main

main@lists.alug.org.uk

10369 discussions

Start a nNew thread

christmas dinner tonight
by Sam Tuke 10 Dec '09

10 Dec '09

Are we still on for this evening? Sam.

2 1

Open Office - can one reduce the clutter for data entry on database forms?
by Chris G 09 Dec '09

09 Dec '09

I'm looking into using Open Office Base for creating some simple data entry forms, it's definitely a lot better than it was a few versions ago and is now a much more viable alternative to MS Access. However it would be really nice to have some way of reducing the 'clutter' (of Toolbars, status bars, etc.) around the window once a form has been designed and is being used for data entry. Ideally one would be able to display just the form one has designed, in much the same way as one can print a document without all the stuff around the edge (it would be a bit pointless if one couldn't!). Is there any way of getting just the form visible, or at least of toggling off all the toolbars etc.? I know quite a bit can be turned off using the View menu but how would one start up in this state? -- Chris Green

1 0

Norwich Christmas Meal - 10th Dec
by Montmorency 07 Dec '09

07 Dec '09

I've just been in touch with the Coach and Horses. For the Christmas meal, they need to know the number coming, and the meals options people want, for first thing on Monday morning.. Menu here.... pick what you'd like. http://imgur.com/bcvVP.jpg If you want to come, reply to the mailing list with what you want. Now please! :) katsmeat Montmorency montmorency(a)ukfsn.org bellphegore(a)nerdshack.com

3 2

Eee desktop
by Anthony Anson 07 Dec '09

07 Dec '09

Does anyone know what the internet/work/settings/etc displays are called, and where I can find them? I want to put a link to Thunderbird on the internet one for starters - it's a bit of a pain doing it from File Mangler every time... -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

1 0

Christmas Meal selection at the Coach and Horses
by Ian 04 Dec '09

04 Dec '09

Hi, I'll go for the Roast Turkey followed by the Christmas Pudding. Ian PS. Any ideas what might cause KDE to drop a USB keyboard after a successful GUI signon?

1 0

lp/lpr printing with CUPS version 1.4.1 is broken, fine with 1.3.9
by Chris G 04 Dec '09

04 Dec '09

I have one system on my LAN running Ubuntu server 9.10 and three running xubuntu 9.04. I have two printers, one a networked HP7310 and the other an HP1320 which is connected by USB to the Ubuntu server machine and is accessible via that from the other machines. So far so good, both printers work fine from all machines when used 'normally', i.e. for printing from Firefox or Open Office or whatever. The problem I have is that when I use lp or lpr from the command line on the 9.10 system the ouput is in a silly typeface and a silly size and the normal command line options have no effect. So if I do, for example, "ls -al | lpr -P HP7310" on my desktop 9.04 system I get a neat output in Courier 10 on the printer. However if I do exactly the same on the 9.10 system I get a horrible mess in some wierd typeface at about 5 cpi so some of the lines wrap and overprint themselves. Unfortunately, since the HP1320 is connected via the 9.10 system (it doesn't have its own network connection) all lpr output from any system to it goes via the CUPS on the 9.10 server and has the same bug, prints at about 5cpi. Ubuntu 9.10 has CUPS version 1.4.1 whereas the older 9.04 has CUPS 1.3.9 so it would seem that there's a bug in CUPS 1.4.1. However I can't find any reports of such a bug in CUPS, does no one print from the command line any more or is my Googling incompetant? In addition to the incorrect default print size the CUPS 1.4.1 command line appears to ignore any options like "-o cpi=10" which might otherwise be used to work around the problem. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where to look for a fix or a workaround? I'm in the process of submitting a bug at the CUPS web site as I can't find anything relevant there. -- Chris Green

2 2

Ipswich ALUG Christmas Meal? January Tutorial?
by samwise 04 Dec '09

04 Dec '09

Hi, Last month's Ipswich ALUG turnout (13) was huge, so it appears there may be enough potential for a Christmas meal in Ipswich next month. Can anyone who might be interested in such an event, please drop me an email. If there's enough of us, we can work out the best date and book a table. On another note, we're trying to bring back bi-monthly tutorials at the request of some members. Following the one we've just had, the next one is scheduled to be on 18 January, next year. Is there anyone who'd like to volunteer to putting together a little something to show off? It can be on anything you like and doesn't even have to be a subject you know well - just something you're willing to spend an hour or two looking at before the meet (I'm certainly no Android expert!). Cheers, Peter.

2 1

Re: [ALUG] Norwich Christmas Meal on the 10th
by Sam Tuke 04 Dec '09

04 Dec '09

On Thursday 03 Dec 2009 19:55:31 Montmorency wrote: > Menu here.... pick what you'd like. Risotto > Turkey > Christmas Pudding please, assuming that we are having starters. If not, just the last two please. Thanks for organising this event! Sam.

1 0

Hello! Bad penny strikes again
by Anthony Anson 03 Dec '09

03 Dec '09

Since Zetnet has been dying I've been unable sensibly to retrieve any postings since August. Now with a proper ISP again I really *NEED* access to the list as my (Shhh!) Windows box has suddenly refused to take part in anything NT-related. DOS and Win 98, yes, but not 2000 or anything subsequent to that. Box still runs Lenny with no problem, also (unsurprisingly) Knoppix from DVD. This Eee is still running Fisher-Price for now. So, hello again, and if anyone has a reasonably-priced laptop for sale, I'd love to hear about it. Eees are ok - at a pinch innit. -- Tony

1 0

How do you get podcasts/iPod apps etc without itunes?
by James Elsey 01 Dec '09

01 Dec '09

Someone here must have an iPod/iPhone/iTouch, how do you tap in to the apple store directory of podcasts, applications and such, without using itunes? There are some podcasts I'm subscribed to, but after replacing window7 with fedora12, I can't get hold of any updates. They are only hosted via the itunes store and not available as downloads from websites I did mention something on IRC about running iTunes under wine, but lets not go there.. :P I can't see any immediate way of Rhythmbox having access to the podcast listings, at least I haven't found a plugin yet. Any suggestions? Whack XP on virtualbox and get them via itunes? Cheers James Elsey

3 2

Cross-Compiling Debian Kernel - AMD64 and i386
by Steve Fosdick 01 Dec '09

01 Dec '09

It occurred to me that building a kernel for an older Pentium 4 machine would be much faster on a three-core AMD Phenom than on the original P4 as long as I can get it to cross compile. I found that with the following command line: make-kpkg --revision 1 --us --uc --rootcmd fakeroot --cross-compile - --arch=i386 --initrd --append-to-version=-scenic --config gconfig kernel_image make-kpkg appears to run 'make config' with defaults for the target i386 architecture and when it moves on to the build step is invoving gcc with options telling it to generate i386 code. The fly in the ointment is that at the end it then wraps the kernel up into a package whose architecture as declared in the filename and in the control file as AMD64. When looking inside the package though all the modules are ELF32 as I would expect for i386. I have checked the man enty for make-kpkg but didn't find any other clue as to how I get make-kpkg to feed through whatever options are required to get the final package the correct type for the architecture it was actually build for. Any ideas? TiA, Steve.

2 2

FW: Re: Using ImageMagick to overlay text
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 01 Dec '09

01 Dec '09

Apologies -- I just noticed that at the end of the message below which I recently posted, I said "the length of "This is my Text" in inches, when printed in Helvetica-Bold in point-size 15." That was incorrect, since everything preceding was done in terms of Courier-Bold! To see what it comes to in terms of Helvetica-Bold, substitute "HB" for "CB" in the commands. Thus: echo "\f[HB]\w'This is my Text'\s0\fP" | troff -Tps | awk '/^t/{sub(/t/,""); print $0/72000}' results in 0.988889 the length in inches of "This is my Text" in Helvetica-Bold in the default point-size of 10 points, while echo "\f[HB]\w'\s[15]This is my Text'\s0\fP" | troff -Tps | awk '/^t/{sub(/t/,""); print $0/72000}' results in 1.48333 the length in inches of "This is my Text" in Helvetica-Bold in 15-point (1.5 times as long as in 10-point). Also note (which I forgot to mention) that this length takes account of kerning (the slight left-shift of some letters relative to a preceding letter -- e.g. in "Text" the "ext" is moved left so tht the "e" is slightly overlapped by the preceding "T"). Kerning can be suppressed. Also, of course, the length is computed in terms of the font-metrics in the font files referred to by troff, and in other applications different font files may be used; however, the result is unlikely to be greatly different. Sorry for the sloppiness! Ted. -----FW: <XFMail.091201122319.Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk>----- Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:23:19 -0000 (GMT) Sender: main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk From: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] Using ImageMagick to overlay text On 01-Dec-09 09:06:14, Mark Rogers wrote: > MJ Ray wrote: >> I'd either run identify on the image beforehand, or test PHP's libgd >> module to see if it was good enough for this. > > I will try GD today and see what the results are like (the results from > ImageMagick are pretty amazing, to be honest). > > I'm not sure what you mean about using identify though - I can see how > I'd use it to work out the size of the image but I can't see how I'd > use > that information to calculate the pointsize to use with my text? > > -- > Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 Your basic problem here is to find the printed length of a given text string, in a given font, at a given point size! You could incorporate something like the following in a script: echo "\f[CB]\w'This is my Text'\fP" | troff -Tps from which the output (to screen, when I entered the above on the command line) is; x T ps x res 72000 1 1 x init C p1 x font 6 CB f6 s10000 V12000 H72000 md DFd t90000 n12000 0 x trailer V792000 x stop The key line in there is t90000 which is the evaluation of the width ("\w'...'")of the string "This is my Text" in point-size 10 (the default) using font Courier-Bold ("\f[CB]"). The numerical result "90000" is the length of the text in units of (1 point)/1000, i.e. 1/72000 of an inch, so the physical printed length would be 90000/72000 = 1.25 inches You could feed that to 'awk' to do the sums (and this time I'll feed in an explicit point-size 15 ("\s[15]...\s0") as well): echo "\f[CB]\s[15]\w'This is my Text'\s0\fP" | troff -Tps | awk '/^t'/ results in: t135000 while echo "\f[CB]\s[15]\w'This is my Text'\s0\fP" | troff -Tps | awk '/^t/{sub(/t/,""); print $0}' results in 135000 so, finally, echo "\f[CB]\w'\s[15]This is my Text'\s0\fP" | troff -Tps | awk '/^t/{sub(/t/,""); print $0/72000}' results in 1.875 which is (15/10)*1.25, the length of "This is my Text" in inches, when printed in Helvetica-Bold in point-size 15. There may be some discrepancy, depending on how spaces are handled in the output. You can probably exploit the above ideas to get what you want! Hoping this helps, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 01-Dec-09 Time: 12:23:16 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above! --------------End of forwarded message------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 01-Dec-09 Time: 14:22:46 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

1 0

Using ImageMagick to overlay text
by Mark Rogers 01 Dec '09

01 Dec '09

I'm playing with ImageMagick's "convert" program to add text to an image. I have something like this (which works): convert "infile.png" -font "font.ttf" -gravity 'south' \ -stroke '#fffc' -strokewidth '3' -pointsize '300' \ -annotate 0 "Test" "outfile.png" However, the only way I can find to size the text is using the -pointsize option. What I want to do is make the text proportional to the image size, eg have the text work out to 50% of the available width, or similar. I can't find any good way to do this - and nor can I find a suitable query for Google to assist me. The "convert" program is being called as part of a PHP script so I can be quite flexible in what I do if I need to be (eg if I need to create dummy images to see what sizes they come out as, etc). Suggestions for other programs I can use instead welcome. I know ImageMagick and I know I can trust it with high quality images if I need to (and will need to here) which is why I stated there. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

5 8

Re: [ALUG] Using ImageMagick to overlay text
by Mark Rogers 01 Dec '09

01 Dec '09

James Taylor wrote: > I think there is a question about whether swapping from inside PHP to > ImageMagick and back is a good thing or not - why spawn a separate > process to do essentially the same work? > > Another possibility is: > > 1) Load image. > 2) Create new image to store text in > 3) Render text (make it vector based if possible) > 4) Resize-text-image to being correct size/proportion > 5) Merge text-image over image > The actual processing is slower than the spawning, so it's not particularly a problem, but I am moving towards using the Imagick PHP libraries which will bring the processing inside PHP rather than spawning a new process. Spawning a process has the advantage that I can experiment at the commandline first (and can seek advice from a wider range of people), but the options are pretty straightforward to convert between library and commandline. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

1 0

Hi to All
by Rob Snow 30 Nov '09

30 Nov '09

Hi there Luggers, I have just signed up to this list and the lug. My interest in Linux stems from a spell working in the Charity Sector. We managed to convert our whole organisation to Linux across ten to fifteen sites (It varied as the project evolved and then unfortunately wound up). My current interest is fueled by offering family and friends an alternative to the commonly available "commercial" offerings. My favored flavors are Opensuse for modern kit and Puppy for the rest. I have recently moved to Norfolk near Downham Market, and am currently a full time parent! I look forward to meeting you all, either on-line or at one of the social meets. Regards Rob

5 5

remote update of debian etch to lenny
by mick 30 Nov '09

30 Nov '09

Advice please people. I have two VPSs. One runs Lenny, the other etch. There are sufficient differences between the two for me to want to standardise on lenny. (I also run lenny internally on a couple of NSLU2s). Upgrading should not be a problem. I have experience of doing exactly that on local machines - but I have never done it from the end of an ssh connection when the machine in question is housed in a remote datacentre (and, moreover, is a virtualised image). The debian site (at http://www.debian.org/releases/lenny/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.html) recommends against upgrading remotely using telnet, rlogin or rsh, but suggests that ssh will be OK. So, before I jump in with both feet, any experience anyone could share would be good. Particulary I would like to be aware of any potential gotchas. I really don't want to be stuck with a partial upgrade that I can't get back in to. Cheers Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this? Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------

4 6

Christmas Meal - Who's coming?
by Montmorency 30 Nov '09

30 Nov '09

OK... for the Christmas meal at the Coach and Horses on the 10th of December. we have: Sam Tuke Ian <ian(a)titanexplorer.co.uk> Steve <steve(a)offend.me.uk> Adam Bower Richard <richardbensley(a)gmail.com> Myself Bill Hill Reply to the mailing list if you want to come. The menu is here http://i.imgur.com/bcvVP.jpg I'll repost this on the mailing list in a week's time as a final-call. Then get in touch with the pub next Tuesday or Wednesday to let them know the number coming. Montmorency montmorency(a)ukfsn.org bellphegore(a)nerdshack.com

1 0

Cannot copy/paste between two screens on a xinerama/twinview setup
by Srdjan Todorovic 27 Nov '09

27 Nov '09

Hi everyone, Got a strange thing happening on this machine - I can copy text by selecting and highlighting, and pasting by pressing middle mouse button (wheel button). This works fine as long as the copy text source is on one screen, and the paste destination is on the same screen. But it does not work if I have text on one screen and want to paste to another screen. Two physical monitors are plugged into the same video card. TwinView is enabled. Is this a: - nvidia issue - X11 issue - KDE issue - kubuntu issue - legacy software issue? It's as if each physical screen has a separate copy/paste buffer. As long as a small portion of a window is over both screens, I can copy/paste from that window into each. This is very annoying! Anyone have ideas? Thanks! Srdjan

3 2

gdi and raw printing
by Peter Alcibiades 26 Nov '09

26 Nov '09

Wayne, do you then mean to set up CUPS with a printer defined as raw, ie with no ppd defined, and then print using that? Its not networked, its local mode only, parallel, and it will just print a few lines very fast, so there is no real way it can need to queue jobs. I came across the suggestion to do cat > [filename] >lp0 elsewhere and now have confirmation from the supplier that the printer will simply print plain text sent directly to it. So this will probably work. Thanks all.

2 1

gdi and raw printing
by Peter Alcibiades 26 Nov '09

26 Nov '09

OK, still struggling with this stuff, and yes, I have googled it to death with mixed success. How does raw printing work exactly? Do you get to send an ascii character stream directly to the printer, and how does the printer know what to do with it? Are there any decent references anywhere? All I am looking to do is send a few characters and line feeds, and don't care about fonts or formatting of any sophisticated sort. One would think it should be possible using lpr, but if anyone has actually done this, it might save a lot of time and experimentation. This is just printing characters, its not real document printing, layout, all that stuff. Peter

5 6

touch screen packages
by Peter Alcibiades 26 Nov '09

26 Nov '09

Don't really like all-in-ones - you get more flexibility with separates, that's my feeling anyway. My friend down the road is stuck, for instance, with a perfectly decent 24 inch apple screen, which has some kind of werid obsolete computer welded to it, and he is going to end up replacing the lot at vast expense, when were they separates, £300 would give him a screamingly fast (by comparison) replacement....An exaggeration, but not much of one. They are convenient, yes. But for us, it will definitely be separates. Peter

1 0

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

26 Nov '09

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

2 1

touch screen packages
by Peter Alcibiades 26 Nov '09

26 Nov '09

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

1 0

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

25 Nov '09

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

3 3

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

25 Nov '09

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

3 4

Jump to page:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

main