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Plain Text Test
by Simon Royal 01 Mar '10

01 Mar '10

Hi. Ignore this please or at tell me if this email is coming through as plain text. I use Windows Live (the new Hotmail) and it was sending all my mail out in rich text which ALUG seems to moderate. I have just changed it and just wanted to make sure it works. Regards Simon Royal --- Catch me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype: Simon-Royal _________________________________________________________________ We want to hear all your funny, exciting and crazy Hotmail stories. Tell us now http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/

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Text insertion point - do others find it irritating?
by Chris G 01 Mar '10

01 Mar '10

I am *forever* getting text inserted at the wrong place because it's inserted at the mouse cursor rather than the text cursor. This happens particularly in web textareas but the problem is common to most/all GUI applications I think. (I just tried in OpenOffice and it's the same there). Surely by default one would expect text to be inserted at the *text* cursor, not where you've moved the mouse cursor to which is often out of the way to avoid it obscuring what you're typing. My editor (xvile) manages to do it right, it's a GUI application but text inserts where I'm typing. Is there a setting somewhere to say "insert text at the text cursor"? -- Chris Green

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Xubuntu... Or Something Else On TP600
by Simon Royal 26 Feb '10

26 Feb '10

Hi. I have been running Puppy Linux on my ThinkPad 600 for a few days. It is the best distro I have tried on it in terms of speed, but it is a little limited. The software repositories are small and getting sound to work is a pain. It is a 300Mhz ThinkPad 600 and at present it only has 160MB of RAM. When I first got it, I wanted to run some kind of *buntu distro. I know Ubuntu probably will never run on it, so I was looking around at lighter versions. I ran Crunchbang for a little while, but even that struggled. Would adding another 128MB of RAM make a lot of difference or is it more of the processor speed that is making this machine slow? The hard drive in it is a 4200RPM drive, would upping it to 5400 or 7200RPM drive make any difference? It did in an Apple PowerBook I had about a year ago. Would Xubuntu run comfortable on a 300Mhz with 288MB of RAM? What would your advice be. What do you lot recommend. I don't have any money to buy a new laptop so I need to get as much out of this as I can. Regards Simon Royal --- Catch me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype: Simon-Royal _________________________________________________________________ Tell us your greatest, weirdest and funniest Hotmail stories http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/

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Apache configuration test on Ubuntu
by Mark Rogers 26 Feb '10

26 Feb '10

In recent Ubuntu versions (no idea if this is inherited from Debian or not), the apache user is set in /etc/apache2/envvars, which is processed when Apache is [re]started via /etc/init.d/apache2 [re]start. However, running apache outside that script will then cause errors. So for example, apache2 -t .. which should test the configuration without restarting, instead generates errors "bad user name" errors because the environment variable relied upon in apache2.conf is not being set. So, is there a "correct" way to test the configuration? (The solution I always end up with is editing apache2.conf to set User/Group to www-data directly.) As an aside, is there any way to make logrotate not kill Apache if there's an error in the apache configuration file? -- 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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Xubuntu... On 300Mhz... Not Bad
by Simon Royal 26 Feb '10

26 Feb '10

Hi Well, yet another day and a different distro. This poor little ThinkPad is being put under a lot of work, I have tried about 8 distros on this thing. I was running Puppy Linux and while it was nice and fast, it was a bit basic. I tried Fluxbuntu last night and after getting past the dodgy screen res, I just didn't get on with it. It might be Ubuntu based but it is still quite ropey. So I downloaded the Xubuntu 9.10 alternative installer - as the standard Xubuntu disc wouldn't install - and started the install last night. It took about 90 minutes which was ok. I must say I am quite impressed. It gives the ease of use of Ubuntu and all the software packages it comes with and are available for it. I know a couple of people said not to install it because it would run quite badly, but it isn't too bad. Booting is a little slow - although quicker than I thought it would be and there isn't too much lag navigating around the system. I only use this machine for surfing and writing, so nothing too intense. With only 160MB of RAM it isn't going to do anything too processor intensive, but with a little more in it could be quite a capable machine under Xubuntu. I have just installed Google Chrome browser and it is whizzing along surfing pages. Simon Royal --- Catch me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype: Simon-Royal _________________________________________________________________ Do you have a story that started on Hotmail? Tell us now http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/

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CSS question, paragraph margins/padding etc.
by Chris G 26 Feb '10

26 Feb '10

I have some generated HTML which is as follows:- <div class=level1> <p> This is the playground </p> <p><a class="folder" href="#folded_1"> Test</a></p> <div class="folded hidden" id="folded_1">This is the text that is hidden or shown</div> <p><a class="folder" href="#folded_2"> Test1</a></p> <div class="folded hidden" id="folded_2">This is some more hidden text</div> <p><a class="folder" href="#folded_3"> Test2</a></p> <div class="folded hidden" id="folded_3">And this is still more</div></div> <span id="folded_reveal" style="display:none;"></span> <span id="folded_hide" style="display:none;"></span> I want to pack the "Test", "Test1" and "Test2" closer together vertically and I'm having little success. I was expecting that setting the following would do it:- .folder { margin-top: 0; padding-top: 0; font-weight: bolder; border-width: thin; border-color: blue; background-color: cyan; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 9px; background: url(closed.gif) no-repeat right center; } The font-weight CSS is having its effect, changing it does change the font weight, but the colours (e.g. the background colour) have no effect at all, and nor do the margin/padding/border settings. What am I doing wrong? Is there some 'outer' CSS that has priority over these settings? If so how can I override it? -- Chris Green

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Network Monitoring Tools
by John Herd 25 Feb '10

25 Feb '10

Dear all, I've got some linux experience and thus far have managed to get a credible helpdesk/auditing setup with GLPI and OCS-NG. I like both of these as tools because they're pretty light on admin and very recoverable should a problem occur. Now I'm looking for a good network monitoring tool that would enable me to graph bandwidth use on switches, disk use on servers etc. I've got a mix of Windows servers and a pile of Cisco kit. There's a profusion of network monitoring tools out there, so I'm after advice on what kind of setups folks in ALUG have experience of, and actually like, rather than a best of breed run down. I should add that the "some linux experience" extends to Ubuntu server and a reasonable knowledge of apt-get, so go carefully with me here. :-) Regards John Herd

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Of the website, backups and the mailing list...
by Brett Parker 25 Feb '10

25 Feb '10

Hi, I've just plonked a few more scripts about on my vps and added some useful hostnames to it... so, here's what I've got backup wise: * A read only copy of our wiki, updated daily from Noodle's backup: http://wiki.alug.itshall.be/ * A different interface to the mailing list archive (searchable) http://alug.itshall.be/ (Updated rougly hourly) (I've also got the normal pipermail archive sitting on disk, that's what I feed to lurker). So, the only thing that I'm missing, basically, is the users/subscribers for the wiki/mailing list... but this should put us in fairly good stead. Thanks, -- Brett Parker

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New Alug wiki/website
by Adam Bower 24 Feb '10

24 Feb '10

Hi people, Due to the unfortunate disappearance of our old wiki and inability to contact anyone at the old hosting provider Noodles has very kindly changed over the DNS and pointed it at a new wiki hosted on his server. (thanks Noodles!) A side effect of this is that we have lost all the old wiki content so please visit the new wiki, create an account and get rebuilding! You can find the new wiki at http://www.alug.org.uk/ for those that didn't know. Thanks Adam -- New signature required, suggestions on a post card please.

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Nagios
by Mark Rogers 22 Feb '10

22 Feb '10

Does anyone here know if Nagios is something I need to install on every server I wish to monitor? Can I combine the results of multiple sites into single reports or do I just need to have multiple reports? -- 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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