February 2010 - main

Linux equivalent to .hosts
by Paul Grenyer 13 Feb '10

13 Feb '10

Hi All I've finally manged to get Ubuntu to connect to my work's fortinet VPN. Yay! However, remote DNS does not work and sticking the company's DNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf didn't fix it. What's the Linux equivalent to the windows .hosts file? -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com

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Looking for a web mail viewing app - any ideas?
by Chris G 13 Feb '10

13 Feb '10

I'm looking for something that will allow me to view mail as web pages but I'm not after webmail, I'll try and explain.... I want to be able to incorporate sequences of mail (saved as maildir mailboxes) into a web site so that one can quickly look through an E-Mail 'conversation' via the web. As I said the E-Mail is already at in maildir mailboxes on the system where the apache server is running so the files are accessible, all I really want is a vaguely civilised interface that I can link to from other pages. For example the link might look something like:- http://home.isbd.net/email.php&Mail:boating:leBoat where email.php is the clever E-Mail reading bit and "Mail:boating:leBoat" is the path down through the mail hierarchy to the mailbox I want to show. Ideally you'd see a clickable list of E-Mails from the mailbox. Any ideas or places to look for such a thing (or bits to make it) would be most welcome. -- Chris Green

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Really silly monitor setup
by Chris G 12 Feb '10

12 Feb '10

I have just bought a new system to set up for a friend. Quite straightforward Asrock G41MH-GE motherboard with a HANNspree 23" monitor. It's been a right royal pain to get going as much because of the silly monitor and BIOS setups as because of a kernel/Intel incompatibility. The monitor initially seems pretty standard with on screen setup and buttons to move through the menus but the real pain is that if there is no signal input you can't activate the menu. It actually tells you this in the manual, I didn't believe it at first but it really is true. I had set the monitor to VGA input (it's dual VGA and HDMI) but (for various reasons, see below) I had the HDMI lead connected. Hit the 'menu' button and notheing happens because there's no input on the VGA connector, sort of Catch22 really, I had to actually connect something to send it a VGA signal to let me get the menu up to switch it to DVI input. OK, it would *probably* have managed itself if I'd left it at Auto input select but we wanted to specifiy which input was being used. Then onto the BIOS on the Asrock motherboard. The boot options only appear for a very short time, too short to actually read them so you have to look in the manual to find it's F2 to get the BIOS setup. The real oddity though is that the splash screen (with the options) *only* appears after a power on, hitting the reset button doesn't show it so then you are really in the dark. I've never come across a motherboard where hitting reset doesn't produce the same effect as power on. -- Chris Green

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Laptop Needed Urgently
by Simon Royal 11 Feb '10

11 Feb '10

Hi fellow Linux users. I am still im desperate need for a laptop. After only being in the linux world for a short while my Samsung laptop died. I am now without a laptop and have to grab the odd minute on my wifes Windows machine. Does anyone have an old laptop laying around doing nothing, that I could dust off and make use of? An old P1 or P2 would be fine. I would only be running Xubuntu or DSL-N. I live in Watton but can travel. Simon --- Catch me on Twitter http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype me: Simon-Royal

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PHP help wanted - arrays and foreach
by Chris G 11 Feb '10

11 Feb '10

I'm trying to understand/debug a bit of PHP, the code is as follows:- if (isset($data['date'])) { if (is_array($data['date'])) { foreach($data['date'] as $key => $date) { $date = $this->_convertDate(trim($date)); if (!$date) unset($data['date'][$key]); else $data['date'][$key] = $date; dbglog($data, "Converted data"); } } else { unset($data['date']); } } What's happening is that it always ends up with nothing in $data (what's reported by that dbglog()). I'm confused by what happens with that foreach as, as far as I can see, $data['date'] is just what I would call a list in python, it's not an array indexed by values it's just a sequential array. So, in the foreach loop $key gets the values from the $date array and $date is empty (confirmed by further dbglog()). Am I understanding this right? If I create an array:- $aa = array('abc', 'def', 'ghi', 'jkl'); Then do:- foreach $aa as $x => $y { // what do I get for $x and $y here? } Sorry this is a bit confused/muddled, I'm definitely not a PHP programmer. -- Chris Green

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IT lessons
by Richard Lewis 10 Feb '10

10 Feb '10

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/tomorrowsworld/8008.shtml Now *thats* what a proper IT lession should be like. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +----------------------------------------------+ | Support open access to scholarship | | http://freeculture.org/ http://www.doaj.org/ | +----------------------------------------------+

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Blogs and such...
by James Elsey 10 Feb '10

10 Feb '10

When you come across an interesting article, or figure out how to do something with a new technology your messing around with, do you document it? This is a bit of a generalised question, just trying to find out what you guys do. I've gone for "Blogger", is there anything exciting Wordpress offers that could tempt me over? I'm using the web interface at the moment, its a bit clumsy, are there any good linux desktop applications that make it easier to type up and organise posts? If anyone has a tech blog, feel free to link me up, would be interested to see what others are doing Cheers! James Elsey

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ipv6 (with Virgin Media)
by Jon Dye 10 Feb '10

10 Feb '10

Hi, I would like to try settings up ipv6 at home in preperation for the global meltdown when we run out of ipv4 addresses. I currently have an internet connection with Virgin Media who I don't believe do native ipv6. I therefore would like to set up a tunnel to a provider. I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for particular providers (brokers?), software or general tips (or specific tips relating to Virgin Media). I have several PCs (Windows and Linux) on a LAN which then goes through a router that doesn't have ipv6 capability. One of the linux machines on the LAN is a server that's on 24/7 so I was thinking of using that to do the tunnelling. I don't have a static IP on the router but it hardly ever changes (I think it's only changed when I've unplugged the router for more than a few hours). Suggestions? JD

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Chrome and Flash
by Bev Nicolson 09 Feb '10

09 Feb '10

I installed Chrome (for Linux) a while ago and am still playing with it but wish to install flash. I've found where it is installed already (and saved the relevant bit of text to copy) but it needs to go into another directory as far as I can tell. Do I do this from Terminal? And how? TIA. Bev.

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Re: [ALUG] curious behavior of audacity and usb mike (Peter Alcibiades)
by phil.ashby＠bt.com 08 Feb '10

08 Feb '10

From: Peter Alcibiades <palcibiades-first(a)yahoo.co.uk> > Disconnect the mike, and try to play back? Error message. > > Restart audacity? Now playback works, but recording does not. What > appears to happen on attempting to record is that the track > seems to be > trying to playback through the mic. Well, this is my > interpretation of > what is visible and audible. Probably correct Peter: I suspect the chipset used in the mic is bi-directional (I have a similar issue with an audio+video grabber that also claims to have audio out but no connectors). You should be able to select the appropriate recording device in the mixer applet (KDE or GNOME versions), and should also be able to see what channels your various audio devices claim to have. It's also worth checking what audio subsystem audacity is trying to use, it's probably Alsa for recording, but may be Jack or Pulseaudio depending on versions and audio arrangements in your distro. If audacity isn't using Alsa directly then you need to configure the appropriate sound server (Jack or Pulseaudio) inputs to use the correct underlying Alsa device for recording. Finally - be aware that USB audio devices can come up in any order, so if you want the external sound card to always be device 0 (Alsa hw:0), with or without the mic plugged in, you will need to edit the udev rules to identify each USB device and fix the numbering (this is tricker if >1 device use the same chipset and thus have the same USB vendor and device IDs, although I have been able to make this work using bus IDs instead). For all this GIYF :) Phil.

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