Linux-Misc Digest #555, Volume #24 Mon, 22 May 00 03:13:02 EDT
Contents:
Re: Slackware or Debian (Sean)
Re: Need ideas for university funded project for linux (Christopher Browne)
Re: Need ideas for university funded project for linux (Christopher Browne)
Re: /dev/ttyp1: Read-only file system ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
netatalk make problem (Alex)
Re: D-link 220 in RedHat 6.2 (Tommy)
PDF files (Golan Derazon)
Re: Motif release to Open Source Community leads to Open Motif Everywhere (Adams
Klaus-Georg)
Re: CDROM problem (Miguel)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Sean <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Slackware or Debian
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 01:28:27 -0400
Ruben Haugan wrote:
> So... I need some help on this one. Can someone who uses Debian or Slackware
> tell me a little about the benefits and the problems - simply pros and
> cons - of these distributions?
Well, I learned on Slackware (v3.0 ... iirc). I think the main advantage
of Slackware is that it forces you to learn more about your Linux system
than other distros do. When you want to install software, you pretty
much have to compile it, etc. Of course this eventually leads to
Slackware's main disadvantage IMO. Eventually I tired of compiling
everything under the sun, so I tried RedHat and some its varients, of
which I cared for none. Then somebody suggested Debian, which at the
time had just hit 2.0, and I've never used anything since. The biggest
advantage of Debian is apt-get .. which is a program that allows for
installation of Debian packages over the internet, including upgrades
and whatnot. If you want some more info about Debian, check out
www.debian.org, and if you're an irc person you can go to
irc.debian.org, and ask questions in the #debian chatroom.
Sean
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Christopher Browne)
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.linux.development,comp.os.linux.development.apps,comp.os.linux.development.system
Subject: Re: Need ideas for university funded project for linux
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 05:44:31 GMT
Centuries ago, Nostradamus foresaw a time when [EMAIL PROTECTED]
would say:
>Mongoose <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> On Wed, 17 May 2000 15:01:04 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> >Mongoose <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>> >The way I see it, Linux needs the following, at minimum, before it can
>> >be a legitimate competitor to Windows:
>
>> >1. A streamlined, easy install process;
>
>> Theres distros that have that now. Caldera I think? You can play
>> tetris while linux is installing on your machine.
>
>Dunno. I've just heard very bad things about some of the installers,
>namely that they either work perfectly or not at all. And, of course,
>we should be able to turn off the easy-to-use installer and get our
>hands dirty.
Actually, all you need to do to get at _that_ is to try installing
Linux on a non-IA-32 platform. It gets _real_ easy at that point to
need to get away from the "pretty, barnified installers."
[No, I'm not bitter. I'm just irritated that it was _so easy_ to bash
up my Debian/Alpha system so that it couldn't run userspace stuff so
easily. If you upgrade a PC164 machine to Potato, and _aren't_
already running a kernel more modern than the 2.0.36 that comes with
the Stable release, the clock gets _very_ confused, to the point of
not being able to get init to anything better than run level 1...]
>> >2. An office suite roughly as functional as Office, and at least as
>> > easy to use;
>
>> Staroffice which is basically a clone of MSoffice, and Corel Office
>> Suite. Both very good office suites for linux.
>
>I've used StarOffice (not Corel Office), and it's not roughly as
>functional as Office. Also, it's not GPLed. I have hopes that
>GNOME's office suite will come through (and it's very nice, though
>crash-intensive, so far).
GNOME seems to have The Spreadsheet. Gnumeric is _quite_ impressive.
Unfortunately, AbiWord is _not_ a terribly impressive word processor;
while it may compare quite favorably to MS WordPad, and be quite
suitable for letter writing, it is _not_ much of an option for more
sophisticated document preparation.
In contrast, Kspread doesn't seem terribly impressive, but the
combination of KLyx and KWord look Rather Featureful.
It would not seem to me to be a Total Disaster if they decided to let
the "less impressive components" fail, as subprojects, and depend on
the Other Folks' Good Stuff.
>> >3. A GUI package installation mechanism that's as easy to use as
>> > InstallShield (trivial if we get a file manager for GNOME or KDE); and
>
>> Maybe, theres a few out there but no one uses them except commercial
>> companies. Most programs use the standard configure; make; make
>> install line
>
>Yeah. And that's a serious problem. Do you realize how fucking
>annoying it is to have to install 150MB of source, dedicate 1.5 hours
>to configuring and building, and then find out that there's some God
>forsaken shared library I need to install before it will work? Not
>that I have gone through this several times with XEmacs on RedHat
>boxes, or anything.
>
>I want to click on a damn button and have the program install. I want
>the option to do it by hand if I have to, but installing anything on
>Linux is a nightmare if you have to build it from the source. Note
>also that "make install" will occasionally break, depending on your
>distribution. And they all seem to be going in tangential directions
>on this one.
>
>There's just no excuse for not having an adequate installer. We have
>two excellent package-management tools, dpkg (and apt) and rpm. All
>we have to do is put a shiny new GUI front-end on them.
>
>Not that I am bitter.
I'm far more concerned with there being a solid basis underneath than
there being a pretty veneer on top.
Unfortunately, RPM seems a bit weak in terms of supporting
construction of well-managed _sets_ of packages, in comparison with
the set of dpkg tools.
Frankly, part of what I'd like to see happen is for some of this stuff
to get scripted in automated fashion.
I've got an hourly process that runs:
apt-get update
apt-get -q -y -d upgrade
which checks to see if there is anything out there needing to be
upgraded.
That's not going to automagically _do_ the upgrades; it merely
downloads the updated packages. I get to run dselect [which needs a
prettier face in these modern times...] to actually _install_ them.
In similar manner, I've set up a fair bit of my systems' configuration
to be self-updating via cfengine.
The point I'd make here is that I'm not entirely enthralled about
"shiny GUI front ends."
I think it might be _friendlier_ to set up some automated processes
which are "open" enough to provide hooks for manual maintenance, when
needed, but which Do Appropriate Things without any need for possibly
naive users to _do anything at all._
In effect, the friendliest user interface for system administration is
the user interface that you don't _need_ to use because the computer
did the Right Thing on your behalf.
>[...]
>
>> It seems that there are alot of linux programs out there that do
>> these things people need, its just that its hard to find them all.
>
>Yeah. Because there are 573,283 Linux packages, 572,911 of which do
>exactly the same thing, and 290 of which are cutesy man pages.
>
>We need some Machiavellian masochist to sift through all the packages
>for Linux, pick the best ones, and throw out the rest. I think
>anything that hasn't been changed for 5 years should go; we might have
>to make an exception for e2fsck, but as a rule, it would probably
>eliminate half the packages.
You overspeak, _slightly._
<http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/> reports:
"This archive hosts 64126 RPMs representing 99304 MBytes of data"
Much of these represent duplicates, whether via being different
versions, or versions for different RPM-based istributions.
In contrast, Debian has somewhere around 5000 packages these days.
With the _significant_ upside that they are each, at least initially,
required to have an identifiable maintainer.
The "maintainer list" occasionally gets a bit stale; there are some
packages that are unmaintained. If this is important to someone for
some particular package, that's an opportunity to identify a new
maintainer.
>> As for ease of use, most linux users are intellegent computer users
>> and don't need guis to configure and install stuff.
>
>This is a lie.
>
>I'm an intelligent computer user. I have manually, painstakingly
>configured my Debian system by hand, because there are either no
>usable GUIs to do it or they don't get put on my X menu (so I install
>them and forget them). I hate doing it, and I have to refer back to
>the man pages - which, by the way, are indecipherable even if you know
>what you're doing - roughly every two seconds. And then we have the
>fact that UNIX folks just love to abbreviate, and apparently consider
>it a matter of personal style and creativity. I use "fn" for
>"function," God help me, but I'm not so big a moron that I'd do it in
>a configuration file. Most of the otherwise-intelligent people who
>write the programs we use every day are guilty of that and worse
>crimes, though.
>
>I much, much, much prefer being able to right-click on something and
>hit "Properties." I also like being able to press F1 when the mouse
>is over a confusing field and get an explanation of it. (The
>explanation often isn't a help, and I expect that would carry over to
>Linux, but at least there's no flipping around between screens.)
>
>Please excuse the rant. But Linux has been a pain in the ass to
>configure since I started using it in the early 90's, and it's
>improved not at all since then.
One problem, it seems to me, is that there has only been limited
effort put into building common tools to help configure stuff.
Yes, there's Linuxconf, and COAS, and such. It is interesting that
COAS is getting rearchitected, because it proved prohibitively
difficult for people to add modules to it.
"As it turns out, most people found developing for COAS too
complicated. I will admit freely that it is very complicated; in our
next version, we're trying to cut down on some of the more esoteric
things." <http://www.coas.org/whatnext.html>
I would speculate that the same is true for Linuxconf; the site
<http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/linuxconf/modules.hc> only lists a limited
number of third party modules.
Contrast with WebMin, which combines a large number of standard
<http://www.webmin.com/webmin/standard.html> and third party
<http://www.webmin.com/webmin/third.html> modules. Admittedly, the
wish list <http://www.coastnet.com/~ken/webmin/wish.html> is rather
large...
I _seriously wish_ that these tools took the approach of not merely
modifying files, but rather generating some form of "closures."
Common Lisp defines closures thus:
"lexical closure n. a function that, when invoked on arguments,
executes the body of a lambda expression in the lexical environment
that was captured at the time of the creation of the lexical closure,
augmented by bindings of the function's parameters to the
corresponding arguments."
The idea is that rather than modifying the file, the tools should
generate _little programs_ (e.g. - closures) to modify the files.
That way, the tool may store the _program_, and provide the ability to
rerun as needed. (Theoretical CS Geek Aside: When you compile a C
program using GCC, what GCC does is to transform C code into a whole
bunch of machine language closures.)
<wild-eyed-dreaming>
For instance, if WebMin generated Cfengine
<http://www.iu.hioslo.no/cfengine/> scripts, this would mean you'd run
WebMin, and it would _generate scripts._
It should log these in a spool directory, so that:
- If you wanted, you could grab some of them and add them to the
Cfengine "cleanup" that runs regularly.
More mundane, and more critical, uses include:
- You get to look back at the spool to see what was done in the past.
Whether this is called "tracing back," "tracking," or "auditing,"
it's useful from a _control_ perspective.
- You may not understand how to configure a particular facility. So
you use the tool to help walk you through. Then you wind up with a
script that you can, if you wish, look at, to see what it did and
how. Good for learning.
The latter things were provided on AIX by the SMIT utility, some
years back; it would log whatever you did with the tool in a format
that would actually let you run it through SMIT to redo it...
</wild-eyed-dreaming>
>> This is the problem though, they don't care enough to create
>> programs to help newbies install and use linux and so linux is being
>> held back.
>
>I care enough. I'm just no good at GUI programming.
>
>> I don't see linux taking off any time soon either but the more help
>> it gets, the more popular it will be.
>
>I don't think we should squander this opportunity. The reason I get
>so locquatious when it comes to Linux is that I really like some parts
>of it, and really hate others. Same thing for Windows, but the really
>funny part is that the two are, for me, almost perfectly complementary.
>I see an opportunity for us to improve Linux so that it can be like it
>is now, or like Windows, or like anything at all, and change between
>the two with only about five minutes' effort.
>
>It's just that there's such a huge opportunity here, and it seems like
>so few people are willing to take advantage of it. Myself included,
>but I, unfortunately, don't have a separate computer available to do
>Linux development. (Is there a Linux for SGI boxes yet?)
I find it irritating that these [UNIX and MacOS] are the only systems
that people appear capable of being aware exist; there are doubtless
useful things that can be learned from:
a) VMS
b) MVS
c) Perhaps MacOS?
d) Lisp Machines
e) There are still things from Multics not emulated on more recent
systems.
--
Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/oses.html>
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Christopher Browne)
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.linux,comp.os.linux.development,comp.os.linux.development.apps,comp.os.linux.development.system
Subject: Re: Need ideas for university funded project for linux
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 05:44:32 GMT
Centuries ago, Nostradamus foresaw a time when Mongoose would say:
>On Wed, 17 May 2000 21:10:43 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>>We need some Machiavellian masochist to sift through all the packages
>>for Linux, pick the best ones, and throw out the rest. I think
>>anything that hasn't been changed for 5 years should go; we might have
>>to make an exception for e2fsck, but as a rule, it would probably
>>eliminate half the packages.
>
> Ya this is true, freshmeat needs some better organization, or a
>voting system. Since everyone can make applications for free, that
>leads to so much crap being made.
When the database is not actually linked to installable, working code,
that's not an incredibly useful "organization."
The best vote is a functioning software package. Whether that be:
a) A source RPM, or
b) A source .deb, or
c) A Ports package.
--
"Windows NT was designed to be administered by an idiot and usually
is..." -- Chris Adams" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/linuxsysconfig.html>
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: /dev/ttyp1: Read-only file system
Date: 22 May 2000 06:10:33 GMT
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> I have trouble with my linux system as I keep getting the message
>> /dev/ttyp1: Read-only file system when i log in.
By any chance is the filesystem on which /dev sits read-only?
Perhaps something somewhere is looking at the serial device as
a normal file.
This would probably manifest itself in other manners as well.
jeremy
------------------------------
From: Alex <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: netatalk make problem
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 06:30:09 GMT
Hi,
I have searched high and low for a solution to this problem as I urgently
need to get netatalk *compiled*. I get
/usr/lib/libwrap.a(hosts_access.o): In function `host_match':
hosts_access.o(.text+0x400): undefined reference to
`yp_get_default_domain'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[4]: *** [afpd] Error 1
make[3]: *** [all] Error 2
make[2]: *** [afpd] Error 2
make[1]: *** [../../etc] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2
when I try to make netatalk. I have found solutions for this problem for a
newer 2.1.4 version netatalk, but unfortunately, due to differences in the
sources, it does not apply for version 2.1.3.
I would greatly appreciate any help in regards to this problem.
Regards,
Alex
--
Posted via CNET Help.com
http://www.help.com/
------------------------------
From: Tommy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.setup
Subject: Re: D-link 220 in RedHat 6.2
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 06:30:10 GMT
Kevin Brown wrote:
>
> I have a D-Link 220 in running in RedHat Linux 6.2. I'm using the
> NE2000 module and it works fine, but during boot the kernel gives me an
> unresolved symbol error when loading ne.o. My /etc/conf.modules looks
> like this:
>
> alias eth0 8390
> alias eth0 ne io=0x300 irq=10
>
> the 8390 has to be loaded before the ne module, but it seems the kernel
> isn't doing this on boot. When i do the insmod 8390 and insmod ne
> myself, it works fine.
>
> If anyone could tell me how to get the kernel to load the 8390 before
> the ne while booting i would appreciate it.
>
> Thanks,
> Kevin
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
Hi Kevin,
sounds like the S95network script in /etc/rc.d/rc2.d is seeing the ne
interface before the 8390 (it always will, n occurs before 8) and therefore
its loading them that way (have a look at the script).
You have two options, firts you can adjust the S95network script, secondly
you can write your own that will start them in the correct order AFTER S95
has failed, this would be an ad-hoc fix, but in my opinion its better than
prewritten scripts (plus if you add more NIC's it wont screw with them)
write the following and save it as S98mynics in your home dir (make sure
the leading S is a capital)
always begin a file that will be put in startup with the following
#!/bin/sh
then add your commands after that, this is a real simple script, you'll
have to hard link it to rc2.d thru rc5.d (remember to chmod it first to
give it execute permissions or it wont work)
If you want a script that will actually start and stop itself depending on
which run level you move to, then email me and I'll write one for you (or
better still, show you how to write it if you don't know how) - this would
stop it trying to start again if say you were in RL4 and typed in init 5,
also if you wanted to stop it (cleanly) on shutdown or single user it
would.
Hope this helps,
regards,
Tommy
--
Posted via CNET Help.com
http://www.help.com/
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 09:30:36 +0300
From: Golan Derazon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: PDF files
Hi.
With which application can I read & edit .PDF files ?
------------------------------
From: Adams Klaus-Georg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Re: Motif release to Open Source Community leads to Open Motif Everywhere
Date: 22 May 2000 08:29:57 +0200
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (phil hunt) writes:
> On Thu, 18 May 2000 12:28:11 GMT, Jay Maynard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >On Thu, 18 May 2000 11:12:38 +0100, phil hunt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >wrote:
> >>Of course, the distinction is rapidly becoming almost irrelevant: the only
> >>closed-source Unix which is likely to remain around is Solaris. The others
> >>(IRIX, AIX, HP-UX) are likely to be abandoned, and their best features
> >>subsumed into Linux.
> >
> >While this may be true for IRIX, I'm not so sure about HP-UX, and not at all
> >sure about AIX,
>
> Which Unix do IBM recommend for the S/390. Is it:
> (a) Linux
> (b) AIX
or (c) OS/390 (formerly called MVS)
> The answer is: Linux.
No, the answer is it depends. Note: AIX doesn't run on S/390, so its
(a) or (c). If you don't have boatloads of Cobol programs to support,
than Linux is an option. And OS/390 ain't going away anytime soon.
> Ditto for the Netfinity series. AIX is becoming a backwater for IBM.
I don' think so. They give you Linux on the low-end machines, but for
the big boxes you take AIX and migrate over to Monterey later. The
difference is only in the administrative stuff anyways, Monterey will
implement all Linux APIs according to IBM (whatever that means).
Don't hold you breath until AIX is dead :-)
--
MfG, Klaus-Georg Adams
------------------------------
From: Miguel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: CDROM problem
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 08:36:31 +0200
James Stevenson wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> are you sure linux is hanging have you tried a different
> console because it should not hang.
>
> what are you using to mount the cdrom drive ?
> where is the cdrom drive ?? /dev/h??
>
> i am not sure about SuSe 6.3 holding information
/dev/hdb /cdrom iso9660
ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
This is the CDROM lines in /etc/fstab. It worked fine for the other CD
drive.
Miguel
------------------------------
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