Re: [newbie] back to Windows
Anne Wilson wrote: We had a Computer Group in Huddersfield, rather like the LUGs today. We all carted down our heavyweights and plugged them in on trestle tables, with adapters on adapters g. On one occasion I actually had the output of another computer on my ZX81 screen! Anne Wow! That is impressive! I remember we used to connect Tandy 100 portables to a UNIX box and use them as rudimentary terminals while testing some comms software we were writing, but to do it with a ZX81! (bows and scrapes in obeisance to true geek divinity) The Spectrums were much easier to link up. Do you remember ZX-Net? And Red Box, where you could use the mains circuit for networking your Speccys? cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Using the sources of http://www.zarb.org
Robert Yu wrote: Is it possible to save the packages downloaded from this site onto a cache folder for later use? You can download the packages using ftp or something similar, and then, when they are all sitting in a directory, call up a root shell and go to the directory and type the following: genhdlist --dest `pwd` If you get errors, then type the following in order to ignore corrupted archives: genhdlist --nobadrpm --dest `pwd` Then, when it has completed, run Mandrake Control Centre and go to media manager and set up the directory as a source. It works for me. I just ignore the whining about checksums and click on yes and then the stuff installs straight from rpmdrake. urpmi should pick it up too, although I usually use the GUII tool for this one. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] back to Windows
JoeHill wrote: On Fri, 1 Apr 2005 07:33:01 -0800 Aron Smith disseminated the following: Hell if he want's to fight send him to the OT list :-) If your definition of 'fight' is a bunch of blindfolded monkeys throwing excrement in all directions... Ha! Maybe the dubya-fans-us-uber-alles list was over-subscribed and Mandrakeot collected the spillage? ;-] cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] xmms and sound
Paul Kaplan wrote: Any ideas why I can't get any sound out of xmms but realplayer, totem, and the system sounds work fine? TIA Paul If you right-click on the xmms console, go Options -Preferences and then see the first tab, Audio I/O Plugins. At the bottom of the box, see Output Plugin. Try changing it. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] HD Failure
SOTL wrote: Hi All Over the weekend I lost my 3rd HD using MC under Mandrake 10.1 in 2 different computers. In each case MC was being used to search or move a directory that had over 100 data files with over 2 GB of data. In the last instance Saturday morning I was transferring a directory with over 5 GB of data from /home/branch/My_Pictures {Data directory being moved which consisted of .jpg files} to /System_Data/My_Picture by the normal method of MC file transfer. In all 3 cases something is wiped out the partition structure. What is unknown as at this point the issue is above my knowledge level. In the latest incident after discovering that the computer had stall and was completely non functional I discovered that the contents of the root partition was corrupted. At this point it should be noted that there was NO data on this box that was not all so on several other boxes so saving HD data was not a consideration. Attempts to recover and restore the system by installation of Mandrake 10.1 disk and doing a custom installation where one defined the partition showed the existence of all partitions those being /boot / swap /home /System_Data Next stage in set up is to format partitions. At that point the installation fails with the notice that installation could not find the root partation. Not being content with that I then attempted to reconfigure the partitions to one giant HD partition with the intent of reformatting the complete HD and then repartitioning the HD. Results of removing /boot, swap, /home, and /System_Data partations was that installation was unable to identify HD giving same error message as previously received for root directory. Two weeks previously I had been using MC to search for a number of test DB that I had on the system. These test DB were all of the 1 to 5 line variety with names all starting with test-XX where XX was 00 to 20 plus located in half a dozen different directories having been written at various times over several months. The object was to collect them all into one place. Anyway the search criteria was set to start at / and I was searching for test*. Half way through one of the directories the computer froze. Closer inspection revealed that the root directory was trashed. Attempts to recover showed the same conditions as noted above. System configuration unable to find root directory and unable to format that directory. Both of the above incidents occurred in my desktop. Last October I was attempting to move files using MC in my laptop. Details of what I did due to time and conditions are fuzzy so one could say a number of things including operator error but then this was followed by two incident where more detail observations were made. Anyway last October the HD showed all the same symptoms as shown above. First the root directory departed with installation unable to find the existence of that directory and then the rest of the system departed as I attempted to recovery from that. At that time I took the HD to a number [if memory serves me correct 5 different groups] linux clubs meetings [1 meeting per club] A number of real Linus and Unix people looked at it with a large variety of different tools. The consensus of all was that that HD which did have critical non backed up data on it was trashed and beyond salvage. Thus my conclusion is that if other are having similar experiences that there is something that is causing Midnight Commander in Mandrake to do something {the details of which are above my knowledge level} that is causing partitions to corrupt when MC is placed under heavy search of file transfer mode. If others are not having similar experiences then there must be something corrupted in my Mandrake 10.1 disks. This also is something that is not unheard of as I had that very issue with Mandrake 9.2 CDs in as much as the system would install and run but each installation had a different set of unexplainable omissions or failures. This after time was finally tracked down to a bad set of CD in as much as those CD would install on some systems and not on other identical systems. Thank Frank Omigosh, what a sad story! I use mc all the time and have been doing so within Mandrake since version 7.0, and before that on RatHead(oops I mean RedHat) and before that on SCO UNIXes and so on. What exactly were you trying to do with the root file systems in question? I don't think mc is the tool to use if you are cloning a root filesystem. It works fine for other filesystems and subdirectories, etc., but be very careful about overwriting a root filesystem with the contents of another. Were you using more than one mc session at the same time? Are these all IDE drives? Is there a USB bus involved? How long since an fsck was performed on the file systems? We need more info. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Re: [newbie] HD Failure
SOTL wrote: You missed the point. I was doing NOTHING with the root file system. I was simply coping data files [5 gb worth] from one directory to another. OK. I misunderstood. Were the two directories on the same hard disk or what? cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] HD Failure
SOTL wrote: There were 3 failures each slightly different all occurred while I was using MC under very heavy load. HD Failure # 3 details snipped At the time of the last failure I had decided to use MC to transfer files as previous transfer had been by root so root permission was required to move directory structure. Half way through move of files from /home/branch to /home/branch/System_Data computer stopped and refused to continue with HD making strange clicking sounds. Inspection showed trashed root directory Strange clicking sounds - very bad news. HD Failure # 2 details snipped Half way through the search the computer stopped with the HD making beating clicking sounds. For the search crash I was using MC as a user NOT as root. Again . Also the HD was set up with partitions exactly as it would later be and as noted above for the third HD failure HD Failure # 1 The details of the first crash are to foggy to relate exact details of events. Frank, I think you are looking in the wrong direction for your problem. Midnight commander is not the problem, but the activity that you set into motion using it is. This leads me to suggest that you should consider looking at your hardware arrangements. Your drives may be overheating and failing as a result. I have had that problem with an external USB2.0 IDE drive. Fortunately the drive was not trashed, although I had to perform a full fsck on the file systems on the drive. One was trashed to such an extent that I had to salvage what I could from lost+found and eventually reformat the file system. It's working fine now, ever since I ripped a HUGE heatsink out of an old power supply and joined it to the case of the external hd. The clicking noise normally indicates a serious physical problem with a drive. Were these drives totally messed up, or was it just the file systems? As a matter of interest, what type of drives are they? I live in a hot part of the world, and, in the last twenty years or so, I have found that the most common cause of PC hardware failure is overheating, followed closely by spikes in the mains supply caused by lightning or other reasons. One thing I have learned is that one should never leave the cover off a busy system, especially if it is fully populated with drives, etc. The cases are designed to channel the flow of air appropriately, and leaving the cover off leads certain parts to overheat. (I am not saying that this is your problem - It is just something I have learned the hard way.) I think that you would have experienced the same problems if you had been using tools other than Midnight Commander. Most of my drive failures have occurred while using MC, but I don't blame MC - It's just that I use it all the time. Good luck Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Program to save a selected part of a picture
Lee Wiggers wrote: On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 16:08:01 -0800 Erylon Hines [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Friday 25 March 2005 12:09 pm, Paul Smith wrote: | Dear All | | I am looking for a (simple) program to save a selected part of a | picture. Any suggestions? | | Thanks in advance, | | Paul May I suggest ImageMagik? It is on your disks, has lots of features (resize, crop, sharpen, color balance, etc) and has a shallow learning curve. The only thing I don't like about it is saving images is somewhat clunky. e Members have been talking about Gwenview. May be what you need. Lee I always use xv for this. Available from PLF. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] cd into file
aron smith wrote: On Sunday 27 March 2005 12:42 pm, Rosemary McGillicuddy wrote: I am feeling particularly stupid and frustrated just now. I downloaded some files in preparation for installing gwenview. I saved them to /home/rosemary/Linux Stuff/rpms - now I can't cd into it, tells me no such file or directory. Thought I would rename it, but same problem. I don't want to have to do the downloads again. I've not had this problem before. I can see the rpms in konqueror and that is the path it gives. It seems simple but I am stumped. Wondered if it doesn't like the Linux Stuff name? Rosemary just a thought try renaming from /home/rosemary/Linux Stuff/rpms to /home/rosemary/Linux_Stuff/rpms sometimes linux/unix takes exception to spaces in filenames Alternatively, use double quotes so that the spaces don't cause a problem. cd /home/rosemary/Linux Stuff/rpms should do it. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Halt/Reboot buttons not available at Login Screen
Russel Dains wrote: I have just installed Mandrake 10.1. I am unable to reboot or shutdown the system from the login screen. The only available option is to type reboot or halt in a command line. Any suggestions? Thanks for your help. Another solution is to change your display manager. You could use kdm or gdm instead of mdkdm. Both of these support shutdown and reboot on the login screen. I use gdm, myself. From the Mandrake Control Centre, you should be able to configure your login options to use another display manager. If no options exist, you need to install the packages (Gdm or kdm). good luck Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Learning Mandrake in the UK
DAN WALKER wrote: On Friday 25 Mar 2005 13:19, DAN WALKER wrote: there is one where I am - milton keynes. would it be full of bearded men who drive austin allegros? a b I shall indeed try it out. Once won't convert me to bearded life. All that hinding behind hair! Dan, In my experience you get all sorts. There are bearded ones, indeed, but often there are many who are as yet unable to justify buying a razor. Often the most formidable propellerheads are clean-shaven with short neat haircuts. There are 70 year-olds and 17 year-olds and all ages inbetween. There are professional support technicians, programmers and rank amateurs as well as academics and even farmers. You won't feel out of place, no matter what you are! regards Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Games recommendation
Fajar Priyanto wrote: On Wednesday 23 March 2005 02:11, H.J.Bathoorn wrote: On Tuesday 22 March 2005 22:59, JR wrote: On Monday 21 March 2005 10:08 pm, Fajar Priyanto wrote: Hi folks, snip Do you have any recommendation on games that can relieve our stress level? Thanks :) I love airstrike. Their still working on it but the version released at the moment is playable against another player or the computer. It's based on 'bip' (bi-plane). Try enigma if you like puzzles.and of course sirtet if you like tetris. Thank you all for all the suggestions. I have fun playing all these new games. I especially like alienbuster, however the game ends after killing two bosses :( So short. Also airstrike, a bit difficult, but quite fun. I still have several games to try, alienpool, amphetamine, alephone (notice the alphabet 'a'?) Hehe.. So many games to dig out and try. Try PySol if you want to see the ultimate solitaire game. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Which Kernel For 10.1 ?
Pete Moscatt wrote: When I have a look, I see there are a number of 2.6.8.1-24 available, being ones like ENTERPRISE, SECURE, SMP and there may even me a few more. Now which one of these would I typically go for ? :-) It depends what your requirements are. If you are running Mandrake at home on a desktop PC, then the standard version as loaded by default should be fine. However, should you have special requirements such as extra security, or optimisation for many users, or if you have a multiprocessor machine, then you would have a need for different versions. SMP = Symmetrical Multi-Processing Enterprise = Optimised for larger organisations Secure = should be obvious, for firewall use, etc Normally the standard port of the kernel as supplied by Mandrake is suitable for all of those uses, anyway, but each variant is tweaked for more applicability to those areas. On some motherboards, the smp version works better(even if the mobo is single-processor). cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
[newbie] Useful URL for newbies
Hello I found this URL to be useful for beginners who have some knowledge, but need a bit of guidance. http://freeengineer.org/learnUNIXin10minutes.html The CLI is not something to be feared. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Useful URL for newbies
Rosemary McGillicuddy wrote: The CLI is not something to be feared. cheers Duncan Is that not so ? I read somewhere about a command that could wipe out your whole system if done as root. Something to do with r and rm and -r I think ... Rosemary PS Not that I am about to do anything so outrageous :-) Ha! That reminds me. Once upon a time I used to run a UNIX support department for a big distributor, and we had our own public access ftp server with patches and drivers on it. Anyway, one fine day, I was logged in as root, fiddling around in a subdirectory, and then I typed cd, and enter, and then someone must have distracted me, and then I typed rm * and pressed enter. Since this was an old UNIX box, cd on its own takes you to the / directory. root does not have its own home as on Linux. OOPS! Not only did that UNIX box not have its own /root home directory, but it also lacked a separate /boot or /stand directory, so I had just managed to remove the kernel /unix and the boot program /boot. DOUBLE OOPS! Fortunately, I kept my wits about me, and quickly mounted an installation boot floppy from which I copied the /boot program, then I relinked the kernel, which produced a new /unix file, while praying that we did not have a power failure. Phew! None of my support technicians noticed a thing! I reckon I would have been a bit embarrassed if they had. Incidentally, the command you were talking about rm -r is absolutely lethal when run as root in the root directory. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Useful URL for newbies
SOTL wrote: I don't know about a comand to wipe a system but I do know a procedure of how I trash a HD. All I did was use MC to search for test and HD went into orbit. It is now a good paperweight on my desk. What I was searching for were DBs I had created call test1, test2 et. What I got was a trashed HD. Frank Frank, When you mention MC, what do you mean? (Midnight Commander?) cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] mp3s to wav/cd burning
Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: I like to make scripts a bit more bullet proof... I would probably change it to: for i in *.mp3 ; do name=$(basename $i .mp3) mpg123 -s $name.mp3 | sox -f 44100 -w -s -c 2 - $name.wav done This way, it handles files with spaces in the name, and you avoid having to use a temp file. The error generated by a file with a space in its name would not be a problem by itself, and using a temp file would not be a problem by it self. but if you get the wrong name, you could delete something other then what you intended to. For example, if you had a file called bridge over troubled water.mp3 and you also had a file called bridge in the same directory, you script would first overwrite, then delete bridge. Using basename in place of FILE=`echo $FILE | sed s/.mp3//g` also solves the problem of a file with .mp3 in more then one place in the name. It would probably not be a problem in any case, but you never know. Mikkel You are a scriptmaster of note, Mikkel. My version of the script works for me, because I always make sure that there are no spaces in the names first. Your refinement allows one to be more lazy! regards Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Useful URL for newbies
Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: There are some added protections to make doing that even harder now. When you type rm from the command line, you are actualy running rm -i thanks to a handy alias. So you would be asked to confirm every deletion. When you get asked about the first one, hit Ctrl-c, and it will abort the command. Yes, isn't Linux (especially Mandrake) just wonderful? Not that you want to be logged in as root, unless you realy need to for what you are doing. But it is harder to break things then it used to be. There are still a lot of things you can do as root that will break the system. Mikkel It's a bit bit like walking on thin ice, isn't it? As a general rule, one should su to root only when it is absolutely necessary. I am a reformed root user. What I mean by that is that I always used to log in as root at home, because I never had to worry about permissions on devices, directories, etc. It was a form of laziness. I did this for years, but lately I have got into the habit of trying to make things work as a normal user. (I still run xmms and k3b as root, though. Probably laziness.) cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Useful URL for newbies
aron smith wrote: On Monday 21 March 2005 07:34 am, Duncan Anderson wrote: Frank, When you mention MC, what do you mean? (Midnight Commander?) cheers Duncan MC is a cloneof midnight commander urpmi mc How can something be a clone of itself? :-) Surely you mean mc is a clone of Norton Commander. Actually it is more of a case of Norton Commander on steroids. Anyway, I was wondering how mc could trash a hard drive. It sounds a bit wierd. I always use mc. It worries me that someone can blame it for hard disk failure. Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Auld lang syne.
James Henry Maiewski wrote: Hello, In the More proof that I'm not the smartest guy in the world department, and in the hope that maybe someone out there is where I was a year or so ago, I want to say that Vim rocks! I had heard it many times, but since I couldn't just type 'vim foo' and go, I took the path of least resistance and suffered. So, if anybody out there besides myself does not know about the tutor, try using 'vimtutor.' Sincerely, James Henry Maiewski Glad to hear it! Learning to use vi never killed anybody. vim is brilliant. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] mp3s to wav/cd burning
Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: lower case names for local varables - so you don't break things if you deside to source the code from another script. Mikkel, Explain this to me, I don't quite follow your rationale here. I always use upper case for variable names so they can be clearly seen as such when one reads the scripts at a later stage. regards Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] mp3s to wav/cd burning
Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: If you are using a varable in a loop, and its value only has meaning in that loop, but not in the rest of the script, use a lowercase name. For example: for name in *.txt ; do file $name done For small scripts, it is not too important, unless you do something like . script name or exec script name from inside another script. Then any changes made to a varable in the sourced script affect the calling script. If the name is upper case, then I know it is ether a shell varable, or it is set at the start of the script, and has the same value in the entire script. For example, I know MAIL is a shell varable pointing to the user's mail spool, and EDITOR, if it is set, is the user's preferred text editor. And if I see $SED, I know that it is the full path to sed, or a program that will act like sed when used in the script. If I see $name, I know to look for where it is set in the script. It should be fairly close to where it is used. If I see $Name, then I know may I have to look farther back in the code to see where it get set. I also know that I have to be carefull about how I change it. Mikkel OK. I see what your system is. It makes sense, but it may add an element of complication where it is not needed. Since there is no practical restriction on the length of variable names that I know of, I simply make sure that I have no duplicates and that I do not invoke subshells which do not initialise their variables correctly. Thanks for all your, as usual, enlightening comments. I think this thread is going too far away from newbie interest, though. regards Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Auld lang syne.
Greg Meyer wrote: On Monday 21 March 2005 12:41 pm, Duncan Anderson wrote: Glad to hear it! Learning to use vi never killed anybody. vim is brilliant. But what about emacs? :p I don't think anyone has actually died from using emacs. However, I'm not too sure what the statistics are regarding people who have died of old age waiting for it to compile. :-) Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] mp3s to wav/cd burning
JoeHill wrote: On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 14:37:18 +1100 [EMAIL PROTECTED] disseminated the following: What do people use for making music cds from mp3s? Check out ROXDAO. The site is offline right now, but check it out later, very nice GUI for burning audio CD's, you can see a shot of it on my site. http://kymatica.com/software.html I am having problems accessing that URL. Anyway, for the newbie, k3b works pretty well. If you have lame installed, k3b allows you to create audio cds from mp3 files by simply dragging and dropping. Otherwise, you can use various methods via the shell. One that I always used to use was this: for FILE in *.mp3 do FILE=`echo $FILE | sed s/.mp3//g` mpg123 -s $FILE.mp3 $FILE.raw sox -r 44100 -w -s -c 2 $FILE.raw $FILE.wav rm -f $FILE.raw done This would convert all the mp3 files in a directory to .wav files. Then: cdrecord -scanbus -dev=0,0,0 cdrecord -v speed=2 -dev=0,0,0 -audio -pad *.wav Substitute the 0,0,0 for the relevant device setting for your system. This setup is for an external USB2.0 cdwriter configured as /dev/sr0. Then, after all that, remove the .wav files. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] mp3s to wav/cd burning
Duncan Anderson wrote: JoeHill wrote: Check out ROXDAO. The site is offline right now, but check it out later, very nice GUI for burning audio CD's, you can see a shot of it on my site. http://kymatica.com/software.html I am having problems accessing that URL. The site is offline right now, Duh! I missed that. Too early in the morning, or too much blood in my caffeine. :-) cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Possible alternative format for forum
Anne Wilson wrote: On Thursday 17 Mar 2005 19:50, Fajar Priyanto wrote: On Friday 18 March 2005 02:46 am, Fajar Priyanto wrote: Anyway, at least you've got flat rate. It my country, using phone line for internet will seriously blow one's wallet as the bill is charged based on minutes :( That's true in many countries, including England. Anne In South Africa, there is a service whereby you pay an extra fee every month which limits the charge of any phone call between 19h00 and 07h00 to approx. 0.9 euro (7 Rands). This means you can stay logged on from 7 in the evening to seven in the morning and pay a flat fee. The real fun is on the weekend, when the deal extends from 19h00 Friday to 07h00 Monday. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Possible alternative format for forum
Greg Meyer wrote: IMO, a ML with a good set of filters and a mail client that does proper message threading can't be beat and I will very rarely visit a web forum. Just my 2 cents. I agree with Greg. In a low bandwidth situation such as mine, a mailing list works much better. Website based forums are a major pain in the behind if you have a slow third-world type dialup connection, whereas you can always go and make yourself a cup of tea or something while the mail is downloading. With a forum, you have to watch the screen so that you can click where appropriate, etc. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] re: SSHD
Mrexecutive wrote: Hello Duncan, I tried doing: chkconfig --add sshd but its telling me No such file or directory any idea what im doing wrong? I am logged in as su also :( Hi Try specifying the full path: /sbin/chkconfig -- add sshd or else, when you use su, do it like this: su - The minus sign means that it will set up root's environment correctly, so that /sbin and /usr/sbin are in the path. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] re: SSHD
Mrexecutive wrote: Hello Guys, I installed SSHD but forgot how to start it or can someone show me how to put it in the autoexec file for linux so it does it upon start up? Sorry im a newbie! Go into the Mandrake Control Centre (Configure Your Computer) and go into the System section, then go into Services - Look for sshd and enable it. Otherwise, from a root command prompt, type chkconfig --add sshd cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Canon Powershot A85
Anne Wilson wrote: On Friday 11 Mar 2005 15:59, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: I guess it is possible that you have to turn the camera on, but I do not think so. (Unless you had to do that for it to be detected in Windows.) Mine is not detected until I switch it on - and it must be in Play mode. For what it's worth, my Samsung needs to be switched on, and the same applies to many other cameras, although some do activate automatically as soon as they are connected to the USB bus. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] file size limit
Trygve Seljeflot wrote: Can anybody tell me how to increase the file size limit in MDK 10.1 ? When copying an dvd.iso image from one machine to another, it stops at 2.0 GB, 61%. If you type ulimit -f at the command line, what does it say? If it says UNLIMITED, then your system file size limit should be limited only by the file system. I am running 10.1 and I created a file of 3GB as a test and there was no problem. The problem must have to do with the program used to perform the copy or something like that. Can you give us some more details? cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] file size limit
Trygve Seljeflot wrote: On Wednesday 09 March 2005 19:23, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: How are you doing the copy? If you are copying to a Samba share, I think there is something you have to set in Samba for files larger the 2G. (I remember reading something about it the other day, but I can not remember the details.) Mikkel By fish, from home/user on PC1 to home/user PC2, both runnimg MDK 10.1 Maybe you should try using rcp or scp and see if that works, or even ftp. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] file size limit
Trygve Seljeflot wrote: I'm usin fish in Konqueror, smaller files is no problem. OK, well I think that uses scp. Try using the command line. At a bash prompt, try setting the ulimit: ulimit -f unlimited Then use scp, or run konqueror from the shell prompt. I think that should work. (I stand to be corrected, though.) I wonder if KDE imposes some limits? I don't use it. I use WindowMaker. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Microsoft overrules EU Council
Stephen Kühn wrote: On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 23:13, Kaj Haulrich wrote: Here's to democracy, EU-style : http://wiki.ffii.org/Cons050307En In short : The Microsoft puppet-state Luxembourg denied council members from Poland, Portugal and Denmark their request to change the Directive on Software Patent from an A-item to a B-item. So friends, that was it : forget about software development in Europe. Kaj Haulrich. That is completely ridiculous. Hell is going to break loose and there are going to be heaps of very mad folks. I don't think they'll get away with it. Huh, this is the kind of dictatorial fascism that Europe is so good at. They have proved it over and over again in the past, so why should this be any different? Greed rather than justice, for ever! Bunch of Nazis! Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] workgroup
Greg Meyer wrote: On Sunday 06 March 2005 03:11 pm, Michel Leunen wrote: Rob Blomquist wrote: You don't Linux does not use workgroups. I assume that you are running Samba somehow, as Samba uses workgroup names to meet Windows networking conventions. The default samba workgroup is 'mdkgroup',that's what I wanna change. Edit that in /etc/samba/smb.conf and restart samba The other newbie way is to install the drakwizard package and then use the Configure Samba wizard from MCC. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] any question (about GPRS software, etc)
I see that there is a huge selection of software for talking to your GPRS phone, but what I need to know (related question) is: What hardware do I need on the PC side in order to communicate with the cellphone? If I have an oldish Thinkpad with IrDA, will that do? Alternatively, can I use wlan cards for Bluetooth? cheers Duncan (Argh, these new-fangled telephonic devices befuddle my dinosaur brain ... what happened to acoustic-coupler modems?) Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] vim error
Dave Williams wrote: E575: viminfo: Illegal starting char in line: ^V4516^@ Hit ENTER or type command to continue I get the same message when I use shift-ZZ to exit. This happens in a konsole in KDE, and it also happens if I use ctrl-alt-F1 and log into a pty session. vi seems to *work* okay, it just gives me this odd message. That is wierd, Dave. I have been using 10.1 for a while now, and I have never seen a message like that, and I use vim/vi all the time. I have used vi under KDE in both konsoles and xterms and I have not seen such messages. Does this message appear when you specify a file as an argument to the editor? Does it appear when you run vi on its own? It sounds to me that the editor is complaining about '^V' which has a significance similar to \ in the shell. It would be odd to begin a line with it. What happens when you specify the -b option to vi? cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Setting up an extra hard disk
Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: The only reasion I remember is because I had to go through it not too long ago. I also learned that with udev, it gets interesting moving a working system to a new drive. udev mounts over the /dev directory, so you can not access the entries under it. Without the default entries, you can run lilo. So the rescue mode can not install the boot loader. So you have to use something like a live CD or a partition copy utility to move things. (Or do a bunch of extra work.) I now have a handy .tar file of the default /dev directory... I used to know how to make Windows boot from the second drive, but I would have to find my notes on it now. I think you have to use the map or drive options of lilo to remap the BIOS mapping of the drives, because the Windows boot loader used the BIOS mapping to load things. XP may be different, but all the versions I have used have used the first BIOS hard drive, and I don't know how to tell it to use a different drive. So I have had lilo change the drive mapping so that the first BIOS drive is the drive I want to boot from, instead of the real first drive. (It helps to have played with a mix of SCSI and IDE drives in the same machine...) Mikkel Recent versions of lilo offer you the following syntax: other=/dev/hdb1 label=Windows boot-as=0x80 This is an example of specifying a windows boot partition on the second ide drive. The 0x80 is used to fool windows into thinking it is booting from the primary master or drive C:' in DOS-speak. This is not the easiest method, but you can use the master-boot parameter in your /etc/lilo.conf, as an alternative: other=/dev/hdb1 label=Windows master-boot Yet another way is to use the old method, like we did in days of yore: map-drive=0x80 to=0x81 map-drive=0x81 to=0x80 This would swap the BIOS labels for the first and second drives, thus fooling any operating system. I should like to say that Mikkel's notes in a previous posting in the thread are spot on. I use the method he describes to clone Mandrake drives for one of the computer dealers in our area. I partition the second drive from the first one, copy the OS and so on over to the various relevant partitions on the second one, then before I swap the drives around, I edit /etc/lilo.conf and /etc/fstab as he described, and then use CD1 - F2 - rescue - restore boot loader and Viola!. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Setting up an extra hard disk
Eric Huff wrote: Paul Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have just bought an extra hard disk of 80GB for my computer. Could someone here please tell me how to make it my master disk (I still have the old one of 20GB), without loosing the information on my old disk? I used this: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Hard-Disk-Upgrade.html Not necessarily the easiest, but it worked. You might want to print it out unless you have another computer running. I have done this many times, and I would say that the safest method of all is to disable/disconnect the old drive, install Mandrake on the new drive, reconnect the old drive as a slave, use drakconf(MCC) - mountpoints - partitions (diskdrake) to edit your old partitions and add mountpoints,etc. You can do it from the command line using fdisk/cfdisk and editing the /etc/fstab file, but perhaps the method I have described above is more suitable for a newbie. Good luck Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] various issues
Martell, Larry wrote: On Monday 28 February 2005 09:26 pm, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: Julie Sloan wrote: Was it harder adapting to XP, or Linux? It's worse coming the other way. I started on BSD unix version III running on a DEC PDP-7 in the late 70's. For the next 26 years I worked exclusively on various unix's systems - ATT SVR4, HPUX, AUX, Solaris, etc. For family use we have always had Mac's. I managed to never once use a windows machine or intel hardware. Well that all changed last November. I was forced (because I like to eat) to take job where I am now working in the wintel environment. This has been the most frustrating 3 months of my life. A large part of it is my mental block against this environment, but it's also because windows seems to be random while unix is orthogonal and deterministic. I swear I think there a random number generator in windows and when you boot it that determines how it will function that day ;-) But I learn so much new stuff every day ... and I have managed to bring in 2 linux boxes here (and I've only been here 3 months!) I just wish there was a list like this for windows! -larry I have to concur with Larry. Windows is a nightmare of frustration for me. I have been involved in UNIX support for nearly twenty years and Linux for about nine. I have managed not to use Windows except very superficially in passing until very recently when my wife bought an Apple iPod which seems impervious to my efforts to get it mounted on my Linux box. My only choice at the moment is to run Windows on my laptop using Samba to allow iTunes to access a directory containing MP3 files on the Linux server. What a pain! Editing text files is particularly irritating because my fingers operate in vi mode reflexively. I also find myself cursing over Windows' apparent lack of consistency in terms of where it decides to save things. I could go on... Fortunately I found something called Cygwin which renders certain aspects of my Windows partition more congenial. My main impression of Windows is that it makes a lot of things unnecessarily difficult! regards Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] various issues
Russ Kepler wrote: On Tuesday 01 March 2005 01:17 pm, Duncan Anderson wrote: What a pain! Editing text files is particularly irritating because my fingers operate in vi mode reflexively. Get vim for Windows. A decent vi emulator, heck, I use it under Mandrake and on Sun instead of vi. I used to use the MKS toolkit version of vi on DOS as well as the Korn shell and awk, grep, sed, et al. It was one of the reasons I never learned DOS properly! vim is cool, though. I also find myself cursing over Windows' apparent lack of consistency in terms of where it decides to save things. I could go on... There is a decent shell toolkit for Windows, the name escapes me at the moment but it has ksh and most of the simple command line stuff. MKS Toolkit, perhaps? Yes. Mortice Kern Associates from Canada, I think. My main impression of Windows is that it makes a lot of things unnecessarily difficult! Some, certainly, other outright dangerous (registry editing, anyone?). If you ever have to write stuff at the system level it's downright schizophrenic with something like 3 sets of system calls for file I/O (as compared to the UNIX norm of 1 set). True pain on Windows is writing something that's to run like a cron job on UNIX. On UNIX you make it work then toss it into cron, on Windows you basically have to write a service around it, a completely different run environment, and it's impossible to test. Bah! Eek! (He makes the sign to ward off demons!) cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] various issues
Russ Kepler wrote: I don't think there's a 'proper' way to learn MS-DOS. My first conputer was an IBM 360/65 running a timeshare simulator called RAX, heck, the first programming test I ever took was to see if I could hold a 1401 punchboard at arms length, so I'm a proper dinosaur. My first programming job was on a Wang 2200 running WANGBASIC 2. (cringe) It had 22KB of RAM per user, and a 20MB removable Winchester which was the size of a rubbish bin lid. The drive mechanism was the size of an industrial washing machine. Fortunately the company wanted to use the new technology, so they had a 2200 emulator running on top of Xenix on a Wang APC (non-IBM compatible 286) as a platform for their package. This was my escape route into the UNIX world. (Now I think we have deviated completely from newbie to dinosaur - perhaps we should start a new saurian mailing list.) cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] 10.1 Community on laptop
Lee Wiggers wrote: Laptop now boots with numlock on. Also sets it on with startx. Annoying with the laptop because the keypad is embedded. How do I change this? To change it permanently, remove the numlock package using the package manager. To keep the package on the system but disabled, go to Mandrake Control Centre (Configure Your Computer) - System - Services, scroll down until you find numlock and remove the cross from the on boot box, and press the stop button. Click on OK and numlock is disabled. If your GUI is broken for any reason, or if you prefer the command line, su to root and type chkconfig --del numlock which will disable the service(or disservice). I had to do this because I have a Thinkpad, and I was going nuts because it was telling me that my password was invalid all the time, until it dawned on me that this silly service was running. (It must have been designed for people who are in too much of a hurry to press the numlock key.) cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Quick question
Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: nonfb translates into booting without using the frame buffer. Basicly, writing to the screen like DOS does, instead of directly into video memory. (Simplifed explination.) This does not affect the GUI mode, only the command line mode. Using the frame buffer, you can do interesting things like have a background image with your CLI. (Distracting when running VMS-Empire!) I have just installed 10.1 on a client's Celeron with P4 motherboard machine and the installation automatically installed the frame buffer inclusive kernel as a default (linux). I found that I could not get a higher graphical resolution than 800x600 at 16 bits. When I changed the default kernel to linux-nonfb, I found that I could see the graphics card properly and was able to set the screen resolution to 1024x768 at 32 bits. (I can't remember what graphics chip it was using, off hand). I also had to specify noapic as a boot parameter. On my own server, when it was still running Mandrake 9.1, I used to have to use the non-fb option for it to work properly. Now I am using the default fb 2.6.10 (cooker) kernel on a fairly standard 10.1 installation and I can use the frame-buffer. All I can say is that the frame-buffer version is not always the best option. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] linux books
Rosemary McGillicuddy wrote: Thanks everyone for your suggestions. Will try get one or two from library first, then buy one. That is very wise, Rosemary. Not wanting to dampen anyone's enthusiasm, but all Computer books are out of date by the time they are published. The best up-to-date information is freely available on the Net. Having said that, even old computer books can be useful in terms of learning the concepts and methods involved. They are not always good at the finer details of the newer releases of various Linux distributions. Linux for Dummies isn't bad. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] logging off
Rosemary McGillicuddy wrote: Is it good for the computer to leave it on all the time? I always leave my UNIX and Linux boxes on all the time (between power outages), and they love it! It's OK to switch the display off, if it doesn't do so automatically. If you prefer downing the box at the end of the day, that's also fine. :-) If you use modem communications and you live in an area where lightning storms are common, it's a good idea to disconnect the phone jack from your modem when you are not using it, but it's not really necessary to shut down the machine. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] startx options
Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: One point that probably should be cleared up - it doesn't matter where X is started from. You could have started the first X secession from tty5, and start the second one from tty1, or the first one could be started by booting into run level 5. You can even start one using startx -- :1 before starting a second one using startx. (startx defaults to :0 unless you tell it different.) The first one started will use the first free Vertual Console. This is tty7 with the default setup. The second one will use the next free VC, and so forth. You are not limmited to just 2. This is slightly off on a tangent, but it may be illuminating. If you have a root prompt, you can start X servers by hand without using startx, even. For example, you can type: xinit -- /usr/X11R6/bin/X :1 (or :2 or :3 or :4) for local sessions, or you can start a session on a remote machine by specifying the display as foo:0 where foo is the hostname of the remote machine. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Maintenance, what if any?
Tim wrote: mdkkdm.log: (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. mdkkdm.log:Feb 19 19:21:28 mdkkdm_config[4693] error: Invalid option value 'All' at /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc:292 mdkkdm.log: (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. mdkkdm.log:Feb 19 20:37:01 mdkkdm_config[4705] error: Invalid option value 'All' at /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc:292 mdkkdm.log: (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. mdkkdm.log:Feb 20 12:47:26 mdkkdm_config[4582] error: Invalid option value 'All' at /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc:292 mdkkdm.log: (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. mdkkdm.log:Feb 21 01:05:13 mdkkdm_config[4702] error: Invalid option value 'All' at /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc:292 mdkkdm.log: (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. Probably nothing to worry about if your graphical login is working OK. messages:Feb 20 13:01:03 localhost msec: changed mode of /var/log/kernel/errors.1.gz from 644 to 640 messages:Feb 20 13:01:03 localhost msec: changed mode of /var/log/mail/errors.1.gz from 644 to 640 messages:Feb 20 13:01:03 localhost msec: changed mode of /var/log/cups/error_log from 644 to 640 messages:Feb 20 13:01:03 localhost msec: changed mode of /var/log/daemons/errors.1.gz from 644 to 640 messages:Feb 20 13:01:03 localhost msec: changed mode of /var/log/lpr/errors.1.gz from 644 to 640 messages:Feb 20 13:01:03 localhost msec: changed mode of /var/log/cron/errors.1.gz from 644 to 640 Ignore these. messages:Feb 21 01:05:02 localhost shorewall: reports complaining about errors that it didn't catch messages:Feb 21 01:05:03 localhost shorewall: reports complaining about errors that it didn't catch If you are using shorewall, then maybe these are worth investigating, else turn it off. messages:Feb 21 01:05:55 localhost kernel: hdd: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } messages:Feb 21 01:05:55 localhost kernel: hdd: drive_cmd: error=0x04Aborted Command Did you disconnect an external USB drive or memory stick? If not, then you may have problems if /dev/hdd is internal. nvidia-installer.log: -Wpointer-arith -Wno-multichar -Werror -O -fno-common -MD -Wno-cast-qual -Wn nvidia-installer.log: o-error -D_LOOSE_KERNEL_NAMES -D__KERNEL__ -DMODULE -DNTRM -D_GNU_SOURCE -D_ nvidia-installer.log: ith -Wno-multichar -Werror -O -fno-common -MD -Wno-cast-qual -Wno-error -D_L nvidia-installer.log: eses -Wpointer-arith -Wno-multichar -Werror -O -fno-common -MD -Wno-cast-qua nvidia-installer.log: l -Wno-error -D_LOOSE_KERNEL_NAMES -D__KERNEL__ -DMODULE -DNTRM -D_GNU_SOURC nvidia-installer.log: arentheses -Wpointer-arith -Wno-multichar -Werror -O -fno-common -MD -Wno-ca nvidia-installer.log: st-qual -Wno-error -D_LOOSE_KERNEL_NAMES -D__KERNE nvidia-installer.log: es -Wpointer-arith -Wno-multichar -Werror -O -fno-common -MD -Wno-cast-qual nvidia-installer.log: -Wno-error -D_LOOSE_KERNEL_NAMES -D__KERNEL__ -DMODULE -DNTRM -D_GNU_SOURCE rpmpkgs:libgpg-error0-1.0-1mdk.i586.rpm None of these are actually errors, they just happen to contain the string error. syslog:Feb 21 01:05:02 localhost shorewall: reports complaining about errors that it didn't catch syslog:Feb 21 01:05:03 localhost shorewall: reports complaining about errors that it didn't catch syslog:Feb 21 01:05:55 localhost kernel: hdd: drive_cmd: See above. status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } syslog:Feb 21 01:05:55 localhost kernel: hdd: drive_cmd: error=0x04Aborted Command See above. Xorg.0.log: (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. Xorg.0.log.old: (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. Xorg.1.log: (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. Xorg.1.log.old: (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. Xorg.9.log: (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. If your GUI is working, then ignore these. mdkkdm.log:Feb 19 19:05:29 mdkkdm_config[4705] error: Invalid option value 'All' at /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc:292 ditto. is this good or bad? Probably nothing to worry about, except the one about the hd seek error, but only if it is an internal hd. I hope this gives you some idea of the kind of thing to look for. You need to practise determining what are real errors and what are bogus errors. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] tar'ing dot files
JIE mail-list wrote: I want to create a gzip'ed tar archive of all my dot files for backup purposes but I can't figure out how to select only the dot files without also getting everything else in the folder. $ tar -cvf backup.tar.gz .* This seems to get everything in the folder; not good. Try this: $ tar cvf backup.tar .[a-z,A-Z,0-9]* If a file name starts with a dot it behaves slightly differently to other files when you use wildcards. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Maintenance, what if any?
Tim wrote: I noticed a few days ago somebody mentioned deleting log files tmp files, is this necessary? If so what else should i be doing? If i don't will it have an adverse affect on my system? The reason i ask is i,ve noticed Firefox Thunderbird are taking longer to load, only a few seconds longer but it's noticeable. I,ve spent an hour or so searching the official doc's on ML, It doesn't seem to imply its needed. Running 10.1 with all the updates. Hi Tim All operating systems require regular housekeeping. On Mandrake, you need to do less housekeeping than on some systems I have known, but the general principles are the same. Always check your /var/log directory for signs of problems. If your log files are getting too large, then you need to view them to see if there are any problems. A useful check is: (From the root prompt:) cd /var/log grep -y error * | less This will give you an idea very quickly if there are problems on the system. If there are no errors, then you can empty out individual log files in the following way: : logfilename (eg. : messages) : simply emptys a file, or, if you like, fills it with emptiness. Do this to all your log files every so often. You can also delete everything in your /tmp directory before you shutdown the system. Sometimes there is a lot of rubbish in there which lurks around taking up space. For example, if you use audacity to record music, you might end up with Gigabytes of rubbish in /tmp. I hope this gives you some ideas. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] modem problem (still!)
Bryan Phinney wrote: On Tuesday 15 February 2005 10:48, Carroll Grigsby wrote: While I agree that an external serial modem is the best solution for a desktop, I'm not sure that it is a realistic solution for a laptop. I differ. A lot of people carry around a bag for a laptop, especially since most power supplies for laptops require something other than just the laptop. When you figure that an external serial modem is about the same size as a plug-in floppy (which I have for my laptop) and about the same weight, adding an external serial modem to your bag is really not that big a deal. And, that is only if you know that you are going to need to dial in somewhere. I agree with Bryan. However, with laptops there is a better solution, if you can find it. I use a Xircom 56K PCMCIA modem with my Thinkpad. It is a proper (not win-) modem. I am sure that there are other similar products out there. Don't waste your time with winmodems. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] keyboard problem
Rosemary McGillicuddy wrote: Hello listers, Sorry to have so many questions. I noticed that keys aren't producing the letters/symbols that I am used to. e.g. @ is not in it's usual place as indicated on the keyboard, seems to have swapped with . There are others also. I think I must have selected UK keyboard instead of US. Is there a way for me to remedy this? Thanks in advance Rosemary You can change your keyboard layout settings by using the Mandrake Control Centre - Hardware - Keyboard option. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] modem problem (still!)
Hi Rosemary Various people have mad useful suggestions to you regarding your modem setup. The way I normally set up an external serial modem is the following: Use Mandrake Control Centre to add a network connection. Ignore the error about no internet connection. Run kppp and go into the configuration section. Add a dialup account with your login id and the ISP phone number, etc. Go into the device section, and select a device (ttyS0, ttyS1, etc). Go into the modem section, and run query modem. If you get any response, then you have selected the right serial port. Once you have found the right serial port, switch on the modem sound. Go back to the main kppp window and try to connect. If you have set up the modem right, you will hear the sound of the connection being made. Another useful tool for debugging modems is minicom. Use minicom -s to set it up. When you have it running on a particular serial port, type AT and press enter. If it says OK then you are talking to your modem directly. You can also use wvdial to connect to the internet using a dialup modem, but this is more difficult to set up than kppp. good luck Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] supposed thunderbird download
Rosemary McGillicuddy wrote: On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 16:27, mike wrote: Rosemary McGillicuddy wrote: I downloaded thunderbird - I thought. It downloaded to home/rosemary/tmp but when I went to tmp something called orbit was there. Download manager says thunderbird was downloaed. What has happened? Which download manager did you use? The one in mozilla Rosemary, perhaps it is time you learned the find command. Open a command line window (konsole or Eterm or xterm or rxvt or gnuterm or whatever), and type the following: find /home/rosemary -name \*thunderbird\* -print This will show you the location of anything containing the string thunderbird within your home directory and all its subdirectories. I'm sure there are people who would invoke this command slightly differently, but I'm set in my ways - I started using find on UNIX, so my usage is perhaps archaic. It works, though. regards Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] How to downgrade gcc version?
Derek Jennings wrote: On Wednesday 02 February 2005 10:33, Derek Jennings wrote: On Wednesday 02 February 2005 06:32, Vathsala Devi wrote: Dear All Mandrake Users, I am using Mandrake Linux 9.1 to do my Master degree research project with University of Malaya, Malaysia... My problem is, I have to install a network simulator called NS2 version ns-2.1b9 on my Linux platform but the Linux gcc 3.2.2 would support my ns-2.1b9...The problem is because of the gcc version and my supervisor advised me to downgrade the gcc version to any lower version... Can someone kindly tell me how to do this downgrading?...I am very-very new to Linux environment and afraid of touching any sensitive areas in it... Please help...I really would appreciate your help... Thank you... Regards, Vathsala Devi Using your software Install/Uninstall GUIs uninstall the package gcc and install the package gcc2.06 Thats it! Have fun derek One day I'll learn to type :-( That should be install gcc2.96 derek You don´t even have to do that. You can simply install both compilers and add the following to your Makefiles: CC=gcc-2.96 List the /usr/bin/gcc* files to see whether I typed it wrong. I have to use both compilers at different times, so this is very convenient. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Playing god with friends new laptop (Moral question)
There should be no problem. The lady in question is a computer newbie. She will most likely want to use email and word-processing initially, so there should be absolutely no issue, since all such programs are standard on Mandrake at no extra charge. Most importantly, she will not have to bother with the time-wasting and expensive activities which surround Windows in its capacity of virus magnet. How any newbie copes with the whole vicious circle of infection, re-installation, protection, updates, etc., defeats me. I have installed Mandrake on several senior citizens' computers and generally a bit of help is required every now and then, but it is normally sorted out over the phone, or for a few minutes, accompanied by a cup of tea and a chat. There is also no problem getting Mandrake to see wireless networks. We don't have such luxuries where I live, but when I was in Europe on holiday, I had no trouble connecting to the hotels' access points with Mandrake 10.1beta2 (at the time, August last year). I was using an Orinoco PCMCIA card. Unfortunately the ADSL infrastructure does not exist yet in our beautiful seaside village. I believe it is due in 2006. cheers Duncan (from the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal) August last year). I was using an Orinoco PCMCIA card. Unfortunately the ADSL infrastructure does not exist yet in our beautiful seaside village. I believe it is due in 2006. br br cheers br Duncanbr (from the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal)br /body /html Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Just built a Mandrake 10.1 system for the 1st time. I am getting the error kernel BUG at mm/rmap.c:407!
Hi Randy What version of the kernel are you running? regards Duncan Randy Paries wrote: Hello, I just finished building a new Box and have been letting it just run to burn in. After running 5 days it crashed, and this was in the error log:: === Dec 19 04:02:01 millhouse kernel: kernel BUG at mm/rmap.c:407! Dec 19 04:02:01 millhouse kernel: invalid operand: [#1] Dec 19 04:02:01 millhouse kernel: SMP I have done the urpmi and got all the updates BTW the hardware is 2GB Ram and Two Intel Pentium4 Xeon 2.4GHz Thanks for any help Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Just built a Mandrake 10.1 system for the 1st time. I am getting the error kernel BUG at mm/rmap.c:407!
Randy Paries wrote: 2.6.8.1-12mdksmp Thanks For what it's worth, the bug error was generated by a failure of the page_remove_rmap function call. This function attempts to remove a page of memory's pte mapping. What caused it is whatever caused the value of page to be invalid. What caused this to happen is another matter. Perhaps the dimensions of the page map were exceeded, I'm not sure. Some further investigation is necessary. Were there any other error messages? cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] How to call Firefox from command-line (after installing)
Edward Wijaya wrote: I've tried this command: export PATH:$PATH:/usr/share/firefox but won't work (gives not valid identifier error). How can I enable it? Thanks so much beforehand. Regards, Edward WIJAYA SINGAPORE Hello Edward You need to type the following: export PATH=$PATH:/usr/share/firefox You had a colon(:) instead of an equals(=) sign. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
[newbie] usb modems
Greetings I have been trying to attach a usb modem to a Thinkpad T22. The modem is a Microcom USB 56K Travel/S. I have looked in the Twiki and found nothing. usbview shows an unknown device. I am very familiar with serial modems, but as far as these new-fangled usb beasties are concerned, I am a complete newbie. I am running 10.1CE. MCC(drakconf) does not seem to work, and using the kppp configuration does not work either. I see various USB related tty devices listed, but when I query modem, nothing is picked up. Does anyone have any experience of these things? Am I wasting my time? cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] usb modems
Thanks Paul I have downloaded the driver. It compiled cleanly and everything looks great. As soon as some other downloads are completed I shall unplug my Xircom PCMCIA modem and try the Microport. The URL you provided was spot on. cheers Duncan paul wrote: The linux USB site says it works, see: http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/showdev.php?id=2317 there's also a link to a howto at the bottom of the page. have fun 8-) Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Mandrake 10.1
Danesh Daroui wrote: I tried to install it on a PIII 933 MHz with 192 MB RAM and 30 GB harddisk. This is not a our server and it is just an old system to test. Danesh, I wouldn't give up so soon. I run 10.1CE on a P3 500MHz machine with 256Mb of RAM, and on a P3 900Mhz machine with 128Mb RAM with no problems. If your graphics card is giving you trouble, then install the system in text mode. You can always fiddle around with the X settings later. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Download the rpm directly instead of urpmi
Fajar Priyanto wrote: Thanks folks, I've just got wake up (4.00 am now), and ready to install the bunch of RPMs that I've downloaded last night. About the gftp.. I didn't know that it has comparison ability. It's cool. I think I'll use it. Have fun. I do that sort of thing all the time. We don't have enough bandwidth for online updates to be anything but a pain, so we tend to download rpms at night and then install them during the day. One day, maybe, we will have fast internet access(when an iso takes less than three days to download :-)) This is the price we have to pay for living in a tropical paradise. regards Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Groups
Keith Powell wrote: A very basic question, please. How do I find out which groups I am in and, if necessary, create and add myself to another group. You can look at /etc/group to see which groups you belong to. Sorry, I just can't find how to do it in Mandrake. MCC-System-Users and groups doesn't appear do it. You can edit /etc/group (as root) and manually create a new group and add yourself to it. (Make sure you assign a unique group id number if you create a new group.) Having said that, are you sure MCC doesn't allow you to add groups? regards Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Mandrake 10.1
Danesh Daroui wrote: Hi, I am migrating from Fedora Core 3 to Mandrake 10.1, but I was jut dissapointed !!! What a garbage is this Mandrake 10.1 !!! It always crashes and it is absolutely unstable. Did you have same problem ? Is version 10 more stable ? I have had no problems with Mandrake 10.1. What hardware are you using? Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] OT Recovering Data
Graham Watkins wrote: Hi Guys, First off, apologies for posting from a Windows box. I'm slowly rebuilding a system after a major hardware catastrophe (see earlier post). After looking at a few options for data recovery from a linux system, I finally opted for the System Rescue CDROM at http://www.sysresccd.org/download.en.php Installed the hard disk as a slave and booted up from the CD.It worked a treat when I finally figured out how to mount the partitions. Got everything I couldn't do without and then some. It may be a while before I get a new linux box up and running as I'm pretty busy just now. But when I do, I shall be moving up from 9.2 to 10.1 Community. I'm looking forward to it. Cheers, Graham When you do get around to it, have fun! cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Changing hostname
Hiya Is there a way to restart the network without rebooting? Vegard Try service network restart from a root prompt. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] DVD Burners
Hi everyone On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 01:48:58PM -0500, BJ Tracy wrote: I'm looking to do the same thing. Newegg has Liteon's for between $60 and $70 and I've heard that these are good (recommended by a few folks at work) but I don't see any info when I search the hardware compatibility on the Mandrake site. I have been using a Liteon DVD-RW/CDRW on Mandrakes 10.0, 10.1beta2 and 10.1 Community with no problems whatsover. I would recommend these drives to anyone. cheers Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] Manuals?
Why has nobody mentioned man. The full manual set for the operating system can be accessed by using man. The only exceptions are KDE type programs which use the KDE help system, etc. regards Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] OT Recovering Data
Hello Graham Anyhow, what I want to know is what is the best way to recover data from a hard drive that is about to fail, but contains part of my Mandrake installation (usr home) when I get a new box up and running. Can I install it as a slave disk an access it through a new Mandrake installation or perhaps a live CD distribution? Or are there other ways? I realise this isn't exactly a Mandrake specific topic but there is more concentrated computer wisdom here than any other place I know so I hope you can steer me right. The method that you mention is perhaps the safest, ie. install it as a slave disk, etc. I have done that sort of thing many times. As long as you are methodical and logical, you should be OK. I have done this with Redhat 5.2, SCO OpenServer, SCO UNIX 4.2, MS-Dog, and various versions of Mandrake from version 7.1 up. Most recently I did it with Mandrake 10.1beta2. It is a good way of upgrading your system as well as a way of recovering data from an ailing drive. Once you have installed your new drive, simply run drakconf (diskdrake) and set up the mount points and off you go! regards Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] How to switch from one linux partition to another?
Rodolfo, All you need is to create an entry in /etc/fstab. Give it a different mount point. Copy the entry for /home and change it so that the device entry is correct and the mount point is different. Make sure that you create the directory to use as a mount point. The easier way is to run drakconf and set up the mount point and it will save the changes to /etc/fstab for you! I you want to have 9.1 as a boot option, you have to fiddle a bit. If you are using lilo as your boot loader, then you need to add an entry for your 9.1 setup. Copy the 9.1 kernel into /boot and run lilo. If you get no errors, then it should work. Make sure that your lilo entry contains the full name of the kernel file, not the shortened link name. regards Duncan Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com