Re: CIFS and data integrity

[Mark Fletcher]

Joe joe at jretrading.com writes:

 
 On Mon, 30 Jul 2012 01:50:14 +0900
 Mark Fletcher mark27q1 at gmail.com wrote:
 
  
  It looks like what got stored on the NAS is not exactly what was
  originally on the host. This is a huge problem for me as it means I
  can't rely on backups dumped on that device. Is there something wrong
  with the way I am mounting the NAS that is leading to this?
  
 
 Probably. I'd guess it is a matter of permissions. If you create the
 archive elsewhere, copy it to the NAS, copy it back again, presumably
 there is no difficulty. I also use a Buffalo NAS, but my backups are
 created on my server, then copied. It is possible that if the
 compression and expansion is done on the NAS, that a temp file involved
 may not have the correct permissions to write, or more likely, amend.
 But is your backup not running under cron as root?
 

I put the exact commands I was executing in my original post. There's no job
involved, I am typing these commands at the command prompt. I'll bring a job
into it once it works reliably. If you read my original post, you can see I
create the archive on the host's local disk, test it to make sure it is good,
and then copy it to the NAS in a separate operation. I use the cp command to do
the copy.

I'm inclined to rule out a bug in the cp command, which leaves something about
the way the data is being transferred to my NAS. Hence my concern about whether
my mount command (again, see details in my original post) was correct.

And yes, to answer someone else's question, this is reproducible, reliably,
every time. The copy on the NAS is always the same length as the copy on the
host's local disk, but diff says they are two different binary files and the one
on the NAS cannot be extracted.

Thanks

Mark

 





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Re: what graphics card to choose

[Mark Fletcher]

hvw59601 hvw59601 at care2.com writes:

 
 Camaleón wrote:
  On Sun, 29 Jul 2012 10:41:00 -0400, Michael P. Soulier wrote:
  
  
  Then choose one that you like (because of price/design) and then check 
  about its current support status in Linux ecosystem, though I would go 
  for nvidia; their closed source driver (sigh...) is rather good.
  
 
 Indeed it is.
 
 Hugo
 

Actually, right now, the nVidia-provided nVidia driver packaged in Debian has a
number of problems with 3D support on several cards. For example I use an nVidia
GeForce 9800 GTX+ which is 2-3 years old -- in other words, neither old nor
bleeding edge -- and 3D support is completely broken right now and has been
since the last working version at 290.10. You can get a Gnome 3 session going
but once you start to exercise the graphics subsystem, eg watching a video,
playing a 3D game, even just exercising the Gnome eye candy heavily, the X
session locks up completely and only a reboot will return your machine to you. I
am currently running Gnome-classic which works fine with the nVidia driver. The
problem seems to be upstream as opposed to in the Debian packaging, but nVidia
themselves are less than anxious to solve the problem it seems. If you are
buying a new system I'd stay away from nVidia cards for now, even though they
are good cards generally, because of the uncerainty about whether a given card
will work properly even with the proprietary driver. But check out the nVidia
website -- once they find and solve this problem, I'd personally go back to
recommending nVidia chipsets.

HTH 

Mark


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Re: what graphics card to choose

[Mark Fletcher]

Chris Bannister cbannister at slingshot.co.nz writes:

 
 On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 07:04:34AM +, Mark Fletcher wrote:
  Actually, right now, the nVidia-provided nVidia driver packaged in Debian 
has a
  number of problems with 3D support on several cards. For example I use an 
nVidia
  GeForce 9800 GTX+ which is 2-3 years old -- in other words, neither old nor
  bleeding edge -- and 3D support is completely broken right now and has been
  since the last working version at 290.10. You can get a Gnome 3 session 
going
  but once you start to exercise the graphics subsystem, eg watching a video,
 
 JFTR, you don't need accelerated graphics to watch a video.
 

Nobody implied otherwise. The point is, in Gnome 3, do anything that makes the
video
hardware work remotely hard and, on some cards -- kaboom. 



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Re: what graphics card to choose

[Mark Fletcher]

Gary Dale garydale at rogers.com writes:

 
 On 30/07/12 03:04 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote:
  hvw59601hvw59601at  care2.com  writes:
 
  Camaleón wrote:
  On Sun, 29 Jul 2012 10:41:00 -0400, Michael P. Soulier wrote:
 
 
  Then choose one that you like (because of price/design) and then check
 Yet another reason why open source is important. NVidia might not be 
 interested/able to solve the problem, but I'm sure the open source 
 community could.
 

Actually, sad to say, Nouveau is even worse -- can't even start a Gnome3 session
using nouveau as the driver. I have seen bug reports echoing the problems I am
seeing, and nothing but push-back from the nouveau guys -- at this rate, I don't
think Nouveau is a realistic candidate to make the nVidia prop driver, even as
poorly supported as it is, redundant. Which I think is a shame, but there it is.



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Re: CIFS and data integrity ; Sorry for the noise

[Mark Fletcher]

Paul E Condon pecondon at mesanetworks.net writes:

 
 Having posted this, which I thought was reasonable, I went and looked at the 
 archives to see what OP (Mark Fletcher) had written. It turns out that all
 of his investigation was done using commands typed in as root. For me, this
 thread is a real puzzle. And very scary. 
 
 Mark: How old is your NAS? What brand? Is it likely that it uses Linux-based 
 open/free software? What vintage? (best guess).
 
 IMHO, something bad is happening as we rush into the future. Layers of 
software
 can cover bugs in basic functionality. Complexity beyond human comprehension.
 

Paul -- The NAS is a Buffalo LinkStation 4TB NAS configured to do RAID giving 
me 2TB of storage. I bought myself it for Christmas from Amazon.co.jp (I live 
in Japan) at Christmas 2010. I don't know what OS it will be running but doubt 
it will be Linux since Buffalo will be aiming to maximise Windows 
compatibility. I have heard of people wresting their NAS out of the grasp of 
the OS it comes with and installing Linux on it, presumably by mucking about 
with firmware etc, but I have never attempted to do any such thing as I would 
probably screw it up :-) So it is running whatever it was running when it left 
the factory.

I'm simultaneously glad that someone else is as unnerved by this happening as 
I am, and increasingly nervous that the issue isn't inspiring oh that old 
chestnut reaction in list readers... :-)

Mark


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Re: CIFS and data integrity ; Sorry for the noise

[Mark Fletcher]

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh hmh at debian.org writes:

 
 Well... there is an awlful lot of CIFS and NFS-related fixes in the kernel
 stable queue.  Check that.  Also make sure it is not your NIC driver or
 memory (or the NAS' memory) that went bad...
 

I wondered about this too -- and the defective cable / NIC idea posted by Gary 
earlier. But I would have expected that network card / driver / memory issues 
would result in a failed transfer that would either end in tears (error 
messages) or would cause part of the transfer to be retried and thus take 
longer but eventually end with correct data having been transferred. What's 
giving me the heebie-jeebies (if you'll pardon the technial term) about this 
is that every software and hardware component seems to think that everything 
went swimmingly as far as I can tell, but the data on the target is 
nonetheless not correct.

Mark


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Re: CIFS and data integrity

[Mark Fletcher]

Martin Steigerwald Martin at lichtvoll.de writes:

 Hi Mark,
 Could you please try it that way:
 

snip to make really obnoxious Gmane submission rules satisfied

 
 If the issue does not trigger with zeros, then use sha1sum your database 
 backup file and then copy it and sha1sum it again.
 
 Thats just to verify the whole thing a bit more.
 
 Just to make sure also copy the file locally and verify sha1sum. It might 
 be an issue local to your client.
 

Thanks Martin, I will try these steps over the next day or two and post back
here. Appreciate your taking the time to help.

Mark



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Debian Install DVD .jigdos out of date?

[Mark Fletcher]

Hi

Can anyone comment on whether the .jigdo files currently published on
cdimage.debian.org and its mirrors for the DVD images of the i386 STABLE
distribution are out of date? I tried to use them yesterday to make an
image of the first DVD (using
http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r1/i386/jigdo-dvd/debian-40r1-i386-DVD-1.jigdo
as my input file) using several mirrors of the Debian archive in Japan,
to find that 247 files couldn't be downloaded because they are not in
the pool. I didn't look at all 247 examples but the examples I did look
at were all because later versions of the package had replaced the
version referenced by the .jigdo file / template. I also tried getting
the missing 247 using a US debian archive -- same problem. Looks like
the .jigdo file is for 4.0r1 whilst the archive has 4.0r2. An example
package is OpenOffice Draw -- what's in the archive is
openoffice.org-draw_2.0.4.dfsg.2-7etch4_i386.deb but the .jigdo file /
template is expecting openoffice.org-draw_2.0.4.dfsg.2-7etch1_i386.deb
(etch1 at the end not etch4). The etch1 file is no longer in the
archive.

Anyone else seen this? Can anyone tell me where I can get an
updated .jigdo file / template that will work? And rather more
importantly, can anyone tell me why the officially published .jigdo
files aren't in step with the archive? Surely this is just going to
encourage people to hammer the mirrors for .iso images?

Mark


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Re: DVD distorted picture

[Mark Fletcher]

hce webmail.hce at gmail.com writes:

 
 Hi,
 
 I am using mplayer to watch DVD video movies. Some DVD can be
 displayed on the screen well, but others were displayed in a distorted
 picture with 3 columns repeated the same contents. Does anyone know
 what was that problem and how to fix it?
 
 I was using following command:
 
 mplayer -fs dvd:media/INCONVENIENTTRUTH/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB

First of all, you should be able to use a more simplified command line,
something like:

mplayer -fs dvd://

should do it. You may have to specify a title number, start with mplayer -fs
dvd://1 and increase the number until something sensible happens. Hard to tell
you in advance which number to use, depends on the DVD.

Now, to your problem. I think we first need to figure out if this is an 
mplayer issue or an issue with the DVD itself. Try playing the DVD on a normal
player, or using another program like totem. Do you get the same effect?

If so, it's a problem with the DVD. If the DVD is an original, bought copy,
you've either been ripped off or something has gone seriously screwy. If it's
a copy, that's what you get for trying to rip off the film company ;-)

Now assuming other players play it OK, it's starting to sound like an mplayer
problem. It would be helpful to see the text output by mplayer when playing the
DVD.

If mplayer has a problem and so does some other software eg totem, but a
hardware DVD player has no problem with it, that implies problems with the DVD
reading libraries such as libdvdread and libdvdcss, in which case we are
starting to get out of my depth, but let us know what versions of these
libraries you have anyway...

Mark



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Moving from WEP to WPA

[Mark Fletcher]

Hi

I have a relatively old (P3) Compaq Evo N600C laptop which I picked up
from somewhere, in which I have installed a circa-2002 PCMCIA Buffalo
802.11a/b wireless LAN card which uses the orinoco driver in the kernel.
I know that this combination of kernel, machine and laptop work since
it's been working since I first started using the laptop several months
ago, while my wireless LAN was configured to use WEP.

However, I recently replaced my wireless router with a newer one which
does 802.11g as well as a/b and supports WPA as well as WEP. I made the
necessary additions to my /etc/network/interfaces file on both my
laptops. My Toshiba laptop made the switch from WEP to WPA with the
absolute minimum of fuss. My Compaq did not.

Thinking that maybe I'd screwed up the setup somehow (I previously
upgraded the Compaq to testing, then changed my mind and went back to
etch -- result: a mess) I have just COMPLETELY WIPED AND RE-INSTALLED
ETCH from the current dvd .iso images on debian.org. I have, as a
result, a completely clean, unsullied installation. I chose to leave the
network unconfigured at install time after discovering that the
installation process doesn't support WPA, and instead configured it
manually after install. I have wpasupplicant installed. But when I try
to bring up the wireless network interface, I get this:

START OF GENERATED OUTPUT
kayo:~# ifup eth1
ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: Operation not supported
WEXT auth param 7 value 0x1 - ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: Operation not
supported
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: Invalid argument
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: Operation not supported
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: Invalid argument
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: Operation not supported
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: Invalid argument
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: Operation not supported
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: Invalid argument
ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: Operation not supported
WEXT auth param 4 value 0x0 - ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: Operation not
supported
WEXT auth param 5 value 0x1 - Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client
V3.0.4
Copyright 2004-2006 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/eth1/00:02:2d:4f:8a:1e
Sending on   LPF/eth1/00:02:2d:4f:8a:1e
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 16
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 15
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.
kayo:~# 

END OF GENERATED OUTPUT

Now my interfaces file looks like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth1 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid My SSID
wpa-psk My PSK, a 13-character alphanumeric code
wpa-group CCMP,AES
wpa-pairwise CCMP,AES

auto eth1


This is the same on both laptops (except on the Toshiba, it's eth2 as
eth0 is a wired Ethernet on both machines and on the Toshiba eth1 is a
ethernet over IEEE1394 which I don't use). I've checked that the SSID
and the PSK are correct. I don't get any of those Operation Not
Supported or Invalid Argument messages on my Toshiba, which is also
running etch and is running the same kernel (stock debian 2.6.18-5 i386
kernel) as the Compaq laptop. 

Clearly, however, something is different -- anyone able to help me
figure out what?

Thanks

Mark


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Re: Java swing gui designer???

[Mark Fletcher]

Hal Vaughan hal at thresholddigital.com writes:

 
 On Thursday 03 January 2008, Margiolas Christos wrote:
  Hello any advise for a good java swing designer?
  Either independent app either eclipse plugin..
  Margiolas Christos
 
 Eclipse has a Visual Editor.  
 

Netbeans also has one, again downloadable as an update. Neither Netbeans' nor
Eclipse's editor are exactly Visual Basic but like the previous poster said,
they are both better than the tool-less alternatives.

Mark


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Re: Wireless card failing after a while

[Mark Fletcher]

Tom Raus raus.tom at skynet.be writes:

 
 Hello All,
 
 I've been having some issues on my IBM netfinity server toybox. For some
reason the networkcard stops
 working while there is no apparent reason. Sometimes it happens during
transfers, sometimes just while
 it's idle. In /var/log/messages I get the following notifications.

snip 

 The card itself will remain visible in ifconfig, so it's not really going
down, it just doesn't transfer
 anymore. When I do '/etc/init.d/networking restart' then the issue is resolved
again.
 To me it seems like he can't associate anymore with my wireless router, maybe
because of an WPA (PSK/TKIP) issue?
 

Could be -- under WPA the router will periodically change the encryption key --
this problem could be occurring when that happens, ie your card isn't resynching
to the new encryption key for some reason. Does your card support WPA? When you
used it before was your network using WPA as opposed to WEP?

Mark


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Re: Autostart programs: How to remove them?

[Mark Fletcher]

Paul Johnson baloo at ursine.ca writes:


 I'm curious why someone would even bother installing Google Desktop if
 they're not going to run it...it's one of those things that more or
 less has to run while you're logged in to keep the index synchronized.
 


Perhaps he installed it to try it out, and then didn't like it? eg the amount of
system resource it consumes while indexing or something...

Just a thought. Anyway, I've got the same problem (totem in my case, not Google
Desktop) and I also can't get rid of it -- could someone post a link to some
doco that explains how Gnome tracks programs to start at login? I found a file
in my home directory that references totem and is different from other users on
my machine, but that file looks system-generated and before I go deleting stuff
from it I want to understand how it works...

Mark


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ipw3945 takes a while to warm up???

[Mark Fletcher]

Hi list

I'm running etch on a Toshiba Satellite laptop I picked up about a year
ago now in Hong Kong. It's on my home wireless LAN supported by a
Buffalo Airstation 54G which I bought recently here in Japan. The
wireless LAN card in the laptop is an inbuilt Intel ipw3945.

If I configure my interfaces file to use WEP, and configure my wireless
router accordingly, everything works perfectly.

However, I recently made the switch to WPA. What I notice now is that
when I boot up the initial attempt to get an IP address from the
wireless router via DHCP USUALLY fails (very occasionally works first
time, but hasn't for ages now) -- times out and eventually gives up. The
boot then continues and I end up in gdm as normal. If I now log straight
in I will find networking is not working. However, if I just leave it
for a while and go make a coffee or something, when I come back and log
in, networking will be working. So something is clearly trying again
later and succeeding the second time.

It's not a huge deal but I'd like it to work the first time. Previously
I noticed a kernel module ieee80211_crypt_ccmp being loaded just after
the initial attempt to connect to the router during boot, so I added
that to /etc/modules to see if that would help (the idea being to put it
in place before the attempt to connect) but it hasn't made any
difference. 

I'm thinking that some of my startup scripts are out of order but I'm
not sure which ones are relevant, so looking for advice.

Thanks in advance

Mark


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Re: Goodbye

[Mark Fletcher]

Joel Roberts Joel.Roberts at pinkardcc.com writes:

 I’ve gotten a lot of good information from this list,
 and hopefully supplied some as well, but I’m not going to weed through 
 hundreds
 of spam e-mails weekly to pursue this any longer. If the list organizers can
 implement some anti-spam measures, I’ll be happy to join again in the
 future. There’s no reason for this quantity of spam to be making it
 through on a mailing list.
 

Wonder what the point of posting this was. Did he perhaps expect us to try to
talk him out of it???






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Re: ipw3945 takes a while to warm up???

[Mark Fletcher]

A few days ago, in the middle of a spam storm, I wrote:

 
 Hi list
 
 I'm running etch on a Toshiba Satellite laptop I picked up about a year
 ago now in Hong Kong. It's on my home wireless LAN supported by a
 Buffalo Airstation 54G which I bought recently here in Japan. The
 wireless LAN card in the laptop is an inbuilt Intel ipw3945.
 
 If I configure my interfaces file to use WEP, and configure my wireless
 router accordingly, everything works perfectly.
 
 However, I recently made the switch to WPA. What I notice now is that
 when I boot up the initial attempt to get an IP address from the
 wireless router via DHCP USUALLY fails (very occasionally works first
 time, but hasn't for ages now) -- times out and eventually gives up. The
 boot then continues and I end up in gdm as normal. If I now log straight
 in I will find networking is not working. However, if I just leave it
 for a while and go make a coffee or something, when I come back and log
 in, networking will be working. So something is clearly trying again
 later and succeeding the second time.

I just discovered last night that, whilst my machine displays the below symptoms
 using the stock etch-packaged 2.6.18-5-686 kernel, a 2.6.22 kernel I built
myself from kernel.org does not -- the network comes up properly at boot time.
For that kernel I built the ipw3945 driver myself (with help from the source
package maintainer!) from the source in unstable (was advised to do so by the
package maintainer, don't remember why). Wonder if the ipw3945 driver in the
stock kernel is at the root of this? Or am I getting too OT for this list?

Mark


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Re: synaptic will not display after upgrade

[Mark Fletcher]

Iván Alemán wrote:


try as a root:

# xhost +

then

# synaptic 

Iván



... Then, if that works, you can look into the xhost program's man page 
to see how to use it to allow the specific user ID you need to open 
consoles on your display. I did something like this a while back to 
allow me to open a Sybase server configuration tool (which runs as user 
sybase) on my display (when I was logged in as a different user). Using 
xhost it was possible to configure only the sybase user, in addition to 
the user I was logged in as, to open windows on my X client. The 
important point here is that xhost + will allow ANYONE from ANYWHERE who 
can reach your computer to open a window on your machine -- not really 
all that serious you might think since they can't see the output since 
they are opening on your screen not theirs, but could still consitute a 
denial of service attack -- forcing you to shut down your computer or 
disable xhost services and in the process losing useful capabilities... 
So xhost + will get it working but leave your system vulnerable -- once 
that is shown to work and we know we are barking up the right tree, you 
can tweak xhost's parameters to allow only the required user from the 
required machine (the same machine or another on your network) which is 
less vulnerable to external attack.


I BELIEVE but could be wrong, that even root isn't automatically allowed 
to open a window on an X client owned by another user. Mentioned that 
since I note you are using sudo below.


Mark

PS Ivan -- please don't top post.

On 2/8/06, *Rodney D. Myers* [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


I'm running debain sarge on my laptop. After I got out of hispital, I
ran upgrate/upgrade, but did not pay any attention to what was being
upgraded.

Now when I try to run sudo synaptic:, I keep getting this error;

sudo synaptic

(synaptic:22313): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:

I've even tried ssh'ing into this laptop, yet I get this same error
message.

Any suggestions?

Thanks


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ICQ#: AIM#:   YAHOO:
18002350  mailman452  mailman42_5

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little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Ben Franklin - 1759






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Re: apt wants to remove my kernel image

[Mark Fletcher]

Colin wrote:


Arnau Rebassa Villalonga wrote:
 


The following packages will be REMOVED:
  initrd-tools kernel-image-2.6.8
   



I'm guessing but do you have the kernel-image-2.4-386 package installed?

(Damn!  packages.debian.org is down so I can't check for the proper name!)


 

I remember someone else had this problem, or a very similar one to it, a 
while back. I can't remember what the resolution was but if you search 
back through the archives of this list for something like *...wants to 
REMOVE my kernel... (I seem to recall the remove was in caps) you 
should find the thread concerned. Hope that helps.


Mark


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Re: apt wants to remove my kernel image

[Mark Fletcher]

Colin wrote:


Arnau Rebassa Villalonga wrote:
 


The following packages will be REMOVED:
  initrd-tools kernel-image-2.6.8
   



I'm guessing but do you have the kernel-image-2.4-386 package installed?

(Damn!  packages.debian.org is down so I can't check for the proper name!)


 

One other thing to try -- make sure you have an up to date initrd-tools. 
Someone else had a similar problem (different from the one I referred to 
in my last post) which was sorted by updating initrd-tools first, ie


aptitude update
aptitude install initrd-tools

or apt-get update
apt-get install initrd-tools

if you prefer apt-get. Note that install will update if it's already 
installed. Try doing that first, THEN doing the apache install and see 
if it behaves a bit more sensibly...


Mark


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Re: switching to kernel 2.6 - splay Failed to open sound device /dev/dsp

[Mark Fletcher]

Daniel B. wrote:


In trying to switch to kernel 2.6(.8) and udev on Sarge, I found that
splay/xsplay fails, saying Failed to open sound device.  Using
strace, I see that opening /dev/dsp is failing:

   open(/dev/dsp ... ) = -1 EBUSY (Device or resource busy).

I'm not knowingly running any sound daemons, so why would the device
be busy?

Does this sound like a change because of udev or just because of 2.6?

(Is /dev/dsp a device from the old sound drivers?  If so, why
is it device busy instead of something like no such device?)


Thanks.

Daniel

Are you using ALSA or OSS drivers? What sound hardware do you have and 
what drivers are you using? Are the drivers compiled into the kernel or 
as modules? Did this start happening after a kernel upgrade to 2.6 -- 
kinda sounds like it from what you say above...


I am running sound with no problems using ALSA on 2.6.12.2 kernel built 
from kernel.org. I saw errors like what you describe when I first 
upgraded as I was using the wrong driver, and memory fades a bit but I 
think I was also missing some underlying / other drivers initially too.


So here's what I suggest you do:

1) Answer the above questions
2) post the output of lsmod here (may need to run as root)
3) post the output of lspci here (again may possibly need to run as root)

Once I can see all that I'll see if I can be more help.

Mark


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Re: switching to kernel 2.6 - manual modprobe lp to dev /dev/lop

[Mark Fletcher]

Daniel B. wrote:


In trying to switch to kernel 2.6(.8) and udev on Sarge, I found that
device node /dev/lp0 (for a parallel-port printer I have) doesn't get
created unless I manually run modprobe lp.

Is the printer (and/or parallel) port supposed to be recognized
automatically and is /dev/lp0 supposed to be created automatically?

Or is it expected that module lp needs to be loaded explicitly
(in /etc/mod...whatever).

Thanks.

Daniel


The only explanation I can immediately think of for this is that in your 
previous kernel, parallel port support was compiled into the kernel 
whereas in your 2.6.8 build you have built it as a module. I am assuming 
you built your kernel from source and didn't take a pre-compiled binary 
one here -- if you didn't of course you won't KNOW what's modular and 
what's not -- just one of the many excellent reasons for building your own.


In any case, adding lp to the list of modules to load on startup in the 
file /etc/modules will fix it -- but if you know you will always want 
parallel printer support on every boot you probably should have compiled 
lp into the kernel -- hardly a disaster but it's worth considering 
carefully what goes in the kernel and what gets compiled as a module so 
you avoid confusions like this one.


Mark


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Re: help with Debian [How to upload a website to a debian web server]

[Mark Fletcher]

Cuthbert Smith Consulting wrote:

Thank you, I have tried contacting my host, but have not had much luck 
which was why I went to Debian/Apache.  I will keep trying, thanks for 
your information.


Cuthbert Smith Consulting Partnership Inc.
400, 14727 - 87 Avenue
Edmonton, AB T5R 4E5
Tel:   (780) 484-3232
Fax: (780) 489-8925
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This communication is intended for the sole use of the recipient to
which it was addressed and may contain confidential, personal or
privileged information. Please contact the sender immediately if you
are not the intended recipient of this information and do not copy,
distribute or take action relying on it. Any communication received
in error, or subsequent reply, should be deleted or destroyed. Thank you.

Here's the bottom line. Your provider should have provided you with 
information, understandable to non-techie people, on how to upload your 
website content on their server. If they didn't, they damn well ought to 
have done.


As someone else mentioned the most common / simplest mechanism is for 
them to give you the address of an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server 
somewhere on the net that you send your files to. The more sophisticated 
providers will wrap that up in some sort of website so you essentially 
go to the site, log in, click links to upload your HTML etc files, wait 
a short while and hey presto your website is deployed. Less 
sophisticated ones just give you an address, a login and a password but 
will probably give you more help if you ask / pay for it.


If your provider has done none of the above despite your asking 
specifically for help with this problem, you should consider switching 
providers as that quite frankly is crap.


The fact that your provider allows the default Debian / Apache page to 
display if you don't upload content, and doesn't instead replace that 
with their own page saying how great they are and what a great deal 
their subscribers get by using them, tends to place them in the 
non-sophisticated category in my mind -- but I could be wrong. In any 
event they ought to be willing to help non-technical customers get their 
site up and running.


Apologies if I seem to have got unnecessarily fired up about this one, 
but seeing non-technical people lost in the techie wilderness and 
getting no help raises my hackles like nothing else, and some of the 
people in this forum, while all trying to be helpful I'm sure, have been 
guilty of making the same assumptions as your provider seems to have 
made -- viz that you are technically skilled at maintaining a web site.


Anyway focus your energies on your provider, don't take no (or silence) 
for an answer, and ultimately consider switching providers if you don't 
get the help you deserve. (Please don't ask me to recommend a provider 
-- I'm afraid I don't know)


Good luck

Mark


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Re: Why?

[Mark Fletcher]

--- S Clement [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 I am new to Debian - within the last two weeks - and
 two things puzzle me.
 
 Why do you seem to prefer gnome over kde?  I have
 examined both and kde seems to me to be easier to
 use.  There must be something I am missing.
 

It's a very personal choice -- I for one prefer KDE to
Gnome. That said I use GDM (the Gnome Display Manager)
instead of KDM to kick off KDE -- but that's for no
better reason than that I set it up way back at the
beginning before I Knew What I Was Doing (TM) and had
some problems with KDM I couldn't get to the bottom of
whilst GDM worked out of the box. I was probably doing
something embarrassingly stupid but I've never had a
compelling reason to go back and try again.

 Is it worth hunting for a way to change the default?

No need to hunt -- if you want to use KDE over Gnome
just remove the Gnome packages and install the KDE
ones. If you need more specific help with that, reply
back to the list. The precise packages you need to
remove / install may depend on whether you are running
sarge (stable), etch (testing) or sid
(unstable).

 
 Where did you get that logo?  When it came up on the
 gnome desktop it immediatlely reminded me of
 something being flushed down the drain.  I hope it
 doesn't mean that!

Actually, the logo is a logarithmic spiral, which has
the interesting property that it employs what the
Greeks called the Golden Ratio (an irrational number
approximated by 0.618) which is found all over nature
and man-made objects, from the ratios of body size
generally considered attractive to the slope of the
Great Pyramid at Gizeh (or is it Giza, I can never
remember which is right). Thus the logo represents
Debian's rightful place at the centre of the universe.
Uh huh.

 
 Adelard
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Re: OT: Re: Why?

[Mark Fletcher]

--- Kent West [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Mark Fletcher wrote:
  the Great Pyramid at Gizeh (or is it Giza, I can
 never
  remember which is right)
 It's Pisa. the Great Pyramid of Pisa.
 
 Oh, wait, that's Leaning Pyramid of Pisa, or, er,
 um, ... never mind.

Yeah, that was the Golden Ratio gone rusty. Um gold,
rusty. Yeah, maybe not...

 
 -- 
 Kent
 
 
 
 
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SMBFS package vs kernel modules?

[Mark Fletcher]

Hi list

I have a question about the smbclient package. What
does it provide that isn't provided by SMB FS support
in the kernel?

I currently run a 2.6.15.4 kernel and am about to
build myself a 2.6.17.7 kernel from kernel.org (using
make-kpkg). I plan shortly to buy myself some NAS and
use it with both Debian and WinXP. I'm assuming at
this point that I'll be buying a NAS solution that
uses SMB. 

Everything else other than the kernel on my system is
from the sarge distribution. I may go to testing in
the near future but haven't decided to.

My question is this: given that the recent kernels
have SMB FS support available in them, what is the
purpose of the Debian smbfs package? Is this a
question of distro-clash ie is this something that
used to be needed but isn't needed on the most
up-to-the-minute kernels? Or is smbfs providing
something that the kernel doesn't?

Thanks

Mark

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SMBFS package vs kernel modules?

[Mark Fletcher]

DUH -- question is about smbfs package not
smbclient...

Hi list

I have a question about the smbclient package. What
does it provide that isn't provided by SMB FS support
in the kernel?

I currently run a 2.6.15.4 kernel and am about to
build myself a 2.6.17.7 kernel from kernel.org (using
make-kpkg). I plan shortly to buy myself some NAS and
use it with both Debian and WinXP. I'm assuming at
this point that I'll be buying a NAS solution that
uses SMB. 

Everything else other than the kernel on my system is
from the sarge distribution. I may go to testing in
the near future but haven't decided to.

My question is this: given that the recent kernels
have SMB FS support available in them, what is the
purpose of the Debian smbfs package? Is this a
question of distro-clash ie is this something that
used to be needed but isn't needed on the most
up-to-the-minute kernels? Or is smbfs providing
something that the kernel doesn't?

Thanks

Mark



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Re: dpkg serious warning ? help please ...

[Mark Fletcher]

Mehmet Fatih Akbulut wrote:


hi all,
i tried to install a deb package named 'lale', but installation 
process failed.
then tried couple of times again. each time got same error and stopped 
installing that package.
but since then, when i try to install another package or run apt-get, 
i get dpkg errors related to that package 'lale'.
[errors indicate that 1 not completely installed or removed package i 
had.]
so finally i decided to purge everything under /var/lib/dpkg/info that 
start with lale ;)

and know i get another error which is :
dpkg: serious warning: files list file for package `lale' missing, 
assuming package has no files currently installed.

how can i fix such errors ?
what should i do when an installation process goes wrong ? how should 
i reconfigure dpkg ?

many thanks in advance.

Cheers,
MFA


I'm an aptitude person rather than an apt-get person, so I'd do:
aptitude purge lale

to get rid of the package. I think you could try that now if you have 
aptitude installed. I took a quick look at apt-get's man page and I 
don't see a purge command there, just remove which isn't quite so 
dramatic, but you could try apt-get remove lale and see what happens...


I think what's happened is you've wiped out the packages at a dpkg level 
but APT still thinks the package is there -- which is why I think 
sending apt-get a command to purge it will sort things out.


In general I don't advise screwing around manually with the package 
cache files etc, you are likely to get into a mess. If you expect APT to 
help you when you want to install a package (which is what using apt-get 
or aptitude is doing) then you basically need to use that approach to 
the package system every time you want to make any change, unless you 
are willing to research the whole APT system and the ways it interacts 
with the older pieces of the Debian package management system like dpkg.


Mark

PS you may get the warning again when you try to remove the package but 
if the operation succeeds you shouldn't get it again after that.



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APT -- if I do this will I screw the pooch?

[Mark Fletcher]

Got a question relating to APT. I typically use aptitude in command-line 
mode as a front-end to APT. I'm running Sarge kept up to date with 
security updates, on a single-processor Pentium 4-based desktop machine. 
My kernel is a self-built 2.6.15.4 built with make-kpkg from kernel.org 
source.


I'm planning shortly to add a second Debian machine, a notebook, to my 
home network. I intend to keep the versions of Debian on the two 
machines, my current desktop and the new notebook, basically in step but 
don't want to be forced to ie if considering a major upgrade, want to be 
able to do one first, play around with it, then do the other.


I don't have up to date install CDs and don't want to download them, so 
I was thinking of setting up the notebook by doing a basic install off 
my old woody CDs I originally set up my desktop off of, getting a 
working net connection in place, then immediately upgrading everything 
via the net to current stable before building out the system any 
further. Since I've already gone through the upgrade process, over the 
last 2 years, with my desktop machine I have all the packages downloaded 
in my /var/cache/apt/archives directory. I don't want the notebook to 
have to download them all again, especially since security.debian.org, 
which has a lot of the latest versions of stable packages, seems to get 
overloaded and be very slow to download at times.


After reading the man pages on apt, apt.conf, aptitude etc, and googling 
around, here's what I am thinking of doing. First of all, exposing my 
desktop's /var/cache/apt/archives as an NFS mount, configuring my 
gateway's firewall to prevent anyone mounting it from outside my LAN. 
Mounting this NFS mount on the laptop, let's say at /mnt/aptarchive. 
Then, setting APT config option Dir::Cache::archives on the notebook to 
point at /mnt/aptarchive, *without touching the other Dir::Cache 
options*. This is because although I want them both to use the same 
repository of downloaded package files, I want the two machines to 
independently track what's installed, so I don't have to keep installed 
packages identical on both machines.


Here's what *I think* the effect of this will be:

1. The notebook, when asked to dist-upgrade and later to install 
packages I didn't install from the woody CDs, will not have to download 
the package from outside my network because its archive already contains 
the package (always assuming that the package concerned is installed on 
the desktop, which 90% of what I want to install on the notebook will be).
2. The notebook and the desktop will have independent views of what's 
installed, and will each know nothing about what's installed on the 
other machine (which is fine).
3. If I want to install something on the notebook that's not installed 
on the desktop, the notebook will download it as normal and put it in 
the same archives location.
4. This means that if I then later decide to install that package on the 
desktop, it will find it already has the package and not download it 
(assuming a newer one hasn't become available in the meantime).
5. Installing a package on one machine will have no effect whatever on 
the other machine's notion of whether or not that package is installed.


Reading the APT documentation, it seems to encourage using squid to set 
up a local caching download proxy to achieve this goal, setting APT to 
use the proxy when downloading packages. I don't like this approach as 
it would mean having at least 2 copies of the downloaded packages (on 
the desktop and on the notebook, if I can persuade squid to use the 
desktop's /var/cache/apt/archives dir as its cache dir) or maybe even 3 
(squid's repository, the desktop's /var/cache/apt/archives, and the 
notebook's /var/cache/apt/archives if I can't get squid and the 
desktop's APT to play nice). Since the point is to avoid extra downloads 
and also space wastage, I'd rather go with my approach.


What I'm looking for is input from more experienced hands with APT on 
whether I will screw anything if I do what I'm proposing, sharing the 
archives dir between 2 machines without sharing the package cache and 
source cache files. The documentation is somewhat ambiguous on whether 
or not what I'm proposing is possible.


I *could* just try it, but I don't want to utterly screw my desktop if I 
can avoid it...


Mark


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Re: alsaconf successful. No sound!

[Mark Fletcher]

--- Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Francesco Bochicchio spake thusly on 03/07/2006
 02:54 PM:
  Il Tue, 07 Mar 2006 21:50:14 +0100, Felix Karpfen
 ha scritto:
  
  I ran alsaconf on my recently-updated Debian
 3.1r1.
  
  It worked like a charm and ended with the
 following messages:
  
  Running update-modules...
  Loading driver...
  Setting default volumes...
  
  
 

===
  
   Now ALSA is ready to use.
   For adjustment of volumes, use your favorite
 mixer.
  
   Have a lot of fun!
  
  However when checking the output of a .wav file
 by running the play
  command from a console, I get a deafening
 silence. alsamixer says the
  the playback master is set at 74. 
  
  What have I missed?  Prior to the update (when
 using the Sarge
  pre-release) sound worked OK. 
  
  What about the  PCM channel? By default with ALSA
 it is muted
  and with 0 volume. You need to unmute and raise
 its volume
  using alsamixer.
  
 
 I've always wondered what genius thought that
 default setting was a good 
 idea..
 
 -- 
 Scott
 www.angrykeyboarder.com
 © 2006 angrykeyboarder™  Elmer Fudd. All Wights
 Wesewved
 
 

Original Poster -- did un-muting the PCM channel and
setting its volume solve your problem? If not, try
unmuting and setting volume for the Headphone channel.
The deal here is that on some sound cards, the master
and headphone channels are swapped. So when the mixer
thinks it's setting master volume it's actually
affecting the headphone socket and when it thinks it's
setting the headphone volume it's actually affecting
master volume. I'm not sure if the problem is hardware
or the driver, I think hardware. There are only a
handful of cards that have this problem but if you
still get a deafening silence then try un-muting and
setting volume for Headphones. 

Either way, you still need to un-mute and set volume
for PCM.

Mark


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Re: Wireless interface fails to initialize fully; still need to get DHCP manually

[Mark Fletcher]

Tim Beauregard wrote:


-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Robert Glueck wrote:
 


Adam Porter wrote:
   


I'm not an expert, and I have no experience with
ndiswrapper, but I'll try
to help.  Please post your /etc/network/interfaces file.
 



I may have missed the entire point of the thread as I've only just
resubscribed but here is my working wireless setup:

apt-get install ndiswrapper-source wpasupplicant ifplugd
kernel-2.6.*-source etc (I'm not sure about ndiswrapper-utils)
(requires self-compiled kernel and modules ie
make-kpkg kernel_source modules_source)

Set up your files as below:

/etc/network/interfaces

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp

# iface dsl-provider inet ppp
# provider dsl-provider

/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

# Minimal /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf to associate with open
#  access points. Please see
#  /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf.gz for more complete
#  configuration parameters.

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=0

eapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1

### Associate with any open access point
###  Scans/ESSID changes can be done with wpa_cli
# network={
# ssid=tim
# key_mgmt=NONE
# }

# Only WPA-PSK is used. Any valid cipher combination is accepted.
network={
   ssid=goodview
   proto=WPA
   key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
   pairwise=CCMP TKIP
   group=CCMP TKIP WEP104 WEP40
   psk=**[edited for my own security!]
   priority=5
}

/etc/default/wpasupplicant

# /etc/default/wpasupplicant

# WARNING! Make sure you have a configuration file!

ENABLED=1

# Useful flags:
#  -D driver  Wireless drive, typically optional.
#  -i ifname  Interface
#  -c config file Configuration file
#  -d   Debugging (-dd for more)
#  -w   Wait for interface to come up

# See the manual page wpa_supplicant(1) for more options and information.

OPTIONS=-w -i wlan0 -D ndiswrapper -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

# EXAMPLES:

# OPTIONS=-i wlan0 -D hostap -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
# OPTIONS=-i ath0 -D madwifi -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Once these files are set up, run the command

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf in the directory where that file resides (I
use /usr/src) (you also need bcmwl5.sys in the same directory)

then

insmod ndiswrapper

You can check with ndiswrapper -l

Hope this all helps,

Tim
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I had exactly the same problem -- with different hardware. The cause was 
that PCMCIA services are started in the boot / startup sequence AFTER 
networking is set up, so at the time the startup procedure is trying to 
connect to your network PCMCIA services are not running.


By the time the boot has completed, PCMCIA services are started, so now 
an attempt to connect to the network works.


Solution is, check your /etc/rcS.d directory and your /etc/rcX.d where X 
is the runlevel the machine boots to by default, and find the SXXpcmcia 
link which will point to something in /etc/init.d. Files in here 
beginning with S are executed in order at startup, first the content of 
rcS.d then the target runlevel. So, as root, change the XX number 
between S and pcmcia to something less than the number attached to the 
startup script for your networking. Then PCMCIA services should get 
started first and be available when the networking attempts to initialise.


Other thing I notice is your /etc/interfaces file doesn't seem (unless 
I'm being blind) to auto your wireless interface. The boot sequence 
will only attempt to initialise interfaces that have the auto keyword 
defined in /etc/interfaces (it does ifup -a which starts those 
interfaces with an auto keyword). cf your loopback lo interface in your 
interfaces file quoted above.


HTH

Mark


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VNC client/server combo doing VNC over HTTP

[Mark Fletcher]

Hi

I'm looking for a VNC server to run on my home Debian setup that will 
allow me to connect to it from work. Trouble is, work is behind a 
(justly) paranoid corporate firewall which will allow me to connect out 
on HTTP/HTTPS on the usual web ports and not a lot else. So I'm looking 
for a solution where the server can be Debian, the client can be Windows 
2000 and comms between the two can be HTTP or better HTTPS over 
80/81/443/8080 etc.


I stumbled over x11vnc which looks good but doesn't appear to support 
communicating over HTTP(s). And my searches on sourceforge etc find me 
products that do what I want but the server side has to be Windows. 
Anyone got any alternative ideas?


Thanks

Mark


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Re: APT -- if I do this will I screw the pooch?

[Mark Fletcher]

Andrew Cady wrote:


On Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 12:36:39AM -0500, Mark Fletcher wrote:

 


I have all the packages downloaded in my /var/cache/apt/archives
directory. I don't want the notebook to have to download them all
again
   



[...]

 

After reading the man pages on apt, apt.conf, aptitude etc, and googling 
around, here's what I am thinking of doing. First of all, exposing my 
desktop's /var/cache/apt/archives as an NFS mount, configuring my 
gateway's firewall to prevent anyone mounting it from outside my LAN. 
   



You don't need a firewall to do this; /etc/exports suffices.  This
should be perfectly safe so long as you don't use both machines to
apt-get at the same time.  If you do, though, one apt-get could try to
resume downloading a file currently downloading in another apt-get, with
unpredictable results.  You could mess around with locking, but there
are several robust solutions readily available.  Look into the packages
apt-cacher apt-proxy and approx.

 


Mounting this NFS mount on the laptop, let's say at /mnt/aptarchive.
Then, setting APT config option Dir::Cache::archives on the notebook
to point at /mnt/aptarchive
   



If you use NFS, you should just mount directly to
/var/cache/apt/archives.  That way, having the NFS server down will not
tell apt to put files in /mnt.


 


Am I to take it that this means that the basic shape of my approach is OK?


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Re: VNC client/server combo doing VNC over HTTP

[Mark Fletcher]

nullman wrote:


2 short infos to clarify :

1. VNC over http doesn´t exist



Is that strictly true? Both [EMAIL PROTECTED] and RealVNC Personal Edition offer 
a version that  allows access through a web browser on the client side, 
specifically to be more firewall-friendly; what are they doing if they 
are not putting VNC over HTTP(S)?



2. Port-Numbers can be altered with any version


I do know that much, but that's only half the problem; the protocols 
allowed by the corporate firewall are the other half...




Solution would be : ssh on Port 443 ... with that you can trick most 
proxies with the connect method to use any proxy-capable ssh-client 
(putty for example)
- after ssh-connection is ok .. you can do vnc-over-ssh (simple 
Port-forwarding)


more professional :
use SSL-VPN-software like ssl-explorer( 
http://3sp.com/showSslExplorer.do?referrer=sslexplorer), which can do 
port-forwarding in y very simple manner


Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try it right away, but I don't expect it 
to work as I expect I'll find the firewall is not configured to allow 
SSH going out of the network to the internet any more than it would 
allow incoming SSH (we are talking about a multinational corporation 
here...)


Unless I am being inordinately stupid, in which case please have 
patience with me and correct me, hard-core firewalls are filtering based 
not only on port number but also on protocol. I am not sufficiently 
senior in my organisation, nor is what I'm trying to do sufficiently 
strategically important, to give me the power to influence my company's 
internet facing firewall policy; so the only option left is to find a 
way to tunnel this traffic over an existing open port/protocol combo. 
The most reliably available is HTTP(S) over the usual HTTP(S) ports eg 
80, 81, 443, etc...



Greets

On 3/10/06, *Mark Fletcher* [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Hi

I'm looking for a VNC server to run on my home Debian setup that will
allow me to connect to it from work. Trouble is, work is behind a
(justly) paranoid corporate firewall which will allow me to
connect out
on HTTP/HTTPS on the usual web ports and not a lot else. So I'm
looking
for a solution where the server can be Debian, the client can be
Windows
2000 and comms between the two can be HTTP or better HTTPS over
80/81/443/8080 etc.

I stumbled over x11vnc which looks good but doesn't appear to support
communicating over HTTP(s). And my searches on sourceforge etc find me
products that do what I want but the server side has to be Windows.
Anyone got any alternative ideas?

Thanks

Mark


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Re: VNC client/server combo doing VNC over HTTP

[Mark Fletcher]

Hal Vaughan wrote:


On Friday 10 March 2006 09:29, nullman wrote:
 


2 short infos to clarify :

1. VNC over http doesn´t exist
2. Port-Numbers can be altered with any version

Solution would be : ssh on Port 443 ... with that you can trick most
proxies with the connect method to use any proxy-capable ssh-client
(putty for example)
- after ssh-connection is ok .. you can do vnc-over-ssh (simple
Port-forwarding)
   



I couldn't get this to work in one of my situations, due to a nasty 
firewall.  What I have found that seems to work is using stunnel to 
tunnel the VNC data through port 443 as HTTPS data, close to what is 
mentioned above.  I'm still working on part of the solution, since I 
can't easily install stunnel on my clients Linux systems.  When I'm all 
done, I'll post my results, since there has been very little on this 
list to directly apply to this -- at least on my case.


Here's a link to stunnel: http://www.stunnel.org

And here's a link to a tutorial about it, but it follows Windows, so 
you'll have to make some allowances and when they tell you to use 
ca.bat, it'll work best to download the file, extract the files that do 
the work, and convert them to Linux and run just those lines.  You'll 
get some directory does not exist errors, but if you make the 
directory and re-run the program line, it'll work.  At one point it'll 
complain about no index file, so do echo 00 index and it'll fix it 
-- forgot what dir that is needed in, though.


I'll have more detailed instructions later, when I've got all my stuff 
behaving at 100%.


Hal


 

Again thanks a lot for the suggestion, I'll try this too -- but I have a 
possibly stupid question. What protocol will the gateway of my corporate 
WAN think it is being asked to handle in this case? I don't think it 
will allow any connections going out on VNC protocol, regardless of the 
port number in use. HTTP / HTTPS is fine, not a lot else is...


Am I just totally wrong on this? Or do I need to do something else to 
disguise VNC packets as HTTP / HTTPS / something else a corporate 
firewall can reasonably be expected to allow?


Mark


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Re: Release cycle

[Mark Fletcher]

gawab wrote:


Steve Lamb wrote:


Marc Shapiro said:
 


Personally, my theory on the REAL reason that the release cycles have
been getting so long is that we are running out of Toy Story 
character

names.  What do we do when there are no more characters left?




Start working through Monsters, Inc.?  I mean what's cooler than 
being

able to say you run Debian Boo.  :)

  


Maybe we can call the next one Debian Hell, so we can wait for Hell to 
freeze :-)



Many of the people who come to this list looking for help know exactly 
what it's like to be in Debian Hell... :-!



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Re: Windows won't boot!

[Mark Fletcher]

Gregory Seidman wrote:


By installing Sarge I have somehow rendered my friend's Windows system
unbootable. The original configuration was two 200GB drives, hda and hdb.
Windows XP was on hda and the other drive was apparently empty.

I repartitioned hdb as part of the Sarge install, removing the unused NTFS
partition and replacing it with root (ext3), swap, home (ext3), and vfat
partitions. I had the installer use LILO, and when it rebooted into
base-config everything appeared to be fine.

I then altered the /etc/lilo.conf to make sure that it was installing on
/dev/hda but using /dev/hdb1 as root. It seemed happy with this and
installed on the MBR of /dev/hda without difficulty. After installing and
configuring lots of packages, I decided to reboot to Windows and leave it
at that for the time being. Windows would boot part of the way, then
complain about a missing AUTOCHK or something and immediately reboot. So I
tried booting to Linux, and it couldn't find the root partition. I managed
to boot by explicitly giving root=/dev/hdb1 on the LILO prompt, but there
does not seem to be any way to get Windows to boot.

Has anyone run into anything like this? Does anyone know how to fix it? At
this point I'd be happy enough not to be able to boot to Linux at all, just
get things back to where booting the computer brings up Windows. Please
help.

--Greg


 

Dollars to doughnuts Windoze was using hdb for something and not letting 
on. Windows has a nasty habit of doing this -- for example using any 
apparently unused area of any disk for its own purposes, eg swap, 
user-silently (there's probably a log of what it's doing somewhere, but 
not anywhere the average user can easily find it).


When installing Linux dual-boot on a machine that already runs Linux, 
one of the golden rules is Don't boot Windows between adding the second 
disk and partitioning the second disk with Linux's fdisk. If you let 
Windows see that the second disk is there and not all the space is used, 
it will do this kind of thing.  You mentioned there was an NTFS 
partition on hdb which you removed -- more evidence that Windows was 
using the disk on the quiet.


Windows is not quite arrogant enough to snatch non-Windows partitions 
back, so letting Windows see the disk once it's fully partitioned with 
Linux partitions is fine. But a disk that appears to have unpartitioned 
space when Windows see it won't be left alone long...


As to how to fix it... don't have much to add to the other posters' 
ideas. You probably don't want to hear this, but a re-install looks to 
me like it's in your near future...


Mark


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Re: Wireless interface fails to initialize fully; still need to get DHCP manually

[Mark Fletcher]

Robert Glueck wrote:


Mark Fletcher wrote:

 


I had exactly the same problem -- with different hardware.
The cause was that PCMCIA services are started in the boot
/ startup sequence AFTER networking is set up, so at the
time the startup procedure is trying to connect to your
network PCMCIA services are not running.

By the time the boot has completed, PCMCIA services are
started, so now an attempt to connect to the network
works.

Solution is, check your /etc/rcS.d directory and your
/etc/rcX.d where X is the runlevel the machine boots to by
default, and find the SXXpcmcia link which will point to
something in /etc/init.d. Files in here beginning with S
are executed in order at startup, first the content of
rcS.d then the target runlevel. So, as root, change the XX
number between S and pcmcia to something less than the
number attached to the startup script for your networking.
Then PCMCIA services should get started first and be
available when the networking attempts to initialise.

   



Thanks for your comments, Mark.  I don't see any SXXpcmcia
in MY /etc/rcS.d/ in Xandros but I don't have any pcmcia
devices in my machine anyway and that bus isn't
initialized.  The person (Bob) on whose behalf I'm
inquiring here of course does have such a device, i.e. the
Buffalo wireless card in question.

 


Sorry for the delay in replying -- forgot to check this thread for replies.

Anyway, yup, SXXpcmcia won't be there unless you install the PCMCIA 
package (can't remember the exact package name) which of course you 
wouldn't do unless you had PCMCIA hardware :-)



However, in my Xandros setup, in /etc/rc5.d/ there is a link
S20pcmcia pointing to /etc/init.d/pcmcia (Bob is using the
same version of Xandros as I do).  Also, in /etc/rcS.d/
there is a link S40networking pointing to the startup
script networking in /etc/init.d.

So it looks as though in Xandros startup of the PCMCIA
services precedes that of the networking services.  That
would also jive with the experience of many Xandros 3 users
who have their PCMCIA wireless networking cards work out of
the box in Xandros.

 

Nope -- although my previous answer didn't make this clear, the contents 
of rcS.d are run in their entirety before the contents of rcrunlevel.d 
are run. So Bob's network startup is happening before his PCMCIA setup 
is done.



FWIW, I should also mention that Bob runs his card with a
Windows driver via ndiswrapper,
and there is a link /etc/rcS.d/20module-init-tools that
starts up the ndiswrapper kernel module at that early
stage.

 

Right, but all that does is get the driver in place and check the 
hardware is working -- it doesn't set up the communications up through 
the networking layers to allow apps to use the link -- that's what 
ifupdown, S40networking, etc are doing.



Other thing I notice is your /etc/interfaces file doesn't
seem (unless I'm being blind) to auto your wireless
interface. The boot sequence will only attempt to
initialise interfaces that have the auto keyword defined
in /etc/interfaces (it does ifup -a which starts those
interfaces with an auto keyword). cf your loopback lo
interface in your interfaces file quoted above.

   



You appear to be responding to the /etc/network/interfaces
file that Tim Beauregard posted.  Bob's looks like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp

OR

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
  address 192.168.11.8
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  gateway 192.168.11.1
  dns-nameserver 192.168.11.1

 


Oops, my mistake, you're quite right.


In the second one, first we tried just address and netmask,
then added gateway, then added dns-...  None of these
worked.

I think Bob's problem boils down to something simple. 
Practically all the networking parameters seem to be

correctly set.  The only thing he has to do after bootup to
get a wireless connection is to manually run either ifup
eth1 or dhclient eth1.

 

Yup that's exactly what I had to do until I moved pcmcia to before the 
networking setup.



Those are exactly the symptoms one would encounter if the
auto eth1 directive were missing
in /etc/network/interfaces. But it's there!

The other possibility is that Xandros doesn't recognize the
device name eth1.  Bob had gone back and forth between
running ndiswrapper v.1.2 (in the presence of which Xandros
calls the wireless interface eth1) and v.1.8 (in which case
Xandros calls it wlan0).  I think Xandros may have done
some aliasing wlan0=eth1 which may have gotten scrambled
but I don't know in which config file this might be found.

 

You could be on to something there -- except I don't think ifup eth1 
would work at all, ever, if that were the case. However, you are now at 
the edges of my knowledge on this subject -- I know moving the startup 
of pcmcia to before the startup of networking (ifupdown is the first one 
I think) fixed it for me.



Does this make any sense, i.e. Xandros possibly mixing up
interface names?

Robert

Re: Why should /boot be on a separate partition?

[Mark Fletcher]

--- Paul Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Saturday 08 April 2006 07:08, Masatran (Deepak),
 R. wrote:
  Why should /boot be on a separate partition
 (rather than on the /
  partition)?
 
 LILO can't see anything past the 1024th cylinder. 
 If you don't use LILO, this 
 isn't a problem for you.
 
 -- 
 Paul Johnson
 Email and IM (XMPP  Google Talk): [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Jabber: Because it's time to move forward 
 http://ursine.ca/Ursine:Jabber
 

Only if you've got very old hardware, right?


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Re: Gnome sound system.

[Mark Fletcher]

--- S. M. Ibrahim (Lavlu) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:

 I don't know the solution, but i am also facing this
 problem. :(
 
 On 4/8/06, Surachai Locharoen
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
  I use gnome debian version 2.12. When I enable
 sound in gnome control
  panel (enable sound for user action such button
 click or system alert),
  The music player program seem to be unable to play
 sound. It show error
  message that the sound device is busy
 
  How could I enable sound system in
  gnome sound and use other music player together?
 
  Kan
 
 
 
 
 
 --
 S. M. Ibrahim (Lavlu)
 Home page: http://lavluda.tripod.com
 Blog: http://lavluda.blogspot.com
 Yahoo!! ID: lavluda MSN ID: lavluda Skype : lavluda
 


OK let's get some more details. We see this problem
fairly commonly and we usually are able to get it
sorted out. Actually, that's an idea, it might be an
idea to google for this as the Debian list archives
contain a lot of records of people coming to this list
to get help with various flavours of this problem --
they usually go away happy in the end.

Anyway, can you let us know:

1. Make and model of sound card -- be as specific as
posisble, down to chipset if possible
2. Previous experience with sound card -- eg works
fine under Windows, used to work under Gnome before
I upgraded, got a friend who's using it fine and we
can't work out what's different, it's brand new and
I've never seen it work yet -- whatever applies.
3. Are you using a stock kernel or did you build your
own? If you built your own, did you use Debian
packaged sources or get a kernel source tree from
kernel.org? (Fear no flaming, that's what I always
do!)
4. If you know (ie you built your own kernel), what
drivers are you using for sound?

From the way you phrase the question it sounds to me
like you already have the soundcard working under some
circumstances under Debian -- would that be accurate,
and if so, what exactly have you got working?

Right off the bat I think we're going to find out this
is a permissioning issue with your /dev/dsp device or
one of your other sound-related devices -- but let's
take it one step at a time and see if we can sort it
out.

Mark


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Re: how do I upgrade while I sleep?

[Mark Fletcher]

--- Mark Grieveson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Hi folks.  How do I upgrade while I sleep?  Or, more
 specifically, how 
 do I set it up so that all the questions about
 scripts that have been 
 changed, which are different from the package
 maintainers scripts, 
 asking if it should keep the current version, or
 install the new one, 
 blah blah blah the default is ... 
 Hell, what do I know?  I'm a desktop user who's too
 cheap to buy 
 Windows; so, I go with Linux (I am going to donate
 some cash SPI, 
 however).  So I always choose the default answer. 
 How can I set up my 
 upgrade from Sarge to Etch, to run while I'm
 sleeping, without it asking 
 me stupid questions that I don't give a shit about? 
 Just have it 
 upgrade, and not bother me, fer Christ's sake.  Aw,
 then I can just 
 sleep.  Blissful sleep.
 

If you're just a desktop user who's too cheap to buy
Windows (too intelligent to buy Windows is what I'd
have said), then Etch isn't for you. Not until it
becomes stable. Suggest you wait until it does at
which time the upgrade path will not ask you stupid
questions that you don't give a shit about.

 Also, is Etch now sane?  Last time I tried an
 upgrade, it gave me all 
 this crap about the new udev requiring a new kernel,
 but I couldn't 
 install the new kernel, because it required the new
 udev (I'm sure the 
 obvious catch-22 was a  practical joke played by
 some asshole -- I can't 
 imagine anyone actually making such a blatantly
 obvious, inane error 
 honestly).
 

Nope, it's not sane. Not in the way you mean. That's
pretty much the difference between stable and
testing. The Testing distro is really aimed at
people who want to get involved in helping with
testing the new release -- hence people who expect to
find problems and know how to solve them, or are at
least willing to figure it out. You've already stated
that isn't you, so my advice is stay with the stable
distro, and upgrade when Etch becomes stable. You
shouldn't feel in any way under-developed or behind
the curve in doing so -- I'm currently in the process
of trying to convince my wife there is an email
program out there other than Microsoft Outlook, and a
web browser other than IE -- so I also stick close to
the stable distro, since while I'm happy to experiment
she's not. Perfectly reasonable way to be.

Mark

 
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Re: Is it possible to simply copy the kernel from one machine to another and use it?

[Mark Fletcher]

--- anoop aryal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Friday 07 April 2006 02:39 pm, Yu,Glen [Ontario]
 wrote:
  Hello everyone,
 
  I was wondering if it's possible to copy the
 vmlinuz-x.y.z from one machine
  to another and have the other machine run properly
 with it.  Here's the
  scenario:
 
  I have 2 systems, both running Debian 3.1 (Sarge),
 and their hardware is a
  little different from each other.  Suppose my
 machine is running a 2.4.x
  kernel and the other a 2.6.x kernel, can I simply
 copy the
  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.x kernel over to my machine's
 /boot directory, make the
  appropriate changes to /boot/grub/menu.lst and
 have it work as if I had
  installed it through apt or dpkg?
 
  If anyone has actually tried this and got their
 machines to work, I would
  like to know what and how you did it.
 
 i am in the process of doing it to a machine where i
 had to use debootstrap to 
 install the system from an ide drive to a scsi drive
 (long story).
 
 it is pretty easy to get it to work as long as the
 root filesystem on both 
 machine reside on similar hardware
 (best-case/simplest-case scenario is both 
 machines use IDE  drives to boot). if that's the
 case, copy the kernel, the 
 modules directory (look in /lib/modules/), the
 initrd file and you should be 
 set.
 
 if the root fs resides on dissimilar hardware (eg.
 one has IDE and another 
 machine has SCSI or even different SCSI cards etc..)
 then you'll need to fix 
 your initrd to load the correct modules (or
 recompile the kernel to inline 
 all needed modules). while this is doable, it is
 slightly more complicated to 
 give a generic howto. google cramfs and initrd and
 you should find some 
 discussion on the subject.
 
 
 
  Thanks,
  -Glen
 
 

--
  Glen Yu | 416-739-4861 | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 

--
 
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 anoop aryal
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 
 
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Bear in mind if you do this, your target machine will
have to have hardware that's at least similar enough
to your source machine's hardware that the correct
drivers will be available, either compiled in as
modules or built into the kernel. If the kernel you
wish to copy is a stock kernel, then you are more
likely to get away with this on dissimilar hardware
than if you built your own -- but then if it's a stock
kernel, just dpkg it on the target machine!!!

Also your target machine will need to have the same or
better CPU to avoid CPU instruction-set assumptions in
the source kernel causing weird effects on the
lower-spec target machine.

If your hardware is wildly different then this is
going to be troublesome.

In general it's better to build your kernel on the
machine you intend to use it on, or at least on a
machine that's so close in spec it might as well be
the same machine. Failing that, use a stock kernel
that's been put together by Debian kernel packaging
folks who Know What They Are Doing (TM). These are
designed to run on a wide variety of hardware.

Assuming you're still set on doing it -- if it's a
stock kernel dpkg the .deb file on your target machine
instead of copying over. If it's not and you still
have the source tree you built the kernel from
originally, then use make-kpkg to build your kernel
image and modules into a .deb file on your source
machine and then dpkg THAT on the target machine. If
you don't still have the sources, you need to copy the
kernel image in /boot, and the modules for this kernel
from /etc, and you probably need to do something to
System.map in /boot as well but I'm not sure what
you'd need to do there. Best of luck...

Mark


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Re: What's the next step?

[Mark Fletcher]

--- Kevin Mark [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 09:22:34AM -0700, Rocky Ou
 wrote:
  Hey,
  
  I use netinst CD installed Debian Sarge 3.1
 successfully. I only installed
  base system no any other stuff. I can use SSH to
 connect to remote server.
  If you could give me some hints regarding to the
 following items, I would
  really appreciate it?
  
  
 1. Which package should I download so that I
 can  browse webpages as
 how I'm doing under Windows?  
 
 Hi Rocky,
 while is is great to use a window manager/gui
 desktop, you should really
 learn to use the full power of Gnu/Linux under the
 traditional console.
 You may not always have a X windows on a system due
 to confiurations
 problems, ocassional sys admin mistakes, upgrade
 problems and other
 issues. Thus, start by learning to browse the web
 with tools such as:
 w3m, lynx, links, links2 and wget. If you can get a
 framebuffer setup
 then use can use cool tools like links2, fbxine, 
 fbi to display
 graphics and video with out X windows installed.
 This is time well
 spent.
 
  This is very important as lots of webpages
 will give me how-to instructions. Do I use
 apt-get  x? Or something
 else?
 
   Debian has all of its documentation in
 /usr/share/doc/ and in
   its man pages. These are great to get familar with.
 You can also
   install 'apt-get install apt-howto' to get more
 info on apt-get.
 
 2. What about Desktop management? I think I can
 either use KDE or X
 servers right? Most likely I'm wrong. What I
 want is that I can open a
 terminal to enter commands not the old MS
 style, So that I can use Crt+tab
 to move betwen termialls?
 
 I regularly start at the console and use 'alt-right
 arrow' and 'alt-left
 arrow' to switch between the basic 6 console
 windows, no need to go to
 the desktop. But you can install a desktop with:
 apt-get install x-window-system gnome gdm 
 or
 apt-get install x-window-system kde kdm
 and there are other choises.
 
 3. Can I use apt utility to download CMS such
 as TYPO3? After
 downloading does all of the users can have
 access to it, I mean except root?
 If this is possible how can normal users do it?
 
 To find stuff use: apt-cache search KEYWORK
 'apt-cache search typo' should help
 
  
  
  As you see, I'm totally a newbie.  The relevant
 link is highly appreciated
  as well!
  
  Thanks a lot in advance!
 
 cheers,
 Kev
 -- 
 |  .''`.  == Debian GNU/Linux == |   my web
 site:   |
 | : :' :  The  Universal |
 debian.home.pipeline.com |
 | `. `'  Operating System| go to
 counter.li.org and |
 |   `-http://www.debian.org/ |be counted!
 #238656   |
 | my keysever: pgp.mit.edu   | my NPO:
 cfsg.org |
 

Notwithstanding everything Kevin said about getting to
grips with Linux directly before laying X on top,
which is all true -- you can get your Linux box to the
point where it's as useful / comfortable as your
Windows environment more quickly by doing the
following:

apt-get install kde kdm
(or apt-get install gnome gdm)
Kevin mentioned these, they will install KDE using the
KDM display manager or Gnome using the Gnome display
manager. KDE and Gnome are two competing windowing
environments for X, and X is, very roughly, Windows
for Linux (kinda sorta, massively over-simplifying,
before i get flamed for saying that!)

I don't think you need to separately install X itself
as I think apt-get will know to do that when you
install KDE or Gnome, but just in case you need it X
can be installed by doing

apt-get install x-window-system

(always assuming you are running Sarge, the stable
distribution of Debian. If you are running Etch
[testing] or Sid [unstable] you have other
options).

After installing that, unless you are very lucky you
will have to screw around a little to get the most out
of your graphics hardware under X, in which case see
you back on this list ;-).

Once you have X working fine, if you installed KDE you
will have a web browser called Konqueror. I'm sure
there's an equivalent under Gnome but I'm a KDE kinda
guy so I don't know the Gnome program. I used
Konqueror for a bit but found it to be a little bit
flaky -- tended to crash randomly on me. Good for
getting started though and has good integration with
browsing the file system -- like IE vs Windows
Explorer under Windows.

Instead, I now use Mozilla FireFox which you can get
by doing apt-get mozilla-firefox or by downloading and
installing the latest and greatest version from the
Firefox website.

So 
apt-get x-window-system[if you need it]
apt-get kde kdm[or gnome gdm or or or...]
apt-get mozilla-firefox

And you'll start having a more familiar-looking
sandpit to play in!

HTH

Mark


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Re: Why do people in the UK put a u in the word color?

[Mark Fletcher]

--- Manaen Schlabach [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:

 It doesn't have to be as long as packages and
 package descriptions
 spell color the right way ;-P

With a u, you mean, of course...

 
 On 4/11/06, Doofus [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  chris roddy wrote:
 
  
  Installing both text/wamerican-huge and
 text/wbritish-huge should shield
  the casual user against the effects of this
 issue.
  
 
  hmm... so it *was* a linux related question?  ;O)
 
 
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Re: trouble getting my wireless stuff to work

[Mark Fletcher]

--- David Parker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 - Original Message -From: tom arnall Date:
 Tuesday, April 11, 2006 6:02 pmSubject: trouble
 getting my wireless stuff to workTo:
 debian-user@lists.debian.org i am a linux newbie
 having trouble getting my wireless stuff to  work.
 i am  running debian on a toshiba satellite laptop.
 the wireless card  is a d-link  dwl-g650. i am
 looking for info on the latest debian methods for 
 dealing with  this technology.  thanks,  tom
 arnall north spit, ca   --  To UNSUBSCRIBE,
 email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]  with
 a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact 
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]Hello,I had great luck
 just a few days ago with ndiswrapper and
 wpa_supplicant.  I am now using a Linksys WPC54G
 wireless card with an old Acer laptop running Debian
 and it works just fine.  You will likely need to
 compile both of them, but it was very easy to do and
 once they were compiled, the instructions on their
 respective pages were very easy to follow. 
 ndiswrapper allows you to use the Windows driver for
 almost any device in Linux.  wpa_supplicant allows
 you to define connections that use

WPA.http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/   
 Good Luck,    Dave
 

Looks like whether or not there's a working Linux
driver for your wireless card depends on the hardware
revision of your particular card. For your card there
appear to be 3 revisions and only 1 (C1) is reported
to have a working native Linux driver. Check out this
link to help you figure out which revision you have:
http://support.dlink.com/products/DWLG650.asp

If you are lucky and have the C1 revision, use the
MadWiFi Linux driver. If not, try the Prism or Madwifi
drivers and if you can't get them to work, fall back
to the ndiswrapper approach -- but if at all possible
use a native Linux driver.

Once you've figured out if you have the C1 revision or
not, post back here if you need help with getting the
driver included in the kernel and other setup, or if
you need help with ndiswrapper.

HTH

Mark


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Re: trouble getting my wireless stuff to work

[Mark Fletcher]

--- tom arnall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 
  Looks like whether or not there's a working Linux
  driver for your wireless card depends on the
 hardware
  revision of your particular card. For your card
 there
  appear to be 3 revisions and only 1 (C1) is
 reported
  to have a working native Linux driver. Check out
 this
  link to help you figure out which revision you
 have:
  http://support.dlink.com/products/DWLG650.asp
 
  If you are lucky and have the C1 revision, use the
  MadWiFi Linux driver. If not, try the Prism or
 Madwifi
  drivers and if you can't get them to work, fall
 back
  to the ndiswrapper approach -- but if at all
 possible
  use a native Linux driver.
 
  Once you've figured out if you have the C1
 revision or
  not, post back here if you need help with getting
 the
  driver included in the kernel and other setup, or
 if
  you need help with ndiswrapper.
 
  HTH
 
  Mark
 
 
 indeed, i could use some help setting up the madwifi
 driver. specifically, in 
 the error output from the compiler: 

OK let me look into this and get back to you. 

Mark

 
   make[2]: Entering directory
 `/usr/src/kernel-headers-2.6.8-2-386'
 CC [M] 
 /home/kloro/linux/madwifi-ng/ath_hal/ah_osdep.o
   In file included from include/asm/thread_info.h:16,
 from
 include/linux/thread_info.h:21,
 from include/linux/spinlock.h:12,
 from
 include/linux/capability.h:45,
 from include/linux/sched.h:7,
 from include/linux/module.h:10,
 from
 /home/kloro/linux/madwifi-ng/ath_hal/ah_osdep.c:46:
   include/asm/processor.h:93: error: array type has
 incomplete element type
   make[3]: ***
 [/home/kloro/linux/madwifi-ng/ath_hal/ah_osdep.o]
 Error 1
   make[2]: ***
 [_module_/home/kloro/linux/madwifi-ng/ath_hal] Error
 2
   make[2]: Leaving directory
 `/usr/src/kernel-headers-2.6.8-2-386'
   make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
   make[1]: Leaving directory
 `/home/kloro/linux/madwifi-ng/ath_hal'
   make: *** [modules] Error 1
 
 the line 'include/asm/processor.h:93: error: array
 type has incomplete element 
 type' refers to the following bit of code in
 'processor.h':
 
   extern struct tss_struct init_tss[NR_CPUS];
 
 i did further research which seems to indicate that
 version 4 of the gcc 
 compiler doesn't like declarations of the form:
 
   extern struct foobar array[];
   
 but wants to see instead the form:
   
   extern struct foobar *array;
   
 but i don't know enough about gcc to determine if
 indeed this kind of problem 
 is the problem with the declaration in
 'processor.h'. and if it is, how does 
 the principle apply to the declaration in
 'processor.h'? i.e., wtf do i need 
 to change in the header file? further, i cannot find
 on the internet anything 
 like a comprehensive list of gcc error messages.
 
 thanks in advance for your ideas,
 
 tom arnall
 north spit, ca
 
 
 
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Re: Alsamixer: no master volume

[Mark Fletcher]

--- Benjam$B!(BVilloslada [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:

 Hello,
 
 The master volume control doesn't appears in
 alsamixer.  I only see
 
 - Headphones
 - PCM
 - Capture
 - Input So
 - Mux
 
 I can ear sound.  In kmixer I can modify the volume
 with the heaphones slicer, 
 but in programs such as XMMS your volume control
 doesn't works.  Kradio 
 doesn't works (log says 
 $B%)(BAlsaSound::readPlaybackMixerVolume: error
while 
 reading volume from hwplug:0,0$B%5(B).
 
 Some experience with this volume issue?  Thanks :)
 

Sounds like a variant of a common problem on some
hardware where the master volume and headphone volume
settings are swapped. Intel cards, especially modules
built-in to motherboards, seem to be prone to it.

You might want to take a look at the possible module
options for your alsa driver -- there might be a
combination of options that solve this for you and
make it behave the way it's supposed to.

HTH

Mark


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Odd mouse behaviour under Sarge / KDE

[Mark Fletcher]

I'm running a dual boot Windoze XP / sarge updated with all latest 
security updates, and a custom-built 2.6.15.4 kernel from kernel.org.


Under sarge I'm running KDE. While using KDE I occasionally notice the 
mouse pointer suddenly jumping around the screen in a manner bearing no 
relation to the actual movements of the mouse I'm making, and responding 
to mouse clicks I didn't make. The mouse is a 3-button wheel mouse with 
a PS/2 style connector.


Doing a dmesg, I notice this in the log when it happens:
psmouse.c: Wheel Mouse at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost synchronization, 
throwing 3 bytes away.


When it happens, if I take my hand off the mouse and just sit there for 
a few seconds, during which time nothing happens on the screen at all, I 
can then start using the mouse normally again. For a while until it 
happens again.


This happens a couple of times an hour on average I'd say. I am not 
noticing any obvious trend like it happening more often the longer the 
machine's been up or anything like that.


I don't see behaviour like this under Windows.

That error message quoted above looks like something in the kernel 
complaining. I have support for a PS/2 mouse compiled into the kernel.


In the meantime, my X config (XF86Config-4 -- I'm still on XFree86) 
relating to mice is as follows:

Section InputDevice
   Identifier  Mouse0
   Driver  mouse
   Option  CorePointer
   Option  Protocol imPS/2
   Option  Device /dev/psaux
   Option  Emulate3Buttons   true
   Option  ZAxisMapping  4 5
EndSection

Am I being punished by the boffins above for using a post-stable 
kernel with stable X? And if so how can I sort it out? Or is something 
else going on?


Mark


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Re: trouble getting my wireless stuff to work

[Mark Fletcher]

Mark Fletcher wrote:


--- tom arnall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 


Looks like whether or not there's a working Linux
driver for your wireless card depends on the
 


hardware
   


revision of your particular card. For your card
 


there
   


appear to be 3 revisions and only 1 (C1) is
 


reported
   


to have a working native Linux driver. Check out
 


this
   


link to help you figure out which revision you
 


have:
   


http://support.dlink.com/products/DWLG650.asp

If you are lucky and have the C1 revision, use the
MadWiFi Linux driver. If not, try the Prism or
 


Madwifi
   


drivers and if you can't get them to work, fall
 


back
   


to the ndiswrapper approach -- but if at all
 


possible
   


use a native Linux driver.

Once you've figured out if you have the C1
 


revision or
   


not, post back here if you need help with getting
 


the
   


driver included in the kernel and other setup, or
 


if
   


you need help with ndiswrapper.

HTH

Mark
 


indeed, i could use some help setting up the madwifi
driver. specifically, in 
the error output from the compiler: 
   



OK let me look into this and get back to you. 


Mark
 

I haven't made much headway with this, other than there does seem to be 
a change between the sarge gcc and the etch / sid gcc in this area.


Since I'm running sarge I can't immediately try it myself.

One idea though -- given the level of support and Debian-friendliness 
I've found from the last few days' googling for Madwifi, I'd be stunned 
if the guys who put this driver together would deliver something that 
wouldn't work with etch or sid (the usual disclaimers about testing and 
unstable notwithstanding). Especially given that the available packages 
are in /unstable and as such are targetting sid...


There's a sarge-friendly version out there I noticed from my googling -- 
where did you get the version of the driver you are trying to compile? 
Is there any chance you've picked up a sarge version of the driver and 
are trying to compile it under etch or sid?


Just a thought...

Mark


 


make[2]: Entering directory
`/usr/src/kernel-headers-2.6.8-2-386'
	  CC [M] 
/home/kloro/linux/madwifi-ng/ath_hal/ah_osdep.o

In file included from include/asm/thread_info.h:16,
  from
include/linux/thread_info.h:21,
  from include/linux/spinlock.h:12,
  from
include/linux/capability.h:45,
  from include/linux/sched.h:7,
  from include/linux/module.h:10,
  from
/home/kloro/linux/madwifi-ng/ath_hal/ah_osdep.c:46:
include/asm/processor.h:93: error: array type has
incomplete element type
make[3]: ***
[/home/kloro/linux/madwifi-ng/ath_hal/ah_osdep.o]
Error 1
make[2]: ***
[_module_/home/kloro/linux/madwifi-ng/ath_hal] Error
2
make[2]: Leaving directory
`/usr/src/kernel-headers-2.6.8-2-386'
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory
`/home/kloro/linux/madwifi-ng/ath_hal'
make: *** [modules] Error 1

the line 'include/asm/processor.h:93: error: array
type has incomplete element 
type' refers to the following bit of code in

'processor.h':

extern struct tss_struct init_tss[NR_CPUS];

i did further research which seems to indicate that
version 4 of the gcc 
compiler doesn't like declarations of the form:


extern struct foobar array[];

but wants to see instead the form:

extern struct foobar *array;

but i don't know enough about gcc to determine if
indeed this kind of problem 
is the problem with the declaration in
'processor.h'. and if it is, how does 
the principle apply to the declaration in
'processor.h'? i.e., wtf do i need 
to change in the header file? further, i cannot find
on the internet anything 
like a comprehensive list of gcc error messages.


thanks in advance for your ideas,

tom arnall
north spit, ca



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Re: trouble getting my wireless stuff to work

[Mark Fletcher]

Chris Lale wrote:


tom arnall wrote:

i am a linux newbie having trouble getting my wireless stuff to work. 
i am running debian on a toshiba satellite laptop. the wireless card 
is a d-link dwl-g650. i am looking for info on the latest debian 
methods for dealing with this technology.
 

Look at 
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/InstallDebianSarge. 
Should also work fine for Etch/Sid.


Chris.


He's not on sarge, he's on etch (Testing). And his card doesn't need 
ndiswrapper, there's a native Linux driver for it (madwifi). The problem 
is that for some reason he can't get it to compile using etch's gcc.


Tom (Original Poster) -- I suggest you post a question to the home site 
of the Madwifi driver and ask if there's a different version for etch. 
They are very debian-friendly there so they'll know what you are talking 
about. If you tell them what version of gcc you are using and explain 
where you got the driver source from, they'll probably be able to help 
you out very quickly. Sorry I couldn't be more help. If you get this 
sorted -- please let me know what the solution was in the end.


Also, it might be worth a look at this: 
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/12/msg00477.html


Thanks

Mark


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Re: Odd mouse behaviour under Sarge / KDE

[Mark Fletcher]

Adam Hardy wrote:


Mark Fletcher on 15/04/06 05:46, wrote:

Under sarge I'm running KDE. While using KDE I occasionally notice 
the mouse pointer suddenly jumping around the screen in a manner 
bearing no relation to the actual movements of the mouse I'm making, 
and responding to mouse clicks I didn't make. The mouse is a 3-button 
wheel mouse with a PS/2 style connector.


Doing a dmesg, I notice this in the log when it happens:
psmouse.c: Wheel Mouse at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost synchronization, 
throwing 3 bytes away.


When it happens, if I take my hand off the mouse and just sit there 
for a few seconds, during which time nothing happens on the screen at 
all, I can then start using the mouse normally again. For a while 
until it happens again.


This happens a couple of times an hour on average I'd say. I am not 
noticing any obvious trend like it happening more often the longer 
the machine's been up or anything like that.


I don't see behaviour like this under Windows.

That error message quoted above looks like something in the kernel 
complaining. I have support for a PS/2 mouse compiled into the kernel.


In the meantime, my X config (XF86Config-4 -- I'm still on XFree86) 
relating to mice is as follows:

Section InputDevice
   Identifier  Mouse0
   Driver  mouse
   Option  CorePointer
   Option  Protocol imPS/2
   Option  Device /dev/psaux
   Option  Emulate3Buttons   true
   Option  ZAxisMapping  4 5
EndSection




That is exactly what I see, but it only happens to me when I swap 
screens with my KVM switch.



It sounds like something just doesn't make the grade in terms of 
performance. You could try this protocol which I use for a 3 button 
wheel mouse:


Option  Protocol  ExplorerPS/2

You may need to upgrade hotplug if you are still using it, or udev, or 
both. But I had bad experiences upgrading udev just now, so I'd 
recommend waiting a couple of months before trying that approach. And 
I'm using 2.6.16.3 which is stabler than what you have.


Adam



Thanks Adam I'll try that protocol.

Mark


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Re: Hardware or software?

[Mark Fletcher]

--- Antonio Rodriguez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 06:12:40AM -0400, Antonio
 Rodriguez wrote:
  How do I determine if the reason for the kernel
 not handling well
  my card reader and usb ports is hardware failure?
  Before buying a new piece of hardware, I would
 like to know the
  answer to this, but I am not sure how to do it.
  
 
 Would knoppix be a good solution (works, doesnt
 work)?
 
 
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Yeah in general if you want to separate kernel
problems from hardware problems the simplest way to do
so is to remove the kernel from the equation, ie test
on another OS / in another machine.

Assuming you don't have easy access to another machine
try a different OS. You could try knoppix as suggested
or even (at the risk of getting flamed from all sides)
a M$ product if the machine in question is dual-boot.
At the end of the day if you can get it working under
some other conditions, you can pretty safely (not,
strictly speaking, 100% but in near as dammit all
cases) say it's not hardware.

Or, you could post details of the kernel you are
using, and the config details of the kernel if you
built your own kernel from source, and someone on this
list may by luck have similar hardware and be able to
help you out.

Mark


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Re: Upgraded kernels, now eth0 and framebuffer are gone

[Mark Fletcher]

M Carlock wrote:


I recently upgraded from woody to sarge per the
instructions (aptitude etc), which was successful.

However, after then upgrading the kernel from
2.2.20-idepci to 2.6.8-2-386, I found I could boot OK,
but I'd lost eth0 and the ATI framebuffer.

lspci can see both devices, but I'm at a loss as to
how to make the kernel see them again.

modprobe eth1349 seems to work OK.  modprobe eth16i
fails, no hardware found.  The card is a 3c905.

This must be a common question, but after a fair
amount of googling I haven't been able to spot an answer.



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Did you use a stock kernel or did you build your own? If you built your
own, let's be having your .config file. If you used the stock kernel, it
probably ought to be working but anyway  pls post your lsmod and dmesg
output. What I'm looking for is evidence of what net drivers it tried to
load. If it can't find your network card now either the right driver is
missing or else a dependency has crept in (classic example -- Intel
EtherExpress cards using the original driver now need an extra source
module called pci-scan which isn't in the kernel source tree...)

As someone else pointed out in this thread, a possibility is that the
module name has changed. If the driver was being loaded as a module
before and you had it set up in /etc/modules to load on startup, and now
the module isn't there because its name has changed, the kernel could be
failing to load the module. What we need to do in that case is find out
what the module is called now and check it's in /etc/modules -- then a
reboot might fix the problem.

Mark


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Re: Upgraded kernels, now eth0 and framebuffer are gone

[Mark Fletcher]

Mark Fletcher wrote:


M Carlock wrote:


I recently upgraded from woody to sarge per the
instructions (aptitude etc), which was successful.

However, after then upgrading the kernel from
2.2.20-idepci to 2.6.8-2-386, I found I could boot OK,
but I'd lost eth0 and the ATI framebuffer.

lspci can see both devices, but I'm at a loss as to
how to make the kernel see them again.

modprobe eth1349 seems to work OK.  modprobe eth16i
fails, no hardware found.  The card is a 3c905.

This must be a common question, but after a fair
amount of googling I haven't been able to spot an answer.


   
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you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! 
Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com



 


Did you use a stock kernel or did you build your own? If you built your
own, let's be having your .config file. If you used the stock kernel, it
probably ought to be working but anyway  pls post your lsmod and dmesg
output. What I'm looking for is evidence of what net drivers it tried to
load. If it can't find your network card now either the right driver is
missing or else a dependency has crept in (classic example -- Intel
EtherExpress cards using the original driver now need an extra source
module called pci-scan which isn't in the kernel source tree...)

As someone else pointed out in this thread, a possibility is that the
module name has changed. If the driver was being loaded as a module
before and you had it set up in /etc/modules to load on startup, and now
the module isn't there because its name has changed, the kernel could be
failing to load the module. What we need to do in that case is find out
what the module is called now and check it's in /etc/modules -- then a
reboot might fix the problem.

Mark


Just poked around in the 2.6 kernel source -- the driver you want is 
3c90x. Quickest way out of your predicament for your network card should 
be to add a line saying 3c90x to /etc/modules (you need to be root to do 
this) and then reboot. When editing /etc/modules (note I do NOT  mean 
modules.conf here) you might as well go ahead and comment out (using #) 
any other drivers that are obviously network drivers (except mii if it's 
listed) -- but if unsure, leave it alone. When your machine comes back 
up your network card should be working.


It's possible to do this without a reboot -- it would involve modprobe 
3c90x as root and then stopping and restarting network services -- but 
I'm assuming if networking is bejiggered you have no remote users so 
rebooting the machine isn't a big hassle...


Mark


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Re: why upgrade kernel?

[Mark Fletcher]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


On Thursday 18 August 2005 11:50 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 


I have a couple of machines which I'm in the process of upgrading to
Sarge.  I'm wondering about whether to upgrade the kernels.  They're
all running some version of 2.4, which I've built for the particular
machines.  If I don't get new hardware which need newer drivers, and I
don't care about any of the fancy new features of 2.6 (whatever those
are), is there any benefit in upgrading the kernel?  Will newer
versions of some packages eventually need a newer kernel?

Thanks in advance for any opinions.

-David


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[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 

   


David,

Wow, this is a sensitive question and my response is heavily opinionated, as 
many answers to this question may be.  I think a person in your situation 
really needs to figure out their needs from the systems the operate, which 
you obviously have.  Let me qualify my response first with saying that I am 
currently running 2.4.27-2 but will be upgrading/recompiling my kernel today.  
I am learning towards staying with the 2.4 if I can get my webcam to work.


They're all running some version of 2.4, which I've built for the particular
 


machines.  If I don't get new hardware which need newer drivers, and I
don't care about any of the fancy new features of 2.6 (whatever those
are), is there any benefit in upgrading the kernel?
   



Exactly.  Since 2.4 and 2.6 kernels are both currently supported, and you 
don't need any new fangled features in the 2.6 kernel...you'll probably best 
be suited staying with 2.4.  Why do I say this?

- Don't fix what isn't broken
	- You will need to reconfig your kernel without use of a previous .config 
	file between 2.4 and 2.6.  

Not true. When I upgraded from 2.4.19 to 2.6.12.2, I copied over my 
.config and then re-ran make xconfig to tweak anything that was new / 
changed. Of course, I got error messages about missing options, but the 
window came up with everything available anyway and all the things that 
_hadn't_ changed were automatically selected for me. Configuring the 2.6 
kernel was thus much easier than configuring the 2.4 kernel had been (I 
did the 2.4 kernel from scratch because my pre-2.4 kernel was the 
2.2.22idepci kernel that came with the distro when I installed it).



Not too big a deal, but with the new options you 
	have to (should) go through each menu and make the right selections.
	- Going of the last, you should continue to upgrade within the 2.4 kernel 
	series, for however long it is supported.  Using your existing .config file 
	will save time and headaches!  Upgrading your kernel within the series, of 
	course, keeps you current on security issues and other system related 
	'upgrades' (the problem with SCSI-emulation comes to mind).
	- As a previous Hardened Debian programmer told me not too long ago, the 2.6 
	kernel is suffering from expansion issues.  I see his point.  There are lots 
	of programmers doing lots of things to the 2.6 kernel right now, inviting 
	security issues that are inherent in new software.


 


Will newer versions of some packages eventually need a newer kernel?
   



Perhaps  (again, mention the SCSI-emulation).  I wouldn't worry about it right 
now.  Since both kernels are supported, I would stay with what you need.  2.6 
isn't the devil or anything, and I would upgrade to it in a heartbeat if I 
determined that is what I needed.  First I need to do some research to see my 
hardware dependencies before I can make an informed decision.  I respect that 
you did the same before asking the question.


Hope this helps.

Respectfully,

Steve Siebert


 

Since I've now weighed in on this topic, let me state my position -- 
upgrade unless you have a good reason not to. Having no immediate need 
to and being concerned about downtime may or may not be a good reason 
not to upgrade depending on your situation and the criticality of the 
machine / machines in question.


You will probably find performance improvements with the 2.6 kernel 
since, for example, an O(1) scheduler has been introduced in the 2.6 
kernel which means that, no matter how loaded up with potentially 
runnable processes your machine gets, the time taken by the scheduler to 
make a decision about what process to run next is constant. This is a 
significant benefit over the 2.4 and earlier kernels, where the time 
taken to make the decision was a function of the number of runnable 
processes in the system. If you really put your machines to work, this 
can make a noticeable difference to the responsiveness of the machine.


There are a lot of improvements in the 2.6 kernel -- another is improved 
ALSA drivers for sound -- OSS is still supported but the ALSA drivers 
are generally considered better. I could go on but others are no doubt 
better qualified to do so.


Mark


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(SLIGHTLY OT): PC speaker not working with 2.6.12.2 kernel

[Mark Fletcher]

I have a small problem after compiling a 2.6.12.2 kernel 
(current stable kernel release at kernel.org as I 
type). I didn't install a Debian packaged kernel source 
because the latest stable Debian package was 2.6.8 and 
I fancied something more recent.

Appreciate this is a debian list and so some of you may 
think I'm taking liberties a bit asking this question 
here, but my experience is you're a bunch of helpful 
chaps so here's hoping. 

I have a recently-upgraded sarge installation (upgraded 
from woody) and have until now been running a 2.4.19 
kernel built from the debian package of the source. 
Everything works pretty much as it should under the 
2.4.19 kernel.

I built the 2.6.12.2 kernel by copying over the .config 
from 2.4.19 and using make xconfig to tweak the 
settings. I use make-kpkg to compile and make the .deb 
file and dpkg to install it. That all goes according to 
plan.

However, under my new kernel the PC speaker (which I use 
only for beeping me when mail arrives, when I hit tab 
in a shell and haven't typed enough to uniquely 
identify a file etc) isn't working (no beeps).

I'm guessing there's a kernel option under 2.6 that's 
needed to turn the beeper on but wasn't required under 
2.4. Can anyone point me at it?

Note I'm NOT trying to use the PC speaker as a sound 
card, I know there are folks out there who do that but 
I have a perfectly good sound card with perfectly good 
speakers, all I want from the PC speaker is the odd 
beep at appropriate moments...

Cheers

Mark


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Re: What file to add command to start at bootime

[Mark Fletcher]

On Monday 04 July 2005 03:42, Cao Van Khanh wrote:
 I have some script and would like to run it at boot
 time . I could not find how to do that in debian . In
 redhat I could add to /etc/rc.d . How to make it in
 debian ?
 Thank for reading

Under debian the rc?.d directories are split out by 
runlevel. Runlevel 0 is shut-down, runlevel 1 is single 
user and runlevels 2-5 can be used for normal setups. 
Debian at installation appears to put everything else 
at runlevel 2 and shoot for a runlevel 2 once up and 
running. SuSE certainly used to spread things out much 
more amongst the runlevels at installation out of the 
box; haven't looked at it for a few years so I don't 
know if it still does.

Anyway, if you have a fairly vanilla setup and you want 
this always to run at boot, I suggest you put the 
script in rc2.d and name it Snumberscriptname. The 
number affects the order it gets run in. I _think_ the 
number has to be 2 digits. 

If your script starts a service of some kind, then you 
should but a script to shut it down, following the 
convention Knumberscriptname, in either / both of 
rc0.d and rc1.d (rc1.d if this service should not run 
in single user mode).

The number after the K again sets the order; services 
should as far as practical be stopped in the reverse 
order they are started in.

Hope that helps.

Mark


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Re: About Debian patch kernel packages.

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sunday 03 July 2005 05:13, Jansen Carlo Sena wrote:
 Hi friends,

 I need to apply the grsecurity patch and compile a
 new kernel for a server. In this server, I am using a
 kernel image from the 2.6.8 version. Then, I
 downloaded both the kernel-source-2.6.8 package and
 the kernel-patch-grsecurity2.

 But I am not able to apply the kernel patch because
 in the kernel-patch-grsecurity2 package there are not
 any diff files to kernel 2.6.8, just for other
 versions like 2.6.11, 2.6.10 and 2.6.7.

 What do I want to do to resolve this problem?!

 Can anyone help me, please?!

 Regards,

 Jansen

Ummm, well you could download the incremental patches 
from kernel.org to get you from 2.6.8 to 2.6.10 (would 
need at least 2 and possibly more if there were 
sub-versions), apply those patches to your source tree 
and then apply the security patch... But of course the 
problem with that is then you have a security-patched 
2.6.10 kernel not a security-patched 2.6.8 kernel...

Best I can offer though -- anyone got a better idea?

Mark


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Re: (SLIGHTLY OT): PC speaker not working with 2.6.12.2 kernel

[Mark Fletcher]

On Monday 04 July 2005 01:40, Cláudio E. Elicker wrote:
 On Sunday 03 July 2005 12:02, Mark Fletcher wrote:
  However, under my new kernel the PC speaker (which
  I use only for beeping me when mail arrives, when I
  hit tab in a shell and haven't typed enough to
  uniquely identify a file etc) isn't working (no
  beeps).
 
  I'm guessing there's a kernel option under 2.6
  that's needed to turn the beeper on but wasn't
  required under 2.4. Can anyone point me at it?
 
  Note I'm NOT trying to use the PC speaker as a
  sound card, I know there are folks out there who do
  that but I have a perfectly good sound card with
  perfectly good speakers, all I want from the PC
  speaker is the odd beep at appropriate moments...
 
  Cheers
 
  Mark

 Try
 modprobe pcspkr

 []'s
 Cláudio

Woah, now I feel stupid -- modprobe pcspkr and lo and 
behold my machine is beeping away like it's going out 
of fashion. So I compiled the PC speaker driver as a 
module then didn't load the module. Duh...

Thanks

Mark

Re: should etch be Debian 4.0 ?

[Mark Fletcher]

On Saturday 09 July 2005 23:56, Johan Kullstam wrote:
 Santiago Vila [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
  On Sat, 9 Jul 2005, Nigel Jones wrote:
   On 08/07/05, Steve Langasek [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
wrote:
On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 11:57:25AM +1000, Drew 
Parsons wrote:
 I'm already seeing documentation referring to
 Debian 3.2 (etch).
   
Where is this?  It's certainly wrong for
documentation to make assumptions about the
release version number at this point, and is
the kind of thing that makes it harder to
change later.
   
And after all, isn't the point of codenames to
avoid third-parties incorrectly attaching a
version number to a not-yet-released version?
  
   http://ru.wikibooks.org/wiki/LOR-FAQ-Debian seems
   to be saying Etch is 3.2 Also
   http://www.computerbase.de/lexikon/Debian seems
   to be saying the same. (Got these from a google
   search of etch 3.2 debian (page 8 onwards)).
 
  Those references should be changed, then. It's
  *not* ok to refer to etch as Debian 3.2, as the
  version number for etch has not been decided yet.

 Why the mystery?

 What message is being transmitted by calling it 3.2
 versus 4.0?

 If there is no message, why the distinction?

 So what we have now is current version of debian is
 N.K with next version of debian being N.{K+1} or
 {N+1}.K according to some inscrutible random variable
 dependent upon the phase of the moon and other
 chaotic factors.

 The only effect as far as I can see is to cause
 confusion about the version number of the next
 release.

 I suspect some sort of Schödinger's cat experiment
 where the next version number is in some sort of
 half-incremented half-not-incremented superposition
 state.

 Does this state of affairs actually help anyone? 
 ANYONE?

Erm, OK. Coming back to earth for a second, I think the 
reason why some people object to a version number being 
attached to etch is because of the stage of its life 
that it's at, it could be argued not to be an official 
release yet. (Pardon me, has it even made it to 
testing yet?). 

Refraining from giving early-stage upcoming versions of 
software an official version number until it gets to a 
certain stage of maturity is pretty common practice in 
largescale software development. And it doesn't get a 
lot more large scale than a worldwide open source 
project.

Mark

Re: should etch be Debian 4.0 ?

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sunday 10 July 2005 21:55, Joris Huizer wrote:
 Johan Kullstam wrote:
  Let me see if I understand you correctly.  Your
  reason for having the ambiguity of wether to call
  it 3.2 or 4.0 is just to keep people from assigning
  etch a number?

 I think this is quite logical, as there is some
 structure in those numbers - 4.0 means a big leap,
 3.2 means smaller  change; nobody can tell right
 now how big the step is from sarge to etch, as it's
 development has just started
 ofcourse, it's just up to the debian development team
 to decide wether the changes are big enough to call
 it 4.0 (anyone know why sarge became 3.1?)

 just some thoughts

 Joris

I'd add that it's not deliberate ambiguity as a means to 
any particular end, so much as it not being an 
appropriate stage of the development of etch for the 
decision to be made if a major or minor version upgrade 
is appropriate. This does matter; this list wouldn't 
take long to hear from a whole tribe of people with 
nothing better to do than complain about unimportant 
things if they decided it was to be 3.2 now and then it 
turned out that the changes were massive and the 
upgrade path difficult... likewise if they decided 4.0 
now and then it turned out the changes were small and 
relatively minor .

Mark


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Re: Questions about sis7012+snd_intel8x0 sound card problem

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sunday 10 July 2005 13:01, Trace Green wrote:
 Hi, all

 My sound card is SiS7012 integrated, vendor and
 device id is 1039:7012. I tried to use alsaconf to
 config my sound card, it loads snd_intel8x0.

 But i cann't hear any sound, when i use alsamixer to
 check, i find pcm and master channel is just 0, i
 can't change the value of them. of course, it is not
 muted.

 This seems an old problem, i tried to find the answer
 in google, fail

 Anyideas?

amixer (the mixer problem for ALSA) should just 
work (TM)

But if it's not, I do have a few ideas.

It's possible you are successfully setting the volume of 
some part of the card, but not of the part of your card 
you think you are. Some cards driven by the 
snd-intel8x0 driver have a quirk which means that the 
surround volume control and the master volume control 
(if you have surround sound) or the headphone volume 
and the master volume control, are swapped. I'm not 
totally sure of the details but my reading of the 
documentation suggests the _pins are wired into the 
board the wrong way round ()_ on some boards... The 
driver claims to be able to detect this in some cases 
and compensate for it -- but my board, which is 
different to yours, is an example of one it doesn't.

Try using amixer to unmute and set the volume of your 
card (you may possibly have to be root to do this, I 
don't on my machine but I'm not sure if that's 
universal).

amixer set Headphone 50 unmute

This will unmute the Headphone setting and 
simultaneously set the volume to 50 (either 50 on a 
scale of 1 to something or 50%, not sure what controls 
which it does, either way 50 should be audible).

If you don't have amixer on your machine, apt-get 
alsa-utils first then you will.

Then you can use aplay sound file to check your sound 
is working. amixer set Master 50 should also set master 
volume, amixer set pcm 100 to set PCM to 100% (then 
control actual volume with either Master or Headphone 
setting)

One caveat -- I'm not sure if the settings are 
driver-dependent or card-dependent. My money is on 
driver-dependent but I've been wrong before (back in 
2002 sometime I think... just kidding). Anyway, 
amixer's set commands are CASE SENSITIVE so first do:

amixer | grep 'Simple mixer'

and that'll give you a list of mixer settings you can 
change. Then be sure to use the setting EXACTLY AS IT 
APPEARS. For example my master volume is 'Master' so I 
can change my volume with:

amixer set Master 50

for example. Actually I use amixer set Headphone 50 
since my card has the Headphone / Master Swapped 
problem and I haven't fixed it yet.

Headphone will probably be muted unless you've unmuted 
it. Actually, on my board ALL the settings using ALSA 
were muted until I unmuted them -- even though I'd been 
successfully playing sounds using OSS under a 2.4 
kernel until I upgraded to 2.6 and ALSA.

Summary:

Make sure you are using amixer
Make sure you really have unmuted the mixer settings -- 
it says off if muted and on if not.
use amixer set Master|Headphone|pcm number mute|
unmute to change settings
Test with aplay
Consider the possibility that your Headphone and Master 
settings are swapped if none of the above solves your 
problem.

The driver claims it can be forced to swap settings so 
Master does what it says it does using module options, 
but I haven't got that working yet.

(Info about the quirk involving master / headphone 
swap came from kernel source 
dir/Documentation/sound/ALSA Configuration.txt -- 
search that file for the word intel.

Mark


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Re: Sound and Video Problems still with my T3985 Desktop PC

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sunday 10 July 2005 06:44, Xeno Campanoli wrote:
 Okay, it has been over a week since I had time to
 work on this.  Please accept my apologies, but I've
 been busy.  The previous title was:

 Re: [Fwd: Re: Sound problem:  apparently I don't have
 the alsa modules   up yet after all

 among others.

 I'm going to systematically recapitulate for myself,
 and sharing, the settings I have achieved so far for
 sound (the video problem is one of blurring digits,
 and I'll get to that later if I have time).

 joehill:~# lspci
 :00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82865G/PE/P
 DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 02)
 :00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp.
 82865G Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
 :00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER
 (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02) :00:1d.1 USB
 Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB
 UHCI #2 (rev 02) :00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel
 Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
 :00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER
 (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02) :00:1d.7 USB
 Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB2
 EHCI Controller (rev 02) :00:1e.0 PCI bridge:
 Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge (rev c2) :00:1f.0
 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) LPC
 Bridge (rev 02) :00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel
 Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) Ultra ATA 100 Storage
 Controller (rev 02) :00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel
 Corp. 82801EB (ICH5) Serial ATA 150 Storage
 Controller (rev 02) :00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp.
 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
 :00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp.
 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev
 02) :01:02.0 Communication controller: Conexant:
 Unknown device 2f20 :01:08.0 Ethernet controller:
 Intel Corp. 82562EZ 10/100 Ethernet Controller (rev
 02) joehill:~# lsmod
 Module  Size  Used byNot tainted
 snd-intel8x0   19584   1
 snd-ac97-codec 59576   0  [snd-intel8x0]
 snd-pcm-oss38176   0
 snd-mixer-oss  13432   1  [snd-pcm-oss]
 snd-pcm59272   0  [snd-intel8x0
 snd-ac97-codec snd-pcm-oss] snd-timer 
 14148   0  [snd-pcm]
 snd34276   0  [snd-intel8x0
 snd-ac97-codec snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-pcm
 snd-timer] soundcore   3940   4  [snd]
 snd-page-alloc  4936   0  [snd-intel8x0
 snd-mixer-oss snd-pcm snd-timer snd] input   
3648   0  (autoclean) i830  
 68476   1
 agpgart46244  10  (autoclean)
 apm 9964   0  (autoclean)
 parport_pc 23880   1  (autoclean)
 lp  6724   0  (autoclean)
 parport26504   1  (autoclean)
 [parport_pc lp] af_packet  13000   1 
 (autoclean) usb-storage65088   0 
 (unused)
 e100   50036   1
 ehci-hcd   18412   0  (unused)
 usb-uhci   23344   0  (unused)
 usbcore62924   1  [usb-storage
 ehci-hcd usb-uhci] sd_mod 11756   0 
 (unused)
 scsi_mod   95108   2  [usb-storage
 sd_mod] ide-cd 31296   0
 cdrom  29828   0  [ide-cd]
 rtc 6440   0  (autoclean)
 ext3   81068   5  (autoclean)
 jbd42468   5  (autoclean) [ext3]
 ide-detect   288   0  (autoclean)
 (unused) piix9096   2 
 (autoclean) ide-disk   16800   6 
 (autoclean) ide-core  108568   6 
 (autoclean) [usb-storage ide-cd ide-detect piix
 ide-disk] unix   14960 218 
 (autoclean)

 Okay, as before the symptom is I can play the songs
 on a Duke Ellington CD, but the tracks show playing
 with no actual sound coming out.  The program I'm
 using is CD Player under Multimedia under the
 Applications pulldown.  We determined previously that
 no cables were obviously connected badly (I have a
 green sound cable going into the appropriately
 labeled line out green plug in the back of the
 machine, and you'll see by the specs on the net
 (http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:9PkH8iJNtvQJ:www.
cyberscholar.com/eMachines/doc/spring05_3985_SF.pdf+T3
985+Desktop+PC+hl=en) that the thing has on-board
 sound and the bios has this enabled (just checke
 again).  My friend Bill Warner suggested these
 problems may happen from some kind of conflict with
 the video driver, and that my problems might be best
 solved if I install Sid (test) instead of sarge, but
 I'd like to have sarge going because I want to use
 the system to help QA web stuff from my work.

 Finally, I will review below as I go through my setup
 steps from this instruct- ions page
 (http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/alsa.html#sargestoc
k) I immediately see that I do not have an
 /etc/modules directory, so that must have changed in
 mid-sarge, presumably.  I see the string
 snd-intel8x0 in 

Re: [Bulk] Re: Sound and Video Problems still with my T3985 Desktop PC

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sunday 10 July 2005 09:12, Xeno Campanoli wrote:
 Xeno Campanoli wrote:
 Okay, it has been over a week since I had time to
  work on this.  Please accept my apologies, but I've
  been busy.  The previous title was:

 I was UNsuccessful at making the sound work by
 commenting out the above.*oss lines from my
 modules.conf file.  I get no difference in behavior. 
 I also checked, and in the discover.d file, the
 alsa-base file has the skip i810_audio line, so I
 think it must be something else.  I am being called
 away, but I should be able to give this more solid
 time tomorrow, especially evening, if anybody has any
 ideas. xc


SNIP

I DON'T recommend commenting these out, you will lose 
OSS support (OSS is the preceding standard for Linux 
sound to ALSA) which will mean even if you get your 
sound working some (older) apps won't be able to use 
it. Better to leave OSS support on unless your machine 
is very cramped for memory and you are worried about 
the space the drivers take up.

Mark


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Re: should etch be Debian 4.0 ?

[Mark Fletcher]

On Monday 11 July 2005 00:23, Johan Kullstam wrote:
 Mark Fletcher [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
  On Sunday 10 July 2005 21:55, Joris Huizer wrote:
   Johan Kullstam wrote:
Let me see if I understand you correctly.  Your
reason for having the ambiguity of wether to
call it 3.2 or 4.0 is just to keep people from
assigning etch a number?
  
   I think this is quite logical, as there is some
   structure in those numbers - 4.0 means a big
   leap, 3.2 means smaller  change; nobody can
   tell right now how big the step is from sarge to
   etch, as it's development has just started
   ofcourse, it's just up to the debian development
   team to decide wether the changes are big enough
   to call it 4.0 (anyone know why sarge became
   3.1?)
  
   just some thoughts
  
   Joris
 
  I'd add that it's not deliberate ambiguity as a
  means to any particular end, so much as it not
  being an appropriate stage of the development of
  etch for the decision to be made if a major or
  minor version upgrade is appropriate. This does
  matter; this list wouldn't take long to hear from a
  whole tribe of people with nothing better to do
  than complain about unimportant things if they
  decided it was to be 3.2 now and then it turned out
  that the changes were massive and the upgrade path
  difficult... likewise if they decided 4.0 now and
  then it turned out the changes were small and
  relatively minor .

 Are people really going to look at the version number
 and say, I've got sarge now and since new number is
 3.2 i'll upgrade but if it were 4.0 i'd sit still? 
 Have people done this in the past?

 Releases come every 3-4 years so why not let the
 release notes explain the changes.  A version number
 might make sense for automated things where cron
 downloads and installs a minor increment but not
 major one.  This is so seldom that manual
 intervention isn't too much to ask for.

 Since the difference is subtle, why have the
 distinction?  Why not use next release is 4.0 and the
 one after that 5.0 and so on *no matter how small the
 update*?

 --
 Johan KULLSTAM

Yup, that's another way to do it.

Mark


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Re: an X problem

[Mark Fletcher]

On Tuesday 12 July 2005 18:45, Ivan Glushkov wrote:
 Hi List,

 Since I went from standart radeon driver to fglrx,
 when I issue:

 /etc/init.d/gdm restart

 Everything dissapiares, including the terminals
 (Ctrl+Alt+F1..). I swithed to kdm. The result was the
 same. I made dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86, but
 nothing changed. The strange thing is that there is
 nothing interesting in /var/log/XFree86.0.log or in
 /var/log/messages.0

 Any ideas are very welcome.

 Cheers,
 Ivan

 P.S.: In the moment the only way to stop/restart my
 laptop is by pushing the button..

I had a similar problem not so long ago, when I upgraded 
from woody to sarge. The cause was an innocent-looking 
option in the XF86Config-4 configuration file in /etc 
in the section that related to my graphics card. In the 
previous version of X under woody, this option hadn't 
done anything, but when I upgraded X was broken in 
exactly the way you describe and turning the option off 
fixed my problem. No error messages, nothing obviously 
wrong, nothing going wrong at the kernel level either 
-- just blank screen (actually my monitor went into 
power saving mode because the card stopped talking to 
it altogether!!!)

The options available are dependent on the graphics card 
you have so I won't confuse you with the specific 
option that caused this for me. Instead, can you post 
your /etc/XF86Config-4 file to this list and we can see 
if there's anything dodgy about it.

Cheers

Mark


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Re: Sound and Video Problems still with my T3985 Desktop PC

[Mark Fletcher]

On Monday 11 July 2005 22:31, Xeno Campanoli wrote:
 Am I perhaps reading this amixer output wrong?  It
 looks like it's unresponsive.


Yes, I think you might be -- the output below shows that 
amixer _has_ responded to your command. Look at the 
bottom 2 lines of each response -- for example 
Headphone said Front Left: Playback 50 [79%] [on] 

indicating that it has responded to your command by 
setting volume to 50 and switching sound ON (un-muting 
it, in other words).

Try amixer set Headphone 10 mute

and compare the two outputs line by line to see the 
difference. Then put it back as you have it below as 
that's more sensible!

OK the settings are being changed -- I don't know why 
you are not hearing sound now. The other possibility is 
I note your card appears to have 3D sound capabilities 
-- the documentation for the intel8x0 ALSA driver does 
mention that this famous Quirk can result in the 
swapping of Headphone and Master (which doesn't appear 
to be happening in your case) OR MASTER AND SURROUND 
settings. Try unmuting and setting volume for your 3D 
sound settings.

Failing that, try IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA (I don't 
know what this is, it's time to fiddle now) or External 
Amp. In each case -- amixer set mixer setting 
number unmute. If neither of these work just work 
down your list you got with amixer | grep 'Simple' and 
keep trying aplay after each change and see if you get 
something.

The fact you are not getting error messages (actually 
have a look at the end of /var/log/messages [ do 
tail /ver/log/messages] to make sure that's true, as 
well as the output of dmesg), it doesn't seem to be 
complaining about the device in /dev, and aplay thinks 
it's playing, it's almost GOT to be a mixer setting...

I assume your PC speakers are switched on, and plugged 
in at the wall and into the PC -- right? ;-)

 Xeno Campanoli wrote:
  Okay, I booted it up in the distribution version of
  Windows and got to the sound test, and the
  sound test worked.  So, hardware is okay and my
  connections are okay. Also, I tried amixer
  suggestions you made in the other post to Mr.
  Green.  Here are my results after going back and
  doing these things again from the Debian boot:
 
  joehill:~# amixer set Headphone 50 unmute
  Simple mixer control 'Headphone',0
   Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined
   Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
   Limits: Playback 0 - 63
   Front Left: Playback 50 [79%] [on]
   Front Right: Playback 50 [79%] [on]
  joehill:~# amixer set PCM 100
  Simple mixer control 'PCM',0
   Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined
   Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
   Limits: Playback 0 - 31
   Front Left: Playback 31 [100%] [off]
   Front Right: Playback 31 [100%] [off]
 
  I then ran aplayer as follows (with no resulting
  sound):
 
  joehill:~# aplay
  /usr/share/apps/kbattleship/sounds/ship-player1-sho
 ot.mp3 Playing raw data
  '/usr/share/apps/kbattleship/sounds/ship-player1-sh
 oot.mp3' : Unsigned 8 bit, Rate 8000 Hz, Mono
  joehill:~# aplay
  /usr/share/apps/kbattleship/sounds/ship-sink.mp3
  Playing raw data
  '/usr/share/apps/kbattleship/sounds/ship-sink.mp3'
  : Unsigned 8 bit, Rate 8000 Hz, Mono
 
  My Amixer list you suggested was:
 
  joehill:~# amixer | grep 'Simple mixer'
  Simple mixer control 'Master',0
  Simple mixer control 'Master Mono',0
  Simple mixer control 'Headphone',0
  Simple mixer control '3D Control - Center',0
  Simple mixer control '3D Control - Depth',0
  Simple mixer control '3D Control - Switch',0
  Simple mixer control 'PCM',0
  Simple mixer control 'Line',0
  Simple mixer control 'CD',0
  Simple mixer control 'Mic',0
  Simple mixer control 'Mic Boost (+20dB)',0
  Simple mixer control 'Mic Select',0
  Simple mixer control 'Video',0
  Simple mixer control 'Phone',0
  Simple mixer control 'IEC958',0
  Simple mixer control 'IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA',0
  Simple mixer control 'PC Speaker',0
  Simple mixer control 'Aux',0
  Simple mixer control 'Mono Output Select',0
  Simple mixer control 'Capture',0
  Simple mixer control 'Mix',0
  Simple mixer control 'Mix Mono',0
  Simple mixer control 'External Amplifier',0
 
  I did the command:
 
  joehill:~# amixer set Master 50
  Simple mixer control 'Master',0
   Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined
   Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
   Limits: Playback 0 - 63
   Front Left: Playback 50 [79%] [on]
   Front Right: Playback 50 [79%] [on]
  joehill:~# amixer | grep 'Simple mixer'
  Simple mixer control 'Master',0
  ...
 
  I guess it looks like something won't let the
  settings change.  Is there a thing to turn on
  that allows writing to settings?
 
  Thanks once again for any feedback.  At this point,
  since with help I've proved my hardware
  works, I'm not in quite so much of a hurry, but it
  would be nice to get this going this week.
 
  sincerely, Xeno
 
  So you can see, it seems to have no effect.
 
  Mark Fletcher wrote:
  On Sunday 10 July 2005 06:44

Re: counting bandwidth usage

[Mark Fletcher]

Almut Behrens wrote:


On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 06:14:41PM -0400, kamaraju kusumanchi wrote:
 

Very trivial question. I have two machines workA, homeB. Let's say I am 
sitting at workA and run an nxclient session to connect to homeB. Now in 
this homeB session, I open a konsole and download 1GB file (using wget). 
Will this be counted as network traffic of 1GB on homeB or network 
traffic of 1GB on workA? I ask because, I pay for network usage at workA 
but at homeB it is free.
   



Unless you've tunneled port 80 (or whichever port wget is using) from
home back to work, the file will be downloaded via your home network.
(I'm assuming there's a seperate internet connection at work and at
home.)  By default, NX will only forward your X display, so that's the
only traffic you'll have to pay for...  IOW, nothing to worry about.

 

BUT Make sure you understand that the resulting downloaded data is now 
on homeB not workA. Any further manipulation you wish to do on the data 
will have to be conducted using tools on homeB, not workA, because the 
data hasn't actually been transferred to workA. Of course you can 
control such manipulation from workA as you did the download in the 
first place, but if this data is for example an image and you expect to 
be able to use some image manipulation tool on workA to work with it 
that's going to entail transferring the data again, this time from homeB 
to workA, and that means paying for the transfer judging by the info you 
provided in your inital post...



Will there be any difference in the answer if I use ssh instead of nxclient?
   



Hardly any.  nxclient might cause somewhat less traffic than ssh with X
forwarding, because NX is highly optimized for just that...  If you can
live with just a remote terminal login (no X GUI), then ssh will cause
even less traffic, of course.

Cheers,
Almut


 




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Re: apt-get install tries to REMOVE my kernel

[Mark Fletcher]

Michael Marsh wrote:


On 12/12/05, Joris Hooijberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 


2005/12/12, Michael Marsh [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
   


Really?  Nothing in what Astrid posted seemed to indicate that to me.
The only kernel-image that appears is the one that's presumably
going to be removed.

 


True. but I'm sure that

A. Apt-get's dependency-checking is designed to check upward dependencies
as well (i.e. when I remove Gimp , X.org will not be removed, although Gimp
depends on X.org).
   



That direction doesn't seem to be relevant here.  It's trying to
remove something lower in order to install something.

 


B. there's no program at all that even can think of removing a kernel
without replacing it or something like that.
   



You're assuming the program will do what it *should* do, not what's it
been *told* to do.  Clearly, apt-get thinks it should be removing the
kernel, and there's no indication that it wants to install a new
kernel.

 


Maybe I'm wrong but I think the program Astrid's installing needs a newer
kernel than the current...

I think the best thing is to save a copy of the kernelimage (can be found
in the /boot directory, if not sure; backup the whole /boot directory)
before installing.
   



My suggestion would be to run
# apt-get -s install xcdroast

That'll do a dry-run (s for simulate), which won't even try to
install or remove anything.  It might be that a substantial upgrade is
needed, and by blocking it with --no-remove apt-get has gone into a
bizarre mode.

--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com


 

That would be my guess too. Looks to me like xcdroast needs a newer 
kernel than you have. I am somewhat surprised that the package would be 
set up to conflict with the older kernel version, and even more 
surprised that apt-get would conclude that the right thing to do would 
be to remove it (does nothing else [apart perhaps from initrd-tools] 
depend on the kernel image in the packaging system???)


Even though the documentation I could find when googling for xcdroast 
suggested any kernel from 2.0 up should be good, I found someone on a 
german debian site advising of problems with 2.4.9 which is only a few 
versions older than your kernel. At least I _think_ that was what it said...


How sure are we that this problem is related to xcdroast? Try installing 
something else, something harmless like an X-based game or something, to 
see if it tries to do the same thing. apt-get may just have got into a 
mess on your machine. I'm surprised any package would put a 
conflicts-dependency on a kernel image since there's no guarantee users 
are using a debian-packaged kernel (yes yes, heresy, I know, but there 
are plenty of heretics out there).


Another option would be to install aptitude and see if that has the same 
problem. I don't know why, but in practice aptitude often succeeds where 
apt-get fails.


Mark


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Re: apt-get install tries to REMOVE my kernel

[Mark Fletcher]

Johannes Wiedersich wrote:


astrid jurgensen wrote:

I recently tried to download and install software using apt-get 
install. The process was aborted because apt-get install tried to 
remove the kernel. See details below:


apt-get install –no-remove xcdroast

13 upgraded, 13 newly installed, 2 to remove and 500 not upgraded.
E: Packages need to be removed but Remove is disabled

As seen in the above, 2 files are to be REMOVED: initrd-tools and 
kernel-image-2.4.18-1-386
The second one of these is the kernel I am currently using, and 
should therefore not be removed, and I guess that initrd-tools should 
also not be removed.

What is the cause of this problem?
(Note: It is not due to my kernel being a bit old. Others have posted 
questions about this problem already, and they were using more modern 
kernels. Unfortunately no solutions were posted.)



You have 500 packages not upgraded. It seems you are mixing different 
releases. You probably attempt to install xcdroast form a 'newer' 
version than the rest of your 500+ packages.


Suggestion: bring your system in sync; possibly by upgrading to sarge, 
as described in 
http://www.de.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html 



If you are mixing different releases on purpose, you have probably 
encountered a situation where this doesn't work due to dependency 
problems.


Hope that helps,

Johannes



Well spotted, that's probably got something to do with it ;-)

Mark


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Logitech MX 5500 Keyboard + mouse problem since recent squeeze upgrade

[Mark Fletcher]

I am running amd64 squeeze on an Intel Core i7 920-based machine with
8GB RAM. I built the machine about a year ago and have been running
squeeze on it since.

I use a Logitech (Logicool) MX5500 wireless keyboard and mouse combo. 

For about the last month or so I hadn't updated packages -- not for any
particular reason, just hadn't gotten around to it. The other day I did
-- and now my keyboard is not working.

The keyboard and mouse work fine in Windows (on another machine). The
keyboard also is working as the machine is switched on as I can use it
to select boot kernel in GRUB. It's once Debian starts booting that it
breaks.

This is exactly the same symptom I observed a few months ago when the
upgrade from udev 151-1 to 151-3 or something introduced a mod
to /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules which was supposed to fix a udev
bug but broke a lot of people's keyboards in the process. I successfully
applied the manual fix for that at the time and have since allowed udev
to upgrade naturally with no subsequent problems.

So naturally, the first place I looked was udev. I note udev is now at
version 157, so I wondered if it was broken again. There don't seem to
be any bugs to this effect logged, so I thought I'd give udev from sid a
go since it doesn't seem to introduce any dependency problems.
Installing sid's udev (v158) did not fix it.

I have googled around for this and don't see anything newer than the
last flurry on this subject a few months ago as referenced above. It's
almost like no one else is having this problem... :-(

I noticed that the kernel has also been upgraded to 2.6.32-5-amd64, so I
rebooted and selected the old kernel (2.6.32-3-amd64) and that did not
help either. 

Is anyone else experiencing similar problems? Any advice? I am not sure
what other information I should provide that would help diagnose the
problem... Right now I am having to use this
easily-most-powerful-machine-in-my-network via ssh only from other
machines as I don't have a spare keyboard and mouse to switch to it.
Really want to get this machine fully back on its feet ASAP so any help
appreciated...

Thanks

Mark


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Old package for bluez?

[Mark Fletcher]

Can anyone point me at where I can get the one-version-old bluez
package, that was in squeeze one version ago? I'm having a problem with
the current version (466-1) and want to compare the old version
(463-something I think it was) but I got a little too enthusiastic with
the ole aptitude autoclean... :-(

(Problem is a logitech wireless keyboard and mouse combo has stopped
working and I want to check /lib/udev/rules.d/62-bluez-hid2hci.rules and
also the hid2hci binary)

Thanks!

Mark


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Re: Initial install question

[Mark Fletcher]

(With apologies in advance if this comes through in HTML -- I have tried to turn HTML-based mailing off but am not sure if have been successful)

Mark -- Debian's "default" way of interacting with the user is through virtual terminals, which is what you're seeing. That said, of course almost no one routinely uses Linux that way, and you should be able to get the X Window system (the GUI) working without too much pain and suffering unless you have really old / very, very new hardware.

First of all you need to make sure you have the X Window System installed on your machine, easiest way to check would be to have a look in /etc and see if there's a directory called X11. If there is you have at least the basis of the X Window System installed. 

In addition to that you need a display manager, of which there are 3 mainstream ones, XDM,GDM (Also known as GNOME) and KDM. Personally I use GDM -- was going to use KDM but due to some stupidity when I was installing my own system I couldn't get KDM to work and GDM worked pretty much out of the box. That comment will almost certainly draw fire from KDM fanatics out there -- apologies in advance.

Quickest way to take yourself forward from this point is probably to run 'apt-get install gdm' or 'apt-get install kdm' as root. You'll be asked some questions about your graphics hardware so make sure you know make, chipset etc (although if you're lucky the gory details will be autodetected, these days it does a pretty decent job on its own). This will install gdm plus any underlying bits and pieces you need and don't have installed. Come back to the list if you still have problems. If you don't have apt-get installed either, you can use the older dselect tool or fall back all the way to dpkg -- 'man dselect' or 'man dpkg' for info.

Hope that helps.

MarkMark Anderson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Greetings. I just installed Debian using the ISOs from your site. Everything went fine and then i got the "login" command. At this point I typed in my username and password and what i got was this: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: ~S: (the "name" being my username i made during install). I can't get beyond this to the GUI. I have little knowledge of command line use and none of Linux in general, which i imagine is obvious by now :) I would appreciate help in how to get beyond the point i've descibed above. Thank you.-- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
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Re: Kernel Panic After Sarge Dist-upgrade To Kernel Image 2.4.27-2-386

[Mark Fletcher]

--- Kent West [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Leonard Chatagnier wrote:
 
  VFS: Cannot open rootdevice 301 or 30:01
  Please append a correct root= boot option
  Kernel panic: VFS unable to mount root fs on 30:01
  Ok, not worried at this time as I have my woody
 CD's and can do a
  rescbf24 to mount woody still installed and
 correct the lilo.conf but,
  here are the related boot messages when attempting
 rescue:
  request_modules_hostadapter]: Root fs not mounted
 (repeated once)
  ...
  cramfs: wrong magic
  Fat: bogus logical sector size 5202
  read_super_block: can't find a reiserfs filesystem
 on (dev 03:03,
  block 64, size 1024)-repeated once
  Kernel panic: VFS unable to mount root fs on 03:05
   
  Now I'm worried.  Note: I don't have a reiserfs
 file system, only an
  ext3 fs since day one on all partitions. 
 
 If I understand, you have a dual-boot system, with
 Sarge and Woody.
 
 Sarge's boot is hosed, but you've tried to boot off
 the Woody
 installation CD into the Woody installation, and it
 fails also.
 
 Is this correct?
 
 If it were me, I'd boot off a LiveCD, such as
 Knoppix or Kanotix, then
 run cfdisk to see what partitions are defined. I'd
 mount the / partition
 on the hard drive, and look to see what /etc/fstab
 says, and take a look
 at the initrd issues you mention. My gut instinct
 (not having adequate
 info), is that either your partition table is
 scrambled, your drive is
 failing, or you're not feeding the correct
 parameters to the Woody CD.
 
 -- 
 Kent West
 Technology Support
 /A/bilene /C/hristian /U/niversity
 
 
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If it's an initrd kernel, I do recall reading
something about issues with the upgrade to sarge and
initrd kernels. Might be worth checking out the Sarge
release notes on debian.org...

Mark




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Upgrade woody--sarge, KDE stops working

[Mark Fletcher]

Hi

Got a problem with KDE after upgrading woody to sarge.
I am running the i386 distribution. For historical
reasons I will get around to sorting out one of these
days, I run gdm then select a KDE session at login.

My X server has obviously survived the upgrade as gdm
starts OK on boot and presents me with the usual login
screen. Even my custom ModeLine settings for my
display survived; my XF86Config-4 file is exactly the
same as the backup copy I took before upgrading.

However on login, the X server appears to shut down
(and gdm promptly re-starts it) -- so I log in and
after some flashing of screens for a second or two I
find myself back at the login screen again.

I poked around in my setup and found something that
looks a bit suss -- looking at
/etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/KDE I note that one of its steps
is it's doing 'which kde2' and shutting itself down if
it can't find it. Looking in .kde-errors in my home
directory that is the error that is being reported. As
root last night I did a find . -name kde2 from the
root of my filesystem and it came back with only a
DIRECTORY called kde2, no files. This was working fine
before the upgrade -- well let me rephrase, I could
use a KDE session out of gdm fine before the upgrade.
If this is what it was trying to do or not before I
don't know as I never had cause to look.

I've had a trawl through the archives of this mailing
list and also googled around for this problem, and
found no one with this particular issue. I've also
found enough people asking different questions about
KDE on sarge that it's obvious a large number of
people have got it to work in this situation, so I
must be doing something stupid. Anyone got any advice?

Mark

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Re: Upgrade woody--sarge, KDE stops working

[Mark Fletcher]

--- Kent West [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Mark Fletcher wrote:
 
 Got a problem with KDE after upgrading woody to
 sarge.
   
 
 snip
 
 However on login, the X server appears to shut down
 (and gdm promptly re-starts it) -- so I log in and
 after some flashing of screens for a second or two
 I
 find myself back at the login screen again.
   
 
 Is it just KDE? Try a different wm/environment.
 
 Is it just from gdm? What happens if you kill gdm
 and try startx?
 
 Is it just your user? What if you try as a different
 user?
 
 Perhaps you need to move/delete any KDE stuff from
 your home directory?
 
 -- 
 Kent
 
 
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Thanks for the ideas -- a couple of things I should
have mentioned in the original post:

If I select a GNOME session then I log in OK (although
it's complaining about keyboard settings being missing
/ screwed up, even though the keyboard proceeds to
work fine). I'm not surprised as I never used GNOME
session before and so never bothered to configure it
properly.

If I try as KDE there are no errors in the X server
log but the KDE error log shows it couldn't find the
KDE2 program and thus bombs. It's doing something
like:

if [! -n `which $WM`]; then
 echo Can't find ...{can't remember exact words},
exiting...
 exit 1
fi

And that's the error in my .kde2-errors file in my
home dir. $WM is set at the start of the script to
kde2.

I noticed a kde2.sh in /etc/X11/kde2 -- what does that
do and if I tinker with this shell script to point at
that instead will I do more damage?

So yes it seems to be just KDE. As to whether it's
just gdm I don't know as I haven't tried another
display manager -- maybe will uninstall gdm and try
kdm as a next step, see if that gets me further. But
I'd still like to know, for education purposes, what
the problem actually is here...

Cheers

Mark

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Re: Upgrade woody--sarge, KDE stops working

[Mark Fletcher]

On Saturday 25 June 2005 12:58, Hendrik Boom wrote:
 On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 05:21:01PM -0700, Mark 
Fletcher wrote:
  Hi
 
  Got a problem with KDE after upgrading woody to
  sarge. I am running the i386 distribution. For
  historical reasons I will get around to sorting out
  one of these days, I run gdm then select a KDE
  session at login.
 
  My X server has obviously survived the upgrade as
  gdm starts OK on boot and presents me with the
  usual login screen. Even my custom ModeLine
  settings for my display survived; my XF86Config-4
  file is exactly the same as the backup copy I took
  before upgrading.
 
  However on login, the X server appears to shut down
  (and gdm promptly re-starts it) -- so I log in and
  after some flashing of screens for a second or two
  I find myself back at the login screen again.

 Very similar problems here:  after the upgrade, I use
 xdm to log in.  My window manager is icewm.  But the
 same problem.  It flashes screens for a maybe five or
 ten seconds (I have a slow machine) and I'm back at
 the login screen again.  So the problem may bot
 depend on gdm and kde specifically, at least if I
 have the same problem instead of just the same
 symptom.

 -- hendrik

Suggest you try aptitude remove xdm
then aptitude purge xdm 

(you can probably do these in one shot, but it might be 
fun to turn on the script command to keep a log of the 
session and compare later what actions each take)

then straight away aptitude install xdm

When I did that (with gdm) -- lo and behold, my problem 
was solved.

Mark
(Sending, with some satisfaction, from KDE's KMail 
client...)


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Re: realplayer10 and sound quality

[Mark Fletcher]

On Saturday 25 June 2005 21:52, Joe Mc Cool wrote:
 Sarge, kernel 2.2.20, small home network. Server: PII
 333MHz.

 Thanks a lot for Debian.

 I have just installed RealPlayer10 and it works fine,
 listening on line to BBC Radio 3. Wonderful, thanks
 again everybody.

 But this is when only one person is logged on. If,
 say, another user is moving his mouse a lot, then the
 sound quality nosedives.

 Any suggestions ?

 Perhaps I looking jam on it :-)

 Joe

PII 333MHz isn't exactly a top-of-the-line machine these 
days. It may be your machine just isn't keeping up.

You could try modifying the niceness of your sound 
daemons, or of RealPlayer (but I think you have to be 
root to increase niceness, certainly you have to be to 
modify the niceness of an existing process)

man nice to see what I'm talking about. Essentially it 
means that the natural priority level can be raised 
to encourage Linux to give more processor time to your 
sound. If your box is struggling under the load (as 
evidenced by the fact that your sound is going down the 
toilet) though, the likelihood is that even if this 
works it will be at the expense of your other user 
waving his mouse pointer around... (S)he'll start 
complaining to you of jittery mouse movements or 
whatever they are actually doing.

There are flavours of the kernel that provide more 
control over process scheduling, but you need to be an 
expert to go down that path, basically.

I'm afraid I can't think of anything else other than 
trying to reduce the load on your machine of other 
daemons / apps taking up the processor. Could your 
memory be full and could Linux be doing a lot of paging 
to disk? If so that takes time and hangs up resources 
which could, if it gets bad enough, start affecting 
your sound subsystem's ability to do its job.

Bottom line, which probably isn't what you want to hear, 
is either your CPU is not cutting it or your memory 
isn't. If you are tight on memory consider adding some 
(you can use the top command to see how much paging to 
disk is going on) and if you're not, time to buy a 
faster machine...

Mark


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X Window problem after woody -- sarge upgrade

[Mark Fletcher]

Hi

I recently (last week) upgraded from woody to sarge
using aptitude. First off much to my surprise X
windows appeared to survive the upgrade although my
KDE was shot. 

Removing and re-installing GDM (which I use to launch
X) solved that problem. However over the following
days it gradually became apparent to me that a ton of
packages had been held back by aptitude -- including
x-window-system and a ton of libraries. 

To try and solve this, this evening I did a U in
aptitude interactively and then did an aptitude
install to upgrade the held-back packages. This
completed successfully.

BUT -- now X is shot. If I try to start X either using
GDM or startx, it starts up but then... my monitor
goes into power saving mode!!! And nothing can get it
to come out of it other than Ctrl-Alt-F1, login as
root (without being able to see what I am doing) then
shutdown -r now... Even Ctrl-Alt-BkSpc doesn't work...

Now I'm going to try the lists' collective patience by
not supply config files / logs etc. Unfortunately the
only Linux mail program I have running at the moment
runs under X.. So I am having to run this from
Windows from where I can't see the Linux partitions
(same machine...) I can tell you though that I didn't
see anything in the XF86.log file in /var/log that
looked odd, nor in ~/.xession-errors (no errors at all
there, a couple of missing modules, specifically pex5
and xie, in the former).

If I can figure out a way to get log files etc to this
list I will do so. In the meantime let me know what
would be useful. My XF86Config-4 hasn't changed with
the upgrade.

Does this problem sound familiar to anyone and can
anyone suggest a solution.

X was working perfectly before the upgrade. And after
the upgrade but before I upgraded the held-back packages.


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Re: X Window problem after woody -- sarge upgrade

[Mark Fletcher]

On Monday 27 June 2005 22:22, Mark Fletcher wrote:
 Hi

 I recently (last week) upgraded from woody to sarge
 using aptitude. First off much to my surprise X
 windows appeared to survive the upgrade although my
 KDE was shot.

 Removing and re-installing GDM (which I use to launch
 X) solved that problem. However over the following
 days it gradually became apparent to me that a ton of
 packages had been held back by aptitude --
 including x-window-system and a ton of libraries.

 To try and solve this, this evening I did a U in
 aptitude interactively and then did an aptitude
 install to upgrade the held-back packages. This
 completed successfully.

 BUT -- now X is shot. If I try to start X either
 using GDM or startx, it starts up but then... my
 monitor goes into power saving mode!!! And nothing
 can get it to come out of it other than Ctrl-Alt-F1,
 login as root (without being able to see what I am
 doing) then shutdown -r now... Even Ctrl-Alt-BkSpc
 doesn't work...

 Now I'm going to try the lists' collective patience
 by not supply config files / logs etc. Unfortunately
 the only Linux mail program I have running at the
 moment runs under X.. So I am having to run this
 from Windows from where I can't see the Linux
 partitions (same machine...) I can tell you though
 that I didn't see anything in the XF86.log file in
 /var/log that looked odd, nor in ~/.xession-errors
 (no errors at all there, a couple of missing modules,
 specifically pex5 and xie, in the former).

 If I can figure out a way to get log files etc to
 this list I will do so. In the meantime let me know
 what would be useful. My XF86Config-4 hasn't changed
 with the upgrade.

 Does this problem sound familiar to anyone and can
 anyone suggest a solution.

 X was working perfectly before the upgrade. And after
 the upgrade but before I upgraded the held-back
 packages.

The problem turned out to be an innocent-looking line in 
my XF86Config-4 file. I remember a while back I 
upgraded some packages woody--woody (noticed using 
apt-get that my installation was behind what was said 
to be stable on ftp.debian.org) and at that time I 
briefly broke my X Windows because I stupidly didn't 
back up /etc/X11 so couldn't retrieve my old config. 

While scrabbling around trying to get it work again 
(this was back then) I uncommented the line in my 
XF86Config graphics card Device section that said 
Option FlatPanel True. At the time, it didn't do 
squat. 

However after upgrading the X packages to sarge, it 
seems it now does... ;-) Commenting it out again fixed 
the problem.

Anyone got any wisdom on what that option does? (Apart 
from stop me from being able to see anything!!!). I do 
indeed have a flat screen monitor... My card is a 
nVidia GeForce3. Just curious now, no longer urgent...

Cheers

Mark


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Re: Cannot update wheezy

[Mark Fletcher]

Stephen Powell zlinuxman at wowway.com writes:

 
 I had the same problem about a week ago.  The solution is to do
 a full-upgrade instead of a safe-upgrade.  The problem is caused by
 libre-office packages taking the place of open-office packages.
 full-upgrade allows packages to be deleted, safe-upgrade does not.
 With full-upgrade the dependencies can be resolved by giving permission
 to delete a couple of open office packages that are functionally
 replaced by a couple of libre office packages, IIRC.
 

Nice one, thanks! That has fixed it.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Mark





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Replacing hard disk used in existing filesystem

[Mark Fletcher]

Hello the list!

My Debian (wheezy am464, upgraded from an original squeeze install)
system started complaining yesterday that one of my hard disks is about
to fail. I suspect it suffered damage in the earthquake that recently
hit Japan (I'm in Tokyo) and has been quietly deteriorating since.

Anyway the disk concerned is a 1TB disk on which is mounted /opt, so I
feel I should be able to replace it without major hassle. I have already
backed it up fully to NAS.

The only issue is that I don't have enough spare power connectors on my
PC's power supply to attach both the new and the old disks at the same
time.

What I want to know is how can I remove the current drive from the
filesystem so I can remove it physically without sending the machine
into a tailspin? I have only ever set up the mapping of disk partitions
to mount points at installation time, never afterwards, and so am not
sure what to do.

I am thinking the procedure will be something along the lines of:

1) modify my computer's mount settings such that /opt is part of the
root filesystem instead of a separate mount point (HOW? manual edit
of /etc/fstab or something more sophisticated?) This will cause me to
lose access to everything on the old disk which is OK because it's all
backed up and there is nothing there that's critical to the running of
the machine.

2) Power down the machine and remove the old disk, attach the new disk.

3) bring up the machine, partition and format the new disk. (is the tool
for this fdisk?)

4) modify the machine's mount settings to go back to mounting /opt on
the new disk (HOW?)

5) restore everything I want in /opt back from the backup.

Even assuming I'm on the right lines, I don't know how to do steps 1 and
4 and am not totally confident about how to do 3, so would appreciate
any advice.

Cheers

Mark


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Re: Replacing hard disk used in existing filesystem

[Mark Fletcher]

On Mon, 2011-04-18 at 11:32 -0400, Dan Ritter wrote:

 You had it pretty much correct; don't worry. Double-check your
 backups are good before beginning.

Thanks a lot, Dan! 

Mark


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Debian Wheezy, Gnome 3, and nVidia graphics cards

[Mark Fletcher]

Hello the list!

I am running Wheezy on a self-built Intel Core i7 920 with 24GB of RAM and
an nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ graphics card. I am using the nVidia
proprietary driver downloaded from the debian repository along with the
kernel module built by the usual Debian installation process.

I am running Gnome launched from GDM3. When I select regular Gnome (ie
new Gnome with the bells and whistles) it works for a while and then
randomly freezes -- often but not exclusively when I am trying to switch
desktops, watch a video, or do something like that. Once it freezes, the
load on the machine starts going up and up and up until eventually the
machine becomes completely unresponsive in all ways and there's no recourse
but to reboot. If I am quick, I can log in remotely from another machine,
kill GDM3, and the machine recovers to a text terminal, where I can log in
and relaunch GDM3. Then everything works for a while, until the cycle
repeats.

If, on the other hand, I select Gnome Classic at the login prompt, I can
log in, do everything I want, and stability is rock-solid -- it will go for
weeks on end (no exaggeration) between reboots without any sign of
difficulty. But then I don't get the bells and whistles :-)

I tried replacing the nVidia driver with nouveau but couldn't get that to
work at all. Probably did something wrong but couldn't work out what.

My Wheezy system is up to date so everything is at version levels you'd
expect from Wheezy. I play games like Quake 3 and have also built and play
Danger From the Deep, a submarine simulation that makes heavy use of 3D, on
my computer with no problems, so I think 3D in the graphics card is
generally working.

I'd like to get to the bottom of why regular Gnome is not working but don't
know where to start. I used to suspect the nVidia driver, because it worked
OK until a driver update, but no one else seems to be having quite the
problem I am having at this point so I suspect I have done something
stupid, but don't know how to find out what.

Can anyone help? For example, what are the software component differences
between regular Gnome and Gnome Classic? What log files should I be looking
in? and so on...

Thanks in advance!
Mark

Re: Debian Wheezy, Gnome 3, and nVidia graphics cards

[Mark Fletcher]

Andrei POPESCU andreimpopescu at gmail.com writes:

 
 
 Could you please try to run following command before killing gdm3 and 
 post the output here?
 
 top -b -n 1
 
 Kind regards,
 Andrei


Thanks Andrei, I will try this at the weekend, machine is running critical
tasks while the markets are open so I'm in Gnome Classic for now. Thanks for
the tip.

I just ran this just now (not expecting to find anything since the machine
is fine) and I see it produces a detailed process list as a one-off. I will
run when the problem hits as you suggested. Anything in particular you are
looking for? Or you just want to know what is at the top of the list?

Thanks

Mark


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/etc/bluetooth/audio.conf obsolete?

[Mark Fletcher]

Hello

I'm currently trying to set up my Jessie system to play audio from my
iPhone by bluetooth through my PC speakers. I've been following an
online guide to doing so and it wants me to
edit /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf to make the PC advertise itself as an
A2DP sink. 

Trouble is, I have no /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf, and instead I
have /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf.dpkg-remove which raised my suspicions a
little bit :-)

A bit of googling revealed this bug report:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=737502

Which seems to imply that the conf file is now obsolete. If that's the
case, what has replaced it? On the web I can find many references to
editing this file for various purposes, and the above reference to it
being obsolete, but if it is obsolete I can't find any evidence of what
replaced it.

Thanks

Mark

Re: /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf obsolete?

[Mark Fletcher]

Mark Fletcher  gmail.com> writes:

> 
> Hello
> 
> I'm currently trying to set up my Jessie system to play audio from my
> iPhone by bluetooth through my PC speakers. I've been following an
> online guide to doing so and it wants me to
> edit /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf to make the PC advertise itself as an
> A2DP sink. 
> 
> Trouble is, I have no /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf, and instead I
> have /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf.dpkg-remove which raised my suspicions a
> little bit 
> 

Well, it seems that it is indeed obsolete. I created the conf file and
proceeded to get the link to work. Then I removed the config file, restarted
Bluetooth, and... it is working anyway. Seems like this step just isn't
needed any more.

It should be noted that at the beginning, my computer could see my iPhone,
but my iPhone wasn't listing my computer as an available device. However,
after asking the computer to connect to the iPhone, the iPhone resopnded and
paired properly. And after that, after nudging pulseaudio to load the
bluetooth module, everything just worked. So this config file, it seems,
wasn't needed.

Mark

Re: make ping executable by normal users?

[Mark Fletcher]

On Fri, 3 Jun 2016 at 06:56, Britton Kerin  wrote:

> On my old debian system I could ping as a normal user.  The ping
> binary had the suid bit set.  Now I get:
>
> $ ping www.google.com
> ping: icmp open socket: Operation not permitted
> 2 $
>
> presumably because the bit isn't set.
>
> What's the right fix?  I could setuid it but then if I understand
> correctly it might get changed back by an upgrade.  Does it use
> capabilites or something?
>
> Thanks,
> Britton
>
> Operation not permitted doesn't, contrary to appearances, automatically
mean a permissions problem. I recently built a Linux From Scratch machine
and at one point was getting that error when running ping as root. I'm now
wracking my brains to remember what the cause was.

Could you have a local firewall eg iptables that has accidentally blocked
ALL outgoing traffic? I think you can get this error if ping cannot connect
OUT of the box.

Does it happen if you run ping as root?

I've also seen this when the kernel didn't have all the right stuff
compiled in, but that's not likely to be it if you are using a Debian
kernel. Running strace on a ping attempt could diagnose that.

So check if it happens when you are root. If it does, check your internal
firewall (not your network's). If that is ok or switched off, try strace.

Mark

Re: Advice sought re HDD --> SSD migration

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 9:31 PM Felix Miata  wrote:


> Before you start, print /etc/passwd and /etc/group. :-)
>
> When forced to create a user during installation, I create user x with
> passwd
> x, and the first thing I do on first boot is login as root and delete user
> x.
> I then install mc and do my "tidy up" before creating the group(s) I want
> and
> then use a script to create users, followed by setting users' initial
> passwds.
>
>
/etc/passwd and /etc/group are still the last word in identities in these
latter days of password shadowing and gawd alone knows what else?

(My own research suggests the answer is YES for what users are on the
system and NO for passwords. I'm not doing anything funky like using LDAP
or anything for passwords, just what comes out of the box when you install
Debian)

Mark

Re: Advice sought re HDD --> SSD migration

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 11:06 PM David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk>
wrote:

> On Sun 05 Jun 2016 at 08:30:38 (-0400), Felix Miata wrote:
> > Mark Fletcher composed on 2016-06-05 11:40 (UTC):
> >
>
>
> I think users and their passwords are the least of the problem.
> A fresh install of jessie sets up about 30 system users before
> the admin ($UID=1000) gets a look-in. So you can end up with your
> email system being owned by statd.messagebus instead of
> Debian-exim.Debian-exim for example.
>
> You can diagnose the extent of the problem with a command like:
>
> # find / -mount -not -group 0 -exec ls -ld {} \; -o -not -user 0 -exec ls
> -ld {} \; | less
>
> but fixing it is probably a matter offor ... chown ...
>
> Cheers,
> David.
>
>
Yes, that is exactly what I was thinking, since all those system users are,
in the end, users. It was those I had in mind. This computer only happens
to have one human user, me.  I am, indeed, the least of my worries :-)

Mark

Re: Advice sought re HDD --> SSD migration

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 5:34 AM David Christensen <dpchr...@holgerdanske.com>
wrote:

> On 06/04/2016 04:11 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote:
>
> I assume you've implemented backup, restore, imaging, archiving, etc..
>
>
> dd'ing the 500 GB onto the second SSD should work.
>
>
> But, if it were my box:
>
> 1.  Buy a 16+ GB SSD to use as the i7-920 system drive, install and
> connect to motherboard SATA-0 port (dev/sda), and do a fresh install
> with MBR and three partitions -- ext4 boot, LUKS random key swap, and
> LUKS btrfs root.
>
> 2.  Install the two 960 GB SSD's.  Set up each with GPT partition table,
> one large partition, and LUKS.  Put RAID1 copy-on-write (COW) file
> system on top -- mdadm RAID1 plus btrfs, LVM RAID1 plus btrfs, btrfs
> with RAID1 (if supported), or ZFS on Linux (ZOL) mirror.
>
> 3.  If you choose ZOL, leave space on the system drive, add a fourth
> partition with LUKS, and use it for the L2ARC.
>
> 4. If you're going to use this as a headless SOHO file server, a USB 3.0
> flash drive could work as your system drive.  If you do this and also
> choose ZOL, it would be best to use another USB 3.0 flash drive for the
> L2ARC.
>
>
Thanks all for the comments. So I have one vote for fresh install, one vote
for copy, and one vote for do something completely different and turn the
box into something else because.. RAID. I think.

The box is my main desktop system, and yes it would p*ss me off something
chronic if it went down for any length of time, but it wouldn't be
critical, no revenue loss etc. So backups are good enough. My critical,
revenue-affecting machines are all outside my home. So I don't think I'll
bother going RAID at this time. Also if I understand correctly, this option
would end up reducing my available space from 1.5TB in HDD land to 1TB (or
960GB) in SSD land, which is also a disadvantage.

The LVM idea is useful, and may allow me to put the extra space on the
first disk to good use by potentially combining it with space from the
second disk. I will look into that. Could do that even if I were doing a
fresh install. Thanks for that idea!

I am then faced with the choice of the "Fresh install to new SSD followed
by copy" option or the "cp -a" option. I assume I'd need to have not booted
from the main disk in the latter case because if I had, for example, /dev
would contain  ton of stuff I don't want to / can't copy, ditto /proc etc.
In other words it would be harder to separate what is actually on the old
disk as opposed to in the Linux file system. Whereas if the disk was
mounted somewhere like /mnt copying what is actually on the disk becomes
easier.

I think both these options have one potential pitfall, which is file
ownership after the copy over of stuff I want to salvage from the outgoing
HDD. If I do a fresh install, no guarantee that user IDs will be the same
on the new system as I of course don't remember now what order I installed
stuff in. My regular user ID created during install will no doubt get the
same ID (although even that is not guaranteed as this machine started life
as etch, if I remember rightly, then was upgraded to squeeze, then to
wheezy, and finally to Jessie). And I don't remember exactly when I
installed, for example, mysql in relation to other stuff. So I could have
some fun and games copying stuff over from the old disk to the new from
that perspective. Any clever ploys to deal with that? I suppose avoid the
install and copy from new to old having booted from old is one way, but
then how do I copy only what's actually on the disk eg avoid virtual
filesystems?

The big advantage of the fresh install though is that the install will take
care of grub which is a plus. I could do that manually but would be afraid
of effing it up.

H, much to ponder. Thanks all for your thoughts.

Mark

Re: Version and Release

[Mark Fletcher]

On Wed, 8 Jun 2016 at 19:51, c.hol...@ades.at  wrote:

> Yes, I already knew this.
> But I still get not the connection.
>
> Chris
>
> On 2016-06-08 12:18, humbert.olivie...@free.fr wrote:
> > Hi Chris,
> >
> > good questions you're asking yourself here.
> > Check https://www.debian.org/releases/ .
> > This is a point where you want to start regarding this.
> >
> > Hope that helps,
> > Olivier
> >
> >
> > - Mail original -
> > De: "c holper" 
> > À: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> > Envoyé: Mercredi 8 Juin 2016 12:03:12
> > Objet: Version and Release
> >
> > Hi!
> >
> > I am not completely new to Debian but I never really understood the
> > version-system.
> >
> > I understand the versions have nicknames (8 = jessie, 7 = wheezy, 6 =
> > squeeze, ...).
> > I also understand there are 3 releases of every version (stable,
> > testing, unstable) and
> > it is clear that stable has the oldest but most bugfree version of
> > software and unstable the opposit.
> >
> > But it seems there is some living connection between the current testing
> > and the future version...
> > And what is "sid"?
> >
> > I downloades 8 testing (some months ago) and in my apt-sources is
> > jessie. Would it be something else if I chose stable??
> > How can I see it in apt?
> > Is there a better way to determine the release beside lsb_relsease?
> > /etc/debian_version is pretty clear but only the verion is inside.
> >
> > Please clearifiy for me the impact of the the once chosen release in
> > connection with the current and future version.
> > Big thankyou!
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Chris
> >
> >
>
>
There aren't 3 versions of each release, there's only one. Stable, testing
and unstable are nicknames / status codes applied to a given release at any
stage of its lifecycle. Right now Jessie is stable, Stretch is testing. The
unstable release is always called Sid, that never changes.

When stretch is considered stable enough, it will get a release number
(9.0), and be referred to as stable. At this point Jessie will be
"oldstable" and wheezy will pass into legend. Whatever Sid looks like at
that time, will get a new Toy Story character name assigned, and become the
new "testing". Sid and "testing" will at that moment be identical, and will
start to diverge as stuff gets into Sid, and takes a while to prove itself
enough to get into "testing".

HTH

Mark

Re: make ping executable by normal users?

[Mark Fletcher]

On Mon, 6 Jun 2016 at 23:15, Santiago Vila  wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 06, 2016 at 10:06:54AM +1200, Jan Bakuwel wrote:
> > Check your firewall rules.
>
> It can't be firewall rules. Try this to block outgoing ping:
>
> iptables -A OUTPUT -p icmp --icmp-type echo-request -j REJECT
>
> then try to ping anywhere. You will get a different error message,
> namely "Destination Port Unreachable".
>
> [ Why people do not read all messages in the thread before answering
>   is a mystery to me ].
>
> Thanks.
>
> No, that's not true, you definitely can get this very error due to
something to do with the firewall, maybe it's not able to resolve the ping
target rather than not able to reach the resulting host, I'm damned if I
can remember the specifics but I've definitely seen this happen on an lfs
box before and it was nothing to do with perms (as I said before, to your
point about people not reading the whole thread...)

Mark

Re: Advice sought re HDD --> SSD migration

[Mark Fletcher]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 7:24 AM David Christensen <dpchr...@holgerdanske.com>
wrote:

> On 06/05/2016 04:40 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote:
>
>
> > ... Any clever ploys to deal with [changing UID's and GID's after a
> > fresh install]?
>
> For users, I track usernames, UID's, and GID's, and refer to that when
> creating accounts.
>
>
> For services, I restore and chown -R if needed (I don't run many
> services, and the Debian project seems to have kept service UID's/GID's
> fairly stable over the years).
>
>
> David
>
>
>
In the end I successfully completed this. I removed the 1TB hard disk which
I had already migrated, moved the replacement SSD to where it had been, and
plugged in the other SSD which was to replace the 500GB main hard disk.
Booted as normal, and the trick was to mount the hard disk
(/dev/sda1,sd5,sda6,sda8 and sda9 ) to separate places on the filesystem.

So I created mount points under mnt for newroot, newhome, oldroot, oldusr,
oldvar, oldhome, mounted the partitions of the hard disk in those mounts,
(in addition to where they were mounted as part of the boot process, eg /,
/tmp, /usr etc) and the partitions of the new SSD (which I first had to
make) in newroot and newhome. Then it was fairly simple cp -a jobs to copy
everything over from there. Doing it that way, I copied what was on the
disk surface but didn't inadvertently grab anything that was actually in a
virtual file system.

I tried to be clever and use GPT partitions on the first SSD, thus proving
I wasn't in fact clever when I tried to install grub and found I needed to
have a "BIOS boot partition" (whatever that is) and didn't. So rather than
eff around unnecessarily with getting MBR boot to work on a GPT partition I
used parted to wipe the label and go back to a "msdos" partition scheme,
recreated the partitions and the file systems, and copied everything a
second time.

Then, install grub to the SSD using grub-install
--boot-directory=/mnt/newroot/boot /dev/sdc and then a grub-mkconfig -o
/mnt/newroot/boot/grub/grub.cfg.

Then reboot, and tell the BIOS setup to boot from the SSD first not the
hard disk. That fired up grub and I was able to select the SSD-installed
Linux. That booted successfully and that's what I'm using to write this.

Because I worked that way I had no file ownership problems, but I did
notice messed up permissions on the directories under / that had previously
been mount points, eg /usr, /tmp etc. Although /var was OK. For example
/usr was world writable which VirtualBox was none too impressed with.
Easily fixed, but I don't know why it happened.

Just one thing I wasn't sure about -- what should the permissions of the
/media directory be?

Apart from fixing that, what's left to do is to disconnect and remove the
500GB hard disk, move the SSD to the hard disk's SATA port so it is
/dev/sda, modify grub.cfg to reflect the move and to remove the hard-disk
boot menu items which grub-mkconfig, trying to be helpful, generated.

But I'm basically there apart from my question above about the permissions
of /media.

Thanks all for the advice -- was very helpful.

Mark

Re: Advice sought re HDD --> SSD migration

[Mark Fletcher]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 7:14 PM Jonathan Dowland <j...@debian.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 09, 2016 at 02:13:58PM +0000, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> > Apart from fixing that, what's left to do is to disconnect and remove the
> > 500GB hard disk, move the SSD to the hard disk's SATA port so it is
> > /dev/sda
>
> Where do you depend upon it being /dev/sda? I'd strongly recommend using
> filesystem labels (change an existing ext2,3,4 filesystem label with
> e2label,
> other FS have similar tools) and UUIDs for identifying drives/partitions in
> config files. In /etc/fstab, you can use LABEL=foo or UUID=x where you
> would normally use a path to the device; elsewhere (e.g. systemd units)
> you can
> use a path such as /dev/disk/by-label/foo or /dev/disk/by-uuid/x.
>
>
Don't recall suggesting I depend on it being /dev/sda. In fact right now it
is /dev/sdc and everything seems to be working. UUIDs all the way here.

I just like to keep things neat and tidy -- two disks, the main one I boot
from and a second with a big data space -- sda and sdb, makes sense to me.
And I'm clearly not the only one who feels that way as one of the earliest
replies on this thread made the same point.


> Try to use non-ambiguous labels. If there's any chance of you mixing drives
> from this machine and another


There isn't, but I can see in some people's cases there might be.


> > modify grub.cfg to reflect the move and to remove the hard-disk
> > boot menu items which grub-mkconfig, trying to be helpful, generated.
>
> Unless you have customized your grub config, they should automatically
> disappear
> after you've removed those drives and re-ran update-grub2. It should also
> be
> working off UUIDs rather than device names like /dev/sda too, mind...
>
> Um, not sure I understand that. To my thinking, I'll need to have updated
grub.cfg _before_ shutting down to remove the hard disk, since after
removing it I won't be able to boot since I'll have moved the SSD and it
won't be on the SATA port the grub.cfg is expecting Oh hang on, your
point is that it should be identified by UUID... Will need to check, maybe
it is, that will be good -- but I think I remember seeing something like
(hd2,msdos1) or something in the grub config generated by grub-mkconfig and
that won't be true any more after I swap connectors on the SSD. So I was
thinking I'd need to modify that, then shut down to physically remove the
HDD and move the SSD, then bring it back up, and if I've messed up the grub
config it will be time to boot from a live thumb drive to fix it...

> But I'm basically there apart from my question above about the permissions
> > of /media.
>
> mine is just
>
> drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 May  5 17:09 /media
>
> Thanks to you, and to David Wright, for this info. Appreciate it. And it
makes sense. I was worried about needing suid bits or some other magic, but
seems not.

Thanks again for all the advice on this, list!

Mark

Re: Mailing-list configuration

[Mark Fletcher]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 12:13 AM Nicolas George  wrote:

> Le sextidi 26 prairial, an CCXXIV, Tanstaafl a écrit :
>
> If you are referring to a MUA command, then first let me remind you that
> MUA
> commands are not standardized, and therefore using the name of the command
> on your particular MUA without an explanation is not a good idea. But that
> is not the point. The point is that a procedure that requires a moment of
> thought for each single mail "I am replying to a mailing-list or a simple
> group discussion" is not acceptable. If that is what you are suggesting,
> then consider that I accidentally got it wrong.
>
>
You know we are not talking about running a nuclear reactor here, right?


> As I said, the default action should be the preferred action. The correct
> interface for a MUA is a single button to reply to almost all the mails,
> and
> a different procedures for exceptions, when the user actively knows there
> is
> something different. As I have already stated, the procedure I use achieve
> that goal for most of the mailing-lists I am subscribed (quite a few) and
> direct discussions (including with groups of people from mailing-lists). I
> therefore consider that if it does not work for some mailing-list, it is no
> fault of mine.
>

But this only works if all participants agree to use such headers, surely?
You'll never get the eclectic bunch that populate this list to do that. Or
does it need to be a feature of the machines hosting the list?


>
> To Lisi: re-read my mail, I gave the technical solution and headers I use.
>
> I'm sure she read it the first time, but to the point above, this is
either something each individual has to co-operate with (not a chance) or
something one or more maintainers of the list server(s) need to be
convinced to work on (ditto).

Mark

Re: ssh again

[Mark Fletcher]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 11:48 PM Lisi Reisz  wrote:

> On Tuesday 14 June 2016 15:40:22 Reco wrote:
> >   Hi.
> >
> > On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 03:32:19PM +0100, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> Hostnames, here I come.
>
> For hostnames within your own network, consider installing avahi. That's
how I got it working on an LFS system I built recently where _nothing_
worked until I built / installed / configured it myself. The process of
getting that machine to a useful state taught me a lot, not least an
appreciation for everything that "just works" with Debian!

Mark

Re: Mailing-list configuration (was: Big dummy at work again)

[Mark Fletcher]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 2:17 AM Morten Bo Johansen  wrote:

> On 2016-06-13 Nicolas George wrote:
>
> > As I already explained twice, a solution that requires a
> > different action when it is a mailing-list and when it is not
> > is not an acceptable solution.
>
> Why not? Don't you know when you are corresponding on a mailing
> list or not? You only need to switch between 'r' and 'L'. And
> if some person on a mailing list in rare cases specifically
> request a CC, then you also have to remember 'g'. That is not
> too hard to manage?
>
> > The solution I advocate does not have this issue.
>
> Your solution is completely hopeless. You want people to
> configure their MUAs to insert "Reply-To" headers on a per
> mailing list basis to avoid your CCs? Many (most?) MUAs can't
> even be configured this way.
>
>   Morten
>
>
Hear, Hear! Morten has put his finger on it. In both his paragraphs.

Mark

Advice sought re HDD --> SSD migration

[Mark Fletcher]

Hi

I've recently decided to upgrade my main PC, running Debian Jessie, to use
SSDs instead of HDDs. Right now I am halfway through the process, having
done what I consider the easy part, and about to start the potentially more
difficult part.

The machine is a self-built circa 2009 machine with an Intel Core i7-920
processor, 24GB of RAM (originally built with 8GB and upgraded later) and
1.5TB of disk space originally spread over 2 HDDs -- 1 500GB disk which
contained the whole filesystem except /opt with multiple partitions, and 1
1TB disk which is mounted on /opt.

The 1TB disk contains a mysql database instance, and also houses 2 Windows
VirtualBox VMs for those few things I still need Windows for.  It's also
got a collection of videos and space for video transcoding work I do
sometimes.

The migration was easy for the /opt disk -- just install the SSD, partition
it, create an ext4 filesystem on it, mount it somewhere temporary, copy
everything over from the /opt harddisk, and modify fstab so that it
automounts the SSD going forward instead of the hard disk. I then rebooted
to make certain I was fully over to the SSD. The 1TB HDD is still inside
the machine but I plan to remove it when I open the box up again to add the
second SSD. I'll set up periodic TRIM as a next step.

I've got a feeling though that the main disk is going to be a bit more of a
challenge, and that is what I want advice about. I'm thinking I should boot
from a live image and effect the copy there so that the disk is not mounted
and in active use. Is that along the right lines or is there a better way?

The replacement SSD is 960GB where the original hard disk is 500GB. Would
you recommend a dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdd (or whatever it turns out to
be), or a cp -r command like I used for the /opt disk, or some other way to
execute the migration?

One complication is when I originally partitioned the 500GB disk I may have
overdone it a bit. I've got separate partitions for /boot, /usr, /home,
/tmp, /var, swap space and the root partition. I now consider that I
overdid that and would ideally like to collapse /usr, /tmp and /var into
the (correpondingly bigger) root partition, ie not have separate partitions
for them and end up with root, /boot and /home (BIOS is too old for UEFI so
using MBR booting so /boot partition makes sense). But, if trying to do so
is going to make life significantly harder, I can accept not doing so --
but I do want to make full use of the available space on the new device so
the partitions will not be the same size as they were.

What other things should I be concerned about (for example the discussion
about ping using capabilities that was on this list a day or two back)? Oh,
and speaking of MBR, as I was a paragraph ago, anything I should watch out
for when trying to make the SSD bootable?

And anything else I should bear in mind when migrating to SSDs on a system
that was originally installed on HDDs?

The HDDs are about 7 years old now -- the 500GB one has been in the machine
since I built it, the 1TB is a replacement since its predecessor didn't
enjoy the 2011 earthquake (I live in Tokyo, Japan) and failed shortly
afterward. Hence my desire to migrate to newer hardware before they start
failing again -- plus the speed and quiet advantages -- I figure with this
upgrade plus adding a USB3 PCIe card I have a machine that's on par with
any I could buy today.

The SSDs are recently-bought SanDisk Ultra II 960GB devices, Japanese
model. I've already checked they have the latest firmware.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Mark

Re: dphys-swapfile why don't us fallocate to create swapfile

[Mark Fletcher]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2016 at 17:51, basti  wrote:

> Hello,
>
> on a low voltage cpu system I can see that the creation of an 1 GB swap
> file can take several minutes. (The file-system is on SD-card which
> write about 6-7 MB/s).
>
> As I see fallocate can do this job much faster, so why you don't use this?
>
> fallocate is also part of the util-linux package which essential in debian.
>
> Best Regards,
> basti
>
> Why don't we use it? We don't use it because we are a user group, not
application developers. The clue was in the group name...

Re: ssh-ing in inside private network

[Mark Fletcher]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2016 at 9:10 PM Dan Purgert  wrote:

> Lisi Reisz wrote:
> > On Tuesday 31 May 2016 23:56:02 Richard Hector wrote:
> >> On 01/06/16 07:31, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> >> > Now to do what I really wanted to do all along, and ssh in to run
> level
> >> > one as root:
> >> >
> >> > lisi@Tux-II:~$ ssh root@192.168.0.5
> >> > ssh: connect to host 192.168.0.5 port 22: No route to host
> >> > lisi@Tux-II:~$ ssh lisi@192.168.0.5
> >>
> >> Run level one? AKA single user mode? I wouldn't expect to find sshd
> >> running in single user mode. Without checking, I'm not sure I'd even
> >> expect networking to be up.
> >>
> >> Richard
> >
> > Yes, I had come to the conclusion that that was probably the problem.
> > Networking does appear to be up since nmap found a host having scanned
> > the ports.
>
> You'll need to reset the init script to fire at runlevel 1.  Not sure
> how you go about this in a systemd setup.
>
> That being said, the 'init' manpage has the following warning:
>
> # On  a  Debian  system,  entering  runlevel 1 causes all processes to be
> # killed except for kernel threads and the script that does  the killing
> # and other processes in its session.  As a consequence of this, it isn't
> # safe to return from runlevel 1 to a multi-user runlevel:  daemons that
> # were  started  in runlevel S and are needed for normal operation are no
> # longer running.  The system should be rebooted.
>
> I'm not sure if this holds for systemd-init though.
>
>
>
To add to that, and not to make value judgements, but the point of Runlevel
1 is that it is single user mode. The whole point is that there is only one
person logged in, _via the console_, and no one else can be logged in doing
anything, and therefore it is safe to perform maintenance like taking disks
offline to back them up (back in the days when that was the main / only way
to do it) or other similar maintenance tasks.

So, running the ssh daemon in Runlevel 1 is like, well, like trying to fit
brake blocks to a tomato. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. I think I
missed what you were actually trying to do but does it really need to be
done in Runevel 1? Because Runlevel 1 and remote access to the machine
aren't concepts that belong in the same sentence, at least without a
negative.

Sorry, probably not what you wanted to hear but...

Mark