October 2006 - main

etch and kde
by peter 20 Oct '06

20 Oct '06

After numerous disasters with Mandriva 2007 too many and too tedious to mention - just, avoid this if you have any alternative at all - I gave up and installed Etch. You will all smile quietly and ask what took him so long. Etch went in perfectly and with a minumum of fuss and started up Gnome. OK, I thought I will get kde and so on as well, for the sake of variety. So I now started up synaptic and installed fluxbox, fvwm and tried to install kde. However, the other WMs don't work as expected. fluxbox appears to start up with nothing at all. Right clicking does nothing, left clicking only brings up a fluxbox choice. There seems to be no way to start any application, including a configuration application or editor or terminal. Then with kde there is something if possible more baffling. Synaptic declines to get kde on the grounds that it is missing kwebdev. It cannot find kwebdev if you search for it using synaptic. I googled kwebdev and it seems to be part of quanta. So I tried to install quanta, and did not seem to get quanta, but got a couple of libraries, but in any case, still no luck with kde. Windowmaker works fine however. Am I doing, or failing to do, something silly or obvious? Peter

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openoffice for debian on amd
by Jenny Hopkins 20 Oct '06

20 Oct '06

Hullo there, I've been setting up a new computer with debian. I'm using the deb-src http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian-amd64/debian/ stable main mirror. I can't install openoffice.org, as it depends on openoffice.org-bin. However, openoffice.org-bin doesn't seem to be available for amd architecture in this mirror. I had a go at downloading the openoffice.org deb file (all_arch) from debian, hoping to fool it somehow, but it still asked for the -bin deb. On looking at the info on debian.org, it doesn't seem that there is an openoffice-bin deb made for amd at all. Can anybody help? Thanks, Jenny (pie-eyed)

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vmware success
by cl＠isbd.net 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

Well, after all my trials and tribulations getting Slackware installed on my new whizzy box it turned out to be very easy to get vmware going. I just followed the 'how to make it work on Slackware' detailed at:- http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~jbyrne/vmware.htm and, it just worked! I'm now installing Windows XP professional in a window while I'm typing this - amazing! I've only installed Vmware Player but I think it will satisfy all my needs. I can create virtual machines for it at http://www.easyvmx.com/. ... and installation has completed, a working XP in a window on my screen - wonderful. Now to really push things by installing Microsoft Access on it - that's the one Windows application I really need. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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Is there a 'startx' equivalent for displaying a remote desktop?
by cl＠isbd.net 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

Are there any 'ready made' equivalents of startx that , instead of displaying the local X desktop, will display a remote system's desktop? I'm a little unclear here on use of 'server' and client BTW so bear with me if I sound a bit confused - I probably am! :-) I want to have a setup on a Linux box that does the same as Cygwin/X does on my Win2K machine. Cygwin/X is an X server and I use it to display the desktop from my Linux box, the Win2k machine effectively acts as an X terminal with all desktop configuration etc. being on the Linux box. This uses XDMCP, which is the XDMCP client and which the server is beyond me! How do I run X on *another* linux box so that it can display the same Linux desktop that I can already display on my Win2k system? Presumably the Linux system whose desktop is to be displayed must already be set up right (with xdm or equivalent, actually gdm in my case) so that remote servers can display its desktop. So all I need to do is get X on the 'new' Linux box to go and find the remote xdm. Is it *just* a matter of saying:- X -query sessionhost Where sessionhost is the system whose desktop I want to display or is there more to it than that? -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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Is this a FireFox bug or a Twiki template/skin problem?
by cl＠isbd.net 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

I've been playing with this bug/infelicity for ages and I'm coming to the conclusion that it's maybe a Firefox bug in its handling of CSS. Could any kind souls out there with nothing better to do take a look at:- http://84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome and tell me if the Search box at the top right and the text underneath it is 'off window' to the right and makes a horizontal scroll bar appear? In IE it's perfect, everything in the right place and no horizontal scroll bar. In Firefox I get the horizontal scroll bar, the degree of the error varies according to the font size (and minimum font size) you set in preferences. I've discussed it with the author of the Twiki skin but he hasn't really been able to resolve the problem. If anyone can check it in browsers other than IE or Firefox that would be very useful but even other versions of Firefox would be interesting. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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Re : Is this a FireFox bug or a Twiki template/skin problem?
by barrie james 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 12:33 +0100, cl at isbd.net wrote: >I've been playing with this bug/infelicity for ages and I'm coming to >the conclusion that it's maybe a Firefox bug in its handling of CSS. > >Could any kind souls out there with nothing better to do take a look >at:- > > http://84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome > >and tell me if the Search box at the top right and the text underneath >it is 'off window' to the right and makes a horizontal scroll bar >appear? For me it's fine - the entire text box is well inside the screen and the text extends halfway across the box - the "t" in "Print" is the midpoint of the box - so no scollbars needed. Using Firefox 1.5.0.7 on Slackware 10.2 at screen res of 1280 x 1024 Barrie _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live Messenger has arrived. Click here to download it for free! http://imagine-msn.com/messenger/launch80/?locale=en-gb

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Copying lots of hidden files and directories - how?
by cl＠isbd.net 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

If I want to copy a hierachy of files and directories which include a lot of hidden files (and directories) i.e. ones which start with '.' what is the easiest way to go about it? I know one approach is to use tar but it would be easier if I could simply 'cp -R x y' and copy *everything* in x to y. Is there not a simple way to do this? -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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Modules - slightly more moderate this time
by cl＠isbd.net 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

Well after my rant last night I would like to actually work out how modules are supposed to work as I don't seem to understand them very well at the moment! So, to some rather basic questions:- How do modules get installed (as in attached to the kernel when the system starts up)? In my previous encounters with modules I think it was a totally manual process in that one had to add the required modprobe command to the rc files. Is this still true or is there some sort of automatic process that does this nowadays? What does setting a device to [M] in the kernel configuration actually do? It can't be necessary for a module to work as otherwise one wouldn't be able to add new modules would you? (E.g. I seem to have added my RTL8168 module by just compiling it and installing it, it doesn't appear in the kernel configuration - or does it?) By the way my problems with the RTL8168 module seem to be down to the fact that the rc.modules script was linked to a 2.4.33 version rather than the 2.6.18 version which it should have been linked to. Fixing this seems to have made things work rather better. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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re: Information (or lack of it) about SATA and AHCI on Linux
by den 17 Oct '06

17 Oct '06

Can't you just use a ready made kernel with everything rolled into it, and use information like the modules used along with the information provided by hal about how all the parts of your system are connected to one another ? Just an ignorant guess about how you might investigate your system further, so don't shoot me down to harshly if it's not good advice. dennis

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Information (or lack of it) about SATA and AHCI on Linux
by cl＠isbd.net 16 Oct '06

16 Oct '06

This is a mixture of a comment and a question. There seems to be very little hard information about using SATA drives in Linux yet, in particular I can't find anything much for the *user* on how to set up a SATA/AHCI system. In particular there seems little help on which kernel one should choose to install a SATA/AHCI based system. The SATA drives appear as SCSI drives to the software when they are AHCI ones but nowhere tells you whether you need a SCSI kernel or an ATA/IDE one in this situation. Considering the possible permutations of AHCI on/off and possible kernels one might choose it could take a long time to get it right! I've got my system working OK now but I'm still unclear on how much IDE support I still need compiled into the kernel, I may not need any at all but there seems nowhere to find out. The best information I've found so far is at:- http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html ... but this doesn't help a lot on the actual 'how to configure it' front. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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