Gowator

No duplication.... No what I meant is::: Well look at it like NFS running the NIS automounter. We do something similar at work all the time with Solaris. Imagine program a) want to install in /mnt/programs/bin/programa but (since were French) we have it in (its not a real example but close) /mnt/logiciel/bin/logiciela using the NIS automounter we make a map which says /mnt/programs/bin/programa is equivalent to /mnt/logiciel/bin/logiciela if you type cd /mnt/programs/bin/programa ou'll see the software but if you do DF . it will tell you your using /mnt/logiciel/bin/logiciela. Relative paths etc. are retained. So what I was suggesting and I guess LVM could be used as well... The install user makes a mount: (/usr/.......) which would be the home directory of the user install. A remapped file tree is bilt which basically is the differences between two distro's places to store information. The process is chroot'd. so as far as install sees everything is being put where it was meant to go package wise. But its only in that directory structure when chroot'd. Imagine rescue disk to fix lilo. You boot up and then mount your positions under /mnt. lilo.conf is in /mnt/etc and vmliuz in /mnt/boot. Now a chroot /mnt will make the new root /mnt .... so lilo.conf is now in /etc. (No duplication its the same inode.) Now you edit lilo.conf, type lilo and viola... If you don't do this then you need to: set your path so mnt/usr/bin/vi (can't remember exactly but you get the point) can be seen. You also need to tell lilo explicitly where /mnt/etc/lilo.conf is andwhere /boot is. (not impossible but simpler with a chroot. You can do the same if you have different versions of linux installed. It helps if you have exactly the same kernel before you do this... RH is on /mnt/distros/RH9 Im' currently in Mandrake. single user.. and Ive recompiled both kernels to exactly the same!!!! now chroot /mnt/distros/RH9 viola your running RH9... DON'T TRY THIS UNLESS YOU WANT TO CRASH YOUR SYSTEM.... its to illustrate a point but I have done this for lilo once generated the files under the other distro and then copied across... The point is the directory trees chroot'd into a virtual. Isn't linux beautifull..... everything is just a file... The idea is the install takes place on a file tree which is mapped to the real file tree. (in the end your filetree is whatever you tell it to be) root can start where-ever you want....

Dunno, I know its acting strange on my /mnt/floppy Difference is i get an audible notification when its actually written. It appears there, I can open the files from Konqueror but unmount (specifically) take the disk out and take it to the other machine and its empty. It just occured it might be doing the same with your memory stick.... Drove me mad for ages becuase I was coming into work and though it was a FAT writing problem or something because the disk was empty. Just an idea, maybe a cp to /tmp from the memory stick would force a delayed write.... havn't tried it specifically...

I'll know better when ive done it!!! You might want to put a seperate topic under SECURITY in the meantime.

Just some gabber. I was interested to learn the internals of doing a distro and so I'm prety easy on which/what for. The scoopy/scratch ideas both have merit and perhaps one would lead to the other. (I don't need to say which direction, surely) In reality no-ones exactly sure of the future of MDK right now (unless I missed something) so .... I had some other ideas, one is making a packaging tool along the lines of alien but better. If you write your own package format you'd limit users to just the packages you create, not good for choice. If you choose either APT or RPM both have there plus's and minus's ... I had an idea about how to do this: someone tell me if they think its stupid. It needs a special root user not called root. I'll call it install. (You'll see why) A major prob with RPM's is the different directory structures. RedHat vs (look its an example I know well so its just an example) KDE. This causes no end of problems and so you need someone thoughtful, like texstar or plf to redo the RPM's. (Check out Mosfets site) OK idea is a INSTALL user, but the install user uses a chroot to a virtual filetree. The exact filetree is dependent upon the exact distro so the install procedes as if the files are being put where they are intended, in fact they are for the INSTALL user. Other users however see them in the place where they work int he distro becuase the tree chroot'd too was mapped that way. Becuase everything is owned by install its easier to see what is installed. I think it might need an urmpi DB for each package type (RH, MDK etc) but maybe not. Same would go for Debs..... A further option being INSTALL from source. The different databases could be checked, compared etc. an RPM (xine-ui....) installed from RPM would be deinstalled from RPM before the compiled version was inserted, then the make install would be parsed to track the files and would be run as INSTALL thus remapping any differences. This could be done first for MDK but would form the basis of a distro later!!! ???

I had a similar problem with the floppy. I copy over and it shows in the /mnt/floppy but it isn't there. Its cached, if I wait 3 mins or so the FDD starts up and it actually copies....

From the edition of the boxset I got you are basically stuffed when/if something goes wrong. I think it depends on your hardware config and I don't know if MDK are adding the updates to the latest boxsets or if they are all pressed and relying on broadband updates. Just cos M$ does it doesn't make it right!! I worry more about a first time user, what impresion would they get. Even after the updates there are lots of problems. Permissions being incorrectly set on files for instance. I had to chuser all the mysql tree for instance from root. Not the only thing, just the last one I did. Also lots of security issues with root being overused. Like I said earlier, this isn't just a mandrake issue. If they release to early and consumers buy a Linux and get put off it hurts the whole of Linux.... I wonder why some prominent developers/support people have left :?

I agree, once again didn't get round to giving LAN and internet access at the same time. I think IP tables can be used to just route and do NAT. I'm going to look into it. Ended up rewatching the Matrix becuase my two houseguests haddn't seen it and were going to see reloaded 2nite. Just couldn't let that happen!!

We don't all have perfect musical ears !!! Actually quite a few friends who are prof musicians don't like it either but convenience is a big factor too. No music vs some music at (at least better than audio tape quality) You can argue CD audio is lossy too. Stick with vinyl . BUT: I can get 100's of albums on my MP3 player, well thousands actually and I prefer that to carrying a record player and amp around:: Sorry tongue in cheek. Your right, its just a matter of convenience.

Pretty much half and half. Mdk get more $ from the club but the sale also helps the store to keep supplying MDK and pre-order more box sets.

tyme, Im no sure. thats why I suggested the network restart and route. Should be clearer then :-)

First check your security level and firewall It can be really frustrating and a big waste of time swapping out cards and messing with everything until your sure it isn't your firewall. Sounds like you already wasted quite a bit so its worth making doubly sure. The fundamental you need to be able to do is ping your network, once you can do that you know everything about the card/hubs/wiring is working you can concentrate on your internet settings. I'd try just setting the card as dhcp. (the chip on your other card isn't a server its a dhcp-bootp client.) It allows you to run diskless from and NFS server. Let your router allocate the IP.... A good way to see whats happening is to restart the network by hand. /etc/init.d/network restart It should show you the dhcp allocation. Copy it here except substitute the IP address (not that the people on this board aren't all nice folks but anyone can browse it) Now do the same with route 193.x.y.3 * 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 ppp0 a.b.c.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo default 193.x.y.3 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 ppp0 make sure your consistentwith substitutions! Are you really dial up.... try and be specific!!

You might need to check with your router if it will anly route for dhcp addresses it allocates. If you can it would be best/easiest to just use the dhcp on the router although mine is a lot slower than the linux dhcp server I have I think its down to the settings. When you use the MCC you will only autodetect the NIC. (logical when you think about it). You can manually click (in my case) ADSL as well. This then sets up the ethernet as eth0 and the default gateway to device eth0:x. It also installs the ppeoe stack from the CD's. I'm not sure what protocol your using (is it DSL?) there are two protcols depending on your line pppoe and pppoa (ethernet and atm) Sometimes the router will bridge them for you. pppoa is more efficient by itself but it depends on the switch at your local telephone exchange. I know the ISP's in Europe tend to use the dhcp allocation as a 'security' feature. I'm going to be doning this myself tonite!!! Meant to do it last night but ended up in a long discussion till my bedtime (sorry you won't get that but static and tyme will). If your using cable then I don't know anything sio disregard everythhing above this line :-) Anyway try what tyme suggest first but also consider have you got the firewall up and what security level. I'd never tell anyone to disable it when connected to the internet ;-) but this worked for a user yesterday. if (as route) you do an ifconfig -a you'll see if the allocations. you can also see your routing table with route {do a man for options}

I had similar probs in install but once sucessfully installed redoing lilo from the boot prompt worked fine. Steve - If you have it set for the mbr then its 'probably' (don't sue me) safe to just check the lilo.conf and rerun lilo instead of the boot floppy thing.

Here here soulsee Exactly. In 9.0 you gotthe full commercial StarOffice vs OO only in the free download. The Powerpack was cheaper than the retial proce of StarOffice... so good deal. For home use if you have broadband you won't really miss out much initially on much. You can get practically everything from the web for free. Supporting Mandrake is important. If your biting the bit: Download the Download edition Try it If you like it Order the powerpack or basic edition whatever you can afford. You'll get some groovy stickers if nothing else and a backup set of media. Mandrake are reportedly a bit slow on shipping at the moment but give em a break. When you look at what you get, even in the stanard pack its less than asingle M$ application and you get hundreds or perhaps thousands. Hence the individual package licences are what limits you giving it away, copying for a friend. Each commercial package might have different restrictions and its up to you to read them.

Oooh don't do that! Don't give files in the home directory root ownership (bad) Giving permissions to /tmp (very bad) Don't worry, its difficult to get used to when to be root and when not. su - <type pass> cd /home/ chown -R <youruser>/<youruser> chgrp -R <youruser>/<youruser> exit cd chmod -R 777 mp3/* Should work. :-) p.s. unless you download a MP3 coder it will only do Ogg by default from the box. plf and texstar both have plenty of options for the actual encoder which is in the options tab's You'll wanna change the filename to esle your mp3's will have a .ogg extension. remember ~ is the current users home, its just the last part .ogg you wanna change. The temp files are in the mp3 directory so don't worry script kiddies, yes Im aware its a oneliner for group/owner but KISS. strictly speaking 777 isn't needed but the UMASK will take care of it!

OK, anyone know exactly what passing failsafe to the kernel does. Not the lilo options, its an append therefore passed directly to the kernel. spinynorman: You should just try vga=normal You can also get rid of quiet, it might just tell more. remember to rerun lilo afterwards >lilo :-)

Sarah31 Yeah, i kinda agree. I know fluxbox does partial gnome support but not exactly which parts. My reasoning is if you take the baggage you mightest well take the goodies. LiveCD... its like good for testing. Like if tyme sent you a live CD you could test it without risking loosing your beautiful archlinux install on a bad partition install routine... Erm, RPM's by themself suck (IMHO) but with urpmi theyre much better ...I can live with urpmi but rpm's alone are a nightmare if you don't have broadband. I got mine Saturday (long story why not before but I live in lots of countries). After adding the contribs, plf and texstar +300Mb of updates I'm finally at a point I wanted to be at. Anyway, I haven't tried a Debian based stuff (except Lindows) so apt is unfamiliar. Anyway . .. i know some people really hate Lindows but it does work. If you look at what they did they started off with a Debian distro, added an installer and (well quite a bit of stuff) and Called it lindows. Ver1 used apt-get, Ver2 a heavily modded apt-get and apparently the new installer is completely redeveloped. Point is look how they did it in stages. Anyway, thats why release 0.99 has to be minimal. (IMHO) Until theres a stable core distro people can install and use (if minimally) testing will be hard. Same thing for kernel ... It might take a year but we can't afford to keep changing for the latest kernel every month. Same thing for GCC etc. need to get a stable version and stick with it through hell and high water until we have a CD that boots/installs and runs the basics. Even the experts screw up. (Remember the glibc change in RH7.0) Just my 2c ... Now what do i need to do to use IRC.... Ive just stuck a client in (KSirc) server at freenode is asking for a password. Do i sign up or what....

Erm, well we don't wanna be compiling on a P200 given that as Sarah31 writes (and I know from experience) well be doing a lot of compile/tweak/compile/tweak P733 in an XBox seemed more reasonable although I'm completely willing to admit I have a vested interest. Erm, when you spend your ?199 you cost M$ money they hope to recoup through 60? games and the online service. But guess what, they ain't getting it they just subsidised a nice Multimedia PC..at least from me!!! Plus its a quality bit of kit. I'm currently typing on a MS keyboard (came with a pre-built PC and have my PS-2 mouse the same) Just 'cos i think M$ are nasty doesn't mean I won't use their kit if it suits me and its cheap. I'm not saying it has to be Xbox, don't get me wrong I just thought its simpler to start off with a consumer item PC before opening ourselves up to 'exotic' hardware. Thats a big advantage Apple have ... Debugging of release 0.99 will be a damn site easier if everyone has the same configuration. Even if its true PC based its going to be a whole loada pain with video drivers etc. and determining whats modularised and whats built into the kernel. This is what I mean about 'favorite' too. First build a firm base, a working if not your ideal distro and then start adding best of breed type applications to a pre-working system. No problem with Flux box... Talking of need to have ... what's linux without GIMP... Its got all the GTK baggage attached but is there any alternative?? Agree completely, still were using a kernel built by one :-)Oh and a few thousand others .... tyme on LFS: Yep pre-requisiste unless we have like theme designers.... I pretty uch suck at user interfaces....just can't keep the interest. What was it tyme said about geeks and ADD.....??? I'll mail tyme a tenative ... skill list....

I figure a project plan is in order (audible groan). Seriously. I'd really start off with version <1.0 with text based install and single windows manager etc. Keep it as slim as possible. Everything else can be added later... I agree wholeheartedly on RPM's ... I also think its really important to keep standard tools that already work well. Webmin for instance ... Theres no point reinventing the wheel and personally I don't like blackbox type config aka DRAK.... As a minimum the tool should tell you exactly what files are being altered, preferably why! I'm not sure about Window manager but I think something like Gnome or KDE is better than fluxbox as far as which apps get supported. Like you use either GTK or Qt widgits and libaries. On your normal PC it doesn't matter but the developers will have to handle every library etc. on the home brewed distro. This means if you wanna use k3b then you need a whole load of KDE libaries anyway. Either way, Gnome or KDE they both have lots of useful projects that can be used with less work worrying about libraries and deps. What Im trying to say is: Define a easy goal for stage 1. Make it reasonable and stick to one app per type. Preferably keep a single set of libraries and life will be much simpler. Once we have a bootable and livable distro we can start incrementally adding things but if we start off all at once we'll end up drowning! Break the whole project into seperate tasks and only add extras once stage 1 is working.... Instead of choosing favorite apps I'd define categories. Windows Manager and Desktop Packaging Console/Xterm Browser Instant Messaging/Chat CD/DVD writing CD/MP3/Ogg/DivX Playing Office Package Network utilities Then look how they combine using different options. Choose the best all-round solution even if its not the favorite Get the whole thing running/installing/tested. Get to Version 1.0 Once all that is done consider which individual packages should be changed out. Look at the consequences in terms of dependencies and size (if we want a live CD) I don't have a DVD-R yet!! The reason I mentioned the XBox is cost. At $199 it gives a standard hardware which would be nice for a first pass at making a distro. Like how do you test syslinux (or whatever bootable version from a SCSI CD if we don't have one.) Also it would be easy to define goals for stage 1. Like multimedia, internet and office apps. It doesn't need to stop as a Xbox/Ps2 only distro but it would be good to simplify things until the team gain experience/knowledge. Its more likely to succeed if each stage gives a usable product instead of try and do everything at once. The less libraries need supporting the better! Ive been looking at Archlinux releases and what was in each and other than not starting with Gnome or KDE this seems to be their stategy.

told you you were learning loads... Why not delete the 'c' config (just comment out) and see if the same thing happens. If you can run the failsafe for now I don't think your missing anything. Can you post /etc/lilo.conf then I can see what the differences are :-) That was smart ! Good idea. Now its just a matter of working out why failsafe works and normal doesn't.... On the modem side... sounds like your mgmt.o is solved now its probably just permissions. Make sure you have the firewall off and minimal security (I didn't say that honest) Seriously turn it off till you get it going. Have you got the connection light?? Also you might have to do some manual reset if the modem is doing its own DHCP and allocating an address. Like I say im not big on USB modems ... mainly cos I don't really understand them like I do ethernet.

It doesn't matter if people say no becuase this will be shi* loads of work and you, me, them, us will be posting all sorts of questions on here.... Big question: Is this a leaning experience or serious attempt to make a distro.... In all seriousness I think the formwer is more realistic. No one distro will do what all the developers want form 'their' distro so if we look at it like this then we are principally learning. It needs to be phased. Like mini-distro first we can all agree on and then expanded later. Also an aim, like movix will keep us all on track..... it needs a mission statement type thing...

I temporarily gave up on USB2 becuase of similar problems. Your problem is probably in the deps but without sitting at my linux box i wouldn't want to tell you exactly what to type. if you rmmod usb-ehci it should disable the USB2 support. However if this has a dep on usb-uhci it might remobve it too. One option would be to disable USB2 support in Bios if you can. Then the kuzdu hardware detection should redo the depmod for you. Its not perfect but it might get you stable until you are ready to tackle it. Another thing. On my shuttle it locks up with any serial devices, including an old mouse. I had the whole thing in peices trying to fix it before changing the mouse to PS2 .... Now I disabled serial support for COM in bios. I don't know why but this solved USB lockup.

I think the first thing is to define what will be in the distro. Will it be an all encompassing one or limited and targetted. I think as someone else said the thrown everything in distro's are already done. As much as anything this will be a learning experience fotr anyone involved. Personally I think a LiveCD distro might be a good start. Also I know i have a vested interest but perhaps a specific hardware support like the XBOX. Suggestions on this are: XBOX server - ie. running network services like proxy, samba and routing. Sort of a server in a box. Obviously the multimedia machine is also dying to be done specifically for this. Sarah points out how much work it is and I agree so I think if we (you them us) do it its better to start off with something easy at first and then plan expansion later. Anyway, not saying that it should be XBOX but it seems that or similar is a good starting point. The reason Im saying this is I was looking at the Gentoo stuff for Xbox. As the guy said he took the basic scripts and 'just' compiled everything specifically. Quite a buit of work just doing that! The Mandrake XBOX development seems to have been abandoned ... Another source of inspiration was Movix ........ As they say, they just ..... but still a lot of work. I think something very targetted but basic to start with until developers and maintainers get the idea would be the easiest start-up.

Mine just mounts as sda1 (unless thats already taken)... The cards are usually FAT12 but Ive never had to supply the mount options. (automagic) hence my mount command is just: mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/removable -o rw just to be simple about it....

Which is the best distro to learn? Answer, your own. :D But: Static has some good points and it needs careful planning. For instance, the gnome/kde descision should be made from day one for release 1. I'm not saying it would only ever support one but you'd have to be realistic! More fundamental, what is this distro aimed at? Speed/Gaming or stability/server. Gentoo-like install from source or pre-compiled binaries?? If its binaries RPM or APT...? portage-alike? I like most of the stuff Static wrote down though I'd leave out the games. Thats's just me but I'd do a CD2 for games later. I like the liveCD idea too. Aside: Ive been wondering what to do for my XBOX in terms of distro and leaning towards the live CD idea. Anyway, I think first thing is to firm up what kind of distro it is then hammer out details.