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Red Hat Enterprise insanity
by James Green 21 Nov '08

21 Nov '08

Been handed a Red Hat Enterprise 4.x box that needs nagios plugins. Problem: How do I download and install together with dependencies. I'm a Debian user myself, so going after the individual rpm files is driving myself and my colleague crazy. Don't really want to go down the tarball route either. We've been under the impression that these issues must have been resolved years ago, but I can't find much help through Google. TIA James

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USB, hard drive, media player sort of question
by Chris G 21 Nov '08

21 Nov '08

If I have (well I do hope to have) a television which will display pictures from a USB memory stick plugged into it, what format(s) will it expect on the USB stick? The manual for the TV isn't all *that* helpful, it says (among other things) :- This TV Supports on JPEG and MP3 Only a USB storage device is recognizable Please use only a USB storage device which was formatted as a FAT32 file system provided with the Windows operating system. In case of a storage device formatted as a different utility programme which is not supported by Windows, it may not be recognized. File alignment method of USB storage device is similar to Window XP and filename can recognize up to 100 English characters So, OK, the USB stick needs to be formatted as FAT32 and have Windows XP compatible file names. That shouldn't be a problem. Does there have to be any particular directory structure? Oh a few more bits from the manual:- PHOTO(*.JPEG) supporting file Baseline: 7680 x 4320 • You can play JPEG files only. • Only baseline scan is supported among JPEG (SOF0, SOF1 only). • Non-supported files are displayed in the form of bitmap. Does anyone know what any of the above means, in particular "Baseline" and SOF0, SOF1? Going on from the above could one plug a USB disk into the same TV? The manual says "It doesn’t support USB HDD" but I don't really understand how it would know, sure a USB storage device looks the same whether it's a flash drive or a disk drive. This is all with a view to choosing a new TV on which I want to display photographs which are stored on my PC. I've decided that TVs with a network connection (ethernet) are too expensive and/or aren't particularly good in other ways so I'm looking at the alternative ways of transferring pictures. Quite a few TVs have a 'PC' input (either or both of Sub-D and HDMI) but that requires the PC to be reasonably close to the TV and/or a dedicated PC. If I can get the pictures off the network via USB it would be easier. Any/all information would be welcome, it's not something I know much about. -- Chris Green

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Free stuff
by David Reynolds 19 Nov '08

19 Nov '08

Hi, Anyone want any of these: Belkin PCI Firewire card Belkin PCI USB card RealMagic EM8300 MPEG decoder / TV Out card. Free to a good home .. I just ask that you either collect, or pay postage. Anyone want? Cheers, David -- David Reynolds david(a)reynoldsfamily.org.uk

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OT: Search engine optimisation
by Mark Rogers 19 Nov '08

19 Nov '08

Not really on topic here but I think this is the most likely group of people (I know) to have anything to offer... Does anyone here know someone with SEO skills they can recommend (or are they that person themselves)? I have a couple of customers interested in paying for the services of someone, but while it's easy to find people who claim to be great at SEO its definitely something I'd only want to pursue with recommendations. PS: I'm only interested in White Hat SEO, no tricks or "guaranteed top 10 in Google" rubbish. -- 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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formatting a hard drive in linux
by Barry Chater 19 Nov '08

19 Nov '08

hi I am intending to take a hard drive from a laptop and place it in a windows desktop.This drive has Ubuntu on it and so as not to cause any problems in windows, i would like to erase the operating system on it before removing from the laptop. Any tips on the best way to do this? Once in the desktop i plan to install Ubuntu back on it( i still have the live disc). thanks Barry

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Technical Arts Show: Curiosity Collective - forewarned is forearmed
by samwise 18 Nov '08

18 Nov '08

Hi, this might be of interest to the technical bodgers on the list. The Curiosity Collective is a techy arts groups who create pieces of art, using technical wizardry, in this case based around the theme of proverbs. I saw their last exhibition in Ipswich, and they had some neat pieces. They use Macs as well as Linux ... :) Peter. The Curiosity Collective present, "forewarned is forearmed" - a preview of our forthcoming proverbs show. We are a group of artists, inventors and mad scientists working in Ipswich, who make interactive curiosities. In our new show we shall give you a sneak peak at our reinterpretations of proverbs - many as strange machines and computer trickery! The show will be on from Friday 28th to Sunday 30th November, in St Mary at Quay (http://www.google.com/maps?q=52.052847%2C+1.156300) Key Street, Ipswich (thanks to the cooperation of Key Arts - http://www.keyarts.org) Friday: 5pm to 9pm - reception at 7pm Saturday: noon until 5pm Sunday: 2pm to 5pm - talk at 3pm The final show will be in the New Year; for details of this and our various projects keep an eye on our website: http://www.curiositycollective.org Ipswich Borough Council and Turnstone - Arts Grants aided

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Report on low power PC exercise
by Chris G 17 Nov '08

17 Nov '08

Well I have my low power[ish] PC put together now, I had a couple of issues while assembling it. 1 - The Foxconn G31MG-S isn't available anywhere, it looks as if it won't become available for a few weeks yet. Since I want the computer now I have used a boring/generic/cheap Foxconn motherboard instead. As a result consumption is rather higher than predicted but is still quite acceptable at around 50 watts when idling with two disk drives and a CD/DVD drive. I could save a watt or two by unplugging the CD/DVD but it's hardly worth the effort. 2 - Some power supplies don't handle SATA drives well. I wasted a load of time on this. I ordered a case *and* a power supply when I ordered the parts for the system. The case (to my surprise) came with a 355 watt power supply so I though I might as well use that and keep the ordered (430 watt) one as a spare. I built the system and it worked OK until I added a second SATA drive, or at least I saw the same symptom a few times with only one SATA drive but put it down to misconfiguration. However when I tried to get it going with two drives it always just powered up for two or three seconds and then powered down again. A bit of searching suggested that it *might* be a power supply problem and so it was, using the 430 watt supply instead has made it work perfectly. Amazing that a system which idles at 50 watts and always uses less than 100 watts can't start up with a 355 watt power supply. Apparently SATA drives hit the 12 volt rail harder than IDE drives used to. I'll probably buy a Foxconn G31MG-S when they become available, more for the fun of seeing how low power I can be than for any real saving. The difference of 20 watts will only save about 0.5KWh per day so the annual saving is only around £20. -- Chris Green

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32 versus 64 bit
by Peter Alcibiades 17 Nov '08

17 Nov '08

Tim wondered: would you recommend upgrading to a 64bit environment? Definitely not. In fact, the solution to my own problems might be to do a clean install of a 32 bit environment. Its just not worth the aggravation. Maybe if you need to be able to address more memory. Or if you don't install all kinds of odd things that are 32 bit only - something which has given me untold grief. There don't seem to be any gains, and there is lots of aggravation. I have narrowed down the FF .xsession-errors issue a bit further, it seems to have something to do with the user, and to be not just with FF. I created another user, started up FF, exercised it a bit, and the errors file was empty. So another and less drastic action than doing a new clean install might be to create a new user and move all the files over. But equally, maybe the thing to do is just get it over with and move to 32 bit. Peter

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Video Conversion
by Steve Fosdick 15 Nov '08

15 Nov '08

My G/F has a Sumsung E100 pocket media player. Whilst this supports a nice range of audio formats including Ogg/Vorbis and FLAC the video capabilities seem rather restrictive - MPEG4 (in an AVI container) or VMV9. I have an MPEG2 transport stream that I'd like to be able to put on that player which means converting it to one of those two supported formats. Does anyone have any recommendations of software to do this? TiA, Steve.

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what a nightmare - firefox 3 - spoke too soon
by Peter Alcibiades 15 Nov '08

15 Nov '08

Spoke too soon. Now its filling up with stuff like this: ** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2) ** (firefox-bin:7254): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment So the nphelix stuff has stopped, but these messages were there before and are not fixed. What a total pile of ***. Have to move over to Konqueror, which will take the better part of the morning owing to the insane way it handles bookmarks. Peter

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