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Old bag!
by Anthony Anson 11 Apr '14

11 Apr '14

Did anyone notice the white carrier bag (tied up at the top and containing a _BIG_ cup and saucer) which I left in the Coach and Horses last night? 'Taint there today. -- Tony http://www.girolle.co.uk/

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ATI Graphics failure
by Chris Walker 10 Apr '14

10 Apr '14

Hi, In the past couple of weeks, the screen of my Mageia4 (64bit) machine has decided it doesn't want to display any of the normal desktop icons or display at the full size. Having googled it, I discovered that ATI have moved the driver for my HD4670 card to legacy. So I went to their site and downloaded what they tell me is the correct driver but when I compile it, it's failing. I think the error is because the code is looking for v2.X kernels and not the 3.12 that my machine is running. If I look in the make log, it says this (excuse line-wrapping):- /usr/src/fglrx-8.97.100.7/2.6.x/drm_proc.h:98:2: error: implicit declaration of function 'create_proc_entry' [-Werror=implicit-function-declaration] It's the 2.6 bit in there that makes me think is looking for the wrong version of the kernel. Am I correct in thinking that, and if I am, what can I do about it? I should say that this sort of stuff doesn't come naturally to me and that it's taken me 2 weeks to get to this point, so a little hand-holding will be required! -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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Subscription language
by Chris Walker 09 Apr '14

09 Apr '14

Following a sudden and very large increase in spam mail to a previous address used here, I've changed it slightly and of course, in doing so went to the lists web site. Just one question, why is the language set to English USA? As far as I know, they don't speak English, certainly it's not any English I recognise and I spent some time working over there ;-) As an aside, has anybody else noticed a large increase in spam to what was, a previously 'clean' address?

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 10th April
by Viperfang 07 Apr '14

07 Apr '14

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 10th April at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- 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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Asus EEE PC 900 partitioning
by Tony 06 Apr '14

06 Apr '14

I've acquired an Asus EEE PC that had windows XP on it. It has two SSD's, a 4 gig and an 8 gig and 1GB ram What I'm thinking of doing is partitioning as follows: 4GB SSD: /boot 250mb / (root) whats left 8GB SSD /usr 16GB SD card (class 6) swap 2GB /home whats left Would it be an idea to add /tmp and/or /var to the 8GB SSD or would you recommend a different schema? OS will be LXLE. I've installed LXLE but without the 16Gb SD card (using a 512mb SD card as swap to check it works okay which it does) but undecided how to partition for the final instal using the 16Gb SD card. Thinking of putting swap on the SD card as they are cheap and easy to replace and its easy to backup/restore whatever is on it. Probably not best performance wise but feel advantages out way disadvantages (i.e. less wear/leaves more room on SSD, cheap and easy to replace. will allow hibernate function) Not sure what I will use it for yet, probably mainly surfing, emails and watching movies on the move or from separate mythtv backend using VLC. A lighter OS such as AntiX would probably be better suited but I'm trying to use the same distro on everything (laptops, desktops & netbooks) and LXLE is my preference. I also have squid-deb proxy set up to cache updates. So far liking it more than my Android tablet :)

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 4th April.
by Viperfang 01 Apr '14

01 Apr '14

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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Mobile phone external aerial - to improve reception
by James Freer 29 Mar '14

29 Mar '14

Anyone else living in an area with poor reception? For me I get one signal bar with T-mobile - and that's on a good day! Other networks nil. I have been trying to set up an external aerial and I was wondering if anyone else had tried this. james

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Going back to VPNs - when I have one set up what does it do for me?
by Chris Green 25 Mar '14

25 Mar '14

I keep thinking that a VPN might be what I need, but then when I look at VPN documentation etc. I wonder whether it is what I need. So, if I set up an OpenVPN server on my home desktop machine (which stays turned on all the time) and set up access for me as a client from my laptop, what does it mean that I could do that I can't do already? Or, maybe more to the point, what does it make it easier to do? (Note that my home desktop is visible at a fixed IP address from the outside world and I can open up any additional ports through the firewall if necessary.) -- Chris Green

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Strange 'bandwidth strangulation' when using ssh on DFDS public WiFi
by Chris Green 24 Mar '14

24 Mar '14

When this first happened to me I thought it was just a one off oddity but yesterday when I returned on the ferry from France I saw *exactly* the same symptoms on two entirely different systems. It's hardly a big issue either just an inconvenience but I'd love to know why it happens. On the DFDS ferries there is free WiFi available, no hassle, no login required, just an open SSID called DFDS-Pax. My laptop (running Ubuntu 13.10) and my tablet (Android 4.x) both connect to it quite happily. It's reasonably usable as well, hardly lightning fast, but fine for browsing web pages etc. However if I try and connect (from either tablet or laptop) using ssh it starts off OK but after some hundreds of characters it just slows down and stops never to pass another character. If I open another ssh session from the same device the same thing happens, i.e. it gets another few hundred characters through. It's not very consistent, sometimes it doesn't even manage to complete the ssh handshake sequence, but most times it gets to a command prompt and allows me a couple of commands before going to sleep. Anything that generates a lot of traffic (like starting up mutt) always hangs before it gets anywhere but a couple of 'ls' commands will sometimes work. So what might be going on? It's not like ssh protocol is blocked completely so it's not that the port(s) are blocked, it's almost as if there's someone watching and, when they can't see what's being transferred, they stop the data. Any ideas anyone? I suppose I could try a different port for ssh but as it's not specific port blocking I don't think this will fix it. ... and as I said, it's not very important, I don't often want to read my E-Mail while crossing the channel! :-) I'm just curious. -- Chris Green

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Running PHP programs
by Chris Walker 23 Mar '14

23 Mar '14

I want to run Geneotree (http://www.geneotree.com/) so I downloaded it and extracted the files from the zip. I'm not familiar with PHP stuff so I put them in /home/chris/geneotree. There are lots of php files and a few folders but how do I run the thing? There's a config.php file which contains these lines :- ============= <?php /******* PLEASE DON'T MODIFY THE FOLLOWING LINE - NE PAS MODIFIER LA LIGNE CI-DESSOUS SVP ********/ $INSTALLATION_OK = FALSE; /*************************************************************************************************/ /****************************** BEGIN INITIALIZATION CONNECTION PARAMETERS ***********************/ $sql_host = 'localhost'; $sql_base = 'geneotree'; $sql_user = 'root'; $sql_pass = ''; /******************************* END INITIALIZATION CONNECTION PARAMETERS ************************/ ?> ============ Do I need to modify any of them to run it? I'm told that there is documentation on sourceforge but I can't see anything that would help me. I've tried putting htpp://localhost/geneotree in a browser but it fails which is not unexpected. So at this point, I'm stuck and any help would be appreciated.

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