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Desktop PC spec for virtualisation and transcoding
by Mark Rogers 14 Apr '16

14 Apr '16

I'm looking to replace my home desktop PC (Ubuntu) with something a bit better. Budget around £4-500. It mainly runs a couple of virtual machines (VirtualBox) and acts as a media PC with Plex (which means video files get transcoded on the fly, which includes some 3D HD titles). Both of these are areas that the current PC struggles with sometimes (A8-6410 CPU with 12GB RAM and SSD). To be fair it copes with everything now as long as I don't try to do both at once but if I watch a 3D title I have to shut down all the VMs, and any more than a couple of VMs at the same time will push it. I got a good deal on a 500GB Crucial SSD so that's prompted me into building a new box around it and the forthcoming Ubuntu LTS. I found some desktops based around an i7 and 16GB which is the direction I'm heading in at the moment but I'm open to suggestion. I assume the graphics capability is of some importance for transcoding, is Intel on-board enough? (I won't be playing games.) I'm happy to build for myself although for a modest premium would buy pre-built (no need for Windows 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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Ghostery and Adf.ly
by Chris Walker 13 Apr '16

13 Apr '16

I keep getting tabs opening up in Chrome with a URL of Adf.ly but can't find it in the list of extensions. So I thought that if I search my machine for that string I might be able to find it and delete as I am irritated by the constant appearance. A search revealed that a Ghostery database file contained that string. So if I want to stop Adf.ly being presented to me every time I run Chrome, should I simply delete appropriate section from the Ghostery database? Or is there a better way? -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 14th April
by Viperfang 11 Apr '16

11 Apr '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, 14th April 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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Free disk array
by Huge 05 Apr '16

05 Apr '16

I have a Sun StorEdge Multipack disk array which I neither want nor need and cannot be arsed to eBay. It's like this one; http://everythingsolaris.org/reviews/hardware/ssm/frameset.html Mine is the 6 disk one. It has some disks in it but (i) they're likely very small (under 500Gb) & (ii) I don't know what's on them and CBA to find out, so I'll likely remove those. If anyone wants this, they're welcome, otherwise it's going in the skip. No, I will not ship it. It's very heavy. I can deliver it near Diss at more-or-less any time, or near Norwich the next time I'm there. Regards, Hugh. -- Today is Setting Orange, the 22nd day of Discord in the YOLD 3182 I don't have an attitude problem. If you have a problem with my attitude, that's your problem.

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Re: [ALUG] 2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 1st April.
by Chris Walker 02 Apr '16

02 Apr '16

On Tue, 29 Mar 2016 03:00:42 +0100 Viperfang <viperfang(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, > more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk Notice that this domain name has expired! -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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Re: [ALUG] Ubuntu update screen woes
by Christopher Dawkins 01 Apr '16

01 Apr '16

Nvidia! That's the problem. Not that it's a lot better with other graphics chips, except when you are lucky. You only need the correct graphics driver, which you can download from the Nvidia site. Much easier said than done - it has taken me days of googling in the past. But twice recently I have been gobsmacked by KDE. Install KDE5, and a pop-up box recognises the situation and offers to find and install for you the correct driver. And that works perfectly. You can probably then deinstall KDE and go back to Xubuntu. -- Christopher Dawkins Archivist, Felsted School http://archives.felsted.org Garnetts Corner, Jollyboys Lane North, Felsted, Dunmow, Essex CM6 3DU cchd(a)pjcd.org 07816 821659 01371 821076

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Ubuntu update screen woes
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 01 Apr '16

01 Apr '16

I've just updated a machine to XUbuntu 14.04 (LTS) from the last LTS release. I've had numerous problems, but something I'm making no progress with is a problem with the display. Text and window borders etc seem to display OK, but standard file manager icons don't. Some graphics look a bit odd - e.g. Tweakubuntu splash screen which I recall as green and dark grey, comes out washed out, very faint grey and barely readable. Some lines of text that should be highlighted, seem to be almost anti-highlighted - thin faint green foreground text with no highlight line (whereas on another machine, there should be background highlight). In synaptic and log file viewer, the text in the top right pane of the display, that is the pane that displays packages that you are choosing to install or uninstall, is cunningly displayed in white on white, i.e. completely invisible. Sometimes by scrolling the mouse wheel or resizing the window, I can get the text to appear. I know that synaptic is working because if I use ssh -X to connect to this machine from another, and run synaptec remotely using x windows forwarding, then synaptic appears and works correctly. This confirms to me that it's a display issue, but I'm at a bit of a loss on how to tackle it. File managers: they show the file names, but some of the file or folder icons appear, some don't. Moving the mouse around makes some appear, and some disappear. The machine has an old nvidea card, and uses the nouveau display driver. I've tried reinstalling this. There's no obvious (to me) display problems shown in dmesg. I will be trawling through the log files to have a look, (but log-file-viewer doesn't show log text either). Any ideas how to go about fixing this? Where are display config settings to tweak. How can I reinstall/fix? There is an xorg.conf file but removing this makes no difference. Any help/advice gratefully received! Steve

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 1st April.
by Viperfang 29 Mar '16

29 Mar '16

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

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get_iplayer help
by Chris Walker 24 Mar '16

24 Mar '16

Perhaps somebody can point me in the right direction here as I'm failing to achieve what I want. On Radio 4 is a new series by Hal Cruttenden called simply Hal. But if I say get_iplayer --type=radio "Hal" I end up with several Asian programmes along with Hancock's Half Hour and so on. Also listed though is Hal - Career, BBC Radio 4 so my question is, how can I differentiate between those unwanted programmes and the one sole programme I do want? My first thought was that I could simply put a space in the name but then I don't get Hal Cruttenden, just the Asian programmes. I then tried to add stuff like "--fields comedy" but that didn't find anything so I'm stuck! I assume other people have overcome similar problems so how did they solve it? Any help appreciated. -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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How to debug a bit of javascript?
by Chris Green 23 Mar '16

23 Mar '16

I am using a thing called editablegrid which is mostly javascript. I've got it working pretty well displaying my data in an editable grid but there's a couple of niggles that are driving me mad. One is that the setting for the number of lines to be displayed in the grid doesn't work. I can set the number of lines in the code but I can't select it with the displayed selector. The HTML has:- <label for="pagecontrol">Rows per page: </label> <select id="pagesize" name="pagesize"> <option value="5">5</option> <option value="10">10</option> <option value="15">15</option> <option value="20">20</option> <option value="25">25</option> <option value="30">30</option> <option value="40">40</option> <option value="50">50</option> </select> Which displays the numbers one can select OK. Then, in the javascript is the following:- $("#pagesize").val(pageSize).change(function() { editableGrid.setPageSize($("#pagesize").val()); }); In the demo it works perfectly, in my copy it doesn't work at all. One can select a value but nothing changes. How can I debug this? There are no errors in the Browser Console (firefox) nor in the apache log. It's as if the hooks are not being set but other hook functions in the initialisation are working OK. Can I set a break point or something on the select and see what gets called? -- Chris Green

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