javaguy

Another thing I did to prevent this from happening again (at least with my photos) is change the script I use to download pictures from my camera. I have a slick little script that grabs all the JPGs from the memory card and puts them into folders like /home/myname/Documents/Photos/2005/2005 April/batch7 (or whatever batch number I'm up to) and even opens up a Konqueror window to it when it's done. Now the script also changes owner to root:root and makes them read-only to everybody.

I do frequent backups, but the file I lost was less than a day old. Other lesson learned: It is absolutely astonishing what a one year-old--who uses one-word sentences and certainly cannot read--can do when he gets his hands on the keyboard.

Okay, lesson learned. In the future would I be better off using ext2?

It's Reiserfs.

What should my "size before" and "size after" be? 0 for after? I have no idea what the size was before. What's the text I'm looking for? Is it the file name? Remember these are JPGs.

No luck. :(

Okay, so I come home this evening, and my wife had a photo up that she wants to show me, or thought she did. Unfortunately our 1 year-old had been playing around the computer, and she forgot to lock the desktop. I had showed her how to lock the desktop because we have been repeatedly amazed at what a 1 year-old can do. There's a directory full of JPGs, and all the other photos are still there, but the one she wanted to show me is gone. Okay, he hit the delete key, I suppose, so I open up the trash bin. It's not there. Now I'm worried. I find a tutorial on recovering files with debugfs. My /home is on hdb7, so I say open /dev/hdb7, and it says the magic number is bad. :( I try opening up the root one, and that works just fine. I run lsdel, and it says no deleted inodes found. I thought that was a little odd. It ocurred to me that maybe, just maybe, he had somehow renamed the file in the Konqueror window. Perhaps I would see the picture with a wierd new name at the top or bottom of the list. At this point I should have made a complete backup, or at least copied the directory. But I didn't. :( I looked at the directory in Konqueror for any screwy file names. I clicked the Show Hidden Files thingy, but nothing new appeared. Out of curiosity I right-clicked on the background and selected Properties to look at what kind of permissions it had. I didn't change anything, but clicked Okay to close the box (probably should have clicked Cancel, I know). A moment later, all the JPGs in the directory were gone. Not in the trash bin. I can't open the file system with debugfs because it still says bad magic number. Just gone. So I realize I'm probably just screwed. But if anybody has any suggestions, I'm all ears. I'm running Mandrake 10.1, btw. [moved from Software by spinynorman]

I'm trying to follow the instructions for mklivecd using the 10.1 community edition, which comes with mklivecd as a package. The how-to over at http://mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=10855&hl=livecd says I need to replace my kernel with kernel-tmb-2.6.7-2, but that's describing how to do it with 10.0. Do I still have to do this if I'm trying to make a livecd for 10.1? On the thinking that I do I went ahead and made a 5 GB partition on hda7 and installed 10.1 on it. When it asked where to put the bootloader I said hda7, and it asked me where I boot from, and I said hda. When I rebooted, it booted into my "real" Linux install, and I went into the bootloader configuration to add an entry for my new installation. Rebooting again allowed me to select the entry for my new installation, and there I switched to root, installed the kernel-tmb-2.6.7-2 and uninstalled the existing kernel. Then I rebooted again into my new installation, but when I did a uname it said my kernel was still 2.6.8.1-10mdk. I thought this was curious, so I rebooted yet again and this time let is go into my main installation. I ran the boatloader configuration thingy and saw that the new partition's image was still set to /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8.1-10mdk. I tried setting it to the "tmb" version, saving and rebooting into the new installation, but that gave me a kernel panic. So...If I'm trying to do a livecd for 10.1, do I really have to replace the kernel with the "tmb" version at all? Also, when I have a second Linux installation with the bootloader installed on the root of that installation, what should the image actually point to in my "master" bootloader in my main installation? Thanks, Sam

Grrrr. Now I can't seem to reproduce the error. :( The one I kept getting was something about the mirror not being up to date. Here's what I do get. I have a directory with all my cool RPMs that I have downloaded, including the mklivecd package. I ran genhdlist in this directory, as root. Then I used urpmi.addmedia to add it as a source. Then I tried to urpmi the mklivecd package. It made two complaints. First it said: mklivecd-0.5.9-0.20041231.1mdk.noarch (due to unsatisfied perl(run_program)) Continue? (Y/n) I told it to continue, but the package did not install. It then said: medium "javarpms" uses an invalid list file: mirror is probably not up-to-date, trying to use alternate method Now it said this approximately sixty seconds after I finished the genhdlist and added the directory as a source (yes, I removed it and then re-added it just to be sure :) ). If I understand correctly, "run_program" is a package that the mklivecd thingumy depends on. Is that right? I searched on rpmseek.com but found nothing.

That's what I've been using. :(

I have yet to find a mirror that does not give me some kind of an error message when I try to update. Is there an authoritative list somewhere of which ones are good?

I wanted to do a clean install because I was actually upgrading from a previous Mandrake.

This is actually a two-parter. I have a two-drive system, and I put my /home, /usr and /tmp on their own partitions on hdb, with root on a partition on hda. I guess it's not really relevant to my question that they're on separate drives, just that they're on separate partitions. The idea I had in mind was that when I upgraded to 10.1 I could nuke the root partition and start afresh with a clean installation (it went well, btw, except that I kept forgetting little details about how the nvidia drivers should be set up, so that took a few days). My first question is this: When I got to the partitioning part of the installation, I had it just put the whole thing on the hda partition. I was afraid if I specified the existing ones, it would nuke the data and stuff that's already there. So I installed it all on the hda partition and then later changed my /usr, /home and /tmp mount point to the hdb partitions it was using before. This worked well except that I did have to reinstall some rpms, and it nuked, for example, all the data (maps 'n' stuff) in my enemy-territory directory under /usr/blahblahblah/somethingelse. I'm wondering, what's the best way to manage this if I want to do a clean installation of the OS without messing with the data and applications that are already there? Is there a way to keep all the software that's installed without having to reinstall packages and/or without overwriting anything? My second question, is, when I changed the /home mount point to the hdb partition, it said that there was already data there (the home directory for mytempuser) and asked if I wanted to move it to the new mount point or "hide" it. I chickened out and moved it, but I'm wondering what would happen if I told it to hide it? How could I find it again? Could I find it without changing the mount point back? While I'm thinking of it, I have a third question pertaining to partitioning and mounting. A friend of mine suggested making partitions specifically for photo directories (I'm a digital camera junkie and take a lot of pictures). His reasoning was that I should make partitions of 650 MB in size, that way when each one gets full it will fit exactly onto a CD, and I'll know when it's full and that it's time to start a new one. But is there a problem with having a bunch of little partitions? Up 'till now I've just have a few partitions in the multigigabyte-size range.

Thanks for the advice. It won't kill me to wait until 10.2 has a release edition. I can re-enable my onboard sound thingumajig (I think that's the technical term for it) and live with it for the time being. The integrated sound doesn't seem to play well with TeamSpeak, but I can live with it.

Yep, I thought I'd disabled onboard sound, but when I went into BIOS setup again it was enabled. So I disabled it, and now only the Audigy card appears in the hardware list. When I click on it and click "Run config tool" it now says "No sound card has been detected on your machine," this despite that it detects it at least enough for it to appear in the list. And yes, alsa is running and all sound applications off.

Hardware: Went into MCC and ran config on my sound card. Set driver to snd-intel8x0, which it says is the default. When I hit Okay it says it's applying the configuration, but then back on the MCC Hardware screen it still says Driver Module: Unknown for my sound card. Doesn't look good, but I then ran kmix anyway and it said, unsurprisingly, "Alsa mixer cannot be found...Please check that the sound card is installed and the soundcard driver loaded."

As the thread title suggests, I just put a SB Live! in my PC. My motherboard also has integrated sound, and when I go into MCC and browse the hardware I see both devices, but the SoundBlaster says module unknown. I'm running Mandrake 10.1, BTW. Now I'm not a guru, so any advice, please walk me through it step by step or point me to a document that does. (Yes, I've Googled it, but couldn't find anything that told me what to do in any language I could understand. :) ).

Okay, I tried this. I have two drives, with Mandrake on the first one. The only thing I care about Winbloze for is a game I have that isn't supported by Cedega. So on my spare drive I made the first partition 20 gig (overkill I know, but who knows what else I may install there), and went into mcc to the boot options. I added an option to boot to /mnt/windows, i.e. /hdb1, where my Windows installation is (I installed it by actually physically disconnecting the drive with Mandrake and temporarily setting the jumper on my other drive to Master just long enough to do the Windows install on the first partition there). So far, so good. I boot, and it presents the option to boot to Winbloze. I select it, and it hangs forever. What am I doing wrong? Thanks! Sam

Forgive me if this is spamming a question, but it was kind of a minor point that got lost in another thread, and it's still unresolved so I thought it merits its own thread. I installed Mandrake 10.1, and for the most part I'm pretty happy with it, but one problem I still have is with my /dev/scd0 file. This didn't exist but is expected by some of my applications. Switching user to root and creating a link by that name that points to /dev/hdd does the trick. So far, so good. But when I reboot the machine, it vanishes! So I have to recreate the link every time I reboot the machine. Does anybody know the story on that?

How do I make an area of ram act like a disk drive and mount it like a file system?

Well kappfinder found some stuff, but even basic stuff like "Configure Your Computer" seems to be gone. :( I don't mean the programs themselves are gone...just their menu items. And for most of this stuff I never knew the command-line name for it. Yes, I know mcc and kcontrol and kwrite, but for every one I know there are lots that I don't know but used to use. The modprobe preload now works, and yes, changing it to simply "nvidia" worked. :) On the printer...Where do I find the printer driver packs? I went through rpmdrake and couldn't find anything. Are these RPMs that I can just download and install? I went through kcontrol like you suggested, and it saw an Epson CX6600 sure enough, but the closest driver I saw for it was for the CX6400. Mandrake's web site explicitly states that 10.1 is Certified with this printer. And another question about the printer: It's a printer-scanner combo. How do I scan?

Well I did an lsmod and learned that the nvidia driver was not loaded. After I modprobed it, X started up okay. But /etc/modprobe.preload has a line in it that says modprobe nvidia so shouldn't it load when the machine boots? Also, I'm still having problems with permissions spontaneously changing on their own. What is up with that? Mandrake 9.2 never did that to me. I can set permissions on the /proc directory so that ps works, but in a little while they get changed back. What is the point of having changeable file permissions at all if the system doesn't even respect any of the permissions set by root but instead changes them arbitrarily? Also, some of my stuff expects a device called /dev/scd0. No problem, I just switch to root and type ln /dev/hdd /scd0 and it works fine...until I reboot, at which point the link is gone. Again, what's the point of having links at all if they spontaneously go away like that? Mandrake 9.2. never did that to me. Are these bugs in Mandrake 10.1, or are they intentional?

This is my XF86Config: # File generated by XFdrake. # ********************************************************************** # Refer to the XF86Config man page for details about the format of # this file. # ********************************************************************** Section "Files" # Multiple FontPath entries are allowed (they are concatenated together) # By default, Mandrake 6.0 and later now use a font server independent of # the X server to render fonts. FontPath "unix/:-1" EndSection Section "ServerFlags" #DontZoom # disable <Crtl><Alt><KP_+>/<KP_-> (resolution switching) AllowMouseOpenFail # allows the server to start up even if the mouse doesn't work #DontZap # disable <Crtl><Alt><BS> (server abort) EndSection Section "Module" Load "dbe" # Double-Buffering Extension Load "v4l" # Video for Linux Load "extmod" Load "type1" Load "freetype" Load "glx" EndSection Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Keyboard1" Driver "Keyboard" Option "XkbModel" "pc105" Option "XkbLayout" "en_US" Option "XkbOptions" "" EndSection Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse1" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "monitor1" VendorName "ViewSonic" ModelName "ViewSonic A90" HorizSync 30-86 VertRefresh 50-180 # Sony Vaio C1(X,XS,VE,VN)? # 1024x480 @ 85.6 Hz, 48 kHz hsync ModeLine "1024x480" 65.00 1024 1032 1176 1344 480 488 494 563 -hsync -vsync # TV fullscreen mode or DVD fullscreen output. # 768x576 @ 79 Hz, 50 kHz hsync ModeLine "768x576" 50.00 768 832 846 1000 576 590 595 630 # 768x576 @ 100 Hz, 61.6 kHz hsync ModeLine "768x576" 63.07 768 800 960 1024 576 578 590 616 EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "device1" VendorName "NVidia" BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce4 (generic)" Driver "nv" Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "screen1" Device "device1" Monitor "monitor1" DefaultColorDepth 24 Subsection "Display" Depth 8 Virtual 1600 1200 EndSubsection Subsection "Display" Depth 15 Virtual 1600 1200 EndSubsection Subsection "Display" Depth 16 Virtual 1600 1200 EndSubsection Subsection "Display" Depth 24 Virtual 1600 1200 EndSubsection EndSection Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "layout1" Screen "screen1" InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard" InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer" EndSection

"nvidia-agp" is already in /etc/modprobe.preload.

I have a variety of difficulties since I upgraded yesterday. I've been doing Linux for about a year, and I'm more knowledgeable than a newbie but far, far, far from being an expert, so bear that in mind as you answer. :) Okay, so I took the plunge and upgraded from 9.2 to 10.1. Just to be safe I installed a new hard drive, partitioned it accordingly and formatted it to make it a fresh install, and also so I could simply pop the old drive back in as the boot drive if it didn't work. Upgrading is always a good excuse to put in a bigger drive anyway. ;) Then I mounted the old one so I could copy the stuff from my home directory over. The first thing I noticed was that I needed to edit the programs menu. So I right-clicked and hit Menu Editor and waited...and waited and waited. I tried several more times--nothing ever happened. I open up a console window and did menudrake. It opened right up, but it looked like the old menu I had. So I closed it and forgot about it. The next time I logged in I noticed that almost my entire menu was completely gone. :( Then only things there were things that I had explicitly added--all the "standard issue" programs like Mozilla, Kmail and kwrite were gone. Any idea how to restore them? The menu editor isn't the only thing that doesn't start. Mozilla intermittently does the same thing, whether I launch it from a terminal window or from the shortcut I made on my taskbar. Sometimes it starts, and other times it just hangs forever. Logging out and logging in again seems to fix this, but I thought rebooting was more of a Windows kinda solution. BTW, when it does this when launched from a terminal window, it reports no errors--just hangs forever. I tried to solve the Mozilla mystery by doing a ps -A just to see what's going on with my system. It said "Error, do this: mount -t proc none /proc". In 9.2 I never had to do anything like that. I did an su over to root to explore a bit and discovered that if I chmoded the /proc to be o+=rx and then switched back to my regular account, it worked again. Great! Except an hour later it stopped working again. So again I did an su over to root and looked at the permissions for /proc: They had mysteriously been changed back again. So it looks like I have to switch user over to root every time I want to run one of the most basic commands that worked just fine in 9.2. Nvidia drivers: I got the latest and ran the install script. I edited the XF86Config file to make sure the load "Glx" was there (it already was) and that it says Driver "nvidia" instead of Driver "nv" and now I get the infamous "no screens found" error. I had this under 9.2 when I installed the Nvidia drivers, but there it was just a matter of opening the editor and seeing what I had screwed up. :) It looks okay to me now. And lastly, the whole reason why I upgrade to 10.1: I bought an Epson CX6600 for the specific reason that Mandrake's web site says it is supported by 10.1. When I installed, it didn't recognize it. I picked from the list of Epson printers, and Epson CX6400 was there, but not CX6600. I picked CX6400, and it prints text, kinda, though with the first letter of every line off the page. How do I get it to recognize the CX6600? I really want to make this work, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.