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Re: [ALUG] £400 - what's the best buy?
by Peter Alcibiades 08 Jul '10

08 Jul '10

The i3 looks a better buy than the AMD from Novatech, looking at the barebones. I bought the ebuyer zoostorm Intel 6300 for someone, it was cheap and fast and Debian went in with no problem. A bit noisy. Very good value though. For someone else, what is wanted is a quiet and not huge desktop, aesthetically reasonable. We are probably going to get the steel Silverstone matx case from Scan, the one that is called something like Evolution and sells for about 45.00. Then we will get a couple of quiet fans from QuietPC, and a Nexus 430 psu, and do all this with the matx i3 mainboard bundle from Novatech which has onboard graphics including vga and dvi. I am expecting this to be very quiet. Not sure whether to use the stock Intel cooler which Novatech supplies, or to go with a Scythe lower profile cooler in the interests of getting the noise from that down. Probably the Scythe. This will come in at not much over 400. The compact Novatech i3 is a contender here too, except noise would probably be higher, and cooling less good, than with the silverstone case. I do think Intel has it over AMD at the moment. Its a great pity that we lost Komplett. You could specify exactly what you wanted, starting with their stock models, and a couple weeks later, it arrived all connected and tested. I got someone a Core 2 system with silent graphics card just before they stopped selling. It used a Gigabyte Triton case, and you have to look to see if its running. Peter

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ALUG horse logo
by MJ Ray 08 Jul '10

08 Jul '10

The horse and penguin didn't perish in the wiki fire! Anyone want it? If so, I may have the xcf for GIMP somewhere too. http://mjr.towers.org.uk/comp/alugtalk/alughorse.i.png If anyone wants to draw a better one, that would also be good. If someone can go make an armoured tux sit on the real thing and take pictures... ;-) Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and developer for hire at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op

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£400 - what's the best buy?
by James Freer 08 Jul '10

08 Jul '10

I want to get a new PC - what would be the best buy? I wondered about this one http://www.ebuyer.com/product/193626 Perhaps some of you build PCs in which case can you do better buy than this? Obviously to run linux [inc compiz which i haven't been able to do on current PC]. I had thought about a laptop but i thought they ran a bit slower than a desktop for a comparable spec. thanks james

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Re: [ALUG] [Fsfe-uk] Fwd: Open Source Motion
by MJ Ray 07 Jul '10

07 Jul '10

ALUG members may like to see the Norwich City Council Open Source Motion which is being discussed at http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.fsf.uk/5909 For further national news, see http://floss.pro/fsfeuk Does anyone think other Anglian councils might follow suit, maybe even note the strategic benefits, call it Free and Open Source Software and consider exit costs too? Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and developer for hire at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op

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Changing broadband provider
by Bev Nicolson 07 Jul '10

07 Jul '10

Or more particularly, getting it to work once I have. I'm after some reassurance essentially as I'm moving from Virgin Media to a non BT ISP and this is new territory. With VM, I needed to be taken through registration via their IP address (yes, some support for Linux!) but will I need to go through something like that again when I swop the way I get broadband? Ta. Bev.

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Re: [ALUG] Anyone use a USB Mobile Broadband dongle?
by Chris G 05 Jul '10

05 Jul '10

Just to report that both dongles are now working with very little effort at all. I just installed usb-modeswitch and both dongles worked without any hassle at all. The Virgin Mobile Alcatel one just plugged in, was trivial to set up and worked. The Belgian one was a *little* more involved but not bad:- I bought an unlocked Hauwei (3) dongle one Ebay for £19.99 I got a Mobistar pay-as-you-go SIM in Belgium for 15 euros Plugged said SIM into the dongle and it connceted but would only access the Mobistar site saying it had run out of credit. I then realised I had to 'enable' it by putting it in my mobile phone and texting 'start' to specified address. ... and now the Mobistar dongle is working too, hence this message. It was all rather less painful than I feared. -- Chris Green

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USB Floppy drive problems
by Chris Walker 02 Jul '10

02 Jul '10

Can somebody point out my error please? I have a usb floppy drive attached to my machine. If I insert a DOS floppy, the light comes on and Dolphin pops up to tell me the disc label. But I want to read some adfs formatted floppies and the thing isn't playing ball. If I run cat /proc/partitions with the DOS floppy in, it tells me it's sdc but if try it with an adfs floppy the light comes on and goes off. If I then type mount -t adfs /dev/sdc /media/floppy it tells me that there is no medium found on /dev/sdc so what am I doing wrong? -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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cron not running script
by Jenny Hopkins 30 Jun '10

30 Jun '10

Hi folks, I've set up a script** to run from cron as below. This script runs from a terminal as it should, but won't run either from cron.d or from cron.hourly when stuffed in there. Can anyone see anything glaringly obviously wrong with it? It's run as /etc/cron.d/update-ip, with the following line: */5 * * * * root /bin/checkIP.sh **I'm sure it's a crappy script, but as long as it does the job..... ;-) Puzzled, Jenny #!/bin/sh #checks IP of courthouse every 5 mins and updates file on stoneboat /etc/ddns/courthouse-ip set -e currentIP=$(/usr/bin/wget -q -O - checkip.dyndns.org | sed -e 's/[^[:digit:]|.]//g') remote="stoneboat:/etc/ddns/" local="/tmp/courthouse-ip" echo $currentIP > $local >> /home/jenny/checkip.txt 2>&1 ##the last bit was put in to troubleshoot scp $local $remote exit 0

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Sound - is it just me or is it really such a black art?
by Chris G 29 Jun '10

29 Jun '10

I never seem to be able to get sound apps working quickly/easily in Linux (or WIndows for that matter). Is it really such a black art. For example I'm trying to get twinkle (VOIP softphone) to work in Ubuntu 10.04. Installs OK, configures OK with my VOIP provider, works perfectly as far as making the call is concerned. I can dial a number, the number rings and I get all the confirmations when the far end picks up the phone and hangs up. .... but there's no sound, which is rather fundamental for a phone application! And there's no way to diagnose it at all, no simple tests to play a sound, nothing, nada. How is one meant to configure and test sound setup on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 in this case) with no simple tests to try out. Sound does appear to work as my Virtualbox Windows XP guest plays Windows sounds fine. However I can't find *any* Linux application which will play a test sound for me. Twinkle offers me a whole raft of different sound 'devices':- ALSA: default device ALSA: plughw:0,0: HDA Intel (ALC1200 Analog) ALSA: plughw:0,1: HDA Intel (ALC1200 Digital) ALSA: Other device OSS: /dev/dsp: Realtek ALC1200 (HDA-Intel) OSS: other device So which do I choose (I think I've tried most of them!)? -- Chris Green

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Is there anything like a 'non-blog' Wordpress?
by Chris G 29 Jun '10

29 Jun '10

I've been around this loop before and not really got anywhere but still there's no harm in asking. Is there anything as simple and straightforward as Wordpress for creating web sites that *isn't* a blogging platform? There are many much more heavyweight CMS/Portal systems such as Drupal and Joomla but there really doesn't seem to be a site creation application as simple to use as Wordpress. I *can* use Wordpress to create a site which isn't fundamentally a blog by turning off loads of options and using its static 'pages' but it somehow seems silly to turn off so much of what it's intended to do. I already have ways to create utilitarian web pages from restructured text and that's fine for 'own use' internal web pages but I'm looking for something just a bit more sophisticated between that and a full-blown CMS. -- Chris Green

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