February 2009 - main

Acer Aspire One Wireless
by Richard Lewis 19 Mar '09

19 Mar '09

Hello ALUG, How's anyone else's experience with wireless on their Acer Aspire One? I'm running Debian unstable on mine and wireless is quite dodgey. It's the stock 2.6.26 kernel from unstable along with the madwifi drivers (0.9.4) installed via m-a. Initially, if I do $ sudo iwlist scanning it says: wifi0 Interface doesn't support scanning. ath0 Interface doesn't support scanning : Network is down it's only after I've done: $ sudo ifup ath0 that it'll actually search for networks. This doesn't seem right. This aside, once I've added a suitable configuration to my /etc/network/interfaces it's very reluctant to connect to it. Normally when I do $ sudo ifup ath0 the little wifi LED doesn't flash, it waits for 20 seconds or so while it does DHCPDISCOVER a few times and then gives up. After this iwlist returns no results: wifi0 Interface doesn't support scanning. ath0 No scan results Then occasionally it connects. The LED flashes as normal, it connects almost immediately and reconnects without problems after suspend to RAM or shutdowns. Usually I go all day Saturday without it working and then it starts working on Sunday. (During the week I use ordinary ethernet.) But this weekend the wifi elves seem to have forgotten to visit my computer. I wondered whether being on AC power vs. battery may make a difference but it doesn't seem to. (Thankfully. It'd pretty useless if it needed to be plugged in to connect to a wifi network.) I also tried installing the 2.6.28 kernel from sidux which has the ath5k drivers in it but that doesn't seem to make any difference either. Is anyone else finding their's bad? Or is it just me? Best, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +-------------------------------------------------------+ |Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.| |http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html | +-------------------------------------------------------+

4 6

Free Laptops !
by Wayne Stallwood 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

Aha..now I have your attention Just a reminder that nobody has stepped up to become the ALUG librarian yet and the book collection is kinda really starting to get in my way now. This (for the right person) could be the stepping stone to many great things, so I am sure there is someone out there who really really wants to take this on.. Come on now..don't be shy..make yourself known and all the fame and fortune of being the only current ALUG librarian will be yours. On a mostly related note, part of the library is a collection of Linux user magazines from circa 2004/2005. Any objections to me chucking them out ? Anybody out there who actually wants them or has a good reason for us keeping them in the library speak now.

2 1

Bbattery charging "mystery"
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

Hi Folks, Yesterday I observed something which surprised me (running Debian Etch in VirtualBox in Win XP on an Advent 8117 laptop). WHen I sat down at the desk, I noticed the battery-charging LED flashing. When I check the battery level monitor (in both Debian and XP) it was at 20% and charging. An hour later it was fully charged. I generally leave the laptop running continuously, days on end, and its power supply is permanently connected to the mains. It's possible that something disturbed to connection for a while (perhaps most likely where the mains cable connects to the PS brick), and that something later re-established it (I do tend to swim in a pile of clutter so stuff gets pushed around), but the event prompted me to wonder the following. Might it be that, if a laptop (at any rate for some models) is kept continuously connected to the mains for days on end, then for the sake of battery health a re-charge cycle is initiated, whereby the input from the mains-connected PS brick is internally disconnected for a while, until battery-level drops to a fairly low level, and is then re-connected? It is, of course, known that it's good for battery life to submit it to a discharge/recharge cycle every so often; but I've not heard of this being built-in to laptops' power monitoring. (But then there's a lot of stuff I haven't heard of). Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 22-Feb-09 Time: 09:44:56 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

4 13

SuSE help!
by Yvonne Everett 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

Hi I've just had delivered an HP 2133 with SuSE installed. I have broadband connection at home which is setup with an ADSL router so I normally just have to plug in and the connection to the internet is direct. From the console session I can see the router, I can see that I have an IP address and I can even ping google.co.uk, bbc.co.uk etc. However, I cannot use Firefox, eventually I get the timeout message. Also I cannot get online updates (I've tried apt-get update from the command line) and I cant even seem to find the icon where I register for updates. Can anyone help me please as I'm new to SuSE (I have used Ubuntu previously). Thanks -- Yvonne Everett Email: ye103910(a)googlemail.com

4 8

Alug 10th anniversary!
by Adam Bower 01 Mar '09

01 Mar '09

Hi all, May 2nd this year marks the 10th year of alug! (well, of the kit meetings anyhow, it did exist as a mailing list before that for a while). Anyhow, in recognition of this who wants to have a kit meet? I'd like to arrange something for the weekend of the 2nd/3rd May and the precise day depending on who is available and wants to come along. As yet we have no planned venue either! Anyhow, who is out there who wants to come along? Will a kit meet format be suitable? Is there something else we should do? Should we have some vintage Linux distros? Thanks Adam -- jabberid = quinophex(a)jabber.earth.li

5 8

Watch this space - just got Lenny and There-Will-Be-Questions[TM]
by Anthony Anson 01 Mar '09

01 Mar '09

Just received a 5 DVD set of Lenny, and am building a box to keep him in. In the meantime, I'm going to put it all on a HDD on this box (HD0 in a tray) ATM the HDD (40 GB) is hosting a cut-down version of Sarge - which I've never got on with, preferring to run Knoppix from DVD. However, that's by-the-bye, I'll be able to find old friends (fiends?) like Gnome on the CDs - the entire contents of which I intend decanting into magnetospace. Anyone used VirtualBox for Windows-based programs, especially anything written in VB-net? -- Tony http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hi-fi/

3 5

Network Browsing via Homeplug
by steveydoteu 01 Mar '09

01 Mar '09

When browsing the home network, specifically on Windows as far as I can recall, there seemingly is no other device on the network in the entire house, which is of course not the case at all. Obviously this causes issues when trying to browse shared folders and so forth. Internet is connected to the system from a LAN switch which in turn is connected to a homeplug device, that obviously, recieves the internet from the router upstairs. I am wondering if there is a simple solution that I am missing here!

3 3

puzzling result from who command
by Peter Alcibiades 27 Feb '09

27 Feb '09

I needed to run the who command, and was surprised to discover that my user was logged in three times. It was something like the following: al@athene:~$ who al pts/1 2009-02-27 07:19 (:0.0) al pts/0 2009-02-27 07:19 (:0.0) al pts/3 2009-02-27 07:19 (:0.0) Though the dates on one of the entries was different. Like an idiot I failed to copy the thing when it was showing. I then shutdown and rebooted, and it now comes up with one login as expected. Why would this happen? Peter

2 1

J2ME / Netbeans
by Stuart Bailey 25 Feb '09

25 Feb '09

Any J2ME experts? I have a small project in development using J2ME to run on mobile phones. It's mostly complete, but probably needs about 3-4 days to finish off. Any one interested in a little extra work? Stuart -- --------------------------------------- Stuart Bailey BSc (hons) CEng CITP MBCS LinuSoft (Managing Director) Linux Specialist & Software Developer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Phone: (0845) 658 3563 Direct: +44 (0)1953 878162 Fax: +44 (0) 1603 858583 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://www.linusoft.co.uk http://www.bluetoothadvertising.org.uk ---------------------------------------- -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

1 0

Trying to get rid of dollar symbol for pound sterling symbol
by Jenny Hopkins 24 Feb '09

24 Feb '09

Hi All, Happy New Year! I'm trying to replace the $ symbol on a friend's laptop with a £. The laptop is American, with only a $ key (HP Pavilion DV9600), and is running kubuntu 8.04. Running locale shows LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en and some other stuff - I'm not sure if that has anything to do with anything. Can anyone offer assistance? Thanks, Jenny

5 8