3 questions

[Tony Baldwin]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 06:43:15PM -0700, thomas smith wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I stilkl have a few problems that I hope someone can give me
> advice on solving.
> 
> 1: 
> I am stuck using the old version (7.x), which was installed by
> the guy who put the computer together.  He installed VISTA,
> then Ubuntu.  I have installed version 8.10 several times but I
> am not able to access the new version.  It goes to the original
> boot screen where the old version and VISTA options are.
> How can I get to the newest version (8.10) and then upgrade
> to 9.xx?. I tried to upgrade from the Ubuntu site but only get
> error messages such as the files don't exist.

That is weird.
Are you reinstalling grub when you install Intrepid?
Check /boot/grub/menu.lst
In fact, do
$ cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
and send the output to the list.
If you can't copy/paste from your terminal,
do 
$ cat /boot/grub/menu.lst > grubmenulist
and send us the content of the file "grubmenulist" which will then
be in your /home

> 
> 2:
> The image on the screen is so small that its difficult to read
> the text.  If I recalled the VISTA password I would go to Vista
> and fiddle with the settings there.  The password was created 
> by the guy who installed it and I don't recall what it was.  He
> was fired by the store - CompuSave of Lynnwood - for stealing
> and I can't ask him.
> 

Changing settings in Vista won't effect settings in Ubuntu.
If it is the screen resolution run
$ man xrandr
read that
then run xrandr
that will allow you to change screen resolution.
Or, depending on your WM or DE, you might have gui tools available to do that.
Not sure what gnome has for that, but in KDE I think you can just right click on the desktop
and change display properties from there.  
I haven't used either gnome or kde in forever, but someone who knows can probably tell you where
to set that from the gui, if xrandr doesn't work out for you.

> 3:
> I am using Evolution for the email.  Figured out how to change
> the default settings to make the body text larger but subject
> and header type is still small.
> 
> How can I fixed these problems?  Would another e/m client be
> better?
> 
> Another problem is that I like to save some of the e/m as just
> text.  What I save is full of HTML codes.  Had this problem with
> Eudora in Windows but was able to changed the settings to
> eliminate these.
> 

Not sure about Evolution, but I know that iceape and icedove have the option to 
save e-mail as a text file...probably Evo does, too.
the thing is, if it is sent to you as html, the text file will have the html tags.

You could just copy/paste the text you want into a text editor.
Or, alternatively, run something like this:

$ perl -pe "s/<([^>]|\n)*>//g;" htmlfilename > textfilename

in the dir with the relevant file, of course, 
this will strip the html tags and leave the text
(where "htmlfilename" is the name of the file with html tags, and
"textfilename" is the name you give the resultant plain text file. )



> Is there a solution to this problem?

There is always a solution.
Usually there's more than one.


/tony

-- 
http://www.photodharma.com
art & photos | tony baldwin