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3gp files
by Ten 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

I wonder if anyone has any ideas on this.. The 3gp video files produced by my phone (or, for that matter, any other phone I have access to) are not so readily accessible through media players as I'd hoped. Some 3gp files can be played by mpeg4 stuff, but phone-shot ones are without sound. Now usually, this sort of thing is a matter of being told "ah, everybody uses package X", but I can't find much in google. I have progressed through several levels of the inferno, past xine, even into the dark and shady lands of RealPlayer(shudder)'s 3gp support, and have now reached the truly gutwrenching depths of running Microsoft's Windows Media Player (shudder still more). All the files work perfectly in WMP, which is consequently associated with 3gp files on our machines for pragmatism's sake. This, is not a desirable state of affairs. ...Help, anyone? There are 10 types of people in this world -those who understand binary, and those who don't.

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A strange filesystem - er - thing!
by Barry Samuels 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

Sorry - did it again - forgot to set my correct email identity for the list so I'm sending it again. Apologies for any duplication. I wanted to try the K3b DVD Ripping/Encoding option. The 'Help' says: "First step is to choose the title/movie you want to rip. For this click on the drive icon of your DVD-Drive. You will now see a list that shows the content of the DVD with all movie sequence. The longest movie sequence (usually the main movie) is automatically selected. Right click on the title and choose copy." So I did that. Then it says: "In the following dialog enter the destination directory in the first line. The second and third will be filled out automatically. Don't change these paths." There wasn't a following dialogue and it immediately started filling my Home partition which I didn't want so I killed K3b. It still went on writing to the Home partition until it was full. I determined to delete whatever file it had written to the partition except that there wasn't one. Even KDirStat wouldn't acknowledge that the partition was full, saying that it was 66% used, and didn't show any large files - hidden or otherewise. 'df' and 'di' showed the partition as 100% used. In the end the only way I managed to cure it was to reboot when things went back to normal. Does anyone have any idea where the space went - how can it be used but not show anything using it? Regards to all Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Using Real VNC Free edition & Personal edition on Linux/XP
by David Simon Cooper 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

Hello folks, I am promoting remote desktop access for support services to a couple of small companies I am working for. I can use the linux VNC client to connect to the XP machines and help them when they have problems, I tested it at home and it works great, I am setting up their on site firewall to use static real IP addresses from the ISP and to do the routing etc, I have this sorted. I am recommending the Free Edition of VNC (I will ensure the company makes a donation to the developers for each licence) because it is simple and fast. I have a few questions you may be able to answer: a) Free edition - The password challenge response is encrypted using DES but all other traffic is not. I will not be sending any critical data over the link but how is the data represented? I am guessing it does not send the text that is visible on the screen on the remote system as plain text etc rather that it uses some kind of framing technology. If I am seeing all of the data on their screen I take it that their VNC server is not sending all of the data as is back to me. b) Personal edition - I could buy them this version as it is only about £15 per licence and it does support full encryption but I am concerned about the speed (I am 120 miles away) and it does not have a Linux version which means I would either have to use an XP machine to provide support, I could instead buy the over-the-top enterprise edition or settle for the unencrypted Free Edition. I have considered the security implications. To make things safer with the Free Edition I could just put an icon on their desktop and ask them to run the user mode app whenever they want me to connect, this would mean the server is only running when they want stuff fixed, they could close it when stuff is done, very safe. I would of course have the "ask for permission" option enabled on VNC for security reasons. Do you folks have any views on this? Cheers David Cooper

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 22 Aug '05

22 Aug '05

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. 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 tkirc, bitchx, xchat 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://freshmeat.net/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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ssh login changes key mapping - possible?!
by Chris Green 19 Aug '05

19 Aug '05

I have a very odd keyboard/key mapping problem which occurs on just one system when I use ssh to log into it remotely. I have my keyboard mapped so that the backspace key sends ^H (08) and the DEL key(s) send ^? (7F). I have my keyboards mapped this way on all the systems I use and (if necessary) I use stty in my .profile to set the tty handling to match. This works correctly using ssh from just about everywhere to everywhere:- Home to Areti internet Home to BSNet Work to Areti internet Work to BSNet Work to Home However when I connect from home to work *something* remaps the backspace key so it sends ^? (7F) and remaps the DEL keys so they send some sort of escape sequence. It is an actual key remapping, if I type CTRL/H then an 08 is sent and I get the expected character deletion. Can anyone suggest what might be going on? I don't think ssh should (be able to) do this sort of thing should it? -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Putting Debian Linux into Microserver (Kuro Box)
by Tatsuhiko Maegawa 19 Aug '05

19 Aug '05

Just to share my experience with you. I bought Microserver kit - self-build Kuro Box, and 250Gb Harddisk. All this for mere 30,000 yen. This microserver is little smaller than miniMac, and consumes 17watts against 60watts on miniMac. It has PowerPC 266MHz and 128Mb of Ram. I put Debian Linux (Sarge) into it. I built this as web server (Apache + MySQL + PHP4), and run Mambo CMS. So far it runs fine. Sometimes program stops, but you can get away from it since you are asking too much from the box. Details are here http://kurobox.com/ Worth buying if you are thinking of SOHO & Private Linux box, I think. T.

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Gigabit ethernet - USR or D-Link NICs?
by Chris Green 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

I have just got a Gigabit 8-port switch and want to upgrade a couple of the NICs to match. Has anyone got any opinions/knowledge as to whether D-Link or USR NICs are liely to be more compatible with a 2.4.xx kernel? (Or other makes for that matter, it's just that D-Link is cheapest and the switch is a USR one). -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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DSL bandwidth
by Stuart Bailey 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

Hi I have a customer who has 512M broadband to their site. They have recently recruited more staff, and find that 512 is not enough. BT have checked their lin3es and say the they're lucky to get 512 (they are about 5 mile from the exchange). Unfortunately, a 2M link is too expensive. Is there any way (perhaps with hardware) to configure multiple 512M links into one high spped link? They ideally want 2Mb Many thanks, Stuart -- --------------------------------------- Stuart Bailey BSc (hons) CEng CITP MBCS LinuSoft (Proprietor) Linux Specialist (01953) 601294 (07778) 383739 http://www.linusoft.co.uk ----------------------------------------

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X programming, fonts question
by Chris Green 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

Well my re-write and tidy up of astime is progressing. I'm happy with my 'one line per parameter' initialisation code, much less sprawling than the original. I'm now onto the bits I actually want to change, the original version has (horrible) bit-mapped fonts for AM/PM, day of week, etc. These are actually included in the program distribution as *.xpm files which are built into the code. Thus there is no choice of font and if you happened to want to change the names for the days of the week you have to recode the bit maps character by character. Not to mention the horrible convolutions required to actually select the right digits given the date! astime already has the ability to display some text (called a 'label') on the clock and you *can* specify the font for this. If you simply set the label to today's date and tell it to display you get a much nicer display of the date than the built in one. It also saves several hundred lines of code! It was playing with this facility that prompted me to start changing the code so that the date, day of week, AM/PM etc. are all done more elegantly. So (as before) finally to the question. I can see how to select specific fonts in X but is there any way to find a default font family? I.e. I want the code to be fairly general and work in a passable fashion on any X system, thus specifying a font in the code is risky, there's no font guaranteed to be on all systems. What I want is a way to find a font which is (probably) the default for the window manager in use for example. Going on from that is there an easy way to find the range of sizes available for a given font? Then I can find a default (or at least definitely available) font and select a size which is a reasonable match to the clock size. I suppose I could wait until I get home and look this up, I have a set of X programming manuals, but if anyone here can help that would be useful. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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PAM issues
by Andy Trevor 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

Guys, I am having some issues with pam_mkhomedir If I log on to the server locally with a use account with no home dir all is well, the home dir is greated with the correct permissions. If I try it from an LTSP client all is not well. The Home dir is created as root and of course all goes wrong after that. Any ideas Thanks in advance -- Regards Andy Trevor Technical Director Cutter Project Limited http://www.cutterproject.co.uk

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