Re: [Hampshire] Laptop Linux distro recommendations
On 29/10/11 16:09, Paul Tansom wrote: I think the changes to Unity in 11.10 are a positive move, but for me it is still seriously lacking in basic functionality. Hi Paul, I've been with Ubuntu in one form or another on and off since the first public release, and I'm not sure I agree with you. And whilst it might eventually turn out to be the case, i.e. a good and positive move, right now I find the awkwardness and ease-of-use issues around Unity a real and frequent stumbling block. Personally I think it should still be a choice, with a readily available fall back to tried and tested interfaces. By making it the default and forcing people through hoops to get back to something a little less awkward and unpolished I think Ubuntu has taken a big step back where hitherto its progress has been mostly forward and just occasionally static. However, I do get on reasonably well with Unity on my netbook, where my usage is pared down to a relatively few things compared to the desktop, and suspect that the main problem with it is that it has been pushed to the fore a little too soon for the comfort of many. That said, my wife and eldest son get on with it reasonably well on their laptops, but then their use is pretty much restricted to Web, email and the odd bit of word processing. Ellen, my eldest girl, gets on very well with Linux Mint, which will hopefully see her through uni before we think of upgrading. Sean -- music, film, comics, books, rants and drivel: www.funkygibbins.me.uk -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
[Hampshire] DVD-Rom Long Shot
A bit of a long shot. Ive got a Dell Inspiron 1200 with a DVD-Rom which doubles as a cd-rom and dvd writer, which has now started to not read any disc. Would any of you have a standard dvd-rom that you were thinking of chucking out ? If so, could you chuck it my way for a few pound notes ? Im in Newbury, so if your local to north hants Id pick up. Thanks Phillip No virus was found in this outgoing message as I didn't bother looking. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Laptop Linux distro recommendations
On Sat, October 29, 2011 16:02, Samuel Penn wrote: To me, that sounds like it's your fault if you don't like it. Sadly, I have to agree here. The target very obviously isn't people who like KDE because it gives them lots of control over their desktop. Gnome/Unity takes away options (or makes them harder to find) with every release, and unless the new defaults are exactly what you like, then that's a bad thing. I've only been trying Ubuntu for less than a year, but in that time every upgrade seems to undo my configuration and makes it harder to get back to how I want things. I'm now at the point where I'm afraid to update my computer, and that rebuilding from scratch with Gentoo might be the least painful option. OK, you mentioned KDE. At the risk of being flamed to death by the mere mention of it, why are you not giving it a go? KDE is currently on 4.7.2,in 11.10, so it has had years to mature and improve since the 4.0 disaster. While as a desktop environment it is far from perfect (heck, it mimics That Other OS! Gasp!), it works very well indeed. I would not run it on an old P3 450, but it runs quite cheerfully on P4 (with compositing switched off) and positively hums on newer hardware. -- Regards, Jan Henkins -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
[Hampshire] Analytics packages
Hi all Does anyone know a good, user friendly statistics / analytics package for Linux? The trick is - it needs to be able to handle an absolutely massive dataset - 13m rows. For Uni, I have a dataset with no fewer than 13m records and I need to run a regression on it. In fact I probably need to run about a thousand regressions comparing results later. In theory, something like Libre could handle the individual regressions once I've split the txt file up but I don't want to get into faffing around with awk, sed, cat, head etc etc (takes ages, creates massive files and besides which the file needs splitting according to a rule which uses a field within it that at present I can't guarantee it's sorted on). I can't afford the frankly ludicrous prices charged for SAS and SPSS. I just wondered if any of you knew if there was something really good that people are using and I've missed. I've tried: R [1] - powerful but very clunky and a dreadful GUI PSPP [2] - still a work in progress and truly awfully formatted output. It'll get there one day but it's a mile off at the moment. DAP - won't compile for me and I don't have time to investigate. gretl [3] - seemingly for economists who seldom have to handle such big datasets. Various database packages which are fine for handling the data - but don't run to linear regression. Cheers Rob [1] www.r-project.org [2] http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/ [3] http://gretl.sourceforge.net/ -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Laptop Linux distro recommendations
On Sunday 30 October 2011 12:23:12 Jan Henkins wrote: On Sat, October 29, 2011 16:02, Samuel Penn wrote: To me, that sounds like it's your fault if you don't like it. Sadly, I have to agree here. The target very obviously isn't people who like KDE because it gives them lots of control over their desktop. Gnome/Unity takes away options (or makes them harder to find) with every release, and unless the new defaults are exactly what you like, then that's a bad thing. OK, you mentioned KDE. At the risk of being flamed to death by the mere mention of it, why are you not giving it a go? Who says I'm not? :-) I run KDE on my main home desktop, and it is my preferred desktop environment of choice. I run Gnome at work, partly because it forces me to experience something other than KDE, and partly because there's a bug in Ubuntu/Nvidia which causes the computer to hang if I resize a Konsole window. I'm running Gnome on my second desktop upstairs because I normally only use it for watching DVDs on, so it hasn't had much in the way of customisation. I tried doing something else on it the other day, which was when I started running into roadblocks. 4.7.2,in 11.10, so it has had years to mature and improve since the 4.0 disaster. While as a desktop environment it is far from perfect (heck, it mimics That Other OS! Gasp!), Yes, it mimics RISC OS in some respects, which may be why I liked it. Oh, you mean MS Windows? I'd have to disagree about that - all the reasons I like it is because it's different from Windows. Okay, it has a task bar down the bottom and a GUI file manager, but so did RISC OS long before Windows 95 was released. In my mind, Gnome and MacOS are much more similar to Windows than KDE is. The skin may be different, but I find that they all get in my way for very similar reasons (mostly caused by the lack of configurability). -- Be seeing you,Games: http://www.glendale.org.uk/ Sam. Posts: http://www.google.com/profiles/samuel.penn -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Analytics packages
Hi Rob, I'd recommend going for R. Yes, it's fairly complicated, but it is incredibly powerful and very good at dealing with large datasets. Depending on your needs, RStudio (http://rstudio.org/) may be useful as an Integrated Development Environment for R - very lightweight, but helps a lot. There are also more fully-featured GUIs available like R Commander (http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/). Hope that might help, Robin On 30 Oct 2011, at 12:29, Rob Malpass wrote: Hi all Does anyone know a good, user friendly statistics / analytics package for Linux? The trick is - it needs to be able to handle an absolutely massive dataset - 13m rows. For Uni, I have a dataset with no fewer than 13m records and I need to run a regression on it. In fact I probably need to run about a thousand regressions comparing results later. In theory, something like Libre could handle the individual regressions once I've split the txt file up but I don't want to get into faffing around with awk, sed, cat, head etc etc (takes ages, creates massive files and besides which the file needs splitting according to a rule which uses a field within it that at present I can't guarantee it's sorted on). I can't afford the frankly ludicrous prices charged for SAS and SPSS. I just wondered if any of you knew if there was something really good that people are using and I've missed. I've tried: R [1] - powerful but very clunky and a dreadful GUI PSPP [2] - still a work in progress and truly awfully formatted output. It'll get there one day but it's a mile off at the moment. DAP - won't compile for me and I don't have time to investigate. gretl [3] - seemingly for economists who seldom have to handle such big datasets. Various database packages which are fine for handling the data - but don't run to linear regression. Cheers Rob [1] www.r-project.org [2] http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/ [3] http://gretl.sourceforge.net/ -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk -- -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] Analytics packages
-Original Message- From: hampshire-boun...@mailman.lug.org.uk [mailto:hampshire- boun...@mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Robin Wilson Sent: 30 October 2011 14:20 To: Hampshire LUG Discussion List Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Analytics packages Hi Rob, I'd recommend going for R. Yes, it's fairly complicated, but it is incredibly powerful and very good at dealing with large datasets. Depending on your needs, RStudio (http://rstudio.org/) may be useful as an Integrated Development Environment for R - very lightweight, but helps a lot. There are also more fully-featured GUIs available like R Commander (http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/). Hope that might help, Robin Thanks Robin - I'd not seen Rstudio (another gui for R) before - been using RCmdr. While Rstudio certainly looks a bit better than RCmdr, I'm truly amazed how bad it is. Unless I've missed something obvious, you click on a package to install it, then it brings up a dialog asking you to type the name of the package you've just clicked on back in before it will install it. Truly amazing. R itself is very good if you have the patience to learn it - but these guis actually IMHO make it worse! Cheers Rob -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
[Hampshire] Shutdown -h sometimes restarts
My server (Debian stable) has developed a habit of sometimes restarting rather than shutting down when I run shutdown -h now Has anyone else seen this, as Googling and looking at logs has got me nothing so far. Thanks, Leo -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] CLI XML diff (and patch?) tools?
On 30 October 2011 19:40, Andy Random andy.ran...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, 28 Oct 2011, James Bensley wrote: Is there any reason you don't want to use the regular diff and patch apps? Yes. Does it have to be something that is XML aware if you like? I'm writing a report script which checks for differences in two XML files and emails them to non-tech people. Just sending them a plain diff of the files simply causes confusion because the don't understand XML. These are config files and the differences will be minor, but providing a textual diff won't tell them what has changed because the won't understand it. What will the non-tech people understand. Can they read a config file and understand what it does? If not, any compare of two files will be just as difficult to understand. It might be better to convert the config files into a format that the non-tech person understands, and then do a diff on them, but instead of using + and - in the diff, use colour highlighting. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] CLI XML diff (and patch?) tools?
On Sunday 30 October 2011 19:40:56 Andy Random wrote: I'm writing a report script which checks for differences in two XML files and emails them to non-tech people. Just sending them a plain diff of the files simply causes confusion because the don't understand XML. It sounds like the best (though not simplest) approach would be to write something to parse the files and compare the actual content, rather than comparing the XML. Output the configuration options as a table, listing options which are different with the two values. Depending on the actual structure of the files, this could be either really easy or very hard to do. -- Be seeing you,Games: http://www.glendale.org.uk/ Sam. Posts: http://www.google.com/profiles/samuel.penn -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
Re: [Hampshire] DVD-Rom Long Shot
I have a slot loading ide DVD rom drive I was going to bin. Interested? Anton - Anton Piatek (sent from my phone, please excuse any typos) email: an...@piatek.co.uk blog/photos: http://www.strangeparty.com pgp: [74B1FA37] (http:// www.strangeparty.com/anton.asc) No trees were destroyed in the sending of this message, however, a significant number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced. On Oct 30, 2011 10:46 AM, e-mail phillip.chandler phillip.chand...@ntlworld.com wrote: A bit of a long shot. Ive got a Dell Inspiron 1200 with a DVD-Rom which doubles as a cd-rom and dvd writer, which has now started to not read any disc. Would any of you have a standard dvd-rom that you were thinking of chucking out ? If so, could you chuck it my way for a few pound notes ? Im in Newbury, so if your local to north hants Id pick up. Thanks Phillip No virus was found in this outgoing message as I didn't bother looking. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk -- -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --
