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Will a 200 Watt Supply do this rig?
by Peter Alcibiades 15 Dec '12

15 Dec '12

My machine died the other night, reasonably gracefully, and having decided it must be the PSU I went and bought the only matx one locally in stock. Its 300 Watt, which is what the old one was, and it works but is unbearably noisy. So I am thinking of replacing with a 200 Watt Xilence, which is reviewed in some german mag as being exceptionally quiet. Question: will 200W be enough? Its an i3, one hard drive, no optical, no graphics card and a gigabyte main board in a mini-itx case. My intuition is that it will be just fine because this is such a minimalist setup, but I know nothing about power or how to measure what the draw is. The other choices seem to be silverstone, but they only make them 400W +, and that is certainly over the top. There do not seem to be any fanless ones in this form factor. Al

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Android app development
by Mark Rogers 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

I posted this initially on the Peterborough LUG list but I wonder if there are more Android experts here? --- Anyone here played with Android app development? It's something I've wanted to try my hand at, and just needed an app to work on. I now have one (a specific development for a customer, it's not going to be App of the Year 2013 on Google Play or anything :-) "All" it needs to do is create a secure connection (SSH) to an existing server using a pre-shared key, then tunnel a connection through it to a web server, displaying the web content in the app. Most of the infrastructure is already set up, although the web pages will want some tweaking to suit the Android device (although not too much as it'll probably be a tablet not a phone). Some time ago I did install the development tools and get as far as a simple "hello world" app, although I can't claim to remember much of the experience, so I'm starting very much from the position of a novice. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Using a laptop/pc to bridge a 3G dongle connection - easy?
by Chris Green 12 Dec '12

12 Dec '12

If I have a laptop with a 3G internet connection provided by a USB dongle is it fairly easy to allow other systems to use the internet connection via the laptop's ethernet port? E.g. if I run something like dnsmasq on the laptop it can be a DHCP and DNS server so that anything connected (directly or via a switch) should work shouldn't it? -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 13th December
by Viperfang 11 Dec '12

11 Dec '12

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, 13th December 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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LCD screen for Raspberry Pi
by Chris Walker 09 Dec '12

09 Dec '12

Ages ago, I think it was Anthony Anson asked here about hooking up a Pi to a small screen. I've just come across this - http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/desktops/25-fun-things-to-do-with-a-raspberry-pi-… (article number 22) which might help. Can I make a public thank you to Nev Young and all the other people that helped me yesterday to recover the SD cards for my Pi. One problem, identified by Nev, was that the cards aren't 8 gigs, they're 4. That's brain fade on my part! Second is that even though they boot fine on the Pi, my machine still won't see them. That's despite using a brand new USB 2 device reader. Finally, once I had the Pi up and running here, the keyboard wouldn't work on it. So that can go back to the shop in Wymondham where I bought it. I had to use an old Cherry keyboard which weighs a ton but works on the Pi. Lessons learned all round but thanks once again to Nev and the other people yesterday.

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How to use either wired or WiFi network, quickly/automatically?
by Chris Green 09 Dec '12

09 Dec '12

I have an Acer Aspire laptop running lubuntu 12.10, when I'm at home I just plug in an ethernet cable but when I'm elsewhere I'm more likely to use WiFi. When there's no hard-wired connection the boot sequence wastes 2 minutes or so trying to get the connection up before continuing. What's the proper way to handle this (it's easy enough to remove the delay from /etc/init/falsafe.conf but that's a hack)? -- Chris Green

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RasPi SD cards
by Chris Walker 08 Dec '12

08 Dec '12

Can anybody help please? My RaspberryPi turned up this week. I ordered it along with 2 8GB SD cards and some other bits and pieces. I downloaded a couple of disc images but I have been unable to write them to the cards. I have a multi-way adapter and when I plug that into the USB port either on the front or rear of my machine I can check the hardware config. That shows USB SD Reader as sdc. But when I try to write the downloaded image to /dev/sdc I get an error message :- sd 4:0:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery That's followed by this :- gs[26282]: segfault at 0 ip 00007effdb5dc470 sp 00007fff76b3c3c0 error 4 in libgs.so.9.02[7effdb3c9000+5f2000] I was curious about the SD cards. I thought at first that they might be faulty so I bunged them into my digital camera. I can format them there and the camera can quite easily write picture images to them both. I then thought I would take the 16GB card out of the camera and use that. But I get the same error messages so I don't think the cards themselves are faulty but perhaps it's the card reader. So I've now ordered a 16GB card with a pre-installed Debian OS on it and another card reader so I should be able to get the Pi up and running. Is there anybody in the Norwich/Wymondham area that would be prepared to have a go at writing a couple of images to these cards as a test? Or, once I get the Pi up and running, will I be able to write the images on that?

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SD card recovery
by Chris Walker 07 Dec '12

07 Dec '12

I'm still waiting for delivery of a pre-installed SD card and card reader from The PiHut for my Raspberry Pi so, fed up waiting, I bought another card reader from Anglian Internet in Norwich. I can now see a 16GB card from my digital camera, but the machine still won't see the other two 8GB cards which I used for a previous attempt at writing images. Are they toast or can I recover them in order to write images to them?

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 7th December.
by Viperfang 04 Dec '12

04 Dec '12

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

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git - if I "git rm" something can I get it back (as an old revision) later?
by Chris Green 01 Dec '12

01 Dec '12

As per the subject - if I am maintaining a set of files in a directory and one of them is no longer used then I would do "git rm <name of file>" and then when I commit the file is no longer in the current version of the repository. I assume however that it would be possible to get back the last (and previous) committed version of the file if I needed ot at some time in the future? -- Chris Green

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