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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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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 16 Mar '15

16 Mar '15

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 March, 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. -- 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 ----- 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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Alternative to Mencoder for Stop Motion Animation
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 09 Mar '15

09 Mar '15

I've been successfully using mencoder for my sprog who makes the occasional stop motion animation video thusly mencoder mf://*.JPG -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=2000 -fps 5 -o clip.avi mencoder isn't installed any more because its codebase is in a bit of a state. Does anyone have any experience of a similar simple command-line replacement? I've tried an animation suite program but it brings my tired old laptop to its knees and makes it run too hot, hence the command line request. I've googled but I still haven't found what I'm looking for.... Cheers Steve

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 12th March
by Viperfang 09 Mar '15

09 Mar '15

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 12th March at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- 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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Recovering data from a disk image
by Mark Rogers 05 Mar '15

05 Mar '15

I have a disk image taken around ten years ago. It has a .dsk file extension, which might be a clue to what I used to take the image but more likely is something I picked because it was a disk! I'm trying to recover data from it but none of my normal tools are recognising it. Eg: $ file myfile.dsk myfile.dks: data $ fdisk -l myfile.dsk Disk myfile.dsk: 39.7 GB, 39711651840 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4828 cylinders, total 77561820 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk myfile.dsk doesn't contain a valid partition table Testdisk isn't giving me any clear results (it can find an ext3 partition but doesn't seem then able to extract anything from it). I'm pretty sure this was a straight image from a physical disk (it could have been a virtual disk but it's 39GB so I doubt that). It's quite possible that the default geometry settings in tesdisk etc are wrong but short of random guesses I don't know what to try. I am confident my data is there; if I view the raw data I am able to find a lot of it (mostly scripts which are therefore in plain text). Not that this is a very easy way to extract data! Suggestions as to what I should do to recover data? If it helps, the first 4096 bytes are all zero (so there's no obvious file header). Mark -- 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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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 6th March.
by Viperfang 03 Mar '15

03 Mar '15

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

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Updating an old Ubuntu Server
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 27 Feb '15

27 Feb '15

Hi y'all. I have a Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS "Lucid". It was originally a server edition. One of the reasons I updated it haven't is because I don't like the Unity GUI. It's becoming apparent that I'm going to have to update soon, but I still don't want to use Unity. What I'd like to end up with is either xfce or perhaps cinamon as the desktop. (any other suggestions?) I'm wondering if this would work: uninstall the ubuntu-desktop package remove any obvious gnome desktop packages. command line update to a more recent verision of ubuntu (the most recent LTS?) then install either a package for xfce, or perhaps xubuntu-desktop package, or perhaps a cinamon package. Do people think this would work? I'm resisting doing a fresh install from scratch then restoring data, packages etc, because I've installed a lot of stuff over the years and tweaked all sorts of things, so I think it'd take me a long while to get it right. It's my server so I don't want to be without it for a long time. Any advice please? Regards Steve

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Asterisk revisited
by Mark Rogers 25 Feb '15

25 Feb '15

A couple of months ago I got Asterisk/FreePBX set up on a virtual machine, and it's been functioning fine but I haven't really made the most of it (lack of time). I look at it now and find it has various errors (files it can't write to etc) from the original install, it seems to work OK but I don't really feel it's set up correctly and I don't know what to do about it.[*] The problem I have with Asterisk that it's way too complex and made more so by the fact that I learn nothing about it in playing with the web interfaces. I am quite happy at the command prompt or editing text files so I am considering a default "apt-get install asterisk" on an Ubuntu box and adding the trunks and extensions manually. Before I do this, is this a crazy stupid idea that's doomed to failure? I don't want anything complex (a couple of trunks, a couple of extensions which will be Android phones with a SIP or IAX client, a bit of routing between them and voicemail). Alternatively: I have been looking at the Raspberry Pi Asterisk distros, and wondering whether I should run one of those at home (where I have a 100M Virgin line) with port forwarding to allow the Android phones to reach it (might have fun with routing when they're on the WLAN at home). Give up on learning anything about Asterisk but have something which (hopefully) will just work. [*] I set up two new VMs last night and tried different fresh CentOS+Asterisk installs following instructions to the letter and still got errors left right and centre. I don't want to install from source (maintenance headache), I just want distro packages that work (otherwise why are they there?) -- 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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