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

Twlight posted:

I've got a server I've inherited and it has many running processes that don't seem to be needed (as I never use an X session) I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what many of these are and if I can safely remove them. Here is a list:
code:
22098 ipaudit   25   0 15652  13m 1560 R 39.8  2.7   0:35.14 MakeReport30
22084 root      16   0 10916 9436  596 R 29.6  1.8   1:32.72 ipaudit
24657 snort     25   0  183m 105m 3320 R 28.6 21.0   3202:30 snort
 1972 mysql     15   0  138m  13m 2820 S  0.3  2.7 225:19.84 mysqld
22097 ipaudit   18   0  1592  388  320 S  0.3  0.1   0:00.20 cat

I'm guessing these are what you're using the server for.

Twilight posted:

code:

    2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.13 ksoftirqd/0
    3 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.27 watchdog/0
    4 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:08.19 events/0
    5 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper
    6 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
   55 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:07.47 kblockd/0
   56 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
  114 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cqueue/0
  115 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksuspend_usbd
  118 root      13  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khubd
  120 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kseriod
  140 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   1:23.86 kswapd0
  141 root      18  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
  306 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kpsmoused
  327 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kmirrord
  334 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksnapd
  344 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   9:51.75 kjournald
  383 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kauditd
  658 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ata/0
  659 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ata_aux
  664 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ac97/0
 1233 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kjournald

Kernel tasks. Don't try to stop them, you can't, and bad things would happen if you did. Although you might be able to remove a sound module or something from your kernel, if you really care for some reason.

Twilight posted:

code:

    1 root      15   0  2004  564  532 S  0.0  0.1   0:05.16 init
  408 root      21  -4  2352  360  356 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.82 udevd
  944 root      16   0  7832 2356 1900 S  0.0  0.5   0:11.35 sshd
 1587 root      16   0  1656  560  472 S  0.0  0.1   3:12.25 syslogd
 1590 root      16   0  1604  328  324 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.02 klogd
 1824 root      18   0  1916  440  288 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.82 smartd
 1833 root      18   0  1596  328  324 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 acpid

Don't remove these, they are fairly important system daemons.

Twilight posted:

code:

 1615 rpc       23   0  1736  404  400 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 portmap
 1634 rpcuser   24   0  1844  596  592 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.04 rpc.statd
 1663 root      15   0  4744  308  284 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.71 rpc.idmapd

NFS stuff; if you aren't a NFS client or server, you probably don't need these.

Twilight posted:

code:

  947 sbaumkir  15   0  7976 1824 1356 S  0.0  0.4   0:17.51 sshd
  948 sbaumkir  16   0  4452 1440 1220 S  0.0  0.3   0:00.12 bash
  970 root      18   0  4764 1176  936 S  0.0  0.2   0:00.04 su
  971 root      15   0  4580 1480 1208 S  0.0  0.3   0:00.22 bash
 1140 root      15   0  3664  472  404 T  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 tail
 1227 root      20   0  9540 3212 2320 S  0.0  0.6   0:09.56 vim
 1511 root      16   0  4764  936  932 S  0.0  0.2   0:00.02 su
 1512 root      15   0  4584 1232 1228 S  0.0  0.2   0:00.71 bash
 1579 root      15   0  3660  408  404 T  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 tail
 1596 root      17   0  9624 2272 2268 T  0.0  0.4   0:00.32 vim
 1847 root      15   0 12512 1068  768 S  0.0  0.2   1:25.31 python
21441 root      15   0  2156 1020  784 R  1.0  0.2   1:07.43 top

This is just a bunch of random processes left over from the SSH connection for your user, the su you ran (bad! use sudo!), the activity you're doing in the root shell, etc.

Twilight posted:

code:

 1678 dbus      21   0  3000  312  308 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.02 dbus-daemon
 1722 root      15   0  1820  392  376 S  0.0  0.1   0:38.81 hidd
 1810 root      15   0  1872  608  564 S  0.0  0.1   0:26.24 automount
 1842 root      24   0  4996  300  296 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 hpiod

These are the daemons that seem out of place for a server load, unless you use, in order, the system-wide dbus messaging bus (which is possible), a bluetooth keyboard (possible), automounted filesystems (possible, especially with NFS also on the system), or are setting up an HP printserver (unlikely without cupsd). Frankly, I doubt getting rid of these is worth it.

If you have particular questions about some of these processes, I think I can tell you what everything except the ipaudit stuff does.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2007 18:10

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:18

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

JoeNotCharles posted:

Hmm, going only by this comment, it sounds to me like Gentoo and Debian use opposite meanings for their unstable and testing branches. Debian uses "unstable" for the day to day, good enough for a desktop branch, "testing" for the temporary branch that they're testing the hell out of before declaring it stable, and "stable" for the branch that's good enough for critical servers. Stuff that's brand new and barely tested at all goes to "experimental".

The way I usually explain it is that packages don't make it past experimental in Debian if they are broken, and the "unstable"/"stable" name refers to config files: In stable, you can "apt-get upgrade" at any time with the promise that once apt finishes, your system will be working exactly as it was before, but using newer software. In unstable, you might have to tweak config files or do other system maintainer stuff after the upgrade because newer software that isn't completely backwards-compatible was installed, or because some package was removed from the archive in favor of a better solution.

dfn_doe posted:

I don't think you get it. If I install vim from a binary package AND the binary package was built with the build time options to enable X support then the binary will be dynamically linked to X11 libs which will then be an install dependency. In my experience this means that for the worst offending packages there exists multiple version of the binary packages in order to limit the number of cross dependency between packages that only provide features which aren't used. Either way you end up with multiple version which still cater to whatever the lowest common denominator is which in the case of a general use OS will be a major portion of the compile time options turned on. vi was just the first example that came to mind, another common example is ipv6, very few people use it, every major distro has ipv6 support built into every major package. Gentoo allows both of these situations to be eliminated with a "-ipv6 -X11" when you build initially.

The vim package on my Debian machine only depends on libc6, libgpmg1, and libncurses5. That said, why the hell do you care? I just SSHed to one of my headless machines and asked it what would be installed if I added xbase-clients (which pulls in all the stuff that a console program which needlessly depended on X would pull in), and the sum total of all the X11 stuff that would get pulled is less than 10MiB on disc! You may lose a millisecond or two at program initialization for it to determine that X isn't in use, but once it knows that only a very minimal number of pages will be swapped in by the X11 libs at startup, and as those pages won't be touched for the rest of the program lifetime they'll be quickly swapped out again under any memory pressure whatsoever. This is as close to zero penalty as you can get.

The IPv6 complaint is even more bogus: The IPv6 stack is in the kernel, not in userspace; the added size of IPv6 support in everything from libc on down should be so close to zero as to not warrant consideration. Now, because the complexity of a new network stack is in kernel space, that means it can't be swapped out, but if you really need that extra few megs of RAM, it's trivial to simply blacklist the ipv6 kernel module and prevent it from ever being enabled. Remarkably, this will also remove any additional system maintainer confusion, because you won't even have to look at all those scary IPv6 addresses anymore!

# ¿ Aug 23, 2007 20:37

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

lilbean posted:

I have a Debian question. I rebuilt all the packages with a changed configure paramter for Bacula since the distribution removed OpenSSL. Now that I've installed the rebuilt packages how do I ensure that an apt-get won't wipe out the locally built ones if the apt source has a newer version?

code:

foo@bar$ sudo dpkg --set-selections
bacula hold
^D
foo@bar$

There might be a slightly more user-friendly way to do that, but this is what everything will eventually do in the background.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2007 03:41

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

FasterThanLight posted:

Pretty sure thats not it. Being out of focus shouldn't make me appear blue and the blue sky behind me appear yellow-orange. I don't think this camera has any manual focus capabilities anyway.

You'd be shocked. A lot of cheap webcams have extreme chromatic variation in their optics, and compensate by post-processing the output of the CCD because firmware is significantly cheaper than glass. It's also not uncommon to see automatic white balance code fail completely in lighting conditions the camera wasn't designed for, with similar effects.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2007 23:01

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

citizenh8 posted:

I was trying to think of a way to use the CLI to change the IP address of a NIC while ONLY using the CLI and this is what I came up with (this is for ubuntu/debian):

sed 's/$address$.*/address 192.168.100.245/' /etc/network/interfaces > /home/pat/interfaces; mv /home/pat/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces

This seems like a really stupid way of doing it, but it works - is there a better way of doing this?

Edit: I was pretending like I didn't know what the IP address of the machine was, and also that the machine only had one NIC since I realize this would change BOTH NICs IP.

code:

ifconfig eth0 1.2.3.4

Not the best way to go about it, but will probably work for what you want.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2007 22:59

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

The Gay Bean posted:

Is there a way to get sudo to parse configuration files? It always annoys me when I "sudo vi /blah" and don't have my options. I have the options file in the /root directory.

Programs invoked with sudo have the same HOME as any other program you invoke, so they should be using the configuration files from your home directory. If you invoke sudo with the -H option, then they will use root's HOME and consequently take configuration files from /root, but that's sort of silly.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2007 00:42

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

The Gay Bean posted:

Probably just a FreeBSD-ism then. It's weird because I can't locate any configuration file other than sudoers, which doesn't mention it. Sudo just refuses to use my configuration files, either in my or root's home directory.

Post the output of "sudo env".

# ¿ Dec 27, 2007 02:38

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

Kidane posted:

code:

nick@nick-desktop:/usr/src/ZimbraEvolution$ locate libedata-book-1.2

/usr/lib/libedata-book-1.2.so.2.4.1
/usr/lib/libedata-book-1.2.so.2

You do not have the development libraries for libedata-book-1.2 installed, or at least they are not in locate's database. What you are looking at is the runtime objects, which are not precisely the same thing.

Under Debian at least, libedata-book-1.2 has its dev files as a separate package. Try to install the libedata-book1.2-dev package. I learned this, by the way, by doing "apt-cache search edata-book" and looking for a -dev package; if you get familiar with searching apt, you can solve these problems on your own.

That said, Zimbra appears to have .debs for Ubuntu available at their download site and that's likely to be a lot simpler and also less likely to wind up with you accidentally confusing your package manager by installing unmanaged files.

ShoulderDaemon fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Jan 9, 2008

# ¿ Jan 9, 2008 13:15

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

Kidane posted:

I didn't know how to use apt-cache to search, this is awesome. I got the development libraries for libedata-book and libedata-cal installed installed.

Holy poo poo it's compiling. Thank you very much.

I'm glad I was able to teach you something new about using your system, but are you sure you can't find a prebuilt package for what you're trying to install? I'm not just suggesting this because you're a new user; installing compiled-from-source packages on top of properly managed packages has a tendency to bite everyone in the rear end, including seasoned sysadmins, and even in the perfect case will require a lot more effort from you to keep up to date.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2008 22:51

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

Anunnaki posted:

I have a suspicion it's because of my having 4 GB of RAM in a 32-bit OS, so I'd like to install the 64-bit.

This is very unlikely. Given your past experience with the 64-bit version, I suspect it will be easier to attempt to diagnose and fix your current problem. Even if too much RAM is a problem somehow, there are simpler ways to go about fixing the issue.

Anunnaki posted:

The only problem is: I know from doing it in my Computer Maintenance & Repair class that if you just delete a Linux partition, the GRUB loader will fail and you won't even be able to boot up Windows. So I figured I could just run the Live CD, delete the Linux partition within that, and do a fresh install of Ubuntu x64. But now, even with a freshly downloaded/burned Live CD, I'm still having the same problem with getting no video after the initial screen. I thought maybe I could try the Alternate Install disc, but I don't know if I'll be able to mess around with the partitions in text mode.

If the text mode is similar to XP's text mode for messing with partitions, then I'll probably do okay, but I don't know if it's like that or like a terminal, in which case I wouldn't be able to do it.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "like a terminal", but I don't think you'll have serious problems with the text-menu-based installer.

Anunnaki posted:

Would this method of just deleting x32 within a x64 Live CD and installing over it even work? Will GRUB work if I do that?

You will have to reinstall GRUB, which the installer should do for you.

Anunnaki posted:

And what can I do about the video problems?

There is probably a bug in the 64-bit version of the video driver that Ubuntu is deciding to use, or an incompatibility with your video card. You may be able to fix it by booting to single user and switch from the non-free driver to the open-source driver, or to the VESA driver if you're desperate.

ShoulderDaemon fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Jan 10, 2008

# ¿ Jan 10, 2008 06:27

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

Anunnaki posted:

Just said that because 32-bit OSs can't handle more than 3 GB of RAM, didn't know if it was causing issues with that or not.

This is true (well, ~3.5GiB depending on hardware) but "can't handle" should just be read as "completely ignore", and it's hard to see how the operating system not using some of your RAM would cause issues.

Anunnaki posted:

Like a console, like the terminal in Linux.

I'm not an Ubuntu user, but the Debian installer has been completely menu-driven for years and years, and I assume that's what Ubuntu based their textmode installer on.

Anunnaki posted:

How do I boot into single user mode from the Live CD?

Normally you wouldn't use a Live CD to boot your system into single user mode - you would just choose that from the GRUB menu, or if it isn't there, edit your normal kernel line to include "single" at the end.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2008 07:07

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

Anunnaki posted:

Well, I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 x64 with the Alternate disc, and it was a lot simpler than I thought it was going to be. However, when booting up, I still don't get any video. I tried the "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" command in recovery mode and tried setting the drivers to both "nv" and "vesa" and it still doesn't give me any video.

Does it hate my video card or something?

If you can post the contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log (or at least any lines that start with "(EE)") then it might help.

Anunnaki posted:

(Also, is there a way to just edit the video driver part of that? It's kind of annoying to go through all those steps just to change one thing.)

Edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf. The syntax is a little involved, though, and you may not want to deal with it just yet.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2008 08:24

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

Anunnaki posted:

If I can't get this working, you think maybe that a different Linux distro would work?

If we can't get this working, then I'd say doubtful; Ubuntu doesn't have that many patches to Xorg code. With that said, I think the problem is in Ubuntu's autodetection code, and I'm going to try to talk you through fixing it.

It does look like it's misdetecting which port your monitor is on; that can be overridden. Edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. In it will be a section that looks like this:

code:

Section "Device"
        Driver "nv"
EndSection

Except it will have more lines in between the Section and EndSection lines.

Post that section (or your entire xorg.conf file) here. I suspect Ubuntu's configuration script added something it shouldn't have.

Now, I'm going to describe something to try fixing it. Keep in mind that I don't know exactly what Ubuntu did, so if these instructions don't seem to match what you see, just stop and post the configuration section and I'll look at that and tell you exactly what it should be.

Look for a line in that section like this:

code:

        Option "Monitor-VGA1" "LG L206W"

Change it to this:

code:

        Option "Monitor-DVI0" "LG L206W"

If you didn't see a line like that, then look for a line in that section like this:

code:

        Option "Monitor" "LG L206W"

Change it to this:

code:

        Option "Monitor-DVI0" "LG L206W"

If you didn't see a line like either of those, then look for a line in that section like this:

code:

        Option "CrtcNumber" "0"

Change it to this:

code:

        Option "CrtcNumber" "1"

If you didn't see anything like any of those lines, then don't make any changes and just post the configuration.

If you make any changes, please post both the version you had before and the version after your changes, in case I explained what I wanted you to do poorly and you put in something I didn't want you to.

Edit: I suck at remembering how the xorg.conf config file works.

ShoulderDaemon fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Jan 11, 2008

# ¿ Jan 11, 2008 04:24

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

I just realized that I used Section "Driver" instead of Section "Device" in my last post... whoops.

Anunnaki posted:

Didn't see any of that stuff you gave examples of. Here's my xorg.conf file:[snip]

OK, looks like it's probably not Ubuntu's fault, X just isn't connecting your screen correctly.

Try adding this line to the device section, just before the EndSection line:

code:

        Option "Monitor-DVI0" "LG L206W"

# ¿ Jan 11, 2008 05:15

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

Drock posted:

In os x when I do "open file.ext" from the terminal it opens the file based on the extension. So when I do "open file.pdf" it opens the pdf in preview and "open file.html" opens the file in firefox. This is awesome pants!

How do I make my linux box do this?

The "see" program, which is normally part of a package like "mime-support". It is primarily configured using the "/etc/mime.types", "/etc/mailcap", and "~/.mailcap" files, all of which have manpages.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2008 22:36

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

Xae posted:

Dumb as hell question:

I'm trying to install some nvidia drivers, and I need to kill the x session before I can do this. How do I get to just a terminal in Ubuntu (7.10 I think)? I tried "init 3" which worked for me in CentOS, but doesn't seem to work in Ubuntu.

/etc/init.d/gdm stop

But you're probably better off finding a pre-packaged version of the drivers, which will automatically keep them up to date and make sure they're properly integrated with the rest of your setup, as well as being much easier to install.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2008 05:49

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

watch(1) runs a program every few seconds and refreshes the screen.

Linux kernel panics on unrecoverable errors.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2008 23:29

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

Chuu posted:

Thanks for the advice, downloading ubuntu server now to test this out. Can you recommend the best lightweight WM? I actuality really liked twm from my Solaris days but I don't see it supported by Ubuntu.

It's certainly in Debian. Is there any reason a simple Debian install isn't what you want?

# ¿ Mar 7, 2008 03:51

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

Chuu posted:

If what I want to do ends up working I'm going to clone the VM several times and a full ~4 gig debain install is going to start to eat a bit too much space, not to mention I want every CPU cycle I can gather.

4 gigs?!?! Where'd you get that number from?

My media server root+usr+var is under 2 gigs, my desktop machine with hundreds of dev libraries and desktop apps is under 4 gigs, most of the virtual machines I run are way under 1 gig, base+required installs in under 180 megs and after apt-get clean is under 140, if you drop stuff from base you can kill about a quarter of that pretty easily, and if you're in a virtual machine and don't need filesystem tools or networking tools you can usually get to around 70 megs or so. If that's not small enough, emDebian can frequently get a working base in under 50 megs, and sometimes smaller.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2008 04:42

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

Grey Area posted:

apt-get source <package>
cd <package>-<version>
fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage
cd ..
dpkg -i <package>_<version>_<arch>.deb

He probably needs sudo in front of that dpkg invocation. Furthermore, because he's not a DD or DM, he almost certainly would want to add a few options to dpkg-buildpackage, and normally dpkg-buildpackage should know how to invoke fakeroot itself. I'd suggest:

apt-get source package
cd package-version
dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i package_version_arch.deb

# ¿ Mar 25, 2008 17:43

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

Scaevolus posted:

Try mounting the SD card with '-o iocharset=utf8'

And make sure it's mounted as vfat and not something crazy like msdos.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2008 06:37

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

chris_bacon posted:

Is it possible to make an alias so that when I gedit something.cpp it will automatically run gedit as a background process?

I tried alias gedit gedit & but it doesn't work

function bgedit () { gedit "$*" & } may work for you.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2008 02:26

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

chris_bacon posted:

I tried this and it said: Badly placed () 's.

Does it matter that I'm using cshell?

Oh, yeah, that was a POSIX-sh function. I can't remember how to do what you want in csh.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2008 02:44

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

Cannister posted:

Another silly question:

What is the syntax to launch an application from the terminal and then have it not lock up and occupy that terminal? (is this called daemonization?) It would make working with the terminal even more appealing.

Use program & instead of program.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2008 09:43

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

CUMGUARD posted:

This brings me to my main questions. First of all, I�ve tried installing the rt2500 and the rt2x00 wireless drivers, but you have to compile them from source, which I�m fine with, and feel fairly comfortable doing, except for one thing. Dependencies. The first and only dependency I�ve run into so far with this driver is GTK+ 2.6. The reason I say that�s the only one I�ve run into so far is because I still cannot get all its dependencies satisfied. Everything I try to compile has more and more dependencies. So basically, I was wondering if anyone has an easy way to do this, i.e. build their own dependency tree and install everything easily.

You are fighting with your distro.

First of all, if the device shows up in ifconfig, it should be working. If you could try to connect to a network then post the exact error message you get, the output of 'sudo iwconfig', and the last 10 lines of dmesg, we might be able to fix your problem without installing any new modules.

Second of all, you probably shouldn't be compiling from pristine source, and you really shouldn't be trying to satisfy dependencies that way. Debian (and I assume Ubuntu) provides an rt2500-source package which contains the module source code and keeps in up to date, and a package called module-assistant that knows how to get all the dependencies and compile it for you, and allows it to be managed by dpkg instead of being some unknown stranger to your system. You should use these packages.

The rt2500-source package will build without a dependency on gtk; the gtk component is rutilt, which is packaged separately in Debian and you can install on its own if you want, without compiling at all.

Now, assuming you were building something that wasn't already provided as a cleaned source tree, you absolutely shouldn't go compiling dependencies. If a source tree depends on gtk 2.6, then you need to install the 'libgtk2.0-dev' (the .0 is because all gtk versions that start with 2 are backwards compatible; Debian actually packages gtk 2.12). If you start compiling things like gtk from source, you will do an unbelievable amount of damage to your install the next time Debian tries to upgrade.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2008 17:36

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

Casimirus posted:

I figured I'd put a filesystem that does compression and encryption.

In the UNIX model, these are hard to do correctly, and very few people have cared enough to try. For encryption, you need the operating system to be aware of active user sessions and a keying protocol; Linux is starting to have the framework for kernel storage of user keys and session tokens, but it's not really mature yet and hasn't been merged with any filesystems. Compression is generally regarded as a bad thing because it breaks the semantics of memory mapped files, which UNIXes in general tend to depend on quite heavily; there are some ways around this, none of which (as far as I'm aware) have made it into any mainstream filesystem.

If you want to play around with per-file encryption and compression, I'd suggest Reiser4. Downsides: It doesn't play very nicely with the rest of the Linux VFS, but if you aren't kernel hacking you probably won't notice; and using its advanced features will occasionally destroy the performance or distort the behaviour of random programs that expect stronger adherence to the traditional UNIX model. Upsides: It does what you want, and you can brag that you're using a filesystem written by a convicted murderer.

On the encryption side, would you be happy with whole-disc encryption? Modern Linux provides fairly good support for that at the block layer.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2008 06:24

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

covener posted:

rpm and dpkg support it, frontends such as apt-get/yum/up2date don't because of a lack of interest. Most people who have any interest in using a different flavor of software spend 20 minutes learning how to build it themselves.

It's not just a lack of interest. Creating a commonly-usable, easy way to install programs as your normal user means that programs will be installed as your normal user. Because the program files wind up owned by the normal user account, random malware and security vulnerabilities would be able to exploit that and overwrite them, and misconfigured programs could trample over eachother; the situation winds up almost exactly the same as if the user were running as root all the time. The system should be setup such that normal operation cannot break it - in order to achieve this goal, software installation is elevated to a privileged operation and requires a password.

The "correct" solution, of course, is something like an SELinux policy which allows certain programs (such as the package manager) to manipulate the whole filesystem, while normal day-to-day-use programs are restricted to only those files that they need to access. With a complete enough policy, the special rights assigned to UID 0 go away, because all sysadmin tasks are handled through roles. In practice, such a policy rapidly becomes unmaintainable, and the root user is a compromise that most people can easily live with.

There is also the minor technical problem that many programs have various paths compiled-in, and the resulting packages cannot be installed to anywhere but / and still maintain full functionality, but presumably you could either fix the programs, or compile in recognizable placeholders and perform install-time binary patching to fix everything up.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2008 21:08

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

originalnickname posted:

I'm trying to install Ubuntu over a pxe netboot, I've got the dhcp and tftp thing figured out but the download that I want to use (the 64 bit build) is giving me file not found errors when it searches in the pxelinux.cfg folder. I got frustrated and tried a netboot install with Debian and it worked fine. Is there a place I can download the proper netboot files so the Ubuntu install works?

The reason why I'm doing it this way is because I don't have a cd-rom for this computer and I can't seem to boot off my flash drive to save my life (evga 680i motherboard)

If you can get a Debian installer netbooted, then you should be able to run a shell and debootstrap an Ubuntu install from there. You don't get the Ubuntu installer, but it should result in an identical installed system.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2008 06:50

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

hybr1d posted:

That worked great, thanks! It would appear that the network connection does not activate on boot, and when activated does not join the same network again. How is this done?

Edit /etc/network/interfaces, add the following stanza:

code:

auto ath0
iface ath0 inet dhcp
  pre-up iwconfig ath0 essid cheapskate

# ¿ Jul 11, 2008 22:05

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

Scaevolus posted:

Debian is still excellent, although Ubuntu is even easier (and is based on Debian). The main repository is essentially Debian Stable.

I may be wrong, but I think Ubuntu is based on a freeze of testing, not stable. And while it's been steadily improving, Ubuntu's upgrade process is still not as perfectly seamless as Debian's oldstable->stable processes have been. For long-term stability I'd choose Debian stable, especially if the user in question already has experience with Debian.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2008 20:52

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

Agapetos posted:

Has Debian ever gotten around to making a graphical installer?

Well, there's a gtk frontend to debian-installer, but absolutely no-one uses it because it's identical to the text installer except for being slower and not working on as many systems. To be honest, I've never really understood why people criticized Debian for having a text-based installer. In fairness the old installer asked some stupid and nonintuitive questions, but graphics wouldn't have made those better. Nowadays installing Debian consists of hitting enter about a dozen times, and setting a hostname, username, and password when prompted. The graphical installer is slightly harder, because you have to type the magic to start it instead of just hitting enter at the boot prompt, and as I recall sometimes it doesn't set the focus right so you have to use the mouse to click OK, or tab one or two times before hitting enter.

Edit: Use this for a fancy-pants installer that bootstraps from Windows so you don't even need to burn a CD.

Agapetos posted:

Anyhow, is aptitude still the way to go or is there now an alternative that I can use with X?

Synaptic might be up your alley. Personally, I use apt-get, because aptitude is too fancy and intelligent for my tastes.

Agapetos posted:

Also, anyone know of a place where I can find a list of compatible ethernet devices? I plan on grabbing the most recent stable version, and hopefully it will support my current device, but you never know...

It's nearly unheard-of for a wired ethernet device to not work; off the top of my head, I can't think of anything that you can buy today and won't have at least minimal functionality in a current Debian kernel image. If you can post what your card is, I can confirm rather quickly that there's support.

Agapetos posted:

Supposedly, linux on the desktop has become quite decent in recent years, and with the exception of the games issue, could more or less replace windows.

Well, I'm a crazy person who's preferred Linux to Windows since '99 or so...

ShoulderDaemon fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Jul 12, 2008

# ¿ Jul 12, 2008 22:52

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

Agapetos posted:

Realtek RTL8101E Family PCI-E Fast Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.0)

Looks like it's supported by the r8169 module, which should autoload during the install and just work.

Agapetos posted:

Also, would my bluetooth/usb Logitech keyboard and mouse work with debian?

Ooh, this is tricky... If you have a little USB fob that you got with the keyboard, then there's a way to convince that fob to act like a normal wired USB keyboard and mouse, which will work up until the point when Debian loads the bluetooth drivers and helpfully disables that feature in favor of a full bluetooth endpoint. At that point, you'll have to get the userspace bluetooth tools installed and reassociate the keyboard and mouse with the computer. So, you probably shouldn't count on being able to use them during the install process, because the bluetooth tools won't be installed but the kernel will probably autoload the drivers anyway. And you'll probably have to either reassociate the keyboard and mouse every time you boot into a different operating system than you last used (because they won't be using the same link key, but they will have the same bluetooth MAC, so the keyboard can't just remember two different link keys).

I'd suggest getting Debian installed with a non-bluetooth keyboard, then get someone to help you extract the link key that Windows is using for your keyboard (which is probably hidden in the registry somewhere) and provide that to Linux so it can use the keyboard without reassociating. After that's done, everything will work perfectly - I regularly use a bluetooth keyboard in Debian with no problems at all.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2008 23:21

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

rugbert posted:

Whats wrong with my fstab that it wont mount my new satas?

Error messages are pretty useful for solving problems.

Anyway, mixing auto and user is pretty atypical; the automount will normally mount as root, resulting in the user option being almost completely useless. The exec and rw options are default. And your fs_passno field should probably be 2 instead of 0, unless for some reason you don't want fsck to run (perhaps these are removable drives, in which case the user, sync and 0 make sense, but the auto is kinda bonkers). If these aren't removable drives, the sync is just crazy.

But I'd guess your problem is spelling sync with an h.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2008 15:46

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

rugbert posted:

the spelling correction didnt help. also, it doesnt look like my /var/log/ folder contains an error log.

Type mount /media/musicbackup at a command line and report the error message you get.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2008 17:58

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

MargotK posted:

You're right, the '{}'\; is from find -exec. I'm just not sure about this translating to
growisofs 1.gpg, growisofs 2.gpg, growisofs 3.gpg
instead of
growisofs 1.gpg 2.gpg 3.gpg

That is, growisofs burning three sessions instead of one with all three files.

Add the -x option to xargs, and it will fail if it can't fit all the arguments in one invocation of the command.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2008 22:13

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

JoeNotCharles posted:

Well, tell us what it was so we can learn something!

I'd assume the problem was that he was providing a full path to the file, so his FTP client was trying to preserve the path on the remote end as well, but the remote machine didn't have a /Users/gregnorc/desktop directory so it just failed with a terrible error message.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2008 04:12

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

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

thesuever posted:

How can I go about doing this without losing any of my data that exists on the partition?

I'll assume you want to move that mount to /foo. All these steps should be done as root.

First, mkdir /foo to create the target mountpoint.
Second, umount /sambashare/music to unmount the filesystem.
Third, edit /etc/fstab and change /sambashare/music to /foo.
Fourth, mount /foo to remount the filesystem.
Fifth, rmdir /sambashare/music to remove the old mountpoint.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2008 22:35

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

The Remote Viewer posted:

How can I get started packaging my own .debs?

The Debian New Maintainers Guide is probably your best bet, and you're likely to want to read the documentation for the debhelper suite of tools as well. Once you get the mindset down, packaging for Debian is relatively straightforward and there are lots of tools to assit you in whatever workflow you find works best.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2008 00:50

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:18

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

FugeesTeenMom92 posted:

does this look sane?

I'd suggest turning down PCM until the gain is zero dB.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2008 04:48

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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