PDF vs Printers

[Bart Silverstrim]

Jeffrey Tooker wrote:> Bart:
> 
> First my mail program is MS Outlook, not Outlook Express.  When I hit the
> reply or reply to all I get no quote carrots along the side of the quoted
> portion.  To this time it has not been a problem.  However now it seems to
> need fixing.  Do you have any ideas?

First, you look in your quoted material and manually delete the "--" line.

Second, use Thunderbird :-)

Third, I am not sure how to fix the quoting, as I've run across a number 
of people who care about the formatting of their mail and their only 
advice seems to be to not use Outlook or Outlook Express.  You can try 
seeing if there's a setting not to use HTML or Rich Text formatting for 
email, just plain text.  That might help.

Fourth, when replying, use inline replies.  By doing that you are 
encouraged to trim out excess material and leave in only bits that are 
being replied to.

> Typical hard re boot today.  Was trying to get resolution changed on
> monitor.  When I executed the chages on the change screen the screen went
> black.  I waited about 10 minutes and nothing changed.  I cut power and
> rebooted, the system came back up.  On the third try the change held and I
> did not have to reboot.  

System drivers can cause hard lockups, and X is a wonderful culprit for 
causing deep problems because it operates at a lower level than user 
applications do.

>I have Ubuntu on a seperate drive and no personal
> files. I have "The Official Ubuntu Book" by Benjamin Mako Hill.  On some
> topics it is a bit lacking.  How does one get out of a situation like the
> above black screen without cutting power?  Is there an Ubuntu equivalent of
> Windows "Control, Alt, Delete"?

Normally if the interface is completely locked I try accessing it from 
another computer with ssh.  You'll need the Secure Shell daemon 
installed and running in order to do that, and a bit of familiarization 
with some command line utilities like sudo, ps, killall and kill, 
perhaps top...and the ability to find and read the system logs (pico is 
great as a text editor for beginners or people who aren't religious 
about vi/emacs, um...cat, more, tail are all helpful).

I don't know the keystrokes for interrupting off the top of my head, 
sorry. Goes to show you how rare it is to have to use it.

You should be able to switch virtual terminals by hitting alt and a 
function key.  Google switching virtual terminals linux and you should 
get some results on that.  There's an additional key to hit when popping 
out of X sessions, though.

Control alt backspace, if memory serves, will kill and restart X.

> I have set up a "No Real Work" computer to be my sand box.  
<details cut>

An excellent setup.

> However your statement about the hard reboot interests me.  I think the hard
> reboots have probably made the Ubuntu on the dual boot machine a bit
> glitchy.  The operation of the OS is what I need to know about.  I will
> never do anything very complicated with Ubuntu.  Most of what I do is email,
> online searching, word processing and a few spreadsheets.  Please explain
> about the sand box.  I thank you for your concern.

The sand box concept is that you set up an application or environment 
that is essentially "safe" to do whatever you want...you (or an 
application) can play in the sandbox without caring about damaging the 
rest of the system.

The virtual system, using VMWare for example (there are others), 
emulates a full computer within a window.  You install the OS, you 
network it, run it all within a fake computer, so if it gets corrupted 
or damaged you didn't harm your own system.  You can reformat it all you 
want.  Play with the rm command.  Backing up is easier too because you 
just shut down the virtual computer and copy the drive image file to 
another location.

There is always the chance that you'll lose data if you just shut down 
the system.  EXT3 with the journal is meant to keep the *filesystem 
consistent*, *not* your data.  There's a subtle difference.