[gentoo-user] Re: Cdrtools installation without suid root
On 26/04/13 23:20, Joerg Schilling wrote: The only problem I see is that you are able to remove important software on a Linux installation while the kernel still supports the feature by default. You are not able to remove it if something actually uses it. If you remove the automagic dependency in cdrtools, you'll be giving the package manager the chance to do the right thing. Automagic deps are a bad thing: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/automagic.xml
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} laptops for a developing country (Vanuatu)
On Saturday 27 April 2013 07:06:41 AM IST, Grant wrote: My wife and I recently visited Vanuatu (island of Santo) and fell in love with it. We got to know some locals pretty well and everybody is pining for laptops. Internet service is becoming widely available due to Digicel and TVL cell phone signals but I didn't meet anyone with a real smartphone. I promised to return with laptops and I'd like to make good on that. Which ultra low-cost but functional laptops or netbooks would you choose for this? I'm looking into OLPC but I'm not sure how that works. - Grant I heard Chromebooks are cheap, but I don't know what's their exact cost / feasibility / etc. I think the problem there is a Chromebook needs to be online in order to do much of anything, and the connection needs to be fast in order to make them very functional. Plus most people are paying by the MB in Vanuatu and a Chromebook must use a fair amount of data even on a fast connection. - Grant Well, any Chromebook can run a normal Linux distro. The chromebook team has put up a chroot helper on their github. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio
On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 12:29 AM, Alan Mackenzie a...@muc.de wrote: 'evening, Mark. On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 11:41:01PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote: On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Yuri K. Shatroff yks-...@yandex.ru wrote: In the end, I humbly believe it's up to me to judge what effect there is for me on my computers. Yes, that's exactly the point. Scroll up and reread this thread, though, and you'll get the impression that some complainers seem to think that Lennart is breaking into their systems and magickally installing his 175-year old software in them. What's this about 100% of the users being forced to have pulseaudio in? Somebody reported that pulseaudio is an absolute requirement for Gnome =3.8. That may not be 100% of users, but the forced is certainly there. If you don't like it, don't upgrade. Or fork it. Complain if the older ebuild gets taken out of the tree. Form a community that doesn't like it and maintain the older one. Use one of the variants that don't have it as a default. Use XFCE. Use mate. Use some minimal tiling window manager. Use cinnamon. Patch it so that it doesn't need it. Wait for someone to supply an ebuild that has a patch (do you know just how many custom patches gentoo has? A _LOT_) that allows you to disable it. Wait for someone to supply a PPA that has a patch that has it disabled. Pay someone to maintain such a ppa. Find another hobby besides building customized systems that you don't customize. You have a TON of choices that don't involve turning the GNOME team into your unpaid slave labor. Here's what I predict. Every time I google gnome 3.8 required pulseaudio, I just get circular references to this thread. The damned rumor hasn't even been confirmed. Whatever. If true, 3.8 is going to cause a wildly popular uproar to maintain a nopulse patch which will be enabled in the 3.8 ebuilds and maintained by the poor Gentoo gnome team. Gnome won't accept it, but Gentoo will ship it, and you don't have to do Jack to get it running. You won't even buy the maintainers a beer for the effort. If false - oh wait, Gnome 3.8 is already working on openbsd, so it's got to be false. Or is that another out of tree patch? Whatever. The GNOME team still remains evil oppressors who take the choice away from everyone. Because of a rumor you guys started. It was me that started this thread, and me that needed that info. Why do you have to be so disparaging about the process of learning? Disparaging about the process of learning? Take a good look at my first entry in this thread. A simple suggestion on a simple technical question. The more I read it the more obvious it becomes to me that some of the participants are more interested in a ricing contest with other distros than, say, learning what pulseaudio does. Case in point: I flat out told you two things it does and you acted like you were still waiting for an answer. Here, let me repeat myself in case you really are interested in learning. It's a sane idea for a desktop distro to include pulse as a -default-. No, seriously, it is. Just, frigging bluetooth headsets. Do you frig bluetooth headsets? Can't say I do. Bluetooth headsets are a damned good reason to default pulseaudio for -desktop oriented systems-. And per-application volume control. Per application volume control is a damned good reason to default pulseaudio for -desktop oriented systems-. Oh but you still don't have to... Yeah, I also answered that already. Are there other ways to go about it? Yeah. It remains to be seen how any of them are an order of magnitude better than pulse. You don't -like- it? Fine. There's no point in going on on some tirade about how the poor, oppressed 99% of users could have been doing just fine with ALSA And the hilarious thing is it turns out that whatever was causing your problem wasn't even pulseaudio to begin with. It was just a convenient scapegoat since bashing Lennart is so goddamned fashionable nowadays. -- This email is:[ ] actionable [ ] fyi[x] social Response needed: [ ] yes [ ] up to you [x] no Time-sensitive: [ ] immediate[ ] soon [x] none
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} laptops for a developing country (Vanuatu)
On Sat, 27 Apr 2013 12:05:06 +0530, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: I think the problem there is a Chromebook needs to be online in order to do much of anything, and the connection needs to be fast in order to make them very functional. Plus most people are paying by the MB in Vanuatu and a Chromebook must use a fair amount of data even on a fast connection. Well, any Chromebook can run a normal Linux distro. The chromebook team has put up a chroot helper on their github. But they are designed to be used with cloud services, and as such have very little storage. Have you considered the used market, especially companies replacing hardware at regular intervals. You may even get them fro free as a charitable donation, giving the company a tax write-off. -- Neil Bothwick COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Server system date synchronizaion
On Sat, 27 Apr 2013 02:20:08 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote: No it wouldn't - DST makes it darker in the morning. When I was about 11, the government experimented with using BST all year round. One of the reasons given for not doing it was that kids would have to go to school in the dark. ... and the children's accident rate in Scotland shot up. They have re-examined the data and found that that was not necessarily true. While the accident rate in the morning did go up, the afternoon rate went down by more, because drivers are more alert in the morning so cope with the darkness better. It wasn't only Scotland, in fact they aren't affected that much anyway. I worked in Dundee one December and it was dark until almost 10am, without DST. When they trialled winter DST, I was going to school in the dark in London. And what is this idea of saving daylight? Only an American could conceive of such a nonsense (I hope). It was the Germans, during WW1, quickly copied by Britain. The idea was to improve the productivity of the factories. And you are saving daylight, you are saving up an hour of daylight that you would otherwise sleep through and spending it at a more suitable time a few hours later. No one suggested a Daylight Bank :-O -- Neil Bothwick Mouse: (n.) an input device used by management to force computer users to keep at least a part of their desks clean. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} laptops for a developing country (Vanuatu)
On Apr 27, 2013 4:02 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Sat, 27 Apr 2013 12:05:06 +0530, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: I think the problem there is a Chromebook needs to be online in order to do much of anything, and the connection needs to be fast in order to make them very functional. Plus most people are paying by the MB in Vanuatu and a Chromebook must use a fair amount of data even on a fast connection. Well, any Chromebook can run a normal Linux distro. The chromebook team has put up a chroot helper on their github. But they are designed to be used with cloud services, and as such have very little storage. Have you considered the used market, especially companies replacing hardware at regular intervals. You may even get them fro free as a charitable donation, giving the company a tax write-off. This. Remember that 1- or 2-year old laptops are mighty powerful enough for nearly everything, except hi-def gaming. OTOH, sometimes business laptops sacrifice battery life for processing power. You will want to select the less power-hungry ones. Rgds, --
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} laptops for a developing country (Vanuatu)
On 27/04/2013 03:36, Grant wrote: My wife and I recently visited Vanuatu (island of Santo) and fell in love with it. We got to know some locals pretty well and everybody is pining for laptops. Internet service is becoming widely available due to Digicel and TVL cell phone signals but I didn't meet anyone with a real smartphone. I promised to return with laptops and I'd like to make good on that. Which ultra low-cost but functional laptops or netbooks would you choose for this? I'm looking into OLPC but I'm not sure how that works. - Grant I heard Chromebooks are cheap, but I don't know what's their exact cost / feasibility / etc. I think the problem there is a Chromebook needs to be online in order to do much of anything, and the connection needs to be fast in order to make them very functional. Plus most people are paying by the MB in Vanuatu and a Chromebook must use a fair amount of data even on a fast connection. I agree - tablets (and everything else in that category that superceded netbooks in developing countries) are a) expensive b) somewhat fragile and c) need to be online to do much of anything. They tend to use the OS app-store for updates which is much harder than a distro repo to replicate out on a tropical isle. And I think there's your opening: netbooks. They are cheap and once you get past that they are much slower than what you are used to, they do work very well. And they work offline too. With one more advantage from your point of view: Windows runs very suckily one them, but a decent Linux runs rather unsuckily :-) *Someone* has all those netbooks that Westeners ditched in favour of iCraps, I recommend you look into who is now selling them 2nd hand. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Server system date synchronizaion
On 26/04/2013 23:28, Nick Khamis wrote: On 4/26/13, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 26/04/2013 19:11, Nick Khamis wrote: Thank you so much for your response, and I totally understand the effort vs. benefit challenge. However, is it really that much trouble/unstable to setup our own ntp server that syncs with our local isp, and have our internal network sync on it? No, it's not THAT much effort. You can get by with installing ntpd on a single machine, pointing it at the upstream time server and pointing all your clients to it. It's clearly recorded in the config file, you can't go wrong. It's understanding how this weird thing called time works that is the issue. Take for example leap seconds. urggg... The basic question I suppose is why do you want to do it this way? What do you feel you will gain by doing it yourself? -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com Hello Alan, Thank you so much for your time. Our voip cluster time always vary for some reason And with long distance, that could mean upwards to a dollar a call. Ah, OK. That changes things quite a bit. I have a little bit of experience with that - I work for a large ISP, we have a large VOIP department and we run a stratum 2 time server that serves most of the country. First things first: you can't just stick any old upstream ntp server in your config and walk away. You are then reliant on the quality of that upstream, and far too often other time servers operate on a good enough policy - if it's accurate to about a second, it's good enough (and for desktop users i.e. most ISP clients, it is good enough). I don't know how big your operation is, if you have budget I suggest you invest in a proper master time source that is GPS-driven. We have a Symmetricom (http://www.symmetricom.com) but it's a mature market with several vendors. Shop around, prices are less than you'd expect (about the same as a decent mid-range server and much less than Cisco's routers...) Weather can get in the way, so back up the device with a decent second upstream. I have a good one available run by the Science and Technology Research part of the Dept of Trade and Industry and the third option is all the other big ISPs around. Depending on your accuracy needs you could get away without the GPS unit and just use a good upstream, but I'd fight for the budget for it - tell management it puts control of billing back in your hands, they always fall for that one :-) So the summary would be that I reckon ntpd will do what you want as long as you chose good reliable time sources. With that in hand, the config is easy as rather well documented. Shout here ont he list if you need a hand with this when you come to deployment time -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com Any suggestions for a reliable, use that word cautiously ntp server. Requests are coming from canada. Was there not a project that dealt with setting up a network across the globe just for serving up NTP services? Did that marvelous idea die out? Isn't that what pool.ntp.org does? As for reliable, I'm not familiar with how Canada has set itself up, but most Western governments have a Science and Technology department or NGO and most run time servers to serve the local scientific community. They might not let you sync to their server (stratum 1 providers are touchy) but someone will sync to it, and they in turn may provide a free time service. Start by Googling stratum 1 time server Canada and see where that takes you. Really, this stuff isn't hard and you will be up and running in no time. The hard part is when *you* provide a public service and need to pay attention to the insane amount of detail inherent in this subject. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Server system date synchronizaion
On 27/04/2013 03:20, Peter Humphrey wrote: On Friday 26 April 2013 22:43:10 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Fri, 26 Apr 2013 23:10:46 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: I wasn't born here in Africa and didn't spend primary school years here either. But I distinctly recall having to walk to school in the snow and in the dark to geet their before 9 o'clock. Not fun. DST would have helped. No it wouldn't - DST makes it darker in the morning. When I was about 11, the government experimented with using BST all year round. One of the reasons given for not doing it was that kids would have to go to school in the dark. ... and the children's accident rate in Scotland shot up. And what is this idea of saving daylight? Only an American could conceive of such a nonsense (I hope). It's not saving daylight, taken literally it's a misnomer. Daylight Savings is just easier to say and get an acronym for than Having more of the hours in a day when you are up awake and trying to do work happen when it's light rather than dark -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Server system date synchronizaion
On 27/04/2013 05:44, Andrew Lowe wrote: Get over it and enjoy the extra hour in the evening. But then again I'm in Australia where [snip here] OK, stop right there. I see where the disconnect comes in. You are in Australia. The sun happens to shine in Australia. It shines a lot there. I am in South Africa. The sun happens to shine a lot in South Africa. It shines a lot here. Neil is in England. The sun never shines in England. It makes the English confused and fries their brains. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Server system date synchronizaion
On 27/04/2013 00:11, Paul Hartman wrote: On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 3:54 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 26/04/2013 22:46, the guard wrote: Пятница, 26 апреля 2013, 22:41 +02:00 от Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com: Do none of us here ever deal with Windows? :-) I notice that no-one has yet mentioned that Windows does not do ntp, as Windows does not do time right, doesn't do timezones right and I strongly suspect can't even do dates right (this latter still unproven) Windows time servers need some magic Microsoft thing called ENTP which is in no way related to the ntp we all know and love It refuses to adjust time if you have a wrong date. timezone is set in your system I was thinking more along the lines of how Windows has no concept of UTC set in the hw clock and a local timezone, and how timezones are odd things like Harare/Pretoria instead of the official names like SAST GMT+2 as set by the scientific timekeeping community. How about daylight savings? Can Windows deal with that? Other than by just shoving the clock back and forward by an hour on the right days? I've used windows for the past 25,000+ work hours at my job (I wish that were an exaggeration) in an all-Microsoft corporate environment. I dare not declare myself an expert in anything Windows so as not to encourage more of it. :) [snip much detail about Windows tying itself in knots to do something quite simple] Now we return to our regularly-scheduled programming... In comparison I have it easy :-) The last time there was a leap-second all I had to do was check our time servers tracked upstream wrt leap-*, and checked that my team's machines did the same. ClusterSSH, bash, grep, sed and awk made this an exercise in on-liner skills :-) I then told the reat of the company using Unix to do the same, and the whole thing was a non-event. Now for the Windows fellows and the idiot running the Domain Controllers in OurAmazingParentCompanyWhoThinkTheyAreCool(tm). Apparently they had a torrid time of it, especially as they ignored all heads-up communications from us. I don't know how they managed to fix all the Windows workstations as we were quite happy to return that favour. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio
I've been a little surprised at some of the posts in this thread. As some others have pointed out, I do not believe it is fair to state that anyone is forcing you to use any particular software (such as PulseAudio, or udev), as it is your choice to use Linux or not in the first place. Why do these same people not complain about being forced to use the Linux kernel? After all, it would certainly be tricky to install Gentoo on metal, and not use the Linux kernel. As an open source developer and as an open source consumer (and of course I consume far more open source efforts than I contribute), I think it is important to keep in mind that we are benefiting from the generosity of others. I think the idiom, Don't look a gift horse in the mouth is probably appropriate to this discussion. Another important point that has been said by others that I think is worth highlighting is that there are many ways to go without using PulseAudio if you really want ALSA. Gnome happens to depend on it, but that's the choice of Gnome developers and not us. I happen to work on an open source server product that requires the use of MongoDB. There are many community users who complain about that, as they would rather us use the DB of their preference (PostgreSQL is a common request). I don't disagree that it would be cool if my project could use either DB and let the users go with their own choice, but it's not a priority for us due to the long list of other features and bugs that we need to deal with. It's so much simpler for us to only support one database, and so it allows us to deliver a lot of other cool features instead. I think that is a reasonable decision on our part, and some of our community members disagree and that's fine. I don't think we or they feel any animosity about it. It would significantly increase our QE and development costs if we were to support other DBs. I think Gnome and PA can be thought of in a similar light. I will divulge that I happen to like Gnome and PulseAudio, and so consider me biased. I did find the /usr thing with udev to be kind of inconvenient since I did happen to have a separate /usr, but I dealt with it and am grateful to have a free udev that I can use. Note that I'm not saying you need to like or use these technologies - I just ask that you realize that there are pretty good reasons for Gnome to simplify their dependency list, and that you do still have great freedom in your software choices. There are many great alternatives to Gnome. Open Source software is incredible, and I think it's exciting to think about all the many choices it has brought us so far. Any one of us could fork any OSS project we wanted at any time and tweak it for what we want and share with the world. That is really good. -- Randy Barlow
[gentoo-user] Router takes too long to assign IP address
Hi All, At the title says, I have a laptop that seems to take too long to get an IPv4 address from my home router. Other machines on the same LAN that have static IP addresses do not seem to suffer this way. I have tried to configure /etc/conf.d/net to use a specific IP address for the particular gateway as explained in: /usr/share/doc/openrc-0.11.8/net.example.bz2 # This is a module that tries to find a gateway IP. If it exists then we use # that gateways configuration for our own. For the configuration variables # simply ensure that each octet is zero padded and the dots are removed. # Below is an example. [snip...] # We can also specify a specific MAC address for each gateway if different # networks have the same gateway. #gateways_eth0=192.168.0.1,00:11:22:AA:BB:CC 10.0.0.1,33:44:55:DD:EE:FF #config_19216801_001122AABBCC=192.168.0.2/24 #routes_19216801_001122AABBCC=default via 192.168.0.1 #dns_servers_19216801_001122AABBCC=192.168.0.1 #config_0101_334455DDEEFF=10.0.0.254/8 #routes_0101_334455DDEEFF=default via 10.0.0.1 #dns_servers_0101_334455DDEEFF=10.0.0.1 So in my case I have my router at 10.10.10.1 and its MAC address is 00:11:22:AA:BB:CC. My /etc/conf.d/net looks like this: === # Define the gateways you want to configure gateways_enp11s0=10.10.10.1,00:11:22:AA:BB:CC # Define the IP and netmask when using gateway 10.0.0.1 config_010010010001_00:11:22:AA:BB:CC=10.10.10.7/24 # Define the default route for gateway 10.0.0.1 routes_010010010001_00:11:22:AA:BB:CC=default via 10.10.10.1 # Define the DNS servers to use with gateway 10.0.0.1 dns_servers_010010010001_00:11:22:AA:BB:CC=10.10.10.1 fallback_enp11s0=dhcp dhcpcd_enp11s0=-t 45 === However, the particular router will not provide an IP address soon enough, the laptop then sets up an APIPA address and every so many seconds thereafter it will try to get an address from the dhcp server. All this creates an annoying delay when I am going online in this LAN. I am not sure I understand why it goes through the steps shown in the log in this particular order and why it says no configuration found (see below): Apr 27 16:56:50 dell_xps kernel: tg3 :0b:00.0: irq 49 for MSI/MSI-X Apr 27 16:56:50 dell_xps kernel: IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): enp11s0: link is not ready Apr 27 16:56:50 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: ifplugd 0.28 initializing. Apr 27 16:56:50 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: Using interface enp11s0/B9:00:A2:20:B2:2B with driver tg3 (version: 3.125) Apr 27 16:56:50 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: Using detection mode: SIOCETHTOOL Apr 27 16:56:50 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: Initialization complete, link beat not detected. Apr 27 16:56:50 dell_xps /etc/init.d/net.enp11s0[1166]: WARNING: net.enp11s0 has started, but is inactive Apr 27 16:56:51 dell_xps kernel: tg3 :0b:00.0 enp11s0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex Apr 27 16:56:51 dell_xps kernel: tg3 :0b:00.0 enp11s0: Flow control is on for TX and on for RX Apr 27 16:56:51 dell_xps kernel: IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): enp11s0: link becomes ready Apr 27 16:56:52 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: Link beat detected. Apr 27 16:56:53 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: Executing '/etc/ifplugd/ifplugd.action enp11s0 up'. Apr 27 16:56:53 dell_xps /etc/init.d/net.enp11s0[1364]: No configuration specified; defaulting to DHCP Apr 27 16:56:53 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: client: * No configuration specified; defaulting to DHCP --Why isn't the configuration in /etc/conf.d/net used here?-- Apr 27 16:56:53 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: client: dhcpcd[1369]: version 5.6.4 starting Apr 27 16:56:53 dell_xps dhcpcd[1369]: version 5.6.4 starting Apr 27 16:56:53 dell_xps dhcpcd[1369]: enp11s0: sending IPv6 Router Solicitation Apr 27 16:56:53 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: client: dhcpcd[1369]: enp11s0: sending IPv6 Router Solicitation Apr 27 16:56:53 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: client: dhcpcd[1369]: enp11s0: rebinding lease of 10.10.10.7 Apr 27 16:56:53 dell_xps dhcpcd[1369]: enp11s0: rebinding lease of 10.10.10.7 --Probably cached from earlier, but still can't ping LAN at this stage-- Apr 27 16:56:57 dell_xps dhcpcd[1369]: enp11s0: sending IPv6 Router Solicitation --This is not an IPv6 capable router-- Apr 27 16:56:57 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: client: dhcpcd[1369]: enp11s0: sending IPv6 Router Solicitation Apr 27 16:56:58 dell_xps dhcpcd[1369]: enp11s0: broadcasting for a lease Apr 27 16:56:58 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: client: dhcpcd[1369]: enp11s0: broadcasting for a lease Apr 27 16:57:01 dell_xps dhcpcd[1369]: enp11s0: sending IPv6 Router Solicitation Apr 27 16:57:01 dell_xps ifplugd(enp11s0)[1257]: client: dhcpcd[1369]: enp11s0:
Re: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Server system date synchronizaion
On 2013-04-26 5:10 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: I wasn't born here in Africa and didn't spend primary school years here either. But I distinctly recall having to walk to school in the snow and in the dark to geet their before 9 o'clock. Not fun. DST would have helped. But what would make more sense (at least in my mind) would be to have official 'working hours' changes, and adjust those, rather than change the clocks - ie, in your example, instead of school starting at 9:00am, it switches to start at 10:00am.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Server system date synchronizaion
On 27/04/2013 18:24, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-04-26 5:10 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: I wasn't born here in Africa and didn't spend primary school years here either. But I distinctly recall having to walk to school in the snow and in the dark to geet their before 9 o'clock. Not fun. DST would have helped. But what would make more sense (at least in my mind) would be to have official 'working hours' changes, and adjust those, rather than change the clocks - ie, in your example, instead of school starting at 9:00am, it switches to start at 10:00am. That's probably a better way overall. It would suit the dairy cows! -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Server system date synchronizaion
On Sat, 27 Apr 2013 17:15:37 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: You are in Australia. The sun happens to shine in Australia. It shines a lot there. I am in South Africa. The sun happens to shine a lot in South Africa. It shines a lot here. Neil is in England. The sun never shines in England. It makes the English confused and fries their brains. Of course it shines over here, it does it non-stop every time I go abroad on holiday :( For the record, I wasn't one of those complaining about DST, it makes little difference to me whether or not there is a sun the other side of those rain clouds. -- Neil Bothwick Copper wire was invented by two Scotsmen fighting over a penny! signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Server system date synchronizaion
On Sat, 27 Apr 2013 12:24:53 -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: But what would make more sense (at least in my mind) would be to have official 'working hours' changes, and adjust those, rather than change the clocks - ie, in your example, instead of school starting at 9:00am, it switches to start at 10:00am. That would mean lots of separate changes, including things that are regulated by time, such as licencing hours (which, incidentally, were introduced here in the same Act of Parliament as DST, and for the same reason). A single, well documented, change to clocks is a lot simpler than every business and organisation having date-dependent trading hours. -- Neil Bothwick Anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Re[2]: [gentoo-user] Server system date synchronizaion
On 26/04/2013 23:43, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Fri, 26 Apr 2013 23:10:46 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: I wasn't born here in Africa and didn't spend primary school years here either. But I distinctly recall having to walk to school in the snow and in the dark to geet their before 9 o'clock. Not fun. DST would have helped. No it wouldn't - DST makes it darker in the morning. When I was about 11, the government experimented with using BST all year round. One of the reasons given for not doing it was that kids would have to go to school in the dark. Hmmm. DST as punted here was couched in reverse terms - have kids go to school when it was light, as it would still be light in the early afternoon when they went home. DST never took off here, it would only be useful in the Cape down south and only for about a month or so of the year. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} laptops for a developing country (Vanuatu)
I think the problem there is a Chromebook needs to be online in order to do much of anything, and the connection needs to be fast in order to make them very functional. Plus most people are paying by the MB in Vanuatu and a Chromebook must use a fair amount of data even on a fast connection. Well, any Chromebook can run a normal Linux distro. The chromebook team has put up a chroot helper on their github. But they are designed to be used with cloud services, and as such have very little storage. Have you considered the used market, especially companies replacing hardware at regular intervals. You may even get them fro free as a charitable donation, giving the company a tax write-off. Is this something to find through eBay? - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} laptops for a developing country (Vanuatu)
My wife and I recently visited Vanuatu (island of Santo) and fell in love with it. We got to know some locals pretty well and everybody is pining for laptops. Internet service is becoming widely available due to Digicel and TVL cell phone signals but I didn't meet anyone with a real smartphone. I promised to return with laptops and I'd like to make good on that. Which ultra low-cost but functional laptops or netbooks would you choose for this? I'm looking into OLPC but I'm not sure how that works. - Grant [snip] And I think there's your opening: netbooks. They are cheap and once you get past that they are much slower than what you are used to, they do work very well. And they work offline too. With one more advantage from your point of view: Windows runs very suckily one them, but a decent Linux runs rather unsuckily :-) This brings up another important question: Windows or Linux. These folks have ultra-basic computer skills if that. They won't be able to hit the forums when something goes wrong. I've only ever really used Gentoo so I'm not sure how easy Ubuntu or whatever is but I'm leaning toward Windows for this. It's a much more universal language in the computer world so the chances of them finding help for a problem are much higher. Plus they can install Windows programs that way. Of course Windows comes with its own set of problems but I think those might be preferable in this case. If I can get systems with some kind of a restore partition, they could follow a pretty simple procedure to restore the OS back to factory when it gets too far out. In fact the owner of the place where I was staying brought me his Toshiba laptop while I was there and (typically) the thing was riddled with viruses and had become unusable. Luckily there was a restore partition and it was too easy to snap it back to factory. He then promptly checked his email for the first time in however long and opened a message from his daughter in Australia which contained a photo of his granddaughter. It was the first time he had ever seen her. He bought the kava every night after that. *Someone* has all those netbooks that Westeners ditched in favour of iCraps, I recommend you look into who is now selling them 2nd hand. I should look to eBay, right? - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] can't mount ext4 fs as est3 or ext3
On Fri, Apr 26 2013, Andrea Conti wrote: Hi, EXT3-fs (sda5): error: couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features (240) /dev/sda5/ ext4noatime,discard 0 1 When first mounting the root filesystem the kernel has no access to /etc/fstab and therefore by default tries mounting it with all available FS drivers until one succeeds. ext3 (or ext4 in ext3 mode) is tried before ext4 and you get that error when it fails because the filesystem is using ext4-only features such as extents. You can avoid that by adding rootfstype=ext4 to the kernel command line. Since all my fs are ext4 I could remove ext3 support from the kernel (3.5.4). Is that the recommended procedure? You can remove ext2/ext3 support even if you still have ext2/ext3 filesystems around; the ext4 driver is backwards compatible and can handle those with no problems. You just have to make sure that CONFIG_EXT4_USE_FOR_EXT23 is set in your kernel configuration. HTH andrea Thanks. I didn't know about rootfstype. allan
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} laptops for a developing country (Vanuatu)
On 27/04/2013 20:45, Grant wrote: *Someone* has all those netbooks that Westeners ditched in favour of iCraps, I recommend you look into who is now selling them 2nd hand. I should look to eBay, right? I reckon that's a good start. There are other companies around that sell refurbed machines, check those out too. I have no idea how to find such companies in your part of the world, so you are probably gonna need some uber-google-fu to find them. And as almost, do your homework and due diligence. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio
Randy Barlow wrote: SNIP I will divulge that I happen to like Gnome and PulseAudio, and so consider me biased. I did find the /usr thing with udev to be kind of inconvenient since I did happen to have a separate /usr, but I dealt with it and am grateful to have a free udev that I can use. SNIP I dealt with udev too. I switched to something that doesn't force me to chose having /usr on / or having a init thingy. Since I switched, I can have /usr on its own partition and not have a init thingy. Having options worked very well. Not having a option would not have ended as well for me and others. For me, I just didn't like the way udev was going so I, and others, complained a lot and when someone came up with a better plan, I switched as I'm sure others did too. If people that use Gnome don't like pulseaudio, they should have a option to use something else. If they don't have that option, then in my opinion it is perfectly acceptable for a person to say they don't like it. If everyone just goes along and doesn't say anything, then people that can make a option won't know one is needed to begin with . I shortened the above but since you mentioned using windoze instead of Linux, that is not a option here. I'll donate money/time or whatever I can to Linux but I will NOT pay for a OS that is even half as crappy as windoze. I have never bought anything M$ and have no plans to ever do it either. It just is not a option for me. I have family/friends that use windoze and that is about all I can stand. Actually, I switched my brother about a year ago. I switched him to Kubuntu but it still beats the stuffins out of windoze. Just my $0.02 worth. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} laptops for a developing country (Vanuatu)
*Someone* has all those netbooks that Westeners ditched in favour of iCraps, I recommend you look into who is now selling them 2nd hand. I should look to eBay, right? I reckon that's a good start. There are other companies around that sell refurbed machines, check those out too. I have no idea how to find such companies in your part of the world, so you are probably gonna need some uber-google-fu to find them. And as almost, do your homework and due diligence. How about Android netbooks or tablets? Here are a well-reviewed Android 4.0 netbook and 4.1 tablet for about $80 each brand new: Kocaso NB726A netbook: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1M80H31141 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kocaso-NB726A-Black-7-1-2Ghz-Google-Android-4-0-Netbook-Notebook-Laptop-/300826243684 Avatar Sirius S701-R2A-1 tablet: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834686007 - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} laptops for a developing country (Vanuatu)
On Saturday 27 Apr 2013 22:09:38 Grant wrote: *Someone* has all those netbooks that Westeners ditched in favour of iCraps, I recommend you look into who is now selling them 2nd hand. I should look to eBay, right? I reckon that's a good start. There are other companies around that sell refurbed machines, check those out too. I have no idea how to find such companies in your part of the world, so you are probably gonna need some uber-google-fu to find them. And as almost, do your homework and due diligence. How about Android netbooks or tablets? Here are a well-reviewed Android 4.0 netbook and 4.1 tablet for about $80 each brand new: Kocaso NB726A netbook: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1M80H31141 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kocaso-NB726A-Black-7-1-2Ghz-Google-Android-4-0-Net book-Notebook-Laptop-/300826243684 Avatar Sirius S701-R2A-1 tablet: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834686007 - Grant What-ever you source for them, can I please ask you to think seriously about avoiding installing any MSWindows OS? The amount of botnets out there that hit my webservers is only getting worse and any IPs that I've scanned to investigate who the attackers are, I see them running MSWindows. :-( -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio
On Sat, 2013-04-27 at 15:13 -0500, Dale wrote: I dealt with udev too. I switched to something that doesn't force me to chose having /usr on / or having a init thingy. Since I switched, I can have /usr on its own partition and not have a init thingy. Having options worked very well. Not having a option would not have ended as well for me and others. Yeah, this is the great thing about Open Source! For me, I just didn't like the way udev was going so I, and others, complained a lot and when someone came up with a better plan, I switched as I'm sure others did too. If people that use Gnome don't like pulseaudio, they should have a option to use something else. If they don't have that option, then in my opinion it is perfectly acceptable for a person to say they don't like it. If everyone just goes along and doesn't say anything, then people that can make a option won't know one is needed to begin with. I think it's fine to not like something and to say so. However, there is a line between respectfully requesting features, and complaining about something that someone is giving you for free (hence my gift horse reference). I don't intend this last sentence to read harshly, or intended as a personal attack against anyone. I'm just sharing how the mood of some posts on this thread feels to someone who is an Open Source developer. The word force is not appropriate to be used in the context of Open Source software. We all have the freedom to choose any number of alternatives to Gnome or udev (including already existing forks and derivatives). Force more often involves men with guns (or Darth Vader). The project that I work on does not force you to use MongoDB. However, if you wish you make use of my project in the way it was intended to be used without modifications, you will need to use MongoDB. It's a hard dependency. Nobody is forcing you to use my project, and there are alternatives you can choose from. You also have the freedom to git clone us, and change it to use SQLite, or MariaDB, or PostgreSQL, or anything else you like (however, if you use LDAP as a database, I know someone who might hunt you down!) By the nature of us giving you the code with an Open Source license (GPL), it's freedom for you, not force. I shortened the above but since you mentioned using windoze instead of Linux, that is not a option here. I'll donate money/time or whatever I can to Linux but I will NOT pay for a OS that is even half as crappy as windoze. I have never bought anything M$ and have no plans to ever do it either. It just is not a option for me. I have family/friends that use windoze and that is about all I can stand. Actually, I switched my brother about a year ago. I switched him to Kubuntu but it still beats the stuffins out of windoze. I think you may be thinking of someone else. I don't recall having ever mentioned The Evil OS®. I too have been using Linux exclusively for a fairly long while :) -- Randy Barlow
[gentoo-user] why my system is keeping old kernel around?
When I run depclean, it prints out: sys-kernel/gentoo-sources selected: 3.6.11 protected: none omitted: 2.6.31-r6 2.6.36-r5 3.7.10-r1 ll /usr/src/ lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 Feb 26 12:35 linux - linux-3.6.11-gentoo The system is using kernel 3.6.11; so I'll keep it. But why it tries to keep older kernels: 2.6.31-r6 2.6.36-r5 ? -- Joseph
Re: [gentoo-user] why my system is keeping old kernel around?
On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 8:19 PM, Joseph syscon...@gmail.com wrote: When I run depclean, it prints out: sys-kernel/gentoo-sources selected: 3.6.11 protected: none omitted: 2.6.31-r6 2.6.36-r5 3.7.10-r1 ll /usr/src/ lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 Feb 26 12:35 linux - linux-3.6.11-gentoo The system is using kernel 3.6.11; so I'll keep it. But why it tries to keep older kernels: 2.6.31-r6 2.6.36-r5 ? If you ran emerge --depclean, the older kernels are not there; only the files created when you compiled them (*.o, *.ko, vmlinuz, stuff like that). You can rm -rf the old versions safely. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
