Re: downloading debian
On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, kumar suresh wrote: So is there any site from where we can get latest debian? Check out http://cdimage.debian.org/ftp-mirrors.html for a list of Debian CD Image mirrors. (This link was last posted on the list just a couple of days ago.) Cheers. -- Dave Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best way to move to 2.4 kernel?
On 20 May 2001, Randolph S. Kahle wrote: My question to the group is this. Which Debian release should I use - Potato with modification for 2.4 or Woody? I want as stable a machine configuration as I can get while settling on the 2.4 kernel. I just upgraded from 2.2.18 to 2.4.4 a couple of days ago, and I'm running Woody. As expected, it was very smooth. All of the packages that I needed were already in place. I'm not using devfs and I did build the ipchains.o compatibility module, so I didn't need the iptables or devfsd packages. Unfortunately, I can't give you the alternate view (of doing it with Potato). Hopefully, someone else can. Good luck! -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED] _\_v
/proc/bus/usb permissions in Linux 2.4.4 (OT?)
Hi debian-user readers, I'm not sure that this question is appropriate for debian-user, since it's about Linux and not anything Debian-specific. Still, I first sent it to the linux-usb-users mailing list, but that list is very low-traffic, and I haven't heard anything back. So, I thought I'd throw it out to the wide and helpful audience of debian-user. I recently purchased a Kodak DC 4800 digital camera, and have been attempting to get it to work. I was using Woody with Linux 2.2.18, but I kept getting the device not accepting new address (error=-110) error. So, I upgraded to 2.4.4, and now the camera is properly recognized. However, it seems to me that the devmode and devgid mount options for usbdevfs, which worked fine with 2.2.18, no longer do anything. I have the following line in /etc/fstab: usb /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs devmode=0664,devgid=107 0 0 and I get no errors when mounting occurs; however, usb device files always get created with the permissions of 0644 and gid 0. For example: -rw-r--r--1 root root18 May 19 13:20 /proc/bus/usb/001/004 The same thing happens when I mount manually, specifying the devmode and devgid options with -o. Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong? Are others having success using usbdevfs with these options in 2.4.4? Thanks for any answers you can provide. -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
SMTP Connections
Hi all, I'm trying get a Debian box to act as a mail server. I'm using exim. Presently, it receives mail, but it won't send mail, at least to the destinations I've been using for testing. When it tries to connect to a mail server, the connection is either refused or just hangs and then times out. Just to test, I also tried using telnet to connect to port 25 of the same hosts. Same thing: either telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused or nothing. The weird thing is: I think I had it working earlier yesterday, and since then, I've hardly changed anything...just some rewriting and aliasing configuration in exim. On what basis could a mail server decide which hosts it is going to allow to connect to it? Thanks for your help. -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SMTP Connections
On Thu, 3 May 2001, MaD dUCK wrote: are you behind a firewall? Yes, but I don't think it blocks outgoing 25/tcp connects. try to telnet to port 25 of mail.madduck.net - if you get a refusal, then you have a problem on your side and i think you might have a firewall that blocks outgoing 25 connects (which is not uncommon). Trying 130.58.82.235... Connected to mail.madduck.net. Escape character is '^]'. 220 diamond.madduck.net ESMTP MAIL FROM:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 250 Ok On what basis could a mail server decide which hosts it is going to allow to connect to it? ip addresses mostly... Could you expand on this? How would a mail server decide which IP addresses to block? Why would it suddenly decide that it doesn't like mine? :) -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SMTP Connections
On Thu, 3 May 2001, MaD dUCK wrote: but the server i made him try uses RBL extensively and did not refuse him. i think he's suffering more a client side problem... but i am a postfix expert, no clue about exim... You're right! It was my configuration of exim. I had it doing hostname lookups wrong. It wasn't looking up MX records because I had made it use gethostbyname(), instead of a direct DNS lookup. As a result, it was trying to connect to hosts that didn't accept their own mail. It's all fixed now. Thanks so much for your help. -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
glibc compatibility
Hi debian-user readers, Something I've been wondering for a while, and now I really need to know: how do glibc versions relate? I'm running testing, which I believe is based on glibc2.2. Is this backwards compatible with glibc2.1? If a program says it requires 2.1, should I expect that it will work? If not, is there anything I can do? I notice that there is a libc5 package, to support older apps built against libc 5. Does anything similar exist for minor versions? More generally, if I have multiple libc versions installed, how does the system know which one it should be calling from any given app? (I realize that this is probably a fairly big question; a pointer to a web reference would be appreciated if its easier than answering.) Thanks very much for your help. -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: newbie fighting with Helix Gnome
On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Ethan Benson wrote: dpkg -l | grep ximian purge everything listed -- apt-get --purge remove blah blah blah dpkg -l | grep helix purge everything listed -- apt-get --purge remove blah blah blah Minor point: you might want to make that grep ximi instead of grep ximian, given that helix/ximian version numbers tend to be quite long, and dpkg -l offers no way to specify a field width. I (mostly) eliminated Ximian today, and, yes, there is a package or two that you'll miss with the complete ximian. Sorry to hear that Simon's upgrade messed up. I actually did an apt-get dist-upgrade today, and it was very helpful in purging Ximian. It seems that a bunch of new 1.4 core packages made it into testing today, which upgraded from Ximian reasonably cleanly (it just took a couple of go-arounds with -f to make it work). Then, it was just a matter of manually replacing the rest of the Ximian packages. In most cases, apt-get --purge remove followed by apt-get install did the trick, but, if dependencies got in the way, I downloaded the deb's and dpkg -i'ed them (this would have definately been simplified by a --force-downgrade in apt-get...). Most of those went to equal versions, but a few (mostly the games) seemed to be downgrades. Oh well. I can't personally see much difference between gnome-xbill 1.2 and 1.0 g. As was pointed out in a previous thread, there are some useful gnome and gnome-related packages that have not yet made it into testing. For those packages, I kept the Ximian versions. Those packages include: abiword eog gnome-applets sawfish sawfish-gnome I also kept the necessary Ximian dependancies for those packages: libgnomeprint11 librep9 rep rep-doc rep-gtk rep-gtk-gnome I suppose that it would have been possible to eliminate these 11 packages, and replace them with versions from unstable, but then you start getting into bonobo dependancies...eek! I'm trying to keep my box a fairly clean testing installation, though I have installed a few packages from unstable. It's so hard to resist when it works so easily, but I decided to stay with the devil I know, in this case. So, those Ximian packages stay on, I've got local copies of them, and I no longer have spidermonkey.ximian.com in my sources.list. Oh, I also kept a few of the pretty theme packages that Ximian is so keen on (HeliX is still, by far, my favourite Sawfish theme g): sawfish-themes gtk-themes helix-sweetpill Anyways, it all seems to be working together quite nicely. Hope this helps out any other would-be Ximian-purgers out there. -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: sawfish on woody
On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Jeff Hornsberger wrote: No mirror problem. It's just not there. I think you may be mistaken cause unstable != woody. -Jeff You're correct; it's not there. I think it's probably related to the librep dependancy. -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: newbie fighting with Helix Gnome
On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Ethan Benson wrote: this may only affect the woody dpkg but setting COLLUMS (that looks spelled wrong) will adjust this. Very nice! I had no idea. Thanks. Oh, it's COLUMNS. :) i think apt has a --force-downgrade. [EMAIL PROTECTED] dave]$ apt-get --force-downgrade install rep E: Command line option --force-downgrade is not understood [EMAIL PROTECTED] dave]$ apt-get -v apt 0.5.3 for linux i386 compiled on Mar 7 2001 19:25:55 ...maybe on a newer version? ximian packages are not binary compatible with debian's so that is not a good idea. better option is to install the missing packages from debian unstable. use of apt's pinning feature can aid this. Okie dokie. Thanks for the advice. I'll get on it (I'm still keeping my theme packages, though). :) -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: An intro to Debian website
On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, Brian Nelson wrote: Do you guys think this is something worth pursuing? A project like this would only be successful if it had the support of the Debian community. Does something like this already started that I'm not aware of? I think this is an excellent idea; it would be a very useful addition to the existing Debian documentation. I'm also a relative newcomer to Debian (I started with this distro in January, after about a year with Red Hat and Mandrake). Although it seems that my recollections of the first installation are not quite as clear as yours, I would be very happy to contribute to this project (assuming you're looking for volunteers). I also think a section on the differences between stable, testing and unstable would be useful, along with some advice on who should use which. -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: Woody nukes Gnome
On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Ethan Benson wrote: you must purge all ximian and helix packages before upgrading to woody, then install woody's gnome. ximian does not support unstable or testing. and there is no reason whatsoever to use ximian there anyway since woody/sid have up to date gnome (1.4 probably is all the way there but it will be shortly). That's interesting, I was not aware that Ximian couldn't be used with testing; I've been doing so for several months, and haven't had any problems. Doing apt-get upgrade today, I see that the following packages have been kept back: libgdk-pixbuf-dev libgdk-pixbuf-gnome-dev libgdk-pixbuf-gnome2 libgdk-pixbuf2, and much removal of core Ximian packages would result if I tried to apt-get install them. This is the first conflict I've experienced between Woody and Ximian. Is there a simple way to remove the Ximian packages and replace them with the Woody ones? -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Simple Install Question
On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Kevin Stokes wrote: I wanted to have three partitions on my D: drive for Linux. I assume you mean your second hard drive? It's only a D: drive under DOS or Windows. :) Seriously, it is a useful distinction to make because if you call it my second hard drive, everyone will know what you're talking about. My D: drive could refer to a second hard drive or just a partition. Since Linux gives you explicit control over your disks, it's a good idea to use more precise language. Enough of that tangent; on to your question... One was going to be for the root only, which I alloted 65mb for. Another 1150mb partition was for /usr, /var and everything else. Lastly was another 65mb partition for swap. However, if I make the first partition the root, and then choose /usr for the 2nd partition, it then puts /var, /home and /tmp in the little root partition. I don't want to have seperate partitions for each of these, because that would waste too much of my limited hd space. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to. Unfortunately, there's no way to do what you want. Think of each partition as containing a single directory tree (a file system). One of these gets to be the root file system, and the root of that tree is the root of the whole file system tree. Then you can mount another file system at any directory in the tree. When you do that, the root of the mounted file system takes the position on the tree of that directory. If you're mounting a partition at /usr, you're saying to make /usr refer to the root of the file system on that partition. If you wanted to also mount it at /var, /home and /tmp all of those directories would refer to the same node. That doesn't make sense, so you can't do it. Ideally, you would put /usr, /usr/local, /var, /home, and /tmp on their own partitions, but if disk space is a problem, and you need to combine them, it's going to have to be on your root partition. Sorry. For this situation, I would recommend that you at least give /home its own partition, and then leave / for everything else. It's not ideal, but at least you'll be able to hold on to your personal data (the stuff that really matters) if anything happens to the other file system. Good luck. -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: 3dfx openGL? what do I need? (kernel 2.4, X 4.x)
Hi Erik, On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Erik Steffl wrote: how do I make this work? I have tdfx module (loade), libglide3 and libglide3-dev (like debian planet suggests), X output says that DRI is used etc... yet I get the message: You need to install the xlibmesa3 package and, optionally, xlibmesa-dev for development. All of those old mesag* and glide* packages are no longer needed either; you might as well get rid of them. Also, make sure that your kernel supports AGP (CONFIG_AGP is m or y; and one of CONFIG_AGP_INTEL, CONFIG_AGP_I810, CONFIG_AGP_VIA, CONFIG_AGP_AMD, CONFIG_AGP_SIS, CONFIG_AGP_ALI, according to your chipset, is y). Note: this part is for 2.2.18. 2.4.x might be different, thought I haven't heard that to be the case. In your XF86Config-4 file, you need: Section Module ... Load glx Load dri ... EndSection Section Device ... Driver tdfx ... EndSection Section DRI Mode 0666 EndSection [This gives all users access to DRI. To restrict access to userss in the xf86dri group, use the following, instead...] Section DRI Group xf86dri Mode 0660 EndSection Oh, and make sure that in the Section Screen that Depth is 16, since it won't work with 24 bit colour. Here is the relevant bit of output at startx: (0): [drm] created tdfx driver at busid PCI:1:5:0 (0): [drm] added 4096 byte SAREA at 0xc511b000 (0): [drm] mapped SAREA 0xc511b000 to 0x40017000 (0): [drm] framebuffer handle = 0xe400 (0): [drm] added 1 reserved context for kernel (II) TDFX(0): [drm] Registers = 0xe000 (II) TDFX(0): visual configs initialized (II) TDFX(0): Using XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA) Screen to screen bit blits Solid filled rectangles 8x8 mono pattern filled rectangles Indirect CPU to Screen color expansion Solid Lines Dashed Lines Offscreen Pixmaps Driver provided NonTEGlyphRenderer replacement Setting up tile and stipple cache: 8 128x128 slots (==) TDFX(0): Backing store disabled (==) TDFX(0): Silken mouse enabled (0): X context handle = 0x0001 (0): [drm] installed DRM signal handler (0): [DRI] installation complete (II) TDFX(0): direct rendering enabled Good luck! It's *really* nice when it works. One problem I have had: the OpenGL screensavers produce nasty flicker. When I just run the executibles, they don't. Also, no problem with Quake or TuxRacer. Anyone else experiencd this? Any idea why it might be? -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: 3dfx openGL? what do I need? (kernel 2.4, X 4.x)
On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Erik Steffl wrote: sort-of-rant on which packages to get this problem is more general, there are some 'groups' of packages that all provide same/similar functionality but it's not clear which ones work together, netscape packages are similar (or at least were when I was installing netscape). /sort-of-rant Agreed. These mesa and glide packages are very confusing. Netscape is similar. I don't know if it could be resolved by better naming, or if maybe there needs to be some documentation explaining the twisted logic g behind these intricately related groups of packages. Do others find that the current combination of naming and dependancies are sufficient to make things clear? dpkg: mesag3-glide2: dependency problems, but removing anyway as you request: xbase-clients depends on libgl1; however: Package libgl1 is not installed. Package mesag3-glide2 which provides libgl1 is to be removed. I got these for all the packages (AFAIK, lot of them: xpp, libfltk1, xscreensaver-gl, vreng, xlockmore-gl, kdebase etc...) How I dealt with this: first, I used apt-get. I acutally got rid of the old packages first, and it uninstalled lots of packages that I didn't want to get rid of, like libwine, wine, xbase-clients, xf86setup, and xscreensaver-gl. That made me a little bit nervous, but when I reinstalled them, it actually installed xlibmesa3 and xlibmesa-dev; that's how I found those packages in the first place. how do I test it now? I got the following info from glxinfo: The glx stuff looks good. Do you also see the OpenGL/Mesa stuff in the glxinfo output? Like this? OpenGL vendor string: VA Linux Systems, Inc. OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Voodoo3 20001101 OpenGL version string: 1.2 Mesa 3.4 OpenGL extensions: GL_ARB_multitexture, GL_ARB_tranpose_matrix, GL_EXT_abgr, GL_EXT_clip_volume_hint, GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array, GL_EXT_histogram, ... btw what do the Xlib messages mean? why would it try to connect to :0.0 server??? I have no idea. I've been running exclusively on display 0, so I don't know why it's trying to use display 0 when you're obviously wanting to use display 2. Weird. Maybe someone else can help? Also, make sure that your kernel supports AGP (CONFIG_AGP is m or y; and I have PCI video card - does this mean that PCI cards don't work? Ooo...that never even crossed my mind. I just saw on some web page that you need AGP support, so I included it; I don't know if works on a PCI card. Again, it's outside of my experience. Maybe someone else knows? You should probably try to find out the anwer to this from the XFree86 people. I noticed that already. that's quite annoying - is this a temporary limitation? I don't know. I think it might actually be a limitation of the hardware. That's jsut a guess though. Sorry I couldn't be a little more helpful. My only knowledge comes from my experience in getting mine to work. Obviously, our situations are a little different. -- David Steinberg -o) In a world without walls Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ and fences, who needs [EMAIL PROTECTED] _\_v Windows and Gates?
Re: Linux wannabe
On 22 Mar 2001, Paul D. Smith wrote: There is absolutely no question that Linux (2.2.18) boots _much_ faster than Windows98 on my system (homegrown PII 450, 128M RAM); I timed it once and Linux was over twice as fast as Windows. My experience mirrors yours. On my Athlon 650, 128M RAM, it takes fully 40 seconds longer to boot Windows 98 SE into a usable state (and I disabled all of the silly little applets that I could) than it does to boot Linux 2.2.18, start a plethora of services, start GDM, and log into GNOME. -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: Linux Network Security: POP
On Sun, 18 Mar 2001, Ethan Benson wrote: if you have a static ip and your connection is actually stable you could just run your own mailserver and have mail delivered directly to it. that way you don't need pop3 or imap. no passwords sent anywhere that way. OTOH, then you have another service running, which makes you that much more open to being cracked. It's not a bad thing in and of itself, but it does demand that you keep up to date with security announcements for that package. At least when you're using POP and sending a plain-text password, it's a password for your ISP's system, not yours. :) -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Getting Helix-Gnome
On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Greg Gilbert wrote: But I'd highly recommend against using the Helix packages. I've found that they have conflicts with other packages on a recurring basis. Really? I've been using Helix/Ximian on Debian (first potato then woody) for a couple of months now, and I haven't seen any problems like that yet. I'm curious to know more. Which release were you using, and which packages gave you problems? -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: Eek! X won't go away!
On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Gavin Hamill wrote: Hi :) It was the generic 'xdm' that was the problem, but when I tried to remove it, it wanted to take 'task-x-window-system' away, too.. so I decided to just remove the startup lines in /etc/rc.* :) There's no problem with removing task-x-window-system, or task-anything-else for that matter. Those packages don't contain any files; they exist only for their dependencies, which make up a typical set of packages to be used for a given task. That's why you got xdm installed in the first place: you installed task-x-window-system and the maintainer had made xdm a dependency, figuring that it was a typically useful package to have with an X installation. Of course, you're allowed to disagree and remove xdm if you wish. If you're not using it, it's just wasting disk space, and you won't lose anything by removing task-x-window-system. -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Testing + libglide3?
Hi, I'm running testing, and just upgraded XFree86 to 4.0.2 yesterday. I would really like to be able to benefit from libglide3, since I understand that it makes use of DRI. Unfortunately, libglide3 is in unstable, and dependencies would lead to a pretty massive upgrade (25 packages upgraded, 13 newly installed, 51 to remove). Is there any better way to get it? Or should I just take a deep breath and make my system a testing-unstable hybrid? -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Installed X 4.0.2, Mouse Pointer Chopped off in 3.3.6!
Hi, I'm running testing, and I just finally upgraded to X 4.0.2 yesterday. From what I understand, I should still be able to run 3.3.6, just by changing the symlink /etc/X11/X to /usr/bin/X11/XF86_SVGA (that's the 3.3.6 server that I ran to support my Voodoo 3). If do that, X starts without any unexpected startup messages, and runs almost perfectly. The only problem is the top half of the mouse pointer doesn't show. Has anyone else experienced this odd phenomenon? Does anyone know what might have changed to cause this, and if there's any way to fix it? Thanks in advance. -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: shutting down w/ ctrl+alt+del
On Tue, 13 Feb 2001, Matheson Cameron wrote: I was wondering if I could change the bindings of ctrl+alt+del, so that it did `shutdown -h now`, instead of `shutdown -r now` It sure is! As root, edit /etc/inittab. If you've never edited it before, the line you're interested in should look like this: ca:12345:ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t1 -a -r now Just change -r to -h. HTH. -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: Mouse
On Thu, 8 Feb 2001, John Foster wrote: There was recently released a new version of gpm into Debian 2,2r2. If you have since upgraded and since you use a ps2 mouse; the new version will NOT work. You will need to dl the sources for gpm and recompile it on your system in order for it to work. I had to do that also. This is a known bug. See mail archives from last month for more details. I'm not sure, but I think you might be mistaken. As I recall, there is no real problem with the gpm in potato, but just that it's default configuration has changed. Take a look at /etc/gpm.conf (which is read by /etc/init.d/gpm when it starts gpm). If you find a line that starts with repeat_type=, delete whatever comes after the equals sign, and the script will stop using the -R option on gpm. I found that when gpm stopped trying to act as a repeater in graphics mode, X was able to access /dev/psaux directly. Maybe I was just lucky, or maybe I'm not using the same version of gpm (I'm using 1.17.8-18), but that was my experience. Hope it helps. -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: windows
On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Marcelo Chiapparini wrote: I am running helix (now ximian) gnome in a potato 2.2r box together with sawfish as window manager. I wonder why there are some windows which I cannot take control over them, as for example the about windows, the confirmation windows, the output window from the GNU midnight commander find file app and so on. All this kind of windows cannot be moved! does it has to do with gnome or sawfish? Yup. For some reason, they decided that this was a useful default. If you start the GNOME Control Center, and select Appearance under Sawfish window manager, you'll see an option called Decorate dialog windows similarly to application windows. Turn this one on, and your dialog boxes will be drawn with all the same controls as other windows. -- David Steinberg -o) Computer Engineering Undergrad, UBC / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]_\_v
Re: RealPlayer installer problem
On Sat, 13 Jan 2001, JC Portlock wrote: The installer is set up for rp7, but the only version currently available is rp8. I could not fool the installer by renaming the app. The filename called for is: rp7_linux20_libc6_i386_b2_rpm Is this available anywhere? Or is there some way to slap the installer around to accept the rp8 file? I found that an easy solution was to simply grab the realplayer package from unstable, and install that instead. It expects the current rp8 file. -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Voodoo 3
Hi all, I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out what to do to set up my voodoo 3 to provide hardware-accelerated OpenGL under X 3.3.6? At this point, what I think I know is that Mesa is a free implementation of the OpenGL API, and that it can work with (over?) Glide, which is the Voodoo's API (also the name of the implementation thereof). Am I anywhere close? But I'm completely lost as to what to do to get it to work... I've installed the following packages (from potato): libglide2-v3 libglide2-dev glide2-base mesag3-glide2 mesag3-widgets mesag-glide2-dev mesag-widgets-dev Okay, so the dev packages are probably overkill at this point, but what the heck? :) If I try to run /usr/bin/test3Dfx, I get: gd error (glide): Can't find or access Banshee/V3 board gd error (glide): grSstSelect: non-existent SSTSegmentation fault In the description for libglide2-v3, it says You'll need the /dev/3dfx kernel driver to use this library. I have no clue what to do about this; where would I get the this kernel driver? I haven't had much luck in finding current documentation (I assume things have changed significantly since the 3dfx howto was last updated 3 years ago, since it specifically mentions that there is no kernel configuration necessary). If anyone could point me in the right direction, I'd be most appreciative. TIA. -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Multimedia Performance Solved
On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Philipp Schulte wrote: On Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 12:16:52AM -0800, David Steinberg wrote: A few days ago, I installed potato, and things were again not so good. I applied the IDE patch and compiled a kernel, and things improved, but they're not as good as they were on Mandrake. I still get brief clicks in my audio... From all I have heard the missing pentium optimizations shouldn't make much difference. You should check if your HD is working in UDMA-mode $hdparm /dev/hda because this is what the patch is ment for. Hi all, I just thought I'd report my conclusion on this matter, in case anyone experiences something similar. I checked the disk access speed (using hdparm) under my potato installation and compared it to that of my Mandrake installation. Under potato, it was actually slightly better (improvements in the 2.2.18 kernel compared to the 2.2.16 kernel that I'm using in my Mandrake installation, perhaps?). So, I decided the problem was more likely in user space. I was going to use strace to figure out what libraries were being used and then compare the versions of mpg123 and any supporting libraries in the two installations. Well, the first thing I noticed was that libesd was being used in Mandrake, but not in debian. I had never even realized that that was an option of mpg123! Also, Mandrake was using mpg123 0.59r, while potato was using mpg123 0.59q (although, esd support has been in mpg123 since 0.59p). Well, I quickly looked at the mpg123 packages, and there was none in potato with esd support. Before compiling my own, I checked in woody, and, low and behold: mpg123-esd (version 0.59r, no less)! I installed that version, and audio is now smooth as a baby's bottom. I'm not exactly sure why it's so much better with esd...can anyone enlighten (pardon the pun) me? Is it a faster implimentation, or does it somehow demand higher priority? Anyways, needless to say, I'm a very happy camper. And I'm ready to switch over to debian full time and reclaim some hard drive space. :) -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Multimedia Performance
Hi all, I've got a question of performance that I was hoping some with more of a feel for these things could help with. Previously, I had been using Mandrake 7.1 on my desktop machine, an Athlon 600. At first, I had performance problems with certain multimedia applications: if I was playing an mp3 with mpg123, there would often be a click when an X client popped up a new window. Playing mpeg video wasn't so good, either. I applied Andre Hedrick's IDE patch and recompiled my kernel with support for the AMD Viper, and things really improved. All of the kinds of problems I just described completely disappeared. I could even play 3 or 4 separate MPEG videos with plaympeg without noticing a performance hit. A few days ago, I installed potato, and things were again not so good. I applied the IDE patch and compiled a kernel, and things improved, but they're not as good as they were on Mandrake. I still get brief clicks in my audio, and trying to play 3 videos at a time, they all drop frames and the system response slows to a crawl. Strangely, plaympeg won't play in full screen mode any more, either. Using xawtv to watch TV on my bt878-based TV card isn't quite as good, either. My question: could the difference be the pentium optimizations in the Mandrake binaries? If so, what might be the key pieces of software that I should recompile to get similar performance? If not, any ideas what the difference might be? Any help is sincerely apprecaited. -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Multimedia Performance
On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Philipp Schulte wrote: From all I have heard the missing pentium optimizations shouldn't make much difference. You should check if your HD is working in UDMA-mode $hdparm /dev/hda Hi Phil, Thanks for replying. From hdparm... using_dma= 1 (on) because this is what the patch is ment for. I don't need the IDE-patch on my Athlon-system, I just do a hdparm -d1 -X68 /dev/hda in my boot scripts and it works. As I understand it, the Viper chipset isn't supported without the patch. I found that if I tried to do hdparm -d1 without it, nothing happened. Are you using that chipset, or some other disk controller? -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: potato_install
On Sun, 31 Dec 2000, John Foster wrote: Antonio Alberto Lobato wrote: Detail: my CDROM reader is very old. It`s a Creative SB 2x (Panassonic). -- When the rescue disk is loading, does the boot kernel find the cdrom? It should show up if the bios is finding it. If so then you should be able to mount the cdrom as /dev/hdc for this purpose (providing you only have 1 hard disk). What makes you think that a very old Creative (Panasonic) 2x CD-ROM is going to be IDE? Isn't /dev/sbpcd a better bet? I would try doing an lsmod, and checking to make sure that the sbpcd module is loaded. If not, try modprobe sbpcd. -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Getting Started with Debian: Package Selection Sanity
Hi everyone, I've been using Red Hat for a reasonable amount of time, but I'm a total newbie to Debian; I'm just installing potato for the first time today. I'm starting to get familiar with the tools, but I must admit that I'm a little overwhelmed by the number of packages in the distribution. And so far, I've only been looking at the one binary CDROM. :) Is there a sane approach to initially selecting packages? Is it best to use the tasks, or go through the entire list package-by-package? Would you start with just the CD and then add the FTP site to sources.list later, or consider everything all at once? Acutally, I have a further question about the task packages. Using dselect, if I try to purge a package that has been added bacause of a task, it tells me, of course, that the task package depends on the one I want to remove. Should I remove the task? Will all the other packages that were installed because of it remain? Sorry for the newbie questions. Thanks for any help. -- David Steinberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]
