Quoting shell command lines in Makefiles
I'm using CPPUnit (http://cppunit.sourceforge.net/cppunit-wiki) to make unit tests for each class in my C++ program. I can say make test to have them all built and executed. The testexec target builds the unit test executables without running them. I started with something like this: TESTS=EndOfFile.t \ YetAnotherClass.t test: testexec ./EndOfFile.t ./YetAnotherClass.t testexec: $(TESTS) (... commands to build the test executables) I thought I'd be clever and use the shell for control construct to execute all the tests that are named in $(TESTS) rather than listing them explicitly. But it doesn't work because make sees the $ and expands it before passing the command line to the shell: test: testexec for test in $(TESTS); do ./$test; done gives me: /bin/sh: ./est: No such file or directory $t expands to , leaving est. I've tried all manner of backslashes and quotes to try to get the string $test passed literraly to the subshell that make executes, but always Make eats it. The *must* be a way to do what I want. Is there? References to The Fine Manual are fine. -- Mike Crawford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Quoting shell command lines in Makefiles
Further Reading of The Fine Manual reveals that that way to quote $ in a makefile is to say $$: test: testexec for test in $(TESTS); do ./$$test ; done I'm using CPPUnit (http://cppunit.sourceforge.net/cppunit-wiki) to make unit tests for each class in my C++ program. I can say make test to have them all built and executed. ... I thought I'd be clever and use the shell for control construct to execute all the tests that are named in $(TESTS) rather than listing them explicitly. But it doesn't work because make sees the $ and expands it before passing the command line to the shell: test: testexec for test in $(TESTS); do ./$test; done -- Mike Crawford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks at: -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Can't browse certain websites
I have seen my problem and its solution appear on this list before but I can't find it in the archives. Maybe someone who remembers can refer me to the thread I vaguely remember. I have a complex home LAN setup that is gatewayed to the internet by a Sarge IP Masquerading box. Most of my machines see the web just fine, but an OS X Mac that is connected via IP over FireWire routed through another OS X Mac using Apple's Internet Sharing can see some websites but not others. DNS works fine, no error is given, the browser just sits there waiting with no response. One problem site is http://www.apple.com/ as well as the site that Apple's Software Update program queries for newly released software version numbers. I have no problem browsing a bunch of sites that I know use Apache on Linux. There are other problem sites, but there doesn't seem to be any pattern to them. I remember reading that the problem was that some sites use a networking feature, perhaps an option bit in their IP packet headers, that cause packets sent by affected Linux boxes to be dropped. The solution was to adjust the networking options on the Linux box, perhaps with ifconfig. I don't know whether the problem is with the network configuration on one of my OS X Macs or whether it is caused by my Sarge box forwarding packets that have already been through a router. Responses I've received from Apple's lists and what I've found with Google indicate that most succeed with both OS X' IP over FireWire and its Internet Sharing. An Apple networking engineer offerred to help me diagnose it in case it's an OS X bug. If you want ifconfig, netstat or routing table details I will post them, but if anyone can dig up the previous solution I vaguely remember I will try that first. My LAN uses the reserved (private) network number 192.168.0.0 and a netmask of 255.255.255.0. That means that the subnet number is this part: xxx.xxx.SSS.xxx and the host part is xxx.xxx.xxx.HHH. My ethernet has a subnet number of 1 and the firewire subnet is 2. The routers each have a host number of 1 on the networks they route away from. OS X Laptop OS X Desktop 192.168.2.2 - FireWire - 192.168.2.1 Sarge Box 192.168.1.3 - Ethernet - 192.168.1.1 24.x.x.x- Internet There is one other box on the ethernet at 192.168.1.2. All the ethernet interfaces have 192.168.1.1 as their default gateway. The Sarge box has a static route giving 192.168.1.3 as the router for subnet 2, so all the machines can access either of the FireWire interfaces. If I can't get this to work I'll put a FireWire card in my Sarge box and try Linux' IP over FireWire. The Sarge box is also a Mac, an old 8500 running kernel 2.4.22 for PowerPC. I will update the kernel if you think it would help but I haven't yet because most things work well. I'm using IP over FireWire because my iBook's ethernet connector is broken and my Apple dealer says repair requires a new motherboard. I plan to get wireless but don't want to spend the money yet. Someday I'll get adventurous and open up the iBook to solder the ethernet myself, as I'm pretty sure it's just a broken wire, but for now I don't want to risk hosing the machine. Thanks for your help, Michael D. Crawford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Portable OGG Player
Does anybody know if there is such thing as a portable OGG player? There is been a core design for an Ogg player available for a while: http://www.finearch.com/english/news/pr_20030715/pr_20030715.htm http://www.finearch.com/english/ will take you to more info. They are selling the basic technology for Ogg players, but I don't see news of it actually being adopted in products yet. A while back I came across Free firmware for the iPod that allows it to play oggs. I don't know if this works alongside the normal iPod firmware or just totally replaces it. -- Michael D. Crawford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: A list administation query
I don't know the answer to your question, but a feature I'd like for mailing lists to have in general would be send only subscriptions. I think anyone can post to debian-user (not sure), but many lists only allow subscribers to post, in an effort to keep out spam. What I'd like to do is subscribe in such a way that I can post but not recieve the list in email. Instead, I would read the list off a web archive. Even if I were able to filter out all my spam, I subscribe to so many mailing lists (over fifty), that I get about 30,000 legitimate emails a month. I have to read my mail with elm, as that's the only mail reader I've been able to find that can handle my collosal inbox. That would be OK if I read every list post, but I only select a few to read from any given list, based on the message subject. It's a waste that I receive all the other messages that I don't read. Happy New Year! Michael D. Crawford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What happened to my menubar?
Besides my menubar being missing, it seems that when I minimize my windows by clicking the _ in a window's titlebar, the Window just disappears, and I can't figure out how to get it back again. Thanks for your help. Michael D. Crawford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[SOLVED] Re: What happened to my menubar?
Somehow gnome-panel had become uninstalled. gnome-panel is what provides the menubar and the bar at the bottom of the screen that lists all my windows. So I did: apt-get install gnome-panel and then restarted my X session. I had to kill the xserver by using control-alt-backspace because there was no logout menu. Hope This Helps Someone Else. Michael D. Crawford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
X can't find keybinding
I just updated and installed the latest sarge. Now when I try to startx, the server exits. I find the following message in /var/log/XFree86.0.log: Server_Terminate keybinding not found I have the following in my XFree86Config-4: Section InputDevice Identifier Generic Keyboard Driver keyboard Option CoreKeyboard Option XkbRulesxfree86 Option XkbModelmacintosh Option XkbLayout us EndSection My box is a PowerPC Mac 8500, but I posted to debian-user rather than debian-powerpc because I don't think this is an architecture-specific problem. What package are the keybindings in? Maybe it got uninstalled when I updated. Thanks for your help, Michael D. Crawford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
What happened to my menubar?
I updated last night to the current sarge. Since then, my x11 session has been missing the menu bar that used to be on the top of the screen, and the bar at the bottom that has an item for each open window. Nautilus is running, but the menus that had all my applications in it is gone. How can I restore it? I'm using gnome, and logging in via gdm. Thanks for your help, Michael D. Crawford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: On unresponsive maintainers (was: Re: On using magicfilter and gs)
Is there any formal requirement that a maintainer be responsive, or even do his job at all? Is there a procedure for taking a package away from a maintainer, and having someone else take care of maintaining it? I don't know anything about the packages in question or their maintainer, but if he's really being unresponsive, somebody should look into it in a serious way. Michael D. Crawford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Good tool for light photo editing?
You know, I think the Gimp may be a little heavyweight for what the original poster was looking to do. Learning to use it for a beginner might be intimidating. Are there any imaging apps that only do the basic stuff like rotation, cropping, and scaling, and are very easy to use? There must be something. It would also be nice to have something that can work systematically on a whole directory full of images, rather than having to go to the file browser to open and save each one. I've got much the same problem. I have several Photo CDs and Picture CDs with hundreds of images on them, many of which I'd like to put on my website. To do all the necessary editing by hand with The Gimp seems like such an enormous task that I've put off doing it for about five years now, during which digital photos continue to accumulate. I know there are several thumbnailers listed at freshmeat but I don't want to have to evaluate them all. Maybe you can recommend one. And a program that did thumbnailing, but was also interactive so I could do simple things like cropping and rotation would be great. Mike Crawford [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: how to start making doodle work
Hi HS, Any suggestion what could be amiss? I get a lot of email that says \/14-gra helps with that. Hope that helps. Yours, Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: ursine.ca has been hijacked
Paul Johnson wrote: Given that he's already on antipsychotics, it scares me with the kind of people that are trusted with people's personal financial information. While I don't doubt that you have reason to be angry with the fellow who hijacked your domain, I don't feel it is right to imply that taking antipsychotics makes one a bad or incompetent person. I take five milligrams of Risperdal each day. It's the most widely prescribed antipsychotic. Without it, I would suffer from paranoia and hallucinations, and would be spending a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals. But with this antipsychotic medicine, I'm successfully self-employed as a software consultant, am happily married, and am putting my wife through art school. I've been working as a programmer for seventeen years. My life is good. The stigma that mentally ill people face causes many to avoid seeking the treatment that would end their sufferring. It's commonly thought that psychotic people are all a bunch of serial killers, but that's actually not the case. A lot of perfectly nice people suffer from psychosis. Quite a lot of people, as one percent of the population has schizophrenia. I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 1985. It's like being schizophrenic and manic-depressive at the same time. Besides the paranoia and hallucinations, I also experience depression and a euphoric state called mania. I wrote a detailed article about it in large part to fight the stigma against the mentally ill. You'll find Living with Schizoaffective Disorder at: http://www.geometricvisions.com/Madness/schizoaffective-disorder/ Sincerely, Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Serial terminal in testing?
Is there a serial terminal program in testing? Like what you'd use to log in to another host over a serial line? Not something like xterm or gnome-terminal which is for login shells over a network login. I need something that communicates over serial ports, and will let me set the baud rate and flow control. I'm developing the firmware for an embedded device that sends debugging messages out a serial port, and into the serial port on my PC. When I was using Windows I used Hyperterminal for this. But I just got set up to develop the firmware under linux instead. Browsing through dselect I couldn't find anything in the way of serial terminals for debian. I'd be shocked if there wasn't something so I must be overlooking it. Thanks! Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Serial terminal in testing?
minicom looks like just what I want, thanks! But is there a way to avoid initializing the modem when it starts up? When my device receives any input from the serial line, it enters a little homebrew debugger. I'd like to just connect. Also, the status line says offline all the time. Do I need to do something to put it online? I did read the man page, but I'm still unclear. Thanks! Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
LUGs in Nova Scotia?
Are there any Linux User Groups in Nova Scotia, Canada? I'm in Truro, but I'd be surprised if there was one here. I often go to Halifax though, which is a big enough city that I'd expect there to be a LUG there. Thanks! Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
where to get old hard drives?
My hard drive died today. Fortunately I was backed up for the important stuff, but there are many less-important files I'd like to recover. I have heard that if a hard drive's problem is the controller and not the mechanism, sometimes you can swap the controller board from an identical drive and recover your data. It's a Quantum Viking II 9 GB LVD SCSI, (40 MB/sec SCSI transfer rate). Can anyone give me a clue where I might find one? Used would be OK, even with a dead mechanism if the controller board were OK. Thanks, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Music Services
Try iRATE radio, I believe there is a debian package for it: http://irate.sourceforge.net/ You should try the free, legal downloads many artists provide a way to promote themselves. I give many links in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/legal-downloads.html If you install BitTorrent, check out http://www.legaltorrents.com/ Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Scrolling beeps while playing music.
I had something like that happening way back, when testing the later 2.3 kernels and I think for a little while into 2.4. Someone told me it was caused by the video driver hanging on to the PCI bus, and not allowing other devices to access it. In my case the beeps would persist until I clicked a background window in my X session, to activate it. I don't know if your problem is related but this would be a possibly helpful clue to investigate. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hard Drive Limitations
This just sounds weird to me. Managing disks and filesystems is done in the kernel; there is very little a *distribution* can do to screw up access at this level. This is almost certainly a kernel problem. However, it is quite likely that different distros have their kernels configured differently. A 250 GB drive has to be ATA-6. ATA-5 drives have a size limit of 120 GB or so because of the way sectors are addressed. ATA-6 increases the limit by addressing the sectors differently in such a way that more of them can be specified, and requires changes to the kernel. I'm not sure, but I could see that changes to the partition map might be required too, so you might need a later version of fdisk or what have you to support this. However, looking through Configure.help in the kernel sources for 2.4.19 (the latest on my box) didn't reveal any mention of ATA-6. Maybe you need a 2.6 kernel. Try this while in the Documentation directory of your kernel sources: grep -i ata-6 Configure.help grep -i ata6 Configure.help This turns up matches of ata66 which is a different thing, running the bus at 66 MHz. If your knoppix cd has the .config file for the kernel it uses, compare that to the .config for the kernel in your debian installation. Debian copies the .config file to the /boot directory. Maybe you can find an option you need to enable. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
trouble upgrading libxft-dev
libxft-dev has been the source of broken dependencies for two or three weeks now. I run testing on PowerPC. I can't get any software to install because apt-get always gives up trying to install libxft-dev. I tried just removing it but then apt wants to uninstall a bunch of stuff. Here's the error I get: apt-get install libxft-dev Preparing to replace libxft-dev 2.1.2-5 (using .../libxft-dev_2.1.2-6_powerpc.deb) ... diversion of /usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h to /usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft1.h by libxft-dev Removing `diversion of /usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h to /usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft1.h by libxft-dev' dpkg-divert: rename involves overwriting `/usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h' with different file `/usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft1.h', not allowed dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libxft-dev_2.1.2-6_powerpc.deb (--unpack): subprocess pre-installation script returned error exit status 2 Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/libxft-dev_2.1.2-6_powerpc.deb Thanks for any help you can give me. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
How can I install with unmet dependencies
Testing for powerpc has broken dependencies. I'm trying to install clamav, but both apt-get and dselect complain that the wrong version of libxft2 is installed. libxft-dev depends on it. Neither of these have anything to do with clamav, so I tried removed libxft-dev, but then that set off a chain reaction that would likely have uninstalled half my system. How can I install clamav in the face of broken dependencies? Trying the suggested apt-get -f install doesn't help. Here's my messages: pishi:/home/mike# apt-get -d install clamav libclamav1 clamav-freshclam clamav-base Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies: libxft-dev: Depends: libxft2 (= 2.1.2-5) but 2.1.2-6 is to be installed W: No priority (or zero) specified for pin E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How can I install with unmet dependencies
dircha said to try apt-get update again. I did, and it didn't help. I think maybe the packages are OK for i386, but not for the powerpc which I'm using. It was just an hour or two ago that I previously updated. I also tried apt-get install libxft-dev, which I wouldn't have expected to do anything, as it was already installed, but it did try to install it. However, it didn't work, because overwriting Xft.h with Xft1.h is not allowed: Preparing to replace libxft-dev 2.1.2-5 (using .../libxft-dev_2.1.2-6_powerpc.deb) ... diversion of /usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h to /usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft1.h by libxft-dev Removing `diversion of /usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h to /usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft1.h by libxft-dev' dpkg-divert: rename involves overwriting `/usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h' with different file `/usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft/Xft1.h', not allowed dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libxft-dev_2.1.2-6_powerpc.deb (--unpack): subprocess pre-installation script returned error exit status 2 -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What can make MP#'s play at the wrong rate?
Maybe you've entered a time-space distortion field, and your audio files are actually playing at the correct rate, but you're experiencing time twice as fast as everyone else. Yers, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What mail program does this?
You can telnet to port 110 of your POP server and delete it by typing in pop commands. I used to telnet to a pop server to read my mail (in the happy days before spam) because I worked at a place whose firewall wouldn't allow external pop access. What I did was telnet to a regular login outside the firewall, then telnet to my popserver. $ telnet server.domain.com 110 Try giving the HELP command to find out what commands you can do. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian on 640KB or RAM?
I just found my old Compaq SLT|286 from the 1990ies! It has 640KB of RAM, no mouse and a 80286 CPU at 12 mhz! I'm sorry, I don't think it will work unless you make some special effort. I don't think the 80286 has a memory management unit, and one is required to use the normal kind of Linux kernel. HOWEVER, there is a version of Linux for CPUs that don't have MMUs, and maybe you could see if there is something that can be made to work. It's used for embedded systems on processors like the ARM7TDMI. The motorola embedded chips are similar to 680x0 chips. http://www.uclinux.com/ It would probably be a lot of work. uCLinux is now integrated with the 2.6 kernel, I understand. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
iRATE radio 0.3 released
5 February 2004 Perth, Western Australia New Zealander Anthony Jones announced the third minor release of the iRATE radio client today. iRATE radio provides users with a powerful new way to find and download free, legal music online. Users rate tracks based on their tastes. The iRATE server then selects other tracks to send to the user from a database of over 50,000 freely downloadable songs by correlating the user's ratings with other users and finding people with similar tastes. Unlike streaming audio, iRATE saves the tracks to the user's hard drive. This means that playback is smoother, without the typical problems associated with streaming media, such as high bandwidth usage. iRATE radio is written in Java, and is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. For Debian i386, there is a package for woody that requires libmotif from non-free, and there is another package for Sarge or Sid that doesn't have any non-free dependencies. iRATE itself is free software, licensed under the GPL, for both client at server. deb http://members.westnet.com.au/takahe/debian/stable woody main deb http://members.westnet.com.au/takahe/debian/stable sarge main Windows users can easily get up and running with iRATE radio using Sun's Java Web Start and Internet Explorer. For other browsers on Windows and Linux, users may need to download and install Java WebStart separately. There are also native Debian, Mandrake, and Redhat Linux packages available. Mac users will be pleased to hear that a disk image (.DMG) file for OS X will be released within a week. This release features a new, more intuitive user interface, a refined track selection algorithm, and better download performance. Other improvements include a new icon (following the recent icon contest), tool tips, ID3 tag display, artist's website link support, playlist management, and many others. Since the project's registration at SourceForge in March 2003, iRATE radio has gathered an increasing number of developers. The user base now numbers over 8,000 individuals. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. Jones recently made an announcement to the development mailing list detailing thirteen focus areas for improvement. These included translations, native playback (for improved decoding performance), better server-side track selection, multimedia key binding support, audio prompting, more publicity, and several others. The iRATE radio website is at http://irate.sourceforge.net/ -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Can't get out of dependency resolution in dselect
I have a PowerPC testing system. I just updated today, and now whenever I try to install any software, dselect keeps wanting me to resolve dependencies. Eventually I get down to where it lists two packages, mozilla-browser and mozilla-xmlterm. After that, no matter what I do, I can't get dselect to think the dependencies are satisfied. The only escape is to control-c to kill dselect, so I can't really use dselect anymore. If I select mozilla-browser in dselect's resolution dialog, down below it says: mozilla-browser suggests xprt-xprintorg mozilla-xmlterm depends on mozilla-browser (= 1.0.0-0.woody.1) note that xprt-xprintorg is not listed in the dependency resolution dialog. I have mozilla 1.0.0-0.woody.1 installed. If I select mozilla-xmlterm in the list, down below it says: mozilla-xmlterm depends on mozilla-browser (= 1.0.0-0.woody.1) Pressing return to exit the dialog just brings me back into the dialog. -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: C++
You might also find my article helpful: Pointers, References and Values: Passing Parameters, Returning Results, and Storing Member Variables with Musings on Good C++ Style at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/parameters/ Best, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: C++
accu-general welcomes the discussion of any language that uses { and } and
has a remarkably high S/N ratio. They also have the accu-mentored-developers
lists where they typically have a bunch of newbies work through some technical
book or project under the guidance of one or two experts.
http://www.accu.org/
They also have a bunch of very helpful technical book reviews on their website.
Mike
--
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Can't play audio CDs
I can't play audio CDs on my Mac 8500. It's running debian for PowerPC, but I don't know if it's a problem with the powerpc port. I have /dev/cdrom linked to /dev/scd0 (first SCSI CD drive). The permissions for /dev/scd0 are rw-rw-rw-. I have esound installed. I've tried this with and without esd actually running. Some programs (like Mozilla :-/) won't work if esd is running. I know that sound works because I can use mpg123 and xmms to play MP3s. I've tried workbone, grip and the Gnome CD player applet. Workbone just prints its help message and exits. Grip will display the list of tracks and their times, but then the UI will become unresponsive. I have to kill the process to make it quit. The Gnome CD player applet will start showing elapsed time when I click the play button, but I don't get any sound. I appreciate any help you can give me. Thanks, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Importing Corel Draw
I don't know what you can do about Corel Draw, but Thanasis Kinias asked about WordPerfect. AbiWord has a plugin for WordPerfect. I haven't tried it, but I'm very impressed with AbiWord in general. I would suggest downloading it directly from http://www.abiword.com/ rather than using the Debian package, as there has been a lot of work such as the very recent 2.0 and 2.0.1 releases. However, they don't appear to provide Debian packages, I thought they did. Maybe you can use alien to convert an RPM. You will also need the Import/Export plugin package as well. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
How to install BitTorrent on Woody?
I'd like to install BitTorrent on Woody, but it's not available in stable. I think it's available in testing. Or does someone have a package built for Woody? I need it for PowerPC. I think BitTorrent is written in python, but it uses wxPython, for which I would need a PowerPC binary. I added the following to my /etc/apt/preferences but it didn't show up in dselect: Package: bittorrent-* Pin: release a=testing Pin-Priority: 850 Package: wxpython-* Pin: release a=testing Pin-Priority: 850 The stable entry in preferences has Pin-Priority 777. I admit to not fully understanding how to do pinning, it still seems like voodoo to me. In general I vastly prefer to get packages that are actually built against woody than to use pinning to get them from testing, because I fear pulling down a lot of dependencies that are going to break my box. Thanks for any help you can give me. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If esd is running Mozilla won't launch
This is very strange. I just installed package esound (the Enlightened Sound Daemon) on my powerpc Macintosh. Afterwards I found that I could not launch Mozilla anymore. Figuring Mozilla was having some problem with esd, I tried killing the esd process, and then Mozilla would launch. If I then started esd again, I am able to open new Mozilla windows. So I guess I have a workaround, but it should not be this way. Can you tell me what is wrong? Thanks, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Recommend a better sound card?
Can you suggest a better sound card to me? The cheap sound card I use in my PC picks up a lot of electrical noise. Digital circuitry emits a lot of RF noise, and this is picked up in the analog circuitry of my sound card as a crackle and buzzing sound. Also, if I try to digitize sound input, the audio files will have a lot of the same kind of noise. The noise on playback didn't bother me when I used speakers, but tonight I switched to using headphones, which make the noise much more obvious. The noise pickup when digitizing audio input makes my PC useless for making audio files from my tapes and vinyl LPs; I've had no luck with several other PCs and sound cards I've tried. The only computer I've been able to capture sound with successfully was my ancient Macintosh 8500, which was an AV model that was built with better sound hardware than is usually the case for consumer computers. (Try capturing thirty seconds of silence on your own sound card, then play it back with the volume turned all the way up. Likely you'll hear this noise too.) I'm looking for a new sound card that will have as little of this noise as possible, and ideally will be of very good audio fidelity. It turns out that one can get sound cards as fancy as one cares to pay for, that are mostly used for professional audio production or for home recording studios by musicians, that have as much as 32 bits per sample and many channels, but those are expensive and require special application software. I'd like a good 16 bit stereo sound card that I can use for playing Oggs and MP3s, maybe do some Voice over IP, and for playing CDs on my PC. But I want this card to be as good as possible given that it's just 16 bit stereo. Ideally it would have an external pod containing all the analog circuitry, so the audio circuits would be isolated from the electrical noise inside the PC case. All the professional sound cards do this, but I don't know if any consumer sound cards do. My hopeful new sound card will need to work with Linux, BeOS and Windows 2000. Extra credit if the card's vendor provides complete hardware specs to Free Software developers. If you'd like to email me your recommendation send it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thanks for your help. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
What does Aliant Telecom use for DSL?
I'm considering subscribing to Aliant Telecom's DSL service: http://productsandservice.aliant.net/PS/ns/english/productsandservices/ps_3.jsp?section=51bodycont=productsandservices%2f56%2fproductdetail.jspcurbody=51 (sorry for the arcane URL). Aliant is a telephone company and ISP in Nova Scotia and some other Atlantic Canadian provinces. Not surprisingly, their system requirements only mention Windows and Mac OS. Can Aliant's DSL work with Linux? According to the DSL Howto, I need to know whether I will be connecting with a bridged connection and DHCP, or PPPoE, or possibly PPTP. Does anyone know what they use? Aliant's pages say they require a password. I've seen other DSL services where they required one to use a proprietary Windows program to log on, and am concerned I won't be able to do such a thing with Linux. If I can supply the password with some standard protocol, then it should work fine. Thanks, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
running short on DMA buffers during badblocks
When I give the following command to do a DESTRUCTIVE bad block check: badblocks -o 11.bb -b 4096 -v -w /dev/sda11 the following message appears repeatedly on the console: Warning - running *really* short on DMA buffers However, the test seems to proceed normally. Is this a problem? Each time the message appears, it repeats a half dozen times immediately, and then the half dozen repetitions come again ten or twenty seconds later. The message only seems to happen while writing to the drive, not while reading. (DON'T run the above command on a device that has data you care about. The -w option of badblocks checks the disk by writing various patterns to the raw sector of the partition and reading them back. It will erase any existing filesystem.) /dev/sda is a Quantum Atlas III 36 GB Ultra160 SCSI disk. The SCSI host bus adapter is an Adaptec 29160 for Macintosh. I'm pretty sure it's the same as a 29160 for PCs except that is has some firmware that's only used during boot and by the Mac OS. The Mac is a power macintosh 8500 with a 350 Mhz PowerLogix CPU upgrade, I think 160 MB of RAM. It's running Linux 2.4.19, I think with the powerpc patch. Possibly it's got the benh patch, I don't know because I don't have my kernel sources online right now. /dev/sda11 is 16.7 GB in size. I will probably upgrade my kernel once I'm done with the installation of my new drive. Thanks for any advice you can give me. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Please test iRATE radio
Friends, iRATE radio is nearing its 0.2.1 release. Many significant problems have been solved, so it is thought this release will dramatically increase its popularity. But we need your help in testing before the release, to discover any remaining problems before its release. From http://irate.sourceforge.net/ iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music. iRATE radio is Free Software under the GNU General Public License. It is a Java program. Versions for Linux are compiled native with GCJ. There are binary debian packages for i386 Woody, Sarge and Sid at: http://irate.sourceforge.net/download.html Please check for new builds each day until the 0.2.1 release is final. It should only be a few more days. The native binary for Sarge and Sid doesn't have any non-free dependencies. Because it's ahead of time compiled with GCJ, it doesn't need a Java runtime, and it uses SWT/GTK for its GUI. The Woody version requires libmotif which is in non-free. Other architectures can use the bytecode compiled Java WebStart version. You will need the Java Runtime Environment 1.4 though. I don't think the JRE is available as a Debian package, and I've never tried to install Java 1.4 on a Linux system. I understand what you need to do is run the javaws program and enter this URL: http://irateradio.org/webstart/irate-client-swing.jnlp That will download the java package, check its digital signature and run the program. To report bugs, either mail them directly to me (not the Debian list!) or join the irate-devel mailing list: http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=77232 Thanks for your help. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Let's Put SCO Behind Bars
[EMAIL PROTECTED] intoned: Michael, this is very much within the topic. Whoever says that this has not much to do with Debian is a little blind, or naive. But for sure that person (consciously or not) is cooperating with the forces trying to break the free sofware movement, b y hindering the effort to organize a counterfight. So go ahead and keep posting. Please let me hasten to point out that the person who told me my post to debian-user was off topic is no enemy to Free Software. He made it very clear in his letters to me that he supported what I was doing and didn't want me to make a mistake. Instead, he felt that the way I have been advertising the article so widely is likely to weaken my case because people might feel I was spamming. Linux fans are more sensitive to spam more than most, so he has a valid point. This person, who I think I would best not identify, said: Thing is, Mike, I *agree* with you. However, I think you're at risk of doing your cause more harm than good if you choose to use channels such as Debian-User for your message I could see how one could feel that way, and that is why I have been hesitant to post much more about it here or other mailing lists. Besides debian-user, I've posted the link to linux-kernel and the arguably more on-topic gnu.misc.discuss. The very first draft was an article at http://advogato.org/ and the second made front page at http://www.kuro5hin.org/ I've posted either the entire article or a link to it in a whole bunch of +5 rated comments at slashdot, causing legitimate accusations of karma whoring. Then I converted the whole article to UBB code so I could post it to http://linux-universe.com/ It's having some effect because starting yesterday a search for Let's Put SCO Behind Bars first showed up at Google with 137 hits, many of which are copies of my article and most of the rest are links to it: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Let%27s+Put+SCO+Behind+Bars%22 I'll be able to tell soon if people are finding the copy on my site independently via the search engines. Also people have started to write to me to tell me they're sending letters to their attorneys general, and in some cases giving me copies of their letters so that others may use them as examples. I've started archiving them at: http://www.goingware.com/notes/prosecute-sco/ You'll find the UBB code version there as well, with a plain-text version coming up in the next couple days. The original article is still at: http://www.goingware.com/notes/prosecute-sco.html I'll try to shut up now. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Let's Put SCO Behind Bars
It has been gently pointed out to me that my post was off-topic for debian-user so I'm going to avoid saying much more here unless someone asks me a question that I feel strongly everyone needs to see the answer to, like the following: Do you have a sample letter to send to the Attorney General? I'm still working on the letter I will send, but someone has sent me an excellent letter that he just sent to his attorney general. In a little while I'll post it on my website and link to it from my article. Look at the bottom of the article for a prominent link: http://www.goingware.com/notes/prosecute-sco.html I just got out of bed after sleeping for 17 hours from a hacking bender so it's going to be a little while before I can get it together to post it. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Let's Put SCO Behind Bars
Ladies and Gentlemen, Please enjoy my new article, Let's Put SCO Behind Bars, which you may find at: http://www.goingware.com/notes/prosecute-sco.html Here's the introduction: --- While the lawsuits being defended by IBM and filed by Red Hat are likely to put an end to The SCO Group's menace to the Free Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I feel we need to send a stronger message. If we all work together, we can put the executives of the SCO Group in prison where they belong. If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state Attorney General. If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for criminal fraud and extortion. --- If you agree with what I have to say, please copy it to your own website under the terms of the legal notice at the end of the article. It has a Creative Commons license. The page is deliberately designed to be easy to copy to other websites: it is all in one file, with very simple, valid markup, and with no external dependencies such as images or external stylesheets. It even looks good in lynx! Thank you for your attention. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
restarting wget?
If wget fails partway through recursively downloading a big website, is there some way to start it over again, to have it download the rest of the site without downloading everything a second time? What I envision is for wget to see that I already have some HTML files in its download directory, and to follow the links in them, rather than fetching the files from the website. Only if it comes across a file that has not already been downloaded would it get the file from the web. I've experimented with lots of wget's command line options, and it seems to me like it ought to be able to do this, but I haven't been able to get it to work. Alternatively, is there another recursive website downloader that can do what I want? I just want something I can restart in the event of failure. Thanks, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Q on NYT article on the cost of Spam
on Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 06:53:45AM -0700, Hugo Vanwoerkom ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: The question nobody(?) seems to answer is why spam at all: it has to be that doing it gets you money. Can anybody answer that side of it? You have to realize how cheap spam is to send. In the direct mail business, that is sending advertisements via snail mail, it typically only takes a 0.5% response rate for a mailing to be profitable. Once you have found a profitable offer to mail, and identified the kind of mailing lists that have the sort of recipients who are likely to respond, direct mail is a license to print money. This even considering the fact that a direct mail letter costs almost a dollar apiece to mail, to pay for the printing, mailing list rental, labor and postage. When you consider that most spammers don't pay for bandwidth because they hijack open relays, you can understand that a response rate of as little as one in a million makes sending spam a worthwhile activity. I read recently that the Nigerian scam nets the all the scammers in the world a total of about $10 million per year. With a potential payoff in the millions of dollars paid to just one person, you can see how worthwhile it is to go to a lot of effort to identify those rare individuals who both have a lot of money (or the ability to embezzle it) and who are too stupid to know they are being duped. (It's not hard for a spammer to find an open relay. I once received a spam advertising an inexpensive program that was a sort of open relay search engine. The program, which was bluntly advertised as a necessary tool for the production spammer, would scan the entire internet to look for relays that you can use to broadcast your spam.) Keep in mind that there are lots of people who own computers but do not think critically enough to realize they're being ripped off. And there are lots of guys who are horny and ill-informed enough that they'll click the link in every porn spam they get. It is not rare for spam to advertise legitimate products, so that those who respond are benefitted by the transaction. It doesn't bother the spammer that clueful folk set up spam filters - as long as there are people who are ill-informed, unintelligent, uneducated, lonely or irrational, it will be profitable to send spam. (I say lonely because I read once that the TV shopping channels sell a lot of stuff to lonely people. It gives them someone to talk to, when they call up to order a product.) Thus it is important to understand that installing personal spam filters won't do anything to stop the spam from being sent. While filters _will_ prevent you from receiving spam, the people whose responses make business profitable for the spammers don't know if a mail filter is fit to eat. Filtering will only reduce the quantity of spam that's sent when a substantial fraction of the world's ISPs and mail hosting services have installed spam filters that are enabled by default. Spam is so costly to the big ISPs that I can imagine some will eventually install filters that cannot be disabled. I posted a couple comments to Kuro5hin that explain the direct mail business in some detail. They will give you some idea of the challenge that spam presents, when you consider how much cheaper it is to send electronic rather than postal mail. I've been planning to write an article for the site that will discuss mass marketing at some length, but I don't expect to have the time to write it for a while: The importance of advertising to business http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2003/7/9/831/85518/55#55 Direct mail is very scientifically targeted http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2003/7/9/831/85518/67#67 Ever Faithful, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: how to have a gpg public key?
How can i have a gpg public key? Go to a locksmith in your nearest town and ask them to cut you one. They keep blanks on hand. Warmest regards, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Serial terminal program?
Is there a serial terminal program for Debian? One that will talk out an RS-232 port? I couldn't seem to find one searching in dselect or debian.org's online package search. I don't think gnome-terminal or the like can talk to a serial port. Telnet talks to the network. I used to use tip on the old SunOS. On Windows I use Hyperterminal. I'll need it for powerpc, but if one is available for x86 there is likely to be one for powerpc too. Thanks, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Firewire card supported by Linux?
Linux supports both OHCI and PCILynx cards, which I think are the only two options. However, I don't think the PCILynx driver has been maintained for a while, so unless you have special needs you'd be better off with OHCI. Almost all currently manufactured cards use the OHCI standard - it's getting hard to find PCILynx cards anymore. I use a belkin OHCI card that is actually marketed for use on a Mac, but I use it in my PC. I think the Mac support is some Open Firmware that allows Mac OS booting, but Linux doesn't use it - maybe if someone worked at it you could figure out how to boot Linux on a Mac with it. It seems to work fine on my PC. It can provide a little bus power just plugged into the PCI slot, but because PCI doesn't provide that much power, it also has a 4-prong power connector like what disk drives have, and to get extra bus power you plug a disk driver power connector into it. I have no problems with power then. What I suggest is that you ask to look at an actual card when you go to purchase one, and select one that has that extra power connector. Any firewire card that says it works with Windows should be OHCI, because Windows doesn't come with PCILynx drivers. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: kinda OT: Web Hosting
I'm a big fan of Seagull Networks, http://www.seagull.net/ - I've been hosting with them for six years. They have SSH shell logins, run Slackware, and have all the development tools online. You can install CGIs that you run yourself. They can do MySQL hosting. But the main reason I host with them is that they have always had excellent customer service, and have always treated me really well. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
floating point hex calc?
I'm debugging something where I'm looking at floating point data in memory in hexadecimal and want to know what the floating point values of the numbers would be. Because a float is a little data structure with the exponent, mantissa and all, it's a little hard to tell what the values are just by looking at them. I normally use calctool as a hex calculator, and it's nice when dealing with integers, but I can't type a raw hexadecimal integer into it and find out what its floating point equivalent is. Is there something like what I want for debian, or if not is there something I can compile from source? If I were using gdb to debug, I could probably cast a memory address as a float* and have gdb do the conversion. But the software I'm debugging is actually running on Mac OS 9, and I'm using the MacsBug assembly debugger. It can format various data types from a memory address, but unfortunately doesn't seem to be able to handling floating point the way I want. Thanks, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: floating point hex calc?
Indeed I did eventually just write one. It's kinda lame, but the code follows.
The fancy part is casting an integer to a float without altering the bits.
Doing a simple cast makes a floating point value that is numerically equal to
the hex integer, rather than having the same bits. So I took the address of
the integer and cast that to a float*.
I think reinterpret_cast in C++ would have done the right thing.
Here's the source:
#include stdio.h
int main( int argc, char **argv )
{
char buf[ 256 ];
printf( MyCalc: );
float foo;
unsigned long bar;
scanf( %x, bar );
foo = *(float*)bar;
printf( %1.15f\n, foo );
return 0;
}
--
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
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Re: OS X Games
There _is_ a project underway to enable one to run OS X binaries under one of the BSD's running on PowerPC. It was mentioned on Slashdot a while back. However this project is just beginning and will probably take at least a couple years before you could run many OS X applications. OS X has a dramatically different API for user space applications than either linux or BSD. For example it uses the Carbon API from C/C++ or Cocoa from Objective C rather than X11. User space access to I/O devices is quite different. You use something called the IOKit whose API is based on Microsoft COM. There is support for Unix-style device files for serial and disk I/O, but you still have to use the IOKit to find the name of the special file in /dev because the device files are created dynamically when the kernel discovers the hardware. Carbon is a modification of the classic Mac OS API that is redesigned to be suitable for a protected-memory operating system. Cocoa is based on the NeXTStep application framework. There is a project called GnuStep that will allow you to run many Cocoa application under X11 in Linux, but it requires a recompile from sources. (Note that the native compiler for Mac OS X is gcc. Objective C has been compiled with gcc for many years. Next tried to avoid releasing the sources to the objective c compiler but the Free Software Foundation wouldn't let them.) -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
USB Midi adapters for Linux?
Are there any USB Midi adapters that are supported by Linux? Do USB midi adapters all use proprietary USB protocols or is there some kind of standard for doing midi via USB? I have a Fatar controller that I'd like to try out with Linux audio software. (A midi controller generates midi signals, but does not make sound on its own. You need a midi sound module or midi software on a computer to make the sound. I bought the Fatar because its keys have such a nice feel when I play.) I asked a musician friend to recommend an adapter that would work with Mac OS and he suggested either the midiman midisport or MOTU Fastlane. Does anyone know about these specifically? Midisport: http://www.m-audio.net/products/midiman/usbmidi.php FastLane: http://www.motu.com/english/hardware/fastlane_usb/body.html Thanks for your help. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: External serial modem advice ?
Be aware that although any serial modem will work with Linux, some serial modems don't work well for any system. I have a Hayes Accura 336/56k fax modem that mostly works well with Linux. But sometimes the modem becomes unresponsive and the only way I can get it to work again is to power cycle it. That happens regardless of the OS on the computer it's connected to. That's OK for the way I usually use it, but for an unattended server it would be a drag. I would like to be able to log into my office network while I'm traveling, but I can't really count on my modem working. It's really sad to see that from a Hayes product. I have also used a Hayes 1200 (that I bought for $700!) and a Hayes 28.8, and they were both rock-solid. Each gave years of performance without a hint of trouble. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Security: system reboot?
Maybe you either had a power failure, or your kernel just crashed and rebooted itself. Sometimes when I come into my office for the first time on a day, I find my Woody macintosh shut down. I've never worried about it too much. I think /var/log/setuid.changes will tell you if anyone became root by setting their userid. It won't tell you if someone has cracked your system in such a way as to be able to reboot you without becoming root though. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Compiling gnucash 1.7.7 for Woody?
I would like to try out the new GnuCash 1.7.7. It has some small business features I'd find helpful, and is supposed to have an easier way to handle foreign currency exchange, among many other new features. I want to install it on a PowerPC woody system, a Mac 8500. GnuCash 1.7.7 is available in unstable. I know how I can use apt pinning to install an unstable package in a stable system. However, I'm concerned because GnuCash has many dependencies. Trying to install the unstable 1.7.7 in my woody system might clobber it because so many dependencies from unstable will get installed. So what I think I would like to do is download the 1.7.7 debian sources, and compile it on my woody system. I would need to make sure I had all the dependencies, but I would be getting stable dependencies. I've managed to compile debian packages before but I've only done it a couple times. GnuCash is supposed to be rather daunting to compile yourself, because it has so many dependencies. Would this have the desired effect? Can anyone tell me if GnuCash 1.7.7 requires dependencies, or versions of them, that aren't available at all in Woody? Thanks for any advice you can offer. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Kernel for PowerPC (AppleMac)
Woody works great on powerpc Macintoshes. I'm typing this on an old 8500 - Woody has brought new life to a six year old computer, it's my main machine for browsing and email, and also serves as a masquerading gateway for my office lan. You will need more than just a kernel, you will also need all the user executables, config files, the whole distro. Woody has these. You should subscribe to debian-powerpc and ask for tips there. Also see: http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/ I think what you have is an Old World machine. If your Mac has the old kind of rom that contained actual system software, rather than just being used for booting, then you have an old world machine. You will need to know that for when you install. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Making a DSL server
That would be great if I could just do DHCP ethernet. But I have visited people who had DSL connections in their homes, that required them to run some windows program to authenticate. My concern is that I won't have any control over the authentication required by the ISP. I expect that many different ISPs will be used. If the product is a success in the market, it will be installed in retail locations throughout the US and possibly in other countries as well. I don't want the installer to have to go through a lot of pain to set up the authentication. I also don't want my client to have to deal with the situation that the ISP refuses to provide a connection because the box is running a turnkey system and not windows. Finally, I can't have the client's installer hacking on text config files - I have to minimize manual configuration and provide a pleasant GUI interface to any configuration that can't be avoided. Does Linux handle DSL authentication? Can linux configure a DSL modem to handle authentication, without any use of Windows? Is there a way I can test this authentication with my office LAN? Thank you for your help. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Making a DSL server?
I am making plans for developing a turnkey system that will be installed in retail stores, that will have a DSL connection. Unfortunately, I live out in the Maine woods, far from available DSL service. I connect to the Net with a 56k modem. But I'm going to need to simulate a DSL connection in order to develop this system. I think that it wouldn't do to just require a DSL-connected masquerading router. At least I think it wouldn't. I would like the user to just make a normal connection to a DSL modem. (I don't think the user's would normally want or need other hosts to be connected to the Internet.) So what I'm thinking of doing is setting up a small DSL network in my office. What I would need is a DSL _server_. I would expect that for the server software I could set something up on a Linux box. What would I need for the server hardware? I expect that if I were an ISP and needed to service hundreds of connections, this wouldn't be a problem. Does anyone make DSL server hardware that serves one connection? What do I even look for. Thanks for any help you can offer. Regards, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. -- John J. Chapman, Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations http://www.goingware.com/reputation/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Please Help Pass W3C Patent Policy
Bruce, I understand your argument, but I have also read the FSF's argument at: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html If, as you say, the holders of patents took their toys to play elsewhere rather than participating in the W3C standards process, this might actually have some benefit. 1. The patent holders wouldn't get their patents stamped with the W3C seal of approval. 2. Nothing that can legitimately claim to be a web standard would be encumbered in any way by a patent. Of course #2 only applies to the extent that the W3C maintains its reputation as being the one true source of legitimate web standards. I acknowledge that the patent holders might get a standard issued with all sort of encumbrances by some other body. But encumbered standards happen all the time. I think there is some safety in the knowledge that Free Software would not get written that uses the patents, and that would help the encumbered standards to fail. After reflecting on it for a little while, I feel it is better for Free Software that implements a restrictive patent not to exist at all than to exist with the encumbrances the proposed policy would require. There are other things people can do with their computers, things for which patent-free Free Software would spring up, thus assisting the market failure of the patents. That might not be the case if there were Free Software that implemented a patent. Respectfully, Mike Crawford -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Please Help Pass W3C Patent Policy
Bruce, Numerous people have posted to the slashdot discussion comments that complain that the W3C comment submission software is rejecting their comments because clicking the validation link in the confirmation email doesn't work. It appears to be a bug in the W3C's mail server software. You should look into that, and perhaps try to get the comment period extended so people can resubmit their comments. I thought some about the license workaround that you say Eben Moglen suggested, and I don't think it's workable. The allowance for linking to libraries that have other licenses that are GPL compatible is meant for allowing GPL'ed code to draw upon non-GPL'ed work. Your workaround doesn't address the case where the new code was created specifically for the purpose of making an existing GPL'ed work compliant with a web standard. There is an accellerated plain-file-only accellerated HTTP server in the Linux kernel for example. Suppose I wanted to upgrade the Linux kernel's HTTP server to support some new standard, wrote the code in compliance with the W3C's patent policies, but licensed my modification to the Linux kernel with the MIT license instead of the GPL. If I distributed my work, even with source, I would be in violation of the kernel's GPL and ever kernel developer would have standing to sue me because I didn't license my addition to the kernel with the GPL. Regards, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Making a custom Debian distro?
How hard is it to make a custom Debian-like system from scratch? Can you give me any suggestions on how to get started? I know a little about Linux from Scratch, and I have no problem building most software packages from either debian sources or source tarballs. What I would like to do is build a custom distribution that could be installed from CD, but kept updated over the Internet. It seems to me that using the Debian packaging system would be the best way to do this. This would be for a software development contract I expect to get. My clients would sell the hardware and installation CD as their product. Most likely the clients would actually perform the installation, so the user might be receiving the PC already installed. The clients would also maintain the machine that is the central package server. If an upgrade were made available, the end user would access my client's server much like any Debian user accesses one of the debian mirrors with apt. There will only be a dozen packages or so, besides what is necessary for the base install. Most of them would be existing open souce packages, plus a few packages that I will write myself. A complication is that the end users are not expected to be computer savvy. These would be expected to be pretty self-automated turnkey systems. I think most desktop user interfaces would be more than they could deal with and a terminal-based UI as is used for configuration after a package is downloaded would be completely unfathomable. The alternative to network updates would likely be to send a field service engineer out with an upgrade CD. It would be expensive for my client to maintain the staff for that. Upgrades wouldn't be very frequent, hopefully, but I want to allow for the possibility. To the extent that I can do it, I will avoid any user configuration at all, and where it can't be avoided, I'd set up a full-screen web interface, probably building a custom web browser out of Mozilla that doesn't have any of the stuff at the top of the window. If the machine were rebooted, the startup script would relaunch this browser. Thanks for any tips you can give me. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: killing the penguin (framebuffer)
One way to get rid of it is, after you log in, type: reset at the command prompt. That resets your TTY parameters to the default, and gets rid of the penguin. If you put vga=normal in /etc/lilo.conf, you will also need to run the lilo command to write a new boot sector. But I suggest leaving the framebuffer, you can run at higher resolution and use nice fonts like the one from Sun. Just type reset to get rid of the penguin. Best, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Using p2c to translate Delphi to C?
I am evaluating some Delphi source code for a consulting contract I might do. The project would be a port from Windows to Mac OS, which doesn't have Delphi support. Delphi appears to be a very specialized dialect of Pascal. Pascal used to be popular on the Mac, but I don't think that there are Pascal compilers anymore that will compile OS X native source for the Mac. My first thought of how to deal with this was to try translating the source with the p2c Pascal to C translator that is available for Woody. But the first try just barfed. I could probably fix up the Delphi source to make it work, but I worry about causing some problem because I don't have a Delphi compiler. Is there a version of p2c available anywhere (it doesn't have to be a Debian package) that can translate Delphi to C? Or any kind of Delphi to C translator? Thank you for your help. Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nature of a boot loader
Dai, Grub and LILO can both chainload to each other just like they can to a windows boot loader. You can have the other boot loader on another drive or at the beginning of a partition. I did just this to make things a little more pleasant to my wife, who is not hip to windows and finds some of the hackerish things I do to our computers confusing. I installed grub on my PC that initially gave a choice of Windows or Linux, with Windows being the default. So that way she didn't have to touch the keyboard to get into the OS she's presently most comfortable with, and even if she does monkey with the menu, it's easy for her to deal with. Selecting Linux from the first grub menu would chain-load to a second copy of grub that was installed in the first sector of my linux root partition, which would then allow me to select the kernel to use. I would often experiment with different kernels, some of which wouldn't work out all that well, but I could leave them in the second Grub menu without disturbing my wife, thus achieving complete matrimonial harmony. The same basic setup would apply to LILO, and should you desire to for some reason, you could chain load from LILO to Grub, or Grub to LILO. You can also have the NT boot menu load Grub or LILO by installing first to a partition, and then copying the bootsector to a file in your Windows partition. Suppose /dev/hda2 is where you've installed Grub: dd if=/dev/hda2 of=grubboot.dat bs=512 count=1 then copy grubboot.dat to your Windows partition and add it to your NT or Win2k boot menu. This probably works on XP too, but I don't have XP. Yours, Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting. http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What [OT] stands for?
Either Ornithology or Ornithologist, depending on the context. It means the study of birds. Bird scientists are very active online. Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
electronic CAD software?
Is there any electronic CAD software available for debian, or any available as open source at all? I couldn't find any in dselect on debian powerpc. I'm looking for something that I can lay out schematics (circuit diagrams) with, that can then generate netlists for SPICE. There's lots of commercial applications for this sort of thing, but most are very expensive. I don't need anything very elaborate at this point, I'd just like to learn back what I used to know about electronics. Thanks, Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Is there a later mozilla?
I've always had problems with the Mozilla 1.0 that comes with woody, and it seems to be getting worse over time. Searching for mozilla in the package search for testing and unstable at the debian website doesn't seem to find that Mozilla 1.1 is available at all. Is there anyone who has Mozilla 1.1 packaged for debian powerpc (that would work on Woody)? Sometimes people post unofficial debian packages on their personal websites. Any pointers would be appreciated. The problems I have are that sometimes when I'm typing an email, the message window stops responding to text input. Curiously, I can save as a draft, open the draft and continue, but it is annoying when I'm in a hurry. Lately it's also been frequently occuring that when I scroll the window, the UI stops updating and the scrolling continues even though I have released the mouse. I have to quit mozilla and relaunch it. Thanks, Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Standards docs available in Debian?
In the discussion going on about removing non-free, Rob Weir mentions that he has some w3c and IETF standards docs that are non-free. He seems to imply that he got them from the Debian non-free section. But I don't find them in dselect. Free or not, they would be pretty handy to retrieve through apt. Are these indeed available with apt? It would be easier than hunting them down, and make it easier to find a place to put them. Ever Faithful, Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: (semi-OT) JPG files - Movie file
Try a google search for: motion jpeg Motion JPEG is a variety of movie format where each frame is made from a separate JPEG file, where they are all concatenated together. I understand it is popular for video editing because it doesn't use frame differencing, so it is easy to insert and remove frames into or from a movie. However, I don't think there is a single standard for motion jpeg format. I believe there are several motion jpeg file formats in use which are all meant for the same purpose, but differ in the low-level details. The second search result I get in the above google search gives Loki's SDL Motion JPEG Library: http://www.lokigames.com/development/smjpeg.php3 however I get the impression from the page that it's not ready for production use yet. There are also motion jpeg hardware cards available on the market. Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: macintosh hardware
Linux runs great on Macs, both 68000 and PowerPC macs. Subscribe to debian-powerpc to ask more about it. Also see: http://penguinppc.org/ I'm typing this on a Mac 8500 running Woody and the 2.4.19 kernel. It can be a little hard to figure out how to install. My recommendation is to put the files you need on an HFS volume (basedebs.tar and so on) as well as the kernel and ramdisk image and boot from Mac OS into Linux. On a Mac with a floppy it is possible to load the ramdisk from a floppy like with an x86 install, but I never had much luck doing that. On the new world Macs (since the G3) you can do tftp boots for installation. The firmware in the old world macs like my 8500 claims to support tftp but it doesn't actually work. Linux has breathed new life into my 8500 that I otherwise probably would have had to retire. It performs much better than either OS 9.1 or OS X. There are a few linux distros for the Mac. Besides debian, there is Yellow Dog and LinuxPPC, which I think are both ports from Red Hat, and there is the Apple-sponsored mkLinux which uses the Mach microkernel like OS X does. I used to run mkLinux on my Mac a few years ago. Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: XMMS goes silent when moving windows
I had a problem kind of like this when testing the late 2.3 and 2.4-pre kernels. I had the opposite behaviour, but I think it is related. What happened to me was that my MP3 player would get stuck and just emit a constant tone after playing for some time. I could get it to unstick by moving a window around. The theory given when I asked about it on the linux-kernel mailing list was that the X server was not freeing the PCI bus, and that moving a window would generate activity in the server that caused it to become free. This got fixed, but maybe it is broken again. Tracking the problem down could be difficult. I would suggest asking about it on the dri-devel mailing list (Accellerated 3D XWindows development, the Direct Rendering Infrastructure). At the time I was having the problem, though, I wasn't using DRI. But they would probably have some idea. Are you using DRI? Which kernel version are you using? Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: cross platform development
Try ZooLib, it is the best thing since sliced bread. Compile native applications for Linux, Win32, Mac OS and BeOS written from a single C++ source base with very little need for platform specific client code. http://zoolib.sourceforge.net/ There is the beginnings of a tutorial at: http://www.goingware.com/zoolib/cookbook/ there is also some sample code. It's best these days to get it from CVS. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FireWire harddrives
Hi, Slashdot ran a piece recently about a review that rated the noise levels of a bunch of IDE drives. Click the older articles link at http://slashdot.org/ and search for noise and you should find it. Also search for quiet. Making quieter computers has been discussed fairly regularly on slashdot. I have a Quantum 10,000 RPM SCSI Ultra160 drive and it's extremely quiet and runs cool, which is very surprising for a 10,000 RPM drive. It's the VP32210, not sure what the brand name of that is. I plan to eventually mod all my computers so they are quieter. I am a big fan of laptops because they are so quiet. The fan in my compaq presario 1800T only starts when it gets hot (rarely) and my iBook doesn't have a fan at all. You are probably better off using more than one hard drive to make all your space than using a single drive. It will be more expensive, but you will have less to lose if a drive fails. I think you would do well to get a RAID. Firewire's being nice for being so flexible and making it easy to attach disks externally. I have used SCSI drives almost exclusively for years before I recently got started with firewire for that reason. I never cared much for IDE drives because they have to be mounted inside the cases and have such unpleasant cables. Even Ultra160 scsi can be external. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: dual boot win2k and debian
You should be able to do what you want. It sounds like you are running grub-install from the Linux command line. While that ought to work, I recall reading in the grub doc that they recommend that you install it to the boot sector of your drive from the command line that you can get inside of grub when you boot off the grub floppy. Doing the install from the grub command line while running grub as a normal Linux process definitely doesn't work. Possibly there is some problem that grub has with the geometry of your drive because of your old bios. There may be something you can say to grub to deal with that, but I don't know what it would be. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: dual boot win2k and debian
Yes, Qian is right I think. You can, if you wish, install grub in the first sector of a linux filesystem partition. One thing you can then do is dd the first sector into a file, copy it over to Windows and add it to your win2k boot menu (boot.ini) and have Linux be a boot option in the Windows boot menu. That's an appealing option for putting Linux on a computer that's mostly used by someone who's uncomfortable with anything but Windows. (I think you can also install grub into a regular 512-byte file this way, instead of using dd.) But it doesn't work to install grub into the first sector of the windows partition. That wipes out the windows boot loader. You want to install grub to the first sector of the whole hard drive, not the first sector of the first partition. The first sector of the hard drive comes before any of the partitions. You can also boot off your Win2k installation CD and choose the repair option. Then install grub with just setup (hd0) and NOT setup (hd0,0) Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Programming books
I wouldn't say that was a particularly off-topic question. A very good book is Large Scale C++ Software Design by John Lakos, ISBN 0-201-63362-0 Here is a review of it: http://www.accu.org/cgi-bin/accu/rvout.cgi?from=0au_lfile=l000736a The main thing it teaches you is how to write a large program so that it's not a huge rat's nest, and how to make it testable, including how to write automated tests. If you develop a real application, I strongly recommend writing a unit test for every module in the project (every class if it's an object-oriented project). You might think this is a lot of extra work but it's really not because it reduces debugging time and helps to focus your attention on the task at hand. It also helps increase the overall quality of your product. While Lakos' book does discuss quite a few C++-specific things, much of his advice can be applied to almost any language. Particularly important is his discussion of how to measure and manage interdependencies between different components of a program. You should also learn something about methodology and project management. I find eXtreme Programming appealing, although I usually work by myself and a lot of its stuff is aimed at small development teams. XP also emphasizes testing. There's an eXtreme Programming Wiki: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExtremeProgrammingRoadmap There are also some XP books out like eXtreme Programming Explained, but I haven't read it. The ACCU book reviews has a subject section on management: http://www.accu.org/bookreviews/public/reviews/0sb/management.htm and writing solid code: http://www.accu.org/bookreviews/public/reviews/0sb/writing_solid_code.htm Finally, I have a little stuff I've written myself you might find helpful: http://linuxquality.sunsite.dk/articles/ http://www.goingware.com/tips/ http://www.byteswap.net/ Best, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
DOS on non-x86 systems?
What options are available for running DOS on a system that does not have an x86 processor, like a PowerPC Macintosh? The reason I'm asking is that I'd like to run one of the lint products from Gimpel Software (http://www.gimpel.com/). If I buy FlexeLint, it comes as obfuscated C code, and I could compile it on anything, but FlexeLint is expensive ($998). PC-Lint is more affordable at $239, but only runs on DOS and Windows. I know I could run dosemu on my x86 systems. But I also use Linux on PowerPC, and it would be nice to be able to run it there too. The one possible solution I know of is bochs, but I'm concerned that emulating the whole machine at such a low level in software may be very slow. What would be better is a dos execution environment that only needed to support normal user applications, but that came with an x86 CPU emulator in software. I've never used bochs so maybe it would suit me, I don't know. I would be happy if there were free software that could do what Gimpel Software's products do, but I don't think there is. gcc does a certain amount of lint-like diagnostics, but not nearly so extensive. Thanks, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Has Mozilla been hijacked?
I would be surprised if this could happen on Linux, but I think somebody has hacked my browser. Sometimes web pages that I have open spontaneously change to one of two commercial sites. one of them is http://download.find.com/ I forget which one the other is. I have Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020622 Debian/1.0.0-0.woody.1 In looking around for programming contracts in the past, I have seen people post requests for software that would hijack someone's homepage setting. What these programs were supposed to do is set someone's homepage to a commercial site, and prevent them from setting it back (or cause the browser to ignore the user's preference). I get the feeling something like that has happened to me. I would be surprised if the URL's for either of these sites were planted on purpose by either the Mozilla or the Debian developers. I can't figure out what is making this happen. Sometimes it seems to me that the pages change to a new URL without me clicking anything. Thanks for any help you can give me. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: print html without netscape
It seems to me that you could write a command-line program that links to Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine to render HTML into an in-memory graphics buffer. Then you could dump the bitmap to the printer, or save it as a TIFF file or bitmap EPS file. I haven't heard of software that does this yet, but I think it would be straightforward to do it. You could even run this from a cron job to spit automatically generated HTML to the printer every hour or day. It looks like Gecko's home page is at: http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/ Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: wget asp pages recursively?
Matthew Weier O'Phinney helpfully answered my question about how one could download the pages in an asp application with: wget -m -L -t 5 -w 5 http://someplace.com/some.asppage=1 This does indeed have the desired effect. Unfortunately, it yields an embarrassment of riches - I seem to be getting all the pages on the site, which is quite large. While I could just download the whole site, I'm only on a 56k modem. I actually may not have enough disk space on my box to store all the files I might download. Is there some way I can limit the URL's wget will follow? Suppose all of my pages have a URL like: http://someplace.com/some.aspThisIsFixed=1page=1 I would like to only download URLs that have ThisIsFixed=1 in them. What would be really cool is if one could get wget to test a URL with a regular expression before downloading it, but I don't see a way to do that. (I have been studying the man page.) I could hack on wget's source code if necessary. If I have to do that, maybe somebody could give me a tip on where to look in the source. Maybe I could contribute a useful patch. Thanks, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How to avoid meltdowns in the future
This seems silly. Is there an easy/accessible way, preferably through LILO, to boot into single-user mode with few, if any, daemons running? I don't think you can without some advance planning, but if you do arrange ahead of time, you can do it. One option is to put an entry in your /etc/lilo.conf file, that is not the one you use by default, that boots your system into single user mode. I think what you do is give the 1 option to the kernel. 1 is not a kernel option, but any remaining kernel options are passed to init, and init 1 gets you into single user mode. Then press the left-shift key to get LILO's menu when you boot. That's what I used to do back when I ran LILO. However, a preferable option is to use GNU Grub, or one of the other more featureful boot loaders. Again with GNU Grub you can have a preset menu option to boot single user, but if you forget or you want to boot single-user off some other kernel, you can escape into Grub's command line and manually boot with any kernel or options you want. Grub is available with apt-get or dselect. Also see: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ Another alternative, if you didn't plan ahead, is to go to somebody else's Linux installation and install Grub on a floppy. Then you can boot your PC off that floppy and use Grub's command line to select your boot options. Another advantage of Grub is that you don't have to configure anything when you replace a kernel - no worry about forgetting to run lilo to replace your block list. If you have a /boot/grub/menu.lst entry for it already, you can just select it immediately when you boot. If you have no menu entry, you can use the Grub command line. Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Debian book for complete newbie?
I may have my first opportunity in a long time to turn someone on to Free Software. I showed my brother in law my Slackware laptop, and he thought it was pretty cool. I suggested I install Linux on his PC for him, and he wants me to do that. I've decided to install Woody. I use both Slackware and Debian, but I think Bruce would get better support from the Debian community than the Slackware one. I think once its installed, Debian's much easier to keep maintained. Slackware never came up with any way to handle upgrading either - Patrick Volkerding's recommendation is to wipe your partition and reinstall from scratch! I'm only going to be here for a month, and while I can do the installation and teach Bruce the basics, I think it would be very helpful to get Bruce a printed book. The online doc only works if you know enough about Linux to find it and use the whatever tool is required to read it. Bruce knows nothing about Linux or Unix. He's not a programmer. He's an intelligent and curious fellow, and he can run a Windows machine. Is there a book you would recommend I get him? It would be helpful if it covered Woody and kernel 2.4. But mostly I want something that will help him feel comfortable operating his machine, help him do basic administration, learn to edit text files and help him find more advanced documentation installed on his disk or on the Internet. It would be OK if I had to get more than one book, but I don't want to overwhelm him. Maybe I could get a book on Linux basics and another on Debian administration, but I think he would find it least intimidating if I could give him just one book to refer to. Thanks, Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian book for complete newbie?
Running Linux looks pretty good. The edition available at http://www.chapters.ca/ is from 1999. The website seems to say there is an upcoming 2002 edition, but when I click the link on chapters' website it takes me to the wrong page. I couldn't find anything about a 2002 edition at O'Reilly's website. Does anyone know anything about it? I guess it's not comin out real soon or else they'd have advance notice of it, but it would be nice to have the update. There's been a lot happened to Linux since 1999. O'Reilly also lists a book called Learning Debian GNU/Linux by Bill McCarty, but it is out of print. One can read it online though: http://safari.oreilly.com/main.asp?bookname=debian -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Q: How to find people with Debian skills
Just ask the recruiter to click on the following link: http://www.google.com/search?q=resume+debian+experience that search finds 7460 results at Google, many of them resumes of people with debian experience. You can add extra keywords for things like skills, and include city names or postal codes if you want to recruit only in a limited region. For example, http://www.google.com/search?hl=enlr=q=resume+debian+experience+c%2B%2B+04854btnG=Google+Search Finds my resume, thereby demonstrating I'm the only Debian C++ programmer in the town of Owl's Head, Maine. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mac OS X package
Most of the subscribers to debian-powerpc are Mac users, so maybe you should ask there. I'm not so happy with what I've experienced with OS X installers so far, although maybe it's because the writer of the installer scripts didn't make the effort to make them flexible. For example, the installer for the OS X developer documentation only gives you the option to install everything, rather than allowing you to select doc for the different APIs (java, cocoa, carbon, device drivers - the whole thing is installed), and it can only be installed on the root filesystem. This was a problem for me because the documentation is 500 megabytes, and I don't have that much room on my startup disk (it's a 6 year old 8500 that I installed OS X on with XPostFacto). I have lots of room on my linux netatalk server, but the installer doesn't give the option of installing to a server volume. One can do scary things with the pax command to install to alternative locations, but I haven't tried that yet. I suspect there are other problems as well. On the other hand, my Mac checks for updates each time it starts up, and there is a nice UI for obtaining them. It would be nice if there were a way that this version checker could be told to check for updates from alternate sources. Maybe there is, I don't know. One of the goals of the GNU Darwin project is a better package system for OS X. They also provide OS X binaries for a great many Free Software programs. You can download a 650 MB installer .iso image, or you can buy a CD from a vendor: http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/ Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tuning for processor architecture
I am interested in making special builds of some of my debian packages in order to tune them for the CPU of the specific machines they will be installed on. I would appreciate any input you have on the best way to pursue this, as well as which packages I should tune to get the most benefit. I believe debian x86 is compiled for 386, and debian powerpc is compiled to run on any powerpc. On x86, I think it would be worthwhile to make Pentium II and Pentium III versions of some packages, tuned for the PC's I own, as well as PowerPC G4 versions for my Mac. I may be getting a 100 MHz Pentium system for free soon, and I think it would be particularly worthwhile to tune the software on that machine. I already have custom kernel compiles. I think this helps a fair amount. I understand Mandrake is optimized for Pentium, and I've seen posts from Mandrake users that say that this makes a great deal of difference. I heard gcc version 3 has better processor-specific optimization, but it has had a lot of bugs. But I understand that the 3.1 release may be of production quality, though I have not tried it myself. I would be interested to know what people think. Unfortunately the packages that I think would yield the most benefit from special compiles can be scary to build and replace. I think that a processor-specific glibc would give a good performance benefit to all my programs, but doing the wrong thing when upgrading it makes one's machine just stop working, and then one also can't reboot. It would be necessary to fix it while booted off an emergency disk, which I've actually had to do when I tried to update my Slackware laptop when trying to install packages from slackware-current on a machine that had an incompatible glibc. However I have seen glibc upgraded several times while doing updates. Can I do a manual update of glibc on a running machine using the debian package tools without any problems? An issue with building any libraries is that I would probably not want to have processor-tuned builds for the static versions, to keep me from sending other people programs that won't execute on their machines (or that execute very poorly). One doesn't normally use much static linking anymore but static versions of most libraries are usually available in case you want them. Also, how would I be able to prevent the automatic upgrades of the packages I have tuned? Maybe I can use apt's pin preferences for this. What I would need to track instead would be upgrades to the sources, and then I would need to rebuild. The other packages I would consider tuning would be the XFree86 server and the X libraries, the Gnome libraries, and Mozilla and the libraries it depends on, the netatalk and samba fileservers, and maybe Evolution. I have built mozilla and xfree86 before, and it's a fair amount of work. A mozilla build requires a gigabyte of free disk space - when I built mozilla on my laptop I had to rush around madly deleting unneeded files to keep the build going. I think it would be really cool if Debian made processor-optimized builds of at least the libraries available. I know that this would increase the developer's workload. Maybe there would be some way that apt could be modified to enable processor-specific versions to be installed automatically if they are available. This would be a good opportunity for a commercial debian distributor, to offer debian CD's where everything is processor optimized. Vendors who offered tuned software like this might make better sales, especially if they continued to maintain their distributions as debian is upgraded. It would be worthwhile for some libraries to include processor-specific optimizations in the source code, guarded by #ifdefs. You can do some of these in C without resorting to assembly code, or you can use small libraries written in assembly to give you access to the instructions you need. For example, I have seen that the library source code that comes with the Metrowerks CodeWarrior IDE has a lot of source that is specific to the PowerPC G4. To some extent it can even be worthwhile to build optimizations for several platforms and choose which one to use at runtime, by checking which microprocessor a library is executing on. One trick is for a shared library to consist mostly of stubs that call through to the real library, and then it dynamically loads the best library for the processor at program startup. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: debian-beer (was Re: wrapping [was: Re: disable paragraphflows in mozilla?])
I just realized I started this thread, several topics ago! Nothing like militaristic Nazi Germany will happen again while the US is the lone hyperpower. Unless fascism takes root in the United States itself. Please read my essay Is This the America I Love http://www.goingware.com/notes/america.html Most Americans tend to be isolationists and pacifists, it took Pearl Harbor to awaken the sleeping giant. It actually created a giant superpower as we like to refer to ourselves. Then on Sept. 11 the giant awoke again. If something like 1939 were to happen again, we will be there. About forty years prior to 1939 the United States carried out such pacificistic activities as the war in the Philippines, something few americans even know about today, but in which countless numbers of innocent filipinos were very cruelly killed in the name of the United States' colonian ambitions. One of the few people to speak out against the atrocities in the Philippines was Mark Twain (the pen name for Samual Clemens), for which he was widely regarded as a dangerously unpatriotic scoundrel. http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/twain/ has some of his writings on the matter. Try a google search for: mark twain war philippines And you'll find lots of pages about it. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: tomcat test
Maybe this will help: Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications http://linuxquality.sunsite.dk/articles/webapptesting/ Mike --- Hello, I just apt-get install tomcat but I don't find how to test it :-) Any idea ? -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: tomcat test
In fact, I would know how testing tomcat is running ! Which URI must I set to my browser to test it :-) Ah! Well, you need to know that your webserver is running. If you're testing from the machine that's got the server, try http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 or the proper ID address or hostname of the machine. I don't think Tomcat does anything by itself. I think you need to write a Java module that you install in Tomcat. I'm sorry it's been a while since I've worked with it, but what you will need to do is examine the configuration files for your webserver (apache?) and the configuration files for tomcat to see what URI is used for the programs installed in Tomcat. If Tomcat comes with sample programs, then try giving on of those in the URI. Sorry I couldn't be more specific. But when you do have a full application developed, do follow the advice of my article, and test it for valid HTML, as well as stress-testing it with a load generator. I wrote the article after I was hired to tune a web application that fell over the day it went live, because it couldn't handle even a moderate user load! Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian on an old system
I had Slackware installed on a 486/100 box running as a web server for a while. I think it had 16 MB of ram. It worked OK. I could run X on it, but the GUI wasn't terribly responsive. For comparison, at Geonex Verde we wrote a bunch of curses applications on Sun 3/160's that were 16 MHz 68020's with 4 MB of RAM apiece, one a server and the other a diskless client. It worked pretty well. We were doing image processing using these frame grabber cards (we didn't have the Sun graphics monitor, just a regular TV video display hooked to the frame grabber and a serial terminal). I think you'll be fine. It would be greatly to your benefit to build a custom kernel that has only the features you need, and whose build options are optimized to the kind of processor you are running. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian on an old system
You could try the database API that is included with ZooLib. It has a C++ api. It doesn't have a network protocol of any sort, although a network server has been built with it that uses a proprietary (and I imagine special-purpose) protocol. It's pretty efficient. You should get the code that's in CVS, the release code is pretty old and we're starting to talk about making a new release soon. http://zoolib.sourceforge.net/ You can browse the database API in: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/zoolib/zoolib/src_other/ZDBase/ Most uses of zoolib are for cross-platform GUI, but you can build a zoolib application with no GUI, I'm pretty sure you could build a database application that uses ncurses with it without having to link to the X11 libraries. It also provides a C++ api for TCP networking. It is multithreaded. There are actually two database file formats provided in the CVS version. The newer format is a fault tolerant data store that is based on the Phase Tree algorithm that was invented by this guy who's also working on a fault tolerant filesystem for linux that uses it. It's kind of like journaling but different. You can see the phase tree stuff in: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/zoolib/zoolib/src_other/storage/ the slotstore is the older database format, which works well (and maybe is faster) but is vulnerable in the event of powerfailures or crashes. Best, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: are there bootable net install alpha woody isos?
I only have windows up Does anyone know whether it would be possible to use the tools that create an iso under Cygwin on Windows? If this were explicitly supported it would likely help a lot of people. http://www.cygwin.com/ - a Free Software *nix environment for Windows. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
disable paragraph flows in mozilla?
A usenet moderator pointed out to me that my paragraphs are flowed when I post to usenet. I think what he means is that my paragraphs are all one line terminated by a return, rather than a sequence of lines each terminated by a return. I don't see how to disable this in Mozilla's preferences. Can someone enlighten me? I'm using Mozilla 0.9.9 on Debian Woody x86. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Evolution quits while recieving mail
I have several thousand messages awaiting me on my POP server. A couple times now, when attempting to receive them with Evolution 1.0.2-1, it receives some mail but then I get the message: The Evolution component that handles folders of type mail has unexpectedly quit. You will need to quit Evolution and restart in order to access that data again. I am using a Debian unstable PowerPC system on a Macintosh 8500 with a PowerLogix G4 CPU upgrade. My existing mail folders have tens of thousands of messages (thanks to mailing lists). I do have plenty of disk space left. I think there is a later Evolution version available, but there doesn't seem to be a debian package for PowerPC later than 1.0.2-1. Is there a later PowerPC debian package I can obtain somewhere? Thanks, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: word format
At the risk of helping a windows user, let me suggest a solution to your problem that won't cost you any money. Go to http://www.abisource.com/ and download AbiWord version 1.0.1 for Windows. It is a very nice, lightweight WYSIWYG word processor, it has all the features you would need to format a nice resume, and it is absolutely free. It's not even shareware, it is Free Software in the sense of Free Speech. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mozilla can't post at Kuro5hin
I don't seem to be able to post any comments at http://www.kuro5hin.org/ with Mozilla 0.9.9 on Woody. I can post there with IE5 on Windows OK, and I can post to Slashdot OK with Mozilla. I'm not sure if it's a problem with K5 or Mozilla. Could someone who has a Kuro5hin account and is using Mozilla try posting a comment there? Maybe this is a bug someone needs to know about. I emailed one of K5's staff but I'm not sure what client systems they have for testing. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
ATI video out on laptop?
I have a compaq presario 1800T laptop. It has an ATI Rage Mobility Pro video chip. Under the original Windows 98 installation (before I wiped and reinstalled the drive) I could use the laptop's video out port to watch DVD's on a regular TV set. I pretty much assumed I'd never get this working under Linux but I recently saw a post somewhere that referred to having video out with an ATI chip working. Is this a possibility? I have been able to get one of the DVD players working. Watching DVD's on a laptop is OK for passing the time on an airplane, but it doesn't make for a pleasant evening cuddled up with one's honey on the couch to watch a movie. It would be much nicer if I could play it on the TV set. I guess I could spring for a dedicated DVD player, but then there's the region coding thing. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: GRUB question
You wrote: menu.1st It's menu.lst, with a loweracse l, not a 1. dot ell ess tee. Grub rocks. I use it on all my x86 systems. No more failing to boot when I install a new kernel and forget to run lilo. Also I can try out new kernel parameters by just typing them in at boot time from the GRUb command line. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Change compile options wi/ apt-get source?
I don't know, but I would very much like to recompile glibc, the Xlib, and the gnome libraries to be optimized for the different processors I'm running. Recompiling the kernel to optimize for a particular processor is a significant performance boost but it would help to optimize the libraries too. Recompiling glibc is a bit risky because you can make your machine unbootable if you make a mistake. I think Mandrake is Pentium optimized. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
C++ Style at Kuro5hin
My article Musings on Good C++ Style just got voted to the front page at community website http://www.kuro5hin.org/ The moderators at K5 are a tough crowd to please. It took two drafts, the one that got accepted took me all day to write. The article itself is at: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/9/205040/3918 If you program in C++, the article may benefit you. Even if you don't, you may enjoy participating in the discussion. It seems to be pretty controversial (or rather it has provoked a lot of people who dislike C++). K5 is a much more civilized site than Slashdot, although it does have its trolls. It was written in Emacs on Woody, and viewed in Mozilla 0.9.9. Best, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Applications close by themselves with CPU under load.
Get memtest86. I was having some whacky problems on the PC I'm using right this second, and memtest86 showed that I had some bad memory. I randomly pulled one of the three memory modules and retested, and it passed the test. It's been stable as a rock ever since. http://www.memtest86.com/ It only works on IBM PC compatibles, as it uses the x86 bios. There are some other options for people with other platforms, such as memtester. I talk about some of the options in this page in the section Test the Basic Health of Your System: Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel http://linuxquality.sunsite.dk/articles/testsuites/ It's not really the case that you need twice the swap space as ram. That's just a rough rule of thumb. What you need is as much swap space as the maximum total mapped data memory that you expect to run. Code is paged in directly from the executable so it doesn't count against swap space. If you run a lot of applications simultaneously, or you run apps that are memory hungry, then you need more swap. They just say twice the ram because it's impractical to estimate this. I would think if you were running out of swap you would get out of space messages when you try to execute programs. I do suggest also trying bad block checking, at least your swap area. Do man mkswap and look at the -c option. Also if you have an IDE drive, get the formatting utility from the disk vendor's website and see if it has a read-only test and check your whole drive. If you have a SCSI disk you may be able to do this from the SCSI host bus adapter's BIOS setup utility. Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe to the GoingWare Newsletter at http://www.goingware.com/newsletter/ Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
