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Open source alternative to full fat Adobe?
by Bev Nicolson 26 Jun '12

26 Jun '12

Evince is great for what it does, imo, but you can't extract pages with it. Does anyone round here know of a good alternative to the full-fat, all singing all dancing but not very cheap Adobe? Does such a thing exist? Bev.

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SOund unavailable on Flash Player
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 24 Jun '12

24 Jun '12

Greetings All! Just now, wanting to play a YouTube video, I found that the sound on Flash Player is turned off, and I can find no way to turn it on again. The "speaker" icon in the bottom bar as an "X" beside it, indicating that it is turned off, and I can find no way to turn it back on again (e.g. clicking on the icon, or on the "X", produces not response; and looking into Settings after right-clicking on the Flash Player screen offers no help). However, everything was fine a few days ago, and I'm not aware of having done anything which might cause this problem. Also, the YouTube video is indeed the same one which I had watched a fews days ago with no problem. Can anyone offer any help with this problem? Adobe Flash Player 10 Iceweasel 3.0.6 (2009) Debian Lenny 2.6.26 ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 24-Jun-2012 Time: 12:23:35 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------

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Wierd hang(s) when using grep
by Chris Green 20 Jun '12

20 Jun '12

Over the past few months I've noticed that when I run grep it sometimes appears to hang, I had put it down to doing "grep -r" down a rather large file hierarchy but now it's happening with a perfectly simple grep:- www-data$ ls *.txt sidebar.txt start.txt www-data$ grep xxx *.txt www-data$ grep fred *.txt www-data$ grep 'CLEARFLOAT' *.txt ... and there it sits, still (like 5 minutes later). The two .txt files are only a few tens of bytes long. It's not using any processor time, it's just stuck. I have just done it again in another terminal window, quotes removed but otherwise the same:- www-data$ grep fred *.txt www-data$ grep CLEARFLOAT *.txt ^C www-data$ ... and with a different user (in the same directory):- chris$ cd /home/www-data/www/wiki/data/pages chris$ grep fred *.txt chris$ grep CLEARFLOAT *.txt ^C chris$ So, what am I missing? -- Chris Green

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Getting MAC address in a shell script
by Mark Rogers 20 Jun '12

20 Jun '12

This works: mac=$(ifconfig eth0 | grep -Eo '..:..:..:..:..:..' | sed -e 's/://g') .. but I'm sure there's a better way. Suggestions? Also, if I have something like: echotemplate="This is my MAC: (MAC)" mac=$(ifconfig eth0 | grep -Eo '..:..:..:..:..:..' | sed -e 's/://g') echo $(echo $echotemplate | sed -e "s/(MAC)/$mac/") .. is there a better way to do the substitution in the last line? I can't swap the top two lines around (one is a user-defined setting at the top of the script, the value of $mac is calculated in the body of the script), otherwise I would just use echo "This is my MAC: $mac" .. which would be nice and easy! But I'm using this as a learning exercise. -- 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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Getting round lack of suid on scripts (not to become root!)
by Chris Green 20 Jun '12

20 Jun '12

Is there any way to run a script such that it executes as another user than the person running it? Normally (well, old-fashionedly) one would have set the SUID bit in the permissions, made the script owned by the desired user and that would be it but nowadays it no longer works because SUID on scripts is disabled. Is there any reasonably simple way to work round this? All I have found searching so far is to write a short C program to do the SUID change and use that to execute the script. I could do this I suppose but I'd really prefer an easier way to do it as the C program method needs to know both the desired UID and the name of the program to run so, while hardly complex, it will need command line parameters etc. -- Chris Green

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Does anyone here know how gmail works?
by Chris Green 19 Jun '12

19 Jun '12

I am trying to sort out moving someone else's hosting. The web hosting has transferred fine along with the domain hosting but I'm a bit stuck with their E-Mail. I have their name/password for logging on to gmail but when I try and change things it just says:- Manage account information Google can't change personal information for jane(a)reshapers.org. To change the information, contact your reshapers.org administrator. Learn more ... er, but the reshapers.org administrator is now me and I haven't any idea how the E-Mail *was* getting to gmail from the old hosting account. Presumably there was some cleverness with MX settings or something but it seems a wierd way of doing things. Is there some sort of 'hidden' gmail address that a user has on gmail that I can forward mail to from the new hosting site? -- Chris Green

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svn file "sets"
by Mark Rogers 18 Jun '12

18 Jun '12

I have a library of code already in svn. I want to create subsets of it that I can either export or checkout, so that I only download the files needed for a specific job. I know about (by reading[1], not doing) sparse checkouts, eg: cd C:\path\dir svn checkout https://server/path/to/trunk/dir/dir/parent_dir--depth empty cd C:\path\dir\parent_dir svn update filename.log (Edit filename.log) svn commit -m "this is a comment." (Copy and paste from an example, hence the Windows-esque paths, although I'm only working on Linux myself.) This will do what I need, except that I'm looking for a simple way to replace "filename.log" in the example above with a name for a set of files. Depending on what I'm trying to do, I might want to export that set of files rather than do a checkout. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/122107/checkout-one-file-from-subversion -- 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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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 17 Jun '12

17 Jun '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 ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back this week - Monday, 18th June, at 20:00: The Mulberry Tree 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 225776 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+2EA WWW: https://www.facebook.com/MULBERRYHOSPITALITY The Mulberry Tree, previously known as The Milestone Beer House, is a grade 2 listed building in the centre of Ipswich. It is located at the intersection between Woodbridge Road and the A1156, across the road from the old Odeon cinema and not far from the Regent Theatre. It re-opened on Thursday March 29th 2012 after a major refurbishment, under its original name of The Mulberry House and has already begun to regain a good reputation for its selection of beers and ales. It has a sizeable car park to the rear of the building. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. Hopefully, those there last month will remember that we've reverted our regular venue to be The Mulberry Tree, which was our home a few years back, after a successful trial at May's meet. Unfortunately, I may not be able to make it this month as I have a work evening do that I'll struggle to get out of. If I can make it, I'll arrive later on in the evening. A shame as I finally have a new gadget to show off! :) Peter. ----- 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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Sort of philosophical question about Web/Client/Server workings
by Chris Green 17 Jun '12

17 Jun '12

Every time I try and do some web application programming that involves forms (i.e. getting data from a user) it ends up being far more complicated than I expect (and more complicated than it should be I feel). Anywhere else that one programs something to get some data from a user it's fairly direct and simple:- Output something to ask a question Wait for user to enter response Get return with the response OK, it's a bit more complex/messier when using a GUI because there isn't necessarily a simple single thread but it still comes down to the program waiting for an event and, when the event happens, it gets handed some data. However when web programming it's nothing like this, one can't simply ask a question and get the answer. Say one has a PHP script running server side, it creates a form which is then displayed when the client requests it and the client fills in the form. The trouble is that there's no direct way for the PHP script that created the form to get the result - at least there isn't in any of the environment/frameworks that I've used. What happens is that there is *another* script which gets run (server side) when the client submits the form duly filled in. This other script has no direct connection with the script that created the form, no common environment, nothing. It's thus very difficult to write simple form driven applications as one can't simply display a form and get the data from the form in 'one place' as it were. Am I missing something obvious here? -- Chris Green

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xterm input delay and alsamixer display screwed up
by Srdjan Todorovic 16 Jun '12

16 Jun '12

Hi all, If I run KDE on the laptop and run Konsole or xterm, I can type commands immediately. Running alsamixer is also fine. Running fluxbox with xterms, input into xterm is delayed on startup by at least 10 to 30 seconds. Nothing echoed to the terminal while I type. Eventually it will show up. Running alsamixer in it caused bits of the ncurses display to screw up, last time I ran it. The volume control levels would be half-drawn etc. Any suggestions what might be the cause and how to fix? I'll try disabling xorg compositing as suggested here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/xterm-delayed-input-fr… but I'd rather like to keep compositing alive any time I run KDE... Thanks, Srdjan

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