Re: [newbie] How to search for greatest # of incidences? Now OT
* Richard Urwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030630 17:09]: The only way to win at games of pure chance is to run the game. A strange game; the only winning move is not to play. When we lived in Florida we religiously bought one ticket each week. About half of that dollar went toward prizes, so we figured 50 cents was an actual investment, although a huge longshot. The other 50 cents was entertainment, and that was a bargain. You can get a lot of entertainment thinking what we will do if we win, and checking the numbers. What we could never understand is why anyone would buy more than one ticket. You are still paying 50% of each ticket for an incredibly unlikely chance to win, and it is hard to believe that you actually get twice the entertainment buying two tickets, compared to the entertainment from buying one. It then starts to look like gambling ;-) -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] ACPI - ohhh no what have I done...
* Inhabitant of Zion [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030621 07:13]: vi is great isn't it! I find even having used it a lot I still forget to press i before I start typing! Most annoying thing is when you do a load of changes and then go to save using shift ZZ and it tells you that it is a read only file! D'oh! Never managed to get it to overide the permissions and save anyway. SUre there must be a way. Have you tried :w! Or, if you do not have write permission and are not the owner of the file, you can try saving it as a different filename: :w newfilename If that doesn't work, it probably means that you don't have write permissions in the directory. I would then switch to a different console (or xterm) and fix the ownerships/permissions, and then save the file. If there is an easier way, I don't know it. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] I borked my boot partition.. (Hijacked)
* Poogle [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030614 08:24]: Always assuming that Knoppix runs on your system, I have it and while it runs with no problem on my laptop, it doesn't like either the Flat Panel or the onboard sis630 on my PC, I can't even get it to run in text mode - just an out of range message from my monitor. Having said that I've not tried very hard yet. Is that a recent version of Knoppix? I have found Knoppix to be excellent at recognizing hardware that other software stumbles over. If Mandrake doesn't catch it, I try Knoppix and get the info from the XF86Config-4 or whatever. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Hard and soft links
* Anne Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030613 11:12]: I should add that the properties of the Graphics link show me as owner and group as user, while the properties of the OldHome link show root for both. I created them immediately consecutively, so there should be not difference in what I was doing. This is what happened: Right. Since you are the owner of the directory and the link, you can change the group. You can't really change the owner, but since you were assigning yourself as owner, it didn't object. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Desktop]$ chown anne OldHome [EMAIL PROTECTED] Desktop]$ chgrp users Oldhome chgrp: failed to get attributes of `Oldhome': No such file or directory [EMAIL PROTECTED] Desktop]$ whoami anne [EMAIL PROTECTED] Desktop]$ ls -l Gr* lrwxrwxrwx1 anne users 9 Jun 13 13:55 Graphics - /Graphics/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Desktop]$ ls -l Old* lrwxrwxrwx1 anne users 13 Jun 13 13:57 OldHome - /mnt/OldHome/ / It allowed you to change the group of the LINK, not the /mnt/OldHome directory that the symlink links to. Notice who owns /mnt ... root, right? Probably with these permissions: drwxr-xr-x ?? root root ?? mnt/ So nobody except root can mess with the /mnt directory. The reason the default permissions for a symlink are lrwxrwxrwx is that they don't really matter much. It is only a pointer to a file or directory; the ownership on the target file or directory is what determines who can do what. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Ownership thing
* Kristjan [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030607 12:29]: How can I make so that users can change the ownership of files that are resided in their own home directory and that are not owned by them Currently an user who issues 'chown' command to the file that is not owned by him only gets that operation is not permitted Several others have responded already, but I'll give a try here ... hopefully it will become clearer. Ownership and permissions on a directory determine what can be done in that directory. If you have read permission, you can see the names of files. If you have write permission, you can create files or subdirectories in that directory, move files in or out, and delete files or subdirectories. If you have execute permission, you can traverse or descend down through the directory to see directories below it; if not you are blocked from subdirectories. Ownership and permissions on a file relate to the file itself, with no consideration for the directory. If you have read permission, you can read the file. If you have write permission, you can change it. If you have execute permission, you can execute it as a script or program. Only root can change the ownership of a file or directory. The owner of a file or directory can change its group ONLY if the owner is a member of the group being changed to. Applying these principles, as others have suggested, the non-root owner cannot change who owns the file. But if the file is not read-only, she can make a copy of it. The copy will then be owned by her. If she has write privileges in the directory, she can then delete the old file. When you start thinking the Unix way is actually fairly consistent (which it is) then you're One Of Us ;-) -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Suspicious email supposedly from Newbie.
* Ronald J. Hall [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030606 15:01]: I'll have to disagree with that. Here, when I remove all permissions from any file or folder in /root, even root can not see it or enter it Mayperhaps your setup is different? Can someone else verify this please? Thanks! Here, with Mandrake 9.1, I can create a directory in /root, copy a text file into it, chmod both to 0, then (as root) cd into that directory, and read the file. I then deleted both file and directory while the permissions were d- on the directory, and -- on the file. I didn't try the -i flag using chattr, but I don't think that would work either. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Perl Script in Background
* Cody Harris [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030527 19:15]: How do i tell a script (perl script) to start in the background and stay running? If you are running it from the command line, put a space and an ampersand after the name of the Perl script, like: myscript -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] broken fonts display
* Jozef Riha [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030326 06:08]: sometimes when i scroll with PgUp/Dn often fonts in OpenOffice get broken (see the attachment). is it known OOo bug or is there an error in configuration (matrox g550 with manufacturer's driver). Yeah, this sort of thing happens all the time. I have been assuming it is an artifact ... where the graphic display gets itself confused about what is actually on the screen, and it happens occasionally with almost any graphics program. However, it happens much too often with OOo. What I tell my students to do to fix it is to minimize the OOo window and then immediately restore it. Anything that re-draws the screen gets rid of the artifacts. Some window managers have a shade button that works quite nicely for this because you don't have to move far with your mouse. But it would be nice if OOo or X or whatever became a little more robust in this area. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Mandrake so slow in a pentium 200
* Rodolfo Lima [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030226 08:24]: But the installation really need to last 4 hours? In text mode? It certainly doesn't do a mere copy from cd, maybe compile some things, I think. OK, try installing Win XP on a blank disk. Now install Office XP. Now imagine you have several CD's of commercial, shareware, and freeware to install, one-by-one. Most Windows users have never installed Windows. They may have the few little applications, Solitaire, Notepad, etc., that come with Windows, and maybe they go through the installation of MS Office. Then maybe they install two or three commercial applications, including things like Quicken or QuickBooks. Just those few things are going to take the better part of an hour, on a fairly fast machine ... much longer on a slower machine. Most people who install Mandrake 9 are installing HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of programs ... an entire computing system, not just an operating system. Not zero or one, but maybe two or three office suites, several email clients, lots of CHOICES, all for a very low price. On a fast machine ALL that can be done in less than an hour. Let me see anyone try it on Win XP. I bet it would take longer, and cost several thousand dollars in license fees ;-) -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Graphics formats
* Anne Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030224 07:00]: I thought that png was a lossless compression - am I wrong? No, you are right. If I start from a jpg file from my camera, 397 KB, why does saving it as a png come out at 2.4MB? Because .png IS a lossless compression. Your camera is using a lossy format, .jpg, to reduce your images to 397 KB. If you then save it as a .png, you are saving the already lossy image in a lossless format, resulting in a much larger file. The .png you make does not contain any additional information than what was in the original .jpg, so it is questionable how useful that is. So why use .png at all? Well, I use it a lot for screenshots for training. One thing .jpg does NOT do well is represent typical application program screenshots. Areas that should appear all the same color often have artifacts (distortions) when saved in .jpg format. Actually, photos do too, but usually they are less obvious. Another good use for a lossless compression like .png is when you will be using a photo editor to edit the file. If you edit a .jpg, you take an already lossy image, edit it ... all photo editors I know use a lossless compression technique internally, at least while they are editing the image ... and then save it. If you save it as a .jpg, the image is compressed in a lossy manner, and these losses can accumulate. The GIMP's native format, .xcf, is lossless, and can get HUGE, but that's the expense of using lossless but better quality compression. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] OT(?) Mutt Pine email clients
* FemmeFatale [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030206 17:40]: Hm... went to see both Pines Mutts web sites. Wondered ppl's opinions on both which is more newbie friendly. Newbie friendly: pine. But I LOVE mutt. I can't believe there are people trying to browse though a high volume list like this with web based email (ugh). Mutt is extremely configurable, and really fast. Did I say I like it a lot? ;-) And it works great with vim as its editor, so you don't have to suffer with an inferior editor for your messages. To be fair, I think you can configure pine to use vim or another editor that is more powerful than pico, that comes with pine. Some people, myself included, try to avoid pine because it isn't GPL. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
[newbie] Regular expressions (was: Vi vs Emacs)
* FemmeFatale [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030206 17:40]: Thx CM. Question: what are regular expressions ? And sed? Heard of it... but no clue what it is... I'll look it up later. The regular expressions has me stumped though mostly. Regular expressions are REALLY fun. I saw recently that someone said that regular expressions are to strings what math is to numbers. I do a lot in Perl, and it has very powerful regex capabilities. There are similar but (usually) slightly less capable regexes in many GNU utilities and languages, including egrep, sed, awk, PHP, and many others. Using a Perl example (something I'm working on right now), if one line of output from this command: netstat -pe produces: tcp 37088 0 ahau.localdomain:33148 ltc002:x11 ESTABLISHED judy 73301 (that's all on one line), then we can use: /^tcp\s+\d+\s+\d+\s+(\w+)\.\w+:\d+\s+(\w+):x11\s+ESTABLISHED\s+(\w+)/ and then we can print out the three pieces I'm interested in: printf %-9s %-9s %-9s\n, $1, $2, $3 to give me a listing of servers, LTSP workstations, and users. This ahau ltc002 judy is much easier to read than the original. As another example, suppose you ask the user to confirm, and you want to check for a positive response, like y or yes or yep or yeah or ok: doaction() if /^(y|ye(s|p|ah)|ok)$/i; Anyway, hope this gives you an idea. Jeffrey E. F. Friedl's book, Mastering Regular Expressions (O'Reilly) is a good reference, and there are tutorials and such if you Google 'em. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Vi vs Emacs... Not a flamewar!!! Any flames will be ignored
* FemmeFatale [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030205 01:27]: [snip] edit files on any system. I realized a while back those 2 editors are standard to Any *nix environment. I believe that emacs is not always installed, even though it is probably available for almost all OSes and distributions. It isn't quite as universal as vi/vim. OK... so whats the real diff between those 2 editors which one is more newb friendly? If neither is newbie friendly, well name something that is and is more or less standard on most *nix's. For the moment I'm leaning to Emacs b/c it is modeless ergo less of a headache/more intuitive. Neither is as friendly as Notepad, which is friendly because it doesn't do much ;-) I like vim a lot, and use it for almost everything that doesn't require a word processor. Vim (or at least the minimal vi) is almost always present. Even LEAF Bering's editor has a vi mode (maybe emacs too, I didn't check that). The essential thing to learn about vim is to use the modes. Once you get used to it, you find there are things that are easier to use in insert mode, other things easier in normal mode (where keystrokes are commands rather than insertions of text), still others in ex mode (sort of a command line for vim), and there is also a visual mode, which is very much like highlighting. If you play with it, and pay attention to what is happening, you'll notice that actually most powerful text editors, even those built into word processors, have modes ... they just don't identify them as such. When you highlight a word or phrase, either with mouse or keyboard, and then press a key, it does something different from normal insert mode, right? And if you accidentally press the insert key, you enter an overstrike mode, where again, keystrokes are doing something different from normal. Among my students, at least, I don't think I have ever seen one that entered overstrike mode intentionally ;-) Many people use less than 1% of the capabilities of a text editor. I have seen people who noticed they left out a word at the beginning of the paragraph, and backspaced over the whole paragraph to add the word, then typed the rest of the paragraph again. For folks like these, the simplest text editor would be overkill. I would recommend vi or vim for anyone who does a lot of text editing (as opposed to word processing) and is willing to learn the basics (a good basic tutorial should take 30 minutes or less) and then gradually pick up more advanced features as you find you need them. It is also very useful for SysAdmins or consultants who have to work with many Unix/Linux boxes, or want a decent text editor they can use on either Linux or Windows. Most of what I have said can also be said of emacs. It's much larger, though with faster computers the load time shouldn't be a factor ... it'll load much faster than OpenOffice.org ;-) Emacs reminds me a little of mc (midnight commander) ... it tends to become a shell of its own, doing everything in its own way. I have used it enough to know that it does about the same things using control key sequences that vim uses with different modes. You will find plenty of emacs people who like it a lot, and those who think cooledit or even pico does everything they need. To summarize, I find vim is extremely powerful, virtually universal in the *nix world and available for virtually all platforms, with a steep but very short learning curve (the modes thing), and I like it a lot. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Vi vs Emacs... Not a flamewar!!! Any flames will be ignored
* civileme [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030205 01:27]: vi has some extensions like vile that allow editing multiple files so emacs has no real advantage there any more. emacs though does split windows one or more times to allow several files to be on screen at once. vim and its graphic version gvim both allow editing multiple files and splitting the screen with different files visible. I forgot to mention that vi and vim (and even emacs, for that matter) can be run character-based only (as in a console environment), or in a graphic version with enhanced mouse control, toolbar, etc. This way you can take more advantage of the GUI environment but still be comfortable when trying to edit your XF86Config-4 file to get your GUI working again ;-) -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] IceWM themes don't stay
* Richard Babcock [EMAIL PROTECTED] [030102 23:43]: I have recently tried IceWM and I like the clean interface. I also like the themes that installed with it but when I logout the theme I have chosen is lost and IceWM returns to it's default. Is this normal behavior? Also, is there a way to change just the wallpaper without changing to a new theme? One of the many things I like about IceWM is that everything is configurable in a few text files. In $HOME/.icewm/preferences: DesktopBackgroundImage=/path_to/wallpaper_image_here.png and Theme=theme_directory/default.theme If you used a GUI program to change the theme (there are several, including IcePref) there may have been one button that says Save, another that says Apply, and yet another that says Restart. Save will save the config files, but do nothing to this session. If you press Apply I think it will make certain changes to this session, but not save any. Restart will make IceWm read its configuration files and begin again. It somehow does this without closing your programs that are running! Windows would have to completely reboot, right? ;-) -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] spadmin
* Anne Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [021228 10:50]: [root@anne-linux staroffice]# ls -l spadmin lrwxr-xr-x1 root root 43 Nov 17 09:03 spadmin - ../../../usr/lib/staroffice/program/soffice* [root@anne-linux staroffice]# pwd /usr/lib/staroffice [root@anne-linux staroffice]# cd program [root@anne-linux program]# soffice [root@anne-linux program]# This offered to set up my addressbook. Since I have KMail and GnomeCard.vcf files, I didn't find how to access these, so I cancelled that and it simply left me with a blank document open. I guess I got it wrong Anne, soffice is one of those tricky programs that does different things depending on how it was called, so if you call it from a symlink named soffice, it will either open OOo, or set it up if you don't have a .sversionrc file in your home directory. In the example above, you set up a link named spadmin that linked to soffice, but then you ran soffice, instead of spadmin. That accounts for getting the OOo setup instead of spadmin. Also, I think root needs to run spadmin. HTH -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] VNC
* ivette brusselmans [EMAIL PROTECTED] [021216 06:01]: 1 box Mandrake 8.2 (server) 1 box win98 (client) network OK (Komba 2) I can get the remote screen of the MDK box on my winbox without problem. But when I type the IPaddress of win98box in the VNC viewer on MDK 8.2, nothing happens. Could it have to do with the fact that win98 has tightVNC installed, not VNC? Do you have a VNC server on the Win98 box? -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Graphic formats, was: OT? LBA and CHS
* Anne Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [021207 15:26]: The Paragon util sounds interesting, but I'm really trying to get rid of the dual-boot, so I don't want to buy another hd manager if I can help it. The main problem now is that I'm picking up the odds and ends - like most of my clip-art collection being .wmf or .cgm, which I would like to convert to .gif or .jpg, or .png, I guess. The only tools I have are windows tools. Your .wmf files are vector image files, so if you convert them to .jpg or .png you will be losing the ability to scale them to any size, and also to be able to edit them as individual objects. I don't recall what format .cgm files are, but probably vector also. I would recommend you keep them as .wmf files ... you can always convert them when you need a bitmap file. OpenOffice.org Draw does a fine job of editing (and converting to .png or .jpg) most .wmf files. That way you can export whatever size bitmap you need without losing information. I do a lot of work with OOo Draw and The GIMP together ... using Draw to create the vector stuff, like text, and then pull it into The Gimp for fine tuning on the bitmap background, etc. Works great! Draw can import a bitmap but can only do simple things with it, like brighten or darken, etc. The GIMP can import some vector graphics, and actually uses vectors (very briefly) when you are creating text, but neither begins to compare with the other's strength in working with the other image format type. If you really need to convert the .wmf (vector) files to .png (bitmap) in a batch, you might try convert, from the ImageMagick suite: convert myimage.wmf myimage.png Depending on how complex your .wmf is, this may actually work ;-) Incidentally, most .wmf files will do better as .png's than as .jpg's. And don't use .gif's ... they use a patented compression method which the patent holder (Unisys?) is using to extort unjustified profits from the world. I recently saw a nonprofit website that inquired about getting the rights to use .gifs on their website. The company replied that it would cost $10K US per year PLUS 1% of any sales from the website! -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] HD size
* walt [EMAIL PROTECTED] [021208 09:55]: Is a 3.7 gig hard drive to small to run mandrake 9.0? one of my hard drives is going and until I buy a new one, I only have this small one to use for linux. That should be adequate for most purposes, assuming you need a fairly normal workstation or even server. With that size hard drive, though, I would watch carefully on installation and not install lots of stuff you don't need. It would be hard to install everything from Mdk 9.0 and still have room for a few users, log files, etc. Use expert install, and select individual packages. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Text in OOo and Gimp
* Bryan Tyson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [021208 19:29]: I was wondering if you could explain in more detail how you use OOo Draw to create text which you then use in Gimp. Sure. Just create anything you like with text in OOo Draw. Make it larger than it will need to be, and then export it as a .png file, making sure to export the selected objects only. Then open the text in The GIMP and you can use it in many ways. The big advantage is that whatever work you do on it in Draw can be saved and if you make a mistake or need to change the text, you can easily edit the text in Draw. Right now, this is a necessary step, because we are currently using Linux Terminal Server Project without using a font server. So The GIMP does not have access to TrueType fonts, at least from the LTSP workstations. However, since OOo has its own built-in font renderer, it can be used to generate the text. It would be nice if the same program could do both vector and bitmap graphics, but I would rather juggle two programs than have one combined program that is not as powerful. For a quick example of text created in Draw being used then in The GIMP, check out the page titles at http://linux.bz/ -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Gimp
* John Richard Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] [021207 06:12]: Can someone point me how to correct red-eye from my pics in gimp. http://carol.gimp.org/other/sloth/diary/redeye.html LOTS of good stuff on gimp.org! -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] M9.0 and OpenOffice
* John Richard Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] [021120 09:19]: I would like to ask of you all your opinion and experience of Open Ofice as supplied my Mandrake 9.0 , and installed in the main mandrake installer. Besides the issue of spellcheckers which we have heard of recently, is there a completeM9.0 OO install, because for the life of me I cannot find a spreadsheet. I have the 9.0 install of OOo at home, but use the download from OOo at school. Both launch the spreadsheet just fine. I know the download version of OO has a spreadsheet programme but as far as I can see this mandrake supplied install which does have nice kstartmenu entries built into the install, does not. What are you trying to use to start it? If you can get OOo Writer open, click File, New, Spreadsheet and see if it opens. If you are in an X window, you can start a terminal, and type: /usr/lib/openoffice/program/scalc and wait at least a minute before you give up. If these things work then you can set up menu items if they somehow didn't get made. If not it was a faulty installation. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] OT: Rendering spreadsheet cells
* Miark [EMAIL PROTECTED] [02 13:38]: Is there a way in OpenOffice Calc to convert a cell from a formula (=A5*1.15) to a string (2.30)? To, in effect, render it? If A5 contains 2, and B5 contains =TEXT(A5*1.15;0.00) then B5 will show the string 2.30. If you copy this to the clipboard, and then use Paste Special to paste only strings wherever you want it. Is this what you meant? If you don't really want a string but a numeric value (instead of a formula) you can copy the formula you gave and Paste Special as numbers. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] CD-RW problem
* Anne Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [021109 13:52]: I want to back up some directories of photos, using XCDRoast, but am getting the following error: mkisofs: Error: '/mnt/win_f/Photos/Spain/Card2/pic00027.bmp' and '/mnt/win_f/Photos/Spain/Card1/pic00027.bmp' have the same Rock Ridge name 'pic00027.bmp'. mkisofs: Unable to sort directory What can I do about this? The whole reason for using separate directories is that both SM cards would have numbered the pics in the same way. I think what you're seeing here is a limitation in the CD directory format. A path can only be something like 30 characters long, so the Rock Ridge extension truncates the path, but then saves the whole path name in a separate file, something like what Windows does with long filenames. However, if the only difference in those directories is after that breaking point, it has no way to resolve the ambiguity, so it stops to let you fix it. You could simply change 'Card1' to 'C1' and/or 'Card2' to 'C2' and it should work OK. This may be an oversimplification, but I bet it will work. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] The Gimp
* Anne Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [021103 08:11]: I am feeling quite proficient now at the kind of adjustments I usually have to make to photos, but can't find a distort tool - you know, the sort where you can widen the top in relation to the bottom in order to correct perspective. I'm sure it must be there. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Click on the Transform Tool, (when you hover over it, it says Rotation, Scaling, Shearing, Perspective). You may need to double-click to get the Transform Tool dialog box. Select Perspective, and click in your photo. You then see a grid over your image or layer. You can click and drag any of the 4 corner squares to adjust the grid to the perspective you would like. When you move those, a Perspective Transform dialog box opens, and you can click Transform to make the transformation. It will take a little experimentation to get what you want. Undo (Ctrl+Z) is your friend ;-) -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] UMAX 1220U was: HP ScanJet 3200C
* Nick Baker [EMAIL PROTECTED] [021027 11:34]: I have a similar problem in MDK 8.2/xsane 0.84. the system sets up the scanner OK, but when I try to use it I get the licence screen, the when I accept it thinks for a mimute, then gives me the error message, xsane: no devices available. (The scanner name is all lc in /etc/sane.d/dll.conf.) Any ideas?? I was not able to setup a scanner for a UMAX Astra 1220U using the RPMS in Mandrake 9.0. I downloaded the tarballs: sane-backends-1.0.9-pre2.tar.gzand xsane-0.89.tar.gz You can locate these at: ftp://ftp.mostang.com/pub/sane/sane-1.0.9/ and ftp://ftp.mostang.com/pub/xsane/respectively. For information: http://xsane.org/ I installed those, and it works fine. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] resizing photos
* Alastair Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] [021001 08:07]: On 30 Sep 2002 17:16:24 -0400 Paul Rodriguez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is there a way to resize a bunch of photos at the same time? I have a folder with 42 photos from my digital camera and would like to make them 1/3 the size to put on the web in as few strokes as possible. Ok, at least in an easy and reproducable way. ImageMagick - the mogrify command therein - will do it: http://www.imagemagick.org/www/mogrify.html Something like mogrify -resize 33%x33% *.jpg would appear to work. (Of course this will _replace_ all the existing .jpg files with their smaller mogrifications, so back them up first!) I agree that mogrify works ... I use it all the time. One tip, though ... I have found that mogrify seems to have trouble compressing photos from my camera (an Olympus 3030z). If I load them into the Gimp first and save them, then when mogrify resamples them they will be a half to a tenth (on small images) the size! This is easier to do than it sounds, providing you have a good bit of RAM in your computer. From the GIMP, open a bunch of images ... I can easily open 50 640x480 images (but then I have 1GB of RAM). They will overlap all over the place on your desktop, but just let 'em finish loading. Then press CTRL+s to save the active image, and CTRL+w to close that window. Repeat until done. Then do your mogrify (see man mogrify) and compare to ones you did without the step of loading into the GIMP. Maybe the mogrify in 9.0 will make this unnecessary. But it's still a LOT faster than resampling them all in the GIMP. One day I'll write a Perl-Fu for it ;-) -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] chcase
* John Richard Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] [020926 05:05]: Very Many thanks Jan, You're welcome. Hopefully others will benefit too. I have a feeling this programme is going to be very useful to me. I cannot think why it's not in the distro on the 3rd disc. Possibly. Sooner ot later I am going to have so many .jpg files alone, that they will need their nomenclature redefined in order to store them, because each batch of camera generated image files begins at the same set on nomenclature which isall very well but jolly inconvenient when you want to combine for long term storage purposes. You might see if your camera has another option. Mine (an Olympus 3030z) includes the date in the filename, and then a serial number which can either begin fresh after each SmartMedia disk is erased or installed fresh, or it can continue the serial number until it reaches and restart at . So it looks as though I can use chcase to change the file names from what ever they be when downloaded into date order, for instance ? Well, with some difficulty. Ideally, it would extract the date information from the image file. I have a Perl script that I wrote that does this, but it's designed for my Olympus and probably wouldn't work with another brand or even model. I had to modify it when I moved up from Olympus 320z to 3030z. If you just wanted the timestamp from the file or the time you ran chcase to be reflected in the filename, it would be easier to do, but what format? For example, you can include `date` in your Perl script, but it gives a rather unwieldy string, like: Thu Sep 26 05:56:18 CST 2002 and with a fast computer they would likely all get the same date, including the second ;-) If you use `date +%y%m%d` you would get: 020926 which might be useful combined with the serial number. Maybe too many numbers, though. ;-) my experimental folder:- root/Desktop/mont root]# cd /root/Desktop/mont mont]# ls DSCI0001.JPG DSCI0004.JPG DSCI0007.JPG DSCI0010.JPG DSCI0013.JPG DSCI0002.JPG DSCI0005.JPG DSCI0008.JPG DSCI0011.JPG DSCI0014.JPG DSCI0003.JPG DSCI0006.JPG DSCI0009.JPG DSCI0012.JPG chcase -x 'tr/DSC1*/dd/mm/'*.jpg Now I don't ecpect that to work because for one thing it will create a lot of files that may possibly end up with the same name, or would it, presumeably it would addopt the numerical progression as well. No, that won't work at all. To begin with, the Perl tr/pattern1/pattern2/ structure only makes a literal translation of characters, replacing any character in pattern1 with its corresponding character in pattern2. Not what you want at all. And of course, you cannot use '/' to separate day, month, and year in a filename because the '/' is used to separate directories and files in the path. What would be your thought here Jan, or maybe you have a better suggestion. Why not just create a directory for each batch of photos you download, and put them into that. One directory would get unmanageable anyway. Then you can use chcase to change the names to something more manageable, but keep the serial numbers to differentiate files. For example, maybe make a directory called 0210 for 2002 October, and in it you put photos from a birthday party: chcase *.JPG chcase -x 's/dsci/bday/' *.jpg Hope this helps. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] 2 displays (X-Servers), one monitor, how do I switch?
* Sevatio [EMAIL PROTECTED] [020910 09:52]: Oh, and I forgot to tell you: ctr-alt-F2 goes to console of screen 1 ctr-alt-F8 goes to X environment of screen 1 ctr-alt-F3 goes to console of screen 2 ctr-alt-F9 goes to X environment of screen 2 ctr-alt-F4 goes to console of screen 3 ctr-alt-F10 goes to X environment of screen 3 ctr-alt-F1 goes to console of screen 0 ctr-alt-F7 goes to X environment of screen 0 and so on... I believe you have up to four screen possible. Then of course there's vnc. But that's a whole other topic. This is very neat. Actually, I just tried it on Mdk8.2, and there does not seem to be a direct relationship between consoles numbers and screen numbers, so the above is true if you initiate the X environments in that order. But if you are in console F3 and you do: $ startx -- :1 Then Ctrl+Alt+F3 will get you back to the console, and then Alt+F8 will return you to the X screen you started with :1. In other words, the F7-F10 refer to X screens :0 to :3, respectively, no matter which console you initiated them from. It's still great, because you can start different window managers in each X screen ;-) -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] help please, keyboard rreeppeeaattiinngg
* Chris Spackman [EMAIL PROTECTED] [020904 13:30]: [snip] Anyhow, I put mandrake 8.2 on it and it works fine except for one or two things. The major problem is that the keyboard repeat rate is totally f**ked up. Typing quickly (normal speed for someone used to typing) causes a large number or double or triple letters, like `mman kbbdrate'. [snip] Any ideas? Could it be a hardware problem? I have found that it is less likely to happen if I pound the keys (imaging typing on an old, non-electric typewriter). Needless to say, that solution is almost as bad as the problem. Have you tried a different keyboard? That would be the first step in ruling out a hardware problem with the keyboard. If the borrowed keyboard works, get a new keyboard and don't worry about it. If it does the same thing, it could still be a hardware problem with your motherboard. I have installed Mandrake 8.2 a lot of times, and have never had this problem with a variety of keyboards, from brand new to ones with a lot of key names rubbed off (old). Never had this problem. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, PHP, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Perl
* John Richard Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] [020711 07:31]: My family often say I'm too curious. I found the name interesting. I hadn't thought about man python, as it wasn't a specific programme, I hadn't thought about looking for perl there( yes I spelt it wrong) The man program looks for a manual for a given command. Try man man for a manual for man ;-) Not everything has a manual. There is also info which I consider awkward and unfortunately, some programs have an old man file that tells you to consult info for more information. Which often is the same as what you found in man anyway. There is MUCH more information available for GNU/Linux stuff than for Windows stuff (unless you have an unlimited expense account for books), but it IS a bit difficult to locate, since it's scattered about. these various flavours they are all variations of C, C+, C++ , I guess. They all do something better in some way and that is why programmes use them. Perl is not a variation of C, although there is a lot of similarity in their syntaxes, the rules about how you construct statements, variables, etc. Many modern computer languages are very C-like. One difference (warning ... gross oversimplification follows) is that C (and its varieties like C++) are COMPILED. This means that someone writes source code, in plain ASCII text, and then a compiler creates binary code which can be executed. Perl, Python, and many others are INTERPRETED, which means the ASCII source code is read and interpreteted by a program (named perl, in the case of Perl) and executed from that. Thus C can be much faster than Perl, at least for certain things ... you wouldn't want to write a video driver in Perl. The speed differences are much less than they used to be, because interpreted programs like Perl, Python, and PHP actually compile the scripts into tokens before executing, and the tokenized code can do many things almost as fast as compiled code. So why use an interpreted language? Well, most programmers would agree that it's a lot quicker to develop a short program in Perl or Python than in C. It's generally a lot easier to learn (someone will of course disagree with this). I would encourage anyone to at least dabble in programming. Learn at least some BASH ( man bash ) because it will help you harness the power of Linux. Play with Perl, Python (some think it's better for learning ... I haven't really tried it), or even JavaScript if you do any web page designing. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Grep..?
* Damian G [EMAIL PROTECTED] [020701 08:46]: the command looks like this: grep -i -A 2 ~/CDs/* -e searchterm will look inside of every file in ~/CDs/ directory, the -i switch means 'ignore the difference between upper and lowercase' so it can find Gaim when i search for gaim , then -A 2 means i want it to show me two lines After the matching line. and -e searchterm is... well, the search term. You might try the -H option to grep. It produces output like this, which might be a cleaner output: $ grep -H 'Senator' *.qif cash.qif:PSenator Inn cp91.qif:PThe Senator Inn Conf Ctr cp92.qif:PSenator Inn Conference Center cp.qif:PThe Senator Inn Conf Ctr cp.qif:PSenator Inn cp.qif:ASenator Inn Conference Cente -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Samba is not working in 8.2
* Beastie [EMAIL PROTECTED] [020513 06:10]: I've just installed new 8.2 from Linux Format DVD. My machine is a Pentium II 350MHz that I would like to install as Firewall/Router DNS Server SMB server (File Server for networked Windows machines) Print Server. You probably know this, but if security is a concern, it would be much better to have one old linux computer that does nothing but act as firewall. It is more difficult to set up good security with things like Samba and NFS running on the firewall machine. However ... I used to have another machine running Windows 2000 Server that served the above purposes, the problem was that the machine was constantly under attack and in the end was defeated and became unusable. How can anyone concerned about security take seriously an operating system (W2K) that by default hides known file extensions from users, and stuffs Outlook down your throat ;-) I hope that by installing Linux, I could get away with some of the problems I was facing. You can. After installing 8.2 I setup DNS and Firewall, these work fine. But not Samba, I can see the Samba server when browse Network Neighbourhood only when I click to open this server the error was Network path not found. I spent most of the weekend fighting with the same problem. I found that the bastille-firewall was interfering with Samba, so I disabled it and loaded firestarter. Same thing. Samba worked fine if I disabled either firewall. I think it has to do with it blocking netbios TCP. Anyway, I took a more manual approach and used one of the sample firewalls from the iptables-HOWTO and it works fine. Now my Mandrake 8.2 server tolerates my Win2K workstation. I tried to set system security to lower level, thinking that these might be the problem but to no avail. Not a bad guess, though. What can I do now ? I know this seems very difficult, but one illusion we have to overcome is that networking can be simple. As soon as you connect one computer to the Internet, you have full-blown sysadmin problems on your hands. For example: Are you using encrypted passwords? Have you looked at the Using Samba book that comes with Samba? Pretty well written, but it's still complicated as heck. Do you have a fixed IP number (connecting to the outside) or using DHCP from an ISP? Are your internal (probably private) IP numbers, your netmasks, your netbios names, your domain/workgroup names all correct? There are so many different configurations that it is a major problem to get all this working properly, especially with Microsoft trying to make it harder, not easier. Perhaps you could provide more details, and then maybe one of us could help you build a firewall that works with your situation. It would be nice if it worked out of the box but that just isn't going to happen, at least in my experience. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Linux User Groups
* William R. Nash [EMAIL PROTECTED] [020327 11:42]: I have been talking with several people about starting up a Linux user group in Hiram, GA. This is my plan so far. 1. Teach people to use Linux. 2. Build computers with Linux installed and set them up for local schools so they will have computers and internet server for free. Check out the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) at http://ltsp.org/ It works great with Mandrake. We are promoting it (and Linux) in Belize, and trying to get a Belize Linux User Group going. http://linux.bz/ We figure between hardware and software savings we can save a school about 2/3 the cost of going the Billy-way. 3. Learn to program free software for Linux. My question is that I'm not sure how to get this started or if this is something that people would like to see happen. Any help on this would be appreciated. Thanks Bill Nash. Google is your friend. Search for Linux user groups and you'll get LOTS of stuff. There's even a howto or two that apply, and an organization or two. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Running Open Office more directly
* Charles Muller [EMAIL PROTECTED] [020310 10:35]: My error was in the path I entered in the properties box. I had originally entered /usr/share/OpenOffice.org641/program But once I shortened this to /usr/share/OpenOffice.org641 It worked fine. I am happy with this, but if anyone can tell me where I might find my PATH statement, or why Jan's LN suggestion did not work, I would greatly appreciate it. There's a good chance that the difference is in the directory structures. If you installed it from an RPM (or even if from a .tar.gz) it was probably put in a different spot. I installed from the .tar.gz from OpenOffice.org, and by default it installs in /opt/buildnum/ where buildnum is something like the OpenOffice.org641 you have above. Then there is a program directory that has the actual executables in it. They also have a link from the buildnum directory. I usually don't like to link to links, so ... If somebody suggests making a symbolic link, like: ln -s target link_name or ln -s target directory the first thing you should check is to see that the target actually exists, and if to a directory, that the directory actually exists. man ln for more information on links Also, echo $PATH should tell you what your path is; finding what makes it is more involved because there are several rc files that may mess with it. I personally dislike things that do set PATH=$PATH:another_dirbecause you often see the same directory added to the path more than once :-( If you are willing to take responsibility for your own PATH, you can change the line in .bash_profile from PATH=$PATH:$HOME/binto something like: PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/kde/bin\ :/usr/games:$HOME/bin (if you can do it all on one line, take out the \ ) make sure there is a line that says something like export PATH The good thing about this is that other things will be less likely to mess with your path. Of course, if Mandrake decides you need something else in your path, you'll have to add it manually. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Running Open Office more directly
* Charles Muller [EMAIL PROTECTED] [020308 23:53]: I installed OpenOffice 6.41 using the tarball, and it works fine. However, it is slightly inconvenient to use, since each time I have to open the console, change directories to /OpenOffice.org641 and then type ./soffice. Is there a way of simplifying this process? You can put a link in any directory in your path (this could be in addition to placing an icon on your desktop or whatever). Open a terminal and type: echo $PATH This will show you which directories are searched when you type a command, and in which order. The colons are separators. Change to one of those directories ... and if you don't have write privileges, su to root: su And give the root password. Then make the link: ln -s /OpenOffice.org641/program/soffice ooffice You can name it something different if you like. Then from an command line you should be able to type: ooffice Or whatever you called it, and it should load up. We use OpenOffice.org 641C in our junior college lab with Mandrake 8.1, and LTSP 3.0 with very good results. OOo 1.0 will be out in maybe a month, and we're looking forward to that. BTW, OOo 642 is available now, but it is a development build, and NOT the release candidate for OOo 1.0. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] thin clients with linux as terminal server
* Rick Henderson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [020222 18:32]: Is it possible to set up linux to as a terminal server for the thin clients? Linux works exceedingly well with thin clients. http://ltsp.org/ Has lots of information. We use Mandrake 8.1 with LTSP here using various legacy PCs and etherboot floppies. If you have a specific dedicated thin client in mind, well, maybe. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] random number in bash
* Andrei Raevsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] [020105 05:51]: The function $RANDOM return a random number in Bash. But how can I choose to generate a random number between X and Y (say 1 and 35)? I looked at the Advanved Bash Scripting ebook but the script this suggest does not work. Thanks! Andrei How about expr $RANDOM % 35 + 1 Seems to work here ... not sure about the quality of the pseudorandom number, but might be OK for your purpose. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Apache config, was Help
* Frank McKenna [EMAIL PROTECTED] [09 16:04]: Thank you for replying. Best to reply to the list ... my phone was out for a couple of days and someone else might have answered. Also, I would recommend a better subject than Help ... it makes it hard to keep threads straight for those of us who have REAL email programs ;-) I am trying to set my 8.0 box to act as the DHCP, DNS, and Samba server to my home LAN right now OK. I thought that it would be nice if I could get Apache up and running as well. If you installed it when you installed Mandrake, it should be up and running ... what do you get when you open a browser window? Try entering: http://localhost/ and see if you get a Mandrake welcome page ... if so Apache is working. A former employer asked me for some ideas and asked me to create a model at home so I could demonstrate what I had in mind for their small LAN Look at the included documentation and let us know if you get stuck. Thanks again, Frank McKenna You'll find this list to be among the very best support groups around. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Help
* Frank McKenna [EMAIL PROTECTED] [08 06:05]: Can someone please tell me where I can find my Apache config file and my Samba log files. /etc/httpd/conf/commonhttpd.conf Most configuration options will work out of the box if you installed Apache. You will have to make changes if you want special directory actions or restrictions. Let us know what you want to DO with Apache and we can give you some tips on setting it up to do that. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Easier reading
* Dan Jacobs [EMAIL PROTECTED] [011109 16:11]: Would you care if most of the reply messages on _this_ list were top posted? I'll have to vote AGAINST top posting. As you can see, bottom posting is fine if you take the time to edit the quotes. Top posting encourages sending the entire thread in each reply, and there are those of us who still pay high costs for very limited bandwidth. Judging by experience, though, you'll never get people to agree on either approach. The only thing you can get agreement on is that people SHOULD edit quotes down to the bare minimum. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
[newbie] weird symlink (was: mount umount cdrom (Audio CD Solution))
* Robert MacLean [EMAIL PROTECTED] [011025 05:31]: Go to / type: mkdir cdroms then copy all the files out of /dev/cdroms to /cdroms and all will work. the problem is that /dev/cdrom points to ../dev/cdroms/cdrom0, it should point to /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 (I have no idea how to make this link), but after that everything works. HTH This is a very ugly kludge. Does anyone know why, in Mdk8.1, you cannot delete the dangling symlink: /dev/cdrom - ../cdroms/cdrom0 You can delete, using rm -f or symlinks -d but it keeps coming back. Is linuxconf having a nightmare or something? -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] POP3
* Michael [EMAIL PROTECTED] [011024 06:21]: My ISP is letting me have multiple POP3 accounts. How do i set my client to fetch them. Or can i only view the other mailboxes online? I have kmail 1.0.28 or netscape 4.73. In your home directory, put (or edit) a file named .fetchmailrc You need a line for each pop3 account ... something like: poll mail.domain.com proto pop3 user myname password mypass Make sure that file has read and write permission for the user only, 0600 in octal code. Then, to fetch your mail from all 3 pop3 accounts, type fetchmail At the user prompt. For details, man fetchmail -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Digital Camera use with Linux
* tazmun [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010925 07:03]: [snip] considering purchasing an Olympus digital camera that uses smart media cards and is apparently designed to be used with USB interface. I'm hoping the group can save me considerable time and possibly a lot of money by helping me avoid hardware that is questionable or absolutely doesn't work with Linux as well as the best software program available. Currently running 2 boxes one with Mandrake 8.0 and one with Redhat 7.1. As soon as Mandrake releases 8.1 to the local stores I will own Mandrake 8.1 Powerpack Both have USB working in Linux for printers at this point. Is the USB interface to downloading from digital cameras doable or am I better off to stay with the older serial transfer interface. I'm open to suggestions and am willing to spend approximately $300. I admit that I have not researched this much yet. However I am under pressure from my job to get this camera working in the very near future and don't have allot of time to look everything over as thoroughly as I would like. Your experiences and thoughts will be appreciated. gphoto2 is working fine for downloading images via USB from my Olympus 3030Z. It's a little tricky to set up, but once you've got it it works great. It wasn't very clear (to me at least) in the gphoto2 docs that the folder they were talking about was the folder name on the CAMERA. For my camera, this will download all images to the current directory: gphoto2 -f DCIM/100OLYMP -P BTW, gphoto2 recognized and identified the camera just fine. It's just that the documentation is pretty skimpy ... type gphoto2 without any arguments and it will give you a short help summary ... that's most of what you get for help (no man page). -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] CDRW compatability
* Tom Brinkman [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010911 19:43]: IDE is fine, buy a Plextor or Yamaha, don't buy a Sony, Philips isn't a good idea either I agree with Tom about Yamaha ... but I can't recommend Plextor. I tried to return a CDRW that crapped a month short of the 1 year warranty. Since it was over one year from manufacture date, I had to fax them my invoice. They subsequently LOST my fax, and after many emails back and forth I finally gave up and bought a Yamaha to replace it. The Yamaha works fine. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] grep -r *.c doesn't find files
* George Petri [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010824 21:11]: I notice that grep -r *.c doesn't recurse through all folders (unless, of course, they're called something.c). How do I tell grep to recurse through ALL subfolders and find .c files? grep -r *.c should recurse through directories to find the pattern *.c in ... well, nothing. You gave it no files to look for, so it is waiting for standard input. With the subject you gave, you probably want find instead of grep. Whichever you want, try man grepor man find -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] Apache Question
* Tom Malone [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010730 06:12]: I am not sure if this question is more appropriate for this list or maybe the PHP list, but I'll post it here just in case - let me know if I am out of line... =) I have Apache installed with mod_php - I am just wondering: Is the standard Apaceh directory structure (i.e.: htdocs, or public_html) automatically created when Apache is installed, or do I have to create it myself? If i have to create it myself, how do I make it the default directory so that when I go to localhost/ in my browser, it will load my index page? Thanks - sorry if this is OT... If you installed Apache when you installed Mandrake 8 (you didn't mention OS distros or versions) it should have created the file index.html in the document root /var/www/html/ You should be able to view this by typing: http://localhost/ into your browser address bar. If not, there are a bunch of things that could be wrong. If you can see the Apache/Mandrake welcome, you can rename that file and create a new index.html and you are off and running with your own Intranet or (if you are set to allow access to the world) Internet website. If you get an error message, let us know what it says. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML
Re: [newbie] HTML differences in Konqueror, Mozilla, Nautilus, Netscape, etc
* Jeferson Lopes Zacco [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010729 16:59]: Oddly enough, all browsers managed to make my page look somewhat different. Even Mozilla and Netscape, which I though were close relatives, behave totally different about tables, width and bgcolor (in a table/tr/td tag.). Konqueror was the most annoying, it made two of my tables overlap. Go back and look at your code ... you are probably doing something wrong there. Recent versions of Konqueror do pretty well at basic HTML rendering. It does barf on some JavaScript, but other browsers do also. I would recommend that you stick to fairly simple HTML unless you want to learn more about it. There are lots of tutorials. Making HTML work WELL on all common browsers is a pretty tough job. There are mailing lists that concentrate on such problems. Lots of books, too. Is there a way to make sure my page looks good across all browsers? other than making it a PDF file? As I said I don't use any particular code /tag, all I use is pretty standart ( or so I hope), but if a browser cannot handle things such a s a bgcolor for a table then it might rend my page unreadable. It's hard to beat white for a bgcolor ... especially for technical info. Again, make it simple. Please do NOT go to PDF. There is no need for PDF for technical instruction ... HTML is universal, but give up on the idea that all browsers will format it exactly the way you want it. I remember consulting with a client who got very mad when he found out that people may be resizing their browser windows, messing up the table layouts he had worked so hard on. He assumed everyone would be using 800x600, full screen MSIE. ;-) -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML
Re: [newbie] Got a question...
* Tim Holmes [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010716 01:20]: Well does anybody know how to turn it off in vim? I've checked the .viminfo and I can't see anything in there. And there's no .vimrc or .virc. Anybody have a clue? tdh In .vimrc: set nobk If you don't have one, you should be able to find a sample one in: /usr/share/vim/vimrc (in Mdk 8.0). -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML
Re: [newbie] deleting contents of a file
* Dan Ray [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010710 06:14]: Well, it's just been pointed out that it doesn't actually EMPTY the file per se. It actually creates a one-byte file. I believe that the 'echo' command prints the string argument given it, plus a newline on the end. That newline gets into the new file, so you actually have a file that isn't empty, but contains a single newline character. As long as you don't actually need this file to be totally emptied to zero bytes, and don't mind a blank line at the top of the file, this should work fine. I haven't seen the permissions issue that Jose mentions at all, in all my fooling with this the permissions are preserved. So maybe he's seeing something we're not. As Ray says, the echo myfile method works fine regarding ownership and permissions, but leaves a newline in the file. If you want a zero-length file, why not: echo -n myfile this tells 'echo' not to follow the (empty) string with a newline, so the resulting file is zero length. I just tested this on Mdk 8.0 to be sure. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML
Re: [newbie] Weird no such file or directory message
* Paul [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010626 05:39]: Say I'm in /usr/games and I type /Maelstrom from a console window. Bash types back at me, No such file or directory, even though there most certainly is such a file, and if I ls or dir it tells me there is. == If you're already in /usr/games, you might have to type: ../Maelstrom [notice the leading .] to point out that the command is in the current directory. Almost right: /Maelstrom would do it. ./Maelstrom refers to a file in the parent directory. Paul Oops. No. Looks like one . got stripped. /Maelstom would refer to a file or directory in the root directory (not likely). ./Maelstrom would be a file or directory in the current directory. ../Maelstrom would be a file or directory in the parent directory. So if Maelstrom is an executable file in the current directory, ./Maelstrom should run it. -- Jan Wilson _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Community College| |:' Corozal Junior College Corozal Town, Belize | /' Central America Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ http://www.corozal.com
Re: [newbie] need tool to trim file names to 31 characters
* David Nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [010305 18:12]:
I have netatalk installed on my LM 7.2 system so that I can share files with
our MacOS system. Problem is files with names containing more than 31
characters don't show up to the Macs. To fix this I need a tool that can trim
down the file name while preserving the file extension. For example I need
something that would turn "everclear-so much for the afterglow.mp3" into
"everclear-so much for the.mp3" not "everclear-so much for the". On the Mac I
use AppleScript if I need to do batch file renaming. I suppose on Linux this
type of thing is done with shell scripts? Am I on the right track? Anyone
have such a script they would be willing to share? Good books on learning
shell scripting?
Try this. I tested it and it seems to work, but of course copy your
files into a temporary directory first:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# name this file to maxlen
# move it into your path
# chmod 775 to make it executable
use strict;
my $syntax = "Usage: maxlen 28 *.mp3\n";
my $len = shift or die $syntax;
my $was = ""; # original file.ext
my $filecount = 0;# files renamed
my $base= ''; # everything before ext
my $ext = ''; # .ext
die $syntax unless $len =~ /^\d+$/;
for (@ARGV) {
chomp; # in case newline
next if -d $_; # skip directories
if ( /^(.+)(\.[^.]+)$/ ) {
# found base.ext
$base = $1;
$ext= $2;
} else {
# no ext, just shorten
$base = $_;
}
next if length $base = $len;
$was = $_; # save original filename
$base = substr($base,0,$len);
if ( -f "$base$ext" ) {
print "Did not rename $was to $base$ext";
print " because it already exists.\n";
} else {
if ( rename($was, "$base$ext") ) {
$filecount++;
} else {
print "Error renaming $was to $base$ext\n";
}
}
};
if ( $filecount ) {
print "Renamed $filecount file";
print "s" if $filecount 1;
print "\n";
};
--
Jan Wilson _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Corozal Community College| |:' Corozal Junior College
Corozal Town, Belize | /' Central America
Visit our Corozal site |_/ http://www.corozal.com
Re: [newbie] VMware Tools ver. 2.0
* [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [000426 19:09]: Are there any VMware users out there using ver 2.0? As of 2.0, the VMware Tools are (supposedly) included in the VMware program download - they no longer exist as a separate package - I have downloaded the 2.0 package for Linux, and installed it - I loaded Win2000 as the guest OS, and it works fine - connects to my company's lan and everything, but it is operating in straight VGA mode (640x480x16-color). I have used ver. 1.x for Win NT and loaded Linux as the guest, and used the VMware Tools for Linux that used to come separately - Worked great. With this "New, Improved" method, I can not find the VMware Tools executable that is described in VMware's new documentation - Can't find the Linux OR the Windows version - Even tried installing the new VMware for Win NT on my NT partition to see if the Tools executable would turn up there - no luck. Does anyone out there have a copy of VMwareTools.exe that they could send me? If so, my address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] I have it working just fine. There is a tricky process for installing the VMWare tools ... it seems to copy the installation files to a temporary virtual floppy disk. Anyway, follow the installation instructions verbatim and it should work. The install instructions on my computer are at: /usr/lib/vmware/help/ToolsInstall.htm You can also access this from the help button on the virtual machine. -- Jan Wilson _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Community College| |:' Corozal Junior College Corozal Town, Belize | /' Central America Visit our Corozal site |_/ http://www.corozal.com
Re: [newbie] path
* rich [EMAIL PROTECTED] [000416 22:04]: I know this is probably a dumb question, but how do you add a directory to the path For instance, instead of going to /root/mozilla/ to run ./mozzila, I would like to be able to type ./mozilla in any directory. If you type ./mozilla you are saying, "run the executable file mozilla, which you will find in the current directory." So that has nothing directly to do with the path. The path you are talking about is the environment variable $PATH, which gives a sequence of directories to search if no path is given. That is, you type 'mozilla' rather than './mozilla' or '/usr/bin/mozilla' or whatever. It is usually set in shell scripts in /etc/profile, or in the directory /etc/profile.d/ or in the user's home directory in a file like .bashrc ... One note, though. Be careful. Linux will happily let you add a world-writeable directory to the beginning of your path. In that case anyone could add a shell script named 'mozilla' into that directory and when you type mozilla you will run it. If it does whatever it wants to, and then runs the regular mozilla, you probably won't know that someone has hijacked your system. For this reason some recommend using symlinks or typing the full path. They must type faster than I do ;-) -- Jan Wilson _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Community College| |:' Corozal Junior College Corozal Town, Belize | /' Central America Visit our Corozal site |_/ http://www.corozal.com
Re: [newbie] changing font
* Ed Santiago [EMAIL PROTECTED] [991226 22:12]: In Linux Mandrake 6.1 how do you change the font size from the default of 75dpi to 100dpi? Try http://mandrakeuser.org/ and in the "X" section, "Fonts on X" or "Why Do Look Fonts So Ugly (sic)" ... those instructions work for me. -- Jan Wilson _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Community College| |:' Corozal Junior College Corozal Town, Belize | /' Central America Visit our Corozal site |_/ http://www.corozal.com
Re: [newbie] Shutdown Rights
* Rick Bonczek [EMAIL PROTECTED] [991226 22:12]: When I log in as root, I can issue the command "shutdown -h now", but when I log in as a normal user, I cannot. How can I give a normal user the rights to shutdown a Linux workstation. If you want to be able to shut down with a Ctrl-Alt-Delete, you can (as root) change this line in /etc/inittab: ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now to ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -h now If you want only certain users to be able to shut it down, you can add an -a flag to shutdown. Check "man shutdown" for details on this. -- Jan Wilson _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Community College| |:' Corozal Junior College Corozal Town, Belize | /' Central America Visit our Corozal site |_/ http://www.corozal.com
