Debmirror - 3rd Party Repo Error (Kali)

[Derek Murphy]

Package: debmirror
Version: 1:2.16+deb8u1

When I run debmirror to sync the Kali repo, I get several errors regarding
uninitialized value $size. I've included a copy of the script that I run to
sync below. You will also notice a blank -r, this is due to Kali not using
the exact folder structure there is no url/ubuntu or url/debian directory.

kali_amd64_root=kali
kali_amd64_section=contrib,main,non-free
kali_amd64_release=kali-rolling,kali-experimental
kali_amd64_server=http.kali.org
kali_amd64_outPath=${basePath}/mirror/${kali_amd64_server}
#start the mirroring of kali
debmirror  -v -a amd64 --no-source -s $kali_amd64_section -h
$kali_amd64_server -d $kali_amd64_release -r "" --progress --method=http
--checksums --postcleanup --debug $kali_amd64_outPath

debmirror log:
user@localhost:/mnt/d/Linux_Repo# ./mirrorbuild_kali.sh
Mirroring to /mnt/d/Linux_Repo/mirror/http.kali.org from
http://http.kali.org//
Arches: amd64
Dists: kali-rolling,kali-experimental
Sections: contrib,main,non-free
Pdiff mode: use
Veriftying checksums.
Will clean up after mirroring.
Attempting to get lock ...
Not able to use rsync to update remote trace files ...
Getting meta files ...
[  0%] Getting: dists/kali-rolling/Release...#** GET
http://http.kali.org//dists/kali-rolling/Release ==> 302 Found (1s)
** GET http://archive-8.kali.org/kali/dists/kali-rolling/Release ==> 200 OK
ok
[  0%] Getting: dists/kali-rolling/InRelease...  #** GET
http://http.kali.org//dists/kali-rolling/InRelease ==> 302 Found
** GET http://archive-2.kali.org/kali/dists/kali-rolling/InRelease ==> 200
OK
ok
[  0%] Getting: dists/kali-rolling/Release.gpg...#** GET
http://http.kali.org//dists/kali-rolling/Release.gpg ==> 302 Found
** GET http://archive-5.kali.org/kali/dists/kali-rolling/Release.gpg ==>
200 OK
ok
gpgv: Signature made Tue 16 Jan 2018 07:07:26 AM STD using RSA key ID
7D8D0BF6
gpgv: Good signature from "Kali Linux Repository "
gpgv: Signature made Tue 16 Jan 2018 07:07:26 AM STD using RSA key ID
7D8D0BF6
gpgv: Good signature from "Kali Linux Repository "
[  0%] Getting: dists/kali-experimental/Release...   #** GET
http://http.kali.org//dists/kali-experimental/Release ==> 302 Found (1s)
** GET http://archive-2.kali.org/kali/dists/kali-experimental/Release ==>
200 OK
ok
[  0%] Getting: dists/kali-experimental/InRelease... #** GET
http://http.kali.org//dists/kali-experimental/InRelease ==> 302 Found
** GET http://archive-6.kali.org/kali/dists/kali-experimental/InRelease ==>
200 OK
ok
[  0%] Getting: dists/kali-experimental/Release.gpg...   #** GET
http://http.kali.org//dists/kali-experimental/Release.gpg ==> 302 Found
** GET http://archive-2.kali.org/kali/dists/kali-experimental/Release.gpg
==> 200 OK
ok
gpgv: Signature made Tue 09 Jan 2018 09:38:19 AM STD using RSA key ID
7D8D0BF6
gpgv: Good signature from "Kali Linux Repository "
gpgv: Signature made Tue 09 Jan 2018 09:38:19 AM STD using RSA key ID
7D8D0BF6
gpgv: Good signature from "Kali Linux Repository "
Use of uninitialized value $size in numeric eq (==) at /usr/bin/debmirror
line 1645.
Use of uninitialized value $size in numeric eq (==) at /usr/bin/debmirror
line 1645.
Use of uninitialized value $size in sprintf at /usr/bin/debmirror line 1679.
Mismatch '.temp/dists/kali-experimental/contrib/binary-amd64/Packages.xz':
size is 32, expected 0
Use of uninitialized value $size in numeric eq (==) at /usr/bin/debmirror
line 1645.
Use of uninitialized value $size in numeric eq (==) at /usr/bin/debmirror
line 1645.
Use of uninitialized value $size in sprintf at /usr/bin/debmirror line 1679.
Mismatch '.temp/dists/kali-experimental/main/binary-amd64/Packages.xz':
size is 1264, expected 0
Use of uninitialized value $size in numeric eq (==) at /usr/bin/debmirror
line 1645.
Use of uninitialized value $size in numeric eq (==) at /usr/bin/debmirror
line 1645.
Use of uninitialized value $size in sprintf at /usr/bin/debmirror line 1679.
Mismatch '.temp/dists/kali-experimental/non-free/binary-amd64/Packages.xz':
size is 32, expected 0
Use of uninitialized value $size in numeric eq (==) at /usr/bin/debmirror
line 1645.
Use of uninitialized value $size in numeric eq (==) at /usr/bin/debmirror
line 1645.
Use of uninitialized value $size in sprintf at /usr/bin/debmirror line 1679.
Mismatch '.temp/dists/kali-rolling/contrib/binary-amd64/Packages.xz': size
is 91412, expected 0
Use of uninitialized value $size in numeric eq (==) at /usr/bin/debmirror
line 1645.
Use of uninitialized value $size in numeric eq (==) at /usr/bin/debmirror
line 1645.
Use of uninitialized value $size in sprintf at /usr/bin/debmirror line 1679.
Mismatch '.temp/dists/kali-rolling/main/binary-amd64/Packages.xz': size is
1474560, expected 0

Re: debian-user-digest Digest V2015 #1449

[Derek Wang]

Please remove me from the mail list. Thank you. 

On Monday, December 21, 2015 5:50 PM, 
"debian-user-digest-requ...@lists.debian.org" 
 wrote:
 

 Content-Type: text/plain

debian-user-digest Digest                Volume 2015 : Issue 1449

Today's Topics:
  Re: AP support for wl driver          [ Stuart Longland  ]
  Re: Attempt to Move Root              [ Stephen Powell  ]
  Re: AP support for wl driver          [ Himanshu Shekhar 
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: AP support for wl driver
Message-ID: <56770f57.6050...@longlandclan.id.au>
Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha512;
 protocol="application/pgp-signature";
 boundary="bPJ46MDLoKNLnU7qMUjwMEgf2GfKuMXnU"

This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 4880 and 3156)
--bPJ46MDLoKNLnU7qMUjwMEgf2GfKuMXnU
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On 20/12/15 19:32, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> > Thanks Stuart! I have made several attempts and almost scanned the
>> > Broadcom driver download page. No support email.
>> > They have 64 bit driver for Linux available for download. I tried,
>> > following the README file, and compilation failed with errors.
>> > Bad experience with Broadcom.
>> >
> Exactly that caused me to blacklist & leave it on the shelf or pegboard=
,=20
> anthing with a broadcom radio in it. I don't buy headches if I can help=
=20
> it.

Likewise.  I have one machine with a Broadcom WIFI chip, that's the
MacBook I'm typing this email on:

> RC=3D0 vk4msl-mb stuartl $ lspci -vnn | grep Network
> 03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a=
/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:432b] (rev 01)

That one, is compatible with the 'b43' driver in the Linux kernel, and
after a few ritual sacrifices, *does* work.  It does however frequently
drop its link (dhclient soon fixes it), and even on MacOS X, misbehaves.

I've never tried HostAP with this particular device.

I don't blame the 'b43' developers for this.  They have done an
excellent job to get it working to the level they have.  Their work has
been almost entirely the result of clean-room reverse engineering.

It shouldn't be that way though.

Himanshu, if your chip is supported by one of the drivers listed here:
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers.  If one of those is
compatible, then you've got a chance.

Otherwise your only option is begging and grovelling to Broadcom, or
voting with your wallet and buying something else.  Given the level of
contempt Broadcom has shown the Linux community historically, I
generally find it easier to avoid them and go with someone like Atheros
or Intel, who actively develop their drivers in the Linux mainline kernel=
=2E

If I wanted a proprietary binary soup I'd use Windows.
--=20
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL)

I haven't lost my mind...
  ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.


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Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2015 15:40:54 -0500 (EST)
From: Bob Bernstein 
To: Debian User List 
Subject: Re: OT Re: POP3 was: Re: command not found [SOLVED]
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: 

Installing Openbox

[Derek Jansen]

Openbox refuses to start after its installation. I get dropped into TTY1.
Using startx works, but Debian will not automatically bring my to TTY7 for
Openbox to start.

I’ve installed xorg and openbox using apt-get build-dep first then apt-get
install xorg openbox second. I finished with a reboot, but I’m about at my
wits end.

I’ve been looking around for about 4 hours on the Debian site and other
forums, but they all seem to be missing a step that I’m not understanding.
​

Problem installing kFreebsd on external USB hard drive

[Derek Cole]

Hello,

I have been trying to install debian kFreebsd to an external USB hard
drive. I am using a VMWare VM running from my Macbook pro  with the
mini.iso loaded to complete the install. I get almost all the way through
the install and i get a message about the grub bootloader installation
failing in /dev/sda

I tried to re-do the installation but it still fails. I saw this article:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16t=72207sid=c03731a55df56298a25dc88790545f5a

it almost sounds like my same problem, but I am not sure since it is a bit
incomplete, and I havent tried what the guy mentions because I am unsure
where that code snipped would go.

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

How do I unlock and/or remove a locked volume?

[Derek Dongray]

I recently decided to move a volume group off of a mixed device (SATA+USB)
md raid mirror after encountering the bio too big bug (which apparently is
likely to cause data corruption, but is classified as WONTFIX! See
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498162 or
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=bio+too+big+wontfix).

The sequence started to use was:

1. Fail USB drive and remove from the raid mirror (mdadm).
2. Repartition USB drive (parted).
3. Create Physical Volume on USB drive and add to Volume Group (lvm pvcreate
 vgextend).
4. Move Volume Group off of raid mirror (lvm pvmove).
5. Remove raid mirror from Volume Group and stop if being a Physical
Volume (lvm vgreduce  pvremove).
6. Stop raid mirror (mdadm).
7. Repartiton SATA drive (parted).
8. Create new SATA-based Physical Volume and add to Volume Group (lvm
pvcreate  vgextend).
9. Move volume group off USB-based Physical Volume (pvmove).
It was at this point (after a few hours) that the sysem 'hung' and was
totally unresponsive. After powering down and rebooting, I attempted to
abort the pvmove (pvmove --abort) but the system locked up again and I
rebooted a second time. This time, the abort appeared to succeed, but when I
started the pvmove againb I got a message about ignoring the locked volume
'pvmove0'. I proceeded with the remaining step:

10. Remove USB-based Physical Volume from the Volume Group and stop it being
a Physical Volume (lvm vgreduce  pvremove)

The system appears to be running OK, but there is a zero-length, locked
Logical Volume which I can't remove.

# lvs -a raid/pvmove0
  LVVG   Attr   LSize Origin Snap%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
  [pvmove0] raid p-C---0

# lvdisplay -a -v raid/pvmove0
Using logical volume(s) on command line
  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Name/dev/raid/pvmove0
  VG Nameraid
  LV UUID2aWJ0g-B5P8-6bAz-zKlk-f4dQ-nwn8-80n12v
  LV Write Accessread/write
  LV Status  NOT available
  LV Size0
  Current LE 0
  Segments   0
  Allocation contiguous
  Read ahead sectors auto

# tail -n11 /etc/lvm/backup/raid
pvmove0 {
id = 2aWJ0g-B5P8-6bAz-zKlk-f4dQ-nwn8-80n12v
status = [READ, WRITE, PVMOVE, LOCKED]
flags = []
allocation_policy = contiguous
segment_count = 0
}
}
}

The volume is locked (as shown from the backup information output) so
lvremove --force raid/pvmove0  simply complains Can't remove locked LV
pvmove0, but pvmove --abort (which would normally unlock this) does
nothing because no pvmove is in progress.

So the question (as in the subject) is how do I unlock and/or remove a
locked volume?

Thanks.
--
Derek.

Re: How do I unlock and/or remove a locked volume?

[Derek Dongray]

OK. I decided this is probably impossible (or at least very difficult) since
no-one replied or even commented after over 12 hours, so I too the
alternative roure of creating a new Volume Group, copying and deleting (if
possible) all the Logical Volumes in the 'corrupt' VG, rebooting using the
new VG, then deleting the old VG and moving everything to the right Physical
Volumes.

Of course, I'd still like to know if a damaged pvmove0 (pvmove, locked)
volume can be unlocked and deleted when 'pvmove --abort' does not do the
job.

On 24 June 2011 11:28, Derek Dongray de...@inverchapel.me.uk wrote:

 I recently decided to move a volume group off of a mixed device (SATA+USB)
 md raid mirror after encountering the bio too big bug (which apparently is
 likely to cause data corruption, but is classified as WONTFIX! See
 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498162 or
 http://lmgtfy.com/?q=bio+too+big+wontfix).

 The sequence started to use was:

 1. Fail USB drive and remove from the raid mirror (mdadm).
 2. Repartition USB drive (parted).
 3. Create Physical Volume on USB drive and add to Volume Group (lvm
 pvcreate  vgextend).
 4. Move Volume Group off of raid mirror (lvm pvmove).
 5. Remove raid mirror from Volume Group and stop if being a Physical
 Volume (lvm vgreduce  pvremove).
 6. Stop raid mirror (mdadm).
 7. Repartiton SATA drive (parted).
 8. Create new SATA-based Physical Volume and add to Volume Group (lvm
 pvcreate  vgextend).
 9. Move volume group off USB-based Physical Volume (pvmove).
 It was at this point (after a few hours) that the sysem 'hung' and was
 totally unresponsive. After powering down and rebooting, I attempted to
 abort the pvmove (pvmove --abort) but the system locked up again and I
 rebooted a second time. This time, the abort appeared to succeed, but when I
 started the pvmove againb I got a message about ignoring the locked volume
 'pvmove0'. I proceeded with the remaining step:

 10. Remove USB-based Physical Volume from the Volume Group and stop it
 being a Physical Volume (lvm vgreduce  pvremove)

 The system appears to be running OK, but there is a zero-length, locked
 Logical Volume which I can't remove.

 # lvs -a raid/pvmove0
   LVVG   Attr   LSize Origin Snap%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
   [pvmove0] raid p-C---0

 # lvdisplay -a -v raid/pvmove0
 Using logical volume(s) on command line
   --- Logical volume ---
   LV Name/dev/raid/pvmove0
   VG Nameraid
   LV UUID2aWJ0g-B5P8-6bAz-zKlk-f4dQ-nwn8-80n12v
   LV Write Accessread/write
   LV Status  NOT available
   LV Size0
   Current LE 0
   Segments   0
   Allocation contiguous
   Read ahead sectors auto

 # tail -n11 /etc/lvm/backup/raid
 pvmove0 {
 id = 2aWJ0g-B5P8-6bAz-zKlk-f4dQ-nwn8-80n12v
 status = [READ, WRITE, PVMOVE, LOCKED]
 flags = []
 allocation_policy = contiguous
 segment_count = 0
 }
 }
 }

 The volume is locked (as shown from the backup information output) so
 lvremove --force raid/pvmove0  simply complains Can't remove locked LV
 pvmove0, but pvmove --abort (which would normally unlock this) does
 nothing because no pvmove is in progress.

 So the question (as in the subject) is how do I unlock and/or remove a
 locked volume?

 Thanks.
 --
 Derek.





-- 
Derek.

raid1 / mdadm issues on reboot - /dev/md* not showing up

[Derek Bosch]

I've had a sid/unstable system with four raid1 / mdadm partitions running
for about 4 years now...
Recently, upon boot-up, three of those four partitions come up as
auto-read-only in /proc/mdstat
for example:
md3 : active (auto-read-only) raid1 sda4[0] sdb4[1]
280631360 blocks [2/2] [UU]

this device DOESN'T appear in /dev/md3

however:
md2 : active raid1 sda3[0] sdb3[1]
9767424 blocks [2/2] [UU]

isn't auto-read-only, and does appear as /dev/md2...

I'd like to reset the auto-read-only on /dev/md3, but /dev/md3 doesn't
exist.  Sometimes I've seen it show up as /dev/.tmp.md3,
but it isn't consistent...

where does it go?

-Derek

Re: raid1 / mdadm issues on reboot - /dev/md* not showing up

[Derek Bosch]

forgot to attach my rcS.d
S02hostname.sh
S02mountkernfs.sh
S04mountdevsubfs.sh
S05bootlogd
S05keymap.sh
S06keyboard-setup
S07hdparm
S08hwclockfirst.sh
S10checkroot.sh
S11hwclock.sh
S12mtab.sh
S18ifupdown-clean
S20module-init-tools
S20policycoreutils
S25mdadm-raid
S30checkfs.sh
S30procps
S35mountall.sh
S36mountall-bootclean.sh
S36udev-mtab
S37mountoverflowtmp
S38pppd-dns
S39ifupdown
S40networking
S43portmap
S44nfs-common
S45mountnfs.sh
S46mountnfs-bootclean.sh
S48console-screen.sh
S49console-setup
S50alsa-utils
S55bootmisc.sh
S55urandom
S70nviboot
S70screen-cleanup
S70x11-common
S75policykit
S75sudo
S99stop-bootlogd-single



On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Derek Bosch smi...@gmail.com wrote:

 it appears that if I let the system continue booting, the remaining
 /dev/md*s do get populated, which makes me suspicious of my /etc/rc*.d/
 ordering...

 On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 12:03 PM, martin f krafft madd...@debian.orgwrote:

 also sprach Derek Bosch smi...@gmail.com [2009.08.26.2020 +0200]:
  md3 : active (auto-read-only) raid1 sda4[0] sdb4[1]
  280631360 blocks [2/2] [UU]
 
  this device DOESN'T appear in /dev/md3
 
  however:
  md2 : active raid1 sda3[0] sdb3[1]
  9767424 blocks [2/2] [UU]
 
  isn't auto-read-only, and does appear as /dev/md2...
 
  I'd like to reset the auto-read-only on /dev/md3, but /dev/md3 doesn't
  exist.  Sometimes I've seen it show up as /dev/.tmp.md3,

 File a bug, please.

 I doubt this has to do with auto-read-only, which is just a symptom
 because the filesystem probably doesn't get mounted, hence the array
 is not written and thus stays auto-read-only. The real issue is why
 the node doesn't get renamed like it should.

 --
  .''`.   martin f. krafft madd...@d.o  Related projects:
 : :'  :  proud Debian developer   http://debiansystem.info
 `. `'`   
 http://people.debian.org/~madduckhttp://people.debian.org/%7Emadduck
 http://vcs-pkg.org
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems

 all software projects are done by iterative prototyping.
 some companies call their prototypes releases, that's all.

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Re: raid1 / mdadm issues on reboot - /dev/md* not showing up

[Derek Bosch]

it appears that if I let the system continue booting, the remaining
/dev/md*s do get populated, which makes me suspicious of my /etc/rc*.d/
ordering...

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 12:03 PM, martin f krafft madd...@debian.orgwrote:

 also sprach Derek Bosch smi...@gmail.com [2009.08.26.2020 +0200]:
  md3 : active (auto-read-only) raid1 sda4[0] sdb4[1]
  280631360 blocks [2/2] [UU]
 
  this device DOESN'T appear in /dev/md3
 
  however:
  md2 : active raid1 sda3[0] sdb3[1]
  9767424 blocks [2/2] [UU]
 
  isn't auto-read-only, and does appear as /dev/md2...
 
  I'd like to reset the auto-read-only on /dev/md3, but /dev/md3 doesn't
  exist.  Sometimes I've seen it show up as /dev/.tmp.md3,

 File a bug, please.

 I doubt this has to do with auto-read-only, which is just a symptom
 because the filesystem probably doesn't get mounted, hence the array
 is not written and thus stays auto-read-only. The real issue is why
 the node doesn't get renamed like it should.

 --
  .''`.   martin f. krafft madd...@d.o  Related projects:
 : :'  :  proud Debian developer   http://debiansystem.info
 `. `'`   
 http://people.debian.org/~madduckhttp://people.debian.org/%7Emadduck
 http://vcs-pkg.org
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems

 all software projects are done by iterative prototyping.
 some companies call their prototypes releases, that's all.

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 Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

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Debian 5

[Derek Woodley]

Hi I like to use your debian 5, once it is installed it will not run
because my monitor stats it is 50Hz to 60Hz, because of this a white
small screen comes onto my monitor stating out of range, is this right
that i cannot run your o/s because my monitor is out of range of your
o/s thanks Derek



-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org 
with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Debootstrap problem.

[Derek \The Monkey\ Wueppelmann]

I'm trying to use Debootstrap to create a new base debain image using a
local apt repository. I created the Packages and Pacakges.gz file using
the apt-ftparchive command, however when I run the deboostrap I get a
Packages was corrupt error. Using the same respository through Apt
doesn't give any errors. Is there something I'm missing? Also this whole
process was working fine under sarge.

-- 
 o)   Derek Wueppelmann   (o
(D .   [EMAIL PROTECTED] D).
((` http://www.monkeynet.ca   ( ) `


signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part

Re: Two questions about boot scripts

[derek]

Hellocreate the script in /etc/init.d/lets say its named myscriptmake it executablethen do /usr/sbin/update-rc.d myscript defaultsthat will create a sym link in all the run levelsDerek
On 10/13/06, cothrige [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I don't particularly like gdm and so I made the script in init.dnonexecutable.I feel, though, this was likely the wrong way.Whatis the right way to do it?The whole Debian bootscript system issomewhat intimidating to a Slackware user, and so I am hesitant to go
in there willy-nilly.Also, where would I be best advised to add something to start esd, asin '/usr/bin/esd -nobeeps'?Is there a config file which will be seenand read during boot?Many thanks for any help,
Patrick--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact 
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Re: Petition about the Firefox trademark problem

[derek]

I dont understand why this is such a big deal.On 13 Oct 2006 14:53:14 +0100, Peter Westlake [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:I believe that the dispute between the Mozilla Corporation and the
Debian Project is highly damaging to both sides and to Free Softwarein general, so I have set up an online petition athttp://www.petitiononline.com/debffx/
urging them to find a way to let Debian carry on distributing Firefox.Please come along and sign up!Peter.--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: Newbie ask for recommendation

[derek]

Debian comes with alot of good documentation,take a look in /usr/share/doc/ and /usr/share/doc-base/DerekOn 10/4/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:Hi all, I'm a newbie for debian.
I've searched throught the web, but I'm not sure what reference is suitable/good for me.Could anyone suggest some links/books which are good?--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: start an application on startup

[derek]

If you want it to start when you startx,put it in ~/.xsessionOn 10/3/06, Michael Ott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:Hello Fred! I have a C++ code which fires, does its thing, and waits for input.
 I need to get it up and running automatically from boot up. I am able to open xterm with the following line in.bash_profile # run the following programs xterm 
 my C++ application proj is in $HOME/path/to/proj in .bashrc path/to/proj which is read by xterm every time it is fired, it works but then when I open another xterm to do othere things, it fires my proj which is not what I want, I
 want only one instant of the proj running.How often will you run it.I put this stuff into the session manager. It starts only one time whenstarting the gnome sessionCUMichael
--,''`. Michael Ott, e-mail: michael at zolnott dot de : :' : Debian SID on Thinkpad T43: `. `'http://www.zolnott.de/laptop/ibm-t43-uc34nge.html
 `-Jeden Mittwoch von 21 - 24 Uhr. Zosh! auf Radio Z.Das Härteste, was der Musikmarkt zu bieten hat. http://www.zosh.deOnline hören: 
http://www.radio-z.net

Re: why...?!

[derek]

sata is working great for me,on etchOn 10/1/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:On Sun, Oct 01, 2006 at 08:24:03PM -0400, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
 On Sun, Oct 01, 2006 at 05:04:02PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:   Indeed, I avoided SATA drives because they are so new on my AMD64,
  though I have all the sockets for them on my motherboard.I still  eventually gave up on sarge because so much if the hardware was not  supported, and went to etch, which did install (though I've has other
  problems).  Interesting.About nine months ago I installed two amd64 machines with dual SATA-II drives in software RAID-1.Worked like a charm with the unofficial Sarge installer.
Given that sarge did not support my graphics chip or my ethernet chip,I thought it would really be tempting fate to try on a SATA drive aswell.Maybe I was wrong.-- hendrik--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: Error when running make menuconfig

[derek]

dont know about the error,but if you want to use the same config docp /boot/config-$(uname -r) /usr/src/linux/.configOn 10/2/06, debian 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:Hi,i installed a new computer with debian but i want newest kernel because
i need to customize it.When i run make menuconfig i get this:ca-phlinux:/usr/src/linux-2.6.18# make menuconfigscripts/kconfig/mconf arch/i386/Kconfiginit/Kconfig:245: can't open file usr/Kconfig
make[1]: *** [menuconfig] Error 1make: *** [menuconfig] Error 2ca-phlinux:/usr/src/linux-2.6.18#Second question,my standard debian kernel configuration of the new installation ispretty good.
Can i use the settings of my running kernel (is it saved somewhere??)and load it in my new configuration (when running make menuconfig, loadan alternate configuration file, so that i have less work).grtz,
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Re: Wierd Firefox behaviour

[derek]

Its probably just cached,and will be free'd when needed.

Re: idsoftware games

[derek]

Make sure you have alsa-base,alsa-oss,and alsa-utils installed,run alsa-conf too.On 9/29/06, Alan Ianson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:Hello All,I am trying to get sound working with quake 3 / doom 3 / RTCW from idsoftware.
I don't have a sound card in this box. I just use whatever it is on the MBand it has always worked well enough to make me happy.It looks like I am going to have to get a sound card to get sound working with
these games. Anyone have these games working, can you tell me what king ofsound card you use and if you are happy with it?--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: capturing terminal scrollback buffer?

[derek]

you can direct the output to a file,for examplelsmod  tmp.txtOn 9/29/06, Andrew Sackville-West 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:anybody know how to capture the contents of a terminal scrollback
buffer? i've got about 1000 lines of debug stuff from a networkproblem that I want to save, but its just sitting in the scroll backbuffer of an aterm. argh! how do I get it out of there withoutcopy/pasting it one screen at a time?
thanksA-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux)iD8DBQFFHeWiaIeIEqwil4YRArboAKCatls56HlBc+dvY61xBwbTXw2UcACgrZ6Ko9qghPHx228Y85ItS9sDJ4U==DKdB-END PGP SIGNATURE-

Re: firefox bookmark file location

[derek]

~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/bookmarks.htmOn 9/27/06, Fred J. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
HiI have debian/testing, and have been trying to locate the bookmarksfile for firefox my browser, any body knows where it is?username:~$ locate bookmarks.html/etc/firefox/profile/bookmarks.html
/etc/mozilla-firefox/profile/bookmarks.htmlniether of the files above when opened in a broswer show my bookmakrs, so I concluded these are not the ones. thanks 
		Do you Yahoo!? 
Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail.

Re: Sound: Microphone not working properly

[derek]

My mic is working good,here is a picture of my alsamixer settings,might help.
http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/4547/picture7id8.png
Derek

On 9/20/06, Alberto Giménez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Hi,

I use Debian Sarge and I installed ALSA drivers for sound card C-Media
CMI8738. I did 'alsaconf' and everything worked OK.

I can hear sounds (xmms, KDE noatun, etc) but i have an issue when
recording sound (well, i don't want to record sound, but use X-Lite VoIP
client, that's just testing).

I (think) I have alsamixer channels OK (no mic muted, etc), but when I
record a sound with my mic (with sound-recorder), it doesn't record
nothing.

But wait, if I blow at the mic (so sound is louder), it's recorded!!
just blows are recorded.

It seems a volume issue, but I have capture and mic levels at 100, and
when no recording i can hear myself (mic-headphones loop works OK), and
sounds good. Any idea?

Thanks in Advance.
--
Luis Alberto Giménez
JabberID: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
GnuPG ID: 0x3BAABDE1


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Re: Re: Recommend a file manager

[derek]

I like rox-filer

On 9/22/06, Damon L. Chesser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

T wrote:
 Hi

 Please recommend a file manager. I need a good one to make my wife happy.
 We used to settle with the the file manager that comes default with Gnome,
 but now that one can't rename files any more (it actually can initially,
 but stop responding to keyboard very soon).

 please help

 thanks





try xfe, windows explorer clone.

--
Damon L. Chesser
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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Re: Linux Will Get Buried (Off)

[derek]

I always just mount the dvd,and play the video file directly.I dont really care about the menu's or anything.On 9/21/06, Owen Heisler 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 23:52 -0700, Scarletdown wrote:
 On Wed, 2006-09-13 at 19:23 -0700, Paul Johnson wrote:  handful of uses!And make it an absolute nightmare to buy foreign movies  while travelling internationally that will play when I get home!
 If you're talking about region codes, that's a trivial matter to bypass.You might try xine; I've never set the region on my DVD reader.Windowscomplains about the region setting, but xine doesn't seem to care.
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Re: copy a dvd

[Derek]

You can try ddsomething likedd if=dev/hdb of=dvd.isosomething like thatOn 9/20/06, Fred J. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:HiI have a dvd, one that I placed in my tv-dvd unit and it played, with video and sound. 
I want to copy it, I have a dvd burner in my debian/testing. I mounted the dvd and was able to find out it had 1$ ls /mnt/audio_ts video_ts1$ ls /mnt/video_ts/video_ts.bup vts_01_0.bup vts_01_1.vob vts_01_4.vob vts_02_0.ifo
video_ts.ifo vts_01_0.ifo vts_01_2.vob vts_01_5.vob vts_02_0.vobvideo_ts.vob vts_01_0.vob vts_01_3.vob vts_02_0.bup vts_02_1.vobhow can I make a copy which I can also place in my tv-dvd player and it plays.
I was reading in mkisofs but could not come up with a way.do I need to use growisofs to make an iso on the hard drive and then burn that iso onto the dvd. if so how please.thanks
 
		Stay in the know. Pulse on the new Yahoo.com. 
 Check it out. 

Re: current mobo recommendation

[Derek]

nforce4 *On 9/18/06, Ron Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-Hash: SHA1On 09/18/06 18:10, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote: Hi, Anybody have a *current* (i.e. gettable from newegg) mobo recommendation? Beats having to wade through miles of reviews that never mention Linux.
32-bit, 64-bit, Intel fanboy, AMD fan boy, gamer, silent, cheap,workstation, lots of PCI slots, what?Come on, give us *some* guidance.- --Ron Johnson, Jr.Jefferson LAUSAIs common sense really valid?
For example, it is common sense to white-power racists thatwhites are superior to blacks, and that those with brown skinsare mud people.However, that common sense is obviously wrong.
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Re: eth0 (Realtek 8139) suddenly not working

[Derek]

I had this problem on my powermac,I ended up just compiling my own kernel without any of the eth1394 stuff.On 9/17/06, Peter Thomassen 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:Hi,I'm still introducing a friend of mine to Linux by phone.
Yesterday and the days before, his Realtek 8139 NCI worked out of the boxusing DHCP. Today, no IP is received over DHCP; instead, the boot scriptdoes several tries after different intervals and finally gives up.
I googled around and found a hint that the Firewire interface can occupyeth0, and indeed, eth1 was present (which I assumed to be the NIC), butreplacing eth0 by eth1 in /etc/network/interfaces didn't work. Also undoing
that change, blacklisting eth1394 in /etc/modules.d/blacklist and rebootingdidn't solve it.After the reboot, I noticed that 8139too wasn't loaded, so we modprobe'd it;then ifdown eth0, ifup eth0. No success.
Maybe it's useful to know that dmesg says that eth0 is a Realtek 8139. Idon't know what to do -- do you?Thanks,Peter--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: install nvidia for latest debian kernel

[Derek]

I use the nvidia installer,never had a broken system,dunno where you got those instructions from.Just download the nvidia installer,run it and you should be good to go(assuming you have all the stuff needed to compile the kernel module).
On 9/16/06, Francesco Pietra [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi all;could please someone adapt the following (official) procedure for amd64 to32bit debian etch (the last two lines for manual downloading):Never EVER use the NVidia installers - they're a quick route to a broken
system.1) ensure you have non-free enabled in your sources.list2) install module-assistant3) run m-a a-i nvidia4) install the nvidia-glx package5) dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, and select the nvidia driver (this
step won't work if you've edited your xorg.conf by hand before, if so,make this change by hand)The above relies on having access to the nvidia packages, which are instable  unstable (but not testing). For testing, just grab the packages
manually from unstable:http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/n/nvidia-graphics-drivers/nvidia-glx_1.0.8774-1_amd64.deb
andhttp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/n/nvidia-graphics-drivers/nvidia-kernel-source_1.0.8774-1_amd64.deb
__thank youfrancesco pietra--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact 
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Re: ls sort order

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 01:01:25PM -0400, Eric d'Alibut wrote:
 I just noticed on a brand new install of testing that ls has begun to
 sort alphabetically, but mixes uppercase and lowercase together i.e.
 'Pearl' comes before 'pearl' but after 'otter'.
[...]
 A stable Debian version I maintain behaves the good old-fashioned way:
[...]
 Is this some utf-8 mutation?

Yup.  If you want the old behavior, use this:

export LC_COLLATE=C

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Linux Will Get Buried (Off)

[Derek]

I dont see how anything apple puts out can bury linux.Ive been using OS X since 10.1 came out,its really nothing special.I much prefer my Linux box.

Re: Michelle Konzack's sex (was: Email programs that work.)

[Derek Martin]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 02:27:09AM +0200, Michelle Konzack wrote:
   his first.  Actually I think he did a fine job.
^^^  ^^
  Do you know something I don't?  I always thought that Michelle was 
  female.
 
 Right.  ;-)

Er...  Sorry Michelle.

I do know Michelle from mutt-users, where I could swear I'd seen a
post (from her) which referred to her as male.  I remember
specifically thinking that it was odd for a man to have the name
Michelle.  Obviously I was mistaken...  

FWIW, I work with a guy named Erin, and another named Kim (not an
Asian family name, but a European first name).  :-P

In any event, I thought Michelle's post was fine.  :-D

-- 
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http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: how can I start one script as soon as screensaver start ?

[Derek]

I have no idea,but im gonna just say it,replace the screensaver binary with a shell script,then you can have the script launch the screensaver and your script.I have know clue if that will work,just an idea
On 9/6/06, KLEIN Stéphane [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
My question : how can I start one script as soon as screensaver start ?I try this bad solution :in gnome-screensaver-2.14.3/src/gs-monitor.c, at the beginin oflistener_active_changed_cb, I've add this code :
char *command;command = myfoobarscript;execv(command);but it don't work.Someone can help me ?Thanks for your help--Stéphane

Re: Debian LIVE CD

[Derek]

Havent tried it,but this might be what your looking for$ apt-cache show bootcdPackage: bootcdPriority: extraSection: utilsInstalled-Size: 224Maintainer: Bernd Schumacher 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]Architecture: allVersion: 2.53Depends: mkisofs, cpio, fdutils, file, dosfstools, realpath, bootcd-i386 | bootcd-hppa | bootcd-ia64Recommends: cdrecordSuggests: ssh, bootcd-mkinitrd
Filename: pool/main/b/bootcd/bootcd_2.53_all.debSize: 53576MD5sum: 6bd1afd4993afbdc3a54534f565a3e14SHA1: 010fe8fdd32938c04faf8008b0879be0554119e7SHA256: 3e6a6c6461487a54f2f663759436a37a588a18e44722e79701c05b917173de0b
Description: run your system from cd without need for disksBuild an image of your running Debian System with the command bootcdwrite.You can also build a bootcd ISO image via NFS on a remote System.When you run your system from CD you do not need any disks. All
changes will be done in ram. To reuse this changes at next boot timeyou can save them on FLOPPY with the command bootcdflopcp. If bootingfrom your CD-drive is not supported, booting from FLOPPY is possible.
It is possible to install a new system from the running CD with thecommand bootcd2disk. Bootcd2disk can also find a target disk, formatit and make it bootable automatically. Bootcd also supports lilo,grub, initrd root fs, devfs, transparent-compression ISO 9660 fs and
syslinux/isolinux.On 9/6/06, T [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Wed, 06 Sep 2006 10:28:08 -0400, Stephen Yorke wrote: 1. Creating a LIVE CD with Debian Testing ... ... Debian LIVECD ...Ok...give up on iBuild Second, I have been playing with the Morphix Tools... build it is empty...
Others have suggested Knopsis  dfsbuild.I've been finding/watching/trying different LIVE CDs (preferable Debianbased) for a long time, and have tried all above.I've now stopped finding because I think I've found the best one so far --
grml. check out grml.org. It derived from Knopsis, but is now pure Debianbased. It's a live CD, but you can also get a working pure Debian systemon HD within minutes. I'm using Debian Testing now, which was its HD
installation.check out the rest at my old post:http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.user/249330--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Webcams and communicating with a windows system

[Derek Wueppelmann]

Hello all,

I recently got a Webcam for my Debian system and I've gotten it all
working and haven't had any problems with it on my side of things.
However the main reason for getting this webcam was so that I could
communicate with other people. Is there a good HowTo somewhere on what
software is good to use to communicate with someone else who has a
webcam but is running Windows? I've tried getting things working using
Ekiga/Gnomemeeting, but I haven't had much luck with that.

Anybody have any other thoughts? Also if you could also reply directly
to my as well as to the list that would be great.

-- 
 o)Derek Wueppelmann   (o
(D .[EMAIL PROTECTED]D).
((`  http://monkey.homeip.net/ ( ) `


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Re: cdrecord / ATAPI

[Derek]

On 8/31/06, Paul Dwerryhouse [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 11:11:37PM +0200, ciol wrote: # cdrecord -v dev=1,1,0 speed=10 dl/debian-31r2-i386-binary-1.isoI've found that it's possible to just use the device name; whether thisis good or bad, I don't know, but it works for me:
cdrecord -v dev=/dev/hdd(etc etc)Cheers,PaulThats the way I do it too,works great. 

Re: What is the status of XGL on Debian

[Derek]

You could install it yourself if you dont want to wait.On 9/1/06, Luis Rogelio Roman Rivera [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:Hello to everybody, could someone tell me what is the status of XGL,
xcompmgr on Debian, I really want this eyecandy on my laptop but I loveDebian and I don`t wanna switch to another distribution.I have Debian SID for ppc.Thanks.--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: Email programs that work.

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 02:28:24AM +0300, Micha Feigin wrote:
  Right now, on my system, t-bird is using 76MB RES  200MB VIRT
  memory.  :(
 
 And I thought that sylpheed-claws-gtk2 is using too much at 17MB
 resources and 38MB virtual. Reminds me why I stopped using T-bird
 and a bunch of others.

PID   USER PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
18782 foo   15   0  3360 3356  1704 S 0.0  2.6   0:04   0 mutt

This is one huge advantage of Mutt.  The memory footprint is
unbelievably small, particularly in light of how much power it offers.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
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Re: Email programs that work.

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 05:15:25PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
 Michelle Konzack wrote:
  You read more then One message at a time?
 
 Yes.  Person A says Person B said something important while talking
 to Person C.  So you have Message A open so you can find what is
 referenced in Message B.  Hell, I do it all the time just on
 debian-user.  Surely you with your mail load have run into that
 situation once or twice.  

Personally, no...  But then I only get about 2,000 messages a day.
Not to say I never wanted to refer to a message (usually when the
person replying has done a very poor job of quoting)...  But I guess I
am a bit better than you at keeping two ideas in my head
simultaneously...  I just go and look at the second message, read what
I needed to read, and then go back to the first message.  I don't see
that this is a big deal.

Very rarely, I might want to look at a second message simultaneously
in order to copy-paste small details from one message into a message
I'm composing, but the message I'm copying from is not the message I'm
replying to.  Despite what you say, this is no problem whatsoever.  I
just start a new screen in screen, run a second copy of Mutt, and look
at the message.  I could also just open another xterm and do the same
thing, but usually it's not worth the extra screen real estate and
time to ssh into my server.

You are making a mountain out of a mole hill.  Or rather, an ant hill.

Best of all, when I do this, because the vast majority of memory pages
are shared between the two copies of Mutt, my memory usage increases
by ZERO (less than half a megabyte):

$ free -m
 total   used   free sharedbuffers cached
Mem:   123120  2  0 25 59
-/+ buffers/cache: 35 87
Swap:  196 15180

[start a new screen, start a second copy of mutt, view a different
message...]

$ free -m
 total   used   free sharedbuffers cached
Mem:   123120  2  0 25 59
-/+ buffers/cache: 36 86
Swap:  196 15180

How does TB or any other GUI do here?  I imagine all those data
structures for managing child windows and the graphics that are in
them must add up...


-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
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Re: Email programs that work.

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 01:16:02AM +0300, Micha Feigin wrote:
 Also, how do you set the encoding of the message, as otherwise it gets mangled
 along the way.

Normally this is handled automatically by your terminal ($LANG)
settings.  If your environment is not configured properly you may have
a problem, but if it is configured properly it generally just works
with Mutt.  I do this all the time with Korean (and Japanese, though
that usually just amounts to typing people's names and a few
greetings, as I can't really speak any Japanese).

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Email programs that work.

[Derek Martin]

 more complex to set up than
filling out a personalities dialog in some GUI, but in return you
get an ENORMOUS amount of additional power.

  ???  And How do you configure GUI clients?
 
  You must setup things for each account.
 
 Yes, which is why I said account inheritance.  When I create a
 subfolder under [EMAIL PROTECTED] I don't have to configure the
 folder for my address, my real name, my signature.  It inherits all
 of that from the account!  I create a folder in mutt and I have to
 exit, vim .mutt/folders and add a freakin' folder_hook!  

Sorry, but no you don't.  folder hooks match patterns of folder names,
so you can have a folder hook matching Mail/account1/.* and all mail folders
under that will match.  There's your inheritance.

Man, it sucks to be wrong, after being so adamant, doesn't it?


On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 06:03:45PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
   A rediculously complicated system?  What's so complicated about
   it.  Let's see, I have home mail and I have work mail.  I 
  configure my home account with 1 signature, 1 POP/IMAP server, 1
   SMTP server.  All the mail remains separate.  All my home 
  filters only apply to my home mail.  I need a work account I
   configure 1 signature, 1 POP/IMAP server, 1 SMTP server.  All
   mail remains separate.  All my work filters only apply to my
   work mail.
 
  And?  -  I use such thin daily with mutt!
 
 Liar.  

I've thus far resisted the overwhelming temptation to call you
names... but frankly I think you deserve to be called names.  You are
being extremely arrogant, and you're just plain wrong.

 As pointed out you can't do SMTP, you need to configure multiple
 things externally so my second case is what you do.

1. Yes, you can do SMTP with the ESMTP patch.

2. Yes, you can do SMTP with sendmail, or a different MTA, if you
prefer.

Furthermore, I've done this myself as well, so I know for a fact that
Michelle need not be lying.  There are at least 4 ways I can think of
to do all of what you describe using mutt and/or the MTA you choose to
use with Mutt.

1. Use different configurations of Mutt on different machines (maybe
log in remotely over VPN to a machine at work, or whatever)

2. Mutt's configuration can be entirely generated by a program.  Use
such a program to generate your config based on where you are.  I have
done this.  Er, I mean I am doing this.

3. Use a boot script to reconfigure your laptop's MTA based on the
network configuration (IP address, hostname, etc.) it gets at boot
time.  I have done this in the past as well.

4. Configure your MTA to relay mail through your work server if you're
using your work account, using mailertable or some such mechanism.
Sendmail is unbelievably powerful, and can do virtually anything you
can think of if you take the time to learn how to do it.


So, now will you please shut the hell up about how bad mutt is?  Every
single thing you have said about mutt is either dead wrong (mostly),
or not a huge problem for any reasonable human, or is designed that
way intentionally to give the user more power and flexibility than you
apparently can handle.  Mutt is largely for power users of e-mail,
which you obviously are not.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Email programs that work.

[Derek Martin]

On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 07:44:00AM +0100, Wulfy wrote:
 PID   USER PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
 18782 foo   15   0  3360 3356  1704 S 0.0  2.6   0:04   0 mutt
 
 This is one huge advantage of Mutt.  The memory footprint is
 unbelievably small, particularly in light of how much power it offers.
 
   
 But that is not a fair comparison with T-bird...  what about all the 
 other programs you must use to get the same functionality?

Oh, very well...

PID   USER PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
18782 foo   15   0  3360 3356  1704 S 0.0  2.6   0:04   0 mutt
 9019 smmsp 15   0   560  12424 S 0.0  0.0   0:00   0 sendmail
19462 foo   25   0   668  668   584 S 0.1  0.5   0:00   0 procmail
19270 foo   15   0  2608 2608  1736 S 0.0  2.0   0:00   0 vim


I had to force a procmail to run long enough to catch by running a
fairly large mailbox through it using formail.  I suspect to do a
single message (the normal usage case) the footprint would be
smaller.  But no matter.  Even at that, we're talking about a WHOPPING
7MB of TOTAL memory usage, including my editor, the sendmail
submission daemon, mutt, and procmail.  RSS of a little more than 4MB.

Oh, yes... I do run sendmail on the machine, so there are listener
daemons that are using some memory too.  But they don't count, because
this machine actually IS my mail server, and you don't have those in
Tbird.  Mutt is compiled with pop and IMAP support, even though I
don't actually use them (the theory being I might need them someday,
and don't want to have to recompile in that event).

And yes, mutt can retrieve mail.  But it's better if you use
fetchmail, if you want to do filtering, which can pipe the messages
through procmail.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Email programs that work.

[Derek Martin]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 04:13:05PM +0500, Dmitri Minaev wrote:
 Actually, considering the number of tools Mutt uses for work, I
 suspect that it 'sucks less' just because it does less. You retrieve
 mail with fetchmail or isync, filter it with procmail, write new
 messages with vim and send them with msmtp. What does Mutt do, then?
 ;)

Quite a lot actually.  

Yes, it does hand off a lot of tasks to other programs which are
specifically written to do those jobs.  With good reason.  vim, for
example, is an extremely powerful editor with a relatively small
memory footprint.  It is superb at what it does.  Why should mutt try
to re-invent the wheel, or using your philosophy, the world?  If the
mutt developers tried to write a built-in editor to edit mail, it
would be far less powerful than vim, would make mutt's code an order
of magnitude more complex, and most importantly would be a monumental
waste of time.  If they did the job well, what they would end up with
is... vim (or emacs).  Only, embedded in the mailer.  The same goes
for procmail, with regard to filters.  Instead, Mutt follows the Unix
Philosophy: do one well-defined job, and do it well.  And it does
that.

So, what does mutt do?  It provides an excellent terminal-based user
interface to read, sort, and (visually) organize and filter mail.  It
does an excellent job of searching through mail in individual folders
using regular expressions.  It does a pretty good job of managing
multiple profiles using its various hooks...  It's very smart about
honoring various recipient headers, so you (usually) don't have to
think about how to reply to mail to send it to the right people...
Just press the right key for what you want to do.  It allows me to
change configuration settings on a per-folder basis.  It allows me to
use different colors to highlight mail from specific people, or mail
about certain topics, or identify some criteria based on information
in virtually any header in the message.  It has good support for
mailing lists, and excellent support for PGP messages (much better
than pine, unless recent updates support the many new (i.e. not 20
years old) standards regarding e-mail encryption).  A lot of GUI
mailers don't get any of this right, or simply can't do it at all.
And there's a lot of stuff it does that I don't have time to
mention...

Do I think mutt needs mail filters?  Nope.  I use fetchmail and
procmail, and would continue to do so even if filters were available
in my client, because those tools are the best BAR NONE at what they
do.  My coworkers are always complaining about their Outlook/Evolution
filters losing mail to their spam filters...  I just laugh.

Does Mutt have weaknesses?  Of course.  But most of the ones people
have highlighted in this thread either represent a misunderstanding of
how mutt does things, and why it does them that way (i.e. they don't
understand the Unix Philosophy and why that's a Good Thing); or
they're just plain wrong.  Mutt has vast power as a MUA, but along
with that power comes the price of having to learn how to use it.  A
lot of people who complain that mutt can't do X simply haven't learned
how.


 I generally like TUI tools, but neither Mutt, nor Pine give me what I
 get with GUI clients. 

You're right on this one, though actually Brendan Cully has done a
tremendous job of improving the IMAP code over the last year or so.  I
haven't used IMAP in a very long time myself, so I can't speak to what
improvements have been made; but I know that his changes have made a
lot of people very happy.

And I agree about having a basic SMTP engine too; MTAs can be a pain
to set up even for seasoned administrators...  A user should not have
to go through all that just to forward outgoing mail to his ISP; and
even if there are some small ones out there that aren't too hard to
set up, many users don't have the option, because they don't control
their mail system.  That's an argument that comes up often...

 Anyway, TUI clients share the same problem -- you cannot open more
 than one message. Am I asking too much? :)

Er... sure they can.  1.  Start screen, or two xterms, or whatever.
2. run one copy of mutt, view your 1st message.  3. run another copy
of mutt...  ;-)

Want more than that from a terminal-based MUA?  Then yeah, you are
definitely asking too much.  Besides... you can only read one mail at
a time, so what's the big deal?  :)  [No, this is not a serious
question.]

 [1] - Won't even mention things like storing non-mail items in IMAP folders 
 :)

Hmph.  They're called mail folders for a reason.  They're for...
storing mail.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Email programs that work.

[Derek Martin]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 08:55:44PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
 Marc Wilson wrote:
  Uhhh, no.  Either you delete all but the last n messages, or you delete
  messages older than n days.  That's not according to a set of rules.
  That's remarkably inflexible.
 
 That is according to a set of rules.  A limited set of rules but those
 *are* rules.

Any reasonably intelligent person could surmise that what he meant was
according to a reasonably flexible set of rules that the user could
define.  It does not do that.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Email programs that work.

[Derek Martin]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 10:49:32PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
 Derek Martin wrote:
  Any reasonably intelligent person could surmise that what he meant was
  according to a reasonably flexible set of rules that the user could
  define.  It does not do that.

 Sure it does.  It is  a reasonably flexible set of rules.  It just
 isn't a highly flexible set of rules.  Furthermore the user can
 define what those rules do.

No... the rules are static, and there are exactly two of them.  The
user can only change the limits of the rules, not the rules
themselves.

This is not flexible by any sane definition of flexible.  You're being
an ass.  Intentionally, I might add.

 Sorry, but where does a reasonable set begin short of, say, Python?

Take a look at what Mutt can do, if you must know.  It does not have
Python, or any other scripting language embedded in it.


-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Error 21

[Derek Martin]

On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 11:27:08AM -0700, Kelly Clowers wrote:
 On 8/27/06, Ottavio Caruso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
 What has KDE got to do with a fileserver? A server
 shouldn't have any windowing system at all...
 
 As someone who was once a total noob with linux, I assure you a file
 server does need a windowing system. 

I assure you it does not.  I've run many file servers which
had none for years.

 I wouldn't use X on a file server now, but if I hadn't used X on
 servers in the beginning, I would have given up long before I got to
 the point where I didn't need X.

So... it's the noob that needs the GUI, not the file server.  That is
a correctable problem.  :)

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Error 21

[Derek Martin]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 10:48:59AM -0700, Marc Wilson wrote:
 On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 11:27:08AM -0700, Kelly Clowers wrote:
  As someone who was once a total noob with linux, I assure you a
  file server does need a windowing system.
 
 To serve what possible need?  How does serving files require X?  How
 does having X *enhance* the ease of serving files?

I think what Kelly means is that to an inexperienced system
administrator, there are a lot of GUI tools that make overall
adminstration of the server much easier to manage.  Even after 11
years of managing Linux and Unix systems, I must admit that some tasks
genuinely are easier to manage with their associated GUI front-end
tools... even if I hate using them, and avoid them like the plague.

The problem with such tools is they rarely encompass every
configuration possibility, and they usually want you to do things
their way.  They tend to be a bit inflexible.  But, for someone who
is very inexperienced and just has basic needs, it's probably
sufficient and a lot easier than trying to track down what file needs
to be edited, or what man page needs to be read, if you can even
figure out what piece of software does the job you're trying to
reconfigure...

But to say a file server needs X is just silly.  What is needed is
user (sysadmin) education.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Could not create server lock file: /tmp/.X1-lock

[Derek]

/tmp is full?On 8/22/06, Kent West [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
marc wrote: Laurent CARON said... marc wrote: Hi, I have installed xserver-xgl and can run it and compiz from a KDE root session -- wobbly bits and all. However, when I try to login -- using
 the same scripts -- I receive the following: Xsession: X session started for marc at Mon Aug 21 18:48:57 BST 2006 Fatal server error:
 Could not create server lock file: /tmp/.X1-lock xset:unable to open display :1 and so on. To login, I have created:
 /usr/shar/xsessions/xgl.desktop which can be selected from the KDM panel. All this does is call: /usr/local/startxgl.sh
 #!/bin/sh Xgl :1 -fullscreen -ac -accel xv:fbo -accel glx:pbuffer  DISPLAY=:1 exec startkde As I say, this all works from root, but from an regular user it is
 effectively halting at the line commencing Xgl. Any ideas? Thanks. chmod 1777 /tmp Yup, /tmp is already 1777
I saw something similar about half a year ago on my Sid box. If I everrebooted, I'd have to change perms on a hidden directory in /tmp to rootownership. I'm not sure which one, but I think it was either:
drwxrwxrwt2 rootroot 1024 2006-08-15 10:14 .ICE-unixordrwxrwxrwt2 rootroot 1024 2006-08-15 10:14 .X11-unix--Kent--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: How does one install extensions in Firefox and Thunderbird?

[Derek]

What I do is,in firefox,go to the tools in the menu and click on extentions,then click on get more extentions and install them that way.They get installed into ~/.mozilla,so they are not installed system wide.
On 8/21/06, Ken Heard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I recently downloaded two extensions, one each for Firefox 1.5 andThunderbird 1.5.The Firefox extension was installed infile:///usr/lib/firefox/extensions/preferential.xpi
, and the Thunderbirdone in file:///var/lib/thunderbird/extensions/configdate-0.3.7-tb.xpilinked from 
file:///usr/lib/thunderbird/extensions.When I start each application the Software Installation window popsup and asks me whether I want to install the extension in question.However, when I answer yes by hitting the Install Now button, and then
go to the ToolsExtensions window, the extension is not listed.Eachtime I start those applications the same thing happens.I am using Sarge with both Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5 installed
from the Debian backports site.Can anyone explain what my problem is?--Ken HeardResearch AssociateMuseum Studies Program
University of Toronto, Canada--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact 
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Re: Osama Bin Laden Take Over List!

[Derek]

On 8/20/06, Paul Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Then you get the situation that we already have:Some jurisdictions don'tbother to enforce requirements for driver's licenses, or even care if youhave a driver's license.For example, California driver's licenses are no
longer valid in Oregon after 30 days, and you have to take Oregon's test toget an Oregon license if you move in from California because of CA's lack ofenforcement.(On the other hand, Oregon's heavyhanded enforcement means that
California plates serve as a warning sign to other drivers and the ones thatmove here find they can't just ask for a license and get it like they do downsouth, they actually have to learn how to drive the right way).
You still have to take a driving test in california,dont know what you're talking about.

Re: macromedia new windows version problem

[Derek]

If more people complain,maybe they will release it sooner.

Re: macromedia new windows version problem

[Derek]

What is your problem paul?I am not promoting it,or whining.Quit being a assOn 8/20/06, Paul Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:On Sunday 20 August 2006 14:44, Derek wrote: If more people complain,maybe they will release it sooner.
I doubt it, but if you really want promote closed source software, go aheadand keep whining.:o)--Paul JohnsonEmail and IM (XMPP  Google Talk): [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: X -configure failed

[Derek]

you probably want to do dexconfthendpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorgOn 8/18/06, Jude DaShiell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:When I did X -configure as root the X command appeared to terminate
normally but still left me with an empty /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.wc justreturns 0's on that file when asked about it.So what package am I maybemissing that would allow this to happen?Correction, I probably had some
kind of error generated because /var/log/xorg.0.log was mentioned.Isthat logging facility advanced enough to tell me which package I'mmissing?--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: The New Virtualizer on the Block

[Derek]

win4lin alsoOn 8/13/06, David Baron [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Now we have four.1. Vmware: Proprietary. I installed their free version and could not completebootup afterwards. Booted up knoppix and removed the vmware. Problem was withthose ip numbers.2. Qemu: More of an emulater, very safe and very easy. Requires a non-free ko
to run acceptably. Knoppix boots up but not its KDE. Other lighter DTMs aregreat. Dynabolic 1.* ran very nicely in qemu, 2.* no. Installed Windows 98under qemu with only a few problems.3. Xen. Runs patched Linux versions, that is host is virgin, guests are
adulterated to run with it :-). Have not tried it because I need it forWindows which is not yet available and older Win98 will probably never be.4. The new boy, apparently an GPLed Virtuozzo, vpserver. This patches the host
instead of the guests, opposite of Xen. Now offered on Debian Sid!Some questions before or mutilate my installation:1. How safe is the kernel patch? Anyone had to unpatch?2. How generic is it? (They offer prebuilt kernel images based on previous
versions 2.6.16, not 2.6.17--can I patch the latest and greatest?)3. Will it run Win98 or does it only work with Linux guest kernels?Anyone used it, had success or not?--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: VNC

[Derek]

add it to your ~/.xsessionOn 8/12/06, Chuck Payne [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi,I only been using debian a short time, and I am wanting to know what would ittake set up X so that it running VNC or a VNC like program. When I start kdeon my SuSE box, it running with out me doing anything.
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Re: multimedia key kbd support

[Derek]

xbindkeysOn 8/9/06, Hugo Vanwoerkom [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi,I note at least 2 daemon packages for multimedia key support on kbds.Anybody have a preference for one?What is the preferred way to use those keys?Does it include use on vt's?H--
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Re: Can't access usb port

[Derek]

lsmod | grep usb-storageis that module loaded?if notmodprobe usb-storagethen mount it,something likemount /dev/sda1 /mnt/if that doesn't work try reloading the modulermmod usb-storagemodprobe usb-storage
On 7/27/06, R A L Carter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Before migrating from Mandriva 2006 to Debian 3.1 r2 Icopied everything on /home/robin to an external hard drive which connects to my PC through a usb port.I had planned to copy it back to my hdd after the Debianinstall was complete.
I now have Debian installed but it doesn't recognize my usb port.I have tried to find it using konqueror and from a terminal as su without success. I have alsoinstalled discover but this didn't help.Robin
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Re: Can't access usb port

[Derek]

EDIT:lsmod | grep usb_storageis that module loaded?if notmodprobe usb_storagethen mount it,something likemount /dev/sda1 /mnt/if that doesn't work try reloading the modulermmod usb_storagemodprobe usb_storage
On 7/27/06, Derek [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
lsmod | grep usb-storageis that module loaded?if notmodprobe usb-storagethen mount it,something likemount /dev/sda1 /mnt/if that doesn't work try reloading the modulermmod usb-storage
modprobe usb-storage
On 7/27/06, R A L Carter 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Before migrating from Mandriva 2006 to Debian 3.1 r2 Icopied everything on /home/robin to an external hard drive which connects to my PC through a usb port.I had planned to copy it back to my hdd after the Debianinstall was complete.
I now have Debian installed but it doesn't recognize my usb port.I have tried to find it using konqueror and from a terminal as su without success. I have alsoinstalled discover but this didn't help.Robin
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Re: how to make colour prompts for pdksh

[Derek Martin]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 04:55:02PM +0200, Florian Kulzer wrote:
   Now that your pointing this out for me :) indeed I was using a
   '^' char followed by a '['.  But how can I enter that control
   character? What is the keycombo for it?
  
  Check my previous email.  I don't know how to do it in vi
  (unfortunately), but it can be done in emacs.
 
 With vi, when you are in edit mode (-- INSERT -- etc.), you can press
 CTRL + Q followed by ESC. (Release the other two keys again before
 you press ESC.) If you use colors you will see that '^[' is shown in a
 different color to indicate that it is a special character and not just
 '^' + '['. It is furthermore treated as one character when you move the
 cursor across it.

If I may be pedantic...  First of all you mean vim.  The original vi
does not support syntax coloring, and there are other vi clones which
may behave differently than you describe (like elvis, etc.).

Secondly, the key to use is dependent on your operating system and
terminal settings.  On Windows, the key seems to be CTRL-Q.  On
virtually any Unix platform, the default is CTRL-V but is configurable
by the user, using stty or similar terminal control programs.  The
setting is controlled by your terminal, not by vim per se.

You can see what it is currently set to using stty -a:

  $ stty -a
  speed 38400 baud; rows 24; columns 80; line = 0;
  intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = undef;
  eol2 = undef; start = ^Q; stop = ^S; susp = ^Z; rprnt = ^R; werase = ^W;
  lnext = ^V; flush = ^O; min = 1; time = 0;
  -parenb -parodd cs8 -hupcl -cstopb cread -clocal -crtscts
  -ignbrk -brkint -ignpar -parmrk -inpck -istrip -inlcr -igncr icrnl ixon -ixoff
  -iuclc -ixany -imaxbel
  opost -olcuc -ocrnl onlcr -onocr -onlret -ofill -ofdel nl0 cr0 tab0 bs0 vt0 
ff0
  isig icanon iexten echo echoe echok -echonl -noflsh -xcase -tostop -echoprt
  echoctl echoke

Notice on the 4th line of output at the beginning, the entry 

  lnext = ^V

This is the key which is correct on your terminal.  The lnext
keyword is short for literal next character and is what you would
use to change the key using stty.  For example:

  stty lnext ^U

...changes the character to CTRL-U, though this isn't recommended as
^U normally corresponds to the kill character (not the same as the
kill command) by default.  These are the normal defaults for xterm and
its cousins, which are based on the DEC vt100 family of terminals, as
is the Linux console.  Note from the output above that ^Q is assigned
to start which is the XON character for terminal flow control, so it
will not work as advertised above on this terminal.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Just a thought

[Derek]

winex/cedega works good,I can even play gta san andreas with it.On 7/26/06, edwardsa [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:Carl Fink wrote: On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 09:14:43AM +0300, David Baron wrote:
 In other words, if one is willing to put in minimal effort  YES! Go for it! Gamers I know ONLY care about gaming.They have no motivation to swith,
 because no cool games are unique to Linux.My experience is with my children, who really like KDE but want theirgames (Star Wars, as well as some educational games) to run easily. In
this case, I intend to install the distro with the best record forrunning windows through WINE or a commercial code on a second disk ontheir computers, with the idea that, eventually, WINE will have moresuccesses. I'm also looking at games officially ported to linux.
There are many card and board games that I have played and enjoyed onlinux, but children really like games that look and act cool (lot's ofgraphics and lots of interaction).Art Edwards--
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Re: how to make colour prompts for pdksh

[Derek Martin]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 09:47:39PM +0200, LeVA wrote:
  So either set konsole up to launch ksh as a login shell, or set ENV
  somewhere.  You can test this with:
 
  $ ENV=~/.profile konsole
 
  Or launch konsole, and do:
  $ ksh -l

 The .profile is always gets parsed (both in a login and a non-login 
 shell). 

This is not correct, unless you have a line such as the following in
your .profile:

  export ENV=~/.profile

However, your non-login shells will inherit exported variables from
your login shell, so your prompts will still be set, etc.  This is the
difference between variables that are exported and not exported.

 When I start pdksh in a non-login shell, the .profile gets parsed, and 
 the PATH and every other env.var. gets set. Only the aliases gets 
 ignored, but why?

Because you are mistaken...  the .profile does not get parsed.  The
environment variables are being inherited from the parent shell.  if
the .profile was being parsed, your aliases would be there too.
 

 If I add the ENV=~/.kshrc line to my .profile and my ~/.kshrc contains 
 my aliases, then I still can not see my aliases... 

You need to export ENV.  This can be done as I did above, or like
this:

  ENV=~/.profile; export ENV

 The man says that if the ENV parameter is set when the shell starts :)
 This is funny because I can set the ENV parameter in a shell, and I can 
 not set it before running the shell :) 

Yes you can... you can export it from a parent shell.

 Something must be running already (eg. KDE) to be able to set up the
 variable. I can put a file which contains 'ENV=~/.kshrc' to my
 ~/.kde/env/ and that gets sourced by kde startup, so the ENV
 parameter will be set when I start konsole.  Wait a minute... that
 is what I'm gonna do! :)

And if you tried that, it didn't work either... because you didn't
export ENV.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: /etc/X11/X already customeizes on a fresh install

[Derek]

I had that same problem,I moved /etc/X11/X to /etc/X11/X.bak(or just delete it) and all was goodOn 7/18/06, James Westby 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:On (18/07/06 09:22), 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just installed 32-bit etch on an AMD64 two days ago. Today I installed xorg. Then I did dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, went through the usual options, and when I was done, it said,
 xserver-xorg postinst warning: not updating /etc/X11/X;file has been customized Now I know for sure I have not done any such thing.Perhaps the test for customization is wrong?
Please see the many open bugs against xserver-xorg for this and relatedproblems. In most cases this bug will not cause you a problem I think,but if you're /etc/X11/xorg.conf is not updated then you need to use one
of the workarounds provided, for instance the workaround or patch inhttp://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=375689James
--James Westby[EMAIL PROTECTED]http://jameswestby.net/--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: Shutdown my Laptop? Why should I?

[Derek Broughton]

David R. Litwin wrote:

 The question is this: Why should I ever turn off my laptop on a normal
 occasion (normal being every-day, standard, stationary usage)? 

Because you care about the planet...

 If I don't 
 want it on, I can suspend it in some way: Waking-up is faster than
 booting-up.

Absolutely.  I power off, but I never do a shutdown except when changing
kernels.  The rest of the time I use suspend-to-disk.
-- 
derek


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Re: Shutdown my Laptop? Why should I?

[Derek Broughton]

Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:

 Sean Perry on Thursday 13 Jul 2006 01:37 wrote:
 
 That said, most laptop batteries degrade performance significantly if
 left plugged into the mains 24/7. So only plug in for refills.
 
 That's scary.
 
 I've been using my laptop 24/7 plugged into the mains.
 
 Can you refer me to some documentation which details about it ?

I'm not sure how significant the degradation is.  I almost never use my
battery, but I leave it in, even when plugged in.  It's down to about a 1hr
charge (originally 3) after 2 years.  But I've been told best practices
won't give you much more than a 3 year life span, anyway.
-- 
derek


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Re: Video conversion

[Derek]

ffmpeg is goodOn 7/13/06, Roberto Sanchez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
J Merritt wrote: I am looking for a good, feature full video conversion package that will allow for conversion between various video formats, containers, audio formats, etc., in the associated video file. Is there a package that can
 be installed under Debian with all the associated dependencies? Any ideas?I would try mencoder from www.debian-multimedia.org.-Roberto
--Roberto C. Sanchezhttp://familiasanchez.net/~roberto--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: No sound on flash movies

[Derek]

I remember I had no sound in flash videos once,turns out I had jackd running.On 7/11/06, Wulfy [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:Iván Alemán wrote: I have the same problem. I use KDE.What should I put in there?I
 tried aoss, artsd and alsa but they don't work... Try restarting firefox, I edited /etc/firefox/firefoxrc and changed to aoss and it didn't work until I restarted the computer (in my case
 and by accident) but just restarting firefox should work fine. RegardsI restarted firefox after each change.As I said, it didn't work...:(--BlessingsWulfmannWulf Credo:
Respect the elders. Teach the young. Co-operate with the pack.Play when you can. Hunt when you must. Rest in between.Share your affections. Voice your opinion. Leave your Mark.--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: Solution: Fluxbox and Debian menu

[Derek]

Thanks,I just tried this and it works good.I put the debian menu in the main menu on mine.On 7/10/06, T 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:Thank you all who replied.My own personal Fluxbox menu will help
- add a menu not supplied by the author/maintainer- add my own shortcutsOn Mon, 10 Jul 2006 15:08:45 -0400, T wrote: Is it possible to keep my own menu, while link to the system menu via a

 Debian sub-menu?yes, here is how. Included is a sample of my ~/.fluxbox/menuThe Debian sub-menu will point to the auto-updated system menu, and alsoI can keep my personal settings as well. For example, the CD-Rom sub-menu
will alow me to open/close my CD via menu and mouse clicks...[begin] (Fluxbox)[submenu] (CD-Rom)[exec] (Open) {eject}[exec] (Close) {eject -t}

[end][submenu] (Debian)[include] (/etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox-menu)[end][reconfig] (Reconfigure)[restart] (Restart)[exit] (Exit)[end]

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Re: [OT]usb stick

[Derek]

This happens to me sometimes,try reloading the usb-storage modulermmod usb-storagemodprobe usb-storageOn 7/9/06, Owen Heisler 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:On Sat, 2006-07-08 at 16:54 +0530, L.V.Gandhi wrote:
 I have Transend usb pen drive. It was working OK. I gave to my nephew for backup. He used in some other PC. Now it is not working. Now when I insert nothing happens. I mean no message in syslog.
 But in the same machine with other USB stick I get as Jul8 16:52:29 localhost kernel: usb 3-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3 Jul8 16:52:29 localhost kernel: Initializing USB Mass Storage
 driver... Jul8 16:52:29 localhost kernel: scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices Jul8 16:52:29 localhost kernel: usb-storage: device found at 3 Jul8 16:52:29 localhost kernel: usb-storage: waiting for device to
 settle before scanning Jul8 16:52:29 localhost kernel: usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage Jul8 16:52:29 localhost kernel: USB Mass Storage support registered. Jul8 16:52:29 localhost 
usb.agent[10831]:usb-storage: loaded successfully Jul8 16:52:34 localhost kernel: Vendor: SanDisk Model: Cruzer MicroRev: 0.2 Jul8 16:52:34 localhost kernel: Type: Direct-Access
 ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Jul8 16:52:34 localhost kernel: usb-storage: device scan complete Jul8 16:52:35 localhost kernel: SCSI device sda: 1000944 512-byte hdwr sectors (512 MB) Jul8 16:52:35 localhost kernel: sda: Write Protect is off
 Jul8 16:52:35 localhost kernel: sda: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00 Jul8 16:52:35 localhost kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write through Jul8 16:52:35 localhost kernel: SCSI device sda: 1000944 512-byte
 hdwr sectors (512 MB) Jul8 16:52:35 localhost kernel: sda: Write Protect is off Jul8 16:52:35 localhost kernel: sda: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00 Jul8 16:52:35 localhost kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write
 through Jul8 16:52:35 localhost kernel:sda: sda1 Jul8 16:52:35 localhost kernel: Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 Jul8 16:52:35 localhost scsi.agent
[10918]:sd_mod: loaded sucessfully (for disk) Jul8 16:52:35 localhost udev[10951]: configured rule in '/etc/udev/rules.d/z_hal-plugdev.rules[2]' applied, 'sda' becomes '%k' Jul8 16:52:35 localhost udev[10951]: creating device node '/dev/sda'
 Jul8 16:52:35 localhost udev[10970]: configured rule in '/etc/udev/rules.d/local.rules[1]' applied, added symlink 'flash' Jul8 16:52:35 localhost udev[10970]: configured rule in '/etc/udev/rules.d/local.rules[1]' applied, 'sda1' becomes '%k'
 Jul8 16:52:35 localhost udev[10970]: creating device node '/dev/sda1' What might have gone wrong with that non-working drive? How to make it usable?It doesn't look like anything is that wrong here.Does fdisk -l
find the drive?If so, it may just need to bereformatted/repartitioned.--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: Problem Stopping mplayer

[Derek]

Tell mozilla to open it with gmplayer,then when your done you can just quit it. On 7/2/06, Carl Fink [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:On Sun, Jul 02, 2006 at 10:00:49AM -0400, Thomas H. George wrote:
 In contrast, mplayer takes over the current mozilla window displaying play/pause/stop buttons in the lower left corner of an otherwise blank window. To continue accessing the web it is necessary to open another
 navigator window. Then if mozilla is stopped all the windows are closed and so access to the mplayer controls is lost.With Firefox I don't see this behavior.I can open a new tab and keepworking, and closing the tab mozilla-mplayer is displaying in (or just
hitting back) stops the playing.--Carl Fink [EMAIL PROTECTED]If you attempt to fix something that isn't broken, it will be.
-Bruce Tognazzini--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact 
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Re: Upgrade from Sarge to Etch

[Derek]

Use etch instead of testing,that way when etch becomes stable you wont be upgrading to testing again.Here is my sources.list# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux testing _Etch_ - Official Snapshot i386 Binary-1 (20060302)]/ etch main
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-freedeb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates maindeb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates mainafter you change your 
source.list,do apt-get updateapt-get dist-upgradeOn 7/2/06, Ron Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-Hash: SHA1Alejandro wrote:
 Dear all, I have DEbian Sarge and I want to upgrade to Etch (testing). I have read that I have to modify the sources.list file with the correct repositories and then execute apt-get update  apt-get dist-upgrade.
 My question is this: is it convenient to keep the security repository like stable or do I have to edit it with testing as for main packages ??? In other words, which is better for Etch (tetsing):
 deb http://security.debian.org/ sarge/updates main contrib or deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
Stable security.d.o does not make sense if you are otherwise usingthe testing branch.- --Ron Johnson, Jr.Jefferson LAUSAIs common sense really valid?For example, it is common sense to white-power racists that
whites are superior to blacks, and that those with brown skinsare mud people.However, that common sense is obviously wrong.-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.orgiD8DBQFEqGGIS9HxQb37XmcRAjTbAKDkpkWr+AgdWpW7+YW/UAfiZTKn3gCff2gRu8ZUsyQfjgBO/eprHC2QNu4==I41v-END PGP SIGNATURE-
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Re: Upgrade from Sarge to Etch

[Derek]

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates maindeb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates mainis what it should be
On 7/2/06, Alejandro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Ron Johnson escribió: Alejandro wrote: Dear all, I have DEbian Sarge and I want to upgrade to Etch (testing). I have read that I have to modify the 
sources.list file with the correct repositories and then execute apt-get update  apt-get dist-upgrade. My question is this: is it convenient to keep the security repository
 like stable or do I have to edit it with testing as for main packages ??? In other words, which is better for Etch (tetsing):
 deb http://security.debian.org/ sarge/updates main contrib or deb http://security.debian.org/
 testing/updates main contrib non-free Stable security.d.o does not make sense if you are otherwise using the testing branch.So this should be my security linedeb 
http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-freePlease confirm to me because I'mnot an expert , THANKS A LOTAlejandro--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: Upgrade from Sarge to Etch

[Derek]

etch and testing are the same thing,using testing instead of etch could lead to a accidental upgrade.On 7/2/06, Shawn Lamson 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:On Sun, 02 Jul 2006 19:00:22 -0700Andrew Sackville-West 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, Jul 02, 2006 at 08:15:03PM -0400, Shawn Lamson wrote:   from 
http://www.debian.org/security/   You can use apt to easily get the latest security updates. This  requires a line such as   deb 
http://security.debian.org/ sarge/updates main contrib non-free - snip - In other words, which is better for Etch (tetsing):  
   deb http://security.debian.org/ sarge/updates main contrib or   *   deb 
http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free * use this one for security updates for testing (which will track testing and leave etch behind when it moves to stable). To follow
 etch into stable, replace testing with etch above.i guess i was always under the impression that security updates were always for stable (sarge) ... sorry.I agree about using testing rather than etch ... i run sid but almost always use stable testing and unstable unless i want to impress/confuse someone :)
Shawn a--Shawn Lamson[EMAIL PROTECTED]--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: X default fonts

[Derek Martin]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 11:50:00AM -0600, Cameron Matheson wrote:
 This is a really un-optimal solution, but if you edit your
 /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, you can change the order that fonts are
 preferred (just search for the prefer tags).  Move the fonts that
 are more readable nearer to the top.  Unfortunately, fonts.conf is a
 file that shouldn't be changed... it would be better to edit
 local.conf, but I don't know enough about how fontconfig works to do
 that.

I'll give this a shot... thanks.  

I'm still kind of wondering why such a crappy font gets chosen as the
default though.  Thin (cursive) script fonts being chosen as the
default should never happen...  FWIW, this is an automated install
where all packages are configured non-interactively.  Given that I
will need to change this on a whole bunch of machines, I'd really
prefer a solution that fixes it in the install process, rather than
having to manually edit files on a large number of machines...

If there's a better place to ask this kind of question, please let me
know.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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X default fonts

[Derek Martin]

Hi Folks,

What I did:

I'm using the debian installer to do an automated install of a bunch
of workstations.  We have various users who speak non-English
languages, so I installed every font package I could.

Problem:

I myself speak Korean (albeit badly).  After installing all the fonts,
two undesirable effects have occured:

1. When I bring up Gnome's font configuration dialog, the fonts that
are displayed in it are some kind of cursive script font.

2. Whenever I view Korean characters, the Korean font which is chosen
to display the fonts is also some kind of hand-written script.  

These hand-written fonts are really hard to read, except at fairly
large sizes.  When I read English texts, the fonts that are displayed
are not what I would prefer, but they're perfectly suitable.

In the font configurator, I've left the fonts configured as the
defaults, Sans, Serif, and Monospace.  So the questions are, why
does Debian choose these horrible fonts as the defaults, and how do I
change it?

I'll be more than happy to provide other information about my install,
if it will help.

Thanks!

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
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Re: Server REALLY slow after console messages

[Derek Martin]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 09:37:07AM +1200, Simon wrote:
 On 6/28/06, Jo Shields [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
 
 You've run out of RAM.
 
 
 Hmm... Could this be some sort of memory leak or something? Would
 anyone be able to offer any path of checking or solving this issue?

Run top, hit 'F' to select a field to sort on, then n for %MEM.  This
will show you what processes are sucking up your RAM.

Also run free -m to see how much memory you have, how much virtual
memory you have, and how much of it is in use.  Make sure you have as
much as you think you have.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Server REALLY slow after console messages

[Derek Martin]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 09:52:42AM +1200, Simon wrote:
 OK, i had to restart the server as there was critical services running
 on it... After rebooting and running the commands above:

Unfortunately it's too late...  To see what is causing the problem,
you need to look at it while the problem is happening...

There might be something interesting in syslog, but I'm sorry to say,
there probably won't be.  If you want to post them on a website, maybe
people can take a look...

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Server REALLY slow after console messages

[Derek Martin]

On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 05:24:02PM -0400, Carl Fink wrote:
 You're out of memory, just like the messages say.  Presumably some process
 on that server has used it all, including all your swap.  Eventually the
 process should be killed automatically or the program might segfault.  If
 you can get on as root and stay on long enough to type some commands, you
 could do:
 
   dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/spool/swapfile bs=1024 count=262144
 
   swapon /var/spool/swapfile

Realistically, this isn't likely to help...  He's already used up 5GB
of virtual memory -- 2GB of RAM and 3 GB of swap space.  At such a
point, the problem is the system is thrashing the swap disk... that
is, it is trying to rapidly pull processes back from swap space as the
kernel changes context between all the runable processes.  

People still advocate having swap that's anywhere from 1.5 to 3 times
your physical RAM...  That made sense on ancient hardware with 8MB of
RAM, when memory was relatively a lot slower and way more expensive,
but I think on modern hardware, that idea is totally brain-dead.  Part
of the problem is that memory speeds have not kept up with CPU
improvements (so context switches kill you), but mostly I think it's
that memory is way, way faster than disk (especially as compared to 20
years ago), so virtual memory doesn't buy you as much as it used to on
paleolithic hardware.

If you're actively using 3GB of swap, there's no way your disks can
keep up to the CPU's context switches, and your system is dead in the
water (note: emphasis on ACTIVELY -- If you have a 3GB process swapped
to disk, but it's just sitting around doing nothing, it's not going to
kill your system... at least not until someone decides they need to
use it again).

The only real solution is to buy more RAM, particularly if this
problem continues to reoccur.  Though, someone suggested a memory
leak... there's a real possibility that one of the processes (or more
than one) does actually have one.  That would be where getting output
from top while the system is thrashing would be useful.  It's
difficult to get due to the state of the system, but totally necessary
to figure out what's really going on.  Steps that might help:

  1. log in on the machine's console.  There's less work for the
 system to do, compared with logging in over the network, so
 logging in locally should be easier.

  2. Boost the priority of your shell (you must be root).  This
 command will do it (including the $$):

 # renice -20 $$

If the system is at all capable of being responsive, this should make
your shell usable.  The $$ is an automatic shell variable which
expands to the process id of your shell.  Here's an example.

First, let's show what the process id of my shell is:

[EMAIL PROTECTED] ddm]# echo $$
13357

Now, notice the NI value for that PID in the output of ps -elf, below:

[EMAIL PROTECTED] ddm]# ps -elf |egrep $$|PPID
F S UIDPID  PPID  C PRI  NI ADDR SZ WCHAN  STIME TTY  TIME CMD
4 S root 13357 13355  0  76   0 -  1389 wait   22:44 pts/500:00:00 -bash
4 R root 13439 13357  0  76   0 -  1415 -  22:47 pts/500:00:00 ps 
-elf

It's 0, which is the normal nice value for any process.  This means
the process has the default priority, same as every other normal
process on the system.  But by reducing the nice value, we increase
the priority.  Not exactly intuitive, I know... but just remember that
by reducing the NICE value, we are making our process less nice than
before.  :)

[EMAIL PROTECTED] ddm]# renice -20 $$
13357: old priority 0, new priority -20

Now, notice the new NICE value in the output of ps:

[EMAIL PROTECTED] ddm]# ps -elf |egrep $$|PPID
F S UIDPID  PPID  C PRI  NI ADDR SZ WCHAN  STIME TTY  TIME CMD
4 S root 13357 13355  0  60 -20 -  1389 wait   22:44 pts/500:00:00 -bash
4 R root 13460 13357  0  60 -20 -  1415 -  22:51 pts/500:00:00 ps 
-elf
0 R root 13461 13357  0  60 -20 -  1235 -  22:51 pts/500:00:00 
egrep 13357|PPID


We've changed the nice value to -20, as low as it can go, i.e. it's
the least nice we can make our process.  You must be root to reduce
the nice value...  Regular users can only increase it.  The idea is to
make processes which the user is running for a long time in the
background be nice to other users...

So, once you log in, make sure renice -20 $$ is the first thing you
do.  After that, the system may respond better for you... but also
realize that all the other processes will run worse for everyone else.

If your system is thrashing like this, about the only solution is to
stop and restart proceses (or just reboot)... but the above is meant
to give you a way to see WHY the system is falling over, so hopefully
you can do something to prevent it after you do finally reboot the
system. ;-)

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Server REALLY slow after console messages

[Derek Martin]

...  ;-)

The essential point is this: If you are swapping busy processes, you
are pretty much already screwed.  Anything you do to try to fix it
(like logging in) is going to require more memory, which will only
make the problem worse...  If you don't manage to catch it soon
enough, it's game over for your server.  You need to get in quickly,
kill the offending processes, and figure out why they're misbehaving
in order to prevent a reoccurence.

Other things *can* help too...  If the machine is a busy network
server, you could unplug it from the network.  Eventually all the
requests it's trying to serve will time out, and the machine will
recover.  But it could take 5-10 minutes, or 5-10 hours... depending
on how busy the server really was.  You probably can't afford to wait
that long. :(  So, while it does help, it's kind of questionable how
useful it is in practice...  Really, it depends on your environment.

 Hmm ... depending on how the offending process starts, ulimit might
 be a way to prevent future memory ballooning.

It could help -- but the processes will die unexpectedly when they
exceed their limit, just as they would if the kernel's Out Of Memory
killer did the job...  That's not much of an improvement.  From the
end user's perspective, your server is still toast.  But at least it
could allow the system to stay usable enough for the admins to log in
and figure out what's going wrong... sure.  On the whole though, I
don't think this is a condition you want to deal with -- if you set
the limit too low, processes which are NOT misbehaving may well die
when there are plenty of system resources to allocate to them.  That's
not a good thing.

Realistically, renicing the shell as I suggested in my other post also
probably won't help much -- unless you catch the problem early.  But
it's probably your best shot (especially if you DO catch it early).

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: multiple identities with mutt

[Derek Martin]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 06:03:42AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
  Why?  I have TBird.  Besides, the answer isn't always write
  one.  Some of us aren't whiz-bang software engineers, thanks.
 
 With Python and the curses, Gtk, Qt, POP3, IMAP, SMTP  RCF822
 modules, writing a new MUA shouldn't be *that* imposing of a task.

If you know nothing about programming, I assure you that it is a
monumentally imposing task.  Linux isn't just for programmers... 

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: What does it mean 'LANG=C'

[Derek Martin]

On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 11:15:52AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
 Derek Martin wrote:
  On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 10:48:28AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
  When US keyboards have the Euro symbol on it, then it will have
   happened.
  
  Well, I don't think that is or should be a requirement...  I
  mean, why limit that idea to just the Euro symbol?
 
 Said nothing about limit and only.  The point was that when US
 h/w is internationalized enough to have foreign symbols on it,
 typing them will be, by default, mundane.

The point I was trying to make is that this is an extremely arbitrary
measure of whether or not a particular keyboard, or the OS you're
using it under, is Unicode-friendly.  The keyboard can only be so big
before it loses its usefulness...  The US keyboard already has a fine
array of characters on it.  I would venture a guess that the vast
majority of US citizens who own a computer will never have a reason to
type the Euro symbol as long as they live... so why should the US
keyboard have it?

What is needed is a handy way to enter characters that are NOT on
it...  And it sounds like SCIM is the answer I'm looking for, from
another post in this thread.  However, as it turns out I already have
this installed on my Debian systems at work), and much like the other
IMEs I've tried to get working, the documentation seems to be
nonexistant (or at least I couldn't find much of anything useful in
the 10 minutes I had to look this afternoon).

 Until then, console apps (and thus the OS) won't be UTF-friendly.

Actually, you may find these helpful:

  http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Euro-Char-Support/
  http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Belgian-HOWTO/configuration.html

Particularly the first.  While I don't speak Belgian, I did find that
the second discussed several ways to configure the system to allow the
entry of accented latin characters.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: cron and kmessage

[Derek Martin]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 07:51:58PM -0400, Kamaraju Kusumanchi wrote:
 My actual problem is that I want to display a message at specific
 times (every 0th, 30th minute of hour) on the user's screen. I
 thought I can do this with cron and kmessage.
[snip] 
 But then it does not display the dialog on the screen. Instead it sends an 
 email to the user's address with the following message
 
 kdialog: cannot connect to X server

These days the X Window System uses a reasonably decent authentication
scheme (with a silly name), called MIT-MAGIC-COOKIES.  When a user
starts their X session, it runs xauth for them to create their session
cookie.  You can see these using the xauth command:

  $ xauth list
  myhost/unix:0  MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 85b25d08e07043401010101010101010
  localhost/unix:0  MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 85b25d08e07043401010101010101010

Not that I'm really worried about anyone accessing my display, but I
sanitized my cookie above with the 1010... sequence.

By default, xauth uses the file $HOME/.Xauthority to store this
information.  If your user's home directory is not on NFS, or if it is
on NFS and you are using the no_root_squash mount option, your
processes running as root will have access to that file.  You can
either add these cookies to your own Xauthority file, or you could
tell the system to use the user's xauthority file by setting the
XAUTHORITY environment variable and the DISPLAY variable in your
script, like this:

  export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0
  export XAUTHORITY=~user/.Xauthority
  kdialog blahblahblah...

You will, of course, need to figure out who is logged in via X.  If
you know it will always be a particular person (i.e. yourself), you
can just put that person's username hardcoded in your script, like I
did above.  Otherwise, you'll need to figure it out programmatically.
You can do that by using the w command.  If the user is logged in
through X, their terminal will show up as something like ':0' in the
output of w, so you can grep on that:

  $ w |grep ':0'
   09:06:59 up 29 min,  5 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.14, 0.19
  root tty1 -08:586:01   0.24s  0.24s -bash
  user :0   -08:40   ?xdm?   1:22   0.23s /bin/bash
  
Unfortunately times can also match, since it's quite common for the
sequence :0 to show up in times (like 6:01 in the line for root, which
we don't want).  We can fix that though.  Normally in the output of w,
the display is shown as :0 or :0.0 with whitespace after the zero.
So, a better pattern to match on (using egrep instead of grep) might be
this one:

  $ w |egrep ':0(.0|)\W'
  user  :0   -08:40   ?xdm?   1:22   0.23s /bin/bash 

Now you can use a tool like awk or cut to get just the username from
that line:

  $ user=`w |egrep ':0(.0|)\W' |awk '{print $1}'`

Now you have the user's name in the variable $user.  But you can't use
the tilde trick with a variable, i.e. if $user is user, the shell
will unfortunately not expand ~$user to the same as ~user.  You'll
need to grep the user's passwd file entry and cut it out of that, like
this:

  $ grep ^$user: /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f 6

Now assign that to say, $userhome:

  $ userhome=`grep ^$user: /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f 6`

All together, your script will look like this:

  #!/bin/sh
  user=`w |egrep ':0(.0|)\W' |awk '{print $1}'`
  userhome=`grep ^$user: /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f 6`
  export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0
  export XAUTHORITY=$userhome/.Xauthority
  kdialog blahblahblah...

If you have multiple displays (i.e. :1.0, etc.) you might need to
change your egrep pattern.  If there's anything else weird about your
system, you'll have to figure that out for yourself too... ;-)

Now, if you CAN'T access the user's cookie file for some reason
(having it on an NFS file system being the usual reason), an
alternative might be to use the wall command to write your message to
the console and all logged in terminals...  This is the usual way for
the system administrator to communicate with all logged in users.
It's a little bit annoying, because it interrupts what the user is
doing in their terminal, but that is after all the idea.  You want to
make sure they see it...  If they are doing something like editing a
file in vi, where writing to their terminals is really disruptive,
users can redwraw their terminals by pressing ^L.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: What does it mean 'LANG=C'

[Derek Martin]

On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 08:01:21PM +0700, Surachai Locharoen wrote:
 I just want to know 'LANG=C' what does it mean? Normally, I see LANG is
 set to laguage which exist in the real world such as en, th, fr.

The LANG variable sets the user's locale, which tells the system what
language and local conventions for things like time, money, numbers,
etc. the user prefers to use.  The primary importance of this is to
tell the system what character set the user is using (and therefore
what characters the user can see on terminals, and such.)

Modern systems are moving to UTF-8 environments, which makes the
language part mostly irrelevant; it can display (almost) all
characters in all supported languages, regardless of what language the
user is using.  However, ancient Unix systems used a locale of 'C',
which uses the character set US-ASCII, and sorts things (like
directory entries, for example) according to the ASCII sequence of
characters.  

See the man page for locale in seciont 5 of the man pages for details:

  $ man 5 locale

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: What does it mean 'LANG=C'

[Derek Martin]

On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 07:37:51AM -0700, Xeno Campanoli wrote:
 I've wondered about that.  Why aren't modern systems just moving 
 straight to Unicode? 

Well, as I said, they are.  It's mostly the modern PEOPLE who are
not...  ;-)

Debian Sarge is pretty good as far as UTF-8 support, though for people
who want to use multiple languages (more than one of which are
non-latin languages) input support is still sub-optimal, hard to get
working, and extremely poorly documented (as far as I can tell).

I also use Fedora Core 4 on most of my personal systems, and I find
that to be a little better than Sarge (it's a bit more current).  I'm
sure the less stable distributions of Debian have the same level of
support as Fedora, but for various reasons I won't go into here, I
don't use those.

While the majority of people in the Windows world have switched to XP
by now, there are still a surprisingly large number of people using
Windows 98/ME (or even older releases) which don't support Unicode.
The same is true in the Unix world... or at least the people using
those systems haven't gotten around to updating their environments to
use the Unicode support their OS provides.

So, it's a complicated issue.  Maybe 10 years from now, everyone will
finally be using Unicode... but by then we'll probably have some other
standard too. ;-)

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: What does it mean 'LANG=C'

[Derek Martin]

On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 10:48:28AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
 When US keyboards have the Euro symbol on it, then it will have
 happened.

Well, I don't think that is or should be a requirement...  I mean, why
limit that idea to just the Euro symbol?  Why not include the Yen, or
the Korean Won, the British pound (they're still using their own
money, aren't they?), not to mention the thousands of other symbols
used by other cultures...

 P.S. - How do you enter a Euro symbol from a US kbd into Tbird?

Copy-paste from a web page or other source which has it?  I keep a
file in my home directory with a few common symbols that are hard or
impossible to type with a US keyboard:

℉ ℃ € ¥ £ ¤ × ÷ © ® ° ± ² ³ · ₤ ₩ ∞ ￡ ￥ ￦

 P.P.S. - How do you do the same from the console?

No idea...

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: What does it mean 'LANG=C'

[Derek Martin]

On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 11:54:54AM -0400, Derek Martin wrote:
  P.S. - How do you enter a Euro symbol from a US kbd into Tbird?
 
 Copy-paste from a web page or other source which has it?  I keep a
 file in my home directory with a few common symbols that are hard or
 impossible to type with a US keyboard:
 
 ℉ ℃ € ¥ £ ¤ × ÷ © ® ° ± ² ³ · ₤ ₩ ∞ ￡ ￥ ￦

BTW, there *is* another way...  If you have your keyboard configured
properly in your XF86Config file, you can type these characters, along
with most of the accented latin characters, using some combination of
Alt and/or Meta plus the regular keys.  Originally I did exactly that,
though I don't recall how the keyboard was configured, and it's since
changed and I'm unable to do that now.  You might have to configure
your keyboard as US-International or enable dead keys, or something
like that...


-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: iptables log target logs everything to tty*. Why?

[Derek Martin]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 01:51:38PM +0200, Erik Persson wrote:
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# cat /proc/sys/kernel/printk
 3   4   1   7

Cool, I didn't realize this file existed in the /proc filesystem.
Time to review the documentation... ;-)

 man proc reveals that the 1 is the lowest value that console log level 
 may be set to. Thats the reson, I guess, that klogd -c 0 did fail.

Yup, it's based on the loglevels for syslog.  There is no level 0...

 There might be a slightly easier way...  
 
 The dmesg command, in addition to dumping the kernel's message buffer
 to the screen, can set the maximum priority (number) of messages which
 get logged to the console.  For example:
 
   dmesg -n 1
 
 This would do the same thing as klogd -c 1 I guess.

The main difference is that this method lets you change the level on
the fly...  you don't need to restart klogd for this to take effect.
If klogd is not running, do the kernel messages get saved in the
kernel buffer?  With normal syslog messages, of course, you would lose
them...

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: group ownership of /dev files

[Derek Martin]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 10:16:26AM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
 also sprach Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2006.06.23.0454 +0200]:
  My conclusion is that it seems from a security standpoint, and
  from an ease-of-administration standpoint, pam_console is the
  clear winner over both of the other proposed solutions.  So yes,
  when I said pam_console was nice, I meant it, and I stand by
  that.  Have I missed something in my analysis?  If I have, I would
  certainly like to learn what it is.
 
 Go ahead then and use it. But please do not make statements about
 Debian not meeting the requirements of seasoned Unix admins such as
 yourself. 

Why should I not make such statements?  If Debian is not meeting the
needs of people who want to use it, why should the Debian community
not strive to meet those needs?  Is the Debian community not open to
change for the better?  Are its developers not open-minded enough to
consider that a solution they previously dismissed might not actually
better than the one(s) they've proposed?  I certainly hope that's not
the case.

 We, as in Debian, are going one path with our system, and
 while someone might well like to deviate, one thing you cannot say
 is that we don't reason with every step we take.

I never said you didn't... but can you provide a logical reason for
discluding support for pam_console?  Can you find any fault with my
analysis?  You may not personally like pam_console, but it appears to
be technically superior to all of the debian-supported solutions to
the problem of how to provide access to system resources to
workstation users -- a problem which lots of sysadmins must wrestle
with.  So what logical reason is there not to include it?  Does Debian
not strive to be the best distribution it can be, meeting the needs of
as many users as it can?  I'm not asking these questions rhetorically,
I'm quite serious.  And if you have a logical technical argument
against pam_console, I'd still like to hear it.

  Based on the above analysis, I rather strongly disagree.  In every
  way, pam_console seems up to the challenge, though it needs the
  enhancement I mentioned regarding killing user processes before it
  is truly ready.
 
 Doesn't sound like a solution I'd want on my machines.

Fine.  But, why?  I don't think ...because I don't like it is a very
reasoned or sensible justification, but that seems to be the only
justification you are willing to offer.  This is starting to seem an
awful lot to me like unreasoned anti-RedHat prejudice getting in the
way of providing solid technical solutions to real problems faced by
real users every day...

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: Replying to list

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 11:07:13PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
 Derek Martin wrote:
  It is probably the most configurable and most powerful MUA in
  existence today, making easy many things which should be and making
  possible many things which are hard or impossible using other clients.
 
 While making hard what other clients make trivial and makes it an
 extremely poor choice for anyone with more than one email address who wants to
 keep the mail truly separate.  

I have about two dozen e-mail addresses, and I find Mutt does an excellent
job of dealing with them.  Perhaps you are just not yet familiar enough
with Mutt's features to know how powerful it can be for managing
this...  It actually provides numerous methods of dealing with that
problem.

 Mutt's good, granted, but it has warts just like them all.

Absolutely true, though I don't think this is one of them.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: group ownership of /dev files

[Derek Martin]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 02:27:19PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
 also sprach Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2006.06.23.1403 +0200]:
  Why should I not make such statements?  If Debian is not meeting
  the needs of people who want to use it, why should the Debian
  community not strive to meet those needs?  Is the Debian community
  not open to change for the better?
 
 Sure, for the better. In this case, however, you are the only one
 who thinks it's better. 

Given that, as you say, there are numerous discussions on the net
about it, that obviously can't be true.  Let me say that my purpose in
pursuing this argument is to understand what the reasons are.  I'm not
attempting to attack you or Debian for their decision.  I'm simply
trying to understand it.  Thusfar, I haven't seen any logical,
technical argument that makes that decision make sense...

  I never said you didn't... but can you provide a logical reason
  for discluding support for pam_console? 
 
 Please go through the numerous discussions on the topic in the list
 archives. You are not the first to raise this issue, you know?

I have already looked at several which you and others have brought up.
In every case I've seen so far, I've shown that pam_console is at
least no worse than the alternatives, and often actually better.  

  Can you find any fault with my analysis?  You may not personally
  like pam_console, but it appears to be technically superior to all
  of the debian-supported solutions to the problem of how to provide
  access to system resources to workstation users
 
 Then I suggest you take a look at the code.

If the code is bad, it can be fixed.  In principle though, the
approach that pam_console takes is technically superior to all of the
alternatives.  You say that Debian has considered pam_console and
rejected it for good reasons.  I'm trying to find out what those
reasons are...  If the sole technical objection to it is bad
implementation, why didn't the Debian developers decide to simply fix
the code, as they have done with so many other projects?

People have pointed me at a few discussions, but in regards to each of
those discussions, all of the supported methods are actually worse
than pam_console, as I've shown.   Did you read my analysis, and
seriously consider what I wrote?  


  And if you have a logical technical argument against pam_console,
  I'd still like to hear it.
 
 It's an ugly hack that will cause more problem than it's worth.

That's not a technical argument.  It's simply an opinion for which you
have provided no basis.  I've managed hundreds of Red Hat systems
which used it, made extensive use of it myself, and have encountered
no such problems.   It does, however, effectively provide access to
peripherals to anyone who logs in on the console.  Your assertion
appears to be baseless.


  Fine.  But, why?  I don't think ...because I don't like it is a very
  reasoned or sensible justification, but that seems to be the only
  justification you are willing to offer. 
 
 You are talking about killing processes and you're asking me why?
 
 How, for instance, do you want to cope with the situation of letting
 a second user log in in KDE or Gnome while the first session is
 locked? Just kill the first session?

First of all, my intention was that this extension should be an
option, not mandantory.  PAM allows the modules to have options...  If
that option is not appropriate for your installation, don't use it.
Even without it, pam_console still is more secure (at least in
principle, without considering the actual implementation) than the two
alternate solutions the Debian community seems to favor.

Secondly, how do you propose to allow more than one user to log into
the same console simultaneously?  The only way this scenario is
plausible is if there is more than one physical console attached to
the system, or if the same user wants to start multiple sessions in
different virtual consoles; this kind of usage is relatively rare, and
in either case that particular feature is obviously not for you.  But
also in that case, someone is going to lose out on using the
peripherals, guaranteed.  A technical solution which accepts this idea
is possible.  pam_console could create a lock file, which it would use
to determine whether or not someone was already using (or at least had
the rights to use) the hardware.  If so, it would not reset the
permissions upon a second user's login.  

  This is starting to seem an awful lot to me like unreasoned
  anti-RedHat prejudice getting in the way of providing solid
  technical solutions to real problems faced by real users every
  day...
 
 Go ahead and provide the solid solution then. Don't expect others to
 do it for you.

Isn't that precisely what Linux distributions do?  They provide
solutions for people so they don't have to do it themselves...

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: xdm source .bash_profile

[Derek Martin]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 12:00:03AM +0200, Pavlos Parissis wrote:
 Hello all,
 
 I have been trying to make my X to source the .bash_profile in order
 to set my $PATH variable.

.xsession is the best place to deal with this, but you need to start
your X session in this file, or else it will just end.  For example,
my .xsession file looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

# start my X session

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi
xrdb -merge .Xdefaults
ssh-agent gnome-session

This starts gnome, and runs it from ssh-agent.  That's a neat trick
which makes your ssh agent accessible to all xterms started from
within your X session.  If you use KDE, replace that with startkde.

The key is, once this script ends, so does your X session.  If you
just source your .bashrc file, your X session will end before it has a
chance to start.  ;-)

 Since ~/.bashrc is invoked by no login shell I don't really mind to
 use this trick.  But, I do mind that fact that I have duplicate
 information, $PATH is set in two files.

The usual way to handle this is to put environment initialization
commands only in .bashrc, and source .bashrc from .profile (or
.bash_profile).  Note that you don't want to put commands which
generate output in .bashrc -- if you do this, it can cause problems
for your ssh sessions (particularly using scp, etc.) which will
receive the output of the .bashrc script, and corrupt the data stream.
To counteract that problem, only put commands which generate output in
.profile (or .bash_profile).

HTH

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: xdm source .bash_profile

[Derek Martin]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 01:22:04AM +0200, Pavlos Parissis wrote:
  This starts gnome, and runs it from ssh-agent.  That's a neat trick
  which makes your ssh agent accessible to all xterms started from
  within your X session.  If you use KDE, replace that with startkde.
 
 Side effect of that approach is that you have to use only one Desktop 
 Environment.

Well, not necessarily.  instead of starting a desktop environment, you
could just start an xterm, by itself, and DON'T run it in the
background.  From that xterm, you can start your desktop environment
on the command line.  It's a little bit yucky, but it gets you what
you want...  But, you have to be really careful.  If you close that
xterm, your X session will die.

  The key is, once this script ends, so does your X session.  If you
  just source your .bashrc file, your X session will end before it has a
  chance to start.  ;-)
 
 That's explain why it was not working for me the trick to just
 source the ~/.bash_profile from ~/.xsession without starting a
 window manager/D.E..

Yup. :(

 Thank you very much,

You're welcome!

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: iptables log target logs everything to tty*. Why?

[Derek Martin]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 12:58:42AM +0200, Erik Persson wrote:
 I tried with klogd -c 0 but the messages just kept on coming. It seems 
 that the minimal allowed log level for kernel messages was set to 4 on 
 the router and klogd -c 0 thus didn't change the kernel log level as I 
 thought. This solves the problem since I now know what caused it. I will 
 probably change the iptables log level to debug to get rid of the messages.

Did you restart klogd?  I don't believe it will change unless you stop
the old running klogd and restart it.  If you didn't stop the
previously running one, the new one you started won't do anything,
except exit with an error message, Already running.

There might be a slightly easier way...  

The dmesg command, in addition to dumping the kernel's message buffer
to the screen, can set the maximum priority (number) of messages which
get logged to the console.  For example:

  dmesg -n 1

This will log only panic messages to the console.  IIRC the default
level of iptables messages is 5 (warn), so this will prevent the
messages from being printed to the console.  You can add it to your
init scripts somewhere, or your script for starting your iptables
rules...

If you want to receive kernel messages on the console for priorities
higher than warn, you should be able to use up to dmesg -n 4 and still
eliminate the messages from being printed.  In practice, I find that
having the messages logged to syslog is enough, so logging only
critical messages works out fine.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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group ownership of /dev files

[Derek Martin]

Hi folks,

If there's a more appropriate place to ask this, please let me know.

I manage a large number of workstations which run Debian.  Everyone in
my organization need to be able to access any of these workstations,
and they expect basic services (like sound, for example) to work
properly.

Red Hat has a nice PAM library that lets people access, say, the sound
devices when they log in on the console.  Thus anyone who logs in
automatically has access to the sound devices.  However, this facility
appears to be lacking in Sarge.

Note: it is not possible for me to add everyone to the audio group.
The workstations get all authentication and group memberships from 
corporate resources which I do not control.  And, even if it were
possible, it would be a very bad solution given the large number of
machines and large number of users; it would be a maintenance
nightmare.

Conveniently, everyone who needs to access these machines is in a
common group.  So, barring trying to compile pam_console for debian
and making a custom debian package of it, which I don't want to get
involved with, the obvious solution, by far the cleanest and most
appropriate solution, is to change the group ownership of the
necessary devices to that group.  Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Except that Debian seems to have some mechanism which, at boot time,
resets the group ownership of /dev files.  Worse yet, there seems to
be more than one of them...  I found /etc/init.d/makdev AND REMOVED
IT, but despite that, the /dev file ownerships are still getting reset
at boot time.  Thus, whenever the systems are rebooted, users can't
use sound.  It's understandably annoying to them, which makes it
rather annoying to me.  ;-)

Anyone know how I can make this stop?  Or alternately, know a
different way to solve this which I have not already discussed?

FWIW, as a long-time system administrator of Unix systems in a wide
variety of environments, I consider this behavior highly undesireable,
and would like to suggest to any developers listening that they
consider changing that behavior.  It combined with the lack of
pam_console or something like it, this behavior makes managing user
access to devices quite difficult.  If you're managing your own box,
it's a simple matter to add yourself to the audio group; but in many
different computing environments, that's just not a feasible option.

Thanks.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: group ownership of /dev files

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 11:07:37PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
[pam_console]
  devices when they log in on the console.  Thus anyone who logs in
  automatically has access to the sound devices.  However, this facility
  appears to be lacking in Sarge.
 
 by choice, yes.
 
 http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/06/msg00944.html

I agree the post's points are valid... However how is this any worse
than adding all the users to the audio group (a solution recommended
in that very message, and many other posts on various debian lists)?
Either way, this is still possible...  In my scenario, everyone who
uses these machines would need to be added to the audio group.  So
there is no gain in security here by comparison.

I would argue that pam_console is actually better, because it offers
only the temporary ability to do this, and the user had to log in on
the console to get the privilege in the first place.  Using the group
method, EVERYONE in the group can do this at any time, as long as the
sound device isn't already open by someone else.  Any such user can
log in remotely and repeatedly open the sound device whenever any
other user releases it...

So, I don't see how you can argue that using a group is better than
pam_console.  And in any event, the only problem it causes is a DoS of
that resource, which the system administrator can fix right quick, and
can disable the account of the offending user.  This is annoying, but
it's not really a big deal, and the user can be dealt with in other
ways.  IIRC pam_console also has mechanisms to prevent it from working
for specific users/groups, so there again, it would seem to be a
better solution.  I might be mistaken on that last point though; it's
been years since I had any reason to configure it beyond Red Hat's
defaults.

But anyway...

 check out pam_group and /etc/security/group.conf for another
 approach, which is not secure (read comments), but a little better.

Thanks for the tip... this may work, though at a quick glance, again,
I don't see how this is better than pam_console.

 You are probably using udev which creates them after boot.
 
 dpkg -l udev

Yup.

  Anyone know how I can make this stop?  Or alternately, know a
  different way to solve this which I have not already discussed?
 
 You could help with modularisation of makedev, which will allow you
 to specify policies for device files.

Is udev using makedev, or equivalent?  If not, I would think that the
better way to go would be to look into configuring policies in udev...
In particular, it would be nice if whatever is managing the devices
noticed that the device files exist already, and leave them alone if
only the permissions and/or ownerships have changed.

 dpkg -P udev

Any potential gotchas to doing that?  It might be the right solution
for my purposes...

 you get what you ask for. Now if you're not using devfs but a plain
 /dev, you should be fine.

FWIW, I didn't ask for udev.  It appears to be the default...  I'll
need to read up on udev, and see what it provides.  Been meaning to do
that for a long time now...  ;-)

Thanks for your response, and thanks to everyone else who responded.
It looks like a real solution to my problem is going to have to wait
until I do a little more research, but at least I know what to look at
now.


-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: group ownership of /dev files

[Derek Martin]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 12:41:51AM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
 also sprach Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2006.06.23.0017 +0200]:
  Thanks for the tip... this may work, though at a quick glance,
  again, I don't see how this is better than pam_console.
 
 It does not mess with the filesystem for a start.

OK... but how is this a win?  One of the reasons devices were
implemented as files was to make precisely this kind of manipulation
easy.  It's simple, efficient, and it works as expected.  Let's try to
make a fair technical analysis.

Think about what problem we're trying to solve: access to physical
devices connected to the hardware.  Who should be able to access those
devices?  It the overwhelming majority of cases, the person who is
sitting in front of the hardware, i.e. logged in at the console.  That
person changes each time someone new logs in and logs out.  If it were
data in a file to which the user needed access, we would just change
the permissions on the file.  But the point is, devices are just
files.  They were designed that way specifically so there would be no
difference in the way they are treated.  Thus, the most obvious,
logical, and efficient way to change the access to those resources is
to change the permissions on the device file to that of a user who
logs in at the console.  That's exactly what pam_console does,
precisely in the way that Unix was originally intended and designed to
do it...

As for the security implications of someone logging in at the console
and holding the resources hostage:  with the pam_console solution, far
fewer people can do this (only the last person to log in at the
console) than can do so if you just add trusted users to the audio
group.  In the latter case, anyone in the audio group can execute such
an attack, at any time.  In that regard, while admittedly still
flawed, pam_console appears technically superior to adding users to
different groups for each of the device classes.  And from a systems
management point of view, it involves no administrative overhead,
whereas maintaining group files (or other authentication mechanisms
like LDAP) can become an administrative nightmare if you have a large
number of users.  There again, pam_console appears to be superior.

Now let's compare pam_console to the other solution that's being
offered here: pam_group. In most regards, pam_group actually seems to
be very similar to pam_console.  However, with pam_group, the user may
temporarily assigned to new groups.  While they have those group
privileges, as the referenced document itself points out, there's
nothing stopping the user from making their own SGID binaries that
grant them that privilege permanently.  Can such a privilege
escalation be executed using pam_console?  No.  pam_console only
grants temporary access to a specified resource to a user, by changing
the permisisons on the resource to that which the user already has...
No additional privileges can be gained in that manner.  Here again,
pam_console appears to be the winner.  [We must ignore the possibility
of an unknown priviledge escalation (probably to root) caused by a
programming error in the pam libraries themselves; such a bug could
exist in either library.]

Additionally, while I don't think it currently does this, there's no
reason I can think of that pam_console can't be extended to find all
of the user's processes which are accessing the devices (or files) it
is managing, and kill them after (not before -- race condition) it
changes the permissions back.  Obviously I already favor this approach
to managing the problem, and I think if such an extension were coded
up, it would make pam_console a vastly superior solution to the
problem compared to any other which has been mentioned here.  As far
as I can see, that would completely close all of the security holes
associated with granting users access to the device files.

[Note though that pam_group could certainly be extended in the same
way...  If I get bored enough, I might just look into coding that up
(as an option) for both libraries.  Both could probably benefit from a
common module of functions that does this.]

My conclusion is that it seems from a security standpoint, and from an
ease-of-administration standpoint, pam_console is the clear winner
over both of the other proposed solutions.  So yes, when I said
pam_console was nice, I meant it, and I stand by that.  Have I
missed something in my analysis?  If I have, I would certainly like to
learn what it is.

Why are inquiries on this list about the functionality of pam_console
met with such contempt and disdain?  Such a response doesn't seem to
hold up to technical analysis, and in fact appears to be entirely
baseless.

 There is no solution to your problem, not on a multiuser operating
 system.

Based on the above analysis, I rather strongly disagree.  In every
way, pam_console seems up to the challenge, though it needs the
enhancement I mentioned regarding killing user processes

Re: Replying to list

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 04:04:40PM -0500, Seth Goodman wrote:
 So getting back to the topic of this thread, insisting that all
 competent mailers have a 'Reply to List' function, when none of the
 most common mailers for people trapped in the most widely used operating
 system have the required feature, is not really helpful to them.  

For those with this concern, without considering the other points:
Mutt is arguably the most competent mailer in existence (or at least
one of them) and does have a Reply to List function.  It runs on
Windows, Linux, and virtually every other major platform in existence.
It is probably the most configurable and most powerful MUA in
existence today, making easy many things which should be and making
possible many things which are hard or impossible using other clients.
It's a good choice for anyone who is on a mailing list (or 12), or has
a job or hobby that requires a lot of mail processing.  It is
non-graphical, so it may have certain mild deficiencies related to
that, but nicely handles configuration of helper applications for
MIME types to compensate.

That said...

 We seem to be saying, in effect, if you aren't smart enough to
 already use Linux and have a competent MUA, get off this list.
 That is hardly welcoming to those who are curious.

Indeed!  While I happen to agree with the sentiment that ideally
everyone should use list reply, not everyone knows that such options
exist; and even if they do, not everyone has control over what mail
client they use.  The choice may be rammed down your throat by your
corporate IT department, and often is.  Also people who are on
mailing lists who do have such powerful tools (and complain that
everyone else should too) should also know that there are methods
available to them of dealing with mail from people who aren't
completely clued in.  There's no harm in politely pointing out to
people that there's a better way... but you should still be prepared
to deal with the problem yourself.

 The fact remains that most people who read their mail on Windows
 workstations, as I do, _don't_ have a 'Reply to List' button.  There are
 a lot more of them than 'nix systems.  

In many cases, lack of education is the issue.  Such mailers exist
for Windows.  You just have to know that, care, and get one.  But
unfortunately, there is no law requiring that anyone do any of those
three things...  ;-)

 If you'd like to see that change, as I would, perhaps we could be a
 little more accommodating and take the operation of their MUA's into
 account when deciding how this list operates.  We are just doing
 M$'s bidding when we make this mailing list cumbersome for Windows
 MUA's.  This may be a club, but let's not make it an exclusive one.

I missed the earlier part of the thread, so I'm not sure what point is
being advocated here.  I will say that header munging is often
requested to combat such problems.  The trouble is that header munging
often makes otherwise sane mail clients behave insanely (i.e. making
it difficult to reply to certain recipients when otherwise it would be
easy to select whether to reply to the sender, or to the list, or to
everyone in the recipient list; all of which are sometimes called
for).

The onus should be on the people who choose to run deficient mail
clients (even if only by choosing to work at a place that makes the
decision for them).  They should be the ones who need to correct their
recipients if their mailer can't do a good job of doing it for them.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D



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Re: find dangling symlinks

[Derek]

try cleanlinksOn 6/20/06, Michael Marsh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On 6/20/06, Johannes Zellner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: how do I find dangling symlinks?$ find -L path -type lshould do it.-L tells find to follow symlinks, and -type l
(that's a lowercase ell) matches symlinks.Since the only symlinksthat will show as symlinks when they're automatically dereferenced areones pointing to nothing, you should get a list of dangling links.
I tested this out, and it worked as desired, but it's possible thatthere might be cases where it breaks.In particular, long chains ofsymlinks break, and I haven't checked to see if those match.--Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarshhttp://mamarsh.blogspot.com--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: stuck in X11 transition

[Derek]

I had that same problem when upgrading xorg because i had opera installed,I removed it by doing dpkg -r opera then apt-get -f install and that did it.On 6/14/06, 
Marc Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 04:19:48PM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:
 apt-get -f remove cbb fails, apparently because of all the problems arising from being in mid-X11 transition (lots of unmet dependencies).Don't use apt-get to fix the problem.Apt-get doesn't allow broken
dependencies... and if you pass -f, *what you specify on the command lineis expected to be the solution to the problem*.So you told it to remove cbb, removing cbb didn't fix the indeterminatestate, apt-get told you so.
Use dpkg to remove the cbb package.-- Marc Wilson | Arnold's Addendum: Anything not fitting into these [EMAIL PROTECTED] | categories causes cancer in rats.
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Re: difference between .xinitrc and .xsession files

[Derek]

.xsession gets used by startx too.On 6/15/06, Olafur Jens Sigurdsson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Þann 2006-06-15, 11:54:02 (-0400) skrifaði Kamaraju Kusumanchi: Is there any document/wiki which explains the file name conventions of the various .[xX]* files in Debian system? In particular I am looking for the
 differences between .xinitrc, .xsession files.My understanding is the .xinitrc is read from the startx script and.xsession is read by xdm (or kdm, gdm).HTHOli--To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to 
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Re: Sound with ATI IXP150 AC'97

[Derek]

You need to install alsa-ossOn 6/14/06, Nicolas Sabouret [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi all,I use debian etch on my Compaq laptop and I don't understand how the soundcard works. I installer alsa packages, the sound card was detected andsome applications (like gcompris) work perfectly.However, most other sound application (
e.g. esd) don't work. It appearsthat the system has no /dev/dsp or /dev/audio device (even after aMAKEDEV).I really don't understand what the hell is going on. Can anybody help mesolve this issue or give me any hint ?
Thanks in advance,--Nicolas SABOURETLaboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6 (LIP6)8, rue du Capitaine Scott, 75015 Paris, Francehttp://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~sabouret
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Re: dpenedencies in testing totally broken :(

[Derek]

I have none of the problems that you speak of.