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Debian starting problem - looking for help/advice
by paul 07 Mar '08

07 Mar '08

Hi all I'm fairly new to Linux and am installing Debian as a desktop. However the system booting stops at black screen "input signal out of range". pressing 'crtl-alt- +' takes you to normal GUI desktop. I haven't been able to find the solution on the net. Is the system not loading my AGP driver properly or is it an X-org problem? If I try to change resolution from the desktop it reverts to black screen "input signal out of range again. the section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file reads Section "Device" Identifier "nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 MX 420]" Driver "nv" BusID "PCI:1:0:0" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "ADI GD-790T" Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Default Screen" Device "nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 MX 420]" Monitor "ADI GD-790T" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 1 Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "720x450" "720x400" "640x640" "640x480" EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Depth 4 Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "720x450" "720x400" "640x640" "640x480" EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Depth 8 Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "720x450" "720x400" "640x640" "640x480" EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Depth 15 Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "720x450" "720x400" "640x640" "640x480" EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Depth 16 Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "720x450" "720x400" "640x640" "640x480" EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Depth 24 Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "720x450" "720x400" "640x640" "640x480" EndSubSection EndSection Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Default Layout" Screen "Default Screen" InputDevice "Generic Keyboard" InputDevice "Configured Mouse" EndSection Section "DRI" Mode 0666 EndSection Best wishes Paul Adams PS I came along to the last ALUG meeting at the Reindeer. Paul, 40ish, brown hair ponytail, bit overweight, drinking diet Coke, didn't say much!! __________________________________________________________ Sent from Yahoo! Mail. The World's Favourite Email http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html

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Does anyone else find the default LS_COLORS settings poor?
by Chris G 07 Mar '08

07 Mar '08

I've just upgraded to Fedora 8 (from Fedora 7) and once again I have to disable the ls alias that automatically gives coloured directory listings. I really can't understand how the default values can work on any normal terminal! :-) The colours that I *can* read OK are the (bright?) blue used for directories and the (bright?) magenta used for graphics files. However I *can't* really read bright green (it's a .doc file in my case) nor (even worse) bright cyan which is used for symbolic links. On a white (well actually a very pale grey in my case, grey90 I think) background few of the bright colours work well at all so why does the default use them, surely most people use a light background nowadays. Anyway from a Google search it seems that the defaults work even less well on a dark background. Does anyone have a more sensible set of colours that they could share? I don't think I want/need any of the file type colouring but colours for directories, symbolic links (especially broken ones) and a few other things might be useful. If not I think I'll go and design my own. -- Chris Green

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Question for the wikimasters
by MJ Ray 06 Mar '08

06 Mar '08

Anyone want to/able to produce a similar linking for the ALUG wiki? If so, please announce it here and I'll tell lugmaster. -- MJR Message-ID: <47CFED80.5080903(a)ppcis.org> From: Brian Ronald <brian(a)ppcis.org> Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 13:11:28 -0000 In the spirit of inter-lug cooperation, I've produced a set of interwiki links. Alas, this is designed for MediaWiki installations, but hopefully many of you can benefit from a reduction of duplicated effort on Wiki articles. http://www.tyneside.lug.org.uk/wiki/Image:Lug_interwiki.sql This link will show the *effect* of the interwiki links, as well as provide a text file of SQL commands for anybody who wants to include these links in their own MediaWiki installation. I might well have missed some. If other wikis show up or change over time, feel free to let me know; I don't mind maintaining this file. The Midlands LUGs wiki has been represented though the Northants URI; theirs was the prettier. Let me know, Midlanders, if you'd rather a different URI was used. Brian Ronald Tyneside

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E-mail, IMAP and Accessing Mail from Anywhere
by Steve Fosdick 04 Mar '08

04 Mar '08

What do people here do to access e-mail when away from their normal PC? Web mail services seem to be very popular these days. Another solution that occurs to me is to use IMAP. I have already set up a local IMAP server so I can easily switch mail clients without having to worry about changes to their mailbox formats. On the subject of mail clients, has anyone had any success at persuading any of mail clients that they should not attempt to access any mail directly, with the exception of any cache, i.e. not attempt to read the default mail spool and keep the "Inbox", "Sent" and "Drafts" folders on an IMAP server? Regards, Steve.

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ALUG Unannual Dinner in Norwich
by Elisabeth Fosbrooke-Brown 03 Mar '08

03 Mar '08

Second call (Paul at the Reindeer is asking for numbers). Suffolk people would be *very* welcome. These people have booked: Definitely: Robrob, Eccles + Kaz, MTM, Srdjan, RichardL, DaveR, Stilvoid, Paul_C Possibly: Sio + Kat, Adam Vague hope of one other, if he's near Norwich at the time. After the meal we'll continue with the usual ALUG Second Thursday. -- e

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Thunderbird as webmail server
by Mark Rogers 03 Mar '08

03 Mar '08

Does anyone know if there's anything around to make Thunderbird behave as a webmail server? In other words I want to connect to thunderbird with a web browser to read the email in my onbox (and other folders). This is for remote access to my email, given that TB is running permanently (and is as much about accessing old email as new). If not it seems like something that ought to be possible as an extension, something of a rainy day project, but I can't think of good Google query to find out if something already exists. There are plenty of plugins to allow TV to collect mail from a webmail server, but that's the opposite of what I want. -- 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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ADSL "Embarras de Richesse", now, how to configure it?
by Chris G 01 Mar '08

01 Mar '08

I have just had our BT business line ADSL enabled, going for their "BT Business Total Broadband" Option 1 means we'll probably pay no more to BT in total (we had a BT business phone line anyway) and now we have a backup ADSL connection. It was scheduled to start working on 3rd March but I plugged in their supplied router today and it all burst into life. I have to say it was dead easy and the router (a 2Wire 2700HGV) and its software seem pretty good. The 'advanced' tabs in the router set up seem to give one a fair amount of control. So now to my "Embarras de Richesse" dilemma, I now have two ADSL connections, what's the best way to set it up? I have two similar ADSL routers each providing about the same bandwidth (both 448kb/s up, both around 4Mb/s down), what's the best way of using them to full advantage. There are some obvious things I have to do:- Change the address of one of the routers so they're not both 192.168.1.254 Turn off DHCP on at least one of the routers (unless I split subnets, see below) But I can arrange things various ways and I'm not at all sure which will work best.... Leave everything on one subnet (192.168.1.xxx) or split into two subnets? At the moment I can't see any really significant advantages in splitting subnets and it would be quite a lot of hassle I suspect so, unless anyone can come up with some really good reason for doing it, I don't think this is a sensible option. We have two main users, it *feels* like it would make sense to use one ADSL router as the default gateway for one user and the other ADSL router as the default for the other user. Then set up so that the 'other' router is the alternative gateway. Are there any downsides to this approach? I don't think there's any easy way to use both routers from one system (to use up all the bandwidth) is there? At least there isn't without a lot of hassle. Any advice and ideas gratefully received. -- Chris Green

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Error about gnome-terminal configuration at startup - how to diagnose?
by Chris G 29 Feb '08

29 Feb '08

I'm getting a pop-up error when I start up my Fedora 7 desktop which says:- An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for gnome-terminal. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly. If I click the "Details" button it tells me:- Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: IOR file '/tmp/gconfd-chris/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: No such file or directory 2: Failed to convert IOR '' to an object reference) Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Failed to convert IOR '' to an object reference 2: Failed to convert IOR '' to an object reference) The "Details" really are duplicated like that so I'm not convinced that they're really telling the truth. I have looked at http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ but it doesn't seem to say anything directly relevant. I have been mucking about with my network setup, changing the (private range) IP addresses of my Fedora machine and the router but it's all working OK (web, ssh, etc.) apart from the above gnome-terminal error. Any ideas anyone? -- Chris Green

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Transfering Live CD to hard disk
by Mark Rogers 29 Feb '08

29 Feb '08

I have a bootable Linux (Debian-based) LiveCD, that I want to duplicate onto a hard disk so that it boots from that instead. The hard disk can (should) be mounted read-only, although a writeable swap partition might be useful. The LiveCD is a web kiosk (www.webconverger.com) The reason I want to transfer to hard disk is so that I can mount the disk read-write, make a few changes, then remount it read-only. As a read only disk it can be "reset" by restarting the PC, the whole point is that no user data gets stored. Any ideas how I'd do this? -- 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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Does this "cpu MHz" figure seem right?
by Chris G 28 Feb '08

28 Feb '08

On my system /proc/cpuinfo contains:- processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz stepping : 6 cpu MHz : 1632.000 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 4897.97 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz stepping : 6 cpu MHz : 1632.000 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 1 cpu cores : 2 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 4895.38 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: Should I be seeing more than that 1632.000 value for cpu MHz or is the nominal 2.40GHz figure for Core 2 Duo 6600 just that a 'nominal' CPU speed? -- Chris Green

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