March 2015 - main

PC slow to boot prt 2
by Bev Nicolson 06 Dec '15

06 Dec '15

I asked about my slow to boot (and sometimes slow to shut down) pc a while back now and have htop installed. I should have asked this then but which bit of the info it gives me do I need to give you lot in order to diagnose the problem? Bev.

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Automount problem - solved
by Chris Walker 31 Mar '15

31 Mar '15

Having thought long and hard and after lots of googling, I decided that I would try my 'failing' Seagate 1TB USB disc in the USB3 interface. It works and pops up the notification message. So it appears that something has changed to affect USB3 devices such that they will only work on USB3 interface. It probably *isn't* that, but it seems that way here! -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 3rd April.
by Viperfang 31 Mar '15

31 Mar '15

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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USB drive won't automount
by Chris Walker 30 Mar '15

30 Mar '15

Hello, Back in October of last year I had problems with a new kernel on my machine (Mageia 4 64 bit) which I reported here. Over the weekend, I did another upgrade to be greeted on Sunday morning by a kernel panic and it wouldn't go at all. So rapidly getting fed up with it and even more rapidly losing what little I had left of my patience, I downloaded Mageia 5 Beta 3 and using that as a live DVD, booted up the box and did a backup of / to an attached NTFS disc. Encouraged by the fact that the live system worked and even though it's still a beta, I installed it over Mageia 4. It works and even though it's done loads more upgrades since yesterday morning, it's still working apart from a 1TB USB disc. I wasn't seeing any notifications when I plugged it in but that was fixed by a setting on the device notifier. If I plug in a 32GB USB stick, that does pop a notification and I can see the disc in the file manager. But even though dmesg shows the 1TB disc as being present, it's not mounting. Does anybody have any ideas why not? Just in case it's important, I notice that when the machine boots, right at the start there's a message about /usr/lib/udev/rules/50-firmware.rules but that's empty apart from a couple of comments. -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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xmodmap at X start
by Richard Lewis 26 Mar '15

26 Mar '15

Dear ALUG, I decided to give up on X display managers some time ago and I now just log in to the console and start X with the startx wrapper. However, I've never been able to get xmodmap to load my ~/.xmodmap file properly in this set up. The file itself is fine; I always execute xmodmap manually after starting my window manager and my key modifications are correctly applied. Just now I've been experimenting with switching from Fluxbox (which I've been using for years) to XMonad. And doing so has brought this xmodmap problem back to my attention because it's the same with XMonad as it's always been with Fluxbox. I've tried putting xmodmap ~/.xmodmap both in ~/.xinitrc and in Fluxbox's start up file. And now in XMonad's start up file too. I've tried adding a sleep: sleep 0.5 && xmodmap ~/.xmodmap after reading a few suggestions that there might be some sort of default that may be getting applied after mine. Any ideas what's going on here? Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis j: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li @: lewisrichard http://www.richardlewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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Strange javascript/jQuery problem, works locally but not on remote host
by Chris Green 25 Mar '15

25 Mar '15

I am trying to make this simple method of showing pictures on the web work:- http://www.nux.ro/archive/2012/10/Instant_image_gallery_with_Apache_s_mod_a… On my home system (xubuntu 14.10 with apache) it works exactly as it should. However on my hosting at TsoHost it doesn't work, there are no obvious errors but the 'lightbox' style display simply doesn't happen, one just gets a standard directory display and clicking on the image files just opens them as it would without any of the jQuery stuff. I have exactly the same layout (I think!) on both home and TsoHost, images in a directory called mandyFlat at document root and the jQuery bits and pieces in a directory called fancybox at document root. I have rsync'ed back and forth to make sure they're the same. The problem seems to be that the in-line javascript at the end of the fancybox.html file isn't getting executed on the TsoHost installation for some reason. It's very odd really as it's virtually all client side code so what difference can it make where the server is? Can anyone suggest what's wrong? The TsoHost installation is:- http://isbd.net/mandyFlat/ -- Chris Green

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USB mass storage device detected but then disconnects, why?
by Chris Green 21 Mar '15

21 Mar '15

When I plug my camera into my laptop I see the following:- [115757.772243] usb 1-1.2: new high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci-pci [115757.868415] usb 1-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=04da, idProduct=2372 [115757.868422] usb 1-1.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [115757.868426] usb 1-1.2: Product: DMC-TZ60 [115757.868430] usb 1-1.2: Manufacturer: Panasonic [115757.868433] usb 1-1.2: SerialNumber: 0000000000000000001X1314210434 [115757.869052] usb-storage 1-1.2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected [115757.869255] usb-storage 1-1.2:1.0: Quirks match for vid 04da pid 2372: 90 [115757.869328] scsi7 : usb-storage 1-1.2:1.0 [115757.869867] usb 1-1.2: USB disconnect, device number 5 So what's wrong, why am I getting that disconnect at the end? -- Chris Green

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Audio open standards / recommendations for portable-ish wireless speakers
by samwise 20 Mar '15

20 Mar '15

Hi, all. I recently sent my trusty hi-fi which had reached a grand old age of over a decade and a half of useful service off to be recycled. The CD player had long-since stopped working and the radio was never very good, so it ended its useful life being a glorified amp. I'd like to replace it with something but I'm not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, so I haven't really got much of a clue in this area. I want something I can connect wirelessly to stream stuff from my Android smartphone, tablet and PC etc. I expect it needs to connect to wi-fi whilst at home where it will be most of the time, but I'd like to be portable enough to move it without too much hassle on occasion to locations where it won't have access to a wi-fi network. As an example, my last hi-fi was recently used to run a few ceilidhs - so I'd like it to be moderately powerful, so I can take it a hall in the middle of nowhere and be capable of playing music streamed from my smartphone, over bluetooth I imagine, and loud enough to work at such an event. In an ideal world, if I could buy two such devices and have them stream together so that I can have the same music playing in two separate rooms, that'd be quite handy. Maybe synced over wi-fi? Now, my (vague) question is - are there any open standards I should be looking for in this area of audio streaming / hi-fi? Is there any device which will provide the above and also things like internet radio functionality (maybe even DAB+?). I'm not looking for a full-on surround sound system, and I don't want to be locked into proprietary technology - I want something which will play nicely with my rooted OmniROM smartphone and, if I ever get round to building one, a Linux-based media server. I don't yet have a NAS setup, but I'm in the market for one of those eventually. I'd like to be able to play stuff from the NAS when I get that setup, so what sort of things should I be considering from the speaker side and also the NAS side? I've heard of DLNA but not done much reading around on it yet. I've also heard of Sonus and the (arguably defunct?) Squeezebox as decent proprietary options but not sure they quite fit my requirements? Has there been any open technologies in this area I should look for? Or, as I'm beginning to suspect, should I be looking at something which doesn't have much intelligence in and is basically just a big wi-fi & bluetooth speaker. I fully intend to do some proper reading around, but I was Interested in anyone's general opinions of things to look for and to give me some pointers to decent buzzwords / protocols that might be worth googling. I thought it might be a topic of interest to others too. Cheers in advance for any help! Peter. -- I am aiming to run the London Marathon 2015 in aid of the PSP Association. All sponsorship gratefully received. :) http://www.bagshot-row.org/marathonformum

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Ubuntu 14.04 LTS get auto/clean auto/remove
by Richard McLellan 18 Mar '15

18 Mar '15

I'm still having issues with this. Sometimes these actions do clear out /root but most times they don't. Is there a way to automate and clear out /root and what am I missing? Should I do these actions before starting any browsers? Cheers Richard

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SSD upgrades
by Mark Rogers 18 Mar '15

18 Mar '15

I'm considering SSD upgrades to my desktop and/or laptop, likely starting with my desktop. I generally need a decent capacity on my desktop so that will be traditional storage, but I want the boot device to be SSD. I know almost nothing about SSD so I'd like some advice. I'm looking at (eg) Crucial MX100 SATA 512GB (~£140), but I could go up to Samsung Evo 850 for an extra £40. (Or maybe 256GB would be enough and I'd benefit more from spending my money upgrading multiple machines?) What I want to achieve is (a) O/S boots and runs from SSH, so loading apps etc is faster, (b) any swap space is on SSD, (c) and temp space (including browser caches etc) is on SSD, and (d) (it would be nice if) anything else on slower storage could be cached on SSD.[1] Getting fast storage is great if my hardware can make good use of it. So how do I find out whether my Linux boxen will support transfer rates that make SSD worthwhile? If my motherboard can only give me 3Gbps, is it fair to assume that I will still see major improvements over traditional hard disks even if not the full benefit of the SSD? What other things should I know? Any tips? [1] My typical usage seems to be Firefox or Chrome open with 100+ tabs, maybe a couple of VirtualBox VMs open, maybe a few LibreOffice docs open. -- 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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