[SLUG] mount LVM from Ubuntu live CD
Can it be done? All the instructions I've found on the net require installation of lvm2 - not sure this is practical on Live CD, even if it was connected to the net, which it isn't. The computer belongs to a club (I haven't had direct access to it yet) - the administrator has vanished and taken the password with him and the drive is now at least partly corrupted and won't boot without a root password. fstab tells me it's LVM. OS is Fedora 7.x. Would a Fedora live CD mount it? DSL maybe? I don't have either but would get one if it worked. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Linux Software Review Day
Its Software Review Day today, So if your reading this make sure you have posted your review. So for my review ill be reviewing a program called xwinwrap, What is this program you say??? well it enables you to have a animated desktop :-O , yes its true, you can animate your desktop and its easy. I'm running Ubuntu so my instructions are as is. Open up your terminal and us these commands to download and install: sudo apt-get install build-essential libx11-dev x11proto-xext-dev libxrender-dev libxext-dev cvs * cvs -d :pserver:anon...@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/xapps co xwinwrap * * cd xwinwrap * * make * * sudo cp xwinwrap /usr/bin So hopefully you have successfully downloaded and compiled and installed. To the fun part know, with the next example you will use the glmatrix screen saver as your desktop. * nice -n 15 xwinwrap -ni -o 0.20 -fs -s -sp -st -b -nf -- /usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix -root -window-id WID So if you look at your desktop you should have the matrix screen saver streaming over top of your desktop, how cool :-! , you may notice that its a bit transparent well you can change that if you like plus may other things about the behaviour by changing the command switches. xwinwrap [-g] [-ni] [-argb] [-fs] [-s] [-st] [-sp] [-a] [-b] [-nf] [-fl] [-o OPACITY] -- COMMAND ARG1... -g geometry -ni no input -argb argb, Alpha, Red, Green, Blues -fs fullscreen -s sticky -st skip taskbar -sp skip pager -a above -b below -nf noFocus -o opacity=# Between 0 and 1 Your not limited to just the glmatrix screen saver, any screeen saver in the /usr/lib/xscreensaver directory should work a treat. Stay tuned every Linux Software Review Day every Friday for more cool Reviews! for moive's is * xwinwrap -ni -o 0.6 -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -- mplayer -wid WID -quiet /home/josh/Documents/this_is_the_path_to_the_movie.mpg -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] removing samba
I needed to do some file sharing recently and now that the task is finished so I want to remove the Samba service. I'm using Ubuntu 9.10. in Synaptic search: samba shows that the following items are installed; samba samba-common samba-common-bin smbclient libpam-smbpass libsmbclient libwbclient0 nautilus-share python-smbc When I mark samba for removal no other files on this list are marked. So is just marking samba for removal sufficient to stop this service from starting at boot... and I don't want to keep files that only rely on samba alone as they'll be superfluous. But when I select samba-common to be removed, Synaptic notifies me of a list of other files that it will also remove with samba-common - one of them being ubuntu-desktop. I'm not so sure that I want ubuntu-desktop removed! advice/suggestions/help are welcome :) thanks... Meryl -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] removing samba
If baffles me as to why it's so difficult to stop a service on boot in ubuntu but read this post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1341947 I also don't see why it's been made hard to pull samba out, maybe someone more ubuntu friendly can explain how to remove the program it's self but for now if the service is off it shouldn't bother you. You could also just try removing entries in /etc/samba/smb.conf if u can't stop the service On 19/02/2010, at 8:11, meryl gnu...@aromagardens.com.au wrote: I needed to do some file sharing recently and now that the task is finished so I want to remove the Samba service. I'm using Ubuntu 9.10. in Synaptic search: samba shows that the following items are installed; samba samba-common samba-common-bin smbclient libpam-smbpass libsmbclient libwbclient0 nautilus-share python-smbc When I mark samba for removal no other files on this list are marked. So is just marking samba for removal sufficient to stop this service from starting at boot... and I don't want to keep files that only rely on samba alone as they'll be superfluous. But when I select samba-common to be removed, Synaptic notifies me of a list of other files that it will also remove with samba-common - one of them being ubuntu-desktop. I'm not so sure that I want ubuntu-desktop removed! advice/suggestions/help are welcome :) thanks... Meryl -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] removing samba
- Original Message - From: meryl Sent: Friday, 19 February, 2010 8:11:53 AM I needed to do some file sharing recently and now that the task is finished so I want to remove the Samba service. I'm using Ubuntu 9.10. in Synaptic search: samba shows that the following items are installed; samba samba-common samba-common-bin smbclient libpam-smbpass libsmbclient libwbclient0 nautilus-share python-smbc Hi Meryl, If you jump on the command line and type apt-cache show samba then scroll down you'll see this (this was on a Ubuntu 8.04 system - YMMV): Currently, the Samba Debian packages consist of the following: . samba - LanManager-like file and printer server for Unix. samba-common - Samba common files used by both the server and the client. smbclient - LanManager-like simple client for Unix. swat - Samba Web Administration Tool samba-doc - Samba documentation. samba-doc-pdf - Samba documentation in PDF format. smbfs - Mount and umount commands for the smbfs (kernels 2.2.x and above). libpam-smbpass - pluggable authentication module for SMB/CIFS password database libsmbclient - Shared library that allows applications to talk to SMB/CIFS servers libsmbclient-dev - libsmbclient shared libraries winbind - Service to resolve user and group information from Windows NT servers . It is possible to install a subset of these packages depending on your particular needs. For example, to access other SMB/CIFS servers you should only need the smbclient and samba-common packages. So with the exception of the nautilus/python bindings Synaptic seems to correspond to the list. Notice that last line? ;) Read on... When I mark samba for removal no other files on this list are marked. So is just marking samba for removal sufficient to stop this service from starting at boot... and I don't want to keep files that only rely on samba alone as they'll be superfluous. Keep in mind there are 2 halves to the Samaba packages: server components and client components (see the description next to samba-common?) with some common bits they both share. You probably only want to get rid of the server components. But when I select samba-common to be removed, Synaptic notifies me of a list of other files that it will also remove with samba-common - one of them being ubuntu-desktop. I'm not so sure that I want ubuntu-desktop removed! Don't sweat the ubuntu-desktop package. It's not a real package, it's a meta-package which depends on all the components for an interactive desktop etc. If you go to the command line (again...sorry) and type apt-cache show ubunut-desktop you'll notice in the Depends section it relies on smbclient. So if you remove the smbclient package the package manager must remove the ubuntu-desktop meta-package to maintain dependancies. HOWEVER, removing a meta-package DOES NOT remove the packages it depends on :) So it's safe. Getting back to your original query, you should be able to remove: samba swat samba-doc samba-doc-pdf libpam-smbpass winbind Just leave the smbclient package and ubuntu-desktop should be fine. Worst case scenario, hose ALL the samba stuff (which will take out ubuntu-desktop as colateral) then simply re-install ubuntu-desktop. This will ensure you only get the bits of samba required to satisfy ubuntu-desktop when you re-install it. Not perfect, but it is simple. Have fun! -- James -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] removing samba
meryl wrote: I needed to do some file sharing recently and now that the task is finished so I want to remove the Samba service. I'm using Ubuntu 9.10. in Synaptic search: samba shows that the following items are installed; samba samba-common samba-common-bin smbclient libpam-smbpass libsmbclient libwbclient0 nautilus-share python-smbc When I mark samba for removal no other files on this list are marked. Samba is the samba server. Thats the one you want to remove. Samba-common and samba-common-bin contain files and programs used by both the samba server and samba client programs. You probably don't want to remove these. But when I select samba-common to be removed, Synaptic notifies me of a list of other files that it will also remove with samba-common - one of them being ubuntu-desktop. I'm not so sure that I want ubuntu-desktop removed! Ubuntu-desktop is a meta-package, a package that contains no files itself, but depends on a bunch of other things that would be useful to have if you are running an ubuntu desktop machine. However, unless you really know what you are doing, you should probably keep ubuntu-desktop installed. Erik (who always uses the command line dpkg and apt-* tools) -- -- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] removing samba
On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 08:11 +1100, meryl wrote: I needed to do some file sharing recently and now that the task is finished so I want to remove the Samba service. I'm using Ubuntu 9.10. ... When I mark samba for removal no other files on this list are marked. So is just marking samba for removal sufficient to stop this service from starting at boot... and I don't want to keep files that only rely on samba alone as they'll be superfluous. At the command line: sudo apt-get autoremove The clean up 'mostly' just works but sometimes dependent libraries will be left lying around. Also in synaptic, check for a section 'Not Installed (residual config). If you want you can flag these for complete removal, cleaning up more package information. But when I select samba-common to be removed, Synaptic notifies me of a list of other files that it will also remove with samba-common - one of them being ubuntu-desktop. ubuntu provides a method for connecting to Windows shares as a client, this is part of desktop. I would not recommend removing it because upgrades become harder. Ta Ken -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] mount LVM from Ubuntu live CD
I've read in the past that the alternate ubuntu live cd has lvm support built in. Maybe check that out, also maybe something like knoppix could do the trick On 19/02/2010, at 0:00, david da...@kenpro.com.au wrote: Can it be done? All the instructions I've found on the net require installation of lvm2 - not sure this is practical on Live CD, even if it was connected to the net, which it isn't. The computer belongs to a club (I haven't had direct access to it yet) - the administrator has vanished and taken the password with him and the drive is now at least partly corrupted and won't boot without a root password. fstab tells me it's LVM. OS is Fedora 7.x. Would a Fedora live CD mount it? DSL maybe? I don't have either but would get one if it worked. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Problems with DVD creation
On Thu, 18 Feb 2010 02:54:10 +1100 elliott-brennan m...@elliott-brennan.id.au wrote: Hi all, I'm quite stuck and would really appreciate some advice/assistance/ideas. My apologies for the long post but I'm trying to be clear about what's happening and trying to solve it without wasting people's time. I'm having a weird experience with DVD creation and playing. Presently using Kubuntu Karmic 9.10. All the hardware is the same as prior to upgrading from 8.04. I installed 9.10 about four months ago. SNIP BUT get this: If I hit the key that looks like this on the DVD player and in-car DVD player | (forwards by scene??) and then hit the play button I get the first video in the queue and sometimes can | through to the second video() SNIP Well, I'm stumped. Well and truly. Any help would be very gratefully and willingly accept...I'm too confused and tired now. Hi Patrick, Feels like teaching my grandmother how to suck eggs to give *you* any advice on videos, but . My power supply blew out last week and so I had to fire up an old machine. I installed Ubuntu Koala on it, and did all the updates. Using DVDStyler, I noticed that the setting on the button properties that tells it where to go didn't stick. Every time I made any little change I had to go back and reset the button properties telling the thing where to go. (I always use the Jump to titleset Action settings) In a panic, I checked that the DVD works in the old player and it does (two titles). I'm back on Debian Lenny now, so can't confirm any of this. Anyway, it seems funny that it would work on your computer but not the DVD player. Cheers, Alan Regards, Patrick -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- Alan L Tyreehttp://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan Tel: 04 2748 6206 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Problems with DVD creation
On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 08:49 +1100, Alan L Tyree wrote: I'm back on Debian Lenny now, so can't confirm any of this. Anyway, it seems funny that it would work on your computer but not the DVD player. Brings to mind. Check the quality of the DVD media. Sometimes crappy DVD's will not read properly on cheaper hardware. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] removing samba
Thank you Ken, Erik, James Mike for your replies. You are a wealth of information! non-dependent Samba pkgs removed, restarted and I'm very happy! thanks again cheers, Meryl -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Netbooks .... Again (7 months on) Are you still happy?
Hi Slug, I know we did this a while back, but that was July last year already. So, as I'm now in the market for a new netbook, I wanted to follow up and ask those of you who have bought in the last 6 months; 1. What you bought 2. Are you still happy 3. How has the battery life stood up over the 6m. 4. What sort of battery life are you getting (esp. now after 6 months) 5. How easy was it to get your chosen Linux up and running (this is of course relative to the person - Me. I'm no genius, but I can figure it out if I have to) 6. How has the build quality stood up 7. What sorts of quirks have you discovered I know Marghanita was big on the Kogans. How many others bought one of those? Prob with Kogan is apparently sold out till April. Recent discussion on Whirlpool has lots of people buying a Benq from onlinecomputer.com.au, but they don't appear to be too linux friendly - some complaints there. What about MSI, Lenovo's, Sony, anything else? Which processor should I be avoiding at this point? -- Kind Regards Kyle -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Inaugural Sydney Devops Meetup
Hi all, The Inaugural Sydney Devops Meetup will be this Thursday (the 18th of February 2010), at the James Squire Brew House on King Street Wharf. People will start arriving from 18.30 onwards. Devops is a movement of like-minded sysadmins and developers interested in bridging the artificial gap between our camps. The event will be an informal meetup where people can meet and greet others interested in or practising Devops in any way shape or form. If you'd like to attend, we ask you reply to this thread on the recently launched devops-aus mailing list. http://groups.google.com/group/devops-aus/browse_thread/thread/22d7c9ea060f08a Hope to see you there! Lindsay -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: [SLUG-ANNOUNCE] SLUG February Monthly Meeting - Python Game Programming *Tutorial*
Hi, Just to warn people this isn't a command line program, if you're purely in the command line then it's not going to work (found this after trial and error). I'm not very clued up on Python, another error i got what after successfully vim-ing and executing the python test.py script i get this message in the x terminal: Xlib: extension Generic Event Extension missing on display :1010.0. Xlib: extension Generic Event Extension missing on display :1010.0. it still works, but is that going to cause other problems? I'm in over NX client to my server (it's like vnc), could it have anything to do with that? if i was in x natively would this go away? I'm (temporarily) running Open SuSE 11.2 as my server and did this testing on there. On 13/02/2010, at 16:30, Sridhar Dhanapalan presid...@slug.org.au wrote: Some corrections and clarifications: * The date is Friday 26 February. We need to start at 6:30pm sharp in order to complete the tutorial on time. * The address is Google Australia, Level 5, 48 Pirrama Road, Pyrmont. It is across the road from Star City Casino. Apologies for the inconvenience. Please make sure of the following: * Sign up through Eventbrite so that we can properly plan space and facilities: http://slug.eventbrite.com * You have a laptop set up with the requisite libraries *before* the workshop begins * I have added instructions for setting up with Fedora and OLPC XO * Please contribute to the wiki page with directions for setting up in other environments * If you need assistance, show up early Thanks, Sridhar -- Forwarded message -- From: Tim Ansell mit...@mithis.com Date: 12 February 2010 05:54 Subject: [activities] SLUG FebruaryMonthly Meeting - Python Game Programming *Tutorial* To: annou...@slug.org.au Cc: slug@slug.org.au, activit...@slug.org.au You can read the full version of this announcement at http://slug.org.au/node/123 == Summary == Date: Friday 29nd of January (Friday next week). Start Time: Arrive at 6:15pm for a 6:30pm *sharp* start Format: Python Game Programming, BOFs, Pizza Dinner Where: Google Australia, opposite Star City *** You will need a setup laptop to participate in this tutorial. ** * Instructions for setting up your laptop are listed at http://wiki.slug.org.au/pythonprogrammingsetup == SLUG January Monthly Meeting == Instead of running two 45 minute talks will be having two Python game tutorials. At the end of each tutorial you should have a fully playable game developed and running! The first tutorial will be suitable for beginners of all ages, no programming experience will be required. The tutorial will focus around a Punch the Monkey game, but there should also be enough meat for more advanced people to create something cool. The second tutorial will be suitable for people who want to advanced further and will concentrate on extending skills learnt in the earlier tutorial. Some programming experience is recommended for this tutorial. During this tutorial people will create a clone of either space invaders or asteroids. As the tutorials will be interactive you will need to bring a laptop. You will also need to set-up your laptop with the appropriate software. The software runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. You will need to install: * Python - http://python.org * Pyglet - http://pyglet.org * Rabbyt - http://matthewmarshall.org/projects/rabbyt/ To test that everything works, I have included a small Python program which will display It works if everything is working. To do so on Ubuntu, you would use the following commands; # Install python and easy_install apt-get install python python-setuptools # Install pyglet and rabbyt easy_install pyglet easy_install rabbyt # Test everything is working python test.py If you figure out instructions for other operating systems or Linux versions please add them at: http://wiki.slug.org.au/pythonprogrammingsetup *** If you have problems, please turn up **early** so we can fix them! = Meeting Details = SLUG is the very mis-named Sydney Linux User Group. We are a general Open Source interest group which runs our primary event on the last Friday of every month (except December). Meetings are open to the general public, and are free of charge. Our venue is Google, Level 5, 48 Pirrama Road, Pyrmont. It's across the road from Star City Casino. A map of the area can be found here[1], and public transit directions are at [2]. Appropriate signage and directions will be posted around the building. You will need to sign-in to enter the venue. This can be performed when you arrive, but to save time we recommend that you do so online beforehand at Eventbrite ( http://slug.eventbrite.com ). If you are unsure, please sign up as a 'maybe'. This allows us to organise adequate meeting space and facilities. You do not need to create an account to indicate your attendance. = Meeting Schedule = We start
Re: [SLUG] Netbooks .... Again (7 months on) Are you still happy?
Kyle == Kyle k...@attitia.com writes: Kyle Hi Slug, I know we did this a while back, but that was July last Kyle year already. So, as I'm now in the market for a new netbook, I Kyle wanted to follow up and ask those of you who have bought in the Kyle last 6 months; Kyle 1. What you bought 2. Are you still happy 3. How has the battery Kyle life stood up over the 6m. 4. What sort of battery life are you Kyle getting (esp. now after 6 months) 5. How easy was it to get your Kyle chosen Linux up and running (this is of course relative to the Kyle person - Me. I'm no genius, but I can figure it out if I have Kyle to) 6. How has the build quality stood up 7. What sorts of Kyle quirks have you discovered I bought an Acer Aspire One a year ago, and am still happy. In fact I'm typing this on it now! Main problems are: -- slow SSD -- when the laptop is clsoed you can't see the power LED, so can't tell if it's suspended, on, or off. -- cover is a fingerprint magnet. I bought wioth the small battery, and am still getting 90 minutes out of it, after a year of heavy use. It only ever gave me 2hrs so that's not bad. When it dies I'll be tossing up whether to get the 6-cell battery (purportedly 5 hours, but an extra 500g), or the 3 cell one I have noe (2 hours, but the whole thing weighs only 900g.) Peter C -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] RAID and LVM
On 18/02/2010 16:45, Paul De Audney wrote: Hi, On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 3:18 PM, Nigel Allend...@edrs.com.au wrote: I want to set up a pair of 1 TB drives on an HP DL145 G3 and I'm looking for suggestions as to the best way to partition them. Would I be best using software RAID and LVM? Given that it's a fairly busy machine (mail server for 40+ users) I'd like to achieve: 1) Speed How much speed do you really need for a email server? For 40-100 users 2x SATA drives in software raid 1 should be sufficient. 2) Reliability Sure software raid 1 will give you that. Make sure you install grub on both drives so you can boot off either in case one dies. Also make sure you monitor for failures. 3) Ease of maintenance. Document the setup. And keep the docs current. Anyone care to take a punt at a layout? This really depends on your requirement for how much email you want to store on the system, duration of logs etc. Will the system be doing anything else? If so the layout might change. I would personally use something along the lines of the following. /boot (md0 100mb) Create another raid 1 array md1 fully allocate this to a PV. I usually call the PV the hostname of the machine. So if I need to access the disk/s from another system I know which system the disk is from. / - LV called root 3-4GB /var/spool/mail - LV called mailspool 1-5 GB (I am assuming I would be storing mail elsewhere such as /home/user/Maildir) /var/log - LV called logs, 5 GB to start with. I'd also have mail logs compressed and rotated daily. Archive as long as you need too. /home - LV called home, 50GB to what ever you deem required for user email storage needs. I'd have users storing mail in their home directories so they can use IMAP and leave mail on the server. If I was doing anything with a database, I would have a dedicated LV for /var/lib/mysql or /var/lib/pgsql. This would allow me to snapshot those volumes for backups etc. Thanks Paul, you just confirmed some of what I was thinking - it's always nice to get a warm feeling though :) The machine currently uses /home/%U%/Maildir for mail storage as you suggested. The rest of the suggestions I'll ponder over a couple of beers this weekend. Thanks to all who posted - makes me glad the SLUG is there. Have a great weekend. Nigel. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Netbooks .... Again (7 months on) Are you still happy?
Peter Chubb wrote: I bought an Acer Aspire One a year ago, and am still happy. In fact I'm typing this on it now! Main problems are: -- slow SSD -- when the laptop is clsoed you can't see the power LED, so can't tell if it's suspended, on, or off. -- cover is a fingerprint magnet. Nice hardware. I've had to work on a few of these for some people who bought into the Linpus black hole of hell where some updates or video streaming doesn't work on older models. Deleting Linpus and installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix fixed that one. Dell Minis are nice. So are the Samsung netbooks. Resist the temptation to spend large piles of money. Plenty of nice netbook hardware out there. I still have my EeePC 701 which has done some airports and some more. I now have an EeePC 1005HA which I used to write a Fosdem report for issue 85 of - www.linuxuser.co.uk. Using that I edited 200 photographs from my Nikon camera in one hour. Happy ? Yeh... you bet... only happier when watching England v Australia playing test match cricket or eating roo sarnies. Richard www.sheflug.org.uk -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Netbooks .... Again (7 months on) Are you still happy?
Peter Chubb wrote: I bought an Acer Aspire One a year ago, and am still happy. In fact I'm typing this on it now! Main problems are: -- slow SSD -- when the laptop is clsoed you can't see the power LED, so can't tell if it's suspended, on, or off. -- cover is a fingerprint magnet. Nice hardware. I've had to work on a few of these for some people who bought into the Linpus black hole of hell where some updates or video streaming doesn't work on older models. Deleting Linpus and installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix fixed that one. Dell Minis are nice. So are the Samsung netbooks. Resist the temptation to spend large piles of money. Plenty of nice netbook hardware out there. I still have my EeePC 701 which has done some airports and some more. I now have an EeePC 1005HA which I used to write a Fosdem report for issue 85 of - www.linuxuser.co.uk. Using that I edited 200 photographs from my Nikon camera in one hour. Happy ? Yeh... you bet... only happier when watching England v Australia playing test match cricket or eating roo sarnies. Richard www.sheflug.org.uk -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] cloud / VM storage
Hi, I know that VPS and cloud hosting has been discussed here quite a bit, and on the basis of that discussion we've started using Linode for some virtual services, so thanks for the recommendations for them to those who posted. However storage at Linode is very expensive -- adding additional GB is around $2 per GB per month. Does anyone have a recommendation for a VM provider where the storage space is cheap, for such things as off-site backups? Thanx, -- Del Babel Com Australia http://www.babel.com.au/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Netbooks .... Again (7 months on) Are you still happy?
On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 09:47 +1100, Peter Chubb wrote: I bought an Acer Aspire One a year ago, and am still happy. +1 on the Aspire One. I have one that I picked up, oh, maybe 18 months ago and it's been my main PC since. Unlike Peter I bought a model with a hard drive, which is no worse than any other laptop hard drive I've used. I'd agree with everything else he's said. The hardware support is nice. Initially had some minor problems with the wifi radio not coming back after resume, but under the most recent Ubuntu everything works perfectly. Any other current Linux should be fine. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Problems with DVD creation
Ken Foskey wrote: On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 08:49 +1100, Alan L Tyree wrote: I'm back on Debian Lenny now, so can't confirm any of this. Anyway, it seems funny that it would work on your computer but not the DVD player. Brings to mind. Check the quality of the DVD media. Sometimes crappy DVD's will not read properly on cheaper hardware. I can second that motion -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Tutorial Friday week
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hi All, First some info: I have an old Acer Travelmate 529ATX with 512Mb RAM(its max). It has a P111 (coppermine) about 900 MHz and a 120GB HDD. At the moment I am running PCLinuxOS and dual booting with XP. I have given Linux a 10GB file system drive and a 60GB home drive with a 1GB swap. Now question or two: 1. Is this notebook good enough for the tutorial? 2. If it is, can anyone recommend a distribution/desktop/setup that would be considerably faster than PCLinuxOS/Gnome? 3. If this notebook is too low in spec, what would you recommend as an inexpensive replacement for the tutorial? TIA Heracles -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkt93QIACgkQybPcBAs9CE9tMgCguhLjgC3bBicwnGqoCIutPNfn t74An1vml85paDlN5hOsSyOiNuOPr8kK =VeDz -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] removing samba
On Friday 19 February 2010 06:42:22 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote: From: meryl Sent: Friday, 19 February, 2010 8:11:53 AM I needed to do some file sharing recently and now that the task is finished so I want to remove the Samba service. I'm using Ubuntu 9.10. in Synaptic search: samba shows that the following items are installed; samba samba-common samba-common-bin smbclient libpam-smbpass libsmbclient libwbclient0 nautilus-share python-smbc Meryl to quote ShazBaz you are talking a fart in a fan factory. I've spent *weeks* trying to reduce the distro size for an embedded video recording system. You are up for a Gig or two no matter what hoops you jump through. Me, after ages in which I gor some 500M as the base distro just gave up and took an extra 2G of flash from video storage for the distro. I built, from scratch, a 40M distro, if you are cynical about it it was worth 10 or 20 K$, Cheaper to buy bigger flash :-) James -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Tutorial Friday week
On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 11:36 +1100, Heracles wrote: 1. Is this notebook good enough for the tutorial? How long is a piece of string. For Uni tutoring / lectures I favour weight versus performance. If we are talking about throwing graphics on a screen anything can do that. I have done full tutorials on a much worse system than that running adobe acrobat and it ran fine. I don't recommend acrobat, bet evince is faster so test it! If you are doing some intensive processing to highlight a feature or monitoring network traffic realtime on a heavy network then it will not hold up. Ta Ken -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] RAID and LVM
On Friday 19 February 2010 05:37:31 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote: I want to set up a pair of 1 TB drives on an HP DL145 G3 and I'm looking for suggestions as to the best way to partition them. Would I be best using software RAID and LVM? Given that it's a fairly busy machine (mail server for 40+ users) I'd like to achieve: 1) Speed 2) Reliability 3) Ease of maintenance. Anyone care to take a punt at a layout? In spite of Seagate's paper (... More than an interface) cautioning that multiple disks in a machine will make them fail quicker and be slower nobody seems to heed this. Is it BS or just like climate-stuff I don't want to believe that so it can't be true Anybody done any measurements ? James -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Tutorial Friday week
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Ken Foskey wrote: On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 11:36 +1100, Heracles wrote: 1. Is this notebook good enough for the tutorial? How long is a piece of string. For Uni tutoring / lectures I favour weight versus performance. If we are talking about throwing graphics on a screen anything can do that. I have done full tutorials on a much worse system than that running adobe acrobat and it ran fine. I don't recommend acrobat, bet evince is faster so test it! If you are doing some intensive processing to highlight a feature or monitoring network traffic realtime on a heavy network then it will not hold up. Ta Ken Thanks Ken, But what I really meant was: Is it good/fast/etc.. enough for the specific tutorial on python programming being held at the SLUG meeting this month? Heracles -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkt96cQACgkQybPcBAs9CE98agCguEMQaibPOIOoZE/F1lpL2kdM FtIAoLJvzzWMIwm7S6QtqJ5Gi8qwA64r =881e -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Tutorial Friday week
On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Heracles herac...@iprimus.com.au wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Ken Foskey wrote: On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 11:36 +1100, Heracles wrote: 1. Is this notebook good enough for the tutorial? How long is a piece of string. For Uni tutoring / lectures I favour weight versus performance. If we are talking about throwing graphics on a screen anything can do that. I have done full tutorials on a much worse system than that running adobe acrobat and it ran fine. I don't recommend acrobat, bet evince is faster so test it! If you are doing some intensive processing to highlight a feature or monitoring network traffic realtime on a heavy network then it will not hold up. Ta Ken Thanks Ken, But what I really meant was: Is it good/fast/etc.. enough for the specific tutorial on python programming being held at the SLUG meeting this month? Heracles -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkt96cQACgkQybPcBAs9CE98agCguEMQaibPOIOoZE/F1lpL2kdM FtIAoLJvzzWMIwm7S6QtqJ5Gi8qwA64r =881e -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html If you can run the test code on the wiki page then it should be fine. -- Harrison Conlin -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Netbooks .... Again
Acer One Aspire. Similar thoughts to the two Peters (C and H) S'very light and easy to carry around. I like the big gap between the screen and the body (the hinges create this). Very nice to hook your fingers through when you carry it around. A nice secure hand hold indeed. Screen is sharp. Installed Ubuntu NBR - I REALLY like their GUI. Very functional for small screen. Build quality is great, keyboard is very good for its size. You get used to it really quickly. I even came to like the mouse keys being on either side of touchpad. Sound is good too. On occasions the SSD runs slow and there can be a pause in activity. Shut down can be slow sometimes (but I think this is probably the related to the SSD speed issues). One other thing is it connects via WiFi really quickly. Can't say the battery life is great, but I think the new NBRs have improved on that and it has the small battery. The one with more cells would certainly improve that. Camera works well with Skype. We had a party during which we Skyped a relative in the USA. We passed the netbook around and he was able to speak to and see everyone there and join in with the kids blowing out the candles. Good stuff. Then I took a vol redundancy and bought a Lenovo X200...weighs not much more than the Acer (costs a lot more though) and the Acer has become redundant. Anyone want to buy one? :)) Regards, Patrick (NB. I'd give it a good review even if I wasn't selling it :)) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Tutorial Friday week
On 19 February 2010 11:36, Heracles herac...@iprimus.com.au wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hi All, First some info: I have an old Acer Travelmate 529ATX with 512Mb RAM(its max). It has a P111 (coppermine) about 900 MHz and a 120GB HDD. At the moment I am running PCLinuxOS and dual booting with XP. I have given Linux a 10GB file system drive and a 60GB home drive with a 1GB swap. Now question or two: 1. Is this notebook good enough for the tutorial? 2. If it is, can anyone recommend a distribution/desktop/setup that would be considerably faster than PCLinuxOS/Gnome? 3. If this notebook is too low in spec, what would you recommend as an inexpensive replacement for the tutorial? I believe the rule of thumb is that you should be fine if you can run TuxRacer or some simple 3D game. -- Bring choice back to your computer. http://www.linux.org.au/linux -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] mount LVM from Ubuntu live CD
david da...@kenpro.com.au writes: Can it be done? Sure. All the instructions I've found on the net require installation of lvm2 - not sure this is practical on Live CD, even if it was connected to the net, which it isn't. ...it is practical, and works, but you do need a net connection. IIRC, the live *DVD* includes a huge pool of standard packages which you can use locally, or you could download the required .deb files to a USB key or something and manually install them. Sorry. The computer belongs to a club (I haven't had direct access to it yet) - the administrator has vanished and taken the password with him and the drive is now at least partly corrupted and won't boot without a root password. Wanna know a secret: your Linux box is almost certainly trivial to break. Try booting the kernel with 'init=/bin/bash' on the command line, and then: ] mount / -o remount,rw ] passwd root # ...and give it a good password ] mount / -o remount,or ] sync; sync; sync # wait thirty seconds, because paranoia never hurts ] sync; sync; sync; reboot That should get you past the problem, at least as far as the next issue. You can also run a fsck on the root volume or whatever at that shell. Just be aware that you don't get a lot of nice things like, oh, some of the flush on shutdown behaviour that you do in a normal boot. :) Daniel -- ✣ Daniel Pittman✉ dan...@rimspace.net☎ +61 401 155 707 ♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] RAID and LVM
james j...@tigger.ws writes: On Friday 19 February 2010 05:37:31 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote: I want to set up a pair of 1 TB drives on an HP DL145 G3 and I'm looking for suggestions as to the best way to partition them. Would I be best using software RAID and LVM? Given that it's a fairly busy machine (mail server for 40+ users) I'd like to achieve: 1) Speed 2) Reliability 3) Ease of maintenance. Anyone care to take a punt at a layout? In spite of Seagate's paper (... More than an interface) cautioning that multiple disks in a machine will make them fail quicker and be slower nobody seems to heed this. Multiple spindles *does* increase the number of hardware failures your system will have. Using redundant RAID makes your system tolerant of hardware failures. Balancing these can be complex. :) Slower, though ... is a bit of a strange claim. Not because it is false, but because the answer is complex: you can, for example, double read speed and halve write speed, using a two disk RAID 1 array ... in the ideal case. Is that slower, or faster, or both? Daniel -- ✣ Daniel Pittman✉ dan...@rimspace.net☎ +61 401 155 707 ♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] RAID and LVM
Slower, though ... is a bit of a strange claim. Not because it is false, but because the answer is complex: you can, for example, double read speed and halve write speed, using a two disk RAID 1 array ... in the ideal case. I must say I'm curious about this, because I have always assumed that for a RAID 1 the write speed would be roughly the same as a single disk, not halved.. my reasoning being that both writes would occur in parallel, as with the reads.. the difference of course is that the 2 reads in parallel each transfer half the data, but the 2 writes transfers all the data each sure, you may have a little bit of overhead - issuing 2 IO instructions instead of 1, or in the case of a setup where both disks share the same bus (which is not the ideal setup) there would be contention on this bus, but halved? Is it really the case? If this is true, I guess the reason would be that the same data travels over the same bus twice before the operation can be said to be completed, therefore halving your write speed. But then this holds true for the read as well, so that despite issuing an instruction to 2 different disks, each with half the data requested, then you will meet the same contention and the data will get to you with the same speed as 1 disk.. so, if this is right, then RAID 1 compared to a single disk would be something like 1. 2 disks on 2 buses = (approx) half read time, same write time 2. 2 disks on 1 bus = (approx) same read time, double write time I honestly don't know if this is the case or not, I've certaintly never measured it and it may be implementation specific, but if not I'd really like to be shown where this is wrong.. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Netbooks .... Again (7 months on) Are you still happy?
Kyle wrote: Hi Slug, I know we did this a while back, but that was July last year already. So, as I'm now in the market for a new netbook, I wanted to follow up and ask those of you who have bought in the last 6 months; 1. What you bought An Asus EeePC S101: http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=43MMgvE7YVpWw1O1 2. Are you still happy Couldn't be happier. I take this thing everywhere with me. 3. How has the battery life stood up over the 6m. Good enough, I get over 3 hours or so 4. What sort of battery life are you getting (esp. now after 6 months) 5. How easy was it to get your chosen Linux up and running (this is of course relative to the person - Me. I'm no genius, but I can figure it out if I have to) Everything worked out of the box with UNR 9.10. I had problems with my wireless card (it was flaky after hibernation and suspends) but I replaced it with another one out of another computer (seems to be almost the same card, used same kernel modules, etc) and its been good since. 6. How has the build quality stood up Nice, the EeePC S101 is one of the nicer EeePC netbooks 7. What sorts of quirks have you discovered I know Marghanita was big on the Kogans. How many others bought one of those? Prob with Kogan is apparently sold out till April. Recent discussion on Whirlpool has lots of people buying a Benq from onlinecomputer.com.au, but they don't appear to be too linux friendly - some complaints there. What about MSI, Lenovo's, Sony, anything else? Which processor should I be avoiding at this point? -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
