[gentoo-user] Accidentally issued hdparm -X /dev/hda on running system
Hi. I wanted to know how was my HD set, and I was issuing information-querying commands like hdparm /dev/hda, hdparm -i /dev/hda when I accidentally issued hdparm -X /dev/hda (idiot me). The hdparm man page does not tell what happens when the -X option is used without an argument. I suspect it is equal to using an argument of 0; the man page says Setting 00 restores the drive´s default PIO mode, and 01 disables IORDY The output of the hdparm -X /dev/hda command mentioned something about IORDY. I then issued hdparm -i /dev/hda and the output said the drive was still in UDMA5. Good sign! Maybe the command did nothing. To be sure, I issued hdparm -X 69 /dev/hda (to set the mode to UDMA5), and issued another hdparm -i /dev/hda (the output seemed identical). I checked dmesg, and I saw at the end one message saying that the mode had been set to UDMA-100 (which is UDMA5 I believe). This is good: this message was probably generated by the hdparm -X 69 /dev/hda command, so the earlier hdparm -X /dev/hda command must have generated no messages, which suggests it did nothing. I then shut the computer down and I writing this from a liveCD. I do not even want to access the disk read only without knowing I have not messed up. So: does anybody know if hdparm -X /dev/hda is safe (on a running system...)? Thank you -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Ext4 for a new installation?
Or would I be better off using ext3 and converting it to ext4 in a month or two? Are there any downsides to converting a fs from ext3 to ext4 in this way? The downsides are that you'll end up with missing ext4 features that will only apply to newly created files after the conversion. I recommend to just be clean about it and use ext4 from the start. AFAIK this isn't true. You can 'convert' an ext3 filesystem to ext4 using ext4's defrag utility. See http://kernelnewbies.org/Ext4. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel 2.6.27-r5 soft lockup
On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 5:01 AM, Dave Oxley d...@daveoxley.co.uk wrote: I upgraded from gentoo-sources-2.6.27-r4 to -r5 a couple of days ago and got the below error messages in /var/log/messages. Also dovecot was using 100% CPU and could not be killed. This resulted in me having to hard reset the server. Couldn't a hard reset be avoided with the magic SysRq key? Regards, Jorge Peixoto
Re: [gentoo-user] xf86-video-intel, compiz, mplayer -fs file.avi freeze
2008/12/8 Kacper Kopczyński [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Thu, 4 Dec 2008, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote: How about you replace the = symbols by '~', such that revision updates are also alwowed? I'll try as soon as I fix my laptop. It survived journey across the country, daily trips by bus... But it didn't survived my mother taking care of flowers. ...Most accidents happen at home. My condolences. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] xf86-video-intel, compiz, mplayer -fs file.avi freeze
On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 4:21 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I cannot solve your problem because I know little of X and nothing about compiz (which I consider futile), but for this kind of problem, you may want to know about the magic SysRq key. It allows you to at least reboot your system cleanly when the system seems locked, and some times can even help you kill the bad program an resume work. http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sysrq.txt Thanks. I solved problem by recompiling whole Xorg to version same as in ubuntu. This is part from portage.keywords: =x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.4.2-r3 =x11-base/xorg-x11-7.3 =x11-base/xorg-server-1.5.2 =x11-libs/libpciaccess-0.10.3 =x11-proto/xproto-7.0.13 =x11-apps/xauth-1.0.3 =x11-libs/libXrender-0.9.4 =x11-proto/renderproto-0.9.3 =x11-proto/xextproto-7.0.3 =x11-libs/libXau-1.0.4 =x11-libs/libXext-1.0.4 =x11-proto/inputproto-1.4.4 =x11-apps/rgb-1.0.3 =x11-libs/libX11-1.1.5 =x11-apps/xinit-1.0.8-r3 =x11-proto/xf86driproto-2.0.4 =x11-libs/libXxf86vm-1.0.2 =x11-proto/randrproto-1.2.2 =x11-libs/libXfont-1.3.3 =x11-drivers/xf86-video-v4l-0.2.0 =x11-drivers/xf86-video-fbdev-0.4.0 =x11-drivers/xf86-input-keyboard-1.3.1 =x11-drivers/xf86-input-evdev-2.0.6 =x11-drivers/xf86-input-synaptics-0.15.2-r2 =x11-drivers/xf86-input-mouse-1.3.0 =x11-libs/xtrans-1.2.2 =media-libs/mesa-7.2 =x11-proto/printproto-1.0.4 =x11-libs/libdrm-2.3.1 =x11-libs/pixman-0.12.0 =x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-1.3 How about you replace the = symbols by '~', such that revision updates are also alwowed? -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] emerge --update pulling in enlightenment-0.16.9999.050
e17 doesn't like transparency and compiz-style effects. You can get it to work with the bling module or by using a compositing manager like xcompmgr or a derivative, but I found it wasn't exactly stable on nVidia. You may have better luck with ATI. Going offtopic, I for myself don't care about fancy eye-candy at all. I consider it futile. For example, my Xfce (with all compositing effects disabled) looks beautiful enough, and is fast, lightweight, customizable, simple and understandable. The things I miss from e17 are that e17 is even more configurable (you can configure what keyboard+mouse combination resizes a windows, for example, while on Xfce it seems hardwired to altright-click, while I would prefer to use altmiddle-click, since I often have to use GNOME and would like to use the same shortcuts), and even more lightweight (disk space, memory, speed) than Xfce. I should give e17 another try when it gets a little more stable, or when at least Vapier finds the time to update the snapshot ebuilds (which, last time I checked, were horribly outdated). Regards, Jorge Peixoto -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] emerge --update pulling in enlightenment-0.16.9999.050
I should give e17 another try when it gets a little more stable, or when at least Vapier finds the time to update the snapshot ebuilds (which, last time I checked, were horribly outdated). Regards, Jorge Peixoto Oh, great, it seems vapier updated the snapshots! Alan, would you recommend an e17 snapshot (dated 2008-09-25) to a system that is mostly stable? I love simplicity, weightlessness and speed, but I don't want too many (or severe) bugs. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user][ot] mail links as footnotes
On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 8:02 AM, Dale [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Stroller wrote: I've been wondering for a while why no alternative has been proposed. HTML was originally considered poor because it wasted bandwidth, HTML messages being *at least* twice the size of the plain text, but often several times as large. I wonder if console-based mail-readers were late in adopting it for that reason, and it gained additional unpopularity amongst programmers the technorati as a consequence. Nowadays HTML is bad principally because it imposes fonts upon the reader. I know what size my monitor is at what size my mail program should render text. [...] I have also found that clients appear inconsistent about how they apply quoting to HTML messages. At least often if I reply to an HTML message and change it to plain text then the quoted message magically looses a level of quoting. Typically I change to plain-text like this because I've copied pasted a single sentence out of the quoted section and it comes out into my own paragraph as blue, the wrong size and an inconsistent font - this is another grip about HTML. I guess my main point was this. Some mailing list people have some set ups that may not work right in certain situations. As I have said, some here are using older mail readers that don't do well, if display at all, html messages. That's what I was told when I first joined here. I also know from being here a long time that if a person does something silly, like sending a 2Mb email or sending HTML that they can't read, they get sent to the dust bin. Also, some people have replied from cell phones or live in countries that charge by the amount of data. The difference between html and text on a list this busy can be a lot. In general, html email is mostly a solution in search of a problem, and it ends up causing trouble and being overall worse than the simple, efficient, easy, working, universally adopted technology that preceded it. Besides all the problems already listed in this discussion, html email facilitates malware, web bugs, phishing, spam, and incompatibility (besides the people who use HTML-incapable email clients, there are email clients that don't render HTML email well (it is more common then you think), not to mention that the HTML email itself is often broken). And of the HTML emails, a tiny minority actually make something useful of HTML, while the rest is either deliberately harmful or has a lot of fancy formating that looks it was created by a teenager. Besides looking horrible, they are often harder to read. As for the guy who suggested a form of sanitized HTML for email, maybe you would like enriched text http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT] filesystems
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:38 AM, Shawn Haggett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 04:21:44 pm Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote: Speaking of md5sum/shasum, do you know some tool that adds data redundancy? I heard dvddistaster does this, but I guess it is limited to DVDs. It would be great fo find a general data redundancy tool. In the moment, with the tools I know, the best I can do is store the files twice, with md5sums/shasums to decide which version is correct. Have a look at app-arch/par2cmdline ( http://parchive.sourceforge.net/ ). It will create parity files for an arbitrary set of data files and you can choose your level of redundency (from 0 = now redundency, just integrity checking, up to 100%). Although expect your parity files to be on the order of the percentage for size, i.e. 50% redundancy for some given files to take about 50% of their size for the parity files). The down side I find with the tool is that it doesn't currently support directories. This isn't so bad for creating parity files, but during checking/restore, the program expects all files to exist in the current directory, despite which sub-dirs they were originally in. You can get around this with a tar/rar/zip first, then calculate parities on the archive though. Thank you very much. I have taken a quick look at this, and seems to be what I look for. In a few days, when I have time, I will try it on some files and see the results.
Re: [gentoo-user] best practice for kernel mainteneance
On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 6:41 AM, Thanasis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Regarding kernel maintenance, mostly from the point of view of security, which is the best way to go: 1) Having gentoo-sources in /var/lib/portage/world, which would mean the sources would be upgraded whenever portage marks a newer version as stable (provided someone follows stable)? 2) Not having gentoo-sources in /var/lib/portage/world, which would mean the sources would be upgraded only as a dependency for some other package (which is quite improbable/rare)? A good way to be kept informed of new software releases is by mailing list. For vanilla-sources, use [EMAIL PROTECTED] Information (including how to subscribe) at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.htm For gentoo-sources, use [EMAIL PROTECTED] Information (including how to subscribe) at http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml By the way I recommend you to subscribe to the announce lists of all software that matters to you. For example, gentoo-announce (which carries important notices such as glsa notices and new Gentoo releases), gcc-announce, etc. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Fragmentation of my drives. Curious mostly
[...] what would be the best way to defrag it? By not defragging it. It's not Windows. Windows boxes needs defragging not because fragmentation is a huge problem in itself, but because windows filesystems are a steaming mess of [EMAIL PROTECTED] that do little right and most things wrong. Defrag treats the symptom, not the cause :-) I don't buy into that argument and never did. Every few months I copy the whole HD to another one and then back to counter fragmentation (ext3) and the system becomes noticeably faster after doing it (speed increase in emerge --sync for example.) Maybe it's not fragmentation but rather related files being more closely together after I do this. How exactly do you copy the files? Be careful not to lose some file property. How about sparse files, for example? AFAIK, you can make a complete backup of a filesytem with (as root, running from another system - such as a liveCD) $ cd /path/to/mountpoint $ tar -cSv -f /path/to/tarball.tar . But I am not sure.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT] filesystems
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 10:12 AM, Daniel Troeder [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Am Mittwoch, den 26.11.2008, 15:26 +0100 schrieb Florian Philipp: As for my photos, I can back all the collection to a single DVD (and to a second one, since I keep hearing that DVD-Rs are unreliable), and since I don't take new photos every week, this solution is fine. A second DVD-R won't solve the problem because optical disks degrade over time and the second one will degrade just as fast as the first. What you need to do is to check the disks periodically (once a year is a good time frame). I myself would add a textfile with md5sums for all files to the DVD so you don't have to check them visually. I have recently taken this decision too. Unfortunately I haven't done so for some old backups (fortunately they still seem healthy) You can buy so called archival grade DVD-Rs that should work for 10-20 years in a good environment. There are hugh differences between products. In germany you can buy very good ones from Verbatim for around 2€/disk. This can be hard to find in my mid-sized Brazilian city. If I lived in the mega-metropolis of São Paulo, this would be far easier. And thanks very much for recommending Verbatim. I have heard of Taiyo Yuden, but that would likely be far harder to find. Speaking of md5sum/shasum, do you know some tool that adds data redundancy? I heard dvddistaster does this, but I guess it is limited to DVDs. It would be great fo find a general data redundancy tool. In the moment, with the tools I know, the best I can do is store the files twice, with md5sums/shasums to decide which version is correct. By the way, it seems from my (limited) experience that even sha256sums are IO-bound (even on my not-so-powerful Athlon XP 2600+), so it makes sense to calculate sha256sums (as instead of md5sums) even it is overkill. To be doubly sure, one can calculate sha256sums *and* md5sums.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT] filesystems
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 12:26 PM, Florian Philipp [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As for my photos, I can back all the collection to a single DVD (and to a second one, since I keep hearing that DVD-Rs are unreliable), and since I don't take new photos every week, this solution is fine. A second DVD-R won't solve the problem because optical disks degrade over time and the second one will degrade just as fast as the first. What you need to do is to check the disks periodically (once a year is a good time frame). I know DVD-Rs degrade, but it is unlikely they would fail at the same time, so copying twice does significantly alleviate the problem (AFAIK) Once a year isn't overkill? Isn't once every two years fine? I myself would add a textfile with md5sums for all files to the DVD so you don't have to check them visually. Sure. I am doing that since some time now. Unfortunately I didn't do so for some old backups. But data DVD-Rs have a considerable amount of correction code, and if the copy from DVD to hard disk proceeds without a single error message, there is a quite good chance that the files are good, right? (If they were burnt correctly in the fist place, that is. The manual of my DVD-RW drive warns that the burned disk should be checked before being trusted as a backup, and even then it - as usual - disclaims all warranties).
Re: [gentoo-user] cruft in /etc. How to clean in out.
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 5:29 AM, Dirk Heinrichs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Am Donnerstag 27 November 2008 03:54:25 schrieb ext Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto: By the way, I found it weird that git has a lot of git-* binaries in /usr/bin that are all 777 KB. Hardlinks? Check the link count in ls -l output. BTW: Newer versions don't do this anymore. Bye... Dirk I stand corrected. BTW, this indicates a bug in qsize. qsize --filesystem indicated that git occupied more than 70 MB in disk. But I have just built git with --buildpkgonly and extracted the tarball to a temporary directory; here is what du says: ~/tmp $ du -sc etc usr 8 etc 6480usr 6488total I should file a bug against app-portage/portage-utils, no?
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Anyone tried a solid state drive?
I think my real reason for posting this is I'm unhappy with my IO performance. I've got a 320GB Seagate SATAII drive. How much better can I do with conventional hard disks? Is there a test I can run to make sure my Seagate is performing as it should? How about you go to single user mode issue the command hdparm -tT /dev/yourdisk three times, and post the results here? Second, here are some basic hints about disk performance. 1) Disk speed is faster in the beginning of the disk (because the beginning of the disk is stored in the outer border of the disk, which has greater linear velocity than the inner border). It may be a good idea to put you swap partition first (and don't exaggerate on its size, since it is occupying valuable space in the beginning of the disk), then your main partition, then other partitions. 2) Your filesystem should not be too full; one of the problems this causes is fragmentation 3) If your filesystem is very old, it is probably fragmented. While fragmentation in LInux is a much smaller problem than in Windows (specially Windows 95/98/ME), it happens over time, specially if the filesystem is too full. I don't know how easily you can defragment in Linux though. Have other people in this list tried sys-fs/shake? I am afraid of it because it is ~x86 and would operate on important areas of my filesystem. 4) file access is slower if there are too many files in the directory. Consider cleaning up your system (such as by wiping out software you never use, and unmerging software you rarely use after creating a package of it with quickpkg) 5) Use lighter-weight software such as Xfce (yeah, obvious).
Re: [gentoo-user] xf86-video-intel, compiz, mplayer -fs file.avi freeze
2008/11/24 Kacper Kopczyński [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I have a MSI Wind U100 netbook. I'm using xfce with compiz-fusion. When I try to start mplayer -fs file.avi the Xserver freezes. It also freezes when the logout window of xfce, that gray transparent background, tries to show 3 buttons (logout, restart, poweroff). I can only move mouse cursor. Pressing ctrl+fN, ctrl+backspace, clicking ... does not work. Xorg.0.log says something like EQ overflowing and something about infinite loop. I don't have access to it right now (I'm in job). When compiz is disabled everything works well. I cannot solve your problem because I know little of X and nothing about compiz (which I consider futile), but for this kind of problem, you may want to know about the magic SysRq key. It allows you to at least reboot your system cleanly when the system seems locked, and some times can even help you kill the bad program an resume work. http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sysrq.txt
Re: [gentoo-user] cruft in /etc. How to clean in out.
Maybe you should search the forums for cruft. I remember Ed (?) Catmur once posted a script or something there. I use a script named findcruft regularly (I think it is an improved version of Ed Catmur's product; I'll check when I get home). It works by finding all files on the filesystem (avoiding areas such as /proc, /sys/ /dev/, /home, and such) and comparing that to the files managed by Portage. The list of orphaned files is full of false positives, caused by, for example, packages that create files outside the knowledge of portage (I think many eselect modules do this for example). It tries to diminish the false positives problem by having a database of packages and files created by using said packages. This database of course cannot be complete, and unfortunately it seems to be very outdated. I would love to see more maintenance of this script and, more importantly, the database. In the current state, the list of orphaned files is huge, with a good part of it probably being false positives. Since I don't want to move a file without being sure it is cruft, I can only read that list and delete the few files that I know about and am sure are cruft. I also run the script regularly and save the results; each time I run the script I compare the list with the previous one. I normally run the script after I unmerge some packages. In the end, if you want a clean system it seems you either have to reformat every couple of years, or you have to be a walking encyclopedia knowing the origin of every file in the huge list that findcruft outputs so you know if they are cruft or not. Sad. In my opinion, this problem needs to be addressed. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] cruft in /etc. How to clean in out.
You could start with qfile -o $(find /etc -type f) I guess that would have many more false positives than findcruft, as it doesn't have the database feature of findcruft. So no, qfile -o does not seem a better option than findcruft.
Re: [gentoo-user] cruft in /etc. How to clean in out.
app-admin/findcruft2 Which overlay? $ eix findcruft * app-admin/findcruft2 [3] Available versions: 20080831 Homepage:http://benedikt.boehm.name Description: findcruft2 is a tool to find orphaned files for unmerged packages * app-portage/findcruft Available versions: ~1.0.4-r1!m[1] 1.0.4-r1[2] Homepage: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=254197 http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Clean_Up_Cruft Description: Yet another script to find obsolete files [1] (layman/arcon) [2] (layman/gentoo-taiwan) [3] (layman/hollow) Hum, findcruft2 yields a different list of cruft files. It is smaller; I think it is better. It is a pity, though, that findcruft2 is only offered through git. I would prefer snapshots (more reliable), or, having to choose a version control system, I would prefer one that doesn't take 75MB of hard disk. If is ironic to install git to get findcruft ... By the way, I found it weird that git has a lot of git-* binaries in /usr/bin that are all 777 KB.
Re: [gentoo-user] --depclean won't work anymore.
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 1:53 AM, Dale [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--with-bdeps y --nospinner I don't see the reason tough. Mine is just $ fgrep DEFAULT /etc/make.conf EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--nospinner The portage's default around bdeps is fine with me. It makes sense. And please think before changing the defaults. Do not change it just because it is fun. When you mess too much with your system, then when something breaks, it is harder to pinpoint the cause. (This comes from a reformed ricer). Well, this started because revdep-rebuild was griping about a package not being up to date and with-bdeps fixed it. You could just install the packages that emerge -p --depclean complained about. And this is rare anyway. I for example have a lot of packages that would be installed with a emerge -pDuNv --with-bdeps=y world, but emerge -p --depc runs fine. In the exceptional case that emerge -p --depc complains, you install the required package.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: dual booting 2 gentoo installations
I take it you've already observed that you can also share portage and distfiles directories? Easiest is if they are on their own partitions but there are tricks that can get the same effect if not. How to do this is left as an exercise for the reader :-) with one tip for those who don't know: mount -o bind -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com I know about mount -o bind. However, (forgive me if this is naive), why not just a symlink? That is the way I do. I want my root partition to be small (for performance reasons), so I put things that don't need speed int its own partion, which I mount in /usr/local/slowpart (the name fits; the partition is at the end of the harddisk and 80% full, so it is slower than the root partion, that is at the beginning of the hard disk and 7% full. In this slowpart, I have DISTDIR, PKGDIR, and some personal files that are not frequently accessed (such as files I will likely never use but kept for safety). I configure DISTDIR and PKGDIR in make.conf, but the personal files are linked to my home via symbolic links. Another reason for having a different partition is that I can easily backup my other personal data to it when I have to format the root partition.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: dual booting 2 gentoo installations
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 3:06 AM, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I take it you've already observed that you can also share portage and distfiles directories? Easiest is if they are on their own partitions but there are tricks that can get the same effect if not. How to do this is left as an exercise for the reader :-) with one tip for those who don't know: mount -o bind -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com I know about mount -o bind. However, (forgive me if this is naive), why not just a symlink? That is the way I do. I want my root partition to be small (for performance reasons), so I put things that don't need speed int its own partion, which I mount in /usr/local/slowpart (the name fits; the partition is at the end of the harddisk and 80% full, so it is slower than the root partion, that is at the beginning of the hard disk and 7% full. In this slowpart, I have DISTDIR, PKGDIR, and some personal files that are not frequently accessed (such as files I will likely never use but kept for safety). I configure DISTDIR and PKGDIR in make.conf, but the personal files are linked to my home via symbolic links. I guess the advantage of bind-mount is having all of it configured in fstab, as instead of having many symlinks. (forgive me it this is naive). And there is all that --move, --make-shared, --make-slave, --make-private, --make-unbindable stuff, but that seems overkill for a desktop user. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] synaptic touchpad stopped scrolling!
Probably the new evdev-driver overrides synaptics. If you do not need evdev and can live with the normal drivers like kbd for keyboard and synaptics, you can try to disable it. I hope you don't consider this to be thread hijacking, but can you point me to a simple and high-level (but not exaggeratedly dumbed-down, as articles by mainstream media journalists tend to be) explanation of what evdev is good for? My only input devices are a PS2 keyboard with standard Brazilian layout (with no foolish extra multimedia keys) and a PS2 mouse with two buttons and one scroll wheel that also works as a third button. Do I need/want evdev? OT: I like to keep my system simple and disable what I don't use. I like to be able to understand my system. My point of view is, that when I keep my system simple (such as by using Xfce with the minimal USE flag, instead of Gnome/KDE and foolish 3d effects), it not only gets very fast and stable, but also far simpler allowing me to understand it. When something goes wrong in Ubuntu, I often have little clue of the cause. When something goes wrong in my simple Gentoo system, it is far easier to find the cause. Speaking of Ubuntu, I have the impression that they are becoming a system that Just Works most of the time, but if you are unlucky and it doesn't work, it Just Doesn't Work and it is hard to find the cause. I continue to advocate Ubuntu to Linux newcomers, but my own system will remain Gentoo. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] synaptic touchpad stopped scrolling!
My only input devices are a PS2 keyboard with standard Brazilian layout (with no foolish extra multimedia keys) and a PS2 mouse with two buttons and one scroll wheel that also works as a third button. Do I need/want evdev? I should put this in a more specific manner: would it be safe/wise to remove evdev from INPUT_DEVICES (which currently includes evdev, keyboard and mouse) ? The relevant sections of xorg.conf are Section InputDevice Identifier BrazilianKeyboard Driver kbd Option AutoRepeat 500 30 Option XkbRules xorg Option XkbModel abnt2 Option XkbLayout br EndSection Section InputDevice Identifier SimpleMouse Driver mouse Option Protocol IMPS/2 Option Device /dev/input/mice Option ZAxisMapping 4 5 6 7 EndSection
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] filesystems
I wouldn't use XFS unless it was all that was left. I tried it once a while back and found out it does not like power failures at all. Each time I had a power failure, I had to reinstall from scratch. Hmm, I use it because of its resistance to power failures. When was it that you had such problems? Its been a while but it happened several times. I just got tired of having to reinstall every time the power blinked. Turned out the wire was loose on the transformer so they blinked a lot, every couple days or so. I think it was Mandrake 9.2. I have had a power failure or two with reiserfs and it recovered. It did the check thing but ran fine. Just my experience. Your mileage may vary. I have a similar story, but for me it was JFS instead of XFS. I will never, ever, ever use JFS for anything again. I had XFS on a file server RAID box with a failing power supply and it died over and over and the FS stayed functional, so YMMV indeed. (I haven't tried reiser, I'm still scared about the corruption stories from years ago.) I suppose if you ask enough people, there will be horror stories about every filesystem. I use reiserfs and I twice got serious filesystem corruptions after crashes, and one was very serious. It is unclear whether this was reiserfs's fault or the hardware. You see, I was using athcool to save electricity, and it seems that when the bit Disconnect enable when STPGNT detected is set on the Northbridge (this is what athcool does) and you are using a PixelView PV-M4900 FM.RC (specially if you are recording tv - with mencoder - as opposed to just viewing it - with mplayer), your computer malfunctions. I was able to recover much of the data with reiserfsck --rebuild-tree, but some of the files had part of their content replaced with a string of null bytes. I heard somewhere that reiserfs is infamous for replacing file content with a string of null bytes, so maybe this is indeed reiserfs fault, and not just bad hardware. By the way, I chose reiserfs (some 3 years ago I believe) because of its speed fame, but now, thinking of it, there are only four computer activities that make my system slow: 1) launch heavy programs such as firefox (when not in cache) 2) compile software 3) view certain web pages in firefox 4) encode video Now, since I usually compile software in a tmpfs, I guess the filesystem makes nearly zero difference. Video encoding is obviously bound by CPU, cache and RAM speed, not filesystem. Web rendering is also hardly affected by filesystem . And launching programs means mostly reading files, and would reiserfs be significantly faster than ext3 for this, specially considering that my system is minimalist and the root partition is only 7% used? So it seems I should not have chosen reiserfs, which has a fame of being less safe than ext3, and certainly has less software support than ext3. The next time I format my root partition, I will choose ext3 (then move to ext4 when it is stable). -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] filesystems
Now, since I usually compile software in a tmpfs, I guess the filesystem makes nearly zero difference. Video encoding is obviously bound by CPU, cache and RAM speed, not filesystem. Web rendering is also hardly affected by filesystem . And launching programs means mostly reading files, and would reiserfs be significantly faster than ext3 for this, specially considering that my system is minimalist and the root partition is only 7% used? So it seems I should not have chosen reiserfs, which has a fame of being less safe than ext3, and certainly has less software support than ext3. The next time I format my root partition, I will choose ext3 (then move to ext4 when it is stable). Oh, and according to this benchmark http://linuxgazette.net/122/piszcz.html reiserfs does not deserve its speed fame.
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] filesystems
reiserfs has barriers turned on by default - which makes it a bit slower but a lot safer for data. ext3 has them turned off by default - ext3 devs don't care about data - only speed. You turn on barriers, performance goes down by 30%. I read an article about that, and if I recall correctly the assumption was that the likelihood of data loss occurring due to the barriers issue was negligible. I have no expertise to decide on that matter, but the fact that pretty much every linux distribution chooses ext3 by default suggests it is the safest (at least for simple desktop/laptop usage), no? Somewhat offtopic: What do you suggest for me? I care about data safety, but am too lazy to make frequent backups, so filesystem robustness and availability of data recovery tools is pretty important; and as I said before, the only performance problem with my computer that I think may be related to filesystem is boot time and launching heavy programs not in cache; keep in mind my root partition is only 3,8 GB used and 93% free - maybe in this condition the filesystem is not stressed and only the actual HD speed matters? Valerie Henson from VAH Consulting says that every file system goes fast with: * O(1000) files per directory * File size a few KB to a few GB * Read-mostly access * Infrequent file creation/deletion * Sequential file read/write patterns * Shallow directory depth ( 10 levels) * Total file system size O(100 GB)
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] filesystems
[...] I have no expertise to decide on that matter, but the fact that pretty much every linux distribution chooses ext3 by default suggests it is the safest (at least for simple desktop/laptop usage), no? fedora turns on 4k stack - well knowing that it kills xfs. Do you want to rephrase your question? Well, I said I have little expertise. Won't argue. Somewhat offtopic: What do you suggest for me? I care about data safety, but am too lazy to make frequent backups, so filesystem robustness and availability of data recovery tools is pretty important; so use whatever you want, get a nice cheap dlt from ebay and let a cronjob write to it. No 'lazy' problem. Very secure. I live in Brasil, and due to huge taxes, poor infrastructure and the currency exchange ratio, computer stuff is far more expensive than in the US. And then you have to factor that the average Brazilian is much poorer than the average US citizen. But anyway, I know I must make backups, but I still want a robust filesystem with good software support (such as data recovery utilities). Could you give me your suggestion for the safest filesystem for a desktop user that only uses 3,8G of his 54G root partition? I care about speed, but I think that my usage pattern does not stress the filesystem (if what Valerie Henson says is true).
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT] filesystems
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 7:15 PM, Joerg Schilling [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Backups. get a usb stick and manually copy your stuff to it, periodically. Where do you get these 1 TB USB sticks? You are seeing from the perspective of a sysadmin. He was replying to me, a desktop user. My most important data occupy little space and can surely be backed up in a 1 GB pen drive. The music ripped from CDs, the linux ISOs and other kind of recoverable data do not need backup. As for my photos, I can back all the collection to a single DVD (and to a second one, since I keep hearing that DVD-Rs are unreliable), and since I don't take new photos every week, this solution is fine.
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] filesystems
I ran ext3 on a dirvish backup server - lasted two days, resierfs is still going after a couple of years. dirvish REALLY hammers a file system. Participating in a few of these discussions over the years has brought home to me that YMMV really does apply to filesystems. Your usage, data profile, power/hardware stability are all variables and any two peoples experience almost assuredly wont be the same. In this discussion multiple people have defended reiserfs as a safe filesystem. This is novel to me. Reiserfs is always bashed as being an unsafe filesystem, developed with only speed in mind; a filesystem to be used only by childish ricers or in specific situations where filesystem performance is critical. For example, once I tried genkernel (but did not like it and decide to go on with manual kernel maintainance) and this message was in an ewarn ewarn This package is known to not work with reiser4. If you are running ewarn reiser4 and have a problem, do not file a bug. We know it does not ewarn work and we don't plan on fixing it since reiser4 is the one that is ewarn broken in this regard. Try using a sane filesystem like ext3 or ewarn even reiser3. They explicitly claim reiser4 is broken and insane, and their wording implicitly suggests that ext3 is better than reiser3. But in this discussion people are saying reiserfs is in fact safer than ext3. I have not dived in the Linux developers x Hans Reiser battle, so I don't know which side is right and which side is guilty, but think that either A) reiserfs is a good filesystem, but the battle between Hans Reiser and Linux developers caused people to dislike reiserfs for non-technical reasons. or B) reiserfs is a bad filesystem but for some reason a lot of reiserfs fans appeared in this thread Note: don't talk about the unfortunate horrible story of Hans' family, the details of which we don't know. People were bashing reiserfs (both versions 3 and 4) well before that.
Re: [gentoo-user] /usr/lib/perl5: file not recognized: Is a directory
Did you try the usual; e.g. revdep-rebuild -p -v -i and perl-cleaner? I didn't know of perl-cleaner. I have never used it, and I don't remember any emerge message telling me to use it (like a python update does). I have just ran per-cleaner all ask. First I run as a normal user (as a test; I was expecting it to complain about lack of permissions), then as root. Did I do any harm to my system? -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] openoffice emerge failing
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Michael P. Soulier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 20/11/08 Michael P. Soulier said: On 20/11/08 Redouane Boumghar said: SO please check how much available memory you have I have 1Gig in this system, and I'm planning to add more. So, I killed firefox to free up memory and let it build overnight. The build completed successfully. Perhaps it was a memory issue. I'm starting to think that ebuilds need available memory requirements. Don't build this without 1Gig of free memory, etc... There is this in the Openoffice ebuild # Check if we have enough RAM and free diskspace to build this beast CHECKREQS_MEMORY=512 use debug CHECKREQS_DISK_BUILD=8192 || CHECKREQS_DISK_BUILD=5120 check_reqs I have one observation and one doubt Observation: more packages should have warnings against this. GCC 4.3 needs more than 1.5GiB of disk space to build, at least with the USE flags fortran gcj gtk mudflap openmp. Doubt: don't you have enough swap? Does Openoffice need so much memory that even with swap it failed?
Re: [gentoo-user] How to run dhclient on the background
On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 10:20 AM, damian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello, When I boot my computer I don't want to wait for the dhcp client (in my case dhclient) to acquire a lease to continue the booting process. Instead, I would like that the client could be run in the background (as a daemon) right after it is invoked. Reading through the man pages of dhclient it seems like I need to pass the -nw flag to the client. However. I can't find how to do this. Any help is welcomed. It seems like I'm the only one with this issue (I don't think so) because I can't find in the internet information about this. Thanks in advance, Damian. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=4chap=3#doc_chap3 Also, in my computer xdm seems to start before net.eth0. In fact, it seems that net.eth0 is not needed for my desktop $ sudo /etc/init.d/net.eth0 needsme gkrellmd netmount pydoc-2.5 samba sshd svnserve transmission-daemon net -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Safety/wiseness of moving stray files from /etc/env.d
On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:56:38 -0800 Andrey Falko [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 11/20/08, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it safe/wise to move 20java and 05gcc-i686-pc-linux-gnu to a backup directory? How about binutils/config-i386-pc-linux-gnu? How about the blas, cblas and lapack directories (I have long ago unmerged the corresponding packages)? They contain only this: Well, since you are backing them up, I don't see much harm since you can move them back once you see that something broke. My fear is that something may break and I not realize; or it may break something 2 months from now, when I wouldn't associate the breakage with my messing with /etc/env.d. I am afraid of breaking the system after doing enough times already. When is the last time you did an etc-update? What running env-update? I use dispatch-conf every time Portage warns me to update configuration files. Just to make you happy, I have just run etc-update followed by env-update. Nothing changed. Speaking of env-update, see my /etc/ld.so.conf, and how it is screwed up: $ cat /etc/ld.so.conf # ld.so.conf autogenerated by env-update; make all changes to # contents of /etc/env.d directory /usr/local/lib //usr//lib/opengl/xorg-x11/lib /usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/lib /usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.1.2 /usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.2.2 /usr/lib/nspr /usr/lib/nss /opt/sun-jre-bin-1.5.0.06/lib/i386/ /opt/sun-jre-bin-1.5.0.06/lib/i386/native_threads/ /opt/sun-jre-bin-1.5.0.06/lib/i386/xawt/ /opt/sun-jre-bin-1.5.0.06/lib/i386/server/ /opt/firefox /usr/games/lib There is no /usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linu/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.2.2 and no /opt/sun-jre-bin-1.5.0.06. These are erroneous entries. Has this happened with other people? Does Portage leave stray files behind in /etc/env.d? -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free. --Linus Torvalds
[gentoo-user] Safety/wiseness of moving stray files from /etc/env.d
Hi. Some of my environment variables are screwed up
/etc/env.d $ echo ${MANPATH}
/home/jorge/.gentoo/java-config-2/current-user-vm/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/share/binutils-data/i686-pc-linux-gnu/2.18/man:/usr/share/gcc-data/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.1.2/man:${MANPATH}:/opt/sun-jre-bin-1.5.0.06/man:/etc/java-config/system-vm/man/
There is a '${MANPATH}' inside ${MANPATH}, and besides that
{MANPATH} references the long obsolete sun-jre-bin-1.5.0.06
Also
/etc/env.d $ cat 05gcc-i686-pc-linux-gnu
MANPATH=/usr/share/gcc-data/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.1.2/man
INFOPATH=/usr/share/gcc-data/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.1.2/info
LDPATH=/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.1.2:/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.2.2
PATH=/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/4.1.2
ROOTPATH=/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/4.1.2
GCC_SPECS=
LDPATH references gcc-4.2.2, which is no longer installed
(for several months, in fact).
And there is both a 05gcc-i686-pc-linux-gnu file and a gcc directory in
/etc/env.d
Also, some files in /etc/env.d are suspiciously old:
/etc/env.d $ ls -l --so=ti
total 92
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22 2008-11-13 12:51 71firefox-bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 192 2008-11-10 09:43 gcc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 145 2008-11-10 06:22 03opengl
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 36 2008-10-26 16:34 50ncurses
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 34 2008-10-09 20:24 05portage.envd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 46 2008-10-04 17:45 90games
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 44 2008-10-01 20:57 37fontconfig
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42 2008-10-01 20:56 99gentoolkit-env
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14 2008-09-09 22:47 50gtk2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 48 2008-08-21 09:50 98ca-certificates
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 33 2008-08-16 07:21 50gconf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40 2008-08-09 11:41 20udev
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12 2008-08-05 02:22 30java-finalclasspath
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 156 2008-07-13 07:14 05binutils
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 168 2008-07-13 07:14 binutils
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20 2008-06-21 08:04 08nss
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21 2008-06-19 07:56 08nspr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 218 2008-05-05 03:02 00basic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 79 2008-04-27 20:35 20java-config
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 72 2008-02-17 14:16 lapack
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 50 2008-02-07 11:29 70less
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 306 2008-02-06 10:32 05gcc-i686-pc-linux-gnu
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 34 2007-09-02 13:35 50emacs
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 72 2007-02-25 23:04 blas
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 72 2007-02-25 23:04 cblas
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13 2007-01-26 20:58 99local
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 552 2006-09-21 18:13 20java
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 29 2006-03-19 14:12 02locale
Also, there is both a 05binutils file and a binutils directory.
Inside the binutils directory, there is this
/etc/env.d $ ls -l binutils/
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15 2006-02-13 23:10 config-i386-pc-linux-gnu
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13 2008-07-13 07:14 config-i686-pc-linux-gnu
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 122 2008-07-13 07:14 i686-pc-linux-gnu-2.18
/etc/env.d $ cat binutils/config-i386-pc-linux-gnu
CURRENT=2.16.1
(obsolete)
Also,
/ $ for entry in /etc/env.d/*; do qfile -e ${entry} || echo ${entry}
ORPHAN; done
sys-apps/baselayout-1.12.12 (/etc/env.d/00basic)
/etc/env.d/02locale ORPHAN
/etc/env.d/03opengl ORPHAN
/etc/env.d/05binutils ORPHAN
/etc/env.d/05gcc-i686-pc-linux-gnu ORPHAN
sys-apps/portage-2.1.4.5 (/etc/env.d/05portage.envd)
dev-libs/nspr-4.7.1 (/etc/env.d/08nspr)
dev-libs/nss-3.12 (/etc/env.d/08nss)
/etc/env.d/20java ORPHAN
dev-java/java-config-2.1.6 (/etc/env.d/20java-config)
sys-fs/udev-124-r1 (/etc/env.d/20udev)
dev-java/java-config-1.3.7 (/etc/env.d/30java-finalclasspath)
media-libs/fontconfig-2.6.0-r2 (/etc/env.d/37fontconfig)
/etc/env.d/50emacs ORPHAN
gnome-base/gconf-2.22.0 (/etc/env.d/50gconf)
x11-libs/gtk+-2.12.11 (/etc/env.d/50gtk2)
sys-libs/ncurses-5.6-r2 (/etc/env.d/50ncurses)
sys-apps/less-418 (/etc/env.d/70less)
www-client/mozilla-firefox-bin-3.0.4 (/etc/env.d/71firefox-bin)
/etc/env.d/90games ORPHAN
app-misc/ca-certificates-20080809 (/etc/env.d/98ca-certificates)
app-portage/gentoolkit-0.2.4.2 (/etc/env.d/99gentoolkit-env)
/etc/env.d/99local ORPHAN
sys-devel/binutils-2.18-r3 (/etc/env.d/binutils)
/etc/env.d/blas ORPHAN
/etc/env.d/cblas ORPHAN
sys-devel/gcc-4.1.2 (/etc/env.d/gcc)
sys-devel/gcc-4.3.2 (/etc/env.d/gcc)
/etc/env.d/lapack ORPHAN
Is it safe/wise to move 20java and 05gcc-i686-pc-linux-gnu to a backup
directory? How about binutils/config-i386-pc-linux-gnu? How about the blas,
cblas and lapack directories (I have long ago unmerged the corresponding
packages)? They contain only this:
/etc/env.d $ find blas cblas lapack -type f -exec ls -l {} +
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 95 2008-02-16 15:59 blas/lib/config
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 95 2008-02-16 15:59 cblas/lib/config
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 95 2008-02-17 14:16 lapack/lib/config
/etc/env.d $ for file in {blas,cblas,lapack}/lib/config; do echo ${file}:;
cat ${file}; echo; done
blas/lib/config:
# Configuration file for eselect
# This file has been automatically generated.
Re: [gentoo-user] xattr
I can live witout attr, but how can I force it *not* be built? I've set USE to -acl and -xattr but it still wants to build attr!?!?! Thanks, HK -- Hinko Kočevar, OSS developer Issue the command emerge -pv --depclean attr to see what is depending on attr -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] How to stop mouse motion
On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 9:58 AM, Etaoin Shrdlu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Saturday 15 November 2008, 21:55, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote: So I want a way to tell the kernel or X11 to ignore mouse motion. Either to shut down mouse motion completely, or to allow it but to ignore it for the effect considering the computer as idle. I have performed a quick read of kernel code and of the xorg.conf man page but I see no clue. Anybody knows? Did you try reducing mouse sensitivity? See man xset. I know about xset, but its man page does not contain the word sensitivity. I have, though, reduced the resolution of the mouse through the kernel parameter psmouse.resolution=100. It seems to have solved the problem. To have the mouse in a good speed, I have increased acceleration from 2 to 4 and decreased threshold from 4 to 3. This is with a xset mouse 4 3 command that is called when Xfce starts. Two comments: 1) xorg.conf does have a Resolution option, but setting is has no effect. I do have to pass the resolution as a kernel parameter. 2) There should be a way to set acceleration and threshold in xorg.conf. Regards, Jorge Peixoto -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Avahi Keeps failing on Emerge - Maybe a Python Error?
On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 8:05 PM, Richard Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Avahi keeps failing with what looks like a Python gtk module error that I can't seem to figure out. I've done the obvious by re-emerging python (with running python-updater) and pygtk but it still fails. I attach the build log below and would really appreciate some assistance. Thanks, Richard === BEGIN OUTPUT This file contains any messages produced by compilers while running configure, to aid debugging if configure makes a mistake. It was created by avahi configure 0.6.22, which was generated by GNU Autoconf 2.61. Invocation command line was $ ./configure --prefix=/usr --host=i686-pc-linux-gnu --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --datadir=/usr/share --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var/lib --localstatedir=/var --with-distro=gentoo --disable-python-dbus --disable-pygtk --disable-xmltoman --disable-monodoc --enable-glib --disable-tests --disable-autoipd --disable-compat-libdns_sd --disable-compat-howl --disable-doxygen-doc --disable-mono --enable-dbus --enable-python --enable-gtk --disable-qt3 --disable-qt4 --enable-gdbm --enable-python-dbus --enable-pygtk --build=i686-pc-linux-gnu This configure line is strange. Look at what it says about gtk: ./configure otheroptions --disable-python-dbus --disable-pygtk otheroptions --enable-gtk otheroptions --enable-python-dbus --enable-pygtk --build=i686-pc-linux-gnu Try to find out why this strange configure command line is being called (take a look at the ebuild) Also, there are other logs you can post. I don't remember exactly the names, but I think there are multiple configure log files like configure.log and configure.error (or something like that) that says exactly why did configure concluded that a certain feature is missing. The log you provided does not say why configure concluded there is no pygtk, but configure usually *does* explain this (is specific log files. Do a little search). Regards, Jorge Peixoto -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] excess x11 drivers
Someone noticed I had too many x11 drivers installed and suggested I set the /etc/make.conf VIDEO_CARDS variable (which I never have set before) I figured out I have an nvidia card so set VIDEO_CARDS=nv Now with my emerge -vuDN @system @world complete I'm unable to start X. (More on that later in a separate thread) SNIP Whats all that for? Checking dependancies on a few I see: dep -l x11-drivers/xf86-video-voodoo: ! x11-base/xorg-x11-6.9 on all I checked. What can this mean? Give this a shot: VIDEO_CARDS=nvidia No, nvidia is for the proprietary binary nvida driver. The free driver for nvidia cards is called NV. I have a GeForce4 MX 440 and I have this in my make.conf: VIDEO_CARDS=nv vesa And this results in $ emerge -pv xorg-server These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies ... done! [ebuild R ] x11-base/xorg-server-1.3.0.0-r6 USE=nptl sdl xorg -3dfx -debug -dmx -dri -ipv6 -kdrive -minimal -xprint INPUT_DEVICES=evdev keyboard mouse -acecad -aiptek -calcomp -citron -digitaledge -dmc -dynapro -elo2300 -elographics -fpit -hyperpen -jamstudio -joystick -magellan -microtouch -mutouch -palmax -penmount -spaceorb -summa -synaptics -tek4957 -ur98 -vmmouse -void -wacom VIDEO_CARDS=nv vesa -apm -ark -chips -cirrus -cyrix -dummy -epson -fbdev -fglrx -glint -i128 -i740 (-impact) -imstt -intel -mach64 -mga -neomagic (-newport) -nsc -nvidia -r128 -radeon -rendition -s3 -s3virge -savage -siliconmotion -sis -sisusb (-sunbw2) (-suncg14) (-suncg3) (-suncg6) (-sunffb) (-sunleo) (-suntcx) -tdfx -tga -trident -tseng -v4l -vga -via -vmware -voodoo 0 kB and $ equery list x11-drivers/ [ Searching for all packages in 'x11-drivers' among: ] * installed packages [I--] [ ] x11-drivers/xf86-input-evdev-1.1.5-r1 (0) [I--] [ ] x11-drivers/xf86-input-keyboard-1.1.1 (0) [I--] [ ] x11-drivers/xf86-input-mouse-1.2.3 (0) [I--] [ ] x11-drivers/xf86-video-nv-2.1.9 (0) [I--] [ ] x11-drivers/xf86-video-vesa-1.3.0 (0) -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] excess x11 drivers
No, nvidia is for the proprietary binary nvida driver. The free driver for nvidia cards is called NV. By NV I meant nv. I always see it uncapitalized, so I think this (nv) is its name, not NV. Sorry for the typo.
Re: [gentoo-user] excess x11 drivers
On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 10:24 PM, Harry Putnam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I posted some output in anther thread concerning update world (Subject: How to fix a hefty (emerge) blocking problem) Someone noticed I had too many x11 drivers installed and suggested I set the /etc/make.conf VIDEO_CARDS variable (which I never have set before) I figured out I have an nvidia card so set VIDEO_CARDS=nv Could you please post your entire make.conf?
Re: [gentoo-user] excess x11 drivers
On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 12:19 PM, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 10:24 PM, Harry Putnam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I posted some output in anther thread concerning update world (Subject: How to fix a hefty (emerge) blocking problem) Someone noticed I had too many x11 drivers installed and suggested I set the /etc/make.conf VIDEO_CARDS variable (which I never have set before) I figured out I have an nvidia card so set VIDEO_CARDS=nv Could you please post your entire make.conf? While we are at it, could you please post emerge --info? -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] excess x11 drivers
On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 1:19 PM, Dirk Heinrichs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Am Sonntag, 16. November 2008 16:12:58 schrieb Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto: On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 12:19 PM, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 10:24 PM, Harry Putnam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I posted some output in anther thread concerning update world (Subject: How to fix a hefty (emerge) blocking problem) Someone noticed I had too many x11 drivers installed and suggested I set the /etc/make.conf VIDEO_CARDS variable (which I never have set before) I figured out I have an nvidia card so set VIDEO_CARDS=nv Could you please post your entire make.conf? While we are at it, could you please post emerge --info? Just courious: What exactly do you want with all this information? IMHO, the only usefull information comes from lspci and eventually an X11 log file. I am not only concerned about the problem reported in this thread; I also want to give opinion on his larger update a very outdated system task. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Back up a server in real-time
On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 10:08 PM, Mick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Saturday 15 November 2008, Dale wrote: Mick wrote: Without gentoo-wiki my knowledge level is rather poor (just like my memory!) What would you use to back up a running server without taking it off line? I keep mine simple, cp -auv paths/you/want/to/backup back/up/to It has works so far. Thought about doing a cron job but that complicates things. :/ Thank you all for the suggestions and for the link to the wiki! I've got some reading to do. ;-) Whenever I have used tar to back up a whole OS I used it with a LiveCD. This was to make sure that files and their metadata were not being changed while I was tar'ing them. Are you saying that I can actually fire up tar/rsync and back up in real time? Please read tar's texinfo manual, at least the section 5 Performing Backups and Restoring Files It is short, and nicely divided in subsections making it is easy to select you need/want to read. Not like a man page, which for me is useful as a reference but horrible at teaching how to use the program (unless the program is quite simple). -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] excess x11 drivers
Give this a shot: VIDEO_CARDS=nvidia No, nvidia is for the proprietary binary nvida driver. The free driver for nvidia cards is called NV. I have a GeForce4 MX 440 and I have this in my make.conf: VIDEO_CARDS=nv vesa What you say may be true, pretty sure it is, but what he is doing is not working, hence him coming here for help. Since I have nvidia in mine and it works fine, thought he may want to try that. What I posted is not wrong, just another way of doing it. Up to him if he wants to try it or not. Also, nv does not work well for me either. It is dreadfully slow and uses a lot of CPU time. At least that is how it was the last time I used it. Things change. Dale Selecting nvidia instead of nv would hardly make a difference in this specific problem. Also I imagine that the nv driver would be the more likely to work, being free software and maintainable by the Xorg developers. As for being slow, everybody knows it (unfortunately; damned be Nvida*) does not support 3D, so any 3D you use will be in software. But for 2D, it is as fast as the proprietary driver AFAIK. Are you saying that it is slower in 2D than the proprietary driver? *If if were to buy a video card today, it wouldn't be Nvidia. But I don't play 3D games so I won't buy a new card anyway.
[gentoo-user] How to stop mouse motion
Hi. I have a crappy mouse made in China. One of its problems is that the mouse pointer sometimes moves even while the mouse is not moving. Usually this manifests by the pointer shaking, moving back and forward one or two pixels very fast (it looks like some 5 times per second). The worst problem caused by this is that the monitor can wake up at seemingly random times. One solution would be to switch off the monitor every time I won't use it for a few minutes, but (AFAIK) this would waste energy and reduce lifetime. I want the DPMS modes of standby, suspend, off. Another solution would be to buy another mouse, but this would cost money and would not teach me the solution (this problem can manifest again in the future, with this or another computer). So I want a way to tell the kernel or X11 to ignore mouse motion. Either to shut down mouse motion completely, or to allow it but to ignore it for the effect considering the computer as idle. I have performed a quick read of kernel code and of the xorg.conf man page but I see no clue. Anybody knows? -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] How to stop mouse motion
On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 7:15 PM, Albert Hopkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, 2008-11-15 at 18:55 -0200, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote: Hi. I have a crappy mouse made in China. One of its problems is that the mouse pointer sometimes moves even while the mouse is not moving. Usually this manifests by the pointer shaking, moving back and forward one or two pixels very fast (it looks like some 5 times per second). The worst problem caused by this is that the monitor can wake up at seemingly random times. One solution would be to switch off the monitor every time I won't use it for a few minutes, but (AFAIK) this would waste energy and reduce lifetime. I want the DPMS modes of standby, suspend, off. Another solution would be to buy another mouse, but this would cost money and would not teach me the solution (this problem can manifest again in the future, with this or another computer). So I want a way to tell the kernel or X11 to ignore mouse motion. Either to shut down mouse motion completely, or to allow it but to ignore it for the effect considering the computer as idle. I have performed a quick read of kernel code and of the xorg.conf man page but I see no clue. Anybody knows? Yes. What you need to do is write your own mouse driver. Call it 'crappydrv'. In this driver, you detect events sent by the mouse, but then simply ignore them. I don't know how to write my own driver, and what I want is to dynamically shut up the mouse at runtime, and free it when I come back. Or, ideally, just make X ignore mouse movement for idle time calculations. But you were probably joking anyway... -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] How to stop mouse motion
if it is a usb mouse, disconnect it. Or unload the driver. It is PS/2. And if I compile the driver as a module (presently it is built-in) and unload it while X is running, wouldn't the module refuse to unload (as it is being used)? -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: How to fix a hefty (emerge) blocking problem
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 7:05 PM, Dan Wallis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On 12/11/2008, Volker Armin Hemmann
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
as root: lspci
Why as root? I get exactly the same output when I run it as my own
user as when I run it as root. Or have I got my system set up
different to everyone else?
$ lspci
bash: lspci: command not found
echo ${PATH}
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/opt/bin:/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/4.1.2:/opt/sun-jre-bin-1.5.0.06/bin:/opt/sun-jre-bin-1.5.0.06/javaws:/usr/games/bin
At least in my system, the lspci binary resides in /usr/sbin, which is
not in ${PATH}
So you should either call lspci as root or issue the explicit command
/usr/sbin/lspci
That said, if you want to use the -v flag of lspci (for extra
verbosity), you should be root, or you will see some fields filled
with access denied
--
Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is equery depends still viable
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 2:06 AM, Harry Putnam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Daniel Pielmeier [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: With recent changes in portage in the last few mnths, is equery in general and `equery depends' in particular still reliable? I use it fairly often still, but do notice I get a lot of null output. So I no longer trust it fully. At least it doesn't give false positives - what's in the putput really is a valid depend. Do you know off hand if there are any alternatives? emerge -pv --depclean atom I realize cryptic answers are the ultimate in cleverness and show massive sophistication but how is this used to show dependencies to some specific package. Maybe a little more detail would keep my little pea brain from smoking under the load ;) Why did you not simply try, you lazy fat SUV owner? Here, I'll do it for you. But I imagine if this will not spoil you even more. $ emerge -pv --depc ffmpeg Calculating dependencies ... done! media-video/ffmpeg-0.4.9_p20080326 pulled in by: media-sound/sox-14.2.0 media-video/ffmpeg2theora-0.22 net-libs/opal-2.2.11 net-www/gnash-0.8.4 No packages selected for removal by depclean Packages installed: 577 Packages in world:134 Packages in system: 50 Unique package names: 577 Required packages:575 Number to remove: 0 -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] jpg support
On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 1:58 AM, Michael P. Soulier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 11:59 AM, Dale [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I hope that will work. emerge -e world is a bit extreme for this. It worked fine. For the record, I am using the default profile at the moment, as I have not managed the profile in any way yet. [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ ls -l /etc/make.profile lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 48 Nov 3 20:27 /etc/make.profile - ../usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/x86/2008.0 $ ls /usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/x86/2008.0 desktop developer parent server $ file /etc/make.profile /etc/make.profile: symbolic link to `..//usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/x86/2008.0/desktop' -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Can't emerge sandbox
On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 4:02 PM, Peter Humphrey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello, Recent versions of portage have suggested an emerge -e world, so I thought I'd try it. It got as far as sandbox, which failed with the once-common C compiler cannot create executables error. Of course I tried FEATURES=-sandbox emerge sandbox but that failed with the same error. I wondered what is set wrongly in my environment, so I booted a minimal installation CD and chrooted into the system, but with the same result. Can anyone suggest where my problem might lie? I've attached the log file. I'm confused by the apparent references in it to the cross-compiler. Google seems to have only old references. This is a dual-Opteron box with a mostly-amd64 setup - only a few packages are ~amd64. I'm also running an emerge -eq world on another amd64 box, which has had no problem with sandbox. Same versions of portage and sandbox on both machines. /usr/libexec/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/ld: crt1.o: No such file: No such file or directory Could you try locate crt1.o ? By the way, why are you using gcc 4.2? I would either stick with the stable gcc 4.1 or use gcc 4.3 (which is used by a number of recent distributions, is used even in Debian Lenny - which should be released shortly - and has a number of improvements)
Re: [gentoo-user] lzma archives
On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Florian Philipp [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto schrieb: On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Nickolay Hodyunya [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How to extract lzma archives? by lzma archive, you probably mean a lzma-compressed tar archive. You can extract them with lzma -dc compressedarchive.tar.lzma | tar -xv -f - This command line can be simplified: unlzma -c compressedarchive.tar.lzma | tar xv I like to do things right (I love Math, exactness and rigor). From tar's info page If you don't specify this argument [the argument to -f] , then `tar' will examine the environment variable `TAPE'. If it is set, its value will be used as the archive name. Otherwise, `tar' will use the default archive, determined at the compile time. [...] If there is no tape drive attached, or the default is not meaningful, then `tar' will print an error message. The error message might look roughly like one of the following: tar: can't open /dev/rmt8 : No such device or address tar: can't open /dev/rsmt0 : I/O error To avoid confusion, we recommend that you always specify an archive file name by using `--file=ARCHIVE-NAME' (`-f ARCHIVE-NAME') when writing your `tar' commands. Regarding old-style tar options (that is, tar options without a dash): old style syntax makes it difficult to match option letters with their corresponding arguments, and is often confusing [...] This old way of writing `tar' options can surprise even experienced users. For example, the two commands: tar cfz archive.tar.gz file tar -cfz archive.tar.gz file are quite different. So I use either tar --lzma -xv -f compressedarchive.tar.lzma or, when using an old tar, lzma -dc compressedarchive.tar.lzma | tar -xv -f -
Re: [gentoo-user] First Portage Hick-up, Chokes on Java
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 1:16 PM, Willie Wong [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 05:23:58PM +0200, Penguin Lover Alan McKinnon squawked: On Tuesday 04 November 2008 16:16:30 Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote: collision-protect seems nice, but I don't know about its drawbacks (if any), and since it seems not to be default and I don't have good knowledge of it, I didn't change the default. You probably want this enabled. I think it's disabled by default because new users will have no idea whatsoever what to do about it. All it does is check the files it wants to install with what's on the disk. If there's a match, the existing files must only have been put there by the same package (ignoring version numbers). If there's a collision, you get a huge big fat error message and a chance to find out why two different packages install the same file. Maybe you need to uninstall one, maybe it doesn't matter. If it's the latter, just FEATURES=-collision-protect emerge package and continue as normal. In any event, you get to decide what should happen. Every experienced gentoo user should be using this imho On my version of portage (2.2_rc13; but I am pretty sure this is the case for some older ones too), there is the default feature protect-owned which provides more or less the same function as collision-protect but is slightly smarter. See 'man make.conf' for details. No. In my system (Portage 2.1.4.5) this FEATURE does not exist. I have searched make.conf.example, and several portage-related man pages; no mention to protect-owned. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Installing software without an internet connection
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 4:24 AM, Dirk Uys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 5:01 AM, Lorenzu Hewa, Gayan Neomal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi I was able to complete the Gentoo installation and boot into my system successfully. I only downloaded the Live CD, But the live CD only contains a limited number of packages and... I do not have an internet connection at home since its very expensive for us. Is their any possible way that i can get a Software collection downloaded for my Gentoo box . I have a P3 with 256 RAM when xfce is combined with Gnome my PC runs slow. I am not much of a xfce/Gnome /KDE fan but since I have no way of getting packages in to my PC I am facing difficulties. What do you mean xfce combined with Gnome ? As a side note: for a PC running on low specs I would recommend using a window manager like WindowMaker or IceWM. Both of them are very lightweight. Xfce is light enough. I'm using it right now, and I like it very much. It is very lightweight, occupies negligible RAM, and also occupies little disk space: equery size xfce-base/ * size of xfce-base/libxfce4mcs-4.4.2 Total files : 44 Total size : 285.76 KiB * size of xfce-base/libxfce4util-4.4.2 Total files : 68 Total size : 527.11 KiB * size of xfce-base/libxfcegui4-4.4.2 Total files : 114 Total size : 1287.49 KiB * size of xfce-base/thunar-0.9.0-r2 Total files : 530 Total size : 9990.27 KiB * size of xfce-base/xfce-mcs-manager-4.4.2 Total files : 199 Total size : 601.28 KiB * size of xfce-base/xfce-mcs-plugins-4.4.2-r1 Total files : 228 Total size : 1494.46 KiB * size of xfce-base/xfce-utils-4.4.2-r1 Total files : 87 Total size : 483.62 KiB * size of xfce-base/xfce4-4.4.2 Total files : 4 Total size : 5.57 KiB * size of xfce-base/xfce4-panel-4.4.2 Total files : 290 Total size : 1638.96 KiB * size of xfce-base/xfce4-session-4.4.2 Total files : 259 Total size : 2215.87 KiB * size of xfce-base/xfdesktop-4.4.2-r2 Total files : 254 Total size : 4127.12 KiB * size of xfce-base/xfwm4-4.4.2 Total files : 1435 Total size : 3048.79 KiB equery size xfce-extra/ [ Searching for packages matching xfce-extra/... ] * size of xfce-extra/exo-0.3.4 Total files : 324 Total size : 3297.70 KiB * size of xfce-extra/xfce4-mixer-4.4.2 Total files : 188 Total size : 624.86 KiB And look at how little memory it consumes: $ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 884 78806 0 643 -/+ buffers/cache: 28855 Swap: 972 0 972 This is from a just-booted system, with a gkrellm open, some daemons, and an aterm (used to run the command 'free'). So only 28 MB used, total (including Xfce plus everything else) (although I imagine the is some kernel memory that does not go in this figure; I'm not an OS expert). There is no need to go the path of Fluxbox; Xfce delivers all the speed and featherweight you need, while being very ease to use, vastly configurable, feature-rich, and good-looking. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Installing software without an internet connection
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 5:49 AM, Dirk Uys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 9:18 AM, Lorenzu Hewa, Gayan Neomal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I Used the Live CD ... It does contain few packages like X11,xfce4, gdm , some network utils,vim . But I need to get other packages which I need. lIke Gcj , fluxbox , mpg321 ... Even though it has only few packages installed it consumes a lot of disk space... that another problem im having. I used to run an offline gentoo setup. You can use emerge -upvf package-name(s) to get a list of files you need to obtain. Pipe the output of that to some file, do some grep/sed to remove duplicates and remove the multiple urls. Write a script to fetch all the files in your file list. It can be as simple as for file in `cat filelist` do wget $URL/$file; done; When you get to an internet connection, run the script to fetch all the files. Why don't you just run wget -i filelist? In fact, you do not even need to edit the filelist to remove duplicates; you can just use wget's -nc option. So you can use wget -nc -i filelist or, if you want to do it in the background wget -nc -i filelist -b --progress=dot:mega The /usr/portage/distfiles directory can very quickly grow, clean it up every now and then. I suggest the tool eclean (part of gentoolkit).
Re: [gentoo-user] lzma archives
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Nickolay Hodyunya [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How to extract lzma archives? by lzma archive, you probably mean a lzma-compressed tar archive. You can extract them with lzma -dc compressedarchive.tar.lzma | tar -xv -f - or, if your version of tar supports it, tar --lzma -xv -f compressedarchive.tar.lzma The command lzma comes from app-arch/lzma-utils, and these days the distros ship it by default. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] FLAC to mp3 converters?
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I'm wondering if anyone has a good way to convert a large hierarcy of directories populated with FLAC files to a new set of directories using mp3 instead? The FLAC directory contains something like 2 files so I need the converted structure to replicate the original. Most likely the tool has to be very tolerant of file naming, unicode, etc., as there are likely to be any number of strange things in there. Possibly something in perl or, for the likes of me, even something GUI based. I wouldn't trust something GUI-based; it would probably call the mp3 encoder with suboptimal default settings. I would write a script myself. For flac decoding use (of course) media-libs/flac; for mp3 encoding, media-sound/lame. You can probably chain them in a pipe, using flac -dc infile.flac | mp3lame lameopts - outfile.mp3 . Read lame's man page and write a shell (or perhaps python/perl) script.
Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel upgrade problem
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 8:56 PM, David Relson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello Dirk, Thanks for taking the time to reply. The combination of gentoo-sources and genkernel has been working quite well for the 2 yrs I've been running Gentoo. It's convenient to have grub.conf auto-magically updated and that's not been an issue. You don't need to edit grub.conf at all. make install automatically updates the symlinks in /boot/ For me, the kernel update process is: emerge -a1v sys-kernel/vanilla-sources cd /usr/src/linux // I usually issue make defconfig to start with a fresh config. But if you skip make defconfig, the following command will start with your old config from /boot/config make menuconfig make make install modules_install //The above command automatically copies the kernel image, System.map and .config to /boot and updates the /boot/vmlinuz, /boot/vmlinuz.old, /boot/config, /boot/config.old, /boot/System.map, /boot/System.map.old symlinks. It also copies the modules to /lib/modules //No need for genkernel, no need to edit grub.conf *reboot *delete obsolete modules in /lib/modules, and obsolete files in /boot *By the way, before i delete obsolete config file in /boot, i back it up in a oldconfigs.tar.lzma compressed archive.
Re: [gentoo-user] FLAC to mp3 converters?
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Neil Bothwick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 5 Nov 2008 15:12:44 -0200, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote: I wouldn't trust something GUI-based; it would probably call the mp3 encoder with suboptimal default settings. Any decent program would let you adjust the MP3 settings. My experience so far is that most GUI multimedia-encoding programs offer far less options than a command-line program. Sometimes the only choice is codec and bitrate, and the bitrate sometimes comes in a drop-down menu of low, medium, high. I have done many video encodings with mplayer, and in this case adjusting settings yield drastic benefits to quality/bitrate. You also need to extract the ID3 tags from the FLAC file and then write them to the MP3 file. I don't care about these, but I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to preserve them.
Re: [gentoo-user] openoffice 3 broken?
The result: a clean compile, as near as I can tell, but useless. Now it quits silently a second or so into any startup, with or without a filename on the command line. No message on the terminal where I start it, and no clue I can see about what's wrong. I'm back to MSOffice. I hate it but it works. Have you not tried Openoffice-bin?
Re: [gentoo-user] fix for e2fsprogs BLOCK?
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 6:52 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mittwoch 05 November 2008, Dirk Heinrichs wrote: Am Mittwoch, 5. November 2008 19:08:23 schrieb Denis: This probably was already discussed at length... But I keep waiting for an automatic portage tree fix to this... Any idea if there will be a fix, or will I need to take care of this manually? (Intel Core Duo 32-bit system, FYI). emerge -f e2fsprogs e2fsprogs-libs # wget won't work w/o com_err , so you need to fetch first. emerge -C com_err ss emerge e2fsprogs or, simpler with paludis: paludis -i --dl-blocks discard e2fsprogs If the block still exists after you unmerged com_err and ss, use emerge with - t to find out which package still wants them end re-emerge this first. HTH... Dirk and mask com_err and ss afterwards - to make sure that nothing pulls them in. Seems completely unnecessary.
Re: [gentoo-user] Is gentoo-portage and gentoo-wiki offline?
I generally try to update the docs with recent packages every six months or so though I am guilty of letting them sit a bit longer. However Gentoo has no official Bind documentation. The official Gentoo Virtual Mail how-to offers about half the functionality, explanation, and troubleshooting info in my doc. Also the Gentoo virtual mail server has remained essentially unchanged in the last six years whereas my doc has continued to change and improve. And while we're being honest my virtual server build kicks the crap out of the official one in just about every way. Well that's a very useful contribution and deserves thanks. Let me also give some thanks to this good man. Therein lies the rub. The OP stated upfront that he is new to Gentoo. The chances of him being able to find the gems amongst the chaff are reduced. Better to advise him to stay away until he is in a position to evaluate these things. If he's in that position right now, then he deserves to know what the overall quality is. I have had a good experience with gentoo-wiki, and I have seen it praised. This is the first time I've seen a person claiming it is bad quality. For the record, it's grossly unfair for others to *expect* you to update the official docs just because you know the subject. why not update the Gentoo docs if you're so darn smart is likely to produce stuff off! responses. Much better for people to ask nicely, say please, and be cool with the answer Certainly; the internet is known for, unfortunately, stimulating personal conflicts.
Re: [gentoo-user] fcron driving me crazy
- Hide quoted text - On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 2:54 AM, Stroller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 8 Oct 2008, at 04:10, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... every fcron is starting updatedb. I dont need this service on a daily basis. I am starting updatedb by hand if I need a fresh db. But I need a full fcron installed for other purposes, so I need to find the script, which tells fcron to start updatedb. If you don't know where the above script is... I have tried to disable all scripts, but it seems, that I am not able to do so ;) I edited also roots fcrontab and my own fcrontab to not to start updatedb -- they are fixed. ... then why did you do this? What did you edit what were the results? My question: Where are other things installed, which trigger updatedb on a daily basis? /etc/cron.daily/slocate It is put there by sys-apps/slocate itself. You can move it to cron.weekly if you prefer (although frankly, I don't know why this would upset you so much). I re-state what Stroller said. What did you edit? And, please read the cron documentation (if memory serves, Gentoo has a nice cron documentation). Also, try mlocate. It is an optimized implementation of locate; its updatedb is faster and less IO-intensive. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] First Portage Hick-up, Chokes on Java
On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 11:08 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My first install of Gentoo, and I'm pleased by how far I've progressed on my own, not being a programmer or computer person, but I'm a bit wary of proceeding further without advice. I was trying to emerge some several files which had a dependency on java-sdk-docs. Below is the message from emerge. More information will follow. !!! dev-java/java-sdk-docs-1.6.0-r1 has fetch restriction turned on. !!! This probably means that this ebuild's files must be downloaded !!! manually. See the comments in the ebuild for more information. * Please download jdk-6-doc.zip from * https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/CDS-CDS_Developer-Site/en_US/-/USD/[EMAIL PROTECTED] * (select English and agree to the licence) and place it in /usr/portage/distfiles named as * jdk-6-doc-r1.zip. Notice the r1. Because Sun changes the doc zip file * without changing the filename, we have to resort to renaming to keep * the md5sum verification working for existing and new downloads. * [snip] So, I downloaded the file, renamed it and put it where it told me to. Fine, you should indeed have downloaded the jdk-6-doc.zip file and put it (with the correct name) in portage's DISTDIR (DISTDIR is, by default, /usr/portage/distfiles). Then I found http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Installing_3rd_Party_Ebuilds and I am trying to follow that. No no no, this is *not* a third party ebuild. It is an official Gentoo ebuild, that unfortunately needs you to manually fetch this jdk-6-doc.zip file. This is *not* a third party ebuild. Rest assured that manually fetching files is, fortunately, very uncommon. I added PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage /usr/portage/distfiles to /etc/make.conf No. Undo this. /usr/porage/distfiles is *not* a portage overlay and *must not* be in PORTDIR_OVERLAY. Remove it. /usr/local/portage is a common location for putting a gentoo overlay, but since you probably don't have an overlay (many, if not most, people don't need an overlay), don't care about /usr/local/portage. Remove the directory name from PORTDIR_OVERLAY and them remove the directory /usr/local/portage itself with the command rmdir --verbose /usr/local/portage. I then added FEATURES=collision-protect ccache parallel-fetch to /etc/male.conf for safety, even though I have no idea what it does. Don't add features without a basic knowledge of what they mean. In fact, this is a big lesson: *Don't mess with your system without a basic knowledge of what you are doing* I did it more than once and broke my system more than once. Do not repeat the same mistake. Look /etc/make.conf.example for a brief explanation of what which feature means. I personally use parallell-fetch. It speeds up emerging multiple packages, because it enables Portage to download one package source in the background while it emerges another package in the foreground. In fact, I don't know why this isn't enabled by default. I don't use ccache, because AFAIK it speeds up compilation at the expense of consuming tons of disk space. I am satisfied with my compile speed (I use lightweight programs, and these tend to compile quickly), but I want my disk to have a lot of free space so that disk access is faster. collision-protect seems nice, but I don't know about its drawbacks (if any), and since it seems not to be default and I don't have good knowledge of it, I didn't change the default. [snip] /usr/local/portage did not exist. OK, so I created it. Now, that is where emerge told me to put the file No, it told you to put the file in /usr/portage/distfiles. [snip] I am not sure how to proceed in creating my own Ebuild to install it. You don't need to, and very probably should not. Am I even in the right ballpark here? No. *All* you had to do was fetch the required file and put it, with the specified name, in Portage's DISTDIR, which is /usr/portage/distfiles by default. Everything else you did without knowing what you were doing should probably be undone, to return the system to its safe default configuration. Thanks, Bo Grimes You're welcome -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] framebuffer hangs in 2.6.26
The current kernel that I am running is 2.6.26.5-rt9-gentoo2.
Sporadically this freezes, usually happening during the end of
emerging an ebuild or when stopping gpm. Usually, the fb only freezes
for a few seconds, but sometimes I have to AltSysRqO the machine
(it's unresponsive to AltSysRq{R,S,E,I,K,U}).
I have the feeling that this is a regression because the framebuffer
never froze on 2.6.25.4-rt5-gentoo nor on the kernel on the 2008.0
install/minimal CD.
Any suggestions?
Note: I emailed about this on lkml, yet got no replies.
I think something similar happened to me; I am using vanilla-sources.
As for version, see
$ uname -a
Linux jorge 2.6.26.6 #1 Fri Oct 10 00:52:35 BRT 2008 i686 AMD
Athlon(tm) XP 2600
+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
(although, at the time of the problem, it might have been 2.6.26.5)
The computer froze during an emerge of multiple ebuilds (I couldn't
know if the emerge had finished or not, but I intensely hope it had -
I hate system inconsistencies and filesystem corruptions).
The system were completely unresponsive to ctrlaltfn and the magic
sysrq keys, except AltSysRqo. In fact, even the keyboard leds were
unresponsive AFAIR (as far as I recall).
Note: Despite the system *seeming* unresponsive to the other
altsysrq keys, *maybe* they were indeed effective, and I did the
whole AltSysRqr, AltSysRqe, wait 5 seconds, AltSysRqi,
AltSysRqs, wait 5 seconds, AltSysRqu, wait 5 seconds,
AltSysRqo hoping that this would cleanly shutdown my computer.
AFAIR, the next boot did indicate that the filesystem had been cleanly
umounted)
On 2008-10-18 it happened again. Using vanilla sources 2.6.26.6. Again, it was
after an emerge (but it wasn't immediately after, it was some minutes
later). For the record, I am using a tmpfs on PORTAGE_TMPDIR (and it
is 1536 MB, far more than enough for emerging the programs I was
emerging - gimp-help, yasm, libpcre, subversion, giflib - and I have 1
GB RAM and 972 MB of swap - and I was not running any memory-intensive
apps (just enlightenment, gkrellm, pidgin, and firefox viewing a
single page on Ubuntu wiki) The emerge went fine with absolutely no
errors. Some minutes later, when I was preparing to shutdown the
system, the system became unresponsive just after I tried to close
pidgin.
It seems that the system becomes completely unresponsive to keyboard
(except the magic sysrq keys); ctrlaltfn , ctrlaltbackspace ,
ctrlaltdel, nothing responds. The screen is completely frozen
(so I don't know if the computer responds to the mouse). The system
itself isn't frozen though - I have cron jobs that beep every 15
minutes (to keep me informed of the time), and I heard the expected
beep when the time reached 7:00 (I woke up early, at 5:45). I then
performed altsysrqr, but the system seemed still unresponsive to
keyboard. I left the system idle for more than 30 minutes, to see if
it would recover. It didn't.
I then rebooted with the EISUB sysrq keys combination. The system
indeed responded to theses keys - it rebooted and, on the next boot,
the filesystem was reportedly clean.
I was using e17. Since i changed to Xfce, I haven't had this problem.
It is very possible, though, that this was just a coincidence, and the
bug is not e17's fault
--
Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Can't play audio cds!
On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 8:16 PM, Michael Sullivan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: checked the log file, but I couldn't find anything. I couldn't mount my CD (in the past this wasn't necessary for audio CDs, but I thought I'd As far as I know, the Linux kernel cannot mount Audio CDs. The one programme that on my system works with Audio CDs is Gnome-mplayer. You might also try VLC. Another option is to rip them with Grip. Regards, Liviu I can play an audio CD (with Beethoven music) with mplayer cdda://. Can you try a program that I or Liviu Andronic know? That way, we would more likely understand the error messages, assuming it does not work and gives error messages. How about you try gnome-mplayer? -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] e17 overlay bug
Mike Frysinger - he's a busy man :-) He heads up the gentoo toolchain team, is a lead kernel dev on the blackfin architecture, recently was (maybe still is) on the gentoo council. And maintains an e17 overlay. Oh boy. I would donate money to him if I wasn't a poor student and if the dollar wasn't so overvalued related to my national currency ($1 was R$1,58 some months ago, but is now R$2,10). By the way, people like him should keep an easy way of receiving anonymous donations. I plan on donating a little money to free software in the future. I think I will donate to national projects, because they are probably more starved than projects in the US, the land where hammers are made of gold. Also, why are the snapshot ebuilds so horribly outdated? The snapshot ebuilds are not out of date - the e17 snapshots are :-) It seems (see http://download.enlightenment.org/snapshots/LATEST/) that the latest e17 snapshots are from 2008-09-24. However, last time I checked the e17 overlay (and I can't easily check it now because I am at work), the snapshot ebuilds were a year old or something. If you use e17 svn code, be prepared to act like a dev. That's what the e17 team expects, that's how they build the thing currently and that's the price we have to pay to get to use that wm. Well, I guess I will stick with Xfce for a while then. After all, it takes something like two more seconds to load (I measured it some time ago, but forgot the results) than e17 on my Athlon XP 2600+, and that's bearable. Also, while I miss e17 power*, the loss of it is also bearable I myself got tired of eternally fiddling with e and have resorted to using kde until things settle down... KDE?! To go from e17 to KDE is a bit extreme; like this micro-compact does not fulfill my transportation needs, so I will buy an SUV. Why don't you use Xfce? It is small, fast, lightweight, quite configurable (both by GUI and by text files**), compiles very quickly and has everything I want a DE to have. Have you not thought about it? And going off-topic: I mentioned that Gentoo's GCC and Xorg are too old. Do you know if there is any prediction (yes, I know predictions can fail; I am waiting for Debian Lenny since September) for their upgrade? Is there anywhere I can get information like this? * A quick example of e17 power is making my TV-viewing program borderless. Programs that are always on top should be borderless to save screen space. Imagine if, for example, the KDE panel had a border. ** That programs with a GUI should also have a command-line interface, and configuration should be accessable via both a GUI tool and text files should be on Software Engineering 101. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] First Portage Hick-up, Chokes on Java
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 3:23 PM, Alan McKinnon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tuesday 04 November 2008 16:16:30 Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote: collision-protect seems nice, but I don't know about its drawbacks (if any), and since it seems not to be default and I don't have good knowledge of it, I didn't change the default. You probably want this enabled. I think it's disabled by default because new users will have no idea whatsoever what to do about it. All it does is check the files it wants to install with what's on the disk. If there's a match, the existing files must only have been put there by the same package (ignoring version numbers). If there's a collision, you get a huge big fat error message and a chance to find out why two different packages install the same file. Maybe you need to uninstall one, maybe it doesn't matter. If it's the latter, just FEATURES=-collision-protect emerge package and continue as normal. In any event, you get to decide what should happen. Every experienced gentoo user should be using this imho Nice. I actually thought that this protection was enabled by default, and wondered what FEATURES=collision-protect did. Once I had a program behaving weirdly, and found out that its binary (/usr/bin/stream, if memory serves) had been replaced by an identically-named binary of another program. I thought it was a Portage bug, but you are telling me that Portage allows this by default. By the way, certain parts of Portage are very scarcely document, are they not? For examples, the FEATURES only have quick explanations in make.conf.example, as far as I know (and I did search for more complete explanations). -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] First Portage Hick-up, Chokes on Java
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 6:26 PM, Alan McKinnon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tuesday 04 November 2008 19:56:41 Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote: By the way, certain parts of Portage are very scarcely document, are they not? For examples, the FEATURES only have quick explanations in make.conf.example, as far as I know (and I did search for more complete explanations). Have you read all the important man pages, in their full excruciating detail? /usr/share/man/man1/ebuild.1.bz2 /usr/share/man/man1/emerge.1.bz2 /usr/share/man/man5/ebuild.5.bz2 /usr/share/man/man5/make.conf.5.bz2 /usr/share/man/man5/portage.5.bz2 To be sincere, I don't remember. I'll read when I get home. Regards, Jorge Peixoto -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel BUG
For about a week, my workstation has been crashing every day or so. Typically it happens late at night while BackupPC is backing up a hard drive. With tail -F /var/log/messages running I saw EXT3 mentioned a few days ago and started suspecting a hard drive problem. Last night it happened again. This time my tail ... window was opened full screen so I saw all the messages and know more. Here's part of what I wrote down (until I got tired of writing): BUG unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 008 IP ff8027ce14 free_block+0xb4/0x160 PGD 11b638067 PUD 11b631067 PMD 0 Oops 0002[1]SMP ... Call Trace 8027cac0 cache_flusharray+0x60/0xe0 8027cc46 kmem_cache_free I'm running a 2.6.25-gentoo-r7 To learn more about what's happening (and to more easily record all the kernel messages), I'm now running tail -F /var/log/messages from a second machine (via an SSH session). Questions: Is there a better way to capture the full BUG output??? Once I have the full BUG output, what's the next useful thing to do? join the lkml (linux kernel mailing list) and let them know about it? For a patched kernel like gentoo-sources, wouldn't it be appropriate better to file a bug report at Gentoo's bugzilla?
Re: [gentoo-user] e17 overlay bug
I've found that the recent EINA library release for e17 has broken just about everything. Gentoo's overlay system should be simple enough to modify however after reading the fine manual I am no closer to understanding the appropriate course of action to create eina as a dependency in the overlay (I've bugged [EMAIL PROTECTED] to no avail) Mike is usually pretty quick with these things. Mike?!, What, Vapier's formal name is Mike? Back to important stuff, is the overlay in good shape (apart from this specific problem)? For example, is it compatible with Portage's new requirements for Manifest? Also, why are the snapshot ebuilds so horribly outdated? Is it because Vapier is too busy to update them or because he just thinks that e17 is like Mplayer, a project where the developers actually take care to keep the svn code in good shape (only committing working code)? My computer has some bugs*. I am trying Xfce instead of e17 to see if the bugs were e17's fault, but the bugs continue. I wonder if I should go back to e17 1) It is *very* fast and *very* lightweight (even when compared to Xfce) 2) It is vastly configurable and does things Xfce does not (like, for a quick example, remembering per-window configuration, fine tuning window borders, and even making windows borderless) but 1) It is unreleased; users have to compile code from svn. 2) Outputs a truckload of text to .xsession-errors. Does it mean that the code is full of little problems that cause warnings? Xfce, in comparison, only outputs two assertion faileds 3) Does not seem to have a Trash Bin or a System tray. I care little about these, though (and I imagine there are plugins to provide them, but I didn't bother to search). Do you think a user who expects a reasonably stable and bug-free environment (say, a user who accepts the latest Ubuntu, instead of demanding the stability of Debian stable) can rely on e17? *Regarding my bugs, they are mostly X-related. When I have time I will dive in xorg.conf documentation. Also, maybe they are related to the fact that some of my X-related packages may have been built with different USE flags (I have disabled the IPv6 USE flag at some point). I will recompile them all, either when Gentoo updates Xorg (which, by the way, is taking a long time) or when Gentoo updates GCC (which is also taking a very long time. I hope that when Debian Stable is released with GCC 4.3, it will motivate Gentoo to declare GCC 4.3.2 stable). -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] emerging gnome - blocked package
I have a little problem with gnome. I wanted to install gnome, but I got this error message: [blocks B ] gnome-base/gail-1000 (is blocking x11-libs/gtk+-2.14.4) I thought isn't a problem because I'm using Gentoo for 3 years. I uninstall gail and gtk+ and emerge is working fine... But after this the blockign situation is same. Okay, nothing problem I thought, I install the gail and after I can install gtk+ BUT - and this is a really big BUT - gail depending of gtk+. softwarealchemy sayusi # emerge -avt gail These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild N] gnome-base/gail-1.22.3 USE=-debug -doc 659 kB [ebuild N] x11-libs/gtk+-2.14.4 USE=X jpeg jpeg2k tiff vim-syntax -cups -debug -doc -xinerama 0 kB [blocks B ] gnome-base/gail-1000 (is blocking x11-libs/gtk+-2.14.4) Total: 2 packages (2 new, 1 block), Size of downloads: 659 kB After this I tried to install gtk+ first and gail second, but blocking situation is same. Maybe you don't have to install gail at all? What depends on gail? I heard that recent versions of gtk+ integrate gail functionality. So for each package that depends on gail, you could see if a more recent version of that package does not have the gail dependency. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Why do these packages depend on corefonts?
Why the hell do these packages depend on corefonts?: app-emulation/wine-1.1.6 net-www/netscape-flash-10_rc20080915 x11-misc/slim-1.3.1 It somehow makes sense with wine, maybe even - remotely - with flash. But why, why should *slim* need Windows fonts to work? Not only that, but why don't they also accept media-fonts/liberation-fonts? In my case it is media-gfx/imagemagick-6.4.0.6 that forces me to have media-fonts/corefonts, as I don't have installed any of the 3 packages you mentioned -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] package.keywords syntax?
To back myself up: file name=why_no.py #!/usr/bin/python import random for i in range(1,1): if random.random() 0.001: print rare if malformed beast: print kick me in the ... else: print whatever /file This kind of error is not a syntax error; this kind of error is indeed only discovered at runtime. However, syntax errors are discovered at byte-compile time. byte-compile happens automatically when you load a module, but you can perform it yourself easily, and this is recommended in certain situations. For this kind of error (try to reference an undefined variable), there are tools like pychecker. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] package.keywords syntax?
The real problem is when you type float real_number = 4e10; int integer = real_number; If your integer can only hold values up to 2^31 - 1 , the behavior of the above code is undefined. In a language like Python, everything either behaves as you intended, of throws an exception. This is why I say In C, you must completely understand the behavior of every statement or function, and you *must* handle the possibility of errors. The line: int integer = real_number; will produce a warning. (or an error if you are smart enough to compile with -Werror) It seems you did not get the point. To attribute a floating point number to an integer variable is perfectly valid, depending on the specific program. The compiler normally does not even warn about this, as this is perfectly valid (from my testing, the compiler only warns if you are using gcc 4.3, and specify -Wconversion, an option that is not included in -Wall and not even in -Wextra). So erase this *wrong idea* that attributing floating-point value to an integer variable is invalid or even just unwise. There is nothing generally wrong with it. The point is: in certain situations, the behavior is well-defined and unsurprising. What happens, though, if (for example) the value of the floating-point variable is too big for the int? In a forgiving language, you would either have a sensible behavior (such as the int receiving a INT_MAX value) or an error. In C the behavior is *undefined*. Got the point? In C, you *must* know what you are doing, and *must* handle the possibility of errors. If not, your program is not even garanteed to crash; it can, after an error, go on working (erratically), possibly damaging user data or yielding subtly wrong results without any warning. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] package.keywords syntax?
I mean to really know C, that is, read a rigorous book such as C: A Reference Manual and be able to write portable programs with well-defined behavior. Speaking of well-defined behavior, do you know what happens when you cast a float to an int, and the float is too big to fit into the int? Did oyu try it yourself and see? The point is that the behavior in this situation is undefined. It might do anything. Programming in C is different than programming in Python. Most likely the compiler will try to treat the float as an int and use the first 4 bytes of the float, ignoring the rest. No, you misunderstood C. C, despite being lower level than (say) Java, does not view variables as typeless bit patterns. It views them as integers, real numbers, etc. So if you perform float real_number = 0.5; int integer = real_number; The value of integer will be 0; if C were to actually interpret the bit pattern of real_number as an integer, you would get 1056964608 (0x3f00) - at least on my machine. That is not what C does, though. The real problem is when you type float real_number = 4e10; int integer = real_number; If your integer can only hold values up to 2^31 - 1 , the behavior of the above code is undefined. In a language like Python, everything either behaves as you intended, of throws an exception. This is why I say In C, you must completely understand the behavior of every statement or function, and you *must* handle the possibility of errors. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] no sound
I open mplayer, mpg321, vlc, or flash (youtube) and I have no sound. ALSA is working. Hardware is working. Already did alsaconf + alsamixer. Any suggestions? To be really sure ALSA is working, I suggest you try aplay. Notice that aplay is minimalistic, and does not support formats like vorbis (AFAIK). Feed a wav to it. Example: aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Right.wav Both aplay and /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Right.wav come from media-sound/alsa-utils You have a lot of verbosity with aplay -v Also notice that many mixer controls have not only a volume bar, but also a setting of muted or unmuted. A mixer control may show its bar at 100% but be muted, which could be confusing if you are not familiar with alsamixer. In my case least, the relevant mixer controls for a wav file are Master and PCM. Both are stereo, both have volume bars, but only PCM has a mute/unmute setting. I don't know if this is your case, this wasn't clear from your screenshot. Can you get a png screenshot and send directly to my email?. Of course, it would be better if the alsamixer screen was maximized when you take the screenshot. Also, to test with another OS could be useful. Do you have any LiveCD? -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] gimp-9999 failed to compile
On Mon, 2008-10-27 at 12:21 +0700, Nickolay Hodyunya wrote: Yes, but it seems 0.0.21 is not even released, because there is no files to fetch from ftp.gimp.org for this version. Well, sometimes that happens when you build from trunk (and why it's usually discouraged). That is not the only reason it is usually discouraged... the main reason is that the code itself is often broken. By the way, there is a contradiction among a subset of the Gentoo users. They spend a lot of time optimizing their system (sometimes even being irresponsible, using absurd CFLAGS), but at the same time they install the very latest software, while 95% of software gets slower with each release. Using the most recent, untested software often leads to bugs and very often leads to decreased performance. What a rational person would do (in my opinion) is 1) A generally stable (no ~arch) system. 2) A few ~arch packages, where the ~arch versions really have important features, and they outweigh the unreliability. One example would be multimedia software, and perhaps Firefox (3.0 is still ~x86). 3) Zero or very few hardmasked or unkeyworded packages, including cvs software. They are hardmasked for a reason. Of course, some people do have a rational reason to download software from cvs, such as developers of that particular software. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] how to downgrade to old fetching indicator?
On Tuesday 28 October 2008 21:11:05 Andrew Gaydenko wrote: Hi! How to downgrade to old fetching indicator (single-line instead of multiple lines)? This has been bugging me for a long time as well, I'd really liek to know what's going on. 'ps ax' while emerge is downloading shows the full wget command used - it's FETCHCOMMAND from make.conf. The identical command on the command line produces the old output. Adding the wget option --progress=bar to FETCHCOMMAND changes nothing, but it is the correct option to influence this behaviour. It seems like perhaps FETCHCOMMAND is no longer the applicable setting in make.conf... Perhaps you did not read wget's info page ? Please read the following excerpt to the end `--progress=TYPE' Select the type of the progress indicator you wish to use. Legal indicators are dot and bar. The bar indicator is used by default. It draws an ASCII progress bar graphics (a.k.a thermometer display) indicating the status of retrieval. If the output is not a TTY, the dot bar will be used by default. Use `--progress=dot' to switch to the dot display. It traces the retrieval by printing dots on the screen, each dot representing a fixed amount of downloaded data. When using the dotted retrieval, you may also set the style by specifying the type as `dot:STYLE'. Different styles assign different meaning to one dot. With the `default' style each dot represents 1K, there are ten dots in a cluster and 50 dots in a line. The `binary' style has a more computer-like orientation--8K dots, 16-dots clusters and 48 dots per line (which makes for 384K lines). The `mega' style is suitable for downloading very large files--each dot represents 64K retrieved, there are eight dots in a cluster, and 48 dots on each line (so each line contains 3M). Note that you can set the default style using the `progress' command in `.wgetrc'. That setting may be overridden from the command line. The exception is that, when the output is not a TTY, the dot progress will be favored over bar. To force the bar output, use `--progress=bar:force'. So you can try --progress=bar:force I personally like --progress=dot. And when I download huge files like CD images, I use wget -b --limit-rate=MY_DESIRED_RATE_LIMIT --progress=dot:mega 'http://example.com/foo.tar.lzma' -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] package.keywords syntax?
Run autounmask, it creates a new file in /etc/portage/package.unmask/ Run a quick awk on it to get it into shape Move file to /etc/portage/package.mask/ Problem solved in a neat elegant insightful way. awk? I assumed it was an obsolete language included for compatibility. People should use Python, Perl, or sed's s command. Am I wrong? -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] package.keywords syntax?
awk? I assumed it was an obsolete language included for compatibility. People should use Python, Perl, or sed's s command. Am I wrong? Yes. You are indeed wrong. Python and Perl are humungous interpreters that rival Java for size. Perl is in a class of it's own for syntax bloat. sed is neat but has nowhere near the functionality of awk. For example, I recently needed to scan a massive text file of 89000+ lines and count the number of character on each line and print it out with the line number. A bash script took 20 seconds to run. A C script took less than half a second. An awk script was marginally *quicker*. Granted, most of that time is spent writing to the console, but the text processing must then also be on par with C. awk is not obsolete, it's just been around for a while. It's no more obsoleted by perl, python and sed than ls is obsoleted by the existence of gui file managers Nice. I might learn it in the future (there are some urgent duties I must to before, and then I want to learn C* and Python**. Then I may study awk) * Before you ask what, you don't know C?, I mean to really know C, that is, read a rigorous book such as C: A Reference Manual and be able to write portable programs with well-defined behavior. Speaking of well-defined behavior, do you know what happens when you cast a float to an int, and the float is too big to fit into the int? ** I know basic Python, but I think Python is nice enough for a person to *really* know it. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] package.keywords syntax?
I mean to really know C, that is, read a rigorous book such as C: A Reference Manual and be able to write portable programs with well-defined behavior. Speaking of well-defined behavior, do you know what happens when you cast a float to an int, and the float is too big to fit into the int? Did oyu try it yourself and see? The point is that the behavior in this situation is undefined. It might do anything. Programming in C is different than programming in Python. In Python, you must know the basic behavior of a statement/functions. If an error occurs, it raises an exception. If you do not catch the exception, the program exits (and you can arrange for cleanup actions to be performed before the program exits). In C, you must know exactly what the statement/function does, and you *must* handle the possibility of errors. If an error occurs and you do not handle it, the program may crash, or it may go on and behave erratically (such as deleting user files, or giving results subtly wrong, or leaking memory, or...) -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
[gentoo-user] Can I clean contacts with isopropyl alcohol?
Hi. I have instability in my PC and I highly suspect it is caused by hardware problems in my TV card. I would like to clean its contacts and see if it, by a miracle, solves the problem. But I don't want to make it worse. So: is it safe to clean the contacts of a PCI card with isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab? -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free.
Re: [gentoo-user] Can I clean contacts with isopropyl alcohol?
Of course it's safe, just turn everything off, take the card out and clean it with the alcohol. Another thing...What do you mean by instability? Abnormalities in the video, and computer crashes when viewing tv. Without the card, no crashes. I have cleaned the contacts of the card (with an eraser) *and* chosen milder settings in the BIOS setup (for example, greater latency for memory) and now the card seems to work OK. I will test a little bit more. -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
Re: [gentoo-user] Corruption in reiserfs partition
Do you think that there is any plausible chance that using the partition might cause further damage? if there isn't a hardware problem - very probably not. I have had very good experiences with reiserfsck (for 3.6) and fsck.reiser4 (with reiser4). If the fs got fixed, it is fixed. If the disk is damaged, than reinstalling from scratch won't help you anyway. I realized that the damaged files were filled with nulls, so I made a script that detected null-filled files across my filesystem. There are some 250 files like this. Here are some: /media/hda2/bin/du: 59084 /media/hda2/bin/rm: 34100 /media/hda2/bin/tr: 27492 /media/hda2/bin/wc: 23108 /media/hda2/bin/dir: 79420 /media/hda2/bin/cut: 27048 /media/hda2/bin/env: 13436 /media/hda2/bin/seq: 17740 /media/hda2/bin/tty: 12800 /media/hda2/bin/yes: 12876 /media/hda2/bin/expr: 23336 /media/hda2/bin/head: 24516 /media/hda2/bin/sort: 65168 /media/hda2/bin/stty: 37380 /media/hda2/bin/sync: 12584 /media/hda2/bin/true: 12200 /media/hda2/bin/vdir: 79420 /media/hda2/bin/dirname: 13836 /media/hda2/bin/rmdir: 14684 /media/hda2/bin/sleep: 14772 /media/hda2/bin/touch: 34328 /media/hda2/bin/uname: 15316 /media/hda2/bin/chroot: 13500 /media/hda2/bin/mkfifo: 14644 /media/hda2/bin/readlink: 18988 /media/hda2/bin/basename: 13772 /media/hda2/etc/enlightenment/sysactions.conf: 2964 /media/hda2/etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf: 15916 /media/hda2/etc/laptop-mode/lm-profiler.conf: 1561 /media/hda2/etc/portage/package.keywords/wanted~: 796 /media/hda2/var/lib/scrollkeeper/scrollkeeper_docs: 1812 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/nroff-filter.info: 232 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/iso-8859-1.cset: 13848 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/iso-8859-2.cset: 14133 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/cp1250.cmap: 31404 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/cp1252.cset: 14039 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/cp1253.cset: 13682 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/iso-8859-8.cmap: 27758 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/iso-8859-8.cset: 12557 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/cp1255.cmap: 35133 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/cp1256.cset: 13307 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/cp1257.cmap: 31235 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/cp1258.cset: 13920 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/context-filter.so: 26976 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/iso-8859-10.cmap: 31046 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/iso-8859-10.cset: 14259 /media/hda2/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/texinfo-filter.info: 914 Most of these things are not essential; the big exception is the things in /bin. So it does seem that the system is fixable. Something else that I wanted to ask: this backup that I made after the screwup but before rebuild-tree, do you think it is reliable? -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free.
[gentoo-user] Corruption in reiserfs partition
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-4225196.html#4225196
Hi. The forums being down, can you give me help by mail on the topic
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-4225196.html#4225196, since I can't use
my Gentoo installation until the problem is solved?
The most important thing to me is to know the answer to the two questions:
1) How can I know if other files were corrupted?
2) Do you think I should just use the computer, after reemerging the
packages that provide the corrupted files? Or should I reinstall the system
from scratch?
The background is: a corruption ocurred in my reiserfs partition, possibly
due to hardware problems; I performed reiserfsck and recovered virtually all
files, but at least some files in /bin are corrupted. In fact, they cannot
be executed, and executing the file command on them tells that they are
just data instead of recognising them as an executable. See:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/media/hda2/bin$ for file in *; do file ${file} | grep -q
data
wc -c ${file}; done
13772 basename
13500 chroot
27048 cut
79420 dir
13836 dirname
59084 du
13436 env
23336 expr
24516 head
14644 mkfifo
18988 readlink
34100 rm
14684 rmdir
17740 seq
14772 sleep
65168 sort
37380 stty
12584 sync
35852 tail
34328 touch
27492 tr
12200 true
12800 tty
15316 uname
79420 vdir
23108 wc
12876 yes
Aren't all these files part of coreutils? So hopefully this was just a
misbehaved coreutils emerge instead of a consequence of filesystem
corruption.
For more details, see the forum thread.
I would appreciate any help. Thanks.
--
Software is like sex: it is better when it is free.
Re: [gentoo-user] Corruption in reiserfs partition
On 9/8/07, Volker Armin Hemmann [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
On Samstag, 8. September 2007, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-4225196.html#4225196
Hi. The forums being down, can you give me help by mail on the topic
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-4225196.html#4225196, since I can't
use my Gentoo installation until the problem is solved?
The most important thing to me is to know the answer to the two
questions:
1) How can I know if other files were corrupted?
well, you can try a script that compares the md5sums of the files
installed
with the m5sums of the files on the harddisk. But everything that wasn#t
installed with portage can't be checked that way.
There is a equery command for that... equery check if memory serves. But I
issued this command some days ago and it always reports some files as
different... so I guess it is normal for one or two files out of 1000 in a
package to be modified without Portage knowing... but I want to know about
the packages that were modified *because of the corruption.*, not the ones
that were modified because of other reasons... but, perhaps this is the only
option: issue equery check and
1) if the checksum match I know it was not corrupted
2) if it does not match than it may or may not be because of the corruption
Too bad it does not apply to files not managed by Portage.
Hum, perhaps I should have made checksums of my personal data? Obviously,
nothing substitutes a backup, but for data that is not worth backing up
(because it is huge - thus costly to back up - and I can withstand a small
chance of losing said data, since I can obtain it again; a rip of a DVD
movie for example) I could at least save checksums, so if the file gets
corrupted, at least I'll know...
2) Do you think I should just use the computer, after reemerging the
packages that provide the corrupted files?
yes
Do you think that there is any plausible chance that using the partition
might cause further damage?
The background is: a corruption ocurred in my reiserfs partition, possibly
due to hardware problems; I performed reiserfsck and recovered virtually
all files, but at least some files in /bin are corrupted. In fact, they
cannot be executed, and executing the file command on them tells that
they are just data instead of recognising them as an executable. See:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/media/hda2/bin$ for file in *; do file ${file} | grep
-q
data wc -c ${file}; done
13772 basename
13500 chroot
27048 cut
79420 dir
13836 dirname
59084 du
13436 env
23336 expr
24516 head
14644 mkfifo
18988 readlink
34100 rm
14684 rmdir
17740 seq
14772 sleep
65168 sort
37380 stty
12584 sync
35852 tail
34328 touch
27492 tr
12200 true
12800 tty
15316 uname
79420 vdir
23108 wc
12876 yes
Aren't all these files part of coreutils?
not all, but most of them.
For more details, see the forum thread.
I would appreciate any help. Thanks.
It doesn't look so bad. You can try moving the corrupted stuff to a backup
dir, and create symlinks to busybox. Busybox should be installed on your
system.
Yes it is.
for example
ln -s busybox rm
Gentoo should have an automated way to do this. For me, it looks like there
should be an eselect option for activating busybox.
I hope you learned your lessons!
Lesson 1: /home on its own partition.
I read somewhere that most of the time when a disk fails it will take all of
its partitions with it, so putting /home is its own partition does not help.
Perhaps that person was wrong... at least in my case, I clearly had a
logical failure in the partition, with no physical failure in the disk, so
if I had multiple partitions, maybe only one would have problems.
Lesson 2: backups.
Hehe. Yes I know. Fortunately it seems I was very lucky this time...
