[gentoo-user] Information request: root directory not listed by df

2009-09-17 Thread Alan E. Davis
I followed the method outlined in the Gentoo installation docs, placing
/boot on a small partition.  Then when booting, I specify the root directory
in grub.conf.

The device is listed in /etc/fstab

  /dev/sda4   /   ext3
noatime 0 1

However, df doesn't list /dev/sda4.  Is this because it was specified as a
parameter?
The following are listed by df:

  rootfs 9780176   8060012   1223356  87% /
  /dev/root  9780176   8060012   1223356  87% /

Thank you,
Alan Davis

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what counts.

   Richard Feynman


Re: [gentoo-user] Information request: root directory not listed by df

2009-09-19 Thread Alan E. Davis
No this was not the full output from df.  There was nowhere, however, any
reference to /dev/sdc1, the filesystem where  the root filesystem "/" is
located.  Only the lines in my earlier message:

rootfs29694968   2877284  25309184  11% /
/dev/root 29694968   2877284  25309184  11% /

In /boot/grub/grub.conf the third line in the following specifies the "/"
directory as /dev/sdc1, while /boot is in /dev/sda1.

title Gentoo Linux 2.6.30-r4.02
root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel-2.6.30-gentoo-r4.02 root=/dev/sdc1

Thank you for earlier remarks that clarified this issue to a satisfactory
extent.

Alan

>
>


[gentoo-user] Double nautilus windows for each USB flash drive plugged in

2009-09-28 Thread Alan E. Davis
Hello:

Apparently I have bodged the setup somehow on this system.

Each time I plug in a flash drive, two Nautilus windows open up.  If I plug
three USB drives in, six windows open.

Any ideas please, to smooth this minor wrinkle?

Thank you,

Alan Davis


Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Double nautilus windows for each USB flash drive plugged in

2009-10-02 Thread Alan E. Davis
Hello, Walt:

I had "Browse removable media when inserted" checked.   Sure enough, when
unchecked, a nautilus window opens.  I also notice that two options are
checked.  I don't understand what the difference between them would be:

   Mount removeable drives when hot-plugged
and
   Mount removable media when inserted

Thank you for the advice.

Alan

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 1:16 AM, walt  wrote:

> On 09/28/2009 06:23 AM, Alan E. Davis wrote:
>
>> Hello:
>>
>> Apparently I have bodged the setup somehow on this system.
>>
>> Each time I plug in a flash drive, two Nautilus windows open up.  If I
>> plug three USB drives in, six windows open.
>>
>
> I can't answer your question, sorry, but I've noticed something here
> that may or may not be related.
>
> In the gnome System::Preferences::Removable Drives and Media dialog,
> I have the "Browse removable media when inserted" box *not* checked,
> but I get a nautilus window anyway.
>
> So, I don't have double nautili, but I still have one more than I
> asked for.  Does that checkbox do anything on your system?
>
>
>


Re: [gentoo-user] Double nautilus windows for each USB flash drive plugged in

2009-10-05 Thread Alan E. Davis
With Flash drive partitions labeled, the mounting is consistent.  I have a
git bare repo directory, on each of two flash drives to keep certain
directories in sync on three machines.  The repos are found consistently by
git this method.  I don't remember any specific method I used to get this
mounting behavior into place, but I have had to specifically set GID for my
user account on each machine to keep permissions in line.

By the way, when I reformatted a drive, I just used the same label, which
seemed to work fine.  I wonder though whether this system might be defeated
by convolutions of various kinds outside my control at a future time.

Alan

On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 5:24 AM, Stroller wrote:

>
> On 3 Oct 2009, at 20:11, daid kahl wrote:
>
>> ...
>>>
 Another useful notion is to use udev to automount flash drives (or
 external usb harddrives)  to a specified location based on serial number.
 ... I can either give an overview or dig up the url if anyone likes.

>>>
>>> I'd have assumed you simple used any of the usual "automount drives with
>>> udev" guides. Am I wrong?
>>>
>>> This is the way I have always intended to approach this problem, so I'd
>>> be grateful to be corrected in advance if there's a better way.
>>>
>>
>> That's correct, except not all of these guides discuss the drive serial
>> number.  If you want to ensure that different drives are mounted at
>> different points, you have to rely on the device serial (since the /dev
>> nodes are filled in order of the device connection, regardless of which
>> drive it is).
>>
>> There are plenty of guides that mention how to find the serial number and
>> how to write the correct udev rules, but most the guides are outdated and
>> suggest use of the symlink udevinfo, which was removed upstream recently.
>>  So, to get a device's serial number, for example (replace /dev/sdb with the
>> correct node) :
>>
>> # udevadm info -a -p $(udevadm info -q path -n /dev/sdb) | grep
>> ATTRS{serial}
>>
>> and use the (first) serial that doesn't have colons and periods.  Then for
>> the udev rule you just need to include ATTRS{serial}==" 00"
>>
>> This is also useful when you have external harddrives that use ext3
>> formatting and flashdrives that don't.
>>
>
> Ops... I omitted a paste - I went to a terminal to check the details
> and then appear to have completely forgotten to include them. Thus my
> question is misphrased & incomplete.
>
> I intended to ask:
>
>   I'd have assumed you simple used any of the usual "automount drives with
> udev" guides, but based their entry in "/dev/disk/by-uuid/". Am I wrong?
>
> How do you find the serial, please? I'm guessing from `dmesg`?
>
> I think the entry in "/dev/disk/by-uuid/" may change if you reformat the
> drive, so your response is most helpful.
>
> Thank you for your help,
>
> Stroller.
>
>
>


[gentoo-user] Uncle: qt-*:4 dependencies/blocks preventing world update

2009-10-22 Thread Alan E. Davis
I've tried alot of things, but I give up.  Can someone help me with the knot
of dependencies that has been holding my system in hostage from any attempt
to update world, for weeks now?

This message asked if I want to merge these packages:

!!! The following update(s) have been skipped due to unsatisfied
dependencies
!!! triggered by backtracking:

x11-libs/qt-assistant:4
x11-libs/qt-svg:4
x11-libs/qt-test:4
x11-libs/qt-script:4
x11-libs/qt-webkit:4
x11-libs/qt-opengl:4

Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No]

Here are the blocks:

Total: 70 packages (54 upgrades, 9 downgrades, 6 new, 1 reinstall), Size of
downloads: 227,710 kB
Conflict: 22 blocks

!!! One or more updates have been skipped due to a dependency conflict:

x11-libs/qt-gui:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.3-r1', 'merge') conflicts with
~x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.2[-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/',
'x11-libs/qt-webkit-4.5.2-r1', 'merge')

x11-libs/qt-sql:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.3', 'merge') conflicts with
>=x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.0:4[mysql] required by ('installed', '/',
'app-office/akonadi-server-1.2.1', 'nomerge')

x11-libs/qt-core:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-core-4.5.3-r1', 'merge') conflicts with
~x11-libs/qt-core-4.5.2[qt3support,-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/',
'x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.2', 'merge')

x11-libs/qt-dbus:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-dbus-4.5.3', 'merge') conflicts with
~x11-libs/qt-dbus-4.5.2[-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/',
'x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.2-r2', 'merge')

I think one of the problems is I installed KDE 4.3.X and all of that may
need rebuilding.

I tried installing a qt overlay.  I tried unmasking a more advanced masked
qt.  I've seen a number of messages, some of them from a few months back,
recommending several magical incantations.  Nothing seems to get me beyond
this knot.

Thank you,

Alan


Re: [gentoo-user] Uncle: qt-*:4 dependencies/blocks preventing world update

2009-10-23 Thread Alan E. Davis
I have read a number of different explanations and suggestions, some of them
regarding an earlier, yet similar, tanglement between versions of qt-*.
I've tried a number of suggestions, and I have unmerged and remerged
packages.

I am now trying to individually merge packages with dependencies on
qt-*-4.5.2.

I tried KDE 4.3.1, with some trepidation, and I have happily been running
gnome, save a couple of nits, and I have run into qt issues in the past.  I
would like to uninstall kde4 (like it, but not well enough to devote so many
resources to it, and to have to upgrade frequently and painfully).  I would
like to remove the KDE 4 installation, but keep the individual packages
depending on kdelibs.  (K3b, etc.).  Would this have an impact on this
issue?  This is off topic, but how to uninstall EXCEPT what I want, of
KDE4?   Is this reasonable?

Thanks.  I hope to solve this soon,  but it's too early to know whether the
help on this list was enough.  I changed USE flags, and the same messages
appear:

!!! One or more updates have been skipped due to a dependency conflict:

x11-libs/qt-gui:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.3-r1', 'merge') conflicts with
~x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.2[-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/',
'x11-libs/qt-webkit-4.5.2-r1', 'merge')

x11-libs/qt-sql:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.3', 'merge') conflicts with
>=x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.0:4[mysql] required by ('installed', '/',
'app-office/akonadi-server-1.2.1', 'nomerge')

x11-libs/qt-core:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-core-4.5.3-r1', 'merge') conflicts with
~x11-libs/qt-core-4.5.2[qt3support,-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/',
'x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.2', 'merge')

x11-libs/qt-dbus:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-dbus-4.5.3', 'merge') conflicts with
~x11-libs/qt-dbus-4.5.2[-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/',
'x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.2-r2', 'merge')


!!! The following update(s) have been skipped due to unsatisfied
dependencies
!!! triggered by backtracking:

x11-libs/qt-assistant:4
x11-libs/qt-svg:4
x11-libs/qt-test:4
x11-libs/qt-script:4
x11-libs/qt-webkit:4
x11-libs/qt-opengl:4

Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No]

Thank you,

Alan


Re: [gentoo-user] Uncle: qt-*:4 dependencies/blocks preventing world update

2009-10-25 Thread Alan E. Davis
I finally was able to emerge -NuDav world, and revdep-rebuild passed the
system as clean.  However, when I try emerge -uDav world again, that same
message, or some permutation of it, is presented.

I have set the flags "dbus qt3support qt3 qt4" and so on.  So that's not
it.

I unmerged a number of the involved packages, that looked something like
"qt-*".  I did this just before running the more or less successful "emerge
-NuDav world".  A week ago, I ran "emerge -e world".  Perhaps I need to do
this again.

I've read a plethora of postings, such as a sticky post on the Gentoo
Forums, and some of these emails, as well as googling, and tried several
things.

When this all began, about three weeks ago, or longer, I noticed problems
with

   hplip
   python

I have python 3.1 and python 2.6 installed,  Some advice was seen to make
sure eselect is pointing to 2.6.  I also ran python-updater.

A new work week is starting, my system is responding normally, I will avoid
KDE4, and type this all shakes itself out, over the next week or so.

Thank you to those who have helped.  Good luck to others.

Alan


Re: [gentoo-user] Uncle: qt-*:4 dependencies/blocks preventing world update

2009-10-25 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you Mr. MacKinnon:

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 11:05 PM, Alan McKinnon 

>
>
> Did you try the most straightforward (albeit lengthy) approach:
>
> unmerge all of Qt
> emerge world and let portage figure out what it wants to put back
>
>
How can I do this?


> There is seldom a good reason to have Qt packages in world (dev packages
> excepted) and recent changes in the ebuild have caused lots of mutual
> blockers. When I first went through this, I saw that almost all qt-*
> packages
> would be rebuilt on my machines. It seemed easier to restart with a clean
> slate. I got a blocker notice which said I had to enable various flags,
> which
> I did and the merge completed flawlessly.
>
>
I will try to uninstall all "qt-*"  packages.   I'd like to uninstall KDE4
also.

Alan Davis


Re: [gentoo-user] Uncle: qt-*:4 dependencies/blocks preventing world update

2009-10-25 Thread Alan E. Davis
Yes.  This is one of the issues I ran into.  Done.

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 11:13 PM, Mick  wrote:

> On Sunday 25 October 2009 12:53:33 Amit Dor-Shifer wrote:
> > amit0 ~ # eselect profile show
> > Current make.profile symlink:
> >   default/linux/amd64/10.0
>
> You may want to change this to .../amd64/10.0/desktop or server depending
> on
> what your machine is.  Then I would think that the flags for qt3support
> would
> be enabled by default.  However, I am running x86 over here so others may
> be
> able to confirm.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Mick
>


Re: [gentoo-user] Uncle: qt-*:4 dependencies/blocks preventing world update

2009-10-25 Thread Alan E. Davis
To follow up, after removing "qt" (by mistake), and all the qt-* packages I
could find, this is what I found when running "emerge -uDav world""

x11-libs/qt-gui:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.3-r1', 'merge') conflicts with
~x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.2[-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/',
'x11-libs/qt-webkit-4.5.2-r1', 'merge')

x11-libs/qt-sql:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.3', 'merge') conflicts with
>=x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.0:4[mysql] required by ('installed', '/',
'app-office/akonadi-server-1.2.1', 'nomerge')

x11-libs/qt-core:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-core-4.5.3-r1', 'merge') conflicts with
~x11-libs/qt-core-4.5.2[qt3support,-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/',
'x11-libs/qt-sql-4.5.2', 'merge')

x11-libs/qt-dbus:4

  ('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-dbus-4.5.3', 'merge') conflicts with
~x11-libs/qt-dbus-4.5.2[-debug] required by ('ebuild', '/',
'x11-libs/qt-gui-4.5.2-r2', 'merge')

media-libs/x264:0

  ('ebuild', '/', 'media-libs/x264-0.0.20090923', 'merge') conflicts with
 wrote:

> Thank you Mr. MacKinnon:
>
> On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 11:05 PM, Alan McKinnon 
>
>>
>>
>> Did you try the most straightforward (albeit lengthy) approach:
>>
>> unmerge all of Qt
>> emerge world and let portage figure out what it wants to put back
>>
>>
> How can I do this?
>
>
>> There is seldom a good reason to have Qt packages in world (dev packages
>> excepted) and recent changes in the ebuild have caused lots of mutual
>> blockers. When I first went through this, I saw that almost all qt-*
>> packages
>> would be rebuilt on my machines. It seemed easier to restart with a clean
>> slate. I got a blocker notice which said I had to enable various flags,
>> which
>> I did and the merge completed flawlessly.
>>
>>
> I will try to uninstall all "qt-*"  packages.   I'd like to uninstall KDE4
> also.
>
> Alan Davis
>
>


Re: [gentoo-user] Uncle: qt-*:4 dependencies/blocks preventing world update

2009-10-25 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you Alan.

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 11:23 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:

>
>
> Simplest way I can think of:
>
> eix qt-
>
> Scroll up and down and note which ones are installed, there's only 20 in
> total
> and the colourized output makes it easy to spot the installed ones. Unmerge
> those.
>

That's what I did, then got back to the same message.  Even after unmerging
avidemux.


>
>

Alan Davis


Re: [gentoo-user] Uncle: qt-*:4 dependencies/blocks preventing world update

2009-10-26 Thread Alan E. Davis
I think this problem has now gone away on my machine.  I cannot be sure what
it was that helped.  I removed all qt-* packages, and some of the
problematic packages mentioned as depending on the earlier versions.  After
running

 # emerge -utv world, I noted some dependencies, and may have removed
one or two.  Then I ran the install.

After a couple of interations, all *seems* to be well.

Thank you for the advice,

Alan Davis


[gentoo-user] flash drive FAT partition disappears

2009-11-18 Thread Alan E. Davis
I can't think of a specific place to look for this, so will try the
eclectics at gentoo-user.

A student handed me a USB flash drive with a video file on it he wanted to
offer to me to watch.  It mounted automatically, I copied the file, then I
took the disk out of the drive and gave it to him.  I cannot say with 100%
certainty that I unmounted it.  The file was completely copied.  I am pretty
careful, so I think I unmounted it.

Today he came back to me, asking what happened to his disk.  He said nothing
it there anymore.  I checked.  Gparted says this drive (4 GB I think) has 2
Terabytes of unallocated space.  None of the Windoze gurus (so to speak)
around here know what to do.

Any ideas?   I'm afraid the little bit of progress I've made over the past
13 years in advocating GNU/Linux and Free Softwrae, will be lost if this
problem isn't solved.

Thanks,

Alan


[gentoo-user] Moving root filesystem to a new partition

2009-11-23 Thread Alan E. Davis
Can someone tell me what steps are necessary to move the / filesystem to a
new partition?  I recall someone helping me with this before, but cannot
find the email.  The oldest of three drives on my system had my / partition,
/dev/sdc1.  One day recently, that partition became inaccessable.  After
quickly installing Ubuntu on a different drive, that root partition
eventually showed up again.

So I've been able to boot Gentoo again off the separate /boot partition on
/dev/sda1.  I need to move that / partition.  I have several other
partitions mounted off this one, mainly as /usr and maybe /usr/local/, and
some storage partitions mounted to my home directory.

I copied the root (/) partition with the new partition at /dev/sdb5 mounted
as /newroot, using
# cp -ax / /newroot

I checked that /proc, /dev, and /sys are there, and empty.  I recall there
are some other steps necessary.  I changed /etc/fstab, and the grub2
grub.cfg from ubuntu, the entry for this kernel.  The boot stalls at a
certain point.

May I ask what steps are necessary to do this?

Thank you,

Alan Davis


[gentoo-user] Re: Moving root filesystem to a new partition [SOLVED]

2009-11-23 Thread Alan E. Davis
I found the email from some years ago, advising to bind mount / and copy
/dev to the new partition from the bind mounted / partition.  It worked
again this time.  Thank you again.

Alan

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 6:35 AM, Alan E. Davis  wrote:

> Can someone tell me what steps are necessary to move the / filesystem to a
> new partition?  I recall someone helping me with this before, but cannot
> find the email.  The oldest of three drives on my system had my / partition,
> /dev/sdc1.  One day recently, that partition became inaccessable.  After
> quickly installing Ubuntu on a different drive, that root partition
> eventually showed up again.
>
> So I've been able to boot Gentoo again off the separate /boot partition on
> /dev/sda1.  I need to move that / partition.  I have several other
> partitions mounted off this one, mainly as /usr and maybe /usr/local/, and
> some storage partitions mounted to my home directory.
>
> I copied the root (/) partition with the new partition at /dev/sdb5 mounted
> as /newroot, using
> # cp -ax / /newroot
>
> I checked that /proc, /dev, and /sys are there, and empty.  I recall there
> are some other steps necessary.  I changed /etc/fstab, and the grub2
> grub.cfg from ubuntu, the entry for this kernel.  The boot stalls at a
> certain point.
>
> May I ask what steps are necessary to do this?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Alan Davis
>


Re: [gentoo-user] Moving root filesystem to a new partition

2009-11-26 Thread Alan E. Davis
I bind mounted / then copied /dev to the new partition.  This was advice
given earlier, the first time it happened to me: I finally found an earlier
replay to a similar request from me.  All is now well.

Thank you for the advice.

Alan

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Dale  wrote:

> Francisco Ares wrote:
>
>
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Dale > rdalek1...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>Alan E. Davis wrote:
>>
>>Can someone tell me what steps are necessary to move the /
>>filesystem to a new partition?  I recall someone helping me
>>with this before, but cannot find the email.  The oldest of
>>three drives on my system had my / partition, /dev/sdc1.  One
>>day recently, that partition became inaccessable.  After
>>quickly installing Ubuntu on a different drive, that root
>>partition eventually showed up again.
>>So I've been able to boot Gentoo again off the separate /boot
>>partition on /dev/sda1.  I need to move that / partition.  I
>>have several other partitions mounted off this one, mainly as
>>/usr and maybe /usr/local/, and some storage partitions
>>mounted to my home directory.
>>I copied the root (/) partition with the new partition at
>>/dev/sdb5 mounted as /newroot, using
>>   # cp -ax / /newroot
>>
>>I checked that /proc, /dev, and /sys are there, and empty.  I
>>recall there are some other steps necessary.  I changed
>>/etc/fstab, and the grub2 grub.cfg from ubuntu, the entry for
>>this kernel.  The boot stalls at a certain point.  May I
>> ask what steps are necessary to do this?
>>
>>Thank you,
>>
>>Alan Davis
>>
>>
>>I have done this in the past.  I usually boot the CD, make mount
>>points for old and new, then mount the old and new that I want to
>>copy.  Then I do a cp -av /path/to/old /path/to/new/ and let it
>>copy.  This can take quite a bit of time tho.  It seems those
>>little bitty files take the longest.  Maybe omitting the -v option
>>would help on that?
>>
>>Once you get it copied over, edit your fstab file as needed on the
>>new side and install the bootloader as well.  After that, it
>>usually just works.
>>
>>Dale
>>
>>:-)  :-)
>>P. S.  Sorry for not including some fancy tarball stuff.  ;-)
>>
>>
>>
>> Well, as far as I know one would like to edit the bootloader configuration
>> as well, so as to reflect the new root directory.
>>
>> Or has anyone written this before and I didn't notice? ;-)
>>
>> Francisco
>>
>> --
>> "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you
>> and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have one
>> idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." -
>> George Bernard Shaw
>>
>
> If it needs to be then sure.  I usually move things file wise with cp then
> move things physically in the case as well.  My OS is always on hda.  The
> grub config is on hda1 and grub bootloader is on the MBR of hda as well.
>  So, I don't have to edit grub on mine.  I do boot once by using the edit
> feature of grub, just to make sure before I move things physically.
>
> You do have to plan these things tho.  Wouldn't hurt to write down on paper
> where everything is and don't erase anything until you are sure your ducks
> are in a row.  Maybe even write notes on the drive with a post it note.
>  Dale
>
> :-)  :-)
>
>


[gentoo-user] How to edit Gnome main menu and keep them around.

2009-12-19 Thread Alan E. Davis
I haven't seen an answer to my question elsewhere.

I have found it convenient to edit the gnome main applications menu, with a
Science menu and a Guitar menu, and others.  I have perhaps too many apps
installed.  Apropos is something I'd forgotten about, but it's convenient to
have a gui way to start up my preferred apps, with Gnome.

Gnome's menu is vastly improved over earlier models, in particular that when
a new app is installed, it is immediately available.  However, when
updating/upgrading Gnome, my edits are lost.

I'd like to specify a config file withing a "Workbench" folder or other
folder off my ~/ directory, under git control.  It would useful for these
changes to be portable on new installs, as well.

Can anyone offer any insight into this problem?

Thanks for previous insightful answers on this list!

Alan Davis


[gentoo-user] Howto generate a list of installed packages?

2009-12-28 Thread Alan E. Davis
Season's Greetings to one and all.

I would like to be able to generate a script or list of packages of some
kind that would enable me to install Gentoo with an identical profile of
installed packages.  Since with Debian/Ubuntu one can run
   dpkg --get-selections > file
and
   dpkg --set-selections < file
(or some such), one imagines that the Gentoo gurus/magicians are able to do
something similar.

It takes me months to get a new machine up to speed.  In fact, I have just
realized I don't have tcsh installed, something I hardly EVER use, but need
to run a one of a kind script.

Can anyone make a suggestion?  Am I missing something?

Thanks

Alan Davis


[gentoo-user] USB Flash Drives automatic mounting breakage (Gnome)

2010-01-04 Thread Alan E. Davis
Recently, I have had to reboot in order to recover the function of automatic
mounting of USB Flash drives, after some activity, such as mounting and
umounting.   This is happening on two AMD64 systems.

I am often able to unmount manually (# umount /media/KINGSTON , for
example).   All of my flash drives have labels, and usually they mount on
/media, when plugged in.  However, not always, but often, when I have
unmounted one of them, the name stays visible on Nautilus, and it is
impossible to mount it again by plugging it in.

Another time, I reorganized the partitions on a flash drive, into one
partition.  After this, I was unable to plug it in to mount it.

Uniformly, the expected behavior is recovered after rebooting.

I am using these drives to maintain git repositories of subdirectories, so I
need to be able to access various drives on demand, by pluggint them in.  I
am not sure where to look for help.  The USB guide, etc. didnt seem to
help.  Is there an init script that I can restart to recover the volume
management function?

Thank you for any ideas.

Alan Davis
Avid user of Gentoo, knows enough to get into trouble.


Re: [gentoo-user] USB Flash Drives automatic mounting breakage (Gnome)

2010-01-04 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you for taking the trouble to answer.

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 6:41 AM, Mick  wrote:

>
>
> All I can say (I don't use Gnome and Nautilus to be more helpful with the
> specifics) is that there is a difference between mounting a device via hal
> and
> mounting it manually.  I recall that you can't mix the two - when I tried
> it
> on my machine (using Konqueror) it wouldn't work.  I think hal complained,
> but
> can't recall off hand.
>

It seems to me that it is possible to unmount the drives manually, many
times, if not always, if it is impossible to unmount them via nautilus.
Other File Managers work differently, I think Thunar may be more
straightforward, not sure, though.  Maybe this will all pass soon enough,
but for now, on one of my machines, especially, I have to reboot
frequently.  If it's hal that is at work, then perhaps I can restart that?
But when I did something similar, the window manager, at least, restarted.

Thanks again,

Alan


Re: [gentoo-user] Re: sata disk assignment mismatch...

2010-01-16 Thread Alan E. Davis
I might chime in, that I once deleted an important 90 GB partition by
mistake, when a Ubuntu install had shuffled drive assignments.  Ubuntu had
assigned the formerly /dev/hda1 to /dev/sda1, and former /dev/sda1 to
/dev/sda2.

Ubuntu used UUIDs.  That is an approach that works, once I learned how to
use it, although Ubuntu itself set up grub with a different partition
assigned as "/", so I had to edit /boot/grub/grub.conf or its equivalent to
even boot the system.  Trouble is, who can read UUIDs?  I soon abandoned
Ubuntu, went back to Gentoo, in great measure because I trusted drive
assignments.  However, it has been pointed out that this is a kernel level
issue, and there's nothing a mere user can do about it.

Again, I was also told, "this is a feature not a bug."  And I totally agree
that anything that makes a system more confusing to set up is NOT a
feature.

Labels (I used gparted to define labels) allowed me to assign partitions in
a more friendly way.  As a convenient side effect, when I have some 15
partitions, it makes it easier to remember which is which.

Alan D




>


[gentoo-user] when emerging: " Wrong number of fields in NEEDED.ELF.2" messages

2010-01-18 Thread Alan E. Davis
It has happened that when emerging packages, the following message is listed
at the end of the emerge process:

 Wrong number of fields in NEEDED.ELF.2

May I ask for advice?

Alan


Re: [gentoo-user] when emerging: " Wrong number of fields in NEEDED.ELF.2" messages

2010-01-19 Thread Alan E. Davis
On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 7:53 AM, James Ausmus wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Alan E. Davis  wrote:
>
>> It has happened that when emerging packages, the following message is
>> listed at the end of the emerge process:
>>
>>  Wrong number of fields in NEEDED.ELF.2
>>
>> May I ask for advice?
>>
>>
> Never seen that issue before, but maybe try to re-emerge elfutils/libelf
> (whichever you have installed)?
>
> Here is a more complete copy of the message, actually at the tail end of
re-emerging libelf :

Wrong number of fields in NEEDED.ELF.2: ���! h 0A
  p��� `A! ��� ���A ���A

�� ���
   � B! ��#x1B
@��� C +C��2sB ���B ���B ���B ��� ���
���

Now I'll try again.

Alan


[gentoo-user] Migration from single to dual core

2008-01-02 Thread Alan E. Davis
I have been running a machine for a long while.  I am beginning to
think that the old saw that Gentoo isn't release oriented is hogwash:
each installation seems to be more polished, leaving behind a windrove
of cruft accumlating over the years.  The few times I have installed
since my introduction two years ago have each exposed some more
polished installation aspects/details.

Be that as it may, I have now installed a new motherboard and CPU.  I
have moved from a 64 bit AMD single core Athlon 64 to a  dual core AMD
Athlon 64.  The install has gone well, I have had to recompile the
kernel before migrating; however, some questions remain.

So it's back to the old threads about whether 64 bits is superior to
32, etc.  My question now is, given that the system is working damned
well now, what is the best way to handle this: recompile everything?
Should I recompile gcc and the libraries and all compilers.

I have to say that this system is pretty solid, but it's been hard to
keep up with the housekeeping.  And emerge -uDav world has been next
to impossible.

So, again, what differences will there be, that will require immediate
adjustment?  I have changed to "-j3" in make.conf.  I have so many
packages installed it will take many days to recompile, and, again, I
am considering a reinstallation of everything.  Gentoo has cured me of
that weakness for constant upgrades and installs, even while
convincing me of the excellence of compiling for the machine.

Alan Davis


-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] Migration from single to dual core

2008-01-02 Thread Alan E. Davis
I apologize: it isn't clear from my message, that I want to migrate
from a single core AMD 64 to a dual core AMD 64X2 processor.  I only
intended to comment obtusely about 64 vs 32 bits, but I think I muffed
that.

Your comment about the -CFLAGS was pertinent.  Thank you.

Alan

On Jan 3, 2008 1:09 AM, Florian Philipp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2008-01-03 at 00:14 +1000, Alan E. Davis wrote:
>
> > So it's back to the old threads about whether 64 bits is superior to
> > 32, etc.  My question now is, given that the system is working damned
> > well now, what is the best way to handle this: recompile everything?
> > Should I recompile gcc and the libraries and all compilers.
> >
>
> In case I didn't understand you correctly in my first response and you
> really want to migrate from 64bit to 32 or vice versa, then I must say,
> that's not possible without a full reinstall.
>



-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man
-- 
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[gentoo-user] CUPS problem

2008-01-05 Thread Alan E. Davis
CUPS has been working flawlessly for quite some time, one of the feats
of newer GNU/Linux installs (to one who couldn't get an HP mainstream
inkjet working right some 10 years ago).Simultaneously, I notices
that Apple now owns the copyright, and after a recent upgrade, stopped
working.

I have to blame myself, because running cfg-update, the changes to
/etc/cups/cupsd.conf were considerable, involving three, and not two
files to be merged.  The interface of xxdiff is not intuitive, to me:
I've blundered through it's kludgey structure for a while, but this
time I was genuinely confused.  Furthermore, I made the mistake of
taking a stab in the dark.

So I uninstalled CUPS completely, and reinstalled.  Then installed the
printer again.  It is doing the same thing: the interface at
localhost:631 says that the printer is ready to print.  Any job sent
to the queue, including test prints, are immediately "stopped".
Reprint a job, and it is immediately stopped.

Hypotheses:
   New ASUS M2N-E Motherboard (was working before upgrading CUPS)
   Configuration file issues.  (I have deleted the entire directory
/etc/cups, and the new derault file was replaced with a simplified one
scavenged of a mailing list, but with no improvement.
   Unknown factors (where to start?)

So I am turning to the mailing list for suggestions.

Any ideas?

Thank you,

Alan Davis

-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man
-- 
gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list



Re: [gentoo-user] CUPS problem

2008-01-06 Thread Alan E. Davis
I have installed two or three times, deleted /etc/cups and reinstalled
the printer.  It showed up as an HPLIP device when installing, w/ CUPS
and/or the kde printer utility.   NOtably the utility OR the
localhost:631 interface did not show any option for a USB printer.
The address that ended up being used was a usb:.  When I
get gentoo booted up I'll look at it again.  For now, I have to print,
so I've installed Ubuntu on another partition.  Printing works fine
there, so that's a start.

Thank you,

Alan

On Jan 7, 2008 2:48 AM, Mick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sunday 06 January 2008, Dale wrote:
> > Alan E. Davis wrote:
> > >
> > > Any ideas?
>
> > I ran into something similar to the a while back and I had to un-merge
> > cups, delete the config files, then reemerge cups and reconfigure my
> > printer.   Keep in mind that when you unmerge something, the config
> > files remain in /etc unchanged.
>
> Assuming that you have set the correct device in the GUI for your printer,
> then the most likely error is that your have not provided the correct path
> for it.  Show us what you have defined the path as in case we can help.
> --
> Regards,
> Mick
>



-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man
-- 
gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list



Re: [gentoo-user] CUPS problem

2008-01-06 Thread Alan E. Davis
Yes.  Even installed as hplip, when jobs are printed, they are
immediately marked as "stopped" in the jobs interface.  There is no
indication that the printer is on line at all, except that it shows up
as Ready.

Thank you,

Alan

On Jan 7, 2008 10:24 AM, Dale <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>  Alan E. Davis wrote:
>  I have installed two or three times, deleted /etc/cups and reinstalled
> the printer. It showed up as an HPLIP device when installing, w/ CUPS
> and/or the kde printer utility. NOtably the utility OR the
> localhost:631 interface did not show any option for a USB printer.
> The address that ended up being used was a usb:. When I
> get gentoo booted up I'll look at it again. For now, I have to print,
> so I've installed Ubuntu on another partition. Printing works fine
> there, so that's a start.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Alan
>
> On Jan 7, 2008 2:48 AM, Mick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
>  On Sunday 06 January 2008, Dale wrote:
>
>
>  Alan E. Davis wrote:
>
>
>  Any ideas?
>
>
>  I ran into something similar to the a while back and I had to un-merge
> cups, delete the config files, then reemerge cups and reconfigure my
> printer. Keep in mind that when you unmerge something, the config
> files remain in /etc unchanged.
>
>  Assuming that you have set the correct device in the GUI for your printer,
> then the most likely error is that your have not provided the correct path
> for it. Show us what you have defined the path as in case we can help.
> --
> Regards,
> Mick
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  They recently changed it over to hplip.  Is that installed on your system?
>
>  Dale
>
>  :-)  :-)
>



-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man
-- 
gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list



Re: [gentoo-user] CUPS problem

2008-01-08 Thread Alan E. Davis
I think this is one of those multifactorial problems, and I'm unable
to pin down the exact cause.  I did several things that might have
conspired to make printing stop working.  I have a new motherboard,
M2N-E, from ASUS, with a dual core AMD64-X2 processor (dual core),
that has given me fits booting.  I moved to the new motherboard after
having compiled a first approximation to an SMP kernel with support
for features and hardware I know about, then at last I tried a world
update, after I'd been using gentoo for a few days.  I had been
printing all this time.

My initial investigations (ie, google) revealed  a large number of
problems with the motherboard involving APIC or ACPI.  Both, I think.
Other problems mentioned were SATA, and I saw more than one reference
to USB.  USB and SATA are now sharing an interrrupt with that gentoo
boot.

When attempting to print or set up printing with CUPS: the printer
shows up in CUPS as HPLIP.  I had another printer on USB, and while I
recall always CUPS showed me USB printers, both, as choices for found
printers, no solely USB entries were seen.  The other printer now has
burned up in what I hope was a disconnected incident, a Brother
HL1440, the fan burned out.  I can install the HP multifunction as the
HPLIP printer, and it shows as ready, but when I print, no printer
action happens, and the jobs are immediately marked as stopped.  I
suspect some USB foibles, but the flash drives work fine.  I
recompiled with usblp as a module and compiled in, and several times
recompiled, but got stuck in a place where I couldn't see a way out.

When attempting to boot to that kernel, or other gentoo kernels I have
compiled around (I do not use initrd/genkernel), almost every time
since the initial boot (that went ok), the machine locks up during
boot.  It might take three or four attempts, but the machine locks up
somewhere during the process.  After cupsd has been started, somewhere
around where syslog-ng is started, or hal, the machine locks.  The
next boot it stops ate approximately the same place, or perhaps
further along.  Finally, usually three or four boots later, it boots
and no further problems are experienced.

Partly because I needed to print, and partly to rule out hardware
issues, I booted ubuntu 7.10, and installed.  No problem has been
encountered over the past few days of using ubuntu.  I can print, and
no lockups are encountered (so far, KOW).

This is distressing.  I enjoy not having to fiddle around, not
spending so much time maintaining the system, and it's almost
lightning quick to install packages!.  Perhaps I'll use Ubuntu for a
while---but I'd sure like to solve this problem.  I just tried an
incantation (kernel parameter) that had been recommended somewhere.
(noapic nolapic acpi=off pci=noacpi), but still got the same behavior.
 Sometime soon I'll try to recompile the kernel or back down to
2.6.22.  (I'd only compiled 2.6.23 for this new motherboard).

I thank several list denizens for suggestions.  I apologize for taking
so much time in explaining this again, but I'd really appreciate any
suggestions, before I become more committed to using Ubuntu.

Alan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


On Jan 8, 2008 7:56 PM, Mick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Monday 07 January 2008, Dale wrote:
> > Randy Barlow wrote:
> > > Dale wrote:
> > >> On my system hpijs was a blocker if I recall correctly.  I read
> > >> somewhere that hpijs was no longer being maintained and that hplip was
> > >> the "new thing" to use.  Not sure why tho.
> > >>
> > >> Also may be worth noting that hplip used to be a service that was
> > >> started as well.  /etc/init.d/hplip start used to work.  The latest
> > >> update got rid of the service and I guess it just runs when it is
> > >> needed.
> > >
> > > I should clarify my question a bit more.  I don't have the hpijs package
> > > installed.  I do have hplip.  Yet when I try to select the driver for my
> > > printer, hpijs is the only option of the two.  I know that hplip
> > > includes hpijs, but I was looking for a driver called hplip and didn't
> > > see it...
> >
> > Did you run hp-setup?  You may want to re-emerge hplip and read the
> > messages there.  I may be forgetting something it said to do.
> >
> > Also, check your error logs.  Should be in /var/log.  Depends on what
> > logger you use as to the name of it.  Mine is messages tho.
> >
> > Post back what you find out from that.  May give us a clue.
> >
> > Dale
> >
> > :-)  :-)
>
> What happens if under Device, you select: HP Printer (HPLIP) ?
>
> Also, have a look at http://localhost:631/help/network.html for defining the
> path (for network printers).  However, I don't want to send you off scent here
> because I have not set up a USB printer before, so I am not sure what steps
> ought to be followed (if udev rules are desired and what not).  I would have
> thought that guidance in this
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/printing-howto.xml#usb ought to help.
> --
> Regards,
> Mick
>



-- 
Alan 

Re: [gentoo-user] CUPS problem

2008-01-09 Thread Alan E. Davis
No I haven't.  I'll try one soon.  This is a new 1GB DDR2 from
Kingston.  It would be interesting if it fails.  Note that w/ Ubuntu's
kernel, I have not encountered a balk at all in booting.

Alan

On Jan 9, 2008 3:51 PM, Randy Barlow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Alan E. Davis wrote:
> > When attempting to boot to that kernel, or other gentoo kernels I have
> > compiled around (I do not use initrd/genkernel), almost every time
> > since the initial boot (that went ok), the machine locks up during
> > boot.  It might take three or four attempts, but the machine locks up
> > somewhere during the process.  After cupsd has been started, somewhere
> > around where syslog-ng is started, or hal, the machine locks.  The
> > next boot it stops ate approximately the same place, or perhaps
> > further along.  Finally, usually three or four boots later, it boots
> > and no further problems are experienced.
>
> Have you run a memory test?
>
>
> --
> Randy Barlow
> http://electronsweatshop.com
> --
> gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
>
>



-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man
-- 
gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list



Re: [gentoo-user] CUPS problem

2008-01-09 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you for the suggestions.  I wonder out loud whether the Ubuntu
kernel is using something like a genkernel install, with everything as
modules.  If so, in that case, how would one get a snapshot of what is
being utilized?

Alan

On Jan 9, 2008 11:00 PM, Mick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tuesday 08 January 2008, Alan E. Davis wrote:
>
> > Partly because I needed to print, and partly to rule out hardware
> > issues, I booted ubuntu 7.10, and installed.  No problem has been
> > encountered over the past few days of using ubuntu.  I can print, and
> > no lockups are encountered (so far, KOW).
>
> Clearly your Gentoo installation has some configuration issues, inc. your
> compiled kernels.  The initialisation scripts and misconfiguration of
> services at boot/default runlevels could be another problem causing it to
> choke.
>
> > This is distressing.  I enjoy not having to fiddle around, not
> > spending so much time maintaining the system, and it's almost
> > lightning quick to install packages!.  Perhaps I'll use Ubuntu for a
> > while---but I'd sure like to solve this problem.  I just tried an
> > incantation (kernel parameter) that had been recommended somewhere.
> > (noapic nolapic acpi=off pci=noacpi), but still got the same behavior.
> >  Sometime soon I'll try to recompile the kernel or back down to
> > 2.6.22.  (I'd only compiled 2.6.23 for this new motherboard).
>
> I suggest that you zcat your Ubuntu's .config file into your
> Gentoo's /usr/src/linux and then run make oldconfig.  That should give you
> the same kernel configuration which you can thereafter peruse at leisure.  At
> the same time I would copy over the CUPS configuration file from Ubuntu to
> Gentoo (but don't try that until you have proven that your new Gentoo kernel
> is still having problems printing).  You can even diff the two files to see
> if there are any significant differences in settings.
>
> HTH.
> --
> Regards,
> Mick
>



-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man
-- 
gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list



Re: [gentoo-user] Daniel Robbins' come back ?

2008-01-13 Thread Alan E. Davis
Perhaps a user's perspective.  A clueless user.  Gentoo is the
ass-kickinest distro I have tried.  The docs are the best in the Linux
communities.  Where does that leave me and where does that leave
Gentoo now?  I am impelled to write after seeing numerous posts about
the apparent demise of GWN, and now the usual divisive arguments about
Daniel Robbins's  recent innuendoes to the community of Gentoo.

Once common thread in the former discussion is the "we don't need not
stinkin' install CD" argument.  I beg to differ, for whatever reason,
but I won't discuss the reason(s) at the current time, except to state
that the more recent (2007) installs went a LOT more smoothly than
earlier ones, and my three machines have become so much of a headache
to maintain that I am preparing to install again. Arguments against it
aside.  Unless I decide that Ubuntu is easier and better.  (It IS
easier.  Is it better?  No, but it's more painless for a clueless
user, in some manners).

That being said, one other thing begs to be discussed: Daniel Robbins
is still interested in participating (albeit his demands---the extend,
anyway, that I have read of them, tend to slightly put me off, but
that's beside the point.  I think it is necessary to take up this
issue (surprized as I am that this would even BE an issue) in full
light of the GWN and the install CD discussions.  I want there to be a
gentoo.  I want there to be a well documented and not horribly painful
way to install.  I like the concept.

Gentoo is still working well, but those soft spots that I mentioned
are serious and troubling ones.

When I first came into Gentoo, one thing I noticed was the kindness of
Gentoo experts in the mailing list discussions.  Debian experts often
left clueless users in the lurch, with their readiness to say "RTFM"
and lack of real support in many cases.  Gentoo people have been kind,
I have not been told to RTFM, although I was (thankfully) often told
where to find more information on a subject.

This off-putting "political" undercurrent of the Gentoo community has
me worried.  Is this the beginning of the RTFM choir?  I hope not.
Why would Daniel Robbins's opinions or suggestions not be of interest?
 Why do so many diss him so?  I am looking for positive suggestions.

Sorry for the waste of time,

Alan Davis
Teacher and GNU/Linux enabled independent scholar and scientist.

On Jan 13, 2008 7:37 PM, Alan McKinnon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Saturday 12 January 2008, fire-eyes wrote:
> > Alan McKinnon wrote:
>
> > > Ciaran Mcreesh - I am very specifically looking at you here.
> >
> > Very strongly agree with Mr McCreesh (spelling?). While I respect his
> > technical abilities and contributions, I believe his horrible
> > attitude, clear trolling and ability to pit devs against each other,
> > seemingly for fun, is far more harmful. That he wasn't gotten rid of
> > early on is actually the biggest sign of problems in my eyes. That he
> > has fans and followers is another.
>
> Ciaran seems to suffer from a horrible affliction that is common amongst
> highly technical people:
>
> A poorly developed sense of how to deal with other people coupled with
> never having realised that people are not machines, do not react like
> machines and need to be handled differently. You maintain machines by
> focusing on what is wrong with them and changing that. You handle
> people by focusing on what they do right and reinforcing that.
>
> I used to do what Ciaran does, and I used to do it a *lot*. Lucky for
> me, one day someone came along with a very big stick and hammered it
> through my thick skull that there is a better way.
>
> --
> Alan McKinnon
> alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
> --
>
> gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
>
>



-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man
-- 
gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list



[gentoo-user] Seek advice: converting Sabayon to Gentoo ?

2009-06-26 Thread Alan E. Davis
Hope not to bother, but ask advice about converting a nominally successful
Sabayon install to Gentoo.

I've been away from Gentoo for a while, found Ubuntu a joy if for no other
reason than to have time to do what I want to use my system for.  I had
found Gentoo required an inordinant amount of time to maintain, and in
several installs, I have always been drawn away by the siren call of newer
and better unstable packages: eventually the systems became inconsistent
enough that I had to bail out.  I tried all kinds of make world, etc.,
tricks and tips.  Have NEVER had an emerge update to world go completely
well.  Maybe one of the problems is the number of packages I install.  I
just cannot spend three hours a day maintaining a system!

Two serious problems for me were Emacs as done for Ubuntu, and the lack of
TeXlive 2008.

But Ubuntu has some serious shortcomings, and some not so serious ones.  I
ended up installing Sabayon 4.1, and it's ok.  Had some trouble with "equo":
still don't really understand what it does, but I eventually have been using
emerge and just installing software of my choosing.  The experience has been
somewhat elevating, in that none of the problems I've encountered over the
past week have been insurmountable.

Meanwhile I am brushing up on Gentoo installation methods, with an eye to
being ready if the time comes ...

So what I am asking this list is about the differences and similarities
between Sabayon and Gentoo.  Years ago, I did the same thing, but in a short
time, my system was hosed when I started using emerge.  This time, seemingly
I have better luck, but I have not installed packages.

May I request pointers to useful information on this topic?  (The conversion
of a modern Sabayon install to Gentoo)?

Gentoo makes the most sense to me.  But Sabayon already has the hardware
under control.

Thank you,

Alan


Alan Davis

"...can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe, but you'd
definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces."

   -- Woody Allen, quoted by B. A. Palevitz


Re: [gentoo-user] Seek advice: converting Sabayon to Gentoo ?

2009-06-26 Thread Alan E. Davis
Sensible?  What's that?

I think if my use has been beyond sensible, it's mainly in one or two areas:
I keep alot of software installed; and I keep up to date on a number of
programs (this is an area where I may need to redefine "sensible" from my
own perspective).

I keep this box set up for a wide variety of task, in the spirit of the
concept of a General Purpose Computer.  For example:

  - Writing
  - Editing videos
  - Once in a long while, writing a little program
  - math calculations sometimes large
  - spreadsheet (Open Office)
  - graphing
  - editing graphics
  - note taking
  - teaching responsibilities
  - printing
  - graphics editing/conversions
  - Repositories of digital content (personal): video, music, graphics
  - Sometimes media player (sometimes I have used mythtv)
  - LaTeXing (user level)
  - Internet browsing and research
  - archiving literature
  - scanning

Alot of the software I have round is kept as an exercize in capacity
builiding and maintainace in these and other areas.  I am a science
teacher---it sometimes seems like one of the few who is not using
Windoze---and I have a hand on some research and keep on top of the current
state in my field.  I have been called an eclectic.

Often have gnome (sometimes an overlay) and kde 4.X, as well as fluxbox and
perhaps a couple of other window managers.  I like to keep enlightenment17
around, as it has a small footprint.

I try to keep up to date, but I am not a computer scientist, so I often will
tolerate some sloppiness in the system, and may overlook maintainance.


Alan Davis

"...can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe, but you'd
definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces."

   -- Woody Allen, quoted by B. A. Palevitz


On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 12:26 AM, Philip Webb  wrote:

> 090626 Alan E. Davis sought:
> > advice about converting a nominally successful Sabayon install to Gentoo.
>
> -- details snipped --
>
> so what's your hardware & what do you use your machine for ?
> Gentoo is not for everyone, but it's not difficult to install or maintain:
> your experiences don't sound typical of a sensible user (smile).
>
> --
> ,,
> SUPPORT ___//___,   Philip Webb
> ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|   Cities Centre, University of Toronto
> TRANSIT`-O--O---'   purslowatchassdotutorontodotca
>
>
>


Re: [gentoo-user] Seek advice: converting Sabayon to Gentoo ?

2009-06-26 Thread Alan E. Davis
I didn't say anything about my hardware.  The main hiccough, installing
gentoo, has been the ath5k module, which was at one time, I think, ath_pci.
Newer kernels may support this out of the box, in a gentoo install.  Beside
that, dual monitors are working with the nvidia drivers.

Another problem, a MAJOR problem, has been a recent marriage of pata and
sata drives, all as scsi, /dev/sdX.  With Gentoo, say a year or so ago, I
had no problem with mixing four drives, two sata and two pata.  Ubuntu
wasn't able to differentiate, and even on a recent install I was forced to
edit grub.conf (or grub.lst) before the system could boot off the right
drive.  Former /dev/hda became /dev/sda1, and former /dev/sda1 was
recognized as /dev/sda2 or /dev/sda3.  UUID numbers were confusing and I
then blamed Ubuntu for moving ahead too quickly.  I lost a bunch of archived
material due to that issue.  More recently, I see that Sabayon is also using
UUID numbers in fstab.  Still, I am now reluctant every time I try to
upgrade or install.  My recent attempt to update Ubuntu resulted in,
eventually the loss of my 90GB /home directory.  I will never know what I
lost.  (Yes, I know, should have backed it all up.)  It was my fault again,
but the failure of grub again to recognize the drive on which I had
installed, or the need to shuffle boot priorities.  I am still learning how
all this works.  Sabayon also had the same issue, so I moved partitions and
now have the system booting off of /dev/sda .

All this means I am pleased that sabayon is working, and I am able to treat
it as a gentoo system, without TOO much tweaking.  I think I cannot go back
to Ubuntu, as easy as that was.

That's about the hardware issues.



Alan


Re: [gentoo-user] Seek advice: converting Sabayon to Gentoo ?

2009-06-26 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you for the useful advice.  One more question will help:  does the new
kernel support ath5k out of the box on an install?

Perhaps I can just edit the existing /etc/fstab, using device names.  The
device numbering is inconsistent between GNU/Linux distros under the (what I
presume to be) new scheme, with all devices names as /dev/sdX .

I'll prepare for a new gentoo install, and hope that the current sabayon
continues to act sanely as gentoo, as I update the system, package by
package.  So far a fair amount of hand work is involved, in updating gnome,
for example.


Alan


[gentoo-user] new system, printing suddenly fails for all printers

2009-07-02 Thread Alan E. Davis
I've been wrangling with a new gentoo install, on an AMD X2 64 bit machine.
It's been a problematic experience, but when the system works right, it
works really right.

Printing has suddenly failed.  I had installed foo2zjs in support of an HP
P1005 printer, but it was masked by ~amd64.  Then foomatic-db collided, so I
upped that to ~amd64.  Meanwhile, and I'm not sure this was the problem, the
printer that had been working, and the deskjet that had also been working
both started to fail.  I've been wrestling with many issues, including
alsa.  There isn't any sound, and I"ve finally compiled a genkernel but the
sound isn't working, neither is printing.

I've seen a plethora of messages about failure to print, often cups.  I have
reinstalled cups, new useflags, restarted, done several things, no change.
The printers are ok.  Ubuntu's install disk has sound.  I thought maybe
alsasound was causing a problem, because when I stop the machine, it stalls
on stopping alsa.

I need to print.  Maybe tonight I'll get on irc.  Meanwhile, can someone
suggest anything?

Print jobs show up both in the localhost:631 and the gnome cups interfaces.
They show up, and show as having printed.  No such luck.

I'll try to # emerge -ua --newuse world after adding ~amd64 to make.conf.

maybe I don't belong with gentoo.  I have to USE the computer.  I can't find
a distro I want, though, that I feel confident I can install quickly and be
up to speed.  I've cherried out this system with most of the tools I need.
Maybe gotten too crazy with USE flags:


ngs were set by the catalyst build script that automatically
# built this stage.
# Please consult /etc/make.conf.example for a more detailed example.
CFLAGS="-march=k8 -O2 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -pipe"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"
# WARNING: Changing your CHOST is not something that should be done lightly.
# Please consult http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/change-chost.xml before
changing.
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
# These are the USE flags that were used in addition to what is provided by
the
# profile used for building.
USE="mmx sse sse2 kpathsea gnome svg X avahi gtk hal dbus \
 startup-notification xinerama cups xscreensaver nvidia usb truetype
jpeg png \
 raw tiff faac faad mp3 theora v4l2 vorbis x264 xvid encode \
 pdf exif xml consolekit embedded kde qt3support"

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64"


VIDEO_CARDS="nvidia"
INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse"
FOO2ZJS_DEVICES="hpp1005"
LINGUAS="en"
# Does it work to have layman sourced after?AED
PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage
source /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf

GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://ftp.ucsb.edu/pub/mirrors/linux/gentoo/";


SYNC="rsync://rsync.namerica.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"

Some use flages in package.use


net-print/foo2zjs foomaticdb
net-print/hplip cupsddk
app-editors/emacs-cvs gif jpeg png tiff xft
net-print/cups ppds dbus X
net-dns/avahi mdnsresponder-compat
app-text/texlive doc dvipdfm graphics png
x11-base/xorg-x11 bitmap-fonts truetype-fonts type1-fonts
app-editors/emacs-cvs xft
gnome-base/gnome-volume-manager automount
media-video/transcode dvd
net-p2p/deluge libnotify
net-dns/avahi qt3 dbus
media-gfx/gimp pdf

I am using a few overlays: science, dev-zero, emacs.


Thank you for any ideas on now to troubleshoot this.  Also with Alsa.

Alan Davis

"...can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe, but you'd
definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces."

   -- Woody Allen, quoted by B. A. Palevitz


Re: [gentoo-user] Re: new system, printing suddenly fails for all printers

2009-07-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you Walt:


On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 12:02 AM, walt  wrote:

>
> I've had both problems several times in the past, always caused by dumb
> things that, of course, should never happen but often do anyway.
>
Me too.  Maybe so this time as well, at least I hope so.


>
> First the sound.  I still don't know why but often when rebooting with
> a different kernel (I do it often) the sound mixer will wind up with
> certain channels either muted or turned down all the way.  Because these
> channels are not visible on my gnome volume control I have to use the
> alsamixer to find the problem and restore the proper settings until
> the next reboot.  Dumb, but that's the way it is.


There is no PCM channel in alsamixer!  Maybe I will try alsamixergui, where
I saw switches once.

>
>
> You should definitely *not* unload your kernel sound modules when shutting
> down -- it's silly and causes problems.  Turn this 'feature' off in your
> /etc/conf.d/alsasound by setting UNLOAD_ON_STOP="no" and KILLPROC_ON_STOP=
> "no".


Duly noted and exorcized.

>
>
> Printing.  Usually my printing problems come from having the wrong printing
> "device" set in the cups Modify Printer section (localhost:631 as you
> said).
>
> Usually the problem is that I didn't have the printer connected and turned
> on when setting the 'printer device' and therefore the proper choice didn't
> appear in the menu.  Really dumb.
>

Two printers are connected, and turned on.  One printer, the deskjet,
started one job, a testpage, got to 17% and stayed there a good long while.


>
> Anyway, start by going back through that printer setup menu system and try
> every choice until you find one that works -- and make sure the printer is
> turned on :o)
>

Thank you again.  I earnestly hope they both iron out quickly.  I'm starting
to grow fond of this install.

Alan Davis

"...can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe, but you'd
definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces."

   -- Woody Allen, quoted by B. A. Palevitz


Re: [gentoo-user] Re: new system, printing suddenly fails for all printers

2009-07-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
Well, like Walt said, printing configuration has often been a problem.  When
I checked, after rebooting after an upgrade to ~amd64, the printers were
both setup as network printers. They are not.  As soon as I changed the
widget to indicate the printer was local, it started priinting!  Dumb things
indeed...

Sound is a more arcane area, not there yet.


>
>
>
>
> Alan Davis
>
> "...can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe, but you'd
> definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces."
>
>-- Woody Allen, quoted by B. A. Palevitz
>
>


Re: [gentoo-user] Re: new system, printing suddenly fails for all printers

2009-07-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 6:20 AM,  wrote:

> Why all the handwringing? Just use hplip when using a HP printer and all
> the hair-pulling will disappear in seconds.
>
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>

eamjr56:

I also am amazed at the support from HP.  Recalling the days some 12 years
ago, and so many hoops to jump through and then only to get an HP printer to
work partially.

What was curious about this, I had used HPLIP.  Somehow, all of a sudden,
all printers were seen as network printers.  Either I did a dumb thing of
collossal proportions, or some update wrote over the top of my config
files.  What I now suspect is that I had consented to let dispatch-conf
replace my original config file, not understanding the consequences.

Live and learn,

Alan


[gentoo-user] qt blocks, poppler, etc.

2009-07-04 Thread Alan E. Davis
I am trying to install cb2bib from an overlay.  The ebuild is on
gentoo bugs.  On this machine, over time, I have gotten qt to settle
down, but now it's a mess.   I have tried to install some dependencies
with emerge -1 , but since I have too little understanding of that
issue, didn't do that for all.  Now qt-core has downgraded.

After installing (emerge -1) apps-text/poppler, then dev-libs/poppler
0.10.7 installed ok.  So I'm starting to understand how that works.
Can I also install x11-libs/qt-core-4.5.1 by oneshot, and then install
x11-libs/4.5.2?

This cyclical bunch of blocks has hit me many, many times, and I was
glad to discover that at least part of the problem was surmountable.

Alan Davis

 "...can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe, but
you'd definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces."

-- Woody Allen, quoted by B. A. Palevitz



Re: [gentoo-user] new system, printing suddenly fails for all printers

2009-07-04 Thread Alan E. Davis
On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 4:21 AM, Mark Shields wrote:

> I would really recommend getting rid of the genkernel and compiling a kernel
> from sources.
>
I will try again to do so.


Alan



[gentoo-user] gdm: No keyboard, no mouse

2009-07-05 Thread Alan E. Davis
I have done alot of upgrades lately, including an emerge -uDvaN world
.  When I got home after leaving this to run, the machine started up,
but in gdm no keyboard or mouse input is happening.  So I did the
following:

  1.  put evdev into the INPUT_DEVICES section of /etc/make.conf
  2.  installed xf8-input-evdev
  3.  re-emerged xorg-server
  4.  compiled a 2.6.30 kernel and re-emerged nvidia-drivers
  5.  rebooted.

The same is happening.  No mouse, no keyboard, with gdm. I cannot boot
into Xorg with startx from single user mode.

Can anyone suggest how to go about troubleshooting this?

Alan



[gentoo-user] Re: SOLVED!] gdm: No keyboard, no mouse

2009-07-05 Thread Alan E. Davis
As it turned out, I needed to emerge xf86-input-keyboard---at which
point keyboard function was recovered, but mouse function was dead.
Then I emerged xf86-input-mouse.

The second thing I had to do was comment two lines in my xorg.conf:
dri and xtrap.

That was pretty easy.

Alan Davis

 "...can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe, but
you'd definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces."

-- Woody Allen, quoted by B. A. Palevitz



[gentoo-user] ncurses is gone

2009-07-06 Thread Alan E. Davis
Ncurses has disappeared, and the system is dead.  I think it is
unrecoverable.  I had hoped to use a binary package, but for now,
since I shut the machine down, it will not boot.

Is this hopeless?  It happened during an emerge -uDvNa world

Alan



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ncurses is gone

2009-07-06 Thread Alan E. Davis
thank you.  And your comment was duly noted about trying random things.

When I boot the system, the following message follows (after one other
line) after INIT: version 2.86 booting

/sbin/rc: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5:
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

Alan

 "...can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe, but
you'd definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces."

-- Woody Allen, quoted by B. A. Palevitz



On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 8:43 AM, walt wrote:
> On 07/06/2009 01:21 PM, Alan E. Davis wrote:
>>
>> Ncurses has disappeared, and the system is dead.  I think it is
>> unrecoverable.  I had hoped to use a binary package, but for now,
>> since I shut the machine down, it will not boot.
>>
>> Is this hopeless?  It happened during an emerge -uDvNa world
>
> It's never hopeless unless the hard disk is damaged, e.g. from a
> head crash or similar catastrophe.  The important thing is to avoid
> trying random things without knowing what you're doing. You can
> turn a simple recovery into a hopeless mess that way.
>
> I find that I can usually get myself out of a 'hopeless' mess just
> by downloading a live gentoo boot CD and using that to install a
> recent gentoo snapshot.  You need a second (working) computer to
> do that, of course.  (Everyone should have as many computers as
> possible for exactly that reason :o)
>
> Meanwhile, more info would help, as the others have already said.
>
>
>



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ncurses is gone

2009-07-07 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you for your response, Sebastian:

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Sebastian
Beßler wrote:

> Use a live-linux from usb-stick or CD, mount your root, chroot into it
> and give revdep-rebuild a try. That should help.

I think you are telling me to use Gentoo Live CD specifically, and
mount my installed "/" (on /mnt/gentoo?), chroot into it (as described
in the install docs) and run revdeb-rebuild.

Is revdep-rebuild part of the live cd?

I'll try it.  Thank you VERY much.  I have installed Ubuntu, but these
steps will save my having to deal with that.

Alan



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ncurses is gone

2009-07-07 Thread Alan E. Davis
On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 8:15 PM, Neil Bothwick wrote:
>
> It doesn't matter. Once you have chrooted you are using software
> installed in the chroot.
>
> However, it may not be possible to use revdep-rebuild without ncurses, in
> which case you need some kind soul with a similar setup to provide you
> with a binary package of ncurses, which you can unpack into your root
> directory.
>

This is exactly what happened.  I used the systemrescuecd, chrooted,
and, lo and behold, the same error message was coming up.  What I
might be able to do is symlink to libncursesw ?  Don't know whether
it's even on the system.

On the other hand, with a binary ncurses, I could see that might work.
 Is there a binary repo?  (Back to sabayon?).  I suppose I need to
know the exact version.  Does it matter which use flags it was
compiled with?

Thank you!

Alan



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ncurses is gone

2009-07-07 Thread Alan E. Davis
As I type, the system is booting, after untarring a Sabayon package of
ncurses into the / partition, mounted in a parallel ubuntu setup.

The system has booted, and I am typing this message from it.

Thank you everyone.

Alan



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ncurses is gone

2009-07-07 Thread Alan E. Davis
Yes.  It's working.  It emerged without complaint.

Thank you for the useful advice.  I am very pleased that this system
is working now.


Alan Davis

 "...can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe, but
you'd definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces."

-- Woody Allen, quoted by B. A. Palevitz



On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 10:07 PM, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jul 2009 21:10:23 +1000, Alan E. Davis wrote:
>
>> As I type, the system is booting, after untarring a Sabayon package of
>> ncurses into the / partition, mounted in a parallel ubuntu setup.
>
> Now you need to emerge the proper Gentoo package to get your database
> consistent with what is installed.
>
>
> --
> Neil Bothwick
>
> MS-DOS: if you believe in a flat Earth, this is the OS for you.
>



[gentoo-user] random reboots

2009-07-10 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you to members of this list who have gotten me through a couple
of serious issues.  I have another one.

My system reboots at seemingly random times.  Usually, this happens
during keyboard or mouse input.  I have been using kernel 2.6.30-r2.
Often this happens when using firefox, but not exclusively.

When I checked my machine, it had an uptime of nearly 4 hours after
the last reboot, when I had not logged in.  However, after logging in,
I experienced two reboots in rapid succession.

Interestingly, after I recompiled the kernel, enabling more modules of
I2C stuff, to enable hardware monitoring for my Motherboard, the
system has seemed to become less stable, and reboots readily.

I usually use nvidia non-freedom drivers.  I am now typing with the
x11 drivers, and the system has not rebooted.  I am now also using
2.6.29-r5.

Once such things happened to me because I had a file with a filename
starting with "_" in my filesystem.  Everytime I started nautilus,
firefox, or epiphany, the system would crash.  This was some long time
ago.

I have three SATA drives installed, with a plethora of partitions.

I am not sure where to look in logs to look for evidence of problems.
May I set up the system to trap for such useful information?

Alan Davis

 "...can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe, but
you'd definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces."

-- Woody Allen, quoted by B. A. Palevitz



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Inconsistent mountpoint for /

2009-07-10 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you, Walt.

I live on a tropical island.  I've been going through about all the
suggestions people have made and all the ideas I can think of.
Changed NICs.  Recompiled kernel with better configuration.

Uptime 1:39

An improvement from earlier today.

I've edited /etc/fstab.  But I'll leave grub alone until I'm sure what to do.

Thank you again.

Alan





On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 10:52 AM, walt wrote:
> On 07/10/2009 05:16 PM, lngn...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>> I recently reported that I am suffering random reboots.  I have now
>> discovered an inconsistency in the reporting of the mount point of the
>> root directory of my Gentoo install...
>
> No, the two are not related.  In my experience, anything that goes wrong
> at random times is related to hardware flakiness -- usually because some
> piece of the hardware is running too hot.
>
> I happen to live in a very hot, dry, dusty place.  I see random flakiness
> just about every summer, which I fix by blowing the thick layer of dust
> off of the CPU heatsink and RAM chips and the power supply with a can of
> compressed gas.  Of course, I also check that all of the fans in the case
> are still working.
>
> Do you know about memtest86?  If you have random nastiness you should run
> memtest86 at least overnight to see if your RAM is becoming senile ;o)
>
> I have suggestions about grub also, but, to be coherent about them I need
> to be much more awake than I am now.  I'll check back tomorrow.
>
>
>



Re: [gentoo-user] Inconsistent mountpoint for /

2009-07-11 Thread Alan E. Davis
On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 11:26 PM, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:16:26 +1000, lngn...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> In grub, it is located first  as hd1 (/dev/sdb) and then as
>> /dev/sda5.  That is where I want it to be.
>
> Those are two different things. the first is GRUB's root directory, the
> place where is will find its configuration and stage files (i.e. the
> location of /boot). The root argument on the kernel line is tell the
> kernel the location of your root filesystem - /.
>

I need to have the second drive (SATA #2) as the first boot drive
because that's the drive with the grub setup in the MBR, for Gentoo.

/boot is found on SATA #1, actually /dev/sda1 after all is said and
done.  But until the system boots, it is called (hd1) (same as
/dev/sda2).

As the kernel boots from /boot, it finds / and mounts it.  It is
actually on /dev/sda1, and it is now identified as /dev/sda1.  So this
is what must be in the kernel line.

I had /dev/sdb5 as / in /dev/fstab, but that was wrong, because by
that time, it is /dev/sda5.

I also had /dev/sdb5 as another partition, mounted as an archive, in
my /dev/fstab.  I thought this was causing a problem.  Not sure even
now.

So I changed the fstab to reflect /dev/sdb5 as / .

This problem has been a central issue over two to three weeks.  Now
the system is working.  I'd like to rectify the boot priority so this
drive is booted first, but that requires grub to install the MBR on
that drive.  Not sure why I had so much trouble with that.  It's a
500GB drive.  Is that an issue?

It's all too complicated.  Once it is clear enough in my own head, I
will try to install grub on that drive and set it as the first
priority at boot, in the BIOS.

In 15 years of installing all manner of GNU/Linux, it has only been
the past year or two I've encounted any of this.  It started with
having PATA drives suddently named /dev/sda1, while the former
/dev/sda1 became /dev/sda2.  It was first on Ubuntu.  Now I'm not sure
anymore.

Thanks.  I think that aspect of the problem has been sorted out, or at
least recognized.  It's dizzying.

Alan



Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Inconsistent mountpoint for /

2009-07-11 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thanks to everyone.  I feel like this was so easy, how could I have
been confused?  But I was.  Somehow, I was lost for weeks between the
ways that Ubuntu and Gentoo handle grub---and I was trying to install
unstable ubuntu with grub 2, so that may explain some of it, but not
all, surely.

I used the usbkey.  Installed grub on the drive I WANT to be /dev/sda,
and, what do you know?  It worked.

Thanks.

Alan



Re: [gentoo-user] File synchronisation utility (searching for/about to program it)

2009-07-24 Thread Alan E. Davis
Hello, Simon:

I'm the last you would want to give advice about this question, but even
though I am not a programmer, I have been using git to sync on three
different systems.  I am using a flash drive as a cache, so to speak.  I
followed some tips from the Emacs org-mode mailing list to get this going.
It wasn't simple for me to recover when some files got out of sync on one of
the machines, but it was simple enough that even I could figure it out.  I
used a bare repo on the flash drive and push from each machine to this, a
very simple procedure that can be automated through cron, and pull to each
machine also from the bare repository.  I am not syncing a programming
project, but my various work.

Again, I am the least clueful you will find on this list, but if you wish
for me to tell you the steps I followed, that is possible.  One of the
mailing list threads that got me up to speed relatively quickly was at this
link.  (Hope it's ok to link another mailing list from this one.)

http://www.mail-archive.com/emacs-orgm...@gnu.org/msg11647.html

I apologize if the existence of a bare repo as an intermediary is a problem.
This can be done on a server as well.

Alan Davis

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what counts.

   Richard Feynman


>
>


[gentoo-user] copying the / partition

2009-08-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
I wish to move the / partition, and separate /usr into a separate
partition.  One reason is to take advantage of a faster 10,000 RPM drive for
system files.

I am stuck on one issue (at least): do I need to copy /sys to the new /
partition?

Thank you for recent help with other issues.

Alan

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what counts.

   Richard Feynman


Re: [gentoo-user] copying the / partition

2009-08-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
Very interesting.  Thank you.

It worked swell.

Alan

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what counts.

   Richard Feynman


[gentoo-user] Knock on wood

2009-08-11 Thread Alan E. Davis
I'm a little reluctant to say this, but it's been a couple of months now
since I switched back to Gentoo, and I want to shout out my pleasure that
this system has been performing admirably well this time around, in
comparison with earlier installations.  None of the earlier installations
were unacceptable, in fact, Gentoo remained my favorite.  I moved to Ubuntu
because maintainance of the Gentoo boxes was much more time consuming.

I've watched Gentoo plummet in the popularity ratings, for example at
distrowatch.  I've watched as the best documentation EVER on gentoo wiki has
fallen off the edge of the world---indeed, I am grief-stricken and perplexed
about that.  I had to debate with myself about whether to go back to
Gentoo.  Ubuntu had played to many tricks on me, at great personal cost.  I
finally made the leap, and it was a soft landing indeed.

I scoffed at the email from this list saying that   emerge -uDva world and
revdep-rebuild problems were not normal!  I had posted that I had NEVER (in
a couple of years or more of Gentoo use) gotten all the way through a
maintainance cycle of emerge -uDva --newuse world, revdep-rebuild, and
emerge --depclean.  I never had (or perhaps very, very seldom), and I spent
a lot of time working on it.  Still the system more or less worked.

Now, however, I have not had any such problem, or maybe I should say, the
one or two times I have it was easy to fiigure things out.  This is a major
turnaround.

Is it because I'm more experienced, or perhaps more cautious?  I am running
~amd64, and have several overlays installed under layman.  I don't know, but
I tend to think the distribution is more mature.

Perhaps this isn't the best place to put a word of thanks.  It's the best I
will do for now.  Thank you to all the developers and all the list people
who have consistently given the highest and most professional level of
assistance to a rather clueless user.  And never a cranky wine, like on
other lists, never any complaint.  This is typical, and always has been with
Gentoo's community.

I hope that at some point I can help with at least the documentation,
although I surely don't wish to pollute the space of the best docs (IMHO) in
the linux community.

Go figure: the popularity figures plunge, but the distro just gets better
and better.  Viva Gentoo...

Now I can go and get lost in the upgrade of gcc.

Alan Davis


Alan Davis

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what counts.

   Richard Feynman


[gentoo-user] Firefox and Ephiphany hang at a certain directory

2009-09-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
It has just happened in the last day that whenever I try to navigate to a
certain subdirectory of my home directory, in order to attach a file to an
email in gmail, firefox hangs.  I have tried a few experiments, with no
success.  This is also no ordinary directory---it has been under git control
for several months.

With any file manager this directory is accessible.  With Konqueror, it is
likewise accessible.  Only with Firefox and Epiphany, as far as I can tell,
is this happening.

I have copied the contents of the directory, without the .git control
baggage, and the same happens.

This happened concurrently with an upgrade to a new firefox and xulrunner:
mozilla-firefox-3.5.2-r2.  I down graded by masking this version (and
xulrunner were also downgraded when I did this), and the same problem
persisted.  I had run revdep-rebuild after upgrading to the newer firefox,
by the way.

This reminds me of a situation some months ago, when a specific home
directory was impossible to browse in either nautilus, or firefox.  This was
due to a peculiar file, I cannot remember the name, but bizaare.  When I
finally found this file deep in the subdirectories, the problem went away.

Thinking the same thing was going no here, I have looked at the directory,
but superficially I have seen nothing.  Except a file ".directory" left
there by dolphin.  I have recently installed kde 4.3.0, and started liking
it a bit, and playing around with it.

I don't know what else to look for, or what method to use, to look for
bizaare bits in a tree.

I suppose I will copy all the files over, one at a time.  Suggestions would
be appreciated.


Alan Davis

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what counts.

   Richard Feynman


Re: [gentoo-user] Firefox and Ephiphany hang at a certain directory

2009-09-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
This is my personal working directory, under git control to carry it around
between computers on a flash drive.  Now stripped of git.  I am reluctant to
send it along, but I could send a tarball to someone who is willing to check
on it.  It's 300M.

I moved ./mozilla out of the way.  The problem persists.

I found one ampersand in a file name, and changed it.  No happiness.

Don't know how to find a filename with a space at the end.  Is there a tool
to find hosed filenames?

Thank
Alan Davis

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what counts.

   Richard Feynman



On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 1:13 AM, Stroller wrote:

>
> On 3 Sep 2009, at 10:48, Alan E. Davis wrote:
>
>> It has just happened in the last day that whenever I try to navigate to a
>> certain subdirectory of my home directory, in order to attach a file to an
>> email in gmail, firefox hangs.  I have tried a few experiments, with no
>> success.  This is also no ordinary directory---it has been under git control
>> for several months.
>>  ...
>> I have copied the contents of the directory, without the .git control
>> baggage, and the same happens.
>> ...
>> Thinking the same thing was going no here, I have looked at the directory,
>> but superficially I have seen nothing.  Except a file ".directory" left
>> there by dolphin.  I have recently installed kde 4.3.0, and started liking
>> it a bit, and playing around with it.
>>
>> I don't know what else to look for, or what method to use, to look for
>> bizaare bits in a tree.
>>
>> I suppose I will copy all the files over, one at a time.  Suggestions
>> would be appreciated.
>>
>
> Are there any files in that directory with unusual names?
>
> Names with ümlauts or åccents in them? Names with &mpersands or sl\ash/es
> in them? Spaces on the end?
>
> You say the directory is under SVN - if it's a public project & you have no
> reason to be coy about accessing it, perhaps you can post a link to it, so
> that other  people here can try & reproduce.
>
> Stroller.
>
>


[gentoo-user] Xorg problems: Intel 945GM (Gigabyte Motherboard onboard video)

2009-09-05 Thread Alan E. Davis
I got caught, apparently like many others, installing Gentoo to another PC.
I've been running Ubuntu (probably Intrepid Ibex, two versions ago), so I
know this video adapter is supported.  But various issues have ambushed me
in trying to get this working.

1.  On first install, the keyboard didn't work.  I followed the instructions
to the letter, the mouse even worked, but the keyboard didn't.  I killed off
the windows one by one with the mouse, and the machine was then stalled in
that state.

2. I remembered a keyboard issue from my home machine, involving a new
version of xorg, so I (unwisely perhaps) added the ~amd64 keyword to
make.conf.  Thereupon followed a series of issues, involving one hypothesis
after another.  I never saw a screen with the "X" cursor again.

3. There is an issue surrounding HAL.  I added a hal keyword, recompiled,
tweaked the kernel: no good.  I got a black screen.  Keyboard wasn't
working, so I followed a few more hunches.  I was unable to read the docs in
a nice screen, as I was using links.

4. Eventually I decided to put the hal keyword back in, and recompiled.  In
the interim I had removed the ~amd keyword from make.conf, and I ran emerge
-uDav --newuse world.  Thinking better of it, a few merges into that, I
replaced the ~amd64 keyword, and started the same process.  I found along
the way that I needed to serially recompile the kernel, re-merge
xf86-input-*, etc., again.  I then decided to enable evdev, even though I
was intimidated by that from my earlier issue with an nvidia card.

5.  I finally read some forum topics and mailing list threads.  Apparently
this is not uncommon at ALL.  A gentoo wiki article about the Intel cards
was referred to, but is unavailable.  Interestingly, even the google cache
is clear of these missing gentoo wiki articles!

I've finally left the machine overnight to run it's course of
re-installation etc.  If that doesn't work, I have already copied over the
grub.conf entry for the ubuntu install on the same disk, so that's an
option.

I guess my question is what is the correct way to go about installing gentoo
on a machine with these on board Intel adapters?

[I can reinstall the whole system once I figure out what's going on.  I must
have this machine working within 24 hours, though, hence Ubuntu looms on the
horizon.]


Alan Davis

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what counts.

   Richard Feynman


[gentoo-user] cb2bib doesn't install from the ebuild

2009-09-05 Thread Alan E. Davis
Has anyone successfully installed cb2bib from the ebuild?  Every time I have
tried, there are a number of tenuous blocks, so I've installed from source.



Alan

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what counts.

   Richard Feynman


Re: [gentoo-user] Xorg problems: Intel 945GM (Gigabyte Motherboard onboard video)

2009-09-05 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you, Volker.

I'm uncertain what did it: I have fluxbox working now.  Many
intervening steps, lots of error messages.  Somehow, it just works.

Thanks again.

Alan

On 2009-09-06, Volker Armin Hemmann  wrote:
> On Sonntag 06 September 2009, Alan E. Davis wrote:
>> I got caught, apparently like many others, installing Gentoo to another
>> PC.
>> I've been running Ubuntu (probably Intrepid Ibex, two versions ago), so I
>> know this video adapter is supported.  But various issues have ambushed me
>> in trying to get this working.
>>
>> 1.  On first install, the keyboard didn't work.  I followed the
>>  instructions to the letter, the mouse even worked, but the keyboard
>>  didn't.  I killed off the windows one by one with the mouse, and the
>>  machine was then stalled in that state.
>>
>> 2. I remembered a keyboard issue from my home machine, involving a new
>> version of xorg, so I (unwisely perhaps) added the ~amd64 keyword to
>> make.conf.  Thereupon followed a series of issues, involving one
>> hypothesis
>> after another.  I never saw a screen with the "X" cursor again.
>>
>> 3. There is an issue surrounding HAL.  I added a hal keyword, recompiled,
>> tweaked the kernel: no good.  I got a black screen.  Keyboard wasn't
>> working, so I followed a few more hunches.  I was unable to read the docs
>>  in a nice screen, as I was using links.
>>
>> 4. Eventually I decided to put the hal keyword back in, and recompiled.
>> In
>> the interim I had removed the ~amd keyword from make.conf, and I ran
>> emerge
>> -uDav --newuse world.  Thinking better of it, a few merges into that, I
>> replaced the ~amd64 keyword, and started the same process.  I found along
>> the way that I needed to serially recompile the kernel, re-merge
>> xf86-input-*, etc., again.  I then decided to enable evdev, even though I
>> was intimidated by that from my earlier issue with an nvidia card.
>>
>> 5.  I finally read some forum topics and mailing list threads.  Apparently
>> this is not uncommon at ALL.  A gentoo wiki article about the Intel cards
>> was referred to, but is unavailable.  Interestingly, even the google cache
>> is clear of these missing gentoo wiki articles!
>>
>> I've finally left the machine overnight to run it's course of
>> re-installation etc.  If that doesn't work, I have already copied over the
>> grub.conf entry for the ubuntu install on the same disk, so that's an
>> option.
>>
>> I guess my question is what is the correct way to go about installing
>>  gentoo on a machine with these on board Intel adapters?
>>
>> [I can reinstall the whole system once I figure out what's going on.  I
>>  must have this machine working within 24 hours, though, hence Ubuntu
>> looms
>>  on the horizon.]
>>
>>
>> Alan Davis
>>
>> You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but
>>  when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the
>>  bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what
>>  counts.
>>
>>Richard Feynman
>>
>
>
> the same as always, You emerge your base system. Then kernel. Then X. X
> drivers. Graphics, Mouse, Keyboard. You can either use evdev or kbd for
> keyboard. I prefer the later one. Hal or not doesn't make much of a
> difference.
>
> The important thing is: after an X update you must reinstall the input
> drivers!
>
>


-- 
Alan Davis

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,
but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever
about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's
doing---that's what counts.

Richard Feynman



Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] advices about motherboard+cpu+fan(+soundcard) combo?

2007-08-21 Thread Alan E. Davis
I might add to avoid using on board video or video cards like my own, an
NVIDIA based LE 6200, that uses system RAM.  Even if you aren't doing
games.  You are using only 1GB of RAM.

Alan

On 8/22/07, Florian Philipp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Am Dienstag 21 August 2007 13:41:39 schrieb brullo nulla:
> > > > I have an old but functional ATI Radeon 9200SE. Won't it work
> anymore?
> > > > If there's something better, with decent 3D supported and onboard,
> let
> > > > me know...
> > >
> > > emm.. since most boards don't have agp anymore. No, it won't. And even
> if
> > > it works.. I am not sure that the 9200SE would be really faster than
> > > todays onboard solutions...
> >
> > OK. I didn't know that agp has been dropped (I really am not into
> > hardware, that's why I'm writing). So is everything PCI? What kind of
> > videocard should I look for? IIRC, Intel onboard videocards were well
> > supported open source...
> >
> > m.
>
> Not PCI (although it is still an option if you don't need high speed),
> it's
> all PCI-Express (short PCI-E). Intel onboard is okay, if you need a
> dedicated
> card (playing games with Cedega, multiple displays, stuff like that),
> stick
> with NVidia.
>
>


-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for one
non-existent."
 ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,


Re: [gentoo-user] linux desktop search engines are ugly!

2007-08-28 Thread Alan E. Davis
I have used glimpse for indexing my email archive.  It works pretty well,
but requires indexing runs and also the index files are quite large.  Good,
though.

And for a bonus, it comes with agrep, if I recall correctly, a fantastic
"almost grep" tool for somewhat fuzzy searches.

Recently, on my system, glimpse was in conflict with some other package.

As an emacs user, my computing experience was recently improved
exponentially by the utility "global-ff.el" that incrementally searches for
files on the entire system by reference to the indexes of "locate":
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/GlobalFF.  It does not search
contents, but does globbing including partial directory / subdirectory
names, quite niftily and speedily.  I have to remember to thank that guy.

Emacs also does a pretty nice "grep-find" that searches a tree for content
of files.

Alan Davis

-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan   [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for one
non-existent."
 ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,


[gentoo-user] MCE in kernel

2007-08-31 Thread Alan E. Davis
I have been unable to boot into my gentoo system due to a Machine Check
Exception.  This is an AMD 64 system.  MCE for AMD is enabled in the kernel
(2.6.21 gentoo-sources).

I am unable to boot in to turn off MCE checking.  I was able to log in by
single user mode.  The MCE happens at the end of the loading of "default"
scripts, at least this is what I am seeing on the screen: xdm has been
loaded.

The problem is, I have been installing ubuntu on another partition, and it
boots fine.

If I have it right, I can download a gentoo live install disk and compile a
new kernel.  Is there a howto on this specific problem?

Thank you,

Alan Davis

-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for one
non-existent."
 ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,


[gentoo-user] Re: MCE in kernel

2007-08-31 Thread Alan E. Davis
Followuing up, I removed a troublesome partition that every time was being
checked on boot, and I was able to boot ok.  Does this make sense?

Alan

On 9/1/07, Alan E. Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I have been unable to boot into my gentoo system due to a Machine Check
> Exception.  This is an AMD 64 system.  MCE for AMD is enabled in the kernel
> (2.6.21 gentoo-sources).
>
> I am unable to boot in to turn off MCE checking.  I was able to log in by
> single user mode.  The MCE happens at the end of the loading of "default"
> scripts, at least this is what I am seeing on the screen: xdm has been
> loaded.
>
> The problem is, I have been installing ubuntu on another partition, and it
> boots fine.
>
> If I have it right, I can download a gentoo live install disk and compile
> a new kernel.  Is there a howto on this specific problem?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Alan Davis
>
> --
> Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> "An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for
> one non-existent."
>  ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,




-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for one
non-existent."
 ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,


Re: [gentoo-user] Re: MCE in kernel

2007-08-31 Thread Alan E. Davis
On 9/1/07, Tim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Thank you for the response, Tim:
>
> This makes little sense without knowing what partition you removed and
> what you mean by "removing" it - did you take it out of /etc/fstab? Did
> you actually repartition your disk? What partition was it, what kind was
> it (primary, logical, extended) and what was on it? Hopefully we can be
> of more assistance with this info.


I removed the partition from /dev/fstab.  It is a partition on /dev/sda1, a
SATA drive, with about 20% fragmentation.  I moved everything off the drive,
and will reformat, making sure it is in ext3 or other journaling format.
Something was triggering a check every boot.  (message saying the partition
was not properly mounted---I don't have access to the exact message now).

I wonder whether this kind of hardware issue might trigger the Machine Check
Exception.

Thank you,

Alan Davis



-Tim
> --
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
>
>


-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for one
non-existent."
 ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,


Re: [gentoo-user] MCE in kernel

2007-09-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you.  I have solved the problem for now, but live in fear that there
is something untoward going in on my hardware.

Earlier on, this was intermittent.  I also wonder whether a register was set
or a cmos flag, because after I booted the Ubuntu partition, the machine did
boot with no complaint.  It hadn't been going on long, though.  Well, I
finally was able to boot using an earlier kernel with no MCE flag set, then
recompile a newer kernel without it.

I think your solution is the better one, though.

I did follow the instructions of the boot messages and installed an mce log
translation utility, but I didn't make sense of what to do with it.

Thank you again,

Alan

On 9/4/07, Dan Farrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 1 Sep 2007 11:08:27 +1000
> "Alan E. Davis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > I have been unable to boot into my gentoo system due to a Machine
> > Check Exception.  This is an AMD 64 system.  MCE for AMD is enabled
> > in the kernel (2.6.21 gentoo-sources).
> >
> > I am unable to boot in to turn off MCE checking.
>
> did you know you can disable this at boot time?  Check it out:
>
> | $ grep mce /usr/src/linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
> |   mce [IA-32] Machine Check Exception
> |   nomce   [IA-32] Machine Check Exception
>
> just add 'nomce' to your kernel boot line in grub and you should be able
> to boot with MCE turned of to reconfigure.
> -- Dan
> --
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
>
>


-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for one
non-existent."
 ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,


Re: [gentoo-user] MCE in kernel

2007-09-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you Dan:

I'll look into this.  Time to tear the old box apart again.

Thank you again.

Alan

On 9/4/07, Dan Farrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 4 Sep 2007 06:51:38 +1000
> "Alan E. Davis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > I think your solution is the better one, though.
> >
> > I did follow the instructions of the boot messages and installed an
> > mce log translation utility, but I didn't make sense of what to do
> > with it.
>
> The thing is, you are only masking symptoms.  There may be something
> wrong, and perhaps you could save a lot of work later by fixing a
> problem before it turns catastrophic.
>
> from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Check_Exception
>
> A Machine Check Exception, also called MCE, is a computer hardware
> error which occurs when a computer's central processing unit detects an
> unrecoverable hardware problem.
>
> Normal causes for MCE errors are overheating and/or incorrect hardware
> installation. Overheating can cause electrons to become more animated
> and thus escape from the silicon tracks, resulting in corrupted data.
> Some specific manually induced causes could be:
>
> Overclocking (naturally increases heat output)
>
> Poorly fitted heatsink/computer fans (the same problem can happen with
> excessive dust in the CPU fan)
>
> Computer software can also cause errors in this way (normally by
> corrupting data they are reading or writing). For example:
>
> -Software performing read or write operations to non-existent memory
> regions which leads to confusion for the processor and/or the system
> bus.
>
> 3rd party programs
>
> mcelog
> mcelog is a Linux program to decode MCE's on x86-64 processors
>
> --
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
>
>


-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for one
non-existent."
 ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,


Re: [gentoo-user] MCE in kernel

2007-09-04 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you.  I noticed that when I ran "make oldconfig" on a new kernel, the
configs were not what I'd expected.  The wrong CPU type was configured.

Alan

On 9/5/07, Don Jerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On 9/3/07, Alan E. Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Thank you.  I have solved the problem for now, but live in fear that
> there
> > is something untoward going in on my hardware.
> >
> Quite possible.  It can also be caused by misconfiguring kernel
> drivers.  I recently (accidently) selected the ATI agpart driver
> instead of the Intel driver.  Most drivers correctly detect when their
> corresponding device isn't present, but this one gamely tried to
> manage the AGP bridge and fouled up memory whenever X started...
>
> So you may want to review your kernel config and make sure you have
> all the devices you're attempting to use.
> --
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
>
>


-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for one
non-existent."
 ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,


[gentoo-user] question about "turbocache" shared memory, or whatever, with xorg

2007-09-08 Thread Alan E. Davis
I have memory issues, and would like to keep my nvidia card out of my system
ram.  Both system ram and video ram are limited.  Video ram is 128 on an
nvidia based 6200 LE card.

I remember some parameters in the config file for X11 XFree86, stating the
system memory explicitly.  I have found no help on this, with some people
seeming to actually want this "feature."  Nvidia says there is no way to
turn it off.

Does anyone know a way to disable this feature with Xorg, or limit the
amount of system RAM, or in any way even query the amount of system RAM
being used?

Probably off topic for this list, but don't know where to take it.

Alan

-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for one
non-existent."
 ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,


[gentoo-user] How to dhcp to a specific address, and thank you

2007-09-24 Thread Alan E. Davis
I hope I will be forgiven for wasting bandwidth; I want very much to express
my gratitude to those developers, documentation writers, and others, that
Gentoo is such an excellent distro.  If three is anything I can figure to
do---possible documentation or perhaps an ebuild or two---I want to do so.
For right now, let me send my thanks to all.  I cannot express my good
feelings well enough about the solidity of my new install.

I have gotten Gentoo running on a new machine (my fourth install, I think),
and it all went well---better than ever!  I am highly pleased...

I was even able to connect to a WPA encrypted network with minimal hassle,
using excellent instructions availalbe in the docs, forum, and wiki.  It
went more easily than a year ago.

My QUESTION: I connect two machines at home to a wireless router, with my IP
number a local one, assigned by the router.  Is it reasonable to set this up
so my main home machine has the same IP number always, so I can set up other
machines to print over the local wireless net?

ASIDE:  I can't speak too highly of the solidity of the install.  Maybe
partly because I now understand the Gentoo system better, I have not had to
ask many questions.  When something troubles, it is easier to figure out
why.  I don't want to bog down in a discussion of other distros and the
fiddling that led to nowhere; suffice it to say, Gentoo just works, for me,
as long as I am willing to put in the time, and my other efforts were less
satisfactory.

Thank you!

Alan Davis

-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


[gentoo-user] Logitech trackball optical cordless, scroll wheel doesn't work

2007-09-29 Thread Alan E. Davis
I've read bunches of WWW pages about this.

The model number is C-BA4-MSE.  It's worked in the past.
The vertical wheel is seen by logitech_applet.  I have tried a large number
of different configs in xorg.conf.

Obviously, this is a common problem.

Can anyone who has had this problem in the past inform me about a solution?
How would I know it were a hardware problem?

Alan Davis

-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


[gentoo-user] /tmp directory: best policy for clearing?

2007-10-01 Thread Alan E. Davis
Somenow I've overlooked that my /tmp file has been filling up with large
files for over a year.

May I ask what is a reasonable way to handle the /tmp directory, without
deleting large files that are maybe only a few days old?

Thank you for any ideas,

Alan

-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


[gentoo-user] Excessively simple flatfile database

2007-11-10 Thread Alan E. Davis
I am posting to this list as a first resort.  I hope this is not off topic.


I've been searching for a very simple database program.  I've used edb
(emacs database) and that works ok, for some things.  All I need right now
is a simple, searchable, sortable list of laboratory and field data for a
research project.

I used a simple program called quicklist a few years ago.  Perhaps it was
viewed as too simple?  I cannot find the program anymore.  I have tried
sqlitebrowser, it's too quirky for my immediate needs.  I've also used
pgaccess, but I don't have tim eto learn postgresql as I probably well need
to do.  At least for now.  I used that program before with some success, and
it looks to have improved over the past few years.

May I elicit suggestions?

Thank you,

Alan Davis

-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
  ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


Re: [gentoo-user] Excessively simple flatfile database

2007-11-10 Thread Alan E. Davis
Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.  I want to have a record of my
specimens and preparations, in a format that can be retrieved in various
ways, sorted, and printed.  A record, like a card file.  Nothing
compilcated, don't need a server.  I'm thinking emacs data base.  I guess I
want database functionality without the complexities.

Alan

On Nov 11, 2007 11:50 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 11:23:42AM +1000, Alan E. Davis wrote:
> > May I elicit suggestions?
>
> Do you want simple key=value pair (perl hash, associative array, etc)
> where one key gives one value?  Your value may of course be tab
> separted sub values or anythig really.
>
> They are hard to search, but if you know the keys, always or often
> enough, they are simple.  I don't know any package names, but Berkeley
> DB is one free source product.
>
> If you need to search on anything very often, key or value, they
> probably aren't it.
>
> --
>... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._.
> Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>  GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E  6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license
> #4933
> I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of
> room o
> --
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
>
>


-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
  ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


[gentoo-user] A few questions on trying to install

2008-07-20 Thread Alan E. Davis
Having been (mostly happily) using Ubuntu for a number of months I
yearn to install Gentoo again.  Tried a beta release of Gentoo 2008.0,
and was pleased, at least to be able to boot and not have the
confusion about naming HDDs, and using Grub was simpler.  Now, as I
approach the Live CD installer (AMD64) some problems are keeping me at
bay.

Now, however, I've tried three or four times to install on an existing
partition.  Grub will not install over the ubuntu grub, or else
something else is crazy.  After a 2 hour preparation the last time
around, emerging the extra packages, the system just stopped, and when
at long last I finally rebooted, it was back to Ubuntu.

May I ask a few questions?

  -  Live CD only installs over a clean partition.  How can I resume
an installation?

  -  I only have a unsupported atheros wifi card for connection.  I've
been using it for years.  No easy way to connect by wire.  Any ideas?

  -  I have an 80GB fast SATA drive and three slower 7000 RPM drives.
What partitions are best kept on the fast drive to maximize
performance (I have basically an all purpose workstation).  My /home
will be about 100GB: is it wiser to split it up into a smaller core
/home with several slower archive and storage partitions (Library,
Project archives, Videos, Music)?

  - Advice about UUIDs?  I lost a partition (a large one) over a
misidentification of a partition when the Ubuntu scheme started
swapping around names of devices.  Old /dev/hda became /dev/sda and
old /dev/sda became /dev/sdb.  What a mess that turned out to be.

For now this will be enough.

Alan



Re: [gentoo-user] A few questions on trying to install

2008-07-21 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thank you for some thoughtful suggestions.

I have just gotten a 500GB SATA drive, intending to back up all of my
data.  What I fear most about LVM is the possibility of losing the
data somehow.  I may be too yesterday, but I sense that ordinary
partitions (at least "ordinary" to me) will be more portable.  I may
want to unpack my system, and carry my Drives with me.  I've been
trying to work around the same /home/USER directories for several
years.   I have archived them from time to time when they have gotten
too crazy.  And (correct me if I'm wrong) I've become some kind of
intimidated about using the same directory and username on a new
install, so I generally end up copying all the pieces over.

Outside of this possibly irrational fear that LVM mayn't be portable,
I actually did delete an entire install once that was on LVM, but that
was due to my own ignorance.  I am no less ignorant now, but if my
fears about portability can be allayed, I would be willing to try.
And learn.

Be that as it may, I have just cleansed my 74GB 1RPM drive, and
look forward to installing on this, and hanging various directories
off of this.  Assuming, for now, I am only going to be using some
unexotic partitioning system, which partitions will be most
advantageously situated on this fast drive?   I am thinking along
these lines:

   FAST PARTITION
 /
 /boot
 /usr/bin
 /usr/sbin
 /usr/local/
 part of home with well-used files
 /tmp?


I have a lot of ARCHIVED data that should be on a separate partition
and this could be slow.

I actually find it makes quite a bit of difference, the speed difference.

I have looked around for comments about this strategy.  Maybe if LVM
is indeed portable, this could be incorporated into the scheme.

Abut Grub issues: I may try to edit the grub that was installed by
Ubuntu.  However, one of the serious issues I have encountered with
Ubuntu Hardy Heron has been a capricious device assignment scheme that
is not consistent from install to install.  And I had to edit
/boot/grub/menu.lst to the correct partition to boot from because even
grub didn't get it right out of the box!  After three or four ubuntu
installs, ubuntu wouldn't touch grub anymore, so I booted a beta
Gentoo 2008.0 and was able to rectify the master boot record.  Maybe
my motherboard is crazy---an ASUS M2N-E.

Thank you again.  I'm already feeling better about getting this done.

Alan



Re: [gentoo-user] A few questions on trying to install

2008-07-21 Thread Alan E. Davis
Comments for this thread have been helpfu.  I have done a test install
from the live install cd.  For now, I guess, 74 GB is enough for the
entire system, leaving out my older /home directories and archives, so
I just let the installer pick a preferred partitioning configuration.
Next  I think I'll try LVM for some partitions.

During the installation, the installer quit at the 50% point, right
after installing the optional packages, and would not restart.  This
had thrown me off during previous attempts.  As it turned out, it was
simply necessary to copy the boot information from
/boot/grub/grub.conf over to Ubuntu's existing grub/menu.lst.

So far, so good.

Thank you.

Alan

-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
 ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man

"We have no art. We do everything as well as we can." ---Balinese saying



[gentoo-user] Success (mostly)

2008-07-25 Thread Alan E. Davis
I have worked my way through the installation of Gentoo 2008.0 from
the LiveCD (amd64), running into several wrinkles along the way, and
eventually overcoming most of them.  I plan to document the process at
another time.

I want to express my joy at the result (except for some personal
errors, perhaps).  This system runs MUCH faster, and more efficiently
than it did on Ubuntu.  1GB of RAM was often topped out on Ubuntu, but
on this machine even with four compiles going at once, I seldom saw
more than 5 or 600 MB of RAM in use (using HTOP and
Gnome-System-Monitor).

I am evaluating how much of the improvement may be from running XFCE4.
 If it's a substantial difference, I may use this more, and Gnome or
KDE less.

I ended up, for now, installing this as one big partition, on a 74GB
drive.  I will split partitions later.

Thank you to the list members who answered my earlier queries.

Alan
-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
 ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man

"We have no art. We do everything as well as we can." ---Balinese saying



Re: [gentoo-user] Success (mostly)

2008-07-25 Thread Alan E. Davis
Alan

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 4:30 PM, Alan McKinnon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Congratulations and welcome to gentoo-land. It's quite a feat of
> accomplishment to get through your very first gentoo install :-)
>
Actually, this about my fifth or sixth Gentoo install, but it was
quite a challenging one.


I am pleased with the machine I have.  While it's not a low end
machine, it isn't a high end workstation either.  I have alot of HDD
space, 2GB of RAM.  A dual core 2200  MHz Athlon 64 X2.

It really flies through compiles, compared to the klunkers I was
running two or three years ago.

Alan



-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
 ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man

"We have no art. We do everything as well as we can." ---Balinese saying



Re: [gentoo-user] Success (mostly)

2008-07-26 Thread Alan E. Davis
Hello.

My motherboard is an ASUS M2N-E.  Not high end.  And I have my doubts
about it at times.  At first, especially, there were moments.  It's
been less than six months.  I got the MB as a kit with CPU and 1GB of
RAM.  I have upgraded the RAM to 2GB as a kit of Dual Channel ram.
Earlier, I only had a single stick of RAM.  I've been through a
succession of Motherboards and etc. in the case, which I bought in
about 1997.

The 1RPM Sata drive is an important addition.

If I could have my druthers, I'd be running a Tyan.  I have such a MB
at work with dual Opterons.  There is a feeling of excellence to it,
but it comes at a cost.  It would be interesting to set two dual core
Opterons on that board.  One Day.

Alan

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 8:29 PM, Dale <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Alan E. Davis wrote:
>>
>> Actually, this about my fifth or sixth Gentoo install, but it was
>> quite a challenging one.
>>
>>
>> I am pleased with the machine I have.  While it's not a low end
>> machine, it isn't a high end workstation either.  I have alot of HDD
>> space, 2GB of RAM.  A dual core 2200  MHz Athlon 64 X2.
>>
>> It really flies through compiles, compared to the klunkers I was
>> running two or three years ago.
>>
>> Alan
>>
>
> Hi,
>
> Would you mind sharing what mobo you have if you built it yourself?  If you
> bought something already built, oh well.  I plan to build one sometime soon.
>  Just looking for ideas.
>
> Dale
>
> :-)  :-)
>
>



-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
 ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man

"We have no art. We do everything as well as we can." ---Balinese saying



Re: [gentoo-user] Success (mostly)

2008-07-26 Thread Alan E. Davis
On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 11:46 AM, David Relson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> A few years back I bought a Tyan SMP board (dual Athlon 1000's if I
> recall).  I was very pleased as it screamed through builds.  Then
> summer arrived, and with a computer room that gets warmish, I had lots
> of cooling problems.  That fall the power supply fried itself and the
> mobo.  To make a long story short, the Tyan was nice, but not right for
> me.  My present Athlon 64 X2 is doing very nicely now...

The Tyan Thunder I am running at work is also a power hungry dog, but
would that not be mainly because of the CPUs?  Wouldn't newer Opterons
be more efficient?  That's what I'm hoping for.

Yes, I like the Athlon 64 XP2.  The point being that the Tyan was a
cadillac of a motherboard---and priced out of my range.

Alan




-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
 ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man

"We have no art. We do everything as well as we can." ---Balinese saying



[gentoo-user] GVFS errors

2008-07-26 Thread Alan E. Davis
I am seeing errors like this, and wonder if someone can suggest a solution:

(emacs:22548): GVFS-RemoteVolumeMonitor-WARNING **: cannot connect to
the session bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a
reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a
reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply
timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

Thank you,

Alan

-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
 ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man



[gentoo-user] OpenRC and rc.conf

2008-07-26 Thread Alan E. Davis
I've had some trouble in the past with "cfg-update" although it sure is
easy.  After a recent upgrade to a new portage, or so I assume, I was asked
to decide what to do about a config file change to an entirely new system:
OpenRC.  Not sure what to do, I probably bodged that.

Now   I receive this message at times:

  /etc/rc.conf: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `>>'
  /etc/rc.conf: line 1: ` File 1'

Investigating I discover there is a "Baselayout and OpenRC Migration Guide"
that tells me


 It is critical that you run dispatch-conf and ensure your /etc is up to
date before rebooting. Failure to do so will result in an unbootable system
and will  require the use of the Gentoo LiveCD to perform the steps below to
repair your system.

So, my question is how can I recover and make sure any new config file has
been activated?

Thank you,

Alan

-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


Re: [gentoo-user] OpenRC and rc.conf

2008-07-27 Thread Alan E. Davis
Mick:

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 6:14 PM, Mick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
>
> Make sure you use the --noconfmem option when emerging openrc so that
> it replaces the config file no matter what with the new default one.


Exactly what I needed to know.  Thank you Mick.  I have followed your advice
and it seems ok.

Thank you again,

Alan

-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


[gentoo-user] firefox et al. crash when attaching file in gmail --- dbus?

2008-07-27 Thread Alan E. Davis
I'm having fits about dbus, at least that's what I think?

Firefox 3, epiphany, and firefox 3 bin all do this.  Attach any file (as any
user, on KDE or Gnome) and firefox immediately crashes.  Root can attach
files.

Some background.

Today I upgraded these before I noticed this problem: dev-libs/expat,
net-misc/dhcpcd,
dev-cpp/libglademm, dev-cpp/gconfmm, net-dns/bind-tools,
mail-mta/ssmtp, sys-apps/coreutils.

Yesterday it worked.  Of course I"ve been twiddling.

I found a suggestion to run firefox in safe-mode ($ firefox -safe-mode).  I
did this.  It's just a way to dismember the add-ons and customizations of a
user, and I'd already recompiled.  But these errors were received after the
crash in the terminal:


[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ $ /usr/bin/firefox -safe-mode
which: no soundwrapper in
(/usr/kde/3.5/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/opt/bin:/usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/4.3.1:/usr/qt/3/bin:/usr/games/bin)
which: no soundwrapper in
(/usr/kde/3.5/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/opt/bin:/usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/4.3.1:/usr/qt/3/bin:/usr/games/bin)
process 1: arguments to dbus_connection_send_with_reply_and_block() were
incorrect, assertion "(error) == NULL || !dbus_error_is_set ((error))"
failed in file dbus-connection.c line 3289.
This is normally a bug in some application using the D-Bus library.
  D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace
Aborted
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ $
(npviewer.bin:6437): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_style_detach: assertion
`style->attach_count > 0' failed


I am most interested in learning how to troubleshoot dbus.  I read one post
where the suggestion was made to delete dbus.  What does that mean?  I've
been having numerous problems with permissions.  They are gradually going
away, and I just emailed a friend that the system has finally stablized to
some degree.  Then I did an # emerge -uDv world and this happens.  Where can
I find out more about dbus?

gtkmm won't compile.  There's an upstream fix, I think, and I might do a
local version bump, with much trepidation.

Thank you for any advice.





-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


Re: [gentoo-user] firefox et al. crash when attaching file in gmail --- dbus?

2008-07-28 Thread Alan E. Davis
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 4:55 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Montag, 28. Juli 2008, Andrey Falko wrote:
>
> >
> > To eliminate the first factor do: emerge -e world.
>
> no. Just no.


For what it's worth, I started emerge -e system quite some time ago.  It
stops about 1/2 way through on glib.  Apparently this is common.   I started
it up again as "emerge -e system --skipfirst".  How bad of an idea was
that?  I think about 200 out of about 350 pkgs have been rebuilt.

I'll halt this and rebuild dbus again.  Etc/





> > The second
> > factor can be eliminated by downgrading to firefox2. If it is a
> > firefox3 problem then the bug report would go to firefox developers.
>

It does affect firefox 2 also.  All users except root.  All gecko browsers,
I guess (all firefox, and epiphany---didnt' try galeon).

>
>
> just re-emerge dbus and/or revdep-rebuilt should be enough. Or that
> 'preserved-libs' stuff.


 I don't qet it about preserved-libs.  THerefore I haven't done anything
about any of the messages.  I don't understand the messages, exactly what
would happen?  Would I be building the same app with the same old lib or
with the new lib?  I need to find something in the docs, but haven't seen
anything yet.

Thank you for the advice,

Alan Davis

>
>
>


-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


Re: [gentoo-user] firefox et al. crash when attaching file in gmail --- dbus?

2008-07-28 Thread Alan E. Davis
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 9:31 PM, Eric Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
>>
> WRT emerge -e world I had a few problems where glibc wouldn't build and
> tracking down the cause of that fixed my other problems.  Could be
> coincidence, could be related.  I rebuilt the toolchain once or twice to get
> glib going again, recompiled and my problems were solved.
>

Do you mind to explain a little more?  How would I go about this?  I have a
few packages that won't build, and glib is one.  Over and over.  gtkmm is
another.  There is an upstream gtkmm that is said to solve that issue, but I
haven't gotten the courage to bump an ebuild to a new version.

How would one rebuild the toolchain?


>
> You say it works as root.  This is a stretch but it's wicked easy and
> should be tried: try killing your profile.  it's as easy as renaming
> .mozilla so firefox creates a new one next boot.  If it's still broken it
> only wasted a minute, and if it works you're not banging your head
> needlessly and later on.


I have tried it as three different users, and have moved .mozilla, used
firefox2, firefox3, firefox3-bin, epiphany.  The same thing happens.  Moving
.mozilla has no effect.

My system has been riddled with these issues of permissions and (I assume)
dbus and/or hal issues, since when.  The livecd was a mess: took several
passes even to get a working, booting system.  It's getting better.

Thank you,

Alan

-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


Re: [gentoo-user] firefox et al. crash when attaching file in gmail --- dbus?

2008-07-28 Thread Alan E. Davis
I have reread the GCC upgrade guide.  I skipped the step of fixing libtool,
and recompiling.  So another overnight emerge -e world ...

Thank you, meantime

Alan


>

-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


Re: [gentoo-user] firefox et al. crash when attaching file in gmail --- dbus?

2008-07-28 Thread Alan E. Davis
I have found a script called emwrap.sh  The forum thread attached to that
script makes it clear it is important to compile the few core TC files twice
before emerge -e system.  Then do that twice.  Then emerce -e world.  Wow.
The script is supposed to shorten the overall time, by not recompiling TC
and system when compiling the rest of the world.  It seems logical.

I also found some inconsistencies in my USE flags, so it's back to square
one.  I hope this works.  (I am trying the script).

Thank you very much.

Alan

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 2:39 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Montag, 28. Juli 2008, Alan E. Davis wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 4:55 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann <
> >
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > On Montag, 28. Juli 2008, Andrey Falko wrote:
> > > > To eliminate the first factor do: emerge -e world.
> > >
> > > no. Just no.
> >
> > For what it's worth, I started emerge -e system quite some time ago.  It
> > stops about 1/2 way through on glib.  Apparently this is common.   I
> > started it up again as "emerge -e system --skipfirst".  How bad of an
> idea
> > was that?  I think about 200 out of about 350 pkgs have been rebuilt.
> >
> > I'll halt this and rebuild dbus again.  Etc/
> >
> > > > The second
> > > > factor can be eliminated by downgrading to firefox2. If it is a
> > > > firefox3 problem then the bug report would go to firefox developers.
> >
> > It does affect firefox 2 also.  All users except root.  All gecko
> browsers,
> > I guess (all firefox, and epiphany---didnt' try galeon).
> >
> > > just re-emerge dbus and/or revdep-rebuilt should be enough. Or that
> > > 'preserved-libs' stuff.
> >
> >  I don't qet it about preserved-libs.  THerefore I haven't done anything
> > about any of the messages.  I don't understand the messages, exactly what
> > would happen?  Would I be building the same app with the same old lib or
> > with the new lib?  I need to find something in the docs, but haven't seen
> > anything yet.
>
> http://r0bertz.blogspot.com/2008/06/portage-22-preserve-libs-features.html
>
> the problem with it (a friend run into it - maybe the have fixed it in the
> meantime)if you do an emerge -e system/world while the old stuff is still
> there, some apps and libs will link against the old stuff. Thus the whole
> exercise will be a waste of time and energy.
>
>


-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


Re: [gentoo-user] firefox et al. crash when attaching file in gmail --- dbus?

2008-07-28 Thread Alan E. Davis
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 11:13 PM, Eric Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
>
> Alan E. Davis wrote:
> > I have found a script called emwrap.sh
>


Please don't top post, it makes it very hard to follow the flow of the
> list.  Thanks!  Let us know how that turns out with the script.  Also,
> where did you find it?
>
> I apologize for that.

I think this would get it for you.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-282474-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html

Alan


>
> Eric Martin
> Key fingerprint = D1C4 086E DBB5 C18E 6FDA  B215 6A25 7174 A941 3B9F
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
> Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iEYEARECAAYFAkiNxgAACgkQdheOldgSlQgu3gCfebbzOlso/9v1CGAO1+Y0nKNP
> I+EAoJOqQwLppIJXYKOwAZSDJW1AvUoO
> =/Uy6
> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
>
>


-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


[gentoo-user] Advice about setting up split home directory

2008-08-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
Thanks to advice on this list I have a reasonably stable system now, and
it's time to get hands dirty.   I have more GB of collected files than I can
fit into my ~/ home directory, so I am planning to link several partitions
to ~/ in an effort to organize this mass.

1.  How could one reasonably link a subdir of a partition as a subdir or
folder of one's ~/, for example, /dev/sdd3/VIDEO (partition on that
partition called VIDEO) as a subdirectory, ~/VIDEO?  I want ~/VIDEO to
behave identically as it would if it were on the same partition as ~/ .  At
least to the greatest extent possible.  I have seen some arcane arrangement
somewhere, but to what extent is that necessary to do?  I would rather avoid
having to mount the entire parition as a subdir, and then have to access,
for example, ~/ARCHIVE/VIDEO.

2.  As an aside, Nautllus (~/amd64 Gnome overlay, version 2.23.5.1) behavior
differs from that in Ubuntu. I have resisted the use of a GUI file manager
for a long time, except for a few tasks, and especially I have avoided
nautilus as a tool for moving files around the system.  The availability of
bookmarks in the sidepane is highly useful, however, and I've gotten used
to it.  Can I remove the display of ~/media/* from the sidepanel?  This has
enabled me to organize my system much more effectively.  Thunar is more to
my taste in this way, but nautilus has other useful features, including it
is integrated with gnome.

Thank you for any advice.  Also thanks to the list for past helpful advice.


Alan

-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


Re: [gentoo-user] Advice about setting up split home directory

2008-08-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 11:17 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
>
> man mount, also google for 'bind' mounting.
>

Thank you.  That was it.  IN answer to another query, as to why not symlink,
I cannot point to a particular behavior, but I have found that symlinks do
not behave in all situations like real hardlinks.  What I want it something
like a hardlink to a directory.

I think this may be possible with bind mounting.

One major problem with nautilus or any other GUI file manager---in fact
many, many GUI programs that rely on mouse input primarily---has been the
loss of subtler capabilities like hard link.  I've been looking at using
hardlinks to organize my literature collection.  A single paper may belong
equally in several categories.  Or for photos, to go beyond, say, catalogs
in gthumbs: catalogs are possibly lost in an upgrade or minor accident.

 I'd be interested in seeing particular examples of the use of bind mounts
for the purposes I propose.  Reiterating:

   - mounting a directory from another tree with a full status in all
respects as a directory on the current tree.
   - mounting a directory in several places.   (A subdirectory of
microscopical images and another subdirectory of notes can be linked
together in the same directory under the specific project or organism under
study).

Perhaps a more skilled approach to the use of symlinks would serve the same
purpose more directly?

Thank you again for the input.

Alan



-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


Re: [gentoo-user] Advice about setting up split home directory

2008-08-03 Thread Alan E. Davis
Norberto and  Josh:

Thank you for the suggestion.  It's on the back burner.  I have the space to
experiment with it now.  I have balked for the time being on basis of,
partly, my need to be able to swap drives in and out, and have it clear in
mind which partitions belong to what.  Also my main drive is a 1 RPM
faster drive, and I'd like to keep the partitions or directories that are
mainly for storage separated.  I really do notice a difference in the
performance of the drive.  this is somewhat of a conundrum: how to keep the
current projects focused on the faster drive.

Interestingly (to me) while I carefully planned for swap on the faster
drive, since I moved to 2GB of RAM, I think I've only touched swap two or
three times, and then only passingly!

I definitely wouldn't want to put / into LVM.

If I do LVM it will be the easy way, the most clearcut way.

Alan



On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 1:59 PM, Norberto Bensa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Quoting Josh Cepek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
>  Personally I'd suggest using LVM for this
>>
>
>
-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man


Re: [gentoo-user] Is gcc slotted? Do I have to manually remove old versions?

2008-08-04 Thread Alan E. Davis
On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 5:30 PM, Dale <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gcc-upgrading.xml
>
> That should stir up something for ya.  :-)


This frightens me:

 Cleaning up

It is also safe to remove older GCC versions at this time. Please substitute
YOUR-NEW-GCC-VERSION with the actual version you've upgraded to:

Code Listing 4.5: Cleaning up

# emerge -aC "

[gentoo-user] Painted into a corner: avahi and mDNSResponder

2008-10-11 Thread Alan E. Davis
Almost perpetually, the following packages or their versions are
blocking.  I have run emerge -e system several times.  Some other
problems were cleared up, and this
avahi--mDNSResponder/mdnsresponder-compat whatever it all is, just
keeps coming back even when solved by some skullduggery.  I've removed
both of them at one time or another.

[blocks B ] net-dns/avahi ("net-dns/avahi" is blocking
net-misc/mDNSResponder-107.6-r5)

[blocks B ] net-misc/mDNSResponder ("net-misc/mDNSResponder" is
blocking net-dns/avahi-0.6.23)

I guess the problem is that I am running gnome and also have two or
three different versions/slots of kde installed.  I suppose, then,
it's remarkable that only these blocks are showing up?

Can someone lend a hand on this?  Anything I do is little more than
blind tinkering.

Alan


-- 
Alan Davis

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
   ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man



Re: [gentoo-user] Beagle eating up Resources!! (BEagled-index-helper)

2007-03-03 Thread Alan E. Davis

I am perturbed that beagle has grabbed 99% of CPU time.  If I kill it,
within 5 seconds another process is spawned, again grabbing 99%.  I
don't even USE beagle.  Is it possible to unmerge it without affecting
other programs?

If I understand correctly, I have found the following to be quite good
for indexing and rapid searching of defined directories:

app-misc/glimpse

As an added bonus, together with glimpse comes "agrep" or "almost
grep" that can search like grep with a specified number of spelling
errors.

I will unmerge beagle just to see what will happen.

Alan

On 3/2/07, Roger Mason <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Hello Albert,

Albert Hopkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

>  A good solution would be a tool that actually indexes files
> in the background, and perhaps automatically when a file is
> changed/added/removed.  And not just text in files but also other kinds
> of metadata.  And when I click that file/data/whatever it would be cool
> if it automagically opened the appropriate viewer and took me to the
> exact location of what I am searching for. Pretty much a one-stop shop
> for searching my stuff.

pinot (http://directory.fsf.org/pinot.html) may do what you want.  It
is not in portage but most of its dependencies are.

Roger

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--
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1-670-256-2043

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I
must share it with other people who like it.
Richard Stallman

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute
rejection of authority.  - Thomas H. Huxley

Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in mud. After a
while, you realise the pig is enjoying it.
-- Jamie Lawrence.
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