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Help!
by Peter 27 Mar '06

27 Mar '06

Hi guys, Do you know of a nice competent person in London who would be willing to help a lady with her Windows laptop, for a reasonable fee? The problems are to do with the broadband connection, and most recently with BSOD occurring on sending mail. A hard crash, the only way to restart was by removing the battery. Also the Windows firewall switches itself on and off for no apparent reason. This is an extremely intelligent and competent person, but with little technical knowledge. Once properly set up and working, will be fine to use it going forwards. I'm not able to support this over the phone, and am not there often enough to do it in person. I have wondered about whether Linux would be a more predictable environment, but that would be complicating things again, and further reducing the number of people who can give support. If you do know of someone who you could vouch for personally and professionally, who'd be willing to fix windows for her, I'd be very grateful, Peter

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 27 Mar '06

27 Mar '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Trying to contact someone
by Stuart Fox 23 Mar '06

23 Mar '06

Is anyone in contact with Tony Bronze? Im having trouble sending email to his freeserve address, well ANY freeserve email addy Cheers Stuart -- The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

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Talks offered Ted Haegar from Novell and Jono Bacon
by David Reynolds 23 Mar '06

23 Mar '06

Hi, Jono Bacon (of Lugradio fame) visited us in #alug today and has offered his and Ted Haegar talks. I thought I'd post it to the list since a lot of people don't hang in the IRC channel all day. Details are below: Begin forwarded message: > Hey, > > Both Ted Haegar from Novell and myself will come and do some talks. > Both Ted and I offer two presentations each, so you can pick one for > each of us: > > Ted's Presentations: > > * Linux Desktop Innovation at Novell - demonstrating such elements as > Xgl, Beagle, the new Main Menu for Gnome, and Novell's latest > contributions to OpenOffice.org. > * Implementing Novell AppArmor - providing a practical how-to on > quickly securing desktop and server applications with Novell AppArmor. > > My presentations: > > * On the Front Line: Convincing People the Inconvincible - this > presentation covers how to perform effective advocacy, and covers a > number of areas and concepts that LUG members can make use of. > * Building the Next Generation Linux Desktop - this presentation > discusses where the desktop came from, how it developed, and where it > is going in the future. This will include coverage of bleeding edge > software and coverage of usability issues. > > We are thinkin of scheduling this for Thu 21st April. > > If you could let me know how much interest there is that would be > great. > > Jono As he says, could we have a show of hands as to who is interested and can make it on August 21st? Cheers, Dave -- David Reynolds david(a)reynoldsfamily.org.uk

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Video DVD Copying
by Keith Watson 22 Mar '06

22 Mar '06

Having last night successfully rescued (i.e. copied) a favourite DVD that had a crack slowly spreading from the centre outwards, I wondered if there are any favourite (preferably OSS) DVD clone packages list members may have? . I looked at various Windows and Linux options and eventually gave k9copy a try and was pleased with the straightforward way it worked. Regards, Keith ____________ I would love to change the world, but I can't get the source code to compile without errors.

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PowerPC Linux
by Simon Royal 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

Hi ALUG Hope you can help. I have been toying with Linux for a number of years. I detest Windows (as most people do) and partly because I am a designer and partly because it is simple, reliable and fast my OS of choice is Mac OSX. As any Mac OSX user knows, it is built around Unix and shares similar attributes with Linux. I have a 1Ghz eMac and want to run Linux on it. I have been using the live Ubuntu distro on an old G3 iBook at work and loved it. I now want to run it at home on my eMac, but don't want to lose my OSX, so would like to dual boot. How do I do this without wiping everything off my Mac and is Ubuntu the best choice for PowerPC users? I have noticed a few others but Ubuntu always seems to come out on top. Yellow Dog is a little behind and I am not sure about OpenSuse? Will any of the PowerPC distros take advantage of my Airport Extreme card, my DLink router and my iPod. I have tried all my other hardware from scanners, digital camera and memory sticks and these all seem to work fine under Ubuntu, but eventually if I can get everything I need from Linux I would scrap Mac OSX altogether. You help would be very much appreciated? Kind Regards Simon Royal ---- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac

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Re: [ALUG] MySQL Dynamic/index tables
by Richard Lewis 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 09:56 +0000, Stuart Fox wrote: > > Hello ALUG, > > > > I hope you don't mind me asking a MySQL question here? > > > > I've got a very slow query on my database which uses a lot of LEFT JOINs > > in order to do a sort of keyword search across a number of tables. It > > seems to me that if I could create a sort of permanent temporary table > > which stores the result of this query, add a FULLTEXT index to it and > > then do my keyword searches on this table things would be a lot quicker. > > It would be like a sort of dynamic or index table because its contents > > would have to change as the other tables change - it would have to > > reflect the current state of the rest of the database. > > > > Does MySQL provide functionality to do this sort of thing? If not I > > suppose I could set up a cron job to perform the query and update the > > table every 10 minutes or so... > > > > I've searched for things like "temporary tables", "index tables" and > > "dynamic tables" but haven't really found anything particularly useful. > > > > Any thoughts? > > > > Cheers, > > Richard > > > > > > You coultd try a "view" if you are using mysql 5, not sure how you do them > but it may be what you are after > > Stuart Thanks for this suggestion. I've just got around to upgrading my MySQL and trying it out. I found the VIEW syntax all right but unfortunately its a bit like a sort of "query template" and it actually /performs/ the defining SELECT statement every time you make a query on the view. So, of course, that doesn't solve the problem because it stills takes around 10 seconds to execute. However, I have been reading the (woeful) MySQL manual and have found that you can create a table using a SELECT statement to define and populate it /and/ it lets you add a FULLTEXT index at creation time. So I've done this and it works great. Of course, the table takes around 10 seconds to create but I only need to re-build it every few hours and, because its one table with a FULLTEXT index, queries are really quick. I just thought I'd let you know how I got on... Cheers, Richard -- --------------------------- Richard Lewis Sonic Arts Research Archive http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ ---------------------------

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Gnome Screenshot
by Wayne Stallwood 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

I am still trying to work my way through the remaining xgl related bugs on my system. Here is another one "Take a screenshot" works from the gnome menu..however my prt sc button used to launch this as well. Since getting compiz going it seems to be broken. xev gives me the following for the button press KeyPress event, serial 29, synthetic NO, window 0x4400001, root 0x52, subw 0x0, time 437305737, (232,143), root:(252,233), state 0x0, keycode 111 (keysym 0xff61, Print), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 0 bytes: XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes: XFilterEvent returns: False KeyRelease event, serial 29, synthetic NO, window 0x4400001, root 0x52, subw 0x0, time 437305825, (232,143), root:(252,233), state 0x0, keycode 111 (keysym 0xff61, Print), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 0 bytes: If I run the keyboard shortcuts wizard thing from the Gnome menu I get the following Take a screenshot print Take a screenshot of a window <alt>print Interestingly if I try to reset the first one I get the following message "The shortcut "Print" cannot be used because it will become unusable to type using this key." Setting it to <crtl>Print doesn't work either. Somebody told me that there may be something in gconf-editor for this...but I can't find it at the moment...any other ideas ? I've been all over the Ubuntu wiki and the dapper forums to no avail

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Training for a non-profit organisation.
by rob page 20 Mar '06

20 Mar '06

Hello all, I'm currently doing some voluntary consulting for a non-profit organisation. They've been using Linux for a while, mostly due to the political aspect, however due to a number of problems with it, they were considering switching back to Windows entirely, but I've agreed to help implement a dual-boot solution so they can stay with Linux, whilst still have Windows available for when they need it. During my first session with them, one of the things they mentioned, was that while it is very easy for them to get funding to buy capital (ie, software), it is much much harder for them to get funding for training. In short, does anyone know of any cheap (ideally free, but I'm aware this is unlikely) Linux training courses in the Norfolk area aimed at teaching a fairly non-technical user basic Linux administration. Thanks, Rob.

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BOM software
by Guy Eastwood 20 Mar '06

20 Mar '06

Yikes that Compiere wants 6gb of Oracle installing! However a search for 'ERP' yielded TinyERP (in apt, no less!) so I'm giving that chap a go. was a faff to setup but seems to be going now, anyway :o) G

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