Linux

I am running MATE 14.
Traditional task bar with menu button. Should be easy for windows person to use.
Everything worked out of the box so far plugins hardware etc...
My favourite desktop distro at the moment.

I think MATE is the Gnome 2 revival, should be quite windowsy. Don't know anything about Cinnamon.

awesome thanks!

I went with 14 and mate. Friend hasn't had any problems except she asked about photo shop. Tried gimp but she doesn't like it

She can try Wine or Crossover to run Photoshop.

She can try Wine or Crossover to run Photoshop.

Here's the Wine vs Photoshop versions compatibility report:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=17

Just grabbed cs2 for free from Adobe. Will install with wine. Thanks

I have this issue with Fedora - both Firefox and Chrome, with certain anigifs (presumably large ones), won't load the image. Instead I get a broken image icon in a grey box with the text "Image Too Large". Google has not been helpful in this case ("image too large" is too common of a phrase it would seem). Thoughts?

Sounds like you are missing a library. Have you tried launching either of the browsers from command line and looking out for any error messages when loading pages with gifs?

I see the same thing in Opera. Are you sure it's not a problem with sslcache.se?

Example of a post that does this: https://www.lfgss.com/post3342571-2173.html

Sounds like you are missing a library. Have you tried launching either of the browsers from command line and looking out for any error messages when loading pages with gifs?

Good shout, but no luck.

I see the same thing in Opera. Are you sure it's not a problem with sslcache.se?

The images load on my phone, so no, don't think it's sslcache.se.

I have ubuntu installed on a portable external hdd. Useful for booting into on my work pc when I'm travelling as it has extra stuff installed like spotify, skype, xbmc etc that I can't install on windows without administrator.

I've seen some cheap USB 3.0 hdds so I'm thinking I'll get one of those and copy the installation onto that. The drives will be different sizes though (new one bigger) so what's the best way to do that? Currently it has the usual ubuntu partitions plus an NTFS partition. I'm probably looking to increase the size of the ubuntu partition plus the NTFS partition.

I remember doing it through terminal last time round but then I had to manually adjust partitions which I remember being a faff.

Any tips? Cheers

I would :

• plug both drives into your PC
  
• Boot your PC from LiveCD
  
• Run "dd" command to clone old drive to new
  
• Depending on whether you are using LVM/RAID, expand on the new drive
  
• partition->LVM/RAID->Filesystem.
  
• Install Grub on the new drive.
  

I wonder if what you might want to do is partition the new drive how you want it, and then dd the partitions over individually. Or even - at least for the ubuntu partition - just format the target partition to whichever filesystem you want and then rsync the files over (I don't use nfts on anything, so I don't know how this would behave). This would avoid having to resize the partitions + filesystem on the target drive.

Cheers, I have a feeling that it was dd I used last time. Don't suppose you have an idiot's guide as to which partition does what do you? From what I remember part of my hassle last time was trying to find out which partitions needed to increase in size and which stayed the same as I seem to remember an install takes 3 or 4 partitions.

TBH, the ntfs element isn't important, can easily back that up to a windows pc then copy it back over later

It kind of depends on how things are set up, whether you are using lvm, have home or boot on a different partition etc. Some useful information can be found by running df -h in the terminal. If you could post that here I could take a look.

Cheers, this is the result of df -h

/dev/sdb6 92G 5.8G 82G 7% /
udev 3.9G 4.0K 3.9G 1% /dev
tmpfs 1.6G 1.2M 1.6G 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 3.9G 160K 3.9G 1% /run/shm
/dev/sdb1 461M 174M 264M 40% /boot
/dev/sdb7 92G 23G 65G 27% /home
/home/andrew/.Private 92G 23G 65G 27% /home/andrew
/dev/sdb8 276G 233G 44G 85% /media/Port

So far as I can gather, I have home set up as a different partition so I can probably shrink sdb6 a bit and expand sdb7 to make the most efficient use of space. I'm not entirely sure what goes to / and what goes to /home but it appears that /home is taking more space.

sdb8 is the NTFS partition which I'll just expand by whatever is left over.

I'm not entirely sure what goes to / and what goes to /home but it appears that /home is taking more space.

Home is all of your user files, which will include configuration settings and the default Pictures, Video, Documents etc. folders. / will be system files, installed software etc. 92G seems like a lot for that (Mine is 6G) I think you would be fine with half what you have at least. Boot is all of the stuff needed for booting. This is often on a different partition if you are using encryption or lvm on your other partitions (which would make them inacessible at boot time).

If you want a good graphical tool for faffing with partitions, I have often used gparted from a ubuntu live cd/usb.

Thanks, I have a feeling I set those partitions up manually when I first installed it which explains why it's so big. Looks like I can use this as an opportunity to adjust.

I have gparted installed on Ubuntu and seem to remember it's not too tricky.

I tried the dd method last night (just picked up a 1TB portable USB 3.0 hdd for £50) but had to abort it this morning as it was still copying and I needed my PC.

Will try one of the other methods that doesn't involve copying empty space maybe

Apache gurus (i am not)

mod_rewrite - can anyone suggest a way that I can perform mass redirects (I am talking many tens possibly hundreds of thousands) of redirects?
My thought was to use the RewriteMap DBM file - as at least this would be indexed
However I also need to be able to map full urls - and getting rewrite to do this without looping is doing my head.

a single made up example (with similar link syntax):

http://abc.bongo.com/content/11.444.44 should be 301 redirected to http://alpha.blarg.org/resource/nfg/magazine/p157_s1

The two bear no resemblence to each other or follow any suitable pattern - hence using a map rather than any kind of regex...

I was thinking something along the lines of:

RewriteMap redirmap dbm:common/production/redirmap.map
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ${redirmap:$1} [R=301,L]

but how to get it to match the whole url (http://abc.bongo.com/content/11.444.44 rather than just content/11.444.44) part (there are MANY different domains and subdomains)

Sounds like too much for mod_rewrite, I'd be looking for the most lightweight (sqlite?) based solution I could build using Python, Perl or PHP.

Gotta be some overhead from having a massive list of rules.

Not sure PHP, Perl or Python will be quicker than compiled C Apache module with hashed map file (probably) loaded into memory.

Have you considered nginx? There is this module
http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpMapModule
Haven't used it personally but general consensus is that its gazillion times quicker than Apache at everything.

So long as you're not changing to code or doing anything weird and reflectiony, I know PHP interprets once. I'd assume the others do so too now.

Well - I managed to get it working - 800k rows produces ~150mb dbm file which Apache seems to cope with ok

RewriteMap redirmap dbm:redirmap.map
RewriteMap lowercase int:tolower
RewriteCond ${lowercase:%{REQUEST_URI}|NONE} ^(.+)$
RewriteCond ${redirmap:%1} >""
RewriteRule ^(.*) ${redirmap:%1} [R=301,L]

Is what I used, in case anyone is interested :) (didn't need to match on hostname after all as the paths were all unique thankfully)

What's the latency penalty? Have any stats to share?