March 2010 - main

VCF - Bletchley Hotel / [Ips]: Peter Jennings walk
by samwise 16 Mar '10

16 Mar '10

Following up from last night's discussions, the Peter Jennings ghost walk (which they proudly proclaim has been featured on GMTV!) round Ipswich is on the first Thursday of each month from the Tourist Information Centre, St. Stephens Lane and costs about a fiver, I think. If enough ppl contact me off-list, I'll see if a date can be agreed upon. Also, for those who expressed interest in the Vintage Computer Festival at Bletchley Park, here's the link to the The Campanile Hotel which has a preferential rate for VCF attendees: http://www.tnmoc.org/vcf-gb/hotels.aspx And, who knows, maybe by next month Adam can convince the landlady of McGintys to give us a tour of the tunnels underneath the pub ... ;) Cheers, Peter.

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MySQL BETWEEN
by James Bensley 16 Mar '10

16 Mar '10

SELECT blah, blah, blah FROM tblBlah WHERE date_entered BETWEEN '01/01/2010' AND '20/01/2010' This will select records from my table who's date_entered field is from 01/01/2010 and 19/01/2010. This is because the BETWEEN command seems to go UP TO the day specified but not inclusive. So I thought I would just add +1 on to the data submitted from the PHP search page which works just great except for when you put 31 in as the day of the month, (so say we search from 01/01/2010 to 31/01/2010) it makes it into 32 and the querie returns 0 rows. However if I add an IF statement to not increment the day value by 1 if "31" is given as the last day in the query, we then only get results for 01/01/2010 to 30/01/2010. How can I combat this or is there a "proper" way of doing this as mine almost defiantly isn't going to be the best method? -- Regards, James ;) Jonathan Swift - "May you live every day of your life." - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jonathan_swift.html

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raw printing, yet again
by Peter Alcibiades 16 Mar '10

16 Mar '10

OK, following or trying to follow, Wayne's advice, I am attempting to use lp -d star temprint.txt. to print to a raw printer. It does not work. My user account is in the lp group, the printer is set up as raw in cups, and it is named star. When I do lpstat -P star all the jobs have piled up there one after the other, and can be cleared by lprm. There are no failure messages however. I have tried lp -P star -o raw But it seems to not recognize the raw option and to only expect page numbers. On the other hand, cat temprint > /dev/usb/lp0 works just fine. If you use cat as above, there is a real risk as Wayne pointed out. If the printer is offline, then its true, the application freezes. This is not desirable at all. Though, its a pretty robust printer, so maybe this is a chance I have to take. And maybe I could provide some kind of choice to just turn off the printing command and clear the queue and tell the user to call for assistance. But it is not good at all. Its a disaster waiting to happen. So it would be nice to be able to use lp. But how? And does anyone have any suggestion why it might not be working or what to check? I also cannot figure out, despite much googling, how to test for whether the raw printer is on line and functioning. Nothing I have tried gives any different result if it is powered on or off. Peter

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I was thinking about going tonight
by Ian Porter 15 Mar '10

15 Mar '10

Just wondering who else is going ?

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VNC problem
by Torben Stones 12 Mar '10

12 Mar '10

I'm having an interesting but very annoying problem. I have set up xtightvncserver (client) on one machine in listen mode, and then use x11vnc (server) on another machine. I connect the server to the viewer using the -connect argument. This works fine, as I can see the servers desktop on the client box as expected. Now I change my routers firewall rules to forward port 5500 to the client, and then try to connect the server to the client, again using the -connect argument, but this time using my external ip-address. This is where it gets odd. The vnc viewer on the client never seems to get a connection from the server. But if I look at the routers logs I can see that a message was received and matched against the correct firewall rule. I have used ngrep to find out if anything was appearing on port 5500 on the client, and I can see that there is indeed something coming in on port 5500. In ngrep it just appears as user@localhost:~$ sudo ngrep -d wlan1 port 5500 interface: wlan1 (192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0) filter: (ip or ip6) and ( port 5500 ) ### T 192.168.0.2:45401 -> 192.168.0.6:5500 [R] ...... ### T 192.168.0.2:45401 -> 192.168.0.6:5500 [R] ...... All this means to me is that something is appearing on port 5500, but as it isn't connecting then I can only assume that the wrong stuff is coming in. When I just use the internal address then I can see alot more on port 5500 for example the name of the display. Can anyone help me with the next step as I don't know what to do next. Thanks Torben -- You've got a lot of choices in your life. If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you're not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice.

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 12 Mar '10

12 Mar '10

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 this Monday 15th March, at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://pjmcginty.moonfruit.com/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. We're usually to be found in the lowest section of the bar, near the library entrance to the pub. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. 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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OT: GPU fans
by Mark Rogers 12 Mar '10

12 Mar '10

The fan on the cheap PCI-X graphics card in my Linux box is failing. It's a little (40mm I think) fan mounted into the heatsink. Does anyone know if these can be replaced? It may only be a cheap card but it still seems silly having to pay for a new card just because the fan is dying! Or is there any way to rejuvenate a fan? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Recommendations: Linux Small Form Factor PC
by samwise 11 Mar '10

11 Mar '10

Hi, I'm considering building a small form factor PC to live under and output through my HD TV, primarily for running SDL games initially and I expect I'll stick some form of 64-bit Debian on it. I'm thinking a Mini-ITX size would be about right - something that will fit comfortably under the TV, but doesn't need to be too small. I'd like to stick in a pretty big hard drive (> 1 TB) and probably 4GB RAM at least. Graphics wise, I've had issues getting the official Nvidia binary drivers in the repositories working with Debian, but given it's intended use that's probably not reason enough to switch to ATI (binaries direct from Nvidia do work, albeit need manually updating every so often). I'd like it to support 802.11g wi-fi and preferably bluetooth internally (might require the use of a combo wifi/bluetooth internal card), and as many USB connectors on the front as I can get away with (4, 6?). Support for media cards etc. would be a nice bonus too. I've done some reading around but most hardware reviews don't generally cover linux compatibility, so just wondered whether anyone might have recommendations either for suitable PCs or suppliers I could be investigating. Cheers, Peter.

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Samba share permissions
by Maz Walker 11 Mar '10

11 Mar '10

I meant to send this to the list but sent it to mark by mistake, sorry! Been lurking for a while so I guess this is hello! > Is there a better way for me to be connecting to the Linux-based server so > that I can access the same files that the Windows users are using through a > mounted share? Yes, the way we do it at work is like this [sharename] force group sambafiles force user sambafiles path = /where/it/is create mask = 0660 directory mask = 0770 writable = yes write list = @users You need to create a user and group called sambafiles that must not be used for anything else, you can control read and write to this share by using groups, all the files will be owned sambafiles:sambafiles which means all users in the allowed groups can read and write. maz

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server startup
by Peter Alcibiades 11 Mar '10

11 Mar '10

Thanks to Mick for offline help. Meanwhile, can I ask for help on something which is so simple no-one seems to write about it? I have installed minimal debian, and then added the requisite stuff for nfs and cherokee and SSH. I'm fine with configuring both of them through the command line, and then in the cherokee case login in and using a web browser. Vi or emacs it will never be, but nano is fine. The command line in general is fine. Its just I never set up a server before. The thing I do not know how to do, is have the installation start up with nfs and cherokee at power-on. And I don't understand what the relationship is between the server function and user accounts. So, when I did the minimal install of Debian, I did one user and set up the root password, and also set up a separate home partition without knowing if this is right or wrong. Was that right? The result is two partitions, one about 10G for / and the other with the rest. Presumably the nfs area will be in the rest. But how do I tell it that? When the server starts, I think this is done by putting entries in init.d, yes? When it starts, does it start with a user login? Or is it running with no users logged in? It will be without screen or keyboard, so I am assuming I do SSH to the IP address. And then login as root? Or as the user? Oh dear, this is so basic. Once its done, it will be fine. I can write little scripts and use awk and manage the system from the command line with no problems, so once I know what to do it will be OK, but at the moment am rather peering into the mist. Peter

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