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How to stop KDE4 automounting an external (USB) drive?
by Barry Samuels 22 Jan '10

22 Jan '10

My wife's machine is running KDE4 and when a USB (IDE) drive is plugged into it it tries to automount the partitions which are not user mountable (root only) and pops up 9 windows saying that they couldn't be mounted. I'd like to stop those popups or stop KDE4 from trying to mount that drive. Telling HAL to ignore the drive makes no difference. Help much appreciated. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Well I'm slowly homing in on what I think I'm looking for
by Chris G 21 Jan '10

21 Jan '10

Just to keep you all well bored, here is where my search for a Wiki/Blog/CMS is now taking me. (I'm not really trying to be boring, comments, suggestions and such would be very welcome) I *think* what I'm basically after is an easy to use (i.e. easy to enter text) web page creation system which is somewhere between a blog and a wiki. The fly in the ointment is that I want to be able to put 'events' into the text somehow and I can't find any Wiki/Blog/CMS that really seems to be able to do this. Oh, I also want to be able to handle a hierarchy of pages. So, to try and give an example of what I want to do, bring out the old boat buying 'project'. This will have chunks of information (i.e. web pages) laid out as follows:- Boat purchase Searching for boat Types of boat Insurance Engineer survey ... ... Then the page about Insurance would basically be a sort of blog:- 28-Dec-2009 Asked for a quote from DBA insurers 05-Jan-2009 DBA quoted £387, seems reasonable 12-Jan-2010 Asked for quote at the Boat Show ... bla ... bla <EVENT> 01-Apr-2010 - boat insurance required I want that <EVENT> entry to somehow be a link to a calendar application of some sort which will actually have the event set up so I get a reminder or, even better, I want the blog/wiki to know that <EVENT> means it's got to remind me. My existing web info management system (cobbled together by me using reStructuredText and a small python script to automatically run it when .rst pages are browsed) does quite a bit of what I want. It provides a hierarchical set of web pages with 'crumb' links and (very) easy creation and editing using reStructuredText. However it doesn't really have any bloglike time/sequence awareness and neither does it have any ability to embed alarms/events. It may be that I could add what I need to my existing system but it feels like someone somewhere should surely have something like this already. It looks like TextPattern *might* provide quite a bit of what I want, I may install it and have a play. -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] preventing shutdown with remote working going on
by Peter Alcibiades 20 Jan '10

20 Jan '10

Thanks, this is brilliant. I have to make sure it catches XDCMP sessions as well as SSH ones, but it seems bound to. Brilliant! Yes, the answer might well be a server and all remote logins, from a technical point of view. Agreed. They have talked about that. But how they would manage to maintain it themselves, if something happened to me? This is doing our best to keep it as simple as possible, and to make sure that if it falls over, it will be no more than inconvenient. Or if I fall over. Peter > Assuming a debian-like system, what about molly-guard? > > http://www.ubuntugeek.com/molly-guard-protects-machines-from-accidental- > shutdownsreboots.html > http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/molly-guard > > Cheers, > > David >

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DNS queries
by Mark Rogers 19 Jan '10

19 Jan '10

I have a list of addresses I need to perform a DNS lookup for. What I need to know is the authoritative server for the domain, and the result of the lookup (A record with IP or CNAME with host). I tried: dig www.google.co.uk .. and it's not showing me the authoritative servers. So I tried: dig www.google.co.uk +nssearch .. and got a blank response. Suggestions? Background: I have a webserver which will shortly be changing it's IP address. It has a local DNS which will be updated as part of the migration so anything which uses that server for authoritative DNS will be updated automatically. However anything on an external DNS may need updating, depending on whether it references the server by CNAME or A record (and if CNAME I need to check that whatever that is gets updated too). So I need to know which addresses still point at the server, and of those which are not in the local DNS and of those which need updating (and where). -- 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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Which Netbook For Ubuntu?
by Simon Royal 19 Jan '10

19 Jan '10

Hi I have been using Ubuntu solidly for a few weeks now and loving it. A Mac fan prior to that for 10 years, I got given an old Samsung A10 laptop, installed Ubuntu and the rest is history. The Samsung is a little beaten up but works fine. Now I have gotten comfortable with Ubuntu and sold my Apple PowerBook I am on the look out for something a bit better and would really like a small netbook. I don't do anything to intense. I only write, email, surf (including games in FaceBook), the odd image editing in GIMP and a bit of Skype. First of all, does anyone have any recommendations as to which netbook to look at? Does anyone have one for sale? I don't really want anything with a 7" screen. I need one to run Ubuntu 9.10. My current Samsung is a 1.1Ghz Duron, so something with a little more oomph would be nice, although Ubuntu runs very smoothly on it with 1GB RAM. Simon Royal --- Catch me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype: Simon-Royal _________________________________________________________________ We want to hear all your funny, exciting and crazy Hotmail stories. Tell us now http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/

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Re: [ALUG] Laptop Adapter
by Simon Royal 19 Jan '10

19 Jan '10

James Picture is attached. Sorry for the poor quality but I only have my mobile for communication. Under the laptop it says 19v 4.2a max. On the adapter it says 19v 3.79a. The adapter was a cheap 2-power one not a genuine Samsung one. Simon --- Catch me on Twitter http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype me: Simon-Royal - original message - Subject: Re: [ALUG] Laptop Adapter From: James Taylor <jt(a)imen.org.uk> Date: 18/01/2010 23:03 Can you read the underside of your laptop and tell us the voltage and power that you require, then if possible take a pic of the socket? Maybe a camera phone pic would suffice? JT On 18 Jan 2010, at 20:25, Simon Royal wrote: > Hi all. > > Can anyone help in my hour of need. I have a Samsung A10 laptop, which I have been running Ubuntu on and loving it. > > The adapter has just blown. The light doesnt come on and I am stuck without a computer or access to my files. > > You dont happen to have a spare one or a generic one? > > Simon > > --- Catch me on Twitter http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype me: Simon-Royal > > > _______________________________________________ > 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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Laptop Adapter
by Simon Royal 19 Jan '10

19 Jan '10

Hi all. Can anyone help in my hour of need. I have a Samsung A10 laptop, which I have been running Ubuntu on and loving it. The adapter has just blown. The light doesnt come on and I am stuck without a computer or access to my files. You dont happen to have a spare one or a generic one? Simon --- Catch me on Twitter http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal or Skype me: Simon-Royal

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Large load average when running dd to a CF card
by Srdjan Todorovic 19 Jan '10

19 Jan '10

Hi all, Any ideas why I get large average loads (8.82, 4.20, 1.80) when running dd that copies 2GB of data to a compact disk flash card using a USB disk reader in Fiesty (or whatever it is called)? If I kill dd, the load drops to more sane levels. It just hit 9.9 :( Thanks, Srdjan

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preventing shutdown with remote working going on
by Peter Alcibiades 18 Jan '10

18 Jan '10

How do you stop users from shutting down the system if there are other people connected, but allow them to shut it down if there are not? Here's the background, I have machines A and B in different locations. Machine A is sometimes going to be used by just anyone, on account X, and sometimes by the main secretary on account Y. Sometimes, to allow the others to work on Machine A, the secretary will decamp to another room, and continue to work on account Y on machine A, but will be phyically located at machine B. Now it occurs to one, life being what it is, that from time to time some other user sitting at machine A, not used to the concept of multiple logins, will just try and turn off the machine while the secretary is working and logged in on it on the different account. How do I stop this? Hopefully by sending a message to the effect, you cannnot shut down this machine because there are other people connected? On the other hand, I don't want to stop all user shutdowns, because often there is not going to be any remote connection. I'm proposing to just use XDCMP by the way, for the remote working, since we are behind a firewall router. This is safe enough in that case, isn't it? Peter

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Re: [ALUG] How to diagnose heavy system load at power up?
by phil.ashby＠bt.com 18 Jan '10

18 Jan '10

Give bootchart a go (usually available in your distro as a standard package). http://www.bootchart.org/ You should get a nice picture of where all your CPU and memory is going at startup. Phil. ________________________________________ Message: 1 Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:57:44 +0000 From: Chris G <cl(a)isbd.net> Subject: [ALUG] How to diagnose heavy system load at power up? To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Message-ID: <20100115165744.GB4223@chris> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii I recently noticed that if I log in to my xfce GUI straight after powering up my computer it takes an inordinately long time. Like it takes four or five minutes from when I enter my name and password to when the desktop appears completely. After suspecting that there was something awry with my X startup (such that it was doing something odd the first time it was run) I realised that it was simply that the system was very heavily loaded by something during/after boot. Watching the load average during the X startup it went over 8 whereas if I login to X after the system has been running for some hours the load average reaches the giddy heights of 0.14. With a load average of 8 things almost grind to a halt, some processes retry starting (I get more than one xfdesktop for example) and update-notifier times out trying to access repositories which it has no problems at all with if I log in later. Another symptom is that some nfs mounts haven't completed before the terminal windows appear on the desktop so when I run mutt (mail program) which uses one of the NFS mounts it fails to see its mail directories. That's seriously wierd. I've tried to analyse what's going on by running top (and 'w' and ps) in a console window while the system starts up but I really can't see anything obvious that's hogging any resource. One noticeable thing apart from the load average being so high is that my 8Gb of memory gets eaten up too, but there seem to be no particular processes using either lots of CPU or lots of memory. Can anyone suggest further ways of trying to diagnose this? -- Chris Green

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