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

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Is there a way to permanently change my hostname in Debian 4?

I tried running `hostname <newName>` but that resets after my system restarts.
I tried editing /etc/hosts, which works 'till I reset.
I tried making /etc/HOSTNAME, which, again, works 'till I reset.
I even made /etc/sysconfig/network, which works 'till I reset my machine.
Is there any way (other than a reformat/reinstall) to change my hostname?

# ¿ Apr 22, 2007 01:18

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 20:31

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

I saw someone ask this, but no reply. What is a good image viewer for Linux (Debian) that supports animated gifs, lots of image formats, and fit to screen/center capabilities?
I'm not liking Eye Of Gnome. (I use KDE.)
KView isn't great, either.
QuikShow does what it's supposed to, but I need more.

Edit: Cornice and ximg don't work too well, though they seem well suited.

Jo fucked around with this message at 05:06 on May 25, 2007

# ¿ May 25, 2007 04:17

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

AlexMax posted:

qiv can quickly show anything I throw at it. It's commandline though.

Will it show (in animated form) anigifs?

# ¿ May 25, 2007 17:35

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

I've got ~1000 files in a folder. I was wondering if there's a way to run a command for each of the files in a folder, appending the output. (Under bash.)

./JTSPSolver < ./06CityProblems/* >> ./outFile

Doesn't work.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2007 19:54

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Thanks to both of you. Works wonderfully.

Though it brings up the question: if I run the script with nice -n -19, does JTSPSolver get high priority, too?

If not, can I change the priority of the task once it's running?

# ¿ Jun 7, 2007 21:33

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

What are the chances running apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; will totally gently caress my system? I've had it happen a few times before, so I'm wary. At the same time, I can't help but feel it's a really bad idea to not patch software. Is there some other alternative where I don't risk screwing up everything I've configured?

# ¿ Jun 16, 2007 04:25

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

I need to run check disk on an NTFS partition from Linux. What are my options, other than booting into windows twice?

EDIT: To ellaborate, I'm mounting a TrueCrypt encrypted NTFS partition that's being read off an NTFS partition. I do not have access to Windows.

Jo fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Jul 20, 2007

# ¿ Jul 20, 2007 04:15

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Scaevolus posted:

The ntfsprogs package contains the program "ntfsfix", which is probably what you're looking for, but I'm not sure how nicely it works with truecrypt. If truecrypt gives you a virtual block device, it should work.

I was under the impression that ntfsfix wasn't a checkdisk replacement. I thought it just made it easier to remount Linux mounted partitions in Windows.

EDIT: Tried it. Still getting the unclean partition warning.

Jo fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Jul 22, 2007

# ¿ Jul 22, 2007 16:01

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

What's the appropriate method of 'cleaning' a Debian Linux install?

Back when I ran windows, the OS would slow down after a period of about two years from software getting added and removed, debuggers getting added, miscellaneous things that I needed to install for school. Cleaning would entail 'remove everything you can from startup', defrag, uninstall extra applications, things of that sort.

I'm in sort of the same boat with Debian right now. I've added security patches, installed and removed software, and the OS is feeling kinda' slow right now. What should I do to clean out my process list, startup, etc?

# ¿ Aug 28, 2007 01:44

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

covener posted:

Finally, monitoring actual resource (mem, cpu, io) usage and finding a culprit would probably be the most likely route to solving a real steady-state performance problem (as opposed to psychological change, or change in startup behavior)

I (found

) and fired up the system performance monitor supplied by KDE. I didn't notice it at first, but it looks like my kernel only recognizes 1 gig of RAM out of the two I have installed. Is there a way to verify this in another application? Memtest will tell me, I think, but I'd like to run something from inside the OS to rule out a configuration problem.

Fake Edit: It reads two gigs on POST.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2007 01:09

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

sund posted:

Run 'free' in a terminal and read the man page if that's not enough.

Thanks for the help. Yeah, I'm definitely not seeing two gig of available memory.

code:

jo@VoidStar-Debian:~$ free -t -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           885        849         35          0         21        522
-/+ buffers/cache:        305        579
Swap:         1906          0       1906
Total:        2791        849       1941

885 megs of physical ram? How did I even get that number?

# ¿ Aug 29, 2007 02:33

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM=y
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G is not set
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G is not set

Guess I need a custom kernel after all. Thanks for the help.

Jo fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Aug 29, 2007

# ¿ Aug 29, 2007 02:50

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Thanks to everyone who helped me in this thread.

I have a couple more questions:
I've recompiled a custom kernel with HIGHMEM support, but I still think my system feels a bit sluggish. Looking at `ps aux` tells me I have around 83 processes taking up nearly 1.7 gigs of ram. (Out of two)

The output of `ps aux` is here: http://silenceisdefeat.org/~jo/processes.list.txt

Should all these be running? It seems like a lot of memory taken up for just the base system and one or two apps.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2007 02:51

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Edit: Nevermind. :sigh:

Jo fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Sep 16, 2007

# ¿ Sep 16, 2007 03:55

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Microsoft said they're phasing out 32 bit operating systems as of 2008.
I'm hoping this means that the AMD64 distribution of Debian will suck less for Wine, Flash, Firefox, and package timeliness.

I'd really like to go back to a 64-bit version, but I'm not sure I could stand not having flash and not being able to run Steam under Wine. When will it finally be worth it?

Jo fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Oct 17, 2007

# ¿ Oct 17, 2007 03:16

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

A while back I asked about the memory usage of my Debian box. Someone responded, telling me that it's normal for Linux to eat fairly large amounts of ram in a 'precache' like act. I accepted this and passed it off, seeing I had larger issues. Well my system is still eating up 2 gigs of memory, solid, even as far as to have 150kb of swap space used. This does not look like precache, this looks loving crazy. Is there something I can disable to free up a little bit of that 2gig block? How many of the 92 processes (omg) should I be running for regular desktop operation?

N.E.: Looks like I only use ~200 megs at startup. After I've run a few applications, it hovers at the two gig mark.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2007 02:40

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

deimos posted:

I get the feeling you just don't know how to read the output of ps and free

I thought I did.

It just didn't seem normal to see so much taken up.

If I'm connected via ssh I use pa (aliased to `ps aux`) and free. Otherwise I'll fire up KDE system guard and look at the pretty graphs. :downs:

Scaevolus posted:

(What does N.E. mean?)

Ninja Edit.

Jo fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Nov 17, 2007

# ¿ Nov 17, 2007 03:08

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Ooooh!
I completely overlooked the +/- buffer line.
It's lucid as water now. Thank you.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2007 03:25

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

After a recent set of updates with Debian testing, I discovered that YouTube behave strangely. They load completely, play for two seconds, then reset to 'no loading'. I tried browsing with Konqueror, but pages lack pictures, backgrounds, etc -- anything that requires disk space. I think that my / drive has been marked as read only, but I'm not sure. df -h and ls -l report no problems with free space or permissions. Any guesses?

EDIT: If I click to jump to a place in a video, it will play ~two seconds from the selected position, then halt and start loading again.

EDIT Again: Got it! Wow, tricky one. After updating all my packages, my root filesystem got filled up. /tmp didn't have any space, so a temporary overflow directory got created as a symbolic link to /tmp. It didn't revert after I cleaned my package cache, so I was browsing with only 1 meg of cache for all the sites I visited. I had to relink /tmp to /var/tmp and reset the permissions to fix it.

Jo fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Mar 20, 2008

# ¿ Mar 20, 2008 00:10

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Running Ubuntu 8.10 AMD64.

After 2 minutes and 33 seconds of wall time, one of my programs terminates and the console prints KILLED. Is Ubuntu killing processes that use inordinate amounts of time? How can I disable this? If the application is breaking, I should get a bus error or segv, but all I get is 'TERMINATED'.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2009 03:59

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

ShoulderDaemon posted:

That's probably the out-of-memory killer terminating the largest-footprint process because the system no longer has any memory available. If you check the last few lines of the output of dmesg, there may be more information.

I'll be damned. Thank you.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2009 17:05

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Not sure if this is possible.

I've got a low-medium range system that's a few years old by the name of Gauss. It's configured and running Ubuntu well. I'd like to toss a liveCD onto my new machine (Euclid) and pass the extra cycles to Gauss for when I'm running gcc, digest, or rendering stuff. Euclid runs a copy of Windows Vista, and I'd like to leave it untouched, if possible. OpenMosix seems like a way to go, but the liveCDs that run it are all really old. Is there a 'best' way to do this with little extra work spent configuring Gauss?

# ¿ Jan 13, 2009 02:44

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Alowishus posted:

The distcc live CD should do the trick for compiling stuff.

Awesome. Thank you.

EDIT: Is there a more general purpose CPU cycle sharing platform? My biggest needs have been satisfied, but I'm curious about what's out there in terms of 'add live CD distribute anything'.

Jo fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jan 14, 2009

# ¿ Jan 13, 2009 13:23

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Nautilus flops around like a retarded marmot when I open a folder with more than 500 items in it. Is there a way to make it stop? Perhaps a way to make it cache folder contents? Perhaps a way to make it only load the first 250 items until I scroll to the new ones? What can I do?

# ¿ Jan 16, 2009 23:43

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

BiohazrD posted:

I want to mount a device twice (once as normal once as read only). What is the best way to do this? I was thinking making a symlink to /dev/md0 (currently everything is using UDID) or could I simply mount by device and once by UDID?

mount --bind might be able to help you here. I'm not sure if you can pass -o ro the second time, but it might work.

Example:
sudo mount /dev/mapper/truecrypt1 /mnt/crypt0 -o umask=0
sudo mount --bind /mnt/crypt0 /home/ftp/friends -o ro

EDIT: -o ro, not readonly.

Jo fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Dec 19, 2009

# ¿ Dec 19, 2009 19:55

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

---

I'm having problems mounting an mp3 player as a block device. gPhoto2 keeps grabbing it and doing its multimedia LET ME HELP YOU bullshit. I just want to mount a mass storage device.

dmesg | tail posted:

1785204.988030] usb 2-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 21
[1785205.344239] hub 2-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 4
[1785205.588016] usb 2-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 22
[1785205.734222] usb 2-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[1785205.748898] scsi11 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[1785205.749078] usb-storage: device found at 22
[1785205.749080] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning

lsusb posted:

Bus 002 Device 022: ID 0781:7432 SanDisk Corp. Sansa Clip (mtp)

There doesn't appear to be an entry in /dev/sd*.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2009 20:30

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

BiohazrD posted:

code:

[1785205.748898] scsi11 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices

Try to mount /dev/scsi11

Ah, I should have mentioned that no /dev/scsi* devices appear, either.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2009 20:38

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Hmm. Interesting. It's not showing up in there, either.

sudo fdisk -l posted:

jo@Euclid:~$ fdisk -l
jo@Euclid:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for jo:

Disk /dev/sda: 750.1 GB, 750156374016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00065343

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 52272 419873816 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 52273 90690 308592585 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 90691 91201 4104607+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

EDIT: I disabled automount and the gPhoto2 bullshit, the unplugged and replugged. No go.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2009 20:43

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

Oh good you got your stuff working. :toot:

---

New dmesg data: posted:

[1785950.668026] usb 2-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 24
[1785950.814253] usb 2-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[1785950.830101] scsi12 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[1785950.830363] usb-storage: device found at 24
[1785950.830366] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning

Hmm. That waiting for device to settle message is a bit curious.

EDIT: Found a potential solution on a Linux forum. Will report on failure.

Solution: Edit /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/10osvendor/20-libgphoto2.fdi and hose every reference to SanDisk. Unplug, replug.

EDIT: :haw:

\/\/\/

Jo fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Dec 19, 2009

# ¿ Dec 19, 2009 20:52

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

I've got an HP Proliant DL580 with a serial terminal at 9600-baud. I can get as far (I think) as booting off a USB stick made with the Universal USB Installer. When the installed kicks in, though, it looks like the serial terminal drops out. I've tried modifying the required files recommended here: http://pcengines.info/forums/?page=post&id=E25612E9-84F0-4DCF-A876-1E92FD1D065C but it looks like I might still be dropping to VGA.

quote:

isolinux.cfg:
# D-I config version 2.0
CONSOLE 0
SERIAL 0 9600 0
include menu.cfg
default vesamenu.c32
prompt 0
timeout 0

txt.cfg:
default install
label install
menu label ^Install Ubuntu Server
kernel /install/vmlinuz
append file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu-server.seed vga=788 initrd=/install/initrd.gz -- console=ttyS0,9600n8 quiet �

syslinux.cfg:
# D-I config version 2.0
CONSOLE 0
SERIAL 0 9600 0

default menu.c32
prompt 0
menu title UNetbootin
timeout 100

label unetbootindefault
kernel /install/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/linux
append initrd=/install/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz tasks=standard pkgsel/language-pack-patterns= pkgsel/install-language-support=false vga=788 -- console=ttyS0,9600n8 -- quiet

Any guesses about how I can get the system installed when I don't have a keyboard or monitor I can hook up? What's the lowest :effort:

way?

Jo fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Feb 17, 2016

# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 07:47

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 20:31

Jo: Jan 24, 2005; Soiled Meat

ToxicFrog posted:

Is it networked? Does the Ubuntu Server installer support piloting it over ssh? I know the SUSE one does.

Yes, it's networked, but there's no OS on there at the moment to SSH into.

evol262 posted:

iLO. iLO. iLO

I was going to say, "Looks like iLO needs a license." but HP's website says there's one included with the server. :woop:

# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 00:33

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