Linux-Misc Digest #708, Volume #18 Thu, 21 Jan 99 01:13:13 EST
Contents:
HELP! 128MB ram linux only finds 64!!!!!! ("Oo.et.oO")
Re: A Tale of Two Installations ("Michael S. Briggs")
Re: A newbie versus "vi" (Jim Richardson)
Re: This is Linux, not Windows, so why not superior flexibility AND idiot-friendly?
(Peter McDermott)
Re: Linux is not even in Windows 9X's class. (Oded Arbel)
Re: Mgetty not working (Bill Unruh)
Re: Are ISPF editor and REXX clones available on Linux ? (William Burrow)
Re: Linux keyboard? (For emacs use) (Darin Johnson)
Re: How to get rid of LILO? (Mark Stolz)
Mgetty not working ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: A newbie versus "vi" (Bob Tennent)
GUI Network Design Tool? ("David W. Jablonski")
Re: 2038 and Linux (mlw)
Re: egcs 1.1.1 and PII (Johan Kullstam)
Re: ? on poorly described -r & -R options of cp. (Gary Momarison)
Re: Linux is not even in Windows 9X's class. (Floyd Davidson)
print server (Rob Montgomery)
switching in and out of an Xwindow console
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Oo.et.oO" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.setup
Subject: HELP! 128MB ram linux only finds 64!!!!!!
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 09:51:44 +0000
hello-
okay this is really mysterious. first Redhat neglected to do anything
with my swap space and I was running with out it. so I fixed that and
while I was doing that I realized that linux thinks I only have 64MB of
RAM!
the bios sees all 128 MB
how do I figure out what is going on and fix it ASAP?
here is my free output:
total used free shared buffers
cached
Mem: 64108 62952 1156 30908 9188
27748
-/+ buffers/cache: 26016 38092
Swap: 88700 0 88700
and /proc/meminfo:
Mem: 65646592 64475136 1171456 31776768 9408512 28368896
Swap: 90828800 0 90828800
MemTotal: 64108 kB
MemFree: 1144 kB
MemShared: 31032 kB
Buffers: 9188 kB
Cached: 27704 kB
SwapTotal: 88700 kB
SwapFree: 88700 kB
I can't find anything on the web about this.
help me pleeeeze-
eric
------------------------------
From: "Michael S. Briggs" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: A Tale of Two Installations
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 03:17:54 GMT
Giftzwerg wrote:
>
> This afternoon - becoming desirous of listening to some web-radio on my
> system here at work - I wandered on over to the RealAudio site and
> grabbed their free audio player.
>
> Actually, I grabbed it twice; one version for Linux, and one for Win98,
> since this machine runs both OS's.
>
> Care to hear how long it took me to install RealPlayer in Win98?
>
> Two minutes (I got a coffee while it was installing...).
>
> Care to hear how difficult it was?
>
> I placed my mouse pointer over the setup.exe icon, and depressed the left
> button (note that since I have "view as web-page" active, I don't need to
> double-click and thus only did half as much work as I used to...).
>
> Care to hear how long it took me to install RealPlayer in Linux?
>
> I have no idea how long - since it *still* isn't working.
>
> Care to hear how difficult it was?
>
> Oh, it involved the usual brain-damaged Linux hoop-jumping;
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH, *.so, links, RA*, ldconfig, grepping for permission
> issues, trips to DejaNews to find messages in bottles from other poor
> souls who had the same problem, trips to AltaVista to seek out websites
> devoted to poor souls dumb enough to think that a web browser plugin
> should install easily...
>
cut......
> The Moral Of The Story:
>
> Linux is not going anywhere as a mainstream OS until the pain of
> installing new software is *always* commensurate with the benefit derived
> from that software once installed. A web-browser plugin is worth exactly
> one command and two minutes...
>
> ...just like it is in Windows.
>
I suggest the possibility that the difficulty of installing RealPlayer
in Linux (assuming you already have sound working) is not so much due to
the current-state of Linux per se, but rather to a business decision by
the company that developed and promotes the plugin about the amount of
work they want to put into making their product easy to install in
various operating systems. If you were a business manager, which
operating system would you spend the most money supporting, Windows or
Linux? Hopefully the situation will improve as the market share of
Linux increases.
It should be possible to write a script that will automatically install
a program, and to include in the script tests for common
problems/mistakes. It takes either a company that perchieves money to
be made, or a dedicated volunteer.
--Michael
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jim Richardson)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.setup
Subject: Re: A newbie versus "vi"
Date: 21 Jan 1999 02:57:05 GMT
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Wed, 20 Jan 1999 01:58:00 +0000,
Kelly and Sandy, in the persona of
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
brought forth the following words...:
>Dear Linux Users, A newbie versus "vi"
> --------------------
>
>
<vi horror story exerpted to save bandwidth.>
>
>
> Therefore I made a mental note to write off a letter, as I am doing
>now, to the Linux newsgroups to find out about using an alternative
>easy-to-use pull-down-menu editor somehow.
>
>
> So, reiterating: can I get a GUI editor by invoking some other
>command, or the right vi -switches or is it something I have to download
>off the web?
>
>
>With Kind Regards,
>
>
>Sandy
>
With RH 5.2 came gvim, which is a graphically aware vim (vi improved) It may
not be exactly what you want but it is enough to get started.
As for a gui editor, try Nedit, which is available online, although at
the moment I am not sure where the web page is.
http://rufus.w3.org/linux/RPM/index is a good place to start for linux packages.
I would also suggest looking into emacs, firing up emacs while in X will bring
up a graphically aware and mouseable emacs. Quirky, yet tres powerful.
--
Jim Richardson
Anarchist, pagan and proud of it
WWW.eskimo.com/~warlock
Linux, because life's too short for a buggy OS.
------------------------------
From: Peter McDermott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.portable,comp.os.linux.powerpc,comp.os.linux.setup
Subject: Re: This is Linux, not Windows, so why not superior flexibility AND
idiot-friendly?
Date: 19 Jan 1999 12:31:28 -0000
Gregory Loren Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In article <77ofit$h87$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, rob <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>So true - what you use is what you like. A foreign graduate student here
>>was all frustrated with windows because he was used to UNIX and coudn't
>>figure out how to grep in windows.
> Can you?
Sure. Just run BBEdit. :-)
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
From: Oded Arbel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: alt.linux,alt.os.linux,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Linux is not even in Windows 9X's class.
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 16:37:41 +0200
Michael Lee Yohe wrote:
>
> I merely admire what Microsoft has done for the computing industry in terms
> of quality of applications (please don't shoot me),
OK , I agree that they make good aplications, their just not user
friendly.
> the power of
> applications (compare Photoshop to Harvard Graphics of 5-10 years ago),
You can't do that - other OSs have matured also - you can get PhotoShop
for macs too, it wasn't even developed for windows - it was ported over
due to market demand.
> and
> a unity of programming style (I like the fact that apps have the same
> _basic_ behaviour - cut/paste, drag/drop, etc.)
With this I agree full heartedly.
> Everyone has their opinions about each subject - and that's the beauty of
> humanity. However, when people base their opinions merely on generalization
> without fact - it's an absurdity to attempt to insult another's intellect
> based on these very weak, dry "facts".
Fact : Microsoft make bloated applications.
And I'm not refering to Win95, but to Win98 -> Win98 is a minor upgrade
to Win95 (it's version 4.10 while Win95 is version 4.00) it improves in
looks, some minor features that were introduced by older upgrades (Fat32
for example) and some misc tools. then Y o' great Bill, is it about 25%
slower on my P2-300 then plain old Win95 ?
>
> Ehem? Define "overbloated".
I just did.
> I love it when people quote the extreme left
> or the extreme right. Overbloat comes from programmers working
> inefficiently. Statically linking libraries.. redudant code.. inefficient
> code - everything with "bloat" is OS-independent - not Windows-related. ALL
> OSes SUFFER FROM THE PROBLEM DUE TO THE LACK OF DISCIPLINE AMONG
> PROGRAMMERS. It's not 100% the OS.
Well, I just gave you an example of overbloated OS. I grant that it's
the first _real_ overbloated OS that MS did, but getting back to the
subject of programers - MS programers program overbloated applications -
in every genre, MS-Office 8 is a bloated version of MS-Office 4.2,
Picture-It is a bloatware copy of Paint Shop Pro, Money98 is a bloatware
copy of Quicken (which acts as it name implies) and on and on and on...
>
> Actually - the fact the Windows 98 and NT have produced applications with
> greater functionality and usability than any application 10 years ago simply
> negates this argument.
It's not that Win98 has made the change - people who develop software,
*develop* it. if another OS (like OS/2 for example) would have taken
over the market, software companies whould have published lot's of
poweful aplications that would only run on OS/2 (BTW - a good example
that MS can write good code - most of OS/2 code was co-developed with
MS).
BTW : you qoute too much. please start cutting only the relevent part
to qoute. it's a pain reading replys by you.
and I'm sorry if my english isn't so good, I'm not a native speaker.
Oded
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bill Unruh)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.networking
Subject: Re: Mgetty not working
Date: 21 Jan 1999 03:48:49 GMT
In <7865bi$gv1$[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>My mgetty simply stopped working one day. I am not sure what caused this. This
>is what I did:
Stopped working how? Do
ps aux|grep mgetty
Is there a listing for the mgetty program?
Look in /var/log/mgetty.ttyS1
Any clue there?
Look in /var/log/messages-- any statement that S1 is respawning too
fast?
>- I checked my modem. Seems to be communicating fine. - Tried typing
>"/sbin/mgetty ttyS1" at the command prompt. I then called. Works fine there
>too. - I checked my inittab to see if everything was ok. This is what is
>listed: "S1:345:respawn:/sbin/mgetty ttyS1" [no quotes] Looks fine to me.
Check in in the mgetty setup files to see if the init string is right.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (William Burrow)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.x
Subject: Re: Are ISPF editor and REXX clones available on Linux ?
Date: 21 Jan 1999 03:11:44 GMT
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Wed, 20 Jan 1999 21:07:19 +0000 (GMT),
Philip Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I'm looking for the "IBM / mainframe bigot" software bundle to put on my shiny new
>Linux system.
>
>Namely -
>
>ISPF editor clone
Get THE (searching on this would be virtually impossible ;):
http://www.lightlink.com/hessling/
Configure to taste (it isn't exactly like ISPF out of the box).
>REXX (either clone of the mainframe or OS/2 versions)
There might be a pointer to REXX there, too. Search the web for it
otherwise.
--
William Burrow -- New Brunswick, Canada o
Copyright 1999 William Burrow ~ /\
~ ()>()
------------------------------
From: Darin Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.linux.hardware,comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.misc,comp.emacs,comp.editors
Subject: Re: Linux keyboard? (For emacs use)
Date: 20 Jan 1999 18:27:32 -0800
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Festus van Landingham) writes:
> >i too use emacs. i even remapped the keys on windows nt since i use
> >emacs at work too.
>
> Do emacs users not type captial letters or does emacs not support
> capital letters?
Do you honestly use caps-lock *more* than control? You don't need to
remove it, just put the commonly used control in an easier to use
place, while putting the the vestigial caps-lock out of the way.
I've needed caps-lock maybe once in the last year. Basically
caps-lock is obsolete (now the COBOL users start flaming me). Of
course, there are occasional times when short words are all caps, but
those times are rare, and the words are short. But I use the control
key all the time.
(I'm also somewhat annoyed that alt/meta/windows/whatever keys
are so hard to typed)
--
Darin Johnson
Luxury! In MY day, we had to make do with 5 bytes of swap...
------------------------------
From: Mark Stolz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: How to get rid of LILO?
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 16:18:30 +0000
Kaustav Bhattacharya wrote:
>
> Ido's wrote:
> >
> > Frantisek Fuksa ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> >
> > All you needed to do is fdisk /mbr in windows
>
> LOL, and how does he do this in windows if he can't get into windows?
> :-)
>
> Kozzey
Place trusty WinBlows emergency floppy in disk drive (you made one,
right?).
Boot computer ... make sure bios is config'd seek/boot off of floppy.
Run fdisk.
No trusty emergency disk? Use crusty DOS boot disk...same procedure.
No crusty DOS boot disk? Shoot self in foot and throw computer out
window.
--Mark
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.networking
Subject: Mgetty not working
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 03:02:15 GMT
My mgetty simply stopped working one day. I am not sure what caused this. This
is what I did:
- I checked my modem. Seems to be communicating fine. - Tried typing
"/sbin/mgetty ttyS1" at the command prompt. I then called. Works fine there
too. - I checked my inittab to see if everything was ok. This is what is
listed: "S1:345:respawn:/sbin/mgetty ttyS1" [no quotes] Looks fine to me.
And yes,I am running at runlevel 3. Anyone have any ideas about what is going
wrong?
============= Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ============
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
------------------------------
From: r d t@c s.q u e e n s u.c a (Bob Tennent)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.setup
Subject: Re: A newbie versus "vi"
Date: 21 Jan 1999 02:51:04 GMT
On Wed, 20 Jan 1999 22:45:18 +0000, Kelly and Sandy wrote:
>In a comp.os.linux.setup newsletter entitled "A newbie versus "vi"", w
>joseph mantle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
>
> However I would like to use "joe" by the sound of it. I have done a
>
> locate joe
>
>on my standard Red Hat 5.2 installation, but nothing was found. How do
>I go about getting Linux to understand "joe"? I have a feeling "RPM" is
>going to be in the answers.
>
I assume you have a RedHat CD. You should mount it to the file
system by doing something like
mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
and then
cd /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS
Install joe by doing
rpm -ivh joe-TAB (the TAB will fill in the rest of the package file name)
That should do it. Do man joe for documentation.
I suggest you also install the xwpe packages and try xwe.
Bob T.
------------------------------
From: "David W. Jablonski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: GUI Network Design Tool?
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 10:14:00 -0600
Is there a network modeling tool (e.g. Visio) for Linux and X11?
Any help would be apprieciated. Thanks...
------------------------------
From: mlw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: 2038 and Linux
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 04:14:12 +0000
Bloody Viking wrote:
>
> In comp.os.linux.advocacy mlw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> : 40 years from now, supporting 32 bit computers would be like trying to
> : support vacuum tube computers today. If any of the systems we use today,
> : are in use 40 years from now, the world has suffered a nuclear war.
>
> That's what they thought when they first started up the old mainframes and
> coded the apps in COBOL. This is how we got into this whole Y2K mess in
> the first place. And becuse 32 bit UNIX boxes are still around, there will
> likely be a Y2K+38 bug.
These are two different problems. The Y2K problem is about the way dates
are stored in persistent files. The 2038 bug is the way dates are
represented inside the OS. I don't know any application that stores
dates as seconds since 1970.
As long as all applications store dates as MM/DD/YYYY the applications
will be fine. It is only routines like:
time_t t1 = time(0);
time_t t_elapsed;
while(1)
{
t_elapsed = time(0) - t1;
if(t_elapsed > 3600) // do it for an hour
break;
sleep(100);
// Do something here 10 times a second
}
The above routine will fail once in 2038 (on a 32 bit platform). Other
than that, I can not see any real problem with the 2038 bug, because no
one will be using 32 bit computers in 40 years.
--
Mohawk Software
Windows 95, Windows NT, UNIX, Linux. Applications, drivers, support.
Visit the Mohawk Software website: www.mohawksoft.com
------------------------------
Subject: Re: egcs 1.1.1 and PII
From: Johan Kullstam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 20 Jan 1999 23:15:14 -0500
Barry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I have a Pentium II 400 running Red Hat 5.2. I've compiled egcs 1.1.1.
> Is it worth recompiling source using this compiler with the -march=i686
> option? I noticed that by default it sends -march=pentium.
using -march=pentium is performance death to a ppro and i assume a pii
as well. i have tried the various -marches (i386, i486, pentium and
pentiumpro) and found that i486 and pentiumpro were fastest and had no
noticeable difference, i386 lagged by a few percent, pentium was about
20% slower. this is varying the optimization targets and running the
result on a ppro.
apparently the pentium classic has a strange pipeline system and
catering to it via -march=pentium really hurts performance when that
code is run on a ppro/pii.
--
Johan Kullstam [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Don't Fear the Penguin!
------------------------------
From: Gary Momarison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: ? on poorly described -r & -R options of cp.
Date: 20 Jan 1999 08:56:13 -0800
Tom Fawcett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (John Brock) writes:
[snip]
> > all the different kinds of special files. (Even tar and zip don't
> > work, although I understand cpio does). So does the -R option handle
> > all the special files properly?
>
>
> I don't know about all of them, but it handles many of them correctly.
> I've used "cp -dpR" to copy large directories containing special files. It
> seems to handle hardlinks and (relative) symlinks correctly.
> On the other hand, it doesn't seem to copy the ext2 fs attributes.
And "cp -dpR" is the same as "cp -a", which I understand people are
using to copy partitions around. I've used it a lot, but I'm not
sure I've put it to a real test on special files. I've diffed
the before and after and gotten messages like "/a/xxx is a special
file while /b/xxx is a special file". Probably just it's way of
saying it can't diff special files, but not real reassuring.
>
> I'm surprised tar won't do it, though.
That might be only for the old tars that wouldn't do more than
255 (?) characaters, while cpio would.
--
Look for Linux info at http://www.dejanews.com/home_ps.shtml and in
Gary's Encyclopedia at http://www.aa.net/~swear/pedia/index.html
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Floyd Davidson)
Crossposted-To: alt.linux,alt.os.linux,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Linux is not even in Windows 9X's class.
Date: 20 Jan 1999 16:13:38 GMT
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Andres Soolo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>In comp.os.linux.advocacy Floyd Davidson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Andres Soolo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>>DOS defines standard io streams stdaux and stdprn that refer
>>>to the serial device (this time it was generally a mouse) and to
>> Why would a multitasking OS want to define those? It is
>> exceedingly easy to do, but has little value and many
>> disadvantages.
>Sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I meant just that: these
>devices have almost no value for a decent os.
Ahh! OK, (sure makes sense to me!).
>> CP/M definitely did NOT have the "kernel" source code in the
>> manual! It did have an example BIOS, the interface between the
>As much as I recall, it had.
It didn't. I have an old CP/M manual.
> It was for a specific platform, however.
You are thinking of the BIOS, which was the platform specific
interface to the "kernel" (which is called the BDOS in CP/M).
It was in *every* CP/M manual, because for any given platform
it had to be customized.
>And, it wasn't fully the original Digital Research one.
Every CP/M manual had the source code to a basic skeleton
BIOS that was derived from the one for and MDS-700 series
platform. It wasn't the most sophisticated BIOS around,
but it would work on that specified platform, and provided
each owner of CP/M with all the information needed to
install CP/M on any given hardware.
Eventually there were several well known variations, and
many proprietory versions too. Most of the BIOS was kept
in ROM on every CP/M system sold after the Ferguson Big
Board design became available and inspired the Osborne
and Kaypro systems which were so popular. For those
systems a number of places sold enhanced EPROMs that would
do things like accept quad density floppy disk drives,
use a better disk buffering system for faster read/writes,
and a number of other odd things.
>But I guess both BDOS and the command interpreter were.
>On the other hand, it may be that was a product of reverse
>engineering. But then again, why did the one who published
>it keep all copyright messages?
Because it was part of the manual that Digital Research sold
to them and required that they print and sell with each
copy of CP/M. I saw exactly the same thing in half a dozen
CP/M manuals from different companies. The one that I still
have is a Kaypro manual, because it was the best printing
job of the bunch.
DRI would have taken anybody to court during those years if
they had published any real source code to the command
interpeter or to the BDOS.
However, a number of people did disassemble it! (Actually I did
that myself, and had it about 90% commented when...) In about
1984-5 one person came up with a commercial program that was kinda
unique. It was a disassembler (based on the commonly available
public domain "resource" disassember), but also had a symbols
file and a control file for disassembling and commenting the
CP/M BDOS. Nothing that you bought belonged to DRI, but when
you ran the program the result was a fully commented source code
to CP/M. Unfortunately, by the time that was available CP/M was
just about worthless anyway... Too bad that hadn't been thought
of in about 1979 or 1980!
Floyd
--
Floyd L. Davidson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Pictures of the North Slope at <http://www.ptialaska.net/~floyd>
------------------------------
From: Rob Montgomery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: print server
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 05:14:44 +0000
Does anyone know if there are drivers/software to operate a Linksys
etherfast 10/100 3 port print server under Redhat 5.2?
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ()
Subject: switching in and out of an Xwindow console
Date: 20 Jan 1999 16:57:28 GMT
everytime i try to switch out of an xwindow console, i can't back into it
from a text based terminal. how do i get my screen back?
------------------------------
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End of Linux-Misc Digest
******************************
