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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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/ full
by Chris Walker 26 Feb '11

26 Feb '11

I was trying to dd a laptop drive to an image file on a NAS drive and managed to fill up the / partition. I've now fixed that but in order to avoid the same problem, can somebody tell me how to duplicate a drive, or at least the recovery partition (it's a Windows drive) by specifying where the temporary file can go? Or if there's a way to do it without generating an intermediate file it would be appreciated. -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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Deleting Files In Ubuntu
by Simon Royal 26 Feb '11

26 Feb '11

Hi When you delete a file in Ubuntu it gives you no warning. Now I know that sounds pretty stupid and most of the time it is a time saver as you don't have to click 'Yes' at the 'are you sure' button, but it does mean things can accidentally get sent to the bin. Is there a way of getting it to ask before sending it to the bin? 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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question about touch screens
by Peter Alcibiades 24 Feb '11

24 Feb '11

I have a touch screen, T2250MTS, by iiyama. Boot from a Natty Narwhal CD, and it works perfectly. How do I find out what it is using on NN, and get Debian to use the same drivers, so it works on Debian too? I have installed the tslibs, and that does not seem to help. Peter

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Installation fled to the bowels of /
by Anthony Anson 24 Feb '11

24 Feb '11

On the flatpot running Lenny, installed the Vodafone dongle using (if I remember the name corretly), Gdeb Ran the files down in user/shared, but can find no way of putting a link up to the 'desktop' or anywhere sensible, like Applications/internet Anyone have a pointer, please? -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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Taking Music From iPod
by Simon Royal 24 Feb '11

24 Feb '11

Hi I am looking for a program to remove music from my iPod. It works fine in Ubuntu - it is an oldish 40GB iPod Photo - I can play and add music to it, but I need something to pull the music off. I had a couple of tools on the Mac to do it, YamiPod and Senuti, but havent found anything for Ubuntu. 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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Getting started with git
by Mark Rogers 21 Feb '11

21 Feb '11

Hopefully a quick and easy question... I have some code developed for a website on a test (Linux) box, which I'll call TestServer. A colleague has a copy, mostly in sync (manually), on his Windows desktop, ("WindowsDesktop"). Both of these are in my office behind my office firewall. I need to get the code onto a Linux box located in another office ("RemoteServer") in such a way as to allow me to make changes anywhere and manage the synchronisation, so I plan on setting up a git repository on my external server ("HostedServer"), and pull the site from (and push back changes to) it from RemoteServer. Of-course my starting point is that all of this has been done so far without any version control or other synchronisation. So, are there any pitfalls I should be aware of if I now try to get everything into git? Should I at least try to get everything synchronised in one location first? (I'd rather not, as I'd prefer to use git to manage that sync.) Are there any issues I need to be aware of given that one person will be using a Windows box? (I'm assuming they'll use TortoiseGit; I'll probably set things up on my Windows laptop too.) I've asked questions about git here here before and played around with it but still not used it in anger, but now I have someone I need to share development with I'm determined to finally get it together and use git properly. I don't want to ruin that ambition and fall flat by starting out wrong! Secondary issue: the sites make extensive use of a database. I should at least make attempts to ensure that the database schema is managed by git (but not the data in the database). Any suggestions as to how best to do this? Mark Rogers

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Anyone use BBC iPlayer streaming? How fast a CPU for full screen?
by Chris G 20 Feb '11

20 Feb '11

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

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Woe upon woe...
by Anthony Anson 20 Feb '11

20 Feb '11

OK, not o bad as that perhaps, but I told Lenny to install Pan. Wanted a password, of course, which I tryped-in. Spat it out. I presumed it was the root password? (Can't unforget the term it used, but it wasn't my user one.) Now, I know the root password, or I thought I did - being paired with my user password in a reminder sort-of way - and I wasn't surprised when it rejected it, as for several weeks it had refused to let me in as user, even though I was feeding it the correct password. (Nev will remember it, in the Fat Cat). Now it has agreed that I really *do* know my password, I can get in as user, but not as root, so, thinks I, I'll do a search in / for the passworm file - search on - contains: my admin password. It failed to find it, or at least, to divulge it. So, I'm up a gumtree. But, I know there's a way of changing the root password without being root because a lot of years ago at a kitmoot a certain Mr. Ray did just that for me when I forgot my root passworm for Woody. Help? Pretty please... -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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A proper newsreader?
by Anthony Anson 19 Feb '11

19 Feb '11

I'm getting a bit ipssde-off with Thunderbird ATM - none my news items will go - and I tried setting-up a new account with Eternal-epteber, and that won't send, either. So, I'm looking for a sensible newsreader which has decent filters - a crosspost filter is a necessity, and TB2 doesn't have one. I've been back through he ALUG archive (on pooter) and not noticed anything - a good search facility would be an advantage with any new newsreader, too... -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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Shoutcast list no longer available to Linux?
by Chris G 19 Feb '11

19 Feb '11

Does anyone here use shoutcast to find stations? I can't get it to work again (after an interval of several months) in either Exaile or Rhythmbox. When I try and download the Shoutcast station list nothing happens, or at least nothng gets downloaded. Are there any alternative station lists which are anywhere near as comprehensive as shoutcast? -- Chris Green

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Recommendations wanted for small, probably laser, printer
by Chris G 19 Feb '11

19 Feb '11

We're after a small printer for use on our boat, doesn't have to be battery powered or anything like that, mains power is available. The main criterion is that it should be as small as possible because space is at a premium, I think also laser is preferable to inkjet because it will spend quite long periods idle. So, any recommendations, obviously we want it to be Linux compatible as well, but that's about it - compact, laser, linux compatible. Size doesn't seem to be an important criterion any more when searching for printers so it's difficult to find particularly compact ones. -- Chris Green

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DropBox SD Card
by Simon Royal 18 Feb '11

18 Feb '11

Hi I am having problems with DropBox under Ubuntu. I sync 3000 pics across an XP machine, an old Mac laptop running OSX and I used to do it on my ThinkPad running Ubuntu. I am now trying to set up the same sync on my EeePC. Ive not had a problem before and I have in the past used a custom location for my folder. In fact my ThinkPad had a shared partition for XP and Ubuntu and my DropBox folder sat in there where both OSes could access it and sync. It seems an issue with using an SD card as the source and I dont think - from I can find out - it is directly Ubuntu related. It also seems this worked until recently although people cannot determine whether it was a DropBox update or Ubuntu update. It just continually says 'Downloading ??? files', yet it isnt. If I pop the DropBox folder on the internal SSD then it works fine. Can anyone shed any light. I found some info about mounting fat formatted drives in a certain way using fstab, but that made no difference. If it a particular problem with FAT32 then I could change it to NTFS or EXT4. Any help would great, I need my DropBox working. Oh and one more thing. Uploading works fine. If I drop a file in my DropBox on my EeePC then it will upload no problem and the rest of the machines sync it. Obviously not the other way. If I drop a file in my DropBox on my Mac then it syncs all the other machines but not the EeePC. -- --- 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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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 18 Feb '11

18 Feb '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 ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back next week, Monday 21st February, at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://www.pjmcgintys.co.uk/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. We're usually to be found in the lowest section of the bar, near the library entrance to the pub. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. This month will hopefully see the return of Mr. Jamieson who's been out of action for several months, so be on the look-out for the loud guy who's clearly out on the town for the first time in a while. I'll also let ppl know about a new regular coding discussion meet-up (Java/Groovy/Ruby/anything etc.) which is due to be starting in Ipswich on the fourth Monday of the month (not fixed yet), if anyone's interested. Other than that, I might start another religious debate on vi versus emacs as I'm trying to make a sincere effort to pick one up again this year. Hope to see some of there! 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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Sort dd/mm/yyyy
by Richard Parsons 18 Feb '11

18 Feb '11

Hi everyone I have some data like this: something:01/01/1980:something something-else:12/05/1993:foobar another-something:32/01/2012:barfoo etc In other words, it's a colon delimited file in which the second field is a date in the form dd/mm/yyyy. How do I sort the whole file in date order by the second field? I can see that 'sort -k' allows me to pick the positional part of the fields and -t allows me to pick the delimiter. But I can't work out how to combine them so that the whole file is sorted. Thanks Richard

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EeePC
by Simon Royal 17 Feb '11

17 Feb '11

Hi First can I start by apologising for mutliple threads. I have started this one, but will keep all future questions within this thread. I am having sleep/suspend issues on my EeePC. It is odd as it works 50% of the time fine. I close the lid, it goes to sleep, I open the lid and press Esc and it wakes fine - sometimes. It is a 701SD running Ubuntu 10.10. I cant replicate it or work out what is causing it not to work other times. 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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question about logging user activity
by Peter Alcibiades 17 Feb '11

17 Feb '11

Hi, We have got a grant from a charity to install a system which gives public access to a few hundred graphical exhibits, basically stuff we would like to have on display, but either they are too fragile, they are too big, or there is no space to hang them. To make the thing accessible we really need to have a reasonable amount of the information associated with the graphic, a few hundred words of prose, and probably a thumbnail. The grant was enough to buy is a nice big screen, we will reuse an older computer to drive it, and we'll mount it on a suitable stand for the public, and it also covered scanning these often very large graphics. We have pretty much decided to use tellico as the interface for this purpose. This is partly because all the information is in tellico already, its what we use for the main catalogue, so it saves work, and it means that keeping everything in sync is real easy. I feel OK about all this part, its just background and not the thing I'm asking about. A condition of the grant (as is apparently usual nowadays) is that we do tracking and evaluation on how much and if possible how the system is being used. This is the question. In the above circumstances, what would you use to log user interactions? If we only logged numbers of uses of the app, that would be a start, and a lot easier than getting questionnaires filled out, which people probably will not do anyway. If we could log which graphcs are being looked at, and how often, that would be very nice as we could think about other ways of making them more accessible. Any suggestions? I am sure it must be possible, but a quick pointer to what people have used successfully for this kind of thing could save an awful lot of flailing around. Peter

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