December 2009 - main

Online command line info pages?
by Anthony Anson 04 Jan '10

04 Jan '10

I'd be grateful if someone could point me at a page/pages which give the scripts for commands I can type into a 'terminal', so I can make things happen in this awful Kenvironment. Too hurriedly, I bought 'Command Line & Shell Scripting' - at huge expense, only to disover that a) because what the author really meant by the title was 'Shell Scripting in a ommand Line Environment', b) I can't haggle with Borders about exchanging it, -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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Eee bah gum
by Anthony Anson 01 Jan '10

01 Jan '10

Have an Eee using Xandros, and a Vodafone mobile internet dongle. If I connect to the internet (3G or GPRS) whatever else I plug into a USB port isn't found in the file system. OTOH, if I plug any other devie in, such as memory stick, SD card, external HDD or CD/DVD drive, any of those will be found, however many there are, even filling a (powered hub), but if I then plug in the dongle, this isn't found. Not being able to transfer files etc onto a memory stick is to say the least, inconvenient. Any suggestions welcomed. (Yes, I'd probably load Ubantu, but without the dongle working, I'm not sure that the driver I've downloaded will work - given I can find the command line string to install it. (See other thread!) -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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USB disk drives
by nev young 01 Jan '10

01 Jan '10

Hi all, Hope every one has had a merry xmas. Does any one know if this[1] 1.5Tb USB disk from Maplins will work on an ubuntu 9.10 machine? If not how could I make it work? I bought a similar one last year and it was not recognised by the PC so I ended up removing the HDD and installing it as an internal drive. Now they're about £30 cheaper than last year and I still need a decent size external drive for backup. I've been to the shop to ask - they don't know and they won't let me try it and return if it doesn't work. I've emailed Maplins tech help - no reply. I've emailed Verbaitum's tech help - no reply. So I thought I'd ask here before I lay out my cash on something else that may not work as intended. TIA Nev [1] http://buy.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?moduleno=323559

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Introducing Myself
by Paul Grenyer 31 Dec '09

31 Dec '09

Hi All I am Head of Software Engineering at validus (http://www.validus-ivc.co.uk) in Norwich. I recently switched from Windows Vista to Ubuntu 9.10 desktop as more and more of the applications I am running on Windows will run anywhere and I wanted something faster and more stable and also wanted to add a new string to my bow. I've tried to switch to Linux on a number of occasions over the years, but this is the only time I've stuck with it. In fact going back to Windows, as I will have to when I return to work in a week, feels horrible and slow now. I am also moving my hosted webserver to my own webserver at home running Ubuntu 9.10 server. I joined the LUG primarily to try and get some help with some issues I'm having, but I will put those into separate emails. For those of you interested, you can read my blog here: http://paulgrenyer.blogspot.com. -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com

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vsftpd and permissions
by Paul Grenyer 31 Dec '09

31 Dec '09

Hi All I've setup an ubuntu 9.10 server at home that I am planning to use instead of the pay for web server I have at the moment. It's the 32bit version running on an old AMD 2.0GHz with 1GB of RAM, that I'm hoping to upgrade to 2GB once I can find some. It's seems pretty nippy at the moment, but it's only running Apache2 and Subversion. You can get up my PHP test page here if you're interested: http://82.69.121.44/phpinfo.php I've installed vsftpd, obviously so that I can transfer files to it easily and although I can move .php files into the /var/www folder, it is of course owned by the www-data user, so the files transfered, when logged in as me, will not execute. After some googling I read that I can configure vsftpd to give the files the right permissions automatically on transfer, but I can't find out how? Also, I cannot delete files via ftp that I transfered onto the server using my user. Can that be rectified with vsftpd configuration too? -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com

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A curious Debian clash
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 31 Dec '09

31 Dec '09

Hi Folks, First, Seasons Greetings to all. Now: Recently, on a Debian system which (from the time-stamps on the earliest user files) seems to have been Debian Etch (April 2009, though I have been following the updates), I installed the xfmail MUA which I have habitually used on a much older system. It was hnot available in the Etch repository, so I searched the web and found and used the deb package xfmail_1.5.5-3_i386.deb 17-Jan-2006 22:35 951K and it all seemed to go in; and also, it seems to work. So far so good. Today, however, I wanted to install ffmpeg. First, synaptic tells me that there is a broken package (which is not identified, but on later evidence it seems that it is xfmail). Then, when I search for ffmpeg and mark it for installation, I am told it xfmail will be removed (and that there are other problems). So I turned to apt-get, with the following results: [1] # apt-get install ffmpeg Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies. ffmpeg: Depends: libavdevice52 (>= 3:20080706) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libimlib2 but it is not going to be installed xfmail: Depends: libglib1.2 (>= 1.2.0) but it is not installable Depends: libldap2 (>= 2.1.17-1) but it is not installable E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). Well, despite what it says about xfmail dependencies, xfmail works! Now to see what "Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages" gives: [2] # apt-get -f install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies...Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: libswscale0 libmcrypt4 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following packages will be REMOVED xfmail 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 1 not fully installed or removed. After this operation, 2597kB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n Abort. So it still wants to remove xfmail. So what about the library libimlib2, say, that ffmpeg depends on? [3] # apt-get install libimlib2 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies. xfmail: Depends: libglib1.2 (>= 1.2.0) but it is not installable Depends: libldap2 (>= 2.1.17-1) but it is not installable E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). So it still stubs its toes on xfmail, but now without any indication that the installation of libimlib2 (and therefore of ffmpeg) is really interfered with by xfmail. It just seems to want to get xfmail out of the way before it does anything else. I do not want to remove xfmail. So is there a way to persuade apt-get (or any other Debian installation program) to ignore xfmail and get on with what it has been asked to do?!! Or am I misunderstanding the workings? With thanks (and if you solve it you will make my Christmas Happy)! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 25-Dec-09 Time: 21:39:40 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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What's the difference (if any) between 'span' and 'JBOD'?
by Chris G 30 Dec '09

30 Dec '09

My Western Digital NAS server offers me (among other RAID formats) both 'span' and 'JBOD'. I thought they were synonyms for the same thing, that is using the disks 'as is' with no RAID processing. If they're different can anyone explain the difference please. -- Chris Green

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sshfs versus just using ssh/rsync
by Chris G 30 Dec '09

30 Dec '09

Is there any difference between the two following strategies for backing up files to a remote system:- 1 Mount the remote destination directory using sshfs/fuser Copy the files to the 'local' directory just mounted using rsync, rdiff-backup or whatever. 2 Copy the files directly to the remote system using rsync or rdiff-backup. Strategy 1 has the significant advantage that the remote system doesn't have to have anything other than ssh available. You don't run into any issues with mismatched versions of rdiff-backup or anything like that. Both strategies require that you set up some form of 'passwordless' login to the remote system or you need to enter the password (or passphrase) when the backup is run. I was thinking that I can run either of these from my .xprofile so that by the time they are run the required passphrase has been entered. I was even thinking that I could run the backup to one remote system from my wife's desktop .xprofile and to the other from my desktop .xprofile so they'd be at different times and to different remote systems, most unlikely to get both damaged at the same time. Only someone breaking into my working X environment would get access to the backups, just breaking into my home systems wouldn't do it. They might of course break into the remote systems I use for backup but then I have my home backups that haven't been compromised. -- Chris Green

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i18n
by Steve 30 Dec '09

30 Dec '09

Seasons Eatings all, I've been playing around with getting my laptop all nice and easy to use in a joint English / Turkish environment. I've got a key combination bound to switching the keyboard layout between GB and TR but when I do so, I lose some (but not all) of the custom keys I had set up with xmodmap. I think what I'm really asking is: has anyone had any experience of working with a dual (or multi) language environment and do you have any nuggets of information or things to look out for? Or even just some cunning xmodmap foo I should be aware of? On an unrelated note, this year marks my 10th anniversary of using linux and I've just been reflecting on how much cooler things seem now. We're a long way from the days of waiting half a day to download the latest kernel, another half a day to compile it, two more days working out how to get the new kernel to support your winmodem and then the fun of hacking X.conf :) More stuff seems to just work these days and it feels a lot more comfortable. Or maybe that's because I've been with it for 10 years. Anyhoo, enough rambling. See some of you for the first pubmeet of 2010 soon :D Steve

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Some success with seahorse and gnome-keyring-daemon at last
by Chris G 30 Dec '09

30 Dec '09

Well, after searching and asking and digging around in the code I have finally got things working as I believe they should work. That is I have a default keyring being automatically opened for me when I log in. It took me a while because firstly there isn't much documentation telling you how you're supposed to use it and secondly because (in xubuntu 9.10 at least) it's broken so it doesn't work even if you do things right. There are two problems:- 1 - By default ssh-agent gets started as well as gnome-keyring-daemon, as they're both trying to do the same thing this isn't a good idea. I've stopped ssh-agent being started automatically by deleting the use-ssh-agent line from /etc/X11/Xsession.options. I'm sure there should be a GUI way of changing this but I don't know what it is. 2 - Although gnome-keyring-daemon is started automatically it isn't set up to listen on the ssh socket. To fix this I have added the following to my .xprofile:- eval $(gnome-keyring-daemon --start) export SSH_AUTH_SOCK export GNOME_KEYRING_SOCKET This second is definitely a bodge but at least it gets things working, there are several bugs reported around this area in more than one linux distribution - in fact that's how I eventually found out how to sort it out. So, now my login password is *also* used to unlock the default keyring and ssh can interrogate that keyring to get my private key to log in to other systems. .... and it really is just about passwordless, or at least I don't have to enter any more passwords after login, but my private keys are kept reasonably safe. I suppose having my login password the same as my key passphrase is a bit less than perfect but this is only for connections going outwards from my home system so isn't very critical really. Now I'm off to those external systems to make them a bit more secure as regards logging into the home system. It's a pity there aren't any 'hooks' in ssh-agent and login that would allow you to do the same for direct ssh logins as happens with Gnome/KDE, then you could do the same sort of thing and enter only one password for connecting onwards. -- Chris Green

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