September 2013 - main

Touch screen support
by Mark Rogers 18 Sep '13

18 Sep '13

I have a web-based application running on a relatively low spec Ubuntu box (it was originally set up as a server install, but Gnome (I think [*]) was added with Firefox). They want to do away with keyboard and mouse so that means a touch screen. Any experience/suggestions/recommendations? Most of the interface is click only (a few elements are hover but they're not critical). There is the need to login so that'll need a pop-up keyboard of some kind, although we'd also like to look at barcode scanning support (all staff have a swipe card with barcode on it and that could bypass the keyboard-based login). I wouldn't rule out a standalone all-in-one desktop PC with touch screen acting as a client to the existing box (which goes back to being headless). Cost may be prohibitive though. [*] How do I check via SSH what desktop manager was installed? -- 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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How to make a 'do nothing' web page?
by Chris Green 17 Sep '13

17 Sep '13

Is it possible to provide a 'do nothing' web page so that one can set references to google.analytics.com for example to go to a page on localhost that does nothing? I've no particular hang-up about google analytics except tha it's so slow. When accessing the Screwfix site for example it spends much more time on Google analytics than it does telling me what I want to know. If I just put an entry like 127.0.0.1 google.analytics.com In my /etc/hosts file it will presumably get lots of 'page not found' errors, probably OK but I was wondering if there was a neater way. -- Chris Green

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New member
by Bob 17 Sep '13

17 Sep '13

Gentlemen & Ladies I decided to join your 'club' as over the past 10 years or so the MS attitude that they have the right etc etc. Much prefer the better and free path that is Linux. I started Linux life with PClinuxOS which was very similar to Windows and it was exciting to use. The problems came in keeping it up to date and the general maintenance aspect. (with Windows an '*.exe' almost cured all) After I found Distrowatch, this opened up a whole new world. Ubuntu was the first OS that I used in earnest, but, Unity arrived. Good bye Ubuntu! That's when I found Linux Mint 11 and I am now on Olivia. My favourite desktop is Mate. I do most of the PC maintenance for my friends and as I am now retired, I'm slowly converting them all to use Mint. I do not however, have the skills to dig into the OS and my latest project has been to try to get the scanners on the all-in-one printers to function. And of course, the dreaded Skype problem. So, if I can give anything to the group I will, but I can't help feeling it will be the other way round. My name is Bob Innes and I live Sproughton, Ipswich. Thank you for listening..er reading Best wishes -- Using Opera's mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

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Thank you for the intro (+ GPG question)
by David Crisp 16 Sep '13

16 Sep '13

On 15 Sep 2013, at 00:22, Bob <bob(a)beriwold.plus.com> wrote: > Hello Mick > ... > Unable to decode/read your attachment (signature.asc) pls > advise program/software for that. > Mick's attachment is a GPG signature used to authenticate that it really is him sending it. If you look in your distro's package manager you should find the necessary programs to decode and verify it - I dunno if there's a plugin for opera mail, but I know there is for thunderbird. BTW, question for the group in general - do we do key-signing at any point? The latest revelations re: the NSA have made me pull my finger out and generate one, but no-one else I know uses it … DC

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 16 Sep '13

16 Sep '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 today, 16th September, 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. 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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vortexbox
by Peter Alcibiades 15 Sep '13

15 Sep '13

Well, I was enthusiastic about this as a solution to the CD problem. Alas, enthusiasm does not survive acquaintance. I installed it on an old emachines tiny little AMD machine and it went in perfectly. The first few CDs ripped perfectly also. Then the problems start. It uses autoripper, which hangs or fails to find the metadata. The first result is that you get 'unknown' albums and tracks and artists. Fine, you can fix this. But its manual and tedious, has to be done from the command line or else from Nautilus over ssh, and in either case you seem to have to fix every track manually.. However, having done one of these or failed to, it hangs. And then it will not autorip again until you do a hardware restart. Its headless of course, so all this has to be command line, which is fine, except that lots of the interesting tools are GUI, which means putting in X11 and X11 forwarding. Then we have playing. Well, it has squeezebox server as the default. This appears to sell in hardware boxes for huge amounts, but I cannot for the life of me see why. Its open source, but why would anyone want it? Or maybe its for a completely different purpose? All I want to do is get my CDs onto a computer and listen to the music, probably over the local net but also its fine to listen to them on the device itself controlled from a tablet. So, what to do? Well, the solution seems to be what a wiser head suggested at the start of this process. Just rip your CDs manually, in fact do the whole thing manually. The other problem is the player. I am not sure if this is the emachines headphone output. But the volume is very low. It seems that the coding process automatically attenuates the sound by soe 6-8db. So its necessary to get a headphone amp (the Topping ones seem to be the choice). Or else in some unknown way fix this? A very interesting article a while ago, a guy had done his own ripping and then installed squeezebox on an old HP thin client. He used the internal usb ports to put in one flash drive for Debian and another for his music. One can see all kinds of advantages to that...... Though why he picked squeezebox is a mystery. Its not nice to be overly critical about something which enthusiasts are doing and releasing out of the goodness of their hearts, but all I can say is, this is not really working for me. Time to look for something else! Al

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using a thin client as music server?
by Peter Alcibiades 15 Sep '13

15 Sep '13

In the ongoing struggle with this, what does anyone think about using a thin client as a music server? I have seen one account from a few years back of using an HP. They have two secure usb slots apparently in the inside of the box. What the writer did was run the OS off one and use the other for storage. You can get the t5740, which is an Atom based device, for under £100, used of course. And you can also get the t5545 for around £35. That has a via Eden 1G processor and less memory and flash storage. I am thinking about the cheaper one, which should surely be fast enough for this, and why not install slitaz, which is a tiny very fast gui distro, put in X11 forwarding (dunno if its possible to do this to android but we can try), one smallish usb stick for the OS, or even use the existing flash (its a DOM). Slitaz is so tiny it will fit in 1G easily, and then buy another huge stick for the music? Which would have the great advantage of making the music iteself super portable. I think both are fanless - the 5545 definitely is. Then install one of the server packages people here have posted about. What do you all think? Its cheap and it would be an interesting project, its low power, and.... its fanless... and no hard drives to worry about. I guess its a bit like the plug computers some people use but a bit bigger physically. I guess the risk is that one might show up in the pub one of these Thursdays carrying a small black box and wearing a distressed puzzled expression having failed to make it work, and entreating someone who knows what they are doing to help! Al

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ssh over HTTP using apache, can anyone explain more fully how this works?
by Chris Green 10 Sep '13

10 Sep '13

I have been languishing behind a hotel firewall (or ISP firewall) which blocks outgoing traffic on port 22. As you can tell I have now fixed my problem by other means (I'm using port 110 for ssh) but I'd love to know, maybe for future use, how the ssh over HTTP thing is supposed to work. I found a number of sites describing the method:- http://quartz-net.co.uk/quartzwiki/index.php/SSH_proxy_via_Apache http://dag.wieers.com/howto/ssh-http-tunneling/ http://blog.m8t.in/2006/12/ssh-through-apache-proxy.html http://mark.koli.ch/2011/12/configuring-apache-to-support-ssh-through-an-ht… ... and loads more. The bit I had/have trouble getting my mind round is the proxytunnel bit that you add to ~/.ssh/config, for example from the last site above:- Host kolich.com Hostname kolich.com ProtocolKeepAlives 30 ProxyCommand /usr/bin/proxytunnel \ -p web-proxy.corp.example.com:3128 \ -r kolich.com:8443 -d %h:%p \ -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)" Firstly I don't *quite* understand why proxytunnel is necessary. Is it 'wrapping' the SSH stuff in an HTTP envelope to pass through apache etc.? Secondly none of the sites say where/how you find what to actually use for web-proxy.corp.example.com (in the above example). Presumably it has to be a 'local' proxy server which one *can* send to using any port but will it always exist? .... or have I got the wrong end of the stick? I do realise that I need to replace kolich.com in the above with the name of my server where I have apache running with mod_proxy. It's more of academic interest now as I said but I'd like to know for future reference. I finally sorted my problem by enabling remote HTTPS access to my router from the command line (using a web based ajaxterm service) and then remote configuring the router to open port 110 and portmap it to port 22. -- Chris Green

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F5 IP kit
by Laurie Brown 05 Sep '13

05 Sep '13

Not really a Linux thing, but there may be an ALUG member lurking here with the right experience. I have a client with some F5 kit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F5_Networks) of which 2 boxes have gone AWOL. One looks like it may be hardware, and the other looks like a config problem. They would like anyone who can to diagnose both and fix if possible. Obviously, this is a short-term job on a B2B basis, based on-site in Ipswich. I can broker that if required, but that's by no means a pre-requisite. Initial contact to me in the first instance, please. Cheers, Laurie. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- www.convergent-ict.com You manage your business. We manage your IT. ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Only a matter of time ...
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 05 Sep '13

05 Sep '13

Greetings all! I wasn't aware of the matters reported in the URL below (and indeed still harbour some reservations about how true it might all be). But, if it is true, then I suppose it was only a matter of time (and apparently that time is now long past): http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2013/8/21/ leaked-german-government-warns-key-entities-not-to-use-windo.html [all one line; also = http://tinyurl.com/ko59qmu ] And, by the way, there are a few positive paragprahs about Linux towards the end! Best wishes to all, Ted. ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 22-Aug-2013 Time: 20:59:26 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------

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