February 2008 - main

Re: [ALUG] Linux can't connect to the Internet
by CDW (Linux) 13 Feb '08

13 Feb '08

(Ted Harding) wrote: > On 19-Aug-07 18:17:50, CDW (Linux) wrote: >> (Ted Harding) wrote: >>> There's a lot of possibilities for this! >>> >>> One thing to look at is whether you have a default gateway set up >>> in Linux. If (as root) you enter the command >>> >>> route >>> >>> you should see somthing like >>> >>> Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface >>> 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 >>> 127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo >>> default 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 >>> >>> where the "192.168.1.1" should be replaced by the IP address of >>> your actual router. If you don't get a "default" line in the output >>> from "route" then nothing for outside will get to the router. >> I get the following :- >> Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface >> 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 10 0 0 eth0 >> 169.254.0.0 * 255.255.0.0 U 10 0 0 eth0 >> 127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo >> default 192.168.1.51 0.0.0.0 UG 10 0 0 eth0 >> >> Ah. I've just noticed that there's a 169.254.0.0 address in my list. >> That would appear to come from a DHCP config but I purposely didn't >> set that so would that be stopping it working? If so, how do I remove >> it? > > I don't think it matters. I get the same too (on a Red Hat 9 system) > without any DHCP going on. It's supposed, I think, to represent some > alternative network numbering, and as far as I know is simply a dummy. Thanks for that info. -- __ __| |_ __ __ .-----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |_______________________________________________|

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Radio interference
by Barry Samuels 12 Feb '08

12 Feb '08

My dedicated MythTV computer has now been removed from its cardboard box and has been put into a proper case. However when it's running it causes interference on medium wave on my wife's radio. Her own computer, which is nearer the same radio, does not cause any interference. What component could it be, in the MythTV box, which is causing this interference? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Browser (Firefox) Character Encoding detection
by Chris G 11 Feb '08

11 Feb '08

I'm sure I've been here before but I can't remember the answer (and the mailing list archives don't appear to be searchable). What are the rules that govern how a browser (Firefox in particular) decides on what Character Encoding to use? I'm viewing some pages which are on my home (Fedora 7) machine and thus are sent by apache 2.2 on that machine using Firefox here at work (version 2.0.0.5). The pages have the occasional accented character and pound sign in them so I need to get the Character Encoding right. Although Firefox is set to default to UTF-8 it's actually using ISO-8859-1 for the pages in question which doesn't work, my accented characters and pound signs are garbled. If I manually select UTF-8 in Firefox all is well. The page headers indicate the character set to be UTF-8, Firefox defaults to UTF-8 but obviously something is telling it otherwise, what? Is it some setting of apache that does it, if so can someone tell me what please. -- Chris Green

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Running X software as another user
by Barry Samuels 11 Feb '08

11 Feb '08

If I SSH into a remote machine and then su to another user how can I run programmes, as that user, under X without it complaining that it can't open the display? I want to run an application as the 'mythtv' user which is created when installing MythTV. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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[ALUG Announce] 2nd Thurs Pub Meet 14th Feb
by Richard Lewis 11 Feb '08

11 Feb '08

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Dear ALUG, The monthly second Thursday social meeting of ALUG will take place on * Thursday 14th February * at The Reindeer (10 Dereham Road, Norwich, NR2 4AY; tel. 01603 762223). It's very near the junction of Dereham Road and the Norwich inner ring road (Grapes Hill) and serves a selection of real ales, nice pub food (if you fancy going early to eat) and coffee. I intend to be there from about 20:00. Others may be there earlier. We should have a table reserved at the back of the pub just to the left of the bar. We look forward to seeing you there. Cheers, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis - UEA, MUS PG http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Grabbing data written to unlinked file
by Dan Hatton 08 Feb '08

08 Feb '08

Dear All, I foolishly rm'd a file that a lengthy process still has open for writing (although it has yet to write any data.) That is, the output of lsof -p 26733 includes gnuplot 26733 dan 4w REG 253,0 0 6802530 /home/dan/Natural_Sciences/mushy/twentyfirstplot.dat (deleted) It would be really valuable to be able to save the data that process 26733 eventually writes to this file. Any ideas, please? -- Thanks, Dan Hatton

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Reverse Telnet connection
by Wayne Stallwood 08 Feb '08

08 Feb '08

I am looking for a way of getting a telnet connection to a device that will be connected to the internet via grps (and as such is not on a known address) The device end needs to be automated to the point that it can just be powered up. ie the "remote end" needs to call the client end Of course you can do the standard thing with netcat but that leaves me with the only security being the ip address the remote end contacts..security isn't a particular concern in this case but it would be nice to have a bit more than that. Also the netcat way doesn't seem to well equipped to handle interactive prompts (for example top fails) Is there a way of doing something similar but getting to a login prompt rather than a shell ? I am sure there would be a way of doing it with an ssh tunnel but I was trying to avoid this as bandwidth may be at a premium, also the remote end is a tiny 100MHZ ETRAX processor with only a tiny bit of flash. So I was worried that the ssh overhead may become a problem. Has anyone done anything similar or do they have any thoughts on a quick and easy way to accomplish this ?

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How to recover from something rather foolish
by Peter Alcibiades 06 Feb '08

06 Feb '08

I upgraded a machine (not alas my own) by doing a clean install of Mandriva 2008, KDE. As you do. All went well. However, I needed to move over the kdepim files, calendar, email, address book. And also the kjots files. So, I cleverly found them in the old /home directory, copied them, and then copied them into the appropriate places in the new /home directory. All went well except for one thing. All the icons in the menu bars of kmail, kjots, and even tellico, have become generic and identical. Not quite what the user had in mind. It is only this user. Other accounts work just fine. Any ideas on how to get them back to normal? Would you for instance copy the .kde folder from another user and try to import mail? Or would you rename the problem user, create another, and then do a more sensible kind of import of the files? And where do kde apps get their little menu icons from anyway? Al

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MythTV
by Barry Samuels 06 Feb '08

06 Feb '08

Has anyone on the list used MythTV particularly with the front-end running on one machine and the back-end on another? I have set up a low-end machine with a TV adapter to run MythTV on the assumption that I wouldn't need X running on the back-end machine but I find that the mythtv-setup programme is graphical! So I need to install a lot of X packages just to run the setup. I find that in selecting to install the Debian Testing MythTV-Backend package it installs other packages such as xterm and QT but NO xorg server packages. Very odd. I would have thought that X packages such as xterm would depend on xorg-xserver packages - but no. Has anyone else been in this situation? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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[Mostly OT] XForms
by Mark Rogers 06 Feb '08

06 Feb '08

Hopefully someone can give me a quick sanity check on this; I need to put a project together based on stuff I haven't done before and I want to avoid digging myself into a hole. I need a web-form based application (which will be run on a simple Linux server sat in an office accessible remotely via VPN, probably PHP based). Most of the time it will be used from PCs with direct or indirect access to that server, but sometimes (eg from a laptop with no Internet access) they'll need to fill in the form offline then submit it later. Often they'll need to do this many times between "uploads". I plan to use XForms for this, and either submit the form directly on completion or store the form data to an XML file if that is not possible. I need to be able to reload the data to edit it if necessary (eg to correct mistakes) and ideally I also need to be able to retrieve data from the XML files for basic manipulation through JavaScript (ie so I can create a printable version of the data again without access to the server). Aside from the lack of native support for XForms in any major browser (fixable through plugins), have I missed any major gotchas in this logic? I'm not after someone telling me how to do it (no complaints if they do :-), I'm happy to learn it to do it, I just need to pick a direction to go in pretty urgently and I don't want to invest too much time on an option that is plain wrong as there's a very short lead time on this project. There's an existing application comprising messy Excel documents that I want to wave bye-bye to asap, but one thing in its favour is that it works fine without server access and I can't lose that. NB: Most of what I know about XForms comes from here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xformsintro1/ -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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