July 2014 - luv-main - example.com

Distro or software to allow restricted set of programs
by Sean Crosby 24 Jul '14

24 Jul '14

I'm looking at setting up a machine as a video conferencing PC. I want to deploy it to end users as an indestructable PC, where if they start it up, it presents them with a menu that allows them to run exactly 3 programs (web browser, another video conferencing program, and pavucontrol to set sound settings). I was thinking of using XFCE or another lightweight window manager to do this, but was wondering if anyone knows of a kiosk PC style distro where you can lock everything down, and possibly allow immutable config, so the end user can change settings while the PC is on, but as soon as you restart, it goes back to a precoded set of configs. Sean

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UK government adopts ODF/HTML/PDF
by Lev Lafayette 23 Jul '14

23 Jul '14

Not 100% related to Linux but pretty close... The open standards selected for sharing and viewing government documents have been announced by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. The standards set out the document file formats that are expected to be used across all government bodies. Government will begin using open formats that will ensure that citizens and people working in government can use the applications that best meet their needs when they are viewing or working on documents together. ... The selected standards, which are compatible with commonly used document applications, are: * PDF/A or HTML for viewing government documents * Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing or collaborating on government documents More at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-u… Arguments for decision here: http://standards.data.gov.uk/proposal/sharing-collaborating-government-docu… -- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GradCertTerAdEd (Murdoch), GradCertPM, MBA (Tech Mngmnt) (Chifley) mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

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Linux on HP Pavilion Touchsmart 11 -e102sa
by stripes theotoky 23 Jul '14

23 Jul '14

Hello folks, have been happily using a Sammy N150NPlus with Ubuntu for the past 3 years but it is getting a bit old and tired. I like the small size for travelling and am not happy with tablets. Have been looking at the HP Pavilion touchsmart 11-e102sa with an AMD A6, 4GB memory and 500GB HDD. Has anybody been using this with any distro? Any pros or cons? Any issues with installing Linux? Either as a standalone or as dual-boot? cheers

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Linux install on new(ish) Toshiba Laptop
by Lev Lafayette 21 Jul '14

21 Jul '14

Hi LUVers, Recently purchased a Toshiba Satellite C50PSCJEA-01N011 Celeron-N2820 4G 500GB 15.6" Windows8.1 Notebook PSCJEA-01N011 Sad reality is because a certain piece of medical equipment requires 'doze (no it doesn't work with Wine etc) said machine had to be bought with said OS. Obviously don't want to do much in the MS-Windows world and have sought to navigate my way around the madness that is MS-Windows 8; have resized the disk, turned off secure boot (necessary for installation apparently), began installation with a nice Debian Mint 201403 disk, grub comes up and... I get a black screen. The DVD drive happily whirls around obviously wanting to entertain the possibility of another Linux install, but alas with no screen display not much else can be done. I have attempted a standard GRUB modification used on other Toshiba systems (https://coderwall.com/p/ydbldg) but to no avail. Any ideas? -- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GradCertTerAdEd (Murdoch), GradCertPM, MBA (Tech Mngmnt) (Chifley) mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

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Debian Sid - migrating to Systemd?
by Jason White 21 Jul '14

21 Jul '14

When I run an aptitude full-upgrade, I am prompted to remove sysvinit-core and replace it with systemd-sysv. does this mean that Debian Sid is making the transition now, or is it the result of the specific combination of packages that I happen to have installed? To be clear, I want to make the change to Systemd, while minimizing the risk of an unbootable system in the transition, and I'm considering whether now is the time to go ahead with it or not.

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Red Hat and Oracle licensing and failover solutions
by Peter Ross 11 Jul '14

11 Jul '14

Hi all, it looks as my company wants to buy a product requiring Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle DB. We also plan to buy 2 new servers with 2 Xeon CPUs each. Red Hat seems to have "Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Virtual Datacenters" for $US 1999 per year (https://www.redhat.com/wapps/store/catalog.html) I guess two licenses are the right solution if you want to install Red Hat on bare metal and VMs and containers on it (in short, not being restricted by licensing) Then comes Oracle licensing.. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list-070617.pdf "Standard Edition One" $US 5800 per processor. Makes it $US 11 600 per machine (or $US 5800 in case I restrict it to a VM with one CPU - is it actually possible?) Is it possible to setup in any meaningful way a second DB server as a stand-by server without paying an additional Oracle license? I guess not.. And then there is $US 1276 "software update license & support". Without that no updates? If it all gets too expensive I may need to look at MS SQL server. I am not very keen to go back to this again but it is the second available option and it seems to be much cheaper.. but I have to work it out in detail too (in defense to MS: SQL Server was performing well and reliable wherever used) In short, my boss would not like to pay more than needed but we need to be sure to have a working setup at the end. Regards Peter

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reminder: Open Source Developers' Conference 2014 (Gold Coast QLD) CFP still open
by Arjen Lentz 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

Hi all We're looking for presenters to talk at the upcoming Open Source Developers' Conference (4-7 November 2014, Griffith University Gold Coast Campus, QLD). Register on the http://2014.osdc.com.au/ site, and propose a presentation. You can submit as many proposals as you wish, and come back to edit them later, so why not get started today? We have space for sessions, tutorials, hands-on workshops with keyboard or soldering iron (or both!) and yes, Miniconfs. Speakers attend the conference for free; travel and accommodation is still your own gig, although we may be able to make arrangements in some special cases. Initial CfP period closes soon, but you only have to get your abstract in at this stage, after that you've got quite a bit of time to prep your talk or workshop! Topics ====== While we're looking for presentations related to creation or use of open source, naturally, there are many aspects that you could address: - Cultivating an open source community – What tools, processes, or skills are required to ensure the human aspect of a project are supported? - Show casing a successful, or unsuccessful open source implemenntations – What did you do well? What did you learn? What would you do differently next time? - Open source in the physical world – How does open source software or hardware help the Internet of Things? Arduino, Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, EEG sensors, ... - Open source in education - Do you have awesome resources, or perhaps you're a teacher or facilitator? We want to hear from you! - Open source in the business world – How do you run your open source business? What revenue model do you employ? What benefits and drawbacks have you experienced? - Closed source in an open source world – Closed- and open source have not just coexisted, they have collaborated. How have you come to successfully use both? - Open Standards and Open Data - for documents, audio, video, telephony, etc. Again, we'd love to hear about tools and use cases! These, and many more topics that are relevant to today's open source developers are desirable to help provide a diverse range of subjects at this years conference. Contribute! =========== Remember, we have ample space for sessions, tutorials, hands-on workshops with keyboard or soldering iron (or both!) and Miniconfs. Go on, put in your cool ideas today! http://2014.osdc.com.au/ Cheers, Arjen. (on behalf of the OSDC 2014 organising committee)

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luv-main listserver munging occasional mails?
by Erik Christiansen 09 Jul '14

09 Jul '14

My post to this list: Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2014 22:11:51 +1000 Subject: Re: Android/PC editing Message-ID: <20140708121151.GA1928@ratatosk> came back from the listserver as: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 <=== !!!! **** Sender: luv-main-bounces(a)luv.asn.au But my local copy of what went out confirms that it was: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit and sure enough, the body is plain text, rather than the ghastly base64 lump which came back from the list. Given that internode flagged the list echo as: X-SpamDetect: : -7.000000 IronPort SPAM scanned=-10.0, Whole message is base64 encoded=1.0, Message text disguised using base-64 encoding=2.0 it seems reasonable to infer that the luv-main listserver did the munging. The message has only been seen by internode servers and tainted.luv.asn.au, according to the headers. The other posts on the thread have not been similarly abused, including my earlier post. It was only turned into: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit What can be happening? Did others receive it munged? (Or did their spam filters dump it?) Erik -- "You know, it's at times like this when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young!" "Why, what did she tell you?" "I don't know, I didn't listen!" - Douglas Adams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

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Android/PC editing
by Russell Coker 08 Jul '14

08 Jul '14

I've been using Google Keep for editing small documents on a PC (web interface) and Android (native app). It works well for shopping lists and for notes for a LUV lecture. But I'd like to find something suitable for editing longer documents, blog posts and magazine articles. As an aside the Wordpress Android app is terrible if you are writing anything significant. What would be ideal would be something like Google Keep but with sections (maybe a folding editor) and spelling checking. I can survive without grammar suggestions etc but I'd probably use them if they were available. Note that I'm willing to consider a free as in beer system for this. As the documents in question will be public on the Internet in a small amount of time so I don't have to trust the secrecy of longevity of a free service (both of which have been lacking in many instances). If there is no good option for editing on Android/web then what's the best Linux GUI option that supports easy conversion to/from plain text? LibreOffice writer? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Re: Android/PC editing
by Nic Baxter 07 Jul '14

07 Jul '14

Hi Russel Have you seen wikieditor? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ondrejchrastina.wikieditor Cheers Nic On 07/07/2014 10:49 pm, Russell Coker <russell(a)coker.com.au> wrote: > > On Mon, 7 Jul 2014 21:26:00 Erik Christiansen wrote: > > There was an issue with an adjacent fold opening when inserting text, > > but a couple of lines in .vimrc fixed that. > > > > Enabling spell checking in Vim is pretty easy, and I have Danish and > > English spell checking turning on via ^D and ^E respectively. From Vim > > 7.3 there's a built-in spellchecker, you don't need the plugin anymore. > > The way vi handles lines is good for source code but not good for documents. > The up/down commands should go to the previous/next line of ~80 characters not > the previous/next paragraph. > > http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/07/06/desktop-publishing-wrong/ > > I wrote the above blog post on this topic. After reading comments it seems > that a fairly ideal option for me would be to have an Android app that allows > offline editing of MediaWiki documents. That would get desktop/phone use as > well as version control. There doesn't seem to be such an app though. > > -- > My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ > My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ > > _______________________________________________ > luv-main mailing list > luv-main(a)luv.asn.au > http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main >

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