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10372 discussions

Everything I do at the moment seems to end up with python!
by Eur Ing Chris Green 08 Mar '07

08 Mar '07

I seem to arrive at a python solution for everything I do at the moment:- I was looking for a backup solution and, after a bit of looking around (and help from here) I have decided to use rdiff-backup. It's working well. It's written in python. I've been looking at lightweight markup languages, in particular one for creating HTML with tables, so after hunting around for a while I find reStructuredText which is part of Docutils which is, guess what, written in python. Digging a bit further on from my reStructuredText investigations I found pyBlosxam which seems to be my sort of blog, python of course. Another utility I installed recently used Docutils as well. I'm beginning to think that people who use python must think a certain way which matches the way I want things to work. -- Chris Green

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Linux Format DVDs
by Ian bell 07 Mar '07

07 Mar '07

I have just about every Linux Format DVD from LXF20 (sometime in 2001). As I am soon to move house I want to dispose of them. Might be useful if someone wants an old distro. Happy to bring them to the next kit meet or look out any special requirements. Otherwise I'll skip them. Ian

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I think the hard drives dead
by Chris & Barry Chater 07 Mar '07

07 Mar '07

Hi Would you believe it finally got Ubuntu Linux working on an old laptop, got a wireless card and got that working. then the other day computer froze while watching video on BBC site.Could not get it to shut down, so switched off . Now on start up it says no operating system and it will not let me reinstall Ubuntu, it cant find device to partition. Do you think the hard drive has gone? It also whines when switched off. Is it a big job replacing the drive in a Packard Bell laptop, like pull one out and plug another in or is it deeper than that and more technical. Just trying to work out if it is cost effective to replace drive. Any advice ? Barry

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Debian server crashing
by mephi 07 Mar '07

07 Mar '07

I mentioned this at the Ipswich meeting, and I've not yet had a chance to do anything about it, so I thought I'd see if anyone here had any ideas too :-) My server crashes roughly once a month. It's not consistent on the day that it crashes, sometimes it can be weeks apart. But it's usually just after 7am (although today I had my first crash at 13:30). The locking up is a bit odd, as the PC still responds to pings, but I can't log in (I can type the username, but it never requests the password), and Apache stops serving files, but samba doesn't. I've got two scripts that run, an rsync backup script that runs at 7am, and one that gathers system info, which runs every 15 minutes. I thought the problem might be something clashing between the two scripts, so I tried stopping the system info script running between 7am and 8am, this obviously hasn't helped. At the Ipswich meeting it was mentioned that it could be the syslog failing, so I'm going to look into redirecting the syslog to another server. Is there anything else that anyone can think of? System: Debian Stable (Sarge, 3.1), 2.6.8-2-686-smp kernel Dual 1Ghz P3 ASUS CUR-DLS motherboard 1Gb of ECC PC100 RAM 2x Silicon Image 3114 SATA cards 6x 250Gb SATA drives in RAID 5 (mdadm) 2x 40Gb PATA drives HP 7170 Dual Port Gigabit card (64-bit PCI) Cheers, Matt

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re: 2nd Thursday Norwich Meet : Reindeer,, Dereham Road
by Dennis 07 Mar '07

07 Mar '07

Hi all, I was thinking of dropping in on the monthly meet, but I was wondering how I would recognise everyone else. How will I recognise you lot ? Dennis

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re: 2nd Thursday Norwich Meet : Reindeer,, Dereham Road
by Dennis English 06 Mar '07

06 Mar '07

Hi all, I was thinking of dropping in on the monthly meet, but I was wondering how I would recognise everyone else. How will I recognise you lot ? Dennis

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[ALUG Announce] 2nd Thursday Norwich Meet : Reindeer, Dereham Road
by Jonathan McDowell 05 Mar '07

05 Mar '07

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Second Thursday" ALUG Norwich Pub Meet is this Thursday, 8th March. It's at the Reindeer pub on the Dereham Road, just opposite the City Gate. People will be there from 8pm-ish, though there may be a few people there earlier. Topics for discussion will no doubt be as varied as ever. The Reindeer has a reasonable selection of beer as well as decent coffee (with biscuits, if you're lucky). Directions to the Reindeer can be found at: http://www.alug.org.uk/venues/reindeer.html Pictures of some of the regulars, and irregulars, and, well, just some pictures of people that might or might not turn up are available from: http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2006-02-ALUG/ http://the.earth.li/~noodles/stilvoid-alug/mp20050811/ http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2005-01-ALUG-Xmas/ http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2004-08-ALUG/ Which should hopefully aid those of you wondering who to look out for, even if the images are getting a bit old now. We're /normally/ just to the left of the main entrance, though sometimes we've ended up at the far end of the pub beside the pool table, as there are comfy seats at that end. J. -- [ I'd love to but... I'm having all my plants neutered. ] ----- 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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Planet ALUG
by Dave Briggs 05 Mar '07

05 Mar '07

Would it be possible for whoever is currently looking after the planet to delete my old feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/davebriggs) and put my new one (http://davebriggs.wordpress.com/feed/) in? Thanks! -- Dave Briggs

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Annoying shell script problem - calling external binary
by samwise 05 Mar '07

05 Mar '07

Hi, Got an annoying shell script bug. I'm using GNU bash, version 3.1.17(1)-release. Here's a testcase.sh shell script: #!/bin/bash -v myfiles="/home/samwise/Desktop/file\ with\ spaces.txt /tmp/otherfile.txt" echo binary --usethese $myfiles binary --usethese $myfiles Relevant output to console: $ ./testcase.sh #!/bin/bash -v myfiles="/home/samwise/Desktop/file\ with\ spaces.txt /tmp/otherfile.txt" echo binary --usethese $myfiles binary --usethese /home/samwise/Desktop/file\ with\ spaces.txt /tmp/otherfile.txt binary --usethese $myfiles $ I want to call an external binary with a parameter made of filenames which may contain spaces. If I run the output of the echo statement above (4th line of output) manually by cutting and pasting into the console, the scanner works fine. However, it always fails if the same command is manually called with quotes around the parameter value: WORKS: binary --usethis /home/samwise/Desktop/file\ with\ spaces.txt /tmp/otherfile.txt DOESN'T WORK: binary --usethis "/home/samwise/Desktop/file\ with\ spaces.txt /tmp/otherfile.txt" Now, despite me *not* putting in quotation marks in the shell script, it appears that the call on the third line is being interpreted as though I have used them ... and so the call fails. Anyone got any suggestions? Peter.

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Kit Meet?
by Mark Ridley 04 Mar '07

04 Mar '07

I delete all my emails (stupid habit) and the mailing list archive doesn't appear to be searchable, from a mobile browser anyway. So, is there a kit meet soon near or in Ipswich? I have a case with mobo and processor (old AMD), and an Atari ST. Someone (samwise/Peter) wanted one of them I'm sure. The meetings page on the webby was going on about 2006, plus this Treo is too fiddley to mention! :) Ta. -Mark (fed up of working in Switzerland) ----------------------------------------------------------- This message may contain confidential and/or privileged information. This information is intended to be read only by the individual or entity to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are on notice that any review, disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete or destroy any copy of this message.

2 1

PC Disposal
by Ian bell 03 Mar '07

03 Mar '07

While we are discussing getting rid of old stuff, I saw on Look East a short while ago and article about a company in Norwich that recycles computer hardware inlcuding peripherals. I have Googleg but all I can find is companies that deal with corporate disposals rather than individuals. Is the dump the only alternative for individuals? Ian

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Firefox help - how it displays directories
by Eur Ing Chris Green 03 Mar '07

03 Mar '07

Yesterday or the day before I saw in passing a web page that had a reference to how Firefox displays directories (i.e. when you open a directory with no index.html and you're allowed to). It had something about extra decorations and how to make things appear in the "Description" column. Can anyone give me a pointer to documentation on this? -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] cups server broken after upgrade to etch
by Jenny Hopkins 02 Mar '07

02 Mar '07

Fixed. And the problem was? Cupsys_1.2.7 package hadn't installed properly, which in turn meant cupsys-driver-gimpprint and cupsys-driver-gutenprint hadn't installed properly. I found and fixed this by: 1. removed the cupsys package and moved /etc/cups directory. 2. installed above packages. I tried all this yesterday and it was all a bit twitchy, but today it absolutely refused to install cupsys, as it couldn't read '/etc/cups/cupsd.conf'. I had a look, and this didn't exist, as it was part of the cupsys package itself. 3. I examined the package in /var/cache/apt/archives, and hand-copied the cupsd.conf to /etc/cups. 4. I re-ran the install command, and this time it installed, then gutenprint ran a whole bunch of useful, helpful stuff, which it definitely hadn't yesterday. 5. The printer was detected and a test page printed successfully. Hoorah! I wonder if this is a bug I ought to report. Perhaps the pre-inst and post-inst lines are muddled or something, or more likely it was my bad luck. Thanks for all the help. I can also use the hp-toolbox now as a result of the breakage. Jenny I

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cups server broken after upgrade to etch
by Jenny Hopkins 02 Mar '07

02 Mar '07

Hullo there, I've just upgraded my debian amd64 server to etch. cups print server is now misbehaving. If I use the web interface on ipp 631, clicking on any of the links request I use https:blah, rather than http:blah, and offer the URL, but following that link causes the page to hang and cupsys to be restarted. Previously I would be asked for a login and password. If I try printing a test page from the web interface, I get the error "Printer not connected; will retry in 30 seconds". The error log on the server says: "D [01/Mar/2007:19:34:07 +0000] cupsdAuthorize: No authentication data provided." I have a queue of daughters waiting to print homework, help! These are the packages I've been upgraded to: dpkg -l | grep cupsys ii cupsys 1.2.7-4 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - server ii cupsys-bsd 1.2.7-4 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - BSD comman ii cupsys-client 1.2.7-4 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - client pro ii cupsys-common 1.2.7-4 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - common fil ii cupsys-driver-gimpprint 5.0.0-3 printer drivers for CUPS ii cupsys-driver-gutenprint 5.0.0-3 printer drivers for CUPS ii libcupsys2 1.2.7-4 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - libs ii libcupsys2-gnutls10 1.2.7-4 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - dummy libs Thanks, Jenny

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Re: SLED
by Eur Ing Chris Green 02 Mar '07

02 Mar '07

On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 09:58:53AM -0000, Peter Onion wrote: > <AOL> Me Too </AOL> I just don't trust them not to do what ever M$ tells > them to do :( > > I've just removed SuSE 10.0 from the last of my machines, and I've gone all > retro, and put Gentoo on instead ;) It's almost as much fun as Slackware > used to be :) > It still is! :-) -- Chris Green

1 0

SLED
by Greg Thomas 02 Mar '07

02 Mar '07

Yesterday, I received a presentation on SLED - http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/ Essentially, SUSE Linux + OpenOffice + Novell improvements. FWIW, I was dead impressed. OK, so underneath it all it's just another Linux distro, but it is really really nicely packaged. Yes, it's €47 pa (for support updates + support), but it's not aimed at the readers of this list - for the first time I really think there is a genuine enterprise ready alternative to Windows on the general user desktop. Greg

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My search for a CMS - some progress and conclusions
by Eur Ing Chris Green 02 Mar '07

02 Mar '07

You may or may not remember me asking about CMS here several weeks ago. Well I have come to some conclusions:- The 'front runners' like Joomla! and Drupal are not what I want, they are so strongly oriented towards dynamic sites with mostly blogs and news. There are a few CMS which are close to what I want, the best (for me) examples are ezPublish, and websitebaker. In fact I think I may still settle on websitebaker. Some Wikis are close to what I want but they don't quite hack it for a commercial/business site, they simply look too much like a Wiki! I am using TWiki on my home Linux box for personal and family stuff though Wikis do seem to be happier with mostly text. Finally, via the Wikis and thus markup languages I have come across another set of utilities for making web sites. These might be called web site 'compilers'. You maintain the web site in the markup language and then run the markup 'compiler' to create the site. This may range from doing it manually (or with your own script) to things like ikiwiki and webmake which wrap the building up for you. I'm currently playing with AsciiDoc which looks like it's ideal for some of my requirements. -- Chris Green

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Links in text files - how to make them clickable?
by Eur Ing Chris Green 02 Mar '07

02 Mar '07

I have a memory from somewhere that one can make URLs in text files 'clickable' when viewing the text file in a browser. I even have a sample file:- http://home.isbd.net/chris/xxx.txt which I'm sure I remember trying once and being surprised when it worked. (I think I maybe had to double click the link) However I can't make this work now, did I imagine it or can someone point me at what I need - e.g. is it a Firefox extension? -- Chris Green

3 4

Fw: [ALUG] SLED
by Stephen Bell 01 Mar '07

01 Mar '07

----- Forwarded Message ---- From: Greg Thomas <Greg(a)TheThomasHome.co.uk> To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Sent: Thursday, 1 March, 2007 2:48:09 PM Subject: [ALUG] SLED Yesterday, I received a presentation on SLED - http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/ Essentially, SUSE Linux + OpenOffice + Novell improvements. FWIW, I was dead impressed. OK, so underneath it all it's just another Linux distro, but it is really really nicely packaged. Yes, it's 47 pa (for support updates + support), but it's not aimed at the readers of this list - for the first time I really think there is a genuine enterprise ready alternative to Windows on the general user desktop. Greg Well, yes, but it is aimed at some readers of this list, namely me, a beginner, who went for the SUSE package for the reasons listed. I wanted a Windows replacement and I believe I've found it. However I've first got to get it to work fully -- the wireless laptop it is on connects to the net via the remaining XP but SUSE can't find the wireless or an Ethernet connection. All ideas welcome. I've then got to learn my way around it from scratch. Steve _______________________________________________ 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! ___________________________________________________________ New Yahoo! Mail is the ultimate force in competitive emailing. Find out more at the Yahoo! Mail Championships. Plus: play games and win prizes. http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://mail.yahoo.net/uk

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A small victory
by Eur Ing Chris Green 01 Mar '07

01 Mar '07

Today my desktop PC will change from a Microsoft Windows XP based one to a Linux (Fedora I think) one. Hurrah! On the windows PC I always ran an X server which displayed my Solaris CDE desktop but now I can run a proper 'unix like' system directly on my work machine (like I used to in the more distant past when we all had Sun workstations). Progress! :-) -- Chris Green

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RE: [ALUG] A small victory
by Tracy Dickerson 01 Mar '07

01 Mar '07

Nice one Chris :-) Wish I could do that here.... Tracy x -----Original Message----- From: main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Eur Ing Chris Green Sent: 01 March 2007 08:56 To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: [ALUG] A small victory Today my desktop PC will change from a Microsoft Windows XP based one to a Linux (Fedora I think) one. Hurrah! On the windows PC I always ran an X server which displayed my Solaris CDE desktop but now I can run a proper 'unix like' system directly on my work machine (like I used to in the more distant past when we all had Sun workstations). Progress! :-) -- Chris Green _______________________________________________ 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

Re: beryl?
by Simon 01 Mar '07

01 Mar '07

I'm about this > < close from installing beryl as my default window manager. Some of it is eye candy / bling / whatever you want to call it but some of the newer features are useful and remember, it's still pretty much a proof of concept, to show the kind of stuff that's possible with a compositing window manager... The fact that the cube thing etc runs smoothly on my rubbish old laptop is amazing, seeing as mac hardware which effectively does similar eye candy stuff is so expensive and yeah, I do show mac users I know to impress them. Windows users too now that Vista has a bit of eye candy they think it's the bees knees... And yeah, beryl is a weird name for a project cos it sounds like an old granny name... Heh. --Simon _____________________________________ Anyone using beryl? (http://www.beryl-project.org) I saw a video of it in use on YouTube, looks really nice. I blew away Linux on my "fast" desktop in order to play games, although I managed to get most of my games running with the third-party ATI Radeon drivers, it would hang and stuff, but that's another story. I run DSL on an old P3 so I'll not be installing beryl anytime soon! :) Just wondered what others think of it? Cheers. -Mark

5 9

Update to 'Strange colour effects'
by Barry Samuels 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

I changed the video driver to the one supplied by nVidia and I certainly had no X problems during the few days that it was running. However when I switched to a plain text console (50x80) I found that each line of text was displayed one and a half times. Here is a photograph of the screen: http://www.realbritain.f2s.com/xorg/cimg0160.jpg1 I don't know where it gets that text from as it should be displaying a blank screen with a prompt at the top. So I went back to the Debian 'nv' driver which gives me this effect sometimes: http://www.realbritain.f2s.com/xorg/cimg0157.jpg http://www.realbritain.f2s.com/xorg/cimg0159.jpg In the first picture the little green folders down the left-hand side of the top window should be orange, the blue and yellow areas below that window should be all yellow and the xterm bottom right should have a white background and the text is illegible. In the second picture all the lines in the top window should be white and not alternating with black as shown and the black bars in the bottom window should be green. I suspect that the graphics effects are a bug in the 'nv' driver so if anyone can suggest a cure for the one and half lines on text in the console using the nVidia driver that may be the simplest cure. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Fw: Testing, testing
by Stephen Bell 27 Feb '07

27 Feb '07

----- Forwarded Message ---- From: Stephen Bell <swbell_tok(a)yahoo.co.uk> To: ALUG <main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk> Sent: Tuesday, 27 February, 2007 5:34:28 PM Subject: Testing, testing Here are a few words that certainly would have been garbled before. Let's see what happens now. Steve ___________________________________________________________ What kind of emailer are you? Find out today - get a free analysis of your email personality. Take the quiz at the Yahoo! Mail Championship. http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://mail.yahoo.net/uk ___________________________________________________________ New Yahoo! Mail is the ultimate force in competitive emailing. Find out more at the Yahoo! Mail Championships. Plus: play games and win prizes. http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://mail.yahoo.net/uk

1 0

.chm
by Tracy Dickerson 27 Feb '07

27 Feb '07

Hello Fonts of much Wisdom, I run Fedora Core 5 and need to be able to open a .chm internet document. Any ideas? Thanks muchly, Tracy x

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