- Linux - Comments

Lost in Translation

garym — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 17:17:37 -0400

bq. Check this box if you only edit system files to configure your Servers

Can anyone translate that from the literal French? In some cases, it counts as one of _Select only N answers_ but in other cases it seems it's a modifier; I've applied for the position as Mandrakesoft's English Interpreter, and some of the odd twists of this survey do underline their need for some native language experience.

The survey is also not asking me about what I change, only if I change specific things, and then not ask what it is I change about them. For example, in several editions of Mandrake I had to change my keyboard to accept the ALT key as the Emacs Meta, and I changed that by editing text files because I get tired hunting through tedious hierarchical menus systems ...

By the looks of the questions, they've decided to trim the fat from their menues, although there's no indication that they might consider such bold moves as only putting _one_ text editor on the board of a menu pop-up we have to look at every single day or ease the navigation customizations so we can quickly anneal _and retain through upgrades_ an effective list of just what we need to do what we do.

O/S Addiction Research Foundation

garym — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 14:04:20 -0400

Hmmm ... that's really quite apropos the more I think of it: Nobody defends an addictive substance as much as those either addicted to it, or those addicted to the cashflow it brings them, and the more highly addictive, the more paralyzingly total and frightening the prospects of breaking the vicious cycles, the more vehemenently the addict will defend and protest those who would detox them.

Sadly, though, as we all know, it only takes one psychiatrist to change ta light bulb, but the light bulb has to _want_ to change, and it likewise doesn't occur to most addicts there is even a problem, whether of substances, of destructive behaviours and beliefs, or the deadly combination of the two that we see in ICT vendor-addictions. It's not until, as happened with France, as happened with the agencies in nearly all these spectacular switch-over stories, it isn't until they hit the wall, until they bottom out, until they nearly suffocate and have no where else to go, and _that's_ when we can finally talk to them about IT freedom.

Kind-a sad, true, but the way of the world nonetheless; the alternative is kidnapping CIOs for rigourous forced detox cult-deprogramming, and I don't see much chance of that happening :)

Still, maybe there's an opportunity in here for a new slogan for GNU ...

bq. Switch to GNU: The _Apomorphine_ of Operating Systems

Quick, what do Microsoft and Big Tobacco have in common ...

garym — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 20:19:51 -0400

This is just getting too cool too fast, be still my beating heart: "Disinfopedia has been asking some obvious questions":http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=AdTI-Funding ... like, just for instance, who is it who pays all those whopping salaries at AdTI? Well, gee now, if you want to fling dung, hey, there's a game _everyone_ can play ...

bq. In June 2002 open-source software advocates wondered if an AdTI criticising open source software was actually a veiled Microsoft response to recent reports of rising government and military interest in open-source systems. Wired magazine reported that a Microsoft spokesman confirmed that they funded the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. "We support a diverse array of public policy organizations with which we share a common interest or public policy agenda such as the de Tocqueville Institution," the spokesman wrote in an e-mail."

An unspecified spokesman, an email, I love it.

More? You want _more_? Of course "there's more":http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=AdTI-Funding ...

Soured defaults in the cdrecord

garym — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 01:33:57 -0400

This is one where I went ahead and bugged Warly way too premature: I'd sought an answer for the name of my CD writer instead of the _application_ where the symptom occurred, and when I return to the Bugzilla to look for cdrecord, on search on the qa.mandrakesoft.com and I got some good hints on a solution pretty fast:

bq. "the defaults don't work on my system" is actually "the defaults don't work on quite a few systems," and they did work in 9.2 and earlier.

Somebody broke something with respect to detecting ATAPI-style CD burners, and that means all applications which call the cdrecord utility must now specify the _type_ of the device along with its SCSI device numbers.

So, for example, my old dev=0,0,0 option won't cut it with 10.0, I have to specify the full dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 and then all is well with the CD burning, the device is found, understood and set into motion just like back in 9.2 -- I still don't know why my FlashCard reader seems to prevent further ripping of WAV files off audio CDs, but that can be left for another day ...

Desktop Adventures

garym — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 09:38:39 -0400

The desktop system, a Dell L700CXE, seemed to go very smoothly through the install, and this time it did request the second and third disks (also requested a non-existant fourth) rolling right on down to the final remove the CD and reboot prompt without incident.

On rebooting, there were a few odd messages about a failure in the firewire OHCI driver loading (there is the ieee driver in lsmod which suggests that it did load, but I haven't had a chance to verify that yet), though nothing that really threw any alarms.

Not until I tried to load Mozilla with my local intranet page; Mozill a starts, but won't leave the default static file page, and won't say why. I try the intranet IP, same result (ie no result, still on the welcome-to-Mandrake page) so I try localhost and I get my page.

Sure enough, /sbin/ifconfig shows there is the lo device, but no eth0 ethernet. The 3c59x driver, for whatever reason, did not load.

the un-config

What else do you call a configuration process that doesn't change anything? I loaded up the Mandrake system config GUI page, navigate to hardware, from there to network hardware, and from there, I just follow the defaults right through the configuration process, each of them prefilled from the detection to what it should be. Hit the final OK on the last form and sure enough, we have a network now.

It was later that I realized I also needed to manually restart some of the network services ... like when May's computer wouldn't go online because the DHCP server is missing (ooops).

Up and running, but ...

Gnome 2.4 was running, all my menu configs and panel configs seemed to have weathered the upgrade, all seemed well and good and an amazingly fast upgrade, probably the fastest and smoothest ever ...

Then I tried using Mozilla.

First glitch, the usual drop-down type-ahead list off the location bar includes a link to search for the current location-box contents, and this link was visible, but did not respond to any mouse events; I later learned that this configuration setting had been lost, somehow set to use Jeeves, which doesn't exist anymore, and thus Google, knowing that we are all busy professionals, doesn't want to bother us with such trivial details, so it does nothing -- I set the option back to a Google default, and the feature came back.

The second problem was far more serious; it's now got me spooked. If I use Ctrl-N to open a new browser window, Mozilla will lock. Solid. No pane repaints, no scroll-bars, no key controlls, no window-decoration controls (except window-move and resize). It's zombified, only killable with a command-line kill. And then it gets really strange ...

Subsequent runs of Mozilla will lock on most form-edit operations. Highlight the location and press Del, type into the location, type into any page form, any of the hot-keys, and it's locked. I tried Mozilla 1.7, same, locked. Mozilla 1.5, my own built-from-sources 1.6, even old 1.4, all same, all locked.

Panic ensued.

I ran Konqueror, and lo there arose a saviour where I could reach the "Mandrake quality assurance website":http://qa.mandrakesoft.com but could find no exact match on this bug, just an old list, likely from Mandrake 8.x, on how some hotkeys were dysfunctional. I appended what I knew of this bug, just in case, because you never know.

Returning to the desktop, I gave Mozilla another shot and found that, after running Konqueror, whatever it was that was twisted into a knot in Gnome 2.4 was now untied -- Mozilla was back, the location bar could be edited and deleted, forms could be filled out

and I won't go near Ctrl-N ... or Ctrl-T, just in case, at least, not until I'm ready to shut down my browser and lose all currently open pages, which, in my daily work, is practically never.

post upgrade stress syndrom (PUSS)

So that's the tale so far: The desktop is running, and performance under Linux 2.6 does seem faster (XEmacs, for example, now churns my 300-msg inbox list in a quarter the time) but I now live in fear of rebooting. If it goes down, will it all come back up? I'll have to face that fear, someday, but for right now, for today, there's other stuff to do.

Like using the thing.

Updating the Synaptics

garym — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 13:44:52 -0500

Ok, I never was much with names -- the Acer 330T is not a _Glidepoint_ mouse, it is a Synaptics Touchpad; I knew that.

Only the bug-report on the "Mandrake QA Wiki":http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/Mandrake10 (which, as soon as I saw it, brought back the vivid recollection of the correct name of the device -- mental note, not only read the README, but always check the QA and Errata pages too); grabbing that recommended file from the contribs, though, was not the whole story.

After installing the new XFree86 module and doing the due-edits of the XF86Config-4 file, the X server would just abort, which is one of those annoying things in GUI life because as you try to fix it in text-mode, the gdm restarts and throws you into the graphic screen for another try (until it gives up). Nonetheless, a simple sequence, when you know how ...

* Alt-F3 put me into a console; I'd tried the F1 and F2 but these seem to have been mapped to the GUI or some other special screen -- you just keep trying alt-function keys until you get a login prompt.
* login as root; type quickly because you might get interrupted by another X-restart try at any time.
* init 3 traditionally puts you into text-mode, and sure enough, the only change to the default config is that it kills the XWindow session manager thereby stopping that annoying restart behaviour. If you wait long enough, X will give up, but the init level command is much more elegant, makes you look like you know what you're doing, and makes it trivial to restart X when you've fixed it because you can test your fixes with startx and then do a slick init 5 to put you right back into proper GUI mode with narry a reboot.

From text mode, I could capture the dmesg, /var/log/XFree86.0.log, /proc/bus/input/devices and startx -- -logverbose 8 outputs to email off to Peter just as he recommends in his INSTALL guide, then revert my XF86Config-4 to the _previously saved_ non-synaptics version.

Sure enough, one glance at those log outputs, and Peter hits the nail straight on:

I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0007 Version=0000
> N: Name="SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
> P: Phys=isa0060/serio1/input0
> H: Handlers=mouse0

There is no event handler present. Make sure the evdev module is loaded or compile evdev support into the kernel.

A quick check with /sbin/lsmod proves he's right, a fast modprobe evdev, I re-flip the XF86Config-4 files back to the synaptics version, and X restarts with a fully functional tap-clickable Touchpad pointer control just like back in the good old days of Mandrake 9.2!

Getting Gnome 2.4

garym — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 23:27:50 -0500

A simple sequence ... simple when you know how, or at least have a mental model of what might be going wrong:

* rpm -qa | grep gnome | grep 2.2
shows a list of rpm packages left behind in the update
* urpmi gnome-session gnome-panel gnome-themes
fetches the needed bits from the second CD

and a reboot, and all is well and fine and humming in the Gnome end of the install.

Install skipped disks 2 and 3

garym — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 17:10:23 -0500

gnome-control-center was also still 2.2, yet urpmi will install it from disk2 ... and now I wonder if the other missing bits are on the other disks

could it be the install just somehow missed updating anything on the other disks? It seems a healthy rule of thumb post-install is to manually run MandrakeUpdate and see what gets put into the queue.

Gnome 2.4.2

garym — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 16:59:43 -0500

The installed RPMs do indeed show Gnome 2.4.2, but the opening splash is clearly a 2.2 graphic, and that lib file is definately missing.

Gnome Revertion

garym — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 16:55:09 -0500

Interesting ... and still investigating, but it seems that while the "Mandrake 10.0 Features Page":http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/10.0/features/ specifically cites including Gnome 2.4.2, the distro not only gets shipped with 2.2, but it will actually _roll back_ an existing 2.4 install.

I read recently a developer's survey where they had mentioned Gnome losing ground to KDE, citing cobwebs as a lead reason, and I wonder now if there may be something about Mandrake 10.0 where Gnome2 just couldn't get up enough charge to be included. Nothing about Gnome is mentioned on the "Mandrake 10 Errata Wiki":http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/Mandrake10 although they do post a known bug and work-around solution to the Synaptics touchpad problem (update is in Contrib)

Another caveat to know: When it asks to install updates from the web, say no -- the Community Edition was inadvertently set to download updates from the Cooker, of which there are over 150 package changes; the _real_ updates directory has "only one":ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/distributions/mandrake/updates/10.0/RPMS

Installation Notes

garym — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 16:43:22 -0500

Not wanting to jump in with my main development machine, I've opted to try the Community release on the laptop, an Acer Travelmate 330T, since it has no irreplaceable data and takes only a few hours to roll it all back should disaster strike; for the record, I'm upgrading a stock 9.2 release. The following are just some notes of the procedure taken as it happens ...

* right on the very first screens, I'm being prompted for an _Extra Drivers Diskette_ ... which, needless to say, I do not have --- one of these days I'll learn to read the README before I leap into an upgrade --- would be really useful if it could tell me _why_ I'd tripped the flag for extra drivers (mouse? wlan?) but the only information offered is this chance to load what I don't have; I hit return and was asked whether to retry or not. I opted for 'no'.
* my glidepoint mouse seems partially crippled, but only in that a double tap has no effect; the mouse buttons do work, so I can proceed with the upgrade -- this may have been a good candidate for a missing driver.
* as with 9.2, I get the _Low on Resources_ warning, but since 9.2 managed to get through, I'm going for it ...

and so far so good, it's off and whirring through about 2 hours of the various MandrakeStore ads while sussing out my installed packages and bringing in the replacements.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge them a shot at the suit-market and this captive-audience opportunity to flog some product (oddly the mix includes presumably paid ads for anti-virus ware "drweb.ru":http://www.drweb.ru), but y'know, I sort of miss those early Mandrake distros with the very human photo-bios of key developers peppering the installation slideshow ...

One hour later ...

Hmmm ... house-ads are great, but gee, it would have been awfully nice to have included at least one ad for the "Free Software Foundation":http://fsf.org or the "Linux Documentation Project":http://tldp.org ... must make a mental note to take that up with someone over at the MandrakeSoft shop.

Or how about this: For machines rating more than 30 minutes estimated install time, we could throw back to the old SGI Indy idea of bundling the juggling balls and maybe sneak in a few slides illustrating how to do some simple slight-of-hand magic tricks, or maybe some "free self-improvement philosophical councelling lessons(Socratic Therapy)":http://www.teledyn.com/mt/archives/001836.html -- there's a vast untapped broadcast network channel going to waste here folks! :)

First Boot

The final configuration-tweaking offered a test of the GlidePoint, but seems there's something lost as it's gained because none of the options re-enabled the double-tap right-button click, nor will any of them support the rocker-button mouse wheel. Nonetheless, the upgrade complete, it's time to reboot and assess the damage ...

A few text-mode questions on the boot-up to confirm the mouse, external CD and the es1938 soundcard selections, and off it goes. Boot messages look promising; one odd thing, though, it says Gnome 2.2 and I thought 9.2 was already into Gnome 2.4. What happened there?

* libgen_util_applet-2.so: no such object or directory -- looks like the tasklist applet is going AWOL
* ditto for the pager applet and the show-desktop applet, even the clock applet! What is this, an anti-Gnome conspiracy?

The good news: I'm up and running, linux 2.6.4, wlan is working, I have a workable internet desktop and without getting into the fine-points of any of my favourite applications, seems the mouse double-tap and Gnome taskbar is the only real casualty, although if this was a machine in the hands of anyone but me (who'll be going straight to the Mandrake errata pages to figure it out) both these losses would be pretty sad heartbreakers.

Don't chuck the Knoppix

garym — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 20:48:26 -0500

Took me a while to get around to testing out the Mandrake Move, and my first impressions are not bubbling with enthusiasms --- in many ways, Move embodies many of the little quibbles I have with the mainstream Mandrake, all collected into one concentrated package.

Starting at the beginning, the install process is tedious compared to Knoppix. With Knoppix, there is a long list of alternate boot-commands that go directly into any odd configurations, but mostly you just hit return at the LILO prompt and go. Move has only the usual Mandrake boot-disk options and once you hit return, you're then trapped into a mini-installation that wants to know your mouse, your language (only the core Euros, no Asian) and insists on a username/password --- knoppix realizes that if you can boot from a CD, you own the machine --- I wouldn't mind terribly considering this is targetted for business use where you might have to leave it unattended, but a bug is a feature that cannot be turned off.

missed the obvious

Mandrake is normally so thorough at detecting devices. How could it possibly fail to detect the plain vanilla SoundBlaster card on this old PII MX machine? Amazing, and from here it's all downhill.

It boots into KDE 3.1 with the "what do you want to do" menus and nowhere a simple terminal button; it's there, but you have to dig. the screen savers are a choice between a Mandrake advert and nothing, the games are tuxracer and frozen bubbles and a few others, but nothing that competes with the 3D Nethack in Knoppix.

And then it blew up, X11 fault, and instead of cycling around to restart X, it goes into the lengthy shutdown that ends in a dead halt. Happened twice before I gave up.

but it's early yet

There's still much to do on Move and there is a very interesting bug-reporting tool that seems useful provided the terms like "which package" beside a select button (is it going to show 200 packages?) don't scare you; considering the default menu options are treating you to direct-into-officestuff land (is it OOo? or KO? No clue), it's the classic schizophrenia of Mandrake not knowing if it's a novice-office or a keener-geek at the controls.

Not being really either, I'm going to maybe try it out again some later revision, but for my take-anywhere GNU, I think I'll stick with my Knoppix.

Royal Bank of Canada investment in SCO

Wed, 19 Nov 2003 05:19:58 -0500

I think we are witnessing another form of capitalism, which may be perceived as a strategy to support Microsoft. Microsoft is a key business partner for banks.

No different than Royal Bank (or any other firm) outsourcing their IT development to India as opposed to hiring local talent.

Mandrake 9.2 Now Available!

garym — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:32:08 -0500

I haven't tested it yet, but I have fixed the links now that the mirrors have updated their ISO collections to the new 9.2 CDs.

bq. Download Mandrake ISO images here

Mandrake 9.2

garym — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 09:55:29 -0400

In case you're wondering, yes, that same page link does get updated to list newer releases.

Right now, it's still 9.1: As of this moment, 9.2 hasn't yet appeared on the ISO mirrors, but the core distro directories have appeared, 9.2RC2 has been dropped, and it's only a matter of time before I get one of my webwatch alerts telling me to update that page to the new file locations.