chalex20

As a programmer, you need to anticipate oddball situations. Although this project may not need it due to expectation, in general, its good to do through error checking. Open a file? Check for a NULL. Do it everytime. Make another class or procedure that does that automatically for you so you don't have to repeat the work.

There is even better programming technique : some function defined as having a return code? Check this return code each time you call this function. Some function defined as returning a pointer ( fopen, malloc)? Check for NULL. The list continues...

When you have cable internet, you are always on. You really don't need an indicator unless you just enjoy the visual indicator.

And what if I want to know what is the current download speed? Or whether there is any traffic at all? Network connections are often subject to failures/disconnections/etc.

The most important thing now is to make sure you have turned on your firewall software. If you are running windows also, you need to download and install firewall software (use the free version of zonealarm).

Agree completely.

To answer the original question : if you use KDE, try knetload. Very convenient systray app, IMHO.

Chalex has a good point, but I have no idea about what /bin /sbin etc. are intended for.

/bin - regular utilities necessary for boot.

/sbin - system maintenance utilities necessary for boot

/etc - system configuration files necessary for boot.

/usr - Unix System Resources.

Of those :

/usr/bin - regular utilities

/usr/sbin - system maintenance utilities

/usr/share - shareable configuration files

/usr/local - system resources LOCAL to this particular station ( /usr/ may reside on a network ).

/var - variable ( quickly changing ) but important to keep data

/tmp - temporary data

Which is strange, I should know that by now!

 

Perhaps someone can shed some light or paste a good link conerning the differences?

Wouldn't it be preferable to copy this file to /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin?

There is a difference, mind you. The /usr/bin and /bin directories have completely different goals. There is a very good reason such differentiation exists.

As far as I understand, /bin and /sbin contain some utilities that are necessary for the system to boot and to function without a network ( /usr may be on the network ) or before the network is up.

I don't think this game file is necessary to boot and therefore its place is in /usr/bin or even in /usr/local/bin.

"-lasound" means the following :

"find libasound.a or libasound.la or libasound.so within some predefined library directories".

Within this : "-l" means "find a library" ( it is a linker switch ), "asound" is the key part of the library name. The full library name is made of the key part by prefixing it with "lib".

Examples :

-lm tells the linker to find libm.so.

-lXm tells the linker to find libXm.so.

When you are in the text console, try to run the following command :

service dm start

If that succeeds, just run

chkconfig dm on

and then

chkconfig --list dm

to ensure that dm is on for runlevel 5. That's all.

into the Konqueror location bar :-)

This may be an example of when GUI tools suck because errors are so difficult to even notice.

This may be an example when badly written GUI tools suck. Rightly written GUI tool should notify a user of its actions in proper GUI way, and not in console or not at all, like *drak* do.

Side note: For what I know "." was a Bourne Shell Builtin, and "source" came later as a Bash Builtin, so if you want the maximun portability in a script you should use "." instead of "source" (It's me speaking?  :shock:  well, it could be comp.unix.shell's fault --- my new 'divetimento' )

source comes originally from the csh/tcsh land :-)

I am trying to put wine on my system, which is Mandrake 9.  I am not able too, because it states that some files are missing: libgdi32.dll, libkernel32.dll, libntdll.so, and libuser32.dll.  In what .rpm file would I be able to find these?

 

Thank you,

Kieth

As far as I believe, they are part of wine.

I have this script to open a Japanese terminal, but as soon as it's finished, ther terminal language resets to English. If I type the commands 1 by 1, the langauge stays Japanese. Why won't it stay Japanese if I use the script?

For one very simple reason - you can't pass environment variables "back" to parents - only "forward" to children. When you run the script, a separate shell is run, which gets all those variables ( LANG and such). When you run commands one by one, your current shell variables are reassigned.

#! /bin/bash

This /bin/bash runs to execute your script!!!

# A script to open a Japanese console

echo "Setting-up Japanese Console"

export LC_ALL=ja_JP

export LANG=ja_JP.eucJP

export XMODIFIERS='@im=kinput2'

And these variables would never get to your login shell!!!

kinput2 -wnn &

echo $LANG

There is a way, though, to leave your terminal in Japanese.

Don't run the script, but "source" it.

. your_script_here

And yes, it is exactly that : "dot space script name" :-)

This way, your login shell and not a separate shell would run the script - the effect would be the same as of typing the commands one by one.

Good luck!

Linux Printing site http://www.linuxprinting.org contains a good database. If the printer is listed there as "Working", it would work. As far as I see, it is listed as "Working perfectly" :-)

to integrate these "page checking" scripts into the print server. It seems to me the most natural thing to do. This would imply some change in the printing commands, though - they should inform user of "exceeding the quota".

So I went back and played with the settings in KMix again, remembering that I had gotten it to work one time before. It seems that the CD slider has absolutly NO effect on volume. You MUST have the volume and the line 1 green lights activated and the sliders to the top....Now it works!

 

Bruce

It may just mean that your CD audio cable is connected to some internal LINE-IN ( AUX or TAD, for example) of your card, instead of the CD-IN. As simple as that.

wow - I was just asking about a simple harware issue - I had no idea that sucha debate would be sparked.

 

I have to say, though, that everyone keeps talking about how great it is when a system automatically picks up and recongnises new hardware.  Mandrake is very good at this.  It is, however, perhaps equally important that harware should be uninstalled along with any related config files if the hardware is removed.

Not removed but rather disabled - just think of USB modems/network adapters. Do you want to re-config it each time you connect it? IMHO, in most cases you would prefer re-enabling the previous configuration.

  This particular issue has caused me a few serious networking problems until Iwas given some help from this forum enabling me to get it sorted.  If the config had simply been removed when the hardware was, then I would never have had those difficulties.

One more issue to start a flame upon. Let's suppose I want to disable some device. What are the steps to do that in Mandrake 9.0/pre-9.1 versus one click in Windows since Windows 95?

Actually has nothing to do with the network config tools, it's just that harddrake2 isn't up to what kudzu was in some areas. Maybe someone would like to open a bug report on this so it is dealt with?

I was actually talking about integration of hardware and network config tools. If the hardware networking device is not there, hardware config tools should notify network configuration tools to remove/disable the appropriate interface. Period.

Kudzu used to prompt you to remove the configuration ...

It shouldn't even prompt in this case. Hardware is not there, don't remove it completely, but at least make it ONBOOT=no. It's not such a nuclear physics.

Is that really such a big problem? Did it unconfigure dhcpcd. There probably is a good reason ...

It is. I've chosen expert mode. My opinion is that in expert mode it should ask. I'm not such a big specialist in iptables, and that's why I've chosen to configure ICS via drakconnect, but I think I do understand something in how networking works.

Because it's much easier when things work out the box. You can't have something easier / more user friendly and ask more technical questions. Windows ICS also sets up a mini dhcp server without you asking ... and that's easy enough, isn't it? At least with drakconnect you have the option of putting in custom values for the dhcp ranges, which Windows doesn't do (even win2kpro only allows 192.168.0.0/24 !)

Once more, expert mode.

Sure, so set up your client box to be static and turn dhcpd off!!!! But how many newbies are going to get their config wrong (like forgetting to setup caching dns ... see below  ...)

But this tool didn't even show me in GUI which packages were installed. This was seen only in console. If I were running it from menu, I wouldn't even see that I need to remove dhcpd, bind and all that. And I don't like any system standing in my way, much less in case it doesn't know its way around.

Caching DNS? How else is your client going to get working DNS? Sure, you could manually set the DNS on your client to be your ISPs DNS, but what when it changes? With caching DNS on the server, you can set the DNS server on the clients by way of dhcp. This is the cleanest way of doing it.

And to get an additional headache with configuring bind on the gateway? I don't want to bother with it. It's not a problem for me to configure a client. ICS at its base is 10 lines of bash script at most, loading several modules and putting 1 instead of 0 in some /proc/sys/net entries. Why can't drakconnect do just that and ask about all the rest when in expert mode?

Something along the lines - "Enable FTP forwarding", "Enable ICQ forwarding", "Enable HTTP forwarding", "DHCP network", "DNS configuration via DHCP". Several checkboxes, that's all.

And BTW, can you tell me how one can configure VPN connection via DrakConnect? There is no way in hell to do that yet, even in recent Cooker version.

If you can write better tools, let's see them (and I will stop working on the one I am working on now to easily setup LDAP ..)

Don't stop. Good tools are THE good thing . Good luck with your tool :-)

Sorry, read your post fast and missed that eth1 was not listed. Have you tried looking in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts for an icfg file for eth1? You should have entries for eth0(icfg-eth0), and loopback(icfg-lo). If there's a icfg-eth1, that might be causing the problem. If icfg-eth1 exists, try editing the ONBOOT line from "yes" to "no" either that or just move the file or rename it badicfg-eth-1 and see if that helps when you reboot.

Just another example of very bad integration between network config tools and hardware configuration tools. If eth1 device is no longer there, why this ifcfg-eth1 is not get removed?

Underdevelopedness and over-"getting in your way" of DrakConnect just never ceases to amaze me, BTW. Not only in this case. I've tried recently to configure simple ICS via DrakConnect (recent Cooker version ). It installed dhcpcd ( for what a hell? I use dhcpxd), dhcpd ( why did not it ask? I wanted my little test home network to be static - just two computers), bind - once more, for what, tried to install and configure shorewall, one little error in configuration passed undetected - and the whole thing didn't work at the end. OK, I configured it manually after some search on the Internet. Who needs such automation tools? Who develops such misfeatured tools?

Hi.  How can you tell if the cdrom (/mnt/cdrom) is mounted or not from a bash script?

 

MTIA,

 

Matt

mount | grep /mnt/cdrom

The best ( usually ) way to install Cooker packages is to download source Cooker RPM and to rebuild it against distribution packages.

On your X server machine, type the following command :

xhost +ip_address_or_hostname_of_your_client_machine

snip... the fat32 system doesn't gel well enough with Linux to allow chmods.

It doesn't get well enough with Windows as well, hence NTFS :-) Linux has nothing to do with that. The FAT filesystem has been designed for DOS ( single-user, single-tasking, for standalone non-networked PC by definition ) and just doesn't provide for such things as file ownership, access permissions and such. More than that - long file names in Windows 95 were successfully introduced with no interference to existing DOS and windows software due to bug in FAT implementation, which became feature - some combination of flags, which should be considered an error, was just plainly ignored, so they made this very combination represent long file name element.

hi bvc!

I tried inserting "ALL:ALL" at first line of hosts.deny but nothing happenned. It still not blocking the hosts.

Or "ALL:ALL" means some syntax?

Thank you!

I think you didn't understand him completely.

He tries to say, that hosts.deny prevents some hosts from connecting to YOUR computer and from using services YOUR computer provides. It DOESN'T PREVENT your computer from connecting to those hosts and using THEIR services. You should either configure your browser or some firewall so that it blocks either outgoing or incoming connections with these hosts.

He solved the problem by booting cd1 and 'upgrading' linux .. lol .. and that worked.

 

Adding the path to the font in XF86config-4 didn't help and he didn't want to remove XFree and reinstall.

What you needed to do is to add ALL the paths from /etc/X11/fs/config to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. As far as I remember, /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi isn't enough, you need /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc there as well, as this is the directory containing the "fixed" font.

Does xfs run ?

Do either "ps aux | grep xfs" or "service xfs status".

Post its output, if there is any. If there is none, or if the second command shows xfs not running, just issue "service xfs start" and then try "startx".

When I created a link from /dev/ttySHS0 to /dev/modem, the modem remained after reboot. 

 

Works fine now, except in Mandrake Control Panel (I am not too impressed with the network section of the Control Panel).

Agree completely. Underdeveloped to say the least. Its Windows XP counterpart is a lot better.