November 2007 - main

Regex
by Ruth Bygrave 11 Nov '07

11 Nov '07

In a more-stupid-than-normal moment I ended up with a Text Edit document on my Mac with lots of capital I's in the middle of words. I tried 'check spelling' to see if it did an entire run of spell- checking through the document, but there was no dialog box. Tried to go through it in NeoOffice, which I'm not that familiar with, but NeoOffice bombed. Can somebody less brain-dead than I appear to be today come up with a bash script to pour the text into that does 'replace I not on word boundary with i'? (The infuriating thing is, I used to *know* this stuff, or at least where to look it up, but because I've been Abjuring Hackish Unixy Things since I was in mental hospital this summer, I don't even know where to start...) Also 'replace 'fI ind' with 'I find', because the reason I was messing about with I's in the first place was there's a timing error with my Alphasmart Neo keyboard and it has a tendency to transpose letters. Kthxbai, Ruth

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Samba question/problem
by Chris G 07 Nov '07

07 Nov '07

I have Samba installed and working on my Fedora system, it mostly does what I expect but one entry doesn't. My smb.conf file has:- # global section default service = default encrypt passwords = yes null passwords = yes workgroup = IBMPEERS nt acl support = no [snip] # # # ISBD, user is set to isbd to allow read/write # [isbd] comment = ISBD force user = isbd path = /home/isbd guest ok = yes writable = yes By my reading of the smb.conf manual page that should allow anyone in to access /home/isbd, it should make them act as the user 'isbd' and it should give write access. (Remember this is a home intranet, two users, who both want access to the ISBD files) In practice when connecting from XP I always seem to have to enter a valid password to get access. In general what's the easiest way to make Samba shares appear in XP 'automagically' without having to enter passwords etc.? -- Chris Green

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Python question about reading files
by Chris G 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

Are there any Python people here? How do I do the equivalent of the C below in Python :- while ( (str = read(file)) != NULL) { do something; } I can read the data OK, i.e. I have opened the file and I can successfully read from the file with the line:- tagNum = tlvFile.read(3) but I don't see how to make that part of a for/while loop that exits at the end of the file. I can't use an iterator because the file is read in variable length chunks whose length depends on context. -- Chris Green

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BBC on amarok or whatever, how to?
by Peter Alcibiades 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

I'm seeking (for someone else) to get streaming BBC to play over some Linux player, don't really care what, on 64bit Debian. Once more cursing the day I ever installed 64 rather than 32bit, and on more than one machine, but that's another story. Amarok, attempting to tune into (for example) mms://wmlive-acl.bbc.co.uk/wms/radio1/radio1_nb_e1s1 gives the response Error loading media, there is no available decoder. I set up amarok in accordance with these instructions: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/gaming-games-multimedia-entertainment/7934… and presumably having got to the point of trying to play, probably did it right. Assuming this is because there is no win codecs, I went to medubuntu and got the 32 bit ones. This was a large weighty package. They will not install being 32bit. OK, went back and got the 64 bit amd64 ones. This was a suspiciously small file, and one's fears were realized when the package installed and the message was unchanged. I have also downloaded Real Player, and made it executable, but now what to do with it? It too of course is 32bit and presumably that is why it will do zip when you try to start it. There is no problem downloading the mp3 files for previously broadcast programmes, and they play just fine (rhythmbox seems to be an acceptable interface for this). But what I'm really being asked to provide is streaming BBC internet radio. Anyone done it? Peter

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How do people here manage updates (or not)?
by Chris G 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

Now that I have been running Fedora 7 for a while I'm beginning to see its strengths and weaknesses. One area that worries me slightly is what seems to be the 'normal' way of keeping it up to date which is to run 'yum update all' (or an equivalent) automatically at regular intervals. Most of the time this works fairly smoothly but every so often there is a hiccough and you see as a result hundreds of messages in the Fedora mailing lists saying "it's broken". For me one of the major disadvantages of this approach is that when the kernel gets updated (which is quite frequently) I have to recompile both my Nvidia display drivers and Vmware. The Vmware recompile can be a bit difficult as Vmware is only guaranteed to build against certain kernel versions and you often have to use third-party patches to get it to compile with more recent kernels. So I don't update all the time now, at least not the kernel. I'm wondering if there is a 'happy medium' somewhere between Slackware which was very conservative and stable (only went to a 2.6 kernal just recently) and Fedora which seems a bit frantically on the bleeding edge. Is there a distribution which offers pretty close to latest versions of everything when it releases but then just maintains things with only security updates and such until the next release? General requirements are:- Not too "GUI and Windows oriented", Fedora is definitely as far as I'd want to go in this direction. A reasonably good package management utility, Fedora's yum makes life a lot easier than Slackware. I run FVWM2 as my window manager so any distribution that makes it difficult to do this is out! Must run Vmware fairly smoothly, I think most probably will, Slackware was slightly messy because of its different initialisation script structure. Vmware is important to me as I need MS Access to run our company's accounts. Running them via Vmware on my desktop is just *so* much nicer than running on a separate machine that I'll never go back. It's all well backed up and, if the Linux/Vmware goes completely pear shaped I could easily enough just put them on a dedicated machine so absolute reliability of Vmware isn't necessary. -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] How should my hostname *really* be configured
by mbm 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

Chris > > I have a CNAME record in the zone file at the hosting provider that > hosts isbd.net so that home.isbd.net has the address > 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net which is my home machine (via ADSL). I'm assuming that enta.net give you a fixed IP address here. It certainly looks that way from their website. So the external world view of your "home.isbd.net" server will be OK and will resolve to the external address of your ADSL router. I also assume that you are either port forwarding 22 and 80 to your "home" machine or have it publicly available on a DMZ. > > So far so good, it all does basically what I want so that I can 'ssh > home.isbd.net' and log in to my home machine and http://home.isbd.net > in a browser gets to see the apache web pages on my home machine. > > > However I still don't seem to have the 'local' setup fully sorted, > i.e. how do I get things on my local intranet to work totally > correctly? As it is things work but there are some 'infelicities'. > > > In particular apache when it starts up has the message about "Could > not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name ...." > and I'd like to know the proper way to get the result of 'hostname' to > be right. Ther apache error is probably not a DNS issue, but more likely caused by a configuration problem in apache2.conf (or httpd.conf). Try setting the ServerName directive to the FQDN "home.isbd.net". Apache will then use that and should stop complaining. > My home network is behind a router and most machines have static IP > addresses in the 192.168.1 range, the router is set up to allow ssh > and http through (with limitations). > > In my /etc/hosts file I have:- > > 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost > ::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6 > 192.168.1.1 home home.isbd.net > 192.168.1.5 garage > 192.168.1.10 chris > 192.168.1.40 netpr > 192.168.1.44 hp7310 HPEDDBB7 HP000D9D068F7D > 192.168.1.254 speedtouch > > Searching in google suggests that I need to add my proper hostname > (i.e. home.isbd.net) to the 127.0.0.1 line in /etc/hosts but that > sounds like it's incompatible with the 192.168.1.1 line. I recommend you don't alias your hostname to local loopback. Leave that to localhost. The 192.168.1.1 entry is fine. So long as all your hostfiles are in synch and your machines all look at local hosts files first (/etc/host.conf says "order hosts,bind") then they will all resolve "home.isbd.net" to 192.168.1.1. Alternatively you could run a local DNS server (possibly on your router) but for a small network that is probably more hassle than it is worth. > I want to end up in a situation where:- > > /bin/hostname returns 'home' (as opposed to home.isbd.net, so that > my prompts and window titles are sensible) > > home.isbd.net is a valid address on my local network and connects > to the linux server machine > > There are no complaints from apache (or others) at startup Just set each hostname locally to "foo" and ensure that /etc/hosts has alias entries for "foo.bar.net" as appropriate. Your example hosts file is fine, but you should have aliases for "garage.isbd.net", "chris.isbd.net" etc. to ensure proper resolution. HTH Mick

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YUM: missing baseurl
by Yvonne Everett 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

I've just installed Fedora 6 and am having problems getting YUM and Software Updater to work properly. For instance, the extract below shows the "Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: core" error which is exactly the same error I get with Software Updated: [root@ukl20943l etc]# su -c 'yum grouplist' Loading "installonlyn" plugin Setting up Group Process Setting up repositories Could not retrieve mirrorlist [url]http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=core-6&arch=i386[/url] error was [Errno 4] IOError: <urlopen error (-2, 'Name or service not known')> Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: core Any ideas anyone? Thanks -- Yvonne Everett Email: ye103910(a)googlemail.com

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Boot question
by Chris G 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

My Fedora system has two (identical, but that doesn't matter) disk drives. Fedora is installed on /dev/sdb which uses LVM. Currently /dev/sda is partitioned the 'old fashioned' way. Now that I'm happy with the Fedora installation I want to tidy things up and use LVM for /dev/sda as well. Backing up and copying the data across is straightforward enough, I can cope with that. I have enough space that I can empty /dev/sda completely and partition it from scratch. However what worries me slightly is that there is presumably an MBR (that's what DOS used to call it) on /dev/sda which the BIOS goes to when the system is powered up. If I repartition /dev/sda will I lose this boot record? How does this get created in the Linux way of doing things? -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] How do people here manage updates (or not)?
by Bev Nicolson 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

FWIW.(Maybe not much but anyway...) Yes, it would be helpful if the Ubuntu update dialogue box gave more information about what was being fixed (when there is something to fix.) Mildly ironic given how user friendly it is. For relative newbie like myself the tech speak is not helpful so unless it actually looks useful I don't install it. On the other hand, most of the time you don't have to faff about configuring anything as it does it for you, although there are exceptions. I have had to venture into apt (with assistance) to get a program I wanted installed. Bev. > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Srdjan Todorovic" <todorovic.s(a)googlemail.com> > To: "ALUG ML" <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> > Subject: Re: [ALUG] How do people here manage updates (or not)? > Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 10:27:37 +0000 > > > On 05/11/2007, Brett Parker <iDunno(a)sommitrealweird.co.uk> wrote: > > On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 09:45:59AM +0000, Chris G wrote: > > > Is there a distribution which offers pretty close to latest versions > > > of everything when it releases but then just maintains things with > > > only security updates and such until the next release? > > > > I believe that is the goal of most of the Enterprise versions out > > there... > > But Slackware's been doing this for ages. Also, doesn't Ubuntu do > this already? > I can't believe that Fedora Core would not have this capability. > > What I've found frustrating with Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu really), is > that when doing updates, there is very little information about what's > been fixed. Adept just > doesn't seem to list the security CVE codes. Maybe I've missed it and need > better glasses. Don't know much about Fedora's update mechanisms. > > Srdjan > > _______________________________________________ > 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! > -- _______________________________________________ Surf the Web in a faster, safer and easier way: Download Opera 9 at http://www.opera.com Powered by Outblaze

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Compiling backages for Debian-based distros
by Mark Rogers 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

I'm still trying to get my head around the correct way to configure a typical source tarball installation to fit into the Debian way of doing things. The best I've found so far is: ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc \ --sharedstatedir=/var --localstatedir=/var \ --libexecdir=/usr/lib Does all that look correct? The general idea is that if I want to try and build a replacement .deb for an existing package, using a more up to date source tarball, then I want all the files to end up in the same places as would have been the case for the original package. (For all the documentation I've found, the best so far was an answer to a similar question on a dbus mailing list: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2006-September/005618.html) For the time being I'm only looking at i386 packages but I think the only thing that would change for 64-bit would be /usr/lib to /usr/lib64? -- 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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