- main - earth.li

Why does mozilla/firefox/netscape make this so difficult?
by Chris G 25 Aug '07

25 Aug '07

Why are web browsers (well, Netscape and its descendents) so different from all other programs? All I want to do is run Firefox on another system on my (three machine) network and it's very difficult! My 'main' machine runs Slackware Linux and is in the house in my office, it's on all the time so I can advertise the occasional web page etc. It's the machine that appears on the web (at least as web pages) as home.isbd.net. I have set up another machine in the garage using tatty old hardware so when I want to get some information (thread sizes for bolts, spare parts for tools, wall plug sizes, etc.) I can do it there rather than having to go back into the house requiring cleanness etc. As I want access to the same home directory when I'm out there I have used NFS to export my home and when I log in on the garage system I have all the same files that I have on my office system. Everything works fine *except* Firefox (well everything I've tried so far that is). Firefox won't start on the garage system because it sees the office system's Firefox lock file and says that Firefox is running already and I can't have another one. I can think of various ways around this issue (separate profile, don't use NFS but copy some files across, etc.) but really why should I have to? Just about every other program would run up a second instance without any bother at all, why does Firefox do different? Netscape was the same, it's "ancestral"! :-) Other programs that create a lock file like this or a file with the PID in it are server type programs where it makes sense (like mySql), there having only one copy makes sense and I could use it from both my garage and office systems at the same time without hassle. With firefox though it's just a nuisance and I can't really come up with a neat solution. To describe the problem more completely:- I have /home/chris is the *same* file system on both office and garage computers, it's a local file system on the office computer and an NFS export to the garage computer. I have a few files that are different for the garage computer kept in /home/chris/.garage, these are such things as my window manager configuration because the garage computer has a lower resolution display than the office computer. I want office and garage computer firefox to share their installation and configuration so that bookmarks and other things are the same. I just want to run firefox in the garage, but I can't! Possible solutions seem to be:- Run firefox in the garage with a separate profile, but I'm not sure if this works completely and it means that I have to choose a profile every time I start firefox. It also means that bookmarks etc. are *not* shared so I have to do something about that. Shut down firefox on the office system every time I leave it, not really a sensible approach, I'll forget! I can't think of any other ways to do it! Oh, yes, there is another approach. Have an independent /home/chris on the garage system and have symbolic links from there to all the important directories in /home/chris on the office system. Thus firefox has a local (and thus independent) configuration/installation and I can just link bookmarks.html to the office system one to get the same bookmarks. This also has the advantage that the garage system will be more able to work without the office system being there. It's probably the approach I will take though I'm not quite sure how to keep the symbolic links up to date. -- Chris Green

10 16

Ipswich ALUG meeting tonight
by samwise 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

Just a last minute reminder about tonight's ALUG meeting ... Wayne, if you need anything else from me (stuff installed on PC, if you need it etc.), let me know! Peter.

4 5

LDAP Address Book
by Ben Francis 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

Hi ALUG, Does anyone use LDAP for their address book? I use IMAP for email and iCalendar/WebDAV for calendars so I can store them on a server and access them with multiple clients. I want to do the same with my address book. I think the main problem is choosing a schema because different mail clients use different address book schemas. I currently have an address book in Thunderbird and an address book in my OS X Address Book which syncs with my phone. I want to combine the two but annoyingly, Thunderbird doesn't appear to import vCard address books and the CSV import is painful. I'm also looking for a piece of web based address book software which can use LDAP as a back end, any recommendations? So far I've found Turba (http://www.horde.org/turba/) but Horde is a little bloated. I was hoping the Bongo Project (http://www.bongo-project.org) would support LDAP as a back end, but it doesn't yet. Thank ye Ben -- Ben Francis http://tola.me.uk

2 1

Windows crashes Skype!
by ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 20 Aug '07

20 Aug '07

Hi Folks, I was amused (though also sad) to read of the reasons why Skype went off the air for two days at the end of last week. I quote from their explanation: On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update. The high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact. Normally Skype's peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days. Since Skype typically has upward of 5 million users online at a time, one cam imagine the effect if they all rebooted within an hour or so! But what a lovely DOS mechanism! (Not for nothing, methinks, was M$'s first operating system called MS-DOS -- though the DOS boot was then on the other foot). Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 20-Aug-07 Time: 22:31:31 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

1 0

Skype, RH9, tribulations; alsa-oss?
by ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 20 Aug '07

20 Aug '07

Hi Folks, Sorry if you experience cross-posting, but I seem to be on a needle-in-a-haystack hunt here. I'm running Red Hat 9 (2003 vintage), 2.4 kernel, on a Compaq Armada 1750 laptop whose sound card is "ESS 1869 Audioline" (though it works OK with 1868 or 11688 drivers). I want to use Skype. Owing to the age of the system, I'm limited to earlier versions of Skype (library compatibility), and these use OSS sound rather than ALSA. Skype works up to successful calling (the "bell" rings at either end, but when the call is accepted all you can hear at the calling end is a repeated clicking (about once/sec) and at the receiving end in a similar rhythm a noise more like someone hitting wood with a hammer in the distance. At the same time, at the calling end, repeated messages come up: GETOSPACE: Device or resource busy GETOSPACE: Device or resource busy GETOSPACE: Device or resource busy ... Extensive web-searching has thrown up various facts. a) The ESS 1869 is bad news Skype-wise anyway; b) The above situation is a well-known issue with the earlier versions of Skype (the most recent versions have ALSA support, but demand more recent libs than I have). c) Some people have reported sucess with deceitful work-rounds, including: -- skype_dsp_hijacker which intercepts Skype's calls to the sound devices and keeps things in order. However, this has not worked for me. Either I get the same as the above, or "Problem with sound device" in Skype plus error message "/dev/dsp-1: No such device" to the comsoles -- alsa-oss which installs a library and uses a wrapper to convert Skype's OSS format into Alsa format. I haven't tried alsa-oss because, seach as I may, I cannot find a download for it (in any version). Even the link on the Alsa Project http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page draws a blank: it cannot change into the directory for alsa-oss! All other links I've found on the Web are dead. I'd be most gratefull is anyone who's travelled along this road and has successfully arrived could help me out! The ideal would be a compilable source package. And if anyone has found a working alternative solution to the abve probelm, I'd be most interested to hear about this too. With thanks, and best wishes, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 19-Aug-07 Time: 22:31:17 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

3 6

Linux can't connect to the Internet
by CDW (Linux) 19 Aug '07

19 Aug '07

Due to some finger trouble on my part, I lost the Mandrake 10.2 system on my second hard drive which is on my dual-boot machine. The other OS is XP and that's where I'm writing this. Over some weeks prior to my hosing of Mandrake, the Internet side of Linux had been getting distinctly unreliable. I'd say that at least 50% of the time it wouldn't work. Other days I'd boot into it and it would work fine. All the time it would say that the network was up but it wouldn't talk to the router (all static IP addresses as they are under Windows). Having lost Mandrake 10.2, I thought I'd give a later version a go. The install all went well with no problems except that it wouldn't bring up the network to search for updates. I gave up with Mandrake at that point and decided I'd take a look at ubuntu so grabbed a copy of that. I was impressed that it found all the Windows hardware and allowed me to enter an IP address from the GUI prior to install. But it still wouldn't talk to the ADSL router. At this point you might imagine that I had a faulty network card but with no changes, other than to the OS, the network is running fine. I watched the light on the back of the LAN card and as XP was rebooting, the green LED illuminated. At no time does it do so in Linux. It's back with Mandrake Spring by the way now as I couldn't persuade Ubuntu to write a sensible boot loder config and at least Mandrake did that, or should that be Mandriva now? Any ideas as to what I should have a try at now? -- __ __| |_ __ __ .-----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |_______________________________________________|

3 4

USB Obesity!
by ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 18 Aug '07

18 Aug '07

Hi Folks, I suspect I've done somthing foolish (OK, maybe several things). Yesterday, browsing round Tesco, I spotted 1GB USB sticks on sale for £9.97. Looked like a bargain, so I bought one. OK, maybe a gamble, but at low stakes. Branded "TESCO / TECHNIKA", "Manufactured in Taiwan for Tesco Stores Ltd."; the info on the front of the pack is in English, on the back in Polish, Czeck, Hungarian and Slovak. After I got home, I gave it a whirl by plugging it in, mounting /dev/sda1 (which is where my USB sticks go) onto /flash (my mount point for this kind of thing), made a directory /Ted on it, and squirted about 300MB at it from one of my "junkbox" directories (which also has a few sub-directories of junk), using cp -a 00_junk /flash/Ted (Maybe "-a" was a mistake). Lots of messages up on the console about not being able to set permissions (OK, expected, since it wouldn't be a Linux file system). Then, after a bit a lot of messages "bad FAT"! Also, at the same time, lots of complaints about multibyte names (which I don't have). A couple of messages about Interrupt from USB. Hmmm. Multi bite, bad fat ... Obesity??? Finally it was done. I could read from whatever had gone in immediately under /flash/Ted, and the sub-directories were there, but if I changed into one of these I couldn't read anything in there. Clearly a bit of a mess. So I deceided to delete everything and think again. Deleting top-level stuff OK, but the sub-directories wouldn't play. Finally decided to start from scratch. Started fdisk on it, blew away all the partitions, planted a new Linux one (type 83), and tried to mkfs an ext2 filesystem on it. Got message that the kernel couldn't make head nor tail of it, and would continue using its stored FAT (previous version) untile the next reboot. Well the previous FAT was no good by now, so I re-booted. Well, you've guessed it -- the thing is now totally useless. Can't do a thing with it! It won't mount on /dev/sda1 of course, since there's no filesystem. So, to come to the point: 1. I'd be interested in any suggestions and expertise about how to set up a Linus partition on a zapped/blank [which?] USB drive. This would presumably involve addressing some /dev/usb*** just as one would for /dev/hda, say, if doing the like for a standard HDD. No big deal if you can't be bothered -- it was only a tenner, so I'll just have to fine myself 4 pints of beer. 2. Also interested in any suggestions about whether I should have bought it in the first place (with implications about possibly ever buying another one). With thanks, and happy weekend to all. Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 18-Aug-07 Time: 08:41:43 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

5 6

Linutops et al
by Matthew Holland 17 Aug '07

17 Aug '07

Laurie wrote: > I wish there were something out there of a similar size with space for a > 2.5" HDD... While trying to read up on Linutops I found this RegHardware article on alternatives: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/30/diskless_linux_web_pcs/ Of particular interest to me is this one, although depending on your app you may need something more powerful: http://www.norhtec.com/products/mcjr/index.html Matthew

2 1

Coin Selector supported by Linux
by Ben Francis 17 Aug '07

17 Aug '07

Hi all, Does anyone know of a "coin selector" or "coin acceptor" with a USB interface which is supported by free Linux drivers? I'm talking about the mechanisms on coin slot machines which send signals to an embedded computer when coins are inserted. I've had a quote for a product which includes an EMP 800 coin selector (http://www.custom.it/ing/money/03-01.htm) and I've managed to get hold of a data sheet for it so I can write my own driver, but I'm wondering if there is a similar product which already has support under Linux. Apologies for cross posting, but I feel I may need to cast the net quite wide for this unusual question :P Many Thanks Ben -- Ben Francis http://krellian.com

4 4

Re: [ALUG] Linutops (was Coin Selector supported by Linux)
by Wayne Stallwood 17 Aug '07

17 Aug '07

On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 22:51 +0100, Ben Francis wrote: > I could use a different thin client computer I suppose... Hmm I have looked at Linutops before (as a plaything/x terminal for downstairs) but really they don't stack that well for price performance compared to a machine built from one of the fanless MiniITX boards unless you really need a machine quite that small. I dunno how the Georde compares to a via chip, but you get many more options for interfacing on mini-ITX and you should be able to easily put together a board, psu, case, memory and flash storage for less than the price of the Linutop. You also get the advantage of expandable ram and other niceties then. You could match the size as well but only by going for nano or pico ITX both of which will push you over the price of the linutop with diminishing extras in terms of interfacing. Also I don't like the way Linutop are using what is obviously xubuntu for their "Plug and Surf key" without appearing to credit Ubuntu anywhere on the website.

3 3