[gentoo-user] Re: revdep-rebuild keeps reinstalling binutils

[Konstantinos Bekiaris]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 5:48 AM, Keith Dart  wrote:

> === On Sun, 02/07, Konstantinos Bekiaris wrote: ===
> > Ok, nice approach. The problem is that no package can be installed
> > because the compiler gcc is not working...this is Gentoo...everything
> > has to do with compiling. The solution of the problem starts with
> > fixing gcc by hand. (You are right about python, i have an older
> > version).So?
> ===
>
> try gcc-config first. See if that clears it up. then
> "source /etc/profile".
>
> I think we are close to the problem. However, whatever i try, i get:

Gentoo kostas # gcc-config -l
 * gcc-config: Active gcc profile is invalid!
 [1] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.3.4
Gentoo kostas # gcc-config -E
 * gcc-config: Active gcc profile is invalid!
 [1] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.3.4
Gentoo kostas # gcc-config -B
 * gcc-config: Active gcc profile is invalid!
 [1] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.3.4
Gentoo kostas # gcc-config -X
 * gcc-config: Active gcc profile is invalid!
 [1] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.3.4

Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Valmor de Almeida]

Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Willie Wong  wrote:
[snip]
>OK - it turns out if I start fdisk using the -u option it show me
> sector numbers. Looking at the original partition put on just using
> default values it had the starting sector was 63 - probably about the

I too was wondering why a Toshiba HDD 1.8" MK2431GAH (4kB-sector), 240
GB I've recently obtained was slow:

-> time tar xfj portage-latest.tar.bz2

real16m5.500s
user0m28.535s
sys 0m19.785s

Following your post I recreated a single partition (reiserfs 3.6)
starting at the 64th sector:

Disk /dev/sdb: 240.1 GB, 240057409536 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 29185 cylinders, total 468862128 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe7bf4b8e

   Device Boot  Start End  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1  64   468862127   234431032   83  Linux

and the time was improved

-> time tar xfj portage-latest.tar.bz2

real2m15.600s
user0m28.156s
sys 0m18.933s


--
Valmor

Re: [gentoo-user] help with inaccessible (trashed?) file

[Walt Rarus]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:

>
> In my experience, fsck consistently detects file systems corruption, and
> consistently fails to do anything useful about it.
>

In my case, reiserfsck --fix-fixable did the trick, i.e., detected and fixed
the exact problem with the directory and file.

 However, it's pretty common for users to have made a separate volume for
> the
> portage tree (i.e. something mounted at /usr/portage). If so, just trash
> the
> thing, download a new-ish tarball of the tree, resync and you're back in
> business.
>

Hmm, something to think about should I ever restructure my setup.

Thanks to Daniel, Alex, and Alan for your helpful comments.

Walt

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: revdep-rebuild keeps reinstalling binutils

[Keith Dart]

=== On Sun, 02/07, Konstantinos Bekiaris wrote: ===
> Ok, nice approach. The problem is that no package can be installed
> because the compiler gcc is not working...this is Gentoo...everything
> has to do with compiling. The solution of the problem starts with
> fixing gcc by hand. (You are right about python, i have an older
> version).So? 
===

try gcc-config first. See if that clears it up. then
"source /etc/profile".

-- Keith Dart

-- 

-- ~
   Keith Dart 
   public key: ID: 19017044
   
   =

[gentoo-user] Re: When is a disk not a disk?

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 02/08/2010 02:27 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote:

Hello again List,

$ sudo  fdisk -l

Unable to seek on /dev/sda


You said that Google didn't help, but still, I've found some info about 
it.  In short, I've found two things:


a) "cfdisk" might work while "fdisk" does not.

b) You have a corrupted partition table that you can try to repair with 
the "testdisk" tool (after you make a full backup of your disk.)


Another thing: are you using busybox here or the normal version of 
fdisk?  (Busybox comes with its own fdisk.)

Re: [gentoo-user] When is a disk not a disk?

[Peter Humphrey]

On Monday 08 February 2010 01:27:33 Mark Knecht wrote:

> sorry to have forgotten is but simply do
> 
> df
> 
> and see what it says is mounted

$ df
FilesystemSize  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 60G   25G   32G  44% /
/dev/root  60G   25G   32G  44% /
rc-svcdir 1.0M  108K  916K  11% /lib64/rc/init.d
udev   10M  144K  9.9M   2% /dev
shm   2.0G 0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda6  40G  6.4G   32G  17% /home
/dev/sda7  61G   23G   36G  39% /home/prh/common
tmpfs 9.0G  1.8M  9.0G   1% /tmp

Now, ever since I upgraded to openrc (by setting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~amd64 
when I installed this system) my root partition has not been shown as a 
physical partition. I decided to let it go for the time being.

-- 
Rgds
Peter.

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: When is a disk not a disk?

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

and what happens if you don't use crap - aka sudo but do it the right way - 
aka su to root?

Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Willie Wong]

On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 01:42:18PM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
>OK - it turns out if I start fdisk using the -u option it show me
> sector numbers. Looking at the original partition put on just using
> default values it had the starting sector was 63 - probably about the
> worst value it could be. As a test I blew away that partition and
> created a new one starting at 64 instead and the untar results are
> vastly improved - down to roughly 20 seconds from 8-10 minutes. That's
> roughly twice as fast as the old 120GB SATA2 drive I was using to test
> the system out while I debugged this issue.

That's good to hear. 
 
>I'm still a little fuzzy about what happens to the extra sectors at
> the end of a track. Are they used and I pay for a little bit of
> overhead reading data off of them or are they ignored and I lose
> capacity? I think it must be the former as my partition isn't all that
> much less than 1TB.

As far as I know, you shouldn't worry about it. The
head/track/cylinder addressing is a relic of an older day. Almost all
modern drives should be accessed via LBA. If interested, take a look
at the wikipedia entry on Cylinder-Head-Sector and Logical Block
Addressing. 

Basically, you are not losing anything. 

Cheers, 

W
-- 
Willie W. Wong ww...@math.princeton.edu
Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitae involvente fluxiones invenire 
 et vice versa   ~~~  I. Newton

Re: [gentoo-user] When is a disk not a disk?

[Peter Humphrey]

On Monday 08 February 2010 00:46:33 Mark Knecht wrote:

> What's in dmesg when the machine boots?

See attachment.

> Is it possible an older driver got loaded and it's showing up as hda
> instead of sda? I found that on one of my machines recently.

I hope not. This is a new installation on a new machine.

-- 
Rgds
Peter.
Linux version 2.6.32-gentoo-r3 (r...@wstn) (gcc version 4.3.4 (Gentoo 4.3.4 
p1.0, pie-10.1.5) ) #1 SMP Sun Jan 31 01:34:50 GMT 2010
Command line: root=/dev/sda5 raid=noautodetect vga=0x31A 
video=vesafb:mtrr:3,ywrap fbcon=scrollback:128k splash=silent
KERNEL supported cpus:
  Intel GenuineIntel
  AMD AuthenticAMD
  Centaur CentaurHauls
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
 BIOS-e820:  - 0009e800 (usable)
 BIOS-e820: 0009e800 - 000a (reserved)
 BIOS-e820: 000e4000 - 0010 (reserved)
 BIOS-e820: 0010 - bf77 (usable)
 BIOS-e820: bf77 - bf788000 (ACPI data)
 BIOS-e820: bf788000 - bf7dc000 (ACPI NVS)
 BIOS-e820: bf7dc000 - c000 (reserved)
 BIOS-e820: fee0 - fee01000 (reserved)
 BIOS-e820: ffe0 - 0001 (reserved)
 BIOS-e820: 0001 - 00014000 (usable)
DMI 2.6 present.
AMI BIOS detected: BIOS may corrupt low RAM, working around it.
e820 update range:  - 0001 (usable) ==> (reserved)
last_pfn = 0x14 max_arch_pfn = 0x4
MTRR default type: uncachable
MTRR fixed ranges enabled:
  0-9 write-back
  A-B uncachable
  C-C write-protect
  D-D uncachable
  E-E7FFF write-through
  E8000-F write-protect
MTRR variable ranges enabled:
  0 base 0 mask F write-back
  1 base 1 mask FC000 write-back
  2 base 0C000 mask FC000 uncachable
  3 disabled
  4 disabled
  5 disabled
  6 disabled
  7 disabled
x86 PAT enabled: cpu 0, old 0x7040600070406, new 0x7010600070106
e820 update range: c000 - 0001 (usable) ==> (reserved)
last_pfn = 0xbf770 max_arch_pfn = 0x4
initial memory mapped : 0 - 2000
init_memory_mapping: -bf77
 00 - 00bf60 page 2M
 00bf60 - 00bf77 page 4k
kernel direct mapping tables up to bf77 @ 1-15000
init_memory_mapping: 0001-00014000
 01 - 014000 page 2M
kernel direct mapping tables up to 14000 @ 13000-19000
ACPI: RSDP 000fb970 00024 (v02 ACPIAM)
ACPI: XSDT bf770100 0006C (v01 112309 XSDT1401 20091123 MSFT 0097)
ACPI: FACP bf770290 000F4 (v03 112309 FACP1401 20091123 MSFT 0097)
ACPI: DSDT bf7704a0 0E8F0 (v01  A1326 A1326001 0001 INTL 20060113)
ACPI: FACS bf788000 00040
ACPI: APIC bf770390 000CC (v01 112309 APIC1401 20091123 MSFT 0097)
ACPI: MCFG bf770460 0003C (v01 112309 OEMMCFG  20091123 MSFT 0097)
ACPI: OEMB bf788040 00072 (v01 112309 OEMB1401 20091123 MSFT 0097)
ACPI: HPET bf77f4a0 00038 (v01 112309 OEMHPET  20091123 MSFT 0097)
ACPI: DMAR bf7880c0 00090 (v01AMI  OEMDMAR 0001 MSFT 0097)
ACPI: ASPT bf77f740 00034 (v06 112309 PerfTune 20091123 MSFT 0097)
ACPI: OSFR bf77f780 000B0 (v01 112309 OEMOSFR  20091123 MSFT 0097)
ACPI: SSDT bf789760 00363 (v01 DpgPmmCpuPm 0012 INTL 20060113)
ACPI: Local APIC address 0xfee0
(7 early reservations) ==> bootmem [00 - 014000]
  #0 [00 - 001000]   BIOS data page ==> [00 - 001000]
  #1 [006000 - 008000]   TRAMPOLINE ==> [006000 - 008000]
  #2 [000100 - 000154c328]TEXT DATA BSS ==> [000100 - 000154c328]
  #3 [09e800 - 10]BIOS reserved ==> [09e800 - 10]
  #4 [000154d000 - 000154d2bc]  BRK ==> [000154d000 - 000154d2bc]
  #5 [01 - 013000]  PGTABLE ==> [01 - 013000]
  #6 [013000 - 014000]  PGTABLE ==> [013000 - 014000]
 [ea00-ea00045f] PMD -> [88002860-88002bdf] 
on node 0
Zone PFN ranges:
  DMA  0x0010 -> 0x1000
  DMA320x1000 -> 0x0010
  Normal   0x0010 -> 0x0014
Movable zone start PFN for each node
early_node_map[3] active PFN ranges
0: 0x0010 -> 0x009e
0: 0x0100 -> 0x000bf770
0: 0x0010 -> 0x0014
On node 0 totalpages: 1046270
  DMA zone: 56 pages used for memmap
  DMA zone: 104 pages reserved
  DMA zone: 3822 pages, LIFO batch:0
  DMA32 zone: 14280 pages used for memmap
  DMA32 zone: 765864 pages, LIFO batch:31
  Normal zone: 3584 pages used for memmap
  Normal zone: 258560 pages, LIFO batch:31
ACPI: PM-Timer IO Port: 0x808
ACPI: Local APIC address 0xfee0
ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x01] lapic_id[0x00] enabled)
ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x02] lapic_id[0x02] enabled)
ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x03] lapic_id[0x04] enabled)
ACPI: LAPIC

Re: [gentoo-user] When is a disk not a disk?

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Mark Knecht  wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Peter Humphrey  
> wrote:
>> Hello again List,
>>
>> $ sudo  fdisk -l
>>
>> Unable to seek on /dev/sda
>>
>> What am I to make of this? The system runs ok, but apparently the
>> underlying disk subsystem isn't happy. This box has only the one disk at
>> the moment. Google doesn't help.
>>
>> The box is a new Armari system with an Asus P7P55D motherboard and a
>> Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB SATA II hdd.
>>
>> --
>> Rgds
>> Peter.
>>
>>
> Very strange.
>
> What's in dmesg when the machine boots? Is it possible an older driver
> got loaded and it's showing up as hda instead of sda? I found that on
> one of my machines recently.
>
> - Mark
>
sorry to have forgotten is but simply do

df

and see what it says is mounted

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: When is a disk not a disk?

[Peter Humphrey]

On Monday 08 February 2010 00:39:50 Nikos Chantziaras wrote:

> Not sure what's going on, but you might want to post more info so
>  that others might have an idea about what's wrong.  First, clean
>  dmesg:
> 
>sudo dmesg -c > /dev/null

OK.
 
> Then try fdisk again:
> 
>/sbin/fdisk -l

$ sudo /sbin/fdisk -l

Unable to seek on /dev/sda

> Then post the output of:
> 
>dmesg
 $ dmesg
[null]

> And finally, post the output of:
> 
>mount

$mount
rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
/dev/root on / type ext4 (rw,noatime,barrier=1,data=ordered)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,relatime)
rc-svcdir on /lib64/rc/init.d type tmpfs 
(rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=1024k,mode=755)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=10240k,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts 
(rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620)
shm on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime)
/dev/sda6 on /home type ext4 (rw,noatime)
/dev/sda7 on /home/prh/common type ext4 (rw,noatime)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,size=9G)

>cat /proc/partitions

$cat /proc/partitions  
major minor  #blocks  name  
  

   80  976762584 sda
   81 112423 sda1
   82 112455 sda2
   83 104422 sda3
   84  1 sda4
   85   62918509 sda5
   86   41945683 sda6
   87   64685691 sda7
   88   2925 sda8
   89   1431 sda9
   8   10   10490413 sda10
   8   11   10482381 sda11
   8   12   20980858 sda12
   8   13   10490413 sda13

[HTH]

-- 
Rgds
Peter.

Re: [gentoo-user] help with inaccessible (trashed?) file

[Alan McKinnon]

On Monday 08 February 2010 01:02:39 Alex Schuster wrote:
> Walt Rarus writes:
> > WALRUS ~ # whoami
> > root
> > WALRUS ~ # ls -l /usr/portage/x11-misc/icesndcfg/
> > ls: cannot access /usr/portage/x11-misc/icesndcfg/icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild:
> > Permission denied
> > total 12
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 rootroot2675 2008-05-09 09:37 ChangeLog
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 rootroot 771 2008-05-09 09:37 Manifest
> > ?? ? ?   ?  ?? icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 portage portage  224 2003-07-07 09:54 metadata.xml
> >
> > The situation with icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild above is disallowing a complete
> > "emerge --sync".
> > I don't know how to resolve the problem since even root can't
> > access/overwrite this (bogus?) file. Any help available?
> 
> Looks like a corrupted file system. A fsck might fix this. You can force
> one by 'shutdown -Fr now'. Sync your portage tree after this to make sure
> it is in a clean state.

In my experience, fsck consistently detects file systems corruption, and 
consistently fails to do anything useful about it.

However, it's pretty common for users to have made a separate volume for the 
portage tree (i.e. something mounted at /usr/portage). If so, just trash the 
thing, download a new-ish tarball of the tree, resync and you're back in 
business.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

Re: [gentoo-user] When is a disk not a disk?

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Peter Humphrey  wrote:
> Hello again List,
>
> $ sudo  fdisk -l
>
> Unable to seek on /dev/sda
>
> What am I to make of this? The system runs ok, but apparently the
> underlying disk subsystem isn't happy. This box has only the one disk at
> the moment. Google doesn't help.
>
> The box is a new Armari system with an Asus P7P55D motherboard and a
> Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB SATA II hdd.
>
> --
> Rgds
> Peter.
>
>
Very strange.

What's in dmesg when the machine boots? Is it possible an older driver
got loaded and it's showing up as hda instead of sda? I found that on
one of my machines recently.

- Mark

[gentoo-user] Re: When is a disk not a disk?

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 02/08/2010 02:27 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote:

Hello again List,

$ sudo  fdisk -l

Unable to seek on /dev/sda


Not sure what's going on, but you might want to post more info so that 
others might have an idea about what's wrong.  First, clean dmesg:


  sudo dmesg -c > /dev/null

Then try fdisk again:

  /sbin/fdisk -l

(No need to be root for fdisk -l.)

Then post the output of:

  dmesg

(If there's any output.)

And finally, post the output of:

  mount
  cat /proc/partitions

[gentoo-user] When is a disk not a disk?

[Peter Humphrey]

Hello again List,

$ sudo  fdisk -l

Unable to seek on /dev/sda

What am I to make of this? The system runs ok, but apparently the 
underlying disk subsystem isn't happy. This box has only the one disk at 
the moment. Google doesn't help.

The box is a new Armari system with an Asus P7P55D motherboard and a 
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB SATA II hdd.

-- 
Rgds
Peter.

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem compiling freemind

[Peter Humphrey]

On Sunday 07 February 2010 18:12:58 Mark Knecht wrote:

> What do you see with java-config -l ?

$ java-config -L
The following VMs are available for generation-2:
*)  IcedTea6-bin 1.7 [icedtea6-bin]
2)  Sun JDK 1.5.0.22 [sun-jdk-1.5]

-- 
Rgds
Peter.

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem configuring Intel Wireless 5300 device

[Shoka]

On 07.02.2010 20:46, Willie Wong wrote:

On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 07:21:20PM +0100, Shoka wrote:
   

I got stuck when trying to get the Intel Wireless 5300 device running.
I'm using the 2.6.31.gentoo-r6 kernel source and have tried several
configuration options for getting this driver to work.

The gentoo os is running on a lenovo x200 notebook.

It seems that the iwlagn module doesn't get compiled at all. When trying
to run "modprobe iwlagn" I get the message "Module iwlagn not found".
The device is properly recognized when using the Gentoo Live CD. There
it uses the iwlagn module. So it should be possible to configure the
kernel to do the same.
 

You said that the module didn't get compiled: did you configure the
kernel to include it?

   

I have found this forum post about configuring the 5300 device, but this
guy used the 2.6.30-gentoo-r6 kernel source and it looks like the kernel
config options in menuconfig have changed. I cannot find a kernel config
option called "Intel Wireless WiFi Next Gen AGN (iwlagn)".
 

If you are in menuconfig, you can always hit / to bring up the search
screen, and type in IWL as your search string.

In 2.6.31-gentoo-r9, go to

Device Drivers ->  Network device support ->  Wireless LAN ->  Wireless
LAN (IEEE 802.11) ->  Intel Wireless Wifi

to enable IWLWIFI first, and then you should be able to see the
Wireless WiFi Next Gen AGN option.

Cheers,

W
   

Hi Willie,

I finally found the problem: I had to enable the option

General Setup
[ ] Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers

I recognized that after invoking a search on "iwlwifi". There was a 
dependency to "EXPERIMENTAL". And this is exactly the mentioned switch 
above.


After selecting this option, I was able to select the "Intel Wireless" 
stuff.


Thanks to all for giving hints into the right direction :-)

Shoka

Re: [gentoo-user] help with inaccessible (trashed?) file

[Alex Schuster]

Walt Rarus writes:

> WALRUS ~ # whoami
> root
> WALRUS ~ # ls -l /usr/portage/x11-misc/icesndcfg/
> ls: cannot access /usr/portage/x11-misc/icesndcfg/icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild:
> Permission denied
> total 12
> -rw-r--r-- 1 rootroot2675 2008-05-09 09:37 ChangeLog
> -rw-r--r-- 1 rootroot 771 2008-05-09 09:37 Manifest
> ?? ? ?   ?  ?? icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild
> -rw-r--r-- 1 portage portage  224 2003-07-07 09:54 metadata.xml
> 
> The situation with icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild above is disallowing a complete
> "emerge --sync".
> I don't know how to resolve the problem since even root can't
> access/overwrite this (bogus?) file. Any help available?

Looks like a corrupted file system. A fsck might fix this. You can force 
one by 'shutdown -Fr now'. Sync your portage tree after this to make sure 
it is in a clean state.

Good luck,

Wonko

Re: [gentoo-user] help with inaccessible (trashed?) file

[Daniel Troeder]

On 02/07/2010 11:08 PM, Walt Rarus wrote:
> WALRUS ~ # whoami
> root
> WALRUS ~ # ls -l /usr/portage/x11-misc/icesndcfg/
> ls: cannot access /usr/portage/x11-misc/icesndcfg/icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild:
> Permission denied
> total 12
> -rw-r--r-- 1 rootroot2675 2008-05-09 09:37 ChangeLog
> -rw-r--r-- 1 rootroot 771 2008-05-09 09:37 Manifest
> ?? ? ?   ?  ?? icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild
> -rw-r--r-- 1 portage portage  224 2003-07-07 09:54 metadata.xml
> 
> The situation with icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild above is disallowing a complete
> "emerge --sync".
> I don't know how to resolve the problem since even root can't
> access/overwrite this (bogus?) file. Any help available?
Most likely a filesystem corruption. -> fsck



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

[gentoo-user] help with inaccessible (trashed?) file

[Walt Rarus]

WALRUS ~ # whoami
root
WALRUS ~ # ls -l /usr/portage/x11-misc/icesndcfg/
ls: cannot access /usr/portage/x11-misc/icesndcfg/icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild:
Permission denied
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 1 rootroot2675 2008-05-09 09:37 ChangeLog
-rw-r--r-- 1 rootroot 771 2008-05-09 09:37 Manifest
?? ? ?   ?  ?? icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild
-rw-r--r-- 1 portage portage  224 2003-07-07 09:54 metadata.xml

The situation with icesndcfg-1.3.ebuild above is disallowing a complete
"emerge --sync".
I don't know how to resolve the problem since even root can't
access/overwrite this (bogus?) file. Any help available?

Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Kyle Bader]

>>> 4KB physical sectors: KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!

Good article by Theodore T'so, might be helpful:

http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/

-- 

Kyle

Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Willie Wong  wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 08:27:46AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> 
>> 4KB physical sectors: KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!
>>
>> Pros: Quiet, cool-running, big cache
>>
>> Cons: The 4KB physical sectors are a problem waiting to happen. If you
>> misalign your partitions, disk performance can suffer. I ran
>> benchmarks in Linux using a number of filesystems, and I found that
>> with most filesystems, read performance and write performance with
>> large files didn't suffer with misaligned partitions, but writes of
>> many small files (unpacking a Linux kernel archive) could take several
>> times as long with misaligned partitions as with aligned partitions.
>> WD's advice about who needs to be concerned is overly simplistic,
>> IMHO, and it's flat-out wrong for Linux, although it's probably
>> accurate for 90% of buyers (those who run Windows or Mac OS and use
>> their standard partitioning tools). If you're not part of that 90%,
>> though, and if you don't fully understand this new technology and how
>> to handle it, buy a drive with conventional 512-byte sectors!
>> 
>>
>>    Now, I don't mind getting a bit dirty learning to use this
>> correctly but I'm wondering what that means in a practical sense.
>> Reading the mke2fs man page the word 'sector' doesn't come up. It's my
>> understanding the Linux 'blocks' are groups of sectors. True? If the
>> disk must use 4K sectors then what - the smallest block has to be 4K
>> and I'm using 1 sector per block? It seems that ext3 doesn't support
>> anything larger than 4K?
>
> The problem is not when you are making the filesystem with mke2fs, but
> when you partitioned the disk using fdisk. I'm sure I am making some
> small mistakes in the explanation below, but it goes something like
> this:
>
> a) The harddrive with 4K sectors allows the head to efficiently
> read/write 4K sized blocks at a time.
> b) However, to be compatible in hardware, the harddrive allows 512B
> sized blocks to be addressed. In reality, this means that you can
> individually address the 8 512B-sized chunks of the 4K sized blocks,
> but each will count as a separate operation. To illustrate: say the
> hardware has some sector X of size 4K. It has 8 addressable slots
> inside X1 ... X8 each of size 512B. If your OS clusters read/writes on
> the 512B level, it will send 8 commands to read the info in those 8
> blocks separately. If your OS clusters in 4K, it will send one
> command. So in the stupid analysis I give here, it will take 8 times
> as long for the 512B addressing to read the same data, since it will
> take 8 passes, and each time inefficiently reading only 1/8 of the
> data required. Now in reality, drives are smarter than that: if all 8
> of those are sent in sequence, sometimes the drives will cluster them
> together in one read.
> c) A problem occurs, however, when your OS deals with 4K clusters but
> when you make the partition, the partition is offset! Imagine the
> physical read sectors of your disk looking like
>
> 
>
> but when you make your partitions, somehow you partitioned it
>
> 
>
> This is possible because the drive allows addressing by 512K chunks.
> So for some reason one of your partitions starts halfway inside a
> physical sector. What is the problem with this? Now suppose your OS
> sends data to be written to the  block. If it were completely
> aligned, the drive will just go kink-move the head to the block, and
> overwrite it with this information. But since half of the block is
> over the  phsical sector, and half over , what the disk now
> needs to do is to
>
> pass 1) read 
> pass 2) modify the second half of  to match the first half of 
> pass 3) write 
> pass 4) read 
> pass 5) modify the first half of  to match the second half of 
> pass 6) write 
>
> Or what is known as a read-modify-write operation. Thus the disk
> becomes a lot less efficient.
>
> --
>
> Now, I don't know if this is the actual problem is causing your
> performance problems. But this may be it. When you use fdisk, it
> defaults to aligning the partition to cylinder boundaries, and use the
> default (from ancient times) value of 63 x (512B sized) sectors per
> track. Since 63 is not evenly divisible by 8, you see that quite
> likely some of your partitions are not aligned to the physical sector
> boundaries.
>
> If you use cfdisk, you can try to change the geometry with the command
> g. Or you can use the command u to change the units used in the
> partitioning to either sectors or megabytes, and make sure your
> partition sizes are a multiple of 8 in the former, or an integer in
> the latter.
>
> Again, take what I wrote with a grain of salt: this information came
> from the research I did a little while back after reading the slashdot
> article on this 4K switch. So being my own understanding, it may not
> c

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem configuring Intel Wireless 5300 device

[David Abbott]

On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 06:55 +1000, John H. Moe wrote:

> 
> You need to enable Wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11) first.  You don't need
> either of the 2100 or the 2200 modules; once you select Wireless LAN
> (IEEE 802.11) a new slew of options should come up, including the Intel
> Wireless Wifi option, and in there you should find your wireless card.
> 
> John Moe
> 

Also make sure Networking => Wireless => [*] Generic IEEE 802.11
Networking Stack (mac80211) and maybe [*]  cfg80211 - wireless
configuration API 

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: revdep-rebuild keeps reinstalling binutils

[Konstantinos Bekiaris]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 10:41 PM, walt  wrote:

> On 02/06/2010 10:05 PM, Konstantinos Bekiaris wrote:
>
>> ...i upgrade my system through emerge -uDN world and then i run emerge
>> --depclean and revdep-rebuild. After that when i tried gcc/g++ i get:
>> gcc-config: error: could not run/locate 'gcc'. Additionally, i noticed that
>>
>> there is a problem with python, because when i try to use vi i get:   vi:
>> error while loading shared libraries: libpython2.5.so.1.0: cannot open
>> shared object file: No such file or directory. If i try to emerge -uDN
>> world, the upgrade fails. Also, the
>> revdep-rebuild fails. I attached a log. Any ideas?
>>
>
> I'm guessing that depclean removed some packages that are still needed.
>
> Do you have python-2.6.4 on your machine?  You should.  What about
> gcc-config-1.4.1 and gcc-4.3.4?  vi is linked to an obsolete version
> of python, so it needs to be re-emerged manually if revdep-rebuild
> won't run properly.  I'm guessing that vi may not be the only package
> that's linked against an obsolete python library, so python-updater
> may be worth a try.
>
>
>
>
Ok, nice approach. The problem is that no package can be installed because
the compiler gcc is not working...this is Gentoo...everything has to do with
compiling. The solution of the problem starts with fixing gcc by hand. (You
are right about python, i have an older version).So?

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem configuring Intel Wireless 5300 device

[John H. Moe]

Shoka wrote:
> On 07.02.2010 20:29, Zeerak Waseem wrote:
>> On Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:21:20 +0100, Shoka  wrote:
>>
>>> Hi folks,
>>>
>>> I got stuck when trying to get the Intel Wireless 5300 device
>>> running. I'm using the 2.6.31.gentoo-r6 kernel source and have tried
>>> several configuration options for getting this driver to work.
>>>
>>> The gentoo os is running on a lenovo x200 notebook.
>>>
>>> It seems that the iwlagn module doesn't get compiled at all. When
>>> trying to run "modprobe iwlagn" I get the message "Module iwlagn not
>>> found". The device is properly recognized when using the Gentoo Live
>>> CD. There it uses the iwlagn module. So it should be possible to
>>> configure the kernel to do the same.
>>>
>>> I have found this forum post about configuring the 5300 device, but
>>> this guy used the 2.6.30-gentoo-r6 kernel source and it looks like
>>> the kernel config options in menuconfig have changed. I cannot find
>>> a kernel config option called "Intel Wireless WiFi Next Gen AGN
>>> (iwlagn)".
>>>
>>> Link to forum post:
>>> http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-792424-highlight-5300.html
>>>
>>> I'm a gentoo newbie and therefore would be very glad, if anyone
>>> could give me an advice in the right direction.
>>>
>>> Thank you very much!
>>>
>>> Best regards
>>> Shoka
>>
>> You should be able to find the iwlagn in Device Drivers -> Network
>> Device Support -> Wireless Lan
>>
>> There you need to set "Intel Wireless Wifi" and then the option
>> should appear :-)
>
> Hi Zeerak,
>
> When calling "make menuconfig", then enter section "Device Drivers"
> --> "Network Device Support" --> "Wireless LAN", all I can see are
> these options:
>
> [ ] Wireless LAN (pre-802.11)
> [ ] Wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11)
> < > Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 Network Connection
> < > Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG and 2915ABG Network Connection
>
> I have selected both Intel PRO/Wireless sections and the only
> sup-options that appeared were:
>
> [ ] promiscuous mode
> [ ] full debugging output
>
> But there was nothing written about "Intel Wireless Wifi" or iwlagn
> stuff
> Even if I checked all the options nothing more appeared.
>
> Shoka

You need to enable Wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11) first.  You don't need
either of the 2100 or the 2200 modules; once you select Wireless LAN
(IEEE 802.11) a new slew of options should come up, including the Intel
Wireless Wifi option, and in there you should find your wireless card.

John Moe

[gentoo-user] Re: revdep-rebuild keeps reinstalling binutils

[walt]

On 02/06/2010 10:05 PM, Konstantinos Bekiaris wrote:

...i upgrade my system through emerge -uDN world and then i run emerge 
--depclean and revdep-rebuild. After that when i tried gcc/g++ i get: 
gcc-config: error: could not run/locate 'gcc'. Additionally, i noticed that
there is a problem with python, because when i try to use vi i get:   vi: error 
while loading shared libraries: libpython2.5.so.1.0: cannot open shared object 
file: No such file or directory. If i try to emerge -uDN world, the upgrade 
fails. Also, the
revdep-rebuild fails. I attached a log. Any ideas?


I'm guessing that depclean removed some packages that are still needed.

Do you have python-2.6.4 on your machine?  You should.  What about
gcc-config-1.4.1 and gcc-4.3.4?  vi is linked to an obsolete version
of python, so it needs to be re-emerged manually if revdep-rebuild
won't run properly.  I'm guessing that vi may not be the only package
that's linked against an obsolete python library, so python-updater
may be worth a try.

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem configuring Intel Wireless 5300 device

[Zeerak Waseem]

On Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:55:00 +0100, Shoka  wrote:


On 07.02.2010 20:29, Zeerak Waseem wrote:

On Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:21:20 +0100, Shoka  wrote:


Hi folks,

I got stuck when trying to get the Intel Wireless 5300 device running.  
I'm using the 2.6.31.gentoo-r6 kernel source and have tried several  
configuration options for getting this driver to work.


The gentoo os is running on a lenovo x200 notebook.

It seems that the iwlagn module doesn't get compiled at all. When  
trying to run "modprobe iwlagn" I get the message "Module iwlagn not  
found". The device is properly recognized when using the Gentoo Live  
CD. There it uses the iwlagn module. So it should be possible to  
configure the kernel to do the same.


I have found this forum post about configuring the 5300 device, but  
this guy used the 2.6.30-gentoo-r6 kernel source and it looks like the  
kernel config options in menuconfig have changed. I cannot find a  
kernel config option called "Intel Wireless WiFi Next Gen AGN  
(iwlagn)".


Link to forum post:  
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-792424-highlight-5300.html


I'm a gentoo newbie and therefore would be very glad, if anyone could  
give me an advice in the right direction.


Thank you very much!

Best regards
Shoka






You should be able to find the iwlagn in Device Drivers -> Network  
Device Support -> Wireless Lan


There you need to set "Intel Wireless Wifi" and then the option should  
appear :-)




Hi Zeerak,

When calling "make menuconfig", then enter section "Device Drivers" -->  
"Network Device Support" --> "Wireless LAN", all I can see are these  
options:


[ ] Wireless LAN (pre-802.11)
[ ] Wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11)
< > Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 Network Connection
< > Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG and 2915ABG Network Connection

I have selected both Intel PRO/Wireless sections and the only  
sup-options that appeared were:


[ ] promiscuous mode
[ ] full debugging output

But there was nothing written about "Intel Wireless Wifi" or iwlagn  
stuff

Even if I checked all the options nothing more appeared.

Shoka








What does searching for iwlwifi in the kernel yield? (kernel search is  
prompted by /)


--
Zeerak

Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Willie Wong  wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 08:27:46AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> 
>> 4KB physical sectors: KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!
>>
>> Pros: Quiet, cool-running, big cache
>>
>> Cons: The 4KB physical sectors are a problem waiting to happen. If you
>> misalign your partitions, disk performance can suffer. I ran
>> benchmarks in Linux using a number of filesystems, and I found that
>> with most filesystems, read performance and write performance with
>> large files didn't suffer with misaligned partitions, but writes of
>> many small files (unpacking a Linux kernel archive) could take several
>> times as long with misaligned partitions as with aligned partitions.
>> WD's advice about who needs to be concerned is overly simplistic,
>> IMHO, and it's flat-out wrong for Linux, although it's probably
>> accurate for 90% of buyers (those who run Windows or Mac OS and use
>> their standard partitioning tools). If you're not part of that 90%,
>> though, and if you don't fully understand this new technology and how
>> to handle it, buy a drive with conventional 512-byte sectors!
>> 
>>
>>    Now, I don't mind getting a bit dirty learning to use this
>> correctly but I'm wondering what that means in a practical sense.
>> Reading the mke2fs man page the word 'sector' doesn't come up. It's my
>> understanding the Linux 'blocks' are groups of sectors. True? If the
>> disk must use 4K sectors then what - the smallest block has to be 4K
>> and I'm using 1 sector per block? It seems that ext3 doesn't support
>> anything larger than 4K?
>
> The problem is not when you are making the filesystem with mke2fs, but
> when you partitioned the disk using fdisk. I'm sure I am making some
> small mistakes in the explanation below, but it goes something like
> this:
>
> a) The harddrive with 4K sectors allows the head to efficiently
> read/write 4K sized blocks at a time.
> b) However, to be compatible in hardware, the harddrive allows 512B
> sized blocks to be addressed. In reality, this means that you can
> individually address the 8 512B-sized chunks of the 4K sized blocks,
> but each will count as a separate operation. To illustrate: say the
> hardware has some sector X of size 4K. It has 8 addressable slots
> inside X1 ... X8 each of size 512B. If your OS clusters read/writes on
> the 512B level, it will send 8 commands to read the info in those 8
> blocks separately. If your OS clusters in 4K, it will send one
> command. So in the stupid analysis I give here, it will take 8 times
> as long for the 512B addressing to read the same data, since it will
> take 8 passes, and each time inefficiently reading only 1/8 of the
> data required. Now in reality, drives are smarter than that: if all 8
> of those are sent in sequence, sometimes the drives will cluster them
> together in one read.
> c) A problem occurs, however, when your OS deals with 4K clusters but
> when you make the partition, the partition is offset! Imagine the
> physical read sectors of your disk looking like
>
> 
>
> but when you make your partitions, somehow you partitioned it
>
> 
>
> This is possible because the drive allows addressing by 512K chunks.
> So for some reason one of your partitions starts halfway inside a
> physical sector. What is the problem with this? Now suppose your OS
> sends data to be written to the  block. If it were completely
> aligned, the drive will just go kink-move the head to the block, and
> overwrite it with this information. But since half of the block is
> over the  phsical sector, and half over , what the disk now
> needs to do is to
>
> pass 1) read 
> pass 2) modify the second half of  to match the first half of 
> pass 3) write 
> pass 4) read 
> pass 5) modify the first half of  to match the second half of 
> pass 6) write 
>
> Or what is known as a read-modify-write operation. Thus the disk
> becomes a lot less efficient.
>
> --
>
> Now, I don't know if this is the actual problem is causing your
> performance problems. But this may be it. When you use fdisk, it
> defaults to aligning the partition to cylinder boundaries, and use the
> default (from ancient times) value of 63 x (512B sized) sectors per
> track. Since 63 is not evenly divisible by 8, you see that quite
> likely some of your partitions are not aligned to the physical sector
> boundaries.
>
> If you use cfdisk, you can try to change the geometry with the command
> g. Or you can use the command u to change the units used in the
> partitioning to either sectors or megabytes, and make sure your
> partition sizes are a multiple of 8 in the former, or an integer in
> the latter.
>
> Again, take what I wrote with a grain of salt: this information came
> from the research I did a little while back after reading the slashdot
> article on this 4K switch. So being my own understanding, it may not
> c

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem configuring Intel Wireless 5300 device

[Shoka]

On 07.02.2010 20:29, Zeerak Waseem wrote:

On Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:21:20 +0100, Shoka  wrote:


Hi folks,

I got stuck when trying to get the Intel Wireless 5300 device 
running. I'm using the 2.6.31.gentoo-r6 kernel source and have tried 
several configuration options for getting this driver to work.


The gentoo os is running on a lenovo x200 notebook.

It seems that the iwlagn module doesn't get compiled at all. When 
trying to run "modprobe iwlagn" I get the message "Module iwlagn not 
found". The device is properly recognized when using the Gentoo Live 
CD. There it uses the iwlagn module. So it should be possible to 
configure the kernel to do the same.


I have found this forum post about configuring the 5300 device, but 
this guy used the 2.6.30-gentoo-r6 kernel source and it looks like 
the kernel config options in menuconfig have changed. I cannot find a 
kernel config option called "Intel Wireless WiFi Next Gen AGN (iwlagn)".


Link to forum post: 
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-792424-highlight-5300.html


I'm a gentoo newbie and therefore would be very glad, if anyone could 
give me an advice in the right direction.


Thank you very much!

Best regards
Shoka






You should be able to find the iwlagn in Device Drivers -> Network 
Device Support -> Wireless Lan


There you need to set "Intel Wireless Wifi" and then the option should 
appear :-)




Hi Zeerak,

When calling "make menuconfig", then enter section "Device Drivers" --> 
"Network Device Support" --> "Wireless LAN", all I can see are these 
options:


[ ] Wireless LAN (pre-802.11)
[ ] Wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11)
< > Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 Network Connection
< > Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG and 2915ABG Network Connection

I have selected both Intel PRO/Wireless sections and the only 
sup-options that appeared were:


[ ] promiscuous mode
[ ] full debugging output

But there was nothing written about "Intel Wireless Wifi" or iwlagn 
stuff

Even if I checked all the options nothing more appeared.

Shoka

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem configuring Intel Wireless 5300 device

[Willie Wong]

On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 07:21:20PM +0100, Shoka wrote:
> I got stuck when trying to get the Intel Wireless 5300 device running. 
> I'm using the 2.6.31.gentoo-r6 kernel source and have tried several 
> configuration options for getting this driver to work.
> 
> The gentoo os is running on a lenovo x200 notebook.
> 
> It seems that the iwlagn module doesn't get compiled at all. When trying 
> to run "modprobe iwlagn" I get the message "Module iwlagn not found". 
> The device is properly recognized when using the Gentoo Live CD. There 
> it uses the iwlagn module. So it should be possible to configure the 
> kernel to do the same.

You said that the module didn't get compiled: did you configure the
kernel to include it?

> I have found this forum post about configuring the 5300 device, but this 
> guy used the 2.6.30-gentoo-r6 kernel source and it looks like the kernel 
> config options in menuconfig have changed. I cannot find a kernel config 
> option called "Intel Wireless WiFi Next Gen AGN (iwlagn)".

If you are in menuconfig, you can always hit / to bring up the search
screen, and type in IWL as your search string. 

In 2.6.31-gentoo-r9, go to 

Device Drivers -> Network device support -> Wireless LAN -> Wireless
LAN (IEEE 802.11) -> Intel Wireless Wifi

to enable IWLWIFI first, and then you should be able to see the
Wireless WiFi Next Gen AGN option. 

Cheers, 

W
-- 
Willie W. Wong ww...@math.princeton.edu
Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitae involvente fluxiones invenire 
 et vice versa   ~~~  I. Newton

Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Willie Wong]

On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 08:27:46AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
> 
> 4KB physical sectors: KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!
> 
> Pros: Quiet, cool-running, big cache
> 
> Cons: The 4KB physical sectors are a problem waiting to happen. If you
> misalign your partitions, disk performance can suffer. I ran
> benchmarks in Linux using a number of filesystems, and I found that
> with most filesystems, read performance and write performance with
> large files didn't suffer with misaligned partitions, but writes of
> many small files (unpacking a Linux kernel archive) could take several
> times as long with misaligned partitions as with aligned partitions.
> WD's advice about who needs to be concerned is overly simplistic,
> IMHO, and it's flat-out wrong for Linux, although it's probably
> accurate for 90% of buyers (those who run Windows or Mac OS and use
> their standard partitioning tools). If you're not part of that 90%,
> though, and if you don't fully understand this new technology and how
> to handle it, buy a drive with conventional 512-byte sectors!
> 
> 
>Now, I don't mind getting a bit dirty learning to use this
> correctly but I'm wondering what that means in a practical sense.
> Reading the mke2fs man page the word 'sector' doesn't come up. It's my
> understanding the Linux 'blocks' are groups of sectors. True? If the
> disk must use 4K sectors then what - the smallest block has to be 4K
> and I'm using 1 sector per block? It seems that ext3 doesn't support
> anything larger than 4K?

The problem is not when you are making the filesystem with mke2fs, but
when you partitioned the disk using fdisk. I'm sure I am making some
small mistakes in the explanation below, but it goes something like
this:

a) The harddrive with 4K sectors allows the head to efficiently
read/write 4K sized blocks at a time. 
b) However, to be compatible in hardware, the harddrive allows 512B
sized blocks to be addressed. In reality, this means that you can
individually address the 8 512B-sized chunks of the 4K sized blocks,
but each will count as a separate operation. To illustrate: say the
hardware has some sector X of size 4K. It has 8 addressable slots
inside X1 ... X8 each of size 512B. If your OS clusters read/writes on
the 512B level, it will send 8 commands to read the info in those 8
blocks separately. If your OS clusters in 4K, it will send one
command. So in the stupid analysis I give here, it will take 8 times
as long for the 512B addressing to read the same data, since it will
take 8 passes, and each time inefficiently reading only 1/8 of the
data required. Now in reality, drives are smarter than that: if all 8
of those are sent in sequence, sometimes the drives will cluster them
together in one read. 
c) A problem occurs, however, when your OS deals with 4K clusters but
when you make the partition, the partition is offset! Imagine the
physical read sectors of your disk looking like



but when you make your partitions, somehow you partitioned it



This is possible because the drive allows addressing by 512K chunks.
So for some reason one of your partitions starts halfway inside a
physical sector. What is the problem with this? Now suppose your OS
sends data to be written to the  block. If it were completely
aligned, the drive will just go kink-move the head to the block, and
overwrite it with this information. But since half of the block is
over the  phsical sector, and half over , what the disk now
needs to do is to 

pass 1) read 
pass 2) modify the second half of  to match the first half of 
pass 3) write 
pass 4) read 
pass 5) modify the first half of  to match the second half of 
pass 6) write 

Or what is known as a read-modify-write operation. Thus the disk
becomes a lot less efficient. 

--

Now, I don't know if this is the actual problem is causing your
performance problems. But this may be it. When you use fdisk, it
defaults to aligning the partition to cylinder boundaries, and use the
default (from ancient times) value of 63 x (512B sized) sectors per
track. Since 63 is not evenly divisible by 8, you see that quite
likely some of your partitions are not aligned to the physical sector
boundaries. 

If you use cfdisk, you can try to change the geometry with the command
g. Or you can use the command u to change the units used in the
partitioning to either sectors or megabytes, and make sure your
partition sizes are a multiple of 8 in the former, or an integer in
the latter. 

Again, take what I wrote with a grain of salt: this information came
from the research I did a little while back after reading the slashdot
article on this 4K switch. So being my own understanding, it may not
completely be correct. 

HTH, 

W
-- 
Willie W. Wong ww...@math.princeton.edu
Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitae involvente fluxiones invenire 
 et v

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem configuring Intel Wireless 5300 device

[Zeerak Waseem]

On Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:21:20 +0100, Shoka  wrote:


Hi folks,

I got stuck when trying to get the Intel Wireless 5300 device running.  
I'm using the 2.6.31.gentoo-r6 kernel source and have tried several  
configuration options for getting this driver to work.


The gentoo os is running on a lenovo x200 notebook.

It seems that the iwlagn module doesn't get compiled at all. When trying  
to run "modprobe iwlagn" I get the message "Module iwlagn not found".  
The device is properly recognized when using the Gentoo Live CD. There  
it uses the iwlagn module. So it should be possible to configure the  
kernel to do the same.


I have found this forum post about configuring the 5300 device, but this  
guy used the 2.6.30-gentoo-r6 kernel source and it looks like the kernel  
config options in menuconfig have changed. I cannot find a kernel config  
option called "Intel Wireless WiFi Next Gen AGN (iwlagn)".


Link to forum post:  
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-792424-highlight-5300.html


I'm a gentoo newbie and therefore would be very glad, if anyone could  
give me an advice in the right direction.


Thank you very much!

Best regards
Shoka






You should be able to find the iwlagn in Device Drivers -> Network Device  
Support -> Wireless Lan


There you need to set "Intel Wireless Wifi" and then the option should  
appear :-)


--
Zeerak

Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann
 wrote:
> On Sonntag 07 Februar 2010, Alexander wrote:
>> On Sunday 07 February 2010 19:27:46 Mark Knecht wrote:
>> >    Every time there is an apparent delay I just see the hard drive
>> >
>> > light turned on solid. That said as far as I know if I wait for things
>> > to complete the data is there but I haven't tested it extensively.
>> >
>> >    Is this a bad drive or am I somehow using it incorrectly?
>>
>> Is there any related info in dmesg?
>
> or maybe there is too much cached and seeking is not the drives strong point
> ...

It's an interesting question. There is new physical seeking technology
in this line of drives which is intended to reduce power and noise,
but it seem unlikely to me that WD would purposely make a drive that's
10-20x slower than previous generations. Could be though...

Are there any user space Linux tools that can test that?

The other thing I checked out was that when the block size is not
specified it seems that mke2fs uses the default values from
/etc/mke2fs.conf and my file says blocksize = 4096 so it would seem to
me that if all partitions use blocks then at least the partitions
would be properly aligned.

My question about that would be when I write a 1 byte file to this
drive do I use all 4K of the block it's written in? It's wasteful, but
faster, right? I want files to be block-aligned so that the drive
isn't doing lots of translation to get the right data. It seems that's
been the problem with these drives in the Windows world so WD had to
release updated software to get the Windows disk formatters to do
things right, or so I think.

Thanks Volker.

Cheers,
Mark

Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

On Sonntag 07 Februar 2010, Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Alexander  wrote:
> > On Sunday 07 February 2010 19:27:46 Mark Knecht wrote:
> >>Every time there is an apparent delay I just see the hard drive
> >> light turned on solid. That said as far as I know if I wait for things
> >> to complete the data is there but I haven't tested it extensively.
> >> 
> >>Is this a bad drive or am I somehow using it incorrectly?
> > 
> > Is there any related info in dmesg?
> 
> No, nothing in dmesg at all.
> 
> Here are two tests this morning. The first is to the 1T drive, the
> second is to a 120GB drive I'm currently using as a system drive until
> I work this out:
> 
> gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2
> -C /mnt/TestMount/usr
> 
> real  8m13.077s
> user  0m8.184s
> sys   0m2.561s
> gandalf TestMount #
> 
> 
> m...@gandalf ~ $ time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C
> /home/mark/Test_usr/
> 
> real  0m39.213s
> user  0m8.243s
> sys   0m2.135s
> m...@gandalf ~ $
> 
> 8 minutes vs 39 seconds!
> 
> The amount of data written appears to be the same:
> 
> gandalf ~ # du -shc /mnt/TestMount/usr/
> 583M  /mnt/TestMount/usr/
> 583M  total
> gandalf ~ #
> 
> 
> m...@gandalf ~ $ du -shc /home/mark/Test_usr/
> 583M  /home/mark/Test_usr/
> 583M  total
> m...@gandalf ~ $
> 
> 
> I did some reading at the WD site and it seems this drive does use the
> 4K sector size. The way it's done is the addressing on cable is still
> 512 byte 'user sectors', but they are packed into 4K physical sectors
> and internal hardware does the mapping.
> 
> I suspect the performance issue is figuring out how to get the file
> system to keep things on 4K boundaries. I assume that's what the 4K
> block size is for when building the file system but I need to go find
> out more about that. I did not select it specifically. Maybe I need
> to.
> 
> Thanks,
> Mark

no. 4k block size is the default for linux filesystems. But you might have 
'misaligned' the partitions. There is a lot of text to read about 
'eraseblocks' on ssds and how important it is to align the partitions. You 
might want to read up on that to learn how to align partitions.

Re: [gentoo-user] trouble starting bash

[Willie Wong]

On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 09:35:54AM -0500, David Relson wrote:
> Looking in /etc/mtab, the last line is:
> 
>none /dev/pts devpts rw 0 0
> 
> Perhaps the mount devpts command should have been issued as part of
> emerging udev, openrc, or sysinit ???  Should this be reported to
> b.g.o.??

Odd, that's one of the two things  /etc/init.d/devfs is supposed to
do. (The other is to mount tmpfs.) The whole point of that script is
to provide those two filesystems in case the user "forgot" to specify
them in /etc/fstab.

If this is reproducible (say, after next reboot devpts still doesn't
come up, while devfs is started), then something is wrong. Filing a
bug report likely won't help because it works on mostly everyone
else's system; you should probably ping the list again to find out
what the source of the problem is. 

A work around would be to just add the appropriate line to /etc/fstab.
the devfs script is smart enough to check if the devpts and tmpfs are
already mounted, so it should break anything additional.

Cheers,

W
-- 
Willie W. Wong ww...@math.princeton.edu
Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitae involvente fluxiones invenire 
 et vice versa   ~~~  I. Newton

Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Alexander  wrote:
> On Sunday 07 February 2010 19:27:46 Mark Knecht wrote:
>
>>    Every time there is an apparent delay I just see the hard drive
>> light turned on solid. That said as far as I know if I wait for things
>> to complete the data is there but I haven't tested it extensively.
>>
>>    Is this a bad drive or am I somehow using it incorrectly?
>>
>
> Is there any related info in dmesg?
>
>

No, nothing in dmesg at all.

Here are two tests this morning. The first is to the 1T drive, the
second is to a 120GB drive I'm currently using as a system drive until
I work this out:

gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2
-C /mnt/TestMount/usr

real8m13.077s
user0m8.184s
sys 0m2.561s
gandalf TestMount #


m...@gandalf ~ $ time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C
/home/mark/Test_usr/

real0m39.213s
user0m8.243s
sys 0m2.135s
m...@gandalf ~ $

8 minutes vs 39 seconds!

The amount of data written appears to be the same:

gandalf ~ # du -shc /mnt/TestMount/usr/
583M/mnt/TestMount/usr/
583Mtotal
gandalf ~ #


m...@gandalf ~ $ du -shc /home/mark/Test_usr/
583M/home/mark/Test_usr/
583Mtotal
m...@gandalf ~ $


I did some reading at the WD site and it seems this drive does use the
4K sector size. The way it's done is the addressing on cable is still
512 byte 'user sectors', but they are packed into 4K physical sectors
and internal hardware does the mapping.

I suspect the performance issue is figuring out how to get the file
system to keep things on 4K boundaries. I assume that's what the 4K
block size is for when building the file system but I need to go find
out more about that. I did not select it specifically. Maybe I need
to.

Thanks,
Mark

[gentoo-user] Problem configuring Intel Wireless 5300 device

[Shoka]

Hi folks,

I got stuck when trying to get the Intel Wireless 5300 device running. 
I'm using the 2.6.31.gentoo-r6 kernel source and have tried several 
configuration options for getting this driver to work.


The gentoo os is running on a lenovo x200 notebook.

It seems that the iwlagn module doesn't get compiled at all. When trying 
to run "modprobe iwlagn" I get the message "Module iwlagn not found". 
The device is properly recognized when using the Gentoo Live CD. There 
it uses the iwlagn module. So it should be possible to configure the 
kernel to do the same.


I have found this forum post about configuring the 5300 device, but this 
guy used the 2.6.30-gentoo-r6 kernel source and it looks like the kernel 
config options in menuconfig have changed. I cannot find a kernel config 
option called "Intel Wireless WiFi Next Gen AGN (iwlagn)".


Link to forum post: 
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-792424-highlight-5300.html


I'm a gentoo newbie and therefore would be very glad, if anyone could 
give me an advice in the right direction.


Thank you very much!

Best regards
Shoka

Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

On Sonntag 07 Februar 2010, Alexander wrote:
> On Sunday 07 February 2010 19:27:46 Mark Knecht wrote:
> >Every time there is an apparent delay I just see the hard drive
> > 
> > light turned on solid. That said as far as I know if I wait for things
> > to complete the data is there but I haven't tested it extensively.
> > 
> >Is this a bad drive or am I somehow using it incorrectly?
> 
> Is there any related info in dmesg?

or maybe there is too much cached and seeking is not the drives strong point 
...

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem compiling freemind

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 9:16 AM, Peter Humphrey  wrote:
> On Sunday 07 February 2010 15:06:37 Mark Knecht wrote:
>
>> Runs for me. I don't know how to use it but the GUI comes up and it
>> allows me to start creating something.
>
> Hmm. After switching to iced-tea I get the same compile error* but the GUI
> comes up and the program appears to work. What the hell.
>
> *     [javac] Compiling 100 source files to /tmp/portage/app-
> misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/binding/classes
>     [echo] Running binding compiler...
>     [bind] Failed setting classpath from Ant task
>
>
> Thanks for the reply, Mark.
>
> --
> Rgds
> Peter.
>
>

What do you see with java-config -l ?

In my previous response it showed some ant stuff. Seems like that's
possibly part of the difference?

Note that I didn't look very hard for compile errors or anything else.
If you want me to let me know what to look for. I just built it and
ran it.

Cheers,
Mark

Re: [gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Alexander]

On Sunday 07 February 2010 19:27:46 Mark Knecht wrote:

>Every time there is an apparent delay I just see the hard drive
> light turned on solid. That said as far as I know if I wait for things
> to complete the data is there but I haven't tested it extensively.
> 
>Is this a bad drive or am I somehow using it incorrectly?
> 

Is there any related info in dmesg?

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem compiling freemind

[Peter Humphrey]

On Sunday 07 February 2010 15:06:37 Mark Knecht wrote:

> Runs for me. I don't know how to use it but the GUI comes up and it
> allows me to start creating something.

Hmm. After switching to iced-tea I get the same compile error* but the GUI 
comes up and the program appears to work. What the hell.

* [javac] Compiling 100 source files to /tmp/portage/app-
misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/binding/classes   
 
 [echo] Running binding compiler... 
  
 [bind] Failed setting classpath from Ant task  
  


Thanks for the reply, Mark.

-- 
Rgds
Peter.

[gentoo-user] 1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? -> bar performance so far

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   I got a WD 1T drive to use in a new machine for my dad. I didn't
pay a huge amount of attention to the technical details when I
purchased it other than it was SATA2, big, and the price was good.
Here's the NewEgg link:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136490

   I installed the drive, created some partitions and set off to put
ext3 on it using just mke2fs -j /dev/sda3. The partitions gets written
and everything works but when I started installing Gentoo on it I was
getting some HUGE delays at times, such as when unpacking
portage.latest.tar.bz. Basically the tar step would be rolling along
and then the drive would literally appear to stop for 1 minute before
proceeding. No CPU usage, the machine is alive in other terminals, but
anything directed at the disk just seems dead. Sticking my ear on the
drive it doesn't sound like the drive is doing anything.

   I was trying to determine what to do - I.e is this a bad drive, how
to return it, etc. - and started reading the reviews at NewEgg. One
guy using it with Linux had this to say:


4KB physical sectors: KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!

Pros: Quiet, cool-running, big cache

Cons: The 4KB physical sectors are a problem waiting to happen. If you
misalign your partitions, disk performance can suffer. I ran
benchmarks in Linux using a number of filesystems, and I found that
with most filesystems, read performance and write performance with
large files didn't suffer with misaligned partitions, but writes of
many small files (unpacking a Linux kernel archive) could take several
times as long with misaligned partitions as with aligned partitions.
WD's advice about who needs to be concerned is overly simplistic,
IMHO, and it's flat-out wrong for Linux, although it's probably
accurate for 90% of buyers (those who run Windows or Mac OS and use
their standard partitioning tools). If you're not part of that 90%,
though, and if you don't fully understand this new technology and how
to handle it, buy a drive with conventional 512-byte sectors!


   Now, I don't mind getting a bit dirty learning to use this
correctly but I'm wondering what that means in a practical sense.
Reading the mke2fs man page the word 'sector' doesn't come up. It's my
understanding the Linux 'blocks' are groups of sectors. True? If the
disk must use 4K sectors then what - the smallest block has to be 4K
and I'm using 1 sector per block? It seems that ext3 doesn't support
anything larger than 4K?

   As a test I blew away all the partitions and made one huge 1
terabyte partition using ext3. I think tried untarring the portage
snapshot and then deleting the directory where I put it a bunch of
times. I get very different times each time I do this. untarring
varies from 6 minutes 24 seconds to 10 minutes 25 seconds. Removing
the directory varies from 3 seconds to 1 minute 22 seconds.

   Every time there is an apparent delay I just see the hard drive
light turned on solid. That said as far as I know if I wait for things
to complete the data is there but I haven't tested it extensively.

   Is this a bad drive or am I somehow using it incorrectly?

Thanks,
Mark


gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2
-C /mnt/TestMount/usr

real6m24.736s
user0m9.969s
sys 0m3.537s
gandalf TestMount # time rm -rf /mnt/TestMount/usr/

real0m3.229s
user0m0.110s
sys 0m1.809s
gandalf TestMount # mkdir usr
gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2
-C /mnt/TestMount/usr

real7m50.193s
user0m8.647s
sys 0m2.811s
gandalf TestMount # time rm -rf /mnt/TestMount/usr/

real0m3.234s
user0m0.119s
sys 0m1.792s
gandalf TestMount # mkdir usr
gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2
-C /mnt/TestMount/usr

real10m25.926s
user0m8.645s
sys 0m2.765s
gandalf TestMount # time rm -rf /mnt/TestMount/usr/

real1m22.330s
user0m0.124s
sys 0m1.810s
gandalf TestMount # mkdir usr
gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2
-C /mnt/TestMount/usr

real8m12.307s
user0m8.463s
sys 0m2.708s
gandalf TestMount # time rm -rf /mnt/TestMount/usr/

real0m29.517s
user0m0.114s
sys 0m1.810s
gandalf TestMount #




gandalf ~ # hdparm -tT /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   11362 MB in  2.00 seconds = 5684.46 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  314 MB in  3.00 seconds = 104.64 MB/sec
gandalf ~ #

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem compiling freemind

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 7:06 AM, Mark Knecht  wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 6:46 AM, Peter Humphrey  
> wrote:
>> Hello List,
>>
>> I thought I'd have a play with a mind mapping program, so I tried to
>> install freemind on this ~amd64 box. This is an excerpt from the log:
>>
> 
>>
>> Can someone who knows more Java than I do see what's missing?
>>
>> This may help:
>>
>> $ java-config -L
>> The following VMs are available for generation-2:
>> 1)      IcedTea6-bin 1.7 [icedtea6-bin]
>> *)      Sun JDK 1.5.0.22 [sun-jdk-1.5]
>>
>> --
>> Rgds
>> Peter.
>>
>>
> Runs for me. I don't know how to use it but the GUI comes up and it
> allows me to start creating something.
>
> AMD64 stable except for a few packages.
>
> m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ java-config -L
> The following VMs are available for generation-2:
> 1)      IcedTea6-bin 1.6.2 [icedtea6-bin]
> *)      Sun JRE 1.6.0.17 [sun-jre-bin-1.6]
>
> VMs marked as Build Only may contain Security Vulnerabilities and/or be EOL.
> Gentoo recommends not setting these VMs as either your System or User VM.
> Please see http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/java.xml#build-only for more 
> information
> m...@firefly ~/Desktop $
>
> m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ cat /etc/portage/package.keywords
> sys-kernel/gentoo-sources ~amd64
> sys-apps/portage ~amd64
> sys-apps/sandbox ~amd64
> app-cdr/cdrtools ~amd64
> x11-misc/read-edid ~amd64
> sys-kernel/rt-sources ~amd64
> media-sound/alsa-tools ~amd64
> games-action/extreme-tuxracer ~amd64
> media-sound/jack-audio-connection-kit ~amd64
> dev-php5/php-gtk ~amd64
> media-tv/huludesktop ~amd64
> m...@firefly ~/Desktop $
>
>
> - Mark
>

NOTE: It also worked the same for me when I switched to Iced-Tea6-bin,
both stable and ~amd64.

m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ java-config -L
The following VMs are available for generation-2:
*)  IcedTea6-bin 1.6.2 [icedtea6-bin]
2)  Sun JRE 1.6.0.17 [sun-jre-bin-1.6]

VMs marked as Build Only may contain Security Vulnerabilities and/or be EOL.
Gentoo recommends not setting these VMs as either your System or User VM.
Please see http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/java.xml#build-only for more information
m...@firefly ~/Desktop $



m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ java-config -L
The following VMs are available for generation-2:
*)  IcedTea6-bin 1.7 [icedtea6-bin]
2)  Sun JRE 1.6.0.17 [sun-jre-bin-1.6]

VMs marked as Build Only may contain Security Vulnerabilities and/or be EOL.
Gentoo recommends not setting these VMs as either your System or User VM.
Please see http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/java.xml#build-only for more information
m...@firefly ~/Desktop $

m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ java-config -l
[ant-core] Java-based build tool similar to 'make' that uses XML
configuration files. (/usr/share/ant-core/package.env)
[cyrus-sasl-2] The Cyrus SASL (Simple Authentication and Security
Layer). (/usr/share/cyrus-sasl-2/package.env)
[db-4.7] Oracle Berkeley DB (/usr/share/db-4.7/package.env)
[antlr] A parser generator for C++, C#, Java, and Python
(/usr/share/antlr/package.env)
[gjdoc] A javadoc compatible Java source documentation generator.
(/usr/share/gjdoc/package.env)
[xulrunner-1.9] Mozilla runtime package that can be used to bootstrap
XUL+XPCOM applications (/usr/share/xulrunner-1.9/package.env)
[pdflib-5] A library for generating PDF on the fly.
(/usr/share/pdflib-5/package.env)
[subversion] Advanced version control system (/usr/share/subversion/package.env)
[pilot-link] suite of tools for moving data between a Palm device and
a desktop (/usr/share/pilot-link/package.env)
[freemind] Mind-mapping software written in Java
(/usr/share/freemind/package.env)
[libidn] Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) implementation
(/usr/share/libidn/package.env)
m...@firefly ~/Desktop $

Cheers,
Mark

Cheers,
Mark

Re: [gentoo-user] Problem compiling freemind

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 6:46 AM, Peter Humphrey  wrote:
> Hello List,
>
> I thought I'd have a play with a mind mapping program, so I tried to
> install freemind on this ~amd64 box. This is an excerpt from the log:
>

>
> Can someone who knows more Java than I do see what's missing?
>
> This may help:
>
> $ java-config -L
> The following VMs are available for generation-2:
> 1)      IcedTea6-bin 1.7 [icedtea6-bin]
> *)      Sun JDK 1.5.0.22 [sun-jdk-1.5]
>
> --
> Rgds
> Peter.
>
>
Runs for me. I don't know how to use it but the GUI comes up and it
allows me to start creating something.

AMD64 stable except for a few packages.

m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ java-config -L
The following VMs are available for generation-2:
1)  IcedTea6-bin 1.6.2 [icedtea6-bin]
*)  Sun JRE 1.6.0.17 [sun-jre-bin-1.6]

VMs marked as Build Only may contain Security Vulnerabilities and/or be EOL.
Gentoo recommends not setting these VMs as either your System or User VM.
Please see http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/java.xml#build-only for more information
m...@firefly ~/Desktop $

m...@firefly ~/Desktop $ cat /etc/portage/package.keywords
sys-kernel/gentoo-sources ~amd64
sys-apps/portage ~amd64
sys-apps/sandbox ~amd64
app-cdr/cdrtools ~amd64
x11-misc/read-edid ~amd64
sys-kernel/rt-sources ~amd64
media-sound/alsa-tools ~amd64
games-action/extreme-tuxracer ~amd64
media-sound/jack-audio-connection-kit ~amd64
dev-php5/php-gtk ~amd64
media-tv/huludesktop ~amd64
m...@firefly ~/Desktop $


- Mark

[gentoo-user] Problem compiling freemind

[Peter Humphrey]

Hello List,

I thought I'd have a play with a mind mapping program, so I tried to 
install freemind on this ~amd64 box. This is an excerpt from the log:


>>> Compiling source in /tmp/portage/app-
misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind ...
 * Using following ANT_TASKS: ant-nodeps ant-trax jibx xsd2jibx 
  
Buildfile: build.xml
  

init:
 [echo] FreeMind Version = 0.9.0_RC_6, build 11.

xmlbind.checkStatusOfGeneration:

gen:
[mkdir] Created dir: /tmp/portage/app-
misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/binding   
  
[mkdir] Created dir: /tmp/portage/app-
misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/binding/src   
  
[mkdir] Created dir: /tmp/portage/app-
misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/binding/run   
  
[mkdir] Created dir: /tmp/portage/app-
misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/binding/classes   
  
[javac] Compiling 1 source file to /tmp/portage/app-
misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/binding/run   

   [delete] Deleting directory /tmp/portage/app-
misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/binding/run   

[javac] Compiling 100 source files to /tmp/portage/app-
misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/binding/classes   
 
 [echo] Running binding compiler... 
  
 [bind] Failed setting classpath from Ant task  
  
  [jar] Building jar: /tmp/portage/app-
misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/lib/bindings.jar  
 
   [delete] Deleting directory /tmp/portage/app-
misc/freemind-0.9.0_rc6/work/freemind/binding   


build:
[...etc...]


Successful completion is announced, but when I run the program from a 
terminal I get this:


$ freemind
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/gjl-2.6", line 266, in 
vm = get_vm(pkg)
  File "/usr/bin/gjl-2.6", line 159, in get_vm
target, needs_jdk = get_needed_target2(pkg)
  File "/usr/bin/gjl-2.6", line 51, in get_needed_target2
target = pkg.target()
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/java_config_2/Virtual.py", line 
112, in target
return self.get_provider().query("TARGET")
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'query'
Couldn't get needed information


Can someone who knows more Java than I do see what's missing?

This may help:

$ java-config -L
The following VMs are available for generation-2:
1)  IcedTea6-bin 1.7 [icedtea6-bin]
*)  Sun JDK 1.5.0.22 [sun-jdk-1.5]

-- 
Rgds
Peter.

Re: [gentoo-user] trouble starting bash

[David Relson]

On Sun, 7 Feb 2010 02:20:19 -0800
James Ausmus wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 8:07 PM, David Relson
> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 6 Feb 2010 19:13:33 -0500
> > Willie Wong wrote:
> >
> > > On Sat, Feb 06, 2010 at 06:29:27PM -0500, David Relson wrote:
> > > > Your replies are much appreciated as we're in an area of Linux
> > > > about which I'm poorly informed.
> > > >
> > > > Output (below) of "rc-status sysinit" indicated devfs stopped,
> > > > so I started devfs (which didn't change /dev/pt*), then
> > > > restarted udev (which didn't affect /dev/pt*).
> > >
> > > Right, but can you ssh in to the machine now (or open a terminal
> > > emulator in X)?
> > >
> > > /dev/pts is just the mount point for the devpts pseudo
> > > filesystem. In modern versions of linux the pts devices are
> > > created on-the-fly when requested (as opposed to other versions
> > > and some modern unixes where there will be a fixed number of
> > > device nodes under /dev/pts or equivalent). All that just goes to
> > > say that if /dev/pts is empty right after you restart the devfs
> > > service, it is normal. A device file should be created
> > > automatically now when userspace programs demand it. (E.g. if you
> > > now ssh in, and if it succeeds, ls /dev/pts should show one
> > > entry.)
> > >
> > > Try it, let me know if the problem is still there.
> >
> > Nope.  Both ssh and X terminal emulators are still broken.  No
> > change in behavior.
> >
> > FWIW, most of the entries in /dev are timestamped 02/02 23:34 which
> > is when I updated udev earlier this week. Today's upgrade/downgrade
> > emerge hasn't affected the timestamps.
> >
> > A comparison of /etc/udev/rules.d to a saved copy didn't show
> > much.  The only puzzling difference is:
> >  --- 90-hal.rules  (revision 51)
> >   +++ 90-hal.rules (working copy)
> >   @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
> ># pass all events to the HAL daemon
> >   -RUN+="socket:/org/freedesktop/hal/udev_event"
> >   +RUN+="socket:@/org/freedesktop/hal/udev_event"
> >
> > removing the "@" and restarting udev hasn't helped.  Since the rule
> > is hal related, I also restarted hald -- which hasn't helped.
> >
> >
> What happens if you do:
> 
> mount -t devpts none /dev/pts
> 
> Does the problem go away?
> 
> -James

Eureka!  Problem fixed.

Looking in /etc/mtab, the last line is:

   none /dev/pts devpts rw 0 0

Perhaps the mount devpts command should have been issued as part of
emerging udev, openrc, or sysinit ???  Should this be reported to
b.g.o.??

David

[gentoo-user] bluetooth devices can connect only once

[Xi Shen]

hi,

my system is gentoo amd64, kde 4.3.4. i have a m$ bluetooth mouse. if
i start my laptop, and connect to my mouse. it is fine. but if i
stopped bluetooth, or disconnected the mouse, i cannot connect to my
mouse unless i restart my system.

in the /var/log/message, i found "Connection refused (111)" logged
when i tried to reconnect my mouse.

i searched for a while, and found a solution. i emerged the hidd tool
and use this tool to connect to my mouse. this tool success every
time.

i just wonder, since the hcitool can connect to my mouse once, why it
cannot connect to my mouse afterward? does some one have a better
solutiion.

-- 
Best Regards,
David Shen

http://twitter.com/davidshen84/

Re: [gentoo-user] remove unneeded package.keywords entries

[Neil Bothwick]

On Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:22:19 -0600, Dale wrote:

> >> True but if the OP hasn't cleaned his before, he may very well have a
> >> lot of cleaning to do as well.  I clean mine every few months and it
> >> still has some size to the output.
> >>
> > That's why I run it every week :)

> You got to much time on your hands.  You need better things to do.  lol

:-)

When maintaining a Gentoo system, little and often usually take less time
in the ling run. I get emailed the results of eix-test-obsolete,
revdep-rebuild -p  and a couple of other checks from each computer each
week. Most weeks I just scan the mails and move on as nothing is
reported. Occasionally I remove a line or two from /etc/portage/*, which
is far less work than trying to decipher the mess after leaving it for
several months.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

... "I'm simply not a nice girl", she whispered tartly.


signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

Re: [gentoo-user] trouble starting bash

[James Ausmus]

On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 8:07 PM, David Relson wrote:

> On Sat, 6 Feb 2010 19:13:33 -0500
> Willie Wong wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Feb 06, 2010 at 06:29:27PM -0500, David Relson wrote:
> > > Your replies are much appreciated as we're in an area of Linux about
> > > which I'm poorly informed.
> > >
> > > Output (below) of "rc-status sysinit" indicated devfs stopped, so I
> > > started devfs (which didn't change /dev/pt*), then restarted udev
> > > (which didn't affect /dev/pt*).
> >
> > Right, but can you ssh in to the machine now (or open a terminal
> > emulator in X)?
> >
> > /dev/pts is just the mount point for the devpts pseudo filesystem. In
> > modern versions of linux the pts devices are created on-the-fly when
> > requested (as opposed to other versions and some modern unixes where
> > there will be a fixed number of device nodes under /dev/pts or
> > equivalent). All that just goes to say that if /dev/pts is empty
> > right after you restart the devfs service, it is normal. A device file
> > should be created automatically now when userspace programs demand it.
> > (E.g. if you now ssh in, and if it succeeds, ls /dev/pts should show
> > one entry.)
> >
> > Try it, let me know if the problem is still there.
>
> Nope.  Both ssh and X terminal emulators are still broken.  No change
> in behavior.
>
> FWIW, most of the entries in /dev are timestamped 02/02 23:34 which is
> when I updated udev earlier this week. Today's upgrade/downgrade emerge
> hasn't affected the timestamps.
>
> A comparison of /etc/udev/rules.d to a saved copy didn't show
> much.  The only puzzling difference is:
>  --- 90-hal.rules  (revision 51)
>   +++ 90-hal.rules (working copy)
>   @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
># pass all events to the HAL daemon
>   -RUN+="socket:/org/freedesktop/hal/udev_event"
>   +RUN+="socket:@/org/freedesktop/hal/udev_event"
>
> removing the "@" and restarting udev hasn't helped.  Since the rule is
> hal related, I also restarted hald -- which hasn't helped.
>
>
What happens if you do:

mount -t devpts none /dev/pts

Does the problem go away?

-James