Re: Trouble getting my screen resolution correct.
On Sat, 06 Apr 2002 12:44:42 -0800, Steve Juranich wrote: Okay, tried this. Still getting screen resolution of 1024x768, and nothing in /var/log/XFree86.0.log You sure there is -nothing- in Xfree86.0.log? AFAIK this file is always written when XFree V4.x starts up - are you running X 3.3.6 by any chance? Cheers, Craig -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: condemn a Debian distributor!!!
--Original Message Text--- From: fti International Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2002 12:47:35 -0600 ... and the Tuxcds.com won't send me a new cd (you cannot believe this, esp. considering the FREE principle of Debain)... I don't know about anywhere else, but in Australia this is -illegal- !! If its the same in your country you might want to remind them of that. Cheers, Craig -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Installing Debian or Linux
On Wed, 20 Mar 2002 22:41:51 +1100, John Lynch wrote: It has a very easy install with good hardware autodetection and has probably the best manuals I have ever seen with a Linux distribution. Can you download SuSe for free over the internet? Yes. And also, can u install it in a dual boot system with the linux partition having 1 gig? Yes, even down to about 120MB. SuSE -is- easy for newbies (believe me), and its reasonably reliable and secure too. Like all RPM (or rather non APT) distros its a nightmare to update and keep updated but you don't care about this when you are completely new and can't get anything running. Cheers, Craig Craig Sampson Professional Systems Integration Pty Ltd Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (08) 9444 5587 Fax : (08) 9444 5175 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
X Window and Virtual Resolution
I have been battling with X on debian for about a week and finally have it working as well as a much better grasp on how X works than I've ever had (a good thing). Have I sent my congrats to the man page authors for Debian in general? I should, debian (potato/woody) seems to have the best man pages I've yet come across. There is one nagging problem I've yet to find more than a passing mention of in man pages, on the xfree86 web site or on usenet - its the 'problem' of virtual resolution. I never found a solution to this in 3.3.6 and was led to believe that there -was- no solution. Anyway, the problem is this, if I set up a max resolution of say 1400x1050 and want at some time during my x session to change to 1280x1024 I get a horrible 'scrolling' virtual type desktop. It appears that the desktop is always sized to the max resolution available, and using anything smaller causes this 'virtual' effect. Does anyone know any way to inform the X server that virtual resolutions are not required and that an 'in session' change of resolution from larger to smaller (or vice versa I guess) actually means redefining the outer boundaries of the desktop? Best regards, Craig -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: BIG drives in old P90 ??
On Fri, 15 Mar 2002 20:50:25 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1) Will the kernel be able to see a 20-100 GB drive if the BIOS can't see it ? Last time I checked, the kernel wasn't bothered by the BIOS's limitations, but last time I checked, a ten GB drive was astronomically huge. I've had mainly good but some bad experiences in putting 'huge' drives into old equipment. Usually, as you say, Linux won't care and will see the whole drive - you'll probably need to be aware of the 512MB limit problem with the bios however. Sometimes though Linux won't get a chance to see the drive because the box itself won't get past POST with the big drive. I had this happen to me recently with a 40GB IDE drive hanging off the onboard controller of an ASUS TX97-X motherboard. Nothing I did worked, the motherboard just wouldnt boot with this drive plugged in and set for full capacity. Luckily IBM drive allowed me to jumper it for 32GB and this worked (Linux sees only 32GB though of course). Your machine is probably significantly older than mine and you may have similar problems. Needless to say I've never ever come across a problem like this even with positively ancient computers using SCSI drives :) 2) Should I be worried about the heat of a 7200 RPM drive ? [snip description of where drive will live] Yes, I'd be concerned. I use only IBM drives and the 7200RPM versions do get extremely hot. I think I know what you mean when you say the drives are closely packed (no air space between them) - I'd get a front mounted fan that sits in front of the drive stack if you can - this should make a difference. Be aware of course that most heat from the drive stack will be carried away from the drives via the steel mounting panels - its up to you then to make sure that air circulates around to help the heat sink action of the steel case itself. Best regards, Craig
Xfree 4.1 on potato
I'm trying to install Xfree 4.10-14 onto an otherwise (reasonably) stock potato machine but am having a problem with a dependancy. It appears that this build, found in testing, requires debconf = 0.5, but, strangely, this version seems not to exist in testing but rather its in unstable (??!!) I'm not at all inclined to use anything from unstable on boxes that are not for development (this one isnt). Would this be a bug I should report? I would have thought that each sub-dist (stable, testing and unstable) would feature all installable components from within its own branch. Cheers, Craig
RE: The future of Debian install??
On Mon, 11 Mar 2002 11:37:08 -0800, Bedford, Donald T. wrote: a few years back. Yes, my first install on a x86 box as anything but easy as I build my own box. But, I now know more about my system than I ever did w/ RH. This is why I chose the Debian path instead of re- installing RH on the new system. Auto-detect would be nice but I sure learned a lot when it didn't... I may have missed something (sure hope so), but what I'd find immensely useful is a way of being able to choose, at install (or other) time what packages I want then save this selection 'list' to a file so that when I next install Debian on another box I can just tell it to use the previously made selections. SuSE has this capability and its fantastic for installing a sane and similar OS onto vastly differing server hardware. I imagine I could make a new 'task' to achieve this, but I've yet to see any way, at install time, of importing something that's not already on the install CD. Something like 'would you like to import package selections from floppy (or other) disk' would be just great. Any pointers anyone? As for the install - well, I -hate- dselect with a passion, it gets the job done but gawd! Does it have to be so time consuming/difficult? I'm deeply distrustful of GUI installers and never use em. Quite liked the SuSE YAST1 (text only) except for the use of RPM which gives you -big- inherent problems later in your servers life. Cheers, Craig
Re: Change from SuSE to Debian
Hi Pete, On Mon, 11 Mar 2002 19:36:05 +, pete atkinson wrote: I have been running SuSE in various releases for the last 3 years and like(d) to think I had a good grasp of what was going on. I'm a fellow SuSEer. Finally got tired of RPM hell so I'm here trying on a Debian coat. So far its been rough, plenty of difference between Debian and most of the other RPM based distros. Boy ! what a difference - I am plodding through various HOWTO's and have configured my display and network card successfully (big deal some might say !) but the thing that is getting me is the whole culture change between the relatively spoon fed SuSE and the somewhat (to me) esoteric Debian. Yep. Its a blast isn't it? I never found SuSE to be too big on the spoon feeding myself, but then I never -ever- used YAST2 (the GUI thing). What I found and liked about SuSE was that it gave a really good amount of granularity on the install package selection, yet didnt bog you down too much in the tiny and (after a while) annoying basic stuff. I usually just installed a minimum system (about 80MB), then built on that for the purpose the server was for. Better yet, when building server farms I'd make liberal use of the 'save/load config' option and just build all the boxes with exactly the same software even across widely different hardware. However, sysadmining many SuSE (or any RPM) box's is hell. Its easy, but immensely time consuming. YAST1 falls down badly in this area. I never tried YOU, the online update thing. I'm not so much a refugee from SuSE as I am from RPM. Having said that though, I've been tremendously unhappy with the stability and production quality of all the SuSE distro's since V6.4 Are there any hints/tips/watch-out-fors that you could offer, principally, I am a bit confused over the non-RPMness of packages and the lack of the config suites such as YAST/YAST2 that SusE employs. Can't help you here as I'm stuck in the same quagmire. Looking for admin tools that just are not there - thats fine though, I always hated them but I'm lazy :)) After jumping in with both feet and no idea I've now come to the conclusion that the best thing for a new Debianite to do is to learn -all- about dselect, apt and dpkg. I don't mean skim over it, learn everything. The whole Debian distro seems to be intimately linked to the packaging system (as they all are). The .deb packaging system and APT in particular would appear to be reason enough on their own to make the switch to this distro, but using them effectively is non trivial and takes a committment I never had to come up with before when using SuSE. Best regards, Craig
Re: new installation from /var/cache/apt/archives
New installation from /var/cache/apt/archives May I do that ? huh, what do you mean? I think what is meant here is that if you have a (fairly massive) bunch of .deb files in your apt cache could you do a completely fresh install of debian using this cache as the source? My guess would be no, probably not. I think the best way to preserve your hard gotten downloads (hard gotten for those of us with modems) would be to apt-move the cache first so that it at least resembles a partial mirror. There would, I assume, be at least a few missing files that an initial install would be looking for using this method as well. Perhaps the best way of attacking the problem would be to do the base install from local media like a CD, then do an immediate upgrade using the files you've stored via apt-move from /var/cache/apt Cheers, Craig
dselect problems too much of what I don't want, nothing of what I need
G'day list, I'm somehow managed to mung the dselect database to a point where it wants to uninstall a heap of critical packages and install a boatload of stuff I don't want. I'm uninclined to ferret through the entire dselect package listing to try and work out whats happened - it would be far quicker to just reinstall Debian (potato). At this point, what I really need to do is to somehow rebuild the dselect database so that it can start afresh (if you like) with only those packages that are actually installed. I've read everything I can get my hands on in the system, also on dejanews and debian.org and cannot see any way to stop the persistance of package selection/deselection from previous dselect instances. I noticed from my searching of dejanews that this is an often asked question, perhaps the 2nd most asked question of all time (after 'Is debian any good?') - yet no solutions seem to have ever been suggested that don't involve a huge amount of manual selection/deselection work. Anyone got some ideas? Cheers, Craig == Zayne Technical PH:(08) 9444 5587 Web http://www.omen.com.au/~zayne Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
Re: Incorporating testing or unstable
Thanks Tim. On Fri, 8 Mar 2002 22:21:19 -0600, Timothy R. Butler wrote: Hi, Can anyone tell me the process by which I might incorporate [...] specific- instances of testing packages but on the whole remain at stable. First, create an /etc/apt/preferences file, and put something like this in it: #-- Package: * Pin: release a=stable Pin-Priority: 900 Package: * Pin: release o=testing Pin-Priority: 500 Package: * Pin: release o=unstable Pin-Priority: 1 #-- Now, once you put that in there, add a testing and/or unstable mirror to your sources.list file. By doing this, apt-get should default to stable, then to testing, then finally to unstable. To grab something from a specific version - say unstable - you can do this: apt-get install -t unstable [packagename] -Tim Craig Sampson Professional Systems Integration Pty Ltd Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (08) 9444 5587 Fax : (08) 9444 5175
Incorporating testing or unstable
Hello all, Can anyone tell me the process by which I might incorporate specific packages, probably from testing, into stable including the packages (probably) updated dependancies but without totally corrupting my apt database with testing references? My worry is that if I point my apt sources list to testing then anything I try to install in the future will most likely come from testing rather then stable - I want to be able to choose - specific- instances of testing packages but on the whole remain at stable. Craig Sampson Professional Systems Integration Pty Ltd Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (08) 9444 5587 Fax : (08) 9444 5175
Re: Fwd: amd problem
On Thu, 22 May 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: i have a amd 5x86-133 cpu not a k5 when chip gets warmed up my floppy drives go belly up. i checked it out by putting a amd 486dx4 120 cpu in and the problem dis appered.i also have two fans, one on heat sink other blowing over heat sink. Make sure that you have heatsink paste between the heatsink the CPU, it makes a big difference. Craig -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
Re: EDO 486's
On Thu, 20 Mar 1997, Nathan Whittacre wrote: On Thu, 20 Mar 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Has anyone put EDO memory in a 486? ..does it work alright? thanks Jonathan There are certain motherboards that accept EDO memory. Unless the board specifies it will work, don't try it. It most likely will not work. I've had mixed success with older motherboards. In most cases, leaving the memory setting speeds at default, or perhaps adding a wait state will allow you to use EDO memory. On some very cheap motherboards I've have not found a way around the problem however. Cheerio, Craig
