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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CRIP EATIN BREAD: Jun 24, 2002; Hey stop worrying bout my acting bitch, and worry about your WACK ass music. In the mean time... Eat a hot bowl of Dicks! Ice T; Soiled Meat

JoeNotCharles posted:

You really need to try something like ion.

I know you were trying to find something obscure here, but I just installed ion2 and have been playing around with it. I actually really like it. Very minimal, and very quick. I like not having to click anything except while in firefox.

My girlfriend is going to hate me when she tries to look up something on my computer.

# ? Jul 8, 2007 18:25

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# ? Apr 26, 2024 00:45

Al Azif: Nov 1, 2006

More tiling window managers: ratpoison, wmii, dwm, xmonad

I'm using wmii right now. I just wish there were better options for Web browsing mouseless (though I have yet to try vimperator or conkeror).

# ? Jul 8, 2007 18:41

Prince John: Jun 20, 2006; Oh, poppycock! Female bandits?

Al Azif posted:

More tiling window managers: ratpoison, wmii, dwm, xmonad

I'm using wmii right now. I just wish there were better options for Web browsing mouseless (though I have yet to try vimperator or conkeror).

Assuming you're not stuck in the console, have you tried Opera? It's been designed to be pretty awesome re accessibility and you can browse easily without a mouse. After an evening of doing it when my mouse broke, I was almost as fast as with a mouse and actually faster in many cases (due to link jumping for example).

See http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/nomouse/

Also, an efficient keyboard layout will help speed you up even more, the Literary Moose has a particularly extreme one that you can download here:

http://lofotenmoose.info/opera/

But you'll probably want to try without before you revamp the keyboard shortcuts so entirely. Unfortunately I can't find moose's keyboard map diagram on his new site

# ? Jul 8, 2007 18:56

CRIP EATIN BREAD: Jun 24, 2002; Hey stop worrying bout my acting bitch, and worry about your WACK ass music. In the mean time... Eat a hot bowl of Dicks! Ice T; Soiled Meat

Col posted:

Assuming you're not stuck in the console, have you tried Opera? It's been designed to be pretty awesome re accessibility and you can browse easily without a mouse. After an evening of doing it when my mouse broke, I was almost as fast as with a mouse and actually faster in many cases (due to link jumping for example).

See http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/nomouse/

Also, an efficient keyboard layout will help speed you up even more, the Literary Moose has a particularly extreme one that you can download here:

http://lofotenmoose.info/opera/

But you'll probably want to try without before you revamp the keyboard shortcuts so entirely. Unfortunately I can't find moose's keyboard map diagram on his new site

Thanks for this information. I'm seeing how fast I can do everything without using the mouse. I've never really played with Opera before, but it seems like a nice browser. I just moved to ion3 and so far I'm loving it. I never realized how I didn't actually need floating windows.

# ? Jul 8, 2007 19:42

Prince John: Jun 20, 2006; Oh, poppycock! Female bandits?

No probs, one thing they seem to have missed out is the , key - hit it to search for text only contained only within links, F3 to cycle - lets you quickly jump around. That, along with shift+arrow keys should have you moving around nicely.

# ? Jul 8, 2007 20:58

JoeNotCharles: Mar 3, 2005; Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

skroll posted:

I know you were trying to find something obscure here, but I just installed ion2 and have been playing around with it. I actually really like it. Very minimal, and very quick. I like not having to click anything except while in firefox.

No I wasn't - I use ion at work. It's awesome for programming.

# ? Jul 8, 2007 23:45

CRIP EATIN BREAD: Jun 24, 2002; Hey stop worrying bout my acting bitch, and worry about your WACK ass music. In the mean time... Eat a hot bowl of Dicks! Ice T; Soiled Meat

JoeNotCharles posted:

No I wasn't - I use ion at work. It's awesome for programming.

It's pretty awesome for even day to day use. Works pretty well, as I find I really don't need a windowed gui. However, is there a way to split a root frame? For example, I split the frame horizontally, and then I want to create a third frame on the right side. Is it possible to do this?

# ? Jul 9, 2007 01:45

JoeNotCharles: Mar 3, 2005; Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

skroll posted:

It's pretty awesome for even day to day use. Works pretty well, as I find I really don't need a windowed gui. However, is there a way to split a root frame? For example, I split the frame horizontally, and then I want to create a third frame on the right side. Is it possible to do this?

I don't believe so - the only way I know is to move all the tabs out, out of the bottom frame, close it, and then do the vertical split first and then re-do the horizontal split. You could probably make a macro using Lua that does this automatically, but it'd be a bit of work.

There are a couple of other things I dislike about ion. For instance, I don't see any reason modal dialogs shouldn't show up as separate tabs that can be moved from frame to frame - often a dialog will pop up and I'll want to see what's behind it, and I just can't. I've been meaning to take a look at some of the other tab-and-pane window managers, but I've just never gotten around to it.

# ? Jul 9, 2007 02:29

CRIP EATIN BREAD: Jun 24, 2002; Hey stop worrying bout my acting bitch, and worry about your WACK ass music. In the mean time... Eat a hot bowl of Dicks! Ice T; Soiled Meat

JoeNotCharles posted:

I don't believe so - the only way I know is to move all the tabs out, out of the bottom frame, close it, and then do the vertical split first and then re-do the horizontal split. You could probably make a macro using Lua that does this automatically, but it'd be a bit of work.

There are a couple of other things I dislike about ion. For instance, I don't see any reason modal dialogs shouldn't show up as separate tabs that can be moved from frame to frame - often a dialog will pop up and I'll want to see what's behind it, and I just can't. I've been meaning to take a look at some of the other tab-and-pane window managers, but I've just never gotten around to it.

I've just tried out wmii as mentioned above, and it works out pretty damned well. It seems to handle window management a bit quicker then ion does. I've only used ion for a bit, but I've seemed to already picked up on the commands pretty quickly. Also, it allows me to generate columns on the fly and that makes me happy.

# ? Jul 9, 2007 02:47

meatpath: Feb 13, 2003

Should I be concerned about this? Its size is what caught my eye, but I don't really know exactly what it is (it's in my home folder):

Also, I'm having some crashing problems in Feisty. 99% of the time it happens when using Firefox (if not 100% of the time), and it seems like it is worse when I have been running the machine for a longer period of time without shutting it down for a while. I never really had this happen in Edgy, although I only ran Edgy for about three months.

Basically, when it happens, my CPU usage goes to 100% and everything locks up. I can't do anything whatsoever, and the CPU fan is running really high. I have to do a hard reboot. I checked my system log in /var/log, and I have found that it is full - as in hundreds of entries - of these lines:

Jul 9 00:14:03 jared-toshiba kernel: [ 671.500000] APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)
Jul 9 00:14:03 jared-toshiba kernel: [ 671.500000] APIC error on CPU1: 40(40)

Where the number in brackets progressively gets higher. This error keeps occurring, even to the point of while I am reading the log file, it will happen several times and inform me of the changes to the log and ask me if I want to refresh to see them. I honestly don't know if this error is related to my crashes, though, but I have a hunch because when I haven't noticed a crash in a while (several days), I can check the log and none of this will be in there.

meatpath fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Jul 9, 2007

# ? Jul 9, 2007 05:50

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

68k posted:

Should I be concerned about this? Its size is what caught my eye, but I don't really know exactly what it is (it's in my home folder):

Also, I'm having some crashing problems in Feisty. 99% of the time it happens when using Firefox (if not 100% of the time), and it seems like it is worse when I have been running the machine for a longer period of time without shutting it down for a while. I never really had this happen in Edgy, although I only ran Edgy for about three months.

Basically, when it happens, my CPU usage goes to 100% and everything locks up. I can't do anything whatsoever, and the CPU fan is running really high. I have to do a hard reboot. I checked my system log in /var/log, and I have found that it is full - as in hundreds of entries - of these lines:

Jul 9 00:14:03 jared-toshiba kernel: [ 671.500000] APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)
Jul 9 00:14:03 jared-toshiba kernel: [ 671.500000] APIC error on CPU1: 40(40)

Where the number in brackets progressively gets higher. This error keeps occurring, even to the point of while I am reading the log file, it will happen several times and inform me of the changes to the log and ask me if I want to refresh to see them. I honestly don't know if this error is related to my crashes, though, but I have a hunch because when I haven't noticed a crash in a while (several days), I can check the log and none of this will be in there.

You have a hardware problem -- it may be overheating, bad or overloaded power supply, electromagnetic noise, etc.

# ? Jul 9, 2007 07:55

meatpath: Feb 13, 2003

teapot posted:

You have a hardware problem -- it may be overheating, bad or overloaded power supply, electromagnetic noise, etc.

Well, I have found quite a few other people online who describe getting the same error (under many differing circumstances), and in some cases they claim it was fixed by updating their BIOS. I initially thought it would be a hardware issue, but since this machine has performed wonderfully while using XP for four and a half months, Edgy for another three - and the problem didn't start occurring until the Feisty upgrade, and it only happens when running Firefox - I sort of threw out the idea of it being hardware related. I'm sure that is a possibility, though. What are the chances that Toshiba would work on it (if it is hardware related) if it's still in warranty since I no longer have XP installed?

meatpath fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Jul 9, 2007

# ? Jul 9, 2007 14:33

RoundsToZero: Dec 3, 2004; An open door is an invitation

Whenever I send back my Thinkpad they say to take the hard drive out first so I always do. Then they'll have no idea whether you're running XP or not. You can just say something like "Firefox crashes" and make a vague reference to the errors you've been getting, but not specific enough that they could tell it comes from Linux (if you're concerned about that). My guess is they'll run through a bunch of tests and maybe do some work, but don't get your hopes up that it'll fix anything. Only send it in if it's still in warranty, otherwise it will probably cost more than you're willing to pay.

# ? Jul 9, 2007 15:08

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

68k posted:

Well, I have found quite a few other people online who describe getting the same error (under many differing circumstances), and in some cases they claim it was fixed by updating their BIOS.

Then there was something terribly wrong with their BIOS.

quote:

I initially thought it would be a hardware issue, but since this machine has performed wonderfully while using XP for four and a half months, Edgy for another three - and the problem didn't start occurring until the Feisty upgrade, and it only happens when running Firefox - I sort of threw out the idea of it being hardware related. I'm sure that is a possibility, though.

No. It's a hardware problem. It may remain undetected in different software configuration, but it's there. Some problems can be caused by bad capacitors, shifting heatsinks, accumulating dust, etc.

quote:

What are the chances that Toshiba would work on it (if it is hardware related) if it's still in warranty since I no longer have XP installed?

Some time ago Toshiba issued recalls/free repair offers for some of its laptops when it made a model with poor static shielding, so it's possible that they already have the same for other models with known problems. In any case ask them.

# ? Jul 9, 2007 16:34

meatpath: Feb 13, 2003

Ok, thanks for the advice. I will give them a call this week sometime.

# ? Jul 9, 2007 16:39

injate: Jan 29, 2006; I'm really bad at trying to act high and mighty, let alone be high and mighty.

teapot posted:

This only works if you have some extremely buggy application that creates processes and does not properly handle their exit, what is not the case with your system. Don't do it.

Sorry for the badly worded question on Friday. I couldn't describe the problem well enough since I'm not an expert at linux, let me try this again.

quote:

1. Versions of OS and distribution you are running. Kernel 2.4.9 compiled in 2001 does not sound like anything supported, or even remembered by most of people here.
2. Symptoms of unexpected behavior, if possible including the output (in your case output of "ps axuw").
3. How does it differ from expected behavior.
4. What did you, or anyone ese, do in the attempt to fix the problem.

1) The server is running Red Hat Linux release 7.2 (Enigma)

2) "buggy application processes not exiting" describes what is going on pretty well - minus the buggy applications part. All not-exiting processes are coming from non-custom applications: standard Linux stuff like apache, sh, crontab.

ps -aux log from my kill -9 "weekend sanity script":
http://paste-it.net/2785

3)All these applications were exiting properly (processes used to exit) just a week ago but now they're leaving behind all/most of their processes without exiting them.

Exampe: every web page hit leaves one or more of these - "apache 15308 0.0 0.3 79908 7492 ? S 10:10 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd" and so on and so forth..for almost every process.

4) On Thursday my co-worker and I went down and watched the bootup process to look for any errors but it came up like normal. There was one minor NFS thing we fixed but it seemed irrelevant to the problem. NFS seemed to be functioning before and after we removed the unknown command line argument from an fstab line.

It was crashing daily at the end of last week and the above mentioned/linked "weekend sanity script" kept it alive throughout the weekend and it's still going.

Once again for good measure, simply put, the problem is: The server works like it always has (as far as I know) but behind the scenes the processes are not exiting and flood the ps -aux list. Eventually this flood of un-exited processes crashes the machine.

Thanks for any ideas/advice you might have.

injate fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Jul 9, 2007

# ? Jul 9, 2007 17:11

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

injate posted:

Sorry for the badly worded question on Friday. I couldn't describe the problem well enough since I'm not an expert at linux, let me try this again.

The server is running Red Hat Linux release 7.2 (Enigma)

That was released six years ago, and was supposed to be upgraded a long time ago. On a system that went that long without updates I wouldn't be surprised if it was broken into, and the problems are the result of someone trying to mess with it.

quote:

"buggy application processes not exiting" describes what is going on pretty well - minus the buggy applications part. All not-exiting processes are coming from non-custom applications: standard Linux stuff like apache, sh, crontab. All these applications were exiting properly (processes used to exit) just a week ago but now they're leaving behind all/most of their processes without exiting them.

No. All of them that you have in the log are from a shell script with the name starting with "ggifanixf" (you see them as "sh -c <scriptname>"). The rest is supposed to run that way.
To see wtf they are, run

code:

ps axuwww|grep ggifanixf

then, with the full name of the script (say, it was shown as "sh -c ./ggifanixfbrokenscript.sh"):

code:

find / -name ggifanixfbrokenscript.sh

Then you can look at the found file, and see what it is.

# ? Jul 9, 2007 17:30

injate: Jan 29, 2006; I'm really bad at trying to act high and mighty, let alone be high and mighty.

teapot posted:

That was released six years ago, and was supposed to be upgraded a long time ago.

Yes I wish they'd update too :\ I have little say in the matter.

quote:

ggifanixf

I know what this is. This is a gif animation tool which processes proprietary format .raws. I just tested one of the Perl scripts that uses this and it worked fine. I just tested it through the command line and it output gif gibberish as it should.

quote:

No. All of them that you have in the log are from a shell script with the name starting with "ggifanixf" (you see them as "sh -c <scriptname>"). The rest is supposed to run that way.

the httpd calls never seem to disappear though, same with a lot of those crons and other misc scripts we have running.

# ? Jul 9, 2007 17:54

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

injate posted:

Yes I wish they'd update too :\ I have little say in the matter.
I know what this is. This is a gif animation tool which processes proprietary format .raws. I just tested one of the Perl scripts that uses this and it worked fine. I just tested it through the command line and it output gif gibberish as it should.

It's a SHELL SCRIPT! Shell scripts can't process gifs, it runns some executables that somehow do not exit. And just because it does not always hang it does not mean that it always works. You have a broken program -- find what exactly it is doing and fix it.

quote:

the httpd calls never seem to disappear though, same with a lot of those crons and other misc scripts we have running.

httpd processes are supposeed to run continuously, this is normal.

If your scripts are running longer than they should, FIND WHAT IS ACTUALLY RUNNING. They are shell scripts, so I don't think, someone placed an infinite loop into them, so they don't do anything but run other programs.

teapot fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Jul 9, 2007

# ? Jul 9, 2007 19:27

injate: Jan 29, 2006; I'm really bad at trying to act high and mighty, let alone be high and mighty.

It's a compiled C executable script (custom) but it hasn't changed for years. It does process gifs.

code:

ls -lat ggifanixf
-rwxrwxr-x   1 aws      aws        143496 [b]Sep 17  2001[/b] ggifanixf

This leads me to believe ggifanixf is unrelated to this new problem. The Perl CGIs which run this script also have not changed. If I run: `./ggifanixf -cmd -argmts` it outputs the gibberish gif code, stops, returns to command line.

We might just end up replace this box (talked about that today). Thanks for the help, I hate to give up but I don't think any progress can be made unless someone has other suggestions. It's probably a good thing to start fresh considering how old this box is.

# ? Jul 9, 2007 21:03

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

injate posted:

It's a compiled C executable script (custom) but it hasn't changed for years. It does process gifs.
code:
ls -lat ggifanixf
-rwxrwxr-x   1 aws      aws        143496 [b]Sep 17  2001[/b] ggifanixf
This leads me to believe ggifanixf is unrelated to this new problem.

Look at your process list. Each instance of shell running this executable (I guess, called from perl script, that should explain "sh -c" with a non-shell executable, what is usually a bad idea) is followed by a zombie process.

quote:

The Perl CGIs which run this script also have not changed.

Most likely the files it takes as an input changed, so some condition causes that program to hang.

quote:

If I run: `./ggifanixf -cmd -argmts` it outputs the gibberish gif code, stops, returns to command line.

This means absolutely nothing. There are huge bugs being found all the time that get triggered by particular input that never, ever, anyone thought of before. How can you say that if that program does not hang if given no input at all, that it is not buggy?

quote:

We might just end up replace this box (talked about that today). Thanks for the help, I hate to give up but I don't think any progress can be made unless someone has other suggestions. It's probably a good thing to start fresh considering how old this box is.

The box is old, but the problem is with the program that is used. Who developed it anyway? Why don't they handle it?

teapot fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Jul 10, 2007

# ? Jul 10, 2007 00:00

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

Any of you guys already playing around with Compiz Fusion? Does any of you run into one of these two issues?

- Windows register only one direction of the mouse wheel, that is up, while compiz notices both directions (e.g. ALT-Scroll for transparency).
- Compiz doesn't acknowledge any settings changed with CCSM and Gconf backend plugin.

And maybe apart from that, does gtk-window-manager blow up with a lot of themes on your end, too? Which is weird, because with compiz 0.5.0 and Gnome 2.16 it worked fine, trying to run the decorator as it is on Gnome 2.18 starts the crashing, and it didn't change with the newest code I've checked out hours ago.

# ? Jul 11, 2007 19:09

emf: Aug 1, 2002

I'm having a problem with Neverwinter Nights running under Kubuntu-gutsy-AMD64 on a Core2Duo system. The problem is with the graphics, as shown in the attachment at the end of this post. This is not a clean install of Gutsy, and I'm trying to avoid doing that, but will if I have to.

The (hopefully) relevent portions of my current xorg.conf are:

code:

Section "Module"
        Load            "bitmap"
        Load            "ddc"
        Load            "extmod"
        Load            "freetype"
        Load            "int10"
        Load            "vbe"
        Load            "glx"
        Load            "GLcore"
        Load            "dri"
        Load            "v4l"
EndSection

...

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Intel X3000"
        Boardname       "Intel 965"
        Busid           "PCI:0:2:0"
        Driver          "i810"
        Screen  0
        Vendorname      "Intel"
EndSection

...

Section "DRI"
        Mode    0666
EndSection

Anyone have any suggestions? I'm going to go get some KFC now.

Only registered members can see post attachments!

# ? Jul 11, 2007 23:15

SnatchRabbit: Feb 23, 2006; by sebmojo

I'm thinking of installing ubuntu 7.04 on my home desktop, but I have a Radeon 9800 in the PC. Will this cause a problem? I've heard that some graphics card makers suck about putting out linux drivers. Should I have any problems?

# ? Jul 12, 2007 20:14

dfn_doe: Apr 12, 2005; I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW STUPID FUCKING CATCHPHRASE OVERLORDS

SnatchRabbit posted:

I'm thinking of installing ubuntu 7.04 on my home desktop, but I have a Radeon 9800 in the PC. Will this cause a problem? I've heard that some graphics card makers suck about putting out linux drivers. Should I have any problems?

ATI drivers are absolute shite and a serious hassle to get working properly with many of the newer accelerated window managers. I've used them in the past and finally figured that at my normal billing rate for computer work it was much cheaper overall to just ditch ATI stuff altogether and replace it with equivalent intel and nvidia solutions which was a simply transition and works about 99% of the time without any additional tweaks. ATI can be made to work, but it requires a serious time/effort investment YMMV.

# ? Jul 12, 2007 20:38

Prince John: Jun 20, 2006; Oh, poppycock! Female bandits?

SnatchRabbit posted:

I'm thinking of installing ubuntu 7.04 on my home desktop, but I have a Radeon 9800 in the PC. Will this cause a problem? I've heard that some graphics card makers suck about putting out linux drivers. Should I have any problems?

Your graphics should be fine using the open source driver in terms of displaying a desktop, watching videos etc.

You'll only need the ATI drivers if you want 3d acceleration (ie if you want an accelerated desktop or to play games) - if you just boot into Windows for games then it may not be an issue.

Seconding the ATI drivers are complete bitches to get working though, its utterly random and bizarre. Try something like Automatix2 to get them installed - I always seemed to have better success doing things like that than actually using the ATI installer!

# ? Jul 12, 2007 20:45

emf: Aug 1, 2002

Col posted:

You'll only need the ATI drivers if you want 3d acceleration (ie if you want an accelerated desktop or to play games) - if you just boot into Windows for games then it may not be an issue.

One of my computers is a AMD Barton 2500+ with a Radeon 9800 running Debian with the opensource drivers, and 3D acceleration works fine. The only 3D game I have is Neverwinter Nights, and it runs just as fast as I remember it did under Windows 2000. Of course, it never ran all that fast to begin with, and it's been a few years so my memory may be a bit off.

edit: BTW, the KFC was yummy, but my other computer still won't work right

# ? Jul 12, 2007 20:59

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

Maybe I'm just lucky, but the fglrx driver has never given me any trouble at all. I use a 9800 Pro in my desktop and an x300 in my laptop and both work perfectly (well, except for Beryl stuff, but that doesn't matter to me at all).

# ? Jul 12, 2007 21:12

RoundsToZero: Dec 3, 2004; An open door is an invitation

I've got a Radeon 9600 with a Pentium M 735 and using the open source driver, 3D acceleration works fine. Google Earth and Beryl run smoothly and based on emf's experiences, you could be fine with games too, depending on the game. It's certainly worth trying it out before you start tearing your hair out over the fglrx driver. Note that 3D only works on r300 and below with the open source driver. According to Wikipedia that means up through the X1050.

# ? Jul 12, 2007 21:21

Al Azif: Nov 1, 2006

My cron jobs haven't been running for a few days, I just looked in the logs and I'm getting "Can't find a unique temporary filename: Too many open files". I know how to increase the limit, but I don't think the system should be past it. How can I see what processes have open files?

vvv thanks, that fixed me up real quick. (it was museekd)

Al Azif fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Jul 13, 2007

# ? Jul 12, 2007 23:51

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

Al Azif posted:

My cron jobs haven't been running for a few days, I just looked in the logs and I'm getting "Can't find a unique temporary filename: Too many open files". I know how to increase the limit, but I don't think the system should be past it. How can I see what processes have open files?

use lsof

# ? Jul 12, 2007 23:55

maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

Edit: doublepost

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Mar 13, 2017

# ? Jul 13, 2007 03:32

JoeNotCharles: Mar 3, 2005; Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Recent versions of Linux can read HFS+ (the native OS X format).

# ? Jul 13, 2007 03:47

sc0ticus: Apr 16, 2005; hey skin like a doll

I'm overwhelmed by all the packages available!

I've taken the plunge and installed Ubuntu 7.04. I'm intending to use my new box for programming, but for now I'm trying a total conversion and see if I can live without Windows.

I've downloaded many basic features like perl/apache/g++/etc... but I'd really like to know what nifty packages are out there that people use. For instance, one of the screen shots in this thread had the weather on the desktop, where did that come from?

If you have a favorite app or extension to apps that you like, please tell me about it as I'd like to discover how neat linux really is. I'm interested in anything really, but especially less obvious things like ion.

1. Are there any effects in beryl that are compelling enough to use?
2. What latex package do people prefer?
3. Does anyone have any good tutorials on advanced emacs functionality (specifically, I'd like to integrate latex and learn how to do advanced programming tricks like commenting out a whole section automatagically)
4. I like to use the keyboard as much as possible, are there programs/firefox add-ons that let you browse with the keyboard?

Here's a basic question:
Is there a keyboard binding for the terminal? If not, how could I make it so that I could type CTRL-F2 or something.

# ? Jul 13, 2007 05:25

6174: Dec 4, 2004

sc0ticus posted:

2. What latex package do people prefer?

Go with TexLive based packages. The alternative, tetex, is no longer maintained upstream.

sc0ticus posted:

3. Does anyone have any good tutorials on advanced emacs functionality (specifically, I'd like to integrate latex and learn how to do advanced programming tricks like commenting out a whole section automatagically)

I'm not an Emacs guy, but I understand that AUCTeX is the standard way to integrate LaTeX into Emacs.

Favorite apps:
Amarok, Vim, Akregator. I also spend lots of time in KDevelop (which has some shortcomings, so I wouldn't call it a favorite), Konsole, and Iceweasel (Firefox rebranded for Debian).

One program I recommend you look at is Valgrind. It is excellent for finding memory issues in your programs.

# ? Jul 13, 2007 05:54

crazysim: May 23, 2004; I AM SOOOOO GAY

JoeNotCharles posted:

Recent versions of Linux can read HFS+ (the native OS X format).

Why not go the full length and use NTFS? Windows, Linux (NTFS-3G), MacOS (NTFS-3G with MacFUSE) . Read and write on all!

# ? Jul 13, 2007 07:29

teapot: Dec 27, 2003; by Fistgrrl

sc0ticus posted:

I'm overwhelmed by all the packages available!

I've taken the plunge and installed Ubuntu 7.04. I'm intending to use my new box for programming, but for now I'm trying a total conversion and see if I can live without Windows.

I've downloaded many basic features like perl/apache/g++/etc... but I'd really like to know what nifty packages are out there that people use. For instance, one of the screen shots in this thread had the weather on the desktop, where did that come from?

There is weather applet for Gnome panel, desklet that displays weather on desktop, MythTV module that shows fullscreen weather-channel-like weather data and, I think, a bunch of other applications.

quote:

If you have a favorite app or extension to apps that you like, please tell me about it as I'd like to discover how neat linux really is. I'm interested in anything really, but especially less obvious things like ion.

I don't recommend doing this until I'll post this configuration in a usable form, but I have found that Gnome works better when I configure Sawfish as the window manager instead of Metacity, and Thunar as a file manager instead of Nautilus. The problem is, Gnome configuration as packaged does not have easy way to configure those things, and there are some options that are needed to make those two applications work well with Gnome. I am going to post it once I will reproduce all changes on a new installation.

quote:

1. Are there any effects in beryl that are compelling enough to use?

Mostly working on rather lean configurations, I prefer more lightweight window managers and use large number of viewports/desktops. However as long as hardware permits, I don't see a reason not to use Beryl's eye candy.

quote:

2. What latex package do people prefer?
3. Does anyone have any good tutorials on advanced emacs functionality (specifically, I'd like to integrate latex and learn how to do advanced programming tricks like commenting out a whole section automatagically)

Already answered by 6174.

quote:

4. I like to use the keyboard as much as possible, are there programs/firefox add-ons that let you browse with the keyboard?

In theory, Firefox is supposed to be fully usable with a keyboard. In practice it's a pain, so I am interested in such a thing, too.

quote:

Here's a basic question:
Is there a keyboard binding for the terminal? If not, how could I make it so that I could type CTRL-F2 or something.

Gnome has it, and it's just disabled in the default configuration in Ubuntu. Go to System->Preferences->Keyboard binding, and assign it.

# ? Jul 13, 2007 08:48

Laconicus: Sep 13, 2003

Background:

I have two 250GB IDE hard drives, which were originally contained within a failed LaCie external USB drive. The drives themselves seem fine, and are fully accessible, just the hardware that made them appear as one, and provided USB connectivity has failed.

From viewing the raw data on the disks, it'd appear that they were simply spanned by the drive hardware (nothing fancy like striping or anything), and I've succeeded in recovering a lot of files that were contained solely on the first drive which has the partition table, NTFS partition header etc. on it.

Question:

I'd really like to be able to recover data that's stored on either disk and have been looking at the software RAID options in Linux. It seems that if I were to create a "linear" RAID drive with mdadm, with no superblocks, this may just allow the system to read the whole drive, without making any changes to the data on disk (which I really want to avoid since I may at some point obtain a replacement for the original drive hardware that failed).

Does this seem a likely possibility, and will this configuration (especially the no-superblock setting) prevent any changes being made to the disks? If not, does anyone have any suggestions as to alternatives I could try?

# ? Jul 13, 2007 10:38

marcan: Sep 3, 2006; (:(){ :|:;};:)

Laconicus posted:

I'd really like to be able to recover data that's stored on either disk and have been looking at the software RAID options in Linux. It seems that if I were to create a "linear" RAID drive with mdadm, with no superblocks, this may just allow the system to read the whole drive, without making any changes to the data on disk (which I really want to avoid since I may at some point obtain a replacement for the original drive hardware that failed).

Does this seem a likely possibility, and will this configuration (especially the no-superblock setting) prevent any changes being made to the disks? If not, does anyone have any suggestions as to alternatives I could try?

The best thing to do in these cases is a test with dummy data. I've created two random data files, set them up as loopback devices, RAIDed them (linear mode, no superblocks), and dumped the RAID device out to a file. The resulting file is identical to "cat data1 data2", so it should work for you.

Here's the mdadm command to set up the array (substitute your own device files):

code:

mdadm --build /dev/md0 -c 4 -l linear -n 2 /dev/loop0 /dev/loop1

This doesn't touch the hard drives. Mount the result read-only (you're probably doing that already, since it's NTFS). If anything goes wrong, you can simply tear apart the array and start over - no data should have changed.

EDIT: You mentioned the first drive has a partition table. You'll need to set up your RAID devices as partitionable then:

code:

mdadm --build /dev/mdp0 -a p -c 4 -l linear -n 2 /dev/loop0 /dev/loop1

You'll get your first partition in /dev/mdp0p1.

marcan fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Jul 13, 2007

# ? Jul 13, 2007 13:08

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# ? Apr 26, 2024 00:45

smug forum asshole: Jan 15, 2005

Toiletbrush posted:

Any of you guys already playing around with Compiz Fusion? Does any of you run into one of these two issues?

- Windows register only one direction of the mouse wheel, that is up, while compiz notices both directions (e.g. ALT-Scroll for transparency).
- Compiz doesn't acknowledge any settings changed with CCSM and Gconf backend plugin.

And maybe apart from that, does gtk-window-manager blow up with a lot of themes on your end, too? Which is weird, because with compiz 0.5.0 and Gnome 2.16 it worked fine, trying to run the decorator as it is on Gnome 2.18 starts the crashing, and it didn't change with the newest code I've checked out hours ago.

Compiz Fusion runs pretty well for me. Did you fully remove compiz before you installed Compiz Fusion?

# ? Jul 13, 2007 15:42

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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