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10372 discussions

Dual Boot On 8GB
by Simon Royal 17 Mar '11

17 Mar '11

Hi Do you think it is possible to Ubuntu and XP, dual booted on an 8GB SSD? Im running Ubuntu on my EeePC, but I would like to run XP for a few apps. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Kiddy Friendly Browser
by Simon Royal 14 Mar '11

14 Mar '11

Hi I have young children who have computers. They used to have Macs which were running Safari, which had a great built in restricted web access and you could lock down the whole system so it was tamper proof. They moved to PCs as their Macs were getting a bit old and they use a lot of Flash sites and Flash is not well developed for PPC Macs. So at present they are running Windows XP on some good spec P4 Celeron 2.5Ghz machines, but with all the anti-virus and anti-malware software it makes the machines crawl. They are also using a kiddy safe browser called KidZui which I think is a kiddy front end for IE, it too is really bad. Its slow and chokes all the time, but it provides a massive selection of preapproved sites, vids and games. I ran Ubuntu on from a Live CD on one of theirs and it screamed. They both have the same machine and running one with Windows XP minus safety software and the other from a Live CD, the Live CD beat it hands down. KidZui is a Windows only thing and I wondered if there was anything like it for Linux, then I could dual boot Win/Linux for the odd occasion they might need Windows. I found some kiddy friendly distros but I am just after a way of letting them only have access to certain stuff on the web without too much hassle and not a whole new distro for me to learn. There was an excellent Firefox addon called Glubble we used for a while that offered a platform independent safe surfing environment but it no longer works. My kids are only 6 and 8 so it is only sites like CBeebies, NickJnr and Lego that they need access to. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Find environment variables used by some process
by Richard Lewis 14 Mar '11

14 Mar '11

Hi ALUG, Is it possible to query the environment variables being used by a specific process; from the outside? Specifically, I want to know if a running Apache has a particular environment variable set. Best, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li http://www.richardlewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Sent from my [insert device/mail clinet here]

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Ubuntu Update Manager Says No Internet
by Simon Royal 13 Mar '11

13 Mar '11

Hi Update Manager told me there were 6 updates, but when I go to download them it says I have no internet. I know I do as I have been on eBay this morning and am writing this in GMail webmail. Anyone else experiencing problems. Most of the updates were for Firefox and Firefox branding, so I thought closing Firefox might help but it didnt. SImon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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"top -bn1p1" shows constant system CPU usage of 4.9%
by Mark Rogers 09 Mar '11

09 Mar '11

top -bn1p1 .. should return the data for (b)atch processing, without any refreshed (n1), for process 1 (p1). (The p1 is there just to save it sending me data for all processes, I'm not interested in anything apart from the header information.) It always[*] on my test system shows 4.9%sy If I run top normally, I notice now that it always shows 4.9% on the first scan, then starts to vary. Any suggestions as to why it never deviates on first scan? [*] "Always" in as much as I have some code that logs the value every 5 mins, and for over a day it hasn't changed; it's a test server that is fairly heavily used during the day and not at all at night, so I'd expect some variation. All the CPU usage figures are almost static, there's max 0.1% variation in some of the others. Also, suggestions as to other ways to get this sort of information would be welcomed. All I want is some sample data to use in another process, so I'm logging CPU, memory and disk usage (etc) as reported by top and df. -- 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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ssh conundrum
by Chris G 08 Mar '11

08 Mar '11

I have a shell login on host cheddar.halon.org.uk, while I was away for a few days recently (that bit's irrelevant really), cheddar.halon.org.uk was (presumably) moved to an new machine and thus its host key changed. So, when I came home, my passwordless login to cheddar.halon.org.uk failed with the usual ssh message about 'host key has changed', maybe a man in the middle attack, etc. I removed the relevant line from ~/.ssh/known_hosts, logged in again, the correct line was added to ~/.ssh/known_hosts and all was well again, or so I thought. However, it doesn't all work again as it did:- While ssh logins to cheddar.halon.org.uk from terminal windows on my GUI desktop are passwordless logins from shell console terminals (i.e. CTRL/ALT/n ones) ask for my password at cheddar.halon.org.uk (N.B. they don't ask for the key to my passphrase, it's the cheddar.halon.org.uk password that is asked for). I'm sure these used to work. More to the point my rsync backup to cheddar.halon.org.uk that runs as a cron job has also stopped working, it's expecting a passwordless login to cheddar.halon.org.uk but like the ssh login from a console it's failing because cheddar.halon.org.uk is asking for a password. So both the above problems point at some sort of screw up with ssh_agent but it's complicated by the following:- The file ~/.ssh/config contains:- Host cheddar.halon.org.uk IdentityFile ~/.ssh/np_id_rsa and ~/.ssh/np_id_rsa and ~/.ssh/np_id_rsa.pub haven't changed so why isn't it being used? Any ideas as to what else might have been affected by the host key change at cheddar.halon.org.uk? It's possible some previous misconfiguration was masking something such that the passwordless login was working for some other reason than the config file above but I still need to sort it out. -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] Best Format For External Drive
by James Bensley 07 Mar '11

07 Mar '11

On 7 March 2011 21:30, Simon Royal <mrsimonroyal(a)gmail.com> wrote: > James > > I thought about NTFS, but it just doesnt play nice with OSX or Linux. > OSX hsa native read capabilities but its a struggle to get it to write > well - even using ntfs-3g. > > Simon Agreed (mostly). I would have mentioned the lack of write support from OS X as I use it every day but you only mentioned Linux and Windows in your original post. However, I'm surprised people still have any mentionable issues with Linux, I haven't in a long time (not to say that isn't just a fluke though!). If Mac wasn't going to be an issue I would have went NTFS simply because you never know what's going to be happening 6 months from now, however it may obviously be the case that you do know this...Evil which doctor :D -- James. http://www.jamesbensley.co.cc/ There are 10 kinds of people in the world; Those who understand Vigesimal, and J others...?

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[ALUG Announce] Norwich 2nd Thursday Pub Meet
by Viperfang 07 Mar '11

07 Mar '11

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 Aluggers, This months second Thursday social meeting of ALUG will take place on 10th March at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). There should be people there from 8pm, although some poeple meet up 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 OFTC (irc.oftc.net) 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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Mobile to PC software
by Bev Nicolson 07 Mar '11

07 Mar '11

I'm not wholly convinced Phone Manger is the one I'm after or if PC Suite will work happily with Ubuntu. (Actually on looking at PC Suite, it's got more features than I want or need.) My phone is a Sony Ericsson W205. All I want to do is save text messages onto my computer when my phone gets too full. Ta. Bev.

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Android mail client
by Richard Lewis 06 Mar '11

06 Mar '11

ALUG, We get a few messages blocked for moderation because (I think) they are base64 encoded; that is, the Content-Transfer-Type header says "base64". (Note that this is distinct from Content-Type; a text/plain message can be base64 encoded.) The pattern seems to be that all such messages are created using the Android mail client. A cursory Web search has turned up no solutions, but I did find an issue report: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2630 which I didn't read carefully enough to notice whether it includes a work-around or fix. This message is merely for information. Best, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li http://www.richardlewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ------------------------------------ Every time you send an MS Office document, Bill Gates kills a kitten. ------------------------------------

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Iceweasel "mail client"?
by ted.harding＠wlandres.net 05 Mar '11

05 Mar '11

Greetings, In order to bypass a possible "spam block" on my normal email client, I brought up the destination on their web page in Iceweasel, and clicked on their "mailto:" link. This opened a mail-composing window, into which I entered my message (with Cc: and Bcc: to my own address). I then clicked "Send". Since then nothing has happened. Seeking to try to track down what may have gone on when I did the above, I have tried to locate anything to do with email in Firefox itself. Complete blank! Can anyone point me to what this Iceweasel/Firefox email client is, what it does with emails composed as above, where it stores any copies, indeed where it stores anything at all to do with emails sent by this route? And what about any incoming mail? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)wlandres.net> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 03-Mar-11 Time: 20:32:35 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Re: [ALUG] Best Format For External Drive
by Simon Royal 05 Mar '11

05 Mar '11

Simon I plumped for FAT32 in the end. A nice all round compatible format. NTFS is a bit better but still has poor support under Linux and Mac OSX and while ext3/4 is a great one, it is only if you are using Linux only. Im only storing music and pics, none of which are over 100MB each file so FAT32 is good enough. Its only storage and backup and will not be accessed very often, mainly written to with new files. Simon ----- Original Message ----- From:Simon Elliott

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stupidly high load averages when VM is doing nothing
by mick 04 Mar '11

04 Mar '11

Hi Guys I am having a lot of trouble with one of my VPSs - a new one I bought for threepence halfpenny from ThrustVPS. I won't bore you with all the details of the problems I am having (I think the systems are HUGELY oversold) but I have one oddity which I am not sure is the ISPs fault or mine. The server is a XEN VM running Ubuntu 10.04 (server edition). I am seeing ridiculously high loads (regularly 2.5 upwards) when the server is actually supposed to be doing nothing. The only process I can see which may be responsible is a kernel process called events/1 which is chewing silly amounts of cpu - see top display below. PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 16 root 20 0 0 0 0 R 85 0.0 569:39.41 events/1 3196 root 20 0 19224 1420 1072 R 0 0.3 0:00.16 top 1 root 20 0 23688 1828 1244 S 0 0.4 0:00.90 init 2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 kthreadd 3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.06 migration/0 4 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 76:43.23 ksoftirqd/0 5 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0 I confess I have /no clue/ what this means and I can't find anything useful through searches. Has anyone any idea where I should start looking? (uname -a Linux beam 2.6.32-28-server #55-Ubuntu SMP Mon Jan 10 23:57:16 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux) Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this? Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Our shiny new Alug twitter account
by Adam Bower 04 Mar '11

04 Mar '11

Hi All, I've setup a twitter account for Alug today which can be found at: http://twitter.com/#!/anglianlug For the moment we're planning to use it for meeting reminders and also as a central hub for finding Aluggers on twitter. Currently I'm running the account with Viperfang (Ben), if anyone has any suggestions for what else we could use it for they'd be welcome! Thanks Adam -- New signature required, suggestions on a post card please.

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Best Format For External Drive
by Simon Royal 04 Mar '11

04 Mar '11

Hi I am about to format an external drive. I have a 60GB IDE laptop drive in an enclosure full of stuff and it is FAT formatted. I have a blank 120GB SATA laptop drive in an enclosure and I want to format it for use in Linux and Windows and then move everything from the IDE to the SATA. What is the best format. FAT32 is a bit old and clunky, what about NTFS. If it was just for Linux then I would pick ext3 or ext4. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Posting on the list
by Wayne Stallwood 04 Mar '11

04 Mar '11

This has been covered in responses to individual threads but I think it is time a global appeal was made. Please can we stop reposting the same question or updates to the same topic under different threads and/or with slightly modified subject lines. Those that are doing this may think that by "bouncing" their question like this they will raise the chances of someone with a solution responding but the reality of this is that it makes some of us not feel like trying to help at all. The specific objections to this are that beyond cluttering the list for those of us that employ a threaded view of posts this also..... Makes the archives harder to use, speaking for myself I take comfort in that by replying with a (hopefully) helpful response I am not only trying to assist the original poster but anyone else who searches the archives later on with a similar problem..if responses are split between threads regarding the same subject then it becomes less likely that the solution will be found. also By seperating the discussion across multiple threads the chances of advice being repeated is increased as it is less obvious what has been previously suggested by others. This doesn't help anyone...particularly the person with the original question. Many Thanks Wayne

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Re: [ALUG] Best Format For External Drive
by James Bensley 03 Mar '11

03 Mar '11

What about NTFS? If you mean, is it any good, it will probably be more beneficial than FAT32 (larger max file size, hopefully more stable). --James. (This email was sent from a mobile device)

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External CDRW
by Simon Royal 03 Mar '11

03 Mar '11

Hi I still havent been able to get my spare combo drive to work properly in my ThinkPad R31. It will burn CDs once into Ubuntu and XP but it will not boot a CD from it, so I have to keep popping back my original IBM CD-ROM drive. My other alternative would be to keep the original CD-ROM drive in and get an external USB one. Can anyone recommend a relative small/portable cdrw drive that will run on USB 1.1 (although I do have a USB 2 PCMCIA card but my wireless card takes up that slot). If possible I would like it bus powered and it needs to work under Ubuntu 10 or will pretty much any drive work. I dont do much burning, apart from the odd distro and a few music CDs. Simon.

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Cant Format SD card.
by Simon Royal 03 Mar '11

03 Mar '11

Hi I have an SD card in my EeePC and it is auto mounted at boot. I am trying to format it but it wont let me unmount it using the format or disk utilty. I configured it using Storage Device Manager which is a front end for fstab. Options set are: defaults,uid=1000,umask=0 It is a FAT32 formatted SD card. I am having problems with DropBox and one of the suggestions is to format it to ext3 or ext4. I can unmount it in Storage Device Manager, but then I cant format it. Any ideas? Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Asus EeePC 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Re: [ALUG] Anyone use BBC iPlayer streaming? How fast a CPU for full screen?
by James Bensley 02 Mar '11

02 Mar '11

On 18 Feb 2011 21:05, "Chris G" <cl(a)isbd.net> wrote: > > I can't find anything helpful on the BBC site about this. > > What sort of processor speed (and memory or whatever else might affect > it) is needed to run BBC iPlayer streaming full screen? Full screen in > this case means 1920x1080. > > -- > Chris Green One PC is a Core2 clocked at 2.72Ghz, about 20% on both cores. But another PC has a Core2 at only 2.0Ghz, I don't watch iPlayer on there but watching 30GB BluRay rips/15Mbps video (so higher quality than the beeb offer), I get about 10% usage, like Wayne, on this box VDPAU is my friend also :) --James. (This email was sent from a mobile device)

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the continuing touch struggle - still baffled
by Peter Alcibiades 02 Mar '11

02 Mar '11

Thinking this must be down to the kernel version, I downloaded and installed the 2.6.36 kernel from Ubuntu and installed it using gdeb on my wheezy install. No, it don't make the touch screen work! Now, its true this is not the natty narwhal one, so that is maybe the thing to try next. All this is in aid of getting a version of webconverger that will drive touch screens for this kiosk project. However, thinking laterally, or maybe simply desperately, what we are now coming to is just to put in Fedora 14, which does definitely work with touch screens, then lock it down to some extent using pessulus. Not perfect, but given that life is short maybe this is the smart way to go. And yet, and yet, surely if all these other distros work out of the box, there must be some simple way to make debian work too.... Oh well. Peter

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Auto starting/stopping Linux virtual machine with VirtualBox on Win7 host
by Mark Rogers 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

Sorry, not entirely on topic here... I have a working ubuntu-server virtual machine, on a Win7 host. I need to make that virtual machine start automatically when Windows starts, and also have it shut down gracefully when Windows shuts down. Only one of these bits is really on topic: assuming I can send an ACPI shutdown signal to the virtual machine, what do I need to do in order to get the VM to shutdown? Anyone who can advise the correct method to run/stop the VM on Windows start/stop from the Windows end I'd also love to hear from you.... All my Googling so far (no doubt with the wrong search!) seems to be finding me support for a Linux host and a Windows virtual machine. I'm hoping that someone else here just happens to have done what I need! -- 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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Re: [ALUG] baffled by touch still
by Peter Alcibiades 27 Feb '11

27 Feb '11

Fedora also works perfectly. It must be a question of the kernel version. Peter

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baffled by touch still
by Peter Alcibiades 27 Feb '11

27 Feb '11

I'm completely baffled by this. It works perfectly under natty narwhal, booting from the live cd and doing no additional installs. Natty is rather unstable, but the touch screen stuff works. Natty is on 2.6.38, don't know if that is materially different for touch screen drivers. I am trying to see why it doesn't under debian. try xev, and it shows nothing happening when the screen is touched. The debian kernel is 2.6.32. When I do lsusb, it sees the device, gives bus 003 and dev 007. When I plug it in and out and try cat /var/log/dmesg I find this buried someplace in the results: [ 6.937367] generic-usb 0003:0408:3000.0003: hiddev0,hidraw2: USB HID v1.10 Device [Quanta Computer Inc. Optical Touch Screen] on usb-0000:00:02.1-3/input0 So it seems to be seeing the device itself, and it seems to be logging when its plugged in and out. There is no xorg.conf file in Squeeze, or in Natty. So my old quick and dirty approach to this will not work - generate one and then copy it over. Maybe try another live CD? Any suggestions? Peter

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touch screens yet again
by Peter Alcibiades 27 Feb '11

27 Feb '11

In a fit of brilliance, this is really a partially sighted guy stumbling around amid the rocks, I did cat /dev/usb/hiddev0 and then touched the screen. This produces a string of garbage! So I know that the usb link to the touch is working, its actually sending data. Why then does not the system pick it up and treat it like a mouse movement? Peter

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