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10372 discussions

"Upgrading" Ubuntu via fresh install
by Mark Rogers 25 Apr '22

25 Apr '22

Over the years I have upgraded my Ubuntu desktop twice a year using do-release-upgrade. My root drive SSD is nearly full so I've just bought a bigger one, and I'm looking at migrating across to it. But... Ubuntu 22.04 is nearly here, so maybe it would make more sense to clean things up with a fresh 22.04 install on the new SSD instead? I know lots of people avoid upgrades and just do a clean install retaining /home (or something along those lines) but I've never done it myself. Is it the right way to go? It's a desktop PC, but 99% of the time I access it via SSH. Over the years it's had all sorts of stuff installed and uninstalled (or installed and no longer used but still there). So a clearout definitely seems like a good idea. So it seems like what I ideally want is a managed migration where I choose which things I have on the old install I migrate and which I leave behind. Is this going to be more hassle than it's worth? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Re: "Upgrading" Ubuntu via fresh install (Martin Collins)
by Peter 24 Apr '22

24 Apr '22

I've been meaning to ask this question for a while, and this seems like a good occasion. I'm moving someone from a very old i3 machine to a new AMD machine. The key difference apart from performance is that the old machine was bios, and the new one is of course compulsorily EFI. So what I did was, do a new install, then use Clonezilla to make a copy of the /home partition, and moved it to the new machine. Everything seems fine, with one exception. The old machine is on Debian Mate. All the files seem to have moved fine. But desktop layout is a different matter. The user has an enormous desktop file on a quite large screen with every inch covered with folders, in a familiar order and positioning. Unfortunately the layout of the desktop doesn't seem to survive the transition, its alpha order. Where is the layout of the desktop file kept? And is there a way to keep its layout while doing the transfer? Its not the end of the world if it just has to be accepted, but it would make life a lot easier if I could keep it. This was never a problem in previous machine moves, because I made a clone of the hard drive, then booted on the new machine. But with the arrival of compulsory EFI this isn't possible any more. They have removed legacy mode on the new main board. I have looked up converting an installation from bios to EFI. It seems like a very fraught procedure. And after all these years there's a case to be made for a clean install, as people here have said. So if I could overcome the desktop layout problem that would be what I would rather do. Peter

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Firefox
by Phil Thane 24 Apr '22

24 Apr '22

Well, last week Firefox was grinding slow so I resurrected Ghostery Dawn which I'd previously tested but not used in earnest. GD is faster and I got all the same FF plugins installed and copied my saved logins and bookmarks. One snag, whilst it responds correctly to clicking on links in webpages it won't open links in other apps, eg email or Twitter. Even if GD is already open clicking a link (from another app) opens a new instance at the home page. So I did a 'Remove Completely' of FF in Synaptic, ran updates and re-installed. And lo, it works much better. But after a time it goes slow again. Running it from a terminal I get this: *phil@phils*:*~*$ firefox [GFX1-]: glxtest: libEGL missing methods for GL test [GFX1-]: glxtest: libEGL missing eglGetDisplayDriverName Checked libEGL is installed and it is. So moving on, opened a YouTube video and get this in the terminal: 2022-04-24T12:56:32Z*ERROR* mp4parse] Found 2 nul bytes in "\u{0}\u{0}" [2022-04-24T12:56:32Z*ERROR* mp4parse] Found 2 nul bytes in "\u{0}\u{0}" [2022-04-24T12:56:32Z*ERROR* mp4parse] Found 2 nul bytes in "\u{0}\u{0}" [2022-04-24T12:56:33Z*ERROR* mp4parse] Found 2 nul bytes in "\u{0}\u{0}" Despite the error the video plays OK. Every time I choose a different video I get the same four lines though with different (time/ID?) numbers before 'ERROR'. Does anyone understand this? And is it likely to have anything to do with the performance issues? -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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Disk half full, but full anyway
by Mark Rogers 21 Apr '22

21 Apr '22

Can anyone explain this? $ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 50 GiB, 53687091200 bytes, 104857600 sectors Disk model: VBOX HARDDISK Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: gpt Disk identifier: E225721B-FB64-4D48-B133-6758468EF9F6 Device Start End Sectors Size Type /dev/sda1 2048 4095 2048 1M BIOS boot /dev/sda2 4096 3149823 3145728 1.5G Linux filesystem /dev/sda3 3149824 104855551 101705728 48.5G Linux filesystem $ df -h . Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 24G 23G 13M 100% / The scenario is that this is a new VirtualBox VM with Ubuntu 20.04.4 installed. It has a single 50GB disk as shown in VirtualBox and fdisk, but having copied 23GB to it from elsewhere (using rsync) the disk is now full. What am I missing and how do I get my disk space back? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Email hosting
by Mark Rogers 18 Apr '22

18 Apr '22

A bit over a decade ago, I took advantage of Google's free G-Suite, back when it allowed 50 users. I did this both for work (the domain I'm sending this from) and separately for personal use. As a consequence of there being 50 free users I set up several mailboxes for various purposes. Now that the free service is being migrated to a per-user pricing model I need to change to something else. For work I'll just accept that we've had a good run and pay the subscription charges (albeit we'll likely ditch a few of the users). But for my personal domain - where I am the only user - I want to switch. I don't need the other collaborative tools (I have a few Google docs/sheets but can migrate them to my work email). But having had it easy for a decade I've lost track of what my options are. Google has of-course spoiled me with very good anti-spam and I'm reluctant to go down the self-hosted route for that reason although that's not to say it's completely out of the question. (I'm happy running up a hosted VM but wouldn't have a clue what software to use these days, or how to administer it and keep it secure. But I could learn if it was the right approach.) What do people here use? (Client-wise I currently use the GMail site - I found it convenient to do that rather so I had a familiar user interface on any PC I might use to check my email. Before GMail I used TBird but that's a long time ago now.) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Firefox resources?
by Phil Thane 18 Apr '22

18 Apr '22

Hi, My desktop isn't state of the art but it's a quad core AMD64 so not too bad. It is by current standards short of RAM (2x2GB) but until recently has performed OK. Now it goes very slow after a little while on Firefox, especially if I play YouTube video. Last night I tried Ghostery (fork of Firefox with ghostery plug-in built-in plus some other security stuff) and it seemed better. So today I played the same vid in both at the same time and ran ps ux to see what was happening. Firefox phil 7854 46.2 8.5 3554956 345568 ? Sl 10:30 1:14 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox phil 7905 0.0 0.7 212184 28524 ? Sl 10:30 0:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -parentBuildI phil 7934 1.4 2.2 2476728 93236 ? Sl 10:30 0:02 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 1 -i phil 7982 18.4 7.1 15488220 288656 ? Sl 10:30 0:27 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 2 -i phil 8037 30.0 8.9 3006520 364668 ? Sl 10:30 0:43 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 3 -i phil 8077 0.0 1.2 2403824 51920 ? Sl 10:30 0:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 5 -i phil 8218 0.1 1.2 2396472 51924 ? Sl 10:30 0:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 6 -i phil 8234 12.1 1.4 363900 58176 ? Sl 10:30 0:14 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -parentBuildI phil 8265 0.0 1.2 2396476 50232 ? Sl 10:30 0:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 7 -i Ghostery phil 5849 0.0 7.6 9023124 311408 ? Sl Apr17 0:28 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -ch phil 5923 0.6 11.9 3019332 486688 ? Sl Apr17 5:42 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -ch phil 6076 0.0 0.6 2383328 24704 ? Sl Apr17 0:00 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -ch phil 6121 0.0 0.6 2383332 24596 ? Sl Apr17 0:00 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -ch phil 6146 0.3 1.1 264824 47156 ? Sl Apr17 3:27 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -pa phil 6184 0.0 0.6 2383328 24496 ? Sl Apr17 0:00 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -ch If you're not familiar the 3rd col shows % of CPU being used and the 4th is % of RAM. As you can see FF opens a lot more processes and three of them are serious resource hogs. Anyone else found this? Guess I'll just use ghostery all the time though it doesn't have all the FF plugins I use. But maybe that's the issue? -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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Thunderbird annoyance
by Bev Nicolson 08 Apr '22

08 Apr '22

I subscribed to a mailing list and was getting emails from the company in my inbox. Now, however, despite having the address in my contacts list, and despite not having any kind of filter on their address, all their emails go straight to the deleted folder for spam. What can I do about this? (I cannot tag them 'not spam', btw. They won't move. My only option at the moment appears to be forwarding the email to another address. It's a bit irritating.) Bev

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Libre Office Calc
by Phil Thane 01 Apr '22

01 Apr '22

Database nerds look away now. I have two loads of data in .ods or .cvs. Basically two versions of a membership list, one with >500 rows, the other >700. I want a list of approx 200 who are on the big list but not the smaller. 'Compare' in LO just gives me a list of thousands of cells that are different, that's no help. Can anyone help? Lots on t'internet about merging and tracking changes but nothing about my case I can find. -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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Re: Libre Office Calc
by cl＠isbd.net 29 Mar '22

29 Mar '22

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 03:15:20PM +0100, Phil Thane wrote: > On 29/03/2022 14:42, Chris Green wrote: > > Can you export them (via CVS) to two tables in a database, it would > > then be trivial to get the answer you want. > > You're absolutely right of course but then I'd have to spend hundreds of > hours learning how to use a database. About 30 years ago I used Access. > Later the LO equivalent 'Base' but that was probably nearly 20 years ago. > Since then not needed anything. Not worth the time for a one off. Thanks > anyway. > It's a trivial bit of SQL to do what you want once the two sets of data are inthe database. No need to learn a lot, just use the command line sqlite3, nothing as complex as Access or anything like that. In this case, IMHO, a GUI just adds complication. -- Chris Green

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OT: DNS propagation delays
by Mark Rogers 16 Mar '22

16 Mar '22

I figured someone here might be able to explain this to me better than the ISP (or tell me they're wrong). A lot of domain registrars provide DNS hosting, but often only after the domain has transferred, and only after the DNS is set to use their servers. This means there is a delay between (a) switching to the new DNS and (b) adding the host records to it, resulting in potential downtime for anything that relies on the DNS. My question: If the time between (a) and (b) can be reduced to almost zero (such as by making both changes in a single hit via an API), I assumed that there'd (almost certainly) never be an incorrect DNS response given and therefore no propagation delays should apply. However the company in question told me that there would still be a propagation delay but disappeared from the chat when I asked where. Am I missing something, and if so what? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Manually creating "thunmbnails"
by Mark Rogers 16 Mar '22

16 Mar '22

I have 100+ images. From each I need to create what might best be described as a thumbnail, but manually rather than automated. I need to manually choose which part of the image is used. What I need "automated" is ensuring the correct aspect ratio. GIMP allows me to set the aspect ratio for the selection, which works well. But from there I still need to "crop to selection", "export as", enter a filename, and set export properties. Which makes it quite cumbersome when I have so many to work through. Any suggestions for a better tool, or way to automate the rest of the process in GIMP? My ideal workflow would be: - Open image "xxx.png" (or "xxx.jpg" etc) (with no additional prompts for how to perform the import) - Manually select the area I want to use as the thumbnail - Hit a key to save just that selection as (eg) "xxx.thumb.png", or "xxx.png" to a "thumbs" directory. As few additional steps as possible so that the focus is on the selection of area, not the process. Note that It's likely I'll want the output format to be png regardless of input format (or maybe jpeg, not yet decided - but it'll be a global choice not determined by the input format. That said I can post-process using imagemagick "convert" if I have to. Thoughts? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Zentyal as a domain controller.
by B D 14 Mar '22

14 Mar '22

Hi all, Just wanted to ask if anyone here is using Zentyal. I have a number of vlans on cisco L3 switches, two independent domains and fortinet firewall to make all more complicated. I'm having problems with gateways and multipaths in Zentyal. I'm guessing this will be better suited for Zentyal forum, but maybe some of you had/have experience with Zentyal. Cheers! Bart

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Thunderbird 91 will not open pdf's in preview
by Bev Nicolson 08 Mar '22

08 Mar '22

That's it really. I wasn't sure about the change for a time but I'd quite like it to revert now. But even though I've made sure the settings ask it to, it will not open pdf's in preview any more but in Firefox. Has anyone found a solution yet? Googling has got me nowhere. Bev (Linux Mint 19.)

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Part time sysadmin or business infrastructure consultant
by Jenny Hopkins 07 Mar '22

07 Mar '22

Morning, As some of you know, I've maintained a mainly internal business set-up for a local client, including the maintenance of currently two debian servers (one hosted at bytemark), 2 ubuntu desktops, wifi access points, data backups, and just generally helping the client get what he needs from his desktop. I'm now a very hand-on granny of two, and find I just don't have the time nor inclination to do the job, however I'm unwilling to leave the client in the lurch. I wondered if anyone on-list knows of anyone who would take over this set-up, which could consist of either five minutes a week, or several hours if something goes wrong? Failing this my techy brother tells me that they way the IT is run is very last century, and that nobody runs their own mail server internally any more or upgrades from the command line etc etc. Does anyone know of a consultant who might advise on how to get the company IT zooming into 2022? Many thanks, Jenny

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ntpclient
by Mark Rogers 03 Mar '22

03 Mar '22

I think this might be more about my expectation than anything else but I am struggling to get ntpclient to work (on an openwrt-based box). It is configured to update every 600s but my clock is drifting by about 2s/day so there's clearly no corrections taking place every 10 minutes, and if left for a week it just continues to accumulate so I don't think it's doing anything at all. But I don't really know what to expect. I'm measuring the drift using ntpclient -c 1 -h 0.openwrt.pool.ntp.org .. so I know it has access to the NTP servers if it chooses to use them, Any suggestions? When I google I find details on setting things like freq for far greater accuracy than I care about (a second or two out is fine by me as long as it isn't accumulating). I'd rather not move away from ntpclient as that's what's baked into the openwrt firmware I'm using and I'm trying to avoid making unnecessary changes, but I just can't get this to work. (I'm sure ntpclient -s in crontab would fix it but surely that isn't supposed to be necessary?) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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OpenVPN with IPv6 only clients
by Mark Rogers 17 Feb '22

17 Feb '22

Just playing with ideas really but I would like to try setting up a VPN, accessed over IPv4, but where everything within it is IPv6. There's a few reasons, but they're mostly that I don't know enough IPv6 so it would force me to get to grips with it when working within the VPN. (My objective is to host a VPN to which devices (typically things like Raspberry Pi's) and "users" connect, with users having access to the devices but devices not having access to each other or anything else. No doubt this might change in future to require that some devices can access specific other services but they'd always be tied down.) Does this sound plausible? As an OpenVPN novice, is this something I should park until I know OpenVPN better? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Nextcloud Pi
by Phil Thane 17 Feb '22

17 Feb '22

Hi Folks, I think I might have asked a variation of this about this time last year but I'm better informed now with a better question! When I'm away on my canal/river boat I like to run a tracker so friends and family can see where I am. I have Phonetack on my phone and on my Nextcloud server and it works OK. What I'd like to do is embed the Phonetrack map page from the server in my Wordpress blog but that throws an error: /To protect your security, 192.168.178.20 will not allow Firefox to display the page if another site has embedded it. To see this page, you need to open it in a new window./ Opening in a new window was last year's work around but a bit clunky for my non-techie friends and family. So I looked into a bit more and there is loads of advice online about editing Nextcloud lib files, ie: /www/nextcloud/lib/public/AppFramework/Http/ContentSecurityPolicy.php/ Unfortunately my Nextcloud server doesn't anything like that as far as I can see. It doesn't even have /lib/public/ Maybe because it's actually NextcloudPi which comes preconfigured as an SD card image for the Pi. I could create the file and insert the recommended lines but would it even be read if the rest of the OS isn't expecting it? And will I bugger up something else? Any other suggestions? (But please not 'start again with a fresh install of standard Nextcloud' The Pi 'just works'.) -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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[OT] SD card not fully recognised
by Peter 16 Feb '22

16 Feb '22

I got a Chuwi for exactly this reason, to have a larger screen ebook reader which could handle pdfs, and seem to recall the same problem. I think I fixed it by installing a different file manager. The other thing worth trying might be to format the card from the tablet. I have a vague recollection of being prompted to do this at least once, but can't recall now if I did it or not. Peter

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[OT] SD card not fully recognised
by Bev Nicolson 10 Feb '22

10 Feb '22

I got a Lenova tablet (Android 10) not long ago, mostly to read e-books on. I also got an sd card for it but it seems only settings recognises it, not the file manager app. I shall run out of storage space soon. (Much of it is taken up by the OS.) Thoughts? Ideas? Bev.

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pdf viewer - evince
by Bev Nicolson 03 Feb '22

03 Feb '22

The background is this. Suddenly document viewer wasn't in the list of options to open a pdf a while back. I've always used Evince so I found and installed it. All was well, but now it only shows the Adobe logo, not the front page of the pdf. How do I fix that, and is it connected to the fact that Mint doesn't seem to have an up to date version of it? (It used to just be a case of renaming the file but this doesn't work any more.) Bev

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Tool(s) for processing text file line by line using state etc.
by Chris Green 21 Jan '22

21 Jan '22

I'm looking for tools (if there are any) for processing a text file line by line sequentially. As it goes through the file it needs to make decisions based on the contents of the line(s) of text and change its state as it goes. The decisions it makes depend on the state it's in. Basically I'm processing some (fairly) fixed format messages from a forum to remove some matched header and trailer lines, modify and output a few other matched lines and simply output the body of the message. The (most) difficult bit is removing blank lines before something. E.g. we have a message that starts:- A new topic has been created on the forum Message Subject : weed webinar 31 January Category : Waterways Continental Europe Posted by : Fred Bloggs I want to delete everything up to and including the blank line after 'Message Subject' then keep (i.e. output) the 'Category' line and the 'Posted by' lines without the blank lines in between. I can't delete all blank lines because I want to retain spacing in the message body later. So I need to be able to do things like deleting blank lines unless I am in the message body. Are there specific tools for doing this sort of thing or should I just write a program (probably in Python) that reads lines, does actions as required and remembers its state as it goes? I got some of the way using sed but it's very difficult to 'delete the line before XXXX' with sed. It *might* be that awk would be better but I don't see it handling the state/sequential bit any better than sed. Any/all advice would be very welcome. -- Chris Green

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boot log messages
by Phil Thane 13 Jan '22

13 Jan '22

Hi, Does anyone understand the boot process well enough to know if this is important? During boot I see a lot of errors but they scroll past to fast to read so today I actually view the log and find messages in red such as: Jan 13 11:32:06 phils kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: AMD-Vi: Event logged [IO_PAGE_FAULT domain=0x0010 address=0xbea0a740 fl> and Jan 13 11:32:06 phils kernel: AMD-Vi: Event logged [IO_PAGE_FAULT device=02:00.0 domain=0x0010 address=0xbea0a740 flags=0x00> There are a lot but the numbers seem repeated so maybe it's just several attempts to find something before giving up. I'm on Mint and the Mint forums suggest it might be a mismatch between the number of USB expected and those actually found, I guess that'd be a motherboard fault though the ports I use all seem to work. Should I worry? -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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Quick and Easy External Displays for Raspberry Pis etc.
by Steve Mynott 10 Jan '22

10 Jan '22

Occasionally one of the RPs crashes and since it's headless I can't see why it's rebooting. It's always awkward to put a full screen display on it. Can anyone recommend a small LCD screen (maybe 1024x768 or 800x600) with HDMI to use? Alternatively I've a number of retro systems which use RCA, Scart, VGA etc. and had a lot of success with early gen LCD screens (12"/14") cheap from car boot sales for around 10-20 quid. Although they usually have loads of ports, I've never seen any with HDMI. Do these exist? Or is any sort of cable/converter possible? I think I used to be able to use DVI as HDMI (?) But I've not seen DVI on these either. -- Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com> rsa3072/629FBB91565E591955B5876A79CEFAA4450EBD50

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Reducing size of pdf's
by Bev Nicolson 07 Jan '22

07 Jan '22

How do I reduce the size of a pdf without a) meaning I have to unzip to read it or b) shrinking it so the pages appear blank? I doubt I'll need to do this often but I'd welcome some pointers. Ghostscript is installed. I have just tried one option found by googling and got the second result. Not ideal. (Mint. 19.1 iirc.) Bev

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List server upgraded
by Jonathan McDowell 30 Dec '21

30 Dec '21

I've upgraded the server running lists.alug.org.uk to Bullseye (Debian 11) and that has finally forced me to move from mailman2 to mailman3. Hopefully things are back up and functional again, but let me know if you see any list oddities. Getting the wiki back up on www.alug.org.uk is going to take me a little longer, but hopefully within a few days. Moin is still Python2 only and no longer part of Debian. J. -- ... Do you believe in happy endings?

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