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Re: [ALUG] usb woes
by Rob Page 23 Jul '06

23 Jul '06

I'd ruled this out because I was expecting it to cause overly nasty disruption to mouse movement, however it is nowhere near as bad as I'd expected, even set to reload every 2 seconds, but i'm trying another mouse at the moment, which *seems* to be working (so far) Thanks! Rob. On 7/22/06, Richard Lewis <richardlewis(a)fastmail.co.uk> wrote: > > On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 22:03:32 +0000, "Rob Page" <page.rob(a)gmail.com> > said: > > Unloading > > and reloading the usbhid module gets it working again, but this is an > > absolute pain. Also, killing X also gets it working again... > > > > Anyone have any idea what I can do to make it work? > > > What about a cron job which reloads the usbhid module once a minute? ;-) > > Richard. > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- > Richard Lewis > Sonic Arts Research Archive > http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ > JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- > >

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Toshiba 4030CDT & Linux
by Simon Royal 22 Jul '06

22 Jul '06

Hi I am after some advice. I haven't posed a message to the list as I was waiting for a newer laptop. I now have a Toshiba Satellite 4030CDT with 128MB of RAM, it is a Pentium Celeron 300Mhz. What is the best way to go with Linux. I don't want to use DSL as I would like something a little higher spec. I like Ubuntu but I think it will run a little slow on this machine. I would like to dual boot it with Windows 2000 which is already installed so what do I need to do. Simon

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usb woes
by Rob Page 22 Jul '06

22 Jul '06

Hello Aluggers! My usb mouse is being a pain. To be honest, this system has had all sorts of usb problems over it's time, mostly when you plug in more than one device (either into the mother board or through a hub) the first device disconnects, and then it becomes really difficult to get the second device to do anything, however, my current mouse issue may be unrelated, and is certainly far more annoying. When I don't use it for a short period of time, it just stops responding. A short period of time can be as little as a few seconds but sometimes its ok for what might be as much as a minute. Unloading and reloading the usbhid module gets it working again, but this is an absolute pain. Also, killing X also gets it working again... Anyone have any idea what I can do to make it work? Rob.

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Re: [ALUG] Toshiba 4030CDT & Linux
by Rob Page 21 Jul '06

21 Jul '06

On 7/21/06, Simon Royal <s.royal(a)totalise.co.uk> wrote: > Rob > > How will ubuntu fair on a Celeron 300Mhz, even running xubuntu? > > Simon To be honest, I haven't a clue. Although I used to run xfce4 happily on a p200 with 64mb ram, so that part of it should be ok! (although xfce has been getting more gnome-like recently).

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Confused about zone file and DNS setup
by cl＠isbd.net 21 Jul '06

21 Jul '06

I recently transferred a hosted domain (isbd.co.uk) from BSNet Ltd. to Gradwell dot Net. The transfer has basicaly gone OK, any reference to isbd.co.uk now gets served by the Gradwell servers. However I also have a domain isbd.net which is still hosted at BSNet Ltd. For some reason isbd.net works correctly (i.e. going to http://isbd.net gets web pages from BSNet) but if you go to http://www.isbd.net you get a message from Gradwell to say the site hasn't been set up. Both isbd.co.uk *and* isbd.net used to be hosted at BSnet so I suspect some misconfiguration there. However, although I supposedly have access to the zone files at BSNet (it still lists files for both isbd.net and isbd.co.uk) they don't make sense to me. Here is what I see:- ; This is a generic domain template ; $TTL 86400 @ IN SOA ns0.futile.net. root.futile.net. ( 2003011901 ; serial 28800 ; refresh 3600 ; retry 604800 ; expiry 86400 ) ; minimum ; IN NS ns0.futile.net. IN NS ns1.futile.net. IN MX 10 mx1.mail.bsnet.co.uk. IN MX 100 foundation.bsnet.co.uk. IN MX 200 relay.bsnet.co.uk. ; IN A ip.address.of.host ; localhost IN A 127.0.0.1 ; this is a commented out line It's identical for both. I suspect I'm not looking at the right thing. What confuses me further is that isbd.net is a US registration, it's registered at Network Solutions and I have full access to the settings there. How is it that there are settings for DNS etc. for isbd.net at both Network Solutions *and* BSNet, I'm very confused! Can anyone explain a bit or point me at a good tutorial please. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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(no subject)
by Simon Royal 21 Jul '06

21 Jul '06

--- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better so I bought a Mac There are only 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who dont.

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Re: Encrypting data on web pages - how?
by chris＠isbd.co.uk 20 Jul '06

20 Jul '06

On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 12:26:14PM +0100, Tim Green wrote: > On 7/20/06, chris(a)isbd.co.uk <chris(a)isbd.co.uk> wrote: > >I want the 'source text' of the HTML page itself to be encrypted, i.e. > >if someone on the server system looks at the HTML itself then it will > >be valid HTML but with some encrypted gobbledegook in the <BODY>. > > > >Using https: will (hopefully) stop 'man in the middle' attacks (which > >always seem to me pretty unlikely) but does no good at all at protecting > >against someone who gets access to the server system. > > > >If I get really paranoid I will use https as well so the text isn't > >'in clear' while it's in transit to me but that's an extra. > > If UNIX style access protection is not sufficient to prevent snooping, > then it is very likely the snooper also has the ability to snoop the > network connection or even the active memory of the process decrypting > your files. Yes, but there's a very small time window when those methods of access are available, unenecrypted files sitting on disk are there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. > Also to consider: where would you like the decrypting key > stored? > In my head! > We appear to be heading towards the solution of storing encrypted > files on the server, and they are not decrpyted until they reach the > viewer. Is there a GPG plugin for Mozilla? > That would be the perfect (well, very good anyway) solution. > Tim. > > PS. Did you want to include ALUG again in the CC? > Yes, I must have hit r[eply] by mistake instead of L[istreply]. I've actually come up with an acceptable solution using mozex (a Firefox extension that I already use for other facilities). It allows a link with an arbitrary protocol (e.g. pwd://somewhere) to run any local executable. I have used this to pop up a small terminal window which does an ssh to the remote system and run vi on an encrypted file. Enter the correct password and there's the data I want. It runs across ssh so the data is encrypted on the way. The remote file is encrypted (as I wanted) though the encryption is probably not *very* strong. It's also rather impenetrable to anyone looking at the web page where the pwd://somewhere link is as it just looks like an invalid URL. Unless they have mozex *and* the script that the particular pseudo-URL links to they won't even know what it does. The disadvantage is that it's not particularly quick and is 'outside' the web pages but it's good enough for the present. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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Encrypting data on web pages - how?
by cl＠isbd.net 20 Jul '06

20 Jul '06

I want to put some fairly (but not *very*) confidential data on some web pages. Are there any simple[ish] CGI utilities that allow one to save the text part of an HTML page in encrypted form and decrypt it "on the fly" when displayed after entering the correct password? I don't want to hide the HTML 'code' or Javascript or anything, just some small data items. Basically all I need to encrypt is a few words but bigger chunks than that would be fine too. A Google search doesn't help much as it comes up with hundreds of (crap) ways of hiding HTML, Javascript and such which I don't want. I know I can password protect access to a page using .htaccess (or equivalent) but I'd really like to encrypt the data so it isn't "in clear" anywhere. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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Linux HTML WYSIWYG Editor
by Ian Douglas 19 Jul '06

19 Jul '06

Hi Folks, Can anyone recommend a Linux based WYSIWYG HTML editor for creating/editing a simple website? Thanks, Ian.

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Website Plans
by Simon Elliott 18 Jul '06

18 Jul '06

Hello all, So, myself and Dave have agreed to take over looking after the Alug website. We've had a talk and our plans are something along the lines of the following; - Get rid of all old and out-dated content. - Possibility of using Django if hosting is available. - Have a "community" section for stuff like the Planet etc. - A more formal part of the site for new people. - Keep the site more centralised - Have part wiki, part static kept up to date by us. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, let us know! -Simon

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 17 Jul '06

17 Jul '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Re: [ALUG] Website Plans
by Christopher Dawkins 14 Jul '06

14 Jul '06

> We've had a talk and our plans are something along the lines of the > following; > > - Get rid of all old and out-dated content. Instead of "Get rid of" how about "move down to a subdirectory called something like "old". Then over the next thousand years this can be developed into subdirectories for each decade or century - at any rate, a new one each time the site is redesigned. Our modern trend for "get rid of" causes so much landfill. Let's think of "preservation" instead. Today's boring records become interesting archives a century or two later. -- Christopher Dawkins Garnetts Corner, Braintree Road, Felsted, Dunmow, Essex CM6 3DS cchd(a)pjcd.org 07816 821659 01371 821076

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Password security, Firefox, etc.
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 14 Jul '06

14 Jul '06

I'm still kicking around ways of remembering/storing passwords and would be pleased to hear any comments on my ideas. First question - how good is the Firefox 'Master password' approach? I run Firefox on two fairly safe/secure systems, one at home and one at work. None of the passwords I could (but don't at present) allow Firefox to save for me is really important but they would control access to things like Web site set up, E-Mail forwarding, zone files and such. The E-Mail in particular is important because my wife's freelance work depends on it (hence my recent questions about hosting). I am a bit wary of relying totally on Firefox, it doesn't give me warm feelings to rely on a 'black box' to save my passwords. On the other hand it would make setting up simple web pages with links to access configuration sites much simpler. What do others think about this? For more important stuff (bank access passwords etc.) I have a simple vi encrypted file which I open and decrypt in a small window by my browser. OK, I'm relying on vi/crypt but that is so unversally available that all I really need to worry about is keeping a secure copy of the file. I think it's pretty secure against most simple cracking approaches, the password is a good quality one and although the encryption algorithm isn't the best it's "good enough". -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

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Re: [ALUG] www.alug - request for adoption
by Simon 13 Jul '06

13 Jul '06

Hello all, I will adopt the site, unless anyone else desperately wants to.. As some people know, I've just finished my first year of university so I've got nothing else to do at the moment. ;) I'll bring the site up to speed with current affairs and do a general spring (or summer) clean and take it from there. -Simon MJ Ray wrote: > Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:40:56 +0100 From: MJ Ray > <mjr(a)phonecoop.coop> Subject: [ALUG] www.alug - request for adoption > To: <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> Message-ID: > <E1G0Ffk-0008Vo-00(a)pipe.localnet.towers.org.uk> As some of you know, > the time I have for ALUG is shrinking again. So, I am looking for > someone to take over www.alug. As most of the other contributors or > likely suspects either already do multiple tasks for ALUG or have left > the area, I'm asking the list first. Personally, I'd prefer new local > help. Hope that's OK. Let the list know what you will do with the site > how and when, everyone argue (politely) for a few days and then let's > see if there's one person agreed on to take it forwards. If there's > any questions about the current html/ssh/cgi/ftp setup (as that may > affect the decision), let me know and I'll answer if no-one beats me > to it. If there's wild disagreement, the hidden powers will make a > random decision and see if it sticks. ;-) Thanks, > --

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Re: [ALUG] www.alug - request for adoption
by John Seago 12 Jul '06

12 Jul '06

On Wednesday 12 July 2006 12:00 Simon <simon(a)sionide.net> wrote: > Hello all, > > I will adopt the site, unless anyone else desperately wants to.. As some > people know, I've just finished my first year of university so I've got > nothing else to do at the moment. ;) I'll bring the site up to speed > with current affairs and do a general spring (or summer) clean and take > it from there. What happens when you finish University? Will we be back at the same point in another 2 years? -- John Seago GNU/Linux Registered User No. #219566 () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments

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www.alug - request for adoption
by MJ Ray 11 Jul '06

11 Jul '06

As some of you know, the time I have for ALUG is shrinking again. So, I am looking for someone to take over www.alug. As most of the other contributors or likely suspects either already do multiple tasks for ALUG or have left the area, I'm asking the list first. Personally, I'd prefer new local help. Hope that's OK. Let the list know what you will do with the site how and when, everyone argue (politely) for a few days and then let's see if there's one person agreed on to take it forwards. If there's any questions about the current html/ssh/cgi/ftp setup (as that may affect the decision), let me know and I'll answer if no-one beats me to it. If there's wild disagreement, the hidden powers will make a random decision and see if it sticks. ;-) Thanks, -- MJ Ray - personal email, see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Work: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ irc.oftc.net/slef Jabber/SIP ask

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[ALUG Announce] 2nd Thursday Norwich Meet : Reindeer, Dereham Road
by Jonathan McDowell 10 Jul '06

10 Jul '06

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 "Second Thursday" ALUG Norwich Pub Meet is this Thursday, 13th July. It's at the Reindeer pub on the Dereham Road, just opposite the City Gate. People will be there from 8pm-ish, though there may be a few people there earlier. I may be a little late myself. Topics for discussion will no doubt be as varied as ever. The Reindeer has a reasonable selection of beer as well as decent coffee (with biscuits, if you're lucky). Directions to the Reindeer can be found at: http://www.alug.org.uk/venues/reindeer.html Pictures of some of the regulars, and irregulars, and, well, just some pictures of people that might or might not turn up are available from: http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2006-02-ALUG/ http://the.earth.li/~noodles/stilvoid-alug/mp20050811/ http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2005-01-ALUG-Xmas/ http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2004-08-ALUG/ Which should hopefully aid those of you wondering who to look out for. We're /normally/ just to the left of the main entrance, though sometimes we've ended up at the far end of the pub beside the pool table, as there are comfy seats at that end. J. -- noodles is the only noodle house in cleveland ----- 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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Mail hosting recommendations wanted
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 10 Jul '06

10 Jul '06

My present web hosting is becoming a bit iffy, the web hosting isn't very important but Maxine relies on the mail for her business so I'm looking for alternatives. What I'm after is:- Hosting one domain, basically for E-Mail but very basic web hosting would be welcome too (domain I already own, either isbd.net or isbd.co.uk). Unlimited POP3 and IMAP mailboxes for the hosted domain. Ideally Linux/Unix shell login but at the very least web based management for the E-Mail. Web mail access to the mailboxes. A *lot* of space for E-Mail, several hundred megabytes at the very least, don't mind buying this as an extra but it has to be reasonably cheap. Prefer UK based because I feel that it will be marginally quicker, I'm willing to be dissuaded though. I'm happy to pay a reasonable amount for this but not a silly amount, i.e. I think anything more than around £100/year is definitely excessive. Places I've considered are:- Areti Internet (because I know their support etc. is excellent), but too expensive really, especially £30 per IMAP and £80 per year for an additional 100MB. Gradwell, good reputation but moderately expensive. Do it myself on my Slackware Linux box at home, very cheap! However there are support issues (i.e. my time) and I don't get the warm feeling of mail being backed up 'off site'. csoft.net which I currently use for my own E-Mail, reasonable price (I'd step up from my current $60/year to $120/year to get a domain hosted) and support is good so far. The $120/year account includes 2Gb of disk space which is more than ample! However they are in Canada. A company similar to Csoft based in the UK would be my perfect solution, they appear to be a techie company which has learned how to sell itself as well. -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 10 Jul '06

10 Jul '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Linix & Windows 2003 Emergency support
by Mark Stangroom 07 Jul '06

07 Jul '06

We are the Students Union at the University of East Anglia. We run a combination of Linux Servers & Windows 2003 servers and Windows XP workstations. We are looking for an individual or company with experience of some or all of the following: SuSE Linux Samba MySQL PostgreSQL Apache Zope Arkeia Rdiff Windows 2003 Windows XP Office 2003 to act as an emergency on call support for when i am on leave or unavailable. Applicants must be extremely reliable and trustworthy. This is just an informal feeler to see if anyone can provide this support in the first instance. Thanks Mark -- Mark Stangroom IT support Union of UEA Students t: 01603 592503 e: m.stangroom(a)uea.ac.uk

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Why Linux
by Ian bell 07 Jul '06

07 Jul '06

I recently read Cliff Stoll's excellent book 'The Cuckoo's Egg' about tracking early net crackers in the late 80s. It got me thinking about BSD Unix (Stoll was at Berkley using a very early BSD Unix). From what I can gather it was BSD's law suit with AT&T that allowed Torvald's kernel to take the high ground which resulted in Linux being the most popular Unix based OS today. However, for me, the core of Linux is seriously disparate - endless kernel revisions, each distro with its own patches, file layout, start up scripts, endless dependency issues and so on. So I was very pleased to find this is not the case with the various BSD flavours. In fact I have just installed NetBSD on an old PC. It has a single source code tree that compiles on 57 different platforms which says a lot about the quality of the code. Its pkgsrc app is what gentoo is modeled on apparently and there are over 5000 apps to choose from (nearly as many as Debian).I am seriously tempted to roll it out across my other PCs. Ian

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FW: A Directory of OSS Suppliers in South East
by MJ Ray 07 Jul '06

07 Jul '06

Please reply to him not me. And s/OSS/Free Software/g. Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2006 14:49:49 +0100 From: "Matthew Edmondson" <Matthew.Edmondson(a)ncc.co.uk> Subject: A Directory of OSS Suppliers in South East Hi, I am posting to invite those of us who work with Open Source in the Voluntary Commmunity Sector to be included in a directory of OSS suppliers (tech support, consultants, trainers, circuit riders etc). There has been a significant investment in ICT support for groups in the voluntary community sector (VCS) from the government. One result of this is the ICTHub, the website of which was lanched last week. Within this, I hope to raise the profile of OSS and benefits that it can bring to the VCS. The OSS directory partly aims to dispel one of those OSS myths - "there is no support"! This directory will also feed into a national, quality assured, directory of generic ICT support available to the VCS through the ICTHub. We are looking to publish an initial (regional) version of this directory by 12th July - The ICT Hub and GMCVO South East Regional Conference. If you would like to be included then please mail me ASAP with your contact details, as defined at the bottom of this mail. Further to this I will mail you with the alpha version, and again later on to enhance/update the information as the directory grows. Having been a 'circuit rider' myself I know the hassle of 'spam' (email, phone, etc) - so I will look after your contact details and only publish them where you have given specific permission. There are a number of other ways that we are attempting to assist OSS uptake in the VCS. Most of these are to do with supporting the IT professionals themselves. It would also be helpful if you were able to include leads (or forward this) to other companies/organisations/folk within the region who also provide such services to charities that may currently be outside the "community loop", Many thanks, Matthew Edmondson Open Source Consultant - ICT Hub To find out about the ICT Hub: - http://www.icthub.org.uk A flyer for the Event is here: - http://f2.futurate.net:8080/cms/opencms/icthub/events/documents/South_East_… Fields for Contact Details Organisation Name Type (Company, Social Enterprise, Charity, Voluntary Group, Community Group, NGO) Skills(What services do you offer?) Phone Fax general email URL Address City County Postal Code Contact(s) within organisation First_Name Last_Name Title Role Office Phone Mobile Phone Email Permission to publish information on 12th July on paper

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Migration away from LVM
by Dan Hatton 06 Jul '06

06 Jul '06

Does anyone know how to convert an LVM logical volume into a real partition, please? (Why would I want to do this weird thing? Because it's my swap partition, and I want to be able to load suspend2 saved states from it without having to have an initrd.) I've tried running swapoff -a, followed by the lvremove command within LVM, but LVM refuses to remove the partition, complaining that it's "open." Thanks very much. -- Regards, Dan

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Help with script for ssh exploit attempts
by Laurie Brown 06 Jul '06

06 Jul '06

Hi, I could use a little help with some scripting. My perl/python is rudimentary, and bash not a lot better, but I'm sure this isn't too hard to do... We get a lot (read thousands a day) of these lines in logs on all the machines we support, including our own: Jul 6 16:53:24 xxx sshd[1628]: Invalid user chris from 202.202.43.110 It's a script kiddie trying to take advantage of an exploit in SSH. We use key-based authentication only, on SSH V2, so no real risk there, but it's annoying. What I'd like to do is monitor the logs for such a line (or maybe three on the trot), and immediately do this: /sbin/route add -host 202.202.43.110 reject which will lock them out until a restart. Any help appreciated! Cheers, Laurie. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- Laurie Brown laurie(a)brownowl.com --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Hosting mail in a different place from web pages
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 06 Jul '06

06 Jul '06

Is it possibe to have mail hosted in a 'different place' from where web pages are hosted? That's a bit of a vague question, I'll expand:- I own several domains, the two relevant ones are isbd.co.uk and isbd.net. Currently everything to do with these two domains is hosted with BsNet (essentially the same as x-1.net), they are fine for the web hosting side of things and anyway that's not so important at present but we do have occasional hiccoughs with E-Mail. Is it possible to move all E-mail to somewhere else? I.e. to keep the web hosting unchanged where it is but to remove all E-Mail from BsNet? I suspect it's something to do with MX records and things like that, I do have access to and the ability to modify the zone file, is that what needs to be changed? In fact I may as well show the current zone file for isbd.net:- $TTL 86400 @ IN SOA ns0.futile.net. root.futile.net. ( 2003011901 ; serial 28800 ; refresh 3600 ; retry 604800 ; expiry 86400 ) ; minimum ; IN NS ns0.futile.net. IN NS ns1.futile.net. IN MX 10 mx1.mail.bsnet.co.uk. IN MX 100 foundation.bsnet.co.uk. IN MX 200 relay.bsnet.co.uk. ; IN A ip.address.of.host ; localhost IN A 127.0.0.1 ; this is a commented out line So it's easy enough to change thos MX records but presumably the places they point at will need some configuration to so that they accept mail for xxx(a)isbd.net and do something useful with it. Any good tutorial/howto pages for this anywhere? -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

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Re: Why Linux?
by John Seago 06 Jul '06

06 Jul '06

On Thursday 06 July 2006 10:58 am, Ian bell <ianbell(a)ukfsn.org> wrote: <snip> > However, for me, the core of Linux is seriously disparate - endless > kernel revisions, each distro with its own patches, file layout, start > up scripts, endless dependency issues and so on. So I was very pleased > to find this is not the case with the various BSD flavours. In fact I > have just installed NetBSD on an old PC. It has a single source code > tree that compiles on 57 different platforms which says a lot about > the quality of the code. Its pkgsrc app is what gentoo is modeled on > apparently and there are over 5000 apps to choose from (nearly as many > as Debian). Is 5000 "nearly as many as Debian", which has over 15490 packages? It would seem to be over 10490 short of "nearly". > I am seriously tempted to roll it out across my other PCs. That is the main advantage of *free* software, everyone has the freedom to choose. One is not 'locked' into any particular software. the whole gamut as laid out here: http://www.freeos.com/ and probably several other URL's as well, HURD is one which comes to mind and I'm sure there are others, the 'Tunes' project for instance. All provide variety and *choice*. -- John Seago GNU/Linux Registered User No. #219566 () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments

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escaping a "!" in a bash shell
by Jenny Hopkins 06 Jul '06

06 Jul '06

Hullo there, I'm trying to echo a command to a serial port that happens to require a "!". In order to send the command I need to escape the ! with a backslash. However, I'm finding that at the other end, the backslash stays there rather than being stripped off, so the received command is also escaped and therefore doesn't work. Emulated on a terminal: I send jenny@phaedrus:~$ echo "\!tts MALE" > /dev/ttyp2 and receive \!tts MALE But I need to receive !tts MALE Any hints on how to acheive this? Thanks, Jenny

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NeXT computers seek loving home
by Richard Lewis 06 Jul '06

06 Jul '06

Hello ALUG, We've been having a bit of a clear-out and my boss was about to throw out a pair of NeXT computers. Luckily, one of the post grads and I managed to get to them in time. We've had a look over them and this is the inventory: NeXTcube N1000 [1] ================== CPU: MC68040 25 MHz RAM 16MB (4 x 4MB SIMMs) notes: * This machine would not boot properly. It sounds the like HDD may be corrupt. * The back panel is split at the top NeXTstation N1100 [2] ===================== CPU: MC68040 25 MHz ? RAM: ??MB (8 x ??MB SIMMs) notes: * The power supply [3] from this machine apparently broke some time ago and is missing. * Therefore, this machine is untested. NeXT MegaPixelDisplay monitor N4000 =================================== NeXT MegaPixelDisplay monitor N4000A ==================================== 2 x NeXT keyboard ABQ ===================== Part No. 2230 2 x NeXT mouse AFF ================== So, in summary, its a complete NeXTcube and a complete NeXTstation neither of which we've been able to boot. The cube was willing to boot from its network card but we decided not to try to install Debian or NetBSD[4] or anything as doing that may be part of the attraction of owning the machine for someone. Also, someone interested in NeXT hardware may be able to recover the NeXTstep OS. Possibly. The machines were given to the studio director at the UEA Music School some time ago because, apparently, they have a collection of IRCAM[5] software on. If anyone is interested in these machines then let me know within a week or so and you can come a take them away for nothing. We decided that we'd rather they were given away to a good home that just dumped. If there's no interest then we'll try selling them on eBay but we'd like to avoid the hassle if possible (the cube is extremely heavy; built from some magnesium alloy[6]!). Let me know! Cheers, Richard PS. Tim Berners-Lee developed Web and HTTP on a NeXTcube! [1] http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/nextcube.htm [2] http://old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=555 [3] http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~heller/NeXT/power_supply_repair.html [4] http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/network/netboot/intro.next68k.html [5] http://www.ircam.fr/?L=1 [6] http://photo.simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis Sonic Arts Research Archive http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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Barcode reader error with Belkin KVM
by Jenny Hopkins 04 Jul '06

04 Jul '06

Hullo there, I fixed a problem that has introduced another problem. I admin a bank of 8 computers running debian stable, kernel 2.6.1, which were connected to a Belkin KVM via PS2. From there we have an ordinary PS2 mouse, and a PS2 keyboard with splitter to a barcode reader. We started getting problems with the mouse going completely bananas. I googled the problem being a known one with Belkin KVM switches and 2.6 kernels, and Belkin then suggested we tried using a USB connection between PC and KVM to stop the problem. This has stopped the mad mouse kernel problems, but now I find that the barcode reader isn't working properly - either no string at all or only half the code is appearing when I bleep. I can't find any errors reported ithe logs, so it seems that the information maybe isn't even getting past the KVM. The keyboard seems to be working correctly. Has anyone any idea of what could be going on? Thanks, Jenny

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Faulty USB ports?
by Nick Daniels 03 Jul '06

03 Jul '06

Hi I have my sisters computer, dual boot Suse/windows. Both Linux and widows indicate that the USB ports are configured, but no USB devices are configured or found when plugging in. Not even the "light" comes on with a USB mouse or USB external drive etc. Have tried Knoppix with same results. Is it possible that all the USB ports have failed? Have checked on Google and only found reference to this with one specific MSI motherboard, this is an Asus Is there anything else I can try or have overlooked? Kind Regards

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 03 Jul '06

03 Jul '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Belkin switch dodgy?
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 02 Jul '06

02 Jul '06

Hi Folks, I recently bought a Belkin 10/100 5-port ethernet switch (product number F5D5131-5). It works for a few minutes (less than 5) and then the LEDs for the ports that cables are plugged into go out, after which it is useless. If I pull out the power supply plug, wait a few seconds, then plug it back, it starts up again OK, but again goes belly-up after a few minutes. Does anyone recognise this behaviour on the part of Belkin switches? (I'm not really looking for a cure, since I reckon the unit is duff, though if anyone has cured such a thing then it would be good to know; there's a possible overheating issue since despite being well aired it feels pretty warm when running). What I'm really concerned about is whether one can expect this sort of thing from a Belkin, since if so I shall be avoiding it when I replace it. (The fly in the ointment is that I bought it from PC World, but seem to have lost the b****y receipt!) With thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 30-Jun-06 Time: 20:21:14 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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New wireless router problem
by Ian bell 27 Jun '06

27 Jun '06

I just upgraded my wireless router becuase the old one kept dropping the line now I have an ADSL MAX connection. Glad to say the new one holds up much better. However, it connects via wireless no problem to the two Windows PCs in the network but I have had a lot of trouble connecting my Slackware laptop to it. The laptop has a Cisco Aeronet PCMCIA wireless card theat is 802.11b - one of a pair I got off an ALUG member. It has worked fine until now. I am running Slackware current. During boot the PCMCIA module finds the card as usual and sets it off. However, as soon as hotplug strarts it gets turned off again. ifconfig does not show it but iwconfig does - presumably showing the PCMCIA setup. no amount of command line jiggerry pokery will get it going for n=anything more than a few seconds. So I disabled hotplug during boot and sure enough the card stays on but is not connected. A quick ifconfig eth0 up followed by dhcpcd eth0 gets it going. So as a temporary measure I can place these commands in rc.local - must do that as soon as I have sent this - but what I need to know is what is hotplug doing to upset things? The strange thing is that it all worked fine with the old modem. Any ideas? Ian

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Amarok Context Browser
by Wayne Stallwood 27 Jun '06

27 Jun '06

In previous versions of Amarok I had a pane in the context browser that offered tracks I might like to listen to based on whatever the current track was. I have a huge diverse collection and this feature was actually quite good at highlighting music I might like to play next (in fact the killer feature it was missing was the ability to feed the current playlist so that I got unattended non-stop but relevant music from my collection). In the version installed by Dapper (1.3.9) this feature seems to have vanished (or at least it is off by default and I can't work out how to turn it on) Anyone know if it can still be enabled ?

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ALUG annual dinner
by sfr 26 Jun '06

26 Jun '06

I know, it's a bit late for the Christmas dinner. St Peters' Brewery has bookings available on Fridays in July - 14th, 21st, 28th. Information is at http://www.stpetersbrewery.co.uk/hall/restaurant.htm. The menu is reckoned by locals to be absolutely fantastic. Volunteers to eat, please take one email forward. And state your preference for date. -- Elisabeth

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 26 Jun '06

26 Jun '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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List weirdness
by Wayne Stallwood 25 Jun '06

25 Jun '06

Just got a bounce from the main list. But the subject it mentions I haven't sent an email with since the end of May and that message did show on the list...I did cause a bounce on the Amarok message because I accidentally sent it from the wrong account at 1.51PM..I got the bounce for that and resent it from the right account. But this bounce turned up at 5:06 PM today. Can one of the list admins tell me what happened ? Your mail to 'main' with the subject Bletchley Park Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval. The reason it is being held: Message has a suspicious header Either the message will get posted to the list, or you will receive notification of the moderator's decision. If you would like to cancel this posting, please visit the following URL:

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Laptops, desktops, and UPS
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 23 Jun '06

23 Jun '06

Hi Folks, I thought I'd push out for comment a thoguht which I've been pondering from time to time. A laptop is pretty nearly immune to mains supply failure, since its battery provides a backup and modern laptops can shutdown on low battery. Desktops, on the other hand, need an external UPS to guard it against mains failure; and of course a UPS can be configured to signal the computer to shut down if the power cut lasts more than a certain time. But it has occurred to me that there's no obvious reason why a desktop can't have its own internal battery like a laptop, and I'm wonderign why they don't. Of course, laptop batteries are notorious for not having a very long useful life -- you can be lucky, in some cases, if you get 5 years out of one. And they're even more notorious for being horrendously expensive to replace, if indeed you can still find one by the time yours fails. But I'd have thought that the space available in a desktop would offer scope for a more robust and cheaper solution. (In passing -- I have an ancient laptop whose battery has been shot for years, which however works well if you plug 12v DC into its PS socket; so I've happily been using it in "away from the mains" situations by attaching it to a motorcycle battery which weighs less than 4 pounds -- 1.7kgm -- so is within my definition of "portable"). So a robust lead-acid battery of the appropriate voltage could be installed into a desktop, if the appropriate circuitry were present in the box's PSU, and would presumably last longer, be easier to replace if necessary, and cost much less. Does anyone know of desktop boxes which do this? Thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 23-Jun-06 Time: 15:18:44 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Crazy question
by Peter 23 Jun '06

23 Jun '06

In a shop run by a friend, and he said his machine was behaving oddly. To his surprise, he had a 120G drive, but from the windows disk utility, there was only 30 in a partion, Drive C, and the rest as unallocated space. He did not know how this had happened or when, but was fairly sure it had not been bought set up like this. He is also getting notices on the screen that memory dumps are happening. He is firewalled and anti virused and updated. But he doesn't have specific anti spyware. Question: have you ever heard of anything like this happening as the result of an infection? Is it a reasonable investigative first step to boot from a live Linux CD and find out if it shows up as unallocated space in that too? And what would you then advise using to see if the space really is unallocated and with nothing in it? I have system rescue CD, and could get any of the other security oriented distros, but this isn't really my area.... Peter

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How to check for packet loss over a long[ish] period?
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 22 Jun '06

22 Jun '06

I want to run some checks on my ADSL connection to see what sort of level (if any) of packet loss I am getting. In particular I want to run some checks in the small hours of the morning because I'm getting some rsync errors which might be due to packet loss. What tools are available for checking packet loss? Is there anything better than 'ping' and/or what is a civilised repeat rate to use with ping to avoid it being seen as a DoS attack? The system I'm rsync'ing with does respond to 'ping' so that's a start. -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

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Strange hardware problem
by Wayne Stallwood 21 Jun '06

21 Jun '06

We have a server at a clients that has been showing random signs of instability (random reboots and a couple of panics) Suspecting hardware problems I brought it down and ran memtest86 on it. Then something odd happened. Memtest shows plenty of memory errors, spreading over pretty much the whole of the installed 512MB. When I stopped the tests halfway through the first pass there were two pages, the lowest error was at about 50MB the highest was at circa 430 But the really strange thing is that the error bits are 00000000 i.e the test data and "bad" data match perfectly. There is no ECC on this machine so how can the data I put in the memory and the data I take out be the same yet there be a memory error. Memtest clearly shows the "good" and "bad" column with matching data but still flags these as errors. I have ordered replacement RAM anyway, but I was just interested in what other type of memory error I am seeing here ?

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Linux 2006, Brighton, Sat 1st July: Introductory Session
by MJ Ray 21 Jun '06

21 Jun '06

Forwarded from lugmaster.mailman.lug.org.uk: > I have now placed the timetable for this event onto the website. [...] > If you're thinking of attending but haven't placed your booking yet, please > would you do so ASAP? We have to finalise numbers with the venue rather > early this year - first thing on Thursday this week (June 15th) - so > later bookings may miss out on food and accommodation:-( > > Also, if you know of any people who might be interested in the free > introductory talks on Saturday (see below), please consider inviting > them - perhaps by forwarding this message to them. > [...] > Introductory talks: Saturday 1st July > ------------------------------------- > This section of the conference is aimed at people who are relatively new to > linux and is free of charge. Lunch is included if you register on the > website before Thursday 15th June. Programme: > > * An introduction to Networking - Antony Stone > * Getting Started with Apache - Jim Kissel (OSM Ltd.) > * Securing Linux - Nils Magnus > * What are all these distributions and how should I choose one? > - Stuart Yeates (OSS Watch) > * Creating DVD videos on Linux and Unix systems - Ben Hutchings > > * The politics of Linux - Andrew Nicolson (Southampton Institute) > * Towards an All-Party Parliamentary Open Source Group - Leslie Fletcher > * OpenOffice.org beyond 2.0... - Michael Meeks (Novell) > * Kubuntu Dapper and KDE 4: The GNU/Linux Desktop > - Jonathan Riddell (Canonical) > > Venue: University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton. > > http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2006/saturdayfree/ > http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2006/programme/timetable_saturday.shtml > > Email: office(a)ukuug.org > Tel: +44 1763 273 475 > > Event sponsored by Novell, The Positive Internet Company and IBM

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Wierd DNS problem
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 20 Jun '06

20 Jun '06

We have a wierd DNS problem at work, it's almost certainly something to do with low level DNS setup and/or the firewall but we're a bit lost as to where to look. >From our Solaris boxes issuing an 'nslookup xxx.yyy.zzz' gives the correct IP address for the domain xxx.yyy.zzz. However every application lookup of domain name xxx.yyy.zzz gives the wrong result. The wron result is always that of a domain at Network Solutions, a US name registration business. DNS works OK from PCs on the network. So it looks like something adrift on our name lookup machine but we really cannot see what at the moment. When an application asks for a name resolution what is the normal order of things happening? -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

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The Pink Local Directory
by MJ Ray 20 Jun '06

20 Jun '06

Could someone from West Norfolk email rachel at pinklocaldirectory.co.uk with their telephone number to become the contact for ALUG in that fine upstanding publication, please? My telephone number is changing, so I cannot do it this year. Thanks, -- MJ Ray - personal email, see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Work: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ irc.oftc.net/slef Jabber/SIP ask

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Disk usage
by Wayne Stallwood 19 Jun '06

19 Jun '06

I think this question may have come up on the list before, but I can't find an answer in the archives. /dev/sda3 111G 102G 3.1G 98% /home Why is my free space only shown as 3.1G if I have used 102G out of 111 ? BTW Windows Vista is a disk space hog, a clean installation into a virtual machine took 8GB (minus 840MB for virtual memory) That's before you add any apps (and office 12 is Huge)

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 19 Jun '06

19 Jun '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Dual boot woes
by Simon Jude 15 Jun '06

15 Jun '06

Hello, Please can I pick peoples brains?! I've managed to kill off my MBR during a linux install on a machine with XP on it. I initially installed Fedora and got Grub error 17 messages on bootup. I've since installed Suse10 on it but get the same problem (error 18 this time). Evidently I should be able to install lilo from suse but this gives errors. I've also tried the XP recovery disk to fix the mbr but it doesn't recognise my password (a normal user with admin privilages). Can anybody possibly suggest a fix to this?! Thanks Simon

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Lifetime of CD/DVDs?
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 15 Jun '06

15 Jun '06

Hi Folks, I often to use CDs to back up archival files. No problems so far. However, I've heard tell that CDs can degrade over time and that times of the order of 4 years might be the point where they start to get dodgy. Is this the case? If so, does it vary with the brand/type of CD? And does something similar apply to DVDs? Thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 09-Jun-06 Time: 19:30:10 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Re:Permission Denied DVD
by Nick Daniels 14 Jun '06

14 Jun '06

On Wednesday 14 June 2006 17:47, you wrote: > OK, I'll soon be out of my depth (hardware has never appealed to me much, I > wish computers didn't have it...) > I notice in your fstab options for the drive you don't have 'user'. This > may be because all the other options you have (most of which I don't > understand) do the same thing. > > Have you tried mounting a disc manually? > > In case you're not sure about this: > > Insert the disc and cancel KDE's automount message. > > type: > $ mount /dev/hdc Hi Richard Many Thanks nick@linux-nxe0:~> mount /dev/hdc mount: only root can mount /dev/hdc on /media/dvdrecorder nick@linux-nxe0:~> su Password: linux-nxe0:/home/nick # mount /dev/hdc mount: unknown filesystem type 'subfs' With Data DVD inserted, likewise with audio CD inserted, but audio CD Plays! I think I might reinstall, now they have fixed a lot of the package management problems and updater. As an avid Suse user of 8 or so years. I do not consider this the "best" of their distributions Many thanks for help. Kind Regards -Nick Daniels

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Permission Denied DVD
by Nick Daniels 14 Jun '06

14 Jun '06

Hi I have been transferring data files from my DVD rewriter, however yesterday morning I suddenly got message "permission denied" to DVD, as user, and as root. I can play an audio CD from it, also play a video DVD System Suse 10.1x64 Copy of fstab: /dev/hdb1 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1 /dev/hdb3 /home reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2 /dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0 debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0 usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0 /dev/hdc /media/dvdrecorder subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0 I have installed Vector on a spare Harddrive in same system and all is O.K. Kind Regards - Nick Daniels

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Meeting report: 2nd Thursday Norwich pub meet, 8th June
by Richard Lewis 14 Jun '06

14 Jun '06

ALUG 2nd Thursday Pub Meet Report. Thursday 8th June, 2006 Present were: Paul [paul_c], Richard [ironChicken], Jonathan [Noodles], Simon [sionide], Dave [Paperface], Becca, Mike, Martijn [mak] and John Henson, who is new. The first meeting of the warm weather saw most members in the geek uniform of t-shirts (there may even have been some legs on show) and drinking the colder varieties of beverages. John is new to the LUG and is playing around with SUSE 10 on a laptop which he brought with him. This, of course, solicited much discussion about the relative merits of, and LUGers' personal preferences for, user-friendly distros which continued on and off all evening. A consensus of opinion seem to fall around Ubuntu. Martijn was showing off his very desirable Hiptop which, although not running Linux, does have a nice little QWERTY keyboard and good connectivity. Richard babbled incoherently at Jonathan for a time about his current project to write a clone of Apache Cocoon using Python. Sorry, Noodles. Paul lent a book to Dave on Pthreads (which I'm sure was a gripping read) so that he could learn about semaphores as he'd had a problem with them during that day and didn't know what they were. Martijn and Dave discussed Django vs. Rails vs. Java for building web applications. Later on there was discussion of copyright, DRM and music copying in which Jonathan impressed us all with the fact that, apparently, Amstrad were the first company to ship a twin-decked audio cassette recorder and were sued over it by the record companies. This discussion moved on to TV programs and cartoons LUGers are currently watching and to PVRs and the merits of the EyeTV one for the Mac. A pleasent evening all round with a small, but select, group of ALUG members. We look forward to seeing you next time! Cheers, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis Sonic Arts Research Archive http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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DLink 624 Wired/Wireless Router For Sale
by Simon Royal 12 Jun '06

12 Jun '06

Hi I am moving and my DLink 624 router is no longer required. Any offers It is a Wired/Wireless router. 802.11g wireless, 4 LAN ports, web configuring superb piece of kit. No longer needed as my new place is not NTL and I purchased an ADSL wired/wireless modem/router. Excellent condition, comes with CD and power cable, plus ethernet cable. Router only, has no built in modem. Kind Regards Simon Royal Kind Regards Simon Royal ---- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac

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Dell XPi Pentium 166 Question
by Simon Royal 12 Jun '06

12 Jun '06

Hi Can anyone tell me whether the Dell XPi Pentium 166MMX laptop has 32bit cardbus ports or just the old 16bit card support? Kind Regards Simon Royal ---- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac

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Which wireless ADSL modem?
by Ian bell 12 Jun '06

12 Jun '06

I currently have an Origo (cheap) wireless modem (802.11b) which was fine until my ADSL connection was upgraded to MAX ADSL (8Mbps max). It is fine much of the time but seems to perform less well with time. A reboot fixes it for a while. So I thought I might upgrade to an 802.11g wireless ADSL modem. I don't actually need any ethernet ports as all PCs in my network (2-off) are connected wirelessly. So I am looking for product recommendations, especially ones known to cope well with the current higher ADSL speeds. (some extra range would be nice too). Ian

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 12 Jun '06

12 Jun '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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OOo
by Bob Dove 11 Jun '06

11 Jun '06

Hi folks, >From some-one who has embraced Open Office since ever - 'cos it's not Uncle Bill's, I'm happy that it opens and keeps most of the formatting of MS docs. I use it in preference - but for 'serious' work will use a page setter. Much easier to place graphics and have them stay put on page, so 'Office' is not an imperative. I get docs (from Scout Leaders) using stone age pooters with Office 3 (or so it seems) down to Cub Scouts who really are on top of things with the very latest! Compared with 'doze. 'ux is too complicated for a pointy pressy clicky user but I can cope with 'ux and OOo. God forbid that 'ux and OOo should be clones of doze but 'ux ain't doing much to win doze users over (in my humble opinion of course!) The desktop looks a bit enthusiastic amateur to me - probably why you guys like the command line so much! Personally, I'd like an OSX type desktop - seems cleaner somehow - and it works. Of course, now that clever clogs has ported OSX to PC!!! Cheers, Bob Dove.

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Cuddly Toy Anyone?
by Keith Watson 09 Jun '06

09 Jun '06

http://www.free-penguin.org/ Regards, Keith ____________ Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look at what they can do when they stick together.

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Office 2007
by Wayne Stallwood 09 Jun '06

09 Jun '06

After playing with the beta a bit, I am hoping that OpenOffice doesn't follow the same trend. This new user interface may look slick on a Windows Vista box (BTW Public beta is available for that too) but take it from someone who has been trying to use it in a productive manner for the last few days, it's not that slick to use. I've dumped some screenshots here http://digimatic.plus.com/office/ So the question is, Given that OpenOffice is supposed to be as compatible and familiar as possible for a MS Office user. Will it be forced to adopt this in a similar way...For openoffice what is more important, compatibility and familiarity or getting it "right" ?

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[ALUG Announce] 2nd Thursday Norwich Meet : Reindeer, Dereham Road
by MJ Ray 08 Jun '06

08 Jun '06

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- (I'm still having some problems deferring posts if I discard any, so here's a repost of roughly what I think the lost mail said:- ) From: noodles at earth.li (Jonathan McDowell) Subject: [ALUG Announce] [ALUG] 2nd Thursday Norwich Meet : Reindeer, Dereham Road The monthly "Second Thursday" ALUG Norwich Pub Meet is this Thursday, 8th June. It's at the Reindeer pub on the Dereham Road, just opposite the City Gate. People will be there from 8pm-ish, though there may be a few people there earlier. Topics for discussion will no doubt be as varied as ever. The Reindeer has a reasonable selection of beer as well as decent coffee (with biscuits, if you're lucky). Directions to the Reindeer can be found at: http://www.alug.org.uk/venues/reindeer.html Pictures of some of the regulars, and irregulars, and, well, just some pictures of people that might or might not turn up are available from: http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2006-02-ALUG/ http://the.earth.li/~noodles/stilvoid-alug/mp20050811/ http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2005-01-ALUG-Xmas/ http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2004-08-ALUG/ Which should hopefully aid those of you wondering who to look out for. We're /normally/ just to the left of the main entrance, though sometimes we've ended up at the far end of the pub beside the pool table, as there are comfy seats at that end. J. -- ] http://www.earth.li/~noodles/ [] Where are we going? And WHY ARE [ ] PGP/GPG Key @ the.earth.li [] WE IN THIS HANDBASKET?!! [ ] via keyserver, web or email. [] [ ] RSA: 4DC4E7FD / DSA: 5B430367 [] [ ----- 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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Gtk2 and fonts
by Barry Samuels 07 Jun '06

07 Jun '06

Since I last upgraded my Debian Testing/Etch system some GTK applications, Endeavour2 for example, display a fairly awful font which I cannot change and some others, gFtp for example display a perfectly acceptable font. I have installed the Gtk Theme Engine package which gives me, in theory, the ability to change font/theme for GTK in the KDE Control Centre but whatever I do the font doesn't change. All the KDE fonts are fine. I have both GTK 1 and GTK 2 installed. Some suggestions as to how to fix this would be very welcome. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

3 5

Evolution
by Mark Ridley 07 Jun '06

07 Jun '06

Howdy all, anyone using Evo in a corporate Windows 2003 OWA style environment? I have a fairly massive mail archive and Evo just constantly hangs. I've tried multiple versions with the same effect. I'm not normally so concerned with the graphical side of Linux, but would love to be able to defend the non-dependance of Windows, and would love to swing a few colleagues over to the dark side. But without a little "it's almost Windows/Office" I'll just be wasting my time. I'm happy with pine, but I'm not sure that'll work for everyone! :) Cheers. -Mark

2 2

Hard Drives
by Bob Dove 06 Jun '06

06 Jun '06

Hi folks, Silly quezzie time - what is the best orientation for a hard drive? My son in law has just had his office and network moved, and the IT specialist (their term/claim) re-installed with all the towers horizontal rather than vertical. Now I know that there are some vertical external HD cases but thought they might have contained 'special' HDs. Presume some gyro force generated so no silly angles - but otherwise? Any wise old owls out there with the definitive??? Cheers, BD.

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[ALUG] [ALUG Announce] Linux 2006 Conference and Tutorials, Brighton, 29 June - 2 July
by Alasdair G Kergon 05 Jun '06

05 Jun '06

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Linux 2006 Conference & Tutorials, Brighton, Thur 29th June - Sun 2nd July ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Full details at http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2006/ * Early-bird discount is available only until Thursday 8th June * The event begins with a choice of tutorials on Thursday. Then the twin-track 3-day conference runs from Friday to Sunday. Tutorials on Thursday 29th June ------------------------------- Full-day: Building and Maintaining Software Packages with RPM - Jos Vos Morning: Optimising MySQL Databases - Mark Leith (MySQL) Afternoon: Using SystemTap and kdump to diagnose kernel-related problems - Richard Moore (IBM) Introductory talks: Saturday 1st July ------------------------------------- This section of the conference is aimed at people who are relatively new to linux and is free of charge. Lunch is included if you register on the website before Thursday 15th June. Programme so far: * An introduction to Networking - Antony Stone * Getting Started with Apache - Jim Kissel (OSM Ltd.) * Securing Linux - Nils Magnus * What are all these distributions and how should I choose one? - Stuart Yeates (OSS Watch) * Creating DVD videos on Linux and Unix systems - Ben Hutchings Further talks to be confirmed - watch the website. Provisional Conference Programme: Friday 30th June - Sunday 2nd July -------------------------------------------------------------------- Advocacy * Towards an All-Party Parliamentary Open Source Group - Leslie Fletcher * State of Play: Free Software, ready or not? - Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton * Introduction to the politics of Linux - Andrew Nicolson (S'hampton Inst) * Advocating Linux - Jono Bacon (OpenAdvantage/LUGRadio) Case Studies * Apache at The Register: Building a Large Website from mod_rewrite and mod_include - Aaron Crane * 30 million and counting: An insight into a enterprise level open source systems - Neil McGovern (Fotopic.net) * How does OSS stack up? - Mark Taylor & Duncan Gibb (Sirius Corporation) * The State of Open Source in Higher and Further Education - Stuart Yeates * OpenStreetMap: The First Year - Steve Coast * Linux at Home - John Pinner (Clockwork Software Systems) * User Controlled Virtual Curtains - Torsten Spindler (ETH Zurich) Clustering and Virtualisation * Linux HA v2: One CRM to rule them all - Lars Marowsky-Bree (SuSE Labs) * How Hardware Supported Virtualization in Xen works - Mats Petersson (AMD) * A low-cost Linux based graphics cluster for cultural visualisation in virtual environments - Aidan Delaney (University of Brighton) Desktop and Applications * Desktop Linux Innovation at Novell - Ted Haeger (Novell) * SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop: Under the Hood - Ted Haeger (Novell) * (Free)NX - Remote Desktop Access, Present and Future - Fabian Franz * OpenOffice.org beyond 2.0... - Michael Meeks (Novell) * Kubuntu Dapper and KDE 4: The GNU/Linux Desktop - Jonathan Riddell (Canonical) * MySQL Roadmap - Mark Leith (MySQL) * Settling on decent Python Web Technologies - Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton Grid * ROOT and PROOF - Ruediger Berlich (Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe) * The Interactive Europen Grid project (int.eu.grid) - Marcus Hardt Kernel * Porting uCLinux on a Coldfire processor: Writing Frame Buffer Drivers - Craig Duffy & Edwin Langley (Bristol UWE) * Flash memories and MTD Subsystem under Linux Networking and Internet Software Group - C-DAC, Pune University * The Linux Error Detection and Correction subsystem (EDAC) - Tim Small Platforms * Hardware hacking on a budget; the Amstrad E3 - Jonathan McDowell Productivity * Sed: more than just s/foo/bar/ - Tethys The programme is subject to change - check website for up-to-date information. If you book on or before Thursday 8th June you can take advantage of the Early Bird rates e.g. 65 pounds for the 3-day conference instead of 100. or just 25 pounds for students. (If you're not already a UKUUG member, you'll need to add the membership fee to this - details on website.) Conference rates also include a ticket for the Conference Dinner on Friday evening (subject to capacity), sponsored by The Positive Internet Company, and a copy of the conference CD sponsored by Novell. There are also still opportunities for sponsors and exhibitors: contact office(a)ukuug.org for details. Web: http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2006/ Email: office(a)ukuug.org Tel: +44 1763 273 475 -------------------------------------------------------------------- | Event sponsored by Novell, The Positive Internet Company and IBM | -------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- 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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Fwd: First ALUG competition of 2006
by sfr 05 Jun '06

05 Jun '06

I posted this on alug-social, but it seems unfair to exclude all those who subscribe to main but not to social. ----------- first email - While we're waiting for the announcement of J's next serious and on-topic contest of brains and programming skill, we shall offer you some light entertainment. And the tease is that I'm not telling you what the competition is, yet. Just a little clue: it's a Caption Competition. ------------- and then - First ALUG competition of 2006 - Part II The photo which awaits your inventive and witty caption is at http://sfr.itshall.be/stuff/tuff.jpg ------------- next will come a voting system... when Brett finishes it... -- sfr

8 21

Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 05 Jun '06

05 Jun '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

1 0

open database format
by Peter 05 Jun '06

05 Jun '06

I'm working at a charity where we have moved from assorted W9x machines to mandriva. There is a W9x database application which has the peculiarity of allowing the user to create multiple identical field names per record, and thus has variable record lengths. I'm being told that exporting this to csv and consolidating the data in multiple identically named fields will lose data. (1) Is this plausible? I've done it, audited, and there is no doubt that every bit of data in every field has moved across. I cannot find any sort of grouping or sorting that can be done in the W9x app that I cannot do in Tellico. What could I be missing? The thing that is hard to see is, if the field labels are identical, how can you do things with the data split up into two, that you cannot do with them in one? Doesn't having multiple identical field labels limit rather than expand one's ability to manipulate the data? Is this something about xml as opposed to csv in databases? (2) Is it really possible that there are data structures which require multiple identical field labels and variable length records? Like, what and why? And could a collection database be one of them, and why? (3) Is there a good source on open database format? The recent BECTA publication mandates odb or csv export for databases in the education sector. Where would you go to get a good account of odb? With particular reference to the moveability of a database from one platform to another. Peter

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Re: [ALUG] First ALUG competition of 2006
by Steve 04 Jun '06

04 Jun '06

> And the winner is.... > > Stilvoid (Steve Engledow) > > Speech! Das w00t! *ahem* I'd just like to say a big thankyou to all of the people that have supported me along the way and especially to work for allowing me the flexibility to spend a while pondering my entry ;) This is the first competition I've ever won *sob* I'm so proud!

1 0

font conundrum
by Peter 03 Jun '06

03 Jun '06

Many thanks to Wayne for the hint on spadmin. On investigating it, in spadmin, in the printer tab, it turns out that font substitution had been turned on, and it was referrring to fonts that the printer did not have. Consequently what must have been happening is that instead of using the fonts on the computer, the printer tried to use fonts it did not have, and defaulted to this strange spidery computerish font. Why it happened, no idea. I certainly had never enabled any of these substitutions. spadmin may have a mind of its own which gets triggered when you install OO2. At any rate, delete all the font substitutions and the computer fonts are used and work perfectly. In hope this may someday rescue someone else from a couple of days scratching their heads, Peter

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[simon.morris@cmtww.com: [Gllug-announce] GLLUG Summer Expedition]
by Adam Bower 02 Jun '06

02 Jun '06

Hi, I just noticed this from the GLLUG announce list, I know some aluggers were talking of organising a day out to Bletchley, perhaps you want to join up with the GLLUG'ers too. ----- Forwarded message from Simon Morris <simon.morris(a)cmtww.com> ----- From: Simon Morris <simon.morris(a)cmtww.com> To: gllug-announce(a)gllug.org.uk Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2006 13:25:04 +0100 Subject: [Gllug-announce] GLLUG Summer Expedition Hello, I am trying to organise a GLLUG Summer Expedition to Bletchley Park, Cambs. for Sunday 9th July. "Bletchley Park was the centre of the Allied cryptanalysis and code breaking efforts during the Second World War. The most notable achievement was the breaking of the German Enigma cipher which is said to have brought the war to an end 2 years early. It was home to a number of famous mathamaticians and cryptanalysts including Alan Turing - the father of modern computer science." At the park there is a Computer history museum, World War 2 exhibits and a Churchill exhibition. One this particular day there is also a vintage car and motorbike show and a WW2 fly-past as well as the regular attractions. The plan is to arrive at Bletchley, visit the attractions and then have a group picnic later in the afternoon. That Sunday is also the World Cup Final (No, England won't be playing in it *duck*) so those who care could find a local pub or race back to London to watch it. Kickoff is at 1900. I need to track numbers of people who are going to attend. Once I have 20 interested people we can claim a group discount for entry of £8 each. Please discuss the trip on the GLLUG Social list... http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/social ... to keep the noise off of the main discussion list. Email me if you are interested in going and I am going to maintain a web-page to inform you of train times, more information etc. http://www.gllug.org.uk/index.php?/archives/18-GLLUG-Summer-Expedition.html Families and other hangers-on are more than welcome. Hope to see some of you there.. ~sm -- Gllug-announce mailing list - Gllug-announce(a)gllug.org.uk http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug-announce ----- End forwarded message ----- -- jabberid = quinophex(a)jabber.earth.li Avoid ID cards, renew your passport: http://www.renewforfreedom.org/

1 0

Some weirdness
by Wayne Stallwood 01 Jun '06

01 Jun '06

Not exactly a Linux question, but the answer may equally apply and it's confusing the living daylights out of me so- I have a client with a SCO box...the application it runs is sometimes made to generate a file that has to magically appear a bit later on another (Windows) box. Due to visionFS (sort of like Samba but not as nice) not being completely happy talking to Windows Server 2003 (or vice versa) the method that was chosen when this was implemented by whoever was FTP. So there is a cron job that looks roughly like this #!/bin/sh userid=foo pword=bar host=windowsbox file=transferfile.csv if [ -e $file ] then ftp -i -n $host <<putfile user $userid $pword cd /location/on/windows/box lcd /file/location put $file putfile echo file transferred mv $file $file.sent else exit The odd thing is that the file is nearly always truncated...I thought at first we were getting unlucky and the script was transferring it before app had finished writing it. So I tried inserting a wait in the script just before the ftp transfer bit...So then it looked for the file and if it existed waited 2 minutes (plenty of time for the app to finish with the file) and only then transferred it...If anything this seemed to make things worse!!! Also interestingly the $file.sent (ie the moved copy of $file) is always complete. But I am guessing because it's a move it would be because the unlinked filename handle would be working until the app let go of it right ? oh and it's not the ftp transfer that's causing the problem because I can do the transfer manually and all is well. Can't help thinking that there is a better way of doing this...but any ideas on how to re-implement or fix the current method are very welcome.

6 8

squashfs and lzma
by Mark Rogers 01 Jun '06

01 Jun '06

I'm trying to play with the firmware of a router, which is basically a squashfs filesystem. If I create a squashfs filesystem and look at it with a hex editor it does look very similar to the one I have for the router, but I have been unable to mount the firmware on my test box. I think this is because it has been compressed with lzma to improve the compression ratio, and this is not compiled into squashfs by default. So: Does that sound plausible? Are there any good distros for this kind of thing (eg a live CD I can experiment with), or should I try and set something up myself? I'm thinking probably a VMWare virtual machine would do what I need. (Basically I want to extract the firmware and hack the HTML, then recompress it and use it to break^H^H^H^H^H tweak my router.) Anyone here done this kind of thing? -- Mark Rogers More Solutions Ltd :: 0845 45 89 555

5 9

Ooops! Another Debian Etch cods up
by Barry Samuels 01 Jun '06

01 Jun '06

I recently upgraded my Debian Testing/Etch system and today I tried to write to a DVD using K3b. The error I got was: System ----------------------- K3b Version: 0.12.15 KDE Version: 3.5.2 QT Version: 3.3.6 Kernel: 2.4.27 Devices ----------------------- ASUS DRW-1608P2S 1.37 (/dev/sr0, /dev/sg1) at /cdrom [CD-R; CD-RW; CD-ROM; DVD-ROM; DVD-RAM; DVD-R; DVD-RW; DVD-R DL; DVD+R; DVD+RW; DVD+R DL] [DVD-ROM; DVD-R Sequential; DVD-R Dual Layer Sequential; DVD-R Dual Layer Jump; DVD-RAM; DVD-RW Restricted Overwrite; DVD-RW Sequential; DVD+RW; DVD+R; DVD+R Double Layer; CD-ROM; CD-R; CD-RW] [SAO; TAO; RAW; SAO/R96P; SAO/R96R; RAW/R16; RAW/R96P; RAW/R96R; Restricted Overwrite; Layer Jump] Used versions ----------------------- growisofs: 6.1 growisofs ----------------------- Executing 'builtin_dd if=/mnt/storage/makedvd/newdvd.iso of=/dev/sr0 obs=32k seek=0' :-( write failed: Invalid argument growisofs command: ----------------------- /usr/bin/growisofs -Z /dev/sr0=/mnt/storage/makedvd/newdvd.iso -use-the-force-luke=notray -use-the-force-luke=tty -use-the-force-luke=dummy -dvd-compat -speed=4 -overburn -use-the-force-luke=bufsize:32m Is it me or is it them? Any suggestions for putting this right would be welcome. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

4 4

Auto-switching desktop/workspace
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 30 May '06

30 May '06

Hi Folks, To set the scene: On the machine I usually work at I have KDE, with several "desktops" (KDE-speak) or "workspaces" (Gnome-speak). Say I have Mozilla or Firefox running in one of these. Now I ask the browser to access a web page. This seems to be taking its time, so I switch to another desktop and do something else while I'm waiting. Then the browser times out. So up pops a window with the message that it has timed out. BUT:-- I find that in so doing it has automatically switched me from the other desktop I was working on while waiting, back to the desktop where the browser is being displayed. SO:-- some software at least knows how to automatically switch between desktops. THEREFORE:-- I would like to know too! I can find uses for this phenomenon -- e.g. if I am running a program in one desktop which from time to time draws graphs in a window on another desktop. When it draws a new graph, I would like it to automatically switch to the desktop with the graph. So what's the secret to auto-switching of desktops? And is it at all specific to the "Desktop Environment" (e.g. KDE)? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 28-May-06 Time: 00:59:52 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

2 1

Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 29 May '06

29 May '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

1 0

Fonts in OO 2.0
by Peter 28 May '06

28 May '06

Seem to be always asking for help with obscure things that drive one nuts! I had OO v1.5 installed on Mandriva. Got the rpms and installed 2.0 in the usual way (rpm -Uvh). Everything is fine. Except that Times New Roman, which would of course be the default font that all the documents are saved in, doesn't print properly. Displays perfectly. Prints however in some sort of default computerish font, the same whether you select bold, italic and whatever size. When I go into drakfont, there seem to be two copies of TNR. But its obscure to me what exactly I will be deleting if I try the delete option - it seems to be offering to delete a lot of fonts from a lot of places all at once, when presumably if to delete anything, its just one of the TNRs probably from one place. When I do spadmin, I hardly see any of the fonts. But others that are not shown print fine. It also still works just fine in OO 1.5 if I go back into that. Aarrrgh! What would you all do next? Peter

3 2

Slow HW Clock
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 28 May '06

28 May '06

Hi Folks, I've discovered that the hardware clock on one of my machines is running about 2/3 slow: loses about 20min in each hour. For the time being, I'm writing the system time to it every so often, and the system time is updated hourly by NTP. But the principal irritation of it is that the system clock is set from the HW clock on bootup, so I have to make provision to over-ride that. I don't know of any important system functions that directly consult the HW clock rather than the system clock. Do you? Also -- and here I'd really welcome good ideas -- does anyone have any suggestions for why this might be happening, and/or for what to so about it? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 27-May-06 Time: 13:34:41 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

3 6

How do you keep all your files in sync on multiple platforms?
by Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. 28 May '06

28 May '06

Like me, I expect several of you have multiple PCs, each with their own different OS installed. I'm investigating how to setup automatic synching between them. What I would ideally like is something that runs in the background and syncs (via peer-to-peer) the files automatically between Linux, OSX and Windows. I've found unison under a GPL license that supports all platforms, but it's only for merging two sources. I've found groove.net, but that's Windows only. Foldershare.com supports Mac and Windows, but not Linux and I don't like the idea of storing my own files externally. What I've done in the past is just have separate file stores on each machine and then sync them up to a master internal FTP server, but this sucks and is not time efficient when the same file ends up on more than one machine as I need to manually check for the most recent version. So, how do the rest of you handle synching your files on multiple platforms? -- Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. http://www.ashleyhowes.com/ "Oh, Great Spirit, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to tell the difference." - Native American Indian

3 2

Relative speeds of ways of doing 'X over the internet'?
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 28 May '06

28 May '06

Does anyone have any ideas about, or is there a web site that will tell me about, the relative speeds of different ways of running X applications across the internet? I'm specifically interested in runnning jpilot (a Palm Dekstop replacement that runs on Linux) remotely through my ADSL connection. The only way I have run it to date is tunnelling X through an ssh connection. This works OK in the sense that it's full functional but it's not really fast enough for normal use. It's just a way of getting at the data if I really need to. What I'm after is knowing if there are better and/or more optimised ways of connecting so that this would become a usable utility when accessed remotely. In terms of bandwidth use jpilot is sort of 'middling', it is much, much more usable than running Firefox via the ssh tunnel for example but not as quick as running an rxvt terminal. (An rxvt terminal actually runs quite quickly but there's little point as it only offers the same function as an ordinary ssh session which is quicker and easier) So, can anyone offer any ideas please. -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

8 18

Real-time Audio Processing and Streaming
by Richard Lewis 26 May '06

26 May '06

Hello ALUG, I'm doing some work with one of the post-grads on a Web-based audio mixer for live sound sources. The user will see each of the, say, half-dozen sound sources arranged on the screen and as he moves his cursor (or "joystick") towards one, it becomes predominant in the mix. Each of the sound sources will play either a continuous stream from a live microphone or continuous loops of interesting cached sounds. My basic plan is to have this sort of "joystick" metaphor on the client side which responds to mouse gestures by sending lots of small HTTP requests representing Open Sound Control commands using AJAX to a PHP (or possibly the dreaded Perl) script on the server side which, in turn, forwards the OSC commands to the mixer software. The output audio stream from the mixer should then be MP3 encoded and streamed back to the client to play in his embedded media player. I have a clear view of how I will implement everything up to and including the server side PHP (or Perl). After that I'm not so sure. There are two aspects that I'd appreciate anyone's wisdom on. First is the mixing software. The reason why I've mentioned OSC is because my colleague is an experienced Max/MSP user and would like to use either that or PureData to handle the mixing. However, I'm worried about how well this will scale up when multiple users are connected. Will I have to run one instance of Max (or pd) for each client connection? Should I perhaps consider a more UNIXy tool like ecasound or something? Second is the streaming software. I'm a bit surer about this: I've looked at Icecast and it seems to do MP3 encoding. I reckon it can probably handle multiple client sessions as long as each connection has its own distinguishable source audio stream which I suppose depends on how I choose to implement the mixer. Has anyone had any experience with it? Is it very resource intensive? Any thoughts or experiences would be very welcome! Cheers, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis Sonic Arts Research Archive http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

3 3

Would anyone care to Samba?
by Barry Samuels 25 May '06

25 May '06

I have an IBM ThinkPad R51 less than a year old which came with Windows XP although I have Debian installed on it which is what I mostly use. However there is one Windows application, MapInfo, which I use occasionally and for which I have never found a Linux substitute. I had the laptop set up to connect to my normal Linux (Debian Testing) desktop machine via Samba and was able to use it. Then two things happend. 1. I moved the mount point of the partition on the Linux machine to which the laptop, running Windows, connected. I changed the paths in smbd.conf and did think to restart Samba. 2. I also upgraded Debian Testing on my non-laptop machine. Now the laptop won't even recognise that the Debian machine is there although it is connected to the network and I can ping the Debian machine. My first thought was to look in the logs on the Debian machine for errors but there are no errors! Where do I go from here to find which machine is the cause of the problem? I assume it must be the Debian desktop because that's the only one that's changed. Both smbd and nmbd are running on the desktop. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

2 2

Linux.com : Runit makes a speedy replacement for init
by Keith Watson 25 May '06

25 May '06

<http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/05/03/2126222 > ...interesting article. Does anyone use anything other than SysVinit for booting? Regards, Keith ____________ Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is to you. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

1 0

Can someone explain?
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 24 May '06

24 May '06

Hi Folks, Someone out there will know the answer to my ignorant query ... Suppose I have an up-and-running internet connection via my ISP. So I telnet into a remote host (e.g. nessie.mcc.ac.uk) and establish a login-session. So far so good. Next, for DSL reasons, the internet connection is interrupted (the router re-syncs). Shortly afterwards, it is re-established again. But now, I have lost contact with the login session. My question is: What is the mechanism (or perhaps absence of mechanism) leading to losing the contact? Or, turning the question on its head, what is it that keeps my link with the remote host alive so long as the internet connection stays up? The naive version of the question: If my packets can find their way to my login to nessie before the line drops, and nessie's can find their way back to my telnet, how come they can't continue to do so after the line drops and is re-estiblished? I hope people understand what I'm asking -- I'll try better if you don't! Thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 24-May-06 Time: 21:03:41 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Why always public-key encryption algorithms?
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 23 May '06

23 May '06

Why is it that *everything* uses some sort of public-key encryption algorithm for storing sensitive data? It's stupid! OK, it's brilliantly useful for sending data across the internet and so on but for storing one's own sensitive data it is entirely pointless as far as I can see. For example if I want to store a file with some sensitive data in it and only only want to be able to decrypt it myself then surely anything *but* a public key encryption algorithm makes sense. Essentially a public key algorithm means that there is always a brute force way of getting at the data, it may take more computing power/time than is available but it is in principle possible. Other ways of encrypting can be made essentially uncrackable if you want. Are there any encryption experts here who can persuade me that I'm being silly? -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

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USB On Old Laptop
by Simon Royal 23 May '06

23 May '06

Hi I have an old laptop with no USB, a ThinkPad 380ED which has 16bit PCMCIA slots. Can anyone suggest where I would get a USB PCMCIA card from? I have searched eBay but even the great online garage sale failed to return anything. It doesn't have to be USB 2 a simple USB 1.1 card would do but all they have is cardbus cards. Kind Regards Simon Royal ---- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac

3 2

For Sale
by Wayne Stallwood 23 May '06

23 May '06

As previously mentioned I have upgraded my home server and the old one is looking for a new home if anyone is interested. It's a converted Gigabyte NAS box. Originally it was a Linux based appliance server that offered basic filesharing, print, firewall and mail services. It's a very nicely built little unit, a tiny tower measuring about 400x300x90mm. Quiet enough to sit in the corner of a room without causing much annoyance (it is a LOT quieter than my new 1U rack server) Many moons ago it was de-commissioned at one of my clients due to hard drive failure (the original OS was lost as part of that failure) I fitted a 120GB hdd and installed Ubuntu Server. It has served me very well ever since. In fact the main reason I retired it was that I couldn't find a half height PCI line card (the only type that will fit) that would play nicely with Asterisk. It has a PIII 866 Mhz CPU 128MB of RAM (standard dimm slots, one free) 2 NIC's (so it could make a nice firewall if nothing else) 1 PCI Modem 120GB HDD (with space for another) It also has a little LCD on the front that shows POST status during startup. This was originally also controlled by the OS and showed running status as well. It is plugged into a PCI card (more on that in a mo) on what I think *may* be a parallel port. However I have never managed to get lcdproc to drive it (and can't for the moment even remember what chipset the LCD is) so at the moment it shows the post bits and then stops at "Starting operating system....." at which point the OS driver should be taking over. A brave new owner can have another go or take one of my spare hd44780 displays to try and replace it. The PCI card also has a socket for a "disk on chip" I still have the 8MB part that was in there, however this contains the bootloader for the original OS and was interfering with the Ubuntu boot so I removed it. The only slight complication is that it is a headless unit (no VGA and no PS/2 keyboard socket) When I originally set it up I got around this by taking it apart and plugging in a PCI graphics card and a USB keyboard on an internal USB header. Alternatives would be to perform a minimal installation with the drive in another machine. With this in mind I would install the new owners OS of choice and set it up for their network prior to handing it over. I am told that the Debian installer will default to ttys0 if there is no local graphics, which would make life a little easier (it has a serial port on the back panel) £80

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Secure web access to password protected data - suggestions?
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 22 May '06

22 May '06

I'm after setting up a small amount of 'secure' data on my web server that I can access and, preferably, modify via the internet using a browser. I.e. I basically want a web page (or a hierarchy of web pages) whose content is password protected. The ideal sort of interface would be a Wiki sort of approach - I think. Is there anything out there that can do this sort of thing? There are a number of PHP based password storage utilities but these are rather restictive of the format in which you can store data, I'd much prefer to be able to store free format text. There are two basic approaches as well:- Use client side decryption (i.e. Javascript or Java) so that only the encrypted data is sent over the internet. For me it wouldn't even be necessary to send the decryption code with the pages as I'm quite happy to install that on the two or three systems where I want to be able to view and modify the data. This approach has the advantage of not requiring an encrypted (https:) web server. User server side encrypt/decrypt and an https: server. This requires more effort to set up apache to do https: but I suspect is rather easier to do the actual encrypting and decrypting. In fact, given that the 'source' code lives on a fairly secure machine at home how vulnerable would the data be if it was just in a password protected Wiki? (i.e. the data itself isn't encrypted) Any and all ideas welcome. (well, except writing it down on a piece of paper and carrying that around with me) -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

2 4

SysAdmin position
by James Green 22 May '06

22 May '06

Hi, If anyone's looking for a sys-admin position and has relevant experience, you might like to submit your CV to employment(a)stealthnet.net Job involves administering various Debian installations including production web, database and mail servers. Also involved with be a certain amount of looking after our "admin" network in Gorleston including Windows XP workstations. Although the successful candidate will find a Mac Mini on their desk should they want to use it :) We're ideally looking for 4 years experience, but 2+ will be considered. You will also be expected to take part in on-call rotas. Desirable experience: MySQL Replication Exim4 / Cyrus Bind9 PHP/Perl Windows administration CVs to: employment(a)stealthnet.net P.S. Don't look at www.stealthnet.net and believe it all - it hasn't been updated in years. Complete new version in beta! Kind regards, James Green

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RE: [alug social] Re: [ALUG] Fwd: First ALUG competition of 2006
by Keith Watson 22 May '06

22 May '06

> From: sfr Sent: 21 May 2006 12:14 > > On 20/05/06, Brett Parker <iDunno(a)sommitrealweird.co.uk> wrote: > > On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 10:07:14PM +0100, Paul > <lists(a)bulldoghome.com> wrote: > > > > > Guess Brett wants to keep the prizes all for himself... > > > > Have we ever worked out what they are yet? > > yes.. well... > > first prize is LOTS of Kudos, international fame, and a certificate. > and something else ... an early release copy of Windows Vista > > second prize is some kudos, slightly less fame, and er... > something else. > ... TWO early release copies of Windows Vista > hang on a minute, I'll look in the charity-shop box. > > -- > eli alternatively... 1st prize - the opportunity to supply Brett with pints of beer for a whole night 2nd prize - ditto (but followed but a chinese/indian take away of Brett's choice) 3rd prize - you don't want to know about the 3rd prize Regards, Keith ____________ Even before I can say it, it is no more. - Sengai

1 0

Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 22 May '06

22 May '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Apple Front Row
by David Noble 21 May '06

21 May '06

Hi All At boarding school, I decided to get a Mac Mini as a 'Media PC', to be able to play films through the projector. (The advantages of the Mac Mini being that it is supposedly fast enough for the job, quiet and small, and with a relatively bombproof operating system. Also, the video input quality on the projector is poor at best, and it is only worth using the RGB input on it.) However, the new Intel (core solo) chip is a pile of rubbish (compiles slower than my 3 year old AMD), and much to the amusement of my friends crashes when a DVD is paused in Front Row for over 5 minutes. I do not know why it does this, but I certainly wish Apple never changed to Intel. It was definitely a step backwards from a modern chip (PowerPC) to one that has had extensions bodged onto it (Intel 8086) over the past 20 years since the Intel 8086. (on my PowerBook G4, I have never had problems with DVDs freezing). I'd put up with it if it was open source, but being a commercial product, and still crashing /after/ a major system update (downloaded and installed all the patches today), but being a system that has cost a lot of money, I'd at least expect it to be able to pause a DVD without crashing. I want to see if Linux can be installed on it, and use that and Kaffeine or Xine just to play back DVDs. I warn anyone who wishes to rely on FrontRow. At least on the Intel series. Regards Dave

2 1

Network drives for Linux
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 21 May '06

21 May '06

Does anyone have any experience of using a network drive with Linux? Nearly all the reasonably priced ones I have seen advertised tell you all about how they appear as a 'local drive' on Windows systems but give no clue as to how/whether they will work with Linux. One actually appears to be running Samba but that still isn't ideal for Linux. While I'm asking, if I press an old system into service with a basic Linux OS installed on it how can I network its drives? Can one just mount drives across the local network or does one *have* to run something like NFS or Samba? -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

4 7

Linux box
by Bob Dove 21 May '06

21 May '06

Hi Guys (and of course Ladies), I'm surprised by the relatively low spec some of you guys are running Linux on. I've got a Celeron powered box with 96mB RAM (Win98/2 word processing box) - I'll have a play and see what happens. Any of you tinkerers connected a 'doze and Linux box via KVM for quick change one to 'tother? Incidentally, I'm also surprised at the low regard for OOo - which is my main office in 'doze (I perforce have to have Bill's office installed 'cos most people seem to use it.) I would say that within my immediate circle - I'm the only non MS user. Can't understand why people spend so much on MS when there is so much good open source stuff out there? Perhaps I'll give AbiWord another go - the last time I tried it it was a pain - especially the blo**y US spell check (US as in RAF tech parlance as well as the place across the pond). Cheers, BD.

5 4

Vista
by Bob Dove 21 May '06

21 May '06

Hi Guys, BBBG [Big bad Bill G] wants to 1/ Rule the World, or 2/ Own the World, or 3/ At least dictate how you use and what you use on your computer. The power requirements for Vista are such that I can't imagine anyone actually giving in to the dictat except to use Linux instead and write really powerful programs to emulate BBBG. Then of course, there are people out there with more plastic than grey matter who will spend the ever increasing amounts of dosh BBBG wants. And there'll always be 'pooter' builders keen to provide the necessary hardware. Personally, to run Quark and PhotoShop - which is all I want to do really - it is all overkill and I'll stick to 'doze 2K. Of course, it is the gaming fraternity who need the blistering power that BBBG is tapping into. Problem is of course, BBBG makes a pretty point and press desktop full of apparent usability while Linux won't let brick brains in! I must say that even (to my wife's intense annoyance) a dedicated box for Linux has (or would have if I had any) caused hair pulling and revision of Anglo Saxon usage. I have been watching the thread as to how little you really need to run a minimum Linux distro - and the little is in fact quite large. Mind you, Solitaire in Linux is much prettier than 'doze! Cheers, Bob Dove.

8 11

This list and html email.
by Adam Bower 20 May '06

20 May '06

Hi Guys, I just thought I'd drop a quick email to the list just to clarify that the Alug list is a plain text only list but I'm bending the rules a bit for new joiners to the list as I feel it is better to let them participate and get involved with Alug instead of freezing them out straight away. When we get new people join the list who have a mail held for moderation because it has an html part I am going to let the post through and then mail the new joiner directly asking them to try and post in plain text only. (Obviously if they have posted with html and it has created a massive attachement then I will not allow it to go to the list). Obviously this isn't set in stone as it's up to the people on the list what we do but I'd like to hear a few opinions of if people think I'm doing the right/wrong thing. Thanks Adam -- jabberid = quinophex(a)jabber.earth.li Avoid ID cards, renew your passport: http://www.renewforfreedom.org/

9 16

Balsa - here's an easy one
by Barry Samuels 20 May '06

20 May '06

Since I've upgraded Balsa to 2.3.8 some of the toolbar button images have disappeared. Does anyone know where they are kept? I can see some in /usr/share/balsa/hicolo/24x24/apps/ and I've added one called 'balsa-compose.png' which I obtained from a Balsa Theme but it doesn't show up. One other puzzle is that there is a printer button with an image showing but it's not in the list in the above directory. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

1 0

Multiple instances of sshd
by David Noble 20 May '06

20 May '06

Hi Is it possible to run multiple instances of sshd on different ports (or for that matter a single instance on different ports)? Have any of you had experience doing so, and is there anything I should be particularly careful about? Regards, Dave

2 1

Good news from MS!!
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 19 May '06

19 May '06

Hi Folks, "Microsoft has released 'minimum' and 'recommended' specifications for Vista. The minimum means that the operating system will run but some new features will be disabled. Recommended means that this is what is needed to get the most basic configuration of the whole package working. VISTA HARDWARE CHECKLIST Minimum Recommended Processor 800MHz 1GHz 32 or 64 bit System Memory 512MB 1GB Graphics card DirectX 9 capable Runs Windows Aero Graphics Memory - - 128MB Free space on Hard Drive 15GB 15GB Source: Microsoft" Well, that's good news! If Vista catches on, there should be a good bit of decent kit coming cheap onto the secondhand market that would run Linux very nicely. Looking forward to that! Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 19-May-06 Time: 20:03:23 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

6 5

Re: [ALUG] Forged email
by John Seago 19 May '06

19 May '06

On Friday 19 May 2006 09:02, Wayne Stallwood <ALUGlist(a)digimatic.plus.com> wrote: > Do nothing, or if you are a good citizen you can try to track down who > sent it so that you can warn them (you might know them) that they have a > virus. > > clue- Whois says it was somebody on Virgin Internet Pay as you Go Thank you so much, I'll work back through my address book and incoming mail this afternoon. -- John Seago GNU/Linux Registered User No. #219566 () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments

1 0

Forged email
by John Seago 19 May '06

19 May '06

AOL have informed me that I have sent an email containing an unrepairable virus. I know from the following lines: X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1106 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 X-Spam: Not detected X-AOL-IP: 82.10.38.23 That it was not sent using my computer as it only has installed upon it slackware10.2. Any advise as to what action to take gratefully accepted -- John Seago GNU/Linux Registered User No. #219566 () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments

3 2

RE: [ALUG] Fwd: First ALUG competition of 2006
by Keith Watson 19 May '06

19 May '06

> From: Wayne Stallwood Sent: 18 May 2006 22:13 > On Thu, 2006-05-18 at 21:43 +0100, Brett Parker wrote: > > > > I haven't quite written the system yet, it's sort of in a> midway state > > because I've not quite decided how to write it yet (lame, I know ;) > > Write it ??? > Have we not learnt anything from Diebold in the US > > I demand a paper ballot ! No problem... ...you'll find hydraulic voting booths installed in most private and public buildings. The ballot papers can be found on convenient tear-off rolls and, after you have cast your vote, lift the lid on the voting box, deposit your completed ballot paper in the water and operate the handle to deliver your vote to the nearest counting unit. Regards, Keith ____________ Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look at what they can do when they stick together.

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