Re: Maximum number of clients reache .. can't open display
On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 05:42:18PM +0100, Christian Jaeger wrote: [...] After running my laptop for a bit over 2 months, I've started getting, for example when running urxvt from another terminal: Maximum number of clients reachedurxvt: can't open display :0.0, aborting. [...] xlsclients|wc -l tops out at 158, hmmm... That is interesting indeed. Apparently debian is patched[1] to allow 512 clients. But I don't think xlsclients is really a good indicator of actual X resource usage. ls /proc/`pidof Xorg`/fd|wc -l at 256. This being such a round number seems to strongly suggest that it's tied to the number of fds. But why so low? xorg.conf does not mention any limit. I imagine based on this: # cat /proc/`pidof Xorg`/limits Limit Soft Limit Hard Limit Units [...] Max open files1024 4096 files that the 256 value is just a coincidence. I've found a variety of references that suggest that perhaps a client is misbehaving and not releasing resources it's not using anymore[2]. What is the output of xwininfo -root -children that should be a better measure of resource usage. On my machine it reports significantly more children than xlsclients reports as the number of clients. Also there is xrestop, a top-like program that shows X clients and, at least on my machine, reports a few more clients than xlsclients. ISTM your best bet is to iterate through all the open clients you can identify, close each one, and perform a test to see how many clients you can subsequently open. One of your running X processes is mis-behaving and holding on to more than it should. Here[3] is an example of the kind of thing that can go wrong... Or you've got a whole lotta windows open ;) A Footnotes: [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-x@lists.debian.org/msg83944.html [2] http://askubuntu.com/questions/4499/how-can-i-diagnose-debug-maximum-number-of-clients-reached-x-errors [3] http://slackblogs.blogspot.com/2011/02/x11-maximum-number-of-clients-reached.html -- signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: post-install questions
On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 02:21:33PM -0400, Stephen Powell wrote: On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 12:49:36 -0400 (EDT), François Patte wrote: [...] 3- Is it possible to install a package without its dependencies with apt-get? I wanted to install auctex but apt-get wants to install a lot of TeX packages which I don't want. I know, auctex is made for TeX, but I install texlive directly from CTAN and don't want to have 2 TeX installations. Maybe, but in general, you shouldn't. There are three levels of dependency. A package can DEPEND on another package, RECOMMEND another package, or SUGGEST another package. By default, aptitude, and I think apt-get as well, installs all packages that are dependencies or recommendations. You can suppress the installation of recommended packages with aptitude -R install package_name or apt-get --no-install-recommends install package_name This may help. But if the extra packages are truly dependencies of the package you want to install, it probably won't work without the dependent packages, even if you can get it installed. If it's possible for the package to work without its dependencies (because the package uses/expect paths that match your manually installed stuff) you can force install via dpkg dpkg --force-depends package.deb A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: How select the access point manually in a wireless network?
On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 04:28:18PM +0100, Brian wrote: On Wed 15 Jun 2011 at 07:46:08 -0700, Adrian Rocha wrote: It may not be possible if the connection quality is too low. What does 'iwpriv scan' say when you are in the middle? Hi Brian, iwpriv scan? maybe you mean 'iwlist scan' I do. Thanks. I can see booth access points in the list: There is not too much difference between the Quality values for Cell 01 and Cell 08. I try setting the freq/channel, but does not work iwconfig eth1 channel 2 freq 2.417G ap 00:3A:99:0C:27:30 commit Channel 2 is 00:22:0C:94:CD:10. Perhaps the software which manages the wireless connection is a factor. What do you use? this is a good point. to really figure out what is going on, make sure you shutdown everything else that is trying to manage the connection -- networkmanager, wicd, etc. Also, what does syslog show when you try to set the access point? A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: How select the access point manually in a wireless network?
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 05:34:34PM -0700, Adrian Rocha wrote: Hi people, I work with my laptop and use a wireless conection in an enterprise network. When I go to other floor, the wireless access point change automatically. I can see this change using the command iwconfig. Is there any way to select the access point of the network manually? man iwconfig iwconfig interface ap address of access point A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: My X environment has become magnified
On Mon, Oct 04, 2010 at 04:58:14PM +0100, Spiros Bousbouras wrote: Hi folks. I downloaded some new levels for the arcade game supertux. I tried supertux -d . on the directory where I had downloaded the levels but presumably I used the option incorrectly because the programme exited immediately. The problem is that my X environment is now magnified. [...] I'm sure that killing the X server would fix it but I have several applications running which I would prefer not to terminate so I'm looking for a solution which will not terminate my desktop session. Preferably also something which will work from the command line since most windows are so large that most of their content goes off the screen. I'm typing this on console. [...] I tried pressing Alt+Ctrl+keypad - and it changes things a bit but does not return them to normal. Pressing the keys several times eventually results into a black screen and the monitor says signal out of range so I have to press Alt+Ctrl+keypad + to get picture again. I'm running Debian lenny with the ratpoison window manager. sounds to my like it's just a resolution problem. I know supertux will change the resolution, and if it dies, it won't be able to change it back. try xrandr. You can connect to the display from a console by using the -d option. Then you can list and set the resolution to something more sane. Note, that I'm not sure why Alt-Ctrl-keypad +/- wouldn't do that... A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
git hooks fail to run on bare repo
Hi list, they may be beter served on a git list, but I'm starting here anyway. I've got a bare git repo on my server and I push and pull through http. This works fine, but now I'm trying to run some hooks for various reasons. I've done chmod +x on hooks/post-update and hooks/post-receive in the bare repo and put in some simple statements to test it -- echo it works, touch post-update-ran and so forth. Nothing seems to be working at all. It appears that the scripts are not invoked at all. I suspect there may be something simple I'm missing, but my googling has returned no real results except this: http://www.mail-archive.com/git-us...@googlegroups.com/msg00516.html which suggests that someone else is having the same problem, but worked out around it instead of actually fixing it. Does anyone have experience and insight into this problem? thanks A -- signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: git hooks fail to run on bare repo
Ah nevermind, sorry for the noise list. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/140453 hooks not supported over http until version 1.6.6... I'm on stable, so 1.5.6 or so. A On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 07:59:06PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: Hi list, they may be beter served on a git list, but I'm starting here anyway. I've got a bare git repo on my server and I push and pull through http. This works fine, but now I'm trying to run some hooks for various reasons. I've done chmod +x on hooks/post-update and hooks/post-receive in the bare repo and put in some simple statements to test it -- echo it works, touch post-update-ran and so forth. Nothing seems to be working at all. It appears that the scripts are not invoked at all. I suspect there may be something simple I'm missing, but my googling has returned no real results except this: http://www.mail-archive.com/git-us...@googlegroups.com/msg00516.html which suggests that someone else is having the same problem, but worked out around it instead of actually fixing it. Does anyone have experience and insight into this problem? thanks A -- -- signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Torrents killing my connection
On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 04:30:56AM -0400, ABS Doug wrote: On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 12:22 AM, Huang, Tao deb...@huangtao.me wrote: so the torrents render you wireless disconnected. if your wifi adapter driver supports auto-reconnecting, everything should be solved. but i have no idea on how to get there. correct me if i get it wrong. My visual indicator something is wrong is when Skype goes offline. The signal meter shows a connection, but once Skype goes offline, I can't do anything until I disconnect reconnect. I'd be able to live with the problem if there was a auto-reconnection, but since the connection doesn't actually disconnect...? I have no real help to your specific problem, but you need to provide some solid useful data so others can debug the problem. Based on stuff in the other thread about what versions work and don't work, and the above, I recommend you do the following: 1. provide for each of the two Ubuntu's and Debian the output of: uname -a 2. provide for each of the two ubuntu's and debian the output of: lsmod 3. provide for the working ubuntu the output of: ifconfig -a iwconfig -a 4. provide for the broken ubuntu and debian *before* it breaks: ifconfig -a iwconfig -a 5. provide for the broken ubuntu and debian *after* it breaks, but before you do whatever you might do to fix it: ifconfig -a iwconfig -a 6. from any one of the version, provide the output of: lspci 7. in the debian version, open a terminal and run, as root, `tail -f /var/log/syslog`, then start a torrent that you know will fail. Watch the log output in the terminal and when the torrent fails note if there is any output. If there is any output that looks remotely relevant, then paste that in as well. The idea here is to give concrete information about known working states and known broken states so people can see the difference and maybe diagnose the problem. The output may be pretty long, so if you are uncomfortable submitting it in an email, then put it up on the web somewhere. A pastebin would be appropriate. hope this helps. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian Community Poll
On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 12:50:17AM +0300, Andrei Popescu wrote: On Sb, 19 iun 10, 12:13:11, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 09:06:32PM +0200, Sven Joachim wrote: On 2010-06-19 21:01 +0200, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: [...] I'm interested inthe results, and how many responses there were. http://twerner.blogspot.com/2010/06/results-from-debian-community-poll.html thanks! A I'm guessing you are the one with the automatic bar tender ;) heh. I wish. The liability would be a nightmare! Hmmm... Guess I should change the email I'm subscribed under ;-P A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian Community Poll
On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 09:51:56PM +0300, Andrei Popescu wrote: On Lu, 14 iun 10, 09:52:32, Ron Johnson wrote: A section from today's issue of the Debian Project News: Debian Community Poll - [...] 12 : http://tinyurl.com/3y33ska The poll is closed now. Thanks to all participants! :( I'm interested inthe results, and how many responses there were. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian Community Poll
On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 09:06:32PM +0200, Sven Joachim wrote: On 2010-06-19 21:01 +0200, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 09:51:56PM +0300, Andrei Popescu wrote: On Lu, 14 iun 10, 09:52:32, Ron Johnson wrote: A section from today's issue of the Debian Project News: Debian Community Poll - [...] I'm interested inthe results, and how many responses there were. http://twerner.blogspot.com/2010/06/results-from-debian-community-poll.html thanks! A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [OT] First computer
On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 06:18:27PM -0500, John Hasler wrote: ABS Doug writes: I had a Vic-20, but that was 1980 I think. Tape cassette, hooked to TV... I'm feeling old. I had a homebrew system built around a Zilog Z80-MCB in the late seventies. Tape storage (I never did get the head-per-track 1MB drives from Newman Computer working right), a surplus OCLC terminal, and a Selectric printer with homebrew electronics. The first computer I programmed was an IBM 1620 in the mid sixties, though. An odd machine. I'm feeling old. Go out and run a mile or so. that'll *really* make him feel old! A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [OT] First computer (was Re: LVM)
On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 09:03:52AM -0500, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote: Chris Bannister wrote: On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 12:18:54PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: On 06/16/2010 06:09 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote: Ron Johnson put forth on 6/15/2010 1:50 PM: On 06/15/2010 01:37 PM, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: [snip] an USB enclosure and use it for backups. Having ~700GB of data with the most critical ~400GB backed up is definitely preferable than no Geez, I remember when I couldn't fill up a 40_MB_ drive, and before that when I was in awe of the KayPro 10. My first computer was a Kaypro PC. No CP/M. Youngster. I had a KayPro II. With, originally, TurboPascal 1.0! Mmm, http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html so around 1982? Commodore PET. 1977 :) What was that thing that was only a keyboard that had the cpu and memory built into it? You connected a tape player for the I/O and a TV for the display. I used it to play chess on and to do astrology programs. It took hours to get that thing to read in a tape without errors. It was around 1977 I think. there were a couple of machines that worked that way, but I'm guessing you're thinking of the Commodore Vic-20 and 64 (and later the 128, but floppies were becoming common then). I think some of the others like the Tandy's or the Sinclair used a tape drive and tv rig. Maybe the Ataris as well, but I don't recall and I'm too lazy to look... I still miss my C-64. The tape drive was awful(ly slow), but worked. The Commodore floppy drives were pretty awful too, but I was lucky to get a third party floppy and (Emerald Components International, ordered it with a money order, took forever to arrive) it was pretty slick. I also remember the upgrade from 300 to 1200 baud... I couldn't out type the modem quite so easily after that. I think your dates are a little early though. The C-64, 64K, 1MHz MOS 6510, came out in 1982, the vic-20, 5K, 1MHz MOS 6502, in 1980 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: dist-upgrade locked resolution at 640x480
fixing the quoting... On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 06:08:17PM +0100, James Allsopp wrote: On 17 June 2010 18:03, Thomas H. George li...@tomgeorge.info wrote: A dist-upgrade resulted in a problem: The display resolution is stuck at 640x480 and the X window is moved to F9. My system is Debian Squeeze. Yesterday (16 Jun 10) I ran apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade. The system was shutdown overnight. When rebooted this morning the X window was at F9 and the resolution 640x480. I ran startupmanager which reported the resolution to be 1600x1200 but the system remained stuck in the 640x480 mode. Anyone else encountering this problem? Is there another way to change the resolution? Check your HorizSync and VertRefresh values in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It's probably just set values that are woefully low to be on the safe side. If he even has an xorg.conf. OP, maybe look at the output of xrandr from a terminal in the X session. It should list the available output resolutions. If you post that along with the contents of /etc/X11/xorg.conf, if it exists, along with /var/log/Xorg.0.log to this list you should get reasonable response. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Restarting X
On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 02:35:00PM -0400, H.S. wrote: On 17/06/10 01:22 PM, Camaleón wrote: On Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:53:49 +0100, James Allsopp wrote: When I'm testing things with X I l want to be able to log via SSH and restart X, how can I do that in a console? I'm using Gnome. /etc/init.d/gdm restart? :-? Correct. This is what I always do, but with sudo (so, same thing): $ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart Replace gdm with kdm or xdm or whatever display manager one is running. BTW, I wonder why the OP needs to SSH to his machine unless he is already doing stuff remotely. On my machine if X messed up, I just switch to a console (CTRL+ALT+F1 or F2 or F3 ..) and give the command from there. maybe the the keyboard is frozen? I have this happen on occasion with gnome apps (my wife's machine, keep that stuff off my box please! ;-). A quick ssh and kill and it's all good. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Backups - was: Re: LVM
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 10:59:46AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: On 06/15/2010 09:48 AM, Lisi wrote: Thanks for this. I was originally responding to Andrew's saying: quote There are many many ways to make take backups beyond having a disk big enough to hold the data. /quote I can think of very few - and was interested in what he was thinking of. Incremental/differential backups are not really practical, since she will be at school. A periodic dd (or Clonezilla?) of the whole drive and more frequent updates of her personal data (of which I understand that there is not much) would be the optimum, but a trifle pricey, so I am still looking at alternative possibilities. I wrote a script that only backs up our data directories (including much of /home) into a bunch of tarballs, excluding junk folders like caches, thumbnails, trash, etc, and compressing most but not stuff like image and OOo document directories. Each backup goes in a separate, dated directory. For huge binary directories (like uncompressible video and audio), I simply do a cp -vau from the live tree to the backup tree. The bottom line, though, is that *yes*, you *do* need enough disk space for the backup data. Yeah, my choice of words was unfortunate. What I really meant was something along the lines of: The inability to find a 1.3TB external disk it not a reason not to take backups. If the data needs backing up, then there are solutions besides one big honking disk to copy it onto. Tape drives, big stacks of DVD-R/RW's, arrays of smaller disks, leased disk space onlines somewhere, etc. I think the OP said something like: I have 1.3 TB and it's too big to backup. This of course is patently ridiculous. meh. To address Lisi's issue, I would suggest a cronjob that checks for network connectivity and then if it's got network, runs rsnapshot (or rdiff-backup) over passwordless ssh to a server somewhere. That would be fairly lightweight, once the initial copy is made. And it would be secure and easy in the longrun. If the user needs local backup, then a usb drive with rsnapshot would be reasonable. It creates duplicate filetrees at each snapshot, but uses hardlinks for unchanged files to keep the total size from ballooning out of control. I think it's pretty slick because it maintains some of the size control of differential backup but also makes access to the complete filetree at a given time a snap. very much my .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Backups - was: Re: LVM
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 09:27:47PM +1000, Alexander Samad wrote: On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 8:32 PM, Lisi lisi.re...@gmail.com wrote: Please excuse the thread breaking. I have suddenly been being rejected by the list server and am sending for the third time. I hope that the list server is now happy with my SMTP settings. On Tuesday 15 June 2010 01:25:56 Andrew Sackville-West wrote: There are many many ways to make take backups beyond having a disk big enough to hold the data. Would you feel inclined to elaborate? I'm trying to solve this problem for my granddaughter's large HDD, and am not keen to have to buy a 300GB external drive. Tar would still require a fairly large medium. :-( see my other response to Ron Johnson. Basically, I was complaining, in a poorly worded way, that there is no such thing as too much data to backup. I think this is essentially what the OP was arguing. And just because the OP doesn't have an extra 1.3TB of hard disk lying around doesn't mean they can't take backups: stacks of DVD's, tape drives, online disk space etc Also, I did not mean to imply that you can fit all your data into less space than the data takes (barring compression... but that fits your data into the amount of space your data takes... so to speak). It all depends. Questions to ask How much total data is there to backup How much data changes on each change how many backups do I want to keep. How easy do I want to make my restores I use rdiff-backup remote diff backup package to a backup server, I usually keep about 30 backups, figure if I haven't noticed in a month then I probably don't really need it :) I have plenty of space on my backup server (you could use a NAS box - one of those ones that takes 2 disks so that you can raid1). I backup the system and the valuable data and for the really valuable data I send to 2 remote sites - its all automated so I don't have to worry about it (sends me emails when it has problems). took me a while to write/setup the system. This is fairly similar to what I do. I use rdiff-backup or rsnapshot to make hourly, daily, weekly or monthly backups of critical data with the time frequency varying depending on what the data is and how often it changes. This is all run via cron on the backup server. For certain really critical data (financial records in particular) I also tarball it up, encrypt it to myself and then send it to a server in another state that I have some spare space on. Again a cron job does it all automatically. Easy peasy once it's set up. I realise i will need a debian DVD to recover a machine, install base and then just restore the system backup set and go from there. It's really a question of whether to backup the *machine* or the critical data. I think unless you need real high-availability, backing up a *machine* is really probably too much. At least for the general home user. In this day and age of really good installers, it's just easier to reinstall and then restore the data you need. For this purpose I keep backups of /home, and /etc and that's about it. I do keep backups of the MBR too, having once lost an MBR due to stupidity on my part... A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: LVM
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 03:56:51PM +1000, Gerald C.Catling wrote: On Tuesday, June 15, 2010 10:25:56 am Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 08:27:32AM +1000, Gerald C.Catling wrote: Hi Boyd, At what point and how do I insert -P in the lvm system? man lvchange Many thanks to all respondents, and NO I did not have a backup, no drive big enough to hold all data. um... really? I've heard all sorts of reasons for not making backups, but that is *definitely* not a valid reason. (hint, there is no valid reason other than The loss of this data does not matter, which suggests the questions then why do you have the data?). There are many many ways to make take backups beyond having a disk big enough to hold the data. [...] One good reason is that I am 73 coming on 4 and pensions are not sufficient to support my buying larger HDD's. I do appreciate the effort you and others have put into your replies. But it does seem to me that all the data is lost! I suspect your data is indeed, in general, lost. You may be able to recover some of it from the portions of the logical volumes that are on the remaining partitions, but it won't be easy (and I'm in no position to tell you how to do it, sorry). As to the other, it's unfortunate that you have more data (I'm assuing you have that much data) than you can afford to backup. In that case, you are definitely running a risk of losing that data and there's not much you can do about it. If it's reasonably cost effective for you, then the static portions of the data can be written to optical disks and archived (being sure to rotate those regularly as they go bad over time). However, if you aren't really using all that 1.3TB (or whatever amount of space it was) then pull one of those drives and stick it in an USB enclosure and use it for backups. Having ~700GB of data with the most critical ~400GB backed up is definitely preferable than no backup, IMO. But it really depends on how much data you have! A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: LVM
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 01:50:48PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: On 06/15/2010 01:37 PM, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: [snip] an USB enclosure and use it for backups. Having ~700GB of data with the most critical ~400GB backed up is definitely preferable than no Geez, I remember when I couldn't fill up a 40_MB_ drive, and before that when I was in awe of the KayPro 10. It wasn't too long ago (4-5 years?) that I built my current server with ~600GB array and I figured I'd *never* fill that up! Hah! I'm eyeing some 1TB drives to reconfigure the thing (to get rid of RAID-5 and grow a little). It's not full, but a little more elbow room would be nice. Sheesh A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: LVM
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 02:59:09PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: On 06/15/2010 02:17 PM, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 01:50:48PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: On 06/15/2010 01:37 PM, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: [snip] an USB enclosure and use it for backups. Having ~700GB of data with the most critical ~400GB backed up is definitely preferable than no Geez, I remember when I couldn't fill up a 40_MB_ drive, and before that when I was in awe of the KayPro 10. It wasn't too long ago (4-5 years?) that I built my current server with ~600GB array and I figured I'd *never* fill that up! Hah! I'm eyeing some 1TB drives to reconfigure the thing (to get rid of RAID-5 and grow a little). It's not full, but a little more elbow room would be nice. Sheesh 1TB is s 3 years ago! gah! NewEgg is selling 2TB Hitachis for $120 with promo code... I know it... how can you not b uy at that price, right? A -- Seek truth from facts. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4c17db8d.7040...@cox.net -- signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: LVM
On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 11:31:41AM +1000, Gerald C.Catling wrote: Many thanks to all that responded to try to solve this LVM problem. I could not recover any data from the crashed system. I could not find any method of mounting drive 2 or 3 as individual drives and the system would not create a volume group without the now non-existant first drive. Once again, many thanks. sorry to hear about the data loss. I will have to try RAID 1. remember that RAID is no substitute for backups. And, there really is nothing wrong with lvm per se, you just have to be careful of having volumes spanning harddrives. Without redundancy, you can lose the volume. best of luck A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian Community Poll
(On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 04:10:22PM +0100, Lisi wrote: On Monday 14 June 2010 16:01:57 Camaleón wrote: On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:52:32 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: A section from today's issue of the Debian Project News: Debian Community Poll - (...) 12 : http://tinyurl.com/3y33ska Done! Thanks for forwarding :-) Greetings, -- Camaleón +1 Lisi)++ A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: LVM
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 08:27:32AM +1000, Gerald C.Catling wrote: Hi Boyd, At what point and how do I insert -P in the lvm system? man lvchange Many thanks to all respondents, and NO I did not have a backup, no drive big enough to hold all data. um... really? I've heard all sorts of reasons for not making backups, but that is *definitely* not a valid reason. (hint, there is no valid reason other than The loss of this data does not matter, which suggests the questions then why do you have the data?). There are many many ways to make take backups beyond having a disk big enough to hold the data. .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [OT] advice on finding programming help
On Tue, Jun 08, 2010 at 12:24:37PM -0500, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: On Tuesday 08 June 2010 12:00:02 Mark Allums wrote: On 6/8/2010 11:02 AM, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: On Tuesday 08 June 2010 10:46:03 Mark Allums wrote: I was/am a computer guy (back in the day), but I have been out of touch for some time. I am looking for intermediate programming help---some Debian-related---but in a mailing list format, not a message board forum. Any suggestions? What language? Oh, the usual suspects, particularly C/C++. Generic help for both of these are generally on the associated newsgroups. comp.lang.c++ or something like that. I'm pretty sure there are some services that do news - mail bi-directional gateways; maybe gmane? just .02 here, I personally find irc to be particularly helpful for bouncing ideas when programming. It seems to have that right mix, for me at least, of immediate help and variety of ideas without mental gear-switching of reading API docs. heh, to put that in English... I find that the interactive component of irc is more in line with how my brain functions when coding than the longer lag times of email. But that is, of course, a personal preference. I don't know what, if any C/C++ irc channels there are, but I'm sure they're out there. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GUI fails to start
On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 02:04:24PM -0500, Nathan Martin wrote: Help! After the setup process for Lenny, the system reboots to start the new installation but the GUI does not come up. The screen remains blank. I checked the option for Desktop in the set up process. Everything seems to go smoothly until the GUI should come up. I am starting from a net-install CD I downloaded and burned. Am I doing something wrong or is it my disk copy? most likely, it's an issue with the X system not properly starting the gui session. Try switching over to a virtual terminal (via Ctrl-Alt-F1) and logging into the command line. You can then debug from there. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: isn't sed s,x,x, one big no-op?
On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 05:39:52PM +0800, jida...@jidanni.org wrote: SJ == Sven Joachim svenj...@gmx.de writes: SJ Yes, actually you can do it at build time by using the configure option SJ --program-transform-name. Say you want grub to be named grub2 to SJ distinguish it from grub-legacy, then you can run SJ $ ./configure --program-transform-name=s/grub/grub2/ SJ and 00_header will have the transform line look like this SJ transform=s/grub/grub2/ SJ This somewhat obscure feature is not used in the Debian package, SJ hence the no-ops. Hmmm, then there is a bug in whatever preprocessor package they are using, that leaves such confusing no-ops when in fact nothing should be left at all perhaps... ISTM that is much easier and more reliable to change one variable at the beginning of the file than to change all the sed expressions throughout the file... .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: isn't sed s,x,x, one big no-op?
On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 08:52:39AM +0800, jida...@jidanni.org wrote:
In /etc/grub.d/00_header we see
transform=s,x,x,
grub_prefix=`echo /boot/grub | sed ${transform}`
locale_dir=`echo /boot/grub/locale | sed ${transform}`
Isn't that sed line one big no-op?
looks like it to me.
Should I file a bug to have it removed or at least have a comment added
as to its purpose, or have them use a better way to achieve what they
are trying to do?
maybe a question is better than a bug report. I imagine it's just a
convenience variable in case someone needs to transform paths for some
reason.
A
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Re: [OT] spam-tagging
On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 04:05:58PM -0500, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: SPAM deb...@list lol A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
OT: list spam, was something else
On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 10:15:49AM +0200, Nick Douma wrote: On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 03:05:15AM -0400, JobsCentral wrote: Sorry you need a HTML email client to view this message. [...snip spammy stuff] Lol, this is precisely why I use mutt to read my mail :P. Please don't actually quote the spammy parts... meanwhile, yes, I find it hilarious. I have a vendor who sends mails with that same disclaimer at the top, and yet amazingly, I can actually read them. Apparently they haven't bothered to notice that they've got a plaintext version as well. A -- signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian on a Super Lean Laptop Part I - Making it Work
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 06:30:58PM -0700, Scarletdown wrote: This may, at first glance, appear to be an exercise into insanity, but it is a rather important little project to me. I have this old Toshiba Satellite laptop (P-120, 6GB had drive, and a whoppong 24MB RAM) that is currently running 98SE Lite. It runs adequately on Windows, but now I would like to make it dual boot with Debian. [...] The build box boots the bare bones build beautifully. However, the laptop hangs when I try to boot into Linux. Specifically, the last thing shown on the screen before nothing else happens is: initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-3-486 [Linux-initrd @ 0x10b3000, 0x76cdf9 bytes] After that, she's locked up tight, and all I can do is power off. This is obviously a problem with initrd. Set too large for such a low memory system perhaps? If so, what can be done to fix this? Perhaps. You could certainly build a kernel that doesn't require the initrd. You'd probably benefit a lot from running a custom kernel anyway. .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: don't open any e-mails sent from my hotmail account
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 04:10:04AM -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote: Han Huynh put forth on 3/21/2010 10:20 PM: I think someone broke into my hotmail account and sending some type of e-mails out. Please ignore all e-mails from my hotmail account. My yahoo account if fine. If you don't know it already just replace hotmail with yahoo. It's the same ID. If that is the case, the responsible thing for you to do is unsubscribe that address from the debian users list instead of telling the rest of the thousands of users here to ignore emails from one of your addresses, which none here will remember to do, unless they're currently adding that address to a kill file. Regardless, please unsubscribe the address. It's the courteous and responsible thing to do. not to mention, sending a notice about ignoring your hotmail account, *from* *your* *hotmail* *account* is a little ridiculous... .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Gnucash segfaults
On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 01:34:09PM -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote: Hello, all. We are in the process of switching from Ubuntu 8.0.4 to Debian Lenny plus selected backports (e.g., OpenOffice, IceWeasel). Since donig so, GnuCash (2.2.6-2) seg faults every time we try to open an account. Since these are our production financials, you can imagine this is quite a problem! The end of the gnucash trace file in debug mode shows: Can you please provide output generated by the crash when launching gnucash from a terminal. A * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=-770/100 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=-770/100 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/1 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/1 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/1 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/1 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/1 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/1 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/1 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/1 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/1 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/1 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:17 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:18 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:18 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:18 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:18 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:18 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:18 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:18 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:18 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:18 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:18 INFO gnc.account [xaccAccountGetBalanceInCurrency] baln=0/100 * 13:27:18 INFO qof.object [qof_object_foreach] type=Split * 13:27:18 INFO qof.query [qof_query_run_internal] matching objects=0xe9b240 count=23 * 13:27:18 INFO qof.engine [qof_event_generate_internal] id=5 hi=0xcf2b90 han=0x7f63e1bc2740 data=(nil) * 13:27:18 INFO qof.engine [qof_event_generate_internal] id=3 hi=0xc75c40 han=0x7f63e2ace9e0 data=(nil) * 13:27:18 INFO qof.engine [qof_event_generate_internal] id=2 hi=0x9ac830 han=0x7f63e16f9ee0 data=(nil) * 13:27:18 INFO qof.engine [qof_event_generate_internal] id=1 hi=0x763d10 han=0x7f63e1bb2d60 data=(nil) * 13:27:18 INFO gnc.engine [xaccTransSetDateInternal] addr=0x62f450 set date to 1268625600.0 Mon Mar 15 00:00:00 2010 * 13:27:18 INFO qof.engine [qof_event_generate_internal] id=5 hi=0xcf2b90 han=0x7f63e1bc2740 data=0x7fffeb415160 * 13:27:18 INFO qof.engine [qof_event_generate_internal] id=3 hi=0xc75c40 han=0x7f63e2ace9e0 data=0x7fffeb415160 * 13:27:18 INFO qof.engine [qof_event_generate_internal] id=2 hi=0x9ac830 han=0x7f63e16f9ee0 data=0x7fffeb415160 * 13:27:18 INFO qof.engine [qof_event_generate_internal] id=1 hi=0x763d10 han=0x7f63e1bb2d60 data=0x7fffeb415160 We have updated and upgraded using apt-get to the latest. How do we fix this? Thanks - John -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1268674449.5897.16.ca...@family.pacifera.com -- signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Gnucash segfaults
On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 02:06:28PM -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote: On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 10:39 -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 01:34:09PM -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote: Hello, all. We are in the process of switching from Ubuntu 8.0.4 to Debian Lenny plus selected backports (e.g., OpenOffice, IceWeasel). Since donig so, GnuCash (2.2.6-2) seg faults every time we try to open an account. Since these are our production financials, you can imagine this is quite a problem! The end of the gnucash trace file in debug mode shows: Can you please provide output generated by the crash when launching gnucash from a terminal. Alas, there is nothing particularly helpful: jas...@jasiii:~$ gnucash --debug gnc.bin-Message: main: binreloc relocation support was disabled at configure time. Found Finance::Quote version 1.13 Segmentation fault hmmm... okay, a couple of options. 1) run gnucash from the command line: gnucash --nofile which will open an empty gnucash instance. If that doesn't crash, then try opening your file from the file menu at that point. I suspect this won't work though, that it will crash. 2) install version 2.2.9 from squeeze. this may be problematic as it may bring in lots of gnome stuff you may not want. I haven't hacked on gnucash in a while, so I can't say what the state of 2.2.6 was, but I know there were a couple of problem releases for a bit there. It may be one of them. 3) get on #gnucash on irc.gnome.org and ask there. The channel can be pretty slow, so you'll have to lurk around for a while. Those guys can probably figure it out, but be prepared to defend your reasons for not moving up to 2.2.9, the current release. 4) build gnucash from source. This isn't as hard as you might think. do apt-get build-dep gnucash and start there. you'll probably want to use the --enable-opt-style-install to put it in a different path to keep from mixing up with dpkg. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Gnucash segfaults
On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 08:16:32PM -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote: On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 18:11 -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote: On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 12:00 -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 02:06:28PM -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote: On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 10:39 -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 01:34:09PM -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote: Hello, all. We are in the process of switching from Ubuntu 8.0.4 to Debian Lenny plus selected backports (e.g., OpenOffice, IceWeasel). Since donig so, GnuCash (2.2.6-2) seg faults every time we try to open an account. Since these are our production financials, you can imagine this is quite a problem! The end of the gnucash trace file in debug mode shows: Can you please provide output generated by the crash when launching gnucash from a terminal. Alas, there is nothing particularly helpful: jas...@jasiii:~$ gnucash --debug gnc.bin-Message: main: binreloc relocation support was disabled at configure time. Found Finance::Quote version 1.13 Segmentation fault hmmm... okay, a couple of options. 1) run gnucash from the command line: gnucash --nofile which will open an empty gnucash instance. If that doesn't crash, then try opening your file from the file menu at that point. I suspect this won't work though, that it will crash. Indeed - had tried that early on and it crashes as soon as I try to open an account. hmmm... try this: launch gnucash with the --nofile flag. Then head into preferences and make sure the automatic running of scheduled transactions is turned off. Edit - Preferences - Scheduled transactions - Run when data file opened. Make sure that's unchecked. Then open your data file and see what happens. One of the problems in the past was a crash from sched txns running automatically. Again, it's been a while for me, so I'm just guessing... [...] Argh!!! This is getting very frustrating - probably all my ignorance. I rebuilt the debs and still get the same segfaults. Here's what I did (from our internal docs): Some of the steps need to be done as root so we will need to create a root console. Install the needed packages for building apt-get -t lenny-backports install devscripts build-essential Edit /etc/apt/sources.list by adding a Lenny Backports source repository such as the following: deb-src http://www.backports.org/debian/ lenny-backports main contrib non-free Make apt aware of the repository: apt-get update Other steps MUST not be done by root so we need another user console to do the following steps. We next need to download the source and rebuild it mkdir /data/Tech/download/gnucash cd /data/Tech/download/gnucash apt-get -t lenny-backports source gnucash gnucash-common what output did the above command produce? We need to install dependencies and this must be done as root so return to the root console and do: cd /data/Tech/download/gnucash apt-get -t lenny-backports build-dep gnucash gnucash-common Return to the user console cd gnucash-2.2.6 debuild -us -uc cd .. The two .deb files should be in this directory and can be installed where needed I then installed them with dpkg -i. It clearly stated it was replacing gnucash and gnucash common: jasiii:/data/download/gnucash# ls gnucash-2.2.6gnucash_2.2.6-2_amd64.changes gnucash_2.2.6-2.diff.gz gnucash_2.2.6.orig.tar.gz gnucash_2.2.6-2_amd64.build gnucash_2.2.6-2_amd64.deb gnucash_2.2.6-2.dsc gnucash-common_2.2.6-2_all.deb these are all version 2.2.6, the same one that was giving you trouble. You need the source for 2.2.9... A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: need help with xorg.conf
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 01:11:14PM -0500, Stephen Powell wrote: [...] OK, we learn a lot from the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file. Your Integrated graphics card is (--) PCI:*(0:1:0:0) 5333:8d04:1462:3908 S3 Inc. VT8375 [ProSavage8 KM266/KL266] rev 0, Mem @ 0xe100/524288, 0xd800/134217728, BIOS @ 0x/65536 I thought at first that the stuff within parentheses might be the chipset. But I found out later that I was wrong. We'll see why in a minute. X chose the savage driver. It lists the chipsets which it supports. (II) SAVAGE: driver (version 2.3.1) for S3 Savage chipsets: Savage4, Savage3D, Savage3D-MV, Savage2000, Savage/MX-MV, Savage/MX, Savage/IX-MV, Savage/IX, ProSavage PM133, ProSavage KM133, [... snip a lot of great stuff...] After tossing out all the modes that aren't supported by the video BIOS, or that won't work for some other reason, it decides to reduce the virtual screen size. (--) SAVAGE(0): Virtual size is 1024x768 (pitch 1024) And things are all downhill from there. The bottom line: the problem is not with your monitor. The problem is that the savage driver wants to use the video BIOS to set the video mode. The single most important thing you must have in any xorg.conf file is Option UseBIOS off This goes in the Device section. If you need more help, let me know, and I'll try to come up with a specific xorg.conf file for you. I just wanted to say this is just a fantastic explanation of the log file. nice job. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: IMAP timing issue
On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 06:07:16AM -0500, Paul Cartwright wrote: [...] The problem is, at home, on our debian box, she runs Kmail. When she clicks on the inbox it takes forever to bring in all the messages, and if she clicks on another folder NOT in her inbox, next time she goes back, it starts over again with zero messages, retrieves them all, and it takes forever. Part of the problem is people that send monster ( OUTLOOK) messages with megabyte attachments.. I don't use kmail, but AIUI, it should only be loading the email _headers_ and not the entire emails. It should only load the email when she tries to view it. That said, if there are a whole lot of emails, it could still take a few seconds to load all the headers. But unless we're talking thousands of emails and a slow connection, it should still only take a few seconds. Iwould look at kmail and see whether it's pulling only headers or the entire emails. What can I do? I'm not that familiar with IMAP, would disconnected IMAP be better? disconnected IMAP might help because it would have a local copy to load, speeding the process. But I suspect that's not really the problem. BTW, what do you mean by forever? A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Limited X setup
putting this back on-list... On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 08:03:54PM -0800, joseph lockhart wrote: --- On Sat, 2/27/10, Andrew Sackville-West and...@farwestbilliards.com wrote: [...] 1. just install only X (package xorg, or even manually pick out packages) without a DE. You don't even need a window manager, you can just run whatever program you want. I used to do this for my kids... no window manager, nothing, just an instance of gcompris for them to play with. Worked fine. thought about this, just wasn't sure if it would work without setting in xorg.conf or something like that often X.org just works without a configuration file. Of course, not always... But I think it's certainly possible to run a very minimal X system both in terms of package weight and configuration tweaks. It just requires care in the installation process. Someone else mentioned installing Xterm, and that's a pretty good idea. It should drag in only the minimal amount of X. .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: -i386 to amd64
On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 05:44:46PM -0500, Charles Kroeger wrote: [...] Before moving an image of the old [i686] partition to the new computer I installed the amd64 kernel. I completed the install by using gparted from a rescue disk to merge the larger new partition with the old smaller one from the image. The previously installed amd64 kernel now listed on the grub2 menu was selected to boot the new computer, and up it came, without a glitch so basically I'm happy. However, it has transpired that it wasn't that simple to change from the i686 kernel to amd64 even though my 32 packages will work under the amd64 kernel Apt and Dpkg for instance don't seem to know this has happened. I would hope someone knows a command line solution. Is there a way to safely morph the old architecture into the new, like purging the i686 kernel for instance or configuring APT or dpkg to upgrade with amd64 versions. It's been a while, but as I understand it, there is an -amd64 kernel available in the -i686 repos, but that doesn't mean you're running in the 64 bit architecture. That requires a number of other things to happen, including changing to a 64-bit libc and so forth. I have done the migration in place, but it's tedious and no fun. I don't remember the specifics, but it required multiple reboots and quite a bit of hackery. In other words, with the installers being so good these days, I don't think it's worth the effort. Just backup your data, export your apt selections and reinstall into a 64-bit architecture and restore your stuff. very much my .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Limited X setup
On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 02:24:05PM -0800, joseph lockhart wrote: Hello, been a while since I posted, Hi Joe! working on setting up a partition which will run mainly console programs, however, I was interested in setting up X to run a few programs (or maybe the framebuffer) a quick search of the web yielded no help. Any suggestions on where to look. I haven't tried any of this, except #1, so salt accordingly. 1. just install only X (package xorg, or even manually pick out packages) without a DE. You don't even need a window manager, you can just run whatever program you want. I used to do this for my kids... no window manager, nothing, just an instance of gcompris for them to play with. Worked fine. 2. check out xserver-xfbdev. looks pretty minimal, uses only the framebuffer, and has pretty low dependency level. might be interesting. Its man page points to TinyX which doesn't seem to be in debian, but might be worth a look. 3. There is some thing you can do to fool the X apps into thinking they are running in X, but a really just running in the framebuffer. I don't remember the details, but maybe that will help you search. good luck. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Upgrade to Lenny?
On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 07:47:05AM -0800, ow...@netptc.net wrote: [... snipped 115!! lines of unnecessary quoting ...] Can you please let me know how to modify it to have ethereal installed on my Lenny ? Ethereal is now called Wireshark Larry Please learn to trim your replies at least some. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Decompiler?
On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 05:11:07AM +, Hadi Motamedi wrote: [... snip nice explanation of why this won't work...] So I dis-assembled the code and I was lucky to find the related subroutine . It is short in length but I cannot decode it to find the logic in behind . So I need to find a de-compiler to de-compile it to some sort of higher level languages to see if I can understand the login behind . Please give me a hint on how to accomplish this . basically it can't be done. It's a one-way operation. Picture this -- within C there are several ways to print a value to the screen. These all likely produce similar machine code where a register is loaded with the address of the value to print and then a print routine is called. The question when decompiling is: how do you know *which* method of printing a string to decompile to? You can't know. Throw in the fact that code and data are indistinguishable at the machine level, and it's basically impossible. Now remember that there are many many many languages that compile to machine code. How do you even know which language it was originally written in? What language do you target for the decompilation? The transformation of high-level code into machine code is not an isomorphism. It cannot be reversed. That said, there my be ways to make some reasonable guess as to what the code is doing and de-compile to some psuedo-language, but this will still largely be guesswork. If you can make it work even remotely reliably, you could probably get a PhD for the work... A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Air compressors vs. canned air
On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 08:00:52AM -0500, Bryce wrote: Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:24:19AM -0500, Chris Jones wrote: [...] I have changed that laptop's keyboard 4-5 times already, and since replacements only cost about $20.00 + SH.. a cost-effective solution is to swap in a new keyboard when the current one stops working to my satisfaction, [...] have you tried running an old one through the dishwasher? works for the old model m's and many other keyboards... A Someone, not yet having full benefit of that first cup of morning coffee, is about to put his laptop into the dishwasher! yikes! A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Air compressors vs. canned air
On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:24:19AM -0500, Chris Jones wrote: [...] I have changed that laptop's keyboard 4-5 times already, and since replacements only cost about $20.00 + SH.. a cost-effective solution is to swap in a new keyboard when the current one stops working to my satisfaction, [...] have you tried running an old one through the dishwasher? works for the old model m's and many other keyboards... A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Tax software for Debian (Lenny)?
On Sat, Feb 06, 2010 at 11:05:55AM +0530, Girish Kulkarni wrote: On Fri, 5 Feb 2010 20:35:26 -0800 Mark wrote: I've done the typical Internet scrubbing and didn't find anything specific to tax software for Debian (something similar to TurboTax, for example). I found a few interesting options but nothing in the official Debian packages. Here's what I have so far as options (on-line versions), any insight into the most Linux/Debian-friendly one of these? I live in the USA and run Lenny on the machine Ill do my taxes with. GnuCash (http://www.gnucash.org/) has some Income Tax related features. Maybe useful? at most it allows you to attach tax categories to particular accounts or transactions, but it doesn't actually do any income tax preparation or anything like that. We've talked various times in the past about it and the core-devs are definitely not interested. been a while since I've been around them though, so that's slightly dated information. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Can Anyone Explain the over-all view of Wireless Networking?
On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 04:04:54PM -0600, Kent West wrote: [...] After a couple of reboots, and after running wicd-client from the actual machine instead of over ssh, the machine did not lock up; it did see the various ACUWireless networks, but when I tried clicking on the first one, it thought for a minute or two, then reported Connection failed: Unable to get IP Address. in the properties of the ACUWireless network (in wicd's interface) there is a check box for treat all networks with this name the same way or something to that effect. Select that box and then it will automatically work it's way through the list of available APs attempting to connect until it finally works. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Can Anyone Explain the over-all view of Wireless Networking?
On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 12:44:45AM -0600, Kent West wrote: Celejar wrote: This is the networking subsystem attempting to configure the wireless interface. Sending on LPF/wlan0/00:18:f8:29:b5:96 Sending on Socket/fallback DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4 DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 11 DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 11 DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 10 DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13 DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7 DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5 No DHCPOFFERS received. No working leases in persistent database - sleeping. done. It is failing. Now, IME, most such failures are due to the card not being properly associated with the AP. You can determine this by either looking at syslog, or by calling 'iwconfig wlan0'. If it's properly associated, the first two lines should be something like this: wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:nnn Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 12:34:56:78:99:aa If it's not, you'll see something like this: wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Information in syslog will be helpful in determining the cause of failure. Stuff like this in dmesg: status=10 aid=0) [ 575.125696] wlan0: AP denied association (code=10) [ 575.321089] wlan0: association with AP 00:0b:86:bb:83:40 timed out [ 594.893308] wlan0: deauthenticated (Reason: 1) [ 652.178643] wlan0: direct probe to AP 00:0b:86:bb:83:40 try 1 I have seen this exact behavior at my uni. The wireless tools are picking, generally, the AP with the strongest signal and trying to associate with it. But that AP denies association for whatever reason (too busy perhaps), but the tools aren't smart enough to realize this and move on to the next AP and try associating. My solution, for quite a while, was repeated issuances of: sudo iwconfig wlan0 ap off while watching a syslog tail. Then I would see it finally associate and *hopefully* do it before dhclient times out. In my experience, this means that your wireless is essentially working correctly, but is just not getting association with a free AP. Around my school, this behavior is correlated with the number of running laptops in the vicinity. For example, over in the liberal arts areas, there are relatively few laptops and the AP's are generally available. I can associate on the first or second try. Meanwhile in the CS and engineering areas, laptops proliferate like bunnies and it can take several attempts to get association. [...] I thought I was through with the machine, but I may have to bring it back up to the ACUWireless network, so I might get to play with it some more. I finally installed wicd and it is sophisticated enough to handle this situation. Now my wireless just works. It can be slow to come alive if there is a lot of traffic around, but it still gets me connected with no fiddling on my part. very much my .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Upgrade wants too many packages (X and apache).
On 2010-01-17 at 17:27:52 -0500, Nuno Magalhães wrote: My latest apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade wants to install [...] *all* the xserver-xorg-video-* packages, you should probably be using aptitude, but regardless, you have installed, at some point, xserver-xorg-video-all, which depends on all the video-* packages. remove that package and directly install the drivers you actually need. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: No flamewar please!
On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 02:35:47PM +, James Allsopp wrote: Hi, I'm using gnome but want to remove all traces of mono from my system, I've a clean install of Squeeze. Can I, apt-get purge mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime tomboy No offence, if you want to use it fine, but I'd like rid of it. Tried running with simulate and it seems to want to get rid of gnome too. when you say get rid of gnome too, do you mean the meta-package, gnome, that is used to pull in all the dependencies required to make gnome work, or do you mean *all* of gnome? If it's just the meta-package, then let it go, its purpose has already been served. If you want more help, you should post up the output of the above command. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: How to connect my ipod?
On Sat, Jan 09, 2010 at 11:13:56AM +0100, Joost Kraaijeveld wrote: [...] Is it possible to let the iPod appear consistently at /media/ipod so that I can use it with GtkPod, which expects it to be at that mount point (or any other consistent mount point I guess)? If so, how does one do that using Debian Squeeze? http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html might help. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Two computers in one: two users each with their own accounts, monitor, and keyboard?
On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 10:58:48AM +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote: I have a desktop computer with onboard VGA and option to add a discrete video card. It has plenty of spare USB ports for mice and keyboards. Does Debian support using this computer for _two_ workstations, each with their own user accounts, monitor, and keyboard? At least one debian user that I know of do this, Hugo VanWoerkom: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2007/03/msg00511.html or at least did it at some point. Also, I thought Kent West was doing this as well, but I could be wrong. Google is not yielding other results for me at the moment. The point is it has been done, and probably still can be done. It just requires a little fiddly stuff. hth A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: rolling-back, reverting system upgrades?
On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 06:28:50PM +0100, Johannes Wiedersich wrote: Andrew Sackville-West wrote: With all due respect, if you aren't prepared to deal with occaisional breakage, then you should be running testing. s/should/should not/ indeed. thanks... A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: rolling-back, reverting system upgrades?
On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 10:43:53AM +, Liviu Andronic wrote: Dear all How would I roll back system upgrades? As I understnad it, generally speaking you don't. You *can* if you use dpkg directly and still have the .deb files from the previous version of a package lying around (/var/cache/apt/archives/). I am using Debian testing and after I hit Reload package info in Synaptic, it will download the package versions that are current in the testing tree, and will completely forget the old tree (which after the update will be dubbed as now). If I perform an upgrade of a package, say a critical one, fglrx (video card) or broadcom (wifi), and the new version comes with an incompatibility that breaks my system, I currently see no way to revert to the old (now) tree, the old versions where the packages worked just fine. In other words, if you update the package info and upgrade some packages that come with breakages, you're doomed to start hunting for a fix (in my case, this morning, without X and without internet). This is the purpose of the testing distribution, to test packages for breakage so that bugs don't migrate into stable with the next release. With all due respect, if you aren't prepared to deal with occaisional breakage, then you should be running testing. In the old times with Gentoo, breakages occurred more often than needed, but it was quite easy to revert an upgrade: each tree---stable and testing---usually contained several, similar versions of the package (much closer than in Lenny and Squeeze). That meant that whenever something went wrong after a package upgrade, I simply reverted to a previous minor version, got on with my work and waited for a new version to pop up. as I said above, you can often manually fix things using dpkg and the old debs. Sometimes you'd have to force it. But to really make this work, you have to keep careful tabs on what packages were upgraded and cause the breakage. So far as I know there is no automated way of doing this. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Restarting Barfed Xorg
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 04:27:04PM +0200, David Baron wrote: [...] How might I kill and restart Xorg from a (remote) console? sudo /etc/init.d/[kgx]dm restart A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Msn protocol
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:48:22PM +0100, Amar Cosic wrote: On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Roy roys1...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, Is anyone from you guys using Msn protocol, and unable to bring it up? It has been two/tree days now, unable to use Pidgin or Centerim, and so is a friend of my .. also Debian. [...] I have this problem too on Lenny and can't find solution. Had to pull Emesene to connect to MSN please learn to trim replies a little bit. It's ridiculous to see more than a full screen of what is unnecessary fluff just to read a one line response. regards A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: User privileges separation in Debian.
On Wed, Dec 09, 2009 at 08:30:40PM +0700, Sthu Deus wrote: Good day. How can I realise the subject? Say, I have SSH daemon, in Debian it starts with root privileges from /usr/sbin/sshd. I'm not sure you *can* realize what you want. When connection is established (a user has successfully logged in), I have sshd (a child process born by the previous process) - still w/ root privileges, - and only *its* child starts w/ some user's privileges. This is only a guess, so hopefully someone who knows will chime in. It sounds like typical forking behavior to me. The parent process, as root, listens for connections, when it gets one, it forks a child to handle that connection. That child does all the handshaking and authentication, once that's complete, yet another child is forked with user privileges to maintain the connection. This format allows the original parent process to handle multiple requests simultaneously while the first generation of children handle authentication and such. but, that's a guess. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [Fwd: Re: Alt key not working]
On Wed, Dec 09, 2009 at 09:54:01PM +0100, roberto wrote: On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 4:54 AM, Tony Nelson tonynel...@georgeanelson.com wrote: From your reply it is not clear, to me anyway, if you do have the console-tools package installed. The showkeys program is in that package. If you need to figure out how/what it is for, I suggest you try reading the man page. I got the same message (on Fedora 12) when running as a normal user. It works when run as root. well, running showkey as root from vt1 gives me: 0x64 0xe4 so the kernel recognizes the key but anyway it does not work under X (kdm is the manager for kde 3.5) now try xev in an xterm and see what output you get for the alt key. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Slow connections in Debian squeeze
On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 10:41:35AM +0100, Nick Douma wrote: On 7-12-2009 1:15, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 04:08:11PM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 01:56:06AM +0200, Andrei Popescu wrote: [..] This sounds like an ipv4/ipv6 issue. Maybe this NEWS.Debian entry for libc6 has the solution: glibc (2.9-8) unstable; urgency=low Starting with version 2.9-8, unified IPv4/IPv6 lookup have been enabled in the glibc's resolver. This is faster, fixes numerous of bugs, but is problematic on some broken DNS servers and/or wrongly configured firewalls. If such a DNS server is detected, the resolver switches (permanently for that process) to a mode where the second request is sent only when the first answer has been received. This means the first request will be timeout, but subsequent requests should be fast again. This behaviour can be enabled permanently by adding 'options single-request' to /etc/resolv.conf. Andrei, I owe you a beer! That's done it right there. Now it's just a matter of figuring out whether it's my firewall or my dns server that's broken... :) blech... it's my firewall, or several public dns servers are broken... A How did you go about checking this? I use OpenDNS as dns servers and no other firewall than what comes with Debian by default. I just googled a list of public dns servers and tried several in a row. They all showed the same problem suggesting that the problem is local to me. Or, as I said, I happened to use only servers in the broken subset of available public servers. specifically, it was a series of edits to /etc/resolv.conf to point to different servers and toggling the single-request option. regardless, it's nice to be snappy again. I didn't realise how annoying it was... A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Slow connections in Debian squeeze
On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 07:40:53PM +0100, Nick Douma wrote: On 7-12-2009 19:33, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: [... snip resolution to dns delays...] How did you go about checking this? I use OpenDNS as dns servers and no other firewall than what comes with Debian by default. I just googled a list of public dns servers and tried several in a row. They all showed the same problem suggesting that the problem is local to me. Or, as I said, I happened to use only servers in the broken subset of available public servers. specifically, it was a series of edits to /etc/resolv.conf to point to different servers and toggling the single-request option. regardless, it's nice to be snappy again. I didn't realise how annoying it was... So to summarize, enabling the single-request option in /etc/resolv.conf solves the 5 second delay issue? Or did you find a non-broken public DNS server in the end? enabling single-request solved the problem for me. I cannot definitively state that the problem is in my network, but I suspect it is. I found no public dns that did not have the problem for me suggesting that the problem is local to my network somewhere. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Slow connections in Debian squeeze
On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 03:13:46PM -0500, Frank McCormick wrote: On Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:14:18 -0800 Andrew Sackville-West and...@farwestbilliards.com wrote: On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 07:40:53PM +0100, Nick Douma wrote: On 7-12-2009 19:33, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: [... snip resolution to dns delays...] How did you go about checking this? I use OpenDNS as dns servers and no other firewall than what comes with Debian by default. I just googled a list of public dns servers and tried several in a row. They all showed the same problem suggesting that the problem is local to me. Or, as I said, I happened to use only servers in the broken subset of available public servers. specifically, it was a series of edits to /etc/resolv.conf to point to different servers and toggling the single-request option. regardless, it's nice to be snappy again. I didn't realise how annoying it was... So to summarize, enabling the single-request option in /etc/resolv.conf solves the 5 second delay issue? Or did you find a non-broken public DNS server in the end? enabling single-request solved the problem for me. Just where in resolv.conf do you put the line options single-requests ? I don't think it matters, but I put it right after the nameserver entry. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Slow connections in Debian squeeze
On Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 09:01:51AM -0500, Celejar wrote: On Sat, 5 Dec 2009 20:38:53 -0800 Andrew Sackville-West and...@farwestbilliards.com wrote: On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 07:44:42PM -0500, Celejar wrote: ... II) Try a DNS cacher (dnsmasq) this is a bandaid solution, imo, and may not help anyway... We don't try solutions that may not help? yeah, that came out wrong... sorry. But thinking about it, it doesn't seem a solution to me because it merely hides the problem under the cache. But I will look into using it as a temporary solution. meanwhile, some tests using time wget http://www.google.com on a lenny machine typically looks like: --2009-12-06 09:47:44-- http://www.google.com/ Resolving www.google.com... 72.14.213.99, 72.14.213.103, 72.14.213.104, ... Connecting to www.google.com|72.14.213.99|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: unspecified [text/html] Saving to: `index.html.14' [ = ] 5,628 --.-K/s in 0.06s 2009-12-06 09:47:44 (88.4 KB/s) - `index.html.14' saved [5628] real 0m0.279s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.004s very consistently. on the problem machine, this is typical: --2009-12-06 09:36:55-- http://www.google.com/ Resolving www.google.com... 72.14.213.103, 72.14.213.104, 72.14.213.105, ... Connecting to www.google.com|72.14.213.103|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: unspecified [text/html] Saving to: “index.html.5” [ = ] 5,628 --.-K/s in 0.06s 2009-12-06 09:37:00 (88.1 KB/s) - “index.html.5” saved [5628] real0m5.280s user0m0.000s sys 0m0.004s the pause is at the Resolving www.google.com... line for 5 seconds, very consistently. interestingly this doesn't happen with ping... and nsloopup www.google.com works just fine as well with something like 0.05s real time. I also see the delay with w3m, which points to the problem being in some common http library? Anyway, the delay is consistent at around 5 seconds. When I get more time, I'll see if I can learn more. Anyway, dnsmasq is probably something worth doing regardless - it saves time, bandwidth and server load (although perhaps not all that much of any). yeah. I used to run it. I don't know why I stopped. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Slow connections in Debian squeeze
On Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 02:15:55PM -0500, Celejar wrote: On Sun, 6 Dec 2009 09:58:12 -0800 Andrew Sackville-West and...@farwestbilliards.com wrote: ... meanwhile, some tests using time wget http://www.google.com ... real 0m0.279s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.004s very consistently. on the problem machine, this is typical: ... real0m5.280s user0m0.000s sys 0m0.004s the pause is at the Resolving www.google.com... line for 5 seconds, very consistently. interestingly this doesn't happen with ping... and nsloopup www.google.com works just fine as well with something like 0.05s real time. I also see the delay with w3m, which points to the problem being in some common http library? Anyway, the delay is consistent at around 5 seconds. Try some other protocols? An ever better idea: use netcat or telnet to talk to google.com on port 80 - same server and port, but no client side HTTP stuff, just plain text going out over the wire. yup, same thing. on the squeeze machine telnet on several ports by name has a five second overhead. telnet by ip address is instantaneous. one a lenny machine, instaneous either way. I did a little digging with tcpdump and some rough timing. Here are typical results on my squeeze machine: and...@basement:~$ date +%T.%N; telnet www.google.com 80 /dev/null; date +%T.%N 15:33:19.209029221 Trying 72.14.213.105... Connected to www.l.google.com. Escape character is '^]'. Connection closed by foreign host. 15:33:24.359495441 note the five second lag... relevant tcpdump output (autofill off on purpose to preserve line structure): 15:33:19.211425 IP basement.36071 cache1.cet.com.domain: 19713+ A? www.google.com. (32) 15:33:19.211440 IP basement.36071 cache1.cet.com.domain: 21948+ ? www.google.com. (32) 15:33:19.254337 IP cache1.cet.com.domain basement.36071: 19713 7/4/4 CNAME[|domain] 15:33:24.216053 IP basement.36071 cache1.cet.com.domain: 19713+ A? www.google.com. (32) 15:33:24.258872 IP cache1.cet.com.domain basement.36071: 19713 7/4/4 CNAME[|domain] 15:33:24.258902 IP basement.36071 cache1.cet.com.domain: 21948+ ? www.google.com. (32) 15:33:24.302859 IP cache1.cet.com.domain basement.36071: 21948 1/1/0 CNAME[|domain] 15:33:24.303090 IP basement.57375 pv-in-f105.1e100.net.www: Flags [S], seq 3169135473, win 5840, options [mss 1460,sackOK,TS val 755934554 ecr 0,nop,wscale 7], length 0 now I don't really know much about this stuff, but I see that as a DNS exchange with cache1.cet.com which is the name server at 15:33:19.21+... with a quick response and then nothing from my side until 15:33:24.21+ when the request is repeated and then proceeds. compare to the lenny machine: mu...@swfamily:~$ date +%T.%N; telnet www.google.com 80 /dev/null ; date +%T.%N 15:33:47.058383705 Trying 72.14.213.106... Connected to www.l.google.com. Escape character is '^]'. Connection closed by foreign host. 15:33:47.220861942 15:33:47.061831 IP swfamily.37796 cache1.cet.com.domain: 10212+ ? www.google.com. (32) 15:33:47.061966 IP swfamily.35621 cache1.cet.com.domain: 46999+ PTR? 5.224.63.206.in-addr.arpa. (43) 15:33:47.103229 IP cache1.cet.com.domain swfamily.37796: 10212 1/1/0 CNAME www.l.google.com. (102) 15:33:47.103383 IP swfamily.51262 cache1.cet.com.domain: 65335+ A? www.google.com. (32) 15:33:47.111645 IP cache1.cet.com.domain swfamily.35621: 46999 1/2/2 (139) 15:33:47.148277 IP cache1.cet.com.domain swfamily.51262: 65335 7/4/4 CNAME www.l.google.com.,[|domain] 15:33:47.165497 IP swfamily.37594 pv-in-f106.1e100.net.www: S 81126028:81126028(0) win 5840 mss 1460,sackOK,timestamp 222186757 0,nop,wscale 5 there are clearly some differences. the lenny machine is making a ? request (whatever that means) while the squeeze machine is making both a A? and ? requests. And the responses are different. This behavior is consistent across attempts. I'm stumped, frankly. It's out of my depth. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Slow connections in Debian squeeze
On Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 07:37:23PM +0100, Nick Douma wrote: I tried the same test with wget'ing Google, these are the results: $ wget google.com [...] These results seem just as consistent as those from Andrew. 3 connections = 15 sec 2 connections = 10 sec 1 connection = 5 sec wow. that's amazing. See my tcpdump results on the other thread. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [OT] Customizing keyboard shortcuts in Iceweasel
On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 01:37:44AM +0200, Andrei Popescu wrote: On Sun,06.Dec.09, 15:07:34, Celejar wrote: /me sets up a bookmark with url=http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?package=%s and keyword=db Hey! It works! Thanks! Great stuff, but I did it like this url=http://bugs.debian.org/%s because it will work with packages AND bug numbers ;) woah... cool! A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Slow connections in Debian squeeze
On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 01:56:06AM +0200, Andrei Popescu wrote: On Sun,06.Dec.09, 15:39:59, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: there are clearly some differences. the lenny machine is making a ? request (whatever that means) while the squeeze machine is making both a A? and ? requests. And the responses are different. This behavior is consistent across attempts. This sounds like an ipv4/ipv6 issue. Maybe this NEWS.Debian entry for libc6 has the solution: glibc (2.9-8) unstable; urgency=low Starting with version 2.9-8, unified IPv4/IPv6 lookup have been enabled in the glibc's resolver. This is faster, fixes numerous of bugs, but is problematic on some broken DNS servers and/or wrongly configured firewalls. If such a DNS server is detected, the resolver switches (permanently for that process) to a mode where the second request is sent only when the first answer has been received. This means the first request will be timeout, but subsequent requests should be fast again. This behaviour can be enabled permanently by adding 'options single-request' to /etc/resolv.conf. Andrei, I owe you a beer! That's done it right there. Now it's just a matter of figuring out whether it's my firewall or my dns server that's broken... :) A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Slow connections in Debian squeeze
On Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 04:08:11PM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 01:56:06AM +0200, Andrei Popescu wrote: On Sun,06.Dec.09, 15:39:59, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: there are clearly some differences. the lenny machine is making a ? request (whatever that means) while the squeeze machine is making both a A? and ? requests. And the responses are different. This behavior is consistent across attempts. This sounds like an ipv4/ipv6 issue. Maybe this NEWS.Debian entry for libc6 has the solution: glibc (2.9-8) unstable; urgency=low Starting with version 2.9-8, unified IPv4/IPv6 lookup have been enabled in the glibc's resolver. This is faster, fixes numerous of bugs, but is problematic on some broken DNS servers and/or wrongly configured firewalls. If such a DNS server is detected, the resolver switches (permanently for that process) to a mode where the second request is sent only when the first answer has been received. This means the first request will be timeout, but subsequent requests should be fast again. This behaviour can be enabled permanently by adding 'options single-request' to /etc/resolv.conf. Andrei, I owe you a beer! That's done it right there. Now it's just a matter of figuring out whether it's my firewall or my dns server that's broken... :) blech... it's my firewall, or several public dns servers are broken... A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Slow connections in Debian squeeze
On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 03:41:00PM +0100, Nick Douma wrote: Since I full-upgraded my Debian installation from lenny to squeeze, I have been experiencing slow connections buildup. This is especially evident when I ssh to another server, while on other workstations (debian lenny and windows) the connection is almost instantly established, on my squeeze workstation it takes almost 10 seconds longer. This happens on all connections, for example, I recently enabled the MusicTracker plugin for pidgin, and set it to use my MPD server. Every time the plugin polls the server, pidgin freezes while it establishes the connection. I tried searching on the internet for similar problems, and found that it might be related to DNS lookups. I tried various fixes, but none of them seem to work. Unfortunately, I didn't keep track on what solutions I tried. Is anyone experiencing the same problems with Debian squeeze? yeah. I've been seeing it for quite a while actually, and couldn't tell you specifically when it showed up. It appears to be only related to the actual connection (in ssh), as everything else zips right along. I also see it in http... google can take up to 10 seconds to appear. Ive largely been trying to ignore it as I haven't really had time to figure out what it is. Also, I *don't* see this problem on a lenny machine on the same subnet, and really interestingly, I *don't* see this problem on my laptop which is running slightly more sid-ish than the squeeze machine that shows the problem. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Problems with adobe-flashplugin
On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 11:59:03AM -0500, Frank McCormick wrote: I am having problems fixing the adobe-flashplugin package and [...] This is what happens when I try to dist-upgrade now: squeeze:/home/frank# aptitude dist-upgrade [...] The following packages will be upgraded: libmysqlclient16 mysql-common The following partially installed packages will be configured: adobe-flashplugin 2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 49.2kB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] E: I wasn't able to locate file for the adobe-flashplugin package. This might mean you need to manually fix this package. Writing extended state information... Done E: I wasn't able to locate file for the adobe-flashplugin package. This might mean you need to manually fix this package. E: Internal error: couldn't generate list of packages to download Stop trying to dist-upgrade until you've resolved the adobe issue. I'm not really familiar with the use of the package from adobe itself, to salt liberally. I would start with aptitude reinstall adobe-flashplugin and if that didn't work, I'd move to purging it altogether. Likely you'll need to try to figure out what you did with the adobe package and undo it completely. Then start over. very much .02, ymmv etc A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Slow connections in Debian squeeze
On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 07:44:42PM -0500, Celejar wrote: On Sun, 06 Dec 2009 01:06:49 +0100 Nick Douma n.do...@nekoconeko.nl wrote: ... To further elaborate, when I send a message in Thunderbird, I notice that the sending message dialogue spends most of its time in the Looking up server stage. After that, the mail itself is sent in a split second. Did something change in the way Debian handles DNS lookups since Lenny? Without knowing what you tried, it's difficult to know what to suggest, but here are some things to consider: I)Try different DNS servers (perhaps OpenDNS) on my systems this is eliminated as the behavior only happens to one machine on the lan. the other, running lenny, is quite snappy using the same /etc/resolv.conf, so it is not DNS servers (in my case). II) Try a DNS cacher (dnsmasq) this is a bandaid solution, imo, and may not help anyway... III) Do something simple, like 'dig somesite', from the command line, preferably repeatedly, and report the response times (dig itself will report ';; Query time: n msec') good idea A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Problems with adobe-flashplugin
On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 02:17:05PM -0500, Frank McCormick wrote: On Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:51:03 -0800 Andrew Sackville-West and...@farwestbilliards.com wrote: On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 11:59:03AM -0500, Frank McCormick wrote: I am having problems fixing the adobe-flashplugin package and [...] This is what happens when I try to dist-upgrade now: squeeze:/home/frank# aptitude dist-upgrade [...] The following packages will be upgraded: libmysqlclient16 mysql-common The following partially installed packages will be configured: adobe-flashplugin 2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 49.2kB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] E: I wasn't able to locate file for the adobe-flashplugin package. This might mean you need to manually fix this package. Writing extended state information... Done E: I wasn't able to locate file for the adobe-flashplugin package. This might mean you need to manually fix this package. E: Internal error: couldn't generate list of packages to download Stop trying to dist-upgrade until you've resolved the adobe issue. I'm not really familiar with the use of the package from adobe itself, to salt liberally. I would start with aptitude reinstall adobe-flashplugin r...@squeeze:~# aptitude reinstall adobe-flashplugin Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done The following packages will be REINSTALLED: adobe-flashplugin 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used. E: I wasn't able to locate file for the adobe-flashplugin package. This might mean you need to manually fix this package. Writing extended state information... Done E: I wasn't able to locate file for the adobe-flashplugin package. This might mean you need to manually fix this package. E: Internal error: couldn't generate list of packages to download look in /var/cache/apt/archives for the deb file. if it's missing, maybe try manually downloading it, although I would think it would download it automatically... hrmm... and if that didn't work, I'd move to purging it altogether. r...@squeeze:~# aptitude remove --purge adobe-flashplugin Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: adobe-flashplugin 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 3 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 10.4MB will be freed. Writing extended state information... Done dpkg: error processing adobe-flashplugin (--remove): Package is in a very bad inconsistent state - you should reinstall it before attempting a removal. Errors were encountered while processing: adobe-flashplugin E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) A package failed to install. Trying to recover: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done try manually with dpkg? either the reinstall or the purge, though I doubt it will move ahead any. you might look at the output of dpkg -L adobe-flashplugin and then check the state of all those files. also, dpkg has various force options you might look into for doing things manually. [...] Likely you'll need to try to figure out what you did with the adobe package and undo it completely. The ONLY thing in the Adobe tar.gz package was the flash library, which I manually copied to 2 plugin directories. I have since removed them. But somewhere along the line something got very foobared. right. so I wonder if you removed a file that adobe-flashplugin was expecting to find? Even dpkg-reconfigure does nothing except complain that iceape is missing ( I never had it on this system) wierd. I am at wits endabout to wipe the partition I don't think you're there yet... that's a pretty drastic measure. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Fatal: Only RAID1 devices are supported as boot devices
On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 01:45:37PM -0800, Tyler MacDonald wrote: Tom H tomh0...@gmail.com wrote: RAID0 is a truly silly misnomer. But many people use it because it gives them one large and fast HD on Windows, OS X, and Linux. If that is what Mathieu wants to do in spite of the lack of redundancy... Agreed -- if you can afford 4x1.5TB drives, you can afford a fifth one to do RAID-5 (or to shrink your array to 4.5TB to do RAID-5...) But don't forget about BAARF: http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/BAARF2.html A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Re^2: Finding the source for a NIC driver.
On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 05:07:45PM -0800, peasth...@shaw.ca wrote: Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:34:33 -0800, Tech Geek wrote, The source of your NIC driver should be in all kernel sources for each of the kernel that is installed on your system. Does that help? Yes. Thanks. pc:/usr/src# ll l*r -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 345210880 2009-09-25 15:23 linux-source-2.6.30.tar pc:/usr/src# tar --list l*r tar -tf l*r A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Installing debian on a multiple disk system (LVM)
On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 06:25:40PM +0100, Mathieu Malaterre wrote: On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 6:09 PM, S Scharf ss11...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Mathieu Malaterre mathieu.malate...@gmail.com wrote: [...] For the first time I am trying to install debian on a system with multiple disk. I was hoping that the debian installed would be kind enough with me to as to propose to group all those physical volume into a single LVM group. So that I could just do as usual and spli this LVM volume group. Could someone please let me know how to do that ? I think I should be able to simply group those disk into a single LVM group (and then later resize as needed). [..] I've never tried that but you should be able to do it from an expert install with the manual partition option No that was a user-mistake. You should leave the installer do a first 'guided partitioning', then you have access to the software RAID partionning. Then for each disk that is marked 'FREE SPACE' you need to select it and state 'use for RAID'. Once all physical volume are setup as RAID, select the RAID entry (should be the first before the physical disk), then setup your LVM volume group on it. So far as I know, RAID is not strictly needed. You can add physical volumes to a volume group directly. Whether the install supports this or not, I don't know. But if you want pure LVM you could certainly use the one disk to install with just LVM and then add the second disk later after the installation. I cannot believe this is free software :) Indeed! A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: migrate to new system disk
On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 09:59:21AM +, David Goodenough wrote: On Wednesday 02 December 2009, Alan Ianson wrote: 2. I'm sticking with LILO. I've never manually installed a boot loader, only during Debian clean/scratch installations using the Deb installer. The last time I did that was with Woody, like 4 years ago. How do I manually install LILO to the boot sector of the new disk? I'm sure it's simple, I just don't know the command. Thanks so much for your very helpful insight to this point Andrew. I haven't used lilo in years.. but if I remember right I ran the command lilo after making any changes to it's config and that would rewrite it. If you (or anyone else) is using Grub, simply copying your files across your files will not work due to the presence of UUIDs in the Grub2 config files. I have been unable to find the proper procedure for updating those UUIDs. heh, good point. last time I did this, UUID's were just not typically used. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Unstable, LVM and Grub2: error: you need to load the kernel first
On Tue, Dec 01, 2009 at 04:17:36PM -0600, Mark Allums wrote: at the moment 'grub-pc' is broken in sid. When you have a separate /boot partition, the package generates a wrong '/boot/grub/grub.cfg'. Look at the BTS for bug #558042. There is also the workaround for the problem. Hth Michael I ran across the same problem, but I am running mdraid RAID 1, which complicates matters, and root (/) is on an LVM2 volume. do you get grub? and where is /boot (I'm assuming it's on RAID but not lvm)? Based on what others have written, editting the grub entries from the grub command line should do the trick. Point grub at the right device and partitions and it should just work. But I'm not facing this problem, so ymmv. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: migrate to new system disk
On Tue, Dec 01, 2009 at 08:22:57PM -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote: I currently have a 40GB IDE boot disk in a Lenny server. I boot with LILO, but not INITRD. I have the following partitions: Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda146234865 1951897+ 82 Linux swap /dev/hda2 *46074622 128520 83 Linux /dev/hda3 1460636997663+ 83 Linux Partition table entries are not in disk order I would like to add a new IDE disk between say 160GB and 250GB, on another IDE channel, and copy/mirror/etc the exact contents of the current system disk to the new disk; make the new disk the system (boot) disk, and remove the original disk from the machine. I've never done a disk migration such as this with Linux. This is very doable. I've done it, throwing in niceties such as lvm on the way across as well. This is a production email firewall/gateway. Thus, I need to have the system down as little as possible to complete this. I know I'll need to enter single user mode to do the work. I'm just not sure what work I need to do in order to properly accomplish this task. only parts of it need to be done in single user mode, and that at the very end, so downtime should be minimal. And, if it doesn't work, you can always reboot into the old disk while you sort it out. So, what's the best method to pull this off, guaranteeing (as best as possible) that all the data made it across the river intact, with an identical partition and directory structure, will identical permissions on all dirs and files, and that will be bootable? why exactly do you want an identical partition structure? That's really not necessary. What is necessary is that the whole file tree makes the migration with permissions and structure intact. Little bits like tweaking /etc/fstab are easily done to accomodate a new partition structure. If I start up Postfix after the migration to the new disk, and the queue directory/file permissions are incorrect, my mail server would be dead in the water. right. I've been unable to find a concise how-to via Google so far that gives me the right comfort level on this. I'm sure one of you can point me to a good set of docs. I doubt there is a concise how to, but here are the steps I've used in the past, as well as I can remember them. 1. get yourself a rescue cd of some kind. Make it one you are familiar with. If you messup, you might need it. 2. make good current backups. 3. shutdown the machine, install the disk, restart. 4. take your time creating partitions and filesystems on the new disk. 5. Begin to migrate chucks of the filesystem. Here's where things get itneresting, because it depends on hoow you like to structure stuff. I like to have many partitions for various bits of the fs, and this really helps in this case, but you can make it work in a monolithic file system as well. Typically, since it's all on the same machine, I just use cp -a (which handles all the permission). There are other solutions use tar and friends, but I don't really think it's necessary. Start out by migrating over things that are fairly static like /usr, /bin, /sbin, /boot, /root etc. If /home is pretty static on this machine, then move it over as well. YOu have to make a judgement call about each section of the file system, but the ones to save for the very end are /var and /tmp. Now, here is where you can really take your time. Move over just one chunk, say /usr, and then remount it back into the current running system and use it and make sure it's working properly. YOu can do this with each piece of the file tree as you go. For migrating /var and /tmp(debatable whether this even needs to be done for /tmp as it'll get handled on a reboot), you'll want to go to single user mode, copy it over, remount the new copy back into the system and then go back to multi-user mode and make sure it's all working. Doing things this way, you can test each piece as you go and you aren't messing with the original working install, so rolling back on problems is simple. Now fix up /etc/fstab, if needed, on the new disk. Finally, once you've got this all working the way you like, you'll want to install a bootloader into the new disk, although, if you use grub, even that can be avoided until later. You *can* reboot and edit the grub entries to boot from the new disk using grub from the old disk. At the end of this, you'd be running the system off the new disk, but booting from the old. Then install grub on the new disk, shutdown, remove the old disk and see if it comes back up. Sorry it's not *specific* instructions. But, depending on your skill level, it's really not that hard. THe key is the -a flag on cp, taking your time, and jsut doing it one piece at a time. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Grep on dictionary words
On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 11:14:58AM +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote: 2009/11/29 Andrew Sackville-West and...@farwestbilliards.com: On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 01:22:15AM +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote: will get the ones that start with capital alphas. if you want initial caps *only* then: grep ^[A-Z][a-z]*$ would match those. Thanks. I meant that caps could only be at the beginning of a word, not in the middle. Expanding your example, I figured that would be: grep ^[A-Z]?[a-z]*$ // note the question mark grep ^[A-Z][a-z]*$ that's what this does, I believe... This means that only words that start with a caps are valid. I need can start with a caps, but caps can be nowhere else. I got that like this: grep ^[A-Za-z][a-z]*$ However I think that there is a better way. Ah ha, I misunderstood. Im sure, too, there are many ways to skin this cat. This is a good exercise. I am bettering my regex skills as I learn what works and what doesn't. :) A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Grep on dictionary words
On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 11:32:59AM -0600, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: In 880dece00911280713n6193b8das6970e8a071fc2...@mail.gmail.com, Dotan Cohen wrote: Is there a way to grep the output of strings in order to only show lines that contain words found in the aspell dictionary? Thanks in advance. I once wrote a small program against the aspell API to do something like that. If you know C, you should be able to do something similar. If you don't know C, beg, borrow, or pay for some time from a C programmer. ISTM that because the output of strings is not discrete list of potential words, but is instead a long list of concatenated characters, this problem is really rather daunting. The output should probably be first broken up into something resembling words by perhaps breaking on non-alphabetic characters. That should do two things: 1) get you somthing that resembles words to actually test and 2) somewhat smaller set of stuff to check. This won't necessarily handle compound words though where two word-like things are jammed together, or an actual word is embedded within a string of nonsense. I think this problem is potentially rather harder than I thought when I saw OP's original question. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Grep on dictionary words
On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 12:00:33AM +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote: ISTM that because the output of strings is not discrete list of potential words, but is instead a long list of concatenated characters, this problem is really rather daunting. The output should probably be first broken up into something resembling words by perhaps breaking on non-alphabetic characters. That should do two things: 1) get you somthing that resembles words to actually test and 2) somewhat smaller set of stuff to check. This won't necessarily handle compound words though where two word-like things are jammed together, or an actual word is embedded within a string of nonsense. I think this problem is potentially rather harder than I thought when I saw OP's original question. It does not need to be comprehensive. Would it be possible to only show lines that have words (continuous strings) of alpha characters that are all lowercase except for the first character? That would handle about 90% of the work by eliminating lines line these: pDuf #k0H}g) GoV5 rLeY1 TMlq,* well, something simple in sed would help: sed 's/[^a-zA-Z]\+/\n/g' splits words at non-alphas and inserts a newline to make each a separate line. or leave out the '\n' to leave the line structure as it is. Then you can grep with something like: grep ^[A-Z] will get the ones that start with capital alphas. if you want initial caps *only* then: grep ^[A-Z][a-z]*$ would match those. I'm sure someone can do better. But that gets you down to maybe a very truncated dataset, then you can somehow look each of those up in aspell. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Grep on dictionary words
On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 01:22:15AM +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote: will get the ones that start with capital alphas. if you want initial caps *only* then: grep ^[A-Z][a-z]*$ would match those. Thanks. I meant that caps could only be at the beginning of a word, not in the middle. Expanding your example, I figured that would be: grep ^[A-Z]?[a-z]*$ // note the question mark grep ^[A-Z][a-z]*$ that's what this does, I believe... ^[A-Z] means start the line with a capital alpha [a-z]*$ means end the line with any number (from 0 up) of lowercase alphas. However my PCRE skills are weak and not working. mine are none-too-strong either... A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Lost window manager and gnome-panel
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 08:13:14PM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote: [... huge snip of history of metacity gnome panel faiilng to start ... ] Tony suggested polluting my new user alter ego with the gnome configuration files from my regular self. I started by just renaming .gconf, .gnome2 and .gnome2_private, then logging out and back in again as myself. There was no change - metacity and gnome-panel still did not start. Yet they do start for my new user alter ego. So I used Tony's suggestion and copied my original .gconf, .gnome2 and .gnome2_private files to the new user, then logged in as the new user. The new user still had metacity and gnome-panel. Conclusion: The problem is somewhere in my configuration files, but not in .gconf, .gnome2 or .gnome2_private. okay, there should be, at this point, very few dot-files in your alter-ego. If not, make another one and don't do *anything* extra in that account. Just login to it, confirm that it looks reasonably right, and logout. Then as root or some other user, take a full listing of that user's /home directory. Since you've already tested .gconf, .gnome2 and .gnome2_private, then the problem is in one of the other dot-files. It should be a fairly small set and fairly easy to test each one. Just copy them over one-by-one from the broken user (make sure to fixup permissions on the files, this is probably important), logging in and out each time, until it breaks. Oh!, you should check out ~/.dmrc. It should say: [Desktop] Session=default anything else, at this point, is probably doing more harm than good. This is the file that tells gdm which session to start for the user (there are multiple sessions specified in /usr/share/xsessions, at least in the past that was the way it worked). A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: lockscreen/switch user issues
On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 07:02:40AM -0800, Brian Denheyer wrote: This is using gnome (and the gnome wm, which is called ?): switch user you get the login prompt login now I get the xscreensaver prompt I check the screensaver prefs and not only is the lock screen option NOT checked, I've restarted the daemon a couple of times to make sure it's not set. Only it clearly is. Any ideas ? only that I can confirm this is the case. It only seems to happen when using switch user. I'd call it a bug that's a feature. Some piece of code in the stack there is assuming that since someone else is using the machine, it'd better lock the screen despite the configuration to the contrary. I would wager this is a bug in whatever does the user switching as the screensaver is doing what it's told. I believe (without having time to test it at the moment) that you can force the screensaver to lock through it's control program despite the preferences being set otherwise. .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Lost window manager and gnome-panel
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 10:31:14AM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote: [...] That day arrived a few days ago. I decided start over from scratch. I used the netinst CD and reinstalled completely, reformatting the new disk. Until yesterday afternoon I spent my time installing and configuring as I did before. Everything was running great. I had just a couple problems left to resolve. Then I decided to reboot. And then it happened again - no metacity or gnome panel. Only this time I couldn't right-click on the desktop and create a launcher either. I could boot into Recovery Mode, but you can't start an X program from there. well clearly you should never reboot ;) so, what do you get? What does the screen look like? Is it the default X gray screen with a mouse cursor and nothing else? Is it some desktop backdrop that you set? we need some more information. Also, how are you selecting GNOME from the (I assume) GDM login? I'm wondering if you're somehow changing the default selection to be a .xsession session and consequently getting an empty session. So this long story boils down to two questions: 1) How can I fix Gnome? What part of the configuration starts metacity and gnome-panel when the user logs in? Note that I'll have to do this manually from XFCE, because I can't even get a terminal running in Gnome. I'm not exactly sure that GNOME is broken. I think perhaps it's something simple (like the xsession thing above) and it's getting lost in the transmission 2) How the heck did this happen? I did hundreds of things before I rebooted - which thing messed up Gnome? Can someone suggest a way to find out what I did to cause this so I can file a bug report or at least avoid doing it again? on the assumption that you've been doing lots of installing, take a lot at the aptitude logs and see if there is a clue there. Perhaps you've installed something that conflicts with GNOME (can't imagine what that might be) or removed something critical. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Lost window manager and gnome-panel
I see you've made progress elsewhere in this thread, so just a couple of points below... On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 12:36:42PM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote: On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:30:08 -0800 Andrew Sackville-West and...@farwestbilliards.com dijo: [...] I'm wondering if you're somehow changing the default selection to be a .xsession session and consequently getting an empty session. Now we might be getting somewhere. I am not very familiar with what's under the hood in Linux. What is an .xsession session? users can specify an .xsession or .xinitrc (not sure if gdm uses .xinitrc or not) file to control how their X session is created. Typically this is used when one wants a highly customized configuration using a non-standard windowmanager (if a WM is used at all...) or when starting the X session from a console via startx (what I do). Basically, it is a shell script that is run by X after it sets up the graphics display and in it the user specifies various things they want such as environment variables, starting special services, a window manager etc. When that script exits, then the X session closes and returns the user to the console. But this doesn't sound like your problem, so that's just for your education ;) [...] Looking at the aptitude logs didn't help - no error messages. I wasn't looking for error messages, but rather information about what packages were being installed or removed that might have provided a clue. REgardless, I know you've got it narrowed down to a local user configuration issue, so good luck with that. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: A Debian Lenny machine declined to work
On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 10:09:55PM +0200, Jari Fredriksson wrote: [..] It boots, finds the hard disk, and loads stuff. Last stuff it prints on screen is usual boot stuff, and in addition to that Arno's Firewall output. I think that is normally printed to screen console. All logging should be logged via syslog to my main server, but nothing happends now. The console does not show login prompt, and the machine seems to be dead or otherwise dead after the boot. It does not route network, and does not allow me to log in and study logs. does it respond to pings? can you ssh in? have you tried booting into single-user mode? is it locked up hard or does the keyboard (capslock, numlock) respond? Any response from the magic Alt-SysRq? If only the NIC was broken it should allow me to log in from console, right? if it previously allowed console login, I would assume it would continue to do so unless, in general. What might cause this? It boots but not fully. No error messages in console. It just does not do anything useful. if it is locked hard that would point to some hardware problem, otherwise I would look for recent updates for a clue. Some boot process is failing to terminate. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Is This Worth a Bug Report, and if so, against Which Package?
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 01:25:57PM -0600, Kent West wrote: Fresh install of Lenny, minimal (unselected everything in Tasksel during the install, then aptitude install'd xorg and icewm). The minimal /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (not included here, but available) did not allow xorg to detect both monitors. I then ran sudo X -configure which generated an xorg.conf file which did detect both monitors, but the second monitor is not usable; I can't move windows over to the second monitor. The addition of the line Option Xinerama to the ServerLayout section fixed that problem. Is this a bug worth reporting, or will it be considered more of a wish-list, or what? And if it's worth reporting as a bug, against which package should it be reported? I suspect it falls to the question of what does the user want to do with their two monitors, and what should the default behavior be. shrug. If *you* think it's a bug, then file it, or find your way to the proper developers (Debian X Strike Force?) and ask them. .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bizarre X windows behaviour?
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 10:23:34PM -0500, Zachary Uram wrote: Running Debian lenny. I installed the Catalyst driver (from manufacturer) for my ATI Radeon HD 4550 card and it seems to be working, but I noticed something weird. Now when I move a window it no longer shows the window static as it is being moved, it's like it keeps redrawing it as I move it. So as I drag it it will move it a little then redraw the window, move it a little, then redraw the window, etc. don't take this the wrong way, but how do you think it is done? The image is redrawn constantly to give the effect of motion. It's just that usually the redraw happens fast enough for you to not see it. I don't know a thing about ATI, but it sounds to me like the driver is not making use of any hardware acceleration, so the redraw is taking longer. I'm willing to bet that if you watch your cpu, you'll see it taking the load when you rapidly move a window around. I would suggest investigating what acceleration is available for that driver/card combination. There may be options you aren't using that will remedy the situation for you. sorry I'm not more helpful, but maybe that points you in the right direction. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: results: debian-user's favourite FLOSS (2009)
On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 12:07:21PM +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: Hi, Following is the results of a poll that has been running for over a week, one which questions readers of debian-user to list their favourite FLOSS - Free (Libre) or Open Source Software. [...] sidenote: this year has had probably the worst participation since I've started this poll in 2005 :-( I noticed that as well. Kinda sad. Any thoughts as to why? my .02 is that the list doesn't seem to have quite the breadth of traffic it has had before. But that's a cursory observation at best. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian on PPC
On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 09:10:58PM -0800, Mark wrote: On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 10:09:42PM -0500, Rob Owens wrote: I'm very unfamiliar w/ the PPC architecture, but a friend has a laptop he'd like me to install a Linux distro onto. Debian offers a powerpc version on the downloads page. Can I expect this to contain all the same packages as the i386 version? I've used the PPC version of Debian on an old Mac G4 desktop. Can't vouch for the wireless-related items, but putting that G4 side by side with an old HP i386 desktop, everything in Debian looked the same to me so I would assume you can expect similar results. I think the real difference is with things (like flash) that are proprietary and are supported in debian through either non-free or not at all. There you will find the real differences IMVHO. It's been a couple of years since I had debian running on a couple of ppc iMacs, and it certainly worked just fine for most things, but the lack of flash was a killer for my kids :( (I try to teach them, but there's only so much one can do...) A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: results: debian-user's favourite FLOSS (2009)
On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 08:31:47PM -0500, Tim Tebbit wrote: Andrew Sackville-West wrote: I noticed that as well. Kinda sad. Any thoughts as to why? my .02 is that the list doesn't seem to have quite the breadth of traffic it has had before. But that's a cursory observation at best. This seem to back that up. http://lists.debian.org/stats/debian-user.png first of all, thanks for a great link. moving one up in the directory is amazing! And it seems to be the same across most of the more active lists. I thought perhaps amd64 was getting some of the traffic with the rise in that architecture, but no, it is falling as well. Interesting. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: setting screen resolution to 1366x768
On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 06:13:05PM -0500, Tony Nelson wrote: On 09-11-11 17:15:06, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 10:32:32PM +0200, Alexander Kaphuk wrote: Hi, I have installed Debian Lenny on a Compaq Presario. The screen resolution was automatically set to 1024x768. This resolution seems to be the highest available based on the output of 'xrandr'. The native screen resolution for my laptop is 1366x768. I'd appreciate anyone suggesting how to go about it. without spending all day relearning how to do it, the basic procedure is to specify a new mode. [...] Before doing that, take a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /etc/X11/ xorg.conf, and see why the modes aren't available. If they're all disabled due to out of range, look at the Configured Monitor lines, and possibly edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf Monitor section to broaden the range(s) (but don't exceed the manufacturer's specs! If the laptop display vertical range is 60 - 60, then perhaps 59 - 61 will fix it). excellent point. I have seen in the past where a monitor reports a vertical range of (making up values here) 50 - 60 but the calculation of the rate for the top resolution is 60.1 and thus is called out of range. It was clearly (a couple of years ago) a problem in the precision of the calculation. setting the range to one more worked just fine and that monitor continues to perform flawlessly years later. ymmv. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: setting screen resolution to 1366x768
On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 10:32:32PM +0200, Alexander Kaphuk wrote: Hi, I have installed Debian Lenny on a Compaq Presario. The screen resolution was automatically set to 1024x768. This resolution seems to be the highest available based on the output of 'xrandr'. The native screen resolution for my laptop is 1366x768. I'd appreciate anyone suggesting how to go about it. without spending all day relearning how to do it, the basic procedure is to specify a new mode. You can do this dynamically through xrandr at the command line. Read the manpage for instructions on how to specify a new mode. I believe it looks similar to the old ModeLine stuff from xorg.conf. Once you've successfully added the mode through xrandr, you can select it and test it out. If that works, then you'll want to take the mode line specification and put it into xorg.conf to make it available to X on startup. There are a couple of modeline calculators available on the net, and I'm pretty sure there is one available in the standard repo, but I don't recall the name. hopefully that is enough to get you headed towards a solution. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Lost my window manager
On Sun, Nov 08, 2009 at 09:42:14AM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote: [snip recap of troubles..] Because I have not yet been able to figure out how to make metacity and gnome-panel start automatically on booting as they are supposed to, plus the additional issues recently discovered, I have decided to wipe it out and reinstall. Not all the effort I put into installing it is wasted, because a lot of time was spent figuring out how to migrate things from Ubuntu. The reinstall should go faster. Indeed it should, though, if you're in the mood for learning your way around debian, you could try using aptitude to purge all gnome related packages and then installing them again. You wouldn't have to do a complete system reinstall, and since it's likely many of the .debs are still floating around your cache, it would not require a bunch of network access. As I starting point, I would look at purging gdm, metacity, and nautilus. That will likely cause all kinds of things to be removed, just as a warning. But, if you head down this path, remember that it can be time consuming... just .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: ksuspend_usbd : what does this daemon do ?
On Sun, Nov 08, 2009 at 12:32:01PM +1300, C.T.F. Jansen wrote: Greetings, What does the daemon ksuspend_usb do ? [...] I *think* it monitors usb and suspends the usb subsystem when it's not being used. This is a powersaving feature. But that is really only a guess based on the name of the daemon and my own minimal knowledge that such a thing is possible. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: what's your favourite FLOSS?
On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 03:56:48PM +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote: Here's a template where you can fill in your favourites If something doesn't fit in any of the categories, put it under misc utilities. Please don't add what you haven't really used. You can include more than one entrant per category. audio editor: audacity audio player: mpd/mpc cd-ripper: DBMS: postgres desktop environment OR window manager: xmonad development: emacs w/ flymake or eclipse for java when I have to do that. disc burner: e-mail client: mutt file manager: bash (heh) finance: gnucash ftp client: sftp games: Wesnoth image creator/editor: gimp image viewer: display (imagemajick) instant messenger: irssi w/ irssi-plugin-xmpp mathematics: octave misc utilities: too many to count p2p: package manager: aptitude pdf/ps-reader: xpdf spreadsheet: oocalc terminal emulator: rxvt-unicode text editor: emacs video player: mplayer web browser: iceweasel word-processor: emacs for latex, oowriter for occasional stuff non-free: SPECIAL CATEGORIES anything unreleased and highly anticipated: anything dying/dead: anything deserving great honours (EG. Linux, GCC): any organisation/community deserving great honours (EG. GNU, Debian): any FLOSS developer deserving great honours (max 5 at most, unless you insist): the uncelebrated random user that sends in the one-line patch to fix their personally most annoying bug. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Depends overkill, how do you weed out the packages
On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 04:23:37PM -0500, vr wrote: I have a fresh install of Debian Lenny 503 amd64 via a netinst CDROM. I've only installed a couple of packages like openbox because I want to run as lean a desktop I can to try out virtualbox-3.0. I figured openbox would be enough to handle the GUI needed for virtualbox-3.0 but after adding the official repository to my sources list I get a bunch of KDE and audio hits when trying to install VirtualBox. This doesn't seem right so I am looking for pointers on how to trim down this list of what I perceive as excessive bloat. without looking closely at the actual dependencies of what you are installing, have you looked at the -R option to aptitude? There are configuration items to coincide as well. Basically, it prevents the automatic installation of Recommends packages. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: jre installation
On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 07:53:07PM +0100, roberto wrote: hello, i try to install geogebra using its .bin.sh script and i get the following message: Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive... Configuring the installer for this system's environment... No Java virtual machine could be found from your PATH environment variable. You must install a VM prior to running this program. but i have already installed the package sun-java6-jre and its dependencies; so i cannot fix the problem by now; maybe an explicit entry in your PATH to get it pointed directly at the jvm would help. Also, you could look at the script and see how it's detecting the java environment and then either tweak the script or tweak the environment. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: A laptop installation challenge
On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 11:16:55AM +, AG wrote: [...] I'm thinking that the way forward would be via the GRUB prompt I was able to get off of an old floppy, but to do so would mean being able to by-pass LILO and boot into the first partition on the HD (/), and then go into LILO.conf and change it to accommodate the larger kernel or dispense with LILO in favour of GRUB. if you have a grub prompt, you may be in luck. You can do quite a lot from a grub prompt. YOu don't even need to know the contents of the partitions to make it work because it will do tab completion for you (depending on the version, I suppose, but I don't know) as well as find. Probably you need to do something like root (hd0,1) initrd /path/to/initrd kernel /path/to/kernel kernel-opts here boot YOu'll probably have to play around with it, but on the assumption that the *only* problem is the boot loader, any grub disk should get you going. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
a cautionary tale w/ successful recovery
Hi all, mildly off-topic, perhaps. Due to a cascading series of errors on my part yesterday, I managed to not only wipe over my partition table, but also overwrite enough data in the actual disk to prevent reasonable recovery of the partitions with such tools as gpart. I could recover /boot, and /swap, but the lvm-hosted remaining portion of the system was hosed, mostly because I couldn't accurately locate the partition. Maybe if I'd been a little smarter about it, I could have, but I didn't know, until too late, what exactly to look for. So, after much gnashing of teeth and rending of clothing, I decided to reinstall. Now mind you, this is the first reinstall on this machine (a very loose description considering it's had three motherboards, two disks and various and sundry parts swapped) since 2004. Installation was, of course, fairly painless using the daily-build business card image of squeeze. I had a couple of problems when partitioning, but got it sorted out after a reboot to properly re-read the partition table. So here is the real success part of the story: my backups worked! I had weekly backups of /etc and daily backups of /home. Since I'd not done any work of consequence in about 24 hours, I had not lost data! Restoring was a simple matter of copying over from the backup server, fixing up a couple of permissions and moving on. Lessons learned: 1) don't do risky things in DOS 6.22 when tired... you can't trust DOS to behave in a consistent manner (maybe) 2) keep a copy of the boot sector lying around (on another machine!!) 3) keep a copy of dpkg --get-selections lying around Now, I know bot 2) and 3), but hadn't really ever bothered to do it. It's *possible* that 2) could have saved me from reinstalling, but it still would have required significant work to get everything going again. 3) is just a convenience really. I have a pretty good idea of what packages I use on a daily basis are, but there are always random things one forgets and they'll probably crop up routinely over the next couple of months. Anyway, I just wanted to share that. And for all those who think they don't need backups... you're so wrong. I am truly grateful that I had good ones and the recovery went well. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: a cautionary tale w/ successful recovery
On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 07:20:23PM -0500, Rob Owens wrote: On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 02:57:49PM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: Hi all, mildly off-topic, perhaps. Due to a cascading series of errors on my part yesterday, I managed to not only wipe over my partition table, but also overwrite enough data in the actual disk to prevent reasonable recovery of the partitions with such tools as gpart. I could recover /boot, and /swap, but the lvm-hosted remaining portion of the system was hosed, mostly because I couldn't accurately locate the partition. Maybe if I'd been a little smarter about it, I could have, but I didn't know, until too late, what exactly to look for. So, after much gnashing of teeth and rending of clothing, I decided to reinstall. [...] A couple good utilites I've used in situations like these are testdisk and photorec. Photorec can recover files even if there is no partition table (it won't know the filename, but it will tell you the file type). to be clear, I was able to see portions of file systems and actually found all of / using gnu-fdisk's Rescue feature. I was able to mount and fsck it and it checked out okay. But that fs was buried in an lvm partition *and* it couldn't find other filesystems. Since I run multiple lv's in lv to hold the system, it wasn't much use... having / without /usr and /var is not really that great. gpart found /boot and /swap(not much use), but /boot was corrupted pretty badly. It did *not* find anything in the lvm partition, though I got tired of waiting for it, so maybe it would have eventually. This has caused me to rethink the use of lvm on this system. Although I like the flexibility, I'm not so sure it's not just better to use one large partition for everything. What I discovered is that though it might have been possible to recover, it was certainly easier and ultimately less stressful to just reinstall and restore from backup. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: a cautionary tale w/ successful recovery
On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 07:08:00PM -0500, Andrew Reid wrote: On Sunday 01 November 2009 17:57:49 Andrew Sackville-West wrote: So here is the real success part of the story: my backups worked! I had weekly backups of /etc and daily backups of /home. Since I'd not done any work of consequence in about 24 hours, I had not lost data! Restoring was a simple matter of copying over from the backup server, fixing up a couple of permissions and moving on. Lessons learned: 1) don't do risky things in DOS 6.22 when tired... you can't trust DOS to behave in a consistent manner (maybe) 2) keep a copy of the boot sector lying around (on another machine!!) 3) keep a copy of dpkg --get-selections lying around Congratulations! If it were within my power, I'd award you the Order of the Clue, the one with the *nice* ribbon. :) For the sysems I back up at work, we do the dpkg --get-selections thing, but I've never kept a copy of the boot sector -- that's an excellent idea. It turns out it would not have really helped in this situation because of writes in other parts of the disk, but in other, slightly less catastrophic situations, it would have been useful. If I had managed to understand what was going on between the part where the MBR got munched and other bits started flying out to the disk, it would have worked to just rewrite the MBR and reboot. A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
