MPlayer will play the VCD file like usual, but with no sound. Just wait
   until it finished. You'll get a file 'audiodump.wav' that you can convert to
   MP3 by using the command:

   $ lame -h audiodump.wav newfile.mp3

   Switch -h is used to get high quality MP3 file, but bigger filesize.
            ____________________________________________________

Netkit

   flavio ()

   I just wanted to let you know about a nice project carried out at the Third
   University of Rome, namely "Netkit".

   In a few words, Netkit lets you build a virtual network in order to do all
   the tests you would like to carry out, with special focus on learning how to
   use routing protocols and stuff like that. This virtual network is realised
   launching separate instances of Linux in different xterms - each being a
   full-fledged Linux box! There are methods to connect those Linux boxes via
   virtual Ethernets and also to communicate with them from the main host.

   Netkit owes 90% of the stuff to UML, aka User Mode Linux, which is a project
   to let the user launch a Linux Box inside Linux. But I think that they had
   really an hard time to set up all the environment and create something
   really  usable  for these network experiences. Moreover, their website
   includes a lot of lectures about networking experiences using Netkit. To be
   honest, when I prepared my exams I found a couple of broken examples but
   everyone should be able to fix it or to... jump to the next example.

   Given the fact that you're probably going to acquire tcpdump logs of the
   experiences if you decide to give Netkit a try, I also suggest to download
   and install Ethereal, which is a nice GUI to explore tcpdump sniffs.

   You  can  find  Netkit  at  [63]http://www.netkit.org,  more on UML at
   [64]http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net. Ethereal is, of course, at
   [65]http://www.ethereal.com.

   Bye, Flavio.
            ____________________________________________________

That's not a bug, that's a feature

   Jim Dennis ([66]the LG Answer Guy)
   Question by Gary Luker (gluker from southerndata.com)

   I found an entry on google regarding a possible bug in bash. I have a script
   that does the following. 

   #!/bin/sh 

   formatmonth=`date "+%m"` month="$(($formatmonth * 1))" formatday=`date
   "+%e"` day="$(($formatday - 1))" 

   when this is run if the current month is 08 it gives me this error. value
   too great for base (error token is "08") 

   have you found a fix for this? or know a workaround? thanks for any help! 

   Gary Luker: MCSE, MCSA, MCP, Linux+, SAIR/GNU Linux Pro 

   The  arithmetic  functions  in  bash (and C and some other programming
   languages) treat numeric literals with a leading zero as if they are in
   octal (base eight). Octal digits range from 0 to 7; therefore 08 is not a
   valid octal number.

   Using GNU date you can use formatmonth=`date "+%-m"` to supress the zero
   padding of the month. That should take care of the problem. According the
   date man page the %e value is already "blank padded" so it will never be
   mis-interpreted as an octal number.

   -- JimD
            ____________________________________________________

answer gang without the spam

   Andrew du Preez ([67]dups from neanderthal.ws)

     As our readers may recall, The Answer Gang ([68]tag@linuxgazette.net) is
     really a mailing list where the regular subscribers get all queries and
     linuxy bits sent through, but it accepts questions and comments from
     anybody in the world. Of course this means spammers throughout the world
     email us too... -- Heather

   Hello gang,

   Here is a lurker's 2c worth on weeding out list spam. With a default set of
   rules, Spamassassin does a reasonable job of cleaning up my inbox. Recently
   though an increasing amount of spam sent to the TAG list has been getting
   past spamassassin. On a mailing list I am willing (more so than for personal
   mail) to accept the occasional false positive. So I wanted to try running
   all TAG emails through a stricter set of spam catching rules. Here is the
   configuration I have tried for the last week or so and found the spam:ham
   ratio greatly reduced.

   A seperate spamassassin config file is used for TAG. From .procmailrc:

:0fw: spamassassin.lock
* ^Subject:.*\[TAG\]