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10369 discussions

machine ID
by Peter Alcibiades 19 Feb '10

19 Feb '10

Question: when you install some kinds of non OSS software, they generate a machine ID. You send this to the maker, they then send you back a registration code which works for that particular machine, and only that machine. Not even that machine, if you make too many changes of hardware. Is it possible to tweak a different machine so it generates the same machine ID? This is stuff that comes free with several thousand pounds worth of hardware, does something very simple, like generate a hash index of some sort on a flash card to make some standard format files accessible to the hardware. But for some crazed reason the suppliers of the hardware want to restrict the use of their stuff to one specific machine. I want to know there is a backup solution, should they go bust, or get acquired and suddenly charge exorbitant prices to move the stuff to a different machine. I am thinking, with considerable sense of humour failure, that one solution might be, install into a VM, then generate the activation for that VM, and then make an archive copy of the VM, so one would always be able to move that VM. I notice that vmware has an option for keeping the machine ID when you move installations. Which is totally ridiculous, but at least you would not have several thousand pounds worth of hardware at the mercy of a whim of some people you have never heard of somewhere in the wilds of Provence. Or their potential purchasers in Kazakhstan! Can you imagine then, you run Linux in a VM, then you run Wine in that VM, all to be able to be sure of having a moveable solution for your Windows package in case one of your machines explodes or gets stolen! Nuts. Is there a simpler way by spoofing the machine ID? Peter

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MySQL table crashes
by James Bensley 19 Feb '10

19 Feb '10

Hey List, We have a CentOS VPS with a hosting provider hosting one of our company websites. We are finding recently that about once a week a table will "crash" and needs repairing via phpMyAdmin. This is a recent development as this never used to be a problem. I wondered if any has any insight as to why this might be happening? -- Regards, James ;) Stephen Leacock - "I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so." - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/stephen_leacock.html

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Sheeva and other NAS solutions
by Peter Alcibiades 19 Feb '10

19 Feb '10

Do you generally think it best to make your own file server, or just buy one ready done? I'm wondering between the following 1) Sheeva plug off ebay, and add a usb hard drive. £100 or so. 2) The Ryan Alubox, which is around £85. I am having trouble seeing why the sheevaplug is better than this. http://www.specialtech.co.uk/spshop/customer/home.php?cat=842 3) Or, we could buy the £140 Acer with FreeNAS or Clark Connect and add a usb double enclosure to it for another £40. http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167153 4) Or the Netgear dual enclosure which right now is coming with a FREE 500G drive, and it does RAID automagically if you put in a second drive, and that is around £150 http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149510 On the whole I'm inclining to the £140 Acer + usb enclosure, but I've never done this stuff before so would be really interested to hear the opinions of people who have. We do have one or two old machines lying around which we could fill up with drives, but I'm veering away from that as they are big, quite old, noisy, rather power hungry, and I am not certain of durability if running 24/7. Probably you guys have been through this and have favored solutions. Its a smallish charity with three or four computers which at the moment are only networked for printing. But we do need a simple internal web server, and we do need some central file storage, and we will have a couple of spare new 160G drives from another purchase. Peter

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Virgin (ex NTL) Broadband with Linux - how to set up?
by Chris G 19 Feb '10

19 Feb '10

My brother-in-law has a new computer with Ubuntu 9.10 installed in it, we put it together here at my house and it connected to the internet with no problems via my router here - just plugged the RJ45 in and it worked. So, basically, it's networking must be configured about right. Now he's back home and wants to connect to the internet via an NTL cable modem (now Virgin Media). The cable modem model number is NTL 250 - Model E08c007. When the RJ45 from the cable modem is plugged into his old Windows machine it works, when it's plugged into his new Ubuntu machine it doesn't work. Can anyone tell me how to get this to work? Is it a question of telling NTL/Virgin that there's a new machine (with a new MAC address) connected or does the Cable Modem expect authentication across the ethernet cable, or what? -- Chris Green

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Recommendations for Java Build Box Linux
by Paul Grenyer 19 Feb '10

19 Feb '10

Hi All I want to create myself a Java build box. Basically it requires: Java SDK Hudson TomCat Apache Webserver Ant SVN client MySQL Windows 2008 & SQL Server 2008 running on VirtualBox. All it will do is spend all day monitoring my SVN repository (which is hosted elsewhere), check out code when it changes, build the code, deploy it to TomCat and run some tests. So, VirtualBox permitting, all I think I need is a very simple server version of Linux. Any suggestions? Can I run VirtualBox on a Linux distro without a Windows manager? -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com

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Site suspended?
by Chris Walker 18 Feb '10

18 Feb '10

I've just had a mail from sombeody that's trying to resubscribe to ALUG but when looking at the site, it says it's suspended with the owner being aware. Can anybody say what's going on here please as it's preventing the subscription? Thanks.

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AMD-V
by Paul Grenyer 18 Feb '10

18 Feb '10

Hi All I've recently upgraded to the latest VirtualBox (3.1.4 r57640) and want to install Windows 2008 64bit. When I try and start the VM I get the error message: "VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration has been enabled, but it is not operational. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect 64-bit CPU and will not be able to boot. Please ensure that you have enabled VT-x/AMD-V properly in the BIOS of your host computer." My first thought was to disable VT-x/AMD-V for the VM just to get it going, but it gets turned on again automatically. So, of course I checked the BIOS as I was sure I had turned virtualisation on already, and yet I have and I can't see any further relevant settings. My motherboard is a GA-MA770-DS3 (F6) and I have a Phenom Quad Core 9850 processor.Do I need to upgrade the BIOS to get this to work? If so, how to I find out which revision of the board I have? The ASUS site says there are three revisions..... Any advice greatly appreciated... -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com

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Last night's ALUG Ipswich meet
by samwise 16 Feb '10

16 Feb '10

Due to a combination family emergency and my Android phone getting confused about what day it was, and so failing to provide me with a timely reminder to send out my apologies, I ended up not turning up without any warning. Shockingly poor showing from my end. (though in my defence, this is my first no-show in the past few years!). Did any one else show up, to curse my name? If you wish to fill in a meeting report on the wiki ranting about it, I probably deserve it. ;) Peter. P.S. Pete #2 also earns a scathing mention for failing to turn up also!

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SheevaPlug
by Mark Rogers 16 Feb '10

16 Feb '10

Has anyone played with a SheevaPlug or variant (TonidoPlug, for example)? Arm CPU, USB and network connectivity, running Ubuntu-derivative on 512MB built in flash (with 512MB RAM), all in a "plug" design. Looks like they can be had in the UK (ie with UK plug) for just over £60 but with £30 shipping (and 2-3 week delay) from the US. I think I will probably get one to play with, so I don't know if anyone else wants to combine shipping. But first off I'd like to know if anyone has played with one already. Obviously with it being Arm based there won't be many binary packes to install on it but the obvious suspects should cross-compile OK I would think. The obvious question is whether 512MB on-device storage is enough to achieve anything useful, but then I have relatively low aspirations anyway! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Charset conversion confusion - mutt works, nothing else does
by Chris G 16 Feb '10

16 Feb '10

I have an E-Mail (well lots actually) which has a text part with headers as follows:- Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable My system is all utf-8 now so just outputting the E-Mail via 'more' or opening it in vi doesn't decode/show the accented characters correctly. Mutt reads the above headers and converts the accented characters and shows them correctly. I want to do some processing on this file and then display the text parts but at the moment I can't get anything to do what mutt appears to be able to do with no effort! E.g. I have tried:- iconv -f iso-8859-1 <filename> and it doesn't change anything at all. Nor does viewing the file in Firefox with the charset set to iso-8859-1 work. What am I missing? It must be something blatantly obvious. -- Chris Green

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User & Group in recent Linux (Debian)
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Hi Folks, I recently noticed something which struck me as strange. In the past, on my older Linux distributions, an "ordinary" user gets set up as user=<username> and group="users". Thus, for instance, on those systems an 'ls -l' gives the likes of -rw-r--r-- 1 ted users 16 Apr 2 2008 - drwxr-xr-x 3 ted users 20480 Jun 3 2008 00_junk drwxr-xr-x 2 ted users 4096 May 10 2005 00_misc drwxr-xr-x 2 ted users 4096 Jan 31 2008 00_realplay However, on recent Debian (since Etch), I see that it is user=<username> and group=<username>. Thus now 'ls -l' gives -rw------- 1 ted ted 4643403 2009-06-02 18:56 03-Iii_Sarabanda.mp3 -rw------- 1 ted ted 3476861 2008-04-27 21:38 2nd_week_004.jpg -rw------- 1 ted ted 2879890 2008-04-27 21:38 2nd_week_006.jpg So now I am user "ted" and am in group "ted"! This seems to have happened "in the background" without my being aware that it was going to happen -- I just happened to notice that it had happened! Is there a good reason for this change? And what would be the best way to revert to the old way (especially when creating new users)? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 14-Feb-10 Time: 22:10:47 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Hot swap sata drives
by Barry Samuels 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Can anyone tell me how I can get a command to run whenever a sata hard drive is connected? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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JavaScript/HTML issue
by James Bensley 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Got a page with a frameset containing two frames (frame 0 and frame 1). The page in the top frames (frame 0) has links and each link calls the same JavaScript function parsing a different value. I want the bottom frame page (frame 1) to have its background colour set to the parsed value. My problem is, within the JavaScript function; window.parent.frames[1].document.bgColor = "#xxxxxx" Will change the bgcolor but I have since gotten round to implementing css. Now this won't change the bgcolor because of the css use of background-color. However; window.parent.frames[1].document.style.backgroundcolor = "#xxxxxx"; Doesn't change the background color. Internet Explorer shows me this error: 'window.parent.frames.1.document.style' is null or not an object I'm stumped? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! -- Regards, James ;) Charles de Gaulle - "The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs." - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/charles_de_gaulle.html

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Job Post: Flash Dev in Loddon
by Richard 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Hello all, I have recently started working with Oilenium and they are looking for a Flash Developer. Details are here: http://www.oilennium.com/jobs/flash-developer-coding/ Cheers -- Richard Bensley - 07540878285

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Small Distro
by Simon Royal 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Hi. What are peoples recommendations for a lightweight distro? It needs to run on a sub 300mhz machine. I have been looking at DSL and DSLN but would prefer to stick with Xubuntu if possible. I havent been into Linux that long and have been using Ubuntu for the past couple of months. I have also used Fedora in the past too but not too keen on it. Simon --- Catch me on Twitter http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype me: Simon-Royal

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Re: [ALUG] Ubuntu 9.10, Networking and NFS
by phil.ashby＠bt.com 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Steve Fosdick <lists(a)pelvoux.nildram.co.uk> wrote: > > You may have read in another thread that I now have a NAS. The NAS > supports NFS so it seemed completely natural to NFS mount a directory > tree from the NAS on a desktop PC and to put this mount in the > /etc/fstab file so it is mounted whenever the desktop PC is started. I > did this and specified the 'bg' option so that if the file system > concerned is not available the mount is retried in the background. > > Upon the next reboot of the PC it got stuck in the boot process in such > a way that all I could see was the Ubuntu logo and no text. Using the > Ctrl-Alt combinations to switch virtual console did not make any > difference (no text appeared) and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill a running X > server did not make any difference either. In the end I used the magic > SysReq to reboot the PC. > > Upon choosing the "recovery mode" from GRUB I found that the NFS mount > was not working because the network card was not up. It seems that when > you use the helpful GNOME-based network configuration to configure a > network connection it then does not get started early enough in the boot > process to support the NFS mount which is rather different than if it > had been configured in the /etc/network/interfaces file. I had a very similar issue with my studio machine connecting to the NAS in the house using NFS over a longish ethernet string (~50m). In my case I had used /etc/network/interfaces to permanently configure the network card, and all worked well with 8.04. Upgrading to 9.10 late last year and switching to 'upstart' caused the NFS mount to fail sometimes on startup. Further investigation of the 'upstart' configuration (in /etc/init/*) indicated that there was a race condition between the 'mountall' process and the networking startup: if the network came up quickly enough (which varies a bit depending on the rain and DHCP server response speed :) all was well; if the network init was a bit slow, then mountall would be stopped by the rcS event or exit of it's own accord and nothing would mount the NFS when the network did come up. I fixed this by the rather ugly hack of modifying the mountall-net.conf script to directly call mount on my NFS if it was unable to find mountall running. There are other similar problems it seems with upstart and NFS: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mountall/+bug/501678 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mountall/+bug/430348 Phil.

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Ubuntu 9.10, Networking and NFS
by Steve Fosdick 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

You may have read in another thread that I now have a NAS. The NAS supports NFS so it seemed completely natural to NFS mount a directory tree from the NAS on a desktop PC and to put this mount in the /etc/fstab file so it is mounted whenever the desktop PC is started. I did this and specified the 'bg' option so that if the file system concerned is not available the mount is retried in the background. Upon the next reboot of the PC it got stuck in the boot process in such a way that all I could see was the Ubuntu logo and no text. Using the Ctrl-Alt combinations to switch virtual console did not make any difference (no text appeared) and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill a running X server did not make any difference either. In the end I used the magic SysReq to reboot the PC. Upon choosing the "recovery mode" from GRUB I found that the NFS mount was not working because the network card was not up. It seems that when you use the helpful GNOME-based network configuration to configure a network connection it then does not get started early enough in the boot process to support the NFS mount which is rather different than if it had been configured in the /etc/network/interfaces file. At this point I also found that one RAID array was failing to start which, after some investigation turned out to be a zeroed-out RAID superblock on one of the partitions which I will discuss in another thread. I now do not know if the failing NFS mount was responsible for the hung boot process and the superblock got corrupted by the magic SysReq reboot or if the superblock was corrupted by a failing drive and the NFS mount was a red herring but it was certainly somewhat surprising. Steve.

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Recovering a RAID Array
by Steve Fosdick 14 Feb '10

14 Feb '10

I mentioned in another thread that I needed to recover a RAID array when the RAID superblock on one of the partitions had become corrupted. I could not find any documentation that deals with this - most of the examples assume you are hot swapping a failed device from an array that is running whereas in my case the system would not start the array concerned. If I ran: mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sda7 /dev/sdb7 /dev/sdc7 /dev/sdd1 I would get an error message about the superblock on /dev/sda7. After much fiddling about the answer turned out to be to add the --force option after which the array is started without /dev/sda7. After that the corrupt but working partition can be added back in: mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sda7 and at that point the array is resynchronised to include /dev/sda7 . Regards, Steve.

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Re: [ALUG] JavaScript/HTML issue
by Ian Porter 14 Feb '10

14 Feb '10

I am on my mobile, but not sure if this helps ? http://www.codingfriends.com/index.php/2009/07/27/styles-alter-with-javascr… Hth Regards Ian Porter www : www.codingfriends.com On 14 Feb 2010, at 16:02, James Bensley <jwbensley(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Got a page with a frameset containing two frames (frame 0 and frame > 1). The page in the top frames (frame 0) has links and each link calls > the same JavaScript function parsing a different value. I want the > bottom frame page (frame 1) to have its background colour set to the > parsed value. > > My problem is, within the JavaScript function; > window.parent.frames[1].document.bgColor = "#xxxxxx" > > Will change the bgcolor but I have since gotten round to implementing > css. Now this won't change the bgcolor because of the css use of > background-color. > > However; > > window.parent.frames[1].document.style.backgroundcolor = "#xxxxxx"; > > Doesn't change the background color. Internet Explorer shows me this > error: > > 'window.parent.frames.1.document.style' is null or not an object > > I'm stumped? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! > > -- > Regards, > James ;) > > Charles de Gaulle - "The better I get to know men, the more I find > myself loving dogs." - > http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/charles_de_gaulle.html > > _______________________________________________ > 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!

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Re: [ALUG] Puppy Linux
by Sam Tuke 14 Feb '10

14 Feb '10

I've used Puppy a few times. I'd imagine that there's a good chance that it'll run on your machine. Puppy is *very* much lighter than Xubuntu in my experience. XFCE is really not king of the featherweight class any more. Puppy has been good for hardware on past machines of mine. However, it uses all its own configuration applications with their own quirks and so it can take a little while to get used to them at first. Puppy feels like its made to be used as a desktop distro - attractive intuitive desktop with all key apps pre installed, despite its small install size and minimal requirements. If the puppy desktop feels a bit foreign, I recommend that you try an LXDE based distro, as this has replaced XFCE as the most fully featured low spec DE in my view. You might want to investigate these distros as alternatives: tinyme, crunchbang, knoppix Sam. On Sunday 14 Feb 2010 10:17:42 main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk wrote: > > Hi > > > > Has anyone used Puppy Linux. Im looking for a small lightweight distro with good hardware support. > > > > Puppy Linux seems to work on very low hardware, has flash support out of the box and good wireless support. > > > > I tried Xubuntu but couldnt get it installed. I tried Fluxbuntu but wasnt impressed. I tried DSLN but it required a lot of tweaking. > > > > I just wondered if any of you Linux lovers had tried Puppy Linux. > > > > Ive got a P2 300mhz with 160mb ram. > > > > Simon

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Puppy Linux
by Simon Royal 14 Feb '10

14 Feb '10

Hi Has anyone used Puppy Linux. Im looking for a small lightweight distro with good hardware support. Puppy Linux seems to work on very low hardware, has flash support out of the box and good wireless support. I tried Xubuntu but couldnt get it installed. I tried Fluxbuntu but wasnt impressed. I tried DSLN but it required a lot of tweaking. I just wondered if any of you Linux lovers had tried Puppy Linux. Ive got a P2 300mhz with 160mb ram. Simon --- Catch me on Twitter http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype me: Simon-Royal

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Linux equivalent to .hosts
by Paul Grenyer 13 Feb '10

13 Feb '10

Hi All I've finally manged to get Ubuntu to connect to my work's fortinet VPN. Yay! However, remote DNS does not work and sticking the company's DNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf didn't fix it. What's the Linux equivalent to the windows .hosts file? -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com

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Looking for a web mail viewing app - any ideas?
by Chris G 13 Feb '10

13 Feb '10

I'm looking for something that will allow me to view mail as web pages but I'm not after webmail, I'll try and explain.... I want to be able to incorporate sequences of mail (saved as maildir mailboxes) into a web site so that one can quickly look through an E-Mail 'conversation' via the web. As I said the E-Mail is already at in maildir mailboxes on the system where the apache server is running so the files are accessible, all I really want is a vaguely civilised interface that I can link to from other pages. For example the link might look something like:- http://home.isbd.net/email.php&Mail:boating:leBoat where email.php is the clever E-Mail reading bit and "Mail:boating:leBoat" is the path down through the mail hierarchy to the mailbox I want to show. Ideally you'd see a clickable list of E-Mails from the mailbox. Any ideas or places to look for such a thing (or bits to make it) would be most welcome. -- Chris Green

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Really silly monitor setup
by Chris G 12 Feb '10

12 Feb '10

I have just bought a new system to set up for a friend. Quite straightforward Asrock G41MH-GE motherboard with a HANNspree 23" monitor. It's been a right royal pain to get going as much because of the silly monitor and BIOS setups as because of a kernel/Intel incompatibility. The monitor initially seems pretty standard with on screen setup and buttons to move through the menus but the real pain is that if there is no signal input you can't activate the menu. It actually tells you this in the manual, I didn't believe it at first but it really is true. I had set the monitor to VGA input (it's dual VGA and HDMI) but (for various reasons, see below) I had the HDMI lead connected. Hit the 'menu' button and notheing happens because there's no input on the VGA connector, sort of Catch22 really, I had to actually connect something to send it a VGA signal to let me get the menu up to switch it to DVI input. OK, it would *probably* have managed itself if I'd left it at Auto input select but we wanted to specifiy which input was being used. Then onto the BIOS on the Asrock motherboard. The boot options only appear for a very short time, too short to actually read them so you have to look in the manual to find it's F2 to get the BIOS setup. The real oddity though is that the splash screen (with the options) *only* appears after a power on, hitting the reset button doesn't show it so then you are really in the dark. I've never come across a motherboard where hitting reset doesn't produce the same effect as power on. -- Chris Green

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Laptop Needed Urgently
by Simon Royal 11 Feb '10

11 Feb '10

Hi fellow Linux users. I am still im desperate need for a laptop. After only being in the linux world for a short while my Samsung laptop died. I am now without a laptop and have to grab the odd minute on my wifes Windows machine. Does anyone have an old laptop laying around doing nothing, that I could dust off and make use of? An old P1 or P2 would be fine. I would only be running Xubuntu or DSL-N. I live in Watton but can travel. Simon --- Catch me on Twitter http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype me: Simon-Royal

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