banjo

Thanks for the info. If 2006 will be better I can definitely wait. My old Mandy 9.1 is working fine, so an upgrade is an optional thing for me to get some of the newer stuff all at once. I will keep an eye on it and see what happens. Thanks, Banjo (_)=='=~

I have an old Mandy 9.1 which is now 2 1/2 years old. It works great, but it is difficult to upgrade the apps for bug fixes and new features. Therefore, I have been considering updating the system. So I went out to the mandrivastore and now I am confused about what all these different versions are. Here is what I found: At Mandriva: 2005 Limited Edition - 1 DVD - about $65 10.1 Power Pack - 6 CD's - about $85 Then, on Edmunds-enterprises I have found: 2005 Limited Edition - 4 CD's - about $11 2005 Limited Edition with KDE 3.4 - 6 CD's - about $13.50 Now, 2005LE is marketed as the upgrade to 10.2 from 10.1 but it costs less than the 10.1 power pack. Also, 2005LE has no support included according to the site, whereas 10.1 Power Pack does get some limited support. There is no 2005 Power Pack listed anywhere. But I have heard that 10.1 is buggy. The versions on edmunds-enterprises are obviously the download versions. So, what it the difference between the edmunds download, and the official 2005LE? If there is none, then the price differential is fairly large considering that the official 2005LE gets no support just lke the download version. Are the contents different between the download version and the boxed version of the same thing? What is in the Power Pack that is not in the official version? Is a Power Pack for 2005 going to be released? And then there is the future 2006. What is in that? Will that be a Power Pack? If I get a download version from edmunds for 11 bucks, will that have everything I need to run, or will it be short a bunch of apps and drivers making me spend hours in Dependency Hell downloading patches and apps? Is there a package list somewhere for these diferent distros? Mandrake used to have a page which listed all of the packages in the distro. This is all very confusing, and I do not have a clue which direction to go. My Mandy 9.1 is a Power Pack, and it had in it everything that I needed to get up and running right from the CD's. If I bought a new Mandy and then I got stuck doing hours of downloads to get it working, I would not be happy. Do I really need to look for a Power Pack, or is the standard release fine? Also, I went out to distrowatch.org and looked at their listing and they show that 2005 and the future 2006 have a bunch of apps in beta. Is that right? Are these releases stable with a bunch of beta apps in them? What gives with that? I am sooo confused by all of this.... Any Mandy experts out there who know what is in these things? Which one sould I get? I am not in a hurry, so I can wait for 2006 if that is the right answer. Thanks in Advance Banjo (_)=='=~ [moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman]

Thanks for the pointer. That is exactly the sort of thing that I am looking for. So far I have not found the right remote commands to do things like reload a page or go to the home page. But it is a good place to start looking. Banjo (_)=='=!

I am trying to make the multimedia keys on my new keyboard work with Firefox. I have xbindkeys running, which allows me to bind a function key to a command. I have this working with aumix to control the sound volume using commands like: Is there some way that I can control a running Firefox program with command line commands to do things like refresh a page, go to the home page, etc? I need to bind a keysym to a command in order to make this work. I would also like to hook up the email keys on the keyboard so that I can fire up Kmail and control it from the keyboard. Has anybody done anything like this? I am running Mandy 9.1. Thanks, Banjo (_)=='=~ [moved from Software by spinynorman]

I am in need of a new keyboard myself, having worn the letters off of the original one. Have you ever dealt with cheapbytes? Are they reliable? Thanks Banjo (_)=='=~

What brand of thumb drive is it? Not all USB devices work with Linux. Go out to http://www.linux-usb.org/ and check whether or not your device has been reported as working or not working. Banjo (_)=='=~

I am just finishing up a six year project programming an industrial user interface in Java. I have found Java to be a joy to use and a wonderful tool for my purposes. Yes, it is interpreted, but I have seen no performance problems that I could not get around, even though we run the interface on a 1 MHz POS fnWindows 2000 box. The interface was written using Java 1.2.2. A few months ago I took my interface home and tried it on my Linux computer (Mandy 9.1 with Java 1.4.2 installed). After about an hour of work resolving file names (because Linux is OCD about case sensitivity and fnWindows is not) I had it running. The application now has about 1800 files in it, so it is not a small app. It is just as snappy on my 2 MHz Celeron as it is on the 1 MHz Pentium at work. On the other hand, I also recently downloaded Jftp on my Linux computer to try it out. It is so slow that it is unusable. It takes 5 to 10 seconds for it to display a menu. I find this confusing since my larger app works fine. The Jftp window also does not refresh itself properly after posting the menus. I don't know what the problem is. However, I must say that my experience using Java has been a positive one. It beats the crap out of trying to use MFC or any of that other M$ junk. Banjo (_)=='=~

Hmmmmm. So if I delete the sugar and add honey, deprecate some of the hops.... Then I will run "make beer" and see what comes out......... Kewl Banjo (_)=='=~

Can you post what is in your /etc/fstab? That might help us figure this out. Post a before and an after. Banjo (_)=='=~

There is always unix2dos and dos2unix as well. I also use gvim as my editor on both platforms, and it will read both formats. Banjo (_)=='=~

It sounds perfectly horrid to me....... they add 4 kg of sugar to 10 kg of malt extract.....?? ... ewwwww. :P The beer I make has only pure malt extract and 100% clover honey. Corn sugar is what they make cheap American beer out of. Yech! ...... and caffein?..... Homebrew is the secret to longevity. Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the pointers. I found some answers in the HOWTO. I guess I will have to install the kernel source to get the other documentation since it is not on my system right now. Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the reply. I have been searching for the list of arguments and I cannot find a document which details them. Perhaps that information is available only to those who dig around in the kernel source. I might go look there if I cannot find the info elsewhere. Now all I have to do is go find the kernel source. Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the pointer. That looks like a very interesting site. I will check it out. Banjo (_)=='=~

I have a mandy 9.1 system using the ext3 file system. I am curious about what the journal actually does for the file system. Can anybody point me to a document that has the details of how the journal works? I would like to understand what it is that I am running here. Thanks in advance Banjo (_)=='=~

I have been recently looking at /etc/lilo.conf to see if I can to make a change to the way the kernel is booted. I understand how to use lilo, but I was wondering what the meaning of the kernel arguments are, for example, what exactly does "quiet" mean? These are the arguments that are specified in the append= command in lilo.conf. Can anybody point me to a document or man page that describes what all the kernel arguments are? I looked in the lilo man page and the lilo.conf man page and did not see it. They tell me how to specify the append= command but not what the arguments mean. Thanks Banjo (_)=='=~

That certainly is a unique and interesting method for backups. Unfortunately I am making my backup on a FAT32 system, and there is no facility for any kind of links at all, much less hard links. It doesn't even store ownership or file permissions. Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the tips. I am considering how to use the tar files effectively to do these backups. I am still trying to keep my backups portable. I also like having the files visible on the drive instead of buried in a tar. The other people using this computer can cope with a copy, but might not want to deal with extraction from a tar. There is only one Linux guru in our family.... The files in my Mail directory are being rejected by the FAT32 because of invalid characters in their names - I think it is a colon. But, if I tar them off, I will only be able to extract them back to a Linux box. But that is OK because they would be useless on a WinBox anyway. So I might do that. I now have a script that I use to do the copies for me. It asks me where the USB disk is mounted and then it reads a list of directories from a file, which I call ~/.backupdirs, and copies them -R over to the external drive. Other than the glitches I mentioned before, it seems to work fairly well. I might add some code to look for the Mail directory and tar.gz it just in case. I will never go back to fnWindows permanently anyway, so that should do the job. I still have some permission glitches, but I might be able to get around those by running the script as root. Since ownership is not stored on the external FAT32 that should not be detrimental for any user's ability to retrieve the files. The search goes on. Banjo (_)=='=~

I thought that I would add an update to this topic since I am discovering things that I did not know before. When talking to a FAT32 partition, there is no facility in the file system to store Linux style file attributes. The only ones that it can save are read/write and perhaps the create and/or modification dates. This makes perfect sense if I had just thought for a minute about how the FAT32 has worked in the past. It is simply a really lame file system. What is confusing at the surface is that Linux fakes up the ownership fields by using the mount properties of the device and displays them for all the files. Hence, the output of ls presents file ownership for the user who mounted the external FAT32. That ownership information is not preserved anywhere. I have confirmed this by logging in as another user, mounting the external drive, and then seeing that all the files on the disk now belong to that other user. So, of course, chown will not work. D'uh. More discoveries to come, until somebody tells me to shut up. Banjo (_)=='=~

Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but never ever ever never ever try to back up a Linux system onto a FAT32 file system. It works great for transferring files, but there are so many problems with file incompatibilites that it is not worth the effort. 1). Links are not copied since they cannot be created on the FAT32. 2). Mail cannot be backed up because the file names have invalid characters in them. 3). File ownership is not preserved during the copy, and chown on the FAT32 is not allowed. 4). The FAT32 uses more space to store the files than ext3 (because of cluster issues, I suppose) I am just about to give up on this and wipe the disk and start over. Or maybe I will give this one to the kids for their fnWindows laptops and get a newer, bigger one for me. :D Anyway, if you are thinking of using a FAT32 system as a backup disk, think again. Banjo (_)=='=~

Ah, me. I fgured this one out. :blush: I started using Unix in about 1975, and cp was just about the second command that I learned after learning cd....... so you would think that I would have it under control after 30 years, but............ Did I mention..... :blush: ? Here is what happened in the Case of the Missing Files. If you use a command such as cp -dpRu /home/user/stuff /mnt/storage/home/user/stuff to copy a directory to an external drive, it copies the entire directory "stuff" to the destination.... including the directory file itself........ OKfine. That makes perfect sense. But the first time I executed the command the destination file, /mnt/storage/home/user/stuff did not exist yet. It appears that if the target directory does not exist, cp is happy enough to copy the entire directory one level up... into.... /mnt/storage/home/user, thus creating the target directory itself. So I ended up with the intended result, /mnt/storage/home/user/stuff with the rest of the directory tree beneath it. The second time I executed the same command, it did find the directory called /mnt/storage/home/user/stuff, so it copied the source directory /home/user/stuff into /mnt/storage/home/user/stuff thus giving me /mnt/storage/home/user/stuff/stuff where the entire directory tree was duplicated.... including the "missing" new files. I simply did not notice that the new duplicate had been created and therefore I could not find the new files. The solution to this embarrasing problem is to issue the correct command to the cp program, which is: cp -dpRu /home/user/stuff /mnt/storage/home/user with no "stuff" on the end. This works with the intended results first time and every time thereafter since all it needs to do is to copy the source directory into the destination directory. Thanks to the MUB for your patience with this 30 year, veteran n00b as he stumbles through the use of basic commands. Linux rocks! :blush: Banjo (_)=='=~ P.S. I also put this into the wrong forum since it is a software issue anyway. :blush:

I have an interesting problem with using cp -u. I have an external USB drive with 40 Gig FAT32 (for portability). I plan on using the external drive to keep some backups. I am doing my backups by simply copying selected directories to the external drive.... nothing fancy. I am writing the files using "cp -u" to make the copies a bit faster (the -u switch causes it to copy only new files and files that have newer timestamps than the destination file). I wrote a bunch of my directories to it last night to see how it would work. This went very well for the most part, and the files were copied OK. But there were problems with files that had the same names and only different capitalizations (FAT32 is case insensitive). So I changed the names of some of those files to avoid the problem and did the "cp -u" again. The "new" files were not copied over. I tried this a couple of times with the same result. The last time I tried it, cp returned immediately without really accessing the drive, as though the information had been cached or something. The renamed files did not show up on the external drive. Questions: How does cp decide what is a "new" file? Does changing the name leave the modification time untouched? Do I also need to touch the files? Does cp cache file information? How can it know the timestamp of the destination without reading the external drive? I am running Mandy 9.1 on a ext3 copying files to an external USB with a 40 Gig FAT32. Thanks in advance Banjo (_)=='=~ [moved from Software by spinynorman]

pmpatrick, Thanks for the tips on upgrading. I will look into that in the future. I do have Knoppix and I have used it on one occasion to save my butt (after I had changed something that made my system unbootable). Right now, I am thinking about how I want to reformat my new (old) disk to use as a backup. Banjo (_)=='=~

I AM IN! I have mounted my old disk using the Bytecc enclosure! The problem was that I had the jumpers set on the drive incorrectly. Inside of the enclosure there is a sticker that says "You must set the drive to Master or it will not work." So I downloaded the WD setup documents and set the jumpers to "Master". I should have read further because there are two Master jumper settings for the Western Digital drives, Master with two drives and Master with a single drive. I had jumpered the drive as Master with two drives. Evidently that does not work when it is the only drive on the IDE. After Googling the net for a while I found a reference to this problem on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage from Francis Hartojo: So, the Western Digital jargon for "Master" when it is the only drive on the IDE controller is "Single". I put it all back together and it worked like a charm. I was able to mount it and read my old files. Yay. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. ============================== ::: Additional Information ::: ============================== In case there are any noobies (like me) out there who are dealing with USB problems, I thought that I would put some of the information that I dug out while trouble-shooting this problem into this topic. This is fairly detailed stuff, so if you already know it or are not interested, just quit reading now. I plugged in the Bytecc and hooked it to the USB and then turned it on. Then I looked at /var/log/messages to track the registration of the USB device. Here is what a healthy message log looks like when the device is recognized properly: Then I went to /proc/bus/usb and printed out the devices file to see what the USB had done for me. That file contains all of the nitty-gritty kewl information about the hardware and where it is mounted. In the extensive output below, my device is described in the section that starts with This tells me that the USB device is assigned to Bus 4 at Level 1 (the computer's internal hub is at level 0) and Port 4 and device 2. It also tells me that the speed is set to 480 Mbits, which is USB 2.0 speed. Here is the entire output, which shows all of the USB devices, including the internal hub........... (this is not for the faint of heart). The interpretation of all that spaghetti can be found at http://www.linux-usb.org/ if you are interested. After I saw that the usb-storage driver had been registered and the device was there I went looking for the drive. Those devices are the normal partitions that should be there for a disk that has a Linux installation on it. So I attempted to mount the drive: The -r switch mounts the drive readonly (just to be safe). After that, I could read my old files by "cd /mnt/oldhome/brian" and there they were. Finally, I unmounted the drive: and turned it off. Success! I hope this information is useful for someone who is trying to deal with the USB system. It took me a while to figure out where to look and what to look for. Thanks to all of the great members of this board for helping me through this. Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~

Just as an aside, does anybody know how I could find out what chipset my system is trying to talk to on that device? Is it in /proc somewhere? Thanks again Banjo (_)=='=~