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

adante: Sep 18, 2003

For the love of god, someone tell me how to change the limits on the number of open files a user can have (this is Xposted on forums.gentoo).

In my /etc/limits, I have tried the following entries

code:

adante N4096
* N4096

Just for the heck of it I have also put into /etc/security/limits.conf

code:

adante          soft    nofiles         4096
adante          hard    nofiles         8192
*               soft    nofiles         4096
*               hard    nofiles         8192

and also added

code:

session    required     /lib/security/pam_limits.so

to /etc/pam.d/login

But when I login:

code:

Using username "adante".
Authenticating with public key ""
Last login: Wed Mar 28 21:45:40 2007 from 192.168.1.67
adante@pveer ~ $ ulimit -a
core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size           (kbytes, -d) unlimited
file size               (blocks, -f) unlimited
max locked memory       (kbytes, -l) 32
max memory size         (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files                      (-n) 1024
pipe size            (512 bytes, -p) 8
stack size              (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time               (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes              (-u) 16383
virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks                      (-x) unlimited

The limits still do not work.

What is the secret behind getting them to work? All the documentation tells me I need to re-login. I have done this, but still the file limit is 1024. Do I need to reboot? Physically login to terminal? Log out of all instances? Is this mentioned anywhere?

# ¿ Mar 28, 2007 12:59

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 00:56

adante: Sep 18, 2003

hi, can anyone recommend some free screen-video-capture software for linux (like camtasia, but for linux)?

most of the ones I've found seem to not be freeware, and the evaluation versions put crazy little watermarks or HUGE PINK ELLIPSES in it

# ¿ May 1, 2007 10:01

adante: Sep 18, 2003

kaschei posted:

ffmpeg did for me what I think you're asking, but I've heard xvidcap is better. ffmpeg has Ubuntu packaging though; the main differences are that xvidcap can write directly to .avi (instead of making a bunch of jpegs you assemble into an avi) and record sound simultaneously (for narration, for example).

I'm assuming that by "screen-video" you mean "a movie of what's on the screen." Also, as I understand, neither of these utilities draw your mouse the way it's drawn because of the way it "captures" the screen. xvidcap draws a "dummy" mouse where your cursor is, I don't remember what ffmpeg does if anything.

Thanks, yeah thats what I want. I'll take a look at it

# ¿ May 2, 2007 00:12

adante: Sep 18, 2003

i have a removable hdd on windows. On my linux htpc I usually mount this with smbmount //windows-desktop/y ~/somedir.

Occassionally this drive becomes inaccessible because remove it, turn off windows box etc. This is usually followed by the htpc box failing pretty ungracefully. Anything that tries to access ~/somedir or perform a directory listing of the parent dir (ie my ~) will block for 3-4 minutes before failing. This includes trying to remount the share. This is pretty inconvenient.

Is there a way to get this to handle a little more gracefully? ideally, when I try to access ~/somedir I wouldn't want it to block for more than 3-4 seconds - if it fails, I would like it to do something like attempt to remount once (just incase my computer was turned off but reconnected) before failing again. Is this possible?

# ¿ Sep 10, 2007 10:41

adante: Sep 18, 2003

hello

I just installed ubuntu on my new t61p. It is great and 98% of it 'just works'. The other 2% is being a real pain.jpg.

Firstly: The Fn+X buttons on my laptop do great things, like let me enable/disable wireless, change brightness, suspend, bring up battery information etc. What the heck controls this? I thought it might be acpi but these events still happen when I disable the acpi daemon. Are they configurable or disable-able at all?

Secondly: I just spent 3+ hours fiddling with twinview. How can I make it so that I can enable/disable screens without having to start X? I figured this would be doable using the metamode option, so I tried defining several metamodes:

Option "MetaModes" "1920x1200,1920x1200; 1920x1200,NULL"
Option "MetaModes" "DFP-0: 1920x1200, CRT-0: 1920x1200; DFP-0: 1920x1200, CRT: NULL"
Option "MetaModes" "1920x1200,1920x1200; 1920x1200,NULL"
Option "MetaModes" "1920x1200,1920x1200; 1920x1200; 1680x1450"

edit: extra info
however, the xlog (below) says "No metamodes defined" (line 615). So when I run xrandr all I get is a single mode:

$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 3840 x 1200, current 3840 x 1200, maximum 3840 x 1200
default connected 3840x1200+0+0 0mm x 0mm
3840x1200 50.0*

anybody know what's going on? How do I define metamodes? :psyduck:

conf here and log here

edit: server being funny paste is here

adante fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Jun 21, 2008

# ¿ Jun 21, 2008 04:28

adante: Sep 18, 2003

I'm looking to build a nas for office stuff. Probably look at a raid 1 with backups to both physical hotplugged drive and remote sites. Password protected shares and so forth are necessary. I can set this stuff up without too much dramas (although never done this in any mission critical capacity), but the catch is that this needs to be managed with a graphical interface.

At the moment I'm considering either buying one of the QNAP boxes or using openfiler.

Just wondering if anybody had any comments on experiences with the above or alternative suggestions? In particular with regards to using these systems as normal linux distros and possibly installing some other random software onto them (mainly for remote backup/sync related tasks)

# ¿ Jan 24, 2009 13:04

adante: Sep 18, 2003

I just scored a free toshiba te2100. Unfortunately the hard drive is wiped and unbootable, the dvd-rom drive is broken, I have no usb-floppy, and I can't netboot seemingly because of this problem (I have intel netboot agent version 4.0.18).

What are my options for getting xubuntu 8.10 onto it?

I have a usb-caddy for it but no other computer can fit the small IDE plug. Is it possible for me to, with my other laptop (which is windows & SATA), disconnect the sata hdd (maybe not necessary?), plug in the usb-caddy, boot livecd and install linux on it, then take the hdd and plug it into the ATA interface on the te2100, boot and be happy? I thought this might be possible MAYBE because intrepid uses uuid's (I think?) but quite possibly there is other stuff that I don't understand, like the entire boot process

Last time I did something like this it involved some very odd low level sector-by-sector copying that while eventually working I neither fully understood nor remember.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2009 15:33

adante: Sep 18, 2003

i just installed ubuntu server. When i try to ssh into the box remotely it seems to stall for about 5 seconds at some stage. (I am pretty sure this is NOT the reverse dns lookup problem as it happens before I am authenticated, and I disabled dns anyway)

running ssh -vvv shows that it freezes right after testing for ~/.ssh/id_rsa. in this log, it pauses after line 71.

This stall does not occur if I ssh in locally (ie while on the box, ssh localhost). Any idea what is causuing it?

# ¿ Feb 8, 2009 16:42

adante: Sep 18, 2003

I would like to install ubuntu on my laptop. I downloaded the 8.10 desktop cd and when booted, it gives me an

[ time] APIC: Aborted because crc error
[ time] crc error
[ time] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,1)

as per this page I tried booting with these options without any luck. I tried the alternate cd without any luck.

How can I install ubuntu?

# ¿ Mar 3, 2009 05:11

adante: Sep 18, 2003

adante posted:

I would like to install ubuntu on my laptop. I downloaded the 8.10 desktop cd and when booted, it gives me an

[ time] APIC: Aborted because crc error
[ time] crc error
[ time] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,1)

as per this page I tried booting with these options without any luck. I tried the alternate cd without any luck.

How can I install ubuntu?

LiquidRain posted:

Someone was close when they said "noacpi" in that thread. What they should have said was "noapic".

I tried that and it doesn't work.

Do I have any alternatives for installing ubuntu?

# ¿ Mar 6, 2009 14:31

adante: Sep 18, 2003

huh. we have an Ubuntu 8.10 server at work. How does one apply only security updates?

Only way I can think of is to comment out all non-security references in /etc/apt/sources, update and upgrade? That's cool except occassionally we do want up to date software - so we then have to re-comment them? Not a big deal but seems kind of tedious, surely there is a better way of handling this?

# ¿ Jul 12, 2009 13:12

adante: Sep 18, 2003

Zom Aur posted:

Yeah, just don't touch /etc/apt/sources at all. aptitude update && aptitude upgrade ought to get everything done. Since you'd still have 8.10 in the sources list it shouldn't upgrade to 9.04 anyways.

This doesn't seem to the case. I commented all but the security lines from sources.list, ran aptitude update && upgrade and upgraded. I then uncommented the non-security lines and ran aptitude update && upgrade -s, and it wanted to install a whole lot of new packages (some, maybe 3-4, of them can be ignored, they are freenx from ppa sources I did not remove):

quote:

$ sudo aptitude upgrade -s
W: The "upgrade" command is deprecated; use "safe-upgrade" instead.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Resolving dependencies...
Resolving dependencies...
Resolving dependencies...
The following NEW packages will be installed:
binutils-static{a} linux-restricted-modules-2.6.27-14-server{a} linux-restricted-modules-common{a}
linux-restricted-modules-server{a} nvidia-180-modaliases{a}
The following packages will be upgraded:
app-install-data-commercial apparmor apparmor-utils doc-base dpkg dpkg-dev fakeroot file foo2zjs
gnome-system-tools gnome-user-guide gvfs gvfs-backends gvfs-bin gvfs-fuse libapparmor-perl libapparmor1
libgvfscommon0 libmagic1 libpam-modules libpam-runtime libpam0g libxcomp3 libxcompext3 linux-image-server
linux-server nvidia-common nxagent nxlibs pm-utils tasksel tasksel-data tzdata xfonts-scalable xserver-common
xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-video-intel
37 packages upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 27.2MB of archives. After unpacking 4837kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
Abort.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2009 00:16

adante: Sep 18, 2003

Zom Aur posted:

It wants to install 5 new and upgrade 37. Depending on when the last upgrade was made, that's not a huge number at all.

If it wanted you to upgrade to 9.04, you could expect maybe 400MB of archives instead of ~30MB.

the point is I don't want to upgrade any. The server works fine (ain't broke don't fix it) and fulfills some fairly important business functions, so I just want to apply the critical security patches only.

for those who are interested the solution is here:

code:

aptitude safe-upgrade --target-release `lsb_release -cs`-security

# ¿ Jul 14, 2009 01:30

adante: Sep 18, 2003

in ubuntu, when i aptitude show <package>, how do i tell what repository it is from?

if I want to install a package from a particular repository, is there a way to do that?

# ¿ Jul 24, 2009 08:59

adante: Sep 18, 2003

Is flash on linux (specifically, ubuntu intrepid 32-bit) fixed?

I was under the impression it was but I am trying to play flash videos online via [url=http://www.abc.net.au/iview/[/url] abc iview (this is like bbc's iplayer) and it eats 100% of my e8400 cpu and does not play smoothly.

I have flashplugin-nonfree and flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound installed.

Is this the usual linux situation FUBAR or is there a way to get working flash which (preferably) does not involve jumping through an elaborate series of upgrade-to-trunk hoops?

# ¿ Aug 31, 2009 15:13

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 00:56

adante: Sep 18, 2003

lol. Upgraded to 9.10 a few days ago.

Now the base 2.6.31-16-generic kernel doesn't boot.

So I dropped back to 2.6.28-17 kernel image. But now audio doesn't work.

As I nowadays find myself less and less inclined to spend 20+ hours fixing fundamental things like this over and over again, I was wondering if anybody knew of a quick fix for this problem?

# ¿ Dec 27, 2009 04:58

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