March 2010 - main

Kernel options for Intel 945GME graphics card?
by Dan 07 Jun '10

07 Jun '10

Dear All, Can anyone suggest what kernel options are best for driving the board that appears in lspci as 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) please? (I think I've got the wrong ones, sice DPMS is flaky and I'm getting quite frequent kernel panics related to intelfb.) -- Regards Dan

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Encrypted PDF with odd password
by Dan Hatton 21 Apr '10

21 Apr '10

Dear All, I have an encrypted PDF file that I can open just fine in Adobe Reader under Windows. But I'd really prefer to read it in Xpdf (or any open source tool). Unfortunately, Xpdf needs the password supplied on the command line, and the password contains characters that are special to the shell. (Actually, I don't think I need to be coy about this. It contains a percent sign, an ampersand, and a pound sign.) I've tried escaping the special characters with backslashes, enclosing the password in various types of quotes, and putting the password in an environment variable, but all of these result in "Incorrect password" errors and failure to open the document. Any ideas, please? -- Thanks, Dan

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 19 Apr '10

19 Apr '10

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back this Monday 15th February, at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://pjmcginty.moonfruit.com/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich, not far from our old haunt - The Milestone. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. Nothing particular planned this month, though I'm sure we'll end up covering broadband speeds again, if only briefly, now that Infinity is being rolled out (nowhere near us, I hasten to add). I may have a whinge about nvidia graphics drivers, as well. Remember to call (mail me in advance for my mobile no.) or email me, if you're arriving later and want to ensure I don't wander off, which might happen if the turn-out hits rock-bottom ... Hope to see you there, Peter. ----- 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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Can anyone help me with this problem
by Tony Aldous 03 Apr '10

03 Apr '10

Hi I'm ald0; Can anyone help me with my Ubuntu installation, I get this message "fsck from-linux-ng 2.16 /dev/sda7: clean, 129398/616512 files, 852648/2465969 blocks" & then everthing stops. Being new to Ubuntu I don't know what to do to sort it out.

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Graphics package to produce neat, aligned protocol table (TCP header) pictures?
by Srdjan Todorovic 01 Apr '10

01 Apr '10

Hi, Lets say I'm documenting a low-level protocol or file format and want to produce a picture such as the TCP header (etc) table (http://izecksohn.com/pedro/pub/tcp_header.jpg) what's the best program to use for that? Another example: http://www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/images/TCP-Header.jpg I have tried Openoffice drawing tool in Writer, and it does not align well. Inkscape might be good as I can snap to grid. I could use a spreadsheet and then export to picture. Is there a special purpose application for this that anyone has used and would reccommend? I need to be able to insert text into the cells or perhaps refer to the cells in some markup way - also the cells should be fixed width as each cell would represent one byte. Any suggestions please? How would, for example, a graphics designer go about doing this? Thanks all, Srdjan

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Replacing popped-off key onlaptop
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 30 Mar '10

30 Mar '10

Hi Folks, Appealing to the hardware-savvy anongst you! I have an Advent 8117 laptop (nice machine, by the way), and one of the keys has popped off (the down-arrow key near the bottom right). For the life of me I can;t suss out how to put the key back on again. The details are probably not specific to this particular machine -- they may well be identical on other makes and models, so if you recognise the description below and know how to put a key back on, I'll be pleased to hear! The key itself has a kind of "trestle-like" hinged frame underneath it, whose function seems to be to keep the key-top level as it goes up and down. This is very tiny. It is presumably also intended to attach itself to something on the keyboard (see below). The bed of the keyboard has a little rubber/plastic nipple which is pushed down by the key (and, lacking the key-top, I can operate it by pressing on the nipple). Above and below this nipple are two lttle metal mountings, each with two little metal flanges projecting upwards. The two flanges on the top mounting have each a little notch near the keyboard bed, as if something is supposed to go in there. The two flanges on the bottom mounting also have a little notch each, in this case being directed somewhat upwards. I guess that the "trestle" structure on the key-top is meant to somehow engage with the notches in the flanges as described above. However, no matter how I try to manipulate things, I can NOT get the key-top to re-attach! I hope that's enough to describe the situation to Those Who Know. Looking forward to very simple and easy-to-execute instructions on how to put things together again! With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 29-Mar-10 Time: 20:42:24 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Version control choices for web development
by Mark Rogers 27 Mar '10

27 Mar '10

I've experimented a little with version control over the years (cvs, svn) but never used it in anger even though I know I should. The thing that's always stopped me is that I've never found one that I've liked for web development. What I have is a server in my office that everything gets developed on. When I am happy, I use unison to synchronise the changes to the live site. What this gives me, is no ability to roll back changes if something goes wrong. What I want is for the version on the live site to just be a checked out version from a version control system, with the changes on the dev server being checked in to the version control as we develop. However, to me the logical location for the version control system is therefore my dev server in the office (which has plenty of disk space), but I don't want to open up ports to allow live servers to "pull" a version from the system. I want to be able to "push" a version to the server from the dev server, and that's where I get stuck. The best solution I've ever come up with is to check out a separate local copy which I then unison to the live site, but this is two steps instead of one and (more importantly) means duplicating the site locally for no real benefit - which is a pain if a site has several hundred MB of images, for example. The other part that I've never found a good solution for is handling databases; ideally there should be a way to perform diffs against different MySQL database schemas and apply them but I'm not aware of a way to do this either. On the other hand, what I want to do seems like a fairly "standard" thing so I'm sure either there must be a way or that other people in similar situations have found a better way to do it than I am suggesting? -- 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-ordering columns in an sqlite database
by Chris G 26 Mar '10

26 Mar '10

I know it isn't really necessary as it doesn't actually affect anything (except my sensibilities) but I'd like the ability to re-order columns in some sqlite databases. Well, it *does* have some advantages, it would mean I can do things like "SELECT * FROM database" and get the columns displayed in the order I want rather than the order resulting from database creation followed by adding extra columns as I found I needed them. So, is there any way to re-order columns other than by creating a new table with the required column order, copying all the data across, deleting the old table and renaming the new one? I can't find any neat utilities out there to do this for me. -- Chris Green

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iTunes on EEE
by Mark Rogers 26 Mar '10

26 Mar '10

I've done a bit of Googling but as a non-iTunes user I'd like some real user experience if possible. A customer of mine has ended up with a "ASUS little shitty netbook thing" (his words!) for his daughter, and with the requirement that "all she wants to do on it is surf the internet & manage her itunes on it". They don't like the noddy interface (presumably Xandros?) and I could replace that for him. But iTunes I know nothing about. I gather that Songbird is a suitable replacement, but I have no idea how similar it is to iTunes and whether it'll allow her to manage her music files. Surfing the internet is easy, and they can already do it. What they'd like, of-course, is the XP model. But installing XP is expensive and I'd like to show them that they don't need XP to do what they want. Assuming that they can.... -- 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] Re-ordering columns in an sqlite database
by Govind Chandra 26 Mar '10

26 Mar '10

Brett Parker wrote: > In case one wasn't aware, all fields in sqlite are text. Nothing else. > It doesn't do type checking. It is not really so simple. Please have a look at http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html For reordering the columns of a table one could resort to a temporary table. create temporary table temptab as select column4, column3, column2, column1 from sometable; select * from temptab; I think that this is more flexible than reordering the columns of the main table. Remember that "temptab" is temporary and lasts only the current session, something I consider a feature. Govind Chandra

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