iAmDaveMyers

I haven't re-installed windows for nearly 2 year.... but I gues that is because I'm runing a linux distro To be honest this is one of the reasons I have moved away from widows, the additional cost of have a system disk just made the whole "lets but a computer" so expensive, and I'm not entirely convinced that the backup disks that windows asks you to create are entirely "effective" at removing unwanted viruses etc!In all honesty though in the last 3 weeks I've re-installed my linux system 3 times.One of the beauties of my setup however, and the general setup of any linux system in fact, is that a users preferences are all stored in thier personal home directory (in my case /home/davem), and simply droping this onto a separate partition of the disk means that if I do decide (or have to) that a fresh install is required, all my user settings are retained from one install to the next as the user config files generaly don't change that much over time - or if they do they are backward compatable for a couple of versions.An example from this week.I am running a new install of MySQL at work on my xp terminal, and I couldn't find the location of the main database table files or config file (it transpired I didn't even have a config file as I hadn't needed to create one at that moment in time).I took me a fair while to find these located in the < c:\Docs and Setting\All Users\Programs\Mysql\MysqVersion\... > what a game, all the places that the manual said it would be located in and they weren't there!I find that this happens a lot with windows, you think you are looking at your photo's in MyDocuments\MyPhotos\ when suddenly you realise that actually you are in some other only half visible directory that the Digi camera has created by default! I had this nightmare with a neighbour, who couldn't understand where his photo's had gone, and it took more than a while to find them!Dave

TravStatesman, I think I understand where you are coming from for this idea, and I would agree with shadowx that you need to have separate servers for each instance of the sytem you want to update. To set up multiple server sounds fairly easy, I have been working on doing the same thing for a backup of my works data onto an external disk.... However it sounds complicated from the official manual, and there aren't really any good places that I have found that explain all the sytax for the my.ini (on windows) or my.cnf (unix/linux) file. I would highly recomend the reference manual from O'Reilly: MySQL in a nutshell, so far I have gradually been working my way through it and it seems concise and reasonably easy to follow. heres a web references that may be of some help http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ However, after an extensive search, and a final return to the book mentioned above, I came across this command. mysqld_multi --example this will return a usefull sample of how your my.ini (or my.cnf) file should look. One thing to remember with this file is that you can't put in any comments - you will need to put those into another file elsewhere! Your next problem is the files that you want to import? I would actually recomend setting up your servers to act a slaves to the primary server on the travian web site. All you will then need to do is link into their server logs (which may or may not be public!) and then they will automagically do the required updating etc. You may even find that you could set your local system as a cluster, in this instance it looks as though there may be good info on the official mysql site http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ This isn't something I had thought of setting up for a while, but may find myself doing so in the not too dim and distant! Good luck with your programing. Dave

Back in the early 1990's the hot one was a certain Katrine Krabbe - an east german athlete. I would link to a page of photo's but they don't do her justice, that only happened when she was in the zone during the 100 or 200 metres sprints.There were suggestions just after her doping ban that she had gone into Porn... but I've never seen any pictures to back that up?Dave

I'm an odd sort of reader, I will go through stages where I read loads then stop for protracted periods of time!When I have time to commute I will read various non-ficiton stuff, recently just finished a book on the political history of Britian (by Andrew Marr, the bbc political correspondent), and it was really interesting, I never thought I would say this but I think that Margaret Thatcher was maybe not such a bad prime minister now!I do read novels (I've recently started the Ian Fleming collection of James Bond novels - which are remarkably good fun).I'm also like reading fiction that is based on people experience and observations.Currently I'm reading "a year in the Merde" who's main character is Paul West (I forget the author off hand, I will try to edit the post later), about a bloke who has emigrated from England to France, which is rather amusing (and pertinent as I am about to do the same thing). It is loosely based around the experiences of the author and his other ex-pat acqaintaincies.I generally stop reading when I start traveling to work by car, or I only have a very short trip. I love the internet and being able to download various radio programmes from the BBC iplayer site (this will be very important to me when I get to France!).Dave

Iguest says that KDE is more for the developer and Gnome more for the general user?I'm not sure I understand why you make that distinction?yes Gnome looks and feels more like Windows, but also gives a level of flexibitlity that you don't get with KDE (personally I like to have a nice clean desktop and I hate the way that lots of ditros end up getting lots of icons on the desktop).I used to use KDE exclusively, but now I've gone over to Gnome - no real reason, for this just fancied a change. I expect in a year or so when the new kernels come out I'll upgrade over to XUbuntu to keep my little old laptop up to pace with developments.There are some nice touches in KDE, but I find them a bit gimicky (I did like being able to have a different background on each of my virtual desktops).I would recomend to arcanistherogue that he joins the ubuntu forums, he will find a hugely helpful crowd. I'm not sure how moving from Gnome to KDE will affect the various underlying things stuff (I know there are some differences in the dependencies for KDE and Gnome).Either way I expect he'll enjoy the change of desktop as much as anything else, as they say "a change is as good as a rest"Dave

Hello All.This really depends on what you want to do with the OS?If you are actually looking for a windowing system that only uses minimal services that is different.spyzo101 has allready mentioned DamnSmallLinux, this is the one that immediately sprang to my mind.However there are a number of Linux distro's that are equally small, but run from the command line - which may not be what you are looking for.If you are looking for something to run on an "old" system then DamnSmallLinux should work a treat, if however you have a reasonable level of computing power then most of the Linux distros (my personal experience would suggest Ubuntu, SuSe, Debian) have a "small" version that you can download for a server (only has minimal system overhead, which is probably what you want).If you then want to have a nice GUI on the top then there are numerous ones available to Linux. The most commun GUI are KDE and Gnome (neither of which are particularly small), but there are a huge number of others available.The one that I use on my server (for those occasions I log onto it) is XVWM, is uses about half the amount of system resources compared to the likes of Gnome or KDE.The thing to remember with a small GUI is that you are going to "miss out" on various things, and having a small underlying OS could make your computing experience rather.... how do I put this.... painful!As I said at the begining what are you planing on using the computer for?Also do you really mean 2mb, or should that have read 2gb?I know of people putting a full working linux distrobution onto a USB key - that could be your answer if you want something that won't use up services on the terminal you are using or want to "take" your whole system with you.Essentialy there is no reason why you couldn't put a Linux version onto an external HDD and then plug into something like the Asus Eee - in fact thinking about it that would probably not be a bad idea!Give us an idea of the system that you are planing on running and what you want to do, and we should be able to give other suggestions.Dave