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Contents: |
Date: Sun, 01 Feb 1998 21:43:23 -0800
From: Bradley Akey, bakey@slip.net
Subject: Creative Labs SB-16 & Sony CDU76E-S
I am attempting to install RedHAt Linux ver 4.2 from a Sony CDU-76E-S CD-ROm connected to a Sound Blaster 16 via an IDE interface at base io 0x1E8, IRQ 15. Waht is the correct boot parameter to get this CD-ROM to function properley
Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 08:25:32 -0500 (EST)
From: Michael Stutz, stutz@dsl.org
Subject: Help Wanted: recording audio data
Is there any way to read and save the data that is currently being played by the soundcard, regardless of the sound source?
(There is a program in alpha which does this called paudio, at http://web.syr.edu/~jdimpson/proj/. It creates a readable /proc/audio -- but I haven't yet gotten it to work with the OSS-compatible driver produced by the Linux Ultrasound Project which I use.)
Michael Stutz
Date: Mon, 09 Feb 1998 14:18:49 -0500
From: Todd Blake,
tbb@enterprise.aacc.cc.md.us
Subject: Help Wanted
I like most people am the only person to use my linux system at home. What I'd like to do is when my system is done booting to have me automatically login as my main user account(not as root though) on one virtual console(the first) and leave all other consoles and virtual consoles alone, so that someone telnetting in will get a login prompt like normal, just that I won't. I'd still like the other vc's have login's for others to login and other reasons. I've tried just putting /bin/sh in /etc/inittab and that didn't work, and I'm stumped. Does anyone have any ideas on this?
Todd Blake
Date: Mon, 09 Feb 1998 17:47:08 -0600
From: peter smith,
psmith@computek.net
Subject: Problems with Linux through Wingate Socks
I'm having a few problems accessing the internet through Wingate v2.0 on my Windows95 machine using my Linux Redhat 4.2 installation. I've had this SOCKS server set-up for quite some time on my internet dial-out machine and have previously had no problems accessing the internet through this server via my second machine's installation of Windows95 or even WindowsNT. The problem is directly related to DNS lookups. If I access a domain-name from my Linux machine that seems to get redirected, I will receive an error that the DNS address does not exist. For instance, if I attempt to open the web page http://www.kernel.org (which gets redirected to http://linux.kernel.org) my browser (Netscape v4.04 for Linux 2.0* i386 rpm) reports a DNS error. However if I instead attempt to open the redirected web page http://linux.kernel.org my browser will open it ok, without error. I'm baffled by this behavior and have tried a number of different things! I can provide more detailed information if needed. Thanks in advance to any who try to help! ;)
I love Linux Gazette and have a great time browsing all the cool suggestions and tips! Keep up the ideas and info!
PeterS
Date: Mon, 09 Feb 1998 19:04:42 -0500
From: Melmac88, smegan@erols.com
Subject: Shadow passwords
Can someone do a clear explanation on how to set up a shadow password file, and exactly how it works? I've seen this recommended for security purposes in many books and articles, but there never seems to be an explanation on how to do this.
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 1998 04:38:06 -0900
From: David Lev, dlev@polarnet.com
Subject: my dual pentium
My name is David Lev, I have a problem with my second CPU.
I am currently using a Caldera OpenLinux Standard with Kernel (2.0.29-2). After I install the system I try to enable the 2 CPU and my computer FREEZE or I loss my DeskTop and it takes for ever to do one process. but with one CPU the computer work fine no problems at all. I ask for your help. If you can help me also on how to enable 2 modems and run them as one.
My computer content:
ATX Dual Motherboard - GA-586DX with SCSI on board Adaptec 7880 CPU - 2x 233MMX Pentium 128M RAM EDO 2x 3.1G HDD - W.D - IDE 2x 8X CD-ROM - IDE 2x 56K Modem ESS Sound card
Date: Sat, 14 Feb 1998 15:00:34 EST
From: Andreas M. Weiner,
HGuAWeiner@aol.com
Subject: Linux and AMD K6 Processor - any Problems?
This is my hardware configuration. Support answered that there would be problems with using the K6 with Linux; for instance a crash.
What dou you know about this problem ?
Could you send me a some informations to solve this problem ?
Are there Kernel patches available ?
I'm looking forward of getting the answers from you
Andreas M. Weiner
Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 10:26:36 -0800
From: David, elvii@writeme.com
Subject: X without a Mouse?
Been searching around the net and ldp, and can't seem to find anything on this one. Trying to be able to use X WITHOUT a mouse. Yes, I know, it works bets with a mouse, but I'd like to be able to get at least limited x funcationality without it. Any help is greatly appreciated, and being waited. Also, is there any was to do mouse emulation without a mouse? I found a program that translated ps/2 to a standard serial mouse, for before x supported ps/2, i assume... anyone know if a program has been written to allow the keypad to do mouse, ie, translate keypad input to /dev/mouse? Thanks for your time, hoping some kind linux guru's out there can help. :)
David
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 21:59:04 -0700
From: Todd Jamison,
jamisont@littoneos.com
Subject: Help with Sound Card
I currently am running RedHat 5.0 on a Pentium 150 W/48 MB Ram. I = cannot get my ESS ES1868 plug and play sound card to work. I am very = new to linux and am still learning. If anyone can help me i would = really appreciate it.
Todd
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 16:41:49 -0600
From: John Gorman,
John.H.Gorman@MCI.Com
Subject: HP4 & font
I just installed a HP LaserJet 4L on RedHat 4.2 Intel and when I print postscript (from emacs, etc), it prints at about a size 24 font. How to I set my font where I want it.
Thanks
John Gorman
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 08:46:12 +0100
From: Jeroen Bulters,
jbulters@scoutnet.nl
Subject: Changing XDM windows
Can I change the XDM login window/screen? I have a cool house logo so i want to use it in my own Home Network. And at my school they want to know to so. Is it possible. If yes, how? If no, WHY NOT.
Jeroen Bulters, The netherlands
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 01:36:30 +0000
From: Mackenzie St. Louis,
mstlouis@tiac.net
Subject: New Motherboards
A lot of motherboards have been coming out lately with built in graphics and sound. Any plans to cover them. I just bought a TX-Pro-II board with graphics and sound. However I think I will be returning it since I can't get the sound to work. It has a SoundPro chip. Can not also get XFree 3.3.1 to run properly. It will only come in 8 bit 320x200, even though the graphic chip is supposed to be AGP. If you could point out where I can get some info. I would gladly write an article for the Gazette in case any else comes across this same problem. Please email me with any info or questions.
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 16:28:09 -0800
From: chewey nougat,
daiger@usc.edu
Subject: HELP-Installing Linux on a FAT32 Drive
I'm interested in installing linux on a machine I built recently, but = when I installed Win95(b), I idiotically opted to format the drive using = FAT32, which in a 95-only environment is great, but linux can't read it = for greek.
I've looked around for utilities to effectively un-FAT32 the drive, = which I will then partition with Partition Magic to use the freespace as = a native ext2 partition, etc., but am having little luck. Reformating is = a disheartening prospect I would rather not face, but am fully prepared = to do so if I don't find any help here.
much thanks,
nate daiger
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 13:47:06 -0500
From: Brian O. Bush,
bbush@xtdl.com
Subject: question on motor control
Does anyone know how to interface and control two motors from a Linux box? I am looking for a simple solution (in circuit at least).
Thanks,
Brian
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 98 14:16:13 -0500
From: Bill R. Williams,
brw@ETSU.Edu
Subject: Wanting HELP!
First off: I can *not* believe I am the only one bitten by this.
In the process of getting a System installed I upgraded from the original CD-ROM install of (Intel) RedHat 4.2 to the new RedHat 5.0 CD-ROM. One of the significant items on this system is the mars-nwe Netware emulator.
Under the RedHat 4.2 with mars-nwe 0.98pl8-1 the mars package ran fine, but logged copious errors about there being "too many connections -- increase the number in config.h". But it ran, and I *liked* the way it happily did Netware duties! (Especially the printer part.)
The *new* RedHat 5.0 with mars-nwe 0.99pl2-1 offered some very desirable abilities, not the least of which is the move of some items (such as number of connections) to the run-time config file (/etc/nwserv.conf under RedHat, probably nw.ini on other distributions.) Now the bad news...
Of lesser, but still irritating, importance is the fact that the mars package won't shutdown without some hard kills. This may be related to the really important problem which is:
This new package spawns out nwconn processes with an empty parenthesis as the last token instead of the USERID ('nwconn ... ()') until all connection slots are eaten, and then, of course, will not recognize any new attempts. Any users already logged into the nwserv(ice) are Ok.
Since I am neither a Netware guru nor a mars guru I can only hazard a guess, but since the nwconn(s) are children of the ncpserv daemon I suspect that ncpserv is the source of the troubles.
I have tried every combination of parameter twiddling in the run-time config file that can think of, but to no avail.
One thing I have noticed, the 2.0.32 linux kernel /usr/src/linux/.config no longer has the 'CONFIG_IPX_INTERN' setting (should be unset according to mars-nwe docs) which existed in 2.0.27. This may or may not have anything to do with the problem. Checking the kernel sources, it appears that the RedHat rpm of the 2.0.32 kernel has the mars patches incorporated into the source.
Anyone who has solved this problem, please share the secret.
BTW: I attempted resolution through the RedHat Support system as a registered RedHat customer, and if anybody wants a good laugh I'll be happy to share the "circle of correspondence" from RedHat support. I did learn from the attempt that no *human* at RedHat actually ever sees the E-Mail to the support team or 'Bugs' team. (The "auto answer" mechanism will get right back to you, though, and tell you not to expect an answer.)
As I said, I can *not* believe I am the only one bitten by this, because I've looked on the news groups and seen several posts with "Mars and RedHat 5.0" in the Subject fields. These were all on the French os.linux.... lists, and unfortunately I do not read French!
Sorry for the rambling on...
Bill R. Williams
Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 13:03:24 +0100 (CET)
From: Manfred Lemke,
lema0019@FH-Karlsruhe.DE
Subject: Support for IBM Ethernet card?
I'm frantically searching for some kind of support for IBM's LAN Adapter/A for Ethernet. Does any of you know of a driver in the Linux Kernel that works?
Best regards and thanks in advance,
Manfred Lemke
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 00:09:33 +0100 (MET)
From: Radoslav Dejanovic,
rdejanov@public.srce.
Subject: Linux Journalists International
Linux Journalists International is an effort to make a meeting point for journalists who use Linux or simply write about it. It is also a place where other journalists and other people can take a look what is going on with Linux and media that supports it. There will be info pages about magazines/media and journalists who use Linux and/or write about Linux & related software.
I am editor in one croatian computer magazine (http://www.pcchip.hr) and this is my effort to give the Linux community something that lacks: popularity in media and a chance to boost media coverage of Linux. The homepage is at http://www.purger.com/~rado/lji.html - please take a look at it. LJ and LG are the strongest "Linux inside" media :), so your support in this project is essential.
Rado
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 10:02:08 -0500 (EST)
From: Paul Lussier,
plussier@LanCity.COM
Subject: Retraction Re: Linux and routing
It was just called to my attention that this came across a little to strongly and I'd like to clarify what I had previously written.
On Tue, 6 Jan 1998, I wrote:
Some words of caution. DO NOT HAVE YOUR LAN CONNECTED AT THE TIME OF THE CABLE MODEM INSTALLATION!!!! [Comapany names removed], and most of the other cable companies (we deal with them all here) will refuse to connect a LAN to their broadband network. Simply remove your hub or coax cable from view, and let them do what they need to do, then connect everything else up after they leave.
This was probably a little of an overstatement. I know only of 1 company that has this as a policy, but have heard of people having problems with some of the others. I have even recently been informed of one company that is *quite* Linux friendly and will "encourage the use of Linux as firewall/routers" as well as "allow and assist individuals & companies to setup there own Web servers, either at their permises or ours. We offer web hosting and will assist in registering a domain name". So, I obviously made an improper, blanket statement which does not represent the attitudes or policies of all companies.
Some other interesting tidbits of information about cable modems and cable companies:
1. Do not expect support for running a LAN over the cable modem from the cable company. They don't want you to do it, they won't help you do it.
2. Do not expect to put up a web server to be accessed by from the internet. You are a client, not a server. This technology,though fully capable of performing in this manner, is not being deployed for use this way.
Again, this is a blanket statement that *does not* apply to all cable companies. There is a good reason for those companies who do hold this policy, and perhaps I should have gone into more detail. When you get a cable modem from a cable company, *typically* you are agreeing to lease the equipment from them under similar agreement as you rent the TV set top box for cable television reception. The agreement typically states that you are not allowed to run the cable to any other TV for which you do not rent a box. The same goes for the cable modems. They are agreeing to lease you 1 modem for 1 computer. Setting up a firewall/proxy server to enable other systems access is exactly like placing a diplexor on you TV set, and running the cable to another television. That is a violation of the agreement, and is illegal, immoral, and unethical; it's stealing. And again, I re-iterate, this is not true for *all* companies. Check with your cable company, they should be happy to explain their policies to you.
I don't really think you *should* expect to be able to do either of these though, unless the cable company has provisions in place. You are agreeing to connect one computer to their network as a client. Anything more, you should expect to pay more, as they are providing you with increased capabilities. Just like the phone company charges more per added service (*69, caller ID, etc) so should the cable companies. Personally, I think that average rate of US$40-$50 a month for the equivalent of a T1 to my house is an awesome deal. If I want more capability, I should expect and be willing to pay more.
Cable companies WILL shut you down for running a server of anykind on your end of the network, and it can be *forever* :(
Again, I spoke without clarification. Obviously it depends upon the policies of your local cable company. I know of 2 or 3 instances where this has been the case. By stating the above, I was trying to warn of the possible consequences of violating the contract with the cable company. If the cable company specifies in the contract what you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do, you should expect to deal with the consequences of violating the agreement.
Spammers love cable/broadband networks. There have been several cases where a broadband network customer has been used by spammers and were subsequently shutdown for life by the cable company. What happens is the person decides to connect their private LAN to the cable modem but sets the firewall up incorrectly. Spammers search cable/broadband networks for proxy servers/firewalls (Usually Win95/NT) that allow incoming connections and then use that system to spam the entire cable/broadband network making the spam appear as if you sent it.
Spammers love any insecure system or network. Broadband Technology though, for the first time has allowed people more extensive and closer contact with other people on the internet. When you dial into an ISP with a normal modem, it's a little more difficult for devious minded people to take advantage of other users. But with cable modems, you now have hundreds and/or thousands of people all on the same private network, all with similars IP addresses, many of whom, now leave their systems connected for much longer periods of time. This makes it much easier for crackers, and other mischievous people, to take advantage of anyone who isn't running a properly secured system.
Usually you will be given 1 warning by the cable company, but there have been cases where none was given and the customer was completely shut down.I have heard of this happening on several occasions, where usually the person was running an improperly configured firewall, and spammers used their system to launch e-mail to thousands of people connected to cable companies' private broadband networks. If I'm paying $40 or $50 a month for this service, I, as a paying customer do not want to receive solicitous e-mail (spam) from some one else, especially if they are on the same broadband network as I. I would complain to my cable company about it and expect them to do something. It was these exact circumstances that has led to several people having their cable modems permanently removed.
Current modems are capable of transmitting at 10Mbs in both directions, but are usually deployed throttled back to a trasmit speed of 300Kbs and a recieve speed of 1.5Mbs. You want more bandwidth, they'll be happy to charge you more money :)
Personally, I think this is very fair. The cable companies are providing us with a service. We, as consumers, have to pay for this service. Just like my electric bill, if I use a lot of electric service, I pay a lot of money; or like the telephone company, if I have more features or want a T1, I pay more money than if I only had a normal telephone line. It's the same with cable modem technology, the capability is there for 10Mbps bandwidth in both directions. The technology is also there to regulate that flow. I expect the cable companies to use that technology. If I want LAN speeds to my house, I should expect to have to pay for it.
Again, I want to apologize for not clarifying my previous statements a little more. Please check with your local cable company before you do anything like connecting your private LAN to theirs. There are as many different policies as there are cable companies, so make sure to explicitly ask if what you want to do is permitted. This is a great technology and has tremendous benefits. Playing by the rules that the cable company has put in place will only help the technology spread. By violating the rules, you run the risk of losing access to it, as well as making it more difficult for the cable comapanies to contiue selling this service. Like any other market driven product, if there's no money in it, or it costs too much to implement, it will fall by the wayside, and no one benefits. By not folling the rules, we as customers can make it cost prohibitive for implementation, and conversely, by following the rules, we create more market demand, which in turn, continues pushing the technology forward, and everyone benefits.
#include <std_disclaimer.h>I don't pretend to know all the policies of all the cable companies. I don't assume to speak for any of the,, nor do I tell them how to operate. My opinions are my own, and no one else's. Dammit Jim, I am a Unix sysadmin, not a sales rep :)
Please feel free to send me questions, comments, criticisms, etc.
Paul
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 15:01:30 -0500
From: Jack Chaney,
JAC14@chrysler.com
Subject: New Direction
I heard on the radio last night, an announcement that IBM has just successfully masked, produced and tested their newest piece of silicon. The processor is based on the PowerPC design and is reported to run at 1000MHz. Knowing what I know about the PowerPC and its various flavours, I think it would do to examine the idea of porting Linux in a native coded version to this processor platform. The pricing of this chip with a heavy duty operating environment could give the Alpha a real run for its money.
The PowerPC (for those who don't know) is a RISC based processor with three major operation blocks, each capable of independent operation. This enables the instruction flow to become parallelized so as many as three instructions can be done simultaneously, and because it is a RISC processor the instructions have been optimised so most occur in only one or two cycles. The other element of the design is to have an extremely large cache memory on-board the processor to reduce fetch time for instructions. To give an idea of the improvement in speed realised by this method, a PowerPC emulates the Intel part by keeping an interpreter block in the cache memory of the chip and interprets the Intel object code at comparable speeds of the Intel parts. The lure of creating a native Linux for this processor has crossed my mind on a number of occasions prior to the IBM announcement, and now I hope with encouragement this can move from fantasy to fact.
Jack Chaney
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 08:50:00 -0500
From: Hampton, Mike,
hamptom1@INDY.NAVY.MIL
Subject: Picking a nit
Maybe I should have called the subject of this "pet peeve" or something like that. What I am writing about is a simple grammatical error that I have seen many people make, but one that shouldn't appear in the Gazette or any published effort and that is the incorrect use of "it's" when the author should have used "its." An example is in the following sentence from a recent issue:
"This was necessary in order for a *nix version to behave to applications like it's counterparts so applications could run everywhere."
If you take the "it's" and expand it, the sentence would read:
"This was necessary in order for a *nix version to behave to applications like it is counterparts so applications could run everywhere."
The sentence no longer makes sense. Authors should remember that "it's" is a contraction of "it is." If they want a possessive of "it," they should use "its." I have also seen instances of authors using the apostrophe-s when they intended to form a plural but made a possesive instead (for example, using menu's, a possesive, instead of menus, the proper plural form). Like I said before, these are very simple and common errors, but ones which I feel can hurt the author's credibility.
Before anybody gets too defensive, let me say that as an employee of a major defense contractor, I have made the above error and have had it pointed out to me. Maybe that's why it stands out so much when I see it now.
Now I'll put down my pen and let others point out my errors.
Mike Hampton
Date: Fri, 06 Feb 1998 08:12:09 -0600
From: Tyree Gwyn,
bounti@myriad.net
Subject: love your site!!
i very much enjoy the information found on LG!! even though i am posting from a windows machine, i use linux(redhat 5.0) the majority of the time. i just happen to be at work, at this time.
anyway, being a newbie to this whole linux scheme, i have used your site, dejanews, oreilly books, and many howto's to get my system up to my specs. linux is very exciting, and has alot of promise. please keep up the good work.
Tyree
Date: Sun, 08 Feb 98 17:34:41 -0500
From: Leon C. Isaacson,
lci2@global.co.za
Subject: Incomplete Book Reviews
In Linux Gazette 25, the review of "A Practical Guide to Linux" , by Mark Sobell, fails to supply the publishers name, publication date, and price. I enjoyed the review, but surely this information should be included as a matter of course. Given your reviewers laudatory comments, how or where can the rest of us hope to acquire this book?
Leon
(I agree. He should have included that information. Here's what I know:
Publisher: Addison Wesley Longman, info@awl.com, http://www.awl.com/
Price: $38.00 US
ISBN: 0-201-89549-B
-- Editor)
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 18:59:53 -0500
From: Timothy D. Gray, timgray@lambdanet.com
Subject: Getting Linux to the public...
Has anyone noticed that when your friends see your neat-o Linux system with the nice 17 inch monitor, high quality video card, and fast computer that when they say, "Wow! that is nice, and you can do almost anything on that!" you cringe with the fact that they are going to want you to put it on their system? now mind you, I dont cringe on sharing the best O/S on the planet, In fact I want everyone to use Linux. It's just that almost all X windows software is written for 1024 X 768 or higher resolution video screens and that 99% of those wanting to use Linux and X windows only have a 14" monitor that can barely get past 640X480 at 256 colors. I tried several times to get friends into Linux and X but to no avail because the software developed for X is for those that have Gobs of money for good video boards and humoungous monitors. It's not a limitation of Linux or X, it that the software that is developed for these platforms are by professionals or professional users that can afford that new 21 inch monitor at the computer store. We as a group might want to see software scaled back to the 640X480 crowd.. then Linux would take the world by storm.. Until then It's going to be limited to us pioneers and Scientists...
Tim Gray
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 15:42:09 +0000
From: Jaime E. Villate,villate@fe.up.pt
Subject: uptime record
In Issue 25 (February 98) Sean Horan wrote about a Linux system that ran continously for 274 days. Here is a quote from Bruce Perens (president of Debian, works at Pixar) that I took from http://www.debian.org
"I thought three months without a reboot was a big deal. When I mentioned it to our developers, one of them showed me details about his system. It was up for 458 days, and was halted to move it to another floor. The network and disk device drivers had handled tens of millions of interrupts in that time."It would be interesting to know what the record is for other operating systems older than Linux.
Jaime Villate, University of Porto, Portugal
http://www.fe.up.pt/~villate/
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More 2¢ Tips!
Apache SSL extensions...
From Frank: My problem is this one ... I've gone bananas in trying to find a document that explains how to install, in a step by step fashion, the Apache SSL "extensions" to one of my Apache WWW Webservers (the performance increase is awesome) can you or anyone that reads this help...
This is how I did it:
Glenn.
Locate
One of my annoyances with the locate program have been that with it, users can see files they have no access to otherwise. So, I have deviced a little patch to the original sources to fix that, along with a few other annoyances. It inherently does a few other things as well. It will only list files that do currently exist (not just files that existed when updatedb was last run). Also, it adds the option -l to locate which simply performs a ls -l on the files returned.
To compile, get the sources from ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/findutils-4.1.tar.gz . Extract that, then apply the attached diff to it with: patch < locate.diff, and compile per the instructions within findutils.
The only file modified is locate.c, so you can skip the installation process if you already have updatedb/locate installed, and just simply replace your existing locate binary with the new one (keeping a backup of the original, should anything evil happen).
Enjoy
Re: Printing Problems
Date: Wed, 04 Feb 1998 22:05:40 +0100
From: M.H.M. Verhoeven,
leeuweri@stad.dsl.nl
Anyone that can help me. I'd love to hear it. I try running lpr, but everytime I get no name for local machine. How do I set this and/or what is the problem. -- Manish Oberoi
I had the same problems with printing (no name for local machine). You should put a entry for your machine in /etc/hosts, and your problem is solved. In my case, the name of my computer had changed, but /etc/hosts still contained the old name for my machine.
Gertjan
Re: LG25, Netscape on the Desktop
Date: Thu, 05 Feb 1998 00:26:03 +0100
From: Soenke J. Peters,
peters@on-line.de
I use a similar trick to start up the browser-/mail-/news-window from three different buttons in my windowmanager's panel. For the mail-window, you have to start the script with 'mailbox:' as the url parameter, for the news-window simply use 'news:'. For urls beginning different from the above, netscape opens the normal browser window.
Soenke J. Peters, Hamburg, Germany
RE: Linux and VAX 3400 and 3300
Date: Thu, 05 Feb 1998 10:11:00 -0700
From: James Gilb,
p27451@email.sps.mot.com
To: dennis.j.smith@ArthurAndersen.com
I have just purchased a MicroVAX 3400 and 3300. I would like to put Linux on these two systems. Can you provide any help in this aspect.
I believe those are MIPS 3000 boxes, try the Linux VAX Port Homepage at http://ucnet.canberra.edu.au/~mikal/vaxlinux/home.html and the Linux/MIPS project at http://lena.fnet.fr/
My guess is that you will need to get your hands dirty on this one. You could also try NetBSD, they may have a port now.
If they are not MIPS boxes, then you could have a real challenge on you hands, but then isn't that half the fun of Linux?
James Gilb
Binary File Access with dd
Date: February 9, 1998
From: Leonard R Budney lbudney@fore.com
dd stands for Disk Dump. Or if it doesn't it should. The "main" use for dd is to duplicate a floppy disk, bit for bit, to a file. You probably used it to create boot disks when you installed Linux for the first time, unless you used its much less functional cousin rawrite. If you're sick of keeping boxes of floppies around, you can use dd in reverse, and throw the floppy away. Depending on permissions, you might have to do this as root.
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=quicken_install_disk_1.img bs=1440k
The if argument specifies an input file (which defaults to the standard input). Naturally, the of argument names the output file (which defaults to the standard output). Finally, the bs argument tells dd what block size to use. Here we set the block size equal to the size of a floppy disk, and let dd read one block of data.
The man page says that the purpose of dd is to "convert a file while copying it." In English, that means that dd does not assume a file is made of text! It doesn't look for carriage returns to delimit lines, it doesn't stop reading at the first binary zero, nothing! This gives us the power to read files exactly, byte for byte. It allows us to read a fixed number of bytes, or physically to overwrite a file.
As just one example, consider /dev/random. That's a nifty Linux innovation--a pseudo device that accumulates randomness. Would you like to read 10 bytes of random data from /dev/random? It's a snap.
dd if=/dev/random of=/tmp/random.bin bs=1 count=10
Note that /dev/random provides binary data, so if we omit the of argument then that data will probably trash our display. Alternately, we could have omitted the of argument, but piped the output through cat -v to escape any non-printable characters. In addition to the arguments explained above, we use the count argument to specify the number of blocks to read. In conjunction with a blocksize of 1, count=10 tells dd to read exactly 10 bytes.
Here's a final example, for the paranoid. When you delete a file using rm, you only delete the inode pointing to your data. The data is still there, on the disk, waiting for somebody with a "Disk Doctor" utility to resurrect and read. Does that bother you? Well, you should delete your data, not just your file. Again, dd comes to the rescue. Normally dd truncates its output file before writing. The argument conv=notrunc overrides that behavior, and causes dd to write over any existing data. The following shell script combines all of these ideas, and wipes out your file by overwriting it five times with pseudorandom data, and then deleting it.
The Mailbag!
#!/bin/sh
FILE=$1
SIZE=`ls -l $FILE | awk -- '{print \$5;}'`
{
for iteration in 1 2 3 4 5
do
dd if=/dev/urandom of=$FILE bs=${SIZE} count=1 conv=notrunc
sync
done
} && rm -f $FILE
Enjoy!
Len.
Follow-up to find 2c-tip
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 19:20:44 +0000
From: Markus Pilzecker,
mp@rhein-neckar.netsurf.de
in your December issue, one of the 2-cents about find had been:
A shorter and more efficient way of doing it uses backticks:
grep "string" `find . -type f`
Note however, that if the find matches a large number of files you may exceed a command line buffer in the shell and cause it to complain.
The solution to this is using xargs:
find <find_roots> <other_options> -print0 | xargs -0 grep <options>. xargs only puts as much onto grep's [or whatever else's] command line as fits without overflow. Only in the latter case will it start a new instance of grep. The trick of the first proposal to add ``/dev/null'' to grep's command line to make it print the name of the file in work is [mostly] superfluous then, since xargs [mostly] puts more than one filename onto grep's command line.
The find option ``-print0'' and the xargs option ``-0'' work together to assure correct handling of odd filenames.
Markus
ispell & Pine 3.96
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 08:39:34 -0800 (PST)
From: Peter Struijk
To use ispell in Pine, go into Pine SETUP (press S, then C), search using WhereIs for "speller" (press W) and make sure the value set there is "ispell". That will do it.
Peter
XVSCAN: Combining different parts together
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997 01:04:29 -0500
From: Earl Fryman, fryman@io.com
To: xvscanlist@tummy.com
Is it possible to combine two (or more) different parts from different pages on same fig? For example, if I scan pages and want to print transparencies from small part of the text enlarged. Now, if the part 1 is at the end of a page and the part 2 is on the following page, I have not been able to combine them on one single fig (part 1 and below it part 2). How could I do that with xvscan? If the parts are on the same page I have used cut, past and crop.
--
Juha Perkkio, juha.perkkio@mikkeliamk.fi
Yes it is posible. Load the first image and select the portion of the image to cut. Press Alt-C (hold down Alt key and press C). Load the second image and press Alt-V. A frame window the size of the cut in the first image will appear. Position the frame where you want the image to be pasted, then press Alt-V (again). This even works if the two image are of different type (bmp, jpg, gif, etc.).
Earl Fryman
2c-tip: Netscape on the Desktop
Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 19:43:58 -0100
From: Victor-A. Bruessow,
Christian.Bruessow@t-online.de
I'm using this little bash script to start Netscape:
#!/bin/sh if [ $1 ] ; then REMOTE_COMMAND="openURL($@,new-window)" else REMOTE_COMMAND="openBrowser" fi netscape -remote $REMOTE_COMMAND || netscape $@I think it has some advantages over the script from Tim Hawes:
Linux and Win95
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 14:55:22 +1300
From: Justin Lodge,
justin.lodge@optimation.co.nz
Rexson Re: Your Question e-mail to Linux Gazette
Your big problem is that Win95 has probably helped itself to the entire drive already - so there is no space left available to install extra Linux partitions.
What you really should do first is to back up all the existing partitions using a tape or a Zip or a Jaz drive. Let me guess you don't have one of these..... if you can beg/borrow/steal one temporarily and back everything up before you do anything that would be good.
Maybe your D: partition doesn't hold much and you can transfer the data to the C: drive where Win95 is installed - this will allow you to re-use the D: partition for Linux.
Next - buy/beg/borrow/steal a recent copy of Red Hat for Linux (make sure you get the book and the floppy disks that come with the CD) and the Doctor Linux book.
Red Hat has a beginners book with it that explains a lot that you need to know to install Linux and a set of excellent scripts that lead you though the installation.
doctor linux has good beginners sections and more complex ones about dual booting Win95 and Linux
I would recommend that you DO NOT try to make the machine dual boot - it could cock-up the win95 installation but these articles will help you understand the mechanics around this area. The HOWTO articles in Doctor Linux are all available on the Internet if you don't want to buy a book but having a hard copy to reference is much easier.
once you have re-located any useful data off the D: to the C: then use the disk partitioning tool that comes with red hat to de-allocate the D: partition and then create the root, usr, swap and home (and any others) in this area. From memory I believe that the root partition has to be in a primary partition but all the rest can be logical partitions contained in a single "extended" partition.
This re-allocation of partitions is EXTREMELY dicey - make absolutely sure you understand which partition is C: and which is D: IF you de-allocate C by mistake then it is almost definitely un-recoverable unless you have Norton for Win95 or something similar that can repair the damage.
Create a boot diskette using red hat so that when you want to run Linux you just plug it in and re-boot the machine - booting off the floppy may seem awkward but it is much much faster than any version of Windoze.
Any one else using the family using the machine will not have this boot diskette and will not be able to see your partitions from Win95 and won't even know that Linux is there. This is how I keep my family off my copy of Linux.
Justin
My $0.02 tip: Graphical su
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 22:01:25 +0100 (CET)
From: Andreas Kostyrka,
andreas@rainbow.studorg.tuwien.ac.at
Sometimes one want to do su but be able to use X11 programs like RH control-panel. There are several ways to accomplish this: *) The hard way: su - and copy&paste the xauth:
$ xauth list $DISPLAY # mark the output $ su - # xauth add <paste the above line> # export DISPLAY=<display mentioned in the pasted line.)
*) The overkill net way:
$ ssh localhost -l root
This depends upon you haveing installed ssh (ftp.replay.com is the site where one gets the crypto stuff for RH Linux in .rpms), and is probably not that fast, as it uses a X11 proxy forwarding server.
*) The graphical (XDM) way, or the way to show off for your WinNT friends:
$ Xnest :10 -query localhost &:10 must be perhaps customized if it is already in use. localhost is your xdm host. This should work if you use xdm for login. (==You have a graphical login screen.)
Andreas Kostyrka
Easter Eggs in Netscape
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 13:32:57 -0800 (PST)
From: Eric Geyer, corduroy@sfo.com
I saw the list of Easter Eggs in Netscape, and I have two more, both much less useful than the ones you listed.
about:mozillaOn all the Unix netscapes I've seen, it changes the Netscape logo in the upper right.
about:jzwThis will take you to Jamie Zawinski's homepage, and will change the Netscape logo on Unix netscape except for version 4.
Just thought you would like to know...
Eric Geyer
Core Dumps
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 13:56:51 PST
From: Marty Leisner, leisner@sdsp.mc.xerox.com
I was annoyed on Linux that file(1) couldn't tell what file dumped core if a core dump was seen.
For a while, I was doing strings | head and guess at it by inspection.
But size will do the job:
: leisner@dw;size core text data bss dec hex filename 45056 295036 0 340092 5307c core (core file invoked as minicom - dpp2)
marty
|
Contents: |
April Linux Journal
The April issue of Linux Journal will be hitting the newsstands March 6. The focus of this issue is Workplace Solutions with articles on Marketing Linux, WordPerfect 7, Satellite Remote Sensing, Linux in Biomedical Labs and much more. Check out the Table of Contents.
Washington, DC Linux Users Group InstallFest
1 Feb 1998
On March 28, 1998, the Washington DC area Linux User Group (DC LUG)
will have its next Linux Installation Fest. Volunteer experts from
several local Linux user groups will assist computer users interested
in trying out Linux, the operating system that Byte Magazine, Wired,
PC Magazine and other industry publications agree is a significant
software phenomenon. Bring your PC and leave with Linux co-installed,
or just visit the demo room to see what Linux is all about.
Started as an exercise in Internet-based collaboration among hundreds of software developers around the globe, Linux has acquired a reputation for superior power and robustness, along with a relentless pace of improvements, a combination rarely matched by the mainstream software Unix and Windows NT industry.
Linux has attracted an estimated 3 to 15 million users, and also garnered commercial support, evidenced by several shrinkwrap vendors with shelf space in mass-market computer stores. Even though in most cases an installation of Linux is a simple procedure, DC LUG will help those who may have unusual configurations or simply some trepidations about jumping in. Representatives from RedHat Software, one of Linux vendors, will also attend and provide advice.
The InstallFest will be held at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the medical school at the Bethesda Naval Medical complex, just inside the Beltway between Wisconsin and Connecticut Avenues.
Doors open at 10 AM through 4 PM, Saturday 28 March 1998. See http://www.tux.org/fest for details and a requested pre-registration form.
For more information:
David Lesher, wb8foz@nrk.com, (301)
608-9775
Przemek Klosowski, przemek@tux.org, (301) 975-6249
Linux in the News
Linux for Dummies by Jon "maddog" Hall and others and Linux for Dummies Quick Reference by Phil Hughes are out from IDG books. Get your copy today.
InfoWorld's 02/02/98 issue names Red Hat Linux 5.0 as it's OS of the year
for 1997. The article can be found on-line at
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayArchive.pl?/98/05/poy2a.dat.htm
under the Operating Systems heading.
Red Hat's Press Release
Debian Year 2000 Compliance
1 Feb 1998
Debian's Y2K compliance statement is at
http://www.debian.org/news.html#19980104
For more information:
Bruce Perens, bruce@pixar.com
"open source" -- new term for libre software
10 Feb 1998
The Open Source Definitionby Bruce Perens
Goodbye, "free software"; hello, "open source" by Eric Raymond
For more information:
http://www.opensource.org/
Linux receives the Softwarove noviny "Product of the year" award
1 Feb 1998
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 1998 13:53:30 GMT
The Czech computer monthly "Softwarove noviny" awarded the Linux 2.0 operating system with its award "Product of the Year 1997". This award is regularly (for the sixth time this year) assigned to the best computer products available on the Czech market without any other limitation. The "Product of the Year" award is strictly non-commercial, no fee is paid and no application is put in. Among the criteria is technical excellence, amount of innovation, price / performance ratio as well as the amount of value added by the domestic vendor. The award was granted to 18 products for the past year, among them two operating systems.
Softwarove noviny (www.softnov.cz) is a prestigious Czech computer monthly. Its name (with meaning Software News) is rather traditional than descriptive: actually it is a generally oriented computer magazine that focuses on software as well as hardware, networking and other aspects of IT market. It is published in Czech language and distributed in both Czech and Slovak Republics. The Softwarove noviny reader?s group includes professional IT users, entrepreneurs and managers. The Softwarove noviny is the only Czech computer monthly prepared entirely from domestic sources without translated articles from American or German industry press. Softwarove noviny magazine publishes now 16,000 copies (total population of Czech Republic is 10 million), 85 % of which are paid (1/3 by subscribers). About 40 % of the magazine are occupied by advertisements of both Czech and worldwide IT companies. According the independent surveys from November 1996, the Softwarové noviny magazine is the most known IT magazine in the Czech Republic.
The WWW page of Softwarove noviny is available at http://www.softnov.cz/. The Czech Linux Users' Group has its WWW page at http://www.linux.cz/czlug/.
For more information:
Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak,
kas@informatics.muni.cz,
http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/
WWW: inofficial StarOffice 4.0 for Linux FAQ
16 Feb 1998
Michael Hoennig has collected some questions and answers into an
inofficial FAQ of Linux (and some UNIX-) specific topics of StarOffice
4.0. This FAQ in the German language can be found at:
http://www.on-line.de/~michael.hoennig/soffice4-linux-faq-49.html
This FAQ in an English version can be found at:
http://www.on-line.de/~michael.hoennig/soffice4-linux-faq-01.html
For more information:
Michael Hoennig, mhoennig@on-line.de
WANTED: Project LEAP: Linux-Equipped Astronauts Project
1 Feb 1998
17 Feb 1998
Recent articles on the International Space Station (ISS) have
mentioned that astronauts will be issued laptop computers running
MSWin95. Other reports have predicted disastrous trouble with
the station control software, because of poor engineering practices
and unrealistic schedules.
This situation creates a real opportunity for Linux. While we (probably) can't help with the main station software, at least the astronauts can be freed from Win95 crashes. Imagine the sound bites: "At least our laptops don't crash all the time."
PEAL is a project to port the applications that the astronauts use to run under Linux, so each astronaut has a choice of operating systems. Many of them will continue using MSWin95, for a time, but if any astronaut chooses Linux, the others will begin to pick it up, just as happens on the ground.
Anyone who wants to take over the web page, design a project logo, set up a mail reflector, create a newsgroup, become group leader, or (almost forgot :-) port software, please write. We need to know what codes the astronauts need ported, and where the sources are. The project web page, for now, is:
http://www.cantrip.org/leap.html
For more information:
Nathan Myers, ncm@nospam.cantrip.org,
http://www.cantrip.org/
4th Annual Linux Expo, May 28-30th
February 17, 1998:
Linux is making waves in the news, and now is the
opportunity for the world to find out why. It's time to get ready for
the largest gathering of the best and brightest minds in the computer
world. For three business-centered and technology-packed days, May
28-30, the fourth annual Linux Expo will take over Duke University in
Durham, North Carolina.
This year's Linux Expo is shaping up to be a can't-miss event. Visit the record number of Expo exhibitors (there is still time for your company to become involved) showing the latest in Linux-based hardware, software, and service solutions. And stop in on the business and technical discussions to hear talks by some of the most important names in technology today.
Yes, Linus Torvalds will be there. And so will many others.
Technical track speakers include:
There will also be Tutorial Sessions featuring among others:
Business track speakers include:
For more information:
linux@linuxexpo.org
http://www.linuxexpo.org/
WWW: linux for starters WWW-page
Fri, 20 Feb 1998 08:29:00 GMT
Here's Yet Another Page Concerning Linux For
Starters. In case anyone's interested...
http://www.ping.be/leminator/leminator.htm
For more information:
Koen Janssens, trott@mail.dma.be
WANTED: OpenBIOS - Freeware x86 BIOS iniatitive
1 Feb 1998
Fri, 20 Feb 1998 08:42:53 GMT
Some discussion about the possibility of a freeware 'GNU' BIOS
was casually mentioned on the Linux kernel mailing list last week.
Talk about it escalated, and a mailing list was quickly formed.
After a few more days of ideas, it seems like a very good possibility
and some people just hell bent on getting started.
What we are looking for now are people with a high degree of knowledge about the low-level workings of the x86 PC architecture, and real mode programming experience. Please join the mailing list and offer what help you can.
Also understand that many Linux people are involved with this, but the purpose is a COMPLETE BIOS replacement for use with all Intel x86 OS's, not just some new boot loader.
To subscribe to the OpenBIOS Mailing list, write an email To: openbios-request@linkscape.net Subject [leave blank!] subscribe [in the body] It is a majordomo managed list. Feel free to use extended MD commands as needed.
OpenBIOS web pages: (DO NOT expect to find much here yet! )
http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/
http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/
For more information:
Dave Cinege
Linus Torvalds at next SVLUG meeting March 4th
1 Feb 1998
20 Feb 1998
March 4, 1998, Linus Torvalds will speak at the Silicon Valley Linux
Users Group (SVLUG) meeting. The meeting begins at 7pm.
This meeting will be held at our new location, the GateWay Conference Center, Building J, ciscoSystems. The address for this conference center is:
255 W. Tasman Drive
San Jose, CA 95134
Please enter through the front entrance of the building, and the conference center will be to your left. There will be signs.
For more information:
Rob Walker, rob@svlug.org
http://www.svlug.org/
[gtk-list] Qt/KDE Netscape -- An estimate of Work!
1 Feb 1998
John McNulty wrote:
I'm sure after Netscape's source code announcement, a number of
people (like me) must have wondered about the possibility of a
port to KDE and/or Qt. So I asked one of the Netscape engineers
for an opinion on this. Below is the answer I got.
Depending on the number of people working on it, it could take anywhere between 2 months to an year. Of course, stripped down versions are possible in a shorter period of time.
- The GUI frontend is clearly seperated from the rest of the browser by a well defined API (which all 3 frontends - MFC, Mac, Motif - use).
- There are about 50 widgets ( ls *.c | wc -l) that are Netscape specific, which'll have to be ported.
- The GUI itself is composed of around 160 C++ files, which instantiate these widgets.
So if anyone put there is thinking about this, you can use
this as a guideline to figure out how much work is involved.
--John
ZINC Software
9 Feb 1998
Zinc's flagship product, Zinc Application Framework, is a very high-
quality C++ GUI API and interface builder which supports popular
desktop operating systems (Windows, Motif, DOS, ...) *and* which is
scalable to embedded platforms as well (in 1/10th the space of
Windows CE!).
Zinc has recently negotiated distribution agreements with popular Linux vendors to include ZAF with their CD-ROM distribution. Zinc has also been engaged by top embedded operating systems' vendors to provide reference ports of ZAF for their embedded OS.
For more information:
Robert Bishop, rbishop@zinc.com
Zinc Software Incorporated, http://www.zinc.com/
EDA Software: Linux VHDL Simulator Sells Via Web
9 Feb 1998
Essex Junction, Vt. -- Despite considerable user interest, very
few Linux-based EDA tools have become available. One of the
first is a new Linux version of the Green Mountain Computing
Systems VHDL compiler, available for $169 via the World Wide
Web.
Green Mountain currently offers a DOS-based VHDL simulator, and Accolade Design Automation (Duvall, Wash.) sells a Windows-based version of the same simulator. The new version 2 of the Green Mountain VHDL compiler supports most, but not all, of the features of IEEE 1076-87 and 1993 VHDL.
The Linux version is a port of the DOS version and includes all the same features, except for the user interface. Both versions come with two simulation environments for batch or interactive simulation, precompiled IEEE packages, an online VHDL tutorial, a Motorola HC11 microcontroller example model and free technical support via e-mail.
Scott Thibault, president of Green Mountain Computing Systems, said he developed the Linux version because that freely distributed operating system is becoming more important in universities, which have made up Green Mountain's primary market. He said the Linux version is slightly slower than the DOS version because of its support for multitasking.
Linux has gained a following because it's viewed as a stable, robust operating system that gives PCs full Unix compatibility. Thus, commonly used Unix utilities such as "make" are available. Linux also has minimal memory requirements. The Green Mountain Linux VHDL compiler can run in about 8 Mbytes of RAM. The simulator can be ordered only by mail or over the Internet.
For more information:
Andy@Piziali.dv.org
http://together.net/~thibault
EAGLE LINUX M68K
for AMIGA, Atari, Mac 68k and all computers based on the Motorola MC680x0 CPU is now available. The end user delivery starts the first week of March. Linux is pre-available on CDR for press and magazines.
Distribution:
Eagle Computer Products GmbH,
S.u.S.E. GmbH
Update CDs will follow every 2-3 months. Planned versionen which will come soon:
Olicom Linux Token-Ring driver released
6 Feb 1998
Olicom is pleased to announce the release of a Linux Driver for
Olicom's high performance Token-Ring Adapters OC-3118 and OC-3137. The
driver is also compatible with the older OC-3136 adapter.
The combination of Olicom's Token-Ring adapters and new Linux drivers
provide superior performance in a Linux Token-Ring environment.
The driver has been tested with the (currently) latest version of the 2.0 kernel, 2.0.33. It will probably work with any 2.0 kernel, i.e. all of the kernels used by the Linux distributions, but this has not been tested and can not be guaranteed.
For the current development versions of Linux 2.1 the driver has been tested with version 2.1.78. Changes to the development kernel are occurring in rapid pace and compatibility can not be guaranteed.
The Olicom Linux driver is available from Olicom's WEB site http://www.olicom.dk/ (Europe) or http://www.olicom.com/ (US).
Pre-compiled kernels with the driver builtin - based on Linux 2.0.33 - for RedHat 4.2, RedHat 5.0 and other systems using the Linux 2.0.x kernel, are available from
ftp://ftp.olicom.dk/pub/releases/Unix-Driver/Linux/unsupported/
For more information:
henrik_stoerner@olicom.dk
http://www.olicom.dk/ (Europe)
http://www.olicom.com/ (US)
GNU plotting utilities 2.0 released
6 Feb 1998
Release 2.0 of the GNU plotting utilities is now available at
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/plotutils-2.0.tar.gz . It should soon be
available via ftp from the GNU mirror sites. A list of mirror sites is
appended below; please try them before you try ftp.gnu.org.
This is a major release. The centerpiece of the package is now `libplot', a function library for 2-D device-independent graphics. Libplot is installed as a DLL (dynamically linked library), on systems that support DLL's. Libplot now supports Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language (HP-GL and HP-GL/2) output, in addition to Postscript, xfig, Tektronix, and X11 output. So HP LaserJet and other PCL 5 printers are now supported.
The manual for the plotting utilities is now over 100 pages long. To install and print the documentation, be sure that you have the current release of the GNU texinfo package (v. 3.11) installed on your system. You may retrieve it from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/texinfo-3.11.tar.gz .
For more information:
Mathematics Department, University of Arizona
Robert S. Maier, rsm@math.arizona.edu
Data Plotting Library DISLIN 6.3c
6 Feb 1998
DISLIN is a high-level and easy to use plotting library for
displaying data as curves, bar graphs, pie charts, 3D-colour plots,
surfaces, contours and maps. Several output formats are supported
such as X11, VGA, PostScript, CGM, HPGL, TIFF and Prescribe. The library
contains about 400 plotting and parameter setting routines and is
available for several C, Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 compilers.
Version 6.3c of DISLIN is now released for Linux. The supported compilers are GCC, G77, Imagine F, NAGf90, Absoft f77 and Absoft f90. Plotting extensions for the programming languages Perl 5.003 and Python 1.5 are included.
All DISLIN distributions for Linux are free.
DISLIN is available from the DISLIN Home Page:
http://www.mpae.gwdg.de/dislin/dislin.html
and via FTP from the server:
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/grafik/dislin/
For more information:
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Aeronomie
Helmut Michels, michels@linax1.mpae.gwdg.de
ktalkd-0.4.1 - Enhanced talk daemon
6 Feb 1998
ktalkd is an enhanced talk daemon with answering machine for Unix systems,
designed to work under KDE, but can also work without it.
It is available at:
ftp://aurora.resi.insa-lyon.fr/pub/people/dfaure/linux/ktalkd-0.4.1.tgz
ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/Incoming/ktalkd-0.4.1.tgz
Tested on Linux or BSD, with or without KDE.
For more information:
David Faure, david.faure@ifhamy.insa-lyon.fr
angela! 1.7 BETA - graph editor w/ Tcl/Tk interface
9 Feb 1998
angela! stands for:
A ngela is a
N atural
G raph
E ditor with
L ayout
A lgorithms
!
angela! is free of charge (GPL LICENSE)
It is intended to help the user creating simple graphs for courses, technical diagrams or simply demonstrating what graph algorithms can do.
The developpment platform is Linux 2.0.32 with glibc libraries as there are provided with RedHat 5.0. Porting angela! to other systems should not be difficult as it uses these Programs:
The actual version is at this time under the following URL:
http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/~pabst/angela/
For more information:
Oliver Pabst, olpa@itm.uni-sb.de
University of Saarland, Computing Center, Germany.
Tsinvest, version 0.4, stock trading program released.
9 Feb 1998
The C sources to a stock trading program, tsinvest.tar.gz, version
0.4, are available at
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/Incoming/"> or
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/apps/financial/investment/. The
sources are free for non-commercial use.
The program tsinvest is for quantitative financial analysis of equity values. An optimal portfolio investment strategy for multiple equities is computed. The program decides which of all available equities to invest in at any single time, by calculating the instantaneous future value of all equities, and using statistical estimation techniques to estimate the accuracy of the calculated values. Entropic techniques are used throughout. A tutorial is presented in the man(1) pages. A companion equity market simulation program is included.
For more information:
John Conover, conover@netcom.com
Linux Logo 1.04 - shows system info with a linux logo
9 Feb 1998
linux_logo outputs a color ansi version of a penguin, accompanied by
system info gathered from proc.
SUPPORTS Linux, SMP, Atari m68k, and even some non-Linux OS's
USES [instructions included]:
Check out other programs at http://www.glue.umd.edu/~weave/vmwprod
For more information:
Vince Weaver, weave@eng.umd.edu,
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~weave/
xfpovray v1.3 - An X interface for POV-Ray raytracer
16 Feb 1998
I would like to present a new version (1.3) of my xforms
interface to the ray tracer POV-Ray. If you have
ever used POV-Ray from the command line, you might
find this program useful. Check:
http://cspar.uah.edu/~mallozzir/
Source code is available in tgz, bzip2, and rpm formats.
For more information:
Robert S. Mallozzi, mallors@crazyhorse.msfc.nasa.gov
http://cspar.uah.edu/~mallozzir/
University of Alabama
Casio Digital Diary Backup/restore v2.2
17 Feb 1998
Casio Diary
is a package that allows communication to
the CASIO series of hand-held organizers based on a protocol posted
by Knut Radloff, knut@krhh.hanse.de.
Version 2.2 has been tested on Linux2.x , Solaris2.x, sunos4.x. For both the BOSS and ILLUMINATOR models and is released under the GPL.
It is provided as is i.e. jamal is not to be responsible for any damages it causes to you, your CASIO or your environment.
Primary-site:
http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/comm/
100kB casio22.tgz, 1kB casio.lsm
Alternate-site:
ftp://ftp.cyberus.ca/pub/users/hadi/casio/casio22.tgz
For more information:
Jamal Hadi Salim, hadi@cyberus.ca
Ottawa, Canada
Telnet98 - updated telnet source distribution
18 Feb 1998
Telnet98 is a new release of the ubiquitous "telnet" utility, based on
the 1995 MIT telnet distribution from ftp.cray.com and net-dist.mit.edu.
Telnet98 adds some new features to the distribution including
new 'configure' based build and install scripts and
support for additional authentication and encryption types.
Telnet98 can be downloaded from ftp://quasimodo.stanford.edu/pub/telnet/, and US/Canadian users can find instructions there for downloading source with strong (128-bit) encryption enabled.
For more information:
Thomas Wu, tjw@xenon.stanford.edu
Stanford University: Computer Science Department, CA USA
Subject: fetchmail-4.3.7 - mail retriever for POP and IMAP
18 Feb 1998
The 4.3.7 release of fetchmail is now available at the usual locations,
including http://earthspace.net/~esr/fetchmail/. Here are the release
For more information:
Eric S. Raymond, esr@snark.thyrsus.com
Organization: Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs,
http://earthspace.net/~esr
leap 1.1.9 - A free RDBMS
20 Feb 1998
LEAP is a free RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) that has been used as an educational tool in Universities around the world to aid students as they learn database theory. It allows relational algebra expressions to be entered directly into the system, and the results to be queried. It supports relational closure, so complete expressions can be deeply nested. Examples are included from popular database texts, including C.J.Date's "An introduction to database systems".
LEAP is entirely free (it is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License), and is very easy to install. All distributions contain the full 'C' source code. Versions exist for all Unix implementations, and Windoze 95/3.1/NT. Full documentation is included in the distribution, and is available on the web. LEAP is in active development (on a Linux 2.0 slackware system) by the author.
Full details, including links to the main ftp archives, are available on the LEAP web page:
http://www.dogbert.demon.co.uk/leap.html
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/~e0190404/leap.html
Strictly speaking LEAP 1.1.9 is BETA software, but extensive testing has shown no major problems.
For more information:
Richard Leyton, rleyton@acm.org
WMF - WebMailFolder 1.0.1 mail folder to html converter
20 Feb 1998
This tool is for converting mails to html and can be used for
mailinglist archive.
It can be found on: ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/incoming/Linux/ or ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/Incoming/ should be moved to ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/www/converters/
ftp://ftp.lugs.ch/incoming should be moved to ftp://ftp.lugs.ch/pub/linux/mail
For more details see the doc/ChangeLog or
Norbert Kuemin, Swisscom, Norbert.Kuemin@gd2.swissptt.ch
http://www.lugs.ch/LUGS_Members/norbert.kuemin/wmf.html
bash Book Released
27 Feb 1998
New Edition of the "Definitive Guide to bash" released--O'Reilly's
Learning the bash Shell By Cameron Newham & Bill Rosenblatt
now covers Version 2.0.
This second edition covers all of the features of bash Version 2.0,
while still applying to bash Version 1.x. New features include
one-dimensional arrays, parameter expansion, and more pattern-matching
operations. In addition, bash 2.0 is POSIX.2 conformant. This updated
edition covers new commands, security improvements, additions to
ReadLine, improved configuration and installation, and an additional
programming aid, the bash shell debugger.
For more information:
O'Reilly & Associates, info@ora.com,
http://www.oreilly.com/
The Answer Guy
Can't Telnet to Red Hat 5.0 Server
From: Brad Lackey, lackeyb@holly.colostate.edu
I am trying to set up a LINUX web server for Colorado State =
University - CIS Dept. I have Red Hat 5.0 Installed with user accounts =
set up but I cannot telnet to the machine. I get the login prompt, but =
none of the user accounts that I have created seem to work, including =
root. they all give me "Login incorrect". I was wondering how to fix =
this validation problem...
Thanks, Brad
First I'll have to assume that you installed RH5 on
a fresh x86 machine with no previous OS, and that you've
just installed the package from a CD and have yet to
apply any upgrades or patches to it.
If that's the case -- fire up the old browser and go to Red Hat's "Errata" pages at:
http://www.redhat.com/support/docs/rhl/rh50-errata-general.html
There are about 30 upgrade packages there -- including fixes for the utils package (fixes 'vipw' command), and glibc (the core c libraries which most of your other programs depend upon through the magic of shared libraries).
I don't see a specific entry for the problem that you're describing -- and I haven't upgraded any systems to RH5 yet -- so I don't know if this problem is generic.
A quick search of Yahoo!/Alta Vista and DejaNews doesn't show a match to exactly this problem either -- but it does show that telnet to RH5 boxes is working for many people. (Many of the problems reported have to do with long delays, caused by the "double-reverse lookup" that TCP Wrappers uses to prevent most varieties of spoofing). So, given that the search string "+red +hat +5 +telnet +login" didn't give us an easy answer we'll have to do some troubleshooting.
Let's start with some questions:
Does your syslog (/var/log/messages or /var/log/security) tell you anything?
Have you run pw5conv to enable shadow passwords?
If you run 'vipw' ('vi' the /etc/passwd file) do the password hashes appear there?
Have you installed a different PAM (pluggable authentication modules) or modified its configuration (any of the files under /etc/pam.d/)?
I didn't see a new PAM RPM up at the site listed above -- though things like the initscripts package and the glibc package might help.
If these questions don't help you find the problem and resolve it I'd suggest that you grab a Red Hat 4.2 or a S.u.S.E., Debian or other distribution and install that. If you use Red Hat 4.2 you'll want to fetch all the upgrades for that -- and you might be able to install specific RH5 rpms (including the glibc which *should* co-exist cleanly with the libc 5.x that most (almost all) Linux distributions prior to RH5 rely on).
As a support volunteer I find Red Hat's decision to push the release of "Hurricane" out the door at the end of last year to be abominable. I suggested to them that they do a 4.5 first -- and wait until about March of this year for a 5.0 (hoping that glibc would be better understood, that PAM would move much closer to 1.0, and that the 2.2 kernel *might* ship by then).*
*** Please note: I don't have any "inside" hints as to when any of these event will occur. I don't know how long it will take to go from the 2.1.8x kernels through the inevitable 2.1.99.x flurry and get to 2.2. I read the kernel mailing list and cross my fingers like everyone else. Obviously Red Hat Inc (the company) and Caldera, and Yggdrasil, and many other organizations and individuals can help. If I were a programmer I might be able to help more.
However, I was sure that 5.0 was too soon -- and the 34 Mb of upgrades and patches that were available as of last November needed to be released on CD to save the 'net a bunch of bandwidth. (I occasionally cut these and similar new stuff onto CD's using my ISDN line and my CD-R and give them away. I'm hoping to give one or two away at tonight's SVLUG (Silicon Valley Linux User's Group) meeting where we'll be hearing from Bruce Perens of the Debian project, and Eris S. Raymond, whose paper on the "Crystal Cathedral" was cited as a key part of Netscape's decision to release their sources)).
I'd like to see Red Hat adopt a subscription model, where I can get monthly update of their "updates" and "contrib" mirrors for about $10/month. (I suppose it doesn't *have* to be Red Hat to do this, anyone with a CD-R and a reasonable trickle feed from the 'net could do it. Though the economies of scale don't work until we get a few hundred subscribers).
Heck, if there's enough interest I'll do it.
In any event, I hope one of these methods works.
At the risk of starting serious flame wars and raising questions about my "loyalty to the cause" (which cause we're not sure) I'd also suggest that you look at the OpenBSD (and FreeBSD and NetBSD) distributions if you don't have a specific reason for picking Linux for this application.
Linux is the most popular of the free Unix' -- but it's not the only one -- and it's not necessarily the best for all applications. OpenBSD, in particular, seems to be very well suited to multi-user "student use" and "computer lab" use. This is because Theo de Raadt and his team have found and corrected a large number of buffer overflows and other vulnerabilities in the sources for FreeBSD and NetBSD (and probably in the sources of many Linux utilities as well).
Obviously this depends quite a bit on your intended applications. However, if I was setting up a general use shell account system for a school lab, an ISP, or a USENIX "terminal room" I'd probably suggest OpenBSD.
For personal workstations I think Linux holds the edge in performance and applications availability.
--Jim
Use the Source, Luke!
From: SuatChoo Lua, suatchoo@yahoo.com
Here there something that maybe you can answer me.
From where i can get the information about Linux
File system,memory managemant,and scheduling algorithm.
Thank you!
coco
In many ways I'm not the best person to answer this
question. Remember that I am not a coder -- and I haven't
contributed any programming to the Linux kernel (which I'm
sure we all appreciate). However, I've read a bit of it
-- and will offer some opinions.
If you want deep information about -- technical details -- about Linux filesystem, memory management, and scheduling internals than the obvious thing to do is to read the sources.
/usr/src/linux/kernel/sched.c is about 1700 lines long (about 80 pages). There are about 30 .c files under /usr/src/linux/fs (the filesystems directory) -- and about 160 .c files under that whole tree. Linux supports many different filesystems -- although the one that is considered to be "native" to Linux is the ext2fs.
A variant of this filesystem has been adopted by the FSF for their ongoing HURD project (which is a microkernel OS for which rms and the Free Software Foundation developed gcc, GNU emacs, and most of the applications and utilities that make Linux possible).
The code for ext2fs is about 5000 lines. Probably the simplest filesystem that ships with Linux is the Minix compatible one. Minix is a simple microkernel operating system written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum for inclusion with (and publication in) his text book on "Operating Systems: Design and Implmentation." That book is one of the seminal works on the topic -- and has probably been studied by every major contributor to Linux.
The memory management code is in /usr/src/linux/mm. It probably shows off the greatest innovations in the Linux kernel. The aggressive strategies here allow a Linux kernel to operate within a pretty modest footprint despite the "freeping creaturism" that some of its detractors lament.
Where to begin:
I hope you find all those interesting and informative.
--Jim
'ifconfig' to Troubleshoot Dropped Ethernet Packets? Uh-Unhg!
From: Chris Oliphant, Chris.Oliphant@nextel.com
I have a HP Vectra XM2 4/100i computer with an onboard PCnet/32 ethernet chip running Red Hat Linux 4.0, kernal version 2.0.18. I currently am having problems communicating over the ethernet connection for the last three days. I want to use IFCONFIG to troubleshooting the problem, but don't understand how to use the command's output. My problems are excessive receive packets being dropped and excessive transmit errors. I am able to ping the onboard chip, and the port connect is good with other systems connected to it. But when I connect my Linux system to the port, I have problems. Please advise. Thanks for any assistance you may provide. --Chris Oliphant
'ifconfig' is the "interface configuration" utility. It
isn't a troubleshooting tool. I'd usually 'ping', 'tcpdump'
and 'netcat'* or 'kermit'* for troubleshooting this sort of
problem.
"for the last three days"? What happened then or before then? Did the link work fine before then? Did you upgrade your kernel? Change drivers? Add a new video card? Did this kernel/driver/module ever work acceptably with this ethernet card? With this system's mixture of other components? With a similar (so-called "identical") system?Excessive errors on an ethernet line suggests the following sorts of problems:
As an example if you put a few xterminals or diskless workstation on a network and they fetch all of their X resources, binaries and libraries over the wire (rather than tftp to a local RAM disk for example) then you can flood an unswitched ethernet segment in no time.
It is possible that some ether card on your segment is broken and "chattering" (generating spurious signals which corrupt the data frames (network layer "packets") from other cards. This is likely to show symptoms across the entire segment (all the machines will be affected). It is also possible that any particular card is damaged. It is also possible for the problem to be in a particular wire (are you using 10BaseT, coax/thin net, or (heaven forbid!) thicknet?), or even a particular port on one of your hubs (repeater, concentrator, whatever the "term du jour" for that thingie-me-bob is). It could be as simple as "someone kinked the wire by running it over with their chair wheel."
A good way to test for this is to get an ethernet "cross over" cable (sort of a "null modem" for 10BaseT) and plug it between the problem system and a known good one. This bypasses all the intervening components to help isolate the problem.
(Basic troubleshooting 101: identify all components, eliminate as many as possible for testing, continue simplifying the configuration -- and possibly the tests -- until something works, re-add components back until failure. That isolates the problem.)
Naturally you'll also want to try a 2.0.33 or 2.0.34 kernel to see if that helps.
--Jim
Cthugha
From: kim angel, angelk@cadvision.com
Could you please tell me when Cthungha will be available for Win95?
Thanks!
Kim Angel
Sorry. Can't be much help there.
I presume you mean Cthugha (no 'n') which would be
the audio/video amusement (turn your $3K multi-media
system into a $40 "discoteque" light).
Hmm....I detect a tad of dissatisfaction with the product!
I've never run it. I have a lack of interest in the
class of software. I had to look it up in the LSM
(software map) to remember what it was -- since I
mis-remembered it as a "game").
I have no idea if or when it would be available for Win '95 -- or even why anyone would port it. However, I'd contact the author/maintainer (should find his/her/their name(s) in the man pages or docs).
What I am seeking is a program that is capable of applying digitized
animation choreographed to audio sequences. Could you help me with
this?
I'm the "Linux Answer Guy" (or, to be more specific and
a little less pretentious, the "Linux Gazette Answer Guy").
It appears that Cthugha *is* just what you want -- for Linux. I'm not the "Windows '95 Answer Guy." A role which I probably would be wholly inadequate at since I don't run it on any of my systems and I don't like what little of it I've had to run.
Despite this I can offer you a pretty simple piece of advice:
Ask the author.Another possibility is that you could try the port yourself. I'm not sure what the licensing of Cthugha and its sources is -- but it's probably GPL. That license lets you port it to any OS or platform you like -- or pay anyone else to perform the port to your specs.
If you should find that the port to native Windows API's is too difficult you could try DESQview/X (which offers X Windows API's over DOS) or you could try OpenNT (from Softway Systems at www.softway.com). OpenNT offers reasonably complete Unix API's -- and some X Windows if I heard correctly -- and runs under NT. I have also heard of several developers tools that purport to compile Unix/X Windows code into native MS Windows API's. However I don't have any experience with them, nor any personal interest in them.
-- Jim
xdm Login doesn't!
From: Cesar Augusto Kant Grossmann,
ckant@fazenda.gov.
I run my Linux Box in the "graphics mode" (changing inittab accordling) = bu I can't login as normal user. When I try to login as normal user, the = screen flickers like a logout in the X, and the login screen comes back.
This is also referred to as "using 'xdm'" (X Display Manager)
which provides a GUI login to X.
You don't mention what sort of system you have (which distribution what architecture/platform, what packages you've installed or updated, etc). You also don't mention whether you can login via a text mode console (VC/VT) or via telnet or a serial line.
If you can, the problem is likely to be a mismatch between your 'xdm' binary and the authentication model/settings that you have for your other 'login' modes.
This is one area where the FreeBSD crowd definitely had a better model. Under Linux you can use the old-fashioned (traditional -- and insecure) authentication mode where the hashes of your passwords are stored in the /etc/passwd. Alternatively you can install or enable some variation of the "shadow" suite. This removes the password hashes from the /etc/passwd file and stores them in a different file -- one which is only accessible to privileged (SUID) programs -- and not readable by normal users.
The purpose of all that is to make the system more resistant to dictionary and cryptanalytic (brute force or otherwise) attacks. In other words using the 'shadow' options is more secure than allowing normal users to just snarf the hashes up, and copy them to a machine running 'crack'.
The problem is that there are many programs that authenticate users under Unix/Linux. In addition to login there's xdm, ftpd, xlock, vlock, screen's lock feature, popd, imapd, the passwd command etc. In FreeBSD they modified the libraries -- and ensured that all the programs were linked against the same shared library. This hides the details -- because the library calls that "getpwent()" (get password file entries) automatigically merge the passwd hash from the shadow file (called /etc/pwdb.master? or somethine like that -- in FreeBSD) if that file exists and is readable.
Thus unprivileged files on a shadow enabled get pw entries with an "obscured" password field (usually just a "x") while privileged (SUID) program get a merged one that's suitable for comparison to a properly crypted/hashed password as provided by an alleged user.
The other advantage to the FreeBSD method is that changing the hashing algorithm (from the traditional 56-bit DES on a string of zeros -- to a MD5 sum) is relatively easy -- only has to be supported in one place (the shared libraries) and doesn't require that all the other programs be changed. (Another feature of the FreeBSD password/account management libraries is that they support dbm hashes of the account names -- meaning that *huge* lists of accounts are possible without suffering a "linear" increase in login/authentication response times)
For now Linux has three different, and partially incompatible account/authentication schemes:
Although Red Hat has shipped their last 2 or three releases with PAM -- it isn't quite all there yet. The most recent version of PAM is about 0.63 (beta). However -- if you installed a recent Red Hat Linux (4.2 or 5.0 with patches) you should be able to use its xdm and all of their stock utils without trouble.
If you compiled your own 'xdm' or fetched it from somewhere you should consider recompiling it -- but looking for options that relate to "shadow" support.
What seems to happen? Where I can find more informations about these? A
FAQ or something like...
I'd start by reading the Shadow HOWTO. I'd also suggest a
web search on PAM (pluggable authentication modules):
Here's some URL's I have for them:
Sorry for my bad English, but I think it's better than your
Portuguese...
Undoubtedly your English is better than my Portugese --
or even my French (I've never studied the former and only
had a couple of high school years of the latter).
--Jim
Here's this month's account of the triumphs, trials and tribulations that I caused myself or encountered since the last time, and a couple tips that may come in handy and increase your understanding of linux.
Like I said, I'm not familiar with all of screen's features, but to use it, basically you type:
screen prognameand your screen session is started in VT0. To add more VTs you can use:
Ctrl-a cand to change from one screen to another:
Ctrl-a 0-9and you can change from screen to screen, depending on how many you have opened. Note that the screens are numbered 0-9 rather than 1-10, the only clumsy feature of this program, IMHO.
tabit will complete the filename so you can get on with your life and file manipulation.Play with this feature, if you haven't typed enough of the name to be unique, it will sit and stare at you, try another character or two.Likewise, if you specified the wrong directory,you'll get nada.
..and its close relative
.The details for a quick cd areas follows: as you may be already aware, the dots represent your current directory(single dot) and parent directory (double dot).By CDing to
..you will be magically transported to the parent directory, ie from /usr/bin to /usr.You can use:
cd -to return to the previous directory, and to go up two or more levels:
../../and so onwill work. The single dot is not as useful in terms of cd, but it does have its use. If you are in a directory that's not in your path, or dont have
.in your path statement, you must give a path to run an executable file. This is easily accomplished by typing:
./execunamewhich will give the relative pathname, allowing it to be found and run. There are a few good reasons why using the single dot in your path statement isn't a good idea, suffice to say, if you'd like more info on that subject, you should read up on system security.
ls -aFwhen you actually meant to type
diror
cpwhen what you wanted was
copyyou can create batch files(like shell scripts) named for your favorite unix commands, using your favorite switches. Not as cool as dosemu or just plain staying in Linux, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
If you have a subject that you would like to see covered or have any corrections, comments or flames let me know, and I'll look into the matter. troll@net-link.net
See you next month!
This column is devoted to making the best use of Emacs, text editor extraordinaire. Each issue I plan to present an Emacs extension which can improve your productivity, make the sun shine more brightly and the grass greener.
You've probably heard the hype about ``Internet-ready'' operating systems where you can access the Internet with a click of your mouse. Well, users of the customizable Emacs user interface have had the Net only a keypress away since as early as 1989!
Emacs has built-in networking capability, which it uses for connecting to news or SMTP servers and for web browsing. To illustrate its use, here is a bit of code which opens a TCP connection to port 13 of your local machine to request the current time :
;; usage: M-x display-date
(defun display-date ()
(interactive)
(let ((stream (open-network-stream "DAYTIME" nil "localhost" "daytime")))
(set-process-filter stream 'my-process-filter))
(defun my-process-filter (proc string)