- main - earth.li

29 Dec '08

All My wife has chuntered at me to clear out some of what she likes to call "junk" from my study - so I have gathered together sundry bits and pieces which may (or may not) be of use to someone else. The list is below. I can't be bothered with umpteen ebay bids and I'd really like it all to go as one job lot. I'm offering the lot here first because I guess some of you may actually have a use it. Sixty quid for the lot seems reasonable to me. If someone takes it all and then decides to offload some bits elsewhere, that's fine by me. But I really don't want to get into bids for individual bits. The idea is to get shot of it all. Cheers - and a happy new year to all Mick ------------------- <list> 1. Compaq Armada 4160T laptop (80Mb RAM, 6 Gig hard disk) - this dates from around 96 or 97 but still works. I have used it as an IPCOP firewall (and it comes with two PCMCIA ethernet cards if anyone wants to do this again). It currently has a clean new install of Debian Lenny. Oh, and a "laptop bag" to go with it. 2. Two of 2Gig 2.5" laptop hard drives. 3. 5.1 PCI sound card 4. AGP Video card - I think it is a 128Mb Radeon Sapphire. 5. BT Voyager 200 ADSL router 6. Maxtor 60 Gig 3.5" ATA hard disk 7. Dell latitude external floppy drive 8. Freecom Classic 80 Gig external USB disk 9. Two port Newlink PS2 KVM switch 10. Two port Sitecom USB KVM switch 11. Four port Aten PS2 KVM switch 12. Zoom X5V VOIP ADSL router (this is actually quite a good router - particularly if you want to use VOIP) 13. Two (yes, 2) BT Home Hubs - both reflashed to run Thomson 7G images - because BT pissed me off and I didn't like what they had done to the routers. I have the original images though if you want to flash them back to the crippled version. 14. Belkin PCI wireless card - 802.11g 15. One Microsoft USB fingerprint reader (it was freebie from MS - honest!) ------------- </list> --------------------------------------------------------------------- The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this? Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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A good brand of USB stick?
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 29 Dec '08

29 Dec '08

Hi Folks, Sorry for possibly irritating cross-posting! Fairly recently, on one of the Linux lists I read, someone (or more than one) made suggestions about good brands of USB sticks, with particular reference to lifetime under repeated cycles of writing, and general reliability. Unfortunately, I can't now find that discussion in my archives, and I've forgotten where I read it! Hence my shouting from the rooftops. Any suggestions and comments welcome. With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 27-Dec-08 Time: 23:59:24 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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[FTAGH]Server Case
by Mephi 27 Dec '08

27 Dec '08

Free Server case, taker collects (its heavy) It has a redundant 300W PSU, fans and a caddy for SCSI drives. It was an impulse buy a while back but it never got used and now we need the space. I'm based near the middle of Ipswich. Anyone want it? Matt

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ubuntu and windows Master Boot Record
by Barry Chater 24 Dec '08

24 Dec '08

HI I wonder if you could give me some advice. I am adding a hard drive to my desktop, but since both master and slave connectors are used on the first ide socket on the motherboard. I intend to use the second socket on the motherboard for the new drive, to which i want to install Ubuntu 8.04. windows xp is installed on the hard drive on the other socket, with DVD writer on the slave. I take it that Ubuntu on the second socket will also be a master. I am wondering if Ubuntu will try and overwrite the XP master boot files when i install it. Has anybody had any problems like this. also will tha computer recognise the dualboot or do i have to alter the Bios settings. All the problems i have read about ubuntu overwriting the masterboot files seems to be when two operating systems are on the same hard drive. Am i correct in this? thanks in advance Barry Merry　Ｃｈｒｉｓｔｍａｓ　ｔｏ　ｙｏｕ　ａｌｌ

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"thumbnail"-type application
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 23 Dec '08

23 Dec '08

Hi Folks, I'm looking for an application (preferably light-weight) which sould do the following kind of thing. I have a good number of images (*.jpg) stored in sub-directories of sundry directories. The main directory names are rather generic (e.g. a regional location, or names of friends or family). The subdirectories are fairly specific and can descend to very spcific (e.g. a sub-sub-sub-directory with just a date, like "2007.03.05"). I'd like to be able to whistle up screenfuls of thumbnails, possible grouped thematically, with a property like being able to "hover" the mouse over a thumbnail and get a little pop-up with the date of the photo and a brief description. There's an implication, therefore, that there's a kind of basic database engine behind it, together with the "pop-up on hover" capacility. There's no shortage of applications capable of making a bunch of thumbnails (especially from a single directory), but I'm not aware of a light-weight application with the above capability. Gthumb does (clumsily) the sort of thing I'm after, so I could think of using it on machines with Gnome, but not, e.g. on KDE machines. Ideally, in a main directory I would do something like find . -name '*.jpg' -print > image.list edit the file image.list to remove uwanted stuff, and then submit this file to the thumbnail viewer. As an example of scale, one major directory has 4 principal subdirectories hanging off it, with sundry sub-dirs of these, and a total of 170 images. Another is similar, with 150 images. On could probably write something suitable in Tcl/Tk, butit would be nice to find one ready-made! Suggestions welcome. With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 09-Nov-08 Time: 09:07:15 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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finally BBC iplayer linux
by Albert Vilella 23 Dec '08

23 Dec '08

Hi everybody, As you may all know by now, we finally have a BBC iPlayer for Linux! I've tried it this afternoon, and started downloading stuff into my Ubuntu for my Christmas journey. Word of caution, the player will complain that you have reached the download limit very soon, unless you go to Settings and define a bigger "Hard disk space allocated". I haven't found any glitches or problems so far, apart from the fact that one cannot download stuff that is older than a given date. I wanted to get the full collection of "Stephen Fry in America" but I can only download the latest one. There is a "reporting participation" in the Settings that I am sure all the Linux users will leave ticked as to show how grateful are we of having a Linux version :-p Cheers, Albert.

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Wierd problem when creating new users, .profile and .bashrc not executing
by Chris G 22 Dec '08

22 Dec '08

I have something not right on my xubuntu 8.10 system. When I create new users using 'useradd <username> they are created OK but don't get a home directory. I'm sure the default used to be to create a home directory and to copy its contents from /etc/skel but it's not doing that. If I do 'useradd -m <username>' then I get the files copied from /etc/skel but they don't get executed on logging in to the new account. Even if I log in to the newly created user and try and execute the files I get a really odd error message:- $ . .profile .: 13: .profile: not found $ The file .profile does exist:- $ ls -al total 32 drwxr-xr-x 5 isbd isbd 4096 2008-12-21 20:23 . drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 2008-12-21 20:24 .. -rwxr-xr-x 1 isbd isbd 220 2008-05-12 19:49 .bash_logout -rwxr-xr-x 1 isbd isbd 3115 2008-05-12 19:49 .bashrc drwx------ 5 isbd isbd 4096 2008-12-19 20:13 Mail drwxr-xr-x 2 isbd isbd 4096 2008-12-19 20:11 .mutt drwxr-xr-x 25 isbd users 4096 2008-10-07 19:20 oldIsbd -rwxr-xr-x 1 isbd isbd 675 2008-05-12 19:49 .profile Erk! What have I done? :-) Existing users work fine. -- Chris Green

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Backups via samba share
by Mark Rogers 22 Dec '08

22 Dec '08

I'm sure this should be easy but I'm getting nowhere with Google... I've created a directory, /backup, which contains symlinks to a number of directories I want to backup across the network (eg /var/lib/mysql is symlinked into that dir). I need to create a samba share which provides read access to all files in that directory. So far I have: [backups] comment = Backups force group = root force user = root path = /backups writeable = no .. but the contents of the directories (like /var/lib/mysql) are not accessible. What am I doing wrong? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Camcorders (Linux friendly, of course)
by Steve Fosdick 21 Dec '08

21 Dec '08

Does anyone have any experience of or recommendation for a camcorder? For me the top priority would be able to make backup copies of the video without resorting to proprietary software, i.e. it would need to record on media that be directly read under Linux or use a communication protocol for which there is a Linux implementation. It would also be good if the video/audio codecs used by the camcorder had a Linux implementation, at least for decoding, so that I could edit the video if I want to or watch it on the PC. Of course, if I can not play the video under Linux I would also want some way to be able to transfer it back to the camcorder for watching on the TV should the need arise. TiA, Steve.

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HDD recovery
by Mark Rogers 19 Dec '08

19 Dec '08

I'm trying to recover data from a (Windows 2k) HDD belonging to my sister. I first tried with the drive in an IDE to USB adapter which wasn't recognised (the adapter was, the disk wasn't) which isn't good. So I'm now trying with the disk mounted in a PC. The BIOS can see the disk and correctly shows its manufacturer/serial/etc. I booted to an Ubuntu live CD and ran GParted, and it shows the disk as 18GB of unallocated space (which is the right capacity, although obviously I'd have prefered it to show an NTFS partition). fdisk cannot access the disk. I tried dd which gives a read/write error. The disk is spinning up OK and isn't noisy. Any suggestions? Professional data recovery could be considered but is probably too expensive. It's lost photos of my niece I'm trying to recover, amongst other things. Professional recovery is likely to be too expensive to justify unless it's under <£100 and I tend to assume anyone below that price isn't going to be doing anything I can't do myself with some Linux tools like scalpel, but if anyone knows otherwise I'd love to hear from you! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Understanding rsync
by Mark Rogers 19 Dec '08

19 Dec '08

I'm trying to sync a directory on my PC with a directory online, using the following command: rsync -avz `pwd` user@example.com:`pwd` In other words, sync the current local working directory with the same directory on the server. Before the sync, I have 12788 files locally and 11433 files remotely. After the sync, I still have the same number of files at each end. rsync is not giving me any errors so what am I missing? (If I expand `pwd` out to the full path I get the same results so that's not the problem. The path doesn't have any spaces.) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Gnome context menu integration
by Mark Rogers 19 Dec '08

19 Dec '08

I'm sure a suitable Google would help me here but I'm not sure what to search for; a few random attempts got me close but not close enough. I have to work a lot with XLS files which need converting to CSV files (using a tab separator). At the moment I do this using OOo which is overkill. I could do this from the commandline using htmldoc/xls2csv but that's not all that convenient in the GUI environment either. So what I would like to do is right-click the file in Nautilus and click a "convert to TSV" menu option that I set up to use xls2csv, taking blah.xls to create blah.csv. Where do I start? There's lots of similar stuff I'm used to from Windows (eg using the context menu to create/extract zip/etc files) although I wouldn't know how to do it on Windows either - I'd rely on the relevant apps setting that up for me. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Jaw-dropper ...
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 17 Dec '08

17 Dec '08

Hi Folks, The following received this morning from the Seattle Linux List. (Still trying to recover from temporomadibular dislocation ... ). Ted. -----FW: <e35fe88f0812102328tbb31ac9m521c25f92fee2b10(a)mail.gmail.com>----- Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:28:34 -0800 Sender: linux-list-bounces(a)lists2.linuxjournal.com From: Jerry Horvath <jerroldhorvath(a)gmail.com> To: Seattle Linux Users Group <linux-list(a)ssc.com> Subject: [SLL] What is taught to some Austin, Texas students "In an age where Windows and OS X reign supreme, it's no wonder that a local AISD middle school teacher became enraged after discovering one of her students distributing what she believed to be bootlegged copies of an operating system in class <http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/ignorant-teacher-linux-in-education.html>." *No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.* <http://austinist.com/2008/12/10/aisd_teacher_throws_fit_over_studen.php> Regards, Jerry Horvath --------------End of forwarded message------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 11-Dec-08 Time: 12:01:37 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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sshd configuration problem
by Chris G 16 Dec '08

16 Dec '08

By default I have sshd set up to disallow root logins, if I want to get to root from a remote login I login as myself (one password) and then su to root (another password). However I want to allow root login from one other system on the local LAN. To this end I added the following to the end of sshd_config:- PasswordAuthentication no AllowUsers root(a)192.168.1.7 However this, of course, prevents anyone logging in from anywhere except for root(a)192.168.1.7. How can I allow any non-root user from anywhere but root only from 192.168.1.7? -- Chris Green

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LAN addresses in /etc/hosts
by Chris G 12 Dec '08

12 Dec '08

Having got dnsmasq working somewhate better (thank you Brett!) I now need some advice on what to put in /etc/hosts on the machine that is running dnsmasq. The machine's name on the local LAN is "isbd", to the outside world it is known as "home.isbd.net". It has a static IP address on the local LAN of 192.168.1.4. "As built" ubuntu puts "isbd" in the /etc/hosts file as follows:- 127.0.1.1 isbd However I need dnsmasq to tell other machines on the LAN that "isbd" is 192.168.1.4. Do I just remove the above line and add:- 192.168.1.4 isbd Is the "127.0.1.1 isbd" only necessary when isbd's address is obtained using DHCP and thus not fixed so it needs to point at localhost? -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 12 Dec '08

12 Dec '08

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 next week (Monday 15th December) at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://pjmcginty.moonfruit.com/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich, not far from our old haunt - The Milestone. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Hopefully, it shouldn't be too hard to find the pack, look for those huddled around a laptop! Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. Hope to see you there, 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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I can't get dnsmasq to work at all, ideas please
by Chris G 12 Dec '08

12 Dec '08

I have installed dnsmasq on my xubuntu 8.10 system using the standard ubuntu apt-get which gives me version 2.45 of dnsmasq. It seems to have installed a reasonable default configuration and dnsmasq has been started up. However I can't get it to provide answers to any DNS requests. As I understand it dnsmasq should read the contents of /etc/hosts and give out local network IP addresses in response to DNS requests, only passing requests on the the external server(s) in /etc/resolv.conf if the address requested isn't a local one. I have dnsmasq running on 192.168.1.4 whose /etc/hosts has the following in it (after the standard default stuff):- # # # Local additions # 192.168.1.1 vigor 2820n 192.168.1.4 home.isbd.net isbd 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net chris.isbd.net 192.168.1.5 home 192.168.1.6 maxine 192.168.1.7 nas garage 192.168.1.44 hp7310 HPEDDBB7 HP000D9D068F7D 192.168.13.254 2wire BT2700HGV gateway.2wire.net I am attempting to use it from 192.168.1.7 which has no non-default additions to /etc/hosts and has the following in /etc/resolv.conf:- # Generated by NetworkManager 192.168.1.4 ... but if I do "host maxine" on 192.168.1.7 I just get:- ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached Sending signals to dnsmasq produces the expected responses in syslog so it is running and working, signal 1 reports "read /etc/hosts - 17 addresses". So it appears to have some addresses to respond with but the other systems on the LAN don't seem to be able to talk to it. Any ideas what might be wrong, or ways to diagnose it? -- Chris Green

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What FS might be on this CD?
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 12 Dec '08

12 Dec '08

Hi Folks, I have a CD which was burnt using Windows Media Player on Vista. It carries a couple of directories with many (mostly PDF) files. When accessed with Vista, its contents are visisble and the files can be accessed. However, Linux doesn't want to know! For example: # mount -t auto /dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 mount: block device /dev/hdc is write-protected, mounting read-only mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc, missing codepage or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so and # dmesg | tail hdc: media error (bad sector): error=0x30 { LastFailedSense=0x03 } ide: failed opcode was: unknown ATAPI device hdc: Error: Medium error -- (Sense key=0x03) Unrecovered read error -- (asc=0x11, ascq=0x00) The failed "Read 10" packet command was: "28 00 00 05 7c 80 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 " end_request: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 1438208 Buffer I/O error on device hdc, logical block 179776 UDF-fs: No fileset found Any ideas? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 10-Dec-08 Time: 23:17:09 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Re: [ALUG] What FS might be on this CD?
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 11 Dec '08

11 Dec '08

On 11-Dec-08 00:47:28, Ian Thompson-Bell wrote: > (Ted Harding) wrote: >> Hi Folks, >> I have a CD which was burnt using Windows Media Player on Vista. >> It carries a couple of directories with many (mostly PDF) files. >> >> When accessed with Vista, its contents are visisble and the files >> can be accessed. >> >> However, Linux doesn't want to know! > > I had this problem once before with A cd made by a friend with media > player under XP. It turned the disc had not be 'finalised' - I use the > term loosely - we put the disk back in the XP machine, ran media player > and did the finalizing and then linux could read it. > > HTH > Cheers > Ian I suspected that might be to root of the problem (given the error message). If so, though, how does one set about getting Windows (Vista) Media Player to "finalise" the disk as Ian describes? I can't find any option to get this to happen! (Sorry to bang on about such an unsavoury topic, but it's all for the sake of using Linux!) Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 11-Dec-08 Time: 09:16:33 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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power problem mandriva solved
by Peter Alcibiades 11 Dec '08

11 Dec '08

It turns out that disabling 'cool and quiet' fixes it, in case anyone else encounters it. At least, it does on this machine. Peter

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Some python behind my apache server is *incredibly* slow
by Chris G 10 Dec '08

10 Dec '08

I have some python scripts which convert reStructuredText to HTML 'on the fly' when xxxx.rst files are browsed. When I look at the pages locally performance is acceptable but I have just tried remotely (from work) and it takes several minutes to display a new xxxx.rst page. Normal HTML and other stuff are shown at normal speed, I have some quite complex PHP (which I didn't write) being served by the same apache server and it's fine. The same rst to html conversion works fine on the old server system and I haven't changed the code significantly, my code is only a wrapper around some standard Docutils stuff anyway. Can anyone suggest any reason for remote access to this being so incredibly slow? It's probably some dire misconfiguration somewhere but I don't know where to start looking really. -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] 2nd Thurs Pub Meet 11 December 2008
by David Reynolds 06 Dec '08

06 Dec '08

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Dear ALUG, The monthly second Thursday social meeting of ALUG will take place on 11 December 2008 at The Reindeer (10 Dereham Road, Norwich, NR2 4AY; tel. 01603 762223). It's very near the junction of Dereham Road and the Norwich inner ring road (Grapes Hill) and serves a selection of real ales, nice pub food (if you fancy going early to eat) and coffee. There are generally people there from 20:00 onwards and we tend to sit to the left of the main entrance. We look forward to seeing you there. Cheers, David -- David Reynolds david(a)reynoldsfamily.org.uk ----- 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

1 0

odd problem with poweroff on Mandriva
by Peter Alcibiades 05 Dec '08

05 Dec '08

Wonder if anyone has any ideas. I had an installation of Mandriva 2008 KDE which worked OK as far as powering off was concerned, but just now did a clean install of 2008.1 (leaving /home as it was). Worked fine means that both shutdown now -h resulted in power going off, and also using the kde off button did the same. Now, it seems to be impossible to powerdown from the keyboard. Previously either the KDE button or shutdown now -h closed the system down in an orderly way and did poweroff. Now, whatever you do, you end up with just a halted system and then have to use the on-off switch to poweroff. This applies either to shutdown now -h, and also to poweroff invoked as root. I can't see anything in the bios which has changed - I've disabled and then reenabled ACPI. In the kde control panel, anyone is enabled for powering the machine down. Its an Asus barebones with AMD processor, if it makes any difference. American Megatrends bios. Any ideas? Peter

1 0

Issue/Bug Tracking Systems
by Mark Rogers 03 Dec '08

03 Dec '08

I have just found out that a client is looking at bug/issue management systems, with the ones they've mentioned being Axosoft, Track Studio and Projector. (All but the latter are easy to find online, I've not found Projector's website). The client will be using them, I believe, to track maintenance and other issues on their site (ie not software bugs). Are there any good FOSS alternatives I should suggest to them or should I stay out of their way? I suspect that none of the off-the-shelf packages will do what they want and a FOSS option would make it easier to modify, but the other suggestion of building something from scratch will probably be a big uphill struggle unless it turns out they have very simple needs. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Latitude ON with ARM system-on-chip linux in Latitude 4200 and 4300
by Albert Vilella 03 Dec '08

03 Dec '08

Hi all, Does anybody know if the Latitude 4200 and Latitude 4300 models sold in UK already come with the Latitude ON feature based on the ARM chip? It seems that Dell has split this feature in "Latitude ON Reader" and "Latitude ON full", the second one being the special purpose ARM chip in a mini-PCIe in the laptop running Linux. Looks pretty cool to me and want to get one early next year, so I am asking if someone else has looked into it as well, http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/12/dell-announces-new-latitude-e-series/ Cheers, Albert.

1 0