sellis

Obvious question: do you have the "wireless-tools" package installed? I seem to remember that it's not installed by default, and that's where you will find iwconfig. Have you seen this thread?

Whoops! It's on the fritz again. The network connection doesn't stay up more than a few hours.If I run iwconfig, it reports millions (literally) of "Invalid misc" packets. The SSID, router address and WEP key are still reported correctly. At first I thought it might be the router - there are some reports of instability with the WRT54G - but rebooting that didn't do the trick. I thought it might be a problem with getting a new DHCP lease from my cable provider (NTL), but even connecting to the router doesn't work. Running service network restart doesn't clear it, although a complete computer restart does. Now, doing a restart every day is not something I want to have to do! Apart from the inconvenience, I wish to impress my Windows-using friends with tales of 100's of days of uptime, as properly befits a Linux system. It also annoys my wife, who just wants to browse the web. So, once again, any ideas?

Are you trying to change permissions on a file which is stored on a non-Linux partition? I was foxed by this for a while until I realised that a particular file was on my shared drive (which is formatted as FAT32 so I can share it with Windows).

I've managed to get everything more-or-less back to where I was before, so I'm able to post from home again. Well, almost. I had a horrible moment where I thought the whole system was borked again. What is actually happening is that the "Booting, press ESC for verbose mode" screen is completely blank. The monitor seems to think it's getting an out of range signal of some sort. Pressing ESC does not return to text mode, although booting via text mode is OK. After 30 seconds or so, the graphical login screen appears, and everything is then OK. Also, the same thing happens during the shutdown sequence. Blank screen for 30 seconds or so, then it shuts down. So, it's nothing quite as nasty as the previous problem, but it's worrying nonetheless. Any ideas?

I was interested by this question as well, so I looked around and found a good introduction to sudo: Sudo in a Nutshell.

I'd expand that last: ADBLOCK - the best thing you can add for taking things away.

Well, I had previously tried rebooting into all the available modes, and nothing seemed to do much good. I've managed to get everything more-or-less back to where I was before, so I'm able to post from home again.

Version 1.0PR Adblock - an absolute must. SingleWindow

Right. After a fun evening, here's a list of the suggestions found on the web, that did not work: 1. Rerun /etc/postinstall/XFree86-f*.sh scripts (this turned out to be a Cygwin tip) 2. Reinstall xorg-x11-fnts (package not present) 3. Check /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts mounted at init time (yes) 4. Check /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/fonts.alias readable by all, not just root (yes) 5. Restart font server using service xfs restart (restart OK, no effect) 6. Reinstall xfonts-base (Debian tip - package does not exist) 7. Disk may be full (no, 10GB free) 8. Edit font paths in XF86config-4 (removed changed folder, no effect) 9. Uninstall and reinstall X (no effect) 10. Run XFdrake as root (no effect) 11. Run xf86cfg as root (no effect) 12. Check xfs installed and running (yes) 13. Run mkfontdir in changed font directory (no effect) 14. Uninstall and reinstall xfs (no effect) 15. Uninstall and reinstall XFree86-75dpi-fonts...etc (no effect) 16. Boot to install CD and run "upgrade" (no effect) 17. Boot to install CD and install without formatting (no effect) 18. Remove font directory paths from /etc/fonts/font.config (no effect) 19. Remove font directory paths from /etc/fonts/local.config (no effect) 20. Run fc-cache . in /usr/local/shared/fonts (no effect) 21. Remove ~/.fonts.cache-1, restart (no effect) 22. Replace X86Config-4 font paths with server path unix/:-1. Partial success. Can now boot to most users, but not my own. Network interfaces (as reported by ifconfig) not available, even after service network start. Finally, here's the step that undid the damage: 23. Back up /home directories, reformat partition, reinstall from scratch. Step 23 seems to work so far, but I only about half way through reconfiguring the system before I ran out of energy and had to go to bed. Knowing my luck, someone will now pipe up with "Well, all you needed to do was to run [3 letter command] from root to reinitialize the font caches and you would have been fine..." Well, say what you like about Windows, I never managed to screw over the entire system to this extent just by copying some font files... So, my valuable lesson is: if you're going to muck around with the system, take a backup first.

There's more discussion of this problem over on this thread. I'm in much the same boat myself, as you can see. I've Googled around and have found several suggestions, which I will try this evening.

I've also spent Sunday wrestling with this problem. A Google search turned up the answer for your particular version of the problem. The X Font Server (xfs) requires at least 4M of free disk space to start up. If, as you say, you have your disk completely full, then this is most likely the problem. My version is slightly different. I copied a bunch of fonts from my old Windows disk into /usr/local/share/fonts/TTF, and then got this error when rebooting. I have probably overwritten or accidentally erased the actual font file it is searching for. (I particular like the way that XFS doesn't actually tell you which font it's trying to load... ) What makes it even more frustrating is that part of the graphical startup has happened by this time, and has altered the palette for the text mode that I am dumped into. To dark grey on slightly darker grey. In man pages, the color used to represent options strings and commmands is remapped to black on black . My 2 year old son learned a few new words yesterday. (But he did correctly point to the screen and say "popooter broken", which is his first step to BOFH-hood, I think.) Anway, now I am at work, I can use Google again, and have a number of things to try. First and foremost is to reinstall the fonts package, if there is one. If that doesn't work, another suggestion is to alter the font paths so that things are searched in a different order, or something else. As a last resort, I may ask some kind soul here (who hasn't borked their font system) to zip up their /usr/local/share/fonts directory and post it as an attachment so I can put it back. Then, I take the advice of the poster who said "back up your /usr and /etc directories when you have a good installation." Anyway, more experimenting tonight, and I'll let you know how it turns out.

I fond the solution to my problem in XMMS. It's a simple thing once you realise. I had created my playlists under Windows, and therefore the directory separator was a '\' instead of a '/'. Simple as that. Of course, I took the hard path and wrote a shell script using sed to fix them all up, before I found the option in XMMS that allowed them to be used in their original state anyway... In case anyone else has this problem, the option you need can be found from XMMS's right-click menu, Options > Preferences, then in the "Options" tab there is a check box for "Use \ as directory delimiter".

What may be better is not a direct comparison, but instead creating several simple "similarity measures", such as average color, or something more sophisticated such as the primary components of a FFT on the image. It would then be possible to create a graphical space where similar photos are closer together. It's been done for UK Parliament voting records by the guys at The Public Whip. The beauty of it is that you can do this without necessarily knowing what the axes actually mean. In an ideal world, you would put tiny thumbnails where the images were, and have zoom in/out and pan capabilities on the applet, and then have right-click menus to delete, move or group images together. Of course, actually doing this is a big job!

Not moaning, just reporting... After AussieJohn's post, I just tried a few DVDs with Totem. Please, no flames on my DVD collection... - Andromeda Strain: Cannot read NAV packet. - Red Dwarf 1: Plays BBC Logo OK but then Cannot read from DVD. - Red Dwarf 4: Plays BBC Logo OK but then crashes. They're all region 2 in a region 2 drive, and the BBC logo looks lovely. But overall, it's still 0 for 3. My guess is I have to install decss - am I right? Edit: yes, I was. Installed libdvdcss and everything plays okey-dokey now. XMMS and Totem also both still pretty screwy with audio playlists. They will play individual .ogg files fine. But not only can I not read .m3u or .pls files created elsewhere, I cannot read .m3u of .pls files created within the applications themselves, 30 seconds previously. I've looked up the MIME types for both .m3u and .pls and they seem to be set up right, so I don't think that they are mis-identifying the type of the playlist file. Frankly, I'm at a bit of a loss here, and since I'm a recent convert from Windows, the only thing I can think of now is to uninstall and reinstall Totem. :o Edit: didn't work. But installing Kaffeine did. I can't create playlists in Kaffeine though, so any pointers on getting Totem or XMMS up and running again would be splendid. I don't hate Totem. Up until yesterday, it was working fine. I just though that the skin is a bit big and wanted something a little more compact.

On much the same theme, I have been using Totem for a while, but it's huge on screen and was looking around for a player with more modest real-estate usage. So, I installed XMMS from the MDK 10.0 distribution disks (I forget which version of xmms it is for the moment - I'm posting from work...). I found that it doesn't like my .m3u playlist files, probably due to the # comments that EZ-CDDA Extractor put in there (I transferred them from my old Windows drive). Fair enough, but it won't play the .ogg files either, despite saying that it has the .ogg plugin installed when I display the list of installed plugins. OK, I think. I'll go back to using Totem for now. But! Totem now doesn't like my .m3u files either! It basically complains that there is no codec for them. :huh: Has anyone seen similar behaviour? I've done a few searches both here and on Google and there doesn't seem to be anything obvious. Next stop, mplayer...? Edit: Just had a thought - what's the MIME type supposed to be for .m3u files?

Thanks a million, beesea. Excellent, clear instructions, even for a Linux newbie like me. Followed your instructions, and I am now wireless with my own WMP54G card. It took me about 90 minutes, but that was mainly because I can't count the number of leading '0's when entering a WEP key. {*slaps head*} A couple of clarifications, based on my experience and questions in the rest of the thread: 1. I did need to run the commands given as root (Post #10 in this thread). 2. I didn't appear to need the colon between the two 4-digit hex numbers in the modprobe.conf configuration file changes (apparently contrary to Post #13). 3. I did need to change the internet connection on the firewall as I was already up and running with a wired connection (Post #23). Another item which would have saved me some time: restarting the network after changing the settings does not require a complete reboot (I m still "thinking Windows" aren't I?) but can be achieved using "/etc/init.d/network restart" instead, as described in this thread.

Yup, installed it yesterday with no problems - it kept my previous settings as I would expect. I had to upgrade a couple of plugins, but that was automated too. What a nice browser. I quite like the "Download missing plugins for this page" feature - this got Flash up and running in no time flat. Never looked back since ditching IE on all my platforms - and I get that nice warm smug glow when I see yet another security advisory. Today, it's browsing JPEGs in IE that is bad for your health: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/15/windows_jpeg_bug/

My home machine runs Mandrake 2005LE on: AMD Athlon XP 1700+ running at 1466MHz 256MB DDR RAM Edit2: Now 512MB Western Digital 160GB primary drive 80GB secondary drive (previously my Windows drive, can't remember mfr) Toshiba SD-R1002 DVD/CDRW combo drive Edit3: Now BENQ DW1620 DVD writer SiS 315 Graphics card VIA VT8233 sound chipset (on mobo) Edit2: Now SIS7012 Audio chipset (on new mobo) Realtek RTL-8139 ethernet chipset (on mobo) Edit2: Now SIS900 10/100 ethernet chipset (on new mobo) Linksys 802.11g PCI card (Edit: Now up and running thanks to instructions on this board from beesea) Edit2: HP PSC1215 printer/scanner combo

Well, I think I cracked it - stupid error, as usual. I wasn't unmounting the drive before I unplugged it.

First, some background. I have a new installation of Mandrake 10.0 (downloaded), virtually "out of the box", apart from installation of Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and a load of documents from my old drive. I also have a QSI Intelligent Stick flash drive, 128M, which I am having trouble with. I've looked through the various forum answers, and haven't seen a description of the behavior that I see, but please forgive me if I have missed an existing post. Thanks to various posts that I have found, I can successfully mount the flash drive when it is plugged in (although I don't see anything new on the KDE desktop, as some people have suggested). So, if I see that the drive is at /dev/sda, I can mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/usb ...and copy files off the drive. So far, so good. So, I now want to add that to my fstab. This is OK until I unplug the device and plug it back in. Now, it has the designation /dev/sdb. If I do it again, it is /dev/sdc. (It also shows up under /dev/scsi/host0/... etc, with the host number incrementing by one every time I unplug it.) Naturally, I want to be able to plug and unplug this drive as I transfer files from one place to another, but I also want to add it to my fstab, so I can create a device icon for it on the KDE desktop. This requires that it has a stable /dev/something designation. Ideally, I'd like to see something like the floppy or CDROM behavior, where the icon appears when the device is present, and is removed when it is unplugged. As I say, it's a fresh installation of Mandrake and I'm learning the ins and outs of Linux as I go, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Sean I'm not a rocket scientist, but I play one on TV.