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previous note on recovering from silly mistake
by Peter Alcibiades 18 Feb '08

18 Feb '08

By the way, this is the conclusion of the story. I had, you recall, somehow lost all the icons in kontact during a new install of Mandriva, and asked the list for help. They were putting up with it until I figured out what to do. So having got some wisdom here, or at least useful suggestions, I go in to visit last week, and discover it will not boot the default. Not only that, but there seem to be some extra boot options in grub. Who knows, maybe they did an update? Its hard to get a clear account. So I boot from the latest kernel version of the new options, and it starts fine. So just to check, I boot again from the default, and now that boots fine. Very odd. And guess what, all the icons have come back of their own accord! In another part of the wood, another Mandriva system, after system update it cannot start X. Then, same process as above, it can start X but only in 640 x 480 mode. The solution here turned out to be, use the xorg not the nvidia drivers, and all was fine again. I know, put them on Debian..... But the thing is, the Mandriva control centre is so easy for people to use. When it works. Oh well. Al

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3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Milestone, Woodbridge Road
by samwise 18 Feb '08

18 Feb '08

The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back tonight (Monday 18th February) at 20:00: The Milestone Beer House 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 252425 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+2EA The Milestone pub is in the centre of Ipswich, near the now-defunct Odeon cinema and not far from The Regent Theatre. There is more information on the venue, including car parking info, on the ALUG wiki: http://www.alug.org.uk/wiki/moin.cgi/Meetings 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.

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virtualbox display on win98
by Peter Alcibiades 18 Feb '08

18 Feb '08

Has anyone managed to get better than 640 x 480 out of virtual box display on Win98? I have gone through endless hassle just to get the thing working at all, which it now does, and it will even install the package I wanted. This was a saga incidentally which may be of interest. First you make a CD or ISO from your existing win98 installation, but using DR DOS as the image. Don't ask me why MSDOS doesn't work equally well, but it doesn't. At that point you can boot into DR DOS and unlike if you boot into MS Dos, you can copy the files over from the CD to drive C. The reason you have to do this is that in MSDOS you can run the install program, but not see the files on D. In DRDOS you can see the files but not run the install program! Unless you can figure out how to raise the max program size in DRDOS, but that was too much like archeology for me. So you boot from the CD with DRDOS, copy all the files to C, then switch to MSDOS boot from a different image, and run the install program, and some hours later you have a proper though rather slow Win98 install. However, it is tiny. Perfectly formed but tiny, and you cannot up the resolution. Well, not quite perfectly formed, networking doesn't work and the CD drive is invisible. But that would be OK, if I could only get the display to work acceptably. So next I tried to use Scitech Display Doctor 6.5 as recommended. Does not help in the least. Display Doctor 7 beta is no better, and in addition it doesn't come with a registration code. Getting this stuff onto drive C so you can install it is another saga - the only way I found was to put it onto the DRDOS install CD. Still, it does not actually work, contrary to what other people report. I am now trying to use kqemu, but that won't boot from the image in a way that lets me get to the install files. I can boot from it, then do fdisk, then format C. But then I can't see the install files on the CD or the image to copy them. What next? Is VMWare the only answer? Does that work in better than 640 x 480? All this is on a Mandriva 2008 box. I cannot get VB to run at all on Debian. Al

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ALUG Christmas Meal
by Steve 17 Feb '08

17 Feb '08

Morning list, Here's an email I entirely failed to send from my phone last night: --- I write from the Reindeer, mid pubmeet and also through my phone so do bear with me as the beer is with me. mChicago said: List up people! I am responsible. We've had three pints; we're going too far. Christmas 2006 was too long ago. We have two options: 1. Construct a time portal and travel back to celebrate this event or 2. Have it on the 2nd Thursday of March which is only four weeks' time. We have been offered a set menu - turkey dinner and christmas pudding or a vegetarian option - at the Reindeer by the head chef. Would everybody who's interested please email the list ASAP to say "TRUE" so I may inform the chef of the size of the part. This.Is.Serious. Enf of transmission. Happy Valentine's Day all. x x x With love, Steve --- So there you have it, christmas party plans must be instigated immediately. 13 March at the Reindeer. Set christmas menu. Win. Mildly hungover, Steve

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USB HID functions
by S.Jude＠uea.ac.uk 16 Feb '08

16 Feb '08

Hi, A friend of mine is after some help with coding USB HID functions. Does anybody have any knowledge of experience of Linux USB API functions and data structures? In particular they are after some example C/C++ code that talks to USB HID devices but are finding thorough and complete documentation hard to find. Any info would be much appreciated as they'd like to release some opensource software for their products. Simon

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Proper/Non-perveted social behaviour
by Richard Bensley 16 Feb '08

16 Feb '08

Does anyone else find Paul_C's lack of respect for women, disturbing? Had I noticed earlier he was taking several photos of my girlfriend without her knowledge I would have asked him about his camera sooner. However it is an act that is familiar with every young girl that turns up to an ALUG meeting to be subject to Paul_C's little photo session. This is not acceptable social behaviour, and if a member of staff at the pub or a police office had seen somebody acting in this voyeuristic manner he/she would have been asked to stop what they were doing and leave the premises. I am unsure what the legal premise is on this matter? But it is totally unacceptable in this situation, how can ALUG thrive in helping newer members if they become subject to such abuse? Needless to say my girlfriend is distressed about the matter, but I assured her I would take action in making this threat aware to all ALUG members about Paul_C's actions which I understand he has denied before, and may other members have a problem with. You wont be denying me punk. What's it to be Paul_C? Stand up like a man and explain yourself? Or cower like a typical pervert? Either way I find your presence and contribution to ALUG to be an insult if your porogative is other than that to help people instead of victimising and treating them as objects. Yours Faithfully Richard Bensley

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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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