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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maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Apr 28, 2019

# ? May 2, 2010 20:08

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 05:50

FISHMANPET: Mar 3, 2007; Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

GregNorc posted:

Just posting to say I found a fix... if you have a Realtek 8191SE-VA2, install this .deb

https://launchpad.net/~matt-price/+archive/mattprice/+files/rtl8192se-dkms_2.6.0015.0127.2010_all.deb

(install it by entering dpkg -i (filename) in the directory you DLed it to)

Restart, then enjoy sweet, sweet wifi.

On another note, while I disdain transparency and other uneeded CPU drains (probably a side effect of learning on lovely hand me down hardware until I was in college), I really, really, love OSX's Expose and spaces features...

1.) Since I had to disable KMS, I cannot turn on any visual effects (such as "real" transparency), so I guess the linux equivalent of expose is out of the question?

2.) I'd like to be able to mimic spaces in Linux. Not so much the whole "Hit F10 and get a set of all your workspaces" but I've noticed that Ubuntu treats each desktop as seperate.

If I have desktop A with Firefox open, desktop B with a bunch of terminal windows, and desktop C with Rhythmbox and Empathy open, if I am on desktop A and hit ALT-TAB, all it seems to see is firefox, whereas in OSX I would be able to hit ALT-TAB and select say, the terminal, and my desktop view would switch to the appropriate desktop. Is this possibly in Ubuntu?

Alt+arrow key can switch between work spaces. Up, down, left, right, depending on how your desktops are laid out.

# ? May 2, 2010 20:12

maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Apr 28, 2019

# ? May 2, 2010 21:32

waffle iron: Jan 16, 2004

I use XFCE for a desktop environment and it has an option to be able to alt-tab between all workspaces.

If you're using Gnome with Metacity (or Metacity variant) as your window manager you might want to look into: http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/2010/01/22/alt-tab-over-all-workspaces/

# ? May 2, 2010 21:39

Cogito Ergo Sam: Mar 27, 2007; I have no idea what you're talking about, so here's a bunny humping a balloon.

Quick questions...one, is there an SA IRC channel for the Linux crowd?

And two, what am I doing wrong when trying to find the size of folders in a directory including hidden ones; I know that I can view hidden ones with ls -a, and I can view folder sizes with du -sh, but I can't seem to get ls to pipe into the du command. I have a feeling I'm missing something pretty simple.

Also, in case anyone else with an older laptop has the blank screen after grub with Ubuntu 10.04, a tip that helped me with getting Lucid up on my laptop (which has the Intel i855 integrated graphics) was to modify the grub boot parameters. Before, I was getting a blank, black screen when GDM was supposed to be loading - I could boot into recovery mode, including the limited graphical session, but the monitor wasn't getting the Intel drivers even after I reinstalled them (xserver-xorg-video-intel).

The solution for me was to edit /etc/default/grub as follows:

code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.modeset=1"

and then run upgrade-grub.

Now it boots up normally, the monitor doesn't show up as Unknown, and all of the resolutions including the widescreen ones are available.

Cogito Ergo Sam fucked around with this message at 18:47 on May 3, 2010

# ? May 3, 2010 18:37

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

Cogito Ergo Sam posted:

And two, what am I doing wrong when trying to find the size of folders in a directory including hidden ones; I know that I can view hidden ones with ls -a, and I can view folder sizes with du -sh, but I can't seem to get ls to pipe into the du command. I have a feeling I'm missing something pretty simple.

du -hs * .*

# ? May 3, 2010 18:41

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Cogito Ergo Sam posted:

Quick questions...one, is there an SA IRC channel for the Linux crowd?

The official IRC Channel is #ubuntu on Freenode. There's https://www.ubuntuforums.com as well.

# ? May 3, 2010 18:44

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

ShoulderDaemon posted:

du -hs * .*

Alternatively, assuming bash, shopt -s dotglob; du -hs *

# ? May 3, 2010 21:14

Green Puddin: Mar 30, 2008

OK, so I have a grandma (alive). She has an old (OLD) tower that she wants to use for her art class. Basically, what she wants is this:

She wants to be able to put a CD in the system, then get to the image files on the CD to display on screen. Thankfully it's old enough but not old enough to have VGA out, so we can just pick up a nice flat screen for her to use.

I think this thing was bought in like 1997. I am hoping to God there is at least 64MB of RAM in this thing. I can get the specs later tonight, but for now I'm trying to find a very very simple distro I can install on this thing, because I'm sure she'll eventually want to use a USB hub with her cameras SD cards and such.

She's not looking for a full blown OS, from what I understand. There won't be any network activity or need to be up to date with the machine. I was thinking of drat Small Linux, but the last time I used that was way back in the day and this is my grandma we are talking about, if it's not GNOME and the CD icon doesn't pop up on the desktop, then that's pointless.

Any ideas?

# ? May 3, 2010 23:37

Keito: Jul 21, 2005; WHAT DO I CHOOSE ?

You should be able to do that with just about anything. If not GNOME, you could use a really lightweight window manager and file manager, and just add in some cdrom/usb automounter script/program.

# ? May 4, 2010 00:34

enotnert: Jun 10, 2005; Only women bleed

Get something geared to be really loving small like DSL (drat small linux)

# ? May 4, 2010 00:37

Count Thrashula: Jun 1, 2003; Death is nothing compared to vindication.; Buglord

I'm having trouble with rtorrent... here's an excerpt from my current .rtorrent.rc:

code:

...
# download directory
directory = ~/Downloads/Incomplete\ Torrents/

# move torrents on completion
system.method.set_key = event.download.finished,move_complete,"execute=mv,-u,$d.get_base_path=,~/Downloads/Complete\ Torrents/;d.set_directory=~/Downloads/Complete\ Torrents/" 

# watch for .torrent files
schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=~/.rtorrent/watch/*.torrent
schedule = untied_directory,5,5,stop_untied=
...

Now, theorhetically, shouldn't this watch for .torrent files in ~/.rtorrent/watch/, start downloading to ~/Downloads/Incomplete Torrents/, and move the files to ~/Downloads/Complete Torrents/ when they finish? What am I doing wrong? It starts there in the ~/D/IT folder, but doesn't move them when they finish.

# ? May 4, 2010 03:17

axolotl farmer: May 17, 2007; Now I'm going to sing the Perry Mason theme

Very minor gripe:

When I run an ncurses program under screen, all line art comes out as ��.

Is there a way to fix this? When I run it in a terminal not inside screen, the line art is fine.

# ? May 4, 2010 22:33

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

axolotl farmer posted:

Very minor gripe:

When I run an ncurses program under screen, all line art comes out as ��.

Is there a way to fix this? When I run it in a terminal not inside screen, the line art is fine.

Are you doing this from a console on the machine or from PuTTY on another machine?

If it's PuTTY, try this:

quote:

In the Settings under Window/Translation set �Recieved data assumed to be in which character set� to UTF-8 and make sure that the option �Handling of line drawing characters� is set to �Use Unicode line drawing code points�.

If not...Which distribution and version are you using? Make sure screen is compiled to use terminfo.

strace -fe open -o /tmp/strace.out screen

That should tell you if screen opens /lib/terminfo/l/linux or a termcap file, the latter being what you don't want.

Can you pastebin the output of infocmp?

Search the screen-users mailing list archives for some more info:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/screen-users/

Might be a setting in .screenrc or some kind of $TERMCAP thing.

Works on my machine, here's my screenrc: http://pastebin.com/kME5Tfk1

Bob Morales fucked around with this message at 00:07 on May 5, 2010

# ? May 5, 2010 00:04

axolotl farmer: May 17, 2007; Now I'm going to sing the Perry Mason theme

Bob Morales posted:

Are you doing this from a console on the machine or from PuTTY on another machine?

If it's PuTTY, try this:

In the Settings under Window/Translation set �Recieved data assumed to be in which character set� to UTF-8 and make sure that the option �Handling of line drawing characters� is set to �Use Unicode line drawing code points�.

I'm running PuTTY, and setting this fixed it!

Thanks! :toot:

# ? May 5, 2010 00:25

Little Brittle: Nov 1, 2004; Come visit me dawg

I'm not so great with Linux, and I'm having a hard time installing php-tidy on a CentOS server with PHP5. I ran this successfully:

code:

yum install php-tidy

But I get this error from PHP:

code:

PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: tidy: Unable to initialize module
Module compiled with module API=20050922, debug=0, thread-safety=0
PHP    compiled with module API=20060613, debug=0, thread-safety=0
These options need to match
 in Unknown on line 0

I've tried everything I can find through Google, but no luck. It looks like yum installs the PHP4 version, but I'm not sure. Does anyone know how I can get this working?

# ? May 8, 2010 06:04

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

I have to be missing something here:

If I have two mysql processes each hitting over 90% CPU usage, how do those add up to one core at 100% and the other three idle?

# ? May 8, 2010 19:28

FISHMANPET: Mar 3, 2007; Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

wolrah posted:

I have to be missing something here:

If I have two mysql processes each hitting over 90% CPU usage, how do those add up to one core at 100% and the other three idle?

That's a good question, but a better question is what's the sweet program that displays usage per core like that?

# ? May 8, 2010 19:57

dont skimp on the shrimp: Apr 23, 2008

FISHMANPET posted:

That's a good question, but a better question is what's the sweet program that displays usage per core like that?

htop.

# ? May 8, 2010 20:02

deong: Jun 13, 2001; I'll see you in heck!

I'm about to flatten and reinstall my system. Going with ubuntu 10.04. My real question is do I go with 32 or 64 bit? Last time I did a format instead of update was back when flash sucked balls on 64bit. Any reason to go for one over the other?

# ? May 10, 2010 05:16

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

wolrah posted:

I have to be missing something here:

If I have two mysql processes each hitting over 90% CPU usage, how do those add up to one core at 100% and the other three idle?

You have htop configured to show threads. You only have one MySQL process using one core.

# ? May 10, 2010 05:21

spiritual bypass: Feb 19, 2008; Grimey Drawer

deong posted:

I'm about to flatten and reinstall my system. Going with ubuntu 10.04. My real question is do I go with 32 or 64 bit? Last time I did a format instead of update was back when flash sucked balls on 64bit. Any reason to go for one over the other?

I've been suing Ubuntu 64 for the past year and I haven't had any problems with Flash or 3D or anything else that I usually expect to go wrong on Linux.

# ? May 10, 2010 06:00

FISHMANPET: Mar 3, 2007; Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

rt4 posted:

I've been suing Ubuntu 64 for the past year and I haven't had any problems with Flash or 3D or anything else that I usually expect to go wrong on Linux.

Java and Flash were always the two stinkers. Now there's 64 bit Java, and a 64 bit Flash beta. Also the 32 bit flash runs with NDISwrapper, and there's even a package for it (do 'aptitude search adobe' to find the exact name, it changes).

# ? May 10, 2010 06:23

deong: Jun 13, 2001; I'll see you in heck!

Cool. I'll try out x64. Squeeze out the most I can out of my aging box heh.

# ? May 10, 2010 06:39

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Is anyone running Linux on a G4 Powerbook? Which distro? Does the built-in wifi work?

# ? May 10, 2010 17:41

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

deong posted:

Cool. I'll try out x64. Squeeze out the most I can out of my aging box heh.

Just yesterday I finally switched to x64 Ubuntu. I installed Flash using these instructions. Despite that fact the opening post says it's only for Firefox, it works for me in Konqueror, Opera and Chromium. The OpenJDK that was installed by default kept killing all the browsers every single time I tried to access anything Java , so I uninstalled the iced tea Mozilla plugin, enabled the Canonical partners repository and installed Sun Java 6.

# ? May 10, 2010 19:01

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

Bob Morales posted:

Is anyone running Linux on a G4 Powerbook? Which distro? Does the built-in wifi work?

TiBooks (and all 802.11b Airport-equipped Macs) used a Lucent Orinoco chipset which has been one of the better supported WiFi cards in Linux from the early days. AlBooks with Airport Extreme (802.11g) use a Broadcom chipset which was not supported for most if not all of the Powerbook's release lifespan, but should now be supported by the b43 driver. Earlier model Intel machines used Atheros cards (also well supported via madwifi), later models switched back to Broadcom. Basically any modern distro should support any card Apple shipped.

As for distro, Yellow Dog is the PowerPC focused Linux. They start from CentOS and then work specifically to improve the user experience for PowerPC Mac and Cell systems. I used Ubuntu for a time on a TiBook and didn't find it any different from the same revision on my PCs, so that was nice. They've since removed the PowerPC platform from official support, but it is still available thanks to community ports (which work fine, I run it on my PS3 without any problems that weren't caused by Sony). That CD is a Live CD, so you can boot from it and try it out without installing anything if you want. Debian and a few others also have PowerPC builds, but it sounds like you're not an advanced user yet, so it's probably best to stick to either YDL or Ubuntu depending on whether you fall on the RPM or DEB sides of the fence.

wolrah fucked around with this message at 00:24 on May 11, 2010

# ? May 11, 2010 00:09

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

Here's an easy one (hopefully)

I want to schedule a reboot to happen at 2am tonight/tomorrow. The man pages for shutdown advise that the time argument is in hh:mm format, but how do I make sure it applies that to tomorrow?

Would shutdown -r 02:00 work on Friday morning if I entered the command on Thursday afternoon?

This is redhat 4 btw.

# ? May 12, 2010 21:52

chutwig: May 28, 2001; BURLAP SATCHEL OF CRACKERJACKS

Use +m instead to tell it to shut down m minutes from now (e.g., +m 660 to shut down in 11 hours).

# ? May 12, 2010 22:22

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

chutwig posted:

Use +m instead to tell it to shut down m minutes from now (e.g., +m 660 to shut down in 11 hours).

The man page doesn't mention a +m option, just a -t for seconds.

So I would use shutdown -t 54000 -r if I wanted to reboot it 15 hours from now?

Is there an option to cancel that countdown if someone objects in the meantime?

# ? May 12, 2010 23:38

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

Wait, I'm a liar, +m is in the man page

so shutdown -r +900 for 15 hours from now.

edit: hang on, will this stop people from logging into the server? I still want to be able to use this thing for the rest of the day and don't want it breaking it's services:

If shutdown is called with a delay, it creates the advisory file
/etc/nologin which causes programs such as login(1) to not allow new
user logins. Shutdown removes this file if it is stopped before it can
signal init (i.e. it is cancelled or something goes wrong). It also
removes it before calling init to change the runlevel.

NZAmoeba fucked around with this message at 23:45 on May 12, 2010

# ? May 12, 2010 23:43

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

You can also use 'at'

quote:

Run jobs at specific times

Sometimes you may need to run a job just once, rather than regularly. For this you use the at command. The commands to be run are read from a file specified with the -f option, or from stdin if -f is not used. The -m option sends mail to the user even if there is no stdout from the command. The -v option displays the time at which the job will run before reading the job. The time is also displayed in the output.

Listing 5 shows an example of running the mycrontest.sh script that you used earlier. Listing 6 shows the output that is mailed back to the user after the job runs. Notice that it is somewhat more compact than the corresponding output from the cron job.
[ian@lyrebird ~]$ at -f mycrontest.sh -v 10:25 Sat Jul 7 10:25:00 2007 job 5 at Sat Jul 7 10:25:00 2007

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-job-scheduling.html

# ? May 13, 2010 00:18

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

Bob Morales posted:

You can also use 'at'

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-job-scheduling.html

So if I want to run from the command line, not call a script, would the syntax be:
at -v 02:00 friday shutdown -r now

# ? May 13, 2010 00:44

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

NZAmoeba posted:

So if I want to run from the command line, not call a script, would the syntax be:
at -v 02:00 friday shutdown -r now

I ended up testing on a spare desktop, and it doesn't like the arguments from the shutdown command.

Turns out it's easy enough to just make a shutdown.sh which has the text 'shutdown -r now' and getting at to run that with:
at -vf shutdown.sh friday 02:00

(just make sure shutdown.sh is executable with chmod 770)

thanks for the advise.

# ? May 13, 2010 03:29

FISHMANPET: Mar 3, 2007; Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

NZAmoeba posted:

I ended up testing on a spare desktop, and it doesn't like the arguments from the shutdown command.

Turns out it's easy enough to just make a shutdown.sh which has the text 'shutdown -r now' and getting at to run that with:
at -vf shutdown.sh friday 02:00

(just make sure shutdown.sh is executable with chmod 770)

thanks for the advise.

It might work if you put the shutdown command in single quotes, so soething like this: at -vf 'shutdown -r now' friday 02:00

# ? May 13, 2010 03:31

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Interactive:

code:

jeff@ubuntu:~$ at 2:00 friday
warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh
at> shutdown -r now
at> <EOT>
job 2 at Fri May 14 02:00:00 2010

# ? May 13, 2010 04:49

maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Apr 28, 2019

# ? May 14, 2010 02:09

dont skimp on the shrimp: Apr 23, 2008

GregNorc posted:

Is there a way to specify a specific bssid to connect to? (My driver is r8192se_pci, my wifi manager is NetworkManager)

Basically, at work there's two APs with the same name, one with a really weak signal, one with a decent signal, one with a terrible signal.

Every 10 minutes or so the moons of Uranus misalign or whatever, and the wireless driver decides to switch to the weak one. I restart networking, and everything is good as new.

I'd really like to tell the wireless card to connect the specific AP that I know does NOT give a poo poo signal.

Right-click on the networkmanager icon in the tray, go to "Edit Connections", edit the one you want and specify a BSSID in the BSSID field, right under "SSID" and "Mode".

# ? May 14, 2010 17:53

maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Apr 28, 2019

# ? May 14, 2010 21:37

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 05:50

maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

edit: doublepost

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 04:54 on May 15, 2010

# ? May 15, 2010 02:23

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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