Re: OT: laptop docks and airliner holds

Christopher Currie wrote:
> I've recently acquired an X41 thinkpad with ultrabay dock from Linux Emporium. 
> I'm contemplating taking it abroad and had assumed I could put the dock 
> (which includes a removable  dvd-rw drive) in checked baggage without risk 
> that it would be damaged by the x-ray machines, while keeping the laptop with 
> me.

this is interesting, I've heard of it - but never seen any real proof of 
why this might happen. I've personally never lost any data or had any 
damage to laptops in any luggage scanning machine. Also, all hand 
luggage is x-ray scanned anyway at every international airport I've been 
to in the last few years, and the eurostar terminal at Ashford.

> But it occurs to me that the dock might provoke a search when the baggage is 
> x-rayed (under the misguided suspicion it's a laptop), which in turn might 
> result in loss or damage of one kind or another.
> 
> Anyone have any stories either about that sort of risk, or about damage to 
> electronics of components like that? 
> 

I've often taken laptops in checked-in baggage and never had a problem - 
  just make sure your insurance covers it if its broken / lost in 
transit. Which (tempting fate here ) has not happened to me as yet.

- KB
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Re: packaging large perl applications and their dependancies for debian

Paul Cupis wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 04:40:39PM +0100, John Winters wrote:
>> Jason Clifford wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> Maybe wait until next week (ie after Etch is released)
>> Do you have inside information?
> 
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/03/msg00023.html

I've been bug-watching for the last few days and although the number of 
release-critical bugs being opened looks depressing at first, when you 
look more closely you find that most of the new ones seem to be being 
generated by some sort of stress test on the build process.

Kudos to the Debian guys - they do take their releases seriously.

John
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Re: Fedora/Dell Clock Problems

Dave Cross wrote:
> I've got a Dell Dimension 5100 running a completely up to date version 
> of Fedora Cora 6.
> 
> About a week ago the clock started to lose time badly. It seems to be 
> running at about half speed (maybe a bit less).
> 
> I don't know much about this area so any advice would be much 
> appreciated. Is it possible that this could be caused by software? Or is 
> is a hardware fault?

An update on my situation.

The problem hasn't gone away. I've trying turning off ACPI and ntpd and 
it doesn't make any difference. I've also tried changing the set of ntp 
servers that I'm using The clock still runs at about half speed.

What works is to restart ntpd. As that happens, the clock is set to the 
right time. And then starts drifting again. But I thought that running 
ntpd meant that the time was constantly being checked and corrected.

This morning, I rebooted from a SUSE Live CD and that exhibited the same 
behaviour. So now I'm thinking that it's a hardware problem. Should I 
just buy a new battery? But the system is always turned on, and I 
thought that the battery was only used when the system was powered down.

Two other problems that might well be related.

1/ Watching videos in xine has become impossible. The sound is very 
stuttery. But it seems fine in mplayer.

info TLD

Why are people so biased against it?

I cannot post to LKML with it. I used to be able to post to london.pm
with it but haven't been able to for about six weeks now. And I could
not even subscribe to another london.pm list with it.

If it's spam people are worried about why not refuse to relay .com
addresses?!

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Re: info TLD

Adrian McMenamin wrote:
> Why are people so biased against it?
>   

It would have been fine if there had be any kind of regulation of its 
use. There wasn't, so it got squatted to Dell and back

> If it's spam people are worried about why not refuse to relay .com
> addresses?!
>   

Because there are very very many legitimate .com domains,  there are 
virtually no legitimate .info domains.

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Re: Signed here

On Wed 21 Mar, Mark Williams wrote:
> 

> 
> Have you tried using the plain upstream version?  If any of the Debian
> NMUs coincided with your first noticing the failure, I know where I'd
> start looking...
> 
   Apt-proxy does have advantages over other alternatives because it is able
to collect files from a list of alternative mirrors, in list order, so that
I can specify a preference for fast academic or other non-debian mirrors
with fallback to Debian sites.
   I think I have identified the problem through error messages from
aptitude; apt-proxy saves the files in /var/cache/apt-proxy with owner
aptproxy:nogroup and permissions 700, but tries to read the Release and
Release.gpg files from /var/lib/apt which is owned by root:root and without
access permission. Unfortunately I have not yet been able to trace the
reason, and have not found any trace of that address in apt-proxy. Someone
must be doing some work on apt-proxy as there was a recent update, but the
problem remains. I have loaded all the old files into apt-cacher, which is
working, while I reload the relatively new box that I hope will evetually
work as a server.

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Re: Fedora/Dell Clock Problems

re clock problem.
If the problem occurs when booting another operating system, it certainly sounds
like a hardware problem.

As far as I am aware the ultimate source of the system clock is an oscillator
on the motherboard, which 'drives' both the CPU and the various system buses.
If that oscillator decides to go slow then everything else will as well I guess.

Is the PC still under warranty?
If so, maybe try loading Windows on it and if the clock then is still adrift,
request they replace it !!

Tim

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Building an external input device

Hello all,

I'm contemplating my next hobby... I'd like to try and build an external input 
device. Let me explain:

I basically want a foot switch that, when pressed, emits a configurable key 
code. This means that I can have a foot switch that controls any application 
that takes a configurable keycode input.

I've seen someone do something similar years ago out of a shoebox, some 
string, and some tin cans, but they were using the old joystick interface 
(which my computer lacks). I guess the process I need to follow is:

1) select hardware interface (PS2? USB?).
2) Design hardware around interface constraints.
3) Develop kernel driver
4) I assume I'll need to do something for X as well..

I'm looking for advice on all four of those points. I know nothing about the 
PS/2 interface, although I have developed USB hardware before.

Alternatively, I guess I could sabotage someone else's hardware, and use 
premade stuff..

Does anyone know of any hardware / software that might help here?

FYI, the foot switch will be controlling a digital effects processor - 
allowing me to switch on, or off a single effect on an input feed (keyboard / 
guitar etc). Eventually I'll need analog input - but I figured that simple 

Re: Building an external input device

Hi

Maplin carry this:

http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=42857&doy=1m4

which works well. Took an hour for un-practised hands to build. There is a 
fairly good initial driver online but I can't remember where right now. Does 
analogue and digital input and output (but I'd reckon the analog would be low 
resolution.

Dylan

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Re: Building an external input device

You could cheat and find a way to strip out a keyboard (usb or ps2) and 
use all of the 104 'buttons' to send individual inputs to a perfectly 
well known interface with existing drivers etc.

But that wouldnt be much of a hobby project ;)
Just my thoughts

-gus

Dylan wrote:
> Hi
>
> Maplin carry this:
>
> http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=42857&doy=1m4
>
> which works well. Took an hour for un-practised hands to build. There is a 
> fairly good initial driver online but I can't remember where right now. Does 
> analogue and digital input and output (but I'd reckon the analog would be low 
> resolution.
>
> Dylan
>   
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