Extended descriptions of non-free/non-US packages.
This message may or may not be pertinent in future given the uncertain status of both non-free and non-US, but here goes anyway ... When I see a package that's in non-free or non-US I often wonder exactly why it's there. It would be really nice if every package explained why it was where it was. And for this to be required by policy if such a thing was appropriate. In detail, I want this at the bottom of every package description in non-free/non-US: - if it's in non-US, explain what parts of the software use crypto, since it's not always obvious. - if it's in non-free for patent reasons, give the patent numbers and the locations in which the patents are held. If it is DFSG compliant, explain this. Explain which parts of the software embody the patents. - if it's in non-free for DFSG non-compliance, explain which points of the DFSG are violated and specifically why not. Is this the best list? Should I take this to policy/devel? If there is agreement that this is a good idea where should I take it from here? -- Matthew Tuck: Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy My experience is that in general, if there's jobs programming in it, it's not worth programming in. Ultra Programming Language Project: http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/
Re: Extended descriptions of non-free/non-US packages.
"J.H.M. Dassen (Ray)" wrote: > Personally, I think this would clutter the package descriptions to little > benefit. A much more appropriate place IMO is /usr/share//copyright. The whole benefit of this proposal is so that you can know this information BEFORE you decide to install the package, since it determines whether I install the package. - if it is patent encumbered, I want to know if it applies to me before downloading - if it is non-free, I want to know whether I consider the license acceptable before downloading - etc. etc. However, even if it is not done, it would still be useful to have this specific information in /usr/share/doc or wherever. In particular, this information being readily available would likely prevent people asking specifically why X was in non-free, etc. -- Matthew Tuck: Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy My experience is that in general, if there's jobs programming in it, it's not worth programming in. Ultra Programming Language Project: http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/
Re: Hard Lock-Up Problems
"James M . Mastros" wrote:
> 1) Are their any unusual noizes noticable either during or slightly before
>this lockup?
Not unusual as such, like say the sound of a HD crashing (been through
that) but there is a reproducible pattern. There is usually a heavy
disk load (possibly this just makes it more likely to occur), then it
stops. A second later there's a split-second disk access, then another
second later it hangs.
> 2) Is your hard-drive under warranty?
No. That sounds ominous.
I've discovered that if I keep the disk space over 50Mb (100 to be
sure), files don't seem to be written where this stuffs up.
> 3) Do you get any log messages before lockup?
No.
> 4) Will pressing numlock toggle the LED?
No.
> 5) Does shift-scrolllock give you less then 128k of free swap?
When it's crashed shift, alt and ctrl scrolllock don't work. Before,
fsck uses up all memory but never starts using up swap. This is what I
would expect from something that reads the whole disk through, it's just
caching what it can, but not actually requiring the memory.
> 6) Have you run e2fsck -c -C0 -vv ? Have you run it repetedly?
>('man e2fsck' before running this command. Make shure you remount root
>readonly. Having messed that up once, let me assure you it is not a good
>thing.)
I just did that. It seems it found a bad block. The following was the
output;
hda: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequestError }
hda: read_intr: status=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBArect=3646226
sector = 1327826
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:04 (hda) sector 1327826
That's as good as I can transcribe it.
I ran it multiple times. The second time and later the error came out
twice but I think it only came out once the first time. Anyway, this
always crashes on "checking directory structure" in the usual way.
I ran badblocks -o and discovered the bad block was "663913". Running
multiple times seems to just come up with this one bad block. This is
not where I would have suspected to find it, more like 770xxx. Even
though e2fsck man says it marks the blocks it finds as bad, it still
seems to crash e2fsck.
Thanks for your help.
--
Matthew Tuck - Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (ICQ #8125618)
Check out the Ultra programming language project!
http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/
Hard Lock-Up Problems
About a month and a half ago I installed Debian Potato on my Cyrix 686-150(200) system with 32Mb of each of RAM and swap. My experience has been fairly positive, but I am having an extremely annoying problem with hard lockups. I quickly determined that these lockups seemed to be reproducible. Certain files tend to cause lockups when used. I've found a variety of files that do this - a gimp image I did (gzipping or copying), running mozilla m4 uncompressed, decompressing kernel source 2.2.5, etc. This wouldn't be so bad, except that the reboot fsck also seems to choke on this section of disk. It actually seems to be an off and on problem - more on than off - it takes me about 1-20 (random) reboots until the fsck will actually complete without a hard lockup. This little exercise can take around two hours out of my time. Luckily it doesn't seem to be doing too much damage. I'm suspecting something doesn't either like a specific disk position or consecutive positions, or a specific stream of bytes. I'm looking at either hardware, kernel or cmos settings. I'm running a dual boot system and my hardware has previously worked well on Win95, although i believe the motherboard had drivers. My mboard chipset is "VXPro-II PCI" and I'm using IDE. I've tried the 2.0.36 and 2.2.5 package images and compiling my own 2.2.1 and 2.0.36. I've been pointed to IDE bug workaround kernel compile options, but have tried them turned on. I've checked out the cmos and fiddled with any options that look like they might be a problem. I've tried reading various documentation suggested on the Debian pages (user faq, hardware compatibility), looking for bug reports, etc. So apologies if I've missed something somewhere. All this has come to no avail, so I can only ask the wider populace - do you know what the deal is here? Where is or how could I work out the problem? What can I do about it? Any help would be appreciated. A 'dmesg' output from a successful boot is included from my 2.2.5 kernel. Linux version 2.2.5 ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) (gcc version egcs-2.91.63 19990224 (egcs-1.1.2 pre-release-3)) #2 Fri Apr 16 18:58:40 EST 1999 Console: colour VGA+ 80x50 Calibrating delay loop... 149.50 BogoMIPS Memory: 29920k/32768k available (1600k kernel code, 412k reserved, 712k data, 124k init) Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode... Ok. VFS: Diskquotas version dquot_6.4.0 initialized CPU: Cyrix 6x86L 2x Core/Bus Clock stepping 02 Checking 386/387 coupling... OK, FPU using exception 16 error reporting. Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK. Checking for popad bug... OK. POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfdb31 PCI: Probing PCI hardware Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2 Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039 NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0 IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP Starting kswapd v 1.5 Real Time Clock Driver v1.09 tpqic02: Runtime config, $Revision: 1.10 $, $Date: 1997/01/26 07:13:20 $ tpqic02: DMA buffers: 20 blocks RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size loop: registered device at major 7 PCI_IDE: unknown IDE controller on PCI bus 00 device 2a, VID=3388, DID=8013 PCI_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later hda: Maxtor 72004 AP, ATA DISK drive hdb: ATAPI CD-ROM DRIVE 24X MAXIMUM, ATAPI CDROM drive hdc: Traxdata CDRW2260+, ATAPI CDROM drive ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 hda: Maxtor 72004 AP, 1916MB w/128kB Cache, CHS=973/64/63 hdb: ATAPI 20X CD-ROM drive, 120kB Cache Uniform CDROM driver Revision: 2.54 hdc: ATAPI 6X CD-ROM DVD-RAM CD-R/RW drive, 768kB Cache Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077 md driver 0.36.6 MAX_MD_DEV=4, MAX_REAL=8 scsi: Detection failed (no card) NCR53c406a: no available ports found sym53c416.c: Version 1.0.0 Failed initialization of WD-7000 SCSI card! EATA0: address 0x1f0 in use, skipping probe. EATA0: address 0x170 in use, skipping probe. DC390: 0 adapters found aec671x_detect: scsi : 0 hosts. scsi : detected total. Partition check: hda: hda1 hda2 < hda5 > hda3 hda4 VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. Freeing unused kernel memory: 124k freed NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0 for Linux NET4.0. Adding Swap: 32252k swap-space (priority -1) Serial driver version 4.27 with no serial options enabled ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A ttyS03 at 0x02e8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A CSLIP: code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California PPP: version 2.3.3 (demand dialling) PPP line discipline registered. registered device ppp0 PPP BSD Compression module registered PPP Deflate Compression module registered -- Matthew Tuck - Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (ICQ #8125618) Check out the Ultra programming language project! http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/
Bizarre Clock Problem
I'm having a problem where my clock seems to jump all over the place. At the moment I have to set it every start up, when I remember that is. I have searched the archives and not found anything. Basically the clock is out by a number of hours, usually in the past. I don't know if there is a pattern in this time difference, there is probably, but in my flailing about to fix things, I probably don't notice. I do set the hardware clock with hwclock. It's not a hardware fault because I can set it under Windows and it will stay correct. It seems every time I boot Linux it gets set backwards in time, and that these changes _accumulate_. My timezone and "clock as local time" settings have not changed and are correct. I am not running chrony, ntp, ntpdate, although I have when I was experimenting, and this might have happened when I removed them, although I am not sure. They may have been running at the same time. Reinstallation and purging has been unsuccessful in preventing the problem. I suspect something is going on in the rc scripts, although I don't have enough experience with them to tell. There is a file called /etc/rc0.d/S25hwclock.sh, and I don't know whether this is normal. Help! -- Matthew Tuck - Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (ICQ #8125618) Check out the Ultra programming language project! http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/
Re: Bizarre Clock Problem
Alexander Stavitsky wrote: > I had this problem couple of days ago. It appeares that > /etc/adjtime got corrupted somehow. Now I am wondering if that > is a bug. Anyway, try removing /etc/adjtime and setting the correct time > with date or ntpdate. In my case the problem went away. It's gone away for me too. Thank you very much for making my life a little easier. =) -- Matthew Tuck - Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (ICQ #8125618) Check out the Ultra programming language project! http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/
Re: Bizarre Clock Problem
"Keith G. Murphy" wrote: > It may actually be due to the *documented* behavior of adjtime. > ... This makes a lot of sense. I vaguely remember something about this happening when I found my clock out by months. In this case, I imagine it would be a good idea to set a drift threshhold wherein adjtime data is not recorded for large drifts due to likely inaccuracies. -- Matthew Tuck - Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (ICQ #8125618) Check out the Ultra programming language project! http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/
Re: Netscape Feedback
Ryan Chouinard wrote: > I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, but these seem to be the most > common. Netscape has a lot of work to do if they want to remain > in the good with Linux users. Thank you everyone that sent me info. If > anyone has other problems, let me know so I can add them to my > report. These were part of the reasons Mozilla is now free software. Mozilla has basically been entirely been rewritten since then though, and Netscape has done an awesome job. The foundation architecture is excellent, and once it is released, I fully expect a large number of independent developers to rapidly improve it. Expect a "beta" in about two months. Whether Netscape will release a commercial beta at the same, I don't know - I don't see that it matters. > BTW, whatever happened to Gecko? (Netscape's proposed engine for the 5.x > series; seems to have disappeared after 4.51...) The Gecko previews were essentially repackaging of the Mozilla milestone releases I believe. "Gecko" is still going strong - in fact in recent weeks, it is getting really really good in rendering the Mozilla UI. See "http://www.mozilla.org/";. The milestones come out every three weeks usually - you can even get a package in the main debian distribution. -- Matthew Tuck - Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (ICQ #8125618) Check out the Ultra programming language project! http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/
