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

15 Nov '08

It may be fixed, and if anyone else finds themselves in this nightmare, this is what it took. It seems to have been a real player library which was 32 bit, to which the 64 bit FF 3 was pointing. At least I think this is what nphelix.so is. So, reinstalling FF does not help. This generated all the error messages and segmentation errors. The smart thing to do on realizing this would just be delete all realplayer files manually from /opt/mozilla.. Now they tell me! Instead I found a real player uninstall script, which declined to run until it was pointed at /opt, and then simply deleted /opt! Fortunately there was nothing terribly vital in it, just realbasic, and and old copy of openoffice, and who needs them? Well, lots of codecs and stuff, so maybe the problems will show up later on. But at least missing files are fixable. Then I reinstalled FF again, and it seems to work. There are still sites which it fails to display correctly, but at least it is now, touch wood, not filling the hard drive with xsession error messages. Peter

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Re: [ALUG] xsession errors file absolutely huge!
by Peter Alcibiades 14 Nov '08

14 Nov '08

Following Ted's suggestions and checking while .xsession-errors is small enough to cat, this is what we see (it goes on for pages already, this is just an excerpt). Probably it would be smart to reinstall Firefox. But how can it have happened, its just a perfectly standard Lenny installation, with FF upgraded to v3 through Synaptic? Real Player isn't installed by the way. And all plugins have been disabled. Peter _____________________________________ ** (firefox-bin:4231): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment ** (firefox-bin:4231): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment ** (firefox-bin:4231): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment ** (firefox-bin:4231): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment ** (firefox-bin:4231): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /opt/mozilla/nphelix.so [/opt/mozilla/nphelix.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32] LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /home/peter/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so [/home/peter/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32] LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so [/usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so: undefined symbol: _ZN13nsTArray_base9sEmptyHdrE] ** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1) ** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2) LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so [/usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so: undefined symbol: _ZN13nsTArray_base9sEmptyHdrE] ** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1) ** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2) ** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1) ** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2) ** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1) ** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2) LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /opt/mozilla/nphelix.so [/opt/mozilla/nphelix.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32] LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /opt/mozilla/nphelix.so [/opt/mozilla/nphelix.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32] LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /home/peter/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so [/home/peter/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32] LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so [/usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so: undefined symbol: _ZN13nsTArray_base9sEmptyHdrE] ** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1) ** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2) LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so [/usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so: undefined symbol: _ZN13nsTArray_base9sEmptyHdrE] ** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1) ** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2) ** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1) ** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2) ** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1) ** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2) LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /opt/mozilla/nphelix.so [/opt/mozilla/nphelix.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32] LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /opt/mozilla/nphelix.so [/opt/mozilla/nphelix.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32] LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /home/peter/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so [/home/peter/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32] LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so [/usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so: undefined symbol: _ZN13nsTArray_base9sEmptyHdrE] ** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1) ** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2) LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so [/usr/lib/totem/gstreamer/libtotem-complex-plugin.so: undefined symbol: _ZN13nsTArray_base9sEmptyHdrE] ** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1) ** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2) ** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1)

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xsession errors file absolutely huge!
by Peter Alcibiades 14 Nov '08

14 Nov '08

There is probably a simple explanation of this bizarre event. I got a popup message in Gnome saying that /home was out of space. It is a 200G partition, and there is not a whole lot on it, so this was puzzling. I did (after a few false starts) find . -size +10G and was astonished to be told there was just one, xsession-errors. OK, tried it with 20G.....same. Well in the end xsession-errors turned out to be 150G. Scratched my head for some minutes and then decided, why not, so I did rm. It went with no fuss. Then did du, and /home was now about 50G which seemed about right. This seemed weird enough that help was needed. Now unable to start kmail. Logged off, now unable to log back in! It wasn't the WM, since it would not work with any of them. Rebooted, and now it invoked fschk on hda6, which is where /home is, and finally after about a minute or two, it fixed something that was orphaned. And now it has loaded OpenBox and kmail perfectly fine. All the files seem to be where they should be. I am just praying that it will launch Gnome, and still more, that the files will be there when it does. What can it be? Anyone seen this before? This is Debian Lenny. By the way, sorry to have missed the Reindeer tonight, I am still not quite well enough. Next time. Peter

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Re: [ALUG] Low powered PC - I've ordered some bits
by Chris G 13 Nov '08

13 Nov '08

Re: my question yesterday about low power PC suppliers I hunted around on Google for a while and found an article on the (venerable) "Tom's Hardware" site about building a low power, but capable, system. They built a 4Gb, Intel core 2 duo system that consumed only around 30 watts when running. I've ordered bits for a similar system, it uses a FoxConn motherboard with Intel G31 chipset. My parts cost for a 4Gb system with 7400 processor (the most expensive bit, 7300 was out of stock) and a 500Gb hard disk was about £250. Compared with Mini-ITX systems and/or Intel Atom based systems this seems good value to me and gives me lots more processor power and room for expansion (i.e. adding hard disks). When the bits come and I've built it I will report its actual power consumption. -- Chris Green

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