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bbc 'play it again'
by Jenny Hopkins 30 May '07

30 May '07

Hullo there, Has anyone on list had any luck with getting the bbc website 'play it again' working? Thanks, Jenny

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Calendar/PIM application that allows links
by Peter Alcibiades 29 May '07

29 May '07

I think the PIM that would have - or might have - met Chris' requirement reasonably well isn't available any more. It was the old Claris Organiser for OS9 and earlier. Years ago now. You had a calendar with appointments, notes, contacts, one or two other things. Then any one element of these could be linked to any others in some simple way. So you had a sort of ad hoc grouping of (say) a person's contact details, every appointment you had with them, every note of every phone conversation, and maybe the text of all correspondence. You got to each element of the set by clidking a link. And you could have as many of these bundles as you wanted. In addition there were the usual categories. So Chris could have had journal entries associated with agenda items, or anything else. Snippets of code associated with a project. Reading lists from people at a given class. Anything at all could be made into a set and once you hit one, the others became available, but if you also wanted to look at items by category, you could do that too. Later on it was sold to Palm and marketed in two forms, the Windows form of Palm organiser not having any of this linking functionality, but the Mac version kept on with it. It was amazing. I kept looking for something like this too, and hoped maybe Chandler might turn into it, but alas... It may have been a functionality that was too obscure for most people to bother with, but once you got used to it, it was very powerful. Al

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Calendar/PIM application that allows links
by Chris G 29 May '07

29 May '07

I'm still searching for a calendar/PIM application that suits my needs (or at least vaguely approximates to them). I want a very simple application that allows me to enter reminders etc. so I can remember appointments etc. I don't want the complexity that most seem to offer but what I *do* want to do is be able to add links of some sort to appointments that can point to what are effectively diary entries. It can be web/HTML or just desktop, I'm not too fussed. I.e. I want a simple appointments diary with a way of linking it to the entries in a journal/diary. It strikes me that this is a very obvious sort of thing to want but I can't find anything that seems to do it. I have installed and tried plan by the way, it seems very 'clunky' to me. It is quite flexible though, e.g. it's one of the very few such applications which lets you actually see a view of today plus the next few days rather than a week that starts on a fixed day or a month. The 'execute' doesn't do what I need either, it runs a program when the appointment is due (or at a time before). What I needed was a way to run a program (to add a dairy entry) when you click on a date, I've found a fairly crude way of doing this using Xdialog. -- Chris Green

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re: odbc, iodc, sqlite, howto
by Peter Alcibiades 29 May '07

29 May '07

Hi Richard, Am I trying to work with sqlite through a gui? Not quite. It was probably less than clear. I have the database all set up. I also have an sqlite ODBC driver installed - the one that comes in the Etch repositories. The programming language doesn't do sqlite natively, it only does ODBC. Yes, probably I should get another language one of these days.... However, all that is OK - I can manage the language, and I can manage to use the ODBC commands and functions it has built in, but to make it talk to the database, I need a DSN apparently. From synaptic, I installed the sqlite ODBC driver, and on checking, it really does seem to be there in /usr/lib. This is where the problems start though. I can't make a DSN for the database, because I can't see how to add the driver using iodbcadmin-gtk. In the gui, it simply doesn't see it even if pointed at it, and it crashes out with the error when you try. So I can't address the database from the language using the ODBC functions, with no DSN. I was attracted to doing this step with the gtk interface that comes with iODBC, because there seemed to be a lot of things to go wrong if you edit it by hand. And I'm very puzzled about why having installed a couple of ODBC database drivers, it cannot see them. Maybe the answer is give up on iODBC and edit the configuration file by hand, and then if that doesn't work, another option is to go out to the shell. Apparently with sqlite you can go out to shell, call it, and then pass a command to it, and that can be a script. This will have to do if I can't get ODBC to work. Which does seem increasingly problematic. Cheers Al

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odbc, iodc, sqlite, howto
by Peter Alcibiades 29 May '07

29 May '07

Hi guys, What am I doing wrong? This is on Etch. First I got sqlitebrowser, created a new sqlite database, then imported my data into it as csv. Seems fine - at least, it can be browsed using sqlitebrowser. Second, apt-get install iodbc and the sqlite odbc libraries. The mysql ones for good measure. Verify they are there. Fire up iodbcadm-gtk and try to set the DSN of my database. It want to know which driver to use, and it cannot see either the sqlite ones or the mysql ones. So I suppose its first necessary to add one. When I point to what seem like reasonable candidates in /usr/lib/odbc, it rejects them because an error occurred when trying to add the driver, invalid keyword pairs. Googling suggests an authorization error, but the same thing happens with the root account. It seems like you have to define a driver before you can do a DSN, however I can't figure out how to define a driver. Any suggestions gratefully received. After this, assuming we ever get over it, comes the fun part of talking to the thing from my programming language. All keeps the blood flowing in the brain! Peter

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Missing touchpad
by Matthew 28 May '07

28 May '07

Hi all, I bought a new laptop the other day - an HP 510 - and put Debian Etch on it, and it doesn't find the touchpad. I don't think it's a hardware problem, since it worked fine under the manufacturer's installation of Windows XP and when booted from the recovery disk. I've also tried live CDs for SLAX and Ubuntu, which behave the same way as Etch. The research I've done hasn't turned up anyone with the same problem on the same machine, but a few people have fixed apparently similar problems by fiddling with udev; something that hasn't got me far yet. The problem seems to occur mainly with recent kernels, often appearing after a kernel upgrade. My 'uname -r' is 2.6.18-4-686. /var/log/Xorg.0.log includes: (II) Synaptics touchpad driver version 0.14.6 (1406) Synaptics Touchpad no synaptics event device found (checked 13 nodes) (**) Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" (**) Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0" Query no Synaptics: 6003C8 (EE) Synaptics Touchpad no synaptics touchpad detected and no repeater device (EE) Synaptics Touchpad Unable to query/initialize Synaptics hardware. (EE) PreInit failed for input device "Synaptics Touchpad" (II) UnloadModule: "synaptics" /etc/X11/xorg.conf includes: Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad" Driver "synaptics" Option "SendCoreEvents" "true" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Protocol" "auto-dev" Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0" EndSection That was generated from the debconf DB, so clearly something thinks the device is meant to be there. Strangely, 'modprobe synaptics' returns: FATAL: Module synaptics not found. The touchpad isn't in /proc/bus/input/devices and it doesn't generate any output if I cat the nodes in /dev/input (nor the useful-looking ones in /dev, especially /dev/psaux as mentioned in xorg.conf). It isn't mentioned in syslog even with udev set to debug messages. I don't really know enough about the device to set udev rules or use mknod; I'm not even sure which bus it's on. Anyone got any ideas? Thanks, Matthew

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ISA NIC card puzzle
by Ted Harding 27 May '07

27 May '07

Hi Folks, I'm puzzled! Can someone give me a hint? I've had an (ancient) NE2000 clone which plugs into an ISA (not PCI) slot running happily on a very old machine (ca 1995) for years. On SuSe 5.2 I had it set up to use module ne.o, with options "io=0x300". Now that machine's PSU has failed, so I moved the hard drives etc. to another box (of more recent vintage ... ). Now it fails to find the card and/or any IRQ line when given 0x300. I've removed all other ISA cards from that box to make sure there are no conflicts. I've tried this not only with the "native "SuSE-5.2 off the hard drive, but also booting with tomsrtbt ("Linux on a Floppy" and with Ubuntu live CDs, in all cases without success. I'm puzzled that it works one the one box but (with the same system and settings) fails on another. Is there a possibility that ISA IO addresses and IRQs can change between different motherboards? With thanks, Ted.

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Moving
by J.R. Seago 26 May '07

26 May '07

As I am moving from the most easterly county in England to the North of Scotland, I am temporarily un-subscribing from the list until I can get myself a new connection and email address. Hopefully I will reintroduce myself in the next two weeks. -- John Seago GNU/Linux Registered User No. #219566 http://counter.li.org/ () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments

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Re: [ALUG] Astronomy Software
by J.R. Seago 24 May '07

24 May '07

On Thursday 24 May 2007 12:00 "Yvonne Everett" <ye103910(a)googlemail.com> wrote: > Hello > > Could anyone recommend some open source astronomy software? I gave my wife's god-daughter a copy of 'The Open CD' and she was very pleased with http://www.stellarium.org/ thatshe could use with 'Windows'® -- John Seago GNU/Linux Registered User No. #219566 http://counter.li.org/ () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments

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$1 = £1.07 !!!!
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 23 May '07

23 May '07

A posting on the Seattle Linux List got me looking (out of curiosity ... ) at http://ostg.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/ masterid=26157844/search=sony%20ux [all one line] -- about the Sony VAIO VGN-UX280P "Micro PC". A very nice little animal, if you can afford it (and there's no info anywhere about being able to run Linux on it). BUT: Go to the relevant Sony UK web page at http://www.sonystyle.co.uk: http://tinyurl.com/32httz and compare with the Sony US web page at http://www.sonystyle.com http://tinyurl.com/3ytxo9 US Price: $1595.00 UK Price: £1999.00 So, at the current exchange (£1 = $1.99), and discounting VAT, Sony's price in the UK (£1701.28) is more than twice Sony's price in the US. Unless it's now $1 = £1.07. I bet it's a deal between Sony and Virgin Atlantic to encourage translatlantic flight. Rip-Off-Britain = ROB. Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 23-May-07 Time: 22:14:51 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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