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Copy files and change case - any ready made utliities around?
by Chris G 06 Sep '10

06 Sep '10

I want to keep two directories in sync but with a slight difference, I want the 'destination' directory to have lower case names only. I.e. any file in the source directory that has an upper case name (or any upper case characters in its name) I want copied to the destination directory with a lower case name. I guess I can come up with solutions that need me to write a wrapper script of some sort for rsync but I was wondering if anyone has any ideas for a ready made solution. This needs to be run as a cron job by the way. -- Chris Green

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NAS Drive mounting help
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 06 Sep '10

06 Sep '10

Hi Gurus! I've been given a Netgear SC101 which I'm intending to use for backups. I found a post somewhere about how to mount it, and I have mounted it, or at least I thought I had until I rebooted and it was no-longer mounted. The steps I have to take are: sudo modprobe nbd sudo ut listall sudo ut attach {DRIVE_ID_FROM_LISTALL} /dev/nbd0 sudo mount -t ext4 /mnt/sc101 /dev/nbd0 Line 1 adds a device driver to the kernel line 2 finds the drive's "id". You only need to run this once - the ID doesn't change line 3 "attaches" the drive to the system. line 4 mounts the block device at my chosen mount point. I've added a line to FSTab to take care of line 4, but the problem is, I seem to need to do line 1 and line 3 after a reboot before I can mount it. Q1: How can I make a modprobe "stick" to survive a reboot? Q2: Where should I execute line 3? Q3: Should I should manually mount there too, rather than using FSTab? I'm attempting to use BackupPC to backup my files. This runs as a service, and requires that drive to be running to start. Q4: Is there a way to conditionally start a service, dependant on whether the drive is present or not, or should I just let it attempt to auto-start and live with it failing if the drive's not there? Any help much appreciated! BTW, the reason I'm attempting to use BackupPC is because it "folds" identical files from multiple PCs into 1, i.e. it doesn't store multiple copies - i.e. it de-duplicates the backup, hopefully allowing me to backup multiple machines without buying loads of disks! Cheers Steve

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What keeps creating files called '%1'?
by Chris G 04 Sep '10

04 Sep '10

Something keeps creating a file called %1 on my system, has anyone else had this happening and, if so, do they know what's doing it? -- Chris Green

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BMJ and Firefox
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 03 Sep '10

03 Sep '10

Hi Folks, I've just had an interesting experience with the BMJ website: http://www.bmj.com With Firefox (Iceweasel) 2.0.0.19 all I see is the banner logo at the top of the page. The rest is pure blank, though this blank page is long. With an old IE, all is fine. I next tried Firefox (Iceweasel) 3.0.6 on another machine again all is fine. I've never had trouble with the BMJ before. On their front page they do state that "bmj.com has moved to a new technical platform" and that there are some problems; but that seems a bit unlikely as explanation for complete failure to display content on one browser version, yet display properly on another. Any comments? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 03-Sep-10 Time: 14:13:02 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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program focus
by nev young 02 Sep '10

02 Sep '10

Hi all, One of the major annoyances I had with MS Windoze was the habit of programs to force themselves into the foreground. I would have some long running task running in the background, or will have started a "slow to fire up" program, meanwhile I continue working on "the task in hand" with the program in the foreground. When I looked at the screen I see the background task has popped up and forced itself into the foreground and the last half dozen sentences I had typed had been lost to it. I have noticed that this is also becoming more common with linux (unbutu 10.04) and was wondering if this behaviour is a part of the programs themselves or if there is a system wide setting that will stop it. That is, I want to be able to specify that the foreground task I am using does not lose focus unless I tell it to. Anybody out there have more in depth knowledge of this sort of thing? Nev

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Wanted - workaround for broken date entry on a web site - any ideas?
by Chris G 02 Sep '10

02 Sep '10

I'm trying to register my Mobistar internet dongle. Their web programmers are obviously a bunch of total idiots, especially on the usability front. Not to mention that they make the site ridiculously secure for no good reason, the only way you could lose information or money there is if you, by mistake, charged someone else's SIM. However that's all by the by, it would be really good if I could actually get our dongle registered to allow us to view our usage and to recharge it. When we tried a few weeks ago it was impossible because the Mobistar website wanted to send an SMS message to our browser and couldn't because we're not running IE on Windows. So we gave up. I just retried and now it allows me to say "I can't receive SMS" at which point it allows entry of the PUK instead. Whoopee I thought, now I can register. No such luck, I get past the first few entries of phone number and PUK but then in the personal information bit it wants to know my date of birth and the pull down boxes for the day, month and year don't work. No problem I thought, I'll do it in IE in Windows, just the same (well slightly different symptoms), can't enter date of birth. I've also tried Konqueror, still no good. Can anyone suggest any workarounds that might allow me to get a date into the right place? The symptom in Firefox is that the drop-down box is the size for just one number and is blank, the symptom in IE (and Konqueror if I remember right) is that the drop-down is quite tall but is still completely blank. I have tried entering numbers even though they don't appear and tabbing through the entries but it still refuses to think I've entered a valid date. -- Chris Green

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Windows domain interoperability
by Mark Rogers 31 Aug '10

31 Aug '10

My work desktop (Ubuntu 10.04) is in an office managed by an SBS 2008 install (as much as I hate it, I kinda like it being something that I can wash my hands of when there's a problem!) I'm looking at the extent to which I can "benefit" from the domain, as much as a learning exercise as anything else. At present I have a couple of CIFS shares mounted, and I get my IP via DHCP and my email from the server via POP3. I discovered www.likewise.com at the weekend. Does anyone have any experience of (the free open source version of) LikeWise? Are there better/different options? To be honest I'm not really sure what I would like to achieve that I don't already have, but like I said this is a learning exercise more than anything. -- 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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cheap laptop broken screen
by Richard 30 Aug '10

30 Aug '10

Please somebody put this to good use, a replacement LCD panel is about 50 quid. I think around 50 quid is enough to ask for it (or nearest offer). I wont be posting it though, I can bring it to meeting or you can come and get it. http://i.imgur.com/wDNej.jpg It's an Acer Aspire One A150 netbook. Atom 1.6GHz (N270), 1GB RAM, 150GB HDD. Charger and battery work perfectly. Cheers Richard -- Richard Bensley - 07540878285

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WiFi - what's the panel applet *supposed* to do?
by Chris G 27 Aug '10

27 Aug '10

Yet again I am totally confused trying to get a WiFi connection to work. The real problem is that I don't really understand what the Network panel applet is supposed to do for me. Is there any good HowTo or similar for this applet? The first question is what's it called? In order to try and find out anything about it by a Google search for example I need to know what I'm looking for. Ah, it does have an "About" entry, it's the NetworkManager applet, version 0.8. (Running on Xubuntu 10.04) Firstly what's *supposed* to happen when/if there's a wireless network available? Do I need to do anything or should something appear in the applet? If nothing appears and I know (hope?) there's a network about can I do anything to make things happen? I am sitting here at the moment (using a mobile phone dongle to send this) in a place where I know there's a wireless network available and I know what the key/password to us it is. My mobile phone quite happily tells me "WiFi network found" One computer here is totally silent about the presence of any Wifi, the other can see something but gives me little clue about how to connect to it. Am I supposed to Add a wireless connection, if so how do I find all the right values for:- SSID Mode BSSID (presume leave empty) MAC address (presume leave empty) MTU (presume 'automatic') Security (i.e. what sort is the 'norm', no one providing me with WiFi seems to be able to tell me) As I said there's very little help I can find for this, there are bit's and pieces of specific information for particular cases but I can't really find anything that tells me 'all about NetworkManager' (or at least the panel applet). A search for NetworkManager applet howto produces several little tutorials on bits and pieces but no proper overall help. -- Chris Green

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Mystery "su" by root
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 26 Aug '10

26 Aug '10

Good morning! I just (and I hardly ever do this ... ) had a look at /var/log/auth.log on a Debian Etch running in a VirtualBox VM. Almost all the entries are simply references to CRON, e.g. Aug 26 03:17:01 localhost CRON[26804]: (pam_unix) session opened for user root by (uid=0) Aug 26 03:17:01 localhost CRON[26804]: (pam_unix) session closed for user root However, there is a short sequence of root su-ing to "nobody": Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30229]: Successful su for nobody by root Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30229]: + ??? root:nobody Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30229]: (pam_unix) session opened for user nobody by (uid=0) Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30229]: (pam_unix) session closed for user nobody Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30232]: Successful su for nobody by root Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30232]: + ??? root:nobody Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30232]: (pam_unix) session opened for user nobody by (uid=0) Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30232]: (pam_unix) session closed for user nobody Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30234]: Successful su for nobody by root Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30234]: + ??? root:nobody Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30234]: (pam_unix) session opened for user nobody by (uid=0) Aug 26 07:37:52 localhost su[30234]: (pam_unix) session closed for user nobody These are the only occurrences of such things in about 80 oepn.close entries over 24 hours (the others being like the CRON one above). Anyone know what "nobody" has to do with anything? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 26-Aug-10 Time: 08:13:26 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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keystroke?
by Anthony Anson 26 Aug '10

26 Aug '10

I've been experimenting with the function keys and the odd letter, to no avail. Is there a keystroke for minimising a pane on the page of a GUI - in Gnome and in KDE? -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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Upgrade Ubuntu 8.10 -> 10.04 broke RAID config
by Mark Rogers 24 Aug '10

24 Aug '10

I have just upgraded an Ubuntu desktop 8.10 to 10.04 The drive configuration is a single drive with the O/S, and two pairs of disks on software RAID1. When I reboot the server, I get error messages on startup telling me that /dev/md0 and /dev/md1 are inaccessible; I have to skip mounting them in order to proceed. However, if I use Syetem -> Administration -> Disk Utility once I have logged in, I can see the drives and if I tear down the two RAID devices and bring them back up again they both come back healthy. The problem only seems to be bringing them online on startup. Any suggestions? -- 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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Newbie Meeting & Repo Question
by Steve 23 Aug '10

23 Aug '10

Thanks for the feedback and the invite to the meetings. I guess that much of the content of these emails is soo far above my head I assumed the meets would be the same. To clarify my question about repos, my understanding was that "mostly" linux is a core kernel that at some particular point is basically the same, some distros use the cutting edge version others stay back a bit. If there's broadly a common basis and one overcomes the packaging differences (why can't they all be the same?), and the dependencies work themselves out shouldn't the bits basically all work. Anyways I don't really need a further response re repos as I have got the message from you guys that its best not to mix it up, and I suppose that the mainstream packages will appear in all the main repositories. It comes from not wanting to miss out on stuff it's the same thing that leads me to try different distros, Peppermint currently. Anyways, I didn't really get what the stuff about SFD was, but as I live near Syleham that location would get my vote for a meeting. Cheers Steve Card

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Where (and how) are the default mouse actions set?
by Chris G 23 Aug '10

23 Aug '10

I'm trying to find out where the default mouse actions are defined. By that I mean what is it that says that when (for example) I double click the left button the word under the mouse pointer is selected. I know that the mapping of button physical numbers to logical numbers is done deep down in X by the function XSetPointerMapping and can be retrieved with XGetPointerMapping but this just sets up the mapping from the physical buttons such that, if one wants, one can make physical button 3 the 'Left' button and physical button 1 the 'Right' button (thus making the mouse 'left handed'). However the above mapping doesn't affect what actions occur when the (logical) buttons are clicked. So Left (logical 1) button always grabs things or selects text, Right (logical 3) tends to open menus and such. Is it really down to every individual application to map the button events to actions or is there a common library (gtk maybe) which defines default actions for button events? If it's gtk what/where should I look to find the relevant code? What I'm after doing is to change the mapping so that I can use a different button (button 9 in my case) to select text with a single click rather than a double-click of button 1. The normally recommended way of doing this (getting button 9 to emulate two clicks of button 1) has stopped working for me since an upgrade from ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 and anyway it strikes me as a clumsy way of doing things. There should surely be a mapping somewhere that links all the possible types of button click to actions:- click left - select click middle - paste text click right - .... CTRL + click left - soemthing else etc. ... or, as I said, is it really down to each individual program? -- Chris Green

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Any git users here - need beginner help
by Chris G 23 Aug '10

23 Aug '10

I want to use git to download a development version of some software. I have downloaded and installed git onto my system, so far so good! :-) However all the man pages tell me that I should read the "Git User's Manual" to see how to download something. However nowhere is there a clue as to what/where the "Git User's Manual" is. Can someone point me in the right direction please. -- Chris Green

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Easeus Partition Manager Home Edition
by Simon Royal 23 Aug '10

23 Aug '10

Hi IF you need a free non-destructive partition tool, check out Easeus Partition Manager Home Edition. http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm I have used it a number of time to resize Windows before installing Linux. I also just used it to remove Linux and resize Windows larger. Brilliant. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4.

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Moving from Xubuntu 9.10 to 10.04, sharpness seems to be worse
by Chris G 21 Aug '10

21 Aug '10

I have just upgraded my system from Xubuntu 9.10 to Xubuntu 10.04, it seems to me that the sharpness seems to have subtly deteriorated. I have checked some of the obvious things (like the screen resolution hasn't been changed). It was most immediately noticeable in my terminal windows but, on looking carefully, I think the effect is general, it's just that I use smaller font sizes in my terminals than elsewhere. Has anyone any ideas what I should maybe be checking to see what might have caused this? It could of course be that I'm getting older and my eyesight is failing! :-) -- Chris Green

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How do you set X resources for a remote client application?
by Chris G 20 Aug '10

20 Aug '10

I'm running a GUI editor (xvile) on a 'remote' (i.e. not my desktop) machine and I need to be able to set its X resources. For xvile run on the local machine it's easy, I just put them in .Xresources and when X starts up it automatically loads any resources it finds in .Xresources (and/or .Xdefaults). So how do I do the equivalent when xvile is running on a remote client? Do I have to install xrdb on the remote client and run it before running xvile? It somehow seems wrong as its the display machine (X server) which actually needs to set the resources, can't I somehow tell the local (server) machine to set resources for a remote client app.? -- Chris Green

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PHP tools
by Peter Alcibiades 19 Aug '10

19 Aug '10

A friend asked me what he should use to write PHP in. Never having done any of this stuff, I had no idea, except that maybe Geany or Kate would work. What do you guys use? Also, he is setting up Linux for the first time. I recommended Mandriva to him, as being more familiar than some of the alternatives. But if he wants to run his PHP, once he has written it, what does he need to install? I am guessing that Apache would work, but is there something simpler and lighter for him to get started on? Peter

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Free ADSL filters?
by James Bensley 19 Aug '10

19 Aug '10

Anyone want an ADSL microfilter? I seem to have a draw with 7 bog standard BT ADSL filters in it? Free to anyone thats wants one/them? -- Regards, 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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Can one get a proper root environment with sudo?
by Chris G 19 Aug '10

19 Aug '10

I tend to use 'sudo -s' when I want to do a series of things as root, it generally works fine but I have just noticed a minor issue. It doesn't set a proper root environment so that you still have the environment of the user who sudo'ed to root - in particular there is the PATH which may have all sorts of oddities on it and HOME is still set to your home directory. -- Chris Green

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Odd cookie behaviour of particular www site
by Dan 18 Aug '10

18 Aug '10

Dear All, I've been trying to visit the website <http://www.cosis.net/> with Firefox 3.6.4 on Gentoo. Even though I have an exception set in my preferences, to allow cookies from cosis.net, the site complains bitterly that `Cookies are currently disabled in your browser', and therefore refuses to let me see any of its content. This is particularly odd because, by this time, cosis.net actually has successfully set a cookie. When I access the same site with Lynx, www.cosis.net sets a single cookie, and lets me in just fine. Any ideas, please? -- Thanks, Dan

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was there a pub meet this month ?
by Ian Porter 17 Aug '10

17 Aug '10

has there been a pub meet this month ? would be cool to say hi :). did not see any emails about it. -- King regards Ian Porter www: www.codingfriends.com

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Multiple gateways
by Mark Rogers 16 Aug '10

16 Aug '10

At work, we have two ADSL lines, one of which is faster than the other and tends to be used as the "main" route out of the office, but it has a dynamic IP address. The slower line has a static IP and has ports mapped for services I want to access remotely (eg SSH). However, with the default gateway being set to the IP of the router on the faster line (say 192.169.10.1), this means that connections through the second router (say 192.168.11.1) don't work. My PC obviously has addresses on both subnets, and out to be able to respond to a connection coming in on the 192.168.11.x address replying via a default gateway on that subnet, but as I understand it I only have one default gateway. So, how should I set this up? -- 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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Linux on dead trees
by Mark Rogers 16 Aug '10

16 Aug '10

I subscribe to most of the various Linux rags, and get varying degrees of knowledge out of them. I frequently read something interesting, get to work (where I could use it) and forget what the software was I discovered, and even which mag I discovered it in, and can't find it. Hopefully any avid dead tree readers can help me on two particular subjects: 1. In this month's issue of one of the mags, I started reading an article about remote access, where several options were compared, including NoMachine's NX (which I use), and something else (which got the best review) which I can't remember, but would like to play with. It was GTK based. 2. A couple of months ago, one of the mags reviewed an SSH tool (might have been a terminal tool) which would allow me to better manage multiple sessions, including running the same command across multiple sessions ("apt-get upgrade" etc), and various commands to make the windows easier to work with. It integrates with screen as well, as I recall. Anyone able to tell me what either of these packages were? -- 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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