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SheevaPlug
by Mark Rogers 16 Feb '10

16 Feb '10

Has anyone played with a SheevaPlug or variant (TonidoPlug, for example)? Arm CPU, USB and network connectivity, running Ubuntu-derivative on 512MB built in flash (with 512MB RAM), all in a "plug" design. Looks like they can be had in the UK (ie with UK plug) for just over £60 but with £30 shipping (and 2-3 week delay) from the US. I think I will probably get one to play with, so I don't know if anyone else wants to combine shipping. But first off I'd like to know if anyone has played with one already. Obviously with it being Arm based there won't be many binary packes to install on it but the obvious suspects should cross-compile OK I would think. The obvious question is whether 512MB on-device storage is enough to achieve anything useful, but then I have relatively low aspirations anyway! -- 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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Charset conversion confusion - mutt works, nothing else does
by Chris G 16 Feb '10

16 Feb '10

I have an E-Mail (well lots actually) which has a text part with headers as follows:- Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable My system is all utf-8 now so just outputting the E-Mail via 'more' or opening it in vi doesn't decode/show the accented characters correctly. Mutt reads the above headers and converts the accented characters and shows them correctly. I want to do some processing on this file and then display the text parts but at the moment I can't get anything to do what mutt appears to be able to do with no effort! E.g. I have tried:- iconv -f iso-8859-1 <filename> and it doesn't change anything at all. Nor does viewing the file in Firefox with the charset set to iso-8859-1 work. What am I missing? It must be something blatantly obvious. -- Chris Green

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User & Group in recent Linux (Debian)
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Hi Folks, I recently noticed something which struck me as strange. In the past, on my older Linux distributions, an "ordinary" user gets set up as user=<username> and group="users". Thus, for instance, on those systems an 'ls -l' gives the likes of -rw-r--r-- 1 ted users 16 Apr 2 2008 - drwxr-xr-x 3 ted users 20480 Jun 3 2008 00_junk drwxr-xr-x 2 ted users 4096 May 10 2005 00_misc drwxr-xr-x 2 ted users 4096 Jan 31 2008 00_realplay However, on recent Debian (since Etch), I see that it is user=<username> and group=<username>. Thus now 'ls -l' gives -rw------- 1 ted ted 4643403 2009-06-02 18:56 03-Iii_Sarabanda.mp3 -rw------- 1 ted ted 3476861 2008-04-27 21:38 2nd_week_004.jpg -rw------- 1 ted ted 2879890 2008-04-27 21:38 2nd_week_006.jpg So now I am user "ted" and am in group "ted"! This seems to have happened "in the background" without my being aware that it was going to happen -- I just happened to notice that it had happened! Is there a good reason for this change? And what would be the best way to revert to the old way (especially when creating new users)? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 14-Feb-10 Time: 22:10:47 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Hot swap sata drives
by Barry Samuels 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Can anyone tell me how I can get a command to run whenever a sata hard drive is connected? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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JavaScript/HTML issue
by James Bensley 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Got a page with a frameset containing two frames (frame 0 and frame 1). The page in the top frames (frame 0) has links and each link calls the same JavaScript function parsing a different value. I want the bottom frame page (frame 1) to have its background colour set to the parsed value. My problem is, within the JavaScript function; window.parent.frames[1].document.bgColor = "#xxxxxx" Will change the bgcolor but I have since gotten round to implementing css. Now this won't change the bgcolor because of the css use of background-color. However; window.parent.frames[1].document.style.backgroundcolor = "#xxxxxx"; Doesn't change the background color. Internet Explorer shows me this error: 'window.parent.frames.1.document.style' is null or not an object I'm stumped? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! -- Regards, James ;) Charles de Gaulle - "The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs." - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/charles_de_gaulle.html

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Job Post: Flash Dev in Loddon
by Richard 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Hello all, I have recently started working with Oilenium and they are looking for a Flash Developer. Details are here: http://www.oilennium.com/jobs/flash-developer-coding/ Cheers -- Richard Bensley - 07540878285

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Small Distro
by Simon Royal 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Hi. What are peoples recommendations for a lightweight distro? It needs to run on a sub 300mhz machine. I have been looking at DSL and DSLN but would prefer to stick with Xubuntu if possible. I havent been into Linux that long and have been using Ubuntu for the past couple of months. I have also used Fedora in the past too but not too keen on it. Simon --- Catch me on Twitter http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype me: Simon-Royal

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Re: [ALUG] Ubuntu 9.10, Networking and NFS
by phil.ashby＠bt.com 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Steve Fosdick <lists(a)pelvoux.nildram.co.uk> wrote: > > You may have read in another thread that I now have a NAS. The NAS > supports NFS so it seemed completely natural to NFS mount a directory > tree from the NAS on a desktop PC and to put this mount in the > /etc/fstab file so it is mounted whenever the desktop PC is started. I > did this and specified the 'bg' option so that if the file system > concerned is not available the mount is retried in the background. > > Upon the next reboot of the PC it got stuck in the boot process in such > a way that all I could see was the Ubuntu logo and no text. Using the > Ctrl-Alt combinations to switch virtual console did not make any > difference (no text appeared) and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill a running X > server did not make any difference either. In the end I used the magic > SysReq to reboot the PC. > > Upon choosing the "recovery mode" from GRUB I found that the NFS mount > was not working because the network card was not up. It seems that when > you use the helpful GNOME-based network configuration to configure a > network connection it then does not get started early enough in the boot > process to support the NFS mount which is rather different than if it > had been configured in the /etc/network/interfaces file. I had a very similar issue with my studio machine connecting to the NAS in the house using NFS over a longish ethernet string (~50m). In my case I had used /etc/network/interfaces to permanently configure the network card, and all worked well with 8.04. Upgrading to 9.10 late last year and switching to 'upstart' caused the NFS mount to fail sometimes on startup. Further investigation of the 'upstart' configuration (in /etc/init/*) indicated that there was a race condition between the 'mountall' process and the networking startup: if the network came up quickly enough (which varies a bit depending on the rain and DHCP server response speed :) all was well; if the network init was a bit slow, then mountall would be stopped by the rcS event or exit of it's own accord and nothing would mount the NFS when the network did come up. I fixed this by the rather ugly hack of modifying the mountall-net.conf script to directly call mount on my NFS if it was unable to find mountall running. There are other similar problems it seems with upstart and NFS: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mountall/+bug/501678 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mountall/+bug/430348 Phil.

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Ubuntu 9.10, Networking and NFS
by Steve Fosdick 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

You may have read in another thread that I now have a NAS. The NAS supports NFS so it seemed completely natural to NFS mount a directory tree from the NAS on a desktop PC and to put this mount in the /etc/fstab file so it is mounted whenever the desktop PC is started. I did this and specified the 'bg' option so that if the file system concerned is not available the mount is retried in the background. Upon the next reboot of the PC it got stuck in the boot process in such a way that all I could see was the Ubuntu logo and no text. Using the Ctrl-Alt combinations to switch virtual console did not make any difference (no text appeared) and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill a running X server did not make any difference either. In the end I used the magic SysReq to reboot the PC. Upon choosing the "recovery mode" from GRUB I found that the NFS mount was not working because the network card was not up. It seems that when you use the helpful GNOME-based network configuration to configure a network connection it then does not get started early enough in the boot process to support the NFS mount which is rather different than if it had been configured in the /etc/network/interfaces file. At this point I also found that one RAID array was failing to start which, after some investigation turned out to be a zeroed-out RAID superblock on one of the partitions which I will discuss in another thread. I now do not know if the failing NFS mount was responsible for the hung boot process and the superblock got corrupted by the magic SysReq reboot or if the superblock was corrupted by a failing drive and the NFS mount was a red herring but it was certainly somewhat surprising. Steve.

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Recovering a RAID Array
by Steve Fosdick 14 Feb '10

14 Feb '10

I mentioned in another thread that I needed to recover a RAID array when the RAID superblock on one of the partitions had become corrupted. I could not find any documentation that deals with this - most of the examples assume you are hot swapping a failed device from an array that is running whereas in my case the system would not start the array concerned. If I ran: mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sda7 /dev/sdb7 /dev/sdc7 /dev/sdd1 I would get an error message about the superblock on /dev/sda7. After much fiddling about the answer turned out to be to add the --force option after which the array is started without /dev/sda7. After that the corrupt but working partition can be added back in: mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sda7 and at that point the array is resynchronised to include /dev/sda7 . Regards, Steve.

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