ac_dispatcher

Members here that run Gentoo do you use genkernel or not?

I do at times just cause Im lazy.

If you are to reply with a "Genkernel bad" comment please tell why you think its bad.

That being said I have a working .config file that I use (one stable one for new stuff or trial/test kernel)

my genkernel command looks like this:

#genkernel --clean --mrproper --install --no-mountboot --kernel-config=/config2.6.8-test --udev --bootsplash --bootloader=grub all

>>>>>>>>>>>

Otherwise I compile like this:

#make clean

#make mrproper

#make xconfig

#make && make modules_install && make install

#mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.8 2.6.8

I know there is a few other ways of compiling a kernel (command wise). but how is one better than the other? I can see if you use genkernel with a default .config but not with your own .config file.

btw: I just switched to love-sources and it rocks

Good Gentoo site I found HERE

May not be too much help but have you tried Point2Play?

It uses its own version of Cedega. You just open it open select the "Versions" tab and then click "Download Microsoft Core Fonts"

It works great for me...

OK so the way I get this is your computer has 2 Nics. One for your internet connection and one for your local Lan. Correct?

And you have no firewall running??

As for finding the linux box. via windows explorer try this:

Open Explorer

click on "My Network Places"

click on "Entire Network"

RIGHT CLICK on "Microsoft Windows Network"

select "explore"

new window should open with listed workgroups.

If you are shareing a connection via one box I highly advise you get a firewall up. I almost sounds like you are shareing your folders with the world....

I find myself switching between Kword, OO, and Abiword. Sometimes a *.doc form will open great with one but not so good with the other.

But for the sake of it all I use OO as my main Office Suite.

Same here. I cant get sleep to work right in XP much less Linux. But to be honest getting that to work in Linux is a crap shoot at best. Its all about how lucky you are....

[EDIT 9/27]

OK I guess Ill go next:

HP Pavilion ze5185

2.4Ghz P4

512Mb Ram

DVD/CDRW Drive

ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY (32mb / AGP 4x)

60Gb Hard Drive

Running Gentoo on a dev-sources 2.6.8 kernel

Switched to a pure udev system (UDEV Info)

xorg-x11-6.7.0

635fps on glxgears

Games I run:

Never Winter Nights (native)

Baldurs Gate IWD2 (Point2Play)

Baldurs Gate II TOB (Point2Play)

Master of Orion2 (Point2Play) Classic Game!

WM: I have fallen in love with Xfce4 (with GNOME goodness added)

Big accomplishments:

My Laptop is known for its poor battery life span. I have worked with it to squeeze the most out of it that I can.

When I unplug this is what happens:

Stuff that shuts down:

cups

usb

pcmcia

My laptop LCD screen darkens a little (helps out a lot for power saving)

My HD spools down after 20 seconds of inactivity

Also got speedfreq working perfectly and set to dynamic mode. My processor runs between 300Mhz thru 2.4Ghz depending on what I need. browseing the net Ill be at 300mhz but when I fire up NWN it powers up to 2.4Ghz

Before I could not get thru a 2 hour movie via DVD. Now I can and be at about 15% power left over.

Oddities:

Not sure if its best but when I compile my kernel I always compile everything into the kernel. No modules. My kernel is about 3Mb now. I have spent hours on it just to have exactly what it needs and no more.

Addition #1 -

I just emerged KDE3.3. May I say its very very very nice. A bit quicker too. One weird thing is that when Im not doing anythig on my Laptop my cpu "throttles" down to 300Mhz. But in KDE it will never go below 900Mhz. Somthing makes the system speed up. Doesnt take anymore ram than 3.2 though...

Added:

Installed SuSE 9.0 (download]

compiled custom kernel (for DRI/DRM)

Running KDE3.3 via apt-get

2nd Puter:

AMD K63-400mhz

Nvidia MX400

256mb Ram

40GB HD

Mandrake 10.1 (via urpmi)

Nvidia works after bios update

Hardest part on this system is it has the ALI1541 chipset. That shipset dont play nice with AGP. After a bios update and some bios/xorg.conf editing its rock solid now (no AGP) only about 520FPS.

I use a separate computer that runs Coyote Linux...

http://mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=14472

(Edit to add Warning from bvc and notes from sellis)

Ever look at your directory tree and wonder - What is that /proc directory for? Well have a seat and get ready for "/proc for beginners".

First what is the /proc?

The /proc or "processes" directory describes currently running processes. They provide views into a running kernel and have special properties. Almost all these files appear to be 0 (zero) in size:

$ ls -l /proc/version 
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Aug 19 06:34 /proc/version

But when you read the file it has data!!

$ cat /proc/version 
Linux version 2.6.8-gentoo (root@arora) (gcc version 3.3.4 20040623 (Gentoo Linux 3.3.4-r1, ssp-3.3.2-2, pie-8.7.6)) #1 Mon Aug 16 04:58:37 EDT 2004

Wow a zero byte file having data.

No two computers /proc directories are the same. Everything in the directory is made at boot up and continues on the fly as you use your Linux system. Ever boot to a "live" cd and check out your /proc directory of you hard drive installed Linux system? It will be empty(in a pure udev system). Thats why you never back up your /proc directory.

Now you can find out some good info from your /dev directory but you can find out EVEN MORE WITH /proc. Some processes are so important they have their own directory -

/proc/pci > this is its own directory that has all info on devices connected to the PCI bus.

I have a Laptop running acpi so I have -

/proc/acpi

Now finding out data on your system requires the cat. What a cat you say? well not the purrr type of cat, the command cat! The cat command views files in their entirety.

open a terminal (konsole, gnome-terminal, Eterm) any one will do. type:

$ cat /etc/fstab

Did you get the whole file listed? OK lets use it in the /proc directory-

I want to know about my cpu so-

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor       : 0 
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel 
cpu family      : 15 
model           : 2 
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz 
stepping        : 7 
cpu MHz         : 2400.426 
cache size      : 512 KB 
fdiv_bug        : no 
hlt_bug         : no 
f00f_bug        : no 
coma_bug        : no 
fpu             : yes 
fpu_exception   : yes 
cpuid level     : 2 
wp              : yes 
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid 
bogomips        : 4751.36

WARNING

cat'ing

/proc/sys/

especially

/proc/sys/kernel

can lock your computer up. Be carefull (ref: bvc)

By now you probably have seen all those directories with numbers right? What are they? They are your currently running processes on your system. Have you ever used the program "top"? Its something like a Window$ task manager. Go back to your terminal program and type top -

$top 
top - 07:32:02 up 45 min,  3 users,  load average: 1.36, 2.06, 1.88 
Tasks: 112 total,   1 running, 111 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie 
Cpu(s): 52.6% us, 13.7% sy,  0.2% ni, 27.4% id,  5.7% wa,  0.4% hi,  0.0% si 
Mem:    512176k total,   448880k used,    63296k free,    34196k buffers 
Swap:   578332k total,        8k used,   578324k free,   234888k cached 

 PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
2052 acdispat  15   0 36884  22m  20m S  2.0  4.5   0:24.70 python              
   1 root      16   0  1348  484 1192 S  0.0  0.1   0:04.07 init                
   2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0         
   3 root       5 -10     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.09 events/0            
   4 root      14 -10     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper             
   5 root       5 -10     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:02.37 kacpid              
  24 root       5 -10     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.17 kblockd/0           
  25 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.03 khubd               
  45 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 pdflush             
  46 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.46 pdflush             
  48 root       6 -10     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0               
  47 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.23 kswapd0             
  49 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cifsoplockd         
  50 root      16   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 jfsIO               
  51 root      16   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 jfsCommit           
  52 root      16   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 jfsSync  

>>CTRL+Z will stop top, but does not actually kill it. Pressing q (for quit) will kill it properly.

Also:

The top command also only shows the most active processes. To list all the processes currently running, use ps -A

(ref: sellis)

See those "PID" numbers? those are the processes found in the /proc directory.

Last note before I let you explore your system. Do you see a /proc/kcore ? How big is it? Mine says 510mb. What is it?

Well this file is unusually sensitive. Its set as owned by root with 400 permissions (read only for root, no access for others) Even root can not change the permissions! Now why on mine does it say 510mb? Well the size of kcore is dependent on the amount of ram you have. the file is usually 60KB less than your ram (sometimes more).

Why is it so secure? It contains all your data - passwords, sensitive data files, and more. If an unauthorized person were to gain access your data would not be safe.

Now go out and explore /proc

Note: Mods/Admins I placed this in Everything Linux, not sure if its the best place or not. Move as you see fit.

bvc:

Thanks for the urpmi output.

Looks like Mandy has a speed freq program "cpufreqd"

Its on Gentoo also.

Has anyone with a laptop been able to adjust there cpu speed? If so with what program and what distro?

Moved to other Distros?

My thread was about cpu frequency in any Distro. I just have Gentoo installed. Does that automatically make it sent to other?

I wanted to know what other Laptop users use to control there cpu freq. Or does Mandy not have any cpu freq program.

Oh well "Other Distros" it is then.

I recently started working on power management for my laptop. I decided that adjusting the cpu frequency was a good start.

Im running:

Gentoo

2.6.8 kernel

pure udev system

First I wanted to check if my compile kernel (and computer) supports it:

from the Gentoo docs:

Get current frequency

#cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "cpu MHz"

 

List supported frequencies. This might fail.

#cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/

#cat scaling_available_frequencies

 

Change frequency to 1 GHz (1000000 KHz)

Replace with a frequency your laptop supports.

#echo -n userspace > scaling_governor

#echo -n 1000000 > scaling_setspeed

 

Verify frequency was changed

#cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "cpu MHz"

when I did cat scaling_available_frequencies I got:

300000 600000 900000 1200000 1500000 1800000 2100000 2400000

So I got a few settings to choose from. But I didn't want to do it manually. At first I wrote my own script so that when I was on battery it switched to a 1.2Ghz cpu (from 2.4Ghz). I want it to do it automatically using all available frequencies.

enter Speedfreq

Now I got it to work on my Gentoo Laptop but This threat is about speedfreq and basic cpu scaling in general.

speedfreq ReadMe:

This is a simple package for actively enforcing a CPU performance policy.

 

It supports 4 policies at present:

 

dynamic - the default policy, which monitors the amount of CPU idle

  time, and increases the CPU speed if it gets too low, or decreases

  it if it gets to high.  This is a good balance between battery life

  and performance, but some applications may experience erratic

  performance because of the latency in speeding up the CPU.

 

fixed - fixed CPU speed at a particular clock rate

 

powersave - kernel cpufreq driver's "powersave" policy

 

performance - kernel cpufreq driver's "performance" policy

 

Speedfreq is a client-server program.  At boot, the server,

speedfreqd, is started by init, with the initial policy.  The

speedfreq client command can be used to change the current policy or

other parameters, and query the current settings.  If the server is

started with "-u", non-root clients can change the current policy.

This is useful for single-user machines (ie, typical laptops).

 

When speedfreq is first run, it becomes a daemon.  It listens for

requests on a socket.  Subsequent instances of speedfreq talk to the

daemon to enact changes or query state.  Speedfreq doesn't do any

policy changes (for example, switching policies based on power source

or remaining battery life) - it assumes that an external entity will

know what to do and tell it to do it.

 

If the daemon is started with "-u", then it will allow non-root users

to set the current policy.

 

For developers, there are two client libraries.  C programmers can use

libspeedfreq, while Python programmers can use the speedfreq module.

I decided that dynamic was the way to go. Man has it worked great. My 2.4Ghz runs at around 300Mhz to 900Mhz most of the time. When I do some labor intensive stuff (like a compile)

WHAM up to 2.4Ghz it goes.

Now I haven't been able to test the extended life span of my battery yet. But I have already noticed that it runs a lot cooler. Usually it runs at 54*C and a normal load. Now its around 49-51*C with the same load.

Not sure if speedfreq is in urpmi repos. Can anyone using Mandy give some input on what they use to control cpu frequencies?

Also if you decide to try this you may need to compile a custom kernel.

[moved from Laptops by spinynorman]

My Hp Laptop broke hard on me last year. It took 6 weeks to get it back.

Laptop + wine = paper weight

I found this trick too.

in /etc/xfce4/xinitrc

edit as follows:

#xftaskbar4&

gnome-panel&

fdesktop&

xfcalendar&

comment out the xftaskbar and add the gnome one. You have Xfce4 with a Gnome panel!

Well VidaLinux didnt work out(twice) I like to run ~x86 (unstable or cooker) and upgradeing to unstable right from the cd gives you a lot of problems.

Oh well Im doing it the old way now..

Darn bvc that was quick. Thanks

OK here is my story -

Im a die hard Gentoo fan. I was a die hard KDE user also. I sill like KDE but after trying out XFce4 I just dont want to go back.'

time to "re emerge" sort of speaking.

Thanks to Tyme Im doing it the easy way - (VidaLinux) now beta 2!!!

Back to the skinny. XFce4 uses the GTK toolkit (GNOME). I dont know GNOME to well. I use the GNOME panel in XFce4 - It just works better.

So I plan on Installing VidaLinux (GNOME 2.6) and emerging XFCe4 (~x86)

I need to know some good tips and hard to find web sites on GNOME and XFce4. I know I could google like everyone else but I want the smalll hard to find stuff and any great tips you have for GNOME.

I see the stuff from here:

http://mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=13600

Kind of stuff I have found out:

in KDE (konqueror)

for network browseing:

lan:///

or

smb:///

but in GNOME (Nautilus) its: network:///

I just found a new one last night:

printers:///

So as you can see Im a GNOME noob in need of help. Some things I will miss from KDE but Ill manage (like right clicking a folder and gzipping it)

Also any clue how to fix GNOME to play .wmv files? I always get an error saying its a .asf file when I know its not.

Note to Admin/Mod - not sure if this belongs in Everything Linux or Software. Move as you see fit.

Sorry off topic here:

Found this cool website that may give some since security info:

http://www.firewallguide.com/

Does here share a printer on the net?

If so load it up and type a nice letter about security and hit print to his printer.

Nothing like freaking people out (with no real harm) to get them to lock up there $hit

Added

It's certainly none of my business, except for the fact that the signal sometimes is strong enough for my laptop to get an IP address from that AP.

Yes it is or you would not be here with the problem. Its sad but other people security its now everyones problem. If he becomes a "zombie" then he can be a host for a DDOS attack. Does that affect you?

I would agree with Gowator. I think yours or someone on your local net was infected. Just recently I was hit pretty hard wiht the my doom virus. I had to turn off firewall remote logginf because it was filling up.

I woulld consider a Windows computer in you local net getting the virus via email or something.

EDIT:

Added note here. Do you have port fowarding turned on at your Firewall?

General Definition:

/dev/hd<x><y> -- the actual "device" containing the dos partition

"x" and "y" are a letter and digit respectively

/windows/<x> -- the target "mount point" -- this is where you

(the end user) will "see" this partition under

linux's "all encompassing file system" [similar to

current windows's notion of "my computer", which

encompasses all the drives: hard, floppy or otherwise]

vfat -- the partition type [no need to joke about windows being

"bloated" when they themselves call their file system

"FAT" :) ]

users,gid=users,umask=0002,iocharset=iso8859-1,code=437 0 0

-- this is "the magic line" that you are interested in.

further breakdown:

"users" -- means ANYONE can mount & umount the partition

"gid=users" -- means the "group" membership should be

"users", not "root"; this by itself should allow you

to see the contents [and possibly write to the drive]

"umask=0002" -- this helps ensure you have the ability

to read/write the drive, no matter who you are

[unless for some strange reason you are not a "user"]

"iocharset=iso8859-1" and "code=437" -- this has to do

with how any "text" data is interpreted; may not be

needed if you are in the U.S.A. (your system will

already be using this charset and codepage)

0 -- [first zero] should this partition be backed up by dump?

unless you actually use "dump", you probably don't need

to worry about this field

0 -- [second zero] fsck on which "pass"? [zero means no

check is done at all] This is equivalent to the DOS

"scandisk on boot" setting for windows

Mandrake is a French Distro. That may be the reason for the code=437.

Google found answer:

http://www.google.com/search?q=code%3D437+...=utf-8&oe=utf-8

http://www.netsys.com/suse-linux-e/2003/01/msg00156.html

Seems you may not have direct rendering on.

open a konsole and type - glxinfo | grep direct

here is what I get:

acdispatcher@arora acdispatcher $ glxinfo | grep direct

disabling TCL support

direct rendering: Yes

Here is the standard series of questions:

What kind off computer (specs)

What kind of Video card

Have you installed drivers yet

Who would ever want to use a Mac ?

# cd /usr/offtopic

# ./super-flame-vest

:P :P

I dont think your should mess with that file. It will change things globally. I think you are suppose to copy that file to your:

~/.xfce4/menu.xml

then edit that one.

From

http://www.xfce.org/index.php?page=documen...on&lang=en#menu

8. How can I customize the right-click root menu of xfdesktop ?

 

You can copy the $sysconfdir/xfce4/menu.xml file to ~/.xfce4/menu.xml and edit it manually. The menu.xml file has to be in utf-8 encoding for the toolkit to be able to display accented or other non-ASCII characters. Therefore, you need an editor that supports utf-8, like gedit.

You can also use Menumaker, a Python heuristics-driven menu generator, which now supports Xfce4.

Do you use KDE? If so try:

open up konqueror (or click your Home icon)

In the address bar type

smb:/// [hit enter]

If samba is running it should show you your network.

If you have lisa running try:

lan:/// [hit enter]

Not sure about nautilus but it would think it would work in that too. Also Linneighborhood is old and busted - new hotness is SMB4K

:P :P

#./flame-vest

Sometimes my XP Pro box doesnt see my Gentoo box. Try this:

Open Windiows Explorer

Right click My Network Places > Select Search for Computers

Type the name of your Linux Box.

Also

Are they both on the same domain? May not matter but have you checked?

Check your /etc/samba/smb.conf