Vdubjunkie

Hello all.. I am nearly completely converted to Linux, and very rarely need to boot to doze, but it seems to be difficult to find a good video editor. In Windoze I could use Adobe Premier or something, but I have yet to find a substitute in Linux. Basically I am wanting to be able to chop and join for the most part. Anybody got any good ideas.

Well said. The terminal is the way to get stuff done efficiently. Now vnc across an ssh encrypted channel, that's an idea. Unfortunately I'm having trouble getting that to work

That's right. Aru won't only tell you how to autologin, but launch half a dozen of your favorite apps with a tight little menu taking arrow keys and enter keys to browse through their myriad of options, and pop open the cd tray for you.... ok, so he might not tell you, but he could do it! I'm surprised at you. We're using Linux here and you think something's not possible! :x :P

dont know if ur still having problems, but this is what I had to do. Im using tightvnc which came pre installed on MD 9.0, but I had the same problem as you. When you first run "vncserver" from the command line it asks you to specify a password for client connections. After it completes you have a ".vnc" folder in your home directory. Yes you do have to do a ls -A to see this since it is hidden. Anyway, use your favorite editor, eg: vi ~/.vnc/xstartup and edit the xstartup file in this new folder. untouched the file has a line at the bottom like this: "twm &" What is that? It's that bare bones X session you saw when you vnc'd in. What I did was to comment that out by making it look like this: "# twm &" - mind you without the quotes Then I followed up by adding the following line.. exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc What is that? It's the file that the "startx" command locates on my computer (and likely yours also) to start up your window manager. I figured this out by reading through the /usr/X11R6/bin/startx script and seeing what it was doing. No, I am hardly a coder, but enough to do that. There are a couple of other places it might look to know what to do when you call the startx command, but that was the first one I found. Basically what this does is tell the vncserver to look in the normal place the computer looks when you sign on locally for a window manager. Hope this helps.

I've got a question for somebody "in the know." I'd like to use dd to make a perfect copy of the various partitions in my running OS to another disk essentially to migrate from one drive to another and remove the original drive. Do I have to boot to a cd or floppy with a basic linux OS on it to get a perfect copy, or will it copy everything using dd while I am running the OS from the partitions I am copying? I know Windoze wouldn't even begin to work properly if you attempted such an act.

Well, as it turns out I had a disk in the machine which used to run NT4. I haven't booted to NT4 in.... lemme see now... a REALLY long time, so I simply pulled a new install on that drive. Cool thing was it found and installed my scsi raid array. Anyway, what I am wondering is, since I do still have the ability to try to fix the original install, by removing all reference to the partition it is supposed to boot to, how is it going to know where to boot? I do afterall prefer to figure out how I could have fixed this problem instead of pulling a reinstall as I did.

ok. that was cool, i was able to run mkinitrd (which seemed to be caught in an endless loop with an error so i killed it) and lilo. The problem is this. Lilo complained that it could not find /dev/hdd. Truly, /dev/hdd didn't exist anymore. Neither did /mnt/dev/hdd for that matter. Aaaargh!!! What do I do now?

Actually, no I didn't mount first prior to trying chroot /mnt. The article I read didn't specify that. When I get home in the morning I will try that to see if it works. Oh yeah, I guess I was kind of vague. Right toward the end of the install procedure the install process asks you what device to boot from and offers /dev/hda as the default. Funny thing there was that after I edited the lilo.conf file and reran the upgrade it had /dev/hdd as the default. I did not know initrd.img wasn't necessary. However if I can successfully run lilo, I would imagine I would be able to run mkinitrd as well, right? That is good to know though, thanks. Perhaps I should do some hardcore boot process edumacation. This is what I love about problems in Linux. You figure out so much in the process of "fixing" it. :P

Ok, so I finally broke down and decided to upgrade my server from 8.2 to 9.0. Everything installed fine, that is until I had a nice brain fart and agreed to let it try to boot from /dev/hda. My /boot (as well as all other partitions of any use to the OS) are on /dev/hdd. No problem, right? I'll just use the rescue disk to get to lilo.conf and adjust it, then run /sbin/lilo. Well, since the rescue disk mounts everything to /mnt I can edit /mnt/etc/lilo.conf, but when I run /mnt/sbin/lilo it complains because nothing is where it is supposed to be. It doesn't know to prepend /mnt to everything. Next I read to drop right to a shell in the rescue disk and type "chroot /mnt" which is supposed to mount everything to / as it should be. Well, that failed too :mad: Then I read on and saw where one guy said after upgrading that his /boot/initrd-<kernel version> file didn't get created. Guess what, neither did mine. In fact the old one got wasted too. So, the symlink "initrd" points to nothing, and I should use mkinitrd to create the new initrd-<kernel version>, right? Sure, except that the kernel version folder isn't where it expects it to be. I backed up mkinitrd and edited it so that everything I could find in there referenced /mnt..., but it still failed looking for things under their native location. HEEEELP!!!! I don't know what to do. I've even tried to re-upgrade hoping LILO would get fixed, but no luck.

Once again aru, your bash knowledge is dizzying to me! I guess practice makes perfect!

I'm preparing to "clone" my xbox hdd to a hdd my friend intends to use in his xbox. There are several ways mentioned to do this, but when I saw a tutorial for doing it with Linux my choice was clear! :wink: Anyway, both drives are 120GB, but likely slightly different block sizes overall I'm sure. I haven't seen his drive yet. Anyway, the tutorial creates 1GB image files with the intention of inspecting them, or transferring them elsewhere, but the author mentioned the idea that you should be able to do a clone with the following script.. Again, with file size limits, the blocks/sectors may need to be copied in chunks. You could dd something like this: dd if=/dev/hd2 of=/dev/hd1 ibs=512 obs=512 count=n dd if=/dev/hd2 of=/dev/hd1 ibs=512 obs=512 skip=n count=n dd if=/dev/hd2 of=/dev/hd1 ibs=512 obs=512 skip=n*2 count=n dd if=/dev/hd2 of=/dev/hd1 ibs=512 obs=512 skip=n*3 count=n : : : : etc. Replace n for the count and skip options with the correct block numbers similar to the image script. What I am wondering here is if anybody sees any reason this would not work, and whether I could keep the "n" and define it's value prior to the sequence? Or, if not, can I do something like 1000516608*2 ..*3 ..*4, etc. Typically as Aru knows I'd like a push in the right direction, but here I am hoping to just get exactly what changes I might need to make as I will likely be performing this operation under time constraints and have so many other projects I should be working on.. ...as always.. Any help is greatly appreciated! :mystismiles:

yes I did open the file system. I read up a tutorial on it, and followed it. However, it was written for ext2 and I run ext3. I sort of temporarily gave up on this venture. I would still be interested in knowing if somebody out there has any successful experience with this procedure.

Man, have I got myself into a mess this time.. I decided to "upgrade" gcc when it failed to compile something or other recently. This did not turn out to be smooth. I wound up deleting the gcc file itself and also it's bed fellows. The idea was that I would simply d/l a rpm and pop it back in there. That didn't work at all, so I got the bright idea to compile from source the latest package from gnu.org on my other linux box (where gcc works splendidly) and then move the files over to the non functioning box to perform make install. This appeared to work, however, when attempting to compile some other packages I got errors stating that gcc could not create executables. Also, almost everything rpm based I try with the age old rpm -ivh or rpm -Uvh method which has worked so well for me in the past errors out with "Segmentation Fault." I don't know enough about the rpm process. I believed it did not require a c compiler and that was why you could use it to install a c compiler if you didn't already have one, but it seems funny that it all of a sudden decided to fail just when my c compiler hit the fan. Anybody out there got any suggestions for things to look at? I am desperate here. This is my friggin print/file server!

Thanks for saying sorry SoulSe, I guess we all have bad days sometimes. lets hope this thread continues peacefully. I don't want to start deleting posts. Anon. Moderator Fact is Soul made a very vaild point. A guy posts a question and instead of being pointed in the right direction, he is attacked over his choice. Seems to me a better reply could have been: Go to the following links to help you config dual monitor. http:.... http:.... by the way, in my humble opinion (IMHO if you prefer) that card isn't much better than another for less money. Just a thought. More people might make the plunge into the world of linux if they saw friendly helpful people assisting noobs with their questions.

guys.. thanks, but I'm sorry. My problem isn't really a lack of understanding how to access the drive. I just provided as much detail as I could to paint a clear picture of what the setup was like. It isn't a combo. It simply does not mount anything. Yes, I have tried various programs, but if I'm not mistaken, if you can't mount it as root regardless of media, etc. then you pretty much can't use it. History goes like this. After installing 9.0 it worked. I could mount and umount and use Ogle, MediaPlayer, etc. All of a sudden one day I tried to mount a cdr or something and it actually locked my terminal. The light on the drive went solid and I wound up killing the terminal and walking away. Since then I have attempted with the same result and mounted the /dev's at various points in the chain of symlinks. No go. I'm sure there is a reason I could root out with enough patience, but I would really like to figure out how to make the system find the hardware and install it all without having to reboot even more than figuring out what got whacked. Anybody have any thoughts on doing that? Also, I am preparing to add a usb zip drive to it and figured the same procedure would be helpful there. Any help would make me very happy!!

Well, here is my latest. Actually I've been having problems for some time. The symlink from /dev/dvd is to /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 which is a symlink to /dev/ide/host0/bus1/target1/lun0/cd. That is cool, I understand that. All about what ide channel, etc. My server though has a cdrw and it "emulates" scsi. I think that is because of the nature of cd burning. Just putting that out there to be corrected if I'm wrong. Basically my problem is that I cannot seem to mount this dvd and read from it to save my life. I've tried changing my /etc/fstab to point at various points in the "chain" /dev/cdrom0.. /dev/cdroms/cdrom0..etc. My next thought was to simply "remove" it and prompt linux to find it again and reinstall it. My problem is that I have no idea how to do that. What I'd like to know is what all needs to be removed and how to prompt the system to find the drive and install it again without rebooting. I'm sure this is possible. One of the great advantages of linux, right? As usual.. anybody who can help me.. i would be greatly appreciative.

Thanks aru. Once again, you know just what to do. I've been quite busy lately, but perhaps tonight I'll try to get this all working.

hokay, here is from my machine.. ...and from theirs. ..so..? the module wasn't loaded? this is a grey area for me.

I'm trying to help a friend get their audio working, and have never had any audio probs of my own, so this is new to me.. What I've found is that the syslog tells us Linux recognizes the soundchip.' Checking my own syslog (on a machine with functioning audio), I noticed that following the recognition of the sound chip, it seems to "load" it. I do wonder about the "Can't locate..." lines on my own, but that's not the major issue here. The major issue is that I see nothing like that whatsoever in their syslog. I'm sure I need to determine if a driver is installed, and if a /dev has been created, but I just don't know what to look for. Help is always appreciated!! :P

I deleted a file I would like back and read a few tutorials all of which declared ext3 would be able to use same methods as ext2. So, at that I began attempting to use debugfs to tackle this project.. I got hung up pretty quickly though. upon entering the lsdel command I get the error previously listed... lsdel: Filesystem not open searching the internet has come up a total bust. Anybody have any thoughts on this? :shock:

Hey guys, I was looking to burn udf cdrws for my xbox since I only have one doze machine left and done have a cdrw in it. Here is a post on our own MDusers.org.. http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php...6&highlight=udf Doesn't look too promising at the moment. I have found a few other things on the net that seem to imply basically the same thing.. recompile the kernel? Aaagh. I have been putting off that one for a while now, and I am in a here and now position. I'd rather purchase an el cheapo cdrw drive for da doze box!! :o

ok, sorry to not just give you the answer, but if you are like me, you will like the challenge with a little nudge. i dont think evo has you define which browser, but maybe you can with a evo config file in your ~ dir or something. im thinking that it uses your default session browser. Seems to me that I just read in my startx or xinitrc file about setting default browser.. something like "whichmozilla" or "whichnetscape" or "whichlynx" strings of code. What I guess I would do is to see if a url in something else pulled up the same browser that evo is pulling up. That would help you lean to the idea that it is the "session default browser" if there is such a term. hope it helps some..

hey guys, that is a bunch of great info. Thanks. I especially like the slocate and the rpm -qa | grep <whatever> So, I got past a whole bunch of errors and determined a bunch of packages mplayer 1586 gui needed which were never mentioned, but since I am vnc'ing to the box, the color depth wasn't sufficient, so I have yet to see if there will be any further errors.. However.. I do believe you have all given me a bunch of good tools and methods to get past them. Like I said before, "what a support group we have here!!" :mystismiles: oh yeah.. in case I'm not the only freak of this type out there, I wanted to let everyone know that a good majority of all of my installation, configuration, etc. is all done from a terminal window... plus it is usually a putty window from work!! Just like my motto says below..

i have yet to get mplayer gui working , but it is great from cmd line, and Xine is also very difficult to get working, so as long as you are doing it the hard way, do the media player preferred by most for it's sheer ass kicking ability.. mplayer Like cannonfodder said, Ogle is great for dvd, and not that darned hard to get going either.. imagine that.