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Batch formatting documents in LibreOffice?
by Phil Thane 15 Oct '18

15 Oct '18

Hello Lugs, Like a fool I volunteered to edit the Great Ouse Boating Association magazine (GOBA News). Obviously I use LO on Linux so maybe someone can help. I get a lot texts sent in from members and others, mostly done on MS Word, various versions, different defaults and different user preferences in evidence. I change the lot as I edit them to my preferred font and remove all the odd line spaces, paragraph indents, justification and so on. It's a bit of a pain. Then I send them to another member who proof reads them, using MS word, and puts all the justification back. Eventually I send the text files (as docx) plus photos etc to the designer. I know from my past experiences with DTP the simpler the input text the easier the designer's job so I'd like to help out by stripping most of the formatting. I don't really want to go to .txt because writers use italics and bold for emphasis and that would get lost. Does anyone know if it's possible to set up a set of rules in LibreOffice then apply them to a batch of files (typically 20-30)? Can't find anything helpful online. -- Phil

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OT: SSD vs SD
by Mark Rogers 12 Oct '18

12 Oct '18

You can buy SD to SATA converters that will take up to 10 micro SD cards and turn them into a "hard drive" (2.5" form factor, SATA connector). In principle you could put 4x128GB SD cards in and get 512GB for about £100 using Samsung or Sandisk cards (Or 1TB for £200, 1.5TB for £300.) Cost wise that makes them a good percentage cheaper than equivalent capacity SSD drives. How would this compare aside from cost? Is it performance that would be a win for the SSD, or reliability (or both)? (I'm looking at this for a Ubuntu desktop but I don't think that justifies claiming it is on topic.) In part I'm looking at it as a way to re-use SD cards that I have floating around but I'm not sure if it's worth the effort. At least for the ones I have looked at the total capacity will be (smallest card) * (number of cards) so if you have a mix of card sizes it doesn't work very well. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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VNC recommendations wanted please
by Chris Green 08 Oct '18

08 Oct '18

I'm thinking of using VNC to remotely access a couple of GUI applications running on my home desktop machine. Both my home desktop and the remote client machine are running xubuntu 18.04. I don't need a full desktop so a simple GUi just giving the ability to run programs is all I need. I *may* sometimes run over slow links so good link efficiency would be helpful. ... and finally it would be nice if it could use ssh for the link. So what would people recommend, preferably from the Ubuntu repositories for server and client? -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 11th October
by Viperfang 08 Oct '18

08 Oct '18

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 11th October at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 5th October.
by Viperfang 02 Oct '18

02 Oct '18

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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Introduction
by Andrew Hutchings 30 Sep '18

30 Sep '18

Hi all, My name is Andrew Hutchings and I'm also known as LinuxJedi. I work as a Lead Software Engineer for a company called MariaDB. I've been a Linux user between a hobbyist and in industry for probably around 20 years. A really long time ago (about 15 years) I used to run a LUG in Wales, I've lived in Norfolk for 6 years now (Watton) and thought it was time to join one again. Look forward to chatting to you all. Kind Regards -- Andrew Hutchings - LinuxJedi - http://www.linuxjedi.co.uk/

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Samba users and permissions
by Mark Rogers 26 Sep '18

26 Sep '18

I'm rebuilding a Samba file server and my knowledge is rusty. Note this is a simple fileserver, no AD. What I want to achieve is that each user has their own user/pass but that all files stored on the server get allocated to one global user. As I recall, I need both a Linux user and a Samba user for each person. However, I still have access to the files on the old server (but cannot boot it) and looking at /etc/passwd on there I do not see the individual users listed. I know that I definitely used to access the share as "mark". Therefore I'm both confused how it used to work, but also the correct way to set it up now. It's Ubuntu Server 18.04, Samba 4.7.6. Right now I have my shares configured in /var/lib/samba/usershares and can access them all via a single user (my primary server login which I added to Samba as well). They're currently read-only because the files are all root.root owned, that's something else I'll need to change. (If I can do it, I'd like to have some users read-only and some read-write once I'm finished but that's not a priority.) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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mdadm woes
by Mark Rogers 14 Sep '18

14 Sep '18

I have just moved two mdadm RAID1 arrays from an old server to a new one. Initially mdadm automatically created two arrays (md126 & md127), read-only and marked resync=pending. I mounted these and they were fine. I then stopped those arrays and rebuilt them manually as md0 & md1, and the resync started. Neither will now mount; mdadm seems happy but there isn't a recognisable filesystem on either array. I have stopped both arrays while I try to work out what went wrong and whether I can fix it. Suggestions? All the important data is backed up elsewhere but there's a lot of unimportant stuff that I'd nevertheless prefer to retrieve if I can. (Several TB of applications, distros, etc which can all be retrieved from the Internet if needed, which is why I don't waste space backing them up, but I'd still rather not have to throw them away and start again if I can avoid it.) One thought, although I'm fairly sure this isn't what happened, is that because I have two raid arrays I might have mixed my disks up when I created my new arrays (one of each in each). I would have thought that mdadm would have tried very hard to stop me doing that though? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Password managers
by Mark Rogers 14 Sep '18

14 Sep '18

Are there any password managers that can cope with the "pick characters 3, 5 and 11 from your password" security challenges? Santander has just moved to that, and if you have a secure unique password it's a pain. <RANT>Santander also require that the password is max 16 chars and alpha-numeric only. Because security, or something. The mere fact that they want me to pick certain characters from it already tells me that the password isn't being stored salted and hashed. It's a good job their app can use biometric because their website has just become pretty much unusable for me now.</RANT> -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Verifying files
by Mark Rogers 13 Sep '18

13 Sep '18

I'm looking for a way to search through an entire filesystem verifying file validity where possible. That is, if the file is a known file type that can be consistency checked, then run that check and see if it passes. So for a .zip file (including .jar, .odt, etc) run it through "unzip -t". And so on for other file types. I can't think of a suitable Google search that doesn't just throw up file system consistency checks, or tests against previously stored md5sum data (which I don't have, but wouldn't really be what I wanted anyway). I'll look at scripting something otherwise, but I'm not a wheel inventor if I can help it. On the assumption nobody has a good solution, the next best thing would be as many helpful hints as to file types I can test for consistency and what tools to test them with. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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