Just thought the TAG group would appreciate this story.
I wrote a small script to handle scanning of all my financial documents into
my computer. It's real simple and easy to use. Well, I have moved since I
used it, about a year ago. So, now with tax time coming, I decided it was
time to start scannnig in all my financial papers and shredding the files I
do not need to keep. Plus, I can burn them to cd and have a backup for the
safety deposit box.
Well...
I did real well, when I moved last year. I didn't lose one thing. I really
mean it. I've been in the house and I haven't missplaced anything. Until last
weekend. I couldn't find that #@#%#! script anywhere. I searched all my
servers, and backup CDs. I was pretty ticked and about half way through
rewriting it, when I remembered something.
I wrote an email talking about it to my local LUG a couple years ago. After
digging in my mail for a while I found a reference that said, and I quote,
Expect some articles from me. I have many other little programs I've written
over the years. I need to write up nice documentation for them all and post
them for the gazette. I would hate to lose them too.
[Rick]
Richard, you might perhaps appreciate a quotation from the Penguinus Maximus:
"Real men don't use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server
and let the rest of the world make copies." - Linus Torvalds
Immortalize those cool scripts of yours too, send them in to LinuxGazette as either articles or nice little tips.
-- Heather
Reading Linux Gazette is like a treasure hunt, you never know what you'll
find. Do you mean for this to be published?
http://linuxgazette.net/issue99/lg_mail.html
Did you get cracked by a polite cracker?
A prankster on your staff?
I almost took that entry out because it seemed the first part had been
lost, but I assumed Thomas or Heather had wanted it in so I left it.
I don't remember when I wrote the original or whether I cc'd it to TAG.
-- Mike
Well, it went right over my head. Sorry! It is a funny sig, I may have to
emulate it in some fashion, like OMG WTF ROFFLE lol HAHAHAA or somesuch.
Oh, *that!* It was just an extremely cute .sig that was in the email (I
immediately stole a copy for my quote file.
-- Ben
The original sender really had that in his sig. Thomas and I normally
strip signature blocks, but especially amusing ones that
make Linux just a little more fun - sometimes I let 'em live :D
-- Heather
[Rick]
I'm pretty sure she's referring to the tongue-in-cheek 31337-speak down
at the bottom of Dave Bechtel's letter. Unless the Cookie Monster,
Oscar, Elmo, Snuffleupagus, and the Elite Sesame Street Crew have
suddenly turned malevolent, nobody has much to fear (or is that PH33R?).
Oh, cuteness in .sigs is a well-established meme. We have nothing to
PH33R but PH33R itself.
Welcome to the influence of the bunnies! With ky00t, we will
rule the world!
-- Ben
[LG 98] 2c Tips: #4
Sat, 31 Jan 2004 05:59:02 +0000 (GMT)
Thomas Adam (The LG Weekend Mechanic)
Question by Robin Chhetri (robinchhetri from fastmail.fm)
Robin Chhetri wrote:
Thanks a lot for your answer.I will add here that I send this questions
months ago(I don't remember the exact date) and I had figured out the
solution to the problem too a long time back.
That's OK. The particular tip was interesting, so we published it
nonetheless.
But I am indebted at least for your reply.
Not at all. You're quite welcome.
If you don't mind could you tell me the link in which this question was
published.
I'm pleased to say that Thomas Adam, our Weekend Mechanic, is feeling
well again, and we hope you enjoy the article he has in this month's
issue. Warm thanks to everyone who thought kindly of him while he was
recovering.
This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/
Some of you will have expressed questions like: "When will XYZ be in
stable" or "is there a backport for such and such". You can in fact
backport packages yourself. For such cases, the following procedure works:
(note: I maintain a number of backported debs, and this routine works)...
1. Add a deb-src line for sid to your sources.list. Typically:
deb-src http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main
(where: <package> refers to the package name in question). What this will
do is install the build dependencies for the given package, and then will
build the package.
When I teach a class, I often need to push one or more files to my
students' systems. Previously, I would write a "for-do-done" loop and
use "scp" to get the files across, laboriously logging in and exiting
out of each system every time I wanted to do a transfer - painfully
clunky.
Then I did some searching on the Net and found "sshtool" by "noconflic".
Written in Expect, it allows multiple host logins and copying. However,
it did not have a "no password" mode (i.e., logging in when
".ssh/authorized_keys" contains your key) and read the list of hosts
from a list defined within the program. I've modified it to read an
external file called "pushlist" and added a "no password" mode; this
last, of course, requires that you first push a "~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
to the host list.
First, create your "pushlist", possibly from an "/etc/hosts" on one of
the local machines. It should contain all your target hosts, one line
per host. Next, create your ".ssh/authorized_keys" in the directory
where you keep "sshtool" by copying your public keys into it:
I can also execute a command on all the systems via the "-U" option.
Note: I'm not an Expect programmer; otherwise, "sshtool" would accept a
"local:remote" syntax so files wouldn't need to be in identical
locations. It would also allow you to specify per-host usernames in the
push list (not an option I need, but something to make it more
flexible.) Anyone adding these features - please send me a copy.
Based on something I saw on the "swsusp" list, I've done a bit of
experimentation with "lzf" compression. It's not any more effective,
size-wise, than some of the common compression utilities - in fact, it's
less so in many cases. What it is, however, is fast.
For applications where speed matters more than size, "lzf" is clearly a
win. For size where speed is not an issue, it's "rar" (which matches the
results of my previous, much broader testing with many file types and
scenarios.)
I have been compiling and recompiling the 2.6.1 and 2.6.2 kernels the past
three days trying to find a configuration that will work for me. I have
performed many kernel compiles in the past and never had this problem
occur on my machine which is currently running 2.4.24.
This is the error I get when I boot into the 2.6.1 or 2 kernel:
VFS: Cannot open root device "302" or hda2
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on hda2
[Thomas]
Believe it or not I had this and it was related to a ramdisk issue. Try
adding:
append="ramdisk_size=5120"
to /etc/lilo.conf
and then:
/sbin/lilo -v
Reboot and pray.
Now I have done some searching around google and saw that other people
have had this problem. I have implemented a number of suggestions they
were given but nothing has been fruitful. This is what I have tried:
Verified the following are compiled in (which they are):
CONFIG_IDE=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDISK=y (I have tried both IDE and IDEDISK separately
also)
CONFIG_EXT2_FS=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS=y
I have removed support for Advanced Partitions.
Should have no effect -- I support advanced partitions all the time in
my kernels so I can mount other-OS drives in my lab station.
-- Heather
I have toggled between DEVFS support (initially I said no, but enabling
does not seem to make a difference anyway).
By the time devfs really causes pain you're in userland already - you
didn't get that far. Didn't I hear a rumor they're deprecating it?
-- Heather
I verified my settings in /etc/lilo.conf were correct. I even tried
passing the root=/dev/hda2 parameter to the kernel at boot.
Nothing has worked.
I have tried to see if there are any error messages during the boot but
where I would suspect there being an error message, it scrolls by way too
fast. Nothing gets logged at this point either.
As I said, I have been running 2.4.24 for a bit now having patched that
from 2.4.9 along the way. My distro is slackware-current which reports to
have support for the 2.6.x series kernels.
Any further suggestions would be much obliged.
Thanks for your time.
[dann]
I fell pray to the post to TAG curse again, which usually has me finding
the answer within a few hours of emailing TAG.
I had replaced a failing drive about 6 months back with a used drive I
picked up along the way. This drive had EZ-Bios installed in the boot
sector. Initially I was concerned with this but when I had no problems
with running linux after I transferred over my partitions, I put it out of
mind a bit too far.
I compiled a 2.6.2 kernel enabling everything possible under the IDE
device drivers into the kernel. This slowed down the boot process enough
for me to see this line:
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0 p1[EZD]
Sure enough, I knew EZBios was going to come back and bite me one day. I
guess EZBios was somehow preventing the kernel from seeing the drive
properly.
After removing EZBios the 2.6.2 kernel booted without a complaint.
Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate your time and effort.
[Ben]
Surely that would be "The TAG blessing" rather than "curse", Dann?
All
you do is write to TAG and shortly thereafter get your answer. What
could be better?
That is true. Perhaps I should take advantage of that blessing more often
and post sooner. Maybe the luck will work the other way. Instead of
three days of trial and error, post on day one and the answer will appear.
[Ben]
(Yes, we managed to enlist the Universe and The Gods of Fate and Time in
helping us. We thought the negotiations would be tough, but, you know,
Gods are intelligent beings and therefore use Linux. It was a shoe-in.)
Well heap some more offerings on the pyre. I'm going in for another round
of video capture and editing soon!
Live Linux CDs
Wed, 18 Feb 2004 19:45:58 +0000 (GMT)
Thomas Adam, Raj Shekhar, Ben Okopnik (The LG Answer Gang)
Hi all,
Someone on my LUG found a really useful site[1] that has a list of all the
Live Linux CDs that are available. Not just Knoppix you know!
[Raj]
A lot of effort is going to create the regional language flavor of
Linux. Linux + Live CDs has provided a fertile ground for
internalization of software and demoing the capabilities of Linux to the
people.
For example, one of my friends demoed a Bengali version of Knoppix
(Ankur Bangla Linux) in the LinuxAsia 2004 held in Delhi, India. It was
a great hit. People watched open mouthed as he typed away happily on
gedit to produce a small Bengali poem.
[Ben]
Oh, excellent! This is sorta the "dark area" of computers - generally
solved by "simply" learning English. Not that I mind the world moving
toward a common language, but the exclusion field and the entry
requirements are keeping the computer culture very small compared to
what it could be.
I'm really looking forward to the day when someone invents an input
method that is multilingual, portable, and at least as fast as a
keyboard (they'll be billionaires overnight.) I've heard of various
"fist keyboards" like the Twiddler and OrbiTouch, but... we're not quite
there yet.
script for finding ssh-agent at login
Mon, 2 Feb 2004 14:02:38 +0100
Karl-Heinz Herrmann, Ramon van Alteren (The LG Answer Gang)
Hi,
I ran into an annoying problem with ssh-agents. If you don't start one
on the very first login screen from which you start X you can't access
the agent from any xterm started from the window-manager. Starting new
ones is no good idea if one is already running. This script will look
for a running ssh-agent and set the environment variables so it can be
contacted. If none is running it will start one. As on ssh-login with
enabled "AGENT Forwarding" the environment variables will be set
and the remote ssh-agent (where you are connecting from) one will be
used.
unfortunately there has been a change in "interface" of "ssh-add -l" --
before it was giving exit code 0 for "agent is there, with or without
keys" and 1 for "no agent".
Now it's finegrained to: 0 for "agent with keys" , 1 for "agent without
keys" and 2 for "no agent".
of course you have to "source" the script to set the local environment
variables:
source sshsearch.sh
or
. sshsearch.sh
to make it automatic call it from .profile (or .bashrc).
Ben (or whoever feels its to clunky): feel free to make it into a
one-liner
K.-H.
[Ramon]
I'm familiar with the problem and found a small tool to deal with it.
It was written by Daniel Robbins.
Here's the relevant part of the manpage:
...............
NAME
keychain - a program designed to keep ssh-agent processes alive across
multiple logins.
DESCRIPTION
Keychain is an OpenSSH key manager, typically run from ~/.bash_profile.
When run, it will make sure ssh-agent is running; if not, it will start
ssh-agent. It will redirect ssh-agent's output to
~/.keychain/[hostname]-sh, so that cron jobs that need to use ssh-
agent keys can simply source this file and make the necessary passwordless ssh
connections. In addition, when keychain runs, it will check with ssh-agent
and make sure that the ssh RSA/DSA keys that you specified on the keychain
command line have actually been added to ssh-agent. If not, you are prompted
for the appropriate passphrases so that they can be added by keychain.
...............
Although it creates a security risk, (don't leave any consoles open
unattended, all your keys are cached) I've found it extremely pleasant to
work with.
I am using RH8 linux and successfully installed xine for video play.
Video cds(.dat format) are functioning well with xine. But I cannot
play the video files (in .dat format) copied to hard disk.
Hi,
Rename the files from .dat to .mpg or .mpeg. Works for me.
Regards,
Aditya Godbole.
Even the laws of nature cannot produce the right results unless
the initial conditions are entered correctly.
This is a cool tip. For people who are too lazy to do all the work
(like me) they can download a program called the Ultimate Boot CD which
allows you to run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives.
On RedHat/Fedora, if only the subnet your computer is part of needs to
be accessed over the LAN card, I believe this simple trick will work. If
not, it is easy to undo.
On set up of the network, simply do not enter an IP for the gateway. If
this is already configured then shut down your network
(/etc/rc.d/init/.d/network stop) and remove the "GATEWAY" line from
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. Restart your network and the
"route" command should show no default gateway, but also a route via
eth0 to the subnet your computer is on. Something like :
192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
kppp should then happily create a default route to ppp0 when executed.
Ron H.
No need to shut it down, just do:
route del default gw <IP_ADDR>
You'll need to be root to do it.
-- Thomas Adam
Sometimes it's not the website
Fri, 5 Dec 2003 10:31:03 -0800
Mike Orr (Linux Gazette Editor)
Question by Raj Shekhar (rajshekhar3007 from yahoo.co.in)
I'm still not seeing it there. The entries are alphabetical and go
from "Firebird Modern" directly to "Lush", and I can't find
"LittleFirebird" on the page anywhere.
after some poking around...
-- Heather
This is really strange. I checked again and I can see LittleFirebird
theme. I asked other people to check it and they could not find it
either.
No idea why this is happening. I am on broadband connection. My ISP
(Sify broadband) has put a LAN in the neighbourhood and we connect
through a proxy server. Do you think this could be an issue with the
cache ? (The other people I asked to check were not part of the ISP's
LAN)
[Mike]
Either your ISP is not updating the page properly, or your browser
isn't. I assume you've done shift-reload, restarted the browser, or
tried a different browser. Sometimes the browser cache can be subtle
and stubborn, although I've had less problems with that since I stopped
using Netscape 4. If your ISP has a malfunctioning proxy server, I
guess there's nothing you can do except tell them to fix it.
Securing a dial in?
Fri, 13 Jun 2003 10:45:13 -0400
John Karns (The LG Answer Gang)
Question by George Morgan (George_Morgan from sra.com)
Hello answer guy,
I need to be able to secure an external modem that has been connect to a
Solaris box to protect against unauthorized calls.. What I mean is that I
want to be able to allow people to connect to the box based purely on the
phone number they are calling from. Is there a way on the modem to only
allow certain calls to go through while rejecting all other calls?
Thanks,
George
[John Karns]
See the "mgetty" open source pkg (http://www.google.com/linux for it).
It offers this capability, provided that your modem line has caller id.
The pkg includes pretty good documentation as well as good example cfg
files.
Thought Linux Gazette might like this one. A project called Captive
has taken a wine like approach and combined some features from
ReactOS.... Microsoft Windows ntfs.sys driver and actually getting full
r/w this way.
In response to 2 Cent Tip #14 in issue 64 (http://linuxgazette.net/issue64/lg_tips64.html#tips/14) which itself claims to refer back to February 2000 (issue 50). Must be a y2k bug, though, because I couldn't find the more ancient reference myself. The fact is, this hasn't changed any, the tip is just as valid as ever, and more useful now that more people might use multiple ethernet cards to run their house LANs. Enjoy.
-- Heather
After reading your post I found this. I figured it would help someone.
Until recently we had a remote machine doing a nightly FTP-job over anonymous FTP to a local machine. Both machines have ssh2 installed, so we started using sftp instead. Here's how we did it:
On local machine:
create a normal user sftp
mkdir /home/sftp/.ssh/
On remote machine:
su <user-who's-doing-the-nightly-jobs>
ssh-keygen -t dsa
give ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub to admin of local machine
On local machine:
save contents of retrieved id_dsa.pub into /home/sftp/.ssh/authorized_keys
Last night I left my zinf (streaming audio) player running. I felt
bad because doing so wasted bandwidth playing music to a muted
amplifier in an empty room. Here is my bash solution, a la
run-mozilla.sh
[allan@array14 workarea]$ cat ~/bin/run-zinf.sh
#!/bin/sh
# June 25, 2003
# Kills zinf after HR_LIMIT
AUDIO_STREAMER="/opt/bin/zinf"
HR_LIMIT=8
$AUDIO_STREAMER $@ &
echo "killall ${AUDIO_STREAMER}"| at now +${HR_LIMIT} hours
[allan@array14 workarea]$
As a general note, just want to remind folks ... do send in your answers
and tips of all sorts! In case you're wondering to where -- that's
tag@lists.linuxgazette.net. They don't always get published in the month we
receive them, but we do collect them and mix them up a bit. And
sometimes we find strays -- this one had been sent to the editors, not
to the normal tips-and-tag mailbox.
-- Heather
I have a NEC MultiSync 77F monitor and a Matrox Millenium II video card. When
running the SuSE configuration program Sax, X configuration occurs sort of
automatically.
All parameters were correct except the modelines associated with my monitor.
I say this because the horizontal centering was incorrect when running X.
I tried modelines generated via the XFree 3.3.6 version of xf86config, and
incorporated the modelines generated from that tool. Those modelines were
proper and usable for XFree86 4.3.0.
As I read on, I saw that X is smart enough to figure out the appropriate
timing without modelines. Thus, I deleted all of the generated modelines, and
now the Modes section looks like this.
Section "Modes"
Identifier "Modes[0]"
EndSection
The file that I edited is:
/etc/X11/XF86Config
I hope that this helps other SuSE 8.2 users.
[Heather]
The flip side of this clue is just as important; if you're on a more
modern setup that doesn't generate modelines because the internally
generated ones will do, but you don't like them and feel they can be
improved, then all the old tuning tricks will still work, as will
modelines found on the net that match your monitor more perfectly.
This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/
The Answer Gang
Linux Gazette 100: The Answer Gang (TWDT)The Answer Gang 100:
...making Linux just a little more fun!
The Answer Gang By Jim Dennis, Ben Okopnik, Dan Wilder, Breen, Chris, and...
(meet the Gang) ...
the Editors of Linux Gazette...
and You!
We have guidelines for asking and answering questions. Linux questions only, please.
We make no guarantees about answers, but you can be anonymous on request. See also: The Answer Gang's
Knowledge Base
and the LGSearch Engine
Greetings, folks, and welcome to the world of The Answer Gang. It's
been a fine time getting up to speed in our new digs, but now I'm
indulging in some spring cleaning.
Taking a look at my hard disk I'm way overdue, too. Let me see...
multiple chroot environments being used as development areas, some of
which distros aren't even supported by their own vendors anymore.
Rescue a few bits of actual code trees, then tarball these things off to
a CD, Poof! Hey, that's not too bad. What else can I toast here?
(BTW, has the state of the art in DVD burning gotten anywhere close to
"just buy one at the computer store and Linux will deal with it" quite
yet? I've been too lazy to check.) Some stray PDFs while I was
planning my kitchen remodel... from years ago. I haven't even started
thinking about cycling off backup tarballs yet.
Then there's mail cleanup. I've got quite an email humor collection. There
ought to be lots of dupes in that, but it'll be amusing reading all
through the summer to clear my way past it all, deleting attached pics
that aren't funny, and making a little gallery of ones that are. (There
are oodles of gallery software available on Freshmeat, but I probably
won't make it public; my bandwidth isn't up to that.) While not a
direct relation to how much disk space I'm eating, some serious antispam
principles could at least do spring cleaning on my available time.
Jim's been thinking of instituting greylisting on our mail server.
Now I have to note the term is a mite overloaded. I mean, we've been
talking about whitelists (our good friends) and blacklists (mail never to
be seen again, whether you use the RBL/MAPS servers and their kindred or
not) but grey, what's that? The fact is that just seeing your friend's
raw address isn't nearly enough; viruses steal names out of address
books freely to spoof headers. Clued people like me can add header
checks to spot they are really coming from their expected route or mail
agent ... but those can change and when they do, your friends will be
out of contact. Ouch. Also, mailing lists that are very open (hmm, do
I know any of those? *wink*) are often targeted by spammers who
hope their mail will hit many at once, while their traces are hidden by
standard list-header mangling. The fact is that even the good guys need
a little checking, and anyone who needs to receive mail from
completely unknown people has to do something serious. Seperating off
how much checking to really do reduces CPU load for some cases, but that
is where it gets a bit greyer. There's ASK and TMDA for making new folk
at least reply before you'll talk to them. This greylisting practice is
pleasantly sneaky, doing something similar but at the transport layer.
Systems run by real people sending real messages really have to have
mechanisms for trying again if a server's too busy, a little overloaded,
maybe drop back and visit the secondary MX. But spammers don't have
time to waste on all that - they've umpty squadzillions other suckers
to mail. So greylisting responds with a temporary error condition, but
logs who came by; at some vaguely random later point but within popular
and reasonable human timeouts it will accept the mail from that server
knowing it's a repeat call... and the chances that it's someone utterly
normal increase drastically. And even the spammers who follow normal
protocol will be stuck hosting their own stupid mail during the delay,
costing them resources instead of legitimate ISPs. The downside
is not really getting instantaneous notes from your correspondents,
but I'm sure this can be tuned a bit.
Of course, you could always just take the classic techie's option - get
a bigger hard disk. With all that I'm up to in my development and
experimenting, it looks like I'll have to do that. Hah. Watch me
complain, twist my arm
Now I should really figure out about backing up this stuff in a way that
would be easy to restore if I have a problem... um, on something that
doesn't take more space than the original does. Otherwise trying to
clean up the house in general will have us wondering where to put all
this. Gosh, laptop drives are getting better capacities these days.
Much easier than dealing with tapes and discs, a mere 4G per disc
disappears pretty quickly nowadays, worse if you're sticking with CDs.
I'm about to attend a music convention; my crew's running an Internet
Lounge at Consonance. So all
the older systems in miscellaneous condition are being brought up to
speed and truly dead parts are finally being tossed. Wow. I'm starting
to have shelf space in my hardware cabinet again. That's more like it.
And of course, I've imporved the preprocessing scripts I use to match
the new stuff we have going on here. So I'm pleased to reintroduce the
TAG in threaded form. Thomas did nearly all the work marking it up (for
which we can thank his Ruby scripting talents) but the layout tricks are
still mine. Let us know if you find any dust that still needs cleaning
out of 'em. Have a great month, folks.
Readers with good Linux answers of their own, in local mailing
lists or published to netnews groups are encouraged to copy The Answer
Gang their good bits if they're inclined to see their good thoughts
preserved in the Linux Documentation Project, by way of the Linux
Gazette. Ideally the answers explain why things work in a friendly
manaer and with some enthusiasm, thus Making Linux Just A Little
More Fun! If they're short and sweet they'll be in Tips, longer
ones may be pubbed here in TAG. But we don't promise that we can
publish everything, just like we don't promise that we can answer
everyone. And last but not least - you can be anonymous if you'd prefer,
just tell us whenyou write in.
shell and pipe question
From Brian Chrisman
Answered By: Rick Moen, Heather Stern, Jim Dennis, Thomas Adam
Just running the 2 cats is easy when the file sizes
on log.* are small. But when those files come to total
many gigs, doing the cat twice gets to be very expensive.
Any suggestions?
[Rick]
This will use (abuse) tee and fifos to do kinda what you want as well..
cat - | (mkfifo /tmp/x; (cat /tmp/x | gzip > /tmp/xx.gz &) ; tee -a /tmp/x) | cat -
[Thomas]
(cat log.*) | tee -a gzip > /other/all-logs.gz | grep -v somecrap | gzip > /other/all-logs-cleaned/gz
[JimD]
How do you mark the EOF?
[Heather]
You really want one file with all the log data, instead of a tar so
you
can tell which log a given line had been from? Hmm. Sounds like a
way
to lose info a sysadmin would care about later.
Well, grep doesn't have any problem searching multiple files - just
say
all of them on its command line - so the initial request gains a
useless
use of cat award. Moreover, a small awk script looking over the files
would as easily be able to spit out two instances of the log as one...
it can even mention the name of the incoming file in your first output
so that the logfilename really isn't lost during the concatenation.
Since you specifically requested bash (the default shell on nearly
every Linux distribution) and it allows you to have additional file
handles ... thought you were limited to standard out, didn't you?
haha!
It's not so! ...you should be able to do something much cooler. Even
in another shell you can at least use stderr also.
{brief pause while I grodgel around for whether pipelines support the
additional handles. apparently not. but < and > do... viz
<
commandline) and >
commandline) automatically generating the fifo to
use. whee!}
[JimD]
Yep. Heather as it right. This stuff is called "process substitution"
and it substites the name of a dynamically created pipe (possibly
a named pipe in /tmp) for the <
...) or >
...) expression.
I have to confess I don't quite understand how the EOF is propagated
through these if they are implemented as named pipes (FIFOs).
In retrospect this also works:
[JimD]
... notice that you MUST background that first pipeline or the
tee to pipesmoke will block. Conversely you could start the second
pipeline in the background (it will immediately block on the empty
pipesmoke FIFO) and then run the cat ... | tee ... command. Clearly
one or the other (or both) must be in the background if they are started
from the same script. Otherwise you'd have a perpetually blocked
process waiting for input or for room in the buffer for you.
[JimD]
The problem here is that tee writes to a file, not a program.
You need "process substitution" like so:
Answered By: Thomas Adam, Ben Okopnik, Bradley Chapman, Robos, Kapil Hari Paranjape
Hello TAGgers,
I am wondering if someone can help. I am having a rather interesting font
issue at the moment with gtk2 apps, in that the font it uses to display in
its menus, etc is not what I would like...it looks weird to me. I think
the font in question is monospace but I am uncertain.
I cannot determine from using "editres/xdpyinfo/FvwmIdent" what font is
being used and it is beginning to annoy me. I have tried adding:
gtk-font-name = "Sans 10 Bold"
as a crude test to: ~/.gtkrc-2.0 but this has had no effect in changing
the font even when re-starting the application(s) in question. I have
checked the BTS but nothing has been that useful. I am now thinking it
might be a pango problem but I wouldn't know.
Ideally it would be nice if I could get the same font that gtk+-1.2 uses
since I have had no problems with the font those apps use in their menus,
etc.
Ideas would be welcome.
[Bradley]
I added:
gtk-font-name = "Luxi Sans 10"
This is what I added to my rc file and the GTK2-2.2.4 libraries that
Firebird is currently using seem to honour it. Have you tried updating your GTK2 libs?
Yes, I have updated them, I'm running sid so everything is bang up to date
in that respect. Still no luck. I do though get the following errors
printed to stdout:
Fontconfig warning: line 248: invalid edit binding "same"
Fontconfig warning: line 260: invalid edit binding "same"
According to the BTS, this error is supposedly fixed by making sure you
only have one fontconfig lib installed, well, I do.
[Bradley]
You could try checking your GTK+-1.2 libraries to find out where their
defaults are stored and then just match the font name & size decls in your GTK2 config.
I fixed it in the end. I found out the defoma (DEbian FOnt MAngler) was
causing all kinds of weird aliases that pango was then having trouble
parsing. The fonts were the defaulting to an ugly monospace-9 font which
looked horrid.
Ok, so defoma really is: DEbian FOnt MAnager, but I couldn't resist it
-- Thomas Adam
[Ben]
Thomas, at some point in the sweet by-and-by, you ought to write an
article on that whole system. As far as I'm concerned, you two are
chatting in a particularly obscure dialect of Gibberish (and that's not
a comment on what you're saying but on how well I'm understanding it.
[Thomas]
Heh, I did take notes[1]
[1] If you think gibberish is correct, you should try and interpret my handwriting.
[Ben]
Twiddling the font system is something I've done in the past -
successfully, in some cases - by the "close your eyes, hit it with a
baseball bat, run away, and read about the effect in tomorrow's papers"
method.
[Thomas]
"O p n k. Ben plays with fonts"
I think we can say that looks like an appropriate header for tomorrow's
newspapers.
[Ben]
As far as understanding it goes, uh-uh. Well, I actually know
of a few things that do some things
, but I have no idea how the
whole shmear does what it does, or even what it really does - and that's
before we even mention console fonts, which seem to be a completely
unrelated (and nearly as complex) system.
[Thomas]
Console fonts are very interesting. These are almost certainly controlled
by locales (which in turn also dictate the font you need to use under X11
as well). As to how they are rendered, this is something that I have been
looking into. I have to go and see a psychiatrist first though -- its just
about done my head in.
[Ben]
Yeah, I can't wait until X is smart enough to be fully UTF8-compliant. I
just love UTF8; it chops out a huge chunk of what I see as horrible
and unnecessary complexity. Admittedly, the mess grew out of a need -
but that's no longer current, hasn't been for a long time, and the mess
is still with us.
[Ben]
At some point, I read some
HOWTO that attempted to "explain" it all in a short, easy, step-by-step
27,500-page memo. When it got to the point about "fonts don't really
define what characters look like, they just kinda hint at a glyph set
which sorta doesn't mean anything either - except when it does", I had
to walk off whistling with my hands in my pockets. Otherwise, I'd have
gone looking for that baseball bat again.
[Thomas]
GTK2/pango/freetype all work in tandem with eachother. The way fonts are
displayed is dictated by pango which helps render them (it's actually used
for internationalisation of fonts as well).
[Robos]
My latest incident: tried some program on my agenda vr3 pda (which I know
not as much about as I would like) and the proggy proclaims: font "9x15" not
known to X server (or something). Yeeeesss, ok, this is a pda! No debconf,
no xfontsel or something. How the heck do I figure out what fonts are there
and what their names are without later being able to write an xserver myself?
Yes, X. Like in "the X files". Maybe that was their initial idea: molder and
scully try to find out what fonts are installed....
[Kapil]
I do know that applications that try to load fonts directly from X
(rather than using a toolkit / themekit like GTK) will find any font
that is also found by "xlsfonts". So on my machine (slightly(!) more
disk space than a PDA) I get:
So 9x15 is an alias for the font described in the first line of output.
You too (yes you Robos!) can define your own aliases as follows.
Create a directory called (say) "$HOME/myfonts".
Put whatever X fonts (AFAIK this means only BDF and PCF fonts). For example you can link the "real" fonts from wherever these are.
Run "mkfontdir $HOME/myfonts", this will create fonts.* files.
Create an fonts.alias file as follows. Copy any line in the fonts.dir or fonts.scale files into this file and replace the name of the file (first entry in the line) by the alias you want to use.
Run "xset +fp $HOME/myfonts".
[Thomas] Don't forget also to run:
xset fp rehash
Radeon 7500 PCI Card Monitor Autodetect - My Solution
From Chris Gianakopoulos
Answered By: Ben Okopnik, Robos
Hello Gang, how are all of you?
I picked up an ATI Radeon 7500 PCI card last month to use in my Linux
machine. A lot of the time, (noting that my login is console based rather
than GUI based), when I launched X, I would get an indication that no
monitor could be found. My card has an S-video connector, a panel connector
(the big rectangular thing), and a VGA connector. My monitor is connected
to the VGA connector.
[Robos]
By the last sentence you mean in reality (IIRC): the second vga connector.
The first "device" is the panel connector (dvi) which can become a vga
connector with an adapter (cheap to have everywhere). The signal quality on
that is in most test far better than that what the second vga spits out.
Looking at the Internet, it seems that some OEM boards have problems
recognizing the monitor when it is connected to the VGA connector.
I think that I fixed it so that it works reliably all of the time. Here is
a section of my XF86Config file. Note, that I have seen other solutions
to the problem, but, I wanted to try this.
Setting CloneDisplay equal to 0 appears to force the driver to default the
monitor to a CRT rather than trying to probe for the monitor. Two days,
and so far, so good.
Looking at /var/log/XFree86.0.log (the X log file) does indicate that the
monitor is no longer autoprobed, and a CRT is selected
(Primary Display == Type 1). Looking at the driver, radeon_driver.c gives
me the same indication that I did override the autoprobing.
We'll see what I say after another month. Time and experimentation will
validate my assumption.
[Ben]
You might want to take a look at the X "radeon" man page. Since I use
ATI's "fglrx" server, it doesn't help me much (I ran across it while
researching my Radeon 9200), but you may find the option set and the
explanations useful.
Yea, that's what I wound up doing. It was a combination of looking at the
man page (the radeon one), and the log files that clued me in. glxgears
gives me a maximum frame rate of 234 FPS. My nvidia geforce2 MX400 gave me
670 FPS with glxgears, but, I would get system lockups (the flashing keyboard
with kernel panics when running scilab, mozilla firebird 0.7), thus, I
got the Radeon board. I can live with less 3D performance since I got
a stable driver with my combination of motherboard plus video card.
[Ben]
Wow - I guess the 9200 is a pretty fair gadget in that regard, then.
ben@Fenrir:~$ glxgears
9073 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1814.600 FPS
9576 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1915.200 FPS
9562 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1912.400 FPS
9604 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1920.800 FPS
9570 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1914.000 FPS
9607 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1921.400 FPS
Anyway, my flight simulator (FGFS) works like a charm. That's what's
important.
Ah, and to the other replies: glxgears is not really an indication of what
the graphics card is capable of! By any means! Rather use some demo proggy
like quake3 in demo mode or some screensaver or something.
Cool. I noticed that torcs runs a little choppy compared to the nvidia
card though. Still though, I'll heed your advice about the glxgears thing.
I'm kinda new to this 3D stuff. I had no idea that so much OpenGL stuff
was available.
Thanks much.
Chris G.
Updating Libc and Gcc Support on Older Distros?
From Steve
Answered By: Thomas Adam, Ben Okopnik
I have an old Pentium I (166Mhz) that runs SuSE 7.0 beautifully.
I will run SuSE 9.0, but it is ponderously slow, so I went back
to 7.0.
I have wanted to update my browser (among other things), but find
that support is needed for the above captioned pieces from later
releases. I have asked the question on various boards and chat
lines but have not gotten any definitive answers. The most
complete answer I received was "don't". It seems that updating
library and compiler support are risky, but it seems to me that
is has to be possible.
Is there any advice or specific information you can give me about
this? My old copy of Netscape 4.76 is really out of date and
crashes on a lot of modern sites.
Thanks in advance for your help.
[Thomas]
My answer also is "don't". Attempting to upgrade libc and gcc without
doing the rest of the distriburion is fatal. Everything you run depends
on those set of core libraries whether implicitly or not.
Remember that if you did upgrade libc then all your programs wouldn't work
since the version that they were compiled against is now at an older
version than the one you have installed.
In short, do a full update of SuSE.
[Ben]
My take on it is a bit milder than that - I've done libc, etc. upgrades
and survived them just fine, although I have to give most of the credit
to Debian's dependency-resolution mechanism. It's not "fatal" as such
because the calls supported by libc aren't going to change - there may
be new ones added, but the old ones aren't generally going to go away
without a whole lot of lead time. If you do the upgrade correctly,
everything will continue to work fine; if that wasn't the case, old
Linux software wouldn't work at all - and I've run some quite ancient
binaries that worked happily and without a glitch.
However, I do agree with Thomas that it's a pretty big undertaking and
many things can break, explode, and fly off the handle if you do it
wrong; doing a full distro upgrade (after, of course, backing up your
data for safety's sake) is really the best way to go.
What are the top five webmail applications of the Open Source world
From Rich Price
Answered By: Kapil Hari Paranjape, Rick Moen, Thomas Adam
I have been toying with the idea of installing a webmail server on my Debian
Linux system.
While looking into Squirrelmail as a possible option, I came across this
statement on the
Squirrelmail web site:
...............
While it may sound silly, my vision for the future of the Squirrelmail
project can be summed up in the quotation, "I have a dream!" by Martin
Luther King Jr. In this dream, Squirrelmail is THE number one, top-dog,
leader of the pack, and mac-daddy Open Source Webmail project in the
world. At this point in time, Squirrelmail has somewhat already achieved
that goal, as it is firmly one of the top five webmail applications of
the Open Source world.
...............
My immediate thought was "What are the top five webmail applications of the
Open
Source world?" I am unfamiliar with this field. What exactly are my
options?
[Kapil]
I would imagine that "apt-cache search webmail" would throw up some
candidates and it did!
[Thomas] ...especially under Debian. There is also the use of freshmeat.
ilohamail - Light weight yet full featured multilingual web-based IMAP/POP3 client
imp - Web Based IMAP Mail Program.
imp3 - Web Based Mail Program
libroxen-webmail - Webmail module for the Roxen Challenger web server
openwebmail - WebMail based on Neomail
squirrelmail - Webmail for nuts
twig - The Web Information Gateway
camas - A versatile WebMail system for the Caudium WebServer
postman - High performace web based IMAP and NNTP client
sqwebmail - Courier Mail Server - Webmail server
[Kapil]
Of these "camas" is restricted to the "caudium" web server and thus
further restricted to those who would write their cgi-bin's in the
language "pike".
SqWebMail is part of the "courier" suite which means that it depends on
a whole bunch of other things being around.
Twig is described as a groupware client and is a bit feature bloated.
Imp (and Imp3) which we use here depends on "horde" and "php" so
probably on "apache" as well.
Only squirrelmail and ilohamail have "lightweight"/"standard" dependencies
("php" and "apache") and restrict themselves to webmail.
Which might explain their popularity...with sysadmins!
But then who can blame those poor users who after getting mail on their
browsers also want to have it as their calendar, editor, news-reader, ....
Guess what application Marc Andreessen worked on before Mosaic and
Netscape? Answer below!
[Rick]
Squirrelmail is certainly awfully good. One could make a good case,
also, for IMP, TWIG, and V-webmail.
What would be the fifth? I don't know, but here's my huge list of
candidates: "Webmail" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Mail .
suppress terminal messages of other processes
From Christoph Sandhaus
Answered By: Ben Okopnik, Thomas Adam, Mike Orr (Sluggo)
Hi TAG!
Hope you can help me, because I can't solve my problem using search-engines
man-pages, faq's (linuxgazette, tldp.org, SuSE portal, ...):
Some programms send messages to any user logged in (i.e. shutdown, module
error messages, ...).
When using a terminal and my script is working cursor position dependent these
messages really disturb!
My questions:
Where do these messages come from, maybe printk (out of the kernel)?
How do I suppress them?
[Thomas]
They come from the script doing "echo foo". Now, if they are just from
scripts that you yourself invoke, you can do:
[Ben]
Not system messages, Thomas. Christoph is right in that regard: they do
come from the kernel.
[Thomas]
some_script >/dev/null 2>&1
which means you won't see a thing. If, however, you are referring to
seeing messages to your console, you can do:
mesg n
which should surpress this. You can even use stty(1).
[Ben]
Nope. You can't suppress messages sent by root. And that's a Good Thing.
(in one xterm)
ben@Fenrir:~$ mesg n
(in the second one)
ben@Fenrir:~$ su -c 'echo Foo|wall'
(Here's what the first one looks like now)
ben@Fenrir:~$ mesg n
Broadcast Message from ben@Fenrir.Thor
(/dev/pts/8) at 8:52 ...
Foo
Generally you are right, Ben, but:
I am displaying server status and activity from my (python) script. The
unwanted messages are first of all from a scsi-modul. Thus: I am interested
in the message, but not in THIS terminal.
[Ben]
First of all, Christoph -
---------------------------------------------------------------
To: Thomas Adam <thomas_adam16@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [TAG] suppress terminal messages of other processes
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 15:07:10 +0100
Cc: Ben Okopnik <ben@callahans.org>
---------------------------------------------------------------
[Ben]
Do not take a discussion off-list without clearly stating that you're
doing that, please. If you want private advice, my rates are $125/hour;
I'd imagine Thomas would also charge you a consulting fee. I've added
TAG back to the CC list.
I do charge, payment is in chocolate....
-- Thomas Adam
[Ben]
Assuming you're talking about non-critical messages, try turning off
SCSI debugging in the kernel config. In an extreme case, you can tweak
the module code itself (but this last one is something you'd have to do
every time you update your kernel.)
Are you sure there is no way to stop the messages send by root on THIS
terminal?
[Ben]
Not unless you send all output on that terminal to "/dev/null".
What you're proposing is still getting rid of all system messages, and
I keep telling you that it's a bad idea - and thus not likely to be
supported. Getting rid of the non-critical messages from one module, OK;
shutting down system messages in general, bad idea.
[Thomas]
Absolutely a bad idea. And let's face it, having tweaked klogd(
, one is
not going to be seeing those messages until one needs to, since shutting
the system down etc, is at a time when either the user is aware of what is
happening, or because it is there to alert you to save your work, etc.
I am your opinion.
'setterm -msglevel [n]' doesn't help:
level 0 is equal to mesg y
level 1: sys msg's still pass through
level 8: all messages
I still belive I have to take a close look at klogd or syslog. But I doubt it
will help...
Next I will experience with stty.
[Thomas]
setterm -msglevel implies klogd
I think it is in your interrest what will be my solution. This will be in the
next days.
If I should not post how it was going on, someone have to tell me.
[Thomas]
Do let us know how you get on, by all means.
So far: thanks for all hints and: tell me how to reach your fee
Are you interesed in help at TAG?
[Ben]
Or he could just see the messages and hit "Ctrl-L" to clear them after
reading them. The screen should redraw back to the way it was before the
message. I thought this would be too obvious to mention, but - maybe
not.
[Sluggo]
Christoph, it would help if you give us some examples of exactly what
messages you are seeing. That would help us narrow down which modules
or kernel systems are producing them and why. See the TAG Posting FAQ,
http://linuxgazette.net/tag/ask-the-gang.html
especially section "Provide enough, but not too much information".
If you see something like "cannot load module char-major-10-175", it
means some program is trying to access a device that is not present in
the kernel. E.g., when a time synchronization program wants to access
the real-time clock but you didn't compile the RTC module. The proper
thing to do is to enable the module (if essential) or disable the
program (if non-essential). The quick fix is to put "alias
char-major-10-175 off" in /etc/modules.conf. That tells the module
loader (modprobe) not to look for that module if requested. In
practice, most people just use the quick fix and forget about it.
After all, if the lack of that service was causing any practical
problems, you would have seen it by now. See "man modules.conf" for
more info.
Ctrl-L works in many Curses-based programs to redraw the screen as it
should be, erasing any droppings left by other processes. It works in
vim, mutt, newsreaders, etc. Although it's a longstanding Unix convention,
it's not automatic, so some programs may not support it.
Going back in computer history, Ctrl-L means "form feed" (ASCII symbol
FF). When a printer receives it, it ejects the page. Video consoles
can't eject the page (or if they did there'd be broken glass
everywhere), so they clear the screen instead. That's why shells and
other line-oriented programs clear the screen when you press Ctrl-L.
However, screen-oriented programs like vi decided on a different
convention more useful to them: Ctrl-L redraws the screen. Line noise
was a significant problem in those days, and it would sometimes cause
random characters to appear on the screen. (Nowadys modems have error
correction built in, so they can detect line noise.) Control-L was a
convenient way to counteract that, and it's still useful when a
background program invades your screen with messages.
"man ascii" shows the control codes, although it doesn't explain what
the symbols mean. Most of the codes are no longer used for their
original purpose anyway. Here's the original reasoning behind the
codes:
Not all terminals actually responded the way they were "supposed" to.
LF is supposed to go down one line but stay in the same horizontal
position. That's why Windows uses CR+LF at the end of a line, because
that's what old-time printers did. But VT terminals needed only LF, so
that's what Unix inherited. Macintosh uses CR, perhaps attempting to
redefine the code according to modern understanding. If you've ever
seen a printer do "stair stepping" (starting one line where the previous
one left off), that's what's happening. The computer is sending only
LF, and the printer is interpreting it strictly.
O.K.
Intention:
display server status/activity (tty11, xterm, konsole, ...) using python
structured output (cursor positioning)
system: Caldera Open Linux (V3.1.1, server) (sorry for that, will change soon!)
kernel 2.4.13
Problem:
kernel messages (i.e.: "printk()", "echo stuff | wall") can't be suppressed:
structured output is destroyed
custom scsi kernel modul will be changed, but system error messages are still active
messages like your example ("cannot load module char-major-10-175") still pass through
once there was a network module (3c5xx maybe?, unsure right now): unplug the network cable => "... has diconnected"
[Sluggo]
One workaround would be to use a GUI window (wxPython, Tkinter, gtk, etc) for
your application output. Kernel messages can't write there.
Maybe I've got an idea:
Doesn't the messages (i.e. from wall) arrive trough STDERR?
Is there a possibility to ignore incoming messages on STDERR on a xterm?
[Thomas]
No, they're written to STDOUT.
[n6tadam@laptop n6tadam]$ echo "wall" | wall 2> /dev/null
Broadcast Message from n6tadam@laptop
(somewhere) at 15:26 ...
wall
Is there a possibility to ignore incoming messages on STDERR on a xterm?
[Thomas]
No, since you would have to have someway of knowing the tty that your
application was on -- tty(1) will tell you what it is. Again, stty might
allow you, it might not...
[Sluggo]
Stderr is a channel a process writes out on, not a channel it receives
things from. So xterm cannot receive things on stderr. It does receive
things from stdin, but that's connected to the tty xterm was started from,
not to the tty that xterm's display window is showing. Stdin/stdout/stderr
are set by the kernel when xterm starts, and only later does xterm allocate
a tty for its display window. If xterm receives something on stdin, it
probably ignores it. But if it receives something on the tty connected to
its window, it displays it. You can do this yourself.
% echo "abc" >/dev/tty
abc
% tty
/dev/pts/7
% echo "abc" >/dev/pts/7
abc
% echo "abc" >/dev/pts/8
zsh: permission denied: /dev/pts/8
% w
09:46:21 up 2 days, 9:22, 2 users, load average: 0.06, 0.04, 0.01
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
iron tty1 - Mon05 2days 3:15 0.03s /bin/sh /usr/X1
iron pts/7 :0.0 22:09 0.00s 0.98s 0.04s w
% echo "abc" >/dev/tty1
% echo "abc" >/dev/tty7
%
(/dev/tty automatically directs to the current tty. The 'tty' command
shows which tty is the current one. I got a permission error because I
don't own /dev/pts/8. The first 'w' entry is the console I ran "startx"
in. Writing to it didn't show up here, but it did show up in my text
console. /dev/tty7 is the graphical display my X session is using, thus
the one konsole was launched from, thus konsole's stdin/stdout/stderr.
Writing to it didn't show up in the window, it just disappeared. In all
cases, 'echo' is writing to its stdout, not to its stderr. The tty it's
writing to may be somebody else's stdin or stderr, but that depends on
how that other somebody is configured.)
I use konsole, which is kind of a super xterm from KDE. Each konsole
has multiple views (like screen), but sometimes I launch a second
konsole from the first so I can keep two sets of views separate. For
instance, one set of views for my personal stuff, and another set for
work stuff (which are all su'd to another user). The second konsole
writes all sorts of undesired debugging information on stderr, which
stomps over the view I launched it from -- similar to the problem
you're having. So I start it with "konsole 2>/dev/null" to suppress
those messages. But that only works if you do it to the process that's
writing the messages. You can't do that to the kernel, to a driver or
a daemon, since you don't have control over their stdin/stdout/stderr.
I have had some experiences and it seems there is nothing I can do.
And "stty" (Hello Thomas!) isn't the answer either. There was no way to switch
off stdin.
I tryed to redirect /dev/pts/X (sorry about this stupid attempt
) and I
think you can imagin what happened: "operation not permitted"
Thanks a LOT to all of you!
I stop off here with all experiments.
But I've learned a lot and maybe next week I'll join TAG.
As I pointed out above, anyone is welcome to join TAG, just as long as
you read the following first:
I have a directory where I keep my MP3s, arranged my artist and album,
plus a few single songs in the top directory itself. What I wanted was
to build playlists for each album (where the name of the playlist would
be the same as that of the album), including one for all the singles;
not a hard task, considering that a playlist is nothing more than a list
of absolute paths to the mp3s to be played - which is exactly what the
"find" command produces when invoked that way.
Set "ldir" and "mdir", stick the program (I call mine "mp3lists") in a
directory in your path (say, "/usr/local/bin"), and run it whenever you
want to recreate your lists.
[Thomas]
Excellent. Assuming you have no ordering preference per se:
What's an "mpg321"? I'm familiar with "mpg123", but...
[Thomas]
[n6tadam@laptop n6tadam]$ apt-cache show mpg321
Description: A Free command-line mp3 player, compatible with mpg123
mpg321 is a clone of the popular mpg123 command-line mp3 player. It should
function as a drop-in replacement for mpg123 in many cases. While some of
the functionality of mpg123 is not yet implemented, mpg321 should function
properly in most cases for most people, such as for frontends such as
gqmpeg.
Ah. I thought it might have been a mispeeling.
Also, this invocation of "find" would get only the top-level MP3s -
none of the ones in the album subdirectories.
[Thomas]
Yes, but then I assume that most of don't have such a highly-ordered set
of files.
How do you figure "most of" organize their MP3s, then? I can't quite see
naming each file something like
Ella Fitzgerald - Ella & Friends 01. Ain't Nobody's Business But My Own.mp3
Ella Fitzgerald - Ella & Friends 02. Baby, It's Cold Outside.mp3
etc. Besides, most ripper programs produce a directory structure in the
first place.
[Thomas]
Do they? I admit I have no idea of that -- I prefer CD's.
[Nod] All the spaces are a bit annoying, which is why you don't
generally want to be typing all that stuff out. Fortunately, we have -
tadaa! - playlists.
[Thomas]
I would be
rather annoyed at all the spaces in the filename though. Then again my
file organisation is a mess. You should see my desk.
I can't carry all my CDs with me.
I'd be willing to bet that 256kB
MP3s don't sound any different from CDs even to your musically-trained
ears, even with really good quality headphones.
[Heather]
Maybe Ogg Vorbis format is worth a listen, for people with picky ears.
They sound ever so slightly different to me. **sigh** I miss analog
equalizers. They really hit the sweet spot.
Are these 256kBs, or the standard "anything goes" types? I've never
administered one myself, but AIUI, it's rare for anyone to pass the
actual taste test.
[Heather]
abcde and our household became good friends awhile back - around the
time the CD carousel was getting rowdy about giving us our discs back.
I haven't tried it, but it looks pretty good. These days, I mostly stick
with John the Ripper - nice and simple.
[Thomas]
That being the case then, just change "-maxdepth 1" to "maxdepth 2"
I dunno, these brainiac types with their good ideas....
Which would give you a single playlist with all the songs in it instead
of individual ones, missing the whole point of the exercise.
[Thomas]
Nah, it would still play the songs
So would "find /my/dir|mpg123 -@ -", but that wasn't the point. If I
want to listen to just the ACDC "Back in Black" album, your example
won't be of much use unless you rewrite it every time - including all
those annoying spaces in the album name.
[Heather]
Isn't that what tab completion is for...
Not for those of us who would find retyping the entire command line
every single time a pointless exercise - or like looking at the
playlists to figure out what kind of music feels right next.
[Heather] And the final tidbit, it's always nice to make symlink farms of stuff
you feel fits a nice mood. After you do that, you're not limited to
"albums" in the order your plastic carries them.
Submitters, send your News Bytes items in
PLAIN TEXT
format. Other formats may be rejected without reading. You have been
warned! A one- or two-paragraph summary plus URL gets you a better
announcement than an entire press release. Submit items to
bytes@lists.linuxgazette.net
Legislation and More Legislation
Jon Johansen
As has been reported in previous months, Jon Johansen, the Norwegian man
charged in relation to the DeCSS computer code, has been successful in his
legal travails. Now, it has
been reported that he is going to attempt to turn the tables
and seek compensation from the Norwegian white collar crimes unit.
The
DVD Copy Control Association (also known as the DVD CCA) has
abandoned its case against Andrew Brunner. Brunner found himself at
the sharp end of legal action as a result of having distributed the DeCSS
computer code on his website. The thrust of the DVD CCA legal action was to
assert that Brunner was a violator of trade secret laws. However, the
legal action taken by the DVD CCA, which was one many cases, proved
unsuccessful in halting the global distribution of the computer code, which
is now anything but secret.
An interesting article by B. D. McCullough
on errors in the statistics
functions of Excel and Gnumeric. The two packages shared some of the same
errors, Gnumeric has been fixed, Excel has not. (courtesy Linux Today).
NOSI
(Nonprofit Open Source Initiative), has released a primer document for
nonprofit bodies considering the use of open-source alternatives to
closed-source applications.
The PDF document can be
downloaded from their website
The old stable line has also received an update, to a
new version: 2.4.25, while the previous stable tree has also seen a
fresh addition in
version 2.2.26.
wxWindows is to change name
to become wxWidgets following pressure from Microsoft regarding
possible trademark infringement of Microsoft's "Windows" name. The
agreement appears to be relatively amicable.
This being a test release, the team would appreciate any feedback, in
particular bugs in the installation instructions. Any and all feedback
should be sent to the lfs-dev mailinglist.
Xandros
The Register has
reviewed Xandros Linux. "User-friendly to a fault".
Software and Product News
REALbasic 5.5
REAL Software has released
REALbasic 5.5 Professional Edition. This
software enables developers to compile Visual Basic source code under
Linux.
AP Intelligent Mail SwitchT
Secluda Technologies
has launched the AP
Intelligent Mail Switch, an SMTP perimeter-gateway solution for e-mail
productivity. With the company's existing product InboxMasterR, the AP
Intelligent Mail Switch gives IT professionals greater ability to monitor
and manage e-mail environments; improve the performance and reliability of
e-mail applications including anti-spam filters, virus scanning, and e-mail
servers; and prevent false positives and other problems caused by e-mail
filters.
Secluda's AP Intelligent Mail Switch runs on SUSE, Red Hat, and Mandrake
Linux, and is priced on a user/server basis starting at $195 up to $3,995
for an unlimited server license.
Mick is LG's News Bytes Editor.
Originally hailing from Ireland, Michael is currently living in Baden,
Switzerland. There he works with ABB Corporate Research as a
Marie-Curie fellow, developing software for the simulation and design
of electrical power-systems equipment.
Before this, Michael worked as a lecturer in the Department of
Mechanical Engineering, University College Dublin; the same
institution that awarded him his PhD. The topic of this PhD research
was the use of Lamb waves in nondestructive testing. GNU/Linux has
been very useful in his past work, and Michael has a strong interest
in applying free software solutions to other problems in engineering.
With all the hype and attention surrounding desktop managers such as KDE and
Gnome you could be
wondering "why bother using other window managers when those have got
everything included in them?" Integrated file managers, nice shiny gadgets,
etc. The answer is simple. Both KDE and Gnome take up vast amounts of memory,
and if, like me, you have aging hardware, you often look for alternatives that will make
your system usable.
You might think that, as KDE and Gnome have everything the user ever wanted,
why bother changing? Or to put it another way, is there some way that I can
emulate some of what KDE and Gnome do, at less memory cost. The answer is
"yes". One of the most requested features from users over the years has to be
about the use of session managers, which is the focus of this article.
What is session management?
Session management allows the state of applications that are running to be
saved and remembered. This includes attributes such as the size of the
windows, their geometry (location on screen), and which page/desk it was on (if
you're using a virtual window manager which supports those).
It works by the session manager handing out client-IDs. The application to
which this is given to is usually the main window, and any other sub windows
do not get any (these sub windows, we call transient windows), since
they are event-driven specific and only show when such events within the
application are triggered.
However, the parent window has to register itself directly with the session
manager so that the session manager knows the originating window so that any
transient windows that can be attached. Such a window has a property called:
WM_CLIENT_LEADER. This is used to talk to the session manager. A
further property WM_WINDOW_ROLE is used by fvwm to define the state of
the window. These underlying calls come from the X server itself, which
communicates them to the window manager that is running.
So a session manager is a program that handles these protocols,
talking both to the underlying X server and the window manager to determine
how these windows are to be setup. It is the job of the window manager, if
running under a session manager, to communicate with the session manager to
learn of these 'hints'.
There aren't that many true session managers out there. But for those that
do exist, getting them to work with fvwm can be a challenge. I shall look at
each in turn and evaluate their performance.
How does fvwm use Session Management
In order for fvwm to use
session management, it must be compiled with --enable-sm at ./configure time.
Once this has been done, you can use any session manager you like.
When fvwm loads up, without the use of a session manager, it looks for a
defined file, usually: $HOME/.fvwm2rc or:
$HOME/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc
But fvwm, in its configuration file, allows us to define two startup/restart
sections. One for running under a session manager and the other without. As an
example, here is a sample InitFunction for fvwm:
DestroyFunc InitFunction
AddToFunc InitFunction
+ I Module FvwmBanner
+ I xsetroot -solid cyan
+ I Exec xterm
+ I PipeRead 'Wait exec run_parts.rb'
This will load up normally each time fvwm loads without a session manager.
Yet the session manager specific startup looks like this:
DestroyFunc SessionInitFunction
AddToFunc SessionInitFunction
+ I Module FvwmBanner
Thus it allows the user to define separate definitions for instances where
the user may or may not be using a session manager. It should be noted that if
running under a session manager that it will only look for the
SessionInitFunction (and related) sections, and will not run the
InitFunction sections at all.
It is also a bad idea to launch xterms and other applications from within
the session functions since this can often interfere with the way that the
window manager interprets how to handle the window.
In order for us to use the session manager though, we need to ensure that
it is loaded up in the correct order. Whenever one starts X, whether it is
from the command-line (startx) or from a graphical display manager such as
xdm, kdm, gdm, or wdm, a certain file is read: $HOME/.xsession.
Normally, it might look something like this:
#!/bin/bash
program1 &
program2 &
exec fvwm
In order to have the session manager work correctly we have to make sure
that it is the last program that is executed, hence:
Making sure that "some_session_manager" above is replaced by the
actual name of the session manager.
smproxy is required since there are some programs which do not
natively support the program calls that define session management. In such
instances smproxy will try and sniff them out.
xsm -- X Session Manager
This is the original session manager, and is quite limited compared to some
of the other session managers we'll be looking at. To use it with fvwm, is
done exactly as described above. Once everything loads, you should see a
window which looks like the following...
Figure 1: xsm's client window
This is pretty self-explanatory. By clicking on the 'Load Session' button,
you can select previous sessions to load. When you initially start X, this is
what you'll see. You can suppress this window, but to do so, you have to
create a session.
Figure 2: xsm's control window
Figure 2, shows what is presented after everything has loaded. Using this
window, you can get an idea of the applications that it already recognizes,
and save the session etc. The only drawback with using xsm is it is very
limited in the applications it can recognize. If the application is not
strictly X aware then xsm will not be able to handle it.
To save the state of you session (and hence to see whether xsm can identify
any more windows, you can press the "checkpoint" button, to get a screen such
as Figure 3.
Figure 3: xsm's checkpoint window
From here you can enter the name of the session that you want to save. I
said earlier that you can by-pass Figure 2, by having it load up the session
name of your choice. Once you have saved the session, edit the file:
$HOME/.xsession and change the line: exec xsm to:
exec xsm -session [name] where '[name]' is the name of the
session.
xsm also causes problems with fvwm in that you have to quit xsm in order to
save the session, since xsm is the governing process. I found this to be quite
annoying. I would however, recommend it to anyone who uses simple apps, or to
someone whom only wants certain apps to run and doesn't wa
Good incentive for publishing your personal accomplishments
Backporting packages.
shell and pipe question
Radeon 7500 PCI Card Monitor Autodetect - My Solution
Greetings from Heather Stern
commandline) and >
Jon Johansen
![[Picture]](../gx/2002/tagbio/conry.jpg)
Originally hailing from Ireland, Michael is currently living in Baden,
Switzerland. There he works with ABB Corporate Research as a
Marie-Curie fellow, developing software for the simulation and design
of electrical power-systems equipment.
