main

main@lists.alug.org.uk

10369 discussions

Monitoring mains via serial port
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 31 Oct '06

31 Oct '06

Hi Folks, Your expertise and wisdom may help me clarify thoughts on the following. I'm contemplating buying a couple of UPS units, at the very cheap end, so no comms to the computer which could be used to initiate a programmed shutdown if the mains goes off. So in turn I'm contemplating rigging a little circuit which would supply a signal to a serial port while the mains was on. The germ of the idea is to use one of those very cheap power converters which can deliver a DC voltage chosen from (say) 3V, 4.5V, 6V, 9V, 12V, and set it up so as to put say 12V between 2 pins on a serial port, when plugged directly into the mains. Then it would be easy to have a little script running in the background which would monitor the lines on the serial port, and initiate a shutdown if the voltage dropped to zero for (say) more than a minute. That's the bare bones of the idea, and indeed enough to define a basic soldering-iron job! But I'm not sure I'm being circumspect enough here, so would welcome comment! With thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 31-Oct-06 Time: 20:26:50 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

4 3

matrox G450 dual head and two identical monitors problem
by Jenny Hopkins 31 Oct '06

31 Oct '06

Hullo there, I've got a Matrox G450 dual head graphics card. I've then got two identical monitors: Flatron L1715S. In my xorg.conf I've put the vertical and horizontal refresh rates as the same, however the second monitor stays dark. If I tweak the horiz rate for second monitor, the screen appears, but fuzzy. (I've posted what I think ought to work but is out of range below. If I change the HorizSync for Monitor[1] to 30-63 it does the fuzzy thing.) Can anybody see any earthly reason why the same setting is not valid? Thanks, Jenny Section "Monitor" HorizSync 30-83 Identifier "Monitor[0]" ModelName "LG" Option "DPMS" VendorName "Flatron" VertRefresh 56-75 UseModes "Modes[0]" EndSection Section "Monitor" HorizSync 30-83 Identifier "Monitor[1]" ModelName "LG" Option "DPMS" VendorName "Flatron" VertRefresh 56-75 UseModes "Modes[1]" EndSection

1 1

computer fairs
by Nick Atkins 31 Oct '06

31 Oct '06

Does anybody know if there are any computer fairs in East Anglia? I have a workshop that is bulging with hardware. All pointers gratefully received, otherwise it's eBay (groan) or London :0( Thanks, -- Nick Atkins South Norfolk

3 2

Simple apache/hosting question
by cl＠isbd.net 30 Oct '06

30 Oct '06

Well I assume it's simple but I can't quite see how to sort it out. I'm running Slackware 11 on my home machine and, on the home network, its IP address is 192.168.1.1, it's running apache 1.3.37 (the Slackware 11 default). I have set up my router/firewall so that HTTP requests are sent to 192.168.1.1. At just-the-name I have the domain isbd.ltd.uk set up so that HTTP requests are routed to my static IP address at my ISP. So far, so good, if you go to http://www.isbd.ltd.uk/ up pops the default apache index.html page to indicate that it's all working. However, if I go to http://www.isbd.ltd.uk/~chris then instead of bringing up the index.html that I have in the public_html directory in my home directory on the Slackware system I get an error:- Firefox can't find the server at server.isbd.ltd.uk. ... and Firefox is looking for http://server.isbd.ltd.uk/~chris/ which of course doesn't work because server.isbd.ltd.uk doesn't exist in the outside world. How do I get my Slackware machine to look like isbd.ltd.uk when seen from the outside world but give it the name server and/or server.isbd.ltd.uk internally to my home network? -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

2 2

Overlaying things on a video window
by Dan Hatton 27 Oct '06

27 Oct '06

Dear All, Does anyone know of a way to overlay a regular grid and/or some text on a video playing in an X window, please? The players I have available are mplayer, gmplayer, and xine. -- Thanks, Dan Hatton <http://www.bib.hatton.btinternet.co.uk/dan/>

1 0

kernel build options (make menuconfig) for Core 2 Duo processor
by cl＠isbd.net 27 Oct '06

27 Oct '06

Can anyone tell me where I can find (or just tell me) the best 'make menuconfig' options for a Core 2 Duo 6600 processor. I can work out most of what I want but there are some grey areas. These are the settings I have at the moment:- [*] Symmetric multi-processing support Subarchitecture Type (PC-compatible) ---> Processor family (Pentium-4/Celeron(P4-based)/Pentium-4 M/Xeon) [*] Generic 86 support [*] HPET Timer Support (2) Maximum number of CPUs (2-255) [*] SMT (Hyperthreading) scheduler support [*] Multi-core scheduler support Preemption Model (No Forced Preemption (Server)) ---> [*] Preempt The Big Kernel Lock ... (the rest seem pretty straightforward) My main question is whether I have the processor type set correctly? Should it be Opteron/Athlon64/Hammer/K8 rather than what I have selected as the Core 2 Duo, although it's an Intel processor, has some of the AMD-64 optimisations I believe. Or maybe I should select soemthing else completely. A supplementary question is whether to set the "Maximum number of CPUs" to 4 rather than 2 since Hyperthreading is enabled. I will eventually come to the end of all these questions relating to my new system! :-) It's very nearly there now, I have Slackware 11 up and running well on it and vmware installed with a Windows XP guest. Once I get these final bits of tuning done I'll disappear back into the woodwork. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

2 2

Mouse help still needed - Xorg setup
by cl＠isbd.net 25 Oct '06

25 Oct '06

I can find very little help regarding the "InputDevice" section of xorg.conf. I have tried various "recommended for Logitech" setups but I can't make any sense of how the mouse works after trying them. There seems no logical connection between the options I set and the resulting way the mouse works. I have now got a rally minimal InputDevice section:- Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse1" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "Auto" # Auto detect Option "Device" "/dev/mouse" # Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7" # Option "Emulate3Buttons" EndSection This results with the left button being button 1, the right button being button 3 and pressing both being button 2 (so in spite of commenting out Emulate3Buttons it still does! Then I have the two mini-buttons which are button 8 and button 9, how can I use those? What I actually want is buttons 1 and 3 as above, one of the little buttons as button 2 (middle/paste) and the other little button ideally as a double click of button 1. Where can I find out what all the options like "CorePointer", "Buttons", "Protocol", "ZAxisMapping" and so on actually do? -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

3 4

East of England FOSS in the VCS
by MJ Ray 25 Oct '06

25 Oct '06

Not sure whether this has featured here before, but a friend from ScunDOG just sent me http://foss.ciac.org.uk/en - Using free and open source software in the UK voluntary and community sector. Anyone here involved? If so, well done. Best wishes, -- MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Somerset, England. Work/Laborejo: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ IRC/Jabber/SIP: on request/peteble

1 0

Where are xorg.conf devices documented?
by cl＠isbd.net 25 Oct '06

25 Oct '06

Where can I find xorg.conf documentation that tells me what device names etc. one can use? The man page tells me about the format of xorg.conf and what all the sections are etc. but doesn't help in the slightest as regards how to configure actual hardware. I'm specifically after mouse configuration information, like which Driver I should use for a Logitech Marble Mouse and what Option settings are available. I'd really like fairly general information though as I may want to set up another (Kensington) multi-button mouse as well. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

1 0

RE: [ALUG] Audio problems
by Keith Watson 25 Oct '06

25 Oct '06

> From: Wayne Stallwood Sent: 24 October 2006 22:24 > > Never had this problem with Totem/Xine For DVD playback, Xine has always worked best for me also. Regards, Keith ____________ CLAIRVOYANT, n. Persons who have the power of seeing that which is invisible to their patrons, namely, that they are fools. - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

2 1

Audio problems
by Martin Collins 24 Oct '06

24 Oct '06

I'm using Ubuntu Dapper on my laptop with kernel 2.6.15-27-k7. There's a problem when playing DVD's or video files with the lip-sync. The audio is 200-400 ms ahead of the video. I've googled for answers but just can't seem to find any. This wasn't a problem before I installed Dapper, but I don't want to uninstall it because of one annoying little problem. I know it's the computer and not the files because I've seem them played on Windows machines with full lip-sync. Has anyone experienced any problem like this, or should it be reported to Ubuntu as a bug? Its an nforce3 audio chip (0000:00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 Audio (rev a2)) Thanks all, Martin

2 1

Re: [ALUG] Re: Old 'official' Linux distributions to give away
by Martin Collins 24 Oct '06

24 Oct '06

I live in Gorleston and ideally I could bring them to a second thursday meet, but I work away 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off and am next due to join ship on the Wed 8th November, yep the day before the meet. So I'm open to suggestions. If anyone fairly close to Gorleston will be attending the meet then I could drop them off with them maybe? Regards, Martin On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 23:13 +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote: > Fantastic, hopefully new material may actually get people using the > library again :-) > > Where are you located > > Regards > Wayne >

1 0

OT, but maybe someone here knows
by cl＠isbd.net 24 Oct '06

24 Oct '06

Are there any OS/2 enthusiasts on this list, or does anyone know of any local (i.e. East Anglian) OS/2 user groups? I have some OS/2 bits and pieces (software and books) that I'd like to clear off my shelves. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

5 8

Old 'official' Linux distributions to give away
by cl＠isbd.net 23 Oct '06

23 Oct '06

Before I try Freecycle or the bin is anyone here interested in the following:- Redhat 5.1 boxed set Linux Mandrake (6.0 I think, I seem to have two boxes but not sure about CDs at the moment) SuSe Professional 7.3 boxed set. (I probably have some old hardware to go with them too!) -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

4 5

Modules problem - grrrrrr!!!!!!!
by cl＠isbd.net 20 Oct '06

20 Oct '06

Well I thought I had modules sussed but apparently not. A couple of days ago I compiled the module for my RTL8168 Gigabit ethernet interfaces and it worked fine. I did what the README said and it all worked. Now it doesn't work any more and my system denies all knowledge of the r1000.ko module. Why are modules so ?^!$%^"$%&^ recalcitrant? How do I get it to work now? All the 'bits' must be there but none of the module commands give me any help to find them. Hheellpp!! -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

4 7

Re: etch and kde
by Peter Alcibiades 20 Oct '06

20 Oct '06

Well its not the end of the world, but its certainly very curious. You can't install kde because of lack of kdewebdev. You can't install this because of lack of quanta. You can't install quanta because of lack of libkde4. And you can't install this because its been replaced by another package. iwill:~# apt-get install kde Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that the package is simply not installable and a bug report against that package should be filed. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies. kde: Depends: kdewebdev (>= 4:3.4.3) but it is not going to be installed E: Broken packages iwill:~# apt-get install kdewebdev Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that the package is simply not installable and a bug report against that package should be filed. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies. kdewebdev: Depends: quanta (>= 4:3.4.3-2) but it is not installable Depends: kfilereplace (>= 4:3.4.3-2) but it is not installable Depends: kimagemapeditor (>= 4:3.4.3-2) but it is not installable Depends: klinkstatus (>= 4:3.4.3-2) but it is not installable Depends: kommander (>= 4:3.4.3-2) but it is not installable Depends: kxsldbg (>= 4:3.4.3-2) but it is not installable E: Broken packages iwill:~# apt-get install quanta Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Package quanta is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source However the following packages replace it: quanta-data kdewebdev-doc-html E: Package quanta has no installation candidate iwill:~# apt-get install kdewebdev quanta-data kdewebev-doc-html Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done quanta-data is already the newest version. E: Couldn't find package kdewebev-doc-html iwill:~#

1 0

Watching Parliament with Linux
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 20 Oct '06

20 Oct '06

Hi Folks, OK, it's maybe a perverse thing to want to do, but ... Browse to http://www.parliamentlive.tv/?Where=Cttees&When=This%20Week&Day=Thursday 10:00am HoC Health Committee - Wilson Room - Meeting Information NHS Deficits I want to watch the video of this session. There is a "Watch from start" link at the right. I'm not getting any joy from this button (Firefox 1.0). It asks me to "Click here to download plugin", but if I do that then I get "No suitable plugins were found". Any suggestings for watching this using Firefox in Linux? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 20-Oct-06 Time: 12:10:19 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

2 1

etch and kde
by peter 20 Oct '06

20 Oct '06

After numerous disasters with Mandriva 2007 too many and too tedious to mention - just, avoid this if you have any alternative at all - I gave up and installed Etch. You will all smile quietly and ask what took him so long. Etch went in perfectly and with a minumum of fuss and started up Gnome. OK, I thought I will get kde and so on as well, for the sake of variety. So I now started up synaptic and installed fluxbox, fvwm and tried to install kde. However, the other WMs don't work as expected. fluxbox appears to start up with nothing at all. Right clicking does nothing, left clicking only brings up a fluxbox choice. There seems to be no way to start any application, including a configuration application or editor or terminal. Then with kde there is something if possible more baffling. Synaptic declines to get kde on the grounds that it is missing kwebdev. It cannot find kwebdev if you search for it using synaptic. I googled kwebdev and it seems to be part of quanta. So I tried to install quanta, and did not seem to get quanta, but got a couple of libraries, but in any case, still no luck with kde. Windowmaker works fine however. Am I doing, or failing to do, something silly or obvious? Peter

4 4

openoffice for debian on amd
by Jenny Hopkins 20 Oct '06

20 Oct '06

Hullo there, I've been setting up a new computer with debian. I'm using the deb-src http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian-amd64/debian/ stable main mirror. I can't install openoffice.org, as it depends on openoffice.org-bin. However, openoffice.org-bin doesn't seem to be available for amd architecture in this mirror. I had a go at downloading the openoffice.org deb file (all_arch) from debian, hoping to fool it somehow, but it still asked for the -bin deb. On looking at the info on debian.org, it doesn't seem that there is an openoffice-bin deb made for amd at all. Can anybody help? Thanks, Jenny (pie-eyed)

4 6

vmware success
by cl＠isbd.net 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

Well, after all my trials and tribulations getting Slackware installed on my new whizzy box it turned out to be very easy to get vmware going. I just followed the 'how to make it work on Slackware' detailed at:- http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~jbyrne/vmware.htm and, it just worked! I'm now installing Windows XP professional in a window while I'm typing this - amazing! I've only installed Vmware Player but I think it will satisfy all my needs. I can create virtual machines for it at http://www.easyvmx.com/. ... and installation has completed, a working XP in a window on my screen - wonderful. Now to really push things by installing Microsoft Access on it - that's the one Windows application I really need. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

1 0

Is there a 'startx' equivalent for displaying a remote desktop?
by cl＠isbd.net 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

Are there any 'ready made' equivalents of startx that , instead of displaying the local X desktop, will display a remote system's desktop? I'm a little unclear here on use of 'server' and client BTW so bear with me if I sound a bit confused - I probably am! :-) I want to have a setup on a Linux box that does the same as Cygwin/X does on my Win2K machine. Cygwin/X is an X server and I use it to display the desktop from my Linux box, the Win2k machine effectively acts as an X terminal with all desktop configuration etc. being on the Linux box. This uses XDMCP, which is the XDMCP client and which the server is beyond me! How do I run X on *another* linux box so that it can display the same Linux desktop that I can already display on my Win2k system? Presumably the Linux system whose desktop is to be displayed must already be set up right (with xdm or equivalent, actually gdm in my case) so that remote servers can display its desktop. So all I need to do is get X on the 'new' Linux box to go and find the remote xdm. Is it *just* a matter of saying:- X -query sessionhost Where sessionhost is the system whose desktop I want to display or is there more to it than that? -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

1 1

Is this a FireFox bug or a Twiki template/skin problem?
by cl＠isbd.net 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

I've been playing with this bug/infelicity for ages and I'm coming to the conclusion that it's maybe a Firefox bug in its handling of CSS. Could any kind souls out there with nothing better to do take a look at:- http://84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome and tell me if the Search box at the top right and the text underneath it is 'off window' to the right and makes a horizontal scroll bar appear? In IE it's perfect, everything in the right place and no horizontal scroll bar. In Firefox I get the horizontal scroll bar, the degree of the error varies according to the font size (and minimum font size) you set in preferences. I've discussed it with the author of the Twiki skin but he hasn't really been able to resolve the problem. If anyone can check it in browsers other than IE or Firefox that would be very useful but even other versions of Firefox would be interesting. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

4 6

Re : Is this a FireFox bug or a Twiki template/skin problem?
by barrie james 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 12:33 +0100, cl at isbd.net wrote: >I've been playing with this bug/infelicity for ages and I'm coming to >the conclusion that it's maybe a Firefox bug in its handling of CSS. > >Could any kind souls out there with nothing better to do take a look >at:- > > http://84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome > >and tell me if the Search box at the top right and the text underneath >it is 'off window' to the right and makes a horizontal scroll bar >appear? For me it's fine - the entire text box is well inside the screen and the text extends halfway across the box - the "t" in "Print" is the midpoint of the box - so no scollbars needed. Using Firefox 1.5.0.7 on Slackware 10.2 at screen res of 1280 x 1024 Barrie _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live Messenger has arrived. Click here to download it for free! http://imagine-msn.com/messenger/launch80/?locale=en-gb

1 0

Copying lots of hidden files and directories - how?
by cl＠isbd.net 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

If I want to copy a hierachy of files and directories which include a lot of hidden files (and directories) i.e. ones which start with '.' what is the easiest way to go about it? I know one approach is to use tar but it would be easier if I could simply 'cp -R x y' and copy *everything* in x to y. Is there not a simple way to do this? -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

5 5

Modules - slightly more moderate this time
by cl＠isbd.net 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

Well after my rant last night I would like to actually work out how modules are supposed to work as I don't seem to understand them very well at the moment! So, to some rather basic questions:- How do modules get installed (as in attached to the kernel when the system starts up)? In my previous encounters with modules I think it was a totally manual process in that one had to add the required modprobe command to the rc files. Is this still true or is there some sort of automatic process that does this nowadays? What does setting a device to [M] in the kernel configuration actually do? It can't be necessary for a module to work as otherwise one wouldn't be able to add new modules would you? (E.g. I seem to have added my RTL8168 module by just compiling it and installing it, it doesn't appear in the kernel configuration - or does it?) By the way my problems with the RTL8168 module seem to be down to the fact that the rc.modules script was linked to a 2.4.33 version rather than the 2.6.18 version which it should have been linked to. Fixing this seems to have made things work rather better. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

2 2

Jump to page:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

main