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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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Gnome context menu integration
by Mark Rogers 19 Dec '08

19 Dec '08

I'm sure a suitable Google would help me here but I'm not sure what to search for; a few random attempts got me close but not close enough. I have to work a lot with XLS files which need converting to CSV files (using a tab separator). At the moment I do this using OOo which is overkill. I could do this from the commandline using htmldoc/xls2csv but that's not all that convenient in the GUI environment either. So what I would like to do is right-click the file in Nautilus and click a "convert to TSV" menu option that I set up to use xls2csv, taking blah.xls to create blah.csv. Where do I start? There's lots of similar stuff I'm used to from Windows (eg using the context menu to create/extract zip/etc files) although I wouldn't know how to do it on Windows either - I'd rely on the relevant apps setting that up for me. -- 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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Jaw-dropper ...
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 17 Dec '08

17 Dec '08

Hi Folks, The following received this morning from the Seattle Linux List. (Still trying to recover from temporomadibular dislocation ... ). Ted. -----FW: <e35fe88f0812102328tbb31ac9m521c25f92fee2b10(a)mail.gmail.com>----- Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:28:34 -0800 Sender: linux-list-bounces(a)lists2.linuxjournal.com From: Jerry Horvath <jerroldhorvath(a)gmail.com> To: Seattle Linux Users Group <linux-list(a)ssc.com> Subject: [SLL] What is taught to some Austin, Texas students "In an age where Windows and OS X reign supreme, it's no wonder that a local AISD middle school teacher became enraged after discovering one of her students distributing what she believed to be bootlegged copies of an operating system in class <http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/ignorant-teacher-linux-in-education.html>." *No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.* <http://austinist.com/2008/12/10/aisd_teacher_throws_fit_over_studen.php> Regards, Jerry Horvath --------------End of forwarded message------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 11-Dec-08 Time: 12:01:37 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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sshd configuration problem
by Chris G 16 Dec '08

16 Dec '08

By default I have sshd set up to disallow root logins, if I want to get to root from a remote login I login as myself (one password) and then su to root (another password). However I want to allow root login from one other system on the local LAN. To this end I added the following to the end of sshd_config:- PasswordAuthentication no AllowUsers root(a)192.168.1.7 However this, of course, prevents anyone logging in from anywhere except for root(a)192.168.1.7. How can I allow any non-root user from anywhere but root only from 192.168.1.7? -- Chris Green

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LAN addresses in /etc/hosts
by Chris G 12 Dec '08

12 Dec '08

Having got dnsmasq working somewhate better (thank you Brett!) I now need some advice on what to put in /etc/hosts on the machine that is running dnsmasq. The machine's name on the local LAN is "isbd", to the outside world it is known as "home.isbd.net". It has a static IP address on the local LAN of 192.168.1.4. "As built" ubuntu puts "isbd" in the /etc/hosts file as follows:- 127.0.1.1 isbd However I need dnsmasq to tell other machines on the LAN that "isbd" is 192.168.1.4. Do I just remove the above line and add:- 192.168.1.4 isbd Is the "127.0.1.1 isbd" only necessary when isbd's address is obtained using DHCP and thus not fixed so it needs to point at localhost? -- Chris Green

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