October 2018 - main

Reformatting a PDF
by Mark Rogers 03 Jun '19

03 Jun '19

On the Royal Mail website is a "handy" price guide available as a PDF: http://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-20… It's only actually "handy" if you have a weird printer (or at least very unusual sized paper). I'm not sure what size/shape you'd call it but it would go into a DL envelope without folding... What I'd like to do is split the individual pages out and merge them to get three (maybe four) "pages" per A4 sheet so that I can print it on my very normal A4 printer. Suggestions? This is an annual headache and I'm fed up with a different manual solution every year. -- 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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Is there a way for an ssh connection to allow the server to send a file to the client?
by Chris Green 02 Nov '18

02 Nov '18

I am looking for a way that will allow my ssh 'server' machine (desktop running xubuntu 18.04 at home) to send a file back to the client machine (laptop running xubuntu 18.04 which may be anywhere including behind a firewall etc. and behind NAT). I need the server machine to be able to do this from a script running on the server at some indeterminate time after the ssh connection has been made. The only remotely possible way I can think of to do this is to run something via the 'LocalCommand' option in the client ssh configuration. However, at the moment, that's about as far as I can get. I can't think of a way of actually doing it at the moment. The best I can come up with is to have a script (run as a LocalCommand) that uses sshfs to mount a server directory on the client. Then a server script can simply copy a file to the mounted directory and it will be visible on the client. Job done..., or not. There are problems with this however. Firstly as I often have several ssh connections running at the same time there needs to be some way to prevent the LocalCommand running multiple sshfs instances. This isn't too bad to overcome but the second issue is how to pull down the sshfs connection when the last ssh exits, at present I can't see any way to do this, there isn't the equivalent of LocalCommand which runs when a connection is about to be closed. Does anyone have any ideas which might help? -- Chris Green

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Pdf measuring tools
by Bev Nicolson 31 Oct '18

31 Oct '18

I don't have Flash installed so I'm not able to 'measure' Adobe documents and it turns out this could be useful in some circumstances. Does anyone know of a Linux tool one could uses for this? Bev.

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Strange apache permission problem, can access anywhere *except* /tmp
by Chris Green 30 Oct '18

30 Oct '18

I want to put some temporary html files in /tmp (well, a sub-directory of /tmp) and view them using apache2. I always get permission denied and it seems as if apache2 refuses to access any files in /tmp. I have a very simple apache2 set up with the root set to /srv with an entry as follows:- <Directory /srv/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory> I add symlinks to /srv to get access to files around the system, it works for every directory I've tried (even including such places as /etc) but *not* for /tmp. (I've removed all the odd symlinks again of course!) What's so special about /tmp? I've searched for references to tmp in the apache configuration but there's nothing there. Can anyone suggest what the issue is? Alternatively where can I put a file that will get cleaned out periodically (like /tmp at reboot)? -- Chris Green

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 2nd November.
by Viperfang 30 Oct '18

30 Oct '18

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

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Evince
by Bev Nicolson 25 Oct '18

25 Oct '18

Now, I have googled and I understand Evince/Document Viewer crashing is not news. But how come it only does this with one document for me? Opens it, loads, crashes. Okular has been downloaded, btw. I'm asking this because I’m puzzled. Bev

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Re: [ALUG] Batch formatting documents in LibreOffice? (Phil Thane)
by mark fernandes 16 Oct '18

16 Oct '18

Would headless mode Libreoffice get you closer to your goal? https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Starting_the_Software_With_Parameters HTH, Mark

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Batch formatting documents in LibreOffice?
by Phil Thane 15 Oct '18

15 Oct '18

Hello Lugs, Like a fool I volunteered to edit the Great Ouse Boating Association magazine (GOBA News). Obviously I use LO on Linux so maybe someone can help. I get a lot texts sent in from members and others, mostly done on MS Word, various versions, different defaults and different user preferences in evidence. I change the lot as I edit them to my preferred font and remove all the odd line spaces, paragraph indents, justification and so on. It's a bit of a pain. Then I send them to another member who proof reads them, using MS word, and puts all the justification back. Eventually I send the text files (as docx) plus photos etc to the designer. I know from my past experiences with DTP the simpler the input text the easier the designer's job so I'd like to help out by stripping most of the formatting. I don't really want to go to .txt because writers use italics and bold for emphasis and that would get lost. Does anyone know if it's possible to set up a set of rules in LibreOffice then apply them to a batch of files (typically 20-30)? Can't find anything helpful online. -- Phil

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OT: SSD vs SD
by Mark Rogers 12 Oct '18

12 Oct '18

You can buy SD to SATA converters that will take up to 10 micro SD cards and turn them into a "hard drive" (2.5" form factor, SATA connector). In principle you could put 4x128GB SD cards in and get 512GB for about £100 using Samsung or Sandisk cards (Or 1TB for £200, 1.5TB for £300.) Cost wise that makes them a good percentage cheaper than equivalent capacity SSD drives. How would this compare aside from cost? Is it performance that would be a win for the SSD, or reliability (or both)? (I'm looking at this for a Ubuntu desktop but I don't think that justifies claiming it is on topic.) In part I'm looking at it as a way to re-use SD cards that I have floating around but I'm not sure if it's worth the effort. At least for the ones I have looked at the total capacity will be (smallest card) * (number of cards) so if you have a mix of card sizes it doesn't work very well. -- 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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VNC recommendations wanted please
by Chris Green 08 Oct '18

08 Oct '18

I'm thinking of using VNC to remotely access a couple of GUI applications running on my home desktop machine. Both my home desktop and the remote client machine are running xubuntu 18.04. I don't need a full desktop so a simple GUi just giving the ability to run programs is all I need. I *may* sometimes run over slow links so good link efficiency would be helpful. ... and finally it would be nice if it could use ssh for the link. So what would people recommend, preferably from the Ubuntu repositories for server and client? -- Chris Green

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