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Re: [ALUG] Linux Mint Help Please
by Simon Royal 08 Aug '10

08 Aug '10

Martin Thanks for that. Excellent. I found the option in the BIOS and it has sorted it. 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. Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2010 09:40:10 +0100 Subject: Re: [ALUG] Linux Mint Help Please From: mobile.sea(a)gmail.com To: simonroyal(a)live.co.uk The slow down when running off battery is (from distant memory), a power saving function of those IBM 240s where it underclocks the processor to half it's original speed. I think it can be turned off in the BIOS. Many kernels ago there may have even been a driver in the kernel for this. Rgds, Martin On Aug 8, 2010 12:30 AM, "Simon Royal" <simonroyal(a)live.co.uk> wrote: Hi Can someone offer some help on my problems using Linux Mint LXDE? I installed it on my ThinkPad 240x via another machine. Initially I had some X problems, but I have resolved them. However, I am still getting some odd screen problems where it is drawing multiple icons and buttons - like the maximise/minimise buttons - all over the screen. You can 'wipe' them off by moving a window, but they randomly pop up. I found one other person who had this problem, however he was using Xubuntu. I too had the same problems under Xubuntu 9.10, but not under Ubuntu 10.04. He resolved them by 'enabling display compositing' under xfce 4 settings manager, but Mint Linux uses LXDE and I cannot find anything in the menus for this. He also mentioned that when running off battery the whole machine was slower - very noticeably slower - than when it is running off power adapter. Everyone else on the forum said this wasn't possible, but I have been experiencing this too. I would really like to get over this graphics problem without switching distros as I like Mint. 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. _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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Bubba2 server
by Peter Alcibiades 08 Aug '10

08 Aug '10

Has anyone any experience with one of these? We have just bought one out of some grant funding at a small charity, and so far have done no more than unpack it. It is about the size of a thick mass market paperback, very solidly made. Its running Debian, Etch apparently, and the main reason we bought it rather than build our own, one is very very low power consumption, and two, it comes totally set up with web server, NAS, picture gallery app and so on. The suppliers intend for you to use it as a firewall/router in addition, but we will be using it strictly as a server. Power consumption is minimal, its meant to be a plug in and forget package. Came with a 500G hard drive. We could have got a bigger disk, but it seemed like it would probably be smarter to have an external usb for the extra storage and greater redundancy. Ours is the non-wireless version, you can get them with wireless also. Price 240 Euro. Peter

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Linux Mint Help Please
by Simon Royal 08 Aug '10

08 Aug '10

Hi Can someone offer some help on my problems using Linux Mint LXDE? I installed it on my ThinkPad 240x via another machine. Initially I had some X problems, but I have resolved them. However, I am still getting some odd screen problems where it is drawing multiple icons and buttons - like the maximise/minimise buttons - all over the screen. You can 'wipe' them off by moving a window, but they randomly pop up. I found one other person who had this problem, however he was using Xubuntu. I too had the same problems under Xubuntu 9.10, but not under Ubuntu 10.04. He resolved them by 'enabling display compositing' under xfce 4 settings manager, but Mint Linux uses LXDE and I cannot find anything in the menus for this. He also mentioned that when running off battery the whole machine was slower - very noticeably slower - than when it is running off power adapter. Everyone else on the forum said this wasn't possible, but I have been experiencing this too. I would really like to get over this graphics problem without switching distros as I like Mint. 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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a deeply puzzling overheating
by Peter Alcibiades 07 Aug '10

07 Aug '10

Any ideas on this? Its a socket 754 machine, something like a 2Ghz Athlon, 1G memory. Debian Squeeze. It has always worked just fine, and in almost all ways except this still does. What has just now started happening however is that the owner has started to read the papers online. Sometimes, it doesn't seem to matter which paper or which browser, there will be a page with 'the wrong kind' of graphics. Its not clear exactly what the wrong kind is, some are fine, others seem not to be. Gradually, the fan will start to speed up. If you now start up gkrell, you can see that cpu temperature starts to rise quite rapidly to the high 50s, and the fan gets very loud indeed. I don't know how far it would go, because one of us closes the browser fairly soon when this happens, and eventually the temperature falls to below 50. It does not do it when displaying pictures. For instance, one can load in a file of a few hundred, and it will display the thumbnails fine, and then one can page through them repeatedly, they come up an display quite fast, and there's no problem. It does do it when rendering some pdfs. Particularly, it did it with a graphics intensive pdf of some sort. I thought about getting a better cpu cooler, this is the stock one, but there is very little space in these smallish cases. And I can't see why this should be happening. I have other barebones of this sort, Asus, and it never does. Another machine is an old 754, and it does not happen on it. I'm not completely sure if this is new, because I'm not sure whether this sort of graphic content was displayed previously. Meanwhile, there's a Novatech small form factor i3 machine at 400 which is looking more and more attractive.... Bought one for someone else, they are fairly compact, quite quiet, and run very cool. 754 is pretty old hat nowadays, so maybe its time. Peter

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Re: [ALUG] Copying SD cards
by Anthony Anson 07 Aug '10

07 Aug '10

Chris Walker wrote: > On 04/08/10 17:05, Anthony Anson wrote: >> Chris Walker wrote: >>> Apologies if this appears twice - I posted it to the wrong address, >>> having already posted it using the wrong email address! >>> >>> I've copied one 2GB SD card to another 2GB card using the dd command >>> (having copied it to the hard drive as an intermediate step). >>> >>> The original card will load up in the desired device - a TomTom sat >>> nav but the second card won't. Is there any way for me to check that >>> the cards are the same? >>> >>> Also, and I realise that it's a bit OT here (although the TomTom is a >>> linux device!) but does anybody have any ideas what might be wrong >>> with the card? >> >> ISTR having a similar promble with a Kingston memory stick - it had a >> separate partition with uselessware in it, and it waas written in a >> (IIRC) NT format. >> >> Using violent methods under Debian, I deleted the contents of this >> partition then the partition itself. (It wouldn't go, all in one lump) >> >> After that, the copy worked as per original. > > But wouldn't the DD command overwrite everything on the SD card > including the partitions? Strangely, it didn't. I also tried reformatting it, and it ignored the partition. I think it's because the partition has a different drive address. -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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enable display compositing in lxde
by Simon Royal 06 Aug '10

06 Aug '10

Hi I have been having some bizarre graphical glitches in Linux Mint LXDE and so far haven't been able to find anyone else with the same problems nor a fix for it. Until now. 'the minimise/maximise/close window icons appear in random places all over the screen when I roll over them. When I move a window over them they dissapear (as if i was erasing them)' I have this exact problem. He appears to be using Xubuntu - I too had the same problem in Xubuntu last night. Oddly enough it didn't do this in Ubuntu. Anyway, he fixed it by 'enabling display compositing' under xfce 4 settings manager. Great, but I am using the LXDE version of Linux Mint and cant find this anywhere. Can anyone offer help or an alternative way of enabling display compositing? 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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Mint Is Working... Few Graphical Glitches
by Simon Royal 06 Aug '10

06 Aug '10

Hi Well, I found a work around. It seems xorg.conf was configured for the machine Mint was installed on. Moving the hard drive confused Mint as it didnt detect the new drivers/graphics. Luckily I found someone else who has Xubuntu installed on their 240X and they posted their xorg.conf online. So I nanoed in safe boot and replaced the contents of mine with theirs. This worked and I am not booted into Linux Mint LXDE on my ThinkPad 240X. It has a few graphical issues where it doesnt redraw things properly, like it hangs onto window buttons and prints them all over the screen. But I am sure this is a problem I can get round. Anyone have any ideas what this is and how to stop it. It is quite hard to describe. When you open up a window that has the close/maximise/minimise options sometimes these are repeated lots of times all over the screen. Fingers crossed I can get this sorted. After the long haul of getting this machine to dual boot I am just about there at having a fully working set up. 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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Mint Problems
by Simon Royal 06 Aug '10

06 Aug '10

Hi I tried installing Linux Mint LXDE on my ThinkPads hard drive via a different laptop. This seemed the easiest way. It went ok and grub works fine. Back in my ThinkPad XP still works fine. Mint boots but then gets stuck. It sits on a black screen with some white text saying: Exporting directories for NFS daemon. Starting NFS kernel daemon. Starting NTP server ntpd. Starting common unix printing system cupsd. This stays on the screen. Every 20 seconds the whole screen goes black then the writing comes back. It doesnt get any further than this. If I do recovery mode then it will boot to a linux prompt. Any ideas? I am assuming this is something hardware related. Something to do with it being set up for the other machine. Is there a way of getting it to redetect hardware? Simon -- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i).

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Distro Oddness Possible Driver Issue
by Simon Royal 06 Aug '10

06 Aug '10

Hi Bear with me this could be a long email. As you know I have a ThinkPad 240X. It dual boots XP and Linux. I originally had Linux Mint on this ThinkPad as it was already installed on a hard drive, but it had graphical glitches. So I installed XP and then put Linux Mint LXDE on it, via removing the hard drive and installing it in another machine with an optical drive. With the hard drive back in the ThinkPad, Mint would boot properly with all sorts of errors. So I took the drive out and put it back in the other laptop and installed Ubuntu 10 using the alternative installer. I put it back in the ThinkPad and it booted perfectly and ran lovely, albiet slowly. So I thought lets try Xubuntu as it is a bit less resource hungry. So once again I took out the hard drive, popped it in my other laptop and installed Xubuntu 9.10 via regular cd. Once done, I took out the hard drive and stuck it back in the ThinkPad. It worked, took a while to boot and has some graphical glitches, such as repeating window icons (like maximise, close etc). I am assuming this is a driver issue. I had the same problem with Mint, but not Ubuntu. Any ideas how I can get round this annoying graphics glitch. I am currently updating Xubuntu to 10.04 (which is going to take about 5 hours apparently) to see if that helps as I got the graphics problems in both Mint and Xubuntu which are buntu 9 based, yet Ubuntu 10 didnt have this problem. Will running the updater update system drivers too? Simon PS. Where is the System Profiler in Xubuntu? --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i).

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pl2303 Serial to USB problem - /dev/ttyUSB0 not created
by Barry Samuels 05 Aug '10

05 Aug '10

I have a CurrentCost electricity usage monitor which is normally connected to my desktop via USB. When the unit is plugged in I get a number of lines in syslog like so: kernel: usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 12 kernel: pl2303 4-1:1.0: pl2303 converter detected kernel: usb 4-1: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0 I am trying to get this same device working on my laptop but this time I see the following in syslog: kernel: pl2303: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver but nothing else i.e no 'attached to ttyUSB0'. Looking in /dev there is no ttyUSBn Whereas the desktop also loads the pl2303 and usbserial kernel modules automatically when the device is connected the laptop does not and when I load them manually I get only the above mentioned line in syslog. Needless to say the software which monitors the device won't connect. Any suggestions? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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