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Urgent - kind new home required!
by Kirsten Naylor 14 Dec '04

14 Dec '04

Hi, Who would like/would be willing/can be persuaded to take over the Alug library? Adam and I have been looking after the library for nearly two years now, but we don't have the space to hold onto it any more. It is a large-ish and heavy box of various interesting geek/computing/coding type books which gets taken to the bigger meetings (not usually pub nights). These are books which have been donated by members of Alug present and past. There is also a little notebook wherein is inscribed in letters of ballpoint the names of those borrowing any books, which books they borrowed, the date they borrowed them and a contact detail or two. There is ample scope for whoever takes over to put the whole thing on a web page, use software to organise it all, etc etc, we use the box and the notebook as it has been simplest that way for us. If you have space in a cupboard, room in the boot of your car, a tendency to go to the bigger meetings, and benevolence towards Alug in your heart, would you please consider giving the library a new home? Our storage space is now at a premium, so even a temporary home would be gratefully accepted. /Kirsten

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Nice levels and I/O
by Wayne Stallwood 14 Dec '04

14 Dec '04

Leading on from my previous question---- Say I wanted to run this backup on a live machine, how do I limit I/O so that the machine remains responsive. The copy operation itself only uses a small percentage of processor time, but hammers the living daylights out of the disk I/O so surely using nice to limit it wouldn't slow it down much. It's not important for this particular thing, but I am interested to know if it's even possible considering that the kernel doesn't even really know how busy the disks are. Or is nice clever enough to know that something else with a higher priority is wanting disk access ? My plan is that now I have made the initial copy I can use rsync to keep it up to date...or is there a better way ?

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RE: [ALUG] top
by Karl Foley 14 Dec '04

14 Dec '04

> hi = dunno Hard interrupts (Hardware IRQ Servicing) > si = dunno Soft interrupts (Software Interrupt driven routines)

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top
by Wayne Stallwood 13 Dec '04

13 Dec '04

Can somebody please provide an explanation (or point me in the direction of one) for the CPU(s) line in top. I get the percentages for us(er) and sy(stem) but what do ni,id,wa,hi and si relate to ? Looked in the man files for top and can't see any obvious mention of them.

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All-in-one Printer/Scanner/Copiers
by Keith Watson 13 Dec '04

13 Dec '04

As the price of these things seem to be dropping lately I've been googling round seeing how compatible they are with GNU/Linux. The Linux Printers site (http://www.linuxprinting.org/) seems to favour Epson (although HP gets favourable mentions). Anyone on the list use one of these devices with Linux? Regards, Keith ____________ When you boil rice, regard the cooking pot as your own head. - Zen Saying

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RE: [ALUG] Enumerating files with spaces
by Keith Watson 13 Dec '04

13 Dec '04

> From: Graham Sent: 12 December 2004 18:11 > > Probably a simple one, but I can't figure it... > > I want to do some conversions on a set of files in a > directory, such as > > for file in * > do > do_something_with $file > done > > However, I want to do the files in date order, not > alphabetically, so I tried > > for file in $(ls -tr) > etc. > > But this only works if the files don't have spaces in their > names; "for" > breaks them up into space-delimited tokens, which is no use > at all. How do I > do this (apparently) simple thing? > > -- GT Been there, done that :o) The problem is that bash sees space as a delimiter. You need to temporarily change this by setting the IFS variable. It's all in 'man bash' - somewhere. Regards, Keith ____________ You can't solve a problem on the same level you created it. - Albert Einstein

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 13 Dec '04

13 Dec '04

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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Christmas meal?
by Jonathan McDowell 13 Dec '04

13 Dec '04

As Mark has pointed out, we're a bit short of meetings - the regular 2nd Thursday meet in Norwich seems to be the only regular event. So, does anyone fancy a Christmas meal? I'm in Norwich, but am happy to travel and would consider driving (and thus being able to give a few lifts) if we could find a location that would help enable more people to come. J. -- Web [ Know Thy User. ] site: http:// [ ] Made by www.earth.li/~noodles/ [ ] HuggieTag 0.0.22

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Next meeting? and Christmas meal
by Kirsten Naylor 11 Dec '04

11 Dec '04

Looking at http://www.alug.org.uk/meetings/2004/, we seem to be without a single future meeting. We will be due for a City Gate meeting on Thursday 13th January (2nd Thursday of the month). This is not on any web page yet, however it is very close to one of our planned dates for our Christmas meal. Does this make Fri 14th January less appealing for a Christmas meal date? We should probably think ahead to having a kit meeting, sometime at the end of January perhaps. Any ideas? (None here, but I haven't thought about it as such.) /Kirsten

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If you can remember Dan Computers ...
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

Hi Folks, I wonder if anyone with a long memory can help me out. I want to have a look at a neighbour's PC which has been giving a bit of trouble, and need to take the cover off the case to get inside (especially to clean out dust, dead insects and cobwebs... ). Superficially looks like a standard desktop box. However, it was made by Dan Technology in 1995 ... I can't see how to take the cover off the case: on the surface it looks as though you can slide the overall cover off backwards, *provided* you can work out which screws you need to remove in order to free it. It's the question of "which screws" that's vexing me. The cover itself has no screws obviously associated with holding it in place. There's what looks like a back-plate with a total of 15 screws in it, some of which may simply be fixing screws and some of which seem to be associated with mounting internal bits like fans, port sockets, etc. Maybe the solution is to remove all these, take off the backplate, and then see how to get at removing the cover. But the last thing I want to do is remove screws blindly and cause unwanted consequences! I've never seen a case quite like it. If anyone can remember opening up a Dan box like this and can advise on how to proceed I'd be very grateful. Thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 [NB: New number!] Date: 10-Dec-04 Time: 11:40:24 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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