Re: OT - gentoo was Re: gimp
[whoops, forgot to say beware gmail reply-to, sorry :) does anyone know if there's a reliable fix for that yet?] On 5/25/05, Steve Holdoway [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think it's probably the fact that you did it at an installfest, where all those 'what do I do here' questions are instantly answered by people who've been there before, and answered so quickly that you've now forgotten you ever asked them. That's probably true, the people there were very helpful. But I did do a stage 1 install on a P166 laptop, so I definitely didn't get through all of the installation on the day (indeed it took me another week ;-) I'm not knocking the end result - I see what Gentoo are trying to achieve, and thoroughly support it. What I don't like are all the irrelevant obstacles that don't teach anything except how to keep your temper better. Well I'd been using linux for quite a few years before I installed Gentoo, but it still taught me (and I'm sure most others too) quite a lot. Especially about Gentoo in particular. Other systems are more easily installed, but you never quite know how everything works, and they sometimes behave most strangely. The thing I like about Gentoo is it feels a lot more transparent - once you've installed it, you know where everything is, what it's for, and what behaviour you can expect from it. Time spent installing the system is time spent getting to know the system :-) I also accept that the point Nick made on the original thread about my experience maybe getting in the way of the instructions could well be valid and I'm asking questions and worrying about things the authors may be taking for granted. Probably true... a lot of the instructions are more newbie oriented, and perhaps sometimes a bit sparse on heavy details for that reason. But I think they're more than adequate For the build in question, I ended up with a completely unbootable system which I couldn't fix. I could see the errors, but couldn't not build an initrd that would work, either with initrd or manually. Aha. I never bother with initrd's (I just compile in specifically what I want, remove everything else, and don't bother with modules or initrds :) , so I haven't come across that issue. I did once try using 'genkernel', which resulted in a bloated pile of garbage that took 10 minutes to boot, with lots of errors. There's still certainly a lot of room for improvement... But, like you say, everyone has a different take on it. I'd like to hear from anyone who 's tried http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ lately and can compare and contrast. As would I :-) LFS sounds interesting, but I've never heard from anyone who's tried it... Sorry for the long reply. Cheers, Gareth
Re: gimp
About 6 months ago, I sat down to install gentoo using only the resources available on that site. Even ardent admirers like Nick agreed that this is impossible to do. The docs missed out too many really important things - just took them for granted. ( and pointing out alternative third party resources is missing the point ). I went to a Gentoo installfest, can't remember when but over a year ago, and got along just fine with only a copy of the install manual, kindly printed by Robert. I've installed a few times since then, and I've always found the documentation to be well written, easy to follow, and complete. It gives step by step instructions my mother could follow. There may be a lot of places one could fault Gentoo, but the documentation isn't one of them IMHO. Just my experience, I realise mileage varies :-) Cheers, Gareth
Laptop Recommendations
Hey all, I've decided I need a computer that's less powerful but more portable, so I'm planning to sell my desktops [1] and buy a second hand laptop. I really want to get one roughly around the order of 700mhz, 256MB ram... but it needs to work with linux of course. Specifically, I need it to have a built in 56K v.90 modem that works with linux. USB and ethernet are fairly essential too. DVD/CDRW would be nice, but I can live without. There are so many different models of laptop around, it's very hard to find good info on linux compatibility for a lot of them. I've tried linux-on-laptops and tuxmobil. What would folks around here recommend as good linux compatible laptops / brands? From googling around, and reading the archives, my brain is dying to jump to one assumption in particular --- IBM Thinkpad's are good, and pretty much always work with linux. Would that be fair to say, do you think? Are there any others around that are equally worthwhile? Cheers, Gareth [1] One is an Athlon (barton) 2600, 512MB ram, 120GB hard disk, TV card, CDRW, Geforce FX5200, 17 inch AOC flatscreen CRT. The other is a Celeron 700 (running happily at 1.05GHz with a decent cooler), 256MB ram, 20GB disk, TNT2, 17 inch Philips CRT. If anyone would like to let me know what they reckon they're worth I'd much appreciate it :-) Putting them in the BSE on friday and gotta think of a price to ask. 'course I'd consider offers from this list first, saves me having to install that other OS in order to sell them ;-)
Re: Laptop Recommendations
On 5/15/05, Rob Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Greetings, I could suggest what to avoid. I bought a new Fujitsu Siemens which has pathetic online support, a virtually worthless worldwide guarantee, very poor and limited bios setup facility and no updates in the 12 months since I bought it, so I shall be avoiding this make in future. It works well with SuSE but not so good with Ubuntu and not that well with Win XP. I always found IBM Thinkpads good. I wish I had paid a bit more and bought one. Thanks for the heads-up :) Although I am looking to buy something second hand, so not too concerned about support or guarantees, but I'll be sure to stay clear of the Fujitsu Siemens anyhow. I think I'll try to find a Thinkpad if I can. But it depends what I can find I guess... Cheers, Gareth
Re: Laptop Recommendations
On 5/15/05, Rob Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Greetings, I could suggest what to avoid. I bought a new Fujitsu Siemens which has pathetic online support, a virtually worthless worldwide guarantee, very poor and limited bios setup facility and no updates in the 12 months since I bought it, so I shall be avoiding this make in future. It works well with SuSE but not so good with Ubuntu and not that well with Win XP. I always found IBM Thinkpads good. I wish I had paid a bit more and bought one. Thanks for the heads-up :) Although I am looking to buy something second hand, so not too concerned about support or guarantees, but I'll be sure to stay clear of the Fujitsu Siemens anyhow. I think I'll try to find a Thinkpad if I can... Cheers, Gareth
Re: Laptop Recommendations
[oops, forgot to mention - beware the dreaded gmail reply-to. I'll copy these two messages back to the list in case they're of use to someone else in future...] On 5/15/05, Steve Holdoway [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm extremely happy with my tosh satellite 5205 - although you'll never get the firewire to work - the bios is well locked down and no good. Don't use the dialup so can't tell you if it works, and it has no wireless/bluetooth. Sound's stunning and the cd writer works fine. I'm working on an Asus wide screen at work - couldn't tell you the model. Unfortunately it's only in my spare (ho ho!) time, so I haven't got the wireless or bluetooth working yet. Everything else does though. On 5/16/05, Christopher Sawtell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I got a R40 ThinkPad off TradeMe about 7 months ago, and am very pleased with it. $1200 + freight from Auckland, and the escrow agent's fee. They are cheaper now. I'm very pleased with it, it runs Linux like a charm. It was either the T/P or an Apple OS/X + linux machine. I chose the T/P basically because IBM are into Linux. I've tossed out XP. The later models run cooler, but are more trouble to to get the kernel correct. There are drivers for the internal Winmodems. Thanks for your input Steve, Chris, and Abhinav :-) It depends what I can afford, but I think I'll definitely try to get a Thinkpad if I can. Cheers, Gareth
Re: Using one X server on one machine for two distros
xhost (on Gentoo) gives access control enabled, only authorized clients can connect I suppose I have to allow anybody to connect to make this work. How do I do this? Try saying xhost localhost to give all users on the local machine access to the X server. Alternatively replace localhost with another host you wish to give access to :) hth, Gareth
Re: Dual Network/Internet Connection - Advanced Routing
On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 11:52:54 +1200, Kim Robertson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am trying to do one internet connection and two private lans, but there is some crap ie viruses etc on one lan and I don't want that to come through easily. Therefore I want to have one commection for my private local lan, one for the unsecure lan and one for the internet. You know, that almost sounds like you only have *one* unsecured lan that you don't want to be able to contact the other one (except in circumstances you specify), but not vice versa. ie. you don't want your bad lan to be able to contact your good lan, but would you care if your good lan was able to contact the bad lan? (and they're both firewalled from the net). Because the way I read your description above, it sounds like a stock standard DMZ setup. You can do it out-of-the-box with IPCOP, just put your good lan on green, public internet on red, and your bad lan with the crap on orange, the DMZ. No? Just checkin the problem isn't simpler than people are assuming :-) Cheers, Gareth
Re: Ubuntu crashing
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 22:13:45 +1300, Andrew M. Packer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip But in extracting the CPU heatsink/fan assembly, I noted that the top of the CPU was dry. Is there supposed to be some sort of heat-conductive grease there? snip Almost certainly. Most heatsinks come with a kinda wax pad on them for the connection with the CPU. If yours has nothing at all, and is just bare metal, I would strongly suggest applying some sort of thermal interface compound. I use Arctic Silver myself. It's damn good, but you've gotta make sure the surfaces are clean before application - if the heatsink has already had a wax pad melted onto it you can forget it :) Cheers, Gareth
Re: Low-level cmd under Python
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 15:29:02 +1300, HappyEvilSlosh Or pointers for that matter. I understand that it's more you can't see them rather than they aren't there, hence the pointer exceptions java sometimes throws. Java lacks explicit pointers. You can't use them yourself, but they're used by the underlying mechanism (and called references I believe). So although this adds a little simplicity, the programmer is still required to understand the concept of pointers and how they behave. Which kinda defeats the purpose of concealing them IMO. Java has a few quirks which annoy anyone, but on the whole it ain't a bad language Gareth.
Re: Open Office Question
On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 16:11:18 +1300, Jason Greenwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You are right, I have 'unchecked' the link box and it still does not embed them properly as it should. =( I am using OO 1.1.3 on SUSE 9.2 Pro. Cheers all, Jason A .sxw file is really just a zip file with a bunch of files inside, including the embedded images. Mine has always worked fine. In a new directory, try: unzip my_document.sxw Mine contains a Pictures directory containing the .jpg files embedded in the document. Hope that information is in some way useful for troubleshooting =) Cheers, Gareth
Re: 64Mb RAM
On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 09:25:56 +1300, Nick Rout [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 09:16:02 +1300 Douglas Royds [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a colleague who wants to put Linux on a laptop with 64Mb of RAM. Is this enough for a normal distribution such as Ubuntu or Suse, running Gnome or KDE, or will he need to look at one of the light-weight distributions? Both KDE and gnome are a little bloated for 64M RAM IMHO. But the solution, again IMHO, is not really to do with the distro, more the choice of desktop. SuSE's installer is probably configurable enough to exclude kde from the install and use something else. icewm is reportedly nice. I used to recommend blackbox / fluxbox for light setups, but I have to say XFCE 4 (version 4 mind you, not earlier ones) rocks. It's got all the features I love without the bloat. I like it so much I've ditched KDE for it on my good (athlon 2600+) machine, ever since I heard about it on this list :) Well worth a look. My 2c... Cheers, Gareth
Re: Windows software on Linux
On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 17:09:18 +1300, Lindsay [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Informed by a friend, there is/are programs that allow Linux users to use some Windows based software on thier systems. I have produced software in Visual Basic that I would like to be able to run on Linux if I can. Does Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty) have such software somewhere on it please? No idea if Ubuntu will have it or not, but look for something called wine. http://www.winehq.org/ It'll only run some things (so cross your fingers ;) and you may have to muck around with it, but it's IMHO the best there is at the moment... Cheers, Gareth
Re: More virtual cmd sessions
On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 18:27:57 +1300, Robert Himmelmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: clip Is it possible to set graphical sessions to 10-12 and the rest to text-sessions? take a look in /etc/inittab :)
Re: Apache 2 (old thread)
mv Fred\ Bloggs.htm fredbloggs.html the backslash character \ tells the shell that the next character is taken literally, not as the command line delimiter. That worked - thanks Nick It's worth noting that if you don't know which characters need to be escaped in a long filename (or you just can't be bothered :) the bash command auto-completion can also auto-complete filenames, and should do this for you. Just enter enough of the filename to be unique, hit your tab key, and bash will fill in the rest, including escape characters. Cheers, Gareth
Publicity for minor open source apps
Suppose I have written a small chat application for websites and wish to release it under the GPL as open source. I grab a sourceforge page for my project (http://sdesk.sourceforge.net/ if anyone's interested :) and post the code up, no problems. But now what? The whole exercise is fairly pointless if nobody can find it :) Is there anywhere I should register my project so that people who may be interested can find out about it? One obvious place that springs to mind is freshmeat.net (and ask google to spider it, of course) ... are there any others that you guys use? Cheers, Gareth
Re: Publicity for minor open source apps
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 19:53:16 +1300 (NZDT), Derek Smithies [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Gareth, I think you have taken the right approach. Mention it on some maillists, and let people have a look at it. I thought it looked interesting, and gave the link to two colleagues. One wrote back: I will use it in our webshop. Wanted to replace the flash shit there that crashes during talks for a long time:) thx for the tip oh cool :) thanks Derek. If they do use it I wonder if you could let me know the URL of their site, I'd love to see it in the wild, hehe. I have yet to work out what the other bit of software is The other bit of software? *confused look* Cheers, Gareth ps. I hope mine doesn't crash during talks for a long time, lol! I haven't exactly done any extensive testing yet - but I guess that's why it's beta, I'm hoping to get some bug reports / feature requests if someone finds it useful...
Re: Ubuntu laptop network no go
Robert, Have you tried assigning the interface an IP manually, using ifconfig, like so: # ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.2 and seeing if it then has one? Does doing this give you any error messages? And could you please post the output of ifconfig :) (or ifconfig eth0 if eth0 isn't up... seems kinda weird that it could be, if it doesn't have an IP?)... Cheers, Gareth [ps. beware gmail reply-to]
Re: Issues with NVidia GForce FX 5600
On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 16:33:14 +1300, Michael JasonSmith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Once hyperthreading is disabled the only major difference I can think of is the model of the GPU. Maybe Volker is right and the GPU is the problem. Thoughts? In case you're interested in a comparison, I actually have an FX 5200 here in my Athlon 2600+ box. ~$ glxgears 11389 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2277.800 FPS 544 does sound rather low. I read point 3 at the bottom of your initial post, but still feel compelled to ask... have you got anything besides glxgears on which to run a benchmark? A 3D game perhaps? (I'm assuming you had a reason for replacing your old GF2MX card ;) what's the real performance like, for the purpose for which you want it? worse than the old card? Cheers, Gareth
Re: suse
Thanks very much to everyone who replied to this thread, and for the kind offers to supply copies :-) I have passed all your helpful comments and tips on to my friend. In the meantime it seems he has come across www.copyleft.co.nz and decided to order himself a DVD from there, seeing as it's not expensive - so it looks like he's getting it off Philip anyway, LOL. Now he just has to go and get himself a DVD drive ;-) Cheers, Gareth
suse
Hey all, I have a friend who just messed over his gentoo install rather badly. Putting gentoo zealotry aside for the moment, he's looking to install a different (gasp) distribution... Anyway, he's quite keen to have his auto* tools, which puts MDK out of the question ;) I told him that suse has quite a good reputation around here (and I'd quite like to take a peek at it myself ;) so maybe he should consider that. The problem is, suse personal seems to be only a single CD. Are there more CDs that one can legitimately obtain / distribute free-of-charge? If so, is there anyone on the list who'd swap us for some blanks? :) Cheers, Gareth ps. beware gmail reply-to
Re: suse
On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 20:10:52 +1300, Nick Rout [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: do the ftp. sorry Nick, could you be a little more verbose please? I'm not sure I follow... I think you're suggesting I go find suse's ftp site, or track down a local mirror, and discover which CDs I can download from there? I'm on a 56K modem, but I guess it's worth giving it a whirl... lol. Cheers, Gareth
Re: Total beginner
On Sun, 09 Jan 2005 19:34:33 +1300 (NZDT), Derek Smithies [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Adding to the problem is if you want 3d hardware acceleration to work. Some distros will not get the optimum out of your video card. Given that cards such as Nvidia require proprietary drivers for 3d hardware acceleration, and with gentoo one compiles everything from source, I do not see how gentoo will give you 3d hardware acceleration. [I'm no zealot... but how can I let that go past...] # emerge nvidia-glx make coffee play doom 3. I've used many other distributions in the past, and it's never just worked like that before :) Admittedly I haven't tried suse or ubuntu yet. In short, most ebuilds do compile stuff from source, yes. But they don't _have_ to. There are some that simply download and install binaries. It really is a very versatile system... Although I do agree it'd be a bit rough on a newbie. It depends how much he wants to learn about his system. And how quickly Cheers, Gareth
Re: cdrom mount problem
On 14 Nov 2004 22:41:00 +1300, Rowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, 2004-11-14 at 18:13, Gareth Williams wrote: ah, you mean when you press the eject button the tray doesn't come out? Some random ideas come to mind... (in no particular order) No - they do open when I push eject. When I go into 'file:/mnt' to look at the drives their properties both say Locked Directory and both icons have little padlocks attached to them. Both drives work ok in WindowsXP so power or communication is not a problem. aha, ok, forget the rest of what I said, I misunderstood the problem :) it seems that you don't have permission to access the directories the drives get mounted on. say one of the is /mnt/cd, try this: su # enter your password to become root mount /mnt/cd # manually mount the cd filesystem ls /mnt/cd # you should see the contents of the cd or your mount command may need to specify the device. pick / make an empty dir, and do (as root): mount /dev/cdrom /path/to/directory/to/mount/on in any case, if you can successfully mount as root, then all that's wrong is your user doesn't have permission to access the directories in /mnt that the cd drives get mounted on. again, assuming the directory is /mnt/cd (replace with whatever it's actually called, of course) try: su # become root chmod a+rx /mnt/cd # set read and enter permissions on the dir now go look at it as your normal user (however you normally do) and see if the padlocks are still there? Cheers, Gareth [warning: gmail reply-to set]
Re: cdrom mount problem
On Sun, 14 Nov 2004 11:25:34 +1300, Rowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: clip Anyway, I am unable to get either of my rom drives to play music or read any cds, data or music, that I put in. I have them both as supermount. Can you post the results of the following commands (as root) please: ls /dev/cdrom* -ld cat /etc/fstab if you have a /dev/cdrom or /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 or such like, try manually mounting it: mkdir /mnt/cd # create a new dir. skip this and use one that already exists if you prefer mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cd if that succeeds, you're looking good. if not, please post the error it reports. Cheers, Gareth
Re: cdrom mount problem
On Sun, 14 Nov 2004 17:29:11 +1300, Rowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: With reference to my query of this morning I have noticed that both rom drives appear to be locked, making them inaccessable Is this possible and how do I unlock them ? ah, you mean when you press the eject button the tray doesn't come out? Some random ideas come to mind... (in no particular order) Perhaps you have it already mounted... try: df and see if you can see it in there. you haven't had the case off recently? ide ribbon around the wrong way perhaps, or drive unpowered? have you ever needed hdx=ide-scsi in your boot options? and if so, do you currently have it? can you open the tray before the computer is booted? (say while you're in the bios screen, or at your bootloader prompt). Cheers, Gareth [warning: gmail reply-to set]
Re: Computer names, was RE: Opinions re choice of CPU; marginally on topic
Sadly I have to admit... luke, leia, kenobi, vader, chewie. However, by far the coolest naming system I've heard of (and one I think mentioned briefly in the RFC Michael posted) is names of elements. This has the two advantages, besides having cool sounding names - the name space is fairly big, so you won't run out, and each element corresponds neatly to a number. Call 192.168.1.1 hydrogen (maybe even give it h as well), 192.168.1.2 heilium (he), 192.168.1.3 lithium (li), etc etc. This might be handy if you want to get to carbon, for example, but your nameserver is down for whatever reason. If you have a periodic table handy (like, say, in your head ;) then you'll know it's the machine with 192.168.1.6. Cheers, Gareth
Re: A marginal topic
On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 23:42:59 +1300, Ralph Stoker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: clip What should I backup (apart from my personal data) bear in mind I am limited to CD data storage capacity. It's always handy to keep a backup of your /etc tree :) should it come to reinstallation, you'll be glad of it. Other than that... and your email directory obviously (~/Mail probably?), you might want to backup your personal settings for your desktop environment - I use KDE, so I backup my ~/.kde3.1 directory. Cheers, Gareth ps. as usual, watch the gmail reply-to, sorry :)
Re: Ubuntu problem...
On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 20:47:48 +1300, eBhakta [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Yes, it's Debian based... At what stage of the boot process should ctrl-alt-F1 be applied? Did get to the cursor, and typed in apt-get... but it wouldn't recognise the command. Serious newbie stuff... :$ oops, I kinda assumed you already knew about apt-get. You will need to be root to run that command. type 'su', then enter your root password, then try it again. you might also like to read 'man apt-get'. if you intend to use a debian based system you'll need to at some point :) try others suggestions before removing / reinstalling KDE, as even this is quite drastic and likely unnecessary. As Nick says, it would help a lot if we knew _which_ KDE package(s) you installed that broke it? perhaps you could just try uninstalling those... Thanks for the (gmail) warning... ;) And thanks for the help. :) you're welcome. I decided to join in once you started posting on-topic (linux) details and not flamebait, despite how tempting the former situation was. Let's keep to talking about Linux :) Cheers, Gareth
Re: Ubuntu problem...
So, how to get a console? Thanks for the input... ;) As I previously posted, press CTRL-ALT-F1. does this not work for you? you will need to login after you have done so. You may wish to use an xterm actually - a console within X (the window system), so you can execute things like kdeinit that other posters have suggested (I doubt this runs from a text console?). So you can get a graphical login screen? Do you have any options for what to use when you login? Most systems provide a failsafe option which will start you with an xterm and nothing else. Please select this option and log in, if you have it. Note that you will need your mouse over the xterm window to be able to type in it. Now, please try: kdeinit [and tell us if it works / what it says] startkde Cheers, Gareth
Re: Ubuntu problem...
So your system does in fact boot up? It appears you have simply stuffed up KDE. Can you get a text console login? (press ctrl-alt-F1). You might want to try removing your KDE packages and reinstalling them with apt-get (unbuntu is debian based isn't it?). Cheers, Gareth ps. beware the gmail reply-to. sorry everyone :)
Re: Perl upgrade question...
On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 12:10:08 +1300, Steve Brorens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, I do know that moving to a 'meta-distribution' like Gentoo would solve this problem, but I'm a bit hazy on how I might remotely upgrade a stack of sites from RH9 to Gentoo over ssh :-) FWIW wget your stage tarball, untar it onto a new partition, chroot to it, then follow installation guidelines in the usual way. Build your kernel, make sure you have sshd installed and configured how you like (and loading on boot), point your bootloader at gentoo as your default boot option, /sbin/reboot, and pray :) I wouldn't do it, lol. Cheers, Gareth
Re: Newbie Advice
On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:45:56 +1300, Fisher, Robert (FXNZ CHC) Gareth might disagree 'cos I think he runs a minimalist Gentoo laptop on similar specs. Indeed. A P166 with 32MB of ram should go just fine with a light window manager :) When I started using linux this was a relatively good machine (I had a P200 which cost around the $4k mark). In recent years things like KDE have gained significat bloat, but all the light window managers still work just fine. I would strongly recommend fluxbox or blackbox. Use opera instead of mozilla (or links :) , abiword instead of OO Writer, slypheed or mutt instead of kmail/evolution. flamesuit on... vi instead of emacs ;) For a distribution I'd suggest going with Debian. Gentoo is nice and all, but it helps if you have a faster machine you can run distccd on :) Cheers, Gareth
RE: 1st CLUG AGM
On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 19:38:55 +1300, Robert Fisher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 18:25, Nick Rout wrote: Or we just ignore Rik, vote for a committee and move on to the main course, which is linux support and encouragement. I would like to table a motion: That the loose grouping of people known as the Canterbury Linux Users Group remain as such with no rules other than sharing a common interest in using, supporting and encouraging Linux and Open Source software and further, that all decisions be made based on any apparent shared but not necessarily unanimous reasoning. If few people share the sentiments of my motion then I withdraw it. If many of you share my sentiments then I also withdraw it. (LOL) Shared. I have read the archive thread Nick refers to, and would like to state that I personally haven't attended a meeting in quite some time, but this is in no way due to the orgisational structure of CLUG (or lack thereof), or a reflection on the current committee. I simply don't get time, or don't get around to it (and thus end up mostly lurking on the list ;) . But I like it the way it is. Can I just ask one thing though? Please avoid use of the word motion. It can tend to give people the wrong idea :) For that matter, I think AGM is a little misleading too. Some people take the term far more seriously than just a loose phrase for meeting to organise stuff. I would quite like to come to this next meeting if I can. However, if it is going to be full of people moving motions to amend motions and taking minutes of said motions, I think I'll be in the vote with my feet camp :) As far as a change in structure goes, if it ain't broken, don't fix it. Perhaps we could have a quick show of hands - who besides Rik thinks anything is broken at the moment? CLUG seems to be fine to me - the mailing list is still up, and still populated with nice friendly people discussing Linux. If some people from the mailing list arrange meetings in meatspace (for want of a better term, sorry :) and not as many people turn up as used to: (a) is this an indication of anything at all? (b) if those who do make it enjoy their evening, is it in any way less successful than a larger meeting? Cheers, Gareth
Re: Newbie Advice
On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 17:59:00 +1300, Jim Cheetham [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: clip (The Gentoo world would say emerge apache, but your machine won't have the guts to do much compiling. Gentoo has a binary option, rather than a source option ... but I don't know anything about that) Basically you get a release set of prebuilt binaries and a portage snapshot which matches it. Henceforward you should not do an emerge sync (like apt-get update) if you still wish to use said binaries. And binary releases are not that frequent. i.e. if you want an up-to-date system, using binaries is pretty much out of the question. I think they're really just intended to be used to get your system up and running quickly initially, so you can have something to use while you're compiling the latest and greatest in the background ;) I didn't use them when I installed on my P166 - but like I said in another post, I have distccd running on another, more powerful machine (to assist with compiling). Things you should install early on to have a friendly command-line toolset would be (more suggestions welcome) ;- screen. and your editor of choice, of course :) Cheers, Gareth
Re: mount: error message
Robert Fisher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /devsda4 or too many mounted filesystems The first place you want to look is /etc/fstab. You might have a broken entry in there.. ? Also, I noticed in the quote above, it's called /devsda4 - I presume you typed that in, not cut/paste the error? (ie. it's a typo) If you don't know exactly how /etc/fstab should look, post it :) Cheers, Gareth
Re: Fwd: mount: error message
Robert Fisher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Everything seems to work even though I get the error message . . . beast root # mount -t ext3 -o sb=16 /dev/sda4 /mnt/share/ mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda4, or too many mounted file systems beast root # mount -t ext3 -o sb=32 /dev/sda4 /mnt/share/ mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda4, or too many mounted file systems So, if I get this right, /mnt/share isn't currently mounted (df will tell you), you give the above command (either) and get the error message... then /mnt/share IS mounted and accessible?? Earlier on in the thread you said everything works (depsite the error message). What exactly do you mean? What happens if you just try a mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/share ? A linux partition definitely exists on /dev/sda4? (fdisk -l) You've made a filesystem on it? (mkfs.ext3) Do you have data on there that you don't wish to lose? If not, you could try running mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda4 (careful with this, pause and think 2 seconds before pressing enter :) Then, once mkfs completely successfully, immediately try mounting it. If that doesn't work, I'd be getting worried :) Cheers, Gareth
Re: ipcop 1.4.0 released
Wahoo. Thank you Nick :-) I'm grabbing the torrent right now...
Re: Fwd: mount: error message
On Sat, 2 Oct 2004 10:38:30 +1200, Robert Fisher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 10:20, Gareth Williams wrote: I am not suggesting that it is a faulty disk. I am interested to know if you can actually mount /dev/sda4, that is all. The errors above look like fatal errors to me - that is to say, they seem to strongly suggest that the mount command failed, resulting in a still un-mounted /dev/sda4. How, then, do you come to the state in which /dev/sda4 IS mounted? (which I presume you must, in order to use the partition). Sorry Gareth, I thought I was replying to the list earlier. Buggered if I know how it works after the error but it does. LOL. I thought I was too! I didn't realise this was off-list until just now. damn gmail. I wish I could un-set that reply-to: header. Sending this to the list now, to get it back on-list. Um, can I ask how you know it's working? Could you please do the following commands directly after boot and post the output: # df # mount /dev/sda4 /home/share # df I have my suspicions that it isn't mounting, and anything you write to /home/share is in fact being written inside that directory on the root filesystem. Cheers, Gareth
Re: Fwd: mount: error message
On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 12:59:01 +1200, Christopher Sawtell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Be sure to check that you have either got the kernel module for the filesystem loaded, or the driver compiled into the kernel? [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ $ zcat /proc/config.gz | egrep -i 'reiser|ext3' # CONFIG_EXT3_FS is not set CONFIG_REISERFS_FS=y # CONFIG_REISERFS_CHECK is not set CONFIG_REISERFS_PROC_INFO=y # CONFIG_REISERFS_FS_XATTR is not set aha, good thinking. But /proc/config.gz will only exist if you have the option for it compiled into your kernel also :) Robert is using Gentoo, I think? So he's likely to have kernel sources still lying around - substitute cat /usr/src/linux/.config for zcat /proc/config.gz in the above command if /proc/config.gz doesn't exist on your system Robert.
Re: 1280x1024 framebuffer
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:25:24 +1200, Nick Rout [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: thats very odd, because fb's are so common these days. frankly i've never used a combination of framebuffer and lilo, i am a grubby myself. i'm sure i've seen append=vga=788 in lilo configs before though. clip try just using: vga = 788 directly in the lilo config file. Works for me :-) Cheers, Gareth
Re: Right way to compile Debian packages?
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:32:00 +1200, Jim Cheetham [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Paul William wrote: I'll be caught out when an upgrade happens, won't I? Not as long as your package version does not conflict with Debian packages i.e. create a package with the version x.ab-zy_jim such as 3.36-11_jim. Than I'll be caught out when a security upgrade comes along, and I don't get the new patch, eh? So keep an eye on debian-security-announce and every time there's a security upgrade, you build yourself a new package. Better than upgrading to their package and having your mysql support evaporate while the package is in use ;-) I hate to echo others, but it really is a pity you're not using Gentoo for this. You'd probably just have to set the appropriate mysql USE flag and forget about it forever more ;-) Cheers, Gareth
Re: Linux on laptops
On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 14:48, Douglas Royds wrote: Key buying criteria for me would now be: 1. Price (as always) 2. Has anyone published a success-with-this-laptop page (see www.linux-on-laptops.com, and do a general Google search)? Will the modem work? Will the ACPI (power management) work? What about built-in 802.11? 3. Some confidence in the brand - reviews, talking to other victims. 4. Battery life I would highly recommend a Dell Latitude XPi CD ;-) Ok, so it's a P166 with 32MB of ram, but it does the job (and for a good 2 hours without recharging). And I didn't pay too much for it, thus satisfying condition 1 ;-) Running fluxbox, on gentoo. Performance is not too shabby (seriously :) - with gaim / bitchx / xterm / xclock (now I'm getting desperate :) open, it'll still open, say, slypheed, in about 4 or 5 seconds. Email (slypheed) / web browsing (links) / IM / programming / document editing (latex or abiword), it's all very useable really. I just try not to 'emerge -u world' too often ;-) Seriously, if you don't want to play games (and laptops suck for games anyway, unless as Nick says you get a decent graphics card in it :) then think about what it is you really need it for. If price is a factor, and you only want to do simple desktop tasks on it, you can pick up secondhand laptops on trademe with at least double my specs for petty cash these days. Worth considering maybe. Do you _really_ need to run KDE? :) Cheers, Gareth
Re: nvidia-settings
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 11:50, Luuk Paulussen wrote: Although, the guy who made the post has only made one post on the forum, so I wouldn't put to much faith in him. I would expect the score to be much higher... On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 23:17:38 +, Caleb Sawtell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 22:19, Luuk Paulussen wrote: This link shows somebody getting similar speeds (same card) with a reply that the result is fine. http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=ad13ddb1c8153c306463d6 2b76 a97665p=339920#post339920 That means I was totaly ripped off with this card :'( snip Caleb, what are the spec's of your machine? Is it possible that the frame rate you're getting is limited by something else, like CPU speed? And what size is your glxgears window? Perhaps your version starts with a different default resolution to people you're comparing to? For high frame rates and high performance cards, glxgears probably isn't an appropriate benchmark :-) I'm not familiar with your card, but it probably has a whole bunch of features that glxgears doesn't take advantage of, even if it's raw polygon-drawing-speed isn't quite up there. A more appropriate benchmark might be to use something like Quake 3 (if you have it) in timedemo mode to test your FPS. Cheers, Gareth
Re: console via usb
On Mon, 24 May 2004 19:37, Michael wrote: There wasn't a follow-up to this thread that gave a yes or no. I'm interested to know whether anybody has ever got this working. I think it is possible since the kernel supports console over serial and usb-to-serial adapters are cheap and easy to use. Out of interest, does this usb-to-serial adapter you speak of: a) help your serial device (eg. mouse) fake being a usb device, OR b) help your usb port fake being a serial port ? There have been several fine explanations so far which have left me with the distinct impression there are some fundamental reasons why it wouldn't work. Although I admit, it would be cool ;-) Cheers, Gareth At 06:52 p.m. 18/05/2004 +1200, you wrote: Hey all, Anyone know if you can get a 'Serial' Console using usb instead of a serial port? I don't really care about having a console at boot up but it would be a bonus. The only documentation I can find is about using the serial port. Cheers Paul
Re: Gentoo tip - emerge --ask and PORTAGE_NICENESS
On Tue, 18 May 2004 10:57, Christopher Sawtell wrote: On Tuesday 18 May 2004 10:16, Nick Rout wrote: Today 10:16:39 Occasional tips as a follow up to the installs we did on Saturday. It worries me somewhat that other people might be getting upset by all our Gentoo oriented traffic on the CLUG list. While it's not overtly Off Topic it's probably not particularly On Topic or very interesting to many folks subscribed. Is it time for the Gentooters to set up something else? I vote no :-) While I don't post much on this list these days (not sure why, heh), I do still lurk and read pretty much everything. Nick's emerge --ask tip is a good example of why. ie. I find I pick up useful / interesting stuff from time to time. Talking about Gentoo Linux on a Linux mailing list is about as on-topic as you can get IMHO. Just about every topic discussed isn't going to interest everyone here. But it does interest at least someone else apart from you three / four :-) Cheers, Gareth
Re: How to set default internet connection manually?
On Sat, 24 Apr 2004 18:53, Christopher Sawtell wrote: The IPCop needs 32 meg, but freesco runs in much less. My IPCop (1.3) machine has 16MB and runs fine. I recall that's all I needed for the installation too. Cheers, Gareth
Re: Gnomemeeting to go to QT -- QT Demo...
On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 02:21, anton wrote: Hey, I might not agree with Don on everything but here I've got to put in a word. I am sick of that real programmer BS. It is just an excuse for people who have nothing else in their lives. Sure, I want to be able to programme only using vi and gcc but I am certain that there are things that people just do better and faster in a more inclusive environment. Certainly the vast majority of programmers. Why should not Linux be the platform of the people - real people - instead of that of some elite group of geek-fascists whose heads are in a dark and smelly place... my thoughts Anton Maybe because those geek-fascists (aka real programmers) are the people who wrote the system, and wrote the tools. Tools that _they_ would want to use. Which is sensible (from their point of view), no? If these others (the real people you speak of) who like flashy gui tools really are real programmers, perhaps they'll write their own tools ;-)
Re: Politics
One more thing to do when installing linux for someone - point them somewhere where newbies can get ongoing support from the community (ie. this list :-)
Re: usind dd to clone hard drive
On Fri, 26 Mar 2004 08:43, Christopher Sawtell wrote: On Fri, 26 Mar 2004 07:37, Paul William wrote: Hi all, Is a simple dd: dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdx capable of 'cloning' hdc into hdx? if the two devices are identical, unconditionally, yes. if hdx is smaller than hdc, then effectively no. if hdx is larger than hdc, then yes, and you then have the opportunity to adjust the partitions after copying. imho, it's a better idea to partition the destination disk appropriately and do file copies of each partition using the cp utility in recursive mode. While this method will take longer it has the side benefit that any fragmented files will the made contiguous. Aha, excellent. I never thought of that benefit (getting rid of fragmentation) of using cp. Of course to do that you then need to create partitions again / create filesystems, copy files (ensuring you keep ownership / permissions intact etc), reinstall your bootloader... it can be a pain. Imaging the disk with dd is faster and simpler. I think I'll still go with that unless it's severely fragmented. Thanks for this Christopher, you answered my question too (which I think was pretty much the same question, doh. Need more coffee...). I now think I'll just extend the last partition to fill up the disk, instead of creating a new one. If I delete the entry for the last partition on the disk, using fdisk, and then create a new one that starts at the same place but ends at the end of the disk, all should be good I think :-) fingers crossed (hey, if it breaks anything I can always just 'dd' the image back again, hehe). Cheers, Gareth
Re: /bin/mail with attachment
On Thu, 04 Mar 2004 11:19, Mike Beattie wrote: On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 11:09:24AM +1300, Michael JasonSmith wrote: Program used to encode binary data as ASCII. Uuencode was originally used with uucp to transfer binary files over serial lines which did not preserve the top bit of characters but is now used for sending binary files by e-mail and posting to Usenet newsgroups etc. The program uudecode reverses the effect of uuencode, recreating the original binary file exactly. Right, and we'd already established that uuencode would be what Nick was after. i.e., go and look at who I replied to - someone else beat me to the same conclusion. - I wasn't asking a question. I think Michael was just posting a little trivia for those of us who didn't know, as he seems inclined to do ;-) I found it interesting :-)
Re: IPCop or Mandrake Network Firewall
On Wed, 25 Feb 2004 23:31, David Taylor wrote: [snip] An alternative that looks promising is the Netboz firewall. It runs from the CD and loads config from floppy, there is a hack to load onto a hard drive, but it is made to run from a CD. That way there is no media that can be written to if the box gets owned. The theory is, you just turn it off and on again. I have not tried it, but it looked good. You switch it off, back on again... and it just gets 0wn3d again ;-) The attacker just repeats what they did last boot, no? My point: how do you fix security vulnerabilities when they are discovered / patched? You burn a new CD every time? Most people won't bother. Then you'd also need to reboot (off the new CDR) every time, wouldn't you? Seems a shame... I think I'll stick with IPCOP myself because it's _dead_simple_ to keep up to date with patches. One click and it's done, and I only need to reboot it for kernel patches and the like. It takes up probably about 30 seconds of my time a month keeping it up to date :-) And assuming you back your config up to floppy, if you ever need to reformat / reinstall, it'll only take you marginally longer than a reboot anyway ;-) Cheers, Gareth
Re: CONNECTING TO INTERNET
i thnk yr kybrd is brkn sam. i suggest u rip yr capslock key off and utilise the 'shift' key instead 2 strategically place your capital leters where thay r needed most, such as at the beginning of sentences :) Also, kernel is spelt with an 'e'. Sorry I'm in a pedantic mood, no harm intended :-) And I'm top posting. Gah. Someone shoot me ;-) About the modem though, could you please post details again for those of us who missed them the first time. Specifically, what kind of modem is it? Brand? Chipset? Do you have drivers installed for it yet? (and if so, do you know they are working? can you start something like 'minicom' and talk to the modem, for example?). If you just need an app to dial the 'net, I find 'kppp' is good on RedHat systems. Straightforward to enter your ISP details, password etc, and then dial away :) But that's assuming you already have the modem set up and ready to go, with an appropriate device in /dev (which I suspect you may not). Hope this helps. Good luck. Cheers, Gareth On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 11:46, stm23 wrote: hi, thanx paul, col, roger, barry etc - i've got the shared drive now set up - yr suggestions were alot easier than my plan to reinstall the kernal! now that i've got the touchpad shared drive setup, all i need now is to get internet access. i've used the internet configuration wizard (from the system tools menu) to create a new modem connection (selecting a provider), but i'm unsure how to now connect to the internet. what programs can i use to dialup connect? (i only have the basic redhat programs installed, ie mozilla) thanx, sam specs: dell inspiron 600m 1.4 mobile pentium 521MB 56 internal modem
Re: CLUG meetings: A future or not
My $0.02 - As things currently stand we have a committee who primarily look after the small amount of money CLUG* has aquired, and the avenues through which that money is spent / aquired (read: meetings, workshops, installfests). This a valuable role (espeically as far as money is concerned, heh). And helpers need rounding up for installfests, speakers need rounding up for meetings, etc etc. But the group is really the mailing list. This is where people come for help, this is where decisions are usually made, this is where most discussions happen. Any off list activities are really just a semi-organised gathering of like minded people, who organised something and invited people via a common mailing list. With the exception of the funds (which the committee looks after), that's all there is really. And that's all we need. Why do we need a formal group (aka committee) organising things like official dinners / dinner meetings? If people on the list want to meet others and eat food, they don't need any kind of structure to do so. Someone (let's say Nick, for example ;-) decides they want to organise a small get together at a local restraunt, and posts an open invitation to all list members. Those who wish to join the fun do so, those who can't make it (like me, regrettably), or who can't afford it (me also, heh ;-) don't. Now, somebody tell me what is wrong with that system. It works. - worked (and from the sounds of it everyone had a good time :-) I would like to see the committee stick to their current role of organising meetings and installfests. Input from people on list as to the content of these (do we need more speakers? more workshops? etc) is of course a good thing. But anything additional that can be left on an ad-hoc basis (such as dinners) should be IMHO. Basically - if you want an activity, organise it yourself, and post an invitation to others on the mailing list.** I don't think we need an AGM, unless any of those on the committee feel they wish to step down, in which case we will need to elect replacements (but even that can be done on-list). Things are running pretty well by themselves. In any case, I move a pre-emptive motion that nobody move any motions, counter-motions, motions to append motions, or any other such silliness, should an AGM be held this year :-) :-) Sorry for the long post. Cheers, Gareth * there is no CLUG ;-) ** this goes for forming random community trusts and the like too ;-)
Re: CLUG meetings: A future or not
On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 08:48, Fisher, Robert (FXNZ CHC) wrote: Well done Nick. (That was just what I was going to say) Rob Well done Nick, that was just what I was _trying_ to say, hehe! Especially the first paragraph. Heartily agree with all of it :-) Cheers, Gareth -Original Message- From: Nick Rout [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, 8 February 2004 11:15 p.m. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: CLUG meetings: A future or not I have been giving all this a bit of thought. There is nothing to stop any group of like minded people forming a Trust, or an Incorporated Society. It may or may not be called the Canterbury/Christchurch Linux Users Group Incorporated, but one would hope a new idea had a new name, so as to avoid confucion with the froup of people who subscribe to this list, a subset of whom occasionally meet for various technical and social purposes. There must be a point to it, otherwise it will fall over as quick as look at you. The points I can take from the few people who have posted is: Technical meetings, be they installfests, fixits, talks etc are liked by many people, some people learn better face to face or in a lecture scenario. Some people, especially newbies who are so new they don't know their root from their / don't know where to start describing their problem, some people just like the mixed social/technical aspect of getting in the same room with a bunch of geeks and their hardware. Which brings us to the second general consensus (as I see it), namely that the social aspects are welcomed. OK some cannot afford dinner, some cannot get into a pub, but there can be events for everyone on the social calendar Neither of those aims require any further structure. They are well catered for already. The third thing I see being called for is involvement in promoting linux in a wider context, eg Trevor's post (and he wasn't the only one). Some have pointed out that there is a bit of community money out there that could be applied for etc. There have been suggestions of an expo type of show, ie show off to the public what linux can do - no installs, just a bunch of demos and maybe talks. Theres also room for more targetted promotions - eg school teachers - produce a reference LTSP site and give guided tours to school principals/BOT's. This type of thing takes money to do properly. An expo would almost require a fulltime worker for a period of time. It requires promotion, advertising, budgets etc. It would basically, IMHO, require a more formal structure to give some accountability etc. personally I would have to limit my involvement in something like that as I have a completely unrelated business to run, but i'd still like to have some involvement. This talk of money and promotion to actual buyers (as opposed to fiddlers with their own boxes to run) begs the question of where are the commercial linux people in all of this? We all know that there are several businesses in ChCh producing Open Source software. You don't see a lot of them on this list any more, perhaps they are lurking. But if there are schools and businesses to sell hardware, software and services to, the commercial guys should be there putting money in and promoting their services. Another way of looking at it is, picture an expo with a great LTSP demo. Teachers are impressed. Where can we get one? - there is no point in saying www.ltsp.org. You need to be able to refer to people on the ground. Anyway its late. My point is that most of the desires expressed are catered for at present, but that heavy duty promotion requires a lot of time money and effort. Thats not to say it shouldn't be done, we just need to think carefully about it before this group, or some offshoot or subset of it, goes down that line in a big way. I hope I get some reactions, and the discussion continues. On Sun, 08 Feb 2004 22:16:41+1300 Gareth Williams[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My $0.02 - As things currently stand we have a committee who primarily look after the small amount of money CLUG* has aquired, and the avenues through which that money is spent / aquired (read: meetings, workshops, installfests). This a valuable role (espeically as far as money is concerned, heh). And helpers need rounding up for installfests, speakers need rounding up for meetings, etc etc. But the group is really the mailing list. This is where people come for help, this is where decisions are usually made, this is where most discussions happen. Any off list activities are really just a semi-organised gathering of like minded people, who organised something and invited people via a common mailing list. With the exception of the funds (which the committee looks after), that's all there is really. And that's all we need. Why do we need a formal group (aka committee) organising things like official dinners / dinner meetings? If people
Re: Dinner was great
imho, we _DO_ need to have an AGM to attempt to decide whether we want the CLUG to become a formal entity, or revert to a strictly mailing-list affair, or indeed something in between, i.e. carry on as we are. Well, if people want to be all formal and move motions and what have you, I doubt I shall attend, that's just no fun :-P However I will (hopefully be able to) continue to read and post on this fine mailing list, without belonging to or participating in such an organisation. So you have two sets of people - one set who belong to / participate in this formal organisation, who are a subset of the set of people who read and post to this mailing list. (perhaps not strictly, there may be others, but for all intents and purposes). Even if the only difference between the two sets is myself ;-) Now, seeing as the mailing list people (the superset) currently seem to call themselves CLUG, I think it would be sensible for the formal organisation to call themselves something else, to avoid confusion. Hopefully I'm not reiterating what Nick said too much here. I just want to ask, why do we need a CLUG AGM for that? If there are people around who want to form such an organisation, they should organise it. Let them post details on the list, and maybe some of us will be convinced to join them (I was just using myself as an example up there, I might actually be quite interested in such an idea). Or you could do this as a clug thing, have an AGM, convert CLUG to some kind of more formal organisation / community trust or whatever -- I'll just say I'm a member of the linux users mailing list instead :-) I hope I make my point. CLUG only exists as a name in our heads, and a small amount of funds (it's only asset I believe?). The official CLUG committee should primarily manage that asset and the activites related to it. Beyond that it's all just playing with names. Cheers, Gareth
Re: Getting Debian
My point here is, restricted as I was, how was I supposed to have obtained the knowledge, possibly through gui help or cli info/man, on adjusting the screen resolution and on readjusting the mouse drivers. Both are configured in your XF86Config file. Had you not always relied on a gui to set it up for you, you would already have obtained the knowledge :-) My point is just that GUIs are great if all you want to do is _use_ a system (and hey, most people just want to get useful work done and not have to worry about configuring the system. Mandrake is usually pretty damn good for this :-). But if you want to _learn_ about a system (eg. to have a chance of fixing it yourself if something goes badly wrong), you're best to uninstall X for a month or two ;-) And yes (in reply to a different post, I think on the Debian installer?) - a GUI doesn't have to be pretty to be easy to use. Text mode GUIs / menus (think ncurses) scare some people, even if they're the identical thing to the X GUI but without a mouse, and a litte more ugly. Haven't posted for a while, just felt like putting in my 2c :-) Cheers, Gareth ps. I hope you're all having fun at the dinner :-) pps. Thanks for mentioning 'artsdsp' Nick, makes life easier :-) I used to always kill artsd whenever I needed sound for something else, and restart it later, which was a real pain, hehe. d'oh
Re: about that ez-ipupdate binary for IPCOP Nick...
woah, hold on a minute. I just checked your earlier posting, and you said you found the official ez-ipupdate.com. Freshmeat pointed me to ez-ipupdate.org. Hmmm. ez-ipupdate.com looks identical, but doesn't have the b8 version. You're right. My mistake. I think I'll grab b7 from that site and see what the differences are between that and b8...
Re: about that ez-ipupdate binary for IPCOP Nick...
My apologies for posting on this topic 3 times in a row. But I thought I'd better share one last thing, in case anyone else besides me is interested. I notice at the official http://www.ez-ipupdate.com; site there is a link to subscribe to the mailing list for ez-ipupdate, [EMAIL PROTECTED] And the website at http://www.gusnet.cx:8080/; looks quite obviously to be the author's own homepage. If it was someone impersonating him, why would he use them for his mailing list? ;-) And that page links to the one you got the b8 source off Nick. So that's good enough for me. Looks like ez-ipupdate.com is just a (slightly out of date) mirror of ez-ipupdate.org, mystery solved :-) Cheers, Gareth
about that ez-ipupdate binary for IPCOP Nick...
I renamed the ez-ipupdate binary on my IPCOP machine (which is the one Nick Rout posted a few days ago) to ez-ipupdate.bak, and then installed the official fixes6. However there is a considerable difference in size between the new (official IPCOP) binary, and the one Nick compiled (now called ez-ipupdate.bak), as follows: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/local/bin # ls ez* -l -rwxr-xr-x1 root root56792 Dec 18 16:15 ez-ipupdate -rwxr-xr-x1 root root 167315 Dec 19 19:23 ez-ipupdate.bak One is 57KB, the other 167KB. I can't help but be a little curious about this, especially as Nick makes the source of the larger one sound slightly dubious. Perhaps you did something like statically link it when you compiled it Nick? I don't suppose you could mail me the source you compiled that binary from, if you still have it, could you Nick? (obviously I don't want to grab the one off the mirror you linked as it could've been changed by now). I'd be interested to run a diff over it (against the source for the same release off the official site). Cheers, Gareth
Re: about that ez-ipupdate binary for IPCOP Nick...
On Tuesday 23 December 2003 11:59, Nick Rout wrote: errr the difference could be (and i picked this up off the ipcop-dev mailing list0 that the ipcop folks may use strip to get rid of a whole lot of stuff in the binary. using strip on the binary i created reduces it to 57056 bytes ah, a very plausable explanation... I am emailing you the source i used offlist. Cheers for that. I found: http://www.gusnet.cx:8080/gus/proj/ez-ipupdate/ and; http://www.ez-ipupdate.org linked from the freshmeat ez-ipupdate page. I'm fairly satisfied that this is the official site for the ez-ipupdate project. There is a file: ez-ipupdate-3.0.11b8.tar.gz linked from that site. The filename, size, and md5 matches the tarball you emailed me. That's good enough for me :) Cheers, Gareth
Re: dyndns / IPCop problem
Well spotted Col, I've had my dyndns for ages and hadn't updated my email address with them so didn't recieve the email. And thanks for the binary Nick, as I'm not sure I have the facilities to compile it myself. Normally I wouldn't use any old random binary posted to a mailing list, especially on my firewall... but I trust ya ;-) Thanks all :-) Cheers, Gareth
dyndns / IPCop problem
My dyndns (gacrux.homeip.net) seems to be broken. Anyone else noticed this? I can manually update it via their webpage, and it works. But when IPCop tries to do it, it doesn't work. I haven't touched the settings, it just randomly stopped working the other day (at least, that's when I noticed). When I connect to the internet, or use the force update button in the services - dynamic dns menu, I get the following in the main IPCop log: 19:28:09 ipcop Dynamic DNS ip-update for gacrux.homeip.net: success But gacrux.homeip.net definitely does not resolve to my current IP address. Again, manually updating it via the dyndns.org website _does_ correctly result in gacrux.homeip.net resolving to the IP address I enter, and up until a few days ago the IPCop update used to work correctly. Any ideas? Cheers, Gareth ps. I'm using IPCop 1.3, with fixes updates 001 - 005 installed.
Re: Ext3 Fs Broke
On Tuesday 09 December 2003 19:08, Benjamin Devine wrote: snip I did the normal fixers mounted the problem device in write mode then I ran fsck2fs (I think cant remember) as fsck is not on my system. After I manually went through and fixed it. I rebooted my system and I kernel panic on boot. I was planning to install gentoo anyway but now seems the right time. I have some VERY important files on ext3 fs has anyone had any success in the past where they have booted from say Knoppix and mounted the fs then copied it across? Does anyone know of any solutions to this problem? snip Firstly, you probably don't want to fsck your filesystem with it mounted read-write, if it isn't mounted read-only then you should 'remount -ro /' (or something like it. Off the top of my head...) before running fsck. I would suggest booting either Knoppix (if you have a CD), or a tomsrtbt floppy if you don't have a knoppix CD (you can download the floppy image and write it to the floppy disk using something like 'rawrite' in windows if you can't boot your linux partition). Try running fsck from that, and then try mounting your filesystem somewhere if you can get fsck to run cleanly. (note that if you don't have ext3 support in your kernel, as I don't think(?) the tomsrtbt one does, you can mount it as ext2, put -t ext2 in your mount command). Hang on... ext3 you say? Wait, what am I saying... do you / can you / should you even fsck ext3? I'm not sure.. I still run ext2, heh. Someone who knows might like to comment... My other idea is... if all else fails, what kind of data do you need to retrieve? Do you know / remember any part of it? If it's a text file, for instance, you could try the old grep through all the raw data trick. Something like: # cat /dev/hda | grep -B 200 -A 200 text you know was in your file (arguments -B and -A indicate to display 200 lines before and after the located text string, read the man page for details. And obviously replace /dev/hda with whatever your hard drive is called) Hope this helps. Good luck Ben. Cheers, Gareth
Re: UT2003 in linux
On Sunday 23 November 2003 20:54, Rowan Trau'e wrote: Hello Chris and Chad Thanks for your advice. Chris I tried what you suggested and it did nothing as a command line - well nothing happened and I got no response so I am reluctant to go down that line of operation. In the world of Unix, programs are typically silent by default. If you got no response then this probably means _something_ happened. No output is almost always a good sign. The program will only speak up if something went wrong :-) Chad, I tried what you wrote (after finally getting a xterm to work - maybe I was doing it wrong as it was my first time) and I got this reply after inputting your first line of command:- /dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1 none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0 and so for another 10 lines or so This is way out of my league so I closed xterm. It looks like you're talking about running vi on your /etc/fstab file. vi is a text editor. It can be particularly tricky to use if you haven't used it before. I'd suggest you use a text editing application you're familiar with. If you don't have a favourite text editor, now is the time to aquire one ;-) Try 'kwrite' if you have KDE installed, it's quite similar to windows notepad. Then just open the file /etc/fstab with your editor of choice (it's just a text file) and make the changes originally described. Cheers, Gareth What does it all mean or would you prefer to contact me off-list via phone to help me ? Your decision. Rowan On Sat, 2003-11-22 at 14:21, Chad wrote: Ok then This is abit messy and I'm sure there's easier ways of doing it but it's fairly quick and will allow you to get the game up and running quickly. Open a terminal like xterm or konsole run su then the first command just makes a backup cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.old vi /etc/fstab comment out the line like this none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdd, to #none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdd,. save the change. Logout and restart the computer. Stick the CD in the drive then in a terminal as root (su) mount /dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom run the install program when it asks for the next disk umount /mnt/cdrom change disk mount /dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom When finished vi /etc/fstab remove the # save and restart. The game should now work though you'll need to add a link to the menu or desktop. The command to run the game from command line should be some thing like ut2003 Instead of vi other text editors can be used Kate, emacs or gedit are best though I'd recomend kate if in kde gedit in Gnome. Also you'll need the ATI graphics drivers installed They can be downloaded from ATI's website. As for Mandrake 9.2 it's abit faster overall, Gnome 2.4 is nicer than the old version in 9.1 as is Openoffice 1.1 over mdk9.1's version. Other than that theres been a few graphical changes Mandrakes Galaxy theme has some improvements and drak tools are abit better. Down side is theres alot of updates for it and some problems. Chad On Sat, 22 Nov 2003 07:59, Rowan Trau'e wrote: Hello Chad I am currently running Mandrake 9.1 and I am considering installing 9.2. I hope that the disabling of supermount is easy. Can anyone tell me if Mandrake 9.2 is any reasonable advance over 9.1 ? I won't bother to upgrade if there isn't much change. Rowan On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 22:57, Chad wrote: Hi What distro are you runing? As supermount can cause problems with some CD binary installation programs. If Mandrake or Gentoo gaming kernel you may have to disable supermount and manually mount the CD. If you are running one of those distros or one of the others that uses Supermount let me know and I'll provide instructions for disabling supermount so you can install the game then renable it. Chad
Re: Java applets on LTSP.
Can you better define LTSP environment? I've set my (computer illiterate / naieve) father up with an old pentium machine, no hard drive etc, connected up to my good Debian box ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), and booting off a floppy with etherboot. It's been ages since I set it up, but from memory I have LTSP installed on the Debian box, etherboot loads the LTSP kernel (via TFTP), then mounts the NFS share LTSP provides for the root filesystem, X is started, it and connects to the gdm display server which is running on the Debian box. ie. the only thing that runs on the remote machine is X. After my dad logs in through gdm, he's using KDE 3.1 running on the Debian box (ie. my good machine), with the display sent to the X server running on his machine. I don't see how this environment is any different from if he were to sit down in front of my good machine physically and log in. He uses KMail, KWord (I'd install openoffice, but I don't want him slowing down my machine too much ;-), Konqueror etc all quite happily. I imagine if he were to use Java applets in Konq he'd get the same results as if he were using it on the local machine (ie. it'd work). If you're sure that your setup is similar and for some weird reason Java applets _don't_ work, let me know (maybe post a link to the page you're using so I can use it to test) and I'll log in from his terminal and try it sometime. Cheers, Gareth On Monday 03 November 2003 21:08, Christopher Sawtell wrote: Greets folks, We were a bit disappointed because we could't run quite a few Web pages with Java applets on them in the LTSP environment. Is this normal? Anybody know a fix?
Re: (OT) linux geek tramp
There are no handy waterfalls around (and I have no generator), The river's flow volume and speed would easily drive a turbine. Great, so now we just need to figure out a way to lug a big-ass turbine and generator in there, instead of a battery ;-) Not to mention the dish. I'm inclined to think Nick was joking :) This (tramping trip) sounds like a cool idea though. I'm not sure yet if I'll be free that weekend, but if I am I'll definitely let you know :-) Cheers, Gareth
Re: OT - Spam Opinion
[apologies in advance for the long post; if you're sick of this thread just go for the 'delete' button ;) ] ooh, a flamewar! I want in. puts on flame proof suit First things first. Seriously, hasn't this thread gone on long enough? This list has a relatively high volume of OT posts these days, and I think Mathew (or anyone else) has every right to object, and those concerned should be considerate and continue the discussion off list. This is, after all, a list for discussion about linux. I don't think it's unreasonable for people signed up to the list to expect the discussion to be mostly about linux. Having said that, if anyone does continue this off list, please CC me ;-) At the risk of being an incredible hypocrite though, I do have a few comments to make though (hey, everyone else is)... so seeing as I'm already posting, I may as well tack them on the bottom of this message - apologies to who will miss the extra kilobyte or two of bandwidth ;-) If you're sick of the spam thread, stop reading here. This'll be my 1 and only on-list post on this topic. puts extra flame proof suit on I think Yuri has a good point. Maybe you should read his post again Nick. I think you misinterpreted it. There is a difference between specifically targeted busines-to-business contact, and unselective spamming. The way spam works is by sheer volume; you send advertising for your product to as many people as you possibly can, knowing that 99% of them won't be interested, but counting on the 1% that will be for your business. It's indescriminate. Yes? By comparison, what Jason described was manually selecting businesses who he thought would be interested in doing business, and making individual 1-to-1 contact with those businesses. It's a legitimate use of email; he could have just as easily telephoned each of those businesses, and nobody would think that spam. It's directed and specifc, not indiscriminate bulk emailing. Another point is that the cost to Jason by this method is actually quite high, at least if his time is worth anything. To me, this doesn't resemble spam in any way, shape, or form, other than that they share the same medium (email). I can't see how anyone can even think the two comparable. Although, I do agree, it is *technically* UCE, aka spam (as David pointed out. Unsolicited Commercial Email). It's not the same activity at all though. Spammers email everyone and *anyone* they can, manually, automatically, however. Jason was being selective, and only emailing those he thought would be interested in correspondence and / or doing business (and I bet he didn't fake the From: field on his email either ;-) It just happens to be covered by the definition of UCE, but that's a technicality. Which I think was Jason's original point. Cheers, Gareth
Re: It's a blond moment - chopping up text files
You could cat file | head -n 96 | tail -n 33 :) On Saturday 25 October 2003 14:04, Vik Olliver wrote: I can't figure out what command-line utility I used to output lines 63 to 96 of a text file last time. OK, I can write it in sed/awk/perl in no time flat, but isn't there a command to do this? Could've sworn there was. Vik :v)
Re: OT: errant keyboard behaviour
On Wednesday 22 October 2003 15:46, Carl Cerecke wrote: My keyboard, both at home and at work has the behaviour that, when I hold down left-shift and press t and r keys simultaneously (or nearly simultaneously), neither (or only one) of T and R appears, but not both. Right shift has no problems. Other pairs of letters seem to work fine with left-shift, but some don't: u and y, and p and [ I have an old AT keyboard (which I keep lying around because I have a couple of old Pentium 1 class machines still in use)... and it actually types incorrect things, rather than just plain omitting things (trying to 1-up Carl here ;-) If I type a lower case 'd' followed relatively quickly by a space, I get a backslash (\) instead of the space. When typing at a shell I always get cd\ when I go to change directory. PITA alright ;-) I would speculate that the switches/contacts under the keys are bouncing or sticking a little bit. There must be some sort of encoder that converts the 100+ individual keypresses into something that can be communicated using just 5 wires (5? I think I counted right). So maybe on old keyboards this encoder is crap and does something undefined when 2 or more keys are pressed at once. Like (as a sideeffect of the way the logic is wired perhaps) adding the encoded output for the two keys together. So for example if, when one key is pressed, pin 3 should be high (and all others low), and for another key, pin 4 should be high (and all others low), then when both keys are pressed it may cause both pin 3 and 4 to be high, which could be the code used for a different key (or in Carl's case, an unused code perhaps, resulting in nothing being typed). And if you type two keys quickly enough after each other, due to keybounce or whatever, they are actually both on at the same time at some point. All just wild guessing of course :-) I'd love to know what actually causes it. Cheers, Gareth
Re: OT: will software writers ever be held responsible for their products?
On Friday 10 October 2003 13:52, Jaco Swart wrote: This woman is fed-up: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/2003-10-07-msftsuit_x.htm and I wish her well! rgds Jaco I'm sorry, but I don't agree. So microsoft make lousy software; it's her choice to use it. I think saying she doesn't have any choice but to use it is a pretty weak argument. Secondly, I think it's unreasonable to expect companies to sell secure products. Mainly because what is secure today, at the time of shipping, isn't a few months down the track. Security is a process, not a product, right? So it's the user's responsibility to keep up with patches. Too many people are still running the default install months or years after release, without any patches, without even a firewall. These people won't be any safer running Linux either. It's up to people to take responsibility for themselves. If they really need security and don't have the knowledge to keep up with it themselves, then they should pay someone who does. Otherwise they shouldn't be silly enough to keep sensitive information like SSN numbers on their computer :) I wish her well raising awareness about Microsoft's lousy security, but I don't think she's going to win this court case, nor should she. Much as I dislike Microsoft and would like to see them take a fall, I don't think they're the criminals here (note that's here - very different from saying they're not criminals full stop ;-) - the crackers who stole her SSN number are the criminals. I don't mean to rant, but this seems akin to blaming the builder of your house when you get burgled, instead of the burglar. What makes it worse is that 90% of people leave their front door wide open, and I suspect will still be inclined to blame the builder if they see others doing it :-) Cheers, Gareth
Re: OT: will software writers ever be held responsible for their products?
On Friday 10 October 2003 15:48, Jaco Swart wrote: The problem is not the lack of security in software, but companies that create the impression that their software is perfectly secure. If I sell you a house, and tell you that it has first class locks, but in truth they are pretty lousy, - maybe then you would like to take me to task? If you sell something, you have got to make sure it works the way you say it does. In the electronic bussiness, we have to face the music when we screw up, so we do our best not to screw up. Why should software be different? A fair point. Microsoft should not be allowed to advertise their software as secure unless it actually is, of course. The problem is that secure is a very subjective thing. If she was taking them to court because they told her their software was secure, and she relied on this information, and then found that she had been mislead, then fair enough. To me though this looks more like I have no choice but to use their product, so then when their product doesn't perform up to the standard I would like, I'll sue them to make them make their product the way I want it. As was touched on in the article (I think), if software companies take this kind of responsibility, their prices will surely rise. And as Jason pointed out, who takes responsibility for free software? Surely a person has the right to say I'm giving you this for free, use it at your own risk if you like, but I don't take any responsibility for it. I'm offering you this, it's up to you if you take it. Right? When you log into a Debian GNU/Linux system for example, you see the blah blah blah... ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is fair enough. If they give it away for free, why should they be asked to take responsibility for it too? So to extend this idea, surely a person (or company, such as Microsoft) has the right to say We're selling you this for a [in our opinion] very low price, we're almost _giving_ it to you it's so dirt cheap, but we don't take any responsibility for it. We're offering you this, it's up to you if you take it. If you want security too, or someone else to take responsibility for your security, you pay for it. But I agree that if Microsoft were to say our software is secure. If you are using it as per the instructions you should be safe to keep your SSN number and credit card number on your computer and our system will keep them safe. That's part of what you're paying us for (or similar, exagerated a little to make my point)... and then the customer places their trust in this, uses the system as per the instructions, and then takes damages when the system fails them, then fair enough they should have them up in court. I hope I've illustrated the difference. Sorry for the long post everyone :) So the question is, does Microsoft claim their software is secure? Cheers, Gareth ps. I think the phrase buyer beware applies here. Make sure you know what you are and aren't getting for your money. And make a judgement about whether you think it's worth the price you're paying. If you think you're getting a bad deal, you have the option of voting with your feet :)
Re: Corrupt Superblock
On Thursday 09 October 2003 11:21, david merriman wrote: Running DevFS daemon Started device management daemon V1.3.25 for /dev unknown group: video, defaulting to GID=0 ** CRITICAL **: unknown class dri at line 80 in /etc/security/console.perms Unmounting initrd: Loading default keymap: /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 265: /dev/tty0: No such file or directory I don't know much about DevFS, but if I had to guess I'd say something in /etc/security/console.perms is breaking it, and it isn't getting started correctly. Again, I am not a DevFS user, but I think the result may be that /dev is empty? If so, that explains all the no such file or directory errors whenever something in /dev is accessed. Perhaps the error about the superblock not being able to be read is being incorrectly reported because fsck can not find /dev/hda8 at all? The errors you got when running fsck manually certainly support this. Try a 'ls /dev/hda8' or just 'ls /dev' and see what you get after booting with the DevFS error and getting dropped to a shell. In short, what I'm suggesting is that your only problem may be an incorrect console.perms file. If so, you could simply boot another system (like Knoppix, or a tomsrtbt floppy), mount your hard drive (/dev/hda8 should be visible as tomsrtbt/knoppix will correctly set up it's own dev filesystem), and go fix your console.perms file :) Cheers, Gareth Checking root filesystem fsck.ext3/dev/hda8: The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 device No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hda8 Failed to check filesystem. Do you want to repair the errors (Y/N) (beware, you can lose data) --- I've tried answering both yes and no to the do you want to repair prompt, but both times it drops me back to the shell saying it can't find /dev/hda8. I tried running: e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hda8 and e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/hda8 but got the same message. can't find /dev/hda8 I tried mke2fs -n /dev/hda8 same message: can't find /dev/hda8 I also booted from the CD in rescue mode, and tried: [EMAIL PROTECTED] /]# lsparts hda1: 3,702 MBytes, type 0x7 (NTFS (or HPFS)) hda5: 8,150 MBytes, type 0x7 (NTFS (or HPFS)) hda6: 8,573 MBytes, type 0x7 (NTFS (or HPFS)) hda7: 5,004 MBytes, type 0x7 (NTFS (or HPFS)) hda8: 5,992 MBytes, type 0x83 (Ext2) hda9: 494 MBytes, type 0x82 (Linux Swap) hda10: 6,243 MBytes, type 0x83 (Ext2) Unfortunately, Rescue mode isn't very useful to me (yet), because I don't know *how* to rescue the partition... I've tried reinstalling from CD with the upgrade existing installation option, and that seemed to run through everything fine, but made no difference when I rebooted. I'm wondering if I have two problems here, because a few days ago I installed the NVidia drivers for Linux, and one of the instructions was to remove the line from /etc/security/console.perms which started with dri. I didn't actually remove the line, but I commented it out (in case I needed to restore it later), as follows: ... gpm=/dev/gpmctl # dri=/dev/nvidia* /dev/3dfx* mainboard=/dev/apm_bios ... The system has worked fine since I made that change, including shutting down and rebooting several times (though I hadn't booted into Windows until last night). Should I have removed the line completely, perhaps ? I'm suspicious of Diskeeper 7 though, my Windows defragger. It ran for a couple of minutes while I was in Windows last night, before I noticed it and shut it down (not for Mandrake's sake, but for what I was doing at the time). I'd originally used Partition Magic 7 to create a blank space at the end of the drive, which I told Mandrake to install itself in using it's default partitioning, and when I ran Partition Magic again after Mandrake was installed, it complained about the boot sector being in the wrong place (or something similar, I don't recall the exact message). I didn't let it change anything though, as everything was working. Maybe Diskeeper shifted or overwrote something it shouldn't have. Many of the posts I've read while Googling have basically said, sorry dude, you're gonna have to reinstall from scratch. While this isn't a major catastrophe (I've only being using Linux for just over a month, and all I'll really lose is a few weeks emails, and some programs I've installed), I'd ideally like to get it back to where it was. Does anybody have any bright ideas ? I'm not at home right now, so I can't try anything until I get back tonight. Thanks for your time, Dave
Re: Corrupt Superblock
Ah, after reading Mike's post I see that I am confusing devfs and devfsd (the devfs daemon). But the conclusion is the same; something that makes /dev/hda8 exist isn't getting started. Perhaps another thing you could try would be (when dropped to a shell during boot failure) to see if the long/proper name of the device exists. Poke around in /dev, see if there's anything in there. Look for something like: /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part8 or similar. (I got that from my gentoo laptop; looks like I do have devfs after all, lol! I just never bothered to look as it's not my main machine). Obviously some of the numbers may be different. Anyhow, if you could still access that then you could point fsck at that directly. Or mount. Or anything you do manually. Or you could try creating a symlink /dev/hda8 that points to it. If you can get your filesystem mounted, then you can go fix whatever's breaking devfsd (looks to be console.perms, so a good idea would be to reverse the change you made the other day and see what happens ;-) Good luck. Cheers, Gareth
Re: Corrupt Superblock
On Thursday 09 October 2003 13:59, Fisher, Robert (FXNZ CHC) wrote: Gareth, I wonder if the fact that Dave has only been using Linux for a month would mean that your advice might be above his head. Dave Oops, sorry, I didn't realise :-/ When someone posts an intelligently worded question, including relevant error messages and all the options they've tried so far, I just automatically assume they're not new without thinking ;-) Dave, let us know how you go. If you need more specific help, post. Don't reformat yet :-) Cheers, Gareth
Re: Slightly OT - lunchtome wanderings.
Has anyone else got one of these? (the $99 DSE deal). I just got one today, coincidentally. Installed xawtv and so far FM radio works, and TV kinda works, only it's black and white. Any tips? I'm using the aerial that came with the card, and yes it is tuned to the station (TV3 atm). Cheers, Gareth On Wednesday 01 October 2003 14:49, Mark Tomlinson wrote: 1. Cash Converters in Hereford St have a DSE video capture card. I know these work in linux, cos I have one. The don't have a tuner, just composite video or s-video in. $55,, about half of DSE's price. While on this subject: DSE have the one with the TV tuner on it (XH6765) on special this week for only $99. (normally $148). I believe the TV tuner will work under Linux, but only from stuff I've read on the web. - Mark
Re: Slightly OT - lunchtome wanderings.
Thanks for the reply; yep, it's set to PAL. On Wednesday 01 October 2003 21:12, Col wrote: Gareth Williams wrote: Has anyone else got one of these? (the $99 DSE deal). I just got one today, coincidentally. Installed xawtv and so far FM radio works, and TV kinda works, only it's black and white. Any tips? I'm using the aerial that came with the card, and yes it is tuned to the station (TV3 atm). Cheers, Gareth First up is xawtv set to pal or ntsc? NZ uses pal. Col
Re: Slightly OT - lunchtome wanderings.
ps. I'm using the saa7134 driver. Incidentally, I didn't have the appropriate devices in /dev, specifically /dev/video and /dev/radio - I'm using the old major/minor numbers, not devfs. So I just downloaded bttv and ran the 'MAKEDEV' script that comes with that ;) was that a dumb move? I imagined it wouldn't make any difference... but maybe it could be the cause of my problem? Cheers, Gareth
Re: Slightly OT - lunchtome wanderings.
Problem solved. Opps, I shouldn't have posted so hastily, sorry :) For those who are interested / encounter something similar, xawtv seems to default to the Capture: setting being overlay - I changed it to grabdisplay, and I get full colour, yay :-) Cheers, Gareth
Re: Epson scanner issues...
Windows solution: - create a linux boot floppy - install windows on a new partition / drive, as per usual windows installation - windows will overwrite your MBR so that only it boots - boot from your linux floppy, edit /etc/lilo.conf to have an entry for your windows partition - rerun lilo And I _think_ that should do it :) (although it's been years since I have, so better wait and see if someone corrects me ;-) Linux solution: - compile yourself an old (pre 2.4.19) kernel and set of modules - install them by: made modules_install and; cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/old_kernel [copying the kernel manually so you don't overwrite your old one] - add an extra entry in /etc/lilo.conf for booting your old kernel. I think something like: image=/boot/old_kernel label=oldlinux should do it, but I haven't checked it myself. - rerun lilo - whenever you want to use the scanner software, boot the system with the old kernel by selecting the appropriate entry in lilo. Hey, if you're gonna reboot to use your scanner anyway, you may as well do it using linux, right? :-) HTH, good luck. Cheers, Gareth ps. you may want to back up your old kernel image (probably in /boot somewhere) and your old /lib/modules/2.4.whatever first; just in case, you can never be too careful. pps.As I found out the other day, I deleted what I thought was an old config file and then realised I needed it 2 seconds later, and it was critical! :-o DOH. I'll never do that again :-/ kicked myself. But luckily I made my saving throw, by: # strings /dev/hda | grep -B 50 -A 50 text I know was in the config file I deleted An idea I saw posted to list quite some time ago - I don't know who by, but whoever it was, thanks :-) [and reposted here for the benefit of those who haven't seen it before] On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 16:50:01 +1200 Chris Wilkinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi there, I've finally gotten sick of trying to get my Epson Perfection 1260 USB scanner to work. The Epson Iscan software won't work under Mandrake 9.1 (despite working very well under 9.0), and Epson seem to be slow to resolve issues with that (most users with a 2.4.19 kernel will have trouble either running the software, or trouble compiling it). I have decided to install Windows 98 or 98SE onto my system so I can use the scanner. My question is this...a dual-boot system is quite a simple system to create, provided Windows is already installed...but can I install Windows onto an existing Linux system? I hate the idea of having Winblows on my PC but Linux solutions for this scanner are useless. I payed good money for the scanner, based on reports on linux hardware compatibility sites that claimed using the 1260 scanner would be fine. I wish I'd waited 3 months, because then I would have bought a different scanner to take account that so many users of later kernels cannot use that scanner... Anyways, can anyone shed some light on installing Windows to a linux system? Kind regards, Chris Wilkinson, Christchurch. --
Re: *.com and *.net now resolve ...
oh, WTF. That is just plain wrong. I didn't believe you until I tried it for myself :-/ Nice article btw, thanks for the link. Cheers, Gareth On Wednesday 17 September 2003 12:31, Jim Cheetham wrote: FYI, I see in my DNS today that every possible .com and .net address now resolves, and goes to Verisign's portal site. This has an impact on email - rejecting an incoming email message because the claimed From address does now exist now fails, because all .com and .net addresses exist. (Naturally, spammers will start to fake from these domains only. Oddly, lots of 'little' TLDs like .ws and .museum have been doing this for ages, and the spammers don't seem to have taken advantage of it) However, because ICANN and Verisign are conjoined twins, there is no way around the situation. http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/verisign-internet-coup.htm l -jim
Re: port 80
Um... seems to me that if you only want students to have access to the www thru the squid proxy, then the best setup would be to have nothing providing internet access to the student machines at all, only provide them with the proxy. Then only the proxy machine needs access to the internet. ie. the student machines see the proxy, but only the proxy sees the internet. Seems like a bad idea to just go blocking port 80 'cos that's what most webservers use. Students will get around that pretty quick :) Of course, I could be completely on the wrong track here, apologies if I am. I don't know much about your specific situation, so it's possible I've missed the boat entirely ;-) Cheers, Gareth On Monday 15 September 2003 17:48, Terry Cole wrote: RH 9, running squid and Dan's Guardian. How to block port 80? Students are bypassing squid and getting strait out to the net. IPchains was set up originally, but has lost it settings and know does not want to work. Cheers Terry Cole Rotorua, New Zealand mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cole.gen.nz http://www.websnz.com
Re: IPCOP
IANAIPCOPU but does that suggest the modem is at fault, or at least not ^ translation required please. It's a mutation of the popular IANAL - I am not a lawyer. I parsed this as I am not an IPCOP user. Back to the topic, thanks to all those who replied. I'm not sure if it'd be the modem or not, when the machine used to run debian the ppp logs would certainly show accurately when the connection got dropped - I had a little perl script watch for Exit. in the logs and redial, that I'd leave running overnight so it'd reconnect by itself for long downloads. I guess I'll just do something similar, but in bash, and using /etc/init.d/rc.red [stop] [start] (thanks Rob :-) Weird - well at least I know it works correctly for others, so it's likely something to do with my setup and I've gotta fix it myself. Cheers all, Gareth.
Re: auto poweroff
If you're exectuting the command(s) from a file, and specifying that file with the -f option for 'at', then maybe try putting: export DISPLAY=:0 (or whatever display you wish to use) at the start of the file, to be executed before the command that requires the display. Cheers, Gareth On Monday 08 September 2003 05:46, antonovich wrote: ps. It might just be that I am not specifying a job properly. How do I do that? I have just been typing what I would type in for a command line instruction eg. mplayer /mnt/Movies/TheMatrix.avi, but this doesn't work. What am i doing wrong??? things seem to work a bit better (=work) when I use a file and when I don't do something that uses the display (halt, mencoder) man seems to suggest that it might be necessary to specify a display adapter (?) but doesnt' mention how. Still not entirely sure I'm not missing the point a bit. Would it help if I specified the adapter at the command? ie. mplayer -vo x11 /mnt/Movies/TheMatrix.avi (or whatever the actual command is...) cheers anton
Re: IPCOP
IPCop has a built in client for updating dyndns. I can't access my IPCop from work, but look throught the web interface and you should find it in there somewhere. Just give it your dyndns user name and password and it will take care of the rest. oh sweet! cheers very much :-) Later David Kirk
Re: IPCOP
Or I could just have everyone manually disconnect the modem socket when going to use the phone, which is often what people do anyway (bastards :) - unfortunately however, this does not change the behaviour of IPCOP. On Monday 08 September 2003 17:07, Col wrote: However - if someone picks up the phone, and the modem gets disconnected, it goes into modem idle mode. doh! It seems to think that the RED interface is still active (when it's damn well been disconnected), and won't go back to the waiting for dial on demand state until you first issue a 'disconnect' (so it thinks the RED interface is down) and then 'connect' from the web interface. This is most annoying, as it means every time we go to use it someone needs to manually put it into waiting for dial on demand mode before it can be used as dial on demand again - kinda defeats the purose, no? I recommend a telephone privacy adaptor. Basically it's a special telephone double adaptor that cuts off one socket when the other is in use. If you want to see what one looks like go to www.dse.co.nz and do a search on part F9772. Col.
Re: IPCOP
On Monday 08 September 2003 17:18, Christopher Sawtell wrote: On Mon, 08 Sep 2003 17:15, you wrote: Or I could just have everyone manually disconnect the modem socket when going to use the phone, which is often what people do anyway (bastards :) - unfortunately however, this does not change the behaviour of IPCOP. Plug the 'phone into the 'phone socket on the modem. That's what it's for! I have a weird setup at my house (the modem is on the other side of the house, don't ask ;-) And I don't have a phone socket on my modem anyhow. The point is that whenever the connection is dropped, I suspect it makes no difference from which end (ie. the ISP can and does drop me after extended periods), IPCOP should detect that the RED interface has gone down and go back to it's waiting for dial on demand mode. Mine doesn't. I can write something to run in the background and watch /var/log/ppp.log (or wherever it is on IPCOP), and whenever it sees the modem has dropped go and move the system back to waiting for dial on demand mode (does anyone know how I can do the last bit from the command line, not the web interface?). I just thought that maybe there was an option somewhere I hadn't seen for lack of experience with IPCOP, and there could be a simple/clean solution (as there was for the dyndns thing, thanks David :-) Cheers, Gareth On Monday 08 September 2003 17:07, Col wrote: However - if someone picks up the phone, and the modem gets disconnected, it goes into modem idle mode. doh! It seems to think that the RED interface is still active (when it's damn well been disconnected), and won't go back to the waiting for dial on demand state until you first issue a 'disconnect' (so it thinks the RED interface is down) and then 'connect' from the web interface. This is most annoying, as it means every time we go to use it someone needs to manually put it into waiting for dial on demand mode before it can be used as dial on demand again - kinda defeats the purose, no? I recommend a telephone privacy adaptor. Basically it's a special telephone double adaptor that cuts off one socket when the other is in use. If you want to see what one looks like go to www.dse.co.nz and do a search on part F9772. Col.
Re: Contact list in K-mail help please
Mine has an address book via the Tools - Address Book menu item. Maybe this is what you are looking for? Cheers, Gareth On Sunday 24 August 2003 17:30, Warwick Ian wrote: I recently set-up a machine for a Green party researcher running Mandrake 9.1 and thought that k-mail would be easier for her to use. I personally use Evolution. How do you set-up an address contact list in K-mail? I must be thick because it is not immediately obvious to me. She is currently visiting for tea so it would be great if I could get a prompt reply. Thanks, Ian Laurenson
Re: 'make install' as 'root'
Personally, I never run 'make install' as root. If it's in debian testing, I trust it, and apt-get install it. If it isn't, and I'm compiling it from source myself, I often don't know or trust it that much. So what I do is: ./configure --prefix=/opt/package_name/ (Yuri, all the 'prefix' option does is specify where you want it to get installed). Then I do the usual make and make install, but as an unpriviledged user. This way if the install script does anything nasty (or just accidental / poorly designed / unexpected), at least it isn't running as root. Once I'm happy with the installation, I switch to root, and make symlinks in /usr/local/ to all the files in /opt/package_name (with the help of a little perl script, to automate the process). Then I switch back to an unpriviledged user before running the program. This is a good way of keeping track of packages you build from source yourself too, that your package manager doesn't know about. I can look in my /opt directory and see all the 'packages' I've installed easily. Then if I want to get rid of one (without keeping the origional source to do a 'make clean'), I just run another little perl script which goes through /usr/local searching for symlinks pointing to anywhere in a specified /opt/package_name and deleting them (yes, I debugged and tested it thoroughly before letting it loose as root ;-) Then I simply remove the package_name directory in /opt and it's done. A little perl script that claims to help with this is GNU 'stow'. However I found it to be quite broken, especially in the 'removing symlinks' department (in short, it didn't). It seemed to work well enough for 'stowing' (adding) things though, although not all the 'features' seemed to work, the ones I needed did. So I use it for 'stowing', and my own (brute force :) script for 'unstowing'. It may be better / fixed now though, certainly worth having a look at if anyone's interested. Cheers, Gareth
Re: Motherboards and other devices.
On Wednesday 20 August 2003 19:21, Chris Wilkinson wrote: I certainly didn't have to fork out $$$ for the nVidia driver, only the means to download it... same as you'd have to for an open source one :) (in disagreement with Volker's position here btw, not Chris's) While Volker's ease of installation / my time is worth money type argument is good, he obviously hasn't used Gentoo recently ;-) A friend of mine with a Geforce2 card installed Gentoo recently, and he had simply to type: # emerge nvidia-glx and a few minutes later he was playing Quake 3 Arena ;-) At least nVidia provide good linux drivers for their cards, same as they provide binary only windows drivers (which I don't hear complains about). I support them for this and buy their cards. Cheers, Gareth
Re: MythTV
Cool. Thanks for the info. Let me know if you get it going :-) Incidentally, what do you mean by 'partly working'? Cheers, Gareth On Wednesday 20 August 2003 06:16, Col wrote: Gareth Williams wrote: ps. I see dragon (www.dragonpc.co.nz) have a Lifeview FLYVIDEO 3000 card that looks to be a TV and FM tuner as well for $109. Has anyone experience with these? I have one but it is still on my todo list. I have had it partly working under gentoo but then got sidetracked. It is based on saa7134 chip. See http://bytesex.org/ Col.
Re: Attn Nick Rout - SCO
Nobody doubts this, least of all SCO. Which is why they haven't, to date, actually said _what_ the offending code is. Just that there is some. Somewhere. Apparently. ;-) On Tuesday 19 August 2003 17:18, Chris Wilkinson wrote: Hi there, Jason wrote: Ok Nick, you wanted your reason for inititating legal action - here it is (I think): I think the answer for Linux is to remove the code, add a different code that accomplishes the same thing, and give the big fat finger to SCO... Kind regards, Chris Wilkinson, Christchurch.
Re: IPacket Sniff
tcpdump may be what you are after. or if you are thinking of / looking for a graphical app, ethereal is good. Cheers, Gareth On Wednesday 20 August 2003 08:32, Shane Hollis wrote: Hi, My network has slowed down for some reason, and I know there is a command to allow you to see allpackets on a network but after 32 hours programming in the last 38 my brain is fried ... help please.
Re: Attn Nick Rout - SCO
There are, as far as I can tell, two camps of thought on why they don't. Either: a) they're full of hot air, and can't prove anything OR b) they know that as soon as they point out the offending code it'll be fixed, and they won't have anything left to bitch about. Either way, you can be sure they're counting on spreading FUD and trying to get money out of people first. Not making a valid claim, or proving it. Just scaring people with lawyers. Which is what this is all about. Cheers, Gareth On Tuesday 19 August 2003 21:12, Chris Wilkinson wrote: Hi there, Gareth Williams wrote: Nobody doubts this, least of all SCO. Which is why they haven't, to date, actually said _what_ the offending code is. Just that there is some. Somewhere. Apparently. ;-) No one should pay them a bean until they prove beyond all doubt that their claim is valid...ie, tell the linux community which part of the code it is and show the original to validate the claim... On Tuesday 19 August 2003 17:18, Chris Wilkinson wrote: I think the answer for Linux is to remove the code, add a different code that accomplishes the same thing, and give the big fat finger to SCO... Kind regards, Chris Wilkinson, Christchurch.
Re: MythTV
Nick Rout wrote: the capture card is the cheapie from DSE, it has no tuner, just captures the composite video output from my sky box. Which card, and how cheap? :) I've been considering getting a TV card for some time. But this would be just as good - it just takes standard A/V input? ie. if I want to watch TV on it I could just plug it into an old VCR and use the tuner on that. If it's cheap, and Nick reports it to work with linux, I'm all for it :) Cheers, Gareth ps. this MythTV sounds really cool. I shall have to google around for their website and take a look.
Re: Attn Nick Rout - SCO
Well, NZers haven't heard from SCO _yet_, but it's looking like they're going to. I'll be watching this space closely. Thanks for the link Jason. Cheers, Gareth On Monday 18 August 2003 23:24, Jason wrote: Ok Nick, you wanted your reason for inititating legal action - here it is (I think): http://computerworld.co.nz/webhome.nsf/UNID/EE36DEFCBB652A19CC256D82007B5AE F!opendocument
Re: MythTV
Thanks Nick. It looks to be around the $100 mark, here: http://www.dse.co.nz/cgi-bin/dse.storefront/en/product/XH6594 They claim it may not work with GF2, GF3, and TNT based graphics cards. Aren't you using a Geforce card Nick? (I seem to remember seeing it in a post somewhere, but I could be wrong). I would appreciate it if you can confirm that this isn't an issue. ps. I see dragon (www.dragonpc.co.nz) have a Lifeview FLYVIDEO 3000 card that looks to be a TV and FM tuner as well for $109. Has anyone experience with these? Cheers, Gareth On Tuesday 19 August 2003 14:32, Nick Rout wrote: I am reasonably sure it is a DSE XH6594, it is a rebadged avermedia, with avermedia drivers for windows in the box. It is bttv based, which is supported in the linux kernel, on my box you load the module: modprobe bttv card=13, autoload=0 [1] there is a long pause, which could probably be prevented by changing some of the module parameters. /dev/video0 is then created automagically and you can watch with xawtv, or many other packages. You need to set to composite1, rather than tv, and and norm =pal rather than ntsc. For some reason (don't know if its because the bttv driver expects one, or the card wrongly says it has one) the software usually seems to default to tv and think that channel changing does something. the kernel also seems to detedt a vbi (teletext) interface, but thats untrue too. [1] of course you automate this in modules.conf or whatever, but you knew this! On Tue, 19 Aug 2003 12:18:20 +1200 Gareth Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Nick Rout wrote: the capture card is the cheapie from DSE, it has no tuner, just captures the composite video output from my sky box. Which card, and how cheap? :) I've been considering getting a TV card for some time. But this would be just as good - it just takes standard A/V input? ie. if I want to watch TV on it I could just plug it into an old VCR and use the tuner on that. If it's cheap, and Nick reports it to work with linux, I'm all for it :) Cheers, Gareth ps. this MythTV sounds really cool. I shall have to google around for their website and take a look. -- Nick Rout Barrister Solicitor Christchurch, NZ Ph +64 3 3798966 Fax + 64 3 3798853 http://www.rout.co.nz [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: CLI user's tip of the week
Thanks, I will remember that. I use rm to remove files all the time. If a small typo caused me to be presented with emacs... *shudder* too horrible to even think about ;-) On Monday 11 August 2003 12:54, Carl Cerecke wrote: Don't alias em to emacs. em filename and rm filename are one small typo away. Cheers, Carl.
Re: Are there only two problem machines coming tonight?
I'll second that! (sorry, couldn't help myself ;-) On Thursday 14 August 2003 15:45, Carl Cerecke wrote: Rik Tindall wrote: Maybe it's time we had some reporting back on CLUG's evolving organisatonal / accountability structure, There is (basically) none. Let's not open that issue again without good reason until next Jan/Feb either. Cheers, Carl.
Re: Knoppix 3.2, hardware detection
On Monday 11 August 2003 10:15, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: It decided to run at 1024x768, although I run at 1280x1024 all the time, so the hardware sure does it. There is no obvious way to fix that - the KDE size-config changes resolution only within of what X allows. There's no X-configurator in the menu (or else it's well hidden). Can you not specify this when you boot? I haven't in a while so I don't remember exactly, but I think if you look at the help/options screen when you're at the boot loader, you'll see you can specify resolution and refresh rate settings. It should be easy to specify the resolution you want :-) (yes, for X) Specifying refresh rate and resolution might help on the machine that gave you the black screen too? Don't be too quick to discount it until you've had a decent play :-) Cheers, Gareth
