'Quick Hacks 8.1' are a loose collection of work arounds,
quick fixes and tips for Mandrake Linux 8.1. They are meant as a supplement
to the official
8.1 errata page, not as a replacement.
You are invited to contribute your
'Quick Hacks' as well!
Problem:
On some mainboards, 'printerdrake' can lock up the system
completely during printer detection.
Cause:
Unknown if kernel or 'printerdrake' related.
Solution:
"Turn off the automatic printer detection in printerdrake,
and choose the printer model manually.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to turn off the auto-detection in printerdrake
shipped with ML 8.1, so you need to replace the /usr/lib/libDrakX/printerdrake.pm
file with a newer version.
At this moment, the new version of printerdrake.pm is available on linuxprinting.org.
Download it, overwrite the old version with the new one, and your new printerdrake
will offer you a possibility to skip auto-detection when setting up a local
printer with it."
(Source: MandrakeForum)
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Problem:
Printing quality on some printers under 8.1 appears
to be worse than in 8.0 (if working at all).
Cause:
Wrong 'recommended driver' is chosen from the database
when using 'printerdrake' in dumb mode.
Solution:
Use 'printerdrake' in 'Expert mode' to choose another
printer driver, or update printer related package via
unsupported/8.1/i586.
See this
article on MandrakeForum for more detailed information and instructions.
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Problem:
You can't 'ping' a machine behind a firewalled machine.
Furthermore services opened via the graphical configuration utility are not
available to clients on the local network.
Cause:
The graphical configuration utility (Mandrake Control
Center - Security - Firewalling) only configures 'public services' but not
'internal services' and furthermore lacks an option to configure the 'ping-ability'.
Solution:
Edit the configuration file of the firewall directly
(as 'root'). The file is called '/etc/Bastille/bastille-firewall.cfg' and
is well commented.
Keep in mind that in order for changes to this file to take effect, you'll
have to restart the firewall (as 'root') with these commands:
service bastille-firewall stop
service bastille-firewall start The options in question here are
TCP(UDP)_PUBLIC_SERVICES
TCP(UDP)_INTERNAL_SERVICES
ICMP_ALLOWED_TYPES
The first two allow you to determine which services
or servers running on your machine will either be available for the internal
network or for the external network or for both.
'Internal network' describes the machines in your local network (e.g. your
wife's computer, your laptop etc) whereas 'external network' usually describes
computers connected to the Internet.
By default all services and servers running on your machine are blocked to
all other machines by the firewall. If you want to make them available either
to local clients or to the Internet at large, you have to provide either
the ports to be opened or the name of the service as options to one or both
parameters.
Let's say you want to make access to your SSH server
possible for local clients only:
TCP_INTERNAL_SERVICES="ssh"
would do the trick as would
TCP_INTERNAL_SERVICES="22"
since '/etc/services' lists port 22 as the one used
by SSH (I prefer specifying the port). External computer remain blocked from
the SSH server.
Notice that in order to provide a service to internal and external
clients, you'll have to add that service to TCP_INTERNAL_SERVICES and
TCP_PUBLIC_SERVICES.
In most cases opening the UDP port isn't necessary, although you might have
to experiment here.
To allow your machine to be 'ping'ed' from other computers, you'll have to
edit the options to ICMP_ALLOWED_TYPES. By default you can't 'ping' your firewalled
machine from another.
To change this, you have to add a certain 'allowed type' ('echo-request')
to this parameter in the configuration file:
ICMP_ALLOWED_TYPES="destination-unreachable echo-reply
time-exceeded echo-request"
Now restart the firewall and you will now be able to
ping your machine from everywhere else.
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Problem:
Sometimes LiLo refuses to boot the kernel from the hard
disk, displaying error messages like:
crc error
or
invalid compression format
Error messages usually only occur when dismissing the
graphical boot menu with ESC and booting LiLo from the boot prompt.
Cause:
Unknown. These errors are usually attributed to bad
media files or corrupt kernel images, but these do not apply to standard
kernel images on hard disks. Maybe hardware related (Promise controllers).
Solution:
Use GRUB instead. Go to Mandrake Control Center: Boot
- Boot Config. Click on 'Configure' button. Choose GRUB from the bootloader
menu and click OK. You'll be presented with a configuration based on your
old LiLo setup which should do in most cases.
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Problem: No access to Kodak digital cameras (like the
DC3400), neither with gphoto 0.4 nor with gphoto2.
Cause:"Kernel 2.4.8 delivered with Mandrake Linux 8.1
fails to make a dc2xx device file in /dev/usb directory, which prevents gphoto
0.4 from working properly. On the other hand, the dc2xx modul which is needed
to access this camera with gphoto 0.4 DOES get loaded, and prevents gphoto2
from working properly."
Solution: "Thus, if you have a Kodak camera, connect
it to your PC using a USB cable, type lsmod to see if the dc2xx
module was loaded, unload it using rmmod dc2xx (as 'root'),
and gphoto2 should work fine."
(Source: MandrakeForum
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Problem: Compiling a kernel from the 8.1 standard kernel-source-2.4.8-26mdk
inevitably fails with various errors (usually ATM related).
Cause: Unknown.
Solution: Before running the configuration
process with 'make [x|menu]config', run this command:
make mrproper
Notice that this command will also delete the standard
'.config' file from the kernel source root directory. However, there's a
copy called '/boot/config-2.4.8-34.1mdk' which you can copy and rename to
'.config' in order to have Mandrake's default kernel configuration as a template.
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