January 2013 - main

Summat up with Mint - or Mozilla
by Anthony Anson 21 Jan '13

21 Jan '13

Using the most recent Thunderbird, ditto Firefox, the system freezes frequently when I have T/bird and F/fox running at the same time. F'rinstance today, I left T/bird running while I went to the BBC website. There I filled in an online comment and then tried to close Firefox, which declined to play nicely, and none of the usual rollover dialogue boxes on Mint functions worked - connection speed, state of battery etc just sat there glumly ignoring the mouse pointer. File and Quit on the function bar closed Firefox, but nothing would shift Thunderbird. Three-fingered salute deleted the last two e-mailsin my inbox... Had to power-down to regain control, but the e-mails seem to have vanished entirely. (Not in trash, nor in any other folder.) Anyone any bright ideas? (Apart from not running Firefox and Thunderbird at the same time...) -- Tony

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?Ubuntu 12.10 Boot Issues
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 21 Jan '13

21 Jan '13

Hi all, I was on an old version of Ubuntu, started getting messages about it not being supported any more and so decided to update. I decided to install the lubuntu-desktop package, then do updates until I was up-to-date. So now, I'm up to Lubuntu 12.10. When I booted it, it hang big-time before getting into the GUI. I Hard-booted and selected a different kernel, and it booted fine. After experimentation it seems that booting into the kernel described as "Ubuntu 12.10, kernel 3.5.0-10-generic" causes the machine to hang before getting into the GUI. I've just tried making LUbuntu and XUbuntu 12.10 CDs and booting from them, but both of them hang, I presume when trying to load the Kernel. Trying to boot via the "kernel 3.5.0-10-generic recovery mode" boot menu option also hangs. I've not had a problem like this before. Does anyone have any advice on diagnosing what's causing this hang? Any logs to examine would have to survive a hard-reboot, or are there any debug options I can put on the grub boot line. Or am I doomed, or have to wait for a new kernel to come out, or keep using the old one. Any advice or comments would be appreciated. I haven't googled much as I don't quite know what to search for (you may tell me I'm a numpty for this!) Hardware is a Dell Lattitude D410. Cheers Steve

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 21 Jan '13

21 Jan '13

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 tonight, 21st January, at 20:00: The Mulberry Tree 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 225776 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+2EA WWW: https://www.facebook.com/MULBERRYHOSPITALITY The Mulberry Tree, previously known as The Milestone Beer House, is a grade 2 listed building in the centre of Ipswich. It is located at the intersection between Woodbridge Road and the A1156, across the road from the old Odeon cinema and not far from the Regent Theatre. It re-opened on Thursday March 29th 2012 after a major refurbishment, under its original name of The Mulberry House and has already begun to regain a good reputation for its selection of beers and ales. It has a sizeable car park to the rear of the building. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. I'm back home and will be out to play today, if anyone wants to join me. :) Cheers, 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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Help with hardware
by Peter Alcibiades 20 Jan '13

20 Jan '13

Any ideas what this might be? I was having a crash with instant power down. So I replaced the PSU with a Xilence, and for a while all seemed well. Then it happened again. Restarted. But to restart, I had to actually unplug the power cable. Only then did the power switch work. All carried along fine for a week or so - I never turn it off, and ir ran just fine. Then just now, it happens again! In the meantime afflicted by a sudden rush of nerves I have made a backup using clonezilla so its not going to be the end of the world if it goes south. What happens is, try to use the power switch and nothing whatever happens. Then I connected up to a different power cable and a different socket, and it goes on. The Gigabyte board asks me to pick the last good boot, so I do. Then it powers down and restarts, and goes into the usual Debian login, after which it runs the disk diagnostic and repairs itself, and now its running just fine again. What on earth could it be and what should I do? See what is weird is that I am tempted to think maybe its the extension block, but the screen runs off that, and that is just fine. It seems reasonable to change out the extension block because they are not expensive. But I can't quite see how that could do it. There is no doubt that last time it was the psu. It was totally dead, and replacing that first with the evo and then with the xilence, it did actually bring it all back to life. But this time its clearly not the psu, or could it be? Al

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A conundrum to boot!
by Barry Samuels 19 Jan '13

19 Jan '13

We have a spare computer laying around the place, as you do, which serves as a quick substitute if either of our main computers goes wrong. It's just a case of taking the disc drive out of the faulty computer and putting it in the spare and off we go again. The mainboard in the spare went wrong a while ago and I managed to get a free replacement from my brother in the form of a discarded mainboard. This mainboard is an Intel DP965LT which has a respectable 2.7 GHz Core2 Duo CPU and 8 GBs of RAM. The PSU in my main (normal) computer exploded recently quite spectacularly with a flash, bang and a puff of smoke so I thought I would swap the drive into the spare computer while I sorted things out. It was then that I discovered that although the spare board had SATA connections it wouldn't boot a SATA drive. With just the SATA drive connected I got a "No bootable drives" message. It will, however, boot an IDE drive. I do have a small IDE drive and I was wondering if it were possible to write a Lilo boot sector on that drive in order to start the Linux system on the SATA drive. But with the two drives connected the IDE drive comes up as sda and the SATA drive as sdb and, of course, the system on the SATA drive is configured to use sda. I don't want to change the configuration on the SATA drive so is there a way round this apart from trying to cadge another mainboard from somewhere? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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zhead/ztail
by Mark Rogers 18 Jan '13

18 Jan '13

I want to display the first few line of each of a batch of log files, some of which are gzipped. Normally I'd use zcat in place of cat, zgrep in place of grep, etc, to work with a mixture of compressed and uncompressed files. But zhead and ztail don't exist. What's the best way to achieve this: zhead -n1 /var/log/syslog* (show the first line of each syslog* file)? All the thoughts I had got increasingly convoluted. Obviously stuff like: zcat /var/log/syslog* | head -n1 .. doesn't achieve what I want... -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Re: [ALUG] Help with hardware
by Peter Alcibiades 16 Jan '13

16 Jan '13

Yes, I did check out the loading on the various calculators I found - in response to the suggestions - and there seems to be plenty of margin. More than the calculators suggest. Its 250W, and its only a main board, one hard drive and i3. No graphics card. The earlier psu that seems to have burned out was 300W. I'm feeling doubtful that an inadequate psu can be the cause. Didn't note exactly what the restart message was. Something about going back to the last good configuration. No, I don't think there are two bios files installed. But there were a bunch of choices which I don't exactly remember. What I did so far was to take the supply off the surge protected strip and connect it directly to the mains and everything is running fine now. One thing that makes me suspect the psu is that the crash happened when watching youtube - which presumably is more processor intensive than just web or word processing. Anyway, I ordered a new extension strip, this one brand named so maybe it will be better, and we will see. I truly hate intermittent faults! Don't we all? Al On Tuesday 15 January 2013 08:01:00 Wayne Stallwood wrote: > As an educated guess I'd say either there has been a power > spike/overload or PSU failure that puts it into protection mode or there > is something going on with your mainboard. > > When you say "The Gigabyte board asks me to pick the last good boot" > what exactly is the message ? Is it falling back to a redundant BIOS image ? > > Is the PSU adequately sized for the machine..I know we had this > conversation late last year on the list. But specifically if you use a > PSU calculator for your combination of hardware components does the > current draw on the 12v rails come in at way under whatever it says for > that rail on the PSU spec. > > If you go by wattage alone you don't know if the distribution of > capacity is sufficient across the rails for your hardware. You often > can't for example draw the total rated capacity from one rail. Sometimes > despite the overall rating appearing to be sufficient the 12V rail can > be undersized, this is particularly true on PSU's designed for older > hardware. > > > > > > >

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Help, graphics broken!
by Mark Rogers 16 Jan '13

16 Jan '13

Kubuntu 12.10 on a new PC, has been working fine. Just had a power cut, and on restarting I see the BIOS on my screen then it goes grey and stays that way. I can tell it's booting up (combination of HDD lights etc, and the fact that if I wait long enough I can SSH in to it). But nothing on the screen. It's possible, but no means certain, that I had does some apt-get upgrade's (or dist-upgrade's) prior to the power cut that have now come into effect, How do I debug this to get my desktop back (by which I mean visible to me - I'm sure it's there!)? In case it helps: $ lspci | grep VGA 00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI BeaverCreek [Radeon HD 6530D] It's just a default install, no graphics tweaking (I haven't even installed proprietary drivers). Monitor is Edge EF220A (1920 x 1080). Mark -- 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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Re: [ALUG] Leetkey
by Anthony Anson 14 Jan '13

14 Jan '13

On 14/01/13 17:39, Anthony Anson wrote: > On 13/01/13 18:07, steve-ALUG(a)hst.me.uk wrote: >> On 13/01/13 12:58, Anthony Anson wrote: >>> On 13/01/13 01:04, steve-ALUG(a)hst.me.uk wrote: >>>> On 12/01/13 12:07, Anthony Anson wrote: >>>> [SNIP] >>>>> I must say I dislike the current offering of Thunderbird. >>>>> >>>> Well I did too, until I found the various extensions and >>>> customisationshe >>>> that made it look, more or less, like it used to look like. What don't >>>> you like? >>> >>> How long have I got? I haven't (yet?) found a way to close mail on the >>> screen without clicking 'inbox'; > >> Not quite sure what you mean. > > Well, the old Thunderbird on the Eee, and Eee bah gum, it were old... > had a close box on the pane - the only 'close' box closes Thunderbird. > > Shall play with dragging functions about as you suggest - there's > already a backward and a forward arrow - ta. > >>> the only way to date that I've found to >>> go on to the next message is to remember to position the cursor in the >>> right area of the pane and use the 'down' key; > >> You can read through emails in the same style as a newsgroup reader >> program, by pressing space. Space shows you a pageful of an email at a >> time. When it gets to the end of the email, it then moves on to the >> next. >> Also, you can right click on the toolbar at the top of the screen (and >> possibly the one on top of the email), and add a Next and Previous >> button. This allows you to scroll through your emails by clicking on >> them. There's a bunch of shortcuts too - see: >> >> https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts#w_moving-a… >> >> >> >> Loads of useful stuff on that page - I've just learnt some stuff! :-) > > I shall look at it next time I can use wifi >> >>> I haven't yet found a way >>> to turn off red worms - er - spellcheck-as-you-trype, and lots more. >> >> Edit/Preferences >> Composition icon >> Spelling Tab >> Tick or untick as you see fit. >>> >>> Mind you, for reasons of my ISP's change of security and methods of >>> connecting, I haven't been able to use POP3 between getting this >>> new(ish) box before Christmas and last week, so I wasn't using the >>> program, and, I haven't tried *really* hard. >>> >>> I was considering overwriting Thunderguts on this box with the old >>> version I had been using on the Eee, but now the new one can get into >>> the mail server I'm loath to poke it with sharp sticks. >> >> as to why you're getting sent email in your inbox, well that's not a >> problem I'm getting. Is something somewhere BCCing your email back to >> you? Could it be a server/ISP issue? Does it happen when you send >> email by other means? > > I don't send email by any other means. > >> Don't get me wrong - I think Thunderbird is heading the wrong way. I've >> just installed it for the other half, and the menu bar was hidden and I >> was presented with all sorts of horrible menus and stuff, and by >> default, it looks horrible, but it is possible to wrangle it back to >> working OK with judicious use of extensions and customising. I've >> managed it! > > Thanks - working my way through all this. Worming powder applied. I had > already adjusted the menu bar, but became pi^h^h^somewhat incensed by > the unintuitive nature of the controls - it's rather like learning to > fly an airliner which is coming in to land without the help of George. > -- Tony

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A cry for help
by nev young 14 Jan '13

14 Jan '13

well for hardware. Does any one have a graphics card, with a PCIE connector and SVGA D-connector on the output, going spare that Vickie could have? If so could they bring it to the ALUG meet tomorrow. I've taken one out of my (spit)windows PC to get hers going and would like to avoid having to part with cash for a new one. Thankx Nev

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