November 2009 - main

Reasonable good-quality touch-screen
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 26 Nov '09

26 Nov '09

Hi Folks, Apologies for cross-posting b A project I'm involved with -- setting up an educational display at a local museum, with (modest) Royal Society funding: see http://www.prickwillow-engine-museum.co.uk involves installing a wall-mounted screen for animated display under touch-screen control. The cost needs to be reasonable (euphemism for "as cheap as poss, subject to acceptable quality"). One of us has poked around a bit, and found: [A]"The MSI Wind top AE1900 is the most expensive at £465 ex VAT but has a 19" screen and Windows XP home. Availability is uncertain and it has no wall mount." [PCworld review at http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/product/61134/review/wind_top_ae1900.html ] [B]"The Asus ET1602 is 15" widescreen and £355 ex VAT including Windows XP home and is wall mountable though it requires a difficult to source adapter." [PCpro review at http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/desktops/256873/asus-eee-top-et1602 ] [C]"TheShuttle X50 is 15" widescreen and is available "bare bones", no memory, hard drive, or software. It does have the dual core version of the Atom processor, the others are single core, and does have the industry standard VESA wall mount fixings. With 1GB ram and 160GB hard drive, no operating system it's £379 ex VAT. With Windows XP home it's £415 ex VAT." [PCworld review at http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/product/55884/review/x50_aio.html ] There is willingness to use Linux (and some of us know our Linux)! One issue is that a 15" screen is probably too small for wall mounted display to (e.g.) visiting school groups, so there's interest in the larger screen. Reviews of [A] and [B] are critical of display quality ("the ropey screen" for [B]) and no great enthusiasm overall for any of the three. If we do go Linux (which I'd like) there'll be an issue of adequate touch-screen drivers for the hardware we actually get. I see that X11 now has quite an array of touch-screen modules, so it possibly might work "out of the box". The reviews (and the home pages) for the three above don't seem to mention what cards/screens they have, so I haven't been able to identify these to the point of being able to cross-check with X11. So I'd be most obliged is anyone who has experience of any of the above could comment or advise, in the context of our intended use. Also, advice on Linux-based solutions to the general question of touch-screen boxes with wall-mountable screens, preferably larger than 15-inch, and broadly in the price range £350-450 (we prefer the lower end ... ) would be most welcome. The guy who poked around wrote: "I would favour the Shuttle X50, we will want a secure wall mount." With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 25-Nov-09 Time: 20:25:11 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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touch screen packages
by Peter Alcibiades 26 Nov '09

26 Nov '09

I have no experience. Not yet at least. But was proposing to use on a similar project an Iiyama PLT1930SR/19 for £385 from ebuyer - 19 inch monitor. And put it together with Acer Aspire Revo R3600 Desktop PC, Atom 230 1.6GHz, 160GB HDD, 1 GB RAM, HDMI, nVidia GeForce 9400 ION, WIFI, Linux Which is on sale at ebuyer for 150. Or use some other atom based sff machine, but this one is so cheap. I was thinking of getting one of those compact flash to ide adaptors, then using the debian variant that is firefox only, so its basically debian with the only thing on it a browser. I guess you could do it yourself, but this is prepackaged. There is also browsermode linux. There seem to be a couple of these around. We are a little way away from doing it, I first have to do a demo not on a touch screen, then get funds committed if they still like it.... Peter

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Replacing duplicate files with hard links
by Mark Rogers 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

Does anyone make use of any tools which can search for duplicate files and (assuming they're on the same filesystem) replace the duplicates with hard links to the first copy of the file? There seem to be a few scripts around but since it'll be messing with my files I'd rather go by recommendation if I can. (The plan is to free up some space on a server which has lots of duplicate images.) Also, any "gotchas" that should put me off trying this would be appreciated. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Any ADSL experts here?
by Mark Rogers 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

Sorry, another OT post on an ADSL subject - if anyone has some suggestions of decent technical ADSL lists or forums please let me know. One of our customers migrated from one ISP to another, from a reasonable speed (3-4Mbps we think, it as never an issue so they never made a note of what it was), which immediately on migration dropped down to silly figures - their BT speedtest results hover between 100kpbs and 200kbps and their most recent result was 40kbps! Despite numerous faults to BT via the ISP, little has changed to date (the migration was in May!); apparently they changed the linecard yesterday and it seems to have been that the change to the linecard is what has given the end user the record low speed of 40kbps. The IP profile for the line is 7150Kbps, and their sync speed is over 7Mbps, and their upload speed is around 800kpbs. (Bandwidth figures for the connection tie in with this data, so it's not as if there's some underlying data transfer that's tying up the connection somehow.) We've changed the end user kit and filters (although bear in mind the original kit was working fine pre-migration) to no avail. Speed tests using different accounts (eg test accounts at the ISP, or bt_test@startup_domain, etc) all give similar results. I need to find someone who has seen something similar and has some sensible suggestions as to what to try next. (Is the fault likely at BT or the ISP?) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Re: [ALUG] using windows printer drivers
by Peter Alcibiades 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

Sorry, should have said what printer. It is a Star SP300 dot matrix parallel interface. I made a silly mistake - the 500 has linux drivers, but the 300 does not. Partly I don't want to be out £40, but also at this point there is an intellectual challenge involved! I think it might be possible to print directly to it in 'raw' mode - there are hints about this on the net. ls > dev/lp0 and there is something about setting up the printer as make = raw, with model as raw queue, after which you are supposed to be able to print to it with lpr -P queuefile If I can figure out how to get some characters, any characters, sent over to it to print, then I can certainly find a way to format the string so they come out right. I do have windows drivers, and can experiment with them if I can figure out what experiment to do.... Peter

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USB device, detected OK but nothing appears, what next?
by Chris G 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

I have a new memory card reader which 'does all the right things' when you plug it in but nothing appears on my desktop. An older, very similar, device works OK and the memory card appears as a drive on my desktop. How does one diagnose this sort of problem? When I plug in the reader (and card) that doesn't work I see the following in syslog:- Nov 24 21:49:16 chris kernel: [34956.231212] hub 2-1:1.0: USB hub found Nov 24 21:49:16 chris kernel: [34956.231361] hub 2-1:1.0: 3 ports detected Nov 24 21:49:17 chris kernel: [34956.508106] usb 2-1.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8 Nov 24 21:49:17 chris kernel: [34956.600669] usb 2-1.1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice Nov 24 21:49:17 chris kernel: [34956.600753] hub 2-1.1:1.0: USB hub found Nov 24 21:49:17 chris kernel: [34956.600887] hub 2-1.1:1.0: 3 ports detected Nov 24 21:49:17 chris kernel: [34956.881611] usb 2-1.1.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9 Nov 24 21:49:17 chris kernel: [34957.031679] usb 2-1.1.1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice Nov 24 21:49:17 chris kernel: [34957.031947] scsi7 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices Nov 24 21:49:17 chris kernel: [34957.032114] usb-storage: device found at 9 Nov 24 21:49:17 chris kernel: [34957.032116] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning Nov 24 21:49:22 chris kernel: [34962.033925] usb-storage: device scan complete Nov 24 21:49:22 chris kernel: [34962.043387] scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access Generic Ultra HS-SD/MMC 1.82 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 Nov 24 21:49:22 chris kernel: [34962.058283] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk Nov 24 21:49:22 chris kernel: [34962.058361] sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0 So what's wrong? -- Chris Green

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Christmas Meal
by Ian 24 Nov '09

24 Nov '09

You can put me down for food on the 10th.

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Re: [ALUG] using windows printer drivers
by Peter Alcibiades 24 Nov '09

24 Nov '09

Thanks for a most helpful reply. Meanwhile I have looked into the Linuxant wrapper, which also seems confined to network drivers, and have found the potentially useful ddiwrapper, which seems a possible if problematic solution. The only posting on experience so far reports getting it to install, and apparently using the driver, but failing to obtain any output at the printer. Peter

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using windows printer drivers
by Peter Alcibiades 24 Nov '09

24 Nov '09

I don't really understand, well don't understand at all, how ndiswrapper works. Is it possible to use it to wrap a windows printer driver? I have a POS printer which I'd like to use in Linux, but just find out that it has no Linux drivers. it does have something called a JavaPOS driver from back in 2002, which seems fairly horrendous to get to work. Is there any way of using the XP one with ndiswrapper or anything else? Peter

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CUPS problem with default font/size, can't change it.
by Chris G 24 Nov '09

24 Nov '09

I have an HP1320 printer connected to my 'server' machine which runs Ubuntu 9.10. The CUPS version is 1.4.1. The printer works fine for 'formatted' output from such things as Firefox, Open Office, PDF files, etc. However I can't get it to print text files in a sensible format, when I do something like:- ls -al | lpr I get a printout in a a rather odd typeface and much too big, it looks something like 5 characters per inch. It makes not difference if I set the default options using lpoptions, nothing seems to change the size of the text. It's also the same whether I print locally (i.e. from the command line on the server machine) or remotely from other machines on the network. If I do the same thing to my other printer (an HP7310 inkjet which has its own network interface) then I get exactly what I hope/expect, i.e. the printout is at 10cpi in something that looks like Courier. That of course doesn't go via the server machine, CUPS on the client machine sends direct to the printer. Aaaahhhh, the problem is with CUPS 1.4.1. The HP7310 wasn't installed as a printer in CUPS on the server machine (didn't really need it) but I have just done so and printing from the command line on *that* machine to the HP7310 produces the same wrong/too big output. So, it's CUPS 1.4.1 that gets the command line defaults wrong. Any ideas how to fix this anyone? -- Chris Green

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