I'm trying to su under linux, and I'm entering the right password, but it doesn't make me root.
How do I grab screenshots on various operating systems?
How do I make Gentoo start up with the X login screen like I'm used to on my other flavors of linux?
I've been getting mystery phone calls from 877 223 8736. I have a Sprint cell phone
I want Firefox to load pages faster and let me do things that web pages don't want me to do.
How do I properly use cdrecord with linux on a Dell Latitude D610?
How do I build doxygen from source on Windows XP?
How do I get pretty fonts under X on linux?
I'm trying to use Scribus under linux, but it complains it can't find fonts, then exits
How do I stop Firefox from running "Quick Find" when I'm on a webpage and hit a keyboard key?
How do I change Gentoo, using KDE, to use a dvorak-mapped keyboard?
What Gentoo packages are helpful when setting up a cups server?
How do I toggle on / off my external video port on my laptop, using Linux?
My bugreport is here. I setup Gentoo linux on a system in my office. I wanted to go ahead and install some linux games. I've never actually played these on work time, but I wanted to make sure these were installed. They serve as stress relievers if ever absolutely necessary, and test graphics and sound on the system.
So I installed everything I wanted, including tuxracer and supertux. Tux Racer is a game where the player is a penguin sliding down a hill on their belly. Aside from merely navigating the course, Tux is also expected to collect herring, and beat a maximum time for the course. Supertux is a fairly loose clone of Nintendo's Super Mario Brother's 3, with Tux in a perpetually frozen world, hopping, breaking blocks, and the usual things you would expect from a Mario clone.
I did an emerge tuxracer supertux, and everything built and installed with no errors. I tried to execute tuxracer, and it immediately failed with the message:
bash-2.05b$ supertux Datadir: /usr/share/games/supertux Fatal signal: Segmentation Fault (SDL Parachute Deployed)
I figured something was wrong with build, so I would rebuild it. But first, to try out Tux Racer, which gave the same error. Something seemed horribly wrong. I didn't know what SDL Parachute Deployed meant, so I tried googling for it. I got useless mailing list posts about specific coding errors in pieces of code for other games. So I added the word tuxracer, which found lots of people reporting similar situations, and nobody ever reporting what the fix was. I had successfully built and ran these games at home, so I couldn't figure out what on earth was going on.
As this system was a work system, it had a sound card, but I hadn't hooked up speakers, and hadn't bothered to configure the sound card drivers, and THIS was the problem. Nowhere do you get a clue that this is a problem from "Fatal Signal: SDL Parachute Deployed". Here's the top hit for SDL. If you don't want to read that, it mentions that SDL is a library that works underneath games and controls audio, keyboard mouse, graphics, etc., which leaves a very large number of things that could be the real problem. Audio was listed first in that list, but I paid no attention to that, as it looked like it might have been an alphabetical list.
I configured this system with the latest version of KDE, and I'd finally gotten annoyed by the error message popping up about not being able to find a sound device when starting up, so I used alsactl to configure my alsa drivers for the sound card, and then, on a whim, decided to check whether I still had the problem with my linux games. This solved my problems, and I updated my bug report on gentoo.org.
The user who wants to be able to su must be a member of the wheel group. Edit /etc/group and add that user to the wheel group.
The menu Copy and Paste functions using Apple+c and Apple+v don't seem to work. But the trusty old method of "middle click" does seem to work, at least to paste. For this function, first enable "Emulate three button mouse" in the X11 Preferences. Now you should be able to press and hold the Option key while pressing the mouse button (you only have one) to paste.
A bigger annoyance is that "out-of-the-box", when you've first installed X on MacOSX, X forwarding is disabled. Fix this by pulling up a terminal, sudo su -, vi /etc/ssh_config, and set ForwardX11 yes
You need two things. First, you need a physical device that will take one of the open ports you do have, and provide a serial device. The one I chose is the Keyspan USA-19HS. This is a USB-to-serial converter. I think it cost about US $25. This hardware device then needs software to make MacOSX recognize the new serial device. This comes on a cd from Keyspan, and I think you can also download it from their website. The program I needed was called Keyspan Serial Assistant.
Now you need to use whatever software you need to control your serial device of choice. In my case, I needed a terminal emulation program to control a 3com network switch. I used Fink to install the free linux tool called Minicom. This only gets you part of the way. You need to tell Minicom which device it needs to take control of. You can get this info from the Keyspan Serial Assistant. It will tell you some device that might have the string USA19X, and you then want to feed minicom the device /dev/tty.XXXXXXX where the Xs are provided by the Keyspan Serial Assistant or an
ls /dev/tty.*
One more annoyance. You have to use Minicom as root, which you can get to by doing a sudo su - and then entering the password for a user who has Admin privileges. The first time you invoke minicom, you have to say minicom -s. All of this presumes you care enough to get Fink working, and have all your paths set properly for command line usage.
There was a change in the configuration files in a recent update to pam, and this is causing the mistake. This is horribly insidious, and I banged my head against the wall until I finally found this with google. The trick is to edit your /etc/security/pam_env.conf file, and comment out the two entries that begin
REMOTEHOST DISPLAYand this should take care of the problem. Don't have to restart any services, just log out of ssh and try connecting back in again.
Yes. There is a tool called cabextract that does what you need.
Yes. You can use the program called unzip which is installed by default with most linux distributions. Unzip should ignore the .exe stuff and pull out the files you want.
First some background. Runlevels on *nix systems have numbers. You probably know that runlevel 5 on Redhat and many other linux systems is "always-on-X" mode, where you get a graphical login screen, controlled by xdm, gdm, kdm, etc. To get that working on gentoo, you'll have to first emerge the graphical login program of your choice, like kdm. Next, if you want to mimic the behavior of runlevels in a flavor like Redhat, you'll need to create that separate set of scripts. On Redhat, for instance, the actual scripts hide out in /etc/init.d. The same is true of Gentoo. On Redhat, the runlevel symlinks hide out in /etc/rc#d.d, where # is the number of the runlevel.
Notice the word symlinks. The files in /etc/rc5.d, for instance are symlinks to the /etc/init.d directory. Gentoo uses named runlevels, which also have numbers that apply to them, and these scripts are in /etc/runlevels/default for example. We want to create a runlevel that does everything default does, plus start up X with the login screen.
cp -av /etc/runlevels/{,x}default will generate a directory called /etc/runlevels/xdefault which will contain all the same symlinks as default. You will also want to add the two symlinks for xdm and xfs.
rc-update add xdm xdefault
rc-update add xfs xdefault
The decision of which runlevel to startup with is made in /etc/initdefault, just as in Redhat. This is also where you define which named runlevel corresponds to which number. We want to map runlevel 5 to xdefault, and set the default runlevel to be 5. The following are the two lines, the way they should now read
id:5:initdefault:
l5:5:wait:/sbin/rc xdefault
You'll now be able to change between X and non-X mode using init 3 or init 5 the way you're used to doing. Gentoo also supplies the softlevel command, so you can also change levels by using their long name, if that would ever seem like something you would want to do.
Why doesn't Gentoo just put all this stuff in place for you?
Because Gentoo is all about choice. It's surprising to some people, but there are servers that not only never run X, they don't even have monitors attached. Linux is content to run on systems with no video card, and if console access is required, a serial console or control software like minicom can be used. There are places that run linux this way and save money of buying KVMs, or multiple graphical displays. Companies like Cyclades make very nice KVM-style console switches that support ssh, so admins can take local console control of large numbers of systems with minimal effort.
I don't know what causes this, but I've had this happen with at least two computers. So far I don't know the solution, but I can describe the symptoms.
I don't have a solution for this, but I have observed that on the problem systems Firefox works fine, as does printing with lpr (cups), and my current best guess is that reinstalling Mozilla will fix this.
In the case where I had this happen, these were an rpm binary package for Redhat Enterprise Linux. I've also heard of this happening on Debian with Firefox 1.5.0.3, so even in 2006 this issue is still popping up for some people, and it seems to be common to the Firefox / Mozilla codebase.
The number is Sprint's "customer service" number. They call you but don't leave a message if you've forgotten to pay your bill. I finally answered the phone call and got a completely unhelpful person who didn't identify themselves and asked for my wife, then hung up and said I couldn't help them when I confirmed that I was not my wife. I only found out who it was by calling them back. Stupid Sprint.
I'm going to assume that for your own sake of saving time, these systems are in the same room, and that you're transferring an enormous amount of data, so you don't want to use encryption.
Encryption poses both a cpu load overhead, and in most cases, also increases the total amount of data transferred, both of which are bad and unneccessary. You will need tar (available everywhere) and netcat, which can be downloaded from many places, and comes included on a Knoppix disk.
I'll assume your system which will be temporarily storing data has no operating systems and unformatted, blank disks. We'll risk that we won't lose power during the transfer of data, but you could modify these directions to use a real linux install.
On the data dump system...
On the system that has the data and is going to be rebuilt
Now we're ready for the actual transfer
Let this run for a long time. A good way to monitor this ON DATA DUMP SYSTEM: cd /mnt/raid; ls -l ; sleep 60; ls -l Using a calculator, like Python, subtract the first filesize from the second filesize. This is how much data you transferred in a minute. Now use python to divide the total size of the data (you can get this with (ON SYSTEM WITH DATA) du -s /path/to/copy) by the amount you transferred in one minute, and you can now know how many minutes you can expect this to finish in. If the value is greater than 60, you may want to divide by 60 to get number of hours. In my case, with two raid0 systems, transferring over gigabit ethernet with a crossover cable (no loss due to cheap switches) I had sustained transfer rates of 50MBytes/sec, or 3GBytes/min. When I tried this with scp, I was only able to get 28MBytes/sec, AND scp blew away all the file times and permissions. To do this right, you need to use tar. I was able to calculate that my transfer for 224GBytes was going to take about 72 minutes. (I've rounded off numbers in my explanation).
At the Firefox URL line, type about:config. You will get a page full of configuration options, most of which are not in the Preferences menu. Some options I like:
That's it. If you leave off the -t hfsplus, the system will guess that it's hfs and you'll only see a ghost of the actual files you have there. MacOSX and ipods use HFS+ as their filesystem.
Under Gentoo, many settings are in the /etc/conf.d folder. Going with this theme, the things that would normally be started in /etc/rc.local now go in /etc/conf.d/local.start. You should make a corresponding entry in /etc/conf.d/local.stop to stop whatever you started in local.start.
I actually have the original manual for this. Hopefully google will cache this and then everybody will be able to get at least one hit for this. This is a 19" CRT monitor. Horizontal Sync, aka HorizSync 30-95 KHz. Vertical Refresh, aka VertRefresh 50-150 Khz. Weight is 22kgs. Resolutions from 640x480 all the way up to 1600x1200. 18" viewable. Put those in your XFree86.conf or your xorg.conf
I used the tool called wpa_supplicant for this task. First, I grabbed the latest versions of the ieee80211 and ipw2200 packages. After installing all these things, I had ordinary unencrypted wireless working fine.
Now to try out getting wpa_supplicant to negotiate with my WPA-enabled access point. I edited /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf with the password, SSID, etc. and tried wpa_supplicant -Dipw -ieth0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf as suggested by the documentation for wpa supplicant. Alas, I got something like the following...
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
This would occur over and over again, and if I added the -d debug flag to the wpa_supplicant command it would tell me the various operations it was trying... with wpa supplicant suggesting to the ipw2200 driver that it should kindly enter its encrypted mode, and the ipw2200 driver flatly refusing to do so.
After fruitlessly searching google to figure out what I was doing wrong, I read things that said the latest versions of the Wireless Extensions (built into the kernel and linked against the wireless-tools package) now contains native support for WPA, meaning that support has been yanked from the latest versions of the ipw2200 driver.
All of this means that:
The proper command, as documented in the aforementioned hit is
wpa_supplicant -Dwext -ieth0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
or a variant of that, but the important thing is to use the Wireless Extensions instead of calls to the ipw2200 driver.
Aside from setting a symlink from /etc/localtime to /usr/share/zoneinfo/path/to/timezone, you need to tell /etc/conf.d/clock that the hardware clock is not in UTC, which is the default. Change CLOCK="UTC" to CLOCK="local".
How do I properly use cdrecord with linux
on a Dell Latitude D610?
For clarity the drive that came with my laptop says the following when
I do a cdrecord --scanbus --dev=/dev/hdc
1,0,0 100) 'HL-DT-ST' 'CDRW/DVD GCC4244' 'B101' Removable CD-ROM
I wasn't doing anything special with kernel parameters. No scsi emulation
or anything like that. At the time I was having trouble I was using
kernels including those from 2.6.12 to 2.6.15.
I was trying to do cdrecord -dev=/dev/hdc filename.iso
The cd drive would spin up, run for a while, then I'd get a big error list
with things like CHECK CONDITION, Illegal Request, Sense Code, Sense
Flags, error after x bytes, problem looks like a buffer underrun. Some
useless hints included Make sure that you are root, enable DMA, and
check your HW/OS set up. Obviously there could be something wrong with my
so-called "set up" but it would be helpful to point me to a list of
probable causes. One of the clues in the long list of things that were
wrong was try with driveropts=burnfree. I thought this sounded like a good
idea. Another person suggested using -sao rather than the default -tao.
The difference is that -tao means track-at-once, and -sao means
session-at-once. You can read more about the difference in the man page
for cdrecord.
My ultimate command was: cdrecord -v -sao -driveropts=burnfree --dev=/dev/hdc filename.iso The write speed and buffer utilization varied widely, but the cd wrote correctly for the very first time. I knew there was nothing wrong with the drive or media because disks wrote fine in Windows.
How do I build doxygen from source on Windows XP?
See my notes about getting doxygen to build from source on Windows XP using a combination of commercial and open-source tools.
How do I get pretty fonts under X with
Linux?
There are a number of packages available with provide free or shareware
fonts that actually look good under linux. One way I find fonts like this
is to (on a gentoo machine),
cd /usr/portage/media-fonts
or you can emerge -S fonts >> ~/fonts_report.txt" and look at the
list at your leisure.
Some fonts I like include:
This seems to be a known issue, as it's documented at this page. I followed a similar tactic, and found my fonts by poking around paths involving /usr/X11R6/share/fonts, then using find with that path, then trimming things down to just the folder paths. You can look at my font list. Save this file as ~/.scribus/scribusfonts.rc and scribus should be able to find your fonts.
According to Scribus's readme, version 1.2.5 and up should properly support fontconfig and nobody should have to go through this ever again.
At some fairly recent version of Firefox, this became the default feature, and I find it supremely annoying. I'm a big user of Gmail. Gmail supports one-key operations, like pressing "r" to reply, or "c" to compose. But now those keypresses were getting trapped by Firefox, rather than passed on to Gmail's javascript keypress detection. A further annoyance was that if I accidentally hit a key, it would steal my focus from my keyboard to the quicksearch box at the bottom of the window. And finally, my biggest annoyance with this feature is that it's VERY easy to get a real searchbox in Firefox. My favorite way is by pushing the "/" key, which is the same way you search a document in vi, less, and other *nix utilities.
To disable quicksearch in Firefox, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced, and there's a checkbox for "Search for text when I start typing". Uncheck that box, and select OK to confirm your settings. Firefox should now behave the way it used to, before they added the "Quick Find" feature.
Slightly amusing, is that when you enter find intentionally using the "/" key, it's still called "Quick Find". If you want the old "Find", you can press "Ctrl+f" or F3.
Ctrl-s, and coincidentally Ctrl-Shift-s in this context were directed at bash, where they were interpreted to mean "pause the output device". The job that is making the output essentially pauses until the output device is resumed. Ctrl-q will send the signal to resume the output device. I use a DVORAK pattern keyboard on my main linux system. Vowels are on the home row of my left hand, and most frequently used consonants are on my right hand. I accidentally had my right hand shifted one key so my ring finger hit s rather than n. I do this once every few months. I use a remapped IBM Model M keyboard, and don't have the tiny tactile pads to help my fingers tell when they're centered on the home row. This is quickly correctable when rewiewing interactive output, but keyboard shortcuts aren't readily backspaced.
The point of this discussion is to complete a BIOS flash, without using a floppy drive, and without using Windows or DOS. Requirements:
When retrieving the BIOS flash image, you want the actual executable tool. If downloading from Dell, this is called "Non-packaged". We need something to start from as a basis for the flash floppy.
How do I change Gentoo, using KDE, to use a
dvorak-mapped keyboard?
I'm using a re-mapped IBM Model-M keyboard for this purpose, but many
other keyboards could be used in the same way. In
/etc/conf.d/keymaps replace the line that says
KEYMAPS="us"
with
KEYMAP="dvorak"
For X, in KDE, this can be managed through the KDE Control Center -> Regional and Accessibility -> Keyboard Layout. Ensure the box labeled "enable keyboard layouts" is checked, then choose US, select add, then select the "active layout" that was just added, use the "layout variant" pulldown menu to change it to dvorak.
In case you're really curious, the dvorak-l and dvorak-r are also available. dvorak-l and dvorak-r are interesting layouts for people who due to disability can only type with one hand. It puts keys in an arrangement to make typing easier and faster. Google the layouts if you're interested in trying those out.
What Gentoo packages are helpful when setting up a
cups print server?
emerge foomatic-filters-ppds foomatic-db-ppds foomatic-db foomatic-db-engine cups
How do I toggle on / off my external video port on my laptop, using Linux?
I've always been able to set up alternate versions of my xorg.conf with settings with and without an external monitor / projector, etc. But that stinks, because you have to restart X to apply your changes. The better way is xrandr, which has a separate Gentoo package, but seems to get auto-included when you emerge X.
To turn it on, try xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280x1024x60. When done, do xrandr --output VGA --off