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10369 discussions

cat docx files?
by Steve Mynott 22 Jan '21

22 Jan '21

For years I've used "catdoc" to cat old msword docs. Is there an equivalent command for docx? (I don't want to have to open libreoffice or whatever) -- Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com> cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5

4 7

Repairing/Copying Windows disk using Linux Tools - A bit OT
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 17 Jan '21

17 Jan '21

Greetings clever cloggses! Sprog's Windows laptop is occasionally saying "I have to reboot - disk error" "Check Disk" isn't really finding anything wrong. I used to be up to date with windows tools for fixing things, but now I'm out of date with Windows tools, though I'm up-to-date with Linux stuff. I'm wondering if likely that booting from Ultimate Boot CD and/or System Rescue CD and running fsck and proprietary disk check utilities (e.g. seagate's disk utility if the disk turns out to be a seagate) is a good idea. Is it possible to use DD to clone a windows hard disk, assuming the destination disk is bigger than the source. Once cloned, would the clone work as a bootable disk so I could swap out the damaged one and swap in the new one? Any advice appreciated. Anyone know a reputable computer fixer in the city? Thanks in advance. Steve

6 17

Are VPNs really this complex to install and use?
by Chris Green 14 Jan '21

14 Jan '21

I'm looking at ways of connecting a small Linux system (a Beaglebone Black, but a Raspberry Pi is near enough) on my boat in France which is headless and behind a NAT WiFi (or 3G/4G) server to my home desktop or laptop so I can 'talk' to it. Currently I have ssh reverse tunnels set up by outward connections from the remote Linux system that allow me to ssh into the system. This works OK except that the marina WiFi it uses is a 'captive portal' system where you have to open a web browser and it pops up a login screen where you enter name and password before it connects you to the internet. The connection, once made, stays up for several weeks but when it disconnects for any reason there's no easy way to reconnect automatically, has to be a human being to do it. So, I'm considering getting a 3G/4G USB dongle to connect via the mobile network so I don't have to jump through the marina's WiFi hoops. I can continue to do my reverse ssh tunnel connection but everyone I talk to about this says a VPN is the answer. However I'm having a hard time seeing how to get this installed and working without a huge amount of effort. For example wireguard is supposed to be a simpler, easier alternative to OpenVPN but take a look at:- https://www.wireguard.com/quickstart/ It's horrible! It's do-able, I can understand all the stages but it's just not nice. Similarly VPN tutorials are full of misinformation, take a look at this one:- https://thishosting.rocks/how-to-set-up-openvpn-on-ubuntu/ It's rubbish! ... and all the others I've looked at are either similarly wrong or more complex than the wireguard one. Is VPN *really* this difficult? If so I'll stay with my ssh approach. -- Chris Green

5 6

Unattended remote access - what ways are there to provide it?
by Chris Green 02 Jan '21

02 Jan '21

I have a Beaglebone Black (SBC like a Pi) on my boat in France that I want to be able to connect to using ssh, how can/should I do it? I have a number of possible solutions in mind but I won't give them here as that might prevent open and lateral thinking being applied. Speed is not an issue, a 2400 baud dial up connection would be sufficient. Security is not a big issue, there is no sensitive data on the Beaglebone Black. I guess it needs to be reasonably secure against misuse but thats all. It's inside the boat in a fairly secure marina so the hardware is safe enough. Cost is important, this isn't something I want to spend lots of money on. A solution costing £7/month seemed a bit expensive to me, I'm aiming at significantly less, one or two pounds a month is fine. The boat is moored in an urban environment, power is (fairly) freely available. When I visit the boat I have lots of time to do fairly complicated set-up if needed but once I've left it's totally inaccessible, it has to work totally unattended, there's no one to phone up and ask to 'press the reset' or similar. So, let your imaginations run wild and come up with some ideas! :-) -- Chris Green

3 6

Backuping up gnome desktop settings
by Steve Mynott 31 Dec '20

31 Dec '20

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 but with a customised desktop setup which is using gnome-session, the ubuntu dock and "move clock" extension (intended to fix the excesses of both Canonical and Gnome). I was quite happily running this on two systems but had to force power off on one because my screen wasn't responsive (screen res mode issues after running an emulator under wine). To my horror this broke many of my customisations, and I was unable to fix them via the Gnome Settings and Tweak Tool. I had to "rm ~/.config/dconf/user" in order to use Tweak Tool successfully which leads me to suspect that this (binary) file became corrupted. First Question: is it usual for this file to become corrupted? I can turn it into a human-readable form by "dconf dump /" it seems. Second Question: How can I regenerate the binary file "~/.config/dconf/user" from a copy of this dump? I don't want to manually do all the config if this happens again, and I'm unimpressed that gnome seems to lose its settings. -- Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com> cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5

5 9

email lunacy
by mick 30 Dec '20

30 Dec '20

Hi and Merry Christmas to all I am having a problem with my email server and would like some advice as to the best way forward. I have run my own SMTP server for about a decade now (beginning at bytemark, but now hosted with Hetzner - which /may/ be the problem). The server (at tap.rlogin.net) runs postfix and dovecot on debian 10 and uses a letsencrypt TLS certificate to transmit mail securely. The server has valid DKIM and SPF records and is not listed on any RBL at mxtoolbox.com. I have no problem sending email to any of the major email providers but recently I have had mail refused by two organisations. One is a small company which uses mimecast filters, the other is ntlworld.com (who use cloudmark). The rejections I receive are "hard" 550 refusals with messages referring to the respective filter mechanisms. I have, of course, contacted the companies using these filters and neither are interested in doing anything about it - they simply refer me to the respective filter providers. Here I enter the catch 22 world of email delivery in that I cannot send email to eiether cloudmark or mimecast - because they use their own products. This is a classic example of why RBLs are a bloody stupid idea, but hey. To make matters worse, the preferred feedback mechanism for both cloudmark and miimecast is via on-line feedback forms. Feedback to cloudmark vanishes into a black hole and I have never had a response from them. Mimecast's is even worse in that it doesn't actually work ("internal server error" would you believe). So I'm a bit stuck. I have resorted to sending email to them from a free GMX account I have, but I should not have to do that (and I still await replies anyway). So - I /believe/ (but have no proof) that the reason my mail server fails a "reputation test" is that it is on a network block used by many others, and which may include Tor servers for example. Certainly I have a Tor node on Hetzner (but on a different network block). It strikes me a simply lazy for any admin to block a whole range of addresses on the grounds that it /may/ contain problematic servers, but hey. admins can be lazy. The reason I am seeking advice here is that some of you also run email servers (or may have dome so in the past). Ideally I would like to continue to run my own server. I like the control and flexibility it gives me. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so in the face of the kind of opposition I see. I see only two options. 1. I find a new VPS provider which can guarantee that its network will not be blocked by lazy idiots and I move to them. or 2. I give up and move my email to a third party provider (such as Ionos) I am reluuctant to do 2 because apart from the loss of control, I would have to pay for each and every email address I use, and there are several, spread across (currently) four separate domains, there are often limits on the size of the emailboxes, or number of emails you can send, and there are also often limits even on the number of /aliases/ you can have. My current Hetzner server costs me less that three euros a month. I'd be willing to pay more (Bytemark used to cost me £12.00 a month) if I could be sure that I woudn't have to move again. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good VPS provider that would meet my requirements? If not, does anyone have a recommendation for a third party email provider that can accomodate multiple domains and email addresses without charging stupid amounts? Any and all advice gladly accepted. Best for the New Year Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 https://baldric.net/about-trivia ---------------------------------------------------------------------

3 10

Re: [ALUG] email lunacy
by Phil Ashby 25 Dec '20

25 Dec '20

On 24 Dec 2020 14:34:25 mick <mbm(a)rlogin.net> wrote: > Subject: [ALUG] email lunacy > ... > Does anyone have a recommendation > for a good VPS provider that would meet my requirements? If not, does > anyone have a recommendation for a third party email provider that > can accomodate multiple domains and email addresses without charging > stupid amounts? I operate a very similar setup (albeit with Exim not Postfix =), and have done so almost without incident for 20ish years. For the last 5 years I have hosted in Azure on a paid account with a fixed IP, who seem to be rather more trusted than the cheapest providers such as Hetzner. Prior to that I was sharing a physical machine hosted by Atomwide (small org), and I'm planning to switch back to an arrangement as described by Chris Green, hosting at home and using my ISP's relay, now that I have sufficient bandwidth locally (this was the only reason I had an external relay at all). It remains to be seen if they block outgoing mail for the various domains I support... testing TBD! Cheers, Phlash.

1 0

Exim4 filtering
by Jenny Hopkins 20 Dec '20

20 Dec '20

Hello, I'm trying to make a global version of the .forward file for exim4, instead of each user having their own. I want this to send messages flagged as spam straight to that users spam box. To do this, I need to extract the user part of the email address. I've found this helpful line: # echo "john(a)somewhere.com" | cut -d@ -f1 john but can't work out how to put it in a format that exim will like. if $h_to: blah then save /home/$home/Maildir/.spam add 1 to n0 endif That "blah" need to extract the name from the header and set it as $home. Any hints welcome! Thanks, Jenny

2 2

Ebay, Firefox and Linux?
by Phil Thane 26 Nov '20

26 Nov '20

Has anyone else come across this recently? I normally use FF but for the last couple of days the Ebay.co.uk website doesn't work properly, it just displays text and links, no images. I've did an online search and it appears to have happened to others in the past though I didn't see any recent examples. Various people suggested back in 2016 that it was OK on Chrome, so I installed Chromium and it does work on that, though it's a bit clunky, the images tear when scrolling. Does anyone know of any FF settings that might fix it? -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

3 2

Re: [ALUG] Ebay, Firefox and Linux? (Mike Montgomery)
by Mike Montgomery 25 Nov '20

25 Nov '20

Hi. This has happened to me before. Turned out to be a DNS issue. Try a different name server. hth. Mike On 25/11/20 12:00, main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk wrote: > Re: Ebay, Firefox and Linux? (Chris Green) >

1 0

Changing a laptop disk drive (with MS Windows as well as Linux on it)
by Chris Green 26 Oct '20

26 Oct '20

What's the easiest way to change the disk drive in a laptop? I want to change the drive in a Thinkpad from a 240Gb spinning disk to a 480Gb SSD, both are SATA drives. The laptop has only one SATA socket. Can I simply connect both drives to SATA interfaces on another system and (very carefully!) us dd to copy from the old disk to the new one? Will this copy the boot sectors, the windows partitions and everything correctly? I know I'll need to resize the partitions after doing this but the alternative of recreating all the partitions from scratch and then copying the contents of each (there are four partitions I think) seems rather messy. -- Chris Green

3 3

Why is anacron usually set up to only run checks from 07:00 to 23:00?
by Chris Green 24 Oct '20

24 Oct '20

I have a daily backup that is run by a script in /etc/cron.daily, this is thus controlled by anacron so that it gets run once a day even if the system isn't turned on all the time. I noticed that the backup gets run at about 07:30 and on checking how anacron is configured I notice that it only runs hourly from 07:00 through to 23:00. On modern systems this is configured by systemd (systemctl edit --full anacron.timer), on non-systemd systems there are other mechanisms but it still has the same configuration with anacron only being run from 07:00 to 23:00. Is there any reason that it's configured this way? In particular is there any downside to changing it to, say, 03:00 to 23:00? I can't really see any reason why one shouldn't schedule the anacron check *every* hour but maybe there is a reason for having an 8 hour gap. I want my backups run earlier so that there's less chance of me using the system when the backup is running so I have changed the systemd setting from "OnCalendar=*-*-* 07..23:30" to "OnCalendar=*-*-* 03..20:30". My systems are *mostly* turned on all the time but not absolutely always so anacron rather than cron is the best way to run the backups. -- Chris Green

2 2

Gnome character applet
by Bev Nicolson 10 Oct '20

10 Oct '20

A while ago I expressed some frustration that there wasn't a character applet with Mint [Tessa] that included fractions etc. (I know you can use unicode but I've never found that method works for me.) Well I found the Gnome version in Synaptic today but I can't work out how to use it. By this I mean, how to find it in a menu or see it when I right click the panel so I can add one to the panel. I think I have enabled everything I should, and restarted this laptop just in case but nada. I have had a look at the Mint forum. Bev.

1 2

Re: [ALUG] Spectacle file save failing
by Srdjan Todorovic 08 Oct '20

08 Oct '20

On Thu, 8 Oct 2020 at 14:12, Peter Berrie <peter.northerly(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Whatever this is, it survived both upgrade and dist-upgrade. I guess the next thing would be to try it in a VM. You might be able to try it out be creating a new user account - it will have the defaults for all the ~/.config/* files. I'm guessing you can still launch Dolphin fine and browse folder and open files that way? > Its not the end of the world, it is saving the files where they are supposed to go, so just not being able to trigger file opening from that particular menu isn't game over. But it seems very weird. This is very weird indeed. What version of Spectace? I have 19.04.3 Also, check out the 3rd post here: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=224&t=143366 You can see the full list of mimetype associations via: K > System Settings -> Applications -> File Associations -> and find inode/director to check that one. > You helped me once before with Sigil, which is working fine for me now, that was very much appreciated by the way. Oh, I have to admit, I don't remember that. I'm not all that active on ALUG these days (but still use Linux 100% at home :D ) Best regards, Srdjan

1 0

Spectacle file save failing
by Peter Berrie 08 Oct '20

08 Oct '20

Does anyone have any idea how to approach this situation? I am using spectacle, the kde screenshot taker. It has an option to go to the folder in which it stores screenshots. When you try this, it ends up trying opening it in deadbeef the music player! I took a look at .config/mimeapps.list, which didn't help much. There was an entry for deadbeef, something to do with inodes. I deleted it, which did not change anything. Then I uninstalled deadbeef with the result it now goes to vlc! I suppose I could go on deleting all the player applications... but then it would probably start trying to open the folder in something else equally useless. I have noticed this behaviour before but forget exactly when. When answering yes to a prompt of 'open in file manager', what I got was an attempt to open the file in a (different) music player. Does anyone know where this stuff is configured? This is Debian stable, up to date. Something has clearly gone wrong, but what? The nice thing about spectacle is that it allows you to repeat the same screen area selection while taking a series of screenshots. So if for instance you are trying to do a tutorial showing how to edit a picture, you can just keep taking snaps of the small changes without having to redraw the whole area each time you take a shot. Same thing with if you are reading a document in an app and want to take a shot of several pages one after the other. Peter

2 2

Local IP addresses in external DNS
by Mark Rogers 03 Oct '20

03 Oct '20

I have the following configuration: - External hosted DNS for *.example.com - Some hosts point to "local" IP addresses, eg test.example.com => 192.168.0.100 If I use dig or nslookup on my laptop, test.example.com resolves correctly to 192.168.0.100. But if I put that into my web browser I cannot access the site (to be clear here: 192.168.0.100 is on my local network and I can access it using its IP.) Chrome reports a DNS lookup error. My home network uses OpenWRT (on a Pi4) and if I use the network diagnostics on that to lookup test.example,com it fails. (It works for hosts configured with routable addresses, but not for any on my local network.) OpenWRT uses dnsmasq. Any suggestions how I can get this to work? Or even just why it doesn't? (Yes I know it's an odd configuration! But I am not aware of a reason why it shouldn't work and I've never had a problem with it before.) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

4 22

Re: [ALUG] Pinebook Pro
by Chris Green 03 Oct '20

03 Oct '20

On Sat, Oct 03, 2020 at 10:38:48AM +0100, Phil Thane wrote: > On 03/10/2020 09:26, Chris Green wrote: > > On Sat, Oct 03, 2020 at 09:18:29AM +0100, Mark Rogers wrote: > > > On Sat, 3 Oct 2020 at 08:46, Chris Green <cl(a)isbd.net> wrote: > > > > Do you *really* need any/all of those apps? [...] > > > > > > > > Everthing else is on the laptop. > > > Each to their own, obviously, but these days I increasingly ask myself > > > if I need the laptop; there isn't anything I can't do on the phone, > > > and plenty I often can't do on the laptop for the simple reason it's > > > not with me at the time I want to do it. (Much like the best camera is > > > usually the one you have with you, I find the same with laptop > > > functions.) > > > > > Yes, I can understand that. However when I see other members of my > > family (all younger than me) struggling to reply to E-Mail on their > > phones or trying to buy things on line I realise why (for me) the > > laptop is so much faster and easier. > > > > It's the 'unix philosphy' use small dedicated 'things' each good at > > what they do. :-) I have a digital camera which is pocketable but > > is *way* better than even the best smartphone camera and it's a > > fraction of the price (proper viewfinder, 30:1 zoom, etc.). > > > There's also the online banking app which works on the phone to generate a > code to login on the PC. > Works perfectly on a feature phone like mine, it's just an SMS message. -- Chris Green

2 2

Re: [ALUG] Pinebook Pro
by Chris Green 03 Oct '20

03 Oct '20

On Sat, Oct 03, 2020 at 10:57:19AM +0100, Phil Thane wrote: > > On 03/10/2020 08:45, Chris Green wrote: > > Do you*really* need any/all of those apps? > > I don't actually have many, my personal take is that most ought never to > have been developed when you could achieve much the same via the web. But > companies like apps because they have more control and harvest more data so > some things are hard or even impossible unless you cave in and get the app. > And some odd, niche things really do need them. For example I have OSMand > (satnav based on OSM). I have had, but lost when I upgraded, a canal/river > satnav app with useful info for boaters. I'll reinstall when I go away next > year (Covid willing). I have used a phone tracker app to upload details of > my solo trips for friends and family to keep a track of where I am. As per > previous mail there's online banking too. > A phone is too easily lost or stolen IMHO to be safe for personal banking. > Some of the other apps (Nextcloud for example) could be replaced by the > desktop versions on Linux, but I'm not sure how they'd scale to fit the > screen. And the functions are different, Nextcloud on the desktop is chiefly > designed for syncing files. On a phone that'd be mad because the multi-GB > server isn't going to sync with a phone. The phone app is mostly for syncing > contacts, calendar, downloading files when needed rather than syncing > everything. But I don't have contacts or calendar on my phone so there's no point in syncing them. I so rarely have my phone with me or turned on that calendar in particular would be pointless. I have a calendar on my laptop which is on almost all the time, and with me. > It also has an Instant Upload function so (given a data > connection) photos are uploaded to the server within seconds of taking them. > Useful for an oaf who might at any time fall in the water! > As I said I don't use the camera on my phone, I have a much, much, much better camera in my pocket more often than the phone. -- Chris Green

1 0

Pinebook Pro
by Phil Thane 03 Oct '20

03 Oct '20

Hello Lugs, Pinebook Pro still going well. Issues so far: Changed OS to Manjaro with KDE (default on newer releases). Built-in speakers are tiny, therefore tinny. They were stupidly quite too until I discovered you can use KDE settings to crank up volume. Currently run them at 150%. Earphones OK at 100%. Then app vol sliders work OK. Zoom app not available and Zoom web won't work on FF. Does work on Chromium but is a bit flaky. KDE themes don't always work, fail during install. Maybe some rely on dependancies not ported to Arm64. Struggling to find my ideal KDE theme. AFAIK a light, transparent panel also means a transparent app launcher which is unreadable when it pops over a window with text in. Opaque panels look a bit clunky and I don't like dark themes. Will carry on looking. Sleep mode works but battery consumption whilst asleep is too high. I shut down if I expect to leave it more than an hour or two. Still think it was a good buy. I've been following development of PinePhone too. As with Pineboook the prototyping is being done openly with early adopter versions for software devs released a while ago. There are about 6 OS projects being ported but only one is Android (AOSP) based. The others are 'pure' Linux eg UBports. It's tempting but so much these days relies on mobile apps and there aren't going to be many of them for Linux OSs. Any thoughts anyone? -- Phil Thane Tweet @pthane www.pthane.co.uk 01767 449759 07582 750607

3 3

weird website
by Phil Thane 28 Sep '20

28 Sep '20

Here's an odd one, probably not a Linux issue but I am using Mint + Firefox and I guess the site is on LAMP so it's Linux-ish... I'm trying to buy some hardware from https://www.ironmongerydirect.co.uk <https://www.ironmongerydirect.co.uk> There was >£50 of bits in the basket and I went to Checkout. The site asked me to log in or register, so I registered. Firefox gave me a random secure password to use and saved it for me. So far, so normal. Now I'm back at the home page with the total still showing in my basket. But the 'My Basket' button doesn't work. Neither does Contact or 'Hi Phil' (My Account on sensible sites!) I'm sure you all now that on FF hovering over a link shows the real destination. Hovering over these buttons shows the link is to the current page. I can use the main menu to choose other pages in the catalogue but those three buttons always link to the current page. So all they do is refresh the page. This means not only can I not return to the checkout, I can't even logout via 'Hi Phil' I've tried closing all the pages then starting again, but FF helpfully remembers the password and logs me in again, with the same issue. I even deleted the saved login from FF, but I still get logged in automatically. Is there some magic way to log out of a disfunctional site? -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

4 3

NHS Covid app
by Phil Thane 28 Sep '20

28 Sep '20

You may not: ...use the NHS App Native Version on any device or operating system that has been modified outside the mobile device or operating system vendor supported or warranted configurations. This includes devices that have been "jail-broken" or "rooted". That's me an my LineageOS phone out then. -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

3 3

Covid 19 app?
by Phil Thane 27 Sep '20

27 Sep '20

Hello, I've gone to some effort to install LineageOS on my phone and remove all Google accounts. The UK Covid 19 app is unlikely I would think to ever be OSS and available on Fdroid (obvs it should, other countries have make OSS apps). So would anyone with a conventional Android phone who intends to install the app be prepared to make an APK file for me to sideload? -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

6 5

Printer sharing gone wrong(2)
by Phil Thane 19 Sep '20

19 Sep '20

Cancel previous, it works. First on PC connected to printer go to KDE printer settings and enable sharing in menu, not on tick box which is greyed out. Second on client PC (also KDE) ignore 'discovered printer' and go through set up new printer. Which it discovers all over again, but works. Weird! -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

1 0

Printer
by Phil Thane 19 Sep '20

19 Sep '20

1 0

Printer sharing gone wrong
by Phil Thane 19 Sep '20

19 Sep '20

Hello, Can anyone advise on CUPS? Wife and I have two PCs in the study, both Linux. For years we have had the printer plugged into hers via USB and Shared via CUPS setup so I can use it occasionally. It has worked like that through several changes of disro on both machines and one house move. But now it doesn't. It still prints OK from her machine but mine can't 'see' it at all. On CUPS (web interface) on Linda's machine if I go to Administration > Modify Printer there is a checkbox to 'Share this Printer' It's checked (ie blue). If I go to Printers on the menu bar and click the link to the printer in question (we've only got one) the status line says 'Not Shared'. Which probably explains why I can't print. Any suggestions? (KDE printer set up doesn't help either). -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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