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Re: [ALUG] Best Format For External Drive
by Simon Royal 05 Mar '11

05 Mar '11

Simon I plumped for FAT32 in the end. A nice all round compatible format. NTFS is a bit better but still has poor support under Linux and Mac OSX and while ext3/4 is a great one, it is only if you are using Linux only. Im only storing music and pics, none of which are over 100MB each file so FAT32 is good enough. Its only storage and backup and will not be accessed very often, mainly written to with new files. Simon ----- Original Message ----- From:Simon Elliott

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stupidly high load averages when VM is doing nothing
by mick 04 Mar '11

04 Mar '11

Hi Guys I am having a lot of trouble with one of my VPSs - a new one I bought for threepence halfpenny from ThrustVPS. I won't bore you with all the details of the problems I am having (I think the systems are HUGELY oversold) but I have one oddity which I am not sure is the ISPs fault or mine. The server is a XEN VM running Ubuntu 10.04 (server edition). I am seeing ridiculously high loads (regularly 2.5 upwards) when the server is actually supposed to be doing nothing. The only process I can see which may be responsible is a kernel process called events/1 which is chewing silly amounts of cpu - see top display below. PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 16 root 20 0 0 0 0 R 85 0.0 569:39.41 events/1 3196 root 20 0 19224 1420 1072 R 0 0.3 0:00.16 top 1 root 20 0 23688 1828 1244 S 0 0.4 0:00.90 init 2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 kthreadd 3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.06 migration/0 4 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 76:43.23 ksoftirqd/0 5 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0 I confess I have /no clue/ what this means and I can't find anything useful through searches. Has anyone any idea where I should start looking? (uname -a Linux beam 2.6.32-28-server #55-Ubuntu SMP Mon Jan 10 23:57:16 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux) 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Our shiny new Alug twitter account
by Adam Bower 04 Mar '11

04 Mar '11

Hi All, I've setup a twitter account for Alug today which can be found at: http://twitter.com/#!/anglianlug For the moment we're planning to use it for meeting reminders and also as a central hub for finding Aluggers on twitter. Currently I'm running the account with Viperfang (Ben), if anyone has any suggestions for what else we could use it for they'd be welcome! Thanks Adam -- New signature required, suggestions on a post card please.

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Best Format For External Drive
by Simon Royal 04 Mar '11

04 Mar '11

Hi I am about to format an external drive. I have a 60GB IDE laptop drive in an enclosure full of stuff and it is FAT formatted. I have a blank 120GB SATA laptop drive in an enclosure and I want to format it for use in Linux and Windows and then move everything from the IDE to the SATA. What is the best format. FAT32 is a bit old and clunky, what about NTFS. If it was just for Linux then I would pick ext3 or ext4. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Posting on the list
by Wayne Stallwood 04 Mar '11

04 Mar '11

This has been covered in responses to individual threads but I think it is time a global appeal was made. Please can we stop reposting the same question or updates to the same topic under different threads and/or with slightly modified subject lines. Those that are doing this may think that by "bouncing" their question like this they will raise the chances of someone with a solution responding but the reality of this is that it makes some of us not feel like trying to help at all. The specific objections to this are that beyond cluttering the list for those of us that employ a threaded view of posts this also..... Makes the archives harder to use, speaking for myself I take comfort in that by replying with a (hopefully) helpful response I am not only trying to assist the original poster but anyone else who searches the archives later on with a similar problem..if responses are split between threads regarding the same subject then it becomes less likely that the solution will be found. also By seperating the discussion across multiple threads the chances of advice being repeated is increased as it is less obvious what has been previously suggested by others. This doesn't help anyone...particularly the person with the original question. Many Thanks Wayne

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Re: [ALUG] Best Format For External Drive
by James Bensley 03 Mar '11

03 Mar '11

What about NTFS? If you mean, is it any good, it will probably be more beneficial than FAT32 (larger max file size, hopefully more stable). --James. (This email was sent from a mobile device)

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External CDRW
by Simon Royal 03 Mar '11

03 Mar '11

Hi I still havent been able to get my spare combo drive to work properly in my ThinkPad R31. It will burn CDs once into Ubuntu and XP but it will not boot a CD from it, so I have to keep popping back my original IBM CD-ROM drive. My other alternative would be to keep the original CD-ROM drive in and get an external USB one. Can anyone recommend a relative small/portable cdrw drive that will run on USB 1.1 (although I do have a USB 2 PCMCIA card but my wireless card takes up that slot). If possible I would like it bus powered and it needs to work under Ubuntu 10 or will pretty much any drive work. I dont do much burning, apart from the odd distro and a few music CDs. Simon.

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Cant Format SD card.
by Simon Royal 03 Mar '11

03 Mar '11

Hi I have an SD card in my EeePC and it is auto mounted at boot. I am trying to format it but it wont let me unmount it using the format or disk utilty. I configured it using Storage Device Manager which is a front end for fstab. Options set are: defaults,uid=1000,umask=0 It is a FAT32 formatted SD card. I am having problems with DropBox and one of the suggestions is to format it to ext3 or ext4. I can unmount it in Storage Device Manager, but then I cant format it. Any ideas? Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Re: [ALUG] Anyone use BBC iPlayer streaming? How fast a CPU for full screen?
by James Bensley 02 Mar '11

02 Mar '11

On 18 Feb 2011 21:05, "Chris G" <cl(a)isbd.net> wrote: > > I can't find anything helpful on the BBC site about this. > > What sort of processor speed (and memory or whatever else might affect > it) is needed to run BBC iPlayer streaming full screen? Full screen in > this case means 1920x1080. > > -- > Chris Green One PC is a Core2 clocked at 2.72Ghz, about 20% on both cores. But another PC has a Core2 at only 2.0Ghz, I don't watch iPlayer on there but watching 30GB BluRay rips/15Mbps video (so higher quality than the beeb offer), I get about 10% usage, like Wayne, on this box VDPAU is my friend also :) --James. (This email was sent from a mobile device)

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the continuing touch struggle - still baffled
by Peter Alcibiades 02 Mar '11

02 Mar '11

Thinking this must be down to the kernel version, I downloaded and installed the 2.6.36 kernel from Ubuntu and installed it using gdeb on my wheezy install. No, it don't make the touch screen work! Now, its true this is not the natty narwhal one, so that is maybe the thing to try next. All this is in aid of getting a version of webconverger that will drive touch screens for this kiosk project. However, thinking laterally, or maybe simply desperately, what we are now coming to is just to put in Fedora 14, which does definitely work with touch screens, then lock it down to some extent using pessulus. Not perfect, but given that life is short maybe this is the smart way to go. And yet, and yet, surely if all these other distros work out of the box, there must be some simple way to make debian work too.... Oh well. Peter

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