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How to refer to 'all my files', including hidden ones?
by Chris G 13 Mar '09

13 Mar '09

I often have this problem! :-) How can one refer to all one's own files and directories easily? E.g. I am sitting at /home/chris and, for whatever reason, I want to apply a command to all the files, including hidden files. A command like this for example (where I have moved some files in which belong to someone else), I become root and do:- chown -R chris * Well, that's OK but it doesn't include hidden files, so:- chown -R chris .* That's no good either because it tries to run the command on .. as well as . and the hidden files. There are things like:- chown -R chris .[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]* but it feels like there should be an easier way. I know there's better syntax than [a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]* (using + I think), but it's still hardly elegant. -- Chris Green

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How to truncate a mailbox periodically?
by Chris G 13 Mar '09

13 Mar '09

Can anyone suggest a neat/easy way to keep only (say) the last seven days of messages in an incoming mail spool? I have a couple of mail spools where I want to be able to do this, possibly with different 'number of days' expiry. -- Chris Green

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Free Laptops !
by Wayne Stallwood 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

Aha..now I have your attention Just a reminder that nobody has stepped up to become the ALUG librarian yet and the book collection is kinda really starting to get in my way now. This (for the right person) could be the stepping stone to many great things, so I am sure there is someone out there who really really wants to take this on.. Come on now..don't be shy..make yourself known and all the fame and fortune of being the only current ALUG librarian will be yours. On a mostly related note, part of the library is a collection of Linux user magazines from circa 2004/2005. Any objections to me chucking them out ? Anybody out there who actually wants them or has a good reason for us keeping them in the library speak now.

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Names sorting in Linux, is it just me that wants surname first?
by Chris G 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

Does anyone else here find that Linux applications' idea of how names should be presented in address lists etc. seems to be wrong, or at least not ideal? Having decided that I don't want to live with Evolution's quirks I took a look at Thunderbird, a well sorted mainstream application if there was one surely. But it *too* decides that the "Screen Name" for entries in the address list is presented as first name followed by surname. Thus, more importantly than the presentation, the names are *sorted* by first name which is decidedly not the way I expect to look names up in an address list. Am I missing some obvious configuration option that sorts names in surname order? This has happened in several different Linux apps when synchronizing data from my PDA whereas when I synchronized with Outlook (spit) I got exactly what I expected, names sorted by surname. It's this sort of thing that puts people of Linux a bit. -- Chris Green

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Bbattery charging "mystery"
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

Hi Folks, Yesterday I observed something which surprised me (running Debian Etch in VirtualBox in Win XP on an Advent 8117 laptop). WHen I sat down at the desk, I noticed the battery-charging LED flashing. When I check the battery level monitor (in both Debian and XP) it was at 20% and charging. An hour later it was fully charged. I generally leave the laptop running continuously, days on end, and its power supply is permanently connected to the mains. It's possible that something disturbed to connection for a while (perhaps most likely where the mains cable connects to the PS brick), and that something later re-established it (I do tend to swim in a pile of clutter so stuff gets pushed around), but the event prompted me to wonder the following. Might it be that, if a laptop (at any rate for some models) is kept continuously connected to the mains for days on end, then for the sake of battery health a re-charge cycle is initiated, whereby the input from the mains-connected PS brick is internally disconnected for a while, until battery-level drops to a fairly low level, and is then re-connected? It is, of course, known that it's good for battery life to submit it to a discharge/recharge cycle every so often; but I've not heard of this being built-in to laptops' power monitoring. (But then there's a lot of stuff I haven't heard of). Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 22-Feb-09 Time: 09:44:56 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Optimising MySQL and/or Apache for speed
by Mark Rogers 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

I have a server which was originally a low spec virtual machine with 128MB RAM, but which is now running on 4-times that RAM (shortly to be doubled again) and a faster "CPU". Available bandwidth has also been doubled. With the increase I'm disappointed not to be seeing much difference in the performance of websites on the server. Many of them are heavily database dependent with lots of queries, so the real fix is to optimise the code itself, but in the short term the CPU and memory hike needs to be showing some kind of benefit. The behaviour of the server is to work fine then suddenly run like a dog for a while, then come back up. How do I go about finding what the bottleneck is? ("top" showed both before the upgrade and since that no swap is being used and CPU usage is never particularly high, with Apache sometimes hitting ~20% but mostly not showing. In case I have some kind of virus/trojan/etc lurking, advice as to what to look for there also appreciated. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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SuSE help!
by Yvonne Everett 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

Hi I've just had delivered an HP 2133 with SuSE installed. I have broadband connection at home which is setup with an ADSL router so I normally just have to plug in and the connection to the internet is direct. From the console session I can see the router, I can see that I have an IP address and I can even ping google.co.uk, bbc.co.uk etc. However, I cannot use Firefox, eventually I get the timeout message. Also I cannot get online updates (I've tried apt-get update from the command line) and I cant even seem to find the icon where I register for updates. Can anyone help me please as I'm new to SuSE (I have used Ubuntu previously). Thanks -- Yvonne Everett Email: ye103910(a)googlemail.com

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Library Books
by Keith Watson 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

I seem to have acquired a stack of linux related books, some of which I know are from the ALUG library (any any that aren't I'm happy to donate). Who should I return them to? and how? Keith

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[ALUG Announce] 2nd Thurs Pub Meet 8th March 2009
by Ben Bewick 08 Mar '09

08 Mar '09

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Dear ALUG, The monthly second Thursday social meeting of ALUG will take place on 8th March 2009 at The Reindeer (10 Dereham Road, Norwich, NR2 4AY; tel. 01603 762223). It's very near the junction of Dereham Road and the Norwich inner ring road (Grapes Hill) and serves a selection of real ales, nice pub food (if you fancy going early to eat) and coffee. There are generally people there from 20:00 onwards and we tend to sit to the left of the main entrance. We look forward to seeing you there. Cheers, Ben aka Viperfang ----- 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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OpenOffice and "yrt.doc"
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 08 Mar '09

08 Mar '09

Hi Folks, Dunno if it's just my installation, or if it's a general thing. Whenever I open a ".doc" in OpenOffice oowriter, or even just start up oowriter without nominating a document, the first thing that comes up is a panel which says: Openoffice.org Document Recovery Recovering document: [ blank ] Status of recovered documents: Document Name Status yrt.doc Not recovered yet [Start Recovery] [Cancel] Then, if I click on [Start Recovery], this changes to Status of recovered documents: Document Name Status yrt.doc X Recovery failed [Finish] Then, when I click on [Finish], it proceeds to open the document as if there had been no problem. It doesn't seem to happen, however, with oocalc (the spreadsheet). There does not seem to be a file "yrt.doc" anywhere on my system. Perhaps it was looking for some basic system/template file which it did not find, hence the messages. But I'd like to know what's going on, if anyone knows! With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 08-Mar-09 Time: 01:10:59 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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