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10369 discussions

Sound problem (no sound) Ubuntu 12.10 - command line
by Chris Green 29 Dec '12

29 Dec '12

I'm trying to get sound working on an Acer Revo R3600 which has Ubuntu Server (i.e. no GUI) installed on it. When I run something like mplayer I see (among other things):- AO: [pulse] Init failed: Connection refused Failed to initialize audio driver 'pulse' This happens even when mplayer is run as root (and anyway I have added the relevant users to the audio group). It's the only significant difference I can see between this system and other systems where mplayer works OK. Google hasn't helped much. Does anyone have any idea what may be wrong? -- Chris Green

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xilence psu
by Peter Alcibiades 27 Dec '12

27 Dec '12

Thanks for the advice on this. The 250 watt came, it went in and works just fine, and it can be recommended. Very quiet. The first one, evo by brand, had a high pitched whine. This one is just about audible and not annoying at all. However, the lesson I learned is that when putting together an sff machine, its better to go one bigger than min-itx form factor, and matx is the way to go. Reason being, the bigger case is quieter in itself, and it will take standard atx power supplies - at least the Sliverstone one does. And this means more choice, and fanless is available too. Yes the bigger Sugo is less portable. But its still compact enough for a desktop, its a medium shoebox rather than a very small one, and its quieter even with similar levels of fan throttling. The other thing about the mini is that it has one large front fan. That's fine. But it collects dust like crazy in the filter. So it has to be vacuumed out every so often. The psu blowup was a blessing in disguise, I'd never have known. They are both running Debian, and its getting to be time to move to wheezy one of these days. Backup first! Al

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Anyone know what this message from logwatch means?
by Chris Green 22 Dec '12

22 Dec '12

I am getting this in logwatch every day:- --------------------- httpd Begin ------------------------ A total of 1 sites probed the server 178.63.53.21 A total of 1 possible successful probes were detected (the following URLs contain strings that match one or more of a listing of strings that indicate a possible exploit): null HTTP Response 200 Requests with error response codes 404 Not Found /robots.txt: 7 Time(s) /urchin.js: 4 Time(s) /appConf.htm: 1 Time(s) ---------------------- httpd End ------------------------- Any ideas as to what that "... probed the server" bit means? (I know the "Requests with error response codes" bit is unimportant). 178.63.53.21 is io.iwmnetwork.com which doesn't seem to be anything/anyone particularly nasty though of course it could be spoofed or used maliciously. -- Chris Green

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Some net site access problems?
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 20 Dec '12

20 Dec '12

Greetings all! I'd like to cross-check to see if others encounter similar problems. [A] Trying to access the Argos website: http://www.argos.co.uk simply hangs: "Waiting for argos.co.uk..." [B] Similarly, trying to access the National Rail website: http://www.nationalrail.co.uk simply hangs: "Waiting for www.nationalrail.co.uk..." Trying traceroute: traceroute www.argos.co.uk gives: traceroute to e624.b.akamaiedge.net (2.18.178.168),... [...] 6 xe-7-0-0.lon10.ip4.tinet.net (89.149.187.101) 43.012 ms xe-5-2-0.tinet.net (89.149.185.74) 45.272 ms xe-2-3-0.lon10.ip4.tinet.net (89.8) 47.953 ms 7 * * * and there it hangs. traceroute www.nationalrail.co.uk gives: traceroute to www.s603697.gslb.savvis.net (206.150.181.244),... [...] 12 dcs2-v3002.lo6.savvis.net (205.138.33.38) 46.148 ms 45.220 ms 47.738 ms 13 * * * and there it hangs. It has been like this since yesterday at least (could have also been earlier, but yesterday was the first time recently that I have tried to access these sites). Any comments? And, while I have the opportunity: Happy Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! Ted. ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 20-Dec-2012 Time: 10:47:08 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 17 Dec '12

17 Dec '12

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back tonight, 17th December, at 20:00: The Mulberry Tree 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 225776 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+2EA WWW: https://www.facebook.com/MULBERRYHOSPITALITY The Mulberry Tree, previously known as The Milestone Beer House, is a grade 2 listed building in the centre of Ipswich. It is located at the intersection between Woodbridge Road and the A1156, across the road from the old Odeon cinema and not far from the Regent Theatre. It re-opened on Thursday March 29th 2012 after a major refurbishment, under its original name of The Mulberry House and has already begun to regain a good reputation for its selection of beers and ales. It has a sizeable car park to the rear of the building. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. I think I mentioned to the regulars last month - I'm now 200 miles away, so won't be in attendance. But hopefully a few of you will turn up to celebrate a Suffolk ALUG Christmas! :D Cheers, Peter. ----- 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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Re: [ALUG] Android app development
by Phil Ashby 17 Dec '12

17 Dec '12

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Mark Rogers wrote: >> Anyone here played with Android app development? >> ... >> "All" it needs to do is create a secure connection (SSH) to an existing >> server using a pre-shared key, then tunnel a connection through it to >> a web server, displaying the web content in the app. > > [Dan questioned the need to write an app..] > > In this case yes: it needs to be something that a "normal person" can > install > (albeit side-loaded). > > It's certainly possible in an app; there are several apps that act as proxys > to send all web traffic through a secure tunnel (to defeat the Great > Firewall > of China etc) which do something pretty close to what I need. The problem is > any time I search for keywords like "Android ssh tunnel" I get pages of hits > for that, not examples on what I actually need. > > I think I just need to re-install the tools and give it a go, and see > where I get stuck. > > Mark A brief search for 'Android ssh VPN app' turns up this how-to guide, which describes the setup of SSHTunnel - you can get all the source for that as a starting point from Google code: http://www.howtogeek.com/121698/how-to-route-all-your-android-traffic-throu… https://code.google.com/p/sshtunnel/ Shouldn't be far from there to a pre-configured app for your client(s).. Phil.

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Renaming of files failing
by Chris Walker 17 Dec '12

17 Dec '12

I have a directory full of files and sub-directories which I've pulled from an emulator. But it has extra filename extensions on it. I would like to traverse this directory, stripping off the extensions and so I've been trying to write a script to do it but it's failing. An example of a file is this :- lamborghini miura_1024.jpg,c85 and so there, I'd like to remove the ,c85. But a bigger problem is where I have the odd file which has a numeric extensions such as .;1 and that's where I struggle. How do I do a substitution in my script to cope with things like that? I've been reading things like this - http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/renaming-multiple-files-at-a-shell-prompt.html and http://www.unix.com/answers-frequently-asked-questions/13774-unix-tutorials… but I'm still struggling. Can somebody point me in the right direction please, even if it's towards the door ;-) -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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Re: [ALUG] Will a 200 Watt Supply do this rig?
by Peter Alcibiades 16 Dec '12

16 Dec '12

On Saturday 15 December 2012 22:48:26 Wayne Stallwood wrote: > It's not really all about the overall wattage, mostly you need to look > at the current capacity of the +12V rails and compare to what one of the > online PSU calculators say for your hardware. > > Modern supplies will be more generous as to what portion of the 200W is > available on the 12v rails as modern hardware hits this rail harder in > proportion to the others. In the old days the CPU supplies were derived > directly from the lower voltage rails. > > Thanks - didn't even know there were online power calculators, but having now used one, it suggests 164 Watts as the proper level including a safety margin. Meanwhile, the xilence seems to come in a 250 W version, so I've ordered that which should give plenty of headroom. Good to hear that people have had good results from xilence. Thanks everyone! Al

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Will a 200 Watt Supply do this rig?
by Peter Alcibiades 15 Dec '12

15 Dec '12

My machine died the other night, reasonably gracefully, and having decided it must be the PSU I went and bought the only matx one locally in stock. Its 300 Watt, which is what the old one was, and it works but is unbearably noisy. So I am thinking of replacing with a 200 Watt Xilence, which is reviewed in some german mag as being exceptionally quiet. Question: will 200W be enough? Its an i3, one hard drive, no optical, no graphics card and a gigabyte main board in a mini-itx case. My intuition is that it will be just fine because this is such a minimalist setup, but I know nothing about power or how to measure what the draw is. The other choices seem to be silverstone, but they only make them 400W +, and that is certainly over the top. There do not seem to be any fanless ones in this form factor. Al

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Android app development
by Mark Rogers 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

I posted this initially on the Peterborough LUG list but I wonder if there are more Android experts here? --- Anyone here played with Android app development? It's something I've wanted to try my hand at, and just needed an app to work on. I now have one (a specific development for a customer, it's not going to be App of the Year 2013 on Google Play or anything :-) "All" it needs to do is create a secure connection (SSH) to an existing server using a pre-shared key, then tunnel a connection through it to a web server, displaying the web content in the app. Most of the infrastructure is already set up, although the web pages will want some tweaking to suit the Android device (although not too much as it'll probably be a tablet not a phone). Some time ago I did install the development tools and get as far as a simple "hello world" app, although I can't claim to remember much of the experience, so I'm starting very much from the position of a novice. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Using a laptop/pc to bridge a 3G dongle connection - easy?
by Chris Green 12 Dec '12

12 Dec '12

If I have a laptop with a 3G internet connection provided by a USB dongle is it fairly easy to allow other systems to use the internet connection via the laptop's ethernet port? E.g. if I run something like dnsmasq on the laptop it can be a DHCP and DNS server so that anything connected (directly or via a switch) should work shouldn't it? -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 13th December
by Viperfang 11 Dec '12

11 Dec '12

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 13th December at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- 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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LCD screen for Raspberry Pi
by Chris Walker 09 Dec '12

09 Dec '12

Ages ago, I think it was Anthony Anson asked here about hooking up a Pi to a small screen. I've just come across this - http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/desktops/25-fun-things-to-do-with-a-raspberry-pi-… (article number 22) which might help. Can I make a public thank you to Nev Young and all the other people that helped me yesterday to recover the SD cards for my Pi. One problem, identified by Nev, was that the cards aren't 8 gigs, they're 4. That's brain fade on my part! Second is that even though they boot fine on the Pi, my machine still won't see them. That's despite using a brand new USB 2 device reader. Finally, once I had the Pi up and running here, the keyboard wouldn't work on it. So that can go back to the shop in Wymondham where I bought it. I had to use an old Cherry keyboard which weighs a ton but works on the Pi. Lessons learned all round but thanks once again to Nev and the other people yesterday.

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How to use either wired or WiFi network, quickly/automatically?
by Chris Green 09 Dec '12

09 Dec '12

I have an Acer Aspire laptop running lubuntu 12.10, when I'm at home I just plug in an ethernet cable but when I'm elsewhere I'm more likely to use WiFi. When there's no hard-wired connection the boot sequence wastes 2 minutes or so trying to get the connection up before continuing. What's the proper way to handle this (it's easy enough to remove the delay from /etc/init/falsafe.conf but that's a hack)? -- Chris Green

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RasPi SD cards
by Chris Walker 08 Dec '12

08 Dec '12

Can anybody help please? My RaspberryPi turned up this week. I ordered it along with 2 8GB SD cards and some other bits and pieces. I downloaded a couple of disc images but I have been unable to write them to the cards. I have a multi-way adapter and when I plug that into the USB port either on the front or rear of my machine I can check the hardware config. That shows USB SD Reader as sdc. But when I try to write the downloaded image to /dev/sdc I get an error message :- sd 4:0:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery That's followed by this :- gs[26282]: segfault at 0 ip 00007effdb5dc470 sp 00007fff76b3c3c0 error 4 in libgs.so.9.02[7effdb3c9000+5f2000] I was curious about the SD cards. I thought at first that they might be faulty so I bunged them into my digital camera. I can format them there and the camera can quite easily write picture images to them both. I then thought I would take the 16GB card out of the camera and use that. But I get the same error messages so I don't think the cards themselves are faulty but perhaps it's the card reader. So I've now ordered a 16GB card with a pre-installed Debian OS on it and another card reader so I should be able to get the Pi up and running. Is there anybody in the Norwich/Wymondham area that would be prepared to have a go at writing a couple of images to these cards as a test? Or, once I get the Pi up and running, will I be able to write the images on that?

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SD card recovery
by Chris Walker 07 Dec '12

07 Dec '12

I'm still waiting for delivery of a pre-installed SD card and card reader from The PiHut for my Raspberry Pi so, fed up waiting, I bought another card reader from Anglian Internet in Norwich. I can now see a 16GB card from my digital camera, but the machine still won't see the other two 8GB cards which I used for a previous attempt at writing images. Are they toast or can I recover them in order to write images to them?

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 7th December.
by Viperfang 04 Dec '12

04 Dec '12

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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git - if I "git rm" something can I get it back (as an old revision) later?
by Chris Green 01 Dec '12

01 Dec '12

As per the subject - if I am maintaining a set of files in a directory and one of them is no longer used then I would do "git rm <name of file>" and then when I commit the file is no longer in the current version of the repository. I assume however that it would be possible to get back the last (and previous) committed version of the file if I needed ot at some time in the future? -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] Announcing Norwich Raspberry Pi User and Developer Group's Second Meeting!
by Steve Pearce 01 Dec '12

01 Dec '12

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Greetings alug. I'm writing to let you know that we'll be holding the second Norwich Raspberry Pi User and Developer Group meeting next Saturday, 8th December 2012. We'll be meeting at House Cafe on St. Benedicts Street again between 12:00-17:00. See the website norwichrpi.org for more details. There will be much going on in terms of discussion, sharing ideas, hacking on projects and so on, but I also learned this morning that we'll be visited by Quick2Wire who will be demonstrating their Python library and beta GPIO addon boards. I hope to see you there, and please help in spreading the word. stevepdp ----- 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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Wisdom (or otherwise) of using software RAID5 across 4 USB drives
by Mark Rogers 30 Nov '12

30 Nov '12

I have a USB caddy that takes 4 drives, on USB3. I have four 2TB SATA disks in it and have just set up a RAID5 array across the four disks, formatted to ext4. cat /proc/mdstat currently reports: md1 : active raid5 sdi1[4] sdh1[2] sdg1[1] sdf1[0] 5860145664 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [UUU_] [>....................] recovery = 1.2% (24142492/1953381888) finish=1134.2min speed=28348K/sec That's about 20hrs to complete the build, running at max speed (/proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max is 500000 so I'm not hitting the upper limit there). To be honest, rebuilding an array comprising 4x2TB disks over USB in 20hrs seems pretty good to me, so I'm not overly concerned. But should I be? Is running this configuration likely to cause me grief in future? The purpose of the array is to store backups, so read/write speed is relatively unimportant. At this point the array is empty so wiping and starting again isn't a big deal if someone has better ideas. (As an aside, does the above look right for USB3 speeds? It's my first experience of USB3 and I'm using a cheap PCI-E USB3 card so I have no idea how well it's performing.) Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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XtreemFS
by Mark Rogers 29 Nov '12

29 Nov '12

Anyone here have any experience of Xtreemfs? http://www.xtreemfs.org/ Distributed replicated file system for Linux (and Mac/Win). Looks like an interesting package to experiment with but as it's not in my distro repositories (Ubuntu) I figured it can't be all that well established yet? Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER`

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"Signal out of range" when booting from Ubuntu 12.10 LiveCD
by Mark Rogers 29 Nov '12

29 Nov '12

I'm trying to reinstall an old server with Ubuntu 12.10 (it was previously on 12.04 I think, but had accumulated a lot of rubbish and a fresh install was the way to go). When I boot the LiveCD, at the point that (I believe) lightdm starts, I get "Signal out of range" on my monitor and can't get any further. I have tried various boot options (nomodeset, fb=false) without luck. I've also tried creating an xorg.conf file manually from the terminal and restarting lightdm - that has got me closer but I don't know my way around xorg.conf well enough to get this to work. (I copied xorg.conf.fallback to xorg.conf and added VertRefresh and HorizSync parameters, which got me a low resolution (800x600?) display but the mouse was all over the place and I managed to break it in the end so had to (hard) reset, losing my changes). What is the "correct" way to fix this? Is there a way to tell Xorg to dump its current settings to an xorg.conf file so that I can tweak it? What's a good "default" xorg.conf file that should work? Or a minimal one that might get me 1280x1024@75Hz (fglrx as the driver from memory). -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Reassembling a RAID array
by Mark Rogers 28 Nov '12

28 Nov '12

I have four drives containing mdadm RAID partitions: /dev/sda1 through /dev/sdd1 I believe they were previously set up as RAID5, although it might have been two separate RAID1 arrays or one RAID10 array. How do I work out what they were, which drive is which, and configure the array on a new PC to access the data? (Obviously I need to do that without losing the data on them!) Mark Rogers -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Why am I seeing "Waiting for Network Configuration" when I have configured a static address?
by Chris Green 24 Nov '12

24 Nov '12

I used to use another (small) machine as my LAN DHCP/DNS server (using dnsmasq) but that machine's other uses disappeared so I decided to move the dnsmasq configuration to my desktop machine. My desktop machine is on all the time because it's also a web server and I access it to read my E-Mail when I'm away from home. So, I have configured my desktop to have a static IP on the LAN with /etc/network/interfaces containing:- auto lo iface lo inet loopback iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.1.4 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.1.1 dns-domain zbmc.eu dns-search zbmc.eu dns-nameservers 127.0.0.1 195.74.113.58 194.72.0.114 auto eth0 That 127.0.0.1 in the dns-nameservers is (I believe) correct, it makes dnsmasq act as a local caching nameserver. Everything seems to work OK once booted but I'm getting a message on the xubuntu boot screen saying "Waiting for network configuration", that seems odd to me as it indicates that Network Manager is waiting for a DHCP response from somewhere and it doesn't need it. I have removed the "dns=dnsmasq" line from NetworkManager.conf so that Network Manager isn't trying to run its own copy of dnsmasq. -- Chris Green

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Console editor with 'linebreak'
by James Freer 21 Nov '12

21 Nov '12

Who know's the editors! Is there an editor apart from Emacs and Vim that does 'softwrap' or 'linebreak' (as vim calls it). I want to use a console editor for editing text words (as opposed to programmer's code). Despite hundreds available it seems that emacs and vim are the only two that offer this. My preference would be for wordstar bindings (yes i'm that old! and i still think they are the most efficient keybindings like a lot of writers). Joe does all i want other than coping with long lines. [I seem to recall a discussion about editors a few years ago and someone on here uses Joe]. Point is i want to save in long line form but view and edit in wrapped form - just like one does in gedit or leafpad. Using nano/pico ^W^J justifies the entire file and saves it in that form... like Joe's ^B - which isn't what i want. I don't really want to have to learn either vim or emacs as they are too complex for my more basic uses but it seems i don't have much choice. So who's experimented and can advise on the many editors available. Nano has an option --softwrap or $ - it truncates but doesn't wrap like vim's linebreak. It seems surprising that no one's done a console editor with CUA bindings. thanks james

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