Crashdamage

Just a quick note for anyone who might care... I fixed transparency in Midnight Commander. I'd forgotten it was one of several things I've upgraded to later versions using non-Mandrake packages. Did a urpmi -v with a mc-4.6.0 rpm I'd used and all is back to normal - well, after sorting out a couple of other glitches, like reinstalling sendmail, one of the security upgrades I'd selected. It was just gone... Anyway, guess I got away with one this time.

NIRVANA HAS BEEN REACHED!!! IT'S FIXED!!! I knew I had to be close, but in my haze of stupidity I forgot to check something. Creating a new user didn't work, but it did kick my measly mind into gear a little and made me realize I hadn't checked ~/.xsession.errors for more info. I'd been thinking global system stuff. So I took a look, and sure enough there was a message about it couldn't find a libqt file. But X doesn't need qt stuff, so whatsup with that? Again, it took a bit for the haze of stupidity to clear and let the reason become apparent... I run Fluxbox, but KDE is installed for 2 other users. Now, I usually let X start at boot, which will open things up at the login manager, handy for everyone. But for trouble shooting I had disabled X starting at boot. Since KDE is the default Mandrake WM, when I tried logging in and typing "startX" it was trying to open the default WM - KDE. So I did 2 things: I reinstalled the offending qt package and re-enabled X start at boot. Now, everything's cool, working like before. HDs seem to be fine, fsck apparently did the trick. I've only noticed one problem. Midnight Commander refuses to run transparent. Still runs my color scheme, but on a black background, I lost transparency. Hey, I can live with that! On the other hand, somewhere along the line I had recently lost the ability to tint aterm windows. They either were black or had to be 100% transparent. But for whatever reason, aterm tinting is working again, so I guess that makes it an even trade. Good 'ol 8.2...tough to kill...but I'm not running any more security updates. I'll just keep services to the minimum (as always) and let Bastille and Portsentry do their thing. But I think this makes a great example of how you can fix Linux, not reinstall it. This system had serious HD file system and application file problems but is a happy puppy again. Thanks guys! Maybe you didn't have the exact answer, but you gave me the needed jolt to the gray matter!

OK, what I did was do --force installs of all the XFree 4.2 rpms and a couple of other things. Now I can a reboot and the shutdown/startup sequence goes by fine, no errors. No font server errors, nothing, it looks good. And, when I type "startx" it seems like it's gonna go, I even get a flash of blue screen (or red if I do it as root, as I should) but X fails, drops back to Level 1 with the message: "waiting for X server to shut down" I've run XFdrake 3 times, checked /var/log/XFree86.0.log for errors - there aren't any. From what I know, everything looks good and should work. I know I'm close to getting this going. But I'm at another dead end and out of ideas again.

Thanks for the sympathy and suggestions. OK, rpm -e --nodeps it is...then out with all the strays I can find, then I'll try reinstalling with urpmi -v and hope it works. Unfortunately, I think I feel a reinstall coming on. At least I can do another complete backup before I do.

Well, I had all the sources setup in urpmi for 8.2 stuff and haven't had trouble before. It just trashed things this time. 8.2 has been very, very stable, and if I do end up reinstalling, I'll probably load it again. I've got no good reason to go to 9.1 and plenty of reasons not to. But man, do I hope somebody's got an answer...

Thanks, but no, I was just doing a bunch of security updates, including one for XFree86 4.2. I wouldn't dream of updating the kernel from the software installer. This is a 8.2 box.

Wasn't broke, I shouldn't have fooled with it. Basically, I tried to install some long-overdue security updates. Opened the Software Manager, picked a bunch, including one for XFree86, and sat back watch them install. Install failed - oh well, forget the security stuff. But problems... App failed to start, so I treid to restart X - no go. Tried a reboot to see any error messages - failed, kernel panic - can't find init. Booted into rescue mode from CD1, tried to reinstall Lilo - no go, it can't deal with something about my CF card reader, /dev/sda1. Decided to do fsck. It found errors, did repairs, Tried another reboot - no go, but better. Started out OK, no kernel panic, mounted all the HDs, started moving along, but then disentegrated into lots of missing file errors, etc. Thinking I'm pretty well screwed at this point, I decided to try an Upgrade-only install to correct the file errors and try and save things. And it did, mostly. I still get error messages at boot about missing shared files for aumix and HardDrake, but I'm able to finish booting and log in as a user or root. I have 'net access and can run text apps like Mutt, slrn or Midnight Commander, and my home network is still up. But if I type "startx" I get: "xauth: error while loading shared libraries: libXmuu.so.1: cannot oped shared object file: No such file or directory" The file's, there, in /usr/X11R6/lib along with a symlink libXmuu.so.1.0. I tried to uninstall XFree86, but no go with rpm -e - dependencies. Finally ended up reinstalling XFree86 with rpm -ivh --force to try and get things working but no good, some problem. I'd *really* like to fix this. Seems most stuff is OK, and this is a *very* complicated, highly customized and upgraded install of 8.2 that would take days of work to redo. I also use it to telecommute to work. I was happy with it and had no desire or intention of upgrading until the 2.6 kernel was stable. Any help is VERY much appreciated. I'm just out of ideas...

>1) Kmyfirewall. >2) Easy Firewall Generator. >3) Firewall Builder. >4) Shorewall. >5) iCop. None of the above. The best is Bastille. Easy setup, and more than just a firewall, though it's good for that. Bastille isn't just a flavor of frontend for iptables, it's a complete system tightening tool that will even teach you something while you set it up. Very cool. I consider it one of the Linux utilities I won't do without. But really, if you keep up with security updates and watch what active services you run a firewall isn't really necessary. You *can* be perfectly safe without one. I'm not always that diligent, so I run Bastille AND Portsentry - another nice tool - and let them take care of my ass.

bvc said: "I've only used PM7 (still do and I use reiserfs for linux) and it does have linux support, but only for ext2 and linux swap." Yeah, I forgot PM7 does have ext2-only support, I was thinkin' they added that in PM8. Oops... "To say it has a 'none-too-intuitive interface' is :shock: . I'd love to no one better. Diskdrake? I don't think so! :wink: JMO :)" Whatever - I've fixed some problems lately that were clearly because the user got confused by the PM interface. I like the Partition Expert interface better, as GUIs go. Anyway Partition Expert is about half of what PM costs and has full Linux file system support. DiskDrake is definetly kinda klutzy, but it works. As with any partitioning tool, ya just gotta be *real* careful! Hey, we're kinda gettin' away from the problem at hand here...any other suggestions?

I read through this thread, and while I don't have a definitive fix for you, I caught something that needs clarification... In your fstab, you have: /dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro,umask=0 0 0 /dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro,umask=0 0 0 /dev/hda6 /mnt/win_e vfatlocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0 This says that you have a NTFS C: drive, a NTFS D: drive and FAT32 E: drive. But you said that your D: data drive was FAT32 not NTFS to allow R/W on it from Win & Linux. So which one is the D: data drive? And E: is swap??? In order to minimize the chance of data loss, I'd do all I could to fix things using M$ stuff 'til you run out of options. If you can get into Windoze rescue or to any kind of system prompt, try running chkdisk on the D: drive. It will probably tell you there is no D:, if so try C: If the only problem on the drive is the partition table, chkdisk *should* be able to fix it without losing your data. I ran into this problem lately and chkdisk did save the data, but made C: & D: into one C: partition doing it. But that was on a system where C: & D: were both FAT32. If your C: is NTFS and D: really is FAT32 I'm not sure what chkdisk will decide to do about it. If you're really living right it might find some clue about what the partitions were (like realizing there are both NTFS & FAT32 files on the drive, but don't expect much, we're talkin' 'bout a M$ utility here...) and fix your C: system partition. But if I were in your shoes right now I'd be pretty happy just to get the stuff on D: back and screw the XP install. You don't need it anyway, right? If somehow the D: FAT32 drive got only converted to NTFS(?), it shouldn't have trashed the data, just changed the file system. If somehow you actually reformatted the drive to NTFS, either with PM or DiskDrake, you're probably screwed. If DiskDrake is now seeing your entire 80G (hda) drive as one unpartitioned drive that's because the partition table is gone. DiskDrake, which reads the Windoze partition info (if it's there) to setup, not the file system itself, of course then knows nothing about your partitions. Give up on Partition Magic. I've helped several people lately with straightening out messes that Partition Magic made. Often it seems users just get confused by the none-too-intuitive interface of PM, but the program really just kinda sucks as a whole. It's bad enough with Windoze and kinda useless with Linux since PM-7 has no Linux support. PM-8 supports ext3 only, and poorly. Use Disdrake for formatting Linux partitions, it handles NTFS fine. If you must have a Windoze partitioning tool, use Acronis Partiton Expert. It's cheaper and all-around better than PM, including full support for all common Linux file systems like ReiserFS, ext3, etc.

OK, from what you're saying seems your C drive is fine, only the D partition is affected. That's the good part. Bad part is that whatever is (was) on the D drive is probably trashed. If you're lucky a file-fix utility may be able to restore part of it. Scandisk very likely isn't powerful enough but something better may work. You've got nothing to lose by trying. You're right that it may have been due to fragmentation. Basically, when you split the 6G, some of the files, or parts of files, were on the 3G you used for ext2, so now you're missing segments of files. Result - garbage. Something's definetly not right, 'cause Windoze should not be able to read your Linux partitions at all. In other words, if you had C and D FAT32 partitions and split the 6G D in half, Windoze shouldn't even know the 3G ext2 partition is there and still see only C and D drives, with D now read D as 3G. So something went very wrong. I'm surprised you could get Mandrake installed. Like I said, best to just stay away from Partition Magic for this and use DiskDrake or Acronis Partition Expert. Hopefully, DiskDrake won't be confused now by the mess Partition Magic made of things and you'll still be able to use it to straighten this out. If it is confused, you might have to try using Partition Magic to reformat the whole 6G section back to a single FAT32 partition, then rerun DiskDrake to re-partition everything again. Of course, then everything on D is lost. So, 1st try to recover the data on D. If you can save any, then defrag it to pack it all to the front of the D drive. Then reinstall Linux, making sure you don't use more of D for your Linux partitions than you have free space on D. If the data on D is cooked, then oh well, but you can still use DiskDrake to split the 6G space into FAT32 and ext3 (or Reiser, or whatever) partitions, install Linux and chalk it up as a learning experience.. You might want to consider something more like a 2G/4G split to give Mandrake a little more to work with. For this machine I'd try something like, oh, 300MB for /, 150MB for /swap and the rest for /home. As far as primary vs logical partitons, yes you need a primary bootable partition. For your purposes, make / and /home primary. /swap is, of course, it's own special file type so doesn't figure into this. Also, in this case it won't matter, but keep in mind that you can have a maximum of 4 pimary partitions on a system. Hope all this helps...

1st, what is your D: drive? A 2nd FAT32 partition or a physically separate 2nd HD? 2nd, I take it that Win98 still works OK, so you can probably just delete the garbage on D: and move on, but what else was (is) on D:? Sounds like the easiest thing to do at this point might be to just reinstall Linux, which should straighten out your bootloader problem at the same time. But this time don't fool with Partition Magic. It's a Windoze tool with very poor Linux support. Use Mandrake's DiskDrake partitioning tool instead. During the install, DiskDrake should come up and ask what to do with your partitions. The DiskDrake GUI makes it very easy. Befor you start, defrag your FAT32 partitions(s) to avoid any data loss. Be careful not to format your FAT32 partition(s), since you don't wanna trash your Win98 install. Set up at least 3 Linux partitions, / (root) /swap and /home. I like to add /usr and /var partitions also, but it's not necessary. Use ext3 instead of ext2 for reliabilty. If you feel you must have a Windoze partitioning utility, Google and download Acronis Partiton Expert. It seems generally regarded by IT guys to be better than Partion Magic anyway. After using it a few times I agree, it kicks Partition Magic. Has a more intuitive GUI and more useful features. But best of all Partition Expert has far better support for Linux, including all the alternative Linux file systems like ReiserFS, etc. A free download edition is available that has all the basic functionality enabled you need for simple partitoning. The paid version is even cheaper than Partition Magic.

Win4Lin right now only supports *software* DirectX. So those games that need direct *hardware* support (where DirectX accesses the hardware directly rather than through the drivers) still don't work. I'm no gamer, so I can't help you out with just what works, and most games don't say which type of DirectX support they need. Last I heard Netraverse was gonna build up a list of what was known to work or not. I don't know if thy have yet. You might check their website and see what you can find. DirectX support for hardware in Win4Lin is very difficult. Hey, DirectX sucks in native Windoze, so whadya expect? Basically, Win4Lin (and Linux) takes care of all hardware operation and makes Windoze only *think* it's doing the work with the Merge virtual drivers. Linux is much better at handling hardware than Windoze, which is mainly why Win9x is much more stable under Win4Lin than running normally (ie native Windoze). But you can see that since Windoze doesn't *actually* access hardware it would make DirectX hardware support a very complicated issue. But it can be done and they're working on it... While I'm here, I just gotta put in another plug for Win4Lin support. Last night, I was upgrading from 5.0.0 to 5.0.2, which adds X cut/paste between Linux and Windoze apps running in Win4Lin - very nice. But the installer burped (my fault) so I left a message on the Win4Lin mailing list. I was hoping for an answer sometime Monday. Within 10 minutes I had a reply from one of the Netraverse people with what I did wrong and the fix. This was at 8pm on Friday night! Their support is UNREAL! Take a cue, Mandrake...

OK, I'll try a few suggestions, stuff I put on my daughter's... Office: Abiword. Gnumeric if they need a spreadsheet. Xcalc calculator. XFE file manager. VERY fast, very light, very windows-like. Klipper for a notepad. Internet: Opera 7.11. Small, light and very fast, looks great. Sylpheed for email. Messenger...never used one. Multimedia: XMMS. Hard to go wrong. Video - Got me. Don't use it on a computer. But I will soon... Games: Got me. No time or inclination. I put some on for her, but I don't remember what. My daughter is perfectly happy with these on an old AMD 300 system using KDE. Took her about 5 minutes to make the switch from Win98. She just started using it. KDE loads kinda slow, but then so did Wondoze, and having KDE will make the switch easier for them than using ICEwm. Been probably 9-10 months since I setup her system and I haven't done a thing to it since except upgrade Opera from v6 to 7. It just runs.

Links 2.1 is what I use for most browsing - I'm writing this with it now. Uusually in text mode but sometimes ya gotta have pictures so I use it in graphics mode too. Opera if I need java or SSL support like for online purchases, etc. I really like the keyboard support in Links and Opera. Now if they'd just add keyboard support to Links in graphics mode...unfortunately, right now it only works well in text mode. aru, have you tried elinks? I haven't messed with it yet myself, but it sounds cool, and a graphical mode for it is in the works. It's a fork of Links, and there's other forks of Links too, like Links-Hacked.

I have k3b under 8.2. I think I installed it right off the 8.2 CDs: k3b-0.5.1-2mdk.i586.rpm Not the very latest version of course 'cause it's KDE2, but it works fine. I like gcombust better myself for a gui burner. But more and more I find myself using burnCDDR from a console. In fact, I find myself using text-based stuff for almost everything anymore.

I can't help, I'm still perfectly happy with Gnucash 1.6.5 on 8.2. But if you post to the gnucash mailing list the help there is very good. gnucash-user@gnucash.org

Thanks aru, worked perfect! You were right the"-s" shoulda been "-i". I was trying to type that string in a hurry from memory at work. I also left out "~/." in "-f jnewsrc.tera". Shoulda waited to post 'til I got home and got it right. Anyway, the whole "-i ~/.slrnrc" part was just me trying to force slrn to find the file. But you got me thinking and the thing I found that was really the problem was in the *actual* menu string. I'd left out the 1st "." in "~/.jnewsrc.tera" Can't believe I didn't catch that before...really dumb...sorry to bother you, that was a kinda brain-dead post, but thanks for the help.

First, I'll say I can start slrn fine from an open aterm window. But I use FluxBox and I'd like to be able to start slrn from a FluxBox menu entry like I do Mutt, vim, etc. But it doesn't work. For example, my FluxBox menu entry for aterm is: [exec] (aterm) {aterm -fg 15 -bg 8 -cr 6 -pr 1 -sl 400 -tr +sb -sh 100 -geometry 80x30+20-15} Works perfect. To take it another step, to start Mutt in aterm from the Flux menu, the menu entry is like this: [exec] (Mutt) {aterm -fg 15 -bg 8 -cr 6 -pr 1 -tr +sb -sh 100 -geometry 80x30+5+15 -e mutt} Of course vim and others work about the same, basically just change the end to "-e vim" or whatever. Usually this works great - I use a VERY long script following "-e mc -C base_color= blah blah" to start Midnight Commander in color in a transparent aterm window. Very cool. So I wrote an entry for slrn: [exec] (SLRN) {aterm -fg 15 -bg 8 -cr 6 -pr 1 -tr +sb -sh 100 -e slrn -s ~/.slrnrc -f jnewsrc.tera} But that (and some more simplified versions) won't load properly - just opens an empty terminal that won't accept any input, no cursor or anything. I know it's no big thing to open aterm and type "slrn" but I'd still like to sort this out, mostly just so I know WHY it doesn't work. I've got the same problem with 1 or 2 other apps and I'd like to know what I'm doing wrong in the menu script. I realize it's really not a slrn problem, but something more to do with the calling software (aterm or FluxBox). Any suggestions? Thanks!

I don't know of anything that will do exactly what you want, but for cropping ImageMagick works fine. If you want a really Windows-style app try CompuPic, pretty nice little thubnail viewer/photo editor. Linux version is almost just like the Windows one. Fully functional free trial version available except that after 30 days it won't do .gif or .tif files unless you buy and register it. It'll do quite a bit of stuff. Here's a little info: http://www.photodex.com/products/compupic/unix/ Get a trial version rpm here: http://www.photodex.com/downloads/platforms/linux.html Sometimes, when I need an even more complete app I use Corel PhotoPaint 9 for Linux, but it's tricky to install. There's the Gimp of course, if you can figure it out...I guess you have at least somewhat. Lately my favorite thumbnail viewer/organizer is Danpei, which will also call up a either simple viewer, ImagMagick or the Gimp directly from within Danpei. Very cool little app. I use it everyday now. Check it out here: http://danpei.sourceforge.net/ You'll have to install from a tarball or .src.rpm. Probably more info than anyone wanted...oh well...

Here's the link for the upgrade deal: http://www.netraverse.com/upgrade/

pmpatrick, I'll post a link to the cheap upgrade later when I'm at home. NeTravese sends some special offers to mailing list members first sometimes, and that's one of 'em. emh, I think that list is kinda like Linux hardware lists - just 'cause something's not there, doesn't necessarily mean it does or doesn't work. But in this case, I'm sure I've seen somewhere - maybe in the manual? - that midi is not yet supported. And I think a while back there was a post from a developer that said, or at least hinted at, that they were working on it. Search the mailing list archives. If you really want the inside skinny on what's happening with Win4Lin and midi, or anything else for that matter, post to the mailing list. You'll find out a lot more than just going through the documentation - they're not gonna give away any secrets there about what's under development.

emh, See my quote above from the NeTravese website announcement. Notice there's no specific mention of midi there in the part about "Improved Audio Integration", but I'm sure it's in the works. You can ask the developers questions directly on the Win4Lin-Users mailing list. They check in and answer questions there several times a day. There is no more helpful software company around than NeTraverse. Go there, leave a post, and you'll get the answers you need as to if, when or how. Here's the links: Win4Lin website: www.netraverse.com To subscribe to the Win4Lin-Users mailing list: win4lin-users-feed@netraverse.com The list address: win4lin-users@netraverse.com The list archives: https://www.netraverse.com:9100/lists/

Did the upgrade to Win4Lin 5.0 last night. I took advantage of a limited-time offer to upgrade for $30. Didn't really *need* to upgrade, but I wanted to support NeTravese for doing such a great job, especially with customer support. Went perfectly, as expected. Everything works exactly as before but a shade faster, meaning Win4Lin 5 is very quick indeed. NeTraverse claims and apparently rightfully so, that video performance is improved, particularly drawing bitmaps. That includes everything from photos to toolbars, so a nice if subtle improvement there. I've now upgraded my original installation at least 5-6 times without reinstalling from scratch, probably more, I haven't counted. It started as Win4Lin3 and has now been upgraded to v4 and now v5 with several minor upgrades in between with zero problems. Very good. Haven't tried the DirectX support. I don't have or need anything that uses it. Besides, I only have DirectX 4 installed and no intention of upgrading, so I'll leave testing DirectX support for someone else here.

This is very, VERY bad news. Why, after 30 years of UNIX, does Microsoft suddenly feel the need to buy a UNIX license? It can only be the 1st step of a much larger plan to put the wood to IBM and Linux. Remember years ago, Microsoft put up something like $165 million to bail out Apple, but on the condition Apple would not compete directly with Microsoft, i.e. sell no x86 compatible operating systems, which is mainly why there is no version of OSX for the PC. Eliminated Apple as a serious OS competitor, but meanwhile Microsoft can sell Apple-compatible software like Office and make money from Apple's continued exsistence. Sweet! Microsoft likely is going to do something similar for SCO - put up the money for their legal fight (SCO really doesn't have it) and bail out SCO but on the condition that SCO does not compete directly with Microsoft, i.e.not allow use of their code in Linux for the PC. Eliminates Linux as a serious OS competitor, but meanwhile Microsoft can sell UNIX-compatible software and make money from UNIX's continued existence. Sweet! Or, after looking over SCO's code, they may decide SCO does have a great case and just buy SCO - and thereby Linux. End of their problem, but just the start of ours. The only good thing I see in all this is the fact that SCO sold Linux themselves, released under the GPL. That might save Linux in general, but maybe not IBM's ass.