March 2011 - main

Ubuntu Theme
by Simon Royal 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Hi I use Ubuntu 10.10 and the default theme is an orange and black combo called 'Ambiance'. Every so often my EeePC boots to a different looking theme, a grey one that looks like a 9.10 theme. It doesnt do it every boot. I cant replicate it. If I go into Appearance then I can change it back. Any ideas? Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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PLay CDs with shift of pitch?
by ted.harding＠wlandres.net 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Greetings! The nub of my query: is there a program which will play an audio CD, with an option which allows the pitch to be shifted? Background: Since quite a while ago (at least back to the 80s) you could buy "Music Minus One" records (on 33rpm vinyl then), along with an appropriate printed musical scores. The idea was that you could buy, say, a piano concerto "Minus One Piano", so it just played the orchestral part, and you would play along on your piano. Likewise say a piano quintett "Minus One Piano", or a string quartett "Minus One Cello". If you are playing a missing string (e.g. violin) part, you can of course easily tune your instrument to the pitch at which the record-player is playing. Not so easy if you are playing the piano part -- you don't want to re-tune your piano each time! However, in those days you could find record players with a knob which allowed you to change the speed of rotation of the turntable, so you could tune the playback pitch of the vinyl disk. It seems Music Minus One is still available, but now they're on CDs, not on vinyl disks. And, for personal reasons, what I want is the "Minus One Piano". While I have a few of the old ones on vinyl, the disks are no longer in great shape, and also I no longer have a speed-adjustable turntable. Therefore, on the basis of the above logic, I'm looking for a program which can play back a CD with adjustable shift of pitch (and that's a "proportional" shift, of course, so that say lowering it by 1/4 of a semitone means 1/4 of a semitone throughout the whole bass-treble range). Any suggestions appreciated! With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)wlandres.net> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 10-Mar-11 Time: 17:49:19 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Re: [ALUG] Kiddy Friendly Browser
by Simon Royal 18 Mar '11

18 Mar '11

Simon Just thought I would point out a serious flaw with the Firefox addon. It has to be manually activated by clicking on the K icon in the Firefox toolbar. There is no way of launching Firefox ready in kiddy mode, which I think kind of defeats the point. Simon ----- Original Message ----- From: Simon Elliott To: Anglian Linux User Group Subject: Re: [ALUG] Kiddy Friendly Browser On 13 March 2011 16:21, Simon Royal <mrsimonroyal(a)gmail.com> wrote: > So at present they are running Windows XP on some good spec P4 Celeron > 2.5Ghz machines, but with all the anti-virus and anti-malware software > it makes the machines crawl. They are also using a kiddy safe browser > called KidZui which I think is a kiddy front end for IE You are mistaken.. Kidzui do a Firefox add-on. Problem solved? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/kidzui/ Looks like it runs full screen when you click the K on the toolbar, I wonder if there's a command line switch to launch Firefox with Kidzui enabled full screen automatically, pop that in the start up applications and you'd be away. -Si _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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Any suggestions for a simple way to print four passport photos on one sheet of 4 x 6 paper?
by Chris G 17 Mar '11

17 Mar '11

Has anyone got any ideas of how to print four copies of a single image on a 4" x 6" piece of paper? I guess one way would be to put them into an Open Office document to position them but it seems a bit overkill for such a simple thing. -- Chris Green

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Is there a way to provide a secondary/backup SMTP server for Evolution?
by Chris G 17 Mar '11

17 Mar '11

We have (at least) two SMTP servers available to us for sending mail, in fact we have way more than that as we have two ADSL connections from different ISPs (hence two SMTP servers from them) and we also have two hosting services separate from the ISPs and they too provide SMTP servers. Is there any way that we can use these to provide some redundancy when sending mail from Evolution? At present I can't see any really easy way to do it as Evolution doesn't really allow for the use of more than one SMTP unless you manually change accounts. I run postfix on one of the machines here, I could point Evolution at postfix for sending mail, can one tell postfix to try an alternative SMTP server if the main/default one is down? It feels like the MX records for the 'smarthost' that we send our mail to (both from Postfix and Evolution at the moment) should provide this but I'm not convinced that it does. E.g. the mail relay I'm using for my local postfix is relay.mail.gandi.net and that doesn't return any explicit MX records in response to a query. The mail relay used by evolution is provided by my hosting at TsoHost and is mail.isbd.net, that does have an MX record:- chris$ host mail.isbd.net mail.isbd.net is an alias for isbd.net. isbd.net has address 188.65.115.75 isbd.net mail is handled by 0 isbd.net. I can manipulate the zone file for isbd.net but I'm not sure if that will actually do what I need. Can anyone help/elucidate/point me somewhere useful? A bit of Googling suggests that maybe Postfix's fallback_relay is what I need but I'd like to find a tutorial/howto because the basic manual is a bit concise shall we say. -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] Ugliest sites on the net.
by Phil Ashby 17 Mar '11

17 Mar '11

On 16/03/11 12:00, Bill Hill <mail(a)wbh.org> wrote: > Following from the pubmeet talk about the worst websites out there, (frames, > flash, geocities, vbsript!) well, after a bit of searching I've found again my > contender for this hotly contested category. > > http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/indexpage.html Ye gods (literally!). Did anyone dare to click through to the main page? This appears in a large font: "Pressurous Moments Storybook Collection" It's almost as if someone is doing it on purpose ;) P

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Ugliest sites on the net.
by Bill Hill 17 Mar '11

17 Mar '11

Following from the pubmeet talk about the worst websites out there, (frames, flash, geocities, vbsript!) well, after a bit of searching I've found again my contender for this hotly contested category. http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/indexpage.html %-)

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Dual Boot On 8GB
by Simon Royal 17 Mar '11

17 Mar '11

Hi Do you think it is possible to Ubuntu and XP, dual booted on an 8GB SSD? Im running Ubuntu on my EeePC, but I would like to run XP for a few apps. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Kiddy Friendly Browser
by Simon Royal 14 Mar '11

14 Mar '11

Hi I have young children who have computers. They used to have Macs which were running Safari, which had a great built in restricted web access and you could lock down the whole system so it was tamper proof. They moved to PCs as their Macs were getting a bit old and they use a lot of Flash sites and Flash is not well developed for PPC Macs. So at present they are running Windows XP on some good spec P4 Celeron 2.5Ghz machines, but with all the anti-virus and anti-malware software it makes the machines crawl. They are also using a kiddy safe browser called KidZui which I think is a kiddy front end for IE, it too is really bad. Its slow and chokes all the time, but it provides a massive selection of preapproved sites, vids and games. I ran Ubuntu on from a Live CD on one of theirs and it screamed. They both have the same machine and running one with Windows XP minus safety software and the other from a Live CD, the Live CD beat it hands down. KidZui is a Windows only thing and I wondered if there was anything like it for Linux, then I could dual boot Win/Linux for the odd occasion they might need Windows. I found some kiddy friendly distros but I am just after a way of letting them only have access to certain stuff on the web without too much hassle and not a whole new distro for me to learn. There was an excellent Firefox addon called Glubble we used for a while that offered a platform independent safe surfing environment but it no longer works. My kids are only 6 and 8 so it is only sites like CBeebies, NickJnr and Lego that they need access to. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Find environment variables used by some process
by Richard Lewis 14 Mar '11

14 Mar '11

Hi ALUG, Is it possible to query the environment variables being used by a specific process; from the outside? Specifically, I want to know if a running Apache has a particular environment variable set. Best, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li http://www.richardlewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Sent from my [insert device/mail clinet here]

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