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

«‹›1024 »

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

Ashex posted:

I believe you skipped the step for partitioning.

The final screen Will have the spot where you point it to the install destination for grub. Also, broken link.

new link:
http://blog.costan.us/

I did delete the FAT32 partition. I can install it fine, it appears on boot. But I think Im just not installing the grub to the correct location. Do I install it to SDA3 (the old fat32 partition, now the ubuntu partition) or one of the other partitions?

I thought I had formatted the hard disk before I install reinstalled OSX but maybe I didnt.

# ? Sep 30, 2008 21:57

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 20, 2024 00:45

dont skimp on the shrimp: Apr 23, 2008

rugbert posted:

new link:
http://blog.costan.us/

I did delete the FAT32 partition. I can install it fine, it appears on boot. But I think Im just not installing the grub to the correct location. Do I install it to SDA3 (the old fat32 partition, now the ubuntu partition) or one of the other partitions?

I thought I had formatted the hard disk before I install reinstalled OSX but maybe I didnt.

Don't you usually install it to the harddrive itself rather than a partition? (/dev/sda instead of /dev/sda3)

# ? Sep 30, 2008 22:10

The Remote Viewer: Jul 9, 2001

Is there any way to make Ubuntu use one taskbar with everything on it like Windows?

# ? Oct 1, 2008 02:21

juggalol: Nov 28, 2004; Rock For Sustainable Capitalism

FugeesTeenMom92 posted:

Yeah, except it loving doesn't.

Turning Wobbly Windows off makes the snapping stop. However, there is apparently no way to have Wobbly Windows without Irritating Snapping Windows.

Have you restarted X after changing the settings? I've had compiz misbehave like that before.

# ? Oct 1, 2008 02:31

Ashex: Jun 25, 2007; These pipes are cleeeean!!!

The Remote Viewer posted:

Is there any way to make Ubuntu use one taskbar with everything on it like Windows?

right-click > add to panel. Choose what you want on it.

# ? Oct 1, 2008 03:09

The Remote Viewer: Jul 9, 2001

Ashex posted:

right-click > add to panel. Choose what you want on it.

Cool, thanks.

# ? Oct 1, 2008 04:37

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

Hey everyone,

I have a local yum repo for our servers at work, and I use rsync to grab updates from the university of Oregon. However, much of the time is spent grabbing packages that I don't need like Cluster_Administration in 462356235 different languages.

is there a way that I could use regex or something similar to ignore certain sets of packages.

here is the 1 liner

code:

 /usr/bin/rsync -avrt rsync://mirror.nic.uoregon.edu/centos/5/updates/i386/ --exclude=debug /var/www/html/centos/5/updates

I know that the --exclude flag is there, but I'm not sure what these packages would fall under.

# ? Oct 1, 2008 15:35

pyo: Nov 18, 2003; ... !

I hosed up the passwords for MySQL and was thinking that it would be great if I could just remove everything that has to do with it and start over again. I'm using Debian lenny and I tried sudo apt-get remove msql-server but the settings remained when I installed it again.

How can I remove all of mysql, even the settings and passwords?

# ? Oct 3, 2008 18:04

ShoulderDaemon: Oct 9, 2003; support goon fund; Taco Defender

Hildgrim posted:

I hosed up the passwords for MySQL and was thinking that it would be great if I could just remove everything that has to do with it and start over again. I'm using Debian lenny and I tried sudo apt-get remove msql-server but the settings remained when I installed it again.

How can I remove all of mysql, even the settings and passwords?

apt-get --purge remove mysql-server

# ? Oct 3, 2008 18:21

bitprophet: Jul 22, 2004; Taco Defender

However, it's easy to update MySQL's passwords, even if you don't know them or messed them up. Do this as root:

code:

# /etc/init.d/mysql stop
# mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &
# mysqladmin -u root password <new-password>
# mysqladmin shutdown
# /etc/init.d/mysql start

What this does is shut down the "normal" MySQL server, start it up temporarily with permissions turned off (for god's sake never let it run like this for very long!), and then you can do anything you like, with the most common thing being to update root's password as shown (but you can also enter the MySQL shell and do stuff in there too, e.g. to mysql.users table).

Once you're done, mysqladmin can shut down the backgrounded mysqld_safe session, and then you start it up again normally.

# ? Oct 3, 2008 20:07

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

So I need to route to a certain interface based on port.

I know how to use route to use a certain interface based on IP, but I don't think 'route' can do by port.

edit: nevermind. I swear every time I post in this thread I figure it out 2 minutes later.

Mysterious Aftertaste fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Oct 4, 2008

# ? Oct 4, 2008 19:02

bitprophet: Jul 22, 2004; Taco Defender

Mysterious Aftertaste posted:

So I need to route to a certain interface based on port.

I know how to use route to use a certain interface based on IP, but I don't think 'route' can do by port.

edit: nevermind. I swear every time I post in this thread I figure it out 2 minutes later.

Make sure you edit in what the solution was!

otherwise anyone following in your footsteps is going to hate you with a passion.

# ? Oct 4, 2008 20:07

The Remote Viewer: Jul 9, 2001

Anyone running uTorrent through wine, and connecting to a secure tracker? I get HTTP Error 400 on every torrent that's on a secure tracker.

# ? Oct 5, 2008 02:51

Token Female: Apr 2, 2007; If I hear the music...

I've recently started using ubuntu, and am in need of a graphics program. After a cursory look xaralx is the program that I get recommend. I was wondering if there is something better out there, or if this should be satisfactory. I'm used to using photoshop CS on windows.

# ? Oct 5, 2008 03:01

crab avatar: Mar 15, 2006; iÅ§ KÃ«3Å, cÄ§ gÃ¸Ã i- <Ecl8

Token Female posted:

I've recently started using ubuntu, and am in need of a graphics program. After a cursory look xaralx is the program that I get recommend. I was wondering if there is something better out there, or if this should be satisfactory. I'm used to using photoshop CS on windows.

Xara is a vector graphics app, similar to Adobe Illustrator. If that is what you need, Inkscape is a better choice as development of Xara LX was killed after Xara LLC was bought out by Magix.

For raster graphics though, try GIMP (the interface is slooooowly getting there), or Krita. I'm hearing a lot of praise of the latter, though I haven't tried it myself. It's been also said that it's closer to Painter than Photoshop (painting vs manipulation).

The GIMP, Krita and Inkscape are all included in Ubuntu's repositories. Krita depends on KDE.

# ? Oct 5, 2008 13:36

mike12345: Jul 14, 2008; "Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries."

Token Female posted:

I've recently started using ubuntu, and am in need of a graphics program. After a cursory look xaralx is the program that I get recommend. I was wondering if there is something better out there, or if this should be satisfactory. I'm used to using photoshop CS on windows.

I've never heard of xaralx, but the obvious contender here is GIMP. The interface is different, and it lacks some features like CYMK-support. Or used to. They've released a new version a couple of days ago, so check it out.

# ? Oct 5, 2008 13:55

37ArmsToBind: Jun 30, 2007; Every Thug Needs A Lady

OK, I need a bit of help.

I recently bought an AAO netbook with linpus linux. Problem is I've never used linux, so it's all very much over my head.

I want to play .avi videos, so I found a guide on http://tlog.de/.
I did everything up to the point of installing VLC. The line "sudo mousepad /usr/share/applications/lvc.desktop" brings up a new window to which I'm assuming I need to copy everything under [Desktop Entry]

Then what? Do I save it and then run "sudo mousepad /home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-app.xml" back in the terminal?

# ? Oct 6, 2008 01:14

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

Linux is hard < :mad:

>

Ok now for some questions.

How do I figure out what version of Linux I'm running? Is there a command equivalent for "sh ver" I want to know what kernal, what flavor, etc. From random commands and the use of the --help, I think I'm running some version of slackware, but...

Next, I'm trying to install some wireless drivers. I have an intel 4965agn card, which amazingly enough has actual linux drivers available for it. I've been using this site:

http://intellinuxwireless.org/?p=iwlwifi&n=howto-iwlwifi

and trying to follow along, but something gets hosed up at the "make" part. It does some stuff, I guess its "making" it, but then I see an error message and the process fails.

Of course the next step doesn't work either.

So any help?

My purpose is to do some wireless penetration because I figure if I'm going for a Cisco security/wireless CCIE then I should be familiar with linux, at least as far as wireless security/capabilities go.

In the mean time I guess I'll be reading the literal books of advanced linux commands that I don't know how to even parse.

# ? Oct 6, 2008 17:48

Accipiter: Jan 24, 2004; SINATRA.

Powercrazy posted:

Linux is hard <>

You REALLY need to read some documentation.

Powercrazy posted:

How do I figure out what version of Linux I'm running? Is there a command equivalent for "sh ver" I want to know what kernal, what flavor, etc. From random commands and the use of the --help, I think I'm running some version of slackware, but...

I can't possibly fathom how you don't know the answer to this question. In any case, the answer is that it depends. For Red Hat and Red Hat-based systems, do cat /etc/redhat-release to see what you're running. If you think you're on Slackware, the existence of /etc/slackware-version will confirm it. As for the kernel (not kernal; we're not using a C64 here), have a look at the uname command.

Powercrazy posted:

I guess its "making" it, but then I see an error message and the process fails.

And I also can't understand how you think you can be helped without specifying the details about what kind of error you're getting. :rolleyes:

# ? Oct 6, 2008 18:23

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

haha.

I understand your frustration. But I literally don't know enough to even ask an intelligent question.

Lets start with some super basics. When I read some documentation and it tells me that I should edit some file, say /etc/X11/xorg.conf How would I do that?

Also what is the general syntax of linux? In DOS if I wanted to change directory I'd just type "cd\my directory\my sub directory"

In linux I've got things like /etc/X11 or /usr/tmp or whatever. Do I need the cd or is it just an ancient command? I can't find the simple things that all the tutorials take for granted.

It makes it doubly hard because apparently all versions are completely different and have nothing in common, so I should probably figure out what version I'm running, but there isn't a good way to do that either.

I believe I'm using Konquerer or/with/and KDE which is running on a slackware core? I'm probably not even making sense.

e: Ok after poking around in th gui, startx (KDE?) I'm running KDE version 3.5.7.
On a linux core version 2.6.21.5

So there we go.

What command do I run from the terminal to find that information?

ate shit on live tv fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Oct 6, 2008

# ? Oct 6, 2008 18:43

Lucien: May 2, 2007; check it out i'm a samurai ^_^

Powercrazy posted:

haha.

I understand your frustration. But I literally don't know enough to even ask an intelligent question.

Lets start with some super basics. When I read some documentation and it tells me that I should edit some file, say /etc/X11/xorg.conf How would I do that?

Open the file with your preferred editor in the GUI, or do it command line style like so:

code:

$nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Powercrazy posted:

Also what is the general syntax of linux? In DOS if I wanted to change directory I'd just type "cd\my directory\my sub directory"

No, you don't. You'd type "cd c:\whatever\directory". In Linux you type "cd /whatever/directory"

Powercrazy posted:

In linux I've got things like /etc/X11 or /usr/tmp or whatever. Do I need the cd or is it just an ancient command? I can't find the simple things that all the tutorials take for granted.

cd works.

Powercrazy posted:

It makes it doubly hard because apparently all versions are completely different and have nothing in common, so I should probably figure out what version I'm running, but there isn't a good way to do that either.

I believe I'm using Konquerer or/with/and KDE which is running on a slackware core? I'm probably not even making sense.

No, no, that kind of makes sense.

# ? Oct 6, 2008 18:59

Harokey: Jun 12, 2003; Memory is RAM! Oh dear!

code:

uname -a

will tell you some information about your kernel, and sometimes what distro you're using...

# ? Oct 6, 2008 19:10

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

So I migrated an Ubuntu webserver to one machine to a small lab machine in my office so play around and I got everything working hunky dory except that apache isnt working 100%.

One the original machine it has an additional virtual host file called mysite.test.com (whose document root btw contains nothing?) and it would i dunno, automatically redirect to zope. HOWEVER, after migrating it does not do this. it simply looks to the default virtualhost file.

I dont know if this is an apache problem or a linux thing so please let me know if there is a more appropriate place for this question.

edit - I disabled the default virtual host file and now when I used W3M to goto localhost I get a 503 error.

rugbert fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Oct 6, 2008

# ? Oct 6, 2008 19:22

mike12345: Jul 14, 2008; "Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries."

I'm on Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 64-bit since last year and the flash-player is starting to piss me off for good. Is it normal for some embedded videos to work and some simply not? And sometimes it shuts off entirely, disabling all flash content. I've begun to use IE6 with wine just to get some flash-content playing.

So, if I switch to 32-bit, will it be better? Is this only because of that npwrapper-script that makes it possible to run flash on 64-bit?

# ? Oct 6, 2008 19:57

Ashex: Jun 25, 2007; These pipes are cleeeean!!!

MargotK posted:

I'm on Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 64-bit since last year and the flash-player is starting to piss me off for good. Is it normal for some embedded videos to work and some simply not? And sometimes it shuts off entirely, disabling all flash content. I've begun to use IE6 with wine just to get some flash-content playing.

So, if I switch to 32-bit, will it be better? Is this only because of that npwrapper-script that makes it possible to run flash on 64-bit?

Kinda, I was using 64-bit and was having this issue. Try using Opera, as it actually reloads the plugin with each tab so if it stops working, just refresh.

# ? Oct 6, 2008 20:36

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

Harokey posted:

code:
uname -a
will tell you some information about your kernel, and sometimes what distro you're using...

Ah. Thanks, I remembered that command from somewhere.

Well I've spent the past 4 hours reading various tutorials. So I'm finally understanding some of the syntax from Linux.

What does '$' do?

# ? Oct 6, 2008 20:56

mike12345: Jul 14, 2008; "Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries."

Ashex posted:

Kinda, I was using 64-bit and was having this issue. Try using Opera, as it actually reloads the plugin with each tab so if it stops working, just refresh.

"was using" - aha. But thanks, I forgot how awesome opera is. That reload-trick works sometimes, myspace is still (mostly) unusable.

# ? Oct 6, 2008 21:02

Megaman: May 8, 2004; I didn't read the thread BUT...

Powercrazy posted:

Ah. Thanks, I remembered that command from somewhere.

Well I've spent the past 4 hours reading various tutorials. So I'm finally understanding some of the syntax from Linux.

What does '$' do?

Also remember if you want to see what distro you are ACTUALLY using, uname -a won't be enough. You need to cat /proc/version usually and it will tell you something like (Red Hat 3.4.6-3) or UBUNTU-DEV-GUSTY or something

# ? Oct 6, 2008 21:23

Ashex: Jun 25, 2007; These pipes are cleeeean!!!

MargotK posted:

"was using" - aha. But thanks, I forgot how awesome opera is. That reload-trick works sometimes, myspace is still (mostly) unusable.

Yeah, I got tired of having issues compiling some stuff so I switched back. It sucks though as I have 4GB now and I'm going to have to recompile the kernel if I want to use it all.

# ? Oct 6, 2008 21:46

Alowishus: Jan 8, 2002; My name is Mud

Super Sekret Way To Figure Out Distribution And Version On Most Modern Linux Installs :siren:

code:

lsb_release -a

This works on every RedHat/CentOS and Fedora system I've tested going back to at least RHEL3, every Ubuntu and OpenSuSE I've tried, and at least Debian 4. I'd be curious to hear about Slackware.

The best thing is that you don't even have to have a vague guess about your distribution, since it abstracts all the /etc/*release|version* crap. Witness:

code:

-----
System 1
-----
$ lsb_release -a
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 8.04.1
Release:	8.04
Codename:	hardy

-----
System 2
-----
$ lsb_release -a
Distributor ID:	CentOS
Description:	CentOS release 5.2 (Final)
Release:	5.2
Codename:	Final

# ? Oct 6, 2008 21:52

Harokey: Jun 12, 2003; Memory is RAM! Oh dear!

Alowishus posted:

Super Sekret Way To Figure Out Distribution And Version On Most Modern Linux Installs
code:
lsb_release -a

Didn't work on an oldish gentoo install that we have here in the lab... But did work on my ubuntu machine!

# ? Oct 6, 2008 22:39

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

Harokey posted:

Didn't work on an oldish gentoo install that we have here in the lab... But did work on my ubuntu machine!

From this, I assume you just don't have it installed.

# ? Oct 6, 2008 23:17

Harokey: Jun 12, 2003; Memory is RAM! Oh dear!

JoeNotCharles posted:

From this, I assume you just don't have it installed.

I guess not, I didn't set up the machine, they date from well before I got here

# ? Oct 6, 2008 23:20

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

Powercrazy posted:

I see you mentioned reading a couple of tutorials, but might I suggest something like the following?

http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html

You may find it to be a useful summary of the basics.

Something like this may be useful if you fancy getting a bit more technical:

http://tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/index.html

(And here in general.)

It's probably bad form to guide you away from a particular distro, but as you're obviously struggling a bit, Slackware may not be the most user friendly of the distros for someone new to Linux. Switching to something like Debian or Ubuntu (or almost any other) would at least give you a package manager and large repositories to easily install wanted programs. They may also do a better job of automatically detecting and installing your wireless card.

# ? Oct 6, 2008 23:47

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

Col posted:

It's probably bad form to guide you away from a particular distro, but as you're obviously struggling a bit, Slackware may not be the most user friendly of the distros for someone new to Linux. Switching to something like Debian or Ubuntu (or almost any other) would at least give you a package manager and large repositories to easily install wanted programs. They may also do a better job of automatically detecting and installing your wireless card.

Thank you for the links etc. Believe me I've been reading tutorials non-stop for quite a while now, just to get my head around the basics. I know how to almost use vi, and how to manipulate input/output, as well as a general hierarchy of device drivers etc. Hurrah.

The whole reason I'm using this particular release is because of wireless penetration etc. I have a bunch of tools that I've managed to install and I'm writing some basic traffic analyzing tools to inspect particular packets. This is strictly for Security testing / exploration and not for anything else. So I have a pretty cut down version of linux. Weighing in at around 300meg with a cold boot time of 25seconds.

Only thing I can't do is get the OS to actually detect my wireless card. Right now I'm running it through a VM on XP, but I might just bite the bullet and just go with a full out dual boot.

Can I use lilo or something to select my OS on bootup without having to reinstall XP, or does XP have an option like that naively?

# ? Oct 7, 2008 02:04

NZAmoeba: Feb 14, 2005; It turns out it's MAN!; Hair Elf

Anyone got any recommendations for good linux books?

I'm reasonably handy at windows server administration, but at my new job there's no 'linux person' as he left, leaving us with a bunch of servers we only marginally know how to manage.

So now I have a task of setting up a linux server and running a wiki off of it, but the only experience I have with it is one semester in university where they taught us some basic unix commands, but now all I remember is ls and cd because it was years ago.

So any good books that teach you the very basics of navigation around red hat etc, as it relates to what the user might be used to in windows?

# ? Oct 7, 2008 02:05

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

Powercrazy posted:

Can I use lilo or something to select my OS on bootup without having to reinstall XP, or does XP have an option like that naively?

Yes, pretty much any distro will recognise an existing Windows partition and add an entry to its bootloader (lilo or more commonly grub these days) so you can choose between the two at boot. Even if you accidentally screw it up and forget to install the bootloader, you can always get access to your linux system from a boot disk if required to fix it.

Windows does not (to my knowledge) offer an option to boot a linux distro natively.

If you need to resize your windows partition to make room for the Linux partitions, don't forget to backup everything just in case.

Also, it seems to be missed out of loads of tutorials, but create a separate /home partition - all of your personal settings/programme settings are kept in the home directory, so you can reinstall linux and get right back to your old desktop and all applications will remember their preferences/libraries etc.

# ? Oct 7, 2008 10:26

Mr. Eric Praline: Aug 13, 2004; I didn't like the others, they were all too flat.

Hey, can someone help me with some text manipulation?

I've got a documentum script that is supposed to add users to a group. The problem is that the username is formatted incorrectly.

The file is a series of blocks like this:

retrieve,c,dm_group where group_name='group' append,c,l,users_names Doe, John append,c,l,users_names Smith, Todd save,c,l

I need to change "Doe, John" to "John.Doe" and "Smith, Todd" to "Todd.Smith".

# ? Oct 7, 2008 14:43

GringoGrande: Jul 27, 2001; Nah...

chryst posted:

Hey, can someone help me with some text manipulation?

I've got a documentum script that is supposed to add users to a group. The problem is that the username is formatted incorrectly.

The file is a series of blocks like this:

retrieve,c,dm_group where group_name='group' append,c,l,users_names Doe, John append,c,l,users_names Smith, Todd save,c,l

I need to change "Doe, John" to "John.Doe" and "Smith, Todd" to "Todd.Smith".

Something like this should work:

code:

sed -re 's|^(\w+), (\w+)$|\2.\1|' $filename > newfile

e: less backspaces
e2: by backspaces, I mean backslashes.

GringoGrande fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Oct 7, 2008

# ? Oct 7, 2008 15:09

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 20, 2024 00:45

Lucien: May 2, 2007; check it out i'm a samurai ^_^

chryst posted:

Hey, can someone help me with some text manipulation?

I've got a documentum script that is supposed to add users to a group. The problem is that the username is formatted incorrectly.

The file is a series of blocks like this:

retrieve,c,dm_group where group_name='group' append,c,l,users_names Doe, John append,c,l,users_names Smith, Todd save,c,l

I need to change "Doe, John" to "John.Doe" and "Smith, Todd" to "Todd.Smith".

My first idea is to open the file in vim and do

code:

:%s/\(\a\+\), \(\a\+\)/\2.\1/

# ? Oct 7, 2008 15:15

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

«‹›1024 »