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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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