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text manipulation
by Peter 25 Sep '05

25 Sep '05

Hello everyone. How do you scan a text file in the following way? It will have multiple occurrences of a label in sucessive records. For instance: ****newrecord**** *TTTT lorum ipsem *TTTT feugiat, ullamcorper *RRRR suscipit dolor..... *RRRR fuerat inscipior *SSS nunquam alebit ****endofrecord**** This is how it actually is - the labels are all in caps preceded by *, the start and end of the records are indicated as shown, and each line consists of a field label followed by field content. I am trying to make this into a csv file for import into another database, but am having problems because the number of identical field labels varies from record to record. The starting database appears to have allowed the user to create any number of identically labelled fields. So the number of fields in a record varies from 30 to 50, and there can be 5 -10 duplicate field labels in any record. It is several thousand records in size. The problem is to go through the file, and remove only the second and subsequent occurences of a label, putting the content from the second and subsequent records in the record with the first instance. So in the above example, you apply the process and end up with *TTTT lorum ipsem feugiat, ullamcorper *RRRR suscipit dolor fuerat inscipior *SSS nunquam alebit Once the file is like this, it will be simple to go through and change the carriage returns into tabs, and then do the import. I realise that uniq will find duplicates, and that tr will do replaces, and that you can probably pipe one into the other...or use GAWK? But can't seem to figure out how exactly to make them all do exactly this. My main problem is how to just delete the second and subsequent duplicate labels, instead of either all occurrences of the label, or the whole record with the duplicate label. Any ideas? Regards & thanks in advance to anyone patient enough to help. Peter Berrie

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Help - CM120 C-Media USB Card Reader
by Tim Green 25 Sep '05

25 Sep '05

Hello, I bought an interestingly cheap USB memory card reader last week. It works fine in Windows but I'd rather having it working in Linux. The card reader is based on the C-Media CM120 chip. I say based on - there is only the one chip on the little circuit board. If you think you can help, you can read the output of "lsusb -v" in my journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/spodlife/90240.html I am running Debian Sarge with kernel v2.6.8, and looking ahead to the more recent kernels there is still no official support. Any ideas? Cheers, Tim.

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When df & du disagree (wildly)...
by James Green 25 Sep '05

25 Sep '05

Hi all, Spot the bleedin' obvious: jmkg@s1c1:/home$ sudo du -csh 64G . 64G total jmkg@s1c1:/home$ sudo df -h /home Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda7 124G 105G 13G 89% /home Tiny wincey little bit of a disagreement going on there. Server is a MySQL box, I've had to keep removing binary logs due to disk space issues and lately this has been a pain. A quick look for other areas of disk usage on this partition showed the discrepency. Any particular ideas on what may be the cause? Only reference on Google was circa 1999 when deleting open files caused this to be demonstrated. df does update when I delete stuff today... Cheers, James

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Autumn ALUG Kit Meet at UEA
by Elisabeth 25 Sep '05

25 Sep '05

There is a note in my phone which says there should be a kit meet at UEA on 23 October, as mooted at the last monthly Moot. If there are no better suggestions or major objections from the assembled masses, I'll book a room next week. Are we going for the record for coffee makers again? And, of course, there will be Cake. And a prize for the most strange, complex, or amusing piece of working kit. And possibly an award for the person who fixes (or breaks) the most things during the afternoon :) e

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Foreign parts
by Bob Dove 24 Sep '05

24 Sep '05

Hi Folks, Greetings from Colonia Claudius. I know that the Wallsend = World's End is a funny - the 'real' World's End is in Chelsea, part of Londinium! I know you all know too that Wallsend is where Hadrian's wall ended! We all learnt at school that Hadrian built the wall to keep the Scots out, the truth of the matter is that there were probably as many gates through the wall as there were watch towers on it. To come through the gate (to trade) you had to pay a tax on your sale goods. Customs and Excise - good idea eh? Julius Caesar 'Veni, Vedi, Veci'? Nah, Veni and Vedi perhaps but he went home with the 'flu! Claudius' army came and found of course already Romanised Celtic tribes and Roman trading posts so the battles were probably not as extensive as the post Roman propaganda would have us believe!!! Alas, the Romans didn't have Linux... Cheers, Bob Dove.

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vnc through a firewall
by Peter 22 Sep '05

22 Sep '05

Does anyone know how to do this? I have a friend in another part of England who regularly wants help with how to do things in OO. So, most of the time I start up OO myself and work in parallel with him and talk him through it. But, he's not very sophisticated and often has trouble following, or even describing very accurately what he is seeing. Today was what led me to think we need another way, when for some mysterious reason printing a journal article he has written, in the approved format of 2 pages per sheet in landscape form, ran into problems. So I find myself saying, you see that icon with the little hand over the printer.... Very time consuming. I have set him up on broadband using a router, so there is a hardware firewall at his end, and of course, NAT. I have put Suse 9.2 in for him, so there is a software firewall as well. I would like to be able, securely, to run VNC and actually demonstrate what he has to do. If we didn't have the firewalls....it would be easy! But with the router, he doesn't have a public IP address - exactly why I made him get one, of course. Oh dear. I am not terribly sophisticated in this stuff, so if anyone can give a simple step by step account, would be very grateful. Regards Peter

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so-long and thanks for all the fish
by Stan Fraser 22 Sep '05

22 Sep '05

I am moving away to the North East (Wallsend) and hope there is an active LUG in the area. Thanks to ALUG I'm now able to understand some of the questions posted, never mind the answers! Best Regards to Everyone Stan

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DVD Authoring
by Wayne Stallwood 21 Sep '05

21 Sep '05

I am looking for a tool chain (or preferably a single application) that can author a DVD from DV cam footage. Specifically- I have video footage on two DV Cams (both have firewire interfaces) that I need to edit into a single video stream. Additionally I may need to edit/substitute the audio track. I am looking for a graphical video editor here because there are sections of the footage I need to remove and cut about. I have a series of Digital camera stills that I would like to compile into a video slide show (possibly with a narrative audio track) I want to create a DVD menu for the above allowing access to either the video or the Slide show. With the option to have the menu skinned with a theme of my choosing Pie in the sky here but, If possible I would like to be able to mess with video effects, I would love to have access to a sepia style effect complete with film scratches/noise. I have a standard Firewire interface on my machine. I am not sure but I guess that any firewire interface is suitable for capturing from a Digital Video camera, do the camera's need some sort of driver or is there a universal capture driver ? If capturing from firewire is a problem then I can dub the video to DVD using a standalone DVD recorder (that has a firewire interface) and then extract the video from the recorded DVD's. Has anyone done this sort of thing on Linux ?

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Success Story - Gphoto2 1 : Windows Nil
by Steve Fosdick 21 Sep '05

21 Sep '05

It's nice to be able to report a success, particularly in what can otherwise be a weak-spot to GNU/Linux, that of interfacing to hardware which is supplied only with Windows (or occasionaly Mac) drivers. Having bought a nice new digital camera, my first attempt at getting pictures off it was on Linux. It took about 30 seconds to install gphoto2 and about a further 30 seconds or so to fetch all the pictures from the camera. Next I was round a friend's and tried to fetch the pictures from the camera to a Windows PC to view them on the screen. After putting in the software disc from the manufacturer the PC spent a good ten minutes running InstallShield for what seemed like an infinite series of related components eventually coming to a halt when one of the instances of InstallShield seemed to reach some kind of deadlock. After a reboot and a second attempt things were no better - in fact it was more than InstallShield that had to be killed with Task Manager. The windows new hardware wizard did detect the camera once and offered a choice of application. After picking the one from the manufacter and finding, not to any great suprise, that it didn't work there wasn't any obvious way of getting back to that choice despite not having clicked the "remember my choice" checkbox. Unplugging the camera and plugging in again, cycling the power on the camera and another reboot of the PC all failed to get back to that dialog. So, after a frustrating half hour in front of the windows PC I took the camera home, fetched the photos with gphoto2 and in less than a minute I'd e-mailed them back to my friend. Steve.

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 19 Sep '05

19 Sep '05

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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