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Fedora 7, not 100% stable, video drivers?
by Chris G 28 Sep '07

28 Sep '07

Well I'm getting on quite well with my Fedora 7 system. I now have Vmware Workstation 6.01 installed on it. There were problems with Vmware 6 on Fedora 7 but these seem to have been resolved by 6.01. As this is one of the reasons I moved to Fedora from Slackware (simple, no hassle, installation of Vmware) this is a big plus for me. It's also been very easy to get apache up and running, and printers, as regards ease of use, instllation, etc. Fedora 7 has been excellent. However!!! .... It's not 100% stable. I originally thought the problem was with the Gnome desktop so I have reverted to my FVWM window manager and, although that seems to have reduced the frequency of crashes it died in much the same way just now using FVWM. The display simply freezes, no diagnostics, no drama, nothing. Keyboard no longer works, cursor is frozen, can't switch to alternate console or anything. The kernel is still running because I can ping the system from my garage system but no services are running, i.e. I can't ssh into the system to shut it down or anything. The only way out is to hit the reset button. Subjectively it feels like the crash/hang occurs when there's a lot of graphic activity, for example the last crash occurred just as CUPS redrew the whole browser window after installing a printer. Other crashes also seem to be at graphically intensive times and the Gnome desktop does work the graphics harder than fvwm so that might explain why it dies more often using Gnome. There's absolutely nothing in /var/log/messages, there isn't a syslog. The video hardware is Nvidia and Fedora 7 isn't using the same Nvidia drivers that Slackware did. With Slackware I had to compile/install the Nvidia driver myself (downloaded from Nvidia) but the Fedora installation recognised the card and has drivers, the xorg.conf file says:- Section "Device" Identifier "Videocard0" Driver "nv" EndSection Does anyone know if there are any stability problems with the "nv" driver? Would I be better off getting the latest Nvidia supplied one? I'll do some Google searching on this front but any comments would be welcome. -- Chris Green

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pc for sale
by Richard Bensley 28 Sep '07

28 Sep '07

PC for sale: -Core2Duo E6000 4MB -2GB RAM (2x Corsair Twin XMS Pro) -Geforce 7950GT 512MB -2 x 200GB SATAII Maxtor -Samsung DVD-RW+/- SATA -Asus P5B Deluxe Motherboard -Creative Audigy 2 PCI sound card -Hauppage PVR 150 MCE -All inside a MASSIVE Chieftec towercase, plenty of room for expansion, ALL 7 fan bays filled with quiet silverstone fans. (http://www.chieftec.com/ba-02b-b-b.html) -580w Taga modular PSU She's lean, she's mean, previously used for Video and 3D, but the internal drives never saw much use other than OS and software. (NOTE: no monitor, mouse, or keyboard) £450 ono excluding delivery, I am 20 miles outside of Norwich down the A146 in Loddon if you want to pick it up. work phone: 01502 716622 +2371 mobile: 07884112398 Cheers Richard

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Truncating text files at non-ascii
by Mark Rogers 27 Sep '07

27 Sep '07

Does anyone have a suggestion for a quick way to process several hundred files, truncating them where ascii text ends and binary data begins? I'm in the process of recovering data from a corrupt drive, and I've recovered loads of would-be Thunderbird mailboxes (ie mbox files). However, since there is no good way to determine the end of an mbox file from its raw data (that I know of anyway!) what I have is loads of 10M files which start "From - " and end 10MB afterwards. So a 10k mailbox is 10k text and 990k rubbish that was next on the drive, which typically is binary data. So I need to scan the files, find where the ascii stops and the binary begins, and truncate them at that point. (Ideally it will be clever enough to allow a few binary chars through in case of any binary chars in the emails, for example unencoded pound signs etc. But something far more basic would be a good start!) I'm guessing that awk ought to be able to do it, something along the lines of reading line by line, and if the line has more than (say) 5% non-ascii data in it then stop, otherwise print that line and continue. I'm just not sure how to go from pseudo-code to real code (nor whether that was the best place to start anyway). Mark Rogers

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Another bash question - aliases in shell scripts
by Chris G 27 Sep '07

27 Sep '07

How do you get aliases to work in bash shell scripts? At the moment the only way I can get an alias that I have defined in my .bashrc file to work in a script is to explicitly source .bashrc in the shell script. Is this the only way it can be done? The korn shell can do 'alias -x fred=bert' which means that fred will work as an alias for bert in scripts called from a command line ksh where the alias is in effect. Is there no way that bash can export aliases so they work in scripts? A quick Google search suggests that bash really can't export its aliases, which is a pity. Does anyone know otherwise? -- Chris Green

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How to make bash 'forget' a path to an executable
by Chris G 27 Sep '07

27 Sep '07

If you move/change a shell script how to make bash forget about the old location? E.g. I had a wrapper for ctags in /home/chris/bin which was called ctags. I discovered that I only needed the wrapper for Solaris and not for Linux so I moved my ctags from /home/chris/bin to /home/chris/bin/solaris which isn't on my path when I'm on a Linux system. After moving it when I try running 'ctags' I get the error:- bash: /home/chris/bin/ctags: No such file or directory i.e. bash has remembered the path to ctags to save time, how do I tell it to start afresh? (There is a ctags on the PATH at /usr/bin/ctags) In C-shell it's rehash but (not surprisingly) that doesn't work in bash. -- Chris Green

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The fonts dialogue in Firefox, what does that line mean?
by Chris G 27 Sep '07

27 Sep '07

When you go to the font selection dialogue in Firefox:- Edit - Preferences - Content - Fonts & Colours/Advanced There's a horizontal line in the list of fonts you get to select when you click on the Serif, Sans-serif or Monospace selection bar. Does anyone know what this horizontal line indicates? I originally thought the ones below the line might be the monospace fonts but that's obviously not right on inspection. Is it possibly that the ones below the line are bit-map fonts? It would actually make selecting a font much easier if there was some sort of indication against each font to tell you whether it's a monospace or proportional font. Some are obvious but not all. Also, a final question, there are fonts one can select called 'monospace', 'serif' and 'sans-serif'. Presumably if you use these then what you get is the system default which is defined somewhere in the build/distribution, there aren't actual font files with these names. Have I got this right? -- Chris Green

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Kubuntu probs
by elc＠freeola.net 26 Sep '07

26 Sep '07

I am using Kubuntu 7.04 - Feisty fawn and a broadband connection. When I have booted up, the OS is NOT automatically online via broadband. I need to go to system settings / network settings and enter administrative mode. I then need to disable eth1 and thus leave me with eth0, - which gives me broadband access. However, I cannot apply this setting – Apply – is greyed out. Thus when I reboot I need to repeat this sequence. How can I apply this setting permanently please. elc

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CPU speed control
by Simon Jude 25 Sep '07

25 Sep '07

Hi, I've got a Sony VAIO that I like to run Ubuntu on. When I run it off the mains the CPU stays pegged at 1.995GHz and the CPU fan sounds like a hoover. When running on the battery the CPU stays at a nice 786MHz (or whatever) and the fan is nice and quiet. Is there a way to switch the CPU speed to the lower speed when it is running on mains to protect my hearing?! I've tried cpufreq-set etc without luck, although I may not have used them properly! Any tips would be appreciated! Thanks Simon

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Terminal window fonts
by Chris G 25 Sep '07

25 Sep '07

Does anyone know where gnome-terminal gets its fonts from? I'd like to use the same font in rxvt if I can but I can't work out what to call it. -- Chris Green

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The photos on Google Earth/Maps
by ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 24 Sep '07

24 Sep '07

Hi Folks, This is for people who have been using Google Maps (or equivalently Google Earth, since they seem to use exactly the same sattelite imagery): http://maps.google.com http://earth.google.com It's some weeks since I last had a look around using Google Maps, and I did it again last night (with both Earth and Maps). It seems to me that the terrain images used have degraded. 1: They seem to be fuzzier, and with less vivid colour, at the larger zoom levels 2: I'm sure they are older than they used to be. In particular, the aerial view of my own house used to show a car I owned a few years back parked at the front, from which (and from other vehicles in the neighbourhood) I inferred that the image dated from around 2002 (certainly not before 2001). And the back garden was much as it was when I moved in in 2001: green throughout, with grass and bushes. Last night, however, there were no bushes in the back garden and at the rear was a large brown, presumably cultivated, area. Now the people before the people before me had a vegetable garden there, which tallies with the image, but the people before me did not (having turned the whole garden over to lawn and shrubs), so that puts the date of the photo over 10 years old. Although the displayed images state "Copyright 2007", this clearly has nothing to do with the date of the photography. I'd be a bit miffed if Google had decided to degrade the quality and especially the timeliness of their images! I fairly regularly use it as a resouce for getting an overview of an area, and until now I've relied on the imagery being not more than a few years old. If, as now seems to be the case, it may be over (even well over) 10 years, then the relevance to recent conditions is seriously diminished! Comments from Google Earthers/Mapsters welcome! Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 23-Sep-07 Time: 11:48:20 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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