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Can one get a proper root environment with sudo?
by Chris G 19 Aug '10

19 Aug '10

I tend to use 'sudo -s' when I want to do a series of things as root, it generally works fine but I have just noticed a minor issue. It doesn't set a proper root environment so that you still have the environment of the user who sudo'ed to root - in particular there is the PATH which may have all sorts of oddities on it and HOME is still set to your home directory. -- Chris Green

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Odd cookie behaviour of particular www site
by Dan 18 Aug '10

18 Aug '10

Dear All, I've been trying to visit the website <http://www.cosis.net/> with Firefox 3.6.4 on Gentoo. Even though I have an exception set in my preferences, to allow cookies from cosis.net, the site complains bitterly that `Cookies are currently disabled in your browser', and therefore refuses to let me see any of its content. This is particularly odd because, by this time, cosis.net actually has successfully set a cookie. When I access the same site with Lynx, www.cosis.net sets a single cookie, and lets me in just fine. Any ideas, please? -- Thanks, Dan

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was there a pub meet this month ?
by Ian Porter 17 Aug '10

17 Aug '10

has there been a pub meet this month ? would be cool to say hi :). did not see any emails about it. -- King regards Ian Porter www: www.codingfriends.com

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Multiple gateways
by Mark Rogers 16 Aug '10

16 Aug '10

At work, we have two ADSL lines, one of which is faster than the other and tends to be used as the "main" route out of the office, but it has a dynamic IP address. The slower line has a static IP and has ports mapped for services I want to access remotely (eg SSH). However, with the default gateway being set to the IP of the router on the faster line (say 192.169.10.1), this means that connections through the second router (say 192.168.11.1) don't work. My PC obviously has addresses on both subnets, and out to be able to respond to a connection coming in on the 192.168.11.x address replying via a default gateway on that subnet, but as I understand it I only have one default gateway. So, how should I set this up? -- 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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Linux on dead trees
by Mark Rogers 16 Aug '10

16 Aug '10

I subscribe to most of the various Linux rags, and get varying degrees of knowledge out of them. I frequently read something interesting, get to work (where I could use it) and forget what the software was I discovered, and even which mag I discovered it in, and can't find it. Hopefully any avid dead tree readers can help me on two particular subjects: 1. In this month's issue of one of the mags, I started reading an article about remote access, where several options were compared, including NoMachine's NX (which I use), and something else (which got the best review) which I can't remember, but would like to play with. It was GTK based. 2. A couple of months ago, one of the mags reviewed an SSH tool (might have been a terminal tool) which would allow me to better manage multiple sessions, including running the same command across multiple sessions ("apt-get upgrade" etc), and various commands to make the windows easier to work with. It integrates with screen as well, as I recall. Anyone able to tell me what either of these packages were? -- 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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PPC Linux
by Simon Royal 16 Aug '10

16 Aug '10

Hi I am moving back to Mac, its what I know and love, but I don't want to leave Linux altogether. The past 8 months have taught me a lot and I have a small amount of experience of PowerPC Linux. I intend to dual boot OSX and some kind of Linux variant, of which I havent decided on yet. I am looking around for an LXDE based PPC linux. I know resources for PPC linux is limited and just because a piece of software is available for linux it doesnt mean it will work on the ppc architecture. So if anyone has any experience of using Linux on a G3 Mac then I would love to hear about it. I ran Ubuntu 6 a few years ago on an iBook G3 and it was pleasant, but things have moved on and I favour LXDE or Xfce over Gnome. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4.

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DHCP/DNS and routers
by Chris G 16 Aug '10

16 Aug '10

I have a Draytek Vigor 2802n ADSL router, a pretty 'normal' router, slightly up-market even. By default its IP address (as most domestic routers) is 192.168.1.1 and it comes up as a DHCP server for that subnet. I've been trying to get it to play nicely (as the DHCP server) on my small network but so far I'm having little luck. Until now I have had DHCP in the router turned off and was using dnsmasq in a 'server' machine instead but that machine now has virtually nothing else to do so it would be nice if I could turn it off and use the Vigor router instead. However, when I try and use the Vigor router as DHCP server I get several problems:- When I boot my desktop machine it complains that it can't resolve its own name (chris). Nothing on the local network is possible to resolve by name. When I do a 'host chris' or anything similar I get a series of messages saying "reply from unexpected source:". DNS queries are being sent to 192.168.1.1 (the router has set itself up as a DNS proxy) but replies appear to be from the real DNS servers at my ISP. It seems that Ubuntu/Linux can't cope with the default setup of the ADSL router but that seems unlikely as surely more people would be complaining about things not working. Am I doing something stupidly wrong (quite likely!) or is it really not possible to set up a pretty standard router so that DNS works for the local network? -- Chris Green

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avi/mpg to video DVD
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 15 Aug '10

15 Aug '10

Hi Folks, I have a .avi video file (copied to HD off my digital camera): approx 30 min approx 2GB file -- video + audio. I have also converted it to MPEG2 with PAL-vieo option (.mpg) using ffmpeg (approx 1.2 GB). I now want to make a video DVD from it. The tool I have seen recommended in the Web is dvdauthor, but my Debian Lenny refuses to install this (says it can't download/can't find some essential files in the repositories). Basically, the desired end result is a DVD that someone can pop into a standard DVD player and watch on their TV. Any suggestions? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 14-Aug-10 Time: 22:48:53 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Flash issues
by Bev Nicolson 15 Aug '10

15 Aug '10

The problem is this. I have Firefox 3.6.6. I have Adobe 10.1.53.64-1 but does video content play? Nope. Either Flash crashes or (for example) the Beeb site tells me my version of Flash is not up to date. Except it is. (I checked.) I have enabled it in plug ins, cleared the cache and the cookies but it's still not working. Anyone got any ideas? Bev.

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Wanted - a phone/PDA than can synchronise calendar/contacts with the desktop
by Chris G 14 Aug '10

14 Aug '10

You wouldn't have thought it was that difficult but it seems to be getting *more* difficult rather than less difficult nowadays. Currently my wife has a Palm Treo 6800 which she synchronises with Evolution. This works reasonably well but does have its problems:- Evolution's calendar is somewhat arcane, has anyone really worked out how those menus in the sidebar are meant to work? It's far from perfect at keeping things 'clean', i.e. we have a problem with duplicate appointments appearing and it's a real pig to get them cleared out. It took me half a day yesterday to sort it out (if I have). This is one of the reasons for this posting. The Treo 6800 is getting a bit long in the tooth and needs replacing soon, since there are no new PalmOS devices we need to move to some other OS and none seems as well supported as the now getting obsolescent PalmOS. So are there any good phone/PDAs available which will synchronise easily with a Linux desktop application? We're quite open to change, it doesn't have to be Evolution (and in many ways I'd prefer *not* to use Evolution), Thunderbird/Sunbird is quite OK for example. We don't want to synchronise via anything 'out there' (like Google) but I'm quite happy to install a web/server application which a PDA and a desktop application can both synchronise with or which provides a reasonable interface itself. -- Chris Green

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