[PLUG] Death Notice / Unsubscribe

[John Jason Jordan]

First: My brother, John Jeddeloh, was found deceased in his home
January 14. He was known on this list as "John Jason Jordan." From his
computer files it looks like he has been active here for many years. I
have even found boxes with meeting posters dating back to 2013.

Second: I need to unsubscribe 'joh...@gmx.com' from this list. Somebody
please help.

Third: Frankly, I was quite surprised to find he was running Linux on
all his computers. I was last able to contact him 27 years ago, and he
was running early word-processing systems at that time. Personally, I
first started using Unix at Tektronix back ca. 1980 and the Usenet days,
and continued through my retirement, lastly working on DSL, Cable,
Ethernet, and Fiber-to-the-Hut home gateways.

However, as to how I am on this account: Pro Tip:
 a) Use a password manager. Share the master password with a
trusted family member or close friend, or leave it in a safe deposit
box, or with you lawyer and a copy of you will.
 b) Have a will while we're at it.
 c) Encrypt your hard drives, and
 d) Don't leave a Debian live thumb drive on you desk next to your
laptop. It can be trivially easy for someone to break into the BIOS to
boot the thumb drive, clear the password on an account, then reboot the
system and log into the account without a password. This not only works
for the guy administering your estate, but also the guy you steals your
laptop from the coffee shop.

-Alan Jeddeloh
Personal Representative,
Estate of John Jeddeloh
arjedde...@gmail.com

Re: [PLUG] how to make folders/files read only

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2023 17:25:18 -0500
Bill Barry  dijo:

>On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 4:41 PM John Jason Jordan 
>wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 27 Oct 2023 15:26:10 -0500
>> Bill Barry  dijo:
>>  
>> >> Stay tuned for the rest of the saga. :)  
>>  
>> >You could just do a few mp3 files to begin with to find out if it
>> >works and then copy them all over after you have perfected a
>> >solution.  

>> I am also curious how Android knew to refuse to display the corrupted
>> ones. Maybe Android is smarter than I thought. :)

>Rsync can check to see if the files are corrupt and only copy over the
>ones that need copying over.

I have several backup scripts that use rsync, but otherwise I rarely
use it, so I'm far from an expert. Thanks for the tip that it can tell
if a file is corrupt. 

As a sort of conclusion for this mess, I have concluded that the new
256GB Samsung Evo card is defective. It's going back to the eBay seller
or to Samsung, as soon as I figure out which one to send it to. Part of
the reason for my decision is that my other 256GB card is working
perfectly in both the computer and the phone. My only complaint is that
it's exFAT, so I have to put up with Android writing unnecessary and
useless folders to it. But that's a complaint about Android, not the
fault of Samsung's quality control.

Re: [PLUG] how to make folders/files read only

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2023 15:26:10 -0500
Bill Barry  dijo:

>You could just do a few mp3 files to begin with to find out if it
>works and then copy them all over after you have perfected a solution.

Since I no longer get a bounce from my own posts I can't quote myself.

Further information. After my previous post I went back to work. I had
completed all the A and B files, so I resumed work starting with the C
files. As I continued, every single C file played perfectly, no
corrupted files at all. Then I randomly checked 20-30 more files in the
rest of the alphabet, and all played perfectly.

New theory: The problem has something to do with how the card is
mounted. In the laptop it has to be placed in an adapter, and from
previous experience, SD card adapters can be problematic. But, also
from previous experience, if the adapter has a problem then the entire
drive fails to appear. Ditto for mounting; it either works 100% or it
fails 100%. I've never had a drive mounted, but show only some of its
contents.

I'm wondering if there is something sketchy about this brand new
Samsung 256GB Evo card. I have another 256GB card, a Samsung Pro, so
for my next exercise I'm going to leave the Evo card aside and redo
everything on the Pro card. Stay tuned. :)

One unrelated bit of additional information. After pulling the Evo card
from the phone and re-mounting it in the laptop, I find that Android
added many new folders on the card, all with 0 contents:

Alarms
Android
Audiobooks
DCIM
Documents
Download
Movies
Music
Notifications
Pictures
Podcasts
Recordings
Ringtones
.android_secure

Hey, Android! If I want a folder, *I* will create it!

At least now we have a clue why Android refused to mount cards
formatted with any restrictions on being written to, including cards
with any ext# filesystems. Dang, I need an open source phone!

Re: [PLUG] how to make folders/files read only

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2023 15:26:10 -0500
Bill Barry  dijo:

>> Stay tuned for the rest of the saga. :)

>You could just do a few mp3 files to begin with to find out if it
>works and then copy them all over after you have perfected a solution.

OK, you have a good point. The MP3s are in three folders, labeled Jazz,
Symphonic, and Zarzuelas, the latter being Spanish sort-of operettas.

After checking out all the Symphonic folder files starting with A and B
(215 of the 1348 total), I pulled the card from the laptop and put it
in the phone. Android saw all the files in the Jazz and Zarzuelas
folders, but only 814 of the Symphonic files. It doesn't take a genius
to figure out that the missing files are the ones that won't play,
ones that I am going through to re-copy from the TB3 source.

Your point made me perform a good exercise. I now know that the exFAT
drive is acceptable to Android, and also that at least all the files on
two of the folders are OK.

I still have to go through the remaining 1,100+ files in the card's
Symphonic folder, which will take a while. They look perfect in the
file manager, exactly as they appear in the source folder. The only way
I know to determine if they are somehow corrupted is to double-click on
one, which opens it in Exaile. Exaile either starts playing it or pops
up an error message. With the error messages I delete the file from the
folder on the card, then drag and drop the same file from the
source, and finally, double-click on the replacement. Out of the 50+
that I have replaced so far, absolutely 100% of the replacements have
played perfectly. Something happened to some of them as they were
copied last night. The corrupted ones appear to be totally random; I
can see no patterns to give me clues about the reason.

It would be nice if I could automate my procedure somehow, but I don't
know any way to do it. I'm using Exaile as my test instrument, but I've
tried several other players, and all of them refuse to play any of the
corrupted files, just as Android refused to recognize them.

I am also curious how Android knew to refuse to display the corrupted
ones. Maybe Android is smarter than I thought. :)

Re: [PLUG] how to make folders/files read only

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2023 07:43:41 -0700
Michael Ewan  dijo:

>The best way to make something read only (even by root) is using the
>chattr immutable (i) flag, i.e. sudo chattr +i file

Copying ~2,000 MP3 files onto a 256GB SD card to be inserted into an
Android phone has turned into a major project. Part of the problem is
copying the files from an external Thunderbolt 3 drive to the SD card
takes five or six hours, so each time usually ends up happening
overnight.

Another problem is inserting the card into the phone, because it
usually fails to connect, so the phone doesn't even see it. If whoever
did the engineering on that tiny tray and its connections were working
for me, they would be looking for a new job.

Regarding Android and the filesystems, forget ext4. All the literature
swears that ext4 is supported, in fact, apparently Android uses ext4
itself, but for external storage to be ext# the phone has to be rooted,
and I mean 'rooted,' not just unlocked.

Other choices are FAT32 or exFAT, but only models from the last few
years can do exFAT. My phone can handle exFAT, but if there's any
restriction on its ability to write to the medium I get 'unsupported
drive.' I found that out after I formatted the card exFAT, but accepted
the utility's offer to make the filesystem require my password. The
utility was Gnome-Disks, sort of Gnome's answer to GParted.

Last night I reformatted the card yet again, at least the sixth or
seventh time, and this time did just plain exFAT. Then overnight I
copied all the files to it (yet again), and this morning I discovered
that about one in four won't play from the card. If I play the same
file from the TB3 drive it works fine, and it also works fine if I
delete the copy on the card and then copy it back from the TB3 drive.
For the overnight copy I used drag and drop from a GUI file manager,
which appeared to be working fine when I went to bed.

Today's job is going to be figuring out which of the files won't play
and re-copying them from the source. This will take several hours, but
less time than wiping them all out and re-copying. I considered doing
'cp -R' from the command line instead of GUI drag and drop, but I
suspect that I'd still end up with a quarter of them unplayable. I
should add that 100% of the source files play perfectly, so the problem
was caused by something in the copy process. For why I have no clues.

In all of this I discovered that my phone has a feature to connect to a
network file server via its wifi. All of the MP3s are on my Synology
NAS and, amazingly, I got the phone to connect to it and I can see all
the files. I considered the idea of just putting the card into the
phone with nothing on it, then filling it up over wifi from the
Synology, but doing that from a tiny screen on the phone is maddening.
It might not be so bad if I could find a command line where I could do
the Android version of 'cp -R,' but I don't know if that is even
possible.

Stay tuned for the rest of the saga. :)

Re: [PLUG] how to make folders/files read only

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2023 19:24:31 -0500
Bill Barry  dijo:

>On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 7:21 PM Bill Barry  wrote:
>
>>
>> You want them read only, 600 is read/write.  Read by world would be
>> good might work better
>> chmod -R 004   *
>Or better chmod -R 0444 *

I tried man chmod, but it had zero about the numbers, although it had a
link to a web page that was supposed to give examples of usage, but it
turned out to be just a site proclaiming the virtues of gnu. I did
learn that the numbers are called 'octal numbers' and stand for who can
read, write an execute the file. There is evidently a system for how to
assemble the octal number, but it remains a mystery to me.

After applying 600 to all the files in a folder I did 'ls -la' and
every file had -rw---. I take it that means that I can read or
write the file, but everyone else gets a dash, so they have to suck
eggs.

However I gave the command with sudo, so I don't know if the 'rw'
applies to me or to some computer god. They're all .mp3 files, and if I
double-click on one in the file manager it plays, so no worries.

After applying the 600 I got a popup on my screen 'Writing data to the
drive -- do not unplug.' Right now the popup has remained there for a
couple hours, so my guess is that it's a lie. I'm just going to umount
it and put it in the phone.

Edit: I'm afraid I lost this play. I had to reinsert the SD card six
times before it finally connected, and when the phone came up it said:

Unsupported SD card
This device doesn't support this SD

There was no problem before when it was exFAT. Of course, exFAT can't
do permissions, so Android is free to delete anything on the card.
FAT32 won't help either, but I wonder if Android can read NTFS.

Re: [PLUG] how to make folders/files read only

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2023 16:43:29 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>On Thu, 26 Oct 2023, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>
>> ... but before I do that I want to make everything read-only, up to
>> and including maybe the entire drive.
>
>John,
>
>On your linux system run 'chmod 600 *.*'. That makes all files
>readable and writable by only you.

Never mind. The files were in various folders, and I had to be in one
of the folders before it worked.

I tried to post this as a reply to my previous reply, but since I was
the sender I got no bounce, so I had nothing to reply to.  Oh well.

Re: [PLUG] how to make folders/files read only

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2023 16:43:29 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>On Thu, 26 Oct 2023, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>
>> ... but before I do that I want to make everything read-only, up to
>> and including maybe the entire drive.
>
>John,
>
>On your linux system run 'chmod 600 *.*'. That makes all files
>readable and writable by only you.

Sounds like a good plan, but here's what happened:

cd /media/jjj/256GB-SD
sudo chmod 600 *.*
chmod: cannot access '*.*': No such file or directory

I'm not very good with wildcards, and evidently the terminal is even
worse. :(

[PLUG] how to make folders/files read only

[John Jason Jordan]

I have a problem with an Android phone, which is deleting files that I
put on an SD card with my laptop. The card is brand new, and when it
arrived it was formatted exFAT. I left the filesystem alone, since I
knew it was destined to go into the phone. I transferred hundreds of
files to the card with my laptop (SparkyLinux, based on Debian 12).
After inserting the card into the phone about a third of the files were
missing. I muttered invectives toward Samung (vendor of the card)
and to the designers of the exFAT filesystem, but nothing helped.

Eventually I pulled the cad out of the phone and mounted it back in the
laptop. Sure enough, something on the phone had deleted hundreds of
files. As to how or why I have no clues.

Android is supposed to be able to read the ext4 filesystem, so I
reformatted the card to ext4, then rewrote all the files. It's now ready
to go back into the phone, but before I do that I want to make
everything read-only, up to and including maybe the entire drive.

My knowledge of Linux is not great, and my Android abilities are much
less. I have no illusions that Google & Co. may have ways to defeat my
efforts, but I still want to give it my best shot.

I could use some instructions and suggestions for how to solve this
problem. :)

Re: [PLUG] Formatting confusion SOLVED

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2023 06:00:48 -0700
"Ted Mittelstaedt"  dijo:

>As a result I never use anything other than FAT or exFAT on this media
>since you never know when you are going to have to force a manual
>ejection and override the OS.
>
>But the journaling thing did not occur to me at all.  That's even a
>better reason not to use those filesystems on such media, wearing out
>the media with excessive writes to a journal

I have thousands of mp3 files that I created myself by ripping and
encoding my CD collection, which has about a thousand optical discs
acquired over the years. I began doing this in 2005 when I started
with Linux, and at that time I used whatever flavor of ext was extant.
(And note that the DMCA didn't exist back then.) Now, ext# has never
had a problem with double quotes, colons and non-US-English characters
in filenames, so they abound among my mp3s, e.g.: Voříšek: Symphony in D
(Maazel). I use only 'folder' music players (currently Audacious),
never those designed to require playlists based on tags, because
everything I need to know about the piece is contained in the filename,
and I like them played in alphabetical order.

I could probably cut down the time required to edit all these filenames
by using a GUI file manager that has bulk rename capability, but then
you have to add the time required for to learn how to use the feature,
and I have more interesting thing to do with my ever-shortening
remaining lifespan. And I like the way they look now, So I might
someday have a use for exFAT, but for now it remains unused on my
computers. 

I would not bother with SD cards at all except for my small Latitude
with removable screen, which came with only a 200GB drive. I could use
a USB stick, but the Latitude will take a micro SD card that becomes
invisible when inserted; one less device hanging on the side waiting
for my clumsy hands to destroy it. 

[PLUG] Formatting confusion SOLVED

[John Jason Jordan]

I have a brand new 1TB SD card. When I first inserted it into the
computer (SparkyLinux) it was automatically mounted and appeared to be
working fine. However, it was formatted exFAT, which I didn't really
want, so I fired up GParted and proceeded to remove the partition,
recreate it, and format it as ext4, with the label 1TB-SD. The
operations completed without error, but it could not be mounted, with
the error 'missing codepage or helper program, or other error.'

I closed GParted and ran Gnome Disk Utility, which offered 'check
filesystem,' 'repair filesystem,' and 'format,' among other options. I
started with 'check,' but it gave the same error message as
above. 'Repair' completed without error, but it still could not be
mounted, giving the same error message. Finally, still in Gnome Disk
Utility, I reformatted it as exFAT and reapplied the label. After that
it could be mounted and functioned normally.

Still not happy I decided to move to the command line. This is what
happened there

sudo mkfs.ext4 -L "1TB-SD" /dev/mmcblk0
mke2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
Found a dos partition table in /dev/mmcblk0
Proceed anyway? (y,N) y
Discarding device blocks: done
Creating filesystem with 262144000 4k blocks and 65664000 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 735301d6-e49f-4aa8-9222-8f621f57f7e1
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632,
2654208, 4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 2048, 23887872, 71663616,
78675968, 10240, 214990848
Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (262144 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

$ sudo mkdir /media/jjj/1TB-SD
$ sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0 /media/jjj/1TB-SD
mount: /media/jjj/1TB-SD:
wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mmcblk0, missing
codepage or helper program, or other error. dmesg(1) may have more
information after failed mount system call.

$sudo dmesg 
[442690.762650] EXT4-fs error (device mmcblk0p1): ext4_find_extent:936:
inode #8: comm pool-udisksd: pblk 131104767 bad header/extent: invalid
magic - magic 0, entries 0, max 0(0), depth 0(0) [442690.764359]
EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p1): Remounting filesystem read-only [442690.764363]
jbd2_journal_init_inode: Cannot locate journal superblock
[442690.764365] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p1): Could not load journal inode
[445844.987215] EXT4-fs error (device mmcblk0): ext4_find_extent:936:
inode #8: comm mount: pblk 131104767 bad header/extent: invalid magic -
magic 0, entries 0, max 0(0), depth 0(0) [445845.991577]
jbd2_journal_init_inode: Cannot locate journal superblock
[445845.991592] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0): Could not load journal inode
[445897.081747] EXT4-fs error (device mmcblk0): ext4_find_extent:936:
inode #8: comm pool-udisksd: pblk 131104767 bad header/extent: invalid
magic - magic 0, entries 0, max 0(0), depth 0(0) [445897.083607]
EXT4-fs (mmcblk0): Remounting filesystem read-only [445897.083627]
jbd2_journal_init_inode: Cannot locate journal superblock
[445897.083633] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0): Could not load journal inode

Is it possible that the device was somehow manufactured so that it can
only be formatted exFAT? I could use some clues. Maybe someone can
figure out what the dmesg results mean. :)

Edit: Because PLUG was plugged up I posted on Ubuntu forums, where I
found the answer. It appears that SD cards don't appreciate journaling,
so my command worked after some edits:

sudo mke2fs -t ext4 -O ^has_journal -L 1TB-SD /dev/mmcblk0

I'm don't know why mkfs.ext4 needed to change to mke2fs -t ext4, nor do
I understand the syntax of -O ^has_journal, but it worked, in spit

Re: [PLUG] Testing the new OSUOSL hosted mailman set up

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2023 17:52:52 -0800 (PST)
Paul Heinlein  dijo:

>On Tue, 21 Feb 2023, Russell Senior wrote:
>
>> A BIG THANK YOU to OSUOSL and Lance Albertson for his work in 
>> helping get this set up.  
>
>And to you all on the PLUG side of things. Mailman migrations are not 
>for the faint of heart!

+1,+1,+1, ¡Y mil más!

Re: [PLUG] Internet services with lowest packet latency

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 23 Aug 2022 02:14:57 +
Cy  dijo:

>Oh, you could run i2p!
>https://geti2p.net

How is i2p different from using a VPN?

From the above page: "I2P recommends that you use Tor Browser or a
trusted VPN when you want to browse the Internet privately." OK, if I
use a VPN (and I do), what more do I get with i2p?

Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu 22.04.1, firefox snap, alternatives?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 22 Aug 2022 13:00:05 -0700
Keith Lofstrom  dijo:

>Today I migrated a test machine to Ubuntu 22.04.1.
>I expected all the upgrades to be DEB packages.
>
>Surprise!  Canonical provides Firefox as a SNAP package,
>their own walled-garden flavor (like RPM).  I had hoped
>to escape jails of that kind.

There are fans of snap and many who don't like it. I would like it
better if it wouldn't keep popping up messages about programs installed
with snap. I hate popups when I am trying to get some work done.

Some of Ubuntu's required utilities can now only be installed with
snap. But for most optional stuff there still exist .deb packages, that
you can most easily find with Synaptic. On the other hand, I read
recently somewhere that Synaptic's days were numbered.

And if you've got a program installed with snap, I don't know if you
can uninstall it and then reinstall it with a .deb. My big problem is
Chromium, installed with snap, and I don't know how that happened,
because I didn't voluntarily install it with snap. I can uninstall it,
and maybe reinstall it with a .deb, but what happens then to the
zillions of settings and configurations? Maybe I just need to spend a
day migrating everything from Chromium to a different browser, then
kiss Chromium goodbye and never look back.

All this reminds me of Alien,  a command line program that used to come
with all Debian based distros. With Alien you could convert an .rpm
instantly into a .deb, and I did so numerous times, and never had a
problem. Maybe what we need is a similar utility to convert a snap into
a .deb. Or maybe even better yet - a non-snap version of Ubuntu.

Re: [PLUG] Getting snap out of mount command

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 9 Aug 2022 07:58:57 -0700
Vince Winter  dijo:

>The way snap works is snaps apps are self contained images that
>include all the libraries the app needs to run. So it doesn't have to
>worry about dependencies being out of date in exchange for larger size
>foot print on the system.

How is this different from Appimages? What is the point of mounting
them, why do they have to be mounted? I have several Appimages and they
all run without needing to be mounted.

[PLUG] Getting snap out of mount command

[John Jason Jordan]

Today I lost power to my networking stuff. It's restored, but I'm having
difficulty getting everything mounted. In the process the mount command
produces pages of lines, almost all of which are from sap, er ... snap.
I don't understand what snap has to do with mounting things. Maybe I
can do a $mount -snap command?

Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu with mate/gnome2 and deb, but not snap

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 7 Aug 2022 00:57:21 -0700
Seth Alford  dijo:

>Fedora has a MATE-Compiz spin that I have been using for a while.
>
>See https://spins.fedoraproject.org/mate-compiz/download/index.html
>
>You can download a live image that you can test run without writing it
>to a hard drive.

For several years I used Fedora, but eventually gave up on it because
of the six month forced dist-upgrades. Plus, the dist-upgrades also
sometimes included things that I didn't want, and without telling me.

Regarding Ubuntu-Maté, it would greatly surprise me if it was
discontinued. Ubuntu does occasionally make questionable decisions with
respect to their *default* desktop environment, but when you get a
different DE the only problem is if Ubuntu changed the base in some way
that makes it impossible to install your desired DE. It seems to me
that if you are concerned about the longevity of Ubuntu-Maté you are
looking at the wrong thing - you should be concerned more with the
longevity of Maté. As long as Maté is still around you can just install
it instead of / in addition to what Ubuntu comes with.

Regarding snap, I have occasional issues where it pops up warnings:

Pending update of "chromium" snap
Close the app to avoid disruptions (13 days left)
Cancel  OK

I searched the Ubuntu forums and discovered that this may be some kind
of virus, yet others said otherwise. In my peregrinations there I
recall seeing advice on how to get rid of snap altogether, but I didn't
follow the instructions, and I don't remember how to do it. The problem
with getting rid of snap is that nowadays there are some apps that
cannot be installed without it. It may be that with Ubuntu you can love
snap or hate snap, but you can't leave snap. 

Re: [PLUG] Direct access to web page from alpine message

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 26 Jul 2022 15:29:18 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>I switched my default browser from firefox to brave. Now, when I click
>on a URL embedded in an email message viewed in alpine, firefox is
>opened rather than brave.
>
>I looked in Settings -> Config and didn't find where alpine stores the
>browser to invoke. Anyone know where that is?

I've never used Alpine, but in Claws Mail I find under Configuration >
Preferences > Message View > External Programs there is a drop down tab
for the browser and another for the text editor, set to
chromium-browser '%s' and mousepad %s, respectively. This is on Xfce4.

Re: [PLUG] <Solved!> No space left on device

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2017 15:42:37 -0700
Dale Snell  dijo:

>Ah, okay.  You'll have to unplug the Synology in order to find
>those movies.  They're in whatever filesystem the Synology mounts
>in.  Say you have a directory "/mnt/storage/".  If you do an
>"ls /mnt/storage", nothing will show up.  When you mount your new
>filesystem (say, the Synology) on /mnt/storage, doing the
>"ls /mnt/storage" will report whatever is in the new filesystem.
>If you create files in /mnt/storage/ _before_ mounting the
>Synology, and _then_ mount the Synology, you won't see those
>files, just the Synology's.

Free space: 57.9 GB of 82.4 GB (29% used)

Hallelujah!!

Now that things are back to normal I want to work on making sure that
this never happens again.

>One thing I learned to do in a previous life, when I helped
>administer a Sun III, was to mark unmounted filesystems.  Use
>mkdir as usual to create the mountpoint directory (mkdir blorfl),
>then immediately do a "touch blorfl/not_mounted".  When you do
>a directory listing of blorfl, it should show "not_mounted" only.
>If there are other files there, you've got a problem.

The 'not mounted' file is a good idea. There is a
folder /media/jjj/Synology and that is where the Synology is mounted.
>From fstab:

192.168.1.115:/volume1/Synology /media/jjj/Synology nfs
auto,user 0 0
#it took me a long time to get that fstab line right

And here is the rsync command:

 rsync -rptog --progress --stats --delete
 --exclude-from=/media/jjj/Movies/rsync_exclusions 
/media/jjj/Movies/ /media/jjj/Synology

It seems to me that maybe a simple way to make sure this never happens
again is to modify the rsync command so that if the Synology is not
mounted the command aborts. Even better, if it aborts it should send me
a message so I know that things are amiss. Wait ... a pop-up with
gxmessage would be better. OK, this sounds like I need a script instead
of just a raw command. 

if  then gxmessage "Movies backup failed"
else rsync -rptog ... etc.

I can do really, really simple bash scripts but I don't know how to do
. Also unsure about bash syntax for if-then-else.
Oh, and gxmessage is installed, as I use it to pop up a list of Unicode
values for characters in IPA.

Thanks a major bunch to you and everyone else who helped. Next time we
meet I owe you a beer! Several beers!
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Re: [PLUG] No space left on device

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2017 13:26:10 -0700
a...@clueserver.org dijo:

>It sounds like something has the file or directory open, but has also
>deleted it. (So the process is still holding onto the file, but the
>system does not show it since it is marked as deleted.) Sometimes
>programs will do this as a way to secure the data from the rest of the
>OS.
>
>Have you tried rebooting to see if the process and/or kernel will
>release the space? I am not certain of lsof will show what process is
>hanging onto it.

The computer was rebooted yesterday. Just now I tried lsof but all I
got was a list of five processes:

COMMAND   PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFFNODE NAME
bash 3657  jjj  cwd  DIR   8,17   4096 1444985 /media/jjj 
bash26652  jjj  cwdDIR   8,17 4096 1444985 /media/jjj 
bash26956  jjj  cwdDIR 8,17  4096 1444985 /media/jjj 
lsof 32601  jjj  cwd DIR   8,17  4096 1444985 /media/jjj 
lsof 32602  jjj cwd  DIR   8,17 4096 1444985 /media/jjj

I should probably be giving lsof some options. I tried to read the man
page but it was too much.
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Re: [PLUG] No space left on device

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2017 14:07:59 -0700
Dale Snell  dijo:

>> I found at least part of the problem. During remodeling work
>> apparently the power plug to the Synology disk station was unplugged.
>> Thus, when rsync tried to sync the Mediasonic USB drive to the
>> Synology it failed. But at least a couple of times recently I ran the
>> command manually (Instead of waiting for cron to do it at 2am), and I
>> watched in the terminal as it did so. It copied a lot of movies from
>> the USB, and then failed. Now I know why it failed.
>> 
>> The part I don't know is where rsync put those files. They are
>> somewhere in /media, because the du command listed /media as having
>> 56GB. 
>> 
>>  jjj@Devil-Bonobo:/$ cd /media
>>  jjj@Devil-Bonobo:/media$ ls -la
>>  total 16
>>  drwxr-xr-x   4 jjj  jjj  4096 Apr 16  2017 .
>>  drwxr-xr-x  25 root root 4096 Oct 24 21:46 ..
>>  drwxr-x---+  5 jjj  jjj  4096 Oct 24 20:59 jjj
>>  drwxr-x---+  2 root root 4096 Apr 16  2017 root
>>  jjj@Devil-Bonobo:/media$ cd jjj
>>  jjj@Devil-Bonobo:/media/jjj$ ls -la
>>  total 436
>>  drwxr-x---+5 jjj jjj   4096 Oct 24 20:59 .
>>  drwxr-xr-x 4 jjj jjj   4096 Apr 16  2017 ..
>>  drwxrwxrwx 6 jjj jjj   4096 Oct 24 21:08 128GB
>>  drwxr-xr-x  2311 jjj jjj 270336 Oct 25 11:17 Movies
>>  drwxr-xr-x  2311 jjj jjj 159744 Oct 25 08:00 Synology
>> 
>> According to ls there are 16 files in /media and 436 files
>> in /media/jjj. Why do they not appear when I use 'ls -la'? I also
>> tried as root, but got the same output. And for what it's worth,
>> Thunar (Xfce GUI file manager) also does not display them. 
>
>The "total " lines in a long directory listing do not
>report the number of files in a directory.  Rather, they report
>the total disk allocation (i.e., the number of blocks) for all
>files in that directory.

Ah, that helps. I was wondering about those numbers, because 436 files
would be a couple of terabytes. 

>If you know the name of one of the files, you should be able to
>find it with the find(1) command.  cd to /media and try
>
>find . -name movie_name -print
>
>If  is excessively long, or you don't remember all of
>it, use a wildcard like \* at one end or the other.  E.g., "Star
>Trek\*" (w/o the quotes, natch) should find anything Star Trekish.

When I ran the rsync command at a time when the Synology was unplugged
rsync added a lot of files to wherever it put them, and they were all in
alphabetical order. Rsync got through the As before failing. That is
164 movies, where each is a folder with the name of the movie, and
inside is the movie, usuallly as an MKV file. So all I need to do is
pick a movie file that starts with an A and it should work. I tried
several such movies, from /, from /media, and from /media/jjj, but all
I got was 'no such file or directory.'

>Another thing you might do is cd to / and run the following
>command:
>
>du -hl --sync --output=source,itotal,iused,iavail

du -hl --sync --output=source,itotal,iused,iavail
du: unrecognized option '--sync'
du: unrecognized option '--output=source,itotal,iused,iavail'

Not sure what went wrong here. 
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Re: [PLUG] No space left on device

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2017 10:18:47 -0700
John Jason Jordan <joh...@gmx.com> dijo:

>I recently encountered this and it turns out that my / partition was,
>indeed, full. At the last Clinic I added ~50GB of free space on the
>drive to /, making now a total of 84GB. And now it is happening again.
>Something in / has eaten the entire new space.
>
>Note that ~/ is on the same drive, but a different partition. According
>to Thunar the ~/ partition is only 64% used, 138GB of free space.
>The device is a 480GB SSD. Palimpsest shows both partitions and no
>unallocated space.
>
>I used Thunar to check Properties on everything in / and found nothing
>out of the ordinary. I need some command line tools to find the pig
>that is using all my space. Also I need to find out what is causing the
>pig to be so hungry. Suggestions?

I found at least part of the problem. During remodeling work apparently
the power plug to the Synology disk station was unplugged. Thus, when
rsync tried to sync the Mediasonic USB drive to the Synology it failed.
But at least a couple of times recently I ran the command manually
(Instead of waiting for cron to do it at 2am), and I watched in the
terminal as it did so. It copied a lot of movies from the USB, and then
failed. Now I know why it failed.

The part I don't know is where rsync put those files. They are
somewhere in /media, because the du command listed /media as having
56GB. 

jjj@Devil-Bonobo:/$ cd /media
jjj@Devil-Bonobo:/media$ ls -la
total 16
drwxr-xr-x   4 jjj  jjj  4096 Apr 16  2017 .
drwxr-xr-x  25 root root 4096 Oct 24 21:46 ..
drwxr-x---+  5 jjj  jjj  4096 Oct 24 20:59 jjj
drwxr-x---+  2 root root 4096 Apr 16  2017 root
jjj@Devil-Bonobo:/media$ cd jjj
jjj@Devil-Bonobo:/media/jjj$ ls -la
total 436
drwxr-x---+5 jjj jjj   4096 Oct 24 20:59 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 jjj jjj   4096 Apr 16  2017 ..
drwxrwxrwx 6 jjj jjj   4096 Oct 24 21:08 128GB
drwxr-xr-x  2311 jjj jjj 270336 Oct 25 11:17 Movies
drwxr-xr-x  2311 jjj jjj 159744 Oct 25 08:00 Synology

According to ls there are 16 files in /media and 436 files
in /media/jjj. Why do they not appear when I use 'ls -la'? I also tried
as root, but got the same output. And for what it's worth, Thunar (Xfce
GUI file manager) also does not display them. 
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Re: [PLUG] No space left on device

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2017 10:23:55 -0700
a...@clueserver.org dijo:

>> I used Thunar to check Properties on everything in / and found
>> nothing out of the ordinary. I need some command line tools to find
>> the pig that is using all my space. Also I need to find out what is
>> causing the pig to be so hungry. Suggestions?
>
>du -h --max-depth=1 /
>
>You can then look in the directory using the most space with the same
>command until you find what you want. You might need to run it under
>sudo to avoid the "cannot access directory" error messages.

I did this and the only thing that looked suspicious was 55016
for /media. I have a hunch that /media is where the problem is, like
what if stuff was supposed to go to a device mounted there but instead
it went to a folder in /media? 

This computer has two drives, 

sdb 480GB partitioned as / 84G and the remainder as /home
sda 1GB, one partition, label Data, mounted at /media/jjj/Data

However, there are also two external drives that are always mounted,
Movies (14TB, USB) and Synology (16TB, NAS). I suspect that Movies is
the problem. It is mounted at /media/jjj/Movies, but I think that there
must be some movies there that are not on the drive. Perhaps I moved
some movies to Movies when the drive was not actually mounted. The
Synology is just a backup mirror of Movies (rsync).

Unfortunately, Thunar just displays all the movies in Movies without
telling me if they are really on the USB drive or whether they are
on /media/jjj/Movies. There are over 1400 folders (one for each movie),
so checking each one individually would be ridiculous. I need a more
efficient way to figure this out. Any suggestions?
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[PLUG] No space left on device

[John Jason Jordan]

I recently encountered this and it turns out that my / partition was,
indeed, full. At the last Clinic I added ~50GB of free space on the
drive to /, making now a total of 84GB. And now it is happening again.
Something in / has eaten the entire new space.

Note that ~/ is on the same drive, but a different partition. According
to Thunar the ~/ partition is only 64% used, 138GB of free space.
The device is a 480GB SSD. Palimpsest shows both partitions and no
unallocated space.

I used Thunar to check Properties on everything in / and found nothing
out of the ordinary. I need some command line tools to find the pig
that is using all my space. Also I need to find out what is causing the
pig to be so hungry. Suggestions?
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Re: [PLUG] Bug? with tab completion in terminal

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 14 Oct 2017 23:03:04 -0700
Robert Citek  dijo:

>I believe Wes is suggesting that the filesystem on /tmp/ may be
>running low on disk space.  Can you post the output of running this
>command?
>
>$ df -hTPl -x tmpfs

jjj@Devil-Bonobo:/media/jjj/128GB$ df -hTPl -x tmpfs
Filesystem Type  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev   devtmpfs  7.9G  4.0K  7.9G   1% /dev
/dev/sdb1  ext4   23G   22G 0 100% /
/dev/sdb2  ext4  321G  216G   89G  71% /home
/dev/sdd1  ext4   11T  4.2T  6.2T  41% /media/jjj/Movies
/dev/sdc1  ext4  118G  9.7G  102G   9% /media/jjj/128GB

Now I see what Wes meant.  Apparently the system has no free space. I
have some free space on the main drive which I had planned to add to
the root partition. I can see a project for the Clinic this afternoon.
I will be sure to bring a copy of the latest bootable Gparted.

In the meantime commands work if I type the path completely.
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Re: [PLUG] Bug? with tab completion in terminal

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 14 Oct 2017 19:57:19 -0700
wes  dijo:

>you did state that there is plenty of space available, but did you
>check all drives/partitions?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'check all drives/partitions.' The drive
where any extension would go and where the download would be is ~/.
That partition must have been working or nothing would have been
working. 

Also, I should have mentioned that today the command that generated the
error message was mkvmerge -i, but a few days ago the command that
generated the error message was a simple cd.
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[PLUG] Bug? with tab completion in terminal

[John Jason Jordan]

A few days ago, while attempting to get information about a movie file
that had a long and complicated name I just typed the first couple of
letters and then hit tab. Here is an example from just now:

mkvmerge -i The_bash: cannot create temp file for
here-document: No space left on device

I had typed 'The_' before hitting tab. And, of course, there are
terabytes of free space available.

When this first occurred a few days ago I started to post a query here,
but was delayed in sending it. A few hours later I discovered that the
problem had resolved itself, so I killed the post that I was going to
send. But tonight it is back, so I probably need to solve the problem.

In case it is important, I almost always use Gnome terminal, but last
time it happened I experimented by going to a real command line
(Ctrl-Alt-F1), where the problem continued. In other words, it is
probably not Gnome terminal. 

The computer is Xubuntu 14.04, up to date.

Observations and suggestions welcome.
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Re: [PLUG] Printing from Virtual Box

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 8 Oct 2017 19:47:06 -0700
Denis Heidtmann  dijo:

>Thanks for your suggestions.  But note that I can get to the printer
>from Ubuntu on the laptop with the desktop suspend or powered off.
>This means to me that the printer is accessed from the laptop via
>wireless.  And it works.  So to my thinking, the issue is between the
>guest win2k and the host Ubuntu 16.04 on the laptop.  The fact that
>the printer is accessed from the desktop via USB should be irrelevant.

What happens if you ping the printer from the Win2000 guest?
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Re: [PLUG] Printing from Virtual Box

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 8 Oct 2017 08:38:57 -0700
Denis Heidtmann  dijo:

>I have tried Add Printer. Chose Network Printer. It cannot find it.
>Tried browsing; picking some names; no success.
>Chose Local Printer.  It gives me that port list that does not have my
>printer listed. Tried create a new port; got lost in the questions.

I can offer suggestions for network connection only because I have no
experience printing via USB. 

Usually the Ubuntu Add printer GUI will find the printer on the network,
although it is slower than the second coming. I've had it take up to
five minutes, so give it lots of time to find the printer on your
network. And, of course, be sure the printer is turned on and actually
connected to the network. Also, there is usually a place in the
printer's menu to set the printer's IP address, which I strongly
recommend. Once you have set its IP address you can verify that it's
really connected with a simple ping. And a simple suggestion, write its
IP address on a slip of paper and tape it to somewhere obvious on the
printer. With its address set in the printer your router will always
give it that address. And speaking of its IP address, nothing is going
to find the printer if its IP address points to the wrong network,
another reason for setting its IP address manually.
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Re: [PLUG] Yes, there will be PLUG

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 2 Oct 2017 22:16:00 -0700
Michael Dexter  dijo:

>Meting announcement to come.
>
>Topic: Privacy options for HTTP

Will there be a discussion of DuckduckGo vs. Google and the rest?
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Re: [PLUG] Power converters for power outages

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 29 Sep 2017 15:55:59 -0700
Dick Steffens  dijo:

>Regarding generators, we bought a Champion duel fuel generator last 
>year. I've given up using gasoline powered equipment as much as I can, 
>simply because of maintenance. I used to be more of a gear head, but
>not so much anymore.
>
>Anyway, an important consideration is whether the generator puts out 
>clean 60Hz power. Mine, currently, does not. The one time we used it 
>last winter it powered the lights, refrigerator, and freezer, but not 
>our computer battery backup units. Eventually I discovered that my 
>generator was not putting out 60 Hz. I found the instructions for 
>adjusting it, but have yet to get around to applying them ...
>something I must do in the next couple of months to be ready.

I installed a 7500 watt tri-fuel generator in the covered patio in the
back of the house. It is connected to the same natural gas that powers
my water heater, gas log fireplace, and kitchen range. I did this
because, like you, I think that maintenance of gasoline powered
equipment is a pain, mostly because the carburetors get bunged up
because I left gas in them too long.

The manufacturer guarantees that it is clean enough to use with
electronic equipment such as computers. Nevertheless, I also have
large UPS systems to power my laptop, desktop, network devices, the
network TV tuner and the stereo. The UPS systems will power all of that
for close to two hours, and the laptop will run another couple hours
on its own battery. If the power goes out and it appears that it will
last a while I just start the generator, plug the UPS systems into it
and carry on. I tried this out and the UPS systems didn't complain. Of
course, they also supply nice clean power to the devices plugged into
them, so if the generator's output isn't perfect the UPS systems will
sanitize it. The genrator's 7500 watt capacity (8500 surge) will also
power the refrigerator, freezer, and lots of table lamps.
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Re: [PLUG] A fontmanager question

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 29 Sep 2017 08:25:42 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>I built and installed fontmanager and it seems to work. But, the display
>is off. The left 'window' is labled for categories, I think, but is
>cut off at the left side. There's no vertical frame divider between
>the left and right windows (the latter contains the typefaces in the
>available range of fonts). Has anyone else seen this?

For years I have used Fontmatrix, but upon reading your question I
installed Font Manager. It was in the Xubuntu 14.04 repos, version
0.5.7-4, so it was easy to install. I fired it up and waited while it
found all the fonts installed on the computer. It seems to work fine,
and I do not see the problems you report. Of course, I am using the
proprietary nVidia driver and my desktop environment is probably
different from yours, so caveat lector.
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Re: [PLUG] LO5 Writer and fonts

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 25 Sep 2017 18:42:40 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>If you have any ideas why 1) LO Writer does not display the font name
>as it appears in /usr/share/fonts/OTF/, 2) why the text in that
>typeface disappears instantly, and 3) how I can fix this, please share
>your knowledge with me.

Sorry, I have no answers. But I do recommend posting your question to
the LO Users listserv. If you're not already subscribed:

https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/

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[PLUG] Patch panel alternatives

[John Jason Jordan]

My house is wired with cat6 rated cable and jacks, with several jacks
in some of the rooms. I have a 16-port patch panel in the room that
also has the internet connection and other stuff. The patch panel is a
pain in the derrière. I find it nearly impossible to punch down wires
in it well enough to get a good connection. It is a Trendnet purchased
from that store in Wilsonville. 

At the same time I have little problem with keystone jacks, that is, as
long as I stay away from the tool-less jacks, which I find impossible.
(I don't have enough fingers that are small enough to hold everything
at the same time). I am considering ditching the 16-port patch panel
and getting a simple blank keystone jack holder, then pulling all the
wires currently in the patch panel and putting them in keystone jacks
instead.

1) Does this sound like a good idea?

2) I can get a 24-port blank keystone jack panel lots of places online,
but does anyone know of any place where I can get one locally?
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Re: [PLUG] PLUG Digest, Vol 156, Issue 17

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 10 Sep 2017 08:17:56 -0700
Denis Heidtmann  dijo:

>cp -pr * /home/household/  will bring all the dot folders in
>/home/household, numbering about 24 dot folders and 19 dot files. The
>exclude option in rsync will do it when I can figure out how to write
>the PATTERN --exclude requires. The shell gets first shot at it.

Here is the command that I use to back up the folder /Movies on a USB
drive to my Synology network drive:

rsync -rptog --progress --stats --delete
--exclude-from=/media/jjj/Movies/rsync_exclusions /media/jjj/Movies/ 
/media/jjj/Synology

I added the --delete option because I want the network drive to be a
mirror of the USB drive, so if I delete anything from the USB drive I
want it deleted from the Synology as well. The --progress and --stats
options just give me reports of what rsync is doing / did and are not
necessary for the successful operation of the command. Note that my
command uses --exclude-from rather than just --exclude, where I have a
text file to tell rsync not to include certain files and folders.
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Re: [PLUG] External hd enclosure recmmendation

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 4 Sep 2017 10:57:29 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>I have a SATA III 500GB hard drive that needs an external enclosure. It
>will be connected via USB3 to the new server.

I recently bought a Mediasonic ProRaid HUR3-SU3S3 2 Bay 3.5'
SATA Hard Drive Enclosure to house two Western Digital red pro drives,
which I set up with RAID 0. Installation of the drives and software
setup could not have been easier. That was some months back and so far
it has been working perfectly, connected with USB3.0.

Mediasonic also sells single drive USB3.0 enclosures, but I have no
experience with them. All I can say is that I am very pleased with the
quality of the product that I bought.

Mediasonic single drive enclosures:
http://tinyurl.com/y74qdthf


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Re: [PLUG] Compile issue: libraries present but not seen

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 3 Sep 2017 09:01:21 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>I'm trying to build gnucash-2.6.17 on my Slackware-14.2/32-bit system. The
>build fails because make cannot find libgnc-gnome, which is in turn
>dependent on libgtk-x11. Both are present on this host.

I have no knowledge of how make finds the stuff it needs. Maybe there
is a list or link or something that it looks at instead of or in
addition to the presence of the actual file. Have you tried
reinstalling the libraries? Just a thought.
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Re: [PLUG] Issues with web browsers

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 1 Sep 2017 13:18:59 -0700
Dick Steffens <d...@dicksteffens.com> dijo:

>On 09/01/2017 11:59 AM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>
><...>
>
>> I wanted to see the html source and send it to you off-list.  I could
>> swear that there is a way to view the source in Firefox, but now I
>> can't find the button.
>
>Firefox 53.0 (64-bit) Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0
>
>Tools > Web Developer > Page Source Ctrl+U
>(near the bottom of the list)
>
>Looks like they decided that the unwashed don't need to see the page 
>source and only web developers look for it.

Ah! There it is! Thanks!
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Re: [PLUG] Issues with web browsers

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 1 Sep 2017 08:21:44 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>   All this on Slackware-14.2/32-bit.
>
>I need to understand what the system is telling me. Firefox loads pages
>OK, but when I try to use the 'bug reports' link on www.gnucash.org it
>tells me it cannot load that page. One of the gnucash devs has no
>problems loading it.

Using Firefox 55.0.2 on Xubuntu 14.04, up to date, I went to the main
page at the link above, then clicked on Bug Reports and the page loaded
quickly and perfectly. The Firefox Help About says that I have "Mozilla
Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0." The URL for the Bug Reports page is
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Bugzilla

I wanted to see the html source and send it to you off-list.  I could
swear that there is a way to view the source in Firefox, but now I
can't find the button.

However, I did find Tools > Page Info that gives me a popup with
various tabs, including one labeled Security, which says "Connection
Encrypted (TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256, 128 bit keys, TLS
1.2." It also says that the site is storing cookies on my computer. The
General tab says "Modified: July 27, 2017, 6:48:37 PM PDT." There is a
lot more under the other tabs but you can't select and copy most of it
to paste here, and I'm not sure which of it might be helpful.

I didn't try any other browsers.
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[PLUG] HDHomeRun Config GUI loses connection

[John Jason Jordan]

My house is wired with Cat6 ethernet to which everything is connected,
including an HDHomeRun TV tuner (the Connect, not the Extend or the
Prime). The incoming signal is just an over the air antenna. The router
is a D-Link DIR-860L B1 (thanks again, Russell). The router also
supplies wireless, used only by my phone and my laptop, although the
laptop is also wired. 

Everything works perfectly except that the HDHomeRun Config GUI pops up
a 'communication error' message periodically. Sometimes I can go a
couple days without it happening, but this evening it happened three
times, one right after the other. I can recover just by scrolling up or
down in the channel list in the HDHomeRun confit GUI. In other words,
this is a major annoyance, but not a total fail.

Side note: All my computers are just straight Xubuntu 14.04, up to
date. There is no mythtv installed. All I use to view television on VLC
is the HDHomeRun Config GUI.

The manufacturer, Silicondust, provides occasional firmware updates.
The latest is dated 8/15/2017 and I have applied it, but there was no
change in the frequency of the errors.

At the last Clinic I brought up this issue and Tomas suggested setting
up a cron job to ping the HDHomeRun device periodically. After thinking
about it I think that this would accomplish nothing. It would respond
to the ping and several hours later would lose the connection again.

I could use some suggestions.
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Re: [PLUG] Linux Widows Guide

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 28 Aug 2017 18:23:08 -0700
wes  dijo:

>>
>> We are considering a project over the next year:
>> writing a "Linux Widow's Guide".
>>
>
>What would go in this guide that isn't in Linux For Dummies?

I considered the same idea. But I have an even easier idea: Make sure
the expected survivor is on this list and knows how to post to it. Is
there anyone here who would not help out the survivor of one of us?
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Re: [PLUG] local source for barrel connectors

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 25 Aug 2017 12:55:49 -0700
"John Meissen"  dijo:

>
>I used to go to Radio Shack for this sort of thing. 
>
>Does anyone know of a local source for barrel connectors (used on
>things like laptop power bricks and other power supplies) other than
>Fry's?

United Radio Supply at NE 7th and Couch would be my first choice.

https://www.ursele.com/about/

Toll Free: 800.955.4877
Portland: 503.233.5341
 
Hours of Operation
Monday - Friday
7:30am - 4:30pm
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Re: [PLUG] I'm shopping for hardware, what about Lenovo?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 23 Aug 2017 17:53:49 -0700
Vedanta Teacher  dijo:

>I was thinking about replacing it with a Lenovo ThinkPad T570:

Thinkpads are famous for reliability and Linux compatibility. But you
should also check out the offerings from System76.
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Re: [PLUG] Building document to show installed fonts

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 16:28:02 -0700
Roderick Anderson  dijo:

>Doesn't appear to be easily available for Linux Mint so before I go 
>looking for sources I'd like to make sure it does what I need.
>
>I did find a reference on Wikipedia but is says Font Management
>software.
>
>I need(/want) a document created that lists and shows the fonts.  I
>can see them in the file manager just fine but would like something I
>can take out to the back porch with a cup of coffee - on my tablet or
>hard copy.

It's in the Ubuntu repos, but I might have one of the extra repos
enabled that you don't.

Yes, Fontmatrix is a font manager, but to do so it displays them
graphically so you can see what each font looks like on screen and when
printed. It also provides additional information about the font, e.g.,
who made it, the filename on your disk, among other details. However, it
will do all this magic only for fonts that are on media accessible to
the computer it is installed on. So if the fonts are on your tablet and
you install Fontmatrix on the tablet, it will display them. 

I have attached a screenshot.

Edit: Resending without the screenshot because the original did not
make it to the list. Must be attachments are not allowed. 
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Re: [PLUG] Building document to show installed fonts

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 11:07:51 -0700
Roderick Anderson  dijo:

>Anyone aware of a method (scripts) to build a document of all the
>fonts in a directory that shows what they look like?

Why not just install Fontmatrix? It's in the repositories for most
distros. By default it displays graphically all the fonts installed
syustem-wide, plus all the fonts in ~/.fonts, but you can also point it
to a directory.
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Re: [PLUG] ENU,Inc R.I.P.

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 19:07:55 -0700
Larry Brigman  dijo:

>There are some places still around.
>Iguana Micro for those on the west side. http://www.iguanamicro.com/
>Also for bits and pieces - surplus gizmos -
>http://www.surplusgizmos.com/

Iguana Micro looks good. 
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Re: [PLUG] ENU,Inc R.I.P.

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 12 Aug 2017 22:09:02 -0700
Neal  dijo:

>What was the big-time computer parts store across from their 122nd Ave
>site years ago? 

I don't remember the name of the store, but I was a regular customer.
Once I bought a computer from them because its motherboard could hold
16 Mb of RAM, an unheard of amount back then. The techs watched as it
booted and the POST went through all the RAM. None of them had ever
worked on a PC with that much RAM. It was shortly after that when I
started buying parts and building my own computers. 

And yeah, ENU will be missed, mostly because there is no good
alternative. It costs around $18 to drive from my house to Fry's and
back, which makes the prices at Amazon and Newegg look good.
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Re: [PLUG] Migrating Win 10 on new machine to VirtualBox

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 9 Aug 2017 18:26:56 -0700
Denis Heidtmann  dijo:

>I figured out how to get to the bios.  There is not boot-order option
>I am accustomed to--the order is set by properties UEFI/legacy rather
>than CD/HD, etc.  I set it to legacy, but it still did not boot the
>CD.  UEFI is disabled as well.  I guess I need to explore other
>options.  Ideas?

This will probably not help, but here goes anyway. On my current laptop
there are two boot options: one takes you to the BIOS and the other (F7)
gives you a list of devices from which you can select the one to boot
to. But this is not a Thinkpad. :(
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Re: [PLUG] PLEX, no support.

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 8 Aug 2017 21:10:16 -0700
Steve Christiansen  dijo:

>This has nothing to do with PLEX (I don't even know what that is),
>but I'd like to comment on the problems I've had in accessing online
>streaming content with my Samsung "smart" TV.
>
>Even though the Samsung TV offers access to Netflix and other online
>services, it is not usable. While watching Netflix content, the video
>and audio become so out of sync that it is truly impossible to watch.
>
>However, the workaround is easy because I also have a Samsung Blu-ray
>player with online access, connected by HDMI to the TV. For reasons
>unknown to me, the engineers who designed the Blu-ray were much more
>competent than those who designed the TV. It works perfectly. In case
>you are wondering, the TV and the Blu-ray are connected to the same
>switch leading to the same router. There is no difference in their
>network connections.
>
>In summary, you might try want to try avoiding the Samsung TV network
>access altogether and use another box with an HDMI connection to the
>TV.

I don't know what PLEX is either, but I do have a Samsung Smart TV. I
also have an HDHomeRun tuner that collects over the air broadcasts and
makes them available over my home ethernet or wifi.

After unpacking and plugging in the Samsung I successfully got it
seeing my home wifi, but no way could I get it to see the HDHomeRun. It
would use the wifi for Netflix, etc., but as I have no interest in that
I left it alone and plugged in a plain set of rabbit ears. Meantime, I
can watch over the air broadcasts through the HDHomeRun, but only on my
computers with VLC. 

I suspect that Samsung gets $$ from Netflix, inter alia, so they
disabled any other possibilities. Instead of the Samsung smart TV I
probably should have bought a big monitor and a small computer.
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Re: [PLUG] Help needed with Virtual Box

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 7 Aug 2017 22:09:39 -0700
DAL  dijo:

>I wonder if there might be someone at the next Sunday afternoon clinic 
>who could help if I brought a portable computer along with Linux? Or 
>even better, is there someone on the Vancouver side of the river who I 
>might contact directly for a little local help? (I live in Salmon
>Creek.) .

You are more than welcome at the next Clinic (August 20), but in the
meantime I have a thought:

Assuming you have Guest Additions installed, USB devices can be made
available to the guest OS, but only one OS can see the device at a
time. If you have mounted the device in your guest OS then it will not
exist for your host OS, and vice-versa.
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Re: [PLUG] Libre Office Writer Version: 5.1.6.2 and curly quotes

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 6 Aug 2017 14:34:48 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>On Sun, 6 Aug 2017, Joe Shisei Niski wrote:
>
>> It seems that once upon a time (circa version 4 or so), LO Writer
>> supported so-called curly or "smart" quotes,
>
>My experience is that this form of quotation mark is
>typeface-dependent. Not all typefaces support them or true small caps
>or true Italic fonts (rather than slanted.) Try selecting a different
>typeface ("font") in LO and see if that supplies them.

I can add that typesetter quotes are alive and well in my LibreOffice
4.2.8.2 on Xubuntu 14.04. I might also add that I have long been in awe
of how well it works. The only time it makes a mistake is when typing
something like 'twas, where it thinks the ' should be an open quote
although, in this case it must be a closed quote.

>> My use is for non-technical college papers and business
>> correspondence, so Tex- based tools area bit of overkil.

>I'll disagree with this. Have you used LyX ? The
>KOMA-script article, report, book, and letter2 classes provide great
>defaults and you can select your default body text typeface to one that
>provides curly quotes.

I'll disagree with the suggestion to use Lyx, but only because Joe said
that he needed to do college papers. For academic writing today you are
in a world of pain doing citations and the references section unless
you have either Zotero or Mendeley, and both work only with LO/OO or MS
Word. Of course, if you want the superior typesetting of Lyx you could
write the paper complete with citations and references in LO/OO, then
copy and paste it all into Lyx. 
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Re: [PLUG] Fonts not visible to upgraded LibreOffice-5.4.0

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 5 Aug 2017 07:21:37 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>On Fri, 4 Aug 2017, King Beowulf wrote:
>
>> Altough Rich has resolved this with moving to Calligra (part of KDE),
>
>   Reverted.

This discussion prompted me to search for alternate office suites for
Linux, but after looking at the options LO is the only one that will
use Zotero, essential for academic writing these days. So I will stick
with it in spite of the Type 1 font issue. I don't even know why I
leave them installed, as I never use them anyway.

>> TrueType and Opentype, especially, are the new "hotness", ...
>
>Of these two, might there be a reason to select one over the other? In my
>case the use is on a single platform.

OTF is just a wrapper around either a Type 1 or a TrueType font to make
it cross platform. The real reason is that Adobe realized that the days
of Type 1 fonts were numbered and they would soon have to offer their
font library in another format. At the time the only alternative was
TTF, which meant that Adobe would have to offer all their fonts in two
formats. OTF was the solution. 

In addition, OTF offers some features not available in either Type 1
or TrueType, most notably offering optional glyphs, e.g., if the font
contains true small caps, old style numerals, true fractions, and
ligatures, a program can add a feature where the user can just turn on
the optional glyphs for a selection of text. At the time InDesign was
the only program to offer this feature, but nowadays Scribus can also do
it. No office suite has this ability yet, as far as I know.

Even if your Type 1 fonts have no optional glyphs I would still go with
OTF. It is the way of the future.
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Re: [PLUG] Fonts not visible to upgraded LibreOffice-5.4.0 [RESOLVED]

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 4 Aug 2017 19:35:34 -0700
King Beowulf <kingbeow...@gmail.com> dijo:

>On 08/04/2017 07:02 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>> On Fri, 4 Aug 2017 18:14:03 -0700
>> King Beowulf <kingbeow...@gmail.com> dijo:
>> 
>>> Slightly OT, but when I am stuck having to use a Windows box
>>> somewhere, I carry a FAT32 USB thumb drive with portable versions
>>> of F/OSS apps and utilities:
>>> https://portableapps.com/
>>> Reputable site that has been around for a long time.  Good stuff.
>> 
>> It sounds very useful. Can you get these apps to run on a computer in
>> the library or a classroom at PSU? 
>
>They will run on any MS Windows box that doesn't have the USB port
>locked.  All the app data ad files stay on the USB drive and so nothing
>ever touches the hard drive.

I am sure you are right that nothing touches the hard drive. But when I
run a program that is installed on a PSU computer I can save the files
I create in my student H drive. The USB ports are not locked in the
sense that I can open a file from a USB drive in one of the programs
installed on the computer. But I doubt that PSU allows other
not-installed-by-PSU programs to write to even the student's H drive.
In fact, I would imagine that running programs from a USB drive is
summarily blocked. How PSU can do that is beyond my ken, but I bet that
somehow they do. I leave it to those more familiar with security on
such systems to explain further or to point out why I am wrong. 

I am not attending PSU at this time or I would do an experiment myself.
However, I know there are others here who might oblige. 
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Re: [PLUG] Fonts not visible to upgraded LibreOffice-5.4.0 [RESOLVED]

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 4 Aug 2017 18:14:03 -0700
King Beowulf  dijo:

>Slightly OT, but when I am stuck having to use a Windows box somewhere,
>I carry a FAT32 USB thumb drive with portable versions of F/OSS apps
>and utilities:
>https://portableapps.com/
>Reputable site that has been around for a long time.  Good stuff.

It sounds very useful. Can you get these apps to run on a computer in
the library or a classroom at PSU? 
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Re: [PLUG] Fonts not visible to upgraded LibreOffice-5.4.0 [RESOLVED]

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 4 Aug 2017 16:28:57 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>I think I've found a solution: KDE's office suite called 'calligra.' It,
>too, has more than I'd ever use and has a cluttered display (at least
>in the 'Sheet' tool), but it uses the .ods/.odt format so I assume it
>will import/export M$ Office documents, too. And, it's part of the
>Slackware distribution, too.
>
>   And, ... (pay attention, John) it recognizes all installed fonts!!
>
>   So, I'll get used to running calligra and remove LO.

My understanding is that Calligra can read MS Office documents but not
write to them.

On the other hand a few years ago I was at PSU and needed to open an
.odt document that I had on a thumb drive. Unfortunately, PSU stopped
putting OO/LO on their computers some time ago, so I assumed that I was
stuck. Someone in the room said 'just double-click on the .odt file.' I
did so at it opened flawlessly in Word. My point is that instead of
sending a Windows / MS Office user a .doc or .docx file, just send them
the native .odt file with a note that it can be opened in Word.
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Re: [PLUG] Fonts not visible to upgraded LibreOffice-5.4.0

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 4 Aug 2017 13:31:59 -0700
King Beowulf  dijo:

>Are these fonts the old style adobe type 1 or truetype (TTF) or
>opentype (OTF)?  LO dropped support for type 1 and this, I suspect,
>may be the reason.

LO dropped support for Type 1 fonts - I was unaware of this, but I just
checked and sure enough, none of my Type 1 fonts can be selected in
Writer (4.2.8.2 on Xubuntu 14.04). Fortunately I rarely use them any
more, and they still appear in Scribus.

I wonder if it was because Type 1 technology is owned by Adobe, not
open source. But then, if memory serves, TrueType was cooked up by Apple
and/or Microsoft to get around the Type 1 monopoly held by Adobe, so is
TT not also closed source? And later didn't Adobe and Microsoft
collaborate on creating OTF? 

This curiositizes me.
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Re: [PLUG] Advanced Topics

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 27 Jul 2017 12:57:47 -0700
Russell Senior  dijo:

>Personal Telco Project had its Annual Members Meeting at Lucky Lab on
>Hawthorne and it was *loud*.  The meeting room there isn't a good
>choice because of the cost.

That is deliberate. They do not want quiet. Anyone in the business of
purveying food and spirits knows that your keggage increases
commensurate with your youth quotient. If you want a high youth
quotient you need either loud music or buzz, or some of each. Finding a 
venue with food and drink and a low enough noise level to be conducive
to a meeting is not easy and, if you do find one, I wouldn't take bets
on the financial strength of the business.

>Alan> How advanced do people want to go with the talks?  Graduate
>Alan> level? Not beginner? Something inbetween?

Even most of the general meeting topics are too advanced for me. But
unlike most people here I am not a computer science kind of guy. I just
poke at stuff on the screen until I get the computer to do what I want.
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Re: [PLUG] What do you call it? LibreOffice preview screen?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2017 09:28:26 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>For example, emacs which opens in an urxvt terminal has this
> command line:
>/usr/bin/emacs -fg wheat -bg black -geometry 115x45+150+10
>
>The geometry specifies a width of 115 pixels and a height of 45 pixels
>and places the upper left corner of the window at 150, 10 pixels (x,
>y).
>
>Another example: LyX which opens in its own window has this command
>line: >/usr/bin/lyx -geometry 1300x800+40+20

OK, the pointer trick didn't work, but I fudged it by taking a
screenshot to the clipboard, opening it in the GIMP, and taking note of
the size of the resulting graphic, which was 1120 x 1060. I added this
to the launcher for Evince, but afterward it wouldn't launch. From the
command line I got:

evince -geometry 1120x1060+150+10
Cannot parse arguments: Unknown option -geometry

So that leaves me wondering what the -geometry option belongs to. 
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Re: [PLUG] What do you call it? LibreOffice preview screen?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2017 09:28:26 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard <rshep...@appl-ecosys.com> dijo:

>On Wed, 26 Jul 2017, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>
>> I use Xfce4, but I didn't know about that feature. Where is it, or
>> do I have to specify in the launch command?

>You can identify the geometry by moving the pointer to the bottom right
>corner and moving it slightly. A small window with the x and y sizes
>opens in the center.

That part doesn't work for me. I assume you meant the window of the
app that I want to specify the geometry for. In my case all the apps
that I use all the time remember their size and location when they were
last used, except Evince. And Evince is my default PDF viewer, so just
about every time I open a PDF I have to drag the corners of its window.
I don't know where Evince gets its notion about what size to open to,
but it's just about always something bizarre.

With Evince open and properly sized the way I normally want it I placed
the mouse pointer at the bottom right corner, but all I could ever get
was the resize window icon for the pointer.
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Re: [PLUG] What do you call it? LibreOffice preview screen?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2017 08:54:53 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>   Alternatively, if your desktop environment allows you to define the
>command line for applications opened from an icon or menu, set the
>geometry parameter to the desired window size. Not sure that works for
>LO but here (with Xfce4) I can define the default geometry and window
>position for applications.

I use Xfce4, but I didn't know about that feature. Where is it, or do I
have to specify in the launch command?
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Re: [PLUG] Free Network Stuff

[John Jason Jordan]

Ah! It turns out that both are version 2. Rich has already spoken for
one of them, so Michael gets the other one. I have sent Michael a
separate e-mail off-list with my address.

On Tue, 25 Jul 2017 05:39:12 -0700
Michael Barnes <barnmich...@gmail.com> dijo:

>The label on the bottom tells which version it is. The power
>connectors are likely the same for all versions. The version 1.0
>models have about 20 LEDs on them. Later versions only have a few,
>like 4 or 5. I'm not concerned about the wall wart, I typically don't
>use them anyhow.
>
>Thanks,
>Michael
>
>
>On Jul 24, 2017 22:37, "John Jason Jordan" <joh...@gmx.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 24 Jul 2017 17:46:06 -0700
>> Michael Barnes <barnmich...@gmail.com> dijo:
>>
>> >I am interested in the Linksys WRT54G if they are pre-V5. i can pick
>> >them up Tuesday after noon if they are still available. Are you sure
>> >it is 5V? All the WRT54G I have seen run on 12V.
>>
>> Michael,
>>
>> As Russell pointed out, if it is 5V it is version 1. All I know for
>> sure is that the connector for the 5V Linksys wall wart for the other
>> WRT54G fits in the hole for either one. I assumed that this means
>> that both are 5V. That assumption may have been foolish.
>>
>> Rich has spoken for the one for which I have a Linksys wall wart. I
>> do have another 5V wall wart on the list, so if you want it with the
>> 5V wall wart that does not say Linksys on its label, you are welcome
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Re: [PLUG] Free Network Stuff

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2017 17:46:06 -0700
Michael Barnes  dijo:

>I am interested in the Linksys WRT54G if they are pre-V5. i can pick
>them up Tuesday after noon if they are still available. Are you sure
>it is 5V? All the WRT54G I have seen run on 12V.

Michael, 

As Russell pointed out, if it is 5V it is version 1. All I know for
sure is that the connector for the 5V Linksys wall wart for the other
WRT54G fits in the hole for either one. I assumed that this means that
both are 5V. That assumption may have been foolish.

Rich has spoken for the one for which I have a Linksys wall wart. I do
have another 5V wall wart on the list, so if you want it with the 5V
wall wart that does not say Linksys on its label, you are welcome to it.
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[PLUG] Free Network Stuff

[John Jason Jordan]

Shaw(?) once said 'three moves equals a fire.' I could add that
remodeling also results in getting rid of unnecessary things. I just
finished the living room and am moving on to the next room, which
occasioned unearthing a lot of network stuff that I no longer need. It
is all free to a PLUGger, and anything that no one wants goes to Free
Geek:

Linksys Wireless-G WRT54G with wall wart, from Free Geek
Linksys Wireless-G WRT54G no wall wart, from a yard sale (needs 5VDC)
Linksys  cable modem model CM100, with wall wart
D-Link Gamer Lounge DGL-4100 (may be dead), have user guide, but no
wall wart 
Linksys 4-port router model NR401, no wall wart (needs 5VDC)
Zonet ZFS3008 8-port switch 10/100, with wall wart
D-Link DI-604 4-port rounter, with wall wart
Motorola Surfboard cable modem SB5100, no wall wart
Two Netgear wall warts, both 12VDC, one 1A and one 1.5A
One unknown wall wart 5VDC 2A
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Re: [PLUG] happy 1.5 billion seconds since unix epoch!

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2017 21:53:36 -0700
Russell Senior  dijo:

>The balloons are still drifting down here.  It apparently happened
>about 3 hours ago.  Happy sesqui-billion seconds, if that's the right
>way to say it!

About thirty-two years ago? Linux started? Ab urbe condita?
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Re: [PLUG] Thoughts on Linux Distros & Desktop Enviro

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:49 -0700
Tom  dijo:

>I would be very careful to check sha256sum and compare it against
>known, published source before installing anything off a public torrent
> these days.

I don't plan to install it or, if I do, I will install into Virtualbox.
Since downloading it I have read more about it and I'm now convinced
that it is not for me. But there is much hype about their desktop
environment, so that is what I want to play around with. I'll probably
just burn the ISO to a USB stick.

But your point about downloading software from a public torrent is a
good one. 
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Re: [PLUG] Thoughts on Linux Distros & Desktop Enviro

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 10 Jul 2017 16:40:13 -0700
John Jason Jordan <joh...@gmx.com> dijo:

>On Mon, 10 Jul 2017 13:29:44 -0700
>"Mike C." <mconno...@gmail.com> dijo:
>
>>Last year I cam across Deepin. It's a Debian based distro w. their
>>own Desktop Enviro. And not only do all the lil' things work as you
>>would expect like w. a MS Win or MAC OS, it works well, is beautiful
>>and fast/fluid. Rolling updates are quick & painless. 
>
>This sounded interesting so I asked Mr. Google to come up with a live
>ISO for me. Indeed, he did, but it is 2.6 GB and I couldn't get the
>server to send it to me faster than 20K/sec. I looked all over for
>torrents, but none to be found. For now I have given up. 

The Pirate Bay came up with a torrent and I now have the ISO. Maybe
I'll play with it at the next Clinic.
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Re: [PLUG] Thoughts on Linux Distros & Desktop Enviro

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 10 Jul 2017 13:29:44 -0700
"Mike C."  dijo:

>Last year I cam across Deepin. It's a Debian based distro w. their own 
>Desktop Enviro. And not only do all the lil' things work as you would 
>expect like w. a MS Win or MAC OS, it works well, is beautiful and 
>fast/fluid. Rolling updates are quick & painless. 

This sounded interesting so I asked Mr. Google to come up with a live
ISO for me. Indeed, he did, but it is 2.6 GB and I couldn't get the
server to send it to me faster than 20K/sec. I looked all over for
torrents, but none to be found. For now I have given up. 
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Re: [PLUG] Printing PDF files

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 8 Jul 2017 12:58:29 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>I download monthly business account statements from my bank's website
>as PDF files and save them with names I give them. (My names are
>different from the string of numbers the bank gives them.) For a
>reason I've not yet found, they will not print from the command line
>(lpr) nor from within xpdf. They display in the CUPS jobs page as
>'rendering completed' but never make it to the printer. Using
>MasterPDFEditor I can print them. However, despite MPE being
>configured to print double-sided they come out single sided.
>
>If you have any thoughts on why a) they won't print using lpr or that
>command within xpdf or b) why they print single-sided while the
>printer is configured for double-sided printing please share them with
>me.

I would wager good money that the problem lies with your bank. It is
possible to embed all kinds of restrictions in PDF files, and your bank
may have (probably without realizing it) restricted the printing to
single sided. I say 'without realizing it' because they probably use
Adobe Acrobat, which has pre-configured sets of restrictions

If I am right the best way to solve the problem is to kvetch at your
bank. In the meantime, or in case I am wrong, there are other tools
that you can use to bypass the restrictions, including some for xpdf: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpdf

I have half a dozen GUI PDF viewers installed, plus another handful of
command line tools. In the GUI department my go-to viewer is Evince,
mostly because I frequently have problems printing from other OSS
viewers, e.g., printing from Okular results in a landscape page
regardless of which orientation I specify, and there are similar
problems with the other viewers. 

There are other things I might try: 
Ghostscript can open a PDF file and then save as a straight
Postscript file. 
Okular (formerly KPDF) can give you information about how the
file was created, including the program used and embedded
security.
PDF Chain describes itself as 'A graphical user interface for the PDF
Toolkit.' 
Foxit Reader is a free, but not open source PDF viewer. Like Okular it
provides properties, including more detail about security than
Okular.

My first step would be to explore the security restrictions embedded in
the file. If there are no restrictions on printing, then I am wrong and
you should ignore everything I say. :)
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Re: [PLUG] Upgrading rooted Samsung Android phone

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 7 Jul 2017 22:02:21 -0700
carl day  dijo:

>Normally if root android OS is upgraded
>ROOT needs to be reloaded. The wiki of keis
>sounds like a "sideloading" of the upgraded image.
>There is a TWRP version for that phone.
>I read XDA and used adb/fastboot when i did my roots.
>Most of the "1-click" roots are M$-Windoz based
>which i do not trust.

What is TWRP? If it is an image/software, where can I get it?

What are XDA and adb/fastboot?
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[PLUG] Upgrading rooted Samsung Android phone

[John Jason Jordan]

If you're rooted you can't do it in the usual way (over the air) - if
you go into System Settings > General > About Device > Software Update
you get "Your device has been modified, software updates are not
available,"

According to internet advice you can upgrade a rooted Android phone
with Kies, a Samsung app normally used to sync your phone with your
computer. Unfortunately, you must install Kies on a Windows or a Mac
computer. Just as well - the last thing I'd ever want to do is sync my
phone with my computer.

My phone is a T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (now KitKat 4.4.2), which
I have loved since I got it three or four years ago. I paid someone $10
to root it for me because I couldn't figure out how to do it myself.
Being rooted is great - for example, I uninstalled the texting app so I
can no longer receive the spam text messages from the carrier (now Metro
PCS). 

If anyone knows how to upgrade a rooted KitKat phone to Lollipop or
later, I'm all ears. And if no one here knows, maybe this could be
addressed at the next Clinic. 
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Re: [PLUG] Convert MPEG2 to MPEG4...

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 5 Jul 2017 20:09:56 -0700
Edward Koenig  dijo:

>ffmpeg, handbrake,  mencoder, etc various GUIs that use these.  All
>F/OSS

+1 for Handbrake. I loves me my GUIs, and Handbrake is one of the best,
most flexible, and easiest to use.

Re VLC, I love it also, but the only way it can 'convert' a file is to
record it as you are playing it. It will work, but it will be slow,
taking as long as it take to play the movie. Sometimes that is the only
way to rip and encode a file, but there are usually better alternatives.

One of my favorite GUI apps is MKVMerge, mostly because it is
astonishingly fast. Note that 'merge' is not all that it can do. It can
also add subtitles to the same file, and many other things. I have
never tried it with a MPEG2 file, however.

And speaking of that, you should also check out AVIDemux and
OggConvert, among many others that I use from time to time.
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Re: [PLUG] Current state of Linux voice recognition

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 28 Jun 2017 16:39:16 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard <rshep...@appl-ecosys.com> dijo:

>On Wed, 28 Jun 2017, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>
>> Human languages all have a unique phonetic inventory, that is, all
>> the individual sounds of the language. English has 41 - 43 phonemes
>> (depending on your dialect), ...
>
>   Does this include Brooklyn and New Joisey?

Oh yes!

Most Portlanders have 41 phonemes, but people in Brooklyn have 42,
because 'cot' and 'caught' are pronounced with different vowels in
Brooklyn, but in Portland those two vowels have merged into one. This
is called the 'low back merger,' or sometimes just the 'cot-caught
merger.'

As for New Jersey, they also have 42, for the same reason as in
Brooklyn, although their most salient difference is the substitution of
the diphthong [ǝi] for syllabic r [ɹ̩], so where I say Jersey as
[ʤɹ̩zi] they pronounce it as [ʤǝ͡izi]. Note that their diphthong is
uh-ee, not oh-ee.
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Re: [PLUG] Current state of Linux voice recognition

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 28 Jun 2017 10:48:47 -0500
Richard Owlett  dijo:

>On 06/28/2017 09:54 AM, Larry Brigman wrote:
>> Human voice frequency range tops out at 8khz.  Normal speech is
>> around 2-3khz.  

> That's the theory that's been around "forever".
>I'm in possession of a factoid that prompts me to do some research 
>needing high resolution at high sample rates.

There is a lot to say about acoustic phonetics, and I'm not sure where
to start.

It is correct that most human speech tops out at about 3 KHz, but the
lower limit mentioned above is too high. In fact, an adult male with a
large head and vocal tract can produce speech sounds as low as 60 Hz
(e.g., a basso profundo). Most males start at about 85 Hz. For
vowels, sounds above 3 KHz are actually just harmonics, in decreasing
volume the higher the harmonic. The harmonics normally contribute
little to perception of vowels. Some consonants, however, use much
higher frequencies, notably the stridents, of which English has an
embarras de richesse.

Human languages all have a unique phonetic inventory, that is, all the
individual sounds of the language. English has 41 - 43 phonemes
(depending on your dialect), and many of them have two or more
allophones. Of these 10 - 11 (again, depending on dialect) are vowels,
plus there are a handful of diphthongs. Each sound has a specific set
of frequencies, plus there are other issues that hearers pick up, e.g.,
length of the sound.

Now I address the issue of frequency, starting with the vowels. When
you utter a vowel you actually produce three frequencies (called
formants) simultaneously. The lower two are the critical ones, and the
upper one could be considered as a kind of checksum. The formants for
the vowel [i] (as in 'beet') average around 280, 2250, and 2900 Hz,
whereas for the vowel [ɪ] (as in 'bit') the formants are around 400,
1900 and 2550 Hz. 

Now here is the crucial point: It is the distance between the two
lower formants that makes our brains think 'oh I just heard an [i],' or
I just heard an [ɪ]. Why is this important? Because every human has a
different 'fundamental frequency,' determined mostly by the size of the
vocal tract. Just as your 6th grade science teacher demonstrated by
pinging the sides of glasses filled with different levels of water, the
larger the volume of air the lower the frequency that will be produced.
Men tend to have larger vocal tracts than women, so males tend to have a
lower fundamental frequency than women. If our perception of vowels was
determined just by the absolute frequencies we wouldn't be able to
understand anything. But the system works because the distance between
the lower two formants is identical whether the speaker has a high or a
low fundamental frequency. The numbers I gave above for [i] are
actually an average; for a man they might be 120,  2090, 2730, whereas
for a woman they might be 380, 2350, and 2990. Note for  both speakers
the difference between the lower two formants is still 1970 Hz for [i]. 

'Speaker normalization' is a term used by phoneticians to describe an
amazing feature of the human brain - the instantaneous unconscious
ability to perceive the fundamental frequency of a speaker the moment
they open their mouth and utter the first couple of sounds, even if you
have never heard the speaker before. 

Now I turn to consonants. Consonants also have formants, but the upper
formants are the most important, and they can be much higher, even
higher than 3 KHz. For example, the upper formant for [s] (as in 'hiss')
ranges from around 4900 to 6000 Hz, depending on the speaker's
fundamental frequency and the vowel(s) that precede or follow it - which
leads me to problems with telephony.

A long time ago when telephone systems were first being developed the
telephone companies decided, for purely economic reasons, to limit the
bandwidth that their equipment could perceive and reproduce to 300 -
3400 Hz. (Those figures are present-day standards; in the beginning
they weren't even that generous.) Equipment that could do a wider range
would have increased expense massively. Unfortunately, this produces
the famous expressions 's as in Sam' or 'f as in Frank,' because the
equipment doesn't go high enough to reproduce the upper formant of [s],
making it impossible to distinguish it from [f] on a telephone.

Having said all of that, there is a lot more to human speech
recognition than having equipment capable of adequate bandwidth. Our
human brains juggle so much input so rapidly that we have to use
shortcuts. Let me give you just one example: If you hear an article (a,
an, the) your brain knows that it always introduces a noun phrase so the
next word absolutely must be a noun, a nominal modifier, or an
intensifier. If you speak a language then every word in your lexicon is
flagged as to which categories it can be used for. This means that as
you try to decipher the next word that you are hearing you can discard a
vast amount of your lexicon as 

[PLUG] Audio hum when playing Blu-ray movie

[John Jason Jordan]

You can't play Blu-ray movies on Linux, right? Wrong. You can if you
give $50 for a license for MakeMKV. Not only will MakeMKV for Linux rip
and encode a Blu-ray movie to a .mkv file, if you follow the
instructions in their forums you can get VLC to play the discs
directly. 

I did this successfully on my laptop first, as that is my usual
platform for making .mkv files. It works perfectly. But I use my
desktop for viewing movies, so that was my next step. Both machines are
Xubuntu 14.04. The desktop installation went perfectly and MakeMKV sees
and will rip and encode a Blu-ray movie. (Both machines have Blu-ray
drives.) I followed the same instructions on the desktop as I did on the
laptop for getting VLC to play a Blu-ray movie, and it does so, but
there is a loud hum, loud enough to drown out the audio in the movie. I
would say it is a 60-Herz hum, except that it seems just a bit higher.
This is strange because the desktop spends all day streaming internet
radio stations to my stereo, and the output is beautiful - no hum. And
the laptop play the same Blu-ray movie without hum.

There is a difference in the source of the audio signal, of course. For
internet radio Banshee is connecting to the stream and sending the
audio signal to the stereo. For the movie the source is the Blu-ray
drive, although I don't know how it is processed into the signal that
goes to the stereo. Note that the same Blu-ray drive on the desktop
plays DVD movies without the hum. (I currently own only one Blu-ray
movie.) It also plays television over the air through my HDHomeRun
tuner, which uses VLC, also without issue.

I poked around in Pulseaudio volume control on the desktop and failed
to resolve the problem. 

I need some clues.
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Re: [PLUG] Problem using a T-mobile Z915 Hotspot on a Linux machine

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2017 14:40:58 -0500
Richard Owlett  dijo:

>About a year ago my local ISP terminated dial-up service and was not 
>marketing wideband to home users. I decided against any type of fixed 
>point of service (i.e. telco, cable, or satellite). I looked for a
>"cell network modem" (proper term?). The closest thing I could find
>from a provider with a physically local presence was the Z915. Having
>only 1 machine I have no use for its WiFi capability. For connecting
>to the internet the hardware aspects are fine. My OS is Debian Stretch.

I have a Note 3 phone, originally T-Mobile, now MetroPCS. MetroPCS has
always had a deal with T-Mobile to use their network, and now MetroPCS
is owned by T-Mobile. 

It used to be that you had to pay extra to use your phone (or modem) as
a hotspot, but about a year ago someone told me that there is no longer
an extra charge. I pay $30 a month for 5GB of data, and using my phone
as a hotspot is included.

Recently I had a problem with my new Centurylink gigabit fiber
connection - no connection at all. Of course this occurred on a Friday
night, too late to get anyone by phone. Have you ever tried to
communicate with Centurylink when you have no net connection? 

Eventually I figured out how to turn my phone into a hotspot. My laptop
saw the hotspot, but could not connect to it. I was tearing my hair out
when it dawned on me to try a physical connection. I charge my phone
with a USB cable from my laptop, so I just plugged it in. Voilà! I was
on the net. And it wasn't even terribly slow. I never did figure out
why my laptop couldn't connect to the hotspot by wifi. 

Once I had a connection I was able to get Centurylink to schedule a
service call, although the earliest they could do was Monday. Knowing
that I had only 5GB of high speed data I turned off everything that
might use a lot of data. Over the weekend I used the connection just
for e-mail and browsing the web. Once my fiber connection was restored
I turned off the hotspot and checked my data usage on the phone - I had
used only 400MB over the weekend.

The point I want to make is that I did it with just my now several
years old phone. So why do you need the Z915? Does it give you extra benefits?
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Re: [PLUG] Trackball middle button pastes string twice [FIXED ... MAYBE]

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 6 Jun 2017 05:39:45 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>   I've read that memory is the first thing to degrade as one ages. :-)

No, memory is the second thing to go. Trust me on that.
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Re: [PLUG] THURSDAY PLUG General Meeting: Open Source Desktop Publishing with Laidout

[John Jason Jordan]

@Tom Lechner
Several years ago I gave a talk at PLUG on Scribus. Scribus has matured
significantly since then, although I haven't kept up as much as I
should as I have not been doing much DTP lately. I downloaded and
installed the .deb for Laidout 0.95. Your talk will be very interesting
to me. Looking forward to tomorrow nght!


On Wed, 31 May 2017 13:15:34 -0700
Michael Dexter  dijo:

>
>Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement
>
>Who: Tom Lechner
>What: Open Source Desktop Publishing with Laidout
>Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
>When: Thursday, June 1st, 2017 at 7pm
>Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
>Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live
>
>
>Learn what open source tools exist to do desktop publishing, graphic 
>design, and general image production.
>
>Special focus on my own software called Laidout, and the various tools 
>I've implemented in it to make production of my comic books easier, as 
>well as other tools that are maybe not broadly useful, but were just
>fun to build.
>
>About Tom
>Artist, programmer of Laidout
>I studied physics and math at Caltech before dropping out to go be an 
>artist, with varying degrees of success.
>laidout.org
>tomlechner.com
>
>Calagator Page: http://calagator.org/events/1250471750
>
>Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the
>meeting.
>
>Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available
>
>PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its 
>mailing lists or at its meetings.
>
>PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/
>Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux
>
>See you there!
>
>Michael Dexter
>PLUG Volunteer
>
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[PLUG] CenturyLink failure

[John Jason Jordan]

Saturday, 5/28/2017 I lost my gigabit connection to CenturyLink. It
worked in the morning, but when I tried to collect e-mail about 4pm it
was dead. I tried the usual stuff (resetting devices, etc.), but nada.

There is a problem connecting to CL without a net connection. All I had
was my phone (né T-Mobile, now MetroPCS), and the only way I could find
to connect to CL was via tech support chat. Have you ever tried to chat
with a phone? Worse, I had to be transferred three times, and each time
I had to re-enter my account number, name and address and password. I
spent an hour and a half until finally my chattee said that apparently
it was an authentication failure. Then he said he could not fix it, and
he disappeared from the chat. I could feel the wolverines gnawing on my
arm. 

I tried calling the local Hollywood office, but all I got was the
standard recording 'we're closed on Saturday and Sunday.' Today is
Memorial Day (Monday), but not a word about that. In desperation I drove
there, only to find (as I suspected) a note on the window that they
would be closed on Memorial Day. Is it too much to ask them to change
their standard recording for a holiday?

Back home I was desperate for any kind of net connection. I knew that
my phone had a 'tethering and mobile hotspot' option, but I had never
used it. It took nearly two hours of finagling, but I finally got my
laptop connected to it. Yay! I'm on the net! And then I was finally
able to find a tech support phone number for CL. (Note: We gigabit
people have to call a different number [800-247-7285] than the one on
the web site.) An hour later they decided that they needed to send out a
repair person (due tomorrow morning) because they were unable to
connect to my modem. I'm not sure if it's really a modem, but whatever
it is, that's where the problem is.

If someone wants to know how to use a T-Mobile/MetroPCS android phone
as a mobile hotspot, let me know under a new thread and I'll explain in
detail. 
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Re: [PLUG] WD 4TB Red drive failure...

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 10 May 2017 19:04:26 -0700
Nat Taylor  dijo:

>I don't think ssds last longer than regular drives.  

Is this true? Is there any data to back up this statement? Is there any
data at all about the relative lifespan of an ssd compared to physical
drives?
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Re: [PLUG] Change firefox open tab order

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 9 May 2017 05:52:09 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>   It occrred to me that perhaps ghostery, adblock-plus, or using the
>'classic' layout might be the culprit. This is a low priority item
>(needed only when a site locks me in and I need to close the tab to
>escape) so I'll get to it Real Soon Now.

I have Adblock Plus 2.8.2 and Classic Theme Restorer 1.6.5, but not
Ghostery, therefore, if the culprit is an extension Ghostery is at the
top of the suspect list. On the other hand, I glanced at the reviews
and didn't see any complaints about tab behavior, although I did note
that it has become a commercial product.

Another thought occurred to me - I have Chromium and Opera as well as
Firefox, and dragging tabs around works the same as it does in Firefox.
If you have any other browsers installed, see if you can drag tabs
around. If so, then the problem is in Firefox, if not, my bet would be
that the problem is some setting in your desktop.  
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Re: [PLUG] Change firefox open tab order

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 8 May 2017 17:37:09 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>   This stopped working a couple of years ago.
>> Window manager? Desktop environment?
>   Xfce4.

Xfce4, c'est à moi aussi, yet no problem here.

At the risk of insulting your intelligence, have you checked add-ons,
plugins and extensions? (Rant: Why three different names for what are
essentially the same thing?) I believe there is a way in Firefox to
launch it in 'safe mode' where all such stuff is not used. It probably
won't help, but it's worth a shot.
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Re: [PLUG] Change firefox open tab order

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 8 May 2017 16:20:11 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard  dijo:

>Apologies; I should have included that in the origingal post. The version
>is 45.9.0.

I have always been able to drag tabs around, including from one window
to another window, and if I drag a tab completely off of Firefox it
opens the tab in a new window. 

My current version is 52.02 from the Ubuntu 14.04 repos. I don't know
if I ever had 45.9.0, but this feature has always worked the same for
many years, including a couple years with Fedora.

I wonder if the problem is in your Firefox. Window manager? Desktop
environment? 
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Re: [PLUG] Where to look...

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 20 Apr 2017 17:50:55 -0700
Chuck Hast  dijo:

>My machine did its updates the other day, after doing so I have found
>that something has been messed up with the upgrade. Now when the
>screen goes dark for a long period of time, and I go to wake it back up
>all I get is a gray screen. It does show the cursor and it follows the
>mo- vement of the mouse.
>
>If it has been dark for a shorter period it will come back. No issues,
>but after some point in time being dark it only comes back to a deep
>gray screen
>
>I end up doing a skill on that session from the console and then
>restarting I am trying to figure out where to poke and try to fix it.
>It almost looks like  the signin screen is just not popping up the
>login, but not sure. I look at syslog and see nothing that rings a
>bell.

1) What is the distro and what is the desktop environment, what video
hardware does the machine have, and which video driver(s) and which
version(s) of it/them are you using? Ditto for power management stuff.

2) Get a list of all the updates that were installed during the update
and scan through them for anything suspicious.

3) Check the forums/blogs/listservs for your distro to see if this has
already been reported. If not, once you have the above information,
report the problem.
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Re: [PLUG] Installing Ubuntu with Geforce 970

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 10:08:10 -0700
Thomas Groman  dijo:

>I would recommend going on the AMD side of things for graphics cards at
>least until Nvidia stops making their cards only run with signed blobs.

That is an interesting comment. 

For several years now I have been using a System76 laptop with an
Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M, currently with Xubuntu 14.04, up to date. I
don't need anything special for a video driver, and I prefer open
source, so right from the beginning I set it up with the nouveau
driver. But for the past year I have been having issues with it booting
to a default resolution (640 x 480, I think). I would have to reboot
until eventually it would come up correctly. That is, until I applied
some updates before going to the Clinic yesterday. At the Clinic it
would not let me log in - I'd enter my password and it would just cycle
back to the login screen. 

Ctrl-Alt-F1 got me to a command line, and there I was able to log in.
Wes helped me with a lot of suggestions and we worked on it for a
couple hours, without much luck. (A long saga not worth the telling.)
In the end I installed the Nvidia proprietary driver from the Ubuntu
repos, and all my video issues went away.

I'm curious what signed blobs are, and if that might have been what
caused the nouveau driver to misbehave. 
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Re: [PLUG] Mounting Synology

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 15 Apr 2017 16:21:30 -0700
John Jason Jordan <joh...@gmx.com> dijo:

>NFS used to work, but when I replaced the drives for volume1 the volume
>went away and I had to recreate it. Now I can't get the permissions
>right. 

I kept poking at the Synology with the Synology Disk Station Manager,
and suddenly it worked. As I write this the backup is proceeding
normally with my rsync command.

For my next exercise I will see if I can get the old 6TB WD that was in
the Synology properly set up as Raid 0 with the new WD 8TB drive in the
Mediasonic USB enclosure. 

The saga continues. :)
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Re: [PLUG] Mounting Synology

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 15 Apr 2017 14:20:47 -0700
benjamin barber  dijo:

>regarding rsync, you should be able to rsync to the system over ssh, i
>dont think that nfs would work because of permissions, due to security
>problems inherent in NFS.

NFS used to work, but when I replaced the drives for volume1 the volume
went away and I had to recreate it. Now I can't get the permissions
right. 

To repeat, here is the line from fstab that used to mount the old volume
(note that it uses nfs):

192.168.1.115:/volume1/Synology /media/jjj/Synology nfs auto,user 0 0

Here is my rsync command that is set to run every day at 2am:

$ rsync -rptog --delete
--exclude-from=/media/jjj/Movies/rsync_exclusions /media/jjj/Movies/ 
/media/jjj/Synology

I noticed that when I use Thunar to 'Browse Network' it mounts it with
smb (apparently). The location bar in Thunar says:

smb://synology.local/synology/

I don't care how it gets mounted, I just want it mounted. 

When I click on it in the Devices list in Thunar I get 

mount.nfs: access denied by server while mounting
192.168.1.115:/volume1/Synology

And when I try to mount it from the command line with 'sudo mount -a' I
get exactly the same error message. I assume that clicking on it in
Thunar is doing the same as the mount -a command, hence the same error
message. It seems to me that 'mount -a' tries to mount according to the
line in fstab, so maybe the solution is just to edit that line. In
fact, I commented out the line in fstab, then tried 'sudo mount -a'
again, and the command executed without error. 
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[PLUG] Mounting Synology

[John Jason Jordan]

My 2-bay Synology NAS (DS216j) would mount automatically because I had
this line in fstab:

192.168.1.115:/volume1/Synology /media/jjj/Synology nfs auto,user 0 0

Today I removed the sole drive from the Synology and replaced it with
two new 8TB WD red pro drives. Using the Synology web manager I fumbled
around for a long time, but finally got them set up as Raid 0. I gave
the volume the name Synology, and it is volume 1 (the only volume).

The computer is Xubuntu 14.04 up to date. My usual file management is
with Thunar, the default GUI file manager for Xfce. I have Thunar set
up with a left bar which has at the top 'Devices' where the Synology is
listed along with File System, plus any other external drives.
Unmounted drives are grayed out, but clicking on the drive
automatically mounts it. However, I did not need to do this with the
Synology because the fstab line always mounted it on boot.

Having set up the Synology with the new drives I clicked on Synology in
Thunar praying that it would 'just work' and display no files. But
instead I got a complete list of all the files on the old drive, now
sitting on a shelf. That made no sense, so I used Thunar to navigate
to /media/jjj/Synology. Again I got a complete file list, but by
right-clicking on the Synology folder and selecting Properties I saw
that the entire folder was 2.47GB, ridiculous as the old drive had
4.5TB of data on it. At this point I renamed /media/jjj/Synology
to ...SynologyOld, and then created a new Synology folder. This time
Thunar showed no files in the new folder.

So then I tried to mount it from the command line:

sudo mount 192.168.1.115:/volume1/Synology /media/jjj/Synology
mount.nfs: access denied by server while mounting
192.168.1.115:/volume1/Synology

I tried setting up nfs permissions on the Synology, but so far this has
failed. Nevertheless I can get into the Synology from both my laptop
and my desktop using (from the bottom of the left bar in Thunar) Browse
Network. This listed 'Synology (File Sharing)' and clicking on it
displayed the volume on the Synology. I confirmed that this worked by
dragging a small text file to the Synology volume with the laptop, then
refreshing the view on the desktop, and the file appeared.

Thunar is not very forthcoming with information about what it is doing
here. If I click on 'Synology' at the top of the left bar I get the
error message as from the command line above. Yet if I use 'Browse
Network' from the bottom of the left tab it can display the Synology
volume which I can then manage the same as any other folder. How it
does this, apparently without mounting the Synology volume, is a
mystery.

The problem is that my rsync command won't work unless the volume is
normally mounted:

jjj@Devil-Bonobo:~$ rsync -rptog --delete
--exclude-from=/media/jjj/Movies/rsync_exclusions /media/jjj/Movies/ 
/media/jjj/Synology

Now that I have the Synology configured with its new drives I want to
use the rsync command to back up the USB drive at /media/jjj/Movies to
the Synology. I need some clues!
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Re: [PLUG] Clinic on Sunday

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 13 Apr 2017 21:21:06 -0700
Michael  dijo:

>On 2017-04-13 21:02, wes wrote:
>> Reminder, the Linux Clinic is this Sunday, 1-5pm. Bring your ailing 
>> systems
>> or questions and we will try to help, or at least get you pointed in
>> a useful direction.
>
>And the dead shall rise again.

Even the non-completely dead can rise again. See y'all Sunday, dead or
alive.:)
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[PLUG] Clinic Sunday! And fix my storage!

[John Jason Jordan]

As discussed at length in a recent thread I need more storage space. I
have bought some new equipment that I was going to install myself, and
it has all arrived: 3 WD 8TB red pro drives, and a Mediasonic 2-bay
USB 3.0 enclosure. But on second thought I wonder if it might be more
clever of me to do it at the Clinic this Sunday April 16 (1:00 to 5:00
at Free Geek).

Current equipment:
Synology DS216j 2-bay NAS with one 6TB WD red pro drive
Toshiba 5TB USB 3.0 drive (primary storage)
New configuration:
Synology DS216j 2-bay NAS with two 8TB WD red pro drives in Raid0
Mediasonic 2-bay USB 3.0 enclosure with the 6TB drive from the Synology
and one extra new 8TB WD red pro drive, to be primary storage

My plan is to:
1. Make a final backup of the 5TB Toshiba to the 6TB WD currently in the
Synology, using my saved rsync command that makes the WD a mirror of
the Toshiba.
2. Remove the 6TB WD from the Synology and place it in the Mediasonic,
leaving it there for the moment.
3. Add two of the 8TB WD red pro drives to the Synology and configure
them with Raid0 as one 16TB drive.
4. Using the Toshiba as the source, use my rsync command again to make
the 16TB partition in the Synology a new mirror.
5. Add the remaining 8TB WD red pro drive to the Mediasonic, and make
it part of a new 14TB Raid0 drive with the old 6TB WD red pro drive.

In all of this my laptop, which is always with me at the Clinic, is my
primary computer at home where it is connected to the Synology over my
home ethernet and into which the 5TB Toshiba USB drive is plugged.

There are parts of this that I'm not sure how to do. Having experts at
hand might be really helpful. But I'm also not sure about connections
for this equipment. Plugging in the Toshiba USB is not a problem - it's
just a USB drive that should mount on the laptop at the Clinic the same
as it does at home. But the Synology at home is given the IP address of
192.168.1.115 by my router with the name "Synology." It was not a
trivial task to get it mounted on the laptop, and the configuration
would probably be messed up at Free Geek.

Does this sound like something that can be done away from home at the
Clinic? Do I need special network cables? Am I crazy?
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Re: [PLUG] USB enclosures

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 5 Apr 2017 16:06:21 -0700
Chuck Hast  dijo:

>I guess one thing about the parallel wiring system usually you use a
>make after break double throw switch so you cannot put power on the
>mains.
>
>The switch is designed such that it cannot make both contacts at the
>same time. I wonder why you did not go that route?

I considered the idea of a double throw switch, but rejected it because
it would require a permit, and I doubt I could talk my way out of it.
Moreover, it would require working with really fat wires, which I hate.
I would probably end up hiring an electrician, and those people are not
cheap.
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[PLUG] Gparted questions

[John Jason Jordan]

Denis recently had a problem with insufficient space remaining on his
boot partition. I didn't participate in the discussion because I didn't
have any suggestions, plus I thought it wouldn't be a problem for me.
Well, I was wrong. I've just been bitten by the same thing. I used
'sudo apt-get autoremove' and I now have about 1.4 GB free on Boot, so
I'm OK for the time being, but I need to do a more serious repair.

My Xubuntu 14.04 is installed on a 512GB mSATA drive which is
partitiioned:

25GBBoot
59GBFree space
Home350GB
46GBFree space

I set it up this way when I originally installed the OS because I
thought I might one day want to install a second OS and dual boot. That
hasn't happened and now I doubt that it ever will. I'd like to add about
half of the first free space (59GB) to Boot and the remainder to Home.
And Home is currently about 70% used, so I'd like to add all of the
second free space to Home as well. 

Can Gparted do this without messing up Boot and Home? And am I correct
in assuming that if I can do this with Gparted I will need to do it
with a bootable DVD or USB stick, rather than the Gparted that is
currently installed? And would it be more intelligent of me to wait for
the next Clinic to do this? (I think the answer to the last question is
'yes,' considering that it is only 12 days from now.)
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Re: [PLUG] USB enclosures

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 4 Apr 2017 18:47:32 -0700
Denis Heidtmann  dijo:

>Both your main storage and your backup run from the same power line in
>the same house.  What is the likelihood lightning or some other major
>event could affect both at the same time?  Low, but backups are
>intended as insurance for low-likelihood events.  Then there is
>crypto-lock.  I do not know about how that works and how different
>backup schemes protect against it.

First, my house has a 7500 watt natural gas powered generator on the
covered back patio. It is not wired to a transfer switch that
automatically turns it on and switches the house wiring to it in the
event that PGE fails to send me its usual electrons. Instead, it is
wired to various outlets around the house that say 'generator only on
the cover plate. If the power from PGE fails then I have to go out to
the back patio, turn on the generator, then go back inside and move
everything that I need to have running to a 'generator only' outlet.

In the meantime, the computers, routers, switches, internet devices, and
even the stereo are all running on major APC UPS systems - three of
them. They will power the electronics for a couple hours, so I don't
need to be in a hurry to turn on the generator. And to keep the
electronics running after I decide that I need to turn on the
generator, all I need to reconnect to the 'generator only' outlets is
the power cords from these UPS devices, plus the refrigerator,
freezer, and some table lamps. I chose to wire the generator this way
rather than using an automatic transfer switch is because 1) automatic
transfer switches are expensive and, 2) automatic transfer switches
require a permit.

Regarding the permit, I had a very heated debate with the City of
Portland, which ultimately I won. My major point was that my wiring was
not connected in any way to the grid, hence it was impossible for it to
electrocute a lineman working on a power pole out in the street. It is
a completely private system. It helped my argument that I did all the
wiring in my house myself and it all passed code inspections. 

As for lightning strikes, since all the electronics are running off the
UPSs, and they have pretty good surge protection, I am not overly
worried. 

Now, it's possible for something to happen that I have not foreseen,
but then, you take some risks getting out of bed in the morning. You
even take risks if you stay in bed. In the final analysis, we are all
dead. In the meantime, I am satisfied with the precautions that I have
taken. :)
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Re: [PLUG] USB enclosures

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 04 Apr 2017 16:55:00 -0700
Tom  dijo:

>I understand that you are choosing RAID0 because you need 8+8=16GB of
>storage space instead of redundancy.
>I would advise you against using RAID0 if you care about your data -
>single disk failure and you loose everything.
>JBOD will give you the same storage space at about the same performance
>over 1Gb/s ethernet + you are only risking some of the data, depending
>which disk fails. So, JBOD is lower risk at almost no tradeoff versus
>not-redundant RAID0 over 1Gb/s network.
>RAID0 is really only useful for performance reasons as locally
>connected storage inside a workstation - it doubles the disk speed.
>That being said, local SSD/NVME will beat 2 disk HDD RAID0 in common
>desktop/media/engineering workloads.

Hmm. Interesting thoughts.

You are correct that I chose Raid 0 because I want 16TB of storage
space. It s also true that speed is not a critical consideration to me
for this setup, that is, the speed of the main storage on the USB is
important, but not the speed of the main storage to the Synology
because that is just backup. I don't care how long the backups take
because they run at 2am every night.

It is certainly true that JBOD is lower risk because you probably
wouldn't lose both disks, but this is backup storage. The main storage
would be unlikely to be affected at the same time as a disk failure in
the backup storage. So if I lose the whole backup, I replace the disks,
and make a new backup from the main storage onto the new disks -
nothing lost. And even if one disk in the backup Raid is still good,
I'd replace it anyway, because the disks were purchased and installed
at the same time, so if one goes, the other is probably not far behind.
In fact, even if neither fails, when they get to the end of their
warranty I'd probably replace both anyway. I'd rather keep things from
failing than have to repair stuff under emergency conditions.

JBOD might be a trifle safer, but I still have the main storage and I'd
replace both disks anyway, so this benefit seems negligible to me. Raid
0 is probably faster, but that is also of negligible value to me. It's
a tossup. 
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Re: [PLUG] USB enclosures

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2017 15:25:26 -0700
John Jason Jordan <joh...@gmx.com> dijo:

>On Mon, 3 Apr 2017 11:04:30 -0700
>Galen Seitz <gal...@seitzassoc.com> dijo:
>
>>On 04/03/17 10:40, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>>> I am looking for a 2-bay USB enclosure, at least USB 3.0, with
>>> internal software capable of Raid 0. I have been looking at the ICY
>>> DOCK MB662U3-2S:

The shopping is done. I ordered two WD 8TB Red Pro drives (5 year
warranty) and the Mediasonic ProRaid HUR3-SU3S3 2 Bay 3.5" SATA Hard
Drive Enclosure - USB 3.0 & eSATA Support UASP and SATA III 6.0Gbps
Speed:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KCEAXJW/ref=ask_ql_qh_dp_hza

The drives are coming from an eBay seller with two-day shipping. The
Mediasonic is coming from Mediasonic Inc, fulfilled by Amazon, expected
by April 10.

When it all gets here I will make a final backup of the current old and
end of life 5TB USB drive to the Synology, then pull the 6TB WD Red Pro
drive out of the Synology and set it aside. Then I will install the new
8TB drives in the Synology and set them up as Raid 0, and make sure the
computer can mount the Synology the same as it now does. And then I will
back up the old 5TB USB drive to the Synology again, now backing up to
the new drives with 16TB of space.

And finally, I will put the 6TB drive from the Synology into the new
Mediasonic USB enclosure and plug it into the computer, unplugging the
old 5TB drive to retire it for good. And then I will have some tricky
stuff to make sure all the programs and the operating system can find
and use the 6TB in the Mediasonic the same as they used to see and use
the old 5TB drive. 

I hope my plan works. :)

Thanks to all for the advice and suggestions. :)
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Re: [PLUG] Raid confusion

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 03 Apr 2017 14:40:39 -0700
Tom  dijo:

>Raid 0 is striping - it combines the disk space from 2 or more disks to
>larger volume - obvious disadvantage is you loose all data on any disk
>failure and at RAID0 creation.
>If you want the combined disk space from 2 disks and do not care about
>redundancy - just add the disk to your Synology filer, add it to disk
>group, create JBOD volume and you are done or you can create new volume
>and export it separately. In the event one of your disks failing, the
>data on the second one are normally accessible either in the filer or
>as ext4 filesystem.
>I would think that using your Synology filer is better, safer and more
>reliable way to go than some exotic USB enclosure. Feel free to bring
>your filer + disk to PLUG clinic to get help.

Considering the problems I am having finding a reliable 2-bay USB
enclosure with Raid I am revisiting the idea of just getting a second
Synology. 
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Re: [PLUG] USB enclosures

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2017 11:04:30 -0700
Galen Seitz <gal...@seitzassoc.com> dijo:

>On 04/03/17 10:40, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>> I am looking for a 2-bay USB enclosure, at least USB 3.0, with
>> internal software capable of Raid 0. I have been looking at the ICY
>> DOCK MB662U3-2S:

>I would be leery of any USB RAID setup unless I knew with absolute
>certainty that the RAID format/metadata was well documented and
>portable.  In other words, you need to be very certain that it is
>possible to remove the RAID disks from the enclosure and recover the
>data.  If the RAID format is proprietary, you would be in trouble if
>the enclosure dies or the company goes belly up.

I have been shopping all day for USB 3.0 enclosures, and the results
are not encouraging. At this time my plan is to buy a 2-bay enclosure
but use it for now with just the 6TB WD Red Pro drive currently in the
Synology. I only want it to be 2-bay for future expansion.

Once the 6TB drive is out of the Synology the enclosure will be empty. I
will then add a new WD Red Pro 8TB drive to it. The Synology is a DS216j
2-bay NAS enclosure, so some day I will add a second drive to it,
probably another 8TB Red Pro. And for both the USB and the Synology,
once they have a second drive I will use just Raid 0. The USB is backed
up to the Synology nightly with rsync to make it a mirror of the USB,
hence I don't need a Raid that creates redundancy - no need for hot
swapping a failed drive. 

My shopping problem is that there are not a lot of 2-bay USB enclosures
with built in Raid on the market. And every one that I can find has
numerous horrible reviews, almost all of which are due to mechanical
failure, i.e., poor quality control by the manufacturer, not software
problems with the Raid. I realize that there are numerous people here
who administer big server setups and when I say "Raid" they immediately
assume that I want hot swapping redundancy, but I don't see the need
for that.
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[PLUG] Raid confusion

[John Jason Jordan]

If I start with one 8TB drive in my Synology NAS, and later add
another and set them up as Raid 0, does the striping to Raid 0 mean
that the data on the existing drive gets wiped out?
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[PLUG] USB enclosures

[John Jason Jordan]

I am looking for a 2-bay USB enclosure, at least USB 3.0, with internal
software capable of Raid 0. I have been looking at the ICY DOCK MB662U3-2S:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817198063

The MB662U3-2S can use drives up to 8TB, however Western Digital now
offers 10TB drives (Gold only). I don't know if there are any USB
enclosures currently available that will recognize 10TB drives, but
maybe I shouldn't worry about that for now. 

Does anyone have experience with USB enclosures? Any recommendations?
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Re: [PLUG] Movie fan needs storage space

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2017 23:09:25 -0700
Chuck Hast  dijo:

>sudo apt install smartmontools, or whichever tool your distro uses to
>pull down
>applications. smartctl is part of the above package.

Thanks. Got it installed and it works. The only problem is that the
external USB drive that I am worried about returned this:

SMART support is: Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.
Error Counter logging not supported
Device does not support Self Test logging

Sigh. :(

Oh well. I don't have the purchase information, but it has to be at
least past its three year warranty and the issues it is displaying
convince me that it's time for replacement.
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Re: [PLUG] Movie fan needs storage space

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2017 22:30:33 -0700
Chuck Hast  dijo:

>On a whim I ran smartctl on my 3 USB disks, guess what??? The Seagate
>knows nothing, the two WD drives give me all of the info... Go

You 'ran smartctl' on your drives. How did you do that? From the
command line? 'Man smartctrl' gave me 'no manual entry for smartctl.'
If smartctl is, indeed, a command line tool, some syntax and lexicon
would be useful.
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