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What will linux do?
by Chris Walker 13 May '16

13 May '16

I have been given a new(ish) PC. It's an i7 with 16GB of RAM. It currently has Windows 10 on a 128 GB SSD and has a couple of 1TB hard drives configured under Windows as RAID1 - they show up in the BIOS as RAID. My intention is to remove the SSD and replace it with a 512GB SSD so that I can have Mageia 5 on it as well (that's the distro I have run for some time and I'm familiar with it). My question concerns the Windows RAID. Does anybody have any idea what linux will make of it? If it helps, I've pulled the drive out and hooked it to my current machine via a USB adapter and it appears that it's a regular NTFS drive. But should there be any extra partitions or files on it to denote that it's part of a RAID array? I also intend to have my /home partition on a separate 1TB drive. The installation on this machine has Windows 10 on a 500GB hard drive with Mageia on a 1TB drive. I'm thinking that I might just bung that drive in to the new machine and at some point remove the extra partitions from it leaving just the /home on there. Once I've installed Mageia on the new SSD, is it as simple as amending the fstab file to point to that 1TB drive? Or should I do something different altogether? -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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Re: [ALUG] Question about backgrounds on pdf
by Peter Berrie 13 May '16

13 May '16

>There doesn't appear to be any useful Export options in >Okular so can't you print it again to a PDF? Yes, that is possible. The problem is that what you see in print preview is the lightened image, but what you get when you print to file is the original again. I don't know how to get the version that Okular displays to print to file. Maybe I am missing something obvious or doing something wrong. Or maybe the only thing to do is to copy and paste page by page into Open Office, and then export as PDF. It will be a bit tedious but it may be the only way.

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Question about backgrounds on pdf
by Peter Berrie 12 May '16

12 May '16

Someone I support has a pdf with a too dark background and is having trouble reading it. By using the controls in Okular I can make it black font on white background, and its perfect, easy to read and straightforward. However, I can't figure out how to either export a copy with the changes, or make the same changes in some other package. To make the changes I used the accessibility options in Okular's configure control, and did convert to black and white, then threshold about 75% and contrast 100%. Okular remembers to apply this on my machine when the file is opened, but how to make the changes to the file itself so that other readers show the same thing? Any suggestions? Peter

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 12th May
by Viperfang 09 May '16

09 May '16

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 12th May 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 http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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An old problem - how to manage permissions with web servers
by Chris Green 07 May '16

07 May '16

I'm always hitting this problem in one way or another and I've never really come up with a good solution. I have lots of personal information (not secret, just that it's mostly only useful to me) which I keep in a Wiki. To make my life easy I run apache2 as user 'chris' (me) on the servers where I have the wiki. This allows me to edit pages directly and do all the maintenance etc. without the rigmarole of becoming root and/or becoming www-data. However this then causes problems with other stuff that runs under the web server as they assume that it's going to run (in Ubuntu anyway) as www-data. My current hassle is with Owncloud which installs with www-data owning the data directory and I have to manually change the ownership to allow it to write. There are also other similar conflicts. Isn't there a way to tell the installation system that I want my browser to run as a specified user rather than the default (and really annoying!) www-data? I suppose I could bodge /etc/passwd so that chris and www-data are the same but it is rather a bodge, I'd like a better solution. -- Chris Green

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What permissions will apt use when installing? Will umask affect it?
by Chris Green 06 May '16

06 May '16

I want to be able to install a web app with a umask of 0002 rather than the default 0022. I have worked out how to get the www-data user to have a umask of 0002 when used by apache but I'm not sure how to *install* the app with the required permissions. It's being installed and kept up to date by using the standard apt in Ubuntu (it's on a PPA). Does anyone know if it's possible to tell apt to use a different umask? I.e. if I set the umask when installing will I get the effect that I want or does an application installed by apt set its permissions by configuration somewhere? -- Chris Green

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Ubuntu updates
by Bev Nicolson 06 May '16

06 May '16

On 12.04LTS but get security updates almost every day and I guess on the one hand that could be encouraging, on the other, I do start to wonder why they don't all arrive at once. (I know now. It's how it connects to the internet.) Is there any way of asking Update Manager to show them every fortnight instead? I can’t see that option. Ta. I'm on a limited broadband band deal during peak hours so saving them up would be useful if possible. Bev.

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Wanted: Non-realtime but automatic file synchronisation
by Chris Green 06 May '16

06 May '16

I have a number of large[ish] directory trees that I would like to keep synchronised across various systems. There are basically three systems involved: desktop, laptop and a remote server. They all run Linux (xubuntu and ubuntu). I don't need real-time synchronisation like that provided by btsync, syncthing or pulse. The directory trees are really too big for this sort of thing anyway. On the other hand I don't want a manual system like Unison which anyway seems beset by problems with different versions at each end. All I want (all?) is a way to keep the directories in sync when changes occur at either end. Since the changes will be mostly generated by me it will be very rare for changes to occur in two places at the same time. If they do then I'm quite happy for the system to require manual intervention. I just want the general case to be automatic. Updating once an hour or so would be quite satisfactory. I can do much of it using rsync with the --update option run first one way and then the other, this does nearly everything I want but there is one gotcha - files deleted will re-appear. File deletions will not be frequent but they will occur occasionally. Adding a --delete option to rsync doesn't necessarily help, it could also mean that new files added get deleted. It all depends on the relative timing of additions and deletions and the copying each way. Nearly all the 'directory synchronisation' tools I can find are one-way and do very little more than one can do easily oneself using rsync. Has anyone come across anything that might do something like I want? -- Chris Green

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Starting a web server on demand - sensible, easy?
by Chris Green 06 May '16

06 May '16

I want to run a Javascript/PHP application on my laptop which will at times be unable to get to the internet. Thus I need to run a web server of some sort on it to serve the PHP side of things. If the laptop is at home on the home LAN I want to be able to run the same Javascript/PHP application on my desktop machine so I can use the bigger screen etc. This will work fine of course with the web server on the laptop, as long as the web server is running. What's the neatest/easiest way to fire up the web server on demand? I don't really want to run it all the time. Ideally also I'd prefer not to run Apache as it's total overkill for what I'm doing. I tried PHP's built-in web server ("php -S localhost:80") and it works fine for me, the home LAN can't be accessed from outside so security should be OK. I suppose the modern equivalent of inetd would do what I want but I'm a bit worried about how easy it might be (or not). -- Chris Green

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 6th May.
by Viperfang 03 May '16

03 May '16

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

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