Re: why oh why...
Hi, Steve Holdoway wrote: Or start a project to provide a sane alternative to alsa... (: --they have. It is called pulse. Sound is one area where linux fails quite badly. Indeed, it is proof that linux is not ready for the desktop of the ordinary user. If you cannot get sound to work for you, then what hope does the ordinary person have?? The biggest failing in linux sound is the software design of sound has not realised that the box has a variable number of sound cards. yes. Variable. 1 onboard sound device built into the hardware 1 usbheadset or bluetooth device or whatever that is plugged in/out at random. The asound.conf file architecture don't cope with this. Further - requiring the user to edit this file - which has (I am told) a lisp like syntax is berserk. There is a quote on the topic of sound from someone which (paraphrased) goes like: sound - welcome to the jungle. For the uninformed: Alsa - the only advanced thing about alsa is the first letter.. - rhymes with the word ulcer. pulse - particularly useless linux sound engineers === I have been cursed with worrying about sound on a linux box for the last ten years. One project has 20 active sound channels (20 mics + 20 speakers) running at the same time. I have boxes here at home used by my family to do web serving flash/youtube. I have read comments from alsa experts on the mailing lists. The quality and helpfulness of their answers is apallingly bad. No wonder others struggle. My personal feeling is that sound on linux has improved, but there is more room for improvement. = Why did it get this bad? Cause the alsa people live in an ivory tower, and don't watch real people use real sound on computers. I think too the management of the sound software libraries on linux have been poor. Not enough time has been spent on getting things 'right'. We have invented new sound systems, rather than fixing the existing sound systems. OSS was fantastic, and worked far better for telephony than pulse/alsa. Ok, rant mode off. However, each of the statements above is true. None are hyperbola.. yes, some lucky people claim to have sound working fine. Try this simple test. put some usb headphones into the computer. head phones work? go to a flash media site - headphones work? altered your asound.conf file yet? Derek. Derek J Smithies Ph.D. Christchurch, New Zealand -- How did you make it work?? the usual, got everything right
Re: Is there such a distro?
Solor Vox wrote: $ sudo su - # Even more useful is sudo sux which gives root the ability to open gui tools. Derek -- Derek J Smithies Ph.D. Christchurch, New Zealand -- How did you make it work?? the usual, got everything right
Re: Bluetooth dongles
Hi, ok, so then when you get a headset, or any other such bluetooth device, what happens? am I likely to be able to connect the headset to the bluetooth dongle? My view on the usb working in linux is simple: if the manufacturer has a driver disk for you to use, it probably won't work in linux - does that hold for bluetooth devices also? Thanks, Derek. Dave G wrote: Hi I got this one from Jaycar for about 30 bucks: Jaycar Electronics Tiny Bluetooth Adaptor CAT. NO. XC4892 And this on Trademe for about $10: Bus 003 Device 004: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode) See: http://www.trademe.co.nz/Computers/Peripherals/Other/auction-282478464.htm both work fine on Crunchbang and Ubuntu dave g Bus 003 Device 004: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode) -- = Derek Smithies, Christchurch, New Zealand
Re: ssh testing
Hi, In addition to the deny hosts approach, I would move the ssh port to somewhere else. The firewall should open some other port (a random number you like and can remember, say 4242) and port forward that to port 22 of the recipient box. Consequently, anyone who checks port 22 of every ip address won't get a response back from your box and will move on. yes yes, this is security by obscurity, (which is a poor form security), but it is a start in the right direction. It will cut down on the number of attacks on your box. If you edit (on the box making the link) the .ssh/config file you can add entries like: Host dereksbox.dyndns.org port 4242 which means that you can do ssh dereksbox.dyndns.org and not have to specify the port in use. Otherwise, it is ssh -p 4242 dereksbox.dyndns.org Cheers, Derek. On Fri, 12 Mar 2010, Steve Holdoway wrote: On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 00:56 +1300, Hadley Rich wrote: On Thu, 2010-03-11 at 21:55 +1300, Steve Holdoway wrote: no - still being prompted for a password... A denied or not allowed user will still get prompted for a password, it will just never work. hads Denyhosts adds addresses to /etc/hosts.deny. This will drop the connection before password requests iirc. Steve -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ How did you make it work?? Oh, the usual, get everything right.
top posters, was Re: Revamping my storage
On Tue, 9 Feb 2010, steve wrote: A curse on top posters! We had a discussion on this topic a while ago. the conclusion was, topbottom posting is not the big thing. The big is removing tons and tons of text that does nothing. this is to aid those users a)trying to read this on their iphones with XXXcom bandwidth charges. b)still on dialup/equivalent with slow links Lots deleted.. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: This years format.
On Tue, 9 Feb 2010, Christopher Sawtell wrote: What about settling on the 17 of the month. That's Wednesday next week to start it off. Sigh - - a group of geeks can surely come up with a better number than 17. My first thought was for the 42nd of the month, but it is a bit large. The 24 would work though. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: This years format.
Hi, On Wed, 10 Feb 2010, Ryan McCoskrie wrote: On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:11:47 Derek Smithies wrote: My first thought was for the 42nd of the month, but it is a bit large. The 24 would work though. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 all fit nicely onto the topic. Shame that we can't use 0. 24 is 1 date 24 is the concatanation of 2 and 4 24 is the sum of 8 and 16 On that basis, I think I have to vote again for 24. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Help please (Nooby) Headless Ubuntu - SHH VNC
On Sat, 21 Nov 2009, Karl Fimm wrote: Hi, I'm a complete noob when it comes to Linux (I've been using Microsoft operating systems since 1983). No worries there - we all started at that point. Any suggestions or offers of help greatfully accepted (or pointers to linux-nerds-r-us services in Christchurch). The problem is that the network interface is being established when you log in as a user with the keyboard on your headless box. Inside the network configuration gui, there is a tickbox at the bottom of the screen which says (or something like), make interface available to all users. Make sure this box is ticked, so the interface is created at boot time. -- I found that the package libpam-smbpass was not installed by default. This should be installed - adding it helped samba work for me. (along with gvfs). --- Hope this helps - any questions, please ask. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Help please (Nooby) Headless Ubuntu - SHH VNC
Hi, I suggest you add to the box the package ssh, which is a metapackage for the ssh server and ssh client. Then test if you can use ssh to connect to the box in question. End gobbledy gook linux commands. as a user on the box you are setting up to run headless, do sudo apt-get install ssh Ok.. From the instructions you have followed, you already have ssh installed on your media box. Similar command on a different linux box, or install a ssh client on a windows box. You should now be able to open a terminal on the remote box and establish a ssh (secure shell) connection to the box you are running headless. This verifies that the network interface is established and running. === Now reboot the box you are setting up as headless. From earlier reports, you said that you could not do vnc to it. ok. Can you use ssh to connect to the box you are settng up as headless? If not, then the box does not have an active network interface, and the problem is not vnc. Derek. === On Sat, 21 Nov 2009, Karl Fimm wrote: Hi Eliot, After a reboot, I can get a command line via putty, I just can't VNC. Thanks Charles On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Eliot Blennerhassett ewb...@gmail.com wrote: My problem is that after a reboot, I need to login using the local keyboard, before I can remote in. Can you clarify. Is the problem not getting a commandline via putty, or not being able to get a vnc connection until you have logged in to your desktop? -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
pulse audio , was Re: Xfce to Stump
is that, surprise surprise, the pulse on ubuntu 9.10 is a significant improvement -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox My favorite language is call STAR. It's extremely concise. It has exactly one verb '*', which does exactly what I want at the moment. --Larry Wall
Re: Halt command on remote box causes ssh client to hang
Hi, I think the scenario you are describing is: logged into box A. ssh to box B do various things. halt (on box B) === This just sits there - the ssh does not break and return control to you on box A. This is identical behaviour to if you had unplugged the ethernet cable from box B. the ssh client on box A is waiting for packets from B - and will wait for ages. you can modify your tcp sockets on box A to have keep alives etc. This is a bit excessive. I suggest that you do ssh to box B do whateever sudo su - (become root, which I suspect you have done to issue the halt command) halt exit and control will immediately return you to box A. Derek. On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Ross Drummond wrote: If I give the halt command on a remote box while connected through a ssh client the ssh client hangs. How do I prevent this? Cheers Ross Drummond -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox My favorite language is call STAR. It's extremely concise. It has exactly one verb '*', which does exactly what I want at the moment. --Larry Wall
Re: Web Site Slow to Start
Hi, sounds like a DNS lookup issue. When you have not used it for a while, the cache of resolved addresses gets emptied. tcpdump/wireshark might tell you what is going on.. Derek. On Tue, 1 Sep 2009, David Kirk wrote: Hey guys. I have installed Trac on Ubuntu 9.04 Server. I'm using Apache2 and mod_python to connect to Trac and it's connecting to our Active Directory to authenticate users. It seems to work pretty fast when I'm using it, but if I leave it for a while and come back to it, the first time I request a page there is almost a 10 second delay. How do I find out where this delay is coming from? I'm guessing that if I don't use it for a while then the authentication times out and it needs to reauthenticate to AD in the background, but how do I prove that (and hopefully speed it up)? I can't see the authentication in any of the logs. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox
Re: Alpining
Hi, I have written on the wonders of alpine before. It still beats all of the graphical tools I have tried. It is better than many of my colleague's email systems. So yes, I am happy to answer questions. I would note that google is your friend - alpine examples abound on the web. In my usage patten, alpine is faster to use than the graphical things. Derek. == On Wed, 19 Aug 2009, Aidan Gauland wrote: Hello, A while ago--a long while ago, I think--someone on this list shared his excitement over discovering Alpine, because he was a fan of Pine. I have since tried a few times to set up Alpine--because it sounded better than anything else I have used (for me, that is), and I find Thunderbird annoying in many ways--but I have failed to overcome the geekiness of it every time. I have recently started regularly using a Linux shell-server, so I am using the command line for more and more, and I would really like to ditch graphical mail-readers (especially as I always turn HTML off, so there will be no loss there). Could that person, if they still be reading this list, or another Alpine user, help me get acquainted with this mysterious mail reader? Thanks, Aidan -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox
Re: Motherboard selection
Hi, On Thu, 23 Jul 2009, Daniel Hill wrote: also Chipsets have to be x86 compatible meaning they are pretty much standardised and only some things like chipset specific features will have problems like power management, and maybe ethernet drivers There will most probably be just a couple of areas of hassle: ** getting suspend/hibernate etc to work ** opengl graphcs (nividia or ati graphics card). ** sound My experience is that all of these things are fixable. The steps to overcome them are: * don't bother with suspend/resume - only required on a laptop. the effort expended to get this working reliably is far more than the time saved. * use nividia cards. --yes, a very contentious issue. support for ati will have improved. As for right now, which is best probably depends on who you talk to - or even if it is worth battling of 26 squillion triangles versus 22 squillion triangles per second.. * drink more coffee.. The easiest way of fixing sound is to try to have just one sound card on the box, which means, no usb sound, no bluetooth. Yes, you can futz around with pulse/alsa etc and get sound to work with multiple cards. The process is helped by drinking more coffee.. Let the wars begin. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox
Re: Linux and RAM size
Hi On Thu, 23 Jul 2009, Andrew Errington wrote: 640MB should be enough for anyone. Hmm.. Your children will be saying in a few years something like, Dad had only 1gb ram on his box - dunno how he managed. In the early 80's I had 16kb of ram on the zx81. Now I have 4gb on my desktop at work. 20 years, growth of 5 zeros, - hmm, getting close to pettabyte material there..[1] Derek. [1] http://gupeng.blogspot.com/2005/04/kb-mb-gb-tb-pb-eb-zb-yb.html -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox
Re: Linux and RAM size
Hi, Ok, let me put the actual number:: when I started with the zx81, I had 1K. This was ok for a bit, but soon ran out of space. The shop wanted $200 for 16k ram packs. I happily forked over the money, and regarded it as cheap.. At $200 per 16k, 4gb would cost you $52,428,800 Derek. === On Thu, 23 Jul 2009, chris wrote: When I started in the early 70s we had 4k! regards Chris T Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox
Re: ekiga not creating sockets
On Sun, 31 May 2009, Andrew Errington wrote: On Sun, May 31, 2009 20:37, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: On Sun 31 May 2009 16:16:17 NZST +1200, Andrew Errington wrote: No. He said that It is only on linux that Skype gets hard to setup. I merely pointed out that it was trivially easy on Linux. For me. Ok, let me clarify. There are going to be problems in installing software on your computer. Going on the number of requests for help that are seen, and the what the requests are, one can predict the likely trouble spots. On Linux:: For Ekiga, you are likely to get sound issues and network configuration. For Skype, you are likely to get sound issues. See - it is simpler to just install Skype and use it. == Andrew - you are lucky - sound worked for you first time.. Why is sound such an issue on linux? Observe the Huge number of sound related posts in the ubuntu user forums. Because, as Volker so rightly said, Sound is a mess under Linux Further, there are no specks of dust||wooden beams here. I detest and loath sound under linux. There is the potential of hope with Pulse. I recently wrote a pulse plugin for ptlib that works well. Multiple applications can simultaneously read/write to the same sound device, all at different ratessampling sizes. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: ekiga not creating sockets
Hi, On Mon, 1 Jun 2009, Andrew Errington wrote: On Mon, June 1, 2009 06:43, Derek Smithies wrote: specious argument snipped See - it is simpler to just install Skype and use it. Actually, from what you are saying, it is simpler just to install Windows and use it. Not the right conclusion. In about 6 months, when ubuntu have been through another iteration, Pulse might have settled down to something that does sound ok In the meantime, never Windows. There are other hassles with Windows that I did not bother to mention -you already know of those hassles. A Mac - well, it is unix under the hood, but, hmm, Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: ekiga not creating sockets
On Sat, 30 May 2009, Barry Marchant wrote: I have been trying for some days to get ekiga-2.0.12 to operate. Iget connected to the Ekiga OK but test calls to 5...@ekiga.net fail with an error msg reading ' STUN could not create RTP/RTCP socket pair;'. google reports plenty of instances of this but I have not found a solution yet. Ekiga usess the sip protocol to send manage the voice stream. The actual voice packets are encoded into UDP packets. The layout of the data in the UDP packets is known as the RTP format. The management of the media stream is handled with other UDP packets. The management packets contain information about which codec is to be used, which ports for the media stream, what the name of the software application is etc. So- the voice between you and the other person (caller and callee) goes in these RTP packets - which firewalls inevitably tend to block. To get the RTP through the firewalls, there are several approaches. 1)Use firewalls that understand SIP. These firewalls understand the management packets and so knows which udp ports to open to let the media stream go through. The media stream can be on any udp port number (well, any port above 1200 or so.) If you are using the firewall on your linux box, you might be able to turn on sip proxy in the firewall. 2)Extra code has been added to the Ekiga code base to get around this. There is STUN (simple traversal udp over nat) TURN (Transfer Udp with Relay Network). ICE was another, but cannot remember all it stands for. 3)Try adjusting your firewall. There is, I think, a firewall test utility in Ekiga. You might have a cone symmetric or something. Cannot remember all the details, but there is a firewall type that is really bad with voip packets from siph323 applications. error msg reading ' STUN could not create RTP/RTCP socket pair;'. your error message is basically, Ekiga tried to get audio through to the other end, but failed, cause (most likely) a firewall got in the way. The most surefire way of fixing this? Use skype. Seriously, you can fiddle for hours getting this to work. To get skype to work, you only have to hassle your way through sound card issues. To get ekiga to work, you have to hassle your way through sound card issues and firewall issues. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: ekiga not creating sockets
On Sun, 31 May 2009, Andrew Errington wrote: On Sun, May 31, 2009 06:04, Derek Smithies wrote: The most surefire way of fixing this? Use skype. Seriously, you can fiddle for hours getting this to work. Except that Skype is proprietary and closed. SIP is the Right Answer, so it's worth persevering. Yes, you are right in one sense.. Picture yourself in a hotel, far away from home, and keen to ring the wife and family. A skype call will (well, most often) get through the various firewalls in the way and get through. This has huge WAF. That you can get through to home and talk increases the chance that you will get her acceptance for the next trip away. Yes, you can fiddle with sip like phones. However, in my jaundiced experience, they are filled with gobbledygoodk like words that make them hard to setup. Look at Barry's problems. He is not a voip developer, but he is capable enough to do many linux like things. And he had trouble getting Ekiga to work. Skype, on the other hand, is sufficiently easy to setup that people with the minimum of computer skills can make voip calls. It is only on linux that Skype gets hard to setup - mainly cause of the Welcome to the jungle phenomenon talked about on slashdot recently. Which was (effectively): linux sound is a mess. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
uses for old computers
Hi, So what do you do with the old computers that one tends to acquire? They are old so the hardware is borderline for reliability, so there is not much point in putting lots of time in them to making them do big important jobs. An old computer as a fileserver - will work, but when it fails the blood pressure goes up (the kids want their videos to watch) and it is not good. The WAF is poor - they don't seem to appreciate when their videos are not available fileserver yes, maybe. Bit limited on ram, so is a bit slow. firewall - yes, the throughtput is low cause ADSL is quite slow. But I only need 1 firewall and I have lots of the old computers. On the old computers, the harddrive is often thefirst thing to go, so maybe a liveCD running some application is the way to go. Yes - but what? As a book end - well, it is a bit big for this.. Hmm, - two computers + some planks of wood and we have a respectable shelf.. Just a bit big. What about a really exotic use? Some custom software, custom hardware, use the computer power supply and we could have a really high speed battery charger.. ---Does anyone know of such a project ?--- Ahh. A teaching tool. Yes, - show kids how they work - pull it apart. Remove cover on the hard drive, and scratch the platter as it it attempts to start up. Makes a horrible sound, but the kids see that when the disk surface is scratched, the computer cannot even begin the boot process.. Install win98 on it, and run all the old games which are still available. Yes, but it is of questionable legality to install pirated win98 isos. Comment?? Derek. P.S. In fact, the most common use for old computers is to take up space in the garage. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox
Re: uses for old computers
Hi, apparently, one can take four (or so) cpus out, glue them to the base of an alumunim plate. (pins away from the plate). connect the pins in series. So the pins on the left side of the chip are soldered together, and then to an electrical bus. Similarily for the right side. Apply power to the electrical bus. This will provide a hot plate. I suppose in the spit of this email, one should use an old power supply. Derek. Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox
Re: Linux on USB stick recommendations
Hi, I have been down the usb linux stick thing for a while, and some thoughts might help the search for a recommendation. If you can avoid a distro that uses a compressed file system, loading files (or running binaries) of the disk will be much faster.. yes, it means a bigger flash disk. No problem.. 4G disks are getting cheap. Getting a machine with a nvidia/ATI graphics card is quite common - it would be nice if the ATI nvidia drivers were already on the disk. Yes, I know, there will be those who want only open source software on their linux distro disk. However, it fails the simple test from the children. They expect to plug it in, and it works immediately. Everything. (which includes the codecs). True, the standard answer is to download the drivers and install them. But each time I run the usb image, I don't want to have to install the graphics driver.. That is too tedious. So lets avoid the discussion on embedding nvidiaati into the image. From a convenience point of view, all the video drivers, and all the codecs, should be in the image. Remastering should be easy. There are always going to be packages that have to be added/removed. On those three quite reasonable requirements, what is best option? Derek. On Tue, 5 May 2009, John Carter wrote: On Wed, 29 Apr 2009, David Lowe wrote: Xubuntu on a stick is highly recommended. Sounds like something out of a PTerry Pratchett novel Wot's yer name then? Cut'me'own'throat' Dibbler? Wanna Xubuntu onna stick? Or Kubuntu inna bun? Just don't ask whats in'em! http://everything2.com/title/Dibbler John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639 Tait ElectronicsFax : (64)(3) 359 4632 PO Box 1645 ChristchurchEmail : john.car...@tait.co.nz New Zealand -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox
RE: computer shopping
Hi, I have looked at second hand machines, and have bought them on occasion. Here is my take on the second hand machine purchase: You can get a 3 yr old machine privately for $100 You can get a ex lease machine (similar age) from the broker for around $250. But, if you go to the liks of pbtech or dragon, you can get a nice new machine for $600 that is way faster than the second hand machine listed above. Further, the new machine is way more reliable.. Given that you want to use the purchased computer for several years, what is going to happen? Well, you are highly likely (if you start with a second hand machine) to have disk problems and fan problems. Do you really want to lose your data (well, raise the probability of losing your digital photos) ??? Dragon have upgrade kits, where they supply the mobo, powersupply, ram, cpu, case for $300. You just install your harddisk in this computer, and an optical drive, and you are good to go. My view is that the priceperformance gap of a second hand computer from the broker makes this option unattractive. Either the new computer (or upgrade kit) from the likes of dragon, or the second hand computer from a private sale are workable.. Remember, you can always take your handy dandy damn small linux disk with you to the private sale and check the comupter a)boots DSL - which means hardware compatibility is ok. b)do a memtest on it (one of the DSL boot options) c)If it can boot DSL, this indicates there is probably enough memory. Oh, Remember the memtest option. this saves a lot of grief later on. Always do a memtest on a box before blowing away windows and installing linux. It is quite hard to take a box back to the broker and say: A linux memory test shows this box has broken memory, and I have wiped the windows off the harddrive, and I want my money back. Derek. -Original Message- From: John Carter [mailto:john.car...@tait.co.nz] Sent: Friday, 24 April 2009 9:18 a.m. www.computerbroker.co.nz I know Aidan said he didn't want to buy new - but some new systems from www.pbtech.co.nz have a prices close to gruntier ex-lease boxes from computerbroker when I just looked. I've always been impressed with the prices from pbtech - they have two physical stores in Auckland - the North Shore store was biggest computer parts store I've ever walked into in NZ with best prices I've seen - if only I had more $$ :-(- and will send the stuff anywhere in NZ. -Regards, Bryce Stenberg. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox
Re: Adventures in netbook distros continued.
On Tue, 17 Feb 2009, Craig Falconer wrote: Steve Holdoway wrote, On 17/02/09 11:17: But those maps are old now and need to be redone. They are. To give you an idea of how old, it is Lancaster Park, not Jade Stadium, ooops, AMI Stadium.. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ open streetmap can be congratulated, it sortof works on my linux browser.. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Asus eee pc 901 Linux
On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, John Carter wrote: On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, John Carter wrote: I was severely (and still am slightly) tempted to wipe the current distro and install Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Hokay, Xandros is doomed no emacs, not even in the repository. That is criminal - how can you call it a linux distro when emacs is not installed? No sshd, but x11vnc sort of works. Bit unsatisfying, forces you to use the smaller 1024x600 screen even if you're administering the thing from a desktop. Yes, which sounds like you reached the same conclusion as other linux users. The only difference is the length of time taken to reach the conclusion to blow it away. I am curious - why ubuntu netbook remix when there is a ubuntu eee distro? Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Thanks Derek...
Hi, On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Steve wrote: PS. Can anyone elighten me on what that PLC'esque board was called in the general discussion afterwards? I'm having an Alzheimers moment... Arduino http://www.arduino.cc/ Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
RE: wtf!
Hi, however articles like this prove that his field is obviously not IT. One might be able to go a little less harsh. Dave is writing about things that he is not fully aware. Dave certainly does know some things about IT. But not all things about IT. If his article is correct, why have linux notebooks (like the asus) been so incredibly popular and sold like hotcakes? Only a fool would argue that all the people who bought an asus were like the people portrayed in his article. His article failed to mention distros such as Ubuntu, which have swept the Linux community and (my view) made it easier to get into Linux. I personally feel insulted. I have been using linux on a personal and professional basis for ten years, and do not see myself as being anything like the people described by Dave. Derek. On Mon, 9 Feb 2009, Payne, Owen wrote: That was written several months ago and I wrote a response piece for it that only got published on the site. I'm sure Dave is a respected professional in his chosen field, however articles like this prove that his field is obviously not IT. -Original Message- From: Steve [mailto:st...@greengecko.co.nz] Sent: Monday, 9 February 2009 7:28 am To: linux-users@it.canterbury.ac.nz Subject: wtf! Just who is this f*ckwit? http://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/4698845a24229.html -- Steve st...@greengecko.co.nz ** This electronic email and any files transmitted with it are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. The views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender and may not necessarily reflect the views of the Christchurch City Council. If you are not the correct recipient of this email please advise the sender and delete. Christchurch City Council http://www.ccc.govt.nz ** -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
RE: Feb meeting...
Hi On Fri, 30 Jan 2009, Payne, Owen wrote: Do we know what the topic of the talk will be? We do. Quoting from an earlier email to the list on this topic: Last year, Nick wrote quite passionately about local Christchurch companies using linux and wondering if any had any stories to tell in a meeting.. I replied, and noted that a wireless rate control module I had written has been added to the mainline kernel. Now, if you peruse your way to: http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/12825/print where you can read about the five best features in 2.6.28, you will find the comment: Frankly, based on what I've been seeing while using it with my Linux-powered ThinkPad R61, I'd upgrade to 2.6.28 for this feature alone. The wireless rate control module I helped write is called Minstrel. I will describe what wireless rate control modules are, why you need them and how the one I wrote works. Further. There will be examples of it operating at the meeting. Someone will need to bring a projector. I have not yet done the slides/presentation, but anyhow.. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Feb meeting...
Hi, Last year, Nick wrote quite passionately about local Christchurch companies using linux and wondering if any had any stories to tell in a meeting.. I replied, and noted that a wireless rate control module I had written has been added to the mainline kernel. Now, if you peruse your way to: http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/12825/print where you can read about the five best features in 2.6.28, you will find the comment: Frankly, based on what I've been seeing while using it with my Linux-powered ThinkPad R61, I'd upgrade to 2.6.28 for this feature alone. Anyhow, Zane said something to me about a talk on Minstrel, and I think it was organised to be in February. any details yet?? No, nothing. Ahhm. Actually. There is quite a bit.. Derek. === On Fri, 23 Jan 2009, Don Robertson wrote: Christopher Sawtell wrote: On Monday 19 January 2009 19:05:51 Steve Holdoway wrote: any details yet?? No, nothing. Therefore can't help but wonder if I should cancel the venue booking, and let CLUG return to being just an email-list operation. Greetings all. I have recently returned to Christchurch, and joined the list a few weeks ago. I'd like to go to a meeting now and then. On the other hand, I haven't been to any yet so I don't know what they are like :-) I'd go along with the suggestion of a pub or cafe someplace and take it from there. I can't suggest any place in particular - I haven't frequented the local hostelries since - well, I remember I was wearing an onion in my belt, because it was the fashion at the time ... Comments please CLUGgers. Note that I personally cannot do anymore program organizing, because I will be away for the winter, and as I may well be leaving the country permanently life is just too busy at the moment, and anyway I think I've done my bit. don -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: de...@indranet.co.nz ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Something for .bashrc file
Hi,
On Thu, 4 Dec 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Here's a little something to slip into a friend's .bashrc file when
they're not looking ...
export PS1='C:${PWD//\//\\\}'
Hmmm, amusing. Note to self - never let this guy near my lappie ;-)
Question: if he does this to a friend - what happens to the people this
guy does not like?
Derek
--
Derek Smithies Ph.D.
IndraNet Technologies Ltd.
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
ph +64 3 365 6485
Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: just to show it's not just redhat...
Hi, On Wed, 26 Nov 2008, Kerry wrote: would I be better off with the 32 bit option? Much Much Much better.. I have three 64 bit machines, that I do all my development on. Two of them the family have access to. --Neopets on linux (64 bit) is inferior to that on windows. I suspect it is the 64/32 bit issue. flash plugins do not exist for 64 bit. They expect you to run the browswer in 32 bit mode, with 32 bit flash plugins, for optimal performance. I ain't doing that to the browser, so neopets struggles. Most of the world software is still made for 32bit, and is most heavily testeddebugged on 32bit - so why go elsewhere? There are many times when I have compiled open source programs (or attempted to compile) which failed to complete - there were pointer/integer size mismatch issues.. The only time when you have a noticable (or significant) advantage for 64 bit is when you have large files of data to process. There was a time when I was processing gigabyte sized tcp dump files. With a 64 bit machine, you can put many more gigabytes of ram into the box, which aids the processing of such large files. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Backup options
Hi, Backup is the thing that everyone says you have to do, but few do it right. The key part of doing backups is the sentence: There are two times to test the quality of your backup a)before disaster hits b)after disaster hits. To test your backup - you need to run this scenario and see what happens: 1)the machine you have regularly backed up has now disappeared completely. 2)you need to recover your data to a second machine 3)does the data recover correctly to a second machine, and can the second machine now be used instead of the first machine? The key thing - can you recover to a different machine? I know one person (not me) who at their business backed up every day. It was a novel 4 machine. Then things died, and they could only get a novel 5 machine. The backup would not recover to a novel 5 machine. So he had to completely install and setup a novel 4 machine, recover the backup, and proceed. As you can imagine - this was a longer than hoped for process. It did not make for many happy campers. Derek. On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, Roy Britten wrote: I'm setting up a backup regime (database dump and file structure) from a server in the states. rsync seems a sensible tool, and I have a little experience with it. I've just come across rdiff-backup. It sounds useful, but I'd like to hear some war stories from folks who have used it before I go wandering into unknown territory. Anyone care to comment on rdiff-backup's ease of use (backing up *and* recovery), robustness, and the like? Thanks, Roy. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Backup options
Hi, Thanks Roger for your vote (in bold) of support. Which reminds me: A paper backup is actually quite good. yes - just print out your addressbook in your email program and send the printout offsite. True, a bit tedious to copy into the next email program, but it has a certain KISS principle about it.. Derek. On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, Roger Searle wrote: I'd like to do one of those +1 responses to the 2 points mentioned by Derek, however given it's importance, I'll do: +2. bold, larger font, upper case etc. I practice what is preached at work but can't claim the same at home - with regards to the frequency with which I test those backups. Plus, since that backup goes about a metre away, if my house burns down, I'm stuffed... And don't be like me and think it can't / won't happen to you - it's only because I woke up extra early one Sunday morning earlier in the year that my house didn't. Still, not enough to get me checking my ability to restore fully and keep copies off-site! Perhaps I'll read this when I get home and actually do something. Cheers, Roger Derek Smithies wrote: Hi, Backup is the thing that everyone says you have to do, but few do it right. The key part of doing backups is the sentence: There are two times to test the quality of your backup a)before disaster hits b)after disaster hits. To test your backup - you need to run this scenario and see what happens: 1)the machine you have regularly backed up has now disappeared completely. 2)you need to recover your data to a second machine 3)does the data recover correctly to a second machine, and can the second machine now be used instead of the first machine? The key thing - can you recover to a different machine? I know one person (not me) who at their business backed up every day. It was a novel 4 machine. Then things died, and they could only get a novel 5 machine. The backup would not recover to a novel 5 machine. So he had to completely install and setup a novel 4 machine, recover the backup, and proceed. As you can imagine - this was a longer than hoped for process. It did not make for many happy campers. Derek. On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, Roy Britten wrote: I'm setting up a backup regime (database dump and file structure) from a server in the states. rsync seems a sensible tool, and I have a little experience with it. I've just come across rdiff-backup. It sounds useful, but I'd like to hear some war stories from folks who have used it before I go wandering into unknown territory. Anyone care to comment on rdiff-backup's ease of use (backing up *and* recovery), robustness, and the like? Thanks, Roy. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: CLUG meeting
Hi, On Thu, 6 Nov 2008, Zane Gilmore wrote: There did not appear to be a reply to my suggestion the other day for the meeting next Tuesday. Derek and Barry... do you have any objection to doing your talks next year? I have no problem with this... Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: OT Learning 'C' - any pointers?
On Tue, 28 Oct 2008, Steve Holdoway wrote: On Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:38:22 +1300 Kerry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm currently learning my first real language (outside of various web-based languages) as part of my studies. I'm keen on bringing some of my work home to expand on it but the compiler/debugger we use is windows based and I'm keen on using something on my Ubuntu box that has a nice GUI interface as at the moment I'd rather spend my time learning C and not mucking around learning how to use command line compilers/debuggers (I'll save that for later...). Also does anyone know of any sites online that have good (basic/intermediate) howtos on C - I kinda prefer real world pointers rather than hello world type pointers Cheers, Kerry I learnt C from Kernigan and Ritchies 'An introduction to C programming', and it was my reference book for years. Now that's good for book - both a teaching aid and a reference. I think there'll be a load of people suggesting you learn an objective language. There had better not be.. Kerry said it was part of his studies - so he has no choice in the language.. I learnt C as I have learned every other language - just endeavoured to use it to complete some task. Along the way, refer back to code examples that I found. Some people provided some good comments, and eventually, it just clicked and it just flowed.. As the years went by, I have had numerous discussions on style and have ended up having to modify my coding style. At the moment, Netbeans has my attention has a IDE. It is a bit cpu intensive. Most IDE's will do code completion - provided you have done the entire project using some IDE. Few IDE's will read in code from an existing project and do code completion. But why is code completion required? cause when you have large projects with thousands of classes/methods, the brain just don't remember if it is Milliseconds or MilliSeconds (for example). The code completion does work out those fiddly details and makes the whole thing easier.. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: laptop blanking
Hi, If you use the console command I described below, you will have to do it every boot. Derek. On Fri, 24 Oct 2008, Barry Marchant wrote: Thank you, that fixed the problem. But is the change persistant between sessions or does it revert when I shut down? Barry --- Derek Smithies wrote: Hi, when the gui fails, just open a console on the display and type xset -dpms which disables DPMS (Energy Star) features. This approach is moderately brutal, but it was effective on another distro. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: laptop blanking
Hi, when the gui fails, just open a console on the display and type xset -dpms which disables DPMS (Energy Star) features. This approach is moderately brutal, but it was effective on another distro. Derek. = On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Barry Marchant wrote: Hi all, I have a compaq nx9040 which I wish to use for a continuous slide show this weekend but I can not stop the screen blanking. I am using kde, running on mains power, Display power control not enabled, blank screen saver selected set to start after 500 mins (over 8 hrs) What have i missed which is permitting screen blanking TIA Barry -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: mail readers
On Wed, 22 Oct 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What more control do you need? Quite a lot.. alpine is ideal, and is the successor to pine. I have an extensive addressbook, and each entry in the addressbook has a fcc field. Messages sent to the person specified in the to field are copied to the folder specified in the fcc field. Incoming messages are matched to the address book - and the default save folder is the folder specified in the fcc field. At the end of all that, all correspondence to a particular person (in and out messages) is saved to the same folder - so you can see in and out messages easily. Copes with large messages quite nicely. I sent a 100 meg message to a colleague here - the mail server was fine. Pine (which is what I had then) was fine. His outlook client crashed.. Don't start that arguement over message size please - I remember when mail systems had limits of 1mb.. Remote access - I can connect over ssh to do mail. So if I have a remote box to manage, and want to send email from that box, well - it all works from pine/alpine just fine.. In my view - discussion over mail clients is like a)Democrat vs Republican b)Holden vs Ford c)Debian vs Ubuntu and go on for ever, with no resolution. At the end of the day, you pick a client that best fits your needs/ability level. I am told that you can send email by telnetting to the mail port on the box and typing the raw sendmail commands Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: OT: Re: mail readers
On Wed, 22 Oct 2008, Steve Holdoway wrote: On Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:26:22 +1300 Roger Searle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Derek Smithies wrote: b)Holden vs Ford c)Debian vs Ubuntu rubbish - everyone knows and accepts the fact that Ford stands for First On Race Day... First where? First taken to the dump? Couldn't agree more... even if the rest of the pub were telling me it was Fix Or Repair Daily! But then again, 100,000 miles in my old Lots Of Trouble Usually Serious was pretty uneventful, too (: Ah. but I have heard of taxis in Australia doing a million kms. (sorry, no link) ford also stands for forgotton on race day failed on race day found on rubbish dump Like I said, no resolution on this topic - lots of discussion, no answer. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: I'm getting hammered... what should I do about it?
Hi, My thoughts were: a)the subject line was sufficiently interesting to attact attention b)it was a golden opportunity for us to point Don in the correct direction and briefly say, standard snort report, port whatever, DNS... --That way, all newbies who read the email will benefit also.. c)Keep the tone of emails to clug good - please. Derek. On Thu, 16 Oct 2008, Brett Davidson wrote: From the subject line, my first thought was lay off the booze. ;-) After reading, my second thought was to learn how to read snort if you're going to use it. That way you'll know that it is DNS traffic and (depending on if you are running a DNS server or not) what to do about it. The what to do about it thought was you should just block it with a firewall - the traffic is insignificant. :-) -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: CLUG meeting
On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Nick Rout wrote: rant There seems to be a dearth of people stepping up to the mark to talk about anything. Where are the commercial linux users in ChCh telling us about how they are helping to change the world? /rant As always, well spoken. Nick, I appreciate the way you can express something that gets you annoyed. Indeed - some might argue it was so well put the rant symbols were not required. I have done a couple of talks now, and am willing to do more talks as required. I could tell you about the minstrel rate algorithm, which Indranet Technologies has sponsored me to do for wireless networks. Minstrel is an adaptive rate algorithm (for 802.11 networks) that is far superior to anything else. It picks the optimum speed for sending packets between two radio nodes. I am told it is now in the kernel - 2.6.28. There is an impromptu talk I could do - no power points etc - just me talking. Will it change the world? It will change the world of linux 802.11 radio networks. You see, * minstrel is superior to the commercial/proprietary rate algorithm supplied by atheros. * minstrel is the default rate algorithm in openwrt. * of the various people I am aware of using atheros radios and doing adhoc networking with madwifi - all are using minstrel * minstrel now works with bc43, ath5k and the p54 drivers. * Felix Fietkau, who ported minstrel from madwifi to the kernel, is confident it will overtake PID (current algorithm) in weeks.. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: CentOS noob
On Thu, 9 Oct 2008, Steve Holdoway wrote: Let's be honest. debian screws up, redhat screws up, suse screws up, mandrake screws up. A few of them try the Winscale solution ( change their name in the hope that people forget (: ). At some point in time, every major distro has cocked up their package management. I reckon personal bias comes from which distro was working properly when you started seriously using linux. yep - I have to agree. (as a sys admin) I really can't see much difference between dpkg/rpm/the others which I forget. suse tries to limit the download volumes, and that's the biggest difference I see. I've got debian servers with uptimes measured in years ( well, except for the single reboot when they moved data centres about a year ago ), and I've got CentOS servers in the same category. Long uptimes are misleading. All a long uptime reports is the length of time you have between kernel upgrades. Which suggests you are running old kernels.. Sigh - probably not an issue for you, but. Does it *really* make that much of a difference??? I mean practically. They all provide you with a linux platform for you to play on ( or, if you're that way inclined, to be paid to play on... I didn't say that out load did I? ). I see the use of a KDE or Gnome gui as being a far bigger difference. True.. Indeed, the real difference is probably in working out how many times the supplied packages are broken. And to work that out, you should do side by side comparisons. Just my $0.02 - which is worth a lot less now than it was on Monday, Be thankful you is not in zimbabwe. With their current rate of inflation, 2c is so meaningless that even the beggars don't want it... Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: CentOS noob
Hi, On Thu, 9 Oct 2008, Steve Holdoway wrote: Running the latest, shiniest kernel is ok, once all your software is tested and proved stable on it. However, in most (server) situations it's that stability that's paramount, and installing newer kernels will usually either increase performance or functionality... and if you don't need either, then the years of uptime have proved the stability many times over! That is the stated advantage of centos - because the centos packages have already had a bedding down period in RHEL, the idea is that the supplied packages are more stable. All I know about centos is the reports I heard at cluecon 2008 - all the comments there were very favourable about centos. I have used ubuntu, and like it a lot... Then along came hardy heron+pulse_audio, and the thing is not quite right.. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: paradise dicey
Hi, Even better, try traceroute This reports the time for each leg of the route taken by the icmp packets. This verifies there is (or is not) a problem in your setup. Derek. == On Sun, 21 Sep 2008, Ross Drummond wrote: On Sun, 21 Sep 2008, Nick Rout wrote: On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 10:09 PM, Wesley Parish [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 64 bytes from 203.96.152.127: icmp_seq=1458 ttl=55 time=4608 ms 64 bytes from 203.96.152.127: icmp_seq=1459 ttl=55 time=3615 ms 64 bytes from 203.96.152.127: icmp_seq=1460 ttl=55 time=2623 ms 64 bytes from 203.96.152.127: icmp_seq=1461 ttl=55 time=1644 ms -- Wesley try this; ping -c 1 -R paradise.net.nz -R Record route.Includes the RECORD_ROUTE option in the ECHO_REQUEST packet and displays the route buffer on returned packets. Note that the IP header is only large enough for nine such routes. Many hosts ignore or discard this option. If your ISP supports this you can see the hop's taken to reach paradise,then you can test each hop with a ping to check latency. Cheers Ross Drummond -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: FTP server recommendations
Hi On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Steve Holdoway wrote: On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:18:59 +1300 Roy Britten [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm setting up an Ubuntu 8.04 Server instance and would appreciate advice on a recommended FTP server. My advice is don't. The fundamental problem with ftp is that the password is transferred over the net in clear text, so if anyone's listening... Which is only half true. I have a Centos DVD, I want to install on several boxes. The boxes are all older, and do not have DVD drives. Well, I could total my bandwidth allocation and suck down centos CDs and then spend time flipping CDs in and out of the different boxes. Not sure if I can set up the centos installation to do samba to get the files of the server. Bah. Install vsftpd, or wu-ftpd on the server, and set up anonymous ftp only. Get a net install CD and do an anonymous install of the server. All boxes are on the same LAN. My advice: ftp servers are not secure, for the reasons explained elsewhere in this thread. For anonymous read only access, these security issues are significantly reduced. Given the example above, there are times and places where a ftp server is ideal. Derek. Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: FTP server recommendations
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, Dave van Leeuwen wrote: Hi Derek, for CentOS, copy the DVD onto a machine. Export this via ftp,http,nfs (internal only ). Either burn boot.iso to a CD or dd diskboot.img to a memory stick. After booting from one of these devices, you will be asked where the rest of the distro is. The installation will suck the packages from your server. It is also useful to have your distro available via the network, as you can point yum at it. yeah - which is what I did. Exported the centos files via a ftp server. Which is the point of my comment below. - there are times when having a ftp server is useful and required. - which is one of the annoyances of the Internet. The original poster asked a reasonable question, was told, no no no, don't do that, security is bad, But the original poster's question is reasonable - as I illustrated with my example. Derek. On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 11:09 +1200, Derek Smithies wrote: Hi On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Steve Holdoway wrote: On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:18:59 +1300 Roy Britten [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm setting up an Ubuntu 8.04 Server instance and would appreciate advice on a recommended FTP server. My advice is don't. The fundamental problem with ftp is that the password is transferred over the net in clear text, so if anyone's listening... Which is only half true. I have a Centos DVD, I want to install on several boxes. The boxes are all older, and do not have DVD drives. Well, I could total my bandwidth allocation and suck down centos CDs and then spend time flipping CDs in and out of the different boxes. Not sure if I can set up the centos installation to do samba to get the files of the server. Bah. Install vsftpd, or wu-ftpd on the server, and set up anonymous ftp only. Get a net install CD and do an anonymous install of the server. All boxes are on the same LAN. My advice: ftp servers are not secure, for the reasons explained elsewhere in this thread. For anonymous read only access, these security issues are significantly reduced. Given the example above, there are times and places where a ftp server is ideal. Derek. Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/ -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: OT: Happy Millionth Moore Day to Me!
Hi On Mon, 15 Sep 2008, John Carter wrote: Ah... but putting on my mathematician hat for awhile you can fairly mechanistically transform any program with N state machines into a program with N threads, no state machines and no gotos. The pendulum swings one way, then another. they used to say, use gotos now they say,don't use gotos I read an interesting comment on gotos, http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131 where Linus Torvals explains some of the motivations to use gotos. The pendulum swung towards threads, not processes. They said, use threads, not processes. John argues it is now swinging to use processes - not threads. Whichever approach you use, it does not matter as long as the code is readable and maintainable. If it is maintainable, people will work on it and add to the project. On that one - I don't ever see the pendulum swing away. As a colleague argues, code spends most of its life in the develop and maintain phases. Since the initial writing bit is only a tiny fraction of the total life cycle, why waste time (long term) by writing hard to maintain code? Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: OT: Happy Millionth Moore Day to Me!
Hi, On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, John Carter wrote: No. I explicitly don't miss computed gotos. I loathed gotos and in particular hated computed gotos. I hated common blocks. Maintenance and bug nightmares the lot of them. Gotos - they are still here. A case statement is one form of a computed goto A break statement is another form of a goto A continue statement is another form of a goto. I don't care what the person uses, as long as it is readable and understandable. The kernel uses goto statements. They have strict rules about how they may be used. Using switch statments, with nested switch statements, with nested switch statements, where the whole thing covers a thousand lines or more, is bad bad bad. This failed the readability test. State Machines are the embedded development flavour of the month? year? (god forbid) decade? but are nothing more than multi-threaded tangle of computed goto's with a roll your own scheduler in drag. :-)) threads often break the readability - but if a thread only runs around inside one or two methods, I am happy with that. (Oh dear... I have probably offended about half my colleagues. :-)) Nope. Most people in the IT industry end up developing a thick skin, so they can cope just fine. The real problem is quite different. If you look at the life cycle of code, you see that it hangs around for a long long time. Indeed, code spends most of its time in the debug/develop/enhance phase. which means that a little care and attention at the initial writing phase will pay huge benefits later on. It is ludicrous to attempt to save time during the initial writing phase. I have seen written C++ threaded code that is easy to follow. I have seen threaded C code that was near impossible to follow. There are open source drivers out there that are state machines with threads (well, multiple task queues interrupts) that are a nightmare to follow. Other drivers are a dream to work on. My view is that it does not matter what model you use. The key point - is it followable and maintainable ? Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Ubuntu on Vista machine
Hi, On linux, qemu is very helpful. I have used qemu to test .iso files which contain live CD images. qemu -cdrom isofilename.iso when the live CD image boots up, I select the failsafe graphics mode and it runs ok (sluggish, very sluggish) but it runs.. Network settings etc don't seem to work.. Sound fails also - but that could have been a pulse audio thing.. Derek On Tue, 9 Sep 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: David Merrick wrote: Can Vmware plaer be used to run ubuntu? Have you tried qemu? Cheers Don -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: The Story of the Little Computer That Could
Hi, And did you notice that it boots in seconds? Somewhat faster than my tower PCs. Derek. On Wed, 13 Aug 2008, Douglas Royds wrote: The crustier engineers among us (myself included) might enjoy this bit of steam computer history: http://www.hp9825.com/ -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Cables to give away
Hi, Why not bring all of the cables to the next meeting? Those who attend the meeting get first pick... Derek. On Sat, 28 Jun 2008, dave wrote: On Saturday 28 June 2008 4:59:04 pm Robert Fisher wrote: I have 17 different types of cables to give away. (More than one of some.) You can see them at http://www.fisherfamily.orconhosting.net.nz/temp/cable_giveaways.html The page was put together very fast with very little care so you may have to scroll around a bit. wouldn't mind the multi plug (ummm think they're called laplink cables). dave. be okay to pick up at next linux meeting? -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: OT: Top Posting.
Hi, Jim - you made some good points. We had a debate on this list a while ago about the merits of top/bottom posting. One person described top posting as a microsoft type thing. (I think cause microsoft applications by default start the reply as a top posted answer). From that debate, the clear consensus was to keep letters short. This benefits people who insist on reading emails on bandwidth challenged devices (cell phones, slow dialup links etc). I agree - short letters are good - rambling letters that take an age to read are a pain. Reading a nice coherrent logical comment is a treat. Reading someone's nitpicking comments inside someone else's comments is a pain. Particularly when several people have added their nitpicking comments. On the merits of top posting vs bottom posting in a concise edited email: I don't care. All the rants ravings of many netizens over the last couple of decades have not stopped/fixed the practice. So I prefer to move on to other more interesting things. Yes, this is admitting defeat. I cannot stop you from posting incorrectly. Derek. On Fri, 27 Jun 2008, Jim Cheetham wrote: No, you have made a strawman argument. Top-posting is not the same as writing lines upwards rather downwards :-) Top-posting works for *some* types of conversation, bottom-posting works for others, and quote/response for a third type. Sometimes a mixture works best. There is no One True Way to reply to an email, so please everyone, stop pretending that there is. There *might* be One True Way to reply to messages in a specific forum, like this mailing list (but I doubt it) -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: [OT] computer needed
On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Caleb Sawtell wrote: Thats all well and good but this person is wanting a computer for keeping track of memberships and newsletters not for keeping huge video files. Er, well, maybe. People have asked me in the past, questions along the line of, All i want is a computer to do mail and browse and print out the odd page, what should I get ? So you run around with them and set them up a machine (linux of course) which is second hand with a small drive etc etc. And then you discover that their desired feature list was a bit longer: *want to be able to play those infernal win98se games on CD *want to be able to play and store video *want to be able to store all the digital images from their camera, which is 8mega pixel and only ever works at max resolution and is used extensively, capturing both video and stills. *want to be able to play all dvds from the dvd shop *want to be able to browse to every web site under the sun, which *want to do video games with accelerated graphics *and the list goes on and on. And that little machine you set up for them (which met the original requirements) is, of course, not up to the job. ---So my preference on hearing someone's spec is to always go big. Further, cause I don't really want to do lots of support work, I tend to suggest reliable systems... Which is driving me away from the cheap second hand things.. Then you look at the price of an expensive second hand machine, you notice the price is not a lot less than the brand new price... The question comes up, So why buy a cheap second hand machine. Note that my whole comment is based on the premise that the spec supplied by people as to what they want is invariably much less than what they actually want. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: [OT] computer needed
On Fri, 20 Jun 2008, Christopher Sawtell wrote: On Friday 20 June 2008 12:55:33 Matthew Whiting wrote: Kia ora, Molten Media for cheap. 205-A Wordsworth Street Sydenham Christchurch 8023 Phone 03 377 1154 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Computer Broker for something rather better. http://www.computerbroker.co.nz/ CHRISTCHURCH Phone: (03) 377 5195 Fax: (03) 377 5105 DragonPc (www.dragonpc.co.nz) for new, but still cheap. Having been through the debate with my colleagues over the costs: A molten media type box will come at $100 or so, with a 1ghz or so proc. A comp broker box will be $200+ they will insist on selling it with windows xp, so the price is higher. this is a couple of years old. dragonpc will sell an upgrade kit (new) for $250+gst with mem,case, mboard,cpu but no drives, and no OS. My view is that the newer box is going to last quite a bit longer than the previous choices, and on a cost/hassle basis works out best I recently bought a box from a shop which was an exlease model. It failed the memtest in every linux live cd disk. I took it back. There were other computers (of the same type) in the shop. On the next 3 computers I tried, memtest failed on all of them. The shop did take the computer back in the end, but they did mutter about linux incompatibilities. The shop felt the memory in the computers was OK. I felt sorry for anyone buying them. At which point, I looked at the hassle factor and went to dragonpc Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: [OT] computer needed
Hi, On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Nick Rout wrote: What has memtest got to do with linux? memtest comes on a linux distro's CD. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: [OT] computer needed
Hi, On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Christopher Sawtell wrote: On Saturday 21 June 2008 10:52:14 Derek Smithies wrote: A comp broker box will be $200+ they will insist on selling it with windows xp, so the price is higher. this is a couple of years old. Beg to differ. A list memberwith whom I am pretty well aquainted got a rather nice HP portable from them without an O/S just last week. Hi, thanks for the clarfication, and you are correct. In the main, broker sell machines with win xp installed. There was a linux machine there last time I looked, but they wanted $300 for it, which brings the price much too close to the price of a new box.. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: [OT] computer needed
On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Nick Rout wrote: dragonpc will sell an upgrade kit (new) for $250+gst with mem,case, mboard,cpu but no drives, and no OS. not much use without a hard drive, so you need to factor that in. Generally the broker's second hand machines home with a 40G disk, at least enough for what has been sought. yes. However, this is a linux user group, and old/small drives can be sourced from our parts kits. you do need to add an optical drive. I had a look in my parts bin (garage) and found two optical drives after a quick glance. Futher, 40Gb - how small is that? 320Gb is $70 from any of those cut price suppliers mentioned in this thread.. ((On a side note, remember how 20Mb was huge ??) (((8kb took 5 mins to save with a ZX81 to tape))) 40gb does not hold many top gear episodes. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Moving to 64 bit system
Hi, On Thu, 19 Jun 2008, Zane Gilmore wrote: Nick Rout [EMAIL PROTECTED] 19/06/2008 10:13 a.m. On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 10:04 AM, Zane Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have been shagging around with installing Kubuntu on a new work PC. you will be fine. Promise. it is kubuntu - part of the OS that has taken the linux community by storm over the last couple of years. Will I need to re-format the home partition? Why? What binaries are on the home partition that could benefit from reformatting? All the config entries on the home partition are text files. These are 64/32/128 bit safe... Does it matter whether the partition was formatted with a 32 or 64 bit system? No. The filing system (ext2, ext3 etc are all cpu bitsize independant. - they are universal. No ...so you're not sure then :-) I dunno how you dragged that conclusion out. 64 bit is a much nicer experience now than in the past. Even flash works ok now. The browser is much better now. Kubuntu will have everything just working. I am using ubuntu 8.04 on multiple 64 bit systems, and on 32 bit systems. All fine. 64bit is great - with ram at 30$gb, you can have 8gb in your machine and it will run. 8gb does make it possible to process large tcpdump files in a small amount of time. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: OT: More on Zoomin maps...
Hi, Just another comment on the swmbo line:: Many guys think they are the head of the household. The reality is that they are just the chairman of the fundraising subcommittee. Derek. On Tue, 17 Jun 2008, David Lowe wrote: umm... Rumpole of the Bailey? She who must be obeyed. 2008/6/17 Don Gould [EMAIL PROTECTED]: David Lowe wrote: Ｎｉｃｅ Ｄｏｎ． Ｎｅｘｔ ｔｉｍｅ ＳＷＭＢＯ ｔｈｒｅａｔｅｎｓ Thanks, but I'd just like to know what SWMBO stands for. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: OT: More on Zoomin maps...
On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Ross Drummond wrote: On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Derek Smithies wrote: Hi, Just another comment on the swmbo line:: Many guys think they are the head of the household. The reality is that they are just the chairman of the fundraising subcommittee. Derek. Does chairmanship of the fundraising committee entitle guys to chairmanship of the financial expenditure committee? Definately. chairmanship of the fundraising committee does entitle guys to chairmanship of the financial expenditure committee. However, the chairman of the financial expenditure committee has no voting rights. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: apt-get seg-faulting
Hi, run a memory test on the box in cases like this. Too many good IT people have gone crazy searching for config errors when the real problem was memory. Derek. On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Neil wrote: Your problem may be unrelated but apt-get update was segfaulting for us on Sarge and we did: sudo rm /var/cache/apt/*bin ..to fix it - neil On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 12:07:23PM +1200, Zane Gilmore wrote: I have a problem with an installation I am doing right now. I have got most of what I need installed but in the process I have managed to do something that seems to have broken apt-get. Every time it is run it seg faults. update seems to go and get the files it thinks it needs but seems to craps out while processing them. After doing a strace it seems to be opening a file called: /var/lib/apt/lists/mirror.aarnet.edu.au_pub_ubuntu_archive_dists_hardy_universe_binary-i386_Packages And the strace always ends with: read(6, [EMAIL PROTECTED]\nOrigi..., 32643) = 32643 --- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) @ 0 (0) --- +++ killed by SIGSEGV +++ Process 6266 detached Any ideas? Regards, Zane Visit our website at http://www.crop.cri.nz __ CAUTION: The information contained in this email is privileged and confidential. If you read this message and you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, distribution or reproduction of all or part of the contents is prohibited. If you receive this message in error, please notify the sender immediately. Any opinions or views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender and may not represent those of their employer. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: CLUG meeting tomorrow night
Hi, On Thu, 12 Jun 2008, Don Gould wrote: Does anyone know if there are issues with using GParted to resize a Vista partition? I thought vista had the ability to resize it's partitions at request of the user, or is that only for the top end versions of vitsa? Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Happy Hardy Heron discovery of the Day - Alpine
Hi, On Sat, 3 May 2008, Rex Johnston wrote: Derek Smithies wrote: I have just updated two machines at home to HH. Now, some of the neopet pages and games don't work. You have to download the lastest shockwave player, and the links don't work. It is not clear where to go in synaptic to get the right package. The mozilla plugin installer don't know where to find the plugin... Oh, one machine is a 64 bit box with nvidia. # apt-cache show flashplugin-nonfree Package: flashplugin-nonfree yes. Already installed. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Happy Hardy Heron discovery of the Day - Alpine
On Sat, 3 May 2008, Steve Holdoway wrote: I have no problems with sylpheed, and only use imap. It only brings down new headers. However, I think that people with 100,000 emails in a single folder may also need to look inwards for the cause of the problem or outwards. Tools like procmail are great - they automatically redirect mail list messages to the correct subfolder. On a busy list, with all messages going to one folder, the folder size can grow quite large. Why should I have to manually move messages from a folder just because the mail client can't cope with a large folder? I want all the messages, so I can easily search backwards through for old posts... Besides - It is a gigahz machine. The mail client should cope with lots of messages in the folder. If the mail client cannot cope with lots of messages, it is a software design issue. pine/alpine copes Perfectly with lots of messages. Other mail clients fail - that was my point. (: By shockwave, I assume you mean flash? It's now owned by adobe, and there is no 64 bit support. You can use the 32 bit player with ndispluginwrapper... here's an example link: http://www.linuxheadquarters.com/howto/64-bit/flash64.shtml Thanks for the link. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Happy Hardy Heron discovery of the Day - Alpine
On Sat, 3 May 2008, Steve Holdoway wrote: Woah there... the mail client is just reading the mailbox, and the design of that mailbox is down to the process serving your imap requests. You may have a local copy of the email, but you're also using remote software to manage / deliver new mail as well. Although it's an irrelevance, and a service you're paying for, but your ISP has to administrate / back up all of these emails as well. You can probably guess what I primarily do for a living - trust me, when you've got millions of mailboxes to look after, it's a huge undertaking (: No, it is a mail client problem. mail client A takes minutes to open a remote imap folder. mail client B (alpine) takes seconds to open the same remote imap folder. Conclusion, mail client B has a better design, and is better for sysadmins. mail client B is clearly doing something less intensive on the network. Turns out that B is using clever IMAP commands to just receive the last headers in the folder, and is consequently heaps quicker. I think that you're also not taking into account the limitations of the filesystem itself. Each email is a file, and to have hundreds of thousands of files in a single directory will never be efficient. How many levels of indirection will you be going through on an ext3 system?? Not really. $200 for a 750GB drive - seems to me that disks are getting hugely cheap. If you're wanting a searchable resource, then I personally think that a mailbox and mail client is a poor choice of toolkit. It would be a fairly trivial task to import them into an ht//Dig indexed resource or a wiki - although I have yet to see any mailing list, let alone a popular one, have a high enough s/n ratio to make it worth keeping everything! yes/no. Several lists provide a search engine of their lists that works quite nicely. Other lists provide no usable search engine. Simpler to just keep a copy of all lists. There are emails from a person that you read and go, twit (or similar) and decide to dump. Later, you receive an email from someone asking for help. The first thing you do is seach on that person's name. Since you have a copy of all previous correspondence, you find if they have indeed written to you. From a commercial perspective, you keep all written correspondence. Why not the same with email ? Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Happy Hardy Heron discovery of the Day - Alpine
On Sun, 4 May 2008, Roger Searle wrote: Do you also have the libflash-mozplugin package installed? Roger yes. I wonder if it is a browser setting. Youtube videos started working when I turned a switch to allow scripts. (security issue I know). Derek. yes. Already installed. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Happy Hardy Heron discovery of the Day - Alpine
Hi, Yep - all those flash plugins etc installed.. The neopets window is complaining that I don't have the latest shockwave X plugin youtube works fine here. java-x do provide a plugin for shockwave x in the eclipse platform. Not obvious how to make the java-x plugin work for mozilla - nor do I wish to experiment on that one... Derek. On Sun, 4 May 2008, Rex Johnston wrote: This is all i have... $ dpkg -l | fgrep flash ii flashblock 1.3.9a-0ubuntu1 mozilla extension that replaces flash plugin ii flashplugin-nonfree9.0.124.0ubuntu2 Adobe Flash Player plugin installer and about:plugins tells me Shockwave Flash File name: npwrapper.libflashplayer.so Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124 MIME Type Description SuffixesEnabled application/x-shockwave-flash Shockwave Flash swf Yes application/futuresplashFutureSplash Player spl Yes $ locate npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /var/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so Youtube works fine. Cheers, Rex -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Happy Hardy Heron discovery of the Day - Alpine
John, having been a pine convert for the last 13 years, I can only agree. pine copes real well with IMAP - few mail clients work well with IMAP. It seems that most clients are designed around pop, and then have imap pasted on as an afterthought. Consequently, on opening a folder with 10 entries, the client brings all the headers of all the messages. Riduculous. And so, such folders take a minute to open. Pine does such folders in seconds. Every now and then you find new features. pine/alpine has a setting where the default save folder for an incoming message can be derived from the addressbook. Thus, if you have a complete addressbook, and FCC entries in your addressbook, the default save folder for the incoming message is the FCC folder.. === Hardy Heron Sadness of the day. I have just updated two machines at home to HH. Now, some of the neopet pages and games don't work. You have to download the lastest shockwave player, and the links don't work. It is not clear where to go in synaptic to get the right package. The mozilla plugin installer don't know where to find the plugin... Oh, one machine is a 64 bit box with nvidia. - Any clues? Derek. On Fri, 2 May 2008, John Carter wrote: Decades ago, when this email thing came out I looked around for a good mailer and discovered pine and learnt to use that. Alas, it was not true blue open source, (stupid dumb Academia might make us money someday license) so it was never packaged with the distros ...but, it was so good, that everytime distro upgrade came around I'd swear and curse, try mutt, evolution, thunderbird, mutter, grumble, mutter, I don't have time for this ...and download and install pine again. Now the Good Folk at Washington.Edu have produced a true open source pine called alpine and version 1.0 is packaged with Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Gnice! Works just like Good Old Pine, except has better ldap integration, and very funny little ascii art busy bars! Oh yes, for those who don't know... pine and alpine are retro-style text only mailers. None of this slow/buggy gluey gui html crap. Well, actually it does a nice text-only links like rendering of html, so thats OK. Which means it's more than usually pointless to send me viral / viral infected / joke / chain emails... All the hearts and puppies and blinking stars just get dropped out. :-) Sigh! Happy me. I like alpine. John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639 Tait ElectronicsFax : (64)(3) 359 4632 PO Box 1645 ChristchurchEmail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] New Zealand -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Ubuntu Hardy Heron RC1
Hi, On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Kerry Mayes wrote: And, not to rely on the release date - I see they have replaced yesterday's 1 day to go with coming soon! http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/Xubuntu-32977.shtml says, As Ubuntu has a delay of six weeks with a new release date of the first of June, Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: OOXML The Norway Vote
Hi, http://topicmaps.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/the-norway-vote-what-really-happened/ On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: On Mon 21 Apr 2008 23:41:03 NZST +1200, Stein Magne wrote: OOXML The Norway Vote - What really happened http://tinyurl.com/6ryrle Can you post a real URL please? -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Laptop recommendations for Linux
On Tue, 8 Apr 2008, Christopher Sawtell wrote: the eeePC has the big advantage over the other two in that you can buy one through normal retail channels. I'd love to know what a member of the target audience thought of them. I was intrigued with them also, and went into dickies for a quick test. On that day, there were none in dickies - they had sold out. According to the sales guy, Dickies has sold a lot of them. They were hugely popular with techies as they were extremely portable and great for when the techy is on the road. One of the eee's would not take up a lot of space. Having space in your backpack would be good, so that when travelling through Heathrow you would have space for several sets of clothes (since you can expect your bag to get lost in the system) and it will be a while before you see your bags again. My personal view is that they are similar to the ZX81 of yesteryear. A very cheap way to get started on computers, and you end up learning quite a bit, and are then able to make a more informed choice as to the next computer to buy. Or for the hacker. Press the start over button and it reimages itself, and all the kernel mods etc disappear and you have a vanilla system. However, with just 4G of flash, and 2G already consumed with the OS, it is a bit light on space. Finally, they keyboard, mouse and disk space issues are not that important - it does have usb expansion capabilities. But when you tack on these extra things, the convenience overall size is not as good. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Next Meeting Talk...
Hi On Sat, 5 Apr 2008, Andrew Sands wrote: On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:44:16 Don Gould wrote: Cheers Don Don, I'd suggest the KISS principle. Describe what you have implemented or are using on a daily basis. Have a printout or presentation based upon that and then flesh it out based on audience responses. I agree with Andrew 100.000%. KISS works everytime. You can speak with authority, and there is a much bigger chance you can answer all the questions easily. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Meeting next Tuesday
Hi, On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Rik Tindall wrote: On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 2:46 PM, Zane Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tuesday 11th March [7.30pm] The St. Albans Neighbourhood Resource Centre, 1047 Colombo Street St. Albans. P.S. I heard rumour that Rik can't bring his projector anymore so if anybody can provide one we would be grateful. If the rumour was wrong Rik could you please let me know. Sorry guys, that is correct, for this month at least. I have to meet with a Residents' Association. I hope it goes well for you though, and maybe see you next month. Err, this is a problem. I have a Live CD to demonstrate, and an openoffice powerpoint presentation. I can bring along a computer do this on, but a projector would help.. Can anyone bring a projector? Thanks Derek -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: 21 monitors from Craig -- xorg.conf
Hi, On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: IIRC your complaint was having to manually enter modelines to get the Linux machine back up and running at a useable size. The method I mentioned lets you do this. After that, if you require multiple screen sizes, you use your system's GUI monitor config tool to add those sizes. Neither require manual modeline hacking. IIRC your complaint Sorry, not remembered correctly The actual complaint is very simple. The windows box gracefully coped with the presence of a KVM The linux box required specialist input (editing of modelines) to get it to go at higher resolutions. Other specialists might have found some options which were hard coded into the xorg.conf file. At the end of the day, a specialist was required to fix it. Further, the system's GUI monitor config tool was totally useless. The system's GUI monitor config tool could not cope with the presence of a KVM. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
RE: Meeting next Tuesday
David, On Tue, 11 Mar 2008, David Lowe wrote: I can bring a projector - I'll put it in the car if it's needed, it will be available. If you are looking out for me, I'm the strange guy limping a bit wearing sandals under my business clothes (a long story involving an iron bar nothing at all to do with computers.) Excellent, excellent. thanks for your help.. I will be the guy that arrives at 7:30pm (sorry, no can do earlier) with a computer under one arm and a monitor the other arm... Cheers, Derek. - David -Original Message- From: Derek Smithies [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, 11 March 2008 11:44 a.m. To: linux-users@it.canterbury.ac.nz Subject: Re: Meeting next Tuesday Hi, On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Rik Tindall wrote: On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 2:46 PM, Zane Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tuesday 11th March [7.30pm] The St. Albans Neighbourhood Resource Centre, 1047 Colombo Street St. Albans. P.S. I heard rumour that Rik can't bring his projector anymore so if anybody can provide one we would be grateful. If the rumour was wrong Rik could you please let me know. Sorry guys, that is correct, for this month at least. I have to meet with a Residents' Association. I hope it goes well for you though, and maybe see you next month. Err, this is a problem. I have a Live CD to demonstrate, and an openoffice powerpoint presentation. I can bring along a computer do this on, but a projector would help.. Can anyone bring a projector? Thanks Derek -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: 21 monitors from Craig -- xorg.conf
On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: On Sun 09 Mar 2008 11:13:45 NZDT +1300, Derek Smithies wrote: Then I got a new computer, and there was not space for an extra monitor/keyboard/mouse. So, I put this new computer on a KVM with the AMD64 computer. Now, the AMD64 computer came up with only 640x480. Do I understand correctly that, when connecting through a KVM, the system drops the monitor resolution to nothing with the same xorg.conf file? yes. The amd64 x config came up correctly over several reboots etc. Then I powered the amd64 down, added the KVM, added the new computer and the resolution dropped to nothing. I did not touch the xorg.conf file. xorg.conf is, in my view, broken as it does not allow the user to force a higher resolution, except by manually fixing the modeline. What's actually happening? Is xorg thinking that a new monitor has been connected (as the monitor is invisible through the KVM), looks for a new/default monitor setting, doesn't find one, and defaults to least common denominator? Not necessarly a bad defensive strategy, you could have connected a 20 year old clunker which would let the smoke out if xorg was running it at 1600x1200. Most probably, you are right. xorg, on reboot (with KVM and second computer installed), decided that there was no monitor connected and set to a minimal size. Rather than entering modelines manually, you'd be faster to enter the monitor's actual hsync/vsync rates manually, which your system tool should also let you do at 640x480. Not true. If you are writing a gui app, one of the useful tests to do is run the app on a display with different resolutions, and see how it looks. After all, not everyone will have a monitor with the same size as you. Thus, there is a point where you need to enter multiple modelines, so you can test the app on different resolutions. The bit that annoyed me the most: the new computer is a windows machine, which worked fine with the KVM. Perhaps it stored the monitor parameters for future use. If you connected a small monitor, things might go belly-up. Which do you prefer? I don't mind things going belly up, provided they do it gracefully. X could, on coming up with the new non existant monitor set to 640x480, and generate a requester: No monitor detected. Do you want me to try the old resolution (1600x1200)? Do you want to try a smaller resolution? The annoying thing was that the windows box coped gracefully with being connected to the KVM. previously, that windows box had been connected to a 1024x768 monitor. The AMD64 ubuntu 7.10 box coped badly, and required specialist knowledge to fix. --And some say linux is ready for the masses. Not quite. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: 21 monitors from Craig -- xorg.conf
Hi, On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: Install a KVM (keyboard video monitor) switch and have two computers connected to the same keyboard/video/monitor. Good point. The KVMs don't bother to pass the ID info through. The obvious (and quickest) workaround would be to remember to install Linux with the monitor temporarily directly connected to the computer, likewise when running the system's monitor configuration tool. Not true. In my setup, I have an AMD64 +ubuntu 7.10 and phillips 21 P1100 monitor that does 80 something hz at 1600x1200. xorg.conf worked perfectly, and correctly detected the monitor and correctly set it up. Good - the system's monitor configuration tool has worked right. Then I got a new computer, and there was not space for an extra monitor/keyboard/mouse. So, I put this new computer on a KVM with the AMD64 computer. Now, the AMD64 computer came up with only 640x480. Browsing the web on a 640x480 monitor for the right modeline is not fun. xorg.conf is, in my view, broken as it does not allow the user to force a higher resolution, except by manually fixing the modeline. The bit that annoyed me the most: the new computer is a windows machine, which worked fine with the KVM. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: 21 monitors from Craig -- xorg.conf
On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Nick Rout wrote: X shouildn't need modelines these days. If the monitor gives out edid info then X should automatically operate at all available resolutions with the highest being the default. Not true. Install a KVM (keyboard video monitor) switch and have two computers connected to the same keyboard/video/monitor. I did this recently, and X (ubuntu 7.10) detected my phillips P1100 21 inch monitor as 640x480 and a slow refresh rate. Don't remember the rate chosen. There is a command line tool, cvt, which will generate a mode line for a specified resolution and refresh rate. I used this tool to experimentally determine the ideal modeline, which I put in the xorg.conf file, to force X to choose a reasonable setting. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: The next CLUG meeting
Hi, how about a multi speaker couple of mins each thing. Of those coming along (and are willing to speak) give a brief talk on their best tipstricks. Me, I would be happy to talk about * using emacs editing commands in the command line * using find and xargs, * building your own custom live CD with ubuntu With just short talks requested, it is less daunting a task to speak. Derek. On Sat, 1 Mar 2008, Zane Gilmore wrote: Seeing as though I have inherited the job and we are now only 2 weeks out. I thought I had better see if we can get someone to speak on something. Suggestions are welcome but volunteers are reeally welcome. If we can't sort something out then I suppose it will be a fix-up evening and a chin-wag. If you have done something interesting and Linux-related recently then we want to hear about it. E.g. maybe you went to the LCA hint hint -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Internet banking security
Hi, On Fri, 15 Feb 2008, David Lowe wrote: - Does one need AV protection in a Linux environment? There are a couple of virus out there targetted at linux. However, they are not a significant threat, if you browse wisely. (Running a web browser while logged in as root is quite silly). Does one need AV protection - ? Not usually. depends. If you browse to suspect sites, accept all cookies immediately, you don't need AV protection. You need to change your browsing habits. - Is Yuri right that Linux is inherently more secure for internet banking? yes. - Or is the security really a function of the choice of web browser? yes. Internet Exploder got its name for a good reason - it is insecure. Security is also a function of the choice of programs on your windows computer. If you don't use IE, don't use outlook, don't use MSN messanger, your risk of infection drops hugely. - How good is the security in Linux applications that save your passwords? The security level varies. As a rule, the more mature the application, the better the security. Would the use of these tools contravene their tc's? Saving passwords in linux would definately violate their tc. I know of one person who has a live CD that he uses for all internet banking. A bit of a pain to have reboot the computer to do internet banking, but it is secure. With live distro such as xubuntu, tools such as mklivecd you can make your own live CD very easily, which contains a short cut to the bank in the bookmarks for the browser. I guess what I'm leading to is that maybe we could argue a case that Linux (installed and operated according to spec) really was more secure? Then how about we mount a campaign with banks to get them to actively promote Linux over the alternatives? ;-) You can campaign all you like. I suspect that supplying prebuilt live CD's will help this campaign heaps. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: kernel panic - not syncing
Hi, A memory check is a fantastically simple place to start, and can prevent hours and hours of frustrating searches. An excellent memory check is available in the boot menu for (almost) every install disk around. I know of serveral people who blame power supplies, and inadequacies there. This is kinda hard to diagnose, except by swapping out your power supply, and probably is not your problem. (it was 2.6.22-14 - the kernel version). To be honest though, it sounds a bit like your hard disk is corrupted. As to why the crash in the first place, not sure.. Derek. On Thu, 14 Feb 2008, Roger Searle wrote: Hi, the following occurred out of the blue today, though may be the second time it has happened. While using the machine as normal, the video cut out, and needed a hard reset. The previous time it may have occurred was about 3 or 4 days ago (where it re-booted fine), and that pre-dated running the Adept Updater yesterday. One of the updates yesterday was a kernel upgrade to (from memory) 2.6.22-something. So I can't be sure that the following is related to the update: On reboot, I get the following: RAMDISK: ran out of compressed data invalid compressed format (err=1) Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0) I have absolutely no idea what this is about, I'm googling but looking for any experience from the list about how to proceed. This email is being composed booted into Mepis - the previous installation to the above Gutsy problem. So the hardware is functional. df isn't showing me any full partitions. Any pointers gratefully received! Roger -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Joys of not quite monolithic kernels...
Hi, Pedants of the world, unite, and fight the good fight. I was trying to say in my previous email that the language we use in this thread is not ideal. Linux is a monolithic kernel + modules - it is not a micro kernel. John's original subject line says it quite nicely of not quite monolithic kernel However, he then went on to talk about micro kernels and linux. Which is misleading... Consequently, Delio's comment on message passing is crucial. a)a micro kernel uses message passing between the different components. It is possible to have user space device drivers. b)a monolithic kernel has everything in common, in the same memory space. Linux is essentially a monolithic kernel, which uses modules. /me braces for the inevitable pedantry chain-reaction. You can, but anyone who uses/partipats in open source is always braced for some form of a reaction. It is a measure of the group what the style of reaction is. When you see personal attacks, it is time to move on.. Derek. On Wed, 13 Feb 2008, Delio Brignoli wrote: On 13/02/2008, at 9:14 AM, John Carter wrote: What ever the merits of the grand debate about Micro vs Monolithic Kernels are I am not trying to be pedantic here, or maybe I am ;-) but... The difference between micro-kernels and monolithic kernels is not about having loadable modules. Informally the difference is that 'modules' access other services offered by other modules in the OS using a message passing mechanism. In linux once a module is loaded it can directly call any kernel API it likes, directly. /me braces for the inevitable pedantry chain-reaction. -- Delio -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Joys of not quite monolithic kernels...
John, I thought the debate over micro/monolithic kernel has been long since finished. True, there will be a few occasions when a micro kernel helps. However, a review of the distros shows that almost all of them are using module based kernels. Are there still people out there discussing this topic? == A quick review of the meaning of the word monolithic (as it is used on the web) notes that linux is actually a monolithic kernel + modules. From http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=23330sid=ebb28b8db70c4ca8afe3d907ed38385b Torvalds himself says: Quote: True, linux is monolithic, and I agree that microkernels are nicer. With a less argumentative subject, I'd probably have agreed with most of what you said. From a theoretical (and aesthetical) standpoint linux looses. If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. Linux wins heavily on points of being available now. It would appear that a micro kernel implies the case where users can add modules (user space device drivers) http://www.superunprivileged.org/hurd/live-cd/different.html EEks. - lots of discussion here on the merits of that one.. I think, for the purposes of this thread, John has used the word micro kernel to indicate: a core kernel that does scheduling/memory/interrupts etc + modules for extra things. Indeed, you will note the subject line is not quite monolithic kernel, which is the linux situation. a monolithic kernel indicates the situation where all drivers etc are compiled into one big binary structure, that manages scheduling/memory/interrupts and all devices + file systems + . Derek. On Wed, 13 Feb 2008, John Carter wrote: What ever the merits of the grand debate about Micro vs Monolithic Kernels are ...here is a curious data point. My CD writer ceased to write. Cease to notice blank disks. .. Lots deleted, essentially, with a module based kernel it could be fixed without a reboot. A monolithic kernel would have required a reboot. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Voip providers?
Hi, You can do a tcpdump/ethereal/wireshark it to get useful information about what is happening. If there are lots and lots of packets received at your end (say every 20, 40, or 60 ms) then you can safely assume you are receiving audio from the far end. If your application is reporting as connected, then you can assume that call control components have been set up correctly. When using the voip protocol H.323, the call control stuff is via TCP, which always seems to work for initiating a call (despite what firewalls you have) The audio is sent on UDP, which is often nuked by firewalls. For the voip protocol SIP (which most argue is the industry standard) most of the control packets and audio is sent on UDP. Again, you need to look at the packet dump - if there are lots of packets received, then you are receiving audio packets. From this point, it is a matter of sound card config to actually hear the sound. sound card config - what is the best way? The simplest is to install a second sound card on your box, and reserve this for voip (a USB headset counts as a second sound card). In my experience, the distros vary in their ability to setup and configure multiple sound cards. It is possible to multiplex system sound and your voip sound onto the same card. Not fun though - it can mean a nightmare of /etc/alsa/asound.conf editing. Finally, don't attempt to do voip on a laptop using the internal microphone and speaker. Invariably, this results in the far end hearing their words echoed back to them. Derek. == On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, Nick Rout wrote: ekiga on the laptop seems to talk with 2talk thru 2 nat firewalls (voyage linux as wireless AP and ipcop as internet gateway) openwengo/2talkphone seems to talk to 2talk at work through some sort of hardware firewall/internet modem thing that I have never bothered to investigate. Mind you I don't have a headset so all I can confirm is that it connects to the server and dials etc. Haven't had a conversation with anyone yet! A bluetooth headset would be nice. by the way an email to 2talk produced a link to their source for 2talkphone. They are big open source fans apparently. On Mon, February 11, 2008 11:38 pm, Chris Hellyar wrote: What firewall/router you using? I've still not managed to get Ekiga to talk to 2talk.co.nz. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: usb headset...
Hi, What usb headet works? pretty much any headset will work, provided it is a recent distro. One thing you can check in the store: If the headset box comes with a driver disk, it won't work. The absence of a driver disk implies the headset only uses standard USB signalling. On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, Nick Rout wrote: pardon me but why are people on this list supporting proprietary skype when open standards are so important to linux users (not to mention life the universe everything)? Because skype works in the hard places. Without fuss, really easily. The hardest voip connection to setup is where both parties are behind different firewalls, and where both parties do not have the ability (or access) to add pinholes to the firewall. for protocols such as sip, h323, this is a problem - how do they set up a call? Further, while SIP is an industry standard, it is not 100.00% adherred to. There are over a dozen open source implementations of sip - all of differing quality and interoperableness. SIP has been described as the largest denial of service attack on the IETF working process - the number of RFCs dealing with SIP is simply huge. H.323 has far higher level of interoperability - the openh323 project has become the industry standard. Skype does have a significant problem for the corporate world. If the boss decides that all communications into/outof the company are monitored (which is reasonable - the boss has supplied the environment), how can the boss monitor a skype conversation? - It is quite hard to do. V hard. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Linux coverage on Stuff
Hi, On Tue, 11 Dec 2007, Michael Fincham wrote: http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4319987a11275.html What do we make of this one? ;) The ChCh press is a paper that won the newspaper of the year award - and one would expect a high standard. I guess this article is the the exception to the rule - they boobed. Forget the Linux/Mac/Microsoft issues. The article was clearly racist. Why any editor let that be printed is beyond me. The so called Facts in the article are apallingly misleading. Typical was the comment that the MS Office equivalents don't open up a document the same way. --- Well - I have news for you. Each different version of word will open up and display the same document differently. I know of one person who has all the different versions of word on her computer, so she can editprint word documents exactly the same way as the original author did. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Bash completion - don't expand ~
Douglas,
I like the idea that one can customize their computer to do whatever.
However, you have the problem:
what happens when you have to use someone else's computer. Most likely
they will have bash as the default shell, and ~ will work in the way you
dislike
When someone else uses your computer - they will complain that the ~
symbol don't work.
I would have thought that using \~ will get most circumstances.
Derek.
==
On Fri, 7 Dec 2007, Douglas Royds wrote:
It has irritated me for some time that Bash was expanding ~ (my home directory
path). For instance, if I type:
$ ls ~/Doc Tab
Bash would expand the path to:
$ ls /home/roydsd/Documents
This is a matter of personal taste, but I'd prefer the tilde to remain,
thanks.
I've found the culprit in /etc/bash_completion. Find the function _expand(),
and edit it as follows:
# This function expands tildes in pathnames
#
_expand()
{
[ $cur != ${cur%\\} ] cur=$cur\\
# expand ~username type directory specifications
if [[ $cur == \~*/* ]]; then
#eval cur=$cur Commented out
return # Added
elif [[ $cur == \~* ]]; then
#cur=${cur#\~} Commented out
#COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -P '~' -u $cur ) )
Commented out
#return [EMAIL PROTECTED] Commented out
return # Added
fi
}
Douglas.
===
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addressee. It is subject to copyright, is confidential and may be
the subject of legal or other privilege, none of which is waived or
lost by reason of this transmission.
If the receiver is not the intended addressee, please accept our
apologies, notify us by return, delete all copies and perform no
other act on the email.
Unfortunately, we cannot warrant that the email has not been
altered or corrupted during transmission.
===
--
Derek Smithies Ph.D.
IndraNet Technologies Ltd.
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
ph +64 3 365 6485
Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: 64bit linux on Ubuntu 7.10
Hi, On Mon, 19 Nov 2007, John Williams wrote: Derek Smithies wrote: Well yes, but you are missing the real problem. The big big big problem with 64bit is application support. a)ATI and Nvidia card support is more problematic. b)Many of the apps on sourceforge etc are tested on 32 bit machines. when building on 64 bit machines, the library paths etc are wrong. It don't work. Which is often an autotool issue. (There is a rant coming on the woes/deficiencies of autotools, but I will suppress that). c)the latest linux flash plugin is available for 32 bit machines only. Yum info nspluginwrapper Adobe flashplayer works in 64 bit Fedora with the wrapper There's a wrapper for JRE too yeup - which verifies my original point, a)ATI and Nvidia card support is more problematic. Doable, but it is a pain. The model I have of software, particularly commercial software, is that I *grab the CD/url/whatever, *install in computer, hit install, *accept whatever conditions, *make ; make install and it just works. This is the standard set by the windows/mac community. Agreed, not always achieved, But this is the standard to strive for. With 32 bit cpus, the standard happens more often. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: 64bit linux on Ubuntu 7.10
On Sun, 18 Nov 2007, Philip Charles wrote: The big advantage of 64 bit is that it can address lots and lots of memory. 32 bit has something like a 4Gb limit. Well yes, but you are missing the real problem. The big big big problem with 64bit is application support. a)ATI and Nvidia card support is more problematic. b)Many of the apps on sourceforge etc are tested on 32 bit machines. when building on 64 bit machines, the library paths etc are wrong. It don't work. Which is often an autotool issue. (There is a rant coming on the woes/deficiencies of autotools, but I will suppress that). c)the latest linux flash plugin is available for 32 bit machines only. cheers, Derek. I went from 32 to 64 bit on this machine and found that I had lost apps like dosemu, so after a few months I moved back to 32 bit. I did not notice any change in speed. On 11/18/07, Ross Drummond [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:13, Phill Coxon wrote: In other words - is there any point in my doing an apt-on-cd backup of all the updates I've installed to Ubuntu 7.10, or will every package have to be downloaded again as a 64bit version anyway? Thanks. This is not an exact answer to your question. I recently set up a 64bit computer with Gentoo. Gentoo is source based distribution which downloads the source code and compiles the applications on the computer they are going to be used. This allows applications to customised and optimised according to your wishes. I compiled my applications to run on 64 bit architecture setting one of the compiler flags to; -march=x86-64 Not one of the GPL applications failed to compile. Some third party applications which supply the executable rather than the source code require 32bit emulation to run. Down at the silicon level computing is about manipulating numbers. So anything which allows these numbers to be processed in 64 as opposed to 32 bit chunks has to be a good thing. My advice is go 64 bit as much as possible. Cheers Ross Drummond -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Live CDs
Hi, In fact, the easiest approach (in my experience) is to use xubuntu. the xubuntu live cd (xubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso) is 566 megs in size, so it has plenty of room for extra stuff. install xubuntu onto a spare partition. Run this installed code and make the changes you need, which will include something like below: extend apt/sources.list to include the Romeo unstable code (this gets you the remastersys package) add in the packages you want, build whatever code you want, and then do sudo remastersys dist cp /home/remastersys/customdist.iso to whatever machine and write a CD. Apparently, you can test the live cd with qemu -cdrom customdist.iso d -m 256 but that did not work for me. Trial and error let me to qemu -cdrom customdist.iso but that don't work either. OK, burn CD's, test them, and continue. A bit slower than qemu, but it works... Customize the very simple remastersys if you seriously need to, and it is all Easy.. If you want an example of this in practice, have a look at the linuxmint distro, which is a remastersys of ubuntu. Cheers, Derek. On Sat, 15 Sep 2007, Graeme Kiyoto-Ward wrote: Hi Yes, you spelled my name correctly. I would look for topics on remastering knoppix or specifically on remastering damn small. Here are some on remastering damn small that I could find: http://www.linuxforums.org/desktop/remastering_dsl:_a_short_howto_with_a_long_preamble.html http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboard.cgi?;act=ST;f=12;t=7177 Best of luck Regards Graeme Kiyoto-Ward Aidan Gauland wrote: Graeme (sorry if I misspelled your name) at the SFD told me about that, but I came from the Mac cult and don't have Windows. But I'll keep Slax in mind as plan C. I'm doing this for the learning experience, and because I can. Isn't why the Linux kernel was created originally? But I will try to thoroughly test my changes to make sure I didn't break anything. On 15/09/2007, at 7:42 PM, Kerry Mayes wrote: I'm not much of a fan of Live CDs anymore, but when I was, I found Slax to be a remarkably easy system for creating custom Live CDs. Everything is in modules you just add them to the right subdirectory on the cd and they are loaded. There's a nice software system for creating live cds, though it's Windoze based! I think it's called myslax creator. Kerry. On 15/09/2007, Aidan Gauland [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: After seeing Damn Small Linux at Software Freedom Day, I am going to try to modify the live CD adapting this how-to... https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDCustomization ...to add some programs like Emacs, and parted, and maybe some other minor alterations. Unless someone can recommend an easier way. If it works, I will post what I did differently. Aidan -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Live CDs
Hi, Live CDs are literally taking off. There are gazillions of different ones to use. Some are focussed on being incredibly small, 2..100mb. fitting the maximum amount into 700mb being a demonstration of a bug distro (fedora live say) They all vary. Some are brilliant at hardware detection, others are mediocre. Bewarned - the instructions on remastering are often terse, and neglect points that are kinda crucial. I am of the view it is easier to take a cut down distro and add things to it, which is safer than taking stuff of (to make room for your additions). You see, if you take stuff off, what gets broken? A colleague suggested basing things on fedora 7, and using the make live cd tool, as the ideal approach. He said it got him to his desired end goal the quickest. My thinking at the moment is to use puppy and add to it, via puppy unleashed, and see how that goes. I have lots of dud CDs so far, and expect to collect a few more.. However, puppy will let you remaster to a USB memory stick, and that might save some angst over CDs going wrong. Derek. = On Sat, 15 Sep 2007, Kerry Mayes wrote: I'm not much of a fan of Live CDs anymore, but when I was, I found Slax to be a remarkably easy system for creating custom Live CDs. Everything is in modules you just add them to the right subdirectory on the cd and they are loaded. There's a nice software system for creating live cds, though it's Windoze based! I think it's called myslax creator. Kerry. On 15/09/2007, Aidan Gauland [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: After seeing Damn Small Linux at Software Freedom Day, I am going to try to modify the live CD adapting this how-to... https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDCustomization ...to add some programs like Emacs, and parted, and maybe some other minor alterations. Unless someone can recommend an easier way. If it works, I will post what I did differently. Aidan -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Tip for the Day: gdmap and filelight, finding the disk hogs.
Hi, du ~ | xdu works quite well also.. A tad slow when applied to a large directory, but anyhow. Derek. == On Wed, 12 Sep 2007, John Carter wrote: Here are two entirely different but both pretty visualizations of where all you disk space went to... filelight - creates concentric rings. gdmap - creates boxes in boxes. Both available via apt-get from debian / ubuntu or http://gdmap.sourceforge.net http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/ Of course ... du -akx ~ | sort -n | less Is ugly, but effective. John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639 Tait ElectronicsFax : (64)(3) 359 4632 PO Box 1645 ChristchurchEmail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] New Zealand -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Distro war - should we have one?
On Thu, 23 Aug 2007, John Carter wrote: What is needed is a If you have this situation, use one of these guide. Absolutely correct. So what are the situations? good/bad network access plays all media types - mp3, wmv, avi, etc (out of the box) graphics acceleration(out of the box) similarity to windows online availability of every package under the sun ? (rules out distros like Gobo linux, where you may have some issues in getting package X installed running) similarity to mac - GnuStep anyone? skill level of user (some tweaking may be required to get package X to to work) Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Re: Re: Advice on building PC?
Hi, On Wed, 8 Aug 2007, Chevhq Car wrote: D'oh. People like those should be chained to the antistatic mat... Maybe. In fact, is the supervisor more at fault for letting a staff member work in a very (static) unsafe manner? The guy running around in socks is only doing what he thinks is OK. However, if the person has been told what to do, and is not following instructions, chaining is not enough. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Advice on building PC?
Hi, static is a weird weird thing. You can be touching the right things, and even strapped, and still blow equipment. - what happened ? you scuffed the carpet while strapped/touching. - you picked things up too quickly - not enough time to dissippate the charge. You can install the equipment, and it works. but 6 months later it dies. - turns out that if you had been more careful with the installation, it would run for years. An interesting point to note is that the anti-static bag is actually a Faraday cage[1]. Put your gear in one of these when transporting it from one potential to another - or when you disconnect from one machine, go to a different bench, and reconnect. Yes, you can hang on to gear with one hand. Occassionaly, one forgets and lets go. Personally, I like to have both hands available when I work. Derek. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage On Mon, 6 Aug 2007, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: On Mon 06 Aug 2007 14:57:45 NZST +1200, Chevhq Car wrote: I was personally present when one young fellow, working for a not unknown company, politly showed me how he works by just touching his hands to the computer case whilst building. This was on a hot Nor-west day. I didn't feel too sorry for him when he went to explain to his manager that the New Custom ordered pc would not boot despite every thing he had tried. Then he didn't do the touching right - believe it or not, that's all that's necessary electrically speaking. You have to touch the right things though. Much safer to use a strap though, esp if you're unsure. I've handled some of my own gear without strap heaps of times and don't recall a problem. I do get the strap out when it's someone else's gear, or something new - prevents any arguments. Volker -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Test your C knowledge here.
Hi, I was at a conference in chicago (www.cluecon.com) and one of the presenters there asked a question: Is the following line of code legal? 2[abcde]; Answer to come, after any discussion.. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Test your C knowledge here.
Hi, Well, it comes from the management of the square braces. 2[abcde]; is equivalent to (from the compilers point of view) to *(2 + abcde); which is *(abcde + 2); which is the character 'c'; which is definately legal. There was general agreement from the discussion on this code that anyone who wrote code like the above should be fired immediately. = Yes, with C you can make spaghetti. However, think carefully. I would suggest that almost any language allows you to make spaghetti. There will always be someone on the staff that writes code in a fashion that is hard to read and debug. Great projects have been written in C (which are not spaghetti). The reason? The authors worked hard at readability and cleanness etc. This takes effort, but pays huge dividends. Derek. On Mon, 2 Jul 2007, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: Is the following line of code legal? 2[abcde]; Not for anyone caring about legibility. The string inside the [] translates into a pointer to an array of char. Pointers as array index aren't right, there should be an offset from the base pointer of the array, so I'd say, not legal. The 2 is a constant, there should be an identifier which gives a pointer to which the array index is added. Knowing C, of course any spaghetti goes. So the 2 is the pointer to the first element of the array, to which the pointer to the const char string array, if it can be converted to integer, is added. So it could work. Unfortunately. Or there is hope that newer compilers put a stop to this nonsense. Volker -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Out of network ports - what to do?
Hi, I've been trying to stay way the hell away from this one, there's more inaccuracies in this thread than I could possibly deal with. Me too. You need to be careful, there's FUD in this. In the case of switches, cable lengths are irrelevant until the switch to switch connection gets to about 100 metres. Each switch-to-switch or switch-to-PC connection (and I am talking about switches) is a segment and so each segment is a collision domain in itself. True, but also wrong. The specification says 100m. Thus, we all talk about 100m. You can get away with way more than 100m. It depends on your traffic flow. If it is a congested network, you will definately want to get lengths below 100m. If it is a lightly loaded network, 200m will work. Performance will be suboptimal. However, if mot of the network data is actually web traffic, the real limit is the speed of your ADSL/cable. - And you probably won't notice the difference between 200 and 100m. Now, what does lightly loaded mean? Try it and see. If it works fine, it is ok. Derek. -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
Re: Would you lend us $200?
Hi, Sorry Don, but I tend to agree with Nick. Further, I would add that a laptop is (once a few years have passed) an incredibly unreliable bit of gear. As a kid, I would feel cheated if I borrowed the money, bought the laptop, and then it died (while not paid off). My guess is that at the time of death, repayments stop. and then what happens? I seem to recall hearing of a well known finance company that went bust cause they lent money on cars (which are slightly more reliable than laptops) Derek. On Thu, 17 May 2007, Nick Rout wrote: I realise that there would be a certain amount of largesse in this, but it is extremely risky to lend on consumer goods, even more so second hand ones. Even aside from that, the problem is that it is legally impossible for a person under 18 to enter into a contract, so if they don't repay the loan you have no recourse, not even a right to repossess the laptop. These kids should do what everyone else does - rely on their parents to borrow the money, give them a laptop, or get a job. On Thu, May 17, 2007 6:30 pm, Don Gould wrote: I did a quick poll of the LES kids today and discovered that almost all of them are saving for some sort of laptop. Kids can't get finance. I'm thinking about setting up some sort of 'trust' arrangement where they can borrow the money (with perants permission) to buy a budget laptop off trademe. What I'm interested to know is how many CLUGer's would like to provide some of the financing. It would be a loan only and also repaid with interest. Comments welcomed. Cheers Don -- Don Gould 2/59 Peverel Street, Riccarton, Christchurch, New Zealand Phone: +64 3 348 7235 www.bowenvale.pointclark.net/funny www.bowenvale.pointclark.net/benjamin/ www.thinkdesignprint.co.nz - www.tcn.bowenvale.co.nz - www.bowenvale.co.nz - www.hearingbooks.co.nz - www.crra.org.nz - www.justhelicopters.co.nz - www.buxtonsquare.co.nz - skype:ThinkDesignPrint?add - Good ideas: www.solarking.co.nz -- Derek Smithies Ph.D. IndraNet Technologies Ltd. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ph +64 3 365 6485 Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/
