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A good brand of USB stick?
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 29 Dec '08

29 Dec '08

Hi Folks, Sorry for possibly irritating cross-posting! Fairly recently, on one of the Linux lists I read, someone (or more than one) made suggestions about good brands of USB sticks, with particular reference to lifetime under repeated cycles of writing, and general reliability. Unfortunately, I can't now find that discussion in my archives, and I've forgotten where I read it! Hence my shouting from the rooftops. Any suggestions and comments welcome. With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 27-Dec-08 Time: 23:59:24 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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[FTAGH]Server Case
by Mephi 27 Dec '08

27 Dec '08

Free Server case, taker collects (its heavy) It has a redundant 300W PSU, fans and a caddy for SCSI drives. It was an impulse buy a while back but it never got used and now we need the space. I'm based near the middle of Ipswich. Anyone want it? Matt

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ubuntu and windows Master Boot Record
by Barry Chater 24 Dec '08

24 Dec '08

HI I wonder if you could give me some advice. I am adding a hard drive to my desktop, but since both master and slave connectors are used on the first ide socket on the motherboard. I intend to use the second socket on the motherboard for the new drive, to which i want to install Ubuntu 8.04. windows xp is installed on the hard drive on the other socket, with DVD writer on the slave. I take it that Ubuntu on the second socket will also be a master. I am wondering if Ubuntu will try and overwrite the XP master boot files when i install it. Has anybody had any problems like this. also will tha computer recognise the dualboot or do i have to alter the Bios settings. All the problems i have read about ubuntu overwriting the masterboot files seems to be when two operating systems are on the same hard drive. Am i correct in this? thanks in advance Barry Merry　Ｃｈｒｉｓｔｍａｓ　ｔｏ　ｙｏｕ　ａｌｌ

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"thumbnail"-type application
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 23 Dec '08

23 Dec '08

Hi Folks, I'm looking for an application (preferably light-weight) which sould do the following kind of thing. I have a good number of images (*.jpg) stored in sub-directories of sundry directories. The main directory names are rather generic (e.g. a regional location, or names of friends or family). The subdirectories are fairly specific and can descend to very spcific (e.g. a sub-sub-sub-directory with just a date, like "2007.03.05"). I'd like to be able to whistle up screenfuls of thumbnails, possible grouped thematically, with a property like being able to "hover" the mouse over a thumbnail and get a little pop-up with the date of the photo and a brief description. There's an implication, therefore, that there's a kind of basic database engine behind it, together with the "pop-up on hover" capacility. There's no shortage of applications capable of making a bunch of thumbnails (especially from a single directory), but I'm not aware of a light-weight application with the above capability. Gthumb does (clumsily) the sort of thing I'm after, so I could think of using it on machines with Gnome, but not, e.g. on KDE machines. Ideally, in a main directory I would do something like find . -name '*.jpg' -print > image.list edit the file image.list to remove uwanted stuff, and then submit this file to the thumbnail viewer. As an example of scale, one major directory has 4 principal subdirectories hanging off it, with sundry sub-dirs of these, and a total of 170 images. Another is similar, with 150 images. On could probably write something suitable in Tcl/Tk, butit would be nice to find one ready-made! Suggestions welcome. With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 09-Nov-08 Time: 09:07:15 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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finally BBC iplayer linux
by Albert Vilella 23 Dec '08

23 Dec '08

Hi everybody, As you may all know by now, we finally have a BBC iPlayer for Linux! I've tried it this afternoon, and started downloading stuff into my Ubuntu for my Christmas journey. Word of caution, the player will complain that you have reached the download limit very soon, unless you go to Settings and define a bigger "Hard disk space allocated". I haven't found any glitches or problems so far, apart from the fact that one cannot download stuff that is older than a given date. I wanted to get the full collection of "Stephen Fry in America" but I can only download the latest one. There is a "reporting participation" in the Settings that I am sure all the Linux users will leave ticked as to show how grateful are we of having a Linux version :-p Cheers, Albert.

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Wierd problem when creating new users, .profile and .bashrc not executing
by Chris G 22 Dec '08

22 Dec '08

I have something not right on my xubuntu 8.10 system. When I create new users using 'useradd <username> they are created OK but don't get a home directory. I'm sure the default used to be to create a home directory and to copy its contents from /etc/skel but it's not doing that. If I do 'useradd -m <username>' then I get the files copied from /etc/skel but they don't get executed on logging in to the new account. Even if I log in to the newly created user and try and execute the files I get a really odd error message:- $ . .profile .: 13: .profile: not found $ The file .profile does exist:- $ ls -al total 32 drwxr-xr-x 5 isbd isbd 4096 2008-12-21 20:23 . drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 2008-12-21 20:24 .. -rwxr-xr-x 1 isbd isbd 220 2008-05-12 19:49 .bash_logout -rwxr-xr-x 1 isbd isbd 3115 2008-05-12 19:49 .bashrc drwx------ 5 isbd isbd 4096 2008-12-19 20:13 Mail drwxr-xr-x 2 isbd isbd 4096 2008-12-19 20:11 .mutt drwxr-xr-x 25 isbd users 4096 2008-10-07 19:20 oldIsbd -rwxr-xr-x 1 isbd isbd 675 2008-05-12 19:49 .profile Erk! What have I done? :-) Existing users work fine. -- Chris Green

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Backups via samba share
by Mark Rogers 22 Dec '08

22 Dec '08

I'm sure this should be easy but I'm getting nowhere with Google... I've created a directory, /backup, which contains symlinks to a number of directories I want to backup across the network (eg /var/lib/mysql is symlinked into that dir). I need to create a samba share which provides read access to all files in that directory. So far I have: [backups] comment = Backups force group = root force user = root path = /backups writeable = no .. but the contents of the directories (like /var/lib/mysql) are not accessible. What am I doing wrong? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Camcorders (Linux friendly, of course)
by Steve Fosdick 21 Dec '08

21 Dec '08

Does anyone have any experience of or recommendation for a camcorder? For me the top priority would be able to make backup copies of the video without resorting to proprietary software, i.e. it would need to record on media that be directly read under Linux or use a communication protocol for which there is a Linux implementation. It would also be good if the video/audio codecs used by the camcorder had a Linux implementation, at least for decoding, so that I could edit the video if I want to or watch it on the PC. Of course, if I can not play the video under Linux I would also want some way to be able to transfer it back to the camcorder for watching on the TV should the need arise. TiA, Steve.

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HDD recovery
by Mark Rogers 19 Dec '08

19 Dec '08

I'm trying to recover data from a (Windows 2k) HDD belonging to my sister. I first tried with the drive in an IDE to USB adapter which wasn't recognised (the adapter was, the disk wasn't) which isn't good. So I'm now trying with the disk mounted in a PC. The BIOS can see the disk and correctly shows its manufacturer/serial/etc. I booted to an Ubuntu live CD and ran GParted, and it shows the disk as 18GB of unallocated space (which is the right capacity, although obviously I'd have prefered it to show an NTFS partition). fdisk cannot access the disk. I tried dd which gives a read/write error. The disk is spinning up OK and isn't noisy. Any suggestions? Professional data recovery could be considered but is probably too expensive. It's lost photos of my niece I'm trying to recover, amongst other things. Professional recovery is likely to be too expensive to justify unless it's under <£100 and I tend to assume anyone below that price isn't going to be doing anything I can't do myself with some Linux tools like scalpel, but if anyone knows otherwise I'd love to hear from you! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Understanding rsync
by Mark Rogers 19 Dec '08

19 Dec '08

I'm trying to sync a directory on my PC with a directory online, using the following command: rsync -avz `pwd` user@example.com:`pwd` In other words, sync the current local working directory with the same directory on the server. Before the sync, I have 12788 files locally and 11433 files remotely. After the sync, I still have the same number of files at each end. rsync is not giving me any errors so what am I missing? (If I expand `pwd` out to the full path I get the same results so that's not the problem. The path doesn't have any spaces.) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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