscape on together.)

It's more amazing that someone would have an entire HTML document
devoted to the lyrics of that song.

Dang -- It's possible that some random staffer noticed that you were missing
some dot files and created them for you.  I did that for a *lot* of people
when we had the disk problem.

I've changed Pine's configuration so that instead of putting a > before the
current message, it highlights the whole line.  I think this may be less
confusing to new people.

If you already have your own pine configuration file, I'm not sure this change
will affect you.

How do we change it back to the arrow?

To turn it back from a highlighted bar to a > character, from Pine's main menu
choose "setup" and "config".  X the box for "assume-slow-link".

I've put Agora 9 back on-line.  It is read-only.  You can look around in it
by typing "join agora9" at an "Ok:" prompt.  I scanned through a few of the
items there; it contains the crazed spellings of matts, rather a lot of banter
between ziggy and vidar, and a discussion of the OJ Simpson car chase.
It's a huge conference.  Oh my.

I'd say that given Grex's slow link, maybe Pine *should*
"assume-slow-link".  It really does make a speed difference,
even over a 9600bps link.  Over our 'net link, I'm sure that
the speed of Pine will drop from unbelievably slow down to 
ludicrously slow.  (Hint: it doesn't just highlight that one
line.)

Okey dokey, I can put it back the way it was.  I was concerned that "slow but
makes sense to new users" was better than "slightly faster but confuses the
heck out of new people".

Re 29:  Possible, but this very much predates the disk bug.  Almost back to
the time of getting the link.   Who knows?  I'll shut up now, and not drift.
  :)

IWLTA that the grex front page on its website has been slightly altered to
appear more harmonious. The credit for this edit is nephi's.
Basically, the white space has been better arranged. Check it out.

http://www.cyberspace.org/ using a graphical browser (i..e not grex)

I saw it earlier, and I was very impressed with the new layout.  Makes me
proud to say I'm a Grexer!

(I'd have to say that the credit goes mostly to Rob Argy, 
who knows HTML much better than me.  

Gosh, it's hard not to ryhme after that last item!  8^)

Anyway, although I don't have the patience to use Pine on
Grex, I'm sure that those who do really thank you for 
backing out that "assume-slow-link" change, since it will
really "speed" up their Pining, Valerie.  You're cool.  8^)

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss