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PowerPC Linux
by Simon Royal 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

Hi ALUG Hope you can help. I have been toying with Linux for a number of years. I detest Windows (as most people do) and partly because I am a designer and partly because it is simple, reliable and fast my OS of choice is Mac OSX. As any Mac OSX user knows, it is built around Unix and shares similar attributes with Linux. I have a 1Ghz eMac and want to run Linux on it. I have been using the live Ubuntu distro on an old G3 iBook at work and loved it. I now want to run it at home on my eMac, but don't want to lose my OSX, so would like to dual boot. How do I do this without wiping everything off my Mac and is Ubuntu the best choice for PowerPC users? I have noticed a few others but Ubuntu always seems to come out on top. Yellow Dog is a little behind and I am not sure about OpenSuse? Will any of the PowerPC distros take advantage of my Airport Extreme card, my DLink router and my iPod. I have tried all my other hardware from scanners, digital camera and memory sticks and these all seem to work fine under Ubuntu, but eventually if I can get everything I need from Linux I would scrap Mac OSX altogether. You help would be very much appreciated? Kind Regards Simon Royal ---- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac

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Re: [ALUG] MySQL Dynamic/index tables
by Richard Lewis 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 09:56 +0000, Stuart Fox wrote: > > Hello ALUG, > > > > I hope you don't mind me asking a MySQL question here? > > > > I've got a very slow query on my database which uses a lot of LEFT JOINs > > in order to do a sort of keyword search across a number of tables. It > > seems to me that if I could create a sort of permanent temporary table > > which stores the result of this query, add a FULLTEXT index to it and > > then do my keyword searches on this table things would be a lot quicker. > > It would be like a sort of dynamic or index table because its contents > > would have to change as the other tables change - it would have to > > reflect the current state of the rest of the database. > > > > Does MySQL provide functionality to do this sort of thing? If not I > > suppose I could set up a cron job to perform the query and update the > > table every 10 minutes or so... > > > > I've searched for things like "temporary tables", "index tables" and > > "dynamic tables" but haven't really found anything particularly useful. > > > > Any thoughts? > > > > Cheers, > > Richard > > > > > > You coultd try a "view" if you are using mysql 5, not sure how you do them > but it may be what you are after > > Stuart Thanks for this suggestion. I've just got around to upgrading my MySQL and trying it out. I found the VIEW syntax all right but unfortunately its a bit like a sort of "query template" and it actually /performs/ the defining SELECT statement every time you make a query on the view. So, of course, that doesn't solve the problem because it stills takes around 10 seconds to execute. However, I have been reading the (woeful) MySQL manual and have found that you can create a table using a SELECT statement to define and populate it /and/ it lets you add a FULLTEXT index at creation time. So I've done this and it works great. Of course, the table takes around 10 seconds to create but I only need to re-build it every few hours and, because its one table with a FULLTEXT index, queries are really quick. I just thought I'd let you know how I got on... Cheers, Richard -- --------------------------- Richard Lewis Sonic Arts Research Archive http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ ---------------------------

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Gnome Screenshot
by Wayne Stallwood 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

I am still trying to work my way through the remaining xgl related bugs on my system. Here is another one "Take a screenshot" works from the gnome menu..however my prt sc button used to launch this as well. Since getting compiz going it seems to be broken. xev gives me the following for the button press KeyPress event, serial 29, synthetic NO, window 0x4400001, root 0x52, subw 0x0, time 437305737, (232,143), root:(252,233), state 0x0, keycode 111 (keysym 0xff61, Print), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 0 bytes: XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes: XFilterEvent returns: False KeyRelease event, serial 29, synthetic NO, window 0x4400001, root 0x52, subw 0x0, time 437305825, (232,143), root:(252,233), state 0x0, keycode 111 (keysym 0xff61, Print), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 0 bytes: If I run the keyboard shortcuts wizard thing from the Gnome menu I get the following Take a screenshot print Take a screenshot of a window <alt>print Interestingly if I try to reset the first one I get the following message "The shortcut "Print" cannot be used because it will become unusable to type using this key." Setting it to <crtl>Print doesn't work either. Somebody told me that there may be something in gconf-editor for this...but I can't find it at the moment...any other ideas ? I've been all over the Ubuntu wiki and the dapper forums to no avail

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Training for a non-profit organisation.
by rob page 20 Mar '06

20 Mar '06

Hello all, I'm currently doing some voluntary consulting for a non-profit organisation. They've been using Linux for a while, mostly due to the political aspect, however due to a number of problems with it, they were considering switching back to Windows entirely, but I've agreed to help implement a dual-boot solution so they can stay with Linux, whilst still have Windows available for when they need it. During my first session with them, one of the things they mentioned, was that while it is very easy for them to get funding to buy capital (ie, software), it is much much harder for them to get funding for training. In short, does anyone know of any cheap (ideally free, but I'm aware this is unlikely) Linux training courses in the Norfolk area aimed at teaching a fairly non-technical user basic Linux administration. Thanks, Rob.

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BOM software
by Guy Eastwood 20 Mar '06

20 Mar '06

Yikes that Compiere wants 6gb of Oracle installing! However a search for 'ERP' yielded TinyERP (in apt, no less!) so I'm giving that chap a go. was a faff to setup but seems to be going now, anyway :o) G

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Wanted: USB 2.0 PCI Card
by Simon Elliott 20 Mar '06

20 Mar '06

Hello, As you may or may not know, I recently purchased a second hand machine. It came with a whopping 6 USB ports, the big problem is - they're all USB 1.0 - And thus, slow as anything. It's taking over an hour to transfer a few gigabytes of data. Not acceptable seeing as I'm using the thing to back a lot of data up for burning to DVD... So I was wondering if anyone had a USB 2.0 PCI card, lying around, perhaps discarded in a drawer, but still looking for a new home that I could buy / scrounge / permanently borrow / take off their hands?? Thanks a lot.. -Simon (aka. Sionide ala IRC)

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BOM Software
by Guy Eastwood 20 Mar '06

20 Mar '06

Does anyone know of any BOM (Bill Of Materials) management software? Either standalone on Windoze or web-based (LAMP, etc) ? My sister is after something to do this for her jewellery design biz but I don't wanna write it (and have the pain of maintaining it) but I thought there must be a free thingy to do this somewhere so she doesn't fork out for something nuts like SAGEware or similar when there's no need to. G

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 20 Mar '06

20 Mar '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Linux Laptop from major supplier
by Ian bell 16 Mar '06

16 Mar '06

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X… Not the best but it's a start. Ian

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Ubuntu apt question
by Stuart Fox 16 Mar '06

16 Mar '06

Hi all Im new to the apt system, is ther a way to completely remove a virtual package and its dependencies? I've just put dapper on my laptop as an experiment and I want to replace gnome with kde (not starting a gnome/kde war, i just dont like gnome) I know I *could* just leave gnome in place but it urks me having all that *stuff* under the hood that I dont want there. Cheers Stuart -- The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

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MySQL Dynamic/index tables
by Richard Lewis 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

Hello ALUG, I hope you don't mind me asking a MySQL question here? I've got a very slow query on my database which uses a lot of LEFT JOINs in order to do a sort of keyword search across a number of tables. It seems to me that if I could create a sort of permanent temporary table which stores the result of this query, add a FULLTEXT index to it and then do my keyword searches on this table things would be a lot quicker. It would be like a sort of dynamic or index table because its contents would have to change as the other tables change - it would have to reflect the current state of the rest of the database. Does MySQL provide functionality to do this sort of thing? If not I suppose I could set up a cron job to perform the query and update the table every 10 minutes or so... I've searched for things like "temporary tables", "index tables" and "dynamic tables" but haven't really found anything particularly useful. Any thoughts? Cheers, Richard -- --------------------------- Richard Lewis Sonic Arts Research Archive http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ ---------------------------

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Kororaa Xgl Demo Live CD (Version 0.1) has been released
by Keith Watson 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

http://getkororaa.com/ Regards, Keith ____________ BAROMETER, n. - An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having. - Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary

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Anyone want some work?
by Joe Button 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

Hi. One of our ex-clients has asked us to do some (unspecified) reconfiguration to their Debian server. Apparently we don't want to do it, but I've been asked if I could find any other takers. If interested please complete the following sentence: "I am good at reconfiguring debian servers because .........." and we will pick a winner at random out of a hat. Cheers, Joe

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RE: [ALUG] USB DVD Reader/Writer
by Keith Watson 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

> From: Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk > Sent: 14 March 2006 22:51 > Any further comments welome -- I've never dabbled yet in the > DVD world. Neither had I until recently, I found this very useful <http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/coasterless_dvd.htm> Regards, Keith ____________ We don't see the world as IT is. We see it as WE are. - Anaïs Nin

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Free to a good (or bad) home
by Wayne Stallwood 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

I am having a bit of a clear out and just stumbled across the following bits...all free to anyone willing to come and get them...If not then I'll bring them to the next hardware meet. eMachines eTower 700ir Mini Tower PC Fitted with Celeron 700,Heatsink/Fan, Mainboard (Intel 810 chipset),CD-ROM,Modem and a floppy drive...Everything else has been robbed. Integrated Video and Audio, no AGP slot, 3 PCI's. Seems to run fine with a test PSU and some RAM (PC100 DIMM)...you'll probably have to junk the case because the PSU is one of the less common sizes. Plextor SCSI (SCA connection) SCSI CD ROM. 40x speed. DXR3/Hollywood hardware (DVD playback) Mpeg card, Drivers to make it work with Xine exist. Strange Compaq all in one PC (integrated monitor etc) with a Massive 8MB RAM and bohemouth 400MB Hard drive I believe it has a 486DX2/66 Processor. Works. Was going to be part of a long forgotten MiniITX project so now heading for the bin (unless anyone wants to save it)

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USB DVD Reader/Writer
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 15 Mar '06

15 Mar '06

Hi Folks, Can experienced persons recommend an external USB DVD reader and writer which works well with Linux? (I would be driving it from a Red Hat 9 laptop). Also: would there be any problems writing files to it from filesystems on other machines which are NFS-mouted on the laptop? (I would chiefly want to use this to make backups of large chunks of filespace, and there would not be space on the laptop to clone the files from the other machines, only one of which has a USB port which may or may not be OK for this -- SuSE 7.1 from around 2000). Thanks for any advice, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 14-Mar-06 Time: 16:58:34 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Windows Vista UI
by Wayne Stallwood 14 Mar '06

14 Mar '06

It's always worth looking at beta's of upcoming OS releases to see where they are heading...you never know there may be one or two good ideas that should be in Linux....But looking at these shots of Vista I am wondering if MS have sacked half their UI team (if they haven't they should do) http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1931914,00.asp Check out the media player shot non standard widgets, confusing boundaries between content tree and content files, media buttons that force you to mouse down to the bottom middle of the screen....madness or unfamiliarity clouding my opinion ? We stuck IE7 preview on a spare XP machine at work, same UI issues, looks pretty but is totally unusable for power users...The only good thing I would like to see implemented in firefox is the tab preview button that gives a screen of thumbnails of all current tabs.

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Wireless "N"etworking
by Martin John Collins 14 Mar '06

14 Mar '06

Evening all, Slowly but surely my Linux knowledge is growing but I have always avoided the big "N" as the alien terminology tends to make my head spin after about 5 mins of reading! But I'm going to give it a go. A full tutorial through the LUG is not what I'm after, but a few pointers of where to start would be appreciated. There's a desktop in the lounge (which will be the server) connected by cable to a Linksys wireless broadband router for ADSL internet access. My laptop connects to the internet wirelessly (ndiswrapper) through the router. Both machines connect to the router via DHCP and there are firewalls enabled on the desktop, the laptop and internally on the router. In the next couple of months I will be putting another desktop in my son's bedroom upstairs. All three machines will be running SUSE 10.0 All I really want is one shared folder on the server for moving files around all machines and for the laptop and upstairs desktop to be able to print to the printer connected to the desktop server. I don't know what route to go. I've read a little about internet printing protocol and configuring cups but that only covers the printing. Samba seems to address both but my first initial attempts have failed. I set up the workgroup COLLINS-NET through the SAMBA SERVER module in YAST which also opens up a firewall port on the server. I then configure the SAMBA CLIENT through YAST on the laptop and after entering the username and password it seems to connect (this is only after I shut down the laptop firewall manually - God knows what port the SAMBA CLIENT needs open!). However when I try to browse the network through konqueror "smb://collins-net/" I get the error "could not connect to host for smb://collins-net/". So I don't know - is SAMBA the way to go or is there a simpler solution? Your comments suggestions would be much appreciated. In the meantime I'm shutting down now and going for a sit down with a beer and a SuSE 9.2 Administration Guide!!! Cheers, Martin

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MySQL on Ubuntu 5.10
by David Noble 14 Mar '06

14 Mar '06

Hi!, After getting my bulletin board to work on my Debian system, I decided that as it wasn't using too many resources I might as well move it onto (another) old school computer (Celeron 600; 64m ram)... I performed a fresh installation of Ubuntu 5.10 (server), as I had a disc lying about. I installed the 'dev tools'(?) package, copied the MySQL source over to the machine, unpacked, ran configure (with relevant options). This worked, found gcc, g++, and all that, but came to a grinding halt, reporting "no curses/termcap library found". I checked that I had ncurses installed- I have ncurses-base. However, an "apt-get install ncurses-devel", or an "apt-get ncurses-dev" returns no results. What should I do- I don't seem to be able to find any relevant .deb packages on the 'net. I also have no internet access to this ubuntu machine as I am at <strike>prison</strike> school. Any suggestions appreciated, Dave.

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locale problem - what has changed to cause this?
by Chris Green 13 Mar '06

13 Mar '06

Until a couple of days ago I had my locales working OK, I just had all the LC_xxx environment variables set to their default value of "C" except for LC_TYPE set to "en_GB". This allowed accented characters to work correctly in mutt and tin. However something I have done over the weekend has broken this, now whenever I start tin for example I get the message:- Can't set the specified locale! If I set LC_CTYPE back to the default "C" then the message goes away so, for some reason, setlocale() cant find then "en_GB" locale. I've tried some other locales and I get the same message so I seem to have lost all of them. I haven't *really* lost all of them, the locale database is still in place at /usr/lib/locale. The most likely candidate for breaking this as far as I can see is that I upgraded the glibc library to get the latest Bluefish to work. What I don't know is how to get my locale database working again. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Thunderbird and Sent-Mail
by linux＠davebriggs.net 13 Mar '06

13 Mar '06

Hi chaps Does anyone know if it is possible to get Thunderbird to download messages in the sent-mail folder of an inbox as well as those that are in the inbox itself? I tend to use a webmail interface to check emails while I am at work, and it's annoying that any sent from there don't download onto my machine at home. Any help appreciated. Cheers Dave

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New Mail Notification Evolution
by Richard 13 Mar '06

13 Mar '06

Hello, Does anyone know how to make the New Mail Notification applet for Evolution display in the GNOME Notificiation Area? I've got evolution-plugins installed and the plugin is ticked in Evolution's plugins list. I've also found the option to make Evolution beep when new mail arrives but I'd like to be able to "close" Evolution and have a little icon in the Notification Area which lets me know when new mail arrives. (Plus, my machine has a bit of a problem with beeping...) Cheers, Richard --------------------------- Richard Lewis Sonic Arts Research Archive http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/ ---------------------------

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 13 Mar '06

13 Mar '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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XGL on Ubuntu
by Wayne Stallwood 12 Mar '06

12 Mar '06

Anybody played with XGL yet....just upgraded my machine to Ubuntu dapper 6.04 ? Looks like getting XGL and Compiz working on a 64bit machine is "fun" at the moment but I am going to give it a try later. Slightly put of by all the warnings on the forums that it is highly unstable at the moment...but hey nothing ventured and all that. Apart from that the dapper upgrade went fairly well (considering Ubuntu are currently considering holding off the scheduled release for 6 weeks to tidy up the remaining bugs) I had a slight problem with Openoffice2 during the upgrade but removing the installation packages and then reinstalling after everything else was upgraded seems to fix it...at least all the important stuff seems to be working, but the default theme is still a bit of a mess.

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Best Linux Out There?
by Simon Royal 12 Mar '06

12 Mar '06

Hi I have posted a few posting for opinions on some distributions of Linux and have still not come to any conclusions. What is the best Linux out there in terms of user interface, compatibility with 3 party hardware and general range of software available. I know more and more software developers and producing linux versions of their software but I want to run Linux on a laptop with wireless internet, any suggestions please. Kind Regards Simon Royal ---- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac

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