- main - earth.li

Firefox / Ubuntu Greyscale Weirdness
by Martin Collins 16 May '08

16 May '08

Hi, is anyone experiencing the same weird greyscale issue as I am? I don't know if it's Firefox 3.0b5 or Ubuntu 8.04 or Gnome 2.22.1 or Xorg or even my Nvidia drivers that are responsible, but whilst using Firefox it will momentarily (few seconds) lock-up and the Firefox window will turn greyscale (similar to when you click on System -> Quit). It is just the Firefox window because you can bring other still coloured windows to the front and then back again and Firefox is still greyscale? The greyscale will revert back to colour after two or three seconds, will unlock and will then be usable again. It's not a big problem but particularly weird and something I have never experienced before. I am starting to think that this might be a "feature"? I have googled around a bit and can find nothing much - I think I'm alone on this one!! Thanks all. Rgds, Martin

2 3

OU software compatibility
by Bev Nicolson 16 May '08

16 May '08

I'm about to start another OU course and have been sent a CD ROM which has some course info on it. I know some of you have studied with the OU before so I wondered if you knew what software they use for the video clips? I tried asking computing support but 'they don't support Linux...' <sigh.> (The plan was to find out then ask you lot about it.) Thanks. Bev. -- _______________________________________________ Surf the Web in a faster, safer and easier way: Download Opera 9 at http://www.opera.com Powered by Outblaze

4 3

Applet or dock app for birthdays/anniversaries wanted
by Chris G 15 May '08

15 May '08

I'm looking for a minimalist application that will display a list of upcoming events (e.g. birthdays, anniversaries, todos) in as compact a fashion as possible so I can park it permanently on my dekstop. I have found a couple of rather old applications that do something like what I'm after but one (wmbday) is a dock application (and I don't have a dock). The other (cstermin) is OK'ish but it's written in perl which is not my preferred language if I want to modify it. Here are some screenshots of the two of them to show the sort of thing I'm after:- http://buzzinhornetz.ath.cx/wmbday/screenshot.php http://cstermin.sourceforge.net/ Can anyone suggest anything more recent which can do the above sort of thing and/or some sort of development framework or libraries that would make writing such a thing easy? Ideally I'd like the data to be in iCalendar format but that's not vital really. -- Chris Green

2 2

cron problem, probably something to do with quoting, how to diagnose?
by Chris G 14 May '08

14 May '08

I have a couple of backups that run overnight which use rdiff-backup to send files to a remote system. The crontab (as shown by 'crontab -l') entry is as follows:- 25 03 * * * rdiff-backup --remote-schema 'ssh -C %s /home/isbd/bin/rdiff-backup --server' isbd(a)shell.gradwell.net::. /rdiffBackup/gradwell If I run the rdiff-backup from the command line (copy and paste the above excluding the '25 03 * * * ' then it runs perfectly without errors. However the cron job is failing and sending me the following mail:- /bin/sh: -c: line 0: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `'' /bin/sh: -c: line 1: syntax error: unexpected end of file So what's going wrong? It's almost as if the line is too long for cron but it's not *that* long. I have checked thoroughly that it really *is* one line. How can I diagnose what's going wrong? Other entries in the same crontab are working OK. -- Chris Green

2 2

Silly regular expressions!
by Mark Rogers 14 May '08

14 May '08

I have some legacy code which uses "[[:punct:]]+" in a regular expression replace (using PHP's ereg_replace) to remove all punctuation chars. Eg: ereg_replace('[[:punct:]]+', 'test1-2,3.4:5', '') returns 'test12345' What I want to do is remove all punctuation except "-", ie to get the result "test1-2345". I can't currently think of a regex that will do it, other than [^\.,:]+ where I list all punctuation except - between the square brackets, but that would be a nightmare to create and maintain. Is there a way to invert [:punct:] somehow so that [^-[:inverted-punct:]]+ would work? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

1 1

Alsa Gain levels
by Wayne Stallwood 13 May '08

13 May '08

Is it just me or is ALSA a little bit pessimistic about maximum gain levels for inputs and outputs. Of a sample of 3 machines (old desktop with a SB Audigy, New desktop with Intel HDA and my Fuji laptop) none of them seem capable of getting the volume out of their speakers that they were capable of in Windows. Also I am having trouble getting any of them to work with a selection of passive (and in one case a USB) microphone at anything like the input gain I need to use them with things such as skype. Is there any way to tweak the input/output gain of my soundcard beyond the limits of the mixer sliders in alsamixer ? My USB Mic is a particular problem as I can just about live with the maximum output volume. But the USB mic is part of a USB camera and with the gain at maximum I can just about be heard with everything set to max if I speak directly into the mic/camera but with it mounted where it needs to be on top of my screen I am barely audible unless I shout. Not that I think it is device specific as it seems to affect even the analogue microphone inputs but my webcam/mic combo is ID 0c45:62c0 Microdia

3 2

Silly sudoer: Lost fstab - help!
by Mark Rogers 12 May '08

12 May '08

I just carelessly overwrote my /etc/fstab file with the following: echo /dev/md0 /storage ext3 defaults 0 1 | sudo tee /etc/fstab .. when I meant: echo /dev/md0 /storage ext3 defaults 0 1 | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab (-a means append) Any suggestions for recovery? This is a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.04 Server, so worst case I will have to reinstall the O/S but I'd like to recover if possible, not least so I know how to do it next time I am silly! [Feeling very foolish right now...] -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

6 13

How to get rid of the dreaded "Stale NFS File Handle"
by Chris G 09 May '08

09 May '08

If my 'NAS' system in the garage gets powered down and then up again the NFS mounted directories on my desktop system (not surprisingly) stop working and give the message "Stale NFS File Handle". The problem isn't so much the error but how to get rid of it. I.e. how do I tell my desktop system to throw away the old NFS connections it had to the system in the garage and start again? I just tried:- umount --force /nas/backup mount /nas/backup and it just says "mount.nfs: Stale NFS file handle". What's "left behind" in the client system that causes this? It can't be at the garage end because that has powered down and rebooted. There must surely be *something* I can remove or kill to get rid of all memory of the old NFS connection in the client. -- Chris Green

2 2

mencoder and AVI options
by Mark Rogers 08 May '08

08 May '08

I have a .MOV (Quicktime) file I want to convert to an AVI, because I need to read it into some software which only handles AVI files. The movie is only a few seconds, and monochrome without sound, and at present is 1MB in size. I'm not too worried about filesize, although if I convert to a raw (uncompressed) video file it comes out to about 350MB, which isn't good. So far, I have found: mencoder -ovc xvid -xvidencopts fixed_quant=4 test.mov -o test.avi .. to be pretty good. Now, what I'm trying to achieve is to get the file into a format which (a) is as close as possible to the original (ie little loss of quality, not that the original is high quality anyway), and (b) likely to work on a different PC (Linux or Windows) with minimal codec issues. Are there any "standard" video formats I can rely on? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

2 4

Backup solutions wanted
by Chris G 07 May '08

07 May '08

I currently use a mix of rsync and rdiff-backup to backup my home system. The basic backup is an rdiff-backup of all of /home to the NAS server in the garage. *However* (and it's a big however) this has one huge hole in it, rdiff-backup does *not* copy the 'contents' of symbolic links. All it does (if you tell it to) is to copy the symbolic link leaving it on the resulting backup as a symbolic link which points at nothing. This is all very well if you live in a perfect world where all of your system resides in one neat partition etc. but my home directory has symbolic links to old (and not so old) data on other filesystems and partitions. Thus rdiff-backup doesn't back these up. I'm looking around for something like rdiff-backup that does incremental backups but *also* copies *everything* that is part of /home/chris whether it's via a symbolic link or not. Can anyone recommend anything? -- Chris Green

4 8

[ALUG Announce] 2nd Thurs Pub Meet 8th May
by Richard Lewis 07 May '08

07 May '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 * Thursday 8th May * 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. I intend to be there from about 20:00. Others may be there earlier. We should have a table reserved at the back of the pub just to the left of the bar. We look forward to seeing you there. Cheers, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +-------------------------------------------------------+ |Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.| |http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html | +-------------------------------------------------------+ ----- 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

upgrading to 8.04lts
by Barrys linux mail 02 May '08

02 May '08

Hi just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 from 7.10 all seems ok thanks for your help. since this version seems to be supported for 3 years it will last the life of this laptop.

1 0

Re: [ALUG] OT: Recovery of data from dead HDDs in RAID array
by Mark Rogers 02 May '08

02 May '08

Robert Tillyard wrote: > [...]I was annoyed that we had already supplied them with enough > information for them to know they couldn't help and yet they still > asked us the send the disk and charged us for the work (if any). Thanks for the heads-up on that. I'll keep an eye out for that kind of thing. How long ago was it? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

2 1

Ubuntu upgrade
by Barrys linux mail 02 May '08

02 May '08

Hi I am thinking of upgrading from 7.10 to 8.04 Lts, but not sure if it will work on my laptop which has 380 meg memory and Pent 3 processor, also when I upgraded from 7.06 to 7.10 it lost all the wireless wep settings. How do I avoid this this time if I upgrade? Has anyone upgraded yet? Also see that new version better with utube video, which seems to broken on my system know even though it did work. something to do with Adobe flash ! Barry

8 10

Re: [ALUG] OT: laptop repairer near Ipswich?
by Dave Cooper 30 Apr '08

30 Apr '08

Thanks Wayne, that'll be great. I think this laptop's been lying around in an 'apparently dead' state for a month so there's no enormous urgency. I'll pass this on to Andy this evening and he'll bring the machine along. thanks again, Dave Cooper Wayne Stallwood wrote: > Hello Dave, > > We take in laptops for repair on a no success no fee basis and also have > access to HP service info and spares. At the moment the workshop is > pretty full so I can't promise a great turnaround time but we would do > what we can to get a quote to him ASAP. > > We have an office in Stowmarket so I am sure we can arrange something > regarding getting it dropped off..Give your friend my office email > address and I can arrange with him direct. > > wayne(a)crimsontechnology.com > > Kind regards > Wayne > > >

1 0

OT: Recovery of data from dead HDDs in RAID array
by Mark Rogers 30 Apr '08

30 Apr '08

Hopefully someone here will have some recommendations.. I have a customer with a Dell server, 4 disks in a RAID5 array, with 2 "dead" disks (I believe they have suffered hardware failures). As they have no backups and need the data (doh!) they've asked me for advice. As far as I am concerned it's a specialist job, but my experience of specialists is that I'd rather go by recommendation than random website claims of competence. So does anyone here have any recommendations? If they were my own disks I'd have a play with some Linux data recovery tools, but they're not so I had better not! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

2 2

Re: [ALUG] [Fwd: Re: OT: laptop repairer near Ipswich?]
by Dave Cooper 29 Apr '08

29 Apr '08

Yes Andy, and they understand about email addresses as well! Sorry, everyone! Thank you, Keith! Dave Andy Turner wrote: > > Hi Dave - gosh they speak a different language don't they? I presume he > is saying its not economic to repair? I'll bring it tomorrow anyway. > > Attached are the pics we took at Medemblik and a brief report of the > event. See you tomorrow at Wells SC 7pm. > > Andy > > > > Dave Cooper wrote: >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >> Subject: >> Re: [ALUG] OT: laptop repairer near Ipswich? >> From: >> <keith.jamieson(a)bt.com> >> Date: >> Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:31:54 +0100 >> To: >> <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> >> >> To: >> <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> >> >> >> Dave >> >> I had a friend who had the same on their Christmas Present, a Melidon >> (SP?) which I put the disk into their sisters laptop and pulled off his >> info before they took it back under warrantee. If they don't have their >> info off the disk then I have had success using an external USB 2.5" >> disk caddy to copy off other laptop info. >> >> Can you get into the BIOS ok? Will it boot of a CD ? This will eliminate >> some issues, ie memory and cpu >> >> I would volunteer but I'm very busy ATM and with older laptops its not >> economically viable to repair them. I know its only 2 years old in this >> instance. >> >> Regards >> >> Keith >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> main(a)lists.alug.org.uk >> http://www.alug.org.uk/ >> http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main >> Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above! >> >> > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >

1 0

OT: laptop repairer near Ipswich?
by Dave Cooper 29 Apr '08

29 Apr '08

Hi, sorry this is off-topic, but I wonder if any of you Ipswichers can recommend anyone to fix a laptop in the your area? A friend has a 2 year old Hewlett Packard that starts to boot when it's switched on and then just powers down again. He was talking about taking it to PC W*rld, so he definitely needs our help! Thanks, Dave Cooper

2 1

re blue tooth
by Barrys linux mail 28 Apr '08

28 Apr '08

Hi just a line to say thanks for the help with blue tooth,i downloaded a blue tooth file transfer program and now i can get the photos from my phone to the computer. thanks again. Barry

1 0

Perl problems
by Ruth Bygrave 28 Apr '08

28 Apr '08

Am trying to install some Perl modules for creating/modifying mobipocket files. Perl version returns 5.8.8, which is apparently correct. On trying any install package I get perfectly correct ftp &c messages from CPAN, followed by a failed make with no explanation. The following is the final set of messages from the Palm::PDB package: "WARNING: LICENSE is not a known parameter. Checking if your kit is complete... Looks good 'LICENSE' is not a known MakeMaker parameter name. Writing Makefile for Palm -- NOT OK Running make test Can't test without successful make Running make install make had returned bad status, install seems impossible" so it apparently happens perfectly correctly up to the make pass, which chokes it. Regards, Ruth

3 3

For Sale: Blackmagic Decklink PCI SD
by Richard Bensley 26 Apr '08

26 Apr '08

Hey All I am gutting one of my G5's and I have this decklink card going spare. Great for any Final Cut users who want to start using hardware based keying, ripping from things like digidecks or just for the sake of haivng access to fast affordable 10bit uncrompressed footage. This however does NOT include the breakout cables as I bought two of these originally OEM and I only bought one set of cables. This card barely saw, I only used it go gain access to the features it was providing on my main machine. This is PCI, not PCIe or PCI-X. I don't know if it will work n a G4 chassis. I am looking to get £80 including delivery. Or £70 with pickup, I live about 15 miles outside Norwich in Loddon. Email me or call me (number in signature). For a connection diagram see page 27 of this pdf manual: http://www.blackmagic-design.com/downloads/manuals/decklinkmacmanual.pdf For a wee piccy see here: http://www.creativevideo.co.uk/public/product_images/18_08_2005blackmagic_d… Cheers Rich -- Richard Charles Bensley richardbensley(a)gmail.com http://www.richardbensley.co.uk 07846466530

1 0

Does anyone have any use for "thin ethernet" hardware?
by Chris G 25 Apr '08

25 Apr '08

I have quite a lot of old "thin ethernet" computer networking hardware, e.g.:- Lots of 50 ohm coaxial cable (originally 100 meters, but in pieces now, some quite long pieces though) Lots of 50 ohm BNC connectors, T pieces, terminators, etc. One or two PC network cards with BNC connectors. An Axis print server with BNC connector. A hub with a BNC connector (and RJ45 connectors). Free to a good home if anyone wants it, I'm near Ipswich, might be able to deliver in the area. -- Chris Green

1 0

Re: [ALUG] Curiosity Collective Ipswich Exhibit Tomorrow
by samwise 25 Apr '08

25 Apr '08

On 25/04/2008, Simon Elliott <alug(a)sionide.net> wrote: > samwise wrote: > > They have re-imagined > > semaphore for the 21st Century, music made with Nintendo GameBoys > > > > Different artist but sounds a lot like what Bitshifter does... > > http://www.last.fm/music/bitshifter Yes, the guy doing the game boy music under the Curiosity Collective banner this week is Pixelh8 who has collaborated with a number of ppl doing similar work online ... Peter.

1 0

Curiosity Collective Ipswich Exhibit Tomorrow
by samwise 25 Apr '08

25 Apr '08

Hi, I don't know if anyone is interested, but the Curiosity Collective that we've discussed at the Ipswich meets a few times is coming up to the last day of their exhibit. They are a local technological arts group who have set up in St. Mary's on the Quay church, on Key Street in Ipswich. They're in there all-day tomorrow, and have some really cool exhibits - I've been to one of their preview meetings. They have re-imagined semaphore for the 21st Century, music made with Nintendo GameBoys, mysterious hybrid-portrait-photographs and interactive-kaleidoscopic-video! http://curiositycollective.org/ Anyway, if you've not got anything on, I reckon it's well worth a walk down if you're around Ipswich town centre. Peter.

2 1

PostPost problem with PlanetPlanet
by Ben Francis 24 Apr '08

24 Apr '08

I've been wondering (probably for years now). Why do all my blog posts get repeated twice in Planet ALUG? The RSS feed looks OK. Ben -- Ben Francis http://tola.me.uk

3 3