February 2009 - main

USB sticks and Acer Aspire One's
by Mark Rogers 10 Feb '09

10 Feb '09

An uncle (just mistyped that as "unclue", oops!) of mine has bought an Aspire One and can't get his USB stick to work. Can anyone offer advice? His message below: ------------------- I've just bought an Acer "Aspire One" note book and it runs on Linux It's got 120Gb of memory which is useful and so I want use some of the space so I thought I'll use a memory stick. But I can't make it work........ having searched the Help files(under Using removable media" that "Thunar supports removable media if it is built with support for HAL" My memory sticks are either Sandisk Cruzer or I have a Freecom "Toughdrive" neither seem to work. So had a look on the internet and it seems to be a common problem "Hal compatibility with memory sticks". Is there anything you can recommend, Ideally I want to use this notebook as a secondary backup and at the moment it's looking a bit useless! ------------------- -- 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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Netbooks, Xandros and 3G USB
by James Taylor 09 Feb '09

09 Feb '09

Lo all, long time reader, haven't posted in a while, but for once a serious question (passed on from a friend). He's bought himself a net book running Linux and a broadband dongle, but is having some problems: "I have been and bought a mobile broadband dongle today from O2, It is a Huawei E160 but the Xandros does not see it." I'm not good when it comes to Linux on the desktop, can someone give me a hint what I should be looking for when I go back to him. Best Regards, thanks in advance, etc etc etc JT / mchicago

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monitor traffic to usb port
by Peter Alcibiades 07 Feb '09

07 Feb '09

Hi, I've a couple of usb dataloggers on order, which are said to be incompatible with Linux. They record events, and then you plug them into the usb port to use a windows only software package to pull the accumulated records off them. Without really knowing how much of a task this might be, I'm wondering about using a usb logger to catch the messages. But which one? Any ideas or suggestions or experience? And then writing my own little hack to do the same from linux using some suitably noddy high level language of course. Has anyone ever done this, and is it going to be so forbiddingly difficult that it should not even be attempted? Or did you do it and it was a snap? Or somewhere in between? Peter

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Linux coping with mainboard, memory and graphics card replacement?
by samwise 06 Feb '09

06 Feb '09

Hi, My PC hardware is getting somewhat long in the tooth now, and is running Debian Testing AMD64. At some point, I'll probably end up inheriting or buying a new mainboard, RAM and graphics card. I've spent an awful lot of time getting my OS configured the way I like it, though, and am not really looking forward to having to rebuild it again. How well would Linux cope if I swapped out the guts of the PC like this? I appreciate I'd have to update X to use the correct drivers for the new graphics card, but I'm not sure about the on-board sound card. That was auto-recognised on install, so is it likely to be detected if the mainboard is changed? Perhaps also worth mentioning that I selected to encrypt my OS hard drive when I installed it. Thoughts on anyone who's tried it ... ? Peter.

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Are there any remote backup systems that don't require ssh access? Recommendations?
by Chris G 05 Feb '09

05 Feb '09

I backup our important data (e.g. /home and some other bits and pieces) to a couple of remote 'servers'. At present I'm using rdiff-backup which does what I want except for one issue - it needs passwordless access to the remote system if it is to run unattended. (At least I think it does, I'm willing to listen to anything that suggests it doesn't) Having passwordless ssh access to the backup machine means that a malicious attacker who gets into the backup client machine can destroy all the backups as well as the files being backed up. While this is a fairly remote possibility (a malicious attacker getting in) I'd like to protect against it if I can. So I'm looking for a backup/mirror/remote copy facility that will allow me to 'push' files from a client machine to the backup machine without needing passwordless access. It also needs to do either timed or incremental backups in some shape or form as otherwise, of course, destroying files on the backup client would probably also destroy them on the backup. Any ideas anyone? I'm toying of playing with rsync with an rsync server on the remote backup machine though I haven't investigated this enough to see if it will work as I hope. There are a number of backup utilities that use rsync and provide timed and/or incremental backups but I'm not sure if they'll use rsync server on the remote. -- Chris Green

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Importing a big mail hierarchy into Evolution - how?
by Chris G 03 Feb '09

03 Feb '09

I am moving my wife over to xubuntu from windows XP, the move has been precipitated by the disk drive on her XP system dying. Fortunately I was able to extract all the data before it expired completely - but that's another story. (I'll post about that in a minute) She was using Thunderbird and Firefox on XP so the initial transition to Linux has been fairly painless. I have got all of her Thunderbird mail on the Linux system now. However it would be better if I could move her to Evolution because that synchronizes "out of the box" with her Palm Treo - I have the synchronization working already. The trouble is I need to get all of her mail across from Thunderbird to Evolution. It's easy enough copying individual mailboxes across but she has an extensive, hierarchical, mail archive with hundreds of messages in a complex hierarchy of fifty or sixty folders. It would take forever to copy this folder by folder. So, can anyone suggest a way to export the folders from Thunderbird and import them into Evolution preserving the structure? I have found the ImportExportTools add-on for Thunderbird but Evolution doesn't seem to understand the format of what it exports. -- Chris Green

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"Cannot run druid if PDAs or devices already configured" - what's druid?
by Chris G 03 Feb '09

03 Feb '09

When I start up my wife's new machine it pops up an error box saying:- Cannot run druid if PDAs or devices already configured I assume this is something to do with the gpilot set up for her Palm hotsync but I'm not clear how to fix it. Even when there's no actual USB cradle plugged in it still gives the error. -- Chris Green

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Securing wireless on a dedicated laptop/netbook
by Mark Rogers 02 Feb '09

02 Feb '09

Suppose I have a "black box" (which is Ubuntu Server 8.10) running in a cupboard and accessible via a web interface from the local network. Suppose also that they want some kind of access in the event of the local network going down. One idea I had was to add a USB wireless dongle to the black box and supply a small laptop or netbook, and set up the laptop so that it can access the web interface on the box. However, I need to make sure that this access is reasonably "secure" in that only that laptop can access the box. I can set the laptop up using wireless security passwords/keys which are not disclosed to the end user, however the end user will of-course have access to the settings from the laptop which they could duplicate on another laptop should they choose to, and we've been asked to tie it to the laptop that's supplied as far as possible. Presumably: (a) I should be able to find a USB wireless dongle with suitable drivers to make the initial connection work on Ubuntu, in ad-hoc mode (I have very little experience of wireless under Linux having had little need for it), (b) I should be able to restrict connections to specific MAC addresses? Is there anything else I should be able to do that would make it hard to duplicate the connection to other hardware? Is there any reason why something like an EEE or any other Linux based netbook wouldn't be ideal for the laptop end? In case it's not obvious, keep in mind that the black box has no GUI installed. -- 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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