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Network connection at boot
by Barry Samuels 15 Feb '08

15 Feb '08

My MythTV box doesn't have a keyboard or monitor and could be moved between TV aerial points. It has two network cards so can connect via cable or wireless. Is there any way, at boot time, to get it to try the cable interface first and then, perhaps after a given time, to try the wireless interface and to keep trying both interfaces until it does find a connection? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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FW: Re: [SLL] Linux Roulette:
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 14 Feb '08

14 Feb '08

The following was just posted to the Seattle Linux List. I don't get it (either one). Can someone explain? Ted. -----FW: <20080214183909.GX3016@zen>----- Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:39:09 -0800 Sender: linux-list-bounces(a)lists2.linuxjournal.com From: Glenn Stone <technoshaman(a)liawol.org> To: linux-list(a)lists.linuxjournal.com Subject: Re: [SLL] Linux Roulette: On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 10:31:29AM -0800, Xeno Campanoli wrote: >!rm Took me a second to get that one. Yeah, that's shooting blind, for sure... Although one could say !rm:p to make sure... -- Glenn "Be sure you are right -- THEN GO AHEAD!" -- Davy Crockett, from his autobiography (1834) (caps his) --------------End of forwarded message------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 14-Feb-08 Time: 19:03:02 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Puppy and DSL
by Peter Alcibiades 14 Feb '08

14 Feb '08

Nothing against DSL, but its a curiousity, its an emergency disk. Its amazing and ingenious, but you'd not install it or use it as your main distro. Puppy is a possible main use everyday distro with an amazing quantity of stuff in it for the space and very fast on old hardware. These are both a lot smaller than DIY, Debian + Fluxbox + xfe.. But having thought long and hard about this for someone with quite a bit old hardware, it seems likely that the flexibility you get from the DIY Debian minimalist solution is worth a lot in terms of maintainability, and probably outweighs the extra disk space. I used to like Windowmaker a lot on old hardware, and it is fast, but its stuck in a bit of a timewarp, no faster than fluxbox, no easier to customize and not as attractive. Ion is quite nice if you are setting up an appliance. Its very fast indeed. Again, wouldn't want it every day, but if you're running only one app in a production environment, it might be worth looking at. Al

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Damn Small Linux v Puppy Linux
by member jessejazza 13 Feb '08

13 Feb '08

I was going to have a look at these two later today. Just wondering has anyone compared them and if so perhaps you'd be kind enough to give some feedback. james

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Re: [ALUG] Linux can't connect to the Internet
by CDW (Linux) 13 Feb '08

13 Feb '08

(Ted Harding) wrote: > On 19-Aug-07 18:17:50, CDW (Linux) wrote: >> (Ted Harding) wrote: >>> There's a lot of possibilities for this! >>> >>> One thing to look at is whether you have a default gateway set up >>> in Linux. If (as root) you enter the command >>> >>> route >>> >>> you should see somthing like >>> >>> Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface >>> 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 >>> 127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo >>> default 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 >>> >>> where the "192.168.1.1" should be replaced by the IP address of >>> your actual router. If you don't get a "default" line in the output >>> from "route" then nothing for outside will get to the router. >> I get the following :- >> Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface >> 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 10 0 0 eth0 >> 169.254.0.0 * 255.255.0.0 U 10 0 0 eth0 >> 127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo >> default 192.168.1.51 0.0.0.0 UG 10 0 0 eth0 >> >> Ah. I've just noticed that there's a 169.254.0.0 address in my list. >> That would appear to come from a DHCP config but I purposely didn't >> set that so would that be stopping it working? If so, how do I remove >> it? > > I don't think it matters. I get the same too (on a Red Hat 9 system) > without any DHCP going on. It's supposed, I think, to represent some > alternative network numbering, and as far as I know is simply a dummy. Thanks for that info. -- __ __| |_ __ __ .-----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |_______________________________________________|

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Radio interference
by Barry Samuels 12 Feb '08

12 Feb '08

My dedicated MythTV computer has now been removed from its cardboard box and has been put into a proper case. However when it's running it causes interference on medium wave on my wife's radio. Her own computer, which is nearer the same radio, does not cause any interference. What component could it be, in the MythTV box, which is causing this interference? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Browser (Firefox) Character Encoding detection
by Chris G 11 Feb '08

11 Feb '08

I'm sure I've been here before but I can't remember the answer (and the mailing list archives don't appear to be searchable). What are the rules that govern how a browser (Firefox in particular) decides on what Character Encoding to use? I'm viewing some pages which are on my home (Fedora 7) machine and thus are sent by apache 2.2 on that machine using Firefox here at work (version 2.0.0.5). The pages have the occasional accented character and pound sign in them so I need to get the Character Encoding right. Although Firefox is set to default to UTF-8 it's actually using ISO-8859-1 for the pages in question which doesn't work, my accented characters and pound signs are garbled. If I manually select UTF-8 in Firefox all is well. The page headers indicate the character set to be UTF-8, Firefox defaults to UTF-8 but obviously something is telling it otherwise, what? Is it some setting of apache that does it, if so can someone tell me what please. -- Chris Green

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Running X software as another user
by Barry Samuels 11 Feb '08

11 Feb '08

If I SSH into a remote machine and then su to another user how can I run programmes, as that user, under X without it complaining that it can't open the display? I want to run an application as the 'mythtv' user which is created when installing MythTV. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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[ALUG Announce] 2nd Thurs Pub Meet 14th Feb
by Richard Lewis 11 Feb '08

11 Feb '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 14th February * 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 - UEA, MUS PG http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ----- 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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Grabbing data written to unlinked file
by Dan Hatton 08 Feb '08

08 Feb '08

Dear All, I foolishly rm'd a file that a lengthy process still has open for writing (although it has yet to write any data.) That is, the output of lsof -p 26733 includes gnuplot 26733 dan 4w REG 253,0 0 6802530 /home/dan/Natural_Sciences/mushy/twentyfirstplot.dat (deleted) It would be really valuable to be able to save the data that process 26733 eventually writes to this file. Any ideas, please? -- Thanks, Dan Hatton

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Reverse Telnet connection
by Wayne Stallwood 08 Feb '08

08 Feb '08

I am looking for a way of getting a telnet connection to a device that will be connected to the internet via grps (and as such is not on a known address) The device end needs to be automated to the point that it can just be powered up. ie the "remote end" needs to call the client end Of course you can do the standard thing with netcat but that leaves me with the only security being the ip address the remote end contacts..security isn't a particular concern in this case but it would be nice to have a bit more than that. Also the netcat way doesn't seem to well equipped to handle interactive prompts (for example top fails) Is there a way of doing something similar but getting to a login prompt rather than a shell ? I am sure there would be a way of doing it with an ssh tunnel but I was trying to avoid this as bandwidth may be at a premium, also the remote end is a tiny 100MHZ ETRAX processor with only a tiny bit of flash. So I was worried that the ssh overhead may become a problem. Has anyone done anything similar or do they have any thoughts on a quick and easy way to accomplish this ?

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How to recover from something rather foolish
by Peter Alcibiades 06 Feb '08

06 Feb '08

I upgraded a machine (not alas my own) by doing a clean install of Mandriva 2008, KDE. As you do. All went well. However, I needed to move over the kdepim files, calendar, email, address book. And also the kjots files. So, I cleverly found them in the old /home directory, copied them, and then copied them into the appropriate places in the new /home directory. All went well except for one thing. All the icons in the menu bars of kmail, kjots, and even tellico, have become generic and identical. Not quite what the user had in mind. It is only this user. Other accounts work just fine. Any ideas on how to get them back to normal? Would you for instance copy the .kde folder from another user and try to import mail? Or would you rename the problem user, create another, and then do a more sensible kind of import of the files? And where do kde apps get their little menu icons from anyway? Al

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MythTV
by Barry Samuels 06 Feb '08

06 Feb '08

Has anyone on the list used MythTV particularly with the front-end running on one machine and the back-end on another? I have set up a low-end machine with a TV adapter to run MythTV on the assumption that I wouldn't need X running on the back-end machine but I find that the mythtv-setup programme is graphical! So I need to install a lot of X packages just to run the setup. I find that in selecting to install the Debian Testing MythTV-Backend package it installs other packages such as xterm and QT but NO xorg server packages. Very odd. I would have thought that X packages such as xterm would depend on xorg-xserver packages - but no. Has anyone else been in this situation? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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[Mostly OT] XForms
by Mark Rogers 06 Feb '08

06 Feb '08

Hopefully someone can give me a quick sanity check on this; I need to put a project together based on stuff I haven't done before and I want to avoid digging myself into a hole. I need a web-form based application (which will be run on a simple Linux server sat in an office accessible remotely via VPN, probably PHP based). Most of the time it will be used from PCs with direct or indirect access to that server, but sometimes (eg from a laptop with no Internet access) they'll need to fill in the form offline then submit it later. Often they'll need to do this many times between "uploads". I plan to use XForms for this, and either submit the form directly on completion or store the form data to an XML file if that is not possible. I need to be able to reload the data to edit it if necessary (eg to correct mistakes) and ideally I also need to be able to retrieve data from the XML files for basic manipulation through JavaScript (ie so I can create a printable version of the data again without access to the server). Aside from the lack of native support for XForms in any major browser (fixable through plugins), have I missed any major gotchas in this logic? I'm not after someone telling me how to do it (no complaints if they do :-), I'm happy to learn it to do it, I just need to pick a direction to go in pretty urgently and I don't want to invest too much time on an option that is plain wrong as there's a very short lead time on this project. There's an existing application comprising messy Excel documents that I want to wave bye-bye to asap, but one thing in its favour is that it works fine without server access and I can't lose that. NB: Most of what I know about XForms comes from here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xformsintro1/ -- 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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Touchpad question
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 06 Feb '08

06 Feb '08

Hi folks, I'm running Debian Etch on a laptop which has a touchpad where the right-hand edge does that "scroll-wheel" thingy. The problem is that, as I type, the ball of my right thumb tends to stroke that edge, often causing chaos in applications where the text-entry point can be moved around using the mouse (i.e. if that happens, suddenly I'm typing at the point where the mouse pointer happens to be lying around on the screen). It seems to be very sensitive. I'd like to turn it off, but don't know how. Any suggestions? And, by the way, as things are at present Debian is running in a VirtualBox which is running on Vista (a situation I intend to put right in due course); so the above problem may require a solution in Vista rather than in Debian. Thanks for any thoughts, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 05-Feb-08 Time: 15:01:12 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Debian books
by James Freer 06 Feb '08

06 Feb '08

Knowing that quite a number of you are Debian users i was wondering which of these books you'd recommend [or others!!]... i'm interested in a book that'll give system info rather than a manual on how to use OpenOffice on Debian as it were! http://www.amazon.co.uk/Debian-System-Concepts-Techniques/dp/1593270690/ref… http://www.amazon.co.uk/Learning-Debian-Linux-Bill-McCarty/dp/1565927052/re… thanks james __________________________________________________________ Sent from Yahoo! Mail - a smarter inbox http://uk.mail.yahoo.com

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hosts.allow syntax
by Jenny Hopkins 05 Feb '08

05 Feb '08

Hullo there, I've got ("have taken over") a hosts.allow file as below: ftp: ALL cvspserver: ALL svn: ALL sshd: ALL telnet: ALL ALL: <domain-we-allow>.co.uk ALL: LOCAL I don't understand why if the ALL keyword is called in the first half, aliases are then described in the second. Surely ALL means just that? What I want is for the cvspserver to be ALL and the others to be restricted to LOCAL and <domain-we-allow>.co.uk. No matter what I try with wildcard *, UNKNOWN, etc, the hosts.allow will only allow anonymous cvs log in with adding ALL:ALL at the bottom, which I don't want to do obviously. Sorry to not rtfm; I have done but it sort of went in one ear and out of the other leaving a puffy pink cloud in the middle. Thanks, Jenny

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Debian books
by James Freer 05 Feb '08

05 Feb '08

Knowing that quite a number of you are Debian users i was wondering which of these books you'd recommend [or others!!]... i'm interested in a book that'll give system info rather than a manual on how to use OpenOffice on Debian as it were! http://www.amazon.co.uk/Debian-System-Concepts-Techniques/dp/1593270690/ref… http://www.amazon.co.uk/Learning-Debian-Linux-Bill-McCarty/dp/1565927052/re… james

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Fwd: Anyone a BIOS/EEPROM burner please?
by Mark Rogers 04 Feb '08

04 Feb '08

One of my local LUG members has the following request, anyone here able to help? ------------ Good evening, As I failed to realize that today is "nothing works" day, I upgraded a Tyan Tiger MPX mainboard from BIOS 4.03 to 4.06 At least, that's what it said it did. Instead, it bricked the machine. I've taken the BIOS chip out, it's a 4mbit part by SST, 32pin square (9pin/7pin) 3.8mm PQFP. If anyone has the tools to write to it, please let me know. Regards, Tony V. P.S. Feel free to send this mail on. I realize that the person doing this will want to be compensated for their time. -- 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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su with user ID (not name)
by Mark Rogers 01 Feb '08

01 Feb '08

I'm trying to delete a load of files owned by previously existing users. In other words I then need to "su [username] -c 'rm -r [dirname]' where [username] matches the owner of the files. (I don't have root access to the server but do have the ability to su to any of the users I need to delete files for.) If I use "ls -l" I see the user names truncated to 8 chars, so I'm using "ls -ln" to see the numeric user ID of the files instead. However su doesn't work with numeric UID values. So either I need to find a way to get the fullname of the owner (I know stat will do this but I have a lot these to do and I can't see a good way to just get a list), or find a way to map the UID to a name for su, or some other workaround I haven't thought of. Suggestions? -- 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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Characters on screen wrong using SSH
by Barry Samuels 01 Feb '08

01 Feb '08

When I use SSH to log in to a remote machine and use something like Aptitude or MC on the remote machine some of the characters on the screen e.g IBM box characters appear as something else which makes the screen difficult to read. Is there a way to cure this? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Cambridge and East Anglia Python Users Group
by Richard Lewis 01 Feb '08

01 Feb '08

Dear ALUG, The Cambridge and East Anglian Python Users group will hold its fourth "first Tuesday" social meeting on Tuesday 5th February at the Carlton Arms (Carlton Way, Cambridge, CB4 2BY). People intend to arrive from around 20:00 and I will be going from Norwich by train if anyone would like to join me. Please feel free to contact me on- or off-list regarding this if you like. Cheers, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis - UEA, MUS PG http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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Backup servers (r)synchronised between sites
by Mark Rogers 31 Jan '08

31 Jan '08

I have two sites that are Internet connected via standard ADSL, and that want to have a simple backup server in each site that uses the other site to store an off-site redundant copy of the data. I plan a Linux server at each site, each with a small o/s drive and two pairs of large SATA drives using software RAID (one pair for each site). That combination should give a good idea of the budget available for this.... Forget hot-swap SCSI drives on hardware raid cards etc! I can easily see how I could rsync the first raid array on site A ("A:md0") across to B:md0, and B:md1 to A:md1. Where I need advice is picking the best backup approach for the users at each site to use to populate their respective backup storage in the first place. (Most of the users will of-course be using Windows, and should be treated as untrained monkeys for the sake of this project.) Given the bandwidth limited ADSL link between the two sites (but with high off-peak limits) I need a backup method which does not cause rsync to needlessly send unchanged data. If I used something like Cobian Backup to create incremental backups, although the disk space usage would be relatively small the periodic full backups will cause rsync to send full backups across the link even though 90% of the content of those backups will already have been synchronised previously. I've seen solutions that use hardlinks between identical files to provide rolling backups on Linux, but I need to support Windows. Any suggestions? -- 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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PDA to use with Linux?
by Jan T. Kim 30 Jan '08

30 Jan '08

Dear All, my Palm Tungsten is getting increasingly short of breath (battery life) and so I think of getting a successor. I'd like a handheld of some sort that * uses flash memory (i.e. permanent storage that survives battery outages) * interoperates with Linux (the Palm can be backed up and restored using pilot-xfer, but I've not found anything useful to work with the data in the *.pdb ("Palm Database") files) * is small (the Zaurus SL-C palmtops seem interesting to me in many ways, but I think they're just a bit too bulky for shirt pockets, and also, they're quite expensive) * provides a decent choice of software for contacts, diary keeping, and (ideally) an advanced "To Do" tool that understands dependency graphs and integrates with the diary Any recommendations / experiences / comments? Please let me know. Best regards, Jan -- +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ | email: jtk(a)cmp.uea.ac.uk | | WWW: http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/people/jtk | *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----*

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TV adapter
by Barry Samuels 29 Jan '08

29 Jan '08

I would like to get a Hauppauge WinTV Nova T 500 adapter which I understand works with Linux. That's the easy part. It would be very inconvenient to install it in my desktop because it would require a connection to a TV aerial socket and I don't have one near my desktop. My idea would be to assemble another computer using some spare parts that I have together with some parts that I would have to re-aquire. I say 're-aquire' because I would have had all the necessary parts if I hadn't given away a lot of them (CPUs, hard drives, RAM) to a local computer recycling charity a few months ago. Why is it that one does not have a use for these parts until they've gone? I'm assuming that if I assemble the said computer with the TV adapter in it (putting it near a TV aerial socket) and can connect wirelessly to my desktop then I could access the TV adapter from my desktop using something like MythTV. Would such a thing be possible? I would be looking at a minimal install of Linux on the new box with all the processing done on my desktop. This would assume that I could connect the two boxes using nothing more than a wireless adapter in each i.e. no router. My desktop has an on- board wireless adapter and I have two spare PCI adapters one of which I could use in the new box. Is it possible to get two wireless adapters to communicate in this way? Would that be fast enough to cope with the data from the TV adapter? What sort of specification for the new machine would be required? I have a Gigabyte GA-7ZXE mainboard which takes a Socket A Athlon (which I would have to aquire) and it takes PC-133 SDRam (which I would also have to aquire). What's the minimum RAM I would need? I would also need to aquire an IDE hard drive. What's the minimum size I could get away with? I wouldn't normally want to use a screen or keyboard after the machine has been setup - would that cause problems when booting? What else haven't I thought of? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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