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

«‹›1023 »

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

I've a VPS with CentOS5. I'm trying to get screen working. As root, it works just fine. As regular account, I always get told "No more PTYs". I first thought it was related to SELinux, but disabled that and it still doesn't work. Any ideas? Google doesn't really help, there's barely any info about that message on the web, apart from telling me to chmod 666 all /dev/pty*, which didn't help.

--edit: Well, it appears if I chown the ttypX that follows the one I'm logged in with (ttyp0 -> ttyp1), I can actually use screen. WTF is that about?

Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Feb 11, 2008

# ? Feb 11, 2008 11:54

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 18, 2024 10:58

Sloth50: Apr 13, 2003; Stupid Newbie

Sorry if this has been asked but I can't read all 70 pages of this thread.

I'm trying to install Ubuntu, but after it loads the kernel my screen turns black and I get no video signal. My system specs are as follows.
AMD athlon 64 3500+
Radeon x800 pro
Hanns-g 28.5in lcd monitor

I have tried using both the analog and digital monitor connections. Also I have tried to install using various Windows and Ubuntu installer resolutions. The safe video mode has the same error also. Help.

# ? Feb 11, 2008 19:16

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

Is there a way to get the "tab" shortcut from most terminal emulators into ssh?

I mean, I could use putty, but it seems silly to start a new window to do everything I could do with the terminal, other than tab shortcutting.

# ? Feb 12, 2008 04:26

Mr. DNA: Aug 9, 2004; Megatronics?

Sloth50 posted:

AMD athlon 64 3500+
Radeon x800 pro

You're in luck. While I may know very little about Linux, I had this exact setup and had the exact same problem. You will need to use the Ubuntu alternate install disc and change the boot options when you run the install. You need to remove the 'quiet splash' options at the very end.

Once Ubuntu is installed you will also have to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and remove the 'queit splash' options.

Get the alternate install by going here. Check the box that says "Check here if you need the alternate desktop CD. This CD does not include the Live CD, instead it uses a text-based installer."

Let me know if you need more detailed instructions. I spent a day figuring this out last year when I first switched!

# ? Feb 12, 2008 04:59

bitprophet: Jul 22, 2004; Taco Defender

Mysterious Aftertaste posted:

Is there a way to get the "tab" shortcut from most terminal emulators into ssh?

I mean, I could use putty, but it seems silly to start a new window to do everything I could do with the terminal, other than tab shortcutting.

Can you be more specific about what you mean by "tab shortcut"? As in, an example? Do you mean you want to type "ssh my<tab>" and have it expand into e.g. "ssh myserver" where "myserver" is a hostname you've ssh'd to previously? Or what? :downs:

# ? Feb 12, 2008 05:10

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

bitprophet posted:

Can you be more specific about what you mean by "tab shortcut"? As in, an example? Do you mean you want to type "ssh my<tab>" and have it expand into e.g. "ssh myserver" where "myserver" is a hostname you've ssh'd to previously? Or what?

I think he means like tabbed browsing, but for SSH windows?

Which I'd kill for as well, seeing as I have on average 6 Putty windows opened at any one time, two connections per server and it's a bitch to alt+tab between them all.

x1o fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Feb 12, 2008

# ? Feb 12, 2008 13:03

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

I have some apt-get help. Running apt-get update seems to work but then when its gets 23% done I get errors like this:

quote:

Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/multiverse Sources
Could not open file /var/lib/apt/lists/partial/security.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_feisty-security_multiverse_source_Sources - open (28 No space left on device)

edit - I ran df -i and found that the partition in question has used up all its inodes. I was thinking about editing the apt-get conf file to use an empty partition but I cant seem to find it!

rugbert fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Feb 12, 2008

# ? Feb 12, 2008 17:17

bitprophet: Jul 22, 2004; Taco Defender

rugbert posted:

I have some apt-get help. Running apt-get update seems to work but then when its gets 23% done I get errors like this:

edit - I ran df -i and found that the partition in question has used up all its inodes. I was thinking about editing the apt-get conf file to use an empty partition but I cant seem to find it!

Er. If the partition your /var is on is out of inodes I think you have a bigger problem than trying to get apt to store its information elsewhere :v:

and that besides, I'm not sure if you can have apt put things elsewhere, given how integral it is to the OS. Some reading of the man pages should clear that up pretty quickly, though, at any rate. I'm guessing that if it is possible it'd require a recompile of apt, which would be rather nontrivial, again considering how integral it is to your system configuration.

# ? Feb 12, 2008 18:51

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

bitprophet posted:

Can you be more specific about what you mean by "tab shortcut"? As in, an example? Do you mean you want to type "ssh my<tab>" and have it expand into e.g. "ssh myserver" where "myserver" is a hostname you've ssh'd to previously? Or what?

Yeah, sorry. That's what I meant...

user@server$ cd up<tab>
would fill it in to say "cd updates"

But I also just realized I was in the wrong directory, and the file I was trying to <tab> to complete didn't even exist... :downsgun:

That or I wasn't using proper case. Either way, I'm retarded.

# ? Feb 12, 2008 20:50

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

Mysterious Aftertaste posted:

Yeah, sorry. That's what I meant...

user@server$ cd up<tab>
would fill it in to say "cd updates"

But I also just realized I was in the wrong directory, and the file I was trying to <tab> to complete didn't even exist...

That or I wasn't using proper case. Either way, I'm retarded.

Just to clarify this: the behaviour of the tab key has nothing to do with ssh - it just relays your keypresses to the server and relays the server response back to you. (Apart from things like deciding how to represent the Delete and Backspace keys.) If you press tab and nothing happens, that's the fault of whatever program is on the other side, which is probably bash. Tab will work the same whether you're logged into a local console or logged in through ssh (assuming you're using the same user account with the same config files and everything).

# ? Feb 12, 2008 21:23

waffle iron: Jan 16, 2004

The correct way to do this is to install bash-completion. It can pick up previously used hosts from your $HOME/.ssh/known_hosts file. Also you can your $HOME/.ssh/config file to include named ssh servers/aliases.

code:

Host example.com
User my_username

That would allow you to do ssh example.com and it would automatically send a username. bash-completion will scan the file and be able to tab complete it.

You can also use aliases

code:

Host what
User my_username
HostName example.com

So then you can do ssh what and it will connect you to example.com. This can also be tab completed.

These are very simple examples of .ssh/config, but you can do more complex stuff like set a non-standard port or enable/disable X forwarding. Check the man pages for ssh_config.
http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl5_ssh_config.htm

# ? Feb 12, 2008 21:35

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

bitprophet posted:

Er. If the partition your /var is on is out of inodes I think you have a bigger problem than trying to get apt to store its information elsewhere and that besides, I'm not sure if you can have apt put things elsewhere, given how integral it is to the OS. Some reading of the man pages should clear that up pretty quickly, though, at any rate. I'm guessing that if it is possible it'd require a recompile of apt, which would be rather nontrivial, again considering how integral it is to your system configuration.

You could always copy it somewhere else and symlink it in /var, couldn't you?

# ? Feb 13, 2008 00:38

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

bitprophet posted:

Er. If the partition your /var is on is out of inodes I think you have a bigger problem than trying to get apt to store its information elsewhere and that besides, I'm not sure if you can have apt put things elsewhere, given how integral it is to the OS. Some reading of the man pages should clear that up pretty quickly, though, at any rate. I'm guessing that if it is possible it'd require a recompile of apt, which would be rather nontrivial, again considering how integral it is to your system configuration.

I was looking over var today and apache has like a trillion cached files in it. This web server uses aapche and zope to serve and manage their web files.

I know nothing about zope or how it stores files but running find on a file I know is on the site points me to one of the many cached folders...so Im afraid to delete anything just yet.

# ? Feb 13, 2008 01:50

other people: Jun 27, 2004; Associate Christ

I just updated my kernel to 2.6.24-r2 which apparently fixed that nasty root exploit.

I am trying to recompile a small kernel module I use and it is now complaining it cannot find the file asm/8253pit.h. It is one of the kernel includes from the module. I have gathered that it has something to do with some old Intel timer chip that's job is now handled by the southbridge bla bla I have no idea where to find this thing. I guess I have to add something to my kernel, but what?

I used the exact same kernel config as before and never had this problem

.

edit: I have been told that this #include is no longer included with kernel 2.6.24. I am not a programmer, is there a way to get around this? Can I get it from somewhere else?

other people fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Feb 13, 2008

# ? Feb 13, 2008 02:20

do it: Jan 3, 2006; don't tell me words don't matter!

I just bought a Syba SD-SATA-4P to add SATA support to my sata-less mobo. I have two drives plugged into it and an IDE drive as a boot drive.

My current IDE drive is booting Ubuntu, but I'm not sure how to get Ubuntu to recognize the new harddrives on the controller card. I don't need the fakeraid that the card has, I just want the drives to be available as storage. How do I set this up? I've looked for drivers, etc. to no avail.

# ? Feb 13, 2008 02:53

Alowishus: Jan 8, 2002; My name is Mud

do it posted:

My current IDE drive is booting Ubuntu, but I'm not sure how to get Ubuntu to recognize the new harddrives on the controller card. I don't need the fakeraid that the card has, I just want the drives to be available as storage.

It should just see them, very unlikely that you'll need drivers. It's going to see them as "sdX" devices instead of "hdX" like your current IDE drive. I'd try "dmesg | grep sd" and see what you can see... chances are you'll see lines referring to sda and sdb, which are your two attached drives.

# ? Feb 13, 2008 03:11

do it: Jan 3, 2006; don't tell me words don't matter!

Alowishus posted:

It should just see them, very unlikely that you'll need drivers. It's going to see them as "sdX" devices instead of "hdX" like your current IDE drive. I'd try "dmesg | grep sd" and see what you can see... chances are you'll see lines referring to sda and sdb, which are your two attached drives.

Here's the output of that:

code:

$ dmesg | grep sd
[   21.872987] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 117231408 512-byte hardware sectors (60022 MB)
[   21.873043] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[   21.873046] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[   21.873080] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[   21.873164] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 117231408 512-byte hardware sectors (60022 MB)
[   21.873176] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[   21.873179] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[   21.873199] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[   21.873204]  sda: sda1 sda2 < sda5 >
[   21.913999] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
[   21.919619] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[   35.614264] Adding 1510068k swap on /dev/sda5.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:1510068k
[   36.061576] EXT3 FS on sda1, internal journal

The IDE drive is 60gb, and the two SATA drives are 120gb and 75gb. I don't think they're showing up :|

edit: lshw -C disk returns

code:

  *-disk                  
       description: SCSI Disk
       product: WDC WD600AB-32CB
       vendor: ATA
       physical id: 0
       bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sda
       version: 03.0
       serial: WD-WMAA61136327
       size: 55GB
       capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
       configuration: ansiversion=5

So the harddrives are definitely not appearing which leads me to believe it's an issue with the card. I'm not sure how to go about debugging that, though.

edit2: Card showing up, drives attached to card are not.

code:

*-storage
                description: RAID bus controller
                product: SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller
                vendor: Silicon Image, Inc.
                physical id: 5
                bus info: pci@0000:03:05.0
                version: 02
                width: 32 bits
                clock: 66MHz
                capabilities: storage pm bus_master cap_list
                configuration: driver=sata_sil latency=32 module=sata_sil

code:

24: PCI 305.0: 0104 RAID bus controller
  [Created at pci.296]
  UDI: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/pci_1095_3114
  Unique ID: FTXf.lje_xHhth_5
  Parent ID: 6NW+.92zbjSp4ZgF
  SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1e.0/0000:03:05.0
  SysFS BusID: 0000:03:05.0
  Hardware Class: storage
  Model: "Silicon Image SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller"
  Vendor: pci 0x1095 "Silicon Image, Inc."
  Device: pci 0x3114 "SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller"
  SubVendor: pci 0x1095 "Silicon Image, Inc."
  SubDevice: pci 0x7114 
  Revision: 0x02
  Driver: "sata_sil"
  Driver Modules: "sata_sil"
  I/O Ports: 0xac00-0xac07 (rw)
  I/O Ports: 0xa800-0xa803 (rw)
  I/O Ports: 0xa400-0xa407 (rw)
  I/O Ports: 0xa000-0xa003 (rw)
  I/O Ports: 0x9c00-0x9c0f (rw)
  Memory Range: 0xdfd00000-0xdfd003ff (rw,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0xdd900000-0xdd97ffff (ro,prefetchable,disabled)
  IRQ: 19 (378 events)
  Module Alias: "pci:v00001095d00003114sv00001095sd00007114bc01sc04i00"
  Driver Info #0:
    Driver Status: sata_sil is active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe sata_sil"
  Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown
  Attached to: #15 (PCI bridge)

do it fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Feb 13, 2008

# ? Feb 13, 2008 03:22

Alowishus: Jan 8, 2002; My name is Mud

do it posted:

So the harddrives are definitely not appearing which leads me to believe it's an issue with the card. I'm not sure how to go about debugging that, though.

Hmm... yes, definitely seems to be the case. I'd expect that the card offers some sort of hotkey to enter a setup/diag utility during your BIOS POST. See if you can find that, and then maybe it will be obvious from there. If given the choice, you want to have each drive configured either as a JBOD or as a single RAID0 drive (different controllers handle single disks differently.) Other key words that you'd want would be AHCI instead of RAID.

# ? Feb 13, 2008 06:50

do it: Jan 3, 2006; don't tell me words don't matter!

Fixed! I plugged the card into a Windows machine (wish I didn't have to do this!), flashed the card's BIOS, formatted and partitioned the drive with Windows' disk manager and then put it all back into the Linux box and the drive appeared.

I'm think it was the card's BIOS that was just extremely outdated or something. Thanks for the help!

do it fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Feb 13, 2008

# ? Feb 13, 2008 07:41

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

So apache has completely used up all my inodes on one of my partitions. Looking at it shows that the mod_disk_cache folder is the culprit. Can I delete everything in there or would that not be good for the server?

Looks like its just a a bunch of empty folders with FEW contents. Ive already made a copy of the directory and was about to empty it and see if the server goes down but I figured Id ask first...

# ? Feb 13, 2008 19:43

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

rugbert posted:

So apache has completely used up all my inodes on one of my partitions. Looking at it shows that the mod_disk_cache folder is the culprit. Can I delete everything in there or would that not be good for the server?

Looks like its just a a bunch of empty folders with FEW contents. Ive already made a copy of the directory and was about to empty it and see if the server goes down but I figured Id ask first...

htcacheclean is the tool for maintaining mod_disk_cache.

# ? Feb 13, 2008 19:45

Boody: Aug 15, 2001

Anyone running Gentoo and Paludis?

I've a gentoo box that's been pretty reliable for the last few years. Needed the occasional trip to the gentoo forums to figure out what the hell was going on with masked packages but other than that no real problems. Wondering if there is any real benefit to moving to Paludis or just sticking with portage as it is.

# ? Feb 13, 2008 19:53

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

covener posted:

htcacheclean is the tool for maintaining mod_disk_cache.

Man this tool blows. Im running it for about an hour while counting files in that directory in another terminal every few minutes and yea the file number is just increasing.

does htcacheclean just delete these files? I could just have cron clean out that directory once a day or something.

rugbert fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Feb 13, 2008

# ? Feb 13, 2008 20:27

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

Boody posted:

Anyone running Gentoo and Paludis?

I've a gentoo box that's been pretty reliable for the last few years. Needed the occasional trip to the gentoo forums to figure out what the hell was going on with masked packages but other than that no real problems. Wondering if there is any real benefit to moving to Paludis or just sticking with portage as it is.

I had switched one of my Gentoo VM's over to Paludis. The only real benefit is if you want more control over what's installed and better security features. It's a frustrating venture though. It might have improved now, but when I tried it, it was a huge bitch to get to work properly.

If your system isn't mission critical and you've got a backup, I'd give it a shot.

# ? Feb 13, 2008 22:12

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

rugbert posted:

Man this tool blows. Im running it for about an hour while counting files in that directory in another terminal every few minutes and yea the file number is just increasing.

does htcacheclean just delete these files? I could just have cron clean out that directory once a day or something.

Did you tell it to daemonize or something? There's not a lot of code there.

# ? Feb 14, 2008 04:19

Peanutmonger: Dec 6, 2002

Boody posted:

Anyone running Gentoo and Paludis?

I've a gentoo box that's been pretty reliable for the last few years. Needed the occasional trip to the gentoo forums to figure out what the hell was going on with masked packages but other than that no real problems. Wondering if there is any real benefit to moving to Paludis or just sticking with portage as it is.

I've been using this setup on a machine for a while now. For the most part, it acts the same. Dependency resolution is definitely faster, but I still use eix to search for packages anyway. There are a few beneficial differences, though. For example, it operates under the premise of having a group of repositories, rather than a main repository and overlays. In this way, it's not nearly as tied to portage as emerge is. It also, by default, does the test phase for packages, which caused some interesting realizations for me (what? They ship this with a make test that they know fails?). When displaying dependencies, it shows the reasons for each package being included. You can configure its response to nearly every event it encounters, pre/post fetch/compile/test/etc success/failure/etc. You can also add scripts to hooks for another large set of events. The last thing I'll mention is the --report feature, which tells you which packages you have installed that have dropped out of their repository/no longer have a reason to be installed/are mentioned as broken in a GLSA.

It's still a work in progress, though. Until the latest alphas, there wasn't a replacement of revdep-rebuild, so you had to make do with an edited emerge-version. And those latest alphas break some cran/ruby stuff (which I don't use, so I use the alphas). It certainly seems like the next step for package management as far as Gentoo goes, it's too bad it isn't backed by Gentoo proper.

Last I checked, you're able to move back and forth between emerge and paludis freely, I think. There might be some paludis features that will break going back to emerge, but I can't remember what. I assume you'd read up on it first on your own though, anyway, right?

# ? Feb 14, 2008 07:09

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

covener posted:

Did you tell it to daemonize or something? There's not a lot of code there.

No, I wanted it to run through once before for I put it on a schedule. I should mention that there is about 6.5 gigs of cache files. But over an hour with no output? Seems a bit long.

Apparently this thing is supposed to start with apache but lot of time it can get turned off for various reasons. The start command didn't seem to work tho.

I just went ahead and cleaned out the folder myself and Ill run apt-get today, maybe theres and update to fix it or something. It doesn't look like this server has been updated in a long time.

# ? Feb 14, 2008 13:44

Id4ever: Dec 2, 2004

What's a good wireless (G) PCI card for Kubuntu 7.10 64-bit? One that'll work without me editing any files or downloading any drivers.

I'm getting tired of trying to get my D-link G510 (RT61 chipset) to work in Linux, besides it doesn't work very well in Vista 64bit either (10% packet loss, worked fine in my old PC).

# ? Feb 14, 2008 21:23

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

Id4ever posted:

What's a good wireless (G) PCI card for Kubuntu 7.10 64-bit? One that'll work without me editing any files or downloading any drivers.

I'm getting tired of trying to get my D-link G510 (RT61 chipset) to work in Linux, besides it doesn't work very well in Vista 64bit either (10% packet loss, worked fine in my old PC).

http://linux-wless.passys.nl/

# ? Feb 14, 2008 22:48

Handsome Wife: Feb 17, 2001

I just got a refurbished ThinkPad T42, and it comes with Intel PRO Wireless 2200 BG. I installed ZenWalk 5.0 on it, which is supposed to have just added support for Intel PRO Wireless cards out of the box.

However, it's not detecting my wireless card. I can't just install the drivers, because they're already installed. Does anybody have any idea what my problem is?

The Xubuntu LiveCD worked out of the box, but I like ZenWalk better and would prefer to use it if possible.

# ? Feb 15, 2008 02:05

deadEd: Feb 20, 2001

Spiffmaster posted:

I just got a refurbished ThinkPad T42, and it comes with Intel PRO Wireless 2200 BG. I installed ZenWalk 5.0 on it, which is supposed to have just added support for Intel PRO Wireless cards out of the box.

However, it's not detecting my wireless card. I can't just install the drivers, because they're already installed. Does anybody have any idea what my problem is?

The Xubuntu LiveCD worked out of the box, but I like ZenWalk better and would prefer to use it if possible.

Which driver is installed? I'm imagining its ipw2200 since that seems to be included with most kernels these days.

I've never used Zenwalk, but I know that even with Debian having ipw2200 built into the kernel, I always had to get the firmware binaries from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net before the card would ever work.

# ? Feb 15, 2008 02:31

Boody: Aug 15, 2001

Peanutmonger posted:

Last I checked, you're able to move back and forth between emerge and paludis freely, I think. There might be some paludis features that will break going back to emerge, but I can't remember what. I assume you'd read up on it first on your own though, anyway, right?

Thanks, from the research I'd done it sounded like something worth checking out but wasn't clear to me just how big an impact the current negatives would be, none of them sounded like huge problems but wasn't sure if I was missing something obvious. Will read up on it in detail and give it a go over the weekend.

# ? Feb 15, 2008 09:14

Rescue Toaster: Mar 13, 2003

I had two questions in relation to a small NAS machine I want to build.

A) Is it straightforward to set it up so me & my roommate can both use VNC (are the kids still using VNC these days?) at the same time to connect to separate X instances logged in as ourselves? Seems like this might not even be possible due to the way X works with video hardware and such...

B) I'll be doing software RAID5 via md. I don't want extra discs that can fail in the machine (and it only has 4 SATA ports anyway). Is it practical to use a small compact flash (connected to IDE) or even a USB flashstick as the /boot partition so root and everything else can be on the RAID array? Does /boot get written to a lot - wearing out the flash?

Thanks!

# ? Feb 15, 2008 10:18

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

Rescue Toaster posted:

A) Is it straightforward to set it up so me & my roommate can both use VNC (are the kids still using VNC these days?) at the same time to connect to separate X instances logged in as ourselves? Seems like this might not even be possible due to the way X works with video hardware and such...

I would recommend investigating freenx (wiki and walkthrough) - its performance is noticeably superior to VNC on my LAN and you can have multiple separate logins active.

The only thing it won't do is take over an existing X session (eg for remote support) but that doesn't sound like it's a problem for you.

# ? Feb 15, 2008 11:40

Alowishus: Jan 8, 2002; My name is Mud

Rescue Toaster posted:

Is it straightforward to set it up so me & my roommate can both use VNC (are the kids still using VNC these days?) at the same time to connect to separate X instances logged in as ourselves?

It's definitely possible... each user can run their own vncserver and they each get their own desktop... you'll just have to connect to different ports ("screens"). But as Col said, NX is much faster displaywise, so your choice.

quote:

Is it practical to use a small compact flash (connected to IDE) or even a USB flashstick as the /boot partition so root and everything else can be on the RAID array? Does /boot get written to a lot - wearing out the flash?

Absolutely. /boot doesn't get written to at all unless you're upgrading the kernel or modifying GRUB's config. A lot of people run /boot unmounted or under autofs.

# ? Feb 15, 2008 17:16

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

Can someone tell me what virtual packages are?

# ? Feb 15, 2008 19:14

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

rugbert posted:

Can someone tell me what virtual packages are?

It's a package that doesn't contain anything, it just has a list of dependencies on "real" packages that installed at the same time.

For instance, a lot of media players can use different engines for actually playing the videos, so you get packages like "totem-mplayer", "totem-xine", "totem-gstreamer", etc. - Totem is the UI, file management, media library, etc, and it uses either MPlayer or Xine or GStreamer or whatever to actually decode the video and play it in the window. The user probably doesn't care which, they care more about what the player looks like, so they install the "totem" virtual package and it picks one more-or-less at random.

Another example is things like "kde-desktop", which is just a virtual package that depends on every single piece of software that's part of KDE, so you can install the whole thing just by installing one package - or, if you're less lazy and more picky, you can pick and choose individual packages (ie. skip all the games, or don't install KOffice because you use OpenOffice instead).

# ? Feb 15, 2008 19:30

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

Rescue Toaster posted:

B) I'll be doing software RAID5 via md. I don't want extra discs that can fail in the machine (and it only has 4 SATA ports anyway). Is it practical to use a small compact flash (connected to IDE) or even a USB flashstick as the /boot partition so root and everything else can be on the RAID array? Does /boot get written to a lot - wearing out the flash?

Flash drive should work, but another option is to create small partitions on the drives and use them as mirrored boot partitions or even standalone.

# ? Feb 15, 2008 20:22

Kaso: Apr 17, 2006; How come the abyss doesn't gaze also into me ?

I have a ubuntu PC with two network interfaces, however my router's DHCP software (as far as i can work out) doesn't want to give me two IPs because both interfaces are broadcasting the same hostname.

Is it possible to force each interface to broadcast a "virtual" hostname of some kind?

# ? Feb 16, 2008 16:02

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 18, 2024 10:58

Dairy Days: Dec 26, 2007

Alright this is giving me a headache.
Ive installed Debian onto an IDE slave drive. I have the vista boot loader set up to boot vista OR boot grub. after booting grub I select Debian, but the kernel is "not found" however, it WILL boot if i change hd1 to hd0, BUT it does a hardware detection and hangs after it finds my USB keyboard. What is going on here? Do i have to change my jumper pins or something?

# ? Feb 16, 2008 17:23

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

«‹›1023 »