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10369 discussions

Help - CM120 C-Media USB Card Reader
by Tim Green 25 Sep '05

25 Sep '05

Hello, I bought an interestingly cheap USB memory card reader last week. It works fine in Windows but I'd rather having it working in Linux. The card reader is based on the C-Media CM120 chip. I say based on - there is only the one chip on the little circuit board. If you think you can help, you can read the output of "lsusb -v" in my journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/spodlife/90240.html I am running Debian Sarge with kernel v2.6.8, and looking ahead to the more recent kernels there is still no official support. Any ideas? Cheers, Tim.

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When df & du disagree (wildly)...
by James Green 25 Sep '05

25 Sep '05

Hi all, Spot the bleedin' obvious: jmkg@s1c1:/home$ sudo du -csh 64G . 64G total jmkg@s1c1:/home$ sudo df -h /home Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda7 124G 105G 13G 89% /home Tiny wincey little bit of a disagreement going on there. Server is a MySQL box, I've had to keep removing binary logs due to disk space issues and lately this has been a pain. A quick look for other areas of disk usage on this partition showed the discrepency. Any particular ideas on what may be the cause? Only reference on Google was circa 1999 when deleting open files caused this to be demonstrated. df does update when I delete stuff today... Cheers, James

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Autumn ALUG Kit Meet at UEA
by Elisabeth 25 Sep '05

25 Sep '05

There is a note in my phone which says there should be a kit meet at UEA on 23 October, as mooted at the last monthly Moot. If there are no better suggestions or major objections from the assembled masses, I'll book a room next week. Are we going for the record for coffee makers again? And, of course, there will be Cake. And a prize for the most strange, complex, or amusing piece of working kit. And possibly an award for the person who fixes (or breaks) the most things during the afternoon :) e

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Foreign parts
by Bob Dove 24 Sep '05

24 Sep '05

Hi Folks, Greetings from Colonia Claudius. I know that the Wallsend = World's End is a funny - the 'real' World's End is in Chelsea, part of Londinium! I know you all know too that Wallsend is where Hadrian's wall ended! We all learnt at school that Hadrian built the wall to keep the Scots out, the truth of the matter is that there were probably as many gates through the wall as there were watch towers on it. To come through the gate (to trade) you had to pay a tax on your sale goods. Customs and Excise - good idea eh? Julius Caesar 'Veni, Vedi, Veci'? Nah, Veni and Vedi perhaps but he went home with the 'flu! Claudius' army came and found of course already Romanised Celtic tribes and Roman trading posts so the battles were probably not as extensive as the post Roman propaganda would have us believe!!! Alas, the Romans didn't have Linux... Cheers, Bob Dove.

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vnc through a firewall
by Peter 22 Sep '05

22 Sep '05

Does anyone know how to do this? I have a friend in another part of England who regularly wants help with how to do things in OO. So, most of the time I start up OO myself and work in parallel with him and talk him through it. But, he's not very sophisticated and often has trouble following, or even describing very accurately what he is seeing. Today was what led me to think we need another way, when for some mysterious reason printing a journal article he has written, in the approved format of 2 pages per sheet in landscape form, ran into problems. So I find myself saying, you see that icon with the little hand over the printer.... Very time consuming. I have set him up on broadband using a router, so there is a hardware firewall at his end, and of course, NAT. I have put Suse 9.2 in for him, so there is a software firewall as well. I would like to be able, securely, to run VNC and actually demonstrate what he has to do. If we didn't have the firewalls....it would be easy! But with the router, he doesn't have a public IP address - exactly why I made him get one, of course. Oh dear. I am not terribly sophisticated in this stuff, so if anyone can give a simple step by step account, would be very grateful. Regards Peter

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so-long and thanks for all the fish
by Stan Fraser 22 Sep '05

22 Sep '05

I am moving away to the North East (Wallsend) and hope there is an active LUG in the area. Thanks to ALUG I'm now able to understand some of the questions posted, never mind the answers! Best Regards to Everyone Stan

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DVD Authoring
by Wayne Stallwood 21 Sep '05

21 Sep '05

I am looking for a tool chain (or preferably a single application) that can author a DVD from DV cam footage. Specifically- I have video footage on two DV Cams (both have firewire interfaces) that I need to edit into a single video stream. Additionally I may need to edit/substitute the audio track. I am looking for a graphical video editor here because there are sections of the footage I need to remove and cut about. I have a series of Digital camera stills that I would like to compile into a video slide show (possibly with a narrative audio track) I want to create a DVD menu for the above allowing access to either the video or the Slide show. With the option to have the menu skinned with a theme of my choosing Pie in the sky here but, If possible I would like to be able to mess with video effects, I would love to have access to a sepia style effect complete with film scratches/noise. I have a standard Firewire interface on my machine. I am not sure but I guess that any firewire interface is suitable for capturing from a Digital Video camera, do the camera's need some sort of driver or is there a universal capture driver ? If capturing from firewire is a problem then I can dub the video to DVD using a standalone DVD recorder (that has a firewire interface) and then extract the video from the recorded DVD's. Has anyone done this sort of thing on Linux ?

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Success Story - Gphoto2 1 : Windows Nil
by Steve Fosdick 21 Sep '05

21 Sep '05

It's nice to be able to report a success, particularly in what can otherwise be a weak-spot to GNU/Linux, that of interfacing to hardware which is supplied only with Windows (or occasionaly Mac) drivers. Having bought a nice new digital camera, my first attempt at getting pictures off it was on Linux. It took about 30 seconds to install gphoto2 and about a further 30 seconds or so to fetch all the pictures from the camera. Next I was round a friend's and tried to fetch the pictures from the camera to a Windows PC to view them on the screen. After putting in the software disc from the manufacturer the PC spent a good ten minutes running InstallShield for what seemed like an infinite series of related components eventually coming to a halt when one of the instances of InstallShield seemed to reach some kind of deadlock. After a reboot and a second attempt things were no better - in fact it was more than InstallShield that had to be killed with Task Manager. The windows new hardware wizard did detect the camera once and offered a choice of application. After picking the one from the manufacter and finding, not to any great suprise, that it didn't work there wasn't any obvious way of getting back to that choice despite not having clicked the "remember my choice" checkbox. Unplugging the camera and plugging in again, cycling the power on the camera and another reboot of the PC all failed to get back to that dialog. So, after a frustrating half hour in front of the windows PC I took the camera home, fetched the photos with gphoto2 and in less than a minute I'd e-mailed them back to my friend. Steve.

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 19 Sep '05

19 Sep '05

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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TV Card
by Wayne Stallwood 18 Sep '05

18 Sep '05

Can anyone recommend a DVB (freeview) card that works in Linux ? Does such a thing exist ? Also what is the state of Top up TV support on PC based Freeview receivers, is it possible or is Top up TV restricted to set top boxes.

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[ALUG Announce]USERLAND : OPENMUTE FLOSS WORKSHOPS & ARTIST TALK 22-23 SEPTEMBER 2005
by Anthony Iles 17 Sep '05

17 Sep '05

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hi there, I found your group online and thought you might be interested in this event happening in Norwich next week. Regards Anthony --- OPENMUTE TOUR ANNOUNCE USERLAND : FREE LIBRE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE WORKING FOR YOU! OpenMute is an online collaborative software tool initiative, and the latest in a cadre of projects by Mute Magazine. OpenMute provides 'free as in beer' web space, tools and services to the non-profit and creative sectors. The OpenMute tour is a varied set of two-day workshops with an aim to familiarise audiences, practitioners and interested parties with the current concepts and practices of Free Open Source Software (or FOSS) as well as practical hands-on help building a website or creating a community project using the OpenMute toolset. The workshops are geared towards teaching people 'you' how to use the OpenMute FOSS software for your cultural or community needs, and these workshops are geared towards a novice to intermediate user of these systems Price : £20 / £10 concessions Date : September 22rd-23rd September Duration : Two Days Times : 10-4pm artist's talk after first day of workshop 4.30pm. Venue : Norwich Arts Centre, St. Benedict's Street, Norwich, NR2 4PG Booking : 01603 660352 All workshop participants please register for your free floss web site http://openmute.org ***22nd SEPTEMBER 4.30PM ARTIST TALK BY HEATH BUNTING OF IRRATIONAL.ORG AND THE CUBE CINEMA*** ALL WELCOME / NO ADMISSION CHARGE Biography. Heath Bunting emerged from the 80's committed to building open/ democratic communication systems and social contexts. He came from the street up, passing through and often revisiting graphity, performance, intervention, pirate radio, fax/ mail art and BBS systems to become an active participant in the explosion of the internet. He has produced many internet projects, some highly recognised and has helped form a strong context for the practice of net.art. Recently, he has moved into the field of genetics proclaiming it to be the next "new media", and is also developing work in the area of physical network performance. 22/09/05 4.30-5.30pm Norwich Arts Centre, St. Benedict's Street, Norwich, NR2 4PG --- END ----- 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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Diversity is a killer
by Wayne Stallwood 17 Sep '05

17 Sep '05

Does anybody else remember MS advertising campaigns of old that suggested that the diversity in the Unix and Linux operating systems from different vendors caused interoperability woes and increased the chances of you deploying the wrong solution. I've been googling away but I can't find any linkage. Anyway if this report is to believed http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050910-5298.html It looks like there is going to be no less than 7 different flavours of Windows Vista (longhorn to those that haven't been keeping up) with not only different versions for home and business but different levels within those versions. As someone who provides support to both business and private customers I can see this being a nightmare. To be honest it is hard enough remembering and explaining the differences between XP Pro and XP Home. But in the future I'll have to remember the differences between Professional Edition, Small Business Edition and Enterprise edition for my business customers and Starter, Home basic and Home Premium Edition for my private clients. God forbid that anybody try to use the Business versions in the home or vice versa because it looks like unless they fork out for the Ultimate edition not one of the above has a full feature set. Why can't it be the Apple way where there is a Server version and a Workstation version. Or better still Linux where any version can potentially be Server,Workstation Home or Business depending on what packages you have installed. There must be a way of MS getting their licensing model to work without resorting to so many versions of what essentially is the same product.

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Re: main digest, Vol 3 #668 - 11 msgs
by Jenny Hopkins 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

Jan: <snip> > The main reason I suggest Black Cat Networks is that I am very happy > with their service (more so than any other ISP I have used) and so are > other Aluggers who use them and Jonathan (who owns/works for/runs Black > Cat) is in the pub every month for the 2nd Thursday Norwich Alug pub > meet. > > [1] http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/ This sounds attractive to me, I would be quite inclined to go locally with a company that is known to be "Linux aware". It seems to me that the ADSL service they offer might be a bit more than what I was looking for -- e.g. I don't think I need a static IP; my main use of the connection would be shuttling files back and forth between home and work (via scp / rsync etc.), installing Debian packages, and occasional general surfing / email checking etc. But then again, a nicely working connection to the rest of the Internet may well be worth the additional costs (mainly the setup fee)... </snip> Hi Jan, I've got a bt line here, and when exchange was upgraded to adsl I splashed out and got firstly my dsl from blackcatnetworks and secondly a Netgear DG834G router. Any extra money I spent has been worth it time and time again as I have had a reliable broadband connection for a year now, and have had to make no support phone calls. Jenny

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General advice on broadband / WLAN wanted
by Jan T. Kim 14 Sep '05

14 Sep '05

Dear ALUG folks, I have moved from Germany to Norwich a couple of months ago and now I consider getting a broadband Internet connection for use with Linux (evidently on this list, I guess...). Looking at the offers by BT and NTL, I have not been quite able to determine what hardware is provided with the packages offered. For example, the most basic package from BT is advertised as "Not Mac compatible", but I've not been able to figure out what causes this incompatibility. Certainly, some of you on this list have a broadband connection? I'd be interested if you could share your experience and tell me how you managed (or failed) to use a broadband package. I'm most interested in the basic ones -- having Internet access at work (UEA), I don't need huge download capacity, web space or other add-on features. The computer(s) to be connected are laptops (running Debian), if that makes any difference. As a next step, I'd also look into getting wireless, so I'd be interested in comments on that too. Thanks in advance and best regards, Jan -- +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ | *NEW* email: jtk(a)cmp.uea.ac.uk | | *NEW* WWW: http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/people/jtk | *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----*

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Simply setting serial port parameters
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 14 Sep '05

14 Sep '05

Hi Folks, Advice on an ancient ritual please ... Suppose I want to set the serial port parameters of /dev/ttyS0, e.g. Speed = 4800 baud, 7 data bits, Space parity, 1 stop bit aka "4800 7S1". I don't seem to find a Linux utility wich will do this simply. I've been doing it by starting up minicom, going into its "config" mode via "^A-Z", doing each of these bitty things separately, and then quitting. However, this is manifestly overkill! (Not to say clumsy, time-consuming, and not suited for incorporation in a script). Of course, once done once, one can save the resulting config to a minirc.* file and then run 'minicom minirc.whatever', which does the business but still leaves minicom running so it has to be killed (since it's stealing data from the serial port), and there's no option I can see to minicom which tells it to "run setup and quit". What I'm really after is a simple utility on the lines of serialpars -s 4800 -b 7 -p S -s 1 /dev/ttyS0 to set up "4800 7S1", but I can't find such a thing. (setserial doesn't seem to do this -- while it's in principle possible to set the baud rate in a roundabout way, I don't see any provision for data bits, parity, stop bits.) Any ideas? Thanks, best wishes, and good morning! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 14-Sep-05 Time: 10:26:27 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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USB -> Serial adapter
by Barry Samuels 12 Sep '05

12 Sep '05

I have just discovered that my shiny new Thinkpad R51 doesn't have a serial port !!!!! I want to be able to connect my GPS which requires a 9-pin serial connector. I see that there are USB to Serial cable adapters available including an IBM one for £50.00 (No thank you). There are many available on ebay for £3 upwards (including postage) so can anyone tell me if these things are likely to require any special software to make them work. The reason I ask is that they all specify Windows or Mac compatibility - no mention of Linux of course. Any information gratefully recieved. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 12 Sep '05

12 Sep '05

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Switch Mode
by Bob Dove 11 Sep '05

11 Sep '05

Hi Folks, Switch Mode - mmmm? In days gone by I worked on a switch mode device for studio flash. The idea was to run studio flash equipment from car battery - 12v DC to 230v AC at a fairly high amperage. The switch mode converter cost more than the studio flash which in itself was expensive! It was almost as large too! I have no recollection of anyone doing this in reverse - far too expensive. However, in the flash market I have specified many an external power supply (transformer pack) to run DC 6v, 9v and 12v devices from 230/240v AC. Currently most of these come from China and cost (according to quantity of course) pence! You can now buy relatively inexpensive switch mode devices - I presume largely to obviate miles of extended cable when you want to strim the back end of your garden (you should be so lucky)! Cheers, BD.

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SiI Raid Card
by David Noble 10 Sep '05

10 Sep '05

Hi I've recently installed a Silicon Image ATA 133 card, and a new Seagate 120 gig hard drive (configured as slave, plugged into the primary channel of the ATA card)- it seems to work fine under Windows, but now when starting up Linux (SuSE 9.1), I get a Kernel Panic when doing something like mounting /root or something(/dev/hdb3). My other hard drives (an 80 gig containing the Linux partitions, and a 60 gig containing the Windows partitions) are connected to the Realtek ATA chip on my motherboard, and they get past the loading stage no probs. HELP!!! what can I do? Are my videos, multitrack audio and everything else hopelessly lost?!?! Please help Dave

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Power & Heat in Laptops
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 10 Sep '05

10 Sep '05

Hi Folks, An off-topic question, but you hardware experts may help! On some laptops, the external mains supply passes through an external transformer and it is the reduced voltage which is plugged in to the laptop. On others, the mains lead is plugged directly into the laptop, and the voltage reduction is done internally. In the former case, heat generated in the reduction is dissipated externally, while in the latter it has to escape from the interior of the laptop. So, other things being equal, one would expect the latter kind to run hotter than the former. This certainly seems to correspond to my experience. I have had 4 (ancient) laptops, 3 still working. One of these has the mains plugged in directly, the others all have an external transformer. I have never had heating concerns with the ones which have external transformers, while the "internal" one does run pretty warm, and periodically exhibits screen-flashing/breakup (especially when running "graphics heavy", as in X with lots of re-draw). Since this can often be cured by switching to a console and pressing a tiny button, which blanks the screen, for a few seconds, and also seems more prevalent in warm weather,I wonder if this is associated with overheating of the graphics chip. (There is an internal fan, which cuts in occasionally, but it seems to be a sleepy bugger and doesn't often wake up ... ) Any comments welcome, and will be read with interest! 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: 09-Sep-05 Time: 08:17:31 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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KDE Konqueror Problem
by Ben Whyte 09 Sep '05

09 Sep '05

Hi I have an interesting problem that I wondered if people could help with. I am running Debian testing and kde and konqueror has developed an odd problem, when you open it up to do file management, it will display the contents of a directory, but if you click on a directory it says it doesn't no what to do and what would you like to open the file using. So I have had a look at the file associations and it doesn't have any applications in the file associations. If I add a simple konqueror it recursively opens konqueror windows but shows no files in these windows. Any and all suggestions welcome. Ben Whyte

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Problem: Emacs + ssh X forwarding = BadWindow
by MJ Ray 09 Sep '05

09 Sep '05

Today I was using Emacs and used File->"New Frame on Display..." to put an emacs frame (a window) onto localhost:10 which was forwarded off over ssh to another display. Oddly, with this machine combination that I've not tried before, keyboard input wasn't recognised by Emacs and while using the mouse to try to see what the problem was, the connection was lost with some BadWindow message displayed on the original Emacs frame's minibuffer (vanished before I could copy it). I'm using Emacs 21.3, OpenSSH 4.0p1 and x.org 6.8.1 - has anyone seen similar problems or know what causes them? (By the way, if you've never used "New Frame on Display..." or its predecessors to create collaborative editing sessions, you've been missing out on a useful tool. Give it a go!) Thanks in advance for any clue, -- MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/

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FTGH: Epson Stylus 480
by Jonathan McDowell 08 Sep '05

08 Sep '05

1 (one) Epson Stylus 480 colour inkjet printer. About 5 years old, but extremely rarely used (hence getting rid of it in a spree of clearing out junk). Didn't work that well under Linux when I bought it, but I believe it's supported ok these days. Parallel port interface. Boxed. I even seem to have a manual. Free To Good Home. Must collect from Norwich (off Drayton Road). J. -- "Why 'maybe' for everything?" "I'm using fluffy logic." [ Black Cat Networks ] [ 0845 PAYG dialup ] [ ADSL from £20+VAT/month ] [ http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/ ]

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autoconf problem
by Chris Green 06 Sep '05

06 Sep '05

I'm trying to configure a utility using autoconf, when I run ./configure I get all the usual checking sort of stuff, then at the end:- checking for XShapeCombineMask in -lXext... no checking for jpeg_destroy_compress in -ljpeg... no not updating unwritable cache ./config.cache creating ./config.status sed: can't read confdefs.h: No such file or directory creating autoconf/Makefile.defines sed: can't read ./autoconf/Makefile.defines.in: No such file or directory creating autoconf/Makefile.common sed: can't read ./autoconf/Makefile.common.in: No such file or directory creating autoconf/Makefile.common.lib sed: can't read ./autoconf/Makefile.common.lib.in: No such file or directory creating Makefile sed: can't read ./Makefile.in: No such file or directory creating config.h cat: ./autoconf/config.h.in: No such file or directory config.h is unchanged ... but all those errors are nonsense, there is a writable ./config.cache (created earlier by autoconf) and the autoconf directory does exist and has those files in it. What am I missing? -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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2nd Thursday Norwich Meet : Reindeer, Dereham Road
by Jonathan McDowell 05 Sep '05

05 Sep '05

The monthly "Second Thursday" ALUG Norwich Pub Meet is this Thursday, 8th September. It's at the Reindeer pub on the Dereham Road, just opposite the City Gate. We'll 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. 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/2004-08-ALUG/ http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2005-01-ALUG-Xmas/ http://the.earth.li/~noodles/stilvoid-alug/mp20050811/ Which should hopefully aid those of you wondering who to look out for. We're /normally/ just to the left of the main entrance. J. -- /-\ | 101 things you can't have too much |@/ Debian GNU/Linux Developer | of : 30 - Comfy sofas. \- |

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