theYinYeti

I forgot to stop a TV recording, which resulted in a giant file taking up all remaining free space on disk.

Now I want to keep only the first 12GB from this file.

The disk is so full I can't free 12GB on it, to be able to use the "head" command.

I know I can (and will) use something like "head --bytes=12000m FILE | ssh remoteuser@remotehost 'cat >TAIL-FILE'". But…

I'd like to know how I can truncate a file to its first bytes when neither the network nor extra disk space is available.

Yves.

I guess I'm going to have to take a picture of my 10 1/2 year old Pentium 1 system running Mandriva 2008 Spring, in order to quiet the skeptics. :D

My 6-year-old son does fine on both Mandriva and Debian (of course, he's not aware of the difference). I don't see any reason for people to be skeptical.

I have an old Pentium 133MHz dual processor system with 128MB of ram, I doubt very much it would even run OpenOffice 2.4 well enough.

For the record, back when my "nomade" laptop was running Mandrake 9.1, OpenOffice could load, but it required some 15 minutes to do so! However, once loaded, it ran fine. Anyway, Abiword is obviously a better choice for such hardware.

Yves.

Does WiFi configuration using the Mandriva Control Center work? That would be the easiest solution.

Yves.

theYinYeti: the only problem with [Netscape Communicator 4.8] is that it hasn't had security updates for several years, so is likely subject to all sorts of vulns. Dillo is in the same state, but has only been so since Feb 2007, so probably less of a problem. links is actively maintained.

You're right adamw. Still, I don't hesitate an instant before using it on my "nomade" laptop.

Netscape has a lot more features than Dillo or Links. As for vulnerabilities, they would come from: a carefully crafted mail or news item, or a web site I visit that has been compromized in a way that makes the browser vulnerable. So:

- What web site author/cracker, or what spammer, these days, would care enough to target an attack at such an old program?

- What part of those hypothetical few attackers would target a bug from the Linux version?

- What part of those hypothetical few attackers would target a bug on a system where root access is denied?

- Last but not least: all important files on "nomade" (2GB hard drive!, 1.5GB of which are the OS+apps) are backed-up.

Yves.

No problems here with a very similar drive (TS-L632H)

Which firmware revision AND laptop manufacturer?

No problem so far, but it's too soon to say.

I'm asking bevause the firmware provided by Samsung will NOT flash on OEM drives used by Dell, Toshiba etc.

In command line you can. Follow the links :)

Yves.

@YinYeti is there an extension to the "desktop" file. I will be using safe-mode so I guess that's a default path "/etc/sysconfig/desktop"

Just like that: "/etc/sysconfig/desktop"

Not more.

Yves.

If the easy way doesn't work, you'll have to install the kernel-…-devel package, not the kernel-…-source one.

Yves.

Wow! This is exactly my problem:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=428756

And comparing my lshal output with his, it seems we have exactly the same drive! 'TSSTcorpCD/DVDW TS-L632D'

What would be the consequences of black-listing the drive in HAL, as the bug report suggests?

Yves.

[edit:] Now this looks like a fix. I'll see that. [/edit]

I regularly have a kind-of-freeze problem with the laptop I use at work. The laptop is not freezed actually, but its CPU goes so high that almost nothing can be done… (up to one minute per keystroke).

Some time ago, I discovered that such a freeze would always eventually happen if a CD had at least been inserted into the CD drive. It can happen if the CD drive hasn't been used, but it always happens eventually if the CD drive has been used.

When the freeze occurs, I get these three messages repeated every 5 seconds either on the console, or in the logs:

hdc: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdc: drive not ready for command

Yesterday, I managed to see the output of `top` while the freeze occured. hald-addon-stor was running like mad, ranging from 50% to 190% (dual-core), depending on the activity of other processes. I once saw syslog at 100%!

So I killed the hald-addon-stor(age?) process, and looked at the syslog file, and… the end of the file was repeatedly filled with the above three lines.

What can I do to stop the problem? It is a laptop from work and I have absolutely no possibility to change it, or even a single part of it.

Yves.

Good looking!

You may need to explicitely force mounting, if it was uncleanly unmounted.

Apart from that, you may find this usefull: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I never did any of this, I just know it exists. Be careful.

Yves.

And don't forget "good" old Netscape Communicator 4.8. Sure it is old. but:

- it understands way more Javascript and CSS than Dillo and Links-graphic (which are nice browsers nonetheless),

- it uses barely more memory than those other browsers,

- it provides a web browser, and a mail client, and a news reader!

And the mail client is more than satisfying: IMAP, POP, LDAP contacts… I never found a better "internet program" for my "nomade" laptop (32MB ram).

Yves.

I don't know of a way to change the display manager from the command line. :unsure:

Create/change the /etc/sysconfig/desktop file as root so that:

DISPLAYMANAGER=GNOME

or

DISPLAYMANAGER=KDE

depending on your display manager preference.

Yves.

I completely agree with arctic. :)

Yves.

avidemux could be part of the answer: you can merge several video files, arrange cuts where needed, and export the whole thing to DVD format. It won't do the actual burn, though. Well, that's "as far as I know"; I never use those parts of avidemux.

Yves.

ashamed of using Mandriva? Why might people feel so?

In my opinion:

- Debian is a legend: THE free GNU/Linux for almost all Linux-supported platforms.

- Slackware is like the 100+-year-old elder in the neighboorhood: they knew how to do things, back in those days, and things weren't bloated like they are these days… (not my opinion, but that's the feeling I get from comments I've read about Slack)

- Fedora benefits from Redhat's excellent reputation, while still appearing new and dynamic to people, their fork from the "real" Redhat being quite recent.

- Ubuntu is shining new and richly supported by a very dynamic company. Besides, their "sudo"-centered administration (an idea I don't like) may certainly appeal to a lot of former windows users.

- And Mandriva… nothing.

It is old, but not that much.

It has no great past to build upon, because they suffered in the past from being described as a Redhat-based distribution, even though it quickly became more fud than truth.

The name, for people to remember? "Mandrake" souded like a joke (in France at least), and "Mandriva" is still too new to be widely recognized.

Still, from a pure technical point of view, Mandriva is my choice for reasonably modern hardware.

Yves.

I certainly am not ashamed of using Mandriva! And I recommend it to anyone asking me what distribution they should use to enter the Linux world :)

Yves.

Close all you opened apps, if any. Go to the console with [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[F1].

Login as root.

Launch the "drakx11" command. Choose the first item (card model), and in the list choose (near the end) "XOrg|vesa".

Setup other items as you see fit, and save your choices.

Still as root, type:

service dm restart; exit

Yves.

Welcome!

It is sad that you enter the Linux world with a hardware compatibility problem…

Anyway, the problem could indeed stem from the video adapter.

Try disabling 3D. And if that is not enough, then try reverting to the VESA driver.

Yves.

That is strange… You say DVD plays fine, and I cannot think of anything that would degrade quality, except the obvious:

- Are you using 24-bit color-depth, or something lower such as 15- or 16-bit?

- Is the PC powerfull enough, so that you don't get skipped frames?

- Is the picture displayed on a computer monitor, or is it a (s-)video output? The latter is often of deceiving quality.

Yves.

John is right. I've had a hard enough time "just" upgrading from 2006 to 2007.1, to say the least… I'd certainly not try an even bigger leap.

Yves.

Were I you, I'd boot the Mandriva One with the same version as your broken install (2009.0?), and then set up easy-urpmi.

You mount your installed partitions, for example under /mnt/broken. Using rpmdrake or urpmq, you look for the kernel packages you want to install, and you install these using:

urpmi --root /mnt/broken

Yves.

The GUI's are not intended to have the same features as CLI (I don't understand why)

In my opinion, it mostly comes from ergonomy considerations: you just can't present all options to the user! Just think about the kind of dialogs that would be needed to present ALL possible mencoder parameters in a GUI!

On the technical side, I think the main difference between non-interactive CLI and GUI is the pipe. stdin and stdout are a powerfull feature that GUI applications mostly «lack».

That being said, all cannot be done using non-interactive CLI; some things just have to be interactive, be it within X (Gimp, avidemux…) or in the console (mc, vi…).

Yves.

:blush: Thank you :)

If you change your mind, I can give some more details to help you get started.

Yves.

Still, the Eclipse platform could interest you.

Yves.