Re: [SOLVED] Is my processor 32-bit or 64-bit?
I run an SSD on my MCP61P so lack of NCQ has no impact whatsoever--SSD's have no moving parts, and all seeks are instantaneous. While I haven't heard of NCQ improving read speed of SSDs, it can have a significant positive impact on write speed for SSDs. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvbohwlb48.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: [Conclusion] Looking for an emacs replacement
(if (= emacs-major-version 20) (menu-bar-mode -1)) I recommend testing (fboundp 'menu-bar-mode) instead. (if (= emacs-major-version 21) (if window-system (tool-bar-mode -1))) And here I recommend testing (fboundp 'tool-bar-mode) and calling the function regardless of window-system. (if (= emacs-major-version 22) (progn ;; Have *Buffer List* use old-style header without white on green highlight. (setq Buffer-menu-use-header-line nil) You can `setq' this regardless of emacs-major-version (older versions will simply ignore it). ;; Disable dark blue on dark background in minibuffer. (set-face-foreground 'minibuffer-prompt nil))) The better fix is to explain to Emacs that your tty background is dark by setting `frame-background-mode' (either via Customize or if you want to use plain Lisp, you'll have to not only `setq' the var but also call (frame-set-background-mode (selected-frame)) afterwards). (if (= emacs-major-version 23) (progn (setq transient-mark-mode nil) (setq line-move-visual nil) (setq search-whitespace-regexp nil) (setq split-width-threshold nil))) Same as Buffer-menu-use-header-line: no need to test emacs-major-version. ;; Disable nasty white on green highlighting in electric-buffer-mode. I suspect that after setting frame-background-mode some of those faces will be less nasty. Of course, you may still dislike them. ;; Stop the annoying question about exiting with shell processes still running. (eval-after-load 'shell '(add-hook 'comint-exec-hook '(lambda () (set-process-query-on-exit-flag (get-process shell) nil I recommend you don't quote your lambda expressions. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwv8vcaaaqx.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: ntpd crashes.
with ntpd crashes on my server. Time jumps forward one hour every time this has happened. However I'm not convinced it's the hardware causing Sounds like something is causing the one-hour jump, and that in turns causes ntpd to go bonkers. As for what causes this jump, I don't know. Some cron job, maybe? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvfw6f4f46.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: ntpd crashes.
with ntpd crashes on my server. Time jumps forward one hour every time this has happened. However I'm not convinced it's the hardware causing Sounds like something is causing the one-hour jump, and that in turns causes ntpd to go bonkers. As for what causes this jump, I don't know. Some cron job, maybe? No I have no cron jobs. Not sure what else it can be. The one-hour difference suggests it might be linked to time-zone or DST issues, maybe some code that syncs up the internal time with some external (could be an RTC) clock? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvd31gztdh.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: USB drive spins up every hour
Hmm... I guess I'm going to have to test it in a minimal environment where I'm reasonably sure there can't be some clever daemon interfering while trying to do something useful. Did you find the solution? And if yes, what was it? I think the problem was hardware. At least I'm now using another USB-sata adapter and that seems to have solved the problem. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwv4nrbkfck.fsf-monnier+in...@gnu.org
Re: Can Debian's paranoia be tamed
Decent desktop environments allow you to use the window manager of your choice. Decency seems to be a dying breed, sadly ;-) Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvip8waryg.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: OT: Seeking Advice on Purchasing a Laptop
The problem with proprietary drivers is of course that they're proprietary, but on top of that, they aren't as hassle-free to install and update. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvfw3v8xjv.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: Anybody have a chromebook? Can it run Debian?
It is possible, but it's not easy. I tried installing a Linux distro (don't remember which one) from a thumb drive in Developer Mode and the BIOS recognized it but would not boot it because it wasn't signed. Google has some way of allowing developer self-signing, but I never looked into how that works. The readers of this thread might find this blog posting interesting. Don't like Secure Boot? Don't buy a Chromebook. http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/22465.html Which reminds me of a question I have about these braindead secure booting systems: has any company (Google/Miscrosoft/younameit) actually shown evidence that there are attacks out there in the wild that subvert/replace the OS's boot sequence? I mean, I'm willing to believe there are such attacks out there, but in order to justify all this pain, they had better be very widespread and very nasty, yet I haven't heard much about such things. So I'd love to see a list of, say, attacks we have seen in the past and which would have been prevented by SecureBoot. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvvca6g8dj.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: OT: just falling back to fluxbox after Gnome3 mem-leak experince
viskup@viskup:~$ awk '/Name|VmSize|VmPeak/' /proc/4186/status Name: gnome-shell VmPeak: 3537456 kB VmSize: 3403068 kB That doesn't show a memory leak. Indeed, but we're talking about 3GB of memory here, which seems hard to justify for such an application. awk '/Name|VmSize|VmPeak/' /proc/$(pidof gnome-shell)/status Name: gnome-shell VmPeak:1250636 kB VmSize:1190912 kB More than 1GB also sounds excessive, so you seem to be suffering from the same problem. Of course, maybe this is not a problem, it is just an artifact of gnome-shell sharing a lot of memory with other applications, so it's not actually eating up all your RAM. But this explanation seems unlikely. I think it deserves a bug report. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvpq0a7n6o.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: stun server. (just want to clear my concept)
stun server is mainly used for Voice and Video due to their UDP in nature. so that if UDP recipient want to response back with voice or video packet it returns back to Stun and stun route back to our local server. but the question is why?. if i have a public Ip which is published behind example.com and i have all the necessary port forwarded to the jabber server so the recipient end could send its response to my public IP rather then stun server and in my opinion it should work as all the ports are properly forwarded. Stun servers do not perform any routing. All they do, is let your computer know which IP and port number it's using (as seen from the other end), so it can tell the other end, which IP and port number to use to contact it back. In your case, *you* might know these things, but your VOIP program probably doesn't (unless you manually tell it). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvy5e8jz05.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: Moving from a proprietary OS - unnecessarily inful experience -- was [Re: I wish to advocate linux]
I don't know if he was referring to that FAQ or not. *HOWEVER*, as a senior citizen moving from Windows(tm) to Debian(tm?), I find the transition unnecessarily annoying. I used http://goodbye-microsoft.org once and it went very smoothly. AFAICT this site doesn't exist any more, but I have the impression that the same is available as http://people.debian.org/~rmh/goodbye-microsoft/ and as goodbye-microsoft.com. Not sure how it relates to goodbye-windows.com, which seem to offer a similar service. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvtxowie58.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: How to ifdown ... on squeeze?
NM's only controversial because there are people who oppose change not matter why it might be. The NM developers haven't done themselves any favors by not providing server-type features like bonding... No, it's also controversial for other reasons. In my case, I have issues with it because it was designed for the there's exactly one user case. The multi-user case (as well as the nobody is logged in case) were only bolted on later and AFAIK those still don't really work right (e.g. last I tried you can only have one nm-applet running at a time). The problem here is that GNU/Linux is a multi-user system, so NM's basic design was fundamentally wrong, and it can be difficult to fix such problem after the fact. Stefan whose machines often have more than 1 user logged -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvmxc7vm1r.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: Adobe flash is dead
Why bother with non-free software when we're talking about a technology that's dying like BSD these days? Because right now, realistically it's the only game in town if one wants to watch flash content. When HTML5 comes along and I am able to get rid of /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so I shall be only too delighted. Until then, one has to be pragmatic. There are many ways to be pragmatic. Nowadays, Gnash works well enough for me that my notion of pragmatic is simply say good bye to web-sites which are too poor to work with Gnash. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwv4nyclp4p.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: how to download the packages in Debian testing non-free before installing?
Most probably it's the firmware you require. This can be provided to d-i on a USB stick. Another alternative is to do the install on another machine, and then to move/clone the resulting partition. Most of my Debian installs were done by cloning an existing system rather than going through the debian-installation process. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvmx9kpfur.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: ntp daemon.
== server1.shellva .INIT. 16 u- 102400.0000.000 0.000 mail.honeycomb. .INIT. 16 u- 102400.0000.000 0.000 thor.netservice .INIT. 16 u- 102400.0000.000 0.000 ntp.sunflower.c .INIT. 16 u- 102400.0000.000 0.000 ntp2.Rescomp.Be .INIT. 16 u- 102400.0000.000 0.000 voxl-nyc-15.ser .INIT. 16 u- 102400.0000.000 0.000 xen1.rack911.co .INIT. 16 u- 102400.0000.000 0.000 ntp1.Housing.Be .INIT. 16 u- 102400.0000.000 0.000 I do need that port 123 open on the router ? The important thing to know is that NTP uses UDP rather than TCP. E.g. machines from my university cannot use remote NTP servers because all UDP traffic is filtered away (they do have local NTP server which get synchronized with remote server, of course). So you need outbound UDP port 123 open (inbound is only if you want other machines to be able to synchronize with yours). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvr4ywpg35.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: stupid question about pvdisplay, just to be sure.
Just to be sure in case I misunderstand and do something really stupid: When pvdisplay says april:/farhome/hendrik# pvdisplay --- Physical volume --- PV Name /dev/md0 VG Name VG1 PV Size 673.62 GiB / not usable 3.00 MiB Allocatable yes PE Size 4.00 MiB Total PE 172445 Free PE 59037 Allocated PE 113408 PV UUID OsiEMf-FpfL-rc95-vV7a-QuJ3-EtUI-w0g7Bb april:/farhome/hendrik# does that mean that /dev/md0 still has 59037*4.00 = 236148 mebibytes of free space left to be allocated to logical volumes? I don't know, but pvs gives that information in a sweet and short way. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwv62jtbnow.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Choppy video
I'm trying to watch www.ctv.ca from a macbook pro (2GHz dual core with ATI graphics) and am having problems where the video is going slow (I'd estimate around 5fps). This is using Debian testing with the nonfree Adobe flash player (obviously since gnash doesn't even display any video at all). The audio is fine, OTOH. `top' says that most of the CPU time (around 130%) is used by plugin-container, so I'd guess the video thread using 100% of one core and the rest (e.g. audio thread) using the remaining 30% of the other core. While the machine is not brand new, it's not that slow and under Mac OS X it renders the video just fine, so I suspect there's a software problem, or maybe some video hardware acceleration whose driver is missing? Does anyone has an idea of what might be going on, what I might try to fix it, or at least how to try and figure out what is going on (e.g. how to find out which codec is being used, for a start)? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvipnryu00.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: USB boot from HardDisk
But if the computer starts I do get a grub menu from the Ubuntu distrobution. Would it be possible to use this grub setup from Ubuntu to boot my pendrive usb ? One way or another, your Ubuntu can read the pendrive, then you can do it. There are various ways to boot over USB; by order of increased reliance on your harddisk: 0- Let the BIOS boot directly from the pendrive. You say this doesn't work for you for some reason. 1- Let the BIOS boot from the harddisk, but then let Grub fetch the kernel and initrd from the USB. This requires that Grub sees the pendrive: if your BIOS doesn't see it you'll need Grub2 and you may need to tell Grub to load some usb modules. 2- Boot Grub from the harddisk, and let Grub fetch the kernel and initrd from the harddisk, but pass a rootfs argument that points to the pendrive. Assuming that the Ubuntu and Debian kernels are sufficiently similar (likely) you could do (2) simply by booting to Grub2 and selecting your usual Ubuntu entry but modifying it so as to replace root=blabla with root=/dev/sdb1 rootdelay=10 (tho I'm not sure the rootdelay=10 arg is still needed nowadays), where /dev/sdb is the name under which your USB pendrive should appear (that's not very reliable, so you can use UUID, labels, LVM volume names, you name it if you want it to be more robust). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwv62jidty4.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: bash command
Sadly, this can't be done in-place, so you'll either need to use mv to
replace /etc/conf.file with /etc/conf.file.new or repeat the loop (with
no substitution) to copy /etc/conf.file.new into /etc/conf.file.
It can be done inplace with `rm' in place or `mv':
(rm /etc/conf.file;
while read line; do
echo ${line/old_word/new_word}
done /etc/conf.file) /etc/conf.file
-- Stefan
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Archive:
http://lists.debian.org/jwvzkgucevp.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: free software mini pc
So to recap my original post, the basic requirements are: - fanless mini PC - it will run Debian - production environment (reliability is important) - good Linux support to facilitate fast deployment and low maintenance, - avoiding non-free software (non-free firmware, out-of-tree kernel modules, ndiswrapper) My Fit-PC2 is running stock Debian, and vrms tells me that the only non-Free code it has installed is firmware-ralink (well, it also mentions some non-DFSG packages which the FSF considers as Free). The wireless chip was not well supported by the stock kernel when I got it, but I haven't needed it very often and the few times I've needed it it worked just fine (including WPA Enterprise). The same should hold for the Fit-PC3 (tho you may want to check their forums first, since support for some particular features like the IR interface or the watchdog may not all be supported by the current kernel). While they don't guarantee that the stock kernels supports all the hardware, they do care about GNU/Linux support and provide fairly good information on the forums about the available support, so you can make up your mind before actually buying the unit. You can actually buy them with some GNU/Linux pre-installed. IOW it's one of the companies I've found to be most supportive of using GNU/Linux on their devices. I'd love to hear of others, especially if they're even more clearly supportive of Free Software, since I like to vote with my feet, Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvzkcja5va.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: free software mini pc
not a necessity, though it is desiable :). A custom kernel that doesn't work is obviously going to be a problem, but if it works well enough then it would be fine for me. But I guess it does make a The problem is: what will you do with your machine three year down the road? Will you have to keep looking for some guy who keeps a custom kernel up-to-date, or will you have to rely on an old version of the kernel, and hence suffer from various minor problems as the user-space code starts to rely on new features your kernel does not provide? If your machine is supported by the stock kernel, all these problems are pretty much absent: you can expect to simply aptitude upgrade for the next ten years. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvpqdfa58a.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: free software mini pc
Of course, the manufacturer distributes the GNU/Linux version of the product with a proprietary driver which is hell to get working on anything else than that specific Xorg+kernel combination. I like to avoid that head-banging experience and the associated why did I ever purchase this garbage. So do I. FWIW the Fit-PC3 seems much more promising in this regard, Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvipj55tqs.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
No sound from Adobe's flash player
I recently updated my Debian testing desktop (which moved it to Gnome 3) and now the Adobe flash plugin doesn't give me any sound any more. Luckily, Gnash gives me sound OK, but I'd still like to solve the issue with the Adobe plugin for those sites that don't work with Gnash. So, from what I understand the issue is that Adobe flash tries to output the sound via ALSA but that doesn't work (hence the errors I get on stderr ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1018:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave) because ALSA considers itself busy with pulseaudio. I'd love to get help here: - how do I work around the problem so that Adobe's flash plugin gives me sound? - why is ALSA's dmix refusing connections (after all, its name claims it's a mixer, so it should accept more than one input stream). - Can I convince Gnome3 not to use pulseaudio? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvsjhwkgmc.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: No sound from Adobe's flash player
I'd love to get help here: - how do I work around the problem so that Adobe's flash plugin gives me sound? - why is ALSA's dmix refusing connections (after all, its name claims it's a mixer, so it should accept more than one input stream). I would like to see the output of: lspci -knn | grep -iA2 audio cat /proc/asound/cards lsof $(find /dev/ -group audio) Here you go: % lspci -knn | grep -iA2 audio 00:01.1 Audio device [0403]: ATI Technologies Inc Wrestler HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 6250/6310] [1002:1314] Subsystem: ZOTAC International (MCO) Ltd. Device [19da:a182] Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel -- 00:14.2 Audio device [0403]: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) [1002:4383] (rev 40) Subsystem: ZOTAC International (MCO) Ltd. Device [19da:a130] Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel % cat /proc/asound/cards 0 [Generic]: HDA-Intel - HD-Audio Generic HD-Audio Generic at 0xfeb44000 irq 43 1 [SB ]: HDA-Intel - HDA ATI SB HDA ATI SB at 0xfeb4 irq 16 % lsof $(find /dev/ -group audio) COMMANDPIDUSER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME pulseaudi 3838 monnier 28u CHR 116,10 0t0 5039 /dev/snd/controlC1 pulseaudi 3838 monnier 33u CHR 116,10 0t0 5039 /dev/snd/controlC1 % Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvehtf20c6.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: xserver-xorg vs. xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
While I admire the work the Nouveau guys are doing, after suffering for more than 4 years with an Nvidia GPU+chipset on my desktop, I just replaced the motherboard with a one based on the AMD E350 fusion chip, and suddenly all my problems are gone. One of the best $200 I've spent recently. Only remaining problem: Gnome. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwv8vjn205n.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
USB drive spins up every hour
My USB-connected drive spins up every hour (or even half-hour). This is a serious problem since it's a 3.5 drive, it's almost always idle (I only use it once a day for backups) and it's not in a place where I can easily plug it in and out. Googling, I found a very similar looking problem that occurred a few years ago in libatasmart and which caused DeviceKit to spin up the drives every hour or so. But I have no DeviceKit here (running Debian testing). Using /proc/sys/vm/block_dump tells me that there is no disk activity that justifies spinning up. I have smartmontools installed, but ps auxw|grep smart confirms smartd is not running. There is no `cron' activity around the time the disk spins up either, not anything disk-related in the logs. Any idea what it might be and how to find out and fix it? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvpqc3l5wg.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: USB drive spins up every hour
My USB-connected drive spins up every hour (or even half-hour). This is a serious problem since it's a 3.5 drive, it's almost always idle (I only use it once a day for backups) and it's not in a place where I can easily plug it in and out. Googling, I found a very similar looking problem that occurred a few years ago in libatasmart and which caused DeviceKit to spin up the drives every hour or so. But I have no DeviceKit here (running Debian testing). Using /proc/sys/vm/block_dump tells me that there is no disk activity that justifies spinning up. I have smartmontools installed, but ps auxw|grep smart confirms smartd is not running. There is no `cron' activity around the time the disk spins up either, not anything disk-related in the logs. Any idea what it might be and how to find out and fix it? IIRC, this setting can be defined using hdparm (-M flag and also /usr/ share/doc/hdparm/README.acoustic) but as the man page/doc says, the possible options for this value depend on the hard disks model. hdparm only sets the timeout for spin DOWN. My drives spins down just fine, the problem is that it spins *UP* even though I don't use it. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwv7gybky6v.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: USB drive spins up every hour
My USB-connected drive spins up every hour (or even half-hour). (...) Any idea what it might be and how to find out and fix it? IIRC, this setting can be defined using hdparm (-M flag and also /usr/ share/doc/hdparm/README.acoustic) but as the man page/doc says, the possible options for this value depend on the hard disks model. hdparm only sets the timeout for spin DOWN. My drives spins down just fine, the problem is that it spins *UP* even though I don't use it. I think both settings can be tweaked. man hdparm is long but worth for a slow reading. You're confused. Spin up happens when the drive is accessed and that's all there is to it. There is no setting for it because there's no reason to spin up the drive if there's no access to it, and there's no way to satisfy an access without spinning the drive, so there's basically no choice of when to spin up, from the drive's point of view (except for accesses to meta-data via things like smartctl and hdparm). My problem is that apparently some application somehow accesses the drive but not in a way that block_dump catches. Stefan already familiar with the hdparm man page, which incidentally also mentions that these operations often don't work for USB-connected drives ;-) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwv398ykau7.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: USB drive spins up every hour
My USB-connected drive spins up every hour (or even half-hour). (...) Any idea what it might be and how to find out and fix it? IIRC, this setting can be defined using hdparm (-M flag and also /usr/ share/doc/hdparm/README.acoustic) but as the man page/doc says, the possible options for this value depend on the hard disks model. hdparm only sets the timeout for spin DOWN. My drives spins down just fine, the problem is that it spins *UP* even though I don't use it. I think both settings can be tweaked. man hdparm is long but worth for a slow reading. You're confused. Spin up happens when the drive is accessed and that's all there is to it. Well, that's not always the case. There are external drives which have embeded in their firmware the power saving routines and spin-down/up automatically based on that, regardless the disk is being accessed or not. Regardless of where the code responsible for the spin-up resides, if the drive spins up when the drive is not accessed, it's a bug. Mmm... if you so sure the disk is awaked by an external application, then don't mount it unless you need it, that way the disk can be still powered on but it will inaccessible for the system and programs. Even when not mounted (and with its LVM volumes deactivated) it still spins-up. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvk424den3.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: shrink ext3 filesystem using e2fsprogs and fdisk
thanks for replies! Is it possible to slide partition using the tools included with e2fsprogs package as well? The e2fsprogs tools only deal with the needs specific to ext[234] partitions. Sliding a partition can be done for any partition you like with `dd'. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvehscdefn.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: USB drive spins up every hour
The hard disk can have set (by default) embbeded routines that make the disk to be awaked at a regular interval and external disks (those that come with USB enclosures or NAS/SAN appliances) tend to do it to speed up things (e.g., to run scheduled backup tasks). For a NAS, I could agree. But we're talking about a dumb USB-attached disk. Mmm... if you so sure the disk is awaked by an external application, then don't mount it unless you need it, that way the disk can be still powered on but it will inaccessible for the system and programs. Even when not mounted (and with its LVM volumes deactivated) it still spins-up. Then I would contact the manufacturer. If the disk is not mounted and no external program is accessing to it and still spins-up, it can be something wrong in the firmware. Hmm... I guess I'm going to have to test it in a minimal environment where I'm reasonably sure there can't be some clever daemon interfering while trying to do something useful. I'd prefer the annoying daemon scenario since I can fix it without buying a new enclosure [ this one is old enough that the manufacturer won't care about my problems. ] Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwviphoa6ij.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: Disk clicking and in increasing Load_Cycle_Count in laptop with debian/testing
to find how often the head get unloaded, I have completely prevented this effect to occur. Notice that you have 2 problems: 1- Unloading. 2- Reloading. From where I stand, the unloading is normal, harmless, and even desirable so the real problem is: why is it re-loaded every 3 minutes? I'd recommend you use /proc/sys/vm/block_dump to try and figure it out. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwv4nsn11ns.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: HELP: Number of CPU cores is not right
I hardly call module size blows up to be no rationale for limiting the number of CPUs. Well, if now is set to 512, the problem was not that big, I mean... solvable. IIRC the Linux kernel handling of CONFIG_NR_CPUS has changed: it used to allocate potentially large static data of size proportional to CONFIG_NR_CPUS, but has been changed recently to do that dynamically based on the actual number of CPUs. Which is why the default can now be set to 512 without suffering from undue blow up. Why 32? Well, it's a nice power of 2 and lots more than the number of cores in 99.% of all computers. That seems not to be a very practical approach to base such decision. On the contrary, it seems eminently practical. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvei2pkqon.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: Debian Squeeze and Intel 82830 GC on Thinkpad X30
Possibly someone out there has a working xorg.conf for this amazingly long lived little laptop? I use Debian testing on my X30 with an empty xorg.conf. The switch to kernel mode setting (KMS) seems to have brought its share of problems, tho: without KMS the i810 driver won't start any more, and with KMS, the text console doesn't display (so I get a blank screen for a large part of the boot, until X starts up, which is a problem when X fails to start up or when booting to single user mode). In case it matters, it seems that KMS is controlled via /etc/modprobe.d/i810.conf (and you may have to update-initramfs after changing that file). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvzkrrm8xa.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: Debian Squeeze and Intel 82830 GC on Thinkpad X30
So you use KMS and get good performance? I'm not very sensitive to video performance, but I didn't notice any particularly slow operation. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwv7hetjkxf.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: [SOLVED] Is squeeze compatible with WD20EARS and other 2TB drives?
If one is so power consumption conscious to be suckered into a Green (EARS) drive, then one needs to realize the CPU dissipates about 10 times the wattage/heat of a hard drive. Thus, concentrate your power I have no idea what makes you so angry against green drives. But I can assure you there are very good reasons to use them: - lower power consumption (and no: not all CPUs use 10x more power. Think of home-routers or atom-based systems). - less heat (so you can put more drives in the same machine, or push your CPU a bit more, or turn down your fans). - less noise (the main motivation for me). - survive more sleep cycles, so you can let them spin down just like laptop drives (after all, they are pretty much like laptop drives, except larger capacity and cheaper). Maybe none of those things matter to your situation, of course, but heat is the big issue for many computer systems, so it's not nearly as rare as you may think. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvwrmdz88p.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: [SOLVED] Is squeeze compatible with WD20EARS and other 2TB drives?
The first thing of notice is that the Load_Cycle_Count of the drive heads increases every 8 seconds by default. As seen on the Internet, this may pose a problem in the long run, since these drives are guaranteed to sustain a limited number of such head parking cycles. The number given varies from 300.000 to 1.000.000, depending on where you look. Those two numbers have nothing to do with each other. The 30 limit applies to spin-down (aka Start_Stop_Count), not to head-park (aka Load_Cycle_Count). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvr5clz7x7.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: need help making shell script use two CPUs/cores
unfortunately that simple approach is harder to do with my renaming scheme. So I would probably write a helper script that did the options to convert and renamed the file and so forth. for k in *.JPG; do base=$(basename $k .JPG) test -f $base.1024.jpg continue # skip if already done echo $k; done | xargs -L1 -P4 echo my-convert-helper And my-convert-helper could take the argument and apply the options in the order needed and so forth. If you want to use the renaming form of the command (which I also tend to prefer), then I think that using a Makefile makes a lot of sense (and GNU make's -j argument lets you specify parallel behavior). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvlj2tz6bg.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: DD To a Smaller Partition
I have a 10 GB partition that is nowhere near full, less than 5 GB of data on it (far less). Unfortunately, the partition I'd like to copy it to is 5 GB. I can do rsync -av but normally I'd use DD. Is there a way to copy an image of just the files from one drive to another? In the case where the 10GB indeed has mostly only files in its lower 5GB, it might be worthwhile to do something like: resize2fs /dev/foo 4G and then to `dd' the first 4GB only. But in all likelyhood cp -a, tar, or rsync will be more efficient. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvfwt1z640.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: [SOLVED] Is squeeze compatible with WD20EARS and other 2TB drives?
I have no idea what makes you so angry against green drives. I am against using any drive, at this time, in Linux, with a native sector size other than 512 bytes. Again, I fail to see why you're so emotional about it. I understand you don't recommend people buy such drives unless they know what they're doing, because their performance is sensitive to irrelevant details and is not great in any case (except maybe for streaming where the bandwidth is perfectly good, tho). That's OK: these drives aren't sold as speed daemons. The Linux partitioning tools still do not easily/properly handle these hybrid drives with 4096 byte per sectors that translate 512 byte sectors to the host. Indeed, although it would be very easy to make them do a better job. B. Doesn't care about performance of any kind, and is happy with sub 20MB/s rates. I don't care much about performance: I have a WD10EADS in a wl700ge, for example (yes, that's a home router with a 266MHz MIPS cpu and 64MB of RAM: no fan, no noise). But I also use another WD10EADS in my desktop, where it is faster (not by a large amount, but I did notice it, even tho I'm rather insensitive to such issues) than the barracuda it replaced. Admittedly, these WD10EADS don't use the 4KB blocks, so their performance is more in line with the usual. I'm down on these drives due to the maniacal 8 second head park interval, which likely does more mechanical damage than it saves power in dollar terms. There is simply no concrete evidence to back this urban legend. Think about it: this head-park speed is not a marketing argument, which means it is both technically and commercially trivial for WD to make the interval longer, so would WD really be so dumb as to keep the interval short just to screw their customers? And same for all the laptop drive manufacturers? I'm down on the fact that people buy them to save power, when they really don't save that much power compared to other drives. Not enough to notice on an electric bill. Doesn't hurt anyone, does it? The sector alignment issue bugs me the most. Second on the list is that these WD Green drives were designed to NOT be used, rather than used. The only way to get significant power savings is to sleep the drive most of the 24 hour day. BUT, all the other drives same almost as much power in their sleep modes. Yes, those drives are mostly meant for use cases where they're not spinning 24/7 (e.g. home server to store your videos, music, photos, backups, ...). And yes, most other 3½ drives consume a comparable amount of power when idle, but most non-green 3½ drives can't be spun down aggressively enough without wearing out much too quickly. So again, where's the advantage? Some of the drives are quieter by 3-4 dB. If your chassis sits on the floor you won't notice much difference. My desktop tower sits on the floor. And yes, I and the rest of my family noticed the difference, despite the CPU fan and system fan staying unchanged. If you have moderately loud system/CPU fans they'll drown out the noise generated by the drives. Hmm... how 'bout: If you have a fanless silent system, even these quiet green drives drown out the noise generated by the rest of the system. There's just nothing to really like about these drives, and many things to dislike. It's that simple. I love them: they're exactly what I need. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvoc7myfca.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: USB key requirement.
The eToken is basically a smartcard that plugs into USB. I still don't really understand the difference apart from it containing a key that I match against. Which is in essence what I was asking to do with a USB block device which looks much cheaper than the eToken. Typically, the difference is that it's not just a key you can read, but instead the key is kept hidden inside the smartcard and you can only ask the smartcard to use the key. Think of it this way: you can ask the smartcard to decrypt some encrypted data you provide, and if it succeeds, it proves to you that it knows the secret key. But you can't directly read the secret key, which means you can't easily copy the smartcard. Real smartcards probably don't work the way I described, but I hope it gives you some idea of how a smartcard can be different from a plain USB mass storage holding a secret key. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvipxuyd94.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: [OT] Hard Drive Energy Not Worth Conserving drives?
# hdparm -I /dev/sdc | grep Sector size Logical Sector size: 512 bytes Physical Sector size: 4096 bytes This is reported by the drive to hdparm. Only the 512 is used by the kernel. It has no knowledge of the 4KB physical block size and can't use it because the drive reports 512 bytes to the kernel as the physical block size. Isn't it rather than the kernel chooses to only use the logical sector size? Where/when does the drive report 512B physical sector sizes? In any case, the issue is probably not really in the kernel but in the filesystems and partitioning tools: all that's really needed to use the drive efficiently is for fdisk/parted and for mkfs to be told (and make use of) the physical block size. Of course, maybe a good way to provide this info is to teach the kernel about it so those tools don't need to use side-band info via hdparm. Don't we already waste that space with our filesystems? Ext2 cannot use blocks smaller than 1024 Bytes, as far as I can see. And by default even 4kB are used for small filesystems (5GB on my /). This depends on the FS and how it allocates space for files. Indeed: for mail servers, there are 2 issues: - actual disk space use, which does not have to depend on the block size (file systems can use sub-blocks, they just often elect not to). traditional 512 byte/sector disk. XFS can pack multiple small files into a single 4KB block extent. It is able to do this thanks to delayed allocation. Indeed, and for that reason 4KB physical blocks wouldn't cause additional disk space usage. - performance accessing those small files. Arguably, when accessing such small files, the bandwidth is typically low, so even in the worst case where 4KB blocks increase the bandwidth by a factor 8, it's still not necessarily going to be part of the bottleneck. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvd3o2ycsu.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: [SOLVED] Is squeeze compatible with WD20EARS and other 2TB drives?
I'm down on these drives due to the maniacal 8 second head park interval, which likely does more mechanical damage than it saves power in dollar terms. There is simply no concrete evidence to back this urban legend. In the WD20EARS I purchased this was in no way just a legend -- be it urban or rural or otherwise. I'd be really surprised if you had evidence that your drive failed because of mechanical damage due to aggressive head-park. And if your drive failed while still young, well that happens to the best of the drives, and is no evidence that those drives fail more often than others and even less that if they do it's due to the aggressive head-park. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwv39ottmgy.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
HD manufacturers and Free Software (was: [SOLVED] Is squeeze compatible with WD20EARS and other 2TB drives?)
MUST READ: Western Digital is unable to provide support for the Unix/Linux operating systems outside of jumper configurations (for EIDE hard drives) and physical installation support. While I never expect any OS-specific support from hard-drive suppliers, I find it offensive for a manufacturer to explicitly single out the OS I use, indeed. So, to get back to Debian, I wonder which manufacturers are more friendly to Free Software (e.g. provides tools to update their drives's firmware from systems like Debian). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvwrm5s7px.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: [OT] Hard Drive Energy Not Worth Conserving drives?
Read the ATA and SCSI specifications. Or ask on either mailing list. In short, the drive presents its LBA addressing based on 512B sectors. The kernel can't choose to ignore that--it's stuck with it. Since the drive is presenting LBA based on 512B sectors, there is no way the kernel can address LBA based on 4K sectors. I don't follow: what prevents the kernel from telling the higher-up tools that the drive uses 4KB sectors (or 72KB sectors for that matter)? In any case, the issue is probably not really in the kernel but in the filesystems and partitioning tools: all that's really needed to use the The current problem with the hybrid drives is that the partitioning utilities don't automatically align partitions on the underlying 4k sector boundaries. I'm glad we agree. Indeed, and for that reason 4KB physical blocks wouldn't cause additional disk space usage. The space savings with 4KB sectors has nothing to do with file systems or user data. I was talking about the space usage increase incurred from the use of ≥4KB blocks in the FS, if we assume that the FS uses the underlying HD block size as a lower-limit of its own block size. This is the ONLY reason these 4KB sector drives were developed: more actual end user space on the drive. That's a different topic, but an interesting one as well: the gain seems small (e.g. WD has/had two Green 2TB drives, one using 4KB sectors and the other using good'ol 512B sectors, and this using apparently the same underlying head/drive technology, so it seems the gain, if any, was too small to make it to the end user). So why does WD do that? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvr5cds7ch.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org
Re: How to: Mount NTFS filesystems RW
Thanks, that is a perfect solution to my problem. Esp. since I am not having much luck getting ntfs-3g installed and running. Odd. For what it's worth I don't use ntfs much, but I tried ntfs-3g the other day, and it was trivial: apt-get install ntfs-3g, then mount. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND=y, ACPI, and uswsusp
No. It is not. That's why I went to the trouble of downloading 2.6.20 from kernel.org. These are my options in either kernel: The stock 2.6.18-4-686 kernel has it enabled, but the 2.6.18-4-686-bigmem doesn't have it at all (not even disabled). Maybe that can help you, Stefan who switched to the non-bigmem version, preferring s2disk even at the cost of dropping from 4GB down to 3GB -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: GPL v3?
So, let me ask you, when you drive the speed limit, you are skirting the law. Or if in a 55MPH speed limit area and you drive 55MPH... exactly, are you are skirting the law (and therefore staying within the limits of the law) or are you breaking the spirit of the law and should be punished extremely? Reasoning by analogy is a good way to end up with complete nonsense. Just for the fun of it, I'd be interested in a little poll: 1 - are you generally in favor or against the GPLv3? 2 - are you a Free Software supporter, or an Open Source supporter? My gut feeling is that the answers are strongly correlated. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: GPL v3?
if you use code under GPL your program has too be under GPL. That's the gist of it, although it's only if you distribute your program that this comes into effect. Also this is not really the end goal, but rather its means. The end goal is to make it possible for anybody to fix/adapt/share/improve the resulting code. Is this not correct (somebody suggested that come companies find legal way to use GPL code for proprietary program - how to)? How can someone work around that? Well: 1 - by not distributing the program. E.g. run the program on your web-server and only let people use it remotely in their browser. Some piece of code might be run on your browser (sent from the web-server), so presumably this part of the code would still need to be GPL'd, but the rest doesn't. 2 - by embedding the code in a piece of hardware which refuses to run anything else. E.g. the hardware keeps an MD5 checksum of the blessed firmware, so even if the GPL forces them to distribute their code, their customers can't fix/adapt/improve it anyway. 3 - by obtaining a patent on some parts of the code. The GPL forces you to distribute the source code, but nobody can use this source code without getting a license for the patent. So people can't freely share it. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: GPL v3?
I say Patents BAD only if they are used for keeping progress from happening. Software patents are an unmitigated evil. However, attempting to fix a patent problem with a copyright license is a serious error. You're confused: while I expect most GPLv3 contributors find software patents an unmitigated evil and would like to be able to make them disappear, the GPLv3 does not try to do that. It only tries to prevent the abuse of patents to circumvent the intent of the GPL. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Off Topic - Open source flash support not looking too hopeless?
I see your point, the reason I am shocked is that Flash is not a web standard as such verified by the Web Consortium but has become a de facto standard as people rush to put stupid animations and graphics on their websites. I agree with the Captalism comment to. The reason I use Debian is almost exclusively for ideological reasons. I am on the side of RMS and the FSF in general and Debian is not a commercially produced operating system. The only sad thing is having to use the proprietary ATI drivers and ipw3945. I am not even bothered about 3d acceleration but I couldn't get even the free Radeon 2d driver to work with my laptop For what ot's worth I use the VESA driver with my X1300 mobility card (gives me not only better karma than the proprietary driver, but also slightly longer battery life). The only serious problem with it is that I can't seem to get the external VGA connector to work (which I need when I do presentations: I guess I'll have to configure the ATI driver for it at some point). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
auto-install modules when installing a new kernel
I need a few kernel modules that are not included in the stock kernel. module-assistant makes it pretty easy to compileinstall them, but I still wish it were even more transparent. I.e. I'd like to be able to automatically compileinstall those modules for every new kernel I install (and also automatically remove those installed modules/packages before removing the corresponding kernel). Any idea how to do that? I can't be the only one who's tired to forgetting to auto-reinstall his ipw3945/fglrx/... modules. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: to lvm or not to lvm?
crash, given this, what would be really cool would be to partition the system at install time using a slightly mean, but granular, best guess layout [0] so things should fit in their partitions without too much wasted space, then configure each partition as one mount point on one logical volume consisting of one physical volume [1] and then partition up the rest of the drive in 1GB chunks that sit in a pool of unused logical volumes so they can be assigned to any mount point when needed, preferably automatically. Huh? Why on earth use physical partitions for that? LVM is a perfect fit for such a situation. Put your whole disk as a single LVM physical volume. Carve it into the few partitions you need (with little space left on each) and leave the rest of the space unused in your volume group. You can then later on grow any partition that needs to with a simple lvextendresize2fs. That part can also be done with a 1GB granularity if you want. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: grub and rootfs as LVM
I setup my rootfs as an LVM, the menu.lst of grub looks like this; title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.18-4-386 root(hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-686 root=/dev/volume/root ro initrd /my_init savedefault Error happens when the kernel tried to mount the root filesystem: The error message is Waiting for root file system... yuwen check root=bootarg cat /proc/cmdline or missing modules, devices; cat /proc/modules ls /dev/ I setup /boot as a seperate disk parition. The rest is for LVM. /dev/volume/root is OK when I use a rescue CDRom. And I re-build the initrd, adding all dm-* modules to the initrd. Any suggestion? Try use /dev/mapper/volume-root instead. I'm not sure why, but I recently had a similar problem where using /dev/Debian/root didn't work but /dev/mapper/Debian-root did (even though once the boot is over, /dev/Debian/root can be used just fine, it looks like the alternate name is constructed later). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: to lvm or not to lvm?
That sounds like poor implementation, the critical bit is not to let it iterate without it having worked the first time. I still don't see anything wrong with the concept as long as it's implemented right, although I've never dealt with a system on the scale you're talking about. The problem is that your good implementation only protects you from the problems you thought about, whereas there will always be some unexpected new situation next time around. Just like the auto-replies for email. The safe implementation which only monitors but doesn't try to auto-extend the partitions will be just as useful in 99% of the cases. I've never seen anything that busy, had a MythTV backed that would sit with the load average up at 3 or 5 and I though that was getting my moneys worth. Problem is not the number of processes, but the amount of disk thrashing going on. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: grub and rootfs as LVM
Try use /dev/mapper/volume-root instead. I'm not sure why, but I recently had a similar problem where using /dev/Debian/root didn't work but /dev/mapper/Debian-root did (even though once the boot is over, /dev/Debian/root can be used just fine, it looks like the alternate name is constructed later). Would you please tell me how to create a initrd with LVM support in Debian? I used the initramfs tool. Thank you very much! I don't know: it just works. As long as you have the lvm2 package installed and the initrd package was created after the lvm2 package was installed, it should just work. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How can I refresh Etch completely?
Is this a clue? When I try to use aptitude it wants to remove 150+ unused packages, including Gnome. Doesn't feel right to me so I don't use it. If `apt-get upgrade' suggested to remove `gnome'. I'd do the following: apt-get install gnome If that doesn't do anything, then I'd write down the list of packages it wants to remove, then let it remove them, then go ahead and ask it to re-install them (although I'd probably not give the whole list, but start with just `gnome' and then add the few packages that I know I need and that were not installed as part of `gnome'). I've never needed to re-install Debian. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: suggestions for window manager
low-resource: box only has 64 MB available. Rock solid stable. A focus on good design and being bug-free over adding 'features'. I recommend ctwm. But you'll have to go through editing a config file. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
How to cut/crop a part of a PDF file
What tool can I use to extract some part of a pdf file? In kpdf, I can copy a piece of the PDF image and save it, but it's only saved as a bitmap, whereas I'd like to keep it in vector form. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
unmounting /media/usbdisk from the command line?
When a USB disk is mounted by gnome-volume-manager, I can unmount it using nautilus (via right clicking on the disk's icon), but I haven't figured how to do it from the command line. Any hint? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How to cut/crop a part of a PDF file
What tool can I use to extract some part of a pdf file? In kpdf, I can copy a piece of the PDF image and save it, but it's only saved as a bitmap, whereas I'd like to keep it in vector form. You don't ask much, do you? No, indeed. Mac OS X's `preview' does it out of the box. theory AFAIK: PDF is not strictly speaking a vector-graphics format. It is a subset of Postscript, which is actually a programming language for drawing documents. It is designed for output, not input or editing. Therefor, it is *very* hard to convert from PDF to a structured document format. /theory Actually, PDF is not a programming language, contrary to Postscript. So it's much easier to deal with (and more difficult to introduce viruses into it, among other things). What exactly are you trying to extract? For example, I have a PDF which contains a poster with (on the side) some meta-information about the author, the intended color scheme, the intended paper quality, the revision number, the order number, the purpose, the date, and I'd like to take the poster part and throw away the rest. I assume you aren't trying to get pictures out, but for the benefit of anyone else, I'll mention pdfimages from the package xpdf-utils, which will extract the bitmapped images from a PDF. I do want a picture out, but not a bitmap picture. Also from xpdf-utils you can find pdftops -- converting PDF to Postscript is kind of silly, but just mybe you can do what you want with a Postscript. I thought about it too, but couldn't find a postscript tool that does it. Scribus is probably your best bet for actually importing a PDF in any friendly way -- I think they were at least working on that, not sure if it is really usable Hmm... never heard of it. Looks interesting. I don't know how to make it read PDF, tho. Finally, pdftk is described as an electronic stapler-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses for PDFs. Most notably for your question, it will let you split the pages in to separate files. Yes, I looked at it, but I want to extract part of a page. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How to cut/crop a part of a PDF file
Actually, PDF is not a programming language, contrary to Postscript. So it's much easier to deal with (and more difficult to introduce viruses into it, among other things). Really? Can you explain more about this? I thought PDF was a subset of Postscript with some kind of compression and/or encryption applied. Was I mislead? If so, what is it really? Is there no relationship between the two? AFAIU, PDF indeed contains a subset of Postscript, but this subset includes basically all the drawing primitives and none of the programming language constructs. I.e. it removes loops, conditional constructs, and things like that. BTW, it seems that what I'm looking for should be easy to do: I don't care much if the resulting file is smaller, so it should be enough to play with the clipping path so as to hide everything but the part I want to see. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Laptop choice?
Intel Celeron M 420 I'd recommend against any Celeron CPU. It's slow and not energy efficient. A Turion64 ML-something is OK but an Turion64 MT-something is more energy efficient, so check the details. W.r.t GNU/Linux support I've come to the conclusion that it's a question of luck more than anything else. I'm pretty sure you'll be able to get Debian running just fine, with full support for the main elements, no matter which laptop you choose. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: ripping several hundred cds?
as part of this project I want to rip all of our cds to mp3 or ogg Of course. Note that if you you can get the necessary disk space, I recommmend you use flac rather than ogg or MP3. This is much bigger (a factor of 5 of so, I'd say) but has the advantage that it's lossless which means that you will never again need to rip that CD to use another format. From my collection of flac-format albums, I then generate other collections in other formats (typically 64Kb/s Ogg for my portable player, as well as Ogg resampled at 48KHz for my router whose sound card doesn't accept 44.1KHz). (if someone has a suggestion ofr an ogg-friendly ipod-replacement?). I've used Samsung players from their Yepp line with great success. The good thing about grip is that you can set it to eject the CD when ripping is finished, and do a CDDB lookup and start ripping as soon as a new one is inserted. I use Grip as well and am satisfied with it. I often need to tweak the tag info here and there (mostly for multi-cd albums and for classical music), but all in all it's pretty good. I wish it had support for fetching CD cover, tho. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: alternatives to sane in scanner software.......
I have given up on sane with my scanner. I guess you mean xsane. If so, a bewildering interface, a badgering licence message, and a lack of stability, make this a program to avoid. Hmm... interesting. I started with the software that HP distributes with my OfficeJet: a complete waste of time. So when I upgraded to xsane it seemed really good. As a matter of fact it has worked reliably for me, AFAIR. The only problem I've had with it is that the PDF it produces doesn't display correctly on Mac OS X's preview, so I always have to pass it through pdf2ps|ps2pdf (which happens to also generate somewhat smaller files ;-). The interface in general isn't amazingly smooth, but I found it OK. Quiteinsane (gimp2.0-quiteinsane) is a simpler alternative. I'll have to try it more seriously, but my first impression is that it's not what I need: I mostly scan a bunch of pages with the ADF (or manually from a book) and don't care much for image-editing features, so all the GIMP thingy comes as a hindrance more than a help. The ability to reorganize pages after the scan but before generating the PDF (which xsane offers me in a primitive but usable way) is crucial in all those cases where the ADF gets wedged or something. OTOH it may be just what I need for those rare cases where I want to scan a few photos. Does anyone have some other favorite (Free Software) scanner program to recommend? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: alternatives to sane in scanner software.......
Hello after a while on this. I have tried xsane in Debian and Fedora until I am blue in the face and I can't get it to work. I am starting to think the only way to get a scanner to work in Linux is if you write the program in assembler code and hire an idiot savant to configure it. I get all these weird I/O output crashes. Sane sort of works but is flaky sometimes. I have tried the gimp quite insane thing and it also dies with the I/O problem. Looks like the problem is with the sane driver itself, then. I've had no such problem with those programs, but I use the hpoj driver which I gather is written with some help from the manufacturer. I don't hold HP in my heart, but they do provide good GNU/Linux support for their printers and scanners in my experience. I think it's something worth remembering when you shop for a new device. Vuescan works instantly and effusively. But it is proprietary. Does anyone know of some even really crappy alternative? What is xscanimage? Does it work? Is it in the packages? I think your best bet is to try to get in touch with the maintainer(s) of your sane driver (IIUC the driver for your Benq is can be found at http://snapscan.sourceforge.net/). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: 48000Hz bitrate Audio distorted
Whenever I play a video with an Audio bitrate of 48000Hz in Totem or VLC, the sound is very distorted, doesn't matter if it's in mp3 or AC3 format. Video files with an audio bitrate of 44100Hz plays fine. Odd, it's usually the reverse. Sound card is an onboard (Asrock 939Dual-Vsta) C-Media CM6501 7.1 channel audio compliant with UAA architecture Can you show us the relevant part of `dmesg'? What can I do get these files to play properly in Totem? Are you using ALSA or OSS? What kind of distortion are we talking about? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: 48000Hz bitrate Audio distorted
Not sure which part of the dmesg to copy so you can see it in full here: http://fab621.googlepages.com/dmesg Hmm... looks like the ALSA driver doesn't output the relevant info. Anyway So the way you describe your problem (48kHz sampled audio is OK, but 44.1kHz one sounds bad) is odd. Usually audio hardware support 48kHz sampling for sure (among other things because it's the mandated default in w32 IIRC), and if it's a bit fancier it may support 44.1kHz and even other sampling rates as well. Usually this leads to problems where listening to 44.1kHz sampled audio leads to some distortion similar to what you describe (tho I'm surprised by your wording: it seems your distortion is much more noticeable) unless the software is careful to do resampling properly rather than naively. In your case the situation is reversed and I really have no clue why that would be. Maybe your audio card only support 48kHz sampling (it's a common limitation), but maybe ALSA is somehow misconfigured (or something along the way interferes) such that the software is forced to use a 44.1kHz sampling internally, so the top-level software ends up resampling 48-44.1 while ALSA ends up resampling 44.1-48, so when you play 44.1kHz sampled audio there's only one step of resampling and it's bareable, whereas when you play 48kHz sampled audio, the double resampling ends up making the distortion sufficiently noticeable. Doesn't sound very likely, tho. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: DVDs - err what gives?
Regulations prevent distribution = non-free True, it's non-free by Debian standards. But I still would like to make a distinction between blatantly non-free software, like the w32codecs, and stuff licensed as free software, like libdvdcss. Agreed. It would be good to distinguish between those packages that are non-free because the author dosn't want to free it, from those packages that are non-free despite the best effort of the author. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAM puzzle
apt-get install linux-image-2.6.18-4-686. And try the 2.6.21 one while you're there: it may reduce your battery consumption significantly. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Notebook Battery
I know the answer to this will probably hurt, but I thought I'd give it a shot in any case. My notebook's battery life took a sudden drop from around an hour to about 15 minutes. I is a 4800mAh battery. Given the specs of your battery (10.8V 4.8Ah, i.e. 51Wh), an autonomy of one hour means your laptop consumes around 50W, which is a hell of a lot for a laptop, unless you keep it constantly in stress test (with full CPU and disk, and graphics card load). So I'd guess that your battery's original lifetime is a good bit longer (at least 2h), and that when it lasted an hour, it was already on its death bed. design capacity: 329 mAh So even the design capacity has been changed, which looks rather odd. Is there anything I can do to improve this, or this battery just on the way out? I think it's been dead for a while now. I'm just bothered by the suddeness of this drop in battery life - it's been at about an hour for a good six months now, and stayed pretty stable. Unless some of the cells just died. Get a new one, or try refilling this one. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: disable saving persistent net rules
How can I prevent udev from saving the MAC address of eth0 into the persistent net rules file? I am using Debian Etch. I added a file /etc/udev/rules/a10-monnier.rules which contains various rules that I like (e.g. rename the firewire network interface to eth-fw0, rename the wifi interface to wlan0, rename drive partition /dev/usbdisk if they come from USB). On my Debian Live on a USB stick I then added the following rule to prevent saving persistent names for the network interfaces (since I use this USB key on many machines, I don't want the only ethernet interface to get name eth34): SUBSYSTEM==net, DRIVERS==?*, NAME=%k -- Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Benefits of using aptitude
Still, if you're used to apt-get, I don't really see a reason to switch. I always recommend aptitude, but never tell users to switch from apt-get on a running system. If I should, please let me know the reasons. The biggest benefit (at least until the new apt) would be the automatic removal of dependencies. Otherwise the TUI is quite useful sometimes, (especially when browsing for new packages), the search patterns, ... I actually keep wondering why apt-get and aptitude are not merged into one (it looks like it good almost be done by just renaming aptitude to apt-get). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: GRUB2 and Windows
I took a leap of faith (or folly, yet to be seen) and installed grub2. I did this in an attempt to move from Lilo to Grub (as I prefer grub). However, I didn't realize that Grub2 is vastly different! It seems to be installed correctly as I have a grub.cfg file that looks correct for booting all of my Linux kernel images. What I don't have though is an entry for WindowsXP. How do I add this entry? Can grub find it automatically? I don't what's the current status, but I know that grub2's support for booting things like Windows was somewhere between lacking and partly working at some point in the past (a year maybe?). Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Disable gnome-power-manager?
Am I the only one who finds the gnome-power-manager to be fundamentally flawed? A power daemon needs intrinsically to be system-global and not specific to a particular login session. This becomes obvious when there are several logins active at the same time (on different virtual consoles), typically with different users. Now, recent versions of the gnome-desktop-environment depend on gnome-power-management, so it makes it inconvenient to deinstall the gnome-power-management package. Is there a way to keep it installed but to deactivate it? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Disable RAM
I want to test how a program would run with a reduced physical memory. The machine has currently 4 GB RAM running Debian. I'd like to evaluate the performance of the system with 2 GB physical RAM. Of course, I could remove on of the RAM modules. But, is there also a way to disable the physical memory by software? At boot time specify the mem=VALUE parameter to the linux kernel. This is easily done with grub at the grub boot screen by adding the parameter to the end of the existing boot options. /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-686 root=/dev/hda5 ro mem=2G Or without rebooting, or should be able to eat up 2GB or RAM by writing a little program (run as root, obviously) which allocates 2GB and locks those pages in RAM (a feature typically used to satisfy real-time contraints or to ensure a piece of sensitive information is never written to disk). Try man mlock. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Transitioning to 64bit, is it worth it, and how
is because there is a penalty for executing 32-bit code, one which is There is none (if you use the 32bit subset of the AMD64 architecture). But there is a penalty for using the x86 architecture instead of the amd64 architecture. This penalty is not specific to the Athlon64/Opteron/younameit, but to all known x86 implementation: it's just the the x86 architecture has few registers and this limitation was partly lifted in the amd64 architecture. So the penalty you're talking about, is there because the amd64 architecture did more than extend pointers and int to 64bit, it also fixed a few problems in the x86 architecture. It has nothing to do with whether or not the amd64 is a true 64 bit architecture, whatever that may mean. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Transitioning to 64bit, is it worth it, and how
So I installed a system where / and /boot are not on raid and low and behold grub seemed to successfully install the boot sector and I could boot the disks. Making the /boot partition on a RAID is generally not possible with GRUB (don't know about LILO). It supposedly can be done if the RAID is just an MD mirror but I remember there being some caveats. So I wouldn't be surprised if the installer doesn't get it right. However I now hit the next problem = the installer somehow thought my drives were /dev/sde and /dev/sdf (rather than /dev/sda and /dev/sdb that they originally were) so created /etc/fstab, and the grub menu.lst entries refering to these drives. However when booting the new system it expected /dev/sda and /dev/sdb and so root failed to mount. I had to go back into the installer and manually edit files in the target system to make it work. My /etc/fstab doesn't use the /dev/sd* names: all my partitions are either under LVM (and hence have the names I chose to give them) or are labelled so that I can use /dev/disk/by-label/*. In Grub I always use hd0. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Canon Powershot A640 (update #2)
I don't have a card reader, but it sounds like that may not be such a bad thing to get, except that it is probably more hassle to eject the SD card and reload it into a reader and run the risk of damaging it from frequent handling. Contrary to HS I haven't found the card reader to be noticeably faster, but it does have the advantage of working even when the camera doesn't (e.g. when the battery is empty). Also of course it uses the UMS (Universal Mass Storage) protocol which is very well supported under GNU/Linux. I think that my immediate concerns are now sorted - I can successfully retrieve images taken. The less pressing issue, but one that will bug me, is the difference between the 2 cameras on one hand and the the difference between the 2 machines on the other hand. Regarding the difference between the two cameras I'd simply look at the protocol they use: most likely the Sony machine uses UMS whereas your Canon uses PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol) which is more recent and less well supported. You may also be able to change your Canon's config to use UMS. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gnome in testing
Right now when I run 'apt-get -s upgrade' there are 172 programs in the 'not-upgraded' response. If I try to upgrade any one of them a bunch of gnome programs are also upgrade but also apt-get wants to REMOVE gnome-desktop-environment and gnome-themes among a few others. I'd probably do: 1 - Write down the packages it removes (and which you don't want removed) 2 - let the upgrade take place and remove those packages 3 - re-add the packages with apt-get install the removed packages Or try `aptitude' which may give you a bit more info about what's going on. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: bash vs. python scripts - which one is better?
Just remember to tell you editor to inserts spaces as tab and set the tab width to something reasonable like 4. Please don't. TABs are 8 spaces apart. Always have been, always will be. People playing silly tricks with tab-width is the main reason why using TABs in languages like Python is a bad idea. Stefan PS: Also remember that the Python interpreter can't read your .emacs to figure out the width of a TAB you intended. Haskell defines TABs as being 8 spaces apart and I expect Python to do the same. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: newbie here - system administration question
Looking in /etc, I see /etc/network/iface, is it here I fix that? I don't see any such file. There is /etc/network/interfaces however. man iface man network try man interfaces ;-) Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: bash vs. python scripts - which one is better?
Haskell defines TABs as being 8 spaces apart and I expect Python to do the same. Python should do it because Haskell does it?? Not because Haskell is so influential, but because the same causes tend to result in the same effects. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: flac and wav
Would have if I could have! But it wasn't a cd. It was an old cassette tape feeding into the sound card, captured with ReZound. There are *definitely* ways to do that with Linux. Someone asks every 4-6 months on this list. Record players, not cassette players, but the concept is the same. When ripping cassette tapes, I do: - use sox's rec to record a wav file of the whole side of a tape. - open the wav in `audacity' to visually find the spots that separate one song from another, writing down the second at which they occur. I generally check the timestamps I write down by comparing them to the official duration of each song. - run `wavsplit' passing it the timestamps I just wrote down. - rename the resulting wav files (so the name reflects the title, tracknumber, ...). - pass them through a `for' loop that compresses them with oggenc. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Samba + external drives
So it's just a mix of network and network copy that seems to cause problems. I hope that's better :-) Any ideas? I'd try linux-kernel. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Disadvantages of Iceweasel instead of Firefox
As you all know, Debian Etch released with Iceweasel instead of Firefox. This is totally okay, but some applications (like X-Chat or Gaim/Pidgin) still uses firefox %u command instead of iceweasel %u for opening web URL addresses, from Gaim conversations and IRC channels. It used to work in Sarge, but in Etch doesn't. Epiphany or nothing opens up. How could I make my system firefox-aware? Maybe a symlink named firefox to iceweasel? Or aliases? Never had this problem. The only problem I bumped into is all the braindead websites that plainly refuse access if your User-Agent is not among the blessed ones. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Good fdisk Practices
I'm a big proponent of swap *files*. Once you allocate the whole disk, there no room left over if you want to add another swap partition, whereas you can add as many swap files as your heart desires, whenever you need them. I'd always heard that swap files are slower than swap partitions. Is that a myth? Also, is there any good reason to have a separate /boot on a modern system? I always thought /boot was just a kludge to get around old BIOSes that couldn't load anything that wasn't on the first part of the disk. I tend to just combine /boot and / on my newer systems -- am I taking some kind of risk by doing so? All my drives have 2 partitions: a /boot (with ext2 or ext3) of about 100MB and the rest is an partition dedicated to LVM. The reason for the separate /boot is that GRUB does not know how to read files from LVM volumes, so I need to load the kernel and initrd files from an ext[23]. Everything else (/, /home, swap, etc..) is placed in LVM volumes. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Good fdisk Practices
I read recently on this list that LVM is not portable across CPU Don't believe everything you read. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
I have been using Subversion for this very application for several years; it works well. Most revision control systems will do the job. And most of the post-CVS revision control systems (other than Subversion) also allow you to commit locally before sending the commit to the remote server. They also all (except for Subversion again, AFAIK) keep track of merges, in case you use branches. All in all, Subversion is probably the least flexible of the new tools. Of course, it doesn't mean it's bad, just that it's worth taking a look at alternatives. Subversion doesn't care; it handles any file type, including binaries. The problem is in what is meant by handle. Being able to store and retrieve arbitrary revisions is easy. Doing it half-efficiently with binary data is terribly hard. But the main problem is how to do merges since the merge algorithm necessarily needs to understand something about the structure of the file. In general, it requires intelligence. In the case of OOs files, you'll need to ask OOo to (help you) do the merge. or for revisions made to dozens of documents. But Subversion uses a diff technique, so the size of the repository grows very little from one revision to the next, unless you are adding much new material. A diff between two compressed versions of very similar files may still be just as big as the compressed file. And with Subversion, you always can go back to any previous version of any document. You can return even to a previous version of a document which you have removed from the repository; this is a consequence of All revision control systems can do that, even the ancient ones. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX
I write all my texts in latex, use JabRef/bibtex to manage references, subversion to keep track of things and to collaborate with coauthors, and -- if I need to submit to a journal misguided enough only to accept word, latex2rtf. My wife works in a field where most journals want Word files. So I thought I'd try and sell her on LaTeX + some conversion (latex2rtf for example), but it turns out it's no good for her: even though she's the sole author, she always sends her articles for feedback/corrections to friends who also want Word format and then do their modification in-place and send back a Word file (with changes marked as such), so she could start with a LaTeX file , but as soon as the text is ready enough to send to friends, she needs to convert to Word and then needs to keep working in OOs to integrate the comments/fixes etc... so she may as well use OOo all the way. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX
I write all my texts in latex, use JabRef/bibtex to manage references, subversion to keep track of things and to collaborate with coauthors, and -- if I need to submit to a journal misguided enough only to accept word, latex2rtf. My wife works in a field where most journals want Word files. So I thought I'd try and sell her on LaTeX + some conversion (latex2rtf for example), but it turns out it's no good for her: even though she's the sole author, she always sends her articles for feedback/corrections to friends who also want Word format and then do their modification in-place and send back a Word file (with changes marked as such), so she could start with a LaTeX file , but as soon as the text is ready enough to send to friends, she needs to convert to Word and then needs to keep working in OOs to integrate the comments/fixes etc... so she may as well use OOo all the way. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] . -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX
I write all my texts in latex, use JabRef/bibtex to manage references, subversion to keep track of things and to collaborate with coauthors, and -- if I need to submit to a journal misguided enough only to accept word, latex2rtf. My wife works in a field where most journals want Word files. So I thought I'd try and sell her on LaTeX + some conversion (latex2rtf for example), but it turns out it's no good for her: even though she's the sole author, she always sends her articles for feedback/corrections to friends who also want Word format and then do their modification in-place and send back a Word file (with changes marked as such), so she could start with a LaTeX file , but as soon as the text is ready enough to send to friends, she needs to convert to Word and then needs to keep working in OOs to integrate the comments/fixes etc... so she may as well use OOo all the way. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] .. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] . -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX
I write all my texts in latex, use JabRef/bibtex to manage references, subversion to keep track of things and to collaborate with coauthors, and -- if I need to submit to a journal misguided enough only to accept word, latex2rtf. My wife works in a field where most journals want Word files. So I thought I'd try and sell her on LaTeX + some conversion (latex2rtf for example), but it turns out it's no good for her: even though she's the sole author, she always sends her articles for feedback/corrections to friends who also want Word format and then do their modification in-place and send back a Word file (with changes marked as such), so she could start with a LaTeX file , but as soon as the text is ready enough to send to friends, she needs to convert to Word and then needs to keep working in OOs to integrate the comments/fixes etc... so she may as well use OOo all the way. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] .. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] . -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: GMT vs UTC
Note that while there is a difference between GMT and UTC, mostly computers are set to GMT. The M is for Mean time which smooths over leap seconds that occur in UTC due to the jitter of the earth's rotation. Check wikipedia for a more precise answer. Note, however, that its unlikely that you'll manage to keep your system clock, even with ntpd, close enough to one or the other to notice the differnce (which needs sub-second accuracy). The error with ntpd should be well below one second, unless your machine is turned off for an extended period of time. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How to install from hard disk on ia64 system?
My cd-rom is not recognized by the debian installer because of the intel 965 chipset on my asus p5b mainboard. I know there is a way to install from an iso image on the hard drive but I am having problems understanding how to get this to work. I currently have mandriva installed and lots of extra harddrive space for other distrubutions. I'd like to load etch and 64studio which is a debian based multimedia distribution. I believe I need the hd-media version of the debian installer, which I can't find in the ia64 installation manual at http://www.us.debian.org/releases/stable/ia64/. http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-ia64/current/images/ I only see booting from cd-rom and from tftp mentioned. Have you tried http://www.goodbye-windows.com/ ? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Laptop Recommendations?
Does anyone have any recent experience, either good or bad, with any specific laptops? Just avoid ATI graphics cards, and nVidia as well (tho it's not as bad). Integrated Intel graphics is often the best choice (best support under GNU/Linux, best battery life as well). How are they for GL? Works, but it's not the fastest there is, obviously. I don't think OpenGL matters too much for laptops (note that I don't consider desktop replacements as laptops, really). I think a blocking factor for many users is If I get an Intel card, can I still game on a Debian box? Obviously it depends on the games. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Growing an HFS file system
I have an HFS+ filesystem (on a powerpc-mac style partition) that I need to grow. parted/gparted seem only able to shrink it. Is there some other tool that's able to grow an HFS+ filesystem. I looked at tools under macosx as well, but macosx is only able to resize an HFS+ partition if it's on a GUID-style partition. Maybe there's a way to switch from powerpc-mac-style partition to guid-partition, then resize, than switch back? Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Debian on a 128MB USB flash drive
I wanted a live Debian system on my USB key. The Debian Live option is too static for my taste, I wanted a real live system, upgradable via apt-get etc... One option is to use a large enough USB drive and do a plain Debian install on it. But my USB drive is only 128MB so it was not possible. I saw someone on the web has done something like that using squashfs+unionfs and so you can do apt-get update and then to store the resulting state back on the drive, you do some kind of commit. I didn't want to go down that route, so instead I've used a plain normal Debian system, but using jffs2 as a file system, which has the advantage of being compressed and writable. The whole story can be found at http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~monnier/gnu-linux/debian-live-usb -- Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian on a 128MB USB flash drive
I know you said you want a plain Debian, but what about DSL ? http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ My understanding is that DSL offers some things I don't need (like a desktop; I'm mostly interestd in this system as a kind of rescue drive) and fails to provide me with the ability to just update it with apt-get (I don't intend to *ever* reinstall this USB system, instead I'll just keep updating against testing, as I've done on all my other systems). DSL looks pretty neat, but seemed too much based on a LiveCD mindset, so I didn't investigate much further. Maybe it actually offers just what I wanted. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian on a 128MB USB flash drive
You say that you have problems with apt-get. Have you tried aptitude at the command line? No. Googling for jffs2 mmap apt seemed to indicate that it's not specific to apt-get, so I didn't even bother to try something else. Besides, I'm used to apt-get and not to aptitude, so I actually deinstalled aptitude. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
