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West Norfolk meetings: second call
by MJ Ray 19 Sep '13

19 Sep '13

Chris Penston wrote [after my question]: > I would be happy to attend any meeting in West Norfolk. I am fairly flexible on days and times. I often feel a bit isolated up here in King's Lynn as meetups seem a long way to go and not have a beer! I've moved this to a new thread to see if anyone else is interested. Is there anyone else in West Norfolk interested in meeting up and do you have any preferences on days and/or times? I'm thinking one of the King's Lynn town centre bars on maybe the second Monday each month, but I might have overlooked some problem with that and I'm very open to venue suggestions because most places we've met before seem to have moved on. Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/

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Re: [ALUG] Thank you for the intro (+ GPG question)
by Ewan Slater 19 Sep '13

19 Sep '13

I'm in North Suffolk (Halesworth), so King's Lynn is a bit far for me. Ipswich, Norwich or even London (if work drags me that way) are pretty easy. Cheers, Ewan On 16 September 2013 17:57, David Crisp <dave(a)goldeneyes.org.uk> wrote: > On 15 Sep 2013, at 20:42, Chris Penston <chris.penston(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> On 15 September 2013 20:30, MJ Ray <mjr(a)phonecoop.coop> wrote: >> >>> >>> I'm willing to sign keys after meeting people a few times and/or other >>> corroboration, but I seem to spend most of my time in West Norfolk, >>> Cambridgeshire or London these days. Are people interested in a >>> meeting over this side and what day of the month? >> >> I would be happy to attend any meeting in West Norfolk. I am fairly >> flexible on days and times. I often feel a bit isolated up here in King's >> Lynn as meetups seem a long way to go and not have a beer! >> > > I'm in south Suffolk, so I'm afraid King's Lynn is a bit far for me to travel on a school night unless I take the day off work -- which I don't mind doing if necessary, but if that's where it's going to be I'd rather it was during the day on a Saturday if at all possible. > > Dave. > > _______________________________________________ > main(a)lists.alug.org.uk > http://www.alug.org.uk/ > http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main > Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above! >

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Thank you for the intro
by Bob 19 Sep '13

19 Sep '13

Hello Mick Thanks for the contact. I was hoping to eventually meet up with 'real people' as email is brilliant for info transfer but, to me, human contact is much more preferable. I do find that my friends have confidence in what I tell them and when I say Linux is the way forward they seem to accept it. I start them off with a dual boot system making them select Windows if they really want it otherwise it's auto boot taking them straight into Mint. I have converted 4 so far and I'm expecting a few more in the near future. I take your point on the Skype problem and will just have to stay with MS for that......unless anyone knows different. Is there another video platform that I don't know about? Unable to decode/read your attachment (signature.asc) pls advise program/software for that. One other problem I have a red cross in the update manager list in the system tray advising 'could not refresh list of packages'. So presumably I'm not totally up to date. Any advice would be appreciated. If I have contravened any protocol in my response please let me know. Thanks bfn Bob -- Using Opera's mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

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Re: [ALUG] Intercepting data from HID (keyboard wedge barcode scanner)
by Phil Ashby 19 Sep '13

19 Sep '13

On Wed, 18 Sep 2013 12:00:01 +0100 Mark Rogers <mark(a)quarella.co.uk> wrote: > I have a cheap barcode scanner that works well as a keyboard wedge - > that is it appears as a keyboard and barcodes appear as though typed > into the keyboard. > > I need to capture that data (and stop it appearing as keyboard data). > In an ideal world it would appear as a TTY (serial) device instead. > > Is there any way I can do this or do I need a different scanner? You can stop the default Xorg HID input driver (evdev) from using it as a keyboard: http://askubuntu.com/questions/17603/how-to-get-xorg-to-ignore-certain-inpu… Then you need to read the key press events from the /dev/input/eventX device node and possibly translate into a virtual terminal device (pty) for the application to read. There are useful symbolic links in the /dev/input hierarchy that make it easier to find your device, and reading events is this trivial (I was debugging a weird keyboard when I wrote this code): // From kernel docs: // https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/input/input.txt #include <stdio.h> #include <fcntl.h> #include <linux/input.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { struct input_event evt; int fd; char *dev = "/dev/input/event5"; if (argc>1) dev = argv[1]; if((fd = open(dev, O_RDONLY))<0) { perror("opening device"); return 1; } while(read(fd, &evt, sizeof(evt))==sizeof(evt)) { printf("type=%d code=%d value=%d (0x%08x)\n", evt.type, evt.code, evt.value, evt.value); } close(fd); return 0; } Sending to the chosen application may be trickier: depends if it can be persuaded to read from a network connection or named pipe (easy), or if it needs a real terminal node, in which case openpty() and friends will be needed to fool the app into thinking it's talking to a serial port. Phil.

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Touch screen support
by Mark Rogers 18 Sep '13

18 Sep '13

I have a web-based application running on a relatively low spec Ubuntu box (it was originally set up as a server install, but Gnome (I think [*]) was added with Firefox). They want to do away with keyboard and mouse so that means a touch screen. Any experience/suggestions/recommendations? Most of the interface is click only (a few elements are hover but they're not critical). There is the need to login so that'll need a pop-up keyboard of some kind, although we'd also like to look at barcode scanning support (all staff have a swipe card with barcode on it and that could bypass the keyboard-based login). I wouldn't rule out a standalone all-in-one desktop PC with touch screen acting as a client to the existing box (which goes back to being headless). Cost may be prohibitive though. [*] How do I check via SSH what desktop manager was installed? -- 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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How to make a 'do nothing' web page?
by Chris Green 17 Sep '13

17 Sep '13

Is it possible to provide a 'do nothing' web page so that one can set references to google.analytics.com for example to go to a page on localhost that does nothing? I've no particular hang-up about google analytics except tha it's so slow. When accessing the Screwfix site for example it spends much more time on Google analytics than it does telling me what I want to know. If I just put an entry like 127.0.0.1 google.analytics.com In my /etc/hosts file it will presumably get lots of 'page not found' errors, probably OK but I was wondering if there was a neater way. -- Chris Green

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New member
by Bob 17 Sep '13

17 Sep '13

Gentlemen & Ladies I decided to join your 'club' as over the past 10 years or so the MS attitude that they have the right etc etc. Much prefer the better and free path that is Linux. I started Linux life with PClinuxOS which was very similar to Windows and it was exciting to use. The problems came in keeping it up to date and the general maintenance aspect. (with Windows an '*.exe' almost cured all) After I found Distrowatch, this opened up a whole new world. Ubuntu was the first OS that I used in earnest, but, Unity arrived. Good bye Ubuntu! That's when I found Linux Mint 11 and I am now on Olivia. My favourite desktop is Mate. I do most of the PC maintenance for my friends and as I am now retired, I'm slowly converting them all to use Mint. I do not however, have the skills to dig into the OS and my latest project has been to try to get the scanners on the all-in-one printers to function. And of course, the dreaded Skype problem. So, if I can give anything to the group I will, but I can't help feeling it will be the other way round. My name is Bob Innes and I live Sproughton, Ipswich. Thank you for listening..er reading Best wishes -- Using Opera's mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

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Thank you for the intro (+ GPG question)
by David Crisp 16 Sep '13

16 Sep '13

On 15 Sep 2013, at 00:22, Bob <bob(a)beriwold.plus.com> wrote: > Hello Mick > ... > Unable to decode/read your attachment (signature.asc) pls > advise program/software for that. > Mick's attachment is a GPG signature used to authenticate that it really is him sending it. If you look in your distro's package manager you should find the necessary programs to decode and verify it - I dunno if there's a plugin for opera mail, but I know there is for thunderbird. BTW, question for the group in general - do we do key-signing at any point? The latest revelations re: the NSA have made me pull my finger out and generate one, but no-one else I know uses it … DC

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 16 Sep '13

16 Sep '13

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 today, 16th September, 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. 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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vortexbox
by Peter Alcibiades 15 Sep '13

15 Sep '13

Well, I was enthusiastic about this as a solution to the CD problem. Alas, enthusiasm does not survive acquaintance. I installed it on an old emachines tiny little AMD machine and it went in perfectly. The first few CDs ripped perfectly also. Then the problems start. It uses autoripper, which hangs or fails to find the metadata. The first result is that you get 'unknown' albums and tracks and artists. Fine, you can fix this. But its manual and tedious, has to be done from the command line or else from Nautilus over ssh, and in either case you seem to have to fix every track manually.. However, having done one of these or failed to, it hangs. And then it will not autorip again until you do a hardware restart. Its headless of course, so all this has to be command line, which is fine, except that lots of the interesting tools are GUI, which means putting in X11 and X11 forwarding. Then we have playing. Well, it has squeezebox server as the default. This appears to sell in hardware boxes for huge amounts, but I cannot for the life of me see why. Its open source, but why would anyone want it? Or maybe its for a completely different purpose? All I want to do is get my CDs onto a computer and listen to the music, probably over the local net but also its fine to listen to them on the device itself controlled from a tablet. So, what to do? Well, the solution seems to be what a wiser head suggested at the start of this process. Just rip your CDs manually, in fact do the whole thing manually. The other problem is the player. I am not sure if this is the emachines headphone output. But the volume is very low. It seems that the coding process automatically attenuates the sound by soe 6-8db. So its necessary to get a headphone amp (the Topping ones seem to be the choice). Or else in some unknown way fix this? A very interesting article a while ago, a guy had done his own ripping and then installed squeezebox on an old HP thin client. He used the internal usb ports to put in one flash drive for Debian and another for his music. One can see all kinds of advantages to that...... Though why he picked squeezebox is a mystery. Its not nice to be overly critical about something which enthusiasts are doing and releasing out of the goodness of their hearts, but all I can say is, this is not really working for me. Time to look for something else! Al

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