main September 2007

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47 participants
52 discussions

Another bash question - aliases in shell scripts
by Chris G 27 Sep '07

27 Sep '07

How do you get aliases to work in bash shell scripts? At the moment the only way I can get an alias that I have defined in my .bashrc file to work in a script is to explicitly source .bashrc in the shell script. Is this the only way it can be done? The korn shell can do 'alias -x fred=bert' which means that fred will work as an alias for bert in scripts called from a command line ksh where the alias is in effect. Is there no way that bash can export aliases so they work in scripts? A quick Google search suggests that bash really can't export its aliases, which is a pity. Does anyone know otherwise? -- Chris Green

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How to make bash 'forget' a path to an executable
by Chris G 27 Sep '07

27 Sep '07

If you move/change a shell script how to make bash forget about the old location? E.g. I had a wrapper for ctags in /home/chris/bin which was called ctags. I discovered that I only needed the wrapper for Solaris and not for Linux so I moved my ctags from /home/chris/bin to /home/chris/bin/solaris which isn't on my path when I'm on a Linux system. After moving it when I try running 'ctags' I get the error:- bash: /home/chris/bin/ctags: No such file or directory i.e. bash has remembered the path to ctags to save time, how do I tell it to start afresh? (There is a ctags on the PATH at /usr/bin/ctags) In C-shell it's rehash but (not surprisingly) that doesn't work in bash. -- Chris Green

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The fonts dialogue in Firefox, what does that line mean?
by Chris G 27 Sep '07

27 Sep '07

When you go to the font selection dialogue in Firefox:- Edit - Preferences - Content - Fonts & Colours/Advanced There's a horizontal line in the list of fonts you get to select when you click on the Serif, Sans-serif or Monospace selection bar. Does anyone know what this horizontal line indicates? I originally thought the ones below the line might be the monospace fonts but that's obviously not right on inspection. Is it possibly that the ones below the line are bit-map fonts? It would actually make selecting a font much easier if there was some sort of indication against each font to tell you whether it's a monospace or proportional font. Some are obvious but not all. Also, a final question, there are fonts one can select called 'monospace', 'serif' and 'sans-serif'. Presumably if you use these then what you get is the system default which is defined somewhere in the build/distribution, there aren't actual font files with these names. Have I got this right? -- Chris Green

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Kubuntu probs
by elc＠freeola.net 26 Sep '07

26 Sep '07

I am using Kubuntu 7.04 - Feisty fawn and a broadband connection. When I have booted up, the OS is NOT automatically online via broadband. I need to go to system settings / network settings and enter administrative mode. I then need to disable eth1 and thus leave me with eth0, - which gives me broadband access. However, I cannot apply this setting – Apply – is greyed out. Thus when I reboot I need to repeat this sequence. How can I apply this setting permanently please. elc

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CPU speed control
by Simon Jude 25 Sep '07

25 Sep '07

Hi, I've got a Sony VAIO that I like to run Ubuntu on. When I run it off the mains the CPU stays pegged at 1.995GHz and the CPU fan sounds like a hoover. When running on the battery the CPU stays at a nice 786MHz (or whatever) and the fan is nice and quiet. Is there a way to switch the CPU speed to the lower speed when it is running on mains to protect my hearing?! I've tried cpufreq-set etc without luck, although I may not have used them properly! Any tips would be appreciated! Thanks Simon

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Terminal window fonts
by Chris G 25 Sep '07

25 Sep '07

Does anyone know where gnome-terminal gets its fonts from? I'd like to use the same font in rxvt if I can but I can't work out what to call it. -- Chris Green

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The photos on Google Earth/Maps
by ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 24 Sep '07

24 Sep '07

Hi Folks, This is for people who have been using Google Maps (or equivalently Google Earth, since they seem to use exactly the same sattelite imagery): http://maps.google.com http://earth.google.com It's some weeks since I last had a look around using Google Maps, and I did it again last night (with both Earth and Maps). It seems to me that the terrain images used have degraded. 1: They seem to be fuzzier, and with less vivid colour, at the larger zoom levels 2: I'm sure they are older than they used to be. In particular, the aerial view of my own house used to show a car I owned a few years back parked at the front, from which (and from other vehicles in the neighbourhood) I inferred that the image dated from around 2002 (certainly not before 2001). And the back garden was much as it was when I moved in in 2001: green throughout, with grass and bushes. Last night, however, there were no bushes in the back garden and at the rear was a large brown, presumably cultivated, area. Now the people before the people before me had a vegetable garden there, which tallies with the image, but the people before me did not (having turned the whole garden over to lawn and shrubs), so that puts the date of the photo over 10 years old. Although the displayed images state "Copyright 2007", this clearly has nothing to do with the date of the photography. I'd be a bit miffed if Google had decided to degrade the quality and especially the timeliness of their images! I fairly regularly use it as a resouce for getting an overview of an area, and until now I've relied on the imagery being not more than a few years old. If, as now seems to be the case, it may be over (even well over) 10 years, then the relevance to recent conditions is seriously diminished! Comments from Google Earthers/Mapsters welcome! Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 23-Sep-07 Time: 11:48:20 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Fedora 7 does dual boot with Slackware
by Chris G 24 Sep '07

24 Sep '07

Now I have the Fedora 7 installation working rather better I thought I'd see if I can still boot Slackware - I can! It was no effort at all to get the Fedora installation to add Slackware to the boot menu, I just pointed it at the root partition on the drive where Slackware is installed (/boot is in the root partition) and that was it, it just worked! I'm impressed. Now I can go and 'tune up' my Fedora 7 installation secure in the knowledge that if I screw it up really properly I can come back here to Slackware and sort things out (and do some real work too). -- Chris Green

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Fedora 7 network problem resolved
by Chris G 24 Sep '07

24 Sep '07

I finally found what the problem was. I remembered an odd problem I had had a while ago when trying to connect into my home Linux system from a Fedora system at work (this was several months ago, in April or even a bit before I think). It took me ages to find the problem that time, I eventually spotted lots of errors in my Speedtouch router's error log saying things like:- FIREWALL fast tcp seqnr check (1 of 2): Protocol: TCP Src ip: 192.168.1.1 Src port: 22 Dst ip: 193.128.168.194 Dst port: 51097 I just found that my new Fedora 7 installation at home couldn't connect to the configuration web server on the Speedtouch router. ... and in the error log I see just the same errors being reported by the router. So I have disabled this particular firewall check and now it all works! Hurrah! (I had lost my previous disabling of this firewall check when I reset the router a few weeks ago) I'm still not sure whether this is an error in Fedora or an error in the router. -- Chris Green

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Still stuck with Fedora networking
by Chris G 24 Sep '07

24 Sep '07

Well I've managed to persuade my Fedora system that it has a fixed network address but it *still* won't talk to the outside world. The symptoms are exactly the same as they were before:- I can 'host xxx.yyy.zzz' and I get the right IP address back for whatever I've asked for. I can't ssh, ftp or anything to anywhere outside my local subnet. All other systems on the subnet *can* talk various protocols to the outside world. The Fedora system can talk various protocols to other systems on the same subnet. So can anyone offer any insight, I'm at the swearing at it stage! -- Chris Green

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