• The MailBag
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• News Bytes, by Michael Conry
• Office Linux -- Feedback, by Matthias Arndt
• Adding Plugin Capabilities To Your Code, by Tom Bradley
• Ecol, by Javier Malonda
• Making Your Own Toy Boot Floppy, by Muhammad Torabi Dashti
• How main() is executed on Linux, by Hyouck "Hawk" Kim
• Perl One-Liner of the Month: The Adventure of the Misnamed Files, by Ben Okopnik
• The Foolish Things We Do With Our Computers, by Mike ("Iron") Orr
• Programming Bits: Meeting C# and Mono, by Ariel Ortiz Ramirez
• Qubism, by Jon "Sir Flakey" Harsem
• Debian APT Part 1: Basic Commands, by Rob Tougher
• Using the Logical Volume Manager, by Vinayak Hegde
• The Back Page

Linux Gazette Staff and The Answer Gang

Editor: Michael Orr
Technical Editor: Heather Stern
Senior Contributing Editor: Jim Dennis
Contributing Editors: Ben Okopnik, Dan Wilder, Don Marti

Linux Gazette, http://www.linuxgazette.com/
This page maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com

Copyright © 1996-2002 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc.

...making Linux just a little more fun!

The Mailbag From The Readers of Linux Gazette

• Linux Voice Mail
• mgp (magicpoint) and mplayer
• Net2Phone and Linux
• X Display's own mind after installing Japanese language support and programmes
• info about xkbcomp
• problem installing on linux on ultra2sparc reg
• Question about compiling against different C library
• More about CAD

Linux Voice Mail

Dear Answerguy:

I am looking to make a Linux Voice-mail system, and using Google, I found the following:

Claiming to be a response from:

By James T. Dennis, linux-questions-only@ssc.com Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org

So, can you tell me what hardware and software I need to make a Linux-based voice mail system (preferrably with 2 or 3 ports)? Thanks in advance for any help.

Sincerely,
Christine Jamison

I think you want to start by looking at GNU Bayonne... Cheers -- jra

I think that someone describing how they are really using such a setup would be a lot of fun. Prospective authors, please see our Author Guidelines.

Although "Linux has integrated..." is expressing at too broad a scale. If someone knows of a specific distro which has set these up together as an integrated answer, please tell us so we can mention it for News Bytes. -- Heather

mgp (magicpoint) and mplayer

Hi Folks

Ben recently said (in the powerpoint thread) that he uses mgp and since I wanted to fiddle with it a little too I thought I ask here: Is it possible to embed the mplayer window in mgp? Has anyone done this? I managed to get mplayer to play with the %system call but I had to disable mgp to take over the screen (thus become windowed) and mplayer will run in its own window too.

Not that I'm an expert on "mgp", but I believe that's the only way you can have it: "mplayer" does not take a "-geometry" option, and that's what the "%xsystem" tag (which embeds an X app) requires. For an example of this, take a look at "sample.mgp" in your "docs/mgp/examples" directory. -- Ben

If no one has, mplayer might get embedded when I know the win id of mgp via -wid id. xwininfo spits it out but I wanted to do something like this.

in bla.mgp:

> %system "mplayer vid.mpg -vo x11 -wid `some bash script or command to get the win id`

But for xwininfo I have to click into the window or provide it with the win id

Does anybody have a idea?

TIA Robos

Hi, Robos

Which Window Manager are you using? If you are using FVWM2, then it is possible to give the window a default ID anyway.

-- Thomas Adam

I still don't think you'll be able to do it (please let me know if you do manage it, though!), but we've talked about how to do this already (I think it was Thomas who asked about it): you can specify a name for your "mgp" window when you launch it, then feed that name to "xwininfo" with a "-name" parameter. -- Ben

There you have it, folks. Looks like Robos stumped the Answer Gang. Fellow readers, if you are Making Magicpoint A Little More Fun we'd like to hear from you and publish some really cool tricks. -- Heather

Net2Phone and Linux

Hi,

We just had a "Linux" technician come out to our office and install RedHat as our Internet Proxy and Mail Server and he has now left...however, I am left holding the bag to figure it all out and how to fix various things.

One item is the figure out how to make the Net2phone program work.. Except for the Linux Server, everyone uses Windows. Since we are in Africa, this program is very important for the staff to call home. I have no idea what to put in the TCP or UDP port sections. Is there a standard port or do I have to configure something on the Linux server (a machine totally dedicated to Linux) or what?

Also, with our previous Mdaemon email service where we used Windows 2000, we were able to keep a copy of all emails going in/out in an archive area so that we could refer back to them should someone lose their mail or couldn't find an email sent to them/from them. I don't know how to configure the RedHat to place outgoing/incoming mails onto another computer as an archive. Can you help with this as well?

I assume the tech installed sendmail as your mail server. While it is a very good mail server, it doesn't do copies as you'd like. (Things might have changed in the years since I tried it, but I'm too tired to investigate it right now.) If you uninstall sendmail and install postfix, it can easily be done. Postfix has a configuration option called "always_bcc" which will copy all incoming and outgoing email to another account. However, without knowing the setup you have (did the tech set up aliases? Any special options like masquerading?), it might not be as simple as un/installing some RPMs. -- Faber

I'm here in West Africa where I have little or no help and no reference books.

Since you say "the Internet works", you've got a plethora of reference materials! All you need actually. Check out The Linux Documentation Project at http://www.tldp.org. There are HOWTOs on setting up mailservers and much more.

Another great resource is Google (www.google.com). Searching for "Net2phone linux" at google brought up several links that might help you. -- Faber

Only a little common sense and alot of prayer. I would appreciate ANY help anyone could give me concerning these two items. I may have been vague with my requests but since I'm new at this, I'm not very clear about anything other than the Internet works and the mail does go out and come in.

THANKS A MILLION FOR ANY RESPONSE

Hmm, I know we have LG mirror sites in South Africa; it's only on the same continent, but it should hopefully be close enough to speed up searching our back issues. Still, I don't think I've seen Net2Phone go by. The LinuxDoc mirror to remember is Zambia's? http://www.linux.org.za/LDP

I think this is only the voice/video conferencing portion of a bigger question above, but it sounds like that'd be a popular topic for an article here. -- Heather

X Display's own mind after installing Japanese language support and programmes

Summary: after some struggles and some success with setting up Japanese on his European setup of Linux, Wilf also hopes to set up some other languages too. Most of our Gang hang out in one language only, so I'm invited any reader with a more worldly penguin on their desk to help out.

If you want to submit in article style, please see our Author Guidelines. Otherwise, please make sure to copy The Answer Gang (linux-questions-only@ssc.com) as well as Wilf when you reply. -- Heather

Hya folks!

I am struggling to install Japanese support on my Linux box based on Mandrake 8.1 (western Europe edition). Despite following instructions on how to do this I am quite at a loss what's going on. (Is that another point I have in common with 90% of all Linuxians using/understanding 10% of Linux' capacity?)

Reminder: I'd like to have the facility to enter and read Japanese text in a wordprocessor and email programme and to look up a dictionary, but run a Linux box based on a western European interface and latin1/latin15 input. JWPce (a Freeware for Windows and, DO believe it, stable) would be an excellent comparsion.

So far, I have used two different methods:

1. I added Japanese language support and programmes to my -then- quite well running linux box, undertook necessary changes in following instructions found at quite a few places too many to remember, and experimenting myself with different configurations and setups. Now, using a user account to work with the linux box I start up the x-display (KDE) : in a quite random fashion the icons and panel show up and I can get on working, or it may show only the icons on the desktop and no panel at all, or, at the worst, just show a blank screen. Only several "logouts" or even "reboots" may grant me with an eventual display of a correctly fonctionning environment. This problem does not all turn up when I log in as root. I de-installed all programmes and replaced changed config files with the original ones I saved as backups. However, even having carefully "cleaned" up the problem persisted. Having been (and I still am) at a loss I decided to
2. I reinstalled the whole system with Japanese language support and programmes which -at the beginning- worked out fine ... just fine for two sessions when the X-Display seemed to have changed its mind. Now, despite much praying on my knees, it may start up correctly and show the working environment, or it may show icons on the desktop only but no panel at all, or it may just show a blank screen. Here, too, root encounters no problem whatsoever.

The actual problem is not the permission to use this or that programme, but that the x-Display only displays when it is (and I take it for being just that) in the mood to do so.

Strangley, the Japanese fonts I installed show up in a browser, Emacs or wih a fontviewer, but so far I have not yet had the opportunity on how to using them in applications like Kmail or a wordprocessor.

For now, I re-installed the whole system without Japanese support and programmes, and all runs as smoothly as before.

I would greatly appreciate it if you and/or a reader could help me out here. I wonder if the problem is due to programmes which supply Japanese support (FreeWnn, Kinput2 and the likes) and upset the X-display or if I am missing out something very badly but am too blind to see... Would you know if Japanese have the same problem the other way round? If they install the Japanese version of a Linux Distribution and install let's say European language support and programmes, does the x-display play up, too?

. . . a day passes . . . -- Heather

Hya folks!

Refering to my recent email concerning the installation of Japanese language support and programmes, I hasten to inform you that I solved the mistery (or missery?) after some clicks only. Why make it easy when it you can make it yourself difficult...

In fact, when installing a distribution (reminder: I use Mandrake 8.1, western Europe edition) you need to select your language, the Japanese language and some programmes needed to enter Japanese text in a wordprocessor, email programme etc. Once the distribution installed, ROOT needs to execute "/usr/sbin/localedrake" and choose Japanese instead of the original language.

A user can configure his environment in two different ways:

Grand A

Personal Country, Language and Keymap are set of the user's choice. This does not alter the the display of the interface or menus : they continue to be displayed in the corresponding language. To enter Japanese text in say Kword, hit the keys SHIFT and SPACE and then enter the text in r-o-m-a-j-i. Nevertheless, how to get out of this mode I would not know... One more thingy : having set the iso8859-15 keymap, the user will not be able to type in the EURO currency symbol - although the personal configuration panel for Country and Language show that symbol. Luck¥ Japane$e, Bri£ish and American$!!! Another thingy : mc displays illegible caracters when it comes to OK, CANCEL or displaying names of directories. Other thingies remain to be discovered yet. Hint : only ROOT can help here. ROOT needs to reset the language to the original language via "/usr/sbin/localdrake" and Europeans can join the "international-currency-display-users'-club", meaning all's back to normal, meaning as normal as normal can normally be.

Grand B.

To display a Japanese interface and menus the user needs to select his country (not Japan - unless you have a Japanese keyboard or you do not mind searching for the right keys and combination, that is). As to language and keymap the user needs to select Japanese in the first case, and a keymap compatible with Japanese input (say keymap "jisx0208.1983-0" or "iso10646-1") in the latter case. Sure, the user may as well go for a real Japanese distribution, but you KNOW what they are saying: "Do it at your own risk!" Personally, I don't, and, mind you, I don't even know where to click when it reads "Quit" on a Japanese screen.

It is interesting to note the different effects this has on GNOME and KDE.

I have come across suggestions like adding someTHINGs to SOME files like "XMODIFIERS="@im=kinput2" LANGUAGE=xx_yy LC_TYPE=ja_JP" (where xx_yy stands for the abbreviation of your country) or something like "LANG=ja8JP.eucJP" or "LANG_ja.JP.UTF-8" ... but hey! Hey, wait a minute! I am just a simple minded user (Yours respectfully, of course) and not a fullblown Linux administrator with years of experience. But then again, I could become one as LinuxG@zette has helped me in the past. So, I remember a Perl script "Uncle Ben" sent me to rename quite a view files... but I'm straying and Ben might have some trouble steering off the course of an oil tanker.

Now that I have overcome this -how shall I put it- "Japanese problem", I am interested in learning how to install, configure, handle and use Indian input. Any readers up here willing to help me, please?

It is my hope that some readers could find some assistance.

Thanking you in advance (not only in case you put in a higher gear to get me some help), I remain

Your linuxely, Wilf.

. . . Robos gives his best shot, though it's not much . . . -- Heather

The only things I can contribute are: look at /etc/locale.gen, see what LC_ALL, LC_LANG and LC_LANGUAGE are set to (echo $LC_LANG) and change them so something else via (for instance in ~/.bashrc)


export LC_ALL=en_GB

and then


source ~/.bashrc

I managed to change something with this but I'm not sure if this is the right way. Maybe this helps? -- Robos

info about xkbcomp

Does anyone know a good source of info about xkbcomp - all I can find are very basic man pages (several saying we are depreciated)

Any pointers appreciated

The only reference I see regularly is a note when X starts up saying not to worry about XKB errors if there are any. Or something like that.

Readers? -- Heather

problem installing on linux on ultra2sparc reg

i downloaded all iso files (from the suse site) and burnt the CDs at 2x speed. the Cds have been checked and tested on different machines and verifies/satisfied that there all files are generated and intact. i am trying to install suse linux sparc on an ultra 2 machine and

i seem to have problems that is least expected. following are the details.

The hardware details of the machine:

Sun Ultra II  CPU speed 296 MHz
128 MB RAM
Open Boot Ver 3.7
Two SCSI hard disks:
     Internal 17 GB
     External 4 GB
We are trying to install Suse Linux Ver 7.3
The O/S is being installed in the external 4 GB HD

Problem observed

The system hangs at stage 6 during installation with CD 1 While installing through GUI, the system hangs without any message.

While installing through command mode (after using fdisk), the error message is 'Cannot create /dev/... '

thanks once again,
Dr. Nagesh R. Iyer

Question about compiling against different C library

I have a RH based system with gcc3.2 glibc-2.2.92

I want to compile some programs (old gnome2 etc) against glibc-2.2.5 - is this feasible?

The basic reason is to distribute RH7.3 rpms (ATM mozilla and galeon)

More about CAD

In a previous issue someone mentioned they were running AutoCAD on Linux. That is, they were running it most happily inside VMware, if I recall correctly: http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue83/lg_tips.html#tips/9

One reader, Frank Smierciak wrote in:

We currently have a dozen engineers running Autocad on Windows (various levels). You mentioned you are running Autocad on Linux. I didn't know Autocad had a Linux version. I don't mean to be a total newbie here but what version of Autocad are you running and have you ever tried LinuxCAD which claims to be 100% Autocad compatible.

...and I innocently thought to myself, "Gee, okay, that sounds neat, I'll mention it." Both these authors are obviously experienced engineers. I went looking for myself, to see what else I could find, to mention next to it.

But I didn't find it in Freshmeat (though there are 53 listings in their electronic design subcategory alone). The product's commercial (http://www.linuxcad.com). As is AutoCAD, of course. There are drawing ryam3d.orgograms mentioning CAD as one among many 2-D uses they can offer. (Is it still CAD if you are only drafting in two dimensions? well, it's a computer, and you're designing, so I guess so.) I found one that designs LEGO layouts

The question then comes up, what do you want to use CAD for ...

I asked my friend 'Dillo, an experienced 3-D artist (among other things), what he uses. He made special note to warn me that the difference between modelling software and CAD is that CAD will enforce real-world measurements. E.g. the intaglio on this pot is exactly 0.125 cm deep. For what he usually does, he's not sending things to a lathe, and just modelling is fine; he uses Ayam, a free front end for Renderman: http://www.ayam3d.org

I have big dreams of replicating little starship cutaway views, re-plotting my garden or living room layout, abusing my SMP motherboard with lighting calculations, stuff like that. "Dreaming" is the key word here. I found myself in the deep side of the CAD swimming pool with no water wings, and drowning -- things are pretty polarized, either no documentation or it assumes that you're already experienced as an engineer. I have a great sense of geometry, and I'm a good hand with the GIMP, but this just isn't my field. So far I'd be safer staying in the GIMP.

We need someone with some real examples to measure these things up against, to bring this all to life with some fun, and give us something that engineering newbies like me can enjoy and work our way through too. Having a bit of a bake-off about the different kinds of CAD and modelling available would be a plus.

Interested? See our author submission guidelines

• Mizpelling and Rekoining
• sendmail and courier imap server
• etymology of "daemon"

Mizpelling and Rekoining

Gooooood Morning LG!

There I have it (thanks Rick!) : what with my eternally installing Linux instead of putting poorly configurated files and setups right ...

Thank you so much for having sent some helpful mails concerning the (hum, "my" ) x-display's mood and configurating foreign languages support.

Mizspelling (yes, MiS) : all that fumbling on the keyboard trying to get foreign languages support on my linux box has given me some bad habits, I reckon.

Rekoining : as to rekoining (with a C, please) a phrase, in fact, it should not be known as "nobody's perfect" but "nothing's perfect". So, raising on one of the back benches I bow me head and admit not having payed much attention whilst setting up the email prog, particularly the e-address.

Felicitation -excuse me/veuillez m'excusez/'tschuligung- congratulation for your restyled web pages! You may now rightly raise and shine and ask around "now, who's the best?" unless, well, unless you do even better!

Yours linuxely, Wilf

sendmail and courier imap server

part kudos, part juicy answers, yet a question still. -- Heather

Hi,

Google had me stumble over your request in the Linux Gazette. Since I have the same problem (have to use sendmail for a specific reason, but still want to use courier imap), I'm interested in whether you found a solution yet?

Regards,
Eddy Buhler

Oh, that.

I've had no problem using sendmail with courier-imap; in fact it's nearly ideal, since Courier's own MTA is too young for prime time whilst IMAP is a path to the future.

The client who enjoyed these goodies was also handling enough traffic to warrant some serious tweaking, or to switch to Postfix, which he did.

The key in honoring IMAP well was not in the MTA, but in the local delivery agent -- procmail can easily deliver to maildirs, you just have to tell it to do so, and tell the MTAs to use procmail instead of the builtin local mailers.

Hope that helps! -- Heather

This is the first time I am faced with the task to set up a mailing system...would you mind supplying a few directions as to how to tell sendmail to use procmail as delivery agent, and roughly what to do to make procmail deliver in the maildir format and, say, into "~/mail"?

...

I got the thing working, thanks.

Glad to hear it! -- Heather

Yes, rather annoying to find out that things worked in the first place and I spent 3 days hunting shadows. Turned out sendmail was already configured to use procmail in my distro (SuSE 7.2 on a remote server), and all that was basically missing were

a. /etc/procmailrc with the source and target directories

b. courier-imap, though that had me turning in circles again until I found the pw2userdb and makeuserdb commands in /usr/lib/courier-imap/share after building and starting the daemon.

Sheesh. Now I just need to figure out what auth module courier is using and see how to use PAM if it's not using that yet. I guess I should also try compile a Step-by-step guide for other Linux mail Newbies like me...

Excellent! We'd love to see it. It'd make a good Article for the Gazette if it's long enough, or an Answer Gang posting if enough of us are all chattering during the notes.

If you're inclined to do it article style, our article guidelines are pretty simple, see http://www.linuxgazette.com/faq/author.html.

the least I can expect is that ppl rip it apart in the air and point out the millions of errors I made and the myriads of places where I could have done something better, which means I get to learn more, and gather a few more e-mails belonging to intelligent and helpful individuals I can contact in the future when I again have mail problems (e.g. in case I really have to change my sendmail config, or go deeper into fetchmail or promail or...whatever).

Good attitude, I like that.

You can always post questions to the Gang at linux-questions-only@ssc.com; if you're inclined to help others too, and not afraid of dealing with the extra burst of mail, you can join the mailing list. Don't worry, we're all good at something and not so great at other things ... even the really experienced souls among us.

Oh, that reminds me. I want to offer a web interface for users to access my imap server. That alone should be perfectly doable since there are a couple imap webmail interfaces out there. But I want them to be able to add pop3 servers to their fetchmail list.

Which suggests that you'll either want a privileged CGI )to let them get at their fetchmailrc) or some cronjob help (to let them work in unprivileged CGI space, then have something sanity check and apply the change to the real fetchmailrc).

Internally, I want to run a single fetchmail daemon (probably I'll just create a dedicated fetchmail user (e.g. "getmail") and let the scripts add the account/user mappings to that user's .fetchmailrc so I don't have one fetchmail demon running per mail user, which could be a bad idea if there were 50 users all polling 5 POP3 accounts every minute, I don't really know about the load though).

Hard to say ...

My main question is if I can tell fetchmail to not only run as a daemon, but to configure each and every individual POP account to be polled at their own intervals, like this:

I've read about the "set daemon" command in .fetchmailrc, but that only determines the interval the daemon wakes up at to do its job. A very ugly solution that I basically discarded before I tried it would be to create one fetchmail user for every account used, and set a daemon for that. But that would not only see the server run one daemon per user, but even one daemon per POP3 account. There must be a nicer way.

Do you know one?

I don't - maybe one of our readers can chime in.

Regards,
Eddy Buhler

Our pleasure.

etymology of "daemon"

In issue 83 of the Linux Gazette, you give some possible origins for the word "daemon": http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue83/tag/1.html

The term "daemon" comes from the demons in Oliver Selfridge's paper 'Pandemonium', MIT 1958, which was named after the capital of Hell in Milton's 'Paradise Lost'. Selfridge likened neural cells firing in response to input patterns to the chaos of millions of demons shrieking in Pandemonium." He proposed program elements, called "demons" that would model the activity of the neural cells and respond whenever a particular pattern appears in the input. The term later grew from its use in Artificial Intelligence to being used in the context of operating systems. The concept of "interrupts" was considered akin to a demon "shrieking" in response to the input pattern.

Bob

That "Day Monitor" was clearly a misguided guess by the querent. The rest were references from the Gang's scattered array of knowledge.

In the context of the Berkeley students who worked on BSD, Evi's comments are considered canonical. I add the link here so readers may see the more complete quote: http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/daemon.html

Many times similar ideas sprout in different places, only to discover each other later. (The Calculus, for instance, was independently developed and the main thing left mismatching were the symbols used.) In this case, it looks like me got concurrent homonymic results, from different origins. Evi clearly states that a system can easily have both... -- Heather

• Ettiquette among the Answer Gang

Ettiquette among the Answer Gang

I'd like to kindly request that if you are not going to answer someone, do not take the extra time nor waste the extra bits to blow them off.

We do not promise to give all requesters an answer, and I know that a lot more off-topic questions are arriving since we re-opened the floodgates labelled "tag" and "answerguy".

We also didn't promise that we're suits, keeping our thoughts squeaky clean and so on... but I note that there is some line between advocacy, curmudgeonly 'tude, and just plain being rude. I do not believe we're meeting the prime directive -- Making Linux A Little More Fun! -- if we make the borg kids run away in tears. Let 'em meet silence until they're ready to ask real Linux questions.

In other words if y'all sharpen the razor wit too far I'm gonna have to install a first aid kit in the TAG beer lounge.

However if you answer in the off-the-cuff spirit of the original Answer Guy, Jim Dennis (hi hon!) ... by answering a patently mswin/solaris/weird-OS question with the Linux version of the answer, then I'll cheerfully make sure that your favorite brewski is present in the TAG Fridge. In this way Jim often actually answered them, while hinting strongly that Linux makes it, whatever "it" is, a bit less painful. Pass the pretzels, please.

I'm pleased to say that in addition to some backroom silliness about coffee, ginger beer, and the exact methods we use to refill the pretzel jar, we've also been seeing a bit more helpfulness from the Gang in regards to cross-platform issues.

Issues where Linux is not involved at all are still for somebody else to deal with, though. Please mention which variety of Linux you're having trouble with when writing to us. Thanks. -- Heather

...making Linux just a little more fun!

More 2¢ Tips! By The Readers of Linux Gazette

• Hiding your email on websites from spammers
• Help on LILO
• bad clusters
• CDRW --or--
  CDRW plugging-it-in mini-howto
• 1 ut2003a.tgz: The archive is corrupt
• How to delete LINUX?
• How to write C program?
• cd-writer device driver
• duplex printing not exactly right --or--
  Cheap duplex fix
  seeking to do a better one...
• odd use for eject
• emacs
• how many roots?
• [LG 82] help wanted #3 Postfix hates Outlook
• Fun With Ioctls
• lkml
• The Weekend Mechanic --or--
  When the Weekend Mechanic loses his tools
  he finds them pretty quickly.
• ATI Rage M4
• Cannot Login as root at all
• LJ Page Customer Service: satheish --or--
  I would have called, but...
• Getting rid of offensive content on your hard disk dreged up by your web browser
• Hoping you have the solution to a problem... --or--
  At a loss for words
• need your help
• 2 tips for the TAG
• Troubleshooting GRUB
• please clear my doubts
• Linux Journal's Weekly News Notes Tech Tips

Hiding your email on websites from spammers

Here's a way to "munge" your email address on your Web page so that spammer's bots can't grab it:

perl -we'map{printf"&#%s;",ord}split//,pop' user@host.com

Use your address, and stick the output into your HTML where you'd normally use your address. It will display correctly, but all that the bots will see will be something like

user@host.com

Of course, if bots get smart enough to undo this, it won't help... a friend of mine also uses tricks to confuse them as to where the @ sign has gotten to... SGML comments within their domain name, stuff like that. Yet another shows their address and phone number within a PNG of their business card (although, admittedly, this is not lynx-clean).

A combination of such tricks, combined with a couple of "sentinel" addresses which look legit but are only for spambots to find, should aid you greatly in both reducing the total spam, and in having bait to feed to Razor to reduce the overall spam even further. -- Heather

Help on LILO

I can usually resolve LILO issue myself but I read your help solutions out of curiosity. The one thing that I noticed that you missed (hopefully -- I only skimmed your replies) is the fact that LILO is printed one character at a time. Each character means the following...

Characters

Description

none

LILO has not yet started. Either it was not installed or
the partition is not active

L errorcode

The first stage boot loader has been loaded and started.
However, the second stage boot loader cannot be loaded.
The errorcode typically indicates a media problem, such
as a hard disk error or incorrect hard disk geometry.

LI

The second stage boot loader was loaded, but could not
be executed. Either a geometry msimatch or by moving
/boot/boot.b and not running the map installer.

Or the "lba32" option was specified and the BIOS or drive cannot handle it. Solution: switch to "linear". -- Mike

LIL

Second stage boot loader started, but could not load the
descriptor table from the map file. Typically a media
failure or by a geometry mismatch.

LIL?

Second stage boot loader loaded at an incorrect address.
Typically a geometry mismatch or by moving /boot/boot.b
without running the map installer.

LIL-

Descriptor table is corrupt. Either a geometry mismatch
or by moving /boot/boot.b without running the map
installer.

That is, you made it into 32 bit or other paged memory processing, beyond what old DOS hacks call "real mode" -- but the page descriptors don't look good, and LILO refuses to jump to hyperspace with such ugly coordinates. -- Heather

LILO

Everything successfully loaded and executed.

Statistics: 3 out of 6 troubles mention the map installer. Just run /sbin/lilo again and see if it helps.

4 out of 6 mention geometry. linear, lba32, and compact are all options which relate to geometry; if you're using one, try changing this and running /sbin/lilo. But you just might have to tweak CMOS instead. For instance, LBA32 often needs to be turned on in CMOS before the lilo option can do anything.

2 mention media problems. Sorry. If you're lucky the mangled piece of disk is not track 0, and you can just copy fresh lilo bits out of their package, to new disk locations that aren't bad. For goodness' sake run fsck -c to get the bad spots marked useless before going much further. And make sure your partition table is good.

And #1 on the "whap yourself on the forehead" list: If you get no LILO response at all, make sure that /etc/lilo.conf says boot=/dev/hda (or sda if you're on SCSI and not a numbered partition like /dev/hda1. -- Heather

Courtesy of Linux Tutorial

http://www.linux-tutorial.info/cgi-bin/display.pl?68&0&0&0&3

Regards
Tres

bad clusters

where do bad clusters come from?

The Great Bad Cluster Cabbage Patch in the Sky.

Seriously, bad clusters represent errors in a file system. They may be soft errors, for example where power failed or the OS crashed during a write to disk. It could be where there are some bad bits on RAM that was used to hold data on the way to the filesystem. It may be that the computer has problems with its power circuitry, either in the power supply or in the power distribution circuits, filters, regulators and so on on the motherboard. Or the underlying problem may be failed sectors on the disk.

also my friend has an HP pavilion with windows 98, she has 3 bad clusters and her computer is running anciently slow. i'm running a windows 95 format disk to reformat her computer and so far it has been running for 3 days just trying to recover the allocation units, why is it running slow, and will re-formatting take care of some of the problems since she does have bad clusters?

In either the Linux case, which is what this mailing list is about, or other operating systems, it's time to enlist the services of somebody with serious diagnostic tools and skills. Simply reformatting the disk is very unlikely to cure the underlying problem, unless it was merely due to a power glitch. It probably wasn't a good idea to begin the reformat prior to consulting an expert, as you may have erased some of the information that would lead to a correct diagnosis.

Or, it might just be time to replace the computer.

I wouldn't rush to that as the first thing; it may only be the hard disk that's bad, not the whole machine.

If a bad controller on the motherboard is doing it, well yes, then it's probably easier to just replace the box. -- Heather

CDRW plugging-it-in mini-howto

I know nearly nothing about drives. I purchased a cd-rd drive and can't get it to work. I have installed the drive, but it won't work. The switch on the back of the drive is set in the middle. There is no writing on the switches, so I assumed the switch was set on the slave from the factory. From what I have read it seems like it has something to do with my ide. But I have no idea how to set that. The drive does not show up in my hardware properties. Do you think you can help?

Thanks in advance

[JimD] .... That's an MS Windows dialog box. Right?

If so you should call Microsoft and see if they offer support for their products.

Strictly speaking, it's the CD bay manufacturer to call, not the MSwin guys. -- Heather

[K.-H.] Start earlier -- bo into bios setup and do a "drive detect" if available. Does it show up there? Also All IDE CD drives I had gave some boot message during the BIOS search for IDE devices. This is before the box with the summary comes but after the memory countup.

If it's not there the hardware is not detected and something is quite wrong on hardware level.

[Dan] Try the HOWTOs...

You'll probably have to rebuild your kernel or load a module to support these. If you need help with that, check back here after you've taken a look at the HOWTO.

[JimD] The best resource for this topic right now is probably:

Winfried Trümper's CD-Writing HOWTO

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO.html

... though there are a couple of comments at:

The Answer Gang 65: cd-writing mini-howto

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue65/tag/17.html

In general IDE CDR/CDRW drives under Linux are accessed through the SCSI emulation layer. Thus you normally have to build the ide-scsi module (either into your kernel, statically, or as a loadable ".o" file). Normally you'd also have to pass the kernel a command line hint like hdc=ide-scsi which will force the system to direct all traffic to that IDE device through the SCSI emulation subsystem.

The oddity of this is that it affect normal access to CDs via that device, too. Thus to mount a normal CD in that drive you'd use the /dev/scd0 (or other /dev/scd*) device node. Writing to CDR and CDRW media would generally go through the /dev/sg0 (or similar) devices -- sg is "generic scsi device" (printers, scanners, etc). (Actually the cdrecord command uses a three part bus, ID, LUN address for this).

[Iron] If it's a new drive, I would return it and say the inadequate labeling is preventing you from using the drive. Maybe that will goad the manufacturer into doing what practically all other manufacturers have done: put labels with diagrams on the drive.

An IDE drive normally has a jumper (not a switch) with three positions: "master", "slave" and "cable select". Some also have a position for "single". IDE cables have three plugs so they can fit two drives on one controller. If this is the only drive on the cable, it must be "single" (if such a position exists) or "master" (if it doesn't). If there is another drive on the cable too, one must be "master" and the other "slave". "Cable select" was one of those nifty new ideas that never caught on, so don't bother with it.

If an IDE plug fits it, it's probably an IDE drive. I've never seen one with a switch instead of jumpers, but it's possible. Is it an external drive? Those would be more likely to have switches.

If the switch is unlabeled you'll have no choice but to try all three positions and see which one works.

The IDE cable should be connected with the red stripe facing toward the power cable. On the motherboard, the red stripe should go toward the pin marked "1".

The power cable is connected, right?

It's possible it's not an IDE drive at all but a SCSI drive. The plug would be a different shape and the switch would have numbers (0-8 or 0-16).

1 ut2003a.tgz: The archive is corrupt

hey i have downloaded a .tar file and it says its corrupted, and i changed it to .tgz and it's still corrupt, any ideas?

thanks.

[Dan] Believe tar. The file is corrupted. Throw it away. Download it again.

You didn't say how you downloaded it.

Rick Moen proceeds to answer the question he should have asked ... "how do I keep it from arriving corrupted?" -- Heather

If you were using the ftp protocol, make sure you were using binary transfer mode, not ascii mode.

How to delete LINUX?

This is the best framed question of this type I've seen in years, and Daniel had a fast, neat answer ready to hand. So I'm publishing it even though it's an FAQ.

As long as later editions of Windows continue to have a tool to replace the MBR cleanly, this note will continue to be useful. -- Heather

Dear Friend,

I have a computer with two operating systems: Win98+Linux. Now I want to delete the whole Linux system to free its space into Win98. The selection of boot for a certain operating system is by LILO at start. Can you tell me 1) How to delete the Linux? 2) After delete Linux, that means delete LILO too, so can I still boot the computer into Win98?

Many thanks

Use a win98 startup disk or the win98 cd to boot. Run fdisk, delete the linux partitions using the non-dos partition optoins. Then exit, run fdisk /mbr. Reboot with the disk or disc, run fdisk again and create a new dos partition. Reboot, format the parition. Why you would want to do this is beyond me. You should be deleting the win98 partition to free up some disk space for the linux partition.

How to write C program?

Hello,I am a university student from China. Now I write C program with vi,and compile with gcc,but I find write program like this is unefficient.There are very good tools for Windows, like Visuanl C++, Tubro C/C++ etc. So I want to ask what tools we can use in Linux and the step to write a program.

If you find vim and command line gcc too rudimentary for your taste, a lot of visual-like and IDE tools for Linux are available. Some of the popular ones are -

KDevelop (KDE/Qt based)
Glade (Gtk based)

If you cannot find them, then maybe you have not installed them from the CDs. Please do so and give them a try. They ship with all popular Linux distros (distributions).

... ashwin

In case it will help, I maintain a list of all known Linux IDEs / GUI Builders / RAD tools, at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#idedev . The list has passed 100 entries.

... Rick Moen

cd-writer device driver

hello answerguy,

Hi Sarath,

It's gang now, not guy: see http://www.linuxgazette.com/faq/index.html or www.linuxgazette.com/authors

I am a final year software engineering student and I want some driver writing information. I would like to know how to obtain enough information about my cd-writer to write a driver for it. This is important for my final sem project and I can't seem to find anything on the web.Even a few helpful links would do.

You already asked this on the cdwrite mailing list and you got one answer pointing you to the SCSI MMC-3 specifications, so why not try to locate it? The cdwrite mailing list certainly has the more knowledgeable people on this particular issue. So they do expect you to know at least to some degree what you are talking about if you venture to write a cd-writer driver from scratch and they think a pointer like they gave should be sufficient. If you have particular questions/problems on implementation that will be a good place to ask again.

I read that u are an LG fan.

I am certainly not an LG fan (neither the cdrom manufacturer nor the Indian(?) electronics manufacturer (TV's and stuff) if they are not the same.

I certainly am a fan of Linux Gazette so....

The device I'm talking about is an LG GCE-8160B (16x max).Hope you can help me with it.

So -- that might be an IDE drive or might not be an IDE drive. I guess it is.

in any case: The protocol used to access these devices --- and all newer CD-writers are ATAPI/SCSI MMC-3 compliant --- is the MMC-3 specification. Actually ATAPI for CDROM drives is nothing but SCSI over IDE, so the devices understand scsi commands which are sent over the IDE hardware connection. In Linux (to be a little bit ontopic for a LINUX-questions-only) there is a ide-scsi driver which is taking care of the scsi over ide commands part, so you don't have to worry about that when writing the driver. (NT BTW does the same, burners and Co are treated as SCSI devices).

SO:

1. try to get hold of this specifications like typing "mmc-3 specification" in www.google.com... but this is not the first hit there and will require some digging. It is well possible that you have to buy that in printed book form from somewhere. I get lots of *.msdn.* hits, maybe you find something generic there too. you are trying low level hardware programming so getting used to that kind of bit poking manuals will be unavoidable I guess
2. get cdrecord and/or cdrdao and have a look at their code, especially the library libscg might be interesting since it's handling all the low level data transfers
3. be aware that this is a major project, i.e. to write a successful driver for at least most of the CD-R's features

If you need info on how to write a device driver for Linux there is a HowTo out there..... hmm. (some poking about in the web-shelves ensues)

What I could find are the SCSI-programming howto's:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/programming.html#PROGINTERFACE

Look for SCSI one page down.

(it doesn't evade view for long, though.) There is a Linux kernel module programming guide:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/mpg.html

K.-H.

It's quite old and the interface is a bit changed in 2.4(from 2.2). The best reference for driver writers is Alessandro Rubini's book

Linux Device Drivers

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxdrive2

This is a must if you are planning to do any serious kernel module hacking. It's quite affordable too. I guess it costs around 170/- in india.

--pradeep

Cheap duplex fix

Hi:

I wanted to share a trivial printing fix, and ask a question. We recently upgraded here to a duplex printer, which worked terrific, except that when duplex printing from my Redhat 7.3 box every second page was offset an extra centimter to the right. It didn't matter which application I used either.

I tried a few different drivers, but they all had this problem. Rather than approach this trial and error I decided to intercept the input Postscript and fix the margins. Admittedly this is not finding the cause of this problem, but it works.

I edited the /etc/printacap file (after backing it up) to point to a different magic filter wrapper for the duplex printer, and copied the original wrapper to a new "improved" one.

I called this mf_wrapper_duplex, the diff output from the original mf_wrapper and mf_wrapper_duplex follows:

diff  /usr/share/printconf/util/mf_wrapper
/usr/share/printconf/util/mf_wrapper_duplex
45c45
< /usr/bin/magicfilter-t "$TMP_FILE" $DEBUGSTRING < /dev/stdin
---
 > pstops -b 2:0\(0,0\),1\(-1cm,0\) < /dev/stdin |
/usr/bin/magicfilter-t "$TMP_FILE" $DEBUGSTRING

I use pstops to adjust margins on the postscript data stream, using the '-b' option to strip binding information, and push the margins over 1 centimeter to the left via the 2:0(0,0),1(-1cm,0) rule, - see the pstops manual. I then restarted lpd.

Of course this is not a perfect, or even a really correct solution, for one the printconf utility will overwrite this, so it should be put in /etc/printconf.local but I was getting really annoyed at the margin drift on the even number pages. Also, I believe the data stream into magicfilter might not be postscript, so it would break on this as well.

I think this should really be done in magicfilter - does anyone know how to hack this nicely?

Thanks
Allan

For quite a while now, I've had a printing problem - plain text always came out shifted about an inch to the left, and some characters "fell off" the page. Until recently, I didn't bother fixing it - instead, I'd bring up the text in "vim", issue an ":ha" (hardcopy) command, and presto!... of course, this required setting up "vim" to print (see my "Fancy Printing in Vim" tip in LG#79.)

However, I really dislike it when things don't work the way they should, and I got around to this recently. Since I use "magicfilter" to process all of my print stuff, I simply edited "/etc/magicfilter/StylusColor-II@720dpi-filter" (which is what I use for my Epson Stylus), and changed the last entry, like so:

See attached leftshift.sed.txt

Note that I also add a formfeed (FF or ^L) at the end of the file. This character is not a '^' followed by an 'L' - that won't work! Instead, use a Real Editor ('vi', or something else that lets you enter raw characters). In "vi", as an example, press <Ctrl-V> ("raw character entry") followed by <Ctrl-L> ("formfeed"). Also, you may need more or fewer spaces than I did; simply adjust that string of spaces in the beginning of the "sed" expression.

odd use for eject

Eject is of course, the command to spit out the CD that's inside your system, rather like the Macintosh does.

If you're a system admin at a large rack of pretty much the same machines, you can double-check which one your KVM switch is pointed to right now... by making it 'eject' and spit out its CD tray.

Then it'll be obvious!

If you have ever rebooted the wrong machine in your server rack or colo facility, you definitely can use this trick to keep that from happening again

Also handy if you have a habit of ssh'ing into any of several workstations in your development offices. You can probably even hear the whirring of the drive tray. But don't do it if you know the boss keeps their coffee in front of the CD bay...

emacs

I'd imagine there's someone here who's fairly knowledgeable in Emacs...

Fairly knowledgeable, no. Slightly knowledgeable, yes.

So, I pull down the "Tools" menu, and choose "Read mail". OK, everything's fine. I exit Emacs, not saving anything... and shortly thereafter note, with an ice-water-down-the-back shock, that my "/var/mail/ben" is GONE. Zeroed. Empty. WHAT THE FSCK???

Fortunately, after some seriously POed muttering and high-speed maneuvers with "find", I thought: "what if Emacs did something weird with it? It shouldn't have just deleted the thing!" So, I open up Emacs again, "Tools/Read Mail"... and there it is! Big sigh of relief, and about a dozen blind avenues later I figure out that it stuffed my mail into a file called "~/RMAIL" and munged the format.

Typical emacs arrogance. It assumes that its way of handling mail is the best and that other mail utilities are stupid not to conform. I had the same problem when I tried emacs mail in 1990. And I stopped using emacs mail for precisely that reason: it didn't handle mail in a way that was compatible with other mail utilities.

So, my question to you guys and gals is, is Emacs ALWAYS this bloody rude? That is horribly intrusive behavior, as I see it: I never explicitly asked it to change, delete, move, mung, or do anything of the sort to my mail. I could see where a new user would be totally lost. If I did something stupid, OK - I'll just be extra-extra cautious of the beast. If, however, that's Emacs default behavior, I'm deleting it off my system with extreme prejudice and it shall never darken my STDOUT as long as I live.

Ben: Emacs is so rude!

Emacs: Why didn't you read the FM?

Ben: Why didn't you give me a warning the first time I ran it, O Editor That Calls Itself "Self-Documenting"? You're the one that's using an esoteric, incompatible format.

Emacs: It was probably the standard format in the environment where emacs mail was written, and then remain unchanged three decades later.

Ben: I'll show you who's boss!!! I'm going to uninstall you with extreme prejudice!!

Emacs: Bigot!

Ben: Bloated piece of crap! You've got more features than Internet Explorer, nyaa, nyaa, nyaa!

Emacs (Eliza mode): Is the fact that I'm a bloated piece of crap the reason we're having this conversation?

<*Splort*> <FOTCL>

Mike, that's one Diet Coke with lemon you owe me. I does not belong on my keyboard, and spraying it out through the nose hurts.

how many roots?

I have a two part question.

How many root directories can you have in Linux?

How deep do you want to chroot? -- Heather

OOOH! Nominated for Answer of the Year. -- Ben

[mike] File systems work a bit differently in linux. There is only ever one root directoery wich is /

All partions or drives are mounted on subdirectories from this root

drives and partions are numbered like so

/dev/hda		first Hard disk
/dev/hdb		second hard disk
/dev/hda1		first partition on first hard disk

[SGD] Basically - it is not possible to have more than one root directory in the box

The real answer is "one at a time"

The guys here are correctly describing a normal directory setup.

However, an application can be working from a deeper directory than the real one; that's called a "changed root environment" or chroot and is actually done all the time by things like Apache and postfix and qmail. -- Heather

I you have more than one disk drive, what steps do you have to perform in order to make them available for use.

[SGD] what you can do is mount your other harddisk under a subdirectory for example, if you have /dev/hdb as your secondary harddisk, and you want to use the first partition of that harddisk under linux, just issue the command

mount -t <filesystem> /dev/hdb1 <mountpoint>

here <filesystem> may be vfat (if it's fat32) or ext2, or ext3 <mountpoint> may be any empty directory in your box - usually /mnt/disk2/ or something like that.

Yup, this is so. You can have lots of partitions, mounted anywhere you want, including on top of each other, though I don't recommend covering up any files as they will look like lost space.

To help make this more readable I made mike and Sayamindu's code describe the same system. I use /mnt/c when referring to a C:\ drive, I think it's nice and memorable. -- Heather

[mike] To eg add a second hard disk you could eg do this

mkdir /mnt/c
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/c

(assuming second drive has been partitioned and formatted)

to make this permanent edit the file /etc/fstab to add an entry like this

/dev/hdb1               /mnt/c                  vfat    defaults     0 0

and save the file (please note the above file system is fomatted for w32 - adjust to taste)

Your response would be greatly appreciated

Thanking you in advance

Maria Diaz

You're very welcome! -- Heather

[LG 82] help wanted #3 Postfix hates Outlook

Shahid,

Postfix is an SMTP server and Outlook will send mail out through it but not get mail from it. The problem seems to be there is no POP3 server running. Have a look here: http://www.postfix.org/addon.html#pop

for info on obtaining and setting up a POP server.

Edward

Fun With Ioctls

Hello Gang,

A while ago, Shreedar V. K. from India asked for a program that would list the IP addresses for all of his interfaces. Back then, I joyfully referred him to one of those Stevens TCP/IP books. We got quite a thread from that response. I like that.

I got bored today, so I cranked out a simple program that prints the interface names with their associated primary IP address. I intentionally omitted the display of alias to keep the program simple. It's really a quick hack.

The purpose is to illustrate why the simple solutions, provided by Ben O., really make sense. Still though, I never turn down a challenge. Everyone can use and hack it at will. Just compile the program and run it. It takes no command line arguments. Example output, as well as the program listing, are displayed below.

Good night, Chris G.

See attached interfaces.c.txt

Hey, pretty nifty! I saved it in interfaces.c and here's what using it looks like -- Mike

% gcc -o interfaces interfaces.c
% chmod +x interfaces
% interfaces
lo: 127.0.0.1
eth0: 216.39.[censored]
eth1: 10.0.0.1

Thanks Mike! The program kinda shows how much work goes into our beloved network programs such as ifconfig.

Later... Chris G.

lkml

Hi there,

I'm doing a report for Uni, I was wondering how many subscribers are there to the Linux Kernel Mailing List? Is there a more popular list? Estimates are fine.

Hi,

I have no idea, so the traffic on that list seems rather high (~1000 posts/day).

You might want to subscribe and send administrative commands like "help" "info" and if available "who" which would give you a list of all subscribed members. These commands depend on the exact mailing-list managing program but most have these options.

K.-H.

Many people subscribe to digests so they can get their mailing list stuff a little less often, all in one chunk.

But there is a brave soul who actually summarizes the Linux Kernel Mailing List, and publishes the results on a website he calls Kernel Traffic: http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/latest.html

The Linux Weekly News notes about what's going on in the kernel are available to LWN subscribers

But you can see some of the latest patches some of these guys have whipped up at http://lwn.net/KernelPatches/ ... and they warn that these things might drink all your beer. From what I know of development parties, perhaps they are speaking from experience? -- Heather

WHIZBANG Patch

Adds /proc entry for refrigerator chilliness support.
Highly experimental, the beer keeps disappearing. Hope
to fix in next rev. Suspect memory leak in purchaser
algorithms.

workaround: we recommend Jolt Cola; or home zymurgy kits
stored in a seperate directory.

When the Weekend Mechanic loses his tools

How many of you have been guilty of using mc (midnight commander), hitting the key sequence "<ALT><SHIFT><?>" before, and then filling out that nice dialog box to find the file that you require?? Don't lie, we've all done it (Hi Ben ).

<blink, blink> Thanks for the vote of confidence, Thomas... but I didn't even know about that feature until you mentioned it. <grin> So, _now_ I'll be guilty of it - maybe. I'm pretty used to "find" by now, and would miss things like "-exec" too much to use some constraining box. -- Ben

I actually wrote that? he he.....

Oh no, Ben. I simply meant that as you keep promoting the use of "mc" for things like: rpm viewing, tar/gz viewing, etc, it was logical (?) to assume that you'd have used the "find" feature occasionally?

<grin> It's one of the things I like about it; after all this time of using it (and using Norton Commander, which is was modeled after, for some 15-20 years before then), I _still_ discover cool new features occasionally. I wrote Miguel a nice letter back when; he deserves lots of kudos for this one. -- Ben

ATI Rage M4

I would like some help configuring my Dell Latitude C800 display (ATI Rage M4 16MB). No matter what magic I try to accomplish with Xconfigurator or hand editing of the /etc/X11/X86Config-4 files, I can't convince my XWindows display to set-up in anything but 1600x1200. This is very hard on my varilux bespectacled eyes.

[Robos] Just as a short answer (no time right now): down in xf86config-4:

 SubSection "Display"
   Depth           16
   Modes           "1024x768"
 EndSubSection
 SubSection "Display"
   Depth  24
   Modes           "1024x768"
 Exchange the numbers (swap em) to something like this
 Modes "1024x768" "1600x1200"

Robos is right on the dot. From my own "/etc/X11/XF86Config-4":

Modes "1600x1200" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

Works fine on this Dell Inspiron. -- Ben

Some posts elsewhere have said to use <Ctrl><Alt><-> or <Ctrl><Alt><+>, but this seems to have no effect. Any help would be extremely appreciated.

Thanks
Mark Gorat

Something I just realized: if you're hitting <Ctrl><Alt><-> or <Ctrl><Alt><+> using the "_/-" or "+/=" keys, that definitely will not work - you need to use the keypad plus or minus. On most laptops - certainly on a Dell - that works out to <Alt><Ctrl><Fn> with the "blue" plus or minus (the ":/;/+" and "p/-" keys.) -- Ben

Cannot Login as root at all

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

(sigh. The MIME has been put in a box on the sidewalk. Maybe that will help him communicate.)

Hi...

I had installed RedHAt 7.0 It was working perfectly fine. One fine day I cannot login at all.. After booting it says login... and when I type my root user it doesnot ask for password.. but just comes back to the login again... But I can access it from Webmin from a remote computer.

Please help me.

Thanx Danny

Check your securetty file, or PAM. Either of them could suggest to the system that root cannot be trusted to login from where you are at.

If it were a regular user, but root could login, I'd suggest checking if the nologin file is present.

You could also be on a system that cannot handle passwords longer than 8 characters, but be trying to work with a longer password, or be using something that is not shadow-aware while your password is stored in the shadow file. This used to cause trouble when Gnome was much younger.

I would have called, but...

Imagine our sysadmin's surprise when a help question came in through the customer service webform for Linux Journal ... (empty fields snipped) -- Heather

Subscriber:                          hotshot
  Comments:

 do we have pc2phone dialer software for linux ?

      Name: satheish
   Country: India
     Email: hotshotis@yahoo.com

Form: CustomerService    Version: 1    Request ID: 6584

[Heather] Hotshot, your question has been forwarded to the Linux Gazette Answer Gang. Linux Gazette is a web-based magazine hosted by the same publisher as Linux Journal. I greet you as the editor in charge of the monthly column.

I took a brief look at the internet search engines to see what you appeared to be talking about. There's apparently a company offering software which turns your computer into a phone, provided that it's plugged into a phone line and you have a full service sound card. It also looks like "2.9 cents a minute" comes up a lot.

There are a lot of internet-phone applications - voice conferencing is especially popular. If you type "phone" as a keyword into the application search engine at Freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net) you'll have about 250 projects to check on. You may want to start at the category : Communications :: Internet Phone.

As for the 2.9 cents a minute that just depends how they implemented it.

• Maybe you just need the right long-distance provider - theirs - in which case, you might want to find out who that is and sign up with them so you gain even when you use a handset.
• Maybe their software implements some magic protocol, in which case, your question is perfect, except that you don't know what their protocol is called.
• If it's called H.323 lots of folks use it for voice conferencing applications, and yes, we have OpenH.323 programs coming out of our ears.

My suggestion would be to contact the folks who make the "ordinary" PC2Phone software and ask them the same question - is it available for Linux, and if not, what is the protocol used. If the protocol is an open standard, note it down, and ask them what settings you'll need to set your Linux software to, in order to enjoy their service.

Good luck in your quest.

[jra] I believe you mean "client software for a voice over Internet phone service called "pc2phone"... which appears to actually be net2phone...

and I'd recommend persuing the results of

http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=net2phone

there appears to be some useful answers in there.

Please see also

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Getting rid of offensive content on your hard disk dreged up by your web browser

[Forwarding to LQO as a 2-cent tip. Anyone want to write such a script or write an article about it?]

The original message was a spam promoting commercial software that would scrub your (Windows) system of "offensive content" (pornography, drug references, terrorism references) you may have accidentally dreged up while websurfing.

Part of the scare tactics it mentioned is a claim that you can get convicted for child pornography merely for visiting a site once that has child porn pics on the home page, even if you didn't know the nature of the site beforehand, or 3rd-party Javascript sent you there without your approval, or you never saw the pictures in the visible portion of the window. This => cached porn pics on your HD => discoverable evidence of a crime => why you need this commercial program.

[tag-admin] Speak right up, what's the best way to delete offensive content that may have been automatically saved on your hard disk while you were websurfing?

Can you say, "Open the preferences/settings dialog and press the 'Empty Disk Cache' button?" I knew you could.

[Don Marti] What about history and cookies?

A script to clean all traces of web activity from your .mozilla directory (except cookies from sites you like) would be an interesting exercise. All of these files seems to have some potentially "incriminating" info in them:


history.dat
downloads.rdf
localstore.rdf

This should work just fine. However, there's other semi-personal info scattered throughout, e.g., info about filenames to which you've printed content in "prefs.js", etc.

<shrug> You could just whack the whole "~/.mozilla" directory if you're really concerned.

Wind*ws people need expensive software to do this... amazing. -- Ben

See attached scrub-mozilla.sh.txt

The canonical way to deal with this in email gardens is to wipe out the guest user home on logout ... completely ... and re-establish it via popping open the tarball of its homedir again.

This, together with having the system be one-user and wiping the /tmp directory, should be sufficient to most purposes. It also keeps nameless guests from using your e-garden as a storage bin. -- Heather

At a loss for words

Hi,

My name is Lon Diffenderfer. I am looking for a way to convert some very important files created by my father in SCO Lyrix into a .txt file. Is this a simple procedure or will I need a the help of a professional? Is there a file conversion program that I can purchase or download that would be able to handle this job? I thank you in advance for your time and assistance.

Best Regards,
Lon Diffenderfer

[Ashwin] Now can you please elaborate on what kind of files these are? Knowing the file format will be essential ...

[Thomas] Ashwin, I agree with you that the filetype is important. Indeed, Lon could acheive this by issuing the command:


file /path/to/file

and then reporting it back to us. This would, as Ashwin has said, help us in determining which program(s) to use.

[jra] Lyrix was a third-party word processor which ran under Xenix.

SCO bought it (or it's resale rights), and I haven't seen it in years. I strongly suspect that you're going to have to hunt up copies of both Xenix and Lyrix to open those files...

[Frank] ... Lyrix was once known as Unixplex, I seem to remember.

While I don't know exactly anymore, I seem to remember that it was always one line of text, followed by a line of formatting code below it, each line ending with a <CR>, a new paragraph is signaled by an empty line.

[Rick] be aware that at least two other software efforts have borne the name Lyrix: a computer-telephony product from Lyrix Systems, Inc., and early versions of the excellent TeX-based graphical document processor subsequently renamed "LyX".)

[Thomas Adams] But in most cases, I would recommend the use of the program: "strings", which trys to report back useful "character literal" information. You could try issuing the command:


strings file | less

where "file" is the file that you are trying to view. (I've piped it through to "less" for convenience, although:


strings file >& ~/some_file

is perhaps better if you want to store the information)

N.B. Strings does work on ELF files, but the result is somewhat unpredictable.

[Frank Rodolf] Lon, if all you need is the text portion, you should do quite nicely with the strings command, as Thomas writes above.

I heard rumors that there has been some conversion utility (lyrix2wrd, or something like that), but when a friend of mine needed that a while ago, I was unable to find it.

To all who replied, "THANK YOU!"

[Thomas] You're welcome!!!

I'm glad that people such as Jay, and myself, were of some use. Makes a change actually!!

He he....

With the information you provided, I was able to find a local professional who had administered Xenix systems in years past and was able to use "strings" to recover the data. I still do not understand exactly what he did, but I am elated and very grateful to your group for your assistance. If this is the kind of help I can get for Linux, maybe it's time to learn it and switch.

[jra] Probably.

Outstanding; glad to ehar you got your data back. Now you understand why Unix people (and especially Linux people) are fond of textual configuration and data files whenever possible...

What he did was to use the Unix strings(1) program, which sifts through a [random] file looking for strings of characters that appear to be ASCII text, extracting them from the surrounding (binary) data, and printing them on it's output. Once you do that, it's usually just a cleanup pass.

need your help

question

You are the Linux system admin of your company, and an employee has forgotten his password and cannot login. How would you reset this employee's password?

su - passwd mrforgetful

question

you are sending mail to an "answer gang" list with potentially a big number of people reading it... using ordinary email clients. How do you send them plaintext only to not waste lots of bits?

http://expita.com/nomime.html

question 2

does HR give him a grilling first for losing this important piece of company data (his password) ? -- Heather

2 tips for the TAG

Folks,

you are SO GREAT, I've gotta drop you 2 tips .

System:


ABIT KT7A mb
AMD Tbird 1.3 Ghz
Nvidia Geoforce II GTS
Redhat 8.0

1

Symptom: System reboots automatically when trying to load Nvidia drivers v 3123

Solution: Turn on "Plug and Play OS = YES" in BIOS setup.

Side Effect: I had been getting this error message:

"usb-uhci: Host controlled halted, trying to restart" (USB mouse) That message is now gone, with the new BIOS setting.

[Ben] That could be very annoying... Turning P&P off is what allowed my old laptop to "see" the audio subsystem; I'd hate to be faced with a choice of "pick only one". Just as a point to consider, I'm using NVidia's drivers (v.2802) on my Dell Inspiron 8200 (NVidia GeForce2GO), and it seems stable - certainly no rebooting.

2.

Symptom: RH 8.0 default firewall killed my SAMBA shares on local net.

Solution: open up these FW rules (I suggest using WEBMIN for FW tuning, much better than "lokkit")


ACCEPT incoming protocol UDP destination port range 137:139
ACCEPT incoming protocol TCP destination port 139

Use arrows on right had side to move these ACCEPT rules above the DENY rules.

HTH,

Don Radick

you can print my name, but not my email address. THANKS!

No problem! Thanks for the tips. -- Heather

Troubleshooting GRUB

Remember: GRUB numbers partitions from ZERO while linux counts from ONE So:


root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1

... and:


root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6

... note how GRUB's (hd0,0) is Linux' /dev/hda1 and GRUB's (hd0,5) is Linux' /dev/hda6

please clear my doubts

hai , i am muthukumar.

Hi, I'm Heather, one of the folks here at The Answer Gang. And this over here is Sayan.

I hope you don't mind that I split your message into paragraphs. -- Heather

[Sayan] Hi I will try to answer your questions one by one.

i did my B.E at vellore engg college.i have 2 PCs. (i) celeron 266Mhz with 92 mb ram (windows 9 & (ii) celeron 1Ghz with 128mb ram (windows 98 & xp ).

Either of these machines should run Linux just fine, although the Gnome or K desktop environments would probably feel as comparably slow as Windows on them. With a lighter window manager and some careful setup it could feel faster. -- Heather

i want to load redhat 7.1 in any one of my pc . i have few doubts in this matter

1. is it possible load linux as 3rd os on my system( ii ) ?

[Sayan] Well, of course it is. Provided you have the required amount of space left on your hard disk to install the packages that you need. You see while installing multiple operating systems you have to follow the rule "stupidest os first". So up till now you have not gone wrong. So go ahead and install Linux.

Yes.

The usual way is to clear some space for it (Partition Magic, parted, or FIPS are most commonly used) and then install Linux in the empty space. For Redhat to be the installed flavor you'd need to do this. With some other flavors of Linux (Slackware's "bigslack" for example) you would need to set aside some space, but you wouldn't need to adjust the partition types first.

If LILO replaces your master boot record, and your kernel is on the same disk, LILO should have no problem selecting among all three operating systems.

If you use LOADLIN.EXE from inside either of your Windows environments, and make a copy of the Linux kernel visible in your drive, you could add an entry to your mswin boot menu for Linux. -- Heather

2. after installation how the dos partition drives can be mounted as the system starts.

In the file /etc/fstab add an entry for the mountpoint which you'd like to use, and tell it that the filesystem type is vfat instead of ext2.

I like to use /mnt/c, myself, and set aside /mnt/a for using DOS floppies ... that is, if I don't simply use mtools commands.

THe LSB tells us that /mnt is expected to be used for temporary mounts, though, so you might prefer /home/c-drive or something like that. -- Heather

[Sayan] This issue was earlier discussed in this magazine in issue 34. You can read through it at:

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue34/lg_tips34.html#young

Still I quote it as it is

So you see you can always access your dos files SECURELY from Linux.

You may already have such a user, for dosemu or wine for example.

You can reuse one of that sort, as long as you're sure you are assigning a similar privilege. Also, you want to avoid making a userid that will classh with something else; if all else fails pick something above 65000. -- Heather

3. i am bit more confused while installing linux so please kindly send me the procedure how to install linux on the system in step by step method.

[Sayan] Big question, demands big answer. Maybe some other more experienced person in the List will be able to give better answer. But I hope you will have no probs trying to installl Redhat. But why do you want 7.1 when 8 has become available. Try to get a copy of the latest distro from your local LUG (Linux Users Group). They are always very helpful. If you can send us your location, somebody can give you the contacts of your nearest LUG. And, these new distros are soooo easy to install, you just cant go wrong.

The commercial package of Red Hat comes with a fine set of manuals. In addition you could get the current version; they've gotten up to 7.3 now.

But if you're going to buy it you might also compare with Mandrake or SuSE and get whichever looked best to you. -- Heather

what are the features available in linux.

Most things that you would expect, many that you wouldn't, and for almost any package, source code if you need it, or some particular programmers to go ask for more features. -- Heather

important things in linux. do's and donot's.one more thing

Mmm, donuts. Important things to do:

1. Have fun. The computer is supposed to be your tool, not your boss.
2. Be willing to read README files, and HOWTO documents. Linux is all about becoming more self reliant. Search engines are expecially handy.
3. Once you've learned, help others with stuff that you understand. It improves the community.
4. The perl motto "There's More Than One Way To Do It" also applies to most activities in Linux. If there isn't, probably some college student somewhere is working on another way, but hasn't gotten around to releasing their code yet.
5. (NOT SPECIFIC TO LINUX) make backups! Whenever things are looking good, make a good copy of how it is; that way you always have something good to come back to if later things go haywire. I recommend a good backup of your present windows setups before you go ahead with your Linux setup, for example.

Important Don'ts:

1. Don't despair. We agree that not everyone's advances in self reliance will include becoming a programmer type. There are web sites dedicated to Linux newbies, and to specific topics as well. There are also IRC channels to talk to people across the internet live about this, and mailing lists, and newsgroups.
2. Don't send HTML attachments to mailing lists; some people get grumpy about it. (Don't worry, I snipped it.)

i have worked in linux in my college on a system with windows nt i want to how to connect the two os.thank u,muthu

Samba is the usual way. It lets Linux look like yet another Windows box with active shares, as far as its Microsoft-y neighbors are concerned. See http://www.samba.org for details.

Good luck! -- Heather

Contents:

¶: Greetings From Heather Stern

Floppy Disk Repair Utiliti

read the manual!

Need help with ftp

Video Question

Greetings from Heather Stern

Hello everyone, and welcome again to the world of The Answer Gang. We've had a very active month (657 non-spam, non-administrivia messages) and I'll have to make extra certain to keep the TAG back room well stocked with pumpkin pie.

Of course, given the usual hours that coders and sysadmins work, pumpkins are probably not too hard to come by. Oops, wrong kind. We meant the kind we just scooped bits out of for a glowing Halloween.

This time I dressed in the same costume as my hubby -- a computer geek. I was hacking on this But I don't mind. It's fun. If a whole lot of people say their Thanksgiving this year for the fact the Linux folk are for the most part, helpful souls, then I did my job right.

Anyways, we've got some notes about dealing with those annoying floppies, and some real notes about linux - X, some ftp stuff. I hope you like it. And the Two Cent Tips are worth more than their average share this month. Enjoy!

Floppy Disk Repair Utiliti

From Dilip Boda

Answered By Jim Dennis, Rick Moen, Mike Orr, Jay R. Ashworth, Karl-Heinz Herrmann, John Karns

I am have much many 0 track bad Floopy disks. How can i repair it?

[JimD] In general I've noticed that floppy media and drives have dropped so drastically in quality that they can no longer be relied upon.

[Mike] Dropped in quality? No longer be relied on? When have floppies ever excelled in reliability?

[JimD] [Rant mode="on"] Read my virtual lips! Markedly DROPPED in quality. The number of drives and media failures I've encountered in the last two years has exceeded the absolute number of failures that I experienced in my first 10 years of regular computer use (despite that fact that I use them far less often then I used to).

Maybe it's just me, but every indication I've see suggests that this is a real shift. When we were spending $100 (US) on a drive and anywhere from a dollar to 50 cents each for the media --- we could usually expect to get only 1 initial failure from a box of ten (or less) and I'd usually see the drives last for three or four years of moderate use (several floppies and a few dozen file writes per day) with very few failures. Now we spend less than $20 on a floppy drive and flip a coin to see if it'll work with any given diskette.

Yes, it is possible to sacrifice quality to the point where there is no value in the commodity. I think we've now seen it with floppies.

Sadly CDR, CDRW, and DVDR related technologies are a poor substitute. I have a nice Magneto Optical (MO) drive that needs no special software or drivers! It just looks like a removable SCSI hard drive to any OS can handle such a thing. There's none of this fuss about mkisofs, just pop in the media and copy files thereto/therefrom.

The computer industry as done us a great disservice by having each company come up with it's own high capacity removable media standards (ZIP this, Jaz that, etc. This leaves no clear choice for the consumer to have high capacity, removable media with sufficient ubiquity that they know they can get media at any local office supply joint and that they can hand their media to almost any associate with a reasonable expection that it's useful to them.

[Scream! Type="blood curdling"] ARGH! [/Scream!] [Rant mode="off"]

[Rick] In my experience, if the software consistently tells you that a floppy disk's track zero is bad, it usually means there really is a physical surface defect. Actual surface defects on a floppy cannot be repaired.

However, before you give up entirely on that floppy, try, while logged in as the root user[1], "fdformat /dev/fd0". /usr/sbin/fdformat performs a low-level format of the floppy, and sometimes will fix problems that originate in logical disk organisation (formatting), as opposed to surface defects.

[Jay] mtools access the raw disk directly; the low-level file format of FAT volumes is wired into a library mtools uses. So maybe mtools could reach the diskettes.

Rick's right, though, mformat is more equivalent to mkfs than to a low-level format.

It's worth remembering here, too, that maybe the problem is the drive. Floppy drives do go bad sometimes, and one possible symptom of a head-carriage misalignment could be Track 0 bad.

[JimD] More likely the drive head is simply being scraped clean and the fabric inside the floppy shell may actually be cleaning the media surface.

[K.-H.] Also a bad drive might actually damage floppies, so every floppy inserted might be really bad afterwards. A second floppy drive in another computer comes in handy in these cases....

[John] In situations where the drive isn't used a lot, particularly in larger urban or industrial environments where there is the presence of carbon in the air, the carbon will collect on plastic parts such as the head cover, and subsequently smear on the floppy.