The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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Combat Pretzel: Jun 23, 2004; No, seriously... what kurds?!

fret logic posted:

Are there any drivers for the Creative X-Fi sound card? Or any way that I can get some sound in Linux? I'm dual booting with Ubuntu and can't get sound to work, and read that the X-Fi cards are closed source, and that they don't have ALSA support.

http://www.opensound.com

Don't expect anything special though, their driver is pretty basic, since Creative released their register specs not long ago.

I'm using these in Solaris (OSS is multiplatform) to use my dusty X-Fi and they're good and stable enough for simple music listening (e.g. with mpd) or movie watching (e.g. with mplayer).

# ? Feb 27, 2008 20:59

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# ? Apr 29, 2024 15:55

Grey Area: Sep 9, 2000; Battle Without Honor or Humanity

MeramJert posted:

Well, my Gentoo installation is on /dev/hdb, but right now grub is running on /dev/hda, and I want to keep it that way. Is this potentially a problem? (I'm sure this is a very simple problem. I'm just very new to linux)

OK, I'm going to go ahead and assume your /boot directory is on the same device as your / directory. What setup(hd0) will do is to install Grub stage1 on the Master Boot Record of the first hard drive. STAGE1 will be configured to load stage2 from (hd1,0) or whatever it's set to in /boot/grub/menu.lst, and start the kernel specified in menu.lst

Basically, the BIOS will only load the 512 byte master boot record from the first disk and the rest from (hd1). You can also install grub into the second disk (setup (hd1)) and change the boot order in the BIOS setup utility if you don't want to touch the MBR on (hd0) for some reason.

# ? Feb 28, 2008 16:22

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

Alowishus posted:

I think you're still missing some parts... or I am not clear on the rest of your Apache config. First of all, is the 404 page you're getting served out of Zope? Sounds like it is... that's definitely an indicator that the rewrite isn't working. From the snippet you posted, I can see why - all you did was turn the engine on, but you didn't give it any rules.

But here's the thing - I would have expected RewriteEngine to already be on in order for Apache to sit in front of Zope. Can you post the chunk of Apache config where it's wired up to serve the Zope content? If it's not a Rewrite thing, I'd guess it's a ProxyPass setup.

What sort of line am I looking for? I cant find any mention of zope in my apache.conf file nor did "/.fs" give me any results.

# ? Feb 28, 2008 21:07

fret logic: Mar 8, 2005; roffle

Toiletbrush posted:

http://www.opensound.com

Don't expect anything special though, their driver is pretty basic, since Creative released their register specs not long ago.

I'm using these in Solaris (OSS is multiplatform) to use my dusty X-Fi and they're good and stable enough for simple music listening (e.g. with mpd) or movie watching (e.g. with mplayer).

No luck, keep getting errors under Sound menu when I try to detect either ALSA OSS or Autodetect, just keeps saying "audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Could not open resource for writing."

# ? Feb 28, 2008 21:24

feld: Feb 11, 2008; Out of nowhere its.....

Feldman

fret logic posted:

Are there any drivers for the Creative X-Fi sound card? Or any way that I can get some sound in Linux? I'm dual booting with Ubuntu and can't get sound to work, and read that the X-Fi cards are closed source, and that they don't have ALSA support.

Creative released their own drivers for X-Fi in Linux but only support AMD64.

http://opensource.creative.com/soundcard.html

# ? Feb 28, 2008 21:44

Mysterious Aftertaste: May 20, 2004; So Marigold, my love, you've had too much to drink...

feld posted:

Creative released their own drivers for X-Fi in Linux but only support AMD64.

That's quite odd.

# ? Feb 28, 2008 22:32

deimos: Nov 30, 2006; Forget it man this bat is whack, it's got poobrain!

Mysterious Aftertaste posted:

That's quite odd.

It's pretty much proof to my suspicions that no one in creative knows how to code drivers and that they have been riding their first generation of engineer's awesome drivers all this time (those DOS drivers rocked).

# ? Feb 29, 2008 00:21

fret logic: Mar 8, 2005; roffle

feld posted:

Creative released their own drivers for X-Fi in Linux but only support AMD64.

http://opensource.creative.com/soundcard.html

Haha I've been to that page twice already but didn't read below where it says Creative released X-Fi drivers, let's hope this works

Well poo poo, it says it only supports 64bit Operating Systems, which I don't get why it's saying that when I have a AMD brisbane 4800+ with Gutsy Gibbon AMD64 version, weird.

fret logic fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Feb 29, 2008

# ? Feb 29, 2008 03:42

Mr. DNA: Aug 9, 2004; Megatronics?

Is it possible to have wget login to the SA forums so that it can download a page that you must be registered in order to see? I tried following a few guides I found through Google but nothing seemed to work. Thanks for any help.

# ? Feb 29, 2008 05:40

waffle iron: Jan 16, 2004

Mr. DNA posted:

Is it possible to have wget login to the SA forums so that it can download a page that you must be registered in order to see? I tried following a few guides I found through Google but nothing seemed to work. Thanks for any help.

Run wget and use the argument --load-cookies FILE where FILE is your cookies.txt (probably from your Mozilla or Firefox profile).

This is just a technical answer, if you plan to run a bot or grab more than a couple pages or someshit, ask as admin for permission first.

# ? Feb 29, 2008 05:52

Mr. DNA: Aug 9, 2004; Megatronics?

waffle iron posted:

Run wget and use the argument --load-cookies FILE where FILE is your cookies.txt (probably from your Mozilla or Firefox profile).

Thanks for the answer, it worked like a charm. I'm just grabbing a single page occasionally, but I'll ask an admin just to be safe.

# ? Feb 29, 2008 14:25

Combat Pretzel: Jun 23, 2004; No, seriously... what kurds?!

fret logic posted:

No luck, keep getting errors under Sound menu when I try to detect either ALSA OSS or Autodetect, just keeps saying "audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Could not open resource for writing."

Although the Linux version of OSS comes with ALSA emulation, you should really try to use native OSS when using it. There's probably no OSS gstreamer plugin installed on your system, considering how some distros treat OpenSound like a red headed stepchild due to ALSA propaganda.

If osstest generates output, OSS works.

# ? Feb 29, 2008 17:27

Alowishus: Jan 8, 2002; My name is Mud

rugbert posted:

What sort of line am I looking for? I cant find any mention of zope in my apache.conf file nor did "/.fs" give me any results.

I'm not really sure what to tell you, outside of my guess that the line isn't actually going to say anything about Zope but will instead have some sort of Rewrite or ProxyPass verbage to it.

The usual setup is that Zope listens on a higher non-standard port (like 9673 on one of my Debian systems), and then Apache sits on the standard HTTP port 80 and listens for requests. It redirects most of those requests via proxy to the Zope system listening on the non-standard port. You need to figure out this mechanism so that Apache can be told not to redirect certain requests (the ones for your webalizer stats).

It's also possible that Zope itself is serving the webpages and Apache has nothing to do with it. Do you not have access to the person who set this up in the first place? If you can find the zope.conf file for your site instance (likely somewhere under /etc), it may give some clues. If Zope is configured to listen on port 80, then it's doing all the web serving itself.

# ? Feb 29, 2008 20:51

Marinmo: Jan 23, 2005; Prisoner #95H522 Augustus Hill

Toiletbrush posted:

Although the Linux version of OSS comes with ALSA emulation, you should really try to use native OSS when using it. There's probably no OSS gstreamer plugin installed on your system, considering how some distros treat OpenSound like a red headed stepchild due to ALSA propaganda.

If osstest generates output, OSS works.

What are the advantages of OSS compared to ALSA nowadays? I've always only used ALSA because it supported multiple outputs on the same card while OSS didn't (if I remember it right) back in 1997 when I last tried it.

Then again I never use gstreamer either, I hate the framework and have never really got it to work properly to be honest and when mplayer+alsa worked just fine I never really bothered to try to make gstreamer do aswell.

# ? Feb 29, 2008 21:02

lol internet.: Sep 4, 2007; the internet makes you stupid

Can amarok connect to an itunes media server from a nas?

# ? Feb 29, 2008 23:26

Combat Pretzel: Jun 23, 2004; No, seriously... what kurds?!

Just stumbled over a site with tons of vim color schemes. And it even includes previews with samples in C, HTML, Java, Perl and Latex.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/

Marinmo posted:

What are the advantages of OSS compared to ALSA nowadays? I've always only used ALSA because it supported multiple outputs on the same card while OSS didn't (if I remember it right) back in 1997 when I last tried it.

ALSA was started because everyone has had their panties in a bunch over 4Front not open sourcing OSS back then, which resulted in an open source reimplementation that wasn't being maintained anymore shortly after doing it. So ALSA was started to make things better, which they practically aren't, if you're to believe people having coded against it (they call it ugly and buggy). Meanwhile 4Front kept working on OSS, implementing a lot of hardware support, evolving their interfaces, which are said to be superior and still defacto standard.

Now that 4Front released the sources not so long ago, we'll see what happens. That the ALSA folks keep spreading FUD about OSS doesn't help (basically claiming that OSS is as backwards as their unmaintained reimplementation, similar to your 1997 impressions).

# ? Mar 1, 2008 01:45

x1o: Aug 5, 2005; My focus is UNPARALLELED!

Yes, but have OSS fixed the issue where you could only play one sound at a time? I got incredibly annoying when I had to restart Firefox just so I could get sound for a flash animation, because mplayer had monopolised OSS even though I quit the program.

# ? Mar 1, 2008 05:32

Combat Pretzel: Jun 23, 2004; No, seriously... what kurds?!

Yes they did. Very long time ago already. No matter what the other sound system/server types say. If your device has hardware mixing, it'll be used. If not, OSS will use a transparent software mixer.

Proof's in the pudding (no hardware mixing because the X-Fi driver is bare skeleton right now):

# ? Mar 1, 2008 13:05

Rescue Toaster: Mar 13, 2003

Samba performance is so bad it has caused me to start smoking again.

I have Debian up & running on my little NAS machine. Getting md Raid 5 configured during install was a breeze and the machine was a snap to setup.

Setting up the samba shares/permissions took a little time but I think I have it behaving correctly.

Connecting to the samba shares from a Win XP machine, I can transfer files *extremely* fast. In excess of 60MB/s with my gigabit setup. The transfer begins instantly and finishes normally with no apparent hangs/trouble at all.

EDIT: Cut out me talking about various media player skipping/dropping frames problems because I discovered this more clear source of the problem...

While I can copy files TO the samba machine at speeds in excess of 60MB/s, copying files BACK (from the samba share to my Win XP machine's local HD) is about 1/250th as fast. A 1 GB file takes ~15 seconds to copy to the samba machine and over an hour to copy back. Speed from Win XP -> Samba machine= ~533 Mbit, from Samba -> Win XP machine= 2 Mbit (tops).

Rescue Toaster fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Mar 2, 2008

# ? Mar 2, 2008 02:22

deimos: Nov 30, 2006; Forget it man this bat is whack, it's got poobrain!

Rescue Toaster posted:

Samba

What filesystem? Samba plays much nicer with some FSes than others, XFS is one of the better ones IIRC, ext3 one of the worst.

# ? Mar 2, 2008 03:28

Rescue Toaster: Mar 13, 2003

deimos posted:

What filesystem? Samba plays much nicer with some FSes than others, XFS is one of the better ones IIRC, ext3 one of the worst.

Yeah, it's ext3... but I can WRITE to the drive at over 60MB/s when copying to the samba share, and read from it at only 2Mb/s when reading from it. The very, very, very little helpfull information I've found online shows it happens independent of hard drive types or filesystem.

EDIT: Turns out the default kernel module for the Realtek RTL8111-series network cards has extremely bad performance w/ samba when sending data out. Replacing the R8169 module with the one downloaded from realtek's site (R8168) almost totally fixed it. It's still asymmetric... 60MB to samba, 40MB/s from samba, but it's usable. Those network controllers are pretty common on Intel's ICH9 systems so I hope debian/ubuntu switch the default driver.

Rescue Toaster fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Mar 2, 2008

# ? Mar 2, 2008 03:49

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

deimos posted:

What filesystem? Samba plays much nicer with some FSes than others, XFS is one of the better ones IIRC, ext3 one of the worst.

Yea Ive noticed that, it seems that I cant access anything stored on a ext3 file system. I always get some error thats just a long string of numbers, but I can access my NTFS externals just fine.

So I guess I'll try XFS

# ? Mar 3, 2008 17:01

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

Alowishus posted:

I'm not really sure what to tell you, outside of my guess that the line isn't actually going to say anything about Zope but will instead have some sort of Rewrite or ProxyPass verbage to it.

The usual setup is that Zope listens on a higher non-standard port (like 9673 on one of my Debian systems), and then Apache sits on the standard HTTP port 80 and listens for requests. It redirects most of those requests via proxy to the Zope system listening on the non-standard port. You need to figure out this mechanism so that Apache can be told not to redirect certain requests (the ones for your webalizer stats).

It's also possible that Zope itself is serving the webpages and Apache has nothing to do with it. Do you not have access to the person who set this up in the first place? If you can find the zope.conf file for your site instance (likely somewhere under /etc), it may give some clues. If Zope is configured to listen on port 80, then it's doing all the web serving itself.

aha! It's located in the virtual host file:

code:

	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/zroot
	RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} 137\.18\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3} [OR]
	RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} 143\.(228|231)\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}
        RewriteRule ^/zroot(.*) http://127.0.0.1:1080/VirtualHostBase/https/[/url]%{HTTP_HOST}:443
/VirtualHostRoot/_vh_zroot$1 [L,P]

rugbert fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Mar 3, 2008

# ? Mar 3, 2008 17:19

Same Great Paste: Jan 14, 2006

Are there any LiveCDs which come with a version of WireShark that will decode the gzip-encoded content of HTTP/TCP streams when you view them?

The latest version I've been able to find (on a LiveCD) is 0.99.6 - and that doesn't seem to do it. Some light googling later, apparently only the newer versions of WireShark can do it (automatically?).

Either that, or I'm using it wrong - which is entirely possible.

Same Great Paste fucked around with this message at 11:48 on Mar 4, 2008

# ? Mar 4, 2008 11:37

deimos: Nov 30, 2006; Forget it man this bat is whack, it's got poobrain!

Same Great Paste posted:

Are there any LiveCDs which come with a version of WireShark that will decode the gzip-encoded content of HTTP/TCP streams when you view them?

The latest version I've been able to find (on a LiveCD) is 0.99.6 - and that doesn't seem to do it. Some light googling later, apparently only the newer versions of WireShark can do it (automatically?).

Either that, or I'm using it wrong - which is entirely possible.

Did you try BT3? I don't have my USB stick with it here but it generally has pretty updated tools.

# ? Mar 4, 2008 14:30

Same Great Paste: Jan 14, 2006

deimos posted:

Did you try BT3? I don't have my USB stick with it here but it generally has pretty updated tools.

Yeah, that was the last one I tried before posting - it's 0.99.6, and doesn't decode the gzip parts. Still more recent than Knoppix, though - which is stuck with .4 .

# ? Mar 4, 2008 14:47

Twlight: Feb 18, 2005; I brag about getting free drinks from my boss to make myself feel superior; Fun Shoe

Hello everyone

I'm running a FC5 server and I want to send email from this server to my gmail address. We already have a mail server at work but I'm not sure how to configure sendmail to work with an existing email server. I'm not really sure how to google for this type of question most results just show how to configure sendmail as a standalone email server.

Thanks

# ? Mar 4, 2008 16:03

Alowishus: Jan 8, 2002; My name is Mud

rugbert posted:

aha! It's located in the virtual host file

Ok good... well you may have already done this, but now that you know where the rules are, go back to my previous post with my rewrite examples and see if you can adopt those for your situation. At least you'll be able to test now and see some results...

# ? Mar 4, 2008 16:30

Alowishus: Jan 8, 2002; My name is Mud

Twlight posted:

We already have a mail server at work but I'm not sure how to configure sendmail to work with an existing email server.

You need to configure sendmail to use a smarthost (where the smarthost is your existing mailserver):

code:

define(`SMART_HOST',`[smarthost.example.net]')dnl

That has to go into sendmail.mc and then you have to generate a new sendmail.cf. If that's not something familiar to you, I really recommend 'yum install postfix' followed by 'yum remove sendmail'. Postfix isn't nearly as retardedly difficult to configure as sendmail is... you'll be able to just read through the comments in /etc/postfix/main.cf and make pretty good sense of everything ("relayhost" would be the Postfix parameter for this particular situation).

# ? Mar 4, 2008 16:34

deimos: Nov 30, 2006; Forget it man this bat is whack, it's got poobrain!

Same Great Paste posted:

Yeah, that was the last one I tried before posting - it's 0.99.6, and doesn't decode the gzip parts. Still more recent than Knoppix, though - which is stuck with .4 .

Have you thought about just using a BT3 install on a USB drive so you can update the tools? It's what I do.

edit: ohh and to make sure I can boot off it I use this trick in both floppy and CD form.

deimos fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Mar 4, 2008

# ? Mar 4, 2008 16:35

Twlight: Feb 18, 2005; I brag about getting free drinks from my boss to make myself feel superior; Fun Shoe

Alowishus posted:

You need to configure sendmail to use a smarthost (where the smarthost is your existing mailserver):
code:
define(`SMART_HOST',`[smarthost.example.net]')dnl
That has to go into sendmail.mc and then you have to generate a new sendmail.cf. If that's not something familiar to you, I really recommend 'yum install postfix' followed by 'yum remove sendmail'. Postfix isn't nearly as retardedly difficult to configure as sendmail is... you'll be able to just read through the comments in /etc/postfix/main.cf and make pretty good sense of everything ("relayhost" would be the Postfix parameter for this particular situation).

I'm going to try and do this through sendmail. I might as well get some practice with it! thanks!

# ? Mar 4, 2008 16:38

DEAD MAN'S SHOE: Nov 23, 2003; We will become evil and the stars will come alive

I want to be able to run `mount -t cifs` as a user, on the fly. I don't want to have to specify the share in /etc/fstab (which is a stupid idea anyway).

code:

~$ mount -t cifs //192.168.1.2/bum /mnt/bum -o username=bum,password=slum,file_mode=0755,dir_mode=0755,rw,iocharset=utf8

mount: only root can do that

Can I chmod the command to be user executable, and if so, how?

# ? Mar 4, 2008 20:40

astounding_zlatan: Apr 27, 2003

---

astounding_zlatan fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Jul 23, 2020

# ? Mar 4, 2008 20:48

Mysterious Aftertaste: May 20, 2004; So Marigold, my love, you've had too much to drink...

Is there a log file that will tell me why X sometimes won't restart with ctrl-alt-bksp?

edit: I think I found what's causing it.

code:

Mar  4 16:07:55 draxduo kernel: [  541.674442] smb_get_length: Invalid NBT packet, code=a2
Mar  4 16:08:25 draxduo kernel: [  571.655821] smb_add_request: request [ef190200, mid=7345] timed out!

Could Samba timing out cause X not to restart? It just hangs at the desktop background, never gets to command line.

Mysterious Aftertaste fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Mar 4, 2008

# ? Mar 4, 2008 22:15

Grey Area: Sep 9, 2000; Battle Without Honor or Humanity

DEAD MAN'S SHOE posted:

I want to be able to run `mount -t cifs` as a user, on the fly. I don't want to have to specify the share in /etc/fstab (which is a stupid idea anyway).

You can use sudo to run a command as root. In /etc/sudoers add the line

code:

shoe ALL= /bin/mount, /bin/umount

Now the user shoe can run /bin/mount as root by saying

code:

sudo mount [i]args[/i]

at which point sudo will ask for your password. (It will cache your password for a few minutes if you want to run several commands.)

edit: You want umount as well of course.

Grey Area fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Mar 4, 2008

# ? Mar 4, 2008 22:33

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

Alowishus posted:

Ok good... well you may have already done this, but now that you know where the rules are, go back to my previous post with my rewrite examples and see if you can adopt those for your situation. At least you'll be able to test now and see some results...

Got it, thanks! I started reading up on rewrite stuff and about had it when I saw your post. Whats that [L] switch do?.

also - Got the .htaccess so Im all square.

rugbert fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Mar 5, 2008

# ? Mar 4, 2008 23:23

Alowishus: Jan 8, 2002; My name is Mud

DEAD MAN'S SHOE posted:

I want to be able to run `mount -t cifs` as a user, on the fly. I don't want to have to specify the share in /etc/fstab (which is a stupid idea anyway).

If you were to put it in fstab with the "user" option, it should allow non-root users to mount it.

Are you saying it's stupid to put it in fstab due to the password info? If so, then there is a way to tell smbmount to reference a password in another file which can be restricted to root readable, though I'm not sure whether that will work in concert with the user option.

Another approach may be to use autofs.

# ? Mar 5, 2008 00:43

DEAD MAN'S SHOE: Nov 23, 2003; We will become evil and the stars will come alive

Grey Area posted:

You can use sudo to run a command as root.

...

edit: You want umount as well of course.

Thanks, that's some useful info on /etc/sudoers but basically I was looking for a way to mount without requiring a password.

Alowishus posted:

Are you saying it's stupid to put it in fstab due to the password info? If so, then there is a way to tell smbmount to reference a password in another file which can be restricted to root readable, though I'm not sure whether that will work in concert with the user option.

Not only the password issue but having to specify it prior in a root-only config file defeats the idea of being able to mount random shares on the fly.

I should clarify that I'm trying to mount network shares on the fly without root permission using cifs (because smbfs is awful in comparison). The mount point is (of course) owned by the user.

chmod'ding the bins used to work for me, but no longer :|

# ? Mar 5, 2008 20:22

Twlight: Feb 18, 2005; I brag about getting free drinks from my boss to make myself feel superior; Fun Shoe

I have a poo poo load of files in my /tmp directory and I want to remove some of them. They begin with A or B have the string 406 inside and end in .txt and/or .text.

I created this command

code:

rm a|b406.txt|.text

Is this correct? I'm getting conflicting reports that rm will alow regular expressions. Or are they not even needed?

I'm refrencing this page regarding regex and rm.

http://polishlinux.org/console/regular-expressions-and-search-patterns/

# ? Mar 5, 2008 20:39

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# ? Apr 29, 2024 15:55

covener: Jan 10, 2004; You know, for kids!

Twlight posted:

I have a poo poo load of files in my /tmp directory and I want to remove some of them. They begin with A or B have the string 406 inside and end in .txt and/or .text.

I created this command
code:
rm a|b406.txt|.text
Is this correct? I'm getting conflicting reports that rm will alow regular expressions. Or are they not even needed?

I'm refrencing this page regarding regex and rm.

http://polishlinux.org/console/regular-expressions-and-search-patterns/

rm doesn't grok regular expressions, but your shell can glob before rm sees arguments (man 7 glob). If you move onto e.g. find, you'd need to protect those pipes from your shell.

# ? Mar 5, 2008 20:53

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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