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Small distro or compute cluster?
by Clark, Adrian F 11 May '12

11 May '12

Hello everyone, I'm in the process of building a couple of dozen oldish machines into a compute cluster. I'd like to install a fairly lightweight distro onto them, both to save on the install time and because the machines have fairly small disks. I'm keen to avoid installing unnecessary things such as documentation, X11 etc. I'm generally happier in the debian-flavoured world, and the distro will have to be loaded from a USB memory stick. Do people have recommendations as to a good distro to use? netinstall distros are fine. You can see I've spent too much time recently just installing and using Ubuntu! ..Adrian -- Dr Adrian F Clark M0PDF WEB: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~alien/ EMAIL: alien/at/essex.ac.uk TEL: +44 1206 872432 FAX: +44 1206 872900 PAPER: Comp Sci & Elec Eng, University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK "The great tragedy of science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact" -- Huxley

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Internet dongles
by Anthony Anson 10 May '12

10 May '12

I have a Vodafone dongle - an early-is one which gives me 1 GB of data-transfer for £15. While this may seem expensive, it has its advantages... Firstly, the early models had rollover, and my first fifteen quid kept me in touch for six months - very little web browsing, true, so mostly e-mail and Usenet. Even now, I'd seldom use one GB in a month, so I was relatively happy. I say 'relatively' because I only have a GPRS signal where I live, so I'm not tempted to wade amongst the websites. Then... It stopped working on the Eee, though it was fine on the Acer when it was in XP mode. I don't like using it under XP because it means I must keep AVG up to date, and that download alone takes a vast bite out of available credit, not to mention the clockface. Earlier, I'd become used to doing some shopping, finding wi-fi in The Fat Cat and elsewhere, or connecting over 3G with the dongle. When the dongle stopped talking to the Eee, and I couldn't get it to work with Squeeze (on the Acer), I just spent ages drinking tea and noshing cakes, sausage and/or bacon sandwiches etc in the Tea Room (*Highly recommended*). Recently, I stuck the dongle in the Eee's USB port, and lo! It worked. And its still working (touch wood). Anyone got any idea why/how the Eee refused to play nicely for - oh - nine months or more? -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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Wrong Desktop
by Chris Walker 09 May '12

09 May '12

Can somebody help me diagnose why my machine always starts up with desktop 4 instead of desktop 1 please? Or would it be simpler just to rename them 4-3-2-1 instead of 1-2-3-4? The machine runs Mandriva 2011 64bit.

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Inserting env vars or other data into config files
by Mark Rogers 09 May '12

09 May '12

I'm using ssmtp to provide simple mail services on a Linux box. I want the configuration to be as simple as possible to migrate between different boxes, but using different users and passwords for different boxes. So for example I might decide to use the device's MAC address as the username, and derive a password from that somehow. That way, I can install a filesystem image onto a device and it will self-configure. (It may be that the device will call a web service with it's MAC address and retreive settings that way, but once the script knows what the user and password details are I still need a method to "insert" them into the configuration files.) So, my question is how best to "insert" these details into a config file (in this case /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf but I'm looking for a general solution). One option would be to simply recreate these files on startup inserting relevant details - or, better, to use sed (or maybe awk) to replace the relevant parts of the config. Is that the "right" way to do it? Obviously I'd need to restart any relevant services after this is done (or better, make sure it happens before they start). Is there a general way to insert an environment variable or other value into a configuration file? 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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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 10th May
by Viperfang 07 May '12

07 May '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, 10th May 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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Browser trouble
by Bev Nicolson 06 May '12

06 May '12

My connection is fine (I've rung my ISP) but I'm having trouble loading pages. It doesn't always happen. Sometimes, like now for example, it'll be slow, then when I go back to it, it springs into life. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox (not gone away) and Chrome's at it now too. Anyone got any ideas? Bev. (Ubuntu 11.04)

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ATD Hogging the processor
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 04 May '12

04 May '12

Hi folks, I've got a problem with my laptop that's recently occurred. The processor usage gets stuck at 100%, and I can't work out why. If I look at processes with top or htop, atd is the biggest user of the processor, with about 20%. Adding up all the processes gives a rough total of 30%. No idea of where the other 70% is going, yet the total at the top is 100%. Issuing the command sudo service stop atd almost immediately brings the total processor usage down to 2-18%. Then issuing sudo service start atd takes it right back up to 100% Any idea what atd is up to? How can I find out? I did get a disk space warning the other day, but have freed up a load of space since. Ubuntu 11.04, fully patched. No recent changes AFAIK apart from installing patches regularly. Any ideas? Steve

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Are there any DLNA/UPnP streaming *clients* for Linux?
by Chris Green 03 May '12

03 May '12

Maybe my multimedia naivete is showing through but I can't find any *clients* for DLNA/UPnP media streaming. I.e. I want to be able to use a laptop (or a desktop) to play music etc. stored on a media server using media server software rather than the file system. -- Chris Green

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FWD: Re: [Sheflug] UK Open Standards: Time to act
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 02 May '12

02 May '12

Greetings All! In case you may not be aware, I'm passing on this message from the Sheffield LUG. The original message (from Richard Ibbotson) gives the URL for on-line participation in the consultation. Gary Stimson's reply gives a link to a very interesting announcement from the Government Digital Service/Digital Cabinet Office. Feel free to pass this on to any other groups you think would be interested! Best wishes to all, Ted. -----Fwd: <4FA18654.2060800(a)stimson.org.uk>----- Date: Wed, 02 May 2012 20:09:08 +0100 Sender: sheflug-bounces(a)sheflug.org.uk From: Gary Stimson <bulk(a)stimson.org.uk> To: sheflug(a)sheflug.org.uk Subject: Re: [Sheflug] UK Open Standards: Time to act On 28/04/12 11:48, Richard Ibbotson wrote: > HI > > For those of you who have an interest in this.... > > http://fsfe.org/projects/os/uk-standards-consultation.html > > " The Cabinet Office is currently conducting an important consultation > on Open Standards The question is whether companies offering Free > Software will in future have the opportunity to sell their services to > the British government. Whether or not British money will continue to > be spent on supporting proprietary standards which lock in public > bodies, currently hangs in the balance. Thanks Richard. I strongly encourage everyone to respond to this Cabinet Office consultation. Our responses will have much greater impact than signing petitions etc. The consultation is very long but you don't need to respond to all of it. If you prefer, you can send some free text instead of answering the questions in turn. If the government wants to demonstrate support then they will count the responses, so yours does matter. If they want detailed analysis they have responses from FSFE, Open Source Consortium and more. If they want to ignore the consultation... they will. The deadline has been extended by a month (to 4th June) following an astonishing conflict of interest by a Microsoft advisor. http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/04/26/open-standards-consultation-… tant-update/ Again, please do take action on this. Gary _______________________________________________ Sheffield Linux User's Group http://sheflug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/sheflug_sheflug.org.uk FAQ at: http://www.sheflug.org.uk/mailfaq.html GNU - The Choice of a Complete Generation --------------End of forwarded message------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 02-May-2012 Time: 22:33:08 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 4th May.
by Viperfang 01 May '12

01 May '12

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

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