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Really odd USB error/failure with Genius mouse
by Chris Green 02 Apr '12

02 Apr '12

I'm not really expecting a solution to this, just ranting/reporting an oddity. It confirms my general distrust/hatred of USB in general! :-) I have a little Acer Aspire netbook that I use (as I am now) when away from home, it runs xubuntu 11.10 (though I'm fairly certain I saw the same problem with previous versions of xubuntu). I use a Genius/Kye Traveller 350 mouse with it rather than the horrible touchpad. This works beautifully as it's actually a trackball rather than a mouse and has a scrollwheel and a fourth button that I have programmed as a double click of button one - bliss! :-) However after a random amount of time the Genius mouse stops working, since this is quite a long time (like hours rather than minutes) it doesn't often worry me too much as I don't spend hours on my laptop. Tonight though I decided to have a play and see if I could work out why it stops working (as the netbook had been left turned on and the mouse had, as usual, stopped working). I have the mouse plugged into the left hand side of the netbook where there are two USB ports as I usually use it left handed (even though I'm actually right handed). Since it had died just now I unplugged it and plugged it back in a couple of times, nothing, dmesg/syslog shows nothing, it's as if the mouse doesn't exist. If I reboot though it will work with no problem. Then I tried plugging it into the USB port on the RHS of the netbbok, and it works! It's still working. I can plug/unplug it repeatedly and it works every time. If I plug it in to the LHS ports there's still nothing happening though. Other devices (e.g. memory sticks) plugged into the LHS USB ports work perfectly though. It's just the mouse that won't work in the LHS ports (until I reboot!). Wierd! I think USB is a creation of arcane beings. -- Chris Green

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Directories to exclude on a backup
by Chris Walker 01 Apr '12

01 Apr '12

I'm about to backup my system as I want to resize the sda1 partition and I didn't think it was possible to do that with an existing system. So I looked online and found a Ubuntu guide to it which suggests excluding the following directories :- /proc /lost+found /mnt /sys/ I intend to backup /home separately so I will also exclude that but is the list reasonable or are there others I should also exclude? TIA

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 2nd March.
by Viperfang 28 Mar '12

28 Mar '12

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

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Re: [ALUG] Best mobile phone for Linux nowadays?
by Chris Green 27 Mar '12

27 Mar '12

On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:40:16PM +0100, Tim Green wrote: > > Chris Green <cl(a)isbd.net> wrote: > > >My wife's Palm Treo has died (after bing dropped for the umpteenth time) > >so she needs a replacement. > > > >The fundamental requirement is a phone which will synchronise contacts and > >calendar with Evolution or Thunderbird/Lightning. > > > >So what's the best way to go nowadays? > > > >We'd prefer direct phone <--> desktop synchonization but I suppose it's > >not absolutely vital. However I'm happy enough to install a sync server > >of some sort (though my experience with Funambol was not an entirely > >happy one when I was trying the same with my Nokia E71 a year or so > >ago). > > > These days all the cool kids sync with the cloud (e.g. with Android its Google). Is that an option for you? > Sort of, that's what I meant by "We'd prefer direct phone <--> desktop synchonization but I suppose it's not absolutely vital. We defnitely *do* need it to be easy/transparent to keep Evolution (or Lightning) calendar in sync with phone calendar. If this goes via the cloud then so be it but the cloud bit will only be used as a sort of server. So to have to explicitly synchronize Evolution <-> cloud and then separately synchronize phone <-> cloud is out. On the other hand it it can be made to just happen when changing things at either end then that's fine. Something that *relies* on having an internet connection all the time to work is out as we are often out of reliable mobile phone network coverage. At home the mobile coverage is often flakey and when we're on the boat in France it may be non-existent at times. -- Chris Green

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Wanted - command line program for listening to BBC radio streams
by Chris Green 27 Mar '12

27 Mar '12

I'm looking for a command line program to listen to BBC radio live streams. I'm a bit of a newbie with trying to do this and I'm a bit confused by the fact that all of the URLs I can find for 'streaming' are actually playlists. But anyway, be that as it may, I have tried a couple of programs to listen to the .asx streams that seem to be the most readily available BBC streams with mostly rather poor results:- mpg321 - doesn't seem to recognise URLs at all though the man page says it should. mpg123 - recognises some URLs (in particular .pls ones) but doesn't appear to understand .asx. mplayer - this manages to play .asx URLs but it's really a movie player and thus drags in far more bits and pieces than I want, playback is still choppy. How much processor power and/or bandwidth is required to play a basic radio stream? -- Chris Green

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Mail Server
by Paul Grenyer 27 Mar '12

27 Mar '12

Hi all I want to create an email server so that I can send and receive email for a number of my domains. I've tried using postfix, but it's a pig to setup and it appears I need to have a user account on the server for every email address and I can't restrict one user to only one domain. e.g. if I create a user called paul and I have two domains, I get paul@domain1 and paul@domain2. Of course this could be my misunderstanding. So, I would like recommendations for a mailserver to run on ubuntu. Ideally I'd like it to be: 1. Easy to setup 2. Not require a user to be created for each email address. 3. Be able to create email addresses for individual domains 4. Web interface 5. Work with mailman 6. Support pop/imap 7. Support email forwarding. Any suggestions? -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com t: pjgrenyer

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Login Problems
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 26 Mar '12

26 Mar '12

Hi all, I'm having problems logging in. Initial login takes an age (~1 minute). Sudo in a terminal takes also take an age, but if I log out and log back in again, I get an immediate login. I think I've had a problem like this before where I had set up something wrong, so that the thing that was handling the login was trying to connect to a non-existant windows server to verify the login, waiting for a time-out, then handling the login itself. On subsequent logins, it's like it knows it's timed out, and doesn't bother trying. This is on my server, and it should be responsible for it's own log-ins. It's running dnsmasq, and is a samba server. I've set samba so that it says it is the authoritative nameserver. Any idea what's going wrong, or what I can look at to work out what's going wrong. There's nothing obvious to me in the log file viewer, or Dmesg. Any other log files to look at or config files to tweak? Any way to view what the login process is doing?? Ubuntu server 10.04.4 LTS Any help gratefully received. Steve

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How to decide which printer driver to use in CUPS?
by Chris Green 26 Mar '12

26 Mar '12

Does anyone else suffer from this dilemma? Whenever I install my HP Laserjet 1320 printer I wonder which of about a dozen or so alternatives that CUPS offers to use. For HP 1320 I see:- HP Laserjet 1320 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.7 (en) HP Laserjet 1320 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.7 Simplified (en) HP Laserjet 1320 Foomatic/Postscript (en) HP Laserjet 1320 Foomatic/pxlmono (recommended) (en) HP Laserjet 1320 hpijs, 3.11.7 (en) HP Laserjet 1320 hpijs pcl3, 3.11.7 (en) HP Laserjet 1320 pcl3, hpcups 3.11.7 (en) HP Laserjet 1320 series Postscript (recommended) (en) HP Laserjet 1320 series Postscript (recommended) (en) HP Laserjet 1320 series Postscript (recommended) (en) HP Laserjet 1320, hpcups 3.11.7 (en) There's no 'help' to click on to give any guidance, I *guess* I can't use the Postscript ones as my printer doesn't have Postscript (and, yes there really are three apparently identical Postscript entries). But how do I decide between that odd mix of pcl3, hpijs and hpcups? -- Chris Green

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Best mobile phone for Linux nowadays?
by Chris Green 25 Mar '12

25 Mar '12

My wife's Palm Treo has died (after bing dropped for the umpteenth time) so she needs a replacement. The fundamental requirement is a phone which will synchronise contacts and calendar with Evolution or Thunderbird/Lightning. So what's the best way to go nowadays? We'd prefer direct phone <--> desktop synchonization but I suppose it's not absolutely vital. However I'm happy enough to install a sync server of some sort (though my experience with Funambol was not an entirely happy one when I was trying the same with my Nokia E71 a year or so ago). -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] Mail Server
by Stuart Bailey 25 Mar '12

25 Mar '12

Hi Paul, I think postfix is still tour best bet. You can authenticate users against MySQL, ldap or sasldb, so you don't need a linux account for each user. You email addresses can be handled the virtual domains, so Paul@anydomain can be configure to go to one account for Paul, or you can have separate accounts for Paul. Any combination can be configured. Stuart Bailey BSc (hons) CEng CITP MBCS LinuSoft (Managing Director) Linux Specialist & Software Developer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Phone: (0845) 658 3563 Direct: +44 (0) 1953 878162 Fax: +44 (0) 1603 858583 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://www.linusoft.co.uk ----- Reply message ----- From: "Paul Grenyer" <paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com> To: "ALUG ML" <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk>, "accu-general" <accu-general(a)accu.org> Subject: [ALUG] Mail Server Date: Sat, Mar 24, 2012 20:57 Hi all I want to create an email server so that I can send and receive email for a number of my domains. I've tried using postfix, but it's a pig to setup and it appears I need to have a user account on the server for every email address and I can't restrict one user to only one domain. e.g. if I create a user called paul and I have two domains, I get paul@domain1 and paul@domain2. Of course this could be my misunderstanding. So, I would like recommendations for a mailserver to run on ubuntu. Ideally I'd like it to be: 1. Easy to setup 2. Not require a user to be created for each email address. 3. Be able to create email addresses for individual domains 4. Web interface 5. Work with mailman 6. Support pop/imap 7. Support email forwarding. Any suggestions? -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com t: pjgrenyer _______________________________________________ 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! __________ Information from ESET Mail Security, version of virus signature database 6995 (20120324) __________ The message was checked by ESET Mail Security. http://www.eset.com

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