February 2008 - main

[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Milestone, Woodbridge Road
by samwise 17 Mar '08

17 Mar '08

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back next week (Monday 17th December) at 20:00: The Milestone Beer House 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 252425 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+2EA At 20:30, however, many of us will be going to Mr. Wing's for a Christmas buffet: Mr. Wing 7 St Helens Street IPSWICH Suffolk IP4 1HE Tel: 01473 212884 or 212885 Google Maps: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+1HE We'll return to The Milestone after we've eaten - probably at about half nine, but to be sure where we are, feel free to call one of our attendees. If you need a mobile no. for one of them, request it on the main mailing list. Both The Milestone pub and Mr. Wing's are in the centre of Ipswich, near the now-defunct Odeon cinema and not far from The Regent Theatre. There is more information on the venue, including car parking info, on the ALUG wiki: http://www.alug.org.uk/wiki/moin.cgi/Meetings All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Hopefully, it shouldn't be too hard to find the pack, look for those huddled around a laptop! Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. This month's meeting is the Xmas celebration. On top of that, I have some more games working under Linux, including both Simon the Sorcerer's in ScummVM, and American McGee's Alice and Road Rash in WINE. Finally, we've invited along a guest who we hope will be bringing along his OpenMoko phone - the Linux geek's equivalent to the iPhone (albeit it doesn't quite make calls yet!). Hope to see you there, Peter. ----- 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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E-mail, IMAP and Accessing Mail from Anywhere
by Steve Fosdick 04 Mar '08

04 Mar '08

What do people here do to access e-mail when away from their normal PC? Web mail services seem to be very popular these days. Another solution that occurs to me is to use IMAP. I have already set up a local IMAP server so I can easily switch mail clients without having to worry about changes to their mailbox formats. On the subject of mail clients, has anyone had any success at persuading any of mail clients that they should not attempt to access any mail directly, with the exception of any cache, i.e. not attempt to read the default mail spool and keep the "Inbox", "Sent" and "Drafts" folders on an IMAP server? Regards, Steve.

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Thunderbird as webmail server
by Mark Rogers 03 Mar '08

03 Mar '08

Does anyone know if there's anything around to make Thunderbird behave as a webmail server? In other words I want to connect to thunderbird with a web browser to read the email in my onbox (and other folders). This is for remote access to my email, given that TB is running permanently (and is as much about accessing old email as new). If not it seems like something that ought to be possible as an extension, something of a rainy day project, but I can't think of good Google query to find out if something already exists. There are plenty of plugins to allow TV to collect mail from a webmail server, but that's the opposite of what I want. -- 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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ADSL "Embarras de Richesse", now, how to configure it?
by Chris G 01 Mar '08

01 Mar '08

I have just had our BT business line ADSL enabled, going for their "BT Business Total Broadband" Option 1 means we'll probably pay no more to BT in total (we had a BT business phone line anyway) and now we have a backup ADSL connection. It was scheduled to start working on 3rd March but I plugged in their supplied router today and it all burst into life. I have to say it was dead easy and the router (a 2Wire 2700HGV) and its software seem pretty good. The 'advanced' tabs in the router set up seem to give one a fair amount of control. So now to my "Embarras de Richesse" dilemma, I now have two ADSL connections, what's the best way to set it up? I have two similar ADSL routers each providing about the same bandwidth (both 448kb/s up, both around 4Mb/s down), what's the best way of using them to full advantage. There are some obvious things I have to do:- Change the address of one of the routers so they're not both 192.168.1.254 Turn off DHCP on at least one of the routers (unless I split subnets, see below) But I can arrange things various ways and I'm not at all sure which will work best.... Leave everything on one subnet (192.168.1.xxx) or split into two subnets? At the moment I can't see any really significant advantages in splitting subnets and it would be quite a lot of hassle I suspect so, unless anyone can come up with some really good reason for doing it, I don't think this is a sensible option. We have two main users, it *feels* like it would make sense to use one ADSL router as the default gateway for one user and the other ADSL router as the default for the other user. Then set up so that the 'other' router is the alternative gateway. Are there any downsides to this approach? I don't think there's any easy way to use both routers from one system (to use up all the bandwidth) is there? At least there isn't without a lot of hassle. Any advice and ideas gratefully received. -- Chris Green

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Error about gnome-terminal configuration at startup - how to diagnose?
by Chris G 29 Feb '08

29 Feb '08

I'm getting a pop-up error when I start up my Fedora 7 desktop which says:- An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for gnome-terminal. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly. If I click the "Details" button it tells me:- Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: IOR file '/tmp/gconfd-chris/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: No such file or directory 2: Failed to convert IOR '' to an object reference) Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Failed to convert IOR '' to an object reference 2: Failed to convert IOR '' to an object reference) The "Details" really are duplicated like that so I'm not convinced that they're really telling the truth. I have looked at http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ but it doesn't seem to say anything directly relevant. I have been mucking about with my network setup, changing the (private range) IP addresses of my Fedora machine and the router but it's all working OK (web, ssh, etc.) apart from the above gnome-terminal error. Any ideas anyone? -- Chris Green

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Transfering Live CD to hard disk
by Mark Rogers 29 Feb '08

29 Feb '08

I have a bootable Linux (Debian-based) LiveCD, that I want to duplicate onto a hard disk so that it boots from that instead. The hard disk can (should) be mounted read-only, although a writeable swap partition might be useful. The LiveCD is a web kiosk (www.webconverger.com) The reason I want to transfer to hard disk is so that I can mount the disk read-write, make a few changes, then remount it read-only. As a read only disk it can be "reset" by restarting the PC, the whole point is that no user data gets stored. Any ideas how I'd do this? -- 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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Does this "cpu MHz" figure seem right?
by Chris G 28 Feb '08

28 Feb '08

On my system /proc/cpuinfo contains:- processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz stepping : 6 cpu MHz : 1632.000 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 4897.97 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz stepping : 6 cpu MHz : 1632.000 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 1 cpu cores : 2 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 4895.38 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: Should I be seeing more than that 1632.000 value for cpu MHz or is the nominal 2.40GHz figure for Core 2 Duo 6600 just that a 'nominal' CPU speed? -- Chris Green

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EEE Pc competitor?
by Mark Rogers 27 Feb '08

27 Feb '08

http://www.elonexone.co.uk/ £99 Linux based laptop. No mention of specs yet, other than it is solid state disk, wireless, Linux, etc. Launches on 28th Feb at Education Show at NEC, heavily targeted towards educational use. (Imagine that, a whole generation of students who know that "word processor" doesn't have to mean "word"...) -- 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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Dedicated Server machine share, anybody?
by Martyn Drake 26 Feb '08

26 Feb '08

Hello, I'll probably be flamed for this, but it's rare that I advertise. I'm contemplating taking out a (cheapish) dedicated server for a couple of personal projects. The specification is: - AMD Opteron 1261 - 1Gb RAM (possibly 2Gb) - 250Gb SATA II HD - 1Tb bandwidth - CentOS 5 64-bit The server will be hosted with SoftLayer in their Dallas Datacentre. I'm looking to partition the server into several Xen virtual machines, and to recoup/off-set some of my rental costs I was wondering if anybody would be interested in taking out a machine for around a tenner a month with relatively generous specifications for the VM. Regards, Martyn

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For Sale...
by Richard Bensley 25 Feb '08

25 Feb '08

-External SCSI RAID array + PCIX controller card. Comes with 4x74GB drives, I used it in a RAID0 config, got about 240MB/s-300MB/s depending on capacity. As pictured here: http://teatimebing.shackspace.com/out/raid.jpg If anyone is interested I will release more specs. Looking to get £300 ono I guess the card would work in a Apple G4/G5 system with a PCIX port, would be great for a Final Cut suite! Those 10bit streams need some juice. -I have an SGI octane that I used with said RAID that I would be willing to part with. Dual 300MHz V6Pro 1x18GB system drive + backup (fresh IRIX install) IRIX CD's (no external CD drive) 2GB RAM - £150 21" SGI granite monitor. SGI keyboard and mouse. Or £400 for both of them together, delivery would be pricey for either/both items as they are heavy. Collections welcome. Cheers Rich

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