January 2011 - main

Re: [ALUG] OK, so as an interim measure...
by Anthony Anson 08 Jan '11

08 Jan '11

nev young wrote: > On 07/01/11 19:52, Anthony Anson wrote: >> >> Nev! Marmalade sometime next week? (ALUG minimeet in Fat Cat innit) >> > > As long as it's not Tuesday. > Will be out all pee em > > Prolly not a good idea to turn up at the quack at 4 pee em on Monday > issped either :-) Ta - aisle limber-up the planner. In the meantime, delve into the BIOS to see whether I've missed something. I presume the EeeBIOS can be updated if it won't boot from USB in this early version - others with later ones do. And that will mean bringing the Ikea^h^h^flatpack^h^h^flaptop 'cos the Eee won't play with the Portly Pussy wi-fi innit. <cue whinge about oomeback> A bag full of Acer, Eee, peripherals etc really needs wheels. -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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Battery Lock Up... Please Help
by Simon Royal 08 Jan '11

08 Jan '11

Hi I am trying to get round a problem with ThinkPad R31 running XP and Ubuntu 10.10 The battery is a bit flakey and it doesnt always show the correct time left, so the light will flash telling me it is running out of battery but it will run for about 60 mins doing this. Not a huge problem but I have bigger problems in Ubuntu. It will not run off battery. If I boot it on battery once it gets into Ubuntu it will hang and the scroll lock and caps lock light flash. Also if I boot on AC adapter and then pull it out it does the same. It doesnt do this in XP. So while the battery is a bit flakey this is more of a problem with Ubuntu specifically. I have tried editing the boot options in grub - adding acpi=off - but that stopped the machine booting. It just showed a load of text of screen and wouldnt go any further. I managed to remove the line and restored grub. I really would love to resolve this. It is the one thing stopping me from using Ubuntu all the time. Any ideas? Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad R31 running Ubuntu 10.10 & Windows XP Home. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Coverdisc
by Anthony Anson 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

A while ago I bought a Linux and Open Source Genius Guide. I didn't find a genius, but the coverdisc had Moblin 2.1 Beta; Google Chrome OS; Fedora 13 Alpha; Absolute Linux 13 and Ubantu 10.04 Apha 3. I don't intend investigating Google Chrome or Fedora, but are any of the others useful, especially as a replacement for Xandros on the Eee? (I run Debian on the flaptop and the big box...) -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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Evolution errors never seem to show the reason, is this normal?
by Chris G 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

My wife uses Evolution as her main mail and appointments program. Most of the time it works OK but it seems most unhelpful when things do go wrong. For example she recently tried to send an E-Mail and "Error while sending message" appeared in the status line, but nothing more, no reason. As far as I can remember from previous errors appearing there's *never* a reason for the error. I remember it took ages to find a simple type in an E-Mail address because of this, it just said "Error while sending message" and left the poor user to work out that there was a comma instead of a full stop in one of the addressees. So is more detailed information logged anywhere and/or can one turn on more detailed information in the status line? (BTW we can't move from Evolution, at least not at the moment, because it's the only program which will synchronise with her Palm. In the longer term the phone will need replacing and then we can consider Thunderbird/Lightning or whatever) -- Chris Green

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Linux assistance needed in Manningtree, Essex
by max＠maxeaves.co.uk 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

Hello Anglian Linux User Group, My name is Max and I just wanted to introduce myself to this email distribution forum. About 2 years ago, I set up an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on an old desktop for a friend of my father. All has been working well - there is nothing special about this installation [it is mainly used for web browsing and the GIMP], but I was informed that it has now stopped working and the distro will refuse to boot. I moved to Buckinghamshire, so I am not able to physically help out, so there is now the opportunity of a nice little consultancy. I am looking for somebody who knows their way around the command line, and is happy with fixing problems in GRUB2. I know that the person will be able to pay for the problem to be resolved, but if anybody is interested, if you can send me over 'years experience with Linux' and 'rate' you would want to charge. Kind Regards Max

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Re: [ALUG] Evolution errors never seem to show the reason, is this normal?
by Chris G 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

On Fri, Jan 07, 2011 at 12:09:40PM +0000, Anthony Anson wrote: > Chris G wrote: > >My wife uses Evolution as her main mail and appointments program. Most > >of the time it works OK but it seems most unhelpful when things do go wrong. > > > >For example she recently tried to send an E-Mail and "Error while sending > >message" appeared in the status line, but nothing more, no reason. As > >far as I can remember from previous errors appearing there's *never* a > >reason for the error. I remember it took ages to find a simple type in > >an E-Mail address because of this, it just said "Error while sending > >message" and left the poor user to work out that there was a comma > >instead of a full stop in one of the addressees. > > > >So is more detailed information logged anywhere and/or can one turn on > >more detailed information in the status line? > > > >(BTW we can't move from Evolution, at least not at the moment, because > >it's the only program which will synchronise with her Palm. In the > >longer term the phone will need replacing and then we can consider > >Thunderbird/Lightning or whatever) > > Not tried Evolution and was thinking of doing so - thanks for the warning. > > I find Thunderbird is fine for mail and not bad for news - though > the filters in the latter are pretty poor. > > In the case of that comma, Thunderbird would have alerted you to an > 'illegal' character in the address and it would have refused to send > it. > That's all one usually needs but Evolution doesn't help. -- Chris Green

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why won't it start?
by Chris Walker 06 Jan '11

06 Jan '11

I've just grabbed a copy of Xara (http://www.xaraxtreme.org/) I remember it from Acorn days and it was a superb program then. I downloaded the AutoPackage Archive and ran that. It complained about some missing files and offered to fetch them. I ok'd that and off it went. But once that was completed, it didn't return to the command prompt. Instead it said it was resuming installation. I waited and waited and gave up in the end and killed it with Ctrl-C. I then restarted the install and this time it went straight through. It has appeared in the menu (I'm running KDE on Mandriva 64 bit) but when I click on it, it produces a bar on the taskbar with a hourglass on it, but the bar disappears with no output anywhere. I've done a 'dmesg | tail' but that doesn't produce anything since a previous error message which I knew about. How can I find out what's going wrong please? Cardboard programmer time! I did a chmod on the install file as root. I then did the install as root. Could that be anything to do with it, and if so, how do I fix it? Apologies if this appears twice. I sent it from the wrong account first time. -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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Request Tracker (RT)
by Mark Rogers 05 Jan '11

05 Jan '11

I've installed RT to be used for managing incoming support emails. Having got it installed and "working" I'm finding it very hard to work out what to do next in terms of actually using it. (Eg I created myself a user, but can't see how to let that user see incoming emails, although I can see them fine logged in as root.) Are there any good guides to using RT around? Google has let me down so far, and the RT wiki seems a bit to broad to get me started. Where I need to get to pretty quickly is having a number of users, any of whom can take a ticket and work with it, or allocate it to another user where necessary. I also need to manage the email process (I have one particular client I want to push in this direction, but to do that I need to make sure they don't get most of the automated emails otherwise they'll be swamped as they send us probably 200 emails a week that will become separate tickets once I get this working). -- 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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Lock Up Resolved
by Simon Royal 03 Jan '11

03 Jan '11

Hi Following up on my problem with Ubuntu locking up my ThinkPad R31 yesterday. Removing the internal wireless card - an Intel 2200BG - resolved it. Not sure whether it was a general problem with Ubuntu and that card or just my card. It has been floating around in my spares box for a while. Another thing I noticed was yesterday the fan would come on every ten minutes, quite forcefully. I thought it was just because I was doing a lot on the machine - well, I was just surfing, DropBox and Skype, nothing much really. Today, I have heard the machine fans only twice all day. I have done about the same on it. I actually dont do much else ever on my laptop. I am wondering whether it is related. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad R31 running Ubuntu 10.10 & Windows XP Home. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Sleep/Hibernate R31 Issues
by Simon Royal 03 Jan '11

03 Jan '11

Hi I've been playing and digging about info on getting a ThinkPad R31 to sleep under Ubuntu. It seems to be a sticky issue under most distros. It goes to sleep but it does not wake. No matter what you do you cannot get it to come back. So, until I could find a work around I set closing the lid to 'Blank Screen' so at least the screen went off. So Suspend (Fn+F4) doesn't work. However, I did get Hibernate to work using both Fn+F12 and setting 'close lid' to hibernate. It takes a few seconds to wind down. Waking up is fairly nippy - faster than Ive had on other machines - it boots, IBM splash screen, grub, 20 seconds of flickering etc and it comes up to a password and bang - everything is there. I can live with that, but I really would like to stop it asking for a password on resume. I cant find any option in under the Power Manager screen. Does anyone know of a way stopping it asking for a password. If anyone know of a way of getting sleep to work properly - ie lid shut, machine shuts off, lid open, machine comes back to life - then it would be appreciated. This seems to be the last glitch - besides the ThinkPad button and audio buttons - to be ironed out. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad R31 running Ubuntu 10.10 & Windows XP Home. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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