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Re: [ALUG] SD & Flash Drives
by mark fernandes (IFR) 07 Feb '11

07 Feb '11

Hi Simon, My 701 eeepc has had no problems with SD or other USB sticks when hooked upto a Huawei 3G soap-bar. Maybe Tony had a duff one. Interested in distro's too. Have used Multiboot to make a USB sick with multiple distros to check feature support. So far Ubuntu NBR 10.10, eeebuntu and Lubuntu (you may detect a theme here :-)) have been tried and am leaning towards lubuntu (as per my son's desktop PC). That said Xandros has been fine as long as you're using the eeepc as an appliance. USB sticks - I've had 2 fail in about 10 years - mainly corruption of files. As has been said it depends on repeated writes to same block and it is a MEAN time between failures (MTBF) so your mileage may vary (it's the distribution about the mean that matters). Regards, Mark ________________________________________ From: main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk [main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk [main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk] Sent: 06 February 2011 12:00 To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: main Digest, Vol 68, Issue 5 Send main mailing list submissions to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk You can reach the person managing the list at main-owner(a)lists.alug.org.uk When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of main digest..." Today's Topics: 1. SD & Flash Drives (Simon Royal) 2. FOR SALE: ThinkPad R31 (Simon Royal) 3. Re: SD & Flash Drives (Anthony Anson) 4. Re: SD & Flash Drives (Wayne Stallwood) 5. Re: SD & Flash Drives (Adam Bower) 6. Re: SD & Flash Drives (Anthony Anson) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2011 22:38:03 +0000 From: Simon Royal <mrsimonroyal(a)gmail.com> Subject: [ALUG] SD & Flash Drives To: Anglian Linux User Group <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> Message-ID: <AANLkTik7dfeChRXk1X0psrX1EEsMr4GsK5ecDw0gJmUU(a)mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Hi How reliable and durable are SD Cards and Flash memory. Im thinking of getting an netbook, one of those little EeePC things but the earlier models have limited internal Flash memory. So, extra storage would be in the shape of Flash drives or SD cards. How reliable are they for storing stuff? I read somewhere about the 100,000 rewrite limitation, but how true is this. Ive got a USB thumb drive that I have had for about 6 years and it is still going strong. It has outlasted some of my newer ones. It used to house my website files so was used on a daily basis, written to dozens of times at once. Simon -- --- Twitter:?http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal?- LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum?- Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad R31 running Ubuntu 10.10 & Windows XP Home. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1 ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2011 23:10:27 +0000 From: Simon Royal <mrsimonroyal(a)gmail.com> Subject: [ALUG] FOR SALE: ThinkPad R31 To: Anglian Linux User Group <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> Message-ID: <AANLkTi==ziQL1qaZo0bvvmqYBQ7Dj4JsCsMQX_eF1jPm(a)mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Hi. I am looking at moving to an ultra portable netbook and to do so would need to sell my ThinkPad to make funds for it. So up for sale is my IBM ThinkPad R31. Celeron 1.1Ghz. 512MB RAM (1GB Max, currently has 1x 512MB) 60GB hard drive. CDROM. Comes with two batteries. One is dead, the other holds charge but is temperamental on charging. Original power supply. The rear USB port is broken, so I have put a piece of electrical tape over it. However, the side USB port works fine. Apart from this, it has no other faults. The screen has some pressure marks. Brilliant laptop currently running Ubuntu and XP. Has XP Pro COA sticker on bottom of laptop. Hard drive will be wiped before sending, so you will need your own OS. Could supply a wireless card if needed. It is a NetGear I think, not sure of compatibility with Linux. I would like to keep the Buffalo one I am using. If you are interested let me know. Make me an offer. Or swap for a netbook. Simon -- --- Twitter:?http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal?- LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum?- Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad R31 running Ubuntu 10.10 & Windows XP Home. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1 ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2011 01:23:05 +0000 From: Anthony Anson <tony.anson(a)girolle.co.uk> Subject: Re: [ALUG] SD & Flash Drives To: Alug list <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> Message-ID: <4D4DF7F9.9090807(a)girolle.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Simon Royal wrote: > Hi > > How reliable and durable are SD Cards and Flash memory. Im thinking of > getting an netbook, one of those little EeePC things but the earlier > models have limited internal Flash memory. Never had any fail. My oldest one is 64 MB, and I had that when it was state of the art. If you do get an Eee and it has Xandros on it, I'd advise you to install a proper distro on it. I've had xPUD and Crunchbang recommended for the purpose. With Xan-dross on the Eee (or at least, my Eee) you can't use the USB for anything else if you have an internet dongle plugged in. If you then want to use anything else in the USB port(s) you have to remove the dongle and reboot first. The dongle won't work if you have a SD card in the slot either. Other distros installed on the Eee don't suffer from this failing, I'm told. I believe you can get at least 32 GB SD cards - but at a price. (8 GB is currently around ?23, but I am told that it's cheaper on the continent.) > So, extra storage would be in the shape of Flash drives or SD cards. > > How reliable are they for storing stuff? I read somewhere about the > 100,000 rewrite limitation, but how true is this. That's hardly a limitation. Don't forget, your Eee will have similar 'limitations'... -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/ ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2011 01:19:53 +0000 From: Wayne Stallwood <ALUGlist(a)digimatic.co.uk> Subject: Re: [ALUG] SD & Flash Drives To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Message-ID: <4D4DF739.5020802(a)digimatic.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed On 05/02/11 22:38, Simon Royal wrote: > Hi > > How reliable and durable are SD Cards and Flash memory. Im thinking of > getting an netbook, one of those little EeePC things but the earlier > models have limited internal Flash memory. > > So, extra storage would be in the shape of Flash drives or SD cards. > > How reliable are they for storing stuff? I read somewhere about the > 100,000 rewrite limitation, but how true is this. > > I think modern and reputable make SD cards/flash memory are now durable to the point that unless you are using them in heavy write scenarios (swap or log files) then the lifetime will exceed the usefulness as technology advances. I have had a few usb flash drives die in my time but most of them have been due to rough handling/water damage/connector damage. I can't remember having an SD/CF card fail on me. Also bear in mind that these figures are talking about writes to a specific block. file allocation,fragmentation and wear levelling in the flash controller all have an effect on this so the real figure will be better. If you are really concerned then making sure you mount with noatime and using a non journalling FS will help prolong life..and improve speed as with flash memory writes are usually slower than reads. ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2011 09:51:31 +0000 From: Adam Bower <adam(a)thebowery.co.uk> Subject: Re: [ALUG] SD & Flash Drives To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Message-ID: <20110206095131.GC20675@electron> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 On Sun, Feb 06, 2011 at 01:23:05AM +0000, Anthony Anson wrote: > > I believe you can get at least 32 GB SD cards - but at a price. (8 > GB is currently around ?23, but I am told that it's cheaper on the > continent.) Wow, you must come from the past in a time machine! :) I got a 16GB micro-SD last month for ?18 and a 16GB SD for ?16. On top of that I paid a premium to make sure I got a card from a reliable retailer (so nothing fake) and getting fast cards. 8GB is around ?8-?10 at the moment, it now means that when I fill an SD card up in a camera that all I do is buy a new card and put the old one in the fire safe. Anyhow, as for the 100,000 writes thing. That is 100,000 writes per block (and is quite an old metric from ye olde days of flash). How often will you actually write to the card? I mean, assuming that you do actually do 100 writes a day to the *entire* card that's still nearly 3 years of life at which point you can throw it away and buy a new one that will have 8x the capacity of the same price..... Adam -- New signature required, suggestions on a post card please. ------------------------------ Message: 6 Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2011 11:58:18 +0000 From: Anthony Anson <tony.anson(a)girolle.co.uk> Subject: Re: [ALUG] SD & Flash Drives To: Alug list <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> Message-ID: <4D4E8CDA.4080204(a)girolle.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Adam Bower wrote: > On Sun, Feb 06, 2011 at 01:23:05AM +0000, Anthony Anson wrote: >> I believe you can get at least 32 GB SD cards - but at a price. (8 >> GB is currently around ?23, but I am told that it's cheaper on the >> continent.) > > Wow, you must come from the past in a time machine! :) I got a 16GB > micro-SD last month for ?18 and a 16GB SD for ?16. Where? > On top of that I paid > a premium to make sure I got a card from a reliable retailer (so nothing > fake) and getting fast cards. 8GB is around ?8-?10 at the moment, Where? > it now > means that when I fill an SD card up in a camera that all I do is buy a > new card and put the old one in the fire safe. It's this 'reliable retailer' thang - The Swedes (Chapelfield Mall) charge ?23 for 8 giggle, as do various camera shops and allied businesses. I *KNOW* you can et them at sensible prices (a correspondent in Germany does), but apart from buying online *I* can't find anyone - in Norwich, at least. Online's OK unless you want one *now*. -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/ ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.anglian.lug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main End of main Digest, Vol 68, Issue 5 ***********************************

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FOR SALE: ThinkPad R31
by Simon Royal 05 Feb '11

05 Feb '11

Hi. I am looking at moving to an ultra portable netbook and to do so would need to sell my ThinkPad to make funds for it. So up for sale is my IBM ThinkPad R31. Celeron 1.1Ghz. 512MB RAM (1GB Max, currently has 1x 512MB) 60GB hard drive. CDROM. Comes with two batteries. One is dead, the other holds charge but is temperamental on charging. Original power supply. The rear USB port is broken, so I have put a piece of electrical tape over it. However, the side USB port works fine. Apart from this, it has no other faults. The screen has some pressure marks. Brilliant laptop currently running Ubuntu and XP. Has XP Pro COA sticker on bottom of laptop. Hard drive will be wiped before sending, so you will need your own OS. Could supply a wireless card if needed. It is a NetGear I think, not sure of compatibility with Linux. I would like to keep the Buffalo one I am using. If you are interested let me know. Make me an offer. Or swap for a netbook. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad R31 running Ubuntu 10.10 & Windows XP Home. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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Re: [ALUG] EeePC Ubuntu
by John Woodard 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

Agreed the 9" Aspire One 150 is okay but the Asus has far superior build quality. Sorry about the top post anyone know how to make mt Blackberry conform? Cheers, BJ ------Original Message------ From: Wayne Stallwood Sender: main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] EeePC Ubuntu Sent: 3 Feb 2011 22:16 On 03/02/11 16:32, John Woodard wrote: > I have 10.04 running on my Acer Aspire One Although to be clear on that if Simon is looking at 10" models avoid the Acer Aspire One 751 at all costs. The GMA500 gfx chipset is a troublesome beast on linux I have just converted my 751 back to a Windows machine and sold it because I was fed up with potential problems every time there was a kernel upgrade. _______________________________________________ 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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EeePC Ubuntu
by Simon Royal 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

Hi Has anyone any experience running Ubuntu on an EeePC machine. I have been very impressed with my ThinkPad and impressed with Ubuntu and have settled nicely into the Linux world. My ThinkPad is only a 1.1Ghz Celeron and with 1GB RAM Ubuntu screams along. Id like something a little more portable and compact and have been looking at these Asus EeePC machines, both the 7" and 10" models. The 7" models are 900Mhz machines, the 10" models are 1.6Ghz Atom machines. I only do basic surfing, listening to music, FaceBook etc and writing. I do YouTube from time to time. So nothing heavy. Simon -- --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad R31 running Ubuntu 10.10 & Windows XP Home. Apple PowerBook G3 'Pismo' running OSX 10.4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro running 2.1

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swap partition question
by Peter Alcibiades 03 Feb '11

03 Feb '11

OK, now that we managed to get the installation transferred to the new machine using clonezilla, just one more question. When I did the transfer, of course it duplicated the original partitions, so we had /, swap and home. The swap partition is sized for the old system, so it is only a bit under 2G. However, the new system has 4G memory. What is the right thing to do? Reclaim some space (it would need to be from / which is 20G or so, so it would be possible to take 6G fairly safely? Leave it alone? Delete it - because do we really need a swap partition if we have 4G memory? Peter

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moving debian from amd64 to i3
by Peter Alcibiades 01 Feb '11

01 Feb '11

Finally got around to doing this. I took out the hard drive from the old machine and using a little plug in usb adaptor, really neat, £10 from ebuyer, and clonezilla duplicated it on the new machine. The problem however, and this has happened before with debian, is that xorg now seems impossible to configure if it doesn't work, except by editing xorg.conf by hand, which is not my favourite pastime. Seems it used to be possible to use dpkg and reconfigure xorg, but if its still possible I could not find a way. So I started up from a PCLinux live CD, became root, set up the screen, then copied the xorg.conf file over to the debian installation, started up from the hard drive, and it all works. This an i3 running on an AMD64 image. I am really a bit surprised that it works. But it seems to. Famous last words. Clonezilla is very easy, and reasonably fast considering the size of the partitions. Peter

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Wanted - simple way to check mains power is available
by Chris G 29 Jan '11

29 Jan '11

I'm looking for the simplest possible way for a script (or any sort of program, can be C, Python, whatever you like within reason) to check whether mains power is on. The computer which is going to check this is running off batteries so will still be running (I'm not quite that stupid!). The easiest way I can think of at the moment is to have some sort of hardware with a presence on the LAN powered by mains so that one can ping it to check that mains power is there. However the 'simplest' device I have at the moment is an old router which seems rather overkill for such a simple requirement. Can anyone think of any better way of doing this for which I am likely to have the hardware available or which will cost very little? I'm quite happy to build simple bits of electronics. The computer running the check is an old eeePc so has only USB and ehternet connections as far as I remember. -- Chris Green

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How to copy a file (using rsync or scp) only if the file exists?
by Chris G 26 Jan '11

26 Jan '11

I have an rsync copy command as follows:- rsync --remove-source-files cheddar.halon.org.uk:odin/tempdata ~/odin This copies tempdata from the remote system to the local system and also removes it from the remote. The file tempdata is put there by a cron job and I want to process the data once only and then wait for new data. This is fine as long as the cron job putting data onto the remote system runs every hour and the local rsync also runs every hour. However if the remote cron job fails then, although I don't process the data again, I get a "No such file or directory" from rsync. I suppose I could just throw the error message away but that would throw other error messages away too which might be important ones. Any ideas? -- Chris Green

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Recommendations wanted for simple, command line, webcam capture program
by Chris G 24 Jan '11

24 Jan '11

I'm after a simple webcam image capturing program to run from the command line (well, ultimately from cron). It's to run on my eeePc on the boat so must be simple and lightweight. I am currently trying webcam and fswebcam without much success at the moment. If anyone has any experience of either of these programs then I'd be pleased to know. It seems that webcam is the nearest to working, I'm am trying to get it to store images locally rather than FTPing them anywhere. It seems to grab an image but then when it tries to copy it fails:- root@eeepc:~# mkdir -p /home/chris/public_html/images root@eeepc:~# webcam reading config file: /root/.webcamrc video4linux webcam v1.5 - (c) 1998-2002 Gerd Knorr grabber config: size 320x240 [none] input (null), norm (null), jpeg quality 75 rotate=0, top=0, left=0, bottom=240, right=320 write config [ftp]: local transfer /home/chris/public_html/images/uploading.jpeg => /home/chris/public_html/images/webcam.jpeg open filename: No such file or directory open filename: No such file or directory open filename: No such file or directory open filename: No such file or directory -- Chris Green

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Superblock problem
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 23 Jan '11

23 Jan '11

Greetings All! I have hit a big snag. On an old machine, I have a hard drive /dev/hda. I had to re-set the machine it when it seized up just now. On re-booting, it went of course into fsck and then announced: fsck.ext2: No such file or directory while tryin to open /hda1 The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid, and really contains and ext2 filesystem ... then the superblock is corrupt and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device> ... fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot. The root filesystem is currently mounted read-only. To remount it read-write do: .... At this point, [**] I logged in with the root password, and ran fdisk /dev/hda1, and I got blanks for all the fields. When I ran fdisk /dev/hda, I got Device Begin Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 1 1 1024 822525248+ 83 Linux Native which looks right. I then ran the suggested "e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hda1" alternative, and it went through the familiar series of checks and asked for approval for the familiar set of corrections. All semed to go well. Then it came boot to the root prompt "#" and, as usual, I pressed Ctrl-D to log out and reboot. Now, on re-boot, I get the same as before down to [**] above, and this time I do e2fsck /dev/hda1 and this time I get: /dev/hda1: clean, 213963/2058240 files, 3193368/8225248 blocks So it looks as though it succeeded. Now I again do Ctrl-D to reboot. But, on re-boot, I again get exactly the same as first time down to [**] above. So it is as though the superblock has not been fixed (though apparently the alternative superblock was fixed). SO: QUERY: How can I try to fix the superblock and get it booting normally? With thanks for any good suggestions! Bes wishes to all, Ted. ---------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 22-Jan-2011 Time: 23:13:49 This message was sent by XFMail ----------------------------------

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