May 2008 - main - earth.li

OU software compatibility
by Bev Nicolson 16 May '08

16 May '08

I'm about to start another OU course and have been sent a CD ROM which has some course info on it. I know some of you have studied with the OU before so I wondered if you knew what software they use for the video clips? I tried asking computing support but 'they don't support Linux...' <sigh.> (The plan was to find out then ask you lot about it.) Thanks. Bev. -- _______________________________________________ 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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Applet or dock app for birthdays/anniversaries wanted
by Chris G 15 May '08

15 May '08

I'm looking for a minimalist application that will display a list of upcoming events (e.g. birthdays, anniversaries, todos) in as compact a fashion as possible so I can park it permanently on my dekstop. I have found a couple of rather old applications that do something like what I'm after but one (wmbday) is a dock application (and I don't have a dock). The other (cstermin) is OK'ish but it's written in perl which is not my preferred language if I want to modify it. Here are some screenshots of the two of them to show the sort of thing I'm after:- http://buzzinhornetz.ath.cx/wmbday/screenshot.php http://cstermin.sourceforge.net/ Can anyone suggest anything more recent which can do the above sort of thing and/or some sort of development framework or libraries that would make writing such a thing easy? Ideally I'd like the data to be in iCalendar format but that's not vital really. -- Chris Green

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cron problem, probably something to do with quoting, how to diagnose?
by Chris G 14 May '08

14 May '08

I have a couple of backups that run overnight which use rdiff-backup to send files to a remote system. The crontab (as shown by 'crontab -l') entry is as follows:- 25 03 * * * rdiff-backup --remote-schema 'ssh -C %s /home/isbd/bin/rdiff-backup --server' isbd(a)shell.gradwell.net::. /rdiffBackup/gradwell If I run the rdiff-backup from the command line (copy and paste the above excluding the '25 03 * * * ' then it runs perfectly without errors. However the cron job is failing and sending me the following mail:- /bin/sh: -c: line 0: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `'' /bin/sh: -c: line 1: syntax error: unexpected end of file So what's going wrong? It's almost as if the line is too long for cron but it's not *that* long. I have checked thoroughly that it really *is* one line. How can I diagnose what's going wrong? Other entries in the same crontab are working OK. -- Chris Green

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Silly regular expressions!
by Mark Rogers 14 May '08

14 May '08

I have some legacy code which uses "[[:punct:]]+" in a regular expression replace (using PHP's ereg_replace) to remove all punctuation chars. Eg: ereg_replace('[[:punct:]]+', 'test1-2,3.4:5', '') returns 'test12345' What I want to do is remove all punctuation except "-", ie to get the result "test1-2345". I can't currently think of a regex that will do it, other than [^\.,:]+ where I list all punctuation except - between the square brackets, but that would be a nightmare to create and maintain. Is there a way to invert [:punct:] somehow so that [^-[:inverted-punct:]]+ would work? -- 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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Alsa Gain levels
by Wayne Stallwood 13 May '08

13 May '08

Is it just me or is ALSA a little bit pessimistic about maximum gain levels for inputs and outputs. Of a sample of 3 machines (old desktop with a SB Audigy, New desktop with Intel HDA and my Fuji laptop) none of them seem capable of getting the volume out of their speakers that they were capable of in Windows. Also I am having trouble getting any of them to work with a selection of passive (and in one case a USB) microphone at anything like the input gain I need to use them with things such as skype. Is there any way to tweak the input/output gain of my soundcard beyond the limits of the mixer sliders in alsamixer ? My USB Mic is a particular problem as I can just about live with the maximum output volume. But the USB mic is part of a USB camera and with the gain at maximum I can just about be heard with everything set to max if I speak directly into the mic/camera but with it mounted where it needs to be on top of my screen I am barely audible unless I shout. Not that I think it is device specific as it seems to affect even the analogue microphone inputs but my webcam/mic combo is ID 0c45:62c0 Microdia

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Silly sudoer: Lost fstab - help!
by Mark Rogers 12 May '08

12 May '08

I just carelessly overwrote my /etc/fstab file with the following: echo /dev/md0 /storage ext3 defaults 0 1 | sudo tee /etc/fstab .. when I meant: echo /dev/md0 /storage ext3 defaults 0 1 | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab (-a means append) Any suggestions for recovery? This is a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.04 Server, so worst case I will have to reinstall the O/S but I'd like to recover if possible, not least so I know how to do it next time I am silly! [Feeling very foolish right now...] -- 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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How to get rid of the dreaded "Stale NFS File Handle"
by Chris G 09 May '08

09 May '08

If my 'NAS' system in the garage gets powered down and then up again the NFS mounted directories on my desktop system (not surprisingly) stop working and give the message "Stale NFS File Handle". The problem isn't so much the error but how to get rid of it. I.e. how do I tell my desktop system to throw away the old NFS connections it had to the system in the garage and start again? I just tried:- umount --force /nas/backup mount /nas/backup and it just says "mount.nfs: Stale NFS file handle". What's "left behind" in the client system that causes this? It can't be at the garage end because that has powered down and rebooted. There must surely be *something* I can remove or kill to get rid of all memory of the old NFS connection in the client. -- Chris Green

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mencoder and AVI options
by Mark Rogers 08 May '08

08 May '08

I have a .MOV (Quicktime) file I want to convert to an AVI, because I need to read it into some software which only handles AVI files. The movie is only a few seconds, and monochrome without sound, and at present is 1MB in size. I'm not too worried about filesize, although if I convert to a raw (uncompressed) video file it comes out to about 350MB, which isn't good. So far, I have found: mencoder -ovc xvid -xvidencopts fixed_quant=4 test.mov -o test.avi .. to be pretty good. Now, what I'm trying to achieve is to get the file into a format which (a) is as close as possible to the original (ie little loss of quality, not that the original is high quality anyway), and (b) likely to work on a different PC (Linux or Windows) with minimal codec issues. Are there any "standard" video formats I can rely on? -- 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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Backup solutions wanted
by Chris G 07 May '08

07 May '08

I currently use a mix of rsync and rdiff-backup to backup my home system. The basic backup is an rdiff-backup of all of /home to the NAS server in the garage. *However* (and it's a big however) this has one huge hole in it, rdiff-backup does *not* copy the 'contents' of symbolic links. All it does (if you tell it to) is to copy the symbolic link leaving it on the resulting backup as a symbolic link which points at nothing. This is all very well if you live in a perfect world where all of your system resides in one neat partition etc. but my home directory has symbolic links to old (and not so old) data on other filesystems and partitions. Thus rdiff-backup doesn't back these up. I'm looking around for something like rdiff-backup that does incremental backups but *also* copies *everything* that is part of /home/chris whether it's via a symbolic link or not. Can anyone recommend anything? -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] 2nd Thurs Pub Meet 8th May
by Richard Lewis 07 May '08

07 May '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 ----- Dear ALUG, The monthly second Thursday social meeting of ALUG will take place on * Thursday 8th May * 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. I intend to be there from about 20:00. Others may be there earlier. We should have a table reserved at the back of the pub just to the left of the bar. We look forward to seeing you there. Cheers, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +-------------------------------------------------------+ |Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.| |http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html | +-------------------------------------------------------+ ----- 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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