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sellis

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Everything posted by sellis

  1. I have just acquired a second-user Chyang Fun CF-S66 small form factor system which has on-board graphics and TV-Out. The graphics chip is an Intel 845G, part of the 845 (Brookdale) chipset. Now, I rather foolishly assumed that the TV-Out would be either on all the time, or switched on via the BIOS, and would just mirror what was coming out of the VGA port. Apparently not. I've googled around and found a lot of information about laptops (many of which also use the 845 chipset), but no specific information about how to enable the TV-Out, or even whether it's possible or not. Does anyone know of any useful links, or have any helpful tips? TIA.
  2. In another forum, I asked about USB Wireless-G dongles, and the general response was "don't!". Luckily, I never listen, so after a helpful seller on eBay posted a link to drivers, I managed to get my a wireless USB dongle (a CNet CWD-854) and get it up and running. This dongle uses the rt2570 chipset, which is pretty well supported over at the rt2x00 project. The specific how-to is here: http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index....10_rt2570_Howto. Hopefully, this will be useful to others in the same situation.
  3. Thanks for the feedback. Just to give you some background, I have just got a second-hand small form factor system, so my wife can do internet shopping from the sitting room (I must be mad). It only has one slot (shared PCI/AGP), which is currently occupied by a TV-in card. Hence the interest in an external WiFi adapter. If the consensus is "Don't!", however, I can easily move the TV adapter to my other machine instead. In that case, I'd probably go for a WMP54G like I have in the other machine. At least I know how to set that one up. Edit: I guess I could also look at a wired connection to a wireless access point, but that's getting very messy (and more expensive).
  4. I'm about to buy a WiFi USB dongle for my second PC, and I've been looking around the web for recommendations. There's a lot of conflicting information out there about which USB wireless LAN products work under Linux. (Specifically, 2005LE.) The Linksys WUSB54G seems to be quite popular, but only on certain versions of the product, and it's a similar story with other products. So, I'd like to ask the good Linux-people on the board, do you have WiFi working via USB, and if so, on which device?
  5. I use subversion at home, and we came within a whisker of using it for work, but the art department wanted to use AlienBrain instead, so everyone ended up using it. (Not as good, IMHO.) Subversion can work locally without having to set up server software and so on, and once it's going it's pretty easy to use. Just go into a controlled directory and type "svn status" to see what's changed, "svn add" to add any new files, "svn delete" to remove any old, out-of-date ones, and then "svn commit" to commit your changes.
  6. Is that the new T30? I came across that today and it looks rather tempting. Don't know about its Linux-friendliness, though. OT: For in-car use, I'm also looking at the Yakumo Hypersound Car - MP3+WMA+OGG on CD, MMC or USB key for £70 http://www.yakumo.com/produkte/index.php?pid=1&ag=Autoradio. (The OGG support is only detailed in the PDF manual.)
  7. I have a HP PSC1215 all-in-one, which I managed to get working under 10.0, both scanning and printing, and I'm very happy with it so far. The settings survived the migration to 2005LE, too.
  8. There have been some discussions about this in the past, but not quite covering what I want to find out. Here's my setup. I wish to have two VGA flat panel monitors (once I find a way to stop my wife from finding out I'm spending money again...), and I therefore need to upgrade my graphics card from the rather poorly-supported SiS 315 that I have now. I'm not a hard-core gamer, but I'd like at least some 3D acceleration. I get the impression than nVidia is the way to go under Linux, rather than ATI. I'm not upgrading my mobo, so it'll be an AGP card rather than, say, PCI-Express. I'd like it to be physically small, so that I can transplant it into a SFF system at some unspecified point in the future. Fanless is good, too. Oh, and if that wasn't enough of a wishlist, I'm looking for cheap. £30 ($50) is about my limit at the moment. I've seen a couple of no-name cards that claim to support 2 monitors (e.g. the Club 3D GeForce FX5200 http://www.udiggit.com/udiggit/productDeta...duct/2_MzQ1NQ==) but the specs aren't exactly clear whether the 2-monitor support is VGA+DVI or VGA+TVOut as opposed to VGA+VGA. So, does anyone have any recommendations, or things to steer clear of? Ideally, does anyone else have a setup like this, and if so, what are you using?
  9. sellis

    Why Java?

    It's what's on the majority of European mobile phones, too. That's a big draw for people like me, who write software for mobile phones for a living.
  10. I upgraded from 10.0 to 2005LE, and ran into the devfs/udev problem. Luckily, Ian had primed me about this and I managed to get it sorted out. See this thread: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...ndpost&p=187257
  11. Yes, you can do it with a little bash script. Assume that you have some ImageMagick command line, like, say, this: convert X.png -shear 5 output/X.png You can do this on a whole folder of things directly from the command line like this: for FILE in *; do convert ${FILE} -shear 5 output/${FILE}; done
  12. I just upgraded my Firefox from 1.0.4 to 1.0.6 and got some very weird behaviour for a while, so I thought I'd share the fix in case anyone else sees it and is as baffled as I was. After upgrading software, I always check the upgrade version number with Help | About... Instead of the expected 1.0.6, I got an XML parsing error report. Same with Tools | Extensions. Same with Help | Help Contents... "Oh dear" I think. But then it becomes apparent that I had a Firefox window open on another desktop. Shut this down, try again, everything is OK. So, when they say "make sure you have shut down all Firefox windows" during the install process, it looks like they mean it. [moved from Software by spinynorman]
  13. Slightly off-topic, but I don't "get" these 3D desktops at all. As far as I can see, they offer very little over and above a traditional 2D desktop. Yes, I can stack windows behind one another, and make them smaller by pushing them into the screen, but I can do that on a 2D desktop too. And, err, what else can I do in 3D that makes sense? I think that a 3D desktop is going to have to be very different to today's desktop if it is to offer a compelling advantage. The "wow, cool" factor is OK for 5 minutes or so, but it won't keep most users using it for day-to-day tasks. There's another disadvantage, because your input devices are 2-dimensional. You have to either shell out for a spacemouse, or learn how to use the 2D mouse as a 3D tool. Perhaps (gasp, heresy) there isn't a good 3D design for desktop-like tasks? After all, we don't have people trying out 3D word processors, because there is an obvious disconnect between the two. With database-like filing systems, there may be room for 3D in the file explorer, but even that is hampered by the fact that the search space is N-dimensional (where N is the number of distinct labels in the system), and so squeezing N dimensions to 3 doesn't give you much leverage over squashing them down to 2. As usual, feel free to disagree.
  14. Some BIOSes have power management options too (I know mine does). Have a look at your BIOS settings to see if that might be it.
  15. I had a similar problem with my USB key, and it was because I was not unmounting it correctly before removing it. Perhaps this is the same?
  16. Full voting record at: http://www2.europarl.eu.int/omk/sipade2?PU...N&LEVEL=2&NAV=X Pages 4 and 5.
  17. Also The Register at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/06/eu_bins_swpat/. Love that url. 648 against, 14 for, 18 abstain.
  18. Are you running 2005LE? If so, then I also had problems after an upgrade. From another (long) posting: This might be what you're after.
  19. If you have a multimeter, you could also check out the voltages from the PSU (you can do this for the +5 and +12v lines easily from a spare HDD power connector). When my last mobo died, if failed with a short across the PSU inputs, so +5V was about +2V, and +12V was about +5V if I recall correctly. I was impressed that there was no smoke!
  20. sellis

    Cannot browse /mnt

    I used to have a similar problem; it may be related. I disabled my floppy controller (I no longer have a floppy in my machine), but the entry for /mnt/floppy still existed. It took it about half a minute to realise that the floppy wasn't there. Going straight to /mnt/usb or any other device was OK, because it never tried to access /mnt/floppy, but of course when asking for a directory listing of /mnt it has to do just that. So, my advice is to check for recently disabled pieces of hardware.
  21. Maybe not 100% relevant, but here's something I usually do when selecting components (CPU, memory, HDD, etc.) If you plot price vs. performance (MHz, MB, GB), you normally get a graph which is fairly straight up to a critical "knee" point, where the price suddenly climbs much faster. I usually buy the spec that is on the knee. That way, I know I'm not paying the "early adopter overhead" for bleeding-edge kit.
  22. That was it, folks. If I just use the usual "ls -l", the listed modification time wasn't changed, but if I use ls -l --time=ctime to list the files, all the times are listed as 2005-06-11 21:39. My memory must have been wrong, and I did the chmod on Saturday night instead of Friday. It seems that it's just the usual - I have no idea even what day of the week it is. Sorry for the threadwaste... Edit. I initially solved this by finding the first file I knew I had modified, and using that as an argument to --newer. However, there is an option for doing what I really wanted - it is called --newer-mtime, which takes the modification time only of the file data into account, ignoring changes to the file attributes. Hope this is useful to some other confused soul.
  23. I've had a google around for this problem, and have come up with nothing. I was looking for a shortcut way of identifying and copying the dozen or so files I have modified this weekend onto a thumbdrive, so I can take them back to work Monday morning. "Sounds like a 5 minute job using tar", I thought, ignoring the giggles from the demons of stupidity lining up behind me at the sound of the magic phrase "5 minute job". Well, tar will quite happily back up either all my files in the directory and subdirectories, regardless of date, or it will archive nothing at all. Here's my tar command line (all on one line, of course): tar --create --file=archive.tar.gz --gzip --exclude=out --exclude=*/.svn --exclude=*~ --exclude=*.tar.gz --newer=2005-06-11 --verbose * (Yes, those excludes do point to the fact that I use subversion as a RCS at home - excellent tool, BTW.) Here's a partial listing of the files in one of the folders I am trying to back up - this is the root of the hierarchy: $ ls -l total 95 -rwxr-xr-x 1 sean sean 1552 May 27 12:50 autobuild.bat* -rwxr-xr-x 1 sean sean 1225 Apr 4 18:56 autobuild.properties* -rwxr-xr-x 1 sean sean 15977 May 27 17:01 autobuild.xml* -rwxr-xr-x 1 sean sean 1242 May 31 16:09 build* ... -rw-rw-rw- 1 sean sean 1225 Apr 23 18:41 run-midp.bat drwxr-xrwx 5 sean sean 4096 Feb 26 22:37 src/ drwxr-xrwx 6 sean sean 4096 Feb 26 22:37 tools/ Note those dates - some as far back as late April They all appear in the resulting .tar.gz archive. If instead, I change the date to today (2005-06-12), then nothing at all is backed up - this is expected as I haven't actually changed them yet today. Now, I did do a recursive chmod on these files to make them all writable, but that was Friday evening (2005-06-10) so even if that updated the modification time (and it looks like it hasn't), the bulk of the files shouldn't be included. I then thought that tar maybe has got the wrong end of the stick as far as the modification times are concerned, so I'll look at the tar -t output directly. Here's just one line: -rwxr-xr-x sean/sean 12434 2005-05-25 17:32:46 tools/java/postprocessor/Readme.txt Now, I don't know about you, but a modification time of 2005-05-25 is definitely before 2005-06-10. I am sure to be missing something glaringly obvious here. Can anyone tell me what it is? [moved from Software by spinynorman]
  24. Adriano, I don't believe that ilia is a troll, as such. I too find the same frustrations with configuration. No "average windows user" would have put up with 2 evenings worth of work just to get his new printer to work. However, I'm also not as pessimistic about the future as ilia. The progress in the last couple of years has been astounding. The remaining configuration problems are exactly the kind of thing that would not be a problem in a coporate/government environment, as your IT department would solve them once and roll them out office-wide. Plus, with major people like IBM in the Linux camp, and governments like Brazil getting involved, I think we will continue to see the pace of improvement ramp up. Of course, none of this helps you, now, so I'll shut up at this point...
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