4GB is not enough?

I have a 4GB vmware-ed XP partition that I tried to upgrade to SP2 today. In vain. After downloading it for the 3rd time it told me instead of "installation failed because there is not enough space on your harddisk" the slightly better "you need an additional 493MB of free space to install XP". Sorry? There is nothing installed except the base of XP on this partition and it is too small to even containt that.

That and the problems I've been having today to get a minimal install of RHAS 2.1 makes me believe nobody is interested in the maxim "small is beautiful". Or as I think "less code are fewer bugs".

skynet pop3 servers don't like Linux anymore.

Since a week pop.skynet.be refuses to send me my email if /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling == 1. I opened a ticket for this, but the response was 'please visit www.google.be'. Yeah. Now I've heard from anyother geek who was wondering why he didn't get anymore email via his official mailbox.

So in the end I decided to dump those losers and got me a fastmail.fm account. They have https/imaps/smtps access, even through proxies on port 443, sieves, spamassassin etc. It is so much better then the skynet crap.

I wonder how long it will take them to realise something is wrong. Pretty long I guess, as most people seem to use their useless webmail interface...

google me: postfix smtp sasl/tls problems

If you get errors like:

warning: SASL authentication failure: No worthy mechs found
send attr reason = Authentication failed: cannot SASL authenticate to server XXX[YYYY]: no mechanism available

Then the problem could be that the sasl modules are not installed. A quick 'apt-get libsasl2-modules' will solve that.

an adventure

I'm trying to install our old laptop with debian for my mother-in-law. She will take it back to .it and use it from there. This should be simple, but there are so many problems to overcome: get a descent IM system for her to use (gaim?), configure the "alice" adsl connection with alcatel usb modem without having nor the modem, nor the certainty that the details are correct and last but not least: give her some easy way to use the system. This could be...entertaining.

On the other hand, giving her windows 98 in dutch would create even more problems I think...